briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Ubuntu)

Remote webcam viewing: Ubuntu 3, Gentoo 0

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:04:32 -0800

One could argue that boringness is a good attribute for a distro. Gentoo has stayed out of my way for a good long time. I update world once a week and I haven't had a package fail to build or fail to work in a while.

Until a few days ago. I wanted to view video from my laptop's built-in webcam, on my desktop, over my local network. My laptop is running Ubuntu, and my desktop is running Gentoo. One point in favor of Ubuntu, my webcam works without any effort on my fault. It works right on a fresh Ubuntu install off the install CD. I never did get any webcam working on any Gentoo install whenever I've tried over the years. Maybe the situation has rectified itself at this point, but I don't anticipate trying.

Unfortunately, viewing my laptop's feed on my desktop also failed to work. First I tried an X-forwarding SSH tunnel, and running xawtv -remote, but I got all kinds of nasty errors along the lines of

X Error of failed request:  BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
  Major opcode of failed request:  2 (X_ChangeWindowAttributes)
  Resource id in failed request:  0x1a5
  Serial number of failed request:  55
  Current serial number in output stream:  56

Extensive Googling turned up nothing on this, which isn't surprising given how un-informative an error message this is. Maybe some extension in X needed to be built to get xawtv to work. Maybe it's a version incompatibility. Maybe some hardware thing with my video card driver. Who knows. On the other hand when I tried to view my laptop's feed on another laptop running Ubuntu (actually Kubuntu), it worked fine. Albeit incredibly slowly.

Then I noticed Ekiga comes installed on Ubuntu by default, so I figured I'd try that, in spite of it being a bit overkill. But installing Ekiga on Gentoo died with a build error, because I needed to build pwlib with ldap support. Ekiga between the two Ubuntu laptops worked fine without any effort too, so at that point I gave up on getting it working in Gentoo, since it was no longer worth it.

No big deal, but slightly annoying. Probably could've gotten it to work in Gentoo eventually, but I have less and less patience for fiddling with installation nowadays. This is probably one of the benefits of the sort of mono-culture Ubuntu is turning into. Everyone using Ubuntu has the same basic crap installed. Whereas there's probably no one in the world with a Gentoo install quite like mine.

But Gentoo is still working well for me overall.

Interview with a new Linux user

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 21:53:06 -0700

After countless, endless hours of nagging on my part, my girlfriend finally put Linux on her laptop. I thought it would be interesting to hear what a long-time Windows-using non-programmer thinks of Linux (Kubuntu in this case) after a few weeks of use. So I interviewed her. Read on. My thoughts and conclusions are at the end.

Q1: How would you describe your level of expertise or skill level when it comes to computers in general?

A: I think I'm better with computers (at least Windows) than the majority of my classmates (I'm starting third year accounting next week). I know my way around the internet, I'm decent with programs like Office and GIMP, and I know how to fix most problems that affect me as a lay user. As for Linux, I would know how to look for help, but I probably wouldn't understand it yet.

Q2: You used Windows for a long time in spite of my constant pestering. What kept you from using Linux until now?

A: A few years ago you tried to get me to use Gentoo. I was younger, and apparently Linux in general was more difficult to use, so I got frustrated pretty quickly. A lot of my reluctance was from remembering that time. I was also worried that I might do something wrong and lose all my schoolwork. At least in Windows I know it wouldn't be directly my fault if that happened (disregarding the fact that I'm slow at backing things up).

Q3: You decided to use Kubuntu. Why did you pick that distro instead of another?

A: I heard it was easy for Windows users to pick up. It's also the one you have on your laptop, so it's easier to get tech support.

Q4: Why did you pick KDE instead of Gnome, XFCE, or some other desktop environment / window manager?

A: I don't remember. Something about having multiple wallpapers on multiple desktops and being able to make them change randomly whenever I want. There might've been other reasons, but that one is the most enjoyable so far.

Q5: How hard was it to install Linux? Compared to Windows?

A: It was about the same.

Q6: How hard was getting everything set up the way you like it after Linux was installed? How long did it take you?

A: There's always a lot to set up on a clean install of anything. It took me a few days to find something I'm comfortable with. I mostly just ripped off your setup because I liked it, though, so that made it a bit easier. Getting SKIM to work was quite difficult, though, since I couldn't find good instructions for my version of Kubuntu (or Kubuntu at all, really). I think I just ended up making you fix it.

Q7: Does Linux have any features or applications you really enjoy, that Windows is missing? Can you do anything in Linux that you couldn't do (easily) in Windows?

A: Even just doing a small amount of image editing yesterday, I'm beginning to see the appeal of multiple desktops. I also like how easily it's detected various wireless networks so far. The package manager is pretty nice too. I wouldn't have a Gmail checker if you didn't write one for me, but the one you wrote is better than the one I was using before.

Q8: Do you miss anything from Windows? Is there anything you could do in Windows that you can't do (easily) in Linux?

A: It's easier to install programs in Windows than it is to install non-package programs in Linux. I still don't know the difference between a source and a binary. I don't miss playing games too much, since I'm more of a console person. But I do miss OtaClock. The default clock is boring and not cute at all.

Q9: How comfortable are you with using a command prompt?

