Rumbles of Mutiny

Murmurs of revolt spread through the taverns in the Kingdom of Windows. The flashy new Vista model King William had promised the people had taken 5 years to put into production, and the price matched its splendour. During those five years, the Apple Opera Company had staged several new productions of impressive polish. The upstarts from Google were giving people free software and email services, and there were rumours that Desktop Linux was mature enough to rival Vista.

In the rugged mountains of Mozilla, far from the Court at Redmond, fiercely independent tribes had held out against King William. Long ago their artisans had sworn an oath to share their ideas and inventions freely. Their creations were built on open platforms like UNIX and Linux, with liberal use of arcane tools. Now there was talk that they’d produced a Linux desktop of great beauty.

The once loyal-to-the-royal media began asking if King William was losing the steely resolve of old. Would people baulk at the outrageous price of Vista and do the unthinkable: rebel and buy a Mac, or replace their Windows with Linux? Was this the autumn of King William’s reign and would Vista become his elaborate tomb? And who would reign after King William? Would it be Big Jobs and Apple or would it be the rebels from Mozilla? Would 2007 be the year of Linux?

A journey into the Mountains

One can easily get lost in Mozilla: many paths lead to distant villages, and every village offers its own version of Linux. The language takes some getting used to in these parts: ‘grub’ is nothing to do with food, and ‘root’ is not a vegetable or a crude word for sex (nor is mount’). These words aren’t all that is unfamiliar here: daemons and gnomes live side by side with penguins and drakes, not always in peace.

Hundreds of villages produce hundreds of distros, as they call their Linux platforms, and thousands of artisans have fashioned thousands of software packages, utilities and tools that run on Linux. For the newcomer, it’s like entering a shop in a foreign country where all the wares are labelled in a language he can’t read.

I bought a tourist guide (Get Started with Linux – all you need) to make things easier. The artisans supply their wares on DVDs or as ISO images you can burn to CDs and boot from, and many are ‘Live’ CDs that let you play with them (by rebooting from the CD) before you install these creations.

Windows has an infuriating trait that has made some users leap from high balconies in despair: it will try to boot from anything left in one of your PC’s slots – a CD, a USB stick, an external hard drive and even your shoelace if it’s nearby. Next morning when you boot up, you shudder as a black and white screen declares that all the system-32 files are missing. First you panic, then you try everything you know to coax the thing into life, but Safe Mode refuses to come up and you can’t even get at the dreaded Recovery Console. As you drink your third coffee from trembling hands, it dawns on you that you left the USB stick in the slot at the back of the PC.

Zen and the Art of Motorbike Maintenance

So getting Windows to boot up from a Linux CD is a cinch. My tourist guide said: ‘You’re about an hour away from having a working Linux system’ but, after my first hour with Ubuntu, I was staring at a blank screen and a hung installation. To be on the safe side, I’d chosen my old IBM Thinkpad as the vehicle for this journey, and the climb up this mountain was too much for it. The engine is a meagre 300Mz Pentium with 192mb of RAM but lots of people say that’s enough to run Linux.

Little brother Xubuntu was my next attempt. It took 20 minutes to reach the install option, and another 20 for the map of the world to come up that lets you select your city and time zone. When I clicked on Sydney, I witnessed the strangest thing I’ve ever seen a PC do: continental drift in slow motion. Yes, the continents began to float away, Australia cuddling up to Indonesia and both of them heading for India, with Africa floating across to join them. Xubuntu just drifted away from me.

Zenwalk was said to be an easier road with its lightweight GUI and simple apps. The install was more of a marathon than a walk but we made it to the finish line. It came up in a pretty blue, ready to accept my user name and password. I keyed in ‘root’, but the word in the panel said ‘r66t’. I thought it was my tired eyes but, after more careful attempts, it was clear that too much Zen had scrambled the TP’s keyboard. I felt like a man who’d built a new house and couldn’t get in the front door.

After playing with num locks, caps locks and various key combinations, I struck it lucky: if I held down the ‘Fn’ key while typing, the problem went way but now I was playing piano with one hand tied behind my back. I didn’t persevere for long because Zenwalk performed like an arthritic waiter on tranquilizers. At least I’d managed to get a Linux distro installed, which did a lot for my self-esteem.

Smaller than Lite

Next I tried Slax, a mini version of Slackware. It came up with a promising cloverleaf but, after a few false starts, it went all droopy and left me staring at a blank screen.

Further down the list was Damn Small Linux. True to its name, DSL is a 50mb download that will run from a USB stick. It installed in a relative flash but came up in colours that made my eyes water: lime green on a light yellow screen. I couldn’t read a thing even when using two sets of glasses, trying different angles or turning the room lights off. Somewhere in there was a setting that could make DSL intelligible but it only a Guild Navigator from the planet Dune could’ve found it.

They say Linux can give older PCs a new lease of life but so far, it looked more like the kiss of death. As it happened, there were more villages offering small, light or tiny versions. Puppy Linux sounded cute and supposedly bounced into life straight from the CD, but it refused to wag its tail on the old TP.

