Eugeni's blog

On Linux Distributions and Desktops

english, linux, Linux-Planet, mac, mandriva, writing 8 Responses »

Jul 172011

My last series of posts about what I think about Desktop OSes and the place of Linux distributions among them resulted in lots of very interesting and informative discussions, so I decided to write this follow-up to summarize everything, and describe the role of Mandriva in this environment as I see it.

(Of course, everything said here is my personal opinion, and in no way I am trying to say something on behalf of Mandriva Board of directors)

First of all, what comes into mind when you think about the term ‘Linux Distribution’? I bet that names like Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Debian, Slackware, Arch, Gentoo – and many others come into mind.

However, what names come into mind when you think about Desktops? I believe that in this case, the names which feel most like it are Mac, Windows, Android, Meego, BeOS, ChromeOS, JoliCloud, and so on. Some of them are running proprietary OSes, some of them are partly open, and some of them are actually based on a Linux distribution or a Linux kernel and libraries stack.

And finally, what comes into mind when you think about the term ‘Linux Desktop’? Without holy wars and discussion which distribution is better (notice the word distribution here), I believe that it is hard to escape from the names as Ubuntu, Mandrake, Linspire, SLED, and similar solutions.

Some of you perhaps have already got my point. What makes a “Desktop” is not a mere combination of packages, applications, community and artwork; but it is the integration and common feeling among all of its components, and somewhat inherited desire of having a ‘standard’ way of doing everything. And Linux Distributions, on their turn, inherently have the essence of freedom of choice, flexibility and multitude of combinations of applications and goals within, which make them much more flexible on one hand, but much less focused on another.

Why Linux distributions will never (in my humble opinion) beat Windows or MacOS on desktop? By a one simple reason – they are too flexible. They provide too many options and possibilities by default, without a ‘standard’ way of doing things, and while everything works and is usually tightly integrated, this is still a combination of packages and applications, and not a Desktop. This is not a bad thing – by the contrary, I believe that this is awesome! But this opposite to what is expected from a Desktop experience.

On other turn, the Desktops which managed to succeed in the history of computers are the ones which started with a vision, and according to this vision, has evolved into a combination of applications, features, standardization and look-and-feel which made them unique.

If you think about productive and efficient desktop, Mac OS comes into mind. Even if it (with some bit of imagination) could be considered a distribution (it has lots of non-apple applications, gnu stack, unix infrastructure under it, and so on) – it is rarely seen as one. It is a desktop, it has its own unique feeling and usage.

It is the same feeling which we have for Android, Chrome, JoliCloud – even if they are, in fact, Linux distributions, they are not seen as such. They are products – with their own features, functionality, feeling, goals, and so on. They have a focus, they have a unique and controlled roadmap and goal, and this is what makes them more focused on that goal.

And this is the road where Ubuntu, and now Mandriva, are headed – running away from being ‘Linux distributions’ in the most common sense of the word, towards becoming Desktops. Ubuntu GNU/Linux Distribution has already become just ‘Ubuntu’. It is still a Linux distribution, it is based on shoulders of the giants, but it is not just another distribution out there – it became a Desktop, with its own look-and-feel, functionality, goals, features and behavior.

This is how Android and ChromeOS evolved as well – even if they are, in fact, Linux distributions, they are not seen as such, but as separated and unique products. This is what JoliCloud did as well, and this is what Linspire did in the past.

In other words, when separating Linux Distributions with Desktop solutions, it is possible to imagine a simple scale, ranging from freedom of choice, flexibility and non-prioritization of specific DEs and UIs – to single and unique look-and-feel, restricted flexibility and focus on specific features and details. The further away from the ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom of choice’ a solution is moving, the closer it gets to become a product with ‘Desktop’ name in it.

Most Linux distributions value freedom of choice and diverse and mulch-opinionated community among everything else. They treat KDE as good as GNOME, and do not consider XFCE and LXDE as 2nd-class citizens. Every one is able to select what he wants to use, mix applications – and there are no restrictions nor enforcements on how his desktop should work.

In other corner, there are Desktop products – which enforce a single and common look-and-feel and mode of operation, define behaviors, and are focused on one single and unique way of doing anything.

And this is basically what I think on the matter .