A: Not very. I know how to chmod things, but that's about it. I need to look for a guide for basic bash commands that explains them in plain English.

Q10: How do you like the general look and feel of the Linux desktop compared to Windows?

A: It's a lot nicer looking overall. I like being able to use all the Buuf icons easily. At first I was resistant to using anti-aliased font, but it's growing on me. Windows displayed aliased fonts so nicely, and I still kind of miss it.

Q11: You have a dual-boot set up. What do you still plan to use Windows for?

A: I have a couple games that don't work in Linux. I also use my laptop for school, and my university is dominated by Windows, so I feel comfortable having it around for compatibility purposes if I ever need it.

Q12: It's been a few weeks since you switched to Linux. How has it been overall? Do you plan to stick with it long-term?

A: Overall it's been about the same as Windows. Something about Vista still creeps me out, so it feels good using an OS that doesn't feel evil. I like being able to get pretty much any program I want free and on demand.

Here are some Linux programs I know you've used... tell me something you like and something you dislike about each one.

Dolphin It's minimalistic, but it doesn't have the view options I like.
Konqueror I can get all the info on a file that I need just by mousing over it. It took me a while to figure out how to both display thumbnails and then sort them by size or date, though. I'm quite obsessive about collecting and sorting pictures, and in Windows that was how I used to see which pictures were new or duplicates.
Gwenview It finds duplicate pictures for me, making the above method obsolete. It even finds similar pictures, which is pretty intersting. So far I can't think of anything I don't like about it.
Amarok Win-B is my friend. There's too many unnecessary features for me, though. I don't care about album art or smart playlists. It's good that I can just ignore them.
Kopete It has custom themes. I really like the Metal Gear theme you made. For some reason I can't figure out how to make our text different colours, though. The text is different for my friends who use the real MSN, but for you it's the same colour is mine, so it's harder for me to read.
Kate It's like tabbed Notepad. I'm one of those people who actually likes Notepad, since I don't do much coding at all. I can see where Vim is better, but Kate is fine too.
KDE as a whole When it's set up properly, it looks really nice. The amount of stuff I needed to change to get it to look nice was quite overwhelming, though.

Thoughts and conclusions: I used to try to push Gentoo on people, and that was a mistake. Gentoo isn't for everyone. A bad experience can kill people's opinions of Linux.

It's a lot easier to make a big switch to a new operating system when you have knowledgeable people to back you up and help you out. This is one area where Linux shines: There are a LOT of people willing to help newbies. The community aspect of Linux is by far one of the best parts of using it. We're all doing this because it's fun and Linux people like to share the fun with others.

Is Linux ready for the desktop? I think so; I think it has been for a while now. A Windows power-user can find a lot to like in Linux. There are a lot of features and apps in modern desktop Linux that offer a lot of things many people would find very appealing if they only knew they existed.

Blah blah blah

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:25:47 -0700

My Westinghouse L2410NM LCD monitor arrived at Westinghouse's factory, according to UPS tracking, on Thursday at 10AM. Thus the clock starts. In one week I'll begin periodic phone calls to Westinghouse requesting updates on the status of my RMA. I know that every phone call you make to a call center costs the company money; it's in Westinghouse's best interests as well as my own to give me good information and satisfy my curiosity.
Yet another reason Vista sucks: trying to get VPN to work. Took me a week and the help of many people from my company's IT dept. before I even got close. The Control Panel UI philosophy of Vista seems to have been to take the XP Control Panel and scatter the options to the four winds; then build an insultingly dumbed-down GUI that has lots and lots of links to all those scattered pieces. Any kind of network configuration takes twice as long and twice as much navigation through a maze of windows and tabs and icons and links than it did in XP. And XP wasn't all that great to begin with.
My Ruby on Rails project for work is turning out well. Deploying Rails is a bit easier than the last time I had to do it over a year ago. Apache's mod_proxy + Mongrel makes things pretty easy. Getting it to work with SSL is also doable; as per these lengthy instructions you have to put
```
RequestHeader set X_FORWARDED_PROTO 'https'
```
in your Apache config (this line requires Apache's mod_headers).
Ruby on Ubuntu / Debian still sucks. I don't like how they break standard Ruby up into many parts and different packages. You kind of expect Ruby to come with rdoc and ri, not to have to install them separately.

(Read the whole crappy story of Westinghouse's dishonesty and horrible customer service: The beginning, Update 1, Update 2, Update 3, Update 4, Update 5, Update 6, Update 7, Update 8, Update 9, VICTORY, aftermath.)

Gentoo musings

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:39:37 -0700

Planet Larry seems not to be updating for some reason. It's stuck on September 27th. Hope that gets cleared up soon.

It's been a few months since I switched back to Gentoo from Ubuntu. Things are going well. Everything works fine. I don't find myself spending any more time keeping it up and running than I did with Ubuntu. Sometimes I find myself missing little things like USB flash drive automounting that come installed by default in Ubuntu but which I'm too lazy or apathetic to set up in Gentoo. But then I think I must not really need such things, or else I would spend the time to set them up, wouldn't I?

