Slashdot Mirror

ClearType-like rendering for Linux exists: it's called Infinality patchset for FreeType. Screenshot (be sure to view at 100% zoom, and pay attention to small letters, that are usually botched pretty badly on vanilla FT).

The only problem is that I don't know any distro which has it out of the box. Arch is probably easiest to set it up on, because it has the package in AUR.

http://archlinux.org/

I gave up on Ubuntu really early (9.04) but I moved to Arch and haven't looked back since. Give it a try, but don't expect it to hold your hand.

And as a parting shot at Linux users, Adobe introduces a major regression (hardware accelerated video tints everything blue, e.g. YouTube), claims it can't be reproduced, and closes all bug reports about it, leaving users to implement a nasty hack individually.

And as a parting shot at Linux users, Adobe introduces a major regression (hardware accelerated video tints everything blue, e.g. YouTube), claims it can't be reproduced, and closes all bug reports about it, leaving users to implement a nasty hack individually.

Arch Linux will probably support it in a few days. The packages have been marked outdated and there is already a 3.3rc7-1 ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=50893 )release in the wild that will probably be the basis for the updated to 3.3.

I rewrote the pidgin-otr plugin to use plain libpurple a few months ago. It will work on anything that libpurple works on, including finch. You can read about it here

http://lists.cypherpunks.ca/pipermail/otr-dev/2011-December/001226.html

and grab the code here

https://gitorious.org/purple-otr#more

There's already a package for it in Arch Linux.
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=55511

How To Assign Printing Administration Capabilities To Users
CUPS administration
that just took me a minute or so to find these links.

Mr Torvalds - rtfm.

and i for one am happy that this is NOT the default, but that as an admin one has to make a conscious decision to give a user access.

Why is it so wrong to use the proprietary drivers?

I'm going to give you an example. My parents computer which is actually a laptop with a GeForce FX Go 5300 has GNU/Linux on it. The last official driver from nvidia supporting that card is nvidia-drivers-96.xx. Then if you read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA :

Note: Currently nvidia-173xx, nvidia-96xx and nvidia-71xx drivers do not support Xorg release 1.11, and therefore are not available in the Official Repositories. You can use the open source drivers (nouveau or nv) instead.

I belive the drivers still worked under Xorg 1.10 under a compatibility layer. But my point is, if the vendor decides to stop supporting your hardware, you are left in cold waters if there isn't any opensource driver..

Another example is the XRandR case. Nvidia bundles the nvidia-settings application which works fine if you use it. However if you want to use the KDE or gnome or whatever other software to change the screen resolution and multiple-screens, then you will notice how bad they work BECAUSE nvidia fails to properly implement the XRandR specification (instead they make some kind of wrapper to their own twinview). With nouveau, XRandR works beautifully.
Because nvidia also emulates Xinerama, sometimes window managers fail to properly detect your multi-screen setup geometry and you will get strange window management results. This happened to me and that's why I perfectly happy with nouveau. Of course I still hit bugs when playing opengl games and sometimes the GPU even hardlocks but I honestly prefer having those localized bugs than the general inconsistencies I described above.

BTW: cudos to everyone involved in nouveau. OpenCL support is indeed a very good thing :)

I have had a lot of time to deal with this, as I dropped ubunturd 3-4 years ago, as I found that every dist upgrade horribly broke the system, and that I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get my custom modifications and kernels not to cause dependency hells...

I'm personally very partial to ArchLinux for my daily driver laptop. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a tweaker and ricer on my laptop, but Arch is perfect for that...

You control every aspect, as you set the system up from the ground up, and it's packages are always more up to date than most distros. It's package management is faster by far than apt, and the PKGBUILD building system gives even the most novice compiler of software what they need to package any application not included in the distro, build any of thousands of premade PKGBUILDs in the AUR repository, and rebuild and modify anything that is already packaged by the distro via ABS.

My server, however, runs Debian testing - which is rock solid...if you need something that "just works," Debian is definitely the way to go.

In my mind, these are the only two distros that exist, as I've been unimpressed with any others, unless you count the TAILS livecd when using public computers, for paranoia's sake.

I have had a lot of time to deal with this, as I dropped ubunturd 3-4 years ago, as I found that every dist upgrade horribly broke the system, and that I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get my custom modifications and kernels not to cause dependency hells...

