There has been quite a bit of activity on The Linux Experiment over the past little while. Check out the site here or quickly jump to the post that I wrote below.

Big distributions, little RAM 3

How do the ‘big time’ distributions handle on constrained hardware? Take a look.

How to install sun-java6-jdk and Netbeans in Ubuntu 11.10

A simple process to install the official SunOracle Java JDK and Netbeans IDE in the latest Ubuntu.

Ubuntu 11.10′s WiFi crashes my router

The new Ubuntu release is pretty good. Unfortunately it also causes my router to crash.

Gentoo (A.K.A. “Compiling!”)

My first post for the second Linux Experiment where I speak about my Gentoo first impressions.

How to enable reboot/shutdown in KDE on Gentoo

Closed source AMD/ATI drivers, wireless networking and Flash in Gentoo

How to update your (whole) Gentoo system

A trio of small posts that walk new Gentoo users through setting up and doing some basic things in their new desktop.

How to play Red Alert 2 on Linux

I managed to get this classic game to run great on Linux. It even includes a bit of a hack that allows you to play LAN games. I don’t think you can even do that on Windows any more.

Oh Gentoo

My final post of the second Linux Experiment. Includes my conclusions on running Gentoo as a day-to-day desktop system.

In case you somehow found your way here and haven’t already seen them over at The Linux Experiment, I have put up two new posts that deal with fixes for your linux desktop.

Two monitors. Different resolutions. One desktop.

If you’ve ever wondered how to use two monitors with different resolutions as a single, unified, extended desktop I highly suggest you do a quick read of this post. I’ve covered how to avoid, and fix, the ‘dead space’ issue where application windows can get lost because of the difference is vertical resolutions.

Fix PulseAudio loopback delay

For some reason I encountered an issue where the PulseAudio loopback module introduced a delay in my sound, causing audio and video to be out of sync. Here is a simple solution to fix the issue.

Hopefully the above two posts can be of use to some of you out there. Let me know if you have any issues getting them to work.

These posts were originally featured on The Linux Experiment

One week, three distributions (Day 0)

With the recent releases of Linux Mint Debian Edition, Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.10 I am once again starting to feel that need to hop around and try something new out. …I’ve set myself up a little experiment of sorts: try each distribution for two days each and on the 7th day choose the best from among the three. Now obviously this isn’t a very fair test, 48 hours is hardly enough to definitely test which of these distributions is truly the best…

One week, three distributions (Day 2: Kubuntu 10.10)

…When I first booted into the desktop I was very pleasantly surprised. I haven’t used KDE since version 4.3 when I had given up on it because, while beautiful and functional, there were just too many rough edges. It seems to be an Internet cliché at this point but I am going to throw it out there anyway: KDE 4.5 is the KDE release you have been waiting for…

One week, three distributions (Day 4: Ubuntu 10.10)

…It’s hard to place exactly what makes this theme so nice but Canonical has done a wonderful job iterating the old theme from 10.04 and making some subtle changes that have an incredible overall effect… This level of polish even extends to the new sound menu. Canonical has implemented new sound APIs which allow media players to integrated natively with the sound menu in a way that is just awesome…

One week, three distributions (Day 6: Linux Mint Debian Edition)

…I have to say that my first impression of LMDE was a mixed one. On one hand it spewed text everywhere as it booted, which I assume came from its Debian heritage. On the other hand the boot was ridiculously fast… Once at my desktop I was presented with a very familiar Linux Mint set up…

One week, three distributions (Day 7: Conclusions)

…What makes a great distribution great? This is a very interesting question that I’m sure would generate a wide array of unique and passionate responses. Some prefer ease of use, while others demand nothing less than complete control over what they can tweak. There are people who swear by using nothing but open source solutions, while others are happy to add proprietary code into the mix as well. This is the great thing about Linux, we get so many choices which means we get to decided what we want…

Windows?? *GASP!*

Sometimes you just have to compile Windows programs from the comfort of your Linux install. This is a relatively simple process that basically requires you to only install the following (Ubuntu) packages:

To compile 32-bit programs

• mingw32 (swap out for gcc-mingw32 if you need 64-bit support)
• mingw32-binutils
• mingw32-runtime

Additionally for 64-bit programs (*PLEASE SEE NOTE)

