Slackware v Ubuntu: Not What You Might Think - Part 3

When it comes to system configuration, Ubuntu and Slackware could hardly be more different. Ubuntu uses GUIs for everything and Slackware doesn't use any. Interestingly, both distributions are aiming for an easy and straightforward configuration. Again, it's only different methods to, ultimitly, the same end. I'll tackle the pros and cons of Ubuntu first.

Configuring in Ubuntu is very guided process. Open this window, check this box, click this button and you're done. This has some pretty clear advantages. My wife, for instance, has no idea how to use the command line in Linux but still wants to be able to connect to the internet. In Ubuntu this isn't a problem for her. In Slackware she would, most likely, never figure it out, give up and end up calling me at work to help walk her through fixing it.

There are some real disadvantages to this method though. The biggest one is something that *nix users have known for years. You will never (well I shouldn't say never, but almost never) find a GUI that provides all the functionality of the command line. It just doesn't happen. What if I don't want certain web related services to have access to that NIC? What if I need to do ip forwarding or configure detailed firewall rules? Ubuntu does not have readily availible GUI answers to these problems.

On a related note, while many times it is easy as knowing which config files to edit in Ubuntu to achieve these goals, many users who have come to rely on an interface will either have no idea what to do with these files or even know that they exist.

This is where Slackware pulls ahead. In Slackware you won't find pretty interfaces waiting to walk you through the process of setting up different aspects of your machine. Some are included with KDE and some of those are useful. Not all of them work with Slackware, however. The KDE wifi manager is a great example. It is, at least at this time and to my knowledge, incompatible with Slackware. Someone wanting to configure their internet with this tool on Slackware is going to be disappointed.

But all is not lost. Editing configuration files in Slackware is incredibly easy. Well commented files and a little bit of Linux knowledge make changes rather straight forward. One of the huge benefits here is that you will know how to do things this way. Different distributions use different programs and different GUI based methods for system configuration. Knowing how to handle edits at the command line will make moving between these differences a non issue.

This was, in the end, one of the reasons that moved me to Slackware. I don't want to mess around with a dialog box setting configuration options only to discover later that several features are not represented by that window. It takes less time in the long run, for me anyways, to edit a group of files then to find and use programs to edit each one for me.

Again here which is better is simply a matter of which you prefer. They are both simple and easy solutions. I will revisit this topic at some point in the near future but for now I leave you with this;

I would recommend either of these distributions to anyone looking to start using Linux. It all depends on what they really want out of it. If they want to use Linux as a safe and effective operating system with little in the way of new learning then Ubuntu is surely a good way to go. If they want to _know_ Linux, well for that it's tough to beat Slackware.

Whatever Happened to the Ibex Review?

I realize I left anyone anticipating my review of Ibex hanging. There will not be a review until the production version is out. I simply don't have the time to constantly troubleshoot a system just to do a review right now. Frankly there were still a ton of rather critical bugs as of alpha 6 that made broad use of the system troublesome. I was doing my part and submitting bug reports but again, I just don't have the time right now.

For anyone having a problem with jockey-gtk,

I still constantly see new people reporting this bug on the launchpad for Ibex. The bug has been fixed and a patch is availible. It seems to be a rather common (and rather annoying) bug. So if you're experiencing a dbus error with jockey-gtk go to the Ibex launchpad and grab the patch.

Slackware v Ubuntu: Not What You Might Think - Part 2

So where does Slackware fall in those regards we talked about with Ubuntu last? That is, on package installation and repositories.

Well that package installation process for Slackware is just as simple as it is for Ubuntu. It's just a different kind of simple. The command line tool pkgtool is run and packages installed locally. There is no default ability to install over the network and there is no dependency resolution. A few simple add on tools like slackpkg (available in the extras parts of the Slackware repository) and sbopkg (availible online) allow for a bit more elbow room but still keep things rather simple.

I am aware, by the way, of a package called slapt-get that resolves dependencies within Slackware but I have yet to use it and probably won't. Not on my production machine anyways.

The lack of dependency resolution is a real gift in my book. I don't much like systems that try and automatically add more software for me, even if I do get to confirm it. If I need or want something else besides the package I'm installing I'll fetch it myself. This isn't even too troublesome for a beginner to Linux as the readme files of almost all packages list dependencies so you know what else you need to get to make it run. I have, so far, only run into one package that did not correctly list these in the readme file. Well it may have, it's a tough case to judge. It required an additional package for the build though not to run. While in some cases this can lead to frustration in not being able to get a package to work, it also relieves the frustration of having your package manager or system broken when it automatically installs something that doesn't play well on your machine.