My next stop was the village of Beatrix but the people there said the artisan had gone to New Orleans a couple of years back and had not been heard of since Hurricane Katrina. Stories like these are legend in the mountains. They said a man in the next village had built on Beatrix to make BFX, an even better Linux Lite. BFX put up an epic struggle to install itself on the TP: rows and rows of lines kept flashing up the screen and among them I saw the curious message irq15. Nobody cared. Try booting with ‘irqpoll’. I stared at the passing code like an archaeologist trying to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, until I saw that the lines on the screen were repeating themselves - this puppy was chasing its own tail and would drop dead if I didn’t stop it.

Taking Risks

I’d learnt my first lesson about life in the mountains: Don’t believe those guides who tell you that Linux runs okay on old hardware. If I wanted to play with Linux, it was clear that I’d have to install it on my mobile workhorse, a Dell laptop (Intel Core Duo, 1mb RAM). It would have no trouble running the most popular distros - Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, SimplyMepis and PCLinuxOS. The only problem was that I’d have to create a partition, which I knew nothing about except that my Windows would shatter if I messed it up.

Some checking up on the Net revealed that Ubuntu could create a partition for you and leave Windows XP intact. More checking revealed that this didn’t always work. The guide I’d hired said: ‘You need to use a program such as Partition Magic to shrink the Windows installation.’

After a full back-up, I installed Paragon Partition Manager from a PC magazine CD. The Help file said: ‘Partition Manager does not provide a function like ‘pick-up free space from existing partition(s) and create one more partition ... [you must] manually define a sequence of resize/move operations on existing partitions in order to free disk space and collect it into a single block of unpartitioned space.’

Follow the drumbeat

I was lost in the wilderness with no option but to trust Ubuntu. The 6.10 ‘Edgy Eft’ CD offered me a quick tour of South Africa’s highveld in its red-brown colours, but I declined and clicked the install icon. The installer took a while to sort himself out and wasn’t very communicative – like a clerk in a bank, he kept disappearing into a backroom for ages, leaving me to stare at the closed door. Eventually Ubuntu came up and started asking the usual questions.
I had my guide with me, just in case. I was also sitting on the edge of my seat (is that why it’s called Edgy?), worried about the partitioning ordeal. I relaxed a little when Ubuntu offered to shrink the existing NTFS partition and even let me select the size. Then it created 3 new partitions and asked me if I was happy to go ahead. I double-checked the settings, which were easy to follow, closed my eyes and said YES. It couldn’t have been simpler and was all over in a flash.

After a few more questions about location, local time (the map of the world didn’t dissolve) the installer copied the files across, then asked me to reboot. When I did, the boot screen offered several options with Windows at the bottom. It came up fine with everything in its usual place.

Back to the Stone Age

A second reboot opened the dusty highveld, but the pleasant welcome music struck a sour note: the letters on the screen looked like they’d been borrowed from a Flintstones cartoon, and the pictures were stretched like those on a T-shirt that’s too tight across a beer gut. Ubuntu offered no help, prodding me to download updates instead. How did it expect me to do that without setting up a connection first? I plugged the laptop into the DSL modem and looked for a set-up screen, then watched Ubuntu load down the updates with my mouth wide open.

If only it could’ve taken care of my widescreen just like that. The default GUI is Gnome, and, coming from Windows, I found this little guy hard to follow. They say KDE is more intuitive, so Kubuntu might’ve been a better choice. When I found the Display panel, it was set on 1024 x 768. An arrow down the side hinted at a drop-down list of better choices, except that there weren’t any. Worse, it wasn’t even showing me what it promised, but plain and ugly old 800x600.

The internet revealed that I wasn’t the only dummy looking for a resolution to the widescreen problem. The geeks who inhabit the forums offered fixes involving command line acrobatics and driver hacks that were beyond this fresh-faced penguin. The short version went something like: ‘Use Kernel 2.6.12+ (compile in AGP/DRI support) and Xorg 6.8.99.10+ (use i810 driver, change /etc/X11/xorg.conf to 1280x800).’
My mission was to check if Linux was ready for users of average skill. Ubuntu failed the test, at least on a widescreen laptop. It’s a shame because so much is laid on here: all kinds of applications that would take days to install on Windows. And I’d read that installing more apps was a breeze with Ubuntu, in contrast to other distros. But what was the point? I had to find a distro I could bear to look at.

SUSE with the Open Smile

At the newsagent in the next village, I found a magazine with a Fedora Core 6 DVD and an Open SUSE 10.1 package, complete with manual. As they’re number 2 and 3 on the Linux hit parade, I bought both. A review in the magazine said that Fedora Core 6 was ‘lumbered with’ Pirut and Yum for software management. By now I’d learnt enough of the local dialect to know that this meant arduous treks deep into the mountains to get hold of additional software.

SUSE seemed like a better bet, given that it came with a manual, even if I needed a magnifying glass to read it in the dim light of the midnight oil. The author said it was best to install SUSE on a ‘fresh’ hard disk and added the useful advice that they were quite cheap these days. He skipped over partitioning and dual booting, claiming that these details were beyond the scope of the manual. I flung it on top of the growing pile of CDs which had had failed to work.
Since Ubuntu had created more partitions, I thought SUSE would see them, and she did: sd2/dev, sd3/dev and so on. The NTFS tag in sd1/dev gave me a hint where Windows lived, so I clicked on sd3 to install SUSE and took a deep breath.

