The Linux Experiment

It’s been a while since I’ve used KDE, however with the recent rapid (and not always welcome) changes going on in the other two main desktop environments (GNOME 3 and Unity) and the, in my opinion, feature stagnation of environments like Xfce and LXDE I decided to give KDE another shot.

My goal this time is to write up a series of quick reviews of KDE as presented as an overall user experience. That means I will try and stick to the default applications for getting my work done. Obviously depending on the distribution you choose you may have a different set of default KDE applications, and that’s fine. So before you ask, no I won’t be doing another write up for KDE distribution X just because you think its ‘way better for including A instead of B’. I’m also going to try and not cover what I consider more trivial things (i.e. the installer/installation process) and instead focus on what counts when it comes to using an operating system day-to-day.

Rekonq

The default web browser in the distribution I chose is not Konqueror but rather its WebKit cousin Rekonq. Where Konqueror uses KHTML by default and WebKit as an option, Rekonq sticks to the more conventional rendering engine used by Safari and Chrome.

This is not Rekonq, it is Konqueror

Rekonq is a very minimalistic looking browser to the point where I often thought I accidentally started up Chrome instead.

This is Rekonq

From my time using it, Rekonq seems to be a capable browser although it is certainly not the speediest, nor does it sport any features that I couldn’t find elsewhere. One thing it does do very nicely is with its integration into the rest of the KDE desktop. This means that the first time you visit YouTube or some other Flash website you get a nice little prompt in the system tray alerting you of the option to install new plugins. If you choose to install the plugin then a little window appears telling you what it is downloading and installing for you, completely automatically. No need to visit a vendor’s website or go plugin hunting online.

Like most other KDE applications Rekonq also allows for quite a bit of customization, although I found its menus to be very straightforward and not nearly as intimidating as some other applications.

The settings menu

I did notice a couple of strange things while working with Rekonq that I should probably mention. First off while typing into a WordPress edit window none of the shortcut keys (i.e. Ctrl+B = bold) seemed to work. I also found that I couldn’t perform a Shift+Arrow Key selection of the text, instead having to use Ctrl+Shift+Arrow Key which highlights an entire word at a time. At this time I’m not sure what other websites may suffer from similar irregularities so while Rekonq is a fine browser in its own right, you may want to keep another one around just in case.

Browsing the best website on the net

While I haven’t found any real show-stoppers with Rekonq, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m missing something. I don’t know how to describe it other than I think I would feel safer using a more mainstream web browser like Firefox, Chrome or even Opera. But like any software, your experience may vary and I would certainly never recommend against trying Rekonq (or even Konqueror). Who knows, you may find out that it is your new favorite web browser.

A couple of years ago I helped a small business convert their old virus infected Windows XP computer into a Linux Mint 11 (Katya) Xfce. This was done after a long time of trying to help them keep that machine running at a half-decent speed – the virus being the last straw that finally had them make the switch to Linux. Amazingly, well maybe not to the Linux faithful but to most people, this transition not only went smoothly but was actually extremely well received. Outside of a question or two every couple of months I have heard of no issues whatsoever. Sadly Linux Mint 11 has recently reached its end of life stage and so the time has come to find a replacement.

The Situation

When I said this was an old Windows XP machine I wasn’t kidding. It sports a speedy (sarcasm) 2.4Ghz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 512 whole megabytes of RAM and an Intel integrated graphics card. With specs like those it is pretty obvious that the only two real considerations (from a technical standpoint) are low resource requirements and speed. I’d be tempted to jump to a more specialized distribution like Puppy Linux but the people using the machine are A) used to Linux Mint already and B) expected a familiar, fully featured operating system experience.

Where is Linux Mint today?

Linux Mint 13 has recently been released (including an Xfce version) based on the latest Ubuntu 12.04 stable release. This makes it an ideal candidate for an upgrade because it is something already familiar to the users and will be supported until April 2017.

The following are the steps I took, in no real order, to setup and configure Linux Mint 13 Xfce for their use:

Pre/During Install Configuration

1. Encrypt the home directory
   Because this is a work computer and will be storing sensitive financial information I configured it to encrypt everything in the home directory. Better safe than sorry.

