Marc’s Mind

The number of minor annoyances in Fedora 11 turned into a major annoyance.  Last Saturday I wiped Fedora 11 from my home machine and installed Xubntu, which is the Xfce-centric Ubuntu distribution.  I did the same on my office machine on Wednesday.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with Xubuntu and Ubuntu in general.  For the most part, everything just works.  The Synaptic package manager made the installation of most things pretty painless.  I’ve installed all of my “non-standard” apps without having to first find the right repository, then hope that there aren’t conflicts, and then fight with different versions of things because there were conflicts, etc.  Everything that I use on a normal basis is in one of the repositories that Ubuntu has included.  On Fedora I always had to fight with them.  I didn’t realize just how many extra steps there were in Fedora until I didn’t have to do them.

The extra software that I normally install (either at home or at the office) include:

• Synergy - For letting me use a single mouse and keyboard on several computers and monitors.  This makes moving back and forth from my Windows machine a matter of moving my mouse off to the left edge of my screen.  Shared clipboard and all.  Can’t live without it.
• Motion - For grabbing web-cam images and saving them when it only detects changes in the image.  In Fedora this was a huge pain.
• Nvidia proprietary drivers.  An optional part of the Ubuntu install, but incredibly easy.  Just told it to search for hardware drivers from the menu, and there it was.  No muss, no fuss.
• Logitech G15 keyboard daemon.  Ubuntu got this out of the box.
• XCache and APC for PHP.
• Conky
• Mplayer codecs
• MP3 support

I’m sure there were others, but those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  There is still room for improvement, of course, but the ease of use, the sane dependency checking in Synaptic/apt-get, and the huge repositories (mutliverse/universe) meant that I didn’t spend two days downloading, compiling, and keeping my fingers crossed just to get a system I could work on.

My time from install to productivity with Xubuntu was less than a few hours.  Very impressive and well polished.

marc Reviews

So this week I did something unprecedented for me.  I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially.  After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge.  I’ve now installed it on three machines (in this order):

• My laptop, an older Toshiba Satellite system.  Previously running Fedora 10 and dual booting with Windows XP.
• My home system, previously running Fedora 10.
• My work system, previously running Fedora 8 (see my earlier post on my experience with Fedora 9)

The install on my laptop would have made a Linux novice ditch Fedora completely and run screaming from it.  The actual upgrade went smoothly.  I booted up from the DVD and told it to upgrade my previous installation which it found with any problem, and update my boot loader config.  The updating of the boot loader was a mistake.  I rebooted the machine and “GRUB” was filling the screen as fast as the poor laptops GeForce4 chipset could pump it out.  I booted the DVD again and chose rescue mode and re-installed grub.  After that all was fine.  It booted up and Xfce came up with my old desktop settings.  Looked good, faster boot.  I was a bit disappointed to not see any suspend or hibernate options, which was part of my decision to do my laptop first since these were included in the latest Xfce.  More on that later, though.

I will say that it did take almost 5 hours to upgrade my laptop, but I kind of expected that since it is about 6 years old now.

The second system was my home system.  Same process, and I even the same mistake with grub.  My home system is quite a bit faster, and it only took about two hours to upgrade.  I upgraded my home system the morning of the 11th.  I only had about an hour or so to work with it before heading into the office that morning, but the upgrade itself seemed to be fine (once I finished kicking myself for having to fix the grub setup — again).

So, great, things appeared to go smoothly.  Since I knew I would only be at the office for a few hours on Thursday and probably wouldn’t get much else done, so I decided to start the upgrade there, too.  That and the fact that I like to be consistent at home and at the office — I’ve always been that way, it makes transitioning back and forth much easier for me.  That one wasn’t so great.  You can only upgrade to Fedora 11 from a fully updated Fedora 10.  So, I upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 10, do a ‘yum clean all’ and then a ‘yum update’, then boot from the Fedora 11 disk to do my upgrade.  This time I finally got smart, though and told it to create a new bootloader configuration.  No problems with grub on this install.

