nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

Ok... I admit it... I messed up on this one. I have indeed managed to get it working perfectly, conky and docky on a 2 monitor setup without problems. I apologize for having inferred this was not possible. The flame I recieved on #pinguyos seems slightly justified though if the people officially supporting the distro gave a solution instead of flaming me, things would have turned out totally differently. In any case, All I did was follow the advice on this page to get it working for 2 monitors. It runs smoothly withtout crashes so far... so I think I have to state that this really is my distro of choice now. Hopefully they will include the 2 monitor setup details in a wiki so people like myself can use it as a professional choice.

Having swum the waters of the many linux distributions as well as an openbsd and freebsd (in pcbsd format) Its quite clear to me that both Natty and Debian 6 pulled some really serious changes allowing others Operating systems to do both big and small. I've traversed super minimalistic systems on both sides of the table. Those that were created in response to niche needs at the time... be they scientific or computational, and at then same time I've seen beautiful minimalistic systems that were based purely on the artistic, but containing all the required software to make it useful out of the box.

It's certainly been a new trend of mostly Debian 6 and Ubuntu 11.04 based releases, which in some cases I immediately set as my main workhorses. I stuck it out with deban 6 in terms of a reliable server operating system, and its clear that both deb 6 and ubu 11.04 are very close in terms of functionality. Let's not forget Red Hat Enterprise, but leave it for another day. It's a little more boring than what I'm about to divulge.

For the first timer looking at both systems they'd see very Little difference other than the blatant patent back and forths. In Debian the browser is called Ice weasel and in most other operating systems its called Firefox, by which you probably know it. What makes Debian highly different is that as time goes but the packages tend to focus on fixes especially, and new gadgetry second.

For a Workhorse system you often want to see what the latest cutting edge tools are, but system administration has taught us that shiny things do not always a perfect system make :-) I Smile because I have been guilty of this charge many a time, and forgive me for stepping away from topic, even the American and British educational systems are rampant with beautiful shiny computers which no one has the time
to study or slip into an existing streamlined systems. These systems exist, they are not expensive, but like many types of technologies that would make the world a better place.,.. Things just aren't bad enough yet. That doesn't mean we won't get there.

The changes between debian and Ubuntu are something someone notices over time. This has as much to do with philosophy as it has to do with our free market economy.

That might be the real goal I choose to use Debian 6 over Something else... Freedom.... the real kind where I and I alone choose the programs I want to use with little to no restrictions.

Ok, that was a slight rant, but a needed one. Every once in a while we should stand up and say our piece before that liberty is taken away too. Next couple of chapters are about fun and the re-discovery of some older tools that many thought dead, but like every piece of nature and forest, life fights hard to get back. So too do people with both new and old ideas.I guess what I'm really saying is ambition is not dead as I once thought, it is rampant, but just really really niched.

So, Le me start with a quick review of the distro I was most impressed with albeit the most annoyed with at the same time. The first thing that struck me is that the devs must have been too poor to buy two lcd screens since although the proprietary yucky nvidia app does work on it to some extent, there are other things that were just impossible to get working. Maybe its just me, but I could get compiz to work like a dream on the main screen, docks on 3 corners and the coolest looking systems monitor I've ever seen. I mean seriously... On one monitor PinguyOS runs marathons around aero and whatever WM M$ is using, or was theirs aero and the fruit company something else.

The point is, it was cool... really cool. I do confess, I was running this on a quad core i5 with 4 gigs and 2 Terabytes, but I can imagine it would run on much less, all nicely viewable on that uber cool systems monitor on the right. Well... so far so good, even the command center at the top right where most systems are located was both neat, not bloated and had some original services.

But.... oh yes... there is always a but... running it on 2 screens seems to destroy that wonderful tingly feeling I get from using it on one screen. Why you ask? well, here we are with a more or less duplicated top bar and a bottom bar, that contains a waste basket and not much else. (there is no such bar on the right obviously.) So I first I try to get nvidia controller to understand that my second screen is on the right... wow did that take far too long. Then I pull a screen over to the other screen,,, Hmmm.... it won't go.. weird I try again... no go.... Fine, lets open a window on that screen, gedit for simpllicity.... hmmm... no borders... compiz is screwed... but weirdest of all I CAN actually drag the gedit app around the screen though not to the other monitor.

