devnet, Author at Yet Another Linux Blog

More Printer Mayhem

Many of you may have read my last post on this subject regarding action that needed to be taken in the form of a petition for Linux and printer manufacturers and their lack of drivers. In a sense, they hem us in to a Windows environment by not allowing us the choice of operating system. I felt this was wrong and started an online petition. The host of the petition has actually seen large companies such as WebTV and CNN, respond to their petitions. I was hoping that our petition would garner enough interest to do so as well.

Many of you thought it was too agressive and felt that we should get them where it hurts by ‘talking with our money’. Some also felt that the correct action would be to write letters urging manufacturers to produce Linux drivers.

For those of you that were thinking along these lines: a reader emailed me recently and sent me scans of the official reply that Canon gave him after he pulled out of a $4000.00+ deal for his business with them. It seems that money doesn’t talk unless it is from a large corporation. It also seems that letters to your manufacturer don’t work out that great either. All private information from the individual providing these letters has been removed. If you’d like to get in touch with him or his business, please email me and I will forward it to him. I’d like to draw your attention to the underlined text on the letter itself. It’s rather funny that a company comes right out and lies about reasons for not developing drivers…everyone knows that they could release binary versions of drivers that could be compiled on ANY and EVERY version of Linux and that people would just snag them and adopt them. The real reason they don’t release them has yet to be devulged. Without further discussion, the letter and envelope:

Envelope

Letter

The simple fact is that Canon threw away 4 thousand dollars US worth of business at the drop of a hat. That’s because it is a drop in the proverbial bucket. Large corporations only listen when other large corporations tell them to…although there are exceptions…in this case, 4k isn’t anything…nor is the opinion of the man who sent a letter to them. In fact, if you’ll notice, they ask him to purchase products from them in the future! The audacity these companies have is flabbergasting. If you don’t feel like taking this lying down, go out and sign the Linux Printer Driver Online Petition and make your voice count by bringing it into harmony with over a thousand people who have signed it already. Thousands of voices together can be quite an influence. Let’s get these companies to take notice. A letter with a link to this petition might cause them to change their minds…but we need more people. Pass this on as much as possible. The more attention this thing gets, the better our chances are at having printer manufacturers take notice.

Click This Link to Sign the Linux Printer Driver Online Petition

Excellent Linux Article

We’re back and getting ready to publish the final head-to-head battle between MEPIS Linux and PCLinuxOS. However, to keep everyone occupied in the meantime, I’ve stumbled across a really fantastic article published in the MIT Technology Review. If you can stand to read all 6 pages…you’ll thank yourself. The author brings out some really nice points and touches on many things that have been echoed by a couple people at Lxer.com and even a few I haven’t heard yet. Take a gander at that article and let us know what you think.

We’ll have the final results to our experiment sometime this weekend. For those of you who haven’t voted on the badge/icon to give to the winning distro, head over to the forums and cast your vote. Thanks again for reading Linux-Blog. I should be able to get back up to speed by next week…moving really stinks. Actually, unpacking boxes after moving stinks :p

MEPIS Linux Loses Another Support Site

It seems that MEPIS is having trouble again. Some of you may recall a few bumps in the road in the past for MEPIS and the MEPIS community. Dotmepis.org, set out to fill a niche for the MEPIS community by providing community developed packages and kernels for advanced users. However, according to Josh, webmaster of dotmepis.org, “it has become increasingly clear that the Mepis development team, reasons that are still unexplained to me, is not a fan of what we have been doing.”

He went on to state, “I personally cannot say exactly why, or what specifically has caused this rift. What is obvious to me, and the rest of the admin team here at dotMepis, is that a true technical community, with our combined insight and experience does not fit within the current framework of Mepis. We have contributed untold amounts of time and effort in making debs to enhance Mepis, providing support for all types of issues, and building friendships among each other. For some reason, that has apparently angered some within Mepis to the point that they will no longer support our efforts. Rather than continuing on in a more censored fashion, and with no hope of any inputs into improving Mepis, we have decided it is simply time to move on.”

Therefore, dotmepis.org will be closing its doors on all 333 of its community members. How is it that a distrowatch #4 distro can have NO developer community? Your guess is as good as mine.

This announcement comes on the coat tails of a release of Professional Quality Sound Applications that were developed by dotmepis and its team. Even Debian proper didn’t have the applications that went into this release. Odd that you would feel a release such as this to be a hinderance to your community, but it is obvious by the announcement that this must have been what took place.

