Right out of the gate, let me make a disclaimer here.

This is NOT an advertisement nor am I “recruiting” Linux users.

Indeed, if you’re satisfied with Windows, or any other “non-Linux OS”, and have absolutely no reason to switch . . . fine.  You’re likely better off sticking with what you’re comfortable with.

However . . . if, like I was about 3 years ago, you are seriously angry with Microsoft’s practices (a discussion of why I was angry with Microsoft is NOT pertinent to this article . . . don’t want to turn this into a Microsoft bashing exchange) or otherwise want to experiment and have the motivation to try Linux, here’s what you might expect to encounter during the transition.

(Note:  I am writing this from a Windows user perspective . . . was a Windows user from the days of 3.11 up through XP.   What the transition would be like from any other OS, say MAC, I have absolutely no idea.)

First of all, the common perception is that Linux is not user friendly.  Depending on what you’re switching from, that may be true and it may not.  If you are a refugee from Windows, I think it’s true (at least it was for me).

If you’re used to manipulating Windows files, there’s a substantial difference in the way some file operations in Linux behave.  I’ll give some specific examples in a second.

OTOH, there ARE some similar behaviors, so it’s not ALL different.

Let me interject here that there are many flavors of Linux (Linux calls them “Distributions” . . . but they all have a common kernel, based on Unix . . . and so are the MAC OS’s based on Unix, but there are substantial differences in MAC OS’s and Linux, enough to consider a switch from MAC OS’s to Linux as a “transition”, though easier in some ways than the transition from Windows to Linux.)

There is Red Hat Linux, openSuse Linux, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu (which also has more subdivisions, like “Kubuntu”, “Edubuntu”, and more) and other distributions I’ve left out.  Suffice it to say, there are many Linux distributions.  Some are heavy on Command Line Interfaces, and others have a desktop (e.g. “GNOME”, “KDE”, “XFCE” and more) that can offer a GUI similar to Windows.

For novices (like I was) making the transition, Ubuntu is one of the easier distributions to master, and the GNOME desktop will ease you into the transition also . . . though Linux Mint is giving Ubuntu a run for it’s money as far as ease of transition from Windows.

If you’re going to try the transition, I would recommend starting off with either Ubuntu or Mint, and the GNOME desktop.  (GNOME is the default desktop with Mint, and used to be with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu recently switched to a desktop called “Unity”, and Unity has gotten some bad reviews.  So now I might try Mint for the transition.)

I used Ubuntu, but that was in the days when Ubuntu came with the GNOME desktop (Version 8.10 is what I started with . . . I think it’s up to 11.x now)

OK . . . let’s get into some of the details.

The first intimidating effort is the Command Line Interface (“CLI”).  Linux relies on that much more heavily than Windows, but you can ease that transition by using the GNOME desktop GUI a little.

When I first started out, I was about 80% GUI and 20% CLI.  Now I’m at least 80% CLI (if not more) and about 20% GUI.  There are some significant advantages to using the CLI in Linux.  Many Linux programs do NOT have a GUI and can only be run in a CLI.  So, by learning to use the CLI (Linux calls that the “Terminal”) you have a lot more options.

Nevertheless, the CLI can be intimidating, unless of course you’re used to using it in Windows, and I don’t think many are because the point-and-click of the Windows GUI is so easy for many.

Now let’s get to those file manipulations I spoke of.

There are two major differences which make the adjustment to Linux difficult when it comes to file manipulations . . . identification of executables and installation of downloads (which Linux calls “packages”).

Let me stop right here and mention another essential part of a successful transition:  THE LINGO.  You’ll notice I’ve said, “Which Linux calls . . .” a lot already.  Switching from Windows, you’re going to notice a lot of these “different” terms.  So right off the bat, you’re going to want to use the University of Google a lot and find out what these terms mean.  For example, another one is “TSR” and “daemon”.  Windows calls programs, like your firewall, that run in the background “Terminate and Stay Resident” (TSR).  Linux calls them “daemons”.  (There actually are some small differences between TSR and daemon, but the beginner does not need to know what they are.)

If you don’t know what these terms mean, if you only have a vague idea, you could be headed down a road that will lead to substantial errors and difficulties.  So, to make the transition smoother, you would be wise to get these terms defined precisely right at the beginning.

This leads me to another problem you might have in the transition if you are making it from Windows.  As best you can (it’s not entirely possible if you’ve been using Windows for any length of time), STOP thinking in terms of Windows.

