bobpeers -> blog

I installed Ubuntu 9.10 into Virtualbox last night just to kick the tires so to speak.

The installation went very easily as to be expected from Ubuntu. There’s not many options to choose but even so it’s a very polished and smooth procedure.

My first impression of the desktop is that, like the installer, it’s very polished in appearance. I really like the new notification icons, they are very clear and more professional than before. My main comments are that it seems very responsive, there’s no delay when clicking on menus and applications open almost immediately.

I would say that Firefox opened from a cold start in about 2 seconds and even Open Office opened much quicker than I expect.

I tried to use bootchart to get a feel for how long the boot process took, but unfortunately even after multiple reboot it continued to report boot time of over 1 minute which I know must be wrong. My gut feeling is that the boot was around 25 to 30 seconds.

Having used Fedora for a few years now I don’t think I’m lightly to switch and I miss many things out of the box (there’s no GUI to control the firewall or services for example) that I’m used to in Fedora. Plus I like the ability to choose the install packages on the Fedora DVD instead of adding them later from the repositories.

Having said that, I think Ubuntu looks and performs great and the other distros can certainty learn a lot from Ubuntu 9.10.

I recently had a problem with a 2 page document scanned to pdf that was far too light to read, the black text had become light grey and the contrast was too low.

I searched how to fix this but everything suggested using Photoshop to edit each page, then save to pdf and finally using some extra program to stitch the 2 pdf files together.

At this point it was obviously going to be easier using Linux so I opened Virtualbox and started Fedora 11.

I imported the pdf pages into GIMP, edited them and saved as pdf, then I used Ghostscript to join the files using the following command:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

I could have done all of this on Windows but not without searching and installing extra programs, in Fedora it was all just there

This is one of the reasons I love Linux, for me the out of box experience leaves Windows in the dust.

After reading this article on optimizations made to Ubunbtu 9.10 in relation to the boot time I thought I would check this out in a virtual machine.

I understand that much of the work done will help when booting from an SSD drive and using a virtual machine adds an extra layer between the OS and the bare metal but I though it would be interesting to compare the boot time to Fedora 11, that I also have installed in a VM.

Setting Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 and Fedora 11 up in identical virtual machines, both set to auto login with bootchart installed I was very surprised by the results.

Ubuntu booted in between 1 minute and 1 minute 6 seconds while Fedora 11 booted in between 32 and 34 seconds. This is by no means a controlled test and Ubuntu is still in alpha status but I was pretty shocked by the results. Hopefully by it’s release it will be booting in the sub 30 seconds range.

My old laptop from 2003 runs the original Centrino (Banias) with a 1.3MHz Pentium M. Up till now it’s dual booted Windows XP and Fedora 9 but since I never use it I decided to wipe clean and just install Fedora 11.

It actually runs amazingly well on a full gnome desktop, it’s fast, responsive, boots in about 30 seconds and shuts down in about 5 seconds! I’m sure it actually runs faster than it did with the old install.

I’m pleased that a new OS still runs fine on an old laptop and despite the increasing size and complexity of the OS it doesn’t seem to have impacted performance.

As much as I love Synology products one glaring omission has been the lack of Linux support to set up the Disk Station. Bearing in mind that the products themselves run Linux it seems very strange that you have to use a Mac or Windows PC to get them up and running.

Reading this announcement I’m pleased to see that they have a beta release that now supports Linux. Well it actually states that it supports Ubuntu but I really hope they work on releasing packages for other distributions or at least the source so we can compile it for ourselves.

In the worst case I can still install it using Ubuntu in a virtual machine, still miles better than having to have Windows around just for this.

After writing about the icons in the Fedora 11 Gnome desktop I came across this article on OSNews about Gnome possibly dropping the icons on menus and buttons.

From the comments it’s clear that most people think that the Gnome developers should just fix the icons rather than just remove them but I’m undecided on the issue. I certainly agree that Gnome has a ‘chunky’ appearance right now that removing icons would fix but properly designed svg icons would also look great.

