Stoning the Glass Windows, Microsoft's OS

It's been 6 months in my current organization, GrocerMax, an online grocery retailer by veterans in the retail industry. But I could use Windows initially only for a week, then I had to retreat to the cozy comfort of CEntOS whereas the IT infrastructure here have been predominantly Windows, except for a few laptops where Ubuntu sits on, in the development bay. Windows, the OS, is no more a means to do some task, it's a road block. Most often I see people working for the Windows, not on the Windows. Put Windows on how shiny or superb hardware you've, it will soon crawl on the knees. Ours are mostly i5 dominated laptops with (unnecessarily) nVidia 820 gpu for graphics. Forget the heavy-lifting on these machines, most are barely able to use them. I'll explain the reasons for this bad experience, and how we're planning to break open the windows for a greener vista outside. For starters, we've to struggle on spreadsheets ridden with macros and formulae. Follow the run.

1. Ever-growing footprint: For the sake of compatibility Microsoft has been offering the full stack of 32bit libraries even if you're running a 64bit edition. The result is heavy footprint of several GBs, on the upper side of 30GBs or so. The scenario is so worse that you can't have a pure 64bit experience and get the benefits of performance. Gross! If delve down, you'll know there are thousands electronic waste bytes. A proof - Windows 10 still supports 16bit executables, has a heavy compatibility layer for this architecture.
2. Vendor appeasement: Microsoft parasites mostly on OEM subscriptions and enterprise copies in this side of the world, south and central Asia, where 90% of the self & retail installations are pirated copies. So, to appease vendors you must have support for their devices, for this get drivers ready in the install base. Take any Windows, 7, 8, 8.1, or 10, you'll find 1000s of residues. Your specific computer may have 10 something subcomponents for audio, video, internet and communications. On the brighter side, Windows won't ask you for drivers if you put on old hardware, say 5 years or more. But on the downside, you have to carry along the truck load of device drivers. Besides, OEMs slug the system down further with their home-brewed bloatware. Take Dell for example, it bundles more than a dozen of its applications in its preinstallations, which nobody uses.
3. Controversial decisions: Surprisingly Windows XP still sits on 14% of the consumer user base. And has a cult following. It was an insecure shit hole, a virus paradise for sure, however, it opened the world to a trusted paradigm of computing, the start screen and menu, feather-weight install base and almost guaranteed unobtrusive operation, till a virus/malware took the control. Then on, the world has seen controversial decisions starting with Vista, be it the moronity called metro interface of tiled shit that gave a Halloween experience on the press of a start button, or the never ending upgrade trips consuming hours of your productivity.
4. Insecure by design: Gates offered Windows, sounds punny? Not so if I say, Bill Gates put together Microsoft Windows. His was a good idea, bring an appliance like model to the Unix dominated computing space. He gave passengers the steering wheel, or put them on auto-pilot mode. Yes, that's what you do if you give the user user all the administrative rights including adding/removing software with that click-click-go or bingo pattern. Sadly, viruses and malware are also some software, albeit malevolent or faulty, they take the administrative rights too. Of course, windows has options to create a local user without administrative privileges and changing the accounts to that effect, but average Joe doesn't know or care. Do you know Windows is the only OS that requires an antivirus software, and the reason for the boom of many IT companies baking these contentious software? Apple went a different route, re-engineering unix base and building on it. The Mach kernel on your Macbook borrows heavily on Unix. Inherently more stable and safe. And it brims of commercial gloss on the outer layers.
5. Growing entropy: For the sake of ease and familiarity (not UI, but operations) Windows has been patching here and there. It has become so cluttered that there is almost no way out to fight the devastating Windows rot (a popular term that describes how Windows gets slower with time). In windows world there's no way to uninstall an application fully and cleanly, removing the entries from registry and killing the configurations from the accounts folder (that Applications and Settings directory). Windows updates from one version to another is highly unreliable and take up lots of disk space. After you update it, I bet you'll get orphan bits from previous version at many places. Sadly on Windows 10 most updates are shoveled down your throat, choosing and managing your updates is very tough, though not impossible. And the real safe mode went for a toss in the recent versions. It's there, but nested deep inside. It's really difficult to debug, and Microsoft's operations are so vast that they are not approachable.

What to do?

The Microsoft way: Nliting/Viliting (taking unnecessary bits out from the install image/iso). Deploying that on user desktops/laptops. Administering the machines with proper group policy, moderating the user rights, imposing active directory, filter/saving data through a proxy server.

Or the Unix/Linux way: Success is not guaranteed. But cultural shock is for sure, because most are unfamiliar with this platform. And those in the know use a Toy, Ubuntu (Microsoft wannabe of Linux world). The real tool CEntOS is not that easy though it's a saner alternative that requires blue pills initially. CEntOS install routines and customization is definitely more difficult. Some components are not supposed to work right out of the box like it does automagically (wrong word with a right meaning) on Ubuntu. But once done, you get 10 years of support, painless computing and much goodies on the way.

Be it *Buntu or CEntOS, transition from Microsoft Office to a certain alternative such as LibreOffice or WPS Office is tedius. I'm sure getting a hang of power-user options on these free suits will be time-intensive. And there's a certain amount of FUD if all can emulate their Windows habits.

Linux Desktop - Zealotry does more harm than good

Is Microsoft and/or Apple holding Linux back? May be, to some extent. However, the real problem is the Linux World itself - the platform and the community. The platform, because it is really not ready for the desktop. The community, because it constantly pushes "holier than thou" attitude for itself and the platform.

The Platform

It's great the way it is. But it's definitely not for the majority. And it's not bad in being so. By design it's a diy, modular, reveal-all, extremely scalable and customizable platform. If you love computers you'll love Linux on your desktop too. Hands down, it beats the competition in performance and security (the server space). It powers the web. It is a winner in the mobile space through Android where it's all about UX and apps (millions), no freedom of choice/chaos is there in terms of system components, it's extremey dumbed down, even to the extent that most users don't know it is powered by Linux kernel, let alone their knowledge of the subsystems.

As a Desktop OS Linux suffers from serious problems. They are all well documented by Artem in his herculean compilation: http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html
However, it's good as long as it serves some users. Technically, it is better in many respects. But that doesn't mean we'll forcefully shovel it down someone's throat.

It is as different as any other OS is from another. It's rewarding too, if you love to work for your desktop, and don't mind occasional glitches. Forget the brain-fucked "Desktop of the Year" aspiration for the rest of your life. However, arguably it deserves better visibility and more adoption than what it enjoys now. Had there been no zealotry, it would have been sitting on lot more desktops.

The Community

Satisfaction is something that matches our preoccupation or exceeds it. Disappointment is something that falls short of the expectations or preoccupations. It applies to products, people and services. Often the evangelists would say Linux is best in terms of performance, usability, security, stability, beauty and couple other superlatives. Whereas there is no basis to boast that, definitely no quantifiable method to reach that conclusion. Had the evangelists not touted Linux out of proportion and bashed the corporates for no reason, it could have created a better impression. The approach should be - "If you won't mind investing some time, use it and check for yourself whether it fits your needs. It's different than Windows or OS X."

Geeky era has gone. It's not fashionable any more to show the compiz cubes to your girlfriend, if you don't mind losing her. Price and Security don't cut it much in favor of Desktop Linux either, though it's inherently more secure. People work on application software, not on OS. And most popular FOSS software is available for those other OSes too. Bashing of Microsoft, Proprietary software and Corporates is not going to help you, until you create a unified/cohesive experience on desktop. (It reminds me of the 80-90s bollywood masala flicks where most of the protagonists were poor, and the bad guys were always rich. Ridiculously, the climax, the showdown was always staged in a godown. Stereotyped so much -  some took that rich people were always bad... )

When driven by false ego and/or obsession, please get down your high horses, understand it's just another OS.
For fun let's see the tone and approach of the community. Here I'll site some examples from muktware, followed by my comments. Rest it's all up to you to judge.

#1

Will free Windows make Microsoft bleed to death?
http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/can-microsofts-free-windows-compete-linux-android/25059

The title hides much than it shows. And what it shows is an utterly biased interpretation of the kind told million times before on those FOSS (FUSS) websites, and none saw the light of the day. Please read the post.

