Tag Archive for distro

Command Line Software Management

December 2, 2009 One comment

One of the nice things about a Debian-based Linux distribution is that it is easy to pull a piece of software onto your system from a repository using either apt-get or aptitude. Some may prefer to have a GUI but I find that the command line offers certain extra transparency that stops the “what’s it doing?” type of question. that’s never to say that the GUI-based approach hasn’t a place and I only go using it when seeking out a piece of software without knowing its aptitude-ready name. Interestingly, there are signs that Canonical may be playing with the idea of making Ubuntu’s Software Centre a full application management tool with updates and upgrades getting added to the current searching, installation and removal facilities. That well may be but it’s going to take a lot of effort to get me away from the command line altogether.

Fedora and openSUSE have their software management commands too in the shape of yum and zypper, respectively. The recent flurry of new operating system releases has had me experimenting with both of those distros on a real test machine. As might be expected, the usual battery of installation, removal and update activities are well served and I have been playing with software searching using yum too. What has yet to mature is in-situ distribution upgrading à la Ubuntu. In principle, it is possible but I got a black screen when I tried moving from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2 within VirtualBox using instructions on the openSUSE website. Not wanting to wait, I reached for a Live CD instead and that worked a treat on both virtual and real machines. Being in an experiment turn of mind, I attempted the same to get from Fedora 11 to the beta release of its version 12. A spot of repository trouble got me using a Live CD in its place. You can perform an in-situ upgrade from a full Fedora DVD but the only option is system replacement when you have a Live CD. Once installation is out of the way, YAST can be ignored in favour of zypper and yum is good enough that Fedora’s GUI-using alternative can be ignored. It’s nice to see good transparent ideas taking hold elsewhere and may make migration between distros much easier too.

Linux, Software

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A multitude of operating systems

October 27, 2009 No comments

Like buses, it seems that a whole hoard of operating systems is descending upon us at once. OS X 10.6 came first and it was the turn of Windows 7 last week with all of the excitement that it generated in the computing and technology media. Next up will be Ubuntu, already a source of some embarrassment for the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones when he got his facts muddled; to his credit he later corrected himself though I do wonder how up to speed is his appreciated that Ubuntu has its distinct flavours with a netbook variant being different to the main offering that I use. Along with Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12 and openSUSE 11.2 are also in the wings. As if all these weren’t enough, the latest issue of PC Plus gives an airing to less well-known operating systems like Haiku (the project that carries on BeOS). The inescapable conclusion is that, far from the impressions of mainstream computer users who know only Windows, we are swimming in a sea of operating system options in which you may drown if you decide to try sampling them all. That may explain why I stick with Ubuntu for home use due to reasons of familiarity and reliability and leave much of the distro hopping to others. Of course, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Windows is the choice of where I work with 2000 being usurped by Vista in the next few weeks (IT managers always like to be behind the curve for sake of safety).

Linux, Mac, Software, Windows

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On keyboards

April 17, 2009 No comments

There cannot be too many Linux users who go out and partner a Microsoft keyboard with their system but my recent cable-induced mishap has resulted in exactly that outcome. Keyboards are such standard items that it is not so possible to generate any excitement about them, apart from RSI-related concerns. While I wasn’t about to go for something cheap and nasty that would do me an injury, going for something too elaborate wasn’t part of the plan either, even if examples of that ilk from Microsoft and Logitech were sorely tempting.

Shopping in a bricks and mortar store like I was has its pluses and its minuses. The main plus points are that you see and feel what you are buying with the main drawback being that the selection on offer isn’t likely to be as extensive as you’d find on the web, even if I was in a superstore. Despite the latter, there was still a good deal available. There were PS/2 keyboards for anyone needing them but USB ones seemed to be the main offer with wireless examples showcased too. Strangely, the latter were only available as kits with mice included, further adding to the cost of an already none too cheap item. The result was that I wasn’t lured away from the wired option.

I didn’t emerge with what would have been my first choice because that was out of stock but that’s not to say that what I have doesn’t do the job for me. Key action is soft and cushioned rather than clicky like that to which I am accustomed; some keyboards feel like they belong on a laptop but not this one. There are other bells and whistles too with a surprising number of them working. The calculator and email buttons number among these along with the play/pause, back and forward ones for a media player; I am not so convinced about the volume controls though an on-screen indicator does pop up. You’d expect a Microsoft item to be more Windows specific than others but mine works as well as anything else in the Ubuntu world and I have no reason to suspect that other Linux distros would spurn it either. Keyboards are one of those “buy-it-and-forget-it” items and the new arrival should be no different.

Hardware

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BBC Radio Player and Linux

November 13, 2007 No comments

It’s been a while since I mentioned anything that might be aurally related and then this rears its head. The Xine plugin beloved by the instance of Firefox on my Ubuntu box simply refuses to play ball with the BBC’s Listen Again feature; 6Music shows are what I am trying to catch later. RealPlayer is on the system but Firefox simply refuses to locate it. On its own, it plays live radio from the BBC and Ireland’s Today FM but, unless I need to do some digging, that’s not much use for Listen Again. It may be some hard wiring done by Canonical as part of their packaging of Firefox: might be related to their preference for Free Software. If I can be bothered, I might replace it with the usual version to see if RealPlayer can be picked up: I do seem to remember reading somewhere that this was a possibility…

Yes, I could use one of my Windows VM’s but I have found another way courtesy of openSUSE 10.3. No, I haven’t changed distro but the reason that openSUSE has made a sudden appearance on this blog in recent times has got to do with my acquiring a copy of the latest issue of Linux Magazine. It came emblazoned with a DVD containing both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of openSUSE’s latest version and, wanting to take a look at how KDE appears these days, I knocked up a VM and installed the 32-bit variant thereupon.

