An introduction... and a gripe.

[HalluxSinister]

Hi all, new to LF, just registered...

I guess I could tell everyone where I'm from and what I do, but since this is a place for discussing Linux, I should start with my Linux Testimony. :^)

have been using (I guess I should say having flirtations with) Linux off and on since I was first introduced to it (Slackware 3 or somesuch) circa 1996. I had always regarded it as something that I wish were easier to use, and worked with less hassles, until one day, I met something called Fedora 11. This was the turning point for me. I started learning more and more about things like file systems, directory hierarchies, permissions, lilo (and later grub) emacs, vi, joe, and the bash, and all its fun little builtins, grep, less, etc., and how to get X to work. I remember running xf86config over and over with Slackware, or Mandrake, and later some one or more other flavors.

I even experimented with FreeBSD, and Solaris... (don't tell anyone!) but when I saw that Fedora 11 not only booted without problem or complaint, loaded straight into the GUI, and even, (I had not thought to even hope this would work) the network over my tethered Motorola RAZR-V3xx not only worked, but I didn't even have to tell it the phone number it had to dial to get a data connection. Linux not only knew, but when I plugged the phone in, I looked away for literally about three seconds, and when I looked back, it had a little pop-up message that said basically, "OKAY, you're up in the net. Go ahead." And lo- the internet workded! I don't think I even asked it to connect. I just plugged it in, and away it went. Hooray!

I started seriously planning to offload all my files from my Misro$oft WinDOS box onto shiny little life rafts, to install Linux once and for all, as soon as I saw it was easier to get online with Linux than it was with WinDOS. I had first been exposed to Unix at a WAN Admin Class I had to take in 1994, and finally, about 12-15 years later, I was finally able to use it as my primary, nay... ONLY OS.

YAY! Freedom from the clutches of Misro$oft without being driven into the iCult. :^)

THAT ALL SAID... I just tried Fedora 15, for about a couple hours. Then I reinstalled Fedora 14, muttering to myself the whole time, words that started with "F". Gnome 3 is NOT ready, I don't think, and I sure hope they go back for the next one, or when I can't use F14 anymore, I'll have to go KDE, LXDE, or XFCE... or maybe even have to manually bash together my own WM/X-Server combination... something I haven't done since trying to decide whether I liked TWM's lightness or FVWM-95's familiarity... (yeah, 'm that old.) (I hope Fedora 16 resembles more Fedora 14, and not 15... swing and a miss on this one!)

Also, anyone else detest Gnome 3 yet? If so, how many seconds or minutes of exposure to that software straight-jacket did it take you to go from "hmm... kinda cool" to "get this crap off my computer!"?

What are we to do when the software we can actually use gets all Macintosh-ey on us, and becomes uncustomizable, almost impossible to configure, and just generally becomes unusable? Do we keep using the old, or do we let someone else force us into the new?

Anyway... I think I'm done typing, it's almost dawn, time to go to bed! :^O

Hallux

[nujinini]

HalluxSinister

My first distro was a fedora 10. Loved it. Only reason I changed is because fedora 11 used 2.6.30.x.x which had some issues with my hardware.

Hope you enjoy it here

[rokytnji]

After being up all night trouble shooting and not meeting with success will make any one cranky and put their panties in a wad.

I read up on stuff before messing with it. Reading up on Gnome 3, Unity, Plymouth, ad nauseum. I figured my gear as too old to run the big dog Desktops. No problemo. I have choices.

So

~$ inxi -F
System:    Host Biker Kernel 2.6.38-7.dmz.1-liquorix-686 i686 (32 bit) 
           Desktop LXDE (Openbox 3.4.11.1) Distro antiX-core-686-a1 20 June 2010
CPU:       Single core Intel Pentium M (-UP-) cache 2048 KB flags (sse sse2) bmips 1196.12 clocked at 598.063 MHz 
Graphics:  Card: Intel 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device bus-ID: 00:02.0 
           X.Org 1.10.1 driver intel (loaded) Resolution 1024x768@60.0hz 
           GLX Renderer Mesa DRI Intel 852GM/855GM x86/MMX/SSE2 GLX Version 1.3 Mesa 7.10.2 Direct Rendering Yes
Audio:     Card Intel 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller driver Intel ICH ports 1c00 18c0 bus-ID: 00:1f.5
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.23
Network:   Card-1 Realtek RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ driver 8139too v: 0.9.28 port 2000 bus-ID: 02:09.0
           IF: eth1 state: down speed: N/A duplex: N/A mac: 00:e0:4d:77:2c:76
           Card-2 Atheros Atheros AR5001X+ Wireless Network Adapter driver ath5k bus-ID: 03:00.0
           IF: wlan0 state: up mac: 00:0b:a2:1c:eb:8f
Disks:     HDD Total Size: 30.0GB (12.8% used) 1: /dev/sda IC25N030ATCS04 30.0GB 
Partition: ID:/ size: 17G used: 3.5G (22%) fs: ext3 ID:swap-1 size: 0.58GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 34.0C mobo: N/A 
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A 
Info:      Processes 80 Uptime 32 min Memory 163.6/492.4MB Runlevel 5 Client Shell inxi 1.5.6 
harry@Biker:~$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_25"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_25-b06)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 20.0-b11, mixed mode, sharing)
harry@Biker:~$ apt-cache policy flashplugin-nonfree
flashplugin-nonfree:
  Installed: 1:2.8.3
  Candidate: 1:2.8.3
  Version table:
 *** 1:2.8.3 0
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing/contrib i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
harry@Biker:~$ apt-cache policy iceweasel
iceweasel:
  Installed: 3.5.19-2
  Candidate: 3.5.19-2
  Version table:
 *** 3.5.19-2 0
        500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing/main i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Just like I don't spend $20,000.00 on a store bought Harley Davidson. I run what I can run on my Computers. One does not have to settle for anything as far as Desktops yet.

