Comments & Rants

Sunday, December 14, 2008

More Ubuntu excitement…

Some people might wonder why I keep on trying to get a Linux Desktop going properly.

The story goes back a long way back when I tried Minix on a PC even before Windows was even in the pipe. I played with a Minix derivative called Coherent on same platform at one point or other. I had a Unix environment at my place of work and I was truly taken by this OS compared to the mainframe environments of GCOS and Multics. Heck, I even had a User Manual of the B programming language, the precursor to C. I was dreaming of seeing a Unix derivative on a PC… It has finally come to fruition with today\’s many, many distributions of Desktop Linux.

However, the Linux world was always a geeky environment at best. Most distributions that I tried in the past were true to the mythology that a lot of hacking was required to get it going. The only distribution that I ever came across that seemed to work quite well out of the box without having to do any surgery to it was SUSE…

The key to SUSE was (is) that it was for Entreprise usage and so, included a lot of proprietary drivers in their releases. This meant that most hardware would work, or at least that a lot of these would work… One thing about SUSE that sort of put me off, though, is that it installed just about every piece of software available, making the environment a bit overwhelming, at best. There was too much choice, creating a sense of being overwhelmed. Interestingly enough, Ubuntu learned from that lesson with their distros, specially Xubuntu. Then came OpenSUSE, which removed all these proprietary drivers in the base distribution; you had to fetch them all over the place…

I had tried others, and every time, I had to do geeky things to get it going. With that GNU and OSS philosophy of free and Open Source Drivers, would mean that Linux Desktop was going to be stuck in the bowels or, to quote the Titanic’s equivalent, Below E-Deck. This is specific to the Desktop environments as the Server environment, is a completely different and much more successful story…

Then came Ubuntu, slowly rising to the surface… Ubuntu has a very good philosophy: make it work for the masses and provide only popular main stream applications. Now, of course you can be as geeky as you want, but the need to fiddle gets to be less and less with every release. In my opinion, it has reached the state where it is Good Enough For The Average User (GEFTAU). This last point is very important to keep in mind as I’ll discuss it in more details soon enough.

The last time I posted, I indicated that Ubuntu 8.10 was quite buggy and I reverted back to 8.04. I thought a bit more about that and after dabbling more with the Mac PowerBook 4G and MacOSX, I decided to give 8.10 another try again. After all, if it is to ever get better, we can’t let a few bugs hold it back…

Thus, 8.10 is back on the Dell D600 (2GB RAM) and I left XCFE as it looses its panels on a regular basis, which required me to delete the UserID and all associated details and re-create it. This was a bummer.

I stick with Gnome DeskTop, turned off all the Screen Animations as it really sucks cpu power. On the Dell C610, forget it, WinXP iperforms much better than Ubuntu… And by the way, forget the Linux Propaganda that it runs on resources limited platforms. Yeah, Right, the server only version OK, no problems, but DeskTop? Forget it… Just like Vista, you need a relatively powerful machine to run Linux DeskTop… So, the Dell C610 is running Debian Lenny RC1 server only and acts as my local server. It is perfect for that.

On 8.10, however, with Gnome, it sort of freezes at times and it seems to occur at times only, when running on battery, as some hal thingy gets stuck and the panels are completely non responsive… I simply have to hard power off and restart it… At least I don’t need to rebuild the UserID… I know, not good enough!

And, as of yesterday, I am re-attempting to get the Mac PowerBook G4 on Ubuntu. MacOSX 10.5.5 is really resources intensive and the performance on the PowerBook really sucks… It can barely keep up as a media player machine…. The C610 did a better job…

So I got the Community Supported 8.10 iso image and after trying it a couple of times, it failed miserably at installing. So, the geeky me, re-installed the 8.04. Works fine, and the Wireless proprietary drivers got automatically installed the first time I tried the Wireless, the [i]Caps Lock Light[/] issue got fixed along with the missing TouchPad Tapping after some googling, and of course the video drivers recognized the1280×854 screen. The best thing was that the Apple BlueTooth Wireless mouse got recognized and works like a charm, after a couple of attempts at adding it. I must say though, that is a kick-ass mouse!

I must admit that Apple has really nice hardware. Ubuntu looks terrific, performs very well on the PowerBook G4. The problem I had before, is that somehow at one point, it refused to boot as it was not able to find an image to thaw. I wasn’t in a geeky mood that day, so I re-installed OSX10.5. I know that Sleeping and hibernating is not working too well, if at all for this machine on Ubuntu, so I can’t really recall if I put it to sleep or if it put itself to sleep after some time… This time around, I disabled all these things as I usually do not use these, so this is not an issue…

So far so good you might say… Hold on to your hats…

I had read a lot about the aborted Sound Environment on Linux, but it had never hit me… Well, VLC’s sound does not work at all… ARGH!!! Of course, being 8.04 I have the older version… The ppc version of the latest version can’t be found anywhere, yet. So I attempted to compile the latest sources, but I’m having a rough time with that part… Too bad, as I had no troubles with compiling TrueCrypt…

These latest details are significant for the PowerPC platform as binaries are hard to find and these must be compiled… I will give it a try as other media tools do work OK…

Back to the Salt Mines….

Regards!

• Posted by Michel at 10:45:22 in Linux
• 2 comments (489 views)