Shopping lists, Honeydew lists, radio program lists…. I keep my lists in Emacs, and in particular I utilize a rockin’ good hunk of Elisp code called Org Mode. In Org Mode, you can fold lines in and out, and you use the number of asterisks to identify the level of the line: its place in the hierarchy, as you will. Here is a classic Org Mode top level:

With your cursor on that top line, hit the [Tab] key. The next level (everything with two asterisks) will be revealed.


If you stay on that top line and hit the [Tab] key again, everything will open up.

Note that one of the items has some sub-sub-sub-headings, and one has some lines that don’t seem to be part of any hierarchy at all. The lines without asterisks are sort of a bottom level; you can’t hide anything else under them. In a relatively modest Org Mode outline like this one, they work for all practical purposes identically to the ones with four asterisks.

Hit [Tab] again, and you’re back to just the single top-level line.

Now is probably as good a time as any to blurt out a few words about formatting. This blog post is long. Even by my standards, it’s long. I like to think that everything I write is interesting, but paragraphs that look like this one will be relatively off-topic, and you can skip them if you’re in a hurry.

If you have a reasonably up-to-date Emacs, Org Mode is included, and so is a lovely reference manual, which you can access by going C-h i (which is Emacspeak for [Ctrl-H], [i]; the “i” stands for “info”) and scrolling down the list of manuals until you get to the O’s. The following excerpt, with keystrokes in classical Emacspeak, will get you started in basic navigation.

2.4 Motion
==========

`C-c C-j'
     Jump to a different place without changing the current outline
     visibility. Shows the document structure in a temporary buffer,
     where you can use the following keys to find your destination:
            <TAB>   Cycle visibility.
            <down>/<up>     Next/previous visible headline.
            <RET>    Select this location.
            /    Do a Sparse-tree search
         The following keys work if you turn off `org-goto-auto-isearch'
            n / p Next/previous visible headline.
            f / b Next/previous headline same level.
            u One level up.
            0-9 Digit argument.
            q Quit
         See also the variable `org-goto-interface'.

If you don’t understand all that, don’t worry. I don’t either.

You can run Emacs within your X environment (that’s where my screenshots come from), or within a terminal emulator, or in text mode by going to one of your TTY screens. If you want to run it in a terminal emulator, you can run it as emacs -nw, and it will stay in text mode, like so:

Emacs, when run in your X desktop environment, does support mouse movements. But Emacs dates back to the 1970s, before mice were even invented, or at least before they were seen outside of the laboratory (didja see what I just did?), and it is still designed to be run completely from your keyboard. The very fact that Emacs predates Linux, mice, Windows 3.1, Windows 2.1, the Space Shuttle, MTV, the 20¢ first-class letter rate, and the deaths of Marshal Josip Broz Tito and Leonid Brezhnev give it an unusually rich folklore and culture and more add-ons than most humans could even count. But it also gives it some ambiguous legacies: a set of keystrokes that aren’t like anything else on earth, a very strange vocabulary both written and spoken, and a symbiosis with a programming language—LISP—that was developed at MIT for artificial intelligence, and which at least for a brief while required its own machines to run on. No fewer than 17 “significant dialects” are noted in its Wikipedia article, and none of them are Emacs LISP (Elisp). And, of course, people who have been using Emacs for 30 years or more, or ever since a fella name of Richard Stallman started hacking around with a pair of existing text editors called E and TECO (sounds like a Butch Cassidy spinoff, doesn’t it?), would go into a coma if one day Emacs just up and started acting like the rest of the world. Not that I am criticizing them. Switching from the WordPerfect DOS keyboard to the Windows CUA keyboard took me to school regarding muscle memory.

BTW, you may be aware that for most of that time, a flamewar has been going on between users of Emacs and users of Vim. I remember once at a Linux users’ group meeting, a guy I’d been talking to and getting along with was actually a bit afraid to tell me that he used Vim at work; I’d been waxing rhapsodic about some damn keystroke combination or another, I guess. I do not hesitate to say that I am ecumenical. I learned Emacs because my supervisor at a job I had for 10 years knew Emacs. Had he known Vim, I’m sure I would have learned Vim, and I’m sure that I would have been very happy. Vim is a terrific program; like Emacs, you can run it in an X environment or at the command line. And more so than Emacs, it is ubiquitous. If you are running Linux, the chances are about 98% that you have at least a vi or a vim-tiny, if not a Vim or a Gvim, at your disposal. Emacs was never tiny. Anyway, I don’t like flamewars, and I wish I could learn Vim, but that’s just too many keystrokes to carry around in the ol’ shoulder pumpkin. Hell, I’ve still got WordPerfect DOS keystrokes up there! And, besides, I do love Emacs and it has never failed me; I have no reason to learn anything else.

But sometimes a list just isn’t enough. That’s when you need a database.

In the C:\> goodold -days, programs like Q&A and PC-File fit the need almost perfectly. Neither of those programs survived the Windows onslaught for very long; in the Windows world, it seemed that Microsoft Works (or, for the cultists, ClarisWorks/AppleWorks) filled this niche market well enough for most dudes and dudettes. And people who had to use Microsoft Office for work or whatever reason, and had or wanted to have a database, could use the souped-up (and pricier) Microsoft Office that included Access.

Access is a relational database—a bigger, brawnier, not to say bloatier beast than Q&A—but it is pretty ergonomic. Or it was, anyway; I haven’t looked it for a long time. You could use it as a flat-file database (that is, a database with only one table) without having its relational abilities get in your way. Paradox, which as part of the WordPerfect complex I gravitated to, was more difficult. I used it for a few projects over the years, but nothing ever really came easy. The best one I ever used was Alpha Five, which was simply a beautiful piece of software (and AFAICT is not mentioned anywhere in the WineHQ database).

Whilst researching this essay, I discovered a successor program to Q&A, Sesame, which claims to have a Linux version. The basic “Personal” version costs $79; you can download a trial version, but I couldn’t figure out how to download a Linux trial version. (Later: Never mind, I found it.) Anyway, though the latest Windows release is dated 2010, I’m not sure how actively this program is being developed; peep, if you will, the Windows logo on the page I linked to above.

Of course, many databases can be kept in spreadsheets. Spreadsheets have traditionally been easier to use, and many of us encountered them at work and learned enough to get by and even create our own.

Throughout this article, when I talk about “databases” I’m not talking about the monsters that run arrivals and departures at Heathrow and track the Human Genome Project. I’m talking about things that normal people might use for stuff like keeping an inventory of their antiques or running a mailing list for the local historical society.

Where spreadsheets break down is in what databases often call a “memo field”. Memo fields are invisible, or noted with a marker, in “table view” (which usually looks something like a spreadsheet). If you go into “record view” in a database, you get essentially a full screen to view or edit your record, including your memo field. I’ll get back to memo fields in a couple of paragraphs. You’ve run into this problem if you’ve ever had to place an extensive annotation in a cell in a spreadsheet.

Where databases break down (besides having relatively rudimentary numeric calculations) is in an ineffable quality that can be called “bloat”, “clunkiness”, “lack of portability”, or whatever. Adding a record, or changing the number of characters a record can contain, or changing the appearance of a form, typically takes an extra step or 3 over doing the same thing in Gnumeric. And sorting records is done obliquely, by creating a “report”, which you usually have to design yourself.

Many articles have been written on which one you should use. If you don’t want to read any more about it, and/or you could care less what I have to say about Kexi, you can skip this paragraph and the next couple and go down to where it says “Can Emacs help?”. (You might be thinking you can skip the whole post, but then you’d miss out on some more cool stuff about Emacs, and boy, are you ever gonna be sorry!) If you were to do an inventory of your book collection and you’re just someone who likes to read, there probably is no reason not to do it in Calc or Gnumeric. If you’re a collector of rare books, you might want to add a bunch of columns to note e.g. what condition the book is in, whether it’s a first edition, whether you bought it legitimately or stole it off of somebody, and your nice spreadsheet is all of a sudden sprawling off the edge of the screen, and you’re sitting there scratching your head and saying, “How’m I ever gonna print this baby?” (The answer, gentle reader, involves Scotch tape.) And, finally, if you’re keeping a book journal, you might keep notes whilst reading, or you might even write an essay about it, and you might want to attach them to the permanent record. Excelsior! You’ve just found a great use for a memo field and, by extension, a database.

There is at least one full-fledged database available for Linux, and that’s Kexi. It isn’t especially well-known, and it has gotten some mixed reviews over the years. (There is another one, Glom, which I haven’t tried and upon which development appears to have slowed. There is also, of course, Open/LibreOffice Base, but I have not had auspicious times with it, personally speaking from experience.) Anyway, I used Kexi for a couple of months or more: not for my book journal, but when I hear some music I like, I keep track of that, and since I listen to a lot of fairly obscure stuff I might have to kind of go out of my way for it if I’m ever going to hear it again. I ended up keeping this in Kexi, partly because you never know when you’re going to need a memo field and partly because I wanted to try out Kexi.

Kexi is certainly good at what it sets out to do, and if you’ve been using Access for something or another and want to bring that data over with you to Linux, I don’t see why you wouldn’t manage just fine. Kexi can be used as a front end to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or as a self-contained Accesslike desktop database application. It’s fairly easy to catch on to, or at least I found it to be so. On the downside, the report writer (which is essentially how you extract particular records from a database) lags a bit in maturity. Some people have reported stability problems; it has crashed on me a couple of times, but without data loss, and I was able to just restart Kexi and carry on. If you design more complex databases than I do, or if you don’t maniacally do backups, or if you really don’t like it at all when your application just flat-out disappears on you, you may not be satisfied with this.

I installed Kexi in Mageia; and since Kexi is part of the KOffice/Calligra suite, Mageia was a good place for it. Later on, when I was putting Linux Mint 12 through its paces, I thought about installing Kexi there just to see how it would work, but it wanted to pull in a total of 295 MB worth of dependencies. I’m sure it would work well—KDE apps do play nice with other DTEs, and Linux Mint is a first-rate platform—but I already had three whole desktop environments in my Linux Mint (five counting some GNOME variants; an essay about that is on its way), and I wasn’t sure I wanted to load it up further with the entire KDE core.

And it got me thinking. Supposing I could get away from the database format? I don’t necessarily mean “locked, blobby binary format”; Kexi uses the free and open-source SQLite format, and it also exports data into .csv, a cheerfully human-readable text format, so your Kexi database is essentially in no danger at all of being rendered inaccessible through obsolescence. But my needs are relatively simple, and in a way, utilizing a relational database for things like my book journals and songs I heard on some college radio station is like driving a Lamborghini to a garage sale. It’s…not exactly pretentious, but it’s a little heavy-handed.

Can Emacs help?

I looked at a venerable and popular Emacs mode called the Insidious Big Brother Database, but it works closely with Emacs email and newsgroup modes and is really designed to be your address book. I looked at GNU recutils, a cluster of command-line utilities that work on text files of a particular format; it’s a fascinating project and I almost got it to work, but ultimately it seemed a little too minimalist (well, okay, hard) for me.

“Gee,” I wondered. “I wish I could use a big ol’ Org Mode file for this! That would be so keen! But there’s no facility for extracting records! All I could do is searches on a predefined value, and…aw, heck, by the time I got done searching for Biography Music and running macros to extract the proper records to another buffer, I’ll be all grown up, and nothing will work any more!”

In fact, the answer was there all along. Org Mode contains something called Agenda View. I’d glanced at it briefly and noted that it was, among other things, a way to extract all items in an Org file (or, if you’re good at discernment, in several Org files) that are tagged TODO: an important Org keyword. I keep everything that would naturally fall under that category all together in the Honeydew List, so I never needed to worry much about TODOs, and I thought—reasonably enough IMHO—that the rest of Agenda View was about, like, y’know, agendas? Like for meetings? And conferences?

But inherent within the concept of the Agenda is something Emacs calls Properties. In their basic form, Properties are like little cannisters of data that can be inserted beneath an Org Mode heading or subheading. They don’t “unfold” like regular Org Mode items as you cycle through with your Tab key; you have to put the cursor right on the line that says :PROPERTIES: and hit Tab from there to open it up. Here’s one.

   :PROPERTIES:
   :Author: Victor Andrade
   :Author2:
   :Title: My Missions for Revolutionary Bolivia, 1944-1962
   :Subtitle:
   :Published: 1976
   :Read: 2010
   :Subject: History
   :Area: Bolivia
   :Subject2:
   :Reread:
   :Recommended: 'Foreign Affairs' review
   :Source: Stonington Library
   :From: ILL from UConn
   :Synopsis:
   :Comments:
   :END:

As you can see, the first and last lines are capitalized and encased in colons. Those have to be your first and last lines, exactly like that. In between, it’s more up to you. You can define “keys” (those are the things between colons, such as :Author: and :Subject2:), and these will be the same in every single record. You don’t have to assign a value to every key in every record; in my example above, four keys have no values, which is not to say that they are immoral in any way, of course. It’s probably a good idea to throw in a couple of extra keys, just in case you have to expand your database in the future. You can call them :Eenymeeny: and :Teenyweeny: or whatever you want, and if you need them, you can do a global search-and-replace and replace the idiotic name with something more relevant.

Here’s a quick shortcut (which I think we can all agree is better than an achingly, grindingly slow shortcut): Type out the form you want to use for your database record. Include all the keys, but don’t include any values at all. Type it out exactly how you want to see it. Go to the beginning of it. Hit [Ctrl]-[Spacebar]. Arrow down to the end of the form. Hit [Ctrl-W], which is “cut”, or what almost every other application in the known universe would do if you hit [Ctrl-X]. Then type something you want to use as an abbreviation for the form; for instance, I use 8books as an abbreviation for the books database record. At the end of the string of characters you want to use as an abbreviation, go [Ctrl-X], a, i, g. At the bottom of the screen, Emacs will prompt you: Global expansion for (whatever your abbreviation is):. Go [Ctrl-Y], which is Emacspeak for “Yank the last piece of text you cut out of the killring” (I told you Emacspeak was odd!), and then hit [Enter]. When you close Emacs, it will prompt you to save the abbreviation in a file called ~/.abbrev_defs. Say yes, and every time you type your chosen abbreviation and follow it with a space, [Enter], a comma, or a period, the text will pop out like a Jack-in-a-box-in-an-accordion. This abbreviation will be yours until the end of time, or until you find yourself without a working copy of ~/.abbrev-defs, whichever comes first.

