Over the last two weeks I installed Fedora 8 Test 3 and OpenSUSE 10.3.  I ran OpenSUSE 10.3 during most of that time and noted several features/improvements that I liked.  The first thing I liked was that the new Gtk interface for YaST which significantly makes it feel more at home on a GNOME desktop.   It now has the same basic look and feel of Novell’s GNOME Control Center.  I really liked the “1-Click Install” feature that OpenSUSE has implemented.  Right now 1-Click Install packages are commonly found in the Software Portal at opensuse.org and a few other sites but with time I think they will be popping up all over.  Basically when you click to install the software from a website you load a YaST Metadata Package that automatically configures the repositories that are needed for the package and any dependencies.  It asks for your root password and away it goes. 

Now on to Ubuntu…This so far has been the best install on this laptop yet (of any distro).  Here is a list of a few of the things that I have liked/greatly appreciated in this new release:

• Automatically configured screen resolution to 1280×800:  No more adding additional packages, messing around with config files, or running special utilities. 
• Compiz enabled by default.  This is a nice addition in my opinion.  I have been using Compiz (or Beryl) on both my laptop and desktop systems for a while now and not only is it more visually appealing but believe it or not there are productivity enhancements that I sorely miss when I am on a system without it.  Compiz is running extremely well on the laptop, especially considering it has an Intel Integrated Graphics chip in it that is several years old at this point.   I also like the fact that they made some sensible decisions regarding the desktop effects defaults.  
• SD Card Reader works!  This is the first time EVER that the integrated SD card reader on this laptop has seen any action.  After every install of every distribution I stick a card in this and wait and see what happens…usually nothing.  On this install I stuck an SD card in from my camera after taking some pictures of Ty helping carve some pumpkins and to my amazement and disbelief an SD card icon appeared on my desktop and the import photo’s dialog  popped up on the screen…very nice!
• Deskbar/Tracker installed and enabled by default. On the Mac I use Spotlight all of the time…it’s almost an addiction…to find files, applications, etc.  On Linux I have grown to love the Deskbar applet for the same reasons.  In the past I have always relied on Beagle as the search back-end but the Ubuntu folks have decided to go with Tracker instead.  At this point I am not entirely convinced of this but I will give it a try.  Deskbar + Beagle/Tracker Live Search plugin rocks.  So far what I miss is a feature I have been using A LOT.  On my desktop system (and my previous laptop install) I had the Beagle Firefox extension installed which indexed every page I went to.  I can’t tell you how many times just in the last week where I have had to try to find an obscure page that I visited and used Deskbar with Beagle Live plugin to find exactly what I was looking for.  I have not, in recent memory, had any issues with system performance and Beagle being enabled, even with the Firefox extension, so only time will tell how well Tracker works.
• Java packages available in the repositories.  Not just any packages, but the most recent updates as well.  I was pleasantly surprised to find all of the packages for Java 6 Update 3 in the repositories.  They also have a package for Netbeans 5.5 (no 6.0 test releases yet).  Given that I have been doing a lot of Java programming for work lately and my IDE of choice is Netbeans this works out extremely well for me. 

Overall performance has been great, even with Compiz enabled and Tracker running in the background.  At least as fast, or faster, than the previous release I had installed on the laptop which was 6.10. 

All of this plus the updated versions of all of the usual packages makes 7.10 a very nice release.  Now I just have to wait until Friday to get my hands on the next release of OS X.

Powered by ScribeFire.

After installation an orange notepad icon sits on the bottom of your web browser.  Clicking on the icon brings up the ScribeFire interface.  As most, if not all, utilities for creating blog entries it has the normal set of formating features and allows you to view the post in either Rich Editing Mode, Source Editing Mode, or Live Preview Mode. 

You can select the Tags for your post but there does not appear to be a way to add new Tags from ScribeFire.  One nice feature is that it allows you to save notes without publishing them to your blog.  A feature I like if I have a quick thought and want to take a quick note.  You can then edit and/or publish the notes at any time.  Another nice feature is that it allows you to edit any of your older published blog posts as well.  I have tested editing older posts and it seems to work well.  I tried the same functionality with Sun’s Weblog Publisher and it screwed up the formatting both times I tried it.   Which leads me to another item, it usually seems to provide me with the results that I expect.  Too many times with the other tools above I had to log into my blog and edit all of the formatting mistakes that would regularly occur.  If you end up logging into your blog to fix mistakes you might as well just create the entire post from there. 

So far I really like ScribeFire and I am hoping that over time and more use it won’t disappoint me.  I haven’t tried Flock’s blogging capabilities since their initial release so I may give that a try again in the near future, but since I primarily use Firefox it looks like ScribeFire will be my blogging tool of choice.

Powered by ScribeFire.

ScribeFire:  I recently discovered ScribeFire, an awesome plugin for Firefox.  This post was created using ScribeFire, more on that later…

Powered by ScribeFire.

