Big Fat Ostrich

I’m officially finished messing around with operating systems for awhile, and I’m officially done with Arch Linux. I re-installed my office machine with Arch Linux a while back, and it was a great experience. Except for one thing. It sucked.

Seriously, if it wasn’t for the one tiny detail of Arch Linux sucking, it would have been awesome.

To be fair, I didn’t try hard enough. But, I just want an OS that works. Arch Linux is a great OS for performance nerds, like Gentoo fans who enjoy compiling every module for days. In my own experience, this is a fun way to really get to know Linux. However, those days are behind me and I just want an OS that works.

Arch Linux is so light and fast, but it’s also a desolate place where nothing lives but the core OS. You have to install every package manually and when I found that even the fucking calculator had to be installed (as part of gnome-extra) well, that was the last straw.

So I made an executive decision and did something I haven’t done in years.

I installed Fedora. Fedora 16.

Why? Two reasons. For one, most of our software runs on Redhat and Fedora is in the same family. Second, I use dual monitors and Ubuntu has become a complete idiot when it comes to managing that.

Well so far so good because Fedora 16 (Verne) works right out of the box. Yep. Everything works: external monitors (both of them) work which includes flipping them vertically or horizontally without having to mess around with your xorg.conf. No wireless issues, and the clean install is fast and snappy. Overall, Fedora 16 is a huge improvement over whatever Fedora I used in the past (like 2008). Even YUM feels better and package management seems tighter.

So for now I’m just going to use it as a regular desktop and see if any issues come up. I really have nothing else to say about it right now because I’m still blown away by the fact that the whole installation was complete and working in under 20 minutes. Also, xfce is light and clean. Had to install the ms-fonts after the fact, but no big deal.

Here’s the default desktop. Looking kinda Steampunk:

So I finally installed the ever popular Linux Mint 12 aka Lisa. The last time I tried Linux Mint was version 3.0 (Cassandra), which was back in 2007 (eons ago in Internet time). Back then, Linux Mint was a little shaky and one horribly broken  upgrade had me reverting back to Ubuntu.

Well, alot has changed since then and Linux Mint 12 appears very solid!

Instead of wiping my recent installation of Ubuntu 11.10 (even though I kind of want to), I installed Linux Mint as a virtual machine in VirtualBox. There’s not much to say about it except that the installation was hassle free. Typical installation, where you hit next a bunch of times. You can choose the advanced options of course, but we’re really trying out Mint for its simplicity.

Linux Mint is a Debian based distro, so like Ubuntu, apt-get is your package manager, and best friend. After using Arch Linux on my other machine for awhile, I have to say that apt-get is still the best. Pacman is fine, just a little too manual.

New features in Linux Mint 12 include Gnome 3 and MGSE aka Mint Shell Gnome Extensions which gives the desktop a super slick look. We used to make fun of Mint and call it Lounge Linux because of it’s pseudo-stylish look, but it really does look good. And the whole feel is just fast and snappy. There’s also MATE, which is a fork of Gnome 2. However, the dudes at Linux Mint central say that it’s not 100% stable yet so I’m not going to get into that now.

Overall the whole thing feels fast, and I’m running it on a mere 512M of RAM. I should say that I initially tried to install Mint using a bare minimum of 256M and that caused the installation to crash. I know. What was I thinking?

There are also tons of visual improvements, slick wallpapers, and MGSE doesn’t have the convoluted look of Unity. Unity feels like it’s there to confuse you. MGSE and Mint just feel better. Like you can just start using the OS without having to play scavenger hunt for all your apps. And it’s all running on the new 3.0 kernel.

Last new thing: I was surprised to see that Linux Mint is using Duck Duck Go as its default search engine. Yep. Where every other OS just assumes that you’re going to want to use Google, in Mint it’s Duck Duck Go. But don’t worry: you can use Google too if you want.

Aside from the weird name, Duck Duck Go is a really great search engine. I think many of us have gotten to a point where we use Google out of habit. Back in the old prospector days of the internet, we used to use multiple search engine all the time because no single search engine had all the results we wanted. Then Google changed all that by becoming so great. However, Duck Duck Go is very good and much cleaner than Google at this point. One of its best features is that its results act like a dynamic feed, so all you have to do is keep scrolling down the page for more results, kind of like Twitter does. With Google, you still have to click next page, next page, next page, etc. Which is so 3 years ago.

