#fedora - You are always wrong

EDIT: Please note that obviously the people in #fedora are not representative of the fedora community as a whole. This is just me blowing off steam late at night after hardware failure and a poor experience.

Fair warning - I am about to go off on a rant here.

I discovered this evening much to my dismay that the year and a half old western digital hard drive in my main laptop is dieing. All three of the Linux installs on the system failed in various ways (typically a sign of a hardware issue) so I grabbed the closest live CD and popped it in. Now, it's been awhile since I've burned a live CD so the top disc in my spindle was an old Fedora 13 disc. After the system booted up, I connected to my wireless internet and was on my way.

There was a few gigs of data on the drive I didn't have backed up, so I opened nautilus and navigated to my files.

Ahh right - the permissions of the hard drive made it so I could not read certain folders I needed access to. Not a problem, I'll just launch the file manager as root. I opened a terminal, typed in su followed by nautilus and was greet by a crash message.

Ahh right - nautilus doesn't like to be opened as super user if I recall correctly. It had been awhile since I had used a non-sudo distro, so I hopped into #fedora on freenode to ask how I could go about launching the file manager as super user.

Dear lord was that a mistake.

Less than a minute in the #fedora channel was enough to remind me why Fedora 13 was the last Fedora revision I had burned. I've found that whenever I am foolish enough to ask a question in #fedora, instead of getting help with what I have asked, I am bombarded with questions on why I am trying to do what I am doing. Even after informing them that I would just like to accomplish what I have asked, I was informed I was wrong and that I should do something completely different (and that would take far longer than I wanted with a dieing hard disc).

I would just like to take a moment to say to all the self proclaimed Linux help nazis out there:

You are not God's gift to your Linux help channel.

When a person asks a question, if you are not going to help - then don't. When someone seems to be asking an odd question - odds are you don't know everything about their story. If their question is truly odd, perhaps just throw a mention of warning after helping them accomplish their task.

Needless to say I left #fedora after a few mind numbing moments and simply installed pcmanfm (which launched as super user just fine).

Whew. I apologize if you are a decent person who really tries to help (instead of criticize) in #fedora on freenode. It just seems more often than not in the four years I've been using Linux as my primary operating system I have always met with resistance in that channel.

My data is all recovered from the drive now and I am happily headed back to apt-get land. If I ever give yum a try again it will definitely be with Fuduntu or Fusion and not with normal Fedora ever.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Top Five Fedora Derivatives

April in Linux land means most people are going Ubuntu crazy as Canonical's first bi-annual release of the year comes to term. I would like to take a moment to remind everyone to stop and smell the distros. Even in April there is much more to Linux than just Debian's child (and grand-children).

One of the other "big names" in the Linux world is Red Hat's community driven Fedora. Beyond Fedora itself, there are also a small number of derivatives out there based off of this Yum+RPM powered distribution. The following is a round up of some of the better ones.

Fusion Linux - Everything and the Kitchen Sink
Fusion Linux is to Fedora as Ultimate Edition is to Ubuntu. It takes the base desktop and crams it full of applicationy-goodness! It offers a good selection of open source applications by default that just about anyone would be able to sit down in front of the distro and accomplish most all of their computing tasks without having to install any additional applications. Beyond this it also pre-packages flash, java, and all those closed source codecs you need to play any sort of media file. If you are looking for a "beginner" or "quick setup" Fedora derivative, there is no doubting that Fusion is the way to go.


Fuduntu - Elegance and Flash
Even if this distro's name is a bit of a joke, it's goals and usefulness most certainly are not! If Fusion Linux is the Ultimate Edition of the Fedora derivatives, then there is no doubting that Fuduntu is easily comparable to Linux Mint. Fuduntu takes the standard Fedora base and adds minor adjustments that make the whole system feel just a bit more elegant. Beyond the new icon set and nautilus elementary, Fuduntu also distributes Adobe's Flash player and MP3 codecs by default. Fuduntu is largely targeted at laptops and netbooks - meaning it keeps power management in mind as well with the Jupiter Applet.


