Official Linux Thread

[JSaintS]

Hello guys!

I know that some of you found them self speaking about Linux in some topics, well, here is a place to do it without being off topic

Feel free to ask questions, speak about addons/programs you are using on Linux, which distribution you find better, etc.

I would start myself by a little question, I'm wanting to switch to Linux, and I had to use Ubuntu 2 years ago for a school work, as I enjoyed it, I wanted to use it but some friends keep telling me Kubuntu is "better".

What do you guys think about this? what should I use?

[davkol]

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[JSaintS]

So anyway you would advice Kubuntu. I was going for that until I had a problem today.
I installed it on my Computer, making a partition on my second hard drive, a partition of 80Gb +/- on a Hard drive of 500.
But big surprise When I came back on Windows, I saw that the Hard drive disappeared :-/ I spent the day trying to make it appear again :S (I think I manage to do it at final ^^ it's formating right now)
do you have any tips for a good dual boot? (as I'm not used now I still want to keep windows ^^)

[davkol]

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[Anynoupy]

When you install your linux distro there's, most of the time, an option to install GRUB-bootloader at the same time (or syslinux, etc), and it often automatic.
It allows you to choose on which OS to boot when you start up you computer
But when you install Win after a Linux dist, Win bootloader overwrites GRUB/syslinux bootloader, so you gotta install Win first.
Don't know if it really was your question, and if I made it cler / without error, but still
EDIT : Yeah, that probably has nothing to do with you not seeing your partition ...

And I would obviously advise XFCE as desktop environment, mainly because of its good look, and low memory consumption.
But I never really gave KDE a try (as I thought that it looked too much like a Win environment, from what I saw though), so can't compare ^^'

[JSaintS]

anymu, you got a pm ^^ as I don't want to speak in french here

[funkymeeba]

Anyone else use the e17 window manager? It's so delicious!

[Daniel Beaver]

Anyone else use the e17 window manager? It's so delicious!

It's like purple jolly ranchers.

As for the Ubuntu and Unity debate... I've since moved on to using Linux Mint. They have a good KDE edition (better than Kubuntu), as well as all the other desktop environments that matter.

[davkol]

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[Findecanor]

I'm still using Ubuntu 10.04 because of that GNOME 3.0 and Unity crap. For my next system upgrade, I have still not decided on XFCE or Mate.

[Djuzuh]

I've since moved on to using Linux Mint. They have a good KDE edition (better than Kubuntu), as well as all the other desktop environments that matter.

I'm interested in this. How different is it from Kubuntu? I use Medibuntu, Kubuntu Backports (or sometimes Neon) and my very specific configuration. I've already wondered, if I would benefit from switching to Mint.

Mint is ubuntu without all the annoying choices (I'm not saying bad btw, just annoying) of ubuntu I find. Non opensource programs installed by default (like flash and mp3), easier to use, easier to get going, etc…

It'd be my default " I just need something that works and don't care about the ethics or the right way to do it".

I'm currently rocking archlinux.

And if I'd have to give a rating of the top unix's, I'd say
OpenBSD > freebsd > debian stable > arch > gentoo > CentOS > ubuntu > mint.

[Djuzuh]

I'm still using Ubuntu 10.04 because of that GNOME 3.0 and Unity crap. For my next system upgrade, I have still not decided on XFCE or Mate.

I'd say xfce.

[rknize]

My two cents...

MATE has some quirks, but it works for the most part.  You end up with a reasonable approximation of GNOME2.  A bit more polish and it will be on par with it.  This is what I use on my main workstation at work when I left Ubuntu for Mint earlier this year.

Feature wise, Xfce comes up a bit short for me compared to MATE.  It does fill the void that GNOME2 leaves behind pretty well, though.  It's bit lighter weight too, though not as light as it used to be.  If you want light, you need to go with LXDM or another Openbox-based desktop.

