I saw it coming, and now I can safely say "I told you so" and so can a lot of other people who were expecting the new Ubuntu release to be unstable. 11.04 was released today to much hoopla from many news sites. Never have I been more disappointed by the stability of a release. Ever. Even Karmic Koala -- with which I had a terrible experience -- wasn't as horrific. I'm not even talking about the speed of the repository servers, which have been bombarded and are, thus slow. It would seem that at least on some machines, system stability rests on the edge of a knife. One of my machines would number among that lot.
I have a secondary machine at home which my children usually use to play games on Windows 7. It also runs the Linux distro flavor-of-the-week. During my vacation time this week I've toyed with Kubuntu 10.10, which was unacceptably slow, and Xubuntu 10.10, which had some notable issues. I was underwhelmed by both.
What has been my experience so far? Not good, I'm afraid. I grabbed a copy of Natty this morning, burned it, and started a clean install. The installer has a few minor annnoyances which have been introduced, such as not being able to type in the mount point for a specified partition. Irritating, but I can live with it. It also allows you to skip downloading certain parts. Seeing that the download speeds weren't as good as I liked, I hit the skip button to pass on downloading updates. My clicking was met with a hung installer. Luckily, I had passed the point where I could reboot without hosing the install, so I hard rebooted the thing, which at this point was my only option.
The first official boot didn't go any better. The GRUB screen was distorted, which didn't bode well. Once Ubuntu started booting, the terminal display was an utter mess and completely unreadable. X started and I was informed that I would have to use the classic desktop. The message was completely expected, but it was accompanied by portions of the screen which needed redrawn -- this would be disturbing to a newbie. Next stop: getting the proprietary Nvidia drivers. Ho-hum. They installed without a hitch (surprisingly), but after rebooting into the new shiny Unity environment I was met with yet another surprise: a totally unresponsive desktop. The only thing that it would do is let me move the pointer. The only session option I had which actually works is the Classic desktop with effects disabled. This is actually a step backward considering that it worked very well under Maverick.
I've heard quite a few good things about 11.04, so it can't all be as terrible as my experience has been. I'm sure in the next couple of weeks a lot of things will shake out. Personally speaking, Natty Narwhal should have been a little less ambitious because this release will not reflect well on Ubuntu as a community or on Canonical. Perhaps Oneiric will be better. It certainly can't do much worse.
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Linux. Show all posts
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
A New Hat... Actually It's a Fedora
I've had fundamental issues with the last few of Ubuntu releases that I've seen come out of Canonical. Jumping from Jaunty to Karmic was foolish -- not all of the bugs had settled out of it for at least a month after its release. Lucid moved the default location of the window buttons -- it is unwise to muck around with a geek's muscle memory. Maverick doesn't seem quite as stable overall, although I've run into fewer problems with jumping from Lucid than Karmic gave me. It is also completely nonsensical and wrongheaded to change introduce a mode to the Close button for Rhythmbox -- it effectively minimizes to the tray if the close button is pressed while it's playing, but closes the program if it isn't. Stupid, stupid, STUPID.
I've been looking for a new distro as a result. Judging from the GNOME vs Canonical news of late, I must not be entirely without justification to be less than satisfied. I've tried Unity. Didn't like it. I've really wanted to go with a Debian based system, if at all possible, because I know the basics of apt well and I like its speed. I wasn't enthused by OpenSUSE's dog-slow first impressions. I've also experimented with CentOS, but I like something a little more up-to-date, so I'm giving Fedora 14 a go. The last time I did anything significant with it was 11(!) versions ago. Still learning, but so far, the experience has been pretty pleasant. I've always liked Red Hat as a company even if I wasn't necessarily wild about RHEL or Fedora. I may be changing my mind about that one. We'll see. Here's to hoping. :-)
I've been looking for a new distro as a result. Judging from the GNOME vs Canonical news of late, I must not be entirely without justification to be less than satisfied. I've tried Unity. Didn't like it. I've really wanted to go with a Debian based system, if at all possible, because I know the basics of apt well and I like its speed. I wasn't enthused by OpenSUSE's dog-slow first impressions. I've also experimented with CentOS, but I like something a little more up-to-date, so I'm giving Fedora 14 a go. The last time I did anything significant with it was 11(!) versions ago. Still learning, but so far, the experience has been pretty pleasant. I've always liked Red Hat as a company even if I wasn't necessarily wild about RHEL or Fedora. I may be changing my mind about that one. We'll see. Here's to hoping. :-)
Friday, October 30, 2009
Karmic Koala is out...shrug
I was really excited last April when Jaunty came out. This time...not so much. Don't get me wrong, I like the new release, and the machine I'm typing this from is upgraded to it pretty quickly, but from the perception of Joe User, it seems more like an LTS upgrade. Here's what I've seen that's new:
First, there is the usual shiny. The icons are different. This version includes some nice wallpapers, and the boot process was made shinier by replacing Usplash with Xsplash. Of course, there is just this odd-looking Ubuntu logo while you're waiting for it to appear. The Xsplash screen is just plain gorgeous, but vaguely-beige logo that shows up beforehand is at least one step back. It's just ugly.
Once again, boot times seem to have been improved. I can't put my finger on it and I haven't bothered to time the differences, but it certainly feels faster.
