Since I have been using Linux pretty exclusively for a good 10 years now I have heard a lot of the same comments regards its ease of use and adoption by the masses. I think it is safe to say that the Distros of today are light years ahead of what we had 10 or even 5 years ago; yet the same complaints are still levied. Well, I am going to challenge some of those myths now with some thoughts I have picked up along the way. I don’t know how many parts this will be in, but here we go.

Linux is too hard for the general user because it is difficult to install.

First off, I will concede that someone who is not technical, or “geeky,” or struggles with technology will probably have a difficult time installing Linux. So yes, the average user would probably have a tough go at it. I say that with the fact that I did film my daughter (Pat has been working the videos, we should release them some day) installing Ubuntu before there was a graphical installer, when she was six without any help from me other than pronunciation of word. I just had her read what the directions said. Alas, maybe somehow I did pollute here with my technical savy. Anyway, if I am going to concede that installing Linux is difficult for the average user, I am going to take it one more. I think installing any operating system is going to be difficult for the average user. Let’s face it, there are a number of technicians out there who make a pretty penny installing or re-installing operating systems. So given that, I would then posit that windows is too difficult for the average user to install. OS X is too difficult for the average user to install.

Let me clarify what I mean by install. First, I do am not talking about a restore disc or partition provided by a computer manufacturer. No, I am talking about a plain vanilla Windows disc from Microsoft, and OS X install Disc from Apple, or an Ubuntu disc (yeah, I know there are other Linux distros out there but I am going to focus on Ubuntu for all intents and purposes here). Remember, we are comparing apples to apples; or as close to apples to apples here, not apples and oranges. Thus, comparing a system restore disc or partition to an out of the box copy of Windows Vista or XP is an apple to oranges comparison just as comparing those restore options to Ubuntu would be.

Therefore, if we validate that Ubuntu (Linux) is too difficult for the average user because the average user would either not be able to install or have a hard time installing Ubuntu (Linux on their computer); then we must equally validate the same statement when we replace Ubuntu with Windows (OS X, BSD, etc.). That is, Windows is too difficult for the average user because the average user would either not be able to install or would have a hard time installing Windows (OS X, BSD, etc). The installation of an operating system can not be used as a differentiator in the argument as to whether one operating system is a “better” choice for the general user because the installation of any operating system is a task the general user would find difficult at that very least and quite possibly beyond their current level of comfort.

Now note I said “comfort” and not “ability.” I chose comfort because I believe that most anyone who takes the time to learn how to install an operating system will be successful at installing the operating system. This is what I mean by getting your ducks in a row. Before you set to a task, make sure you have enough knowledge and resources to perform the task. As with any new venture like this; chances are there will be stumbling from which one will learn even more.

In my follow-up parts I will make a point to continue with “comparing apples to apples” and pointing out where it is important to have “one’s ducks in a row” as I tackle what I believe to be more myths levied at Linux in general.

Oh man, so my father’s system is on the fritz again. The windows 2000 computer is hosed and this time it looks like a hardware failure! Oh nos! The Ubuntu box is up and running and he is also trying to get this old win95 box to do anything useful. Well, actually it had win95 then 98 and now he is trying to get 2000 running on it but it keeps throwing some kind of error about virtual memory or something. I don’t know, but he was asking me how to increase the amount of virtual memory.

Anyway, I set to the downed box and it’s just not going to fly. I said basically, at this point he is going to have to choose either the linux or the windows but then decided that we could just drop the windows hard drive into the linux box and do a dual boot.

So I pulled the hd and dvd burner out of the windows box and threw them in the linux box. I had to set the windows hd as the hd1 because we all know if windows doesn’t see itself has the first partition on the first hard drive it fits; and you have to do some crazy stuff to make this happen anyway. This meant that I had to find some way to get grub into the mbr of the first hd so that I could boot linux too.

Long story short, after trying a slackware live iso and ubuntu breezy badger cd, I used knoppix 3.3 and chrooted to get grub on there. Nuff said. Oh, I also had to edit the menu.lst file for grub that was in ubuntu and switch hd0 to hd1 and hda to hdb. Had to do the same thing in /etc/fstab.

You know what? Linux booted without a problem. The only hiccup is that my father recently got a new printer and the version of ubunty, dapper, does not have a native driver for it. I mean come on, dapper was over 2 years ago, right? The printer was just put out last year I think. So, I have not given up yet.

