As Byte is now a subscription service I thought some people might enjoy reading some extracts.
I'd like to think that the people at the big Linux distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo) and at the big desktop projects (KDE, Gnome, Ximian) are finally reading my articles. The perennially ugly and guru friendly (as opposed to user friendly) desktops of Linux are being addressed. The people at the big distributions have collectively addressed functionality and feature set these last six or seven years. Recently, they finally understood how important it is to make Linux beautiful and easy to use to catch the remaining share of the market.
I've often complained how much nicer Windows fonts were compared to what's available on a standard Linux distribution. Sure, you could copy and use fonts from a Windows machine, but that's again a guru friendly process. It also seemed they would never get that by just adding many thousands of little sometimes ridiculously immature utilities and little programs they only make a distribution appeal to propellerheads rather than the typical, modern human being, especially one who has been exposed for prolonged periods of time to Microsoft desktops.
Well, the good news is things are changing. Ever since Red Hat 8.0, beauty is finally coming to my desktop. Never mind that particular release was born under an unlucky star when it comes to stability and quality assurance. Never mind, furthermore, Red Hat 9.0 being too bold (new threads library) on technology and too skimpy on QA (again). But thanks a lot anyway for a very nice desktop finally, both Gnome and KDE. Even configuring a wireless network card has become doable under Red Hat whereas a year ago, at Linux Tag in Germany, I wrestled with it for a whole day, only to utterly fail in the process.
The same goes for SuSE and everybody's favorite distribution, Gentoo, and probably most other distributions, as well. They all have nice looking desktops with lots of improvements in usability and ease of operation.
However, some offerings and sacrifices had to be made to the Gods of Pecunia. Red Hat stopped selling a boxed version of its distribution, except for the enterprise version which I never even saw being sold in a box anywhere, really. At this summer's LinuxWorld, it was almost impossible to get my greedy fingers on a boxed version of SuSE, whereas Daniel Robbins, the project leader of Gentoo, freely gave away beautiful, flower decorated CDs to passers by. The economics of free stuff (in this case, free as in beer) are seemingly just too powerful, even for cash rich companies like Red Hat.
Encouraged by these developments, I decided to toss my Apple laptops aside and take the attractive new penguins on the road, seeing with my own eyes how far Linux has come. I knew that beating OS X usability would be hard, especially considering some of its essential new features. On the other hand, I have longed for the malleability and openness of Linux on the laptop ever since I started using OS X in the summer a year ago.
The Penguins Added Some Fat
Freshly armed with ISO images of Red Hat 9, SuSE 9.0 and Gentoo 4.1, I wrote to the good folks at IBM, Dell, and HP to ask for review models of their laptops, making sure to mention I was going to use them with Linux and not with Microsoft's eXtremely Pricey operating system (which comes pre installed anyway). You would think they (not Microsoft, that is) would make sure to send Linux compatible hardware. You would have been thinking wishfully, however. I guess these companies are just too busy to spend time thinking along these lines, so they just tossed me whatever they need to sell right now a Dell Precision M60, an IBM T40, and an HP Evo N800w.
I don't know if it's just me, but the excited feeling and the tickling expectations when opening a brand new laptop box are just not there anymore. Nowadays, you pretty much know what you are going to get, and so I proceeded to throw away all the dozens of flyers, AOL spam brochures, and bonus sign up offerings so I could start the installation fest already. All three laptops have a half a gig of RAM, 60 or 80 GB of disk space, and sub 3Ghz Intel cookers. As I said: nothing to write home about; these are all pretty standard numbers.
Red Hat installation is pretty much what we all have gotten used to in the last few years, with a few notable improvements. You can now check the CD media before proceeding with the installation and so avoid getting stuck half way through because one of the three or four CDs are found to be illegible by the installer. Nice touch. SuSE's installation still has that Mercedes Benz German engineering feel to it. You feel like nothing could break it and that every little detail has been thought of in typical Teutonic efficiency and fashion. Gentoo, on the other hand, has this tradition of being everything but what you expect it to be, and hence it is a box of surprises, right from the installation on. Gentoo's installer is pleasant, clear and surprisingly advanced for a non commercial distribution.
