Xgl on OpenSuSE was a nightmare, Xgl on Ubuntu was cool…Xgl on Kororaa was simply amazing!
Kororaa is a LiveCD based on Gentoo which showcases Xgl. On Ubuntu while using Xgl the system was really slow. Moving windows around in “wobbly” mode was jerky. On Kororaa everything has been running smoothly, and very fast.
If you want to take an Xgl test drive I suggest downloading Kororaa and taking it for a spin.
I was a huge fan of BeOS and was extremely dissappointed by the slow demise of Be and its eventual sale to Palm. Ever since the death of Be I have been closely watching the various attempts to keep the dream alive. Many projects have come and gone in an attempt to recreate the magic of BeOS but one has always remained in the background steadily working on what many said was an impossible feat.The Haiku project, formely known as OpenBeOS, has made some tremendous progress after years of development. The goal of the project is to create a new OS that is source and binary compatible to BeOS R5 (the last official release by Be). Yesterday I downloaded one of the daily builds as a VMware disk image. You can find the daily builds here: Haiku Images.
I then used this online VM Builder I found a little while ago to create the needed VMX files to boot the disk images with VMware Player.
It was amazing to see “BeOS” boot up once again. Since Be open sourced Tracker and Deskbar before their demise it has been possible for Haiku to incorporate that into their project. They are now able to run Tracker and Deskbar on top of their new kernel so you are presented with the old familiar desktop!
It’s pretty cool to see many of the old Be apps run. Many of the preference apps still don’t work or are buggy but it’s a great start.
I recently installed the latest Ubuntu Dapper release (6.04 Alpha 4). The first thing I did was use the following instructions to install the new Xgl/Compiz packages.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XglHowto
Earlier in the week I also installed OpenSuSE 10.1 beta 4 and surprisingly getting Xgl/Compiz to work on Ubuntu was a thousand times easier than trying to get it to work on SuSE.
After playing around with it over the last week I must say that Xgl/Compiz is cool! Here are some of my notes after a week of fun:
One of the quickest ways to learn what all the key combo’s were for Compiz was to go into the gconf-editor and look through all the plugins. You can also see a good list on the OpenSuSE site here:
In regards to the Cube plugin (the one that spins your screen around when you change virtual desktops), I have found that I prefer the “In” setting rather then the default which puts the desktop images on the outside of a cube. For me it just seemed more fluid and more appealing with the “in” setting.
My favorite’s are:
Switch windows = Alt + Tab
Arrange and View All Windows = F12 turns on or off; clicking a window will zoom it to the front
Switch desktops on cube = Ctrl + Alt + Left/Right Arrow
Switch desktops on cube with active window following = Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Left/Right Arrow
Rotate cube manually = Ctrl + Alt + left-click
Another suggestion I would make is to download the transset utility which allows you to make windows transparent. On Ubuntu it was as easy as:
apt-get install transset
It’s clearly early in development but at least somewhat usable and fun even at this point.
What can I say…LTSP is cool! I have had a plan in the works for a while to implement LTSP at work for a key group of users. Over the last couple of weeks we have been expirementing with various distributions and setups to see which would best server our purpose and give us the best performance.
In the end we decided to go with CentOS 4.2 installed on the server and downloading the LTSP installer from the projects website and setting it up on our own. We also decided to create a new subnet for the LTSP users to segment the network traffic.
Eariler this week we put the whole thing into production and currently have 4 users running off of it. The LTSP server is a quad Xeon PIII 700 mhz system with 3 GB of RAM. The client computers are PII 400 mhz systems with 192 MB of RAM. Performance on these machines using LTSP clearly exceeds the performance of the OS installed on the machines themselves. It also gives us a central machine to manage rather than having to manage and update each individual workstation.
Over the next few weeks we intend on migrating at least three other users over to the LTSP system and then we will go from there to see what other users we can convert.
The users primary needs include email access, working with office documents, and limited web browesing. For this we use Evolution, OpenOffice.org, and Firefox.
Interesting Item I discovered today:
SUSE originally stood for “Software and System Development” in German. It was orginally based off of Slackware and later integrated with another distribution called Jurix.
