17 Responses to “The GNU/Linux User Show #19!”

1. Robert Says:
   October 13th, 2005 at 10:46 pm

   I agree with your opinion about Ubuntu. I wonder why so many Linux journalists praise this distro. Even Ian Murdock said (on The Linux Link Tech Show) that Ubuntu is a fork - one can’t install ordinary deb packages. On the other hand I think that Ubuntu is a good distro for beginners who don’t have big requirements.

2. Jon Says:
   October 14th, 2005 at 2:07 am

   Glad someone else agrees with me. I’m taking *some* flak for not liking Kubuntu :)

   At the end of the day I would rather that someone use ANY distro of GNU/Linux than any non-free operating system. I have varying degrees of love for distros like Linspire and Kubuntu (can I lump those two together?), but they’re still GNU/Linux. And they still have the power to switch people away from their non-free operating systems to the free world, and that’s a “good thing” ™.

   I think/hope that once people make the leap and start using GNU/Linux that over time they will want to expand their choices and freedoms and will move away from the more closed distros into the more mainstream and powerful ones. But the first step is getting them into any distro of GNU/Linux.

   If it takes Kubuntu - then that’s OK. My requirements are just a little higher than Kubuntu can deliver.

   Oh, and I was pissed off when I recorded that bit as well. A little righteous indignation goes a long way :)

3. Pat from TLLTS Says:
   October 14th, 2005 at 3:48 am

   Jon, another great episode. I agree with you regarding Ubuntu. It’s very hyped. At the very least it’s generating positive press about linux. Kanotix is soooo much better and easier to deal with. Why spend 3 hours tweaking and installing pieces when you can have Kanotix installed in 20-30 minutes. Kantoix is the real deal! We just need to spread the word.
   Take care

4. Jon Says:
   October 14th, 2005 at 5:35 am

   Thanks Pat,

   Totally agree. The mission is to get people using GNU/Linux and if it takes Ubuntu or Linspire to do it - then I’m OK with that. I just hope that when people move over and get over the learning curve that they will spread their wings and move on to other more powerful and flexible distros.

   I thought I was taking a chance by spewing off about Kubuntu at the beginning of the show, but so far I’ve had 2 positive comments and one not so positive over on my personal blog.

   Not too bad :)

5. Robert Says:
   October 14th, 2005 at 7:21 am

   You should also write about insidious nature of (K)Ubuntu, because I think that it is scandal that you install a package without any errors and next you see that this package didn’t install properly. I don’t have any problems with forking, but (K)Ubuntu should have warning in big bold red letters saying DON’T INSTALL ORDINARY deb PACKAGES!

6. Jon Says:
   October 14th, 2005 at 7:56 am

   Hi Robert,

   I’ve seen the same type of behaviour with the Skype Debian package (which actually says it’s OK for use with Skype). While it didn’t disappear after installation, it certainly didn’t work very well. I tried every freakin’ Skype package I could find and they all blew up on Kubuntu.

   Originally I directed my comments at Ubuntu in general by which I meant “Ubuntu which includes Kubuntu”.I did this because the Kubuntu FAQ states that the only difference between Ubuntu and Kubuntu is KDE vice Gnome.

   Since then some readers of my personal blog have pointed out that they’ve had crappy experiences with Kubuntu, but much better experiences with Ubuntu. That leads me to believe that perhaps Ubuntu is more stable than Kubuntu and that perhaps there’s more to Kubuntu than simply the addition of KDE.

   I don’t know what the case is as I’ve only used Ubuntu long enough to install KDE. I just want to make it clear that perhaps I should be directing my ire at Kubuntu specifically rather than at Ubuntu as a whole.

   Here’s a link to the conversation about this on my personal blog:

   http://www.jonwatson.ca/blog/?p=522

7. Konrad Says:
   October 14th, 2005 at 5:38 pm

   SimplyMEPIS has this same sort of subset. There is also information on the distro wikki on how to get out of the subset, and into 100% Debian. However, they give good instructions on how to get notifications about potential problems, and avoid them.

   I wonder if SimplyMEPIS would give you the same issues as Ubuntu.

   I made more comments on the show in the forums. Specifically I discuss three points on digital signatures, and passwords.

