Scientific Linux 5.5 is Ready

The best RHEL clone for Desktops, Scientific Linux 5.5 is released! Based on well-tested RHEL 5.5 source (plus some inhouse additions), it's perhaps the only RHEL child that works out of box. In fact, every thing including Wireless, Bluetooth, multimedia codecs, compiz, application programs, sharing, windows partition access (fat32 and ntfs) and other important stuff that any desktop user ever needs, is bundled with utmost care, without loosing RHEL stability.

Urs Beyerle announces "Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD 5.5 has been released for i386 and x86_64. Features: live CD can be installed to local hard disk; live CD runs from USB key; changes can be stored persistently on an external device; live CD can be mounted over NFS (diskless client). Software: Linux kernel 2.6.18, OpenAFS client 1.4.12, X.Org 7.1, ALSA sound libraries 1.0.17, GNOME 2.16.0, GIMP 2.2.13, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1, Firefox 3.0.19, Thunderbird 2.0.0.24, KDE 3.5.4 and Evolution 2.12.3"

For more, read the release notes.

Here is a great review on its previous version.

Traditional Server Guy's Views on the Linux Desktop

While Linux is growing leaps and bounds (by feature and performance; not deployment, Redmond still rules the race and will probably do the same for quite long), it's time we spread the same in the mass psyche, public mind share. So, where do we start? Noobs? New converts? Non-profit, governmental organizations? Or from the top, the busy Enterprise Linux server room managed by a traditional server guy? To me the latest seems a good starting point.

Now let's define who a "Traditional Server Guy" is? He is one who oversees all the server tasks, manages jobs, assigns works to the 2nds in commandment. He is a busy person who deployed Linux desktops couple of years back somewhere across some user desktops and has no time to either catchup with the recent advancements or to maintain the leftovers. He still believes CentOS 4 is the most stable desktop around and assumes ver.5 is still in beta (point to be noted, CentOS 6 beta might be brewing in devs' circles). Puns apart, he has been managing the business well, so he has a better command over all the departments.

Here is a few of his theories that coincides with traditional rules of Linux, that have long been challenged and changed.

1. Performance is squarely dependent on the proximity of hardware-software timeline. In other words, a dated software works better on a dated hardware. Conversely, a new and shiny hardware needs the latest software. Latter is 100% true. But not the former. In theory (and in reality) it was recommended that the user should install a contemporary linux OS in relation to the hardware, and it was really a good advice. But slowly the paradigm changed by many factors. In recent years there has been enough refinement on how linux handles drivers, manages system memory and prioritizes tasks on desktops; this ball game was changed to a great deals after kernel version 2.6.31. Of course, kernel alone is not solely responsible for this sweet change, there are tons of changes in userland and system scripts. I have seen the dated computers perform better on CentOS 5.5 and Fedora 12 than they did on Centos 4 or 5.2 or Fedora 10.
2. Age of software has nothing to do with performance, moreover newer packages require more memory and cpu cycles owing to the inclusion of more features and eye-candy. It's true in some cases, but not always. For example, OpenOffice 1.1.1 was a pig at its time, new features added, programs refined, but it was still a pig till ver. 2.0. Then the real changes seemed to show up... on the next point releases the focus was more on performance than features. And on reaching OO.0 3.2 we got a swift office suite that can revolve circles around the older office suites. The story is same with Firefox. First, it was slow, then slower, but later some dramatic changes and it became a faster and less resource hungry browser at ver. 3.6. This trend in software advancement is obvious. First, we punch the features, define libraries and dependencies. Then focus shifts to remove the dead-weight and do some refinement to squeeze more performance out of it.
3. CentOS is a great server and desktop. The statement is partially true. I've installed CentOS server only a few times. Since then it has been working well. It's steeped in the tradition of RHEL stability whose focus has always been the enterprise server. No doubt about it, CENTOS IS A GREAT SERVER. But the same is not true in case of desktops. It's more of a closed and almost a loser to catch up with the alway-merging diversity of desktop hardware. Taming it to meet your requirements is a Herculean task, though it can be done. CentOS is a fit-it and shut-it desktop where stability and security enjoy the most priority. Other linux poster-boys such as Ubuntu, Fedora and hundreds of Debian siblings still value stability (if not as paranoic as CentOS), but for them performance and feature-richness is all that counts the most. Needless to say, it's easy to customize them to your needs. Just do and compare the ease, success and benefits of compiling your kernel in Debian and CentOS. Dirty your hands at the package management tools of both the venerable distributions; add/remove programs, tweak them! You will know to the truth - RHEL clones are not as tamable as Debian siblings. The bottom line is: it's the best to deploy CentOS on servers, but you can find better alternatives for your desktops.