What I mean is that if you constantly ask “What would this be in Windows”, you’re setting yourself up for confusion.  For example, the Windows directory “C/Documents and Settings” is similar to the Linux folders “/bin” or “home/usr/bin”, but not precisely.  That “not precisely” part is what’s going to confuse you.  So drop the Windows mind-set as best you can.

Someone who’s first use of an OS is Linux, IOW Linux is the OS they learn on, will find Linux much easier to understand than someone who started out on Windows and is trying to make a transition to Linux.

OK, let me get back to file manipulations and then I’ll be done . . . though this is not a comprehensive guide to transitions . . . just a heads-up about the most difficult stuff.  I’m leaving a lot of things out.

In Windows, an executable can easily be identified by the .exe extension.  In Linux, there is NO .exe extension (Indeed, few file types have extensions in Linux . . . executables are identified in other ways . . . you’ll learn.)

So, for example, whereas most download installations can be performed in Windows by simply double clicking on a “setup.exe”, that’s not the way it works in Linux.

Which leads me to the second file manipulation caution I have:  Downloads and installations.  If you remember, I said these are called “packages” in Linux.

These packages come in many formats, from those called “RPMS”, Binaries, Source files in tarballs (lingo again) to many others.

For a novice the best thing to use, if available, is a “.deb” package.  You can double click on a .deb and it will install itself.  Actually, the best thing for a novice to use is the “Synaptic Package Manager”, which comes by default in the Ubuntu distribution.

There’s a lot I’m leaving out, but I don’t want to make this so lengthy that it will put you to sleep.  This should get you started if you want to try.

Two more cautions, and I’ll close.

First, Linux IS NOT IMMUNE to infections, though since it doesn’t have as large a part of the market as Windows, there is not as much malware written for Linux as there is for Windows.  BUT, there are some Linux vulnerabilities and there IS Linux malware in the wild.  Despite what some Linux users may arrogantly proclaim, Linux distributions can, AND HAVE gotten infected.  Security best practices are still needed with Linux.

Second, give your try more than a few days.  Ideally, you’ll want to give it about a month if you’re serious.

After about two weeks I was so frustrated I was about to go back to Windows.  But I hung in there and persevered, and after about a month I was comfortable enough that all thoughts about going back to Windows were gone.  Now I’m a 100% ‘nix kinda’ guy and glad I got over the two week hump.  Hang in there if you’re serious about it and expect some frustrations.

According to the KDE 4.6 road map, KDE 4.6 was released on January 26 of this year. I installed the plasma desktop and have about a week to play with KDE 4.6  and here is what I have found. I have included some KDE screenshots from my system.

The KDE team has fixed thousands of bugs and they really worked hard on this release. Thanks to them for all of their hard work. The new Plasma Desktop is really refined and, well beautiful. A huge improvement from previous releases. Improvements have been made to the Dolphin file browser. You can now integrate your network shares more easily and the indexing for searches is greatly improved.

The first thing I have noticed is how much faster the whole environment responds. The KDE plasmoids are fast and responsive. The menu structures move faster than previous releases. Some of the improvements are from improvements by QT, but most of them are from the work done by the KDE 4.6 team. KDE 4.6 did not cause any noticeable processor load on my machine. Previous editions of the KDE suite had given me some issues with run away processes.

Adding more plasmoids was easy and fast. All of the plasmoids that I tried out worked well. There are more plasmoids to be included in the KDE 4.6 feature plan. One of the plasmoids I really liked was the new network tool which worked with both wired and wireless networks. Small and just enough user feedback.

The taskbar now has launcher capabilities. You can drop tasks into the taskbar and use the bar as a smart launcher. Compiz worked after install without any tweaking. KDE has added Desktop Effects system settings to control the aspects of your Compiz desktop. KDE 4.6 handles the OpenGL acceleration very well. With the features added from the 4.6 improvements in combination with Compiz, this is one of the best looking desktops I have used.

All the software I had installed under Gnome worked well under KDE 4.6. Video playback was smooth with no chop. Some of my my favorite packages like Handbrake and the Chrome browser ran perfect, although theme integration with the GTK+ apps was not so great. KpackageKit in the past ran updates with out issues. I did have some issues with Amarok, the KDE Music player, still kind of buggy.

KDE 4.6 was the best release we have seen from the KDE team. More work is needed with integration with GTK+ applications. The plasma desktop is smooth, fast and refined, it’s easy to use and it just looks beautiful. This is what should have come out when they released 4.0, which left a bad taste in the mouths of KDE users. Hopefully KDE 4.6 will be in your distributions repositories shortly. KDE 4.6 is worth the update.