As far as GNOME defeaturing itself, it always does that.  They did a real number on themselves when GNOME2 came out too.  Eventually, most of the features/settings came back.  GNOME2 was not a huge paradigm shift like GNOME3 is, though.  This desktop-tablet convergence that GNOME3 and Unity are aiming for is not worth the reduced productivity it causes, IMO.

I'm using Cinnamon right now on this laptop and at home.  It's buggy, but it has a future in the GNOME3 landscape and makes the next GNOME much more usable.

[Daniel Beaver]

I'm sort of torn between MATE and Xfce. MATE is a little more feature-complete than Xfce, but I feel like the latter has more of a future.

[fohat.digs]

I have dabbled with Ubuntu for a couple of years now. I installed Lucid Lynx 10.04 on my laptop and 2 desktops 2 years ago and have dual-booted since.

Also, at the office we have a couple of weak old computers that I have set up as Linux-only. My co-workers are dreadfully computer illiterate and don't want to change.

Windows XP + Lucid 10.04 was just dandy and I was very happy all around. I knew that the day would arrive when I had to modernize, and I avoided it until a couple of months ago.

The upgrade was painful and protracted on all but one of the desktops, and made me realize how old-fashioned I am. Now, the new OSs have grown on me a bit, and aside from a handful of HORRIBLE ANNOYANCES that are entirely the fault of arrogant and asinine programmers, I am OK with them. (Crippling Windows Explorer has got to top the list!)

The new UIs are no particular improvement, in my opinion, although I suppose most people think that they look prettier.

I hated Unity a lot more than I hated Aero, but much of that has subsided by now. They are just more cumbersome. To me, the new "concept" of navigation is just more difficult and convoluted than it used to be, in both systems.

One of the older systems simply would not take Ubuntu 12.04. I tried several times, and also Kubuntu and Xubuntu. I even tried re-installing 10.04 and trying to upgrade. I still think that the problem is in the software and not my hardware. It is old but easily meets all the specs.

Otherwise, the upgrades eventually came out fine. My laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed, and I immediately shrunk the partition and made room for an ext4 partition. I upgraded in place from 10.04 to 12.04 because I was a little nervous about diddling with the partitions.

For the desktops, I simply took some older (40GB and 80GB) hard drives and used Gparted and dedicated them to Ubuntu. If you have room in your box, and an old hard drive laying around, that is the cleanest and safest way to do it.

In Precise 12.04, I found that Grub-Customizer works great and will recommend it for dual-booting. In an emergency you can also go into Setup and select your hard drive boot order, if Linux has its own drive.

The only really ugly part was the difficulty of getting my laptop's built in wireless to work in Ubuntu. It took MANY hours of work, just like last time with Lucid. Fortunately, Ubuntu Forums has a group of very nice and helpful moderators. They make it possible for newbies to survive the rigors of starting cold.

[vyshane]

Anyone else use the e17 window manager? It's so delicious!

I haven't used it recently, but here's an old screenshot.

e17 on FreeBSD, circa 2005:

[sth]

is it the year of the desktop yet?

[vyshane]

is it the year of the desktop yet?

Yep, someone had to say it Not sure that will ever happen. They're owning pretty hard in the datacenter and in mobile though.

[dorkvader]

Anyone know how to hack slitaz to quit asking for the localization on every boot? I've read their guide, which appears to be out of date for V4.0, and the cheatcodes aren't working.

Other than that, Slitaz is pretty awesome. I'll eventually want to add the wacom drivers to it (and photorec, etc.), then use it at work all the time. Of the To-ram linuxs I've tried, Tin hat was the worst (though that was a while ago), and Puppy (and the "puplets," lighthouse, and browserlinux) just doesn't want to work right half the time.

I use Crunchbang at home, though I change every once-in-a-bit I do a clean and install every 6 months or so. I like to try new distributions. Maybe I'll swap for the rolling-yet-similar Archbang. Other than the awful default theme, it looked pretty good.