A few new apps and some changes to existing ones. Network Tools adds some standard tools like pinging and port scanning, but nothing that wasn't already easily installed by those who needed it (or skipped if using bash). The Disk Utility is a nice addition, but it's only a mild improvement over gparted -- SMART information and a different way of looking at the partitions. The Ubuntu Software Center is even simpler than Add/Remove Programs was. As if IM using Pidgin was hard, as far as I can tell, Empathy makes A/V chat easy. A bunch of programs received upgrades, such as Firefox to 3.5 and OpenOffice.org to 3.1. Aside from these kinds of things, nothing earthshaking.
One notable exception to the otherwise nice-but-not-groundbreaking list is Ubuntu One. Now by default there is cloud storage. For cheap power users like myself, the 2GB storage is just a drop in the bucket and with the US economy being in the toilet, spending $10 or $20 a month for extra storage just isn't an option unless you *really* need it. Dropbox has the exact same storage costs and is cross-platform, unlike Ubuntu One. If you need cloud-base file synchronization with at least one Window$ box, this is a much better option. Still, Ubuntu One is nice, too.
Maybe I was expecting more because some of Canonical's previous releases have been major improvements. Karmic Koala is more of an incremental improvement. There are other big fish to fry, such as simple remote desktop access with FreeNX or a decent entry-level desktop publishing -- sorry, Scribus doesn't cut it in this case. Yes, these are "merely" apps, but there are plenty of improvements that can be made. I'm hoping Lucid Lynx makes some real headlines, but for now, I'm quite content with Karmic.
First, there is the usual shiny. The icons are different. This version includes some nice wallpapers, and the boot process was made shinier by replacing Usplash with Xsplash. Of course, there is just this odd-looking Ubuntu logo while you're waiting for it to appear. The Xsplash screen is just plain gorgeous, but vaguely-beige logo that shows up beforehand is at least one step back. It's just ugly.
Once again, boot times seem to have been improved. I can't put my finger on it and I haven't bothered to time the differences, but it certainly feels faster.
A few new apps and some changes to existing ones. Network Tools adds some standard tools like pinging and port scanning, but nothing that wasn't already easily installed by those who needed it (or skipped if using bash). The Disk Utility is a nice addition, but it's only a mild improvement over gparted -- SMART information and a different way of looking at the partitions. The Ubuntu Software Center is even simpler than Add/Remove Programs was. As if IM using Pidgin was hard, as far as I can tell, Empathy makes A/V chat easy. A bunch of programs received upgrades, such as Firefox to 3.5 and OpenOffice.org to 3.1. Aside from these kinds of things, nothing earthshaking.
One notable exception to the otherwise nice-but-not-groundbreaking list is Ubuntu One. Now by default there is cloud storage. For cheap power users like myself, the 2GB storage is just a drop in the bucket and with the US economy being in the toilet, spending $10 or $20 a month for extra storage just isn't an option unless you *really* need it. Dropbox has the exact same storage costs and is cross-platform, unlike Ubuntu One. If you need cloud-base file synchronization with at least one Window$ box, this is a much better option. Still, Ubuntu One is nice, too.
Maybe I was expecting more because some of Canonical's previous releases have been major improvements. Karmic Koala is more of an incremental improvement. There are other big fish to fry, such as simple remote desktop access with FreeNX or a decent entry-level desktop publishing -- sorry, Scribus doesn't cut it in this case. Yes, these are "merely" apps, but there are plenty of improvements that can be made. I'm hoping Lucid Lynx makes some real headlines, but for now, I'm quite content with Karmic.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
CloneZilla: More than a Ghost of a Chance
School started for the teachers at my school last Wednesday, so no code for me. :( However, there has been an up side to it all. To make a long story short, I get to teach some junior high and high school computer classes and had a need to image a total of 10 laptops. In the past, I used Norton Ghost 12 and recently upgraded to 2003. Both were provided by my school. Never again, however. While I was in the middle of waiting for a machine to be imaged, I did a little looking around Wikipedia for alternative software, having never heard of any alternatives or bothered to look for any. There is a wonderful alternative: CloneZilla.
What is CloneZilla, you ask? It is a Linux-based Live CD project which does the same basic stuff has Norton Ghost 2003 (and a lot that it doesn't), but is free software and -- as far as I can tell -- faster, too. Both allow you to back up your machine to one big file and then clone others from that file. CloneZilla, however, is quite a bit more technical than Ghost, which tries to market itself as both a backup solution for the regular user and a sysadmin's imaging tool. With that said, CZ is quite technical, and there were quite a few options that I had no clue what they were for. It was a wise idea for those behind the project to incorporate both a beginner and an advanced mode. The latter is well-named!
Some of the other things that I really thought were nice to have: backup can be done via SSH, NFS, or Windows file sharing (Samba) or to a local disk. Quite literally, you could clone a machine from the Live CD and a flash drive! Maybe I'm just really happy because Ghost 12 leaves you using PC-DOS and 2003 sticks you with the Vista pre-install environment. While for different reasons, they're both junk. It took 2003 probably a good 5 minutes to boot and the CZ disc about 2. Multiply that by 10 machines and you have something significant.
One thing I did not test out was the server version of CloneZilla. It comes as a part of Diskless Remote Boot Linux and requires loading a machine with Linux to act as a server to handle booting over the network. If the testimonies on the project's website are any measure, not having to buy theexpensive enterprise version of Ghost coupled with the speed of cloning up to 100 machines over the network at the same time is nothing short of phenomenal.
