Lazy Tech Guy

Utility of a Web only OS

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 18:01:26 PDT

Google announced ChromeOS and did that in style. It was a hot topic of discussion in my friend circle. Some were highly excited about it and some considered it a gimmick by Google, akin Google Docs. There is no doubt that Google is directing current internet inventions, it has class leading products in almost every sphere it ventured, however, it has no experience in making an integrated thing like an OS. Google took a better approach, they decided to make Linux as the base of their ChromeOS. Now Linux is time proven for its stability and security features and now has excellent driver support too. ChromeOS will have most common application like Google Docs/ upcoming Online MS Office, will have great boot time, web-email, Facebook, online games etc, however, there is just one thing that bothers us all – Online.

Is our use of a computer just restricted to online tasks ? Do we so rarely use desktop applications that we will be happy to transition to a Web-only OS ? With these question in mind we decided to do a survey of our usage of Home computer and below are our findings. Please NOTE that the survey is conducted on software engineers and their wives, who are a little more comfortable with their computers than a normal users. Based on the results we have allocated points in favour/ against possible acceptance to ChromeOS.

The most common task we all do on the computer is checking Email. Gmail is the most common amongst us. However, some people still stick to Hotmail or Yahoo. With Gmail coming out of Beta, people are more at ease using it, but frequent disconnects is still an issue. Most people have multiple email addresses, hence use outlook or Windows Live mail to consolidate all mails. However, they were OK to visit each in browser as long as they do not have to retype their password every time ( Techys are Lazy people). In the most common task the transition to ChromeOS will be very easy. ChrmoeOS: +1
Second most common task is Facebook. Wow ! we guys are socially active too. Some people use the desktop client for Facebook and many use the mobile clients but almost all find the web interface most convenient to use. ChromeOS : +1
Games come as a definite number 3 on our list. Most guys are addicted to online multiplayer games. Some find Warcraft amazing so some swear by CounterStrike. Though many of us have XBOX/PS3 but computer gaming experience is just out of this world and the most satisfying. We have even formed teams for the yet to be released Diablo-III. PC Games are very important and serve a good purpose of bonding us even if we are physically miles apart. Oh did anyone mention Web games ??? I think we bought our $3000 gaming PC for nothing ! Big NO NO for ChromeOS as far as games are concerned. ChromeOS –1.
Twitter. Amazingly this small web app is a favourite amongst housewives as well. All love it. This looks like a positive thing for ChromeOS, but all of us use TwitterDeck or some other mobile application. The web interface is too bland to use at the same time TwitterDeck provides some good features like notifications which make life easier. Shifting to web only interface would not be preferred by most. ChrmoeOS: –1
Skype. The cheapest ( read free) means of talking to our friends and family. The sound and video quality is exceptional. No other service like MSN, yahoo or G-talk can come anywhere near. Good thing about Skype is Linux client. But that is desktop client. ChromeOS: -1
Watching Movies. Just download it off iTunes/Amazon and watch it on computer. Will ChromeOS have this capability ? Does not look like in their initial announcement. ChrmoeOS: –1
Coming to iTunes. Switching to ChromeOS means ditching my iPhone/iPod Touch ? No way! ChromeOS: –1
Office. Now we guys are past the stage where we used to make ppts, or write docs for submitting assignment. We rarely use office applications unless for very specific tasks like preparing a doc for house renovation. Most will be very happy to use online version MS Office/ Google Docs. ChromeOS : +1
Pictures. Techys are gadget freak too. Most of us have DSLR and love going together for photo shooting trips. Though most of the pictures we take are just to be shared on Flickr, but we do a lot of post processing before uploading our prized photos. Most take photos in “RAW” mode and then use the respective software from Canon/Nikon/Sony to process them. Processing a good photo sometimes takes hours. This is serious work we do. It is not like “Auto-Correct” or red-eye reduction found on Live Photo Album/ Picassa. Some of us have bought Adobe Photoshop and do some amazing work. Personally I use GIMP on Arch Linux, but most other friends cannot work without Photoshop/ Canon utilities. Photos processing is something we just cannot do online. Big NO NO for Google. ChromeOS : –1
Internet News. Name says it all. ChromeOS : +1

ChromeOS is a googd initiative of looking at tasks people do in a different perspective. But by no means is Chrome a replacement of everyday OS. From the above 10 points we see that Chrome does not satisfy many of our everyday needs. For switching to ChromeOS we will have to let go of Games, Skype, Movies, iPhone and our passion for shooting. Too much to pay for falling into the web of an internet giant.

If we go for a vacation, we might not have access to internet thus our laptop will become useless.This is not the case today. By switching to ChromeOS we miss too much. But what do we gain ? What are the benefits of ChromeOS ? What can Chrome do that my Arch Linux cannot ? Its just a matter of brand recognition. Hey wait !Ubuntu is much more recognized than Chrome. Also Ubuntu/Arch provides me with a plethora of desktop applications.

Our Survey concludes that if we have to shift from the existing Windows desktop it will be Linux – A full blown Linux Desktop which has a browser to perform all the functions of a ChromeOS.

P.S: The survey is only for home desktop. For Office Laptop we cannot think about anything except Windows. We make extensive use of Microsoft Office, all the web applications are written keeping IE 6 ( yes IE6, not IE7 or IE8) in mind, and we have huge number of desktop apps written for Windows XP. Many of us use Visual Studio for programming. Hence Office laptop has to be Windows only.

Personally I use Arch Linux at home and have no Love for either MS, Canonical or Google.

Microsoft should launch Windows with Opera

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:54:28 PDT

Not sure why MS decided not remove IE from European version of Windows 7, they had a much better alternative – Give users an option to try Opera instead. This would have made the EU regulators happy at the same time done the trick for MS.

If MS does not want to support Opera ( which they should never do), they can give this option on an "AS-IS" basis. Make user click "Accept" to the fact that Opera is a non-MS software and MS will not provide support for it. They can always include a Desktop icon to download IE8 from Internet and install it.

As per latest data it is FireFox which is causing most harm to IE market share. With version 3.5 coming out the scale will shift more towards FF. I on the other hand love Chrome, there is no parallel to it. In no time Chrome is slated to take over browser just as gmail did to web email.

Opera will inadvertently safeguard MS from ever increasing influence of FireFox and Chrome.

Here are my reasons for it

Opera is EU company and is the one which launched the complaint. If MS includes Opera than all EU would be happy.
Firefox is the biggest market competitor currently. If MS bundles Opera, then MS haters would (possibly) choose Opera instead of Firefox and thus decrease the market share FF has. This again would make MS as the only dominant player with other having less than 10% share each.
As the only dominant player MS will again get a chance to dictate web standards.
Opera would also possibly weed out Chrome – arguably the best browser currently.
Apple safari is already almost non-existent. Opera might help put a death nail.
The last reason is the most compelling one --- Opera SUCKS. Yes Opera is no where close to even IE8 in terms of ease of use, let alone Chrome. Some reasons

Around 5% sites refuse to open in Opera.
Another 5% look real funny in Opera. ( Ok the fact is that all sites are designed to run in IE so not all browsers display them correctly, but look at FF and Chrome – they do a very decent job).
Opera hangs whenever it wants.
I tried changing the default search engine to “bing”, but Opera will simply not accept it.
Too much space is allocated to different (tool)bars reducing the available space for web page. They could have taken a lesson or two from Chrome.
On fresh install, it does not import settings from IE – FF and Chrome does it perfectly.
It lacks the suggestive URL that Chrome has.
It lacks the cool web accelerators that IE8 has. I specially like the Blog, Email and translate accelerators.
It lacks the Private browsing mode.

In effect Opera lacks the best features of all current browsers and does not have any feature that it can boast of. People running Opera might conclude that IE8 is a much better option and might come back to IE8. If they switch to Chrome, there is not chance of returning back.

Hence Opera is a blessing in disguise for IE8. I hope MS guys read this article and try out this fuzzy idea.

Why People resort to Arch Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:44:30 PDT

Arch Linux is a Linux enthusiasts dream. It has a rare reputation of being very basic at the same time very user friendly. It is a minimalistic distribution which allows for great customizations, it very updated ( much better than OpenSUSE or Ubuntu) and has a very good package manager.

That said, the first thing that will deter people from trying Arch is non-availability of Live CD/DVD installer. Also the default install takes you to a command line type, non-GUI shell. There on you are supposed to read the guide and install everything from XOrg , XFCE/KDE to FireFox extensions. Then, how come such a beginner deterring distribution gaining so much in popularity ?