For people who like mint, I would also recommend pinguy, it's got a lot of features there. I wish I'd used it first.

When my brother forcibly switched us over to ubuntu is 2005 (when the computer broke), it was a pretty easy changeover for me. Now it's a useful diagnostic tool at work.

But yeah, Slitaz. The default boot option doesn't look right. I don't really know what that one is doing.

[rowdy]

My main server at home is running Ubuntu 10.04 (without a GUI - a perfect excuse to get another mech keyboard).

At work we have Ubuntu on about half the servers (a mix of 10.04 and 12.04), and I use Lubuntu 12.04 in a virtual machine (hosted under Windows 7 *sigh*) for various development activities.

Haven't tried Unity yet, don't really want to either 

I've tried most of the major distros, and settled on Ubuntu as it supports (supported?) a few different architectures, has LTS, and the package management more or less works.

[devel]

Ubuntu  feisty fawn was my first linux distro. I hopped around playing with other distros till I ended up with Arch. I have it installed on my old thinkpad t60. All I really need is  pekwm, and tint2 for desktop enviroment.

[Djuzuh]

Ubuntu  feisty fawn was my first linux distro. I hopped around playing with other distros till I ended up with Arch. I have it installed on my old thinkpad t60. All I really need is  pekwm, and tint2 for desktop enviroment.

Is your avatar Felicia Day?

[davkol]

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[Djuzuh]

No sh*t, Sherlock. ~_~

Pixels are too big, I'm not sure.

BUT I NEED CONFIRMATION !

[davkol]

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[daerid]

Confirmed here

[devel]

Fapping leads to blindness, confirmed =)

[DaClownie]

I have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a secondary boot on my desktop, and a really lightweight version of XFCE on my laptop... I've all but given up on the Ubuntu install. If you have anywhere near cutting edge PC components, half of the pieces don't work. I can never get sound to work properly, I can never get DVDs to play back properly, I can't play any of my games... It gets rather frustrating.

However, on a 8 year old laptop, Linux is beautiful. Lightweight, and fast, and allows me to work on my C++ programming that I've been putting off for way too long. If only it could play back a DVD so I could **** off at work and look like I'm working still.

One day Linux, you'll fully sell me on your goods. Until then, I still love Windows 7.

That and I don't have mech keys on my laptop

[JSaintS]

Well I put Ubuntu 12.04 on my computer too as a dual boot, and man! that UI suxx! where is the UI from Ubuntu 10? what is that ugly/stupid bar at the right? ô.Ô ...

plus, I can't get mumble to work (I can connect, but not put the password of my mumble server ... so I can't connect to it xD).

not sure if I'll keep it ... for now I'll give it a try ...

[fohat.digs]

I think that ugly/stupid bar on the right is a watered-down version of what we will have to become accustomed to in the future.

Cumbersome and counter-intuitive, I bit the bullet and started trying to get used to it. Just another nuisance to learn, it really isn't all that terribly different under the skin, except that they played the shell game again and moved everything.

[davkol]

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[Striketh]

Classic gnome is best gnome. Not a fan of unity, myself.

I use Ubuntu, like many others, but at work we use CentOS on all of our servers so I spend most of my time working in a shell on that. While CentOS is slow to update, it's an extremely stable platform and it's nice to not often have issues come up regarding the OS itself. Install it and it just works with no fuss or muss.

I work as a system admin for a living, so I'm always happy to answer any questions anyone may have on *nix or that area in general.

[slueth]

I have archlinux with xfce right now but I can't seem to get the ati drivers to work.. and now it boots to a garbled screen.    I had it working pretty well but I couldn't play games so I tried the proprietary drivers and it all went downhill.  I really like pacman though.  Gentoo is pretty nice too.  Ubuntu and Mint(with cinnamon) just works if you want a fast setup. 

[DaClownie]

If only it could play back a DVD so I could **** off at work and look like I'm working still.

Do you have libdvdcss (or whatever it's called) installed? Medibuntu & VLC/MPlayer are your friends.

