Monday, February 28, 2011

Vala, Vala everywhere!

...okay, okay, maybe not everywhere. But since I posted on Vala a while back, I've noticed a couple of teams in particular seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly. What's really cool is that these teams have been writing some really impressive software for GNU/Linux in Vala. Nearly all of these software projects were started within the last year or two, and these aren't your grandma's Linux apps. These are sleek, fast, and have a strong focus on usability and a nice, clean interface. They're really worth checking out.

Here are the teams and their software:
  • Yorba
    • Shotwell (photo organizer)
      This one's extra impressive because in less than two years it's gone from brand new project to the default photo manager for top GNU/Linux distributions Ubuntu and Fedora
    • Lombard (video editor)
    • Fillmore (music recorder)

  • Elementary
    These guys started out creating slick themes for Ubuntu, and before long started making their own apps. They've started up so many software projects, particularly in the last year, I don't know how they could possibly have time to work on them all:
Elementary has another app named Dexter, an address book, and although it's currently written in Python, I wouldn't be surprised to see it go the way of some of their other apps like Purple.

There's also Midori, a lightweight browser, which I don't think the Elementary team started, but I know they contribute to it, and somehow or another Vala is involved, possibly due to their influence.

As if that wasn't enough, next month the Elementary team is releasing their own GNU/Linux distro, based on Ubuntu, but with a cleaner interface and packaged with many of their apps. Here's an early screenshot:

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Connecting to a Windows machine via RDP from GNU/Linux

For a while I used a program called Terminal Server Client (tsclient), a frontend for rdesktop, to connect to Windows machines from GNU/Linux using native Windows RDP. While it worked, it wasn't the greatest. For one, it seemed that in order to save my connection settings, I had to save a separate .rdp file for every server. And then if I wanted to connect to another server with its saved settings, I'd have to open the .rdp file for that machine. pretty annoying. In addition, when I would log out of the remote server, tsclient would present a popup saying that the connection was terminated, and after 30 seconds try to reconnect. Neither issue was a big deal, but it was kind of irritating. I confess that I never even looked for a solution to either one, so they both may have been easily solvable.

But now it doesn't matter, because I just stumbled upon a new RDP client called Remmina, thanks to this post. Remmina is quite nice, and solves both of the main issues I had with tsclient. Perhaps it will present some issues of its own, but so far, it's won me over.

I'm sure it's available in the repositories for most distributions. At the moment I'm using Ubuntu, and so to install it, I ran this in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install remmina

Here's a screenshot:

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Why I'm probably switching from Ubuntu, pt 3 (future)

In my last post, I discussed why the direction Ubuntu's taken recently has left me less than satisfied.

The future?

In short, I'm not really sure.

I think I've been using a Debian-based distro for so long that it'll probably be something along those lines. I did use Fedora for a while (6 months-ish) when I came to my present job. Honestly one of the most frustrating things was there seemed to be a major fracture in it's external repositories. Maybe I was just trying to install some weird stuff, but it seemed to me like a lot of what I wanted was in one repository, but some was in another, and the dependency conflicts eventually became too much. At any rate, at the time I was longing to get back to Ubuntu.

As far as Debian-based goes, the three that pop into my mind are:

  • Debian
    Switch from Ubuntu to Debian? Not unheard of, actually:

    Considering my major complaints with Ubuntu right now are stability and the new direction it's taking in terms of features, Debian would be a logical choice. At least from an outside perspective, it seems more balanced than the one-person (Mark Shuttleworth) distro that Ubuntu seems at times.

  • Mint
    I'm still not really sure why Mint exists, but to be honest I just haven't looked into it. The only advantage that I know of is that it's green instead of the ugly brown/purple that Ubuntu has used. A big disadvantage would be that I believe it's based on Ubuntu, so it may inherit many of the issues I have with Ubuntu right now. But I can't knock it til I try it.

  • Elementary
    Again, this one is Ubuntu-based, and so could inherit many of the issues I have with Ubuntu. But this one looks really amazing. I especially love the focus on simplicity. Sometimes when you have software written by geeks (and often for geeks) like GNU/Linux, simplicity gets lost in the quest for gobs of features. Quite often this ends up making me less productive, as I sift through buttons that I'll never use to find the one I want. But less really is more. And Elementary looks very promising.



Who knows what will happen. There's a strong chance I'll be too lazy to switch from Ubuntu, or that I'll try other options and come back. But Ubuntu definitely isn't on the pedestal it once stood. And maybe it's not the end of the world after all.

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Why I'm probably switching from Ubuntu, pt 2 (present)

As I was saying in my previous post, some things began happening with Ubuntu that I haven't particularly been too fond of, especially recently.

To sum it up, I think the focus of Ubuntu has moved away from a distribution which is easy to use while still pretty stable, to one that is more concerned with features. It seems to me that the developers, and probably the leadership, are more concerned with adding new bells and whistles than they are with spending time making sure what they have works. And that's pretty frustrating when you use Ubuntu on a daily basis at work and home.

To be sure, there are bugs that arise every time a new version of pretty much anything comes out. Even companies with gobs of money, like Microsoft (especially Microsoft), can't catch everything. But it seems like the past couple upgrades of Ubuntu have brought quite a few relatively minor bugs, that are collectively driving me crazy.