SUSE asked many more questions than Ubuntu and the install took an hour. After the reboot, a bright blue screen showed that Windows was still an option and I relaxed. Like Ubuntu, SUSE took her time to offer her services, and once again I found myself staring at a scene from the Flintstones. Everything else was where and how it should be, except for Gnome – I’d been so worried about the partitioning that I’d missed the KDE option.

Screens and Screams

SUSE’s list of screen options seemed to cover all the screens made in the last twenty years. Picking a Dell screen with a 1200 x 800 resolution and the Intel G945 driver brought up a panel that said: 1024 x 768 - Accept or Refuse. I refused and went through this loop another dozen times with different choices before I gave up for fear of going mad. We’re not talking about some obscure screen and weird driver here – Intel G915/G945 cards are as common as weeds.

A quick check on the internet revealed that SUSE had a problem with Intel graphics cards as well. The ever-helpful geeks that populate these mountains offered the usual command line hacks but I soon lost interest. Yes, I can see the wise heads shake and hear the voices that say: you can do anything you want with Linux, but you have to learn a little about it first. True, but I’m a typical Windows user - ever tried to read a Microsoft manual or technical bulletin? They’re about as easy to follow as rulings from the taxation office.

I rebooted to check that XP was still intact. It came up with a black and white screen and asked if I’d care to reboot or try Safe Mode. With hands trembling, I restarted the laptop and this time Windows came up, but all the letters were squashed together like sardines in a narrow tin. I delved into Windows to reset the screen resolution. At least I knew my way around XP, so this was easy. It occurred to me that I never thought I’d say anything was easy in Windows.

The Easy Path

There are distros that claim to make it easy for Windows refugees. PCLinuxOS has many ardent fans but the only version offered on the website was a beta 2, yet several reviews said it was stable and easy to work with. I checked into Intel G915 support and was assured that it was a simple tick-the-box install, courtesy of Synaptic (a ‘package manager’ that helps you install software).

PCLOS asked me a lot of questions before even running the live CD - about my language, time zone and internet connection. The install took just over 20 minutes (including the now familiar partition routine) but the screen came up in 800x600. When I checked the Display settings, PCLOS told me that I’d have more luck with the 915resolution installed – would I like to install it now? I hit the OK button and rubbed my hands with anticipation. PCLOS came straight back and said it couldn’t do what it had offered to do, sorry.

I dived into Synaptic via the ‘convenience’ icon in the taskbar, found 915 resolution, marked it for install and ticked Apply. Synaptic said it couldn’t do it either and I began to suspect there was something more basic amiss. I ran up Firefox and it couldn’t connect, so it was off to the Control Panel to check the DSL setup, back through the same old dialogue to get it going again, then back to the screen settings and at last PCLOS got rid of the Flintstones look.
PCLinux uses KDE for its desktop, which I found easier to follow than the Gnome. The list of installed applications includes OpenOffice, Scribus, Thunderbird and MPlayer for movies on DVD. Despite laying on the works, PCLOS felt more nimble than the two previous distros. Only OpenOffice still crawled onto the scene.

I had other things to worry about: panels that hung and wouldn’t close whatever I did. Logging out would leave me stuck, staring at black and white lines – the power button was the last resort. After a reboot, PCLinux had lost the internet connection again, and this also happened when it shut down normally.

PCLinuxOS has a lot going for it but isn’t stable in its current beta form. Beta 3 has just been released so the finished product can’t be far off.

The North West Passage

Xandros offers a 30-day trial of their professional edition, which costs money but promises an easy transition for Windows refugees. From the moment the install began, I was impressed. The screen has a left pane like XP that gives you a running snapshot of the installer’s progress, while the right side tells you all about Xandros Linux. The process is easy to follow and gets by with a minimum of questions - unlike Windows, Linux distros don’t insist on inserting an electronic eel into the bowels of your PC to check that your set-up is legal.

I checked that 915 resolution wasn’t a problem but, when Sesame opened, a warped world faced me once more. The XP-like panels made it easy to track down the Display settings, and Xandros let me choose the resolution I needed along with the driver. Despite these hopeful signs, it didn’t produce the hoped-for results.

I checked the user forum and, once again, I wasn’t the only dummy looking for a fix. One helpful geek wrote in: ‘I downloaded and tried the Intel driver but couldn't get it to work either :-(. I downloaded a more up to date release candidate kernel (2.6.12-rc6) and found that DRI support for the i910GM card had been added. For AGP compile in kernel support for '/dev/agpgart (AGP Support)' and 'Intel 440LX/BX/GX, I8xx and E7x05 chipset support'. For DRI support compile in kernel support for 'Direct Rendering Manager (XFree86 4.1.0 and higher DRI support' and 'Intel 830M, 845G..... (i915 driver)'.