Thats where the successes ended.  A bit of back story first.

As I mentioned earlier, I use Xfce now.  Between KDE’s attempts to be like Windows Vista Aero and MacOS/X and Gnome’s brain dead window placement (though it has gotten better, it is still not good enough and you can’t change it) I chose to go with Xfce.  Xfce is light-weight looks good and is well maintained.  It stays out of my way, is configurable “enough” and I really like the Terminal and file manager (Thunar).  It also plays pretty well with Gnome and KDE apps.  It works exceptionally well with non-Gnome Gtk apps (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) since thats the toolkit it is written with.

The failures of Fedora 11.  The most notable was the inclusion of  Firefox 3.5 beta 4 and Thunderbird 3.0 beta 2.   Its nice that they tried to include the latest and greatest, but it broke almost all of the extensions of both apps.  The way that Mozilla tags extensions, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get them re-installed.  I haven’t even bothered with it yet, I’ve been too busy trying to get a stable Xfce again.

Something that I figured out yesterday was that after upgrading to Fedora 11 from Fedora 10, it didn’t actually upgrade everything.  I had to do another “yum clean all” and “yum update” to download another GB of files before I was actually updated.

Now that my machines are all completely updated, I’ve discovered a few other issues.  Notably, a bug was introduced into the Xfce Terminal.  The option MiscAlwaysShowTabs if set to TRUE now causes the app to segfault on startup.  I prefer to have that option enabled so my windows don’t resize when I open a new tab (major annoyance).  Several of my custom keymappings also vanished or no longer worked.

If I had done a clean, fresh install it might have been different (except the Terminal segfault), but I’m just not happy with Fedora 11.

Thunar also doesn’t seem to support LUKS encrypted volumes, either.  Patches were approved for adding that about 4 months ago.  I’m thinking Fedora is racing to try to beat some other distro in having the cutting edge, and in that they seem to be succeeding, but for most people I’m sure its not worth the several days it will take to work around the quirks.

As I was writing this post, I was downloading the latest Xubuntu.  I know of a lot of people that have switched to using Ubuntu for their desktop and are really impressed with it.  I think its mostly because of the compositing, though.  I may just end up re-installing today, we’ll see…

marc Reviews

I’ve been running Linux as my primary desktop since about 1996 (switching from OS/2 when IBM started dropping support for it), and running Linux servers since early 1994 (my first Slackware system was running Linux Kernel 0.99pl15). Over the years I’ve tried many of the various distributions including Slackware (which is what I started with), Caldera, Debian, SuSE, and of course RedHat. Back around RedHat Linux 3 I switched and have been using RedHat distros for my desktop almost exclusively since then. There have been a lot of frustrations with RedHat over the years, but with the Fedora Project things have gotten much better. The switch to Yum for package management and 3rd party repositories such as Livna have made things very easy to upgrade and maintain. Every 6 months I watch to see what’s new in the latest Fedora release. Typically I’m a version or two behind since I want my computer to be stable. Right now at home I’m on Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 at the office.

I’ve switched window managers quite a few times over the years, too. The first one I really started using was fvwm, then I found AfterStep. I used AfterStep for several years. KDE was still too bloated back then and not quite feature rich enough, Gnome 1.x was in the same boat as KDE at the time. AfterStep stayed out of my way and was customizable-enough to let me get my work done. I like keyboard hot-keys for just about everything and AfterStep fit the bill. The only thing really lacking in AfterStep was a good way to interact with the desktop. I still missed a lot of the features that I had in OS/2’s Workplace Shell. When KDE 3.x and Gnome 2.x came out I switched back and forth between the two as each started advancing beyond the other. About 2 years ago I finally switched and stayed with KDE. My biggest reason was one that may sound silly, but when you’re managing dozens of servers and have everything hot-keyed it makes a big difference: Smart Window Placement. With Gnome 1.x I ran sawfish as the underlying window manager. With the 2.x series they made it very difficult to run anything except Metacity which has almost brain-dead window placement.