The second reason was that I wanted to show my support monetarily for the decision by Dell to pre-install Ubuntu. It also doesn’t hurt that Ubuntu has been my distribution of choice since 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). I really think this has the potential to be a big deal for all of Linux (not just Ubuntu) if it is done right and if the response is significant enough. It is too easy to simply place a vote for change on a website. You can vote as much as you want but it means nothing if you don’t back up your votes with action!

I have every reason to believe at this point that Dell at least has the right idea, or is on the right track. I have read several articles and blogs, including those on Dell’s site, that mention that:

“We configure/install open source drivers for hardware, when possible. We use partial open-source or closed source (”restricted” in Ubuntu terms) drivers where there is no equivalent open-source driver.”

This is a good compromise, it needs to work out of the box or it will just turn new users away. It is nice to see they understand the value of preferring open source drivers. The more promising quote though is this:

“For hardware options not offered with this release, we are working with the vendors of those devices to improve the maturity and stability of their associated Linux drivers. While this may not happen overnight, we do expect to have a broader range of hardware support with Linux over time.”

This is where the real benefit for ALL of Linux comes in. Working with device vendors to improve the maturity and stability of their Linux drivers could be a substantial boon for Linux in general. The real downfall will be if very few of the 100,000 people that voted for Linux to be pre-installed on Dell computers actually open their wallets and purchase these machines.

Here are the specs for the machine I just purchased:

• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6420 2.13GHZ
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM
• 256MB nVidia GeForce 7300LE TurboCache
• 250GB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM)
• 16X DVD+/-RW Drive
• Samsung 19IN Wide Screen LCD
• and…..Ubuntu Desktop Edition version7.04!

all for $1048 (with $350 off coupon)

I found the coupon I used online and it says that it lasts until May 31, 2007. If you are in the market for a new computer, specifically one that runs Linux (regardless if you want to run Ubuntu in the end or not) I suggest that you buy one of these Dell’s as a way of supporting pre-installed Linux and work toward more Linux drivers. Any significant demand could make a real statement!

The coupon I used was: $4?HW9L1NB4VTT

:: Try 1 - The Tower ::

My first attempt at installing Vista was on my test PC. 1.7 Ghz P4 processor with 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 video card and 2 NIC’s (1 netgear, 1 d-link). Vista gives this PC a performance rating of 2. Neither of the NIC’s worked on Vista so I had no access to the net, which was extremely disappointing. Aero Glass (the flashy GUI) worked but was really sluggish, which was a little surprising.

Aero Glass itself is a little disappointing. It pretty much consists of the following: Transparent traskbar, start menu and window borders, Thumbnails of minimized applications when you hover your mouse over them, and scrolling through your open applications in a rolodex fashion. There are probably other features but those were the most noticeable. So, really nothing too exciting or new. MS fanboys like to criticize Xgl/Compiz as being all eye-candy and nothing real in terms of usability, which really isn’t the case at all.

So to these usability experts I ask, what is the usability of having a transparent window border? Oh, what…it’s just eye-candy…there to keep up with MacOSX in terms of flash. Lets talk about the ridiculous usability nightmare of scrolling through your applications in a rolodex fashion. Since they couldn’t just come out and copy Apple’s expose feature they came up with this brilliant idea instead. It’s a little tricky to use, especially when using the scroll wheel. You don’t get a good overview of all your open windows and it’s sometimes hard to pick the one you want. So, let’s say that the window you actually want to have focus is in the back of the rolodex? You have to scroll through all of them to get to it (and that’s if you don’t scroll past it or accidentally select the wrong window). Unlike expose which nicely lays out your open windows as convenient thumbnails across your entire screen making it easy to see ALL open windows at once and select the one you want.

:: Try 2 - The Laptop ::

Given that neither of my two NIC’s worked in the tower on Vista I decided (for some stupid reason) to install it on my laptop. The laptop is a Dell 700m 1.8 Ghz Pentium M processor with 1GB of RAM integrated Intel Pro Wireless, and Intel integrated graphics card. This laptop was running Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED10) which I installed on it after I found out that the Xgl/Compiz shipped with SLED10 “just works” even on the Intel integreated graphics card! The graphics weren’t as fast as when used on the Nvidia card on my tower but it was faster than I expected and worked really well (a pleasant surprise).

I download the latest GParted LiveCD (version 0.3) which was extremely slick! I used it to resize my SLED10 partition and basically split the 40GB drive in the laptop. It worked like a charm. Before I started my Vista install I was able to still boot into SLED10 without any problems.

Unfortunately Vista (like all other MS operating systems before it) do not play nice with other operating systems on the same drive…so I ended up just trashing the entire partitioning scheme and starting from scratch installing Vista on the front of the drive and leaving an empty partition at the end of the drive to reinstall Linux into. I had a feeling this was going to be the case but I really wanted to try out the GParted LiveCD to see how well it worked.