This is not to say that working with CloneZilla is all wine and roses. I did run into one major problem with my first attempt. The first image I created with it was done over the network to a disk I was sharing from Windows XP. The image had somehow gotten corrupted when it was created. However, I made a new one to a USB hard drive I had lying around and it was all fixed from there on.
I can't stand Norton's antivirus package, but Ghost is a solid product. CloneZilla feels like it's based on Linux, full of technical terms and a slew of unfamiliar options. Guess what? When it comes to price, speed, and hardware compatibility, Norton seems to lack the spirit.
What is CloneZilla, you ask? It is a Linux-based Live CD project which does the same basic stuff has Norton Ghost 2003 (and a lot that it doesn't), but is free software and -- as far as I can tell -- faster, too. Both allow you to back up your machine to one big file and then clone others from that file. CloneZilla, however, is quite a bit more technical than Ghost, which tries to market itself as both a backup solution for the regular user and a sysadmin's imaging tool. With that said, CZ is quite technical, and there were quite a few options that I had no clue what they were for. It was a wise idea for those behind the project to incorporate both a beginner and an advanced mode. The latter is well-named!
Some of the other things that I really thought were nice to have: backup can be done via SSH, NFS, or Windows file sharing (Samba) or to a local disk. Quite literally, you could clone a machine from the Live CD and a flash drive! Maybe I'm just really happy because Ghost 12 leaves you using PC-DOS and 2003 sticks you with the Vista pre-install environment. While for different reasons, they're both junk. It took 2003 probably a good 5 minutes to boot and the CZ disc about 2. Multiply that by 10 machines and you have something significant.
One thing I did not test out was the server version of CloneZilla. It comes as a part of Diskless Remote Boot Linux and requires loading a machine with Linux to act as a server to handle booting over the network. If the testimonies on the project's website are any measure, not having to buy the
This is not to say that working with CloneZilla is all wine and roses. I did run into one major problem with my first attempt. The first image I created with it was done over the network to a disk I was sharing from Windows XP. The image had somehow gotten corrupted when it was created. However, I made a new one to a USB hard drive I had lying around and it was all fixed from there on.
I can't stand Norton's antivirus package, but Ghost is a solid product. CloneZilla feels like it's based on Linux, full of technical terms and a slew of unfamiliar options. Guess what? When it comes to price, speed, and hardware compatibility, Norton seems to lack the spirit.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Windows Responsiveness (or Lack Thereof)
It's official: I really have gone off the deep end -- at least if you talk to anyone from Redmond. BeOS fanatic zealot that I am, I'm acutely aware of the responsiveness of an operating system's desktop user interface. I expect my computer to run slower if I'm hitting the hard drive or processor pretty hard. I also expect programs to NOT take several seconds to respond to input or to redraw themselves. My experience with OS X is pretty shallow in comparison to my usage of various Linux distributions, BeOS and its variants, and all Windows versions save Media Center and 2.0 -- yes, I there was a time where I twiddled with Windows 1.0. Nonetheless, to my recollection, I have never seen Windows respond to the user very well even on a machine far beyond the recommended specs.
After spending the summer with my work laptop running Ubuntu, I had to install XP Pro. I didn't want to, but my school is a Windows-only shop. I disliked doing the install and resented having to hunt all over the Web for drivers only to have to install 500MB of system updates, but the last straw was when I was copying over my MP3 collection. Both machines were running XP and the file copy was taking forever. After about fifteen minutes, I rebooted the source machine into Linux, deleted what little had been copied, and started copying the collection using FileZilla to do an SFTP transfer. I had two files being copied at once and each one was taking half the time to copy as the XP file copy had. Somewhere in there, there's a problem. Worse yet, the destination machine was so slow (Athlon 64 3000, 512MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive) as to be unusable. Just plain sad. Man, I'm going to dislike using this machine with Windows again. :(
After spending the summer with my work laptop running Ubuntu, I had to install XP Pro. I didn't want to, but my school is a Windows-only shop. I disliked doing the install and resented having to hunt all over the Web for drivers only to have to install 500MB of system updates, but the last straw was when I was copying over my MP3 collection. Both machines were running XP and the file copy was taking forever. After about fifteen minutes, I rebooted the source machine into Linux, deleted what little had been copied, and started copying the collection using FileZilla to do an SFTP transfer. I had two files being copied at once and each one was taking half the time to copy as the XP file copy had. Somewhere in there, there's a problem. Worse yet, the destination machine was so slow (Athlon 64 3000, 512MB RAM, 80 GB hard drive) as to be unusable. Just plain sad. Man, I'm going to dislike using this machine with Windows again. :(
Friday, May 15, 2009
Brick Walls Sure Hurt
Ouch. I've been doing research into the whole Linux clipart manager and wxPython and I've run headlong into a brick wall. What is it? The X clipboard system was designed by paranoid, short-sighted morons. If you're not copying text, you're pretty much shut out, so it seems, because most applications that work with other kinds of data use private clipboards. Then again, the way the X clipboard is designed, clipboard storage is decentralized and if an app puts something on the clipboard and then quits, the data goes poof with it. Interoperability at it's best. Yay! The nice part? Unless we have some benevolent dictator say this has to be fixed, it'll never be fixed, either.