The question remains to be answered: Will MEPIS ever be a true Community driven open source flavor of Linux? It could have been what Ubuntu IS, had it allowed a community of developers in. I am confused about how a community of package developers (developing according to Debian package standards) and kernel hackers (developing kernels according to Debian kernel standards) could NOT BE CONSIDERED A WELCOME ASSET TO MEPIS? With the loss of this site, Warren Woodford, the creator of MEPIS, has a lot of explaining to do. He and his official community website, mepislovers.org, have now caused over 500 users and 2 major support websites go down without so much as a WORD. How many lost users will it take before a reply will come out of Morgantown, WV? Is the microphone on? Perhaps time will tell.

The Linux-Blog Badge

<booming voice> Calling all of you who have read our experiment! Yet Another Linux Blog needs your assistance. </booming voice>

We’re gearing up for the final stretch where we crown the “YALB Recommended Best Linux Desktop for New Users”. The last comparison between SimplyMEPIS and PCLinuxOS will take place when Mrs.Devnet and I get to our new apartment on 16 May (or a few days after that…we gotta unpack 🙂 ).

However, we can’t do this if we don’t have a snazzy icon or badge to give to the winning distro. I posted a few badges in another topic here but they kind of went unnoticed. So, there was a poll in the forums (forums were removed in 2006) for everyone to check out and vote on. Please help us out and cast your vote!

Experiment: The Distro Roundup

What do you get when you take 1 new Linux user with zero Linux experience, add 5 distros and stir? You get the Linux Blog experiment, that’s what. What makes these reviews different from all other reviews is that they are done by an avid Windows user. That means they’re not sugar coated…they’re not ‘made nice’ to make things appear to be good when they’re not…and when the distro’s succeed, they are really applauded. Why? Because my wife (aka mrs.devnet), the main focus of the experiment, loves to NOT spend money for anything and everything. If I can convince her that Linux is ready for the primetime and deserves a permenant place on our desktop, she’d be as happy as I would be.

As some of you know…the last review by Mrs.Devent went up on the blog early this week. Most of you saw how it was received…I know she didn’t dig the current distrowatch #1, Ubuntu, very much. The reason the review wasn’t well received is because people do not have a grasp of the entire scope of the experiment. So to remedy this, I’ve round up all the reviews into this single post. That way, everyone will be on the same page with what we focused on (criteria of the experiment), what hardware we used (hardware post), and which distros we took for a drive. The results were interesting and odd…because some of the distros you’d have thought would have scored well, didn’t score well at all.

However, the reason for the experiment wasn’t to find problems with distributions…it’s to provide solutions in the form of feedback and to find the best distro for a convert from Windows. So we set out to review each distro in our list and test how it ran for a new user with no alterations to the distro…that is, right out of the box.

While every single user of Windows has different requirements…I felt that Mrs.Devnet was somewhat average in her tastes. She does p2p and multimedia stuffs and she checks mail then surfs the internet. Pretty average. So, the beginning of the experiment was set to some standards. I’m going to post a link to that here so that we’re all on the same page:

First up was Mandrake 10.1 Community. Mrs.Devnet found Mandrake to be a 6 out of 10 for her first review. In her upcoming post we’ll talk about where Mandrake went wrong for her and where it can improve. However, during this review, Mrs.Devnet found the distro infuriating: “In conclusion, Mandrake has made a dummy out of me and I don’t like it one bit. An experience like this is enough to wound any new user’s pride. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure this is a really great OS for someone who knows a lot about Linux or computers in general.” Here’s the link to the Mandrake review:

Mandrake 10.1 Community Final Rating of 6 out of 10.

Next, we had SimplyMEPIS 3.3 Test2. SimplyMEPIS is a LiveCD with optional hard disk install. The simplicity of this distro is touted quite a bit with around 10 clicks to a hard disk install. I included test distros in this review because we wanted to go with the most current offering a distro had. That way, people couldn’t get upset because we weren’t using bug patched versions. Some might argue that the distro is test for a reason…but in my software developing past…a test distro really was used for feedback and not for bug finds…that’s what beta versions are for. Anyways, SimplyMEPIS scored 7 out of 10 and rocketed up to first place. In the end, this distro settled for second place and a right to be in the distro drawdown. Of SimplyMEPIS, Mrs.Devnet writes, “I liked SimplyMEPIS for the most part. Even though it is sometimes confusion and sometimes annoying I know this could easily be overcome with a little more time.” Here’s the link to the SimplyMEPIS review:

SimplyMEPIS 3.3 Test2 Final Rating of 7 out of 10.

