Desktop Linux Dilemma - To Swap or Not To Swap?

Linux swap space has been a mystery for years. The same is true for Windows. Remember those Virtual Memory and pagefile thing?

In old days when RAM was really costly, Linux community, suggested to have swap space two times that of physical memory (RAM). Time went by, RAM has become cheaper and larger, and now they say you should still have a swap space 1.5 times the size of physical memory, bla... bla... bla...

Let me tell you, I neither use/create swap partition in my Linux (Mepis 8.0 and PClinuxOS 2009 TR3), nor do I create/use pagefile in my Windows XP Pro SP3 machine at office.

In all I have just 1GB of RAM in home laptop and office workstation, both. I have been running of them for 1 year now, and I never run into any problems whatsoever. Interested what do I do on both the machines? I surf the web, do some word-processing, listen to music, watch movies, and occassionally do some video/audio editing.

So, what's the use of swap, unless I use hibernation or remaster Linux to create custom disks? I never needed it though I have only 1GB of RAM, whereas these days notebooks and desktops are being shipped with more than 1GB RAM such as 2GB, 3GB, 4GB, and even 8GB. Does swap space make sense in such a scenario?

I welcome your comments and appreciate all your ideas.

Mepis 8.0 Desktop - A Debian Joyride

This time around I tried the daddy of many desktops, Debian Lenny, and compared it with Mepis 8.0 on my notebook. I am pleased how Debian has made itself easy to install and use - booting from netinstall.iso to a full-blown Debian Desktop was easier than ever. However, Warren has spelled magic onto Debain through his much tested Mepis. Till PCLinuxOS 2009 Final shows up I am going to stick with it for three reasons:

1. Its wonderful implementation of KDE 3.5.10 (thank God he did not move to KDE 4.x.x!)
2. Its very handy set of Mepis Tools (According to me it dwarfs Mandriva Control Center (MCC) and OpenSuse Configuration Application (Yast))
3. And its out-of-box support for a wide array of multimedia (though in pure Debian you can add debian-multimedia repo and install these stuff, but who is going to dirty around when it's already there in Mepis?)

Having said that, one more worthy point is that - Warren moved to kernel 2.6.27, all for good to support a larger set of hardware, though the core is pure Debian Lenny. Mepis 8.0 is a pure KDE Desktop OS, it has very few gnome stuff, less than any other desktop Linux. Also it includes OO.o3 which is faster and has more features than the older 2.4.1 (remember stable Debian still sticks to OO.o 2.4.1).

Overall hardware detection is good. It configured most of the devices of my notebook. But I find the touchpad to be way too sensitive, so I copied the touchpad section of xorg.conf from Ubuntu 7.10 (it detects all my hardware) by running the liveCD.

I also pulled in extrastuff such as GIMP, Wordnet, Kthesaurus, Krita, Kplato, PDFedit, Realplayer, Audacious, Kaffeine, w32codecs, libdvdcss2, kchmviewer, Kget, Ktorrent, Skype, Kmail, KSirc, Audacity, Avidemux, Leafpad, Kplato, Kivio, and Kformula, to fully load my desktop.

1. Boot up time - from poweron to full-blown KDE desktop is 1min 20sec (50sec from grub to desktop).
2. Memory usage after booting (with no applications started) is 210MB (ofcourse you mileage may vary, because I have disabled may services and configured memory handling to suit my needs).

Overall Mepis 8 is snappier than ever. Needless to say it is rock solid based on Debian Lenny. I have been tinkering with it for 3 days, but it has never borked. And the best thing in using Mepis 8 is that you can you can enjoy very easy Linux computing yet access thousands of Debian applications.

Desktop Linux Mepis 8 Knocks all other Distros Down!

Installed Mepis 8.0? No? Go, get it. Sure it is not in the top of Distrowatch Rankings, but it undoubtedly is a champion of the Linux Desktops!