That wasn’t nearly the end of it but it was the end for me. I closed Firefox and hunted around for other system settings. I was about to give it away when I spotted an item called ‘Drivers’ in the Xandros Networks panel (the package manager that helps you install more software). I opened it and what did I find there? A driver for the Intel G915/945 card. I ticked the box, then Install and off Xandros went and fetched the thing for me, installed it and told me to reboot. I was greeted by a close to perfect desktop. What a difference the right driver makes in these mountains.

Xandros Networks also shows you what applications are installed and OpenOffice wasn’t among them so I ticked the box and watched Xandros load it down and install it for me – it couldn’t have been easier.

The Jackpot

Like PCLOS, Xandros also offered a 3D desktop but I thought I’d better learn to walk before attempting double backwards somersaults. After installing the usual updates – like Ubuntu, Xandros had found my DSL connection – I played around with the Xandros File Manager, which is conveniently laid out like Windows Explorer. It listed both the Linux and Windows partitions as drives - Windows pretends that Linux doesn’t exist, as you’d expect.
Out of idle curiosity, I popped a Windows document back-up CD into the drive, fully expecting Xandros to give me big read cross error sign or a rude message. Instead it listed the folders on the CD and opened individual files with a simple click. Opening a Word document brought OpenOffice to life (eventually), and it did what its name promised. The same happened with PDF and HTML docs, and even Powerpoint presentations. The only kinds of office docs Xandros couldn’t handle were those created with Publisher.

That meant I could copy 99% of my files from the windows partition into Xandros. You can even copy files from Xandros to the Windows partition. The professional version also includes CrossOver, which lets you run Windows apps on Linux, but the list is limited and features ancient software like Acrobat Reader v5. Publisher wasn’t on the list and nothing else tempted me.

An icon in the taskbar was vying for attention, a rather unattractive critter that looked like a bedbug jumping up and down. It turned out to be the Xandros Security Suite, which includes a Firewall, Anti-Virus and even a rootkit detector. This looked impressive, but why bother? To make paranoid Windows users feel comfortable? Last year, 48,000 new virus signature were found in the Windows world, against all of 40 in Linux.

The bug was throwing its weight around and insisting on running a file scan on a brand-new system with no user files. Apart from that annoying bug, Xandros does exactly what it claims: to open an easy passage for Windows users through the mountains of Mozilla. If you merely want to find a familiar refuge from Windows, Xandros provides it. The price for the professional edition is $99 including Codeweaver’s Crossover, the Home Edition is about half that.
If you want to explore the new world of Linux, on the other hand, Xandros might be the wrong way to go. Many Linux utilities are re-branded and proprietary software has been added, so it’s hard to figure out what is Linux and what is Xandros. Also, the list of tick-and-install apps in Xandros Networks is quite limited and I suspect the safety net might vanish if you venture beyond it.

Mandrake, the Magician.
Mandriva was once known as Mandrake and is said to suit dumb users like me. After checking that it supported 915 resolution, I bought a Linux mag with a Mandriva 2007 DVD – downloading these distros takes hours, even on DSL. The DVD came with extra cheese, salami and anchovies and the install was well done, keeping me informed about progress all the way through.

By now, the distorted screen had become as familiar as a friend who’s overstayed his welcome. Digging into the Display options made Mandrake the magician appear, and he told me that I had an Intel G945 graphics card. What’s more, he offered to install the right driver for me. Log out and back in, and the world looked normal again. Why can’t the others make it this easy?

Mandriva’s default desktop is KDE, which suited me except that it felt like a heavy load. Or was the extra cheese gumming up Mandriva’s works? Then again, all of the distros I’d tried were slower to start and to respond than XP on the same machine. Launching or clicking on a process is like ringing the bell for a nurse in a hospital: a lot of time goes by before you hear the footsteps in the hallway and see her appear. And Open Office takes longer to wake up than a teenager who’s been out partying all night.

There’s a control panel that lets you disable unnecessary processes, but it’s written in a foreign language. I have to admit here that my first reaction to XP’s task manager was the same – it takes time to become familiar with operating system processes.

Linux is not Windows

There are rigid procedures for installing software on Windows, and these are followed to the letter by all authors except those who work at the King’s Court. In the mountains of Mozilla, where everything is handcrafted, installing software is a hit-and-miss affair. The smart thing to do is to buy what you need from the shop you bought the platform from, then there’s a chance that the add-ons will fit. The shops call this ‘package management’ and talk about ‘dependency hell’, meaning that some programs won’t work or will only work after adding other bits and pieces.
Mandriva’s Software Management Console lets you download updates, see what’s installed and what else you can get from the shop. The DVD was loaded with apps, from OpenOffice to DTP and Website design, but MPlayer and Opera were missing. A visit to Mandriva’s website revealed that these guys make their money from bundles of apps you can buy from a kiosk and have installed for you. Mandriva Club membership offers more apps and extra privileges, but the Silver Service (recommended for all but home users) is a hefty $130 a year.

