nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

One is constantly looking for the best working/creative/or playing environment when it comes to one's desktop. It sounds like there must be a fairly obvious answer to a seemingly ridiculous question, yet everywhere you look or listen, everyone's opinions, when they have one (that excludes the majority of people who use a computer for less time than 2 hours a day (my opinion obviously)) is a changing, mostly circular desktop environment. This sounds somewhat convoluted, so let me try and break this down a little.

Most of us, other than those lucky enough to have had parents who were either highly alternative, worked in the academic industry or perhaps even the government, grew up using one of about 5 systems:

# Commodore 64 ands its cousins like spectrum atari or msx
# Commodore Amiga or Atari ST (The step up from the previous line)
# Apple (mostly macintosh)
# Microsoft DOS and Windows
# IBM OS/2 (god knows whatever happened to that? Did MS buy them out?)

Of course, we have to remember that personal computing was considered something for those people unable to do real number crunching requirements, and usually didn't want or need to. That was left for the nerdy geeky scientists and to a pretty large part the telecommunications companies, who I guarantee saw the mobile revolution far ahead of its time, and to some extent are still seeing things ahead of their time, releasing technology today that they probably developed 5-10 years ago. And why not... in an age where human beings have been programmed to work in order to buy an object and ultimately equate that to happiness, gradually releasing new products makes sense. More sense than releasing the technology and what they call their intellectual property  just after being invented and created, which is surely what the scientist or creative person in charge would want, but can't due to stupid outdated and frankly cannibalistic intellectual property laws which would get them fired for even talking to their cat about it.

Think I'm talking hogwash, well, lets look at a scenario that is actually forcing certain companies to release products ahead of the times they usually would. As we are talking about computing we can pick either any BSD derivative or Linux kernel with a decent visual platform (be it Gnome, E17, KDE, XFCE or even LXDE) Now... we have 2 different completely free, in every sense of the word, operating systems running a stunning variety of highly evolved desktops, all also free in every sense of the word.

What's happening? Well, the so called fortune 10, high flyers, the guys with talking houses who still dominate by massive numbers due to the slow adoption of new computer systems, the fact that not everyone spends the majority of their day in front of a computer, and finally the massive and aggressive marketing campaigns these 2 companies throw at us like candy and coca cola.

But even with all that strength, the money, and probably seriously committed people, its clear to those of us living in the digital age and who understand the concept of open source, GPL, and free software, there isn't even a battle here to be won. Those 1000s of people working daily on the Linux kernel, or hundreds working on each of those open source projects mentioned above don't do it for financial gain, or for any kind of monetary aspiration. They simply do it because at that precise moment in time, they notice something needs to be created, fixed, tweaked, documented, or the hundreds of other micromanaging events that happen in open source projects. No one has told them they have to do it, nor how they have to do it, they simply get to a point where they can't resist scratching a so called digital itch, and go ahead and go forth, perhaps checked by a peer here and another interested peer there, but due to such an efficient self checking system it always just works out, eventually.

And from the outside this whole open source thing, Linux thing, or whatever other name is given to the information revolution, seems like a chaotic mess, uncoordinated, unmanaged, spread far and wide without any one person really knowing what the whole picture is.

But the truth and beauty of it is, because of this unstructured completely anarchistic (because its not even democratic, I can think of at least 5 benevolent dictators for life) system there will never be anything but the voice of the people that pushes the direction the information revolution takes. And if that doesn't fill you with joy then I suppose few things will.

Anyway, having digressed quite a bit, but I think in a necessary direction. these days more than ever we take the time to sit and think... hmmmm... what operating system should I install for the next X number of months or even weeks, and you might start thinking as many people of my generation think, what would best for our parents and grandparents or our kids. And the truth is, the choices are just amazing... Should I get an One laptop Per child XO for my nephew, while feeling good about myself for giving another individual on this planet the chance to learn. Should I buy a dual tablet/laptop  made by Asus running ubuntu Linux for my Mom, and should I install pcBSD on the ageing computer (mainly used for the Internet) in my Dad's study room. Unfortunately the only person I haven't been able to convince is my 91 year old grandfather, but understandably, perhaps this is just too way out there for him, though I would give anything for him to feel the joy of using this tool most of us take o so for granted.

And my brother is in the Mac OSX phase, one I went through, I cannot lie, but freedom is far more important than an admittedly luxurious looking desktop, since the company in question bought itself a significant number of years by moving to a UNIX based system, possibly being the next dominant player, but I think the speed with which open source is breaking down digital walls will surely hit them to, perhaps not so hard since they've sneakily (in my mind) marketed themselves as pro-open source, which they are absolutely not... In that respect, and just looking at the amount of limitations they've stuck in the iphone and ipad on purpose makes me not only distrust them but consider them evil. At least the other big giant shows its true colours and doesn't hide behind plain sneakers, a black polo and 501 Levis (hello everybody, I'm the honest common man) Still, I run pinguyos in a virtualised second window and really don't notice much of a difference between that and OSX, other than the cost.

