Linux Lines
Monday, January 16, 2006
What Desktop War?
There's been a lot of noise on the 'net lately about the state of GNU/Linux on the desktop. I've seen all kinds of arguments for and against and I find most of them amusing. The simple test of value for what works best is what suits the end user. Period. As for me, it's GNU/Linux now and that's the end of the story.
Or is it?
I've always been one to like a good looking graphical display but I'm not one to chase technology. I used to do that, way back when. A good friend of mine and I had a standing joke that we often passed on to others. We said: "If you want to buy the latest computer, just wait for one of us to buy it and it's guaranteed to drop in price." Quite often it was true. In those years it made sense to get the latest hardware because unless the only thing you cared to use a computer for was wordprocessing -- and this was on a basic text display, folks -- you sought the latest and greatest hardware to hit the street. Anymore, decent graphic displays can be had on even older hardware. If you're willing to leave Microserfdom behind, that is. Yes, OS X is very nice. Macs have always been the cream of the crop in that venue. They're also at the top of the spectrum in most budgets.
My first introduction to the X Windows system was to TWM on a Unix graphics workstation. Blech! X seemed decent enough and I could appreciate the client/server aspect it was built around but use it? No thanks. I was happy to go home to my Amiga, thank you very much. It wasn't long before GNU/Linux started growing and I decided to take another look. I have had the opportunity to use many different operating systems over the years and I've always preferred Unix. When I finally got serious about GNU/Linux I installed RedHat on the PC I had. I'd been running Windows 95, I think it was, and was sick of it. I never liked any of the Windows products and I've had to argue with it since Win3.1. I remember looking forward to leaving it behind. I built a machine and installed W95 at the time to become more familiar with it since I was having to support it at work. It didn't take me long to get bored and soon RH 5 was in control of my NexGen box. I never looked back. I remember thinking "This is X?" Incredible improvement over TWM but some research soon showed that I could have something very similar to TWM if I wanted it. Yeah, right. FVWM was a big improvement but still not what I'd hoped for so I checked out Gnome and was thrilled at the result. I was still not completely satisfied so I went looking around some more and discovered Enlightenment. Wow. Now this is what a desktop should look like. Still, it had its own quirks and I ended up using it only occasionally. I mostly stayed with Gnome at the time.
Since then, GNU/Linux has seen tremendous improvements and has become the OS of choice for many users. Powerful applications suitable to both business and home users have matured and the graphical destop environment continues to get better. My particular favorite, Enlightenment, has not been left behind either. The latest incarnation is affectionately referred to by its users as E17. One of the problems with the most popular graphical display managers today is the sheer bulk of the code used and many lament that it's getting as bad as Windows has. Honestly, I don't think anything could get that bad. After all, we can at least change it to look as nice as we like and we can trim it down to run as efficient as possible. Does this take some effort and a modicum of knowledge? Certainly. The point is -- it's possible.
Being a constant tinkerer it seems I'm never happy with what I have to look at day after day on my desktop. Linux is already a success there. The GNU utilities have made this the most functional Unix environment a technology buff could ever want. The truly hard part is trying to choose the most functional, best looking graphic desktop environment to use with it. It's frustrating beyond belief because none of them will stay put. I'll be thinking I'm perfectly happy with what I'm using and then I'll trip over an article showing the latest and greatest KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, XFCE, or what have you and, of course, I've just gotta check it out for myself. Blast! Why can't they stop this nonsense!
Seriously though, like so many others I'm ecstatic that the many developers on hundreds of projects are never happy with the status quo. Thanks everyone for your hard work in providing us what we enjoy today. I cannot say enough good about FOSS folks. They have made the world of GNU/Linux and OSS what it is today.
And then there's RasterMan.
Have you seen the latest display of graphical prowess he and his team have come up with? If you haven't you're truly missing out. I'm delighted with the default theme. Simple. Elegant. Functional. Usable. Fast.
Wait a minute. Fast? A graphics intensive environment. How is that possible?
