Category: Operating Systems

Operating systems are a hobby of mine. Not writing them mind you though I’d like to give it a shot one day. No, I just like trying out every available OS there is.

Reddit’s Interview with Richard Stallman

Recently, Reddit users were given the opportunity to ask RMS (Richard M. Stallman) questions. The top 25 were answered by RMS here.

For anyone who doesn’t know who RMS is, he is the founder of the GNU project. He wrote Emacs and the GCC compiler. Much of what makes up a “GNU/Linux” (don’t ever let him hear you call it “Linux”), is the GNU tools. Linux itself is just the operating system kernel. Although the OS kernel is a very important part of the OS, a base GNU/Linux system has a ton of software from the GNU project as well. The OS doesn’t work without the kernel, and it doesn’t do much without the GNU tools.

RMS answered most of the questions as I would expect. The one question that stood out to me, although I haven’t made it through the entire list yet, is number 7. The question relates to how the open source world can’t create tax software and games that can compete with proprietary software. It’s a very good question. RMS mentions that the Free Software Foundation in Latin America does have free tax software. He also says

I don’t know whether our community will make a “high end video game”
which is free software, but I am sure that if you try, you can stretch
your taste for games so that you will enjoy the free games that we
have developed, or you can try Roulette Games.

Now, this is the part that really made me think. I’ve always been an advocate of free software, but do I really want to rely on free software to produce video games that compete with some of the games I play on PS3? I truly wish that they could make them, because I’d love it, but I don’t see it happening. Another major point to that comment is that games have always been the driving force in computer hardware improvements. The computer systems we have right now are only this good because of games.

That may be hard to believe, but for anyone that’s been playing PC games for decades, it’s common sense. Video games are it. That’s what all of this technology was built on. You were either playing games or writing them. Sure, computers have many other useful features, but games are responsible for these beautiful user interfaces and awesome sound.

Games kept getting better. Hardware kept getting better. A huge majority of the research and design came from game sales. All of that wouldn’t have happened without proprietary games.

RMS knows that, but RMS isn’t worried about games at all. RMS is worried about software freedom and he has many good points. Those same points could be applied to many industries. To me is seems like the old communism vs. capitalism debate. Extremes on both sides suck. It’s the happy medium we should strive for.

LXDE – The Light-weight Linux Desktop Environment

I was reading a post over at the Linux Mint Blog and found that I’m a bit behind on my Linux news. I’ve never heard of LXDE. Now my desktop environment of choice is Gnome, usually. I also like XFCE, but Gnome has all the features and rarely lets me down. I like the variety in Linux so I was glad to see yet another desktop environment.

LXDE seems to be geared toward netbooks and other cloud-client computers. Linux has many light-weight desktop environments, and even though I like variety, sometimes I wish that they would all come together and work together.

This leads me to a pitfall of open source. It’s also an advantage. Those are complete contradictions, but there’s really no other way to explain it. I lean more toward the advantage side of things but sometimes I wonder if the different projects could be merged as much as they are split.

It seems that it’s perfectly logical for developers to split from a project and create a fork, but rarely do two projects merge to form a super project. Perhaps open source in general needs more merging to balance out the massive amounts of forks….just a thought.

What’s Killing Linux and Software Freedom?

I know many will say “we knew that already” when they read what I’m about to write, but I just came to this realization today. I was reading a blog title “I miss using Linux“. The author was describing some of the reasons he can’t avoid using Windows. That blog is a continuation and actually comprises of my interpretations and expostulation on the previous blog on data synthesis.

There are many good reasons like the ones he offers. Some people want to game, but game companies just don’t make games for Linux because it isn’t popular enough. Others need certain programs that are only available for Windows. Whatever the reasons, it’s not going to be the “year of the Linux Desktop” any time soon, but those people have another option and are Nevada Online Casinos games .

One part that really stood out to me about the post was the reiteration that Photoshop was a main reason for not using Windows. I would actually go so far as to say that the entire creative suite is a major reason more people don’t switch to Linux completely.

Sure, one could possibly run it in a VM but that’s not a good solution. If you need a VM of Windows, why not just run Windows, right? That’s the correct reasoning if you ask me, and I’m a Linux advocate. The problem could be that more people are procrastinating truthfully. They simply don’t want to switch completely or don’t feel comfortable enough in Linux to use it full time. I don’t think this is the prime reason, but for some it could be a factor.