Post Install Configuration

1. Install Google Chrome
   I removed Mozilla Firefox and installed Google Chrome for two reasons. First Chrome tends to be, or at least feel, a little bit snappier than even the latest version of Firefox and as I mentioned above speed is king. Secondly, unless something changes, Google’s Chrome (not even Chromium) will be the only Linux browser that will continue to get Adobe Flash updates in a straightforward and easy way for the user. UPDATE: ironically the only issue I found with this whole install related to Google’s embedded Adobe Flash. For some reason the audio on the particular version ran at double speed. This is apparently a known issue.
2. Install Rhythmbox
   I also removed Banshee and installed Rhythmbox instead. This was done not because I consider one better than the other (or even that these two represent the only options), but simply because the users were already familiar with Rhythmbox. They use Rhythmbox to listen to streaming Internet radio.
3. Remove unnecessary software (Pidgin, XChat, GNOME Mplayer and Totem)
   Not because they are bad applications, they just simply weren’t needed. I kept VLC because it can pretty much play all audio-video.
4. Add Trash can to desktop and remove Filesystem icon
   
5. Remove all but one workspace
   
6. Install preload to speed up commonly used packages on startup
7. Configure LibreOffice
   The goal of this step is to set up LibreOffice in such a way as to make it use less memory while still keeping most of the functionality. In order to accomplish this I changed the number of undo steps from 100 to 30 and disabled the Java components.
8. Change screensaver to blank screen
   This looks more professional and uses less memory.
9. Spin down hard drive when possible
   While I was at it I also went into power management and had the system spin down the hard drives when possible. This configuration had nothing to do with performance, in fact spinning down the drives can slow access to files, but was done because they often just leave the PC running 24-7 and it is not in use at all during the night. I’m sure this will save them a couple of cents per year or something.
10. Disabled unused startup services like Bluetooth
    The machine doesn’t even have a Bluetooth radio.
    
11. Set it so that inserting a removable drive causes the system to open a window for browsing the contents
12. Change the system tray clock time format from 24 hour time to 12 hour time.
    This was a user preference.
13. Set updates to be downloaded from best available server
    
    
14. Install Microsoft fonts (i.e. ttf-mscorefonts-installer)
15. Install 7zip, rar and unrar
    You never know what kind of random archive formats they might need to open so it is better to support them all.
16. Change login screen theme
    The default login screen is nice but it isn’t the most user friendly. I opted to install the Mint Pro (MDM) theme from GNOME-Look.org.
17. Install all updates
18. Run Grub boot profiler to speed up the boot process
    If you’re not aware of this it is a great trick. Essentially once you have everything installed (driver wise at least) you do the following:
    -Modify /etc/default/grub and change the line GRUB_CMD_LINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to GRUB_CMD_LINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash profile”.
    -Then run sudo update-grub2 and reboot.
    -The next reboot might be slower but once the machine comes back up simply edit that file again and remove the “profile” text. Your computer will now intelligently load drivers as the hard drive head travels across their location, instead of in some other arbitrary order which can actually shave a couple of seconds off of your total boot time.

How did it turn out?

Surprisingly well. The machine isn’t a speed demon by any stretch of the imagination but it does perform its simple tasks well enough. It remains to be seen if the computer will make it to the next long term release of Linux Mint Xfce, or even if it will be able to run it at that time, but for now the users are happy and that is what matters.

On a good week, I consider myself an avid runner. Right now I’m training to run a 5k in the spring. Ideally, I’ll be able to get it under 20 minutes. Now, two of the keys to exercise are to set goals and to track your progress. Clearly I’ve got the first half under control, but the second half? Well, it turns out that’s where a lot of people falter, lose motivation, and ultimately fail. I’m no exception – I’ve tried running without really tracking my progress and I found that eventually I just gave up. Manually drawing routes, estimating distances, and keeping time take effort, and frankly I didn’t have the wherewithal to do it. Thankfully, modern technology has come to save the day. I use a Google Nexus S, which comes with a GPS and dozens of apps on the Android Market for tracking exercise.

Google My Tracks

Google happens to make an open source app that tracks runs (My Tracks). It supports waypoints (so you can get data on each mile or kilometre of your run), and it records your speed and altitude. All in all, it’s a very handy app and I use it regularly for my runs. The software integrates with Google accounts and lets you upload your runs to Google Maps and track statistics via their spreadsheets in Google Docs. And if you’re the sharing type, it also exports your runs through .gpx files .kml files and supports sharing through Twitter.

