DigitalHobbit

I just realized that it’s been a little over a year since I pretty much permanently switched from Windows to Linux! I had been using Linux on and off over the past 10 years or so, but it wasn’t until a year ago that I seriously ditched Windows in favor of Linux.

On December 30, 2004 I blogged about my Gentoo installation, which I had completed the week before. I kept Windows as a dual boot option, but these days I pretty much never boot Windows any more.

Overall I was quite happy with Gentoo, and I still have a lot of admiration for this distribution and the community around it, but a few months ago I decided to switch to Kubuntu, and I’ve been extremely happy with this distribution so far.

These days my Linux box serves many purposes, and it serves all of them well. First and foremost, it is my primary desktop machine that I use for email, browsing the web, posting to my blog, occasionally watching movies, doing some minor graphics work here and there, etc. Second, it is my development workstation that I use both for my personal projects, as well as occasional work related programming tasks. Third, it acts as a server: My MP3 collection is exposed to our various laptops via a Samba share. Recently I have also started running Galleon, the open source Tivo media server. This application is actually quite impressive, and I’ll blog about it in more detail some other day.

I do have to admit that I am still running Windows on my laptop. The main reason for this is actually iTunes, which is still far superior to any Linux application when it comes to syncing with an iPod. Otherwise, I would seriously consider installing Kubuntu on my laptop as well, as I am very impressed with it and confident that it will run just as smoothly on my laptop. However, this is probably a moot point, because I know that I’ll ultimately replace this with a PowerBook anyway.

Anyway, I’d like to point out that Linux is an awesome operating system. It’s come a long way in the past 10 years and should be considered a very serious contender to Windows. Until very recently, I was still quite disappointed with the state of Linux desktop environments. However, this is no longer the case. KDE 3.4.3 (which is included in the last official Kubuntu release, “Breezy”) is great, and the recently released KDE 3.5 (which I haven’t tried yet) is supposed to be even better. I personally like the recent KDE versions much better than Gnome. Anyway, if you’ve mainly been using Windows so far, you’re technically minded, and you don’t have any highly specialized Windows software needs, I strongly encourage you to take the plunge and at least set up a dual boot Linux installation. You may find that you don’t even want to boot back into Windows any more…

A good week ago, I decided to install Kubuntu Linux at home, replacing my previous Gentoo Linux installation.

Overall I was very happy with Gentoo, and it still ranks high among my favorite Linux distributions. But while it was cool to have a system that was built from source and therefore (at least in theory) optimized for my particular needs as well as very up to date, I seemed to be spending a disproportionate amount of time doing upgrades. Another problem was that I had selected to install the 64-bit Gentoo version, as I have an AMD64 processor. While Gentoo’s AMD64 support is very strong, 64-bit Linux in general nevertheless still lags behind the 32-bit version, and certain closed source drivers or plugins (such as Macromedia Flash) simply aren’t available in 64-bit versions. There are ways around this, but they are inconvenient and require too much effort. Again, not a Gentoo problem, but something that bothered me enough to increase my inclination to reinstall my system. The final trigger was KDE. I had mostly been using Gentoo for the past few years, with a little bit of more minimal solutions like XFCE or Fluxbox sprinkled in, but after seeing the recent improvements in KDE I felt like switching to this desktop. Unfortunately I was unable to get KDE to run stable on my Gentoo system, and it always crashed after a few minutes, usually when I used the “K” menu. Up- and downgrading the ATI driver, upgrading to the latest Linux kernel, and experimenting with Kernel settings didn’t have any effect, so I was finally ready to reinstall and switch to a different distribution.

The Kubuntu distribution is derived from Ubuntu, which is gaining a lot of popularity these days (it is in fact by far the top ranking Linux distro on DistroWatch in terms of hits per day). Kubuntu is essentially exactly the same as Ubuntu, except that the Gnome desktop has been swapped out for KDE. Ubuntu in turn is derived from Debian. It inherits Debian’s excellent package management system and solves its greatest problem: Debian’s stable distibution is very stable, but also very outdated and therefore not an ideal choice for a desktop system if you want to keep up with the latest software releases. Debian releases are very infrequent. Debian’s unstable distribution is cutting edge, but lacks stability. Ubuntu strikes a perfect middle ground, with releases every 6 months, and of course important updates (such as security updates) in between. The official Ubuntu repositories contain a subset of packages that are officially supported, as well as a wider set of packages that come without warranty. It is also possible to add generic Debian repositories, although this is discouraged. So far, I have not had to resort to generic Debian packages for anything.

