Category: Linux/Open Source

I thought I’d do a quick post detailing my return to Ubuntu.

I installed 12.04 LTS Precise Penguin last June  and experienced a variety of small issues. Mainly I experienced crashes related to memory dumps — often with mounting file systems or loading music libraries. I thought it might be related to my ATI video card or just with the fact that Ubuntu was still receiving bug reports. My main goal in using Linux was to have a test server environment for  a new CMS for my Personville Press site.

I managed to fix most of my user issues (mainly with dropbox) , while I had to live with several others: Oxygen XML Editor was incredibly slow, and I still had not found a decent desktop blogging editor.

Let me define what the problem is: Bloggers need a desktop client for linux which has a preview mode, an  offline mode which you can save  (if necessary) and the ability to withstand a browser crash.  Optionally the  Windows Live does this well (although over time I have noticed some deficincies  — crappy code). The greatest thing about Windows Live is that it was very reliable and did all of these things. (Update: I just checked Live Office 365 which I paid for…Its blog client incorporates most of Live Writer’s elements, while leaving out some important things — like the ability to position an image in terms of pixels instead of inches).

Because Windows Live produced good clean code (basically), had a preview mode and a save/restore mode, it was basically better than MS Office itself….. I tried several linux blogging clients. The best so far I’d seen is blogilo, which has a lot of Live’s features, but just isn’t as reliable (it also hasn’t been updated in a while). More importantly, I lost some work…and I don’t think I ever lost work in Live Writer.

At someone’s recommendation, I am trying Scribe Fire (a browser plugin). This doesn’t really solve the offline mode problem, but it is better than nothing. On the other hand, the WordPress rich text editor is so good and reliable that you might as well do that from another browser. WordPress does autosaving, so if the browser crashes, you are protected generally (thanks, Matt).

Last summer, just as I was getting comfortable and productive in Linux, I had two major projects in MS Office, so I had to live in Windows Vista for a long while. Then I started learning about some Windows music tools and  and then was already comfortable using Oxygen in Windows (it had all my settings configured).  Then, I started doing a lot of music-related research for my upcoming ebook on music collecting  that involved Windows tools. Despite my resolution to have a working Linux desktop, I spent almost all of it in Windows.

Finally, I’m ready to return to Ubuntu, first having to do some updates. Here are some things I discovered:

1. Ubuntu and specifically Unity  is much more stable than before. Horray! Also, more apps are built into the Unity framework. I know Linux people have been ragging on Unity, but I loved it from day 1.
2. The Firefox flash plugin still causes problems — especially for Youtube. This firefox plugin lets you set the Youtube default to play the HTML 5 video player.
3. The Clementine music player (which was the fork from Amarok 1.4 before they ran it into the ground) is awesome and stable. It even makes me less inclined to try Foobar2000 on Wine.
4. There is an linux client for Evernote called Everpad.
5. Music streaming program Rdio now has official linux support for their client.
6. It wasn’t too hard to find, but gpodder podcast client for linux seems to work well.

Another thing. I noticed that Ubuntu works significantly better on my dual boot machine than Windows Vista (which has lots of Firefox-related memory problems and Flash memory problems). Vista is just slow and especially slow to boot.  (Ubuntu by contrast boots in record time). Windows Explorer is ridiculously slow.  Despite the fact that my HW is  6+ years old, its specs are still good:  4 gigs of RAM and lots of HD space. So a new 64 bit OS will have to work much better and faster than an OS several years old which has been patched to death.

So I’m generally happy with my Ubuntu machine and don’t expect to have to revert to Windows (especially because my Win 7 laptop is several feet away). On that laptop I have several indispensable  programs which simply must run on Window: dbpoweramp, Camtasia, Sony Vegas, MS Live Office 365.

Postscript: One very annoying thing is that Firefox is continuously showing a Flash plugin error whenever a website (like my blog) requires flash. Need to figure out how to turn that message  off because (on my system at least) the player and Youtube does work, so the error message is in fact mistaken.  (Solution found: go to about:config, set value for plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin to True).