This discovery more or less puts the clipart manager dead in the water, unfortunately. The upshot to all of this is that I've been slowly getting the hang of working in Python, which is both fun and powerful.
This discovery more or less puts the clipart manager dead in the water, unfortunately. The upshot to all of this is that I've been slowly getting the hang of working in Python, which is both fun and powerful.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Ups and Downs
That would definitely summarize my life for the last couple of weeks. Not so much a roller coaster, but it has had some smaller ups and downs. I started working on integrating my old website and this blog and renovating my old site for the integration. It's a ways off and I'm having to relearn Javascript and learn some DHTML magic to make it work well, but it's started. Teaching computers at school has also spawned a couple of smaller projects and revived work on another -- if you're a coder and none of the tools available fit your needs, what do you do? Make your own, of course!
This would probably be the first time where I've been juggling more than a couple projects at once: a simple whiteboard application (almost done), fixes for BeMines, a few more tweaks remaining before Paladin's 1.0 final release, a small app for reviewing flashcards -- mostly pictures -- in class with my students, and reviving my first project by rewriting it: BePhotoMagic. It's a lot, but I'm not planning for the tools to be used before the end of this year, and it's all been fun stuff, so a timeframe for release isn't really an issue.
Unless you've been under a rock or don't follow Linux at all, the latest release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope, was released last Thursday. I absolutely *love* it because of the much-improved boot times -- the only real complaint that I've had about Linux up to now. My development box is a Pentium 4 3Ghz with Hyperthreading and 1GB of RAM and it boots in 30 seconds. That's half as long as XP Pro on the same machine!
Also in Jaunty is the dovecot-postfix package, a complete mail server installed in one package, courtesy of the Ubuntu team. If you've never attempted to set up a mail server under Linux, it's not for the faint of heart. In fact, I'd say it's harder than compiling and installing your own Linux kernel, so this is also big news for any would-be beginner sysadmins out there.
It's also easier to work with more than one monitor under Linux using the new release, as well. It's still a little strange and takes some playing around, but it's nowhere near the headache that it used to be. Gone is the need for futzing with xorg.conf files to configure Xinerama. This is also a major improvement in a smaller area.
In other news, Microsoft has conceded defeat on the OOXML vs ODF wars and apparently has included full ODF support in the just-released Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. All I can say is it's about time that Redmond got some sense in this area. Unfortunately, it won't be rolled out via Microsoft Update until August. At least now my coworkers can finally use my OpenOffice.org files without much hassle.
There isn't much else to tell, but when I have something to show, you'll know. TTFN. :-)
This would probably be the first time where I've been juggling more than a couple projects at once: a simple whiteboard application (almost done), fixes for BeMines, a few more tweaks remaining before Paladin's 1.0 final release, a small app for reviewing flashcards -- mostly pictures -- in class with my students, and reviving my first project by rewriting it: BePhotoMagic. It's a lot, but I'm not planning for the tools to be used before the end of this year, and it's all been fun stuff, so a timeframe for release isn't really an issue.
Unless you've been under a rock or don't follow Linux at all, the latest release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope, was released last Thursday. I absolutely *love* it because of the much-improved boot times -- the only real complaint that I've had about Linux up to now. My development box is a Pentium 4 3Ghz with Hyperthreading and 1GB of RAM and it boots in 30 seconds. That's half as long as XP Pro on the same machine!
Also in Jaunty is the dovecot-postfix package, a complete mail server installed in one package, courtesy of the Ubuntu team. If you've never attempted to set up a mail server under Linux, it's not for the faint of heart. In fact, I'd say it's harder than compiling and installing your own Linux kernel, so this is also big news for any would-be beginner sysadmins out there.
It's also easier to work with more than one monitor under Linux using the new release, as well. It's still a little strange and takes some playing around, but it's nowhere near the headache that it used to be. Gone is the need for futzing with xorg.conf files to configure Xinerama. This is also a major improvement in a smaller area.
In other news, Microsoft has conceded defeat on the OOXML vs ODF wars and apparently has included full ODF support in the just-released Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. All I can say is it's about time that Redmond got some sense in this area. Unfortunately, it won't be rolled out via Microsoft Update until August. At least now my coworkers can finally use my OpenOffice.org files without much hassle.
There isn't much else to tell, but when I have something to show, you'll know. TTFN. :-)
Friday, March 20, 2009
Presto: Instant-On Linux from Xandros
A while ago Xandros, the producer of a commercial Debian-based Linux distribution, announced Presto, a way to jump into Linux without the usual boot time to make Skype calls, browse the Web, and edit documents. Yesterday in my inbox was an e-mail announcing the availability of the public beta version of Presto. I was really wondering if it's possible to get the "instant-on" boot times advertised and if they really are that fast.
Downloading and installing Presto from the website is easy enough. The installer is 483MB, so it's smaller than most of the major Linux distributions, but larger than the little ones like DSL and Puppy Linux. It installs (and uninstalls) the same way that Ubuntu can be installed through Wubi and on my machine, everything installed without a hitch. There was one minor bug I had to deal with, but for my purposes here, I'm not going to bother with it here, being a beta version and all.
