Scientechie

Introduction

It is no secret that openSUSE has always been my Linux of choice. I have always found it to support my hardware, do what I expect it to, and otherwise work correctly, practically out of the box. And as always, I excitedly install the latest, newest distros, hoping that they will give it a run for its money.

I am also a KDE fan. KDE4 is a lot more usable than GNOME, and the looks don’t hurt either.

With that in mind, and the latest Fedora release (11, Leonidas), I downloaded myself the Fedora 11 KDE Live CD and took it out for a spin.

Hardware

As always, I test my distro on two platforms: a VMware 6.5 Virtual Machine with 1 processor and 512MB RAM, running on a Windows Vista host; as well as a native installation on the hard disk partitions of my Acer Ferrari 5000 (2.0GHz AMD Turion 64 X2, 2GB RAM, ATI X1600 Mobility Radeon).

First Impressions

On both the real hardware and VMware, I had less than favourable first impressions while booting off the Live CD.

For one, the default theme is passable at best. I like the wallpaper, but it is just so incongruous with the relatively modern and plastique KDE 4 look. It might look good with GNOME, but not with KDE 4. And why are the scrollbars of the Kicker Menu pink?

Secondly, Fedora 11 seems to have some major sound issues, because on both the hardware and the VMware, my speakers began to beep uncontrollably for about 2 minutes at login to the desktop before stopping. Furthermore, any sound files I tried to run restarted the same nightmare.

Thirdly, in an age of brilliant Linux installers, Fedora still forces you to use a fullscreen, archaic design installer. It gets the job done, no doubt, but these are first impressions, after all.

Deeper In

The install was relatively painless. But I noticed something bad: the shutdown hangs on my VMware install. This is not just bad, this is very bad. I have to do a hard shut down every time I shut down my machine. And this is not an issue with just the KDE 4 version, it actually occurs with the GNOME version too (yes, I downloaded the GNOME Live CD just to check this out).

And the sound problem still persisted. In the end, I was forced to keep a pair of earplugs besides me, for use every time I rebooted.

My ATI X1600 was supported out of the box, but desktop effects faltered. This is not so much a surprise, as many distros fail to do that, but I was expecting better out of this Fedora release.

What is worse, though, is that on changing the incorrectly discovered resolution to 1680×1050 (my native resolution), all the windows elements retained their earlier appearance. In a nutshell, everything looked horribly mis-sized.

I have plenty of grudges about the software selection too. KOffice? In favour of the well respected, and perfectly functional openoffice.org? Okay, I am using a KDE 4 distro, but so what? openSUSE never asked me to use KOffice. GIMP is missing, as are Mplayer, or even Totem. There isn’t even Firefox. Sticking to the default KDE 4 apps is one thing, but this is taking it too far.

In line with Fedora’s policy, I cannot play most media files without downloading extra codecs. But that is where I found out that PackageKit refuses to work for me. My internet is behind a network prock-sy, but despite setting up the internet prock-sy in the system, PackageKit refuses to get my files for me. No luck from the command line either. This is interesting, given that the internet browsing works fine otherwise.

Stability

It turns out that the shutdown issue on my VMware was not the only stability issue. On opening many windows rapidly on even my real hardware (which is fairly fast), I can easily hang the session. I have to kill the Xserver, or in some cases, even do a hard reboot.

Conclusion

To be honest, I was disappointed. I was expecting much more. This was a poor show from a major distro. Given the slipped deadlines, I was hoping for something worthy. In a phrase, I didn’t like Fedora 11 at all.

I guess I will just stick to my Ubuntu 9.04 and openSUSE 11.1.

Rating: 4/10

Update: Many readers are pointing out that Fedora 11 has worked well for them. I have not stated that Fedora is outright bad. It is just that Fedora did not work out well for me on two environments. And secondly, many of the readers are repeatedly pointing me to the repos for software gripes. As said earlier (now highlighted), my package manager is not working.

My original statements remain valid.

Bing.com is, as you will know unless you have been completed cut off from this world for a long time, Microsoft’s latest attempt at wooing internet search users.

Bing has just started to become publicly available. And its first impressions are, well, not so good.

To begin with, the homepage doesn’t display properly on my browser. No, I am using Firefox 3, not some under the stone browser. It the search box, somehow, obscures the lower horizontal half of what I type. Not good.

Next, the search. Some of the results are downright awry. I am a university student, and I use Google heavily for my purposes. So as a test, I searched for “atmega8535 programmer circuitry”. Bing reports a plethora of buying option for this particular microcontroller. Google presents me with, well, a page containing the ATMEGA8535 programmer circuitry. Wide gap.

Then, I decided to try something more common. I tried “formula 1 ferrari”. Google shows me the top two results as the Ferrari homepage as well as the Formula 1 official site. Reasonable. What Bing shows me is just the Formula 1 site, and then the next results is something about the Shell and Ferrari partnership. In fact, the Ferrari homepage is nowhere on the first page. Google also offers me some images. Bing? No. Talk about a decision engine.

Type in a popular name, such as “avg” or “opensolaris”, and Google offers sublinks to the most important pages of the top site. Very useful if I already know what I am looking for, and want to go directly to some page. Bing doesn’t.

What Bing does offer is a text preview of each link. This can be very handy, but for complex searches, the relevant content is often down the page. This wouldn’t help you decide, then.

Bing also uses a three column layout, as opposed to Google two columns. Bing places the related links and the history of your searches (which it remembers, unlike Google) in the left most, results in the second and the previews in the third. Personally, I prefer the two column layout, specifically if I am working in a very small sized window.

