Interesting new developments in Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 6

Although I don't use Ubuntu anymore, I still try to keep up with the news on it, and I've tested the upcoming Intrepid a couple of times recently. There have been some interesting developments which I'd like to let you know about.

Installation

I used the netboot (mini.iso) method of installation. Some of the options may not be available in the graphical install.

1. Intrepid now offers to automatically create a private, encrypted directory within each user's home directory.
   
   
2. There are several options for automatic updates, including an option to use Canonical's Landscape, a tool for managing clients in an enterprise environment. With this choice and the possibility of pre-seeding the installation shows that Canonical is making a concerted push into Red Hat's cherished enterprise business.
   
3. There are an enormous number of tasks. Non-Debian users might consider these profiles for client machines. There are so many that they go well off of the first page. Servers. All the Ubuntu sub-projects. They're all there. The Ubuntu server project has added several new server types.
   

The Desktop

1. The Screen Resolution applet now has a tag to show which monitor you're adjusting. This is extremely useful for multiple-monitor setups.
   
2. Over the last few days, the logout panel applet has been completely replaced by the new user-switching agent. It offers switching to the new, limited-permission guest account. When Pidgin or Empathy are running, you can also use it to change online status.
   
   
3. Although Intrepid still uses the Human theme by default, the darker NewHuman theme is available in the installation.
   
4. Totem comes with a new plugin to access BBC videos.
   
5. Although Mozilla has pulled back on its EULA requirement, it was still in Intrepid on the 20th.
   
6. Rhythmbox now has a plugin to make it minimize to the notification area. This behavior is against Gnome's HIG, but it is the behavior expected by many users. This screenshot also shows that popular plugins like cover art and DAAP are now enabled by default.
   

Well, that's the quick look at what's changed recently. I'll update in a couple of weeks.

Does Linux Lag Windows? If So, Why? Part 1

It's often claimed that Linux is not as prepared for the desktop as MS Windows (hereafter called just "Windows") is. I'd like to compare the time-lines for some parts of the Desktop systems to figure out whether that's true and if so, why it might be.

The Kernels

Let's start with the kernel. Given that yesterday was the seventeenth birthday of teh Linux kernel (by some accounts), I thought it was appropriate to start there.

Linux 0.01 was released on Sept 17th, 1991. It couldn't run enough of a system to compile itself. Linux hit the 1.0 mark in March, 1994, nearly three years later.

When did the Windows kernel hit 1.0? I'm not sure that question can be answered. Windows 1.0 (really, 1.01) was released in November of 1985 (almost 23 years ago), but that used MSDOS as the underlying kernel, which saw its 1.0 release in August of 1981 (over 27 years ago), and I'm not sure that MSDOS uses a kernel that should be compared to modern variants in any way. Also, unfortunately, modern Windows doesn't use any of this kernel. The first NT kernel was released with Windows NT 3.1 in July, 1993, which effectively makes the 3.1 release the actual "1.0," and also makes it the elder of Linux 1.0 by less than a year. They are essentially the same age.

Both kernels had networking in their first real releases. The NT kernel had the benefit of running preexisting 16-bit Windows applications without any problem and also getting 32-bit Windows applications with a simple recompile in most cases (similar to Apple's move to Intel). Linux had the preexisting GNU tool set and many other Unix applications which were easy to port. Again, most of this seems equitable.

Drivers

What about drivers, the often cited reason for Linux's poor performance on the desktop? NT 3.1 had very limited drivers available for it, but it ran on most 386 and 486 machines. A year or two later, the NT3.X series had reasonable driver support. Linux wasn't so lucky and took much longer to get support for devices common outside the server room. Six years later, Linux was still struggling for drivers while Windows 98 / NT 4.0 had cornered their respective markets and had drivers for virtually every consumer device produced at the time. Linux got a lot of press just before 2000, but that didn't change the fact that the driver situation made it unready for prime time. The difference in driver availability between the NT kernel and the Linux kernel has diminished since then, but certainly still exists in a major way.

The Desktop including toolkits)

Desktops? Where do we stand on those?

Windows 1.0 was released in November, 1985, and saw steady development until 2000, after which the environment has been fairly stable. We'll discuss the move to .NET soon.

Linux doesn't have an official desktop, so I'll decribe the first few.

Unix had the available Motif-based Common Desktop Environment (CDE), but it was painful to use and to program for. It was supported by almost all the major Unix vendors, though, so it had a large number of applications early in Linux's history.

KDE was the first really usable open source desktop and saw the 1.0 release in July 1998. Because it was based on the QT toolkit, which at the time wasn't fully open source, there was a lot of political discussion about it.

Gnome arose as an attempt at a fully open-source desktop, including toolkit. Its 1.0 release was in March 1999, fourteen years after MS Windows released its first version. Because of Gnome's relative success on the Linux desktop, I'll be using it for comparison from this point on.

2D Graphics (outside toolkits)

MS Windows developed DirectDraw (part of DirectX) to handle modern 2D graphics requirements. It was later deprecated and the 2D rendering was taken over by Direct3D. The first release of DirectX was in 1995.

Gnome has used Cairo for its 2D rendering since 2005, but its not exactly analogous to DirectDraw. Gnome is beginning to use a new OpenGL-based canvas named Clutter.

Direct3D is definitely more mature than any of the Gnome options.

3D Graphics

Microsoft uses Direct3D to render 3D images.

