I’ve added a new category titled ‘Linux‘. I moved a few previous posts, not all though.

If you’re curious what ubuntu is really about and where it came from, a great place to find information is Mark Shuttleworth’s writing…

“With Ubuntu, our vision is to make the very best of free software freely available, globally. To the extent we make short-term compromises, for drivers or firmware along the way, we see those as bugs, and ones that will be closed over time.” [link]

“In the 1990s, Shuttleworth participated as a developer of Debian, a computer operating system. In 2004 he returned to the Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly distribution of Linux, through his company Canonical Ltd. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of 10 million dollars. In the Ubuntu project, Shuttleworth is often referred to with the tongue-in-cheek title Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, or SABDFL. In September 2005, he purchased a 65% stake of ImpiLinux.” [link]

Now that I have some experience with Ubuntu, I find myself looking for excuses to keep running fedora on my desktop. When you have the likes of Eric Raymond jumping to your OS you have to like your prospects. I have no idea how legitimate this ‘Goodbye Fedora letter’ is but if it is then it’s very interesting.

My only hesitations with moving my desktop to ubuntu are dual monitor and raid-1 support. I’m sure they’re both doable but I’d have to feel cozy about that first.

Jaimie sent me this link to ubuntu on tap. I don’t even know if ‘internet cafes’ still exist but if they do then someone’s got to install a row of taps with various distros being served up.

I’ve been in meetings the past two days and so far my experience of running ubuntu on my laptop is that people are certainly curious about it. System76 sells hardware exclusively powered by ubuntu, including some nice looking minis.

Do I recommend that people switch to a linux distro? No. I’d suggest that everyone explore some of the stuff that’s available and if you’re new to linux then ubuntu is the one to try.

There’s a lingering perception that linux is painful. During our meetings someone was explaining their wife’s experience with her new apple notebook and the fact that she plugged in her camera and her pictures were automatically imported etc. The next comment was something along the line of “you should see how painful it is in linux, mounting drives and crap”. Ahhh, that’s just not true anymore.

Later during the meeting I plugged Jaimie’s memory card into my laptop and instantly had a popup stating something like ‘there appears to be a pictures on this memory card, import?’

If you haven’t tried linux on the desktop in a while then just give it a try, things have improved. Is it better than windows, apple, etc? No, they’re all unique and there’s reasons to use each.

My offer….If you live near me then I’ll happily burn you a ubuntu live cd to give it a try. Or even simpler, download and burn one yourself. Or get free cd‘s shipped to you.

I’m impressed, Fedora just fixed itself. If you’re not familiar with linux based OS’s then you may not have used a package management system. Basically they manage the applications you install and the OS itself. So instead of having find a download on the interweb, download it, install it, reboot etc. You just find the application in a list and select it. The PM does the rest of the dirty work for you.

There are several PM’s out there to choose from as well as many different repositories that they draw on. Making installation painless is cool. The slick part is keeping your OS AND all your applications up to date and working. This is something that I know windows does not do and I’ve read that Apple isn’t doing either, however, don’t know that first hand. What I’ve read is that Apple does it but only for their apps but not third-party.

When I built my fedora desktop I managed to hose up my video drivers. I got things working but not entirely smoothly. There were some kinks that I knew I’d introduced. I turned my machine off last night for the first time in well over a week. When I turned it on today it found updates and pulled them down and in the process completely repaired the kinks I’d introduced.

Sure it’s not the linux way and I should have had to type “sudo rpm -i lsjlkjfj lskjdf” a few more times but in the end it just worked. So far my experience with Ubuntu’s PM has been nothing but lovely as well.

