Category: Linux

Ubuntu 8.10 vs. Fedora 10

 I have used Linux regularly for about 4 years. I that time, I have, for the most part, used Ubuntu Linux, but I have on many occasions tried other flavours of Linux, including Fedora. So, how do the latest editions of Ubuntu and Fedora compare?

It is fair to say that Ubuntu generally has the edge on Fedora in my experience. I have tried Fedora Core 4 and Fedora Core 6 before, with little success, Fedora Core 4 suffered from dependency problems when installing programs, and Fedora Core 6 just wouldn't install. I also tried Fedora 9, which ran very nicely from a Live CD, but didn't install properly.

On the other hand, I have used every version of Ubuntu since the first, 4.10 (Warty Warhog). It is fair to say that I have generally been impressed with it - no installation problems at all. The early versions I used - 4.10 (Warty), 5.04 (Hoary) and 5.10 (Breezy) were solid, but unspectacular.

This changed with Dapper Drake, (6.06, LTS), the first long-term support release. It was accompanied with a much more integrated feel, and generally just worked out of the box, with few changes required. All the releases since then have carried on building upon this release, none of them being spectacular, but all solidly pushing forward. So, how would Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 8.10 fare?

The fairest test is to run a clean install of both. For both, I used a Live CD, with my desktop PC, which is a 2.8 Ghz Intel Processor with HT technology (the most over-rated technology of the last 5 years, if you ask me), 512Mb RAM and a 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6600GT. So, not slow, but not about to set the world on fire either. Hardware support shouldn't be an issue.

I tried Fedora 10 first. It booted without a problem, and quite quickly. It has quite a slick desktop, but I really wanted an installed system, so I installed the OS to the hard drive straight away. Everything was fine, and I re-booted. Now, in the past, Fedora has forgotten to add itself to the bootloader when installing, which is a fairly major error, but there were no major problems like that this time.

I selected Fedora 10 from the GRUB menu and watched as Fedora booted. It then came to a screen where I could finish the setup of my system. Error. My mouse didn't work. My keyboard didn't work. I tried using USB and PS/2, but neither worked. I was stuck.

I tried installing the whole system again (the Live CD recognises the keyboard and mouse without any problem), and booting again, but the problem re-appeared. Given my previous bad experiences with the Fedora installer, I cut my losses and gave up.

Next, I tried the Ubuntu 8.10 installer. I had previously upgraded an install from 8.04 to 8.10, but this test is for a clean install - and clean installs are generally better anyway. I booted the Live CD - no problems. I ran the installer - no problems. The graphical installer is very slick, and the partitioning tool that Ubuntu uses is very impressive - Ubuntu manages to make partioning a joy, whereas Fedora has, in my experience, made it a very complicated affair, despite using the same base package. Anyway, I answered a few questions, the whole thing installed and it asked me to reboot.

At this point, I would like to mention something. When Fedora finishes installing, it just gives you a button to press to reboot. This is fine, but it leaves the CD is the drive, and if you don't take it out, you can end up booting from CD again when you reboot. Ubuntu automatically rejects the CD from the drive, tells you to remove it from the drive and to then press the "enter" key, thus eliminating this annoyance. It's a very small matter, but it saves a lot of hassle. Big thumbs up to Ubuntu on that one.

I then rebooted and logged in. No problems. The desktop is very slick. The background wallpaper looks fabulous. I was quickly prompted to install my updates, which I always like. The user panel at the top of the screen has been integrated fantastically to enable you to lock the screen, log out and reboot with the minimum of hassle. You can even start a guest session within your own session, giving someone else access to your computer, but without giving them the ability to log you out or accidentally shut your computer down. It even saves where your music was in the middle of playing and starts playing it back instantly when you end the session to go back to your previous session.

There are many more neat touches that impress. Pidgin integrates fanastically into the user applet to set your availability status. The codec finder works wonderfully so you don't have to worry about having to download the correct codec yourself. You can even buy licenced codecs if you want.

Pulseaudio now seems to work fantastically. I can play music in Rhythmbox and watch videos in Firefox without then having to kill pulseaudio in a terminal afterwards. Olive - the GTK frontend to bzr, has now evolved into a much friendlier program. The only slight disappointment is that OpenOffice 3 isn't included by default, although it is easy enough to add. Overall, very impressive. So, what's the verdict?

Software: Ubuntu 8/10, Fedora 9/10. They have virtually identical programs, but Fedora includes OpenOffice 3, so it shades this area.

Desktop Integration: Ubuntu 9/10, Fedora 7/10. Fedora's looks good, but Ubuntu's integration of user sessions, Pidgin and hardware drivers puts it out ahead.

Speed: Ubuntu 8/10, Fedora 8/10. Both are nifty, even on a machine that's starting to struggle slightly for raw power in an age where RAM is key.

Installer: Ubuntu 10/10, Fedora 6/10. Fedora's installer is quite slow, whereas Ubuntu's is fast, asks very few questions and has the best partition editor I've seen anywhere, ever. I'd use it over proprietary software any day.

