Had a few issues with Kubuntu crashing and acting strangely, but I’m attributing that to it still not being officially released yet (Karmic), plus there was a big update I got today so maybe that’s fixed many of the problems.
I did flirt with the idea of changing to something else today, but after booting into Kubuntu and doing the updates, I’ve decided to keep this around and give it another chance.
Gentoo is gone, Kubuntu (9.10 “beta”, though you can hardly call it that with a release next week) is now officially installed in its place. Had it installed using Wubi and had some decent experiences with it so I decided to just use it.
Immediately I see improvement. I’ve been trying to run Lord of the Rings Online using Wine (and the pylotro launcher for it) under Gentoo but had a problem with it freezing after about five minutes of play. Even setting everything on low as suggested didn’t help. It’s running great under Kubuntu, though. I just played it for quite a while with no issues.
Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’ve really disliked all of the stuff running in the background and the automation of everything before but everything just seems to work now — I didn’t even need to edit xorg.conf to get ATi drivers working nor proper settings for my monitor. That was impressive, given that it’s never happened in the past.
I’m crossing my fingers as hard as I can.
I’m still here, and still using Gentoo, although these days I’m really finding myself stuck in Windows mostly due to gaming that Linux just can’t provide. Even though the ATi drivers have vastly improved as of late, I’m still finding myself looking at crashes and other issues with some games that supposedly should work just fine, and I’m starting to wonder if Gentoo is to blame.
But do I really want to get myself into the whole Distro Mess yet again?
I really got tired of playing the Distro Hop, going from distro to distro trying to find the one that would serve my needs without being horribly irritating and allowing me to update and move to applications and drivers without throwing a huge fit. Gentoo is just perfect for that — it stays out of my way and allows me to use what I want to use while still providing a good base of applications to use. And the desktop and applications work wonderfully.
I’m just needing to scratch that gaming itch, and I really hate to have to reboot to get it every single time. Maybe it is time to do the Distro Hop yet again. I don’t know if I will end up with anything useful or just land right back where I started, but every day I am becoming more and more ready to take that chance.
I’ll put on my hopping shoes.
I’m still rolling along in Gentoo on this machine, still unfortunately crippled by the use of an ATi card which, despite many improvements since I’ve started using it, still causes more crashes, lockups, nonworking 3d applications/games, and other weirdness than I can tolerate most of the time. Thus, I find myself using Windows more than I would like, but the thing is, the ATi drivers work just fine under Windows. So what is a person to do?
I’m still sort of irritated at the state of GNU/Linux these days that prompted my rant back in April about GNU/Linux not being a viable desktop solution, but I think with a lot of work it can be. The sad thing about it is that no one seems willing to do the sort of work necessary to create a decent GNU/Linux distribution that cuts out all of the bad things in modern distros that cause it to be a pain (the automation daemons and other unnecessary layers that seem to want to emulate the behavior of Windows rather than just be GNU/Linux). With a distribution like Gentoo, this kind of system is possible, but not without a lot of work and even having to go beyond Gentoo’s packages at times just to remove some hard dependency on something like dbus. The concentrated effort to create, perfect, and (above all) maintain such a distro is beyond my self-will and patience, or I would certainly do it.
Regardless, that’s why this blog hasn’t been updated in a while — it’s just that not much has happened in my Linux world lately, and my disillusionment with it plus its instability on my system means that I have to remove myself from it much more than I would like.
As a side note, this post has (hopefully, anyway) been posted with a program called “Zoundry Raven” (http://www.zoundryraven.com/). I’ve traditionally never bothered with these programs because the disconnect between the end result (the blog on the browser) and its medium (some third party program) is generally disconcerting to me, and I’d rather just use the browser. While it’s not bad, there have been some strange half-second or so freezes while I’ve been typing, and as I type this, the end result (a successful blog post) hasn’t been done yet, so I’m not yet convinced this is the best way to do it. But I’ll try anything once.
Today I say with a heavy heart these words:
Linux has ceased to be a viable desktop solution.
I will continue to push for and support Linux for servers, since I still wholly believe that it is the absolute best solution for servers over Windows and even over other Unixlike systems such as *BSD. Linux’s structure for configuration of server systems is unparalleled and its performance is superb.
