The Linux Experiment

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.

Graphics Drivers

Continuing where I left off in my previous posts I now had a somewhat working desktop but a few things still had to be done. For one I am running this on my laptop and while the open source radeon drivers are actually pretty decent they’re just not quite good enough when it comes to power management. Thankfully the Linux closed source drivers are up to the job.

After reading through these two sites I was able to install the closed source drivers and get full control over my graphics card. To be perfectly honest I’m not exactly sure what steps got me to this point but I do know it was a mixture of the two sites.

Wireless Networking

After careful consideration I had come to the conclusion thought I had bricked my wireless. Worse yet after following the guide here (even the parts specific to KDE) I just couldn’t seem to get it to work. Thankfully I stumbled upon this guide which instructed me to install networking components for KDE. Apparently once I had installed this package all was good.

Flash

Flash was actually incredibly easy to install. All I had to do was enter the following command in a root terminal and then restart Firefox.

emerge adobe-flash

Java

Another big install was the official Oracle Java JRE and JDK. To install just the JRE run the command dev-java/sun-jre-bin. If you want the JDK as well then run the command dev-java/sun-jdk. The only weird part about this was that this package is now considered restricted. To work around it simply download the bin file from Oracle and place it in /usr/portage/distfiles before running the command.

More to Come

There is still plenty more to do, like install LibreOffice and figure out why my computer currently can’t play audio CDs. I am however thankful that at this point I am at least a bit better off than some other fellow Linux Experiment participants.

My Desktop So Far

The high CPU load was because I had just finished compiling a bunch of stuff

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

Yeah… apparently the ability to restart or shutdown your system using a normal user account from within KDE SC is not something that is installed by default. In order to accomplish this you need to compile and install the kde-misc/kshutdown package using the following command from a root terminal:

emerge kde-misc/kshutdown

I also had to create a new file called /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords in order for this to work. Inside that file just put the following text

kde-misc/kshutdown-2.0

For this version of the experiment I have chosen to try my hand at installing Gentoo. Gentoo, for those who don’t know, or who weren’t following Jake’s posts during the original experiment, is a fully customizable distribution where you have to compile and install all of your applications from source code downloads. Thankfully they do offer some excellent package management tools, Portage in particular, that help automate this process.

Preamble

I suppose a bit of background is the best place to start. During the original experiment I ran Fedora which, while having a whole host of issues of its own, was more or less a straight forward experience. Since that time I’ve dabbled here and there with other distributions, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Linux Mint, among others. For this experiment I wanted a bit of a challenge. I now know the basics, and then some, about running a day-to-day desktop Linux system but I still don’t fully understand all of the inner workings that are going on under the hood. That’s where my choice of Gentoo comes in.

Getting Started

I began by following the rather excellent Gentoo Handbook which thankfully got me to the point where I was able to boot my machine, without the installation media, into a kernel that I had personally configured and compiled. To say that this was smooth sailing probably isn’t accurate, but considering what was actually involved in getting to this point, and how quickly I managed to do it, is a testament to how easy the guide actually is to follow along with.

One thing I would stress to Linux users who may want to try Gentoo and are coming from a more user friendly distribution like Ubuntu is to make sure to get a list of hardware before you start. Run lshw in your Ubuntu (or whatever) install and save the output somewhere. This will show you the list of hardware devices and more importantly the drivers required to run them correctly. I ran into a snag early on where my network card wasn’t working even though Gentoo claimed to be loading the drivers correctly. A quick modprobe later of the driver that was shown to be in use from my earlier install, tg3, and I was back and Internet enabled. Sadly even the lshw output didn’t provide a whole lot of direction when it came to picking and choosing some of the more obscure configuration options for my kernel.

The Challenge

So what do you do when you can finally turn your computer on and boot into your kernel? Well install X I suppose. Unfortunately it was this step that caused me more grief than any of the others. You see apparently you’re supposed to remember what graphics card is in your machine before you try and build a kernel that supports it…

Following along with the X Server Configuration Guide I made it all the way up until the point when I had to specify which “in-kernel firmware blobs” I wanted to compile into my kernel. After, literally, hours of compiling X and then a series of trial and error attempts I finally found a combination that seemed to work. For my own reference the only firmware blob I seem to require is

radeon/R700_rlc.bin

The Wait

I finally had a system that could start X and present me with multiple(!) graphical terminals. By this point I had sunk about ~5 hours into this project. Now it was time to try setting up a desktop environment. My two main choices were GNOME 3.x or KDE SC. I opted for KDE for two reasons:

1. I hadn’t used KDE 4.x in a couple of releases and didn’t mind it last time I had tried it
2. I have yet to try GNOME 3.x but since it is quite the departure from the 2.x series I figured I would go with what I know for now and maybe try GNOME 3.x later

Pulling up the Gentoo KDE guide I began my compilation of KDE SC.

emerge -av kde-meta

More than 400 packages needed to be compiled and installed. My system, a Core2Duo at 2.4Ghz and 4GB of RAM, took approximately 24 hours to finish this single process. Gentoo is certainly not a system that you can expect to have up and running in an afternoon if you’re expecting to have a fully working desktop environment.

