The website of Tate Johnson
"Welcome to tatey.com, the transmission belt for my random (and sometimes communist) propaganda. Please, grab a beer and poke around, you may even find something interesting – Cheers, Tate"
People often recognise me as the guy who uses Gentoo. Yes, I’m a strong advocate for Gentoo and support everything that it stands for. Gentoo empowers the user with complete control over their system. It’s almost like a LFS install except with package management. Portage is one powerful piece of software, and with it’s respective use flags, the possibilities are endless. Everything about Gentoo is customizable, you can configure, alter, change and edit practically anything you want. Other distributions include support for Xinerama in their applications, DE’s and WM’s. What if the user only has a single monitor? Why would they require Xinerama support? Obviously, the user wouldn’t. Therefore with a correctly configured Gentoo box, one may ultimately end up with a much leaner OS. This is probably where the perception that Gentoo is “faster” is derived from.
I’ve learnt a great deal of my linux knowledge from Gentoo, and I’m thankful to the distribution for that. However, as I progress through University and other social aspects in my life, I am finding less and less free time. Gentoo’s configurability is ultimately it’s demise (In relation to myself). I require a distribution that works “out of the box”. The problem with this, is a lot of “out of the box” distributions are limited by their flexibilty. Fedora, SuSe and Mandriva are all victims of this.
In recent years, a new distribution sprouted from practically nowhere and has received much attention as of late. I could never understand why as I was under the impression it was simply a newbie’s distribution based on Debian. I guess, in a nutshell that’s true. However, my curiosity for Ubuntu eventually drove me to give it a try. The current release at the time was 4.10 codenamed “Warty Warthog”. Rather bias towards Gentoo and close minded, I installed Ubuntu and was ultimately unimpressed. I didn’t feel comfortable because I didn’t understand the inner-workings of the distribution. More importantly, the lack of root account threw me completely off. I understood sudo and it’s principles but I loved root too much. Typing sudo before each command was rather annoying.
Eventually, my mother bought a computer. It came with MS Windows 98se and she said that it needed to be formatted. My first thought was to format it anyway, since there is no knowing what the previous user(s) had done with the box. I had every intention of purchasing MS Windows XP and installing it on her computer. However, the hefty licence fee made me reconsider my options. It then occurred to me why not use Linux? Realistically, my mother purchased the computer to send emails and browser the web. Why does she need Windows for this? Why does *anyone* need Windows for this? Rather than take the MS Proprietary route, I opted for Fedora Core 4. Ashley Kyd suggested that Ubuntu may be more appropriate. This time round, I had Ubuntu 5.10 codenamed “Breezy Badger”. The experience for my mother was a success. She quickly picked up everything and now uses a completely Free OS on her computer that she can copy pictures to, listen to music, chat on MSN and most importantly send emails. More importantly, I don’t have to worry about virii or spyware and those applications slowing her already slow computer down (P3 866, 256MB Ram)
At the same time, I was currently using MS Windows XP on my desktop. I’m a PC gamer, and I don’t have the time to configure Gentoo as much as I liked. However, after a few months of having the install on my computer it’s starting to degrade. Just as all Windows install eventually do. Seriously reconsidering my options I thought I’d give Ubuntu a try. In my honest opinion, Ubuntu is a cross between a user-friendly newbie distribution that is still flexible enough for power users such as myself to tweak. I’m not afraid of the CLI and I’m quite competent using it. I don’t mind compiling packages from source, since I’ve been doing it with Gentoo for years. Gnome dual-monitors support is fantastic and Adobe Photoshop 7 is running beautifully under WINE. The desktop is feels so stable, and fast. In addition, the fonts are rendered perfectly. I don’t understand why Gentoo fonts are poor when compared to Ubuntu. I assume that Ubuntu dev’s are using a significant amount of tweaks. I’m a fan of the MS Cleartype technology and Ubuntu fonts are *so* close I can barely tell the difference. Of course, I still keep Windows XP installed on a separate HDD for gaming and a big FAT32 partition in the event that I ever need to swap files between both Operating Systems.
Ultimately, my Ubuntu experience has been a positive one and I have no trouble recommending it to my mates and people I come across in day-to-day life. In contrast, this page is still being served off Zingers, my Gentoo powered Web Server and that is unlikely to change. I still *love* Gentoo too much to just completely be away with it. Everything is setup nicely and why break something that works? That said, the HTPC has been having issues lately and I’m seriously considering installing Ubuntu on that. Purely because of it’s great Multimedia support out of the box. I will keep you informed.
UPDATE [06-06-06]: Fujitsu (A participant and organiser of the Ubuntu-AU group) pointed out a valid contradiction in the above post. That is, I expressed that Gentoo would remain on Zingers indefinitely. Admittedly, I took the opportunity to explore alternative flavours of linux, specifically Arch and Ubuntu over the previous Summer holidays. In my most recent post, I have stated that Zingers is now powered by Ubuntu in addition to my justification for switching distributions in the first place. Please understand that after gaining experience and understand of several other distributions that I feel Ubuntu has been the appropriate [and good] choice for Zingers, at least for the next five years. In contrast, I’ve settled for Arch linux on my desktop. Arch would not make an ideal server for the same reasons that Gentoo doesn’t. I hope that this small update will correct any misconceptions.
March 7th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
That’s good to hear, Tate.