   –Konrad
   http://kjoatmon.typepad.com

8. Jon Noble Says:
   October 15th, 2005 at 9:16 am

   Jon,

   Caught the podcast for the week of Oct 10 and felt your frustration with Ubuntu. Most of your objections (with one very large exception) should be overcome with the release of PCLinuxOS “real soon now”. I’m curious to know if you’ve ever tried the preview releases of this distro? I suspect you would be impressed.

   There’s almost nothing a user needs to do with this distro; Live-CD to check your hardware for compatibility, GUI installation that most dummies can successfully navigate, most necessary apps are installed with the distro including Skype, Audacity, OpenOffice, Amarok and a slew of peer-to-peer network apps, FireFox, Thunderbird, the list goes on and on. Yes, right there on the single CD disk. FireFox and Konqueror are even pre-configured with all the necessary multimedia plug-ins to make browsing the net an immediate joy.

   Like Ubuntu it uses Synaptic as a GUI front-end for apt-get commands. In that respect I suppose you could call it Debian-based though it is derived from Mandrake/riva (9.2 I think). I dunno, I’m a relative newbie to Linux: is Mandrake Debian-based?

   Also like Ubuntu it uses its own repositories driven by /etc/sources.list. There lies your big exception that PCLinuxOS shares with Ubuntu. Texstar re-packages everything to work smoothly with PCLinuxOS. So I’m not sure that other Debian repositories would work. I suspect not.

   However, I’ve found this to be a strength of PCLinuxOS. It just works. Even though the distro is in beta, I’ve been updating the OS and apps several times a week for six months and have never had a failure that caused me grief. Texstar has over 4,000 packages on the site and is quick to respond to requests for any package that I need. I suppose it helps that I sent him a $50 donation 2 years ago, but otherwise this has all been completely free.

   I installed PCLOS preview .81a to my Windows XP machine. The installation resized my disk which only had a single XP partition, giving me dual-boot into Windows or Linux. I’ve been running both this year without problems on either side. I’m frankly amazed. I hope you are too.

   Good luck!
   -Jon Noble

   P.S. Sorry if this came across as marketing slock…I am not associated with PCLOS in any way except as a satisfied beta user. I was just surprised that you had problems with Skype and Audacity in Ubuntu when these worked out of the box for me using PCLOS.

9. Jon Says:
   October 15th, 2005 at 9:59 am

   Konrad: Ubuntu not only doesn’t supply any instructions on how to move out of their repositories, they specifically say that they won’t support anything that didn’t come from their repositories. That’s fair game, I guess, but I still find the concept annoying.

   Jon: I’ve heard a lot of good things about PCLOS, but never tried it. Part of that it because I had no test machine. I’m finally building my test machine this weekend and am looking forward to trying a WHOLE lot of stuff out.

   The idea of distro specific repositories bothers me. If I make a Debian based distro that won’t run Debian packages - what have I really made? The GNU/Linux community takes a lot of heat for having too many distros which make choice too confusing for new users. Adding distros that have their own repositories to the mix doesn’t help this problem - it aggravates it.

   While some systems (such a PCLinuxOS) may work very well, it’s the philosophy that I disagree with at this point.

   I’ll still try it though. I’m a curious type of guy :)

10. macbeach Says:
    October 15th, 2005 at 11:03 am

    More and more I have learned to distrust anyone who makes a formal living at “journalism”, including the “tech journalists” just as much as those who are “into” politics. Maybe the constant pressure to get SOMETHING out by press time forces them to lose touch with reality, not to mention the fact that many people who choose journalism as a profession aren’t that tech savvy to begin with.

    I haven’t yet tried Ubuntu, and was glad to hear of your troubles (poor wording there): glad that hearing of your troubles saved me my own bad experience (that’s better). Having been through Suse, Red Hat, Knoppix, Lindows and even Slacklware at one time or another, I finally settled on Debian about two years ago and haven’t tried anything else since. I have been tempted by all the recent Ubuntu talk though. Most tempting of all were the assurances I’ve heard that it is Debian based and that you could mix and match it’s repositories with the regular Debian ones. (You know, if this were really true, then you should be able to take a straight Debian system and by ADDING the Ubuntu repositories and doing any upgrade, make it into an Ubuntu release without doing a fresh install. I haven’t heard anyone say that this actually works though… backing up your experience).

