[conspire] Linux distributions, and variations thereon

[Ruben Safir]

On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 10:46:52AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Friday and Saturday, I found myself rebuilding my workstation at work
> because of some foolishness I'd committed with upgrades of packages for 
> Debian.  Specifically, upon accidental coldboot, I found that the dbus
> service was now required but not running, and X11 was unable to start
> even when I got dbus running.  There's more to that, but it's not
> important.  The point is, it was time to do a rebuild, so I backed up
> /home, /etc, /usr/local, grabbed copies of the output of 'dpkg
> --get-selections', 'dpkg -l', and 'fdisk -l /dev/sda', and considered 
> choice of installer.
> 


By coinsidence, I'm going through a similar process at this point,
upgrading the server running opensuse 11.2 for several reasons which
include that 11.2 is being depreciated, and I've run out of hard drive
space on the scsi chain.

I picked up for NYLXS a dell diminsion E521
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
 Model: "nVidia GeForce 8300 GS"
  Device: pci 0x0423 "GeForce 8300 GS"
 Broadcom 44xx/47xx 10/100BaseT Ethernet
MCP51 High Definition Audio
2 gigs of ram


Overall, not bad i think for $200 despite all the nVideo chipsets

My only problem on installing opensuse was that when my son downloaded
Torcs (the car racing game) the video is obviously not accelerated and
I see nothing in Yast anymore to allow for video settings


