The Linux Experiment

The state of media players on Linux is a sad one indeed. If you’re a platform enthusiast, you may want to cover your ears and scream “la-la-la-la” while reading this article, because it will likely offend your sensibilities. In fact, the very idea behind this series is to shake up the freetards’ world view, and to make them realize that a decent Winamp or iTunes clone need not be the end of the story for media management and playback on Linux.

This article will concentrate on lambasting Rhythmbox, the default jukebox software of the GNOME desktop environment. Subsequent posts will give the same treatment to other players in this sphere, including Banshee, Amarok, and Songbird (if I can find a copy that will still build on Linux). If you’re a user of media players on Linux, keep your own annoyances firmly in mind, and if I don’t mention them, please share in the comments. If you’re a developer for one of these fine projects, try to keep an open mind and get inspired to do better. A media player is not a hard thing to build, and I do believe that together, we can do better.

For the remainder of this article, please keep in mind that I am currently running Rhythmbox under Kubuntu 9.10, so you’ll see it rendered with qt widgets in all of my screen shots. This doesn’t affect the overall performance of the app, but leads nicely into my first complaint:

1. Poor Cross-Platform Support: There are basically two desktop environments that matter in the Linux world, GNOME and KDE. Under GNOME, Rhythmbox has a reasonably nice icon set that is comparable to other media players. Under KDE, the qt re-skinning replaces those icons with a horrible set of mismatched images that really make the program look second-rate:
   

   As you can see, these icons look terrible. Note that there isn't even an icon for 'Burn' and the icon for 'Browse' is a fucking question mark.

   This extends to the CD burning and help features too. They rely on programs like gnome-help and brasero to work, but don’t install them with the media player, so when I try to access these features under KDE, I just get error messages. Nice.

   

   This is just plain stupid. Every package manager has the concept of dependencies, so why doesn't Rhythmbox use them?

2. The Player Starts in the Tray: Under what circumstances would it be considered useful for a media player to automatically minimize itself to the system tray on startup? It doesn’t begin to play automatically. The first thing that I always do is click on the tray icon to maximize it so that I can select some music to start playing. Way to start the user experience off on the wrong foot.
3. Missing Files View: This one is just plain stupid. Whenever I delete a file from my hard drive, it shows up under the ‘Missing Files’ view, even though my intent was clearly to remove the file from my library. Further, I use Rhythmbox to put music on my BlackBerry. Whenever I fill it with music, I first delete the files on it. Those files that I deleted from my mobile device? Yeah, they show up under ‘Missing Files’ too, as if they were a legitimate part of my library! So this view ends up being like a global garbage bin that I have to waste my precious time emptying on occasion, and serves no useful purpose in the mean time. Yeah, I deleted those files. What are you going to do about it?
   

   As you can see, I've highlighted the fact that Rhythmbox is telling me that these files are missing from my mobile device. No shit.

4. Shared Libraries that I can’t Play: So we’ve known for awhile now that Apple broke the ability to connect to iTunes via the DAAP protocol, and that it’s not possible to connect to a shared iTunes library from Linux. If that’s the case, why does Rhythmbox still show these libraries as available? And how come it shows my library under this node? Why would I listen to my own shared library? Finally, I’ve found that even if I’m running Rhythmbox on another machine, I still can’t connect to my shared library. This feature seems to be downright broken – so why is it still in the build?
5. The GUI and Backend are on One Thread: I keep about half of my music collection as lossless FLAC files. When I want to rip these files to my portable media device, they need to be converted to the Mp3 format. Turns out that Rhythmbox thinks it appropriate to transcode these files on the same thread that it uses to update its GUI, so that while this process is taking place, the app becomes laggy, and at times, downright unusable. Further, the application doesn’t seem to give me any control over the bitrate that my songs are transcoded to. Fuck!
6. Lack of Playlist Options: Smart playlists in Rhythmbox are missing a rather key feature: Randomness. When filling the aforementioned mobile device with music, I would like to select a random 4GB of music from my top rated playlist. But I can’t. I can select 4GB of music by most every criteria except randomness, which means that I get the same 600 or so songs on my device every time I fill it. This is strange, because I can shuffle the contents of a static playlist; But I cannot randomly fill a smart playlist. Great.
   

