[Update on 2003-05-22: Now I have an almost properly installed Linux desktop at work. I say almost because I still need to configure lpd, tweak either X server or mozilla to use properly anti-aliased fonts and whatnots. Using a 20 inch LCD screen makes it somewhat tolerable even though I cannot understand why same version of mozilla running on Linux with 2.6 GHz chip runs a bit slower than its counterpart on an 3 year-old dual 660 MHz running Windows. In a few days I'll get a faster machine with brand new Redhat 9 - I am looking forward to test driving it.]
Discounting my little Macintosh and Apollo workstations, the first "real" computer I used was SGI Indigo workstation. I learned C by adding useless, unnecessary options to cat, ls, etc and I learned Unix from man pages. Only reason I switched from FreeBSD and Solaris to Windows 2000 on my home machine was that JBuilder ran better on the latter. Or rather JBuilder and other Java GUI apps looked really crummy on Solaris x86's X Windows. Maybe I should've fiddled with the X colormap but I had to get the Java program I was running hooked up with Excel via ODBC first. So I switched. That was 3 years ago.
Every year since then I try out Linux from time to time. Every time I get rather disappointed. Today was no exception.
Two Linux distros I tried today are Knoppix 3.1 and SuSE 8.1 eval CD. Knoppix is a bootable CD-ROM, useful for demos and tryouts as it does not require a harddrive. Pop the CD in, reboot and you have a Linux machine (but your hard drive remains intact). It's supposedly extremely good at detecting hardware. Alas it didn't detect my mouse. It was a shock after reading only positive, enthusiastic reviews of Knoppix. [Addenda: now Knoppix gets the mouse if I manually configure it at the boot time. However I need to configure lots more options before Knoppix becomes usable enough for evaluation. More about Knoppix after SuSE below.]
SuSE 8.1 has good reputation of being a solid professional desktop/server distro with great installers and package management system. Unlike other major distros, it comes with a Knoppix-like CD that lets you try out without fully installing it to hard drive.
SuSE did better than Knoppix - it detected hardware and network (DHCP) accurately (even though it didn't have driver for the printer) and started a working Linux with KDE 3.0 desktop. Instead of analysing what makes SuSE/KDE less than satisfactory computing environment, I'll just list troubles I encountered today.
- No driver for printer (Panasonic KX P7105 - probably the cheapest duplex printer in the market) -- yes, I guess I can read the HOWTOs and build a CUPS driver for this but the whole point of getting a prebuilt Linux system is to do away with this joke, no?
- Fiddling with maze of config options busted CUPS. I couldn't find the right utility/tool to recover from this. Just give me lp.
- Too many tools and utilities. There are zillions of them for printer, printer manager, and whatever else and they are scattered around in many different parts of the "Start" menu, often hidden in 3rd,4th level hierachy of the menu.
- No mo zilla -- could not install Mozilla, believe it or not. Maybe the blame should go to mozilla folks but the bottomline here is I couldn't run mozilla on Linux.
- Silent non appearance -- some programs never show their face (and they are GUI apps) and silently bail out leaving no apologies. Click on a program, a blinking mini-icon of that program shows right next to the mouse cursor, giving you the impression that program is about to show up. But many just do not and never tell you why. (No, I am not going to read /var/log or whatever.)
- Overall slowness of GUI. KDE3 seems a good deal faster than KDE2 (I found Mandrake 8 with KDE2 to be painfully slow a year ago) but still it feels like, well, X windows. Even the mouse drags a bit and buttons are sticky and widgets are redrawn a few milliseconds too late. But it was still rather usable.
- Even on KDE, the toolkit war ain't over. Eclipse uses GTK+ and Acrobat Motif.
- xkill -- had to use this sucker a lot.
- Because SuSE allocates very small partition for / and /home, I had to create a ramdisk before doing much else.
- Linux man pages are sadly incomplete.
Now Knoppix 3.1. First few times, it couldn't see my ordinary PS/2 mouse. I had to murmur some magic words like knoppix ps2 lang=us this and that to get it started up. In many ways I like Knoppix over SuSE because its KDE menus are a lot simpler than SuSE's maze. Better, Mozilla is preinstalled and Knoppix kernel read my NTFS harddrive (SuSE's kernel didn't have NTFS option built in).
Unfortunately I ran into a few problems.
- Java crashed.
- Load would shoot up to 4-5 when I am practically leaving the system idle (CPU < 10%)
- Some fonts look jagged at large sizes (it's too be expected to some degree but not so prominently)
- Printer is still out of reach
I should note that Knoppix is not a full distro but a demoware with a short development history. Given all that I find it impressive. If I were to use Linux as desktop (with say OpenOffice) then I'd keep Knoppix with me so that I can "borrow" other machines on a temporary basis (say giving a presentation written in OpenOffice).
Well, from what I wrote above, it should be clear that I am not going to move to Linux soon. It has made a great improvement over the years but it's nowhere near delivering even the modest need of mine for a simple desktop. Still it wasn't all for naught. Desktop Linux has definitely improved over last year. On SuSE Eclipse ran OK and some other random Swing apps looked fine. ls ran well unlike on Cygwin. Playing with decent i/o redirection was sweet. Now I know what to expect from Linux workstation better.
[originally written on 2003-01-29]
Copyright 2003 Jay Han
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