Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

In Debian, I had been having problems getting software mixing working with the Intel HDA sound card integrated into my mother board. I decided to try Linux Mint again, knowing it had excellent multimedia support. I had tried it when it first showed up on the seen and remember being impressed with it at the time and wanted to give it another go.Linux mint handled software mixing from the beginning. Whoever has said that “Linux is not ready for the desktop.” has not tried Linux Mint.

It is built from Ubuntu as the base using Gnome, but adds a lot of its own configuration tools, adapted synaptic package, and a nice menu system. The installation is from a live CD and will be familiar to anyone installing Ubuntu or Fedora from live media. The menu system allows for easy search and access to all your applications and ability to bookmark you favorite applications.

Once installed I could watch flash on YouTube and Hulu, listen to mp3s and watch wmv, mpg and avi movies. At first I could use totem to play a comercial (encripted) dvd, but then a few days latter when i tried again, it wouldn’t work leaving me to install VLC. I could not find a solution online; however, others have experienced the same problem. All the applications a desktop user would need where installed, OpenOffice, Firefox, gFTP, pidgin, Transmission, etc. One criticism, was the inclusion of Gnome M Player, M player and Totem seemed redundant.

The crowning achievement of this distribution is that it is multimedia capable from a fresh install. I only had to install the proprietary nVidia drivers via the standard restricted drivers interface common in Ubuntu. Once done, enabling Compiz effects was easy as in Ubuntu. Though Mint is built from Ubuntu as a foundation, it is more then a simple Ubuntu remaster, with the time and detail spent to polishing the user interface, installing all needed media codecs, flash and java. It has the task bar and menu along the bottom, making it comfortable to anyone migrating from the Windows world.

I bought a new case a few weeks ago, The Cooler Master Elite 360. I have gone through my share of computer cases in my time, and the Elite 360 by Cooler Master has been one of the better in the lot. To begin with it is has a screwless design for optical and hard drive bays which actually works. I have had screwless designed cases before and usually found that my optical drives would stick out a bit or not enough, or that the fit for hard drives was to tight, and the screwless mechanisms would jam.  No the Elite 360. It comes with side stripes that you plug into the screw holes of your drive and slides right in and with a click their are firmly secured. The case also has a versicle design that it can stand up like a tower, or sit down like a desktop.  I sit it down and slid it into the vc/dvd player space of an old TV stand I use for my computer equipment. It can handle both ATX and Mico ATX, and was one of the more easier cases to build a system with. The one down side is my MicroATX motherboard comes right to the edge of where the 3.5 bay for a flopy sits. I tried fitting a regular sized hard drive there, but found that edge of the mother board allowed for no room to plug in the sata or power cables, where the IDE connector was in the way. However, that really cannot be faulted to the Case. It did fit an old full size ATX motherboard, which shortly gave up the ghost (that is when I moved my main system into it.)  It comes with one 120mm fan which is nice and quite with good airflow, and has additional room for a second 120mm fan above the CPU and a 92mm fan on the left (when laying down as a desktop).  the one thing I would have liked is if it where made of Aluminum instead of steel. Check it out at NewEgg.com

Over the last couple of years I have launched a few web projects. Some have been neglected and abandoned do to lack of interest or time, but others I have continued to maintain. Over these few years I have tried many different blogging engines and content management systems with varied results of success. Since I have documented my work and experience with Linux, particularly Debian, it thought it would be a good Idea to document the my work and experience with Drupal, and other CMS programs. Below is a list of CMS and Blog engines and a sysnopsis of my experience with them.

Joomla
I have tinkered with Joomla over the past couple of years to develop a social networking site that never got off the ground. Joomla is one of the most powerful and extensible CMS programs out there. There are countless third party extensions for Joomla to make it do close to anything you might need it to. There are also many free and professional themes for Joomla. The drawbacks to Joomla I have encounters is that extensions do not always integrate well with each-other and since the shift from 1.0 to 1.5 the framework has change enough that many extensions have not been revised for 1.5 compatibility. Even though there is a legacy mode to use 1.0 extensions in 1.5, they results of doing so has been hit in miss. Joomla can be stunning and intuitive to the end user, but administration of Joomla is not always a straight forward, and with all the option available managing it become a time consuming task for me.

