Technology Tales

Looking at a few Operating Systems

The last few weeks have seen me poking around with a few different operating systems to see how they perform. While I am too sure what exactly has kicked off all of this curiosity, all the OS's that I have examined have been of the UNIX/Linux variety. With the inclusion of Unity in the forthcoming Ubuntu "Natty Narwhal" 11.04, I am mindful of the need to be keeping an eye on alternative options should there ever be a need to jump ship. However, a recent encounter with an alpha version has reassured me a little.

Forgetting the Ubuntu password (a silly thing to do, I know) for my Toshiba laptop meant a reinstallation that allowed these explorations to happen. Only for that, I may not have looked in amazement at the impressive minimalism of CrunchBang Linux before settling on Lubuntu to see how it did. Since these were Live CD runs, I was trying things out before committing to any installation. Since Lubuntu is based on Ubuntu as its name suggests, I wasted little name in finding my way around the LXDE desktop. By default, everything supplied with the distro is lightweight, with Chromium coming in place of Firefox. There's no sign of OpenOffice.org either, with offerings like Abiword coming in its stead. For the sake of familiarity, I started to add the weight of things without reducing the speed of things, it seems. Well, the speedy start-up wasn't afflicted anyway. Being an Ubuntu clone meant that it didn't long to add on Firefox using the apt-get command. LibreOffice was downloaded for installation using the dpkg command, and it seems much more fleet-footed than its OpenOffice.org counterpart. As if these nefarious actions weren't enough, I started to poke in the settings to up the number of virtual desktops too. All in all, it never stopped me going against what be termed the intent of the thing. Despite what Linux User & Developer has had to say, I think the presentation of the LXDE desktop isn't unpleasant, either. In fact, I reckon that I quite like it, so the next thing to do is to restore the entry for Windows 7 on the GRUB menu. Well, there's always something that needs doing...

While I may have learned about it after the event, the release of Debian "Squeeze" 6.0 was of interest to me too. The new release comes on two kernels: GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. Regarding the latter, I did try having a look, only for it to lock up my main home PC when I tried booting it up in a VirtualBox virtual machine. Given that it's a technical preview anyway, I think it's better to leave it mature for a while, no matter how fascinating the prospect may be. Or is it VirtualBox 4.x that hasn't around long enough? Debian's latest Linux incarnations showed no such inclinations, though I found that the CD ISO image that I'd downloaded didn't give such a complete system when I fired it up after doing the installation. Being someone who knows his way around Linux anyway, it was no problem to add the missing pieces using apt-get, though that'd stop it being an option for new users unless the DVD installation yields more complete results. Other than that, it worked well, and I quickly became comfortable with the OS, which has a much fresher feel than version 5.x ("Lenny"). In summary, I look forward to continuing my investigations of the new Debian release.

To round up my explorations of different UNIX/Linux operating systems, I have updated my test installations of Ubuntu 11.04. While initial looks at the next Ubuntu release weren't so encouraging, things are coming along by all accounts. For one thing, Unity can be switched off in favour of the more familiar GNOME desktop that we've had for the last few years. Messages warning about the lack of 3D graphics support have been replaced by graceful degradation to GNOME, which is definitely an improvement. In case it hasn't been so obvious, I am one of those who needs convincing by the likes of Unity and GNOME Shell, so I'll sit on the fence for a while. After all, there are always alternatives like LXDE if I want to decamp to something else entirely. One of the nice things about Linux is the amount of choice we all have; while it might be difficult to choose sometimes, it's always good to find alternatives when someone makes a decision that doesn't suit you.

Taking the sudo command beyond Ubuntu

Though some may call it introducing a security risk, being able to execute administrator commands on Ubuntu using sudo and gksu by default is handy. It's not the only Linux distribution with the facility, though, since the /etc/sudoers file is found in Debian and I plan to have a look into Fedora. The thing that needs to be done is to add the following line to the aforementioned file (you will need to do this as root):

[your user name] ALL=(ALL) ALL

One that is done, you are all set. Just make sure that you're using a secure password, though, and removing the sudo/gksu permissions is as simple as reversing the change.

