software: Linuxtag 2008 Berlin, Germany

linuxtag.org
The editor goes to a Linux show and tries out a few distros ...

In addition to just seeing what was happening I was also on the lookout for an up to date Linux Distro to put on a Thinkpad. The fact that the Thinkpad only spoke Windows XP German and I don't, added a little urgency to my quest. This turned out to be a small saga. If you want the show in a nutshell, here it is ...

huge place - orgs not in basement! - biz out the
back - 2500 sq m

kde 4.1 has 3d stuff, out July; regarded as .0
by lots of people. They go to zero early as
they get more feedback that way - fedora bills
itself as super-clean and sees future as
community building and enhancement especially of
dev communities - jacklab there and will be at
Franfurt's Musikmesse - trusted computing hq'ed in
Portland - no biggies

students from Nurnberg, keen, smart and
knowledge hungry. super-friendly press people.

ibm had their displays powered by ps3's running
linux - cell processors

It was a nice contrast to other shows I've been to where the orgs, etc were usually bundled into a basement ghetto - here they were mingled together, as they should be.

The major Linux distros were all there, including Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSuse, Mandriva. Sun were also giving away discs with Open Solaris on them and so were the people behind a new BSD fork called MirOS.

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Other projects with stands were MythTV, PhpBB, Drupal, and Jacklab representing the music side of things, and lots of others. IBM had a very large setup with the only interesting thing to me being that the bunch of PS3's they had (and which have their Cell processors in them) were running Linux - no word on where it came from or whether it was available. The consoles running them could boot either into console mode or Linux. It's likely this is a development of the system that ran on PS2's. It'll be interesting to find out at some future point whether it uses the full power of the PS3. If it does, it should rock some.

I grabbed a selection of distro CD's and that night I put OpenSuse 10.3 on, closely followed by Ubuntu and Kubuntu, which had KDE 4.0 on it. I thought the 3 series sucked more than somewhat so was interested to see what 4.0 was like. It looks very nice I think with lots of whizzy things to play with. 4.1 is, I'm told, the real 4.0 as the really and truly 4.0 has quite a few showstopper bugs. The reason they go early to zero is that, once they do, feedback and bug reports pick up enormously. 4.1 also has some nifty 3D stuff for the desktop. Interestingly, it is called Looking Glass, which is the same name as a Sun project which is done in Java and which has real utility by having such things as rotatable windows with things happening on both sides. I can't say anything about the utility of the KDE things as I just had a brief glance at the beta demoed by Aaron Seigo, KDE's chief architect.

One of the important things I wanted the Linux distro to do was talk to a DWL G122 USB wifi thingy and to cut a very long story short, none of them did. They all wanted to load 4500 drivers whereas what it wants is 4570 drivers. ndiswrap is another way to go with this but not many people seemed to realise that this required that the proper Windows drivers need to be installed.

The reason I wanted to keep XP was that I have some music gigs coming up and I want to use Ableton Live which I've been using on a Mac for a few years. I checked periodically that XP was still there but at some point Ubuntu got the partitioning wrong (it overlapped a partition which had nothing to do with XP) and that trashed the Windows installation - very unimpressive! A web search indicated that this experience was far from uncommon. That same search also brought up huge numbers of quite silly "answers" for the problem. Basically, you need to format the disk with a Windows-friendly cleaner. Formatting from Linux is useless, with my setup anyway. I'd tell you what was used on mine but I don't know. It was done in a shop and they weren't telling.

Quick comments on the distros: OpenSuse 10.3 - nice selection of packages, which can be quite handy if you're offline. The packages are kind of old though. I don't like Yast much, and that goes for rpm's as well. Last year, a 10.1 install I did was completely trashed by a confused Yast. Ubuntu and Kubuntu (Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop manager and Kubuntu uses KDE) have Debian's apt-get system and this works very well. The show CD for Kubuntu had KDE 4.0 on it, which I liked but the stable version which was put on at their stand had 3.5 which I don't like, mainly for accessibility reasons. Fedora was an easy install - all of them were really, but the packages seemed a little dated: There's a tradeoff here of course - the more conservative distros have reputations for solidity. In some, you can be bleeding edge or not, according to your own preferences.

In the end I liked Ubuntu best and I even got it online by getting a different card but due to the partitioning problem it had to be wiped and after XP was re-installed the partitioner couldn't even do a resize. As I now had XP in English, the pressure was off, and XP it will be for a while ... plus the Unix tools from Cygwin and plus a few Linux ports such as Vim and the Gimp.

There's no doubt the distros have all got quite easy to install in most cases. This is underlined by the number of 'Live CD's' where you can run Linux from the CD and where your hardware will usually be recognised and usable. But it's still not all that fun to try and find solutions if there's a problem. Someone setting up a search engine that only bothered with known useful spots would be a boon here.

And if you need to use special kinds of hardware, it's still a good idea to research what works first.

John Littler

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