Jamie's Random Musings

It's been quite a wave of new Linux distributions over the past month or so, but with the release of Fedora 12 (Constantine) this week, we have finally made it through. I have intentionally chosen what is likely to be a controversial title this time, but the basis for my choice is rather simple. Fedora 12 is the only one of this series of releases which has loaded successfully on absolutely every computer I own. So rather than waste my time and yours on "yet another Fedora 12 review", I'll simply say that if you want good, authoritative information, I would recommend the Fedora Project Documentation, and if you are looking for an overview of the highlights of the new release, complete with pictures, have a look at the excellent Fedora 12 One Page Release Notes".

The Fedora 12 distribution is available in 32- and 64-bit versions, and with the Gnome or KDE desktop. It also offers a variety of other desktops as installable packages, including Xfce, Moblin, and a variety of others. I have initially installed only the Gnome version, but both the 32- and 64-bit versions on different computers, as noted below. Unlike the unhappy experience with the Fedora 11 distribution, there are no problems or restrictions with installing from the LiveCD. Installation is amazingly fast - you really have to try it for yourself to believe it - and there are relatively few questions to be answered during the installation. Once installed, Fedora 12 boots fairly quickly (between 30 seconds and a minute on my systems), and shuts down very quickly - and without imposing a silly, irritating 60-second delay.

That's it for the "review" details. If you really want a good idea of what Fedora 12 looks like, I strongly recommend the One Page Release Notes mentioned above. That not only gives an excellent overview of the new release, it also gives you a good idea of what the developers themselves are most proud of. What I will do now is give a "scorecard" of how installation of the various releases went on some of my systems:

- Fujitsu Lifebook S6510: This is really a very ordinary laptop by today's standards, with an Intel Core2 Duo CPU and associated chips for graphics and WiFi. One distribution managed to "get it wrong", though - Mandriva 2010. For some reason the xorg.conf file they generated for it during the installation was wrong, and the console came up at 1024x768 instead of 1280x800. All I had to do was delete that file, and everything was then fine both during and after installation. I installed 64-bit distributions on this system.

- ASUS N10J: This should be a pretty typical netbook, with an Intel Atom 270 CPU and associated chips (as long as I don't switch on the nVidia graphic controller). So once again, I expected this one to be "easy", but once again, one distribution got it wrong. Surprisingly, that was Ubuntu, on which the installation program (ubiquity) consistently crashed near the end of the installation, leaving the installation functional but incomplete, and incorrectly configured. I stumbled across a "work-around" for this, by turning on the nVidia card during installation. Once the installation finished successfully, it would then run perfectly well with either the nVidia or Intel graphic adapter active. I installed 32-bit distributions on this one.

- HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez: I consider this one to be a bit more "unusual", because it has an AMD Athlon Neo CPU, an ATI Radeon HD graphic controller, and an Atheros 9k WiFi adapter. To my surprise, every one of the distributions installed on it with absolutely no problems. Go figure. I installed 64-bit distributions on this one.

- Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S2110: This is now an "old" laptop. I also expected it to have some problems, because it has an AMD Turion 64 CPU, an ATI Radeon X200 graphic controller, and an Atheros 3k WiFi adapter. In fact, only one distribution had a problem with it, and that was openSuSE, which just basically failed miserably. When I tried the 64-bit distribution, I couldn't even get the LiveCD to boot properly, and when I tried the 32-bit distribution the LiveCD booted ok and seemed to install normally, but when I try to boot the installed system, it hangs about 8 times out of 10. I still haven't been able to figure out where the problem is. I installed 64-bit distributions on this one.

