Wow, I need to write more.

I’ll try harder to do so. I have a lot floating around in my mind about the state of the Linux world, but I just forget that I have this outlet to do so (or just too lazy…).

Linux is becoming Windows

I like to have control over my computer. Generally, when my computer thinks it knows better than I do, 99% of the time or more, it’s wrong. I like to tell it what to do and how to do it, and I expect it to do only that and nothing more.

This is one of the reasons I left Windows so long ago. Windows enjoys automating stuff and taking the administration of the system out of my hands. When I tell it that I do not want to automate certain things, I expect it to obey and not change back, and with Windows, sometimes getting it to do exactly that is an adventure. Many times, it’s simply impossible.

With Linux, I discovered an OS that did exactly as I said, exactly how I said, and nothing more. Configurations were basically straightforward scripts or configuration files that told the OS exactly what I wanted, and at no time did it ever think that it should do any more. It was very liberating and very exciting to use such an OS that I had ultimate control over.

But modern Linux is attempting to get away from all that. For the sake of user-friendliness and to get new users, Linux has begun to collect an arsenal of daemons (programs that run in the background to accomplish certain tasks, like services in Windows) that do nothing but automate pretty much everything. Configuring the X server with xorg.conf? Becoming obsolete. Why should users waste time when X and the collection of daemons can figure out your hardware for you and configure it by itself?

Of course the answer is that often, the “automatic” configuration is dead wrong, and worse, fixing it requires disabling the entire suite of daemons and such to keep X from automating everything. I have yet to see an automatic configuration of X that sufficiently detects the requirements of my (admittedly old, yet still perfectly useful) CRT monitor. I either get 640×480 with no ability to modify it or 1600×1200@60Hz with no 3D acceleration, neither of which is acceptable. (Also, for some horrible reason, the latest nvidia drivers apparently use the refresh rate settings as a sort of internal catalog for the resolutions, causing them to incorrectly report odd values like 57Hz as the refresh rate, which causes problems for some applications — I have to disable “DynamicTwinView” in the nvidia video card section of xorg.conf to get rid of this madness.)

But it’s not just X, it’s the entire battery of daemons that have no real purpose other than to make things slightly more convenient for new users and things horribly inconvenient for experienced users who are often trying to set things up properly for the new users. Take dbus (please, take it, and don’t come back!), an invention created by some twisted mind that decided that passing information from one application to another needed more than simple scripting and created a horribly complicated Windows-like application messaging system that does nothing but take up resources. Take pulseaudio, which hasn’t learned the lessons of aRts and ESD that a daemon-based sound manager for mixing audio causes more problems that it solves (we need to get people to purchase audio cards with functioning hardware mixers via ALSA, or rewrite ALSA to take care of mixing there instead of using a half-baked method of mixing that isn’t consistent over all applications). Take Avahi/mDNSresponder, giving zeroconf configuration to a resource-hogging daemon instead of a simple script. Take hald, which does the above-mentioned “automatic hardware detection and configuration” for X and other programs that can be done much more reliably by hand.

I could go on; Ubuntu alone has a ton of these unnecessarily complex things running at startup, and it seems like every new version adds several more. What we need to do is create scripts and user-friendly configuration dialogs to enable effective configuration of a system for a new user, not throw a lot of unnecessary garbage onto their system just to configure things that eventually spreads out to infect other distributions as it is doing now. Then Ubuntu users can ease into the true Linux way of doing things by having a system that JustWorks(tm) after install but not be crippled by a lot of Windows-like automatic configuration so they can learn that the true strength and power of Linux comes from learning how to manually configure your system, and not just leaning on a bunch of automated stuff that makes it nearly impossible to strip a system down far enough to effectively manage it.

Sadly, as I said, this garbage is infecting other distributions now as well, and it is making it very difficult even on source-based distros such as Gentoo to run a system not dirtied by this garbage. I fear that as time goes on it will get even worse, and sadly there aren’t many places to go from here.

(And why should I care if these things are taking up the large amount of resources available in computers today? Because resources are resources, and any amount is that much less available to what really matters, which is the programs I run. Plus, they simply aren’t necessary when you know how to configure things yourself — which is how it should be when using Linux — and it’s just foolish to have things running that are not necessary.)

Ubuntu 8.10

Officially, Ubuntu 8.10 drops in a few days, but from my experience, a few days outside of its release is usually close enough to be considered final, as they have to package up the actual release and everything is pretty much stable and done. So from my newly-installed Ubuntu 8.04 install from a minimal install CD to help get rid of all the bloat Ubuntu typically throws in there, I did a simple update using sudo do-release-upgrade –devel-release, which nicely automated the process. Soon enough, I had a new 8.10 system waiting a reboot away.

Unfortunately an interesting thing happened — 8.10 did not (from what I saw) have normally packaged nvidia kernel drivers as usual, and it took a moment to realize that I had to use envyng-core to install, made worse by the fact that it wouldn’t install the 9xxx drivers (the most optimal for my older nvidia card). The 173 series drivers worked well enough, though, and everything seems to be running fine now. Still need to do a manual compile of my kernel because the libata drivers still do not work well with my drive controller, slowing the entire system down more than it should on heavy disk access and occasionally causing problems with CD reads and writes.