I'm personally very partial to ArchLinux for my daily driver laptop. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a tweaker and ricer on my laptop, but Arch is perfect for that...

You control every aspect, as you set the system up from the ground up, and it's packages are always more up to date than most distros. It's package management is faster by far than apt, and the PKGBUILD building system gives even the most novice compiler of software what they need to package any application not included in the distro, build any of thousands of premade PKGBUILDs in the AUR repository, and rebuild and modify anything that is already packaged by the distro via ABS.

My server, however, runs Debian testing - which is rock solid...if you need something that "just works," Debian is definitely the way to go.

In my mind, these are the only two distros that exist, as I've been unimpressed with any others, unless you count the TAILS livecd when using public computers, for paranoia's sake.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CMYK_support_in_The_GIMP

I have to find another linux that gives me just a shell and apt-get and some more.

http://www.archlinux.org/

You can try checking out the Arch Linux Wiki on System Encryption at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/System_Encryption_with_LUKS

1. The files in the tarball relative to /.
2. A small metadata file recording e.g. dependencies, any configuration files that should be backed up.
3. (Optional) A small file containing bash functions that will be executed before and after installation, upgrades, or removal.

Setting up Arch Linux is not hard. The article at http://lifehacker.com/5680453/build-a-killer-customized-arch-linux-installation-and-learn-all-about-linux-in-the-process is particularly useful. I did not even need to refer to the guide. Just followed the instructions at LifeHacker and then used the Arch Wiki to configure and fine tune things from there. So yeah, I can do it. But I found a better way.

Interesting choice of terms, "better". I think most Arch users would disagree, especially since most of them don't share your preference for OpenBox, and would find it undesirable cruft.

Of course, it goes without saying that "better" is subjective, and it's ok if ArchBang's better for you (i.e. you have a fundamental philosophical disagreement with the whole Arch project). But simply representing a project with a complete reversal of The Arch Way as "Arch, but better", with no clarification of the profound philosophical difference that causes you to favor ArchBang is bound to fundamentally misrepresent one or both projects to newbs. So please stop it.

Next question: why did Arch need to reinvent the package management wheel? deb and rpm already existed. What does the Arch package format (format, not the pacman front-end) give you that other formats could not have?

- OP

Arch packages are much easier to build. This was the thing for me. You basically write a file containing the package name, version number, where to get the sources (and their checksums), and then a bash script of how to install it. Most Arch packages can be written in minutes -- which I think is why the AUR is so popular.

For example, this is the entire source for a pylibmc package:

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/py/python2-pylibmc/PKGBUILD

Notice how simple the build() section is in comparison to Debian packaging.

My favourite Arch feature is the AUR (Arch User Repository) where anyone can submit their own packages which other uses can then install.

Cool, thanks. That's a good differentiator. Most other distros have mechanisms to add unofficial repositories. But that's a lot of bother for the packager.

Next question: why did Arch need to reinvent the package management wheel? deb and rpm already existed. What does the Arch package format (format, not the pacman front-end) give you that other formats could not have?

- OP

Great documentation and vanilla packages. That about sums it up. It's like Slackware with improved package management.

I've been running systems built from Debian base for about a decade. Recently I kept running into the Arch wiki when I wanted to solve a problem. e.g. if I want to reenable ctrl-alt-backspace in Xorg. If I google that, I get a page full of shitty Ubuntu related solutions that depend on extra packages or gui configuration tools.

But there's one result that sticks out. The Arch wiki provides a nicely organized richly linked list of things you might want to configure, and how to configure them. This is how you collect and present useful information. I figured, if I find myself consistantly using the documentation for a distro, maybe I should check out the actual distro.

So I still use Debian on most of my systems, but have thrown Arch on a couple for fun. It's easy, it works, and it doesn't feel as crufty as Debian does. Package signing will make it a contender for real work. Yay Arch!

Read: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions
I don't think you have a clue tbh. I've tried most well known Linuxes (all that you mentioned and a few others), and I can tell you that there are two major differences that distros have, as far as users are concerned: 1) GUI/CLI based (which is also complex/minimalistic), 2) Regular/rolling release based.

1) Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and so on are GUI based systems, coming with fully installed DEs and offering people little choice on the initial install. Sure you can remove stuff and install simple WMs, but that just makes it harder to configure than Arch/Gentoo and even Slackware, who are made for ground-up installation. The reason I use Arch regularly is because I can configure it to do pretty much exactly what I want.

2) Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, Slackware, and a whole lot of others are using the regular (once, twice a year) release cycle. It's fine if you're using it in the office/classroom/servers, or you just don't use computers much. But often, software updates come a lot more regularly than that (Windows _software_ is rolling release!, the OS itself isn't of course), and it's always good to in the bleeding edge - unless it's you who's bleeding, and that's a potential problem (much like this update required some meddling before it would just work). And even if you do get problems every once in a while when you do rolling release updates, the huge amount of problems whenever I do a full update every 6 month on Ubuntu makes me want to do a clean install (I'm using an uptodate Arch from 2008~, did some experimenting with other linuxes). In the rolling release field it's quite similar to Gentoo (that's another power of Gentoo, it isn't just people compiling stuff for the laughs).

My favourite Arch feature is the AUR (Arch User Repository) where anyone can submit their own packages which other uses can then install.

Because of the AUR, Arch is more likely to have a package for some given obscure application that Debian would be missing. Also, these packages are kept up to date to a greater extent than you'll see on Debian. Finally they're all in one place where as you don't have to constantly add repositories to your package manager's repo list.

udisks and udev work together to let you mount devices, and udiskie uses both and does it automatically. So things show up in /mount/usb-name-here instead of sitting in /dev/bla waiting for you to mount it somewhere.

Some related information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Automount#UDisks

TL:DR https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=131196 read the information below the screenshots and take your pick! Your realization is what people were doing for many years now.

The answer is clear, if you want a complete "build it yourself" distribution, with parts hand choosen, just go for one of the command line interface based distributions, such as Arch or Gentoo, which come with a bare system.
F.e by just following Arch Linux' wiki for system installation you will get familiar with all the WM/DE choices, and depending on what you pick there you can get further specific information on the Arch wiki or specific WM, regarding systray/pager/filemanager and other utilities that work well there.

I for one have openbox with tint2, conky and pypanel, with thunar as filemanager (although I often just use coreutils when it's faster/easier). Of course, no one is forcing you to choose Arch or Gentoo, Ubuntu is fine but to me it makes no sense to choose a GUI distribution which comes hand polished for GNOME/KDE/*DE usage when you will just clean it all and install ratpoison.

If you're the kind of user that cares about boot options, you should probably be using Arch Linux

Thanks, I'm not a gnome user so I've been curious. Well, while gnome2 is still stable, unless the gnome people are extremely incompetent or the KDE people are gods I really think you gnome people are over reacting. I was no long time user of kde3 but I think kde4 has replicated 100% of the functionality and behavior of kde3 (and am curious if there are any objections to this). In the mean time, get these fixes to the MATE devs some how. I call your list of differences fixes because of the project goals of MATE. Also, see here if that previous link didn't make their intentions clear. I really think they're trying, you all would just give them a chance.

I can't speak for VIA, I have an Intel Atom based bookshelf unit that runs http://xbmc.org/ on http://archlinux.org/ as a media center, remote controlled using the XBMC android app.

It plays full HD over HDMI (audio also through HDMI). I didn't run into any issues with installation. It also holds backups and serves as network storage. It's awesome.

Here's the link to the unit I have on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856176008

GIMP is missing one thing that's pretty important in pre-press work: full built-in support for CMYK. Yes, the Separate and Separate+ plug-ins will allow you to do some work in that color model, but it's incomplete and not well-integrated.

If any GIMP developers are reading this: Please prioritize work on CMYK support! I can program a little C/C++ and am willing to help out!

I don't know what distro you're on, I personally use arch linux. They have an answer to both those problems(the power management solution is generic but the network management is an arch-only thing, I think):

Power management:
    1) http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpufreqd/ A nifty little tool that allows you to define profiles and switch to them depending on a few variables(with plugins to extend the built in variables). Handles things like AC on/off of course, but also cpu temperatures, battery percentage, etc...
    2) install acpid and modify /etc/handler.sh to react to specific acpi events(like ac on/off)

Network management: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Netcfg The nice things about netcfg is that it's easy to use and cli-based. This means you can have wifi up and running from the terminal without fooling around with wpa_supplicant. This is really useful for me because my laptop has switchable graphics and I've been experimenting with automatically detecting which card has been selected from the bios and loading the appropriate drivers(it so happens that the catalyst and intel driver packages are mutually exclusive on arch). This leaves me without any graphics on boot quite a few times and it's nice to still have internet access when that happens.