Anyway, here is a short primer on how to locate records in an Org Mode database. This will be very simplistic; I won’t get into searching multiple databases, and in fact I’ll give just one example that kindasorta replicates how you would use a filter or a simple query in a more conventional spreadsheet or database. Here is my book journal, all folded up:

A [Tab] on the only visible line opens up all the second-level lines. (I use authors, rather than book titles, as individual entries; for some reason they have always been easier for me to remember.) Oh, by the way: the ellipsis at the end of a line indicates that that line has a folded-up level (or levels) below it. It’s not editable, but that’s okay, because it loves you and it’s there to help.

Hit C-c / (a.k.a. [Ctrl-C], /.). See the dialogue at the little area—the minibuffer—at the bottom of the screen?

To see what other books about Bolivia besides this one by Victor Andrade are here, hit p for “property”. Type Area. (Remember, properties are the things stuck in between :colons: and which remain the same in every record. Elsewhere, they are sometimes called “keys”, I just noticed.)

Next, Emacs will prompt you for the value. Type Bolivia.

Wait a little while, and you’ll see something that looks like this:

You can unfold the whole list, and the six Bolivian titles will remain partially highlighted, just as they are here. Pretty cool, huh?

On my Play Computer, with 8 GB of memory, this procedure took 16 seconds. On my laptop, with a 1.6 GHz processor and a mere 1 GB of memory, the same search took 24 seconds. That’s going through over 2,500 entries. (Yeah. I read a lot, I remember what I read, and I’ve kept a book journal for a long time.) The book journal .org file is a text file of some 550 KB in size. I would never complain about that being too slow of a search.

To learn more—and there’s so much more to explore!—simply visit orgmode.org. From that site, you can download a 200-page .pdf of the Org Mode Manual if reading it in Info format in Emacs doesn’t float your boat, or for about $17 after shipping you can purchase a rather nicely printed copy of same, of which a buck goes into orgmode.org’s coffers. You can even buy an Org Mode T-shirt. I don’t get anything out of it; I’ve never even met anybody from Org Mode, never mind asked them for a cut. But once in a while, a piece of software comes along that makes a difference. Not only has Org Mode organized my book journals, it has even made me like my Honeydew Lists—and that, dear reader, is an endorsement you won’t hear every day.

Foresight Linux 2.5, Xfce edition
The first distro I reviewed after I opened this blog, Foresight Linux offered me a veritable fantasia of computing enjoyment. It hits a near-spotless balance between “just works” and “urges you to get under the hood”. Sadly, though, I had problems with sudo conary updateall on both the Play Computer and the laptop. Simply put, there appears to be a high amount of resource usage—memory usage in particular—associated with Conary, and if I went for too long (more than a couple of weeks) without updating, or if a kernel update came along at the same time as a LibreOffice update, Conary froze in its tracks. Bug reports have been filed. The way around this would probably be to run sudo conary updateall in the terminal emulator, pipe the output to a file, render the text more or less readable by way of a whole lotta search-and-replace operations, and run conary update… one or two packages at a time. But whenever I thought about doing all that, I got really tired.

I will absolutely look at Foresight Linux 3.0 (or even 2.≥6 if there is such a thing), but for now, both of my existing installations have been rendered less than trustworthy. I can’t install it on the memory-richer Fun Computer because Foresight’s installer—an older version of Anaconda—gets overwhelmed by the number of partitions on its drive: ±18, which I agree is a lot. Foresight Linux is in many ways the most fun Linux I’ve ever used. But this time around, it just wasn’t meant to be. Next time around, I hope things’ll be different.

Kubuntu 11.10
I haven’t fired Kubuntu up very often, either. But that’s not Kubuntu’s fault. I liked it when I wrote about it, and I still do. If I want to work in the KDE environment, though, I tend to default to my more familiar Mageia. This may be an over-generalization, but I have found that one KDE distribution is much more like another KDE distribution than, say, one Xfce distribution is like another Xfce distribution. (I’ve found one exception: Netrunner, which is based on Kubuntu, has an inventive mix of pre-installed KDE and GNOME applications. But Netrunner is very cloud-centric, and since I don’t use any cloud apps and don’t really have any intention of starting, I disqualified myself from reviewing it.)

There was one project that I especially liked Kubuntu for: Uncle Jim’s Master’s thesis, which I’m turning into a LaTeX document. AucTeX, an Emacs add-on, wasn’t in Mageia’s repo (it’ll be in Mageia 2), and I had to compile it myself; it was in Kubuntu’s repo, though, and that version seems more able to tell TeX from LaTex. But I haven’t been working on Uncle Jim’s Master’s thesis lately. When I return to that project, though, I’ll have a good excuse to return to Kubuntu.

One thing I will note: one day when I was running an update, Muon—a package manager for KDE (and apparently for the whole Debian family, or those parts of the Debian family that deign to acknowledge it on the street)—whimpered and stopped. I had to do a hard shutdown. When I next went back, Kubuntu still worked well enough for me to grab Synaptic from the repo (a little postmodern irony for your entertainment), and I was able to complete the update through Synaptic. I haven’t looked back. Muon has given me trouble on two Kubuntu installs, so I have to conclude the problem isn’t with me. Anyway, three cheers and a variety of mad props to Kubuntu for keeping itself in a workable condition during an update failure.

You have probably heard, maybe even from Jonathan Riddell himself, that Kubuntu is getting semidisenfranchised from the Ubuntu roster after the upcoming 12.04 LTS release. I don’t know much about the inner workings of Canonical, and, quite honestly, I don’t know if knowing too much about Linux politics would do my tender soul any good. It seems to me that Kubuntu has attracted more than its fair share of disrespect through the years: some of it from Shuttlephobes, some of it, I’m sure, from people who had bad experiences with earlier versions, and some of it, no doubt, from people who think Kubuntu runs on Unity, which they heard they shouldn’t like.

Linux Mint Xfce Edition
As you probably know, Linux Mint made the decision to move their Xfce offering to a Debian-based rolling release. The first .iso of the new branch came out in March or April 2011; I got around to installing it in July. Actually, I think I downloaded it when it came out, or shortly after, and couldn’t install it at all; I assumed I’d gotten a bum burn and put it aside as a project for another day. When I finally did get it to run, I commented at the time about various flakinesses, attributing them to the changeover from Xfce 4.6 to Xfce 4.8, which had just made it into Debian Testing around that time. (I can only assume that by the time Xfce 4.8 makes it into Debian Stable, Xfce 4.10 will be here.) There were other things going on, though. The audio didn’t work well (I got sound, but it didn’t, uhh, sound good). Even though LMDEXfce looked into the Debian Testing repos, the version of Rhythmbox that was in this release’s repos was older than the ones I had in a few other installations, and the audio quality was a few steps down from what I was used to (and from what I choose to live with).

Linux Mint released a new .iso in September. I duly downloaded that one and installed it on the Fun Computer, and…well, in all honesty it didn’t seem to be that much of an improvement. I really didn’t go back to it that often, and once I waited too long and hundreds of updates mashed the whole installation. I like rolling releases as a concept, but to get the most out of a rolling release, it has to be your main distro, or else you have to be extremely organized and want to boot up each of your installations once a week or so for some housekeeping.

I had an LMDE on the Play Computer—the traditional GNOME version—and it was well-nigh flawless, almost indistinguishable in day-to-day operations from Linux Mint 10. The Xfce mix, not so much. I’ll try it again with the next .iso.

(You know, I just got an idea. I wonder what would happen if I installed Xfce onto LMDE? Would it work better for me than the tailored Xfce mix? Gee (drooling contentedly at the thought)…a science project!)

(Later: The answer to “Would it work better?” appears to be “Not a whole lot better”. But this particular science project is in its childhood, if not infancy.)

Linux Mint 12
A whole ‘nother story; this one is challenging to be my go-to distro. I’ll write about this in a whole ‘nother post, because it was starting to get long, and the next part of this post is already The Return of the Brothers Karamazov III: War ‘n Peace (feat. Diamond Dave Copperfield).

Mageia
I wrote about Mageia in July and then again in October, and here I am again, and I still think it’s just about perfect. Mageia, I mean, not my writing. I don’t necessarily think KDE is just about perfect, but—save for a few holes in the repo, of which more anon—I couldn’t ask for more from Mageia than what it’s given me.

Once there was an Xfce version of Mandriva. I had it on a computer that has since slid into senescence (kind of like me, except worse), and I enjoyed it while it was there, but I went back to GNOME, and I don’t think the group that put together the Xfce mix is still involved.

So I decided to try making one on my own. Things went good, and then things went bad, and then things went good, and then things went bad, but I had some fun and learned a few things. I tried it 3 times and got it working once. So I thought I’d write about it.

This project works best with the DVD version, which is downloadable from Mageia’s download page. The live CDs marry you to either KDE or GNOME. The DVD version will suggest KDE, too, and you’ve got to select Custom, as in this screenshot, which I took while installing Mageia in a VirtualBox in Mageia, which is kind of existential, huh, buddy?

As the name implies, for each field you select, Mageia picks out a number of packages that it thinks will fit your busy, active lifestyle. At this point, Mageia also assumes that you’ve come to your senses by now and really want KDE after all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; KDE, Mageia style, is a likeable, even lovable, desktop environment. But for our purposes today, deselect KDE and select Other Graphical Desktops.

You can go in and pick out packages individually, but it’s a chore. The packages are listed under the appropriate groups, and sometimes in more than one group, and there aren’t any descriptions. In one installation attempt, I got blinded by all the foam that was pouring out of my mouth and managed to partially deselect the login manager. Once I was done, or thought I was done, an astonishingly harsh B&W login screen confronted me. Not only was it angry, it didn’t work, and my only recourse was regret, reformat, reinstall.

You can’t really select a workable Xfce desktop from Other Graphical Desktops. Mageia offers a forlorn IceWM “light”, but I’d leave it to its misery and take my chances with WindowMaker. You won’t need to spend very much time here anyway. (On Mandriva, you were stuck with a hideous IceWM theme and you couldn’t even upgrade IceWM via the repos, even though the real thing was sitting right there. I’ll have to give it a try in Mageia.) (Later: Indeed, I was able to install the “real” IceWM. So at least some of this paragraph is obsolete.)

After that, you can proceed with the installation.

Now I’m going to show you Mageia’s configuration screen, mainly because I can. Here is where installation screenshots come to an end, because here is where my VirtualBox crapped out. VirtualBoxes are like that.

Some people might describe the Mageia installer as “dated”, and no, it hasn’t changed in years, but you can do just about anything here. You can click those buttons on the right that say Configure and, for instance, place your GRUB where you want it, and (on tabs not shown here) change the network name of your computer to something with a little more panache than localhost.localdomain, and customize your firewall, which is on by default (Mageia inherited, and chose to keep, Shorewall. I’m not sure if that firewall is the default in any other major distribution. Is it?), and adjust your security settings.

After the installation is done, you are asked to restart the computer. So do that. Log in, and you’ll discover WindowMaker, which is Mageia’s default if it can’t find anything else.

A tad sparse, eh? That large icon in the upper right corner is the equivalent of GNOME’s Preferences or KDE’s System Settings. It probably has a name, but I call it the Floating Head of Death.

Anyway, to get anything done in WindowMaker, right-click somewhere on the unoccupied part of the desktop. Most of the desktop is unoccupied, of course, so you’ve got lots of room to express yourself.

A menu opens up, and you’ll see Install and Remove Software, just like you would in a standard Mageia. Go to that, and when it opens go to Options, then select Media Manager, and click on Add. Media Manager, which is one of the very few Mageia utilities that refers to itself in the first person, will ask your permission to contact a server. Say OK. Then when Media Manager has refreshed the list (which will take a while even on a speedy connection), go back and deselect the CD-ROM.

(In a move that has taken the entire world by surprise, WindowMaker is under development again after a very long break.)

Back to Media Manager: you pretty much have to do that to get Xfce, because even Mageia’s capacious DVD only offers a severely stripped-down version called task-xfce-minimal. Once your list of available software is populated via Mageia’s fine repositories, you can install:

task-xfce
task-xfce-plugins

I honestly don’t know what would happen if you didn’t install task-xfce-plugins, but my guess is that your desktop would be pretty boring. The plugins give you quick access to useful things like a system load monitor and a battery level indicator. task-xfce and task-xfce-plugins each bring in about 15 or 20 items, if I remember right. I didn’t really count them. For similar reasons, by which I mean boredom avoidance, I also recommend the xfwm-themes package.

Anyway, so far so great. But one lacuna in Mandriva’s packages is a clipboard manager. Parcellite isn’t there, and neither is its excellent fork ClipIt. You can’t install Klipper on its own, or if you can I haven’t figured it out, and I didn’t want to bring in a lot of KDE dependencies for this project. The Xfce Clipman isn’t available, either; I recall that it became mysteriously hard to find in the early days of Xfce 4.8, which were also the early days of Mageia. I downloaded it from its Xfce goodies page and started to run the good old ./configure | make | make install routine, but I ran into such messages as X window system libraries and header files are required. A knowledgeable person on the Mageia forum told me that I needed some “devel” versions of certain packages and also how to find them. The method and the results are:

[root@mgaxfce eddie]# urpmq -a xfce4 | grep devel
libxfce4menu-devel
libxfce4panel-devel
libxfce4ui-devel
libxfce4util-devel
[root@mgaxfce eddie]#

I installed all four, which may have been more than I needed, but they aren’t that big and I don’t see how they could possibly do any harm; I tried to install Clipman then and discovered that I also needed a couple of others.

You can cut and paste the following string into a terminal as root:

urpmi libxfce4menu-devel libxfce4panel-devel libxfce4ui-devel libxfce4util-devel libexo-devel libxtst6-devel

If you are utilizing the 64-bit version, try this one:

urpmi lib64xfce4menu-devel lib64xfce4panel-devel lib64xfce4ui-devel lib64xfce4util-devel libexo-devel libxtst6-devel

(libexo and libxtst6-devel don’t have separate 64-bit versions in the repos.)

“Exo?” you might ask. “What, pray tell, is exo?” Well, you’ve come to the right place! I just saw an announcement about it on the Xfce listserv.

