Linux Usage for 2015

Calendar year 2015 is coming to an end, and I know I haven't been posting much here lately. But here's my Linux usage for 2015.

Desktop Computer

For year 2015, I noticed that I've used Red Hat family distributions starting Feb 2015.

Distribution	Used from	Used until
CentOS 7 (Gnome)	2015-06-15	2015-12-31
Fedora 22 Workstation (Gnome)	2015-06-04	2015-06-14
Fedora 22 Workstation (KDE)	2015-05-30	2015-06-04
Fedora 21 Workstation (Gnome)	2015-02-06	2015-05-30
Antergos (Gnome)	2014-08-23	2015-02-05

Laptop Computer

My laptop, an aging IBM ThinkPad T60, is what I normally use to try different distributions. So there is a lot of variations in usage in this computer.

Distribution	Used from	Used until
Q4OS 1.2 Orion	2015-08-08	2015-12-31
Manjaro i3 0.8.13.1	2015-08-06	2015-08-07
Debian 8.1	2015-08-03	2015-08-06
Peppermint 6	2015-07-10	2015-08-02
Bodhi Linux 3.0	2015-07-06	2015-07-09
CentOS 7	2015-05-14	2015-07-05
elementary OS 0.3 Freya	2015-05-10	2015-05-13
CentOS 7	2015-03-22	2015-05-10
Fedora 21 Workstation	2015-02-02	2015-03-22
Ubuntu MATE 14.04.1	2015-01-29	2015-02-02
PC-BSD 10.1	2015-01-28	2015-01-29
Ubuntu MATE 14.04	2014-11-11	2015-01-28

For year 2016, I'm planning to try out Linux distributions that make it easy for me to (1) install proprietary video drivers and (2) the Steam client because I've decided I want to try and play some video games again.

My current pick as of this posting is the Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa MATE edition. As a matter of fact, it's currently an ongoing installation to my desktop PC right now.

Here's to the new year for computing, especially Linux. Happy Linuxing!

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr experience

Guest starring OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks

I’ve finally spent some time with the latest Ubuntu release, 14.04 LTS codenamed Trusty Tahr, and this here is a transcript of my experience with it. As mentioned before this paragraph, I have decided to guest star OS X 10.9.3 Mavericks because I’ve been using it for the past couple of months and I felt it would be interesting to compare and contrast them.

If you are looking forward to some OS X bashing, then I’m sorry to disappoint you because I don’t subscribe to that kind of shit. As an avid follower of technological tools, I feel it is really moronic to bash on a platform. Use what you feel is best for you, then move on. But I digress…

Let’s begin!

Linux Distribution Usage History

A little over a year ago, I assembled my first desktop computer all by myself. I've been using computers for a very long time but it was only until that point in my life where I felt the inspiration to try and build one myself. After much reading and YouTube watching, especially the part about inserting the CPU into the motherboard, I bought all the parts and started assembling.

PC Build Components (May 8, 2013)

But this post isn't about that. When I successfully completed that build, I already decided to boot only Linux on the machine. And so I made a running file in Google Drive to log all the Linux distributions I've used since May 8, 2013. (I felt really stupid for not thinking of doing this earlier, when I started using Linux in 2008...but oh, well.)

In Search of a Main Operating System

I've been using the Linux operating system for close to 5 years now. My first foray was with Ubuntu 8.04 and ever since, I've been switching between distributions (a.k.a. distros) but I have always used Ubuntu as my fallback, and starting 2012, it was Mageia. But recently, I decided to just stick with Debian-based distros so I don't need to memorize a whole lot of troubleshooting and CLI commands.

Here's a list of the distros I wanted to use, in order of my preference:

1. Debian 7 (Wheezy)
2. CrunchBang 11 (Waldorf)
3. Linux Mint 13 (Maya)
4. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)
5. (Tied) elementary OS 0.2 (Luna) or Pear OS 7

And here are some of my personal thoughts about said distros.

Debian 7 (Wheezy)

I really wanted to use this as my main OS as I feel it is very flexible in terms of total user control. Similar to what I felt when I used Arch Linux in the past, building a customized setup with the 'net install' ISO of Debian 7 was very empowering to me as a user. But I had to look elsewhere because the boot process of my system was rather inconsistent. Most times it would boot up. But sometimes, it just freezes, and I have to do a hard-reset just so it can reboot and finally continue to an up and running OS. Also, I get sound issues with PulseAudio. I don't know if both issues are because of hardware incompatibilities, I guess I need to investigate it further in the future. But I needed a working computer so I moved on.