All three distributions immediately set out to occupy as much of the disk space as possible. With my standard choice of KDE, Gnome, a string of development library and languages, standard databases, web server, spam killers, and editors/wordprocessors, I always get somewhere around 4GB of used space on the platter.
I use Linksys wireless gear for just about everything. Their 802.11G routers are sensational, and reasonably priced. The management interface is easy to use, and includes functions for NAT, firewalling, port forwarding, and much more. The only item missing is a way to let users roam between a bunch of 802.11G routers in the same building (Apple's Airport Extreme base stations do have this nifty feature). The price is within the $160 range and with that there is really no excuse anymore for not having wireless at home or in your office. Furthermore, Linksys' cards just work (my HP wireless cards fail often, and Cisco's cards are just too expensive). For my three laptops, I used Linksys combo B/G cards and all three distros had no problems recognizing the Linksys cards and configuring them. Wherever I travel, I always use T Mobile's nationwide wi fi roaming service, and so the first worry for me is to get wi fi going on a laptop (something Apples excel at, by the way).
The hardware compatibility worries of the past are gone for good. All the hardware on the laptops was duly configured by Linux and I didn't have to resort to voodoo to make it all work.
Once I had Red Hat 9 running on the IBM laptop, I copied my traditional /data directory (nowadays a healthy 12GB of data) onto it and went off to a trip to New York City.
When I am in NYC, I never stay at the same place for long as I usually have a number of meetings back to back. It is crucial for Linux to be good with power saving functions like spinning down the CPU and hard disk, and going to sleep correctly when the lid is closed and waking up again when it is re opened. Linux on the IBM T40 proved to be a champ at that. The only problem was that the network card sometimes stopped working correctly on wake up. Installing the correct drivers from the Intel web site (rather than the one provided with the Linux kernel) fixed that.
Now, I do a lot of writing (being a journalist and all) and I found the xft2/fontconfig system has made great leaps of quality since the modest beginnings of Red Hat 8. Red Hat's preconfigured fonts on its Bluecurve desktop render a crisp screen which is good enough for writing, although certainly of lower quality than what could be obtained by running Windows on that same laptop, or an Apple laptop under OS X. Red Hat also went through some work to configure OpenOffice fonts appropriately, which makes for a better writing experience. Overall, the Red Hat desktop is beautiful, quite usable and alas uninspiring. It looks like somebody was given the task of coming out with something "good looking," never mind what you can actually do with it. Thanks a lot, but given the choice I'll stay with OS X.
One more note on Red Hat 9 on the road. Red Hat has chosen not to include MP3 players or DVD players with its distribution, for fear of the overly repressive Digital Millennium Copyright Act laws. You can easily obtain RPMs of such players, but if you do so, remember to drop an e mail or letter to your Congressional representative to ask for these laws to be amended, so as to allow law abiding citizens like yourself the freedom to chose which medium is best for your needs.
KMail, the KDE e mail client I used for my e mails during that trip failed quite miserably. It's slow, and navigation around e mails is cumbersome (can't use cursor keys: must use N and P keys to move up and down the e mail list. Argghhh!) In the end, I went back to Pine, which I have been using for the last seven or eight years and which I have come to trust; plus it works under all current computing environments.
Back from New York, I switched to the Dell with Gentoo laptop for my attendance at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco in early August. I gave a speech there, and OpenOffice's PowerPoint replacement refused to render my presentation correctly. I had created that presentation on my Apple laptop under Microsoft's PowerPoint and in theory OpenOffice should be able to read and display it properly. With only a short time to spare before my speech, I was glad to see the Linksys wi fi working correctly under Gentoo 1.4, and found the rendering on the large display more appealing than under Red Hat/KDE/IBM T40. Using the wireless link provided intentionally or not by the good folks at MySQL's booth, I downloaded VMware and then went to the Microsoft booth to ask for a Windows XP CD so I could make my PowerPoint presentation. Nobody is surprised anymore to see Microsoft at a Linux show, and their folks are always very helpful. Of course it took almost an hour to install XP (I hate how it installs a million strangely named little files over which one has no control at all), and another 10 minutes get PowerPoint up and running, but in the end I had my presentation going in time. What's even more surprising is that the display and font rendering of Windows XP under VMware under Linux is better than under Gentoo directly. Strange but true.