Thanks for sharing. Here's the link for it I found:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATE

I like polish and a good-looking desktop, but functionality comes first, and I basically just want to be able to work, not wonder what the flavor of the week desktop is now.

So please stop with that "neutral vs bias" nonsense.

OK, that suits me fine.

Until a few weeks ago, I had a MacBook that suited my requirements quite well when the heavy lifting capabilities of my (Linux-based) desktop machine were not required. I don't give a flying fuck about any religion regarding Apple, I just like to have a *nix-y environment to work in from the command-line (when the mood takes me) and a GUI that works when I feel like being a drone with a rodent or trackpad.

That MacBook has now died messily, and I am disinclined to spend much on a replacement. In the next day or two, I anticipate that I will be buying an Asus U31F-11YR-RX132V machine (a compact and lightweight machine easily available from local bricks-and-mortar shops) , on which I intend to set up an implementation of Arch linux. I'll add a post here if I hit any roadblocks.

I don't know what GP meant by "non-kernel drivers", but Arch has a package for NVidia binary drivers, same as most other distros.

Is Arch Linux. After using Ubuntu for a long time they have really forced me to leave with their decision to force a Fisher Price desktop on me.

Arch Linux. Great support, ease of maintenance and gets updates as soon as a package releases a new version.

I'm a long time Gentoo user and i'm considering migrating my workstation to Arch.

What distribution are we supposed to use now? Ubuntu has given up on its users, and is turning into an interface for the elderly, the disabled and netbook people.

I'd rather have my advanced UI that lets me do whatever I want with my workstation, thank you very much.

Arch

A friend has one of those Optimus laptops. In the BIOS there was a setting to make it use Intel only, Nvidia only or hybrid Optimus.

Also check out Bumblebee.

I find the definition on when a system should be counted a GNU system is quite confusing. If it is the coreutils that determines it, Arch linux users can quite painlessly transplant GNU coreutils with busybox ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48187 ) or heirloom ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48399 ) equivalents. Is it a dependency on Bash-isms in init scripts and other stuff for running the system, then the Debian-derived distros should be out of the definition since they have moved on to Dash and Gobo linux is using zsh if I am not mistaken. Is it glibc that determies if a system is a GNU system? This one is more difficult to replace, but Android is using bionic, there are uClibc and musl libc linux variants out there. If it is binutils and gcc that determines if a system is a GNU system, a lot of the BSDs would also be considered GNU systems.

I find the definition on when a system should be counted a GNU system is quite confusing. If it is the coreutils that determines it, Arch linux users can quite painlessly transplant GNU coreutils with busybox ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48187 ) or heirloom ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=48399 ) equivalents. Is it a dependency on Bash-isms in init scripts and other stuff for running the system, then the Debian-derived distros should be out of the definition since they have moved on to Dash and Gobo linux is using zsh if I am not mistaken. Is it glibc that determies if a system is a GNU system? This one is more difficult to replace, but Android is using bionic, there are uClibc and musl libc linux variants out there. If it is binutils and gcc that determines if a system is a GNU system, a lot of the BSDs would also be considered GNU systems.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio.

If you still don't know how, there's a card I want you to turn in.

You might not have those panel applets installed. I don't think they're included by default. There definitely is a frequency monitor plugin. Under Arch, it's located in the package xfce4-cpufreq-plugin. Same thing under Debian. Or you could install the xfce4-goodies package to get a lot more panel plugins. Check out the Arch wiki on xfce, it's got a lot of good information: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce

He means Arch.

