Linux

[xtifr]

As far as memory and such goes, though, my environment (FVWM) along with all the desktop applets I use takes up less memory than an absolute bare-bones Gnome or KDE system. I'm pretty sure it takes up less than even XFCE. FVWM is tiny, even with the dock plugin. But it does everything I need.

The only real disadvantage I've found (aside from the fact that it's a bear to configure--but I did that years ago) is that you have to reload it when the menus get updated. But that doesn't happen very often, and only takes a few seconds. But it is a manual process that you have to remember to do every so often.

So, no, I don't feel any guilt whatsover for the desktop applets I use. Not even the completely useless ones like wmMoonClock.

 

[megaresp]

Pitch my bitch = make a complaint

Ah, thank you. I can't for wait for an opportunity to drop 'pitch my bitch' into a conversation.

 

[Captain_Snort]

One thing I have found with KDE plasmoids is that it will remember what screen they are on. I only have them on showing on my main laptop when I use an external monitor as an extension. With no external, they do not simply move onto the active screen as they do in windows (which is really annoying if yo have any already there or a different screen geometry). I will say that Linux still has some-way to go for the ease at which it handles external, or multiple screens. In the office, I have to still manually set the screen size (have a simple shell script for it) so it will display at the correct resolution. It is also a bit of hit an miss when using a projector, so when I am lecturing I will usually run windows7 just as I am sure it will work most of the time. Another we rant, why it is very few people have libreoffice impress installed when you just bring along a USB. The Impress options are just a hell of a lot better from a presenters viewpoint IMHO.

 

[AgeGap]

I don't know if this is possible but could you put libreoffice portable on a usb with your presentation.

 

[AgeGap]

I have installed Mint 15 but I am shocked that it is only supported to January. Mint 14 is supported to April. Down to Ubuntu but it doesn't seem very long at all.
The first thing I did was download a couple of emulators (MAME and a PSX one). Can anyone recommend a game pad?

 

[Captain_Snort]

I don't know if this is possible but could you put libreoffice portable on a usb with your presentation.

It would be, but I have been places that want your presentation in beforehand, so they can put it into a 'meta' presentation to 'make it easier'. Easier for whom though is the question.

 

[GodMark2]

One thing I have found with KDE plasmoids is that it will remember what screen they are on. I only have them on showing on my main laptop when I use an external monitor as an extension. With no external, they do not simply move onto the active screen as they do in windows (which is really annoying if yo have any already there or a different screen geometry).

My desktop widgets migrate from laptop monitor to external primary monitor just fine. Maybe there's a setting somewhere that prevents/permits that.

 

[The Norseman]

Since I discovered that my then-current distro of SolusOS was being dropped, I have been coasting along for a while until I finally figured out which OS to go to next. I thought of Arch but ultimately settled on simplyMEPIS. It's a Debian base running KDE. Got it up and running and had a pretty easy time of getting the ATI drivers installed, the dual monitors working properly and so on. Getting full sound to work was a bear though.

Now finally I'm trying to get sound to work with flash in my browser and that's about it. Overall, I think it's been a smooth transition from one OS to the next.

 

[Mitchell314]

Trying my first non-debian-family distro CentOS; it's always been Ubuntu and Debian for me. But a couple days ago I was muddling around with some custom gtksource files, and I couldn't help but notice how horribly outdated some of the default gnome apps were. Cough gedit. So I figured if I wanted to play with the newest toys, why not go with a new system. It'll be my first time with Gnome 3, too.

Really tempted to give zfs a spin, though I doubt running it in a small VM with my humble hardware would do it the justice it deserves.

 

[Axiom_Blade]

But a couple days ago I was muddling around with some custom gtksource files, and I couldn't help but notice how horribly outdated some of the default gnome apps were. Cough gedit.

I love Geany. It's a great, lightweight text editor that can be extended into a development environment.

