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[SCD]

For what it's worth, I'm not really that linux-savvy, yet all of my problems really do get sorted out by google such as "how do I get that webcam working". 

[Thad]

Lifehacker today provided a link to Getting Started With Ubuntu.  Might check this out when I get home.  Also, the Live CD stuff, is it possible to just set it up to work Ubuntu or whatever off of a flash drive?

Don't know if I'd run full-on Ubuntu from a flash drive, but there are distros designed for them.

[Bal]

Yeah, there's a tool in the download to make a bootable thumb drive. In this case it isn't so much booting Live CD style as it is booting from a removable hard drive.

[Thad]

Updates:

ATI drivers still suck.  KDE's plenty zippy if I don't turn on compositing (in fact I think it's faster than the previous version)

KDE is no longer zippy.  I think I'm going to have to disable the fucking indexing service because it is eating my entire fucking dual-dual-core Xeon.

And they've taken the blue lines off the titlebars of active windows, so now active windows have gray titlebars again, which is stupid.

Turns out there's an easy fix in the system settings, which looks much less half-assed than the blue bars.  So that's cool.

[Thad]

KDE4 has not ceased to piss me off, so I'm trying GNOME again.  So far I like it!  I hate the color scheme out of the box, and there are a couple weird little interface things I don't like about it, but up to this point it's actually a lot faster than KDE and -- and THIS is where it gets weird -- much easier to customize.

Not 100% I'll stick with it, but at this point I think it's fair for me to recommend regular Ubuntu to newbies over Kubuntu.


EDIT: The first truly, unbelievably asinine thing I have run across in GNOME is that you can't map Ctrl-Tab in gnome-terminal.

Fortunately, there's no shortage of terminal programs in X, but it's still really frigging stupid.

EDIT 2: You can't even SET keybindings in gedit.  The default text editor.

Also, GNOME's "Are you you sure you want to overwrite this file?" is FAR less useful than KDE's.  KDE's gives you the datestamps of both files, and the option to rename the new file, not just replace/skip.

I'm starting to think that GNOME is a better desktop but KDE has a better suite of programs.

EDIT 3: GNOME's default not-quite-like-a-Mac top panel is a waste of space, especially on a widescreen monitor.  You've got three menus on the left, then quicklaunch, then a shit-ton of empty space, and then the system tray on the right.  (Suppose it's nitpicking a bit, but if you minimize a program to the system tray, you shouldn't show a DOWNWARD animation if the system tray is at the TOP of the screen.)

It's similar to how Apple puts the menu and tray at the top and the dock at the bottom, but the key difference is that, while the various MacOS's put the program's menu bar on the same line as the Apple menu and the tray, GNOME doesn't by default.  So you get a top panel with a bunch of negative space AND each program gets a menubar with a bunch of negative space.  (You can set the panel to autohide, but, while this is fine with the bottom panel, it's a pain in the ass with the top one as you'll unhide it every time you try to click the minimize/maximize/close buttons.)

There are themes you can get to make it behave more like OSX (or Windows), but I don't much want to look through that crap right now, and anyway I'm just talking about something that I think is poorly-designed in the default config.

(I'm also not sure how well the themes work across different toolkits -- a theme that puts a GTK+ program's menubar across the top of the screen might not work for a Qt program or an XUL one.)

[Thad]

Pretty confident at this point that my slowness issues are a result of shitty ATI drivers.

So, general reminder: do not use Linux with an ATI card.

And a specific warning: do not use Ubuntu Lucid with an ATI card.  At least in the previous versions you can get good performance with all the OpenGL shit turned off; in Lucid you can't even get that.

[Brentai]

This week in the news:

Massive security flaws found in Windows.

Massive security flaws found in Flash.

Massive security flaws found in Safari.

Massive security flaws found in iPad.

Google changes its homepage.

[blah]

Since I have limited knowledge running linux, all I can add here is that I run windows 7 64 bit simply because it works really well with 3D art programs like MAYA and Mudbox. Other than that I frankly have no real opinion when it comes to windows in general. It works so long as you install decent security..and update every other day when someone finds a security flaw. Thankfully Mozilla updates Firefox enough to cover internet usage.

[JDigital]

WGA is saying Microsoft has blocked my Windows key after it's worked fine for six months. How do I tell if I've been supplied with a dodgy CD key, or WGA is just flipping out?

[Thad]

...so GNOME started exhibiting a weird bug whereby some of my Firefox windows wouldn't refresh.  Like, I'd open the program and get a set of tabs with "(Untitled)" at the top and it would just stay like that.  It was working on the backend, because if I hit Ctrl-Tab the title of the window would change, but nothing below the titlebar would update.  Closing out the window and then reopening it from the History menu didn't fix it, and quitting out of Firefox and restarting it didn't work consistently.  So, back to KDE for now.