Main My Tracks spreadsheet

My Tracks summary statistics

Pytrainer

i discovered Pytrainer through an entry at another blog. If you’re more inclined to keep your data offline, it might be a better solution for you. In order to use Pytrainer, you’ll have to import your .gpx files from your phone and specify the types of activities you were tracking (running, cycling, etc). In order to get the mapping to work properly, I had to install the gpsbabel package.  Once that was set up, I had the option to use either Google Maps or the Open Map Project. The program allows you to enter information about heart rate, calories, and equipment as well, but I didn’t have any of that information available. Gathered statistics are aggregated and can be examined for specified time periods, activities, and athletes.

Uploading a new run into Pytrainer

Mapping my run

Summary statistics in Pytrainer

Endomondo

This doesn’t technically fall into the category of open source, but I feel compelled to add it because it’s actually my preferred tracking solution. Endomondo is a website (with associated Android app) that allows you to track routes with the added benefits of calorie estimation, social integration (such as competitions and commenting/”pep-talks”), and a general smoothness in functionality that the other solutions don’t really reach. It also has a “coach” available and workout playlists, but I don’t make much use of those. Not that I have anything against the functions, but for personal safety reasons, I prefer not to run with headphones.

Endomondo workout imported from My Tracks

My choices

After testing out the programs and apps mentioned here, I’ve decided to go with My Tracks and Endomondo. I chose My Tracks because it integrates seamlessly with Google Maps and Docs (I like screwing around with spreadsheets) and because despite looking stripped down and simple, it’s actually excellent at what it does. As for Endomondo: its functions overlap considerably with My Tracks, but the social environment and the excellent website make it very appealing and easy-to-use. The main reason it won out over Pytrainer is because the app takes away any uploading – the second I’m done my workout, it’s available online.

Since the install of Linux From Scratch, one of the main issues I’ve been having is the playback of audio and video files. VLC does both quite well, so I decided to install it.

Like most of my installs in Linux From Scratch, there are millions of dependencies, and you have to install each one manually. I found that the CBLFS VLC page was a great help in determining which packages were required.

One thing I noticed, is that even though it lists some packages as “Optional,” VLC will not compile without a few of them. The easiest way to deal with this is to just install the optional packages as required.

I only ran into one issue while compiling:

D-Bus library appears to be incorrectly set up; failed to read machine uuid: Failed to open "/var/lib/dbus/machine-id": No such file or directory
See the manual page for dbus-uuidgen to correct this issue.
D-Bus not built with -rdynamic so unable to print a backtrace
Aborted

The quick fix for this is to just run:

dbus-uuidgen > /var/lib/dbus/machine-id

Now that VLC is compiled, you can run it anytime by using vlc from the command-line. Make sure you don’t pull a Jake and run it as root. It will yell at you.

So I’m a big Dropbox user. I primarily use it to keep my personal info synchronized between my machines (don’t worry, I encrypt my stuff before dumping it into Dropbox, I’m not dumb), but it’s also handy for quickly sharing files with others.

Unfortunately, Dropbox doesn’t exist in the Gentoo portage tree.

To get started, head over to the Dropbox website and download the source tar.bzip file for your platform. Unzip it to your desktop, open a root terminal and cd into the resulting directory. Before you can actually install Dropbox, you’ll need to satisfy a few dependencies.

First, make sure that you’ve got python by typing emerge python into the aforementioned root terminal. Next, install docutils by typing emerge docutils in that same terminal. Now you should be able to install the dropbox stub by typing ./configure && make && make install.

At this point, Dropbox will have installed a stub of an application on your machine. You should be able to find it under Applications > Internet > Dropbox. When you launch this application, Dropbox will attempt to automatically download and install the binary portion of the application.

Optional: Verifying Binary Signatures

When dropbox downloads binary files, it verifies their legitimacy by calculating a digital signature and comparing it to a known value. In order for it to perform this task, you’ll need to have the pygpgme library installed on your system. Note that this is not the same as the python-gpgme library. They are different, and Dropbox requires the former. Like most Python libraries, pygpgme is a wrapper around a c-based library, in this case, GPGME. As such, the installation takes two steps. First, run emerge gpgme in your root terminal.