Update on 2011-12-03: The very same can be done for both Arch Linux and Fedora, The same file locations apply too.

A look at Slackware 13.0

Some curiosity has come upon me and I have been giving a few Linux distros a spin in VirtualBox virtual machines. One was Slackware, which reminds me of a fellow university student using it in the mid/late 1990's. Since then, my exploration took me into Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake and eventually to Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. Since all of that bypassed Slackware, it was to give the thing a look.

While the current version is 13.1, it was 13.0 that I had to hand, so I had a go with that. In many ways, the installation was a flashback to the 1990's and I can see it looking intimidating to many computer users with its now old-fashioned installation GUI. If you can see through that, though, the reality is that it isn't too difficult to install.

After all, the DVD was bootable. However, it did leave you at a command prompt and I can see that throwing many. The next step is to use cfdisk to create partitions (at least two are needed, swap and normal). Once that is done, it is time to issue the command setup and things look more graphical again. I picked the item for setting the locale of the keyboard and everything followed from there, but there is a help option too for those who need it. If you have installed Linux before, you'll recognise a lot of what you see. It'll finish off the set-up of disk partitions for you and supports ext4 too; it's best not to let antique impressions fool you. For most of the time, I stuck with the defaults and left it to perform a full installation with KDE as the desktop environment. If there is any real criticism, it is the absence of an overall progress bar to see where it is with package installation.

Once the installation was complete, it was time to restart the virtual machine, and I found myself left at the command prompt. Only the root user was set up during installation, so I needed to add a normal user too. Issuing startx was enough to get me into KDE (along with included alternatives like XFCE, there is a community build using GNOME too) for that, but I wanted to have that loading automatically. To fix that, you need to edit /etc/inittab to change the default run level from 3 to 4 (hint: look for a line with id:3:initdefault: in it near the top of the file and change that; the file is well commented so you can find your way around it easily without having to look for specific esoteric test strings).

After all this, I ended up with a usable Slackware 130.0 installation. Login screens have a pleasing dark theme by default, while the desktop is very blue. There may be no OpenOffice but KOffice is there in its place and Seamonkey is an unusual inclusion along with Firefox. Though it looks as if it'll take a little more time to get to know Slackware, it looks good so far; I may even go about getting 13.1 to see how things might have changed and report my impressions accordingly. Some will complain about the rough edges that I describe here but remarks about using Slackware to learn about Linux persist. Maybe, Linux distributions are like camera film; some are right for you and some aren't. Personally, I wouldn't thrust Slackware upon a new Linux user if they have to install it themselves, but it's not at all bad for that.

If all else fails...

Two problems have come my way that were resolved by removing configuration files and going again. Both affected Linux installations that I have. The Ubuntu installation on my main PC is working well, but I ran into trouble starting up NetBeans 6.8. No GUI would ever appear but taking away the .netbeans folder from my home area allowed a fresh start with the IDE starting up as it should. To date, not all the various projects that I have are restored, but that can be done as I go along. Plugins for PHP development needing reinstatement, but that was another easy thing to achieve; just go to Tools > Plugins on the menus and work with the dialogue box that appears to download and install the needful.

The inspiration for taking the configuration folder from the home area came from needing to address a misadventure with a Debian VM. Perhaps foolishly, I went using gconf-editor on there and messed up the appearance of the terminal window with whatever change I made. Getting rid of the .gconf folder restored order with its recreation by the system. Next time, remembering what changes have been made and reversing them might be the best course of action...

Command Line Software Management

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. While some may prefer a GUI, but I find that the command line offers a 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.

One thing that 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 experimental 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.

You always can install things yourself...

With Linux distributions offering you everything on a plate, there is a temptation to stick with what they offer rather than taking things into your own hands. For example, Debian's infrequent stable releases and the fact that they don't seem to change software versions throughout the lifetime of such a release means that things such as browser versions are fixed for the purposes of stability; Lenny has stuck with Firefox 3.06 and called it IceWeasel for some unknown reason. However, I soon got to grab a tarball for 3.5 and popped its contents into /opt where the self-contained package worked without a hitch. The same modus operandi was used to add Eclipse PDT and that applied to Ubuntu too until buttons stopped working, forcing a jumping of ship to NetBeans.

