Post FeedLinux sucks (sometimes)
As you may or may not already know, I use both Windows and Unix-like operating systems, both at work and at home. (I’d like to add OS X to that list, but Apple decided to sell the underpowered x86 Mac minis at ridiculously high prices, but that’s another story …) In the last few days, I had a fair amount of »fun« (note the quotation marks) with Linux, though.
The Debian box (a.k.a. notebook)
One component of my usual home computing environment is a nice little Acer TravelMate 3000 series notebook that runs IRC/ICQ and Mail clients as well as Opera for reading some RSS feeds while sitting on the sofa. The Debian installation there is my main Linux installation, so it’s paramount to have full hardware support (including 3D) and frequent updates. The latter one is why I chose Debian, because honestly, APT is cool :) Gentoo would have been an alternative, but I wasn’t willing to spend extreme amounts of time and disk space for compilation of such monsters as KDE or OpenOffice. IMO, a 2.6 series kernel compile takes long enough :)
Two or three weeks ago, Debian made the switch from X.org 6.9 to 7.0. Consequently, aptitude upgrade wanted to update about everythign that has to do with X. Because I didn’t want to sacrifice stability then, I postponed the update until about one week ago. The update was a little bit tricky, because the package depencies were sufficiently broken to require a lot of bitching around with APT. Eventually, I had X.org 7.0 installed and was surprised how well everything went. Everything except 3D acceleration, that is.
It turned out that the i915 DRI driver wasn’t compatible with the kernel driver I had. I tried to retrofit 2.6.16.14’s driver into my serverly hacked-up 2.6.14 kernel. I wasn’t willing to do a full switch to 2.6.16.x because I had applied some patches and modified some code to make it work (i.e. not crash) on my notebook. But the retrofitted kernel module did nothing but throw kernel-level exceptions, so I resigned and let the 3D problem unfixed.
Yesterday, I finally decided to do a kernel update – and this was exactly the right date, because the Debian maintainers decided to drop pre-2.6.15 compatibility by installing a new version of udevd. I built a brand-new 2.6.16.16 kernel, along with a custom ACPI DSDT table, because I remembered that with the original one, the battery indicator didn’t work. The first boot into the new kernel was apalling – it didn’t crash straight away like the unpatched 2.6.14 did back then, but twice a second, I got a three-line critical ACPI error message, and since X didn’t work either, I couldn’t do anything but boot into my old 2.6.14 again and recompile the kernel. As the ACPI error message was a DSDT related one, I removed my custom DSDT and voilà, the kernel booted. To my utmost surprise, even the battery status worked – the new ACPI code must be more fault tolerant than the old one.
However, there were two other annoyances: 3D acceleration still didn’t work and I didn’t get any sound. Fortunately, solving these problems only involved some Google use. The 3D acceleration problem turned out to be a incompatibility between the kernel module and the DRI driver again, but this time, it was the other way round: The kernel module was too new for the DRI driver. A fresh snapshot driver from the DRI page (man I’m glad they have binaries there!) solved the problem.
The sound problem was a rather strange one. The drivers were loaded without problems, and all programs played without any errors, I just didn’t get any sound, like everything was muted. Fiddling around with the mixer settings didn’t help, either. Looking at the ALSA bug tracking system revealed that this was quite a common problem with High Definition Audio devices, but as it seemes, these were minor model-specific problems. One more generic bug of this kind was marked as »fixed in 2.6.17-rc4«. Now I didn’t want to compile yet another kernel, let alone a development one. I tried to install ALSA 1.0.11-final instead (the kernel had 1.0.11-rc3), and to my relief, it worked.
Bottom line: Linux on the desktop and especially on notebooks can still be an adventure. But the ACPI story shows me that at least, the situation improves over time.
