Mandriva One 2009 – Kaptivating KDE

It has been a couple of days since the Mandriva team released Mandriva Linux 2009 in KDE and GNOME flavours. I decided to try Mandriva and see for myself how it has improved over Mandriva Linux 2008.1. So, I downloaded the One version based on the KDE desktop. The One version is a Live CD and helps to see how it all works without installing it on to the computer. So lets get started.

The test system is my year and half old Dell Inspiron powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor running at 1.73 GHz. It is supported by a GB of RAM and the graphics support is provided by an Intel 945 GMA. It has bluetooth and an Intel 3945 a/b/g wireless chip. That is not really a cutting edge configuration but enough to get work done.

As for the Mandriva Live CD, the first thing it reveals is its new artwork. Blue is out and black is in. There are fine lines of various colours on a black background. Mandriva has moved to KDE 4 and this version packs KDE 4.1.2. Other goodies include Mozilla Firefox 3, OpenOffice.org 3.0, Amarok 2 SVN version. There is no Flash or Java support out of the box but MP3 files were played without any complaints.

This is how the desktop looks right after booting. Mandriva has chosen to use its La Ora theme for the controls and the window decoration than go with Oxygen. I think this is a good move. I personally like the window decoration to be distinct from the work area. There are some pretty themes for both the desktop as well for the Plasma engine. The wallpapers are pretty refreshing too.

I can easily say that this is one of the best KDE 4 distros out there. openSUSE has the KDE 4 desktop as default for a while now, but I should say that nothing comes close to the polish that one can see in Mandriva Linux 2009. The OS is a pleasure to use. Another area that has received more attention is the Mandriva Control Center and this is apparent from the new sleek design. Another important thing – Plasma is quite stable and crashed just once when I tried to change the wallpaper. Not sure what went wrong but at second attempt things worked as expected.

There are a few areas where things are still to be improved. For example, when I wanted to check the amount of free space in my hard drive, there was a question mark in the place where the drive icon should have been. I know, this is minor, but does not reflect well on a OS which not so long ago was considered the best linux distro out there for anyone to try. Icons were missing in a few other places as well.

I did not have a wireless network so I could not test that. I know this is really important but I just did not have a hotspot around to test. Another thing that did not work was the front audio control. This one is also quite important and I would like to know if there is any way to get it working. But that apart, almost all the other components worked. The display was set to the correct resolution at 1280 X 800.

Initially there were some redrawing issues, especially on the window decoration, but once I turned Compiz off, everything was smooth. I guessed that an Intel 945 GMA is not sufficient to run Compiz and Plasma together. I tried booting the CD on my brother’s fairly recent desktop powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 processor with 2 GB RAM and an Nvidia 9500 GT with 512 MB RAM. The same issue was visible. However, I tried to boot with the CD again and this time there was no such problem. I am not sure what is wrong.

My conclusion is I am going to install this as dual boot with my current OS and try using it for a while and then decide which is the one OS that I am going to retain for daily use. I have got used to GNOME apps and I may be critical of some KDE apps. I would just like to tell everyone that I started with KDE with Red Hat but have come to like GNOME. I am not going to start a flame war here but Mandriva 2009 has made KDE 4 Kaptivating enough for new users. I sincerely wish Mandriva goes back to be one of the best Linux distros for anyone wanting to use it.

I have a bunch of screenshots here. So let me know what you think.

Ricoh Card Reader on Dell Inspiron 6400 running Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04)

Today, While casually surfing various support forums of Ubuntu and Mandriva, I stumbled upon this How To guide to get the Ricoh Card Reader (Internal) working on Ubuntu for various laptops.

For your information, I am running Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron. I tried the guide — though what was said made little sense to me — and got my card reader working.

So, give your luck a shot if you have been disappointed with the card reader not working on your laptop

A first look at Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron

Yesterday evening, I installed the spanking new Hardy Heron on my laptop. This post is not going to be a complete review, but I will just cover the major points. For more information, please refer to my twitter timeline. I just don’t have enough time on my hands for a complete review.