It's the weirdest set of combined problems I've seen on a Linux distro... but what can I say, I just love the look and feel of this distro and seems like it's based on an uber tweaked version of Ubuntu. You wouldn't recognise the ubuntu influence at the beginning, actually, I only noticed after I saw a program called Ubuntu Tweak sitting in the control panel. What can I say. the right hand monitor gives me a new nice image every 2 minutes and I can run wine on it or chrome (won't allow 2 firefoxees, as it seems to think the firefox on the other screen is another session (ghmmm) >) For now its just too cool to pass up the good things versus the bad so I use it as my main workhorse... but a fixed second screen... now that would be awsome, and below you can see it:

So yeah it led me to the initial question... no money for an extra lcd to test on? hell I'd chip in 25€ if it meant it working decently... cause seriously... this is one HELL of a distro, I'd give it a 9.8 if it wasn't for the dual screen thingy..., so it gets a modest 8.2 rating... The screenshots should give some ideas. Ok it now gets a 9.8, but lets hope the pinguyos folks include instructions for 2 monitor setups

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Fine, so sharing multiple formats that include reverse engineered file systems that are/were proprietary to creating new ones which are supposed to be just plug and play, is close to rocket science.

Well it would be if it worked in most cases. I'll give you a brief example:

This morning I decided I would take all my pc equipment, my drives, my CD drives, DVD drives, usb sticks, etc etc and on and. I would then try and make an efficient (efficient as can be with multiple Oses and multiple hubs, network cards running at various speeds, and a host of external hotpluggable hard drives, both SATA and IDE to test and see what was on them after the years and years of collecting.

In fact, I'm currently staring at a pile of about 8 SATA drives totaling about 3.5 TBs, and a stack of 12 IDES which god knows might even hit the 1.5 TB mark. NOw... having all of that working together in a more or less redundant method across the network (I figure its the perfect opportunity to brush up on my bash shell coding skills to do a plethora of things from managing all that data, checking how corrupt the disks are and somehow forecasting when its time to get rid of the problem kids, setting up a nifty search system that fits MY naming conventions, not some complex XMBC like system that tries to do everything, moves stuff around and then leaves you more lost than when u started)

Anyway, as always, I digress. This entry was really to complain about the STILL dire problems that the average user will have to share a set of files. First, of course, me being old school, I go to the terminal, set up my smbpasswd -u and set up his password. Perfect...

Then I open the file/s or directory/ies that I'd like to share, but of of course only Root can do that, so here comes problem number one... Do I know the name of the sharing program so I could run it using gksudo from terminal? Nope... bet you don't either.... hint: It's not nautilus.

Ok... Then I think, ah but wait, I can open it from the control panel, so I go to preferences -> Personal File Sharing and repeat the operation... Suddenly I'm bombarded with questions to do with blue tooth sharing, which is really not what I was after... I just wanted regular old samba to allow me to move files to and from my Oses with too many questions. But If go ahead and fill in all the questions, where there is no mention of sharing via samba or nfs or anything.

I right click on the directory I've now been trying to share for 10 minutes and the shre this folder tick box is ticked, and there 2 other options which I choose not to touch in case they influence the final outcome. I then click 'add share' and get the following message:
'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare add: share name 'myname' is already a valid system user name'

So I think to myself, OK, so there is a conflict because I tried to speed up the process manually of creating a smb user and password which the system seems to be unable to parse (why? heaven knows... Has ubuntu decided to change the way samba details are stored too?"

Fine, I think to myself, let me use a different share name, say share, I then hit create share with a new name aptly named share and get an even more complex explanation on how to get this working. By this time I am starting to get amused (as I tend too, having been involved in the Unix/Linux/OSX worlds far longer than the MS world, you can see me slowly admitting to the n.1 argument that regular folks mention when using a Linux based machine for anything that slides over into a little bit of systems administration work.

I know, that, had a client been with me at this point it would be extremely difficult to convince them that Linux is in fact a better, more efficient and easier solution to set up than a multiple windows based system.

But 'not being one to give up easily, I continue the journey. This time I have the following sprawled across the screen:

'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare add: cannot share path /home/nubae as we are restricted to only sharing directories we own.
Ask the administrator to add the line "usershare owner only = false"
to the [global] section of the smb.conf to allow this.

Sooo.... away we go again, to command line and try adding that, hoping this will finally allow me to share the ONE directory. I restart the smbd service from the command line with service smbd restart (though admittedly, I'm still more used to doing a /etc/init.d/command restart.)

Trying to change any of the other tick boxes (allow others to create and delete files, or allow guest access) fails on the premise that permissions could not be changed for the directory nubae.

I decide to start from the very beginning, deleting the nubae directory, removing samba completely with --purge and giving a go from scratch in case I've missed something, but so far, you can imagine I'm grinning out of frustration more than out of anything else. I delete the whole user account from within the user setting visual GUI, to make sure there are no lingering side effects. And start again by creating the user through the GUI.

Vy recreating the account through the user settings control panel, I suddenly have no problems, even when it comes to sharing the account. It simply asks me if I want to install Samba and away it goes.