Of course, you could make a mess when veering away from what is in a distribution, but that should be good enough reason not to get carried away with software additions. With the availability of DEB packages for things like Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, VirtualBox, Google Chrome and Opera, keeping things clean isn't so hard. While your mileage may vary when it comes to how well things work out for you, I have only ever had the occasional problem anyway.

What reminded me of this was a recent irritation with the OpenOffice package included in Ubuntu 9.10 whereby spell checking wasn't working. While there were thoughts about in situ fixes like additional dictionary installations, I ended up plumping for what could be called the lazy option: grabbing a tarball full of DEB packages from the OpenOffice website and extracting its contents into /tmp and, once the URE package was in place, installing from there using the command:

dpkg -i o*

To get application shortcuts added to the main menu, it was a matter of diving into the appropriate subfolder and installing from the GNOME desktop extension package. Of course, Ubuntu's OpenOffice variant was removed as part of all this but, if you wanted to live a little more dangerously, the external installation goes into /opt which means that there shouldn't be too much of a conflict anyway. In any case, the DIY route got me the spell checking in OpenOffice Writer that I needed, so all was well and another Ubuntu rough edge eradicated from my life, for now anyway.

Rough?

Was it because Canonical and friends kept Ubuntu in such a decent state from 8.04 through to 9.04 that things went a little quiet in the blogosphere on the subject of the well-known Linux distribution? If so, 9.10 might be proving more of a talking point, and you have to wonder if this is such a good thing with the appearance of Windows 7 on the scene. Looking on the bright side, 10.04 will be an LTS release, so there is some chance that any rough edges that are on display now could be resolved by next April. Even so, it might have been better not to see anything so obvious at all.

In truth, Ubuntu always has had its gaps, and I have seen a few of their ilk over the last two years. Of these, a few have triggered postings on here. In fact, issues with accessing the BBC iPlayer still bring a goodly number of folk to this website. That may just be a matter of grabbing RealPlayer, now helpfully available as a DEB package, from the requisite place on the web and ensuring that Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras is in place too, but you have to know that in the first place.

Even so, unexpected behaviours like Palimpsest seeing every partition on a disk as a different drive and SIL Raid mappings being seen for hard drives that used to live on the main home PC that bit the dust earlier this year; it only happens on one of the machines that I have running Ubuntu so it may be hardware thing and newly added hard drive uses none of the SIL mapping either.

Perhaps more seriously (is it something that a new user should be encountering?), a misfiring variant of Brasero had me moving to K3b. Then, UFRaw was sluggish in batch mode, yet that's nothing that having a Debian VM won't overcome. Rough edges like these do get you asking if 9.10 was ready for the big time, while making you reluctant to recommend it to mainstream users like my brother.

The counterpoint to the above is that 9.10 includes a host of under the bonnet changes like the introduction of Ext4 hard drive formatting, Xsplash to allow the faster system loading to occur unseen and GNOME 2.28. To someone looking in from outside like me, that looks like a lot of work and might explain the ingress of the annoyances that I have seen. Add to that the fact that we are between Debian releases, so things like the optimised packaging of ImageMagick or UFRaw may not be so high up the list of the things to do, especially with the more general speed optimisations that were put in place for 9.10.

With 10.04 set to be an LTS release, I'd be hoping that consolidation is the order of the day over the next five or six months, but it seems to be the inclusion of new features and other such progress that get magazine reviewers giving higher ratings (Linux Format has given it a mark of 9 out of 10). With the mooted inclusion of GNOME 3 and its dramatically different interface in 10.10, they should get their fill of that. However, I'd like to see some restraint for the take of a smooth transition from the familiar GNOME 2.x to the new. If GNOME 3 stays very like its alpha builds, then the question of how users will take to it arises. Of course, there's still some time before we see GNOME 3 and, having seen how the Ubuntu developers transformed GNOME 2.28, I wouldn't be surprised if the impact of any change could be dulled.