Windows was a different matter on the other hand. It just did not like being moved to some different hardware. I barfed over itself loading up the first time, could not find the network card drivers and started chucking errors. Long story short, it never recovered after a reboot. I can get into safe mode and all that but when I try to boot normal it just does nothing at a blue screen. What a piece of work.

Now I could trouble shoot this but with the problems my father says he has been having, weird errors, constant crashing, the second hard drive never working anymore, the dvd drive crapping out, etc. I figured it would be less of a hassle for me to just re-install windows.

Guess what? The dvd drive won’t boot the windows cd. It will boot the three different linux discs I tried with no problem but an offical win 2000 disc kills it. So I have to take the system apart again to swap the optical drives. Now we have booted the install and the disc is formatting. By the time I had the install booted and the disc formatting I could have been at the end stages of ubuntu, finished if it was slackware. But no, are waiting for the drive to format.

Oh, and when it is installed I will have to jump through the hoops to get grub back on there again because windows just throws itself without warning into the mbr. Whoohoo!

I cannot wait until the driver hunt begins. But at least I can boot into linux and see what hardward is n there.

Previously I mulled over the potential patent or ip legality issues that may be hidden in Mono making it, for me, a risky proposition. As I pushed it around my head on my way into work this morning I started down a “tin foil hat” kind of path after listening to Dave Yate’s answer to my tongue-in-cheek question posed to him about Mono. He felt that it is a “Trojan Horse” outside the Linux gates. So I wondered how is it that this could be.

Mono’s biggest proponent is Miguel De Icaza; the renown programmer of much brilliance and popularity, integral to the Gnome project. And while many have ballyhooed that C# is an ECMA standard, I still have concern that just because it is a standard does not mean we are free to implement said standard in a “FOSS” format. Case in point, MPEG4. Now of course I could be wrong on this as it clearly states in the MPEG standards that the implementation of MPEG is wrapped in IP owned by the MPEG group. Anyway, this has been discussed already. But let’s suppose some where there is IP or Patent bombs under the surface of Mono and the entity holding the match to the fuse wold most certainly be Microsoft.

It was revealed recently that Novell has experience 31% growth outside their infamous MS-Novell agreement. That is, this growth did not result from the SuSE coupons Micorsoft was distributing. After listening to the Linux Action Show guys claim that this may not be something to tout so proudly as it makes one wonder why Novell made a deal so bemoaned and disliked by the FOSS community only to show that proposed profit gained was not a direct result of a big proponent of the deal. Regardless, one can posit, from what Novell has reported, that making this deal with MS provided “peace of mind” to some of the businesses they were courting. I can buy that. I mean come on, I am sure that there is a lot back scratching going on here and business sure as hell don’t want to upset an entity like Microsoft who, has proven time and again, that they will do whatever it takes to insure the best interests of the MS stranglehold on the technology industry today.

Microsoft has been pushing their .NET initiative for some time now. From what I have garnered in the past was that for a while there was more growth on the Mono side of the .NET development than MS’s own .NET uptake. How the two communities compare now, I am not sure. Some have posited that .NET is MS’s attempt as a JAVA killer. On the heels of .NET is Silverlight, MS’s Flash killer and the Mono edition - Moonlight. Moonlight comes with it a “reassuarance” that if you receive Moonlight from Novell you are welcome to use the MS technologies involved, specifically the necessary codecs to play the Silverlight content.

Now, pushing Silverlight and Mono into a cross platform world allows MS to get a stronger foothold across all technologies, especially the web, where they have been very weak. Right now, even though Moonlight is released under the LGPL, there are questions surrounding the what the MS Moonlight covenant means with regards to redistribution and future use. For more details on these questions see The Groklaw article: Shining Some Light On Microsoft’s Moonlight Covenant. Never-the-less, I am not going to rehash all the points made in that article suffice to say only time will tell, I guess if these IP and Patent concerns bare fruit.

