Take 2

This month, there were a good set of new Linux distribution releases.  The ones I was most excited about was Fedora 9 and OpenSuse 11.  This excitement was driven by a few things:

1. Improved hardware support with the 2.6.26 kernel
2. Package manager improvements (especially with OpenSuse)
3. The new Gnome desktop (2.22) runs snappier than previous versions
4. KDE 4

My initial project was to install Fedora Core 9 on the arcade system.  The installation was unique in that I decided to install to a flash drive instead of a hard drive.  This was inspired by the Fedora Live USB tools http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo.

Fedora is in a very interesting point in its life.  It is getting over being trounced in popularity by Ubuntu and learning to implement some of the features that make Ubuntu so appealing to so many.

I used the Windows version of the Live/USB creater tool first and it seemd to complete successfully.  However, the system would not boot fully to the device.  It seemed that the USB stick was assigned /dev/sdb which caused some errors.  I did get it to boot after typing some commands to mount the stick properly.

It was near sighted on my part, but I didn’t reallize that the Live USB stick would want to do hardware configuration on every bootup.  Perhaps a save hardware profile option would be a nice addition.  After realizing this, I decided that a full install to a the the USB Flash drive would be the best route.

The installer that is included with Fedora 9 is lacking when it comes to installing to flash.  There is no option to use jff2 as the file system.  This would’ve helped increase the life of the flash disk.  It took about 10 tries to get the installation going.  There were various problems with the disk partition tool that kept cropping up.  It, of course, didn’t like that I didn’t want to use swap space.  Also, any attempt to use the fat filesystem for the drive resaulted in a failure.

I ended up buying a 4GB drive to be the primary drive.  The Fedora installer fails if the drive does not have enough space (I think it was around 2.3GB) to copy the initial image.  The failure for this happens after the disk partitioning is done, so you have to go all the way back through the installer to correct this.

The Fedora desktop is really good looking and has been for most of there recent releases.  The hardware detection worked well and detected the atheros wireless card and loaded the driver correctly.  It surprised me since that was only recently committed to the Linux kernel.

Fedora package management has been its Achilles heel, in my opinion.  This release is, unfortunately, no exception.  Pup and Pruit have been ditched (yea!!).  The have been replaced with an installer that can only install one package at a time (boo!!).  This is a flaw that may just turn people against the distribution as a whole.  Installing yumex is a good interim solution for this issue.

There are a few ways that Linux distributions separate themselves from other distributions.  Here’s where comparisons should be made.

Type:  Desktop

Release Cycle: 6 months, supported for 1 1/2 years

Package Management:  Still slower than most, the default graphical fronend is missing the feature to install multiple packages.  This is the area where the distribution does the worst.

Feel: Good overall feel.  Theme is pretty and desktop is snappy.

Security:  SELinux is great.  It stayed out of the way while still prividing security.

License: It’s harder to find a “freeer” distribution than Fedora.  They and Red Hat are members in good standing with the open source community

Virualization: I didn’t test this on the arcade, but Fedora 9 does include the new paravirt_ops.

I will still use Fedora and check out the releases as they occur.  They are simply great at moving Linux forward with projects like PackageKit, AIGLX, pulseaudio, and paravirt_opts.  It’s hard not to want to support them.  Just please fix the installer and the package manager.

Rocks:

My computer has never run beter than it has today. My gentoo system just got a full update to the latest unstable AMD64 release and the difference is quite noticeable. The new kernel, 2.6.25 actually gave me a decent performance boost as did the move to the new gnome 2.22 desktop. I was previously thinking about investing in a quad core proc to get some speed improvement, now those thoughts are history.

Linux core2 2.6.25-gentoo #2 SMP PREEMPT Thu Apr 17 19:46:30 CDT 2008 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Sucks:

There are a few line items on why Linux sucks. These are the things that people keep sighting and then saying “Linux isn’t ready for the desktop”. If your needs are one of these things, then you may be right.

1. The new IPod Classic crashes Banshee and Rhythmbox — This one hurt. I was trying to show my mother how cool Linux was by syncing her new IPod. It didn’t work and I had to resort to using a mac to get the sync to work.

2. Skype video chat doesn’t work for me — I recently purchased a creative live cam video im pro webcam device. It works great with most Linux apps, but not with Skype. This is important to me as nothing else does what Skype does right now. I have several familiy members on the Windows version of it that I can’t video chat with.

3. Epiphany bookmark related crashes — I’ll post on this later in more depth. On my box, epiphany cannot even import its own exported bookmarks. There is a bug out there for this.

4. ATI video isn’t 3d accelerated — This is a work in progress right now. There is a lot of effort to get the specs that ATI released into a xorg driver. The two main efforts for this are the ati and radeonhd drivers. This will get there, it will just take time. xcompmgr still works fine so my desktop looks snazzy; its just slow.

Please don’t take these critisms harshly. I am in no way trying to dismiss or invalidate the great work these projects represent.

And then it dawned on me, blogs are public! I don’t write here much not because my mind isn’t coming up with interesting things, it is more that there are a whole lot of people who don’t read words the way they are written. Anything that is written or spoken can be taken out of context by people who are blinded by their beliefs or simply ignorant. There are horror stories about companies who have done research on candidates and discovered things they didn’t like about them by reading their blogs or social network pages. I don’t want to fall into that catagory. Only things that are non-debatable will show up in the public portions of this site. If you would like to talk about debatable matters in an intelligent setting, feel contact me.