Howdy and Welcome to the forum.

[hazel]

What are we to do when the software we can actually use gets all Macintosh-ey on us, and becomes uncustomizable, almost impossible to configure, and just generally becomes unusable? Do we keep using the old, or do we let someone else force us into the new?

Well, you more or less answered your own question: there's plenty of alternative desktops out there if you don't like where gnome is going. It's nice, by the way, to hear from someone who remembers FVWM95. That was my first Linux desktop (Red Hat 6).

The beauty of Linux is that you don't have to choose between upgrading to a new version of something (desktop or app) which you actually don't like very much, or staying with the old one and getting slowly more and more out-of-date. You can always move sideways because there are alternatives for everything.

So if your distro management team try to bully you into accepting something new, just thumb your nose at them!

[HalluxSinister]

There's no reason not to run great software, Linux is efficient like that. Guess I should have mentioned what I've been messing with: my current computer is a netbook, a Toshiba NB205-... something, with an Atom 1.6GHz processor, 2 GB of ram (the most I could cram in there) running a 32-bit version of Fedora 14, (it was 15, but like I think I said, I went back,) and some meager graphics on a little 1024x600 panel. Don't remember the graphics specs or audio, but both work fine, run Compiz with wobbly windows, etc. etc., and oh, BTW: when I first started playing with this, I had no extra HDD's, so I used my camera's 16GB Kingston Class 4 SDHC card as the HDD. The machine literally had, for about a month, NO physical moving-parts-based HDD in it, just that SD card on /dev/sda1 in the netbook's built-in card reader. It was a little slow at times, bootup took a while longer than it does now, but it worked, and that's way less drive space than you've got, using a LVM,... also, after putting Linux, Wine, Gnome-Chem-Utils, Firefox-4, the Gimp, Audacity, and all that other kewl junk on it, as well as several GB of music... there was STILL almost 6 gigs of space available. I only slapped the HDD back in to install F14 so I could put all my music and videos on it, and have a mobile movie and music platform, without having to drag my external drive around. (The battery on this thing lasts about 10 hours, no kidding!)

So yeah, 1+ year old netbook that cost about 300 bucks, running the latest and greatest (32bit) Linux distro. There's no reason to settle, man. Oh, wait... Pentium-M 600... well, okay, maybe you do have to ride that thing in the bicycle lane... :^) But that's a great example though, of why Linux is the best! Look at that, a Pentium-M 600 MEGAHertz computer, running Linux! Don't think WinDOS 7-ULTIMATE would quite fit and run on that. Didn't see from your screengrab how much RAM you have though... did I miss it? I'm guessing we're looking at about 1GB, or maybe even less. Still...

[HalluxSinister]

I know I can do that, that's one of the great things about Linux I tell people about, but at the same time, it's hard to sell others on an OS they don't know anything about using, if I can't just tell them to download Fedora XX, LiveUSB Creator for [whatever OS they're currently using], fire it up, and BAM, live Linux system they can play with, right on the spot, looking all shiny and cool, with hardware autodetected and configured right out of the gate! Also... as long as I have been messing with this, I have yet to compile my own custom kernel, and the days of swapping one WM for another are long ago and far away. I'm not really a computer expert, though I suppose I may be slowly and almost accidentally becoming one. I just want it to work, and let me do what I need to do, and that's what got me so excited about distros like F11-F14, was that for the most part, they did that. Yeah, I know how to manuever in the bash, I know about file permissions, grub, man, (a very important command) info, vi, grep, locate, the difference between an unpriveledged user and root, when to be root and when it pays not to be, why you don't login as root and tell the cmoputer "rm -rf *" in the root directory... so yeah, I suppose I could install F15, then yank Gnome 3 off and install something else... hell, I could probably slap Gnome 2 on there, or TWM, (so light and small and FAST! but not pretty) and so on, but I like being able to use all the point-and-drool stuff, and not have to pull up a terminal (or Ctrl-Alt-F[n] out to a VTTY) to do anything but once in a great while.