Overall: Strictly speaking, Ubuntu 35/40, Fedora 30/40. However, I think I have to disqualify Fedora and give it a big fat 0/40.

It might seem harsh, but at the end of the day, my Fedora installation isn't useable - and not for the first time. It's not like I'm using cutting edge hardware. The keyboard is a fricking Cheery Linux keyboard for goodness sake! There's clearly a problem with the Fedora installer somewhere. And yes, I know I could spend hours on the Fedora forums trying to find an answer, but I shouldn't have to - not when every other Linux distro has no such problems. Linux Format may have had Fedora 10 down as beating Ubuntu 8.10, but there's no such judgement here. Ubuntu wins an easy knockout.

CPU Frequency Scaling In Ubuntu 8.04

I hope you have a nice cup of tea at hand. This is one long post, but oh, is it good! If you're not interested in CPU frequency scaling, then firstly, why not, and secondly, this probably isn't for you...

Please note: this is a first draft and is liable to change after feedback, but it works! Please report any mistakes! This guide is also available as a downloadable pdf.

I am writing this guide to scaling CPU speeds not because there isn't any documentation out there already – there is, although it can be hard to find – and not because I am a technical genius – I know a fair bit, I guess, but I'm no Einstein. No, I'm writing this because it's something that I wanted to do but had to look in a number of places in order to find out how to do it. Furthermore, some of the documentation that I found was a little muddled and probably not easy enough for some people to follow. Thus, I am going to try and explain how to scale CPU speeds in Ubuntu's latest release, 8.04 (Hardy Heron). If you're not using Ubuntu 8.04, you may need to change a few things, but this guide should still be helpful as long as you are using a 2.6 kernel.

Before we start, a little disclaimer. Some of this guide will have you executing powerful commands and you could accidentally wreck your system. If you do this, it's not my fault. I'm not forcing you to do this, nor am I there to make sure you do it correctly. If you wreck your system, you've likely done something wrong. If so, you're best off going somewhere like the Ubuntu Forums for help, not here. If, however, you follow this guide and it just doesn't work, feel free to leave a comment or contact me and I can see if I can help this work for you, and perhaps update the guide. Like I said, I'm no expert, but I have, after some study, made CPU scaling work very nicely on both my laptop and my desktop, which are very different machines.

So, before we actually start doing anything, what exactly is CPU speed scaling, or as it is more technically known, CPU frequency scaling? It's quite simple really. A CPU is a central processing unit – it processes everything as computer does. The faster the processor, the quicker it can executer commands – although it can, of course, be constrained by other elements of your hardware, like insufficient RAM. CPUs have a speed rating – my laptop has a Core2Duo T7300 rated at 2.00Ghz, so basically, it has 2 CPU cores, and they run at 2.00Ghz. My rather ageing desktop has a Pentium 4 HT processor running rated at 2.8Ghz, meaning it has 1 core, running at 2.8Ghz. However, whilst this is what these processors are rated at, this does not mean to say that the processors must run at this speed. Far from it. My laptop CPU can also run at 1.6Ghz,  1.2Ghz and 800Mhz. My desktop CPU can run at all sorts of speeds down to 350Mhz. This is known as speed stepping. Please note, this is not the same as overclocking (or underclocking)!  I will explain later about how overclocking fits in with speed stepping. One final note before moving on to the "why" - CPUs do not have to run at a set speed – they can dynamically change speeds. This can be very useful, as will be explained next...

So why might you actually want to speed step your CPU? You might want to save power. This would be a good way to do that. You may not need all the processing power your CPU has, and thus not want to use it unnecessarily. Neither of these are particularly likely reasons, but there are two more likely reasons for speed stepping. Firstly, if you have a problem with overheating, turning the processor's speed down will reduce the effect of overheating. Secondly, you may be using a laptop and trying to save power to extend battery life. Speed stepping can, when used correctly, save power and extend battery life. Considering laptops can often overheat because of their compact nature and people's lack of care for them, the reduced heat could potentially prolong the life of the laptop too, whilst still leaving you with processing power when required. So, enough of the background, let's get on with actually implementing speed stepping on our Ubuntu system!

The first thing we need to do is make sure that we have a couple of packages installed. One of these is "powernowd", and the other is "cpufrequtils". To see if these two packages are installed, go to System → Administration → Synaptic Package Manager and type in the package names.

Once you have made sure that these two packages are installed, go to Applications → Accessories → Terminal. In the terminal, type "/sys/devices/system/cpu/". Then press the "tab" button twice. If you have two processors, or a multi-core processor, you should see "cpu0" and "cpu1". If you have more than two cores or processors, you will see more (one for each that you have); if you have just the one processor with one core, you should just see "cpu0". If you still have the command on the line, type "cpu0/cpufreq". Hopefully, it should find a cpufreq/directory. If it does, press the "tab" button twice again. A whole list of new options should be available, such as "scaling_driver", "scaling_governor", "scaling_max_freq", "cpu_max_freq", etc... I have 13 options on my system. We will use these later to probe the processor and to change our speed step settings.

