Ever since I have started using linux, I have been convinced that if more people used linux they would fall in love with it as I did... and inevitably that leads to the desires that many have to make linux so "ready for the desktop" that everyone will want it. Well, lets just say that in the past month I am starting to rethink that theory.
Basically, I love linux for what it is. Sure, there are lots of area where it could be improved. Drivers for things like graphics and wifi really need to be open-sourced. Support for certain peripherals (scanners especially, but printers and others too) could use some work. And the constant development and tweaking of the UI is always in need... thats the beauty of FOSS, it is always improving itself for the sake of improvement, not convincing consumers to buy it.
That right there is really the secret... FOSS (and linux by extension) isn't here to draw in new users. It is here to be the best it can be. If those new users want to appreciate what it is, then we welcome them with open arms into the community. But the idea of "user friendly" meaning "being comfortable for windows users" doesn't fly with me.
Linux is a great operating system in its own right. It doesn't need to be compared to windows as the yardstick... windows has certain things it does well, I don't mean to imply that it is crap, but if you strip away the fact that every vendor has to support windows, there isn't all that much going for it.
Which brings me to my main point... why does linux want to bend over backwards to get new users? In reality, I don't think it does. Don't get me wrong, if a user has a genuine interest in learning linux then by all means we should make the system easy to pick up. But for those who are just looking for a free OS and don't want to leave their windows habits/lifestyle, the I do not think linux should try to attract those users. The amount of development spent on these features is staggering, and it is cutting down on the development that could go to making linux a better linux rather than a free windows. This would include everything from non-free programs OOTB to programs like wine, which just encourage reliance on MS software and inhibit change.
Along that line, and this is a bit off of my original rant topic, but how many people claim they cannot use linux because of no photoshop? I see it everywhere, probably a more common stopping point than the oft mentioned games (which I certainly understand, gaming on linux has only a very few titles). Which begs the question, do all these people own photoshop? It's like a $600 program,a nd you are whining about the difference with the gimp? I would put money that most of these people pirated photoshop to begin with, so I have no sympathy that they cannot use it. Between the gimp and krita there has been nothing I can't do. It's amazing how many rich, professional photographers want to use linux, hmm.
Ok, thats enough for now...
Monday, April 9, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Sidux
Ok, I stumbled across this distro today, and I am immediately enamored. I have seen it tossed around with fairly positive reviews, and I decided to take the plunge. I finally got my new (old) computer up and running (Athlon 1ghz, 704mb ram, all like 6 years old at least), and I needed to find the right OS for it. All the usual suspects were too slow, so I started exploring. I still have the Fluxbuntu disk bodhi.zazen pointed me towards (and I swear I haven't given up on it... just want to wait until the Feisty version comes out), but that didn't tickle my fancy... this computer's not THAT old ;-). So I gave Sidux a shot.
Upon boot I was met by a sharp dark theme. I have always loved the dark themes, so this is a definite plus. In fact, while I am very picky about my wallpaper, I still am using the default. I went ahead and installed. I noticed there was LVM support (a very nice touch, and if I wasn't being lazy I would have used it... the drives on this computer are 10 and 4 GB's, so to tie them together would have been nice). I installed to the 4 GB drive, as Linux Mint was taking up the 10 GB one and working OK. The installer was very easy. I would have liked a few more options with package install, but the base is so trim its not really a big issue. The tabbed layout was a great touch, I wish more installers would take this approach. After the install I had the option of installing some meta-packages (among them were fluxbox (w/ rox), fvwm-crystal, Xfce, etc.). I added fvwm-crystal and fluxbox, but stopped there as I was concerned about HD space (turns out I could have tried more... even after installing a bunch more stuff I'm still only using 61%).
Configuring the system was really easy. I quickly glanced at their forums (always start by browsing a distro's forums... best place to find easy answers) and found there was a script, built into the OS, that could do some configuring for me, and possibly even install the graphics drivers. Ever curious, I checked it out. I can't remember the exact command, but it certainly did all it purported to do... and then some. Imagine the Envy script, parts of Automatix, and parts of adept-updater rolled into one. And then some. This script dist-upgrades your system to get the latest from Debian Sid (including the newest kernel if you want). Then it gives you the option to clean all the junk that has accumulated (apt cache, excess language files, all sorts of other stuff I would never have thought of). Then it allows you to install many commonly used apps. I pretty much skipped through here, but there was a non-free section where I got Opera and some msttf fonts. Finally, after everything else was done, it installed and configured the NVIDIA drivers for my 6600GT. With my new drivers I decided to try beryl. Again to the forums, a quick search found an SVN repo that has semi-stable weekly builds. I decided this was my best choice (with something as volatile as beryl best to stay a half step off the cutting edge), and found the install repo to also offer extra plugins. This is great news for those who don't want to compile these things. Amongst many others, the wallpaper plugin is once again found... a different wallpaper for each side of the cube!