Duck Duck Go also has a strict privacy policy where they state that they do not collect any personal information.

All that to say, give Duck Duck Go a try. I’m challenging myself to use it for a week even if I’m having trouble getting used to looking at that bow tie wearing duck. And the name. Again: What is with people using animals in names for software and websites? Yeah, I’m looking at you, IPchicken.

One last thing! If you want a clue about how amazing Linux Mint 12 is, do a Google search for something like Linux Mint 12 Issues or Problems with Linux Mint 12. The results of my searches were mainly Linux Mint reviews, and for the most part, positive ones. The issues that people have been having have been minor so far, which is a good sign.

Ok, I need to go so let’s end this thing: Linux Mint 12 looks and feels great. Try it and adopt it.

Continuing with the joy that is Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and how it completely messed up my previously working wireless, here’s a solution. Note that I’m currently using a Dell Core i3 Inspiron using the following Broadcom network adapter:

Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4353]

You can run lspci -nvn | grep -i net from a shell console if you want to find out which card your machine uses.

Anyway, long story short, you may need to remove the wrong drivers and install the correct ones. This solution worked but may not work for everyone depending on your hardware:

Remove and uninstall the drivers:

sudo apt-get purge broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-source bcmwl-kernel-source

Install the correct one:

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer

Enjoy and let us know if this solution worked for you. Found a different solution? Tell us about it!

I don’t know how it happened, but I got totally obsessed with fonts and typesetting this weekend. There I was, writing some documentation, when I remembered the LaTex system of formatting text. Back in college, I was completely confused by LaTex because the whole idea seemed more like a concept than anything.

Now that I’m all grown up, I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND A DAMN THING ABOUT IT.

So I installed the whole package on my Ubuntu machine like so. Just to see what would happen:

sudo apt-get install texlive-metapost

Yep, after letting that command rip, 209M of vague and obscure packages are now installed on my system, and you know what? It made absolutely no difference in my life, or yours. I will still be writing the same documents, without the benefit of TeX or Metafont(s)??. Yep. With TeX installed, preparing documents has never been more like it ever was. At least for me.

But man, there were a lot of packages. The Metapost and Metafont drawing packages in particular, are extensive.

For example, there’s:

metauml, which is a MetaPost typesetting library for UML diagrams.
mp3d, for 3D animations.
piechartmp, which uses MetaPost to draw pie-charts. And everybody likes pie.
garrigues: These are MetaPost macros to reproduce Garrigues’ Easter nomogram. I was actually really happy about this one, cause like, you know, Garrigues!
bbcard: Bullshit bingo, calendar and baseball-score cards.

I kid you not. That was a direct quote from the package listing. Does anyone remember Bullshit Bingo? This isn’t like your traditional bingo. Bullshit Bingo is also referred to as Buzzword Bingo, which is a game that fellow colleagues used to (maybe still do) play at insufferable meetings. This is how you play: You make up a bingo style card. Populate it with buzzwords and catchphrases. Then, you check them off as the words are spoken by the buzzword spewing buffoon, aka, the meeting presenter/your boss/a colleague/Al Gore.

So now that I’ve gone through the exercise of installing TeXlive, here’s how to remove it:

sudo apt-get remove texlive-metapost –purge

And that’s how you use LaTex.

Speaking of being on the bleeding edge of technology, a recent update/upgrade of my Debian server revealed a bug with man-db. Yes. man-db. Out of all places it could have happened, it happened here. It’s shameful!

After upgrading, you might see mandb taking up 100% of your cpu. And not only that, the upgrade is likely to hang on it.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

2653 811 man 20 0 21500 1256 488 R 100 0.1 154:39.62 mandb

This was found in man-db version 2.5.6-4 but it’s already been fixed. You’ll just have to do an apt-get update followed by an apt-get upgrade. After that you should have man-db version 2.5.6-5

You can also look at the bug report here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=562503

Exciting times.