Now, you need to copy and paste the following command into the terminal and press "enter":

ls /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/cpufreq/ \
/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel\
/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/

Please note: if you are using an earlier version of Ubuntu, you may need to replace the "x86" in the last line with "i386". If you get an error message in the output from the above text, try replacing the text. Unfortunately, I don't know when that changed in the kernel – I just know it did. Anyway, what we're interested in is the output. The first output lists the available speed step drivers we can use to speed step the CPU. The second output lists the governors, which I will talk about later. The first list will consist of drivers such as "acpi-cpufreq.ko", "speedstep-centrino.ko", "p4-clockmod.ko" and "powernow-k8.ko". Hopefully, one of these drivers is the one we need – we just need to find out which one. With some logical thinking, and by paying attention to the terminal's output, we can actually do this quite easily. The format we need to use is the following:

sudo modprobe driver

Please note, although the drivers in the previous output had the extension ".ko", we do not add that extension in the modprobe! So, if we are trying to add the p4-clockmod driver, we enter the following:

sudo modprobe p4-clockmod

If I accidentally add the ".ko" extension, I will get the following error:

FATAL: Module p4_clockmod.ko not found.

So the next question is, how do we know if we have loaded the correct driver? If we load the correct driver, there will be no output from the terminal. If we load the incorrect driver, however, we will see a message that says something along the lines of "Device not found". And so, having evaded simple errors, we come to the million-dollar question: which driver is the right driver?

Good question! The simply answer is, "I don't know"! However, with some logical thinking, we can get somewhere. The best driver to try first is "acpi-cpufreq" as it is the most likely to work. This is the driver I use for my Core2Duo. If you have an nforce2 chipset, try "cpufreq-nforce2". If you have a Centrino processor, try "speedstep-centrino". If you have p4, like my desktop, try "p4-clockmod". If you have an AMD processor, try one of the "powernow-6/7/8" drivers (use the number that's most appropriate, if you know which one that is).

But what if you don't know what kind of processor you have? That's not a position I'm familiar with, but I can still help you. For more information about your processor, type in the following command in the terminal:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

This will tell you lots of information you don't need, and a little that's helpful. Take a look at "vendor_id" and "model name" - these two labels will tell you what you need to know about your processor. Also look at "cpu Mhz" - this tells you the speed your processor is currently running at. Please note: it does not display the speed it is supposed to run at, or can run at, but the speed that it is currently running at.

Anyway, once you have successfully loaded a driver, you need set the speed or set a governor to automatically govern the speed. These are two very different things. Setting the speed is, in effect, manually throttling the CPU – especially effective if you're trying to stop the CPU from overheating. Setting a governor is a dynamic way of changing the speed of the CPU in accordance with the amount of power it needs at a given time – more effective for saving power on laptops. Decide which of these methods you want to take – for now – as they take different approaches (although we will be able to alter both later).

First, I'm going to go through how to manually set the speed of the CPU to a set level. Before we can set the level, however, we need to know what speeds the CPU is capable of running at. We do this by executing the following command:
$cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies
This command will output a series of numbers, separated by spaces. These are the speeds (in hertz, Hz), that the CPU is capable of running at. On my laptop, the CPU can run at 2Ghz, 1.6Ghz, 1.2Ghz and 0.8Ghz. Make sure you count the number of 0's! Decide which of the available frequencies you want to run the CPU at, and then execute it with the following command:

sudo cpufreq-selector -f value

Remember, 1Ghz == 1000000! The "-f" argument simply tells the program to set the frequency. You can select a particular CPU by using "-c" followed by the CPU number. That's it, if you were just wanting to set a new, constant CPU frequency! And, just to check the new frequency has been applied, we can issue the following command:

cpufreq-info

This will output a fair amount of information, one piece of which will be "current CPU frequency Is..." If, however, you want *just* the current CPU frequency, you can issue a more long-winded command that will just output the frequency in hertz (Hz):

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq

If, however, you are wanting to set a governor, it's a little more long-winded, but not complicated. First, we want to go to the cpufreq/ driectory:

cd /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/

Now that we're here, we want to see which governor is currently set:

cat scaling_governor

The output will almost certainly be "userspace", which basically means that the CPU has been set to a particular, constant speed. If you're reading this, I'm assuming that speed is full speed! Anyway, what we want to do next is to find out the scaling_governors we are able to set, which we query using the following command:

cat scaling_available_governors

The output will hopefully be "ondemand", "userspace", "conservative", "powersave" and "performance". "Userspace" allows the user to set the CPU frequency manually, "powersave" runs the CPU at the lowest frequency, "performance" sets it to the maximum frequency. "Ondemand" and "conservative" are very similar – they both set the CPU frequency quite low where possible, and then raise the frequency as necessary to run commands. The difference, however, is that the "conservative" governor gradually steps up the speed, whereas the "ondemand" governor is capable of jumping straight to the fastest frequency step. Depending upon what you are doing, either of the two methods could save more or less power than the other, and it is probably in part down to personal taste. So, now you're an expert in the options, pick one and execute it in the terminal! I'm going to execute the "ondemand" governor.