Back in February I looked at the road map for Fedora 9 and noticed that KDE 4 was going to be in there. I started looking at the some of the cool new features, specifically Plasma, the framework for allowing active widgets (plasmoids) to be running on the desktop or the panel. Its a big step beyond the little docklets that Gnome, KDE and even Windows have now. From what I understand its a bit more Mac-like (I’ve never used OS X so I can’t say for sure).

So I waited for about 2 weeks after Fedora 9 was released to let the first round of patches and bug-fixes to make it out. On Thursday I took the plunge and upgraded to Fedora 9 and KDE 4. I finished the install and started using it by mid-afternoon, exploring the new aspects of it and trying to figure out how to re-implement some of the things I use the most with KDE or Gnome. On Friday at about noon I re-installed Fedora 8 with KDE 3.5.

KDE 4 is not ready for widespread use. I probably would have left Fedora 9 on there and used Gnome instead, but Metacity is still retarded about its window placement.

KDE 4 is gorgeous to look at. Very smooth and clean with lots of eye-candy and desktop effects — when they work. I crashed various KDE components a number of times. Many of the crash issues I could live with since the apps restarted. It would have been an annoyance, but I could have suffered through a few more update cycles.

What I couldn’t live without, though was a way to either hot-key or mouse click to get the list of active windows. I hate the taskbar window list. Its one of the first things I turn off. I prefer to either hit a hotkey or more often, middle click on my desktop or click on the window list icon in my panel and then pick the window. Its how I’ve worked for the last 10 years and its something I can’t live without. In KDE 4 there is no way to show the open windows except for the taskbar. There are no plasmoids that will provide this same feature, and with the architecture of KDE 4, I don’t think there ever will be. The concept of the desktop has been turned into a second workspace for running programs on. The only difference is that application windows will always cover them and there is only one place where plasmoids run for all of your virtual desktops. The concept is promising, but I think they’re headed in the wrong direction.

I don’t have any problem with improving the appearance of the desktop. Far from it, I like the cool widgets and the flash. But not if its going to hamstring functionality.

With how different KDE 4 is from its predecessors, and how much it is lacking in features compared to the much more mature KDE 3.5, it shouldn’t have been called KDE 4. I expect a new desktop project to emerge from this, either renaming KDE 4 or a fork of KDE 3 by another group, but this won’t be embraced by business or power users/programmers like myself (I’ve been programming since 1982).

There were a long list of annoyances that drove me to going back, both with the distro itself, KDE 4 and Gnome. I know that my productivity would have dropped just by running this on my desktop, and thats bad.

In the 14 years I’ve been running Linux on my computers this was the first time I’ve ever downgraded to a previous OS. I won’t run Fedora 9 and won’t recommend it to anyone. I hope that the Fedora, KDE and Gnome teams can learn from this and not just trudge forward.

marc Rants, Reviews

After a very long wait, Aspyre has finally released Pirahna Bytes’ Gothic 3 in the states. Jessica and I picked it up last Saturday and have been playing it every evening since then. I would say we’re about 20% of the way through the game at this point, so I thought I would post my first impressions on it.

The bad:

First, the map and the world itself is gorgeous. Perhaps even a bit too much… The topography is a bit confusing because of the level of detail on it. We are playing at 1024×768 on high detail, so everything looks great, but things are a bit too overgrown and it makes finding things like huts, caves and things a bit more difficult than it should be.