> I prefer a cutting-edge Debian system with no 'Desktop Environment' 
> softare (GNOME, KDE, XFCE4, LXDE, CDE) using the Window Maker window
> manager.  (See http://xwinman.org/ for screenshots and comparative
> data.)  The hardware is a 2005-ish Dell Optiplex GX620 with 2 GB RAM 
> and two 21" LCD monitors that I run in side-by-side Xinerama mode.
> 
> That motherboard (one I most emphatically would not have picked) poses
> two challenges:  It has an Nvidia graphics chip (drivers:  nv, or vesa,
> or nouveau, or Nvidia-proprietary), and it has a Broadcom 57xx 'Tigon 3'
> ethernet chip (driver: tg3).
> 
> Those who've been playing along at home will recall that I consider
> Nvidia and Broadcom to be swear-words (along with Marvell).  Nvidia's
> the least cooperative graphics chip company by orders of magnitude,  
> and Broadcom is its counterpart for ethernet and wireless chips.  Even
> when the open source community has successfully reverse-engineered
> Broadcom's chips -- which we've gotten really good at -- the drivers
> tend to require that one have in /lib/firmware a 'firmware image' binary
> large object (BLOB) that initialises the chip.  Nothing wrong with
> requiring a firmware BLOB, but Broadcom makes such image files available
> only as part of proprietary OS drivers, and in many cases gives nobody
> else permission to redistribute it.
> 
> In the case of the tg3 driver for Tigon 3 chips, Broadcom apparently
> _did_ get around to issuing permission to redistribute its
> firmware-image BLOB file without modification, so Debian and many other
> distros can include it.  Debian does.  In the most recent Debian
> archives, it's in omnibus package 'firmware-linux-nonfree' that 
> includes such things for many wireless and ethnet cards
> (http://packages.debian.org/sid/firmware-linux-nonfree).  However, 
> package 'firmware-linux-nonfree' is in the non-free package collection
> (because of licence terms), and Debian installer CD/DVD images don't
> include non-free packages on their media.  (You can enable access to the
> non-free archives during installation.)  Problem:  I needed the tg3
> support _during_ installation, and hadn't anticipated the obstacle.
> 
> By the time I realised that, I'd already blown away my filesystems and
> was trying a daily snapshot CD of Debian 7.0 'wheezy'.  No go, for lack
> of firmware-linux-nonfree.  I didn't have a second machine handy, or I
> could have fetched
> http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-linux-nonfree_0.29_all.deb
> and put it on a USB keydrive.  Also, that installer crashes and burns
> because it has corrupted package indexes, which is sometimes the case
> with daily beta-version builds.  (Users are strongly warned that the 
> daily images aren't guaranteed to work.)  
> 
> So, I tried something I like a lot anyway, the Aptosid 2011-01 'Geros' 
> XFCE i386 CD.  Aptosid (a classic in the tradition of terrible naming 
> among good projects) is what used to be called Sidux, a live CD issued 
> quarterly that includes an HD installer, and is a cutting-edge Debian 
> system very closely based on the Debian sid=unstable rolling branch,
> with the Aptosid developers' stabilisation packages from their own
> additional repository.  The disks default to your choice of either KDE
> or XFCE4.
> 
> However, no go:  The Aptosid developers apparently share Debian's policy
> of omitting 'firmware-linux-nonfree' with its wacky proprietary licences
> from the installer disk.  (At home, this would be yet another use case
> for one of my spare Intel EtherExpress Pro/1000 cards:  Shut down
> system, install Pro/1000, boot up, fetch and install 'firmware-linux-nonfree',
> configure tg3 driver, shut down, remove Pro/1000.)
> 
> In goes an old Debian 6.0.1 'squeeze' CD1:  That was before Debian
> banished the tg3 firmware to a non-free package.  Do a minimal install.  
> fetch firmware-linux-nonfree_0.29_all.deb onto a spare partition.  OK, _now_ 
> I can install Aptosid (doing 'dpkg -i firmware-linux-nonfree_0.29_all.deb'
> in a shell, early in the installer).  Let it finish, install package
> wmaker (Window Maker), do 'update-alternatives --config x-window-manager'
> to pick wmake, delete /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager[.1.gz] to
> disable XFCE4's session management, lose gdm.  
> 
> Configuring Xinerama is a small pain, especially now that the X.org /
> freedesktop.org people have gone all 'Oh, you don't need an
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.  Don't worry; be happy', such that you don't
> have an example to work from.  However, I had a saved xorg.conf file in
> my spare partition.  Just to save time because I was in a hurry, and
> because the Aptosid developers' comments on the raw state of the nouveau
> drivers made me nervous, I installed the goddamned Nvidia proprietary
> drivers for now.  (May try to ditch them later.)  Tweak the X config a bit;
> hey, it works, high resolution across two monitors.  Install xdm (not as
> overengineered as gdm).  Install xterm, GIMP, AbiWord, JPilot, centerim,
> irssi.
> 
> Work for a while with 'dpkg -l', deborphan, and debfoster to identify
> and remove packages I have no need for -- paring things down to a nice,
> tight system.  Aptosid defaults to a few too many superfluous services
> for my liking.  Lose all the XFCE-related and GNOMEish stuff.  Install
> Mozilla Thunderbird (icedove), Mozilla Lightning (iceowl), Exchange
> Provider for Lightning, External Editor extension for Thunderbird.
> Install Debian's packages for Firefox (iceweasel), AdBlock Plus,
> NoScript, User Agent Switcher, Firebug.  Fetch from upstream some more
> extensions:   HTTPS Everywhere, FireICE, Beef Taco.  Install the Debian
> package that fetches and debianises the goddamned Adobe Flash extension
> for Firefox.
> 
> And, hey!  LibreOffice (OpenOffice.org with secret ingredient '100% Less 
> Oracle') is available, and looks good, and appears to be stable.  pidgin
> doesn't install; some dependency isn't currently installable in
> sid=unstable.  (That happens with some dependency-hairball packages when
> tracking the bleeding edge.  Probably will be installable in a few
> days.)
> 
> Anyhow, my point is, _that_ is my idea of how to configure a desktop
> Linux system.  Note in particular that (1) I pick an installer image
> that suits me rather than using the default installer, and (2) the work
> isn't done when the installer program finishes.  If you want to make
> Linux your own, you have to take charge of the decision about what is to
> be run, and why.
> 

