Debian and A Graphical Environment

It’s been some time since I re-installed Debian over my Kubuntu install, so I thought I’d discuss some reasons why I changed back to Debian, what my experience was like, and some learning opportunities.

One reason I made the switch was because there was a utility newly packaged for Debian, Frama-C, which was not available in Kubuntu at the time. It also frustrated me that I was having various frustrations with the installation, not the least of which was an unreliable and quite crashy KDE Plasma.

When I reinstalled this time, I picked the normal install but told it to install a graphical environment, which gave me a GNOME desktop environment. I actually rather like it, the setup didn’t ask too many questions and everything was set up perfectly. There was some minor tweaking, but it was all done by the easily accessible System menu and all the applets therein.

Now, I wanted to be able to use the server both as a virtual machine and as a physical dual-boot. This wasn’t working properly with GRUB-2, so I had to stay with version 1.96, which works rather well. I even spent some time making a pretty splashimage for it, which looks rather nice, even if I don’t see it all that often.

If I boot into the Virtual Machine, all the hardware is detected properly, and there aren’t even complaints about the fact that a bunch of hardware disappeared — certainly very good news if you decide to do something like move your hard drive to a different machine. Likewise, if I boot into the desktop, everything works well there too.

One issue I came across during the installation was having to teach Network-Manager how to configure my network interfaces. In my VMware NAT setup, there is no DHCP server, so the IP address, subnet and gateway information needs to be statically defined. Luckily, Network-Manager was able to do this based on the MAC address of the adapter — inside my virtual machine, it had a VMware-assigned static one. Through this, Network-Manager had an easy way to determine how to configure my network, and it works beautifully for Ethernet and Wireless (when Debian is running as the main operating system) and also for VMware NAT (when inside the virtual machine container).

Anyway, I have now been developing quite happily inside a Debian + GNOME desktop environment. The system runs fine even within a constrained environment, though I miss KDE’s setup with sudo; with GNOME, the option seems to be to have the root password entered every time privilege escalation is necessary. I don’t like using a root password — on my server system I don’t use the root password at all, and do everything I need to do via sudo. It’s okay for me because I log into the server with a private key and have disabled SSH password authentication for security reasons.

One thing that is still weird for me is that my system currently shows a time of 01:53 even though it is 23:57 in my timezone. Presumably the few minutes of difference is because the virtual machine clock and my system hardware clock aren’t synchronized perfectly, but more than that, I think it’s an issue with the Date applet somehow. I haven’t looked into this because the thing is running inside a virtual machine, so it doesn’t bother me much.

I have looked high and low to see where to change the time zone, and to my knowledge the system knows that it’s in the America/Toronto time zone. The house picture next to Timmins (the city I am in right now, though it doesn’t matter since the timezone is the same) seems to indicate to me that it’s set to the appropriate time zone.

I think it’s due to VMware synchronizing the virtual machine clock with my host machine clock. Windows (my host operating system) stores the time in the local format, which I believe Linux thinks is UTC. Still, it doesn’t explain the weird display it’s got going.

Someone noted last time that I didn’t make direct mention of which programs are only offered on Windows and not on Linux/etc, and that do not have reasonable replacement on these systems. Kapil Hari Paranjape noted that I was sounding somewhat like a troll by simply saying that I don’t think Linux is yet ready to replace my environment. Here was my reply:

Far from a troll, I’d really like Debian and Ubuntu, but moreso Linux in general, to improve at the pace it has been doing so. It’s made great progress since the last time I tried it out on my desktop, but I have to acknowledge that there are lots of rough edges right now that should be worked out.

One of the advantages of huge proprietary development organizations like Microsoft is that they have tons of developers and can implement new features at a relatively quick pace, even if they’re half-assed. Developers’ pride in the FOSS community prevents this overly quick pace of development in favour of more secure, more stable platforms. Which is a good thing, I think. But nonetheless it results in a “slower” development pace.