• No installation problems. Installs under 30 minutes for a clean install.
• The laptop is more snappy now. I run a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Intel Core 2 Duo at 1.73 MHz and 1 GB RAM with 1 GB swap space. The system boots up faster, responds well and shuts down much faster compared to Gutsy.
• Firefox 3 Beta is stable, no bugs or crashes until now
• I installed the server apps today. I run Apache, MySQL and PHP – this took me some time to backup and restore the databases and blogs. Nothing to do with those apps though
• The repositories seem to be heavily loaded now. So I advice to select the Best Server from the Synaptic package manager.
• Wireless works. Ethernet works(it should, ain’t it?), Compiz works, OpenOffice.org works, codecs downloaded for the various media types. Pretty much all the standard stuff work.
• Installing additional applications might take some time. For example, AWN is included in the repo but not many applets are available. So I had to add another source and install from it. I had the latest Flash version downloaded, so that was a snap to install. I prefer Amarok to Rhythmbox, so I installed it.
• On the bad side, my laptop froze twice in two days. Yes it froze! Just like windows. Mouse did not respond neither did the keyboard. Ctrl+Backspace did not work either. So it was not X problem.
• Most of the old GNOME GTK Icon themes don’t seem to work. Not sure what the problem is. My favorite Mac OSX Icon theme displays the default GNOME folder icon. This is the case with most other themes too. Has something changed in the way themes have to be created for GNOME 2.22? No idea.
• Suspend works perfectly. Hibernate works, but considering the time taken to wake up, one can shut down and restart.
• Brightness management seems to have gone bad. I am able to use the Fn key and get only two levels of brightness which forces me to add the Brightness management applet on the panel. I used to get ten levels in Gutsy.
• Movie player does not play more than 8 sec of VOB files from DVD. VLC has no issues though. The file is just 1024 MB and had no issues on Gutsy.
• Bluetooth worked after installing the Bluetooth File Sharing from Add/Remove programs. If this is required, why cant it be installed by default? I was able to send and received files to my Nokia phone but was not able to browse the phone on the computer. I was able to do this on Gutsy after installing gnome-vfs-obexftp but no luck here.
  
• Apart from these minor irritations, the release is pretty good. I would not say solid because and OS freezing a computer cannot be called solid.

The real test for this release will be on the coming weekend when I will install it on my 7 year old P III computer running at 1.1 GHz and having 256 MB RAM with no graphics capability whatsoever. Gutsy is running pretty slow. I want to see how the Heron fares. No, dont suggest me to try Xubuntu. We are talking about Ubuntu here

My conclusion is everyone can use this distribution, but some hand holding might be required for newbies. I should say that this is one of the releases that I had to spend more time on setting up the computer. This is also partly due to the fact that I have a lot of stuff to backup and restore.

Windows Vista SP1: Good

The Decision

After mulling over for a few days, I installed Windows Vista SP1 today. I was thinking whether or not to go on this expedition since I did not want to spoil my weekend. But the sluggish performance of Vista on my laptop and the promised improvements made me jump on the decision to go ahead and install SP1.

The SP can be downloaded from the Microsoft website – click on Download Center link on the Related Links section – or you can wait until it appears on your Windows Update. I took the download route. The file is about 435 MB in size.

Machine Specifications

Model: Dell Inspiron 6400

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 @1.73 MHz

RAM: 1 GB

Audio: SigmaTel

HDD: Primary Drive is C: and is 50 GB in size

Optical Drive: TSST Corp

Graphics: Intel 945 GMA

Card Reader: Ricoh Co Ltd

Vista Flavor: Windows Vista Home Premium

Other Software: McAfee Internet Security, Roxio Creator DE 9, OpenOffice.org 2.3

Installation

The installation took an hour and forty minutes with three reboots in all. Post installation I also removed most of the crap that came pre-installed. I should have done this long ago but found the time today. One major irritant was Dell Media Direct which had one component called PCMService with a huge memory leak which brings the computer down to its knees after using for about an hour.