I was interested to see this Information Technology Bulletin from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s Office for Information Technology. The bulletin lays out the Commonwealth’s policy regarding a standard for which Linux servers can be used within the State government.
This does not specify that they are standardizing on Linux, it simply states that as far as Linux use goes they are standardizing on Red Hat and Novell. Their reasons for specifying a standard are to help from each agency having to “reinvent the wheel” and to be able to grow a knowledgeable human resource base. They have choosen to accept a dual standard to keep their options open and to avoid getting locked into either one of the two vendors.
The bulliten also states that Linux is already being used sporadically accross the enterprise in a wide variety of forms from vitualized instances on mainframes to simple firewalls.
There has been a lot of chatter across the net lately about Novell showing off its Novell Linux Desktop 10 which is due out later this year. After watching the videos and viewing the screenshots I must admit I have mixed emotions.
The screenshots are just mockups but after watcing the videos they seem to be very close to what Novell is working on. The primary thing that I don’t like is that it looks to be a very heavily modified version of GNOME. It by no means looks like the stock GNOME layout. This really annoys me! I have always hated distributions that heavily modify the desktop environment rather than shipping something closer to the default.
Lycoris, Linspire, Xandros, Ximian, even Sun’s JDS. Why? For one it creates inconsistencies between distributions, there is no confomity, which I feel only stands to hurt more than it helps. I especially hate it when the modifications are made to make Linux more like Windows. Most of the before mentioned (aside from Ximian) are all quilty of this to varying degrees.
If you look at the “mockups” and the videos you will see that they have implemented an XP-like start menu??? You have got to be kidding me! Why!!! Not only is it a crappy rip-off of an MS idea, most people I know hate the XP start menu.
Gone is the applications menu along the top of the screen and the taskbar on the bottom (though personally I always combine the two into one panel along the top of the screen). Instead you have a windows-esqe panel along the bottom, XP start menu and all..how original. The irony if it is that the demo was done by Nat Friedman, who I quoted several years ago about the dangers of making Linux look too much like Windows.
Get the Videos Here
It’s been a while since I made a post on the ol’ blog and there has been a lot I have wanted to say so I will try to quickly do a little catch up post. So without further ado, and in reverse chronological order…
[Netbeans 5.0]
I just noticed that Netbeans 5.0 final has been released. I have been getting into quit a bit of Java programming lately and have really come to love working with Netbeans. One of the cool features I like is the GUI editor, it makes developing interfaces quick and easy.
[The VNCing Until we Kill the Box Experiment]
So, how many concurrent VNC connections and openned applications can a P2 450 mhz computer with 198 mb of ram running CentOS 4.2 take before it comes screeching to a halt…Well apparently it is 3 VNC connections with approx 35 applications open all while running a webserver. I was fairly impressed with the results of the little experiment we carried out at work this afternoon for no real good reason at all except for the sake of science. Each VNC connection was using xfce4 as the desktop environment.
[Solaris 10]
I have always been a big fan of Solaris. Even before it was cool to run Solaris on x86 I had Solaris 9 installed on one of my machines at home. I started using Solaris while at Penn State in my compter science classes and more while I worked for the CSE Dept. I have been closely following the developments of Solaris 10 since they released the early express builds before the final release. With things like zones (and Linux zones), ZFS, dtrace, service management framework (smf), and predictive self healing Solaris 10 is pretty slick. Recently I have been more interested in some of the other open source distro’s based on Solaris 10; ShilliX, BeleniX, and Nexenta.
Nexenta is particularly interesting. It’s aim is to combine the OpenSolaris kernel and the userland apps from Debian/Ubuntu. They just released their second alpha…go check it out.
I also just read recently from Jonathan Schwartz’s blog that they might consider dual-liscensing Solaris CDDL and GPL3.
[Wiki’s are Cool]
At work I decided that we should setup a Wiki for centralized, editable, documentation. One other cool feature is that it keeps a revision history of all pages. We ended up deciding on MediaWiki, the same wiki that powers Wikipedia. It’s pretty slick and has worked extremely well for what we wanted to use it for.
