Mandriva, it’s all about packaging

From time to time distributions such as Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo get some attention through some features they introduce, Speedboot, control centers, first to include KMS etc. What I believe these guys miss is that the availability of software is the biggest problem some user might face.
1.Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat (and Fedora more or less) get most of the attention from closed source packagers.
2.Point 1 applies to open source packagers that don’t have resources to produce packages for all the Linux fauna. Not all software is like the kernel or Firefox to be omnipresent.
3.Even if the software is not available for the likes of Debian or Fedora, because of their high penetration, the chances to find an article on how to make things work are high.

Mandriva is not going to cut it unless you are in a well established setting, where you are assured to need nothing more than the available packages. I remember switching from Mandriva and SuSE to Debian and notice how it suddenly becomes possible to run all kind of software. I cannot imagine testing all the things I needed with anything else that a Debian or RedHat system.

I would suggest Mandriva to try to move all its technology to Debian-like packaging and make the system 99.9% percent compatible with Debian.
“Mandriva offers you 5 seconds boot time, super-duper control center, x kernel enhancements and the already proven Mandriva technologies combined with the possibility to install any package available for Debian”.
So this is far-fetched, they have RPM knowledge etc. Replace this with Fedora. I just chose Debian because of the primitive (in my view) packaging system that Fedora offers.

I don’t know the disadvantages, but the advantages are obvious: one less target for independent packagers, access to the whole of Debian software and one more step for compatibility between distributions.

Giving up Linux because of X.Org? – with the help of other Linux quirks, maybe yes

These days X.Org & Co. are slowly dragging me to the end of my patience. A short list of problems:

1.Configuring the laptop touchpad. Currently there are no tools to easily configure the touchpad. GSynaptics has incomplete support and the configuration is lost after Xorg restart. KSynaptics doesn’t work anymore because it expects some shared memory, which cannot be enabled whatever you do in Xorg. Go deeper to ugliness of HAL rules, you’ll do it, in hours.

2.XKB only accepts 4 keyboard layouts at a time (FOUR). A stupid small number, chosen by fair dice roll. Good that the dice didn’t say 1. It was known and discussed at least since 2005: http://community.livejournal.com/xkbconfig/304.html (When I write this is 2009, FTR). KXKB of KDE 3 protected me from this, the one from KDE 4 doesn’t.

3.X.Org turns of external monitor output, for good. Video projector at presentations, that is. This one has been with Debian and Fedora on all 3 laptops I touched for at least 9 months (graphics from Ati, NVidia and Intel). You need to have the external monitor plugged in at computer startup so that it doesn’t get turned off. It may be gone with the current X.Org from Debian unstable, as it fixed other bunch of stuff too. It really gives you confidence when giving presentations (and makes you look professional when audience sees terminals scolling )

I forgot the rest, X.Org has had other limitations known for long which didn’t really hit me, ex.: cursore movement is lost at screen edge, affecting game developers; total number of keyboard key codes is limited (can’t use some special buttons on keyboard); problems with programs taking cursor focus for good, taking the whole screen for good; clipboard problems continue to exit (maybe 100% application toolkit problem). This is totaly from memory and I may have to stand corrected very easily.

4.Video drivers. Word of mouth says that everyone except NVidia has big problems on Linux. I know it’s true for Ati, FGLRX seems to work without crash only for a minority, I have no hope to see performance from Radeon/Radeonhd. It’s been very low when I first saw Linux 5 years ago, it’s the same today. Playing with 3D modelling tools is less and less fun.

5.ALSA – integrated speakers never mute, specific to some laptops. I didn’t see any help from any developer for half a year (https://bugtrack.alsa-project.org/alsa-bug/view.php?id=4165 + plus bugs at Debian and RedHat). Yes, I looked at ALSA drivers code. I may have to say I’m not smart enough to solve this without days of looking through code. And the lack of *any* suggestion made me feel extremelly frustrated, after begging for attention times in a row.