Given those points, though, it raises a concern to me that maybe this is a “Trojan Horse” and Novell is being used by MS to inject malicious technology that, if it takes hold, becomes a revenue stream not only for Novell, but more importantly Microsoft. It seems that at any point MS could flip the switch on the Novell or Moonlight Covenant and render future technologies based off of Mono to require a license or risk IP or Patent suits. It’s an ugly proposition, but not too far from reality. Rope Linux, BSD and other non-MS system into the .NET technologies. Increase market share in areas where MS properties are not dominant thus increasing dependencies on MS technologies. Once that is successful there are two choices - 1) Extend beyond the capabilities 3rd party solutions (lumping Mono in here) through closed methods and offer “easier to use” and “more integrated” solutions (remember, you are working with MS technology to begin with, why settle for second or third tier will be the message); 2) Flex their patent and IP muscles against third party solutions like Mono. Either way, MS has the potential to come out on top, maintaining their stranglehold.

That sucks; because I am pretty sure that Mono is a decent technology and has a lot of great potential. But like MPEG, which is pretty good, while it is an open standard, that does not mean it is not patent or ip encumbered; and thus, a sweet technology could turn into a viscous asp down the line.

Man, it’s a tough call. There is so much out there that warns of the mono allure and the potential for it to be patent encumbered. Yeah, it’s built on an open standard, but what defines an open standard? I’ve heard mpeg4 defined as an open standard but really, you cannot implement mpeg4 without a license from the mpeg licensing group. Thus, it’s not really an open standard.

How does mono fit into the picture being an “open” implementation of .net? It’s a tricky situation and one I’d probably be based staying away from.

So why would I be interested in Mono? Well that is because the opensim project is built on mono. I thought it might be cool to run an opensim server, but I guess not now.

Boo hoo.

I’ve ragged on Xfce4 for some years now. I used to use it as my main desktop back in the pre-4.0 days and I think maybe even 4.0; but something changed along the way, and it was a change I was not too thrilled with. In fact, I think Linc echoed my sentiment as, if I recall correctly, he liked to run xfce with rox filer for icons and desktop management. Only the newer version of Xfce4 have desktop managment and icons which make the use of rox pointless.

Having fired up Xfce on Hardy Heron a few times in the past weeks at work, after I switched from Gnome to WindowMaker, I noticed that it seemed to look way too much like Gnome. The Xfce I recall had a simple dock at the bottom you could easily add shelves or icons to and that was pretty much it. The Xfce4 I saw on Hardy Heron was more a blue themed gnome (and I would verify this if I still had xfce4 on my System76, alas…). Where was the dock at the bottom? I don’t know. Wait, was it even there? I don’t recall. Now I will have to look tomorrow.

That got me thinking today and I went to the Xfce website and saw that the dock was still there. Hmmm… I had to give it a look on Slackware, there I should find a pretty vanilla release of Xfce4. Well, to my surprise, things were not too far from what I remember. The dock is still there and the panel at the top is a mainstay. You can, of course, turn either one off in the settings for Xfce4. I figured I would leave them on. I went through some of the other settings and elected to let Xfce4 control my desktop.

Well so far I must say, Xfce4 is fast, damn fast. Now I don’t know if this is because I am running it on slackware, again, I would have to compare on Ubuntu, but it is fast. Fast and crisp and easy to configure. Plus, I’m one who likes to have a rotating array of desktop images. I noticed my bgswitcher script was not working in xfce4 properly (as it uses wmbgset) and then I saw a program called xfceimageswitcher. Wow, just what I needed; and when it runs, it switches my images. Cool, I will set this up in crontab. So I put in /usr/bin/xfceimageswitcher and then I verify the path only to discover it is a script in my home directory. I don’t recall making the script but there it is. Essentially it calls xfdesktop -reload which reloads the desktop and a random backdrop from the list configured in the desktop settings. What I don’t understand is why they don’t make this an option in the desktop settings, to rotate your background. Hmm…. Why complain when maybe one day I could do something about it.

My hats off to Xfce4. I cannot remember what I disliked so much about it compared to the older version I was used to. What is happening these days? I’m back to using WindowMaker at work, along with a nice little analog clock with fish swimming around (along with the panel clock from pypanel recreating the Vista desktop there) and now Xfce4. What is next? Kde????

Oh and for rfquerin, I think I made a mistake regarding Xfce4 configuration files location. It’s in .config not .Cache. Ooops.

At work we the engineers finally got dual monitors and graphics cards to boot. Well, I will add that while the dual monitors are nice, we got a pci nvidia card with only 128 mb ram. So running compiz on this tends to make things a bit boggy.