Personally, I've found Ubuntu very useful in situations where I couldn't do any dedicated partioning for linux and only a bootable version would do. They're not the first or the only distro to offer a bootable linux kernel, but they typically provide a nice desktop interface and fair driver support. There's also an incredibly active community, with forums, where news posts are usually not even required (your question has been asked and answered countless times over, accessible via search).

http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.kubuntu.org/
http://www.xubuntu.org/

In the event she's looking to do some more serious introspection on linux, I would suggest Arch Linux. CLI from the start, and certainly not for the weak of heart. I started with Arch Linux years ago, because I like a challenge, and it definitely paid off in the long run.

http://www.archlinux.org/

Thanks, I started reading into it and found this, right on the KDE page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE#How_to_enable_Cpufreq_based_power_saving

I liked the Amiga's solution: Holding down one of the Amiga keyboard buttons turned the cursor keys into a virtual mouse

You can do the same in X, with shift-numlock. Recent versions will require an xorg.conf option to enable it however.

BTW, what's with X.org shipping broken by default these days? You have to add options to enable basic functionality like mousekeys or ctrl-alt-backspace. Lame.

What the fuck are you talking about? I have a nagging feeling that this is not exactly a warez site. Using your logic, HTTP and HTTPS should also be banned because people up- and download warez over it, and so should be SMTP because most e-mail is spam these days. It's a data transfer protocol, stupid. That some people are transferring data illegally is not very relevant to your argument.

"Honestly I don't use either Synaptic or the Software Center. I do it all on the command-line using apt-cache and apt-get." I always found update-manager convenient in that I could omit unwanted updates by ticking boxes and look at descriptions of the updates before accepting them. Not quite as easy in terminal. When I know precisely what I want to install, apt-get is great; but when I need to sift through possibly problematic upgrades (flash, etc.), I prefer to have an easily-read interface, which I think update-manger did a very fine job of. But since I would literally rather force-feed myself an Active-Directory book rather than use GNOME3 or Unity, I guess I shouldn't have to worry. Arch is now looking mighty fine to me: http://www.archlinux.org/news/the-canterbury-project/ - and for having an easy to use OS on hand, I think I'll go with Debian or Mint on a separate partition.

Just because I wanted to look it up:

Gentoo: Latest stable is 3.6.17, unstable is 4.0.1
http://packages.gentoo.org/package/www-client/firefox

Arch: Latest is 5.0
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/firefox/

Debian: Sid has Iceweasle at 3.5.19
http://packages.debian.org/sid/iceweasel

TFA mentions the descent of Slackware from SoftLanding Linux System as an example to illustrate his point, but I'm not sure it really applies in this case. IIRC, the principal difference between SLS and Slack was originally the choice between a.out and ELF binaries. Although history has favoured the latter, the difference doesn't seem that significant in the light of the X.org/XFree86 or Open/LibreOffice shenanigans.

Don't get me wrong - I still love Slackware, and it is by far my first choice for any Linux server. In fact, until a year or two ago, it was still my first choice as a desktop platform too, but more recently Arch Linux has taken that position, since it has all of the elegant simplicity of Slackware in combination with a more modern (but still simple) package system.

Yup, that's Ubuntu before the suckage added.

  Or Unbuntu with the suck massaged out: http://www.linuxmint.com/

    Too light to contain suck: http://www.archlinux.org/

    Too tiny to hold suck: http://puppylinux.com/

    Got their suck fixed a few releases ago, it's all good now: http://www.fedoraproject.org/

    fixed their suck a while ago too, lookin' good: http://www.freebsd.org/
 
    supports all kinds of desktops that don't suck: http://www.mandriva.com/

    roll your own without the suck: http://www.gentoo.org/

Arch Linux: Slackware For Human Beings.

UNITY, the great DIVIDER :)

Anyway, Real Men use Xmonad, dwm or Ratpoison. Me? I'm a bit of a wimp, so I use Openbox.

Also, Compiz by itself is a surprisingly capable window manager, for all of you who like your jiggly windows and desktop cubes.

Does that mean they weren't using a profiler before now??

That... actually explains quite a bit...

No, we use profilers ;) In fact we have some valgrind - the awesome Linux profiling tool - devs working here.

Profile guided optimization is something else though. It is a special way of compiling and linking, that the compiler and linker use profiling information to know how best to optimize the code. So code that is used a lot is compiled with -O3 (the most optimizations), while code that is not used a lot gets -Os (to take less space), and so forth. This is a very useful technique that was not available on Linux until last year, and the news today is that Firefox now builds properly with it and there is a nice noticeable speed improvement for Linux users.

PGO builds have been available under Linux since 2008; until last year I used to compile PGO-builds on my ArchLinux netbook (AUR Package)