 

[The Norseman]

Since I discovered that my then-current distro of SolusOS was being dropped, I have been coasting along for a while until I finally figured out which OS to go to next. I thought of Arch but ultimately settled on simplyMEPIS. It's a Debian base running KDE. Got it up and running and had a pretty easy time of getting the ATI drivers installed, the dual monitors working properly and so on. Getting full sound to work was a bear though.

Now finally I'm trying to get sound to work with flash in my browser and that's about it. Overall, I think it's been a smooth transition from one OS to the next.

Ha! Well, couldn't get sound to work as I needed, and there were a few other problems I encountered with MEPIS, so I decided to go back to Linux Mint Debian Edition. Installed LMDE with (gah, can't remember if I went with cinnamon or MATE.) Anyway, sound works flawlessly with no tweaking on my part, I had to unplug one of my monitors to initially install LMDE plus the proprietary ATI drivers, but once that was done, I plugged in my second monitor and both work flawlessly as well. Strangely enough, LMDE recognized the model and brand of my printer but said there were no drivers, so that's really the only hiccup.

Oh, and the other major problem with MEPIS is that it kept dropping my wired internet connection every 15-20 minutes and I had to manually reconnect. LMDE recognized the wired internet and has not had one single drop or foul up.

Getting VMWare installed was a breeze so now I can run a virtual WinXP so I can utilize WP. I may end up messing around with the last Linux version of WP but I'm not sure yet.

Anyway, that's my diary entry for now. Linux on, everybody!





ETA:

Oops! Forgot to mention that MEPIS failed spectacularly with any torrents (ahem, such as VMWare...) but LMDE again worked flawlessly at torrents straight out of the box. Overall, I was mildly disappointed with MEPIS considering the amount of effort I was having to put into it so I could simply have an OS that just worked. LMDE did that.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

I have to say, it took me a while to get what the KDE team was doing, but now that I "get" KDE Frameworks 5 it looks really awesome. I think a lot of people go looking to DEs for cool new UI stuff, but KDE 5 is technically a masterpiece, I tell you.

That said, KDE does desperately need visual design help, and it looks like they are taking steps by starting a design committee as asking for help from the community. My only concern based on the website is that these designers seem to be on the Metro/Modern bandwagon of big, blank, coloured squares. But it is only the website. One can only hope they develop a less glaringly Windows Vista-esque eye-candy theme.

And Debian chose systemd over Upstart! Suck it, Canonical !

 

[The Norseman]

I have to say, it took me a while to get what the KDE team was doing, but now that I "get" KDE Frameworks 5 it looks really awesome. I think a lot of people go looking to DEs for cool new UI stuff, but KDE 5 is technically a masterpiece, I tell you.

That said, KDE does desperately need visual design help, and it looks like they are taking steps by starting a design committee as asking for help from the community. My only concern based on the website is that these designers seem to be on the Metro/Modern bandwagon of big, blank, coloured squares. But it is only the website. One can only hope they develop a less glaringly Windows Vista-esque eye-candy theme.

I was always partial to KDE over the years because it allowed for more nuanced control of my DE. Then there was this huge mess with everyone practically killing one another over Gnome and KDE changes and fork this, fork that... too much for me to follow, to be honest. Good to hear that KDE is finally taking action though, and listening to their "customer base".

And Debian chose systemd over Upstart! Suck it, Canonical !

Yeah, I read about that, but I am wondering if you could put it in dummy terms regarding the benefits of systemd?

 

[Blue Mountain]

Yeah, I read about that, but I am wondering if you could put it in dummy terms regarding the benefits of systemd?

Because Lennart Poettering says it's good!

Frankly, I'm not totally sold yet on systemd. The old shell-script based rc.d approach, while clunky and maybe none too fast, has the huge advantage of being human readable. I've investigated and solved many system startup problems by reading and hacking scripts in /etc/rd.c/init.d.

systemd, on the other hand, consists largely of compiled binary files that are not easily read or hacked. If something goes wrong you're entirely at the mercy of the whatever debugging messages systemd chooses to give you. I remember one time on my home system I had moved aside /usr/lib/udev/rules.d while debugging a problem on libmtp. When I booted the laptop the next morning systemd panicked when it couldn't mount my root filesystem. All it told me was it couldn't do it--it gave no indication as to the reason why. After a couple of hours searching though things, I finally remembered the change I'd made regarding the /usr/lib/udev/rules.d directory and put the original one back into place, which fixed the problem.

