Adventures In Open Source

brewed to perfection

Ok it’s time for another distro review and I’m a bit overdue with this one but I’m a big fan of Debian and the dedicated community who develop it I make no secret of that. When I reviewed Etch (4.0) last year I declared that if I were to finally grow up and settle down with just one distro this would be the one. I like the fact that it’s not backed by any commercial entity and sticks closely to it’s Free Software principals. After some delay version 5.0 Lenny was finally released this Valentine’s Day, how appropriate but would it still be true love? There was only one way to find out…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Itself, Debian is the mother of a lot of modern distros
Packaging – .deb (Managed by the mighty Apt)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.26
Default Desktop – Gnome 2.22.1

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LXF Issue 116

Just a quick note to let everyone know the guys from Linux Format magazine are giving away free hi-res PDF downloads of this month’s issue for 24 hours only, so follow the link below and get one while you still can!!

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/linux-format-free-download-24-hours-only

I know I’m late in blogging this, at the time of writing there’s about 11 hours left to download your copy. Hope everyone sees this in time. If you are reading this after that time then I’m sorry about that. The news has been going around various LUG mailing lists in the UK since very late last night but I only just got the chance to pass it on properly. Hope you enjoy the magazine, I haven’t read this issue myself but it’s a very good publication in general and I can recommend it. I hope this idea gets the guys some more publicity and ups the readership as I suspect it’s intended to.

Enjoy

Update: I’ve also just been tipped off by the good folks at Chester LUG about a free Linux Starter’s Pack download. It’s on the same site and isn’t time limited, so anyone new to Linux or even just curious about learning more can download that at the following address – http://www.tuxradar.com/linuxstarterpack

Hope it helps someone

I saw an interesting video a few days ago. I’ve already discussed it a bit with people over at the Linux Outlaws Forums ™ but figured I should write something here that might reach a slightly larger audience, emphasis being on the word “slightly” in that sentence So here goes. First watch the video below in case you haven’t seen it…

I found it amusing that most people thought KDE 4 was Windows 7 but hardly that surprising if I’m honest. I wouldn’t expect most people in the general public to know the difference and why should they? This was obviously meant just as a joke and that’s all very well but as I watched one thought screamed louder and louder inside my head, “for god’s sake tell them it’s Linux!!!”. I know this wasn’t a Linux advocacy project and I don’t even know if these guys care at all about open source, it’s up to them but they could have said just one word to these people after showing them the software. A little word beginning with “L” and ending in “x”. As I watched these people looking at Amarok and saying “oh wow, is this included?” I got more and more irate. Far from realising they could have it all for absolutely nothing these poor folk will be rushing to hand over their hard earned cash to Microsoft when Windows 7 comes out. I know in the video they make a joke of it by saying they’ve learned nothing from the whole thing, that’s cool, I like a laugh as much as the next guy, probably more but it does bother me they’ve effectively advertised Windows on the back of KDE. It probably sound like I’m taking to seriously and maybe I am but come on guys! One word, that’s all it would have taken.

I’m off to mutter angrily under my breath in a corner, please feel free to ignore me

Booting Sabayon 4

It may have been a while but I decided I should really get distro hopping again seriously. I like to try out new software, it’s almost a geeky form of OCD and besides, it makes for great review fodder I hope. Today’s candidate is the latest release of a distro I first looked at some time ago, Sabayon. I’ve had mixed feelings about it in the past, I found 2.2 Professional to be very bloated, capable of interesting innovations but overall slightly disappointing. It’s a Gentoo based distro from Italy and it seems there’s no love lost between the Gentoo and Sabayon camps so I’ve been told. I wanted to see how it had developed now they’d reached version 4.0, so here goes nothing…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Gentoo
Packaging – .tbz2 (Binaries managed by Entropy) Source installations also available with Portage
Linux Kernel – 2.6.27-sabayon
Default Desktop – KDE 3.5 (edited after a comment, I thought it was KDE4, my bad), Gnome 2.24, XFCE, Openbox, Fluxbox and almost everything under the sun it seems

Installation:

The Boot Menu

I downloaded the main DVD installer image and burned off a copy. My test laptop is a Dell m1330n which a lot of you will already know, I’ve talked about it before so won’t go into the details now, you can read more here. Upon booting the DVD the first thing I noticed were some rather exotic options on the boot menu. The usual install options you get with all distributions were there of course but so were more interesting things such as: Boot without music, Play Sauerbraten, Anonymous Web Browsing and eeePC boot (640×480). Despite this bewildering array of choices I stuck with the default and just booted Sabayon into a live session, I could install from there. The drivers for my freedom hating nVidia graphics card were automatically enabled and I was asked whether I wanted the 3D Compiz Desktop or not, so I switched it on. This was all very painless and similar in experience to Mandriva or some other distros I’ve tried. It was around this time the “boot without music” option began to make some sense to me. I noticed some strange sounds faintly coming from the speakers at a low volume so turned it up and instantly recognized it as Pornophonique, a band we’ve played on Linux Outlaws before. Their work is Creative Commons licensed and published on Jamendo so well worth checking out. I like the band but I’m not sure the wisdom of putting music in the background of your installer, it reminds me a little of those awful rave tracks you used to get on Warez installers years ago. Not that I would know about that of course *ahem*. I let the boot continue and was greeted before long by a KDE desktop.

KDE

The earlier versions of Sabayon I tried had a slightly garish red theme which felt about a subtle as a slap in the face with a wet trout, and while aesthetics are not usually my primary concern, I do have to say this new theme is a great improvement. It looks slick and much more toned down with grey and pastel colours. I shall move on from that before I begin to sound too much like Brian Sewell but rest assured it looks good, you can judge for yourself from the screenshots. I clicked the install icon on the desktop to get things under way. The installer itself is pretty straightforward and includes an interesting option to update from the Internet before starting. I’ve never seen this on a distro before and it’s a cool idea. I added my wireless settings to the little KDE widget and got online quickly enough but still had to close and reopen the installer to actually get past the offline error message. I got the installer updated and proceeded to manually partitioning my drive as I always do, a 12gb root partition, a 140gb (ish) /home partition and the remaining space left as swap. I stuck to  the default install options most of the way through to get a feel for what most people can expect with Sabayon. The black background of the windows made it hard to read some the text and use the interface effectively at times, worth mentioning I thought. I timed the install from this point onwards and it took well over 35mins, hardly speedy by Linux standards but then I’ve been told both Vista and OS X are slower to install, I’ve never used either so can’t really say.

In the end I had to actually perform the install twice when the it crashed and failed the first time. The installer window kept greying out and freezing for periods during the process which usually indicates processor strain in Compiz or at least an operation stalling. Then a message popped up  which read “Exception occurred – check crash report”. I had to reboot the system and decided to try booting from the hard disk to see if the install had taken. Sadly it hadn’t and I was left to go through the whole process again of booting from the DVD. It took just as long the second time around but at least it did complete. I ejected the disc, rebooted and I logged into the KDE desktop. The reason for the slow install would soon become apparent. Read on fellow travellers.

You can see a full slide show of the process here

The Kitchen Sink and More:

Not A Slim Install

This distro seems to contain almost every piece of software you could possibly think of, all installed by default! It’s nice in some ways but bad in others. Having the likes of Picasa, Google Earth and Skype installed will please a lot of users but it takes up a lot of space. My 12gb system partition was already feeling the strain with 10gb of data. People call Ubuntu bloated but even after running it for over a year and installing a hell of a lot of addition software I’d only used about 3gb on my system disk. I quickly noticed that not only had KDE been installed but also Gnome, XFCE, Openbox and Fluxbox. This is the default behaviour it seems, when in doubt install everything. I’d wrongly assumed choosing KDE from the wizard would only install this desktop.  Another reason for the large footprint and slow install could be the source-based nature of the distribution. I’m not 100% sure of this as I don’t have a lot of experience with source-based distros but it seems possible.