Yea, DVD playback won't work on my desktop due to not being able to get working sound on it. It hates my Realtek onboard sound from my Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H. I can't get DVD playback to work on my laptop because I guess it's too slow to do DVD playback in Linux. It's a 1.8GHz single core Pentium M with 512MB of RAM running a stripped down version of Linux. I install libdvdcss, VLC, and it's so choppy and broken up you can't see what's going on. It's running ATI video too, so that could be the issue.

I'll eventually get it on a laptop and make good use of it, just haven't had the luck I've wanted as of yet.

[isp]

Anyone pickup a new macbook pro? Not so friendly with linux atm.
I hope those displays trickle down to the rest of us eventually...

Arch users:  Have you made the switch to systemd yet?  How was it?

[davkol]

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[Matt3o]

Lot's of Ubuntu users here. After many years of Ubuntu and Debian I recently tried Fedora and I am pleasantly surprised at the speed and general cleanness of that distro. You have to add rpmfusion to get some "evil" softwares and codecs but apart from that I'm totally in love with it.

I must say that the best distro for me remains Arch but it's harder/longer to install and maintain, so I've found in Fedora a good compromise (I use google's repos a lot that are available for ubuntu and fedora only, sure you can have them working on Arch as well but it's just easier with a supported distro).

[mantle]

Like many Linux users it seems, I started out with Ubuntu. I stick to the LTS releases, but am still at 10.04 because I'm really not that keen on Unity.

A few months back when my desktop HD crashed I decided to install a fresh OS and went for stock Debian stable, and it's been fantastic. I still run Ubuntu 10.04 on my laptop, but I expect I'll go Debian for that at some point, too.

For me Debian is just clean and functional and trouble free!

[sth]

just threw arch back on my x40. installation is actually a little quicker without AIF. i threw evilwm on it and i'm loving it. everything i like about dwm but with even fewer 'features'. not sure about the code footprint in comparison to dwm but it really doesn't matter that much to me.

if you like minimal window managers i recommend giving evilwm a shot. it's not as customizable as dwm as far as i can tell but the defaults are sane and if you are up to it, you can probably modify the source pretty easily to change things like keyboard shortcuts.

[OrangeJewce]

I'm installing Gentoo right now on one of my machines. Probably the most painful linux install I've ever done. Our main product at work runs on Gentoo, and I've been told they are moving me from Windows dev to Linux, and thus have been decreed to start on Gentoo and then when it (inevitably) breaks, I can move to whatever distro I want. We have one guy running Ubuntu, and one on OpenSuse (that I don't really get but it makes him happy). I would probably pick something like Debian for myself but, only time will tell.

Pre-compiled sources.... 1 million times faster than downloading, compiling, installing all the packages via emerge.

Cheers,

[alaricljs]

My work laptop and my home xen server w/ web/email domU and media server domU all run Gentoo.  I moved to it a few years ago from Debian when I wanted to not use MySQL and I've been very happy with it ever since.

[OrangeJewce]

My work laptop and my home xen server w/ web/email domU and media server domU all run Gentoo.  I moved to it a few years ago from Debian when I wanted to not use MySQL and I've been very happy with it ever since.

Don't get me wrong; there are some very good reasons to use gentoo, especially when you want an extremely light-weight, modular version of Linux (Xen being a perfectly good example). But for personal use instead of for server use, I don't think it's the best. (Unless you love optimizing those C Flags...)

We run our Xen server on CentOS, which has been great thus far.

Cheers,

[funkymeeba]

Optimizing CFlags is for ricers. See: http://funroll-loops.info/

That said, I like Gentoo enough, but have moved over to Funtoo on my home box, as well as my work laptop.

[alaricljs]

Only thing I play with is USE flags when I install something new 

[jdcarpe]

No Slackware love around here? What about the BSDs?