- HP 2133 Mini-Note: This little guy is still my favorite, but it really does tend to be a problem for a lot of distributions. It has a VIA C7-M CPU and Chrome 9 graphic adapter and a 1280x768 display, both of which can be tricky, and a Broadcom 4312 WiFi adapter, which can be a royal pain. It turned out that I was pleasantly surprised at how well the new distributions did on it. They all at least installed and started up normally. The only one that had significant problems was openSuSE, which gets the display wrong (1024x768) because it is not using a VIA Chrome-specific driver, and doesn't have a suitable Broadcom WiFi driver. With previous releases I was able to get around the WiFi problem by using the install_bcm43xx_firmware script, but when I do that with this release openSuSE becomes very unstable, and hangs the first time I move the mouse after login. Also with previous releases I was able to install the openchrome driver from the openSuSE Software Build Service, and thus get the console right, but that package isn't in the Build Service for 11.2 yet, and when I installed the version listed for the "Factory" distribution, openSuSE again became very unstable, and strange things started happening like audio volume levels suddenly shooting up so high that I through it might blow out the built-in speakers. Fedora also does not include the Broadcom WiFi driver, but it does have the b43-fwcutter utility, so it didn't take much effort to install the b43 driver myself, and it then worked just fine. Likewise, Ubuntu does not include a Broadcom driver in the base distribution, but after the installation it offers a choice of downloading and installing either the b43 or STA driver. The b43 driver seems to cause the 2133 to hang, though, so I have only been able to get it to work properly with the STA driver. Hmmm. I guess that means that the only distribution which really installed completely "out of the box" and works properly on the 2133 was Mandriva!

- Dual Atom MiniServer: This is the one I assembled myself, with a Dual Atom 330 CPU and associated chip set, and no WiFi. All four of the distributions installed on this system with no problems, no drivers missing or needing to be added after installation, everything just went very smoothly. Too bad they all didn't go this easily.

So, of the four "major" distributions over the past month (Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010, openSuSE 11.2 and Fedora 12), the only one that didn't crash, hang or otherwise misbehave on at least one of my laptop/netbook/nettop systems was Fedora.

Of course, there is plenty more fun to come yet. New releases of Linux Mint and SimplyMEPIS are already on the horizon, and I don't think it will be long before there is another PCLinuxOS release, too. The fun never stops in the Linux world!

jw 20/11/2009

I got some good news in a comment over on Linux.com a few days ago. The problem I was looking at was setting the default boot selection on Ubuntu 9.10, or more generally with GRUB 2. The difficulty is that GRUB 2 regenerates its grub.cfg file, and during that generation it looks for additional Linux kernels in /boot and automatically includes any that it finds there. This means that when it is first installed, there are two "native" boot entries, one for a normal boot and one for a recovery boot. Additional boot options follow these two. So, for example on Ubuntu 9.10, if you want to boot Windows by default (ugh), the default would be option 4 (two for Linux and two for memtest86+, then Windows).

Unfortunately, when updates are installed and the kernel version is incremented, GRUB 2 finds another bootable kernel image, and adds it to the grub.cfg file, so now you have two for the new image, two for the old image, two for memtest86+, and uh-oh, your Windows boot has suddenly become option 6 rather than 4, and your default boot of option 4 gets you memtest86+. Probably not what you want.

What I just learned is that GRUB 2 will take not only numbers for the default boot, it will also take the "menu text" for the options. The only thing you have to be careful of is that it must be the complete text exactly as it appears in the menu. So if I want my S6510 to boot WinXP, I can set the boot default like this:

GRUB_DEFAULT="Microsoft Windows XP Professional (on /dev/sda1)"

This definition goes in the file /etc/default/grub, so that it will be preserved when GRUB regenerates its config file. Your exact text will vary, depending on what version of Windows you have, and where it is installed, of course. You can copy it out of grub.cfg the first time, to be sure you have it exactly right.

jw 19/11/2009

I've been trying out the new openSuSE 11.2 release for nearly a week now, loading it on everything I have. It's been a mixed bag of results, starting out very strong, and ending up with several significant disappointments. Here is a summary of the highs (and lows):

The cosmetics look great. I have to say, over the past couple of releases openSuSE has gone from what seemed like a fairly "stodgy" distribution, both in terms of cosmetics and content, to one which I think is right up with the absolute leaders in both of those.

One of the first things I noticed, on the first system I installed openSuSE on, was that they have fixed the problem with non-U.S. keyboard maps not working. Hooray! That one has been a minor pain in the neck since Milestone 5 or so, and when it was still there in the RC releases, I was afraid it wouldn't get fixed before the final release. Well done!