Foremost, Microsoft is not going to offer its pot-boiler OS for Desktops and Servers for free. Microsoft did made a statement about offering it's OS for Mobile devices to the ISVs. Besides, desktop is not going to die any time soon. FYI, the corporate is not worried by linux community, because it knows the latter's direction-less approach. Given the current model of linux desktop, every ISV is damn sure that the community will never get its priorities right when it comes to desktop. What worries it is Google. No denying of the fact. If google adds some offline mainstream applications plus some options to window listing/switching, it'll definitely make a huge dent to the MS dominance.

#2

Reasons why Windows XP users should upgrade to openSUSE
http://www.muktware.com/2014/03/reasons-windows-xp-users-upgrade-opensuse/24418

It's somewhat OK if you change the title to "Reasons why Windows XP Home users should upgrade to openSUSE". That "Home" in the suggested title is about "Home Users" and not "Windows XP Home".
Similarity in looks is only thing that I could relate to in that post, nothing else. So much QA, bug fixing and years later XP is almost perfect (though reached EOL), it beats OpenSuse in polish, performance and stability. And please don't go by GIMP, LibreOffice, PiTiVi at workplace. A compromising home user may probably switch to OpenSuse KDE. Most of your XP machines can accommodate Windows 7/8 quite well, if you can take some time to nlite/vlite them. Google is your God. Do it to know how.

#3

What are Chromebooks? And why you don’t need Windows any more...
http://www.muktware.com/2014/03/chromebooks-dont-need-windows/23561

True, only if you're a web-junkie. Else you'll still need Windows for a wide variety of tasks, the author somewhat reveals it at the end. Grossly misleading if you go by the title and lacking substance.

#4

Microsoft to cut on software development, focus on ads
http://www.muktware.com/2014/03/microsofts-cut-software-debelopment-focus-ads/22321

What's newsworthy here? Microsoft is a for-profit organization. Wealth creation is no sin. And around Microsoft millions of people are employed. It's prospering them too. Ok, let's admit the company has done enough development already, and it tries to outdo Google in marketing. What's so wrong in that? 98% of users don't bother what this company does as long as they are happy with its products.

Finally, the world view you have is quite different from the real world.

#5

Indian state drops Windows, switches to Linux
http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/indian-state-drops-windows-switches-linux/25011

Yes it did. So many others did too. And then some have undone. The rest will follow. For the reasons best described by Artem.

#6

London borough drops Windows, goes with Chromebooks, saves around £400,000
http://www.muktware.com/2014/04/london-borough-opts-google-chromebooks-saves-around-400000/25121

They are considering the options, and it's one of them. But they have not moved yet. Besides, what good does it hold to inflate figures? The calculation also deliberately ignores the bulk licensing and corporate customization part.

That's a few from one website who is SAVING THE HUMAN RACE from certain Microsoft or Apple epidemic. The web is littered with tons such pedestrian FOSS literature.

Fedora 20 64bit Mate Review: Sacrificing a Virgin

Prologue

Once upon a time I gifted one of my friends a Fedora 10 LiveCD. Five years went by. I met him on facebook three days back. Asked him about his Linux experience. Got a funny reply:

I had so many problems on linux
finally I solved them all..............
............................................
............................................
.......... I installed Windows.

Any kind of review is intimidating. Reviewing an Open Source Operating System is more so. You need to have enough information and knowledge (the two are different) of OS basics and UX. Goes without saying, the reviewer must have flair for writing - should know how to put it all together. The readers expect some precision, grammatical rules and meaningful/practical information. For the reviewer it means pulling out his/her own intestines. In case of Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X any release is an epic event and any review on them is very much mercurial. But most of the Linux distribution reviews are trash - impractical, ego-laden surface-scratching. Sometimes it seems the reviewers are not qualified for the job, other times it feels the releases are non-event owing to their frequency and buggy character. Also changes between successive releases are not so ground-shaking.

Generally a linux desktop review starts with a nice picture of a desktop-cube effect or a pretty login screenshot. That's it. Then the rundown is predictable - the livecd experience, the looks, the install routine, the responsiveness and the resource usage. Plus personal bias thrown here and there. The reviewers have a different (may be distorted too) world-view. For them, every new feature is shinny. They almost always suggest their readers to update for any tiny change in version number. They are unaware of the vast non-Linux user base who update only when there is a real need, only when something is pressing. I've seen people happily using Windows XP even till date. Often the update to Windows 7 was forced up on them via new devices.

Having said that, I must add Linux desktops don't shun me. Because, perhaps I don't mind "working for" a system, whereas most users "work on" a system. I don't bother random annoyances, whereas 98% of users will flee away. Because I know Linux desktop is ridden with bigger and more serious perennial problems. That's why, in comparison, the random annoyances are kind of non-existent.

Let's start our Fedora 20 Mate Spin review. Shall we?

Touching 2014 CEntOS 6 started showing its age. Partly because I bought a new system, and partly because many of my favorite mainstream proprietary applications either did not work, or did very badly. Then some other applications required the latest glibc. I was damn sure such a critical package will never be pushed as an update. Of course, I was flirting with Debian Wheezy and a few other distributions. Sadly, none could offer that gnome2 "usability:performance" combination. Often, it was a trade off with one or the other. Now that Mate desktop has made way into Fedora official spins, I found it's a worthy candidate. Chances were pretty high that I'll be on the bleeding edge of gnu tool chains, latest kernel, glibc, and of course, the application software. On top of all these, there's Mate desktop.

The Test Machine

A Gigabyte H68 board, G2120 proc, Nvidia GTX graphics, Atheros Lan, Huawei modem, Logitech HD webcam, Samsung DVD RW drive, Western Digital 2TB green hard drive.

The Good

Downloading Fedora 20 64bit Mate spin took an hour. Installation was pretty fast. The freshly booted system looked familiar pre-fedora 14 like. The panels, the icon set, control-center and that ugly gnome effects were all there. Then I pulled in my usual application stack - a media player, a screen recorder, a voice recorder, ffmpeg, an offline dictionary, webcam recorder, disc burner, flash and other popular multimedia plugins. With rpmfusion repo configured, the installation of these apps was breezy. That's a good thing about Linux software management. You've a great package manager, centrally managed repo structure, and a fairly large base of software. Installation and removal of software is almost always clean, unlike Windows that leaves so much residues at places you can't sniff or suspect.

All my devices were recognized and configured well. By default the system was using onboard Intel graphics. That was just perfect for everyday purpose. But later I installed nvidia non-free drivers.

Yum in Fedora 20 is a great improvement over Centos 6 and earlier Fedora releases. It does the best use of delta management, and package cleaning. I am falling for systemd, another definite improvement over the traditional sysv. I am surprised by its speed and parallelization powers. It takes much of the process onto itself and does a great job at it. I'm fan of its masking and unmasking safe manageability.

The Bad

So far, so good. But I was not comfortable with the setup. Something was missing. The system was not as responsive as CEntOS 6. That much touted "Mate Desktop", I'm afraid, needed an alien army of other mates, mostly gnome 3 stuff, to keep working. Taming and managing Mate Desktop was tough. There were Gconf and DConf, metacity and marco, nautilus as well as mate file manager, and some other such redundancies. Especially network manager, network applet, login manager, and some application software needed a weird combination of toolkit packages, windows manager, file manager and some bits and pieces from other desktop environments. Not that coherent, unified and prestine like gnome 2. Mate seemed still in early alpha phases. Perhaps the whole environment is caught between gtk2 and gtk3, and gnome2 - mate -gnome3 package resolutions. Mate roadmap says it's work in progress for full wayland and systemd integration. So, expect Mate to be in transition for rather long.

In the broader sense it shows how the UX is badly affected by the plural culture in things as crucial as toolkits such as qt, gtk, wxWidgets, FLTK, AWT/Swing and Tk. An application may look totally different in the presence or absense of one or more of these stuff, as per the case. Quality of the outer layer of GNU/Linux (DEs, Windows Managers, Toolkits, Login Managers, Icon Set, Themes, etc.) shows that it's developed by unpaid volunteers. Because everyone is busy with the "sexy" features galore; and none gives a flying fuck to the usability, uniformity and cohesiveness.