Whats Improved?

Post installation I checked all my hardware and software and compared them with the experience prior to SP1 installation

Hardware: Every piece of hardware worked. No problems with audio or graphics or even the Dell Quickset programs which are used for operating the volume and media buttons in the front.

Login: No change. Still takes the usual two minutes. I think this would have to be the highest time taken by a modern OS to boot up.

Explorer: Drastic Improvements. I must say that for the first time I found Explorer on Vista usable. No stalling until the progress bar disappears on the address bar. Folders open with ease and no stress was noticed when opening multiple Explorer windows. Almost everything thats got to do with Explorer has improved. For example, the Control Panel loads faster than it did previously.

Other Programs: Programs load much faster. Open and Save dialogs also reflect the same speed as Explorer. I get a feeling they use the same component as Explorer.

Media Center: Though I don’t use this, I opened to see how things have improved. I should say quite a lot has improved. Just as in explorer, the buttons and the menus respond beautifully. I used to struggle to go back and forth in Media Center prior to SP1 and that is one of the main reasons I stopped using Media Center

Shut Down: Shut down speed has been improved as well. It takes about 35% less time for my laptop to shut down post SP1. Its still high compared to my Linux installation which shuts down in 10-12 seconds. I am not going to mention the distro here and start a flame war

Conclusion

After the post installation experience, my conclusion is that SP1 is really good. Of course, hardware differences might cause problems, check on the MS website if you are suspicious about some of your hardware. In the one day where I used Vista after SP1 installation for all my day to day activities, I feel one should not wait for the update to show up on Windows Update. If your hardware is the same as mine or similar, just grab the download and install. You won’t regret it.

Update:

I am seeing some quirks after the installation. Windows Update still shows 256 MB worth of updates available and that includes (see Correction) SP1. Not a major issue but quite annoying.

On a side note, I would like some opinion of Roxio Creator. I did not find it good. I have another system with Nero and it offers quite a lot of options. I would like to know any free or open source alternatives that are available for Vista with a decent feature set. Thanks in advance.

 Correction

The SP1 which I said was available after the Vista SP1 install was that of MS Office 2007 Trial and a few other security updates.

Installing Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on Dell Inspiron 6400

I got hold of Ubuntu 7.10 aka Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. This post will detail the experience of installing it on my Laptop. The computer is a fairly new – about 6 months old Dell Inspiron 6400/E1505 running on an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 processor at 1.73 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Intel 945 Graphics and a 120 GB hard drive, dual booting with Windows Vista Home Premium and Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

The steps

Backup critical files
Boot from Live CD
Start Installation
Boot into Ubuntu
Reboot and check if Windows is alive

I wont be dealing with partitioning here since I already have my hard disk partitioned and running Feisty. The partitions are like this 10 GB for / (root) as ext3, 10 GB for /home as ext3 and 1 GB for swap. Another 30 GB as FAT32 for sharing files with Windows Vista. For more information on partitioning refer my earlier post.

Note: The Dell Inspiron 6400 has a 50 MB FAT16 partition. This would raise questions during the installtion of GRUB. If an error message comes up during the installation saying that one of the partitions has inconsistent sectors or allocation units, click Cancel. Do not click Ignore. If there is a second dialog, click Continue.

Boot

The Live CD booted up faster than Feisty and the desktop response was also way better. Wireless networks and wired networks were detected and configured. I began the installation.

Installation

The installer also showed great improvements in speed. I selected the timezone, language, keyboard and then landed at the partition step. I selected to format my root partition and retain my home partition. The advantage of having a home partition is that all customizing and preferences would be retained across all the applications, unlike in Windows where a reinstall would install a set of ‘My’ folders. Installation was complete in 12 minutes. I always hold my breath when the installer reaches the grub installation part. No problems there, even though the Migration Assistant did not detect Windows Vista, GRUB did as it did in Feisty.

