Posts Tagged ‘ubuntu’

Ubuntu: So Easy a 10 Year-Old Can Do It

Okay, this “Linux is hard” FUD is driving me insane. I can’t take seeing articles like this anymore. The author claims to want to give Linux a try but clearly wants the experiment to fail. The author tries to pick a distro for the experiment by searching for “linux os that doesn’t suck” suggesting that there would only be a handful to choose from. Other comments such as “So that’s one point for Ubuntu; good job on making use of basic http protocol” after downloading and “I hurriedly look for a copy of the OS and blissfully ignore anything that looks like a guide or set of instructions” indicate that the author doesn’t really want to succeed. Using that logic, I’m going to stop checking the fluid levels in my car since I bought what was supposed to be a “good” car. See how far that gets you with a mechanic..

All right, rant aside, I’ve some embarrassing news for those who argue that Linux is much harder to use: I installed it for my sisters (at the time one was 10 and the other was 16, both with very little “tech” experience) and had to answer very few questions for them to use it.

A couple of years ago around Christmas I acquired an old Dell Inspiron for free, so I wrapped it up. It was a slower Pentium III with 256MB of RAM with a broken USB port and a battery that barely held a charge. I picked it up to give to my sisters so that when one of them was using my parents’ XP desktop for school, the other could do some browsing on another machine. It fit the bill perfectly. I installed Ubuntu 6.10 (the newest at the time) and let them play with it. They actually used it much more than I ever anticipated. They both did a lot of browsing as well as some arcade games and chatting. The older of the two surprised me one day and called me wanting to install Real Player. I was very impressed. She had gotten the .deb files that she needed, she just needed the command to install it (sudo dpkg –install <package>, btw). They both used the machine for using Firefox (they even used it to play Flash games), OpenOffice.org, Pidgin, and the arcade games. One of them even got into using GIMP just a little bit for cropping pictures. They had even been keeping up with updates and had installed a few extra pieces of software. Given that story, all the people claiming that simple tasks are difficult absolutely amaze me. What makes me laugh even more is that now the older one has a MacBook and I seem to field more phone calls with questions about OS X than Ubuntu (Please, any Apple fans, don’t flame me. I’m an Apple fan as well, it’s just an observation I’ve made).

Just to preempt any Microsoft fanboys from commenting on this.. I would like to point out one key difference between the article linked to earlier and my story: the author of the linked article was trying to install Linux from the perspective of an “Average Joe” whereas my story did not involve the installation of any OS or drivers (actually I just popped in the CD and took all the defaults). Unfortunately, thinking that the installation is part of the “average user”’s experience is very flawed logic. I’ve done my time in the IT support world. There’s not a single “average user” who will even think of reinstalling his or her OS (Windows, Linux, or Mac). In fact, a lot of users have a hard time connecting to file shares on their Windows server from their Windows desktop. They simply call the IT support department to have them just do it for them. Heck, most users don’t even read error messages, let alone try to install an OS.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 4th, 2009

Canonical Announces ARM Support

Canonical has announced that it will be adding ARM support to its mainstream desktop operating system. Ubuntu support for ARM will begin with version 9.04 which will be released in April of 2009. ARM is the architecture of choice for most mobile devices. Back in April, of a build of Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 by Nokia popped up in the blogosphere. Most netbooks have been built utilizing the Intel Atom processor, but ARM has recently announced its intentions to move into the netbook market with a partnership with Canonical. Netbooks are increasingly becoming mainstream and will play a vital role in the desktop operating system marketshare game. Microsoft has already made it very clear that the Windows team will be focused on performance and boot times on lower-end hardware, i.e. netbooks. Canonical has also been focused on the netbook market as that has been a stronghold for Linux as the idea of the netbook has evolved.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Nov 16th, 2008

Parallels 4 vs. VMware Fusion 2

Parallels recently released version 4 of their desktop virtualization software promising 50% better performance over the old version. I have used both VMware on Linux and Parallels on Mac for some time and decided to put them to test on the same system using VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop 4. My hardware was a Core 2 Duo MacBook at 1.83Ghz with 2GB of RAM. The machines were stored on an external hard drive attached via FireWire. My host OS was Mac OS X 10.5.5 and I used 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 desktop as the test guest OS. I gave each machine access to both cores and 1GB of RAM. Most of my tests were very unscientific, but general observations about the usability of the machines in each software.

General Speed Observations

Since I wanted to start with fresh installs, the first step was to lay down an install of Ubuntu. I didn’t take any time measurements during the installer, but the installer in VMware was noticeably faster than Parallels. After the installation, I did a quick test of the boot speed of each. Ubuntu booted in 1 minute 28 seconds from the time I clicked the power button to when it was usable in Parallels and 1 minute 20 seconds in VMware. Really, there’s not a lot of difference there. VMware was also slightly slower when I opened OpenOffice 2.4. In Parallels, it took 11 seconds before it was usable compared to 9 seconds in VMware.