Here are some reasons I can think of :::

Most updated distro ( at least in top 20 on Distrowatch )
Every thing is simple/minimalistic and well laid out. Like making some changes is mostly done by editing rc files with "vi". Good thing is that its all well documented. No chance of any GUI app screwing things up.
Very fast and ultra efficient package management System. Pacman is gaining popularity everyday.
Huge number of packages optimized for i686 and x86-64( most modern computers).
As the default install is very minimalistic, so you add only the packages you actually need. Like there is no need for CUPS if you do not have printer attached.
Arch is faster than most other distros. Applications like Open Office and FireFox open much faster in Arch. It is also lighter on resources, uses much less RAM than most other with similar packages installed.
Rolling releases. This means that Arch is always updated, very unlike 6-month update for Ubuntu. You will never have to re-install Arch. The latest release of Arch are just a snapshot of your already updated system.
Here is something where Arch is very user friendly - If you want to install binary packages, most are there in official repositories, however, in rare circumstances you can either download from AUR or better still compile very easily on your own. ArchBuildSystem is one of the easiest compile from source I have seen.
Very friendly community. Arch Forums are equally good for new users as well as for seasoned ones. But even the Linux Gurus here are very polite and answer the silliest question ( most of mine fall in this category ) with poise or guide me to other forum threads where the question is answered.

The Last benefit is a little appealing only to Techy at heart. Chauvinistic you might say.

10. PCLinusOS, OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Ubuntu are all great distros. However, they do all the work for me and I want to DO-IT-MYSELF. I want to dirty my hands. I want to have a feeling that I am not spoon fed. And I want to show-off my latest packages before any other distribution has it in their database. The latest Firefox, KDE, GIMP - you name it and mostly Arch is one of the first to have it in its repos.

Give Arch a patient try (keyword is patient), read guides, goto Forums and you will also fall in love with it.

Oh Its Beautiful

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:49:37 PST

These were the exact words from my wife's mouth when she saw my Mandriva 2009 install. I choose the KDE 4 desktop which is eye-candy in itself, but Mandriva devs have put in a lot of effort and made KDE look much more adoring. Every look is pleasing and speaks of the attention to details paid by devs.

Beginning with the splash screen ( common to both GNOME and KDE ), KDE wallpapers, KDE theme, modified KMenu and all the way to screensavers every thing is a pure visual delight. Mandriva has made sure that all applications are well blended in the theme and look similar.

Mandriva is like Miss World -- Beauty with Brains. Mandriva 2009 takes off from one of their best releases MAndriva 2008.1 and adds to it. I immediately recognized all my hardware and installed the correct drivers for it, Well !! except for the driver for Vaio Motion Eye Webcam. Mandriva One also comes with "out-of-box" support for most media formats, so all my mp3 and you-tube videos play without any intervention from my side. As with any new KDE Linux distribution, Mandriva comes with Office, Firefox and other applications of everyday use and there is no need to explicitly add new applications.

Ok coming back to the beauty again - KDE 4 has inbuilt beautiful Desktop effects provided by KWin, however, KWin is still not as matured as Compiz-Fusion is. Hence, Mandriva 2K9 provides the option to enable compiz-Fusion and get all the amazing effects like Desktop Cube and Fire. I think my wife played with the Fire extension for a long time.

Lastly ! did I mention that default Fonts look amazing in Mandriva ? Oh they are almost like the Fonts we see on Vista.

After having spent 2 hours with Mandriva I asked my wife, is she willing to jump to Mandriva ? Her answer was NOT until she can video chat with her friends using Skype and Sync her Samsung Omnia with Outlook like software in Mandriva. Despite all her beauty, Mandriva still has a long way to go before My wife starts using it as her primary OS.

PS: I know that Skype with Video is available for Linux, but I have a Vaio and new Linux Kernel does not have driver for Motion Eye Webcam.

Thank God Ubuntu comes as Live CD

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:01:20 PST

I have Mandriva 2009 installed on my Vaio Laptop and it works great out of Box.
Till now only two things are not working

Motion Eye webcam, and
Fn buttons

Searching on Google, I found that Ubuntu has packages for these ( where as I'll have to compile them on Mandriva). My next step was to download and burn Ubuntu 8.10 and check it out. I thank God that most modern distributions can be tested as Live CD else Life would have been hell for me.

On booting Ubuntu, it loads to a almost familiar brown themed Gnome desktop. Now this is typical Ubuntu and we do not expect Ubuntu to be WOW looking out of box. However, as people claim it to be the most user friendly desktop - I expect all the hardware to work out of box. At max its ok that restricted driver module detects a non-OSS driver for a hardware; connects to internet and installs the correct driver.
For that connection to Internet is essential, but in my case that basic step was proving to be a trouble. My wireless card which works perfectly in Mandriva, since 2008.1 was not working with Latest Ubuntu.
For some time I could not believe it, but when even after 3 reboots the card did not work. I realized that it is not my mistake. The card in question is detected by Mandriva as


02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

Then I connected the wire from modem and eth0 came up beautifully.
I thought now hardware will be detected and the correct driver will be fetched. Nope, Ubuntu again proved me wrong. Fiddling with the Admin software, I came across Hardware Drivers application, on firing it immediately detected the card and showed it as Enabled and configured properly. My joy was short lived, still the wireless card did not show up in Network adapters.
Googling for AR42X on Ubuntu Forums, I came across many such complaints. Amazingly there is no easy solution to this problem, no one has made a package for ubuntu to just work.
The workaround involves cumbersome command line procedure.
Disabling this ..
Enabling that ..
Compiling...
modprobe....

All this just to get wireless working ??
Strange!!.
I am sure that Ubuntu came after Mandriva 2009, why should it lack simple wireless drivers ?
If I have to compile, I am better off compiling driver for motion eye webcam. At least for that I do not have to keep my laptop next to my router.

A little search showed that AR42x is supported out of box by the following major distributions

Mepis 8
Mandriva 2009
PCLinuxOS 2009
Opensuse 11.1
Mint 6
Fedora 10

EDIT: as posted by darkchild

AR42x also works out of the box with Fedora 10.

OK some are still in Beta, but the support is good.

I again thank my stars that I did not install Ubuntu, otherwise either I would have to treat my Laptop as desktop till the driver compile not work ( and who knows that self compiled drivers will work properly ) or had to install Mandriva 2009 back.

Thanks again Canonical for providing the option to use a LiveCD.

Uptime of Linux Desktop System

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:48:12 PST

I have religiously avoided the temptation of checking new distributions like the Mandriva 2009 and Ubuntu 8.10. The reason is that I did not want to shut down my OpenSUSE 11 installation. I always just close the lid of my Laptop and resume the session on return. Many a times I have seen my KDE 4.X crash and I had to restart my XServer, but OpenSUSE never asked me to reboot. OpenSUSE testing repos have KDE 4.2 ( testing) and I keep myself updated. As I use a non-stable version of KDE so I have seen many crashes. Good thing is that even after three months of usage, the memory footprint was always very low.

Do let me know if anyone else has allowed there desktop Linux to run for three months or more. Please let me know the distribution you are using and the XServer crash/freeze seen ( if any).

Lets share in a format like

1) Distribution

2) uptime. For more information on uptime use " man uptime" on terminal.

Please Note that I am talking about home desktop machines and not Linux servers. I think in my office the Linux servers are running on RHEL 3 since more than 3 years.

Prominent public figures in Open Source world

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 01:26:30 PDT

Open source has taken the world by storm. Numerous open source applications are being used by satisfied users. The most prominent and widely used open source products are Firefox, Linux Distributions,Sugar CRM, GIMP, Wordpress, emacs etc. The latest to join this ever increasing bandwagon is Google Chrome. Many people don't know what Open Source (OS) means but are still happily using these OS products.

The wikipedia defines OS as Open source is a development methodology,[1] which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge). Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet, which provided access to diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities.

As OS software is influencing the lives of so many people, lets take a look at the commonly known people of OS ::

First and foremost the grand daddy of open source movement, Richard Matthew Stallman. He was a Harvard student, who abandoned his studies for his love of programming at MIT Artificial Intelligence lab. He is the developer of emacs, a tool which is a long time favourite of unix and linux programmers. However, his rise to fame started when he started the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation. The prominent software out of GNU include GCC ( collection of compilers) , GNOME and GNASH. Out of these GCC is of utmost importance as it forms the basic of almost every free software including Linux operating system. He also wrote the GPL which is fast becoming the most popular free software license.
Eric Steven Raymond is a prominent unix programmer and had championed the Free Software Initiative.
Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum is a professor of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Hes is a distinguished author of many computer programming books like Computer Networks and Operating System design and implementation. As part of his book Operating Systems he wrote a small Operating system called Minix. The design principles Tanenbaum applied to MINIX famously influenced the design decisions Linus Torvalds applied in the creation of the Linux kernel. Sir I was a student of Computer Science and totally realize the importance of your teachings. I am sure that all Computer Engineering students hold you in high esteem.
Ok here comes the GOD of Linux- Linus Benedict Torvalds. He is the most prominent name in Open Source world. He is the man who has the guts to take on the Redmond Giant head on in their bead and butter product - Operating System. Apart from Linux kernel, Linus also developed the distributed revision control system GIT. He is an open supporter of KDE over GNOME.
Coming to KDE, although KDE was founded by Matthias Ettrich, today the most common face of KDE is Aaron Seigo. He is the man behind KDE e.V - the non-profit organization behind KDE.
He is undoubtedly the most recognized man in open source world - Mark Richard Shuttleworth. He is the man behind mighty Ubuntu. For most people Ubuntu IS Linux. Dell is shipping Desktops and Laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. Dell computers running Ubuntu 8.04 include extra support for ATI Video Graphics, Dell Wireless, Fingerprint Readers, HDMI, Bluetooth and MP3/WMA/WMV. Ubuntu provides all the software required for normal working and is touted to become a viable alternative to Windows.