Installation from the LiveCD was reasonably easy. It seems to me that with previous openSuSE releases, if you installed from the LiveCD on a system which did not have an internet connection (such as a laptop or netbook which depends on WiFi that is not yet configured), it could stumble when trying to configure software update and repository information, and that could be a bit tedious to recover from once you booted the installed system. That is certainly not the case with this release, I installed all of my netbooks without internet connection, then configured the WiFi afterward, and they call came out just fine.

The openSuSE 11.2 release installed flawlessly on my Fujitsu S6510 (laptop), HP dv2-1010ez (subnotebook) and ASUS N10J (netbook). At that point I thought I was pretty much home free, because it had successfully covered a range of systems, CPUs, graphic controllers and network adapters. I was starting to think that, considering the problems with Ubuntu this time around, maybe I would consider openSuSE as my first-choice Linux for everyday use. Then things started to go south...

When I installed 11.2 on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, everything seemed to go pretty much as it had with openSuSE 11.1, which worked ok with a bit of tweaking on the 2133. The console was only 1024x768, rather than 1280x768, and the Broadcom WiFi adapter didn't work. I already knew how to solve both of those problems, from 11.1. So went to the openSuSE Software Build Service, and used 1-click install (really nice!) to download and install the latest SVN build of the openchrome graphic driver. When I rebooted, the console was indeed 1280x768, but several other things were seriously screwed up, most noticeably the sound having gone to some ridiculously high volume that I could not get down again. So I backed that out, and then I noticed that there has been a new release of openchrome, apparently newer than the SVN build i had been using, and it is also in the openSuSE Software Build Service. So I tried that, and got the same results. Sigh. Ok, back those out, stay with the standard driver at the lower resolution for now. Sigh.

Next up, get the WiFi working. This one I knew from 11.1 also, and if anything it is even a little easier. Just run install_bcm43xx_firmware - that's a script that comes on openSuSE which picks up the firmware cuts out the bits you need and puts them in the right place - and then reboot. Nice and easy. Except when I rebooted, openSuSE would freeze as soon as I touched the trackpad. Every time, frozen solid, the only way out was to hold the power switch for 5 seconds. Grrr. I confirmed that it was the WiFi adapter causing the problem by switching it off while openSuSE was booting, and confirming that it then didn't freeze. Once that was clear, I added the b43 driver to /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf, and the freezes stopped without me having to remember to switch off the WiFi.

At that point I was left with the 2133 having sub-standard graphics and no WiFi, and I decided that it wasn't worth fighting with any more. I'll leave it loaded, and pick up updates from time to time by plugging in wired ethernet, in hopes that some fixes will come along that take care of one or both of these problems. I'll also keep an eye on the openSuSE Software Build Service for a new build of the openchrome driver specifically for 11.2, in hopes that will fix the graphic problem. I would also like to try the Broadcom "wl" driver package from the Build Service, but I honestly don't know which one to try (default, desktop, kmp or whatever) so that is going to take some time to figure out. I know that I have had much better success with Ubuntu on the 2133 when I use the STA (wl) drivers rather than the b43, so I hope that will be true for openSuSE too.

Having effectively given up on openSuSE on the 2133 for now, I moved on to my trusty old Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S2110. It has an AMD Turion 64 CPU and ATI Radeon X200 graphic controller, which used to be a bit touchy but for the past few releases haven't been any great problem. Installation seemed uneventful. But when I tried to boot the installed system, it hung with a black screen. BLEAH! Several tries, always the same result. This is getting tiresome. I booted to safe mode, that worked just fine. I used startx to get the X server going, and that worked fine too. Strange. I fiddled with the rc5.d scripts, to try to isolate where it was hanging, but I started getting strange results, sometimes it seemed like one stage, sometimes another, and sometimes it even seemed to come all the way up without hanging. Very strange. I finally gave up on that in disgust as well. I don't have the time to fight with those kinds of things any more.

So, the bottom line is that on my three newest systems, openSuSE 11.2 installs easily, looks wonderful and works great. I suspect it will behave this way with many or most "newer" systems. But with my two older systems, one VIA CPU/graphic based (2133) and one AMD/ATI CPU/graphic based (S2110), it has all sorts of problems, so serious that even I gave up on it, at least for the time being.