sudo sh -c "echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor"

The "sh -c" bit is telling bash to run the command in a shell. This is needed because the command is run as a superuser. You can run the command as root, but I really wouldn't advise it when you can do it like this. Because the command has to be run through a shell, the actual command has to be run within quotation marks. Anyway, once this has been successfully run, your system will be running the "ondemand" governor! But you can't see that yet, and you want to be able to see that this is working, right? Yes, you do. Read on. We're almost there!

Apologies to all non-GNOME users out there, but the following section is applicable to GNOME (but there's more after this section to interest you!). I don't use KDE or any other desktop, so I can't help you when it comes to a graphical utility for CPU frequency and governors outside of GNOME. However, if you do use the GNOME desktop, there is an applet for the GNOME panel that can help us. However, first of all, we need to reconfigure the "gnome-applets" package so as to give it superuser privileges. We do this using the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

You will be asked a question, to which you need to answer "yes". Then, right-click on the GNOME panel, click "add to panel" and select "CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor". Once you have placed it in the panel, you can left-click on the applet and select either a frequency, or a scaling governor. We're done!

However, for your piece of mind, I have added a few notes on the bottom here to explain a few other things. Take a quick look here if you experience any difficulties.
The command "cat cpuinfo_cur_freq" and "cat scaling_cur_freq" output the same information, but the former requires superuser privileges whereas the latter doesn't. The commands "cat cpuinfo_max_freq" and "cat scaling_max_freq", and "cat_cpuinfo_min_freq" and "cat scaling_min_freq" give the same relative output, but in this case, none of the commands require superuser privileges. No, I don't know why either!

If you want to find out which driver you are currently using, use the command "cat scaling_driver". To check the current governor, use the command "cat scaling_governor". To check how long your computer has been in each CPU frequency state, execute the command "cat stats/time_in_state".

You can artificially set a minimum and maximum CPU frequency state using these commands too. To check the current maximum state, execute the command "cat scaling_max_freq", and for the minimum, execute "cat scaling_min_freq". If you wanted to set the minimum frequency to 1.2Ghz, you would execute the following command:

sudo sh -c "echo 1200000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq"

And to set the maximum frequency at, say, 1.6Ghz, you would execute the following command:

sudo sh -c "echo 1600000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq"

Easy! I don't know what happens if you accidentally set the maximum frequency to a lower value than the minimum – you'll probably get an error message though.
As far as I am aware, that is everything and this tour through CPU frequency scaling is complete! If you use this and it works, please leave a comment to let me know. If you tried and it didn't, leave a comment and let me know. If you don't understand, or you find a mistake, leave a comment and let me know! If you're still reading, you're a committed reader. Leave a comment and let me know. Maybe I'll buy you a drink sometime!

The Disappointment Of Fedora

I have, a few times before, tried out different versions of the Linux operating system. I generally use Ubuntu, but have also been known to use Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, Knoppix and Fedora.

I quite often use Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux to run a simple operating system from a USB device, and Knoppix if I want a full system. However, I have often tried Fedora as an alternative to Ubuntu. Unfotunately, I have never been very successful with Fedora. I frist tried Fedora Core 4, which was ok, but took half a dozen attempts to successfully install to a hard drive due to conflicts. Then, every time I tried to install programs, it told me about more conflicts and explained that the software couldn't be installed. Sadly, that meant that it wasn't really very practical. Never mind, eh? Well, I then tried Fedora Core 5, which had the same problem, as did Fedora Core 6. So I gave up, admitted defeat. Until now.

Yesterday, I tried installing Fedora 9. I downloaded the DVD image and burned it to a DVD. I then installed it on my desktop seemingly successfully (albeit slowly), and went to bed to come back to this morning. Unfortunately, it hangs at the loading screen. Not helpful. So, I have now tried four versions of Fedora, and none of them have been successful. It doesn't give me a great impression of the project!

One difference with my setup this time around was that I installed the Fedora on to an XFS partition, whereas beforehand, I had always used ext3. However, Fedora is supposed to support XFS, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Annoyingly, this failed installation has also stopped my installation of Ubuntu from working, as it reinstalled GRUB and insisted upon formatting my boot/ partition, so I now need to reinstall this too. This is also a problem Fedora has had in the past, although now with a marked improvement. In the past, Fedora didn't install itself on the boot partition, let alone anything else, so at least it's got that far...

Should I try Fedora 10 later in the year? Or should I admit defeat and just try Linux From Scratch again?