If systemd had emitted a message like error: cannot find /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/nn-whatever-file-I-need.rules, which I think it should have done when it could not find or open a file it obviously required to do its work, the time to fix would have been 30 seconds. To this day I still don't know what part of systemd actually attempts the filesystem mounts, so I haven't been able to examine the code to see if it's even checking for errors when attempting to open whatever file it needs in that directory.

 

[The Norseman]

Because Lennart Poettering says it's good!

Frankly, I'm not totally sold yet on systemd. The old shell-script based rc.d approach, while clunky and maybe none too fast, has the huge advantage of being human readable. I've investigated and solved many system startup problems by reading and hacking scripts in /etc/rd.c/init.d.

systemd, on the other hand, consists largely of compiled binary files that are not easily read or hacked. If something goes wrong you're entirely at the mercy of the whatever debugging messages systemd chooses to give you. I remember one time on my home system I had moved aside /usr/lib/udev/rules.d while debugging a problem on libmtp. When I booted the laptop the next morning systemd panicked when it couldn't mount my root filesystem. All it told me was it couldn't do it--it gave no indication as to the reason why. After a couple of hours searching though things, I finally remembered the change I'd made regarding the /usr/lib/udev/rules.d directory and put the original one back into place, which fixed the problem.

If systemd had emitted a message like error: cannot find /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/nn-whatever-file-I-need.rules, which I think it should have done when it could not find or open a file it obviously required to do its work, the time to fix would have been 30 seconds. To this day I still don't know what part of systemd actually attempts the filesystem mounts, so I haven't been able to examine the code to see if it's even checking for errors when attempting to open whatever file it needs in that directory.

Thank you! I was musing to myself after I wrote my previous post that one of the things I really like about Linux is the human-readable scripts and files. It may be a pain sometimes to really track something down, but... it's possible to actually track it down. To this day, Windows still says crap like, "error: please see your system administrator" followed by an obtuse hex-dump or even more mystical error.

Now, I happen to be pretty proficient in Googling Windows/other OS errors, so at least I have that much going for me, and to be fair, I can find forums that describe even the mystical MS Hex Codes and human-translated ways of solving the problem, but that's an extra step. Linux *tends* to be just human-readable in general which speeds up my troubleshooting times quite a bit for the most part.

Anyway, to my post and your response, I was for some reason under the impression that systemd was, in fact, human-readable rather than a binary. I can't remember how I got that impression though. Maybe due to some high praise that some people were singing regarding systemd. Maybe they themselves didn't understand but one other forum was a debate between two people that had a very intimate knowledge level of the relative merits of systemd and init.d but, alas, was beyond me to follow. Maybe I got confused while trying to follow that debate.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Upstart vs systemd is hard to put into simple terms. I would say at base systemd is Linux specific with cgroups, dependency focused, more abitious and bigger (encompassing more functions), while Upstart is not Linux specific, event focused, and smaller/more conservative. Of course, simple terms often hide complex ideas .

I would say the biggest sticking point for people were:

• Upstart would work with BSD, while systemd wouldn't.
• Upstart development means the Ubuntu CLA, which many felt was too unbalanced in Canonical's favour.
• Relatedly, everyone else is developing for and with systemd, including Gnome and KDE and applications specifically incorporating it.

There are lots of technical differences, but it wasn't really about those.

Mark Shuttleworth just announced that Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, will go along with systemd. Everyone is praising him for being rational and diplomatic, but that is just proof of how irrational and undiplomatic Ubuntu has become in recent years. Hopefully once Ubuntu Phone goes the way of the Ubuntu TV he will ditch Mir.