I have to thank KDE developes for making wonderfull programs available for other platforms, to make the possible transition less painfull. I won’t have KWin and middle click paste for example, but who knows, maybe these will get solved.

If anyone may be asking how I help: I took the time to report and try to provide steps for lots of bugs (>50 at Debian, tens at KDE and some in other places) and then follow them, these days I actually worked on some KDE stuff and I hope to come with more patches.
I actually looked at ALSA and X.Org code, but it may be that I’m not smart enough for that.

Diverse

1.I really want some tagging for my files. How can I do it? I know about desktop search and use it up to some point, but Amarok gave me the habbit of tagging and I can’t stand their missing from my FS. Yes, I know, I have to give a try to NEPOMUK from KDE4. Do you know about some other simple solution?

2.I hate Raiffeisen, both in Romania and Austria. If “hate” too tough replace it with: “I am very dissapointed with the services”.
-today I wanted to make a transfer and they told me I can only do a transfer in the place where I have done the account. I asked if I can do it with cash, the answer was no. I asked if there is any way to do it there, the answer was no. I was so lost and surprised that I just tried to fake a smile, say goodbye and left.
-the e-banking was not working. Went to the bank, the lady didn’t know why it was inactive, she said that in a few minutes should be activated. When I last checked (3 days after the happening, it was still not working).
They are generally slow. The employees are not as polite and helpful as they could be (except from the ones in Roman).

3.In Debian there exists a software named Cycle (page on Sourceforge). You guessed it, it is about women’s cycle. Citation from the description:

Cycle is a calendar for women. Given a cycle length or statistics for
several periods, it can calculate the days until menstruation, the days
of “safe” sex,[...].

NOTE: This program is not a reliable contraceptive method. It does
neither help to prevent sexual transmision diseases like AIDS. [...]

I am pleased to see this is a GUI program. I only note it for being interesting. The next one will be noted for being funny.

4.PornView, is an image viewer that appears in my list of Debian software. It was covered for its name before, so I won’t do it again. Page on Sourceforce.

5.KDE has made some excelent advances. In two or three weeks since the last compilation the following have happened:
-the panel received a new design that makes the tab of one window distinguishable from the tab of another.
-Plasma crashes less often and when it crashes it doesn’t massively reset the panels, desktop and other related settings. It still does reset some of them.
-I haven’t seen any KWin crash.
-the panel is now stable, its components can be moved without any major oddities.
Excelent work, the first two points already made try the new KDE for longer.

Fedora 10 encounter

Here is a list of notes from installing Fedora 10 (the KDE live CD) on my computer after more years of Debian.

Good.
1.Boot works quite smooth, after around 2-3 minutes of torturing the CD-drive I get a desktop at the right resolution, with sound working, no obvious oddities.
2.Installation of packages on the partition is very fast. I guess it merely unpacks everything, this is a good thing from my point of view.
3.Suspend works, unlike in Debian.
4.Radeonhd works, unlike in Debian, but without correct 3D (I may move this to the Bad list).
5.The audio controls only show two settings, via PulseAudio, but actually the microphone worked correctly by default.

Bad.
Installation on the hard disk:
1.The program used to select the timezone is hard to use:
-the dropdown list of countries cannot be navigated by pressing the initial letter of the country on the keyboard.
-on the map the tooltip covers the points around the cursor;
-the map cannot be zoomed enough;
2.The graphical representation of the partitions is not functioning correctly. If a partition is too small compared to the disk size you cannot select it with the cursor, altough it is drawn on the screen.
3.It does not want to install on an existing empty partition, and insists on formatting the partition (“partitions need to be formatted during live-cd install”).
4.There is no option to format a partition as Reiser3.
5.After so many years there is still no Linux installer that can resize a Reiser3 partition (there exist programs like Acronis Disk Director which do it perfectly, I don’t know any OSS program that can make Reiser3 smaller).
For points 3, 4, 5 it is fair to mention that as a rule, the work that what Linux installers can do on partitions is limited.
6.The NTFS resizer seems to be CPU bound.
While doing the NTFS resize a busy progressbar* will appear on the screen and the speed of the moving indicator seems to be unlimited. My conclusion is supported by ksysguard which shows that one of the processors (50%) is fully used: 31% Xorg (probably performing the drawing) and 19% the Fedora installer. This is further sustained by the fact that neither the HDD nor the CD are active. After 30 minutes the resize was still not over. It took only 5 minutes with ntfs resize run from the command line, with the HDD being continuosly active, the operation was obviously I/O bound.
7.The NTFS resizer does not feedback the progress, only showing the busy progress bar.
8.The NTFS resizer will quit without offering any warning/option if the close button is pressed, potentially leaving a damaged partition.
9.The bootloader installer does not do any efforts to automatically (automagically in Debian terms) discover existing operating systems on the other partitions.
If I remember correctly this is a done for many years now, SuSE and Mandriva (and i believe even Debian) did it for at least 3-4 years.
10.The window of the installer is fixed size.