[funkymeeba]

Thanks, jdcarpe! You have reminded me I need to work with learning stuff on my FreeBSD and OpenBSD VMs.

[rowdy]

No Slackware love around here? What about the BSDs?

I have a Cobalt Qube and a Sun Netra something (AC200 I think) server both running NetBSD, although not in actual use at the moment.

[rknize]

No Slackware love around here? What about the BSDs?

I think my first stab at Linux was Slackware, but I found it cumbersome...especially since it was all new to me at the time.  It was fine to install, but after that you are on your own.  That was rather cumbersome when information was sparse, save for a few scattered HOWTOs on Usenet.

RH/Fedora/CentOS has come a long way since I first used it, circa 1997.  I originally installed it from floppies, but eventually found it on CD at the college bookstore.  I eventually found SuSE, which had far superior system configuration tools.  Great for someone still trying to find their way.  Alas, they made their free version more and more difficult to use and that's what led me to Debian.  Been using Debian or some Debian-based distro ever since.

...I've been told they are moving me from Windows dev to Linux, and thus have been decreed to start on Gentoo and then when it (inevitably) breaks, I can move to whatever distro I want.

Pre-compiled sources.... 1 million times faster than downloading, compiling, installing all the packages via emerge.

Haha...that was my experience as well.  It wasn't long before portage committed suicide due to some self-induced Perl breakage and that was it.  I think I tried it for about a week until I discovered apt-build.  Then I went running back to Debian. 

Back then there was something to gain by building for the native processor when the machine needed a bit more oomph.  Now there is just no point.

[Grimey]

Holy crapolla this week has been rough.  C# training provided by work and the MS fanboism by our training person is tough to stomach, but made very silly when he looks at this iPhone.

The evenings spent hacking on a system I actually enjoy is a welcome reprieve.  MS does pay the bills now that I work in a C#/MS shop full time, but the passions cannot be squashed.

[Matt3o]

honest question? is Gentoo significantly faster/lighter than a rolling release like say Arch? last time I tried (many years ago) I actually spent days installing gentoo and I couldn't say it was faster than debian (the distro I was using at the time). It was a time without 12 cores/24 threads so maybe things changed. Also I definitely didn't have the skill to take full advantage of the distro, maybe now it would be different. But gentoo seems more a "way of life" than a choice dictated by practical reasons. I'm talking of a desktop environment, not server. Again, no flame intended, honest question.

[alaricljs]

The practical behind Gentoo is that you can be very picky about what gets installed and what support is compiled into things.  So I have GTK but not Gnome, I have QT but not KDE, and if I don't use a particular program it's just not installed.  There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.  A buddy of mine at work that used to use Gentoo on everything switched to Arch and is extremely happy with it.

[OrangeJewce]

The practical behind Gentoo is that you can be very picky about what gets installed and what support is compiled into things.  So I have GTK but not Gnome, I have QT but not KDE, and if I don't use a particular program it's just not installed.  There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.  A buddy of mine at work that used to use Gentoo on everything switched to Arch and is extremely happy with it.

You can get something like 6% performance increases if you optimize your CFLAGs enough.

Cheers,

[alaricljs]

There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.

You can get something like 6% performance increases if you optimize your CFLAGs enough.

And without benching you'll never notice so it doesn't really matter for a desktop.  If you're dealing with large data sets then maybe you'll notice.

[OrangeJewce]

There's not going to be a perceivable performance difference.

You can get something like 6% performance increases if you optimize your CFLAGs enough.

And without benching you'll never notice so it doesn't really matter for a desktop.  If you're dealing with large data sets then maybe you'll notice.

Never said it was worth it...only that the performance increase is there! ;-D

Cheers,

[rknize]

The increase you will observe depends on a great many things.  Your particular CPU variant, the version of GCC you are using, and of course the workload.