   It's funny; I really want to like Rhythmbox, but it's shit like this that ruins the experience for me

7. Columns: What the fuck. Who wrote this part of the application? When I choose the columns that are visible in the main window, I can’t re-order them. That’s right. So the only order that I can put my columns in is Track, Title, Genre, Artist, Album, Year, Time, Quality, Rating. Can’t reorder them at all, and I have to go into the preferences menu to choose which ones are displayed, instead of being able to right-click on the column headers to select them like I can in every other program written in the last 10 years. This is just ridiculous. I know that the GTK+ toolkit allows you to create re-order-able columns, because I’ve seen it done.
   

   Why, for the love of God, can't these be re-ordered?

8. The Equalizer is Balls: No presets, and no preamp. So I can set the EQ, and my settings are magically saved, but I can only have one setting, because there doesn’t appear to be a way to create multiple profiles. And louder music sounds like balls, because I can’t turn down the preamp, so I get digital distortion throughout my signal. It would be better to just not have an equalizer at all.
   

   I mean, it works. But...

9. Context Menus Don’t Make Sense: Let’s just take a look at this context menu for a moment. There are three ways to remove a song from a playlist. You can Remove the song, which just removes it from the playlist, but not from your library or your hard drive. Alternatively, you can select Move to Trash, which does what you might expect – it removes the song from the playlist, the library, and your computer. I’ve got a problem with the naming conventions here. The purpose of Remove isn’t well explained, and confused the hell out of me at first. In addition, when browsing a mobile device that you’ve filled with music, the GUI breaks down even further. In this case, you can still hit Remove, which seems to remove the song from Rhythmbox’s listing, but leaves the file on the device. So now I have a file on my device that I can’t access. Great. The right-click menu also has the ability to copy and cut the song, even though there is no immediately obvious way to paste it. For that functionality, you’ll have to head up to the Edit menu.
   

   I'm starting to run out of anger. The 10,000 papercuts that come along with this app are making me numb to it.

10. No Command Line Tools: Now, normally, this wouldn’t bother me too much. A music library is something that’s meant to have a GUI, and doesn’t generally lend itself to working from the command line. In this case however, command line access to Rhythmbox would be really handy, because I’d like to set up a hot key on my keyboard that will skip songs or pause playback. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that within the software, and it doesn’t have any command line arguments that I can call instead. Balls.

There you have it, 10 things that really ruin the Rhythmbox experience. While using this piece of software, I felt like the developers worked really hard to build something that was sort of comparable to Apple’s iTunes, and then stopped trying. That isn’t good enough! If we want to attract users to our platform of choice, and keep them here, we need to give them reasons to check it out, and even more to stick around. If I say to you that I want to have the best Linux media player, you tend to put the emphasis on the word Linux. Why not just make the best media player? GNOME is on at least half of all Linux desktops, if not more. Why hinder it with software that gives people a poor first impression of what Linux is capable of? Seriously guys, let’s step it up.

        

Recently I have started to mess around with the Vorbis audio codec, commonly found within the Ogg media container. Unlike Theora, which I had also experimented with but won’t post the results for fear of a backlash, I must say I am rather impressed with Vorbis. I had no idea that the open source community had such a high quality audio codec available to them. Previously I always sort of passed off Vorbis’ reason for being regarded as ‘so great’ within the community as simply a lack of options. However after some comparative tests between Vorbis and MP3 I must say I am a changed man. I would now easily recommend Vorbis as a quality choice if it fits your situation of use.

What is Vorbis?

Like I had mentioned above, Vorbis is the name of a very high quality free and open source audio codec. It is analogous to MP3 in that you can use it to shrink the size of your music collection, but still retain very good sound. Vorbis is unique in that it only offers a VBR mode, which allows it to squeeze the best sound out of the fewest number of bits. This is done by lowering the bitrate during sections of silence or unimportant audio. Additionally, unlike other audio codecs, Vorbis audio is generally encoded at a supplied ‘quality’ level. Currently the bitrate for quality level 4 is 128kbit/s, however as the encoders mature they may be able to squeeze out the same quality at a lower bitrate. This will potentially allow a modern iteration of the encoder to achieve the same quality level but by using a lower bitrate, saving you storage space/bandwidth/etc.