Adobe is the problem, at least in my mind. Adobe is the last non-open company. Microsoft office uses an open document format finally. There is a lot of compatibility with Open Office. Most other programs have decent open source alternatives. Even Photoshop has a decent open source alternative in the Gimp, but some people don’t think it is enough. Adobe has a lock on a lot of the media on the web right now with Flash, even though there are better alternatives to using Flash, most sites use it.

Adobe is holding back Linux. Rather, our dependency on Adobe products is holding back Linux tremendously. There would be a lot more people to adopt Linux if the Creative Suite was available in it. There would be a lot of people adopt Linux is Flash was no longer the defacto standard for media on the web.

Apple has the right idea by not including Flash support on the iPhone. This will help push us away from the closed-standard. I’m for this change.

Driver Scanning Scammers

I was trying to locate a simple audio driver for a Windows XP VM I have. Basically, I’m in Linux and I want to watch Netflix but my main VM is having trouble with SilverLight for some strange reason, and rather than deal with that, I decided to use a spare VM. The movies play but I don’t have sound in that VM. I realized that the VM was an N-Lite created image, which means that most of the drivers were stripped out of it. So I decided to find the driver and install it.

This is when I started getting furious. The problem is, when you search Google for driver downloads, you will undoubtedly run into nothing but scams. This is the same for Bing and Yahoo. The entire first page of just about any driver download search will have nothing but scams. By scams I mean people trying to get you to download software that costs money, just so you can download and install FREE drivers for you hardware that you’ve already bought.

So, looking through these scams I realized that there are at least three different pieces of software everyone is trying to sell. The first one I ran into was Driver Detective. This seemed to be the most spammed software out there. Tons of fake sites with fake “Thanks” comments on them, but no true download for your driver, blanket the first page of search results. These sites don’t actually have the driver, only a download link for the DriverDetective software. Whether or not the driver detective software works isn’t even the questions. The tactics used to sell this software make it nearly impossible for even a very computer-literate person to find the driver they need.

It’s days like this that make me appreciate some of the OEMs like Dell, which make it very easy for customers to find drivers. Undoubtedly the adsense to the right of this post will have links to driver software, but that is expected, those are ads. They clearly say so. They are required to disclose what they are selling.

If you run into this problem, here’s probably the easiest way to find the correct driver for your system. Open up device manager. This is usually accomplished through the Windows Control Panel. Once there, find the problem device, with the exclamation point beside it, and right click on it. Choose “Properties”. Go to the details and look for the VEN and DEV ids. These should each be four characters long. Pull up http://pcidatabase.com on your browser. Search for those ids. You should get the manufacturer and device from that. This will at least help narrow down what driver you need. Get the drivers from the manufacturers website. Don’t even bother Googling it.

Is Debian Still Relevant

I’ve been dual booting or running Linux full time now since around 1996. During the first few years, I used mostly Red Hat based distributions. I used Mandrake/Mandriva, SuSE, Red Hat, and Fedora to name a few. When I switched over to Debian, my eyes were truly open to what a distribution could be. I’m not even sure what made me switch to Debian. If I had to guess, it was during my distro whoring days when I just switched distros at random, trying each one out for at least a few days.

Needless to say, Debian-based distros have been my staple ever since. I’ve tried others. I’m a big fan of ArchLinux, for example, but I’ve always had a Debian-based distro running on a machine somewhere.

A few years ago I started using Ubuntu, which is probably the most widely used distribution of Linux there is. Ubuntu uses as its base Debian testing/unstable, and build upon it, creating a great user experience.

Ubuntu has become so popular that there are now many distributions of Linux based on Ubuntu. That makes Debian the grandfather distribution of all of these. Probably may favorite Ubuntu-based distro is Mint. It adds to the base Ubuntu system and promises a better out-of-the-box media experience, along with a better theme. Ubuntu needs better designers in my opinion.

With all of these Debian-based distros and distributions based on Debian-based distros, is there still a need for Debian itself?

