My favorite feature of Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04)?

Dust is installed by default.

There has been lots of discussion on this in the Ubuntu community for a few releases now…I think Dust is a definite winner. There will never be any theme that will please every one, but I think Dust not only looks great now but will integrate into GNOME shell very nicely as well!

Just a random comment – now back to your regularly scheduled Blog reading.

Let’s face it. Ubuntu is based on Debian – each new release of Ubuntu draws packages in from Debian’s Unstable branch, polishes those packages and with the wave of a few thousand magic wands, a new Ubuntu version is born.

Ok, ok – there is more too it than that, but it is true that although technically no longer “compatible” with each other, Ubuntu is based on Debian, and does to a certain extend depends on Debian for it’s mere existence.

You would think that these two projects (both being Linux distributions) would have the same end goal in mind, which would be to offer a free, and open PC Operating System to end users. However, with some discussions I’ve been reading lately I wonder if that is really the case, at least in regards to Debian. I’m really confused by the attitudes and beliefs of some of the Debian developers. I know of two separate occasions where members of Ubuntu’s leadership, first Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, and most recently Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth have reached out to the Debian community offering help in having the two distro’s work together to achieve a common goal of providing quality free software to the end user.

Although Mark’s attempt is probably too recent to really “call” either successful or unsuccessful, but judging by some of the comments being made, it hasn’t exactly been met with open arms by the Debian community. Some in the Debian community see Ubuntu as a “leech” that takes and doesn’t give back. Ubuntu does give back! It gives back upstream, and it also gives in a big way that Debian never has and that is by exposing the mass public to free and open software. Ubuntu got Linux installed on PC’s being sold by what is probably the largest PC Manufacturer in existence (Dell). Not only did Dell start the Ubuntu line back in 2007, it’s kept it going since! Also, Dell recently commented that they hadn’t seen any of the “rumored” high returns of Linux netbooks, hinting that the entire Linux line has been successful.

I guess what I’m getting at is that it seems that Debian developers are creating a free and open Operating System for themselves, and could care less about a “stupid user”, while Ubuntu is more concerned with the end user experience, and is committed to providing the best that the Open Source world has to offer in a nice, stable easy to use package. Although there are only small fundamental differences between Ubuntu and Debian on the technical level, there is a *huge* difference in the public “opinion” of the two projects. For example, Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself has admitted himself in an interview that he’d never tried Debian, stating (and I quote):

So the only major distribution I’ve never used has actually been Debian, exactly because that has traditionally been harder to install. Which sounds kind of strange, since Debian is also considered to be the “hard-core technical” distribution, but that’s literally exactly what I personally do not want in a distro. I’ll take the nice ones with simple installers etc, because to me, that’s the whole and only point of using a distribution in the first place.

So the creator of Linux itself has never tried your distro because it’s believed to be so “technical”. If he has that opinion of Debian how do you think the guy just wanting to try Linux out for the first time would feel? Why would you not want to work with an easy to use distro such as Ubuntu that was created from the ground up to be a competitive, user-friendly OS?

I just don’t get it.
Flame suit on – fire away!

I neglected to include this info in last nights post.

To enable plugin-ins, simply place them in: /usr/lib/chromium-browser/plugins and also modify your launcher for chromium to include the --enable-plugins options.

Flash is working perfectly for me.

I have been Firefox fan for many years, in fact, I was a Mozilla and Netscape fan before that. I’ve tried many different browsers, but nothing, to me ever came close to what Firefox could offer. Although many people like Firefox for all of the available add-on’s, I’m more of a simple user…there have been a few small addon’s I’d adopted over the years, but nothing I couldn’t live without, and honestly I’d forget about them most of the time. I simply liked Firefox because it was an excellent browser that was available on all of the platforms I used and it just worked – plain and simple.

When Google first announced Chrome for Windows, I was pretty skeptical. In fact, I hated the initial build that I installed. However, I warmed up to it quickly and it has become my browser of choice on my Windows boxes, while continuing to use Firefox on my Linux boxes.

I recently found out about the PPA repositories for Ubuntu and since then I’ve been doing as much browsing as possible on my Ubuntu laptop with Chromium (the open source browser behind “Chrome”). These are all daily builds, and can be unstable, and may change from day to day. As of right now, there are still some things that simply do not work as expected (such as plugins and add-ons) but I kinda like browsing the web w/o Flash every once in a while

If you would like to experience the awesomeness of this light-weight Webkit browser follow the instructions below.

Bear in mind that there are no x86_64 builds as of yet, so if you are running 64-bit Ubuntu as I am, you must have the ia32-libs installed.