Nothing is decided as yet but it will be interesting to see what happens to Gnome in the near future.

Using Fedora 11 with the default settings it strikes me that although most of the interface and icons seems reasonably modern there’s a few glaring exceptions. See the image below from the Control Centre.

The ‘Network’ and ‘Network Device Control’ icons look like they haven’t been updated in years, in fact I’m sure they’re the same as when I started using Fedora Core 4. They’re not terrible but they certainly stand out as being different from the rest. Maybe Fedora 12 will show them some love….

One of the great things about Linux is the sheer variety. Some are great for servers, some for netbooks and some are just there to fix problems.

A Windows computer I use recently died in a big way, it booted and seemed to be starting but then died with the infamous blue screen saying something about ‘Cannot boot from the disk’. Not having the original CD with me I was in a bit of a jam to fix it just from Windows.

Fortunately I have SystemRescueCd on a disc so I booted the computer from the CD to see what I could do.

I decided to start the X server (typing wizard to start) as I’ve never used it before so decided it might be easier with a GUI. A few seconds later I had a fast, responsive XFCE desktop with a bunch of tools to try. First up I used TestDisk to rewrite the mbr followed by GParted to rewrite the partition table.

Unfortunately none of this actually got the computer to start Windows so I decided it was time to replace the computer but not before I copied the important documents off the hard drive.

Back into Linux and I soon mounted the hard drive and inserted and mounted a flash drive. In no time I had found all the files and copied them off to the flash drive ready to copy over to the replacement computer.

Linux may not have fixed the underlying problem but at least it enabled me to get at the hard drive so I could copy off any files I wanted (while conveniently ignoring windows file permissions as a bonus!). It’s at times like this that I’m glad to have a bootable CD with me, or even better a bootable flash drive that will be my next test.

It seems everyone has an opinion on the Google Chrome OS announcement (me included!). In the past week I must have read 30-40 different articles or blogs on the subject.

Opinion seems very divided on whether it’s a serious threat to Microsoft Windows, no threat, or rather ironically, a threat to Linux.

I see it like this.

1. Google will have a very hard time getting any market share if they only look at netbooks. Of course I’d be naive to think that they don’t intend to attack the desktop at some point.
2. It will be even harder to get any traction on the desktop. Most people still expect to download some .exe file and just install it. The familiarity and enormous installed user base of Windows is a major hurdle to overcome.
3. If it’s locked down to work with Google Apps then am I any better off then being locked into Apple or Windows environments.
4. As for the comments that it further splits the Linux community I can’t really see the problem. I view diversity in the Linux world as a good thing and any work done by Google on instant-on system will undoubtedly feed through to the wider Linux ecosystem.
5. At the end of the day Google were forced into this position. They must know that who controls the desktop also controls (or heavily influences) the online world. Microsoft constantly try to make our online experience a Microsoft-only one by changing the default browser without asking and search to Live Search (or Bing). There’s no way Google can rely on a future where visitors are fed to their apps using Microsoft tools.

Despite the obstacles, from a purely technical point of view, I’m looking forward to see what they come up with. Google have masses of smart people and if they can make a full OS boot and connect to a network in, say 5 seconds, I for one will be very impressed.

If you look at any page on Ars Technica (like this one for example) you will see that they use an extention of ‘.ars’.

It’s very easy to set up Apache to do the same so you can use any extension you want. Even if your site is hosted elsewhere and you do not have access to the httpd.conf file you can still make the change by using the .htaccess file.

For example let’s say you want to use the extension ‘.data’ for you files, simply add this line to your .htaccess file.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .data

Now all pages called ‘.data’ will be processed by PHP. If you also use content negotiation then you will need to add ‘.data’ files you your DirectoryIndex so Apache looks for ‘.data’ files first.

It should look something like this.

DirectoryIndex index.data  index.php index.html