Not only is this distro sharp looking, it performs at an extremely high level. This old beast of a machine boots in under 30 seconds with Sidux. By comparison, the new Sabayon 3.3 took about 3 minutes to boot. Even Linux Mint and Fedora 7 test2 took close to a minute, maybe more. Running beryl feels snappy as well, more so than other distro's felt without it's drag on the system.
It was not all fun and games. Since this is basically pure Debian, you get Iceweasel. While many of you are probably expecting me to rant about the Iceweasel/FF split, I am not. The issue is purely with the use of a GTK based browser in a KDE distro. It looks awful, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Why can't we just have Konqueror as the browser? And h2's script gets Opera installed quite nicely, which is qt based, for those who need more features in a browser. FF/Iceweasel just look bad and perform poorly in a KDE environment, so please get rid of it.
I would highly recommend Sidux, but not to everyone. It is, in its very nature, about as cutting edge as a distro can be. As such, undoubtedly packages will break at times. If you want stuff to just work, and that's your vision of what an OS should do... avoid distro's like Sidux (and the afore mentioned Fedora). But if you want an OS that has the latest and greatest, and don't mind it being a little work at times, then Sidux is a great choice.
Upon boot I was met by a sharp dark theme. I have always loved the dark themes, so this is a definite plus. In fact, while I am very picky about my wallpaper, I still am using the default. I went ahead and installed. I noticed there was LVM support (a very nice touch, and if I wasn't being lazy I would have used it... the drives on this computer are 10 and 4 GB's, so to tie them together would have been nice). I installed to the 4 GB drive, as Linux Mint was taking up the 10 GB one and working OK. The installer was very easy. I would have liked a few more options with package install, but the base is so trim its not really a big issue. The tabbed layout was a great touch, I wish more installers would take this approach. After the install I had the option of installing some meta-packages (among them were fluxbox (w/ rox), fvwm-crystal, Xfce, etc.). I added fvwm-crystal and fluxbox, but stopped there as I was concerned about HD space (turns out I could have tried more... even after installing a bunch more stuff I'm still only using 61%).
Configuring the system was really easy. I quickly glanced at their forums (always start by browsing a distro's forums... best place to find easy answers) and found there was a script, built into the OS, that could do some configuring for me, and possibly even install the graphics drivers. Ever curious, I checked it out. I can't remember the exact command, but it certainly did all it purported to do... and then some. Imagine the Envy script, parts of Automatix, and parts of adept-updater rolled into one. And then some. This script dist-upgrades your system to get the latest from Debian Sid (including the newest kernel if you want). Then it gives you the option to clean all the junk that has accumulated (apt cache, excess language files, all sorts of other stuff I would never have thought of). Then it allows you to install many commonly used apps. I pretty much skipped through here, but there was a non-free section where I got Opera and some msttf fonts. Finally, after everything else was done, it installed and configured the NVIDIA drivers for my 6600GT. With my new drivers I decided to try beryl. Again to the forums, a quick search found an SVN repo that has semi-stable weekly builds. I decided this was my best choice (with something as volatile as beryl best to stay a half step off the cutting edge), and found the install repo to also offer extra plugins. This is great news for those who don't want to compile these things. Amongst many others, the wallpaper plugin is once again found... a different wallpaper for each side of the cube!
Not only is this distro sharp looking, it performs at an extremely high level. This old beast of a machine boots in under 30 seconds with Sidux. By comparison, the new Sabayon 3.3 took about 3 minutes to boot. Even Linux Mint and Fedora 7 test2 took close to a minute, maybe more. Running beryl feels snappy as well, more so than other distro's felt without it's drag on the system.
