:: Linux Log ::

I lead a double life.

I am a Windows System Administrator by day, and almost exclusively a Linux user by night (and weekends).

This lifestyle has its challenges, but they are well worth it. For example, in order for me to keep up to date on new features of new Microsoft products, I build a lab at home. This means that I end up, from time to time, having a “test” Windows Active Directory running at home. This usually comes in the form of converting my Linux file server to a Wndows DC, and tacking on File and Print. This prompts me to figure out the best way to set up AD integrated log on via LDAP, map Windows shares, and even to figure out how to manage the domain effectively using Linux.

I thought I’d write about this as a lot of people I’ve seen in the Linux world seem to mostly talk about one or the other. Not many people comment on how well they can inter-operate

With BYOD (bring your own device) a pending reality for a lot of organizations, more and more the understanding of how to integrate non-Windows operating systems, and devices into the domain will become a great knowledge to have. Let’s face it, as a Linux enthusiast even I know Windows is not going away.

To all the hardcores out there, I’m not saying embrace it, but have an open mind and at least understand it. I guarantee it’ll put you one step ahead of those who choose not to, when it comes down to it.

Jay

Well, so far, not so good. I have been unable to get this installed on my Netbook. Reason being that when I run the install, I get to the 3rd screen (Keyboard selection), make my selections (which are the default) and hit next… then, nothing. It sits there. I can’t go back, and I can’t move forward. All I can do is quit. I’ve let it sit there for 10 minutes thinking maybe it’s doing something in the background, but nope.

So, in the meantime, I have Fedora 16, with Gnome 3.x running on it. Its a bit sluggish, but works really well once whatever app you’re working with is open. Not bad for 1GB of RAM (which I’m planning to correct with an extra GB).

As for Jolicloud, I have not given up. Even though the Googles don’t say anything about this issue, I’ve tweeted at @jolicloud, and hopefully will have at least a place to post my question soon.

Stay tuned!

Jay

Yet another distro is finding its way onto my hardware This time I’ll be playing with the latest version of Jolicloud on my netbook (Acer AspireOne).

I used this OS when it first came out, but I hadn’t really adapted myself to the “cloud” yet, and technically neither had the OS. It was mostly a bunch of browser links to “cloud” type sites. I’m hoping that it has progressed since then, and I’ll let you know if I have anything overly interesting to say about it.

Jay

I just re-read my last post, and while Ubuntu was fun for a while, the limitations of Unity were still too much.  The menu system is so difficult… it just wasn’t workin for me.  So, rather than try to find a Gnome interface that I liked, I decided to give KDE a chance, after what feels like 100 years.  So far, I like it – its a lot more intuitive… although, maybe that’s because most of my computer world is spent in Windows (at work).  At any rate, Fedora 16 KDE is what I’m running right now.  I’ll post any comments that I feel may be useful either here, or on Twitter (@linuxlog).

I ran into some problems with Linux Mint 12… java problems.  So, I looked far and wide, and high and low for a solution – which I didn’t find.  Given that I’m not the most patient person in the world, I started to look for a different distro, and found my way back to Ubuntu.  I installed 11.10 and found that it had the same issues as Mint 12, so on a whim, I decided to try the 12.04 beta of Ubuntu.  Well, I’m sold.

I’ve been trying out new distros lately, and yesterday it was Linux Mint 12. I put this on my laptop, replacing the latest Fedora. I was quite happy with Fedora actually, with its sleek Gnome 3 desktop environment (DE), but always felt something was missing. Enter Mint 12.

Mint’s DE is also Gnome 3, but it’s been customized to allow those moving from the standard Gnome 2 interface, to be a bit more comfortable. To be honest, even though Im very comfortable moving away from it, I still feel more at home with this interface. It actually takes the best of Gnome 2, Gnome shell, and Unity and puts it all together nicely.

The other major reason that Im trying out the latest Mint, is because it’s Debian based, and I very much prefer that base (using .deb packages) to Fedora’s Red Hat base (using .rpm packages). Not to mention, when you get to the command line management of these packages, apt and dpkg are a bit more straight forward to me than yum and rpm.

I’ll be using this OS over the next while, and will post more inf as needed.

If there are any questions, please email me at Jason(at)billingham(dot)ca, and I’ll answer as I get them.

Jay

Hey everyone. I just had to stop by and write up a quick note about Gnome 3. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole thing, the main message of my post is “Try it before you hate it.”