Dapper, Edgy And Fedora

Following my problematic and failed upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, I thought I'd use the opportunity to try out Fedora Core 6 in the hope that the Ubuntu installation would get fixed and I could return to it. So, I got my Fedora install CD - no Live CD, just a straight install - booted it up and followed the instructions. I did once use Fedora Core 4, but became frustrated because programs didn't seem to install very easily and I had used Ubuntu before, so I just went back to using Ubuntu.

Anyway, I followed the install process, which I must say is very simple. The advantage of an install CD is that it installs the bare minimum, whereas a Live CD which you install from installs other things - I'll come back to that, though. It was probably the simplest install CD I've seen, bar the Ubuntu text install CD. It has an added benefit over the Ubuntu CD though - you have absolute control over everything you wish to install before it starts, should you so wish. I like that :)

The trouble was with installing, though. As it installed, it came up with a conflict - with file names. Thus, the install failed and I had to reboot. However, I wasn't going to hold this against Fedora - the hard disk I was installing to can be a little dodgy occassionally, so it could have been a problem with this rather than with Fedora. Anyway, I rebooted and started again, this time just selecting all the default options. Success! It installed fine and asked me to reboot. So I did - but there was a problem. When GRUB appeared, there was no mention of Fedora. It appears that Fedora just didn't set up the boot loaded. I booted from the other disk to see if it was installed there, but there was no boot loader there.

Fine, I thought. I'll load up Knoppix or the Ubuntu Live CD, and find out the information I need to set up GRUB myself - except when I did, there was no mention of the partition. It had been set up as a logical volume and I had no idea how to access it. So, I cut my losses, loaded the Edgy Live CD and booted that, wiping the Fedora disk again and installing Edgy. The install went perfectly, although I did need to download about 600Mb of files.

Oh, then there was one more problem - the hard drive started playing up again. So... I went out this evening, leaving my PC to make a tarball of everything except my /home directory. It's 1.8Gb large, down from 6Gb uncompressed, and tomorrow, I can try to extract it to my old Ubuntu partition. We'll see if it works. I've not tried it before and I'm only taking a wild stab at how to do it, so it'll be interesting to see.

Using Cron

Following my previous post about outputting RSS feeds to XHTML, I spent today doing two things: firstly, I worked at formatting the output to my page so that it displays as I like, which was quite easy. I wanted two columns, so I floated one column to the left and one to the right - nice and simple. I then fixed the overall width for the two columns and their height - which proves tricky to judge when you want the description of each item and not just the total! I put a fixed height of 500 pixels on the div tags, but the output sometimes exceeded this on some feeds. I vcan get round this in one of two ways: firstly, only use the title, or secondly, limit the character output - but that's for another day.

I then looked at the slightly harder part - automating the rebuilding of the feed output - as I believe is the case with Planet Jedimoose. I had found details of how to do this already. In the script I want to execute:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

And in Cron:

0 11 * * * /path/to/file.php >/dev/null 2>&1

The block of 5 numbers/asterisks denoting that the script be run on the hour, at 11 o'clock, every day, of every week, of every month. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this to work, so I emailed the web hosting company, who told me that I needed this in Cron:

30 18 * * * /usr/local/bin/php -qf

/home/busyscot/public_html/test/magpierss/jedimoose_rss.php

>/dev/null 2>&1

Ignore the change in time the script would run (in this case, 18:30 every day) - I was merely testing it at various intervals, and I just updated the time to approximately 2 minutes after I'd finished editing each time! Unfortunately, this didn't seem to work either, and no output from Cron had made its way into my email inbox; thus, I decided I needed to do some Googling. I found a nice resource which told me that what I needed to do depended upon whether my php was installed as an Apache module, or as compiled CGI. For compiled CGI, it said to do this:

#!/usr/local/bin/php -q

That would be in the executable file, and then this in Cron:

* * * * * php /path/to/your/cron.php

That would execute the file every minute of every day. So, I modified it to this:

30 * * * * php /path/to/your/cron.php

0 * * * * php /path/to/your/cron.php

It then told me to execute a shell command, which I ignored as I don't have shell access. It then stated that if you have php installed as an Apache module, you have to do something else to work.

Well, the above Cron command works - but phpinfo() shows that I have php installed as an Apache module - so I guess it works either way (surely you can't have both installed, can you?)!

Wanted - Tenacity

I posted in April about troubles upgrading Ubuntu to Dapper and, a couple of days ago, I posted about finding a new tool to upgrade Ubuntu automatically. Well, I am pleased to say that I recieved an email today from one of Ubuntu's mailing list announcing the pre-release beta candidate for Ubuntu 6.06 - and the one click upgrade is there to use :)

Ok, it's more than one click, but all you have to do is click 'ok', 'yes', and 'upgrade'. Hopefully it will work nicely, unlike my previous experiences. The only downside - it's an 842Mb download, with 642 updates. I need to go out for the good part of a day having already had it going overnight to do that. So, I'm going to hold it off for a few days, methinks. I'll keep you posted about how it goes when it's -done though :)

If you want to look at some screenshots of the new release, go to the Dapper Beta page on the Ubuntu Wiki. It's looking extremely nice - and that's high praise from me!

