YWAM Information Technology - Operating Systems - Comments

re: 64Studio

neo — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:57:37 +0000

Hi Takabuntu,
I checked out UbuntuStudio when it came out, well, when it was downloadable anyways. But at the end of the day I couldn't really test it because I didn't had a extra computer for a test install and I didn't want to make it dual boot just to see how it looks like. So I made a VM which was of course unusable with the hardware I have. But I really just wanted to see it.
And guess what, I still don't like the Gnome Desktop. But that's another story. However, I liked the overall work they did with that distribution. I just realized that non of my hardware would be capable for sound recording & editing. Besides that fact that if I want to run any of this software I also could install that on my desktop.

If I would have got another laptop than the one I have now I would have had other plans. But I'm happy that God provided for this machine. It might be just not the time to get into more serious audio recording.
The 64Studio is a good find. I came across that as well. However, about the low-latency kernel I must say that this is nothing magic, that one is available for UbuntuStudio as well. Well, actually for every distro. Although it's nice that they have it in there as default. This is how it should be.

So, just for the record I add the link here to 64Studio, in case anyone is interested:
http://64studio.com

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

64Studio

Takabuntu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:28:17 +0000

And it comes with a great variety of graphics tools, just like ubuntu-studio (somehow my previous post got in here twice and I can't delete it...so I edit it short sorry)

Tried it, but switched to 64Studio

Takabuntu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:24:00 +0000

Hi Neo,

I tried ubuntu-studio immediately when it got out. I was already a Kubuntu user at the time and had my system set up for audio processing. It might have been my PC (a PIV-1.8Ghz-750Mb-7200rpm pata), but somehow it responded slow and seemed bloated to me. I was kind of disappointed because Ubuntu is great as a workstation. I also tried Jacklab, but could not get past the installation process. I heard it is a decent 32-bit audio distro too (OpenSuse).

After some research I ran into 64Studio, a 64-bit Debian audio distro, that also had a 32-bit version available. I really started to like Debian, so I gave it a shot and guess what: it worked out-of-the-box, got lower latencies (because of their tweaked low-latency kernel) and the overall response was great. I also tried it on a lower-end machine (PIII-1GHz-256Mb-5400rpm pata) and it also performed very decent and left ubuntu-studio disappearing in the rear mirror. One of the contributors is a developer with Debian, so that must count for something. I now have 64-bit PC and am running the 64-bit version of 64Studio and am having a blast.

Out-of-the-box it comes with Gnome installed. But you might as well use it with KDE, because the case libraries of KDE are already installed. GNOME is a bit lighter on the memory so I like it better, but it is all a matter of taste basically.

doesn't suprise me...

KevinColyer — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:02:43 +0000

Nice to hear you have it working in the wild! No excuses now. Did you find it straight forward to set up?

Doesn't surprise me it is faster than Vista. I did a head to head start from a cold boot on my Ubuntu Dell Latitude 750Mhz, 192 Mb machine against Steve Sullivan's new Toshiba Vista beast. I won it easily and was typing away at least a couple of minutes before his was responsive. Sigh. Progress eh?!

Cheers,

Kevin

PS Guess who forgot his password for his virtual machine and had to wipe it!

Crypto LVM (ubuntu on Dell Inspiron)

pcp1976 — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:04:54 +0000

I've been using a fully encrypted root/swap on an encrypted lvm for ubuntu installed on my inspiron (1.8 celeron). No noticeable hit in speed. Runs much faster than Vista (which came pre installed).

Virtual web development

Dan B — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 07:25:15 +0000

I started using virtual machines back when I converted to Mac. But since I develop web sites (for mainly Windows users) on a Mac, I found that my code (actually, the CSS) was buggy, and lacked cross-browser compatibility.

That's when I realized I couldn't be a die-hard single platform user, when my audience uses varied OS'es... and browsers.

So now I build (design and code) an Mac OS X and test on Win XP and DSL (linux). As long as a can have virtual copies of my least favorite OSes, then I can live and work in a relatively smooth Mac environment, and avoid the worlds of Windows and... (sorry guys) linux. :-]

LVM

KevinColyer — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 10:32:10 +0100

Dear Douglass,

Gutsy implements the encrypted filesystem on top of the LVM, so I guess you could use any filesystem you want. Never tried XFS. I briefly flirted with Reiser 3 but went back to ext3 in the end.