CrunchBang 11 (Waldorf)

Hell bent on using a Debian-based (except Ubuntu) system, I landed on the web pages of CrunchBang. I have heard of this distro before but never really considered it because I thought it was based on Arch Linux (which I also like). And when I read that it's a customized Debian-based distro using Openbox, I had to give it a go.  My preferred desktop GUI when I used Debian was LXDE and, if I wanted to go lighter, Openbox (with tint2 as the panel); CrunchBang fit the bill. Using virtualization technology to test it, I fell in love with CrunchBang immediately! With all my data backed-up, I installed it on my physical machine. And it worked fine for a couple of days, until after unmounting a USB device caused a kernel panic! I thought it to be a one-off event, but it started happening more. Also, the inconsistent boot up I experienced with Debian 7, I was experiencing them again in CrunchBang 11. So again, I said goodbye to it, and moved on.


Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

Out of personal options with pure Debian-based (except Ubuntu) distros (note: I say personal options, because there are a plethora of Debian-based distros out there, like Trisquel, etc. but those didn't make it to my personal list), I came back to Ubuntu-based distros. Now, there's nothing wrong with Ubuntu. In fact, I owe it all to Ubuntu as it paved the way for me to using Linux. But I don't like their decision with using Unity (more on this later). Good thing Linux Mint was there to pick up the torch. And it isn't the no. 1 distro in Distrowatch for nothing. It's what I would consider to be a n00b distro as everything (except for the kitchen sink) is thrown in there by default. Adobe Flash player works by default, codecs to play MP3s and M4Vs and other proprietary formats are there. I probably would consider it to be a distro that works out-of-the-box. Not much tweaking and such. I really didn't have any issues with the distro itself. It booted up reliably 99% of the time, sound issues were gone, etc. I guess the issue was with myself, I got bored! I got bored because I wasn't tinkering with the command-line to get things to work. Come to think about it, I think Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE would be my new fallback distro if others don't work out well for me.

NOTE: I could have used Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) to satiate my hunder for using a Debian-based (and not Ubuntu-based) distro, and I would have used LMDE, but it's a (semi) rolling-release distro (not that there's something wrong with that...I like Arch Linux) and it didn't fit my needs. If you haven't gleaned already from my list, my main requirement is a long-term release distro, so...


Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

Ubuntu is what got me started using Linux. I got my first laptop in 2008 and it had Windows Vista pre-installed. I've read all the flak and dissing regarding said OS received. So I downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), wiped off Windows Vista, and the rest, as they say, is history. Now, when I got my new desktop rig setup earlier this year, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was the first OS I installed into it. And like Linux Mint, I really didn't have any critical issues. It booted properly 99% of the time, sound worked alright, non-free drivers/codecs/plugins were easy enough to install. What killed it for me was Unity. What I really didn't like about it was the application panel was stuck to the left side of the screen and it couldn't be moved somewhere else. Also, the integration of the context menus to the top panel was annoying -- use case: I have some 80x24 terminal windows running during a typical session which I like to put on the lower-right corner of my 1920x1080 resolution screen. Now, I want to access the context menu, like 'Preferences' for the terminal emulator. So, I'd have to drag the mouse from the lower-right corner all the way to the upper-left corner just so I can click the 'File' menu. I know I can use keyboard shortcuts, but still, it can be annoying for non-maximized windows. But this doesn't mean I will never use Ubuntu again...but then again, with them ads popping up from Dash searches, BY DEFAULT, gets into your nerves quickly.


elementary OS 0.2 (Luna) or Pear OS 7

Both these distros struck me as what I would describe as a 'Mac OSX'-ish looking OSes. I haven't had extensive experience with Mac OSX (except for times when I walk into an iStore -- Apple products resellers where I'm located -- and tinker with their MacBooks on display) so I can't comment much if these 2 OSes indeed work as close as how a Mac OSX machine would work. And I've only tried running both on virtualized environments so I don't have much to comment on with regard to how they would kick it when installed on my physical machine. Both are Ubuntu based, elementary OS 0.2 (Luna) uses 12.04 LTS and Pear OS 7 uses 12.10 (a cue that I will most likely not go with Pear OS 7).