This effectively concludes my list of prominent public figures. However, a few more prominent ones includes Gael Duval of Mandirva fame, Danniel Robbins of Gentoo Fame and the Legendary Texstar (Bill Reynolds) of PCLinuxOS fame. Texstar specially deserves praise for single handedly creating an distribution and an ecosystem which could take on mighty Ubuntu and be the favourite distribution for a large groups of users.

Please feel free to add any names I might have missed.

How to Perfectly Kill a Perfect Distribution

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:37:09 PDT

PCLinuxOS was the perfect distribution in 2007. It had all the bells and whistles to be an excellent Windows XP alternative. Here the the things I loved about PCLinuxOS

Good looking UI ( OK I admit that I love KDE ).
Almost mimicking XP look and Feel ( now many of Linux Purist might not like it, but this acts as an important point to help transition a new user from XP to PCLOS - keyword is less learning curve).
Almost everything working out of Box.
Very fast and responsive.
Ultra stable.
Works on almost every hardware.
Amongst the first to update the repository with updated software, ( Check my blog about GIMP 2.4 release).

When a distribution is able to configure my hardware, is ultra stable, highly updated and provide me with almost all the required software then I think that is the distribution I am looking for. PCLOS had all these abilities and more. That's the reason it was called the distro-hopper stopper. People loved it and it rose to the pinnacle of Distrowatch Page hit rankings. Not only reached; it stayed there for a good 6 months. If we consider that the distribution PCLOS dethroned was mighty Ubuntu, that makes PCLOS achievement even more impressive. On one hand Ubuntu had the backing of Canonical - they were sending free CDs, had tieup with the likes of Dell, had dozens ( maybe more ) developers working; on other hand there was PCLOS which had a very small dev team and no corporate backing, no big computer assembler backing them.

Yet PCLOS rose to top on account of sheer merit. It had the novelty to generate interest and the quality to sustain it. Kudos to Textar and PCLOS 2007. It was almost perfect.

Alas! that was 2007, however, this is 2008 and almost end of 2008. A lot has changed since then. Specially for me life has taken an altogether new twist. I have changed my company, changed my job responsibilities and even changed my country of work. And how much has PCLOS changed since 2007 ? I know its repositories are updated but question is how much ? Are they having the latest versions ? Or are they having the version which most of its peers have ? Does it still support almost all latest hardware ?

I had all these questions in my mind and tried PCLOS 2007 on my Sony Vaio. For reference:: Mandriva 2008.1 detected all the hardware except for Motion Eye webcam and the Fn+F7 does not work. Apart from this everything works perfectly. With OpenSUSE 11 and Ubuntu 8.04, additionally I had to download the drivers to get my Atheros wi-fi working. Of the three only Ubuntu failed to resume from hibernation; Mandriva and OpenSUSE have no trouble waking from up upto three continuous sleep. Coming back to my attempt with PCLOS 2007, here are my findings:

LiveCD download was fast.
The initial boot shows too many options which can be confusing for a new user. I like the Mandriva Spring approach which provides a single option or even the slick options of OpenSUSE.
Same old, but still good looking splash screen.
A huge number of clicks before I can reach the desktop. I actually counted the number of different screen to 18. God, I had to click the mouse at least 12 times before I reached the desktop. Compare this with class leading Ubuntu where the number of clicks is ZERO and the frustration increases. Lets see some of the clicks and the stupid reasons behind it

Configure Network: This gives the option to select Ethernet, DSL etc. Then starts a series of 6 clicks in the end when PCLOS says "Congrats the network is configured". However, the funny and frustrating part is that I still have to click OK for the LiveCD to proceed. My question is when the LiveCD discovered that I want to go for Auto-DHCP from my router, why does it still require user intervention ?
Select keyboard ( Oh yes, what happened to hardware auto detection ?)
Select Timezone. Comeon man this is just a LiveCD boot. We can do with these questions when I actually try to install it on my hard disk.
KDM. Why show KDM in a LiveCD. In a LiveCD all a normal user wants to do is to reach desktop and check the distribution and possibly install. Also the options are Root and Guest. Luckily they have provided the passwords for both users, but would have been handy to have both the user name and password populated when a user is selected. Either way password is displayed on the same page so security is not an issue- it just reduces problems to user.

On the desktop, I found the old customized KDE, which amazingly is still good to look at.
Next was the time to install on hard disk and again I counted 17 different screens even when I selected to use my entire hard disk. I just hope this is not a deliberate attempt to frustrate users.
On reboot, I found myself quickly on the KDM, there is no option to auto login during install. OpenSUSE does a fantastic job in this respect. Now some people might cry security. Lets remind ourselves PCLOS is intended to be used by home users where there is hardly any risk posed by Auto-login.
OK if auto-login is a risk, then what is the option to login as root ? ? PCLOS gloriously provides the option to login as root.
I quickly came to the desktop and smiled at the familiar and pleasing KDE presented. However, there is not novelty. Nothing new.
Then I tried connecting to my wi-fi. Unfortunately like Ubuntu, PCLOS also failed where Mandriva worked perfectly. I know that PCLOS 2007 has an old kernel, old everything so an update might bring about some change. I connected to my wired ethernet connection and started the upgrade through Synaptic.
Synaptic told me that some 600 odd packages needs to be updated and 700 odd MB needs to be downloaded. Wow! more than the 2007 iso. Still I was happy that I'll get a new and fresh system. Destiny had some other plans for my install. Towards the end of download, Synaptic gave me an error saying that some package could not be downloaded. I tried and then again tried and finally clicked skip. Same thing happened with three more packages and I clicked skip. After the download Synaptic started upgrading my system and all hell broke loose. All of a sudden my system rebooted and I was brought to a shell saying that "no inittab file found". I know what this means. This clearly means that some error occurred during upgrade and now my system is screwed.
I have taken a picture of that error as this was the first time the Ultra Stable PCLOS duped me.
I agree that I clicked skip on a few packages, but Synaptic should be intelligent enough to not upgrade packages whose dependencies are not met.

This was end of my date with PCLOS. Then I checked that PCLOS repositories are not updated to the latest version of software. For instance KDE 4.1 is still not the default KDE desktop. Yeah, yeah some might say that KDE 4.1 is not suitable for normal use. Unfortunately for those, the distribution managers of major distributions like OpenSUSE, Mandriva and Kubuntu think otherwise. Guys if KDE 4.1 was really that bad, these high profile distributions would not include them as default desktop. Not just KDE 4.1, even the Linux kernel version in PCLOS repos is 2.6.22 where as the latest version is 2.6.26.

To summarize PCLOS lost on the exact points where it scored in 2007.

It does have a good looking UI, but there is nothing new in it. There is no novelty.
It is not Ultra Stable.
The repos does not have updated software.
The hardware detected is exactly same as Ubuntu.
Speed wise it pales in comparison to OpenSUSE and Mandriva.
It is not class leading in any respect. There is no compelling reason to use it.

I would anytime choose Mandriva over it. For someone who do mind pre-installed binary software OpenSUSE and Kubuntu are better choices.

I know that Tex ( the main person behind PCLOS ), was not well recently and could not devote time to PCLOS. However, isn't PCLOS supposed to be a community distribution ? PCLOS 2007 was released in May 2007, since then all major distributions including Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Mandriva have done at least two releases. However, PCLOS still prides itself on the successful 2007 release. The only OS I know can easily sustain a Looooong period between releases is Windows XP. Unfortunately PCLOS is not XP.

Guys PCLOS was the perfect distribution in 2007, but times have changes. 2007 is history, wake up now. Wake up before its too late.

EDIT:: I know very well that a PCLOS MiniMe is release, also we have a PCLOS Gnome edition. However, please do let me know in which respect are they class leading ? Why should I choose PCLOS say over Ubuntu ?

