Slashdot Mirror
The Well-Tempered Debian desktop
An anonymous reader writes "What happens when the editor of a popular Linux website attempts to install a Debian Etch desktop on an old ThinkPad? How does it turn out? Surprisingly well! The article comprises an entertaining account of the entire process, complete with lots of informative screenshots, from downloading the net-install to tangling with Wi-Fi and modem PCMCIA cards as the last step — and everything in between. A great primer for Debian newbies... Go Debian!"
How about installing Debian Etch on an NSLU2?
``What happens when the editor of a popular Linux website attempts to install a Debian Etch desktop on an old ThinkPad? How does it turn out? Surprisingly well!''
Only if you don't know Debian and you don't know IBM ThinkPads. If you do know them, you know that Debian generally works really well. Of course, Linux support for laptop hardware isn't always stellar, but IBM seems to actually have made an effort to ensure their hardware, including ThinkPads, played nice with Linux. Alas, Lenovo seems to have no intention of continuing that tradition.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I just did the exact same thing myself. I don't know what type of computer this guy had, but I installed Etch on a Thinkpad 390X this past Friday. (That's like a 5 year old at least model I got for $40 used...) It went suprisingly simply actually. It even detected my wireless card no problems, which really surprised me.
The only hitch in the procedure that is even sorta the fault of Linux is that I don't know how to get it so that the computer will hibernate/resume.
I'm not sure if I am correct here, but I believe that this particular user had customized KDE with the Redmond KWin window border theme that ships with KDE.
This page describes install of Debian Etch on Dell Inspiron 1150, including tweaks for Compiz and Truecrypt encryption.
Personally, I don't use a windows-like theme at all, but the answer is that the Windows look and feel is familiar to people who are moving from Windows to Linux (easier transition) or who work in both environments on a regular basis (consistency.) I would have thought this is obvious...
Does this mean that year 2007 will be the YEAR OF LINUX DESKTOP?
I kid, i kid! =)
Good question...and the answer, my friend, explains why Linux won't make it to the mainstream desktop for quite some time. I'm going to focus my comments on hitting a particular target audience, and neglect the technical/security superiority of one platform over another.
FTA:
Two points of interest here:
(1) The author had to create symbolic links to make Firefox and Thunderbird work.
(2) "A quick bit of googling" was required to get the missing library installed.
Read the first quoted paragraph again. Note the author had to unzip and untar the files into the directory "where Debian likes to keep them," and make the symlinks where "where the system expects to find them." Does the Debian distro put Firefox and Thunderbird in a different directory than the Ubuntu or Fedora? How about Slackware?
Lots of Linux fans berate Microsoft for stooping to the lowest common denominator, i.e. the common user, when it comes to making Windows more or less configurable. These same Linux fans point out that most users are just doing Web surfing, e-mail, word processing, and playing multimedia files/viewing photos--activities that don't require knowledge on configuring user permissions or defining firewall rules or any other low-level ("low level" as in base system) settings.
If these users are the ones that the Linux community are trying to get to migrate to Linux, there's a long road ahead of them. These "commoners" aren't going to know about installing libraries, or making symbolic links because "the system" expects the files in one locations but that particular distro "like them" somewhere else. Here's the real kicker; they don't CARE about these things. They want to read and send e-mail. They want to look at Web pages. They want to look at the pictures taken with their digital cameras. They know "click the setup.exe" files and the installation takes care of the rest, including installing other library files that may be needed. Click the desktop icon, and your program starts.
You want the masses to migrate to Linux? Make application installations "point and click" operations, including all necessary dependency checks and library installations as part of that initial click of the mouse button. Installing apps has to be that easy. There's no getting around it. Computers are no longer the domain for the tech-savvy (and haven't been for some time) and have to be made easy to use, like a television or microwave oven. Computers are a commodity, not an oddity.
Before you go off accusing me of being a MS apologist or fanboy, note that the only thing I use Windows for is playing a couple of games on rare occasion. The rest of time I'm on an OS X platform. I've used Linux in some research projects and tried to convert comp
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
Using an apt frontend of your choice really is that easy though.
;)
If, however, the app you want isn't available via apt in the way you like (e.g. you want to use Firefox and not Firepandadovebollocks that Debian ships now...dunno why but last time I tried Linux that really irritated me, possibly a bit more than not being able to get my surround sound working properly) or it isn't available in apt at all (mplayer anyone?), or you need to add extra repositories (which is NOT going to be easy to do for a newbie)...you may be slightly fuct.
Put it another way: if I want to play DVDs in 5.1 surround in VLC, here's how it works on Windows XP:
1. Download VideoLAN installer
2. Run VideoLAN installer
3. Click Next a few times until the installer finishes
4. Go into Windows' speaker settings and change the speaker type to 5.1 surround (which has a little descriptive picture to make it nice and clear) and click OK a few times.
4. Run VideoLAN and play my DVD, with surround sound working
I recently tried to do the same on Debian, and this is precisely how it went:
1. apt-get install vlc
2. Run VideoLAN client, try and play DVD
3. Notice that it crashes every time giving no cause or reason
3a. Smash with hammer
4. Google with the only real error message I get, which has nothing to do with DVDs
5. Find out that libdvdcss is required, and it's on an additional repository, so edit sources.list and apt-get update
5a. Realise that any sane person would have given up at step 3
6. Apt-get install libdvdcss (or whatever the precise package name is, I forget)
7. Run VLC, find out that my DVD plays now...in stereo
8. Play with volume settings and read lots of stuff about alsa.conf via Google
9. After much futzing, work out that ALSA outputs the rear to the subwoofer and vice versa for no explicable reason, so I had to swap the cables round
10. Watch my DVD, only with a pisspoor slow CPU-intensive picture because I haven't installed the NVidia drivers yet, which is yet another rigamarole
For its part, Xine (or at least Kaffeine) was even worse; that just crashed whenever I tried to play a 5.1 DVD. Now; which will be easier for a new person? For most people, over the phone I could tell them to go to VideoLAN.org and click the big Download link, and then tell them where in the Control Panel to go to enable surround. Can I do that on Debian? No. I'd have to explain to them how to edit sources.list, which commands to type in, when to type them in...you get my point.
This isn't just APT though, it's a lot of things. Why does ALSA change the subwoofer and rear plugs around for example? Where is the simple clicky box that changes the speaker settings from Stereo to 5.1? And I understand the licensing implications of including libdvdcss, but...well, who outside Slashdot is going to take "Well, it's the big bad mean MPAA" as an explanation for why getting DVDs working is such a pain in the ass?
Sorry for the length, it being Christmas I may have drunk a little bit too much Hobgoblin (or, I'm sure a few people are lining up to say, "the Kool-Aid")
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
People aren't switching for the GUI, they're switching for the price. The GUI is one of the reasons they stick with windows.
(Statements apply to the vast majority of non-technical people I know; the people who know what they're doing and *do* swap for the interface know how to set a non-default WM)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment