The Google Desktop

I always seem to find time to play with the computer, to test out new things. In the long run this habit causes an instable system and a lecture from Agnes about the time I spend behind the computer. She is right of course.
My recent project (small as it is) was signing up with all services that Google is providing. I had read the various articles about “Google now adding.. ” or “Google now has….”, but never really tried it. Signing up through the various offering is easy once you have a GMail account. From then on it is simple to create your own Google start page with links to the Google Desktop: documents, spreadsheets, notebook, creating HTML pages, chat, email, newsgroups, photoalbums and a weblog. Picasa gives the warning that it supports Windows only, but it is no problem to upload pictures to my album under Linux.

It is an interesting collection of web-based applications/tools, all accessible through one account and one password. Single sign-on all the way (except maybe for Blogger). The settings for each app/tool reveal functionalities that just beg to be tested. Like the ability to recieve notifications from your online calendar via SMS. I want to know whether it works and whether a price tag is involved (since I can hardly imagine it being free). The online help is not really helping since it states that it depends on the provider. “It could be free”. The Calender can be integrated in a personal website. Simple documents and spreadsheets can be created, shared and edited.

The Google Notebook is a fun little tool which embeds itself in Firefox. The right mouse button option to add text to your notebook only works when there is no other extension in FF claiming that (like Radial Context in my case). But the Add note button works just as well and this is great when surfing around and gathering information. The selected text is preserves as well as the hyperlink. You can create multiple notebooks for various projects.

Time to stop playing and start working again, but I can suggest you to Google Desktopping yourself.

And back to Sarge again

After two days of attempting to solve the problems with Debian Sid I decided to delete the whole installation and revert back to Sarge again. The problem with the USB drive could be traced back to udev and the fact that a newer kernel needed to be installed. That’s what I did and upgraded the kernel from 2.6.8 to 2.6.18. With that came a full upgrade of Sarge to Sid again and when that was finished I had an inaccesible system again. Just like with Ubuntu. Why? Because Sid comes with a change in the xserver from xfree86 to xorg as well.

I did my Googling and asking around, but there doesn’t seem a clear solution to the issue. The boards are full of attempts, but nothing final. There were some posts that said that when it worked, it worked erratic. I don’t like erratic. I like stable.

For now I have to conclude that either the kernel or the xserver changes don’t go well with the iMac and that there is no easy solution in sight. So, while I am typing this the third network install of Debian Sarge is under way. That will leave me with quite a few dated packages, but I will give it a try to upgrade those on an application basis. As long as Synaptic doesn ‘t tell me it will uninstall gnome-development or do something with x there is little to worry about.

Am I disappointed? Yes and no. I did learn a lot again, but I there were other things I could have done with the time. The issue isn’t a new issue. It has been around for almost a year, but apparently it is not considered urgent enough (or not big enough in terms of userbase) to fix it. One thing is good though. When Debian tells you it is stable, it is stable. When it is unstable…. no warranty included. There is something to say for stability after all.

From Sarge to Sid

With the iMac almost ready it is timeto look forward to the real task of writing 100 pages on the day to day use of Linux. Not about geeky shellscripting, not about running Linux as part of a renderfarm, but plain simple effective day to day use. About the programs that make you forget the software you used to pay for.
I have been playing with computers since the Commodore Vic 20. No GUI in those days, but that was hardly needed. Wordperfect did the job just fine on the HeadstartII which sported two 5.25″ floppy drives and a 320 Kb virtual C: drive. Then came the windows era, from Windows 3.0 to XP and Vista. About seven years ago I was asked to help out by the it department to unlock the information from the students database. It appeared I was the only one with sufficient DOS knowledge to make that happen (long story, but it saved the school from a hefty fine. I got promotion after that).
Anyway, things have changed with even the more experienced users being used to sitting behind a nice GUI instead of a command prompt. That is the target audience. Adventurous enough to try a completely new operating system, but it has to work out of the box. Can Linux deliver? In the book we will make our case for it. On the level of applications I would say yes. For most people. The ones who run Dreamweaver to build simple websites, or use Word for straight forward text editing. And I am firmly convinced this counts for the majority of users.

On a side note. I decided to experiment a bit with the Debian sources.list and add the Sid source to it followed by a complete upgrade. It took a few hours and the system feels somewhat unstable (switching themes causes problems and Kde thinks it is running on laptop with an empty battery, hence shuts the system) the upgrade is worth it. The instability can be fixed, as well as some other issues (like a non-mounting USB drive), but I do have all applications on the same level as Ubutu now.