I like (like so many other people out there) my software to, as they split the infinitive so often when they say, "just work". And when it does, as it does, (starting a sentence with "and" like so many people do nowadays, despite the grammatical disrectitude,) I feel some trepidation about screwing around with it, making it STOP working right, and ending up in a situation I am not able to claw my way out of, with what I already know, and I REALLY hate, even doing proper routine data backups, having to reinstall everything from scratch every time just to get back to what I had before I started screwing around with it. It's the reason so many people still use non-free crapware/crippleware/straightjacketware like anything from Misro$oft or crApple. They just want their stuff to work, without having to become computer experts.

I see it as being similar to how people view cars. These days, in order to wring most every erg or joule out of every drop of gasoline, (or petrol, depending on where you live) whilel producing a waste gas that has almost no odor or harmful particulate matter in it, the engine compartment has about 10,000 parts, and your "shade-tree" mechanic can't work on it anymore, because it's so complicated. Once upon a time, there were about a halfdozen things under the hood. Engine, transmission, (or part of it,) radiator, fan, battery, steering linkage and front suspension components, and the backs of the headlights and turnsignals, and that was about IT. Sure, there was some engine mounted equipment, a carbourator, alternator, oil pump, water pump, distributor, the pulley that drove that stuff, a couple belts, and enough room around those parts for a couple dogs and a family of cats to hang out when it wasn't running.

Now, the way cars are built there's almost no room to slip a feeler guage in in the compartment, and you need a bachelors degree, or nearly, to work on the damned things. Sure, it's great that you don't choke every time one drives by, since they're no longer turning 90% of the gasoline they burn (at a gallon a minute) into filth no one wants to breathe, but the new ones are a nightmare to even think about working on. I expect before too long, cars will be like computers, and you'll pay more for gas than the cost of the car over the time you have it, and when it breaks, you just buy a new one, because it's cheaper that way in the long run. How many places still fix VCR's, or fix DVD players? Remember about 25 years ago how every stripmall or every other, at least, had a TV/VCR/Vacuum/Sewing machine repair shop in it? Try finding someone who repairs TV's now.

Here's how you repair a TV today. Step 1. determine there's something wrong with the one you have, and it's not a problem with the remote control, power, cable, satellite dish, or internet connection. Step 2, buy a new TV. (or if it's still under warranty, return it for a replacement.)

It's all disposable, and I, like many people, have better things to be doing than spending weeks or months fiddling with the computer. I just want it to work. I don't see how that's too much to ask. Sure, being an expert is great, but it's not what I want to do with my life. I'd rather be an engineer, or a musician, or a doctor, anything but a computer tech. If I have to do that, I might as well be a truck-driver. Sitting on my ass all day, doing the same stupid, repetative boring task. (And I'm not disrespecting the vocation of truck-driver. I used to be one, for a short while, before I realized I was getting to hate driving..., I know it's necessary, and if that kind of job can fulfill you deeply, as a person, I'm happy for you, doll. But it's NOT for me, and neither is being a software installer/troubleshooter/tech.) A little story - if I may without turning this into a novella. When I was a kid, (read ages 16-24) I loved working on those things in my car that I could. I changed my own oil, I repaired a leaking radiator, I changed out a window, replaced a door once... I've repaired a jerky speedometer, a non-functioning cruise-control, a broken seat-mount bracket, the list goes on and on. I saved a bunch on money, and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity and thrift, not paying someone else to do these things. As I got older, and started earning more and more money, I came to realize that in the end, my time was more valuable than the cash I was saving wasting time screwing around with the cars guts myself, and slowly, over time, I came around to the idea that I should pay someone else to get all greasy underneath my car, changing the oil, lubing the points, and so on. The fun had all gone out of it, and since I know enough about cars that I'm not going to fall for "your blinker fluid is low, and your piston-return springs are badly worn, and should be changed", and I know if I JUST HAD TO, I could change the oil and lube the points myself, all I would need is the oil and lube, a funnel, a pan and a wrench, grease-gun, and to know where the points were, (which shouldn't be too hard to find with a flashlight and a little patience).