Spritz in action

If you want a big selection of software by default then this is the distro for you I’d say, right down to things like Ardour. I found almost everything I could want was already installed and there’s something to be said for that I suppose. There’s also a package manager called Spritz which allows you to install binary packages rather than compiling everything, it’s a lot faster but some would say not very efficient. It was very buggy for me and probably needs a bit more work. I found Spritz froze a lot and the range of packages seems paltry when you’re used to something like Debian. I installed a few things such as Rhythmbox but couldn’t find Tasque, gPodder or Gwibber. This is a minor complaint as most things are already installed or available but I did have to resort to using Portato for compiling the extra things I wanted. Portato is a front end to well known Portage package manager from Gentoo, it uses what are called ebuilds (triggers of a sort) to compile the software you want from source trees. I’ve been told by a few more knowledgeable Gentoo fans this is not a good idea on Sabayon and you should only install new software using tools like Emerge and Portage, updating your system with an “emerge world” command can break things pretty badly apparently. If you’re not an experienced Linux user of even a Gentoo user it’s probably best to be wary of this. I found Gwibber 0.7 and Tasque in Portato and installed them both. This took well over an hour to complete and it’s not a speedy process. The virtue of compiling your software is the performance benefit of having it tailored to your system proponents of the art say but I find it a bit too time consuming personally. I left the machine while I retreated to get some dinner but when I returned over an hour later it was still compiling some of the dependencies for Gwibber. Tasque worked well enough once installed but Gwibber wouldn’t display messages and after a near 2 hour wait this can be very frustrating. I’ve been advised since that this was probably down to a Web Kit library problem, either the wrong version or a fault but I didn’t manage to get it fixed. I’m sure these things could be fixed with time and expertise but it’s not an ideal situation. I should point out that there really were only a couple of things I wanted but couldn’t find in Spritz, most of the things I needed were already installed and a whole lot else besides.

Disaster Strikes:

Over 3gb of updates

I used Sabayon for about a week and at one point I was prompted by Entropy (the back end to Spritz) to install updates to 277 packages. 277?! This seemed a lot to me but without thinking I foolhardily let it start it’s business of installing 3gb of updates, only realising about half way through this was a stupid thing to do as my 12gb root partition was already over 10gb full. Unfortunately by this time it was too late to stop it and my whole drive had been filled. The system became unstable pretty quickly, just changing work spaces was taking a long time so I shut it down. On reboot I wasn’t able to log in at all and it seemed the only course of action was to reinstall the whole thing from scratch. Another 40mins of my life I’ll never get back, yay!

This time I was a little smarter during the install, I chose the Gnome desktop and went through the list of packages removing all the KDE and XFCE stuff. I figured this would slim down the install but it still took up 8.5gb of space. Not a light distro in any sense but then to be fair it doesn’t claim to be.

Interesting Innovations:
I don’t want to sound like I’m being negative about Sabayon, there are some really interesting things in it. Original little touches like the option to update your installer, prompts to accept licenses for restricted software like Google Earth and Picasa in the update wizard, the amount of different ways to use the live CD, the binary packaging system with Entropy, it all has potential. I was able to do all the things I needed to reasonably well and spent about a week testing it day to day, so it’s a usable distro it just has it’s quirks. All the multimedia codecs and tools I needed were installed out of the box so I didn’t have to set up any of that which saves time. Flash, Java and all the other things you could need are there right away.

Conclusions:
Ease Of Installation & Use: 3/5
Speed & Stability: 3/5
Community Support & Documentation: 4/5
Features: 4/5
Overall: 3/5

Running Sabayon

Overall I think Sabayon has the potential to be a really good distro but for me it’s incredibly bloated and though some of the ideas are ambitious, they lack a little finesse in the execution so far. It was pretty fast to run, the boot was quick and applications seemed snappy enough despite the bloat. There’s a hell of a lot of software in there but if by some chance you need something extra, installing from source is time consuming and can be risky. I’d say it’s probably not a distribution for users who are very new to Linux, it’s not scary or particularly hard to use, I don’t want to give that impression but if you run into problems it’s easy to get lost. There are a lot of good resources on the Sabayon website it has to be said, an active forum, IRC channel and pretty well stocked wiki are all at your disposal. So there is help out there, I just found it wasn’t quite for me. I’d be interested to try Gentoo some time to compare and contrast, see what I could learn from it. I expect it would be quite a project though and probably take a week to set the system up with my lack of knowledge. I like to test on my main everyday laptop to give an authentic feel for what people can expect, so it’s all on the line and I’m not sure I could get Gentoo installed quickly enough while going about my daily work on the same machine. When I get a spare test box I think Gentoo will make a nice side project.