On the repository side of Slackware you have relatively few choices compared to other major distributions. This can cause some problems but isn't too cumbersome. The plus side here is that you probably don't need access to the 25,000+ packages of Debian to get the software you want or need thereby making searches much faster. The down side is that most things that can't be found in the official repository or on the slackbuild repository (Managed by some Slackware developers but not official. Use sbopkg to automatically fetch and install packages from this source) will need to be compiled from source.

I, for one, don't usually mind compiling from source. It allows greater control over the outcome and it's really not as hard as many people make it out to be. Most programs can be compiled by following three steps as root. Jump into the directory containing the top level of the source code and use these three commands.

1) $ ./configure (options) [Discover options with ./configure --help]

2) $ make

3) $ make install

For 90% (if not higher) of the programs I have compiled that's all it takes. The second most common method I have seen will use the command 'ant' followed by something like './install.sh' but it's still fairly straight forward.

The big negative here is that it can be very time consuming. My only real grudge against installing things from source is how long it takes. When I bring a new system up in Ubuntu I can have everything I need or want installed on it in roughly 11 hours (including downloads). I am still working on that goal for my Slackware system after three days. Granted if I skipped work it may well be done right now but it's a process that has to be monitored constantly which is both good and bad for what is, I hope, obvious reasons.

Part 3 will go into configuration on both distributions.

Slackware v Ubuntu: Not What You Might Think - Part 1

Slackware and Ubuntu share a common line of thinking. They both aim to be simple. However, they have different approaches to simplicity and different target audiences.

Ubuntu wants to be simple for end users switching from Windows. Everything has a dialog box. Installation of additional packages is straightforward and simple. You can throw the disk in the drive, boot and go.

Slackware wants to be simple for Linux users. BSD style init scripts that are easy to edit. A package management system that won't install anything you don't expressly tell it to. A setup environment that allows someone in the know to install exactly what they want and nothing else.

Two days ago I installed Slackware 12.1 for production use on one of my computers. This marked the first time since I started using Linux (roughly four years ago) that I would be using something other then Debian or a Debian based system on a production machine. The reasons for the change were immense. What I'm going to go into here is some of the highlights and drawbacks of two distributions that strive to be simple and why I would ultimately recommend them both to a new Linux user.

Ubuntu has a lot going for it with a new convert to the Gnu way of computing. For someone who isn't much of a computer person it is, perhaps, the best option as far as Linux goes. It remains installed on one of my computers to this day so that my wife can use it without needing to call her tech support (myself) while I'm at work. I'll look briefly at each feature that is easy to use and why it can be a problem.

Installing extra packages in Ubuntu is pretty damn easy. Using software like Synaptic extra programs can be added with as little as three or four mouse clicks. There is no need to worry about dependencies and conflicts as these are automaticly resolved for you. Repositories give you access to over 25,000 packages meaning you can probably find what you're looking for somewhere in the heap.

Auto dependencies and conflict resolution can be devastating. The system is not always right, for one. Part of what I do is break machines. It's how I constantly develop my ability to fix them. My record for breaking a fresh install of Ubuntu is only 30 minutes. It was the package manager that broke it. The system required a rescue boot to recover. The problem? The auto conflict resolution decided that the gnu c library should be removed. The system was near useless after. Now someone who knows Linux well enough to know that it's not a good idea to remove that could have prevented this. However, someone who is not well versed in what packages are necessary would have surely allowed their removal and therefore lost the system.

As a side note, the fastest I ever killed an installation was actually during an installation and not on purpose. Apparently earlier version of OpenSuse did not mix well with tablet laptops.

There is also a serious drawback to having access to 25,000+ packages. It can make finding the right thing a real pain. The searches do not always turn up what you're looking for and browsing through package by package can take hours.

Continue on to Part 2 to keep reading.

Ubuntu 8.10 Inreped Ibex: Part 1

Alright, I know it's technically Saturday and I said I would have this up on Friday but I ran into some technical difficulties. The update is installing on my test computer as we speak. The problem is that I started the upgrade _Thursday_ night. So far several packages have failed to upgrade properly as well, including update manager. However this is an _alpha_ release (alpha 5) so I expect these problems and won't hold it against them. They will be duly reported.