    Mark Shuttleworth (who spoke on 2005-7-14) at the most recent Debian conference (I think you can view the mpegs from dc5video.debian.net) seems like a nice guy and it can’t hurt to have someone who is filthy rich willing to dedicate so much of his personal resources to the promotion of Open Source. On the other hand I can’t help but sense that the existence of full-time salaried positions to work on something that looks a lot like Debian may be hurting the cause in the short term.

    Thinking back now I remember all the “noise” for lack of a better term that was being made over getting the next official release of Debian (Sarge) out the door. I had already been using Woody on a couple of systems flawlessly, and was running Sarge, still beta (the installer) and as the “testing” release on my laptop, mostly without problems. The last thing in the world I wanted to do with these working systems was do a fresh install. One thing Linux systems lack in a big way is a method to install a totally new operating system (or even a new version) without wiping out the /home directories. I learned that the hard way a while back. So I’m always careful these days to copy /home, /etc, and a few other things off to a safe external drive whenever I do a new version of the OS. What a pain in the ass though. At what point is it safe to wipe out those “special” backups? With each new install I usually think of new ways to arrange the old files. Am I sure I have everything from the old archive? Hmmm. It’s not just a Linux issue, my old Windows buddies go through the same thing. In fact they have it worse, since Windows often claims to do thing automatically for them, they are even more likely to find themselves screwed than us relatively knowledgeable Linux users are.

    Which brings us to the point of some of these new distributions, Ubuntu, Linspire, Suse, that attempt to mimic the ease of use that Windows PRETENDS to have. Linux is ALREADY better than Windows in so many ways, and yet we all have friends that refuse to venture into an experimental install. Do they still call you for Windows advice like they do me? I’ve stopped badgering them to try Linux, I’ve stopped making fun of their girly-man operating system. I just tell them these days: “sorry, can’t help you, I’ve forgotten everything I knew about Windows. Haven’t booted it in months.” While the truth is I haven’t forgotten it all, the actual time span is now years, two to be safe, since I’ve booted a Windows machine. I think it’s still installed on an old dust collector around here somewhere, waiting to be reformatted or consigned to the dumpster.

    I give Linspire and Suse credit though, they are both great places to start for the “dumb user” who wants to use Linux and have someone to contact when things go wrong. Is support for these systems great? No, probably not, but then again when is the last time a Windows user you know actually got helped by Microsoft? If that were the case they wouldn’t be calling you now would they?

    My experience with Linspire (then Lindows) was exactly the same as yours with Ubuntu. I BAUGHT a copy, thinking it would be the perfect thing to give or sell to my poor Windows using friends. I just needed to use it a while first so that I could help them if they got stuck. Only *I* got stuck, and spent a lot of time trying to get unstuck, mostly without success. Things may have changed, but at the time Lindows told you that you could use their package management system or Apt-get (that I was used to) interchangeably. I did that for a while, but more and more it seemed that only Apt-get worked, and if I requested some new package from their list (which didn’t seem to be available from apt-get for some reason) I would have problems. Then apt-get stopped working too. Like you, I spent a week, or more, trying to get my system working again without a re-install. By the time I gave up on it I was so frustrated that I went straight back to Debian and haven’t used anything else since.

    Basically, these so called end-user friendly systems (including Windows) have to limit how flexible they can be in order to remain supportable by some average-joe who answers the phone at their support center. Can you imagine being that support center person and being told that the user you are trying to help has renamed half his directories, moved things around and installed half a dozen things you’ve never heard of? You’d probably tell them “Have you tried re-installing Windows?” which is about all that Microsoft support is good for.

    The problem that Debian will have over the years is “too many chiefs and not enough indians”. Shuttleworth says they want to be big supporters of Debian by contributing back into the base, and I’m sure that is his intent, but IBM, Suse, and a lot of other folks will be contributing to that base too, and SOMEBODY is going to have to spend a lot of time merging it all together and somehow making a living at the same time. In the end, I think that Shuttleworth, and a few others with money to spend would do better to simply PAY people to do Debian work so that they could leave their day-jobs behind or not have to somehow mesh their day-job with whatever their Debian contribution was. Like the Apple OS (which I’m using at the moment) great things can be done when a money-making company takes the Open Source work built up over years and runs with it, but in the long run, if those improvements don’t find their way back into a consistent, and Open product, the cycle ends there and it becomes a pretty much walled garden that only those who can, or are willing to pay can participate in, and only then, with continuing permission from the license holders.