Live CD/Desktop experience:
1.Booting takes a lot, and is obviously bounded by the seek speed of the CD-ROM drive. Knoppix seemed a lot faster, but I may be wrong. I guess giving up some of the things loaded is one simple step to make this faster. For example, after 4-5 minutes of booting, the KDE desktop appears; other 30+ seconds and KDE4 start-up jingle is played.
2.The desktop comes with all the KDE4 known bugs. Example: replace the Kickoff KMenu with the old KMenu. After a desktop crash there will be no KMenu in the panel. This is very repeatable.
3.Replacing the Kickoff with the old menu will disable the Alt+F1 shortcut. I have this bug with my KDE from svn though.
4.The VLC that comes with Fedora seems to have some bugs, its sound is continuously jittered.
5.The text terminal may work or not depending on something I haven’t yet discovered.

Package management:
1.The package management program that is found in the menus is KPackagesKit, but it doesn’t do anything: does not show any package, it cannot be configured, no repositories can be configured.
2.Information on Fedora package management is not easy to find, Google shows a very spread and fragmented pool of documentation. With some lost time, this is workable though and of course may be an artifact of being used to Debian. I found no obvious right way to do things (say aptitude+synaptic in Debian).
3.There is no obvious sign saying that there is no MP3, Amarok2 will simply not play. I installed the forbidden codecs and the players worked but Amarok remained unable to play MP3s.
4.Yumex is not good. You can’t search anything detailed in it. I wasn’t able to find the radeonhd driver, but after finding the exact package name, I could install it from the command line with yum.
Yumex also has a text area that show information about the package. Too bad that it is fixed size, so you can’t get it to show more that 5 lines of text.

Funny
1.The first Xorg session is on vt1, the next ones on vt7, vt8.

*A busy progressbar shows only an indicator that walks around, without telling the exact progress, like this one.

Full text search – bachelor’s thesis

Long after the bachelor’s exam I am uploading my bachelor’s thesis project, as I promised some time ago.
It is a desktop text search engine, written entirely in C++ and the Qt libraries, with all the code related to scanning, storing and searching the information written from scratch and only using the basic C++ and Qt data structures.

You may download the torrent (http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4538524) and can also find it here, on a thing called sendspace (first upload service that Google revealed, I don’t know if it is working).
I will upload also the paper when I’ll find it, altough that is not a big thing either.

The archive contains:
-Windows executable + Qt libraries
-Linux executable (debug build).
-All the source code.

The scanning speed is CPU bound, and it is incovenient to fix. It toped at around 1MB/s on the old system and 1.5MB/s on the new one. The space overhead tends to around 13% of the scanned contents. The search is fast and can use simple AND, OR and exact phrase combinations. I even used it for a few weeks until going back to Recoll.
The source code is GPL v2+, as Qt requires. There is no license notice on each source file but nobody will die from that. Try the tree viewer as I consider it very nice for the small quantity of time I put into it.

The blatant limitations and defects:
-the scanning speed;
-the inconsistent and unfinished threading + crashes.
-the bad and unfinished user interface;
-the overall usefulness is by far not that of a real program anyway.