Your mileage may vary. Mine did.

jw 16/11/2009

Sometime during the Ubuntu 9.04 release, Canonical added a 60-second delay when Reboot or Shutdown was selected. At that time it was at least possible to go to the "User Switcher Preferences" and disable the delay. Now, with the 9.10 release, that disable option seems to have disappeared. I've been watching for it through the entire Alpha/Beta/RC release cycle, convinced that it would reappear sooner or later. As far as I can tell, it didn't - either that, or they have put it somewhere that I can't find it.

After considerable searching, head-scratching and digging, I finally found that it is accessible via a Gnome configuration setting. That means there are two ways to change it, and eliminate the delay:

- Open a console (terminal) window, and enter this command:

gconftool-2 -s '/apps/indicator-session/suppress_logout_restart_shutdown' --type bool true

- Press Alt-F2, enter gconf-editor, navigate to apps/indicator-session and set the value of suppress_logout_restart_shutdown to true.

It's Friday afternoon, I'm not in a particularly good mood, I've been irritated about this since the first Karmic Alpha release, and it's time for a rant. Why was this changed? Why was the option to disable it hidden away where it is unlikely to ever be found? If this is the way that Ubuntu administration is going to be moving in the future, we are headed right back to the days where people said "Linux is so obscure and confusing that only geeks can use it". Massive amounts of time and effort have been put in over the past few years just to get away from having to use apt or yum commands for package management, and now we're back to this kind of stuff for such a simple option? Bah. Humbug. End of rant.

For those who, like me, really object to having to click-away this enforced wait every time, now at least you know where and how to turn it off. Have a nice day.

jw 13/11/2009

I know, I know... I'm late, Mandriva 2010 has been out for a week now, and openSuSE is due out already today. This is a crazy time of year, with all of these releases coming so close together, but I do the best that I can to keep up, even if it is a bit slowly.

I think I'll put the wagon before the horse this time. Mandriva Linux is one of the long-established distributions, and it just keeps getting better. There are plenty of reasons to choose it on its own merits, as it is a good, solid, stable distribution, it has wide support in the Linux community, and they do a good job of keeping up with the latest packages and device drivers. But in addition to all of that, if you have had trouble with the new Ubuntu 9.10 distribution, or you are a bit reluctant about it because of the numerous reports of problems circulating... or even if you are just becoming uneasy about the direction that Canonical is moving, then this could be a very good time to take a look at Mandriva Linux.

I always use the Mandriva One distribution, because I want the added proprietary drivers and packages it includes. If you want to stick with a strictly FOSS distribution, you can choose Mandriva Free. If you want the "Full Monty", with support and printed documentation, go for the Powerpack distribution. There is generally also a "Mandriva-On-A-Stick" USB drive option, but it doesn't seem to be ready for the 2010 distribution quite yet, it should be out soon.

I ran into a bit of a problem with installation on a couple of my notebook/netbook systems. Mandriva seems to still be trying to generate an X.org config file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) on the fly during installation, and with the newest X server they are somehow getting it wrong on a few systems, and when you boot the LiveCD the console display is black. All I did was press the power button, and let the system shut down normally, then reboot and choose "Safe Mode" or whatever Mandriva calls it, to get a text console. Then delete the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and run startx. If you get a normal desktop display, you can continue with the installation; if the console is black again, I don't know what else to suggest, as that has not happened to me.

Installation is fast and easy, with very few questions. Mandriva offers both KDE and Gnome LiveCDs; I usually use their KDE version. The installer window was a bit small for my system, so things were cramped and difficult to read in the disk partitioning step (especially on the netbooks), but it was no problem to either resize or just maximize the window, and then all was well. Device driver support is excellent, there was not a single device on any of my systems which wasn't supported in the LiveCD installation, including the various ATI graphic controllers and Atheros WiFi controllers.

Once the installation has completed and you have rebooted, you might have to deal with the X.org config problem one more time. On one of my laptops the console resolution was incorrect, 1024x768 rather than 1280x800. Again, the solution was to get rid of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, and reboot so that the X display server could figure out the "right" thing to do. In fact, I ended up doing this on all of my systems, even the ones on which the console appeared to be correct, because I would prefer to run without the config file if possible. If you want to be on the safe side, you can simply rename the config file to xorg.conf.Mandriva or some such.