    Hopefully in the long run, companies like Apple, and even the brain-dead Microsoft will learn that owning the franchise need not require owning the building in which the product is sold. Apple SEEMS to be getting it in that their profit these days is based on the Itunes name and on downloadable content, and not the fact that their OS is based on Unix. The shift in emphasis over the next few years to how we are connected, and what we are connected to and away from our OS or what kind of PC we are running will (I hope) make the OS wars a thing of the past.

11. Jon Says:
    October 16th, 2005 at 4:21 am

    Hi Macbeach.

    Wow…I think that’s the longest comment we’ve ever receeived.

    I think that we share some common ground in that I don’t think ‘distro specific repositories’ are going to help GNU/Linux adoption in the long run. As I said in a comment above yours, the GNU/Linux community already takes a lot of criticism from new users that the plethora of distros is a barrier to entry. Adding distro specific repositories just compounds this problem. While there may be no technical reason not to pursue this idea, it bothers me philosophically.

    I’m also interested to hear you say that the emphasis over the next few years will shift to how we’re connected and not what we’re connected to. I wholeheartedly agree. I said something to this effect on The Linux Link Tech Show once: I believe that until we (meaning consumers at large) stop buying ‘windows pcs’ or ‘macs’ and start buying ‘computers’ the OS wars will continue. We need to start purchasing capabilities and not names. In schools we need to start teaching children how to ‘word process’ and how to use ‘a spreadsheet’ and stop teaching them ‘MS Word’ and ‘MS Excel’. Software has come so far that there is very little man-machine-interface difference between OSes, office suites, web browsers, and email clients. As a society we’re still giving people fish by teaching them to rely on closed-standard software that is controlled by a single corportation. We need to start teaching people to fish by teaching them how to use the software that supports open standards and is therefor not in the control of a single entity.

    Unfortunately, most people don’t care about their freedoms when it comces to computing. They just want to play the same game that all their friends are playing, or be able to open the same document at work as they can at home.

    I agree with your preditiction. though. Within the next decade the computer OS will become abstracted and of no concern to the end consumer. It will be much like the OS on a cellphone - nobody cares what their cellphone OS is because it has all the basic capabilities and interactivity as every other one out there.

12. Joshua Says:
    October 19th, 2005 at 1:26 pm

    Hi, I’ve just started listening to your Podcast and am a new Linux user myself (mostly as a toy to play with besides my iBook. Hey, what else am I going to do with a computer someone dumped on me for free?). As a new user, I’ve actually found myself liking Kubuntu. Contrary to your beliefs, there is actually a way to install files outside apt-get. For some of the programs that require higher packages than in the Ubuntu repositories, I just go to the Debian website, http://www.debian.org/, do searches for dependent packages, and download from there. Additionally, it seems like the backports from the main Ubuntu site for Breezy don’t seem to be up yet (I substituted hoary for breezy, and apt-get update functioned fine). What I did find was a mirror that seems to be working. This is what I put in my sources.list file for downloads from the backports:

    deb http://pub.planetmirror.com/pub/ubuntu-backports/ breezy-backports-staging main universe multiverse restricted
    deb http;//pub.planetmirror.com/pub/ubuntu-backports/ breezy-extras main universe multiverse restricted

    I hope that helps.

13. Jon Says:
    October 19th, 2005 at 2:53 pm

    Hi Joshua,

    Thanks for the sources, I’m sure some other users can make use of them.

    There appears to be a few people that have had some luck in installing straight Debain packages, but I sure didn’t. I’m glad it’s working out for you.

    One of my problems since day one is that I run a laptop. As we all know, laptops have their own special hardware problems from time to time and that has made some things more difficult for me than a desktop user may find. I’m OK with that, but I have a policy to speak about my experiences rather than try to speculate on other’s experiences. As they say “your milage may vary”!

