Later, Ubuntu

So I whiped Ubuntu and had a crack at some other linux versions.

Simply MEPIS

There's a lot to like about this distribution. The unique installation system is quite well thought out. Basically, it loads the entire operating system from a live CD and allows you to play around with all the features, straight from the disc. If you like it, you double click an 'install me' icon on the desktop, which installs the operating system to the hard disk.

What I like most about this approach is the ability to use the computer whilst I install. For me this meant the ability to write a university paper whilst the files were copying over - a big improvement on distributions like Suse which leave my computer out of order for an hour (but more on Suse later).

But by far the stand out feature was a desktop sync feature. It allows you to sync your linux and windows operating systems together, so that when you restart into windows you can easily carry over settings such as your Firefox bookmarks. Now, the actual implementation of this idea has a long way to go before it's really user friendly, but it at least shows that there's people out there thinking about these sorts of problems. I eagerly await future versions!


Mandriva 2006

The installation programme was quite user friendly - much easier than Fedora and Suse. The distribution itself, well, give me a break. In an effort to configure my pppoe connection, I rendered the system unbootable. Yeah, top design that. NEXT...

Suse 10.1

After a rocky start, things are really on the improve. The installation programme was fairly friendly, although at some points I wanted to put my computer through a wall. Take for instance partitioning. The auto partition system divided my hard drive up beautifully - but half way through copying files over it told me the partition wasn't big enough. Gee, thanks. This forced me to use the expert partitioning tool, and quite frankly as a newbie it scared the shit out of me. I never really bothered with backing up hard drives until I encountered linux installation programmes.

There's some real positives with Suse. It's pretty. Multi monitor support is almost newbie friendly. There's a graphical dialogue available, and it works. Almost. Like Ubuntu, Suse has this fascination with setting my external CRT monitor as the primary display. Which is a problem for me, because my laptop LCD is what I use for my work. The CRT is located 1 metre behind me at the foot of my bed. Well, I guess I can curl up in bed every time I want to use the taskbar. Or programme I just loaded. Or desktop icons. Urgh. I found no feature allowing me to make my laptop's LCD the primary display... gimme a break...

Finally on Suse, this trend for not including 'non free' software is giving me the shits. I want to play mp3s. I want to use the wireless card I paid 50 bucks for. If the distribution does not support them, that's two bloody massive reasons to go back to windows.

A Long Holiday

It's been a while since I updated this blog. And with good reason - I broke up with Ubuntu. It wasn't one of those messy affairs where you go through the motions, passing in hallways without saying hello. Or going to bed at night, this is my half of the bed, that's yours, if you want to read your book go to your mother's house. No, it was quite a clean, quick break.

What it basically came to was that, whilst Ubuntu is really nice, it just placed too many demands on me. I can't commit my life to opening up a command line and fiddling with its knobs to get it to work, when my ex, aptly named XP, just does everything I want.

So, why am I updating this blog then? Simple. The chance meeting. A lot like when you're walking in the street, and you run into your ex. You exchange greetings, discover that you've both not had a decent screw since you broke up - abeit it's more like the girl has had 5 and none were satisfying, because that's the default setting for females, meanwhile the bloke has been sitting at his computer desk at 3am slapping away to porn which is progressively getting younger, kinkier and more foreign, all the while thinking to himself 'why did I break up with her when I didn't have a substitute ride organised?!.'

That metaphor got way out of control, so i'll cut to the chase. I turned the computer on, took a leak, came back and Ubuntu was loaded because the boot manager is still installed. Meh, let's give the old fling a go. Maybe it'll turn out that the problems we previously had were just due to my emotional state at the time and not anything to do with Ubuntu itself. Well for Ubuntu's sake I hope that's right.

When something gives me the shits i'll be sure to let the internet know. Until then...

Multimedia Problem...

...and thankfully an easy solution.

When you install multimedia support in Ubuntu, it has a default setting of 'don't really work properly' - I suspect this is to make it integrate perfectly with the rest of the system.

I initially tested Divx video in the Totem Movie Player. Totem is nice - it's compact, it fits in with the GUI theme, and therefore it has nice square boundaries. Media players which force you to move around all your other windows to make them fit around their elaborate designs are a real pet hate of mine, so it's great that there's a nice boring alternative to use.