I think "user-friendly" computer systems like Ubuntu tends to give you a of things like that: things that are nice to have but if you don't have them you don't really miss them. Automount is one. I lump GDM/KDM into that category also. It's actually easier and faster to do startx manually, but Ubuntu gives you GDM and it's kind of nice to look at, so you keep it around. In Gentoo I never bother installing it. Same with framebuffer console (though I don't remember if Ubuntu even had that).

Probably part of the reason my Gentoo install has yet to implode is that I've calmed down and stopped installing so many ridiculously beta versions of lots of packages. Though I am running ~x86 versions of the Gimp, Pidgin, KDE, Firefox, etc. You can't beat Gentoo for the ability to selectively unmask certain programs and keep everything else stable.

That's better

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:05:14 -0700

This is why I like Gentoo. I installed ZSNES and I got version 1.51 from the Portage tree, but that version doesn't have netplay. The version I want was some funky 1.42n version somebody wrote with netplay built in. It took me all of five minutes to write an ebuild based on the build in the Portage tree and mask the later versions and install what I wanted. In Ubuntu I'd have been back to ./configure && make && sudo make install and it probably would've bombed due to missing libraries.

Lots of chatter on blogs lately about Gentoo management problems. As usual, I guess. Something I've been guilty of in the past myself is ignoring all the good and focusing on the bad. It's somehow easy to install 1000 packages and focus on the one that fails and respond with "Holy crap Gentoo is broken, stupid lazy devs". It's easy to see one offhand comment from a dev on a mailing list that may be very vaguely insulting to someone if read in a certain way and conclude that Gentoo devs as a group hate non-dev users and think they're scum. (How can a one-paragraph email spawn a five-page forums thread?) I'm making a concerted effort to ignore all of this crap as much as possible.

There's so much good here if you open your eyes to it. Sure some things don't work sometimes, but so many things do work so much of the time and it's easy to lose sight of those. This is one reason I think it's important to make some noise when things DO work sometimes, even if it seems redundant. Just to keep perspective.

Nothing to it

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 16:32:12 -0700

My Gentoo install went swimmingly. Of course swimmingly for a Gentoo install means that I had to recompile my kernel twice. (I foolishly tried to get away with using /proc/config.gz from the liveCD instead of configuring it by hand, and it turns out the liveCD doesn't compile SATA support into the kernel, so I got a kernel panic when it couldn't find /. Oops.) I didn't touch a single file in my /home partition, and everything still works largely as expected. I re-used the old xorg.conf which has come with me from the Gentoo install before my Ubuntu install, which saved me time again.

Including the time I wasted on kernel recompiles, and added time to re-burn the CD because my flaky DVD burner / low quality CD-Rs gave me a corrupt liveCD the first time around, it only took maybe five hours of attention from me to get up and running with KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, the GIMP, Amarok, gvim, and so on and so forth. Nothing to it. I've actually run out of programs to install now, so I guess I can consider myself "done".

I think installing Gentoo actually took me LESS time than the last time I installed Ubuntu. That may be because my Ubuntu install CD was 2 years old and I had to upgrade my way through 3 Ubuntu releases to get current, but it still amuses me to say it. (Funnily enough though, many times over the years I've resorted to using my old Gentoo 1.4_rc1 install CD from 2003 to install Gentoo on one computer or another. I was tempted to try again this time but I like being able to fiddle around with Gnome and use Firefox while I do my install.)

Inevitable?

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 10:22:35 -0700

Having used Ubuntu for almost exactly eight months at this point, I think I have a good idea what its strengths and weaknesses are in relation to what I want.

Strengths:

It's fast at installing things.
It's brainless to use; a monkey could install it, a monkey could keep it going.
Packages are fairly up-to-date. You're guaranteed lots of updates at least once every six months.
There's a big community. That has a lot of benefits; for example, if you hit a bug, the more people who share your distro, the more likely that someone else hit the same bug (and possibly fixed it).
Ubuntu is supported by a lot of places. last.fm had a nice link to a .deb installer for their client when I needed one recently, for example. And now Dell supports it. Its hardware support is likely to be good.
Apparently well-funded and unlikely to disappear any time soon.
Handles uninstalling packages that were installed only as dependencies for other packages.

Weaknesses:

I looked at how to roll your own .deb's once, and it does not appear to be something enjoyable.
*-dev packages are not installed by default.
Huge updates to lots of packages once every six months is not how I like to do my system upgrades.
Installing anything that isn't in the official repos is error-prone and unenjoyable.
Bumping the version of something in the official repos to get a new release before it appears in the official repos is non-trivial.
The init system sucks. I don't enjoy fiddling with symlinks
Way, way too many services are started at boot by default and it's not entirely clear what can safely be disabled.
apt sucks. The commands are too obscure. I can never remember how to do simple things like search for a package by name or list all files a package provides. There are too many tools that are almost but not quite the same thing, or that overlap in functionality. dpkg, apt-get, apt-cache, aptitude. Its output when installing a package is unhelpful.
The documentation for apt tends to suck also.
Apache2 is not set up nicely. It took me forever to get Rails working.
Too many things are considered "lib" packages and handled / named stupidly as a result. For example Ruby gems.
Single programs are split into multiple packages non-intuitively. (Vim)
The Ubuntu forums are ugly and mostly useless.
Silly release names.
Lack of cow mascot.

