Josh Saddler

Alternative distros

In the last few weeks I've tried Arch Linux, Zenwalk, and Myah OS.

Arch is mostly the same ol' Arch it always is -- I used to dual-boot it with Gentoo on my old laptop, but I won't be moving to it at any point. It used to be hell on wheels for installed boot times, but now it's slower than many liveCDs. And like Gentoo, it takes a lot of initial configuration. Too much, I discovered. I don't really mind setting up things by hand, but the tools to do so need to be easy to use. Whether this means graphical applications or command-line tools (such as rc-update, which is one of the best selling points of Gentoo), they need to make system configuration quick and straightforward. Arch doesn't have much in this regard. Also, several packages that I consider essential to the light desktop I'll be building are only available as source packages. Binaries only, please. If I'm going to be spending at least as much time configuring and installing stuff on Arch as Gentoo, I may as well just install Gentoo.

Zenwalk's 5.2 release shows much more promise than the last version I tried. Except for the small problem where wireless networking won't work, that is. And I ended up not being able to finish installation or get a bootable desktop. The installation process heated up the CD drive to the point where the media started to become unreadable; packages on the CD would fail their checksums. When the machine was cool, there were no such issues. My laptop almost overheated to the point of shutdown. Once I finally got it to install several tries later, it couldn't boot -- the Lilo screen came up (ugh, Lilo) and tried to boot into Zenwalk, but then the computer reset itself. Repeat ad infinitum. Scratch Zenwalk.

Myah OS is a fairly promising new distribution that offers a "Box" edition built on LXDE, which looked to be perfect for my needs. Unfortunately, it comes with compiz by default and no real support for my GeForce 2 Go graphics chip; Myah includes only the unaccelerated "nv" driver, which is a real POS. So it sticks a heavyweight window manager into an otherwise decent desktop environment. Way to go. Fortunately, openbox is an option, and a few other window managers and desktop environments are available once you have an installed system.

Package selection in the installed environment was quite decent; lots of good, fast apps. LXDE (as configured by Myah) isn't the speediest desktop I've ever used, but it was acceptable. Unfortunately, wireless networking simply will not work. I couldn't figure out if this was because of the stone-age initsystem (and an equally antiquated config layout), or if it was the fault of ath5k. I've never used a kernel with ath5k before now; Myah ships with 2.6.25.2. Up till now I've just used madwifi, which works well. Whatever the cause, I could never get my card to initialize, much less see networks.

Package management is also a cast-iron bitch; the thing uses a weird mix of xterm output and a gtk frontend. The frontend fires up an xterm window with output in the background, but they're both slow as molasses. The frontend is extremely difficult to navigate; you first have to choose whether you want to add, remove, or update packages, then proceed through category menus and select individual packages. Stepping forward or backward through each window is a laborious process, forcing multiminute waits as the installer does whatever the hell it's doing. It's like it's fetching package information via the internet at each screen, and then executing a hell of a lot of code at each stage. Really, I've no idea what was going on under the hood. I just knew that it was a profoundly dissatisfying experience. Scratch Myah -- but I'll look in on this project in the future. It could be going places.

What's next? Well, I downloaded Xubuntu 8.04, so now I'll try a distro that's known for having "easy" configuration and management. Sure, I'll be getting an Xfce desktop (which is in itself too much for my laptop) further bloated with lots of Gnome cruft, but I figure I can use it as a decent base for getting a better environment. It's a lot better than starting with Ubuntu's Gnome desktop. There seem to be packages for everything I need so far.

Alternative desktops

I've also recently switched my workstation's desktop from Gnome and Firefox 2 to gnome-light and Firefox 3. The latter necessitated moving to the former, as right now, too many packages force dependencies on Firefox 2 and/or xulrunner-1.8. Plus, now that I'm on gnome-light, I've discovered the joys of unmerging Epiphany, Evolution, sound-juicer, and sundry other miscellaneous bloat. I've also given up on trying to use Midori and webkitgtk. While I appreciate that both are now in Portage, Midori is just too broken to consider using as a worthwhile browser, even though its rendering speed (thanks to webkitgtk) is second to none.

Besides, the primary advantage of Midori was its integration with my desktop environment. Now that Firefox 3 is installed, it blends in as a proper gtk app. And it's faster than 2.x; Gmail and other AJAX sites load much faster. I must say that I'm impressed with its overall speed despite my initial pessimism over the inclusion of a fricking database (sqlite). I still regard it as so much unnecessary bloat, since I have absolutely no use for all the new bookmarks features, but maybe someone out there will get some good from it.

Gentoo

In other news, we're looking to release 2008.0 final soon, after dealing with lots of security updates and miscellaneous fixes for the snapshot. What's this mean? To new users, it means a newer set of packages will be installed than what's on the beta2 CDs. To current users, it means nothing at all. Gentoo isn't like other distros that force you to reinstall or upgrade your entire system at release time. Releases are made solely to update the installation media -- CDs, stages, etc. -- to bring them up to date.

I've sent in the final documentation tarballs to the rest of the releng team and updated the tentative release schedule with the info provided by Chris, so now I can focus on finishing up the next issue of the GMN. There's one article in particular that I'm excited about, so stay tuned . . . it's coming soon!