Everyday Linux User

Fedora 18 Can we ever be totally free

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:38:00 +0000

Introduction

For the past week I have been playing with Fedora 18.

Fedora 18 only contains free software. You do not get MP3 codecs or an Adobe Flash Plug-in. What you do get is free alternatives.

The question that I wanted answered is "Can we ever be totally free?"

Installation

I have read other reviews of Fedora on other blogs and the consensus of opinion is that the installer is not the best.

I however do not think it is as bad as some other people would have you believe.

You can download Fedora from http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora.

To create a bootable USB drive I actually used the version I put on a dual boot pen drive a few weeks ago whilst creating the article for "Installing and booting 2 or more Linux based operating systems on a pen drive".

Generally though I would have used Unetbootin.

When you boot into the live Fedora image you are presented with the screen above. You can continue using the live system or install the system. Before installing the system I check for basic problems that I may have later on such as connecting to the internet or graphics card issues.

The live system worked well enough for me to start the install. I am not going to go through the entire install process here as this is a review not an installation guide.

That is the thing though. If you want to install Fedora there are installation guides available:-

If you prefer a visual aid then there are YouTube Videos that show you how to install it.

This video shows you how to install Fedora within a virtual environment.

This video shows you how to dual boot Fedora

The installer isn't as crisp as the Ubuntu installer but if you read the documentation and/or follow the examples other people have kindly left then it is quite a simple process.

I think the biggest problem people have when moving to Linux is the partitioning. Once you have mastered partitioning the rest is actually very simple.

The main problem for Windows users coming to Linux is that Windows doesn't care whether you have other operating systems or not. It wants to be the one and only operating system and so it will try and eat all resources available.

Linux is much more accommodating but to be accommodating it has to know where to put things so as not to overwrite what you already have.

Some Linux distributions try and make it easy for you. (Ubuntu for example). They give you options such as replace entire operating system or install alongside existing operating system. Whilst at the beginning this sounds great it actually takes the control away from you.

For instance when installing alongside Windows, Ubuntu will take the rest of the disk and create its own partitions. Now all your programs and documents will live in the same partition.

Fedora, Debian and other Linux operating systems give as much help as possible to guide you through partitioning but they really leave the control in your own hands. The documentation is there to help you with suggested configurations but at the end of the day it is your choice how to partition.

With the exception of partitioning the rest of the install is just as easy in Fedora as it is in any other Linux distribution.

First Impressions

Fedora runs off Kernel 3.6 and Gnome 3.6.

I am going to go against general opinion here and say I really like Gnome 3. I actually prefer Gnome to KDE and Unity.

KDE is great if you like widgets and you like stuff on your desktop. It is basically really for people who like to customise their experience.

Unity and Gnome are the opposite. Whilst you can do basic things like changing the desktop wallpaper, the rest of the desktop is fairly static.

The reason I prefer Gnome is that Unity has that bar down the left hand side which takes up real estate. Gnome provides a really clean desktop.

With Gnome you have a bar across the top. On the left is an activities menu and then a clock in the centre and on the right system icons for accessibility, sound, networking, battery and then user options.

You can pull up the activities menu by clicking with the mouse or by pressing the "Super" key which unfortunately on most computers still looks like a Windows icon.

The picture above shows you what you will see when you bring up the activities menu. You can now either click on an icon on the favourites bar which is down the left hand side or start typing. In the screenshot above I started typing "screenshot" and the relevant applications were shown on the screen.

On the right hand side of the screen is a list of open applications.

People have various issues with the way Gnome 3 works such as for instance the lack of a minimise and maximise button on the screen. The reason for no minimise button is that when you minimise the program normally goes into the taskbar but in Gnome it doesn't. The only program in the taskbar at the top is the currently active program. If you minimise a program the only way to get it back is to alt-tab into it or to open the Activities menu and choose the application on the right hand side of the screen. This means minimise isn't really minimising, it is hiding.

Personally I find Gnome very intuitive and easy to use. For a quick cheat sheet visit https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet. It takes a little while for people who use traditional desktops to get up to speed but after a while you will find it second nature and it really works very very well.

Changing the desktop wallpaper

To change the desktop wallpaper click the "super" key and start typing "desktop". An option will appear for background which when clicked will enable you to choose from a set of stock photos.

There is quite a nice set of wallpapers available but I always like to go for one I find on the internet. An alternative way to set wallpaper is to find the image you like online, download it to a folder and then open the file in shotwell. You can then choose to set the image as the desktop background.

Connecting to the internet

Fedora like all modern Linux distributions makes it easy to connect to the internet. Just click the network icon in the top right hand corner and a list of wireless devices is available.

Both my home broadband and mobile broadband networks were found straight away. All I had to do was click on the network and enter the security key and I was connected to the internet.

Flash and MP3

Fedora is all about freedom and neither Flash nor MP3s fall into that category.

So what are the options? Well I normally in these occasions go searching for the quick fix of going to Google and searching for the answer.

As this is Fedora however I wanted to investigate the free options on offer to see if we can truly work without proprietary software.

Firstly there is the Flash issue. If you look in the Package Manager there is an option for Gnash, which is an open source Flash player. Gnash includes a FireFox add-in which is handy because the default browser in Fedora is FireFox.

I decided to try Gnash out and to see if it worked I went to Youtube and unfortunately the image below says it all.

I didn't have much success. None of the videos would play. I therefore decided to try another Flash site called Miniclip which has online Flash games to see if the problem was isolated to Youtube. Unfortunately none of the games could be played.

I read the Fedora documentation at this point (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash).

With regards to Youtube, the Fedora documentation makes the suggestion to sign up for WebM support and after doing this I was able to watch a good selection of Videos. Not all of them worked but the majority did.

I could not find a way to get the games on Miniclip to play. I therefore bit the bullet and installed Flash.

The truth is HTML 5 will take over at some point and the reliance on Flash will become less and less but Flash will be around for quite some time yet. I have tried Gnash more than once in the past and it doesn't seem to improve. (Unless I am doing something wrong).

At the moment Flash is still one of those things that is used often enough on websites to make it a necessity.

Moving on to MP3s. Now the free compressed music format is OGG Vorbis.

In order to realistically use OGG Vorbis regularly I need a few things. Firstly I need my personal music device to be able to support OGG. Now whilst my current player doesn't support OGG there are a good selection of players available that do.

OGG players are available in most good electrical retailers and a few bad ones as well.

The next thing I need is to be able to get the music from my CD collection into OGG format. That is easily done as there are a number of converters available.

I also have a lot of music files already in MP3 format. Now here is a weird thing. You can convert from MP3 which is a compressed format to OGG which is also a compressed format with minimal if no degradation in quality. Again there are an abundance of tools for this job.

The final thing I would need to switch to OGG forever is an online store that sells music in OGG format. Now I have had quite a search online and there are no major online music stores providing music in OGG format.

For me that is a problem. If you can't buy music in OGG format then you would have to buy it in MP3 format. If you buy it in MP3 format and you need a converter to convert to OGG then you are using proprietary codecs to perform the conversion.

I have come to the conclusion that I may as well stick with MP3 format. If there was a music store for OGG format music or FLAC then I would be more than happy to ditch MP3 as well as it would save the GStreamer plug-in issues that are encountered in certain distributions.

Fedora has documentation about how to get MP3s working and so I followed that guide and I was able to listen to MP3s. (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/MP3)

Applications

Fedora comes with the following applications:

Games

Aisleriot solitaire
Freecell solitaire

Graphics

Document viewer
Image viewer
Shotwell
LibreOffice Draw

Internet

Boxes - Virtual Machines
Firefox - Web Browser
Empathy - Mail Client
Remote Desktop
Transmission - BitTorrent

Office

LibreOffice

Sound/Video

Cheese - Webcam
Brasero - Disk burning
Rhythmbox - Audio
Videos - Video player

There are a host of accessories and system tools available as well.

Installing applications

To install applications in Fedora you can use the graphic packagekit. Simply press the "Super" key and start typing "software".

The graphical tool is nicely laid out. On the left hand side there is a list of categories and on the right hand side a list of applications that fall into the category. There is a search box as well which enables you to search by name or keyword.

You can check all the boxes of all the items that you wish to install and then click apply. This will then find all the dependencies for the applications you wish to install.

I had a small problem the very first time I ran this tool in that it constantly said "Queueing" and wouldn't find any applications. The only way to solve this was to open a terminal and look for processes containing "packagekit". I then killed the rogue process and the problem was solved and it has never come back.

The alternative to using the graphical tool is using Yum. Here is a basic cheat sheet (http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumCommands).

Yum is to Fedora what Apt is to Debian.

So what is in the repositories? Google Chrome isn't in the repository. You can go to the Google website and download Chrome but when I did that I received the following error:

Again I decided to refer to the Fedora documentation (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium). This gives concise instructions on how to install Chromium.

If you really want to make your life easier in Fedora then visit this link http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration/ as it gives you the options required to get non-free software into Fedora.

What is new in Fedora 18?

If you are coming from Fedora 17 then you should perhaps read the release notes before upgrading. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/

Summary

Ideally I would like to follow the Fedora concept and live in a "Free" world but realistically I don't think that is going to happen any time soon.

Fedora is a really nice distribution.

Criticisms of the installer are a little over the top. Just read the documentation, read other people's guides, watch a Youtube video.

The Gnome desktop also takes a lot of unwarranted criticism. It is a modern desktop for a modern way of computing. I think for a lot of users who just want to work without tinkering with configuring the desktop it is very intuitive and I can navigate to any application or window with one or two keystrokes.

Fedora is a crisp distribution. It feels very much a polished distribution in the same way that Ubuntu or Mint is and the only issue really is the lack of non-free software.

It is relatively easy to get around the non-free software issue by visiting the RPMFusion page and following the instructions.

I had a couple of errors early on but they went away and have never returned.

Thank you for reading.

The Everyday Linux User interview

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:59:00 +0000

I was asked a few weeks ago to answer a few questions as part of an interview for the site MyLinuxRig.com.

The questions were as follows:

1. Who are you, and what do you do?
2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?
3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?
4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?
5. What is your ideal Linux setup?
6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

To find out the responses to these questions visit:

http://www.mylinuxrig.com/post/49681374629/the-linux-setup-gary-newell-everydaylinuxuser-com

Which Linux Distribution would you save? The Results

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:03:00 +0000

Introduction

Last week I started a poll.

There was one simple question:

Imagine that tomorrow the world decided there can only be a limited number of distributions. Which distributions would you save?

The poll's reception was mixed.

At first the people at Reddit thought it was a dumb idea and the topic got voted down. It then picked up and 13 people commented on the concept.

The people at Linux Today warmed to the idea and the votes came flooding in.

In the end the article itself received 6090 pageviews and 44 comments.

The Results

Bizarrely despite there being so many pageviews there were only 362 votes cast.

The graph above tells you everything you need to know. Debian came out clearly on top followed by the usual suspects of Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, Fedora and openSUSE.

The people who use Luninux, Snowlinux and Rosa were far too cool to vote on such a silly subject and decided to keep away from such a bizarre concept.

But what about my distribution?

A common theme in the comments was the question "What about Distribution X?", "Where is Distribution Y".

Well I could have listed all 300+ distributions on Distrowatch but the graph above would then look even sillier than it already does.

Instead I am going to give an honourable mention to the distributions I left out in the poll right here, right now.

What can we learn from these results?

What can we learn from the results of this poll? I would say not a lot.

There are various reasons for this.

The first reason is the number of votes cast. The proportion of people voting is obviously a very small subset of the Linux community.

It also has to be concluded that the bigger distributions received the highest number of votes. This was always going to be the case because they already have a larger user base and people tend to vote for the distributions they actually like as well as the ones that are actually most important.

I think the comments actually provide far more information than the poll results themselves. The conversation that generated from the poll was very good.

It didn't start that well as the first comment received was:

Who would vote against a particular distro, using another? And why should he or she do so? So you get a nice picture about how many users distros have but nothing more.
Furthermore not all are just forks. Some have a specific purpose but for only a few people.

It is a fair point. Why should people vote? Well to be honest I started the poll as a bit of fun and out of interest to see the response that I would get and how the votes would be cast.

The follow comment was interesting because the person who made it interpreted the question to be "which is your favourite distro?"

The whole idea of "better" is entirely subjective. Better for desktops? Better for servers? Better for commercial software support? Better because I said so and I've been using Linux longer than some of you have been alive? Every distro out there was created to "better" meet the needs of someone.

In equal measures came comments from both sides of the argument that I initially laid out when starting the poll.

Some people say though that it would be better if some of the smaller distro creators concentrated on contributing to their upstream project.
You can argue for both camps in this debate. If there isn't a distro doing what you do and it is worthwhile then there is merit to your work. On the flip side if more people worked on the upstream projects they may be even better than they already are.

The text in blue was written by me at the top of the poll.

The following comments suggest that more is better:

I would rather have as many distros as possible than a limited amount. Some people complain about one and enjoy another, I love 'em ALL! Even the ones I don't use have something to contribute!

The idea of spins, to me, is great. I mean, that's how Linux Mint got started, and what a distro that is! Fedora, for instance, doesn't really care about making life easy for the home desktop user. Enter Korora. It blends some things from Ubuntu and uses the KDE and Gnome desktops to make a nice Fedora experience.

I voted for all the ones I know and have used, because they helped me along the way to what I know now, I'm glad there are so many distros around, many are for specific needs, to "scratch a developers itch" as they say.

In more than equal measure came the following responses:

Just too many distro..! If Linux would want to replace iOS or M$, then we need to combine all the effort..

Exactly!The rest of distro there are ... just parasites over these.Although they bring little added value, they cannot survive alone without the hosts they parasite upon.

There were a few very insightful comments such as:

Presumably, people start these spins because the upstream distribution is not interested in the changes they want to make.
Given that,it's pretty unlikely that the upstream distro is going to welcome the same changes in the form of a so-called contribution.

I think the above point is right. If you use a particular distribution and every time there is a new release you have to do certain things to get it back to the way you like it and then you suggest to the distro developers that they add in your changes but it doesn't materialise then there is a justification for creating your own distribution.

How many people do you need to use your distribution to make it a success? The answer: One. Just you. If you can justify the time and effort to spin your distribution even if it is just a re-spin and it works for you and does everything you require from it then you have justified your time and effort. You have also probably learned quite a bit along the way.

One needs a vast knowledge of the Linux world to answer correctly this question. I have no idea about 80% of the distro listed above. Should I *not* save them? May be they have full of merits and actually I would be happy with one of these?

This is why blogs like this exist. I don't just review the big distributions. I review the smaller ones as well which brings me to the next comment:

I'd love to see in your list some of the FREE distros from the list that FSF post in http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html.

April was certainly a month where I targeted reviews of bigger distributions such as OpenSUSE, Debian and PCLinuxOS.

May will be the month for reviewing smaller distributions and I have already lined up reviews of Emmabuntus, Mozillux, SolyDXK and Linux Royal.

Before I finish I'd like to comment on a few of the other comments. Firstly there is the scientific response suggesting that if I had put the items in a different order then the results would have been different.

I'm guessing that if you displayed the choices randomized differently for each voter the results would differ.As is, I'll bet that the choices listed near the top are favored.

