Red Hat and Fedora are Poles Apart

While Fedora is too bleeding edge, Red Hat (and Centos) is too conservative. Both are poles apart. Red Hat and its community bandwagon, Fedora don't offer anything in between. Of Course, there are Blag, Scientific Linux, StartCom, but the leading flavors of Red Hat Camp are still Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Centos) and Fedora.

While most of the people in Linux World know what to use, the rest of the world has no exact idea. For example seasoned Linux Administrators will never deploy Fedora as Server or Desktop, they will stick with RHEL or Centos. However, they might backport some packages from Fedora to get something done in RHEL or Centos.

There is nothing wrong if an enterprise distribution is somewhat conservative and its backed community distribution is bleeding edge. But the situation becomes grim if some people consider both to be somewhat same. I have witnessed many such unfortunate situations.

My previous employer wanted to replace the entire Windows platform with Linux. To ensure the transition smooth, he hired a Linux consultant. On his first day in office, the consultant configured on Web and Data Server Centos 5.2 (It is running seamlessly). Next day, after some discussion with the CEO, he installed Fedora 10 on the desktops. (Reason: The consultant convinced our CEO that Fedora is backed by Redhat, the most trusted name is corporate world) And here is where all the pleasure ended. For next 10 days the office was chaotic with heated Fedora bashing. That Consultant was again called in. This time he tried Centos on desktops but could not succeed. The new and shiny desktops and laptops just refused to Centos. Reason? Centos is really very old and our hardware is too new.

Blame it on the yesteryears and the popularity of Redhat, most of the people even today mean Linux by Redhat. Still worse, they equate Fedora with Redhat and proceed deploying Fedora as an alternative to Red Hat only to fall into trouble.

PS: We have installed PCLinuxOS 2007 and 2009.1 in our office desktops after the disappointing experience with Fedora. There has been no glitches so far.

Debian Lenny, Mighty Debian!

Blame it on me because I also thought Debian is not for newbies for use as a Desktop Linux. The latest from the Debian Project, Lenny changed me. Many are in the thought that Debian is a good server operating system, and many suggest its derivatives such as Ubuntu, Mepis, Pardus and Linspire for desktop usage. Pity! Debian has come of age since Potato and Woody, and now, as much I experienced, is perfect for desktop usage.

I found pure Debian to be better than its so called derivatives in many ways.

1. It's rock solid. I hope nobody will defy this statement.

2. It is easy and I mean it. Before installing I prepared myself for an uphill task for pulling non-free packages, configuring the closed-source wlan device, integrating codecs/plugins into browser and installing some proprietary applications. First of all, installation of the default Debian Lenny was as easy as installing any modern Desktop Linux. The plain pink installer was painfree. After installation I pulled in ndiswrapper module and got my wlan up and running. Finally setting up Debian-Multimedia repository was only as easy as placing an URL in the synaptic. And then all my favorite packages such as skype, unrar, w32codes, libdvdcss2, vlc, mplayer and firefox (remember Default Debian install has a pure opensource clone of Firefox, Iceweasel). With main, contribut, free, non-free and multimedia repositories active you are just a click away from around 25,000 packages!

3. It is a performer. Previously I thought it to be slow trying to appease a lot of criteria. But I was wrong, I found it to be as responsive as Mepis or Ubuntu.

4. It supports all. Many are in the wrong opinion that "Debian owing to its stable principle and delayed release cycle does not support modern hardware". Rest assured, with Xorg 7.4 and Kernel 2.6.26 Lenny is not outdated at all. Most probably it will support your desktop and laptop devices including some esoteric devices as well.

In conclusion I would suggest all of you who are using Ubuntu or other Debian Derivatives to try Lenny. It is worth the time!

Linux Desktop is not in the Menu of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Sometime back I had tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5.2. Well, I did not purchase it. My cousin, an RHCE aspirant got that for me. The interaction was short – First I installed RHEL 5.2 on his Desktop (specifications: Intel 845 motherboard, PIV 1.8 GHz processor and 1 GB RAM) then tried to installed the same on an HP DV notebook. Installing on the desktop was painless, but it could not install on the HP DV notebook. So, when the 5.3 release was announced I was really curious to try that. After all, version 5.3 has many updates, especially those about device drivers.