Given the spec’s on the laptop above, Vista blesses it a performance rating of 1. Aero Glass does not work, making a rather dull system even more boring. This was disappointing considering that Xgl/Compiz run on it just fine and reasonably well. Fortunately though the wireless on the latop worked out of the box (though to be fair it also worked out of the box on SLED10 and also the last two releases of Ubuntu so in itself not a big deal).

Vista, like all Windows releases before it, comes with basically no applications. This even though it was installed from a DVD and requires a “40GB hard disk with at least 15GB free” to install! Why so much space? During my initial try at installing it on the laptop Vista would not continue the install because apparently the 15 GB I had allocated for it were not enough (hence the deleting all partitions and starting from scratch). This, to me, is yet another reason why open systems are way better than proprietary closed systems. I mean really…I can strip down either Linux or Solaris 10 and install them on just a few gigs.

IE7 sucks…The layout of the interface is terrible and in terms of features it has nothing on Firefox (especially the beta’s for version 2) or Opera. It is also interesting to note that without Aero Glass IE7 does not display thumbnails of the pages when you hover over the tabs (something Opera does already anyway). After playing with IE7 for a while…giving it the benefit of the doubt…I promptly headed over to mozilla.org and downloaded the latest beta for Firefox 2. There were articles a while ago about MS apparently offering to assist Mozilla in getting Firefox ready for Vista (???) so I wanted to see what they really needed to do to get Firefox to work on Vista…I was almost expecting it to not work at all. Fortunately for me it worked famously. I also proceeded to install OpenOffice.org 2 Novell Edition to see how well it worked on Vista, and of course it worked just fine.

:: Back to Ubuntu ::

So after my little adventure with Vista I installed Ubuntu Edgy Knot 3 in that extra partition I created at the end of the drive during the Vista install. Surprisingly Ubuntu automatically mounted my Vista partition even though it is NTFS and added an entry in the bootloader (Grub) for Vista (and even labeled it as Vista). Now if only MS would be that kind when there are other operating systems on the same computer. I continue to be impressed with Ubuntu and I believe we are continuing to see the fruits of all the optimization work being done to GNOME because on both my systems running Edgy right now GNOME is just really fast.

:: Vista Conclusion ::

Vista’s Sidebar? It’s okay I guess, I mean…they are just widgets nothing earth shattering (OS X widgets, gDesklets, etc.). The new start menu I like…much better than the default on XP. The default theme is much better than XP too, at least I don’t feel like I am using a computer purchased from Fisher Price. The integrated search is okay, not nearly as cool or flexible as Gnome’s Deskbar applet (which rocks I must say, and I use all the time), especially when used with Beagle Live searching. The first user is still by default the administrator…but you have to click a dialog box that pops up anytime you want to change any settings. A step in the right direction I guess (???), though I have heard this can be disabled so what’s the point.

Overall it’s okay and probably a good step in the right direction for MS but I don’t think OS X has anything to worry about (not even comparing it to the upcoming OS X release early next year) and Linux has proven to me that it can contend with much of Vista already (again, not comparing it to who knows what advances will be made in Linux by early next year).

[Upstart]

It appears that Ubuntu is working on an init daemon replacement called Upstart.  All I can say is it is about time!  Apple replaced it a while ago with launchd and Sun replaced it with smf.  I have been wondering how long it would take for a mainstream distribution to come up with an init replacement.

Upstart has been recently added to the Universe repository for Ubuntu for testing.  They are hoping that Upstart will be ready to intially replace the init system by the time Edgy is released.  By the time Edgy+1 is released they are hoping to have it completely replace cron, atd, anacron, and inetd.  Then by Edgy+2 they are saying that no new packages will be accepted unless they provide upstart jobs instead of init scripts.

After watchcing the video on the site it reminded me of the BumpTop Prototype video that made it’s way around the web a little while ago. In the same vein is “lowfat“, which looks equally interesting. There is also, Akamaru another physics engine prototype I ran across earlier which has a demo of a dock application where the icons behave with real physical interaction.

Obviously none of this stuff in it’s current form is “productive” or “serves any real purpose” (I love the idiots that see stuff like this and say “looks fun but doesn’t look like it’s usable”…it’s called a prototype for a reason!) but I can already envision a good mixture of some of this technology with a more contemporary desktop environment and some of the effects from Xgl/compiz on linux.

Imagine switching virtual desktops (sorry Apple, I mean “Spaces”) by grabbing the side of the screen and dragging the cube around like in Xgl but with your hands. Or better yet, with one hand holding onto an open application and the other flipping the cube around to place that application on another desktop. How about sorting through your file manager by physically manipulating your files on the screen, where the other files around react like true phyiscal objects. Or maybe changing the current applcation with focus by pushing/pulling applications to the background/foreground…the possibilties are endless! It makes me wonder what kind of interface my 1 month old son will use even by the time he gets to high school…