Exo is an Xfce library targeted at application development. It contains various custom widgets and APIs extending the functionality of GLib and GTK+. It also ships utilities for defining preferred applications, mounting storage devices and more.

BTW, Clipman is expected to be in Mageia 2, and you won’t have to worry about all this any more. Which is a good thing. I tried the above instructions three times, and only once did I get a clip-equipped Xfce desktop.

So…does it work? Does it work good? Here are some numbers. These are all taken from the Fun Computer. The two Mageias are separate installations on separate partitions. These are all the 64-bit versions.

Time from GRUB to a usable desktop
Mageia with KDE: 66 seconds
Mageia with Xfce: 38 seconds
Xubuntu 11.10: 33 seconds
(These numbers are just me counting off the seconds, so please don’t take them like they came from the atomic clock at Fort Collins or anything like that.)

Loading an 856 kB .pdf
Mageia with KDE: 1.5 seconds (Okular)
Mageia with Xfce: Whoa, I can’t count that fast! (ePDF)
Xubuntu 11.10: 1.5 seconds (Evince)

Loading a 2.8 MB .pdf
Mageia with KDE: 2 seconds
Mageia with Xfce: ½ a second
Xubuntu 11.10: 1.5 seconds

Loading a 511 kB .odt into LibreOffice Writer
Mageia with KDE: 17 seconds
Mageia with Xfce: 8 seconds
Xubuntu 11.10: 9 seconds

Loading a 2.3 MB .jpg
Mageia with KDE: 2 seconds (Gwenview)
Mageia with Xfce: 1 second (gThumb)
Xubuntu 11.10: 1 second (Ristretto)

Loading a 114 kB LaTeX document into Emacs
Mageia with KDE: 3.5 seconds
Mageia with Xfce: 1.5 seconds
Xubuntu 11.10: 3.5 seconds

CPU usage when the computer is just sitting there
Mageia with KDE: 2%
Mageia with Xfce: 1-2%
Xubuntu 11.10: 0-1%

Memory usage when the computer is just sitting there
Mageia with KDE: 620 MB
(The widget said “9% of 6960″, which seems like a hell of a lot, but the widget also ran top, and Plasma took up 27,756 and Krunner took 23,004, and Kdeinit4 was listed at 15,980. I would have liked to match these numbers against Kubuntu’s, but the Kubuntu partition fritzed out through no fault of its own just before I did this comparo, and I wanted to post this a month ago.)
Mageia with Xfce: 434 MB
Xubuntu 11.10: 336 MB

Just to finish off, I also tried installing Mageia with the default settings, KDE and all, and then installing Xfce over it. It wasn’t a great experience; Klipper was available, but it only worked quite erratically when it was separated from its KDE brethren and sistren. I didn’t do any measurements on resource or memory usage.

Pardus Xfce
In the last post before this one, I gave you a link on the Pardus World Forum to follow if you’re interested in the fate of this noble distribution. For now, I think it’s safe to say that the Pardus Xfce spin I wrote about last summer is pretty much bye the bye, which I think is sad; they were on to some excellent design concepts, and I hope someone picks up the pieces.

Xubuntu 11.10
Always the bridesmaid…. I like Xubuntu a lot. I think it is the most visually attractive out-of-the-box Xfce distro of all that I have tried, and it may be the most easy to use; it circumvents some of the vestigial problems Xfce (or its file manager, Thunar) has with local area networks (or it would have if they hadn’t left out a component; I wrote about that in the original post, and I’m sure the Xubuntu team will never make that oversight again). The overall impression is one of elegance and professionalism.

And I think Xubuntu may be catching on. I don’t keep detailed stats on page hits. My hosting company provides some logs; I look at them now & then, and I’m pleasantly shocked at how popular this blog has been. I can also say that my Xubuntu writeup appears to be the second most hit-upon of my various reviews, behind only Linux Mint 12 (I think even Steve Ballmer read that one! Hey, did you know that residents of Maryland’s largest city call it something very close to “Ballmer”?), and considerably ahead of Mageia (which is in the Distrowatch Top 10) and Kubuntu.

For all that, Xubuntu hasn’t ever quite established itself as my go-to distro. Part of that, I’m sure, is that I have my Mageias tuned to a T. Certainly, my fascination with Linux Mint 12 and its three—yeah, count ‘em!—new desktop environments has taken up a lot of my time the last few weeks. But I wonder if I really don’t like Xfce quite as much as I think I do, or if I like it more for exploring than for my day-to-day activities. Or if I still, on some level, think of it as the GNOME 3 that Wasn’t or the GNOME 3 that Shoulda Been, and don’t deal with it on its own substantial merits.

Anyway, I sometimes fire up Xubuntu when I’m on the road, and I keep both my installations up to date without letting them get old. I really wish that Xubuntu could break out of Canonical’s six-month release schedule, just for once; I can hardly wait to see what these guys do with Xfce 4.10.

Meanwhile, an interesting thread on the Pardus World Forum is must reading for anybody who cares about Pardus enough to help fork it. (I know “fork” is a good old Open Source word, but “fork it” sounds like “stick a fork in it”, among other things. How about “anybody who cares about Pardus enough to help Mageiafy it”?)

I’ve been working on another longish essay and should have it ready in a few days.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but this wasn’t it. That’s not a complaint; I really didn’t have any idea what it would be like. I was greeted with a screen that looks suspiciously, reassuringly Minty. There is the famous Mint Menu click-me in the lower left corner: smaller than usual, but right where I expected it. There is a taskbar atop the screen, too. To the right is the notifications and a truncated date. And my name, even; wow, all the people who install Linux Mint will see me up there; what great publicity!

The clock said Thu 22:27 when I looked. I clicked on it and found that I could switch it from 24-hour time to AM/PM time, but that was all I could do. As it turned out, the rest of the settings are to be found in “Advanced Settings” in the Mint Menu. (I really don’t want to call it the Mint Menu, because it is palpably different from what has come before, but this is the future, folks, unless it isn’t, which it might not be, as I’ll eventually get to.) I now have it displaying as Thu Nov 17, 10:35 PM; I would prefer Thursday, 17 Nov, 10:35 pm (some time in the 1980s I had a gig that required me to work with Eurostyle dates, and I got used to its logic). Xfce lets me do that, but I’m not going to let myself get bugged out over it. I need to save my energy so I can spazz about some other things.

At the left edge of that top menu bar is an infinity sign. This switches you between the main screen—the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE) come to life—and a more recognizable GNOME Shell. (Not that I’m an expert. I installed a Fedora 15 beta when it came out and played around with it for a couple of evenings. I didn’t hate the GNOME Shell at first blush, but for various reasons I never got back to that installation.) The behavior is odd. I can switch into the GNOME Shell (oh, since the whole thing is GNOME Shell, I guess I could call it the Real GNOME Shell) and see the huge icons on the left (Firefox, Banshee, Software Manager, Advanced Settings, Terminal Emulator, and Nautilus), and to the right of Firefox the choice between Windows and Applications. Clicking on the latter covers the desktop with icons for just about everything on the computer; it pretty much fills the 23-inch monitor on the “Fun computer” and flat-out overwhelms the little laptop, and I’ve only installed about 4 things that aren’t part of the core Linux Mint installation. People who do a lot of tuning might get overwhelmed. Over near the upper right corner is a box called “search”. I typed an “e” and a bunch of icons appeared, along with two black tabs at the bottom of the screen saying “Wikipedia” and “Google”. I typed an “m” and about half the icons disappeared. I typed an “a” and only Emacs was left. I clicked on “Wikipedia” and the EMA page came up. I learned that an Ema is a wooden plaque with prayers or wishes at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, and also an alternate name for the Kemak people in Timor. EMA is also a popular acronym, e.g. the Ethiopian Mapping Authority, European Mahjong Association, and so on. The Mint logo from the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions shows through faintly, for a camera obscura vibe.

Anyway, I have described the GNOME Shell for you, but I had to keep flipping back and forth to do it; the very second I started to type, the desktop went back to the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions. It’s sort of like the Mint designers let you sample the GNOME Shell and even let you select an application now and then, but they don’t let you stay there, because they know that madness awaits. I don’t know. This is a release candidate, and it may or may not be the last release candidate. It is presumptuous of me to analyze the Linux Mint development team, but I have a feeling that all this is working as designed, and now they want to find out whether the design works at all. (Later: It was the last release candidate, and this is the design.)

Then I fired up the GNOME Shell on the laptop. I had to. I wanted to experience the GNOME 3.2 desktop with the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions anyway, but because of a bug that precludes loading the MATE desktop in the 32-bit installation, I had no choice. Like many distros, Mint greets you with a dopey little tune. I wish it wouldn’t: not just Mint, but any of them. Ubuntu’s drum roll bugs me out. So does that other operating system, for that matter; I wish I had a dollar for every time I had to listen to that mess. I had to look around to find out where to turn it off. In GNOME 2, or at least in any of the GNOME 2 distros I remember having on the laptop, you could go into Startup Programs and disable Login Sound. Here, Sound has its own category in System Settings, and Sound Effects is in the first tab, and you click on “No Sound Effects” and hope that’s what it is. I also noticed that there wasn’t a Startup Programs. And that made me cranky. I usually like exploring new interfaces; I’m not writing this blog because I hate Linux or because I like getting comment spam (I finally installed Bad Behavior, which keeps some of it from even getting here, while Akismet does quite well with the rest). I write this blog because I like writing and I like Linux, and I like both of them a lot. Linux is such a blast I’m not even scared of my computer any more! But I have to say that, despite Linux Mint’s sincere efforts to make GNOME 3 usable, it has been a strain. I ran out of patience with the compose key and the login sound. Finding stuff in Xfce is a can of corn compared to this. Finding my way around Xfce 4.8 in Foresight Linux was fun—and in Xubuntu, too, though by then I knew where most of the goodies were kept in Xfce. Finding my way around GNOME 3 is not fun.

I disliked KDE 4 when it first came out, and got frustrated fairly quickly, but this is a different sort of frustration. KDE 4 was busy, busy, busy; it still is, though it has been ergonomicized in many ways. GNOME 3 is almost stark; let’s call it “elegant in an austere way”, because that sounds nicer, and there is something elementally attractive about the Shell. Maybe it’s the difference between being lost in Philadelphia and being lost in southeastern New Mexico. But I know I’m reacting differently because I never loved KDE 3. I had Pardus on the laptop for quite a while, partly because Pardus is very ergonomic and partly because it was one of the first distros to play nice with my Broadcom wireless card, but there was never a time when KDE 3 was my go-to desktop. So I didn’t have a history with it, and I didn’t feel the betrayal that many KDE 3 advocates did four years ago. I’ve followed the history off and on, and the extremely condensed version is that the KDE organization thought they were communicating but it wasn’t getting through. They’ve learned a lot since then. If they ever do such a thorough makeover again (not that I’m suggesting that, mind you!), I’d bet my last dime that it’ll be a much smoother process.

And I did love GNOME 2. And, despite my best intentions, I do feel betrayed.

This does not mean that the GNOME organization is malevolent. Nobody sat down and said, “Wow, KDE alienated ⅔ of their users? Let’s see if we can cheese off ¾ of ours!” People within the GNOME organization have to be hurt by the tough reception. I hoped I would enjoy the GNOME 3 experience more than I am, in part because I like to have fun, and in part because I wanted to say lots of good things about it simply because of all the negativity, some of which is so lacking in elemental civility that it makes me wonder where some people got their socialization training.

A name like “GNOME 3″ creates certain expectations. I wish they had called it something else.

I guess I should talk about performance. I didn’t crash anything, either when I had the release candidate or when I installed the Real Deal. Linux Mint has been criticized for being relatively sluggish, but version 10 was generally as fast as any other GNOME desktop on which I tried to get any work done (so was 11 as far as I could tell, though I really didn’t work with that one a lot), and I haven’t noticed any decline from those standards here. But I didn’t measure anything; I was trying to get the lay of the land, with a spyglass rather than a stopwatch, as it were.

*

The final release came out. I installed it, and verified that MATE was available in the 32-bit version. Then a very important family matter came up suddenly, I was out of town for several days, and…well, I haven’t really felt much like writing.

This past Saturday, I went to a terrific LinuxRI meeting and learned something about VPN tunneling via a splendid presentation and otherwise had some nice conversations (and a likeable guy from Fedora brought along some Fedora swag, including stickers & ballpoint pens, giving me another incentive to see what Fedora has done with GNOME 3), and while I was there I heard about a Free Geek Providence organizational meeting (I’ve been doing a little work with them, refurbishing old computers for use by people who are stuck on the wrong side of the Digital Devide or, mostly, “demanning” (“de-manufacturing”, or disassembling) old computers that just plain don’t work any more and can’t be fixed, and trying to keep them out of poisonous landfills that are killing people in less favored parts of the world). So I went over there, “there” for the time being being the basement of a Pentecostal church in South Providence. I’m starting to emerge from the cloud I was under.

And MATE is part of that emergence. If you’ve heard of MATE, you’ve probably heard it’s a fork of GNOME 2. To me, it is like GNOME 2 in a dream. Everything seems to be in the same place, and it’s hard to describe what, exactly, is different. One thing I noticed when running the release candidate is that when I went to look for a file, sometimes I launched Nautilus, and sometimes I launched something called Caja, which looked a lot like Nautilus but crashed very suddenly a couple of times. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to which one I got. It seems that the developer, “Perberos”, had to rename many of your favorite old GNOME accessories so that they wouldn’t collide with the versions in GNOME 3. But since I installed the Real Deal release, mostly I get Nautilus. And gEdit is still gEdit. The renaming may affect, for instance, ArchLinux, which has an active MATE community and is considerably more modular than Linux Mint.

(Some readers may wonder how a distro can have two separate desktop environments. When you turn on your computer in the morning and boot into the Linux Mint login screen, you’ll see your name, and below your name is a place to type your password. Next to your name is something that looks like a gear on a bicycle, or one of those things that impaled Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Click on that, and you’ll get four choices: GNOME 3, GNOME Classic, GNOME Classic (no desktop effects), and MATE. If you choose, for instance, GNOME Classic, you’re in that session; the only way to get to MATE is to log out and choose MATE from that bicycle gear and log back in again. Some distros have this; Mageia, for instance, will let you choose WindowMaker and a severely stripped-down, marginally customizable IceWM. Others, like Ubuntu, generally don’t, unless for instance you install “kubuntu-desktop” into Ubuntu, after which you’ll be able to choose either Unity or KDE. If multiple desktops are present in a distribution, they can collide with one another in various ways, such as having duplicate services or cluttered menus. Linux Mint makes sure that the various desktops stay out of one another’s way.)

