desktops

I’m at my parents farm in Cornwall and there is ridiculous amount of work to do around the place. It’s difficult to hack bushes at day and then try hack at night. At least we now have “broadband”.

A couple of days ago I opened up a clueless bug report. Everything was unstable on my Unstable system, especially under 2.6.17, but not 2.6.16.

Then I upgraded, not the kernel. I think udev (usual suspect), not sure, and everything works again. I was upgrading frantically after every pulse and last night I noticed 2.6.17 was working again. Now I am uneasy as I really don’t know what was at fault here.

If I had more time I would have chased this down. Though as I’ve whined about before, you can’t roll back and diff that easily between upgrade snapshots.

In other news I’ve switched from Ion3 to dwm. dwm sort of requires some tweaks and a recompile, so it’s another package to maintain. Below is a screenshot:

In about a week I’ll be off on my first expedition to South America. I’ll begin at Buenos Aires to learn some of the local lingo.

The main thing that makes the Unix Xorg platform so broken is copying and pasting.

I’ve seen this rear its ugly head as I’ve been teaching someone about the Debian platform. I like to teach how to search for answers and then copy in samples to try. That’s so hard to do on Debian with poor skills it’s not funny.

• The “middle click” for pasting or pressing left and right mouse buttons together is completely brain dead
• When clicking to focus on another window in windowing environments like KDE or Gnome, it is very easy to accidentally select text (or rather whitespace) and lose the important information in the clipboard
• Selecting text in a link in Firefox is broken. Try copy some text from this list
• Pasting into vim? Now spend a couple of minutes cleaning up white space and reformatting without `:nopaste`
• The Shift+Insert shortcut! Who came up with that? You need TWO HANDS to do that.
• Close the window of what you copied and you'll loose your copied text! ARGHHHHHHHHH

I’ve seen it written somewhere that “Copying and Pasting” is the single most productive element of everyday computing.

The real Unix way of copying and pasting doesn’t use a mouse and it’s far too difficult for average users.

This makes me even more convinced that the Desktop should just be the Web browser (Firefox) where CTRL+C/V/X “sort of” works…

Ok, I glanced over the earlier DP LTSP post and I thought I should let out this brain fart.

LTSP sucks, because:

• It needs a super strong server to do the heavy lifting
• A decent network design to go along with it
• I recall LTSP not making use of the hard drive. That’s stupid. Every computer has a hard drive.

The good thing about LTSP is that it is very easy to get a number of machines booting up Debian, which is impressive.

So really mass deployment in my mind needs to be with the debian installer’s preseed technology and apt-get updating itself. Are there any guides how to make a Debian machine auto-update? Like RH’s up2date? Ubuntu’s gnome updating thing is painful.

Any other better ideas?

Lately I’ve been testing a few distributions. A few comments.

Redhat (or CentOS) make it real easy to re-compile their sources, so you can basically create your own Enterprise distribution with your own company’s branding very easily.

Redhat Nahant EL4 “nahant” type distributions must have quite a high percentage of the server market. I see it time and time again. I find it quite an “average” platform, though I also find it difficult to argue why Debian is all that much better. One policy that interests me is that EL4 updates out the box. Is it a good thing for a box to update itself? I guess so, though with Debian that’s not as usual I find.

I hate how all the distributions I’ve tried use screensavers that hog resources. Whatever happened to the screen just blanking ffs? Making the screen actually power down gets bonus points. Extra bonus points: do not power down while I am watching a movie.

Xandros is quite an interesting distribution. Debian based. It has this LDAP centric xDMS (desktop management system) for aiding deployment. It also had crossover linux (for photoshop and M$ office) by default, also video works out the box and CD burning. I has quite a bit of spit and polish. It’s a pity they don’t seem to work as closely with Debian as Ubuntu seem to.

I’ve got my sister using Ubuntu dapper and she is bitching that she can’t play multimedia files. I found this awful post on the ubuntu forums where it suggests installed j2re. FS, no. I’ve managed to download the win32 codecs and get that going for her over ssh, but I’ve no idea how get mp3 playback working still on her (sic) “desktop”. My sister is also struggling with copy and paste in Gnome (compared to win32). I feel her pain in ion3 and Firefox’s textarea.