Minime and PCLOS 2007 share the same repos, Hence, stability wise Minime cannot be more stable.
With Minime I have to download a hell lot of software to make a working system. I guess I'll have to download a lot less with Ubuntu. Also Ubuntu has the ability to tell which driver/software we are missing in order to get anything working. Like if I type "gcc" in the terminal, I get a message that gcc is not installaed and can be installed using "apt-get install gcc", similarly I I play a video, Totem tells me the required codecs and pops a UI to download and instal it. This is also there is Mandriva. I think that these makes life simpler.
MiniMe is good, but does it has documentation to work on Vaio. Luckily Ubuntu has, though not official. A google search for "VCC6 Linux" ( the Vaio webcam), immidiately takes me to Ubuntu Forums.
Ubuntu has more recent software in the repositories. The 8.10 version of Kubuntu will have KDE 4.1.

OK Lets leave Ubuntu, Does PCLOS even compare to Mandriva? I find the latest Mandriva 2009 RC1 with KDE 4.1 to be very stable. I easily recognizes my wi-fi and is much faster than PCLOS.

One thing in PCLOS favor is the rolling release, Hence it need not make a 6 monthly release like Mandriva/Ubuntu. A user fo 2007 release will still have all the updated software as a user of PCLOS 2008 will have ( if they release PCLOS 2008). However, my point is that the software version in repos is not the very latest, for instance Firefox 3.01 was released on July 16, 2008 today is September 4 and PCLOS still has 3.0 ? All the three - Mandriva, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu will have it in their next release which is due in October/Nov. Another rolling release distribution "Arch Linux" has Firefox 3.01 in their Current repositories. Why is PCLOS slow in packaging it ? This is the same PCLOS which release Gimp 4.0 in no time. Its just that the quality is degrading.

My simple question is why should I try PCLOS when there are much better distributions already available free. Please suggest me the reasons. Merely saying PCLOS rocks has no merrit.

NOTE :: I am not trying to degrade PCLOS, I just want the devs to take a note of the other distributions and do a catchup.

Dell takes Ubuntu to the world

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:20:52 PDT

I simply admire Dell for being the pioneer in bringing Linux to an average users. Dell was the major manufacturer who introduced Ubuntu on Laptops and Desktops in US. It followed up with its success in few European markets and now Dell is trying to further stretch its wings-- Dell is going to offer Ubuntu on its Latos and Desktops to 20 more countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.

That's like music to my ears. This means that more people will buy Linux desktops and Laptops; hence more hardware manufacturers will provide Linux drivers ( even if binary) and this might result in a chain reaction which might bring Linux comparable to OSX in usage. The next step would be to dethrone Windows, but I think that is very far fetched.

OK coming back to Dell offerings; In India, Dell had introduces two laptops and two desktops. Quoting from Dell site

Today, we're offering two pre-configured laptops--the Vostro A840 and A860, and two pre-configured desktops—the Vostro A100 and A180. Both the affordable notebooks feature a sturdy compact design. The A840 weighs in at right at 5 lbs while the A80 weighs just about 5.7 lbs.

Of these the details for A840 Laptop are displayed. Now this is not a very high end laptop, actually a ver low end one, but its a good start. Lets check the configurations

Intel® Celeron® M Processor 560   OR Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T2390
Ubuntu® Linux
512MB 667Mhz DDR2 SDRAM    OR 1GB Dual-channel 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
14.1” Widescreen WXGA (1280x800) TFT Display with Anti-glare
80GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive    OR 120GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
24X CD-RW/DVD Combination Drive    OR     8X max DVD+/-RW Drive with DVD+R double layer write capability
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
Internal 10/100 Fast Ethernet

Now the lower configuration is expected to be priced at INR 22,000 ( USD 550). That is a great offer and can result in many people buying a laptop instead of a desktop and for a change most people will not require to install pirated version of Windows as the pre-installed Ubuntu will provide a fully working system.

I think this is a great effort by Dell and should be applauded.

Best among the rest

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:32:45 PDT

Now this is beyond doubt that Ubuntu is the most searched Linux distribution. Most websites/forums claim that Ubuntu is the most popular one. Okey, agreed that Ubuntu is the most popular; what about the rest ?

Now Distrowatch reports the top 10 distributions as

1Ubuntu
2openSUSE
3Fedora
4Mint
5PCLinuxOS
6Debian
7Mandriva
8Dreamlinux
9Sabayon
10Damn Small

When I took a Google trend data, I found that apart from Ubuntu, only Debain, Fedora/Redhat and OpenSUSE/SUSE had the best search hits. Here is a link from Google trends depicting the comparative ratio of the five. Please note that I have checked the Google trends data for OpenSUSE and SUSE differently, same holds true for Fedora/Redhat. Interesting thing is that individually each five distribution scores much better than most other top 10 distributions I tried ( Well ! except for the mighty Ubuntu). Please note that each of these five are searched more than Kubuntu, Xubuntu and any other Buntu too.

Debian and Fedora certainly emerge as the clear winner, with SUSE a distant third. I am no expert to do any analysis on this data, maybe you guys can help.

opensuse suse redhat fedora debian

Fore more detailed data please visit Google trends.

Lets see how these stack against mighty Ubuntu

ubuntu suse redhat fedora debian

Again more details at Google trends site.

EDIT: Due to some extreme comments I am adding another google trends comparison. In the original article I had not included distributions which were too low on Google trends to mention. However, now that some guys really want it; I have added comparative searches of "Linux Mint", Mint and PCLinuxOS. Please Note that I have searched for "Linux Mint" as well as Mint. Now we cannot take all Mint to mean Linux Mint, Mint can also mean Mint that we love to eat. Note that Mint search graph has remained consistant since 2004 and earlier, when even Linux Mint's father Ubuntu was not born. So please don't mistake Mint to mean "Linux Mint" Just For Comparison I have added the most debated distribution Debian. Check that Debian is still more searched than Mint. Needless to say "Linux Mint" and PCLinuxOS are no where in comparison. Guys in real world people go by facts; no matter how much I love Linux Mint fact is that Debian is much more popular and this is going to remain so for next few months at least. Many hardcore server admins use Debian and simply would not use any other distro. Here I have not compared a "Desktop only" distribution and I am sure that hardly anyone will use Linux Mint on server.

ubuntu mint linux mint debian pclinuxos

Refer to Google Trends site.

Downgrade to XP or Upgrade to Mandriva

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 23:59:26 PDT

My friend wanted a low cost Laptop and went for Dell 1525. Here in Singapore, it is really a value for money Notebook. For SGD 1099 we get a full featured Laptop with the following Configuration

Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core Processor T2390 Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic 2GB DDR2 SDRAM 15.4” WXGA Display with Integrated 2.0 mega pixel web cam 160GB* SATA Hard Drive 8X DVD Burner Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 Dell™ Wireless 1395 802.11g Wi-Fi Mini-card 1-Year Limited Warranty (Next Business Day On-Site* Service)

Everything is OK with this Laptop, just one issue- It has Vista Basic. Now Vista Basic does not have the cool features of Home Premium, nor is it as snappy as Windows XP. Dell also installs a 30-days subscription of McAffee anti-virus, which although secures the system, but at the same time further makes Vista slower. To further accentuate the problem he uses Netbeans ( his company uses it )for his java development work and had to use OpenOffice ( he does not want to pay SGD 200 for a basic version of MS Office ). Now these two are resource hungry and make Vista crawl. We discussed his problem and came with two possible alternatives

Downgrade to XP SP3 ( which is blazingly fast compared to Vista). This was the most obvious option and a good one too as Dell is known to provide drivers for XP and my friend would have an OS he is very comfortable with. However, there is one problem - MS allows downgrade only for Vista Ultimate and Business editions. That means that my friend has to BUY XP and this defeats the entire purpose of having a Low cost Notebook. Since my Friend had to do some of his official work on this Laptop, so a pirated copy of XP was ruled out. Also, as Dell provided only a 30-Days McAffee subscription, he had to mandatoryily buy a years subscription ( read spend more money). Though extremely tempting this option was ruled out.

Stick to Vista Basic and save the money required to buy XP. Invest some money in McAffee and some more in RAM and get everything working. This sounds great but unfortunately Dell decides to sell a 1GB RAM for SGD 153 and 2GB for SGD 183. Another very expensive option.

