Mandriva Linux on my Acer Aspire 7220

Two weeks ago I bought a Acer Aspire 7220 laptop. Based on a AMD Semphron 3800, Nvidia Geoforce 7000M, 2 GiB DDR2 RAM and a 80 GiB HDD. Everything I could ever wish for is included, except for a webcam.

It came preloaded with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic (well sort of). It was on a "hidden" partition and installed itself at the first bootstrap. No DVD-ROM was provided neither a production key or certificate. I later figured out, its on bottom of the machine. Very handy indeed :-)

In my favorite Usenet newsgroup COLA, there is this character, who digs up "Linux problems" from a diversity of Linux help forums, probably to scare Linux newbies off. According to the "problems¨ this character spews, I expected some problems with Ubuntu and see if I was able to fix them.

The Ubuntu install.
So I installed Ubuntu and the only thing which didn't work properly was the Atheros Wireless adapter. But a search on the Ubuntu forum, solved the problem. I simply opened a terminal window, copied the code from the forum and pasted it into the terminal window. A few packages where downloaded and compiled.

But hey, Ubuntu refused to connect to a insecure accesspoint somewhere in my apartment building, which Vista abused to download its updates. Ubuntu cept on demanding a SSID and password.

Back to Vista.

Because of the absence of a DVD-ROM there was no way to demand a refund for Vista I guess (probably a new trick of Microsoft). So I thought, OK let's give it at least a try.

I removed the demoware and after the next boot Vista reinstalled itself again. Meaning I lost all the software I installed in the meantime and the data, which I copied from my Ubuntu desktop machine.

The Vista MBR disaster.

My friends where quite happy I became part of the Windows ecosystem (read piracy herd) again. So I thought let's make them happy and stick with Vista. Thus I removed Ubuntu in a rush.

Of course the next bootstrap failed. So I used a couple of old Windows CD's to fix the MBR (Master Boot Record). Unfortunately FDISK /mbr did not work, then I tried a Windows XP CD-ROM... Hopeless!

I've searched various Microsoft sites and there was a DVD image, required to do the job. Insane! but after a time consuming Google search session, I found a tool called Fixmbr or the like, which finally did the job.

What is that with Microsoft, have they gone completely insane?

Anyway, Vista and me never became good fiends. It's incredible slow. It takes 4 minutes before I was actually able to fire up any application and desperately wanted to get rid of this limb.

Mandriva just works, including Wireless.

To my great pleasure, I came across this post (please ignore the disinformation by the group's house trolls). Richard Rasker's first respond, moved me to download Spring 2008.1 One, from the Mandriva site.

I booted the CD-ROM and was extremely pleased, because indeed. Everything worked right out of the box, including connecting to the insecure accesspoint of one of my neighbors. It took me 0.30 seconds to make the decision: dualboot? nah Mandriva is going to F* bury that Vista!

RIP Vista, may she burn in hell :-D

Now the only remaining problem is: where do I get a Mandriva or Tux sticker to show the world with pride this Acer Aspire is exclusivly powered by Mandrake Linux?

Many thanks to Richard Rasker and Roy Schestowitz for pointing me in the right direction.

Update: I recorded a small desktop session video in lowres Ogg-Tehora, using Istanbul.

Ubuntu Steunpunt Daalhof (Update)

I have recently joined the Dutch Ubuntu LoCo team and started the Ubuntu service site in my area. This is a volunteering afford to provide all the help, with Ubuntu, people in your area might need.

In first case, the Ubuntu websites, forums, mailing lists and IRC channels, are the right spot to get help with Ubuntu. In Belgium and the Netherlands however, if you get stuck on the usual help sources, you can contact the Ubuntu Service Site (Steunpunt) in your area. You can ask your USS for a demonstration, CD-ROM's and eventually additional help with installing and configuring Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Steunpunt Daalhof, however is not limited to the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux. Since I have experience with a wide range of GNU/Linux distributions, Ubuntu Steunpunt Daalhof, will gladly provide gratis support for any GNU/Linux distribution.

I think it's a nice way to finally give something in reverse to the community, that gave us our favorite Operating System.