Boot into Ubuntu

I restarted the computer after the installtion and booted into Ubuntu. I heard the login sound but saw no splash screen. Either none was used or it appeared for a really short time for me to see it. A new dark wallpaper greeted me but it was still brown . CompizFusion was enabled by default but the Compiz settings manager was not installed. I installed it using the command sudo aptitude install compizconfig-settings-manager. I got an array of settings on that one.

I was skeptical if my Intel 945 GMA would handle all those effects. But except that the settings manager which showed some latency in response the effects were in full glory. I will post the screenshots in my next post since I don’t have my laptop with me right now.

Bluetooth is back and worked too. This was one reason where I needed to boot into Windows. I installed the codecs for common audio formats and changed the theme to Clearlooks. The new Clearlooks theme is really good compared to the old one.

Applications

The major ones:

GNOME 2.20
OpenOffice.org 2.3 for Productivity
Mozilla Firfox browser
Pidgin for IM
Evolution for Email

Evolution failed to run . I even tried deleting the old .evoltuion folder from my home partition but in vain. It would start and abruptly quit. I tried reinstalling and even that did not help. I use a lot of calendering with email and Thunderbird is not my choice. Evolution displays the tasks and appointments right in the calendar which is very useful. I am not sure what is wrong. Hope an update would fix it soon. Until then its only webmail.

Boot into Windows

I rebooted to check if Windows still made it. Yes it did. It showed up on GRUB and booted well too.

Conclusion

A hassle free install and great improvements. Evolution failure is a big minus and Nautilus sometimes showed signs of slowness. Apart from that I think its a great OS for a casual user. My windows use would now be limited to gaming alone.

QEMU

Today, I am trying out QEMU a processor emulator. It allows us to run another OS from either a hard disk image or a CD Image.

Well, a word on the machine its running on: Dell Inspiron 6400, Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 @ 1.73 GHz, 1 GB RAM, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, 1 GB swap space.

I am trying to run PCLinuxOS-2007 live CD using QEMU from within Ubuntu. The first thing I noticed is it was comparitively slower than running from the Live CD. Of course it should be since it is being emulated. Second, though the Live CD boot up was impeccable, it takes forever to launch an app. I launched Ark and it took more than 3 minutes to launch. There was no sound. I clicked on Firefox icon and I waited for more than 5 minutes and nothing really happened. I stopped there.

This post is not an intended review of QEMU but initial observations. I will put it through the paces again and write more on my findings

Update: Added link to QEMU website

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Installing Ubuntu 7.04

A couple of days earlier, I had given a hint of what I was doing with my laptop. Today lets dive deeper and see what that was all about. Well, I installed the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn) on my laptop and it would dual boot with Windows Vista Home Premium that had come preinstalled with the machine. I will share with you my experiences.

Steps

1. Backup important files

2. Checklist of required items

3. Partition hard disk

4. Install Ubuntu

5. Reboot and check Windows can still boot

6. Reboot into Ubuntu

Caution: The steps outlined below deal with partitioning and formatting. If you are following these steps to do the installation yourself and are not sure about a particular step, exercise caution else you might end up losing all the data on your disk. I recommend taking help of a friend who is knowledgeable about partitioning and formatting hard disks.
Backup

Its always a good idea to backup important files before I – for that matter you or anyone else – venture into the exciting world of OS installation. I made sure that my backups can be restored and the files are in good order.

Checklist of required items

1. Ubuntu 7.04 CD. I downloaded the iso image from here and burnt a CD. Make sure that you download the correct version matching your processor type. Alternately, you can order a pressed CD from Canonical at Shipit

2. Windows DVD that came with my laptop – for the worst case scenario

Partitioning the hard disk

I had read in the forums that if I need to dual boot with Windows Vista, then I need to partition the disk using the Disk Management tool that comes with Windows. Right click on My Computer > Manage. Select Storage > Disk Management. I shrunk and existing partition and made some free space. I then created three simple partitions to hold the root, home and swap partitions. The first two were 10 GB each and the swap partition was 1 GB in size. I formatted the drives as NTFS. Though this is not required, I went ahead since I did not want to have any trouble while installing. I rebooted my laptop again and made sure that Windows was still able to pull itself up. Yes, it was ok. The new drives showed up correctly. The reason we do the partitioning in Windows is, Windows does not allow changes to the partition table and will require you to restore the partition table using the repair option available on the Windows DVD.