Review of KDE 4.6 was run on Fedora 14

With the release of Fedora Core 11 coming, you will need to know how to get Video Codecs and MP3 support. As always, the Fedora team is not releasing FC11 with MP3 support. I have a quick two lines on how you can get the support for all  your media content.

First, you have to add the repositories that you will need to get the packages. Open your terminal and become Super. Then just cut and past in these commands.

[User1@localhost]# su -

[root@localhost]#  rpm -Uhv http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-rawhide.noarch.rpm

[root@localhost]# yum install gstreamer-plugins-bad gstreamer-plugins-ugly

You may have to answer Yes to some questions, but that should do it. You now have MP3 and Video support.

Nothing is impossible and we hope you Fedora fans will enjoy your MP3′s and Videos!!!

Enjoy

You always hear how stable Linux is but one of the great things about Linux is how awesome you can make it look. With a 3D card and Compiz there is no end to the configurations you can make. Compiz has a lot of functionality in it also, but the eye candy is what you really want. Here are a couple of tools to make your desktop look as good as it can.

After you install Ubuntu 8.10 make sure your Compiz is working, by:

1. Clicking on System > Preferences > Appearance. When that window comes up click on Visual Effects tab. The click on the Extra Radio button. Compiz should now be working. Check it by moving a window. It should wobble ( wobbly windows are activated by default).
2. Next install an easy to use Compiz manager.  > sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
3. Next install a dock-like taskbar. I like AWN. Thanks to Only Ubuntu Linux for the next couple of steps.
4. echo ‘deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/reacocard-awn/ubuntu intrepid main’ | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
5. sudo apt-get update
6. Install AWN Using the following command:
   sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-bzr awn-core-applets-bzr awn-manager-bzr
7. Now you just have to configure your Task Bar. start AWN from Applications->Accessories->Avant Window Navigator.
8. Log out and log back in you should be set.

After a little bit of configuration and playing, you will have a great looking desktop. I have included some screen shots of my desktop.

The Desktop.

The Cube with 3D Applications.

App Switcher

The Dock.

Sometimes looks are everything!

Enjoy

It comes at no surprise that the Mac OS and Linux will get their own Google Chrome browser, but not until June of 09. In hopes that Chrome would spend more development time releasing new extensions, it looks like this may slow the process up a bit with the development for the Mac OS and Linux.

Brian Rakowski, Chrome’s product manager, said the company wants to release Chrome for Mac and Linux before the first half of 2009 is up.

“That’s what we’ve been hoping for,” he said in an interview Friday. “Those two efforts proceeding in parallel. They’re at the same level of progress.”

The Mac and Linux versions are up to the level of a basic “test shell” that can show Web pages. But a test shell is pretty raw.

“That team now is able to render most Web pages pretty well. But in terms of the user experience, it’s very basic,” Rakowski said of the Mac version. “We have not spent any time building out features. We’re still iterating on making it stable and getting the architecture right.”

Another major missing piece of Chrome (as indicated above) is a framework to handle extensions, optional features that can be downloaded and plugged in to customize the browser. Extensions were one of the early advantages that helped Firefox blossom, it’s the top-requested feature for Chrome.

But a new cutting-edge version of Chrome, 2.0.156.1, gets support for some “Greasemonkey” scripts to customize the browser, a move that lays the groundwork for extensions, Rakowski said.

“We have user script support. That’s a baby step,” he said. As Chrome develops, Google will “expose more capabilities, then expose containers where can you have your own toolbar-like thing. You’ll see it evolve over time.”

It looks like will have to wait for those extensions a little longer.

MythTV is a free Linux application which turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or Home Theater Personal Computer. It can be considered as a free and open source alternative to Tivo or Windows Media Center. If you have an old computer laying around the house and maybe a TV tuner card, you need to take a look at MythTV. It’s a homebrew PVR project that has been under heavy development since April 2002, and is now quite usable and feature rich. Some of the features include:

• Basic ‘live-tv’ functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind “live” TV.
• Displays basic program information on channel change using a themeable semi-transparent on-screen display.
• Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
• Picture in picture support, if you have more than one tuner card.
• Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
• Electronic Program Guide that lets you change channels and select programs to record.
• Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec).
• Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
• Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder.
• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
• Grabs program information using xmltv.
• A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.

The project is community supported and you can find tons of info on MythTV. You can even try MythTV out on your computer without installing it with distos like Mythbuntu.