Now... if it had been obvious from the start that one can no longer touch the terminal without causing serious damage I wouldn't be so annoyed by this. But it seems like more and more, anyone with a terminal based systems administration background is being left in the dark, while Ubuntu developers and Canonical decide upon their own best practices.

This is not very different from what windows forces its users to go through, and it is yet another reason I am become more and more alienated by those who promise to stick to standards while secretly doing whatever they want without letting people know what is really going on.

I state this not as a newbie, but as someone that's been involved in development through countless areas of Linux, and never have I seen so much secrecy surrounding the introduction of new ways of doing absolutely fundamental things (adding users) without being told that if you use the terminal, you can screw up everything.

This is unacceptable. Either make things backwards compatible, or give an explanation somewhere on the new/right way of doing things. Making users jump through hoops is no way to get a larger user base, in fact, in my case, its made me actually start running XP along side Ubuntu... something I thought I'd never do....

sigh.... There is of course always OS X, which if I really have to be honest about... its the system of choice, if one has the money. Everything just works, it has a unix core so you dont have to feel like you are in unfamiliar territory, and it looks damn cool.

So the moral of this story is... Developers... please... work united to give people a unified experience that they can manipulate either in a format that has been charted out for them (we L(i)(u)nix people don't like that at all) or let us once more be free, and make the gui stuff work along side the true tried and tested command line environment configuration files. Its not that hard...

Any developer worth their salt will tell you that editing existing config files and making a gui that does the same is JUST as easy as doing some proprietary...

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Seeing as I recently purchased a macbook Pro for the nice price of 600 euros, I searched around for the easiest way to create a dualboot system, one with osx, the other with the latest Ubuntu. The procedure was actually ridiculously simple.

They really couldn't have made it much easier than that...

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Until now I've always looked at making my Linux environment as windows friendly as possible, using tools like Samba for file and printer sharing, as well as domain joining with or without the help of LDAP (an ldap client will go a long way to help with attaining a truly single sign on system if your server happens to be windows based. Other tools like Wine, Crossover, Cedega and windowblindas (I do believe the latter has recently changed named) help run most windows apps natively without an emulator. Then you can always install a virtualisation solution for those truly troublesome apps that absolutely must have a windows environment. These usually amount to older proprietary applications. The installation of Vmware, or preferably (at least imho) virtualbox. There is always KVM or XEN for those wanting true CPU based virtualisation. In any case, the point is, one can pretty comfortably create an environment where windows applications can live inside a truly Linux operating system.

Recently though, I have tried doing the reverse, in which I create a Linux like system running on top of a windows environment like windows XP (which I still have to admit has its advantages in many cases, especially those where either specialization is required (A music media machine, or high end graphics machine [think auto cad]), or the needs of the frequent gamer are met. As I am a computer specialist, requiring many different kinds of applications, a bash environment along with the tools that go with it, as well as the many open source applications I use from day to day, I seriously wondered if the latter would be possible. I am happy to say that with today's grat efforts at cross platforming, this has become a reality, and I find myself oddly attracted to such a system.

Where I do draw the line is on the server machine, which I cannot foresee running anything non Unix like. But with today's many tools, it is easy to work on a windows XP based desktop, which has been highly modified to resemble and duplicate the functions of a Linux desktop (reading and writing to Linux partitions, virtualisation for compartmentalizing Linux services and applications, and running a host of QT and GTK based apps which though originally written for Linux will run on Windows too. On the fly virtualisation like Quemu is of great help too, especially in the case of multi-partitioned usb sticks. Installing a bash environment with bash tools along with my essential programming kit (Python and LAMP, along with nice IDEs like Eclipse or more specialised ones like Wingware for python and phpeditor for php) are a must, but are also relatively stable and workable.

Since we are now in a relatively ancient incarnation of the best functioning windows (XP), it too can be tweaked to behave like Vista and Windwos 7 without adding all that unnecessary bloat, yet still giving a modern look and feel, as well as some essential tools that were lacking in the original incarnations of windows XP. Granted, it takes a good 2 days to get a working windows XP environment that contains all the elements of a Linux system, as well as the many open source tools one needs, integration with a Samba server, LDAP and LTSP if one so desires, but the outcome seems to be well worth it. From the XP distribution I am using (Dark edition V 6) I can create an ISO of the highly tuned system, so I can then revert to a working system should anything mess up my system (this is windows after all, and I can only trust it so much.)

Anyway, for the time being, I'm working with this environment so as not to have to constantly dual boot, or sacrifice my game time (the only real reason for running windows), but at the same time, I feel the system runs a tiny bit more smoothly when it comes to playing video across the network, or listening to music across the network. Perhaps its a novelty thing, but I hate to admit I would actually recommend a similar system to computer engineers requiring a plethora of tools, networking with a unix or linux server, and the occasional gameplay, alongside a system optimized for web/design, system administration and programming work.

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