Macdriva experience

devel, english, linux, Linux-Planet, mac, mandriva, programming, review, tutorial, writing 12 Responses »

Jun 262011

…or, “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

Mandriva 2011 beta3 running on macbook air

To do a more fair comparison between Mac and Linux approaches on same hardware, I took a shot and installed Mandriva 2011 beta3 (x86-64 version) alongside Mac OS X on the same Macbook air. The process is nowhere simple nor straight, but it is certainly possible. So in case someone wants to repeat the feat, here is a quick step-by-step instruction how to do so (alternatively, for the impatient ones, you could skip till the end of this post for a simple one-step solution).

Download Mandriva 2011b3 from your favorite mirror. The architecture should not matter, but to get the most from the hardware I’d recommend 64bits edition (but it is solely up to you to decide).
Run hdiutil convert -format UDRW -o mdv2011.img Mandriva.2011-beta3.x86_64.iso to convert the image to mac-compatible format
Now comes the tricky part. In order to make the system boot from this image, it is not enough to create a bootable usb disk or create a local disk partition for the installation. You actually have to create 2 local disk partitions – one where the Linux will be installed, and another roughly equal to the size of the installable image (1.6GB as of mdv2011 beta3), where you should put the copy of the installation image using dd. In other words, you must do the following:
Open disk utility from Dock->Utilities.
Create a new partition with roughly 2GB in size.
Create another partition with the space you want for your Linux install (about 10GB should be enough).
Format both partitions as MSDOS FAT.
Plug your pendrive which will be used for installation.
Open a terminal, become root and run diskutil list, it should show you the partitions you have created and the pendrive. E.g., it should show something like:



  sh-3.2# diskutil list
  /dev/disk0
     #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
     0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *121.3 GB   disk0
     1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
     2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            89.9 GB    disk0s2
     3:       Microsoft Basic Data                         29.2 GB    disk0s3
     4:       Microsoft Basic Data                         2.0 GB     disk0s4
  /dev/disk1
     #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
     0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *8.0 GB     disk1
     1:                       0x17                         1.7 GB     disk1s1

Here, disk0s3 is the partition where the Linux system will live after the installation, disk0s4 is the partition for the installer, and disk1 is the disk currently located inside the pendrive.

Now we have to transfer the installation image both to the pendrive and local partition. For this, first run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk0s4 and diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 to unmount the partitions, and then transfer the image to them with dd if=mdv2011.img of=/dev/disk1 and dd if=mdv2011.img of=/dev/disk0s4.
!! AS ALWAYS, make sure you know what you are doing, because dd command does not likes newcomers and non-careful people !!. If you are not careful, this is the step you have the most possibility of losing all your data for good. You’ve been warned.
After it is done, the installation procedure is mostly prepared, but you still need to prepare your mac for multi-booting. Luckily for you, this is easy – just install refit and it should work without any configuration.
Now, with the pendrive still plugged, reboot your machine. On boot prompt, there will be a new nice refit menu, where you should choose partition tool and allow it to syncronize the GPT partition table with MBR. This is necessary because grub1 and low-level system utilities used in Mandriva 2011 do not support GPT partition tables.
Now you can try booting from your pendrive. If you receive a Non-system disk or Unable to find isolinux.bin, make sure that you have followed the steps of having the same image on both pendrive and local partition. What (apparently) happens in this case is that Mac gets confused about the local disks namings (e.g., it confuses the USB partitions with local disk ones), and isolinux gets lost trying to figure what to do and usually gets stuck. There is probably a more clean way to make this work, but as I am lazy sometimes, I just settled with this solution.
If you got to the grub splashscreen, congratulations, you have almost reached half of the procedure . Now press TAB to edit kernel parameters, and change the root=LIVE:LABEL=… to root=LIVE:/dev/sdb. This way, you are telling kernel that the partition you are booting from is in fact the pendrive, and it won’t get lost trying to solve the puzzle of GPT+MBR+multiple disks mappings (more on this later). Just make sure you select Live system instead of Installation to prevent needless reboots and problems.
If everything goes OK, you should be able to boot to KDE with 800×600 resolution. If you reached this point, open the konsole terminal, become root, run draklive-install and proceed with the installation until the partitioning step. At this point, the Mandriva installer gets confused by the GPT+MBR partition table as well, and gets lost about what to do. What you should do is remove the partition you dedicated for Mandriva installation (the big one, not the 2GB one), create a new one with your favorite Linux file system (I suggest ext4) and format it. Just name it as / partition and create no swap – we could always create a swap file later.
Now the installer will tell you that the machine must be rebooted to update partition layout and will quit. Instead of rebooting, however, just run partprobe command as root and it will re-sync in-memory partition table with the new disk content, and restart draklive-install. Now it should allow you to proceed with the installation, so just sit back and relax while Mandriva gets installed on your system. Or go make a tea or drink a beer, cause it will take a somewhat long time.
When the install finishes, in the bootloader installation step, make sure to install it to the root of the partition – in my case, it was /dev/sda3, but your mileage may vary.
The install should finish, but in case grub-install command output in the terminal gave you an error message, you must install grub manually because somehow, surprisingly, it gets confused with the GPT+MBR layout as well. So just run grub-install /dev/sda3 and it should work. If it does not, try running just grub so it would recreate the device mapping, and install the bootloader manually (this is a bit technical and tedious procedure so I’ll skip it on behalf of clarity – feel free to ask in comments if you have questions about this point).
Finally, run fdisk /dev/sda, unmark the /dev/sda4 (old installation partition) as active, and mark /dev/sda3 as active. Basically, fdisk /dev/sda – press – a – press – 3 – press -a – press – 4 – w should do it (/me feels like describing Mortal Kombat fatalities with this explanation ).
Reboot, and a new Linux entry should appear within refit menu. However, when you try to boot it, grub will fail, saying that it is unable to locate kernel and initrd files at correct location. This, once again, is due to mismatch between GPT and MBR partition table, and a quick fix is to change (hd0,3) to (hd0,2) for both kernel and initrd lines. Once again, I am not describing the right fix, but the quickest one.
When the system boots, everything should work automatically, including wifi and everything else. As Mandriva 2011 comes pre-loaded with firmware for most closed cards and devices, it all should just work out of the box.
Just remember to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst file and make the change from (hd0,3) to (hd0,2) there to have it permanently remembered.