There’s another way to get more apps, but it involves a tortuous journey through the mountains. First you have to find your way to the village of Urpmi, which is on the way to RPMDrake. There you need to find a guide who’ll take you to the Penguin Liberation Front further up in the mountains. These folks will help you track down what you’re after, but it’s a convoluted process. Once you get the software, installing it can be tricky as some of the artisans use tarballs to package their wares in. All of this sounded too hard so I tried a more direct route: downloading Opera with Firefox. To my great surprise, Mandriva installed it without a hitch.

Easter Eggs

When it comes to tracking down desktop and system settings, KDE rivals Windows in its confusing layout. With KDE it’s not so much a case of hidden Easter eggs but too many look-alike eggs. There are two control centres: the one that goes by that name (KDE’s control panel) gives you access to themes, panel colours, wallpaper and so on. The Mandriva Linux Control Centre is hidden under ‘Configure Your Computer’. It lets you mess with files, set up printers and tweak screen settings, as long as you log in as administrator. This safety feature can get annoying after a while, since you have to do it every time you open a panel with restricted access.

KDE is a puzzle with many pieces that range from an email client to a CD burner. One of these is a guy called Konqeror who has many jobs including that of file manager - listing him under Internet browsers adds more confusion.

Easter Eggs in 3D

The Mandriva Control panel offered 3D effects, which I assumed required a better graphics card than the humble Intel in my Inspiron. A quick check with Google found many articles on how to enable 3D with Nvidia and ATI cards. More digging produced a piece that said the Intel G945 was enough for the basics. I ticked the 3D option and suddenly, everything I clicked on went wobbly. Panels behaved like curtains in a breeze when you moved them, or like chewing gum when you tugged at their borders. The world on my screen looked weird again, only this time it followed Salvadore Dali’s ideas rather than those of Barney Rubbles.

I couldn’t see what the 3D fuss was about until I followed the instructions of the Linux mag that had provided this distro: hit CTRL+Alt+ right cursor, which made the cube spin around to a second desktop. Not bad. CTRL+ALT+ right-clicking on the desktop with the mouse lets you move the whole cube in space, in any direction. Shift +CTRL+ALT+right+left cursor allows you to drag an open panel across to the next side of the cube. And if you get lost among all the cubic desktops, you can hit CTRL+ALT+ down cursor and see all the screens at once in 2D.
This stuff will impress your mates, but it can be useful when working on multiple documents, cutting and pasting. You can have transparent panels, menus and toolbars as well if you want to impress your mates some more. I was surprised that this fancy stuff worked so fast on a base-model Dell Inspiron. Microsoft says Vista Premium will run on this machine, too, but we know their hype for what it is by now: hype. Dell’s online configurator recommends 2gb of RAM for anything above Vista Home, plus ATI or Nvidia graphics cards. Mandriva’s fancy graphics are free and work well on basic hardware, that’s the beauty of it.

I didn’t find any bugs, only pleasant surprises: after fiddling with the settings on one occasion, I lost all my toolbars. Rebooting not only restored them, but also restored the programs I had open at the time. There was a greater intelligence at work here, you could feel it. Mandriva even speeded up over the few days I played with it, I don’t know how. All I know is that it took less than a minute to boot up in the end.

Mandriva grew on me. If you can live with the generous list of installed applications and the extras on Mandriva’s menu, or don’t mind joining the Club, this is a fine alternative to Windows Vista.

Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

Novell offers a 60-day trial for SLED 10. Basic installation was easy and took about 40 minutes. Then the fun started, with Novell acting a bit like Microsoft – registration, product codes, access to updates and support. That took half an hour and the updates took another forty minutes. The 800x600 resolution had me worried but, in the end, SLED redeemed itself and offered to reconfigure the screen to 1200x800.

The default Gnome desktop makes the Simpson Desert look lush. All you see are couple of folders on the screen and a My Computer button in the bottom taskbar, next to a pencil. ‘My Computer’ turns out to be the ‘Start’ button. It opens a screen offering a few apps, a ‘More Applications’ button and pointers to things like Help and Control Centre. The More Apps button goes to other extreme and opens a leather-bound volume of 160 programs: 21 office applications, 9 browsers/file managers, 10 communications tools, 10 graphics programs, 15 audio/video programs, 50 system utilities and 28 tools. There are group headings on one side, but you get the entire Carte des Vins on the right. When you click a heading, it colours in the related group but it still takes too long to find what you want.

The Works and More

There was no bar along the top of the screen, which puzzled me since Ubuntu had one. After turning the Gnome upside down and shaking him a few times, he confessed that I could add a top bar if I right-clicked on the bottom task bar > new panel. The top bar appeared with 3 headings: Applications, Places and Desktop, all with sensible drop-down menus including the long-lost RUN command.

With Novell aiming SLED at the corporate desktop, you wonder why there are so many entertainment apps and not a single DTP package. Totem is the movie player provided here but it wouldn’t play my movies. I tried to install Opera the same way as I’d done with Mandriva but SLED turned it into a tarball and a few boxes wrapped in brown paper. No help unpacking them was offered.

