Entries Tagged: Linux
The Trials of OpenOffice.Org
I’ve been a user of OpenOffice.Org pretty much since OOO first came out. Even when I was still occasionally using Windows, I was looking for alternatives to using Microsoft products. OpenOffice, to me, offered that alternative. It provided me with the basic functionality that I needed from a word processor, spreadsheet program, and presentation creator. I’m not a power user of the basic office products, so the lack of features that Microsoft Office provides has never been an issue for me.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. I’ve been working on some articles that I’ve finally decided are good enough to publish to the interweb. I typically write them in OOO. I was looking into an easy way to convert them into HTML and noticed that OOO contains a feature to export a document in XHTML format. I thought that this feature could be pretty handy so I tried to use it. Bzzt! Try again. How foolish was I to attempt such a thing without first telling OOO what Java VM to use. Ouch! OOO depends upon Java for some of its functionality. So I went to the settings to tell it what VM to use. Surprisingly, after I navigated to my /opt directory, it figured out that I had 3 different JVMs installed: 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6. I figured that I might as well use the most recent one I’ve got, so I pointed it to 1.6. OOO gave me a message box that indicated that I’d need to shut down OOO and restart it in order for the setting to take effect. OK. No problem.
It shut down fine, but when I attempted to run it again I got a whole lot of nothing. Nothing? What? It just wouldn’t run. No error messages of any kind. That seemed a bit odd. So, I embarked on a journey to try and figure out how to unset the JVM setting. All I could find was a file that was autogenerated each time OOO was started. So, I asked Gentoo to uninstall OOO. Then I made sure that any OOO related directory was removed. Then I re-installed OOO. I typed in “oowriter” at a command prompt and was greeted with nothing but another prompt. No error, no messages, no OOO starting up. After another fruitless hour of searching and trying everything I could think of, I just gave up. This was going to cause a serious issue. I have Windows installed in a VMWare virtual machine if I absolutely have to use Windows, but I’d rather not deal with it.
I went with Plan B. Plan B was to let my computer spend the time to compile OOO from scratch. Fortunately, I was a bit smarter with my disk partitions on my laptop and actually put enough space in the /tmp partition to be able to perform large compilations. OOO notoriously uses up about 4GB of disk space and on my Core Duo 2 machine took about 3.5 hours to compile. I crossed my fingers and typed “oowriter” into a prompt after it finally finished compiling. Much to my surprise, OOO started right up! Back in business! But, I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t be telling OOO where my JVMs are. I can live without this hassle.
Filed in: Team Member Blog java, linux, openoffice
Linux on the Desktop is not a Failure
Sometimes it’s much more interesting to just read the comments on Slashdot rather than the articles. Today is an article titled “Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop” (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/1432245&from=rss). The comments are quite interesting.
Personally, I don’t feel that Linux has failed on the desktop. I think it’s just fine. There were all kinds of comments about the actual article about how the kernel is really built for servers which value high throughput over low latency, about how the desktop UI just isn’t responsive, how it can be a pain to configure devices, etc. These are all great points. But, I don’t believe that any of these things point to the failure of Linux as a viable desktop OS.
Part of the problem stems from the open source approach of Linux. The kernel itself is open source and most applications people use are open source. Because of this, there tends to be a do-it-yourself viewpoint of using Linux as a desktop OS. If you use Linux, you pretty much need to know it inside and out. Can there really be an easy to use version of Linux that performs and has the ease of use that other operating systems have? I’m not certain.
One of the unusual things about running Linux is that a distribution is just a bunch of different applications cobbled together in a semi-coherent manner using whatever packaging and distribution system the distribution creators decided to use. When you use something like MacOS or Windows, the vendor locks you into one specific desktop UI and their suite of programs.
I’ve used large Linux distributions in the past and got really turned off by them. Sure, they seem simpler and easier to use because they have all kinds of nice GUI programs with them, but they all turned out to be awful for me. Eventually they got all kinds of application crud on them that performed poorly and caused crashing issues. That’s why I turned to a distribution like Gentoo. Gentoo gives me the flexibility to install whatever I want, compile my kernel however I want, use whatever desktop UI I want. All of this adds up to machines that run fantastic.