Boot times are impressive. From the time that I hit Enter at the boot menu to choose Presto, it was literally 10 seconds to the desktop. While I'm not so sure I would call that instant-on, the only OS I've ever seen to boot that fast is BeOS. By comparison, XP SP3 on the same machine takes over a minute. Ubuntu takes somewhere between 1 minute, 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Ouch. The test rig is neither a dinosaur nor a bleeding-edge gaming rig: an AMD64 3000+ with 2GB of RAM on a 320GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. The major marketing point behind Presto seems to be pretty much valid in this case.
Once booted, you are greeted with a rather spartan desktop with a panel along the left side of the screen. The desktop environment is Xfce4 and immediately available are Firefox for web browsing, Pidgin for instant messaging, Skype for voice chat, the Thunar file manager, and a launcher for the Xandros Application Store and that's it -- sparse, but the Store makes installing other programs a cinch.
The Application Store is nothing new if you're familiar with Click and Run from the days of the Linspire distribution. For the uninitiated, Click and Run is a way to install a program with one click from the Firefox web browser. Many programs in the store are free, but there are also web services and commercial products, as well.
The only real downside to using Presto that I found was the lack of customizability. Having used Xfce and GNOME extensively and experimented with KDE 3 and 4, I'd say that Xfce is a good middle ground between GNOME and KDE for the amount of options offered to the user. Unfortunately, I found none of that available. In fact, the only way to open a terminal window is by right-clicking in a file manager window and choosing Open Terminal Here. It appears that the user is not permitted to add another launcher to the panel or to access the regular control panel that comes with Xfce.
This lack of customization makes me wonder what Presto's target market is. It seems too limited to bother with on a reasonably modern PC and worthwhile only in a semi-embedded role, such as the OS shipped on a netbook. Nontechnical users won't care what's on it as long as they can use Word (which they can't). Power users will probably find it fairly limiting like I did, and Free Software advocates will most likely look elsewhere, being this is a proprietary distro.
Personally, I find the boot and shutdown times amazing -- it boots as fast as BeOS and shuts down faster than Haiku, which is really saying something. Once booted, though, it feels like something's missing. There are some nice choices in the Application Store, but the ones which were unfamiliar to me were almost exclusively the non-free choices. Somehow, I just don't find Presto compelling. Here's to waiting for the Jaunty Jackalope release next month.
Downloading and installing Presto from the website is easy enough. The installer is 483MB, so it's smaller than most of the major Linux distributions, but larger than the little ones like DSL and Puppy Linux. It installs (and uninstalls) the same way that Ubuntu can be installed through Wubi and on my machine, everything installed without a hitch. There was one minor bug I had to deal with, but for my purposes here, I'm not going to bother with it here, being a beta version and all.
Boot times are impressive. From the time that I hit Enter at the boot menu to choose Presto, it was literally 10 seconds to the desktop. While I'm not so sure I would call that instant-on, the only OS I've ever seen to boot that fast is BeOS. By comparison, XP SP3 on the same machine takes over a minute. Ubuntu takes somewhere between 1 minute, 30 seconds to 2 minutes. Ouch. The test rig is neither a dinosaur nor a bleeding-edge gaming rig: an AMD64 3000+ with 2GB of RAM on a 320GB Western Digital EIDE hard drive. The major marketing point behind Presto seems to be pretty much valid in this case.
Once booted, you are greeted with a rather spartan desktop with a panel along the left side of the screen. The desktop environment is Xfce4 and immediately available are Firefox for web browsing, Pidgin for instant messaging, Skype for voice chat, the Thunar file manager, and a launcher for the Xandros Application Store and that's it -- sparse, but the Store makes installing other programs a cinch.
The Application Store is nothing new if you're familiar with Click and Run from the days of the Linspire distribution. For the uninitiated, Click and Run is a way to install a program with one click from the Firefox web browser. Many programs in the store are free, but there are also web services and commercial products, as well.
The only real downside to using Presto that I found was the lack of customizability. Having used Xfce and GNOME extensively and experimented with KDE 3 and 4, I'd say that Xfce is a good middle ground between GNOME and KDE for the amount of options offered to the user. Unfortunately, I found none of that available. In fact, the only way to open a terminal window is by right-clicking in a file manager window and choosing Open Terminal Here. It appears that the user is not permitted to add another launcher to the panel or to access the regular control panel that comes with Xfce.
This lack of customization makes me wonder what Presto's target market is. It seems too limited to bother with on a reasonably modern PC and worthwhile only in a semi-embedded role, such as the OS shipped on a netbook. Nontechnical users won't care what's on it as long as they can use Word (which they can't). Power users will probably find it fairly limiting like I did, and Free Software advocates will most likely look elsewhere, being this is a proprietary distro.
Personally, I find the boot and shutdown times amazing -- it boots as fast as BeOS and shuts down faster than Haiku, which is really saying something. Once booted, though, it feels like something's missing. There are some nice choices in the Application Store, but the ones which were unfamiliar to me were almost exclusively the non-free choices. Somehow, I just don't find Presto compelling. Here's to waiting for the Jaunty Jackalope release next month.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Viruses, Spyware, and Trojans, Oh My!
I wear a great many hats at school. Amongst them is the all-around computer geek fix-it guy. In the last three weeks, I've had to remove spyware from two machines, and I'm currently in the middle of a complete reinstall on a colleague's home machine as a personal favor. The cause? Conficker, a.k.a. Downadup. Sigh. I tire of this kind of stuff. It would also be the reason why I highly favor other operating systems. Then again, the source of the infection was a keygen for some software. People looking to get commercial software for nothing seem to forget that pirates and software crack teams don't distribute their stuff out of the kindness of their hearts. The son of my colleague asked me what antivirus program I'd recommend. My first response, as a somewhat-pointed joke, was "Linux," but I wish I'd been able to reply with "Haiku."