As a workaround I removed all those alien mates of Mate desktop. The side effect - loss of some necessary applications such as brasero, network manager, lightdm, cheese. The next step in the process was to find the replacements of those applications that don't have any such weird dependencies. I went for gtk-recordmydesktop, audio-recorder, mpv, guvcview, xcdroast, artha, cdm. And I'm happy with what I did. Now I'm using the good old Bluecurve theme with Redhat "start here" startup menu. I curated it by adding some more icons, creating a theme file and customizing metacity window manager. The curation was a must as the new notification system, application menus and toolkits have changed a lot from what they were in good old Redhat days. Finally it's worth it.

The Ugly

I started experiencing some intolerable annoyances. Every time I booted the system my mobile broadband would refuse to connect. I had to plugout and plugin on successive boots, then it would connect. Later I came to know the culprit was systemd 208. After I enabled rawhide repo and updated to systemd 211, that problem was gone.

Among other problems, slow boot, high memory consumption and overall slow performance required immediate fixing. After masking unnecessary systemd units and removing unnecessary mate-session startup applications, the system became very fast and responsive. Fresh booted system consumed some 251mb memory. The average boot time from grub selection (mine is a Windows 7 / Fedora 20 dualboot mode) to fully active mate desktop was ~9 sec. Both the results are amazing. Here's some data.

memory consumption:

free -m

                   total    used    free     shared   buffers  cached
        Mem:  7902   418     7483   27         25         142
-/+ buffers/cache:  251      7651

that means, just 251mb for a 64bit OS with 8gb physical memory, amazing!

boot speed:

systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 2.004s (kernel) + 1.088s (initrd) + 6.190s (userspace) = 9.284s

systemd-analyze blame
          1.682s lightdm.service
          1.608s NetworkManager.service
          1.515s accounts-daemon.service
          1.411s systemd-fsck-root.service
          1.086s polkit.service
           730ms systemd-vconsole-setup.service
           729ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
           716ms systemd-remount-fs.service
           481ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
           408ms udisks2.service
           387ms ModemManager.service
           374ms rtkit-daemon.service
           321ms kmod-static-nodes.service
           254ms systemd-readahead-replay.service
           239ms tmp.mount
           202ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
           152ms systemd-sysctl.service
           118ms systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
           113ms systemd-readahead-collect.service
            83ms systemd-random-seed.service
            82ms user@1000.service
            73ms systemd-logind.service
            35ms fedora-import-state.service
             4ms systemd-journal-flush.service
             3ms sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount
             3ms sys-kernel-config.mount
             3ms systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service
             2ms systemd-update-utmp.service
             2ms systemd-udevd.service
             1ms systemd-readahead-done.service
           941us systemd-user-sessions.service

Pleasant Surprises

While updating systemd from rawhide, I had a chance to read the "check-update" data. I could see updates to glibc (2.19.90), mesa (10.1), xorg (1.15) and mate desktop (1.8). Crossed both the fingers and updated these packs. Overall it was a good decision on my part. Full HD movies, and games like Torcs ran very smooth. There was barely any frame drop, if at all.

The problem with open-source graphics on Linux is that the driver stack is not self-contained. The components are scattered in the Linux kernel, DRM library, Mesa, the X.Org DDX and VA-API et al. That means updating to bleeding edge versions can be risky. May be I'm lucky this time around. And it's all playing very nice. DPI scaling, fonts antialiasing and windows shadowing were not that much of a pain. The defaults were good enough.

Current Software Galore

To achieve a pristine just-Mate desktop I had to do much rpm transaction, sometimes nitpicking a few packages from rawhide (Please don't do that!). Right now my install base is touching only 3gb with the following software:

Accessories
  - Artha dictionary
  - Engrampa archive manager
  - Mate calculator
  - Pluma text editor
  - Mate search tool
  - Mate screenshot
  - Caja file manager
  - Mate terminal
  - Bleachbit disk cleaner

Games (All for my son, Piyush)
  - Gcompris
  - Childsplay
  - Trigger (packages from OpenSuse)
  - Torcs race

Graphics
  - Eye of Mate image viewer
  - GIMP
  - ImageMagick

Internet
  - Firefox
  - Pidgin
  - Uget

Office Suite
  - OpenOffice 4.0.1 (I found it more responsive
                                    than Libreoffice 4.2.2)
Multimedia
  - Audio recorder
  - gtk-Recordmydesktop
  - Guvcview webcam utility
  - Ffmpeg + Winff media manipulation pack
  - Xcdroast disc burner
  - Flash and other popular multimedia plugins
  - Mpv media player (It's more refined, fast and
                   hassle-free than VLC and Mplayer)

Conclusion

So, what's the gain after so much pain? Immense. If you value the theory of freedom as proclaimed by GNU/Linux. In real world scenario, you'll also get some benefits in terms of pure computing. For example, on the other OS you can only dream of the scripting capabilities of bash in combination of linux utilities. I was looking for a practical solution to digitize my favorite VCDs gathering dust. Running a nice ffmpeg batch script I could enhance and convert yesteryears classics into modern h264/aac formats that can be readily playable using any standalone device, smart phones or your desktop computer. In init 3, on a dumb terminal, ffmpeg took some 8 hours (in the night) to process more than 20 vcds.

Among others, I am really surprised at the modularity of Linux, here Fedora 20 Mate. A great kernel, full bundle of productivity suite, multimedia suite, internet suite and some nice system utilities were accommodated in a sub-3gb drive space. The system booted in ~9 sec, and the initial memory foot print was just 251mb. The boot time could still be reduced had I installed it on an SSD. And the entire package base (system software and application software), manuals for each bit and piece and a vocal user/developer community are there on your fingertips. On top of it all, you are enjoying a very secure computing. All that for free, if time is not a premium for you. That's a great feat in any stretch of imagination. That you can never achieve on Windows or OSX.

But the point is, how much these so called goodies concern a lay-user who is addicted to commercial gloss on Android, Windows, iOS and OSX, and who never cares about knowing the system internals, or who never buys your libertarian theories? IMO, none. But the bad UX, bad integration and loose pieces are enough to ward them off. Linux developers should know that an average Joe uses applications, not the OS. There's less benefit in showing bones of an Oh-So-Great OS.

Plea

Those who don't agree with me on the "bad integration" of Linux Desktop please have a look at the design of linux graphics and audio stack, see the mess of multiple layers. Then take a fresh look at the incohesive approach to put together the toolkits, desktop environments and notification systems. For proof you may visit various bugzillas (gnome, kernel, xorg, pulseaudio, mesa, kde, the list is endless) and confirm for yourselves about the bugs that should not have occurred at the first place.

32-bit Ghost Still Haunts on Linux Desktop

People hear something about computers and repeat it mindlessly without understanding the world around them. One such example is the support for 32-bit architecture. For them a home desktop performs better on any 32-bit OS + native 32-bit applications than their 64-bit counterparts, and the user should restrict to it. It's somewhat true if that mythical user never goes beyond web browsers, word processors and media players. That's very much it. If he/she jumps into some database work, media encoding and some other CPU-intensive task, the power of 64-bit shows. It almost revolves circles around 32-bit thingy.

So, what's holding 64-bit arch from replacing everything 32-bit? There are many reasons; the two most important ones are - 1) there are many 32-bit hardware still scattered around, and 2) very crucial of all, people have developed an adamant inertia for 32-bit. They'll keep sticking to it. That's why some popular software come in 32-bit only, such as Skype, Teamviewer (I know there's a 64-bit version, but inside it's still 32-bit, 64-bit is only the wrapper) and AnyConnect. Good news is - on Windows 64-bit one can easily enjoy the mix of 64-bit and 32-bit applications.

Because:
 #1 Windows is targeted squarely by all the ISVs at its vast userbase, and
 #2 Microsoft through its skilled developer base is able to feed and keep alive an old dinosaur of 32-bit libraries and compatibility layers inside 64-bit OS versions to support both the arches ensuring that point-n-click usability.

On Linux desktop, 64-bit architecture has it's own set of irritants. And when you try to run a mix of 64- and 32-bit apps it misbehaves. There are some endeavors like multi-arch in Debian, but it's still not there.