Here recently, I decided to replace my Mint installation with the newest Ubuntu release (10.4). I should mention that I’m installing the 64-bit version of all OSs mentioned. This is so I can take advantage of the RAM I have installed on my main system. I should also mention that there is an issue with my nVidia card and the “nv” generic open source nVidia driver. This error causes many problems when I try to install most distros. The problem occurs when the distro recognizes my nVidia card and uses the nv driver. This usually causes the system to not boot. I was able to get around this by using the Ubuntu alternative install CD and using the curses-based installer. This installer is more like the default Debian installer and doesn’t require X. I’m probably one of the few people who like this type of installer over the Live-CD installers. There are two main reasons that I prefer them.

  1. Curses-based installers are much faster. Waiting on a Live-CD to load can take time. There are advantages to Live-CDs but when I’m wanting to install an OS that I’ve pretty familiar with, curses-based installers are more efficient.
  2. Errors like the one I mentioned can make the OS much more difficult to get up and running. The installer mistakenly uses the wrong display driver. This mistake doesn’t just cause an issue with X. It makes the entire system freeze for some reason.

So even though I used the alternative installer, I still ran into issues post-install. This required me to boot into recovery mode and install the proprietary nVidia drivers from the command line. Since one of Ubuntu’s goals is to make Linux easier for the masses, this is very counter-intuitive. If a first time Linux user ran into this same issue, they would be turned off of Linux instantly.

So, after having other issues with Ubuntu that shouldn’t be there, such as 64-bit Adobe Flash sucking completely on it (videos won’t pause or let you use the slider to seek through them), I decided to try something else. I thought to myself, “Why not try Debian 64 bit?” I was in for a surprise.

Debian had none of the issues I ran into with Ubuntu. I even installed the desktop right away, and it came up without any errors. I still had to install my proprietary nVidia drivers, but for some reason Debian used X settings that didn’t freeze the system. This is probably due to the fact that it doesn’t use Compiz right out of the box. I believe that the issues I had in Ubuntu were due to Compiz being enabled by default. I like my eye candy just as much as the next guy, but a desktop that works out of the box is a great thing.

I’ve always like Debian as a server OS and I’ve used it many times as a desktop OS. I have to say, after evaluating the latest Ubuntu and Mint, Debian is still very relevant and could even give them a run for their money as a desktop OS. Sure they have some added features that make them a bit easier for a new user, if the user doesn’t run into the issues I had, but for many of us, Debian is actually easier to use. I’ve been using Ubuntu so long, letting it take care of things like my networking and automatically starting Empathy when I login, I have forgotten just how simplistic Debian can be. It does what I want, when I want it, with little fuss.

I’ll be using Debian this year. I may try out the next Ubuntu release in October. I’ll probably try a few other distros as well, but Debian doesn’t seem to be going away from my computer any time soon. The politics inside the Debian camp may be rough, but the results are spectacular.

Eclipse issues in Linux Mint

I’ve been wrestling with IDEs and OSs for the past few days, trying to decide which would be best for Javascript and PHP development. I had been using Netbeans. I absolutely love Netbeans, but I found that editing Javascript in it was somewhat lacking. I was having trouble keeping up with my nested anonymous functions and thought it’d be a good time to try out other alternatives.

I bounced around between Linux Mint, Mac OS X, and Windows 7. I find that I would really like to program on my Macbook Pro, but it just doesn’t feel comfortable. There’s something about the keyboard setup or something that just annoys me. It’s more of a problem with my familiarity with the keyboard, I think. At any rate, after messing with Eclipse, Netbeans, and Textmate on my Mac, I decided it was going to be a no-go.

Windows 7 presented a problem in the fact that XAMPP seems to have issues with sessions. They work but almost at random, creating a new session will lock up the entire web server. When you are developing a website which uses Sessions for user logins, that creates a problem. So, I decided it would be in my best interest to use Linux, which seems to be made for programmers, because most programming related things work great in it and the fact that you almost have to be a programmer to get some things to work correctly in it. Though, that is an outdated misconception, but everyone still seems to believe it.

I had been using Linux for most of the development of my new project anyway. So, there was no transition there. I’m using SVN on a server machine so it really didn’t matter which OS or IDE I decided upon for that. They are all pretty universal in their ability to handle SVN. The major exception was Mac OS X which didn’t include the ssh-askpass command needed to tunnel SVN through ssh correctly. I was able to find a shell script that handled the ssh-askpass function, however. Textmate didn’t really work well, either, because it didn’t really have robust SVN integration. It was pretty much just like manual SVN. I also needed separate programs for Diff and Merge. That was lacking and clunky. I was spoiled by Netbeans’ built-in Merge, Diff, SVN, and so forth.

