Deep Ubuntu

With lots of changes here at the Los Angeles Daily News, I find myself in a good position to put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty to work posting Web content via the Clickability publishing system and for the more mundane tasks of writing memos and reports, reading e-mail and the like. So get ready for my latest dip into the Ubuntu pool, plus some Red Hat/Fedora-based Live CDs and a little bit on my long-delayed Puppy 2.16 review and a detour through Sabayon and Gentoo to Simply Mepis.

I started with Feisty just as we've completely redesigned the features section changing its name from U to LA.com to both wholly shake up the content and froth up the synergy with the existing Web product of the same name. We can do this because a) we're both owned by MediaNews and b) we're in the same building.

LA.com the Web site has recently converted to the Clickability content publishing system, and I'm trying to learn how it works. Unlike a stand-alone app like Dreamweaver, Clickability is accessed through the browser, supporting both IE and Firefox (as opposed to the main Daily News Web publishing system, also browser-based but only supporting IE) and when I told my company rep that I was using Firefox in Linux, asking why something wasn't quite as smooth as in IE, she said, "we don't support Linux -- use Windows. Well, it turns out that the few quirks I've found in Firefox in Linux are replicated in Mac OS X ... and the main quirk I referred to -- a pop-up window not being large enough to accommodate all the content in it -- also happens in IE. So much for not supporting Linux. If it works in Firefox in Windows, it's bound to work in Linux. Ditto for the stuff that doesn't work.

Anyhow, I decided to do some of this work on my Xubuntu 7.04 system, and just to see how it works, I decided to add the Ubuntu Desktop packages. On my test system, Xubuntu and plain ol' Ubuntu don't perform all that differently (the test system being a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with a long IDE cable connected to a hard drive and CD-ROM drive outside the box, 256 MB RAM, VIA C3 1 GHz processor on an ECS motherboard model EVEm). So since I don't see a speed boost from Xubuntu, and Ubuntu offers a better experience overall, I decided to tack it onto the existing Xubuntu install.

First I tried apt-get install Ubuntu-Desktop. That chunked around for awhile and seemed to go OK, but when I started a new session, there was no Ubuntu (or, more specifically, no GNOME).

The next time, I used Synaptic, and it took care of whatever was broken. Now I had GNOME and XFCE as possible window managers when starting a new session. And all the Ubuntu apps (or most of them, anyway) seemed to come along for the ride. And the bonus is that in GNOME I know how to add menu items, so I could get mtPaint and IE (running with Wine) into the menus. I never could figure out how to modify the menus in Xfce (more specifically in Xubuntu).

One curious thing: While Xubuntu 7.04 in this setup still has four workspaces, and my other drive with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS also has four workspaces, the Ubuntu/GNOME desktop in this Feisty install only has two workspaces.

Another strange thing: I see Thunar in the menus, but Nautilus is the default file manager in GNOME (although there's no menu entry specifically for Nautilus). So when you click on a drive or folder icon, Nautilus comes up. It's nice to have both file managers, and I'm not wedded to one or the other. Again, I see no speed differences between the two.

I've recently needed to write a couple of internal reports, and I'm using AbiWord, saving the documents to a USB flash drive so I can share them between my Linux and Windows systems (I can't get into the settings on the Windows box -- otherwise I'd just network the two PCs).

Since these reports aren't for print publication, I'm OK with AbiWord's lack of typographical quotation marks. I'm very OK with the functionality of AbiWord -- the margins, the bolding, the fonts, which look great printed out, by the way.

And as always, I love an application that opens in under 10 seconds.

Warning: (to myself anyway) ... Ubuntu/Xubuntu on this hard drive is running out of room.

I have three identical 14.4 GB IBM hard drives that I can swap out in this bastardized system. Two of the three drives are dual-booting, and the other has my pup_save for Puppy Linux on it. One has Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Another has a Debian Etch desktop install (with a 1.25 GB pup_save file). The drive I have connected right now has Xubuntu/Ubuntu Feisty and a Debian Etch standard install with no GUI. (I used the bare-bones Debian for my Month on the Command Line series.)

Anyway, when I first partitioned the drive, I gave 4.6 GB at the beginning to Xubuntu 7.04, then did my swap file (can't remember how big it is at the moment) and then gave 6.2 GB to Debian 4.0.

Currently the Xubuntu partition is 89 percent full (I've got 705.6 MB "free," and 467.1 MB "available") and the Debian partition is 14 percent full (5.3 GB "free," and 5.0 GB "available). I deleted a lot of stuff from the Xubuntu partition to get even that much free space -- and while I don't understand the difference betwen "free" and "available" at this very moment, I'm considering using Gparted in Puppy Linux 2.14 to delete the swap partition, delete the Debian partition, put swap at the end and give the rest of the drive over to Xubuntu/Ubuntu. I figure this is a good move since I have another whole drive devoted to a full Debian install, plus I'm running a standard Debian with X and Fluxbox added on the $15 Laptop (and it's running great, by the way, with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM).