• mingw-w64
• gcc-mingw32

Once you have those packages you just need to swap out “gcc” in your normal compile commands with either “i586-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 32-bit) or “amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 64-bit). So for example if we take the following hello world program in C

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
printf(“Hello world!\n”);
return 0;
}

we can compile it to a 32-bit Windows program by using something similar to the following command (assuming the code is contained within a file called main.c)

i586-mingw32msvc-gcc -Wall “main.c” -o “Program.exe”

You can even compile Win32 GUI programs as well. Take the following code as an example

#include <windows.h>
int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
char *msg = “The message box’s message!”;
MessageBox(NULL, msg, “MsgBox Title”, MB_OK | MB_ICONINFORMATION);

return 0;
}

this time I’ll compile it into a 64-bit Windows application using

amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc -Wall -mwindows “main.c” -o “Program.exe”

You can even test to make sure it worked properly by running the program through wine like

wine Program.exe

You might need to install some extra packages to get Wine to run 64-bit applications but in general this will work.

That’s pretty much it. You might have a couple of other issues (like linking against Windows libraries instead of the Linux ones) but overall this is a very simple drop-in replacement for your regular gcc command.

*NOTE: There is currently a problem with the Lucid packages for the 64-bit compilers. As a work around you can get the packages from this PPA instead.

After a little bit of pressure from the people responding to my previous post (My search for the best KDE Linux distribution), I have finally given in and tried out Chakra. The Chakra Project starts with Arch Linux as a base but, instead of forcing you to build your own distro piece of piece, Chakra comes more or less pre-packaged.

Installation

The installation was one of the best I’ve ever seen. For alpha software this distribution’s first point of interaction is already very polished – even warning me that it is not stable software and might therefore eat my hamster.

The install process even let me decide to install some very useful packages, like Microsoft Core TTF Fonts and Adobe Flash, right away. Even the Language & Time step was incredible, offering a rotating globe that I could drag around and manipulate.

The only issue I had was trying to create a disk partition to install the OS to. This was because I was trying this out inside of VirtualBox, and the virtual hard disk did not have any partitions on it whatsoever. There is a bug and (thankfully) work-around for this known issue with their Tribe installer, and after reading a quick walk-through I was once again ready to install.

The Desktop

The desktop is standard KDE version 4.4.2 after install. Opening up Pacman (or is it Shaman?) showed me a list of brand new software that I could install, including the newest KDE 4.5. One of Project Chakra’s great strengths will be in this rolling release of new software updates. The concept of installing once and always having the most up-to-date applications is very intriguing.

Unfortunately, as with most alpha software, Shaman is still pretty buggy and often crashed whenever I tried to apply the updates. Also unfortunate is that Shaman started a trend of applications simply crashing for no reason. I don’t want to give this distribution a bad reputation, because it is still pre-release software, but I think it goes without saying that the developers have some bug squashing to do before a stable release will be ready. Something I found rather strange is that the current default software selection that Chakra ships with includes two different browsers, Konqueror and rekonq, but no office software whatsoever.

Google Chrome much?

Final Thoughts (for now!)

The Chakra Project looks very promising, albeit very unpolished at the moment. If they can manage to fix up the rest of the distribution, getting it just as polished feeling as the installer, this will definitely be one to look out for. I look forward to trying it out again once it hits a stable release.

It’s no secret that while Java possess probably the most widely distributed, cross-platform, and common user interface libraries, graphical Java applications on the whole simply stand out for the wrong reasons. Whether the GUI comes in the form of the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) or Swing, each can be far from pretty and often do not mesh well with the platform they are being run on. For instance, running an AWT or Swing application can be an almost alien experience, no matter what operating system you are using, because neither uses the native control widgets. Even AWT, being a ‘thin’ layer above the native controls, often looks completely bizarre. On Windows Vista AWT looks more like Windows 3.1 than anything else. Thankfully there is a nice alternative in the IBM created (and now Eclipse maintained) SWT.

The Standard Widget Toolkit, or SWT, passes all GUI rendering responsibilities onto the host operating system. This allows for some interesting advantages like hardware rendered drawing for free (as an example). It also provides for a native look and feel because its actually using the real native widgets. So when run on Windows it looks like a regular Windows application and when run on Linux it looks like a Linux (GTK+) application. It also works on the Mac as well as a few other obscure platforms.