However, that is no longer the case for desktops. The reason is that Linux is no longer a simple desktop OS.
Over the past several years, Linux has grown bigger and has tried to become more of a player in the desktop market. To do so, it has had to add simple configuration options for those who wish to migrate from Windows. At first, Linux did well in this — it simply created easy to use terminal and GUI configuration programs that would do what the rest of us knew how to do in the background — edit configuration files. But as it continued, some Linux developers thought it would be best to change this simple method — simplicity being the backbone of Linux’s power — to something approaching Windows in its mind-numbing complexity. dbus, hald, pulseaudio, and other things were added, not to assist the system that was already there and working, but to replace it. And many times, they simply didn’t work.
I write this after weeks of trying to get Linux up and running on my system. After years of easily and quickly getting Linux systems up and running on many different types of systems, and only running into small, easy to fix issues, I have been blocked by issue after issue after issue, each absolutely insurmountable even after days of investigations and searching. Xorg has become a slave to automatic configurations and a mountain of things behind the scenes deciding that what I put in xorg.conf just isn’t good enough for it — it decides on its own that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say I want certain resolutions, or when I specify sync ranges for my monitor. It just goes off and decides that I have to have a gigantic screen at 60Hz. And even though I’m certain that the fglrx (ATi binary) drivers are partially to blame for some of this (plus bizarre crashing and other issues), it seems that the Linux system itself interferes with it from what I have seen in Xorg.0.log.
There are also sound issues — pulseaudio, esd, alsa, oss, all competing and fighting each other for the use of the sound device. Some things work fine, some not at all, and it’s seemingly random what does work and what does not.
What Linux needs is to return to a much simpler system. Is it that blasphemous to ask that sound mixing might be handled in the kernel, so that different sound systems don’t have to worry about whether or not the sound it’s making will be heard? Is it too much to ask to simplify Xorg and the surrounding systems where it actually uses xorg.conf as it should?
I’m really sad that it had to come to this. I have been a long time supporter of Linux, but it’s just gone too far now. The configuration of even the most “easy to use” distro and the most “power user friendly” distro (Ubuntu and Gentoo, respectively) is now down to luck and what you have on your system. Configuration of something that should be a simple editing of a configuration now involves investigating tons of settings, many involving these new “automated”, “easy-to-use” daemons that are supposed to make things “easy.”
Easy, my foot. Desktop Linux is now so far from what it used to be that it’s no longer usable. *BSD is just as bad or worse, and Apple has us paying premium prices for underpowered hardware just for the privilege of running its (admittedly nice) OS. So basically I’m stuck back in Windows, where even if things are overly complex, its monoculture design at least doesn’t make its complexity a limitation. I know that may sound like I’m praising Windows too much, but trust me, it is damning with faint praise. I do not like its design, but right now, there is nothing better. I am forced to run a poorly designed OS on a system that should be flying along with a well-designed, simple, good OS. Thanks to Linux’s poor design choices over the last several years, I can’t have that.
So long, Linux. I hope to come back one day when your developers have figured out that Linux is supposed to be simple rather than complex. Until then, I guess I get to wait for Windows 7 while stuck in the very poor Windows Vista.
Firefox 3.1 (which will likely become 3.5 in Firefox’s grand chaotic numbering scheme) beta 3 and Seamonkey 2.0 alpha 3 were both released recently. I like the progress of Seamonkey, particularly the way you can actually customize the behavior of the URL bar so that it doesn’t necessarily act like Firefox’s “Awesomebar” in the way it searches for things. Both are really nice, though, and even though I still prefer Seamonkey, Firefox is a very good choice and works great.
Though, in Linux, an odd thing is happening in both.
Except for a few very rare cases, I despise “event sounds”, sounds that occur whenever something is happening. Stock Windows is the worst at this, giving events to popups, IE and Explorer navigation, and pretty much anything that happens, ever, gets some annoying little sound. Fortunately, you can turn them off.
KDE and Gnome in Linux, too, behave this way, but not quite so annoying, even by default. Still, turning the beeps and dings off is one of the first things I customize on either when I decide to use them, and since I’m on a quite advanced system with tons of RAM and a lot of ways to plug in devices, I decided to brave KDE to take advantage of some of its automation. Normally I despise any sort of automation, but I figured I’d give it a chance.