Well point is that I have nothing really to say tonight. I wish I did. But I don't. Only thing I can really throw in there is that it would be nice if the bandwidth on the Ibex repositories were higher. Upgrading my laptop to 8.04 from 7.10 took roughly four hours total. The massive download _alone_ for Ibex took over 14 hours. Not ok in my book.

More to come as I finally get to rev up the system and take a look around.

Until then.

First Look at Ubuntu 8.10: Intrepid Ibex

Well I had planned on this being the first article I wrote about the forthcoming Ubuntu release but I'm afraid that at this time I can not do that. The upgrade will not properly work on the test desktop I selected. The problem, according to the feedback from update manager, is an inability to correctly modify the repositories prior to the actual upgrade taking place.

When I have time I will look further into the issue and see if there is already a workaround known and if not what I can do to create one.

Until then I have selected another test desktop which will take a full install of Ibex from CD. However, I will not consider these results to be reliable in terms of upgrading as we're talking about different processes being used at this point.

To highlight some on the features of the new version I will be using ext4 with LVM and both Gnome 2.2.3 and KDE 4.1. I've never been a fan of KDE but I suppose it deserves a place in the reviews as many people do like it and use it with Ubuntu on a regular basis.

Bugs found during this test will be listed here and be submitted to the development team.

The desktop that will be used has a Pentium 4 at 2.6Ghz and 2GB DDR400 RAM along with a 30GB and a 60GB IDE Hard Drive. Testing will begin this Friday the 12th and will continue for five days with posts being made at least once a day on the status and results.

Sorry for the delay.

Ah, before I forget the version will be Alpha 5.

Until then.

Five Window Managers You Should Try

1.) FVWM - http://www.fvwm.org
A lightweight highly customizable window manager for the minimalist in all of us. It can be tweaked and turned into just about anything you want it to be. Although I found one of it's forks, FVWM-Crystal, to be more to my liking, there's no denying that this is the base that makes Crystal such a joy to use.

2.) IceWM - http://www.icewm.org
My personal favorite and the window manager that runs my infamous development oriented laptop from the recent How-tos. Easy to configure and easy to use. This manager is compliant enough with gnome (and even have an official gnome support version) that I was able to run a bunch of gnome apps and even the gnome menu bar within it without a hitch. Lightest memory footprint I've recorded occupying only 3.9% of my laptops 512MB RAM at the most. Anyone looking for sheer performance and a remarkably easy setup would do well to look at this. Check out the IceWM Configuration How-to on this site for tips if you need help.

3.) Enlightenment - http://www.enlightenment.org
I didn't like it but what do I know. One of the more popular lightweight environments availible. While I had a multitude of problems with it sheer number of users alone justifies at least taking a look. It's a real hit and miss on this one. You either love it or hate it. I will say that it can be made to look exceptionally nice when the effort is put in.

4.) Fluxbox - http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net
The ultimate in simplicity. Designed to be as usable as possible, any sort of attractiveness seems to be an after thought. Which as far as I'm concerned is a good thing. When testing this window manager I was pleased with the results but I suffered from extreme configuration issues. My laptop wouldn't do much with it even after fetching the latest version off the website. I'm still not entirely sure what the problem was. So I had to run it on one of my testing desktops. As a result the test results are somewhat tough to analyze as that desktop has far more processing power then my laptop does. Suffice to say it was pleasant enough and I'm confident that when and if I work those issues out that it will run well on the laptop too.

5.) Wm2 - http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/
If all you really want is frames around your X programs, that's about all you're gonna find here. That is it's one and only selling point. There's a narrow niche for this window manager but a real one. If you hate extras of any kind this is the one for you.

There you have it. If you think I left one or two off let me know!

Until then.

First Impressions: PC-BSD

To make sure that I was getting a solid look at the whole Unix like community and not just Linux I decided to install PC-BSD on my test machine and give it a spin. I chose PC-BSD because it seems like the best distribution to use as an introduction to BSD. The website touts simplicity for the end user and an easy to use graphical install.