But unless you can tell me what the following command does, you aren’t leet:
[code]
#!/bin/bash
less /etc/passwd | grep student | cut -d : -f 3
[/code]
March 7th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
Seriously though, I have used Ubuntu and it is quite a good operating system. I don’t know what Desktop/WM it uses, but it still doesn’t seem quite as polished as Windows XP does.
I have a feeling that FC5t3 uses the same Desktop/WM as Ubuntu (is it GNOME?), and it feels the same.
What I don’t like about either of them is that it seems like not all clicks are caught properly, ie, clicking on the toolbar of a window to drag it elsewhere doesn’t always work, and clicking right on the edge of a toolbar to resize the window doesn’t always work, and clicking on the Applications menu and quickly scrolling through it seems a bit slow and unwieldy…
It’s just small annoyances like that which make me feel like it’s just not there yet…
P.S. What does this do?
[code]
#!/bin/bash
head -n 1 /etc/passwd
tail -n 2 /etc/passwd
wc -l /etc/passwd
[/code]
(yes I realise now those tags don’t work, it just looks neater nestled in-between them somehow)
March 7th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
P.S. Your htpc anchor is a relative url when it should be absolute.
eg if I click on it now it tries to take me to
http://www.tatey.com/articles/2006/03/07/the-migration-to-breezy-badger/htpc.php
instead of
http://www.tatey.com/htpc
like it’s supposed to.
(apologies for the multiple comments, you really should enable user rego so we can edit them)
March 7th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
If you want to be politically correct, Ubuntu uses a Desktop Environment called Gnome. Metacity is the Gnome WM. A WM is simply that, it manages your windows. Fluxbox, Openbox and Kwin are WM’s where as Gnome, KDE and XFCE are DE’s. DE’s contain fully integrated applications to provide a more “polished” feel, like that of Mac OS X and Windows. I’m not sure what version of Ubuntu you tried, but it has drastically improved in 5.10 (Breezy Badger) and the next one is set to debute on the 20th of March in sequence with the Gnome release a few days earlier. You can read additional features of Gnome 2.14 here.
In response to your clicking and so forth, I really don’t understand what you mean. What you’ve described functions perfectly for me, and I haven’t experienced any issues.
The head program will output the first part of a file, in your case the first line. Tail is the opposite, outputting the end of the file, in your case the last two lines.
I’ve never used WC before, though the manpage says it prints the number of newlines, words and bytes in a file. According to the “l” option, it will print the newline counts.
March 7th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
My experiences with GNOME come directly from using the FC5t3 systems at uni today.
I’ll try to give a little more detail. Basically, occasionally when I quickly (in one swift motion) clicked on a menu title bar, held the mouse button down, and began to drag, the window wasn’t ‘caught’ by the pointer, and wasn’t dragged anywhere.
Likewise with the window resizing; if in one fell swoop I moved the pointer, clicked while moving the pointer onto the edge of the window, and began to drag it … it occasionally wouldn’t catch, and I’d be left just clicking and dragging for no reason.
Basically, it’s as though the software behind such functions doesn’t calculate the cursor position in relation to the window positions fast enough to keep up with what I am doing… that’s probably totally incorrect, but that’s what it feels like.
Now that I think about it, it actually reminds me of the Win9x series GUI’s — they sometimes didn’t ‘catch’ what you were doing, and the Start menu was prone to getting confused when you tried to navigate ‘too quickly’ through the menus.
March 7th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
You are able to register, click here.
I also fixed the relative URL to an absolute one, that will resolve the issues you were experiencing. Thanks for pointing it out :).
Again, in reference to your comment, I don’t believe I’ve ever tried to move the cursor relatively fast and grab the window to resize it. As soon as the cursor changes to the “resize window” one, the window then resizes. I also moved quickly through the Menu and again, it all loads fine. Hmmm… I’m not sure to be honest.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
I guess my methods of interacting with the GUI are “Windows-specific”; my mouse movements, click timings and co-ordinate recognition systems are incompatible with open-source software.
It’s a shame really.
March 8th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
You should considering trying KDE. There is much choice in the Opensource community and you might find that suits you better. There are pro’s and con’s for each DE/WM. The reason I’d avoid a WM, especially if you’re coming from a Windows background is the lack of integration which might make you feel uncomfortable. I too, prefer a DE over a WM. It’s really personal preferance and that’s what Linux is all about.
March 11th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
Although I used Suse before, and KDE on that and I promoted it amongst my friends and thus to you too, I’m quite happy for you and somewhat surprised you moved to predominately Ubuntu as your main desktop OS.
Sorry I have sort of dropped-out-of-the-loop. After I switched to Ubuntu and GNOME I got a lot more involved with the project and since haven’t had nearly as much time to work and catch up with people as I had and sort of would want to afore.
Cheers mate,
Pascal
March 12th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
I’m a strong advocate for straight
March 13th, 2006 at 2:34 am
Too bad you’re gay
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:14 am
user. gamer. lamer.
Learn BSD.
P.S.: Though I agree with you that Ubuntu is *by-far* the best choice for newbies. But, as you learn Linux you should probably move towards Slackware, and then, eventually, you will know enough to see why BSD kicks Linux’s ass.
May 31st, 2006 at 9:41 pm
I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to notice your comment. I have previously dabbled with BSD, but to be honest I wasn’t that impressed. Admittedly, I’m not exactly sure what I was doing or trying to achieve. I’ve since moved to Arch Linux, where I feel at home. That said, I have intentions to further expirement with BSD in the future.