Driver Installation

The Parallels tools and VMware tools installations were significantly different. The Parallels tools installation was a very simple menu-driven installer from the terminal. It took just a couple of minutes to install and a quick reboot and we were up and running. The VMware tools installer was easy as well, but a bit longer with a few more options. After the first install, the mouse driver wouldn’t let the cursor leave the guest when it got to the edge of the machine window. I had to update the Ubuntu kernel to make it work. Upgrading the kernel was definitely recommended anyway, but I thought it would be worth noting.

File Transfer

I opened up SSH on my OS X box so Ubuntu detected it from the “Places” menu in Gnome as an SFTP server. I logged in and transferred an .iso file from my home directory over to the guest. The file was 637MB. I transferred the file in Parallels in 3 minutes 7 seconds and transferred it using VMware in 2 minutes 15 seconds. VMware wins again. VMware also allowed drag-and-drop files from OS X to the Ubuntu guest. Parallels didn’t offer support for that and neither offered drag-and-drop transfers going back. I transferred the .iso again using drag-and-drop to the VMware machine and it ran almost as fast as the SFTP transfer, transferring in 2 minutes 18 seconds.

Video Performance

No performance test involving Linux would be complete without glxgears. Surprisingly, the tests seemed to swing the opposite way and Parallels excelled at this test. VMware ran glxgears at a mere 155FPS, but the Parallels guest was able to run at 231FPS.

Summary

VMware seemed to be slightly faster in booting and launching applications, but Parallels had simplicity and video responsiveness on its side. The VMware tools were slightly more involved to install and had to be copied to the guest and extracted and Parallels tools slightly more simply. The VMware drivers also required me to update before automatically moving the cursor from the virtual guest to the host at the edge of the screen. However, VMware did allow the user to drag files from OS X into the virtual guest. Unfortunately, without running Windows you don’t get a lot of the features that VMware and Parallels offer, but support for Linux in both seems to be coming along nicely.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Pete from VMware who pointed out that there was a newer build of VMware available (the software did not prompt me for an update). I updated to the new version and Unity works great. Unity from the VMware platform was a definite plus since it allows applications from the guest to be in separate windows alongside the windows from the host OS. I did notice that video was quite a bit more choppy when in Unity view and glxgears showed around 127-128FPS rather than the 155 that I was seeing without it turned on, but the system was still usable. One thing that happened to me with the newer version of VMware tools was that when I clicked on any of the menus in Gnome and went down the list, it would consistently click the mouse for me. Eventually it stopped, but fairly annoying for just a few minutes.

With this new-found freedom, I decided to have a little bit of fun with Unity. I have Office 2007 installed using CrossOver so I quick downloaded a trial of Apple iWork to show off a little bit of diversity:

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (4) : Nov 16th, 2008

VMware Server 2 on Ubuntu 8.10

Apparently all the bugs with running VMware on Ubuntu 8.04 have either been worked out on the VMware side or the Ubuntu side with 8.10. I installed today using the Ubuntu 8.10 i386 desktop version with just a few prerequisites to install:

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential

You’ll of course have to register with VMware.com to get a license key for VMware server and download the tarball. Once downloaded I untarred and unzipped:

tar zxvf VMware-server-2.0.0-122956.i386.tar.gz

Then run the installer:

cd vmware-server-distrib
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

During the installer I just took all of the defaults except I didn’t allow NAT’ing for my machines and I changed the default store location for my VM’s.

Once the installer was finished, I launched Firefox and navigated to: http://localhost:8222 (If you’re going across a network (especially across the web) you can also use the SSL server at: https://:8223).

Once logged in I created a virtual machine. To get to the console, I had to install the Firefox plugin for VMware and all was well.

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Filed under How-Tos : Comments (1) : Nov 12th, 2008

Ubuntu 8.10 To Be Released Today

Ubuntu 8.10 is scheduled for release later today. The new version builds on previous releases with a few new features. Probably the most notable on the server side of things is the new virtual machine builder that now comes with the JeOS (Just enough Operating System) which was also just introduced last year. Ubuntu is bragging that virtual machines can be installed and booted within 5 minutes using the new JeOS virtual machine builder. JeOS acts as a kind of hypervisor as it’s just a stripped down version of the OS as the name implies, perfect for running other guest operating systems on top of it. Other features and improvements include better RAID controller support, support for encrypted home directories, simplified firewall management, and full support for the Apache Tomcat/OpenJDK platform.

On the desktop side, we see, of course, a newer version of the Gnome Desktop Environment, claiming better support for multi-monitor setups. They have added a new “guest session” feature which allows a “guest” user to login and have a limited set of applications and directories to use. Support was added to allow the OS to be installed and booted off a flash drive. Ubuntu has also made it simpler for connecting to 3G wireless networks using 3G modems, a cable or Bluetooth connection to a wireless phone.

The release will be available at Ubuntu.com.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Oct 30th, 2008

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