Pear OS 7 is what I would consider to be the closest resemblance to Mac OSX as far as I can say. The dock houses icons which are very, very similar to Mac OSX. I can probably surmise that Pear OS 7 was created as some of distro to be used by transitioning Mac OSX users to Linux (similar to what Zorin OS is to Windows users). It's aesthetically pleasing graphically and it totally screams 'MAC OSX!' to me. And similar to Linux Mint, Pear OS 7 comes with pretty much everything; Quote. "And it comes with thousands of free applications. Pear OS 7 does everything you need it to. It’ll work with your existing PC files, printers, cameras and MP3 players." Unquote. This will probably go very well with new Linux users as well.

elementary OS 0.2 (Luna) is also another distro that looks like Mac OSX at first glance. But what it really is is something simpler. I don't know what's so appealing about it, but I would say the closest adjective I can pin on it is elegant. Like Pear OS 7 (and Mac OSX), it is also dock-centric. What's probably great about this distro is that it follows the "a new version will be released when it's ready" philisophy, similar to that of Debian. That means that you are not "pressured" to update every 6 months to the next release of the distro which makes it somewhat stable in a way. Of course, it's based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) so it will be supported until 2017. Unlike Pear OS 7 which throws everything into the fold, elementary OS has a much more minimalistic approach. It doesn't come with proprietary plugins and modules installed. That makes it somewhat harder for Linux n00bs to use out-of-the-box. It also comes with it's own desktop environment called Pantheon (a port of Gnome 3, I suppose) and it's own applications written from scratch like Scratch text editor.


Conclusion

So, what am I using now? Inasmuch as I'd hoped to use pure Debian, or pure Debian-based (except Ubuntu), distro, I have to say that the Ubuntu-based distros I mentioned above are what's giving me better experiences. As I mentioned, my first fallback right now would be Linux Mint 13 (Maya) but since discovering elementary OS 0.2 (Luna), I decided to give the latter a go. So as of this posting, I am using elementary OS 0.2 (Luna) as my main OS.

External Links:

• Debian (http://www.debian.org)
• CrunchBang (http://www.crunchbang.org)
• Linux Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com)
• Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com)
• Pear OS (http://pearlinux.fr)
• elementary OS (http://elementaryos.org)

Getting the DWA 125 Wireless Dongle to Work in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I have a laptop with networking interfaces eth0 (Atheros AR8152) and wlan0 (Broadcom 4727) which are not supported by the kernel version of 10.04 LTS (2.6.32-21-generic). I needed a kernel version 2.6.37 or higher to get these 2 interfaces working. But since I had no Internet connection, the best way, based on the answer(s) to my query, was to download the kernel manually from http://packages.ubuntu.com and install it in it's binary (.deb) format. When I tried searching for them in the package site, I saw that these linux-generic or linux-*-generic files had multiple dependencies so I thought twice of installing them this way. Dependencies is actually one of the top reason why I get freaked out about installing Linux distros without an Internet connection.

Resize Images in Ubuntu

So I like using my Ubuntu install. One thing that bothered me was that with the default F-Spot photo manager, I could not for the life of me find a way to resize my pictures. So I removed F-Spot and went with Shotwell. The same, there is a button to Crop but no Resize.

What I like about 10.04 LTS is that GIMP wasn't installed by default. I use a netbook and I feel that it may not be able to cope with the resources needed for GIMP. But I felt that installing GIMP was the next move. I searched Google and came across the article below (mentioned as a Reference).

So what's the fastest, most convenient and most user-friendly way to resize photos? Right-click the picture and on the drop-down menu select "Resize Images..." (read: it can process multiple pictures). It's called the Nautilus Image Converter and it resides in the context menu. Obviously, you will need Nautilus to be your file manager.

Clean Up the GRUB2 Menu

I'm on my Christmas break and so I get to use my personal computer most of the time. I am currently using an Ubuntu run netbook and lately I did a kernel upgrade as per advice of the update manager.

I noticed that the Grub menu at the boot screen is presenting me with way too many choices of the different kernels installed and it looks messy (for me). So today, since I am on vacay and I don't have much to do, I decided to try and clean up the Grub menu. This will not only make the Grub menu look cleaner, it will also remove the unused kernels and recover some disk space.