Update #2. I’m about ready to give up again on the Unity Window Manager. Really, I had high hopes. I like the interface a lot; I can get things done  quickly, and everything is intuitive. The problem is that it always crashes catastrophically. Whenever I have an application crash (Firefox, etc), the windows manager crashes and then Ubuntu needs to be rebooted. I’ve been rebooting an average of 5 times a day at least.

Here’s a thread I started last summer about alternative window managers. Unfortunately, from a usability point of view, none of the other window managers came close. Now that I’ve decided to ditch Unity 2D, I’m going to have to try again. Here’s a more recent discussion about Ubuntu stability issues. What would be interesting (and sad) is if these random crashes still occur in other windows managers. Then, I  would be in bad shape.

(PS, I am typing this in Windows).

Update #3. My computer crashed and I re-installed Ubuntu on a slightly newer PC.  I learned a few important things. First, with a decent video card, I could use the 3-D Unity. In terms of performance, my PC handles Unity much better, but more importantly the application darkens whenever the app uses too much CPU or memory. When I used Ubuntu before, I think I had tried the 2-D Unity, which apparently didn’t have this feedback feature. I don’t think I’ve had to reboot once. Ironically on my new machine I have only 3 gig of RAM (I had 4 gig before), but because of the better video card and the darkening window, I have avoided any catastrophic crashes. Sometimes a specific app will hang (I’m looking at you, Firefox!), but most of the time it’s just a matter of waiting for the memory usage to decline to more manageable levels.

I stopped reading slashdot a few years ago. It became really popular and it was overwhelming to read. Besides, there were all these corporation-oriented topics and tight control over news stories. I jumped ship and went to Digg (which lasted about 6 months before I grew bored with that as well).

I wrote several book reviews for Slashdot and was delighted to find they were being run. Then, two of my stories were rejected without good reason, and Slashdot’s luster seemed to fade for me. Also, their interface for viewing threads was insufferable. They switched to an ajax interface, and I could never figure out the best way to view things.

But now that Slashdot has lost web traffic to other geek sites, many of the loyalists remain and the last few times I’ve visited Slashdot, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Today, I read on slashdot that the SCO vs. IBM and Novell lawsuit (this crazy and baseless lawsuit which became a subject of hilarious ridicule) is now reinstated after a judge rejected a previous summary judgment. I just read a discussion about transgender and was amazed to find that at least 5 of the commenters were transgendered. From a discussion  about why linux battery life sucks, I see this great comment:

My first Linux install was Slackware (if I remember correctly)…back in 1998. That’s 10 years. And for all 10 of those years, my experience with Linux has been like this…

Linux Community: ‘This new version of Linux is totally great. Easy to use, great hardware support, best Linux ever. Totally better than Windows!’
Me: "Ummm, that’s cool and all – but I have a problem with X"
Linux Community: "*I* don’t have a problem with X! I don’t even believe you have a problem. Where is your proof? It’s totally not a problem with Linux, if it’s even a real problem at all."
Me: "Umm…okay. Well…all I want to do is be able to X (where X was get on the internet, hear sound, use a wireless network card, have decent battery life – all of which were or are problems). Here’s more information….
Linux Community: "You are using Y? Y is worthless. Everyone knows Y isn’t supported in Linux because of XYZ. You either need to write your own driver or get a real Y."
Me: "Can you tell me, specifically, what Y I should buy?"
Linux Community: "*I* have ABC and it works great. But it’s more than just what is on the box, it’s the chipset and stuff. It’s kind of hit or miss.’
Me: ‘Wtf? This sucks….I’m going to run Windows’
Linux Community: ‘N0ob.’