I want to add that setting up the Nvidia dual display was a bit tricky at first, but once I got it down I was able to help all the other engineers. Two of us have dual displays running separate instances and one has an extended display which I believe is called twinview? Maybe not. Anyway, compiz stuff like the cube does not seem to work on an extended desktop. It works fine on the separate desktops though.

This is the second time in as many weeks I have had to work with dual displays. I must say, this is an area of work X really needs to work on. It should not be that difficult. It seems that it either works out of the box or you are going to be tweaking the hell out of your settings. Case in point, our lead got an IBM tablet which is supposed to work fine with dual display, but try as we might, we could not get it working. And this is with Hardy. Alas… I am almost beyond the main topic of my post.

Since I found that switching off compiz produced a snappier desktop on my dual display I figured, why am I still using Gnome here? It’s not that I don’t like Gnome, but I am more aligned to fluxbox and such. I almost gave Xfce a shot but then I said to myself, it’s been a while since I ran windowmaker. So I set about rolling with that.

I must say, I miss windowmaker, it’s a great, cool looking, lite weight window manager. The speed is perfect, the responsiveness is out of this world, plus I have a collection of cool dockapps to entertain myself - Bubblemon (oh no! all this stuff running has my duck floating upside down!!! Must be ff3 killing him), Moonclock, wmweather, network monitor, wmmix and fish-clock. Yeah, I know, fish clock is an analog clock, go figure. At least it’s not big ass! But wait it gets better.

Ok, so I am rocking along when I realize that when I fire up amarok I have no way to control it as windowmaker does not have a panel. Uh oh, what to do? Well there are a number of panels you can install and I settled upon pypanel. It’s lite, unobtrusive and fits the bill perfectly. I tried avant-navigator, but that requires compiz and also Matchbox-panel, but that mucked with my windowmaker settings. So pypanel it is. Now I have all I need.

On a side note, I just realize that pypanel also has a digial clock in it. Uh oh, I have both a digital clock in the bottom right-hand corner and an analog clock on the dock panel. Holy crap, I’m recreating the vista desktop with software like 5 years old or more!!!!

Here is something interest to keep in the back of your mind. The latest version of ext3 file systems have support for 256 byte inodes in preparation for ext4. The legacy version of GRUB (0.97) series only support up to 128 byte inodes but there is a patch that most distros are applying.

Tonight I helped a person on irc who could not boot slackware 12.1 from the GRUB installed by Ubuntu in the mbr. He did not want to overwrite grub with lilo, which slackware uses. When he would try to boot slackware from grub he would get the error: Bad file or directory type. After some sleuthing I figured it was the 256 byte limitation and verified using tune2fs -l his_hard_drive that slackware’s root partition was formatted with 256 byte inodes.

I noticed that the version of Ubuntu he was using, Hardy, had the 256 byte patch applied to grub, but this was an upgrade from Gutsy. It appears that when the Hardy upgrade is run it does not install grub again. So I had him run grub-install his_hard_drive and all was right with the world again; he could boot slackware, and that is a beautiful thing.

Now most of you who know me have come to realize that I do stupid things sometimes; mostly to get some yuks. It was to that end that when fellow, ultra-TLLTS community member and integral assistant/contributer to the show Gorkon informed me that you can record straight to youtube with the eeePC webcam; you know that I had to try it out. And why just any old hello or something? Nope, not me I started with my tongue and then escalated to a 37 second video entitled picking my nose with my tongue. Yeah, I am proud that I have a rather large, flexible tongue; and we all got laughs at work.

Well, lo and behold I wake up this morning to receive and email from a fellow who really enjoyed my work and would like to commission me for a 60 minute video of me picking my nose; that is his predilection, so to speak. He offered me $100 bucks to boot. How about that! Looks like I have a career path ahead of me.

Now really, I don’t think I am going to do that. While I could use the $100, I cannot see me picking my nose for an hour. No, that would turn out real bad I suspect. I don’t even want to think about it.

There are a number of distros ready to run on the eeePC, and of course there is a Slackware build. I could have mucked around with eeeBuntu and I have played around with Puppeee; but having found new love with slackware I figured, why not give it a shot.