    Welcome to the show, I’m glad (hope?) you’re getting some use out of them :)

14. lance Says:
    October 20th, 2005 at 12:18 am

    Just reading the post by Jon_noble and Macbeach prompted me to take a step back and really think about what I have learned about Gnu/Linux for the past few years, and what I’ve learned about Free Software.

    Thinking about RPM’s; sure that means that the code is based on the Red Hat Package Manager install method and all that it implies, dependencies and such. But, one has to remember that the binaries are distribution specific.

    I run GNU/Debian/Linux on my desktop, but I first got started with Mandrake. I found out early that I could not go to just any RPM depository to fetch the binaries, they had to be .mdk, meaning Mandrake specific. So that meant I had to discover .mdk mirrors and configure urmpi accordingly. Ultimately I realized the only way to actually keep the OS’s updated and current was to join the Mandrake Club ($), you bet, a yearly subscription fee, how else could they generate revenue. After all Mandrake/driva is nothing but Free Software modified and redistributed!!

    Maybe y’all haven’t had a chance to read the latest publication of Linux Journal but Ubuntu got #1 in the readers choice awards. My experience so far has only been with the Live CD version, but it has PnP’d (plug and played) on every machine (3) I’ve tested it on, flawlessly. Congrats to Ubuntu and the Shuttleworth Foundation
    for promoting the GNU/Linux Ideal, by offering free Linux courses in countries abroad and linked to within this site (learnlinux.tsf.org.za).

    Here again we have a distribution (Ubuntu) that claims to be .deb based. Yet, one has to acquire the binaries from ubuntu.universe. However, if the code is not being maintained, not meeting the Debian Policy guidelines as far as pre_install, post_install, depends, recommends decclarations, then the installation will surley
    fail. Options, are to find a good repository and edit /etc/apt sources.list accordingly or install from source (reccomnded by Marcel Gagne’).

    my 2 cents worth
    //lance

15. Jon Says:
    October 21st, 2005 at 8:45 am

    Hi Lance,

    I think the server will finally let me respond to your comment. What a challenge the past few weeks have been.

    First off, thanks for writing such a thoughtful comment. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. I’ll just address some of it.

    I can assure you that ‘we all’ have noticed that Ubuntu is getting rave reviews all over the place. I can also assure you that every single platform I’ve tried to install it on, it has failed for one reason or another. My show is based on my experience as a GNU/Linux user and I simply cannot recommend a distro that I cannot get to install. That’s my simple outlook on things. If I can’t get it to work, then you won’t hear me raving about it.

    Having said that, I’ve acknowledged on many occasions that my primary platform is a laptop and therefore I’m prone to more hardware type problems then your average desktop clone machine. I also acknowledge regularly that ‘your mileage will vary’.

    The fact that Ubuntu is popular doesn’t mean anything in my book. Millions of people a year go to hockey games, but I don’t care for the sport at all. The fact that I don’t like it has nothing to do with its popularity.

    I do agree that anyone promoting GNU/Linux as vigorously as the Ubuntu dudes are deserve great kudos for their efforts. Whether I agree or disagree with the underlying philosophy, I would rather see someone using *any* distro of GNU/Linux than any other close operating system

    Compiling from source on Kubuntu - tried it with Skype and it failed dependencies all over the place. In fact, the dependencies failed not because they weren’t present, but because they weren’t named properly. I can’t remember the exact name, but when I attempted to configure Skype from source it failed because it wanted somepackage-ubuntu rather than the somepackage (get my drift?). I had had enough by then and reinstalled my beloved Kanotix.

    At the end of the day I’m a user with a microphone. I’ll always share my thoughts on whatever Linuxey thing I’m involved with at the moment and that’s just what they are: my thoughts and my opinions. I try to be fair, but I also try not to mince words. I think my listeners in general appreciate that. It seems that way, anyhow.

    Thanks again, and remember:

    “Your mileage may vary!”

16. Gary Buxton Says:
    November 16th, 2005 at 1:52 pm

    Whats going on just stoped by so thought I’d say hi

17. Jon Says:
    November 16th, 2005 at 2:42 pm

    Hi!

    Thanks for stopping by :)

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.