So Vorbis is better than MP3?

Obviously when it comes to comparing the relative quality of competing audio codecs it must always be up to the listener to decide. That being said I firmly believe that Vorbis is far better than MP3 at low bitrates and is, at the very least, very comparable to MP3 as you increase the bitrate.

The Tests

I began by grabbing a FLAC copy of the Creative Commons album The Slip by Nine Inch Nails here. I chose FLAC because it provided me with the highest quality possible (lossless CD quality) from which to encode the samples with. Then, looking around at some Internet radio websites, I decided that I should test the following bitrates: 45kbit/s, 64kbit/s, 96kbit/s, and finally 128kbit/s (for good measure). I encoded them using only the default encoder settings and the following terminal commands:

For MP3 I used LAME and the following command. I chose average bitrate (ABR) which is really just VBR with a target, similar to Vorbis:

flac -cd {input file goes here}.flac | lame –abr {target bitrate} – {output file goes here}.mp3

For Vorbis I used OggEnc and the following command:

oggenc -b {target bitrate} {input file goes here}.flac -o {output file goes here}.ogg

Results

I think I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t tell you to just listen for yourself… The song in question is track #4, Discipline.

Note: if you are using Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, or anything else that supports HTML5/Vorbis, you should be able to play the Vorbis file right in your browser.

45kbit/s MP3(1.4MB) Vorbis(1.3MB)

64kbit/s MP3(2.0MB) Vorbis(1.9MB)

96kbit/s MP3(2.9MB) Vorbis(2.8MB)

128kbit/s MP3(3.8MB) Vorbis(3.6MB)

        

This weekend, I installed Fedora 12 (Constantine) on my laptop, and I have to say that so far, I’m impressed. Thanks to the standard GNOME desktop, it looked familiar, and felt like a more polished version of the Debian desktop that I’m used to. The installation only took 15 minutes, and almost everything worked immediately.

One of the only things that I’ve had troubles with thus far is Adobe AIR. Now normally, I avoid Adobe apps like they’re the plague, since the great ones are really expensive (Photoshop, Premiere, etc), and the free ones are awful and full of security holes (Reader, Flash on anything but Windows). In this case however, I got hooked on the AIR framework because of Tweetdeck, an excellent little application that makes managing Twitter feeds a dream.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work worth a shit on Fedora 12.

Now most AIR apps ship with an installer that will put the framework on your system if you don’t already have it. I’ve always had problems with this method on Linux, and have instead downloaded AIR directly from Adobe as a *.bin file, and installed it manually from a root terminal.

The next step is to install the app. In the case of Tweetdeck, the process is a little bit convoluted because they use a Flash widget on their website (Christ, why?) that starts the installation for you – sketchy from a security standpoint, but it’s always worked well for me in the past. Under Fedora, the installer just crashed.

Hoping for a workaround, I downloaded the *.air installer file to my desktop and tried to use the Adobe AIR Application Installer from my root terminal to do the job. All that got me was a bunch of angry error text. After a quick IxQuicking, I found this blog post with some answers in the comments:

#delete the AIR certs:
rm -rf /etc/opt/Adobe/certificates/crypt/

#install your application like this:
su – /opt/Adobe\ AIR/Versions/1.0/airappinstaller /path/to/install/file.air

While this worked, and the install actually completed (albeit with a bunch of angry error messages yelling at me for deleting the AIR security certs), Tweetdeck failed to function on launch first launch, complaining about Adobe AIR failing, and requesting that I file a bug.

Luckily, one quick restart later, and everything worked perfectly.

So long story short, AIR is kinda dirty on Fedora, and doesn’t work as well as on other distributions. Everything else, however, works great.

        

Recently while browsing the Internet I noticed that Mozilla Firefox was taking up an awfully large amount of RAM. In fact it’s RAM use continued to grow even though I had not navigated to any new website or even touched it at all! Being a KDE user I decided to try the same website within Konqueror, the KDE web browser that everyone seems to toss to the side right after install. To my amazement Konqueror seemed to render the same website, using much less RAM, and better yet it’s RAM use remained static. Perhaps there was something more to this ‘throw-away’ browser than I had first thought. And thus began my idea for a series of comparisons of four of the most popular Linux web browsers: Firefox, Chromium, Konqueror and Epiphany.