Besides that little hiccup (and heaven knows Mandriva is not the only one struggling with X.org configuration right now), everything else in Mandriva 2010 seems to look wonderful and work well. The graphics are once again a lovely improvement... funny thing about that, isn't it? Almost every time a new distribution comes out, there is a lot of ooohhh and aaahhhh about how nice the graphics are, and yet six months later when the next release comes out, they are perceived to be "even better". I'm as guilty as the next person of this, but I guess it is just that a fresh new look is always a welcome change.

Mandriva 2010 includes the usual array of utilities, applications and packages. Firefox 3.5.5, OpenOffice 3.1.1, GIMP for grpahics, Amarok for audio and Dragon Player for video, and of course lots of KDE applications and applets. If a particular package that you want, need or prefer isn't installed, you can generally find it through "Install & Remove Software", as I did for things like Thunderbird.

The other interesting thing about Mandriva 2010 is the alternative desktops that are available - in particular, Xfce and Moblin. Since I was just writing about Moblin (whinging about it, to be honest), I decided to give the Mandriva implementation of it a try, in hopes that it would work better than the "native" Moblin distribution.

Installation was easy, I just selected task-moblin in the Control Center / Install & Remove Software utility. That downloaded and installed something like a hundred packages, which took another 10 minutes or so. Once that was complete, I just logged out, and then on the Login screen I clicked the "pencil and paper" icon, chose Moblin from the drop-down list, and logged in.

I was surprised at the Moblin desktop that came up. Although it says Moblin 2.1, the background and icons were clearly still those from the 2.0 release. Also, there is a gap in the icon bar where the Bluetooth icon appears in the native Moblin 2.1 desktop. I did some poking around, and got more confused rather than less. This really does look like a strange mix of Moblin 2.0 and 2.1, but at least it seems to have most of the Mandriva KDE menus integrated into the applications section - but not all of it. It seemed to function better, or at least more reliably, than the Moblin 2.1 distribution I tried the past couple of days, at least nothing hung or crashed on me as I was testing it. After a good bit of investigation and testing I decided that this might really be a better and more reliable implementation than Moblin's own distribution, so if and when Mandriva finishes updating everything to the Moblin 2.1 standard, it could be a good alternative if this style of "social networking" desktop is what you need.

Then came the unpleasant part. Ok, I'm done looking at Moblin, I'm ready to go back to the normal Mandriva KDE desktop. Just logout and select a KDE session, right? Well, of course, this is Moblin, so there is no "Leave/Logout/Reboot/Shutdown" button. Hmmm. Well, at least I remember that Moblin 2.1 reacts to Ctl-Alt-Del by rebooting, so I can do that. Not. No reaction. Sigh. All right, start a console terminal window, and kill the X server, that will log me out... except I can't find one in the application menus! This is getting irritating.

Ok, so I have to hit the power button, let it shut down and power off, and then start over. That works, except.... GRRRRR! Mandriva has this nasty habit of setting itself for automatic login without me telling it to, so when I rebooted it came right back up into Moblin! Now I'm mad. I could probably do a safe mode boot, or boot one of the other Linux partitions, and fix it from there, but I don't want to do that. There has to be a way to get out of this mess.

After a good bit more digging around, I finally remembered (stumbled across, actually), Applications / System Tools / Configure Your Computer / System / Open a console as administrator. Whew. From there I could kill the X server, which logged me out, and then select the KDE desktop again on login.

I will say this again about Moblin. They might think it is "cool", or "chic", or "new wave" to make a system without a Logout/Shutdown selection, but it is a mistake. You think you are being very "modern", but what you are doing is making things less obvious, and therefore more difficult, for a lot of people. It wouldn't hurt anything, other than perhaps a few over-inflated egos, to add one more bizarre hieroglyphic to the menu bar, and put "Lock Screen / Logout / Suspend / Reboot / Shutdown" on there!!! End of Rant.

To summarize, Mandriva 2010 is, as expected, a worthy successor in their long line of distributions. It installs easily, it supports all of the hardware that I tried it on with ease, and it works well. Their Moblin desktop seems to work better than Moblin's own distribution, but that is rather thin praise. If you have been using Mandriva Linux previously, you are likely to be pleased with this one.

jw 12/11/2009