BOSS is Nobody's Boss!

A few days back I was watching the much hyped "Life" series on Discovery Channel. The episode on that day was on Amphibians and Reptiles. It was interesting, but what caught my attention was an advertisement on Bharat Operating System Solutions, a.k.a. BOSS.

I was happy to know that Indian Government is waking up to such novel OSS initiatives. But that happiness faded away after a little combing of distrowatch and the project's own website. After all it is a Governmental project, and like other such projects - it's dated, ill-maintained, and never meant to be widely deployed.

Developed by C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing), it's yet another Debian fork with packages more dated than the current Debian stable, Lenny (Remember, Squeeze is close to freezing and is unofficially ready for mass consumption). BOSS' software stack has all the usual suspects such as - Web server, proxy server, Database server, Mail server, Network server, File and Print server, SMS server, LDAP server, plus all major Indian language packs. However, all these and the underlying kernel, desktop environments and userland is very old. Now, the latest, at version 3.0, it still sticks to linux 2.6.22, xorg 1.3, gnome 2.20, OOo 2.2 and FF 3.

I ran it on my test machine (Dell Optiplex 360 - Intel Dual Core, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Integrated Intel Graphics & Audio and Gigabit Ethernet). Looked sobre but worked poor. In comparison, Lenny was more responsive in almost every aspect - booting, program startup and overall stability.

To all users looking for an Indian Free Linux, I would strongly recommend a vanilla Lenny (or Squeeze) + the required Indian language pack from Debian repo.

I just wonder why India fosters such a distribution and drains big money into advertisements. Why anybody will ever choose BOSS over Debian, CentOS or Suse!

CentOS 5.5 Left Me Clueless

CentOS is a venerable server OS, no doubt about it! But when it comes to desktop, the same OS is a pig - you can't tame it to your liking. I had mentioned a few of the centOS desktop annoyances here in my previous post. As the time goes on I keep on getting more and more problems. Who told it's a no-nonsense desktop!

The USB issue still persists. And I now encountered a new problem related to file-roller. CentOS 5.5 comes with file-roller-2.16.0-2.fc6. Yes, it's the versions that originally came with Gnome 2.16. It's been very long... the package has been hardened by Red Hat in each of its point releases. CentOS also packaged the same, may be after doing some QA. However, I found a weird (and critical) problem – file-roller is unable to roll at all in some cases, i.e., though it easily archives directories with a few homogeneous files (such as docs, spreadsheets and text files), it fails to archive directories with complex structures and varied file types (such as completely saved web pages including css, js, html and other files).

First, I thought it's a regression, and went on to downgrade the package with the stock CentOS 5.2 disk. Nothing to my avail. Then I came to know the problem is deep-rooted in something that went wrong while upgrading.

What Did I Learn? CentOS is not Debian, that means, you can't upgrade from one point release to another and be assured of a stable system.

CentOS desktop behaves well if you don't fiddle. As I told earlier, you can't tame it to your liking the way you can do with a Debian system. At CentOS, I am clueless about this problem. Steadily CentOS is losing all its glory before me - I can't strip its kernel to suit my fancy, I can't tinker the runlevels and boot processes the way I did with Debian, I can't play with all the system internals the way I did with Lenny. Compared to Debian it seems more of a closed system.

In short, if you want to deploy CentOS on desktops, don't fiddle. Better still, choose Lenny or Squeeze. They won't let you down. You can always use CentOS on servers. Here, server side is very much standardized.

Good Heavens! There are some nice CLI goodies like tar, bzip, gzip.... they do the job.

