#!Crunchbang Linux

An interesting new entry in the Ubuntu-based distro world is #!Crunchbang Linux (in both full and lite versions), as well as a version especially for the eeePC that is more than a match for the Netbook Remix from eeebuntu. After having tried eeebuntu, Mandriva 2008 Spring, Windows 7ista (Phail), the default Xandros and now #!Crunchbang, their version is the best fit for the first generation 701 (4G) eeePC. Not the freest mind you, as all the codecs, etc are included (as is the array.org kernel); but if your concern is less purity and more practical, then it is nice to get everything setup in one fairly quick step. Something nice about this version is that returning from sleep gets the wifi network immediately, and the conky running with all the shortcuts to open various apps is a nice touch as well.

It Just Gets Better

Ubuntu already outperforms Vista. And more devices are supported than in any other OS. But you knew that, right?

Aspire One

Very nice review here.

Free At Last

From the unwieldy MS :

“This is the part of the Windows Vista backlash that really matters,” said IDC analyst Richard Shim, who had recently seen HP’s Linux mini-laptop. It’s especially notable, he said, that HP and Dell are experimenting with highly visible non-Windows options. “There aren’t that many companies that can afford to invest in this type of development,” and those two are among them.

Scary Moment

Updating from Hardy to Ibex the other day. After changing sources.list and apt-get dist-upgrade, gdm and kdm failed, dropping me to the command line and a bunch of cryptic error messages, chown’ing all my directories to read-only and failing to update as some packages were broken.
After rebooting (and of course this is when the periodic fsck came up), starting up in recovery mode and downloading the correct packages, was able to get kdm running again and thus a desktop environment.
A few notes on what feels different on Ibex: Flash is absolutely brilliant, as are the kernel drivers for the nvidia card, networking is more responsive and some of the odd scim/skim problems (with fonts) seems to have gone away. Still way too early to tell, but all signs point to another brilliant Ubuntu iteration.

Gos On The eeePC

First step to trying out the latest beta of Gos was to run it in a virtual machine via Virtualbox. Not having used Vbox since Gutsy Gibbon, so an install of the correct linux modules was necessary, as well as adding one’s self to the vbox users group through the users & groups gui panel. A simple logout and log back in and all was set.

I set the ram to 512MB and the disk size to just under 4GB (though I have 1GB of ram in the eeepc many do not) to best mimic the conditions an install would take.

The livecd portion of the system loaded very fast and all the nifty google gadgets were loaded and updated once the desktop came up. The new google gadgets are very reminiscent of Dashboard, the Mac OS X feature that lets you load tons of widgets, though these are directly on the desktop and not one step removed a la Dashboard.

Some of the widgets/gadgets were clumped together in the lower right corner of the screen, but a simple resizing and/or shifting of them around fixed that.

The mini-dock at the bottom of the screen was quite responsive even in a vm with such a minimal amount of ram and no opengl, so certainly in an actual hard drive install it would be much faster.

Open Office apps launched impressively quickly, as did skype, Firefox, Pidgin and the rest.

The main menu, at the top left under the green Gos logo is very nicely laid out, and the number of apps and the selection quality is quite impressive. Also, the fact that system administration and preferences is in the same menu as a series of sub-menus makes configuring your system that much more convenient.

As the eeePC has no optical drive, and requires burning the system to either sd/usb or attaching a cd drive, first testing in a vm is truly a must. Gos passes muster in this respect with ease.

Next up: installing via external cd drive and getting wireless working. Hopefully someone will have written a wiki page by that time; not at all a stretch with the growing popularityof the eeePC and other netbooks. Not sure if this will work, but certainly worth a shot.

Oh, snap. This is what makes Linux and Ubuntu so great.

Long Day’s Journey Into Breakage

Looking for the Ultimate in Ubuntu Linux experiences? Then simply install UltiBuntu! It has everything you could ever want or need. If that’s not enough, you can download the deb that will transform your UltiBuntu into Uberuntu! When things go awry simply reinstall. Be sure to have a very large hdd though, as Ulti/Uberuntu will install nearly everything. Just a bit more than a minimal install with openbox. A one TB drive should do nicely. Already the positive reviews are flowing in:

It debuted a few years ago, and got negative reviews from Ubuntu developers and experienced users due to the risk of breaking dependencies, but it offered an easy solution for beginners who weren’t familiar with the way deb packages worked.