On my CentOS-Windows (both 64-bit) dual-boot home pc, it was an uphill task to install some 32-bit-only applications on CentOS, whereas on Windows it was like a breeze.

32-Bit (Un)Success story and some How-To's

Showstoppers: Cisco AnyConnect, Teamviewer, Skype

Unresolved: Cisco AnyConnect. It installs quite well, but doesn't work at all. Looking for a workaround using OpenConnect. You may suggest your fixes, if any.
Installed/Fully resolved: Teamviewer (yum localinstall Teamviewer.rpm or whatever the name of that 32-bit rpm, it will pull in a few 32-bit dependencies)
Partially resolved: An old version of Skype (thanks CentOS Wiki, resolved partially, because you never know when the next update will break it all.

Skype installation procedure:

The latest version doesn't work. Please download a bit older static build (mentioned below) that's still available.

     yum install glibc.i686 nss-softokn-freebl.i686 alsa-lib.i686 libXv.i686 libXScrnSaver.i686 libtiff.i686 glib2.i686 libSM.i686 libXrender.i686 fontconfig.i686 pulseaudio-libs.i686 alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i686 libv4l.i686

        cd /tmp
     wget http://download.skype.com/linux/skype_static-4.0.0.8.tar.bz2
        cd /opt
     tar xjvf /tmp/skype_static-4.0.0.8.tar.bz2
     rm /tmp/skype_static-4.0.0.8.tar.bz2
     ln -s skype_staticQT-4.0.0.8 skype
     ln -s /opt/skype /usr/share/skype
     ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3 /usr/lib/libtiff.so.4
     ln -s /opt/skype/skype /usr/bin/skype
     LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /opt/skype/skype

That's it!

Debian Wheezy - feather light and rock solid

Question: Why do I like Debian?

Short Answer: It gives me a "Debbie Does Dallas" experience. Addictive like pristine porn - no nonsense and predictive. The rest gazillion other lady-like distributions invigorate you with too much Viagra but don't show up at THAT moment.

Long Answer: Read this review and/or comb the web for so many other reviews.

From early days, sitting on version 4.0, that's right Etch, it flirted me. It was neither too easy, nor too beautiful, but always rock solid. Then followed Lenny and Squeeze only to reaffirm and sometimes spice up that experience.

With that prelude follow the run.

Wheezy from it's very alpha and beta phases put so many Debian lovers into suspicion. Whether it'll default to XFCE or Gnome; why it jumped into that gnome 3 mess; and if it'll stick to the proclaimed "2-years - one release" schedule. With the release of RC1 it certainly proved that it sticks to the schedule. Also confirmed that gnome3 is not that much of a holly mess the jerks make it out to be. Little obsolete as per Fedora and Ubuntu standards, but the latest Debian is very modern and polished.

Installation

After cd/dvd drive started behaving mad while still under warranty I didn't go for a replacement. Not wise to add to plastic waste. Better use USB drives - for sharing data and creating bootable media. Debian is infamous for creating USB bootable media. Unetbootin didn't work as expected. But now you don't need it anymore. Bytecopy procedure works like a charm with netinstall images. I picked up a 64bit all-nonfree-firmware loaded netinstall image and created a usb install media with dd. In my case, it was:

dd if=firmware-wheezy-DI-rc1-amd64-netinst.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

Change the device options as per your setup.

Butter smooth install routine, as expected from a Debian installer! I chose my first SSD, an OCZ Octane SIII as / partition and dedicated a donkey 2TB WD HDD for /home. No swap (who needs swap when you've 16GB of RAM). Went for some SSD options - noatime and discard. Then followed the sane default package selection and user account creation, MBR selection, et al. Boring, it may sound, if you're accustomed to ugly surprises during installation.

Install routine completed. Poweroff. Night set in. I went to bed.

Post Installation

Next morning I woke up to a nice Debian Wheezy on gnome-shell. Seductive as they say, but not slutty. Never experienced any crash, gnome-shell nuisance or kernel-panic stuff. There were some minor annoyances which I hope will be fixed with the Final Release. Mind it, it's still an RC1!

Everything worked. Network sharing with Windows 7 on my Asus EEE 1215b, data sharing with my ntfs partition on Windows 7, mac filesystems on a hackintos (never tell mac people), on that same machine. Then some more, bluetooth, WiFi and all.

For the first time, multimedia experience was very smooth. Just install libavcodecs-extra package and you're there. Throw anything at it, it plays. And for those abominable porno stuff with some esoteric format there's always the venerable VLC. In short, the days of bad multimedia experience is over. Basement dwellers and FOSS purists may complain though, for this non-free move.

Resource Usage

Very frugal. No sudden clock ups and downs. CPU stays at ~1-5% throughout till you don't burn it with intensive gaming, program compiling and media encoding.

Very low footprint of memory. Freshly booted system uses ~320MB, with all effects - bells and whistles on and mysql, apache services (and what not) still enabled (for my wife) on runtime.

Do that foreplay. Fix bugs and bad things!

Wheezy at RC1 has its share of bugs and problems. However, none is a showstopper. You can live with them without any fix, cos most of them will be fixed automatically in the Final Release. If you like you can fix them very soon with a few minutes of dirtying your hands in the command line. First fire up terminal and be a root user - use su or sudo, whatever you're used to.

#1 - "cannot set freq 16000 to ep 0x86"

During booting the screen fills with "cannot set freq 16000 to ep 0x86" error messages and stops for around 4 secs (it might vary in your case) and then the login windows appears. This bug is related to Logitech HD quickcam. The easiest fix is to update kernel from Unstable Repository. Enable unstable repo in /etc/apt/source.list. Upgrade kernel and disable, or better delete that entry from the sources.list. Never fiddle with testing and unstable. 

#2 - no sound

While Intel Azalia HD sound card worked nice on first boot, consequent boots were without any sound while the audio mixer button was still showing active.
Permanent fix for this annoyance is to put:

options snd-hda-intel model=generic

at the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

#3 - enable poweroff option:

Default gnome-shell 3.4 doesn't show poweroff option if you don't press Alt key with still point the mouse to the suspend option.

The easy fix is to edit /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/userMenu.js

Look for "this._haveSuspend = this._upClient.get_can_suspend();" and replace the same with "this._haveSuspend = false;" (don't use those quotes, they're here to distinquish commands/config text from human English)

#4 - [warn] PulseAudio configured for per-user sessions ... (warning)

This pulse audio message is not fatal. But you can fix it too:

edit /etc/default/pulseaudio 

look for 

    PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=0

and change it to

    PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1

That pretty much ends this review.

Improve KDE4 Performance: Disable Nepomuk and Akonadi

KDE 4.9 (and above) workspace comes as a great relief when the major distributions resort to some fu**ing desktop environments (such as gnome and unity) and/or spin some lame reiterations (such as cinnamon, mate and a ton others). The latest KDE workspace is way too much polished than unity and gnome3 - highly usable, customizable and not so resource-hungry. But you can still make it lighter and faster if you don't rely much on desktop search function and KDEPIM stuff like kaddressbook, kmail and the rest. Amaik, very few people use them anymore, and can be done without them. Just a working set of thunderbird, pidgin and firefox, and you can very well dump kdepim + akonadi + nepumok + strigi.

By "Dump" I mean "Disable", cos you can't remove those packages as they are deeply integrated into the workspace. Here's how you can disable:


#1 Add these lines (if they don't exist, else make necessary changes in them) to ~/.kde/share/config/nepomukserverrc

[Basic Settings]
Start Nepomuk=false

[Service-nepomukmigration1]
autostart=false

[Service-nepomukstrigiservice]
autostart=false

#2 Then add these lines (if they don't exist, else make necessary changes in them) to ~/.config/akonadi/akonadiserverrc

[QMYSQL]
Name=akonadi
Host=
User=
Password=
Options="UNIX_SOCKET=/home/manmath/.local/share/akonadi/db_misc/mysql.socket"
ServerPath=/usr/sbin/mysqld-akonadi
StartServer=false

#3 Open ~/.kde/share/config/kdedrc and set "autoload" to false for nepomuksearchmodule

[Module-nepomuksearchmodule]
autoload=false


#4 Finally, remove the file nepomukcontroller.desktop and akonaditray.desktop from /usr/share/autostart/, if they exist.

