Reilly2040's Blog

Another of probably a few linux posts today

So I found my first issue.  As its a new installation of Firefox (3.0 Beta 5), there’s no flash support.  No problem, since Firefox prompts you to install the Flash player, and even gives a few options of different ones to try.

Being a freedom-hater (and wanting to go with the known quantity) I installed the non-free Adobe plugin.

Which worked except there was no sound while Youtube videos were playing.

A quick search of Ubuntu Forums threw up this thread.  Essentially (for anyone else with this problem), all you have to do is fire up Synaptec and install libflashsupport.

Nice easy fix

Wow, that was surprisingly painless.

I had tried to upgrade my installation last night, but the servers were clearly choked with people upgrading, and it was getting nowhere, so I figured I’d wait until this morning while America was still asleep.

I kicked off the upgrade this morning, left it to its own devices for an hour and a half, and when I came back (aside from asking me if I wanted to change or keep a few config files) it was ready to reboot.

I did then have the minor issue that it hadn’t replaced Mandriva’s boot loader, but that actually makes sense.  I booted into Mandriva and updated the grub config to pick up the new Ubuntu entries and rebooted.

I must say, so far I’m impressed.  As I’ve mentioned before, the hallmark of the 7 series releases was to kill my soundcard off.  This time my sound was present and correct on booting.  My Nvidia drivers, Compiz settings, internet settings, multimedia codecs all seem to have survived the upgrade.

Its easily the smoothest one I’ve done yet.  It’ll be interesting to play with it properly, but so far I’m very impressed.  This is definitely how it should be.

Well, I just got emailed that the new version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) has been released.

Previous upgrades have usually broken my soundcard, so hopefully this one will be smoother. I may not bother upgrading tonight though. I imagine the servers will be taking a bit of a kicking from everyone wanting to check it out.

Since getting my iPod and discovering the joys of podcasts via iTunes, I’ve been suscribing to a reasonable number of them. A lot of them are BBC or Guardian podcasts, but I’ve also been subscribing to a good few Linux podcasts after the article in Linux Format on them.

One particular favourite is the Linux Outlaws podcast. Presented by Fabian and Dan it provides a good balance of news, reviews and discussion on all things Linux. Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for a new podcast to listen to. Its quickly become a podcast that jumps the queue on my iPod when there’s a backlog to listen to.

I was catching up with the ZDNet blogs I read, when I noticed this post in the Hardware 2.0 blog.

Of course, a religious war quickly erupted in the comments section. MS vs Linux. Thank God no Macs were involved.

However, despite the allegations of bias, I do think he has a point. It *is* a blow for Linux. However, its not an unexpected one. Once it was established that the EeePC could run XP, then of course Asus were going to capitalise on it. At the end of the day, put Joe Public infront of two EeePCs, one running XP and one running Linux, he’s probably going to go for the one with the familiar OS. From Asus’ point of view, it just makes sense that an XP model is going to be more popular than a Linux one.

However, it is a blow. The EeePC was a big win for Linux on the desktop, and represented a great way to get Linux to the masses. Now, I’m not getting into the argument of whether its ready for the masses or not. Its not perfect, but then, neither’s Windows, and Linux is certainly a lot better than it was in terms of desktop use. While I still open up a terminal to do some things, its not the necessity it once was.

With the XP model shipping, then its going to be the preferred choice for most people, who would’ve otherwise had to buy a model running Linux.

But I also agree with the posters who say this isn’t that bad news. The ratio shipping is still 3:2. So Asus obviously still have a lot of confidence in the Linux model, and the Linux model is also going to be cheaper and offer a better spec (I believe). What demand is like for the Linux model once a Windows version is available, we’ll see once it hits the shelves, but as it stands, yes its a blow, but I don’t think its a huge one.

Hmmm, not put up any new posts for a while.

The other weekend, I decided to finally do something with the spare partition on my Linux drive.

Since getting the new drive, the intention had always been to have a main Ubuntu setup, and a couple of other distros to play with. Since I’d been impressed with SuSE, it was the 2nd distro, but until recently the third spot had been free.

After some deliberation, I decided to install PCLinuxOS. According to Linux Format, its flavour of the month, and is fast rivalling Ubuntu’s popularity as an easy-to-use distro.

Sadly, it proved to be too much grief for me. There was something about my hardware it really didn’t like.

On booting up after the install:

Strike 1 – no sound. Well, in fairness Ubuntu has issues in that area as well (although seems fixed in the Hardy Alpha4 liveCD I tried – and in Ubuntu at least, its quickly sorted).

Strike 2 – no NVidia drivers. Well, some distros are funny about carrying them, so maybe I’ve just been spoiled by Ubuntu automatically detecting the card and asking me if I wanted to install them.

Strike 3 – No ethernet. This broke the camel’s back for me. Every other distro and live CD I’ve tried has had no problems detecting my Ethernet. Just two of these problems and I might’ve stuck with it, but no ethernet was really a killer. I didn’t see why I should spend time trying to fix something so vital when I had other distros sitting there.