(K)ubuntu’s installation is very straightforward, without a whole lot of interaction. You make some basic choices and the system goes ahead and installs the OS and a basic set of packages, including KDE (in case of Kubuntu) or Gnome (in case of Ubuntu), as well as OpenOffice and other productivity software. Pretty much everything else (including things that come as standard on many Linux distros, such as the GCC compiler, the Apache webserver, etc.) need to be manually installed afterwards. But with the powerful Apt package manager as well as convenient GUI wrappers (by default Adept for Kubuntu, Synaptic for Ubuntu), this step is trivial. Simply select the package you want, and all necessary dependencies will be marked for installation automatically. Upgrading or uninstalling packages is just as easy. The result is a very clean system, without a lot of the cruft that you get with other Linux distributions.

The user management is well thought out. By default, there is no access to the root user. Instead, a single user is created with sudo privileges, and sudo is used for all system administration purposes. The root user can be manually enabled later, but this is discouraged and generally unnecessary.

Kubuntu’s KDE (version 3.4.3) desktop is very clean and highly usable. Out of the box it includes many great tools such as the Konqueror browser and filemanager, the K3B CD / DVD burning tool, the amaroK audio player, etc. There is an abundance of productivity software for KDE, ranging from office software to graphics software, IDEs, and more. Of course, Gnome and other X applications can be run as well.

So far I am extremely happy with Kubuntu, and I warmly recommend this distribution to anybody who’s in the market for a new Linux distro.

Since I installed Gentoo Linux a few weeks ago, I have made it a habit to check the ATI website almost every day to see if a new driver has been released that supports my AMD64 processor as well as the XOrg (instead of XFree) server. The default driver works fine in 2D, but it does not support 3D acceleration.

Today, my search was finally rewarded. Here is the updated ATI driver. Of course, there are a few known issues, so I should probably surf around and read the initial success / failure reports before attempting to install the driver myself. Also, the new driver has not made it into the Portage tree yet, so I guess I’ll have to install it manually.

Here is a Great article on Gentoo Linux. It includes a lot of information about Gentoo’s package management system, including an overview of how to build your own or customize existing ebuild files. It also has some very interesting points on how a corporate environment could benefit from Gentoo, which is different from the usual preconception about Gentoo being better suited as a desktop OS.

Of course most of the comments by other users on that page degrade into the usual Linux distro flame wars, but there are some interesting ones. In particular, one comment pointed me to Vidalinux, which I had not previously heard of. It is based on Gentoo and sounds like this is essentially Gentoo Linux wrapped with Redhat’s Anaconda installer and a bunch of standard desktop applications. Not a bad idea, as Gentoo’s somewhat daunting installation process is certain to scare many users who could otherwise benefit from the many nice aspects of this distribution.

I ran into another FAT32 limitation yesterday: I had completely forgotten that the maximum file tsize in FAT32 is 4GB. Or more likely, it simply wasn’t an issue back when I was using FAT32 the last time. Unfortunately, it is much more of an issue now. I frequently burn DVDs, and as a regular DVD can be up to 4.7GB, I sometimes need to deal with 4.7GB ISO files on my hard drives. I also still have some old, 8GB large AVI files that I captured from my digital video camera some time ago and haven’t gotten around to processing yet. I just ran into this issue when I tried to copy my data files from my old NTFS drive to my new FAT32 drive. Unfortunately this means that FAT32 isn’t the solution for sharing data between Linux and Windows that I was hoping for.

For now, I think I will keep an NTFS partition and use it for these kinds of files. Most of these are transient in nature rather than data files that need to be stored for a long time, so something around 25GB might suffice for now. I am still hoping that solid NTFS support will be available for Linux soon, but I’m not holding my breath.

Another potential option could be to store my data on a Linux (ext2 or ext3) partition and find a way to access this on Windows. There are various tools that provide access to ext2 partitions, but I really would need a solution that provides native, transparent access to the file system. There is at least one such solution (ext2fsd) with at least one positive user report, but some of the recently fixed bugs listed on the website indicate that this implementation might still be very risky… I think I’ll hold off on this for now.

Using a separate file server with NFS shares could be another option, but unfortunately this would not really work for my use case either, as I would need fast access to the video and DVD ISO files for video processing and DVD burning applications.

I have spent a significant portion of last week installing, configuring, and exploring Gentoo Linux on my desktop at home. I have used Linux on and off over the past 9 years or so, starting with an early Suse distribution (long before there was a graphical installer). Most of my recent Linux experience has been on Redhat, and at my new job we use Redhat Enterprise 3.0 on our workstations. The fact that we use Linux at my job has sparked a renewed interest in Linux, while at the same time causing some minor frustrations. Many of these are due to the package management. Overall, I think that Redhat has done a decent job with RPM, which allows for a relatively easy way to install and manage packages and dependencies. But when trying to get a particular feature working (such as Bluetooth), this often leads to a wild goose chase to download all the necessary RPM, the dependent RPMs, etc. In case of Bluetooth, I would have had to install Gnome, which again would have required upgrading to the xorg (rather than XFree86) X server, as the updated Gnome RPM packages are only available for the newer Fedora distribution, which has (like most current distros) switched to xorg. At that point I gave up and decided to pursue this again some time in the future… Particularly in a corporate environment, goose chases like that are not very desirable, as our sys admins (who are ultimately responsible for maintaining and upgrading our systems) want to maintain a reasonably standard workstation configuration. They use the apt tools to manage packages and push updates to our systems, which is definitely a step up from RPM.