An interesting point. If you took the Distrowatch rankings and instead of ordering them by downloads you ordered them alphabetically then would people use a different spread of distributions? I think there would be certain people that would take the pin on the paper approach (The same way that I pick horses at the bookies). I think what would really happen is that people would use Google, Reddit and other distro ratings sites to find out which distributions are most popular. In truth if you go to Reddit on any given day there are people constantly asking which distribution to use.

The other question that came up more than once was "Where is Linux From Scratch?" Whilst I have included this in the honourable mentions above I thought I would comment further. I don't really see Linux From Scratch as a full distribution. It is more a guide showing how to build your own Linux system. In a similar way when I buy flat packed furniture from Argos I don't see for example a wardrobe. I see lots of pieces of wood, screws, tacks, drawer runners and wood glue. Along with that I get instructions of how to build the actual wardrobe.

And my favourite comment.....

I may just build a bigger Ark

I would like to thank everyone who contributed into making this poll a success. I hope you enjoyed reading this short review of the results.

So what happens next.... well clearly we now need to strip it down to just 5 distributions and they are Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.

I voted against Ubuntu. It's actually not necessary in 2013

Oh well maybe we won't then. Maybe we will just keep things the way they are. In truth the world has a happy knack of sorting itself out and the best keep on going and those that become redundant disappear into the mists of time.

For those waiting for something more substantial from this blog, check back next week as I am currently running the new version of Fedora and so there will be a review for that and I am trying something out on the Raspberry PI that I need to write up.

Thank you all for reading

Linux Podcasts and Magazines

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:57:00 +0000

Introduction

Whilst there are a host of great blogs out there reviewing distributions and providing key how-to articles there are times when you just don't have time to read, yet you may still need that Linux fix.

When I'm driving long distances or whilst programming I need to plug myself in and block out the outside world.

A lot of programmers block out the outside world by listening to music but I find I get bored of listening to music. When driving I listen to the radio rather than listen to CDs and when I am programming I listen to podcasts.

This article highlights my favourite Linux based shows that I like to listen to and also highlights a couple of good free magazines available for download.

The Linux Action Show

The Linux Action Show is hosted by Chris Fisher and Matt Hartley. It features news and reviews and guest interviews.

Technically not a podcast but more an online television show. The show is very entertaining and it is quite cleverly put together so that the hosts can appear in the bottom right hand corner leaving the rest of the screen for showing the display on the laptops they are using.

The show has a few sponsors and so some of the show is given over very enthusiastically to showing the best bits of the sites and services being advertised.

The two hosts have the knack of keeping you interested and are knowledgeable about the subjects they are talking about.

In the recent episode that I have just watched the guys were reviewing Ubuntu 13.04. They don't appear to have any agenda and the review was largely positive especially when it came to improved performance. On the other hand they weren't blown away with excitement about it.

Personally, looking at the examples they displayed it would tempt me to have another look at Ubuntu because it did look very crisp. I always do that though and then a few days later think "why did I do that?" and end up back at Linux Mint.

In the same episode of the show there was a guest interview with the creator of Descent OS. It is good to see the faces behind the distributions and it is interesting to understand the motivation behind a distribution.

To Watch the Linux Action Show visit http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/tag/linux-action-show/

PCLinuxOS Magazine

Up until recently I hadn't tried PCLinuxOS but I have been reading this magazine for years. To be honest it doesn't really matter which version of Linux you are running as most of the articles are relevant to all distributions.

The format of the magazine is varied, with tutorials, screenshot showcases, poetry, spot the difference and of course reviews.

A lot of the online blogs write about the different operating systems and tend to gloss over the actual applications and this is something I am guilty of myself.

The PCLInuxOS magazine reviews the actual software that makes up the repositories and so there are plenties of articles about LibreOffice and GIMP etc.

Whether you intend to use PCLinuxOS or not this is a very good read.

Read the Everyday Linux User review of PCLinuxOS: http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2013/04/is-there-easier-transition-to-linux.html

To get the latest PCLinuxOS magazine visit: http://pclosmag.com/index.html

(Available in HTML, PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats).

Going Linux

Visit http://goinglinux.com/

The Going Linux podcast is hosted by Larry Bushey and Bill Smith (Chief Executive Minion).

It is fairly similar to the Linux Action Show content wise but with less emphasis on the adverts. The show has a mix of news, reviews and a good bit of technical stuff thrown in.

I listen to this when I am on the train.

The Linux Link Tech Show

So what has a lot of chatting and very little of it actually about Linux? The Linux Link Tech Show of course.

Don't let that put you off. This show lasts a good 2 hours and to be honest lasts a bit longer than that.

The show generally starts and there is general chit chat for about 15 to 20 minutes and then suddenly someone will announce "shall we start". Then you get an opening theme tune and you are back to the same sort of chit chat that happened before the music.

This podcast is great for me when I am working. I have been listening to this podcast for a while now and it is like listening to a bunch of friends I have never met.

Will you learn anything about Linux whilst listening to this show? Probably not that much. There are a few tit bits of information but mainly it is just chat.

I really enjoyed the recent episode where they looked back at all their previous shows. I'm guessing the girl who appeared on a show talking about RSI probably wouldn't agree as it was announced by one and all that she was the worst guest they had ever had. (I never heard that interview but I'm guessing it would be like someone from Alcoholics Anonymous walking into a South London pub on a Saturday afternoon whilst the football is on and suggesting that everyone calms down with their drinking).

This is my favourite podcast.

To listen to The Linux Link Tech Show visit http://tllts.org/

Full Circle Magazine

Full Circle magazine is to Ubuntu what PCLinuxOS Magazine is to PCLinuxOS.

The magazine features news articles about Ubuntu and derivatives of Ubuntu. It also contains programming tutorials and how-tos.

There are also letters pages and a question and answers column.

In this month's edtion there is a review of SolydXK and how-to guides for LibreOffice.

The magazine also contains book reviews, games reviews and software reviews.

I don't find it quite as endearing as PCLinuxOS magazine but I still read it every month.

To read Full Circle Magazine visit http://fullcirclemagazine.org/

Ubuntu UK Podcast

This podcast is very British.

It is another one of those podcasts I can just put on and listen to and get on with my work. The show is almost like a radio show in the way it is presented but there is a good element of feeling that it is just a few people in a room chatting.

Today I listened to episode 9 where there were important discussions about the direction of the Ubuntu Swirl.

I listen to this show more for entertainment value than to learn anything because generally I don't use Ubuntu and because also the show features mainly news features and short snippets rather than how-to guides.

To listen to the Ubuntu UK Podcast visit http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/

Summary

I like listening to podcasts. They help me to zone in to what I am supposed to be doing in a way music just doesn't seem to work.

There are hundreds of podcasts out there and as I come across some more I will share them with you.

Thank you for reading.

Which distros would you save?

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:21:00 +0000

Introduction

One of the comments that is quite often made on Reddit and in other Linux forums is that there are a lot of distributions that are just re-spins of Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE etc.

Diversity is great and it is good that people put the effort in to creating a distribution.

Some people say though that it would be better if some of the smaller distro creators concentrated on contributing to their upstream project.

You can argue for both camps in this debate. If there isn't a distro doing what you do and it is worthwhile then there is merit to your work. On the flip side if more people worked on the upstream projects they may be even better than they already are.

So the point of this post is to run a little poll and it is just for fun.

Imagine that tomorrow the world decided there can only be a limited number of distributions. Which distributions would you save?

The Poll

Please place a checkbox in all the distributions you would save. Sorry if your distribution isn't listed already. I had to stop somewhere.

The best screenshots of Everyday Linux User all in one place

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:00:00 +0000

Introduction

One of my favourite things about blogging about Linux is the artwork that I find whilst trying out different distributions.

Sometimes the images in the blog posts are commented about after the article by readers of the blog.

I therefore decided to create a Pinterest page which shares my favourite images.

I would like to clarify that the desktop images that I use aren't always taken from the distributions themselves. The wallpapers come from various sources on the internet and sometimes they are photos taken with my own digital camera.

I hope you enjoy viewing them. I have included some of my favourite images within this post.

Pinterest Page

To see the Everyday Linux User Pinterest page visit:

http://pinterest.com/everydaylinux/everyday-linux-user/

If you like the articles that appear on this blog why not subscribe?

Read the articles before anyone else and be the first to comment.

Is there an easier transition to Linux from Windows than PCLinuxOS?

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 22:35:00 +0000

Introduction

In the past couple of weeks I have taken a look at two of the more popular Linux operating systems.

Last week I tackled Debian and before that I tackled openSUSE.

This week I am looking at one of the more user friendly operating systems and one a Windows user looking to move to Linux for the first time.might want to try.

PCLinuxOS is aimed at a similar audience to Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Zorin but unlike those operating systems PCLinuxOS is not based on Debian.

So without further ado lets get started.

Installation

You can download PCLinuxOS from this link:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/?page_id=10.

I chose the KDE 32 bit desktop version. The machine I chose to install PCLinuxOS on is the Samsung R20. (The same machine that I had previously installed openSUSE and Debian).

I installed the live KDE version to a USB drive using UNetbootin and rebooted the computer.

The PCLinuxOS installer (Drak) is one of the best I've used. From start to finish the install took about 10 minutes.

The first part of the installer deals with partitioning your drive. You can choose to use the entire disk, use existing partitions or choose a custom partition setup..

Depending on which partitioning option you chose a few extra screens appear asking about the partition setup and then the installer creates the partitions and then starts copying the files.

When the files have finished copying you are then asked to choose the boot loader.

That is it. You are then asked to reboot the machine and you are ready to go.

Well actually not quite. When you reboot you are then asked the rest of the necessary questions such as keyboard layout, timezone and user details.

A nice touch though is that when I first boot into PCLinuxOS it has remembered my wireless connection from when I entered it into the live session saving me from having to enter the password again.

When you first log in you are shown a message stating that your system needs to be updated.

I followed the instructions and 128mb of updates were installed which is not unreasonable.

First Impressions

When you first log in to PCLinuxOS you are presented with a screen that to Windows users may seem quite familiar.

There is a taskbar at the bottom and just a couple of icons on the desktop.

The taskbar contains a menu icon, a series of quick launch icons and in the bottom right a system tray with system icons and a clock.

From left to right you have the icons which brings up the menu, show the desktop, configure your desktop, configure your computer, a file manager and virtual desktops. (You may notice in the screen above that there is a FireFox icon as well but that is because FireFox happened to be running at the time the image was taken).

In the system tray the icons are for network settings, klipper (a clipboard tool), sound, (then there is a little arrow which when expanded gives options for) desktop notifier, kwallet, korganiser and notifications. Finally of course there is the clock.

The two desktop icons are to show the home folder and the trash icon to show the recycled files.

If you click the PC button (which for a Windows user is where the Windows start button is) then a menu appears.

I find this menu to be a bit underwhelming and chaotic. There are simply too many categories and no search feature.

KDE has a better menu system than this and you can turn it on by right clicking the PC icon. Now select the switch to "Application Launcher Style".

The application launcher style menu is much nicer for navigating and it has the search feature.

Simply type a keyword or a program name and the chosen item is likely to appear.

The layout of this menu is much nicer as well.

You have the favourites tab which should contain the applications you use most and is fully customisable.

There is the applications tab which provides a list of categories and then applications within the category.

The computer tab provides access to important folders.

The recently used tab shows your most recently accessed applications, files and folders and last but not least the leave button gives you options for closing down the computer.

Customising the desktop

If you are a Windows user looking to move to Linux then you should consider that PCLinuxOS as a real step up.

Not only does it perform better than Windows it is fully customisable as well. Sure at first the desktop looks exactly the same but I am sure that is just to make everyone feel at home. We have grown up all our lives with Windows so showing people a Windows style desktop isn't a bad way to go.

Customising the desktop is made easy in PCLinuxOS. To be honest everything is made easy in PCLinuxOS.

Lets start with changing the most basic thing, the desktop background.

Right click anywhere on the desktop and click the item that says "Folder View Settings". Now that name may not sound as nice as "Change desktop background" but there is a reason for the menu item name that I will come to later.

PCLinuxOS comes with a nice selection of default stock wallpapers but you can add your own by clicking "open" and then navigating to the path to an image file you saved onto the computer. When you have chosen the image you wish to use click "Apply".

As you can see you can brighten PCLinuxOS up with a few simple clicks.

Other things you can change in the folder view settings are the mouse actions and also if you choose the location option you can choose the icons that appear on the desktop.

Now for your main desktop you might wish to leave it as is or you may wish to add a few widgets.

You can add widgets by right clicking on the desktop. Now select "Add Widgets". There are a whole host of widgets available.

One of the best widgets is the shelf. (Doesn't sound very exciting does it). Adding a shelf enables you to group all your folder icons into one place. It makes it possible to group your icons and move them around your desktop en block.

Now my example above isn't the greatest but I have chosen to add the places icons into the shelf. You can put anything in there. You can add pictures, movies, music etc.

Other widgets include calendars, the weather forecast, RSS feeds, CPU monitors etc.

Now everything you have seen thus far you can actually do in Windows (even Vista had these options). Windows however doesn't have the option of multiple desktops. The last icon in the quick launch bar gives you the option to switch desktops.

Each desktop can have a different desktop background and different widgets on it.As well as that each desktop can have a different activity. Remember earlier when I mentioned "Folder View Settings". Well if you click in the top right hand corner then a new menu appears and one of the menu options is "Activities".

Each activity can give you a different way of viewing things. For example as well as the folder view there is the search view or the grouping view or the newspaper view.

There are a whole host of other options for configuring your desktop.

Simply click the configure your desktop icon in the quick launch bar (spanner and screwdriver)..

You can add desktop effects, configure desktop search, change screen resolution, change the locale and window appearances.

The systems settings screen that loads lets you configure other things as well such as network settings, bluetooth, printer configurations, the login screen and many other settings.

If you want to configure more serious options such as adding users to your system, setting up a firewall, creating an FTP server etc then you can click the "configure your computer" icon on the quick launch bar which is a little spanner icon in a circle. To run this feature you need to be able to enter the root (administrator) password you created when you first installed PCLinuxOS.

Connecting to the internet

If you setup the internet whilst running the live session of PCLinuxOS then the connection will be remembered when you install the system which means you are automatically connected.

Obviously you may move around and so the wireless connection will be different from place to place. To change the wireless connection click the network icon in the system tray.

The network card on my PC was picked up straight away in the live session and carried across to the installed version.

Clicking the network icon brings up a screen similar to the one displayed and as you can see I have two networks available to me.

If I click the other network than the one I am connected to it asks for my security key and after entering the key KWallet appears asking whether I want to use it to keep my passwords safe.

Flash and MP3

PCLinuxOS is impressive on most fronts and I wasn't at all surprised to find out that Flash and MP3s were able to play straight away.

What is also impressive is that the default music player is Clementine which is a top music application.

Applications

Bearing in mind that I used the live disk to install PCLinuxOS there is an impressive amount of applications installed by default.

The following table provides a list of some of the applications installed.

