The Linux Experiment

As you know I am currently running OpenSUSE 11.2 on my laptop. While I have enjoyed my time using it, I have noticed that this particular distribution tends to be on the heavy side of memory usage. This got me thinking. If OpenSUSE uses this much memory on my machine, how could it possibly run on a machine with 512MB of RAM (the lowest recommended amount)? If Ubuntu is the most popular distribution, but it is also, what I would call, a fully-fledged desktop distribution, then how does it manage given tighter memory constraints? And so the mini-experiment begins.

Points to make before I begin

• This is not a very scientific study, but rather something I did in my spare time because I was curious.
• I have picked the majority of the most popular desktop distributions. These distributions were chosen not because they were designed for minimal system specs but rather because they are popular and provide a full desktop experience out of the gate.
• What do I mean by full desktop experience? The distribution should be easy enough for a novice Windows user to install, should come with all of the standard software for desktop activities, and should not require any fine tuning.
• What you won’t find here: DSL, Arch Linux, Slackware (only because it failed at installing in VirtualBox), Gentoo, or other ‘expert’ distributions. You also will not find netbook remixes or low-resource specific distributions. This experiment is designed to see how these big distributions run on little RAM, nothing more.
• Please do not post things like ‘you forgot to test XYZ’ or other useless comments that don’t actually help the discussion. Yes I am sorry I missed your favourite distribution, but grab a tissue, clear the tears from your eyes and let’s all move on with our lives.

How I tested them

The process was identical for all tested distributions. I set up a new virtual machine inside of VirtualBox with the following specs:

• Total RAM: 512MB
• Hard drive: 8GB
• CPU type: x86

The tests were all done using VirtualBox 3.1.4 on Windows, and I did not install VirtualBox tools (although some distributions may have shipped with them) nor did I change the screen resolution from the default 800×600.

Results

I have broken the results down into a variety of categories and included fancy graphs just for you!

First boot memory (RAM) usage

For this test I installed the distribution and then on its first (post-installation) boot measured the amount of memory it used. This was to gauge the amount of resources that the stock distribution required before any updates.

Average first boot memory (RAM) usage by packaging type

This shows the average memory usage broken down by the packing type used.

Memory (RAM) usage after updates

This was a test to see whether or not system updates caused the memory usage to increase or decrease. I updated the system with all current updates and then rebooted and measured the resource usage again.

Memory (RAM) usage change after updates

This graph shows the usage difference between installation and post-updating. The formula I used was [after updates - initial installation].

Average memory (RAM) usage after updates by packaging type

Similar to above. Again this is broken down by packing type.

Filesystem layout

This is a simple graph showing the partitions that each default setup created as well as the relative size of them.

Filesystems used in partitions

This graph shows the different filesystems used for the various partitions. For example if a distribution has a value of 2 under ext4 that means that it used ext4 in two different partitions.

Occurrence of filesystem by packaging type

This graph shows the number of distributions who used a certain type of filesystem. It is broken down by packing type.

Install size after updates

This is the total OS install size after downloading and installing all of the updates. This should represent a fully updated version of the distribution.

Average install size after updates by packaging type

This shows the average install size of the distributions broken down by packing type.

Conclusion

Make you own! …well it is pretty obvious that some of these distributions would perform better than others given these low system specs. There are however other things to consider. For example which packing type you prefer, or for that matter which package manager.

        

Linux, Tyler B 512MB, distributions, Linux, RAM

Tonight I decided that I’d like to be able to do some web development from home. The basic suite is called LAMP, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP; the standard web developers toolkit. After a little bit of googling, I found this great guide from Tux Tweaks that walked me through the entire process. Once installed, my system hosted any files in the /var/www/ directory, and had MySQL and phpMyAdmin installed for database access.

Enjoy!

        

Jon F, Kubuntu, Linux, Open Source Software, Ubuntu 9.10, apache, install, karmic koala, Kubuntu, lamp, Linux, mysql, php, tutorial, Ubuntu

As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE. Unfortunately I was unable to do so after openSUSE decided not to play nice. However my search did not stop there, and once the community edition was ready I jumped over to Linux Mint KDE CE. Finally I decided to once again try openSUSE, this time installing from a USB drive. This somehow resolved all of my installation issues.

Now that I have tried out quite a few of the most popular distributions I figured I would write a little bit to tell you fine people my thoughts on each, and why I will be sticking with openSUSE for the near future.

Fedora 11

• KDE Version: 4.2 – 4.3
• Pros: very secure, not too many modifications of the KDE source, cutting edge
• Cons: could have really used some more modifications of the base KDE packages in order to better integrate GTK+, Bluetooth problems, not always stable
• Thoughts:

  I have written at length about my experiences with Fedora during this experiment. Without re-writing everything again here let me simply say this: Fedora is primarily a GNOME distribution and I could never shake the feeling that KDE got the left-over treatment.