Windows users will feel right at home using PC-BSD. After all it took far more work then it should have and a risky maneuver to get it to dual boot with Linux. It was clunky and slow within the desktop. And it assumed that the end user on the machine was a complete idiot to the point that on typing a sudo command A message came up before the password prompt that basically suggested that I should be briefed by my sysadmin before sudoing. Not to mention the fact that even though only one user was set up aside from root it was not an admin account by default.

The installation was simple enough. I have to give it credit for being the fastest and most painless install I've seen that wasn't a mini-distro. I didn't test the partitioning system for fear of destruction so I had made a partition earlier in gparted. Per the official install guide I did not install the boot loader as the guide suggested that doing so would over write my MBR and therefore grub. Installation all said and done I jumped into the menu.lst of grub and added the appropriate entry. A quick restart and I was to be on my way.

Except not. It wouldn't boot. At all. After hours of manipulating the grub entry and scouring the web looking for help I decided it was time to attempt another installation. I wiped the partition and tried it again. This time at the prompt I installed the boot loader. I consider this to be a somewhat risky maneuver as it could have left me without grub on my MBR, leading to much pain and suffering later trying to get it back. I read several forum posts where this had happened just that way to users trying to dual boot Linux and PC-BSD.

Well as luck would have it it worked. I was finally able to boot into my new OS. Upon boot I was eventually greeted with the familiar desktop of KDE 3.5.9. I chose a slightly older version of PC-BSD as the new one, version 7, comes with KDE 4.1. I don't know what it is about the new 4.x series of KDE but I have managed to crash it dozens of times doing such benign things as opening the file manager so I have utterly rejected using it.

The first problem I noted with this OS was that it used KDE. This in itself is not a problem except that KDE is not my preferred desktop. I'll generally use XFCE and in some cases Gnome. Lo and behold according to the official PC-BSD documentation a substantial amount of Gnome based software is unsupported in PC-BSD and may not run at all.

I consider this to be a serious drawback because it has taken away an element of freedom in what I want to run on my system.

Another obvious play to Window's users is the installation method preferred by PC-BSD. It's called PBI. You download a PBI file and then run it as an executable. It then automatically installs the software for you. If your coming to PC-BSD from Windows this should be great. I guess. As a Linux user I don't really understand the point in making it take longer to install a program I want to use. If I want to install emacs for instance, I'll have to find it online in the PC-BSD directory, wait for it to download, and then run the file. In Linux I would just pop open a virtual terminal and run sudo apt-get install emacs and then go back to whatever I was doing while I waited for it to finish. There is nothing streamlined about having to monitor the download progress of an app and then find and execute it's file to get it going.

Of course the OS does allow for the more traditional means of installation. You can use packages and ports to install instead. Installing from packages seemed like a bit much as well under these circumstances as there is no included package manager. While many advanced users will feel perfectly at home without one it's something that I generally like to have and I know many others do too. For instance when I first set up a new computer I'll open up synaptic select everything I know I'm going to need or want and then let it go for a few hours. Initial installs on some of the computers I've worked on have required over 1,200 packages. I wouldn't want to do that without the help of a package manager and I certainly wouldn't want to do that with PBIs.

The ports system was far more friendly then either of the other two. You download the ports directory and are then given a nice organized place to browse and install applications using the make install clean command from the terminal. The only real problem I found here was that it was rather slow and again lacked an easy way to organize the ports that you wanted to install or that had already been installed.

A lot of the complaints regarding installation methods may seem absurd to the advanced user but for someone who wants more power but still lacks some of the more technical skills these faults are devastating. There is no clear middle ground in this OS between the novice and the expert.

Having installed a few packages to get things rolling I took it for a spin. I installed the first apps I install on any OS I'm going to tinker with. Emacs and Nethack. The former being my preferred editor for extensive configuration work and the latter being the way I take breaks when I get to the point of preparing to use my machine as a projectile for my home made catapult.

I started tinkering around. Nethack came around quickly. Be it due to how utterly foreign parts of the system seemed compared to the Linux I've come to know and love or because of how utterly inept of a system PC-BSD seems to be, I never finished configuring the system. It was driving me insane.

Final call?

The guys over at the PC-BSD development team don't seem to know who they're targeting with this distro. The complications that came from attempting a dual-boot and the lack of effective documentation would make any Window's user think two or three times before risking there system to giving it a try. More advanced users who know that they can make it work will be left wondering why they bothered, My opinion? If you want BSD go for FreeBSD and skip the bull shit. You'll thank yourself.