First up, I had to make sure which is the latest kernel installed so I don't accidentally remove that one. So I went to the command line, issued an command and got a result of the latest kernel installed.

ric@ubuntu-nb:~$ uname -r
2.6.32-27-generic

How I Got PC-BSD Into The GRUB2 Menu of Ubuntu

Long story short -- I followed a guide for this; CLICK ME and I will take you there.

Long story long, this is how I did it personally.

I went into Terminal and typed:

riclags@nix:~$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for riclags:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00095910

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        2432    19530752   83  Linux
/dev/sda2            2432       15076   101561345    5  Extended
/dev/sda3           15076       19458    35195737+  a5  FreeBSD
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5            2432       14590    97654784   83  Linux
/dev/sda6           14590       15076     3905536   82  Linux swap / Solaris

I took note that FreeBSD, the base of PC-BSD, is in /dev/sda3 device.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS comes installed with GRUB2 so doing changes to the menu is a bit different.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 3: Post Installation and Final Thoughts

So it's early in the morning and finally everything is installed. I don't know exactly if they will work as expected, though.

First boot - Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
The first boot for Ubuntu was as I expected it to be having installed it 2 times prior to this feat. On a fresh install, after setting up the WiFi connection, the Update Manager instantly kicked in presenting me with a whooping 224MB worth of updates. It took close to an hour to get all these updates to install before I went about and did the routine checking if sound worked, setting the display resolution, installing packages, etc. Since I am fairly familiar with Ubuntu, I didn't have a hard time navigating around the system.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 2: Installation

After creating the necessary partitions for the 2 *nix OSes, Ubuntu 10.04LTS and PC-BSD 8.0, I proceed with the installation.

Installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
As I am more experienced in installing Ubuntu, having done so many times in the past, it was not really hard to get it installed to the first primary partition on the disk. I ran the live USB I created and clicked the install to hard disk option in the desktop. I subdivided the 1st primary partition further to different mounts, namely: /, /home and swap as is my practice when I install Ubuntu (and I don't exactly know why). The installation took about 20 - 30 minutes for it to get installed in my laptop.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 1: Pre Installation

As I installed Ubuntu  10.04 LTS prior to my decision to do a dual-boot with PC-BSD 8.0 setup, I needed to make changes to the hard disk partition. So I decided to edit the partitions using GParted. According to the site:

"The GParted application is a graphical partition editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions.

A disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions. The GParted application enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions."

On the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation, I did an install of GParted.

$sudo apt-get install gparted

After the installation of GParted, I ran into some problems.

Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 0: Overview

I continue to learn about Ubuntu by searching forums or good ol' Google. In some of my searches, I noticed that some people think negatively about Ubuntu, or Linux in general. And those people also think that BSD is better. So I did a search and came upon PC-BSD.

Based on the PC-BSD site:

"PC-BSD is a free operating system with ease of use in mind. Like any modern system, you can listen to your favorite music, watch your movies, work with office documents and install your favorite applications with a setup wizard at a click."

I decided to download the PC-BSD 8.0 DVD image and try it out. And as it is still downloading as of this posting, I have decided that I will make my laptop go dual-boot with Ubuntu and PC-BSD.

First order of business -- repartition my hard drive to accommodate the PC-BSD install. Details will be posted in a new entry in the near future.

Sysinfo on Ubuntu

Sometime ago, I was wondering what the equivalent of the Windows command dxdiag was for Linux, specifically for Ubuntu. Then I came upon an article, I don't know exactly where now, that talked about Sysinfo. So I installed it.

$ sudo apt-get install sysinfo

After install, you can run it in command line by typing sysinfo or go through menu Application, System Tools, Sysinfo from the top panel (I am using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS so it may differ where the menu will be created for other Ubuntu versions).

Here are some screenshots of Sysinfo.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: Initial Impression

I recently finished installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop. Having used Ubuntu before, I can see that there has been a massive push for improvement. Some changes include the Ubuntu rebranding. Most notable is the default theme which is no longer brown and now has the Close - Maximize - Minimize window control buttons on the upper left corner ala Mac OS X style.

The last version of Ubuntu that I extensively used was 9.04 but I had problems with the Wifis so it only took me a month and I decided to take it down and return to the Redmond-centric OS. But much has changed in 10.04 LTS. Almost everything basic works out of the box. The Wifis is now easily configurable and connects instantly after the initial setup of access point, etc. In fact, I have removed Windows XP from my computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as the main, and only, OS.