Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 2: Common Linux Distributions

Desktop Linux: Unveiled is a series of posts that show how to start using Linux.

Previous chapter: Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 1: What is Linux?

In this post, a few of the more well known linux distributions and desktop environments will be showcased.

Note: Clicking on the various desktops will show larger versions.

Fedora

Fedora Linux is a general-purpose linux distribution focusing on free software (ie. not containing any proprietary software) and on being on the leading edge of free software development. It can be used by all desktop users. While having many tools that developers find useful, it is can also be used as a general purpose computer desktop.

Fedora using the Gnome desktop, with the activities screen opened up

Fedora provides a variety of desktop environments; the Gnome desktop environment is the default desktop environment, although other desktop environments are available in Fedora’s various spins, which cater to varying visual aesthetics, technical requirements, and useability.

Fedora Linux can be downloaded from https://getfedora.org (note: do not add “www”, it will lead to an error page)

Debian

Debian GNU/Linux is a general purpose Linux distribution aiming to be available on a large variety of computer architectures, built on free software, and is known for its stability. The large number of software packages available under Debian and its stability are often highlighted as some of its strengths. Debian is used for a wide variety of purposes including desktops and servers, and is equally capable in both functions. Debian is often used as a base for other Linux Distributions.

Debian using the XFCE Desktop

Debian can be downloaded from https://www.debian.org/distrib/

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution based on Debian. It releases “Long Term Support versions every two years which typically are supported for at least five years, as well as intermediary releases usually every nine months. Ubuntu is often found not to be too difficult to learn to use.

Ubuntu using a custom Gnome desktop

Ubuntu can be downloaded from https://ubuntu.com/desktop (note: adding “www” optional)

Linux Mint

Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and is known for its desktop named “Cinnamon”, which was originally based on the Gnome Desktop, but was branched off into its own desktop environment which focuses on a more traditional computer desktop appearance and functionality.

Linux Mint using the Cinnanon Desktop

Linux Mint can be downloaded from https://www.linuxmint.com/download_all.php

openSUSE

openSUSE is the community version of SUSE Linux, a business and server oriented version of Linux. openSUSE is known for its use of the KDE desktop, but also uses the Gnome desktop.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is a version which updates continuously and does not require reinstallation after a certain period of time; however, it may prove more challenging to newer users, who might find openSUSE Leap more stable.

openSUSE Tumbleweed using the KDE Desktop

openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE Leap can be downloaded from https://www.opensuse.org

Other Linux Distributions

More Linux distributions, with reviews and description, can be found at https://www.distrowatch.com

Next Chapter

Desktop Linux: Unveiled Chapter 3 will show some steps to prepare to install Linux.

News Flash — Linux spotted in the wilds of Montreal — again!

Back in January I mentioned a chance meeting with someone on a commuter train using Fedora on their laptop. Well this afternoon, I had another such chance meeting in a pub.

At a 5 à 7 (Quebec speak for “Happy Hour”) at Hurley’s Irish Pub on Crescent Street this afternoon, I walked by someone with a laptop listening to the Irish musicians, and almost walked by, the Ubuntu icon in the corner of the screen was so familiar (despite being a die-hard Fedora user). I realized my error and exclaimed “Wow Ubuntu in the wild!”

I got a quick look at Ubuntu Netbook Remix using Chrome. Dan, the user, said that though he uses Firefox at home on his desktop, he finds that Chrome is way faster at least on his netbook. He said that the machine came with another Linux distro when he bought it, which he didn’t much like, so he reformatted.

Well, Dan, you made my day!

Ubuntu and Fedora LiveCDs — Ubuntu a clear winner!

I’m trying to convince a certain group to wipe their virus infected (and no doubt with trojan horses, key loggers, and spyware) computer over to linux, and so I’ve burned the Fedora 12 Live CD and the Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD.