There is a great little project over at http://slackeee.strangled.net/ but the documentation is a bit sparse and furthermore, I don’t want to just go ahead and replace xandros on there just yet. I want to install it on my 4gb flash card. That’s where things became a bit tricky. You see, I was not interested in making the flash card bootable as I could just boot from grub and point it to the flash drive. Thus, it took out some of the how-to’s on install slackware to a flash drive.

To that end, let’s just say for now that it took a lot of tinkering to figure out which kernel to boot and how. I used the 2.6.24.5-smp kernel with 12.1 and got it to boot to the flash device, but I needed to create an initrd image to get it to use the flash as root. Even more, I had to configure the intird-tree to include the sda device nodes. Fun stuff.

When I got the build booting that is when I realized that just untarring the packages onto the flash card is not going to be enough. That’s where the beauty of slackware package manager comes in. I just mounted the flash card on my slackware workstation and fired of installpkg with the -root switch pointing to where the card was mounted. A bit later I had a basic system.

I culled some more packages from the eeePC slackware project as I had difficulty building the ehternet drivers. Luckily, they also had the wife and ucview packages already to go so I took the lazy way out.

There were some more files I wanted so I used Chess Griffin’s sbopkg to build some non-slackware packages from the slackbuilds site. Great tool Chess. Now I am slackpkg’ing down the stuff for X and we shall see how it all goes. Whoohoo!

I got some work to do but I am psyched. Maybe someday soon i will write this up into a how-to.

I take a bit of pride in running my own services. I like the fun of configuring email servers, web server and other applications for personal and for communal use. I like to share.

I like to tinker with applications and such and try out new things. Who doesn’t? Anyway, what I am not too keen on is using outside services like gmail, google docs, any of the windows live services and social networks like myspace and twitter. This is largely a personal decision and not anything against those services or the technologies they use. In fact, they are quite good services. I personally like to do as much myself as I can.

It is with that interest that I have embarked upon attempting to centralize a few key applications so that no matter where I am or what system I choose to use, the same information will be at my fingertips.

Case in point, my email. I use imap so that my email is kept on the server and I have access to all said email from any client I choose to use. Be it thunderbird from my eeePc or main workstation or squirrel mail from work or a remote workstation; all my email is right there, right now.

I wanted similar capability from my calendars. I don’t want to be pigeon holed to a specific application or an online service. I like my calendar app to support ical format and be able to read and write to a webdav server. Sunbird and Thunderbird’s Lightening fit the bill perfectly; but were a bit too bulky on the eeePC. So I choose korganizer on the eeePC and now I have my calendar whereever I go. Be it work or home calendar, I can update and be reminded no matter where I am. The only snafu I had was trying to get evolution to work with my webdav server. It would read the calendar but it could not write to webdav. I could write to caldav though, but that is a completely different service.

Probably the last hurdle for now was getting a centralized rss aggregator. I had been using Thunderbird’s forumzilla to pull down my feeds and store them on my imap server; but the problem with this is it looks horrible through squirrel mail. Plus, with the eeePC I figured it would be great to look into some other aggregators like liferea or akregator. I like both of those but was more partial to lifrerea. I was all poised to use rsync to maintain state between where I was using liferea when I learned, to my chagrin, that the version of liferea on Hardy stores the state in a new format incompatible with the older version that is on my eeePC. Bummer. So I decided to try out akregator. But try as I might, I could not get state to maintain. Sure I could rsync my feed information back and forth but those items I have already pulled down and read were not carried over. I could not figure out why? This information must be stored a location other than .kde/share/apps/akregator.

Well, ec_lug to the rescue on our irc channel today. He recomended checking out blogbridge, a java based aggregator that provides a syncing service from their server. Now I was a bit skeptical but I figured I would give it a shot. It’s a pretty good application. I set up some feeds on my eeePC and account on their server and set about doing the same on my workstation at work. I synced with the server and all the feeds plus state were retained. This was cool. I added some more feed, did a sync and was presented with an error. I could only sync 2 times per day with the basic service. Bummer.

Now I am not one to begrudge anyone making money and if you are looking or a stand alone aggregator to run on multiple systems and keep synced BlogBridge and their service is an excellent choice. But note that I had previously mentioned that I prefer to maintain my own services. So, not to be undone, rsync to the rescue. I set up some syncing of the .bb directory and now I can transfer my settings and state between all my machines within a few seconds. I love it.

So definetly give blogbridge a look-see.