Update: I have created a website for USD:

http://ubuntusteunpuntdaalhof.googlepages.com

Currently in Dutch only, an English version will be added soon.

Smart people choose Free Software

Introduction.

Please allow me to share my opinion again ;-)

What bugs me, is the insulting nonsense our Microsoft funded Astroturfers claim: "Linux makes you stupid" and such.

I hope you don't consider this arrogant or narcissist like, because I can only speak for myself and it is _only mine_ opinion.

The only reason I write this message, is because _I am_ proof of the fact that these ignorant colatrolls are wrong!

This will probably become a huge message, so in case you are not interested to read, why Free Software is such a great thing and why it's the best choice, simply ignore this one.

In the beginning.

I passed high school, because my parents wanted me to, not because I was interested at all. I was a very lazy and complete ignorant student. In fact I was educated (sort of) as a kook.

Being such a low educated student, of course I had a lame job, the "coffee bitch" at a local public social services foundation.

However, in 1986 Personal Computers where introduced at my work, connected to a Novell Network file- and print server.

Somehow, I got very exited about these computer thingies, since my colleagues where able to write documents in "WordPerfect", save them on disk and edit them later.

My first opinion was: "Gee, that's handy" and started dreaming of having such a "PC" my self.

In a TV magazine I read commercials of NTI (Nederlands Talen Instituut), who provided programming courses, including the option of buying a (8-bit home) computer.

There was a choice between the Commodore 64 and MSX (Microcomputers with Software eXchanging, which was a Microsoft led attempt for a Home computer "standard", equal to the VHS standard for Video recorders). MSX was pretty popular, however never made it to the UK and USA.

Of course the MSX had a Microsoft produced firmware BASIC interpreter, which also was the source of my (futurity) Microsoft zealotry.

To my own surprise, I seemed to be a very talented coder and my teacher wrote me "Your code is exceptional "smart" it is a joy to see".

However I loved MSX and its firmware BASIC interpreter, at some point I found BASIC pretty sluggish and inefficient. As a result I started to teach myself Z80-Assembler. Which was the base, for turning me into the advanced computer literate I became.

Data was stored on cassettes (using a so called "DATA-recorder"). After a while I bought (a freaking expensive) Disk drive. Which was connected to my Philips NMS 8020 MSX2 machine, using a inflexible thick cable and a so called "expansion module".

This "module" included firmware which extended the BASIC interpreter with MSX-DISK-BASIC.

However, later on ASCII corp. implemented ad CP/M clone, called MSX-DOS, which was compatible (including the disk format) to MS-DOS.


My first PC.

Since my employer (at that time) was a public service, it started a so called "PC Private" project. PC Private projects, where enormously popular in the Netherlands, during the last two decades of the 20'st century.

The employee had the chance to get a PC cheep, funded by the state (payed back by taxes) and the employer did not had to invest in expensive courses, because the employee learned to get used and work whit "the computer" in his/her spare time.

This PC Private machine was a Bondwell 38 XT, with CGA, two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives and a Star NX-1000 matrix printer.

While I was waiting for my first "real computer" I bought a book, called "The MS-DOS Expert", so when this machine arrived, I knew all the ins and outs of MS-DOS, because it was a really great and advanced book.

In the meantime, I turned into this advanced computer literate. I was especially interested in data communications. I was extremely exited by the fact that you could connect your computer to another one, using a MODEM. I started my own BBS and helped a dozen of future sysops getting their BBS's up and running. After a while, I even founded a FIDO alike network, called "Aquarius-net".

I was able to do this, because I printed Andrew Milner's RemoteAcces BBS software and Johachim Hormighausen's FrontDoor frontendmailer documentation. And "studied" it carefully.

Since the rumor at my job got wide spread, that I became a computer literate, my employer offered me a job at our word processing office. Later on I even became the (unofficial) admin of our Novell network. (not bad for such a low educated bitch, eh?)

At some day, our official "Computer dude" decided, the Novell network had to go, in favor of strictly "Stand alone" machines. My employer asked me about my opinion and saw that I was furious about the decision, I almost started crying.