Memory leak persists.  I've seen some threads suggesting that I switch over from the proprietary ATI drivers to the open-source ones; it doesn't seem to help everybody and I don't fucking have time for that right now because I have a website to finish.  (Frankly I'd like to wipe the hard drive and start clean -- I'm sure there's plenty of crap I've accrued in the 4 major OS upgrades since I first installed it -- but I REALLY don't have time for that.)  So for now, I guess I'm just gonna party like it's 1999 and restart my window station once a day.

[Angryoptimist]

Haven't come across it myself.  It's just with Gnome + Firefox?  Well, that's pretty weird, but Firefox does have it's problems.  If Vimperator had a standalone like Conkeror, or was properly cloned to something else, I'd be gone.

And that's an fglrx memory leak?  I'd heard about one of those.  I'm currently using Mesa ~7.8 and 6.13 free radeon driver, with the 2.6.34 kernel.  Was getting a bit frustrated with fglrx and its shitty 2D performance, quirks, and inability to play large-frame videos without a whole mess of tearing.  Much happier with my current setup, though as soon as the code for the whole 'we don't need AVIVO, we'll just accelerate/decode video with shaders and Gallium!' code actually gets written, I'll be all set (it is better as it is, though).  Maybe you don't want to run bleeding edge code, though.  When I was running Lucid (got fed up with Sid, went to Ubuntu; got even more fed up with Ubuntu went back to Sid--and everything was fixed, go figure), I had stability problems every now and then--don't know if that's the case now.  No such problems under Sid.

You might not have heard this:  supposedly, 10.6 has new-ish, faster 2D code enabled by default.  Don't know if they've fixed the memory leak.

Am I the only one who finds a bit galling that Nvidia, the only major GPU company that has thrown nothing to the free software community, has the best video experience under Linux right now?  Supposedly, Intel's got nice/nice-ish free drivers, but nobody's got anything (complete) like Nvidia's VDPAU.

[Thad]

Haven't come across it myself.  It's just with Gnome + Firefox?

Hasn't happened since my latest round of GNOME updates; hopefully it's fixed.

And that's an fglrx memory leak?  I'd heard about one of those.  I'm currently using Mesa ~7.8 and 6.13 free radeon driver, with the 2.6.34 kernel.

Switched to mesa/radeon.  Took all day to get my computer to work properly again, am not sure how the fuck I finally got it working and am not sure if it will still work after next reboot.  (Note to self: last thing I changed was to add nomodeset to my boot options.)  Haven't noticed a memory leak yet but compiz is balls-slow and I get vertical tearing when I play World of Goo.  Will reread this post any time I consider buying another ATI card.

[Thad]

Update: still getting a bit of vertical tearing, but after the latest update compiz is quite zippy.  It is no longer painful to alt-tab between programs!

Update to update: until I run it for a few hours.  Ugh.  Doesn't look like a memory leak this time, but it definitely slowed down after it had been open awhile.

[Brentai]

Pretty confident at this point that my slowness issues are a result of shitty ATI drivers.

So, general reminder: do not use Linux with an ATI card.

And a specific warning: do not use Ubuntu Lucid with an ATI card.  At least in the previous versions you can get good performance with all the OpenGL shit turned off; in Lucid you can't even get that.

Oddly enough: I inherited a medium-high end server-workstation from my old lead along with the task of setting it up as department-use SVN/Virtual Machine/Test Automation server.  He had only had it for a few weeks before he scrammed and only got as far as fucking the Apache install up beyond repair, so I decided to clean out and start over despite, you know, not being a Linux guy at all.

Damn thing came installed with a Radeon FireGL in it - why he went in for a Radeon card in a server is beyond me, I remember him asking me about it at some point and I joked about playing Crysis on it, which I hope he didn't take seriously - and a distribution of Red Hat.  Red Hat of course couldn't so much as load the graphical installer without putting the monitor irrecoverably into sleep mode, and after doing it in text mode the thing didn't get any better no matter how many drivers I threw at it.  I need to at least run XOrg to do my job, so after marveling at the fact that Dell had supplied us with an operating system which was completely incompatible with the machine they sold us, I took the old boss's last suggestion and burned up a disc of Lucid Lynx.

Let's be honest here: I am a fucking caveman when it comes to system administration, and ULL's so easy a me could do it.  I took the barebones Server version that supplies you with bash, a LAMP stack, and little else, and in two days I'm already mostly done building two of the thing's three major functions (Virtualization is probably going to take me a biiiit longer to puzzle out).  Apparently John had the Desktop version on there, which instantly turned it into Free Software For Your Mother.  I have to admit the whole experience has been vastly different from the usual sort of intentional unhelpfulness I've come to expect from the Linux crowd.  It's almost been... *hgk*... pleasant.  Now if only it actually could run Crysis.