From what I’ve read they used the Oblivion engine as a starting point for Gothic 3. In my opinion, that was a mistake. The game stutters and pauses way to often. Not enough to make the game unplayable, but it does detract from the overall enjoyment of the game. The engine they were using for Gothic 1 and 2, while a bit dated by comparison ran far better, even on slighly older hardware. We had no trouble running Gothic 1 & 2 on my older Windows box which was an Athlon XP 2400 w/1G of RAM and an GeForce 6600 in it. After reading the required specs, I upgraded my Windows machine a few months ago to be able to handle it. I upgraded to a P4 3.2GHz w/2G of RAM and a PCI-E 16 based GeForce 7600GT with 256MB of RAM on it. The game stutters and pauses a lot, whether or not its loading something from disk. I also upgraded the disk from an ATA-66 drive to a SATA-150 drive. Since I’ve got 2G of RAM in the machine, I was able to find some tweaks on the forums to bump up the caching of certain things, which helps. On Friday I ordered a Dual core P4 3.4GHz and a slightly faster 7600GT. We’ll see if that helps. The machine I’ve got, while not the fastest and most powerful system out there is faster than what the majority of people have on their desks at home. They should have tested this a bit better on slightly older hardware.

There also should have been a way to use strictly the keyboard for movement. An option to “use Gothic 2 controls” or something would have been a big help. Moving to the typical first person shooter style “WASD”/Mouse combo without an easy option to switch back was quite irritating.

My next big gripe is that they changed the way that all of the characters look too much. Perhaps it was changing the engine, perhaps it was by choice, either way its distracting. In the previous versions, the NPC’s that we interacted with and that have carried over from game to game were always somewhat distinct from the other NPC’s in the game. Not so now. Now they look like the other un-named NPC’s. Not really a big deal since its what they do that is the help, not what they look like. Part of the storyline of Gothic 3 was that it was a continuation of the previous two, and the characters have changed just a bit too much.

Speaking of characters changing. Where did his pony-tail go? That should have stayed. As silly as it looked (like a little tassle on the back of his head), it was part of the character and it should have stayed put.

The documentation is also really lacking. A tiny 58 page booklet that is mostly screen shots and graphics. Major things are missing from it, like the default keyboard map. While its true you can get to a lot of this stuff in-game, they have a section on how to move around with the default keyboard/mouse controls but leave out major things. The two biggest things that they left out were quick-bar related — Use F1 to enable or disable the quick-bar. The other big thing was using different types of arrows or quarrels. To do that you have to arm your bow or crossbow then pick the different type of ammunition you want to use from your quick-bar. It makes sense after you figure it out but its not obvious enough to leave out of the manual.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the game isn’t all bad. In fact its mostly good:

The map, while perhaps a bit over done is huge. As I said before, we’ve been playing every evening for about a week now and we’ve seen *maybe* 20% of it. That may even be an exaggeration. This is one of its greatest features. You can play for hours and discover new things in each area you go to. Three distinct “continents” each with different creatures and inhabitants make a very realistic world. Moving from one continent to the other is pretty seamless and realistic. The Hero reacts differently in each continent as well, which is another nice realistic touch. In the desert his endurance depletes faster and regenerates slower which is a nice touch. We haven’t been up to the cold north yet, but we were able to learn the “resist cold” attribute before hand, so I’m sure the climate there effects the Hero as well in some way.

Combat takes a bit of getting used to and doesn’t always work as you hope. They did do a pretty good job of making the keyboard/mouse setup handle combat but in close fights it does end up being a click-fest at times. There are some good weapons that can be found fairly early in the game so the Hero isn’t constantly dying. The fights are pretty even most of the time if you think about it and use a bit of strategy.

The main focus of Gothic has always been the quests that you do. Gothic 3 is no different. There are typically quests for each group of people you encounter. The main story line makes the quests a bit more challenging than in previous games and quite a bit more enjoyable since you have to think about how completing a quest will impact the Hero’s repuation and standing in the different communities. Basically actions have repercussions — very realistic. Its one of my favorite aspects of the game.

Trading went back to more of the style used in Gothic 1, which was much better than the style used in Gothic 2. You trade goods and gold for goods and gold. The style in Gothic 2 was less bartering and more supermarket checkout style. You can also learn skills to haggle better, though since we don’t have them yet, I’m not sure what they do yet.

The AI is much better in this version than any of the previous versions. Characters really do change their daily routines just enough for you to notice. Someone who was one place on one day doing something may not be there doing the same thing the next day. Its another one of those nice touches.