Jaws CMS
Jaws excels as being simple and straight forward. It does not do a whole lot, and the extensibility of it is determined by plugins developed by the Jaws teem. The advantage is that the code and interface is clean, and straight forward. I have used it for a basic static information sites for non-profit organizations and my own personal website. There are not many plugins or themes for it, but for a simple easy to publish and maintain solution it does it job very well.

TikiWiki
I experimented with TikiWiki for a little while. Initially I was impressed with the collaborative features it had, and it robust features which came out of the box. I was also overwhelmed by the amount of features offered out of the box and annoyed that it weighed in at 80mb once installed on my server. To make things easier it has preset templates for different persposes, such as a personal blog and static site, to a comprehensive collaborative wiki like site. One I tried to customize it a little more for my project, an archive of band discographies and biographies, I found the wiki style was not quite what I needed for this particular project. TikiWiki would work great for one of those collaborative fan websites about TV shows, or Video Games, or even for a Linux Distribution site, complete with wiki, forum, and file manger.

WordPress
It does one thing and does it very well, Blogs. I have used WordPress for this blog in the past, but migrated to another system a while back. I still maintain WordPress blogs for a few of my projects, and have installed and configured WordPress for friends. It has many different plugins available for it from third party developers with varying quality of usability. There are thousands of free wordless themes available on the net. With the new 2.8x + releases managing plugins, themes, and upgrades of the system and installed plugins has become easy and intuitive. It is obvious to see why this has become the most widespread open source blogging engine out there, it is intuitive for both the simple end user who wants to journal their ideas and for the more advanced system administrator to work with.

B2Evolution
this is the blogging engine I am currently using for Oojah tec as of 20th of December 2009 (This Might change in the future). B2e, as it is abbreviated, is designed with multiple blogs in mind. However, it does not work as well if you want to have many separate blogs with different authors, but if you want to have different blogs with different subjects which integrate with each other in a neat fashion. I switched from wordrpess to b2e because I desired to blog about more then Linux and technology at the time and wanted to integrate blogs about politics, food, and music. This never happened, and I have stayed with it. There are not as many plugins or themes available for b2e, but I have found it to be easy to manage my blog posts and comparable to Wrodpress in some ways. It may not be as user-friendly for the end user as WordPress, but I have found its management to quite robust.

Drupal
With a new project, I have decided to use the Drupal CMS. I have tried Drupal in the past, but at the time found the learning curve to be too steep and intimidating. Now that I have learned the basics of many other CMS programs I am beginning to understand Drupal, and will provide some tutorials on it in the future.

I have had a sorted history with Fedora. I first started my Linux in the days before the Fedora Project and before the Red Hat enterprise change. I am not sure of the details, but somewhere along the line, the Development of Red Hat become more commercial minded and the Fedora Project was created to fill in the gap. I am not an expert on the licensing and development policies of Red Hat but I remember the first Fedora releases. This was in the days before automated packaging systems like apt-get, yum, or pacman had become commen place, and I spent my time in “Dependency Hell.”

I have not been a fan of RPM based distributions for sometime, and my initial experiences before the adaption of automated package systems may have something to do with that. I quickly found Debian and the wonders of apt-get and have been mainly a Debian man ever since. All though the Arch Linux and Frugalware package manager pacman has impressed me over the last couple of years. With that said, I check in on the Fedora Project from time to time and have found many of their early innovations, which few distros where implementing at the time, have become major features in other distributions over time. I have admired them for their ability to push the envelop on occasion but have always found the distribution lacking in some way.

My experience started over Thanksgiving brake. I was having some issues on my laptop connecting the to my Parent’s wifi setup. I had Fedora 12 XFCE Re-Spin loaded on a USB stick and was experimenting with it before I had left. I installed it on my old Dell Inspiron 600m and the wireless worked out of the box. This did not surprise me since it is an old wifi card that has well documented support in Linux. I was satisfied that I could surf and watch movies on my laptop and started pocking around Fedora some more. The installation itself was straightforward. I have always appreciated the simplicity of the Anaconda installer. Some people have complained that it is not clear when coming to partitioning, but I understand partition tables well and found it easy to work with. On my laptop everything was preconfigured and I only had to figure out how to play movie and mp3 and watch DVD’s. I was impressed enough with it on my laptop I installed it on my Desktop which I built myself which took a little more configuration.The only installation option I have not seen, and I simply may not be aware of it is a core, striped down, command line only install like Debian. I like to have a bare bones system and build up from their with my own specifications and configure as I go to give me more control over my system.