Features of the new release:

Like I said, it's looking good. I can't wait to get my hands on it - but I haven't the time to install it at the moment - hopefully I'll be able to install it in the next week or so though. Maybe Wednesday will be a good day, since I'll be out.

Gwenview - Photo Resizing In Linux

Until now, if I've wanted to resize lots of photos on my computer, I've needed to boot in to Windows to do the job. I could, of course, resize them all in something like the GIMP, but I'd have to do them one-by-one, which, when you're doing about 120, and you need to resize each photo twice, just isn't feasible. So, off I'd go in to Windows, and use a program called 'Visualiser Photo Resize' (if you're looking for it, try downloads.com for 'photo resize', I don't think it's available anywhere else - not that I know of, anyway).

Anyway, I thought I'd have a look around, and I found a few programs to do the trick. One is KimDaBa, another is Gwenview. They're very similar and both very good. They are designed for KDE rather than GNOME, but that's no real problem. To use the batch resizing, you need the 'kdegraphics' package on Ubuntu, and then it just rocks and rolls!

As a bonus, you can also edit photos to include a border, so you can do a batch edit and add, say, a 1 pixel border to every photograph. Watch out for the photos gracing the photo gallery sometime before October (the current gallery is only work in progress - it WILL change - I need the time to work on it though).

Anyhow, it's another area where Linux replaces Windows nicely. There's really not much that I ever need to use Windows for. I can only think of two reasons:

So what's your excuse? I'm have more demanding software requirements of my PC than most of you reading this. If I can do it... ;)

Noelinho's Back Using Breezy Badger

Just before I start what I'm actually meant to be posting about, I found a neat little program to install on Ubuntu earlier called 'Blog Entry Poster' which is meant to be compatible with WordPress - I tried to post using it, but it didn't work. It would be handy if it worked, though it can't do categories - it would be great to be able to post via my desktop with no browser. Of course, I can always post by email to WordPress...but I don't. Anyway....

It's a while since I've used Ubuntu actually. I'll admit it, when I had endless problems upgrading to Dapper Drake, and then with my fresh install of Breezy, the sheer amount of work I had to do meant Linux had to take a back seat whilst I used Windows XP to get my work done. However, I no longer need my PC for University work (I don't need it during the exam period - paper has everything I need) until October, so I am free to do what I'm so good at - breaking software (and salvaging the pieces as an afterthought).

You may remember that I had problems with lock-ups in Breezy Badger. I thought I had a graphics card problem. I didn't. I thought it was the power lead. It wasn't. I thought it was the PSU. It wasn't (but the new one blew up, thankfully not taking the whoel of the PC with it). I thought it was the memory. It wasn't - not completely anyway, though the PSU had gone a long way to wrecking my nice RAM.

So, what was the problem? I do believe I now know. My new graphics card didn't like the generic Linux drivers. With nVidia's binary drivers, I'm having no problems today. Evidently, the generic drivers just aren't compatible with my nice new card. It took 4 months to work it out. Computers.... ;)

Actually, even that's a sidetrack of what I really want to talk about. What I really want to talk about is something I find quite exciting, which I found on Planet Ubuntu today. It's about upgrading Ubuntu. The link has the full article, with helpful screenshots, but the upshot of it is this - it's going to be potentially easier to upgrade Ubuntu. Upgrading Ubuntu, at the moment at least, involves editing a configuration file and then typing a couple of commands in to the terminal. It's not difficult, but it's not worked for me yet. This would just add a button that appears when a new release is ready. It tkaes away the possibility that you can do a bodged upgrade - though it won't necessarily mean it is perfect. It should also help less technically proficient people too :)

Honestly, you might not be excited about it, but I happen to think it's one of those small little things that is actually very useful. If people can see upgrading should be as easy as clicking upgrade, that can only be a good thing!

Ubuntu Linux - The Healthy Choice

I've been playing around with Linux for about 3 years now, although it's only in the last year or so that it has actually appeared as an integral part of my desktop. However, the more I use Linux, the more frustrating Windows becomes whenever I move away from Linux to use Windows. Quite simply, Linux, overall, is better. It makes more common sense. It runs faster. It is definitely more stable (except when you have problems with your memory). It looks cleaner. It's more versatile for what I want to do.

In fact, there is very little that I want to do that Linux doesn't do. Games are one thing, but I don't get much time for games generally. It's not a huge problem. Playing media files can sometimes be an issue, but it usually copes. There can be a few problems though. Hardware-wise, it's not too bad. Occasional disagreement with memory causes a lock-up, but that's not the fault of Linux, that's the fault of a PSU blowing holes in my RAM. The nVidia drivers (when I get them installed) work fine, though my card is slightly too new to be recognised, and I can't therefore, change all my speed settings on the card. However, considering I don't really play games on Linux, it's no real issue. My USB devices work fairly well - USB 2.0 is supported. My USB headset is supported, though the volume control of the chord doesn't work. It's not exactly life-threatening. So, aside from games and the occasional media playback issue, there's nothing really wrong with Linux.