I, like a lot of other technology, and computer enthusiasts, am still waiting for the coming of the ultimate Operating System. In the Windows world, the direction, in my opinion, is dumb. Focusing on touch screen interfaces that, oh yeah, you can also click with a mouse. Why? Well because everyone should have a touch screen silly. If you can afford to pay for Windows, you can afford a touch screen. Anyway, don’t get me started.

In the Linux world, the U.I. battle also rages on, with no end in sight. Unity, Gnome, XFCE, KDE, etc.. and everyone has something to say about each of them, usually favoring one, and putting down, or discounting the others. I for one have fallen victim to the “believe everything you read” syndrome, and until I broke out of it yesterday, realize that you cannot, and should not take someone elses opinion as your own, until you try it yourself.

Enter Gnome 3. When Ubuntu announced that Unity was going to be THE desktop environment of the future, I cringed. I had tried out Ubuntu Netbook Remix on my Acer AspireOne, and wasn’t overly enthused. I even tried Jolicloud, which uses a similar interface, and again… meh. I always just stuck to full-blown Ubuntu on my Netbook, running Gnome 2.X. That is, until yesterday.

I decided I had had enough of Unity, so I went online in the hopes of finding “The next big thing” in DE’s. Low and behold, I found a You Tube video explaining the ins and outs of Gnome 3, and thought – wait a minute.. that’s not half bad. Its supposed to be horrible, and cluttered, and unusable, and even Linus himself said it was a mess. Wait… did I just say that I never even gave it a second glance, because Linus Torvalds said so…

“Google Search: Installing Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04″

The verdict? I think its good. I haven’t used it long enough yet to say it’s awesome, or that I won’t be going back to Unity, or even one of the lighter desktop environments, but it was easy to figure out, and I quite like the interface. Its easy to find programs, and I think that being able to push my mouse to the top left corner and see all my windows, or drag them to the right to move them to another workspace are great features.

The bottom line is, don’t take all the hype on the blogs, Twitters, and other opinion driven sites as law. Sure, a lot of people, especially Linus, have great opinions, and we should take their thoughts into account, but there is honestly no substitute for first hand experience. I relearned that yesterday, and felt I needed to share with others who may have fallen down that hole too.

Thanks for reading.

Jay

So I have ended up with a gTablet, sort of by chance, and free… which is nice because out of the box, with the stock image on it, its crap.

Sure, they claim its Android 2.2, but they cover it in their own proprietary interface that ends up losing any sign of usefulness.

I do have to be fair though, as ViewSonic is not an OS company, but a hardware manufacturer, which is why this tablet is pretty well awesome.

What makes it awesome is its overclockable dual-core processor, especially when coupled with an awesome custom ROM yo replace the limitations in their OS.

As for the ROM, I haven’t tested them all, but all three that I did test were nothing short of great.

Flashback: This is a quite mature Honeycomb ROM built for the gTablet.  I’m not sure what device its base is from, but it runs phenomenally on this device.  The nobly drawback is that it doesn’t “sleep” well, and tends to crash/power off instead of just sit and wait to be woken up.  As well, at least in my experience, certain apps will install and work until you cinema back later and instead get a message saying “App not currently installed”.  For these reasons, I had to say goodbye (for now) to this ROM.

Bottle of Smoke: Again a Honeycomb ROM, however this ROM appears to be very new on the scene.  It installed without a hitch, and runs quite well; however I did find it more sluggish than Flashback, and overall I couldn’t live with the performance hit.

VeganTab: This brings me tobthe last ROM I tried, and the one I currently have on the tablet.  This is a 2.3.5 Gingerbread ROM, I believe largely based on the work of the CyanogenMOD team. 
I am not exaggerating when I say that this ROM is lightning fast! I have had no force close messages, no crashes, and no strange anomalies.  The only drawback to a 2.x based ROM is that its optimized for a phone, as are 99% of the apps published on the Android Market for this OS release.  That aside though, I recommend this Tom for anyone looking to make the tablet 100% useable.  Even the camera works, which it does not in either 3.x ROM.

Ultimately I’m not finished experimenting, but for the time being, I’m sticking with VeganTab.

Thanks for reading.

Jay

I finally decided last week to convert my new laptop to Linux.  I was using the pre installed Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit), which wasn’t horrible, but I am now much happier with Ubuntu 11.04, and here’s why.