So, that’s it, and if you have got through this quick tutorial to this point and managed to get Mandriva 2011 installed on your Mac machine, you can consider yourself a true geek. Of course, most of this tutorial applies to Macbook Air, because it does not has a CD/DVD port – if it had, most of those steps wouldn’t be necessary at all. But.. we do not seek easy routes, are we?

And of course, I mentioned in the beginning of this post that there is a way to install Mandriva on OSX in just 1 simple step. This step is very simple – just ask me to send you a .dd.img copy of my Mandriva partition to you, so you could simple copy it into one of your own partitions, and it will just work. Somehow it feels a more natural way of distributing and packaging anything on Mac platform (I mean, within a .dmg file) – so I am unsure if it is more a hack than the complete tutorial I described above .

P.S.: Just to update you with some timings on the same hardware. Mac OS X 10.6.8 takes approximately 10 seconds from refit boot menu towards desktop. Stock Mandriva 2011 beta3 takes approximately 12 seconds from grub menu to kdm, and approximately another 12* seconds from kdm to full-featured desktop. After some optimizations, I could decrease this time to 7 seconds from grub to kdm, and 6 seconds from kdm to full-featured desktop. With auto-login they are tied in this comparison, which is really amazing!

Mac experience

devel, english, linux, Linux-Planet, mac, mandriva, review, Uncategorized, writing 20 Responses »

Jun 252011

At request from my friends from ROSA Labs , I was using a mac os x-based machine this week, to get a feeling on how it works, feels and looks like. As I had never used a mac before, it was certainly a nice experience, and I think I managed to extract the feeling of what is fundamentally different between a Mac and PC-based approaches (in this case, let’s consider PC as being Linux-based OS instead of Windows, which stands in between those approaches and perhaps I’ll describe my thoughts about it later).

Hi, I'm Mac.

So, after using a Linux-based OS exclusively for my Desktop for the past 10 years or so (except the time at Microsoft where I was using a pre-released version of Vista during the work hours), I finally was able to get a hold of a MacBook Air. One thing I can say that most of the mac advertizements are true – the hardware really looks amazing and “cool”. As for the software, well, let’s go step-by-step in this evaluation.

The fest thesis I want to emphasize is that the fundamental change between the Mac and Linux Desktop approaches is that Mac does everything to force you to understand and bend to the system default settings and the way it works, and Linux is completely aimed at making the system easy to customize and adapt to you. In other words, Mac forces you to adapt to the system, and Linux focuses on making system easily adaptable to what you want. This ranges from each and every level of the system configuration, starting with the UI, standardization of the used applications, the standardized menu, dock, and so on. On Mac, it is done this way, and you should not even think on changing it – it just works and the only solution for you is to get used to it.