Second, you’ll need to install the pygpgme wrapper. It can be found on the project’s homepage at Launchpad. Unpack the tar.bzip, cd into the resulting directory, and run python setup.py build && python setup.py install from a root terminal. If the installation fails with an error message like

fatal error: gpgme.h: No such file or directory

then check the location of your gpgme.h file. It should have been included with the emerge gpgme command, but pygpgme expects it to live in /usr/include/. On my system, it was living in  /usr/include/gpgme/. I solved this problem by running cp /usr/include/gpgme/gpgme.h /user/include/. The only catch is that if you upgrade GPGME, you’ll need to remember that you copied the header file in order to make the python wrapper work. Once the file is copied, you should be able to run the setup script above.

Finally, run Dropbox and check to ensure that the warning message about binary signatures has gone away. You should now be good to go!

Edit: After I had figured all of this crap out, I realized that Dropbox actually is available in the Gentoo tree, but it’s called gnome-extra/nautilus-dropbox. You should be able to skip all of these steps and install Dropbox with the command emerge nautilus-dropbox, although I haven’t tried it myself.

Hi Everyone,

Now that I have a relatively stable environment, I just wanted to write an update of how things went, and some issues that I ran into while installing my desktop environment.

No Sound

Not that I was expecting anything different from LFS, but I had no sound upon booting into KDE. I found this quite strange, as alsamixer was showing my sound card fine. One thing I can tell you, is that alsaconf is a filthy liar. My sound is now working, and it still says it can’t find my card. I’m not sure how I got it working, but here are a few tips.

• Make sure your sound is un-muted in alsamixer.
• Check your kernel to make sure that either support is compiled in for your card, or module support is selected.
• If you selected module supprt, make sure the modules are loaded. For me, this was snd-hda-intel.

Firefox and Adobe Flash

I’m not going to go into too many details about Firefox, as Jake covered this in his post here, but I’d like to note that installing Flash into Firefox was quite easy. All I had to do was download the .tar.gz from Adobe, and do the following:

tar -xvf flash.tar.gz (or whatever the .tar.gz is called)

cd flash

cp libflashplayer.so ~/.mozilla/plugins (make sure plugins is created if it does not exist.)

KDE Crash On Logout

The first time I tried to logout of KDE, I noticed that it crashed. After doing some investigations, I found a solution here. You want to edit your $KDE4_PREFIX/share/config/kdm/kdmrc to reflect the following:

[X-:*-Core]
…
TerminateServer=true

What’s Next?

I’m actually not sure what I’m going to do next. I suppose I should get VLC running on the system, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. I now have a working web browser, flash, and sound, which should be fine until I can get other things working.

Do your GTK applications (i.e. Firefox) look like something designed in the 90′s in KDE? I think I can help you.

I installed the latest Firefox, (not the one in the screenshot, I stole this.) and was very disappointed to see something like the following:

Tyler pointed me to the Gentoo guide here, which helped me find out which packages I needed.

If you install Chakra-Gtk-Config, and either oxygen-gtk or qtcurve (make sure to download the gtk2 theme), you will have better looking GTK applications in no time. Note that there are probably tons of other GTK themes for KDE4, these are just some suggestions to get you started.

That is much better.

If you’re going through the Beyond Linux From Scratch guide, and run into this error while compiling qca-2.0.3 (and I assume many other versions of qca), I think I can help.

You don’t seem to have ‘make’ or ‘gmake’ in your PATH.
Cannot proceed.

The fix is relatively easy. Just make sure to have which installed on the machine. Jake found this out the hard way by looking through the configure script. Doing this experiment on Linux From Scratch has really given me an appreciation for distributions that come with basic utilities such as which.

Since which is very difficult to find on Google, here is a link: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/which.html

Ah Linux

One website lists ten reasons to use linux my favourites of which are “Linux is easier to use than Windows” and “Linux is fun.” It is day three of the experiment and so far I haven’t installed Linux but I have taken a Dell Vostro 3350 apart about five times. I borrowed this laptop off a fellow comrade in this experiment, Jake B, as I will be sending my own netbook home this coming December.