Video Imagination - DVD Slideshow Maker VLC Media Player - Media Player Kamerka - Webcam application TV Time - Television Viewer K9 Copy - DVD backup Dragon Player - Video Player	Sound KSCD - CD Player Clementine - Audio Player Juk - Music Player	Office LibreOffice Writer LibreOffice Calc LibreOffice Database LibreOffice Impress Okular - Document Viewer Calibre - Ebook library Management KOrganiser - Personal Organiser KCalc - Scientific Calculator
Internet KTorrent - Bittorrent Client Krfb - Desktop Sharing KGet - Download Manager Dropbox - Online File Hosting Thunderbird - Email Client Filezilla - FTP Client Kopete - Instant Messenger KFlickr - Photo Management KGmail - Gmail Notifier Choqok - Microblogging Client KRDC - Remote Desktop Client Skype - Video Calling UMTSMon - Control 3G Devices FireFox - Web Browser	Graphics DNG Image Converter GIMP - Image Editing ImageMagick - Image Editing KColour - Paint Digikam - Photo Management Inkscape - Vector Graphics	Games KBreakout - Arkanoid Bovo - 5 in a row Gnugo - Chess style game Kigo - Go KMahjongg - Mahjongg Kiriki - Yahtzee LSKat - Card Game KPatience - Patience PySolFC - Card Game KSudoku - Sudoku KMines - Minesweeper Naval Battle - Ship Sinking Game KAtomic - Logic Game KHangMan - Hangman
File Tools Dolphin - File Manager Konqueror - File Manager Midnight Commander - File Manager (Various Other Tools not listed)	Editing KWrite - Text Editor	More Applications Ark - Archiving tool K3B - Disk burning Nepomuk - Backup Q7Z - 7Zip KWallet Samba UNetbootin (and loads more tools)

Installing Applications

The application used to install applications is Synaptic.

If you happen to have used Debian or Ubuntu based distributions you will have come across this application many times.

Synaptic provides a good interface for searching for the applications that you want to install..

For example my favourite browser is Chromium but by default only FireFox is installed.

(Oddly enough searching for Chromium comes up blank (even with other repositories selected). However searching for Chrome comes back with the option for installing Google Chrome.)

The PCLinuxOS Magazine

Every month there is a magazine released for PCLinuxOS. I have enjoyed reading this magazine for a while even though this is the first time I have used PCLinuxOS.

I would recommend reading the edition for January 2013 if you are installing PCLinuxOS for the first time as it provides a really good tutorial on how to install PCLinuxOS from scratch.

http://www.pclinuxos.com/?p=1783

Summary

PCLinuxOS is a really good distribution especially for newcomers to Linux. If you are really fed up with Windows and have been scared off by the talk of having to enter commands into a terminal window then PCLinuxOS maybe your answer.

PCLinuxOS is one of the few distributions where the terminal application isn't immediately available and to be honest for most users it is unlikely you will ever need it.

This really is a distribution for everyday computer users who surf the web, create documents, do a bit of microblogging or online interaction via Facebook etc. It is a great alternative to Windows and a throughly professional looking operating system.

Any complaints? Not really. I'm not a fan of the classic menu that is installed by default but that was easily swapped out and I did have a KDE crash message appear although it never had any effect on the running system.

I would probably recommend that if you are going to try this out and you want the full experience that you should skip the live distribution and go straight for the full monty option.

One word to sum up PCLinuxOS. Impressive.

Click here to download PCLinuxOS

Click here to get PCLinuxOS on DVD or USB

Installing and booting 2 or more Linux based operating systems on a USB pen drive

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 21:05:00 +0000

Introduction

This week I discovered a tool that I hadn't come across before and I thought I'd share it with people who also may not know that this tool exists.

There are a number of different tools out there that enable you to put a Linux based operating system on a USB pen drive. The one that I prefer to use is called UNetbootin.

UNetbootin is a really good tool. There are versions for Windows, Linux and the MAC. Simply choose your distro, pick your USB drive and hit go.

The one thing UNetbootin doesn't do is enable you to install more than one operating systems to a USB drive and then boot from each one individually.

YUMI

The tool I found for burning multiple Linux distributions to a USB drive is called YUMI and it can be downloaded from http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/.

The site www.pendrivelinux.com has links to a number of other very good tools so even if you don't like the YUMI approach it is worth a visit.

Unfortunately YUMI only works with Windows so to follow this tutorial you will need to go to the dark side for a short period.

Creating a dual boot USB drive with multiple Linux distributions

When you run YUMI for the first time you are asked to agree to the license agreement.

After accepting the license agreement you are straight into the action.

Step 1 - Choose your USB Drive

First of all you need to select your USB drive. It is definitely worth making sure you have the correct drive chosen as the drive will be formatted.

Step 2 - Choose your first operating system

Now go down the list of distributions until you find the one you want to use. There is a huge list of distributions available.

Step 3 - Browse to the ISO

You can choose to let the tool download the ISO or you can download the ISO image yourself from the relevant Linux distribution's website.

If you download the image yourself then you will need to click the browse button and navigate to the downloaded image.

Step 4 - Click Create

A message appears telling you what is going to happen.

This is the last point to check the drive that you will be writing the image to is correct. If you are unsure, check and check again.

If you are absolutely sure you don't need anything on the USB drive and that you have indeed selected the correct USB drive click "Yes".

Step 5 - Wait for the files to be installed

The files will be now be installed to the USB drive and when it is complete you will be asked if you want to install another operating system.

If you choose "yes" then you basically repeat steps 1 to 4 again.

In theory you can install as many operating systems as you desire but it depends on the amount of disk space of the USB drive.

The end result

If you reboot your computer and leave the USB drive plugged in then the computer will into a rather garish looking menu.

It isn't the prettiest menu you will ever see but it is functional.

There are three levels of menu. The first lets you choose whether to boot from the hard drive or the USB drive.

If you choose the USB drive you then get to choose the second menu which lists all the distros that you have installed.

When you choose the distro of your choice you will then see a third menu with the possible options for that distribution

End of the road for Fuduntu?

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:35:00 +0000

I have just followed a link on Reddit that states that the Fuduntu project is closing down in its current form.

The main reason cited for Fuduntu closing is that it is becoming increasingly unsustainable to provide a Gnome 2 based distribution as many applications are built to work with Gnome 3.

Last year I wrote a review of Fuduntu and in that review I was very positive about Fuduntu as a project because it worked well and had some unique tools and the Gnome 2 base made it very quick.

The other point to note about Fuduntu was the amazing artwork used on some of the wallpapers. They provide by far the best wallpapers out of all the distributions that I have used.

In my review I stated the following:

I do not know how long the Fuduntu team intends to continue using the Gnome 2 desktop and whether they will adopt one of the other desktops as they mature or whether they will do the same as Zorin and create their own desktop.

I guess the time to make that decision has arrived and the decision that was chosen was to close down the project in its current form.

Now for the good news.

It doesn't appear to be the end of Fuduntu. A new project will hopefully rise from the ashes and it is likely to be based on another desktop although details at the moment are quite sketchy.

I would urge anyone who likes the Fuduntu project to read this article as it gives details of an online IRC meeting that is going to take place to discuss the future.

On Reddit there is some discussion that the new desktop will be KDE. I'm not so keen on this idea. Fuduntu needs to reposition itself again and there are already a lot of KDE based distros. Someone on Reddit suggested Razor-QT. I think this would be a novel idea and might just work.

Incidentally all this brings into question other distributions that have used a Gnome 2 base such as SolusOS. SolusOS has forked the code and has called it Consort. Long may this continue as I really like SolusOS as well.

I would like to wish the Fuduntu team all the best for the future.

Thankyou for reading.

Debian.... The daddy of all distros?

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:13:00 +0000

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a review of OpenSUSE. As one of the bigger distributions I asked the question whether OpenSUSE is a real alternative to Ubuntu.

I received a lot of comments about the review, some positive and some negative. The main issues included the fact that I had installed OpenSUSE from a live disk and the fact that I appeared to be biased towards Ubuntu.

I would like to clarify that I am not deliberately biased towards Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distros. I have used a lot of Ubuntu based distributions and therefore subconciously I may find it easier to use these systems. Similarly I have used Gnome, XFCE and LXDE more than I have used KDE so I will instantly feel more comfortable with these desktops.

I think using a live disk as a basis for an installation is not a bad one. It gives you a base working system on which you can build upon. The alternative is to get multiple DVDs full of applications. It is highly likely that most of the applications will never be installed and the ones that are will probably have been updated since the DVD ISOs were created.

Maybe Ubuntu wasn't the distribution to compare OpenSUSE with. Maybe Debian was a better source for comparison.

Therefore this week I have decided to review Debian. To keep the comparison against OpenSUSE fair I have used a live disk again and I have also decided to go for the KDE version. Whilst reviewing Debian I installed it fully to the hard drive of the Samsung R20 computer used for the OpenSUSE review.

The Debian Site

Before I talk about the main installation I would like to talk about the process of obtaining a Debian Live Image.

The path to get ISO images for Debian is insane. I am going to try and demonstrate this with images.

So the image above is the home page for Debian. So far so good. There is a clear heading that says "Getting Debian" and underneath a link to "CD ISO Images".

The link takes you to a page where you can decide how to obtain your CDs. You can buy them, get them using Jigdo, use BitTorrent, download using http/ftp or Download live images using HTTP/FTP or bittorrent.

I chose the last option which is to download live images but say for instance you chose the download CD/DVD images option above that link.

You now have the option of downloading the official stable versions of from the testing branch and further down the page you get a list of mirrors.

Look at the number of files available. On that page there appears to be the KDE live image.

Imagine now that you had used a mirror instead of the official stable image.

You now get a list of folders and if you choose the current_live version you get a page with another list of folders.

You can now choose whether to use the AMD64 or i386 and if you choose for instance i386 you get a list of folder names which will be meaningless to a lot of people.

The average person would not have a clue what any of these folder names mean. Finally if you select iso-hybrid you finally get to a download page with the following listing:

The list of files is absolutely huge. Incidentally if you just click on the live disks link then you get to the page you want straight away with a similarly long list of files.

It would be very easy to get lost in the maze of links on the Debian site.

Installation

Anyway all of that was fairly irrelevant. As long as you can read and pay attention to what you are selecting then you should be able to find the file you want.

If you want to try out the version of Debian used in this article then you can download it by clicking this link.
and then download the KDE live ISO.

I used Unetbootin to copy the Debian distribution to a USB drive, plugged it into the Samsung R20 and booted it up.

A menu appeared with a list of options and I chose to boot into the live image. I always do this to make sure I won't have any problems when it comes to accessing the internet and to make sure there are no glaring issues.

On this occasion I noticed that I couldn't connect to the internet. I referred to the Debian documentation and I came across this nugget of information which explained the situation fully.

What you have to do is download a firmware zip file and unzip it to a folder called firmware under the root directory of the USB drive.

I did just that and restarted the machine and I was now able to connect to my home broadband service and my mobile broadband provider.

I played around a bit more with the distribution before going for the full installation but no other serious issues occurred so I decided to go for it.

The Debian installer works really well and is fairly easy to use. Choose your language, keyboard, timezone, enter the hostname, choose a root password and create a standard user.

The partitioning section gives you the option of choosing a guided installation or to go for a custom one. I chose the guided installation and I chose to use the entire disk. At this point I am given the option to create one big partition or to create a home and root partition or go for the third option which creates separate home, tmp, var and usr partitions. I went for the home and root partition to separate the operating system from my user files. By default Debian sets aside space for a swap partition.

After creating the partitions and formatting them the files are copied and installed to the system and the grub partitioning section starts.

At this point I came across issues.

grub-pc failed to install into /target/

I was given the opportunity at this point to try again or continue. Trying again did nothing. Pressing continue gave me the option to use LILO instead. Attempting to install LILO gave a similar error.

I tried various methods to get past this error but in the end I gave up and rebooted the USB drive and this time instead of booting into the live image I chose the text install option.

The text install option gives you all the same options as the graphical installer used within the live image. This time however I had no issues at the GRUB install stage and at last Debian was installed.

First Impressions

The Debian KDE live image provides a fairly blank canvas. In the bottom left corner is the K symbol which brings up the KDE menu and in the bottom right corner a series of icons such as an audio icon, list of recently accessed files, network connections, plugged in devices, notifications, battery monitor and of course the clock.

The bottom bar (or panel) can be completely customised and this will be discussed later. You can also add further panels.

Connecting to the internet

To connect to the internet I clicked the network icon on the bottom panel and chose the option for managing connections. The above screen appeared showing a list of networks.

I chose to connect to the mobile broadband whereupon I was able to enter the security key required for the 3 mobile broadband network.

After entering the security details the application KWallet starts which enables you to keep all your passwords in one place. This means that you can connect to the network again next time by entering a password as opposed to the wireless security key.

Applications

I have to say that I was incredibly impressed with the depth and quality of applications installed by default with Debian.

Debian -> Accessibility

XMAG - Magnifies an area of the screen

Debian -> Data Management

OpenOffice ORG Base - Database

Debian -> Editors

Nano
XEdit

Debian -> File Management

K3b - disk burning

Debian -> Graphics

ImageMagick - Image editing
OpenOffice Draw - Image editing
GIMP - Image editing
XWindow - Screenshot

Debian -> Network -> Communication

MUTT - command line email client
Telnet - Telnet client
XBIFF - Shows new mail

Debian -> Network -> Web Browsing

Iceweasel - Web browser
W3M - text based browser

Debian -> Office

OpenOffice Writer - Word processing
OpenOffice Calc - Spreadsheets
OpenOffice Impress - Presentation

Debian -> Programming

Beanshell (text) - Scripting language
Beanshell (window) - Scripting language
Python - Scripting language
Ruby - Scripting language
TCLSh - Tool Command Language

Debian -> Science -> Mathematics

Bc
Dc
OpenOfficeOrg Math
XCalc

Debian -> Shells

BASH
DASH
SH

There are also a host of system tools that are available as well as games and the default KDE applications such as Konqueror, Gwenview and KSnapshot.

The one tool that didn't appear to be available was Synaptic.

Installing Applications

To install applications in Debian the tool for the job is APT. I like APT. I feel at home with APT. I find it intuitive and easy to use.

There were two programs I wanted to install. One was Synaptic (a graphical tool for installing applications) and the other was Chromium (the web browser).

To start off with I opened a terminal window and had a look in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. I knew I would need to edit this file because I needed to add the online repositories as opposed to using the local repositories.

I therefore typed sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list and received an error stating that I did not have permissions to use sudo.

I switched the user to the root user and edited the /etc/sudoers file using nano. I added the line:

gary ALL=(ALL) ALL

I saved the file and exited out of the root shell and I was then able to edit the sources.list file.

Within the sources.list file I added the path to the Debian main, contrib and non-free repositories. I added the non-free option because I knew I would need this to install Flash later on.

With all that done I then ran the sudo apt-get update command and then I was able to install Synaptic by running sudo apt-get install synaptic and I was able to install Chromium by running sudo apt-get install chromium-browser.

From now on I will be able to use Synaptic to install software and I did because I needed a good music player for the next section and so I chose to install Amarok.

Flash and MP3

I ran the Chromium browser and went to Youtube and attempted to watch videos and was surprised to see that I could straight away.

I suspected this might be more down to Youtube and Chromium than Debian's ability to play Flash out of the box. I therefore went to Miniclips to play Flash games and I was right. I was unable to play any games as shown below:

Fortunately installing Flash in Debian is relatively easy after adding the non-free repository to the sources file.

All I had to do was run Synaptic and search for Flash-Nonfree.