PCLinuxOS .81 rang in next. Like SimplyMEPIS, this distro provides a very polished Linux desktop in a matter of minutes being a LiveCD with hard disk install. PCLinuxOS scored a whopping 10 out of 10 propelling it up to first place ahead of SimplyMEPIS. Mrs.Devnet had the following to say about PCLinuxOS: “Guess what? Mrs.Devnet thinks PCLinuxOS ROCKS!! It makes everything I need to do simple AND it’s easy on the eyes. It serves my purpose, bottom line. This is exactly what Linux needs to draw average users.” Once again, the link to the review:

PCLinuxOS .81a Final Rating of 10 out of 10

Fedora Core 4 Test 1 went onto our test computer next. Fedora Core is often touted as “the new user’s distro” and we set out to see if Fedora could foot this bill. This was also the first Gnome desktop centered distribution that we had examined. However, despite Mrs.Devnet’s pleasure of working with the Gnome desktop, Fedora Core 4 Test 1 scored 4 out of 10. Of Fedora, Mrs.Devnet stated, “It didn’t provide me with the things I needed to even go about my every day usage with my PC…I wouldn’t consider this to be new user friendly at all, by any means.” You can read the complete review at the following link:

Fedora Core 4 Test 1 Final Rating of 4 out of 10

Originally, we weren’t going to include Ubuntu into the experiment. However, a few users emailed me and were anxious to have Mrs.Devnet give Ubuntu a try. So, reluctantly, I allowed Ubuntu to be included with the experiment despite it’s rather more advanced install. Mrs.Devnet was able to stumble through the install using all defaults but was put off by the non-visual process (text only). Ubuntu scored 4 out of 10, which seemingly surprised many of those leaving comments on the review. Of Ubuntu, Mrs.Devnet commented, “So I have to ask the question, how can a distro that looks absolutely fantastic be so useless? …how is this attractive to a new user or a Linux convert?” Read how Ubuntu 5.04 “Hoary” tied Fedora for the lowest rating:

Ubuntu 5.04 “Hoary” Final Rating of 4 out of 10

So there you have it. The whole She-bang. I made Mrs.Devnet go back to her Windows for some days in between each review to re-adjust to that environment. I wanted her to try and stay as fresh as she could for each review. I also wanted her to maintain her criteria and the main criteria as much as possible for each distro…so I explicitly forbid her to learn anything such as software installs/package installs UNLESS the “how-to” was included ON THE COMPUTER after the distro install. Not a single distro included a ‘getting started’ or ‘how-to’ guide by default. That’s why Mrs.Devnet didn’t get into upgrading/installing anything. So, something to take note of there.

If you’ve read each one of the reviews discussed above in detail and take to heart the criteria we set forth and the aim of this experiment…you’ll note that PCLinuxOS came out on top. Just to be certain, we’re going to take #1 and #2 (PCLOS and SimplyMEPIS) and pit them head to head in a distro duke out. The criteria won’t change…BUT instead of rating on a scale of 1-10…we’re just going to switch up to advantage or disadvantage. So if SimplyMEPIS installs better than PCLinuxOS…then advantage would go to SimplyMEPIS. Things might turn out different because SimplyMEPIS has since released an updated version AND an updated OS Control Center as well…so who knows? In the event of an even rating, Mrs.Devnet will choose the winner and will absolutely justify in writing why it won.

Also during this time, we’ll begin voting in the Forum here on which 2 badges (anyone that can design better than me, please submit some!! I’m not extremely crafty) will be given to the winning community to display proudly. We will also display the badge here on the Linux Blog front page as well. The badge can link back to this synopsis article.

An interview with the creator/main developer of the winning distro will also take place. YALB will contact the winner and attempt a Q & A session with them for posting here. It will be a chance for everyone to discover what drives the developer to produce the best free desktop as approved by YALB through the experiment. Lots of excitement?!?!?! I know its very exciting for both I and Mrs.Devnet to see the culmination of what we set out to do. We really appreciate all of those leaving comments and your continuing support. Since I don’t advertise this blog (other than through blog rolling and sometimes a news site picking us up) remember to spread the word! If you like something you read here whether in the forum or on the blog…please be sure to let everyone know. Everything is creative commons so please remember to give credit where credit is due. Thanks again for reading!

See the Results of this Experiment Here!

New Host, Same Blog

For those of you that didn’t notice…I recently migrated to an actual domain… (linuxblog.sytes.net has now become linux-blog.org) and host now due to a bit of traffic increase to the site. We had about 10 minutes of downtime overall today. All old links should work and update themselves automatically. If you find any problems, please let me know. Also, I do realize that there are some text oddities in older posts on the site and I’m working to eliminate these. Of course, going back through every single post I’ve ever done on this blog (and Mrs.Devnet’s posts) will take some time.

The main driver behind this move was a real life move that is coming up for us. You may not hear from us too much from around the 12th until after the 17th. Then we’ll be physically relocated ourselves. Thanks for reading and keep that petition alive!