It comes so late as I did not have a Windows machine or a cross compiler until now, and I finally installed a Windows copy in VirtualBox. That’s enough for such a small project.
Note:
Remember to add a screenshot tomorrow .

Using the microphone in Debian – I hope Windows XP works on my laptop

Update: Using the ncurses program “alsamixer” I was able to get decent settings and make the mic. work right. Unlike KMix and Alsamixergui, changes made with alsamixer were applied. It is also keyboard friendly (it’s stupid console in fact, couldn’t be otherwise). I’m still thinking about other OS, this was too big a hassle

VoIP is finally reaching us, and offers prices that are unbelievably good. Buy credit from a VoIP provider (TerraSIP in my case), start a VoIP program (WengoPhone in this Debian case), do some settings to the program and call home. I have mention that quality is also surprising, I guess that in more than half of the case it is better than phone to phone. Being abroad this means very important savings.

And I did this, until Debian sabotaged me. To make the microphone work correctly on this laptop, a fair bit of experimentation is necessary, I did that and everything worked. After some time, with no conscious ALSA related changes on my system, this doesn’t work anymore, and the sound is no longer clear. It now misses all the higher frequency sounds and transforms them in squeaks.

The bad thing is that I don’t know where the problem is coming from, and more, I have no idea how to solve it.

Here’s a picture showing Alsamixergui with the best settings I could get. The program has tons of controls and none of them is explained. Googling didn’t give me too many answers. Some of the controls cannot be used (although KMix uses them, but to no effect), and also the range of possible combinations, without using a manual, is frightening.

So counting the sacrifices done for running Debian:
-no 3d acceleration -> No playing CS with friends. No other interesting gaming. I never got too far with Blender to feel the need for real 3d, but I will.
-problems with opening fancy shit office documents, not using proprietary math software from the university, others like this -> A few bad marks and some time wasted.
-calling at home from abroad with prices as much as 15 times higher than the VoIP ones. Well, this is the hot point, the costs are directly measurable as money. I guess now I have enough reasons to leave the Debian away.

So, where to?
I guess Windows XP/Server 2003. (The Vista saga is also written on this blog, and it is also not happy.) After about 3 years of running Linux on an underpowered desktop (but at least with good sound ), I have to give up goodies like KDE+Kwin, a decent console, nice package management from Debian, easy development with Qt and easy plugging in of external libraries, the Xorg middle click paste and easy switching of users and desktops. The good thing is that Amarok, Kate, Konqueror, KOrganizer and others make their way to Windows, I will be able to use the decent Visual Studio debugger and some others.

There are alternatives, but with shortcomings:
KUbuntu, I’am afraid they will try on me stuff like PulseAudio, the kernel TCP/IP bug (they didn’t release this one after all), and other half working thinks.
SuSE looks attractive, but it seems they said goodbye to KDE 3 and I guess there are not as many programs as with Debian.
Mandriva. My all time favorite, although the lack of proprietary packages (and also free ones) makes it hard to use.
And also, there’s no guarantee the sound problems will go away, while with Windows I have high hopes they will.

Oh, and later random thoughts:
-the man/woman/guy/dude (I didn’t dig to see who he/she is) from linuxhatersblog said he would stop. I still think he knew a lot more about Linux than I do.
-I still hate AMD/ATI for tricking me into buying a laptop with a radeonhd “supported” shit video card. I hope they will get their shit together though, as competition is always good.
-I will ask some help from some ALSA guys before leaving Debian. I would do some coding myself, but it’s a bit beyond my power.
-I think this message has a record number of “shit” words, I think 5 if we include this one. There is no f-word though. I hope there’s none on this whole blog.

Running this recovery DVD will delete all data on your disk

Not long ago, I had to buy my first laptop, and after spending lots of time thinking about the right decision, I made the wrong one.

Finally, I went to the shop and made the decision based on:
-(screen size + memory + hardware performance + warranty) / price;
-looking capable to run Linux;
-having AMD/ATI graphics, as these guys sponsor free video driver development.

