A couple of months ago, one of my clients asked me why I liked Linux so much. We discussed things we liked and disliked about various operating systems. This was no clueless user, but she was searching the options for finding something that was less work than XP. She knew enough to realize it was never going to be pain free, but she was unhappy with the constant hassles. I’m not a salesman, and she didn’t come to any particular conclusions, but the conversation got me thinking.
First, it got me wondering if there was a way to make Linux easier for people who didn’t love computers, just wanted to use one. Over the past month I took a grand tour reviewing the distros and alternatives, and ran through a fresh sampling of several. The whole point of the review was how well I believed I could make Linux easier for non-hobby users. My current conclusion is the result of messing about with Debian Lenny and Etch, openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1, CentOS 5, FreeBSD 6 and 7, several of the *buntus, etc. Having two harddrives makes it possible to remain sane and keep track of my other work on one drive while horsing around on the other.
Second, I found I could easily tie myself to a project like that and neglect my own personal preference. What I like for myself is not something I can recommend to average non-techie users. I admit I’ve gotten really tired of rolling release as well as any other system which requires I keep moving to newer stuff, even if it’s only yearly. Most of my clients would hate that vehemently, but I simply weary of it. I don’t have any problems with complicated configuration, but if there’s a wizard to do it for me, why not take advantage of it? For my clients, wizards would be obligatory, but for me it’s okay if I have ways to work around it. For example, during my OS wandering, I used SUSE’s SaX to create a really detailed and near-perfect xorg.conf. It was good enough I recycled it when the distro (or BSD) in question didn’t do such a good job. It made a huge difference, and I wonder why more distros and BSDs don’t simply appropriate SaX for themselves, or create something similar. Politics, I’m sure, but while I readily permit Boycott Novell to link to my blog, it’s not out of any sympathy for their cause. My dislike for MS, and large corporations in general, does not extend to boycotts on principle if any of them offer something I can use without hurting myself. You have your principles, and mine are likely way-out-there compared to yours.
So while I’m keeping CentOS 5 on one harddrive, in order to support the project of creating a more non-techie friendly Linux meta-distro, it’s not what I really want to use for myself. I’ve always liked SUSE, regardless who owned it, but lately things aren’t going that well with SUSE on my hardware. I’m also not happy with certain package decisions, and it doesn’t help I find KDE 4 utterly repugnant. I actually prefer 3.x, and will encourage you to snicker or frown, or whatever else you might do to express your disagreement. Since SUSE leaves so many parts of KDE 3 broken, I’ll just take advantage of the SaX product and use it elsewhere. That “elsewhere” is running Debian Lenny for AMD64 on the primary harddrive.
My disparaging comments about Lenny 64 were in the context of what I could offer my clients. They would never have a clue how to develop a fully functional xorg.conf. Unless it just so happened their combination of hardware was readily recognized by Xorg itself, they would revolt. Worse, they would have no idea how to search for and select the standard complement of multimedia packages, completely at a loss to pick through the all-too-generous inclusion of just about any Open Source software made by anyone anywhere. I still say having no default firewall configuration (such as SUSE and RHEL have) is a mistake, even as an option you can refuse. However, since no one has run into serious trouble with it, and complaints aren’t that loud, I don’t expect the Debian folks to change on that issue. It’s not enough to drive me away from running Debian.
The installation narrative follows.
I used the most recent ISO for Lenny’s KDE Installer CD. With my archived SaX-made xorg.conf it was necessary to change the FontPath statements to match Debian’s locations. I made sure none of the lines had that ancient “unscaled” tag, and put the 100dpi fonts before the 75dpi, simply because I’m using a large CRT. Most of the rest was copied wholesale, to preserve the full set of IDs for various sections in the final ServerLayout. Here is the relevant section for my Dell P-1230:
Section "Monitor" Option "CalcAlgorithm" "XServerPool" DisplaySize 404 303 HorizSync 30-130 Identifier "Monitor[0]" ModelName "P1230" Option "DPMS" Option "PreferredMode" "1600x1200" VendorName "DELL" VertRefresh 50-160 UseModes "Modes[0]" EndSection
A critical element for font display is the DisplaySize line. Those are very close to the physical dimensions of my screen, and offer a perfect 4/3 ratio, so I end up with 100dpi as the hardware resolution without any other tweaking. I find generally nailing down as many variables as possible prevents unexpected behavior in the X server, so I included the nit-picking mouse and keyboard definitions, etc. Once I had this configuration in place, I restarted X and was rewarded with an excellent display. In particular, I note favoring 100dpi fonts on larger display resolutions produces a lot less fuzziness whether you choose TTFs or bitmapped fonts. I also made sure to run dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config, selecting to enable bitmapped fonts, since I prefer Misc-Fixed in Konsole.
As you might expect, I added a few repositories to my sources.list because I know what I like:
deb http://mirror.anl.gov/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free deb-src http://mirror.anl.gov/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free deb http://debian-multimedia.informatik.uni-erlangen.de lenny main deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ lenny non-free
This allowed me to add easily the NVIDIA drivers, Gspca for my webcam, and includes:
- Lyx
- Cream/Vim
- Opera
- Xine
- w64codecs
- Timidity
- IcedTea Plugin
- ffmpeg
- libdvdcss
I removed the swfdec because I have the Flash 10 beta for 64-bit in my ~/.mozilla/plugins and it works fine in Opera.
However, that’s only because my religion work includes dealing with a lot of videos online, and a few sites I visit require a graphical browser. For document rendering into plain text, nothing beats the Gecko engine, but it won’t work with the Flash beta. I’m pretty selective about which browser I use for the broad collection of sites I visit, and none of them do it all for me. Most of the time, for simple surfing and reading, I use Elinks. While it’s available in the repositories, I find the latest 0.12pre2 a significant improvement over previous versions because the developers have finally gotten rid of the ghost text effect which plagued my use of it in the past. I compiled that from source, making sure I had the development packages for SpiderMonkey, among others.
For email, I’m currently using Opera, but I’d much rather use Fetchmail, Postfix and Alpine. However, in this day when some 90% of all Net traffic is spam email, I understand the limitations which makes all the servers treat my internal mail server as a potential spam source and block me based on my IP address, which arises out of the AT&T home DSL pool. For now, I’m forced to use a client connecting directly to my remote mail server, and Mutt and Alpine both make that entirely too complicated. Yes, I’ve used Thunderbird, Kmail, Evolution and Claws. In the balance of evaluating the relative merits of each against the sometimes unreasonable preferences we all have, I’m finding Opera is the most tolerable for the way I like to work.
For no other reason than I like it that way, I’m sticking with the “pure 64-bit” theme. If everything we did made perfect sense, we’d be less than human. Despite reasonable arguments from Thomas Vander Stichele to the contrary, I still prefer 64-bit audio and video, and I’ve not found anything to compare with Xine. I make sure KDE calls that first on just about everything it knows how to play. It works the way I do for such things.
It bears mentioning here again: For the Logitech QuickCam Messanger which uses the Gspca5 driver, there is a conflict during the modprobe process. The system attempts to load the webcam as the default audio device, simply because it includes a microphone. The simplest way to prevent this is add one line at the end of your /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base: options snd-usb-audio index=-2. This causes the webcam driver to load after the sound driver for my onboard MCP61 High Definition Audio is loaded and running.
I won’t pretend this makes any sense to most Linux fans, and Debian fans in particular. However, I think we can agree freedom is a good thing.
