/home/endperform   Rants, rambles and technobabble

Been geeking out the past few nights setting up an old Dell Dimension desktop as the new home fileserver. I decided to install Ubuntu Server edition on it to keep things simple. Within about an hour I had a working machine using LVM and a Samba server installed. It’s easily accessible, and I’m pondering opening up an SSH port to the outside world so I can get back to it. I also installed Lighttpd (my first experience with it) and I have to say it was pretty painless. PHP, mySQL and Cacti are all running happily, and I’m a happy geek.

On my desktop, I decided to try to play with compositing a bit. I installed XFCE (which is what I’m now using at work), turned on compositing effects and installed Avant Window Manager. I kinda like the little dock. It stays out of my way and is very functional. I also have an XFCE panel to the right, which is handling the system tray, time and main menu. I’ll post a screenshot of it shortly.

Something else amazing also happened this past week. My wife, Bethany, decided that she wanted to try Linux out. After a little guidance, she installed Ubuntu herself using Wubi, and has a pretty Gnome desktop complete with compositing and AWN as well. After about two weeks, I’m going to bug her with some questions and repost them here. So far, she seems to be enjoying it a lot, especially the fact that she can change the look of her desktop anytime she feels like it with ease. Score one for Ubuntu!

I’ve been thinking lately about the configuration time I’ve spent with Arch vs. what I’ve spent with Ubuntu. Now, by configuration time, I’m not just talking about hardware, I’m also referring to customizing and setting up the working environment to my liking. Now, a lot of you might think that Ubuntu is set up in a workable environment to start with. It is for the regular user, however I don’t feel I’m a ‘regular’ user. In Arch, it’s the exact opposite. Once installed, you reboot and have a prompt and a fairly clean slate to work with. Let’s look at what I had to do to get each environment to a state where I was happy with how things were working.

Ubuntu
I rebooted Ubuntu and logged in, greeted by GDM. I logged in and was presented with the default desktop, default apps, no actual ATi driver (using the open source version) but everything worked. So, what did I have to do to get the environment to my liking? I had some things I needed to install:

- ATi proprietary drivers (some may frown on this, but I’d like to use vendor-supplied where possible)

- build-essential, in case I find something not in the repository so I can build it.

- Mozilla Firefox from Mozilla. I find things seem to work a little better with the actual client from Mozilla.

- Media codecs. I need my media to play. This involved adding a new repository and installing a couple of packages

So far, not a big deal. Now we get into the area where I spent a majority of my time, namely removing things I didn’t need and disabling services I had no intentions of using. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu (and it’s still on the laptop), but I just wish some days for a stripped down version other than the server version. It would be nice to start with a clean baseline install. At any rate, here’s what I ended up doing:

- Uninstalled applications that were of no use to me (bluetooth, evolution, PDA utils, Firefox from the repository, Tracker and a few other things)

- I disabled some services from starting up at boot time that I didn’t need

- Edited some menus to remove / update entries.

- I disable some session startup applications

On top of that, I found my favorite GTK theme and went ahead and installed it.

Arch
Arch is at the opposite end of the spectrum. As I mentioned, once installed, you get a login prompt and can log in as root only. So, the time I spent in Arch was installing / configuring things I need. Here’s what I went through:

- Create my everyday user and add to the needed groups

- Install xorg, flglrx and configure it

- Install Fluxbox and configure it. I should note that as I install / remove apps, I have to edit a menu. No big deal, it doesn’t take too long

- Install some needed services (hal, fam, dbus, cpufreq, acpi) and configure them

- Install the apps I need / want (Firefox, Thunderbird, Conky, Amarok, etc.)