Firefox 3

If you want to try something different then you could do a lot worse than take a look at Sabayon but for me it’s still not quite there yet. I admire the ambition and the goals of the project, I think you have to take risks sometimes and while everyone else is racing to make the smallest distribution they can these guys have gone the other way, I like individuality. It has potential but still needs some development I feel. Take a look for yourself and see what you think, then you can let me know in the comments.

You can download Sabayon 4.0 here

Moving on…
So next up for me it’s the recently released Debian Lenny, I’m actually typing this in OpenOffice on Lenny right now. I’m an unashamed Debian fan and also a Gnome fan so I’m expecting to like it but I’ll try to be fair and honest about any shortcomings I find, it won’t be getting an easy ride. You’re all welcome to join me of course, expect that review in the next week. From there I’m not sure where I’ll go. I’ve threatened a BSD for some time, still need to do that. I’d also like to take a look at Sidux and perhaps Foresight. I know all you Arch fans out there have been asking me to try that for a while and I will but I fear it’s the same situation as Gentoo, not sure I could install it and go about my daily work quickly enough on this machine. It would require a lot of reading and learning which are both good things to do, just not when you have someone on the phone asking you why their website doesn’t work. If you have any suggestions for me please feel free to post them and I’ll take a look. Till then, see you over the hill, I’ll race you…

Debian, brewed to perfection

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the long awaited release of Debian 5.0 (codenamed Lenny) will be this weekend, February 14th to be precise. Keen observers will notice that’s also St Valentine’s Day, which apparently is just a coincidence and wasn’t planned but I think it works out brilliantly for marketing. “Say it with Lenny” no? Ok perhaps not. I was lucky enough to have a chat with Steve McIntyre the current Debian Project Leader about all of this when we recorded Linux Outlaws 77. The show will probably be released on Sunday, a day after the actual Lenny release but hey what can you do it all came about at the last minute, the interview that is not the distro release.

I’m really excited that Lenny is finally coming out and I hope the release goes well for everyone. Steve let us in on some of the background surrounding the release date and we also discussed the unrest in the Debian community over the inclusion of binary firmware (BLOB) in the final product. It seems to have caused a lot of ructions in the camp with people quitting their jobs and a lot of flame wars but hopefully this will all blow over now that it’s finally out. I’ve always been a big fan of Debian and while I’m not an old school Linux user by any means (Debian has been around since 1993) I said a while back how it amazes me that so many of the good things about Ubuntu are inherited from Debian. I think in a lot of ways it’s a misunderstood distribution. Before I tried Debian for the first time I was told by people “oh it’s a lot of work”, “it’s difficult to install and setup” and many other such encouraging things. I didn’t find this to be true at all. Perhaps it’s not the best choice for someone brand new to Linux I accept that but it’s not the big scary monster people make it out to be either. Debian is unique in that there’s no corporate or business interest behind it, in many ways it’s software by the people for the people, democratically developed and distributed. It’s true that sometimes this kind of rule by comity causes problems, like any family there are arguments but when it comes down to it blood is thicker than water and it’s all sorted in the end. Think of how many other distributions are based on Debian. Without it there would be no Ubuntu, no Mint, no Mepis, no Xandros (now popularized by the eeePC), no Crunchbang, no 64 Studio (a personal favourite of mine) and so many more I’d be here all week just trying to list them. It’s one of the founding pillars of Linux as we know it today and in my humble opinion remains the power behind the throne in a lot of cases. Many people don’t know that fact and I think that’s a shame. A lot of people will ask “why don’t you use Debian all the time then if you love it so much?” and this is a fair comment. My answer is because I’m a convicted distro hopper, I have to keep changing to try new things for reviews. I use 64 Studio on my music machine which is essentially a modified version of Debian and I tend to favour Debian-based distros on my laptop too.