I have been running the system for 2 years now and have been complety happy with MythTV. I use MythTV to store all my media, download all my podcasts and recorded all my TV. With the addition of Media sharing you can also share all your video and music to all your Windows media players. Why pay an extra $200 plus a month from your cable company for a DVR when you can do it for Free!

Time Vault is an open source free backup utility for Linux. Time Vault creates incremental backups of files that can be restored at a later date. Snapshots are copies of a directory at a certain time. Snapshots use very little space for the files that haven’t changed since the last snapshot was made. This is because instead of backing up the entire unchanged file, snapshots use hard links that point to the existing backup of the unchanged file. This is also known as delta changes where it will only backup what files have been modified since the last snapshot. Time Vault has a nice easy to use GUI.

Snapshots are protected from accidental deletion or modification since they are read-only by default.

After installing the .deb file, there are two steps required to complete installation:

You must configure TimeVault, the backend will start automatically but the notifier needs to be started. To get the notifier app to start in your systray whenever you log in, you can add it to your startup programs in System>Preferences>Sessions in the tab Startup Programs you should have an option to add a program click that, name it TimeVault and put:

‘/usr/bin/timevault-notifier’

In the command box, you can put whatever you like in the comments box. After you have done this, if you log out and back in again you should magically have the TimeVault notifier app sitting in your systray. Right click on it and go to preferences to configure TimeVault as you wish.

Configuration

When you start the TimeVault Notifier for the first time, the tray icon will be grayed out and if you hover over the icon, it will say that it is unconfigured. Listed below are the steps needed to configure TimeVault:

There are three tabs: General, Include and Exclude.

General:

• Enable Automated Snapshots: By default, TimeVault will not automatically take snapshots of your system. Checking this box will tell it to automatically take daily snapshots.
• Show snapshot notifications: This switch toggles on and off whether snapshot notifications are to be shown or not.
• Snapshot Root Directory: Where to store the snapshots. Ideally, you should pick a directory that is mounted onto another physical drive from the data you are backing up. This is so that, in the case of a hard-disk failure, the backups will remain intact (unless the drive containing the backups fails, in which case the current version of the data remains).
• Make sure you change the settings under Advance to include your largest file, currently it is only set for 32mb. This is not large enough if you have videos as part of a back up.
• You may consider to back up to a network drive, in the case of total hard drive failure your data will be safe.

Include:

• Backup paths are listed here. Every directory that you want snapshot should be added to this list.

Exclude:

• Paths or patterns to exclude from the snapshots should be listed here.
• When you have finished making the necessary changes press the save button and TimeVault should pop up a message saying.
• You have included new directories in the TimeVault. File signatures will now be computed.
• Click ok in this box and TimeVault should be active and will start watching your files.

Latest version: timevault_0.7.5-1_i386.deb (md5)

I am a Redhat Certified Technician (RHCT),  so naturally I do like the Fedora distributions. The last couple Fedora releases have little bit of a let down, slow and buggy. This caused me to convert over to Ubuntu which I am currently using (8.10). After my install of Fedora Core 10 in Part 1 of my review I had high hopes for this release of Fedora Core 10.

The first thing that struck me, just as in the install, was how nice everything looked. I did the static install and just took the settings that a newbie would use, which installed Gnome. The Gnome desktop looks great. The theme looks good and the colors seemed balanced. Other applications that I opened looked like they fit, and the themes were in-line with the total desktop “feel”.

As I started to use FC10 I noticed the speed has improved since the release of FC9. This is a good thing as FC9 was really a dog. I was running FC9 on the exact same hardware I am using for the FC10 review. I went through the software and there were really no surprises. FC10 comes with Gnome (2.24), OpenOffice.org (3.0.0), firefox (3.0.5), compiz (0.6.2), just to name a few.

All of my hardware was recognized and worked properly although the 3d effects on my Nvidia card were not enabled by default. As I used FC10 I could not help but notice the improvements that have been made throughout the distribution. Speed and ease of use really stick out in my mind as vast improvements in FC10. There are big improvements in the administration tools. The network manager and the printer manager are easy to use and work really well. Even a non Linux user will not be intimidated by the GUIs for these administration tools. Little improvements like theses make FC10 feel easier to use.

I have FC10 set up and browsing my shared files on my network quickly and easily. I was able to see my MP3 files and my movies on my files server. I moved over some OpenOffice documents and opened them without an issue in FC10.