Miscellaneous

USE Flags are ridiculous. I understand the concept for them but the fact that you have to continuously add to this list in order to compile programs you explicitly told it to install is a bit much. If you don’t know what a USE Flag is consider yourself lucky. For those thinking about installing Gentoo, don’t worry you’ll know soon enough.

Be sure to change the root password and add any user accounts after you chroot into your new installation. Otherwise you’ll end up like me and boot into a system that you can’t log into!

Next Steps

Well I’d like to finish setting up my desktop. I now have KDE installed but there seems to be some missing components that I hope won’t require a re-compilation… I’ll let you know how that turns out. I also need to sort out my wireless card and get that working. But hey at least for now I can browse the web in my new installation!

As noted in my previous post I have decided to try out a mini experiment wherein I test out three recently released distributions (Kubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 10.10 and Linux Mint Debian Edition) giving each 48 hours to leave me with either a brilliant or terrible first impression. First on the docket was Kubuntu 10.10.

Install

Kubuntu’s installer is absolutely beautiful. It is simple, sleek and gorgeous. As you work your way through the very simple wizard system it begins to copy files in the background which makes the whole install process much faster than in previous iterations. I’m not exaggerating in the least when I say that this is perhaps the best Linux installer I have ever used.

‘New’ Desktop

When I first booted into the desktop I was very pleasantly surprised. I haven’t used KDE since version 4.3 when I had given up on it because, while beautiful and functional, there were just too many rough edges. It seems to be an Internet cliché at this point but I am going to throw it out there anyway: KDE 4.5 is the KDE release you have been waiting for. Most, if not all, of the rough edges that have plagued the 4.x series in the past have been ironed out and replaced with extremely user friendly, soft and presentable windows and options that just make sense.

For instance the new network connection interface is stupidly simple. If you can’t figure out how to connect to a network (hint: you just click on it) perhaps you shouldn’t be using a computer in the first place.

All of these refinements are accented by the new notification system that not only provides a universal area for all program events, but also fixes almost all of my complaints about the previous versions. You can now scroll through the notifications, instead of watching them grow off-screen, and you can even filter by the individual applications that are generating said notifications. Think of it like a unified e-mail inbox versus individual account inboxes.

Along similar lines the new, subtle, system tray notifications are simply awesome. Take a look at this screen-shot of the animated file copy indicator.

Its a bit hard to see in the screen-shot but the white pie in the upper right is actually the progress indicator. Unlike in GNOME where you get either a file copy dialog, or a motionless tray icon, I now have no clutter and yet full functionality. You couldn’t make a better system for displaying the information needed. “But what if I want to see more information?” Like everything else, this indicator is fully integrated into the notification system and a single click brings up the progress bar and file copy information. I suppose the point that I’m trying to get across is that this KDE release has done a lot of work in doing away with the clutter that you don’t really care to see 9 times out of 10.

Driver installation is once again handled by jockey, just like in Ubuntu. This time however I had absolutely no issues with it crashing or just not working unexpectedly.

‘New’ Software

I also decided to try out the default software selection to see what had changed. Plus I figured this would be a non-bias way to get a real first impression/feel of the distribution.

Software Management

KPackageKit has always been a sore part of (EDIT: the KDE SC) Kubuntu for me. It ‘worked’ but it was far from intuitive, helpful and, sometimes, even useful. The new KPackageKit is an entirely different story. It is far more like a mix between Synaptic and the Ubuntu Software Center and it pulls it off beautifully.

You can now browse by category or search by application (not just package) name. In addition it now also features a list of installed software which is something so painfully obvious that it is hard to believe that this functionality hadn’t existed previously. These three changes alone have completely reinvented KPackageKit in my opinion. I now almost look forward to opening it up to find new software, whereas in previous releases I would go straight to the command line just to avoid it.

Browser

The browser that ships with Kubuntu 10.10 is rekonq 0.6.1, which is essentially a re-spin of Konqueror but instead of using the KHTML rendering engine it uses the faster and more compatible WebKit. While there is nothing overly special about this browser it does feel very Chrome-like and was good enough that I never even bothered to switch to anything else.

One nice thing about it is that it integrates seamlessly into the KWalletManager password store. It also did an excellent job of prompting me to install all of the proprietary codecs so that I could watch YouTube or whatever. The only low point was a lack of a Moonlight plugin but I assume that is probably forthcoming.