Edit: I got file-roller working the way it should after removing brasero (by mistake). But I still wonder why and how brasero messed up with the archiver.

CentOS 5.5 USB Device Mounting Annoyance

What do you expect the next version of your favourite distribution to be? Better or worse. For me upgrading CentOS 5.2 to 5.5 became a worse experience. I was running CentOS 5.2 on my office workstation (Dell Optiplex 360) for long. Never really needed/worried to upgrade cos it was only a work station, I mean no play, only work. However, of late I wanted to pull in some multimedia stuff from rpmforge (that's not available in official CentOS repo). At the same time I thought of upgrading the system also. And I went ahead... Read below for the annoyances.

The fully upgraded system now has two kernels - kernel-2.6.18-92.el5 (original CentOS 5.2 kernel) and kernel-2.6.18-194.el5 (came with CentOS 5.5 upgradation), menu.lst points to the latest kernel as default boot options.

1. Annoyances with the new kernel: Running the new CentOS 5.5 kernel was fast, responsive... audio/video worked like a charm. But oddly enough I am unable to mount any USB drives (specially the ones with sdhc cards such as phones and cameras); lsusb does show make of the device and its id, but refuses to automount it. Even doesn't accept manual mounts.

2. Newly surfaced problem with the old kernel: After being unable to mount usb devices I rebooted the system to run the old kernel. To my surprise, the old kernel automounted all the usb drives that I threw at it. But, sadly, alsa sound server did not work the way it should. It was working fine before upgradation.

Solution: I wandered across dozens of forums for a solution and could not get any. Now I've to boot to the old kernel when I need to use USB drives, otherwise, the default 2.6.18-194.el5 kernel handles everything quite well.

Please comment to this post if you have a solution for this weird problem.

Debian + Backports is Better than the Latest Ubuntu

Debian Stable has a bad reputation of being little obsolete. It's never able to catch up with time. For example, at the time of writing this post, Debian 5.0.4, Lenny is still sticking to the old Iceweasel 3, OpenOffice 2.4, 2.6.26 kernel line and some other vital packages, whereas the package versions are greatly updated in the so called popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSuse. Some critics even say that this late-to-party nature of Debian is the reason for Ubuntu to show up in the Linux crowd.

But I don't buy to the view that Debian Stable is outdated. If you are running a server this much older packages and slow updates are a blessing. Moreover, you can catchup to the latest and greatest packages even on desktop. All you need is to add debian-backports to your /etc/apt/sources.list. A mix of Debian stable and Debian Backports will bring you all the popular packages. Here is the content of my sources.list

manmath@debian:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main non-free
deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free

With the above repo list I am able to run Debian stable and work on OpenOffice 3.2, Iceweasel 3.5, Pidgin 2.6.6, Kernel 2.6.32 and many other packages. Besides, Debian stable is supported by Google Chrome, Skype and a majority of other linux software vendors such as Softmaker and Codeweavers. The only caution you should take is to pick out single backports which fits your needs, and not to use all the packages from backports repo.

For example, if you need to install the latest iceweasel from backports just enter:

apt-get -t lenny-backports install iceweasel

I've always found Debian Stable+Backports to be more stable than the latest Ubuntu. What's more, with backports configured you can get the latest versions of popular packages.

Airtel GPRS Internet on Your Linux PC through USB Cable

Internet through GPRS is not a joyride, but you might need it during some bad times when your ISP is down, broadband cabling in your area is messed up, or you are on the move. In such circumstances you may pair your mobile phone with your pc and easily get connected to the Internet. Here are some details on how to get internet working on your pc using GPRS in your Airtel Mobile Phone.

First, you need to active GPRS on your Airtel mobile phone. Dial  *567*11# to activate gprs and dial *567*13# to get mobile internet. Usually Airtel (or any other mobile service provider) will send settings which you will have save/install on your mobile phone. After that you should recharge your prepaid Airtel mobile phone with Rs. 98/- (as of 27th April, 2010) to get unlimated GPRS internet access for one month.

