Distribution change

So far, I have tried various flavours of linux. I have tasted various desktop environments, stability policies, maintainance policies and packaging policies. I have tried KDE 3, KDE 4, GNOME, Enlightenment, XFCE. KDE 3 is undoubtedly "rock solid". GNOME is simple. XFCE is leaner GNOME. KDE 4 has slowed down with semantic desktop. However, much of the work is yet to be done to get back the old KDE feel. Enlightement is fast and stable; however the development is on. I like working in Enlightenment. However, I also have KDE 4.

Coming down to packaging, I have experienced .debs, .rpms and compressed source files. I also have rpm packaging experience. I would say all of them solve different purposes. They define (or may be match) the distro's policies and philosophies. For business oriented distros, rpms are a good choice. However, Debian's package management is also nice. It is a mark of their stability. Compressed source files however are the most flexible ones. Gentoo's packaging clearly reflects its philosophy of flexibility.

I had been running openSUSE for a long time now. Recently, I had decided to go for a change. I wanted to go for a rolling release as I wanted to keep at the edge of technology. Moreover, events like the okular problem inclined me towards rolling release distros.

The first option that came to my mind was Gentoo: its a lovely distro. However, I didn't have time for all the compilation so I thought of trying Arch. Distrowatch said its a lean distro that provides bleeding edge software. I downloaded the netinstall image and started my installation. After multiple Gentoo installs (successful ones), I was ready for it as soon as I had the image copied to my USB stick.

One common problem that I face while installing any distro is that my internet connection is PPPoE and not many people have it so its hard to find help regarding that. To add to it, I don't like to download unnecessary packages or large images. So, I spent some time trying to figure out how to connect during installation. Once that was done, I had a pretty smooth install. Arch linux is a nice experience. However, I miss Gentoo's community support on Arch. #gentoo is far more responsive and friendly than #archlinux. Interestingly, I solved Arch problems while talking at #gentoo.

I had KDE 4 installed on it. Then I moved on to get the latest svn snapshot of Enlightenment and installed it. Both are working fine. Arch's package management is not as flexible as portage in Gentoo. Also, sometimes you need to know your way around. For example, I had installed Ark on KDE; but was not able to unzip any of my .zip files. It was because I had installed zip with it; but not unzip. After installing unzip, its working fine.

Okular problem

Recently, poppler was having a bogus memory allocation bug. It had creeped into okular. Some pdf files were rendered okay; while some others flashed instantaneously and closed. The problem was on both of my systems openSUSE and Gentoo. As soon as poppler fixed the issue, Gentoo was quick at releasing it in stable tree. It was back in February.However, not until a couple of days back was the patch provided by openSUSE. Meanwhile, the inability of accessing my documents was really pissing me off. As my linux experience has evolved, I have gradually drifted away from openSUSE; though I love it as my first distro and still have it on my laptop.

he he ...

Improving boot time on Gentoo

Continuing with my attempts at reducing boot time on my Gentoo x86_64 running desktop, I tried switching off interactive boot and booted in about 20 seconds.

To improve booting, I tried prelinking. However, to my surprise it increased boot time.

Slower boot on newer kernels

Recently, I upgraded my kernel on my Gentoo x86 and patched my kernel on openSUSE 11.1 x86_64. I found both booted slower than when I charted booting last time, earlier this year.

The increase in boot-time was more in case of openSUSE compared to Gentoo.

Insecure gmail POP

Recently, after a long time (about a month time) I accessed gmail through pop. Interestingly, I found many older mails being pushed to me. Those mails were supposed to be deleted by gmail as I had selected "delete gmail's copy after sending" option. It seems like gmail just marks them as deleted; but keeps them for deletion at idle time. This is okay as long as gmail deletes them in time. However, when I accessed my mail after a month, I got mails that dated about 6 months back.

The insecurity lies in the fact that if my password is compromised, the person shall have access to mails that I thought I had deleted. Even if I notify my contacts about my password compromise, the person shall still access vital information from those past mails if he attempts POP access.

Google can surely improve on this

E17 vs KDE 4.3.1 -II

After my previous post comparing E17 and KDE 4.3.1, I tried to improve performance on both environments. On KDE, I could not go below 50 degree Celsius.

However, on E17, CPU temperature easily reached to 40 degree Celsius.

I have heard criticisms against E17 that E17 has taken more than 7 years trying to produce what KDE did in less than two years [they are referring to desktop shell]. However, such criticism is quite shallow. On its release KDE lacked a lot in terms of both functionality and stability. Even now, many packages are not complete in terms of functionality. For example, Amarok 2 has a new improved look than Amarok 1.4. However, Amarok 2 lacks ipod sync functionality [not considering the circumventing solutions as they are not for normal users]. Amarok 2 music database was not stable until recently. I have had a messed music database with incorrectly matched artist names and genres. k3b is not properly maintained. Kaffeine recently had a KDE4 port. My next post shall throw more light on "poor" KDE 4.

On the other hand, E17 has not been released but does not have intentions of such premature release to put users in trouble. E17 is clear in its approach and has maintained a standard of stability and functionality [Check out the svn version to verify]. Its performance even on embedded systems is marvellous.

Cooked linux console

Recently while I was playing around with code, there was a log line

printf("foo: skipped '%c'\n", c);

When c was a carriage return; the log line obtained was

'oo: skipped '

This was because carriage return takes the current position to the beginning of the line. Now, as the linux console is cooked by default [Most *nix programs get their tty input via the kernel tty driver in `cooked' mode.], it formatted the whole line and printed the line at once producing the effect.

A simple way to detect parts where the "cooked" console interferes is to run the command from within emacs. Emacs does its own input handling and is not cooked. The same log line in emacs is shown as:

foo: skipped '^M'

These petty issues must be kept in mind while considering portability of software.