I’ve just upgraded to Kubuntu 6.10 - actually I did a full reinstall since I hadn’t had much time to use the install I did at the beginning of the summer. This install went a lot smoother than 6.06 did in June. The graphical install worked, and the disk partition tool was able to change the partitions on my disk that already had an XP install on it without any problems.

After the base install was done, I had to spend a couple of hours sorting out a variety of small problems while trying to get to a usable system state. The time spent made me realize just how far Linux is from being accepted at the desktop by average users.

I am surprised to see that basic items like MP3 support still aren’t part of the default install. I understand the licensing concerns, but surely something can be done to solve them. Accessing media on network shares is still problematic, too. A share can be seen, but the media can’t play off it without editing /etc/fstab - try explaining that to a non-technical friend.

When I started configuring the wireless network I found three different tools installed, each of which had a different interface and only one of which could support WPA. In the end the wireless service didn’t get configured because my network card (Broadcom based) wasn’t supported. The system didn’t tell me that either - I remembered from earlier work that the Dell notebooks required extra monkeying around to get wireless working.

Software remains complicated to install, and standard ways of doing things aren’t in place yet. Getting packages I wanted to use required editing the apt configuration files by hand. Even after downloading some packages, the installs failed until I updated the /bin/sh link to point to bash instead of dash.

One area where Linux has simplified things better than Windows is updates. If you stick to using the default package manager for a given distribution, updates for the entire system are simple. There’s no need to connect back to the update service repeatedly (like one must in Windows), or to update individual software packages one by one.

It seems to me that there is too much focus on evangelism and ideals, and too little focus on the actual needs and wants of the average user. Decisions can’t be made simply based on performance, or licenses, or idealistic views of what an OS should be. Usability and consistency are vitally important.

After failing to get Ubuntu to install this week, I downloaded the Kubuntu DVD image and used it to boot my notebook. It looked very similar to Ubuntu during the startup process, and left me at KDE desktop instead of a Gnome desktop (hence the K in the name). I’ve come to prefer KDE over the past couple of years because it’s easier to switch between Windows and KDE - the metaphors are similar. I haven’t bothered to take the time to get my head around what Gnome is doing. For me, KDE just works.

The install process was also very similar, but this time an option to format the partitions as they were created was available. It made a difference - I was able to create, format, and then install to a partition created in the unallocated 20gigs on my disk.

The rest of the install process was a breeze. The only change to the system I felt necessary after initially installing was to enable the root account. I appreciate that working in a non-root account and using sudo is a safer way of administering the machine, but I prefer to su into root as necessary and do a bunch of tasks at once.

I haven’t worked on the notebook under Kubuntu as of yet, but I’m pleased the install was smooth.

Rather than just loading Fedora and continuing as usual, I’ve decided to take a look at some of the other distros, starting with Ubuntu.

I started out by downloading and ISO of ubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386, and burned it to CD. I then restarted the notebook and let the machine boot from CD. After several minutes I was sitting at a sleek looking Gnome desktop with an “Install” icon on it. I started the install, and was taken through the usual keyboard, language, and time settings, and then prompted me create the first user on the system.

The next step was to allocate disk space to Linux. The default was to erase my entire disk and let the install create and allocate partitions for me. Since I have Windows XP installed, I selected “Manually edit the partition table” and hit next. After a minute of scanning the disk I was taken to a screen that showed my partition table.

When I did the first XP install I left 22 gigs of space free for installing Linux, which I selected in the partitioning tool and split into a 1 gig swap partition (”New Partition #1″) and a 21 gig root partition (”New Partition #2″). I clicked next and told the install to go ahead and write the changes to the disk.

After a minute or so, I was taken to the next screen where I was to select the partition I wanted to allocate to “/”. The drop down list didn’t show my newly created partitions though. Figuring I must of done something wrong, I went pack to the previous screen. My partitions were there, but they were not tagged as having the filesystem types I thought I had assigned. I removed and recreated the partitions, taking extra care to assign the proper filesystems.

I clicked next again, said okay to the changes and was taken to the partition assignment screen after a minute or so. Again, the drop down list didn’t show the partitions.

I tried a couple of more times before giving up and searching the Ubuntu forums for an answer. It turns the partition tool in the installer is known to be buggy - you can’t manually edit partitions.

At this point my first attempt at installing Ubuntu ended in failure.

Next up: Kubuntu from DVD.

Not playing WoW on a regular basis means I can go back to running Linux on my primary desktop at home again. I had been running Fedora up until I started playing WoW last fall, and still have it running on a variety of machines. I am also interested to see what Ubuntu is like - it’s been getting a lot of buzz.

The bash shell has a quirk in how it recognizes numbers that caused my monthly mail archiving cron job to hiccup again this morning. Numbers preceded by a zero are assumed to be octal. My script stores the previous month in a variable as follows:
MTH=$((`date +%m` - 1))
This worked fine until last month when I got the following error in the cron output: value too great for base (error token is “08″). Instead of storing the archive as 2005-07, it stored it as 2005-00. The date command as above returns the month as two digits which fools bash into thinking it is working with octal numbers for the first nine months of the year. August and September (08 and 09) are invalid values in octal.

The problem is fixed in one of two ways. GNU date can be told not to zero pad the numbers by inserting a hyphen between the ‘%’ and ‘m’:
MTH=$((`date +%-m` - 1))
The bash shell can also be told the number is decimal by using the base#number notation as follows:
MTH=$((10#`date +%m` - 1))
For September this modifies the date output to be 10#09, which bash evaluates as a decimal instead of octal 9. This method can be applied more generally to anytime a script is returning zero padded values that should be interpreted as decimal numbers.

I spent the weekend re-configuring the machines in my home office. My primary workstation now runs Linux (Fedora). The XP station is still running, but it is stripped down to a basic machine. I can access it easily enough through rdesktop when I need to use a Windows app, although that’s only been for Nero so far. All data, our twiki site, and this blog has been moved to a new server.

I’ve been aiming to cut over to Linux as my primary work platform for some time. Almost everything I do now is on open source software, so there was little reason to work within Windows. I rarely have need for the standard office type applications anymore, since most business data is now stored within a wiki. My primary use of a wordprocessor is for writing assignment submissions for CGA courses. Spreadsheets still have their use, but OpenOffice.org Calc should do fine. Should I really need to use MS Office, the corporate notebook still has it.

There are some limitations to Linux though. It’s not quite as polished as Windows is, for example, when network browsing and connecting shares, but most of the issues are small. On the other hand I was impressed to see that the printing worked as soon as I plugged in the Brother MFC-8600 to the USB port. All it required me to do was approve the driver the system had selected as being appropriate. Printing was an area I had expected to have to do some manual configuration.

Microsoft makes some great products. Their operating systems are too popular with the virus and worm authors for my liking right now, but they have come a long way in the last few years. Gone are the days of the daily (or more) reboots to keep a workstation stable. MS Office applications, and particularly Excel, are very powerful - too powerful for the average user. Using a $500 suite of software to type letters and create tables is too expensive, especially when equally useful tools are available in the OSS world.

Each of the guys at the office has a dual head box running Fedora Core 3 for displaying Big Brother and other monitoring tools. We use Matrox G550’s for video, since they seemed to provide the most consistent output on two analog monitors.

There is a minor problem with the driver that Fedora ships: it disables analog output on the DVI connector. The problem appears the first time the machine is restarted after everything is up and running. The issue is easily resolved by installing the mga drivers from the Matrox website.