To ease my pain, my employer donated the file server to me, which I donated again to a potential sysop of the local HIV-net. I installed and configured everything needed, all the sysop had to do, is plug in his MODEM and rock ;-)

It's obvious, I'm a outraged computer nerd, I loved Microsoft and worshiped Bill Gates and Paul Allen, for making all of this possible.


Commodore-Amiga.

One fine day, a friend of mine introduced me to the Commodore-Amiga, of which I was pretty exited. The Commodore-Amiga introduced an entire new computing scenario: Multimedia.

Man, was I exited, about that freaking thing.

I've been a one man band, since forever I guess and these so called Tracker Editors (Theijo Kinunen's MED and later OctaMED) and a bunch of other music software packages, really freaked me out, in a positive way.

The most interesting part about the Amiga was however, that AmigaOS was a UNIX like OS. For example, the AmigaOS Shell comes very close to the freaking Borne Again Shell (Bash).

I still have an moronic hardware hacked Commodore-Amiga 500 up and running (including a 1.3 and 2.4 Kickstart ROM, a "boot selector" and more "retarded" hardware hacks). Yummy yum :-)


Microsoft Windows, that boring POS.

It's out of the scope of this post, to sum up all the computers I've used. I'm convinced that most of my fellow COLA "regulars" have used dozens of them, why would I bee an exception?

Anyway, some day I bought a Pentium 166 MMX with freaking 16 MiB RAM and an ATI Expression+ (Mach64 based) GPU. Which was a hell of superpower machine at that time. (It was also the first machine I installed GNU/Linux on, namely SuSE Linux 6.1).

It came pre-installed with Windows 95 and in first case I loved it. After a year or so, I felt very bored about Windows 95. All this stupid clicking, dragging and dropping, drove me nuts somehow, what a bore :-(

Then one fine day, someone yelled at me, on the street "Help me with Linux please".

I had no idea what the heck this "Linux" thingy was, but he got me interested. At a local record store I spotted Redhat (some version) and SuSE Linux 6.1.

I choose SuSE Linux 6.1 because it was cheaper then the Redhat box.


My first GNU/Linux experience.

Since I was a Microsoft Zealot my self, simply because I actually *believed* that everything but Microsoft software was crap, I left SuSE Linux 6.1 for half a year in its box, because I was afraid of messing up my system.

Then a Dutch magazine called Linux Magazine was introduced and I bought it right from it's second issue (currently I prefer the UK based Linux Format and German based Linux Intern). The writers where such enthusiast about GNU/Linux, that I could not any longer resist to install "the damn thing".

Remember, YAST (Yet Another Setup Tool) was fully text based at that time, but as an old CP/M and DOS user, that did not bothered me at all. And SuSE Linux 6.1 included a great printed (English) manual. So I jumped on the GNU/Linux bandwagon.

During and after the installation process, my first impression was: Oh My, this is freaking cools man!

You must know, I have wasted hundreds of bucks on Microsoft compilers and here I've had this freaking GCC for free.

I became even more exited about Linux, when I had to reconfigure an compile Linux, because I needed support for my Baycom MODEM and required protocols, since a couple of CB Packet Radio users, in my area, actually _demanded_ I fired up a Packet Radio BBS.


Conclusions.

GNU/Linux has moved me to figure out how networking stuff really works. It has moved me to run many network services, like a website, FTP and introduced me to PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment), just to figure out how it works. Without GNU/Linux I would have probable never known. (Remember I am yet another "uneducated" hobbyist).


Appreciation.

Finally I would like to speak out my appreciation, who contributed to my knowledge and joy. To limit the text, I won't list the names of all those great people, because it would be enormous. Therefor, I would like to limit my appreciation to this:

Everybody who contributes to Free Software and advocate it.

You know who you are.

Thank you and keep up the good work!

Moving to GNOME

Probably everyone knows, I've been a KDE fanatic for the past decade. And thus I installed the latest KDE4 packages on Kubuntu. Unfortunately many icons where missing in the Ubuntu packages, which made me decide to give SUSE's KDE4Live a try, which I installed on the hard disk of Pleunix. However openSUSE did not live up to my expectations and thus I replaced it with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, using the GNOME desktop environment.

