The ongoing adventures of Jen on Linux

Let’s start with a failure: I haven’t been able to get Warcraft 3 running on her laptop. At first, the problem was that the NTFS partition with the Warcraft directory wasn’t mounted with ntfs-3g, so I corrected that. Then, I forgot to rename the Movies directory (Warcraft 3 movies don’t play in wine), so I fixed that. Then, apparently, there were some sound issues. In any case, as soon as I started the game, X restarted. With some fiddling in winecgf, I managed to start the game in windowed mode, at the speed of, well, whatever’s the opposite of lightning. Even moving the mouse around the menu didn’t work…the cursor remained where it was, then moved a couple of inches, then remined fixed again. A test with Heroes 3 also crashed X.

I have no idea why this is. I can safely rule out any problems with Arch, or wine, since I use the same versions on my PC, which work just fine. The only difference is that my desktop has a nvidia 8600GT videocard, and her laptop has an integrated intel i915 chip.

It’s frustrating, and googling it didn’t yield much result. Maybe the intel drivers simply aren’t good enough, but somehow I don’t think that’s it. Maybe I should look into the wine configuration some more, but I have no idea what to change exactly. Both games run just fine in Windows, so at least the hardware is capable enough.

I hate it when I can’t solve a problem.

San

KDE 4.3: Boom baby!

I’ve blogged about KDE 4 before, gradually noticing the improvement, but ultimately always running back to Openbox for various reasons. These reasons include:

• Stability: My earliest posts complained about issues with the nVidia driver, crashing plasmoids, KDE simply failing to start,  Kwin effects leaving artefacts, and systray icons that look horrible.
• Configuration: It’s a well known fact that, while KDE 3.5 was loved for it’s ability to configure the crap out of it, KDE 4 was somewhat lacking in this regard, especially when it came to the panel. A personal pet-peeve is that KDE 4 left out the ShowDesktop keyboard shortcut, although it supports the function. The only workaround here was to add a plasmoid and assign a shortcut to it, cluttering the panel needlessly.
• Looks: This might seem strange, since I’ve been raving about the way KDE 4 looks since the very beginning.  To clarify, I have no problem whatsoever with Plasma, which looks gorgeous. However, the novelty of the Oxygen window borders quickly wore off, especially when comparing it to Windows 7 or Snow Leopard. Next to those OSes, KDE’s window borders suddenly look dull and drab. The real issue here however, is that there simply weren’t any serious alternatives available.
• Qt applications: Yeah, I’m beating the old horse again. To sum things up: I think the available selection of QT software is limited, and lacking in quality.

But when I tested Chakra Alpha 3, I also ended up with KDE 4.3.2, so why not have a look if things have improved?

Stability has gradually improved to the point where I no longer have any problems at all. KDE boots fast and without issue. Applications don’t crash, except for the printer applet after one update, which was immediately remedied in the next. Kwin effects are fast and leave no artifacts. KDE 4 is stable.

chakra: Alt-Tab KWin effect

Configuration-wise, things have improved too. Config options have treacled back into KDE 4, and while it still might not be up to the standard set by its predecessor, it’s getting there.
There still isn’t a “Hide all Windows and show the Desktop” keyboard shortcut option, but this post should give you an idea how to implement it yourself. It worked for me.
What’s important too, is that the old layout for the System Settings is available too. Personally, I prefer the Icon View, but at least we have the choice now.

Chakra: Tree View in System Settings

When it comes to looks, KDE has improved even further. The old Oxygen Plasma theme looked very good, but the new Air theme tops it in every way. It’s light, fresh, modern, and altogether beautiful. In contrast, it makes the Oxygen window borders look even worse. Luckily, there’s progress in that area too, with the new Aurorae theme engine. To quote: “It was created with the idea of making KWin decorations as themeable as the Plasma desktop shell.” A truly excellent (and needed) idea, and it’s one I really wish the KDE devs had implemented from the start. The selection of window decoration themes is small but growing. One of the best I think is Glowglass.

Chakra: The Glowglass windows decoration theme

Finally, the Qt applications thing…I’m sorry to say that in my opinion it hasn’t improved. In some cases it’s a matter of personal preference, in others the Qt apps simply don’t work as well as their GTK counterparts. To deal with the situation, I used whatever application I thought worked best, and installed QtCurve to make sure things looked decent. In fact, they look more than decent: QtCurve is a beautiful, professional looking theme, and is actually a step up from the default Oxygen theme.
However, while QtCurve can make your applications look good, it can’t make them better. For chat, I still prefer Emesene with it’s clean layout over the cluttered Kmess or Kopete. Both Qt options work very well, I just don’t like the looks of the Contact List or the Chat Window.