One thing I noticed right off the bat was that the bottom menu bar looked somehow anemic: it wasn’t GNOMEy, nor was it Minty, for “anemic” can never be applied to the classical Mint appearance. This was easily remedied: I went to Preferences | Appearances, then chose the Fonts tab, and I changed the Application, Document, Desktop, and Window title fonts to Droid Sans 11, which is really quite a lovely screen font (I think the default was Sans 10). I also changed “Rendering” to “Subpixel smoothing”, which seemed to help, at least in my case. There’s a “Details” button that gives you a bunch more things to set, including the resolution, which defaults to 96 but which you can try goosing up to 100 if you’re really having trouble getting your display to look nice.

Also, for the record, when the Real Deal was released, I had the impression from something I read somewhere that I could run MintUpdate on the release candidate and not have to reinstall. I found that to be not quite the case. On the Play Computer, the Mint Menu that we all know and love from previous GNOME 2-based Mints didn’t quite work; there was a menu, but it was more minimal, like the standard Xfce menu or the “Classic” KDE menu. Downloading the Real Deal .iso and installing fresh was generally better, and I recommend it.

The same problem I had with the Broadcom wireless adapter in Kubuntu and Xubuntu reappeared in Linux Mint Lisa. I’ll repeat the steps here:

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
modprobe b43

If that doesn’t last past your next shutdown/restart, and it probably won’t:

sudo nano /etc/modules

(You can substitute the text editor of your choice for nano, of course, but you’ll never find anything faster) and add, on its very own line:

b43

Linux is easy! Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise!

There are a couple of other things I’ve come up with that don’t work in MATE. The themes aren’t completely integrated and some have been known to make the menu button disappear. (This has to do with the transition from GTK 2 to GTK 3.) I haven’t been able to assign keyboard shortcuts. Both of those are known bugs. I haven’t been able to get the GNOME Keyring to come up, but that hasn’t been a showstopper for me, and I haven’t had the time to check out the Launchpad and see what has been reported. (I’ll do that later tonight, I hope.)

*

The Linux Mint development team has grabbed the future by its greasy, pockmarked horns and tried to make it work. But that’s Linux Mint for you; they’re all about making their distribution, and Linux in general, Just Work. GNOME 3 might never work for some people, and it might never work for me. But, with further development and support (moral and otherwise), MATE will work. It is not perfect, but after a week of fairly regular use, I have found its imperfections to be well within the boundaries of livability.

KDE, Xfce, and MATE. It’s like contemplating that eternal question, “Italian, Chinese, or Mexican?” In life, as in cuisine, there are no ultimate answers, and what satisfies today might tomorrow merely confuse. As the Moody Blues once put it, How is it we are here, on this path we walk? I love that “Dee-scending from the apes”! But I digress. Linux Mint 12 has presented us with two possible futures, and has presented them with the utmost in professionalism. If you’re reading this, you will probably like one of those possible futures. And you might like both. Wouldn’t that be great?

There are a few times when, through hard work and diligence, we get things right. The developers and contributors of Xubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” believe they have it right. They are proud to announce the release of Xubuntu 11.10, “Oneiric Ocelot”. Through the outstanding efforts of all involved, this sleek and smooth release offered for your enjoyment and use.

(The grammar snob within me will be polite for once.) I installed Xubuntu 11.04 when it came out. I liked it a lot, and I think I could have learned to love it. But for various reasons—Foresight Linux, Mageia, Hurricane Irene, KDE, a gray enveloping torpor—I didn’t specifically blog about it. Xubuntu got some heavy name-checking in my Foresight Linux review from last May, and that’s about it.

Before then, I had never spent a lot of time with Xubuntu. I don’t even remember what version(s) I tried, but I wasn’t especially impressed. Until this year, my only—or at least my most—positive experience with Xfce was in an unofficial community mix of Mandriva 2010. That lived for a few months on a since-retired computer that I used for working on during the day while looking after my wife as she slowly recovered from a series of major surgeries. (That computer is going to rise again; all I need is a couple of parts.) I enjoyed it, but went back to a Gnome 2 desktop after a few months. Then, as now, my work is stored on a computer upstairs. I figured out how to mount remote partitions in the fstab on the Work Computer, but for reasons I no longer remember, that stopped working one day, and I couldn’t get it to work ever again. I might not have knocked myself out over it, either. I did perceive the Mandriva 2010 Gnome release as being aesthetically on a higher level than its Xfce release; depending on what you think of Apple, Gnome 2.2x/2.30 on Mandriva might have been the most visually appealing desktop ever. (Honestly, I’ve never spent enough time around Apple products to have strong—or at least intellectually honest—opinions about their legendary interfaces.)

The release of Xfce 4.8 (in January 2011) and Gnome 3 (in April) got me interested in Xfce again. The technical improvements over 4.6 are significant and have been remarked upon. One thing I noticed is that a lot of work has been done to make Xfce look better. To some extent, that is coincidence; SalineOS has proven that an elegant desktop can be constructed on an Xfce 4.6 base. And Linux Mint managed to make their first Debian Edition Xfce release look reasonably Minty. But Kubuntu 11.04 surprised me; it was a visual knockout, the most gorgeous desktop I’d ever seen on any *Buntu.

Now on to 11.10. Have they, indeed, gotten it right?

Installation
Here is a bit of a change. When I installed Xubuntu 11.10 on the “Play Computer”, it dispensed with the “% done” displays I described as so much phonus balonus in last week’s Kubuntu ravings. But the following day, I installed a copy on the laptop, and I noticed that some of the text I expected to see accompanying the progress bar had gone missing. I wonder if the vaunted *Buntu installer has gotten heavier and not everything could be displayed on my aging laptop. I used the same disk for both installations, and checked the disk integrity first (a pleasant option that *Buntu live CDs offer), and the display was noticeably different between the two computers. I don’t need the prompts so it wasn’t a big deal for me, but I don’t know if newer explorers might wonder. I’m not trying to brag; it’s just that I’ve put this installer through its paces more times than I can remember.

Anyway, I asked for the restricted drivers, but not for the updates. The installer asks you for some information near the beginning of its routine, and after I supplied that and flipped through the slideshow, I went off do do a few chores and pretty much left the installation unattended. It seemed faster than Kubuntu’s, but that is probably because I didn’t sit there like a buffoon and look at it.

First impressions
Here is the announcement from the Xubuntu news page:

Changes for this release include the following applications included by default: gThumb, pastebinit, and onboard. The team has also chosen to switch from GDM to LightDM as the default display manager and from mousepad to leafpad as the default text editor.

Nothing there that shatters the time-space continuum, really. Not even a deposing of an old favorite; gThumb—another single-hump camelCapped name—competes with but doesn’t replace Ristretto, the traditional Xfce viewer. I looked at a few utilities and applications that come standard with Xubuntu. Thunar has moved from 1.21 to 1.23; Gnumeric (which you get, along with AbiWord, instead of LibreOffice) from 1.10.13 to 1.10.17; and xfterminal from 0.4.7 to 0.4.8. The credits on the Help | About are animated in both Gnumeric and GIMP (which is version 2.6.11, just as it was in Xubuntu 11.04); the animation makes them harder to read, but it looks kind of spiffy.

I fired up AbiWord to write a note for my wife (Emacs isn’t known for attractive printouts, and I wonder what would happen if I sent a message to the Emacs Listserv saying, “Hey, I leave notes around for my wife and I want them to have some pizazz, not this corny M-X ps-print-buffer with lines that sometimes run off the edges, what’s up with that?” Would RMS find a little place in his heart for that message?) and was puzzled; AbiWord has a pleasantly hi-res editing screen, but it moved like a sullen child; the cursor loped along like it was on a 286 running That Other Operating System 3.1. I found that it had maybe 40 plugins enabled, including an ISCII Importer/Exporter (it’s Indian ASCII, which you might have known but I sure didn’t), a ClarisWorks Importer, a .wmf Import Plugin, a Google Plugin, AbiGarble (that sounds like fun!)…. I could go on, but I’d do better to save up my energy for figuring out how to load them only when I need them, not all in a big pile.

Xubuntu 11.10′s arboreal default wallpaper and darkish window dressing are all but identical to its predecessor’s. All in all, the biggest change—one that Xubuntu inherited with its siblings—is probably the migration to Linux 3.0.0-12.

Poking around, I did happen upon an immediate problem. I opened Thunar, went [Ctrl-L] to type in a location, and endeavored to go to one of the shared folders on the “Fun Computer” by typing in smb://f…. Something changed color. A regression had crept into Thunar, and, just like in earlier versions under Xfce 4.6, the language of Samba was unknown to it. A quick search via Startpage, which claims not to track anything about you, uncovered the answer: a package called gvfs-backends had gotten left out, and I had to install that from the repo. (I learned from the Launchpad page that the “something that changed color” was a “no entry icon” that appears when you type in a protocol that Thunar doesn’t like or doesn’t understand.)

The Broadcom problem discussed in the Kubuntu 11.10 review exists here, and because it is an identical problem, it has an identical solution.

So here’s what I had to do to get a fully functioning Xubuntu system.

sudo apt-get install gvfs-backends
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
modprobe b43

I then had to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf to replace ; name resolve order = lmhosts host wins bcast with name resolve order = bcast host lmhosts wins and edit /etc/modules to add a line reading, simply, b43. I edited the two files in nano. The whole operation from “So here’s what I had to do” to here took about 3 or 4 minutes, After rebooting, I had a working Xubuntu installation, and all I needed to do was load up with some software I rely on and copy some of that software’s customization files over from my backups (e.g., accountrc for Claws Mail, .emacs and a few others for Emacs), and I was good to go. By “working”, I mean that Thunar can browse networks and accept SMB addresses with the best of them, and I can get onto any WiFi network that will have me, including several very fine and upstanding WiFi networks.

A couple of other things come in mighty handy. I disabled the touchpad and added a compose key. These are best accomplished, as near as I can figure out, by adding them to Session and Startup. To wit: From the menu, go Settings | Settings Manager, and then choose Session and Startup. That screen has five tabs, the middle one of which is called Application Autostart. Choose that one. Click the button near the bottom that says Add, and your screen should look a lot like this (if you have trouble reading this image, click on it and you’ll get a full-sized copy):

To add a compose key hotkey, give it a name like, uh, ComposeKey (duhhhh…), and where it asks you for the command, type in (or paste from this page):

setxkbmap -option compose:lwin

That’ll make your left Windows key a compose-key trigger. You can also use, for example, rwin for the right Windows key—the one with the context menu on it—or lalt (left Alt key), ralt, lctrl (left Ctrl key), rctrl, or even caps (Caps Lock key). For the life of me, I can’t find a complete listing of these things anywhere.

If you rarely use international characters or for whatever reason don’t want to add that script to your startup, the Gnome character map 2.32.1 is available by default and may suit your purposes just great.

If you have a touchpad and you want to disable it, run the command

xinput list

You’ll see a list of input devices and numbers. The one on this laptop reads:

(What’s up with that master/slave crap, anyway? Some of the heroes of the technological revolution had tin ears.) Here is how to disable it permanently. Go to Settings | Settings Manager, Session and Startup again, like above. Add something with a name like TouchpadOff, and where it asks you for the command, type in (or paste from this page):

xinput set-prop 12 “Device Enabled” 0

Change the number 12 to whatever number is on the appropriate line in what you saw when you ran xinput list. (Ye gods, that’s an awful sentence!!)

I set up a printer: System | Printing, then Add. In my case, the printer (which is on a network) appeared in about 10 seconds, and I activated it with a couple more clicks. Installing printers in that other operating system always entailed trips to boring vendor Web sites to get patched printer drivers and fuddling around with mounds of .inf files. Installing printers in Linux—at least HP printers—truly is luxury you can afford!

Bloatware for n00bs
Xubuntu has been criticized for not really being “lightweight”; I am finding, mayhap, that there is a quite noticeable difference in resource consumption between it and Kubuntu. Here are some numbers:

Load time on my laptop, from GRUB-ho! to where it’s sitting there ready to use
Kubuntu: 48 seconds
Xubuntu: 32 seconds

RAM usage with Firefox open to my Postcrossing page, and Uncle Jim’s Master’s thesis loaded as a 115 KB LaTeX document in Emacs (LaTeX is known for being a bit of a porker in the resource department)
Kubuntu: 361-380 KB MB (Thank you, Prince Cruise!)
Xubuntu: 189-210 KB MB
(CPU usage was pretty minimal in each case)

RAM usage with nothing opened, the system just sitting there waiting for me to stop picking my nose
Kubuntu: 320 KB MB
Xubuntu: 146 KB MB

I’ll have more to say about this in a future post. Again, I don’t have any significant experience with pre-11.04 Xubuntu, and my experiences with pre-4.8 Xfce are back there with Goddess-worship and contacts between the Inca and extraterrestrials as far as being able to give you any verifiable data, so to speak. But I’ve got a couple of lovely Xfce installations and a couple of equally charming KDE installations going on now, so I hope to come up with some data that transcends individual hardware and installation quirks. I hope for a lot of things.

So did they get it right?
I can’t give an unqualified “yes”, for the following (possibly churlish) reasons:

First, leaving out gvfs-backends apparently doesn’t affect that many people, but it was an oversight—one that, according to the Launchpad talk, has already been rectified in the planning for 12.04, which will be a LTS release and probably really dynamite.

Second, so far, I haven’t found a way in which Xubuntu 11.10 is a great leap forward over Xubuntu 11.04. To put it in a more positive (or less creepy) manner, there may be substantial improvements in the underpinnings, and it may also be that Xubuntu 11.04 was so good that a great leap forward was simply not in the cards. I’d buy that. In other words, this may be as good as Xfce and Linux get in the year 2011. In that case, Xubuntu 11.10 is about as close to an unqualified “yes, they got it right” as reality will permit.

If you looked at Xfce in the past and found it lacking, give Xubuntu 11.10 a few hours. You might well find that your dissatisfactions have been addressed. It is a versatile environment that has come into its own in a big magnificent way.