SimplyMEPIS 8.0 is a beginner-friendly desktop Linux distribution based on the fresh Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, Lenny. It uses 'Debian Lenny stable' foundation enhanced with an LTS kernel, key package upgrades, and the MEPIS Assistant applications to create an up-to-date, ready-to-use desktop computer system. In addition to Linux kernel 2.6.27.18, it includes a rich selection of desktop applications - KDE 3.5.10, OpenOffice.org 3.0, Firefox 3.0.6, and almost all the popular multimedia codecs and other stuff. Apart from these, MEPIS 8.0 includes BIND 0.9.6 and IPv6 is enabled out of the box.

Mepis head, Warren has taken every care to provide the best desktop experience through this release. On my notebook it readily autoconfigured all the devices including Broadcom 4311 WLAN card, even it did not ask for firmware. Besides, read/write support to ntfs is also there out-of-box. It seems Mepis is ready to give Ubuntu a run for its money. As of now, it's the best possible Linux Desktop around. I am going to put it on my work-machines, and will settle for nothing till the venerable PCLinuxOS 2009 knocks my door.

Download SimplyMEPIS 8.0 32bit or 64bit

Purchase SimplyMEPIS 8.0 32bit or 64bit

Big News - Debian Lenny Released on 15th Feb 2009

Making end to all those hoopla spanning 22 months Debian Lenny is finally released on 15th Feb 2009. It is a grand day for all those Debian fans and for those who respin it such as Mepis.

This release includes 12 processor architectures, the KDE 3.5.10, GNOME 2.22.2, Xfce 4.4.2, and LXDE 0.3.2.1 desktop environments, the GNUstep desktop 7.3, X.Org 7.3, OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, GIMP 2.4.7, and much more. As always Debian Lenny carefully organizes everything so it all works together the most stable, secure and sleek way.

Read the release notes

Get the "netinst" images for i386 and x86_64 architectures

Windows XP Extreme Tweaking Tips for Linux Users

The very title - Windows XP Extreme Tweaking Tips for Linux User - in a Desktop Linux blog might make some visitors frown, but I thought it worthwhile to give a detailed XP tweaking tips. Because most of the linux users use or are compelled to use Windows at home or workplace, on different machines, or on a dualboot machine, for many reasons such as running some commercial applications, playing games, etc. Hope these tweaks will help readers optimize their Windows to the best.

Like Linux, the first step to optimize windows xp is making the startup first. You can run msconfig and change various parameters to improve boot speed. Click on the picture below to view its original size and get the details of my tweaks. Here I have disabled 16-bit application support (who uses it anyways?) and outlook mail, reduced timeout to 3 sec, removed everything from the startup except Avast antivirus and ctfmon. You can add/remove/disable items in the msconfig dialog box as per your requirement.



You might have noticed sometimes Windows takes more time to open a drive and/directory. You can make it quite snappy by changing the disk properties. Right click on the C, D, E… drives and uncheck Compress drive to save disk space and Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching. Because very few people really need fast-searching on their home desktops, and today nobody at home faces space-crunch on their computers. Click on the picture below to view its original size and get the details of my tweaks.



It’s good to have eye-candies on your desktop, but they take considerable amount of cpu and memory. However, you can enjoy the most the beauty of windows borders and desktop actions by optimizing visual effects. Right click on My Computer, click on properties option, then click on Advanced tab and select Settings below Performance box. And, choose custom option under visual effects tab, uncheck everything except Use Drop Shadows for icon labels on the desktop and Use visual styles on windows and buttons. Click on the picture below to view its original size and get the details of my tweaks.



Next, you can change the system properties of Windows XP to a great extent to enhance speed and responsiveness of your system. The most important system properties tweaks are: disable error reporting, turnoff system restore on all drives, turnoff automatic updates, uncheck remote assistance and disable the devices that you don’t need. Click on the picture below to view its original size and get the details of my tweaks. Be sure, you have Linux as your another booting OS, so that you can easily manipulate your files in the windows partition in case of a system failure.



The default Windows installation activates a lot of services that you probably don’t need at all. Run services.msc, have some idea about the service names, startup status and description, and disable the services that you don’t need. Click on the picture below and get the details of my services tweaks. My system runs only this much of services and I have never run into any problems.



Few days after tweaking services.msc if everything runs smoothly you can remove the disabled services from the system registry. Click on the picture below to see how I have browses the registry levels and deleted the disabled services.



