Category: Linux/Open Source

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).