Note: The numbers you are going to see below are purely anecdotal and are based on my own personal experiences, which might not represent your own.  For the record I am running Kubuntu 9.10 with the 2.6.31-19 kernel.

Packages I had to install

This is simply a list of packages I installed for each browsers to sort of give you an idea of what to expect.

Startup speed (from a cold start – i.e. from reboot)

To test this I rebooted the computer and then opened the browsers for the first time.

Startup speed (from a cached start – i.e. after opening and closing the program)

To test this I rebooted the computer, then opened the browsers for the first time and closed them. Then I opened them a second time and recorded the time.

Memory usage (about:blank)

This is how much memory the browser took to display the web page in brackets. The memory inside of the brackets is the amount of shared memory each browser uses. This of course could change depending on your system and setup. Where there are multiple numbers separated by plus signs it means that the browser spawns multiple processes which each take up memory.

Memory usage (about:blank -> kubuntu.org)

For this test I first loaded the browser to the homepage, in this case about:blank, and then navigated to the website www.kubuntu.org. In Konqueror’s case it spawned a few small KIO processes which I assume did the actually downloading of the webpage. I have averaged their values below.

Memory usage (about:blank -> kubuntu.org | google.com | bing.com)

For this test I once again started with the about:blank homepage and then opened the websites in different tabs.

Memory usage (about:blank -> kubuntu.org | google.com | bing.com) 2 minutes later

For this test I started with the above test and then waited two minutes and re-recorded the memory usage. This was to see if the browsers suffer from any sort of memory leaks, something Firefox has been famous for over the years.

Memory usage (about:blank -> kubuntu.org | google.com | bing.com | ubuntu.com)

Same as above but with one more tab.

Memory usage (about:blank -> kubuntu.org | google.com | bing.com | ubuntu.com) 2 minutes later

Same as above but with one more tab.

Noticeable rendering glitches in pages viewed

None of the browsers had rendering glitches except for Konqueror. In Konqueror Bing’s search bar was offset from where it should be and on Kubuntu’s website the header image was overlapping text that it shouldn’t have.

Acid 2 test (http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html)

The (now old) Acid 2 test.

Acid 3 test (http://acid3.acidtests.org/)

How well did the browsers handle the Acid 3 test?

SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html)

The classic JavaScript benchmark test!

Conclusion

Well there you have it. Rather than ‘rate’ each browser I’m going to leave it up to you to weigh the merits of each given the above information. Even though Firefox might not be the most technically superior browser it does have the advantage of being very popular and having an excellent add-on system. Then again Epiphany can use most of those add-ons as well. Chromium, based off of Google’s Chrome browser, is also a new favourite for a lot of people and is obviously the fastest in terms of JavaScript. Being a KDE user, Konqueror might be the best browser for you thanks to its infinite customization and uniform look.

Linux is all about personalization and I think everyone should extend that to the browser they use. Who knows you might just find one you like even more.

        

Since the end of The Linux Experiment I have started dual booting my laptop, switching between Kubuntu 9.10 and Windows 7 as needed. While this solves all of my compatibility issues, it does pose some more annoying issues. For example after setting up one operating system just the way I like it I now need to do the same for the other. Furthermore after becoming used to using particular applications under Linux I now have to find alternatives for Windows. Well no more! The KDE guys and gals have ported the libraries to Windows!

Installing

To install KDE on Windows all you need to do is head over to http://windows.kde.org/download.php and grab a copy of the installer exe. This will more or less walk you through the initial setup and then present you with a list of packages you can choose to install. Most applications are there including things like KTorrent, Konqueror, Konversation and more! Simply select them and watch as they are easily installed.

Image Walkthrough

The first screen you'll see when installing	The package list
kdebase-apps includes things like Konqueror	The installer downloads the source and compiles it locally
After installing the applications show up right in your start menu	The final result. Konqueror and KWrite running on Windows

        

Some readers may recall all of the attempts that I’ve made in the past to synchronize my Blackberry with Mozilla’s Thunderbird email and calendar client. During each of these tries, I had relied on the OpenSync framework, along with the Barry project for communication with my phone, and a number of different solutions to link into Thunderbird. At various times, these included the opensync-plugin-iceowl, opensync-plugin-sunbird, and bluezync packages, none of which yielded success.