Chakra: Emesene

It’s the same with browsers. You can use Konqueror of course, and Chakra also provides Arora as an alternative. I quickly uninstalled it, because if I’ll use a Webkit browser, it’s going to be Chrome. It’s fast, configurable, supports extensions these days, has a lot of available themes (I chose the Porsche one), and is perfectly usable in Linux.

Chakra: Chrome with the Porsche theme

The real sore point in this area is still the music manager. If you want Qt, it’s Amarok, Juk, and maybe Cuberok. That’s it. I still detest Amarok’s playlist based layout, which means that Cuberok is out too (and Exaile and Listen on the GTK side, for that matter). In my mind, music managers have to scan my music collection, play music, and stop bothering me. Amarok doesn’t do that. Besides, upon scanning my collection it stopped at 53% every time. No Amarok for me, and Juk is so old it can’t handle a decent collection without a crash. On the GTK side I still have to try Banshee. I won’t try Rhythmbox because it’s too tied to GNOME. The last time I tried that half of the functions and icons were missing.
In the end, I installed the same music manager I also used in Openbox, which is Goggles MM. It uses the FOX toolkit, which means that QtCurve can’t do anything about the looks, but it does have an Oxygen colour scheme which makes it look a bit better. The next major version will have *gasp* gradients, which should improve things even more.
But here, the looks don’t matter. It has my favourite, Rhythmbox-like layout. It’s lightning fast, scanning my 6000+ music collection in less than 30 seconds. It can edit tags. It has album art. It uses the xine-engine, which means it plays more internetradios than both Rhythmbox and Amarok. Really, the only thing I’m missing is a song queue, but that’s it.

Chakra: Goggles Music Manager

To add insult to injury, I even replaced Konsole with XFCE’s Terminal. It supports transparency just as well, but is much much faster. Konsole booted slow and performed quite badly. Whenever I tried to create a package from the Arch AUR, text scrolled by at a slow, jittering pace. It took me a couple of days to find out that the problem wasn’t Chakra or yaourt, but Konsole itself. Using Terminal immediately solved the problem.

Chakra: XFCE's Terminal

I’ll admit, one of the reasons I wanted to try KDE again is because I was jealous of Jen’s fantastic looking Windows 7 laptop. She had rotating backgrounds of beautiful English landscapes, folders with previews of the pictures inside, nice window effects, a great looking Aero theme, that panel/dock crossover…I wanted that! Well, without installing Windows, obviously. I’d never do that.
In the end, I think I succeeded. Apart from the dock/panel thing I have everything she has, using far less space on my hard drive, with all the benefits of (Arch) Linux included. It’s fast, it’s beautiful, and I like it so much I’m keeping it, even though Dolphin, Krusader and Kaffeine are the only Qt applications I use.

KDE has arrived, baby.

San

Setting up a small file/printserver

Now that Jen has her new laptop, and I have a netbook, I finally came to the conclusion it might be a good idea to put my music collection on a file server. Another good idea would be to make sure that Jen doesn’t have to go to my desk and connect the printer to her laptop every time she wants to print something.

In theory, Arch would be ideal for this. In practice, I was tired, I couldn’t figure out the right Samba settings, and the server had to double as a desktop for my son anyway, so I slapped Ubuntu on it, right-clicked the map I wanted to be shared, made a small (suggested) change to /etc.smb.conf, plugged in the printer, noticed it was shared automatically, and finally made it boot into console by default.

It’s the easy way out of course, but I like easy, and it works.

San

Vista has entered the building

…and I hope it’ll leave as soon as possible. Jen’s new Dell Inspiron came pre-installed with it, and I detest it. Not only does Dell think it’s a good idea a desktop is littered with crap (taskbar, dock, moving pictures, clock, hideous wallpaper…), not only did McAffee demanded to be registered in a way I could only close it via the taskbar, not only did the bloody thing immediately need 27 updates, 3 reboots, and then some more updates, not only does it asks for an approval up to three times for the same task (install Firefox), it actually manages to be much slower than Tinkerbell, the Asus EEE900 I bought recently. Okay, it’s not a top of the line machine, but it has twice the processors and four times the RAM of the netbook, ergo, it should perform faster.

So tomorrow that Vista abomination will be replaced by a Arch + XFCE and Windows 7 dual boot.