At first planned to install KDE right the way, but while I was playing around with GNOME and took a look at the Gnome-Look site, I came to the conclusion, that there was not any longer a reason to drop Gnome in favor of KDE.

The last time, I seriously used GNOME was on Fedora Core 2 (which is considered ancient by now in the GNU/Linux community). In the meantime GNOME has come along the way. And when ether you like it or not, it has become even more easy and to "pimp it up" then KDE (at least for the 3 series of KDE. What's ahead for KDE, only time will tell). So I'm not running out of conclusions here.

I won't bore you with the installation and configuration process of Ubuntu, because that was (as expected) a piece of cake (not even worth mentioning).

Just wanted to share some screenshots of my new desktop. (click to enlarge to 1024x768)

Meet my desktop

I've been playing around with a program called Istanbul, which is a desktop session recording program and here is the result, a short video in Ogg-Tehora format. Due to the lack of (hardware) resources, many of the frames unfortunately have been skipped.

Anyway it shows what my desktop currently looks like and shows the concept of multiple desktop spaces, providing the ability of running multiple applications full screen simultaneously. As you can see, the desktop is (30%) transparent, using the Beryl manager and Emerald theme manager.

Still think GNU/Linux is a out of date, sluggish HobbyOS eh?

Istanbul if available for free and Free, from most GNU/Linux distribution's repositories

WoW, GNU/Linux!

This is so freaking cool!

While I was browsing the Dutch Ubuntu forums, just to check out or I could help a n00b, I discovered, that the Beryl manager fully supports a transparent desktop. The screenshot I spotted, had the Ubuntu Studio wallpaper, which looks really cool on a transparent desktop. I was very impressed by this and started searching for the wallpaper and finally found it. So I played a little around with the Beryl Configuration center and below are the results.

Pretty catchy huh?

As usual the screenshots are thumbnails, so click on them for full screen. Remember this all is done on a 1,7 Ghz CPU, 380 MiB RAM and a old school nVIDEA Geoforce 2 MX400 (64 MiB VRAM) GPU, try that with Vista, Doh!

My new desktop. If you look a little closer you'll see multiple applications on multiple desktops.

The Beryl settings manager, mind the numbers I entered.

Still wondering "When "Linux" is ready for the desktop"?

And the winner is: Kubuntu

As a long term fan of the SUSE and openSUSE distro, there was for me, and many with me, no longer a reason to support this distro after Novell made their patent deal with Microsoft. Inspired by the interesting articles on Boycott Novell, I decided to jump ship, a couple of months ago and tested a dozen of distro's.

On my previous Dutch Blog, I described the other distro's I've tested in the meantime. However, you probably don't understand Dutch, remember, a picture saids more then 1000 words. The screen shots speak for them selves :-)

Of course these screen shots are thumbnails, to enlarge them to their full size, simply click on them.

However installing any distribution should be no problem, since I am for over 8 years a devoted GNU/Linux user now. But somehow, we GNU/Linux users have became very spoiled. For those who are new to GNU/Linux, manually partitioning the hard disk drive and creating file systems on it, from the command line, however is not an option. Here's where the Live CD comes into view.

What on Earth is a Live CD?

Well, it's name saids it already all. It's a Operating System, that runs "Live" from a CD or DVD-ROM, without the need to install anything on your hard disk drive, so you'll be able to test it without taking any risks (possibly loss of data etc.). If you feel happy with Kubuntu, you are able to install it any time it suits you, simply by clicking the Install icon on the desktop. The so called migration wizard will ask you six questions and that's all. If you are sates fight with your choices, Kubuntu will copy the CD-ROM content to a partition on your hard disk drive.


