A Year of Linux, January 22: Crashing at Linux’s Place!
January 22, 2009 by AshPringle
Filed under Gear
The old plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition. To read that first week, click here!
The new plan: Keep using Linux for the rest of the year, giving periodic updates on my experiences, all of which you can read here!
January 22: Crashing at Linux’s place!
As readers of my first week know, Linux and I had a tumultuous relationship for our first period of time together. There were ups and downs, tears and laughter, romance, action and suspense, and in the end everyone involved learned an important, heartfelt lesson about pre-marital intercourse. (The lesson: don’t do it or Linux will burn your car down.)
But like all goodish things, that week had to come to an end. Linux and I packed up our stuff, said our goodbyes, deleted each other’s numbers from our telephones, stomped on the phones as hard as we could until they stopped working, held them next to an incredibly powerful electromagnet to ensure no information could ever be salvaged, then got Alishyana the Mystical Psychic Gypsy Fortune Teller (call 555-5-GYP to set up an appointment) to cast an ancient telephone-disabling enchantment on them.
As you can imagine, I thought my relationship with Linux was over. But like all firey, passionate, Latin couples, no matter how much we fought and yelled and stabbed one another with rusty pairs of Fisher Price scissors, we ended up coming back together.
The circumstances of our reunion are familiar to all of us I imagine: after an extended period of time searching my soul while doing some of the extremest sports known to man on the highest snow-capped mountains and most remote, crocodile-infested tropical islands, I returned home to find that my landlord had evicted me.
"Yes, I am seeing it now. Your future is grim: Linux will do something unexpected, then you will write a bad joke about it. (That will be 42 dollars please. Please call 555-5-GYP again for all your fortune-telling needs)"
With no place to stay, I turned to Linux. “Please, Linux! I’m out on the streets with no way to process words, or even browse social networking sites to read incredibly boring minutia about the lives of people I haven’t talked to in years,” I whimpered. “Take in this tired, old sky-diving rocket-roller-boarder one last time.”
With a sigh, Linux agreed to let me sleep on its couch for an indefinite period of time, so long as I didn’t invite too many people over or eat all of its eggs.
So join me as I crash at Linux’s place!
Now that I’m hanging out at Linux’s place for an extended period of time, I figure I might as well make myself at home. So my first order of business is to get all my mail sent to Linux, because I am a very important person who gets a lot of mail.
Fortunately, Linux doesn’t seem to have a problem with this; it gives me a touch of the evil eye as I write my name on its mailbox with a permanent Sharpie, but other than that the process goes flawlessly.
Setting up my gmail and school email in the pre-packaged Evolution Mail program seems to be no different than doing the same thing in Mozilla Thunderbird, and before I know it I am flooded with hundreds of pieces of wonderful electronic mail. As such, I get straight to the important task of highlighting each one, clicking Mark All as Read, and ignoring everything that was sent to me.
Now that I’ve very carefully inspected all 963 pieces of mail asking me for a monetary donation to the school that sapped me of tens of thousands of dollars and forced me into a massive, overwhelming, depression-inducing student loan-based debt, it’s time for me to rearrange Linux’s place a bit and make it more comfortable. I mean, this place has some seriously harsh feng shui, bro, and I just can’t chill if there’s bad chi-flow in my living space, you know?
So while Linux is at work I decide to completely rearrange its desktop. I’m sure it will be happy with my changes when it gets back, because I have a lot of experience with rearranging friends’ places without their permission.
First, out with that dirty, brown, coffee-stain desktop background (that I spilled my drink on a piece of old parchment paper look is so last week) and in with a stunning, minimalist, black background that is sure to impress all my post-modernist friends.
I am a very important person who gets a lot of mail
For the next step in my Desktop Makeover (official TV series debuting this fall on The Style Channel) I decide to change the theme. The Mist one looks nice, and its blue colour pallet will go well with my black background, and will maybe take some attention away from those hideous curtains that Linux insists on keeping around. (Honestly? Just because your grandma gave you those curtains literally seconds before she died a horrible death doesn’t mean you have to keep them up forever. Especially when they clash with, like, everything, girlfriend.)
The final step in project Desktop Makeover: change the desktop icons. I prefer to change all of my desktop icons into question mark boxes from Super Mario Bros. 3 and give them blank spaces for file names, so that anyone who uses my computer gets hopelessly lost and confused and runs away befuddled before they can snoop around at all. (Password protection is for narcs, man.)