Given that, I think it's time to move on. Aside from the reasons above, this is largely an emotional decision because Ubuntu has been annoying me. But I have come to realize that my computer isn't for work, it's for fun. Even if something isn't the most efficient thing in the world, why not do something if it's enjoyable? Ubuntu is pretty efficient, but it's not a lot of fun in the end.

So I just finished downloading Gentoo 2007.0 install ISOs. (ISOs plural because I'm not going to use the graphical installer, so I got the minimal ISO too. I'd still like to give the graphical installer a glance though.) Why Gentoo instead of something else? It definitely has a lot of weaknesses of its own, but some strengths too. It's mostly because I'm not sure where else to go, or because picking Gentoo again is sort of like going home after being away for a while. Again largely an emotional decision. But there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. Gentoo has been fun for me at times in the past. If Gentoo becomes un-fun again I'll switch away again, maybe try something else new.

As I've said before, switching distros is easy and usually fairly safe, given a sane partition scheme and a bit of knowing what the heck you're doing. I plan to keep my /home around and wipe everything else. (I need to repartition anyways, I'm running out of room on /boot. Made it too small to begin with.) And I can always switch back if I want, or pick another distro, almost on a whim. This is one of the strengths of Linux, and I may as well take advantage.

I'm also a firm believer in keeping in mind that I can at any time be wrong about anything. I ditched Gentoo because I decided it was headed in a bad direction and it was causing me un-needed headaches. I'm prepared to re-test that conclusion and admit I was wrong if necessary. Or maybe it'll start to annoy the heck out of me again right away and I'll try to find another distro that I haven't used before, you never know. We'll see.

last.fm sadness

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:49:33 -0700

I tried to play a "custom radio station" in Amarok via last.fm today, and I get a message stating "This item is not available for streaming". I did some googling and read that this is a problem that may have been fixed as of Amarok 1.4.6. I upgraded Amarok via Ubuntu's backports and it still doesn't work. So I apt-get installed the lastfm Ubuntu package and tried that, and it still doesn't work. Depressing.

Then I read that last.fm streaming was gimped up a few months ago due to pressure from record companies. Those J-pop songs that I almost certainly can't buy in America were really bringing the industry to its knees. Thank God that was put to a stop, before all music on the planet ceased to exist.

The very latest version of the last.fm client (downloaded from last.fm manually) does let me play a custom radio, but only searching based on one artist at at time. The sucky Flash-based web player also works in the same way. Amarok does not, and I don't know what's going on there.

Neither of the official clients supports pausing the music either though, again because the music industry forbids it. I believe this is because every time someone pauses music coming from a radio station, a 20-dollar bill somewhere in America bursts into flames.

So there you have it. I'm not really going to use last.fm any more. Not a lot of point in it.

Oh come on.

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 14:40:35 -0700

:perldo s/something/other/
E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version

In spite of my previous actions which I thought led to a successfully non-gimped Vim install, it turns out that I actually ended up getting rubydo to work AT THE EXPENSE of perldo.

Apparently what I actually needed was vim-full. Installing vim-ruby and vim-perl doesn't work. One shadows the other. They must both provide the same files. But stupid apt never told me there was any problem.

In fact right now I have vim-perl, vim-ruby, AND vim-full installed. I just uninstalled vim-perl and reinstalled it and it let me do it, but I have no idea what it did. It didn't affect my ability to use perldo even when vim-perl is uninstalled.

When I do aptitude show vim-full it says

...
Conflicts: vim-gnome (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-gtk (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-lesstif (< 1:6.4-001+3),
           vim-perl (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-pyt<span></span>hon (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-ruby (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-tcl
           (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-tiny (< 1:6.4-001+3), vim-common (< 1:6.4-001+3)
...

Apparently "Conflicts" does not mean "Prevents you from installing them all at the same time". Thanks Ubuntu.

EDIT: No, the current vim-perl I'm installing is version 1:7.0-164+1ubuntu7.1, so it doesn't conflict. But it still doesn't seem to do the right thing.

Arrrrrrgh Ubuntu

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:03:10 -0700

Error: Required vim compiled with +ruby
E117: Unknown function: rubycomplete#Complete

I had this magic vim-ruby package installed, but it wouldn't let me :rubydo or use Ruby omni-completion in Vim. I had to force-uninstall every vim-related package. It whined when I did that because apparently some system package had a dependency on vim.

It turns out I had vim-ruby, vim-perl, vim-common, vim, gvim, and vim-tiny packages all installed, and possibly some other vim-somethings that I couldn't manage to track down, and I have no idea what any of them do / did. I assume some of them are virtual packages of some sort or another. How the hell many packages does it take to get a working vim? Let's see:

chester@compy ~ $ sudo apt-get install vim-that-actually-works
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package vim-that-actually-works</pre>

In any case force-removing them all and starting over and installing just vim and vim-ruby and vim-perl seems to have worked. But this really ticks me off.

Ubuntu woes

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:15:11 -0700

I wish there was some setting that would tell apt, "automatically install all the -dev packages relevant to anything I install". One thing about Ubuntu that really annoys the heck out of me is how single programs are broken apart into multiple packages. And for that matter, another thing is how so many things are shoved into "lib-*" packages for no reason I can determine.

