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Thursday 29 May 2008

First Eee PC experiences

By Daniel on Thursday 29 May 2008, 21:47

Eee PC - OpenAfter some consideration and waiting until it was stocked at a local vendor, I bought an Eee PC. Although my MacBook is pretty compact, I wanted a machine that I can use for calendaring, checking mail, and browsing. Since my phone does not offer these options, and are not that cheap without a new subscription, the Eee seemed to be a good choice. I opted for the non-surf variant with 4GB of flash storage an 512 MB RAM.

The standard Xandros-based distribution seems to be user-friendly and snappy. I was surprised to see that even OpenOffice.org booted up fairly quickly. However, I do not agree with some of the policies of Xandros (yes, I know, by buying the Eee, I paid the Xandros tax), and I prefer a system that is easy to customize for my own needs. Since the Debian community has worked hard on making Debian work well on the Eee PC, and provides an excellent Wiki page. The installation was a straight forward Debian-testing netinstall (the Eee doesn't boot from my 8GB USB memory stick, but 512MB and 1GB works fine). One of the upsides is that a driver for the wireless NIC is included in the default install, as well as some useful ACPI scripts to get the special keys of the Eee PC working. Virtually the only thing that I needed to change was the X configuration for touchpad scrolling.

Eee PC - ClosedI was a bit worried that the small screen would not be comfortable to use a normal desktop environment. So, I initially used the IceWM window manager with the GNOME network manager applet to get flexible en easy wireless connectivity. I ended up installing GNOME as well, and it turns that it mostly works fine with the screen size/resolution, although some dialogs are too large, and take some guesswork to tab through properly. Another problem is that the battery/power applet does not work well, because the machine reports the battery state in percentage rather than mAh.

All in all, it seems to be a good purchase, but I haven't tried the battery time and some other things yet. But I did accidentally drop it on the floor, and it still works :).

3 comments

Tuesday 11 December 2007

The last day with OS X

By Daniel on Tuesday 11 December 2007, 10:15

For the reasons outlined in my previous blog post, I have completely removed OS X and replaced it with Ubuntu 7.10. For my day to day use, modern GNU/Linux distributions are far more suitable. Besides that, the hardware vendor lock in and the loss of the possibility to fix bugs, make it even less attractive.

4 comments

Sunday 9 December 2007

Five days with OS X: some frustrations, first reflections

By Daniel on Sunday 9 December 2007, 16:53

I have to get my usual opensource *nix-ish tools running to do my daily work. There are basically three options: MacPorts, Fink, and pkgsrc. All three projects provide a ports-like system. Yesterday, I gave all three of them a shot. Fink was quickly dismissed, because some of the ports that I'd require are at fairly old versions. Many packages didn't compile well with pkgsrc. I am fairly familiar with pkgsrc, and I really love it, and it has always worked great for me on NetBSD and also pretty well on Linux. Unfortunately, I currently do not have the time to fix all packages that do not compile. MacPorts worked fairly well. One package failed to build, because the original site for the package was down temporarily (manually downloading the tarball from another site did the trick). Some other packages failed, because there were overlapping files between ports/packages. Installing with force did the trick there.

So far, MacPorts seems to be an excellent choice for running UNIXish applications on OS X. Unfortunately, it has the downsides inherent with a port collection: compile time. E.g. compiling Inkscape and all its dependencies required a few hours. An additional problem is that the X11 applications don't integrate well with OS X: the GTK+ applications have their native themes (though, a Aqua/Leopard styled theme engine would probably solve that). Besides that the performance of X11 applications seems to be subpar. E.g. rotating images in Inkscape gives very noticable flickering. As said in my previous post: this all seems to be a huge step back from APT/yum, where applications can be installed very easily, within a snap.

To look further than OS X I decided to install a Linux distribution as well (my most favorite system since ~1994). There is a small problem though, after booting a GNU/Linux with rEFIt, the keyboard can not be used at the ISOLinux prompt. Most distributions require the user to (at the very least) press enter to continue the booting process. Ubuntu is one of the exceptions: the live CD boots automatically after 30 seconds (IIRC, some other distributions like SUSE also do this, but none of the distributions that I normally use). Ubuntu seemed very snappy, even from the live CD. Post-install this Mac Mini seems to run Ubuntu faster than my other Core 2 Duo machine, maybe partly due to the excellent Intel-sponsored video drivers. An additional surprise was power management: the Mac Mini seems to use about 23 Watt of power when it is mostly idle (which is about the same as on idle OS X).

I slowly start to believe that Ubuntu is more user-friendly than OS X. I am not the typical desktop user. But OS X seems to be great if you use the i* applications or Adobe software, and the integration between various components of the desktop is very good. But if you want automatic (security) updates for all your software, look beyond the small set of Apple and third-party applications, let alone run non-Apple hardware, Ubuntu seems to be much closer to the holy grail of desktops. Especially if you would like to keep vendor choice (both of your hardware and OS).

Am I disappointed? No! OS X is a nice system, and I would like to explore it further. But apart from that: it's hard to get better hardware at that price, with only a fraction of the power use of a normal desktop machine. So, even if I end up running Linux on it only, the hardware is a good deal!