Dell laptops by default would have 4 primary partition one each for the OS, Recovery, Dell Media Direct and a small 50 MB partition for which I saw no use rather than to install a boot manager. The small 50 MB partition was formatted as FAT 16.

Installing Ubuntu

I rebooted my laptop with the Ubuntu CD. You can boot from the CD by selecting the device in the boot menu. On Dell machines you can do this by holding down the F12 key when the system boots up. The networks were configured and I was able to surf the net. I then started the installation. This is now a 7 step process. The first three steps involve selecting your language, keyboard layout and time zone. Next was the partitioning.

Since I already had my drives partitioned, the only task here was to select Manual partitioning and assign the drives to appropriate partitions. I selected the drive, clicked on edit partition and selected the mount point as / (root), home and swap respectively. I also chose the file system as ext3, one of the best available today and asked the partition manager to format my / and home partitions. If you get an error that one of your partitions has some inconsistent sectors, allocation units etc, click on Cancel. Clicking on Ignore will spell trouble during the boot manager installation and render the machine non bootable in either OS. I learnt this the hard way. I was all set and continued with the install. It took around 14 minutes for the install to complete.

Reboot and check Windows can still boot

I rebooted and GRUB appeared. I selected Windows which was listed as the last option. I held my breath as the OS came to life. No signs of trouble here. I was able to login and everything looked so good.

Reboot into Ubuntu

So, I booted into Ubuntu. All was well here too. I was greeted with a popup that said the OS was using restricted drivers for the Wireless device. I tried connecting to a Wireless network and there was no problem. The NTFS drives were automatically mounted as read only and I could open the files on the Windows section of my hard disk. I had at hand a very usable, friendly, fast and stable OS. I strongly feel I can live using Ubuntu alone.

Conclusion

All my fears of dual booting with Windows Vista was laid to rest when I saw that GRUB managed quite well in the end. I am enjoying Ubuntu now and has been a while since I booted into Vista. The memory footprint was also small. Would that not constitute another post? Well, yes, kinda. I am planning to write a review on Ubuntu sometime next week and will cover all these in detail. Some of you might ask why dual boot when I can live with Ubuntu. Simple, I have paid for Windows Vista when I purchased the laptop and I will use it for what it is worth. A few games, Windows DVD creator is a cool app that lets me create photo DVDs with some neat effects. So its going to be both atleast for sometime now.

I am glad to help anyone who might have questions regarding the dual boot installation process. However, my limited time may not be in favor of that and I have to admit that I may not be able to help on time. I recommend that you visit the Ubuntu forums at http://www.ubuntuforums.org.

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Other Applications

Now that my laptop with the OS was working well, it was time to get some software installed to be productive. Here is a list of software that I installed – without any fuss except for the UAC nag.

1. OpenOffice.org suite 2.2.0 with JRE
2. Adobe Reader 8.0
3. Jdk-6-windows-i586 for my development work
4. Apache Tomcat 6.0.13
5. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3
6. WinRAR 3.7 Beta 8
7. An outdated but really capable and lightweight Java IDE GeI
8. Adobe Flash Player plugins for both IE and Firefox
9. Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003
10. Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003
11. Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003

Ironically, the problems were with the pre-installed Roxio Easy Media Creator 9 DE which was not very comfortable with the Windows libraries. I had to re-install this application to resolve the problem. The Roxio Direct-to-Disc application which is a part of the Roxio EMC 9 suite did not have a suitable driver – I did not understand, that is what windows complained at startup – and I removed it for good. It was of no use to me anyway.

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 3 – Screenshots

After the first two parts [part 1, part 2] I could not manage to get a post the third post ready today. So, here are a bunch of screenshots.