It was not all fun and games. Since this is basically pure Debian, you get Iceweasel. While many of you are probably expecting me to rant about the Iceweasel/FF split, I am not. The issue is purely with the use of a GTK based browser in a KDE distro. It looks awful, and sticks out like a sore thumb. Why can't we just have Konqueror as the browser? And h2's script gets Opera installed quite nicely, which is qt based, for those who need more features in a browser. FF/Iceweasel just look bad and perform poorly in a KDE environment, so please get rid of it.
I would highly recommend Sidux, but not to everyone. It is, in its very nature, about as cutting edge as a distro can be. As such, undoubtedly packages will break at times. If you want stuff to just work, and that's your vision of what an OS should do... avoid distro's like Sidux (and the afore mentioned Fedora). But if you want an OS that has the latest and greatest, and don't mind it being a little work at times, then Sidux is a great choice.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Home for Spring Break
WOOHOOO, SPRING BREAK!!! Haha, well, not really. I am rocking out in sunny Syracuse, NY (where we are all bitterly angry that the 'Cuse got shut down by the NCAA selection committee for being too awesome for their little "tournament"...). I might make a visit to even sunnier Binghamton, NY later in the week for even more good times. All the while I am thinking about how I could be in Georgia on the beach and playing Frisbee all week... oh well.
In other news, I am now a member of the Ubuntu Forums Beginner's Team. Our goal is to help new users transition to Linux/Ubuntu as easily as possible. We are setting up a wiki page as a sort of "Beginner FAQ", so if you have anything you want included let me know. It feels good to get more involved. I regret that I lack the programming knowledge to directly contribute, but helping others like this is excellent as well.
Well, its 3am local and I promised my friend I would ski with him at 9 tomorrow, so I should get some sleep. Goodnight.
In other news, I am now a member of the Ubuntu Forums Beginner's Team. Our goal is to help new users transition to Linux/Ubuntu as easily as possible. We are setting up a wiki page as a sort of "Beginner FAQ", so if you have anything you want included let me know. It feels good to get more involved. I regret that I lack the programming knowledge to directly contribute, but helping others like this is excellent as well.
Well, its 3am local and I promised my friend I would ski with him at 9 tomorrow, so I should get some sleep. Goodnight.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Ubuntu 6.10 -> Edgy Eft
Ubuntu has pretty much been my primary OS since I really got into linux (and is the only OS on my new box). I figured (slightly belatedly) that I would put down some formal thoughts on what it does well and what it struggles with. Here goes:
The live CD has almost never worked for me. My old ATI card (x800) could never be recognized properly and Xorg never loaded. With nvidia this issue was gone, but since nvidia and ati split the market down the middle (with a few intel/via onboards thrown in there for good measure) thats a lot of people who can't use the live CD (or are at risk of not being able to use it). ATI card detection could be better, as all Xorg has to do is select "radeon" instead of "ati" and it works fine. Besides that, when the live CD works it is great. Sabayon one up's it with beryl running, but its good none the less.
The install is decent. I lament that there are no options, although we've improved from dapper and can at least choose where to install GRUB. I would like to be able to choose my packages like in Fedora, but no such luck. It is really easy, and that is the idea behind it, but an "expert mode" with individual package choice would be awesome. The live CD occasionally crashes while installing, so the alt CD is safer, but its still quite good.
Once installed, the system is trim by default (which is nice). The default brown theme is hideous, but will never change. Everyone uses blue for OS themes and they want to be different, ok, but brown? It's hideous. That said, gnome is so easy to theme its rediculous, so thats easily fixed. I love apt, its not quite portage and cannot handle various architectures, but its easy and quick and handles dependencies well. Synaptic is a pain, and add/remove is pointless. CLI is god when it comes to package management, GUI's are just to slow and clunky. The default apps are good, although I wish Evolution would be replaced by Thunderbird and Firefox is way too bloated. I use swiftfox mainly, though I find Opera to be a great browser too. If I was in Kubuntu I would use Konqueror, but not in Gnome.
Overall, Ubuntu is simple but unpolished. The CLI rules here, and I like that (although as commented in my Fedora review annoying at times). I would not recommend Ubuntu as a first timers distro over Opensuse due to the lack of GUI's, but I think once a person has used Suse and is comfortable with linux, if they are the type that likes to tinker they will move on, and Ubuntu is a good next step.
