oti0sus

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For the past two weeks I've been using the Ubuntu 5.10 Linux. It's the most popular Linux according to those who keep track of such things. I was using Mandriva 2006 until the middle of this month and wanted to experiment a little more. I re-installed Mandriva 2006 with the KDE user interface. After this I found that X crashed when I tried to view a video file in "full screen" mode. I'd never seen this kind of problem before. It seems as though the Gnome interface is less demanding on my system. There were some other problems that lead me to abandon Mandriva, the MP3 player never really automounted properly. I'd have to reboot to mount it. The other problem is that Mandriva is not a free distro and there was no automatic updating. I liked this feature in the Suse 10.0. A little green icon would appear every few days letting me know that newer and presumably better software was available. I suppose Mandriva has something similar but I never found out because I didn't wish to pay.

With Ubuntu being totally free, including the update advisor that I missed in Suse, there are some drawbacks. The lack of MP3 and other Windows codecs is the most notable. Previously I abandonned Ubuntu after I found that the codecs I'd installed somehow crippled the applications that used them, namely, the Totem or Rythmbox players. I found instead that there is a package of applications put together by Arnieboy. I found that I had some trouble with Azureus, had to remove it and re-install it in home directory to get the automatic updating to work properly. Otherwise I've had no trouble. I would only recommend Ubuntu with Arnieboy's package.

I may have solved the automounting of the MP3 player. It seems fine now but may be a little buggy. It may take a little more tinkering with to make it work as I want it to.

1876
The Adventures of Kavelier and Klay
Damascus Gate
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Labyrinths
Middlemarch
The Slow Movement
Vernon God Little

After only a couple days here, I've found the island too crowded and up-scale for my taste. I've spent a day or two inland, and about the same on the beach. It's difficult to get around without a motorcycle. I'm considering a trip to smaller islands for a change but it'll be best to wait a day or so for the holiday traffic to die down a little.

I ended the last post writing that I would use the Suse 10.0 OS for the foreseeable future. Well, it didn't last long. I believe Suse has always had a bad reputation for multimedia, and that's what I found the problem was. For reasons beyond me, when I opened a movie on the media player, it played back either in slow motion or it skipped frames. There were other strange issues, such as the download speed to my MP3 player through the USB. Again for reasons unknown, the downloads proceeded only at the most trochian speeds I seen for a long time. It would take almost 30 minutes to put an album of 50 MB or so onto the MP3 player. I decided to give the Mandriva 2006 distro another try.

Mandriva 2006 has to be the fastest installing OS I have encountered. It couldn't have taken much more than 15 minutes. There are three install CDs, and I used the Gnome gui which I still wanted to give a try, though it isn't the default for Mandriva. On the first install I opted to change the default configuration to use the "vesa" driver. This led to instability and I had to re-install following the wizard more closely. After finishing, I went to opt for the "vesa" and it seems to have worked fine.

I had decided to try to install Mandriva with the plugin SB Audigy sound card. It had never worked, and required making a selection in the BIOS. It's a big plus for Mandriva that it correctly recognized the card and installed the drivers automatically. On the other hand, Java and Flash had to be installed manually.

One feature I like about Suse was the automated update notification. Every few days a little lizard on the panel would turn red telling my that updates were available. I would click on it and decide whether or not to install the updates. It's a comforting procedure. Nothing like that exists for Mandriva, unless you shell out some money to join the club. I would consider doing this but, I might just as easily abandon the OS and install another one whenever another attractive alternative comes along.

There are still problems with the USB external MP3 player, which is mounted at booting, but otherwise ignored. It may take a little bit of work in getting it to work properly. I also found that I have to log out as user and log in as root to delete or change any files that don't sit in my HOME directory. A bit disconcerting at first until I discovered the trick to it. Using the "su" command and my attempts to "chown" or "chmod" were to no avail. It's not a bad idea really, as it's very easy to delete valuable data files. The Gnome applications I found so unsatisfactory on the Ubuntu 5.10 distro were better on the Mandriva. (By the way, 5.10 refers to October 2005, so I was mistaken in calling it 5.1 in the previous post.) I found some advice by searching the net for changing the default font size for subtitles for the Totem Movie Player: Among the hidden files in the HOME directory, is the folder .Gnome2 and in there is the totem_config file. Open the file and make the appropriate changes. I believe it was this page that helped me. I had better luck with the Rhythmbox audio player, but it was short-lived. I removed it a few days ago when it seemed to stop allowing me to expand my library. I'm on the look-out for a good Gnome audio player.