I definitely encourage everyone to update when it hits, though. Ubuntu just gets better with every release and even though I have had issues with it over the years, it’s still the single best Linux distro out there right now for desktop use in my view. I still like Arch, Slackware, Debian, and others, but for a system that I need the best performance and reliability out of (my desktop), I have found that relying on Ubuntu is my best bet.

Case Insensitivity in Windows Strikes Again!

So now that I’m playing World of Warcraft again, I had to go grab the expansion that’s out now (Burning Crusade) to prepare for Wrath of the Lich King that hits in November. I figured the easiest thing to do would be to head over to Windows to install and patch up again since I figured there might be something odd with the installer/patcher and Linux, so I didn’t take any chances.

Grabbed everything, installed, and ran completely successfully in Windows, though its performance made me quickly want to head back over to Linux. Which I did.

Unfortunately, trying to run it in Linux gave me a curious error:

This application has encountered a critical error:

File not found

Program: C:\Program Files\WoW\Wow.exe
File: .\Client.cpp
Line: 2840

file: signaturefile

Apparently a file called signaturefile was nowhere to be found, which was odd, since everything worked fine in Windows. I tried a few combinations (running from a pristine .wine directory, for one) but nothing seemed to work. So I tried running the repair.exe to no real effect, which made me start searching. First thing I found: someone suggested deleting some of the patch pack files in WoW and running repair to allow it to repatch. That sounded quite time-consuming, but was looking like my only hope…

until someone said the answer was actually much simpler. Even though Wine tries its best to be case-insensitive when looking for programs and files, at times it just can’t be as mind-numbingly case-insensitive as Windows because, after all, we are still in a Linux environment which (correctly) requires precise case for a filename. The culprit: the patch.mpq file which holds the data for the patches. WoW was looking for “patch.MPQ”, but the Windows patcher had named it “patch.mpq”. Being on a FAT32 partition, simply renaming the file didn’t work (since, for FAT32, Linux thinks it’s the same file to, again, appease Windows), but moving it elsewhere as patch.MPQ then moving it back worked perfectly.

World of Warcraft ran without a hitch after that, and everything is great again.

Windows, I curse you and your immature file system that lazily does not enforce case sensitivity. Yet another example of why Windows needs to start over a la OSX.

Wine

Wine continues its march toward creating a new Windows platform without having to use Windows itself. With each new version, Wine runs better, is more compatible, and will run new applications and games easier than it had before. While ideally I would like to have Linux applications that I can run natively instead of programs written for another OS, at least I am able to deal with these programs in a controlled environment running on open-source software rather than a Microsoft-controlled closed-source system.

Not to say that I don’t have a Microsoft-controlled closed-source system on my computer to run things Wine can’t quite handle, but I digress.

I’ve recently started playing World of Warcraft again (what can I say, I’m a weak person), and as it has before, Wine easily plays this behemoth of a game flawlessly with a minimum of tweaking, and even runs it better than it runs under my Windows XP install, especially in large populated areas where framerate can at times be a slideshow under Windows. It still struggles with framerate under Wine in these areas, but I attribute that more to my quite ancient computer than anything else.

For some strange reason, I’ve had lockup issues with the native version of Unreal Tournament lately under Linux, so I decided to see how Wine would handle it. At first, all I could get it to do was display the splashscreen, go to a dark fullscreen and then do nothing (getting back to the desktop revealed some sort of exception caused by the sound not working, according to the messages I got back). Finally I fiddled with it long enough to discover that setting Wine to use OSS instead of ALSA under winecfg was enough to get it working flawlessly.

What really makes me marvel is the fact that I can point Wine to a CD-R mountpoint for a drive and use it to run Windows CD burning software under Linux. Generally pointless of course thanks to the amazing k3b, but amazing nonetheless.

Of course, the latest wonder for Windows has to be Google Chrome, but it looked like at first Wine was going to be unable to handle this new browser until Google got around to porting it over to Linux (I’m not holding my breath). But someone found a way with a little tweaking, and Chrome runs just fine under Linux, even running the “about:internets” easter egg if you throw a copy of the Windows 3d pipe screensaver in your Wine virtual C drive. Amazing.

And finally, while I don’t quite have the power to run it, apparently the new game Spore actually works, though with a few graphical glitches, and even these can be taken care of with a patch to Wine.

Thanks to everyone that works to make Wine great. I look forward to every single release knowing that you are working hard to bring more software to those of us running Linux.

KDE 4.1 Released

KDE 4.0’s release was unfortunately not a usable release, since many features one expected from KDE3 were missing or incomplete, and the whole thing felt thrown together. Work has been done since then and now we have KDE 4.1, which KDE says is actually a more complete, usable desktop experience.