Welcome to Kubuntu
I won’t go into much detail about the installation process. I have to assume that my readers have installed at least one *Buntu, and installation hasn’t changed all that much. So my observations will be random.

The new or returning Kubuntista is invited to watch a slideshow during installation. The friendliness and professionalism of these shows has become a hallmark of the Kubuntu experience. In this one, I learned that Gwenview can now export to Flicker, SmugMug, and PicasaWeb. (There was a girl named Gwen in my high school. Later on, I met a girl named Bronwyn, which is an even cooler name.) I don’t know what SmugMug is, though the name evokes that knowing smirk found on the faces of fatuous mediocrities, not that I have any issues or anything. The slideshow also suggests that for more advanced graphics projects, you can download digiKam, which has singleHump camel caps.

Rekonq’s logo—a superhero, or a giant bird, with wings circling the globe—is really cool, whatever it is.

Some of the other logos are purposefully old-fashioned. Kontact is represented by a letter and a paperclip, and LibreOffice by a Selectric. “Installing Additional Software” has a shrink-wrapped box with the K logo! I’m still a bit nostalgic for those days of going into a store and blowing $10 on some CD from Expert Software and getting a bunch of clip art I never ended up finding a use for but still kinda liked having around.

I chose to install the restricted drivers, but not to have Kubuntu download updates during the installation, as that can easily be done later. Nonetheless, it retrieved 23 files from the security repositories. That wasn’t quite what I asked for, but I assume the developers considered these to be important, so I’m cool with it. The fact that they had 23 of these things ready when Kubuntu hadn’t even been in the wild for 48 hours impresses me. I guess nobody went on vacation.

One event I’ve gotten used to in any *Buntu install is the Big Interruption. Here it happened at 64%, in between “Configuring hardware” and “Installing system”. It just stopped, and it doesn’t tell you why. It doesn’t tell you anything. (This is on my laptop, which has a mere 1 GB of memory.) There was another stall at 88%, when Kubuntu downloaded some more packages (without telling me what they were) and then reverted to 86%. Those percentages don’t seem to mean much—they only lull you into feeling a false sense of accomplishment—and I have found *Buntu installations to be relatively slow, if also relatively unhassleful.

Meet Muon
The Family Synaptic is available in the repos, but Kubuntu defaults to Muon, the new wave of KDE package management. Physically, Muon reminded me at first of KPackageKit, as has been seen in recent Kubuntus. There are differences, of course; Muon has a nice left panel with categories that remind me reassuringly of the classical Ubuntu package management style. And it goes easy on the italic typefaces.

But I can’t say that I’m in love with it. When I get around to putting up some screenshots, there will be an image of what happened when I searched for claws-mail. You will notice that the list isn’t exactly in any kind of order. And that’s what you get. In theory, it seems, alphabetical sorting is possible, but in practice, it doesn’t work with search results. This might not bother most people, but some of the applications I use (Emacs, Claws Mail) rely on add-ons and/or extensions, and it would be somewhat easier to find things if they were predictably ordered.

The Muon Software Center looked like the Ubuntu Software Center. I haven’t used it much, but I took a break from writing this essay (my head hurts from all the thinking, so I needed a break anyway) to look at it again. I went to “Internet”, then to “Mail”, then to “Claws Mail”, clicked, asked for “More Info”, and found that some extensions were listed. Not all of them, but several of the most useful ones. Pretty darn thoughtful! (The entry for Emacs didn’t suggest any ancillaries, not even perennial favorites like emacs-chess or planner-el. But the immense Emacs ecosystem may be too complex—or, if you prefer a term that puts the onus on Emacs, unwieldy—for the Muon Software Center concept. If they included erlang-mode but not haskell-mode, for instance, somebody might feel left out. And I’m certainly not in favor of anybody feeling left out, except for people who are cranky all the time.)

Netwebbing
I had a little trouble accessing shares on the Fun Computer. I went into Dolphin and typed in the name of my main share: smb://funcomputer/today/. Nothing happened. I did the same thing, but this time I typed in the IP number of the Fun Computer, and it worked OK. Browsing the network via Dolphin absolutely didn’t work; it found the workgroup, but it didn’t find anything in the workgroup.

Then I remembered a trick I had learned on the Linux Mint forums, back when I struggled with getting Linux Mint Debian Edition Xfce to read my Samba shares. I looked up my notes on the trick, opened up a terminal emulator, and typed sudo emacs /etc/samba/smb.conf.

I found a line that read
; name resolve order = lmhosts host wins bcast

and replaced it with
name resolve order = bcast host lmhosts wins

Note that, besides changing the order, I deleted the ; at the beginning of the line. The semi-colon keeps the line from being read, and acted upon, when Samba starts up.

After all that, I ran another command:

sudo service samba restart

Within seconds, Samba shares were flying around like paintbrushes in a Three Stooges movie. Good-o!

In my Kubuntu—and in yours, dear reader, I suppose—ufw (the Uncomplicated Firewall) is installed but not enabled. gufw, the graphical front end to ufw, is not installed, but you can grab it from the repos.

The “blue light” told me that Kubuntu 11.10 found the laptop’s Broadcom B4311 wireless during installation. But when I rebooted, the blue light wasn’t there.

This was a known problem in Kubuntu 11.04. I never installed Ubuntu 11.04, but the concurrent Xubuntu lives on a laptop partition, and I had the same problem there. I tried a couple of the fixes that were offered on the boards, but they didn’t work, and eventually I went on with my life. I went into Kubuntu 11.04 to work on Uncle Jim’s Master’s thesis, but when I took road trips, I worked in Foresight or Mageia.

This time, I decided to work a little harder. One person got wireless working in Kubuntu 11.04 on a MacBook; I decided that anybody who could do that is a really smart person who should be listened to, so I tried installing firmware-b43-installer and reinstalling bcmwl-kernel-source. No joy.

Another suggestion was to run the command sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer. The rationale was that apparently sometime during the development cycle, the b43 drivers disappeared from the *Buntus, and the “restricted drivers” that are offered during your installation process actually give you another driver, called STA, which may or may not, and probably won’t, work. This was intelligent speculation on the part of the posters—a lot of things having to do with closed drivers are guesswork by necessity—but it helped some people. It didn’t work for me.

I really couldn’t find anything else, so I tried the series of commands that had gotten it done for me in Mageia, adapting them for Kubuntu, which, of course, uses sudo and apt-get, not su and urpmi.

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
modprobe b43

The Blue Light of Hope flickered. And it prevailed! Yay, modprobe! Yay, Linux!!

We don’t have wireless at our house, so I couldn’t test it there. Due to a confluence of events in my ordinarily placid life, I didn’t have any time at all to camp out at a library that day. So I had to sandwich in, if you will forgive the expression, a stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Warwick, Rhode Island. Of course, “a Dunkin’ Donuts in Warwick” is like saying “a bespoke suit at a shareholders’ meeting”; it could be anything. This one is kitty-corner from the Rhode Island Mall, which is so big I’m physically scared of it. Dunkin’ Donuts, for the benefit of non-Yankees, is the rocky shore upon which the Krispy Kreme juggernaut was dashed. They’re everywhere. Some Dunkin’s have WiFi, some don’t. This one did, and the women who were working there that night were cheerful, so I took a place on a stool next to a window that looked out onto a fence that separated the Dunkin’ from the next group of stores, and fired up the laptop.

No Blue Light of Hope. Only the Dim Bulb of Despair. No recognition in the KDE Network Manager that there was such a thing as wireless anywhere in the world.

On a hunch, I ran modprobe b43 again. Yay, blue light! Yay, KDE Network Manager! Yea, verily, WiFi networks far and wide, verily even unto the Subway around the corner!!

Now, I’m not like all you young ‘uns out there who don’t even know what a modem is. I’m old and primitive enough to think that WiFi is like magic, and it honestly doesn’t take much beyond connecting to please me. But even I know that having to run a modprobe every time I want to access WiFi isn’t quite right. (Warning: obsolete comment follows.) I don’t know if this is a factor of the 3.x kernel (this is my first experience with it) or of Kubuntu or I don’t know what; I’ll check in at the bug factory this weekend, I hope, but I don’t think anybody’s gonna know anything for sure for a while.(End obsolete comment.)

☺

Later: Elder-Geek left a comment that explained it all. As it happens, the b43 module wasn’t loading, so I added three letters—b43—on their own line to a file called /etc/modules. That file now reads as thus:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with “#” are ignored.

lp
b43

Works like a charm now!

☺

Kubuntu in everyday life
So far, I have only installed Kubuntu on the laptop, which at 1.6 GHz processor speed and 1 GB of memory is no longer a hardware trailblazer. Actually, it wasn’t a powerhouse when I bought it, either. It cost $400 plus tax, and ran badly enough on the pre-installed operating system (not mentioning any names, but it was born near Seattle, Washington, and unleashed via your favorite retail channels in January 2007) that I was forced to prostrate myself in the Temple of the Mighty Penguin, which of course turned out great for me—and, I humbly submit, for you who are reading and enjoying this essay as well. It’s like a big fat HappyFest!

I perceived Kubuntu to be slower than Mageia, the other KDE distro that owns a laptop partition, but for the most part that just ain’t so. It takes a little less time to load: 43 or 45 seconds, as opposed to Mageia’s 52 to 56. (I don’t own a stopwatch, so I counted off the seconds in my head; they’re probably a little off, but not by a whole lot.) Opening a one-page letter in OpenOffice Writer takes about 10 seconds in Kubuntu and 16 in Mageia. Printing that same letter, though, took 8 seconds—that’s from [Ctrl-P] to the whirrrrr of the printer belching it out—in Kubuntu and either 1 or 2 seconds in Mageia, so I got those 6 seconds back. Big deal, huh?

I would like to blame KDE frivolities, but Mageia in fact arrives with fewer “desktop effects” enabled. Kubuntu has quite a few effects going on; if you like that sort of thing, you’ll almost certainly like Kubuntu. The development team has some terrific designers, and has for several releases now. Kubuntu also informs you during the slideshow that you can install a module called kubuntu-low-fat-settings module that will shut down some of the slowdown stuff.

One quibble: I installed gLabels, like I often do. Everything works except for Print Preview, which sometimes tosses up “Error launching preview: No application is registered as handling this file” and sometimes just fails silently. gLabels print files are .pdf’s, and Okular opens other .pdf’s just fine, so I don’t understand this. (It works like a gem in Mageia.)

Another quibble: Emacs unexpectedly minimizes itself from time to time. It may have something to do with the touchpad (and if KDE offers an easy way to completely disable the touchpad, I haven’t found it; instead, there are some sixteen actions I can disable, one by one). I haven’t noticed this misbehavior anywhere except in Emacs, but that’s where I do most of my typing, so that’s where it would show up. Logical, yes?

A third quibble: Dolphin has lost its menu bar. Half of it ended up squished up into a crescent wrench in the upper right corner. This follows a design trend found first in Web browsers; I don’t especially approve of it, but I don’t plan to lose much sleep over it. Drink to forget, maybe.

One opposite-of-quibble: that rockheaded bouncing cursor stays off, just like in Mageia. (What is the opposite of quibble, anyway?)

One warning: The cashew in the upper right corner has grown. It is now a cashew with a label that says “New Activity”. Clicking on it brings up a menu: “Add Panel”, “Add Widgets”, “Activities”, “Shortcut Settings”, “Folder View Settings”, and “Lock Widgets”. I was feeling brave, so I clicked on “Activities”, and I got this big panel that said, “New Activity”, “Search and Launch”, “Photos Activity”, “Desktop Items”. “Photos Activity” doesn’t seem very grammatical, and I had to read it twice. I thought it was, like, one of the moons of Mars, and it had crashed into Mars or something. Anyway, I really don’t get Activities and I don’t see how any of those menu entries are so important that they need a cashew. That aside, KDE 4.7 seems like a nice stable desktop environment, and it seems completely usable; paradigms such as Activities haven’t gotten in my way or overstressed the ol’ shoulder pumpkin. Not yet, anyway, though I fear that may be forthcoming. I haven’t found any ways in which Kubuntu 11.10’s KDE 4.7.1 is an improvement over Mageia’s KDE 4.6.5, but I haven’t found anything that’s broke, either. In the tidal wave that is Linux, the absence of regression may easily pass as progress.

The happy recap
Everything either works out of the box (or, since there is no box, right off the .iso) or can be made to work with a little research and a few minutes of keyboard-pounding. The Broadcom wireless situation can’t really be called satisfactory, but neither can it be laid solely at the feet of Kubuntu.

What you do get in Kubuntu is a vast selection of possible softwares, an active and dedicated development team and community, an exceptionally polished visual impression, and a lot of stuff that works just the way it’s supposed to. Unless you revile KDE and/or go around saying things like “Canonical is just like Micro$haft”, I propose that Kubuntu 11.10 is absolutely worth checking out.

But also, I’ve gone through a temporary lull in distro-hopping. I installed a couple and had trouble with them. And before I write anything negative, I want to start over again and see if any of the problems were self-created. (Gee, ya think??) I did successfully install one and found that I haven’t had a lot to say about it so far. Thursday was Big Bad Beautiful ‘Buntu Day, though, and I’ve got K* and X* all CD-R’d up and ready to roll.

Mostly, though, it’s because I’ve been very happy with Mageia. I decided that I wanted to get better acquainted with the KDE way of doing things. In my Mageia blog post, I went on about how that has been easier than I would have anticipated, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any more difficult. One thing that is different from the Gnome way is that, in Mageia, the screensaver settings are under “Display and Monitor” in System Settings, whilst “Power Settings” has its own entry. For some reason, I can’t keep that in my head, and when I installed Mageia on the “Play Computer” I spent a lot of time looking for how to change the screensaver settings (which default to 5 minutes, which is rather quick).

But running actual applications isn’t much different. A lot of the stuff I use—Emacs, Opera, Claws Mail—is desktop-independent. I’m running version 3 (yeah, it’s for Gnome 3) of gLabels in Mageia, and it runs at least as well as gLabels 2.28 did under Gnome 2.xx, which was pretty darn well itself. The same goes for Rhythmbox, which has been, if anything, more stable in Mageia than it was even in Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

I haven’t committed myself to the KDE lifestyle just yet. I still boot into Foresight Linux and Xubuntu from time to time, and I keep the activities of the Xfce development team under surveillance via the mailing list. (I still keep wanting to call them Listservs, but I do enough to date myself as it is!)