*six months later*

Linux Community: "Great news! We’ve totally made it so you can do X"
Me: ‘Wait, last time you told me you could do X, and that it was easy, and free, and better than Windows. When I said I had problem doing X, you all told me I was crazy and to RTFM!’
Linux Community: ‘Oh well….yeah…in the past, we’ve had some problems with X. Some users couldn’t do X at all, but now we’ve totally fixed it! Now Linux is is totally great. Easy to use, great hardware support, best Linux ever. Totally better than Windows!”

——–

You get the idea. Months after getting flamed for complaining about how my wireless network adapter doesn’t work in Linux, the Linux community raves about how they’ve improved wireless support.

I’ve had plenty of problems with Windows….but when I have a problem with Windows, at the very least, people *believe me*.

After lots of people  rise up to defend the Linux community, some snarky guy comments:

This post is exactly what is wrong with Linux advocates. Instead of answering the question – why does Linux die when watching DVDs where other OSes don’t – the GP blames the user and suggests another, harder way to do the same thing.

Well, I had been worrying unnecessarily about installing fedora 7 on my laptop. Sure, it was a pain downloading the DVD and backing up data, but this time it didn’t present me with a lot of choices and installed things fairly quietly. Also, the dual boot situation wasn’t messed up at all.
Right now, it’s upgrading the packages with pup. I have yet to try wifi. I expect that to be a pain, but certainly easier than it was before. I also have to install proprietary applications (and the forbidden items ), but things are going quickly now. My main fear is that some of my configuration files in my home directories will confuse my installations. Apparently, ntfs write is substantially more reliable than it used to be, so I might be in fedora more often than I used to. Frankly, I stay in windows only for two reasons:

1. recording in Audacity–I have a usb adapter that doesn’t seem to work in linux.
2. demoing ebook software.

My main disappointment with linux solutions is that I couldn’t get my nokia pda to sync with my linux calendar. That was a reason I ended up buying a Dell Axim PocketPC pda.

Update: Wifi worked out of the box (in Gnome anyway). There are advantages to keeping your /home directory. Now if only I can figure out the absolutely bizarre way to download mp3 libraries (and perhaps other codecs). (Here’s a solution for downloading all those closed codecs). Here’s the fedora 7 tips page. Here’s another tips page. You gotta hand it to Fedora though.  They’re losing the mindshare war to ubuntu because of these damn libraries and codecs, and they won’t compromise!

Speaking of totally bizzare, here’s instructions on how to run IE on linux fedora.  I won’t be trying that anytime soon.

I just noticed that Fedora is no longer supporting FC5. lately I’ve noticed that support of things is waning: most notably Firefox 2. So now I’m faced with the perilous prospect of beginning another install on an older laptop. I would need to reinstall commercial applications, make a list of things I’ve installed and do the requisite backups. It would be a major time sink.

Oddly enough, last Monday I made significant progress getting started with plone 3. To install FC 7, I would need to start from scratch. Also, there are potential gotchas (I seem to recall my Thinkpad doesn’t allow install from DVD). Also, the wifi chip on my Thinkpad did horrible things when I first installed FC5. It took me a good 2 weeks of persistent troubleshooting Wifi to get it to work. I am not really in a position to waste time on unproductive activities.

So what do I do? At minimum, this is going to take a day and a half, possibly more if something fouls up. Someone suggested running the LiveCD to test hardware, a sensible idea if I ever heard of one. Also, apparently now you can boot the Live CD and then use an iso image from a hard drive. So Fedora people are making it easy. (Here’s an article about Fedora 7).

Still, it looks like Ubuntu has made the problem of forbidden downloads (i.e., java, mp3, adobe, etc) much more palatable to ordinary users. (Fedora doesn’t seem to have changed on its policies).