By the way, I was a panelist in the traditional Linux Golden Penguin Contest where a team of nerds is pitted against one of geeks on questions around geekdom, Linux, and science (fictive or real). I was with the Nerds, whereas Donald Becker was with the Geeks: a case of openMosix against Beowulf. My team lost miserably, as I stumbled on the formulae for glucosium and sarin. I assumed the first one not to be edible, and the second yes.
Spam Killers
Anyway. I still had to test SuSE's distribution on the HP (ex Compaq) Evo N800w. I decided to take this combination on vacation to my little house in the Italian Alps. Since I don't have a phone line there, I have to use my cell phone to dial up to an Internet provider and fetch my e mails from my server. When you are on a 9600baud connection to the Internet, you don't want to waste time and money downloading spam. I get about 700 e mails a day, not including well over 2000 spam e mails. If I was to get all these e mails through the cell connection I'd surely be on the phone all day. In these situations Procmail is your friend.
Before my departure I made sure to set up smart Procmail rules so as to move all my mailing lists' incoming e mails to a specific directory on my Linux mail server (hosted on a 150mbit link by the good folks of the Italian Supercomputing Centre, Cineca in Bologna, Italy). Also, all e mails from people with whom I haven't been corresponding these last few weeks would be saved for my later perusal, concentrating instead on e mails I have been expecting or from important people. As to what concerns the thousands of spam e mails that are illegally being sent to me, I have found SpamAssassin to be the solution. SpamAssassin is an advanced Perl program applying hundreds of checks to every incoming e mail and then calculating a Spam "factor." If that number is higher than a user specified threshold then SpamAssassin will assume it is spam and mark it as such. You can then use Procmail to check for the added "Spam Flag: YES" and move it to a spam folder, like this:
bash 2.05a$ more .procmail
:0 fw
| /usr/bin/spamassassin P
:0
* ^X Spam Flag: YES
spam/
This little Procmail recipe takes care of all my spam problems and I haven't had much more than one or two spams a day. My SpamAssassin threshold is at 3.6, which is pretty aggressive and I am sure I lose a genuine e mail here and there, but not having to read ceaselessly about organ enlargements makes up for it.
But I disgress. Having the HP laptop with SuSE in my vacation at the little mountain house means the laptop will have to serve dual duty as a word processor and a DVD/MP3 player. When I am in the little house in the mountains I spend roughly five or six hours a day writing (either writing exercises, my novels, or my computer books). I don't have an external monitor in that house and therefore I place very high demands on the laptop screen and its font rendering. With the SuSE integration of xft2/fontconfig, most applications render the text very beautifully. The only exception is the included StarOffice 6.0 which has its own font system. Sadly, a simple wordprocessor like KWord or Emacs is not good enough for me. I have written several books, a few dozen academic papers and hundreds of articles with Microsoft Word over the last ten years and I have sort of grown accustomed to its style and user interface. True, I don't use much more than ten percent of Word's feature set, but when I need some special feature from Word, then I badly need it.
SuSE, like Mandrake, has always placed emphasis on desktop software and usability features. Though SuSE also offers strong server features, the maturity of the desktop packaging, documentation, and overall appearance of the product will be immediately evident. However, the desktop is only nice under KDE; under any other desktop environments (like Gnome 2.0, included on the CD) you get far less appealing results.
I managed to write a good 50 pages of my novel and a few articles (including this one) on the SuSE powered laptop and things worked mostly okay. StarOffice crashed a couple of times for no apparent reason, and the sleep mode simply didn't work; I had to shutdown and restart the laptop whenever I needed a break. Also, just like Red Hat, SuSE 8.1 really takes up a lot of space on the hard disk. What's even worse, after booting into it, you will typically find over 130 processes contending for the CPU. You can trim down considerably if you care, but this bloat is simply not necessary.
On the positive side, SuSE 8.1 let me easily configure the IrDA interface to be used to connect to the cell phone, making the serial cell phone cable unnecessary. The wireless card by Linksys was recognized immediately and configuring it was very easy.