We also use wmaker, but the problem is that a lot of hardware
configuration
> Members of this mailing list will have seen the recent guy with the PII
> Compaq who haplessly tried poorly chosen Xubuntu (and Ubuntu before
> that) and Puppy Linux installers and had no luck because he didn't
> understand how to control processes and RAM usage.  He currently seems
> to think Linux cannot run on old computers!  That's a bit sad.  If more
> people would learn how to interpret the 'ps' and 'top' commands, and
> understood how to control and pare down RAM usage, they'd be a lot
> better off.
> 
> 
> Here is a run-through of recent distros I've burned for CABAL.  As
> always, http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/installfest/#distros has the
> cumulative list, and attendees are welcome to duplicate them.
> 
> Aptosid 2011-01 'Geros' XFCE for i386
> Debian 6.0.1 'Squeeze' CD1:  GNOME, KDE, and XFCE+LXDE images for 
>    i386 and x86_64, XFCE+LXDE image for PowerPC
> 
> Fedora 14 'Laughlin' GNOME DVD for i686
> Fedora 14 'Laughlin' GNOME Live Desktop CDs for i686 and x86_64
>   (Fedora 15 is expected in a couple of weeks.)
> 
> OpenSUSE 11.4 DVDs for i586 and x86_64, 11.4 Non-Open-Source Add-ons CD
>   (OpenSUSE is another distribution in a tenuous situation for
>   mindshare, on account of Novell being passed like a sack of potatoes
>   to Attachmate of all companies.  They've been a bit slow, and the
>   next release, expected to be numbered 12.1, is expected only in
>   November.  Mandriva's in an arguably worse state, but the community
>   fork 'Mageia' is approaching 1.0 status.)
> 
> PartEd Magic 6.0 for i386
>   Your super-capable toolkit for all partition-editing,
>   disk-duplicating, etc.
> 
> Then we get down to the Ubuntu family.  Here's one thing I really don't
> understand:  Many of the people who go for Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu do so
> because they want easy access to proprietary AV codecs, Adobe Flash,
> extra themes, built-in copies of everything to drive cranky ethernet,
> wireless, and video chips from uncooperative manufacturers.  _But_
> Ubuntu doesn't give easy access to those things -- whereas two
> compatible distros, Linux Mint and Ultimate Edition, do.  But no
> newcomers at CABAL ever asks for Linux Mint or Ultimate Edition.
> It's always just Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu all the time.  I think it's just
> ignorance and marketing.
> 
> Ubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' Alternate and Desktop disks for i386 and x86_64
> Kubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' Alternate and Desktop disks for i386 and x86_64
> Xubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' Alternate and Desktop disks for i386 and x86_64
> 
> Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meercat' DVD for x86_64
> Kubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meercat' DVDs for i386 and x86_64
>    (These are obviously older, and not Long-Term Support, but I'm
>    keeping them around because they're DVDs and presumably have the
>    kitchen sink.)
> Ubuntu Server 10.10 'Maverick Meercat' CD for i386 and x86_64
>    (Also aging, but they're the most recent Ubuntu Server disks I have.)
> 
> Lubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' LXDE for i686
>    (This unofficial spin based on LXDE should be favoured for low-spec
>    machines.)
> 
> Linux Mint 10 'Isidora' GNOME DVDs for i386 and x86_64
> Ultimate Edition 2.8 for i686
>    (Both of these really go to town in bundling 'desktop' tchochkes.
>    Why aren't they popular?  Are people really that dumb, that they're
>    not willing to install Ubuntu except from official Ubuntu images?)
> 
> Linux MintPPC 9 LXDE for PowerPC
>    As I've mentioned before, this is a third-party variant on Mint from
>    the group at http://mintppc.org/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> conspire mailing list
> conspire at linuxmafia.com
> http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire

-- 
http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Interesting Stuff
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software

So many immigrant groups have swept through our town that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological proportions in the mind of the world  - RI Safir 1998

http://fairuse.nylxs.com  DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002

"Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"

"The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need the ability to participate in our own society."

"> I'm an engineer. I choose the best tool for the job, politics be damned.<
You must be a stupid engineer then, because politcs and technology have been attached at the hip since the 1st dynasty in Ancient Egypt.  I guess you missed that one."

© Copyright for the Digital Millennium