To test the ability to play MP3 files I ran Amarok and to my surprise it worked straight away.

Customising the desktop

First things first. The wallpaper is a bit bland. To fix this right click on the desktop and click on folderview settings. (or if you are using a desktop activity you would click desktop settings.

There are a number of wallpapers installed by default and you can change the wallpaper simply by selecting the one you want to use.

Of course you can also download and use your own wallpaper.

Changing wallpapers isn't the only thing you can customise. You can add extra panels and you can add widgets to any other part of the screen.

The other thing you can do is add a new activity. An activity basically gives you a new desktop and you can by default choose to have a desktop view or a folder view.

The folder view enables you to choose a folder which will then add icons to the desktop for each item within the folder.

The desktop view gives a blank desktop. In either case you can add widgets to the desktop

Summary

So what are my thoughts of Debian?

Lets get the bad bits out of the way first.

There is the minor point at the beginning where finding the correct ISO could be a challenge for some people.

More serious than this is the installer issue with the GRUB errors. I have seen a whole host of people on forums with a similar issue. I could understand this error more if I had downloaded the testing branch or the unstable branch but I downloaded a live image from the stable branch. I think there would be a good number of people who gave up at this point.

The other point I would say is that I found OpenSUSE easier to customise when it came to customising KDE. I like the shelves that came with OpenSUSE and there were more activity options. With a bit of a play I am sure I could get to the same place with Debian.

I also have an issue where Chromium keeps asking whether I want to make it the default browser.

Now for the good bits.

If it wasn't for the Grub error installation would have been a breeze and the text based installer was a breeze. The Debian installer is one of the best there is. It works in a completely linear fashion.

The major selling point of Debian though is the sheer volume of applications available in the repositories and getting the applications is made simple by APT (or if you prefer graphical there is Synaptic).

Would I recommend Debian to a person new to Linux?

The answer to this has to be determined based on what the user wants to get out of Linux.

If the user just wants a working out of the box operating system that is graphical in nature and just works out of the box then I would say choose one of the distributions based on Debian or Ubuntu.

If the user wants to get a base system and build it up and learn a bit about Linux on the way without getting tied up in knots then Debian is a great base to start learning from. Debian also provides a stable branch, testing branch and unstable branch so it is up to each user whether they want cutting edge software that is untested or a stable system that is relatively bug free.

There are so many distributions out there that have a Debian base and therefore that definitely makes Debian the daddy of distros but for ease of use there are better alternatives such as Mint, Zorin and SolusOS.

I am going to try the Gnome version of Debian out next week.

Thankyou for reading.

Click here to Download Debian

Click here to buy a Debian CD or USB Drive

5 must read Linux Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:42:00 +0000

Introduction

I like to update this blog as much as I can but a lot of this blog is based on reviews of Linux distributions.

To be able to give a distribution enough time to give it a real go I like to have it installed for at least 5 days and so reviews are usually written once a week.

I thought therefore that I would share some of the other blogs that I read and that I think you may find interesting.

Linux Notes From Dark Duck

The reviews on Everyday Linux User are all based on full installs.

Linux Notes From Dark Duck reviews live distributions.

The importance of a live install is that it gives you the first impression of a distribution.

The live distribution can be thought of as sales pitch and also the testing ground of a distribution.

If you have problems with the wireless connection in the live version then there is a good chance you will have a problem after the full install. By fixing the issue in the live version you will know what to do when you install for real.

Linux Notes From Dark Duck has been on a bit of a hiatus in terms of regular reviews but it does have a lot of guest posts and on top of this competitions.

You can either benefit from entering one of the competitions or you can read the content that is generated from the competitions or any one of the guest posters.

Linux Notes From Dark Duck has in the past had a number of guest interviews. If you have the time visit the site and look through the archives.

The style of the site is unique and a good read.

DEDOIMEDO

The reviews on Everyday Linux User attempt to be informative and the focus isn't on being negative to any one distribution.

If there is a problem with a distribution I will highlight it and I will also offer a solution if I know of one.

The reviews at Dedoimedo are different in that they are completely open and they provide a real critique into the Linux distributions that are reviewed. There is no pandering and no holes barred.

I find this blog is incredibly entertaining.

Desktop Linux Reviews

For a really in depth review of a Linux distribution read the reviews at Desktop Linux Reviews.

The reviews are very well written and give a full insight into the distribution that is being reviewed.

When I first started out on this blog I received a comment on a forum somewhere that said about the post I had just written "He is no Jim Lynch". Ever since that day I looked for Jim Lynch's work and I have read it and I aspire to be as good as Jim Lynch.

Das U-Blog by Prashanth

This blog is written in a different way to most Linux blogs in that to review a particular distribution Prashanth installs the distribution and sits on it for a set amount of time.

After the time period has ended Prashanth will write a post stating what he did on each day and will list the problems that were faced and how they were overcome.

You may not always get a full description of a distribution in this way but if you match the reviews from other blogs with the experiences on Das U-Blog then you can get a feel for how the distribution will work for you.

Thoughts On Technology

This blog is written by Jeff Hoogland who is the main man behind the Bodhi Linux distribution.

There are a few things I like about this blog. Jeff is a very likeable person and if you have ever used Bodhi Linux you will appreciate all the work that has gone into it.

Jeff is very approachable and will answer questions about Bodhi and also pitches in on all manner of topics regarding Linux.

Jeff is clearly knowledgeable about Linux and writes from the perspective of a distro developer.

And For Comedy Value....

Linux Hater's Blog

Now obviously I love Linux otherwise I wouldn't spend so much time using it, trying out different distributions and writing about it.

The guy that writes this blog claims to hate it. The odd thing is that he seems to know so much about Linux that he must have used it for quite some time.

There haven't been many posts recently but read through the archives in your lunch hour. If nothing else you will probably find it amusing.

And where there is a Ying.... there must be a yang

Windows Hater's Blog

Unfortunately there are only a couple of posts and they were in 2008 and to be honest not particularly funny.

I Hate Windows

This blog is a little more interesting but again hasn't been updated in so much time.

Maybe everyone just started hating this instead....

AppleHaters

This blog is much more up to date and has quite a few followers. Still not as funny as the Linux Hater's blog though.

Summary

The internet is full of good reading.

This site is updated regularly and if you want to know exactly when it is updated why not subscribe.

Thankyou for reading.

Coming soon.....

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:51:00 +0000

Just a quick note as to what is coming up on Everyday Linux User.

Last week I reviewed OpenSUSE and this received a fair amount of attention, some good, some bad.

In the coming week I will be taking on a couple of other big hitters with Debian and PCLinuxOS.

The Everyday Linux User review of Gadget Show Live 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:46:00 +0000

Introduction

For those of you who live outside the UK "The Gadget Show" is a television program that is shown on one of our terrestrial television channels called "Channel 5".

"Channel 5" is mainly known for naff television but "The Gadget Show" is a jewel in a crown. It really is top viewing for any tech fan.

"The Gadget Show" has had many hosts during the years but for the past year or so has been hosted by Jason Bradbury and Pollyanna Woodward.

In the current guise the two of them have been touring the world testing out the best gadgets available, from Tablets to Juice Makers.

The way the technology is tested is what makes the show a huge success.

The pair often embark on crazy missions in order to test the latest camera, electric car or jet powered skateboards.

"The Gadget Show" live is like a trade show in some ways but in other ways it is a technology festival. No, that is not enough. The "Gadget Show Live" is an extravaganza of technology, a lollapalooza of technology. It is every geek's dream.

The technology

The exhibition is basically split into two rooms. The first room has every gadget you can possibly think of from paper made of stone to solar powered cars.

There were stalls by all the major computer and tablet makers. Apart from the wide array of tablets that supported Android there was no Linux on offer anywhere. (I wonder if this was because the event was sponsored by Microsoft).

I spent a lot of time trying out various tablets from various manufacturers and it meant I had my first real go with Windows 8. I have to say that it isn't as bad as some people would have you believe.

I can see why traditional Windows users may have issues. There is a new layer aimed for the tablet market using the tiles that we have all seen on Windows phones and on the XBOX. From a tablet perspective Windows 8 is actually very good. I have a Nokia Windows phone and the apps available are every bit as good as the Android equivalents. Windows 8 works really well on a touch screen.

I think it is easy to knock Microsoft for what they are doing and what they have done in the past but from a useability perspective I found Windows 8 quite good. Of course underneath the tiles there is the original operating system. All you have to do to get the original interface is to hover over the hotspot in the corner of the screen and switch to the other view. This really isn't much different to switching between activities within KDE.

Obviously Microsoft is targetting Windows 8 at the ultrabook style interfaces where keyboard meets tablet.

I tried a dozen or so different devices for Windows 8. The product I was most impressed with though was the Acer Ultrabook.

This is not a sales pitch for Windows though and I have no intention of going out and buying a Windows 8 device. At the same time I am not here to knock Microsoft just for the sake of it. The XBOX is undeniably a great gaming device.

The other devices that really caught the eye were 3D printers. At the moment they are fairly pricey at well over £1000 but they are amazing.

Samsung showed off their range of 3D, ultra high defiinition and SMART tvs. I wasn't that impressed with the SMART television. The idea is that you can use gestures to change settings such as screen size, the program you are watching and selecting movies.

The SMART television can recommend programs based on your previous selections but the thing that lets it down are the controls. You control the SMART TV in the same way you control Kinect. I think that I would end up having a coronary trying to change the channel. There is no way that this is better than using a remote control. My son tried out the television and kept apologising for not being able to do as the person giving the demonstration was asking. A television shouldn't be that hard to control.

The show had some novel ideas as well including bouncy shoes and water activated batteries. For the kids there were a range of radio controlled helicopters, the latest NERF guns and toys.

Nintendo were demonstrating the power of the WII U and I predict that this Christmas the WII U will be the number one toy. The games on offer were standard fair with a new version of Mario and the impressive Lego City.

Just going through the first room took 4 hours and I barely scratched the surface. At that point in time I had no idea that room 2 was tech heaven.

The second room had banks and banks of computer games including a whole wall showing the history of computers including the Atari 2600, Sinclair 48k Spectrum, the Commodore Amiga 1200 and Sega Saturn.

EA Sports had a games truck with the FIFA challenge where I managed to come 2nd three times in a row missing out on the goodie bag each and every time. On the 4th time I gave up after a 10 year old managed to beat the record for the whole week.

Outside the EA Sports truck there were some people more serious about their work. Banks of computers all set up to play Alienware. The general public weren't playing though. Teams of gamers with shirts, sponsors and nicknames battled it out in a keyboard and joystick frenzy.

Next to the gaming area another competition was taking place. Teams of Robot Engineers showed off their latest robots in a Robot Wars competition.

For the laser quest fans out there a large area of the second room was set aside for laser quest with small rooms, barriers and all the usual equipment required for a good old shoot em up.

The highlight of the experience however is the live stage show. Pollyanna and Jason were joined on stage by a previous presenter called Jon Bentley.

The show was presented in the format of "Tour of the gadget world" and each segment was designed to highlight gadgets from different parts of the world. In reality the show was pure entertainment with a few gadgets thrown in and a lot of prize giveaways and throwaway entertainment.

The show started with the audience taking part in an interactive computer game where the audience as a whole controlled a computer character running through the luggage lounge trying to avoid obstacles in order to get to the gate. To direct the character the audience had to lean left or right and say jump to jump.

Impressive parts of the show included mind controlled skateboards and the folding bike powered by an electric rocket pack.

So what has this article got to do with Linux? Absolutely nothing. The only thing you will have learned is that maybe Windows 8 isn't as bad as first feared and that if you want a really good tech experience visit "The Gadget Show Live" in Birmingham, England next year.

"The Gadget Show" is back on air in June 2013 and there will be 4 hosts this time. Along with Jason and Pollyanna there will be the return of Jon Bentley and new girl, Rachel Riley who up until recently has been on Channel 4's Countdown.

Thankyou for reading

Everyday Linux User @GadgetShowLive

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 06:57:00 +0000

Today I will be at the Gadget Show Live event in Birmingham, England.

Technically my next post will probably not be Linux related but will highlight all the cool things that I will see throughout the course of the day.

Subscribe to this blog and you will get instant updates to not only the Gadget Show Live content but every new article that appears on this site.

OpenSUSE - A real alternative to Ubuntu?

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:23:00 +0000

Introduction

The world of Linux is home to a plethora of Linux distributions.

Many of these distributions work on a niche of some kind by offering something the others don't.

Then there are the really big distributions. These distributions set the trend that many other distributions follow and fork from.

OpenSUSE is a big distribution. It is up there with Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. OpenSUSE is a community distribution but has the advantage of having a big money sponsor (Novell).

I have been using OpenSUSE for the past week and the aim of this review is to determine whether it is a good alternative to Ubuntu.

Installation

To download OpenSUSE I went to the Distrowatch.org website and then looked at the rankings on the right hand side.

OpenSUSE is currently sitting 6th in the rankings, based on downloads for the past 6 months. It is sitting behind Mint, Mageia, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian.

Upon opening the link for OpenSUSE I visited the download mirrors page and downloaded the KDE live edition from the mirror closest to my location.

My normal method of burning live ISOs to USB is to use Unetbootin but I had read up on OpenSUSE and many people have had trouble using this method so I used the suggested option from the OpenSUSE.org webpage.

Whether you are using Windows or Linux you have to download the Imagewriter software and then use that software to write the image to the USB drive.

So with the USB drive created I performed a reboot of the laptop (Samsung R20, not the quickest machine there is, but not ancient).

OpenSUSE started without any issues.

Before installing a distribution to the hard-drive I check basic things like the wireless connection to make sure I am unlikely to have issues after the install.

There is an install link on the desktop and clicking this starts an installation program.

The installer for OpenSUSE is fairly linear and easy to follow. The bit that might trip up a new user is the partitioning bit. OpenSUSE makes an attempt to suggest the best set up with regards to partitions that you might wish to use. Now ordinarily if you want to use the whole drive then it will offer to create three partitions. (Root, Home and Swap).

In my case I already had 2 operating systems on the laptop (Snowlinux and SolusOS). I wanted to replace the Snowlinux and so I had to adjust the partitioning myself. I'm not sure how well OpenSUSE copes if you already have Windows installed. Does it offer to replace it or install alongside? Maybe someone can answer this in the comments section.

So other than the partitioning all the other usual questions are asked such as timezones, locales, keyboard settings and initial user settings.

First Impressions

Upon first glance OpenSUSE looks every bit the professional operating system.

The KDE desktop is very modern looking and at the same time will give a familiar feeling to most Windows users.

The first run of OpenSUSE displays a welcome message in the centre of the screen. Generally speaking though the KDE desktop consists of a panel at the bottom, the desktop and a folder view at the top of the screen. Later on in the article I will show some more of the features of the KDE desktop.

The bottom panel is like the Windows taskbar with a menu button, quick launch icons and a system tray in the bottom right corner.

Connecting to the internet

Bizarrely the first time I booted into OpenSUSE there was no wireless network icon on the taskbar.

I tried adding the network applet to the panel but it couldn't find my wireless networks.

I decided to go for a reboot (not my usual course of action but I had a hunch) and the next time OpenSUSE booted the network icon appeared on the taskbar and I was able to see both my home broadband and mobile broadband networks and even more bizarrely the wireless network for our neighbour's house. (This is bizarre because we are some distance away).