Next, you need to install ppp and wvdial on your Linux PC. Then change your /etc/wvdial.conf file to read:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","airtelgprs.com","",0,0
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
stupid mode = 1
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99#
Password = manmath
Username = manmath

(You might change the Username and Password the way you like, the above is just an example)

Additionally you should also consider adding the following few lines to your /etc/sysctl.conf as a root user. It will reduce packet transfer overhead considerably.

net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps = 0
net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1

That's it! Now connect your Airtel Mobile phone to your PC through USB cable, and as a root user (su or sudo, whatever appropriate in your case) enter wvdial in a terminal. And lo! You are connected to the web. If you want to connect to web as a non-root user, follow this link for further instructions.

You can also use Airtel SIM in your USB modem and connect to the Internet. For this you will have to use "Modem=/dev/ttyUSB0" in place of "Modem = /dev/ttyACM0" in your /etc/wvdial.conf

At Last RHEL 6 Beta Shows Up

Finally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is here. The Beta is a big transition from RHEL 5 in terms of core packages, desktop environments and applications. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 blurs the lines between virtual, physical, and cloud computing to address shifts taking place in the modern IT environment. Featuring updated core technology, from the kernel to the application infrastructure to the development toolchain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is designed to meet the needs of the coming generations of hardware and software technologies......” However, if you consider the package version status of the RHEL 6 final (when it comes) with contemporary distributions, it will still be little orthodox, as always.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta is available on the following architectures: i386, AMD64/Intel64, System z, IBM Power (64-bit)." Read the release announcement and the press release for an overview of the most notable features.

Welcome PCLinuxOS 2010

Good news for all who are looking for a Mature "Just-Works" Desktop. PCLinuxOS 2010 bandwagon is released. This time Tex and the Gang has offered 7 releases:   Main KDE Desktop, KDE MiniMe Desktop, Gnome Desktop, Gnome ZenMini Desktop, LXDE Desktop, XFCE Desktop and Openbox Desktop.

PCLinuxOS 2010 Main KDE edition features Kernel 2.6.32.11-bfs kernel (for maximum desktop performance) and full KDE 4.4.2 Desktop. PCLinuxOS includes all of the latest popular applications such as Firefox 3.6.3, Thunderbird 3.0.4, Dropbox for online backup storage, Pidgin 2.6.6,  Kymoney, Ktorrent, Gimp, Digikam, Amarok, Smplayer and much much more. In addition there are over 12,000+ additional packages available from our software repository.

As always there is support for Nvidia and ATI fglrx drivers. Many new wireless cards and printers are supported as well. Plus 2010 release is able to play the popular multimedia. Other versions (Gnome, Zen, LXDE...) have got the respective latest desktop environments and applications.

Download PCLinuxOS 2010

How to Make GTK Apps Look like KDE on a KDE-only Desktop

KDE4 is eye-candy. But most of the distributions that bundle it are not that stable or usable. Here I don't talk about PCLinuxOS 2010 or Mepis 8.5. They have done a great job in their implementation of KDE 4. But there are a lot others.

Well, coming to the point.... Of late I planned to install a KDE-only Debian desktop on a custom-made system. It was meant for somebody very new to Linux. That's why I thought of good old KDE 3 and the most stable distro of our times - Debian Lenny. Lenny installed a fully-functional KDE desktop on that machine (PIV on Intel 945 mobo) quite well. Afterwards I made some tweaks on the system so that my friend could easy plug his ntfs external drive, web cam, use his stock DVDs, windows media files and so many other non-free stuff. Again after configuring debian-multimedia it was easy as always.

KDE 3.5.9 on Lenny worked like a charm - quite responsive while carrying a truck load of kde apps. But those gtk apps looked butt-ugly on a kde-only environment. Here is a screenshot of how a gtk app looks on a debian pure kde desktop.

As you see, the look of apps is not consistent. Thank God, there is gtk-qt-engine package in Lenny repo. I installed this package and configured in kcontrol (kde control center) as shown below. And Lo! Upon reboot I got consistent KDE look across kde and gtk.

If you are also a KDE-lover but can't do without some gtk apps gtk-qt-engine is the way to go.

Here is the screenshot of Avidemux after installing gtk-qt-engine.