The Linux Experiment

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.

        

Tonight I installed VirtualBox, an incredibly handy virtualization program that lets me run instances of Windows and other Linux distributions from the comfort of my Linux Mint 9 Isadora desktop. Upon installing the latest version in my repositories, I launched the program, only to be confronted by a dialog box offering a link to a newer version of the program available on its website. So I clicked the link, and downloaded the *.deb of the new version. My package manager started up, tried to install the new package, and complained that it conflicted with the existing VirtualBox install. So I opened synaptic, uninstalled the version of VirtualBox that I got from my repositories, and finally installed the most recent version from the website.

So here’s my question, and please feel free to leave your opinion in the comments below: Should Linux applications warn the user about updates that are not available from their repositories?

On one hand, I like having up to date software, but on the other, package maintainers work hard to ensure that everything that ships with a stable distribution plays well together, and probably don’t appreciate these apps leading users outside of their carefully curated repositories. From a security-oriented point of view, this is also bad practice, as much of the security that is inherent in Linux comes from the fact that the vast majority of the software that you install has been vetted by the package maintainers who work to ensure that your distribution is safe and stable. And surely the guys who program VirtualBox, being the insanely awesome ninja-powered pirate wizards that they are, could have come up with a way to update my install without my having to uninstall and re-install an entirely new version. Just sayin’

Chime in with your opinion in the comments below.

        

At home, my setup consists of three machines -  a laptop, a PC, and an XBOX 360. The latter two share a set of speakers, but I hate having to climb under the desk to switch the cables around, and wanted a better way to switch them back and forth. My good friend Tyler B suggested that I run the line out from the XBOX into the line-in on my sound card, and just let my computer handle the audio in the same way that it handles music and movies. In theory, this works great. In practice, I had one hell of a time figuring out how to force the GNOME sound manager applet into doing my bidding.

After quite a bit of googling, I found the answer on the Ubuntu forums. It turns out that the secret lies in a pulse audio module that isn’t enabled by default. Open up a terminal and use the following commands to permanently enable this behaviour. As always, make sure that you understand what’s up before running random commands that you find on the internet as root:

pactl load-module module-loopback
sudo sh -c ' echo "load-module module-loopback" >>  /etc/pulse/default.pa '

The first line instructs PulseAudio (one of the many ways that your system talks with the underlying sound hardware) to load a module called loopback, which unsurprisingly, loops incoming audio back through your outputs. This means that you can hear everything that comes into your line-in port in real time. Note that this behaviour does not extend to your microphone input by design. The second line simply tells PulseAudio to load this module whenever the system starts.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have jerks to run over in GTA…

        

As a follow up to my previous post I have decided to re-run the tests, this time with the updated distributions (where available of course). Again I will be testing all of this within VirtualBox on ‘machines’ with the following specifications:

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

The tests were all done using VirtualBox 3.2.6 on Windows, and I did not install VirtualBox tools (although some distributions may have shipped with them). I also left the screen resolution at the default 800×600 and accepted the installation defaults. All tests were run on July 3rd, 2010 so your results may not be identical.

Results

As before I have provide state of the art graphs for your enjoyment.

First boot memory (RAM) usage

This test was measured on the first startup after finishing a fresh install.

Memory (RAM) usage after updates

This test was performed after all updates were installed and a reboot was performed.

Memory (RAM) usage change after updates

The net growth or decline in RAM usage after applying all of the updates

Install size after updates

The hard drive space used by the distribution after applying all of the updates.

Conclusion

As before I’m going to leave you to drawing your own conclusions. I will point out though that almost all of the distributions have done a good job of lowering memory usage with system updates, which is very commendable. Also it’s important to note that even though RAM and disk space increase with updates so might performance so it’s all about which metric you hold as most important.

        

This blog post is about my experiences. If you hit this page from a search engine looking to fix this issue click here to skip to the solution.

Recently, I’ve been reorganizing my computers based on their usage. My old HTPC, has resumed its duties as my primary desktop/server, my Mac Mini has been attached to the my desktop through Synergy, my server was given to my brother for personal use, and his old computer – a nettop – is now being used as our new HTPC.

After a painful decision making process – a topic for another time, and another post – I decided that this nettop, named Apollo after the Greek god of many things including “music, poetry, and the arts” [as close as I could get to entertainment],  should run Ubuntu 10.4 with XBMC as the media center app. After testing it’s media playback capabilities from a local file, I was rather impressed. I set out to add a SMB share from within XBMC, and was prompted to add a username and password.

I wasn’t really expecting this, because Leviathan – my desktop/sever running Windows 7 – has public sharing turned on, as well as a guest account. I entered in my credentials, and was asked yet again for a username and password. After trying multiple times, I decided to quit XBMC and see if I could get Ubuntu to connect to the share. Here too, I was prompted for a username and password, again and again.

Next I headed to the terminal to run smbclient. This didn’t work either, as I was shown a message saying smbclient failed with “SUCCESS – 0″. I guess success shouldn’t be zero, so my next move was to attempt mounting the network share using CIFS. Again, I was met with repeated defeat.

Begrudgingly I took to the internet with my problem, only to find that there were many people unable to connect to their Windows 7 from Ubuntu. The suggestions ranged from registry hacks to group policy administration, none of which worked. One repeated suggestion however, was to un-install the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant. However, as a user of the Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) Beta that was recently released – I had no such program. I did however have a similar application called the Windows Live Messenger Companion, which I chose to uninstall – again, to no avail.