One of the coolest new things is hunting. There are herds of animals roaming the plains that you can practice hunting skills on. Heards of 10-20 bison or 5-10 deer on a plain, each of them yeilding 200 experience points, 2-4 pieces of raw meat, horns/antlers and a skin. Its a great way to get learning points by leveling up as well as cash when you trade your skins and horns. There are also lizards, snakes, hares and vultures that give 25 experience points each that are roaming around through the country. The hares even give you raw meat. Adding this gives the game a very nice bit of realism — not all creatures will attack on sight, in fact creatures like deer will run when you get too close because you spook them. Very nice touch.

I will say that it took me two evenings of playing before the game became immersive for me because of all the differences between it and its predecessors. There are bugs and its crashed a few times, the different look and feel to the game, the different voice actors all lessened my initial enjoyment of it. We’ll still be playing it to its conclusion, but its not quite as enjoyable as Gothic 2 was for us.

I’ll post again on this after we’ve played a bit on the new hardware when it gets here.

marc Reviews

Okay, let me just get this out of the way now so people don’t complain. This post contains spoilers! If you haven’t yet seen the movie and want to be surprised by it, then don’t read this post.

So, Wednesday night Jessica and I met Joe at the theater to go see Serenity. All three of us were quite excited about it, I mean we almost never go see a movie in the theater. The last time we went to a theater to see a movie was more than two years ago. With Serenity it was different, though. We’re all Firefly fans, and the rumor was that if Serenity did well at the box office and then in the DVD market, that there was a good chance for another movie or even the return of the series. We’re all for more Firefly, in movie, TV or DVD’s, we’ll take what we can get.

Once the credits started rolling and the lights in the theater came back up, Jessica seemed irritated, so I questioned her about it. She was quite upset about the killing off of two of the main characters, as well as the way things ended. She and I talked about it for a while afterward and what follows are the conclusions and impressions I got after thinking about it a bit more.

So, after seeing it, and talking about it with Jessica here are my opinions. Again, I wasn’t kidding — there are SPOILERS here! Read no further if that bothers you.

Let me start by saying the casting of the main characters is great. All of the actors seem quite comfortable in their roles, which really helps to make their characters believable. There is a lot of well written dialog and great one liners spread throughout the movie. Production quality was fair, but it could have been much better. Some of the scenes were extremely well done, like near the beginning as the camera follows Mal through the ship; there are no cuts or fades at all for several minutes as he makes his way through the entire ship and re-introduces you to the crew and ship. Scenes like that are hard to pull off and this one was done flawlessly.

One of the things that I noticed while watching the previews was that in all of the scenes there were two key characters missing, Anara and Shephard Book. I had a feeling this didn’t bode well for those characters. I did see Ron Glass’ name in the credits, so I knew he was in the movie, but it was only a very small role. I think his part was more for the people that watched the series than anything else. It was quite upsetting when he was killed off by the main bad-guy. Not surprising, but upsetting. His character could have remained a solid set of story lines by slowly exposing us to his past life before he was a shephard. There was also no background on these, or any of the characters at all. You had no idea why these people were together or why any one of them was significant. The only way to know this was from the series.

Let me go on a bit about my “more for the people that watched the series” comment. Throughout the whole movie, things felt a bit “off”. I don’t know if it was Joss Whedon’s doing or if it was the studio’s doing, but the characters and the story seemed adapted for the big screen and mass market appeal. Many things changed in the movie from the series. For example, River in this movie became a psychic. Okay, no problem there. We knew that there were lots of experiments on her, and the series ended before explaining a lot of it, so this one could be believable. What bothered me was that during the series, the principal villians were “two by two, hands of blue”. They were creepy, ominous fellows that you didn’t want to trifle with. They were replaced by a single bad guy. Granted the guy they chose to cast in this role played it very well and they pulled it off well. What I had a problem with was there was never any guys with blue hands. It was just suddenly *BAM* here is the bad guy. There could have been a bit more reference to the previous bad guys. I’m not sure why the formula in movies for bad guys is always a single super villain that always gets defeated. Its not necessary and its quite pandering. An enemy that is as mysterious as the guys with blue hands is just as effective and you don’t end up in that same tired movie formula: Here is the bad guy, here is the good guy, bad guy keeps getting the better of the good guy until the end where the good guy wins. I guess Hollywood likes to stick to a single thing that they think will work. Its no wonder movies aren’t doing as well as they used to, there is nothing new being done. It really does make me wonder just how many concessions Mr. Whedon made with the studios in order to get Serenity made, or if he’s lost his touch after being away from it for so long.