Oh yeah and I guess the main point I was trying to make is that 10.04 definitely has no problems with newer FireGL cards at least.  Go upgrade.  Go upgrade again?

[Thad]

JE-SUS CHRIST.

So okay.  compiz performance got to be unbearable.  I did some research and found that in fact it's probably that nomodeset that's causing that.  You know, the nomodeset I need to enter in order to get a picture.

This appears to be a known issue with 2.6.32.  So, I try rolling back to 2.6.31.  That fails to load the radeon driver outright.

So, I try rolling back to 2.6.28.  That loads the radeon driver fine, but for some reason when I start X it doesn't take input from my keyboard or mouse.  Don't know why, as it ID's them just fine according to the log.

So, fuck it, I'm back to nomodeset, and I've disabled compiz so I can run my computer at a usable speed.  And back to KDE for now.  What does KDE have to do with it?  Well, I don't like GNOME's default alt-tab behavior, because it won't let you tab to windows on other workspaces.  You need to have compiz enabled to do that.  (Also: I like that KDE's non-compiz alt-tab gives a full list of window names.  Window previews may be a great idea IN THEORY, but when I have 14 browser windows open that all pretty much look like fucking black text on a white background when they're thumbnailed, THAT IS NOT HELPFUL.)

[Thad]

New Ubuntu RC is out!

The open-source radeon driver still doesn't work properly (have to use nomodeset to boot).  I've read that fglrx has finally been fixed, but at this point my shit's working well enough that I don't want to fuck with it.

New version of KDE 4.x is like every other new version of KDE 4.x: tweaking the fucking icons and not actually doing anything about usability.  My Quicklaunch still doesn't have an icon for Firefox, because it broke the LAST time I upgraded and you can't just fucking right-click on a program in your Quciklaunch (or on your launcher menu) and assign an icon to it.

On the plus side, one of the interface tweaks appears to have gotten rid of that stupid fucking black background that the last version put behind half (and only half) of my taskbar.  So, you know, one of their unnecessary graphical tweaks at least fixed one of the unnecessary graphical tweaks from LAST version.

At any rate, KDE's perfectly usable at this point, so I'm not really ready to fuck around with GNOME again, especially if I need to switch drivers again and turn on compositing to get it to work the way I want it to.  But I'd still recommend it over KDE for most users.

(Interestingly, I got the same Firefox-won't-refresh-a-new-window bug under Win7 at work the other day.  It's only happened once, whereas it happened enough times under GNOME to make me switch back to KDE, but it's interesting to see that the bug is cross-platform and not solely based on the rendering toolkit.)

EDIT: Kubuntu's also got a new default browser, rekonq.  It's fast, it's compact, it supports adblocking and text-only zoom, and it crashes every 3 fucking seconds.  Oh well, maybe next time!

[Thad]

Latest batch of updates (which I assume were from RC to final) hosed my system.  Somewhere in the middle (I queued them up and then went to work) my FS got set to RO for some damn reason.  I rebooted and had no keyboard or mouse support (similar to what happened when I tried to boot 10.04 with a kernel from 9.10).  It hung when I tried to boot to a recovery console, too; something about Plymouth.  Dunno, don't have time to look into it right now.

The nice thing about running 3 different OS's is it takes something pretty special to hose all 3 of them.  So, OSX for the time being.

[Thad]

Booted to LiveCD.  Narrowed the culprit down to openoffice.org-common.  Which appears to be seriously broken.

Problem: I attempt to reinstall it, it somehow turns my FS read-only and fails.

I attempt to remove it, it somehow turns my FS read-only and fails.

I attempt to hold it, upgrade ignores my hold and tries to reinstall it.

Good times.

[Thad]

The plymouth thing was the OS hanging because it couldn't mount network shares.  From the CD boot, I edited fstab and commented those lines out.  (Now I've added "nobootwait" to them; hopefully that achieves the same effect while still letting them mount during a normal boot.)

Not sure why aptitude behaved itself when I rebooted into recovery mode but it did.  Back up and running now, but OpenOffice is still hosed.  Push come to shove I think koffice will read all my ODF docs, but I would very much still like to get my shit fixed all the way.

[sei]

The Linux Experience™: 2011 Edition

Install VirtualBox.
Install Ubuntu 10.10 as Guest.
Marvel at how clean and usable it looks.
Enjoy this new Synaptics package manager thing, which is pretty awesome compared to what one had to put up with ten years ago.
Discover that Ubuntu-Tweak isn't quite TweakUI or Freshmeat.net.
Discover that users can't use Docky/AWN or even change the fucking Visual Effects level because of regression errors in compiz and/or libdecoration0.
Spend hours going through the top solutions on Google to no avail.
Give Linux a couple more years to mature.

Maybe things haven't changed so much after all.

See you in 2021!