Instant Messaging

The default instant messenger is Kopete 1.0.80 which is a fine instant messenger that integrates nicely into the notification system. The real problem with Kopete however is that it simply hasn’t seen nearly as much improvement as the rest of the distribution’s software. If you showed me the Kopete that shipped with KDE 4.3 and the one in KDE 4.5 I couldn’t tell you the difference. From my tests (using the Windows Live Messenger service) I didn’t see anything new. Oddly enough, just like the last time I used Kopete, this version recognizes my laptop’s webcam but there is no option to use it anywhere inside of a chat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a lot of work has been put into Kopete since 4.3 but the problem is I would never know it.

KMail

KMail, now at version 1.13.5, once again takes the e-mail duties for KDE and once again I find it to be far too complicated, cluttered and messy. Sure it is very function and has a boat load of options but at the end of the day I just want to read my e-mail. A good e-mail client should be invisible to the user and KMail is certainly not.

KTorrent

I’ve always liked KTorrent and this release (version 4.0.3) is no different. If you don’t feel like messing around and just want things to work then default settings are perfect. But if you like to tweak your settings at all KTorrent offers every major feature that you’re looking for.

Amarok

I’ll be honest, I don’t really like Amarok and never have. That being said I was determined to give it a fair try and I found it to be a very functional media player. I still do think that it is a bit too complicated for the average person though. What do I mean by this? Well for example why do I have to right click and then choose a menu option to listen to my music? Why doesn’t double click just do it?

One area where Amarok does excel is in its music importing wizard. It is very simple and full of sensible defaults that makes ripping tracks from a CD super simple. Kubuntu ships with Amarok version 2.3.2.

Dragon Player

Like GNOME’s Totem, KDE’s Dragon Player (version 2.0) is a no fuss video playback application. There really isn’t much to say about this as it is a very feature lean and purpose focused player. I do however have to give it a special mention; I never had a single vsync issue while using Dragon Player (even with my troublesome ATI graphics card). Not even VLC can say the same without some fiddling around in the options menu.

Kontact

Kontact 4.4.6 is KDE’s answer to Microsoft Outlook. It provides e-mail, calendar, tasks, RSS and more by basically displaying a single user interface that joins together KMail, Akregator, KOrganizer and more in a single window. While this is an excellent way to achieve the end result it does unfortunately mean that the user experience suffers a bit when each application chooses to do things slightly different from one another. Again this is one area that I didn’t notice much difference from the last time I used it.

Conclusion (Konclusion?)

This Kubuntu release is so much improved its hard to believe it was done by the same people who have worked on the previous iterations (I mean that as a compliment… somehow ). If you’ve been put off by KDE in the past or even if you’re just looking for a modern KDE distribution then I highly recommend checking this release out.

Pros:

• A huge improvement over previous releases
• Lots of refinements that make using it a pleasure

Cons:

• Some of the KDE software (not the desktop) could still use some work
• Plasmas are cool and all but I don’t think they are quite as amazing as the KDE team keeps pushing them to be

After a little bit of pressure from the people responding to my previous post (My search for the best KDE Linux distribution), I have finally given in and tried out Chakra. The Chakra Project starts with Arch Linux as a base but, instead of forcing you to build your own distro piece of piece, Chakra comes more or less pre-packaged.

Installation

The installation was one of the best I’ve ever seen. For alpha software this distribution’s first point of interaction is already very polished – even warning me that it is not stable software and might therefore eat my hamster.

The install process even let me decide to install some very useful packages, like Microsoft Core TTF Fonts and Adobe Flash, right away. Even the Language & Time step was incredible, offering a rotating globe that I could drag around and manipulate.

The only issue I had was trying to create a disk partition to install the OS to. This was because I was trying this out inside of VirtualBox, and the virtual hard disk did not have any partitions on it whatsoever. There is a bug and (thankfully) work-around for this known issue with their Tribe installer, and after reading a quick walk-through I was once again ready to install.

The Desktop

The desktop is standard KDE version 4.4.2 after install. Opening up Pacman (or is it Shaman?) showed me a list of brand new software that I could install, including the newest KDE 4.5. One of Project Chakra’s great strengths will be in this rolling release of new software updates. The concept of installing once and always having the most up-to-date applications is very intriguing.

Unfortunately, as with most alpha software, Shaman is still pretty buggy and often crashed whenever I tried to apply the updates. Also unfortunate is that Shaman started a trend of applications simply crashing for no reason. I don’t want to give this distribution a bad reputation, because it is still pre-release software, but I think it goes without saying that the developers have some bug squashing to do before a stable release will be ready. Something I found rather strange is that the current default software selection that Chakra ships with includes two different browsers, Konqueror and rekonq, but no office software whatsoever.

Google Chrome much?

Final Thoughts (for now!)

The Chakra Project looks very promising, albeit very unpolished at the moment. If they can manage to fix up the rest of the distribution, getting it just as polished feeling as the installer, this will definitely be one to look out for. I look forward to trying it out again once it hits a stable release.

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‘.

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