So, I went back to the Linux Format distro heaven DVD and looked to see what else there was. Then Mandriva caught my eye.

When I was last into Linux. Mandrake was the distro of choice for many users, and that included myself. Having fond memories of it, I thought I’d give this latest incarnation a spin.

What a difference.

Everything just worked from the outset. On rebooting after the install, I was greeted with the NVidia logo with no prompting (although I appreciate that not automatically installing their drivers is a matter of principle with other distros like Ubuntu). My ethernet was up and running no bother, and my sound was clear as a bell (score one over Ubuntu).

While Mandriva may not be the big name it used to be, I must admit, from my first impressions its still an incredibly good desktop distribution. Its been the easiest to install and get up and running from the ones I’ve tried so far, and KDE’s as easy to use as you’d expect (although I’m still a GNOME man).

Definitely worth a try if you’re looking for an easy distro.

I do still find the PCLinuxOS thing a bit strange though. Given its glowing reviews, and the fact that its actually based on Mandriva, I’m really at a loss to explain the problems I had. I’m sure other people have had more luck than me with it, but as I say, first impressions – especially with a system that was for mucking about – didn’t give me much reason to stick with it.

Talking of Linux Format, this month’s issue has a big “Distro Heaven” feature. Its nice roundup of 14 of the most popular Linux Distributions, and the cover DVD has 10 of them on it.

Its a cracking issue, and it was good fun flicking through the DVD the other day trying out the different LiveCDs. Its well worth picking up, and if you’ve never tried Linux before, then the different live CDs you can boot from the DVD will let you try out some of the different types without changing your hard disc. Brilliant!

Currently I’m an Ubuntu/SuSE man. Although I’m keen to install Fedora to get back into one of the more popular distros again, and PCLinuxOS has been getting a lot of good press in Linux Format.

So, over Christmas, I decided to re-jig the setup of my main PC.

I’d been getting back into Linux, and quite liked trying out different distros, however the current harddisc setup was quite restricting.

So, I went onto Dabs, and ordered myself a new 80Gb internal drive. Not huge, but Windows is always going to be my main OS (as a gamer), and its more than enough for my purposes (since all my main media files and the like will still be stored on the Windows drive.

So, I finally got it setup this weekend. I’ve now got an expanded 40Gb of space dedicated to Ubuntu (up from the previous 16 or so), and I’ve installed SuSE 10.3 (which I was quite impressed with) on a 20Gb partition. That still leaves around 16Gb for me to chuck on anything else that takes my fancy.

Of course, the only problem with starting from scratch was the inevitable setup issues. Ubuntu 7.x still hates my soundcard (a Realtek card using the hda-intel driver for Alsa), but fortunately I found this really good thread on UbuntuForums that sorted it easily.

SuSE was slightly more straight-forward, although with the 64bit version I couldn’t get the proper NVidia drivers running. So I fell back on the 32bit version and everything setup smoothly.

I must admit, I’ve tried going down the 64bit route a couple of times now, however I’m just not convinced its nearly stable or supported enough for me to switch at the moment. Hopefully in a couple of years it will be though, but for now I’m sticking with the 32bit OS, as third party applications seem to be a lot easier to get and run under it.

Well, last night’s triple-boot experiment went a lot better than I thought it would.

Despite some initial hassles when installing SuSE (the installer got confused by my multiple optical drives), it installed easily.

Its certainly a slick-looking OS. The last time I tried to install SuSE (probably 7 or so years ago), it didn’t like the NVidia card I was using and refused to do anything. So this was a big improvement. The boot loader is very swish and the setup menus clear (Ubuntu’s partition manager I thought was clearer when setting up partitions though).

So, some initial thoughts:

I’m using KDE (to get the maximum difference between SuSE and Ubuntu) and I still prefer Gnome. But OpenSuSE did give me the choice in what I wanted as my default desktop. I liked that.

My sound worked straight off (despite showing as muted in the taskbar), so that’s a plus over my last few Ubuntu installs.

However, OpenSuSE by default didn’t mount my windows partition (or my other Linux partition), unlike Ubuntu. A minor thing to fix, but still another tick in Ubuntu’s direction.

The bootloader coped perfectly with the triple-boot setup though. It correctly included Windows and identified Ubuntu as options. Although the Ubuntu entry infact just takes you to Ubuntu’s Grub menu. Something I’ll tweak to include a top-level option for booting Ubuntu.

So far, I like it. Yast seems easy to use, and my network and internet connection was sorted in no time.

The lack of things like a LiveCD mode, or mounting other partitions automatically means that I’d probably still say that Ubuntu should be the distro of choice for newcomers, but so far I like this a lot.

So, over the last month or so I’ve been taken with various other Linux distributions. Now, I’m perfectly happy with my main Ubuntu setup, but knowing that the 20Gb partition I set aside for it had a lot of unused space, I came upon the idea of resizing it down, freeing up a couple of Gb, and using the spare space as a testbed, to install any distros that took my fancy, and check them out.

Tonight’s the first attempt, using OpenSuSE 10.3 which came with this month’s Linux Format.

Wish me luck.