After entering my network password the KWallet application appeared asking whether I wanted to store my passwords within it.

The upshot of this is that the next time I log in all I have to do is enter the KWallet password and the wireless connection will work.

Flash and MP3

To test flash I logged on to Youtube and attempted to watch the trailer for Spiderman.

As you can see the Flash player isn't installed by default.

Now Ubuntu has the Ubuntu-restricted-extras package so I looked online to see if there was a quick way to get Flash working within OpenSUSE and the site OpenSUSE-guide.org came up trumps.

The above link shows you how to install Flash, Java, Silverlight and Google Voice and Video chat.

To install Flash just open a terminal window (on the quick launch bar) and type:

sudo zypper install flash-player

After running this command I tried refreshing the Youtube page but it didn't pick up the change until I restarted Firefox.

The audio player supplied with OpenSUSE is Amarok.

As with Fedora and Debian, OpenSUSE is a community distribution and so only distributes with free software therefore MP3s do not work straight away.

The OpenSUSE website tries to influence you into installing Fluendo. This is a commercial option. Fluendo provide a range of plugins for DVD playback and MP3s. There is a free MP3 decoder on the website.

There is of course a better way. If you visit Opensuse-guide.org there is a method for installing all the tools you will need to accomplish MP3 playback.

After following the article on Opensuse-guide.org I was able to play MP3s within Amarok.

Applications

I only downloaded the live KDE version but this comes with a good range of applications.

Education

Desktop Globe - Globe

Games

KMahjongg - Mahjongg
KReversi - Reversi
KMines - Minesweeper
KSudoku - Sudoku
KPatience - Patience

Graphics

DNG Image Converter - Image Converter
Exposure Blending - I have no idea what this does
Panorama - Make a panoramic photo
digiKam - Image viewer
showFoto - Photo viewer
Photo Layouts Management Program
AcquireImages - Scanning
Skanlite - Scanning
Gwenview - Image viewer

Internet

Konversation - IRC Client
Kopete - Instant Messenger
Choqok - Microblogging
KMail - Mail client
Firefox - Web Browser
Konqueror - Web Browser
KTorrent - BitTorrent
Akregator - RSS Feed reader
IFTP- FTP Client

Multimedia

Amarok - Audio player
K3B - CD/DVD Burning

Office

KAddressBook - Address Book
LibreOffice
Kontact - Personal Information Manager
KOrganiser - Calendar

Summary

There are also a host of system and configuration tools.

Package Management

Package management in OpenSUSE is performed by using a utility called YAST.

I have to say that I think that this piece of software lets OpenSUSE down. Compared with Apt-get and Synaptic, YAST is lacking in useability.

The interface itself seems fairly easy. When you first load YAST the control center is displayed and from there to install software you can click on "Software Management".

The next screen provides a way of looking for applications. You can either search for the package by entering a keyword or you can click the RPM groups tab and search down a tree for the application you wish to install.

So far it all sounds quite good doesn't it? Except I cannot seem to find any decent software in the default repositories.

I was able to find a whole host of repositories by following this link (http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_package_repositories)

The other thing that annoyed me was that when I did try and install software I was greeted with the message "173 packages to be installed, estimated 1.3 gb".

By default OpenSUSE will try and update every package that needs to be updated. Now this ISO is about a month old yet the download size of the updates is bigger than the ISO I downloaded to install OpenSUSE in the first place.

It is of course possible to prevent the package manager attempting to update these packages.

KDE Customisation

I am of the opinion that KDE actually looks quite good nowadays. I first noticed this when reviewing SLAX a few weeks ago.

Basically KDE comes with various different views which are called activities. The default view is the folder view whereby you have a desktop with various folders listed in panes on the desktop.

If you like the traditional Windows view then you can go for the desktop icons view.

Other views include gallery view and search view but you can add your own customised activities.

Each activity window can have its own desktop background. OpenSUSE comes with just two as standard but you can easily install additional backgrounds from the list provided.

Of course you can add your own wallpapers by downloading them from the web or digital camera, USB drive etc and importing them into OpenSUSE.

In Windows Vista you may remember the news and weather widgets that appear on the desktop. KDE incorporates a whole library of widgets.

Although by default there is a panel at the bottom you can also add an additional panel at the top of the screen and remove the bottom panel entirely if you so wish. You can add any number of icons onto the system tray including application launchers.

It is easy to switch between activities by clicking the hotspot in the top right hand corner of the screen.

Summary

OpenSUSE is clearly very mature as an operating system and is definitely up there with the larger distributions.

The KDE desktop looks good and for Windows users it will give an instant feel of familiarity. Unlike Windows however the KDE desktop is very customisable and there are some excellent features.

In terms of installation I would say it is probably just as easy as installing Ubuntu with the exception of the partitioning but I would say that Ubuntu makes that a little too simple and doesn't necessarily create the partitions in an optimal way. It really is up to each person to decide the best layout of their partitions.

The lack of instant Flash and MP3 playback is an issue but not one that can't be overcome. The documentation I have found for OpenSUSE is very good.

I was disappointed with YAST and the selection of packages available by default and I was baffled by the size of the updates. Again the packages issue can be overcome by adding extra repositories and the updates can be configured to work how you want them to,

How does OpenSUSE compare with the other big distributions? I would say it is on a par with Debian and Fedora really. I think Mint is definitely the distribution setting the standard at the moment. Cinnamon is a classy desktop environment and Mint works straight away without having to install any extras or jump through any hoops.

Thankyou for reading.

Click here to download openSUSE

Click here to buy an openSUSE DVD or USB drive

Power to the Raspberry PI

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:18:00 +0000

Introduction

There are lots of things in life that are a mystery. One of the big mysteries is what happens to all those odd socks, buttons and tea spoons.

What has any of this to do with the Raspberry PI or power? Well this article is about the ways that you can provide power to your Raspberry PI.

Now you may think that it is obvious. Connect a power cable to the PI and turn it on. Whilst this certainly works there are issues that the makers of the Raspberry PI have missed and which I intend to cover in this blog post.

I think there is a modern spin to be taken on the whole lost sock and tea spoon problem and that is with USB cables. I can never find the correct USB cable that is used to charge my mobile phone and sure enough no two mobile phones seem to use a USB cable with the same connection at the end.

It isn't just mobile phones that use USB cables however. The Kindle uses a USB cable as does every digital camera, MP3 player and even games consoles such as the Blaze ultimate. Keeping track of the USB cable that goes with my mobile phone is a constant battle.

Anyway on with the article.

Powering the Raspberry PI from a standard mobile phone charger

The most common way to set up the Raspberry PI is to use a standard mobile phone charger with a micro USB connector.

To make your Raspberry PI work simply plug the power cable of the charger into a plug socket and hey presto it starts to boot up.

If you have connected your Raspberry PI using a HDMI cable to the television and you have forgotten to turn the television on first it is highly likely that when you do turn the television on you won't see anything happening. On top of this issue you cannot tell how far through the boot sequence the Raspberry PI is.

There is no on and off switch for the Raspberry PI which means the only way to restart the PI, if the operating system hangs for any reason, is to pull the USB cable out of the PI and plug it back in or to press the switch on the wall.

The lack of a reset switch on the Raspberry PI is for me a design flaw.

Power the Raspberry PI from the television

Modern televisions quite often come with USB ports. If you plan to connect to your Raspberry PI and use a television as the main output then it makes sense to power it via the USB port on the television especially if you are using your Raspberry PI as a media centre.

Powering your Raspberry PI via the USB cable connected to the television means that it doesn't come on until you turn your television on.

As soon as the television is turned on you will see the Raspberry PI boot up.

Life rarely provides us perfect solutions however. If you now turn the television off your Raspberry PI will also lose power and if you haven't shut down your operating system first then there is a risk that you corrupt it and so subsequent boots may fail.

Power the Raspberry PI from a powered USB hub

For me powering the Raspberry PI using a powered USB hub is the best solution there is. You will almost certainly need a powered hub to run your Raspberry PI as although the Raspberry PI itself can absorb enough power to run itself it will begin to struggle when you have a mouse, keyboard and wireless dongle plugged in. Every device added saps a little more power.

If you intend to use your Raspberry PI as a retro games machine you will certainly feel the benefit of a powered hub.

If you are going to use a powered hub get one with an on/off switch.

The only real issue with using a hub to power your Raspberry PI is that it uses up one of the USB ports on your hub but there is nothing stopping you daisy chaining hubs.

Battery powered Raspberry PI

The Raspberry PI doesn't have to use power cables. You can actually power a Raspberry PI using a portable mobile phone charger.

If you search on Google there are various do it yourself guides showing you how to power the Raspberry PI with 6 AA batteries but it takes some skill to get it to work which is why the portable phone charger is the simpler solution.

Here is a Youtube video showing exactly how to power your Raspberry PI using batteries.

Solar powered Raspberry PI

There are various solutions provided on the internet for powering the Raspberry PI by sunlight but I think the guide provided on CNET is a good one because instead of sending direct power to your Raspberry PI it actually charges batteries which then powers the Raspberry PI. This ensures that only the right amount of power goes to the Raspberry PI.

This video on Youtube also shows how to run the Raspberry PI from sunlight.

Summary

When you first bought your Raspberry PI I bet the last thought in your mind was how am I going to power this thing.

As you can see the lack of an on/off switch does cause issues but these can be overcome by using the power of your television or a powered hub.

The main issue is that when you log out from Raspbian the display for the Raspberry PI stops and so you have no idea when the shutdown process is complete.

In another of my articles I showed how to connect to the Raspberry PI using a Google Nexus 7. Using this method you could actually place the Raspberry PI anywhere as long as it has a WIFI connection.

Power the Raspberry PI from your loft, your garden or even the cupboard under the stairs.

Thankyou for reading

First steps in Arch Linux

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:05:00 +0000

Introduction

Ok so one of the plans this year was to actually learn some stuff. In order to do this I needed to challenge myself a little bit.

Before I continue this isn't a review of Arch Linux. This is a post highlighting my experience thus far trying to install and get Arch Linux working.

I have been using computers since I was about 9 years old and I am now 38. I have been writing software for Windows for the past 10 years and I have some Unix and Mainframe programming experience. Therefore when it comes to computing I am not what is termed in the game as a "Noob".

However from a Linux point of view I have never ventured that far in. If Linux was the sea I would say I have probably been no further than waist high. It is high time that I got my face wet.

The Plan

For me it makes sense to have a working computer handy whilst working on something that is technically challenging so that I can use Google search skills to find help and to also download any extras I might need along the way.

I could have achieved my aim in two ways. The first way would have been to have two computers side by side. The second way was to create a virtual machine using Oracle's Virtualbox.

I decided to go for the Virtualbox option. I do intend to install Arch on a separate PC but that is a later story.

For this experiment I just so happen to be using Windows 7 running Oracle Virtualbox but I could just as easily be using Linux Mint or any other version of Linux.

Let the games begin

Now the sensible thing to do first would have been to read the documentation and there is absolutely heaps of it. Just visit https://wiki.archlinux.org/.

I didn't do the sensible thing. I went to www.distrowatch.org and clicked the download link for Arch Linux.

The download page actually links to the installation guide as the first step but I ignored that and went straight to one of the mirror links and downloaded the 64 bit ISO.

If you are thinking of installing Arch for the first time do yourself a favour and visit https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Main_Page and then click the link to the beginners guide.

I did this as my second step and I was glad that I did because it really helped.

Preparation

The first thing I did was to create a Virtual machine in Virtualbox. I allocated 50gb space for this and 2gb ram.

The installation guide starts by showing how to burn the installation medium. In this case I should have taken more notice of the bit that said "Installing on a virtual machine".

I did read this section before starting but it starts off with terminal commands to install virtual box guest utilities using Pacman.

As I am using Windows I knew this didn't really make sense at this point and so skipped the rest of this part of the guide.

The next part of the guide says to boot the installation medium. The guide shows you how to deal with EFI, how to change keyboard layouts and how to change your locale.

Whilst these tips are good I have a recommendation for people who like using graphical tools for partitioning. The Arch guide moves onto partitioning fairly early in the process and there is a whole section showing the best disk layout. What I did at this point was to boot my virtual machine using a Ubuntu live ISO and I used GParted to create the suggested disk layout.

Installation

With the partitions created I went back to the guide and followed the bit about changing keyboard layouts and locales

The next step was to make sure there was a working internet connection. As I am using a virtual machine the wireless connection actually acts as a wired connection so I set up the internet using the instructions for the wired connection. Obviously when doing this on another laptop I would have to follow the instructions for setting up a wireless connection.

I followed steps for mounting the root and home partition and then edited the Pacman mirrorlist to put the UK mirrors at the top.

Installing the actual system was actually fairly simple. All I had to do was run the Pacman command pacman /mnt base base-devel and the relevant packages installed one by one and after about 15 minutes I was back at the command prompt.

So far so good.

With the packages installed the next step was to create the fstab file and then to chroot into the newly installed system.

As the locale and keyboard maps were set for the live ISO these had to be configured again for the installed version.

Most of the next bit you would do in a normal install such as set up timezones, the hardware clock and internet connections. Within Arch it is all done using the terminal but the principal is the same.

Just a few more steps to go.

One of the last steps is to configure Pacman so that is uses the repositories that you want to use to retrieve packages. This is simply a case of editing the pacman.conf file and commenting and uncommenting the relevant repositories.

I then set the root password and installed the bootloader. As this is a virtual machine and therefore the only operating system going to run I decided to take the easy option and use Syslinux.

All that was left to do was to unmount the partitions and reboot. (Obviously it would have been a good idea at this point to unmount the ISO so that when I rebooted my shiny new Arch Linux installation would have loaded instead of the live image again.)

Second time lucky and bingo. There you are. Arch Linux installed.

Adding a User

Now obviously it isn't a good idea to run as root all the time so I followed the guide to adding a new user to the system. (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Users_and_Groups#User_management).

Sound

The Arch Linux beginners guide is very good and tells you that Alsa is installed by default but the volume would be turned down. It shows you how to install Alsamixer and how to run it and unmute each level.

When I tried this for the first time I did the sound test and nothing came out. It took me a good couple of minutes to work out that I did actually have the speakers set to mute within Windows and therefore it was still mute within the virtual box.

GUI

By default Arch comes with no graphical user interface. You have to install everything yourself including X.

The guide however takes you through the process of installing X and also the installation of video drivers.

When I tried to start X for the first time it didn't work.

I did what I always do in this scenario which is to open Google and search using the error message. This usually brings up a list of pages where people who have the same issue have listed it in forums or on Yahoo Answers and I can use the solutions provided by others.

I was a little annoyed to say the least when I found a forum post on the Arch user forums where somebody had asked the exact same question I was basically asking (although I didn't need to actually ask it because it was already answered). The response by two or three users was to check forum etiquette and to read the manual.

Why do I have a problem with this? Well the guy fell into the same trap I did. He was installing in a Virtual machine and hadn't installed the guest utils. Upon installing the guest utils the Virtualbox video driver is installed and X works perfectly.

Remember at the beginning when I said I skipped this because it was telling me to type Pacman commands before we had even got to the point of booting the Virtual machine from the ISO. It is clear to me that from other people asking very similar questions that whilst the Arch guides are very thorough there is clearly an issue with the ordering of content because something that is not relevant straight away suddenly becomes more relevant later on. The point therefore is that the people did read the manual and fell down because maybe the manual isn't entirely clear. As Eric Morecombe used to say "I'm playing all the correct notes, not necessarily in the right order".

