Tag Archives: operating system

OS Tryouts 2: Linux Mint 17

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As part of my brief tour through some alternative operating systems I uncorked and tried out Linux Mint 17. So far for all the different systems I’ve tried, this was the most pleasant and simple installations that I’ve had so far. The system boots up into a Live CD environment, letting you try before you buy. I also found the lack of “Scary Text” during the system startup to be a very nice touch. When the OS gets started it works well out of the box. X Windows with the window manager works as it should, without any misgivings. The updater worked well from the first pass and only required one pass to get all the updates that the system needed. The application suites provided worked really well, LibreOffice, a host of web browser choices, but the only thing that was missing was a Calendar application. I thought about iCal and how well that works with Exchange, and wondered if there was an app in the Linux space that could do something similar. My admittedly cursory search didn’t yield any results. Arguably it is a non-issue as the entire Exchange experience for me can be done on the web, so pffft.

There really wasn’t much to write about Linux Mint 17. The OS got a green star on my selection board and led to the disposal of PC-BSD. Next up are Elementary OS and CentOS. I suspect that the last one will be a boondoggle, but only time will tell.

OS Tryouts 1: PC-BSD

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PC-BSD

System Setup

The PC-BSD initial setup was pleasant enough, there was only brief exposure to the horror of the console as cryptic text scrolled past. I can imagine consumers panicking when they see these sorts of screens, pages of text they can’t comprehend without a solid understanding that much of it really is meaningless unless the system doesn’t work, and then it rockets from being worthless to priceless. Generally when I think of designing operating systems for consumers, you want to suppress this behind some pretty pictures or a progress bar, which is a clearer representation that everything is proceeding according to plan. Even when everything is working properly in systems like these you can spy error reports in the startup console text screens. The developers either don’t care or expect the errors and they are “worthless” issues because the system starts up normally. To consumers, if they are reading along and have a little bit of training about what they are looking at, they could be unsettled by a line that looks like an error even if it’s a throwaway warning.

After the initial setup, the standard installation questions are rather straightforward. Language and locale settings, however it is good to note that these days the really good systems automatically fetch much of this material from the indigenous Internet address. I would argue that if the IP is in the United States then it’s likely English, and if you know the IP, then you know the location, so time zones are easily set as well. The hostname selection is always different from system to system I’ve found. Some systems are computer-before-person and some are person-before-computer. Since you can set this to whatever you like, it’s not really a quibble.

PC-BSD does a very good job at clearly separating the difference between root access and user access. You create the password for the root account, and then it automatically leads you to create a user account afterwards, with the option for encryption presented immediately, which is a nice touch.

First Login

I was presented with a login dialog box, I selected my window manager to be Cinnamon as it was an installer option when I set up this system. The system attempted to start X Windows and then the desktop manager crashed. I tried to restart it twice and then when that wasn’t working I clicked Cancel and the system started into X Windows without a desktop manager. There are no clear ways on the display to proceed forward unless I wish to use “AppCafe”, “PC-BSD Control Panel”, or the “PC-BSD Handbook”. I tried to use the magic keyboard combination of Control-Alt-Backspace to exit out of X Windows to no avail, the key combination does not work. I then inserted Control-Alt-Delete which reset the system and led me directly back to the login window. This time I selected the default window manager, of KDE and logged in. The system did at this point proceed properly.

I tried to start a basic application, in this case I wandered through the applications and selected “Marble” in the education category. The app failed silently. After that I went to system update and started the update search. The wait for progress was rather long at about five minutes, but I did see there were “Base System Updates” available, what they are is not stated, but I elected to install them anyways. The progress bar does not really fill up in the way that a consumer would expect, but rather as a quarter-inch blue rippled box that bounces slowly left and right.

Generally when the system is installed and updated it seems to be competent. The fact that you can’t really stray from the KDE interface is a little bit of a concern, but generally not a huge problem. I would say that PC-BSD really isn’t ready for prime time consumer use yet. Then again, no Linux OS is, at least yet.