As a speed tip I always at noatime to the options in /etc/fstab as this stops ext3 from making a save for every read (to update the "last accessed time" record). That speeds things up by 10% or so. But to be honest I have never been disappointed with the speed of the filesystems!

It is quite neat to see the encrypted filesystem in action as once you boot you have to enter the passphrase and that is as far as you will get! After that it is business as usual.

I chose the "guided setup with LVM and encryption" for ease from the installer. All seemed to go well except I got dumped at the text prompt when the machine rebooted! I tried startx but nothing happened. That was odd. I did a quick (well slow) sudo apt-get install kubuntu and about 700 packages were selected. I had some trouble remounting the CD ("sudo mount /dev/scd0 /cdrom" or something - Linux uses the SCSI subsytem for all disk drives now from IDE to Flash) but eventually it pulled the packages from the internet and all is tickerty boo now!

It does run like a slug under VirtualBox - but it does run! I it definitely the way to go if you want to run Linux on a laptop. As I doubt the encryption will slow much down on a real box (biggest bottleneck is always the hard disk writing).

Perhaps someone else will want to play with this!

cheers,

Kevin

Re: Virtual Machine

crashsystems — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 16:15:50 +0100

I've been testing Gusty since RC1 came out, and have been quite impressed. During the span of time I've been following Ubuntu releases (almost two years), this has been by far the most innovative. The encrypted hd option on the alternate install cd sounds quite interesting. I wonder why that is not an option on the main cd. Since you are already testing that installer out, does it have options for setting up LVM? I've been thinking about using LVM + the XFS file system on my new laptop I am about to get. I have been using XFS for six months now, and love it.

As far as VMs go, I use VMware very extensively. I used VirtualBox for quite a while, but it is so much easier to set up networking in VMware. Perhaps some day I'll try out KVM.

P.S.
If anyone is having problems downloading 7.10 due to clogged mirrors, check out torrent.ubuntu.com:6969

re: Disadvantages of Linux

neo — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 13:52:39 +0100

Hi Judge,
sorry, didn't had the time right away and then kinda forgot to write that down. Although you should be happy that I was pretty gracious with the Mac disadvantages there is so much more I could've written down.... ;) But now here it comes. All against Linux.

- driver support not always that good or fast, sometimes drivers are never available, e.g. for the wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop
- the touch pad on laptops are a bit imprecise and/or too sensitive. So, a external mouse is pretty much needed which can be a pain on the road. On top of that I could find an option to disable the touch pad.
- many times Linux is that last version that get updated by software vendors and is therefore hanging behind the Windows and/or Mac version. Skype for example is lacking many features even in the latest beta version compared to long available stable versions of Windows. ⁽¹⁾
- some areas of profession are underdeveloped, like video production, although most programs can do more than the average Joe can do, anyways. ⁽¹⁾
- for very few software is no FOSS alternative available. E.g. if you want to develop something with Flash you need to have Windows or OSX. To date I don't know of anything to develop Flash on any *nix. Watching Flash is no problem though. ⁽¹⁾
- Linux is not really a gaming platform. So, a power gamer would most likely not choose Linux. Or he will have 2 computers or dual boot or Wine ⁽¹⁾ will become a good friend of him.
- specially with the actual distro there so much choice, that is just overwhelming for some people. Then there is not only the distro itself but also different desktop environments, most common probably Gnome and KDE.
- Linux needs just as much system resources as a up-to-date Windows, if not a little more. Many times people think they can try out Linux on their old computer but that then is many times a not so fun experience. It's like trying to run Windows Vista with full blown Aero on a old machine. Although, here is an advantage of the choice part mentioned above. There are light weight desktop environments available so that older computers can run a Linux with an up-to-date kernel but with an not so eye-candy and highly customizable desktop.

(1) If there is a desperate need for a specific software or version of software there is a possible solution though. I never tried it myself but I know that there is "Wine" available. No, that's not alcohol in that case. From the developers website: "Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available."
Means, with that it should be possible to run pretty much every software that is available for Windows, including Adobe Flash or Acrobat, Dreamweaver, Games, Quicken, etc. It's kinda a risk of course to buy something and then try it out. So, downloading a trial version is probably a good idea before spending any money.
Wine online:
Official Homepage
Wine at Wikipedia

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

vs. All Three

metamorphousthe — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:07:40 +0100

My wife and I use all three at home. My wife runs a Mac Book OS X with Parallels running XP. I run a Dell Inspiron 6400 Laptop dual boot with XP Pro and Kubuntu.