My friend had almost given up and was about to just buy McAffee 1-year subscription and bear the slow Vista. He said that he will upgrade to more RAM after a month or two of saving. It was then that I pitched in and suggested him to give Mandriva 2008 Spring a try. Now he is not afraid of Linux and said that if all the peripherals worked good and the speed is better than Vista, he will consider Ubuntu. His rationale was based on tha fact that Dell officially ships the same Laptop "Inspiron 1525" with Ubuntu pre-installed in US so Ubuntu should have no problem on this one too. I reminded myself that Ubuntu is the most dominant Distro, but the trouble was that I had to download the Ubuntu LiveCD, whereas I had Mandriva 2008 Spring One on a CD. So we decided to download Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS on my Laptop and in the meanwhile try Mandriva on his Dell.

Good thing for me is that Mandriva One is an excellent flavor of Linux. It comes with almost all the necessary drivers and application. We booted with the LiveCD and in no time we had a beautiful desktop.

I forgot to mention that during boot we had enabled Compiz Fusion, which works beautifully with Intel X3100. Not sure what Mandriva guys have done but the default fonts look beautiful, almost as good as they look on XP. Our next task was to check if all the peripherals work well ?

USB Drive -- YES

DVD Writer -- YES

8-in-1 Card Reader. We inserted a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo and Bingo Mandriva detected it and gave KDE pop-up asking what to do with the new device.

Monitor -- Default resolution was 1200 X 800 ( which is the actual resolution of Dell LCD)

Wireless -- This was a sweet surprise as Mandriva auto-detected the Wireless connection and when we entered the Password, it connected to the WPA-2 Password protected router. In no time we were browsing.

Touchpad -- Works perfectly, though a little extra sensitive.

In-built-webcam -- Works like a charm.

With all the peripherals working out of the box, the next check was for provided software. This is another area where Mandriva One shines. Apart from the beautiful KDE; it has

OpenOffice,
Firefox ( as default browser against most KDE based distros which have Konqueror ) ,
many media codecs,
GIMP,
DigiKam,
Amarok and other media players.
Support for Windows Mobile Phone, which we could use to sync the new Samsung Omnia.
Excellent Control Center for any configurations ( if required).

Now these are enough for normal working of an average user. However, he wanted Netbeans which was an easy download and install from Netbeans website. To our amazement, Mandriva Live CD was easily able to takeup OpenOffice, Firefox and Netbeans all at the same time. Please Note that LiveCD also takes up good amount of RAM.

Here we had Mandriva running from RAM and still faster than INSTALLED Vista Basic on the same hardware. All the hardware was properly detected and working out-of-box; most of the software that he would use on Vista was also on Mandriva ( OpenOffice, Firefox and Netbeans) and the best part is that for Mandriva he does not have to buy any anti-virus.

Needless to say that he instantly installed Mandriva on the hard disk, dual booting with Vista. Finally he got the speed he required and saved money on anti-virus. This all was not done by "Downgrading to XP", but instead by "Upgrading to Mandriva".

P.S: After a while we did try Ubuntu on the same Laptop, but he felt that Mandriva LiveCD was faster and decided to stick to Mandriva.

IS Ubuntu Hardy really THAT buggy ?

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:17:25 PDT

Blogsphere and forums are full of post saying that hardy is much more buggy than Gutsy or any other previous release. Come on this is a LTS release, how can this be so buggy ? Lets take a look at some of the posts

We begin with the comments section on LWN. Lwn reported the release of Ubuntu 8.04 and starting from first comment its all bug reports. The first comment reports three major bugs

The ubuntu kernel should use CONFIG_FAIR_CGROUP_SCHED, same as Completely fair scheduler; instead of CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED/CONFIG_FAIR_USER_SCHED. This bug is now fix both in Hardy as well as coming Intrepid.
Default ALSA device must use PulseAudio, otherwise ALSA applications may fail. This bug is fixed in Hardy.
Manually Configuring Network Causes Massive, Unreversable, Failure. This bug is comfirmed, but not yet fixed.

Its heartening to see that Ubuntu developers are taking the pain to fix the bugs, but I think that such serious bugs should not be part of a LTS release.

Also there is a very nice thread on Mint Forums about Hardy bugs. Some users comment like

Ubuntu is not the least buggy distro available, quite the contrary... e.g you can find bugs reports never fixed, never resolved, although marked for certain importance: "high", "critical" and "confirmed"...
Probably the developers are not interested in fixing bugs, they prefer without doubt add new 'features' which themselves come with other bugs...

There are several threads going on on the Ubuntu forums right now about Hardy being too buggy. It is very buggy. Ubuntu has gotten progressively worse since Feisty. I was hoping Hardy would stabilize this trend, but it has just gotten worse.

Interesting haan.. This made me think how can a distribution that is on the most popular list of almst every Linux site, that has tie-ups with the likes of Dell and is the primary distribution responsible to take Linux to desktop; be so buggy. A distribution like Ubuntu, which is fast becoming the default face of Linux for average computer users, need to be extra cautious about its releases and doubly more when the release is a LTS.

I tried doing a reality check and personally asked my colleagues and friends about how they felt about Linux. Now I am a C++/Unix dev, so is most of my friend circle. I believe that most of us are above average Linux users due to our default familiarity with command line Unix. However, to my astonishment, most of people I asked have never used Linux at home. A few (around 50) , specially from US and India have taken the plunge and became the target of my questionnaire. Here are the most common replies.

I ordered a free Linux CD ( read Ubuntu) and am happy using it as LiveCD with no danger of Linux corrupting ( Corrupting Uh!) my hard disk.
I shifted to 8.04 only after 8.04.1 was released.
I use Ubuntu to showoff the cool Fire effect (compiz) to my friends.
I dual boot Ubuntu and XP ( For games only) as Ubutnu is much more safer.
I like Ubuntu as it detects all my hardware and puts a popup for installing drivers ( for Nvidia cards) or other software ( media codecs). It detects the correct software and installs it. In effect Ubuntu does all the work for me.
I like Ubuntu as for most of the problems, there are already posts in the Support Forum. Even if I ask a question, I get many relevant instant replies and mostly the problem is sorted out.
I love Synaptic, it has never failed me.
I think it is slow than PCLOS and OpenSUSE.
Ubuntu is a parasite on Debian.

Few of my friends work at Novell and are hardcore OpenSUSE fans; can't blame them OpenSUSE is a really good and polished distribution. Some others hate Novell for their pact with MS and are Mandriva/PCLOS converts. OK Coming back to replies regarding Ubuntu, hardly anyone replied in negative. Small problems like speed and theme were common.

I came to the conclusion that Ubuntu supports all common hardware, presents a very nice Package management, Ships a free CD, has excellent Forums and above all is used by majority of the people I asked. No one reported problems with ASLA, Kernel configuration or the likes. Is this just because all the people I asked are techies ? They all can search for bugs and its resolution ? They can easily apply workarounds ? and if required, they can easily patch and compile a newer version of software?

Not sure what is the reason, but from this small exercise I came to conclusion that Ubuntu is good for people who do not mind a little effort to setup their system and more importantly believe in not jumping to the latest release. Most software product have a little bugs when released, they all take some time to mature. A bleeding edge software is not necessarily better than the previous version. For instance, KDE 4.1 is great but still not as user friendly as KDE 3.5X is. Its better to wait for KDE 4.2 than cry about bugs in KDE 4.1. As they say, bugs needs to be ironed out :)

MSN Video does not support Internet Explorer 7

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:38:21 PDT

I could not believe my eyes, but then truth is stranger than fantasies. Ok to being with: I have Microsoft Vista Home Premium edition - that came pre-installed with Sony VAIO. I was browsing Microsoft MSN site, I think MSN still belongs to MS :), and came across a video. On clicking the link for the video I came across an Error saying my browser is not supported. I almost fell down laughing. On reading further, I found that MSN says that IE7 is a supported browser, but it thinks that the IE7 in my laptop is not supported. Not sure if this is funny or not, but a bitter truth. Check out the attached link. Due to some issues with Paint ( another MS product), I had to take the picture again and still paint managed to put a biiiig blank space below the actual screens shot :)

Moral Policing by MS

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 02:00:33 PDT

Recently I was searching for Victoria Beckham's autobiography "Learning to fly", I did not get many places where I can read it online, so I broadened my search and searched for Victoria. I did not get her biography but came across many of her pictures. Probing further, I came across pictures of "Victoria silverstedt", now these were much more appealing than that of Bekham. Hence I decided to search explicitly for "victoria silverstedt". Google did return me too many results, but Microsoft Live Search gave me an error saying that this search might result in sexual content. Wow, so that means I cannot search for a sexual site on Live search. Hmmm....

Big brother MS will protect us from visiting sexual sites. Look at the attached image of the error message.

Not just them even my ISP "Starhub" in Singapore does not allows me to checkout playboy page of Victoria due to some government regulation.

Note that both Google and Yahoo return relevant results for the same search. This is when MS share of search is the lowest among the three. Dear MS if you guys do not return the result that does not mean that I'll not search for a query. It only means increase in search share of Google/Yahoo.