Xange - Blue Fedora at it's Best
Odds are you may know there are many different desktops to choose from in the land of Linux. Unlike Fusion and Fuduntu, Xange opts to use the KDE desktop instead of Gnome. Xange advertises itself as an "easy to use" Fedora derivative that is designed to be beginner friendly. It has some a-typical default applications such as aMSN and Skype included by default.


CentOS - Enterprise Stability, FOSS Cost
You won't find flashy desktop effects, multimedia codecs, or anything of that sort here by default - Just a rock solid Linux distribution. CentOS really shows Red Hat's dedication to the open source ecosystem. CentOS aims to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL and is just as stable. It is geared towards those that need a rock solid system, but do not need (or cannot afford) enterprise certification and support.


Yellow Dog - Enlightenment for your PS3
Of course I can't get through a Linux distro round up without mentioning my favorite desktop - Enlightenment. Yellow Dog is a Linux distribution designed for the PowerPC and PS3 architectures that features the E17 desktop. It is designed for home, business, and cluster computing users. It is one of the world's only Linux distros optimized for the cell processor.


Have another favorite Fedora derivative I didn't mention here? Drop a comment below letting me know what it is and I will be sure to check it out.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

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Fusion Linux 14 - Distro Review

Fedora is one of those Linux distros I have always wanted to love. It is sponsored by one of the top FOSS supporting companies in the world, it has strong principals in free standards, and yet somehow every time I get around to installing a new Fedora release it is just enough of a hassle that I end up removing it from my computer and reinstalling some form of Ubuntu. This is why Fusion Linux sparked my interest. Fusion Linux aims to to for Fedora what distros such as Linux Mint, PinguyOS, and Zorin did for Ubuntu. It aims to alleviate much of the messy setup work that is required to get a fully functional desktop operating system out of Fedora. It does this by preinstalling useful applications and codecs, including Adobe Flash and Sun's Java. It does all this while remaining 100% backwards compatible with Fedora.

For this review I will be using the latest release of Fusion Linux, which is their beta release based on Fedora 14. This version comes in a hefty 1.6gigabyte download, a bit large compared to the 700megabyte CD sized distros such as Linux Mint, but not too much larger than Pinguy and Zorin. The first thing you will notice when booting up Fusion (and I did a double take when I first saw it) is that their icon is a hotdog with legs...
According to the Fusion Blog this logo is really more of a funny place holder and they are looking for a graphics designer to create a real icon for the final release of Fusion 14, personally I think it gives the disc some unique personality.

Upon booting the operating system you are presented with a gnome desktop that largely resembles Linux Mint:

This isn't a bad thing though, for those coming from a Windows environment this setup will feel familiar. In fact, the menu you see in the lower left hand corner is the Linux Mint menu! Right next to this menu there are launcher icons on DockXBar for Chromium and terminal.

Also present on the desktop is the wonderfully useful "autoten" script. The autoten script allows for easy installation of extra packages on Fedora, you can see that many of the applications from this script come preinstalled on the system:

The reason Fusion has such a large download size is evident when you take a look at it's default software selection. It is a sizable list:

Accessories

• Calculator
• gedit
• Geany
  
• Gnome Do
• Gnote
• Parcellite
• Take Screenshot
• Tracker Search Tool
  

Games

• Abe
• Alien Blaster
• Blob Wars: Metal Blod Solid
• Chromium BSU
• FooBillard
• Frozen Bubble
• Glaxium
• PySol Fan Club Edition
• Teeworlds

Graphics

• Blender
• F-Spot
• Fotowall
• GIMP
• Inkscape
• PhotoPrint
• Picasa
• Scribus
• Simple Scan

Internet

• airsnort
• aLinkCreator
• aMuleGUI
• Chromium Browser
• Empathy
• Firefox 4
• Net Activity Viewer
• Thunderbird
• Transmission
• wxCAS