Although I finally managed to tackle my laptop wifi problem on Fedora Core 5, I really haven’t done much work on the Thinkpad T43 laptop until last week. But since then I have really been falling in love. I never realized how much I had fallen in love until I came across someone running a version of Red Hat from 2003. It’s like night and day. Observations:

• FC5’s default is Gnome. I like it because of its simplicity (and more importantly, because I like the Network Manager, which only seems to show up in the Gnome toolbar). But it has problems. The File Manager always opens up a new window when you click on it and lacks a two panel view you typically see in File Explorers. KDE’s Konqueror is an unusually good file manager, especially if you turn on the option “Show Navigation Panel” under the Window Menu. (see my screenshot) The vertical tabs on the left side tremendously enhance the user experience, letting you change views from Root to Home to History to System. With Konqueror I am always bookmarking paths to local documentation, so that helps a lot.
• Yumex kind of sucks when you have a dependency problem. (Sometimes to run a simple utility you end up having to downloads tons of other seemingly unrelated RPMs), but generally it works smoothly.
• KDE is a bit too topheavy for me, although you can access a lot of the stuff through command line and the Konqueror file browser. That’s right; you can experience the coolness of KDE within gnome just by typing konqueror on the command line.
• I haven’t quite figured out how to create menu applets for applications even though it’s rather easy to create them on the toolbar. Too bad they don’t come with hundreds of unique generic icons. I end up using icons from little used programs to appear on the top toolbar for quick launching.
• Clipboard problems (which I always used to experience previously) now seem to have disappeared in this linux.
• I no longer have stuck windows or Xwindow problems.
• With Thinkpad I’ve had issues related to start after suspending (usually after I close the laptop). But I’ve learned not to immediately start hitting buttons but to wait for the display to flash on before doing anything.
• I haven’t implemented my backup solution yet (that’s the project for this week), but I don’t expect to have many problems.
• FC5 hasn’t really had any problems with mounting USB drives or DVD. I’ve experienced some small problems with video files, but mostly it’s a matter of knowing which codec is supported for which application.
• In Gnome I’ve noticed that some applications have gigantic dialogue boxes which go outside the main display. Really annoying. Maybe I should increase my screen resolution? (I’m at 1024 x 768).
• Although I haven’t downloaded any mp3s yet (they will be on my storage network drive when I connect that). However, I’ve noticed that the fancy mp3 players aren’t adept at playing m3u files off the net–something really strange.
• I didn’t install the ATI drivers, although I might consider doing so later.
• Although I’m happy with my laptop experience, I can’t begin to describe the hell I had to go through to get wifi to work. Eventually I just needed to reinstall the whole thing. Thank god I installed /home on a separate partition. FC5 let me reinstall without even touching /home.

Mark Pilgrim is a python/xml programmer who influenced a lot of web developers. I’ve read his great Dive into Python book and caught various essays here and there. But he’s been an erratic blogger. Now I find he is blogging (and even vlogging) on a semi-regular basis, which makes me very happy. Apparently, he has switched from Mac to Ubuntu recently, in response to some concerns about lockin. Here’s his thoughts about a Mac email client:

However, in the interests of fairness, I will amend my previous statement that Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with no possibility of exporting it to an open format. This is not true. Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with a tantalizingly broken export feature. I apologize for the confusion.

Here’s his list of essential applications he’s been using in Ubuntu  . He still uses emacs (that bastard!) but some of his other apps are more current. Here’s his rant about why open source apps don’t automatically ensure open standards:

There are more risk factors in the layer above the OS, the application layer. I still need to be vigilant about the formats that specific applications use to store data I care about preserving. Open source != open formats, and there are many examples of undocumented and underdocumented data formats in open source applications. The GIMP is a particularly egregious example. Its default .xcf format can only be read by GIMP and is deliberately undocumented outside the source code. GIMP only exports to formats with massive fidelity loss (you can export the final result but not in any editable form that includes layers and effects and brushes and so on). There are only a handful of third-party converters, and none of them are anywhere near complete. This is no better than Microsoft Office; in fact, it’s probably worse. In practice, Microsoft Office documents have better interoperability, because third parties have spent more time reverse-engineering the formats and handling all the edge cases. (Third parties are working on reverse-engineering XCF too.)

(On a gimp-related note, I’ve been reading up on gimp features and enjoy being able to leverage my knowledge on different PCs. I think Pilgrim is faulting the project when it may simply lack the resources to  document the format and handle the export filters).