Xubuntu. I haven’t mentioned it very often, so here’s a quick survey. I installed the 11.04 beta on the Play Computer, and it was so stable that I never wiped it and installed the official release; I just kept accepting updates as they arrived. I admired it as a smooth, finely tuned distro that served not only as a highly-functioning desktop but as proof that Xfce could be elegant and hi-toned. I stayed mostly with Foresight Linux during my bout of Xfce exclusivity, partly because I had something invested in it (some active bug reporting & contact with the developers) and partly because, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate even to myself but had something to do with requiring just the right amount of tinkering, I liked it more than Xubuntu. But Xubuntu has its own considerable merits—those great and groovy ‘Buntu repos, intuitive LAN sharing, a remarkably smooth out-of-the-box look ‘n feel—and I hope to slobber in public over the new version real soon now.

Mageia now regularly supplies updates of various kinds, which it didn’t do for about a month after I installed it. The original release had KDE 4.6.3, and we’re now up to KDE 4.6.5; I’d be quite surprised if the Mageia packagers push this distribution release up to 4.7, but I’ve noticed incremental 4.6.5 updates come down the pike.

Here is one peculiarity. For purposes of working on Uncle Jim’s thesis, I downloaded AUCTeX, which adds (La)TeX prowess to the simmering cauldron of goodness that is Emacs. AUCTeX was in Kubuntu’s repository; but I had to download, ./configure, make, and make install it in Mageia. In Mageia, when I open up Uncle Jim’s thesis, AUCTeX recognizes it as TeX; in Kubuntu, AUCTeX recognizes it, more properly, as LaTeX. I don’t know why. It’s no biggie; John Milton gives me an excuse to spend some time in Kubuntu, that’s all. (And if John Milton ended up where he thought he would and is reading over my shoulder, he’s probably wondering what he did wrong. OK, Johnny, since I got your attention…I’ve read some of your stuff, and you’re IMHO a bit of a windbag. Did anybody ever call you up and say, “Hey, Jack, bro, wanna go catch a couple of frosties?” Betcha they didn’t, LOL!) Someday, for purposes of self-education, I’ll find out why this is so and what I can do about it. I mean find out about AUCTeX, not find out why John Milton never shut up.

Finally, I’ll mention one other change within Mageia. On the “Fun Computer”, the time between the KDE desktop finishing loading and the network coming up used to be about one second, maybe two tops; now it’s about eight. (It’s an Ethernet network. For whatever reason, wireless doesn’t work well in our house.) It seems to only affect Mageia, not any of the other distros installed on the Fun Computer. And it never happened on the laptop. I don’t really care. After I turn the computer on in the morning but before I check my email or my Postcrossing group, I go feed Lily (a dog of average intelligence), so it’s not like I’m in a big hurry or anything. I just mention it because I don’t know why it started doing that.

Within a few days of installing Mageia, I decided that it was one of the finest distributions I had ever spent time with. I still do!

Are there some things about Windows that I miss, though? Well, I always liked PocoMail. When I moved over to Linux, I got used to Evolution (which bears traces of its Groupwise roots; Groupwise was a staple at one of my better jobs). I never loved Evolution, and when I started experimenting with Xfce I gave Claws Mail another try, even though it bills itself as “the email client that bites!”, and this time (a) it worked, and (b) I liked it. I’m not saying it beats PocoMail, but I’m very happy with it. Pretty Good Solitaire is neat, and I especially miss Demons and Thieves, which as far as I know hasn’t been duplicated in the Open Source world. But for me, solitaire is something to do while I’m waiting for the return calls to start pouring in; I don’t take it that seriously. I did not find PySol adequate for my solitaire needs, but I looked at its fork/continuation, PySolFC (Python Solitaire Fan Club Edition), for the first time in a year or more, and it’s just fine now, grotty X11 graphics and backwards mouse pointer and all. It keeps track of the number of games I’ve won, which for some reason seems important. It also keeps track of the number of games I’ve lost, information which of course is of no use to anybody.

But the other day I opened up LibreOffice Writer in my Mageia installation on the laptop. It opened up in about ⅔ of a window, as it always does (it must be a KDE thing, because it does the same thing in my Kubuntu) (or it was transient; weeks later, sometimes it opens up in a full window), and I maximized it, and I realized that I’m really never going to love LibreOffice Writer.

Friends, there is nothing like WordPerfect. And my weltanschauung is so full of weltschmerz that I’ll say there never will be anything like WordPerfect.

This isn’t Windows nostalgia, not strictly. For WordPerfect 5.1 (WP51DOS) was fabulous, and WordPerfect 6.2—the last DOS version—was almost an office suite in itself (“Tables” and “Math” had evolved to a point where they could reasonably do many routine functions that in the Windows suites were offloaded to Quattro Pro). Sometimes it seemed like it was a whole operating system.

WordPerfect is still around. But it lost market share, catastrophically, in the mid-1990s. If it was so good, why did that happen?

Let’s look at the theories. I know the name of this blog is “Linux is my Life”, not “WordPerfect is my Life”. But bear with me. Partisans of Open Source may learn from the stunning rise and complex decline of WordPerfect. What can the Open Source community do? And what can’t it do—or, maybe, what won’t it do or what hasn’t it done?

Before we proceed, allow me to introduce some general sources. This article, from the aptly-named Computer Nostalgia site, offers what seems to me a concise and judiciously curated general history. For the armchair historian, the memoirs/apologia of W. E. Peterson will certainly be of interest. The fact that he chose to call his book Almost Perfect may or may not be relevant.

Theory 1: Bill Gates is the Antichrist
Everybody likes this theory, and so do I. A court case (Novell Inc v Microsoft Corp, number 10-1482) in which Novell alleges anti-competitive business practice on Microsoft’s part has been droning on at Bleak Housian length. In business terms, this seems to have to do with Microsoft’s penchant for “forcing” hardware manufacturers to buy Microsoft licenses for every computer they make, not just the ones on which Microsoft products are actually installed. This case was dismissed in 2010 (a Groklaw analysis of that dismissal is here), but another judge allowed the same case to continue. (Ironically, the judge in the 2010 decision did appear to be unclear about the difference between a word processing application and an operating system. I told you WordPerfect is good!)

WordPerfect partisans point to things like the mysterious removal of Windows Messaging (a precursor of, among other things, Outlook Express) in Windows 98 as evidence that Microsoft went out of its way to sabotage WordPerfect. It does seem clear that Microsoft never let any other software developers know everything about Windows. Did Microsoft do things specifically to break WordPerfect, or was WordPerfect more prone to breakage simply because it was one of the most complex third-party applications in the world of Windows? (WordPerfect 8, which was the current version in 1998, had no fewer than seven service packs in its lifetime.) I don’t know that anybody could claim it’s solely one or the other. (What are some really, really complicated third-party applications that run well on Windows? Probably some stuff by Adobe, but I am not a graphics person and I don’t know anything about the prowess or the stability of Photoshop or InDesign.)

Theory 2: The WordPerfect Corporation was a bunch of losers
For one thing, it’s not always smart to be snotty with the press. More generally, I referred above to the autobiography of W. E. “Pete” Peterson. The fabulous WPUniverse support group (in, yes, all its various meanings) has occasionally had refugees from the Orem days drop in to reminisce, and I found an alternate-universe view of Pete by some relatively unhappy campers. The software-mogul-as-north-end-of-a-southbound-horse phenomenon is hardly confined to WordPerfect. Long ago, I read a book called Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, by one “Robert X. Cringely” (he blogs, meaning he’s probably a lot like me), which left me with the impression that software pioneers have the personalities of Phillies fans, though I think they are expected to be smarter, most of the time.

But that aside, the history of WordPerfect’s corporate ownership is a microcosm of sorts of everything that is wrong with the M&A lifestyle. The owners of the WordPerfect Corporation probably did have to do something drastic; the company had outgrown their visions and their management styles. Novell purchased it, and the amount of money they lost became the stuff of business legend. This WPUniverse thread gets into some of the culture clashes that plagued the Novell/WordPerfect union. (Here is more about Novell.)

A year and a half later, the hitherto fairly obscure Canadian company Corel purchased most of the remains of the WordPerfect Corporation from the remains of Novell. Like Ray Noorda at Novell had, the then-CEO of Corel, Michael Cowpland, wanted to diversify his company’s offerings by challenging Microsoft in the office-applications world. And as there had been at Novell, there was another rough merger, exacerbated by the fact that Orem and Ottawa are separated by a national border and some 3,000 kilometers. And since Cowpland gave up, Corel has had a series of CEOs and owners; it has not been a stable environment.

Theory 3: WordPerfect didn’t change with the times
Much ink has been spilled on WordPerfect’s decision to bank everything on OS/2, and its last-minute reversal when Microsoft’s ambitions for Windows, and its blindsiding of IBM, became apparent. Whatever the cause, WordPerfect careened into the world of Windows haphazardly. The first Windows version, 5.1, sold a lot of copies at first, but pleased nobody and was soon replaced with 5.2. I was never very familiar with them. I did purchase WordPerfect 6.0 when it was part of a short-lived endeavor called “Borland Office”, which included Quattro Pro and Paradox. (It may have had WordPerfect Presentations, but I honestly don’t remember it being there.) Anyway, I can attest that WPWin 6.0 was pretty awful: slow, buggy, crash-prone, and apt to create unmanageably large files (sometimes up to 10 times the size of an equivalent file in WPDOS).

(Here follows some version history. You can skip down to “end reminiscing” if you want.)

WordPerfect 6.1—the first release from Novell—was altogether a much better piece of work, and I used it for years. It did have one quirk: customizations were kept in a binary file, wpcset.bif, which personally never gave me a moment of trouble but which gave other people conniption fits. I recall that the binary was especially vulnerable on networks (odd, given Novell’s heritage); for instance, it got really upset if your network drive letters changed. You could always delete wpset.bif and let the program create another one for you, but for some obscure reason, certain unique data like label definitions were kept there, and you’d lose a lot of work. Still, it was a fine program.

WordPerfect 7 was available for both Windows 3.1 and (somewhat belatedly) Windows 95. I actually never saw it, except once at an interview for a job I didn’t get. (If I remember correctly, some editions had the Novell splash screen, while later ones had Corel’s. But I’m not sure.) I don’t remember a lot about WordPerfect 8, except that it may have been the most beautiful of them all; the splash screen was a fountain pen, and the editing screen almost shimmered; by the standards of 1999 graphics, it looked positively opulent. Despite its myriad patches (and this was a time when 56k modems were all the rage, making the service packs a bit of a bother to attain), it was one of the more well-loved versions. I kept using Quattro Pro 8 for a while even after I moved my writing over to WordPerfect 9. But many a WordPerfectionist had trouble running it on Windows XP, and it fell into obsolescence before it really should have.

WordPerfect 9 (part of the imaginatively named WordPerfect Office 2000 suite) had the unique property of running better after it had been on your computer for a few weeks. That is so unWindowsy it staggers the imagination, but I wasn’t the only one to experience it. I don’t know if anybody ever figured out why.

With WordPerfect 10 (or WordPerfect Office 2002; long gone were the days when you could buy a copy of WordPerfect without Quattro Pro and Presentations), Corel tried again to introduce a PIM (parts of which were pretty good) and an email client (which, shall we say, failed to win me away from PocoMail). Overall, I found 10/2002 to be slow and unresponsive, and I ended up going back to 9/2000.

Since Corel acquired WordPerfect, improvements have been few and far between. WordPerfect 11 offered “classic mode”, which replicated the look and some of the feel of WordPerfect 5.1. (5.1 is the Dark Side of the Moon of software. A surprising number of transcriptionists—legal and medical—go to extraordinary lengths to keep it running on modern machines, and Edward Mendelsohn, a professor at Columbia University, has an extensive Web site devoted to the care and feeding of DOS WordPerfect.) What they didn’t, and couldn’t, do is replicate the 5.1 macro language, which I’ll get to shortly.

But “classic mode” was the type of innovation that would barely have rated a .point release in the old days. (There were actually a multiplicity of 5.1 versions, identifiable by their release dates. Some macro commands, some print drivers, and even a couple of formatting options were only available on versions released after such-and-such. Most of these were pretty obscure, but once in a while the discrepancies would crop up, and somebody on the Prodigy WordPerfect board wouldn’t quite know what somebody else was talking about.)

WordPerfect 12 was masterful; I used it exclusively until I moved over to Linux, and my wife still runs it on XP. I think that we’ve managed to crash it half a dozen times between us, and that’s in almost seven years. I don’t remember a lot of features that weren’t actually in WordPerfect 9; there is a “preview mode” which if, say, you choose a new default font from the pull-down menu, the editing screen changes temporarily to show you what your document will look like. It wasn’t life-changing, but it was fun and useful.

(End reminiscing.)

More recently, look at the What’s New in WordPerfect 15 page. Almost everything in there is about working better with Windows 7 and the Office 2007 file formats. It has been argued that new WordPerfect releases are cash cows, having no purpose but to be sold to unwary WordPerfect addicts. I don’t think that’s quite fair. When your product is:

• very complex;
• used by a demanding audience (lawyers and freelance writers);
• otherwise marginalized;
• designed to be run on an operating system whose inner workings change from time to time and are never completely known to you, and which is owned by a company with a rival product;

you’re going to spend a lot of programming time just trying to get things to work. Always crashing in the same car.

WordPerfect doesn’t support Unicode. There is limited and partial support in recent versions, but it is very hard to recommend WordPerfect to anybody who routinely has to work in multiple languages—especially if some of those languages are non-Latin. Unicode is a victim of WordPerfect’s backwards compatibility, which (with the exception of macros, which I promise I’ll get to) is exceptional. DOS WordPerfects (at least 5.1+, an enhanced version released in 1993, and 6.x) can open documents created in WordPerfect 12; not all the formatting might survive, but the DOS WordPerfects are smart enough to know when they don’t understand a formatting code, and they’ll just ignore it rather than ruin all the formatting they do understand. The downside is that WordPerfect uses a different method of interpreting and displaying characters above and beyond the plain-chocolate ASCII set (I have researched the difference, but I don’t feel competent to explain it; if you are competent, reader, this link might help you), and to realign it with the world would cost a lot of money that Corel probably doesn’t have (or its owners don’t want to spend), and break a large part of its WordPerfectness.

