rohitj's domain

So, one of the reasons why I use ubuntu and not debian is that I want relatively new softwares. But ubuntu’s release period is really irritating now. They release a new version in every 6 months. Of course, nothing major changes this short duration. So, all they do is mainly add new release of KDE or gnome, thats it. Basically in ubuntu upgrade is practically equal to a decent size update. Now, there is nothing wrong is releasing new releases every six months, the problem is that those new softwares are not supported in previous release. For example, Jaunty has KDE4.2. But Intrepid will not have 4.2. Just because KDE updated, and because I want to use KDE4.2, I have to upgrade (or I have to use unsupported KDE, which I want to avoid, for obvious reasons). I wonder how big an issue it would be for system administrators. This is getting irritating. The definition of upgrade and update is totally screwed for Ubuntu.
The only decent difference as I see between Jaunty and Intrepid is KDE version, couldn’t they just give an update for KDE. I believe same goes with gnome.

Now then summer is coming, I think I will again be exploring various distros. Any suggestions?

Update : Oh, the issue with upgrading is that there are chances of things breaking. For example, when I upgraded to Jaunty, my knetworkmanager was gone. So, I had to use LAN and install it. fglrx drivers are not installed. And stuff like that.

I went to a group meeting. Usually, my laptop is not used for projector. But since, everyone else had mac, and they didn’t have the connector, I had to use my laptop. I had to restart X to get the projector working. Now, my default my KDE starts kopete, firefox, kontact, amarok, skype, plasma. The worst is plasma, skype and kopete. Plasma because I have this photobox on my desktop which shows pictures. Now, there is no objectional photo being displayed, but I still want to avoid showing that in public, because they are a little private. Skype because it doesn’t start in minimized mode. Kopete because it starts showing offline messages. Also, the sound. Now when I am in a group meeting, I want my desktop to be a little formal. I don’t want all this on startup. But when I am using it for normal purpose, I want all these things. So, here is the wishlist. Is it possible that on start, I could have an option to start the Window Manager in a formal mode, or unformal mode. Like I have an option to select between gnome and kde on start. I strongly believe that its a really important feature, and it should be available. Since I use mostly KDE applications, I believe KDE framework should have such facility. It will also be easier that way.

2007 was overall good. I got to learn lots of things, and got to do lots of things. Got to talk to lot of cool people. Though I wouldn’t forget that it also brought 7th semester which was like the most difficult semester I ever had. This semester probably took my anxiety level to top. Some of the highlights of 2007 are below:

1. Got a job at Microsoft, India. I am excited about it.
2. Got involved into Free Culture activities.
3. Shifted 99% to open source softwares. (flash )
4. Shifted 100% to free songs. (though, this is true.)
5. Shifted to wonderful KDE. I will write an entry for it.
6. No more Gentoo, it takes time. Ubuntu on other hand is wonderful. (Apologies to all those who are on Gentoo or are thinking of shifting to Gentoo because I asked them to do so. )
7. Hiking
8. Another hobby now is Photography …. need money to buy DSLR.
9. Bought a new web space to play with different things. Its been wonderful till now.
10. Zeropage removed restrictions from their songs.
11. Kelly Allyn sent me her autograph, need to go home to get it.
12. Met some wonderful people during internship at Virginia Tech.
13. <compressed because its personal>

Hopes from 2008 :

1. Grad School or a good job (or a startup?)
2. DSLR
3. Free Culture Club at IITK
4. Passing IITK
5. openmoko / android
6. make IITK music club release an album under CC ( www.tempostand.com should help us)
7. Finish talk with Vox Populi guys

I have been thinking about business models for open source softwares. Though I couldn’t come up with proper answer. Lets see, let me try to start with different software people make and use.

Office : No doubt it needs very big amount of work. And if someone puts this much effort to make an Office package, why will he give it away for free? Of course not, it doesn’t make sense. Probably thats the reason why we do not have any open-source Office software. And surely Microsoft Office is way too good. OOo is dumped for long time now.