Is there something about computer geeks that never lets us be satisfied with anything? I don't have time to go off and change distros again but I find myself wanting to. Ubuntu works fine for 95% of the things I want it to do. Why does the 5% bother me so much? Same with window managers, I've flip-flopped from Gnome to KDE to FVWM to *box to XFCE back to KDE back to Gnome etc. etc., with even a diversion to buying a Mac and using OS X for a while. Pretty much all of those do enough or almost enough to let me get by on a daily basis. Why do I feel the need to abandon ship so often?

In another way it's a good thing, I get a good taste of everything, but there's also something to be said for settling down and going with what works after a while.

Feisty

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:49:01 -0700

I upgraded Ubuntu to Feisty beta yesterday. The upgrade bombed pretty hard. Probably why it's still a beta. I think I managed to salvage things though.

This is another thing I sometimes miss about Gentoo: Gentoo's upgrade messes were always spread out over the course of many months, and then one day you wake up and 2006.1 was "released" and it so happens you already have the equivalent installed, assuming you kept up on updates. In Ubuntu the upgrade mess pretty much hits you all at once.

But Ubuntu makes up for it by the fact that upgrading most of the hundreds of packages on my computer only took 50 minutes of downloading and unpacking. If this was Gentoo I'd still be waiting for it to finish compiling. Even adding in some amount of time to clean up Ubuntu's mess when it bombs (and it does bomb from time to time), it still ends up being way less time than waiting for hundreds of packages to recompile. That's a good thing.

I think it's been six or seven months of Ubuntu at this point, and I'm still pleased. I'm happy with my choice to switch.

KDE, hello again

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 23:31:49 -0800

I changed back to KDE today on a whim. This means I can start working again on my Gnome <=> KDE icon converter script that I started way back. This is necessary because most of the icon themes for KDE are essentially hideous.

Every time I start using KDE again after a long absence, it takes me a good hour or two to get it in a usable and non-annoying state, visually and otherwise. Generally achievable in 7 easy steps:

Step 1: Kill Klipper. This used to be a hassle. I could never figure out how to do it permanently. Now the first time you right-click and quit Klipper, it asks you if it should restart every time you use KDE. KDE devs read my mind.

Step 2: Remove all the default ALT+F# keybindings. Rebind them all to "Change to desktop X". Remove any other annoying keybindings. The fewer the better; I don't like surprises.

Step 3: Make everything about eight times smaller. Fonts, icons, window borders, Kicker.

Step 4: Find a QT theme that doesn't look like it was inspired by balloon animals. This one is about as minimalistic and "flat" as I've ever seen in KDE. I like it so far.

Step 5: Change the color scheme and wallpaper to remove all traces of neon blue. Muted greys and a few bits of lowly-saturated green work well.

Step 6: Open up a random GTK app and wince in pain. Set gnome-settings-daemon to auto-start from now on.

Step 7: Start adding launcher icons for oft-used apps to Kicker. gvim never seems to make it into KDE's menu by default. Oddly in Ubuntu I even had to make a kcontrol icon, I couldn't find one by default. Not sure what's going on there.

That's about all it takes. Usually takes a good couple weeks after before everything is just right though. Strange how KDE always feel lighter and more responsive than Gnome. You'd think it'd be the other way around. KDE looks so darn bloated, but somehow in spite of all the complexity it runs very well. Maybe I will post a screenshot once I get things presentable. I haven't posted one in a long while.

Spare partition

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:46:32 -0800

So after Windows having collapsed into a heap of flaming ruin, leading me to delete it in disgust and vow never to let it defile my hard drive again, I realized I have a spare 34GB partition on my drive just sitting there. I'm not even sure what to do with it.

It occurs to me that I could put Gentoo or some other distro on there and either dual-boot or maybe chroot in and play with it or who knows. I think perhaps if/when pkgcore ever matures I might give that a try. Or say KDE4 is released and Gentoo jumps right on putting it in Portage while other distros lag behind, that might induce me.

I have to say I'm largely only considering playing with Gentoo again due to emotional, irrational attachment and fondness for the distro based on past experience, and there's not really any rational reason I can think of to do it. I should also say that all the mess that I see on Planet Larry and elsewhere regarding devs quitting and problems with dev flame-wars is a good counter-balance to the above, because that kind of thing really makes me not want to touch Gentoo after all; that's an emotional and irrational response as well, but it balances out the above, and rationality wins the day, and I'll probably stay away from Gentoo for a while longer. But you never know.

Sadly no other distro really appeals to me at the moment. But another option is to put a bleeding-edge Ubuntu on there to play with before I switch my main partition over to the newest version. This strikes me as largely a waste of time because I'm going to upgrade my main partition eventually anyways. Probably always within a few days after it's released, because I'm obsessive about having the latest versions of things I can, for better or worse.

Most likely I'll turn it into a miscellaneous file storage partition. But that's awfully boring.