Shortly after completing the last post, a number of new Linux distos came out. Also, I wanted to experiment with the Gnome desktop. It should have worked with Mandrake 10.1, and had in the past, but this time my computer froze when I tried to start Gnome. I'd also thought about re-sizing my HDD partitions to give less space to windows - all the excuse I needed for some tinkering.

I downloaded the Gnome oriented Ubuntu 5.1 and burned it onto a CD RW. It was easy to install, but didn't recognize my sound card. (No Linux Distro yet has done this.) The TV-Out didn't work either. There was no support for MP3, and strangely, my other hard drive was not recognized. I had to sleuth around the net to learn about editing the fstab file and mount the slave disk. Installing the various codecs was no problem. None of the newer distros include these codecs, but they're easy to find. I was never satisfied with the audio players that supposedly work with Gnome. There were at least two, and they were extremely buggy. Asian language support is lacking and I never really got used to the Nautilus file system interface, though it's more attractive than KDE's Konqueror. The Evolution email program was a pleasure and I was sorry to see it go.

I gave Mepis 3.1 another try. The nice thing about this distro is that it's uniquely a Live CD with an option to install. (In something like 20 minutes.) Unfortunately it doesn't work reliably. I remember using it at some point in the past year. It was satisfactory, save for it's lack of Asian character support, and I used it until X11 crashed when I'd tried to change the KDE background image to a painting by James Ensor. This time I left the background as it was but ran into trouble trying to de-interlace the Xine media player so that it would display on my TV. It did work at some points, but there was obviously a bug that I wasn't about to fix. I also struggled without success to change my local time zone from the default New York City. Time to move along so I downloaded Suse 10.0, and burnt it to a DVD RW.

Installation went smoothly until the very end when my monitor went blank. After another attempt, I had the same result. I went back to Mepis and downloaded another newly released distro, the 3 CD Mandriva 2006, successor to the Mandrake 10.1 that I had used for most of the previous year. I was ready to settle into this distro but it didn't display anything on my TV. I'd tried to address this issue in the past with other distros and had been led to alter the XF86Config file. It had been a frustrating experience and nothing seemed to work. By chance really, I noticed the booting dialogue of the Knoppix live CD as it flashed by referring to the vesa video driver. When I use Windows, I configure the Nvidia card for "TwinView" but I was stumped when it came to Linux. The Knoppix distro, like Mepis and Mandrake 10.1, does a nice job at TV-Out so I went into Mandriva's control panel and found such an option for the video driver. It worked, I had successfully got the TV display, but there were intermitent crashes after that.

I went back to Suse 10.0 and a more careful installation showed my error. In the final step, the installation wizard suggests a screen resolution that was too great for my monitor and I had to scale it back to 1024X800. I settled for the KDE desktop and went to the XF86Config and switched the driver to "vesa". I had to do this with the Vim editor, by the way, while Mandriva 2006 offered a convenient wizard. My little changes worked and no crashing either, giving quite a feeling of accomplishment. Note, however that since selecting this option, I cannot play demanding action games like GL-117. Either way, I've been using the Suse 10.0 distro ever since. The only problems I've had with it is the occasional crashing of the Amarok audio player, and that Foxfire slows down to a standstill when it is asked to download even a tiny .torrent file. There were a few other anomalies with Foxfire and I experimented with Konquorer and Mozilla, which both out-performed Foxfire, until I settled on Opera 8.5 which seems to be capable of all that I've got used to in Foxfire.

There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing over a couple of weeks, but most of these distros can be installed on my system while I make and eat supper. I should confess that it seems the only time I learn anything about Linux is after installation when it's time to make it work as I want. Suse 10.0 is a nice distro and I doubt I'll change anytime soos.

It's been about a year since I started using Linux, so it's time for a short review. I haven't really learned much about using Linux except for installing applications and mounting disks. I use Mandrake 10.1 for web browsing, file sharing, and various media applications. There are occasions when I need to use applications that work on Windows, so I still have a dual booting system. In fact it was only yesterday that I had to re-install the Windows which had become crippled due to spy-ware and virus. It went smoothly except that the bootloader was erased in the formatting. Mandrake's installation disk replaced it easily.

Some of the problems I've had with Linux are difficulties in hardware recognition. I'm using Mandrake largely because it worked so well with my hardware on installation. It still had trouble with a sound card and I haven't got around to addressing the issue. I'm using sound from the motherboard instead. The screensaver never really worked (for Mandrake) and the Wine emulator are not much use either. That aside, I'm happy using Linux and see no need to return to Windows, except for the odd occasion when I need to use a Windows application.