While running GNOME on my Debian laptop, I had managed to successfully synchronize my phone with the Evolution mail client. Even so, I continued to work at Thunderbird synchronization because I disliked Evolution, seeing it as a Microsoft Outlook clone, which is a platform that I have had considerable problems with in the past.

With my recent installation of Kubuntu 9.10 on my PC, I have been exposed to the Kontact PIM suite, and have thus far been impressed. Kmail is a solid email client, although the way that it handles the setup of multiple email accounts is confusing to say the least, forcing the user to create a sending, receiving, and identity object for each account, and then to link them together. Likewise, Kontact is a decent application, but is sorely lacking basic GUI configuration options, something I never thought that I would say about a KDE app. Finally, Kalendar does everything that one would expect, and allows the user to display appointments in a number of useful ways. All have excellent integration, and live in a tray widget that uses the native KDE notifications system to let me know when something important has happened.

Most importantly however, I managed to get the entire Kontact suite to sync with my Blackberry after about five minutes of playing around in the terminal. Unlike during previous installation attempts, I found the latest stable Barry packages available in my repositories, so installation was a snap. I simply added the following packages to my system:

• libopensync0 v0.22-2
• multisync-tools v0.92
• libbarry0 v0.14-2.1
• opensync-plugin-kdepim v0.22-4
• opensync-plugin-barry v0.14-2.1

From a terminal, I then used the msynctool application and the following steps to do a little bit of configuration:

1. msynctool –listplugins if the install went well, this command should list both kdepim-sync and barry-sync as available plugins
2. msynctool –addgroup BB create an OpenSync sync profile for my Blackberry called BB
3. msynctool –addmember BB barry-sync add the barry-sync plugin to the BB sync group
4. msynctool –addmember BB kdepim-sync add the kdepim-sync plugin to the BB sync group
5. msynctool –showgroup BB this lists each of the plugins that we just added to the BB sync group, along with their member numbers. In my case, barry-sync was member number 1, and kdepim-sync was member number 2. The output also showed that while barry-sync still needed to be configured, kdepim-sync had no configuration options to be set.
6. msynctool –configure BB 1 configures member number 1 of the sync group BB. In my case, this was barry-sync, and simply popped a config file in the nano text editor. All that had to be changed in the file was the PIN of the Blackberry that the plugin would attempt to sync with.
7. msynctool –sync BB actually performed the synchronization process. For safety’s sake, I made sure that Kontact was fully closed before running this command.

And that’s it! In the future, I simply have to run the msynctool –sync BB command to synchronize my Blackberry with Kontact. That’s one more reason to stick with Linux – Blackberry synchronization that isn’t tied to Microsoft Outlook!

        

In my daily RSS feeds I read about the release of the newest version of XBMC, formally the Xbox Media Center, so I decided to check it out.

While the maintainers do not specifically support Fedora with pre-built RPMs, they do offer instructions on how to build it from source here. Even so, I did run into a couple of little problems along the way. For example on the step that says to enter

*sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so
*sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so

depending on if you are running the x86 or x64 version of Fedora, I needed to change this to say

sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.16.0.0 /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so

because that is the current version of my library. In addition running

./configure

failed due to an error with OpenSSL, specifically its lack of something called “openssl/ecdsa.h”. I managed to fix this by altering the source code according to the patch found here. Then before re-running ./configure I had to run

autoreconf –force –install

(that’s two dashes in front of force and install!) from within xbmc/cores/dvdplayer/Codecs/libbnav. Once that was done the ./configure ran smoothly. From then on I simply followed the rest of the instructions and I was in business!

There really is only one word to describe this version of XBMC: AWESOME!

It picked up my pictures, videos and music from all of my network shares and local drives without issue. The user interface is absolutely stunning as well. At one point I had Star Wars playing in the background (still in view) while navigating beautifully rendered and slightly transparent menus to adjust other system settings. It can even be configured to pull down information about the movies from the Internet, including who stars in it and what the plot is. The music playback is similar and offers a variety of visualizers for your viewing pleasure. The picture options allows for very neat slideshows, accompanied by your own music playing in the background, which would be great for atmosphere at a party.