Pro-Ubuntu / anti-Gentoo post #8475.9

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:28:19 -0800

In Ubuntu I just ran sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and I noticed it wanted to remove nvidia-glx for some reason (conflicting with some kernel package). I thought well, that's not good. But I let it go anyways as a sort of experiment. Then I logged out of Gnome and restarted GDM. As I thought, GDM failed to reload. I checked /var/log/X.0.old and yeah, failure to load the nvidia module. So I sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx and tried again and then it worked.

I tried the other day to get epsxe to work. It appears to be missing from any Ubuntu repos. But there were long threads at the Ubuntu MB detailing how to get it working. I downloaded the binary from the epsxe website and stuck it in its own dir and it worked.

I mention these because these are the worst problems I've had in Ubuntu since I installed it a few months ago. Beyond that, zero problems that come to mind at the moment. I really thought transitioning from Gentoo to Ubuntu would be problematic at least SOME of the time, but nope, smooth sailing.

I swing by the Gentoo forums sometimes, and it seems to be a lot of "RTFM n00b" or "Fix it yourself or leave, we don't care". I remember a few years back a lot of people in the forums used to harp on other distros that had many users who did that kind of thing. It's sad to see; even if it's just a loud minority, it stands out. And there's a lot of the usual "Gentoo sucks" and then the defensive counter-arguments. Maybe Gentoo is headed towards attracting an elitist sort of self-righteous userbase; that's fine, to each his/her own. It does not appeal to me however. To be fair, I have not participated at the Ubuntu forums as much as I ever did at the Gentoo forums. But I have yet to see any of the same kind of negativity there.

I think that getting rid of Gentoo really did free up an inordinate amount of time for me. You always hear the "It's only free if time is worthless!" kind of argument, and I generally tend to dismiss it, but there may be some shred of validity to it. Upgrading packages takes 5 minutes tops with Ubuntu and it tends to work right the vast majority of the time. No package breaking every 3 days, or forced complete system-rebuilds. No re-compiling PHP and mplayer 4 times a week because someone added or changed a USE flag. Etc. etc.

The free time I got from not using Gentoo has gone directly into things like studying for an exam or updating my (other) website; first time in years I've had the time to work on that site. Or just playing a game or two with my girlfriend. I've really gotten into gaming again for the first time in a long time, and it's probably no coincidence that it started right about when I ditched Gentoo.

Sun Java on Ubuntu

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 12:23:45 -0800

Note to self, Ubuntu uses GCJ for Java by default. To get Sun's Java and set it as default,

sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Fear

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 09:55:33 -0800

A lot of updates popped up in Ubuntu in the past couple days. Looks like a new version of xorg is out. I must admit I'm a bit nervous actually doing this upgrade. There is no etc-update, though there is something similar that asks if I want to overwrite config files with the ones from the package I'm installing. But I'm still not entirely sure how it works. So I don't know what's going to happen to my xorg.conf. This will be my first real test of Ubuntu, I think.

It seems Ubuntu's subversion package is older than what I was running in Gentoo before I switched, because I hit some problems working with some old scripts I'd checked out of a repository while using Gentoo. It worked itself out though. Aside from that and a few KDE bugs, having retained my /home folder from Gentoo and made no changes to it, Ubuntu has been a flawless drop-in replacement. All my old config files still work. I'm sure the same could be said of most distros; it's more a strength of Linux than a strength of Ubuntu.

December screenshot

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:11:55 -0800

Haven't posted one in a while. Gnome + Beryl, Buuf icons, MurrinaNeoGraphite GTK theme. I caught a window in mid-closing-animation, but I thought it looked neat so I left it.

Things I miss about Gentoo

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 14:36:02 -0800

It's been about a month since switching to Ubuntu. So what do I miss about Gentoo? A couple things...

Last week the repository I was using for my beta Nvidia driver seemed to have disappeared. That's kind of a bad thing. Gentoo was great at having lots and lots of stuff in the main official Portage tree. There are way more things that I'm needing to go to third-party repositories to find in Ubuntu. The more of these I install, I imagine the more likely something is going to go horribly wrong. I'm bypassing any kind of QA Ubuntu might employ on the official repos, and instead blindly trusting that some random guy is smart enough to make a package that's not going to conflict horribly with another package. But given that uninstalling software in Ubuntu actually seems to work, I'm not as worried about this as I would have been in Gentoo.

There's a question of which is better: having tons of highly unstable packages in the official tree which may or may not b0rk your system, or leaving the official tree as stable and tested as possible? I can see an argument for either. Gentoo leans toward the former, and Ubuntu apparently leans toward the latter.

Another thing I miss about Gentoo (I think?) is that in Ubuntu, even running unstable, I don't seem to get updated packages every single night like I would with Portage. I don't know if I miss this, per se. In the sense that it's actually sometimes FUN to upgrade a bunch of packages and see what's new, I sort of miss that from Gentoo. But this may be an entirely masochistic sentiment. I don't know how many updates in Portage were simply corrections to ebuilds, rather than upstream changes; I certainly don't miss Portage telling me to rebuild xine or php or something huge just because a USE flag was added.

A final thing I miss, come to think of it, is running 64-bit packages. In Gentoo I at least felt like the money I spent on this processor was worth something. In Ubuntu to preserve my sanity I run all 32-bit packages. How much difference running 64-bit rather than 32-bit made, who knows. Probably not much. Running 32-bit does save me a lot of hassle, and would've saved me even more hassle in Gentoo I think. But such is life.

