Linux

Well, it looks like alice is now fully operational: and my fingers are adjusting to her keyboard rapidly. Fortunately, I am finding myself more often hitting fn+key in place of ctrl+key on dixie, then I am on alice. Whew.

I’ve installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and set it up to behave as dixie has been used all these years: a workstation rather than a terminal. I don’t have time to fiddle further with making OpenBSD play nice with Windows 7 on this rig. This does pretty much net me all that I desire: a bourne shell, decent terminal multiplexer, XMonad, Chrome, Pidgin, Dropbox, and a system tray area. I can live with the (ugh) GNU and Ubuntu parts.

The only real difference between the Desktop and Netbook editions of Ubuntu, the former comes with a customised GNOME where as the latter comes with a custom GNOME shell called “Unity“. I have really got to say that Unity SUCKS!!!!!! I seriously cannot fathom anyone getting real work done with Unity because you’ll have to set it up to do anything more useful than launch Mozilla, it feels so useless, that I think I would trade GNU/Linux for MS-DOS 2/3, and old DOS really, really did suck. Once I found the GNOME shortcut for the run dialog didn’t work, I decided instantly it would have to Go.

But to be fair, Unity does do some Very Good Things, and I commend the engineers behind it for breaking away from the Windows norm, that every GUI app tends to follow. The focus on full-screening the apps also is a feature that I like. The whole dock/sidebar thing is also quite nice, if kind of restrictive. Not even KDE4 offered as much nice “Wow, this looks integrated” kind of warm and fuzzies.

But I don’t want to take hours to try and restructure the thing, nor do I want to constantly grep programs by their menu pretty names, or have to push a button for just about every darn thing. OK, I still live in a command prompt 75% or more of the time, so sue me.

Sometime ago, installing KDE rather fouled up the gnome session on my laptop. That was the first strike against Ubuntu package management. Well the other day, I was adding a few more development packages, and trying to think of what kind of minimalist tiling window manager I would like to try. The only real reason I’ve been using gnome the past few months, is that’s the default and the system kind of centred around it o/. In working on a list of what window managers I wanted to test out, I decided that I would like to install dmenu first. So I installed dwm-tools to get it, using synaptic (I find it easier to use the GUI for searching for available dpkg’s).

Well, sure enough on reboot things were FUBAR. GDM unable to log into anything, XDM bumfucked, and using KDM to launch a Gnome session resulted in a barely functioning one, just like before. KDE however worked perfectly, and I also have come to see KDE4.4 as the slowest pile of software in the Linux world >_>. That’s the only bad thing I currently have to say against it. Reinstalling GDM, Gnome, and related packages didn’t help matters any. So I bid farwell to Ubuntu once and for all, and I’m not going to say hello to Debian for a while either.

I’ve always used Slackware or Debian ‘esque systems, when I’m stuck using or desiring to use a GNU/Linux distribution. People have reccomended Arch and Gentoo, and I’ve meant to experiment with Source Mage and Arch for a while. However, I don’t have time to fuck around, and Debian dpkg or Fedora rpm level compatability is desirable. So I flicked a wild switch and decided to try something a bit more red headed.

Enter CentOS 5.5! While certainly a fine Linux distribution, and its yum tool proving much more, pleasurable than manually invoking rpm. There were numerous problems. Most of the packages in CentOS, even after using RPMForge and EPEL (a community supported mirror of newer packages for RHEL)—most of the packages in CentOS were ancient. The youngest of my development packages was slightly younger than my laptop, and most just so old that it’s distasteful. That would mean, to get any *real* work done, I would have to forsake yum and install/manage my software manually from source. Joy, why didn’t I just slack off? That however wasn’t a show stopper. It was getting the blobs I rely on to function on top of that, that seriously broke the deal. I gave up trying to get Chrome working. There were also problems getting the default gnome desktop to work, but I wasn’t planning to use anything heavier than blackbox anyway.

CentOS has earned my respect among Linux distributions, and I like the system a lot. I just can’t rely on it for my personal work station :'(. For regular desktop and laptop users, CentOS is probably a great idea though. I’m not a regular user by any means.

So after that, I started relying on the only thing left I could trust: my own head. Using a mixture of CentOS on my laptop, a USB stick, and NFS mounting the work dir’ on the desktop (faster processor), I set to work. Building scripts to fetch and build Linux and the usual GNU packages. My own Linux distro. Trying to get things to actually fucking build was a bit of a different story. Remind me to never rely on chroots in Linux.

Since plans C and D popped a cork, I quickly zipped up my work and saved it to the flash drive. Then archived my home directory over SSH. Googled for Slackware’s latest release and searched ye ol’ wikipedia for related distributions. I know of several but have never used anything more slackware, except for a very brief test run of KateOS. Among a quick grep of distros related to Slackware, one that stood out was Zenwalk.

Plan B, as everyone knows, is make it up as you go along. Or at least, out of my ever present plans A through D, that’s my plan B ;).

So I have setup Zenwalk Core 6.4—they have several distributions. Unlike the complete Xfce based system of Standard, Zenwalks Core distribution has a rather minimal but complete base of packages. All without the headache of selecting what to install in slackwares installer lol. Core is a command line install, X isn’t included. That is my kind of system, hehe. There are a few helper tools but for the most part, I prefer to work directly in /etc when possible. Being based on Slackware, of course Zenwalk Core doesn’t feel alien in this department. The Debian/Red Hat based systems tend to be more confusing then need be, where as the BSD systems usually forgo run levels in favour of traditional unix Simplicity. In slack country, a happy median is found.