Apt-get and aptitude are quite difficult for new users; simply typing ‘sudo apt-get install vrms’ is quite a chore, and the many variables all but insure that there will be a foul-up. Better to have a shiny pointy and clicky interface

Linux newcomers will be pleased to know that installation of Ultamatix is purely point-and-click.

Sadly, it looks as though the market will soon need a replacement, as some things are omitted:

There’s not much to dislike in Ultamatix. Yet, with thousands of great Linux applications out there, it goes without saying that it can’t possibly include all of them. A few noteworthy apps that are missing are the Opera web browser and Thunderbird email client.

The best test of whether something works is the installation procedure; if that goes off without a hitch then it is golden. This applies to Linux distributions, third-party scripts, and just about anything you can think up. So download this fine tool and get it going today; it is just a single click away. No thinking required. Kinetic energy not included.

Ultamatix and The Myth of OOTB

If you have been using Ubuntu for any length of time then you will remember Automatix, the automated installer that pulled in all of the codecs, apps and anything else you could imagine, all in the name of giving a perfect out of the box experience.

Perfect, that is, until the conflicts started piling up, leading to the complete borkage of your system. Automatix finally went away, and there was relative sanity in the Ubuntu world for a brief period of time. No more.

Ultamatix promises to do what Automatix did, for Ubuntu, Ubuntu Ultimate, and Debian (though it is still completely untested on Debian). Instead of relying on the sanity of the excellent package manager present in those distributions, one can download the deb, launch the script and fling all caution to the winds. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Where the idea of ootb originally came from is somewhat of a mystery; installing *any* system requires some tweaking, adding apps, and updating. Some Operating Systems more than others.

Perhaps Linux has acted as a sort of spoiler; on a recent re-install of Windows XP SP2 (not my own machine) due to contact with the internet (spyware, etc), it was a shock to see that even with a ethernet cable attached that one could not just connect to the internet. Never mind wireless, that was out of the question.

Using a Ubuntu Hardy livecd and a DreamLinux (Debian-based) livecd had not only ethernet, but wireless, and all the codecs one could ever want or need, as well a plethora of apps for every imaginable purpose in a matter of minutes.

You will need to tweak your install, whether it is Mac, Windows, or Linux; do so in a sane and responsible manner and the possibilities of conflicts, breakage, and complete system failure will be minimized, at least in the first and last instances. Quick fix is just another way of saying quickly needs to be fixed. Spend the extra bit of time in Synaptic, Software Update, or Random Website for Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows respectively.

ThorHammer, Flux And Back Again

The past several days have been spent trying out just about every distro I have ever downloaded (sans OpenSuse) capable of liveCD mode and running them on the 3ePC to see how they stacked up against the default Linux install of Xandros. Ones that could get Ethernet received bonus points, and those that got the wireless card were almost golden, provided they could install in a smaller space than Xandros, about 2.6GB.

Among the candidates reviewed were (and this is off the top of my head): Stux, Slax, DreamLinux, Granular, Fedora 8 (test 2), Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fluxbuntu, LinuxMint (3.1 and 4.0), Kanotix 2007, Damn Small Linux, GrafPup (PuppyLinux based), NimbleX v2, Sidux 2007, PCLOS 2007, PCLOS TinyME, Mandriva 2008 ‘One’, Sabayon 3.4 Mini, Pud-Linux and Zenwalk.

Zenwalk was out of the running immediately as it had no liveCD mode, and several of the others as well as they could not even get an X server; a further few could not even recognize the Ethernet card, leaving just a tiny handful that could get any kind of internet.

Those precious few, oddly enough, were either Debian or Ubuntu based, and the only one that got a desktop, ethernet, and wireless in liveCD mode was LinuxMint 4.0. Still, with all the disappointments, there were several bright spots, and an introduction to a distro that I had never tried before in my wide-ranging distro-hopping days of yore.