Unexpectedly, that has afforded a Linux solution to my BBC Radio Player conundrum. openSUSE’s Firefox instance is able to find RealPlayer once you have it installed. That process involves a spot more work than if it was Free Software: you need to add an extra software repository to YaST (openSUSE’s configuration utility). The breadcrumb trail is YaST -> Software -> Software Repositories and hitting the Add button fires up a wizard that needs the following settings to set things up as needed:

Protocol: http

Server Name: download.opensuse.org

Directory on server: /distribution/10.3/repo/non-oss/suse/

Authentication: anonymous

Once the new repository was set up (I named it Non-OSS), I found the RPM and YaST took care of the rest. So, what started out as an exercise in curiosity has now found a use. Network traffic may cause playback to stutter but I have what I want without once starting up Windows. Sorting out Ubuntu may happen but it is a lesser priority and I don’t want to disrupt my computing environment in any event.

Audio, Linux, Software, Virtualisation

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A perspective on Linux

February 8, 2007 One comment

I have revisited an old website that I used to have online in and around 2000 that has since been retired for while. One thing that it had in common with this blog was its focus in computer technology. I don’t remember blogging being bandied about as a term back then but a weblog would have fulfilled the site’s much better. One of the sections of this old world website was dedicated to Linux and UNIX; this was where I collected and shared experienced my experiences of these. These days, unless it is held in some cache somewhere (rather unlikely, I think), the only place that it is found is what I bundled together in a tar.gz file for transfer to Linux. Irony strikes…

Back then, my choice of Linux was SuSE 6.2, followed by 6.4 from PC Plus DVD. It was the first, and only, Linux distro that I bought after exploring a variety of distros from cover-mounted CD’s in books and magazines. While I did like it, it wasn’t enough to tempt me away from Windows. I had issues with hardware and they got in the way of a move. Apart from what some might judge to be clunkiness, there were less impediments on the software side.

I am a DIY system builder and there were issues with Linux support of my hardware, particularly my modem. Rather than being in possession of all the electronic wherewithal that a full modem would need, it got the operating system to do some of the work. The trouble was that this locked you into using Windows, hence its Winmodem moniker. Besides this, my Zip drive was vital to me and SuSE didn’t support it out of the box: a kernel recompilation was in order and could involve losing any extensions that SuSE had actually added. Another foible was non-support of a now obsolete UDMA 66 expansion card.

But improvements in hardware support were coming on the scene. Support for printing with CUPS, scanning with SANE and audio with ALSA was coming along nicely and has matured nicely. Apart from cases where vendors refuse to help the Open Source community and bleeding edge hardware that needs drivers to recoded according to the demands of GPL, things have come a long, long way.

Software-wise, the only thing holding me from migrating to Linux was my use of Microcal (now OriginLab) Origin, a scientific data visualisation and analysis package that was invaluable for my work. Even then, that could be run using WINE, the Windows API library for Linux. OpenOffice could easily have replaced MS Office for my purposes unless formula editing was a feature outstanding from the specification. GIMP, once I had ascended the learning curve, would have coped with my graphics processing needs. After committing myself to non-visual web development, Bluefish and Quanta+ would have fulfilled my web development needs. Web technologies such as Perl, PHP, Apache and SQL have always been very much at home in Linux so no issue there. At that stage, experimenting with these was very much in my future. Surprisingly, web browsing wasn’t that strong in Linux then. Mozilla was still in alpha/beta development phase and needed a lot of rough ends sorting and the dreadful Netscape 4 was in full swing with offerings like nautilus coming on stream. Typography support was another area of development at the time and this fed through into how browsers rendered web pages. Downloading and compiling xfstt did resolve the situation.

SuSE 6.4 desktop (317 kB)

These days, I have virtual machines set up for Ubuntu, Fedora Core and Mandriva while openSUSE is another option. I spent Saturday night poking around in Fedora (I know, I should have better things to be doing…) and it feels very slick, a world away from where Red Hat was a decade ago. The same applies to Ubuntu which is leagues ahead of Debian, on which it is based. With both of these, you get applications for updating the packages in the distribution; not something that you might have seen a few years ago. Support for audio and printing comes straight out of the box. I assume scanner and digital camera support are the same; they need to be.Fedora includes the virtual machine engine that is Xen. I am intrigued by this but running a VM within a VM does seem peculiar. Nevertheless, if that comes off, it might be that Fedora goes onto my spare PC with Windows loaded onto one or more virtual machines. It’s an intriguing idea and having Fedora installed on a real PC might even allow me to see workspaces changed onscreen as if they were the sides of a cube, very nice. Mandriva also offers the same visual treat but is not a distro that I have been in a lot. The desktop environment may be KDE rather than Gnome as it is in the others but all the same features are on board. The irony though is that, after starting out my Linux voyage on KDE, I am now more familiar with Gnome these days and, aesthetically speaking, it does look that little better to my eye.

So would I move to Linux these days? Well, it is supported by a more persuasive case than ever it has been and I would have to say that it is only logistics and the avoidance of upheaval that is stopping me now. If I was to move to Linux, then it would be by reversing the current situation: going from Linux running in a VM on Windows to Windows running in a VM on Linux. Having Windows around would be good for my personal education and ease the upheaval caused by the migration. Then, it would be a matter of watching what hardware gets installed.

Fedora Core desktop (972 kB)

Linux, Operating Systems, UNIX

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