What else do I miss about Gentoo? Well, nothing comes to mind at the moment, surprisingly. There are a lot of things I definitely DON'T miss, but that's for another post, another time.

Beryl, wow

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 21:10:16 -0800

The latest version of Beryl, or whatever version I just installed (0.1.2 I think) has new effects (new to me anyways). One is Beam Up and the other is Burn. Beam Up is like a Star Trek transporter effect. Burn is a flame animation, but if you set it to random colors it looks like magic or something. It's quite simply the nicest-looking thing I've ever seen.

Here's a very short little movie I made of these effects: ogg format, avi format. They were created using recordmydesktop.

Again Ubuntu took about 25 seconds to update every beryl-related package on my system. Gotta love it. Gotta love Linux in general; you don't even have to exit the X server to restart your window manager. How many times would I have had to reboot if I was doing this in Windows? (The answer is "undefined", because Windows doesn't have anything this nice to install in the first place.)

Ubuntu week 1, and smbfs

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 20:37:19 -0800

I hit a snag in Ubuntu today trying to mount a Samba share. Turns out smbfs support wasn't installed by default. Trying to figure out what to actually install was not fun. Packages called samba, samba-common, and smbclient looked like likely candidates. But nope, it was a package actually called smbfs. One thing bad about Ubuntu, the package repository seems to be awfully cluttered and things have nearly random names (or else I'm not aware of the naming convention). I like that I could browse portage by looking through the filesystem in /usr/portage. Maybe I can do that in Ubuntu but I don't know how.

I am mounting the same smbfs share now as I used to in Gentoo. When I used to do it in Gentoo, Gentoo would throw and error message about some printer option being deprecated, but it would still mount cleanly (as far as I can tell). But then it would pull in 4kb/sec of network traffic across the LAN, over and over and over in one- or two-second intervals. I notice Ubuntu doesn't seem to do that. I don't know what was causing it before, or what fixed it now. Computers are mysterious beasts sometimes.

It's been one week since I started using Ubuntu, and I can notice no appreciable difference between this and Gentoo. But that scores in Ubuntu's favor, given how much easier this was to set up. It took very little effort. We'll see how it stands the test of time though.

~/.inputrc

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 19:02:12 -0800

I have posted my old Gentoo inputrc largely so I don't lose it. The one that comes with Ubuntu sucks. This one fixes PageUp / PageDown to scroll through bash history. And it fixes the Delete key to delete rather than belch out a ~. I don't understand why these things aren't fixed by default on all distros. Is it backwards compatibility? Are there really enough people using keyboards without a Delete key that the rest of us should suffer? Or maybe I'm missing something, which is very possible.

Unimportant Gentoo-related ranting

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:20:21 -0800

I found a nice version of emacs with XFT support on this blog. I really plan to start learning emacs. A guy at work uses it and it seems like it can do some things vim can't do easily. For example nicely spawning a shell and playing with the output, and searching / highlighting multiple strings simultaneously (vim can only do one search at a time, unless you use a plugin).

Which leads me into my rant! One nice thing I notice about Ubuntu is the community. First, it's big. You need a big community to support a distro. Would I ever have taken the time to build an XFT version of emacs myself? Extremely unlikely. So I have to rely on someone else doing it, and the more people who share your distro, the more likely someone out there has done this kind of thing. So the more people with the same stuff as you, the nicer the selection of software you end up with. This is actually one of the things (if anything) I would say is good about Windows. In those very few areas where Windows lets you customize things, such as GUI theming, you end up with tons and tons of nice choices.

One attitude I notice too often in the Gentoo community is "I don't give a crap about users". Either by people who demand that Gentoo is only for extreme nerds and that all other people should just go away, or by developers or power-users who deride "normal" users for being too stupid to want to deal with. That's not to say this is the most common opinion of the community by any means, but it's the one most often noticed by me and my selective memory. I think users are what keep a distro alive. You can have the smartest people in the world working on something, but no matter how smart they are, a few smart people alone aren't going to be able to hold a whole distro together. And who cares how nice a tool is if no one is around to use it? You need some talented people to work on the core of the thing, but you also absolutely need all the "little people" contributing in little ways. All those little bits add up. Even if users are almost completely clueless, they still have value. The near-constant "WE NEED MORE DEVS" message in Gentoo is good evidence of the value of a large and strong community.

It seems as though there's sometimes a tendency toward a defensive attitude in Gentoo, and it's almost verging into the realm of RTFM-ism, which is a trashy attitude in my opinion. Gentoo used to be extremely "n00b-friendly", in that new users were sought after and welcomed with open arms, and it doesn't seem as much so nowadays. I used to crawl the forums looking for unanswered posts and give them a try, and I'm sure there are other people doing it, but we could always use more. The helpful and valuable users of tomorrow are the clueless people of today. Rather than flaming people for being ignorant, I think people should help other people learn whenever possible.