First you’ll need to add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu [version] main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu [version] main


Where [version] equals the version of Ubuntu you are on in it’s “codename” format, so you can choose between:

• Hardy (8.04)
• Intrepid (8.10)
• Jaunty (9.04)
• Karmic (9.10)

After adding the repositories to your sources.list you’ll want to add GPG key for the repo to your apt keyring by executing the following command in a Terminal window:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 4E5E17B5

Finally simply run sudo apt-get update to update your sources. Bear in mind for Chromium to work, you must have the package msttcorefonts installed or no text will render, so before installing Chromium, install the MS Core fonts by executing sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts once they are downloaded and installed, you can install Chromium with sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.

Now you can Chromium in all it’s glory. Be sure to see this page for more information. Also, be sure to check out the Chromium Project page in Launchpad as well as the official web-site of the Chromium project.

Thanks to all of the hard work that have made this browser, and this repository possible.

See Part II for info on plug-ins.

No matter what other distro I try to use on a daily basis, and no matter how many little “papercuts” annoy me in Ubuntu, I can’t help but come back to it as my daily driver. The good news is that Ubuntu is aware of all these “papercuts” and are working on them with their One Hundred Papercuts initiative.

If you narrow down the world of Linux Distributions to two, Ubuntu and Fedora, Ubuntu is like the reliable “Family Sedan”, while Fedora is more like the exotic foreign sports car.

There are many cool things about Fedora – in a lot of ways, it’s like using “tomorrow’s” Linux distro today. The bleeding edge technology is what draws me to Fedora, and I am truly amazed at the job that the Fedora team does at getting such leading edge packages as stable as they do – in fact, Fedora 11 *technically* at the distro level, works better on my machine than anything else this distro cycle.

So, what’s the problem then?

Part of it, I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it, but somehow Fedora still feels like the Linux distro’s of old too me – if you can remember way back to the late 90’s or early 00’s when Linux on the desktop was, honestly, pretty RAW. Fedora still has a bit of that character to me – kind of like a bunch of packages just put together and called Fedora.

Ubuntu, some how, and I can’t explain this, feels more like a complete, coherent fluid OS. It feels like it’s supposed to work together, and it feels professional.

The problem, for me was with the current 9.04 release. In fact to me, 6.06 was the best Ubuntu ever, and nothing has come close to topping it yet, but 9.04 is probably the worst (for me, and ONLY because of the Intel Graphics Issue) . It’s the only release where I have had to take drastic measures to get something as simple as video working correctly. The good news is, I was able to do just that, and I found a simple guide that might help those of you who also have Intel Video:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582

I’m using the setup referred too as the “Optimal” setup, using the upgraded X drivers and the 2.6.30 Kernel.

All of my X related problems were solved with just a few minutes of tweaking, and I honestly wish I’d just spent the time seeking that info out earlier, but I did want to get some “distro-hopping” in and “out of my system” anyway.

Also, something Ubuntu has (or is getting more of) that other Distro’s simply do not have is mainstream acceptance and recognition. I firmly believe that there are now people in the world that know that ‘Ubuntu’ is another computer system that competes with Windows that has never heard of ‘Linux’ before – that speaks volumes.

Also, I’m able to find little things, like a nice repo with daily builds of Chromium thanks to the PPA repos, and I’m able to get Adobe Air for Linux working (under 64-bit) which I couldn’t under Fedora. The Ubuntu installed base is so big at the desktop level that more and more stuff is going to support Ubuntu that will not support any other distro, and I think folks need to wake up and accept that. Unless you REALLY want to be running a truly niche’ OS like Linux has always been, you should jump on the Ubuntu train and stay there, unless you are only interested in Linux at the server level, and in such case stay w/ Red Hat distro’s such as Fedora and CentOS.

Just some random thoughts from me, and my $0.02

So, the end result of the OS search for my Laptop?

Ubuntu 9.04 (and a half, thanks to the updated X and Kernel)

Next project, updating my Quad-Core Desktop (and subsequently one of the machines my Mom uses) to Windows 7. This should prove interesting since she’s never even SEEN Vista – all she has used for the past 7+ years is XP aside from the few times she’s used a Linux box for surfing the web. I’m curious to see how she takes too it…especially considering she’ll now be switching between the Windows 7 machine and an older Machine in her Bedroom that will continue to run XP.

Anyway – happy computing y’all!

I’ve pretty much taken a break from Linux for quite a few months now. I did dabble around in Fedora a bit around April, but outside of that I was either playing w/ the iMac I owned briefly or one of the pre-release Windows 7 builds. When  I decided to sell the aforementioned iMac, I decided to purchase a notebook, and I picked a Lenovo Y530 which also turned out to be quite an awesomely compatible Linux machine when tested w/ a Live USB, so I decided to make it my “Linux Box”. But what distro to run? I liked Fedora when I tested out the pre-release builds, but did I like it well enough to live w/ it as a full-time OS? I used to be a die-hard KDE user, but I switched to GNOME around the time of the KDE 4 release – was KDE 4 ready to win be back? These were questions I had to answer. Anyway, here are a few brief “non-review” reviews of a handful of distro’s on my specific machine.