Unfortunately because the application is now creating widgets outside of the JVM you are suddenly responsible for freeing the memory. There is no automatic garbage collection in the world of SWT. It’s not all bad however as freeing a parent object, like a window (referred to as a shell in SWT lingo), automatically frees all of its related child objects as well. Simply call the .dispose() method and 9 times out of 10 you are done.

Another other caveat is that you will still need to package the correct swt.jar file for your target platform. For instance Windows has its own version of swt.jar, as does Linux, and Mac, and so on and so forth. While this is rather annoying it does offer some interesting trade-offs. For instance you do not need to recompile your code just because you want to run it on a different platform; simply swap out the swt.jar file and watch as the exact same code generates completely different native GUIs. I even wrote a simple program that first checks what platform it is being run on and then downloads the correct swt.jar file before launching the GUI. This makes releasing the exact same package very simple.

So how do you start using SWT? Head over to http://www.eclipse.org/swt/ and download the newest stable version for your platform of choice. Depending on how you will be programing, all you have to then do is add the enclosed swt.jar to your class path. If you’re using Eclipse, or a similar IDE, you can simply add the source as either part of you project, or as a separate referenced one, and take full advantage of the auto-complete as well. Perhaps I’ll get around to posting a more thorough how-to guide at some point in the future.

Like most things in software SWT is not perfect. There are still other challenges to overcome, such as creating each individual platforms’ unique user experience to compliment their native GUI toolkits. That said if you’re looking for a way to leverage the widespread nature of Java, while still creating an application that looks like it belongs, SWT might just be what you’re looking for.

When Ubuntu 10.04 was released it represented the most modern incarnation of Canonical’s premier Linux desktop distribution. However not all things were better in this release. For myself I immediately noticed a problem while trying to install the gnustep-devel development libraries for GNUstep and Objective-C. I was greeted with this oh so lovely error message:

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnustep-devel: Depends: gorm.app but it is not installable
E: Broken packages

So essentially I was left with the following choice: install the missing Gorm.app package from the repository (which wasn’t there) or don’t install gnustep-devel. Thankfully it was pointed out to me that I could perhaps see if the package still existed in the Debian repository instead. So off to http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages I went and after a quick search I found what I was looking for! I recalled reading somewhere that Ubuntu synchronizes with Debian testing (A.K.A. squeeze) at the start of every round of development, so I figured that would be the best package to grab. A short download and install later Gorm.app was finally on my system. With the dependencies now met it was a breeze to install the rest of the development files using a simple

sudo apt-get install gnustep-devel

And there you have it. By installing a single package from the Debian repository you too can get around the problem. For reference I have also filed a bug report with Ubuntu at Launchpad here.

As some of you already know, I am a big fan of the KDE desktop environment (or KDE Workspaces or whatever they’re calling it these days). In my search to reach Linux KDE perfection I have tested out a number of different distributions. First there was Fedora, which I happily ran throughout the length of the experiment. Once that was finished I attempted to install and try both Kubuntu and openSUSE. Unfortunately I was unable to do so after openSUSE decided not to play nice. However my search did not stop there, and once the community edition was ready I jumped over to Linux Mint KDE CE. Finally I decided to once again try openSUSE, this time installing from a USB drive. This somehow resolved all of my installation issues.

Now that I have tried out quite a few of the most popular distributions I figured I would write a little bit to tell you fine people my thoughts on each, and why I will be sticking with openSUSE for the near future.

Fedora 11

• KDE Version: 4.2 – 4.3
• Pros: very secure, not too many modifications of the KDE source, cutting edge
• Cons: could have really used some more modifications of the base KDE packages in order to better integrate GTK+, Bluetooth problems, not always stable
• Thoughts:

  I have written at length about my experiences with Fedora during this experiment. Without re-writing everything again here let me simply say this: Fedora is primarily a GNOME distribution and I could never shake the feeling that KDE got the left-over treatment.

Kubuntu

• KDE Version: 4.3
• Pros: very easy to use, nice integration of GTK+ and GNOME notifications, access to Ubuntu support
• Cons: the hardware drivers application (jockey) simply did not work, very bad sound issues, Firefox could not handle opening file types
• Thoughts:

  When I first installed Kubuntu I was thrilled. Ah, this must be what it’s like to use a real KDE distribution, I thought. Everything seemed smoother and far more integrated then it did in Fedora. For example: OpenOffice.org had a KDE theme and it’s file browser actually used the native KDE one. Furthermore the notification system was awesome. Now instead of a GNOME application, like Pidgin, generating GNOME notifications, it instead integrated right into the standard KDE equivalent.