This one will probably take some work, as I am unfamiliar with Ubuntu’s icon system and what special file-type Ubuntu uses for icons. So it’s off to the Internet for some research!
After about 16 hours of digging through dead-end links and unrelated information in a search for Ubuntu’s special icon file-type, I figure out that Ubuntu doesn’t actually have a special file-type for icons; any suitably sized .png file will work just fine.
This is a refreshing change from Windows XP, which required I go through a very long bureaucratic process in order to obtain the proper authorization for changing icons, and insisted I fill out reams of paperwork that proved I wasn’t an icon terrorist before it let me actually make my own icons.
So with that I open GIMP and get to work making my custom icon. Another 16 hours later (what can I say, I’m no graphic artist) and I finish screwing around with alpha channels and layer merges and a bunch of other stuff I can’t really get to work because I don’t even know what any of it is, until I get an icon that pretty much looks the way I want it to, even though it is entirely jury-rigged and wouldn’t work for anything but a perfectly square picture.
It is right about this time, when I am continually right-clicking the eraser button in GIMP to try to force it through attrition to erase to a transparent background, that Linux comes back from the office and sees what I have done.
“What the hell did you do to my desktop?” it yells. “And why are the entire contents of my fridge arranged into a happy face on my living room floor?”
“I made a happy face because happy faces are good karma, dude!” I yell back. “And I had to rearrange your desktop because I can’t take my mid-afternoon power-nap unless all the energy lines on my desktop are facing north! It’s common knowledge that energy lines should always face north!”
"Which one is your pictures folder again?" "It's the one with the question mark box you idiot!"
Oh man is Linux pissed off now; and right when I was about to install Java so I could get my important accounting websites working.
After our fight, Linux doesn’t seem to want to cooperate any more, and also responds to everything I ask it to do by calling me a dirty hippie.
I go to Add/Remove Programs, and Linux gives me a host of different Java installations, including Sun Java Runtime, Icedtea Java Plugin, OpenJDK Java Web Start, You Are a Dirty Hippie, and OpenJDK Runtime. Since Linux isn’t being any help, I decide to install the Sun Java Runtime, because it sounds most familiar. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work, because none of my Java-requiring sites function.
With that I check the manual, which Linux has clearly gotten to, because it mostly just says “you are a dirty hippie” over and over. It also tells me to install the Sun Java package, then go into Firefox and type a command into the address bar to make sure Java is installed. Once you have confirmed that Java is in fact installed into Firefox, because this process is absolutely flawless, the manual explains that you will then prance around in a Java-filled wonderland, executing Java script at will and rolling around in endless Java flower beds.
Unfortunately, Firefox indicates that Java is not installed, and also indicates that I am a dirty hippie. The next step, according to the manual, in getting Java working in Firefox is apparently to do nothing at all, because the manual’s instructions end after telling me to type the command into Firefox. This further reinforces my suspicion that Linux is still angry at me for that whole thing where I smashed every one of its eggs to make sure there were no baby chickens mistakenly trapped inside, trying to get free.
Thinking it must be a problem on Firefox’s end, I decide to install the Java plug-in from within Firefox’s plug-in menu. Unfortunately that doesn’t work either. But I think I’m getting through to Linux and making some progress, because it doesn’t call me a dirty hippie this time. (It just spits on my shoe and kindly informs me that I have spit on my shoe, and that I should probably clean it up.)
At this point I’m starting to get a funny feeling that Linux needs some space and time alone (my friends at the weekly seances tell me I must be psychic or something, because I get feelings like that all the time from everybody) so I head to the old forums to drown my sorrows in a few beers. When I get there, I notice a few people talking about having the same problem as me.
The first suggestion I get is to download the Java plug-in’s binaries straight from the Firefox website, then do something involving an alien to install them, which sounds more ridiculous than anything I can imagine, but is actually pretty much what it said.
Being absolutely terrified by this course of action I check out what other advice is available. Someone else mentions that they got Java working with Firefox by downloading a file-package from the Synaptic application after they installed the Java Runtime, so I go for it too.
Success! When I head to one of my Java-based websites to check if it worked, the site instantly crashes instead of doing nothing at all, showing that Java has been perfectly integrated into Firefox.
Being the stubborn person I am, my next step is to change absolutely nothing at all, load up Firefox again, and try a different Java-based site.
This time it works! Hooray! Linux must have finally forgiven me for catching all its furniture on fire with my patchouli incense!
The process is so obvious; how did I not figure it out earlier? Installing Java just required me to install the Java Runtime from the Add/Remove Programs application, then go to the Synaptic application and install a different Java package that didn’t mention Firefox at all! What a fool I am.