In summary, my few weeks with Ubuntu 9.10 as my main OS have thrown up no major roadblocks that would cause me to look at moving elsewhere; Fedora would be tempting if that situation were to arise. The irritations that I have seen are more like signs of a lack of polish and remain peripheral to day-to-day working if you discount CD/DVD burning. To be honest, there always have been some element of roughness on Ubuntu, but has the lack of sizeable change spoilt us? Whatever about how things feel afterwards, significant changes can mean new problems to resolve and inspire blog posts describing any solutions, so it's not all bad. If that's what Canonical wants to see, they might get it, and the year ahead looks as if it will be an interesting one after a recent quieter period.

An early peek at Ubuntu 9.10

Even if the twice a year release means that changes to Ubuntu are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, that isn't to imply that curiosity doesn't get the better of me from time to time. The result is that an early alpha version (3 at the time of writing) of the Linux distro has found a home in a VirtualBox VM on my main system. The most noticeable change so far is the inclusion of GNOME 2.27.5 with its Fedora-esque log-in screen and the movement of the shutdown and log-off paraphernalia to the System menu, which is where you find it in Debian or Fedora. On the account settings menu, there lives a link to an equivalent of the Windows Control Panel called Control Centre; the menu item is named System Preferences. For the record, I have seen it in Fedora 11 too, so it does look as if Ubuntu's GNOME implementation is looking more like a brown equivalent of Fedora. Whether this stays like this is anyone's guess, but a new messaging arrangement is coming into being, too.

Otherwise, there appears to be no real drama on the surface, with Firefox staying at 3.0.x for now and OpenOffice moving to 3.1. Personally speaking, I'd be very surprised to see Firefox 3.5.x being left out, though I did run into a spot of bother with the Preferences dialogue crashing it on Windows XP. Under the bonnet, the kernel is at release 2.6.31 and things seem reasonably stable at this stage. Saying that, there is a crash report icon that appears every session, but that has no effect apart from the visual side of things. VirtualBox Guest Additions work as they should, better than they in Windows guests if my experience provides any sort of benchmark (the display does odd things unless you keep jogging the graphics memory up and down). All in all, things appear usable if undramatic at this stage, and there are a few months to go before the final release anyway.

Adding msttcorefonts to Fedora

Once you have enabled the appropriate software repository, you can install the msttcorefonts (Microsoft TrueType core fonts like Arial, Times Roman, Verdana, Georgia, etc.) package on Debian and Ubuntu. With Fedora, it surprisingly isn't so straightforward. There is a recipe using the command line that worked for me, and I'm not going to repeat it here, so I'll leave you to go where I found it. In fact, it forms part of a wider unofficial Fedora FAQ that may be of more interest to you than solving this.

Update for Fedora 12 (2009-11-24):

You also need chkfontpath so the following needs doing before the final part of the command sequence, changing the filename as appropriate for your situation:

yum install xfs
rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/chkfontpath-1.10.1-2.fc12.i686.rpm

Making Nautilus work like it does in Ubuntu for any other GNOME-using distro

While It's a personal preference, I like the way that Nautilus (GNOME's default file manager if you need to know) is set to work on Ubuntu by default. For some tastes, it might look too similar to Windows Explorer, but having all the action happening in the same window is a convenience that users of other GNOME using distributions may not realise is there at all. By default, Debian and Fedora use what is called spatial mode, with each double-clicking action on a folder icon firing up a new window. Personally, I think that clutters the desktop without good cause, yet it's easy to change. All that's needed is to go to Edit>Preferences in a Nautilus window, proceed to the Behaviour tab and toggle the Always open in browser windows tick box as shown below. Quite why this is not the default in all GNOME using distributions is beyond me, but others may prefer what I dislike and Linux is all about choice, after all. Well, you can decide to use Gnome Commander instead and there are times when I do the same along with being a command line user too.