However, I soon reasoned that perhaps whatever was blocking people using the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant was now being used within the actual Windows Live Messenger client or the other Windows Live Essentials apps that I’d recently installed. I started by uninstalling everything but Windows Live Messenger – because I really, really like the beta version. Alas, this did not help. Next I uninstalled the actual Windows Live Messenger client and voila – I was able to connect with no prompting for passwords at all. Because that makes -any- sense.

As a matter of interest, I installed the regular WLM non-beta client and made sure that the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant was installed, and tried to connect again. Not surprisingly, I was no longer able to connect to my Windows 7 shares. After un-installing the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant my shares were back up and I was mostly happy. Except that I couldn’t use the new Windows Live Messenger beta.

I can’t be sure if the other tinkering I did also helped clear up my problems, but as a recap here are the steps I recommend to access your Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu:

1) If you have the Windows Live Essentials (Wave 4) beta installed, you’ll have to uninstall all of the applications that come with this. For now, you can install the current version of Windows Live Messenger and the other Windows Live Essentials.

2) If you have Windows Live Messenger installed, or ANY of the Windows Live Essentials programs installed check to see if you have the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant installed. If so, uninstall it.

3) Hopefully, now you can enjoy your Windows 7 shares in Ubuntu

Important Note:

Beta software has this nasty habit of leaving beta status sooner or later. If this issue is not resolved when the newest version of Windows Live Messenger is officially released, you may not be able to use the Window Live Messenger client if you need your Windows 7 shares from Ubuntu. I would suggest using an application like Pidgin as your instant messenger, as it can also connect to the Windows Live Messenger service. Other options include Digsby, Miranda, and Trillian.

Originally posted on my personal website here.

        

Two of the linux machines that I use both have ATI graphics cards from the 4xxx series in them. They work well enough for what I do, very casual gaming, lots of video watching, but one thing has always bothered me to no end: video tearing. I assumed that this was due to vsync being off by default (probably for performance sake) but even after installing the proprietary drivers in the new Ubuntu 10.04 and trying to force it on I still could not get the issue to resolve itself. After some long googling I found what seems to be a solution, at least in my case. I’ll walk you through what I did.

Before you continue read this: In order to fix this issue on my computers I had to trash xorg.conf and start over. If you are afraid you are going to ruin yourself, or if you have a custom setup already, please be very careful and read before doing what I suggest or don’t continue at all. Be sure to make a backup!

1 ) Install the ATI proprietary drivers and restart so that they can take effect.

2 ) Make a backup of your xorg.conf file. Do this by opening a terminal and copying it to a backup location. For example I ran the following code:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/backup.xorg.conf

3 ) Remove your existing (original) xorg.conf file:

sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf

4 ) Generate a new default xorg.conf file using aticonfig (that’s two dashes below):

sudo aticonfig –initial

5 ) Enable video syncing (again two dashes before each command):

sudo aticonfig –sync-video=on –vs=on

6 ) If possible also enable full anti-aliasing:

sudo aticonfig –fsaa=on –fsaa-samples=4

7 ) Restart now so that your computer will load the new xorg.conf file.

8 ) Open up Catalyst Control Center and under 3D -> More Settings make sure the slider under Wait for vertical refresh is set to Always On.

That should be it. Please note that this trick may not work with all media players either (I noticed Totem seemed to still have some issues). One other thing I tried in VLC was to change the video output to be OpenGL which seemed to help a lot.

Good luck!

        

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.

        

The Empathy instant messaging client for Gnome is not yet ready to be the default client on your favourite Gnome-based distribution. In fact, I can’t even make it work! Tyler B originally posted about this problem way back in October, but it doesn’t seem to have been fixed during the interim.

To demonstrate my point, allow me to walk you through the process of adding an MSN account, one of the officially supported protocols, to a clean install of Empathy:

1. After launching Empathy, select Accounts from the Edit menu:
   

   Hey guys, nice UI. Way to give that listbox a default width. And why the hell is this dialogue box so big, anyway?

2. Select the MSN protocol from the dropdown menu, and hit the create button:
   

   Wow, way to get icons for every protocol, guys. Either have icons, or don't, ok?

3. Enter your MSN email address and account password, and hit the Connect button:
   

   Hey, see that Add button under the listbox? If I click that, I can add a new account, before even finishing with this one! Wow, recursion in a GUI! Sweet!

4. With the new account created, hit the Close button, and watch as the authentication of your newly added MSN account fails:
   

   Wouldn't you know it, my freshly minted account failed to authenticate. I wonder what the problem is...

5. Hit the Edit Account button, and open up the Advanced area of the Account Manager window that pops up:
   

   Have you ever seen anything communicate over port 0? I haven't

6. Open up your working copy of the trusty Pidgin instant messenging client, put the correct port number into the Port textbox in Empathy, and try to figure out how to save your changes:
   

   Since I couldn't click apply, I hit Close. Empathy warned me that I hadn't saved my changes, and only then enabled the Apply button in the Account Manager window... Fuck me

7. Watch as, even with the correct Server and Port information, Empathy continues to fail miserably at connecting to an MSN account:
   

   Hey, it's still failing to connect. Imagine that.

The Bottom line? This application is buggy, untested, incompatible, falsely-advertised garbage. I want my Pidgin back. It may have some rough edges, but at least it connects. How these glaring errors and this horrible GUI design ever got past the community is beyond me. I do hope that Empathy has something even somewhat mediocre up their sleeves for their 2.29 release, but until then, I’m headed back to Pidgin.

        

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.

        

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!