Ubuntu Hardy Heron – so far (A review)
I have been playing around with the new-fangled Ubuntu 8.04 for the past 2 hours and things have been smooth so far except for some minor issues with wifi. Same old, same old. Fortunately it was nothing that the regulars over at the Ubuntu forums have not seen and it took all of 5 minutes to resolve the issue.
In an attempt to win over Windows teetotalers, you can now try out or even install Ubuntu from within the Microsoft OS. No more messing around with partitioning and reformatting. The heron will live quite happily within a directory in Windows XP (don’t have Vista but I need that like I need a hole in my skull). During boot up the loader will default to Windows with the Ubuntu option just below it.
The new default background shows an abstract rendering of …… what else, a heron!
Talk about stating the obvious. Otherwise, things are still as brown as it has always been. The almost perfect Firefox 3 beta 5 is thoughtfully bundled into the OS and in my books thats a plus. Installing the proprietary ATI driver was a breeze and compared to previous versions, without incident.
On the downside the OS has locked up twice on me already; once when I was installing the Adobe flash plugin for Firefox and another time when I was adjusting the time zones for the system clock. Don’t know what happened but it happened.
All in all an A minus experience.
Download the heron here.
Why Linux is the way to go
Convincing argument that Linux and open source software is good for the soul and society at large.
PCLinuxOS 2007 – a personalized review
First off I have to admit that I am a Ubuntu loyalist. But that does not mean I am any less of a whore when it comes to other linux distros. During long lost weekends in the past I would purposely download a distro just to tinker around with it. These excursions usually end with me pulling at my hair at each distro’s distinct and elitist (read geeky) way of doing things as simple as enabling sound in the OS. I got the jones again this weekend and here I am with PCLinuxOS 2007.
A cursory glance at the ranking list on distrowatch.com will tell you that PCLOS has overtaken Ubuntu as the top linux flavour. And Ubuntu has been there for a very long time. Installation took all of 15 minutes on my trusty desktop. Within the first few minutes in the desktop I realized that it has knocked out my wifi router and internet connection. Great going PCLOS, I cursed under my breathe.
Without net access is like being stranded Crusoe-style on a deserted island. Nevertheless after some body contortions reaching for the back of my computer, I plugged my adsl modem straight into the network card. I switched into WinXP and made a beeline for the PCLOS forums. Had to find out how to get online with PPPOE in PCLOS. Thankfully the forums are collectively a bottomless well of information.
Back in PCLOS I configured the necessary settings and a cruiser ship appeared on the horizon to whisk me back to civilization. The web was mine again. By this point I was fuming. Stupid OS!
However my wounds were partially soothed by the out-of-the-box multimedia capabilities of PCLOS. No tweaking involved. Its all just there including online flash content and java stuff. A refreshing gust of wind. With a click of button I was even able to switch Compiz on and before you can say ‘eye-candy’, my menus and windows were wobbling merrily away. No strange and impenetrable strings of text had to be cut and pasted into the terminal. Not one! Color me impressed.
Just then my sis tapped me over the shoulder and said she needed one of her CDs to be ripped into mp3s for her iPod. K3b took care of that in no time flat. I was glowing at this point, all my initial frustration ebbing away. Strangely though, PCLOS has problems unmounting the iPod. Try as I may, I still ended up unceremoniously unplugging the media device from the usb port despite the cautionary ‘Do not disconnect’ message. More poking around the forums will no doubt settle this, if I get around to it.
All in all, its been great barring some irritating quirks. I am beginning to see some of the reasons why it has peeped even the mighty Ubuntu at its game. If the programmers continue to work at it, it can only improve in leaps and bounds. Ubuntu? Thats so yesterday!
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HOWTO: Cleaning up all those unnecessary junk files in Ubuntu
Love this tutorial on cleaning up my favorite Linux distribution. Even the best of OS needs some tidying up now and then.
Penguin sighting
Ok, this picture looks like those photos of alleged sightings of ‘Big Foot’ but thats the best that I could do with my phone camera. Found this on a screen in a plane. Linux is going places!
Early experience with Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04)
Angry and disappointed, that was the limited range of emotion I went through when I first installed Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04). There was so much hype about it before its official launch compounded by the fact that i went looking for the hype in the first place. I downloaded the iso but unfortunately had to wait for a full 48 hours (had to work the weekend) before I could get my hands on it to do anything about it.