MacDebian

It looks like Debian is here to stay on the iMac. On the Gnome-Look website I found a complete theme pack to turn the desktop into an Ubuntu style desktop. I also found some other interesting looks as well, so it might alter from time to time. With synaptic and some additions to the sources.list (non-US, main, stable, non-free and contrib) there is plenty to install. There is already a big difference between Debian and Ubuntu: Ubuntu made some good choices for the default desktop. The default Debian desktop has far more software by default, but why Mozilla and Epiphany and not Firefox? The Debian menu seems less organized, but Debian is not for first time Linux users. I installed Sarge 3.1R3, released on September 1, so quite recent. Debian is stable, solid and -with some visual tweaks- good to look at.

Yellowdog out, Debian in

Yellowdog, day 2
And it could well be the last day. When you are used to the well-stocked and easy accessible Debian repositories, the Yellowdog repositories seem pretty bare. Adding a new repository in yum.conf was a series of trial and errors, before I could finally connect to FreshRPMs. Abiword was not in there, but Bluefish was. But yum install bluefish, brought me to the heart of dependency hell. The Abiword RPM gave an even longer list of dependencies. Only then can you appreciate the strength of apt-get and synaptic.
Yellowbird is an overall disappointment. For a distro that targets the Mac users it is unpolished and illogical. The iMac has a single button mouse. Who came with the idea to use F10 and F11 as alternate mouse buttons? It doesn’t follow the Mac oOSX experience. Why add Gnumeric, but leave out Abiword? And to use version 1.1.8 of OpenOffice is also a blast from the past. Yellowbird is definitely not keeping up with Fedora Core, where FC 5 met with wide acclaim as a strong progressive distro. I wonder if Debian is available for the PPC? I need to check that out.

[update]
The answer is yes. The net-based install is running. l might have the same problem with x, but I know where to look and how to fix it.

[update2]
Well, that went smooth enough. It was simply a matter of selecting the default desktop install and on it went. As expected, X did not work, but dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xf86config along with the information from the Yellowdog experiment was sufficient to have it up in five minutes. Strange enough, synaptic did not work from the menu, but starting it from the terminal went fine. I want to change the sources list in order to add the unstable and testing repositories. And I want to install the Ubuntu theme , because the default Debian gnome theme is a bit ugly, too dark for my taste. But it works and that was the whole purpose of this endeavor.

MacLinux.... at last

Linux on the iMac at last! Finally, because I was about to give it up. Both Ubuitu and Xubuntu did install, but booted up extremely slow and when I clicked on a menu item the system froze. Yellowdog Linux would be my last attempt in these series.
The install wouldn’t use the graphical mode, so that was not promising. I don’t mind the text-based mode, so on I went. The process went smoothly, though a few options did raise my eyebrows a few years ago. I realized again how much Linux made me learn about computing. If only for that reason it is a bit of a shame that most distro’s have simple install nowadays.
The really big glitch came after the reboot: no screen, no X. What followed were two hours of digging into the X configuration file, the error logs and checking the internet. I had to dig into Vi again in order to edit XF86config and yaboot.conf. That was fun. Time consuming, but fun. As the install procedure had shown, the system did not recognize the graphics card properly. It had to be added manually to XF86config and the Yellowdog forums showed the exact information for the iMac Indigo. After that a reboot ended up in the default KDE desktop.
It worked but not thanks to Yellowdog. The iMac is listed as a supported system, with only the infrared option mentioned as a problem. It is a prebuild system with well described components, so all drivers should have been there with all hardware recognized. Still the Yellowdog forum was filled with people having similar problems. I cannot understand why it has not been fixed yet. This way, only a geek can make it work. But then again. only a geek would want to install Linux on a Mac.
Anyway, the experiment succeeded. I wanted to have Linux on the iMac, because I like to write on that box. It’s an inspiring piece of hardware and now I have all the programs on hand I am writing about. Only ten days to go. But first I have to fix the fact that it won’t mount cd’s automatically, nor configure the single button mouse properly, things that would run fine with Ubuntu.

Ubuntufying the iMac

I have an old iMac Indigo with a decent 768 Mb ram. Today I tried to install Ubuntu on it. First, I wanted to install it on my external usb drive, but that just stuck, twice. After that I deciced to forego Mac OSX and replace it with Dapper.
Well, the install worked. But that was about it. It was freezing slow. Nope, this did not work. Next experiment: Xubuntu or Yellow Dog. I am slightly more inclined to go for Yellow Dog as it is a company that is fully focused on Linux on Mac. Plus my G3 is mentioned as being supported. Xubuntu will have it’s shot first. Xfce is supposed to be less resource heavy. That said, I did not expect Ubuntu to be that slow either on the old box. I even used the alternate cd, just in case.
Yellow Dog comes with four CD’s. Thank ADSL for overnight downloading.