Novell’s Package Manager (in YaST) listed many program components that meant nothing to me, and none of the apps I was looking for. On the Net I came across the link below, which shows how to access the storehouse of apps from the Open SUSE community - http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/46/

This was a less arduous trip than the long trek to the Penguin Liberation Front, but it still took time. Once these ‘repositories’ had been added, I tracked down Opera and YaST installed the browser for me in a flash. Adding Scribus was just as easy. Be warned, though: doing this might cause the Novell support guys to spit the dummy - OpenSUSE is Novell’s product too but it’s not quite the same as SLED.

Of Gnomes and Konquerors

If Novell is trying to win over Windows users, their Gnome set-up isn’t the best choice – the little guy can infuriate you faster than an obnoxious waiter in a fancy restaurant. Some things just aren’t where they should be, like an ‘Open With’ option on the right-click menu, or a ‘Set as Background’ option with photos. And the login settings are buried many layers deep under security.

I tried to switch to KDE but couldn’t find it (I’d clicked the install option so I knew it was there). It turned up in YaST’s the admin toolkit, as an option under /etc/sysconfig Editor>Windows Manager. Making KDE the default desktop didn’t do the trick, so I consulted the exhaustive User Guide. It revealed that you choose the desktop with the ‘session’ option on the login panel. I never saw that since I’d opted for auto-login - and I used to complain about Windows and its traps for the unwary ...

KDE’s layout and options were different from the Mandriva version, and it looked a bit clunky and slowed everything down again. In the end I persevered with the Gnome and its more rounded panels. After shaking the little guy some more, he offered me a ‘traditional main menu’ applet in the bottom taskbar, which provided logical fan-out menus. I dragged a few launch icons down there as well and soon realized that the top-of-the screen bar I’d set up was redundant. With the bottom taskbar set on tiny and transparent, and a nice beach photo on the screen, the look of SLED 10 assumed a simple elegance that grew on me.

Getting that photo into place was a pain, since neither the file manager nor the photo viewers offered me a ‘set as background’ option. By chance I found that you can ‘add’ your photos to the background theme panel, and select them from there with a single click. The 3D toys were as easy to set up as Mandriva’s, and the settings provided more options than I knew what to do with.

In fairness, neither of the two desktop GUIs is harder to come to grips with than Windows XP – I had the same problems the first time I saw that boring green lawn. Diving headlong into several Linux distros with different desktop managers, as I did, was bound to add more confusion. A user choosing one distro will only have to learn one GUI. The real challenge is in choosing one over another.

More Extras and more Speed

Choosing Gnome didn’t bar access to other KDE apps like K3b, the burner, or Kaffeine, KAudioCreator and Kino. Conversely, you have access to Gnome apps if you choose KDE’s desktop, so SLED offers the best of both worlds. Novell says it’s done a lot of work on Open Office (which it owns) to provide better support for Microsoft Office macros, Excel ones especially. It also throws in AppArmour, a security suite that claims sandboxing facilities. A more useful addition is a laptop package that provides power management and wireless communications.

There’s even a process monitor that resembles XP’s Task Manager. It revealed that SLED occupied 250mb of RAM and 3gb of disk space, not bad for a full-featured system with a truckload of tools and applications. Even with half a dozen apps running, SLED used just 400mb of RAM.

It takes a couple of minutes to warm up from a cold start, but once the SLED is moving, it’s quick to respond to the helm. This is the first time I’ve seen both Firefox and OpenOffice come up in seconds rather than minutes, so the tuners at Novell’s garage have done a pretty good job.

I don’t have much fancy hardware on my laptop but I do have a couple of printers in my office. I chose the ‘add printer’ option on the Control Panel and SLED picked up the HP 3100 Photosmart right away, offering to install the driver. Yes please, I said, and SLED 10 opened the file manager for me, which drew a predictable blank. So did a check with HP’s website – the 3100 wasn’t an option for Linux yet but my second printer, an HP Laserjet 1300, was. I plugged it in but drew another blank.

I checked with HP who offered me a driver set and instructions for a simple install via the console. I stumbled over the first instruction - cd to directory - so I approached YaST, the guy who offers help with all kinds of problems. He made me fill in a few blank panels and then offered to test the printer. To my great surprise, it worked.
SLED 10 is a serious alternative to Vista: business users will find few glitches and a number of sensible tweaks, while home users will find plenty to amuse themselves with. The documentation is extensive and the QuickStart Tour is a great way to explore the new landscape. Novell’s SLED 10 costs fifty bucks but that includes a year’s access to updates and support.

SimplyMEPIS

People on the internet say it’s like Ubuntu, only better. Downloading the live CD gives you the now familiar look-before-you-install option. Before you do that, F3 lets you choose the screen resolution and my spirits lifted when I saw a 1280x800 option. The install was simple, with a progress bar and assorted tips and features that helped pass the time.

After the reboot, I was back in the stone age. The ‘Display’ panel claimed the resolution was 1024x768 and offered no improvement on it. Other settings deep in the System panel were no more generous. Once again Google showed me that I wasn’t the only one with this problem and pointed me to sites offering fixes that involved the usual command line surgery.