SUSE Linux 10.1
My other PC is a normal desktop model with an Athlon64 3000+ on an Asus K8V-SE Deluxe board. This box mostly runs on Windows, so the Linux installation there is only rarely used. So my requirements for this system are a quite different than those for the notebook: I don’t want to fiddle around too much to get everything working, I expect the distribution to do all the funky stuff.
The Linux partition still contained a half-broken remnant of some distribution I tested back in March for the CLT beginner’s distributions comparison. As I just downloaded the SUSE 10.1 DVD for a colleague and SUSE 10.0 was one of the best distributions in my test back then, I decided to install it.
To sum it up: SUSE 10.1 is a mess. In my review, I recommended 10.0 to novice users because installation went flawlessly and the amount of manual configuration was minimal. The SUSE community managed to kill all these advantages and get back to the dark 8.x ages.
The first thing is the almost unbearable slowness of the installer. Every setup screen takes about one or two minutes to show up. The delays reminded me of a SUSE 8.0 installation I did six or seven years ago – but my computer now has about 10 times the performance of the box back then …
Not only the installer is slow. Booting and starting KDE also takes almost unbearable amounts of time. The online update function updated only one of four packages I selected. Also, I don’t remember the YaST dialogs be so unlogical, misleading and badly designed.
The point where I finally lost my patience was the nVidia driver installation. In 10.0, YaST offered the installation of the binary nVidia drivers as part of the initial online update (that is, even before the desktop is started the first time). In 10.1, no nVidia drivers can be found whatsoever. The only thing is the tiny-nvidia-installer, which turns out to be nVidia’s original installer that can’t handle a running X instance (executing /etc/init.d/{x,g,k}dm stop is really a hard job, you can’t expect this to happen automatically!!!11) and needs the complete kernel sources to build its module. No, I’m not going to install 250 MB just because of this <censored> driver. I will rather use some Kanotix version again later on …
Hi,
I’ve also an AMD64 computer with the same motherboard and an NVidia compatible graphics card. I’ve configured this homecomputer as following:
first harddisk installed with Windows/XP sp2. This disc is divided into 3 partitions
The second harddisk has been partitioned as following:
/dev/hdb1 is the /boot for SuSE 10.1 formatted with ext2 50Megabytes
/dev/hdb2 is the /boot for Kubuntu Dapper 6.06 formatted with ext2 50 Megabytes
/dev/hdb5 is the swap partition for both Linuxes 2 Gigabytes
/dev/hdb6 is the / for SuSE 10.1 formatted with reiser 55Gigabytes
/dev/hdb7 is the / for Kubuntu Dapper 6.06 formatted with reiser 55Gigabytes
Windows runs without any hitch. It runs perfectly with my hardware.
Both Linuxes also run very well, but I prefer Kubuntu above SuSE, since there are a bunch of programmes which make SuSE a memory hog:
1. beagle is a cron member written in Mono (curse-word in Linux)
2. ZMD ZenWorks is also written in Mono, aaaarrrgh
Both packages really suck: beagle for its resource hunger and ZenWorks for its initial bugs. Happily ZenWorks doesn’t suck so bad any longer, since the most evil bugs have been corrected. It’s only drawback is the inability to load delta rpm’s. Now ZenWorks has to download the full-sized RPM’s of the patches.
Both Linuxes make use of the open-source non-3d ‘nv’ driver which run well on my homecomputer. It’s not that superfast on Windows, but the performance is fairly good. I don’t dare to do the command: tiny-nvidia-installer –update since I’ve read a bunch of stories that complete configurations got blown up under SuSE as under Kubuntu. I don’t want to blow my Linux!
With regards from
Tom
It might be fun to check if your X can play video’s (mplayer/xine), it might be broken too.
I have all the same problems as you have :-/
That’s why we use gentoo. Stop talking about linux as about an OS… It’s just a kernel. It has _no thing_ to do with X. Thank you man you were talking about 2 most sucking disrtos ;-). I hate binary distros (All debian and SuSE/redhat and few others). YTes it takes time to compile stuff. But it works so i can safelly leade install with 300 dependences for night and it will success.