Log out or restart your system to experience the lightness and speed of your sexy KDE workspace.

Linux is Free and it Shows

"Year of Linux Desktop" has always been a delusion of grandeur, or the so called pipe dream at best. It'll remain so for the future n-number of years, cos Linux is free and it shows, feels and works like everything free, with a connotation of "Cheap".

There's no problem in its being free and open source as long as it works for the majority of userbase, which it certainly doesn't. Why? Because it lacks the commercial gloss people are used to. Against popular belief, you won't have to practice closed/proprietary means to achieve that polish and gloss. All that's important is certain orderly and cohesive approach to how software work, in both users' and developers' point of view, and a clear direction. For example, Android is both opensource and free, yet it brims that much desired commercial gloss, courtesy the big G's focus on user experience. The Big G knows what to flaunt, what to hide, and so on.. and on..

On Android you don't bother which bootloader to load - grub or lilo, which DE to choose from - KDE, Gnome, LXDE, Blackbox (there're a dozen others), how to set system initiation - systemd, sysvinit, innserv... how the sound and audio subsystems talk to the rest of the system, bla..bla..bla... Here these ugly system software work under the hood, users are unaware of it for a lot of good reasons. This is how the big G establishes order in an otherwise chaotic open source model of software development.

The prevailing model of linux and the software built around it suffer from three perennial diseases due to its overtly free nature of "Fork everything and Break everything" development:

#1 Shoddy quality of software: Forking model of development that leads to bad testing, rapid release cycle and unnecessary overdo. Users are often forced to fix certain problems where they should not happen in the first place. For example, a certain sound card works out of the box on a certain distribution, needs to do some manual editing of certain config file on some other in order the sound to work, wherein still others the users are forced to remove a certain component and install/build something on their own. Whereas the kernel versions, alsa/pulse components, DEs and the usual software stack are the same across all these examples. Reason? Bad integration! Morever, these type of user annoyances are not restricted to sound only, they are there in network, graphics, power usage, and then some more, in other application software too. The situations/annoyances aggravate further when every distribution puts together certain types and versions of the system and application software different from every other and in a different way, where most of them seem similar on the surface.

#2 Overkill: Forking and freedom to do everything leads to unnecessary overkill of time and efforts and further contributes to shoddiness in software quality. For example, what KDE or Gnome should do? Develop DEs and a few DE-specific tools/appls, right? But that's not the case, they keep constant focus (and ignore the core activities) on things they should not do in the first place. First of all, application software should not be DE-specific, yet every DE, be it KDE or Gnome, has its own set of office suits, browsers, messengers, media players/managers and system utilities and tools. This, more often than not, results in poor duplicates of certain industry standard software. Intrigued? Just compare KOffice with LibreOffice, K3B with Brasero or XCDroast...? Everybody loves to skin a frontend, cos its' tough and boring to squash the bugs out of standard libraries such as gtk and qt, and backends such as cdrdao or growisofs.

#3 Always in transition: Lastly, this forking and chaotic nature of development creates an environment where the platform is always in a state of transition. Consider the period of transition such as hal >> udev, alsa >> pulse, xserver >> wayland, module-init-tool >> kmod. Sadly, it has been so from the very beginning, and it will remain so till eternity. It is a major contributor to user annoyance. How about consolidating various forks, putting enough manhours and creating something that will just work, in stead of forking every which way possible and breaking things on the way.

I'm sure only very few will agree with me. Cos most of the so called open source community members consider free software as a cult than a tool for general well being. For them choice (read it Chaos) is everything. And yet they expect a placebo effect to these perennial diseases of bad quality and performance. They'll poop, fork here and there, make badly integrated incohesive software tank to drive to the nearest supermall, whereas a lean street bike would have been a better choice.

Android is the future desktop

Linux on desktop was a fantasy; it could not gain significant mind-share in last two decades of its existence. And it won't attract any more user attention if the development continues the way it has been so far. Bad integration, fragmentation, in-cohesive development, and the so called freedom to fork (or fu**) warded off ISVs, OEMs and users. Linux as a kernel is great, but the OS build on top of it is a toy thing. X and everything on top of it suck like hell. That bad/breaking approach towards development, design and delivery is not going to change, cos the community doesn't treat it as a tool, or a means to an end; for them, it's a culture, a religion. As a user you need to learn a lot of rules  just to get your daily chore done. It's more so, if you are going to develop something for the linux desktop. General perception now is Linux serves best when it runs headless, i.e., when it's a server.

But I feel, sooner or later, Linux will start dominating the consumer desktops with google power, in a form similar to Android. For quite long I've been following android-x86.org, a community effort to port Android to x86 platform. So far it's been non-yielding. None of the release is feature-complete. However, the good thing is - this project is less fanatic about open-source. I'm sure google will bet on it and make it big by building a consistent development environment wherein the new desktop will consist of highly-integrated subsystems backed by a simple application distribution system. Google will strip as much ugly stuff as possible off the OS, hide the rest from the users, and put a bright layer on top of the customized linux kernel. Of course, the hard, the hobbyist, and the raw fragmented-linux desktop with full of choices will be there for the basement dwellers.

what's value of linux being modular

What's value of linux being modular if it needs so many duplicate and different versions of the same libraries.

I am running debian squeeze which has almost 50% packages from wheezy such as xorg stuff, kernel, drm, mesa and some application software. However, accidentally I found that I've bewildering number of duplicate libraries. It's insane, can't even remove those duplicates as they are  dependencies for a variety of packages. In the normal world a later package should override an older version, but it's different in linux, sadly. Even if I've deborphan and debfoster I see tons of different versions of libraries such as: libavcodec, libavdevice, libavfilter, libavformat, libavutils, libdb, libjpeg, liblzma, libmatroska, libnspr, libntfs, libssl, libswscale, libusb and libx264. Please have a look at the youtube video to know what I mean.

GIMP 2.8 on Linux: a Story of Pride and Pain

The latest stable GIMP 2.8 is great in many ways such as the sane integration of docks, speed and some nice addons. It installs like a charm on Windows 7 and the aging XP. Getting it to work on the latest *buntu and Fedora is also easy, although both these flavors suck as far as stability and usability is concerned. But if you expect it to play nicely on your reliable CentOS 6.2 or Debian 6.0.5, forget it. Cos you may fuck your entire system just to get it installed.

I was very much at home with my mighty Debian untill I was lured by GIMP 2.8.

I knew Debian Squeeze repo will never have it. So, looked for backports. Nothing there too. Then tried backporting it myself. It is not as easy as:

wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/gimp-2.8.0.tar.bz2
mv gimp-2.8.0.tar.bz2 /tmp/
tar xf gimp-2.8.0.tar.bz2
cd gimp-2.8.0/
./configure
make all && make install

there's much more. Compiling it is really tough, you'll be flooded with errors related to missing packages, flags and lots more. Then I took the easy path of pulling it down from testing repository by adding:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ testing main

in /etc/apt/sources.lst


then configuring apt pin priorities to make testing version as additional to prevent distribution wide updrade by putting:

      Package: *
      Pin: release a=stable
      Pin-Priority: 700

      Package: *
      Pin: release a=testing
      Pin-Priority: 650

in /etc/apt/preferences

followed by:

apt-get -t testing install gimp

Result:

Holy shit! It almost installed truck loads of packages from testing. Finally I fucked my Debian Stable. It now feels slow, sound stopped working, it shows tons of boot error messages.

Dear linux distribution enthusiasts please bring out some api/abi that doesn't change every fortnight. 99% users love stability more than the shiny non-working stuff that doesn't bring any perceivable difference to their lives.

My Mighty Debian Squeeze 64-Bit

People always run after high performance and less resource-hogging computers and operating systems. In that run they stumble upon barely usable linux distro forks with lxde or xfce environments, or go for big muscle hardware such as core i7 extreme processors, latest intel chipset mobos, discrete graphics cards and the latest maximum memory modules. May be out of ignorance.

I'm also a speed freak. Here's my take for speed.