After installation, I knew that I was in the red when Fiesty did not automatically pick the correct resolution for my LCD monitor; something that Edgy Eft did right off the bat. When I saw the option for automatically enabling restricted driver for my ATI X550 graphics card in the system administration option I naturally went for it. See I am a sucker for eye candy and cannot live without my wobbly windows. It did jack shit for my graphics card. I was still stuck with an ugly 800 x 600 (I am usually at 1280 x 1024 in my previous installations of Ubuntu) screen resolution and no other options.
I tried tweaking my xorg.conf file and ended up having to reinstall Feisty a total of 7 times seeing that every tweak I made caused x server not to load up. Before long I noticed clumps of hair at my feet and a quick look in the mirror revelaed a chemo-patient wannabe. I decided that I should give it a rest and went back to Edgy in another partition on my hard drive.
3 days later and with time on my idle hands I went in again. This time I followed the link here and I managed to get 3D acceleration going using ‘Method 1 : Install the driver the Ubuntu way’. Celebrations! Next I installed Beryl using the instructions here (following he Beryl setup section under Method 2 : Installing it the hard way). Double celebrations!
On the plus side Feisty recognized my multimedia media needs straight off and pointed me to all the correct codecs. I even got the fonts to look prettier with this link.
After about a week I finally got a working and good looking Linux OS sitting on my screen. And you know what? It was worth all the hair-tearing at the start. My life is complete now. Of course things could change as I get in deeper into Feisty but for now I foresee a bright future.
Simple list of things to do after a Ubuntu fresh install
Beryl in actionAfter about 3 years of using various versions of Ubuntu, I have more or less come up with a gameplan following each fresh install of our favorite friendly neighborhood linux distro. I was bugged for the longest time that I could not get Beryl to run in Edgy Eft (version 6.10 for the uninitiated). I did it with the previous Dapper Drake and knew that my PC could handle it and handle it well. The various threads I found in the Ubuntu forums only made me more confused. Being a lazy Saturday I decided to do a clean install and perhaps finally get to enjoy all the eye candy that Beryl promises. Which brings us nicely to the point of this post. Many newbies to linux or Ubuntu will be largely underwhelmed when first confronted with the far from beautiful brown desktop. Worse still is the fact that the thing is mute and blind too. Due to fear of copyright infringement, Ubuntu has no multimedia capabilities out of the box. This does not mean it can’t be done. You just need some simple tweaks.
1. Upgrade the OS – as soon as you log into the desktop an icon on the top panel will inform you that there are upgrades available. Click on it and follow the resultant instructions. A broadband connection to the internet is essential.
2. Multimedia – Being a lazy ass, I decided to give the much touted Automatix a spin this time around and it did not disappoint. Before long Morrissey was singing from within my PC.
3. Graphics card driver – I found this automated script recently and it worked like clockwork. You will need the latest driver for Beryl to work.
4. Beryl – Finally. The best tutorial I have found so far is this one here. Everything but the kitchen sink can be found here. Scroll down to the section on “Eye Candy” and go crazy!
5. Should things not work out do not despair. Hop over to the friendly watering hole that is the Ubuntu forums and you will find people who will go out of their way to help you out.
That’s all you need to end up with a dancing, singing Ubuntu desktop environment.
Disclaimer : These things worked for me in version 6.10 codenamed Edgy Eft
ubuntu edgy eft – another review
ok i know it has been roughly one and a half months since the release of ubuntu 6.10 codenamed edgy eft but better late then never. after lurking around the ubuntu forums for the past few weeks and coming across horror stories about installation and inexplicable bugs, i finally decided to see for myself if it could be that bad. on the contrary i found it very stable and slightly faster then my previous install of version 6.06 codenamed dapper drake.
the install itself was smooth as butter. slipped in the cd of the iso and booted into the familiar sea of brown. a minor grouse i know but i wish that the powers that be would change the default background after all this time. making sure that my internet connection was detected by firing up firefox 2.0, i clicked on the install icon and away i went. the options by now are like second nature to me seeing that i have in total installed 3 different versions of ubuntu.