Office

• OO.org Writer
• OO.org Calc
• OO.org Impress
• OO.org Draw
• Project Management
• PyRoom

Sound and Video

• Audacious
• Audacity
• Audio CD Extractor
• Brasero
• Cheese
• Gnome MPlayer
• gtk-record My Desktop
• K3B
• Miro Internet TV
• Movie Player
• Pitivi Video Editor
• Rhythmbox
• VLC

System Tools

• autoten
• Fusion Icon
• Gparted
• LiveUSB Creator
• System Monitor
• Terminal

I only have a few comments about the selections Fusion Linux makes. First, is that there are two applications installed for several tasks including Brasero and K3B for burning CDs and Firefox and Chromium from webrowsing. While I am on the topic of Firefox, I would like to mention that Fusion ships with the beta 6 version of Firefox 4. This is a good thing, the beta is fairly solid and much better than firefox 3.x. I personally have been using it for several months now without issue. The installer for the live disc is the same one Fedora itself uses, so while it is not as friendly as Ubuntu's installer it is more than functional.

Also present is a wonderful selection of FOSS games that should keep most children (and some adults) entertained for a good long while. What is lacking from this application list you may notice is that there is no IRC client installed by default. The only issue I had with the software was that upon installation the system already had broken packages. Running yum update with the --skip-broken argument allowed the system to upgrade just fine though.

To finish on a good note I would like to mention I used my T101MT Asus tablet as my test computer and 100% of the hardware was functional with out any extra configuration! This is fantastic compared to the amount of work it takes to get the tablet to function under Ubuntu 10.04 (it has gotten better under Ubuntu 10.10, but it is still not 100% functional OOTB)

Overall Fusion Linux is a fantastic distro and for any beginner (or someone that doesn't want to deal with setting up Fedora) I would highly recommend Fusion Linux.

~Jeff Hoogland

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Best Linux Distro for 3D Performance

There is one question all new Linux users ask themselves at one point or another:

Which Linux distro do I want to use?

The answer to the question is different for everyone and varies depending on what you are doing with your Linux box. One thing I think many users fail to consider (or perhaps don't care about) is the level of 3D performance their distro gets. You may think that your choice of distribution does not matter in this area, but you will soon see it very much does.

The Hardware: While my hardware is not fastest in the world it is decently quick. Processor - Intel p9700 2.8ghz Dual Core, RAM - 4gigs of DDR3 1066, Video Card: nVidia 260m with 1gig DDR3 dedicated memory (Running the latest stable nVidia driver 256.53).

The Software: I used my favorite OpenGL benchmarks made by Unigine Company. The distros I am going to compare are:

• Ubuntu 10.04 (Pinguy) - Gnome
  
• Ubuntu 10.10 Beta - Gnome
  
• Linux Mint Rolling Release (Debian Based) - Gnome
  
• Chakra 0.2.1 (Arch Linux Based) - KDE
  
• Fedora 13 - Gnome
  
• Mandriva 2010.1 - KDE
  
• OpenSUSE 11.3 - KDE
  
• PCLinuxOS 2010.07 - KDE
  
• Sabayon 5.3 (Gentoo Based) - KDE
  

All of the tests where run on clean, fully updated install of each distribution. They use the stock kernel each of the distributions provides. Desktop effects where turned off in all cases.

The Results:
Well, being a math guy, I firmly believe the numbers speak for themselves. So here are the results of the three benchmarks (higher is better - click on image to enlarge):








As you can see the scores of most of the Linux distros are fairly close (within 3% of the number one), with one exception: Ubuntu. It appears that of all the wonderful improvements Canonical has been making to Ubuntu, 3D performance is not one of them (10.10 scored higher than 10.04, but only by a small amount). It is hard to get the exact numbers by reading a histogram so here are the scores in numerical form:


Across all three tests Chakra scored the highest (With PCLinuxOS and Sabayon in close second and third). Ubuntu 10.04 was at the very bottom (over 10% behind Chakra). While I think Ubuntu is a great distro it appears that if you are a Linux Gamer, you are better off using a non-Ubuntu distro.