I don’t want to bother giving them the Fedora Live CD. The Ubuntu CD is far too slick. And, the Fedora Live CD is far too vanilla. And that’s despite my usual rivalry with Ubuntu; at first glance, the killer is the inclusion of OpenOffice.org on the Ubuntu CD, while Fedora has the lightweight (albeit otherwise capable) AbiWord. Even the brown looks bright and welcoming, as opposed to Fedora’s more conservative, dull greyish-blue.

Add to that the directory of various files introducing Ubuntu, what it’s about, and even a sample mortgage calculator, and it’s little wonder that Ubuntu gets a whole lot of first timers straight out of the gate, or that first timers settle on Ubuntu after trying a bunch of other distros. As a marketing tool (at least for the desktop), the Ubuntu CD wins hands down; I’m not even sure that fully set up via traditional means from the DVD or full set of CD’s Fedora is this flashy.

I’ve been telling people for a while that “I use Fedora, but you’ll find Ubuntu easier”. I’ve just seen the proof. Seeing the CD, I would want to start afresh with it. I won’t of course, but I was impressed.

I’m wondering, though, which is the real killer — the inclusion of OpenOffice.org, or the directory introducing Ubuntu? I bet that were Fedora to mount a similar directory, including how to expand upon the base supplied on the CD, that people might take it up a bit more. I’m thinking of things like “Accustomed to OpenOffice.org? Go here and this is what you do.” or a “top five” “what to do once you install the Fedora base (or even just the Live-CD)” based on “Common desktop tasks”, “Setting up a home file and media server”, or the usual choices found in the standard anaconda setup.

I’m even thinking that the Ubuntu Live CD is productive — and “complete” — right away with its little directory, forget having little tutorials.

I guess that I should find out about whether or not Fedora does something like this, though … 🙂

It’s tax time, and the Government of Canada supports linux!

Doing a bit of research for tax-time, I went to Service Canada’s website to get some extra information needed. I finally figured out how to navigate through some pages, and whaddya know, they support two linux distributions: Fedora (they added, incorrectly, “Core”) 8 — which of course now is out of date — and Ubuntu 7.1, which I suppose was really 7.10. I suppose to some government person who doesn’t quite understand Ubuntu’s version numbering system, 7.1 and 7.10 are “about the same” — of course, were there any validity at all, it would represent the January 2007 release of Ubuntu, which never existed, as opposed to the October 2007 release. 🙂

I was pleased to see them finally picking up the slack, even if this was put in place about 2 years ago. 🙂

And of course, here’s the screenshot, with the appropriate areas highlighted.

Service Canada Supports Linux!

Linux, the mainstream, and market penetration

Back in January, I related a story of a billboard I’d seen in October and how the software being advertised happened to be available for Windows, Mac, AND Linux.

Everyone who cares (that’s about, what, five of us) knows about “MovieOS” or “Hollywod OS” — computer sceenshots that are obviously custom shots that are in-house artwork. You know, either the animated PlaySkool shots showing people to click on the “GO” button regarding going to their store to spend lots of money on their wares, or, it’s a screenshot that “looks” like it’s a functional computer screen but doesn’t look like any computer desktop people are familiar with or any other computer desktop on the next show or movie you watch.

I’ve been noticing things on occasion in the mainstream media for a couple of years regarding computer screenshots: Not only is it not Windows or Mac, it’s not “MovieOS” either. What you see is a variant of the Gnome desktop, usually on Ubuntu (for those of you who have no clue what to look for, watch for two white lines on the screen, one on the top of the screen, and one on the bottom, and a light brown background to the rest of the screen.)

Listen up folks, here’s one of the moments that I think Mr. Shuttleworth’s little darling is doing some good.

In late 2007, there was a CBC Marketplace report on the various download speeds of the various high-speed internet suppliers across Canada. A closeup of the download progress window made it clear that each participant was downloading the Ubuntu CD of the day.

Just today on CNN I noticed in an ad for AT&T 3G USB key for highspeed mobile internet — this is the one with Bill Curtis in a boxing ring bragging about how fast he is — and the laptops appear to be running Ubuntu.