Conclusions
Linux has made some progress on the desktop. Anti aliased fonts, now the standard, make for a much more readable screen, although there is certainly still a serious lack of a bigger font collection. Linux can be taken on the road, but it will not be as painless as OS X or, God forbid, Windows XP. Of the three distributions I tested here (Red Hat, Gentoo and SuSE), for the laptop, I liked SuSE best. It has a more refined feel to it (as long as you stay with KDE), better engineering and better hardware support.
On the other hand, considering the amount you have to invest in making yourself comfortable with the particular Linux you installed (never mind the time required to make a good installation), and the little, but annoying problems you get, I don't hesitate to go back to my trusty OS X based Apple PowerBooks. OS X offers the best of both worlds, UNIX with its stability, malleability, performance and ease of development and Apple's flair for highly usable desktops, extremely nice rendering, big fonts library, and last but not least Microsoft Office.
Apple Season
I live a few hundred feet from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino and share with them a Starbucks outlet just across our streets. Let me tell you that Apple's programmers are typically not among the Apple crowds you usually meet there. They are far too busy on making OS X the standard in usability, robustness, and new, ground breaking functionality. I recently spent a few hours with Apple's top executives to look at their new announcements.
Next to the much touted new G5 desktop system with a 64 bit CPU, Apple also announced the new version of OS X, named Panther. This new version (internally, 10.3) brings a slew of new and very exciting features for the 7 million users of OS X. To name just a few of the changes under the hood: full IPv6 support, full integration of LDAP with Microsoft ActiveDirectory (single sign on), Quartz rendering in all UNIX utilities (you can have a Quartz rendered Python application, for instance), much enhanced font management, and enhanced standard applications like Mail (much faster now, with Safari based rendering and much more).
These changes are partly bug fixes, partly necessary enhancements, and partly completely new, and are what one would expect from a minor bump in the version from 10.2 to 10.3. The really big changes, however, are some of the new features I witnessed at Apple's journalist briefing.
Together with the new G5 64 bit CPU, Panther now supports partial 64 bit addressing. The address space size remains 32 bit at 4 GB, but the kernel can now address beyond 4 GB of real memory (something that Linux has been able to do on the Intel platform for a number of years). This will allow memory hungry users to add lots of RAM (up to 64 GB for now) and avoid swapping to disk, therefore enhancing overall system performance. I would have wished for a true 64 bit address space, but I understand Apple not wanting to break application compatibility so soon after the switch from OS 9 to OS X. And in any case, very few desktop applications require more than 4 GB of address space.
The most striking new Panther feature, however is the new Exposé usability standard for the Aqua desktop. It allows users to find out where their windows are on the desktop by pressing a key. The special effects used by this new feature are eye popping and a complete new metaphor for usability. It's one of those features that you have to witness to fully appreciate.
Also, OS X 10.3 now supports faster user switching (like Windows XP), but again with a typical Apple twist: 3D special effects make the switch more visually appealing and easier to use.
The other big news came from the new iSight FireWire webcams in combination with iChat AV software. With iChat AV and iSight, you can now use AOL to connect to other iChat users and have a video or audio conference over the Internet. Apple generously provided journalists with an iSight camera and I rushed off to buy another one for my wife (she uses an Apple iMac). The quality of the video is amazingly good, even at 100kbps and we have taken to having a couple of video chats a day instead of calling with the phone. Especially when traveling abroad, the new iChat AV will make distances shorter by allowing you to be closer to your family and avoiding overseas phone charges. The iSight camera sells for $149 andthe iChat AV beta can be downloaded for free from the Apple website. After January 1, 2004, the beta will expire and users of Panther will continue to use it for free, while Jaguar users will have to pay $39 for it. Recommended.
I have had a beta CD of OS X 10.3 on my PowerBook for almost two months now and have found the new FreeBSD system version 4.8 in Panther to be fast, reliable and easier to use than OS X 10.2. Apple plans to release Panther before the end of the year, most probably in the Autumn. There will be an upgrade charge, but from what I experienced it will be well worth paying for.