The applications I’m complaining about are things like:
– SolidWorks (a CAD tool for designing parts and assemblies, used in manufacturing and mechanical engineering)
– SpectrumSoft Micro-Cap (a version of software similar to PSpice used by my school)
– AutoCAD (another CAD tool)

Luckily this is changing, but only for the large & most popular distributions:
– MathWorks MATLAB (runs on Linux and Solaris, etc.)
– Wolfram Mathematica (which has versions for Linux and MacOS X)
– FEKO (runs on Linux and Solaris among others)

Anyway, I still consider SolidWorks to be a rather big program not supported on Linux, which is a big issue for those working on Civil Engineering programs. There are most probably others which are very domain-specific that I don’t even know about.

There is a nice matrix comparing cross-platform capabilities of CAD software: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CAD_software

Oh, one final thought: perhaps that KDE Recommends: should be moved to a Suggests: instead, on account of its heavy dependencies, requiring mysql-server installed on desktop machines.. WTF!

Oh, and on another note, I re-installed Debian using the non-expert Auto Install and it installed Gnome rather flawlessly, much like installing Ubuntu, which was pretty nice. So kudos to those who have been working on the main installer; it seems as though the advanced ones really give you some rope to hang yourself with, though :-)

Oh, and k3ninho told me that there is an initiative from the Ubuntu community called “100 Paper Cuts” to help fix small bugs like those I was complaining about. I hope this leads to an improved user experience, and I’d really like to see some of those changes propagated both upstream to Debian and upstream to the KDE folk.

During my install of Kubuntu + KDE, I felt that plasma was crashing more than Windows Explorer — it felt like the days when I was running Windows ME, and the shell would crash, and the system would restart it. Repeatedly. It’s exactly what seemed to happen with plasma. I’m not sure if it was something I screwed up during configuration (presumably so), but KDE was far too complicated for me to try and debug. It might also have been a result of me running my system within a fairly constrained virtual machine environment – the system only gets 768MB of RAM and no access to the actual graphics processor unit (since it’s virtualized).

Read Full Post »

Dual Booting Debian and VMware

Okay, so allow me to explain my personal development platform. I use Windows XP Professional as my primary operating system for various reasons, but I develop software for Linux (mostly because I like Linux, but also because I intend for a lot of my software to be used on my own servers, all of which can be considered Unix-like).

Because I prefer Windows for daily use, I’ve built various tools around the operating system and have become quite attached to them. I really like TortoiseSVN and Notepad++, for example. I’ve just gotten used to running Windows.

Anyway, I wanted to see if I could transition into using Linux for everything, and because I work in Debian and have servers running Debian, I installed Debian. I had some trouble at first, prompting me to change to Kubuntu, but later came back to Debian after realizing that the packages in unstable and testing that I’d come to love were under an entirely different process in Ubuntu, which is currently unknown to me.

So long Ubuntu, I’ve re-installed Debian and love it so far. One problem I’ve noticed is that Debian would not boot inside VMware Workstation under Windows, while Kubuntu was able to do so out-of-the-box. Instead, I got an error like this:

WARNING bootdevice may be renamed. Try root=/dev/hda2
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
 - Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
   - Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
   - Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
 - Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/sda2 does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

Looking into it further, it turned out I could edit the command line options to use a different device name–the debug output was right, I had to use /dev/hda2 instead of /dev/sda2–and things would work. The system would boot up normally, and everything was good. I guess it had to do with my drives actually being SATA (which I suppose are treated like SCSI drives); whereas VMware Workstation (in my setup) presents them as simple IDE drives.

But then I got to wondering how Ubuntu totally got around this problem, and it turns out that Ubuntu uses UUID identifiers to point to a hard drive. After searching on Google, it turns out that using UUIDs is convenient because it can handle cases where drives are removed; especially with external drives, or even re-arranging the drives inside your computer for whatever reason.

Using the command “blkid” from Debian (do this as root), you can get the UUID of all the partitions. You can either reboot into Linux using your normal dual-boot method (selecting the option from GRUB, etc), or you can edit the boot options from GRUB explictly to use /dev/hda2 temporarily. Once you boot into your Debian installation, you can edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to use drive UUIDs instead of /dev names.