While I do commend KDE for making 4.1 feel much more complete and usable, I still have various issues with it:

• Slower interface. Not as much an issue with much newer computers, I’m sure, but it doesn’t feel nearly as snappy as KDE3 did, especially with menus and such. Turning on compositing might have helped, but I don’t use that because it sacrifices speed in the applications you run on top of a desktop just to smooth out the desktop a bit. Unlike many people, I feel that giving the applications you run on your desktop the most amount of resources possible is much more important than having a slightly “smooth” desktop.
• Panel issues. There’s no way to directly place an application launcher in the panel (from what I can tell, anyway; the only way to add an application launcher is to right-click an app from the menu and add it there, which means you can’t add something that’s not in the menu). Worse, though, is that the panel glitched out on me when I was trying to add and remove some widgets from it, making everything spaced out, and I could not restore it to the way it was. I had to delete the panel and create a new one from scratch.
• Menu resizing. The new menu has a resizer on the top right that I was going to try to use. However, when I clicked on it, the menu instantly grew bigger, and locked its minimum size to this new bigger size, so I could only make it larger. I wanted it smaller, but there was no way to put it back to even the default size before I started resizing it.
• Input Actions doesn’t work. I used Input Actions in KDE3 to give me some keyboard shortcuts for things like locking the screen and changing gamma settings (to brighten up some dark games). Unfortunately, Input Actions in KDE4.1 does not work at all. I enabled the KHotKeys daemon from the global settings and ensured that both my action and its group were not disabled, which is all one had to do to get it working in KDE3, but no luck — none of the shortcuts would work at all.
• General bugginess. In addition to the other bugs I noted above, the System Settings crashed on me several times, my mouse pointer setting would revert to the ugly (in my view) default fat black pointer on some occasions (over certain apps and in “busy” mode), and the Add Widget list would constantly move its list elements as I scrolled up and down. I think they need to take some more time with bug-squashing before throwing this thing out to be used.

I’m still looking forward to a stable and useful KDE4 in the future, just as I was when I first tested KDE4 a ways back. But this release, despite KDE’s claims to the contrary, isn’t stable and useful enough. I’ll keep trying future releases, but I definitely won’t be keeping this one.

(Note: all grammatical and spelling errors in this post are because I was sort of sick while writing this… <g> )

No News Is Good News

What happens in the world of Linux is you get pretty content. Oddly enough, one begins to lose the wonder at how well everything works and the immense depth of the software available to you and just go on cruise control for a long while, at least until something utterly mind-blowing makes you stop and look at it all in wide-eyed wonder again.

I’m in full cruise control mode at this time, so nothing has been written here for a while. Wine still improves, more software is being released, everything is going just great. I’m just enjoying the moment here and enjoying the best operating system available today. I haven’t given up, I haven’t become disillusioned, I’m simply having fun. No news is the best news of all.

Firefox 3.0 and Wine 1.0. Go get ‘em.

I really don’t know what else to say besides what the title says. Ubuntu repos have Firefox 3.0 and the Budgetdedicated repos (from winehq’s site) has Wine 1.0 for Hardy.

Sure, I’m not really a big fan of Firefox 3, but if you like it, grab it. I’ll continue to use SeaMonkey 2.0 alpha myself…

Blog version 1.27, the nicer, more friendly blog!

If you’ve ever kept a blog for a long period of time, you’ve probably gone back and re-read your old posts and were quite embarrassed by them. Many things you said you no longer believe, or have changed your mind on, or something. You rant about things that really didn’t matter in the long run, and you generally wonder what state of mind you had to be in to write that.

Well, I have gone back and re-read all my posts, but I’m not going to change or remove any of the core things I said, even though I now disagree with a few of them (Amarok, I’m very sorry I was so harsh to you!). However, I was distressed by my use of harsh language in many posts, and decided to edit a few of my posts to remove the harsh and vulgar language. The tone of the edited posts was not changed at all, just my choice of words to express my feelings. Getting mad at something does not mean one has to drop F-bombs, you know.

So I feel better by having a generally cleaner blog now, and hopefully it will not scare people off as it did before with its occasionally scary language. I apologize for using such language on this blog, and I will not use any more scary language here in the future.

Wine 1.0 is on the way

In case you have missed it, the Wine project (an effort to implement a Windows-compatible application layer under other operating systems) has been marching toward a 1.0 release lately, currently (as of this writing) at 1.0 Release Candidate 4 (1.0-rc4). They have been working on fixing most of the major bugs in many applications so that Linux (and other open OSes such as *BSD) can run Windows programs on their desktops without having to deal with emulation/virtual machine-type software that would slow execution down significantly. Wine even runs many major Windows games such as Steam engine games (Half-Life 2, Portal, Counter-Strike Source), World of Warcraft, the Grand Theft Auto series of games, and many others with minimal or no extra tweaking, as well as programs like Photoshop, the Microsoft Office suite, and many others. (Compatibility reports can be found on their AppDB page.)

Even though I would like for developers to port these applications to Linux so that we may run them natively instead of using a program that, admittedly, will never gain 100% compatibility with Windows due to Microsoft’s desire to keep the internals of their OS closed off and therefore unable to completely duplicate successfully, the tireless work of the Wine developers have made it possible to have the next best thing, and I thank them for their efforts.