Anyways, the video played, but there were immediate problems with sound. From beginning to end, all sound was out of sync. So I closed Totem and loaded the video in Xine Movie Player. This was a little better - sound was in sync for as long as I watched the movie. Unfortunately that was all of 3 seconds, because it would crash my whole computer when I tried to hide the playback controls.

It was obvious that I was going to have to google again. Luckily I found a solution in a few minutes. By default the desktop uses something called ESD for sound. It sucked. I changed it to use OSS, which sucked less but still had sync problems. I then selected ALSA. Perfect. Now all video has sound which is perfectly in sync!

Now I just have to ask.... why the hell wasn't it set to ALSA by default!

Troubleshooting

Some google searchers are coming to my site for help on PPPoE and intellimouse side buttons. Well, i'm no expert, so i'll just send you to the site that helped me. The first link is to a Ubuntu linux enthusiast forum, which is a goldmine for technical support.

How to enable intellimouse side buttons.

How to install PPPoE for ADSL connections.

Good luck guys.


And in other news, I can report that after enabling multimedia support, my Dell Laptop's multimedia keys now work! It makes sense - the playback controls didn't work because Ubuntu couldn't play anything ;) Looks like things keep getting better for me on the hardware compatibility front.

But, i've got an even better example of my improving relationship with Ubuntu. This morning I checked the weather by starting my laptop and looking at the weather applet. Which is pretty funny, because my house's front door is closer to my bed than this laptop.

Wait. That's scary...

Software Installation

Software installation has been very much a hit and miss affair - much like the Uruguayan national football team's form in penalty shootouts.

The automated installation system made it fairly easy to add multimedia support to Ubuntu. Unfortunately, it required a little technical knowledge to get working, as Ubuntu does not have the correct download repositories enabled by default. However once I had translated the instruction manual from English into Australian, it was a a pretty straight forward process. Admittedly it took a lot longer than planned, but mostly because my mate's kangaroo was giving me the shits.

Once properly configured, apt is a very easy tool to use. I rate this specific experience above adding multimedia support to windows, because all the necessary software is in a single respository, and it isn't littered with 15 different brands of spyware. Where's your EULA now Gator!!!

Unfortunately, things quickly fall apart if the software you want isn't in a repository. I tried installing the Opera browser by downloading it from the official website. Although it was available in the correct package format, Ubuntu didn't want anything to do with it. This link tells the story better than I do, so knock yourself out.

So basically, if software is in the reposititories, you have a good chance of success. Otherwise, you're headed for disappointment. Not quite newbie friendly yet, i'm afraid.

Fancy.

Yep, this GDesklets thingy is cool.



And the totally customisable (Australian spelling, don't chew me out!) toolbars are very cool. I never thought a 15 inch screen could have so much space to play around in. At the moment it's too much space, but we'll see what happens when I finally get around to installing all the multimedia stuff. An MP3 player here, divx player there, it's bound to make things a little cramped.

This Could Take A while...

I marvelled at the sheer customisability of the Gnome Desktop for a few hours today. I thought it didn't get any better than being able to change the size (height and width) of the taskbar.

Then I discovered GDesklets.

I could be playing around with this thing for days.

Little Tidbits

I had an hour to wait before the football was on television, so I had to find a time filler. Out of the two time waster options I had, playing around with linux was by far the more moral option.

In this time I managed to put two demons to rest: the niggling thought that linux is slow, and the niggling nuisance of not having my mouse's side buttons working.

My extremely unscientific speed benchmark of Linux and Windows XP consisted of timing how long they take to start up, and also timing the startup times of Open Office Writer and Mozilla Firefox. I compared similar versions of Open Office, and Firefox 1.5 (as installed myself, with some frustration).

The results? Windows XP took 26 seconds to load from the boot menu, Open Office opened in 10 seconds, and Firefox 2 seconds. In comparison, Ubuntu loaded in 53 seconds, with an additional 18 seconds to load the gui after the login page, making a startup time of 1 minute 11 seconds. Open Office opened in 10 seconds, and Firefox 4 seconds. So there we go, Linux isn't slow when you use it, only when you wait to use it.