Anyway the upshot is I got X working and it was now time to install a display manager and desktop environment.

Display Manager

I would recommend installing the display manager first and then the desktop environment.

The desktop manager is responsible for displaying a graphical login screen (although there are command line versions).

It is worth considering using the appropriate display manager with a matching desktop environment. However you don't have to do this.

My favourite desktop environment is XFCE and so I went for the SLIM display manager.

Installation and setup of the SLIM display manager was easy especially as Arch has a very well written guide showing you how to configure it.

Desktop Environment

As mentioned in the previous section I decided to go for XFCE. Again Arch comes with an excellent user guide for installing XFCE.

Bing Bang Bosh......

Yes ladies and gentlemen there is my login screen and there is my XFCE desktop.

Now it is worth noting at this point that it is a vanilla XFCE desktop with absolutely no software. There is no browser for instance. There are a few default stock applications such as a calendar, image viewer and CD burner but that is it.

My next step therefore will be to customise the XFCE a lot more, work harder on the god awful desktop manager settings that I have in place and basically tart it up.

Summary

Actually installing Arch and getting it working took me about 2 or 3 hours and at this stage I have a virtual machine running a fairly blank operating system.

Was it worth the effort?

For me yes it was. Today I learned a few things such as how to configure the SLIM display manager, how to use Pacman and how to get XFCE to work.

I already knew how to connect to the internet from the command line but had I not then I would have learned that too.

For me this is where Arch can take me. It can let me learn a bit more of what is going on under the hood.

It is however hard for me to imagine ever using Arch as my full time operating system at this stage. I can't believe I will ever get to the stage where I can produce an XFCE based system that is better than Xubuntu and there is no way I'm as skilled as all the people working on Linux Mint.

Thankyou for reading.

Click here to download Arch Linux

Click here to buy Arch Linux on DVD or USB

Everyday Linux User now accepting guest posts

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:21:00 +0000

The Everyday Linux User blog up until now has been about me experimenting with different distributions and writing about my experiences.

I have written reviews and how to guides on a number of different subjects ranging from "Connecting to the Raspberry PI using a Nexus 7" to "Customising the Xubuntu desktop".

Some of the articles are very well received and some of them blow around like carrier bags in the wind.

If you have an article that you want to write about Linux to promote your own site or you just want to try your hand at writing without the commitment of starting your own blog why not write an article for the Everyday Linux User blog.

If you are interested email everydaylinuxuser@gmail.com.

Everyday Linux User now on Reddit

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:12:00 +0000

I have recently become a user on Reddit and I have to say that out of all the social networking sites it is the one I relate to the most.

I currently subscribe to the following sub-reddits:

Linux
Linuxnoobs
Linuxquestions
Raspberry_PI
RaspberryPI
Distrohopping

In order to be able to discuss more fully the articles on this site and to chat freely about Linux without bombarding the comments section at the bottom of each article I have decided to create an Everyday Linux User Sub-reddit.

So if you are a Reddit user feel free to subscribe to the EVERYDAYLINUXUSER Sub-reddit.

Visit http://www.reddit.com/r/EverydayLinuxUser/

Feel free to discuss anything about Linux on this Sub-reddit. If you have your own Linux blog then I am more than happy for you to promote your own linux blog links and articles.

If you want to become a moderator get in touch.

Everyday Linux User Review of SLAX

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:45:00 +0000

Introduction

If you go to distrowatch.com and look down the rankings you will see at number 24 a distribution called SLAX.

It is very hard for distro developers to make their particular distribution stand out. SLAX is not one of them.

SLAX weighs in at 210mb and is built to run from a USB drive as opposed to being installed to the hard drive. What you end up with is a fully functional portable operating system.

Installation

To download SLAX go to http://www.slax.org/en/download.php and click on the 32-bit or 64-bit zip file for your particular language.

Now ordinarily when downloading Linux distributions you would download the ISO image and burn it to the USB drive using something like UNetbootin but to install SLAX all you need is a USB drive, the zip file and a program that can extract the zip file to the USB drive.

Once the USB drive has all the files extracted to it you just need to run the bootinst.bat file located in the /slax/boot folder.

You do not need to install SLAX to a hard drive because it is built to run from the USB drive.

First Impressions

The first boot is a little longer than subsequent boots but it isn't that long even on an Acer Aspire One D255 netbook.

As you can see you are greeted with a rather nice green KDE screen with a toolbar at the bottom.

In the bottom left there are three icons which from left to right when clicked, shows the menu, opens a terminal window and starts the Firefox web browser.

In the bottom right there are icons for keyboard layout, audio, display settings, network settings and a clock.

Next to the clock is a little hotspot that when clicked enables you to change the panel settings and add further widgets.

On the desktop itself there are two icons. The first one is a link to the SLAX software repository which I will explain further later and underneath that icon is a help guide which is definitely worth reading as it explains a lot.

In the top right corner is another hotspot which when clicked enables you to log out and change KDE settings.

Connecting to the internet

I had issues when I first tried to connect to the internet. The problem is that this netbook contains an Intel Centrino Wireless-n 1000 card and this driver isn't installed by default.

Now I could tell you the way I got around it which was to:

download the driver iwlwifi-1000-5.ucode
copy the driver to /lib/firmware
open terminal and type: modprobe -r iwlwifi && modprobe iwlwifi

After following those steps I was able to use the graphical tool to connect to my wireless network.

Later on I'll show you an easier way of making sure you have the correct wireless drivers installed.

Flash and MP3

Rather surprisingly Flash worked out of the box and just as surprisingly I was also able to play MP3 files using the media player (Juk) without having to install extra drivers or libraries.

Applications

SLAX is obviously a lightweight distribution because it is built to run from a USB drive and the applications reflect this.

Games

KBounce - Ball bouncing game
Bovo - 5 in a row
KPatience - Patience
KSudoku - Sudoku
KMines - Minesweeper

Graphics

GWenview - Image Viewer
KSnapshot - Screenshot
Kolourpaint - Paint
Okular - Document Viewer
KColorChooser - Colour selection

Internet

FireFox - Web Browser
Pidgin - Messenger
KRDC - Remote Desktop
KPPP - Internet Dialup
KRFB - Desktop Sharing
KNetAttach - Network Folder Wizard

Multimedia

SMPlayer - Media Player
JUK - Audio Player
KMix - Sound Mixer

There are various other system tools and utilities such as file browsers and wizards.

Installing Applications.

SLAX doesn't use tools like Synaptic or YUM to install software. Software is installed as modules and can be downloaded from the SLAX website.

To install an application you download it from the website and place it in the /lib/modules folder.

By placing the module in the /lib/modules folder it is available for use everytime you run SLAX.

You can activate and deactivate modules by clicking on the software center icon on the desktop.

The software center has three tabs.

The first tab has the "best picks" from the module library and as you might expect contains applications such as Google Chrome.

The second tab is called "All Modules" and when clicked just shows the following message: "Here will be interface to browse all modules. Soon. Stay tuned! :)".

The third tab is called "Active Modules" and shows all the modules you have installed thus far.

You can choose to active or deactivate modules by clicking the button to the right of each application.

Remember earlier on when I showed the method for installing the wireless drivers? Well instead of doing that I could have gone to the module downloads page and from the drivers section installed the firmware-iwlwifi module.

And finally...

So everything thus far has been fairly standard except for the fact that it all runs as a live USB rather than installing it to a hard drive.

But I found something odd whilst looking for further information on SLAX.

Visit http://old.slax.org/build.php.

You can build your own version of SLAX by adding the modules you want to add and removing the modules you don't need.

When you are happy with your selections you can just download the ISO and install it to a USB drive. There are hundreds of modules available. (Many more than from the main SLAX website).

The main issue I have with this is that it seems to be an old version of the SLAX website. Is this now obsolete or is this still active? If this is still active then do the modules for SLAX on this website work with the version of SLAX from the main website?

I love the idea of being able to build your own ISO. It is like Linux Lego. There is no link from the main SLAX website to the link above. I found the above link by searching for SLAX on Google.

Summary

This review is just a cursory glance at what I have learned so far about this operating system. I plan to spend quite a bit of time investigating it further.

The operating system works straight away from a USB drive and is easy to create. The modules system also makes it easy to install software.

For those who like to play, the USB base makes SLAX a good sandbox for compiling other modules that don't appear in the module repository. It is a great way to learn how to compile applications without messing up your main distribution.

The portability of SLAX means you can take it anywhere and interchangeable modules means you can get the drivers working without too much fuss.

The main issues I have are as follows:

I don't see the point in having a tab in the software center that says "will be implemented shortly". Just hide the tab until it is available.
Why is there an old site and a new site? I think this is confusing. Should you use the modules from the old site?
A lot of the modules on the old site are shown as "Not verified" and it isn't recommended that you use modules until they are verified. Will this ever happen now being that this is an old site?

Regardless of these issues, I really like the idea of SLAX and I plan to compile my own modules and explore it further in the next few weeks. It would be good to get a Raspberry PI version.

Thankyou for reading.

Click here to download SLAX

Click here to buy SLAX on DVD or USB

5 things to consider when installing Linux for the first time

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:38:00 +0000

Introduction

I have written quite a few reviews about various Linux distributions and in many cases I give a brief overview how to install the distributions.

There are however things that I have skipped that you really ought to consider before installing your first Linux distribution.

This article lists 5 things that you should consider when installing Linux for the first time.

1. Which Linux distribution should I choose?

I have recently discovered the beauty of Reddit and there are a few sub-reddits that I read regularly such as Linuxnoobs and Linuxquestions.

One of the most common questions is "which distribution should I choose?".

The answer to such questions usually come from the experiences of various contributors and there is a bias towards one distribution or another. Very rarely does anybody ask important questions such as "What is your computer experience level?", "Do you want to it work straight away or are you happy to put some effort in?", "How old is your computer?", "What are the specifications?" and "What do you primarily use the computer for?".

So how can you decide which distribution is best for you if everyone gives an opinion that has a bias to their own needs?

Well first of all there is distrowatch. Distrowatch is the go to place for Linux distributions. Nearly every distribution is listed there and it has a great search facility which enables you to search by category such as distributions for beginners, games, education, distributions for older computers and netbooks.

Distrowatch also has a chart which lists the popularity of Linux distributions based on the clicks of the download links on the site. This doesn't really prove popularity of course because I might install Ubuntu today and think it is rubbish and therefore choose another distribution straight away.

Rankings are also somewhat self-fulfilling prophecies in that because for instance Linux Mint is top, visitors to the site are much more likely to try the distributions at the top before trying the distribution at 256 in the list thereby making it even more popular. So rankings aren't the only method you should use to choose your distribution.

If you click on the link of any particular distribution within distrowatch you will see links to reviews for that distribution.

Again reviews can be somewhat biased as that is only natural. We all try to be objective with our opinions but we are only human.

What you can really gain from reviews are obvious pitfalls, who the distribution is aimed at, screenshots and by reading the comments at the bottom other people's opinions of a distribution and of course the person who wrote the review because if the reviewer is not credible there are endless streams of people willing to tell them so. (Of course there are internet trolls everywhere so you have to take some of the comments with a pinch of salt).

The best thing you can do is to download a few distributions and create live USB drives and try out the features of a few distributions until you find one you are happy with.

2. Are you replacing Windows or installing alongside Windows?

If you are using Windows and you have very little experience with Linux then it is probably a good idea to run Linux alongside Windows for a few months until you are happy that all your needs are served by Linux.

It is also a good idea to try out a few of the Linux applications in a Windows environment. Many of the larger open source applications are available for Windows so you can try them in advance of installing Linux.

For example:

LibreOffice - Use as a replacement for Microsoft Office.
Thunderbird - Use as a replacement for Outlook
Banshee - Audio player
VLC Player - Video player

3. Have you backed up?

There are loads of guides online showing you how to install various Linux distributions. I am yet to see a guide that actually asks you whether you have backed up your Windows partition even though many of them show how to install Linux alongside Windows.

A lot of modern laptops are sold with Windows 7 pre-installed. What this generally means is that most people don't receive a Windows 7 DVD.

Whether you are going to install Linux or not you should read this next bit.

"Create a recovery disk and a system image"

What would happen if Windows suddenly stopped working because you accidentally deleted key files or you accidentally contracted some kind of nasty virus or malware?

You need a recovery disk and you need to create a system image. There are loads of guides for doing this online including:

Now there is an inherent issue with the way Windows is installed when you first receive it on your shiny new machine and it causes big issues when creating system images.

Windows is installed on one big partition. (well actually for Windows 7 there is another smaller partition). The problem with this is that when you create a system image it creates a huge image file and you have nowhere to save it off to.

Where you save your system image is very important. You basically have a choice depending on the size of the image that is going to be created. You can backup to an external hard drive, secondary internal hard drive or a series of blank DVDs. You can also create another partition on your existing hard drive in which to save the image. (many manufacturers already create a partition for this purpose).

Saving a system image to a partition on the same hard drive is potentially dangerous in that if the drive itself is faulty then the system image will be destroyed along with the rest of the data therefore rendering the system image useless.

So what is the solution? You have a 1 terabyte drive with Windows taking the whole kaboodle. How do you back this thing up? You could of course buy lots of very cheap DVDs. This would work but one dodgy DVD and the whole process is pointless and do you really fancy restoring dozens of DVDs to get your Windows working again?

First of all deal with that huge Windows partition. Windows 7 has an option which enables you to shrink it down.

Read this guide to see how to shrink the Windows partition.

With the Windows partition shrunk down to size you can backup straight to an external hard drive and hopefully not fill it up.

What I like to do though is create a backup partition on the same drive and create the system image to the backup partition. (Note that I don't use the whole of the unpartitioned space for the backup partition but just enough to store the system image).

There is still the inherent problem that the system image is stored on the same physical drive. I get around this by copying the system image files off onto an external hard drive.

What are the benefits of doing this you might ask? Well if I want to restore quickly I don't need to rely on my external hard drive unless the whole drive is toast. I can use the system image stored on the local backup partition. If the drive is toast I can install a new drive and use the system image on the external hard drive.

4. Partitioning the hard drive

Whether you are installing alongside Windows or installing over the top of Windows you need to consider the partitions that you will create on your hard drive before installing.

There are a few distributions that try and help you partition your drive such as Ubuntu and Mint.

I think that they have the same inherent flaw as Windows does in that they try and create one large partition for everything. (with maybe small partitions for boot and swap). This means your home folder is lumped in with your applications.

So what is wrong with having your applications and data on the same partition? Well if you backup your home folder regularly and you have no plans on removing the chose distribution there is no problem in keeping your home folder on the same partition as every other system file.

For me though the best decision you can make is to create a separate home partition. This separates system files from user files. You will now be able to re-install your chosen version of Linux as many times as you like without affecting your documents, music, videos etc.

I found this guide to be very useful on the subject on disk partitioning.

5. What is your motive for moving to Linux?

Giving up Windows is a bit like giving up smoking or drinking. If you aren't committed to the idea then you will not really break the habit.

You use Windows because that is what you were taught and what you have used everyday up until now. So why now choose Linux? What is your motive?