Kubuntu

• KDE Version: 4.3
• Pros: very easy to use, nice integration of GTK+ and GNOME notifications, access to Ubuntu support
• Cons: the hardware drivers application (jockey) simply did not work, very bad sound issues, Firefox could not handle opening file types
• Thoughts:

  When I first installed Kubuntu I was thrilled. Ah, this must be what it’s like to use a real KDE distribution, I thought. Everything seemed smoother and far more integrated then it did in Fedora. For example: OpenOffice.org had a KDE theme and it’s file browser actually used the native KDE one. Furthermore the notification system was awesome. Now instead of a GNOME application, like Pidgin, generating GNOME notifications, it instead integrated right into the standard KDE equivalent.

  Then the problems started to show up. Oh I’ll just download this torrent file and… hmm Firefox doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. Why can’t I set the file type options inside of Firefox for torrents? Why doesn’t it use the system defaults? Then the sound issues came. YouTube stopped putting out audio all together and all of my attempts to fix it were futile. Maybe it’s just my hardware but Kubuntu just could not handle multimedia at all.

  While Kubuntu is definitely one of the better KDE experiences it is by no means problem free.

Linux Mint KDE CE

• KDE Version: 4.3
• Pros: excellent package manager, easy to use
• Cons: sound issues, WiFi issues, is this actually a KDE desktop? there are so many GTK+ applications in it…
• Thoughts:

  After hearing much praise for Linux Mint I decided to give the newly released KDE community edition a go. I must say at first I was very impressed. The package manager was far superior to KPackageKit and even included things like user ratings and comments. It also came bundled with many tools and applications designed specifically for Linux Mint. Sadly very few of these were re-written in Qt and so I was forced to deal with GTK+ skinning almost everywhere.

  Sound issues similar to those in Kubuntu (maybe it’s something in the shared source?) started to crop up almost immediately. Again YouTube just did not work no matter how much I tried to fix it. Finally the WiFi connection was very poor, often disconnected on what seemed like a  specific interval.

  While I think this distribution has a lot going for it I can only suggest the GNOME desktop for those who want to give it a try. The KDE version just does not seem polished enough to be recommended for someone looking for the ultimate KDE distribution.

openSUSE

• KDE Version: 4.3
• Pros: very responsive, a lot of streamlined tweaks, rock solid WiFi, excellent audio
• Cons: slower to boot, uses quite a bit of RAM, too much green
• Thoughts:

  Installing openSUSE seemed like an awful idea. After reading all of the complaints that both Phil and Dave had written over the course of the experiment I have to admit I was a little hesitant. However, I am very happy I decided to try it anyway; openSUSE is an excellent KDE distribution.

  Everything about it, from the desktop to the little helpful wizards, all seem to be designed with one purpose in mind: make openSUSE the easiest, or at the very least most straightforward, distribution possible. YaST, often a major source of hate from my fellow Guinea Pigs, does indeed have some quirks. However I honestly think that it is a very good tool, and something that streamlines many administrative tasks. Want SAMBA network sharing? Just open up YaST and click on the wizard. Want restricted codecs? Just hop on over to openSUSE-Community and download the ymp file (think of it like a Windows exe).

  My time with openSUSE so far has been wonderful. My network card seems to actually get better range then ever before, if that’s even possible. My battery life is good and my sound just plain works without any additional effort. If I had one complaint it would be with the amount of RAM the distribution uses. After a quick reboot it takes up a very small amount, around ~350MB or so. However after a couple of hours of general use the RAM often grows to about 1-1.5GB, which is far more than I have seen with the other distributions. Thankfully I have 4GB of RAM so I’m not too worried. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that I am running the x64 version and not the x86 version. Perhaps it assumes I have at least 4GB of RAM for choosing the newer architecture.

  Whatever the case may be I think I have finally found what I consider to be the very best KDE Linux distribution. Obviously your results may vary but I look forward to hearing what you think.

This piece was cross-posted over at my person website ‘TylerBurton.Ca‘.

        

KDE, Tyler B, openSUSE KDE, Kubuntu, Linux, Linux Mint, openSUSE

Just wanted to share a link to a great table that I found – the practical reference of linux commands is a handy little table of terminal commands organized by task. I’ll add it to our sidebar under the ‘Useful Sites’ heading for future reference.

Happy Linuxing!

        

Jon F, Linux command, command line, Linux, reference, terminal

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.