Starting off I aimed to install both VectorLinux and Bodhi to compare them. I consider myself a relatively light computer user outside of the office and so comparing two different distributions would give me something to talk about. Alas this choice has come back to bite me in the…

I used unetbootin to begin with, on a USB key that was confirmed to be working. I then put Vector on the USB key and it brought up half a blue screen with the top of the vector logo just appearing above the black lower half of the display. After a couple of tries I figured it was corrupt files or a bad ISO so I reformated the USB in order to try Bodhi instead. Unfortunately I didn’t even get a logo this time. Next I burned a CD of Vector and got as far as the ‘find installation media’ screen but no matter how may refreshes or reloads I did it apparently couldn’t find the CD-ROM or configuration files.

From previously experiencing installers fail to find hard drives and USB keys because of the type of hard drive setting in the BIOS, I changed it from ACHI to ATA and low and behold finally some success. I managed to get the Vector installer to write partitions to the disk (using the CD at this point) after choosing the add-on applications I wanted to install. Again this failed so I tried once more with the USB key. This failed the same way except it said that it could not find live media. I even tried using the USB key and the CD together at the same time with no luck.

Switching between Bodhi and Vector in order to try and get a complete install and many, many CDs later I temporarily gave up. I downloaded a new distribution called Sabyon, a Gentoo based distro with the Enlightenment desktop environment, but alas I kept getting the same errors. I even tried Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint and neither of them could not write to the disk.

Figuring it was a hard drive issue I took out the hard drive from the laptop and mounted it in an enclosure. After a quick reformat, which removed a random 500MB LVM partition that I believed to be corrupt, I put it back in the machine. Still no luck.

The errors I kept getting included disk, I/O, live media, cannot find CD-ROM, no useable media, no config file and a couple of others. Each time I tried installing it would fail at different sections of the install and the error would be different with each media used. Among all of the errors I’ve seen the main one seems to be “(initramfs) unable to find a medium containing a live filesystem”

On a whim I decided to test any other hardware errors by running diagnostics from the BIOS. No errors found. I even dug out my ancient XP Profession disc, and after a couple of BIOS changes and a couple of Blue Screens – that were my fault because I had changed the hard drive out so much – I got XP to successfully load, install, and commit changes to the hard drive.

Turning to Google, and with the help of a more advanced Linux Experiment comrade, I retried installing Linux by adding some commands to the installer boot options. Still no luck.

After more Googling I have found that there are a few possible reasons that this could be happening. I have read that it could be caused by the USB3 ports interfering with the bootable media  or that it cold be related to a CD-ROM master/slave setting. Either way, I still haven’t figured it out and I’m not willing to break someone else’s computer just to see if I can overcome this frustrating first experience with Linux. My next task is to try some ACPI hacks  and after finding this useful link, try to install the latest version of Ubuntu which seems to be compatible with the hardware of this machine. But for now its …

Windows 1 Linux 0

Men using Linux 1 Women using linux 0

What Next? Chroot

Once you get into the chroot environment, you will get the incredibly annoying PC speaker beep every time you foul up a command.

When compiling glibc in section 6.9, first ensure that there’s no “lib64″ directory in your root; for some reason I had a symlink of lib64 pointing to itself. Make sure you’ve run the sed script correctly or the “make install” portion will fail. Specifically, use -Wl (the letter l) in the command, not -W1 (the number 1). After you fix the idiotic transposition of 1 and L, remove both the glibc-build and glibc-2.14.1 directories under /sources and restart section 6.9 from the beginning. If you don’t restart from the beginning, you’ll still get “glibc cannot find dynamic linker” even though the file exists in /lib64.

Keep Watching What You Type

In section 6.10, when running the grep command to ensure the correct startfiles are used, make sure you use [1in] with a one and not [lin] with an L in the command:

grep -o '/usr/lib.*/crt[1in].*succeeded' dummy.log

In section 6.11 and 6.12, I had to run ldconfig before the new libraries were picked up. It seems like the same problem encountered on this mailing list but I’d confirmed that my PATH was set correctly. The same applied for section 6.22; run ldconfig before attempting the configure/make/make install process for E2fsprogs.

For procps-3.2.8, when applying the sed command in chapter 6.27.1, make sure you’ve copied and pasted it (or at least check your typing.) I missed a forward slash in the regex about four times, causing an error during make:

...undefined reference to `get_pid_digits'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

But hey, at least I have things sort of working:

My next few posts will deal with specific problems with reasonable solutions.