I thought I’d give Aptana a try. It is a PHP developer plugin for Eclipse. It is also available in a standalone package. I had various problems with the standalone version of Aptana so I decided to install Eclipse from the LinuxMint/Ubuntu repositories. Eclipse worked great, and Aptana installed perfectly. However, I needed the SVN tools that are Aptana add-ons. They wouldn’t install. There was a version conflict with the version of Eclipse in the LinuxMint/Ubuntu repositories.

So I decided to install the latest version of Eclipse. I downloaded and ran the latest version and found that there were UI issues. This brings me to the subject of this post. The UI issues were a major roadblock, so I searched for a solution. The problem, I believe, stems from compositing inside Gnome. Unlike Ubuntu, I couldn’t find an easy way to turn off compositing inside LinuxMint. OH, I’m sure I could disable the compositing extension inside the xorg.conf file, but I really wanted a light switch option. The normal way I would handle this is the Fusion Icon. It didn’t seem to work. I also tried disabling effects from the Gnome Appearances menu option. Compositing just wouldn’t turn off that easily.

So here is the solution for Eclipse and Aptana inside Linux Mint.

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true /opt/eclipse/eclipse

That will work if eclipse is installed in /opt/eclipse, but I just had mine downloaded to my home folder. It doesn’t really matter. You would just change the /opt/eclipse/eclipse to your actual executable path. The key here is to add the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true before the eclipse command.

I’m about to create a shortcut to do this for me. Now all my buttons will work when I click on them. That’s convenient huh.

Adventures in analog video recording on Linux

Linux does many things well, but the multimedia experience can be lacking without the correct bit of hackery. I mean, some cool things can be done with Linux on the multimedia side, but typically it’ll take a lot of work to learn how it’s done. Mac and Windows make complex things simple, while Linux makes simple things complex.

Back when I purchased my TV tuner card for my PC, I was using Linux as my main OS. I still use it daily but not on my main PC. Only occasionally do I boot to Linux on it. I typically run Windows Server 2008 as I’ve talked about on previous posts. When I bought the tuner I wanted to make sure that it worked under Linux. So, I purchased one that was made specifically for Linux, a PCHDTV 5500.

It has served its purpose as a TV tuner, since I watched a year or so of cable TV in analog on it prior to the digital switch. I have never been able to get the HD side of things to work on it. Either it’s beyond me or my cable company just had all of the channels encrypted. I didn’t spend enough time on it to find out.

Recording analog video in Linux can be FUN. By “fun” I mean the type of fun one has pulling their own toe hairs. Be forewarned, getting a good recording is best done from the command line. I tried many ways. I ended up going with mencoder.

That being said, there’s not much you can’t do with mencoder and ffmpeg from the command line.

I have some VHS recordings I’m converting to AVI and then later on to DVD. I first had to purchase a VCR because, wouldn’t you know it, I didn’t have one that worked.

After that I had to come up with a good way to connect it to my capture card. The card has coax and component inputs. The new VCR didn’t come with any coaxial connections. The capture card had a yellow RCA connection for video. I could use that but then there was the problem with audio. The capture card had a 1/8″ jack for audio. Luckily I had an RCA-to-1/8″ adapter for one of my gadgets (not sure which). I ended up using two sets of RCA’s.

I was amazed I actually got audio and video from it. Here’s where more fun came in. I was running virtualbox in the background. Everything I tried to use to record the video told me that /dev/dsp could not be opened. I went through many hoops trying to troubleshoot that issue. I should have realized it sooner but it was all virtualbox’s fault. Next time I’ll make sure it’s not running when I’m dealing with audio.