Moral:
Don’t swear on linux, swear on distro team. Kernel rules.
I hate how did you talk about new kernel version… Man your processor is really slow if you was bored by compiling the kernel… It takes about 6-7 min for me, installing modules is about 2 min.
So my questions are:
1). Do you really know what linux is?
2). Do you know any ways of using it?
3). Do you know that SuSE is reported to suck so there were no reasons for you to use it?
4). If you knew ou would have problems, why did you use the graphical installer?
5). Yes, exactly it sucks sometimes when you do something wrong, like hda==sda etc. (Not a question)
5). DO not refer to all the distros as linux. Linux is what all the distros are based on. Nothing more. Debian always sucks. SuSE have never stopped sucking. Stop using commercial distros. Debian is community-driven… Gentoo rules. Their bug tracking system and community rules too. Portage is great. d00d.
Moral: It’s all your distros…
Zaba:
1) I am perfectly aware of the fact that Linux is, strictly speaking, just a kernel. I was just using the common notion of “Linux” = “operating system based on the Linux kernel” that almost everyone uses, except for some nitpickers. You should be able to figure out when to replace “Linux” by “GNU/Linux” in my text, though.
2) I use both Linux and Windows all the time, both at work and at home. So, yes, I know how to use it. I do so since 2000.
3) Back when I installed SuSE 10.1, it was so relatively new that there wasn’t that much bad press about it. I knew that 10.0 worked quite well for me and didn’t expect 10.1 to be such a mess.
4) I reviewed that system from a newbie’s “let’s try out that Linux thing that everyone keeps talking about” standpoint, that’s why I chose the default installation method.
5) Ah, now I recognize that you are just some random Gentoo fanboi.”Gentoo rules, all other distros suck”? Your opinion. I’ll stick with Debian for the following reasons: (a) it works for me (b) it is binary-based and (c) the Debian installer never deleted my partition table, while the Gentoo installer once did :)
(Oh, and yes, I actually prefer binary-based distros. Source-based distros may be the cleanest approach, but I don’t have the disk space and time to waste to do all that.)
I didn’t say that Gentoo rules and others suck (if I did, I wasn’t probably in good mood, I have flu for quite long already). Debian is binary based, and as most of such sucks on non-x86 platforms. Gentoo isn’t binary distro, but it doesn’t really just spend disk space (why do i still have 30gigs from 41gig partition?). And about the installer (graphical one), it was unstable till gentoo 2006.1, and it was know to be so. If you’re talking about fdisk, then you better use partition magic ;-).
Oh yes, if i didn’t say already, I was trying following distros:
* mandrake linux 10.0
* mandrake linux 10.2
* mandriva linux 2005 limited edition
* mandriva linux 2006 free
Comment: RPM sucks. It _never_ did right update for me.
* debian 3 something
* kubuntu 5.something, 6.something
Comment: Where are my devices, man?
* gentoo 2005.1
Comment: They could make less complicated way of installation (for me it was minimal cd)
* gentoo 2006.1, without using installer’s partitioner.
Comment: About portage, i would say they _really_ respond to bug reports.
Before that i was working on FreeBSD workstation that didn’t seem something really exciting to me (cause it was job or however you call it).
P.S.: Yes source distros waste some time. They you win a lot of time when it finishes.
P.P.S.: Yes, i wasn’t thinking much when i was writing that all from “Gentoo rules”.. I think i just suddenly recalled about my Kubuntu installer experiences (It didn’t want to leave my partition table as-is and use preformatted ext3 partition for some reason, then couldn’t leave me with one non-super user).
P.P.P.S.: After all, I don’t want a distro war here.
I do love all the linux nerds desperately jumping to defend their precious OS – I know it just sux in general, that is why everyone is so keen on trying to make their own flavour of the miserable thing :)