You have to want to use Linux and you have to be prepared for new experiences to enjoy it.

I am going to sound like a self help hypnosis recording now.....

You don't need Microsoft Windows
You don't need Microsoft Office
You don't need Outlook
You don't need Internet Explorer

When you can appreciate that there are alternatives to Microsoft Office, Outlook and Internet Explorer then you will appreciate Linux.

If you are going to install Linux and try and run all the Windows programs you run already then the question has to be asked "Why?".

Sure there is the WINE project that allows you to run many Windows applications but in many cases there is a more than viable option in the Linux repositories that is not just equal to but often better than the Windows equivalent.

Chrome (Chromium) for instance is a much better browser than Internet Explorer. (To be honest a blind dog with no sense of smell is better at browsing than Internet Explorer).

LibreOffice has moved on leaps and bounds and is more than useful enough for most users especially at home.

Do you really utilise Outlook at home? Do you really need it? Most people use Webmail now and if you really need an email client then there is Thunderbird which is a great replacement.

I found the key to making the move to Linux all those years ago was to forget the Windows applications because there is always a Linux equivalent.

I think the biggest mistake someone can make is to install Linux and then complain that it doesn't work the same way as Windows. If you want Windows use Windows.

Summary

If this article has done nothing else I hope it has encouraged a few Windows users to go and back up their computers because I fear there are so many people one bad file deletion away from having an expensive brick. (or they are in for a large PC World bill)

Another good idea for Windows users is to create a standard user and use that user for most tasks. It is much harder for a virus to penetrate your system if you are logged in as a standard user than as a power user or administrator.

Before I sign off consider this.... how many applications do you use under Windows that are also available via most Linux distributions. For each application that you use regularly check online and see if the the same application has a Linux version.

I am looking at the list of applications in my Windows launch bar and I can see DropBox, Skype, VirtualBox, Steam and Spotify. All of these are available from within Linux.

Thankyou for reading.

Everyday Linux User Review of Crunchbang Linux #!

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:27:00 +0000

Introduction

Ok so I have put off doing this review for sometime. I tried Crunchbang for the first time about a year ago and I was a little underwhelmed.

Actually to tell the truth at the time I was in a position where I had a number of versions of Linux I wanted to try out but I had suffered a hard drive failure and all the distros I had downloaded had been destroyed. I was left with a DVD wallet with old versions of Ubuntu and Mint and two USB drives with live installations available. (One contained Mageia and the other Crunchbang).

At the time I tried Crunchbang first and was immediately alarmed at the incredibly black screen and I switched straight away to Mageia. I used Mageia for about 2 weeks before I downloaded other distributions and started building up a new library. This all reminds me that I never did a review of Mageia either.

I have moved on a lot since those dark days and it is about time I gave Crunchbang the review it deserves.

Download and Installation

To download Crunchbang Linux visit http://crunchbang.org/.

There are two versions of Crunchbang available:

32 bit
64 bit

I am aware that Crunchbang is very lightweight and therefore I decided to install it on my Samsung R20 laptop which has a mediocre 2gb of ram and is fairly low in specifications.

I installed Crunchbang onto a USB drive using UNetbootin and rebooted the laptop. I was given a choice to start Crunchbang Linux in live mode or to install the software.

I chose to run the live mode first just to make sure there were no glaring problems that would prevent me using Crunchbang on this laptop and the live mode worked perfectly well.

I then looked for the install option from within the live mode but could not find it. I pulled up the alternative menu and typed install and there were various options available but none of them started an installer.

I therefore decided to reboot the computer and install using the "Install" menu option.

The Crunchbang install process was actually pretty good. I like an installer that runs in a clear linear fashion without jumping around.

You basically go through the usual steps of choosing a language, keyboard layout and timezone and you are also asked for a username and password so that you don't have to run Crunchbang as root.

Then comes the partitioning bit. If you are installing Crunchbang so that it overwrites everything on the disk then there is a simple install routine that enables you to do this. You can also choose to create a separate home partition and even separate usr, var and boot partitions.

If you are installing alongside Windows then you would need to know what you are doing with regards to partitioning beforehand. There is no simple Mint or Ubuntu install alongside Windows option.

First Impressions

The Crunchbang Linux screen loads with it's familiar black screen. At the top is a taskbar with icons in the top right for connecting to the internet, clipboard manager, battery monitor, audio settings and a clock.

A really useful feature of Crunchbang is the information on the right side of the screen.

There are two categories of information displayed. The first category is system information and this shows your computer name, uptime, ram, swap usage, disk usage and cpu usage. What is remarkable is how well Crunchbang Linux is performing. Memory usage is just 100 megabytes and of course there is no swap usage. The CPU is sitting at 1%. It is all very slick.

The second category is a list of shortcut keys that can be used. First of all there is the run dialog which can be called up by press Alt and F2.

The run dialog enables you to type in the name of the program and run it. Other shortcut commands bring up various menus. For example Alt and F3 brings up a menu at the bottom of the screen. Again you can start typing a program name but this time a list of available applications is shown with each keystroke.

There are shortcut keys for bringing up the main menu (super key and space) and then there are shortcut keys for bringing up the most commonly used programs such as super and w for bringing up a web browser and super and t for bringing up a terminal window.

Connecting to the internet

Crunchbang automatically detected the wireless card within the laptop and my wireless connections were made instantly available.

All I had to do was enter the security key and I was connected.

Post Installation Tasks

When you run Crunchbang Linux for the first time a terminal window is displayed with post installation instructions.

This is a really useful script that helps you install a few extras. There are 13 installation steps but some of the steps rely on you saying yes to certain options.

The sort of options available in the post installation script include updating the software repositories, updating the software packages, setting up printer support, installing java, installing LibreOffice and installing development tools.

Change the desktop wallpaper

The main thing that put me off Crunchbang when I first tried it last year and indeed this time is the ultra black wallpaper.

Adjusting the wallpaper is simply a case of bringing up the main menu (right click on the desktop), choose settings and then change wallpaper.

There are a number of wallpapers available but all of them are quite dark or not very inspiring. There are loads of wallpapers available on the internet though so I downloaded one and it appeared in the list within Nitrogen (wallpaper manager).

Applications

Crunchbang Linux is a lightweight distribution and the applications installed by default match the lightweight ethos:

Accessories

Catfish - File search tool
Archive - File compression
Geany - Text editor
Task Manager - Task Manager
Terminator - Terminal
Thunar - File Manager

Graphics

GIMP - Graphics editor
Viewnior - Image viewer
Screenshot - Screengrabber

Multimedia

VLC - Media player
Volume control
XFBurn - CD/DVD burner

Networks

Iceweasel - Web Browser (+ installers for Chrome, Firefox and Opera)
gFTP - FTP Client
Transmission - Torrents
XChat - IRC
Gigolo - Remote Connections
VNC Viewer - VNC Client (+ installer for VNC Server)
SSH
Installer for Dropbox

Office

Link to Google Docs
Abiword
Gnumeric
LibreOffice (You can install this from the first run wizard)

Other

Synaptic - Package Manager
GParted - Partition Editor

Installing Applications

Crunchbang doesn't come with a default audio player. I think you are expected to use VLC.

If I am using a lightweight system then I like to use Guayadeque. Guayadeque has grown on me the more I use it. When I first started using it I really didn't like it all that much because it isn't immediately intuitive but when you get used to the way it works then it does really work.

Guayadeque isn't installed by default so I loaded Synaptic to install Guayadeque. Synaptic is easy to use. Just type the program name or a description of the program in the search box and a list of suitable applications is displayed.

Guayadeque is in the default repositories and therefore is displayed straight away. Simply mark the application and click apply to install.

Synaptic enables you to mark a number of applications and install them all at once and it finds all the dependencies that are required to make the applications run.

One thing that has to be mentioned is that installed applications do not instantly get added to the menu. You have to edit an XML file and then click the reconfigure Openbox menu item for the downloaded application to appear.

Flash and MP3

To test Flash I load up a browser and go to Youtube. The default browser in Crunchbang is Iceweasel. Iceweasel is a forked version of Firefox. You can install other browsers within Crunchbang by going to the Network menu and clicking the installer of the browser you prefer to use.

Flash was installed correctly and I was able to watch videos straight away.

I tried to play a song within Guayadeque and instantly hit the Gstreamer error that is common across many distributions. (Missing plugin)

To get around the missing plugin error I loaded Synaptic and installed the GStreamer Ugly plugin.

I was then able to listen to Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride" from the 1980s. Don't ask me why I chose to do that. It really isn't relevant to the review in any way whatsoever.

Summary

There are some distributions that have a lot of glitz and glamour and they lack functionality (if these distributions were people my nan would say they were "all skirt and no knickers"). There are other distributions that are built for do-ers. (and of course there are some that provide Glitz and glamour as well as functionality).

Crunchbang is built for do-ers. The people that use Crunchbang are not bothered about gestures or flashy graphics.

Crunchbang is for people that have a purpose for their computer and the operating system is a tool to help them achieve that purpose. I would imagine that Crunchbang would be great for software development.

The performance of Crunchbang is absolutely brilliant. It is fast and sleek and uses very few of the system resources made available to it. If you have an older computer it is ideal.

I would suggest that Crunchbang is not for people new to Linux unless they are computer savvy to start with. If you have been using a Ubuntu type distribution for a few years and you have become competent enough to not need the pretty menus and graphics then Crunchbang will give you a lot of your computer's power back in your hands.

One thing I would change? the black wallpaper.

Thankyou for reading.

Click here to download Crunchbang #!

Click here to buy Crunchbang #! on DVD or USB

Connecting via VNC to Raspberry PI from the Google Nexus 7

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 22:09:00 +0000

Introduction

This guide provides a step by step method of connecting the Google Nexus 7 Android tablet to the Raspberry PI using VNC.

You will need

For this tutorial you will need a Raspberry PI running Raspbian Wheezy. (Read this guide which shows how to set up the Raspberry PI).

You will also need a working internet connection on the Raspberry PI. (Read this guide which shows how to set up a wireless connection on the Raspberry PI).

You will also need a Google Nexus 7 Tablet PC (Android 4.1 Jellybean) - 16 GB.

Installing the server

Boot the Raspberry PI (Doesn't matter if you have X started or not)
Make sure you have an internet connection.
If you booted into the Graphical Desktop double click the LXTerminal icon on the desktop.
Type the following into the terminal window that opens:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
A message will appear asking whether you are sure you want to install the tightvncserver. Press y.
A bunch of text will now scroll up the screen telling you what is being installed and how long there is to go.
When the software has finished installing enter the following command to start the server:

vncserver :1 -geometry 1200x720 -depth 16 -pixelformat rgb565
The first time you run the above command you will not have any settings saved so you will be asked for a password which the user must use to connect to the PI via the VNC. You will be asked to repeat the same password.

Note that if you choose a password longer than 8 characters it is truncated.
You will now be asked if you want to set a readonly password. If you do then select yes and enter a readonly password.
A message will now appear stating that settings have been saved in /home/pi/.vnc. You now have a running server.

So what did we actually do here?

In steps 1 to 3 we booted the PI, connected to the internet and opened a terminal window.

In steps 4 to 6 we installed the tightvncserver software

In step 7 we started the vnc server

In steps 8 and 9 we set the password a user should use to log in via VNC

In step 7 I said we started the server but what does the command vncserver :1 -geometry 1200x720 -depth 16 -pixelformat rgb565 actually mean.

The vncserver part is obviously starting the server.

By default the vnc server starts running on port 5900. The :1 is the display number. What this means is that when you run the vnc client you need to specify port 5901. If you set the display number to :2 you would need to specify port 5902 and so on.

The -geometry part of the command specifies the screen resolution to use within the client and the -depth specifies the colour depth.

Installing the client

There are loads of VNC clients available on the Android platform but for this guide I have chosen AndroidVNC. It is free and it works.

On the Google Nexus 7 open the Play Store.
Click the search icon and type VNC Viewer.
The first result should be android-vnc-viewer. Click the icon for this app.
Click the install button

Connect to the Raspberry PI

The first thing you need to know is your IP address on the Raspberry PI. To get this enter the following in a terminal window:

ifconfig
If you are connect wirelessly the IP address will be next to the wlan0 entry and will be something like 192.168.1.x (where x is the last number).
Open AndroidVNC (it will be one of the installed apps)
Leave the nickname field blank.
Enter the password you entered in step 8 of "Installing the server".
In the Address field enter the IP address from step 2.
In the port number enter 5901.
Click the connect button.

If everything has gone smoothly you should have a Google Nexus 7 connected to the Raspberry PI.

Run the VNC server at startup

I'm not sure running the VNC server when booting is a good idea by the way. If you are never going to use your Raspberry PI with a monitor then I guess there is a case for starting the VNC server every time you boot but if you generally use your Raspberry PI with a monitor but occasionally plan to use another device to connect to the PI then I would use SSH to connect to the PI and start the VNC server from within the SSH session. Read the next section to see how to do this.

To run the VNC server at startup following these steps:

Open a terminal window by clicking the LXTerminal icon on the desktop.
Run the following command

sudo nano /etc/init.d/vncserver
Enter the following script into the window (partly copied from http://www.abdevelopment.ca/blog/start-vnc-server-ubuntu-boot)

#!/bin/sh -e
export USER="pi"
# parameters for tightvncserver
DISPLAY="1"
DEPTH="16"
GEOMETRY="1200x720"
NAME="VNCserver"
OPTIONS="-name ${NAME} -depth ${DEPTH} -geometry ${GEOMETRY} :${DISPLAY}"
. /lib/lsb/init-functions
case "$1" in
start)
log_action_begin_msg "Starting vncserver for user '${USER}' on localhost:{$DISPLAY}"
su ${USER} -c "/usr/bin/vncserver ${OPTIONS}"
;;
stop)
log_action_begin_msg "Stopping vncserver for user '${USER}' on localhost:{$DISPLAY}"
su ${USER} -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -kill :${DISPLAY}"
;;
restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
;;
esac
exit 0
The script above now needs to be made executable. To do this type the following command into the terminal window:

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/vncserver
Now run the following command

sudo update-rc.d vncserver defaults.
At this stage it is worth testing that you have entered the script correctly. To do this run the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/vncserver start
If there are errors when you run the command in step 6 check that you have the same commands as in step 3 above.
If there are no errors try and connect to the Raspberry PI using your Google Nexus.
The final test is to reboot your Raspberry PI and then attempt to connect to the Google Nexus.

So what did we do in this section?

In step 1 we opened a terminal window.

In step 2 we opened a text file called vncserver which is a shell script that will start when the Raspberry PI starts.

In step 3 we created the script that is run.

In step 4 we made the script executable. (otherwise it really is just a text file),

In step 5 we turned it into a service that starts at boot up.

In steps 6 and 7 we test the server by starting it manually.

In step 8 we rebooted the Raspberry PI,

In step 9 we try connecting to it.

Now the script may look complicated but essentially it is building the same tightvncserver command used in the first section.

If you specify start when running the script as in step 6 then the tightvncserver command will run. If you specify stop when running the script then the server will stop.

If you specify restart when running the script the server will stop and then start.

The default option is to start.

My preferred method for connecting to the PI

I'm not that keen on running the VNC server every time I start up the PI. I think it is better to make the decision to start it when you want to.

