Dizzy Dizzy

It's been a crazy couple of weeks here at Daemon Dancing World Headquarters. I finally made the big internal office move, setting up all the way downstairs in the forlorn hope of getting a quieter work place. One where I can actually close a door to shut out some of the kid noise. The girls are actually very good in general, but they are only 7 and 6, so can be expected to be only so quiet. So I've been planning this office move for quite some time, and finally pulled it off. While I am by no means completely settled in, I do have two of the computers set up and running. Now to get the bookshelves restocked.

Another big time sink has been the effort to find a new OS. PC-BSD just wasn't working out. Ever since the 3.x upgrade and, I believe, the move to HAL, my hardware has been kinda screwed up. I no longer saw my local disks, the syslog was getting filled with a warning messages about some device, sound wasn't working, and the list went on and on. These problems, plus the fact that I just don't think FreeBSD is a good client machine. It is still a great server OS, but its lack of basic amenities like Flash and solid multimedia apps means it is too much ofa fight to use as a personal workstation.

So I went back to looking at Linux distros. Tired of playing with the lost stepchild of OSes in FreeBSD, I began looking at the most popular distros on Distrowatch. I wrote up a short list of things I wanted my OS to do for me:

• Install, with extra credit given for those that understand I'm using my own boot loader and to give me an easy option for picking where and what to install for a boot. Installing from a LiveCD is also a plus.


• Play audio CDs. I should just be able pop a CD into the player and listen to music, with an easy way to rip it.


• Show me my local partitions. And I make it difficult, by having five different kinds of partitions - DOS, FAT-32, NTFS, ext3 and ufs2 (the BSD one). The latter one is vitally important, as I have six months of living done on it.


• Dual monitor support. As I've documented in the past, dual monitor support is a real pain with X and I wanted a better way. I never could get it to work in PC-BSD with more than 16 bit color. And by using Linux, I could even go with an "official" driver from ATI, as I don't mind using proprietary stuff if it "just works".


• Palm Pilot connectivity. Another thing I was never entirely successful in doing with BSD, getting my Palm Pilot (actually, an old Handspring Visor) to sync.


• Teamspeak. This is a voice communications app I like to use and even had it working for a bit on PC-BSD. But the mic stopped working, just one of many things.


• See both of my CD drives. I have a DVD writer and a plain old 50x CD-ROM drive, which was another device that disappeared in the HAL days of PC-BSD.


• Connects to my Windows network. This is especially true in order to get to my printers, both of which are hooked off of Windows boxes.


• Easily add apps. I'm a real glutton for apps, and I need to easily get at new ones.


• Automatic OS updates. I just don't want to think about it. Make my updates happen.


• Work with my KVM switch. It's been a little on the flakey side, as machines just miss out seeing the keyboard, but it has to easily work with my KVM switch.


• Get to the text terminals, ones that work. I like to have a root login on one of the alternate ttys that you get to via Ctrl-Alt-Fn. I spent way too much time trying to get more resolution than 80x25 on the PC-BSD text terminals.


• As mentioned in an earlier one, let me easily add a networked printer.

Seems like a pretty basic list, one that nearly anyone would need. Only the dual monitor support is pushing the limits, and even that isn't so strange these days. So I began my quest with the most popular Linux distro these days, Ubuntu. For some reason, I was bound and determined to go with a GNOME desktop this time. I'm not sure why I was being such a glutton for punishment, as I was pretty satisfied with PC-BSD's KDE desktop, and that's all I needed was Yet Another Thing to learn, but I just couldn't resist. So I stuck with the main Ubuntu line, as opposed to Kubuntu, which does the KDE desktop. It also had the added benefit of matching up with Edubuntu, which is a Ubuntu-based distro target at the educational market, which I hoped to install on the girls' computer.

So I downloaded the 6.10 "Edgy Eft" release and got busy installing. I resized an NTFS partition to give it 60gb to work with and installed pretty much the basic set. I've installed Ubuntu before and its LiveCD install is very nice. It's still annoying in how you tell it where to install the boot loader. There's a mysterious

(hd0)

in the middle of the last window that you are somehow supposed to know what to type in. This time I was ready though and knew I had to type in (hd1,6) to use the sixth partiion (second extended) of the second hard drive. It should do better, even though I realize most people will be happy with the default. The problem is, if they aren't it can be a pretty mysterious problem.

And so I settled in for the long haul. I figured if Ubuntu was good enough for so many people, it was probably good enough for me. But I only lasted about three days with it. The dual monitor setup was painful. Not quite so bad as for PC-BSD, but still a drag, and I could only get the "two displays" mode running, not the "one big display" (Xinerama or MergedFB) mode going. It wasn't too painful, as your mouse can go from one display to the other, just not windows. I don't know why the defaults are so weird. The basic setup has the displays in "Clone" mode, where one merely mimics the other - virtually useless. The next default is this one, with two displays. Slightly more useful, but still not what you want out of the box - just one big dislay.

But the gradually things started going awry. I couldn't get Teamspeak to work. It wasn't in any repository, and the installer from the website (GoTeamspeak.com also wouldn't work. The media players gave me headaches. It took me far too long to get the mixer settings correct so that CD playing worked. Amarok only worked intermittently, crashing or disappearing at startup. I had some problems getting the fglrx (ATI) driver to build without errors, although it seemed to work. But if I wanted these problems, I'd go back to Windows!-)

So I started looking around some more. Heck, much to the surprise of my Mac friend, I even checked out Mac prices, but I wasn't ready to go there yet! I list more distros that I tried in my next post.