The biggest complaint I have had since the beginning of the Fedora Project is the RPM based package management always felt sluggish and clumsy to me. Taking much longer then I had become accustom to with apt-get. The other problem I found, was their dependency requirements seemed to be overkill, installing up to twice as many dependencies for the same package I would install in Debian or Ubuntu. The one annoyance I found with it was the package management GUI lacked any kind of progress indication other then simply telling you it was downloading or installing. I think this is odd, since almost all package management GUI’s have a percentage or time indicate on what the system is doing. I hope that future releases of Fedora will correct this over sight.

One of the other things that has always been a point of frustration is their policy about some proprietary drivers and codecs. I understand the philosophy behind this, and respect it. However, as a desktop user there are some codecs I just find I want (such as to watch movies, DVDs, and play mp3s). Debian is also known for its strict open policy, but in some ways Fedora has them beat. I had to install EasyTAG to edit mp3 tags from their unstable branch because mp3 support was not included. Before in my Fedora experiences it had been frustrating finding documentation and third party repositories for these codecs and drivers. Fortunately I found most of what I needed at the RPMfusion website. I found that libdvdcss was no longer supported by RPMfusion and I had to find another source, and I had to install my nVidia drivers manually for my desktop (all of which is documented on this site). Anotehr issue I have found is support for wma files, and converting them to mp3 is limited, and have yet to solve this problem. One feature I would like to see would be an automated search and download system like Ubuntu has when trying to play files not supported by the default installation.

I was impressed with the XFCE re-spin and the detail taken to make it usable and accessible. I like XFCE for its lightweight design but still being a robust Desktop Environment option, and even run it with Compiz. The bug reporting tool was handy to, telling me about minor kenral crashes and giving me some detail about Firefox crashes and other things. The Firewall GUI is relatively straight forward, though I felt it was a little too straight forward at times. Overall the desktop experience on Fedoar 12 has been a stable and consistent experience. Last time I checked in with Fedora this was still the case with their Fedora 10 release. However, that has changed with Fedora 12, and I have been overall impressed with yum and the overall Fedora 12 experience.

A few days ago I received my ASUS Eee PC 1005HA-VU1X-BU which I ordered from NewEgg. It came with Windows XP pre-installed, and I bought the item with the intentions of installing Linux on it. I am still working on getting Debian to work with it. The problem is the new Atheros AR8132 Ethernet controller and Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter are a new design. The old Kernels do not sport modules for Linux. The new modules on the 2.6.28 and above kernels will support the Wireless adapter but not the Ethernet controller (however I have heard the release candidates for the 2.6.31 candidates support both).

With this dilemma I decided to try one of the distributions specifically designed for netbooks. My search lead me to the Easy Peasy project who provide a Linux distribution tailored to the Eee PC and netbooks in general. Easy Peasy is based on Ubuntu 8.10 and utilizes a collection of tools designed for netbooks such as the Netbook Launcher that organizes the desktop in a more streamlined manor for smaller screens.

I followed their instructions for installation via a USB drive. Once installed, I discovered I had no access to my Ethernet controller or Wireless Adapter. I had to download the fallowing back-ports from Ubuntu 9.04 to acquire the 2.6.28 kernel and modules. I saved the following packages onto a USB drive and transported them to my Eee PC for installation (in the same order as below):

wireless-crda
linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic
linux-backport-modules-2.6.18-15-generic
linux-backports-modules-jaunty-generic
linux-backports-modules-jaunty

With that accomplished I rebooted my computer and I know had wireless access via my wireless router. Overall I like the general design of Easy Peasy with the Netbook Launcher and Go-home applet, making navigation and operation on the small 10.1 inch screen a breeze. Behind the interface is the GNOME desktop environment, and you can switch to regular desktop mode. However, I feel there is a lot of unnecessary bulk included with Easy Peasy and I am not always a fan of the Ubuntu way of doing things. I tested the backport packages on my Debian desktop and found them operational; my theory is that this same method might work for Debian Lenny on the Eee PC 1005HA. I will report back soon with my discovery.