Matlab, Visual Studio etc : Again it requires big amount of investment and hard work. No reason one should give it away for free. Though yeah Eclipse is there. And I must say that it is very good. But isn’t it a way in which IBM is earning publicity? And isn’t it same with netbeans as well.

Computer Games : Again too much work and proficiency.

Operating System : Again, do you think open source can help make an Operating System any better? Oh yeah, bug fixing.. probably yes, but without incentive why will someone do quality work? Every second day one thing or another is broken. But yeah surely, like Redhat is doing, good things are possible with it, specially for server side technologies.

Other Desktop Applications :  Amarok, they are fighting to get funds… Is there any good voice chat client? Ekiga? does support proxy. Skype? no more an open source project. Gaim? not yet. Now don’t say that they are fighting in reverse engineering and other bullshit. Firefox? don’t you know that people start with Firefox but do not stick to it for long time. Thats a popular observation, isn’t it. Evolution? I wish they come up with something good. Though I guess they are also having problems (because of open source nature? I guess yes.)

I am not saying that open source is right or wrong. But at the end of the day, what a user wants is good software, softwares in which he need not be a geek to solve the problem. And surely as of now, I do not see open source work to give any good  reply to this need. You may say that Gutsy is a solution, or fedora 8 is awesome, and these distros solves most of the problems. But don’t you think you have been giving these arguments for last 20 years? When fedora 5 came, everyone said the same. When fedora 6 came same. And same goes with Ubuntu.

-by guest blogger nareshov

Let’s begin then:

Let’s see, I’ve been asked to post here by rohitj on some sort of Fedora vs. Ubuntu. (He was more interested in “Fedora sucks” than “Ubuntu rocks” ).

I have my own experiences with these distros ever since the FC3 days (and then Ubuntu 5.04). I’ve had n00bs having trouble with the default SELinux settings in Fedora given the LAN environment in IITK. Hunting for everyday requirements such as Valknut (those days, we didn’t have linuxdcpp). This repo and that repo and more. The troubles people had with not having mp3 support out of the box in either of these distros.

I hate hunting 3rd party repos and installing nvidia drivers only to experience strange lockups or X crashes. Many of us have had bad experiences with nvidia and deb-distros. Freezes and Crashes were common (not sure now, with gutsy things might’ve changed).

Ubuntu has seen a lot of improvements since Breezy. Trying to adjust time+date asks you to install NTP support if you choose to use a time-server. Ubuntu asks you to install either NFS or Samba if you try to share a folder. Totem calls synaptic to install gstreamer-plugins-{ugly|bad} when needed. I’m not aware if Fedora does the same. They probably do. While Shuttleworth still insists on a brown+orange mixture in the default appearance of the desktop, Fedora has been playing around with their blues ever since the Bluecurves in RedHat9.

Here in India, the “old” linux junta is primarily a RedHat fanbase. Ever since Ubuntu started sending CDs for free, we see things changing. Many who have a lot of faith in RedHat (for good reasons) use Fedora, only to realise that it’s more of a community playground for the RedHat folks to experiment on. I’m not really sure why SuSE wasn’t very popular until Novell showed up in Bangalore.

More? When I do an aptitude install mysql-server , Debian would ask me to set the root password for the server and start the service. Now, yesterday RohitJ had trouble even starting the service and didn’t know the default root server (Probably had none). I can understand Gentoo not setting a default root passwd and not starting the service for you, but Fedora?

Another point of dissatisfaction being the GUI Server administrative tools in Fedora. Boy do they suck donkey balls. I don’t even have to describe what we went through a year ago in that hurry.