I feel the same way about computers now. I would rather find a distro that I trust, and just use that. Yeah, there's about 15 thing I have to do to a new Fedora install to get it to work the way I like. But I have them written down, I run down the list, and it takes about 20 minutes (after install finishes) and it's done. I don't want to spend days or weeks screwing with it. A new distro comes out, (hour zero). I download it while doing other things, and back-up all info, files, my bookmark stack, etc. I make a bootable out of the iso. I take a deep breath, and (hour one) I boot into the new Linux, and hit "Install to Disc". Then I go make lunch, work out, do laundry, vacuum, etc. Then I come back and set up my user name, run down my list of post-install configs, copy files, install bookmarks, install software, let it download all 500+ updates that there are suddenly, for some reason... (hour two) and test it out.

If I start downloading the iso when I wake up, by after lunch I expect it to be up and running, just how I like it, and not to have to screw with it anymore, as I have classes to study for, cooking/cleaning/working out to do, etc. I don't have days and weeks, (like I did when I was a kid) to devote to this kind of thing.

THAT'S why I don't want to, (although I feel confident I could if I really wanted to and didn't mind investing the time,) customize a Linux install by swapping WM's, etc. I'd much rather get out and ride my bike, (which I've spent MUCH more time customizing and tweaking than my computer). This is how it should be, as far as I'm concerned. < / rant >

[HalluxSinister]

Yeah... I remember my first experience with it... the first time I got X working... (xfree86) with the default background that looked like grey burlap, a nifty round analog clock, an empty xterm, (which when you killed it the x-session ended!) a pair of giant eyes that followed my big, X-shaped mouse curosr around the screen, no docks, menu bars, etc., but if you left-clicked the screen, a menu would appear anywhere, and I eventually learned there was a file you could edit and change the menus, add things, make the xterm pop up somewhere else, be a different size... then someone showed me WindowMaker... and eventually, I ended up reinstalling WinDOS on my Packard Bell 486, so I could play MYST!!! YAY MYST! < sigh > the good old days. :^) Maybe I will go back to that one day. I do like the fact that with Linux, most things are GUI frontends and a backend is out there somewhere, that I could launch from the venerable old CLI... but anyway... I digress.

[rokytnji]

Didn't see from your screengrab how much RAM you have though... did I miss it? I'm guessing we're looking at about 1GB, or maybe even less. Still...

Less than 1 gig

@Biker:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        504204     179924     324280          0       6316     111176
-/+ buffers/cache:      62432     441772
Swap:       562268          0     562268

Graphics with right intel driver and latest xorg

@Biker:~$ glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
298 frames in 5.0 seconds = 59.405 FPS
296 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.988 FPS
290 frames in 5.0 seconds = 57.880 FPS
294 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.501 FPS
291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.125 FPS
293 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.507 FPS
294 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.706 FPS
291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 58.105 FPS

So woobly windows only show up after a few beers.

I have a 63 Ford F100 with a 300 Cubic Inch 6 cyl that runs on points and propane and gas. My Winter and scrapper truck. Does fine for the decade it was made in. I keep it running fine.

Have also a 2007 Nissan 4 door Frontier with a 4.0 litre V6. I can tinker with it also.
So know what you mean by running vehicles and how manufacturers try to keep the home user /shadey tree out of the loop. I have tinkerer DNA in my blood though and
nothing I own whether, Trucks, Motorcycles, Computers, House, Ranch, is stock.
I always try and use the best tools for the right job. It helps also being able to read and understand any how to's for anything.

Some folks prefer paying payments and having things just work OOTB.
I am one of those that lives by modifying what others consider old junk.
If it is new. Heck. I'll tweak it to the way I want it to work for me.

Takes all kinds in this world. Not everybody thinks like me or you. No sweat off of my hairy back.
As long as I can do what I can do. I am a happy camper.

Good luck with the Toshiba NB205. You may deny it. But it sounds like you have some tinkerer DNA in you also.



Happy Trails, Rok

[Mudgen]

Rokytnji, I have a thirty years newer Ford truck, and I think it's old. But I love it as your do yours.

OP, I often skip a Fedora release after finding too much broken stuff. F14 is fine, F13 had too much broken stuff for me. Have not tried F15 yet, so thanks for the heads up.

[Eldergeek]

I use Debian stable w/KDE and have also hit a (probably hardware induced) slump with Squeeze. First off, KDE4 has entirely too much of a learning curve, especially when KDE 3.5.x was user friendly, intuitive and quite mature. Secondly, on the the same machine I've used since Sarge (1.8 GHz Athlon w/768 MB of RAM), for the first time, the latest version of Debian (Squeeze) is slower instead of faster (I had modest speed improvements with Etch and Lenny). My brother Bill was a die hard Windows nerd until a few years ago when I gave him a PCLinuxOS machine. Since then he's been a distro-hopping fool. This week he's been raving about Linux Mint 11.

I realize that the developers are thinking ahead and trying to prepare for newer, nicer, faster hardware that's coming down the pike but, until now, I've been a little spoiled by how well Linux has worked on older hardware. Guess everything changes and I'm just an old fuddy-duddy.