On to the part that was really bothersome. Why did Wash have to die? It was pointless and didn’t add anything to the story. The only thing it did for the three of us was piss us off. Jessica was so mad about it that she will probably give up on the whole franchise. Wash was an integral part of the crew — the crazy pilot that saved them and was willing to do things with the ship even though they were not likely to succeed. His warped humor was part of the whole Firefly experience. Without Wash, I’m afraid that there isn’t much show left. Of course, if the future follows the typical Hollywood formula, he’ll be brought back from the dead somehow, or another character that has similar traits will replace him. Either way, it will be really bad. If the intent was to kill off Book’s character and Wash’s death just added “drama”, then a better way to do it would have been to have Book come along to try to help River. He could then have been killed by the Reavers or whatever. I would rather have had both characters remain living, though.

Speaking of Reavers. While some of the background was introduced, it wasn’t quite enough. You would have to have seen the series in order to really appreciate what they were. Even the explanation of how they came into existance wasn’t quite adequate. Also, when they took Serenity into the Reaver section of space, they painted the ship with red paint and put corpses on it. This didn’t make sense at all since none of the Reaver ships that were shown were red or had corpses on the outside. I will say that the chase scene with the Reavers at the beginning was quite enjoyable, and better still, only extras died.

The final space battle with the Reavers was also horribly done. Everything kept jumping around way too fast and you couldn’t tell what was happening, let alone who was who. You could barely make out Serenity itself in all of the chaos. It was almost like the CGI people couldn’t figure out how to do this battle and have it come out on film unless they did lots of very short, very fast closeups. I was sorely dissapointed with that.

The story line at the very end of the movie defies description, and not in a good way. Again, things went back to the typical Hollywood formula — everyone was paired off or it was implied that they would soon be pairing off. There were three tombstones, one for Wash, one for Book and one for “Mr. Universe” who was just a peripheral character, so I don’t know why he was included in that scene. I guess if you’re going to do something badly, why not go all the way with it. River in the co-pilot’s seat taking off was also a bit cheesy.

In reading others reviews, saying this could be the next “Star Wars” or the franchise is re-born, and there was nothing bad about this movie, and I just don’t see it. This movie had a murkey beginning, a clear middle, and a definate end. This story combined several of the previous series stories and wrapped them all up. It will be hard for Mr. Whedon to recover from this and give us good story lines with where the characters ended up.

In conclusion (and this may sound very strange) it was a very good movie, and I’m quite glad I saw it. The aspects above did detract from my overall enjoyment of it, though. If those things were done differently, or principal characters weren’t killed off, then I would have have enjoyed it a whole lot more. The humor and the interplay between the characters kept the movies pace going pretty steadily. The action sequences (with the exception of the last one) were all well done and the characters stayed true to form (except River’s, but that was the main plot line for this movie so it fit in well).

If another movie was in the works (which I’ve heard rumors that there will be) or another TV series was made from it, I’d probably give it another chance. But my personal opinion is that it will have a big initial attraction, but then it will die off again from lukewarm ratings because the characters aren’t the same as they were, and I don’t think it will be able to hold the attention of its audience. I hope I’m wrong, though, and that it does succeed and continue to be “fresh”, but Serenity didn’t give me the feeling that would happen.

marc Movies, Reviews