So, once you've got past the potential 'it doesn't do what I want' problems, there's how it does them, and whether it does them well. Like I said, graphically I prefer Linux. Of all the Linux distributions I have tried, Ubuntu is by far the most appealing to me. I prefer GNOME to KDE any day of the week - it looks cleaner, more conservative, more integrated. Some people don't like the 'Human' theme that comes with Ubuntu - I quite like it.

General Computer Usage

Multiple desktops are something which are a must for someone like me. When I am working, I invariably have multiple windows open. If I'm doing anything to do with websites, I'll have my usual windows open - Firefox, my web browser; Thunderbird, my email client; GAIM, my instant messenger client; my FTP client (Filezilla on Windows, gFTP on Ubuntu); a media player (Windows Media Player on Windows - no matter what people say about it, I've never found a windows application that is better for playing media personally, though iTunes is good for podcasts, not that there are many good ones around to be honest), Rhythmbox on Ubuntu. That's 5 applications already, before I'm editing. When I'm editing, I'll have a text editor open, like gedit (Ubuntu) or Notepad2 (Windows - far better than Notepad). If I'm copying and pasting, I quite often use Abiword too (if in Ubuntu). That's quite a few applications open at once. To have them all on one window is possible, but not the most practical solution.

Multiple Desktops

Therefore, multiple desktops are a must. Now, this can be done on Windows. One of the reasons I buy nVidia graphics cards, if you take out Linux support, is because of their support for such desktops with an application called nView. You create as many desktops as you like, and you flick between them, either by a taskbar, or by keyboard shortcuts. Problem one - the taskbar mucks up your desktop icons. Problem two - keyboard shortcuts are slow for this purpose - say you have 6 desktops - you can only cycle them one by one, you can't cycle straight to a particular desktop (even if you could, you'd have to know the shortcut for that particular desktop, and you'd have to have 6 shortcuts that didn't interfere with any shortcuts you already had for any program!). It's much easier to have the desktops listed at the bottom of the screen, with their own identifiable label, which you can scroll using the mouse in a fraction of a second. That's what Linux does. It saves huge amounts of time with my work.

Comparing Applications

So, laying out my applications is easier (yes, I took about 300 words, and summed it up in 7. Sorry), but what about the applications themselves? Are they any good? Well, actually, they aren't all that different. Which programs do I use the most? GAIM is open most of the time, unless I'm really busy. Firefox is open all day - although it gets closed and reopened every few hours because it does gradually eat my memory. Thunderbird is open too. All three of these applications are used in both Ubuntu and Windows. Moreover, I also use the same extensions (though a couple are slightly different versions).

My text editors are hardly different. In Windows, I use Notepad2, available on the Open CD. It's very good, highly recommended. On Ubuntu, I use gedit. But let's face it, a simple text editor isn't going to be radically different. Moving up, there's office applications. I don't use Microsoft Office, I use OpenOffice. I much prefer it, and it has functions that I use constantly that Microsoft Office just doesn't have - like PDF exportation. I also use Abiword, which suffices for almost all word documents. Both are available on both operating systems. When it comes down to media, however, there is a big difference. You can't using Windows Media Player (duh!). However, Ubuntu comes with the fantastic application that is Rhythmbox. Now, you do have to convert all your music to Ogg Vorbis, but that really shouldn't be a big problem. After all, you can download plug-ins that make Windows Media Player play Ogg Vorbis, and you can buy MP3 players that play this media type too. The joys of open formats! Granted, the application doesn't look as good as Windows Media Player, but it does the job just as well, and please, don't tell me you actually watch the visualisations, do you? For music streams online, there is the wonderful Streamtuner, with mplayer and Totem for playing DVDs. All of them do a wonderful job.

On to imaging and you guessed it, the program I use on Windows and Ubuntu is the same - GIMP. Oh, and it loads faster on Ubuntu than Windows (as does OpenOffice now I come to think of it). It works in exactly the same way. But it is more stable. The Windows version does have a tendency to crash when utilising certain modules.

In fact, when it comes down to comparing applications, there is only one area where Windows comes out on top: FTP. I prefer Filezilla over gFTP. I'm not a massive fan of the gFTP interface and Filezilla supports dragging and dropping much better. Filezilla is the one application I will reboot for - if I'm spending all day on website stuff and I know I'll be using ftp frequently, I will boot in to Windows. It just saves time. But it's the only application that I'll do that for.

So, anything else I use on Windows that I also use on Ubuntu? Why, since you mention it, yes! Audacity (for sound recording, very good little application). I think that does it for comparing applications - basically, moving to Linux hasn't meant that I've needed to lose any of my programs. Far from it. I have more programs installed on Ubuntu than I could ever have on Windows.