The ancillary programs in WordPerfect Office—the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, Presentations, and (in the more expensive varieties) the Paradox database—suffer from neglect. Quattro Pro has had bugs for years; the file format was changed around version 9, and if you ask me it was never the same. As for Paradox, Corel doesn’t even pretend that it’s under active development; they put a new splash screen on it with every release, and that’s about it.

Theory 4: WordPerfect did change with the times, and shouldn’t have
With WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, and the concurrent Windows versions, a new macro language was introduced. On the surface—and underneath—it offered some substantial improvements. For one, you could issue commands in a less literal manner; they weren’t quite as dependent as the 5.1 ones were on certain transient conditions. (I noticed that applying font commands was a lot easier.) For another, the macros could be edited as regular WordPerfect documents; once you were familiar with the language, they were a lot more legible. An excellent history, written by J. Dan Broadhead, the lead developer of the PerfectScript cross-application language, is here.

I found some annoyances. There was a 5.1-to-6.x converter, but it injected a lot of spuzzy code—things that you’d probably never use in a macro, any macro, that you built from the ground up—and the more complex the macro, the greater were the chances that the converted version wouldn’t run at all. Some shareware macros I had accumulated (from, among others, the revered Alan Kaplan) became slow or buggy in their converted incarnations. Ones I had done myself, I found, I was better off just doing over. That was easy for me; I couldn’t program my way out of a bowl of overcooked linguine, so most of my macros were ones I’d recorded directly as keystrokes anyway.

I could never make heads nor tails of the 5.1 language. I decided to give the 6.x language a try; I purchased the books from the nice man who answered the phone at the WordPerfect Corporation (who also told me that the DOS and Windows languages had enough dissimilarity that I should get both, which I obediently did). The books were, essentially, lists of commands, with very little in the way of conceptual information. The first third-party book I bought made me sad because it was another bunch of stupid lists and boring prose that taught me nothing; other third-party books glided past macros.

I didn’t really know it at the time, but quite a few of WordPerfect’s loyal customers were enraged. These were people who had invested a lot of time, self-education, and/or consultancy fees into using the 5.1 macro language as a productivity aid, and didn’t want to have to go through it all again.

Theory 5: Microsoft just did a better job of marketing
Certainly, Microsoft did a better job of building a loyal cadre of experts. I became a Certified WordPerfect Expert, and I got a certificate, and that was about it. I never really heard from the company again. I still have the certificate; it’s in a file folder in the basement, but I can’t bear to toss it with the way I toss matchbook covers from forgotten restaurants. I may have forgotten who I went to the restaurant with, but I’ve never forgotten passing that exam at the Sylvan Learning Center office in Toms River, New Jersey.

It is documented (not least in some of the links I supplied above) that Microsoft did a much better job massaging the computer press and corporate purchasing agents than WordPerfect Corp., whose stroking efforts could be boorish. The question is: how did Microsoft get away with conquering the world with an inferior product? One of the first times I ever used Word, I hit [Ctrl-I], assuming—with some justification, I think—that the next characters I typed would look like this.

Wrong again. The whole damn paragraph looked like this.

To me, the very definition of an inferior product is one that takes something self-evidently easy (hitting [Ctrl-I]) and makes it something self-evidently Baroque (rolling back the cursor, highlighting the word you want to italicize, selecting [Italic] from the handy-dandy menu bar at the top of the screen). It was only years later, after I had actually used spreadsheets in a (tee, hee!) professional, productive way, that I figured it out. Word was the most commonly used part of the Microsoft Office empire, but it wasn’t the most important. Microsoft Office was built around Excel. And Word acted a bit like Excel; the paragraph, not the character, was the essential unit in Word, because paragraphs were containers. Like cells.

There is a good business reason for this. First, the competition in spreadsheets was less rigorous; instead of WordPerfect, you basically had Lotus 1-2-3, which was floundering in the wake of some of its own dubious decisions. Second, people who use spreadsheets are in general higher in the corporate structure; they deal with finances, statistics, finances, and money. Much of the word processing in a corporation is done by administrative assistants, secretaries, typists, and who cares what they think? Offer the higher-ups (most of would consider the ability to type 62 WPM about as attractive on their résumé as four years of migrant farm work) a superior spreadsheet in a bundled suite, and you will get sales.

This doesn’t explain the loyalty that Microsoft products have retained through Word macro viruses, the infamous metadata affair, Clippy, master documents that eat their children, the inability to do an acceptable pleading paper, and the other crimes against common sense that Microsoft Office has imposed upon the modern world. But once Microsoft put its mind to making Office its franchise, it became very successful very quickly, and Office and its file formats became the standard at a time when companies throughout the United States and the world were investing unbelievable amounts of money into “Information Technology”. It was a lot harder to get away from Microsoft in 1998 than it was to ditch WordPerfect in 1994. And, frankly, WordPerfect’s revolving-door ownership and its perceived missteps didn’t inspire a lot of confidence then, and they don’t now.

Okay…so what does all this have to do with Open Source?

Well, an open source operating system levels the playing field. No undocumented APIs. No struggling with an operating system owned by people who hate you and has inscrutable varieties. Bribery doesn’t work. (Maybe it does, but I don’t know how.) If Windows had been open, maybe WordPerfect would have been saved from itself.

But the fact remains that Open Source has yet to develop its own office components. Gnumeric is one exception: it is a very capable spreadsheet that has been Open Source from the git-go. Its interface isn’t especially modern, so to speak, and it lacks a few modern amenities, but it is robust as hell, blindingly fast, and has formula capabilities Warren Buffett couldn’t wear out. AbiWord started under corporate aegis, but has been community-driven most of its life. However, AbiWord has never been as featureful as Writer—never mind WordPerfect—and, unhappily, its development has sputtered; version 2.8 is more than two years old now. (After I started writing this article, I discovered Kexi, which will be briefly discussed below.)

PostgreSQL is a massive Open Source project, and from all I’ve ever heard a great one; but it isn’t comparable to Access or Paradox, and it isn’t something you’d be likely to find in a SOHO environment, or in general deployment in most corporations. Really, what I’d absolutely love is a flat-file database: say, a Linux version of PC-File or Q&A. (I never even saw DataPerfect. None of WordPerfect Corporation’s other products—there was a spreadsheet called PlanPerfect—ever developed very significant market share. The failure of the WordPerfect cachet to transmit itself over to other Perfects is worth a case study in itself.) The fact is, though, that there has never been a commercial successor to Q&A; that tells me that the demand isn’t screamingly huge, or whatever demand there is has been met by the database module in Microsoft Works.

OpenOffice, of course, started as a commercial, proprietary product called StarOffice; it was acquired from a small German company, Star Division, and (mostly) open-sourced by Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice is greatly, vastly improved over its beginnings as a clunky and rather nasty office suite; but it has had a contentious history, with two forks: Go-OO, sponsored by—of all people!—Novell; and the more recent LibreOffice, which has become the default in the majority of Linux distributions. Although it is genuinely Open Source, it has been dependent on considerable corporate sponsorship, and it wouldn’t have progressed to today’s level without the generosity of Sun, Novell, and Red Hat. (Ten years later, the custodians of LibreOffice are still removing leftover StarOffice code.) (More recently, I saw this history of the Open/LibreOffice schism. I doubt that we’ll ever know everything about what really happened, but it does muster some evidence that the corporate underpinnings of OpenOffice could be as much a hindrance as a help.)

It is not impossible that a bunch of volunteer programmers could get together and develop good office applications. These programmers would have to be independently wealthy (or have significant others as well-recompensed as they are understanding). They would also have to get along, which does not always happen, as KOffice found out. In one of the WPUniverse posts I linked to way back when, the developer of the PerfectScript language talked about sleeping in his office for nights at a time. Putting in those kinds of hours because you are committed to a project is at least slightly different, and sometimes a lot different, from putting in those kinds of hours because your income depends on it.

To some extent, we get what Free/Libre/Open Source Software programmers want to develop. This means myriad cool distros and more desktop environments/window managers than you can shake a stick at. In application terms, it means text editors that’ll knock your socks off, some awesome multimedia utilities, GIMP and Inkscape, and Internet-related programs that should please almost everyone. So far, it hasn’t meant a tremendous amount of activity in traditional SO/HO applications. However, two months or more after I started writing this essay, I started fooling around with Kexi, the database component of Calligra Office. I don’t know how stable it is yet—very, I hope, because I’ve got two big honkin’ music databases in it already!—but I like it, and it’s real easy to use; it can be either a Paradox or a Q&A, it seems like, depending upon your needs. I will try to write more about it in the future.

Corporate environments are certainly not immune to blood feuds, backstabbing (I knew some backchewers once, but not in a workplace environment), consternation, and slander. But schisms such as those which befell KOffice are sometimes contained. WordPerfect was part of one of the most Hatfield/McCoy mergers I can think of, but it survived; the cost was immense, but it survived. Would we be better off today had a group of disgruntled (did you know that “gruntled” really is a word, even if nobody ever says it?) WordPerfect programmers started a rival (WordFabulous? Ooh, I like it!) in 1992?

If I happened to have the money—and I don’t, and I won’t—I would pry the shells and shards of WordPerfect from the stiff but grasping fingers of Corel, and copyleft the code, and release it into the wild like a kestrel. I wonder if the 5.1 code could be had for cheap, and I wonder how much work would it be to Linuxize it. I don’t know what would happen, but I would love to find out!

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Frostbite Systems is a mail-order outfit where, to be snarky about it, you can pay extra for the privilege of owning a computer that doesn’t have that other, expensive operating system pre-installed. Nadeau does a good job telling you why you should consider doing just that, and beyond that, he has some absolutely convincing true-life stories to tell about how Open Source has opened new worlds for people with disabilities.

Here is a link to the MintCast archive page. Great listening.

It was a strange confluence of events, and I never quite figured it out. As best as I was able to deduce later on, Arch fed me a kernel with a regression in which support for some aging Intel video cards went lacking. This wasn’t something you could fix with a modprobe, either—well, maybe you could, because you’re smart, but I couldn’t, because the screen was totally blank, and I’m not that smart. (I did manage to use the MS-DOS copy command to get a bunch of files from an AT&T 6300—the one with an 8086 processor—onto 5-¼” floppy discs when the video card died, but that’s different from running a modprobe.) Complicating matters was the fact that X.org had just moved on to its 1.7 series, and at first I was inclined to blame the X server.

Anyway, that computer with the primitive Intel video card (it was made by Advanced Digital Logic) was important to my existence. My wife is disabled with a complicated form of nerve damage, and she is extremely sensitive to the noises that moving parts in computers make. The ADL computer didn’t have any moving parts; it was fanless and absolutely silent, and therefore I could camp out in the living room and work (I had a work-from-home job for an academic publisher, but my full-time job was and is looking after my wife). It was also low-powered, with a 1.4 GHz Pentium M chip and a whopping 512 MB of memory. In other words, it was an excellent Linux box.

I could have reinstalled Arch and figured out how to lock pacman into not updating the X server. But, really, I no longer trusted Arch. That might not have been rational, or fair to Arch, but it was the way I felt. (Arch’s documentation is second to none, but the Arch community doesn’t remind me of friendly puppies and teddy bears.) Yeah, I’m a hobbyist and a Linux adventurer, but I have responsibilities, too, capisce? I wasn’t going back to Arch, and I sure wasn’t going to reinstall Windows™, so I got a bunch of distros on CD and tried them, one after the next; some gave me an unacceptably low-resolution display, and more didn’t work at all.

Then, as I was running out of hope, I tried Mandriva. Mandriva 2010 was fairly new at the time (all this happened in November 2009, or maybe December), but it still had X.org 1.6. It also probably had some nice patches in the kernel, or a more proven kernel, or something; as I was to learn, Mandriva’s hardware support was remarkable. But at the time I understood less about Linux than I do now, especially things like kernel mods (which I’m still not exactly well-versed in) and I couldn’t make sense out of all the various information that was coming my way. Anyway, Mandriva worked perfectly on the Work Computer, and basically kept me in business.

Mandriva wasn’t my first choice. And it never had been. I had looked at it from time to time, but I thought of it as the Girl Next Door of distros: always there, but not especially interesting. But to my delight, I discovered that the Gnome version was not only not an afterthought, but it was the best Gnome desktop I’d ever seen. (A good thing. Even in its best days, the Work Computer had its hands full running KDE 4.) Mandriva soon became the #1 distro on my Play Computer and the laptop as well. Later, I discovered the unofficial Xfce version and ran it on the Work Computer for a few months before certain struggles with Xfce 4.6 drove me back to Gnome. (I wrote about it on this Bruno’s All Things Linux thread; if you really can’t get enough of my prose, you can read all about it there.)

So, Mandriva was like a very special Girl Next Door.

But in Linux as in life, the road is long, with many a winding turn. One day I ran a system update on the Work Computer, and something went wrong. (Did I learn my lesson from Arch Linux? No, I’m a sloooowwwwww learner!) It wasn’t the debacle that the Arch system update was, but it was disconcerting. I never quite figured this one out, either; but it seems that Mandriva 2010 was approaching the end of its cycle, and I might have hit the FTP server as some eager beaver at Columbia University was dismantling the 2010 FTP server. I used a bunch of urpmi commands to point the update mechanism at a server in Wisconsin (Mandriva had accurately decided Columbia was the most proximate to my humble abode). That helped for a while, kinda, but Mandriva on the Work Computer never really was the same again. Or maybe it was my trust level. I will say that, for all of Mandriva’s considerable virtues, I never spent much time at their Web site. I’m not sure why, but certainly the parent company’s well-documented troubles didn’t imbue me with well-being, and those troubles sometimes bled down into the community and the forums. There might have been an official end-of-life announcement that I missed, but if there was, I wasn’t the only one who missed it.

I retired the Work Computer (I’m in the process of rehabilitating it now, which will give me something to write about in a few weeks), set up the laptop in the living room (it’s noisier than the Work Computer, but I’m there somewhat less these days, and my wife can live with it) with a variety of partitions, and went on my way. I looked forward to Mageia, but as time went on, I looked forward to it less and less.