Ubuntu’s launchpad is painful. I remember some dude raved about it on -devel. WTF. I won’t rant about that. In Ubuntu I am still trying to understand the way the disb is formed and a release is made. The scripts are quite odd. Seed and Germinate ? I am getting confused with preseed.
I also don’t like the MoinMoin Wiki (same tech behind Debian’s Wiki ). Compared to MediaWiki, information doesn’t look as nice, editing isn’t as easy and the searching sucks.

Someone has got to write some nice Web interface to these Ubuntu patches. They’re a nightmare for my brain to parse.

When I was installing and re-installing different distributions, it would have been nice if the /home directory was left alone. I managed to save it once with the debian-installer, but the other installers were into blanking the drive. I also played about with LVM in the debian installer and somehow caused a strange error. I’m not confident about using LVM.

I would like to test disbs without burning ISOs and nuking the HD. I remember QEMU being really slow and VMWARE being non-free and only working properly on Windows. I don’t think you can boot an ISO with Xen. Any tips people?

Update: See comments. Or VM Player with Ubuntu samples are OK for testing.

Update: Argh, I’ve got issues with vmplayer…

So my sister is working at a school where the computers are in a shocking state.

All infected with viruses, spyware and malware. The machines either crawl along or are incredibly unstable. Some of them run some sort of virus protection program and I’ve seen one or two computers running two different anti-virus programs. On my travels I have seen countless infected Windows machines. It’s incredible!

And the worse thing about it, is that the Free Software geeks and outfits can’t seem to capitalise enough on it.

So what can I do? The Computer Scientist. Well, not a lot. For example all the Windows machines are in Korean. I can’t figure out how to change win32 language. Can you?

Plus, I don’t want to re-install Windows. I want to deploy some Linux based solution.

So what are the requirements? They need to :
* print timetables (via a crappy Epson inkjet) with something like Office
* be able to play macromedia based games
* use a browser

That’s it. It also can’t be more complex. No username or passwords please. We don’t want to have to train people to use a new system. Must be simple.

Oh diddums. Can Director macromedia kid games be played in Linux? I don’t think so. Oh I wish these kids’ software was on a N64 or something.

There is only like 10 PCs in this school and installing them with Linux would take quite a bit of my time. I need some sort of centralised control tower where I can control deployment of my own customized Ubuntu based distro.

I know very well about SkoleLinux but it is simply too complicated. No need for email. Outsource to Gmail and hosted service. Must be simple.

All I can think of will be complex and painful. Grrr…

Dependency on a Internet connection

Offline operation can be surprisingly usable (e.g. writing an email), but in most cases if you lose your network connection Web applications become useless. Network connections do tend to go down and if a Point of Sale (POS) Web system is offline then you can lose a ton of money.

Making Web applications distributed is very hard. Having a server on local client sites is asking for a whole world of pain. Making that local server update to a remote server with Debian is fairly easy, but that solves only part of the problem. Syncing databases and data. Nightmare.

Implications are that environments without good stable (and cheap) Internet connections (Islands, entire countries) can be (initially) poor areas to market a Web application solution.

Dependency on a Web browser (UA)

UAs usually require quite a good machine to run on. I forget what the minimum specs are for Firefox. For sane operation, you do need at least 800mhz and 256megs of RAM. There are quite a few PCs out there that don’t meet that specification. UAs also tend to require a mouse and hence more desk space compared to terminals.

There are loads of security problems associated with UAs nowadays. UAs are as complex as the operating systems beneath it. In fact, one could argue UAs are operating systems themselves.

In these cases I would suggest clients to switch their machines to LiveKiosk. Send clients new CDs for each major update.

I must comment on this Desktop rant.

Thanks to my earlier post about Kiosk Linux I have put onto LiveKiosk 1.0.

That’s the future desktop for 99.9% of the people out there. Of course, I couldn’t live without a big black uxterm.