I give Ubuntu 8 1/2 penguins for a great product, but just that 1/2 step less refined than Fedora. I would wager that it will soon pass Fedora, however, due to the tremendous rate of development going on. Hopefully the next review will be Sabayon, but I will wait until 3.3 is out, so if thats a while there might be another in between.
The live CD has almost never worked for me. My old ATI card (x800) could never be recognized properly and Xorg never loaded. With nvidia this issue was gone, but since nvidia and ati split the market down the middle (with a few intel/via onboards thrown in there for good measure) thats a lot of people who can't use the live CD (or are at risk of not being able to use it). ATI card detection could be better, as all Xorg has to do is select "radeon" instead of "ati" and it works fine. Besides that, when the live CD works it is great. Sabayon one up's it with beryl running, but its good none the less.
The install is decent. I lament that there are no options, although we've improved from dapper and can at least choose where to install GRUB. I would like to be able to choose my packages like in Fedora, but no such luck. It is really easy, and that is the idea behind it, but an "expert mode" with individual package choice would be awesome. The live CD occasionally crashes while installing, so the alt CD is safer, but its still quite good.
Once installed, the system is trim by default (which is nice). The default brown theme is hideous, but will never change. Everyone uses blue for OS themes and they want to be different, ok, but brown? It's hideous. That said, gnome is so easy to theme its rediculous, so thats easily fixed. I love apt, its not quite portage and cannot handle various architectures, but its easy and quick and handles dependencies well. Synaptic is a pain, and add/remove is pointless. CLI is god when it comes to package management, GUI's are just to slow and clunky. The default apps are good, although I wish Evolution would be replaced by Thunderbird and Firefox is way too bloated. I use swiftfox mainly, though I find Opera to be a great browser too. If I was in Kubuntu I would use Konqueror, but not in Gnome.
Overall, Ubuntu is simple but unpolished. The CLI rules here, and I like that (although as commented in my Fedora review annoying at times). I would not recommend Ubuntu as a first timers distro over Opensuse due to the lack of GUI's, but I think once a person has used Suse and is comfortable with linux, if they are the type that likes to tinker they will move on, and Ubuntu is a good next step.
I give Ubuntu 8 1/2 penguins for a great product, but just that 1/2 step less refined than Fedora. I would wager that it will soon pass Fedora, however, due to the tremendous rate of development going on. Hopefully the next review will be Sabayon, but I will wait until 3.3 is out, so if thats a while there might be another in between.
Monday, March 5, 2007
It's Been a While!
It has indeed been a while since I have posted. In this time I have upgraded to a new box! Very exciting. I got one of the new AMD Athlon64 X2 chips (Brisbane Core, 65nm process). Also a Biostar tForce 550 mobo with 1GB matched pair DDR2 RAM. Finally, since the new board is PCI-E, I grabbed a GeForce 6600GT (Only 128mb vram, but it's DDR3, so it flies). It's amazing how much faster I compile when 2 cores split the work. I thought 64bit alone was fast! I saved the old pieces and am in the process of getting a new PSU to get them back up. I think I might throw Vista on that box for gaming (I have Vista for free - thank you MSDNAA - and don't feel like paying for WinXP). Actually I'll probably sell it. Who knows. Anyway, another review is in the works (hopefully later tonight). Hopefully they will come more frequently.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Fedora Core 6
Since I have just finished installing Fedora 6, I thought I would begin by sharing my thoughts on the process:
I downloaded the FC6 DVD months ago, but not being a Gnome fan I didn't really get into it very much, and without really trying it out it got quickly buried underneath other distro's I wanted to try. Well, time passed and I found the DVD and decided to give it a shot. The install was very straight forward. The one thing that stuck out in my mind was the default use of LVM groups. I understand that these are more functional than normal partitions in many ways, but I personally dislike them because with many OS's installed, they make it very difficult to share data between partitions. So I did my own partition setup and the install went fine from there.