[WordPress 2.0]
I upgraded to WordPress 2.0 the day after it was released. The upgrade went fairly smoothly and 2.0 looks pretty good. The default theme is the same, and at some point I would still like to site down and find or create a new theme for this site.
Xen is one of the projects I have been keeping my eye on with some interest. Xen is a virtual machine monitor, or hypervisor, developed by the University of Cambridge, UK. Xen is similar to, but not exactly the same as, VMware.
The other day I downloaded the Xen 3.0 Demo LiveCD to see what it was like. The LiveCD is obviously the easiest way to give it a test run without going through the hassle of actually installing anything.
Keeping in mind this was running off of a CD I gave it a go. Upon booting into the desktop you are given a “top” like virtual machine monitor, which shows statistics on all running Xen instances. One of the nice features of the LiveCD is that everything is pre-built for you so all you have to do is right click on the desktop and select to either start a new instance of Debian or start a new instance of CentOS.
Once you click an option to start a new instance it asks for a name for the new domain and then begins to boot. After the instance is booted it automatically launches a VNC viewer and displays the login screen.
I started off by starting a new instance of Debian. I was impressed by the performance of the virtualized instance, especially considering that this is all running off of a LiveCD and accessed through VNC. I then went on to fire off another instance of Debian and CentOS. So overall I was running three virtual instances on top of the Xen hypervisor. Performance remained impressive, I even opened Firefox in each instance and surfed the web in each…pretty cool.
Being that it all has to fit on a single CD it doesn’t come with a lot of applications to test with it but it does give you a basic feel for what Xen is like.
Two other projects related to Xen that I intend on looking into are Xenophilia and Enomalism. Xenophilia is a distribution based around Xen and has several Gtk-based utilities in the works for managing Xen. Enomalism is a Virtualized Management Console, though not yet released.
While I was re-installing Windows on a computer for a friend I read an article at xyzcomputing.com entitled “Desktop Linux’s Hardware Woes”. The following sentence from the very first paragraph made me pause.
“Every day Linux users encounter driver and compatibility issues which Windows users have not had to deal with for years.”
To say that Windows is devoid of any hardware compatibility problems is a joke. I do not know how many times I have had to install (or re-install) Windows only to find that Windows couldn’t find drivers for all the components. The real kicker is that Windows gives you NO meaningful information to aid in determining what the device actually is (name, type, model) so that you can look for the appropriate drivers. It gets even better if you are doing an install on a machine with onboard components or generic PCI cards that have little to no labeling on them.
My usual answer to this problem is to stick a Linux LiveCD into the machine and reboot! I have always found that even if Linux doesn’t support a device it is still able to provide useful information about it. In the past I have used the lspci and dmesg commands to determine what devices were actually on the machine. Now with HAL it’s even easier. Most distributions come with some sort of Device Manager tool that you can use to browse through your hardware.
Sure Linux has problems with being compatible with lots of hardware, but so does Windows. The reason Windows seams to work better is because it is pre-installed on almost all computer systems sold.
If manufacturers pre-installed Linux across all of their hardware lines and sold peripherals that were compatible with Linux then Linux and Windows would be on the same level…until then we are fighting an up hill battle, regardless of how many devices Linux actually supports.
Writely is an online word processing application which “allows you to store, edit and publish documents online - privately, in collaboration with specific people, or publicly on the Internet.” I first discovered Writely by reading the Ajaxian blog. I have long been fascinated by the prospects of an online office suite, not really to replace the office suite on your machine but to supplement it.
I just discovered today that Writely now supports the OpenDocument format. This means that you can now upload ODF files and edit/share them or create documents online and download them as ODF files. I decided to find out how well Writely handles ODF files. I started by creating a document online and downloading it as an ODF file. I tried to use a variety of different formating options and included a simple table. I then opened the file created with Writely in OpenOffice.org. While the document wasn’t extremely complicated it worked rather well.
I then tried locating several already existing ODF files on my system and uploading them to Writely. All of them opened perfecly, but again most of my files these days are simple business letters or outlines/notes.
vs.