KDE 4.1 Live CD

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 02:43:30 PDT

I just bought a new laptop and KDE guys decide to pamper me by releasing the greatest desktop manager in form of KDE 4.1. To add cherry to the cake OpenSUSE guys made a Live CD and gave me the opportunity to fiddle with it.

The download was a breeze, looks like all the OSS guys are just seeding the Live CD. On the first boot I was presented with the familiar OpenSUSE welcome screen.

The Live CD boots into know OpenSUSE desktop

However, the similarity to all previous OpenSUSE desktops ends here. As from here we see a magnitude improvement in the look and feel of how a desktop should be. The default KDE 4.1 desktop does not have any icons, I think listening to so many people grumble about it, the devs have implemented Folder View. The default Folder View on the Live CD is of desktop. Some people might like the looks, but for me it appeared as if occupying too much desktop space. I would love a blank desktop- a la Vista. Look at the screenshot, Desktop Folder View looks totally out of place.

The Kde menu is kickoff which is still controversial, but offers easy and intuitive access to applications.

The revered plasma Widgets are easy to put on the desktop and some of them offer great functionality and are very pleasing to look at. You just have to hover the mouse at the top right corner and the options pop-up. I think plasma has taken the concept of widgets to a new level. Just wondering what will be the future of Plasma in 4.2.

Great eye-candy often comes at great price too. We add and delete plasma widgets by a simple click, I just happen to click the KDE menu option and the already in use plasma widget was deleted. When I tried adding a new KDE menu widget it came to the rightmost part of the KDE tray. I tried my best to drag it to the left most side but failed. Then I deleted it and tried to add it to the lest side, but no Luck. I tried many a things but was unsuccessful in bringing the icon to its correct position. Frustrated I decided to let it remain at rightmost corner itself. I am sure that there must be ways to rectify this, but it was not intuitive. One good thing I noticed was that the KDE Menu offers an easy way to switch back to "Classic KDE Menu". Just right click on the icon and we are presented with the option.

Now, KDE 4.1 comes with Kontact, the KDE personal Information Manager. KDE 4.0 was heavily criticized for not having Kontact ported to it. Users had to make use of KDE 3.X libraries to use kontact in KDE 4.0. KDE 4.1 overcomes thins limitation and provides a very stable and working kontact.

I ran a couple of programs and found KDE 4.1 to be better responsive than KDE 3.X.

This is where my testing stopped. Why because, the Live CD did not have the drivers for wlan, Come on, PCLinuxOS 2007 contains wlan drivers , Mandriva 2008.1 contains them; then why not the demo cd for KDE 4.1 ? I had to then connect through wired network, thankfully it worked. The second major problem which I faced ; and which made me abandon testing; was that when I tried to search for multimedia codecs and install it on the LiveCD, it did not work. Let me elaborate. I went to the openSUSE community multimedia site and found the link to the famous 1-Click install for multimedia codecs. Konqueror gave me an option to open it with YAST, however, on selecting the option YAST did not fire up. No matter what I did, I could not use the 1-Click option to install codecs. I am in love with 1-Click install since OpenSUSE 10.3 and could not take the absolute failure in KDE 4.1 LiveCD, hence abandoned my testing.

Finally:

The KDE 4.1 live CD presents a very pleasing desktop. It is fast and absolute eye candy. However, it does have some teething problems. I wish it had the wlan drivers or allowed me to drag KDE Menu to left side. Aboveall I would love to see 1-Click install work.

I am Back

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:26:40 PDT

I know that my last post was on 28 May, 2008. Its already two full months and I have not written a single post.

-- Agreed that the name of my site is LazyTechGuy, but this time I have taken my laziness to extremes.

Actually I do have a few reasons for this, its up to you which one you guys accept ::

I changed my job. So what everyone does it at some point of their career. Changing a job does not entitle me to remain dormant for two months.
I changed my country. Hmmm.. I am an Indian and was based in Bangalore till May, but on 1st June 2008 I moved to Singapore. Some people might agree that shifting to a new country might involve a lot of time to settle in and a lazy person like me might actually be held up in other things and forget to blog.
I had to buy a new Laptop. I had to sell my beloved desktop and its 19" LCD monitor ( God I still despise that) as shipping to Singapore would have been very costly. Now Singapore is much costlier than India, I just wish I could get Singaporean salary in India and I could live like a king. Hence I had to wait till I get my first salary check before I could buy a laptop. Laptops here are almost twice the price they are in US. For instance, I bought a Vaio CR-32B for SDG 1699 ( ~1250 USD). Its a dual-core ( not core2duo) machine with 160GB hard disk space. On US Sony website the most basic Vaio CR notebook is for USD 869 but that has core2duo and double the hard disk at 320GB.
I am part of Investment Bank which does not allow an employee to post blog or even visit most blog sites. Hence I had to wait till I get my own notebook and Internet connection at home.
The VAIO I bought came with Vista home professional. I have read, and read and read multiple times that Vista is evil OS. I never thought that I'll buy Vista. In US we can buy a Ubuntu laptop from Dell or In India we can buy an Acer or Compaq with FreeDOS loaded, but unfortunately almost every Laptop sold here in Singapore comes pre-loaded with Vista. Having said that, I decided to give Vista a try befoer wiping it off my hard disk. Amazingly I found Vista work flawlessly on my VAIO. Not sure but why am I not encountering any crashes/hangs/printer incompatibility that is omnipresent on Internet ? ?
Lastly, Ubuntu 8.04 fails to detect the recovery partition made by Sony. As currently I do not despise Vista and intend to use it I do not want to loose the recovery partition. In transition from India to Singapore, I have lost my DVD-RW so cannot burn the OpenSUSE iso. Now I have to work my lazy body and get myself some new DVDs. Till then I am using VirtualBox to check out the new OpenSUSE 11.0.

Did you like/accept any of the above reasons, If yes then please let me know. I'll also try convincing myself on that. I am looking for some reason to cover my laziness :)

However, I do have my Mandriva Spring CD which works beautifully as a live CD and detects the Sony recovery partition. I'll try it as a live CD for a week and if I do not find any issues, I'll take the plunge and install it on the hard disk. Rest assured that I'll be much more regular with my posts even if they are about Vista ;)

OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:56:10 PDT

OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3 marks the end of Beta series of OpenSUSE 11. With final version scheduled to release in 22 days on 19th June 2008; I felt its time to test what is in-store for us. I was specially interested in the KDE4 version and the new installer.

It was nice to see 200+ seeders for the KDE4 iso of OpenSUSE Beta3, download was a breeze.
Here are my experiences after popping in the LiveCD.

I have NVIDIA 6200 256mb card and most LiveCDs result in a blank screen while booting. This is due to them using the opensource "nv" driver which is not correct for 6200. I understand that OpenSUSE confirms to opensource software only policy and does not include any propriety driver. However, the boot should include an option to boot in "Safe Mode", a la Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS. There is an option to boot in VESA mode, however, even that results in blank screen. I have to explicitly enter 3 at boot options to boot at init level 3 and then run sax2_vesa to configure xorg.conf and finally run "init 5" to get a GUI. Now, I don't have a problem with this, but we cannot expect a newbie to find this trick. NOTE:: Mandriva Spring 2008 ships with NVIDIA drivers and produces beautiful compiz effects even in LiveCD.
The default KDE4 GUI is simply amazing and usable. I was expecting KDE4 to be full of bugs, but it proved me wrong. OpenSUSE devs have done a wonderful job and KDE4 looks beautiful, works fast and there are hardly any crashes. The interface is preety neat with a simple eye pleasing wallpaper.
The new Installer presents a much better ( than OpenSUSE 10.3 ) and intuitive interface. The install is as simple and fast as a PCLinuxOS or Ubuntu install. The installer was able to correctly detect Ubuntu and Windows installed and was able to resize the Windows partition and configure grub entries for OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Windows. This was a big refreshing change from Ubuntu 8.04, which failed to resize my windows partition and I had to log in Windows to make available some free space for Ubuntu.
I had my first major frustration immidiately after the install. Despite the fact that I configured xorg.conf to use vesa drivers in LiveCD and then did the install, the installed system had "nv" as the driver. Due to this I got a blank screen on first hard drive boot. This time even the boot parameter 3 would not work. The only solution was to boot using Ubuntu partition ( can also use LiveCD), mount the OpenSUSE "root" partition and manually change the Display drivers to vesa in xorg.conf. This perhaps is the biggest problem with OpenSUSE 11. It was such a big putoff, that I was about to abandon my test.
The urge to discover made to continue and I was greeted with a beautiful KDE4 desktop .

