devnet, Author at Yet Another Linux Blog

Why I Hate Mainstream

Linuxquestions.org has announced the winners of its members choice 2004 awards for Linux and open source. Upon hearing, I visited the site and slowly scrolled down the list nodding my head every so often, sometimes shaking my head where I disagree. Then I arrived at a category I actually know a little bit about…Live CD’s. Knoppix?!? Again!?!? Ok…let’s think this through. Perhaps it deserves it…afterall, X number of system admins swear by it. However, to me, this isn’t what a Live CD is about.

IMHO, a Live CD is about trying out Linux…not just rescue functions or data recovery. It’s about being able to run an entire operating system as read only from your CD-ROM. It’s about showing the power that Linux has. It’s about having an entire desktop with all the eye candy fixins in sub-5 minutes to attract new users. In a sense, it is a “try before you buy”…in this case download. It’s about detection, installation, configuration, and automation. While Knoppix does a good job on this…actually it wrote the book on it…there are those distributions out there that now PUMMEL Knoppix in detection. Two that come to mind are PCLinuxOS and MEPIS.

I figured that PCLinuxOS would be the major player at this years members choice award…mainly for the reason that it really advanced this year at distrowatch.com. In 2003, it was 44th. In 2004, it skyrocketed to 9th. That’s the fastest moving Linux distribution that is currently being tracked by Distrowatch. So, when I read Knoppix as the choice…I was surprised. Then I thought about it for a minute, isolated the real problem, and became a bit ticked off.

This isn’t about choice and it definately isn’t about a Live CD…it sure isn’t about the best. It’s about the most popular. Unfortunately, this is becoming the ‘in thing’ for open source. Linux has become chic. Well, maybe shabby chic. Nonetheless, Linux has arrived mainstream and brings entoe all of the things (good or bad) something that goes mainstream will bring with it.

Continue reading “Why I Hate Mainstream”

2. Update to the Experiment

The experiment is still continuing. Last night we installed SimplyMEPIS onto the hard drive. Mrs.devnet did not get a whole lot of time to spend on it…she simply checked out some of the menu’s and the organization. She clicked on a few things, found the KDE Desktop Wizard and set up her environment with a Windows-Like behavior (i.e., double clicks, etc). However, with this distribution, I have not had to intervene at all as I previously did in four places with Mandrake.

The first place I intervened on Mandrake 10.1 was ‘alsaconf’ to get the sound running. With MEPIS, I did not have to do this…sound was enabled right off the start. I also didn’t have to point her toward installation of Java or Flash as I previously did as these are installed by default as well. Yet another task I didn’t have to do is mount the Windows share. This was also done by default and the icon was present on her desktop. Mrs.Devnet maintains her smtp and pop passwords and usernames to configure her mail. I suspect she’ll have few problems configuring her email client up but I’ll assist her like I did in Mandrake to even out the playing field.

Mrs.devnet will be using the desktop this week and finding out how it suits her. She’ll use both KDE and Gnome since SimplyMEPIS also comes able to use either desktop. She’ll use SimplyMEPIS for the next week and post back on her findings. I’ll give you a hint though…I did see a smile on her face when she opened up her website and the java mp3 player began to play. Keep tuned! More to follow this week…she’ll post her initial take on things sometime in the next couple of days.

Experiment: The Hardware Listing

I just realized that I forgot to list the hardware that we are using for this experiment. I originally posted a small list in a different category here…so I’ll put it here and explain more.

Mobo: Abit NF7 2.0
CPU: Athlon XP 2400
RAM: Crucial 1024MB (512X2) PC2700 (underclocked for these tests)
HD: Maxtor 7200rpm 120GB, Western Digital 6GB 5400rpm
CD/DVD: NEC 2510A DVD-R/RW 8X
Video: GeForce 4 Ti 4400 128MB
NIC: integrated nforce2
Keyboard/Mouse: Standard PS/2 and Multimedia Keyboard
Sound: SB Audigy Platinum X-Gamer
Floppy: Mitsumi Standard 1.44 Floppy

Ok, so now we know about the hardware setup. Mrs.Devnet has already saved her entry and I’ll get to publishing it. Please point out anything I might be lacking from the hardware list. Thanks for reading!

Extend Laptop Battery Life

Found a great tip when doing some reading…

When running linux on a laptop, it’s a good idea to mount hard drive partitions with the -noatime option. This prevents extra writes to the hard drive every time a file is read. Add the noatime option to the entry in /etc/fstab.

Example (from /etc/fstab)
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1

By default, access information on a file is updated every time that file is accessed, including just being read. It’s very rare that you’ll need this feature, and disabling it can result in a lot less disk-writing, which translates into an increase in performance and battery life.

1. Update to the Experiment

The experiment continues. Today, mrs.devnet spent about 5 hours in her new Mandrake 10.1 environment and was scribbling away with a notebook on her likes/dislikes. She then opened up Open Office and began typing up a storm. I took a couple of screenshots while she got up to take a break so we can have some eye candy for the review. I also had to intervene 4 times right away…so I think what we’ll do is intervene on these four things for EACH distro so that they have an equal playing field. The following items were where I intervened…

I had mrs.devnet run ‘alsaconf’ on the distro because sound wasn’t enabled right away. I checked Kmix beforehand for mute but to no avail for it was unmuted. It seems Mandrake had problems with the SB Audigy X-Gamer sound card I have. No worries, I got it up and running with a quick alsaconf…which I will do for each distro if needed. Reason being, there wouldn’t be much of a review if mrs.devnet couldn’t listen to music…she’d give up before even starting. There is also no way that she would ever figure out to open up a terminal, su, and run alsaconf (now she will…before, no way).

I also mounted a music share to the desktop so that mrs.devnet had access to her music library. I will also do this for each and every distro.

Mrs.devnet also consulted me on a couple of points as well and I attempted to bring mandrake into swing with java and flash with only minimal assistance (i.e., showing her the correct website to get stuff from and showing her where the instructions were…not doing it for her). We’ll have to wait for her final review to see if she got it configured.

The last thing done is that I gave her our smtp and pop server logins and passwords so that she could connect to check her mail. So those four things were done in this distro and will be done for each distro installed.

She’ll continue to use Mandrake 10.1 Community for the next 2 days and then switch back into windows. Then she will compose her review based on the criteria posted in this blog and also her own criteria. She’ll rate the distro on a scale of 1-10, 10 being the best for each area in the criteria. We’ll continue on to the next distro which is the latest stable version of SimplyMEPIS, SimplyMEPIS 2004.06. After MEPIS, PCLinuxOS followed by FC 3, then Knoppix, and finally we’ll add Ubuntu…just for kicks. We’ve got a good start thus far! We’ll keep you posted!