There are hundreds of reason why but all I can tell you is that E17 is most certainly to be the last stop for me where a desktop environment is concerned. Oh drat! I just remembered seeing posts about E18. Sheesh. Still, it's truly a technological marvel. I've grown quite fond of E17 and it's not even in Beta yet, let alone a release version. Still, it has proven to be the most beautiful, stable, and fastest desktop environment I've used to date. Remember that I said I stopped chasing technology? My primary machine is a very usable Fujitsu P1120. Not exactly a screamer. With an 800MHz Crusoe chip and a limit of 256M of RAM, it does well enough but I found it dragging along under KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2.10 as if it were walking through deep mud. Adding memory would help this a lot but remember, I'm limited to the maximum amount I have. It was time to find a better alternative. Oh! And don't get me started about the drop shadows...
So I went and did this fool thing of actually building Enlightenment 17 from CVS. For some of you, that term is completely foreign. It's a tool used by programmers to keep track of changes made to the many thousands of lines of code that is made to any given project. The E17 developers have decided that the world should be allowed to experience the result of their handiwork long before it is officially released and have provided access to us humble users to the snapshots of code that they produce. I must warn anyone interested in following this path that you will subject yourself to programs that are not finished which most certainly will change in functionality or even be completely broken. While I have found this true of some of the supporting applications I have to say that the core programs for E have always worked well for me.
I am running the Kubuntu distribution for which there is a very active community of support that provides answers and direction to those interested in reaching beyond the mundane. Great group of people over at www.ubuntuforums.org. I have been using a script found there prepared by RasterMan that's been modified to pull in a few extra things to build. If you are truly interested in looking at this wonderful destktop environment I suggest you take a trip over to www.get-e.org. Spend some time there reading and looking around before you dive in.
For me, this is the only way to go. On my laptop it's quick, very usable, and looks the best of any environment I've ever used. Yes, it takes work to get things set up to do what I want but that keeps me happy when the tinkering itch comes around.
¶ 8:23 PM 0 comments
Or is it?
I've always been one to like a good looking graphical display but I'm not one to chase technology. I used to do that, way back when. A good friend of mine and I had a standing joke that we often passed on to others. We said: "If you want to buy the latest computer, just wait for one of us to buy it and it's guaranteed to drop in price." Quite often it was true. In those years it made sense to get the latest hardware because unless the only thing you cared to use a computer for was wordprocessing -- and this was on a basic text display, folks -- you sought the latest and greatest hardware to hit the street. Anymore, decent graphic displays can be had on even older hardware. If you're willing to leave Microserfdom behind, that is. Yes, OS X is very nice. Macs have always been the cream of the crop in that venue. They're also at the top of the spectrum in most budgets.
My first introduction to the X Windows system was to TWM on a Unix graphics workstation. Blech! X seemed decent enough and I could appreciate the client/server aspect it was built around but use it? No thanks. I was happy to go home to my Amiga, thank you very much. It wasn't long before GNU/Linux started growing and I decided to take another look. I have had the opportunity to use many different operating systems over the years and I've always preferred Unix. When I finally got serious about GNU/Linux I installed RedHat on the PC I had. I'd been running Windows 95, I think it was, and was sick of it. I never liked any of the Windows products and I've had to argue with it since Win3.1. I remember looking forward to leaving it behind. I built a machine and installed W95 at the time to become more familiar with it since I was having to support it at work. It didn't take me long to get bored and soon RH 5 was in control of my NexGen box. I never looked back. I remember thinking "This is X?" Incredible improvement over TWM but some research soon showed that I could have something very similar to TWM if I wanted it. Yeah, right. FVWM was a big improvement but still not what I'd hoped for so I checked out Gnome and was thrilled at the result. I was still not completely satisfied so I went looking around some more and discovered Enlightenment. Wow. Now this is what a desktop should look like. Still, it had its own quirks and I ended up using it only occasionally. I mostly stayed with Gnome at the time.
Since then, GNU/Linux has seen tremendous improvements and has become the OS of choice for many users. Powerful applications suitable to both business and home users have matured and the graphical destop environment continues to get better. My particular favorite, Enlightenment, has not been left behind either. The latest incarnation is affectionately referred to by its users as E17. One of the problems with the most popular graphical display managers today is the sheer bulk of the code used and many lament that it's getting as bad as Windows has. Honestly, I don't think anything could get that bad. After all, we can at least change it to look as nice as we like and we can trim it down to run as efficient as possible. Does this take some effort and a modicum of knowledge? Certainly. The point is -- it's possible.