Gnome uses OpenGL, which , though venerable (c.1992), is supposedly more difficult to write for, but good front-ends like SDL exist for it. Then there's Clutter.

Again, DirectX beats out Gnome's choices for right now, though Clutter and SDL are developing well.

Sound and Video

Microsoft has, again, DirectSound and DirectX. It's mature and (supposedly) easy to use.

Gnome now has the GStreamer framework.  Gstreamer began as a separate project in 1999, but was only included as a part of Gnome in 2.2 in February, 2003. GStreamer 0.10 is also mature and easy to use.

This area appears to be a draw between the two.

Part 2 will talk about applications native to Windows and Gnome. That promises to be a much less technical and more divisive comparison.

Debian2Debian Represented Visually

Click for the full image. Solid lines are complete features. Dotted lines indicate planned features.

Happy Chuseok!

It's a long 5-day weekend, and I would normally post 2-5 times on a holiday, but Chuseok is probably the most important holiday here, and I'll be busy with other things this weekend. Apologies.

Notes on Chrome, Google's New Browser

Sure, you could read 38 pages of the slow-loading, comic book explanation over thirty minutes, but why should you have to?

1. It's open source (though what license, I'm not sure).
2. It's trying to be built form the ground up with "Web 2.0" in mind, meaning it needs a lot of Javascript speedup.
3. It uses, not a multi-threaded design, but a multi-process-design, which incurs some extra overhead but which also means there's no memory creep and that closed tabs (each tab is a process) return 100% of the allocated memory.
4. Because of the above, bad plug-ins or websites can't crash or freeze your entire browser, just the tab. Enter the "sad tab."
5. Also related..., you can monitor individual websites for performance.
6. It will use Webkit.
7. They are touting platform independence and mention the ability to embed.
8. The Javascript VM is going to include a JIT compiler.
9. It's tab-oriented, and tabs can be detached.
10. It has "porn-mode."
11. It has a Prism-like mode for web apps like Google Docs
12. It has a "default deny" security policy and sandboxes as much as possible.
13. It includes Google Gears for off-line work.

There's no code, though. Until there is, it's just vaporware.

Is it Hollywood, or is it eLive?

I took a look at the newest snapshot of eLive, which is E17 on top of Debian. It looks like someone watched a few Hollywood versions of what an interface is. Snazzy. Really, really snazzy.

Things I Miss When I'm Forced to Work in Windows

I do 95% of everything in Debian Gnome, but my school standardized on Windows XP. As a result, there are times when I'm required to use it (e.g. I'm teaching in a classroom that's not mine). There are a few things that I really miss, even when the work is shallow and quick.

1. Good window management: The scroll wheel in Windows only works when I click inside IE. I can't just move my mouse over the window and start scrolling. This takes a lot more work than you'd think it does. There's also not "Always on top" choice, meaning cluttered space becomes really annoying, bringing me to my second point
2. Virtual desktops or workspaces: When the space is cluttered, which is normal because I'm on someone else's computer and can't close any of the stuff they left open, I can't just switch to a new desktop to start fresh. It really sucks. If you live in Windows, you have no idea how much this one hurts.
3. Middle-click to paste: Because I'm pasting from stuff all the time, I can normally hold two states, the Ctrl-C one and the highlighted one. That means, for example, if I want to paste the name of an article and the link to it, I can normally highlight one, copy, then highlight the other, move over to my blog or wherever and paste both in without switching back. There are a million other uses for this stuff. Highlighting and middle-clicking is just easier, anyway. Speaking of easy ...
   
4. The deskbar applet: I can generally just highlight the word or phrase that I want to search for, look up, or note and just hit Alt-F3. Everything is right there and it's painless.
5. A decent file system: I never know where stuff is buried in Windows. Data is just as likely to be on drive C: as it is on drive D:. If it is on drive C:, how many layers do I need to go down to find user stuff, and is that stuff in the "All Users" section or the one I'm logged in as (which I never seem to know the name of because it's no my computer)? Absolute rubbish.
6. A well laid-out menu: Even if I don't know where an application is in Gnome, it's easy to find the menu entry because the menu is categorized. Every Windows machine I work on has a menu which is longer than the screen and which has no identifiable layout other than (sometimes) the software house that made it.
7. Pop-ups: Everything is always popping up to bother me, even if I've got a presentation going. Sure, no problem, just tell me that I need to so updates in the middle of a full-screen presentation. Send ugly little system noises over my listening exercise.
8. Mime-type handling: Want to download a PDF from a site? Sometimes it'll work and sometimes it won't. Sometimes the PDF plugin crashes the whole browser. And what if I want to use a different program to open it, but don't want to change the default on a computer which isn't mine? No right-click "Open with..." menu of apps to choose from.
   
9. Honorable mention -- Two panels: This doesn't actually bother me, but it would if I had to use a Windows computer full-time. One panel just isn't wide enough. The menu is the single-button variety. The task bar is always crowded by the notification area, which itself is too long for the area it is put in, so it folds over on itself. Oh, and the notification area has that awful expand button that only works for a second until you actually find the icon you want to click, then closes before you can do that. There's no space to put a bunch of common launchers. I don't even know if Windows can do an applet or not. If I had to use that crippled panel all the time ....
   

Whew. Was that enough? I'm sure there would be a much longer list if I wanted to go into applications, but I just wanted to cover the core OS and the way it's designed to work. Maybe I'll get into apps another time. Contextual right-click, anyone?