I was amazed by the beauty of the desktop. Just look at the colors and texture of icons, they look fabulous. Even OpenOffice, a primarily GNOME application, looks good.
Dolphin is the default file manager and presents a light weight interface against heavy Konqueror. I somehow like konqueror more. Dolphine has new Column like view, which resembles finder of MacOSX.
Konsole is also revamped and integrated well into the new theme.
There is a KDE4 taskbar applet which indicates any new device that is plugged in. Though not shown in the scrrenshot, it clearly displayed my Sony digital camera and gave an option to open with Dolphin.
OpenSUSE uses Firefox 3 Beta as the default browser, but this is very stable as compared to that in Ubuntu 8.04. Flash can be installed using YAST2.
Java 6.0 and java plugins for Firefox can be installed using OpenSUSE 10.3 repositories.
Infact OpenSUSE 10.3 repos can also be used to install many other essential softwares like adobe reader, multimedia codecs, microsoft fonts etc.
OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3 does not have any binary drivers from NVIDIA. The only option is to download the NVIDIA drivers from here and manually compile and install them. Following software are required to compile NVIDIA drivers

kernel source,
make and
C++ Compiler.

The NVIDIA drivers can then be installed by running command "sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.08.pkg1.run". The installer compiles and installs the correct NVIDIA drivers, optionally it also configures xorg.conf. Now this is easy and expected from anyone using a Beta version of a distribution. I hope testers will have no reason to crib about this.
After the NVIDIA drivers install, I have almost everything I need in a regular distribution. KDE4 is appears much faster than KDE3 and undoubtedly much prettier. I am yet to come across a system freeze or any major software crashing, though digiKam and Amarok 2 have crashed a couple of times. However, those are still beta softwares.
The yast updater reported that there are updates available, but no matter what I did, I was not able to use the updater. However, normal YAST2 was prompt and showed 1.3 GB of updates. With a beating heart I updated everything except for the kernel and luckily had no breakage. It was really amazing to perform an Update of 1.3 GB with no error. As I have spent too much time to configure this system, I am not prepared to risk a kernel update and then go through the process of installing NVIDIA drivers again.

Overall, OpenSUSE 11 Beta 3 is fairly stable and very fast system. It is definitely not for the fainthearted of the newbies, but distro junkies like me will love it. With KDE4.1 Beta1 released and OpenSUSE 11 RC1 schedule to release this week, OpenSUSE 11 is right on track and is poised to be a distro worth tempering with.

Make a CD Cover from A4 Paper

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:54:16 PDT

This is one cool tip.
Check out the you tube video.
http://www.youtube.com/v/jEFs3BEIKTQ

Mandriva 2008.1 Package Manager

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:23:31 PDT

Mandriva Spring 2008.1 is no doubt a great distribution. It has good collection of default software, has excellent hardware detection, has proprietary drivers and software and an overall great out of box experience.

People, including me, often complain about its Package manager. With 2008.1, Mandriva has greatly improved RPMDrake. Its fast, has good number of packages and beautifully handles dependencies.
Lets have a little detailed look.

We start it with the nifty "Install and Remove Software".
It first opens to a welcome screen and confirms if we want to use the tool, want to add media source, if update only or full sources,

After this it presents the list of servers for us to select the appropriate one and proceeds to add media.

Finally we are presented with the RPMDrake GUI.

I like the layout, we can either search through the search box or select depending upon the groups. I selected libopenmotif and Applied to start installation.

NOTE:: RPMDrake does not displays information like percentage install complete or size of remaining packages to be downloaded. However, after "some time" the packages get installed successfully.

One funny thing is that if I search for Quanta Plus there is no KDE 3 package for it. However, we do have a KDE 4 package. Searching kdewebdev displays KDE3 package which has quanta as one of the files to be installed. Not sure why Mandriva chooses to list quanta as a KDE4 only package when it is also part of kdewebdev in KDE3.

Coming to the Update Manager.
When an update is available, a red colored icon displays in the KDE task bar. On clicking again it takes you through numerous questions and answers, however, again at the end you have a fully updated system.

Finally, If we play a clip in Totem for which we do not currently have a codec installed, Codenia automatically detects the correct codec for it and gives an option to either install the Fluendo package ( Paid) or install the freely available codecs from PFL repos. Luckily I do not stay in the US of A, so I am not compelled to pay for Fluendo package, I can do away with free codecs.

RPMDrake presents a nice looking interface and performs its job well. I never faced even a single dependency problem.
However, it does not give enough information regarding install progress. I mean I would like to be told that the install will go on for X more minutes and still X Mb of data needs to be downloaded. One more problem I faced is that RPMDrake and its Updater cousin ask too many unnecessary questions during first time startup.
Imagine it asking is it OK to continue in the welcome screen -- Dude I have started this application, so I really want it to continue. This will only give me a GUI, if I dont want I can anytime close it. I can understand that this is to deter a user who does not know about pacakge manages and has unknowingly clicked the icon, however, Clicking OK 10 times before a pacakge manager GUI starts is a little overkill.

Ubuntu servers still down

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:24:28 PDT

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution, hence, when the latest and the greatest Ubuntu was getting released, I was expecting heavy load on Ubuntu servers. I thought that even Ubuntu people expected this. However, I was not exactly right.
The heavy load took its toll on Ubuntu servers and they were un-reachable. I tried after 5 minutes and the servers are un-reachable. I am sure that Canonical will bring them up in no time -- but dude its already been 5 minutes.

When I try I get this message


Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) Server at www.ubuntu.com Port 80

Update:: Ubuntu Servers are up now.

Good morning from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:23:25 PDT

Very good morning, a morning made better by the release of long awaited Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
People always look out for Ubuntu releases, this one being a Long Term Support (LTS) is even more sought after.

It was nice to see the shining Ubuntu homepage with 8.04 release announcement. Check out some of the screen shots of the release pages.

One issue I had, there is no torrent for 8.04. Now I love torrents and believe that they relieve pressure off the servers. The absence of torrent was slightly disappointing, specially when they provide the torrents for 6.06 and 7.10.

So I went back to the default download page and used KGet to get the iso for me.

Here you can see KGet (KDE 4 version) performing its job beautifully and I have already downloaded 30% of the iso.

The download will be over in 2-3 hours and Iĺl then enjoy the shining new Ubuntu. Till then bye.

EDIT::
Like Ubuntu, its KDE cousin Kubuntu is also released.

However, the Kubuntu team believes in a torrent and have a torrent for their KDE3 release ( Hardy)

Looks Like Ubuntu people saw this blog :). They have now released a torrent.

Flash in Firefox 3 in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:38:05 PDT

As a continuation of my article on Flash in Firefox 3 in Windows.
I tried Flash in Mandriva 2008.1 Spring.

Firefox 3 for linux comes as a tar.bz2 compressed file.
All I had to do was to uncompress it using


mkdir /home/abhay/Download/Firefox3/
cd /home/abhay/Download/Firefox3/

tar -jxvf firefox.tar.bz2

This creates a directory called "firefox".
the -"j" option on tar command tell that the compressed file is compressed with bzip2 and we need to use bunzip2 to uncompress it.

Next step was to install Flash plugins in Firefox3.
This was trivial. I went to the Firefox3 plugins directory.


[abhay@localhost plugins]$ pwd
/home/abhay/Download/Firefox3/firefox/plugins

and just linked Flash library from my previous installation of Firefox 2.


ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so .

One single step and I had flash working beautifully in Firefox 3.

Happy Flashing with Firefox --- IN LINUX

Flash on Firefox 3 Beta 5

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:57:06 PDT

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is the latest and the greatest version of Firefox. It has many improvements over Firefox 2.
Despite being in Beta, Firefox 3 is so stable now that the most popular Linux distribution Ubuntu is shipping with Firefox 3 Beta pre-installed.
OK enough praising Firefox 3 Beta, lets come to the most common problem one might face when we install Firefox 3 Beta.

I tried Firefox 3 Beta on Windows XP Professional and discovered that I cannot install Adobe Flash on it. whenever I tried I get some weird error saying


"Firefox could not install this item because
"install-3lw..rdf" (provided by the item) is not well-formed or does not
exist. Please contact the author about this problem."

I wanted to make Firefox 3 Beta my primary browser, but without Flash -- its a big NO. What I did is a hack, but hey it works for me. Luckily I still have Firefox 2 installed on my system. I have it installed at
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox".
I went to the plugins directory


"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins".

and copied these four files

flashplayer.xpt
npnul32.dll
NPSWF32.dll
NPSWF32_FlashUtil

Then I copied these files to the directory where Firefox 3 Beta 5 is installed


"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5\plugins".

While copying I got a warning saying that npnul32.dll is already present in Firefox 3 Beta 5 plugins directory, so I did not copy it. That's it.
These four ( actually three) files ensured that I have Flash working in Firefox 3 Beta 5.