Without Getting into all the FOSS philosophical issues. I always believe that it leans more towards usability and support.

Usability being: How fast can someone pick up the use and navigation of the desktop to find and run programs. Obviously for a person who has used nothing but Windows, to ask them to now navigate a Linux distro or even a Mac OSX can be daunting if they are not willing to take on the challenge. Some people don't have that kind of patients. The easiest person(s) to take on "any" OS of choice would those willing to take on the challenge or those whom are not ingrained with one type of OS.

Support being: Amount of software available and the support thereof. Whether software at no-charge or even commercially purchased software (which the latter would definitely have the Tech Support end). Drivers for hardware is another issue. It IS true that being M'soft has the majority of the market it will stand to reason that it will have the majority of drivers available for just about any hardware out.

There are many aspects that made M'soft the majority holder of the software market. Without getting into any other issues known or rumored, one of them is that M'soft wanted to make their OS the easiest to use for any consumer. And at that they have.

So, IMHO what are the advantages of any of them:

1. Obviously M'soft would have more. Hook it up, turn it on, and you are ready to go. Let someone sit down and do there stuff. Any *nix distro would mean a little more of being sure that the drivers are available for the peripherals you are using, though most of the forefront popular distros would have plenty unless it is some specialized peripheral. Mac OS X would be right behind M'soft but the majority of the software and is commercially sold which would mean more expense out of your pocket.

2. Obviously any *nix version would have the leverage on software available as just about all the distros come pre-loaded with tons of software. The disadvantage I have always found is this ... if you are trying to draw someone to your distro, don't bog them down with many version of the same thing which can be quite confusing along with the naming of some of the software which can be also confusing.

What would I do if I had the opportunity and time? I would construct a *nix distro with a familiar desktop, obviously mimicking that of M'soft's desktop, design and layout with icons, naming of programs, etc. for all computers on a YWAM campus complete with all the drivers needed for the peripherals used on the campus. Basically making a YWAM Distribution. My reasoning behind this would be the obvious turn-around of staff that a YWAM campus goes through and the need to lessen the amount of training.

Now you might ask why a *nix distro that mimics M'soft and the *nix not having the usual support behind it like M'soft when you can just get the real thing? At that you would typically be correct except for another main issue a ministry like YWAM goes through ... costs of purchasing an OS.

"transformity" not "conformity" then you will understand things as with a new mind

re: Kubuntu

neo — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 14:25:53 +0100

Hi.
So, I just tried it this afternoon.

Enjoy - install it on an old box and you wont look back!

Well, in a sense I only have old boxes. The newest one is "only" 2 years old but at the time I bought it, it was the cheapest/slowest available machine. The only good thing is, I got enough RAM with it. Can you imagine how long it took me earlier this year to look for a decent video card that would actually fit into this computer? It took me forever. Anyways, since I don't have a extra machine for testing I do things like that with VMWare.
So, this afternoon I installed Kubuntu as a virtual machine (VM) and was surprised in many ways.

First of all I was wondering why the heck do they boot up that thing as a LiveCD or did I miss an option? At boot up I selected "Install or Try Kubuntu" and it didn't give more option about what exactly I want, install or try out. So, it booted up as LiveCD with a shortcut on the desktop to install which I did right away. After installing and rebooting I was surprised that it only took 45min. Pretty good for a VM on low-end hardware I guess.

After boot up I needed to manually select the video card but that's not a big deal. I don't know if auto detection works better without VM. Up till now I couldn't figure out how to get any kind of sound out of it. But again, it's a VM. So, I guess that's the difficulty. I would have a hard time to believe that a up-to-date OS can not auto detect a standard on-board sound from a 2 years old computer.
Since this is really just for testing/checking how it looks like it's not a problem at all, so I will not dig deep into this. BTW I have the same problem with the Fedora VM but the Fedora that runs as first boot option (Windows is 2nd ;) ) works just fine.