Anyway, I’m getting off track, as I really wanted to write about Gentoo. I was recently forced to upgrade my personal desktop due to a motherboard failure, and I ended up upgrading to an Athlon64 processor. I figured that this would be a good opportunity to install a recent Linux distribution with AMD64 support. Fedore Core 3 first came to my mind, but I felt like trying out something new and different and decided to give Gentoo Linux a try.

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In one of my previous postings, I hinted at some of the issues I initially had with the Linux workstation at my new job (we use Redhat Enterprise 3.0). The UI was very sluggish, the memory usage high, I was unable to get Bluetooth support working, etc. Some of these issues have been resolved in the mean time, at least for the time being.

Our home directories are on a network share, which adds significant overhead with desktop environments like Gnome that frequently need to access dot files in the user’s home directory. Moving these dot files to a local directory and symlinking to them from the home directory brought some performance gains. The memory usage was still high, though.

Ultimately, I ended up switching from Gnome to XFCE, which brought a tremendous improvement. XFCE is much leaner than Gnome and thus requires much less memory. It does not offer all the desktop functionality that Gnome has, but it has everything that I really care about, such as an extensible and configurable panel, a task bar, virtual desktop, etc. Like Gnome it is built on top of the GTK library, and all Gnome applications I have tried work and look fine under XFCE.

I never really got all that much into the whole desktop metaphor, to be honest. Perhaps, because I never had a Mac… The year or so that I ran OS/2 in the early 90s was perhaps the closest I got to a nice desktop environment. On Windows, I usually just use the start button or quicklaunch bar to launch applications, and Windows explorer to manage files. I never use the desktop itself to store and manage files. Therefore, a desktop environment with support for icons really isn’t very important to me (although I believe there are ways to extend XFCE to support this, for example by integrating it with the Rox file manager). Most of the time, I end up using the terminal for all file management tasks on Linux (somehow everything else just doesn’t feel quite right under Unix…), and I rarely even use the Gnome, KDE, or XFCE file managers.

Anyway, I can heartily recommend XFCE as a lean alternative to the bloated Gnome or KDE. It is much more complete desktop environment than simple window managers such as Fluxbox provide (which is one of the best super-lightweight window managers I’ve used), yet very quick and sporting a conservative resource usage. It supports themes and other eye candy, is easy to configure, and supports many useful, optional plugins.

At my new job, development is done on Linux workstations. In many ways this is great, as I enjoy the power of Unix. Unfortunately, the experience has not nearly been as smooth as I would have hoped… (more…)

I don’t have a Gmail account, but if I ever get one (on that note, please feel free to leave a comment in case you have a spare Gmail invitation ), I’ll be sure to try GmailFS. GmailFS turns your 1 GB Gmail account into a Linux-mountable filesystem. I’m not sure how useful this would actually be for me, as I only use Linux at home and therefore would not be able to access my files from the office, for example. Still, this is a very clever idea. I wonder if Google will attempt to crack down on this creative use of its email service…

(via BoingBoing)

I originally wanted to call this post (or series of posts) “Patterns of Home Computing” and provide a lot more background on how I use my various computers at home. However, as I really need to catch some sleep I will keep this initial posting reasonably short.

About 2 months ago, I have bought two new laptops for me and my wife. I am running Windows XP on my laptop, which I mostly use for Email, web browsing, Microsoft Office, and some occasional programming. With a wireless network, it’s great to be able to do these kinds of things from anywhere in the house, and it has changed the way I use my computers.

My main desktop PC is an OK but slightly outdated Athlon-1800, on which I have been running Windows XP up to now as well. Now that I have a Windows-based laptop that I use for all of my office-type work, I am planning to make Linux the primary OS on my desktop. In fact, I installed Fedora Core 2 on a spare partition a couple of days ago, and now I am in the process of slowly installing all the applications I need and configuring my system.

There are many different things that I like to do with my PC, for some of which Linux still is not ideally suited (such as games, even though the situation has improved tremendously since the last time I was seriously running Linux, about 6 years ago). Part of this has to do with lack of driver support (for example I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, for which 3D-accelerated drivers don’t exist yet for XFree86 4.4).

I won’t go into all the specifics here. Instead, I have setup a Wiki page on Converting to Linux. I just added some initial information on ATI driver support and games, and I will expand on this in the next few days to cover other topics of relevance (for me, anyways), such as NTFS support, various other types of applications (media players, music software), etc.