Hardware: Intel H61 board, Pentium G620 processor, 8GB Corsair DDR3 1333MHz RAM, Atheros LAN Card, Intel HD 2000 Graphics on the same die of the CPU, 32GB Kingston SATA II SSD as / partition + Western Digital Blue SATA II TB HDD as /home partition.

OS: Debian Squeeze 64Bit, backported 3.2 kernel, mesa, drm and xorg manually backported from Debian Wheezy repository.

Package Repos: Debian squeeze, backports, mozilla-debian, debian-multimedia, google and debian wheeze.

Desktop Environment: Gnome 2.30

Software: LibreOffice 3.5, Gimp 2.6, Mplayer and Totem with all codecs and browser plugins, Iceweasel (Firefox) 13, Icedove (Thunderbird) , Sun Java and Netbeans full suite, GCC + G++ along with Code:Blocks, Full Wine suite, and the fat repertoire of media players, audio/video editors, remote access/desktop sharing tools, mysql server, client and admin, a plethora of games and tons of system utilities and recovery tools.

Speed benchmarks: Booting 8 secs, libreoffice startup 1 sec, firefox 1 sec, gimp startup 2 secs, and surprisingly netbeans startup 3 secs. Initial memory footprint is just 130MB. You can't expect more.

Tweaks I did: Optimized SSD to use trim (noatime,discard option in the /etc/fstab of the ssd drive), disabled ipv6, changed /etc/hosts to look for localhost whenever possible instead of searching and reaching there, removed swap partition, removed initram disk, put all my driver modules directly into the kernel so as to avoid seeking initram. Finally cleaned all the unnecessary locale files, symlinks, orphan files and then a few tweaks on gconf-editor. Finally cleaned the gnome config residues (after installing all the software I needed) with gconf-cleaner.

Here's the testimony video, watch it in HD 720p format full screen:

Caitlyn and Linux Hardware Support

Only this morning I saw a post by Caitlyn Martin on tuxmachines.org. About "Linux Hardware Support Myths and Legends" . Funny as always - flaming, ranting and what not!

Come on Caitlyn, admit, Linux is still not ready for consumers. It's never going to be considering the control, complexity and its nature of development. We all love linux. We can tinker our way to use it at our homes and offices. We'll keep on using linux, and we are not sad or sorry if linux doesn't make it to the mass adoption. But your adamant post is laughable at the best. Numbers tell, if there was a pinch of truth in your statement linux desktop would have enjoyed comparable marketshare like the one from Redmond. But 1-2%!

You wrote, "Linux is compatible with more hardware than any other OS bar none. That certainly includes Windows. Try installing Windows 7 on some random laptop from scratch and see how much is missing or unsupported without third party drivers. My experience doing Linux installs for my customers is that a lot of off the shelf hardware "just works" and the rest needs proprietary drivers downloaded to make it work, just like Windows. There is, indeed, some hardware that doesn't work with Linux and years ago that was a real issue. The fact is that more and more manufacturers are supporting Linux well and other drivers have been adequately reverse engineered."

Partly right, linux does support maximum hardware out of the box. But that other OS supports all of the hardware, though not all out of the box. Besides, the maximum number of hardware that linux supports is not as good or simple as it is in that other OS. Compare the installation procedure and performance of modern ATI and NVidia graphics cards on linux with that other OS. Linux fails from a long margin. Moreover, the support is both complicated and buggy most of the time, and not feature-complete.

Caitlyn, please try any of the recent Northern or Southern Island ATi Radeon graphics card on your favorite linux box. Do the same on that other OS. Compare the performance and installation procedure. On that other OS, all you've to do is to pull in the software (just one executable file) from AMD and install it. Your favorite distribution with modern kernel and gallium drivers will readily support the Northern Island ATi chip out of the box. But the performance will be shoddy at best. Then you will search your distros repo or browse the manufacturer's website for proprietary drivers. Download and install the packages. Graphics still won't work the way it does on that other OS. Then you will look for vaapi wrappers, configure the media player settings, bla..bla..bla.. In linux it's not just a driver package, you've to fight with xorg, kernel, drivers, wrappers and decoders. After this big fight your distribution may play your 1080p hd stuff. But again, not as good as on that other OS.

Audio driver scenario is no different. The point is, Sound and Graphics support in linux is very complicated and is always in a catch-22 stage. Admit it!

Here's a copy of the discussion thread on her post. Just imagine how mis-informed and adamant Caitlyn is in comparision to the mature, practical and realistic Jack.

By Jack on May 10, 2012 11:21 AM

Having used Linux since the end of the 90'ies i certainly agree that hardware drivers are not really a big problem. But for some, it really is.

Therefore one should never claim "pick this or that distro - it works out of the box" unless one in fact has experience with the exact combination.

If you do recommend where you should not, you are likely to be the creator of a user very hostile towards Linux, thus a true credibility killer.

Another wrong thing to do is recommending Linux with the ambition to make a Linux enthusiast out of the victim. Recommend (and if possible assist in installing) Linux on basis of the potential users needs and capabilities.

Forget your own preferences - it's all about the potential user, as long as you are sure that you are able to assist.

Now, I've got some shocking news!!
There are no perfect Linux desktop environment, and there are no perfect Linux distribution. There are probably 20-30 distros and 4-5-6 desktop environments that are technically suitable and has the potential, but none of them are really there.

We, as enthusiasts, are able to tweak a distro or a desktop environment into submission. The regular users who just want a neat piece of equipment to work well are not.

Where are the distros for consumers? They don't exist.

By Caitlyn Martin in reply to comment from Jack on May 10, 2012 12:58 PM

Jack: I have some shocking news for you. Any of the major Linux distributions are consumer-ready. That's been true for at least a decade. Any of the major Linux desktop environments are consumer ready. That's been true for at least a decade as well. The current generation of desktops on Windows and even on MacOS are based on ideas that first appeared in Linux. See my recent article on the subject. If those Linux distributions aren't "really there" then certainly Windows and MacOS are even less ready for consumers. You are certainly right that there is no perfect Linux distribution or desktop. There is no perfect OS, period. Linux is in no way more flawed or less ready for consumers than the other options out there.

I see the second part of your comment the same way I see the articles proclaiming that Linux hardware support is terrible: as spreading more fear, uncertainty and doubt for no good reason.

Seems, evangelists like Caitlyn are more of problem than solution to the badly integrated and ever-forking open source OS.

Why Opensource Xorg/Gallium drivers suck on linux desktop

They suck for sure. Nothing much required to prove than showing up the status of xorg/gallium drivers for ati radeon as of 9th May 2012. Have a look at the stuff (marked red) that's not working perfectly. The current situation in modern ati graphics chips almost wards off anybody from using linux. And it doesn't seem to go anywhere till couple of years. The current status shows only a fool will buy ATI graphics to rely on open source drivers and run linux on it. What's more enthusiasts say even if the listed features are completed, the performance will no way be comparable with its catalyst counterparts. Pity!

• "DONE" means that it is implemented and relatively bug-free.
• "MOSTLY" means that it is implemented but has some known bugs.
• "WIP" means that someone has started on the initial implementation.
• "N/A" means that the feature is not supported by the hardware.
• "N/N" means that the feature will not be implemented, because a better alternative is or will be available.
• "TODO" means that someone needs to write the code.
• "UNKNOWN" means that the current status of this item isn't known.