Being a constant tinkerer it seems I'm never happy with what I have to look at day after day on my desktop. Linux is already a success there. The GNU utilities have made this the most functional Unix environment a technology buff could ever want. The truly hard part is trying to choose the most functional, best looking graphic desktop environment to use with it. It's frustrating beyond belief because none of them will stay put. I'll be thinking I'm perfectly happy with what I'm using and then I'll trip over an article showing the latest and greatest KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker, XFCE, or what have you and, of course, I've just gotta check it out for myself. Blast! Why can't they stop this nonsense!
Seriously though, like so many others I'm ecstatic that the many developers on hundreds of projects are never happy with the status quo. Thanks everyone for your hard work in providing us what we enjoy today. I cannot say enough good about FOSS folks. They have made the world of GNU/Linux and OSS what it is today.
And then there's RasterMan.
Have you seen the latest display of graphical prowess he and his team have come up with? If you haven't you're truly missing out. I'm delighted with the default theme. Simple. Elegant. Functional. Usable. Fast.
Wait a minute. Fast? A graphics intensive environment. How is that possible?
There are hundreds of reason why but all I can tell you is that E17 is most certainly to be the last stop for me where a desktop environment is concerned. Oh drat! I just remembered seeing posts about E18. Sheesh. Still, it's truly a technological marvel. I've grown quite fond of E17 and it's not even in Beta yet, let alone a release version. Still, it has proven to be the most beautiful, stable, and fastest desktop environment I've used to date. Remember that I said I stopped chasing technology? My primary machine is a very usable Fujitsu P1120. Not exactly a screamer. With an 800MHz Crusoe chip and a limit of 256M of RAM, it does well enough but I found it dragging along under KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2.10 as if it were walking through deep mud. Adding memory would help this a lot but remember, I'm limited to the maximum amount I have. It was time to find a better alternative. Oh! And don't get me started about the drop shadows...
So I went and did this fool thing of actually building Enlightenment 17 from CVS. For some of you, that term is completely foreign. It's a tool used by programmers to keep track of changes made to the many thousands of lines of code that is made to any given project. The E17 developers have decided that the world should be allowed to experience the result of their handiwork long before it is officially released and have provided access to us humble users to the snapshots of code that they produce. I must warn anyone interested in following this path that you will subject yourself to programs that are not finished which most certainly will change in functionality or even be completely broken. While I have found this true of some of the supporting applications I have to say that the core programs for E have always worked well for me.
I am running the Kubuntu distribution for which there is a very active community of support that provides answers and direction to those interested in reaching beyond the mundane. Great group of people over at www.ubuntuforums.org. I have been using a script found there prepared by RasterMan that's been modified to pull in a few extra things to build. If you are truly interested in looking at this wonderful destktop environment I suggest you take a trip over to www.get-e.org. Spend some time there reading and looking around before you dive in.
For me, this is the only way to go. On my laptop it's quick, very usable, and looks the best of any environment I've ever used. Yes, it takes work to get things set up to do what I want but that keeps me happy when the tinkering itch comes around.
¶ 8:23 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
I've been running Linux for a lot of years. I've tried most of the popular distributions and always seemed to run into something that just would not work the way I expected it to. For the longest time I wanted to run Debian because I saw the potential that was there. Unfortunately, my early attempts left me looking for something better. I did run it on a server I had in-house and on a box I used for a firewall for a while. But as a desktop distro, it left me wanting. The other "desktop" distributions left me with a sour taste as well because most of them were RPM based. Being a tinkerer for years, I'm always changing things or installing this program or that feature or trying something new. I was never satisfied with RPM based distros because I nearly always ended up in "dependency hell". Those of you that have been there know what I'm talking about. Then I found Gentoo and was quite satisfied with it. For anyone interested in the true nuts and bolts of how a GNU/Linux system is put together, this is a great way to learn. But as good as Portage is, I eventually ended up with some sort of problem or limitation.