On Linux, the things are quite opposite on all stages. Each and every part of the system can be customized, adapted, modified; there is no single point of complete integration between applications, settings and features. It is quite common to have a Linux system with systemd+kde+pidgin+openoffice, where each application has its programming framework, UI, look-and-feel, and functionality. And by no means it makes this system a second-class citizen when comparing to a upstart+gnome+emphaty+libreoffice one. This is the biggest advantage (and, for some, disadvantage) of Linux-based approaches – the large choice without One True Way of doing things.

This also brings me back to the eternal flame was which says that “the Mac is the Best Desktop Experience out there”, which I personally cannot agree with. Yes, Mac has its own experience, but the largest drawback is that is the only experience you could get out of it. By the contrary, on Linux there are thousands ways of how one could create, customize and run his Desktop. Somebody feels comfortable with pure KDE experience, someone would feel much more natural with a GNOME desktop. Many productivity-oriented Linux desktops are running dwm, icewm, ratpoison, wm3, evilwm and many many other desktop environments with multitude of apparently incompatible applications and do not miss any of their larger cousins (like kde, gnome or xfce) features.

So to summarize it all, one big advantage of a Mac-based experience is that the entire desktop feels like an appliance. To illustrate, consider any cellphone OS, or any TV or a videogame – the things “just work”, and you have no choice nor need to modify the way they work and just go on with using them. This is certainly a huge plus for casual users who just need to use their devices to get things done – it is very hard to get confused about what to do with the system, and in most applications all keyboard shortcuts, UI, menus, appearance and so on is standardized. In other words, you don’t learn how to use a Mac or Android or Symbian, you just use it, and there is only one correct way to get something done.

The advantage of a Linux-based desktops is their absolute – and even exaggerated sometimes – flexibility. They are completely focused on making the desktop experience bendable towards what you need, at a cost of much higher entry level and necessary learning about all the puzzles which compose it. It is certainly not focused on casual users (and, in my personal opinion, it should not be), and it is more of an elitist system – only the ones willing to learn, customize and adapt the system will be able to get the most out of it. But the ones who manage to get through this exhaustive task will be truly rewarded with a system where you know exactly what each and every piece, process or file are responsible for.

In other words, Mac is an appliance, and Linux is a constructor. Mac just works (not necessarily the way you expect), and Linux gives you the possibility to make it work the way you want (at a cost of a high learning and customization curve).

So in my personal opinion, it is pointless comparing a Mac experience to a Linux Desktop one. If Mac should be compared to anything, it is to other appliance-like environments, like cellphones and similar devices for example; or to end-to-end solutions based on any OS which has the similar goals in mind (like meego, android, winphone, windows, symbian, ubuntu – and now mandriva, which has invested a lot of time of ROSA Labs designers and developers to introduced a new UI experience for the 2011 release). In such cases, the user does not cares – nor should he – about what the system is based upon – a darwin os, a win kernel, a linux or any other low-level operating system. What use gets is the overall default UI which just works, and he should adapt to.

Hi, I am PC^WMandriva 2011 (this shot was shamelessly borrowed from softpedia because it really looks awesome!)

At the end, summarizing and concluding this long text, I can say now that it is more clear for me now where the ROSA Labs designers and developers are getting their inspiration from. Personally, for me, the Rosa Panel (included by default in Mandriva 2011) feels more natural and easy to use than its Mac equivalent and more flexible and tunable than its Windows counterpart. The same way, the ROSA Launcher application feels more powerful than Mac’s finder+dockbar combination, and much more flexible and friendly than Windows 7 start menu. This, at least for me, only complements my opinion that Linux is a constructor – you can build anything from the tools and pieces it has, take the best ideas out there and use them as inspiration, and result in something new. This is specially true to the geeks (like me) who do not like some of the design choices taken by ROSA – so we can just go ahead and make the system the way we want, taking the best from the both worlds.

Hi, I'm a bit customized Mandriva 2011 - and the limit to my customization is only your imagination

And, of course, having the power of Linux constructor, you can certainly adapt the system towards your needs, remove or change things you don’t want, and add what you find missing.

That’s it .

P.S.: Please, consider everything said here as my own personal opinion. By no means it represents the official Mandriva or ROSA view on the matter. This is what I think.

P.P.S.: Some extremely interesting discussion and feedbacks in the comments, be sure to check them out. Thanks for all this feedback!