All the screenshots are in 1280×800 resolution, PNG Format

Well, the last one is a sign of progress
More details on this one in the coming days

 

 

 

Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 2

This is part two of the series on my laptop. We had already seen about the build and the hardware in part 1. Before we look at the OS, lets have a peek at the laptop specifications.

Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo Processor T5300 (2MB Cache, 1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB)
Genuine Windows VistaTM Home Premium
Intel® 945GM Chipset
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz (2X512MB)
120GB1 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
15.4″ Wide Screen XGA TFT Display (1280×800 res.)
4 USB Ports (2.0), Integrated IEEE1394 Port
6 Cell 53Whr Lithium Ion Primary Battery
Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection 802.11a/g
Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 945 Up to 224MB shared system memory
Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection 802.11a/g
Integrated Stereo Sound w/ subwoofer
DVD Burner

Now lets look at the OS

1. 1. General: As the name implies, the version that was bundled (on request, else it would have been Windows Vista Home Basic). The OS at first look was pretty solid and looked good. But first looks deceive. The OS has been considerably dumbed down compare to the previous releases of the OS. Easy tasks like changing icon for a file type has been completely removed from the Folder Options dialog. Now one has to do a Registry setting to change the icon for a particular file type. This is a serious annoyance to developers like me since distinguishing the file types becomes difficult. I tried the add a new Key called DefualtIcon registry hack suggested on so many Windows forums but it did not work for me. Then there is another place in the control panel which lets the user to change the default association of file types with programs. Here again, you can only change the program. There is no way to change the description of a file type. Such small things may not mean a lot to many people, but considering the name of the OS, at least there should have been a way to do it.

   2. Aero: I am really not sure why so much hype was given to Aero. I agree, the interface is quite nice, shiny progress bars, maximize, restore and close buttons that light up when you hover your mouse over them, thumbnails when you hover your mouse on an open program in the taskbar, transparency everywhere. But if this is the criteria for selling an OS, then I am disappointed. There aren’t even a couple of other themes included save for a bunch of wallpapers.

   3. Start Menu: In one word. Bad to Worse. Navigating through a lot of layers of menus was painful. Now you have to either scroll to open the program you want or type the name of the program in the search box. <sarcasm>Wonderfully use friendly</sarcasm>

   4. IE: Well, most of us already know what it is capable of. So I got Firefox installed.

   5. Networking: Just worked out for me.

   6. User Access Control: Those pesky dialogs which popup whenever you try to run a third party app that has not been certified by MS. You can easily disable this from the Control Panel. But thats not the end to it. A red shield sits in the system tray and keeps popping out a bubble saying that you are strongly recommended to turn on UAC.

   7. Windows Components: Windows Explorer has been redesigned and the icons for folders and a few common files like images, music have be done again. They are neat and pretty. Windows Explorer is also a pleasure to use. Additional programs like Windows Calendar, Windows Email, Windows DVD Maker have been included. I have not tried the email client. Both Calendar and DVD Maker are usable. Calendar is again dumbed down version of the MS Office Outlook Calendar. In MS Office Outlook I can double click on the calendar area and instantly create an appointment or a task with as many details as I wish. But here you could just enter the title and then edit the item in the sidebar.

   8. Control Panel: That another mess. Too many icons spoil the panel. But fortunately you can switch over to the classic versions of the Control Panel. Which on is better. Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features? Hm. Well again, everyone may not agree with me. I found the former easier.

   9. Security: MS made sure that this was their most secure Windows ever. But they still let users login without a password. I agree you can do this in Linux as well. Windows Defender, Windows Firewall are built into the OS now. I did not get a chance to check them out.

   10. Windows Media Center: No complaints here. Everything worked well except for the small quirk that the songs took a whole three seconds before they started playing and the same was noticed when I clicked the Next button. However, when I ran Windows Media Player as a separate application, sometimes it struggled to play the songs. The output was jarred for a song that plays well when used with Winamp.

Ok. So much for the OS. If there is something I may have missed, let me know, so that I can check out those features as well.