I purposely compile my kernel to be low latency (it’s a configuration choice). I use a very minimal desktop UI (Fluxbox, I think it’s something like 4 MB in memory). The other Windows-esque UIs (KDE, Gnome) tend to be memory hogs and really heavyweight (much like another suite of operating systems from a company whose name starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘T’). I have a 2 Ghz AMD box with 256 MB of RAM that Gentoo runs great on. Sure, loading apps is a bit slow, but once programs are up I have absolutely no problems speed-wise. Firefox runs fast, Eclipse runs fast, even running Win2K in Vmware runs faster than Win2K on a similar machine in my house where it’s the installed OS.
So, my feeling is that Linux is definitely NOT a failure on the desktop. Will Linux ever gain the kind of popularity that Windows or Mac have? Probably not. Maybe that’s OK, though. I’m fine with being one of a small minority of users that actually use Linux as their primary OS. I’m fine with dealing with the issues that come with being a Linux user. It’s not for everyone, that’s for sure, but I’m hoping to convince others that it’s OK to make the switch.
Filed in: Team Member Blog linux
Apparently Linux has Ceased to Exist and I didn’t Notice
Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Director and head of Microsoft’s Linux Labs, Bill Hilf, made some rather interesting comments recently about Linux. He’s proclaiming that Linux has ceased to exist in 2007 and that the open source movement is dead because many of the developers actually have paying jobs to work on Linux programs. He went on to mention that the rise of Linux had nothing to do with Linux itself, but with the rise of Apache, MySQL, and PHP and the usage of them on the Linux platform. He described those three stalwart components of many web servers as the “Visual Basic of open source”. Oh yeah… IBM, his former employer, also decided to start a standards war by promoting the Open Document Format because they wanted a part of the Office market and people just don’t want the ODF.
Wow! I don’t even know where to begin on this. I don’t know if this is just the standard FUD that comes out of the Microsoft camp, or if Mr. Hilf really believes what he’s saying, but it’s certainly absurd on many levels.
I can start by saying that I’m pretty sure that Linux still exists right now. Gentoo just released the 2007 version of their base installation. My laptop is running Linux just fine. It hasn’t fallen apart. I’m writing this inside version 2.2 of OpenOffice, which still works and supports ODF as its default document format. Things are good as far as I can tell.
Even though Linux isn’t quite ready for the desktop for the average Windows or MacOS user, it has made great strides. The real power is in using Linux as a server platform. It’s certainly not going anywhere anytime soon. On the server the LAMP stack has worked quite well. It’s possible that the AMP combination had the side effect of raising the awareness of Linux, but my guess is that’s more due to performance on Linux vs Windows than anything else. Also, I’m surprised that Mr. Hilf would compare anything to Visual Basic since that’s less of a “real” programming language than PHP (obligatory VB dig).
I’m not sure why people wouldn’t want the Open Document Format. What it does is create an open standard for storing various document data that has no vendor lock-in associated with it. It will force office software vendors to really compete with their products rather than relying on their locked-in format to keep a person from switching to a different office product.
I don’t see it as a bad thing that programmers are getting paid to write Linux and open source software. They need to make a living, too. If a company wants to sponsor the creation of an open source product, that’s great. It makes it even more likely that the product will continue to be improved upon than if the product was created by a programmer who was in between jobs or creating the product in his or her spare time.
So, in deference to Microsoft and Mr. Hilf: I’m sorry, but I don’t think that Linux is going to go away anytime soon.
Here’s a link to an article (PHP, no less) about this, and another link to the Slashdot story.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/090507_Database/09May2007_data05.php
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/14/2038250
Filed in: Team Member Blog linux
Emacs vs. vi - Editor Wars
I ran across a thread on Slashdot [it.slashdot.org] that linked to an article on the Register [theregister.co.uk] talking about Bill Joy, his impending retirement from Sun, and how he created the vi editor. It’s interesting that someone decided to post a thread about an article that was written almost three-and-a-half years ago. But, that’s not the point. It brought up the whole Emacs vs. vi argument.