“Ubuntu shines in this aspect thanks to the centralized packaging of software. Given that all available applications are packaged by the developers and put in a common server, the apt package manager is able to automatically update all of your installed packages to the latest available versions. This also includes keeping track of added dependencies so that an update will not (generally) break any of the existing stuff. In some sense, you can consider that there is no “core OS”: once a new program is installed from the repository, it is integrated into the OS in such a way that it is indistinguishable.” [link]

Ok, I really liked fluxbuntu but there was one specific app I couldn’t get running and that’s keepassx. While I’m sure it’s doable I didn’t fiddle with it long enough to get it going. I installed ubuntu and so far it seems like the most user friendly linux distro I’ve used. Pretty much everything just plain works, including all laptop stuff like power management, touchpad, etc. Keepassx was easily installed through it’s packages as well as amarok.

While I want to give fluxbuntu a longer look I’m not sure I’ll get a chance now that ubuntu’s working so well.

So now that I’m setup on my new desktop, I’m ditching windows on my laptop as well. I think I’m going to use my laptop to test drive a few distros. I was just going to put Fedora on but I figure I may as well try some of the ubuntu’s first.

I’m installing fluxbuntu as I type this. I find Gnome a bit large and clumsy so trying out something tuned specifically for fluxbox interests me a lot:

“Fluxbuntu is a LPAE-standard compliant, Ubuntu-based distribution. It is lightweight, swift and efficient. These features support the Fluxbuntu Linux Project’s Goal of running on a wide range of mobile devices and computers (low-end & high-end)”

“Fluxbuntu is an upcoming “lightweight” Linux distribution to be based on Ubuntu, version 7.04 “Feisty Fawn”, that uses Fluxbox for window manager (or desktop environment).

By contrast, with the official distributions, Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop environment, Kubuntu uses KDE, and Xubuntu uses Xfce, all of which are thought to be somewhat more unwieldy (viz, larger and slower).”

The cool thing with fluxbuntu is that it’s a live cd. So you can throw it into a machine, boot from cd, and run it before you even install. So I was in and browsing the net in firefox within minutes. That’s just slick as you can really test drive it without touching your system.

I’m downloading the iso now for ubuntu. Judging by the pictures on the site, it’s users may be a little too happy for me.

One of the nicest things about linux is the window manager paradigm. I was about to attempt to sum that up but the Ion Conclusion does a good job:

“To ultimately solve usability problems to the extent possible with current technologies, applications should be written independent of their user interfaces and the UIs should be built according to the user’s preferences based on a high-level semantic description of commands provided by the application”

What is a Windows Manager?

“One of the guiding philosophies of The X Window System (and also UNIX itself) is that its functionality is achieved through the co-operation of separate components, rather than everything being entwined in one huge mass (or should that be mess?). The advantage of this is that a particular part of the system can be changed simply by replacing the relevant component. The best example of this is the concept of a window manager which is essentially the component which controls the appearance of windows and provides the means by which the user can interact with them. Virtually everything which appears on the screen in X is in a window, and a window manager quite simply manages them.” [link]

The window manager is ultimately what most user’s think of as their operating system. They don’t think of disk I/O, process management, etc. They think of what happens when they right-click here or where their taskbar’s located etc. It could be argued that the window manager is THE most important part of the OS in the end user’s eyes. Ask a OSX user why they prefer it over windows and most of the time the answer will involve descriptions of OSX’s window manager.

The beauty of linux is that the end user is given the ‘keys’ to their window manager. Trust me, once you get a taste of this it’ll be difficult for anyone to pry those keys out of your hands. You can swap your window manager all day long if you like. So if you don’t like the way your “OS” works then just shop around and find another, or build one yourself.

Even in windows I don’t use icons on my desktop and rely on shells to launch applications. So I’m currently having good success trying out fluxbox:

“It aims to be lightweight and highly customizable, with only minimal support for graphical icons, and only basic interface style capabilities. The basic interface has only a taskbar and a menu accessible by right-clicking on the desktop. Fluxbox also supports user-created keyboard shortcuts.” [link]

Is it just me or is this just another modified shell emulator? It sure looks a lot like a *nix screen if you exit your windows manager, or ctrl-alt-F1, and fire up vi or your favourite text editor. There are certainly no distractions in that environment.

Interesting looking project and great to see new software that’s not so GUI intensive.

Link courtesy of Chris.