I think the only other group that used Upstart was Google with ChromeOS. It will be interesting to see where that goes.

 

[The Norseman]

Thank you for responding!

Upstart vs systemd is hard to put into simple terms. I would say at base systemd is Linux specific with cgroups, dependency focused, more abitious and bigger (encompassing more functions), while Upstart is not Linux specific, event focused, and smaller/more conservative. Of course, simple terms often hide complex ideas .

I would say the biggest sticking point for people were:

• Upstart would work with BSD, while systemd wouldn't.
• Upstart development means the Ubuntu CLA, which many felt was too unbalanced in Canonical's favour.
• Relatedly, everyone else is developing for and with systemd, including Gnome and KDE and applications specifically incorporating it.

There are lots of technical differences, but it wasn't really about those.

Mark Shuttleworth just announced that Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, will go along with systemd. Everyone is praising him for being rational and diplomatic, but that is just proof of how irrational and undiplomatic Ubuntu has become in recent years. Hopefully once Ubuntu Phone goes the way of the Ubuntu TV he will ditch Mir.

I think the only other group that used Upstart was Google with ChromeOS. It will be interesting to see where that goes.

As to the highlighted, could you explain that part in a little better detail?

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Thank you for responding!




As to the highlighted, could you explain that part in a little better detail?

Well, perhaps I should differentiate between Mark, Canonical, and Ubuntu devs. Mark has made a habit of calling out people (sometimes the wrong people) in his blogs who oppose the Canonical way. For Canonical/Ubuntu itself, Mir and Unity are the big offenders. Ubuntu has been increasingly becoming an island. They are doing their own things for their own projects. Which doesn't sound so terrible, but in the open source ecosystem it burns bridges left and right. Ubuntu went from wanting to free the desktop with human friendly Linux for everyone, to wanting to be profitable from cloud and mobile licensing. Mark also has announced many of these changes at a drop of a hat, and in contradiction of previous commitments to external devs and the community. The CLA I mentioned before, which gives Canonical re-licensing rights, has kept everyone but Canonical from working on their technologies. This is all in addition to smaller ways that Ubuntu has been closing up shop. Management tells the devs what to do, and the community needs to be grateful for it. Mir and Unity have been going nowhere fast.

Histories here.

 

[BazBear]

Well, perhaps I should differentiate between Mark, Canonical, and Ubuntu devs. Mark has made a habit of calling out people (sometimes the wrong people) in his blogs who oppose the Canonical way. For Canonical/Ubuntu itself, Mir and Unity are the big offenders. Ubuntu has been increasingly becoming an island. They are doing their own things for their own projects. Which doesn't sound so terrible, but in the open source ecosystem it burns bridges left and right. Ubuntu went from wanting to free the desktop with human friendly Linux for everyone, to wanting to be profitable from cloud and mobile licensing. Mark also has announced many of these changes at a drop of a hat, and in contradiction of previous commitments to external devs and the community. The CLA I mentioned before, which gives Canonical re-licensing rights, has kept everyone but Canonical from working on their technologies. This is all in addition to smaller ways that Ubuntu has been closing up shop. Management tells the devs what to do, and the community needs to be grateful for it. Mir and Unity have been going nowhere fast.

Histories here.

Yep, Mir and Unity are a couple of cluster-*****. I use the Lubuntu version of Ubuntu (LXDE lightweight desktop environment instead of Unity), but at this rate I'll probably switch to LXDE on top of another Debian based distro in the not too distant future.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Yep, Mir and Unity are a couple of cluster-*****. I use the Lubuntu version of Ubuntu (LXDE lightweight desktop environment instead of Unity), but at this rate I'll probably switch to LXDE on top of another Debian based distro in the not too distant future.

I was worried about LXDE because it was basically a one man show, but since he decided to switch to Qt and is thus merging with Razor-qt I am less concerned about the future.

I don't think XFCE, though much more popular, has decided for certain what they are doing about the future. Which is odd, given that Debian is looking at making it default.