But getting back to the reason for this article in the first place, it was Linux, BSD, GNOME, and KDE which pushed the information revolution far faster than it would have gone did they not exist. It was due to the OLPC XO that the information revolution was pushed again faster making smaller and cheaper and even sturdier laptops. And it was due to yet another open source player, perhaps the biggest of them all, at least for now that mobile telephony is being taken in directions we can only dream about. I'm obviously talking of Android and the now millions of android apps and Android programmers. (I'm one of them BTW, hint hint)

So whats the prediction for the future? well its hard to say, because trends change, wallets get thinner or thicker, people are certainly manipulated in ways we still don't quite understand, watching TV, films, or playing Video Games. But that won't stop any time soon since those are the biggest money makers on the planet and unfortunately our own pride, greed and envy is our worst enemy, embedded in the very objects we desire and acquire ever more abundantly.

Can the information revolution still save us from this? Will open source, and its yet to be contested armour, GPL open the hearts and minds of people everywhere and unite us, rather than divide us....

aye... there lies the rub. So next time you are looking for your brand spanking new OS and desktop... give a couple of names you haven't heard of a try. Distrowatch.com is always a great starting point. My own recommendations in order of preference are currently ( and this always changes, I guess for everyone ):

# PinguyOS
# Strawberry Linux
# Mint
# Ubuntu / Fedora or even Fuduntu (not kidding, it exists and strives to be a combination of the best of both worlds.)
# PCBSD
# Sugar ---- extremely fun desktop environment that kids will love, and parents will enjoy. Built at Massachusetts Institute of Technology after decades of research into how humans and especially children use the computer. Its truly an OS that is years ahead of its competition, focusing on things like collaborative learning, journal based memory and intuitive management of the desktop. In fact, every program on the system can be changed right there on the fly, encouraging kids to tinker and look under the hood, rather than stay away and look from a distance with expected admiration at the expensive laptop Daddy bought at PC World with extra worthless guarantees, antimalware, antivirus, antiphishig, antihacking, antichildren, etc etc etc.

If you're serious and want industry standard telephone support, you have 3 options, Debian, Redhat Enterprise, and Novell SuSe Enterprise. Debian doesn't really have official telephone based support, though many companies support them anyway because of the large user base in the server Arena [basically, its super super stable], whereas Redhat and SuSe have proper industry standard contracts with up to 24/7 support, but it ain't cheap. Ubuntu is desperaately trying to get a foothold in that market, but either they've had bad marketing executives or haven't really tried hard enough. because their product exceeds both SuSe and Redhat in many ways. The likely explanation is that Ubuntu is still a young player, compared to Redhat and Suse, who have been around for at least 10 years longer. But one can argue that Ubuntu is simply Debian with some extras. Anyhow, its a political war which makes little sense, since they are all on the same open source GPL protected side. But everyone needs to eat I guess so perhaps we can write it off as a little bit of healthy, though somewhat silly competition.

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

This certainly seems like an interesting release, seeing as it clearly caters to replace windows XP and/or Windows 7, by making an interface that seems almost identical to the latter.

In fact, when I put the operating system on a couple of notebooks and had family members and friends use it, they couldn't tell the difference, other than the Z on the left bottom corner. The programs work identically to anything on the mainstream operating systems, and wine as well as flash, adobe pdf and other non-free elements are already directly installed.

In a way, it was a step backward from my elitest perspective, but I can see its great for anyone trying to move from Windows due to the extravagant costs to a mostly free operating system, benefiting from the power of the at hand software which is absolutely obvious to install. This is probably even easier to use than OS X, even more simple than windows 7, but still has the most stable OS in the world running under the hood.

For the mainstream, and I don't mean to sound like an elitest, it is absolutely a great way for capturing a larger audience for Ubuntu, on which it is based, though you'd be hard pressed to realise this unless you start running some of the software update tools, ubuntu One, or some of the other ubuntu specific tools.

With the stabilty a Linux OS brings and the look and feel of the most common OSes of all time, Zorin definetly has a place in the operating system field, and I predict a lot of people beginning to use it.

That said, if you are used to tweaking every aspect of your OS and are a die hard Unix/Linux Guru this won't keep you interested for longer than 10-20 minutes. I do hope it brings people over from the dark side though, and into a world where open source is a word they may learn about, ease of use is evident, and the myths that Linux and Unix are only for nerds and technical people is dispelled at last. So I hope Zorin 5 has a long a prosporous life.

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

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.

Rate It! (Average 0, 0 votes)

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5