Having decided to try RHEL 5.3 I browsed the www.redhat.com. Registration was damn easy. After a short while I got mail with details of my account and activation for downloading the evaluation version of RHEL 5.3. Having those info with me I logged in to Red Hat Network (RHN) and reached at the download page. And that's exactly where all my enthusiasm ended. Actually I was looking for the Desktop version of RHEL, but to my despair Red Hat offers evaluation versions for Servers only. There is no option to download and try Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. Sad! It made me think that RED HAT DOES NOT AIMS AT OR CARES FOR LINUX ON DESKTOP.



Despair and frustrated I browsed www.centos.org. After all, Centos is the free clone of Red Hat. Downloading Centos 5.3 was easy. I downloaded through the bin DVD. Installing Centos 5.3 on my Desktop was hassle-free. But again, Centos 5.3 was joke on the same HP DV notebook. Then I tried the same on my Compaq notebook. It failed again. It could not detect some of the devices and it could not configure (though detected) many others. Well nothing to blame Centos, it is just a recompilation of Red Hat source packages.

My search for Red Hat Linux Enterprise Desktop 5.3 and my hands-on experience with Centos 5.3 tought me a lesson. Both these distros are not meant for notebooks at all. Of course, you can use them if your notebook is more than one decade old. Well, you can use them on relative old and standard desktops.

I hope you know Novell has already released its SLE 11 with a new kernel and updated packages. Even Debian is shining and ready to sit on most of the notebooks and desktops with its relatively new 2.6.26 kernel and xorg 7.4, where as the RHEL 5.3 is still sticking to that 2.6.18 kernel and an age-old xorg, making it a big NO for notebooks. What's more, there is no sign of the plans for RHEL 6. May be, it will take another 2 years when the it hits markets.

It seems to me that Red Hat does not aim at the desktop/laptop markets.

PCLinuxOS - 4 Tweaks to Speed up Firefox3

Firefox3 is very feature-rich, secure and usable web browser. It is a testimony of the power of opensource software. But while going to please everybody and serve many functions it has become little heavy and seems sluggish, especially during startup and first connection. Fortunately, you can tweak its settings to make it blazingly fast.

Here are a few of them that will help speed up firefox3.

#1
Open about:config in firefox3, type network.http.pipelining in the filterbar, then double-click on this line and its value from false to true. Likewise search for network.http.proxy.pipelining, plugin.expose_full_path and network.dns.disableIPv6 and change their values to true.

#2
Search for network.http.pipelining.maxrequests in the filterbar of about:config page, double click on it and change the value anywhere from 10 to 20.

#3
Rightclick in the about:config page and select New followed by Integer. And in the new Integer value box type nglayout.initialpaint.delay and click ok. In the integer value box type 0 and click OK. Likewise create two Integers - one content.notify.backoffcount with value 5, and the other ui.submenuDelay with value 0. 1. Similarly, create a New Integer, name it Network.dnsCacheExpiration and give its value as 3600.

#4
The last tweak is about loosening one of the firefox3 security features for fast browsing, so be careful. Turn off these two security options under the Edit>>Preferences>>Security section of firefox:

Security -> Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected Attack site
Security -> Tell me if the site I’m visiting is a suspected forgery

Close the preferences window, exit Firefox, and then delete urlclassifier3.sqlite file in .mozilla/firefox/*/, i.e, rm .mozilla/firefox/*/urlclassifier3.sqlite (checkout for *, in my case it is loela80g.default)

Computing on Gnome Desktop was never so easy before PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Gnome

PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Gnome Desktop

I am a KDE guy. I have loved KDE for its superior usability and availability of good KDE apps. I like Mandriva, PCLinuxOS and Mepis for many reasons, an important of them being they implement KDE better than any other distro. However, PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Gnome made me think seriously over Gnome. I must recommend every Gnome enthusiast to try it.

It's beautiful Gnome Distro optimized to give you maximum performance. It comes with a good selection of multimedia apps, especially VLC, Mobile Media Converter and Kino. It dwarfs default Fedora Gnome desktop with its good selection of packages and stability.

PCLinuxOS 2009.1 Gnome is the only Gnome Desktop that has such handy system tools such as PCLinuxOS Control Center. In addition to these, it seems me to be a pure Gnome Desktop, i.e., it does not have much stuff such as libraries and stuff of other desktop environments like KDE, Xfce. With the main KDE PCLinuxOS you have got some gnome stuff alongwith a customized and fine-tuned KDE desktop, but this gnome remaster has a somewhat pure gnome appeal.

Installing Roboform in Linux and integrating it with Firefox

The last roadblock of our migration to Linux is over with the successful installation of roboform on PCLinuxOS 2009.1 in our SEO Company in India. Now we are happy that we accomplished it after a week-long toiling around. We searched various forums for a fix and none of those suggestions worked. Here is the detailed and ordered acount of what we did to get roboform work on top of firefox in PCLinuxOS.