The main point of interest here, is package management: zenwalk uses a shell script called netpkg to manage things. I really is a crude form of pkg_add/apt-get but it gets the job done. It’s not perfect and has it’s qurks, for example netpkg foo will interactively ask you if you wish to install/reinstall each package matching ‘foo’ along with a yes/no to installing each missing dependency; where as netpkg install full-foo-pkg-name.txz will install foo, omitting dependencies. It gets the job done.

It’s the slackware compatability that I like about it though, namely the ability to rip apart RPM packages into Slackware tarballs and hand sort the dependency (netpkg can do some dependency work). Installing dropbox was a cake walk, just rip open the RPM and install it as a vanilla slackware package.

The problem is the network, sigh. The reason I hate Linux from a user perspective, is YMMV quite a lot between Linux distributions. Never mind that most distributions use the same software. In my case, the problem seems focused totally on my wireless card. I’m also to tired to go into it right now.

But to suffice it to say, I am still alive <_<

After so many years of dodging RHL and company, I finally opted to give Fedora fair chance. Since it’s a big disk set and I lack the spare DVD medium, I opted to d/l the net install and live cds. For the sake of wanting to try it, I also opted to download the x86_64 version, since the machines processor is an Intel 64.

Round one: a very nice setup using the netinstall disk, only to find out, as anticipated it was cram packed full of network drivers (as any sane distributor would do), even had the necessary crypto support! Just not a driver for my fairly common wireless card. Even more irksome, whether by virtue of bad design in GRUB, BIOS, or a foup up in Anaconda, on rebooting the system, I was greated with a load of gibberish in the terminal, where in pressing enter goes to the Intel Boot Agent for PXE based booting 8=). Odds are my knoppix disk can nuke the MBR back to a stock without trouble, or I could just reach for my FreeBSD disk and correct the MBR.

Round two: go scp myself the the live cd ISO, and burncd it. Only to find it increadably slow and not very agreeable. However the blasted thing was able to auto load the necessary crap for my wireless, connecting after I supplied the nearly 500bit code for the system. While I don’t care much for yielding the package selection (or screwing with the running image in slow mo), it shouldn’t be hard to adjust things post boot and tune Fedora to my tastes. That’s kind of one plus of the distribution, it’s more of a screw with it until you break something sort ;). However the installer wouldn’t function off the disk, so back to the drawing board….

Round three A: cart the entire freaking kit to my room, and hook it into the router with a spare Ethernet cable. No thanks, there are distros that ‘like’ my hardare.

Round three B: Download and burn five disks of Fedora 12…. and shout loudly if the driver isn’t included.

Of course, I could likely have show horned the driver from the live disk into working with the net install disk, pardoning kernel panics, if I hadn’t chucked the disk already >_>. That is also assuming that the installers demands could be appeased!

In the end I took round three B, finding that Fedora x86_64 and for sake of testing, Ubuntu x86_64 really do not like my hardware! So much for having suitable kit >_>. Rather than trouble myself further to fetch a set of Fedora i386, I dug out a two year old (8.04) Ubuntu 32-bit disk and installed that. Did a quick set of updates to bring her to the new 10.04 LTS.

After installing about 900 extra software packages… I think I’m done, lol.

With my laptops updates finished last night, I’m finally ready to go green on setting up Fedora 12 on my desktop. Although I could always wait ~two weeks, I’d rather see how the system tkes the upgrade to Fedora 13. I’m also interested, to see how SWAT 4 and Raven Shield play with it, both in the client and server role.

The main thing that concerns me, is doing the install of Fedora ver the network. Generally speaking, I have had much better hardware support from modern BSDs then I have Linux distributions. On the other hand however, Fedora tends to be more ‘cutting edge’ and bloated to kingdom come, where as most distributions that I favour, tend to be more focused on stability and share my view points on minimalism. So hopefully, Fedora will take well to it.

In waiting for Dixie to sort the compiling, I spent much of it reading up on more of the finer details of Common Lisp, including CLTL. While I knew that modern lisp was a rather huge beast, I am now convinced that it must dwarf C++, in which case you have to take the C++ standard (and occasionally Cs) into sequence, along with Boost and numerous issues of developmental expertise. Most of which, I reckon, are rather learned by living with classy C++ code, or having to put up with shitty code when you know there’s better.

Now where did I store my CD-Rs… lololololol

Now  having less need of maintaining a Windows XP install, last night I began more thorough computations about setting up a GNU/Linux distribution on my desktop. I would certainly like to see how the SWAT 4 support has come since my last outing, and this time I intend to use regular WINE.

As always, the real question is which distribution to use? Arguably the least trouble would be to setup Ubuntu 10.04, but I’m more familiar with Debian and Slack’ based systems as it is. This time, I was thinking about going with Fedora: I’m not fond of Red Hat Linux and it’s modern relations, but it would be a fresh change.

The main thing that concerns me with Fedora, is the stability and upgrade path, mostly the amount of time needed to abuse things. Ubuntu is fairly painless, at least when you run Long Term Support (LTS) releases on your stable systems. My only gripe with Debian, being it can be a chore to get reasonably up to date debs, and sometimes (for example with Pidgin) it can be preferable to be ready op on that. Although I’ve no big qualms about building from source, when the developers actually knew wtf they were doing about getting it building in the first place.

I’m more of the OpenBSD type, but Linux as a “For the masses” system, is much easier to live with for me, then Windows XP. With 350~360 gigs of disk space free, running full development environments in twins won’t make a dent either.