FBackup: Free Is Good

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At work I was asked to put together a server on the cheap which I’m fine with as long as everyone understands that doing so has some implicated risk. A server cast on a desktop machine is a risky proposition. You don’t have power support from redundant power supplies, you don’t have RAID which can protect you from hard drive failure, and the machine is not designed to be a very robust server in any stretch of the imagination – it just lacks the processing and RAM that would really answer the need strongly. However, once I covered those risks, everyone was still on-board with me moving forward. I rolled a server out, used an Operating System that would be best to not speak about and set up the software.

Being a part of the technology from the great beast, of course it didn’t work well at first. There were hidden requirements, annoying requirements. Requirements with “dots” in their name. Once I figured out the how and got the thing running I took it down from the lab place I was working on it in and moved it to its permanent home in our machine room. From the point of deployment which was a few days ago I’ve had a niggling worry that the thing is going to fail, as any machine could when it relies on just one hard drive. I needed a backup solution.

The built-in backup solution in the “product” that I was “using” as an “operating system” was just not going to work. I needed something that would work well and be free above all else. I went to the great sage and eminent junkie Google and eventually ran across FBackup. It’s not glorious, it’s not complicated, but it is exactly what I was looking for. So now with that software installed, and it’s quite good in fact for the “operating system” I was using I don’t have to worry so much about that “server” going down. If it does, eh, who cares, at least the data will be safe. For those that wonder where I put my backups, I have a NAS, a handy dandy DroboNAS that isn’t the fastest tool in the shed, but at 16TB, it certainly has a lot of space and it’s RAID means that I don’t have to worry so much about hardware failure with that box.

So, hooray for FBackup. It’s free, and while I can’t spare any change for it, what I can do is recommend it. If you are looking for something handy and you can’t get your hands on a native installation of ‘tar’ like you should be using, this is quite good. It’s not Backup Exec of course, but then, I would rather chew a lightbulb than even hear the words “Backup Exec” spoken aloud.

Williamsburg – November 15th 2010

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Today was the official beginning of the Sage Millennium Symposium. This is the direct result of all of the user base griping about how we missed this place and how we wish we had a little conference all on our own, like the way it used to be. Much like a magic genie, Sage granted us our wish and here we are again, for my coworkers who joined me in this trip it’s old-hat to them, it’ll be my first time staying at Kingsmill Resort.

We arrived last evening and I found this place to be very expansive, definitely charming, and a great place to “Get away from it all”. The price tag, well, that’s definitely on the high side, but the quality is unmistakably there. My room is laid out very spaciously and everywhere they could have skimped out they did not, which earns my respect.

Last night we went to the Red White and Blue, which is a Blues-themed Memphis style BBQ Rib restaurant in Williamsburg. The food was okay, the ribs were done well. What more can you ask for while traveling into a tourist trap?

Overnight everything went well, my iPad doubled as a noisemaker/alarm clock very nicely as well as a book, a newspaper, a game of Uno and a window into the world of all my collected RSS feeds that I aggregate through Google Reader.

In the morning we all visited Colonial Pancake House. We’re in the middle of Pancake House Central and this one got a 5-star review so we decided to give it a shot. There wasn’t much that was remarkable about the place, the food was good, the atmosphere was what you’d expect and the prices were fair.

After breakfast we talked for a little while and then my coworkers settled on hitting the local outlet mall. I didn’t have anything else better to do since the meat of the convention wasn’t due to begin until 2pm, so I tagged along. We found it easily enough as the two coworkers who had been here before knew the path to the outlet mall very well. I pulled in and parked, scanned the shops and immediately noticed the kitchen outlets, which are (I think) identical to the ones in Michigan City. We only had an hour and then one of my coworkers who knew I was fond of Under Armour pointed out that UA had a factory store in this particular outlet mall. UA is kind of like my Kryptonite, I’m quite fond of their clothing and seeing the store put a foolish grin, even for a short flash, on my face. As we walked along everyone sort of split up and went their separate ways. I joined my boss on a search for a replacement tote-bag to replace the flimsy bag provided by Sage when we registered the night before. We weren’t able to find anything for her and as we walked we met up with our other coworkers and while they went looking in a nearby shop I decided since there was only about twenty minutes left that I should at least check out the UA shop. It only took me ten minutes to pick out some things I liked and went to try them on. I did buy some Under Armour, but it was on the clearance rack, $10 off plus 20% after that so I wasn’t feeling too upset about the cost. Under Armour is mighty expensive stuff, but it’s durable and it’s one of my few vices that I get to indulge in from time to time.