It seems like this argument rears its ugly head every so often on Slashdot for some unknown reason. It’s well known in the UNIX and Linux circles that more often than not, developers/sys-admins/etc. either use Emacs or vi to get all their editing done in the terminal world. It’s a similar argument to whether you like the Xbox or PS2 better.
Which do I use? Well… if I had to choose, I’d choose Emacs. I tried… really, really tried to figure out vi when I was back in school, but to no avail. Even though people tried to tell me that vi was waaaay better than Emacs, I would have none of it. I turned to Emacs. For me, Emacs did the job better than vi. It just seemed more natural. I couldn’t get used to what I thought were incomprehensible control keys and no easy to find documentation with vi. So, my entire college career was Emacs-ful and I still maintain that bias.
Truth be told, though… At home, I don’t even use Emacs anymore. When I need to do some quick editing of a file from a terminal window I just use Nano. Now, Nano isn’t the greatest text editor in the world. It’s not even close. It’s a Pico clone [wikipedia], so you get all the un-robustness (is that a word?) of that type of editor. Why do I use it? It’s simple to use. There’s no hassle in learning all kind of key combinations. I just want to edit text quickly, and Nano fits the bill. This may be somewhat of a bias from using Gentoo since Nano is the default terminal editor that is installed, but it works for me.
This gets me thinking. What does make a good editing program? I use Nano from a terminal. For quick text editing in the GUI realm I usually use gedit [wikipedia] (think glorified version of Notepad). For programming, I use Eclipse. In the Windows world I’ll use TextPad [textpad.com].
For the most part, the editors I’ve chosen are fairly simple, uncluttered, and don’t require vast tomes of information to figure out how to use.
What it really comes down to, I think, is pure personal preference. The reason that there are so many different text editing programs available for so many different operating systems is because people’s preferences range so widely. Still, it seems that there’s a large contingent of developers and sys-admins that treat this as some sort of polarizing thing. Either you’re with us or you’re against us. I find the whole Emacs vs. vi debate to be amusing.
Can’t we all just get along?
Filed in: Team Member Blog linux
Linux is Fun
I’m a huge fan of Linux. I’ve been using a Linux desktop as my primary OS for about three years now.
Call me crazy. Call me a glutton for punishment. I enjoy it.
I realized a few years back that there just wasn’t a need to use Windows anymore. Everything that I really use on a computer has a Linux equivalent (well, almost… but there are ways around that). So, I made the big switch.
I started out using one of the older versions of Mandrake (now Mandriva if I remember correctly). Unfortunately, Mandrake had a tendency to corrupt itself on my computer, so after the third or fourth time of starting for scratch, I decided to look at a different distro. One of my brother in-laws who also uses Linux as his desktop OS had tried out a distro called Gentoo. I checked it out and have been using it ever since.
Gentoo is an interesting distro with an interesting philosophy: everything should be built from source on your machine. The upside is that everything runs fast. The downside is that it can sometimes take a long time to compile packages depending upon your processor speed.
The package manager, Portage, is top notch. It does a great job at managing dependencies and performing the builds through a glorified scripting system called ebuilds. Gentoo can be kind of heady, though. There is a ton of documentation and a really great community surrounding it, but it’s still not as simple as other distros to get things to work. You’re routinely editing scripts and config files to make things work.
I don’t mind it. I’ve currently got three machines running Gentoo (soon to be four). It runs really well on low-memory and low-processing speed machines.
So, what’s the point? The point is that as a Java developer there’s no need to be tied down to the Microsoft world view. Java works just as well on Linux as on Windows. Eclipse runs great on Linux. (If you really want to use it, WSAD is available also)
Developing on a Linux box is so much snappier than on a Windows box. (Disclaimer: I do not run a full Desktop Environment such as Gnome or KDE)
The nice thing is that if you absolutely need Windows for something, you can always run it inside VMware. VMware Server is now a free product. It works spectacularly well.
Give Linux a shot. The more people try it out, the better the OS and the various desktop environments will get. This is critical to give Microsoft and Apple a bit of competition in their arenas.
Gentoo: http://www.gentoo.org
VMware: http://www.vmware.com
Filed in: Team Member Blog linux