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Easy Remote Linux Logins with FreeNX
With my having to fuss with networks at school and having a couple of machines at home, there have been a few instances where being able to remotely log into another machine has been a significant convenience. There aren’t many options out there unless you want to pay money:
- RDP (aka Windows Terminal Services) – Free only for the client. As far as my limited experience has been, this is quite nice, fast, and it even supports audio. The only problem is that the licensing is quite draconian and it only is available on the server editions of Windows or a pay-for version for *NIX.
- X11 – X was designed for network-transparent sessions. The only problem is that it’s not secure and setting it up over SSH is a pain.
- VNC – Lots of good things here – free servers and clients for just about any platform you can think of and setup is pretty easy in most cases. The problem? It’s a bandwidth hog.
Enter the Italian company NoMachine, which offers its commercial NX Server for remote access under for Linux and its ilk with open source libraries. These libraries implement the NX protocol, which is more or less a way to both secure and speed up remote login connections.
As far as my experience has taken me, it hasn’t seen anywhere near the popularity that VNC has. I find this strange – VNC tends to be slow – even with compression – and is not secure on its own. It can also be a little weird to set up sometimes, as was the case for me setting up UltraVNC on a Windows box at school yesterday.
Perhaps it’s just me, but FreeNX deserves more limelight than it has received, if my setup experience from earlier today is any measure. Part of the ease of installation was thanks to http://www.drtek.ca. The main part of the site seems to be in French, but one page was both in French and English. Compliments of its author, I received listings for the repositories that I needed and was able to install the server with one command. Because NoMachine offers NX clients for both Windows, Linux, OS X, and Solaris, I went to NoMachine’s download page and grabbed the Windows and Linux versions. Just to test to see if things worked, I installed the Linux client on the server machine and tried to log into a regular terminal login and it worked – a little too easily for Linux, in my opinion. I tried a GNOME login from my windows box with the same results. I’ve come to accept the amount of tweaking that Linux requires in most cases, so when it just seemed to work, I was a little suspicious, but everything works as expected.
For a short summary, here’s the entire install process:
- Open up /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following lines to the end:
# Ubuntu FreeNX Repository for Hardy
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/marceloshima/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/marceloshima/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/freenx-team/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/freenx-team/ubuntu hardy main# Ubuntu FreeNX Repository for Intrepid
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/marceloshima/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/marceloshima/ubuntu intrepid main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/freenx-team/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/freenx-team/ubuntu intrepid main - Update the list of packages kept on your machine by hitting Reload in Synaptic or sudo apt-get update from the Terminal
- Install the freenx-server package, either from Synaptic or from the Terminal using sudo apt-get install freenx-server .
- Grab the necessary clients from NoMachine’s download page and install on the machine of your choice.
- Marvel at the lack of work required.
There is still the ability to tweak the configuration until the Second Coming of Christ, as is typical of Linux, but this is only needed if you want remote printing (which I haven’t tried… yet), sound, or certain other things like setting up a remote login cluster or something. If you just want to be able to log in, you’re done. Ain’t that nice.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
What Vista could Teach Linux and Haiku
Once again, I am in the process of finding some hot sauce to go with the words that I'm eating. There was once a time when I said to myself that I'd never, ever install Windows Vista on my desktop machine at home. It's funny how circumstances have a tendency to change your mind. To make a long story short, I plonked down 65 clams to get an upgrade license to Home Premium and my computer now dual boots Vista and Xubuntu. I haven't forgotten or abandoned my love of Haiku or my liking for Ubuntu, but I will share with you a little food for thought, as in what Linux and Haiku could learn from Vista, both its successes and failures.
The Out-of-the-Box Experience Matters
This one is mostly for Haiku, but it could also apply to just about any Linux distro. Apple has got this one nailed, but I digress. Microsoft did well on the OOBE for Vista. From the unpackaging the CD (or DVD) to the "junk papers" included in it, the installation and ability to upgrade from within Windows, Vista at least gives you the impression that it is a well-polished piece of software.
The installer is nice-looking, clear, well-worded, and--dare I say it--usable. I can do without all the marketing-speak, but that's par for the course and easy to ignore. I think that Haiku could do more to reduce the amount of interaction needed to get an install done, but Redmond has certainly improved over, say, XP's installer.
Proper Hardware Support Really Matters
Driver support has been spotty in Vista. I know more than a couple of people who have been burned by unsupported peripherals after an upgrade to Vista. My desktop machine is about a year old, and -- unsuprisingly -- its game port is not supported. I have an old 3com 3c905b network card which I'm not exactly surprised isn't supported. Yeah, yeah, some of you are might be saying that it's up to the manufacturers to support their hardware, but I'll say it again: the technical details only matter to the technically-minded. Businessmen don't typically care unless it significantly changes profits, one way or the other. Nontechnical home users don't care. Many office workers don't either.
Some devices in Linux work perfectly out of the box. Others require some tweaking, and then there is the On Your Own realm where either a device requires a lot of playing, configuring, reconfiguring, swearing, forum scrounging, and possibly even code hacking to get to work. Of course, there are more than a couple devices that don't work at all, for whatever reason. The funny thing is that even between distros you find support for certain hardware or hardware-related features, such as suspend / hibernate, varying between distributions.