The best of them was one from a contributor who said getting Mepis set up was a breeze, including the widescreen fix: ‘I’ve done this so many times in the past,’ he wrote. ‘I just used a script I made to set this patch up properly. I still remember how difficult it can be as a newbie to install 915resolution and make it work each time the computer reboots.’ I looked in vain for the fix but, like a man who claims to know where the fabled treasure is buried, he left the tavern without revealing the details.

Linux Mint

I had no luck with two distros based on Ubuntu and wasn’t keen to try a third, but the Great Gizmo suggested Linux Mint. I was even less keen after seeing folks on the forums complain that there was a problem with 915resolution and, worse, that installing Mint had trashed their Windows installations.

The version I downloaded was 2.2, christened ‘Bianca’ by its Irish creators. I ran the live CD and it came up in full 1280x800 technicolour right away. After that impressive debut, I couldn’t wait to see more of Bianca. Mint uses the Gpart and it demands all of your attention when it comes to ticking the right partition boxes. The process is logical if a little unnerving for baby penguins.

The Mint emblem looks like a slice of green star aniseed with a bright white centre that beams like Venus. They say Venus is a treacherous planet but no treachery occurred. In fact, the install was a breeze and beat all records at 15 minutes flat. Bianca even ejected the CD before rebooting from the hard drive, something most of the others refuse to do, leaving you to wrench it out right after the reboot.

She turned out to be a fast lady in every way: I was up and running in half an hour, a time that exceeded all reasonable expectations. Bianca had my internet connection working right away and told me there were updates to download, which she took care of without making a fuss.

It was a different Gnome from Novell’s (the South African cousin) and you wonder why the artisans can’t leave these things alone. The theme choices were limited and lacked polish, and the boot screen looked like a throwback to the days of PC-DOS – clearly Bianca is still going through puberty. In the end, I settled for the Ubuntu default theme rather than Bianca’s bile green and blue hues. Now I was back where the journey through the mountains had begun: on the Highveld. I didn’t mind that since it gave me a chance to see why the village of Ubuntu was such a popular destination.

Linux on Speed, with the lot

They should’ve called it Lightning Linux – it fires up in 40 seconds, rearing to rev. Firefox and OpenOffice bounce onto the screen as if propelled by a slingshot, and so does everything else. It’s the most responsive distro I’ve tried by far.
The ADD/Remove option is a really neat piece of work. The plain English package descriptions include logos and popularity ratings, and the apps already installed have ticks in their boxes. Tick any others you want to install, click Apply, then sit back and watch the download/install happen in front of your eyes. It’s not hard to see what makes Ubuntu so popular: the list of apps is longer than the Limpopo river. No more long trips into the mountains - everything is just a mouse-click away: Opera, the Gimp and NVU, and even Xara-Extreme and Inkscape, and all of them are easier to install than any software on Windows.

Bianca played a DVD movie out of the box (Mandriva and SLED refused to) and made the push button controls on the Dell Laptop work the volume – another first for any of the distros I’ve tried. She offered power management for laptops and provided a Monitor that told me Mint used 230mb of RAM and 2.6gb of disk space.
She also offered things that weren’t strictly legal, like MPlayer and Java. There are copyright/digital rights issues but the Mint website says their developers opted for complete freedom. To those of us who resent Microsoft’s restrictions and frequent probes into the fundamental orifice of our PCs, this is Nirvana.

A Bridge too Far

Sadly, Nirvana is a mythical place. After I’d installed a few packages, Mint browned out next time I started it. The screen said: warning – not loading blacklisted module ipv6. I wondered if this was a one-off or something I’d done wrong. I’d been so impressed with Mint that I reinstalled it. I downloaded only a couple of packages including Opera, and this time Bianca told me I had a broken package and urged me to check the filter in Synaptic. I followed that lead but soon felt like a blind man trying read the insert of a fortune cookie in the dark.
When Opera closed and apologized for its hasty departure, I had a hunch that it might be the problem and uninstalled it. The broken package icon went away and Mint was happy once more, but the next day it wouldn’t start again. It’s a shame, but the rough edges are clearly more than skin deep. The best I can say is that Bianca has lots of potential: Ubuntu with the extras offered here has to be a winner.

 

The Verdict - an Attempt at a Fair Comparison

I’ve treated these Linux systems as if they were commercial products, comparing them with Windows XP and Vista. These are the products of a company with unlimited manpower and funds, while the bulk of Linux is the work of unpaid enthusiasts. That the results are comparable is astonishing; that some Linux distros offer a genuine alternative to Windows is wonderful news.

This was an exciting journey for me and, like someone who’s travelled through India or China and avoided staying at five star hotels, I’ve come back overwhelmed by the experience. The colour, variety and wealth of ideas I’ve seen makes the familiar Kingdom of Windows look pretty dull.

Hitches and Glitches

There were obstacles like strange customs, odd dialects and foreign currencies. By contrast, Windows XP is as familiar as the local shopping centre, but it took many frustrating trips to those shops to find my way around. Why should Linux be different?