From Wikipedia here are just some of the features supported by this release:

• Physical media: CDs, DVDs, DVD-Video, Video CDs (including VCD/SVCD/XVCD), Audio-CD (CDDA), USB Flash Drives, and Hard Disk Drives
• Network/Internet protocols: UPnP, SMB/SAMBA/CIFS, XBMSP, DAAP, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, RTSP (RTSPU, RTSPT), MMS (MMSU, MMST), RTMP, Podcasting, TCP, UDP, SFTP, RTP
• Container formats: AVI, MPEG, WMV, ASF, FLV, Matroska, QuickTime, MP4, M4A, AAC, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia RAM/RM/RV/RA/RMVB, 3gp, VIVO, PVA, NUV, NSV, NSA, FLI, FLC, and DVR-MS (beta support)
• Video formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.263, MPEG-4 SP and ASP, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, RealVideo, RMVB, Sorenson, WMV, Cinepak
• Audio formats: MIDI, AIFF, WAV/WAVE, MP2, MP3, AAC, AACplus, AC3, DTS, ALAC, AMR, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio (APE), RealAudio, SHN, WavPack, MPC/Musepack/Mpeg+, Speex, Vorbis and WMA
• Digital picture/image formats: RAW image formats, BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, MNG, ICO, PCX and Targa/TGA
• Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, SMI, SRT, SUB, VOBsub, VPlayer
• Metadata tags: APEv1, APEv2, ID3 (ID3v1 and ID3v2), ID666 and Vorbis comments for audio file formats, Exif and IPTC (including GeoTagging) for image file formats

For a sampling of the beautiful new interface check out their official wiki here. I apologize for this sounding a lot like an advertisement but in all honesty I am floored by how impressive this application is and would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a sweet home theater setup. Try it out now!

        

Thanks to incompatibilities with ATI’s catalyst drivers and the newest version of Xorg used in Fedora I am still unable to install Fedora 12 on my machine. Yes, I know there are open source alternatives but frankly they don’t work well and actually caused my system to be unstable during the brief period I did use them.

I had really hoped that I would be able to try out Fedora 12 in a meaningful way before the end of this experiment but I just don’t see that happening…

        

Finished Exams

Rather than just copy Sasha’s previous post, I will do my best to try and tell the story through the eyes of a Computer Science undergrad. Now that I have finally finished my exams for this term I can safely say that Linux has not impeded my coursework and in fact has given me quite a seamless user experience.

Web Development

Designing websites and creating server side programs has been an absolute delight in Linux. Unlike within Windows, I can easily mount a remote SSH server as a browsable folder in my file system in Linux, making additional file transfer programs unnecessary. This lets me edit the files in my favourite editor, which more often than not was just KWrite, and then watch as they updated on the remote server with a simple click of the save button.

Graphics Programming

For a different course I was required to program 3D graphics in OpenGL. On Windows my professor had recommended Dev-C++, a program I am familiar with but not exactly a fan of. Thankfully we weren’t doing anything platform specific and thus I was able to make use of the exact same OpenGL and GLUT libraries to get the job done on Linux. As a replacement for Dev-C++ I started with Eclipse but eventually settled on MonoDevelop as my IDE of choice. Even better I was able to share the exact same code with a fellow classmate for our group project, which he was in turn able to compile on Windows in Dev-C++ with no modification whatsoever!

Pretty Standard Stuff

The rest of my time spent at University was of pretty standard fare: note taking, web browsing, e-mailing, instant messaging, assignments, etc. Linux performed superbly at these tasks as well and handled everything I could think to throw at it – even our school’s insane Wi-Fi network configuration.

Three Months of School Later

And there you have it. My experience with Linux during my term at school has been, like Sasha’s, excellent. For those of you out there worried that trying out Linux will impact your school or work or have concerns that you won’t be able to find replacements for your generally Windows or Mac centric worlds, I can attest to the exact opposite being true. Give Linux a shot, it might even make you more productive! Hell, you just might even like it

        

Hey, where'd my text go?

I set my system font to Dingbat, which worked perfectly in every application except for Open Office. The strange part is that the font worked just fine in all of the other programs that I have installed. Silly OpenOffice.