The great advantage of installing Kubuntu on your hard disk drive, is that you are able to add 1000's of software packages to it. Another advantage of Kubuntu in contrast with Ubuntu is that it uses the KDE desktop environment, which is highly configurable. For example, the desktop you'll see on these screen shots is dramatically personalized. It looks far from the original Kubuntu desktop. A great resource for color schemes, kicker buttons, alternative menu systems (on my Kubuntu install Tasty Menu was used), wallpapers and other artwork can be found on KDE-Look.

Plenty of additional software is available from the repositories. To install additional software, simply start the Adept (System -> Add/Remove Software) package manager and have a look around.


The main reason however, why I choose Kubuntu over Mandriva 2007 and PCLinuxOS 2007 is, that those two did not support the on board sound controller of my IBM PC300PL Pentium III machine (Simonix). Beside that they also refused to play sound while playing Flash movies (Google Video and Youtube) on my Dell Optiplex 240GX Pentium 4 (Pleunix), while it supported the sound controller without any glitch. I tried a few of my little ol' tricks (making symlinks to the Flash Lib).

Eye candy.

What surprised me most, the past years I've been working with GNU/Linux is the way its desktop evolved. Visionaries keep on telling us that "this is the year of the Linux desktop". Well in my home it has been the year of the GNU/Linux desktop since 1998. I tried several desktop environments, but KDE is without any doubt my favorite. Since version 3.2.x KDE has become the ultimate desktop anyway. And beside that, you must have been living under a rock the last year, if you've never heard about the composite desktop, also often referred as to the 3D desktop, with its greatest feature "The (legendary) Cube"

Now what exactly is this mysterious cube?

To explain that we'll have to go back to The Pager. A tiny applet that lives in the kicker of every X11 desktop environment. The pager gives the user the ability to use 4 distinct workspaces, meaning in practice you are able to switch between 4 desktops, simply by selecting the preferred desktop icon. So in fact the user is able to run 4 applications full screen at the same time. Now the cube does exactly the same, but this time in a animated 3D manner, presented as a cube. This funny animated toy, makes you want to use this function much more often and thus has a positive influence on your productivity :-)

So that's what all the fuzz's about?

Certainly not, there's more! For example in the next screen shot (on the left side of this text block) you'll see a translucent file manager (Konqueror), which doesn't only look cutting edge, but could in some cases even be very handy, think about a terminal window. Beside that you might have noticed the cutting edge icon set I installed, all the candy came from KDE-Look. And finally there are the Super Karamba applets, like the analogue clock and system statistics, on the right side of the first screen shot. The great thing is that all of this runs on a 1,7 Ghz CPY, 380 MiB RAM and a old school nVIDEA 64 MiB RAM Geoforce 2 MX400 GPU!

Games, games, games.

Another complaint by those clueless lusers is, that there are no games for GNU/Linux. Ha! Kubuntu comes loaded with games. You'll only have to install them using System -> Add/remove Software. I for one am a serious FPS addict and Kubuntu comes up with a few of them, right out of the box. However, fortunately on Wikipedia I found this impressive Free FPS list. Most of them are available for GNU/Linux!

Conclusion.

However I loved playing around with all those distros, I described in my Dutch blog (which will be discontinued) Kubuntu, the distro I've despised until now is my new mate. I installed it on both Pleunix and Simonix, only Hexon remains running on Debian Etch (with XFCE, due to the lack of RAM (64 MiB) and Proton still runs FreeDOS (even more lack of RAM). Kubuntu is the right choice for those who are used to Windows only, because Ubuntu looks to alien for those n00bs IMHO.

Since I am an old school GNU/Linuxiac, I've had no problems installing and configuring it. If you are a n00b however, there's a fair chance you will find answers on your national Ubuntu forum.

You've got the opportunity to stick to the latest cutting edge technology, on your outdated PC, no need to buy a new one, if you have a machine that matches Pleunix (dated 2002). If you don't want to download the CD, you can order a Free copy from Kubuntu's shipit service; yes that was no typo, it's free as in free beer :-)

The Tux wallpaper is Copyright (C) 2003 by Daniël Bleyenberg.
The icon set is simoo's OS-K.
The color scheme is 5er's 53dark Blue.

Here is a detailed article on Kubuntu by Rick Lehrbaum.

Happy hackin'!