Pilgrim mentioned beagle, a nifty-looking tool for searching your personal content. That includes email, multimedia, IMs, files. Apparently this gnome application was already included with the FC 5 default install. Am definitely checking that out soon.

The Beagle demos were made with  a vnc to swf screenrecording program. I’ll try that out next week.

Other interesting apps on the list: tomboy (a notetaking tool) , diva (gnome’s answer to imovie), freemind (a java applet mind mapper), bookburro (firefox book shopbot extension),  backuppc and rsnapshot . I also plan on investigating the itunes-like applications (such as amarok) after I configure my network/backup drive.

Update: I have been busy chasing down yet another wireless bug related to my Linux laptop and the Intel 2915 wireless driver/firmware. Frustrating, and yet educational. (For those who take joy in my travails, check out this thread).

There is a positive side to this. I’m reaquainting myself with the linux networking configuration files. Also, I have decided henceforth to keep a fairly detailed chart (er, well, list) of the information I gain along the way.  There’s a lot of good information on the forums, although it’s so scattered that no one really has a sense of where everything is. It’s not so much documentation as notetaking. (When I gather enough information, I’ll post it on my weblog).

Longtime readers of this blog will recall how I suffered under the agony of getting wifi to work on FC4 and inhabited the ndiswrapper limbo(which I vow never to go through again). So I bought a laptop with a well known linux Wifi driver and installed the latest-and-greatest version of Fedora Core 5 distribution.

Now, alas I find getting Wifi to work is still painful. Here’s what I’ve found:

• in previous versions of FC, it defaults to an ethernet hardware setting (and still does so in FC 5).
• in this version (which I still haven’t gotten to work) they have an earlier version of the drivers, but they don’t appear in the configuration wizards (although they do appear in the command lines–such as /sbin/lspci ).
• there’s a nice network status manager available in Gnome, but it isn’t turned on by default and you need to do so. (Here’s how to get started on that).
• Bill Moss wrote up a great little guide about updating the firmware/drivers, although it’s still very complex. (sorry, here’s the correct link). Here’s the intel GNU documentation. Apparently, you need to update the kernel and firmware and drivers and probably some configuration files as well (and update some rpms while you’re at it). Egad! (update: the kernel recompile was NOT necessary).
• Most of the instructions for configuring wifi make the assumption that you have easy access to ethernet, which is not always the case. For once, I’d like a CD to have all the tools necessary to work.
• even if you get the Intel drivers to work, you still need to download wpa_supplicant in order to have a relatively recent encryption method for wifi.

Perhaps you may think that this 2915ABG driver I’m talking about is an edge case. Actually this is default wifi hardware device for almost every single Intel-based laptop out there these days. I really have to wonder why the FC5 testers didn’t make sure it would work before they shoved this distribution out the door.

This post will detail my progress for getting the 2915ABG driver to work.

Update: I am happy to report that my problem was solved with little difficulty. (The main difficulty was getting familiar with yum commands and yumex, which was time-consuming, but not difficult. Then I downloaded the ipw2200-firmware rpm. After a reboot, the network configuration wizard (in gnome, System –> Administration –> Network) now showed my intel miniPCI card in the list of devices, and everything after that was a piece of cake.

While reading a Slashdot book review about Linux Multimedia Hacks, I wondered aloud why no one hasn’t written an up-to-date gimp book. Well, it seems that someone has (or will) . Looks like the idea for this book came from a Linux Chic email course . The author Akkana Peck has a weblog and is actively involved in linux development. Here’s a list of her favorite gimp links.
Curiously, her blog (powered by pyblosxom) has no working RSS feed (at least not one detectable by bloglines).

I am still a novice at graphic design, but I switched to Windows gimp two years ago, if only for basic photo editing. Over time, I’ve aquired a small bit of knowledge, and my video projects make it probably a good time to expand my proficiency on this.