San

Why I’m still an amateur

I usually don’t bother with installing a printer. I have one, but I rarely use it. Jen however needed to print something, her Windows Dell is broken (another story), so I installed cups and the HP drivers, and connected the printer. I tried to add it via the webinterface, but it wasn’t found.

I modprobed the right module. Nothing. I rebooted, although I knew it wasn’t necessary. Nothing. I reinstalled the drivers, but of course, nothing happened. I muttered a bit, when Jen passed and asked if I had checked the cables.

“Well, of course I did, I just plugged it in, and at the back of the printer it’s…oh. Thanks. And I’m an idiot.”

Printer was up and running a minute later…

San

The slow route to Linux

I blogged before about putting Linux on Jen’s laptop. After wring that post, I found that the new KDE (4.1 at the time, I think), didn’t really work out, so I simply slapped Ubuntu on there and asked her not to ignore the updates. That’s pretty much all I did, because she’s sick and tired of hearing me claim that Linux is far superior to any other OS

In any case, she didn’t use it much, and kept booting into Windows by default. Fine by me, but every time she had a problem (wireless simply doesn’t work, SN connection problems, weird Firefox scrolling behaviour), I asked “well, does it work in Linux?”, because if it did, that would be my solution.

Then a couple of things happened. First, she wanted to edit some photographs, didn’t find a good application on her Windows partition for that, booted into Linux, found the Gimp, and liked it. Secondly, she bought a camera and didn’t liike the software that came with it. I installed Kino for her, and although converting movies into MPEG doesn’t always work the first time, it does get the job done eventually. With Emesene being an acceptable replacement for Messenger (apart from the games) she doesn’t have much reason anymore to boot into Windows.

However, her using a video editor meant that the 5GB partition I had put Ubuntu on wasn’t big enough anymore. I borrowed her laptop for a couple of hours, made the partition 10 GB, and installed Arch on it. I chose Arch instead of Ubuntu mainly because I wanted more recent software on it, like Firefox 3.5.

I wanted to keep the system lightweight, so I tried LXDE first, but that turned out to be a bit too sparse. XFCE turned out to be the better choice. I installed the Buuf icons because she liked them on my netbook, chose a purple theme she liked (which I think clashes horribly with the icons, but who am I ), made the Volume up, Volume down and Sleep buttons work, and gave it back.

She’s been booting into Linux by default now, because at the moment it’s that or a crippled Windows. The best thing about it is that I haven’t forced her to pick Arch. She made the choice herself.

The best thing for me is that I have to do the support of her laptop anyway, and I’m much better at it in Linux. Everybody happy.

San

Wine, OpenGL direct rendering, and compositing

I mentioned problems running Warcraft 3 under wine yesterday, but I was convinced that it should be possible.

Of course, I couldn’t just let things go.

After some browsing around, and googling, and generally driving Jen nuts, I became convinced the problem was connected to direct rendering. I had done “glxinfo | grep render” before, but glanced over the result after I saw “direct rendering: yes”.
This time however: I noticed this: “OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer “. No wonder everything was so slow: hardware rendering was turned off.

As usual, once you find the problem, the solution is found immediately afterwards. This forum post took care of the slowness, but warcraft kept crashing X when it was not run in windowed mode. It only happened in KDE though, not in Openbox (which I installed specifically to test these kind of issues). The solution was easy: I simply turned off compositing in KDE. After that, the game ran flawlessly.

I also checked if it was possible to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3 in wine (it was), and then I added some launchers to her desktop, which now looks like this:

Jen's pretty KDE desktop

I haven’t changed the default plasma theme, or the default looks in general, because quite frankly, she wouldn’t even notice. The launchers are little plasmoids, and I’m actually rather proud of the first one because it points to a very simple script that changed the directory to the one where the Heroes executable is stored, otherwise it complained about missing files.

And I added the moon phase plasmoid, because she’s a woman. Moon phases are special to them.

San

Installing Linux on my girfriend’s laptop: an overview

Jen’s off to see Shopaholic with her sisters, and left me alone with her laptop. Moo hoo ha ha.

I now have a couple of hours to free some room on her hard disk for a Linux partition, and install Arch on it. At this time, I’m still not decided if I’ll put KDE or GNOME on it. We’ll see. My plan  is to keep updating this post while I’m working, so if you’re reading this, don’t forget to come back later to read about Jen’s reaction when she finds out I changed her life with open source/corrupted all her data beyond repair because I did something stupid/made the laptop explode and took the whole of Belgium with it. We’ll see.