  Then the problems started to show up. Oh I’ll just download this torrent file and… hmm Firefox doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. Why can’t I set the file type options inside of Firefox for torrents? Why doesn’t it use the system defaults? Then the sound issues came. YouTube stopped putting out audio all together and all of my attempts to fix it were futile. Maybe it’s just my hardware but Kubuntu just could not handle multimedia at all.

  While Kubuntu is definitely one of the better KDE experiences it is by no means problem free.

Linux Mint KDE CE

• KDE Version: 4.3
• Pros: excellent package manager, easy to use
• Cons: sound issues, WiFi issues, is this actually a KDE desktop? there are so many GTK+ applications in it…
• Thoughts:

  After hearing much praise for Linux Mint I decided to give the newly released KDE community edition a go. I must say at first I was very impressed. The package manager was far superior to KPackageKit and even included things like user ratings and comments. It also came bundled with many tools and applications designed specifically for Linux Mint. Sadly very few of these were re-written in Qt and so I was forced to deal with GTK+ skinning almost everywhere.

  Sound issues similar to those in Kubuntu (maybe it’s something in the shared source?) started to crop up almost immediately. Again YouTube just did not work no matter how much I tried to fix it. Finally the WiFi connection was very poor, often disconnected on what seemed like a specific interval.

  While I think this distribution has a lot going for it I can only suggest the GNOME desktop for those who want to give it a try. The KDE version just does not seem polished enough to be recommended for someone looking for the ultimate KDE distribution.

openSUSE

• KDE Version: 4.3
• Pros: very responsive, a lot of streamlined tweaks, rock solid WiFi, excellent audio
• Cons: slower to boot, uses quite a bit of RAM, too much green
• Thoughts:

  Installing openSUSE seemed like an awful idea. After reading all of the complaints that both Phil and Dave had written over the course of the experiment I have to admit I was a little hesitant. However, I am very happy I decided to try it anyway; openSUSE is an excellent KDE distribution.

  Everything about it, from the desktop to the little helpful wizards, all seem to be designed with one purpose in mind: make openSUSE the easiest, or at the very least most straightforward, distribution possible. YaST, often a major source of hate from my fellow Guinea Pigs, does indeed have some quirks. However I honestly think that it is a very good tool, and something that streamlines many administrative tasks. Want SAMBA network sharing? Just open up YaST and click on the wizard. Want restricted codecs? Just hop on over to openSUSE-Community and download the ymp file (think of it like a Windows exe).

  My time with openSUSE so far has been wonderful. My network card seems to actually get better range then ever before, if that’s even possible. My battery life is good and my sound just plain works without any additional effort. If I had one complaint it would be with the amount of RAM the distribution uses. After a quick reboot it takes up a very small amount, around ~350MB or so. However after a couple of hours of general use the RAM often grows to about 1-1.5GB, which is far more than I have seen with the other distributions. Thankfully I have 4GB of RAM so I’m not too worried. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that I am running the x64 version and not the x86 version. Perhaps it assumes I have at least 4GB of RAM for choosing the newer architecture.

  Whatever the case may be I think I have finally found what I consider to be the very best KDE Linux distribution. Obviously your results may vary but I look forward to hearing what you think.

This piece was cross-posted over at The Linux Experiment.

Well, at least for now. Check out the site to see what everyone thought about the experiment as a whole.

Check it out here: The Linux Experiment

As a long time Windows user I have had my fair share of dull, gray toolbars, buttons and controls. Prior to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s first real attempt to pretty up the system – sorry XP, making the taskbar blue just doesn’t cut it – I even looked to Mac OSX with some jealousy.

Flash forward to The Linux Experiment and I have been introduced to a whole new set of environment graphics. Some of them are quite beautiful and some are just… plain ugly. On the plus side, the nice thing about Linux is it’s ability to customize just about every detail, including how my desktop looks. But is there really any excuse for some of the horrible themes, colour choices (*cough* Ubuntu *cough*), and graphics that are still present in Linux today? Surely there are some artists out there in the open source community that could be let loose on these problems? Come on people, I know you can do better!