Distros Archives - Page 9 of 11 - Yet Another Linux Blog

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.

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!

Anticipated Problem in Fedora Core 3

I’ve hit quite a few snags with FC3 lately. Very odd that people consider this one of the most new user friendly. I have a bad feeling that this is actually going to score very low with my wife when she takes it for a test drive. The reason I say this is that FC3 doesn’t play mp3’s! That’s right, you heard me correctly, you can’t play mp3s with FC3…I was shocked as well. I did some snooping and it turns out that Red Hat thinks they can’t distribute the mp3 codec legally…or are just to scared to do so. Pretty odd considering all of those mp3 players out there seem to be a-ok with being able to play mp3s. Let me setup what happened and how I came to this conclusion.

I decided to go back to FC3 to do some more messing with it…mainly because quite a few of the Lxer.com crew seem to LOVE FC3. So…I install and have it up and running. I mount my shared music drive and decide that I want some mood music while I mess with compiling a few things. XMMS pops open and decides that mp3’s aren’t something it wants to play. Here I thought of two things I could do.

Convert all of my mp3s to .wavs immediately so that FC3 would be happy with it and play them.
Find out what in the world was up with this and get a workaround

Now, if this were the review we’ve been building up to for the past couple of months…I’m afraid a new user would be more apt to replace my number 2 above with a “ditch Fedora Core 3” and they’d be perfectly justifiable in doing so. How many new users have even been to a forum before? How many have asked for help? If we’re shooting at being viable competition for Windows, we’ll need a distro that allows a person to operate WITHOUT GOING TO FORUMS or helplines. It will need documentation available to it immediately after installation and it will need things as simple as listening to mp3s to work out of the box.

Snooping led me to a tips and tricks post on a forum that shows me a bunch more stuff I haven’t even run across that doesn’t work out of the box. I wouldn’t be too concerned if they didn’t have to deal with really basic tasks such as playing music. But alas, one cannot wish for too much out of a distro evidently. Fedora came up majorly short in this department and I suspect that my wife will give up on it if she runs across this problem. We’ll see what happens I guess 😛

Knoppix Installs with no Problems…

No problems with the Knoppix install tonight. Very nice interface and I love the way it detects everything. It really lets you see the detection process and how it goes. This makes you really think that Knoppix is something different from most distros…however, it didn’t detect my monitor and sound card. It was the first distro to not detect the monitor…odd considering that all others did. But other than that, it seems to be a very solid distro…an excellent way for people to try out Linux.

I don’t think this distro has anything special as far as the Linux desktop is concerned. It is very plain…but I did appreciate the languages options and the menu layout. It was a bit more organized than a default install of Debian. Wine was another added bonus. I’ll have to play around with this a bit more to get used to it. A very solid distro. I can see why so many like it.

5 Distros of Desktop Linux go head to head…

Not all distros are created equal. This is something I’ve found out the hard way during the past 10 years I’ve experimented with Linux. Keeping this in mind, I wanted to search for the most new user friendly distribution of Linux I could possibly find on the market in order to recruit my friends and acquaintances to Linux. In order to find the best of the best, I’ve selected 5 distributions of Linux that are some of the top rated ‘Desktop’ linux distros (according to distrowatch.com and user opinion). I’m going to install each one of these distros for a week and let my wife try to do all of the stuff she normally would do (blog entries, surf web, email, burn CD’s, listen to mp3s, link her portable media device) and see how each one stacks up to each other. My wife is a new user to Linux. While she does know the basics of what Linux is…she’s never used a Linux desktop. I hope this qualifies her as a ‘new user’.

I’ve selected the criteria that all distros will be judged on which I will post after I install Knoppix to hard disk and do a quick comment under the ‘distros’ category here (sometime next week). I install these distros before hand to ensure that there are no large issues that cause problems for me so that when we go to actually rate these distros…they’re all on the same starting point. I also do a quick commentary with my take on the distro so you know my biases and opinions (which I will eliminate from the rating process as much as possible).

We’re one week away from posting the criteria of rating and 2 weeks away from getting started. It is important to note that if any hardware conflicts arise, I will not help my wife resolve them. She has told me that if something that ‘just works’ in XP doesn’t work in Linux, she’s giving up on that distro and moving on. That sounds a lot like what a new user would do so I have no problems with that. So, some reviews might be quite short. I’ll be equipping my wife with the command alsaconf and that is it 🙂 We’ll really know what distro is great because the hardware configuration (posted earlier in another entry) is really standard and isn’t cutting edge new…if a distro can’t detect and install what I’ve got…they not really that great. If I were to add a modem to this, I’m sure that it would really throw a kink in many distros spokes…but I think I’ll save the modem/winmodem tests for a part II of this feature. I’ll publish each review by mrs.devnet in the ‘reviews’ category here with as many screenshots as possible. Countdown, 2 weeks.

Fedora Core 3. Polished?

I type this from Firefox 1.0 after updating FC3 via yum. Upon first booting FC3 I think there is a sense of eager anticipation…it is visually pleasing. This is a perfect second distro (I’ll explain further on in this post) but I don’t think it is a very wise choice for those crossing over into Linux for the first time. It’s bound to score low for mrs.devnet because there is quite a bit of configuration that is needed to get it up and running. The sound didn’t work out of the gate. I’m used to alsaconf…so I didn’t go into the menu’s right away to get the sound working. While I do like the organization that they have going on in the menu AND the ability to get your sound going by clicking on a menu option…I don’t like the fact that I am not able to run alsaconf if I want to. One other peeve is the fact that when I go to do a yum update via commandline…I have no gpg key set. It tells me to run rpm –import blahblah.key.gpg and when I do…it fails. This was annoying but the up2date gui is very nice and eliminated the need.

I’d say the worst part about things is that there are no plugins installed by default in the web browsers. Trying to install them…both fail automatic installs. Mrs.devnet would be stopped in her tracks right there. Any new user would be stopped in their tracks. They’d be about as inclined to try a manual install as they would to try and stick their fingers into a blender. So…while FC3 is visually pleasing with a fantastic install…I believe it to be more hype that anything. We’ll see how it stacks up when mrs.devnet gives it the test drive.