Stability and Performance

This is something I like. A lot. Ubuntu is generally very stable. I've only had a few problems with a fully working system - and most of them were with dodgy RAM. It doesn't normally crash for no reason. Applications don't crash too often either. When they do, a prompt comes up asking if you want to restart it immediately. You don't have endless pop-ups appear asking if you want to send Linus Torvalds a bug report that, let's face it, wouldn't get read anyway. Imagine if someone at Microsoft read every one of the bug reports I could have sent them. That'd be a full time job.

It's not just this, though. One important thing, for me, is that Ubuntu doesn't steal your CPU when you aren't looking. If I leave my PC for a few minutes, Windows tries to hijack my CPU by running background tasks for half of China, running anti-virus checks, spyware checks, downloading 60 billion Windows fixes for crap code. I woke up this morning and I could hear my PC whirring away at what sounded like a rather arduous task. When you wake up to a Ubuntu PC, it's quiet. It makes it so much more responsive. Imagine trying to open OpenOffice and the GIMP under a Windows machine that's processing 10 things in the background. That's going to be slow - and they open slowly to begin with. Under Ubuntu, because the CPU isn't cluttered, they'll open much faster. That's what I want. Nice. Performance is also enhanced by other things. I've used this illustration before, I know. But you probably didn't read it anyway. You want your desktop background to change automatically. Say, every 2 hours. In Windows, you download Webshots. It does the job, but it uses up 50Mb of RAM, 3% of your CPU, etc.. What's more, it uses that constantly, all the time the PC is turned on. What a waste. The Linux way - option 1 - put a script on your desktop that changes the wallpaper. Click it, and the wallpaper changes. Option 2: same as above, except the script runs as a cron job. Can't write the script? They're not hard to get hold of on the internet. Efficiency. That's what I'm after.

Closing Thoughts

So, after that glowing appraisal of Ubuntu, shall I tell you a secret? I wrote this whole post in Windows... This is Noelinho's problem, you see. He's fantastic at breaking software. It's like this: people come to me complaining that their PC doesn't work. I fix it and make it work again. How do I do this? I've got a PhD in breaking software. You don't learn to fix things without experimentation and breaking! No matter what I use, I'll make it break eventually. It's just me. I love playing. But for most people, people who just want their PC to work and aren't intent on trying out 50 new programs a day, distributions like Ubuntu will just work. You really should try it. Oh, wait. Only mrBen is actually left reading this...

Anyway, why did I write this? I've written similar things before. Well, having suffered a week without Ubuntu, I miss it. Windows doesn't make sense the way it used to. I constantly think 'but it'd be so much easier if it worked like this...' - and it would! I thought for a long time that, as a power user on Windows, I'd not get on with Linux. There'd be too many customisations that I'd lose. But I haven't. They just run a little differently. I've gained much from using Ubuntu. I recommend it not as a cheapskate geek who just loves to be different and show off with things that other people can't use, but because there's less stress involved, it's simpler, it does everything (gaming aside) that I need, and means that I can spend more time using my PC than setting it up. Though I should say, I'm just about to reinstall Ubuntu now...

(Tip: Always think before upgrading when you have a couple of thousand applications installed. Problem 1 - you can't actually remember what was installed. Problem 2 - the unexpected can always happen.)

Oh, and another thing - installing programs is far easier than under Windows. Really.)

Ubuntu Linux And Gadget Support

You may have seen this article on NewForge about Ubuntu Linux and gadgets, comparing support for gadgets betwwen Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.

Linux having comparable support for hardware to Windows? You probably wouldn't think so. However, the article asks the question anyway, looking at:

The result was this: on Windows XP, you had to wait until the drivers were installed. For one camera, the drivers appear to have been available for a local install. For the second, an installation driver was required. However, Ubuntu recognised both cameras straight away and already had the drivers installed. The only required action was to turn the cameras on. When I got my new digital camera, I also found that Ubuntu needed not bother to install anything - it just worked, whereas Windows XP needed to install drivers - for a camera that only needed a mass storage driver, not a set of specialised drivers for the camera.

The printer was a slightly different story. Windows XP installed via a 'large application package' - but installed without any real hitches. For Ubuntu, a package called HPLIP was installed, and seemed to work well for printing and copying, but not so good for scanning.

The rest of the article talks about using software related to this hardware, but I shall ignore it as it seems unnecessarily biased against Windows XP. Windows has enough shortfalls, there's really no need to skew an article to reflect Windows badly...

Apart from gaming, USB hardware support in Linux was about the only issue I had with Linux. However, I have been rather impressed by how much support there is for it. If only I wasn't so attached to my gaming, I could perform a little experiment on my second hard drive to see if it really can survive 50G's of force like it says on the label. I dare say it can't - well, no, it just plain _can't_ - but I'd have good fun watching it smash into a billion pieces under the impact :)

Interesting post path, don't you think? Hardware support in an OS - - > smashing a hard disk to pieces.

Noelinho - the missing link between unrelated thoughts :)