Back when x86 binaries were all compiled for i386, recompiling for your native "Pentium" class architecture made a measurable difference...even on the desktop.  For doing codec stuff on P4, compiling for P4 was pretty much mandatory.  Now all the IA32 stuff is generally compiled for i686.  IA64 doesn't seem to gain much when optimized for your variant in my experience.  I've pretty much given up on this sort of thing so I can't say much more than that.

[godly_music]

To give you some speed comparison from my Q9550..

Standard Aoyumi OGG Vorbis encoder gets ~85x speed.
SSE2 Lancer base Aoyumi OGG Vorbis encoder gets ~125x speed.

My standard ffdshow settings are 5-tap lowpass, deband, spline upsize, xsharpen.

Generic ffdshow build uses 25-35% CPU.
ICL10 optimized ffdshow build uses 15-25% CPU.

Yeah, it largely depends on the application. For all kinds of audio/video work, yes, highly recommended. For this specific case though, Arch is already i686 optimized, which should be good enough.

[Matt3o]

finally got some time and installed Arch Linux (64bit) with systemd right from the start. It took some time but it was well worth the effort. The system is slightly more responsive than my previous Fedora install but memory usage is definitely better.

[blert]

I have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a secondary boot on my desktop, and a really lightweight version of XFCE on my laptop... I've all but given up on the Ubuntu install. If you have anywhere near cutting edge PC components, half of the pieces don't work.  [...]

I might just be used to it (running Linux as primary at work since Ubuntu 6.04, and everywhere else since probably 10.04, with earlier work systems on various *nixes), but I haven't had a lot of issues with recent installs.  Most of my coworkers (small group) are running Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) without much problem (just a couple of set-up tweaks for one that I know of -- same for me), on newer Dell laptops.  I had a few issues with a Lenovo at my last gig, but I got things worked out (that laptop had a few issues with wireless in Win XP, too).   I do run multiple monitors, sometimes with a docking station, sometimes not.  This has required some configuration, but really not much more than Win7 does (with my dual-boot Dell). 
I also cheated a couple of years ago and bought a nice system76 laptop with Linux pre-installed for home.

  I move between lubuntu (Openbox-based) and fluxbox and unity these days.     I haven't tried a whole lot of DVD playing, though.  Last time, I got things to work -- seems like I had to set a region manually, and then I was good.  With ubuntu, do 'sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras' if you haven't (Also [klx]ubuntu-*, if you're on one of those.) 

I like 'buntu's Unity, with the exception of about two things -- global menu treatment and scrollbars.  I really like it otherwise, especially like its keyboard shortcuts.  (Protip -- hold down the 'super/win/tux' key for a bit in default unity for a pop-up shortcuts list).   For myself,  I have to install ccsm for tweaking the desktop environment.   I change the size of the launcher icons (in stock settings), etc, but I don't mind those terribly.    Of course, if I install terminator, nmap, htop, and minicom, I'm pretty good to go.  Kids play minecraft on one of the Linux boxes at home, so that requires pointing to the correct Java libraries, but smooth-sailing for the most part.

Nice thing with the Linux stuff is that you can change what you like, script things easily, and run conservatively or cutting edge.  I'm using Ubuntu now largely for the package management, updates, and community (askubuntu.com, etc.).   I think Ubuntu has done a good job of extending Debian's package management -- good stability, security, and not too far out of date.  The ppa's (personal package archives) also work really well (in my experience, and anecdotally with most who use them).

[blert]

I use Ubuntu, like many others, but at work we use CentOS on all of our servers so I spend most of my time working in a shell on that. While CentOS is slow to update, it's an extremely stable platform and it's nice to not often have issues come up regarding the OS itself. Install it and it just works with no fuss or muss.

For what it's worth, we run a mix of CentOS, some BSD's, Debian, and the Ubuntu server flavor at work.   So far, the CentOS and Ubuntu have been the easiest and most stable.  Well, the OpenBSD has also been very stable (as one would expect?), but updates have been a pain (due to changes impacting our existing configuration logic, etc.).   Debian has been stable, but again, upgrades have required more hand-holding.