So this Valentine’s Day spend as much time as you can with a loved one naturally but also spare a quick thought for Lenny and the guys and gals that make it what it is. Of course if you’re in love with someone called Lenny then everyone’s a winner, it’s perfect symmetry and you don’t need to buy an extra card As I write this I’m actually about to install Sabayon 4 for review purposes, so after a couple of days with that I’ll be ready to get onto Lenny at the weekend or maybe the beginning of next week. I’ll report back on all of these things in due course so stay tuned. Listen out for our interview with Steve in episode 77 of Linux Outlaws and enjoy your Valentine’s weekend everyone.

Take care

Dan

Running Handbrake

I decided earlier this week I needed to rip a DVD and looked around at the available options on Linux. I’m not overly experienced at doing this sort of thing, in the past I’ve always got the job done with applications like dvd:rip but not had a very satisfying experience. I’d heard a while back that the popular program Handrake had now released a Linux version with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and it seemed a good idea to try it out. I have some Mac using friends who really like it and often tell me how good it is for ripping discs. There’s been a command line version of Handbrake on Linux for quite some time I believe but I never used it, I can handle myself pretty well in a terminal but it just didn’t appeal. Handbrake is licensed under the GPL and as such is completely free and open source software, with all these facts and endorsements ringing in my ears I figured I should take it for a spin, no pun intended.

Installation:

Installing is easy

Installing the program was nice and simple for me on Linux Mint 6. There are “.deb” packages built for Ubuntu on the Handbrake website so it’s simply a matter of double clicking to install, who says Linux has to be hard eh? Admittedly if you’re on a non Debian-based system it might be not be quite so simple for you. You can download the source code and build the application yourself which isn’t as daunting as it sounds or it’s possible some other distributions might have their own binary packages. It’s worth having a look around before you start I’d say. Once installed the application should just appear on your menu, for me it was in the MintMenu under “Sound & Video” so it’s likely to be in a similar place even if you’re using a different flavour of Linux.

Ripping It Up:

Selecting the source

Upon opening the application for the first time you’re presented with a pretty nice looking interface, simple enough and not overcrowded but incorporating all the features you could need. One thing I did find strange is that the program didn’t automatically detect the DVD I’d loaded in my drive, instead I had to manually select the correct device. I’m using a Dell m1330n laptop and I only have one optical drive, the one selected was labeled “dvd” so I chose “dvdrw” from the dialog and then everything worked. I don’t know if this is a quirk of the program or a quirk of my hardware but once I’d figured this out it wasn’t too much hassle. I have to do this whenever I want to rip a new disc, it doesn’t auto-detect which would be a nice feature. I decided to test it by ripping an episode of Spaced, a British comedy series that I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it.

Useful defaults

One thing I like about the Handbrake interface is the list options down the right hand side to quickly and easily target specific devices. I don’t have an iPod or iPhone but I do have a PS3 and being able to just select that profile and know the video will work on the device is great. I wish more applications worked as easily as this. You can also tweak the video and audio settings if you ‘re more of an expert and you know what you want, so it doesn’t limit you really but still has sensible defaults you can call up. One thing about Handbrake which isn’t great is the length of time it takes to actually rip a disc. It does produce very high quality rips with minimum fuss but you need to be patient, very patient. I only ripped a small section of the DVD I was using to test, about 20mins and it still took almost half and hour to complete. Once it was done I opened the mp4 file and it looked perfect I have to say, so perhaps good things really do come to those who wait.

I made a slideshow of whole process if you’d like to check it out

Verdict:

The End Product

I really like Handbrake as you can probably tell by now, it does it’s job well without being overly fancy. It has all the features advanced users could need but still remains accessible for the average Joe. It’s not quick as I said, it takes it’s time in ripping discs but does produce great quality. My advice would be to start it up when you can afford to leave the machine alone for a couple of hours to work, perhaps at night. Especially if you’re doing a 3 hour epic like Lord Of The Rings or something, you’ll be in for a long wait if you sit there and watch it and you could probably grow a convincing Gandalf beard by the end. Overall I would recommend Handbrake as the best application of it’s type I’ve used on the Linux desktop, best of all it’s free in both the speech and the beer senses so there’s nothing to lose. Try it out and let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for reading.

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