~Jeff Hoogland
Please note while these benchmark scores presented are accurate to the best of my abilities, they only represent my personal hardware and software configurations. Your results on your own system(s) may vary (and if they do, please share them!).

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HOWTO: Setup a Linux Storage Partition

Anyone who has use a computer for an extended length of time knows that reformatting now and again is inevitable. For a distro hopper such as myself reformats come much more frequently than they do for most others. At any given point it is not uncommon for me to have two or more Linux distros installed on each of my laptops at the same time. While I like testing new things I also enjoy my laptop being fully functional in the processes and for it to be so I need access to my files regardless of whether I am booted into the latest Ubuntu, Sabayon, Fedora, or what ever other new distro I might be trying that week. While it is possible to share a single home directory for these different distros it can get messy to say the least - different versions of different programs all trying to save settings to the same places (You can see where this can cause issue).

The solution I have come to for such a dilemma is partitioning off a section of my hard drive as a "storage" partition. Essentially this is a large section of the hard drive that is not set to a default mount point for any of the installed distros (on my system I have this partition set to the first part of my extended partition, so sda6, that is formatted as ext3). Once you have your distro installed you can setup your storage partition to be the default save location for many things with a few simple commands. The first thing we need to do is create a location to mount your storage partition to, I like to use the point /mnt/storage (but you can use what ever floats your boat) to create such a point run the following in your favorite terminal: sudo mkdir /mnt/storage Next we have to tell your distro what to put at that mount point - to do this we are going to add a line to our /etc/fstab to do so open the file as super user in your favorite text editor by running something like: sudo gedit /etc/fstab Once you have the file open we are going to add a new line that looks something like this: /dev/sda6 /mnt/storage defaults,exec ext3 0 0 Now assuming you used the first partition on your extended partition for your storage space and the mount point you created is located at /mnt/storage upon rebooting your system it will auto mount your partition for you. (If you need to use a different partition, mount point, or file system type scroll down to the second to last section to see the edits you need to make for the above listed fstab entry to work).

Now that we have your partition setup to mount properly lets configure it so it stores (or looks for) your data there! Things I like to keep on my data partition are my Documents, Pictures, Videos, Downloads, and large game installs (namely Steam). Take any folders you want to keep on the storage partition and cut and paste them there. The last step is to make these folders we have now moved to the storage partition point to their original location using a symbolic link or symlink for short. For example to link a your Documents folder from your storage partition back to your home folder run the following: ln -s /mnt/storage/Documents ~/Documents Lets take a look at this command for a moment ln is the link command and the -s argument tells it to make a symbolic link, then the next two arguments are the source of the actual folder and then the destination to place the link. The result of running the above command is the creation of a folder in your user's home directory called "Documents" that when clicked into shows the contents of the Documents folder on the storage partition. You should repeat the above listed symlinking command for each folder you want to keep on the storage partition.

If you used a different hard drive/mount point/file system than the ones I initially suggested, it is easy enough to change you fstab entry so it works for your particular configuration. The syntax for an fstab line is: [file system] [mount point] [type] [options] [dump] [pass] The important ones are the first three [file system] is the location on your hard drive of your storage partition, for example if it is the first primary partition it would be /dev/sda1. The second part [mount point] is where you want to mount your partition to, just replace this with what ever path you created. The last one we care about is [type] this is simply the file system type you have your partition formatted to (ext3, ext4, ect.). What the remaining three arguments do is a bit beyond the scope of this article take a look here for further reading on them.

Personally I find having a storage partition extremely useful in the case of both multiple distros installed and when reformatting (I do not like to reuse a home folder). All in all it cannot hurt to set one up so - give it a try and let me know what you think!

~Jeff Hoogland

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