• First of all I have to create a new partition. She hasn’t much room left on this hard drive, so 5GB will have to do. There are two NTFS partitions on the HD, I’ll have to shrink the second. I’m a little bit worried because trying a disk defragment threw an error (stupid XP), and no fixes I found on the net actually fixed the problem.
  I could use the Arch LiveCD to re-partition the drive, but I find gparted is simply easier, so I’ll use a Linux Mint 6.0 LiveCd for this.
• I hate Vista. I’m typing this from the laptop of Jen’s sister (Jen’s laptop is reformatting the HD and I don’t want to much strain on it), and just opening the Network Center took a whole minute. Then, I typed an entire paragraph down, clicked “Update post”, only to find out nothing happened and everything I wrote is lost. At first glance, seems like a Flash problem in Firefox…everytime I use Vista I find more reasons not to. The whole thing is slow as molasses.
  Anyway, I went about reformatting Jen’s HD as safely as I could: After Linux Mint had booted up, I moved/resized both partitions, created two new ones, completely ignored the safety-warning yelling at me I should do a backup, and hit Enter. Fingers crossed.
• Apparently, the move/resize of the second partition will take another two hours. Ah well, I have time, and my boy is watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I think I’ll join him.
• Partitioning has finished. I booted up Windows to look around, and it looks like nothing went wrong. In the meantime, internet connection went down, so I checked the modem. Instead of one modem, I found four devices, all with lights flickering in every colour imaginable. Me being the genius that I am, I switched them all off and then turned them back on. To my horror, the laptops couldn’t even connect to the wireless network after that. With visions of parents in law burning me at the stake, I checked everything again. Seems like a network cable had come loose, I plugged it back in. Nothing happened. I saw another loose network cable and plugged that one in. Nothing happened. I really started panicking at that time. Finally, I worked out that both cables were in fact the ends of the same cable, and plugged one in the switch, the other in the access point. After that, the internet was back, and the pizza my mother in law had bought for me was burned to a crisp. I suck.
• Arch is installing now. I hope the wireless connection doesn’t give me too much trouble.
• Arch is installed, configured and updated. Configuring wireless was no trouble at all, using the excellent Beginner’s Guide at the Archlinux Wiki. However, xorg.conf has me stumped at the moment. There’s an intel driver in that laptop somewhere, which means I can’t use nvidia-xconfig like I always do on my PC, which means that so far X refuses to boot. I’m trying now to copy and use the xorg.conf of the Mint LiveCD.
• That didn’t work. Neither did using the xorg.conf of the PCLinuxOS LiveCD (but it did point me in the direction of the right touchpad driver). In the end, I noticed X started if I ran xorgcgf as root, so last night I let the laptop download and install kdemod-complete. That works, and looks great.
  Things still to do: Install some kind of Qt networkmanager (I’d really like to try out the plasmoid), make the fonts somewhat less blurry, and installing/configuring some software.
• The kNetworkmanager plasmoid is in testing, but I don’t want to enable that repository, so in the end I decided to install wicd, and gtk-qt-engine to make it look good. Works like a charm. Fonts are being worked on now.
• Fonts are okay, I installed the “-lcd” packages. I tweaked the gtk looks, by installing the oxygen icons and a ported oxygen theme, which improved the Firefox scrollbars.

I could go on and on like this, because there’s still some tweaking and configuring to be done, but the main things are installed and are working just fine. She already used it a couple of times, telling me she didn’t notice the difference with Windows.

I guess that’s a good thing

San

Linux for a new user: Gnome or KDE?

So now that I have decided I’ll install Arch on Jen’s laptop, what DE should I install with it? I know I said I wanted to use KDE 4.2.1 (and I still do), but I’ve been thinking. Unfortunately. There’s a lot to be said for both of them.

Why KDE?

One of the main selling points of the KDE4 release is, undoubtedly, looks. Microsoft and Apple are really sexy-fying their OS, and KDE4 now looks just as good. Just look at these screenshots.

This is how the latest build of Windows 7 looks out of the box:

Windows 7 Beta: Default look

Now, you may argue about the quality of the OS, or non-free software, and I’d agree, but damn if that doesn’t look great.

Let’s have a look at the latest OS X (Leopard):

Mac OS X Leopard: Default look

That’s polished, shiny, and professional. I don’t think Macs offer enough value for money, but Apple knows what’s beautiful and what’s not.

So how does KDE 4.2.1 measure up?

KDE 4.2: Default look

Very well, actually. You get the same sense of polished sleekness when you compare KDE to OS X and Windows 7.