One of the things that FC10 has boasted about is the PackageKit. FC10 now automatically advises you about what package you are missing trying to play a particular audio or video format. This is great since Fedora has always lacked native support for certain media types ie., mp3 and certain video codecs. So the first thing I did was move over a MP3 and clicked on it to play. Totem came up to play the MP3 and almost instantly the PackageKit came up telling me that I needed something to play this file.

Great just the way it was supposed to work, so I clicked search.

This process failed. No support for MP3s (without installing additional repositories). I repeated my test with a DVD.

This gave me the same result. No DVD support. PackageKit does not work as advertised. The Fedora team needs to work on this feature a little more. Now I do realize that you can get FC10 to support MP3s and DVDs by adding some repositories but this is something that FC10 needs to support without extra steps.

Overall this was a great release from the Fedora team. They have made great improvements on Fedora Core 10. I have even left the release on my machine to use it as one of my desktops. I was however disappointed with the lack of support for MP3 and DVDs out of the box. This is one of the things that is keeping FC10 from being the top Linux distribution.

Enjoy

Fedora 10 (codename Cambridge), released 25 November 2008 has been hyped to be as good as Fedora 6. Now I loved Fedora 6 and used it as my primary desktop for a long time. Then I “upgraded” to 8, that was a huge disappointment. I skipped even trying 9 after the headaches with 8. When I heard all the talk about Fedora 10 I thought I should give it a try.

I downloaded the DVD ISO and burned it. It is available at http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora.
Put the disk in and booted from it. Here is the first screen.

The Fist thing I thought was “great no stupid balloons” The install
screen looked good. No surprises on the options, pretty standard for a Fedora distro, or any distro of Linux for that matter.
Hit enter and away I went.

This was new, not very flashy but functional, at least you know it is
doing something. Although not sure why they didn’t go with a a nice
splash screen? Then I got the familiar Anaconda screen.

Anaconda 11.4.1.62 to be exact. No surprise here. It seems to be quick to load although I did not put a clock on it.

The new theme looked great on the installer. Looked fresh and new. I
just went through the standard steps to install Fedora. I will just
give you some screen shots so you can get the feel of it.



The whole install took about 27 minutes start to finish. Everything went smooth with no issues. The anaconda installer performed as expected, and I really liked the new theme. What can you really say about a Fedora/Anaconda install, if it doesn’t fail it did its job. Looking forward to working with Fedora Core 10.

In Part 2 I will get into the real meat of the Review. Thanks.

Like most people I have a couple TVs in my house. One of the TVs has the Linux based MythBox on it and the other has the Xbox 360. Now I keep all my movies on the MythBox (all legal backups of course). I wanted to play these on my Xbox on the other TV. I noticed that after the Xbox 360 dashboard update the Xbox saw my shared drive and I could browse to my media directories. When I tried to Play one of these I got some cryptic Microsoft error code. So I did a little research and found out that Xbox media streaming uses the DLNA protocol to receive content from a peer on a network. Great, does Linux have a DLNA protocol server, YES, it is called uShare.

Here are the easy steps to set it up.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ushare

Configuration

Once finished, you’ll have uShare installed and ready for configuration. Out of the box, it won’t work for our purpose. You’ll need to edit /etc/ushare.conf to enable Xbox compatibility as well as define the standard port – 49200. Open /etc/ushare.conf as root and change the following lines:

USHARE_PORT=49200
USHARE_DIR=/path/to/your/media
ENABLE_XBOX=YES

Before these changes will take effect, you’ll need to restart ushare using its init script. However, an issue I’ve noticed is that the last line (’ENABLE_XBOX=YES’) does not always work. So before we restart uShare, we’ll need to make a small change to the init script that resides under /etc/init.d/ to force Xbox compatibility:

sudo vi /etc/init.d/ushare

and add the following line at the beginning of the script:

USHARE_OPTIONS=-x

This tells uShare to start with Xbox compatibility. Now restart uShare using the init script:

invoke-rc.d ushare restart

Now you are finished. You may need to restart the Xbox. Now navigate to ‘My Xbox’ and then select ‘Videos’ and finally you should see ‘uShare’ at the bottom (computer icon). Selecting that will connect to your Linux box and you’ll be able to browse your media just as you would on your PC.

When I tried to play a xvid file it said I needed a download to play this file.  I am sure it was the codec, but it was free and worked great. Now I have another TV with a HD feed that can Play all the movies on my MythBox .

uShare also works for playing media across the network on the PlayStation 3.

I love technology!