These are the two that come to mind. However, every couple of months, what do I see? An Ubuntu screen. I rather suspect that the reason for this trend as well as most instances of “MovieOS” is that it’s cheaper — including the cost of paying the computer technician in the back the time to reformat a computer, assuming that they didn’t just ask the guys in back to lend them their laptop, or of course asking the art department to make up something that looks nice — than paying any licensing fees to MS, Apple, or anyone else. Or, they didn’t get a sweet enough product placement deal from MS or Apple or whatever computer manufacturer in the advertising department’s rolodex.

I’d say that Linux — be it Linux in general, Ubuntu, any other distro, or the fact that there is a wide choice out there, in this case I don’t care — seems to be making some headway. Here’s one of the examples where I’ll concede the point that if people think Linux, they think Ubuntu, and that that’s OK.

Hmmm … OO.o differences, Fedora, and Ubuntu

In my post I may just have that reason to get rid of Ubuntu I whined about minor differences between “stock” OpenOffice.org appearances and functions and those I used straight off the OO.o website as well as what ships with Fedora.

This blog (here’s my archive) explains a bit why: It says “Many Linux distributions ship ooo-build. … Fedora ships a modified OpenOffice.org, but Fedora does not use ooo-build.” Which means that in keeping with Fedora’s usual policy, it ships upstream versions of software with only reasonably required modifications to make it work under Fedora. When I was using CentOS, I was using the vanilla version directly from OO.o.

That explains a few things. It doesn’t necessarily justify my whining — nor all the changes Ubuntu or other distros (or even Fedora) make, but … Why mess with a good thing? 🙂

Vino-server appears to have struck again!

Back a couple of years ago, my CentOS-4.6 system was slowing down to near unuseability. Using the Top command at a command line, there seemed to be this service listed at the top called Vino taking up a good amount of resources. My brother looked at it, researched it, and set up an hourly cron job to kill the vino-server every hour, and the problem was solved.

Back last fall, I was getting this notion, while running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, that the system had slowed down a bit much the same way that Windows 2000 is a little slower than Win98. When I switched back to Fedora 10, I noticed the same thing. However, I never noticed a return of the infamous vino-server.

Then last week I figure it’s time to get more memory and decided to pull out my 512meg memory stick and go with it, for comparative purposes to make sure I get the right thing, to the store to get a twin for it, or a 1gig stick, in the hopes that either a gig or a 1.5 gigs would improve performance. I’m cheap and was pleased to pick up what appeared to be a nearly-new, opened box of 1gig of SDR2 667mhz for $5.

Well, I guess those of you who actually know what to do around an open computer are chuckling by now and know that my new purchase doesn’t fit in my DDR slots, the little slot in the DDR2 stick being about a millimetre or two over from the same slot in DDR memory sticks.

In the meantime I of course put my original memory stick back and notice over the past week that my computer is becoming increasingly bogged down to unuseability. During the week I found a website that seemed to make my computer freeze, but others didn’t. Today I mention the general slowness that the computer has bogged down to to my brother who looks at things and he has a flash of memory. A quick hourly cron job is set up to kill vino-server, and my computer works fine again.

It’s an Ubuntu World After All …

So last night I went to a Linux Meetup up here in the Wonderful City of Montreal, my hometown. I have my laptop up and running. Another participant walks up to it, notices the stylized “F” in the upper left-hand corner of my gnome desktop beside the “Applications” pull-down menu, and says “Ooooo, that’s different …”

The person using my laptop matter-of-factly responds, “Well sure, it’s Fedora” and continues with what he’s doing. I enjoyed that.

(Curiously, at the same time, I wonder what was going through his head as he switched the default keyboard over to US-English. Montreal is a predominantly French-speaking city, the second-largest French speaking city after Paris, in fact; I’m a native-English speaker, operating my computer in English, using a Canadian-French keyboard; he, a native-French speaker, obviously preferring the US-English layout.)