In both Firefox 3.1 beta 3 and Seamonkey 2.0alpha3, though, any time a popup “alert” (from Javascript or otherwise, e.g. the box that comes up in Seamonkey telling me what I pasted in wasn’t a valid URL), a sound effect happens. I’ve noticed there are, in fact, two — a single drum beat sound and a fast series of drum beats, which is in fact the one that Gnome (GDM) sounds when the login screen shows up in Ubuntu. And nothing — NOTHING — I do or try will turn it off. There are no preferences in the browsers themselves, all of KDE’s sounds are off, launching the Gnome sound manager from KDE shows that all the sounds are off there, and so on.
And worse, these events do not generate noises in other browsers, even Firefox 3.0.x (the latest stable Firefox).
Something is telling me that there is something within these new browsers that are hooking up to something, somewhere, and generating noises that it should not be doing. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of it, but until I do, it’s really, really annoying me.
Update: I tracked down the cause of this; apparently the new browser releases use GTK’s setting to determine whether or not to play a sound. Specifically, it looks for gtk-enable-event-sounds, and if it’s false (set to 0), it won’t play the sounds. So if you have this problem, create or open ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (or ~/.gtkrc-2.0-kde-kde4 or a similar filename if you’re using KDE and it manages GTK apps) and add the following line:
gtk-enable-event-sounds=0
Restart the browser and those stupid sounds will stop.
Oh man, what a fun time.
So after dealing with a terribly slow PC after my just somewhat slow PC died a few months back, I finally found a semi-cheap PC to replace it. It’s certainly not a monster of a PC, but it runs pretty much everything I want it to just fine. Sadly, getting Linux to run on it has been an absolute chore.
First, this thing came preinstalled with Windows Vista, which isn’t the best OS in the world, I can tell you. Still, on this computer with 4GB of RAM and a quad core Phenom, it at least runs okay. The issue is that being a modern off-the-shelf PC, it did not come with an actual installer CD for the OS. It instead comes with a sort of “restore from scratch” boot function, using a custom partition with images of everything from scratch. This unfortunately means that I have to throw everything onto one massive C drive instead of reinstalling plain Vista on a smaller partition… unless, of course, I could use gparted to shrink that partition.
Trying that turned out to be a horrible idea.
Running gparted was successful; however, rebooting put me on a “repairing Vista” screen that just sat there for hours with no disk activity save for about 5 minutes at the beginning of the process. Trying to fix it from a Linux boot CD was unsuccessful as well, and every boot after that threw me back to the unfortunate uncancellable “repairing Vista” screen.
So I activated the repair mode at boot, and hoped against hope that the repair would use the existing resized partition, at least (and would somehow fix that partition as well). No luck, though — the repair truly took the system back to its initial state, with Vista installed on a partition that filled the entire drive. So at that point, I was somewhat stuck. My only real option was to try Ubuntu’s Wubi installer to give me a Linux partition inside Windows. Its max size being only 30GB was kind of a downer, but undeterred, I pressed on.
It worked, and Ubuntu seemed to have everything working just fine, including sound and 3d. Disliking Gnome, however, meant that I had to do some serious tweaking. This is when new trouble began.
I changed the oddly minimalist xorg.conf file to use a smaller screen than the nearly unreadable default of 1600×1200 (on my monitor, and especially with my aging eyes) and the proper refresh rates for my monitor. When I started X, however, the screen didn’t fill the monitor size, it was stuck at 60Hz, and I had no 3d. Trying to fix it, I eventually screwed things up bad enough where X wouldn’t even start. It was time to remove Ubuntu and start anew.
After reinstalling, I was more careful to not change anything that was not necessary, but unfortunately the same result happened. A search of Google, as before, was mostly unenlightening as to the exact cause, though I had seen some hints to some configurations not working with Ubuntu’s provided drivers. I had thought nothing of that, since, when Gnome and gdm was running by default, things were working just fine.
