Ken Leyba's blog
The last time I blogged about Ubuntu Desktop, either I didn't explain the problems I was having sufficiently, or people just don't get it and react. I try to make what I write clear enough for those new to Linux, but that may make it seem like I'm not very experienced with Linux, even though I have been actively abusing it since 1995. I have decided to just keep on writing and let the chips fall where they may. This post shouldn't raise the ire of most people though, because unlike many Ubuntu veterans and rookies alike, I have had very little, if any, problems with Karmic Koala, much to my delight. Though I should point out, even with the problems I had with Jaunty, I still ran it on all of the systems I'm mentioning here. I also manage twenty Sun workstations that have been happily running Jaunty with none of the problems I had with my home system. My home system is a Dell XPS 420 with an ATI graphics card. I first upgraded, rather installed Ubuntu 9.10, and restored my data backup from 9.04. I created user accounts and the previous fix to the gnome-system-tools made this uneventful. Installing the multimedia and third-party software is incredibly easy now. The best guide for multimedia and add-on software I have found is over at my-guides.net. Once I had everything running smoothly I decided to take a chance and install the proprietary ATI drivers. I had nothing but problems with the ATI drivers in 9.04. This time however, it all worked without a hitch. I have full eye-candy and VLC plays videos smoothly with no problems. The final big test was Brasero, which was a giant headache with Jaunty. I burned an audio CD with the Normalize Plug-in and it worked like a charm. Well over a month later, Karmic Koala has been trouble free.
Karmic Koala Eye Candy |
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A few recent stories from experts in the field or journalists have raised my ire more than a bit. Seemingly well intentioned, to inform and educate the reader, criticized where more research (or common sense) would have served better. The Square Peg in the Round Hole The first set of stories began with the idea of shoehorning an enterprise Linux distribution (i.e. workstation/server class) into a netbook computer . I read the first headline of this misadventure and was baffled by the idea and just couldn't understand the logic. Netbooks are not tiny notebooks, but a whole different class of machine. This grand experiment evolved into a tirade against CentOS in general. As a CentOS user, this again made no sense, in that one who uses CentOS is aware that updates are generated from sources of upstream vendor and small delays have historically occurred. The delay of CentOS 5.3 had me considering moving to another distribution, and I still haven't made a final decision. Yet, I have always been in complete knowledge of the derivative nature of CentOS and the pluses and minuses of a distribution that is dependent of another. |
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I had intended to create blog post about my frustration with Vista and how I finally installed Linux on my almost one year old PC. A funny thing happened on the way to Linuxland, a roadblock whose name is Jaunty. So arrives the much hailed Jaunty, destined to be the final stake in the heart Vista. For the few Windows applications I need, I begin by giving less than half of my disk to the new Vista install, a common clean start to a gradually failing Windows operating system. Suspecting I wouldn't be using Vista anytime soon, I didn't bother with updates or anti-virus, saving those wonderful tasks for a later date. The next step was the uneventful install of Jaunty, updates, multimedia codecs, and Virtual Box, nothing unusual. My first indication of problems were burning a audio CD for my daily commute. One of the touted features of Jaunty was the much improved Brasero CD/DVD burning software. After building my list of tracks I began the burning process. Stepping away and returning to my machine, there sat Brasero with a message “normalizing title...” After a short on-line search, I found there is a bug with the normalizing plug-in for Brasero, that is installed and enabled by default. No problem, turn off the plug-in and a audio CD is created, albeit with varying volume between tracks. |
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I had to send my netbook, an Acer Aspire One, for repair after three months of use. The unit originally came with Windows XP, but had 1Gb of memory and a 160Gb hard drive, a configuration not available on Linux versions. I installed Fedora 10 XFCE respin, but when sending in the unit I knew that Acer would probably re-install Windows XP; Acer was upfront about this. As I suspected the repaired unit arrived with a fresh install of Windows XP.
This leads me to Easy Peasy v1.1, which is based on Ubuntu 8.10. Installing the XFCE respin of Fedora was not uneventful. I had to search the Internet on how to configure the wireless adapter, sound and installing all of the multimedia codecs for video and Internet. It wasn't a difficult task, but took a little time going over different web sites and getting the configuration just right. After the work was done I was happy with the final result. I didn't really want to go through that process again. |
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Marcel had another excellent show tonight with guest John Terpstra on the subject of the Linux Desktop and its adoption. Marcel, John and I are long time users of Linux and the Linux Desktop. I, however, have not had the success of pure Linux adoption that I would like to have. I have deployed several Linux servers in different environments and have had very good results, the desktop is another story in itself. I have repeated many times what one of my early Unix instructors taught us, “Users buy applications not Operating Systems.” The problem that I have run into many times is an application that has become a deployment killer. There are many applications for specific use that do not have a Linux equivalent. The application that I brought up tonight in a call-in was Accelerated Reader (http://www.renlearn.com/ar/), a reading program with a Windows client. Fortunately the database is able to be stored on a Linux server using Samba. I have not been able to find a Linux based replacement for Accelerated Reader. This is only one example though, there are several other applications that are specialized for specific markets. |
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