Gutsy is here btw, I can see the Indian Ubuntu servers go slow with the rush as I write. Ubuntu has a decent Compiz-fusion set up that hasn’t crashed on me so far – been two days roughly. It also has a n00b-friendly restricted drivers manager. All this cuts trouble and time-expenditure, you know? Ubuntu even understands that when I do an aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree on an amd64 machine it first gets nsplugin-wrapper and then downloads the flashplugin from Adobe’s mirrors and voila! Your 64-bit firefox can play videos on Youtube. I seriously doubt if Fedora can do this (comments please).

What else? Ah yes, good things Fedora has done recently is to stop messing around with the upstream Gnome default layout and combining /core and /extras. But Livna et al still exist >_>.

Look at Debian or Gentoo, it’s all there in one place. *Most* of it at least, compared to the rest – Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva where you _have_ to depend on third party repositories for some software which might not be popular in the US but very popular in Russia or India (DC++ !). Come on!

Well, guess I’ll drop by when the comments are pouring in

mm, I want my Gentoo back. This is a funny article which says who uses what linux distro.

http://www.askreamaor.com/linux-and-unix/what-your-linux-distro-says-about-you/

So, what does your linux distro say about you?

So, these guys they have collected some logos of some free softwares. Checkout http://raro.oreto.inf-cr.uclm.es/apps/stickers/ . It’s a cool collection. Right now, on my laptop I have got 5 stickers.

1. Some warning label.
2. Laptop Hardware Config.
3. Graphics by ATI
4. Intel Inside
5. Designed for MS Windows XP

Of course the fifth one makes my laptop look dirty. . I want to remove it, but I am afraid my laptop’s beauty will go down with the mark that this sticker will leave. But these guys have given ‘us’ a solution. We plan to get these stickers printed. And then we will be able to remove the existing stickers and place these free software stickers on  the same place. It will be so cool.

Those who want such stickers, leave a comment here. And wait for some time. ( Search for a press is going)

So, after having some problems with installation of Gentoo, I was thinking of installing something else. It was very bad that I couldn’t install Gentoo for some bugs that I couldn’t fix. I waited for long time, asked experts for this bug, no one could solve the problem. I finally installed Fedora 7. Yeah, I know I have been supporting Ubuntu, and still I installed Fedora. The reason being that one friend asked me to try it again. Don’t forget, my linux life started with Fedora Core 4, 2 year go. I kinda thought that I should try it again. The main reason of my separation from Fedora is that Fedora is backed by an enterprise and it releases its new versions so frequently. But his point was good enough. Fedora separates non-free softwares from free softwares. Thats a good thing, I think. Rather Gentoo and Ubuntu should start doing that. I was on ubuntu for just 1 week. Though I was feeded a lot that Ubuntu is better. I will give Ubuntu another shot and then will compare things. I still think that if I leave apart this non-free, free software repositories stuff, Ubuntu is better. At least it claims straight forward that it will remain free. Anyways, I used Gentoo for like 1 year. It felt good that lots of things were under my control. I am not linux developer or debugger, but still Gentoo gives me so many controls. I liked that.

Fedora after Gentoo surely makes me feel dumb. Its obvious, right? You have so less controls and so many things that you don’t want. You know that things are not good with your computer, but you don’t want to do anything because you are afraid of compile time of Gentoo. Though I think it’s better. Gentoo was big addiction. I agree Linux is addiction, but Gentoo is a step forward. I have less things to do with Fedora, its good because now I can spend time in creative works. . I remember that I used to spend a lot of time in compilations and searching for solution of bugs in Gentoo. But, of course I will shift to Gentoo sooner or later. Though I am afraid of future of Gentoo. Main developers of Gentoo are going away from Gentoo. And those who are in have lots of internal fights. I hope they will unite soon.

Another friend of mine tried Debian. He liked it. But, I am sure I am not trying that for next 1 year at least. So, main competitors for me are Ubuntu, Gentoo and Fedora. Lets wait for another 2 weeks, then I will tell you where I am. In a week or 2 CFS will come on Gentoo. Then I will try Gentoo, before that I will try Ubuntu.