First off, I really enjoy using Linux.  I like that its Open Source, and that I can find the software I need without having to pay rediculous amounts of money for it, or having to acquire it through alternate channels.  I’m all for paying for software, but let’s face it, when you want the software for home, non commercial use, and you’re on a budget, “free” is a wonderous word.  If I were making money from the software’s use, or if I had money to burn, I’d be the first one to donate to software developers.

Two pieces of software that I’ve installed for instance:

Chromium Browser: I love the speed of this browser compared to FireFox, and its backed by Google who have produced some pretty decent software (including Android OS).

Virtualbox: I installed this, with the optional non-open-source extentions because I needed the extra USB support.  This will allow me to manage my wife’s iPod using iTunes, and to use applications that I otherwise can’t be without due to proprietary Windows software requirements.  As awesome as Linux is, we still live in a predominantly Windows world, and you can’t just ignore that fact.

My final comment, to show that its not all peaches and rainbows, is about the Unity interface, which is the new graphical desktop that you see in Ubuntu (if you have at least a semi-decent graphics card).

I actually like this interface for the most part.  My only issue with it is the way it presents and manages the application menu.  I find it very hard to find an app, unless you know the name of it (which if you install apps to try them out as often as I do, you don’t always remember).  I don’t have any suggestions as to how to make this experience better, and perhaps there is already a way and I don’t know it, but as of now, that is my only complaint.

Ubuntu is available in a number of flavours including wight the KDE and XFCE environments, should Gnome not be to your liking.  If you’re curious, why not download a live CD image, and give it a try?  S live CD allows you to boot into Linux without the use of your hard drive (where Windows is installed).  Then you can test and play around as much as you want without having to install it.  Just remember that when you exit, you will lose all changes you made.  Unless of course you make an Ubuntu live USB stick, but that’s another blog post, for another time.

Jay

Recently I picked up two 1TB USB hard drives to use as storage for my home file server. The server was going to be a VM on an ESXi 4.1 host (mainly because it now supported USB device pass through), and would allow me to finally decommission an old IBM workstation that was originally filling this purpose. I ended up with two 1TB drives, instead of one 2TB drive, because I didn’t like the idea of having all of my important personal data (Pictures, Videos, etc) being on one drive, that if it died, would prompt my wife to do nasty things to me until I could will all of our life’s pictures back into being.

That requirement being fully defined, I set up these two drives, using their default NTFS partitions, on an Ubuntu 10.10 server VM (10.10 was the current release at the time), and got them working. It was simple enough to set this all up, add in some Samba sharing, and a rsync script to keep them synchronized. Everything was great, except the speed. The initial sync of just over 400GB of “stuff” took just over 24 hours. Now, understanding that there is a bottleneck in USB itself, it shouldn’t have taken that long at all. On top of that, it was taking forever for the script I wrote to run, because I had a diff command at the beginning, and one at the end to ensure that I had a log of all changes. The reading of the files was the bottleneck, and for a while, I lived with it because I didn’t think I had an option.

One day, I needed an Ubuntu ISO in a bad way. I had a friend’s netbook that died, and I wanted to use my trusty Ubuntu bootable memory stick to boot the laptop, get onto the network, and copy off her files. Easy enough, except I didn’t have my trusty Ubuntu USB drive. No biggie, I’d just create another one. So I mapped my shared drive, and started the copy. Ten minutes later, I’m still waiting, and fuming. I was wired on my local LAN, and there was NO other network traffic. Why was a 700MB ISO file taking so long? So, I did some research. It turns out, especially on a Linux system, there is a ton of overhead (wasted resources) that bogs down the disk read/write, on NTFS file systems. As soon as I found that out, I said to myself, this just won’t do.

I found a few benchmarks online with regards to file systems that perform well on Linux, and a few that specifically talk to USB drives. Turns out that either the EXT3 or EXT4 file system was the preferred, unless you were working with abnormally large files. Since I wasn’t, I opted for EXT4.

Since formatting these drives, (and moving off of the ESXi server due to a failed hard drive that I haven’t replaced yet), the speeds are incredible. Less than 60 seconds for the same file copy, across the network – on wireless no less.

The moral of this story? Get into the weeds, and check out your options a bit more when implementing even the simplest of solutions, and sometimes, you’ll find that more often than not, the details matter.