rebooting into the installed os was speedier compared to the previous versions. i have come to expect all multimedia to be crippled with a clean install and they did not disappoint as far as this disappointment was concerned. for any newbie reading this though; do not despair. diving into the rich resource that is the ubuntu web forums, i configured the synaptic package manager to include some proprietary repositories and before you can say ’slap me silly on my behind’ i have downloaded all the necessary codecs. minutes later various family members were seen running and screaming out of the house with heavy metal music streaming behind them.
downloading some cool wallpaper from www.deviantart.com, i ended up with the look at the start of this post. the bar at the bottom comes with the package gdesklets and it behaves like the famous mac os x dock. you can also run various widget-like menus with gdesklets which you will notice on the upper right hand corner of the screen. sort of like a konfabulator for linux.
over all it feels very stable and just right. firefox is blazingly fast during net-surfing and after installing the flash player and mplayer plugin, i have yet to come across a media-enriched website that it cannot support it. playing all those movie trailers on the apple website is a cinch.
ubuntu has consistently been topping the list of popular distro on www.distrowatch.com. its there for a reason and edgy eft has proved it yet again.
ubuntu – the satanic version
as a response to the squeaky clean christian edition of the popular linux distro, get ready for some satan worship! get it here.
linux – my os of choice
over the past few years i can proudly say that i have tried quite a few linux distribution (or distros for short) and i find that they are generally more sophisticated than windows. also nothing beats something which is free and infinitely configurable. virus and adwares? what are those?
if you talk to any diehard windows users about linux the first thing they think about is an ugly text-based interface where obscure commmand lines are typed in at prompt signs. that may have been true 10 years ago but now some linux distros trump even mac os x in the looks department. everything can be done by pointing and clicking on beautiful graphical interfaces. throw in windows managers like beryl or compiz and you end up with a hippie’s lysergic-laced wet dream.
having said that i can understand why some people run screaming away from it after a few days of tinkering. and there lies the crux of the matter. you have to be a great tinkerer. you must relish spending hours setting up restricted formats like mp3s and videos files to get everything the way you like it. be prepared to type or cut ‘n paste obscure text commands into the terminal. there are tons of howtos, wiki and forums to wade through on the web for each distro. if you just want things to work right out of the box or if you have a dateline to meet, you are best off sticking with windows or better still mac os x but once in the while you just have to take that leap of faith. that last bit is an euphemism for having more time than what is considered normal by the general public.
from the get go you are expected to install the os on your own. how many people actually do that with windows? discounting all the geeks, this is virtually unheard of. there are partitions to be created or formatted. you have to choose between grub and lilo bootloaders (little scripts that are installed on the very first bit of your hard drive so that the os can be booted into on startup). the jargon used during this process may be daunting at first but most of the time it is pretty self explanatory. over the years the programmers have simplified the process even more with the aim that one day even your grandmother can install the os.
after rebooting into your brand new spanking desktop you will find that you are pretty crippled as far as multimedia is concerned. there is a valid reason for this. mp3, avi, mpg, wmv etc. are all proprietary formats and in order to avoid copyright issues they are turned off by default. this does not mean that they will not work in linux. you just have to sweat for it. this is the first crossroad that will differentiate the geeks from the non-geeks. the latter will just throw their arms into the air, delete the linux partition and crawl back to bill gates who will mock you and throw more security holes at you for daring to question his authority.
the geek will immediately fire up firefox and google up the web forums for their particular distro and after a few quick questions, be on their way to tricking out their os. before long you will have a singing and dancing desktop with some cool eyecandy (ie beryl or compiz windows manager) thrown in for good measure.
a common question that windows users ask me is about compatible software applications. for every windows program, there is a 99% chance that it has a linux equivalent. the caveat is that the software is usually organised into repositories, which as the name suggests, are directories of applications or in unix-speak ‘packages’. the directories are hosted on servers all over the world and in order to get to them, most distros come with an inbuilt package manager. these are used to not only download packages from the servers but also to install them.
the linux community is born out of a spirit of sharing. right from the programmers to the end-users, every shred of knowledge and knowhow is shared with no fiscal aspirations whatsoever. any question posed in the forums are usually guaranteed a quick and accurate reponse. the community has only one aim and that is ensure that linux is used and enjoyed by as big a global population as possible. there are no leaders or followers. as long as you have something meaningful to contribute to the linux world, the sky’s the limit. already whispers and predictions abound that 2007 may be the year that linux finally breaks through and give microsoft a run for its money. the beauty of this is that for linux there is no money involved!