So for the heck of it, I removed xorg-driver-fglrx, installed the kernel headers, and — and as I removed xorg-driver-fglrx I noticed apt recommended I remove some other “unneeded” things as well, including an unknown package called dkms. Looking at the specifics, it was apparently something to help automate driver detection for Ubuntu. Knowing that would probably be a thorn in my side for where I was heading, that got removed as well.
Running off to ATI’s site for drivers, I got the latest ones for my Radeon and ran them. Without even having to change my xorg.conf configuration that I had tweaked to a much more traditional format during my trials with Ubuntu’s fglrx driver, startx now brought up a working, 3d-enabled screen. Finally.
No sound, however, but that was easily fixed by adding my user to the audio group. One has to wonder what kind of voodoo magic Ubuntu does behind the scenes to set all of this up. It boggles my mind at how much modern Linux distros automate just to save people from a few simple configuration edits.
So now that I’m back in business, I seriously hope to get back to this blogging thing here. There’s not much to talk about when you’re using Debian on an ancient, crippled, nearly useless computer.
Since I have apparently been too lazy to write anything here in over a month, here are quick updates:
And it’s not dbus this time, I promise!
As a developer, I do like to use GTK+ as my graphical toolkit of choice. As much as I dislike Gnome, I have no real issues with the toolkit it uses — it’s lightweight, simple to use, and can be done in a huge variety of languages, including plain C (so many these days require C++, for some odd reason). One of the nice utilities for coding in GTK+ is a program called Glade, a user interface designer that you can simply load in a text-based file to your application and reference the named parts of your GUI in your program to automatically create a GUI quickly and simply. Good for rapid development, and even good for prototyping even if you’re doing everything manually in C (which I end up doing most of the time).
Emerging Glade in Gentoo brought up a strange dependency, however — Scrollkeeper, a method to catalog documentation, and something I neither wanted nor needed. Why the strange dependency, I wondered? Looking at the source tree, I found out why: it “depended” on Scrollkeeper for the sole purpose of updating Scrollkeeper itself! This strange bit of logic gave me an instant headache, and made me wonder why the build process for Glade didn’t simply check to see if Scrollkeeper existed on the system and only updated it if it did. Apparently the very notion of someone having a system with no Scrollkeeper on it was foreign to the developers of Glade — what kind of fevered madman would have a Linux system without Scrollkeeper! — and they plowed ahead secure in their delusion, checking for Scrollkeeper in the configure process and giving the user an error if it wasn’t found, since obviously it needed Scrollkeeper to update Scrollkeeper!
So a bit of hacking on some of the files in the source tree to keep the configure process from dying and the make process from erroring out when it didn’t find Scrollkeeper (the hard way — I just removed all references to it), and the program built, installed, and ran just fine.
Developers, we don’t all want all of this unnecessary fluff on our systems. Please keep this in mind when you create your packages.
Hate to continually harp on dbus here, but this is really beginning to irritate me. I generally have gone with Seamonkey 2.0 alpha as my main browser due to my increasing disgust with the bloat and behind-the-scenes activity (not to mention the hideous Awesomebar — if I wanted to search my History, I’d open up my History and search it), but apparently the builds all come with dbus as a dependency. It was tolerated on Ubuntu and systems that forced the hideous poison onto me, but now that I’m running a dbus-less system, it has become an issue.
Generally, thanks to a lack of interest in taking the time to compile the hideously bloated Firefox and Seamonkey, I’ll just download the binaries, and even so in Gentoo. I currently have the -bin version of Firefox 3.0.4 installed, which does not have that hideous dbus dependency. The ebuilds do not have Seamonkey alphas available, so getting them means a manual install (as I have before in Ubuntu) from a download. But now that the Seamonkey binary has a need for dbus, I had to try compiling the thing from scratch — and failed due to some sort of problem with the build (not sure if it was their end or mine). My fear is that Firefox 3.1 will suffer the same fate on its release, but at least Gentoo will likely provide a tested ebuild to allow a pain-free compile without dbus.
It’s really become a pain now. My anti-dbus campaign has reached new levels of frustration and fist-shaking at those responsible for this abomination.
As an aside, I’d like to praise WordPress for its revamp of the Dashboard (administration section for each blog). It looks very clean, and I like it. Thank you for continuing to improve the best blogging software out there and providing us with free space to write.