Maybe I should try Vista to complete my comparison ;). (No thanks!)

no comment

Friday 7 December 2007

Three days with OS X: the good and the bad

By Daniel on Friday 7 December 2007, 22:24

A short update on my first experiences with OS X. I had some pretty urgent work this week, and the good news is that I had no real problems getting stuff done. First off was a presentation that I had to finish. I prefer the LaTeX beamer document class for presentations over anything else. It lets me work on the actual content of slides, rather than formatting, and the class defaults are very sane in that they create very nice-looking slides. The MacTeX distribution was easy to set up, and provides TeX-live, Ghostscript, and some related stuff you may need.

The first less surprise came up running Mercurial, my favorite distributed SCM:

$ hg
[...]
    raise ValueError, 'unknown locale: %s' % localename
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8

This can be worked around by setting the LANG variable to 'c'. Of course, this is a bad solution, I still have to look into this. Though this is a minor problem compared to disk images (dmgs), let's state it right away: disk images suck! For the non-OS X user: these are images that get mounted when you click on them. Most third party software vendors provide their software as these disk images. Installation is usually done by opening the disk image, copying the disk image to the Applications directory, and unmounting the disk image. Besides the fact that you have to download disk images manually, application upgrades seem to be manually (usually). E.g. a security update was released for the Camino browser. I had to download the new disk image, open it, copy the new Camino folder to Applications folder, close the disk image. This is many steps back from APT and yum, where you can not only install your applications from repositories, but upgrade them with a single command as well. With Synaptic wrapped around it, APT is even very usable for non-expert users.

Yes, I know of the existance of Fink. Once they offer binary Leopard packages, I'll try it, because I'd be very happy to have a decent package manager. At least for the opensource applications that are usually provided with Linux distributions.

2 comments

Wednesday 5 December 2007

My first day with OS X

By Daniel on Wednesday 5 December 2007, 10:22

I have finally made a plunge that I had been thinking of making for some time: moving to a more effortless desktop operating system. I primarily use my computers for development and the usual stuff (mail, music, etc.), as such I want to spend less time on maintaining my desktop systems. I have a few additional requirements for a desktop system: it should have a UNIX kernel, shell, etc. and the usual development tools (Python, Ruby, C/C++).

The best candidate was OS X, so I bought the lowest-spec Mac mini. The first impressions are good: I am already getting used to the interface, installing TeX et al. was easy, and everything seems snappy. I had to print some stuff, just plugging my Laserjet 5M did the trick, no additional configuration was required. So far so good :).

4 comments

Thursday 8 November 2007

HP says: if you don't want Windows, maybe you should consider another laptop brand

By Daniel on Thursday 8 November 2007, 23:40

I am a happy buyer/user of a HP laptop (HP NX6110), and previously of a HP/Compaq Workstation. Often, I also recommend HP computers to others. Unfortunately, a recent post on a Linux Dutch forum makes me want to reconsider such recommendations and my future purchases. There have been recent cases where buyers went to court, and the courts ruled that they should be awared a fee upon rejecting the Windows EULA. So, at the very least, I am surprised, maybe even entertained by their reaction. Here are some snippets translated from Dutch:

''It is correct that we, as a manufacturer, can not return the money for the license, or give a price reduction for a product of HP or Compaq. Your salesman could have the possibility to handle this for you. I have to state clearly that not every salesman can offer this possibility for all products that they sell.

To clarify this a bit more, every HP or Compaq product is delivered with a License, and we do not have the possibility to remove this license or deliver the product without a license, so without an operating system and extra hardware. HP only guarantees that their products work properly with the original software that was preinstalled.

It could be the case that you, together with your salesman, have to look at the possibilities of a completely different product from another brand. This can be a bare system, or a system from another manufacturer that provides more opportunities for returning the license costs.''

Thank you HP for listening to your customers, your advise couldn't have been clearer :)!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, so I do not know whether HP or someone else is required to return a free upon declining the Windows EULA. But their own recommendation is pretty entertaining.

Update: Let's be fair: some resellers do offer HP laptops with FreeDOS.

3 comments

Saturday 30 June 2007

NSLU2

By Daniel on Saturday 30 June 2007, 16:36

After hearing Gideon/Etelerro's enthousiasm about the NSLU2 (Linksys Network Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Driver), I decided to get one myself. It is a tiny, fanless device that can be used to share USB storage devices over a network. It run's its own Linux system with a web interface, but its firmware can easily be replaced with alternative firmware. I decided to use Debian installer firmware to install Debian to the NSLU2.

The NSLU2 uses a 266MHz Intel XScale ARM processor. Of course, this CPU is fairly slow compared to modern desktop systems. Aditionally, the device has 32MB RAM. Nonetheless, it's a great system to run a minimal Debian installation for sharing file over the network (SMB/NFS), handling some mail, running a light webserver, etc. And uses far less power than the average 400MHz closet home server.

I currently have Samba and OpenSSH running, and it seems to cope well with only 32MB RAM:

daniel@slug:~$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:            29         28          1          0          2         15
-/+ buffers/cache:          9         19
Swap:         1270          2       1268

3 comments