You may have noticed that there is another in the list that does not have a liveCD mode–Fluxbuntu (RC) 7.10. Following the frustration of trying out so many distros only to be met with failure again and again, I decided to go for it and actually install one (or two).

The installer for Fluxbuntu is very nice, though likely suited to a faster CPU than the one I was trying it on–the install process went well, though a bit slow in my estimation. Sadly, once I had completely installed it and was booting into the login screen for the first time, the login would not let me do so, constantly giving me the message ‘login failed’, and then refusing to take any more login attempts. Pretty discouraging for a first install to the 3ePC, but no matter.

Next up was Kanotix 2007 ‘ThorHammer’ (RC), and the installation options on this distribution are very nice, with the choice between a manual partition, and then 4 different automatic partitions, including one without a swap drive, exactly what I was looking for. After the twenty or so minute installation, I successfully logged in and had an honest to goodness KDE desktop with the correct (though strange) resolution of 800×480, proper Ethernet connection, wireless card recognized correctly but no driver loaded, and a fast, responsive (though tiny) desktop environment.

Loading madwifi-tools did not do the trick for this odd atheros card, which left the option of either using ndiswrapper (a truly desperate last resort) or compiling the ath_hal from source (if such a thing is possible). No doubt that if given enough effort, Kanotix 2007 could get wireless and run very nicely on this little laptop, but at this point just not an option, as I use this computer just about every day, and having it out of commission as I struggle to get wireless was not a choice on offer.

And why not LinuxMint 4.0 (beta) ‘Daryna’? Well, a couple of reasons–first, it is the GNOME version, and second, it would be a very large install, likely to rival that of Xandros. When the KDE version of ‘Daryna’ comes out, I will be sure to revisit it, and then mull over putting it on the SSD for day to day use. This is not a good distro-hoppers test machine, largely due to the speed of the SSD and the CPU; it’s pretty much a one distro machine, and choosing that one distro has to be done with a certain amount of deliberation.

One final aside on installing the two distros to this machine–it was crazily fun to see the Beryl effects of Kanotix, mini spinning 3D cube and expose features. The graphics card can handle those (and others, perhaps even compiz fusion) with no problem.

As I had to do all this in a single session, and then decide to either keep one or go back to Xandros, I finally opted for reinstalling the Xandros and then restoring it to its English menus state (thanks CheeseMP!) for the next day’s use. This process took less than five minutes, and offered not only the lovely Xandros EULA, but a chance to finally personalize it with a user name and a password without hunting through the various menus on the machine after the fact. Hang on to that restore DVD, for if you screw up, reinstallation is just a couple of minutes away.

More (surely) to come as the Debian experts on the eeeuser forums come up with a pared down version that can handle all the various hardware devices in less space than the odious (but effective) Xandros install. Stay tuned.

Big Doings

With the little computer, the 3ePC; you can find out more here. The forums are very busy now, and my lack of posts here is due to activity there. Just trying to find the best Linux distribution to replace Xandros; have been on a whirlwind inspection of all the light (and not so light) distros to see which is the best fit for this little beast. Thus far, only three (out of nearly twenty) can even get ethernet, and only one can get wireless–keep in mind that this is via the liveCD, and not fiddling with ndiswrapper or compiling stuff into the system.

The reason for the caution is that wireless and the rest currently work flawlessly, and replacing the system might mean losing that–the advantage of such a small, portable system is the ability to connect anywhere effortlessly, and the ndis-kludge is certainly not that. To date, only Kubuntu 7.10, Kanotix 2007 Thorhammer RC, and LinuxMint 4.0 ‘Daryna’ (beta) can get ethernet–the Mint is alone in being able to not only get wireless, but have the proper (strange) screen resolution–800×480–out of the box. As Mint is based on Gutsy Gibbon, I fear it will be a bit on the large size when it comes to actually installing it, thus my preference for something like the latest release from Fluxbuntu (7.10), which weighs in at a scant 1.3 GB, half of the Xandros (ugh) current install. More as events develop, as well as some reviews of LinuxMint 4.0, Kanotix 2007, and Fluxbuntu 7.10.