Indeed, the only real positive feature is Bing’s homepage, which is not only attractive, but also interactive. Hovering the mouse over various positions lets you view interesting snippets of information regarding whatever the page happens to be displaying. This can make it a really interesting page to set as your browser’s default home.

But at the end, Google is still king - and by a massive margin. I, at least, won’t be using Bing for search. I’ll just bookmark it, and come to it for the pretty pictures, now and then.

This is a repost of an article I wrote for a newspaper in my country. Its an enjoyable read, and I got quite a few retaliatory comments. It was published under the tagline:

“By attacking from the bottom, where Microsoft can no longer successfully compete, Linux will finally cut itself a large slice of the desktop”

Everyone with even a minor experience in computers knows what Linux is. It is a remarkably complete operating system and is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development. It has, in fact, more than one beautiful Desktop Environment (DE) available, that gives it the point and click capabilities that one expects from a graphical operating system. Actually, Linux is just a ‘kernel’ (a core base) around which the operating system (OS) is built. This means that, unlike the popular Microsoft Windows OS, there is no single distributor of Linux. Many companies and developers use it to build operating systems known as ‘distros’ (short for ‘distributions’). Spearing a thrust that aims to make Linux available to the average end user are the major distros. So why would the common home user choose one of these distros over the much more common Microsoft Windows (and Mac OS, which is itself a close relative of Linux)? One of the major reasons would be that Linux is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This means that the full software is not only available for free, but the code used to make the OS is also openly available to everyone to view and modify. This translates into unbelievable stability and security: no more crashes, hang-ups, or viral threats. Linux is faster than Windows, more adaptable, and highly customisable.

It was always that much. These are the reasons large and powerful companies like Google, Yahoo, IBM and others adopted it. These are the reasons nearly all higher end network servers are run on Linux. But these reasons are not enough to entice the average user to start using Linux.

The clinching point now is the manner in which the Linux DEs and Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) have evolved. They are in no way lesser than their Windows or Mac cousins. They are fully functional, powerful, intuitive, and to top it all off, can be stunningly stylish. They can mimic the behaviour of the Windows OS, or work in absolutely unique ways. Gone are the days when the command line text was necessary to use. Even the installation procedure, once the most intimidating part of the Linux experience, is now so easy, that the Windows installation seems downright complex by comparison.

That would mean the Linux is finally ready to take over the average Desktop. A very recent adoption of Ubuntu by the French National Assembly is an indicator of how things are going. After the phase over, the politicians are unanimous in their opinion of how much better the new system is.

However, one is tempted to ask, “if I’m paying big money for something (Windows, Mac OS), there must be a reason.” And there is. Unless you get a commercial version of Linux (which indeed is available), you do not get any official support, even though there is plenty of community support available. Moreover, everything from Microsoft Office to professional development tools to graphical software to web browsers to media players has its fully functional (and often even more powerful) equivalent in Linux, yet the fact remains that most of the Windows software you are familiar with will not run in Linux.

But the biggest obstacle in large scale common Linux adoption is the hesitation in getting used to an entirely new way of thinking. Not much in Linux works in the same way as Windows. You do not double-click an executable to install something, you use a package manager. You do not have a C: and a D: drive, you have a structured filing system. Softwares do not usually come on a CD or DVD, you usually download them from online ‘repositories’. Window management is spread across ‘workspaces’. Not that the Linux Desktop is difficult to use, it’s just different.

In the end it comes to down to how ready the common user is to accept something new. Those who manage to get a Linux system up and running never look back. The now legendary unreliability and clumsiness of Windows is just a reason to change over. Also note that most distros can be easily installed alongside Windows in ‘dual-boot’ configuration: Linux is perfectly happy with that. You can get a ‘LiveCD’ and actually try out the OS without even touching your hard disk.

Linux is ready to take over the Desktop: of that, there is no doubt. The ever increasing number of users adopting Linux is testament to that. Whether it can complete the takeover, is something only time will tell.

There is a lot of buzz on the internet about Wolfram Alpha. It is an old concept with a stunning development: take knowledge and make it computable with computer algorithms. Difficult, but possible.

I do not intend to explain what Wolfram Alpha is - it is worth a look for anybody. What I need to point out before you check it out is that is no magic wand, yet. There are lots of things it cannot tell you because it was not designed, and many it should, but still cannot.

Queries often need to be reworded, specially when dealing with maths and facts. A search about ‘voltage controlled oscillators’ brings up the rather more than acceptably frequent “Wolfram Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”. The query ‘fastest man on earth’ should be easily computable as the current 100m Olympic sprint champion (Usain Bolt), but Wolfram Alpha is not sure. Google, though, brings you good results.

But let that not put you off. When it brings results, they are awesome. See them to believe. There are plenty of sample queries on the Wolfram Alpha home page.

It is still a phenomenal achievement, and will be more so when Google pulls off something similar with Google Squared. And THAT should be a sight to behold - all of Google’s info converted to knowledge.

But for what it’s worth, Wolfram will always be known as the pioneer of the idea. And Wolfram Alpha is worth a look.

I have had yet another report of a rogue / slightly obscene ad appearing in the top banner. I have filed a complaint at the ad service.

Once again, I request my readers to copy the link of the ad (Right click > Copy Link Location) and paste it into any comment thread whenever they see something of the kind.

I do NOT tolerate bad ads on my blog, and all complaints WILL be acted upon.