Finally, the most important thing to make your system fast, stable and usable is a small but wise selection of applications. I have chosen to install MS Office 2003 + Open XML addons (because MS Office 2007 is too slow and annoying), Ashampoo Burning Suite (because Nero is a memory hog), K Lite Mega Codecs (because it’s the most comprehensive codecs pack that merges seamlessly with Windows Media Player), Avast Antivirus (because it’s the best free antivirus suite, you can also try Avira), Foxit PDF reader (because it’s of miniscule size compared to adobe reader, and it’s fast), Winrar (because it’s better than winzip in every possible ways being small, fast and feature-rich), and Encyclopedia Britannica (but you can refer Wikipedia or Wordweb also).



Well, now onto linux news. Mepis 8 RC2 has already been released and PCLinuxOS 2009 TR6 is on the way. Don't forget to try them both when they go gold.

Ahoy! Granular 1.0 Released

Welcome Granular 1.0 aka Esto Vox! Lead developer Anurag Bhandari has announced the release of Granular Linux 1.0, a PCLinuxOS-based desktop distribution which brings with it solid stability, out-of-the-box usefulness, great multimedia experience, support for running Windows software, and much more in a Live CD. The current release embraces Linux kernel 2.6.26.8, KDE 3.5.10, Firefox 3.0.4, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KOffice 1.6.3, Compiz Fusion 0.7.6, GIMP 2.6.3 and Wine 1.0.1. What's more, Granular has its own new repository.

Visit Granular Linux Project to know more

Download Granular 1.0

Granular 1.0 Screenshots

Merging Full NTFS Support into Linux Kernel

Support for FAT16 and FAT32 has been merged with Linux Kernel, since many years. It's a good thing. But I wonder when the same will happen with NTFS, the widely popular filesystem for windows XP, Vista, and the upcoming Windows 7. As of now full read/write support in Linux has been a workaround with ntfsmount, ntfs-3g, both of which require fuse. And both of these don't come configured for lay-users. Of course, many distributions such as Mint and Mepis have ntfs-3g as a default install, PCLinuxOS repo has the packages. But it never sounds solid. And the looks the configuration fragmented where you have to run fuse services and mount with ntfs-3g or ntfsmount options. Even the mounting sometimes becomes trickly involving superuser permissions.

Is there anyone working on "merging full ntfs support into linux kernel"? Will full ntfs support always be a dream? Will we ever have full NTFS support? NTFS has been around for many many years. I am sure Microsoft will never be happy or want to release documentations of NTFS. That means Linux folks have reverse-engineer the ntfs support. But it's high time linux had full ntfs support merged in the kernel. After all, we are living in a world dominated by windows where we have to deal with ntfs formatted media every now and then.

Please post any info you have regarding "merging ntfs support into linux kernel".

Desktop Linux - If it ain't broke don't fix it!

Hobbyist attitude in Linux world is not always good. There is no hue and cry if a Microsoft release is delayed or a Mac OS is postponed for sometime. But it seems Linux is moving just too fast, and everyone including developers and users are running to catch up with the pace. And it creates a lot of problems - developers are busy in fitting the latest kernel and other packages to their distro, and users are awake looking at the repo to install the latest packages and newer kernels, at times even if the same is not required.

Thanks God, the two distros Mepis and PCLinuxOS (both are my favorites) are not after this rat-race. They would stick to the recent stable apps and well tested kernel. Of course, this approach results in slow release cycles. But I am happy at a slower and well-tested releases, than a hurried latest and greatest release. However, sometimes I also get carried away by the newer releases. Here is an example.

I have been using Linux for a decade and using PCLinuxOS since it's 0.92 release. I had installed PCLinuxOS 0.92 sometime in 2005 worked on it for quite a long period, and installed the much anticipated pclos 2007. But I had to distro-hop, when I sold off that desktop and brought home a low-cost notebook. Hopped a full circle across the much hyped distros but again came back to pclos - the venerable PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniME.