The though point:
1.The recovery DVD from Asus.
Later after buying the laptop I erased the vfat recovery partion and made the C: smaller. This was a mistake, as now Windows is not booting anymore (I only found out today). I can imagine some reasons, but from the point of view of the stupid user, this is a Microsoft screw-up. If the Windows partition is bootable by itself, why does it need to find information about anything else?. This was a strong point of other Windows versions: just select the partition, and bang, it works. As somewhat experienced luser, I am able to repair a Linux boot, which used to be somewhat hard, but I have no idea how to repair the Windows one.

With the laptop I also received a recovery DVD. I ran it thinking that in 2 minutes I will have Windows repaired with no other complications. Here comes the big blow: “All the data on your partition(s) will be deleted. Asus shall not be held liable…”. This text was written on the _second_ paragraph of some long enough message. My mouse left button was already pressing the “Next” button, waiting for the release that would go to the next step. Only some masochistist curiosity for reading long messages made me skim through the text that predicted havoc.
Thank you Asus for such a lovely experience.

The rest:
1. Beginning, partitioning and Vista from Asus.
I knew that the laptop comes only with 32 bit Windows Vista, I tried not to pay for the OS, but I did not manage to do that, I’m too lazy to ask for a OS refund, I might try a refund for the entire laptop though, and you’ll se why.
The first surprise was partitioning, 20 GiB vfat partition for recovery, around 120 GiB C: with Vista. This only left me around 90 GiB for other stuff. What was worse, is that the Debian installer was not able to resize the oversize C:, so I had to accept the situation and go with small Linux partition for my data. This will come and punish me in part 3.
The other thing is that the OS was configured such that the Antivirus + Security Manager (Symantec crap I think) was always asking me to register, had an unkillable window and kept asked things I found difficult to answer. There where also other programs that started with the computer and made the disk seek like mad and keep the computer slow for minutes after startup. Also, I think was not entirely Asus’s fault, as the OS was also doing huge unknown jobs on its own.
The good thing is that the OS came with disk burning software preinstalled.

2. Linux support.
2.1)Video. “This comes with modern discrete ATI graphics card, Radeonhd will sure do.” False. Radeonhd does not work on my laptop at the moment. Radeonhd is the only driver that does not work.
Fglrx makes 2D feel slow, takes ages to start Xorg, and hard crashes the computer at each logout. Only the open source ATI (2D only) driver works fine.
The Debian installer left me with the vesa driver, that only gave me small resolutions, anything better was on my own. It was good though, as X worked from the beginning, unlike other installs. So I had to do xorg.conf configuration by myself until I got the right results.
At the moment Nvidia is a dream for me. I don’t know what they do, but their shit works.

2.2)Wi-Fi. “Linux is the Chuch Norris of Wi-Fi.” False. I had to do good googling to find out that I need to install (from the repository, fortunately) some firmware. Also worth bo be said, NetworkManager seems to take longer than Vista to connect to wireless networks and it does always simply work. There are two graphical interfaces to NM: KNetworkManager that is not always working correctly; nm-applet, which works correctly, but looks like shit and does give me enough control. NM is strange anyway.

2.3)Sound. “Everyone does sound.” False. a)The internal speakers do not mute when inserting headsets. b)I had to trial and error flip the switches in the ALSA control panel until I got working microphone. c)Not all programs are able to access the microphone as they should. Some get the full volume, others only inaudible volumes, no matter what I do. Skype seems to be the only that will get good quality sound, for reasond I don’t know.

2.4)Suspend to ram. “That’s a done deal, long ago.” False. Does not work, I can’t say why, but at wake-up it used to reboot, after some update it goes to a hard crash.

2.5)Others.
Included camera. Not very important, but that is not working with most programs either.
Blutetooth. I was not able to get that working. I would have a use for it, but not important now., and I didn’t even know the laptop was capable when I bought it, so this is only and unreachable bonus.