KDE vs. GNOME:

Sorry – I didn’t get around to really testing KDE 4 this time around like I wanted. I did create a Fedora 11 KDE Live USB and I have played around on it a little, as well as a KDE 4.3 Live CD from openSUSE. I think KDE 4 *is* getting “better”, but I think I’m pretty much set in concrete as a GNOME user from now on.

Distros:

Fedora 11:

Fedora actually wound up being the “winner”, and I’m going to do a separate post on Fedora 11, and how I have it set up, but here are a few of the reasons I ended up picking Fedora:

* All of my hardware works
* Large, friendly community
* Rooted in Enterprise Linux (anything I learn in Fedora can be applied to RHEL/CentOS/SL)
* It’s not Debian or Ubuntu (Means nothing other than I can learn a “different” way of doing things)

That’s all I’m gonna hit on for Fedora – I’ll save the rest for the dedicated Fedora 11 post.

PC-BSD:
Wanted to try – never could get the ISO to download – gave up. PC-BSD guys – you should work on getting more mirrors and/or Torrent seeds out there!

Debian Testing/Sid:
Never could get Testing or Sid to install using the businesscard.iso for the testing distro, which is usually how I set these up. Regardless of whatever mirror I would choose, or regardless of if I chose Testing or Unstable, the install would fail at some point during the “Base Install” stage. I’m assuming it’s just where the cycle is at in dev. at the moment. I tried to install Lenny & upgrade, but like Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) I think Lenny is just too old for my hardware as I couldn’t get X to work.

OpenSolaris 2009.06:
This is an interesting OS. I’ll be honest, I never intended on staying with this when I installed it, and I knew I was just playing around from the beginning, but honestly, I *think* I *might* could live with OpenSolaris long term IF I wanted to devote the time to learn a new Operating System, because this isn’t Linux by a long shot Everything did seem to work ok out of the box, and I even got VirtualBox set up and working. Some things I noticed – ZFS LOVES it some RAM – used up almost my entire 4GB of RAM almost instantly, but I guess that’s a good thing since unused RAM is wasted RAM, however the machine got slower, not faster, and seemed to be swapping. Also this has to be the S-L-O-W-E-S-T booting Operating system I’ve ever used!

OpenSUSE 11.1:
I like openSUSE – I like their GNOME implementation, if for no other reason than it’s “different”. They do a great job with making KDE 4 almost usable, and the OS is always stable. However, as much as I “should” like openSUSE, I’ve never been able to get it running stable for more than a couple of days on any machine I’ve ever tried to run it on. I don’t know where the problem lies, but I simply don’t get along with it somehow. I think I end up trying to over-tweak it since it has a butt-load of services and stuff turned on by default, and it is surely the most bloated of the mainstream distro’s. In short, I like it, they have a great community, and it may be a great distro for you – it’s just not for me. Do be sure and check out Suse Studio though – it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread and Velveeta cheese

Ubuntu 9.04:
Man…I don’t even know where to start with this one. It was the last distro I tested, mainly becuase I had the preconcieved notion of it working the “best” and had planned to stay with. I used Ubuntu full time from 5.10 until 7.04 – as of 7.10, things started going downhill for me, and I wonder just what is going on. The community is beyond huge, the distro has come closer to becoming a Mainstream OS than any other Linux distro has (Dell, etc.) yet it seems to get WORSE with every release. Even the “LTS” 8.04 was an utter disaster for many people. Is it a situation where there are simply too many cooks in the kitchen? Is the distro just too big with too many packages and too many volunteers? Is Ubuntu just riding a wave of success and as a whole lost some of it’s drive to take things to the “next level”? I mean they have been talking about a new theme for over a year – since 8.04 – it STILL hasn’t happened – they can’t even decide on a new color scheme – that, to me, speaks volumes on the state of the development process at Ubuntu.

9.04 was very broken for me with my Intel graphics. I’m not getting into that, as it’s very well documented in other places on the web, but there was also something going on w/ brightness and power management. My screen would just randomly get brighter and then dimmer with no warning, and never would go full brightness. I then tried upgrading to the development branch of 9.10 as I heard that fixed many of the Intel issues, and I *thought* I had a stable distro/install and was pretty happy until for no apparent reason my machine just randomly started hard locking. I lived with it a few times, but after that, it was time to move on – and back to the first distro I tried, Fedora 11, which has been awesome. This whole thing disappointed me, as I was pumped up having an “all Intel” machine as I’d always heard that was the sure-fire way to ensure full Linux compatibility. The fact that Ubuntu would release, knowing all too well those Intel regressions were there, JUST to stay on time with their precious little 6mo release cycle is disheartening, and I think I’ll stick with Fedora from now on, as they are always more cutting edge, better with upstream and as leading edge as they are, they aren’t afraid to push a release back if something is broken!

So, there you have it – my brief run through some distro’s in the Summer of ‘09!