With that I move back into Linux’s place, although I still don’t feel entirely at home. My desktop has been configured to my liking, but Java is hit or miss with particular websites, meaning I’ll have to use other operating systems if I want to use online banking to transfer money out of the savings account my mom set up so I can buy a new hacky sack for the jam-circle this weekend.
Also, the process of getting Java installed in the first place was pretty obtuse: the manual didn’t even begin to help, Firefox’s plug-in menu didn’t work, and all the most obvious courses of action were ineffectual. What I did finally do wasn’t really, you know, explained at all. Oh well!
And thus concludes today’s article! Stay tuned for me next article, which will occur some time in the future!
Stumble It!
Wyatt on Thu, 22nd Jan 2009 10:40 pm
Yeah, the Java situation is…really terrible. Frankly, there’s no other way I can put it. I will say that a lot of that’s in Sun’s court, and another part of it is in Mozilla’s, however. This series of articles has been a little difficult to follow at times. I had to reread passages to ensure that no, it wasn’t a joke. It’s a good perspective on the weak points of the state of desktop linux.
I’m a little curious, though; how do you actually view the process by which everything fits together in what is quickly coming to be known as the “standard” distribution?
I know when I started, having had a good explanation of how things fit together and interact would have been a godsend: the Windows and MacOS paradigm is that of a giant block with intricate cavities carved into it. Everything is tightly integrated with everything else.
For a quick rundown:
The Linux kernel – This is it. This is the thing that’s actually LINUX. It’s what lets your shiny apps talk to the hardware. It’s also where most every driver for a good deal of all hardware known to man lives. The wise-beyond-his-years eldest brother with all the answers, if you will.
X11 Server – Variously shortened as X11 or simply X, this is the OCD eldest sister with “grand vision” that nevertheless paints something bland and then gets artists’ block. Tragic. This creates a screen that doesn’t consist of an 80×40 TTY terminal.
Desktop environment – fraternal twi…trip…qua…oh bloody it, we never figure out how many came out, but it was more than the number of wait nurses on hand. Gnome, KDE, Xfce, Rox,
Enlightenment…there’s probably a few more feral ones hiding behind the couch, too. This set of troublemakers is what gives most of the signature “look and feel” of your current environment. Each of them has a set of applications that the project packages, designed to give you a full and mostly-usable experience in the general sense (Rox is short. KDE is tall. “E17,” as we call her, is a rebel on a diet. Gnome is the middle brother. etc.). Note that the apps from different DEs can be used even if that DE isn’t running. That sort of restriction is rather taboo, in any case.
Other applications – Firefox, Audacity, Pidgin (used to be Gaim, btw), Mplayer (best video player, IMO) are sort of like those neighbors that can just walk in without you physically going to the door. Think of it like Cheers, only you don’t know everyone’s name quite yet. Except for binary drivers. Those are hobos.
Distro – This is the pad you’re crashing in. It was built by Ubuntu, who some how worked the redhead (Gnome) into pulling all the chores. Ubuntu got the blueprints and materials to build from Debian. See, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Suse, Mepis, Slackware, and many others are all projects that take the kernel, X, a sibling
Package Manager – Ubuntu us using the Debian package manager, dpkg, often just called “apt.” Things like aptitude and synaptic are puns on this. The important thing is that if there is something you need, always go to your package manager first. He’s your “go-to guy for anything” …everything! No, really, you don’t get a feel for the scope of what’s available until you check through his list. You name it, he’s probably got it.
Dependencies – This is pretty simple. Unlike Windows and MacOS, Linux is very much like Unix. Unix is the cranky mayor and and hates redundancy, so things only get installed once. If you want to install an app that uses jpeg for images, fine, you can do so. But next time you install something ELSE that uses jpeg, Mayor Unix says “no way, we already payed for that. Use the one you’ve got.” You’ll notice as time goes on that installing dependencies gets more and more rare.
So Linux is a lot like…a buffet!
And everyone loves those, right? A lot of the names CAN be confusing, the user HAS a lot of freedom to choose, and the way you approach troubleshooting and installing IS different; but in the end, it’s just an OS that people use to do things. If it was the same as the rest, what would be the point?
And so, greetings from a permanent squatter in Gentoo’s house; welcome! Hope this helps a little.
Wyatt
PS: The different desktops/different wallpapers thing? That’s totally Gnome going through his rebellious stage. KDE is much more easy-come-easy-go about those things.