At a previous such meeting, I found it refreshing to observe two people on opposite sides of an heated discussion: One, annoyed that “When people think of Linux they think of Ubuntu” and argues how the wonderful thing about Linux is the diversity and choice, how everyone can drive the colour of car they wish, and it doesn’t have to be black. The other is arguing not so much in favour of Ubuntu per se, but the notion that if one distro is strong enough and helps move the Linux cause forward, so be it, it’s a good thing.

Uggghh … I need a bar of soap

I think I’m going to be sick. 🙁

I never cared for Debian and derivatives because Debian never seems organized enough to get a new release out. In all honesty I’ve never tried Debian. I hate Ubuntu, mostly because I’m very suspicious of anything with great marketing hype and hordes of fanboys to boot. (So much for my initial suspicion of the Stargate movie in 1994 and all of its over-hyping; I have long since wished I had overcome this and gone to see it in the theatres, and I do love SG1 in reruns. 🙂 )

Last week my brother and I were jumping hoops again and again to get my printer working under Centos 5.2. Last January we’d gone to a lot of trouble to get it to work under Centos 4.6 (I finally upgraded to the 5.0 series about a month ago.) No matter how many hoops we’d jump through and resolve there were still more, or another set would surface. Realize that this is a relatively new printer that must have come out at least last fall if not earlier, my brother received it as part of a “throw it in with the new laptop he bought” kind of deal. Red Hat therefore had gone through at least one update, if not two (at least 5.2 if not also 5.1) to add the appropriate drivers or move to the next HPLIP version that would support the printer. To give you an idea, Centos 5.2 comes with HPLIP 1.6.something, my printer needs at least 1.7.something, and the current version is 2.8.something.

Seems to me that commodity printers should be supported, it’s not as though a corporate situation doesn’t use printers. Though they would probably say that my line of printers is too commodity for an enterprise to be interested in, they probably want high-capacity, high-quality printers, not an inkjet meant for the consumer market.

I knew that the printer worked under ubuntu since I tried a live CD from them and it worked without saying boo. My brother was “willing” to continue trying to get it to work but was pushing hard to switch. “You can always switch back to Centos you know.”

The printer was a killer. So is getting wireless on my laptop, using a several years old (about 4 years old) pcmcia wireless card; under CentOS 4.6 I had a kernel under which it worked but any time there was a kernel upgrade I would have to switch back if I wanted to use the wireless. We hadn’t done anything yet about the wireless but had a plan.

I still haven’t gotten the wireless to work under Ubuntu but to be fair I haven’t tried yet at all.

My first reaction was that Ubuntu was the Playskool version of linux.

I also HATE the fact that the default user under Ubuntu is a defacto root user — first thing I did was get rid of the annoying sudo requirement by assigning a password to root, but it’s not of much value because so far I haven’t come across anything in Ubuntu that really requires root the way it would under ANY other linux distribution, other than the fact that it constantly asks for passwords to do anything. Also annoying is that I can’t log root into a gui to do things that way (including to REMOVE the default user from the admin ring.)

This may be the undoing of Ubuntu along the lines of the way that Windows is plagued with problems because most of the time the default user has admin rights and can install and run just about anything unless the Admin user shuts it down. The only upside is that it always asks for your password, but I expect that most windows converts would find this annoying and just mindlessly enter their password just to get on with things.

Once I got over the shock, the problem now is that the user experience, other than the administration to which I’m accustomed mostly doing under a command line instead of gui, is identical to Centos. (The main ubuntu distro desktop is gnome, as is the case for Centos.) Admittedly, the Synaptic gui package manager along with the extensive Ubuntu repo vs. the Centos repos is as good as they say, and worth the switch. And 8.04.1 is an LTS version, meaning that it’s supported for 3 years instead of having to go through the reformat treadmill every 6 months (OK, Fedora supports versions for a month after the release of the second release following, meaning about 12-13 months.)

I hope that RHEL (and hence Centos) shapes up and realizes that some people like using as a desktop, and that making it at least vaguely usable without pulling teeth and hair is as important as making it stable.

I have to go now and wash my mouth out with soap.