By contrast, this is what the latest GNOME (2.26) looks like:

Gnome 2.26: Default look

That doesn’t look good! And yes, I know that look is easily changed. I know that, because everybody does it. That screenshot of a default GNOME screenshot comes straight from the official homepage, because it’s the only one I could find. No-one in their right mind leaves their GNOME looking like that. I suggest having a look around the various screenshot threads in the distribution forums…there are beautiful GNOME screenshots everywhere. It’s easy to change the theme and the icons, but out of the box, it’s fugly.
Why is that important? Because alternative themes and icons are more often than not done by amateurs. Which means they can be incomplete, or have flaws where text is unreadable in certain cases, or not maintained anymore. I know, I’ve been there…I’ve changed many icon names or symlinks or .gtkrc files so that icons would show up properly. You can’t expect that from the average user.

KDE has other advantages too, not in the least that it’s more actively developed. Yes, KDE 4.0 broke almost everything, but every release since has been more stable, faster, and generally better. The GNOME devs on the other hand seem quite content with just polishing their DE a bit every six months. The biggest item in the GNOME 2.26 changelog is that Brasero is now included by default. Six months ago, the hot topic was the new tabs in Nautilus. The overal impression is that GNOME is lagging behind KDE, and that the gap is widening.

Why GNOME?

Ironically, GNOME’s biggest drawback is also it’s biggest strength. GNOME is a finished product. It works, it’s stable, and it holds no surprises. No matter how much KDE is improving, it’s stability is not quite at GNOME levels, nor is it as bugfree. Considering how young KDE4 is, it’s only normal that this is the case, but that doesn’t make it less true.

Another point in GNOME’s favour are the applications. There are tons of GTK-apps out there, with multiple choices for every possible purpose. Don’t like Rhythmbox? Try Banshee, or Exaile, or gmusicbrowser, or QuodLibet, or Consonance, or one of the many, many mpd clients. Nautilus does nothing for you? Thunar or PCmanFM or even emelfm2 can help you out. The list goes on and on and on.

And Firefox uses GTK, which is a huge point in GNOME’s favour. There has been talk of a Qt version of Firefox in August last year, but it has been dead quiet since.

Application support in KDE on the other hand is a bit spotty. When KDE switched to Qt4, all the third party developers of KDE software had to follow, and many of those still aren’t finished.  To name a few: Amarok and Ktorrent were rather fast, but have to keep updating to get the functionality at the same level as the previous versions, and to squash bugs; digiKam 10.0 has only just been released, Kaffeine is still in svn and taking longer than expected, and does anybody know what the hell is happening with k3B? The last entry on the website mentions a KDE4 port, but it’s dated May 2008. Of course it’s lead developer is very busy with Nepomuk, but considering k3b wasn’t just the best burning software in KDE, but the best in Linux period, this is a rather big gap in KDE’s application list.

In the end, it’s easy to have a desktop environment with just GNOME/GTK applications, but at the moment, it’s a bit of a pain to do the same with KDE/Qt. Worst scenario: you end up with a mixed GTK/Qt3/Qt4 desktop, which looks absolutely horrible.

Conclusion

I honestly have no idea. I find myself going back and forth on this one. The safe and easy choice would be GNOME, the pretty and challenging one would be KDE.

I think I’ll just take the challenge, and see if things work out. In five minutes, I’ll probably think something else.

San

Linux for a new user: what distribution?

Jen has given me her permission to install Linux on her laptop, on the condition that she doesn’t actually has to use it.

Fine by me!

I’m thinking of creating an extra partition on her hard disk for that purpose. 10 GB should be more than enough, and afterwards I can install all the apps she needs and configure things to her liking (even if she doesn’t want to use it ).

At first, I meant to install the latest release of PCLinuxOS, but after testing it myself, I changed my mind. I’d like to give her KDE 4.2 (4.2.1 with Qt 4.5, if possible), which limits my options. Ubuntu is out for obvious reasons, and I haven’t used Kubuntu in ages. Same for Mandriva. Besides, those two only offer KDE 4.2.1 and Qt 4.5 in their alpha releases/release candidates, and I’m not installing beta software on somebody else’s computer. Well, not anymore.

So it seems like I need something with a rolling rolease model, which would provide me with the latest software (after a reasonable testing period). That sounds like Arch.

I also want a distribution where it’s easy to compile software, especially since we like to play Warcraft 3, which needs a patched version of wine to be able to host games and connect to the net. That too, sounds like Arch. I had to patch wine myself a week ago, and it was just a case of opening the PKGbuild, add a patch line, and type makepkg.

And I want a distribution I’m familiar with myself. If there are problems popping up, I want them fixed fast and easy.

Hmh.

Arch it is.

San