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:

It’s done.

I wrote about how I was going to remove Ubuntu 11.10 and install Arch Linux instead and I did it.

The experience was nowhere near as painful as installing Gentoo, and as I suspected, it would be a little bit closer to an older Debian installation. You really do have complete control over what to install. Yes, you have to specify that you want xorg, or else you’ll end up with a headless install.

The first time logging in was clumsy as hell.

I get the desire to have a minimal installation. Really, I get it. Logging in for the first time and seeing 3.9 Gigs of RAM free out of 4Gigs was a thing of beauty. But do I really have to install ‘ifconfig’ separately? It’s really not included in the base install?

Choosing which packages to install is fine, but having to install sshd and ifconfig separately? Now you’re just wasting my time. Seriously, I’m getting angry again just thinking about it!

And what about the stuff I DID choose? Like Libre Office, Rhythmbox and VirtualBox? Even though I specified those, they were never installed. No biggie, since I just installed them myself afterwards.

But what about important stuff, like fonts? Don’t get me started on the fonts or the complete absence of them. Yep. Have to install those too.

So, to figure out which fonts you need, you can do the following:

pacman -Ss font

Install those net-tools as well. You’ll need them:

pacman -S net-tools

Do you need ssh? Of course you do!

pacman -S sshd

And so on.

Getting my xorg nice and slick and spanning across two monitors using the proprietary Nvidia drivers took some work. I installed the drivers like this:

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Anyway, I’m not going to go into a huge how-to for Arch Linux here. It’s way too involved for that. Plus, they have a wealth of documentation which you can find on the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s long and involved, but all of the answers are there.

With all that said, if you don’t like documentation or reading/learning something new, Arch Linux is probably not for you. It’s definitely not for the impatient. I will say that now that I’ve got everything working, my system is faster than it’s ever been. I don’t have the fonts just right yet so it kind of looks like it’s been up all night drinking vermouth, but it sure runs fast. Everything is super snappy like and good.

I’ll be back with one more post about this, after a week of regular use. If things don’t work out with Arch-Linux, I’ll either be going back to an apt-get based system or Red Hat Fedora.

I was going to list a whole bunch of reasons why I’ll be switching from Ubuntu 11.10 to Arch Linux, but my decision really just comes down to 1 thing:

Ubuntu has gotten fat and lazy.

Actually, Ubuntu always was fat. It’s just that each subsequent install/upgrade seems to add more and more weight to the overall operating system. I may have said it before, but Ubuntu is starting to feel like the Windows of Linux distributions: bloated.

So, we’ll be test driving Arch Linux and its minimalist approach. Since I’ve never installed it before, I’m kind of expecting the process to be somewhere between Gentoo and Debian, but hopefully more Debian. Gentoo was a great learning experience, but god was it painful to install back in the day. Anyway, I’ll write about the experience next week or something.

One other reason why I think moving to Arch Linux will be a good thing: more focus on scripting and command line functions. See, as fat and lazy as Ubuntu is, it’s made me fat and lazy too. I need some more sweet command line action to sharpen my skills.

Later

Yes, today was the day of the upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10, so let’s talk about that.

Ubuntu 11.10′s friendly alliterated animal name is Oneiric Ocelot. Oneiric is defined as dreamy, which brings me to the riddle I just made up:

Q. Why is Ubuntu 11.10 called ‘Oneiric Ocelot’?
A. Because they were asleep when they made it!

Stop laughing. I’m not joking.

The Upgrade
First of all, the upgrade took over 2 hours! Why? Because we all know that Ubuntu is not known for it’s slim girlish figure anymore. A few nicknames came to mind while watching some of the many packages get installed: Bloatbuntu, Ubun Too Goddamn Fat, and Moo-buntu. Yes, this is one fat OS.

The upgrade itself was smooth. After all, you can’t do anything but make dinner or watch T.V. while the packages are installed and downloaded. Why? Because networking is disabled throughout the whole process. Well done.

Ubuntu 11.10 boasts a hideous new login screen
I noticed two things once the upgrade was complete and I logged in for the first time: Oneiric Ocelot is incredibly sluggish when launching apps. 4 gigs of RAM should be more than enough on a linux system, but not here. Ubuntu has become the Windows of linux distros. Fat, bloated and with way too many processes eating up your cpu.

2nd thing: NO WIRELESS.

Well done Canonical/Ubuntu. Maybe I’m being harsh, but can you have everything work out of the box for once? Least of all the wireless. I’m pretty sure that in 2011, wireless technology is kinda a requirement. Jesus. I kind of expected to have to re-configure the desktop environment after upgrading, but the network settings? You’re kidding, right?

As I write this, I can connect to my wireless network so the driver seems to be fine, but I can’t ping anything. Yep. I get an ip address from DHCP, but no ping and no internet. Yes, it’s back to wired for now. Slow clap.

3.0 Kernel
Oneiric Ocelot uses kernel 3.0. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux. It was Linus Torvalds‘ idea or something like that. It’s kind of cool to see 3.0 after seeing 2.6 for so long, but it’s not making much of a difference, yet. We’ll get a better idea after some testing.

Desktop environments and Unity
Unity is “cute” but not something I’ll be adopting anytime soon. It’s clean but not necessarily optimal. It’s just sluggish. Gnome 3 is not much better, so I switched to Gnome with no effects. Decent, but not great. It should be faster once I tweak the performance. Again. Like after every upgrade. Probably should have forced it to leave my previous settings.

The Verdict: Oneiric Ocelot is a lazy cow. Arch Linux is starting to look more attractive. Or maybe a clean Debian install.

P.S. After using Ubuntu 11.10 for awhile I’ve come to really hate the Ubuntu Software Center. It’s ok and does the job eventually, but I feel that Synaptic Package Manager was cleaner, faster and more robust overall. It feels like aesthetics were the main reason that they replaced  the old Synaptic Package Manager with the Ubuntu Software Center.