So I moved on to Slackware and was actually quite happy with it. I still am in many ways. This is a solid distribution that I can recommend to any techie. Well worth the effort to get to know. Gone were the days of packaging hassles. Well... most of them anyway. At least I never got my system in a condition where I felt like dumping the root partition and starting over. Still... there were limitations. Some new, fascinating update to KDE or Gnome would come out and I'd end up struggling to get it working, frustrated for many hours. Part of the problem was that I am a laptop user and a lot of the things I needed to work just didn't. I purchased a new laptop (Fujitsu P1120) and was checking out an online forum for it when I ran across a post proclaiming the virtues of a new distribution called Ubuntu. Strange name but I thought, "why not". After some reading and research of a lot of posts in various places -- all very positive -- I decided to give it a try. One of the things the authors of this distribution came across with is that a GNU/Linux distro should "just work". Given that my laptop was a long way from that I figured I had nothing to lose. Learning that it was Debian based was attractive as well.
I've been running Ubuntu since just before Hoary was released and I have to say that I think I've finally found a home. The package handling is wonderful. Things really do "just work", at least for the most part. Though it was not yet perfect, my laptop would suspend and resume just fine. The only real issue from that was that X had problems waking up. ALT-F7 took care of that. An extra step, sure, but it was better than having to shut the thing down all the time. Hibernation worked and suspend to RAM worked. Now granted, much of the credit for this goes to the kernel development team for getting ACPI up to par, but the Ubuntu team deserves kudos for putting it all together in a very functional package. I have to say, there's nothing quite like the discovery that you need a given program or library and find that a simple apt-get install solves the problem for you. Nearly every time. THAT has been much of what keeps me using it.
I'm now running Kubuntu Breezy and I have to say that I'm a very happy camper. One of the first things I did was to upgrade to 3.5Beta. The KDE folks have done wonders and I'm very happy with the environment. Yes, it's a bit power-hungry for my tastes but after I configured the laptop daemon (klaptop) and discovered how well it now works, there was no turning back. My true preference is E17 but it's just not quite there for everything I want to do and one of my primary requirements is to be able to close the lid and hear those two beeps immediately. Well, and see the screen return when I open it back up. Fairly important.
This is just an introduction relating some of my experiences with GNU/Linux and I'll be digging deeper into a variety of aspects in the coming days. Stop by again. I'm sure you'll enjoy the read.
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments
So I moved on to Slackware and was actually quite happy with it. I still am in many ways. This is a solid distribution that I can recommend to any techie. Well worth the effort to get to know. Gone were the days of packaging hassles. Well... most of them anyway. At least I never got my system in a condition where I felt like dumping the root partition and starting over. Still... there were limitations. Some new, fascinating update to KDE or Gnome would come out and I'd end up struggling to get it working, frustrated for many hours. Part of the problem was that I am a laptop user and a lot of the things I needed to work just didn't. I purchased a new laptop (Fujitsu P1120) and was checking out an online forum for it when I ran across a post proclaiming the virtues of a new distribution called Ubuntu. Strange name but I thought, "why not". After some reading and research of a lot of posts in various places -- all very positive -- I decided to give it a try. One of the things the authors of this distribution came across with is that a GNU/Linux distro should "just work". Given that my laptop was a long way from that I figured I had nothing to lose. Learning that it was Debian based was attractive as well.
I've been running Ubuntu since just before Hoary was released and I have to say that I think I've finally found a home. The package handling is wonderful. Things really do "just work", at least for the most part. Though it was not yet perfect, my laptop would suspend and resume just fine. The only real issue from that was that X had problems waking up. ALT-F7 took care of that. An extra step, sure, but it was better than having to shut the thing down all the time. Hibernation worked and suspend to RAM worked. Now granted, much of the credit for this goes to the kernel development team for getting ACPI up to par, but the Ubuntu team deserves kudos for putting it all together in a very functional package. I have to say, there's nothing quite like the discovery that you need a given program or library and find that a simple apt-get install solves the problem for you. Nearly every time. THAT has been much of what keeps me using it.
I'm now running Kubuntu Breezy and I have to say that I'm a very happy camper. One of the first things I did was to upgrade to 3.5Beta. The KDE folks have done wonders and I'm very happy with the environment. Yes, it's a bit power-hungry for my tastes but after I configured the laptop daemon (klaptop) and discovered how well it now works, there was no turning back. My true preference is E17 but it's just not quite there for everything I want to do and one of my primary requirements is to be able to close the lid and hear those two beeps immediately. Well, and see the screen return when I open it back up. Fairly important.
This is just an introduction relating some of my experiences with GNU/Linux and I'll be digging deeper into a variety of aspects in the coming days. Stop by again. I'm sure you'll enjoy the read.
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments
