:: Linux Log ::

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.

Here’s a tip, if you want to keep your bookmarks synchronized on both your computers, and your Android devices: Use Google Bookmarks, and Gmarks.

Google bookmarks (www.google.com/bookmarks) is a free service from Google, where you upload/create bookmarks to your favourite sites, thereby allowing them to be accessible from anywhere on the internet, through any web browser. Previously, I was using XMarks which is a great service, and they have plugins for all the major browsers; however they do not have an Android client that is freely available. You have to pay for their premium service to get access to it. That’s not a horrible thing, people have to make money, but I can’t afford it, so I went in search of alternatives.

Gmarks (available on the Android Market) was what my searching led me to, which is a free, open-source application for Android that synchronizes your Google Bookmarks to your phone or tablet, allowing you full access to them using your default browser. If you’re looking for something like this, or an alternative to one you already have, give this a try and post your results and feedback!

Tip: Unfortunately, there is no easy way to Export/Import from your web browser into Google Bookmarks. What I did, which was a suggestion I found on another site, was the following:

1. Export your bookmarks from your browser, using its native method (for Chrome click the wrench, then bookmark manager, and drop down the box and select Export).

2. Go to www.delicious.com, which is another bookmark site without an Android app, and create an account (which is a throw away so don’t fuss too much over username etc..).

3. Import your exported bookmark file into Delicious

4. Go to www.google.com/bookmarks, and log in using your Gmail address.

5. Click the link at the top of the page that says “Import Delicious Bookmarks”

6. Follow the instructions, and at the end, all of your bookmarks will now be in Google Bookmarks.

So I went to make a post here, because I hadn’t in a long while, only to find that there was no here.

Someone apparently had hacked my account, and deleted random files. Why still baffles me. Surely there are more important people to hack out there?

I honestly have nothing of value on my site

Oh well.

Guess that blog post with actual content will have to wait since I wasted the time I had restoring.

I will say though, I restored using my hosting providers website on Dolphin browser running on my Galaxy S with Android 2.2. I could NEVER have done that with an iPhone.

Jay

Well, after a long and torturous time with my blackberry, I finally had an opportunity to replace it with what I considered a true smartphone.

I was all about getting an iPhone at one point.  Yup, I didn’t know what Android was besides a Linux kernel driven OS created by Google and as far as I was concerned it had nothing to do with me.  Then someone at work got the Galaxy S from Bell (Canada) and started telling me what you found do with it.  I was hooked.

I started looking around, as I was replacing my work cell phone and had to find something that wasn’t a Blackberry.  As well, I wanted to keep my number, and corporate rate which meant I was sticking with Rogers.  I hadn’t researched their Android phones, but was pleasantly surprised to find that they too had the Galaxy S, but a different version.  The Captivate.  Now I have one.

Now that the preamble is out of the way, lets get right to the point, its awesome.

I have never had a more robust, functional and easy to use device in my life. 

The first thing I did was upgrade the OS to 2.2 as I could see based on articles I read online that this greatly improves the Android experience.  This was not the easiest of tasks and if I had one con it would be this:  your everyday joe smartphone user is not going to bother.  Which is sad because it really does make the experience that much better.

After that it’s all about the apps.  I’ve only had the phone for less than a week but can recommend any of the standard social networking apps such as Facebook and Twitter.  I also can recommend eBuddy for chat and Angry Birds because it’s awesome and free in the Android Market.

The one thing that I now couldn’t do without, and quite frankly dont know how I lived without ods Swype. This allows you to swype your thumb or finger across the software keyboard, and using predictive text it prints the most likely match given all the keys you pressed in the order you swyped over them.  Its not perfect, but works 99% of the time.  Let’s put it this way, this blog was completely written using swype.

I’m still finding more and more out about this phone and will continue to report back when I have more new and intetesting things to say, but I can say this: I strongly urge anyone looking into a smartphone to give the Galaxy S fair place in your research.  It can’t hurt and since it’s about 60$ cheaper than the iPhone 4, it’s not only a feature rich option, it’s cost effective too.

Jay

I just have to say a few kind words about Linux Pro Magazine. I was given the December issue by my daughter for Christmas, and I haven’t been able to put it down yet! In the issue it talks about a DVD that contains the last 10 years worth of issues, that was given in the November issue. I was so upset that I couldn’t find that one, but lo and behold I found a solution!

If you sign up for a 3 issue trial (for only 3$ USD) you can actually select back issues to start your trial from. Since I already had December, I chose September to start, so that I could also get October and November’s issues! I’m not sure if it’ll work that way, but they gave the option, so I chose it.

I’ll report back when I get my first magazine! I’m not sure if I can afford the entire subscription as it’s about $100 USD for 12 issues (with DVDs), which is not a bad price, just out of my range. I even considered the electronic issues, which do not come with a DVD (or ISO for that matter) but are less than half the price at $40 USD for 12 issues, but even that, at this point in the year, is stretching it a bit.

Hopefully though, I’ll have 10 years worth of reading to catch up on!

Jay

Well, I’m a bit late – but I wanted to post a Merry Christmas to everyone reading this blog!

As I’ve mentioned before, I spend a great deal more time on Twitter, so this blog has been lacking in posts. I’d say that I hope to spend more time posting in 2011, but why set myself up for failure right?

I will say that I truly value this blog, and my twitter account, and the rest of the online resources that I maintain – no matter how much real life takes me away from them.

So, enjoy your holidays, and I’ll post when I get some time.

Jay