Wyatt on Thu, 22nd Jan 2009 10:52 pm
And I already have a corrigendum :/
Where it simply cuts off with,
“…all projects that take the kernel, X, a sibling,”
it should read as follows:
“…all projects that take the kernel, (and usually) X, a DE sibling, and some friends (Firefox, et al), and place them under house arrest. It might actually be more like a cult or commune, though.”
Sorry about that!
AshPringle on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 10:02 am
Thanks for the comment Wyatt!
The whole “state” of the Linux distribution I’m using is actually something I’ve thought about quite a bit.
At times it seems a bit… disparate, is the word I guess? The developers have done a great job trying to pull things together, with the Add/Remove programs app and such, but it is still confusing at times.
Sometimes I find that there are a lot of different parts, which have basically nothing to do with one another, being forced to work together. Java is a good example of this; Java is a third party, closed piece of code, so Linux doesn’t support it the same way as it does other apps, but at the same time it is basically essential to almost every user. The result is that its stuck in a sort of weird Linux limbo, where it is necessary but troublesome.
I find that having a consistent experience with an OS is essential; the Mac OS does this very well, but at the price of being very proprietary and closed, for the most part. Ubuntu is obviously trying to get a similarly simple, user-friendly experience, but the Ubuntu developers have so much open-source and closed, third-party stuff on their plate to organize in order to get that experience for the user.
The problem seems to be a bit of a fundamental one, and might be difficult to overcome. By having a completely open system, with lots of third party apps and options and so on, the “feel” of the OS naturally tends to move away from simplicity and towards a sort of confusing noise. There are so many apps, all made by different people, and so many “restricted” third party drivers and things, all of which seem to require different installation processes, that at times it can be overwhelming. Add to that a host of crazy names for everything, and its hard to tell what’s going on sometimes
Linux’s strength –its completely open-source design– also seems to be its weakness at times, because it seems to hold it back from giving the user a fully integrated experience. Some people like this, of course, because tinkering and learning unique systems can be fun sometimes, but a lot of users probably don’t like that same sort of thing
Finding a balance between the open-source cacophony and the dead-easy simplicity of competing operating systems will be the balance Linux has to find, I think. They’re on their way, I believe, and I look forward to seeing how things develop from here on out.
Anyways, I wrote this comment pretty quickly, so it might not make sense
Thanks for the clarification on all the parts! This is the sort of thing new users need. I think something almost like a videogame walkthrough would be useful, the first time you start Linux up. A “here are the programs and features, here’s what they’re called, and here’s what they do” kind of thing. It’s sounds dumb and annoying, like that paperclip guy in Microsoft programs, but if it were done tastefully, I think it could really help some people.
Anyways, thanks again for the great comment!
Boo Radley on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 11:22 am
Fortunately Ubuntu has provided a meta-package that takes care of Flash, MP3 playback, Java, DVD playback, MS Fonts and a host of other “must haves” for Windows->Linux converts…
Find it in Add/Remove programs (make sure you are search *all* proggies vs. just open source) or go to terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
I think it would be nice if after a new install when first booting up a dialog box would tell you these things aren’t there by default and offer the option to install then. But there may be licensing issues esp. with DVD playback in the US
Cam C on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 11:49 am
The simplest way to get a lot of stuff working is to install the “ubuntu-restricted-extras” package in Synaptic. That should install flash, java, audio/video codecs, and more. That said, it might not work for you at this point if you’ve installed flash from the adobe website (file collisions, synaptic won’t be able to install a package if it detects it would overwrite files that it doesn’t think should be there).
Bart Burroughs on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 1:28 pm
You should also add the Medibuntu repository. Just go to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu and follow the instructions for your ubuntu version.
quinnten83 on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 4:25 pm
I think you just haven’t completely grasped the concept of Linux yet.
And you do need a bit of help.
I believe you are using Ubuntu. you might want to check
http://www.ubuntuguide.org out.
It has lots of post install instructions, and will explain some concepts unknown to newcommers.
This is also a very good site, http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/. It offers a lot of great tutorials and explanations, like installing a seperate home partition. If you don’t understand what I mean, than you should definitely check those websites out.
rob enderle on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 9:16 pm
Before the Ubunmaniacs bukakke over themselves, MANY distros have the restricted/free separation.
Some like Mandriva (the original user centric distro) offers a free software only cd and an all dressed one.
I have yet to find a good distro lately that doensnt work out of the box right away.
Stop living in 2007 and stop acting like one distro only has the answer.