If you followed the section to start the VNC server every time then first of all you will need to reverse step 5.

The way to do that is by running the following command from a terminal window

sudo update-rc.d -f vncserver remove

The problem now is that to be able to VNC onto the Raspberry PI you need to be able to start the server. The problem with that is that you need to be on the PI to do that.

I recommend therefore installing an SSH client onto your Google Nexus 7.

On the Google Nexus 7 open the Play Store.
Click the search icon and type SSH Client
The client I chose was called "Connectbot". Click the icon for this app.
Click the install button

To connect to the Raspberry PI from connectbot:

Run connectbot
In the bar at the bottom type pi@192.168.1.x (where x is the last number of your IP address)
Now enter the password for your pi user
Once you are connected run sudo /etc/init.d/vncserver start

Your VNC server should have started again and you can run AndroidVNC to connect to it again.

Summary

You should now be able to use your Raspberry PI without having to use a HDMI cable connected to a monitor or television. In theory you can now plug it in anywhere in the house as long as you have a wireless signal to the router.

You can use most of these instructions for connecting to the Raspberry PI from any computer. You just need to have a VNC Viewer on the client computer and an SSH client.

Thankyou for reading.

Everyday Linux User Review Of SolusOS

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:44:00 +0000

Introduction

SolusOS is a Linux Distribution based on Debian Stable. It's an operating system for your computer, that provides the base system that allows you to do things like listen to music, browse the internet and create documents.

In this week's review I have started with the opening paragraph on the SolusOS website. Last week I wrote a review about Snowlinux 4 to see if that operating system achieved everything it set out to achieve. Unfortunately I think it fell short because it stated that it intended to be easy to use with a carefully selected range of software.

As someone with a lot of computing experience and a fair amount of experience using Linux I found that for an average person the installation could cause some issues and there were problems with setting up the internet. In addition to this, the software installed did not provide a complete solution.

This week I am happy to report that I think SolusOS really does live up to the statement made on its website. SolusOS is very stable, is easy to use and comes with a complete set of software for the average user.

Installation

The installer for SolusOS is the same as the one for Snowlinux so this may cause problems for users new to Linux and I will explain why shortly.

The installation starts easily enough.

Choose your language
Choose your timezone
Choose your keyboard layout

Then comes the trickier bit for your average Joe.

First of all you are asked which drive you wish to install SolusOS to. Now for a Linux user this makes perfect sense but if you are a Windows user then you are used to drives being called C:, D:, E: etc. Linux names drives differently and not only that it depends on the type of drive what the naming convention is.

This is of course not the fault of SolusOS or Snowlinux as it is just the way things are done in Linux but it can be made simpler. Linux Mint and Ubuntu give options such as replace your existing operating system or install alongside your current operating system which for a novice makes the installation a much more accessible option.

Moving on to step 5 you are then asked how to partition your drives and also after partitioning you have to set the root drive. The partitioning bit would make many would be Linux converts turn away in fear.

The Ubuntu and Linux Mint installers I think work better in that for novices they give an option that works but they also give a partitioning tool for the more experienced user.

Step 6 is to enter the name of the main user of the system along with a password and a host name for the system.

Step 7 asks which drive is to be used for the GRUB bootloader and step 8 asks you to confirm your settings before installing SolusOS.

First Run Wizard

When you run SolusOS for the first time a wizard appears.

There are five steps to the wizard.

Useful Links
Internet Connection setup / Firewall setup
Detected hardware
Setup updates
Donate to SolusOS

You can run the first start wizard at any time by selecting it from the settings menu, although it would make more sense just to pick the network connections manager, the firewall manager or the update manager as the chances that you need to configure all the options again are slim.

First Impressions

SolusOS uses Gnome 2.30 which is a blast from the past for many Linux users. It looks great and it runs smoothly and performance wise it is fantastic.

The layout for SolusOS is like a lot of Linux distributions and would be familiar for most Windows users.

There is a plain desktop with a taskbar at the bottom. There is a menu button in the bottom left and a system tray in the bottom right with icons for networking, battery power, audio and messages. There is also of course a clock.

Clicking the menu button brings up a fairly nice menu with two main panes and a search box. The menu makes it easy to navigate SolusOS.

Firstly there is the search box. Enter the name of the program or the type of application you are searching for and it will appear in the right hand pane. Alternatively you can select the category on the left hand pane to produce a list of results in the right hand pane.

From the menu you can also bring up the control centre which enables you to perform system functions such as change desktop effects, desktop background, set up Flash, set up hardware, install applications etc.

Change the desktop background

As with a lot of Linux distributions (and Windows really) the default wallpaper is fairly bland and it is nice to change it to something more in tune with your own personality.

In SolusOS it is easy to change the desktop background by right clicking on the desktop and then selecting "Change desktop background".

SolusOS has a range of wallpapers to choose from but if you don't like any of the stock images click the "Add" button and choose one of your own images.

In addition to just changing the desktop background you can also add some effects using the Compiz Settings Manager.

There are a number of effects to choose from such as fading windows and wobbly windows and animation effects which means you can personalise the experience as much or as little as you want to.

Connecting to the internet

SolusOS works straight out of the box. I was sat on a train when I first started typing this post and I was able to see the wireless connections for the train company, a few home wireless connections and some which were clearly people's mobile phones.

I managed to connect to my own mobile phone there and then using the internet connection sharing wizard on my phone. I have since also managed to connect to my home mobile broadband and my home broadband connection.

Flash and MP3

SolusOS makes it as easy as possible for users. Flash is installed by default as are the MP3 codecs required to play music.

This means, music, video, games etc work straight out of the box.

Applications

Sometimes when I install a Linux distribution I wonder why I had to download 800mb of ISO. The reason for this is that some distributions provide a full set of applications such as LibreOffice, Rhythmbox, VLC Player and WINE and other distributions for the same size give you Abiword and Gnumeric and that is it.

Fortunately SolusOS is one of those distributions where you get the full deal straight away as you can see below:

Accessories

File Roller (Archive Manager)
Calculator
gEdit - Text Editor
Terminal

Games

PlayOnLinux

Graphics

GnuPaint (Similar to Windows Paint)
gThumb (image viewer)
Simplescan

Internet

Dropbox (online file storage)
Firefox (web browser)
Thunderbird (email client)
Pidgin (Messenger)
Transmission (Bittorrent)
xChat (IRC Chat)

Office

Libreoffice Base (Access clone)
Libreoffice Calc (Spreadsheets)
Libreoffice Impress (Presentations)
Libreoffice writer (Word processing)

Sound and Video

Brasero (Disc burning)
Cheese (Webcam viewer)
Gnome mPlayer (Movie player)
Minitube (Youtube viewer)
Movie Player (Movie Player)
Openshot video editor
Rhythmbox (Audio Player)
VLC (Video Player)

System

Synaptic (Package Management)
WINE (Run Windows applications in SoluSOS)

There are various other applications but the ones highlighted above are the main ones. You will notice the duplication when it comes to movie players. I think the reason for this is that some you get when installing Gnome by default and the developers obviously decided there were better ones to include.

Installing Applications

SolusOS uses Synaptic for package management.

Synaptic is fairly easy to use. In the left hand pane there are a list of categories and in the right hand pane there are the applications within that category.

If you click on an application a description will appear at the bottom of the right pane.

Installing applications is a two step process. The first step is to mark the applications you wish to install and then you click "Apply" to install the applications. Dependencies on other applications are automatically marked.

Summary

Does SolusOS live up to it's promises? The answer to that is yes. SolusOS is easy to use, comes fully featured with all the necessary multimedia codecs and Flash installed and has a really good selection of applications.

The installer could do with a bit of work. I think the installer will put potential Windows users off unless they are computer savvy to start with. Having said that of course it is unlikely that non computer savvy users would ever attempt to install a new operating system.

Gnome 2 is still great and for anyone with an older machine SolusOS is a brilliant choice. The downside of SolusOS using Gnome 2 is that at some point a decision has to be made. Will SolusOS remain on Gnome 2 or move over to MATE or XFCE.

It is easy to see why SolusOS is riding high on Distrowatch. It really provides a no hassle approach to computing.

Thankyou for reading.

Click here to download SolusOS

Click here to buy SolusOS on DVD or USB

Everyday Linux User Review of Snowlinux 4

noreply@blogger.com (Gary Newell) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:21:00 +0000

Introduction

What is white and can't connect to the internet? It really is snow joke.

The description of Snowlinux on distrowatch reads as follows:

Snowlinux is a set of Linux distributions based on Debian's latest stable release and featuring four different desktop environments - GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce. It aims to be user-friendly, incorporating many useful tweaks and carefully selected software applications. The project also develops a separate, Ubuntu-based edition featuring the MATE (a GNOME 2 fork) desktop.

For this review I decided to use the Xfce edition which is based on Debian's latest stable release.

The machine I installed Snowlinux onto is an Acer Aspire One D255 netbook.

Installation

The first three steps of the installation are fairly straight forward.

Choose your language
Choose your timezone
Choose your keyboard layout

The next few steps require some knowledge of disk partitioning which might scare away people who haven't used Linux before.

Ubuntu and Mint provide a few easy options for users which will make them feel comfortable such as "Replace your current OS" and "Install alongside your current OS".

Snowlinux does not provide such comfort but this isn't a criticism because there are many distributions that do not provide such simple options. Really it is a good idea to understand how partitioning disks really works as opposed to allowing distributions like Ubuntu to do it all for you.

Snowlinux requires you to think about how you want to set up your installation.

If the disk is completely blank then a message will appear asking you whether to allow Snowlinux to work out the best way to partition the disks.

Either way you are shown the available disks and the partitions on the disk and you must then choose how to set up the partitions and on which partition to install Snowlinux.

The partitioning of disks is outwith the confines of a review.

For my partitioning I set up a 20 gb primary partition formatted to ext4 for installing Snowlinux.

I then set up a second 20gb primary partition formatted to ext4 for another operating system that I intend to review next week.

I set up a home partition for the rest of the disk minus 8gb also formatted to ext4. The 8gb was used for the swap partition.

It is imperative that one of the partitions is set to be the root partition so I set the first primary partition to be the root partition (/).

The final three steps are more straight forward.

Choose your username, password and machine name
Choose where to install the bootloader
Review the choices of the installation script and install.

At this point Snowlinux will install and it is possible to reboot into a new version of Snowlinux.

Before installing Linux and partitioning disks you should always back up any important files and folders and make sure you have a way to recover if the unexpected should occur.

First Impressions

I have used XFCE quite a bit over the past few months so the Snowlinux 4 interface is fairly familiar. The look and feel should be quite familiar to Windows users as well.

There is a taskbar at the bottom of the screen with a menu button, quick launch bar, a system tray and a clock.

On the desktop there icons for the home folder, the wastebasket and all available disks.

If you would like to customise the XFCE desktop you can follow this guide which explains how to do so. It was written back in November. 2012 when I started reviewing Xubuntu but should work for all distributions running XFCE.

The desktop

The Snowlinux desktop is a little bit bland but there are a whole host of stock photos available in /usr/share/xfce4/backdrops.

To change the background right click on the desktop and choose "desktop settings".

The desktop settings screen will appear.

Click the plus symbol (+) to add a new background image.

Navigate to the folder where the backdrops are located and choose the image you wish to use as the background.

You can of course use an image you downloaded from the internet as well.

Connecting to the internet

Now this is where the difficulties began.

With every distribution there is always one little thing that causes an issue that you have to find a solution for. More often than not the issue is to do with playing MP3s but very rarely do I ever have a problem connecting to the internet anymore.

Imagine my surprise when I clicked the little network icon in the system tray only to find out there were no available wireless networks.

My first thought was that because Snowlinux is based on Debian it must be a driver that needs to be downloaded.

Now this is of course an issue. If your sole method of getting online is to use a wireless connection then not being able to get on wirelessly makes it very difficult to download drivers.

I have a USB wireless dongle that I normally use for my Raspberry PI so I borrowed this for the netbook but this didn't work either.

Luckily I have another computer so I looked online to find out which drivers I might need and there were several suggestions.

After a few downloads I was able to get the TPLink USB dongle to connect to the internet but the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 controller inside the Acer Aspire One just would not work.

I would like to be able to tell you what I did to fix the problem but I'm not sure which step it was that fixed the issue. If you follow this link then you will get some of the ideas I worked through. First of all I installed an earlier version of the kernel and I set 11n_disable=1 which sped the internet up. However what I can't explain is that now I'm running the original kernel that was installed with Snowlinux again and the wireless is working. If anyone has an explanation as to what may be wrong with Intel Centrino Wireless-N controllers please feel free to leave a comment below.

What occurs to me is that this is a real step backwards. I'm not sure whether this is just an issue for Snowlinux or other distributions as well. Is it a kernel issue? Wireless connectivity works fine with Ubuntu, Mint and all derivatives that I have tried. Do they run a different kernel that just doesn't have the problem? Is this a problem that is going to come to light again and again in the future? Time will tell I guess on this one.

Connectivity issues are like buses, you get no issues for ages and then two come along at once.

The second connectivity issue was that whilst choosing a wireless connection I received the following error:

To get around the "Failed to add/activate connection" error I followed this guide.

Flash and MP3

Flash did not work straight away but it was easy enough to install via the Synaptic package manager although there is another issue to discuss later on regarding Synaptic.

After installing the Flash package from the repository I was able to watch videos on Youtube.

To test playing MP3s I loaded Rhythmbox.

I was expecting to get an error but was pleasantly surprised when the song "Safe Home" by "Anthrax" blasted out into the living room. My wife was less impressed.

Applications

I can't speak for every version of Snowlinux but the XFCE version is very light when it comes to the applications that are installed by default.

Accessories

Application Finder - Find applications
Orage Globaltime - Clocks from different timezones
Root Terminal - Terminal (logged in as Root, a password is required)
Thunar File Manager - File manager

Graphics

Shotwell - Photo management
Simple Scan - Scanning application

Internet

Firefox - Web browser
Thunderbird - Email client
Pidgin - Instant Messenger
Transmission - BitTorrent

Multimedia

Audio mixer - Volume control
Brasero - CD/DVD burner
Movie player - Movie Player
Rhythmbox - Audio Player

Office

Abiword - Word processor
Orage Calendar - Calendar application
Orage Globaltime - Clocks from different timezones (duplicate)

Installing Applications

The default package manager in Snowlinux is Synaptic.

This is where my next problem occurred.

Synaptic won't load from the menu.

The only way I could get it to work was to open a terminal and type "sudo synaptic".

Summary

To begin to summarise Snowlinux I will refer back to the aim of Snowlinux which is to "be user-friendly, incorporating many useful tweaks and carefully selected software applications."

Snowlinux isn't particularly user friendly. There are just too many hurdles to get around.

Installing Snowlinux is possibly too challenging for some would-be newcomers to Linux and the problems connecting to the internet were issues I thought were left in the past. Add to this the problem with the permissions and the inability to run Synaptic from the menu and it could get very frustrating.

XFCE is clearly a good choice because as a desktop environment it is very familiar and very easy to customise, however the software choices don't seem particularly "carefully selected. There is no real office suite (just Abiword) and there are no games.

To be honest there is nothing to identify Snowlinux ahead of other distributions. I intend to try the MATE version out to see if I get a better experience.

Thankyou for reading.