After the install I booted the system, and was immediately struck my the Fedora DNA theme in the boot splash. Not only did it actually work with my ATI card (note: pay attention here, Ubuntu), but it actually looks tremendous. In fact, the whole DNA theme is great. Once booted, the system worked well. The desktop was slow because Fedora (being a F/OSS distro) had chosen the open source 'radeon' drivers for my card. I was impressed by this (normally the 'ati' choice is used by default, which doesn't work with my card). These drivers, however, left me without 3D acceleration. At first I searched the Livna repository (a 3rd party repo) for the drivers, but they wanted to update my kernel from the i586 version to the i686 version and that gave me errors (note: I had installed the updates available and gone from kernel 2.6.18 to 2.6.19, so the i686 kernel was nearly identical to the i586 one... more on this later). No problem I thought, I'll just use the ones from the ATI page. This was a nightmare. Neither the RPMs created by the installer or the direct install worked (my xorg.conf was properly set up, but the kernel modules would not build properly). So, I did what any linux user would do: I reinstalled to clean up the mess. This time I didn't do the updates before installing the drivers via Livna, and it upgraded to the new kernel perfectly. After a reboot, 3D acceleration was enabled.
As for the OS itself, I was blown away. The polish is tremendous. I love the default apps, I love the little touches (like when I double click on a binary I get a dialog that asks me if I want to run the program... most distro's would open a text editor!), and it is gorgeous. I went ahead and themed a lot of it, but left more than I usually do. I have never been a fan of RPMs, but yum is a very usable tool. Much better than whatever Mandriva uses (I can't remember), and much quicker than Yast on SuSE. I did have an issue with OpenOffice.org (which to my surprise was of the 2.0x series, not the new 2.10), but I uninstalled it to use abiword/gnumeric anyway, so that was a non issue.
Overall, I love Fedora. I was once a Ubuntu diehard, but that lost its luster and I have been floating for a while without one stable OS... I have now found it. I strongly encourage anyone to try Fedora, as it is one of the very best linux distributions I have tried to date. I give it 9 penguins (out of a possible 10).
I downloaded the FC6 DVD months ago, but not being a Gnome fan I didn't really get into it very much, and without really trying it out it got quickly buried underneath other distro's I wanted to try. Well, time passed and I found the DVD and decided to give it a shot. The install was very straight forward. The one thing that stuck out in my mind was the default use of LVM groups. I understand that these are more functional than normal partitions in many ways, but I personally dislike them because with many OS's installed, they make it very difficult to share data between partitions. So I did my own partition setup and the install went fine from there.
After the install I booted the system, and was immediately struck my the Fedora DNA theme in the boot splash. Not only did it actually work with my ATI card (note: pay attention here, Ubuntu), but it actually looks tremendous. In fact, the whole DNA theme is great. Once booted, the system worked well. The desktop was slow because Fedora (being a F/OSS distro) had chosen the open source 'radeon' drivers for my card. I was impressed by this (normally the 'ati' choice is used by default, which doesn't work with my card). These drivers, however, left me without 3D acceleration. At first I searched the Livna repository (a 3rd party repo) for the drivers, but they wanted to update my kernel from the i586 version to the i686 version and that gave me errors (note: I had installed the updates available and gone from kernel 2.6.18 to 2.6.19, so the i686 kernel was nearly identical to the i586 one... more on this later). No problem I thought, I'll just use the ones from the ATI page. This was a nightmare. Neither the RPMs created by the installer or the direct install worked (my xorg.conf was properly set up, but the kernel modules would not build properly). So, I did what any linux user would do: I reinstalled to clean up the mess. This time I didn't do the updates before installing the drivers via Livna, and it upgraded to the new kernel perfectly. After a reboot, 3D acceleration was enabled.
As for the OS itself, I was blown away. The polish is tremendous. I love the default apps, I love the little touches (like when I double click on a binary I get a dialog that asks me if I want to run the program... most distro's would open a text editor!), and it is gorgeous. I went ahead and themed a lot of it, but left more than I usually do. I have never been a fan of RPMs, but yum is a very usable tool. Much better than whatever Mandriva uses (I can't remember), and much quicker than Yast on SuSE. I did have an issue with OpenOffice.org (which to my surprise was of the 2.0x series, not the new 2.10), but I uninstalled it to use abiword/gnumeric anyway, so that was a non issue.
Overall, I love Fedora. I was once a Ubuntu diehard, but that lost its luster and I have been floating for a while without one stable OS... I have now found it. I strongly encourage anyone to try Fedora, as it is one of the very best linux distributions I have tried to date. I give it 9 penguins (out of a possible 10).
My First Thoughts
I plan to use this blog to review and/or just rant about various technology (Hint: mainly linux distro reviews). Many times I will try to be as impartial as possible, other times I will probably very single mindedly bash things I don't like. I hope many of you find this useful!
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