BeOS did somewhat better in this matter. It either worked or it didn't, and there generally wasn't anything in between. Unfortunately, there were occasions where it wasn't obvious whether a device worked and, as a result, remained a mystery without some digging around. An easier device manager app might be the solution to this. Hardware support for Haiku will be hit and miss in many cases for a while, but it should be easier to make it come around, thanks to many of the inroads made by Linux.
Place No Unnecessary Restrictions on Your Users
Vista has a variety of methods for getting in the way. You can't use GRUB (or any other bootloader, for that matter) without some hackery. The UI is comfortable, but slow. More steps are required to do certain tasks than in XP. There is much change for the sake of change. UAC makes me Cancel or Allow seemingly everything, and while Linux and its brethren have the occasions where you have to type in your password to do administrative tasks, this happens much less frequently in my experience than Vista. Filesystem permissions can give headaches from time to time, but they have nothing on the annoyance value that Vista's do. Using an upgrade license key isn't that bad unless you need to change the partition table, in which you will have no choice but to install Vista twice -- the key only works when installed from Windows and the partition table can only be changed when booted from the install media. Joy. It's things like this that make books like O'Reilly's Vista Annoyances necessary.
Eye Candy isn't Required, but it is Nice to Have
Believe it or not, I'm not even referring to a 3D-accelerated desktop experience, even though that is the direction that Vista took. Good looks aren't necessary for the experience, but it does help to initially draw someone in to take a second look and it makes working with the OS more enjoyable. One thing that I've felt in using Vista is that it feels like going on a luxury cruise: it looks pretty nice, has its annoyances, costs a lot of money, has a generally cushy feel to it, and it takes some time to get used to your surroundings. It also makes some people want to throw up. Don't get me wrong, though. Let's just say good looks has enough value to make a requirement.
Linux has some distros that look good and others not so much. GNOME and KDE go in opposite directions in terms of general look and feel. GNOME is very conservative and KDE is brightly colored-- so much so that some would say it is garish.
The initial work that Stephen Aßmus and others have done on the icons and general look is praiseworthy. The colors aren't too bright, but it does look nice and without shying away from the use of color. I'd say Haiku's in good hands on this one.
A Broken Trust is Hard to Repair
This has more to do with a company behind the software than the software itself. There are numerous instances in both XP and Vista where it shows that Microsoft groups users into two categories: geeks and clueless people, and it doesn't trust geeks without making any attempt to hide it. How? Let me see... Windows / Office Genuine Advantage and its WGA Notifications nagware, DRM in Windows Media Player, Trusted (ha!) Computing, the privacy-invading Windows Vista Customer Experience Improvement Program, and forced software activation, and even stealth computer updates by means of Windows Update, just to name a few.
Most of this stuff has been put into place because of software piracy in the warez scene and bootlegging overseas, even though Microsoft has made money by the truckload with Office and Windows. As a result, many existing customers have less trust for MS than most citizens have in the Internal Revenue Service here in the U.S. The sad part that Microsoft neither seems to care nor has any plans of changing this. Combine this distrust of its users with several botched software upgrades like XP SP3 and you have a reputation problem on your hands that even Redmond's spin doctors will have a hard time fixing.
Linux proponents vary in their opinions, which, considering the wide variety of its users and developers, isn't surprising. Many of them fall into the Richard Stallman camp which not only preaches software that is free as in speech, but has a somewhat-justified distrust of proprietary software.
My experience with the BeOS / Haiku community is that open source is good. Haiku is developed under the MIT license but bundles in software with other licenses. I remember asking Michael Phipps about the "what if someone grabs the source and makes a closed-source product with it" scenario and I liked his answer. It went something like, "So what? Haiku is still free. Call it a gift to the community. If some one makes a closed source version, Haiku is still free." If that's not goodwill, I don't know what is.
Conclusions
All-in-all, Vista's not a bad experience for most folks. It's just that, at best, it's not very compelling and at its worst, it's a nightmare. High cost, steep hardware requirements, too many choices of editions, a development cycle that went way too long, a company whose bureaucracy weighs heavily on software development, a lack of trust for its customers, and many other factors combine for a let-down with few positives. If Microsoft wants to head into decline, it need only continue its current behavior. However, it's unlikely that Linux's chaotic development into all directions without a clear vision for certain markets will cause it to become a Windows-killer, but that leaves opportunity for Haiku to find a clear niche. Only time will tell to see if anyone learns from Vista and Microsoft.
The Out-of-the-Box Experience Matters
This one is mostly for Haiku, but it could also apply to just about any Linux distro. Apple has got this one nailed, but I digress. Microsoft did well on the OOBE for Vista. From the unpackaging the CD (or DVD) to the "junk papers" included in it, the installation and ability to upgrade from within Windows, Vista at least gives you the impression that it is a well-polished piece of software.
The installer is nice-looking, clear, well-worded, and--dare I say it--usable. I can do without all the marketing-speak, but that's par for the course and easy to ignore. I think that Haiku could do more to reduce the amount of interaction needed to get an install done, but Redmond has certainly improved over, say, XP's installer.