Now, as far as multimedia codecs goes, I didn’t have to add repositories or anything of that nature. One pacman command and I was set up. Not a strike against Ubuntu, just here for comparison’s sake. As of this writing, I have pretty much everything I need to function. Below is a screenshot of my working environment (click to view full size)

In Conclusion
In conclusion, I figure it’s a wash as far as time spent. While Ubuntu will get you up and running quickly, if you’re anything like I am you like to tweak / play / streamline and that’s where the timesink comes for Ubuntu. One the opposite end, Arch starts you off with the bare essentials and you install what you need. Ubuntu resides on my laptop because I’d rather not deal with tweaking it too much since it’s been relegated back to mobile / secondary status. Which one is for you? Well, that depends on what you want. If you want instant gratification and aren’t concerned with default applications, Ubuntu would be the way to go. If you want to learn about Linux and install exactly what you want, go with Arch.

One final note: Arch is a rolling release distribution, which means packages are constantly being updated and there isn’t a set ‘release’ with set versions of software like Ubuntu has. This can be a blessing and occasionally a curse when something comes down the pike that breaks things.

If any of you are following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a Tweet where I mentioned I installed Arch on the desktop. I figured I would go into my reasoning for going back to Arch. I left Arch initially because I got tired of messing around and tweaking things to get them working, but I also missed two big things when I switched to Ubuntu: up-to-date software and the install what you want way of things. I am keeping Ubuntu on my laptop, because now I’m moving back to the desktop for most of my computing at home. This leads me into what I have running as far as a desktop goes. Once again, I installed Fluxbox. It’s small, easy to configure and pretty flexible. I’ve been spending the past few days installing the software I need, and right now I’m working on transferring my music and such from the laptop back home to the desktop. All and all, I’m happy to be back on Arch, at least on the desktop. Ubuntu will work fine on the laptop, although I think I’ll probably end up installing Fluxbox on it as well.

As far as Twitter goes, I’ve been a little lax on my updates there. I’ve been rather busy at work, so that limits the amount of tweets I spit out during the week. On the weekends I’m usually pretty busy with family things, so again, lack of updates. One thing that’s beginning to annoy me with Twitter, though, is that there are a lot of ’spam’ users cropping up. I don’t add anyone that follows me. What I usually do is check out their Twitter page and see if they interest me at all. If it turns out they’re a spammy type of Twitter (spammy being ‘listen to x podcast! buy x!’), I’ll block them so I don’t see them on my follower list. I notice some of my Twitter friends are using another service (Plunk, I believe), so I might give that a shot at some point.

Lately, I’ve kept the laptop booting into Vista and doing what I need to do there. Why? Well, with the way the laptop is hooked up, opening the lid fully to see is something of a challenge. The problem with Ubuntu (most likely X/Nvidia) is that it defaults to the laptop display and does not output to the external monitor. Once I get booted into Ubuntu, I can use the Nvidia settings utility to set the display, but the issue is that the utility doesn’t save the settings. I have to reset it every time I boot. Now, I’d go through the trouble of setting the Xorg configuration up, but in a week or two the laptop will be back to mobile-only status. I just figured I’d vent a little bit about it here.

Since I’m on the subject of Vista, I’ve been going through a couple of sites trying to get the best performance I can. Right now, it’s not too bad. Sometimes I forget that Windows isn’t all bad, really, but I do prefer Linux. Aero is a decent interface, and seems pretty snappy on the laptop. I turned off indexing, which helps with disk thrashing. I’ve also got Firefox 3 running here, and it works well. There’s a part of me that is pondering setting up Ubuntu in Virtualbox under Vista on the desktop. I’ll have to give it a test and see how it works. If it performs well enough I’ll keep it, otherwise I’ll go through and repartition.

So, I installed the latest Ubuntu on the desktop because I got tired of messing around with Arch. The install went painless and it’s running pretty smooth. Of course, I have some things to do to customize my install, such as remove some extraneous apps and add a few that I need. I think I can safely say, though, that I’m going to move the laptop and work machine back to Ubuntu. It’s nice not having to configure things by hand. I mean, Arch is a great distro, but I finally got tired of messing with things, and I did eventually break my install on the desktop, hence the reinstall.