From the day MiniME 2008 was released, there has been a lot of development in Linux World, but PCLinuxOS development has been somewhat slowed down, only for good. But I was also too anxious to grab a PCLinuxOS 2009 iso. When its tr5 was released, I could not resist to pull in the packages such as the newer kernel 2.6.26.8, kde 3.5.10 and some updated apps from the testing repo. Of course, I had doubts whether it will break my system, but fortunately installation went fine and the system is working as before. I compared the performance of both the kernels - 2.6.22.15 and 2.6.26.8 on my notebook, but could not find any difference. However, kde 3.5.10 seemed more polished than its previous version, but no major difference.

Hence, as a long time Linux Desktop user I would suggest others not to create chaos if a certain distro release is delayed and not to always run after the latest releases. In short, if a particular release works for you, work on it don't work at it. Don't run after frequent updates.

What Keeps Linux from Mass and Corporate Deployment?

I was going through this Interview with Warren Woodford , and that old "Linux Desktop of the Year" thing came across again. That interview talked a lot about Mepis, Ubuntu, Corporate Use of Linux and the Future of Client-side Linux (Linux Desktop) as well as about IPv6 and DNSSEC.

Here is an excerpt from that interview:

Scott: What about the year of the Linux desktop?

Warren: It's never going to happen. Sorry.

Scott: Why not?

Warren: There's a chicken and egg problem with getting it on the desktops, where no matter how much Mark Shuttleworth does, Michael Dell is not going to tell Bill Gates where to go. No one is going to forget that Microsoft's the big game in town, no matter how much Microsoft stumbles.

Mark Shuttleworth can spend his entire billion dollars on trying to make Ubuntu good enough to shoot down Microsoft on the desktop and that won't change. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about the fragmentation in the Linux market.

You don't have one set of products against which you can build commercial software, or do commercial deployment, or even long term enterprise deployment. It's doable with Ubuntu, but it's not a no brainer, although Novell and Red Hat are trying to address that part.

Right now, I don't know of a single major corporation that would go with Linux on the desktop for one reason–no Visio. Until OpenOffice does a Visio clone, you can forget it.

I like Warren for his no-nonsense clear comments and his technical expertise. In fact, he is a true champion of Linux Desktop (like Tex) who puts users first, and ensures extreme quality of every release. He can't be wrong when he says the fragmentation in the Linux market is the major hindrance in the desktop deployment of linux.

Fragmentation of Linux market does more bad than good to the popularity and deployment of Linux. The multiplicity of distros often do more harm by warding off many linux enthusiasts. In my 10 years of experience with distro-hopping I have tried more than 100 of distributions, but liked only PCLinuxOS, Mepis and Mint to be really usable for desktops. Apart from it, multiplicity of distros, rapid release cycle of base packages, kernel and libraries pose many difficulties for application software developers. Only a few like OpenOffice and Firefox has done a great job in bundling software that often works across most of the linux distributions.

Does anybody know what happened to the Linux Standard Base (LSB)?

Here is my radically simple pclinuxos 2008 desktop.

How to Install Standalone Flashplayer in PCLinuxOS and other Linux Distros

Today most of the linux distros come with flash plugin preinstalled. Hence you have no problem in playing flash animations in your web browser. But the difficulty arises while playing individual (downloaded swf games, files, presentations) swf files as most of the distros don't have a standalone flashplayer.

Here is the trick to install standalone flashplayer on PCLinuxOS 2008 MiniME. This trick will work across all the distros but you have to make sure that you are installing the same version of standalone flashplayer as your flashplugin. For example, I have flashplayer plugin 9 installed on my pclos 2008 minime that's why I installed standalone swf player 9 from adobe flashplayer website. Here are the steps.

1. Install flashplayer plugin from your distro's repo or from adobe flashplayer website download section.
   
2. Download standalone flashplayer from adobe flashplayer website download section (you can download standalone flashplayer at http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html Please skip down the page to Linux Debugger and Standalone Players for Flash Developers on that page). Extract the files and copy the flashplayer binary file to /usr/bin.
   
   
3. Rightclick on a *.swf file, select openwith option. Type flashplayer in the textbox below openwith as mentioned in the screenshot below, and check the remember option.
   
   

You are done! Henceforth, you can open and play any swf file just by double clicking on it.