        

Free Software, Kubuntu, Linux, Open Source Software, Tyler B Chromium, Epiphany, firefox, konqueror, Linux, Web Browsers

Just a quickie here – if you keep video of any kind on your Kubuntu 9.10 system, you may have noticed that the Dolphin file manager doesn’t show thumbnail previews of video files by default.  Turns out that it’s a very easy (if non-obvious) feature to enable. Simply follow these steps:

1. Open up kPackageKit
2. Search for and install the package mplayerthumbs – it has three dependencies, which include mplayer itself (I use VLC, but to each his own)
3. Back in Dolphin, navigate to Settings > Configure Dolphin > General > Previews Tab
4. Scroll down in the list, and you should be able to see an option called Video Files (MPlayerThumbs) – Check that box
5. Drag the Maximum file size slider all the way to the right, and hit apply

Navigate to a folder that contains video files, and watch as they slowly begin to populate. Be patient though, it can take a few minutes if you have a lot of media. You should also note that it doesn’t work with all WMV files.

Thanks to youTube user gotbletu for the following informative video that I ripped these instructions off from:

        

Jon F, KDE, Kubuntu 9.10, dolphin, image, karmic koala, KDE, Kubuntu, Linux, preview, thumbnail, video file

After playing with the GNOME Appearance preferences on my new Mint 8 installation, I managed to completely lose the color scheme, window decorators and other options for the default Helena theme – which I actually liked.

Due to an unrelated incident that I will blame on an abuse of Compiz (which really doesn’t play nice with the Xinerama extension), I recreated my GNOME profile this morning and saved out the default theme. For my own future reference (and anyone else who doesn’t want to nuke their profile), I’ve uploaded the default Mint 8 theme. Extract it to your ~/.themes/ directory and it will appear in Control Center > Appearance as “Default Mint Theme”.

This theme should theoretically work on any Linux distribution with GNOME, as well, but you’ll need the “Shiki-Wise” control set, “Shiki-Colors-Metacity” window border, and the “GNOME-Wise” icon set for more than just the gray and green hues.

        

GNOME, Jake B, Linux Mint colours, default, Gnome, icon, settings, theme

If any of you are using a Ubuntu-based distribution (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint) and do any sort of Eclipse development, the current 3.5.1 package available with the distribution (3.5.1+repack~1-0ubuntu3) is missing the standard Galileo and 3.5 update sites in the Available Software Sites list:

This bug has already been reported to Launchpad, but here are the relevant sites you can add to enable Galileo updates and install new plugins:

Name: The Eclipse Project Updates
Location: http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/updates/3.5

Name: Galileo
Location: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo

(This has also been cross-posted to my personal site, “Bus error”.)

        

Jake B, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, Ubuntu Eclipse, missing url, software update, update site

While my initial plan for January was to stick with Windows 7 and perhaps try out Fedora 12, a bad DVD interrupted the Fedora install progress. Out of sheer convenience, I’d planned on running Linux Mint in a VM and had pulled the ISO earlier in the week. “Aha!” I thought. “I’ll install this instead of Fedora and see what’s what.”

My initial impressions are that Mint is perhaps the first Linux distribution that I’d enjoy using on a day-to-day basis. With only a few minor tweaks (activating multiple monitors and using optical out for sound), I have a completely functional desktop environment. Compiz is totally integrated into the experience, degrades gracefully if needed, and is used to enhance the UI rather than provide unneeded eye candy.

Taking a page out of Jon’s book, I also installed Banshee for media playback. What a difference from previous media player experiences – my BlackBerry was automatically detected, synced with my library and folders were built properly in the MediaCard/BlackBerry/music directory. Now, all I need is some better music and I’ll be set!

        

Banshee, Compiz, GNOME, Jake B, Linux Mint audio, banshee, first run, mint, positive impressions

Hosts: Dana H, Dave L, Jake B, Jon F, Sasha D & Tyler B

Missing in action: Phil D

Show length: 0:54:52

Description:

The third (and final?) podcast from the guys at The Linux Experiment. In this episode we reflect upon the last four months of constant Linux use and discuss the future of The Linux Experiment.

In this episode:

• A reflection on our own personal experiences with Linux.
• Would we recommend Linux? Is Linux ready for the desktop? Are we sticking with Linux?
• The future of The Linux Experiment.
• Bonus material.

Music:

“Handicapped Lover“ by Vicnet found on Free Music Archive here.

Get the show:

• iTunes – Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes
• Podcast Alley – Subscribe to the podcast at Podcast Alley
• RSS Feed – Subscribe to the RSS for the podcasts
• Direct MP3 download – Grab the MP3 right here (right-click, save as)
• Direct OGG Vorbis download – Get the OGG right here (right-click, save as)

Listen here (explicit):

        

Guinea Pigs, Linux, Podcast Podcast, The Linux Experiment