BTw, average story/article that barely kept my interest but Wyatt’s post was amazing. Im gonna keep it for friends who want a quick breakdown.
If only we could get this read by tech writers/columnists on Rev3, TWIT, CNET so they have at least a clue.
Too many of them are confused by the very idea that there are different desktops and that a GNome desktop looks nothing like a KDE so trying one distro means absolutely nothing.
So good work W.
i guess its true what they say about Gentoo users: they are bright, virile, studly and get plenty of ladies.
Giggly, giggly goo.,..
aikiwolfie on Sat, 24th Jan 2009 4:42 am
Any time you want to do something to Ubuntu you don’t understand. Head to the Ubuntu Forums. There’s a whole “How-To” on how to get all your videos and DVDs and other stuff like Java working.
The next thing I’d do is close that savings account your mum opened. On-line banking shouldn’t need Java. All the work should be done on the server side.
Fred on Sat, 24th Jan 2009 9:06 am
I’ve been using Mepis for a while and starting to like sidux (both are KDE) and don’t have any java and media and other un-free problems. Sure you have to install some extras but that’s painless. And as aikiwolfie points out looking around the forums, wikis and fagq can gain you a lot of information.
aikiwolfie on Sat, 24th Jan 2009 3:47 pm
The Ubuntu Forums are particularly good. They don’t just give you info. They give you the command you need to fix the problem. They even forego the whole computer science lecture and history behind the command as well.
No boring lecture, no running around. Read basic description. Understand. Cut and paste. Press enter.
Christopher Hennis on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 2:18 pm
I still use Slack7.
Nathan on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 3:33 am
I remember trying to get an Ubuntu machine running on an old computer someone gave me. It did work, but wasn’t the fastest thing in the world (it was a really old pc). In the end, I just couldn’t drag myself away from my PC games, so I stuck with windows and turned the linux box into a server, where linux is at home
Wyatt on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 10:09 am
Good doctors do follow-ups.
@Ash
I might say “disparate” is being kind at times…
As far as the relation between things, that’s a definite Unixy holdover. The ideal is that your libraries don’t NEED anything to do with one another; that it won’t matter until you get to the rendering part. But this created an unfortunate situation where everyone had different ideas of what that rendering part looked like (or, indeed, if it existed at all!). We’re slowly gravitating toward a set of fairly universal guidelines, and things have improved dramatically over the past few years (really, this could be said of everything that gets packaged in a desktop distro), especially with the help of initiatives like freedesktop.org.
Now, a small(? Can I DO “small?”) explanation of what things look like as far as looks, right now.
You have, really, two major “widget toolkits:” Qt and GTK. These are used by KDE and Gnome(and Xfce) respectively (others include wxWindows and FLTK). If the DE is responsible for giving the system its look and feel, the toolkit is definitely a large part of it; everything inside the window border is the demesne of them. Java…has always been sort of a stranger in a strange land with Linux. Efforts have been made to improve that, but as you can see, they’ve yet a ways to go (I think Swing was supposed to help with this, but I’m not a frequenter of Java land, so I don’t know how that’s going). Part of the inconsistencies you’re seeing may be related to using Gnome (If it’s still as I recall, KDE tends to be much more consistent with its interface), but I’ve not used it in a few years as I don’t particularly agree with their overall direction. But don’t misunderstand– You’ll be hard pressed to find it at the level of Apple (for now
). At least it’s much closer that Windows seems to have ever managed, no? 
@Rob:
Thank you for your kind words. Interestingly, a lot of the basis for that writeup comes from having read the “Linux is NOT Windows” article from a few years back. The theory goes that, if people don’t know that Linux isn’t Windows, it follows rather naturall that neither do they actually know what Linux actually IS. As for my choice of distro I think the important thing about Gentoo is that it continues to bring CHOICE to users, so I celebrate choice by educating others about it.
@Aikiwolfie:
I sort of see that as a double-edged sword, really– it encourages the same sort of mentality that led to the absolute inability of one to troubleshoot Windows without extra utilities. Taken to an extreme, it creates or reinforces a user that can’t help themselves when the chips are down.
@Nathan
Try turning off all of the eye-candy and switch to a lighter-weight environment (I tend toward Fluxbox for incredibly low-spec hardware).
What hardware are we talking with “old?” The minimum profile for Linux is a 80386 with 4MB RAM
AshPringle on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 10:21 am
Thanks for the comments everyone!
@ Boo Radley and Cam C:
Thanks for the tip! I was unaware of the big meta-package of extras. Wish I had known about it earlier!