The slow start up time strikes me as quite important. Time spent waiting is less time spent computing. And even worse for dual booters, it discourages us from loading Linux at all if we can get the job done quicker with windows. Some may argue that the longer startup times for Ubuntu ensure a safer, error free startup. For me however, I have only experienced startup troubles with Ubuntu (having lost my wireless card 3 times now).

Now with that thoroughly unexciting spiel out of the way, onto the mouse buttons.

Windows XP thoroughly trounces Linux in this area. Simply put, it works straight away in Windows. No hassles. In contrast, to get these buttons working in Ubuntu, I had to google for 10 minutes, install software from the internet, edit/create/backup 4 different text files, and reboot my computer. Actually following these instructions was fairly straight forward (yet time consuming), so it makes me wonder - if it's just a matter of editing text files to get the buttons working, why can't it be set that way by default!!

Font Rendering

I thought i'd do a quick comparison of the font rendering in Windows XP and Ubuntu. When I started using ubuntu, I felt that the fonts seemed below par with their windows counterparts. However, after logging back into windows, I saw its fonts with a more critical view.

Click on the thumb for a visual comparison.

My initial view of the small font rendering in Ubuntu was that the fonts appeared too thin and weak. The side by side comparison certainly shows this in my opinion. The font edges in Windows Cleartype appear smoother, and have a stronger contrast with the background. I'd lean towards Windows Cleartype for small font rendering.

However, large font rendering is a different story. Ubuntu's fonts are very smooth on the edges, whereas Windows Cleartype is a little grainy in areas. Ubuntu gets my vote for large font rendering.

On balance, as the vast majority of text I read on the net is small, i'd have to lean towards Windows for overall font rendering quality. Although in reality there's not that much difference between the two.

I'm curious, does everyone else get similar results on their machines?

Hardware Compatibility

Much to my delight, Ubuntu supports most of my Dell Laptop's hardware straight out of the box... erm, cd burner. Wait, I can say that legally with Linux!

Hardware Inventory:

Stuff that Just Works straight after installation:

ATI Radeon X300; my definition of 'working' is that I can select the resolution I need. It does. I'm not sure which driver is installed, but it suits my needs perfectly.

Intel Pro Wireless 2200; as mentioned earlier, wireless configuration was quite a simple experience. The card is automatically installed, all I have to do is connect to my SSID and i'm online. The only problem has not been hardware related - I can't seem to find a way to tell the network connections thingy to connect to my wireless network instead of the neighbour's. I have to manually disconnect from the neighbour's network before I can connected to mine. Ah well.

HP DeskJet 5652 USB Printer; installation was marginally easier than in Windows. I plugged the printer in, powered it on, opened the 'Printers' configuration from the System --> Administration menu, double clicked New Printer, Selected USB Printer, then the make and model from a list, done! I printed a quick test page from Open Office, mostly because I wanted an excuse to use Open Office. When I chose the print option I was only given the choice of printing from 'Generic Printer' but hey, it put text on the page, that's all I need.

USB Camera; I used the bundled USB cord to connect my camera to the USB port, a friendly popup asked my if I wanted to import photos to my computer. Just the way it should work!

Laptop Function Keys; This keyboard has a Function key which, when pressed in conjunction with other designated keys, performs some function. Funnily enough. I had no expectation that it'd work, but it does. So far i've been able to adjust the LCD's brightness settings and sound card's volume, and the pseudo number pad also works. I haven't tested all functions, such as the key with the battery on it, because I don't know what it does :)

Stuff that doesn't work, and has no available configuration utility:

USB Mouse Side Buttons; My Microsoft USB mouse works straight after plugging it in, however I can't get the side buttons to work. One of those perks I really miss. Althgouh Alt+left and right works well, it just isn't the same.

Dell Touchpad; The basic functionality of the touchpad works well. However, the extra scrolling functionality does not. That's okay, I preferred pageup+pagedn anyway.

Multimedia Buttons; sometimes the volume adjustment buttons work, but mostly don't. The other function keys do not.