Proper Hardware Support Really Matters
Driver support has been spotty in Vista. I know more than a couple of people who have been burned by unsupported peripherals after an upgrade to Vista. My desktop machine is about a year old, and -- unsuprisingly -- its game port is not supported. I have an old 3com 3c905b network card which I'm not exactly surprised isn't supported. Yeah, yeah, some of you are might be saying that it's up to the manufacturers to support their hardware, but I'll say it again: the technical details only matter to the technically-minded. Businessmen don't typically care unless it significantly changes profits, one way or the other. Nontechnical home users don't care. Many office workers don't either.
Some devices in Linux work perfectly out of the box. Others require some tweaking, and then there is the On Your Own realm where either a device requires a lot of playing, configuring, reconfiguring, swearing, forum scrounging, and possibly even code hacking to get to work. Of course, there are more than a couple devices that don't work at all, for whatever reason. The funny thing is that even between distros you find support for certain hardware or hardware-related features, such as suspend / hibernate, varying between distributions.
BeOS did somewhat better in this matter. It either worked or it didn't, and there generally wasn't anything in between. Unfortunately, there were occasions where it wasn't obvious whether a device worked and, as a result, remained a mystery without some digging around. An easier device manager app might be the solution to this. Hardware support for Haiku will be hit and miss in many cases for a while, but it should be easier to make it come around, thanks to many of the inroads made by Linux.
Place No Unnecessary Restrictions on Your Users
Vista has a variety of methods for getting in the way. You can't use GRUB (or any other bootloader, for that matter) without some hackery. The UI is comfortable, but slow. More steps are required to do certain tasks than in XP. There is much change for the sake of change. UAC makes me Cancel or Allow seemingly everything, and while Linux and its brethren have the occasions where you have to type in your password to do administrative tasks, this happens much less frequently in my experience than Vista. Filesystem permissions can give headaches from time to time, but they have nothing on the annoyance value that Vista's do. Using an upgrade license key isn't that bad unless you need to change the partition table, in which you will have no choice but to install Vista twice -- the key only works when installed from Windows and the partition table can only be changed when booted from the install media. Joy. It's things like this that make books like O'Reilly's Vista Annoyances necessary.
Eye Candy isn't Required, but it is Nice to Have
Believe it or not, I'm not even referring to a 3D-accelerated desktop experience, even though that is the direction that Vista took. Good looks aren't necessary for the experience, but it does help to initially draw someone in to take a second look and it makes working with the OS more enjoyable. One thing that I've felt in using Vista is that it feels like going on a luxury cruise: it looks pretty nice, has its annoyances, costs a lot of money, has a generally cushy feel to it, and it takes some time to get used to your surroundings. It also makes some people want to throw up. Don't get me wrong, though. Let's just say good looks has enough value to make a requirement.
Linux has some distros that look good and others not so much. GNOME and KDE go in opposite directions in terms of general look and feel. GNOME is very conservative and KDE is brightly colored-- so much so that some would say it is garish.
The initial work that Stephen Aßmus and others have done on the icons and general look is praiseworthy. The colors aren't too bright, but it does look nice and without shying away from the use of color. I'd say Haiku's in good hands on this one.
A Broken Trust is Hard to Repair
This has more to do with a company behind the software than the software itself. There are numerous instances in both XP and Vista where it shows that Microsoft groups users into two categories: geeks and clueless people, and it doesn't trust geeks without making any attempt to hide it. How? Let me see... Windows / Office Genuine Advantage and its WGA Notifications nagware, DRM in Windows Media Player, Trusted (ha!) Computing, the privacy-invading Windows Vista Customer Experience Improvement Program, and forced software activation, and even stealth computer updates by means of Windows Update, just to name a few.
Most of this stuff has been put into place because of software piracy in the warez scene and bootlegging overseas, even though Microsoft has made money by the truckload with Office and Windows. As a result, many existing customers have less trust for MS than most citizens have in the Internal Revenue Service here in the U.S. The sad part that Microsoft neither seems to care nor has any plans of changing this. Combine this distrust of its users with several botched software upgrades like XP SP3 and you have a reputation problem on your hands that even Redmond's spin doctors will have a hard time fixing.
Linux proponents vary in their opinions, which, considering the wide variety of its users and developers, isn't surprising. Many of them fall into the Richard Stallman camp which not only preaches software that is free as in speech, but has a somewhat-justified distrust of proprietary software.
My experience with the BeOS / Haiku community is that open source is good. Haiku is developed under the MIT license but bundles in software with other licenses. I remember asking Michael Phipps about the "what if someone grabs the source and makes a closed-source product with it" scenario and I liked his answer. It went something like, "So what? Haiku is still free. Call it a gift to the community. If some one makes a closed source version, Haiku is still free." If that's not goodwill, I don't know what is.
Conclusions
All-in-all, Vista's not a bad experience for most folks. It's just that, at best, it's not very compelling and at its worst, it's a nightmare. High cost, steep hardware requirements, too many choices of editions, a development cycle that went way too long, a company whose bureaucracy weighs heavily on software development, a lack of trust for its customers, and many other factors combine for a let-down with few positives. If Microsoft wants to head into decline, it need only continue its current behavior. However, it's unlikely that Linux's chaotic development into all directions without a clear vision for certain markets will cause it to become a Windows-killer, but that leaves opportunity for Haiku to find a clear niche. Only time will tell to see if anyone learns from Vista and Microsoft.
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