I'm currently using Ubuntu 10.04 at work now. It's called a "Long Term Support" release, which means it will be supported for two years. To me, that means it should probably be pretty stable. And it is relatively stable, but it's also got quite a few annoying bugs that I encounter on a daily basis:


Okay, so those are a few of the annoying bugs I've dealt with. Now, for some of the annoying "features":

  • Window buttons (close, maximize, etc.) were consolidated and moved to the left.
    Sounds silly to complain about, I know, but I can't help but feeling like Mark Shuttleworth simply made this decision on his own, especially when I've only heard complaints about it. It doesn't seem to me like this was a community decision, but maybe that's just one of the things you have to deal with when one person has so much say over something. By the way, if you don't like this, you might want to go here and vote: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/23899/. Not sure it will accomplish anything, but it doesn't hurt.

  • Empathy was chosen to replace Pidgin.
    Okay, I ,know telepathy is a better basis for a chat client than libpurple, but that doesn't mean Empathy is better than Pidgin. It's extremely basic and has no support for text formatting or buddy pounces (the developers refuse to implement the latter: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=576120) As far as I understand, they don't even have a plugins API: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547208. How is that better, again? And which Ubuntu users were involved in that decision?

  • Ubuntu One
    I installed the Ubuntu One Firefox plugin. Firefox restarted, never came up. I tried again, nothing I know it's new technology, but did anyone even test this thing? I installed the Tomboy notes plugin, and now they go grey every few minutes (not allowing me to type or even select text), even though I have them set to sync once a day.

  • More bad decisions, like libstdc++.so.5 being intentionally excluded from the distro and repositories.



How is it that Ubuntu 10.04 came out nine months ago, and yet these bugs still exist, especially when it's an LTS release?

I guess the bottom line for me is that while all of these issues are relatively minor, they all add up. What they're adding up to is a distribution that's off-focus, and what I'm left with every six months (each time a new version of Ubuntu is released) is a distribution with more new bugs that could have been fixed if a minority at the top didn't have developers spending their time instead on more new features that I didn't ask for.

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps. But when I'm at work, I need to be getting work done, not dealing with a thousand paper cuts that these new bugs and "features" have become.

Up next, the future. Well, some possibilities at least.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Why I'm probably switching from Ubuntu, pt 1 (past)

I feel like I've recently begun a journey, and although I'm not sure where the destination will be yet, I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve Ubuntu. Before I go into why I'm considering switching from Ubuntu, I suppose I should start with how I started using it.

When I started using GNU/Linux (henceforth abbreviated to Linux, cause, well, I'm lazy) in the late 90's, there weren't many options. I tried Red Hat, but even the most basic tasks (like flash or mp3 support) seemed to require a gajillion commands that I frankly wasn't familiar with nor did I have the patience for. I eventually happened upon a copy of Mandrake in a store, and although I didn't use it very much, it became my distro of choice for quite a while. I remember I liked it because it made the simple things relatively simple.

At some point, however, I realized that it wasn't really all that stable. The system would give me problems on a regular basis, and I began looking around at other distributions. Red Hat, while stable, still didn't make life any easier. I tried Debian but couldn't even get past the installation. For a while I dabbled with Slackware, but that was just too much work.

Around this time, Ubuntu came out. Mind you, it seems like a new distribution of Linux pops up nearly every week, and it's been that way for a while, so I didn't pay too much mind to it at first. But then I began hearing things. Good things. Often. Finally, a close friend convinced me to try it out.

It was a bit hard at first to get used to a .deb-based distro (as opposed to .rpm-based). But I soon forgot about that, because what I found was a distribution that was easy to use, with some of the latest software (like Mandrake), pretty stable, and with an ever-growing support community. I've been using it ever since.

I'm using it right now, in fact.

Maybe I'm just slow, but it seems like recently that my path, which has been following the path of Ubuntu for years now, has started to go places that I really don't want do go, however.

And on that note, I'll leave you to ponder where those places might be, until another time.

Monday, November 22, 2010

DBAN *ERROR /dev/sda (process crash)

So I was using DBAN 2.2.6 beta to wipe the drives on a Dell PowerEdge 860. After typing "autonuke," DBAN would load, but instead of starting the wipe I would get these errors:

DBAN finished with non-fatal errors.
*ERROR /dev/sdb (process crash)
*ERROR /dev/sda (process crash)
Press and hold power button to shut down

When I loaded DBAN manually (by pressing enter at the boot prompt instead of typing "autonuke"), I would see an "unrecognized device" in the device list.

I finally figured out what it was: the DRAC had set up some kind of virtual drives. I had to go into the DRAC menu (Ctrl-D when it asks you at the boot prompt), page down until I saw the virtual drives, and then I pressed E to disable them. Once I did that, DBAN ran just fine.

Edit:
I just ran into this same problem on a Dell PowerEdge 1950, but it must have had a different DRAC version because the process of disabling of the virtual drives was a little different. I had to press Ctrl-E to get into the DRAC menu when it prompted me, then I had to arrow down to Virtual Media Configuration and change the Virtual media setting from attached to detached.

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