Tabula Rasa

A few months ago I installed Debian GNU/Linux on an old Sony Vaio Laptop of a friend of mine. The laptop is really nice with slim case and a 15″ screen. She was really happy she could write her thesis on this nice machine again because Windows XP could not function properly on this machine. Installation was a breeze and  the non technical friend of mine was working on it happily for 4 months now.

Three weeks ago she called me and asked how she can watch DVD’s with. I figured out I forgot to install libdvdcss2 on her Debian. So I dropped by her place to fix it. I opened Synaptics and searched for it. But somehow it got stuck. So I had a terminal open and I typed

ps aux | grep synaptic.

At this point she mad a remark on “oh, what is this magic and all those words…”

I murmured something about this is the linux terminal while reading the pid of synaptic, and then I typed:

kill -9 5322

At this moment she stopped breathing and then yelled “Oh, what’s going on… don’t kill my computer…”.

Trying to explain what is the meaning of the command kill where non-useful. She was really astound by this.

So my conclusion is for next type – to save panic from your non technical friends, avoid using the command kill in front of them. It sound scary I guess. If you really have to kill a process, to it from gnome-system-monitor or ask them to bring you a glass of water before you type kill on their computer !

Been traveling in the USA for a couple of weeks now. I was prepared for bitter timetime with my Debian and wireless roaming. So I’ve mastered the use of commands ifconfig and iwlist and such. The reason is that I’ve had my share already with network-manager.

I always found gnome-network-manager resource hog, and non reliable. And when I tried it two weeks ago after one and a half years I discovered it’s developed so much I can’t recognize it anymore. It has too many options, and it’s more suitable to a network engineer than a simple user. What happened to the GNOME simplicity I don’t know, some one in Red Hat really screwed up with the development of it.

Anyways, I decided to give WICD a shot. Hearing only warm words of it I downloaded the version from Debian repos, and after a minute I was already connected and running wireless.

What makes WICD awesome ?

It’s reliable, It’s easy to use because the user interface is clear and simple. And most importantly it stays out of my way, unlike gnome-network-manager.

The latter needed to many mouse clicks and dialogs to configure, whereas wicd just needs one click.

Here’s a screenshot of the simple wicd notification:

I really like the simplicity. Just for the nostalgia I keep also on the panel the gnome-netstatus-applet…

P.S I forgot to mention, I really think this should be the default network application in Debian/Ubuntu and other gnome based distros.

As a frequent reader of Linux related news, I’ve come to the conclusion the sometimes reading posts about Linux is a complete waste of time. With time I’ve noticed that there are some repeating patterns to what I skip, so I’ve compiled this list to those who want to save some time, and a reminder to myself.

1. “The year of the Linux desktop” post type – <”YEAR”> won’t be the Linux Desktop
Two many words are typed on this subject. Really, and most of them are just concluding with the fact (usually with a sad tone) that this year will not be the year of the Linux desktop. Well, who cares ? I was introduced to Linux in 2004 – that was my Linux year. And that’s what’s important. The fact is Linux is quietly and steadily growing. If someone expect a sudden massive adoption of Linux… well keep waiting it’s not gonna happen. Mountains are built very slowly, so does Linux adoption. So don’t waste your time reading that type of posts.

2. “Are there too many Linux distros\Linux Desktop is too fragmented…”
Earlier I used the mountain building example. Here’s another example from earth’s history: Evolution. Without natural mutation forking and change, we’d all still be bacteria. So in short – diversity is good ! Imagine we just had red hat – where would be the Linux community then ? We’d still be installing from floppies without KNOPPIX and UBUNTU. BSD’s are good too, just in case.

3. Is “<insert distro here>” dead ?

Pessimists are all the place man. So Gentoo has some issues with it’s management (this is why I don’t use it), but can you expect a project with ~1000 dev’s and hundreds of users to just die ?
Debian too has lot’s of dev’s and it’s full of bureaucracy, and flame wars but it’s kicking. My point is any distro which is not managed by one man, or an elitist group (for example ARCH Linux. ), and has a foundation is not supposed to die. Organizations have their own DNA and they tend to survive and adopt them selves to new situations. This is true for distro’s like SuSE, Red Hat Ubuntu and Mandriva (the biggest commercial Linux distro’s I think of). My point: No is not dead and won’t die. It might just evolve into something else (i.e gentoo-sabayon path).

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Last week I upgraded one of my workstations at work to version 11.1 from 11.0 only to discover this week that automount of usb disks has ceased to work.
Morons in Novell managed to break this somehow. I remeber how a similar bug which was not adressed by canonical drove me away from Ubuntu to Debian.
I always warn people against this terrible bloated distro called OpenSUSE. Here is another evidence…
This is probably a solvable bug, but the fact that there has not been a centralized patch indicated where this company put it’s users.
To be honest I keep working with OpenSUSE only in the frame of ‘get to know the enemy’.

Be warned, if you install opensuse you are expected to have similar problems. Instead you should probably opt for Debian.