Afterwards we put all our winnings in the back of the rental SUV and headed back to Kingsmill. We heard the welcome song-and-dance from Sage regarding their database software, Millennium, which powers our alumni and donor record database.

Sage laid out the Millennium roadmap for us, telling us what to expect in the future and some of us were mildly jilted that they delayed the “Rip out that damned Java!” request we lodged with them last year. Now we’ll have to wait for version 8 to roll around, we’re currently on 7.6.1 and we’re dallying with the notion of upgrading to 7.7.1 or 7.8, maybe on the outside chance, 7.8.2. This software is very competent at what it does, there have been some missteps and from what I can perceive they essentially rushed a RDBMS product into a “web enabled” paradigm by using shortcuts. In the short-term this worked great, they were able to convert their Windows only application interface with one that worked via a web-browser. On closer inspection this greatness tarnishes because you can only use IE6 or IE7 on Windows XP, not Windows 7. (Windows Vista works, but it’s abomination, so we don’t speak it’s name). The key sticking point is that the software relies in very specific and vital parts on loading the Java runtime library. In ways, they cheated. They got a product rushed to market and it worked well as long as you had all these backup-singers in place to provide the parts to make the entire production work. This would be not-an-issue if it wasn’t for the fact that in order to use this core-to-our-business-case software, we are effectively stuck using Java 1.5.11. This in and of itself isn’t harmful, but this old copy of Java is vulnerable and opens up computers to a heaping batch of security vulnerabilities, add to that damning fact that another piece of software we use, BSR’s Banner requires an updated jInitiator and JDK update which forces a machines JRE to the most updated version, breaking Millennium. So we have two products we need so that we can do our jobs and Java is the pinion of suck that we’re stuck upon. Removing Java is only the first step, as they really ought to only push their web-based product (and it’s the only thing that they can really push, so get to it!) and that product really ought to be W3C compliant. If that was the case then all my users could have the freedom to select whatever operating system they liked to interface and use the database. They could use Chrome on Ubuntu or even Safari on the Mac. The benefits of switching out Java for AJAX and Javascript are pretty compelling, even as such that by doing so they would effectively enable other non-Java OS’es to be able to login, such as iPhones, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, and Androids. Technically one of our staff could query our database on a color Nook. It’s not the particular devices that I’m in love with (despite the fact that I am quite smitten with my iPad) but rather that standards are respected, that the software follows a logical and plain design and works well, simply.

After the chat and the disenchantment discovering the delay with tearing out Java we waited around for the Welcome Bash at 5:30pm. Sage puts this welcome on whenever they have an event like this one, open bar, nibbly bits, the works. I chatted with a new Millennium client that’s coming out of Boston, MA. The school starts with a B, I’m terrible with names unless I have business cards and as dumb luck would have it, I totally forgot to bring business cards with me on my travels this week. Duh. We waited and schmoozed until about 7pm when we had to gather everyone up and head to an Italian restaurant here in Williamsburg called Donelos or something. We did more eating, more chatting, and only now did I have any time to myself. I was going to call Scott and relate to him the days events and then I looked down at my watch and felt wrong to make a call after 9pm. So, instead of a call, I thought I would write a blog entry and share this with all of you. Tomorrow we’ll have presenters and I’ll write a lot of ‘neat ideas’ that ‘I’m definitely going to get to work on’ until I actually get to work and that occupies all my time and this entire batch of ‘neat ideas’ falls by the wayside. It always seems to happen this way. When I don’t have life pushing me around I can get all creative and clever with the database, but without fail, life butts in and I’m right back where I started.

On high notes, I have discovered Whitley’s Virginia Peanuts. These are hand-picked giant peanuts in a variety of preparations. I ended up buying two little 16oz. sacks, one Honey Roasted and the other Honey Toffee. They will serve as snacks during this week when I can’t get free of my meetings and end up missing the snacks they lay out for us just outside our meeting halls. These peanuts are exceptionally good and the lady in the little shop we went into had a great sense of humor.

I’m thinking about contacting my family out here and see if they’re available Tuesday or Wednesday night, perhaps I can manage to get the rental SUV for the night so I can get down to VA Beach and then back up again, we’ll see how my coworkers feel and if my family has time.