I am sure that similar hacks exist for Linux too, will try tonight at home.

Happy Flashing with Firefox.

Countdown to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:56:06 PDT

Ubuntu is undoubtedly the most popular Linux distribution. It's meteoric rise has made Linux accessible to normal users.
With computer manufacturers like Dell offering Ubuntu pre-installed on their Laptops and desktops, Ubuntu is destined to rise further.
The 8.04 or the Hardy Heron release of Ubuntu is a LTS Release, which makes its very attractive for users who look for a stable release, with very few bugs and Long Term Support (read three years) for it. This release is also touted to catapault Ubuntu in the commercial business server and desktop environment.

Counter:

Lets check some of the features which make Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron a great release.

Latest Firefox 3 (Beta 5). Though in Beta, Ubuntu devs have extinsively tested and and found to be very stable on Ubuntu.
Enhanced F-spot photo manager. F-spot enables downloading of photos from digital cameras and mobile phones. It also aloows the users to perform basic editing functions like removing red-eye, crop etc, manage the photos, print photos, tag them and to upload them to various web sites like Flickr.
Latest version of Gnome 2.22.1 along with latest Nautilus.
Policy Kit. Ubuntu devs have integrated Policy Kit with the "Network", "Users and Groups", "Services", "clock applet", "gnome-mount" and "Time and Date" tools; enabling tighter ocntrol over user acces levels.
Basero DVD burning application. This is by far the best Gnome DVD burner.
Transmission bit torrent Client. Thanfully we are free from the very basic gnome-bittorrent client.
Would clock applet
Totem with capabilities to play from youtube and digital TV brodcasts.
Wubi installer. This will be a great boon to Windows users who want to install Ubuntu from the comfort of their Windows environment.
Latest Xorg server and Pulse Aduio and finally
Long Term Support for three years.

Not just Ubuntu, but also its KDE cousing Kubuntu has great features. Unlike Ubuntu, Kubuntu does not come as LTS.
Kubuntu comes in two flavous

Based upon KDE 3.X. This is the latest version of the KDE stable branch 3.X and will enjoy support from Canonical for 18 months.
Based on Cutting edge KDE 4.0. KDE 4.0 is the active development branch of KDE, however, it is still not considered production ready. People are hoping that KDE 4.1 will be a stable release. For the enthusiasts who would love the cutting edge feel, Kubuntu offer a KDE 4.0 based edition too.

LTS or not, users are waiting eagerly for both the Ubuntu variants.
I am one of them :).

Mandriva Spring 2008.1 - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Abhay) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:33:39 PDT

Mandriva has just released their 2008.1 spring edition.

Continued from Part 1.

Multimedia & Browser Support:
Mandriva has many open source and proprietary codecs. Kaffeine on the ONE (KDE) edition and the FREE (KDE) edition handle Ogg, MP3, AVI, WMA, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, and Quicktime files out-of-the-box.
However, for no apparent reason Totem is the default Movie player even in KDE version. Question -- What is Totem doing in a KDE distribution, when Kaffeine can perform better?
The presence of all this media support by default does not make Mandriva a codec GOD, still many codecs like win32-codecs, gstreamer-ugly (for real media support) etc needs to be installed from the PLF repository. PLF is like a merge between Official and Unofficial repositories and can be easily configured using easyurpmi.
Again sun java or java-plugins are not installed by default ?? No idea why this is so, thankfully they can easily be installed from the repositories.
Firefox comes pre-configured with Flash and it works beautifully. However, with Konqueror, flash works but till the time video is over, I cannot do anything else. It's like the desktop and mouse freezes and only thing working is flash video, though I can still kill the XServer using CTRL+ALT+BKSPC, but this is hardly a solution. No other issues with Konqueror, which I found to occupy less Memory and CPU than the hungry Firefox.

The next generation of sournd server Pulse Audio is used by default. Quoting from Mandriva Site

"The release comes with the PulseAudio sound server installed and enabled by default in all new installations and upgrades performed via the official installer. PulseAudio's benefits include much improved handling of multiple sound cards, the ability to control the audio outputs of different applications separately, and advanced network capabilities. We have worked hard to ensure that the widest possible range of applications works correctly with PulseAudio. However, it is possible that some users may wish to disable it. Some of the known drawbacks of using PulseAudio are:

PulseAudio uses a higher quality but more CPU-intensive resampling algorithm than ALSA. If your sound hardware is incapable of playing certain sampling rates natively, PulseAudio will resample the audio before sending it to the card. Resampling is also necessary when you are playing two audio streams with different sampling rates at once (for instance, playing a CD - 44.1KHz - and a DVD - usually 48KHz). When resampling is needed, PulseAudio will use around two to three times as much CPU power as ALSA would in the same situation. On most reasonably modern systems this will not be noticeable, but on older systems in can represent a significant percentage of available CPU power.
PulseAudio is not really compatible with the JACK server used for professional audio applications. If you need to use JACK, you should disable PulseAudio first.
There may still be some applications that do not work correctly with PulseAudio, despite out efforts to minimize the likelihood of this.

You can easily disable PulseAudio via Mandriva's sound hardware configuration tool, draksound."

A special Mention to Elisa. Quoting Again :

"Elisa is a sleek, cutting-edge media center based on the Gstreamer media framework. Elisa concentrates on presenting an attractive, sleek and simple to use interface that makes it both easy and visually appealing to watch videos, listen to music, and browse pictures from a dedicated interface. Elisa has a heavy emphasis on internet integration, with support for media sharing services like last.fm, Flickr, Youtube and more all built in. Its architecture makes it easily extensible through the use of plugins. Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring's /contrib repository includes the latest version of Elisa, 0.3.5, and its associated plugins, making it easy to try out, and new versions of Elisa will be made available following 2008 Spring's release through Mandriva's extensive /backports repository system."

Personally speaking, I have tested it very briefly and was able to view a slide show of the pictures in my Pictures folder. For videos It only displays videos which are in videos folder, Videos in all other folders cannot be accessed.

Graphics:
Mandriva come loaded with graphic applications.

GIMP,
ShowFoto,
Ksnapshot, and
Digikam

We can transfer the images from digital camera using Digikam and perform normal editing like red-eye reduction, white balance etc in showFoto. showFoto also servers as image organizer. For users who require more advanced editing, Mandriva offers GIMP.

Office:

Mandriva comes installed with OpenOffice.org 2.4, which comes with improved integration to the desktop and packaging. Now the different OpenOffice.org components are separated in several packages. OpenOffice.org 2.4 features many improvements like:

impressive OpenGL based 3D transitions
improved multi language support in the documents
block selection mode
ability to show bars side by side and many others improvements to the charts module
ability to convert text to columns in Calc
improved performance

Further information about new OpenOffice.org features (with images) can be found on OOoninja.com website, or on Openoffice.org wiki

Finally:
After having spent two weeks with Mandriva, here is my list of Pro´s and Cons
Pro:

Excellent Hardware detection
Out-of-box support for NVIDIA binary drivers
Flash works by default in Firefox.
Very light memory footprint. The desktop always feels snappy. I can open 30 tabs in Firefox and have RPMDrake open, still OpenOffice will open instantaneously. I just have 512 MB RAM.
KDE Theme well integrated into all applications including Firefox.
Good set of applications serving almost all my needs.
Excellent Configuration GUI
Fast package Manager
easyurpmi makes adding PLF repository as easy as clicking a button. PLF repos has a huge number of packages
Very stable, never had a full freeze or a crash.
Parental Control.

Cons:

No Java by default
No Ktorrent by default, now this one surprised me.
Kaffeine is not default Movie player. Totem opens when I click on video file.
Flash does not work properly in konqueror.
sudo not installed by default.
Elisa sounds good, but is not user friendly.
Too much user intervention sought during LiveCD boot
Package Manager has basic capabilities, nothing fancy like YAST.
Presence of Join Mandriva and Upgrade to Power icons. I know I can just delete them, still its not good to suggest user to shift to paid version. Look as OpenSUSE or Ubuntu, they also have paid siblings but never prompt user to ¨upgrade¨.

Conclusion:
If you are a new Linux user, blindly go for Mandriva Spring 2008.1. It hand holds you and you would not require to open the dreaded command line for any normal task. Till now I have not opened it, except for my programming work. It has great artwork and a friendly community too.
This release has all the bells and whistles to impress all. Windows users will find the interface very similar to XP. Actually when it comes to installing XP ( with all associated drivers and applications) a new user will find Mandriva much easier and much - much faster.
Don´t believe me -- Give Mandriva a try.

NOTE:
Many screenshots have been shamelessly copied from The coding studio and HowToForge. I would be thankful to them if they allow me to use use the screenshots; else I might have to remove them.