2D features	Evergreen	N.Islands	S.Islands
Kernel Modesetting	DONE	DONE	DONE
Max Supported Display	2-6	4-6	6
DRI2	DONE	DONE	DONE
Page Flipping	DONE	DONE	DONE
ShadowFB	DONE	DONE	DONE
2D Acceleration	DONE	DONE	Gallium
Textured Xv	DONE	DONE	Gallium
Decode on 3D engine	WIP	WIP	WIP
Decode on UVD	TODO	TODO	TODO
Hybrid Graphics	MOSTLY	MOSTLY	MOSTLY
Mesa 3D features	Evergreen	N.Islands	S.Islands
3D Driver	r600g	r600g	radeonsi
Primitives	DONE	DONE	WIP
Stippled Primitives	TODO	TODO	TODO
Smooth Primitives	TODO	TODO	TODO
Textures	DONE	DONE	WIP
Hardware TCL	DONE	DONE	WIP
Vertex Shaders	DONE	DONE	WIP
Fragment Shaders	DONE	DONE	WIP
GLSL	DONE	DONE	WIP
Texture Tiling	DONE	DONE	TODO
S3TC decompression	DONE	DONE	TODO
full S3TC	DONE	DONE	TODO
Tessellation Shades	TODO	TODO	TODO
Geometry Shaders	TODO	TODO	TODO
Anti-Aliasing	WIP	WIP	TODO
Anti-Aliasing	DONE	not tested	not tested
Anisotropic Filtering	DONE	DONE	TODO
Hyper-Z	WIP	WIP	TODO
OpenGL Compliance	3.0/4.210	3.0/4.210	3.0/4.210
Output	Evergreen	N.Islands	S.Islands
Dual-link DVI	DONE	DONE	DONE
XRandR 1.2	DONE	DONE	DONE
TV Out	DONE	N/A	N/A
DisplayPort	DONE	DONE	DONE
HDMI Audio	DONE	TODO	TODO
Power Saving	Evergreen	N.Islands	S.Islands
Engine reclocking	DONE	DONE	DONE
Memory reclocking	DONE	DONE	DONE
Voltage adjusting	DONE	DONE	DONE
Thermal sensors	DONE	DONE	DONE
Other	Evergreen	N.Islands	S.Islands
Suspend Support	DONE	DONE	DONE
CrossFire	TODO	TODO	TODO
Compute	WIP	WIP	TODO

Desktop: Debian vs. CEntOS

While every *buntu and *edora moving towards Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon or MATE, only two distributions remain practical for desktop productivity and fun, they are CentOS 6.* and Debian 6.*. They both will support the good old gnome2 line at least couple years more. However, they are a lot different from each other. Here's a short description on each of them vis-a-vis desktop use.

	Debian	CEntOS
Pros	#1 clean package management. With backports repo now merged with main debian repos and debian-multimedia being very compatible with debian, you can install whatever you like without the being scarred of any adulteration, conflict or breakage. #2 largest no. of packages, roughly 30,000+. #3 flexible installation options - from netinstall, base cd to kmuto backported images, full CDs and DVDs. #4 less memory footprint and disk space usage. #5 support highest no. of architecture - from arm to amd86 and beyond. #6 frequent updates and point releases. #7 larger community and better/quicker support. #8 better hardware support out of the box with unofficial backports/kmuto installation images. #9 very flexible system offering easy customization as per individual needs	#1 very responsive (better than debian) system as a workstation. #2 quicker updates to major productivity suites for office use such as - openoffice, mozila suite. #3 better tested/trusted set of packages. #4 longer (more than debian) support period
Cons	#1 sometimes updates lose the previous configurations, especially printer, though reconfiguring manually resolves the issues	#1 repo conflicts and occasional breakage of package base as rpmforge, rpmfusion, elrepo, remi, elrepo, epel and atrmps don't always work in sync. #2 lesser no. of packages in the repo. #3 no easy customization as per individual needs. #4 smaller community and less no. of contributors

Debian on desktop: 9 pros + 1 con = 8 points
Centos on desktop: 4 pros + 4 cons = 0 points

Of course, the list is not complete at all and may reflect my bias towards Debian. If so, please correct me sending you feedback that'll help me revise the list.

Too much of freedom = Chaos

Q: Why FOSS on Linux desktop did not get traction the way it should?
A: It started up with a Utopia - freedom of choice.

Windows powers around 90% of the desktops worldwide. It doesn't offer much choice. And the little choice it offers is limited to a few application software. For more than 15 years we have just two GUI for Windows - Luna (Pre-Vista) and Aero (Post-Vista). Ask average Windows users about the desktop environment they use. 99% of time you will get a shock response - they have no idea. Or at best the answer will be "Windows". They have just one word "Windows" for the OS, for the desktop environment and everything else. What does it mean?

• people are not so fond of software, they just want to get their job done using some software (often reluctantly), crying "choice" aloud just frightens them
• they don't worry about the source code and the RMS freedom associated with it

99% of normal people don't know how to program and don't give a damn about source codes and freedom of choice. They skip any reference to "source code" and "EULA". Free software is ok, but saying "you can have a look at source code" is definitely not an effective point. Very often freedom of choice becomes a costly affair if you consider the time invested to get your way through these choices before settling at one.

That's precisely why after so much trumpeting of the advantages of FOSS it's struggling to register in the mindshare of the masses. The often said "Resistance to change" is not the only reason holding the opensource platforms back. It's the lack of standards, simplicity, coherence and good applications, plus the ever growing chaos in terms of fragmentation and multiplicity in every possible form.

You need to clean the clutter by dumping 90% of the stuff that make up for freedom of choice. Then you need a benevolent dictator who can apply an adamant standard and QC system to really push FOSS on the Linux desktop forward, but then it won't be FOSS anymore.

It's not the same linux across distributions

Many times I've read this in a lot of prime linux fora - It doesn't matter which distribution you're using as long as it's linux. Then the usual preaching of choice and freedom runs till the end of those particular threads. I don't buy to this generalized statement. Read on to know why, but first let's see how this statement surfaces from the so called evolved linux gurus.

An enthusiast Windows/Mac user jumps on linux enlightened by a friend or being encouraged on the web. He/she tries a so called popular distribution, if unlucky faces multiple problems related to the stuff on the outer layers, the gnu stuff and other OSS stuff which in combination with linux make a distribution. Then googles for a while, visits some fora, gets suggestions from seasoned and noob users to change his/her distribution with some other, where the issues in question are resolved but may face some other bugs. Then some guru drops in and says - linux is linux, doesn't matter which distro, it's best to use one that suits best for his/her particular needs.

Now on to the topic. In theory every distribution is the same, but in practice they are not. A developer or a long time user might feel it same after cleaning the clutter and sorting everything to his or her liking. But the average Joe is not that skilled and doesn't have that patience to tame the OS. A minor quirk that comes in the way might make him/her feel distro A is different from distro B which is quite different from distro C.

It's a pity reality. Linux distributions are so loosely integrated that a minor mistake in putting stuffs together will create major problems. Doesn't matter even if that distribution is byte by byte a recompiled copy or just a derivative of some popular distribution with minor changes here and there. Most often even if the derivative distribution shows superficial changes in skins, branding, selection of default apps or choice of desktop environment, it might influence components lying much deeper in the bundle. For example, take the case of audio stack (click on the image below) on a typical linux system. Look at its complexity and relationship with various components and imagine what can happen with slight mishandling.

Here's an interesting case of Scientific Linux 6.2 and Centos 6.2, both are free recompiled versions of RHEL, both aim to be as much close to the upstream as possible. I started with Scientific Linux, the installation was literally a non-starter on a Dell Optiplex 380. Checked mdsum, changed media from CD to USB to network. No go! However, CentOS had no such problem on the same PC.

Android-x86, Just a Hobbyist Project

Started at mid-2009 Android-x86 project has not been able to offer a well-rounded release so far.

Then, it was a welcome relief for all those loved Android on mobile devices and wanted the same usability, performance and security on their x86 devices such as netbooks and computers.

I was an early adopter of Android-x86 for three basic reasons:

#1 it pumped vigor to some aging PCs (PIIIs, PIVs and Atoms)
#2 it was a tightly integrated project (not like fragmented Linux ecosystem)
#3 performance was great (expected being a mobile OS)

Till date the project has been delivering on those basis reasons, but has not been able to come up with a version worthy of consumer adoption. It always tries to catch up with the upstream, and pushes out unfinished releases (RCs) pretty close to the android releases. But before it could resolve all the issues and bring out a final bugfree release, Android jumps one version or one point up, and Android-x86 people drop it right there and sit together to work on the new upstream offering. Buggy RC stays just there. From Android 2.3 through 4.0, you get just unfinished RCs. I don't dare guess their future releases.

Here's the timeline of recent releases:

 - 2012-02-27: Android-x86 4.0 RC1
 - 2011-11-23: Android-x86 3.2 RC2
 - 2011-08-28: Android-x86 2.3 RC1

Each of the releases has been plagued with one or more of the following issues:

#1 Suspend and resume doesn't work on some targets.
#2 No Ethernet support.
#3 Camera and bluetooth don't work.
#4 Camera recorder doesn't work.
#5 Wifi and Ethernet cannot be turned on simultaneously.