After all of those problems were worked out, I was able to use:

mencoder tv:///1 -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:forceaudio:adevice=/dev/dsp -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=-750:threads=2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64:mode=3 -o /home/five/homevid.avi

I’ll try to explain some of what is going on in that command. Mencoder is the program itself. There’s little to be said there. The next part is interesting: tv:///1  That tells mencoder we are using the tv card and that we want to use the composite1 input. Typically it defaults to input=0 or tv:///0, which is the coax TV input. There are three inputs on the card: tv, composite, and s-video. The next part (driver=v4l2) tells mencoder that we want to use Video4Linux2. Then we specify the width and height of the capture. The forceaudio bit was placed there during my troubleshooting. It just forces the use of audio device /dev/dsp. I had tried a couple other devices during my troubleshooting, thus the addition of that option. Then we have the option for output video codec (xvid). I set the bitrate and the number of threads. I actually upped that bitrate considerably later to around 2048. I believe I’ll end up upping it even more for the next vid. I did the same with the audio output bitrate. I set it up to 256.

That should help anyone experiencing some of the pain I went through.

The Best Dock for Linux

I’ve been looking for an OS X-like dock bar for Linux for many years. For a while, I used the launcher applet in gdesklets. It works without x-composite and pretty nice, but gdesklets can be a resource hog at times. Most of the gdesklets are written in Python if I’m not mistaking and Python, being an interpreted language, uses much more system resources than a native compiled application.

My next dock was AWN, or Avant Window Navigator. At one point, possibly the present, Google was involved with this project. Again, this is if I recall correctly. AWN is very nice, however, it only works if you are using the composite extension in X, as in Compiz/Beryl/Compiz Fusion. It’s very customizable and behaves much like the OS X dock.

There’s one part of the OS X dock that I really like that isn’t quite the same in these docks however. The fish-eye zoom of icons on the dock is a trademark of OS X. AWN and the launcher in gdesklets both have a zoom function but it’s just not the same.

I recently discovered that there is a great dock pretty much hidden away in a program called Gnome-Do. Gnome-Do itself is a cool search app for gnome. It’s somewhat like a KDE app I remember that lets you launch programs by hitting a keyboard shortcut and then typing the name of the app. I can’t remember the name of that app at the moment though. Gnome-Do does exactly that. One can type super(windows key) and the space bar to bring up Gnome-Do.

Of course, you will have to install it first though. After it is installed, simply run the application and go to the preferences for it. Change the appearance to “Docky”. Voila, the best dock you’ve ever had in Linux will appear. Play with it and you’ll soon see that this is very close to the OS X dock experience.

Ubuntu Synergy Howto

There’s really not much to setting up Synergy in the latest Ubuntu. The reason I’m writing this is because I ran into a roadblock while setting it up and it was a stupid mistake on my part. I know someone else will probably make the same mistake.

I’m used to Debian-based distros. I ran Debian for a few years on my home desktop, and I use Debian on my personal development servers. I should have realized that synergy and quicksynergy were in the Ubuntu repositories. It just makes sense. They are even available for the 64bit version.

Before I realized this, I looked for the package in Ubuntu’s “Add and remove software” app. I searched for synergy and found nothing. Stupid me assumed that it wasn’t available. I should have just ran the ole trusty apt-cache search synergy. Assuming that it wasn’t in the repos, I downloaded the source. The only binary available for Linux was in RPM form. I just don’t like converting RPMs to DEBs using Alien. Sorry. So, I tried to compile it. I ran in to a few issues while trying to compile. That’s when I decided to check the repos. Lo and behold, there both packages were. So to install synergy and the nice graphical front-end for it called quicksynergy, simple run: sudo apt-get install synergy quicksynergy

I’m pretty sure these are both in the universe repository. However, in the event I’m incorrect, they are at least in the multiverse repo. So if universe doesn’t turn up anything, just add multiverse. If you don’t know how to do that, Google.

If you’ve never tried Synergy out, it’s one of those must have apps for Linux, Windows, or OS X. It’s useful if you have more than one computer and more than one monitor, but only want to use one keyboard and one mouse. It makes the two computers seem to work in unison by sharing the keyboard and mouse over IP. It’s not exactly the same as KVM over IP because video doesn’t get shared.

It’s great for me because I have a regular desktop and my “server” box at my desk. I have dual displays on my main box and I now have another display connected to my “server”. My keyboard and mouse are shared between the two computers. When I mouse over to the far right hand side of my main box’s desktop the mouse goes to my server box’s display. My keyboard then works on it. Mousing back to the left gives control back to my main box.

If you’ve never tried synergy, give it a shot. It’s open source, free, and extremely handy.