It’s detractors say it’s not ready to put in front of your favourite auntie. Come on, would you really give her a Windows PC and leave her to it? No chance. There’s lots of stuff that doesn’t work on my Windows PCs: Outlook just clams up and refuses to send emails for no reason, six times a day. Media Player 11 won’t install on either of my machines, nor will the .net platform and some Windows updates. IE7 has mislaid McAfee’s Site Advisor, windows keep losing their memory, various settings keep dropping out and some days it doesn’t recognize my USB stick. My partner and I (and some of our friends) have paid lots of money to Windows gurus to sort these things out, with mixed returns.
You’ll remember the joke: If your operating system were an airline ... Microsoft Airways’ planes take off with no problems but sometimes explode in mid-air for no reason at all. These days, XP is pretty stable but let’s not forget that it took Microsoft a good three years (and two major updates) to stop Windows XP crashing for no reason. Stable it may be, but I’d probably give Auntie Nell a Mac, and I sure wouldn’t buy her a new PC with Vista unless I was trying to make her life a misery – chances are she’d slip on the Aero Glass and break a hip.

Freedom comes at a Price

That old joke has a line about Linux Air too: everyone brings a piece of the plane along when they gather at the airport. Out on the runway, they put the plane together piece by piece arguing about what kind of plane they’re supposed to build. This isn’t strictly true - they actually build lots of different planes, and therein lies a problem for the Windows refugee: it’s not a simple choice between airlines.

The biggest issue with switching platforms is application portability, and the average user’s needs are pretty simple: email, internet, Instant Messaging, photo editors, audio and video players, and a word processor. For office users, add a spreadsheet and maybe DTP and a few other tools. The litmus test is that they can open their files with Linux and run the kinds of programs they’re used to.

Whether it’s Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Mandriva, Mepis or Novell’s SLED, everything the average user needs on her desktop is part of the package. Laptop users are more limited in their choices, at least in the short term. Both will have to come to grips with either KDE or Gnome, but neither has any reason to get lost in the mountains looking for extra applications.

Where Linux shines

• 
  Installation. Linux is streets ahead of Windows here, installing an operating system and entire suites of applications in less time than it takes to install XP and its meagre accoutrements.

• Cost of ownership. There’s no contest here, even if you buy a commercial version or donate to the people who provide the distro you end up choosing.

• Wealth of applications. This is the touted a the big plus for Windows, but there’s just as much on offer in the Linux mountains. Here’s a list of equivalents: http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html#43

• Resources. Linux needs about the same hardware as Windows XP to run well, and less than Vista by a big margin.

• No interference - no need for MS licence validation and intrusive probing.

• Security – no need for all that anti-malware, but if you really don’t feel safe without it, there are free add-ons like ClamAV - http://www.clamav.net/

Nifty Stuff.

• Setting up the internet connection - automatically (in most cases).

• Disk partitioning done for you in a flash – no lengthy re-formatting of drives.

• 3D out of the box, easy as pie.

• Choice of GUIs.

• Restoring sessions after shutdown.

• Auto-configuration and performance optimization. This happened with  several distros speeded up as they learnt my habits.

• Inbuilt backup and restore facilities.

• Easy backup to a file server on the network via FTP.

• Lots more stuff I don’t yet know about.

Where Linux has to deliver more

• Standards. People have trouble dealing with too much freedom of choice. Two GUIs are justifiable (and there are more), but the current grab bag of package managers is ludicrous and the arcane workings of several resemble witchcraft. The installation routines of some distros aren’t far behind. The Portland Project is trying to address these issues and put some standards in place.

• Documentation. Badly needed is an idiot’s guide to Linux desktop managers, software management principles and file systems.

• Graphics. Many willing converts to Linux will try it out on their second machines, which are often laptops. Many newer laptops have wide screens and they’re becoming common on desktops, therefore it was a surprise to strike so many problems with wide screens and the humble Intel G915/G945.

• Look and Presentation. Apps that look fine on Windows (Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird) don’t look as good in their Linux attire. They resemble templates that aren’t fully coloured in or lack effects like raised buttons. I fiddled with all the Firefox settings to no avail. Also, fonts didn’t look smooth a lot of the time. This lack of fine polish will put people off.

• Bewildering Choices. Linux needs to present a united front to fresh penguins and give them sensible directions: if you want Linux easy, go to this group of distros over here; if you’re into command line stuff, come this way; if you’re a developer, this is where you should go.

• A slip of the drill. Some distros aren’t stable enough for everyday use. They should be clearly marked: beta, use at your own risk.

Summing up

So, is Linux ready for the masses? The answer is that Linux isn’t but that some of the major distros are. My top choice was Novell’s SLED 10, with Mandriva 2007 a close second. Widescreen issues aside, Ubuntu is another good choice (if you don’t hang out for a 3D desktop) and so is Open SUSE. And Xandros will do if you just want to get away from Windows.

What impressed me most was that none of the distros I installed trashed my Windows system, which I’d fully expected to happen. And most of the smaller glitches I found wouldn’t exist, I suspect, if more Linux developers joined forces. Ubuntu and Linspire have done so and more should follow. The perfect Linux would be a distro like SLED 10 or Mandriva 2007 with Ubuntu’s package manager and Linux Mint’s speed and hardware recognition. But we’re drifting into Nirvana again.

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