Instead of:

# kopt=root=/dev/hda1 ro

or similar, you can change this to:

# kopt=root=UUID=<info from blkid for /dev/hda1> ro

Then you can use ‘update grub’ to update grub’s automagic menu.lst information, so that the new root is recognized. This way, however your disk is installed, the UUID will be detected and the appropriate drive mounted/booted. I haven’t tried this, but I suppose this would help if you have an operating system on a bootable USB drive or something, to help you select those partitions (though I don’t know if GRUB will even detect them on a boot. I’m hoping so since most BIOSes these days support booting from USB Mass Storage Media).

Good luck, I hope this helps somebody out there :-)

Read Full Post »

Experiences With Debian and Kubuntu

For my Google Summer of Code project, I have been working with PerlQt4 bindings, which requires that I have Qt4 installed. While this is technically possible under a Win32 environment. Lots of people in the free software community vehemently oppose Windows, but while it has its flaws, I think overall the hardware support is still much better than Linux. True, this is because of Microsoft’s shady business practices, and because many companies keep their driver source code closed. I’m still using Windows XP Professional and quite happy with it, stability-wise and feature-wise.

As an Engineer, many applications we use on a regular basis are simply not available on Linux. They’re simply not replaceable with the current state of open source software, though there is some great stuff out there. Nonetheless, we’re still far from a point where engineers in general can switch to Linux — the application support is as important to an operating system as the kernel. Linux would be nothing without GNU’s binutils, for example.

I tried to install Debian first, as this is an environment I’m very familiar with. I use Debian on my development server, and it has worked wonders there. But everything I do on that server is command-line stuff. When trying to install a desktop environment, I followed the KDE Configuration Wizard, which isn’t too bad, but it expects an Internet connection throughout the process. The problem was that I didn’t have enough Ethernet cables to have both the desktop computer and my laptop plugged in at the same time, even though I had a wireless router set up, which meant I had to unplug the computer while updating packages, etc. Some of the updates took quite a bit of time, which was inconvenient for everyone else.

I eventually got the system to install, and told tasksel to set up a desktop environment. It was installing stuff, I typed ‘apt-get install kde’ and assumed everything would Just Work. After installing a whole bunch of stuff (which included a local install of mysqld, on a desktop machine?! — turns out it was due to one of KDE’s recommended packages, it starts with an A, I forget which). Anyway, then the environment didn’t “just work” as I had expected. Upon booting up my system, it just dropped me to a command line prompt. Fine, I thought, I’ll just use startx. But that was broken too. So after another few hours of fiddling I just gave up altogether.

While trying Ubuntu (the last time I had done so was probably in version 7 or so), I downloaded a recent image of Kubuntu 9.04, the Ubuntu flavour using KDE as a default desktop environment. It’s surprising that there has been lots of progress in Ubuntu and Linux in general. I have found that driver support is much better than it used to be, as it now detects my network card – a Broadcom 43xx chip – and does everything it needs to do. For the most part, my operating system “Just Works.” Great. This looks like something I might be able to slowly transition toward, completely replacing Windows except inside WINE or a Virtual Machine container.

Has Debian and Ubuntu made lots of progress? Sure. I can definitely see that Ubuntu is geared a lot more to the average user, while Debian provides bleeding-edge features to the power user. Unfortunately, despite being involved in packaging Perl modules for Debian, I fall into the former category. I’d really just like my desktop system to just work. Oh, and dual monitor support out-of-the-box would be nice too — I hear the new KDE and Gnome support this.

One thing Windows handles rather well is changing hardware profiles – when my computer is connected to its docking station, a ton of peripherals are attached. When I undock, they’re gone. Windows handles this rather gracefully. In Kubuntu, I got lots of notification boxes repeatedly telling me that eth2 was disconnected, etc. This sort of thing is undecipherable for the average user, so I’d really just like for these operating systems to be more human-friendly before they are ready for prime time on the desktop.

Read Full Post »