Something else what kinda surprised me was that there is no Firefox by default. Maybe that's just me but I kinda expected that it comes with Firefox pre-installed. I know it's only a install CD not like Fedora which comes as DVD and therefore comes with more than 4x the size of Kubuntu. Fedora is about 3.2GB to download. Well, anyways this is fixed very quickly. Mac or Windows don't come with Firefox either, so no downside there. Fedora comes with Firefox but as I said it's DVD with more than 3GB.
The next surprise was OpenOffice. First of all not all OpenOffice programs are installed, at least I haven't seen them. Even if I never heard of someone using OO Math, Draw or the Database but it's something I expected to have by default. But actually what I find is really strange are the icons used for OO. Why are these not the original OO icons? At least I'm the kind of person who is looking for the icons when searching for the program I need to use. Very unfortunate.

Something else I actually don't like too much is that there is no root password by default. I might be a bit old fashioned here but I like to have a root user with a password instead of using sudo and then typing in the password I already use for my normal user.
Earlier versions of Kubuntu could be updated with a "real" root user, means assign a password for root, so I assume that it's possible with this new version as well. I just haven't checked for that so far.

APT vs YUM.
I personally like APT better. It's so much faster and the results are better to read. But as I said, that's my personal opinion. There is however one downside compared to YUM. You always search through a local file that contains all information about available packages. That means, if you want to be up-to-date you have to update that file first. YUM is doing that by default but the search takes so much longer. Also depending on what you're searching for it can be a very long list and therefore almost impossible to read. But it gives more description of each package.

So, besides what I said, Kubuntu looks really good. Not that it's so different from other derivates but just keep it like that, I really like Debian's APT. That plus Kubuntu is very easy to use is a very good combination. I don't wanna play geek, I want a OS that is doing what I want. So, Kubuntu and Fedora have a very good hardware recognition, those 2 seem to be the ones for me. So far I have Fedora running on both, Laptop and Desktop. But I might give Kubuntu a go on the Desktop since I need to reinstall that thing anyways. Windows takes so long to boot up that's really a pain.
So, I'll see what I will do but for sure Kubuntu is an option.

Greetings from the MatriX,
neo

Kubuntu

KevinColyer — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:40:30 +0100

Dear Neo,

I upgraded my laptop to Fiesty today - that was pretty painless and I upgraded my server in half an hour too. Just the LTSP server to go. That might happen this weekend - it tends to break a few more things (mostly config files).

To be honest upgrading a distro is incredibly easy - either from the command line or from the GUI's available. I have never experienced anything in Linux as easy as the Ubuntu (and Debian) package management. What I like so much is that setting up a Linux machine is so easy and quick and it comes with a huge software stack. I re-installed an XP machine the other day, setup printers and the like with all the software and settings and... it took a whole afternoon! Linux installation takes 30 mins! I guess Fedora's YUM package management is good too but I have heard it is not quite so slick at the APT system.

Enjoy - install it on an old box and you wont look back!

Kev

Driver support

KevinColyer — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:48:02 +0000

Lack of drivers support is a problem with Linux, even common hardware like Nvidia accelerated 3D cards wont work out of the box, although drivers are available.

Wireless Cards can be very difficult to get to work too, although most Windows drivers can be made to work with Ndiswrapper, but this is not easy.

The reason is not lack of technical competence but ethics! If the manufacturers would open up their hardware very good drivers would get written very quickly. Linux's openness and freedom for the user are not values shared by many vendors (except IBM, Novell, Sun, HP et al!)

It is useful to check BEFORE you buy hardware for Linux.

However, you would be surprised just how much stuff just works out of the box! If you use a good live distribution on a CD you can test a machine before install. Then you will know!

You will have better success rates with older machines in many cases. One disadvantage with installing Windows on older machines is the hunt around the internet for drivers (assuming the network card works!). An advantage of Linux is the way older machines are supported straight away.

Hope this helps!

Kevin

Disadvantages of Linux

alex.costa — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:29:37 +0000

* Softaware instalation & Update (it has gone a long way with Yast2 and Zen Installer, also the famous apt-get for Debian but still there are a lot of library dependency issues and sometimes the best way is still to either compile or comandline RPM). For a normal desktop user it could be a pain.
* Although Linux has one of the best USB support, there are a lot of devices that are not geared towards the linux OS(which is not a Linux problem but affects it's users)

Disadvantages of Linux

conkey — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:27:01 +0000

OK, you mentioned the disadvantages of Windows and OSX, but what about the disadvantages of Linux? Is it so perfect that you couldn't think of any?

The Judge

"Cheap is good; but free is better!"