6. The games now run longer thanks to more commercials than ever before
5. The commentating of Troy Aikman
4. The commentating of Phil Simms
3. You only have one choice of game to watch in the second slot on Sunday
2. The number of times you watch the players on the field swearing during a game
1. This year’s coach of the year was convicted of cheating and yet still gets the award

This one comes as a result of Intel trying to stifle a humanitarian effort, OLPC.

From http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Intel#INTEL_RESIGNS_FROM_OLPC.

January, 4 2008 - We at OLPC have been disappointed that Intel did not deliver on any of the promises they made when they joined OLPC; while we were hopeful for a positive, collaborative relationship, it never materialized.

Intel came in late to the OLPC association: they joined an already strong and thriving OLPC Board of Directors made up of premier technology partners; these partners have been crucial in helping us fulfill our mission of getting laptops into the hands of children in the developing world. We have always embraced and welcomed other low-cost laptop providers to join us in this mission. But since joining the OLPC Board of Directors in July, Intel has violated its written agreement with OLPC on numerous occasions. Intel continued to disparage the XO laptop in nations that had already decided to partner with OLPC (Uruguay and Peru), with countries that were in the midst of choosing a laptop solution (Brazil and Nigeria), and other countries contemplating a laptop program (Mongolia).

Intel was unwilling to work cooperatively with OLPC on software development. Over the entire six months it was a member of the association, Intel contributed nothing of value to OLPC: Intel never contributed in any way to our engineering efforts and failed to provide even a single line of code to the XO software efforts – even though Intel marketed its products as being able to run the XO software. The best Intel could offer in regards to an “Intel inside” XO laptop was one that would be more expensive and consume more power – exactly the opposite direction of OLPC’s stated mandate and vision.

Despite OLPC’s best efforts to work things out with Intel and several warnings that their behavior was untenable, it is clear that Intel’s heart has never been in working collaboratively as a part of OLPC. This is well illustrated by the way in which our separation was announced singlehandedly by Intel; Intel issued a statement to the press behind our backs while simultaneously asking us to work on a joint statement with them. Actions do speak louder than words in this case. As we said in the past, we view the children as a mission; Intel views them as a market.

The benefit to the departure of Intel from the OLPC board is a renewed clarity in purpose and the marketplace; we will continue to focus on our mission of providing every child with an opportunity for learning.

This basically says that Intel is far in the lead and therefore, will sit on their current platform instead of pushing the envelope further.

Santa Clara (CA) - Digitimes is reporting that Intel has decided to adjust its scheduled release of three previous quad-core CPUs due to the problems AMD has been having with their Barcelona architecture and launch. A significant errata in AMD’s processors, the temporary fix of which affects performance by as much as 20% on average, some applications see a 55%+ hit, is the cause of the delay. AMD has been relatively tight-lipped on answering questions relating to the impact, timeframes, etc.

According to Digitimes, Intel believes there will be little benefit to launching the CPUs now that AMD is significantly behind schedule. The three CPUs were Core 2 Quad Q9300, Q9450 and Q9550. The remainder of its 45nm lineup are on track for Q1 2008 launch, though no specific timeframe was given.

David Airlie was interviewed and has come up with two reasons why they opened up their GPU specs.

1.) Lost CPU sales due to lack of open source GPU support at an OEM level.
2.) Future CPU/GPU combination projects would require opening info on the GPU portion to allow uptake.

What a bummer. The CPU seems to be the _big deal_ item here. I think their lack of CPU sales are more due to the fact that Intel has a better chip than anything.

This is just another example that shows us that the Linux desktop market is not big enough to have any sway in the marketplace. The place where Linux has sway is in places where there are CPU/GPU combinations (embedded systems?).

I see this as AMD trying to compete with Intel; not NVidia. Remember, this is to capture more of the CPU market. Is AMD admitting that it can’t compete with NVidia, or are they considering NVidia as a non-competitor due to it’s lack of a CPU business?

I like movies. Expecially good ones. Rotten tomatoes has just ranked Ratatouille as the best movie of this year so far. Here’s why it’s not.

1. Waaay too much of the “We’re gonna die!!!!!!!! We’re ok now!!!!! We’re gonna die!!!!!” type of excitement. See Finding Nemo for a really good example of this annoyance.

2. Over reactions. A good example of this is when Grandma decided to shoot the rats with a shotgun while indoors. Also, why was everyone sooo mad when they found out that a rat was cooking?
3. Suspention of belief. I’m ok with talking rats. I’m ok with a guy who can serve really well when he’s never done it before. Where I draw the line is controlling a person through pulling their hair.

My pick for the summer is Transformers . Ratatouille just isn’t that good.

The last 2 trips to Burger King have been interesting. The person who takes the order will now say “What size do you want. Large, King Size?”. They conveniently leave out the word Medium from the size choices.

When standing in line and just wanting to get the order done with, someone may think that the choices presented are the only choices available. In fact, it’s hard to see that there even is a medium size by looking at the menu board.

Because of this wordplay scam to take more of my money, I am boycotting BurgerKing for 6 months.