The general atmosphere of the Ubuntu forums is one of helpfulness and enthusiasm and it seems generally positive. I remember a long while back the Gentoo forums had that same kind of feeling to them. There would always be all kinds of threads popping up with people posting tips and tricks and whatnot. Lately it seems like there's more and more people making "I'm leaving" threads and being flamed, or flaming each other for other reasons, etc. Of course it's hard to form an opinion based upon a few threads at a forum, but it's human nature to extrapolate, right? cop-out

The other thing I notice about Ubuntu is a lack of people saying "apt sucks!" and a lack of lots of people making hacked-together tools to try to fix it. apt seems very mature and solid and it seems (in my limited experience thus far) to work pretty well pretty much all the time. In Gentoo there seems to be a general feeling that Portage is a piece of crap in many ways, even by people who like the distro. I know I personally had a love-hate relationship with Portage. It's great when it works, but there are times it drives you mad. Then there are lots of hacked-together tools to try to make up for deficiencies or perceived deficiencies with Portage, and it seems like none of them ever last very long. People lose interest or something better comes along, or else Portage changes so much that the old tools break. apt seems like a nice change of pace from that.

Above all else, I use my home computer because I enjoy it. Only part of enjoyment comes from whether a tool works well technically. The people I have to deal with in the process of using that tool are also a huge part of enjoyment. I'll take a decent distro with a really active, friendly, helpful, enthusiastic community over a really advanced technical distro with a lot of abrasive personalities prominently connected with it. I must say that the people who post to PlanetLarry seem for the most part to be very friendly and good-natured, and it's possibly just a few loud people who are drowning out all the tons of good people. Or maybe I feel better about Ubuntu at the moment because it still has that new-distro smell. We shall see. There's a good reason I labeled this rant "unimportant".

Ubuntu day 3

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 20:51:50 -0800

Good:

Installing Beryl was brain-dead easy: add a repository and apt-get install beryl. About the same as Gentoo I guess, where you'd layman -S whatever-the-repo-name-is and then emerge beryl. Except Ubuntu didn't take 30 minutes to install it, and it was nice and tested and likely to work. I'm using the Emerald theme called "kind of blue". It's simple and looks nice and most important does NOT look like Vista or OS X. The only thing I don't like about all of this is having all these third-party repositories; for example I needed yet another one for the beta nvidia drivers. But I suppose it's not much different or worse than using overlays in Gentoo.
I got lm-sensors working. Again it was mostly easy; I followed this guide, sort of winging it on a few steps. There are a LOT of guides for ubuntu that assume you know nothing. If you know anything at all, it's more than enough information, usually. Anyways other than that it was a matter of apt-get install lm-sensors and then sensors-detect which tells you which kernel modules you need. (I had to run some bash script to create some device nodes first.) I modprobed those myself, and restarted conky, but conky hung without outputting anything. Turns out the sensors show up a bit differently in Ubuntu than they did in Linux. I had to change my ${i2c temp 1} to ${i2c 9191-0290 temp 1} in ~/.conkyrc. Took me a while to figure that one out. Ubuntu must be detecting more than one i2c device. Even after getting that right, conky wouldn't work until I killed and restarted X. Strange. Works now though.

Bad:

My printer (Canon iP1600) refuses to work in Ubuntu. Every site I check for every distro says that there is no Linux support for this printer at all (except, ironically, Gentoo). But I had it working in Gentoo, unless I've been imagining the past year. I tried the iP2200 drivers, and a bunch of other things, and nothing works. I tried some drivers from a site called turboprint; it worked, but it prints a huge logo over top of everything you print and if you want to disable the logo you have to pay $40 for the driver. Screw that. I'll probably set up my old 550MHz computer, stick Windows XP on it, set it to load VNC by default, and stick it in a corner somewhere with my printer plugged into it.

Ubuntu day 2

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:47:46 -0800

Today I fired up conky and realized that only one of my cores was being used (I have an AMD X2 3800+). In Gentoo of course I compiled my own kernels, so I never had this kind of problem. I am still trying to get used to the idea of using a precompiled kernel in Ubuntu.

I searched the ubuntuforums for "smp" and came up with plenty of results. I needed to apt-get install linux-686-smp. Simple enough. When you install a kernel in Ubuntu, it edits your grub.conf automatically and adds two entries: a normal entry and a "recovery mode" entry which I have yet to try. In any case it's nice not to have to do that manually.

I rebooted quickly and GDM failed to load due to the nvidia driver not loading. I tried to modprobe nvidia myself and got some really generic and unhelpful error message. I tried sudo apt-cache search nvidia and got way more results than I'd hoped for, with no idea which was what I wanted. I tried nvidia-glx but I already had that installed. Same with nvidia-kernel-common.

So I resorted to sudo apt-get install lynx and started googling. On the first page of results I got my answer: I needed to install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.17-10-generic. It's so obvious, how did I miss it? Honestly though, this isn't something I would ever have figured out without google. The steep learning curve of Linux strikes again. (In fact now that I look, I think I should've installed linux-restricted-modules-generic?)

But from the time of reboot to the time GDM was back up and running was STILL less time than it'd take me to compile a single kernel in Gentoo let alone manually copy the kernel to /boot, rename it nicely, fix up my grub.conf and then reboot and pray everything worked. What a world.