Another thing: Since LA.com uses a lot of Flash, I needed to reinstall the Flash plug-in in Firefox on the Xubuntu/Ubuntu Feisty system. It worked. I could never get the plug-in to work in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, but maybe I'll try it again.

Yet another thing: I changed gears a bit recently and ran a few live CD distros on my work box -- the Dell Optiplex with 3 GHz Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM. It's something I hadn't done for awhile.

Running any OS -- Windows or Linux -- on this newer computer is a vastly different experience than I "enjoy" using the VIA-based system that I devote to the heavy Linux lifting.

With the faster processor and doubled RAM, everything works better. GNOME runs as quickly as you need it, and everything basically screams.

And I can run Red Hat-derived distros. The VIA box will not even boot Fedora, CentOS or Scientific Linux. I thought it might be something having to do with the live CDs themselves, but a CentOS install CD wouldn't boot, either, on the VIA system, so I couldn't even do a hard drive command-line install.

But the live CDs all work on the Dell. With the CentOS live CD, I couldn't figure out the root password, so I couldn't even configure my static IP network connection, but I did have the password info for Scientific Linux, which, like CentOS is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. I liked Scientific Linux, and I also enjoyed my brief time running the Fedora live CD (which is way more polished than the other two, by the way), giving gave me the opportunity to work with the Fedora package manager.

I'd sure love to do one of those Fedora installs where you pick and choose your apps during the install process itself. I seem to remember the GUI Debian installer also offering that option, but for some reason, when I've done the net install of Debian, I'm in the command-line installer, which doesn't seem to do that -- you can pick desktop, laptop, mail server, etc., but not individual apps.

Alas, until I get my next project -- the Free Laptop -- up and running, I'll have to be content with distros that will install on the Maxspeed thin client. (The Free Laptop, by the way, is a Gateway Solo 1450 that is currently dead due to a screwed-up power plug ... and which is still dead because I can't figure out how to get the case pried apart, despite removing every screw I can see.)

Puppy 2.16 update: I've been meaning to do a long review of Puppy 2.16, and I have about 16 pages of handwritten scrawl to go with a whole bunch of stuff I already have in the computer. That's the problem -- I never seem to get around to actually typing in the stuff I've written when I didn't have a computer turned on. But the Puppy review will come. They'll probably have 2.17 out by the time it happens, but that's the breaks, right?

Puppy 2.16's best new feature: The ability to encrypt and password-protect the pup_save file.

Puppy 2.16's worst new non-feature: Gparted takes a full 15 minutes to read the partitions on a hard drive. That's up from 15 to 30 seconds in Puppy 2.14.

Mepis 6.5 preview: I wanted to install something -- anything -- and neither Sabayon or Gentoo were cooperating, so I chose SimplyMepis 6.5. The install process itself was very nice -- you get a lot of helpful "tips" on the screen as the install progresses. But my static IP configuration didn't stick, I was barely able to boot the system after the install (I kept getting network config errors of some kind, but rebooting helped), and it took a couple of tries to get the network configuration right. I suppose if I was using DHCP, this would all be moot, but so far SimplyMepis wasn't striking me as simple at all. It wasn't as user-friendly as Ubuntu, for instance (or Debian, for that matter).

Once I did get the network config right, I was told to reboot for the changes to take place. I checked Firefox anyway and the Internet was flowing without rebooting, so go figure.

On my old test box, things aren't completely snappy in the KDE desktop. I'm a bit disturbed by the time it takes Kate and Kwrite to load. And where are my workspaces? I'm so used to having four workspaces in Linux that I'm feeling cramped in by the single one that's evident in this KDE implementation. I'm sure I can resurrect the multiple workspaces, but it would be nice for them to be there out of the box. I'm not anywhere near a KDE expert, and while I understand that everybody loves KDE because of the endless configuration options, at this point I'm a bit overwhelmed by them.

I can't be waiting a minute for Open Office to load, and besides, I'm really hooked on AbiWord at the momen, so I decided to add the small word processor via Synaptic. I curiously got a warning about the package, that it couldn't be "verified," or something to that effect. Hell, I just wiped a drive for this install, so I didn't care about any malicious intent and proceeded to install the packages. After Synaptic did its thing, AbiWord didn't show up in the menus. I could start it from a terminal, but it wasn't listed under Office or Editors ... until I logged out and logged back in. Then it appeared. Not as friendly or as easy as Ubuntu, Debian (or Puppy or Damn Small Linux).

I don't want to get down on Mepis just yet (or any more than I already am). It's new, and I'd like to give it a further test. I just might dump it and go for AntiX, the new lightweight Mepis that looks more suited to my needs.

I really wanted to have the Gentoo/Sabayon experience, but I couldn't even get Sabayon loaded, and the Gentoo net install hung every time when I tried to configure the static IP -- you can't download a distro if you can't get on the Internet.

But back to Mepis. All was far from lost. Flash was preinstalled, There's a whole lot of KDE and Mepis-specific config utilities. I see tons of great applications to explore -- and I plan to do just that in the days ahead.