Is it just a product for developers to learn packaging for Android? Or for those hobbyists who don't expect anything more than being able to tinker?

I don't need sex, gnome 3 fu*ked me in the brain

I am not just another gnome 3 hater in the most fashionable and popular way. That's, though I don't like the way it defies the traditional workflow, the biggest problem for me, is something else. It's the shoddy quality of the software, even after one year of its initial release.

Forget the usability, still the gripes are many, ranging from its integration into the system to how it talks with various other core components such as graphics, desktop effects, and the overall stability.

As for usability, I'm ok with putting a few extensions to tweak the desktop behavior, but not, if my graphic card crawls on this new desktop. Searched every forum, tried with gallium3d, failed. Installed catalyst plus vaapi with gstreamer and vlc backends. Still no-go. I am sorry, it's not for me. Moreover, my system wearing this new gnome skin coughs every now and then. Sometimes it stays irresponsive for quite long. That's simply unacceptable.

My Radeon HD 6310 flies on both gnome 2.32 and kde 4.8. I know I may achieve the same performance after some more workaround. Same with system irresponsiveness. But who cares!

 Shoddy software quality, defiant community and bad usability = Gnome 3

How has been your gnome 3 ride? Please don't flame on the task management and workflow, just mention how stable the whole stack has been so far?

MCLinuxPC 2012 - The Whole Kitchen Sink

Kind of bubble sort, distributions come up, tumble down, some grow, some die unmaintained. First we had Slack, then Redhat, Mandy, Mepis, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS... and now Mint. Most often the popularity of a distribution depends on the degree of "out of the box" functionality it offers, plus how well it integrates the various bits and pieces. IMO, only three distributions championed in this regards - Mepis, PCLinuxOS and Mint.

Now on to the business. Here I am reviewing MCLinuxPC 2012, a remaster that comes from one of my favorite distributions that manages rpm packages on synaptic, by Sefy. No awards for guessing. But I won't reveal the name for two obvious reasons: first, this remaster has gone too far in including the software not allowed to be legally redistributed, second, it's not been publicly announced.

The good thing is, that legality neither applies to him in Israel, nor me in India. Besides, Sefy has taken all care to rebuild some base packages related to lsb, issue, grub, etc., altering every reference of that famous distribution. For now, the remaster is floating across a few close friends.

Hope it doesn't violate any rule.

Here's the review.

I'm a big time fan of that popular distribution for one solid reason - it never failed on my hardware. It's neither the most beautiful, nor the most cutting edge distribution. Stable, and may be a little conservative, but it just-works, you won't have to fiddle much. You are ready to go the very next minute after installation. Having said that, seems it's a great feat for the remaster to maintain that quality, after loading so much extra stuff.

I won't repeat here the livecd experience and the installation. It's pretty much similar to that big distribution. So, fast forward to the installed environment.

Hardware

As of now the remaster has been running on four different set of hardware at my home and office -  a Dual Core Pentium Dell Optiplex 360, an old PIV Compaq, an Asus Eee PC 1215b with AMD Fusion C-50, and an Intel Essential D410PT nettop. Some of those machines have housed Debian Squeeze, Arch and Ubuntu Natty also. Let's see how well MCLinuxPC fares against those veteran distros.

Booting

As always, no surprises here. MCLinuxPC booted just fine across all the four different configurations. Of course the bootup time was a few seconds more than Arch and Debian, it's the price for its heavy customization. The freshly booted desktop seems to be pimping Windows 7 and Mac OS on top of the default KDE 4.6.5. Under the hood there's a bfs patched 2.6.38 kernel. The application software selection is huge and all-encompassing, we'll see later. The look is quite different from its parent distro. It doesn't do blue and gray that much.

Memory Consumption

Memory consumption right after booting was around 350MB on all the machines, except that EEE PC 1215b, where it was around 400MB. No bad for a KDE 4 remaster.

Performance

I can't site any numbers here. As far as my perception goes MCLinuxPC is as responsive as Natty, Arch and Squeeze on all the machines except Eee 1215B. Squeeze was the most responsive of all on this tiny computer. 1GHz Ontario C-50 APU is not enough for KDE 4, may be.

Desktop Experience

No surprises here. For the first time my Eee 1215B worked as expected. Graphics, Touchpad, Wireless, Webcam and Bluetooth behaved smooth. The other three machines worked well too including my old PCI Hauppage analog TV tuner on a dated PIV system. Apple Trailers, Microsoft Media Server, flash videos, MP3 et al played. Oh the good xbmc, the local media files were shelved the way they should be. MCLinuxPC does a very good job of managing additional languages through its Localization Manager. For the rest, there's good old MCLinuxPC Control Center.

The systems are stable - I've been working on the machines for last 4 days, so far no crashes related either to KDE or kernel.

Applications

MCLinuxPC outshines almost every other distribution in this department. There is the whole kitchen and sink. The system utilities, internet suite, productivity suites, multimedia suites + xbmc + codecs + media converters, graphics suites, games, emulators, and believe it or not, the universal computer learning suite comprising the full jdk, gcc, g++, assembly, mysql. Wow! A superb selection. Be it sharing your stuff, using internet, doing some serious office work, converting your media, syncing your devices with PC, managing security, cleaning the system, sharing peer desktops, or whatsoever, you name any popular modern system software or application software, it's all there. Also, there's a balance of the software - not much duplicity. Under 2.6GB it packs so much applications that the good old synaptic seems an overdo. You can live your life without using it ever, except for updating the system, if you like.

Here's a list of applications that comes with MCLinuxPC, sorted items menu-wise:

Communication: qtadb for android barry backup synce kde pda manager Configuration: ATI catalyst manager 3D acceleration configuration cairo dock chbg compiz manager emerald ezswitch firewall floppy formatter google gadgets kde grub manager gtk theme switch hardware information install MCLinuxPC localization libreoffice manager network center ntfs configuration manager nvclock partition manager pulse audio manager redo mbr samba configuration unetbootin user administration kwallet manager Development: diff/patch configuration teamviewer kompozer complete gcc, g++, nasm, assembly (nasm), sun jdk, mysql Text editors: medit vi kwrite File tools: bleachbit krename krusader midnight commander kleansweep Games: complete bundle from arcade, board games, puzzles, strategy, etc. Graphics: imagemagick gui gimp kolourpaint kamoso gpicview digikam picasa ksnapshot xsane kruler Sound: amarok songbird kscd kradio timidity cd ripper nvidia tv output floola volume control sound recorder Package management: dupclean synaptic libreoffice manager opera widget manager

Emulators: wine - Windows Emulator desmuke - Nintendo DS dosbox - DOSbox epsxe - Playstation One xgngeo - NeoGeo nintendo - Nintendo hu-go! - HuGo pcxs - virtualbox visualboy - Advance Gameboy winetricks gsnes - Sega Master System & Genesis yabause - Sega Saturn zsnes - Super Nintendo Monitoring: thinkpad battery monitor desktop widgets netapplet removable media utility system monitor xkill view disk usage Terminal: konsole xterm Archiving: acetoneiso k3b nero ark file roller iso master nepomuk backup p7zip gui Internet: google earth qbittorrent filezilla dropbox teamviewer firefox chrome opera kdesktop sharing krfb thunderbird kopete kppp groupware blogging putty tightvnc xchat irc tkpppoe Office: libreoffice note taking tools time management adobe reader personal organizer artha calibre Video: imagination cheese coriander me tv xbmc media center tv time realplayer vlc video4fuze mobile media converter kplayer winff gtk-recordmydesktop

Conclusion

Question: So, what's so good about Sefy and his remaster?
Answer: MCLinuxPC is godsend for all those who love linux but can't stand the annoyances and pains that come with it. Yes, it's fat, it's not as clean and swift as a default Arch or Debian setup. But that's a small tradeoff for the amount of goodies you get. You only need to download just the remastered iso, and have a secure, modern, entertaining and productive life without the need for any extra bit or piece. Another big point is this is the only Linux with "out-of-the-box" adb pre-configuration for immediate access to Android phones.