1. First we installed "Crossoverlinux Pro 7"
2. Then we installed "Internet Explorer 6" through crossover linux.
3. Make the crossover bottle having internet explorer 6 default.
   
4. Install "firefox windows version 2" in the default bottle.
   
5. Finally, we installed Roboform Pro 6.9 in that default bottle too.

Important notes:

After please install "internet explorer 6" "firefox 2 windows version" and "roboform 6.9" in the same bottle of crossover linux.

That's it!

Linux Experience - Pains of OpenSource or Price for Going Free?

In the earlier posts it is mentioned in details on how we planned to move to Linux, how we hopped across different Linux distros and finally settled on PCLinuxOS 2009.1. Overall we are having much secure, free and better computing experience with PCLinuxOS. But there are still a few glitches that turn it down on our Search Engine Optimization in India.

The first and perhaps the most annoying difficulty we are facing is interoperability with Microsoft Office generated files. PCLinuxOS 2009.1 ships with OpenOffice 3, needless to say we can read/write Microsoft Office documents from Office 97 to 2003, and can only read 2007. But the problem with OpenOffice lies in the way it renders Microsoft Documents. Sometimes the rendering of document is so poor that the reading is meaningless. We have to review and update hundreds of Microsoft Documents that contain a fair amount of tables, graphics and other artworks. OpenOffice jumbles up the display of these documents. After having this experience we tried GO-OO and OxygenOffice. Both these OpenOffice clones seemed little enhanced performance- and feature-wise. But again the proper document display has still been a problem. Seems it still lacks the polish, features and usability that alternatives such as MS Office and Apples iWorks have. OOCalc fells flat when it comes to working on complicated excel sheets calculating financials. Sometime it can't read the tsv files at all.

Next comes the issue of System Performance. PCLinuxOS 2009 seems very responsive on the machines with more than 1GB RAM and P4 or above processors. But its performance is not that good on machines with 512MB RAM. Of Course, we had worse experience with Mint and Fedora on these machines. The worst part is that the system becomes sluggish like a turtle even with a couple of heavy spreadsheets open.

A minor annoyance also lies in realtime editing on ftp. Earlier we used cuteftp. On it we used to open files from clients website, do the editing realtime, and upload. But on linux we are missing some of its comforts. We have to save those files first on local drive, then edit and upload. Filezilla on linux also has the feature of realtime editing. And it asks for a text editor while editing realtime. But the problem appears after you leave Filezilla. For example, if you make kwrite your default editor for editing HTML files realtime on Filezilla, you will experience konqueror crashing while you browse your computer. Because Linux tries to open the local drives and directories on kwrite.

Another problem is related to password security. Previously we were using roboform in Windows. We searched for applications comparable to it on Linux. We could not find one as easy and effective.

The last noteworthy annoyance is about CPU scorching. Sometimes we need to download files from client's website. We have been using downthemall (firefox extension) for this purpose. But strangely while downloading a large number of files with downthemall the CPU usage rises above 90%, fan moves frantically, and the desk becomes noise. This was a not a problem with Windows. Would anybody find a fix for it?

PS:

None of these problems are specific to PCLinuxOS. They are even worse in other distributions. There are so many other problems besides the ones mentioned in this post.

Desktop Linux Help – How to Import Outlook Mails from Windows to Thunderbird in Linux?

We have almost migrated from Windows Platform to Linux. PCLinuxOS is sitting on 40 out of 44 Desktops in our Search Engine Optimization Company in India. What about the rest 4?

Well, he had to pause installing those rest four. Because those machines where use by our customer care people and almost 4 Gbs of Outlook mail files are there. We could not think of moving till we get those imported into Thunderbird in Linux.

We searched a lot of Linux Forums on how to import Outlook mails in Windows to Thunderbird in Linux. Most of the solutions offered in the forum was to install an extension pst-import-plugin, which did not work at all.

Next our System Administrator, T. N. Pandeya, resorted to a desi-formula that worked well. Let's see what he did.