I tried a beta of the Gnome version, and…while it wasn’t quite as lovely as the Mandriva desktop (the fonts were a little off), it was recognizable, classical Gnome 2. And I knew that soon it would be as abandoned as DOS. I know this isn’t being fair to Mageia, but installing a new Gnome desktop was like drinking of the cup of bitterness. Simultaneously, I installed the DVD version on another computer, and made the mistake of installing the Xfce desktop on top of the KDE one. I booted into the Xfce desktop, and it melted. (Later, I was to find an unauthorized cure, and I’ll try to write about it shortly.) I booted into the KDE desktop and booted right out again. I had never managed to warm to KDE 4, and I did not think now was the time. There may be ways of having the KDE and Xfce desktops reside comfortably together, but I haven’t found it; you end up with a lot of duplication of services, cluttered menus, and paradigms struggling angrily against their confinement. But that, too, is a topic for another post.

I put Mageia away for a while, and for some reason, a couple of weeks back I decided to give it another try. This time I installed the KDE version.

Wow.

Installation
Like Mandriva, Mageia comes in an installable live-CD format (either Gnome or KDE) as well as on a big honkin’ install-only DVD. And I mean honkin’; the .iso was over 4 GB. (Mandriva is dropping official support for Gnome in its forthcoming 2011 release, so there is a divergence right away.) If you have ever installed Mandriva, and I suppose most Penguinistas have, the Mageia installation process will look very familiar. It is a bland but generally straightforward process; it doesn’t take much time, and it asks the right questions. Or…I should mention one “trick”. If you install from the live CD, eventually a screen will pop up asking you where you want to install Grub (Mageia is one of the last Grub 0.97 holdouts).

If you install from the DVD, you won’t get that screen, and you have to change it after you think you have already installed Grub, at a screen that looks a lot like this:

That screenshot is from 2006!! But the Mandriva installer, which as I mentioned has made its way into Mageia more or less wholesale, hasn’t changed a lot through the years. Anyway, it doesn’t show up on this screenshot, but if you scroll down you’ll see an entry called “Bootloader”, and you click the “Configure” button to change where Grub is installed. The first time I installed Mandriva from a DVD, it was version 2010.1, and I thought it was a regression in the installer. It wasn’t; it’s always been like that, I guess, or at least it has been like that since electricity was invented, but I had always installed from CDs before (I was late getting a DVD burner) and never noticed the discrepancy.

During both installation procedures, I noted certain pauses, as if the installer had a momentary change of heart: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. It worked fine; I just thought I’d mention it, even though it’s nothing to worry about.

Initial Impressions
I never had much experience with Mandriva’s KDE version, so I can’t make any comparisions, and I’m in some danger of being all wet from time to time. I hope you don’t mind.

Mageia inherits the legendary Mandriva Control Center and can even still call it MCC. People coming over from another KDE distribution and/or who aren’t familiar with Mandriva may be confused by this; most of the stuff in MCC used to be in the KDE System Settings module, and the division of labor may not be quite intuitive. Crudely summarized, MCC includes the stuff you need to do as root: networking, security, software installation and updating, boot management, and hardware—which includes printers and sound, but is also (and I personally find this less logical) where you turn on Compiz and Metisse. I love MCC and think it is the finest control panel interface in the whole wide world. If you wish to claim that MCC is more appropriate for the Gnome or Xfce desktop environments, though, I wouldn’t argue.

The good news is that Compiz and Metisse are not turned on by default. The bad news is that, like every other KDE 4 distro I’ve ever tried, Mageia comes with that stupid bouncing cursor. The real good news is that if you turn the bouncing cursor off, it almost always stays off. The KDE developers seem to think that everybody needs this kind of effect; I’ve never gotten System Settings | Application and System Notifications | Launch Feedback | Busy Cursor | No Busy Cursor (whew!) to stay set at No Busy Cursor. This is a fairly important issue to me. I really don’t like repetitive motion. I can’t drive in a snowstorm for more than a few minutes without getting hypnotized, for instance. And, being a bit ornery, I feel like if I go to the trouble of turning off the bouncies, my wishes should be respected. Anyway, Mageia does a comparatively crackerjack job at neutralizing this highly abrasive effect.

MCC and System Settings are side-by-side in the Task Manager (which is what normal people might call a taskbar), and System Settings can’t easily be found in the menu, which isn’t necessarily that bad of a thing, because KDE by nature has a System entry in the menu and a Settings entry in the menu, and who can remember which one has System Settings? That’s harder than remembering what’s in MCC and what’s in System Settings. I get a headache just thinking about it! (If you really wanna know, it’s Menu | Tools | System Tools | System Settings, which is kind of like a Fibonacci progression in words, except different.)

Out of the Box Experiences
Mageia is a new distribution, and its repositories are still being populated. I didn’t run into any insurmountable problems, but it may take a while before everything you could possibly want is available.

Office chores are handled by LibreOffice. “Of course they are,” I’m tempted to say. Does any KDE distribution provide the Calligra Suite (formerly KOffice) by default these days? (Actually, a couple of Calligra apps—Calligra Charts, and Calligra Words (I wonder where they came up with that name?)—found their way onto the Fun Computer, on which I used the DVD. I used the live CD to install onto the laptop, and yes, we have no Calligras.) I need Gnumeric for some of my work, so I installed it (and, along with it, as many dependencies as there are horseflies in the hot dog stands at the boardwalk at Misquamicut Beach).

On to multimedia. I couldn’t find Guayadeque, and I’m sorry, but I can’t make heads nor tails out of Amarok (how complicated can you make saving the URL of a radio stream?), so I installed Rhythmbox, which I find to be a bit dull but which is certainly more than competent. Rhythmbox didn’t require as many dependencies as Gnumeric, maybe because Gnumeric took care of some of them, though I don’t know for sure; Banshee would have been a download of close to 100 MB, which I thought was a bit much. Banshee requires a lot of Mono.

Live365 didn’t work out of the box. I installed Flash from Adobe’s site, but when I tried to run Live365 again, I still got an error message. The cure was to uninstall Flash and run Malabi’s shell script. Apparently the installation from Adobe will sometimes fail quietly.

My WiFi didn’t work straight away, either. This appears to be a bug, or maybe I should say an ambiguity, in the Mageia installation procedure. If you happen to have a Broadcom b43 WiFi chip (the Notorious B.4.3.), the instructions given by DShelbyD in the Mageia forums (scroll down most of the way until you peep a couple of white code boxes) worked like a German Shepherd search-and-rescue dog for me.

If you install Mageia from the Live CD, the Kickoff and Lancelot Menus are not even options; you get the plain-chocolate “Classic Menu”, and that’s it. This is no problem for me, as I prefer plain things, and I hope it isn’t for you, dear reader. On the Fun Computer, I get the “Application Launcher” option (aka Kickoff), but not Lancelot, which is in my opinion pretty good, though I understand it isn’t all that popular amongst KDEficionados. (Later: I found Lancelot! It’s available as a widget. I don’t claim to understand why it’s a widget instead of a menu option, and I haven’t tried it out in that form, being quite content with the Classic Menu, but there it is.)

Right-clicking on the menu button brings up a veritable treasure chest of delights. Application Launcher Menu Settings lets you add “recent documents” to the menu, and it works with the Classic Menu, not just the Application Launcher Style menu. Yay! For some reason, and I did find this a very mild annoyance, “recent documents” doesn’t display filename extensions; this document that you are reading, which is “mageia.txt”, displays just as “mageia”, which could be just about anything.

From that right-click, you can also Edit Applications. Edit Applications is really cool. Another annoyance is that the KDE menu tended to put my installed applications (such as Gnumeric) into “More” categories a level below the pre-installed ones. In Edit Applications, you can just drag them around in a way that will be familiar to anybody who ever edited a Windows™ menu. Also, you can go Edit Applications, navigate in the tree to an application to which you want to assign a keystroke, select “advanced” in the right panel, click on where it says “None” next to “Current shortcut key”, and press the shortcut key(s) you want to have launch that application. I use [Ctrl-Shift-F4] for Konsole, the KDE terminal, and [Ctrl-Shift-F5] for Dolphin, the very capable KDE file manager, which is otherwise buried way down in Tools | System Tools in the menu. You can do [Alt-F1] to bring up the menu, but Tools is one of the few entries—that, Games, and a few of the Recent Documents—that doesn’t have a mnemonic, so you have to arrow up to Tools, then arrow left, then hit S for System Tools and D for Dolphin to open it up unmousefully, which seems like a lot of work. Either Mandriva has made keyboard shortcuts very easy to configure, or KDE 4.6.x is a lot easier than previous versions. (The other possibility is that I’m getting smarter, but I think that’s about as likely as the Turtles All the Way Down Theory.) In fact, it is KDE; I’ve also been auditioning Kubuntu 11.04, and the keyboard shortcuts work the same way. I’ve always struggled with KDE 4; I’m not struggling with Mageia’s KDE 4.6.3. In fact, I’m really digging it.

Looking back, I see that in KDE 4.4, you could add keyboard shortcuts in the same way, but they wouldn’t last from one session to the next unless you first went somewhere into System Settings and activated KMenuEdit, and nobody really knew you were supposed to do that. I suspect that this is one of innumerable things have been refined in the 3½ years (!) since KDE 4.0 came out: taking gnarly, complicated interface decisions and turning them into fun interface decisions.

Special Considerations
I had no trouble setting up my Mageia Fun Computer installation as a Samba server. The firewall, Shorewall, is enabled by default, and wouldn’t let me in from the laptop or the Play Computer until I went in and disabled things until it worked. I’m not complaining—in fact, I think it was nice of them to enable Shorewall, and I can always use the exercise that comes from going up and down the stairs (see? Linux is good for you!)—but most distros don’t enable firewalls during the installation, and I wasn’t expecting it (even though Mandriva always did).

Speaking of Samba, KDE handles this a bit differently from what I’m used to. From the laptop, I can grab, say, “mageia.txt” from the Fun Computer, and it’ll open it, but under a funky name like bchwd45789.mageia.txt. When I’m done editing, I’ll save the file, but what KDE does is save the file with the funky name in my /tmp folder, and then ask me, “Upload mageia.txt?” It’s not as transparent for dealing with remote files as Gnome or Xfce are, but that’s not a criticism; it’s just different, that’s all, and if you’re coming over from a different desktop it might take you by surprise. (It has been a while, but in the past the messages were a little less clear and confused me as to their import.) I find working with my home network overall as easy in KDE as in Gnome 2.x, and in Gnome 2.x it’s like a dream.

(For years, we had a server in the basement, running Windows 2000 and Citrix, and then when that server broke down, we got a new one with Windows Server 2003, and we had “thin clients” (the polite term for “dumb terminals”) by Neoware here and there around the house. All this was connected by Ethernet cables, because for some reason wireless has never done well in this house. The Neoware terminals were as quiet as quiet can be, which made them great for my wife, at least for her writing and managing the household and Quicken, but they didn’t have sound, so she could never enjoy multimedia or YouTube or anything like that. I could do some of the Windows™ maintenance myself, but for the big jobs I had to call Manny Theadore in Westerly, who knows a lot more about Windows™ than I ever did, and is a nice guy as well. I can kinda do the Linux stuff myself, though I’ve never done well with NFS and stick with Samba, which people tell me is overall a lot more complicated. I’m really pretty weak in hardware, partly from being a klutz of sorts, so having a more peer-to-peerish type of network works better, since whenever the Windows™ server fried a memory stick I was pretty much out to sea and had to call Manny. The Fun Computer acts as my server, but if it ever has an existential crisis, I could use the Play Computer for the same purpose, unlike the Windows™ server, which controlled everything and didn’t allow the Neoware boxes a mind of their own, which was good because they didn’t have minds. I learned a couple of rsync flags to back up to flash drives, and so I’m usually current with backups within a few hours, and could turn the Play Computer or the laptop into a file server pretty quickly if I had to.)

One thing I’ve noticed is that KDE provides a very welcoming environment for non-KDE applications. I mentioned Rhythmbox (a core Gnome application) and Gnumeric (part of the soi-disant Gnome Office, but more often found in Xfce and “lightweight” distros these days) above, and I’m also very dependent on Opera and, especially, Emacs. They all work fine in KDE, and (except for Emacs, which in all honesty looks sepulchral in every setting) they all look fine, and they look like they belong. The days of “KDE and everything else” are over.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that KDE 4.6 is a spectacular desktop environment. I never thought I’d say that KDE 4.anything would be this good, but once in a while I’m proven wrong, and this time I’m glad. My biggest worry right now is that someday they’ll release KDE 5.0. What does it take to get out of going through all these things twice?

So what about Mageia?
I realize that this self-styled review of Mageia has been more of a meditation on KDE. What about the distro itself? Well, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been using it almost exclusively on the Fun Computer, and it’s getting about a third of my laptop time. (Foresight Linux Xfce gets a lot of the work there, and I audition other distros as well.) It has been rock-solid stable in both places.

I mentioned before that the repos weren’t quite as full as they might, and someday will, be. The same may be said for updates. If you install Mageia, which I hope you will, you’ll probably wish to do the updates right away, and there won’t be as many as you will probably expect.

If you wish to install Mageia on a partition and use a pre-existing Grub, be forewarned that running update-grub on your main distribution will insert an entry for Mageia in your Grub menu, but the entry won’t work. You can add one of the following scripts to your /etc/grub.d/40_custom file:

menuentry "Mageia" {
insmod ext2
set root=(hd0,12)
linux (hd0,12)/boot/vmlinuz
initrd (hd0,12)/boot/initrd.img
}

or:

menuentry "Mageia chainloaded" {
root=(hd0,12)
chainloader +1
}

Change (hd0,12) appropriately. After you edit 40_custom, don’t forget to run update-grub. PCLinuxOS requires the same treatment. I personally launch Mageia from the first of those two scripts, and I launch Foresight Linux from a chainload. Mageia, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, and Foresight Linux are the four distros I’m familiar with that don’t play well with Grub 2.

In a weird way, I wish I could find something negative to say about Mageia. Okay, the installation was a bit slow in a couple of places, and I’m not nuts about the splash screen. There! I’ve done my job as a perceptive critic, and have inoculated myself against charges of fanboihood. Now I can get on with my life and just say that Mageia is wonderful: one of the very best distributions I have ever used.

Wow.