1. He first installed Thunderbird on those Windows machines having Gbs of outlook mails. Dont make Thunderbird the default mail client.
2. While configuring Thunderbird on those Windows machines, he imported outlook mails through import wizard of thunderbird. Please make sure while importing mails outlook must be your default mail client.
3. After that Thunderbird automatically imported all the Outlook mails to its mail folders. (example, browse this folder - "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.AGONSIS\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\fjhawubs.default\Mail\Local Folders" and copy everything related to outlook such as - outlook mail.sbd (folder), trash.sbd, outlook mail.msf, outlook mail, etc.)
4. Then he copied Thunderbird mail folders of all windows machines to our linux server (you can also copy them to any media), renamed them as per their respective users.
5. Next, he installed PCLinuxOS 2009 on all those windows machines.
6. Then, he configured Thunderbird on those machines.
7. Finally, he copied the thunderbird mail folders from the linux server to the mail folder of the thunderbird mail folder (example browse /home/user/.thunderbird/4pth.default/Mail/Local Folders/) in the newly installed PCLinuxOS 2009.1.

Thats it!

Desktop Linux - Felicia Failed in My Office - Part 2

Those who are interested in what the Part 1 was please read it here.

Where did I leave you last time? Oh! We had our way from a bad Linux Mint Experience to Fedora 10. That administrator took almost a week to install Fedora on all the desktops. There were several problems (more than that of Linux Mint) related to internet connectivity, wi-fi configuration and many others specially related to internet access and web services, all of which are crucial for a Search Engine Compay in India like us.

Strange, we had to struggle our way to just maintain internet connectivity, and manage wi-fi alongwith ethernet. On several occasions the net_applet would just vanish and require us to manually run the command to activate it again. The biggest annoyance with Fedora 10 was working on the FTP client. We first tried it on FileZilla, then gftp, and then ftp. Every time the client would download just 5kb of data and then get stuck until we kill it. The next big annoyance was to maintain continuous connectivity with mail accounts in pidgin. The last pain in the ass was that Fedora 10 was slow like turtle. No doubt, booting was quite fast and sophisticated but the real problem came along when running many applications together. With as few as 10 applications running, after pressing ALT+F2 we had to wait around 4 secs for RUN dialong box to appear.

Fedora 10 was a no-go situation. Now, it was the turn for PCLinuxOS 2009.1 shine. Tomorrow, our office is ready to go Linux with PCLinuxOS. Many are still sceptic about PCLOS, but I am confident, it will create a cult of linux-conversion among our employees.

Absence of a General Purpose installable CD or DVD Media - a Debian Delirium

Debian is the best, most stable, and the biggest community distro! No doubt about it. I liked its latest, Lenny very much. But all the way from downloading it and installing was not a joyride. First, I hit their download page. It was where actually my frustration began. Though the Debian download page is great with multiple options such as Minimal Bootable netinstall image, Buying Options for finished CDs/DVDs, Downloading options with Jigdo, Bittorrent and HTTP or FTP, it lacked a General Purpose installable CD or DVD Media. By "General Purpose installable CD or DVD Media" I mean the disks like Mandriva DVD, Fedora DVD, Centos DVD, using which anybody can have a smooth installation. The user can have a smooth journey of installation by choosing his/her favorite desktop environment (KDE, GNOME or XFCE) and desired platform (server or desktop). Of course, after installation he/she can choose to add/remove packages by getting connected to that particular distribution's software repository.



I browsed my way to download using HTTP or FTP, chose Official Stable CD/DVD Images, clicked on i386 architecture of CD and landed on a page that's quite puzzling.

There were as many as 35 CD iso images.



Likewise, the Official DVD download for i386 had 5 DVD images.



What to choose? And how? Even there were no information on what the individual disk images contained.

Then I came to netinstall image download. It was of 150 MB in size, so it got downloaded soon. But problem began while installing as I could not connect to net. It's also not a fault/bug of Debian, but the nature of my connection. Debian installer asked to enter IP address, Netmask, Gateway and DNS servers of the network. I furnished those information, but could get connected to debian mirros. Because, My ISP requires to enter a particular username and password after furnishing those network details. So, I halted the installation then and there.

Later, I took my notebook to my office where I could connect to net by just entering IP address, Netmask, Gateway and DNS servers of the network. The installation was very smooth and clean, except for some minor problems while configuring Wifi and display resolution. Those problems were fixed in half an hours of googling around.

So, here my request to the Debian people is that they should bring out a general purpose DVD image (like that of Fedora DVD, Mandriva DVD, Centos DVD) or a Desktop CD image (like that of PCLinuxOS Live CD, Mepis Live CD, Mandriva One Live CD, OpenSuse LiveCD ), in addition to those 35 CD images and 5 DVD images. It will definitely bring more users to the Debian domain by clearing the confusion of so many installable media.