Monthly Archives: February 2007

Vista vs Linux

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (DesktopLinux.com) has written a review of him comparing Vista to Linux, on a step-by-step basis from install up.

You can read his whole review here. However, what you should definitely read, is page 3.

Steven came across big problems with Vista relating to hardware support, such as buggy drivers with missing features, and certain common hardware not being supported. It also sounds like Microsoft has been understating the true system requirements to run vista, and there are some interesting stats in the article.

I fail to see how Microsoft can claim that Vista is ready for people to use, when there is a lack of driver support and missing driver features – it all shows signs of being rushed out of the door – and I wonder what else got rushed – security testing perhaps?

What scares me even more are certain big organisations who are starting to role out Vista installations on a big scale, when the software is so new. It is also unfortunate that Dell has stopped offering WinXP on their desktops, consider that lots of people will still want XP for another year or two at least.

However, I feel the best bit in the article was “When I switched back to Vista, I tried to play Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot CD. Whoops! Not a single sound emerged from my speakers. After a little investigation, I found that Vista disables media outputs that don’t incorporate DRM, when you try to play DRM protected media through them.”.

Vista certainly does deliver on the “WOW” experience. The “WOW, this really sucks” experience.

Mac Mini

In the weekend I went out and picked up a little Intel Core Duo 1.66Ghz Apple Mac Mini. I got the model with 512MB RAM and 60GB hard disk, and I am using it as my desktop/home server, freeing up my amd64 for developmental work.

Here’s what I love about it:

  • The unit is almost completely silent! I now leave it on all the time, as it doesn’t bother me with noise, and makes it useful as my home file server.
  • Low power usage – only about 23W whilst idle. (according to apple, and also various other people have measured similar results)
  • The DVD drive is also very quiet when playing DVDs.
  • The sound quality from the integrated audio is very good – just as good as my Creative Audigy LS in my old desktop.
  • It looks REALLY nice. :-)

However, in my adventures with it in the weekend, I found a few things that are a problem:

  • 512MB does not run MacOS very smoothly – if you are going to use MacOS (I used Linux of course), boost it up to 1GB.
  • The DVD drive seems to have read problems on a few very hot days I’ve had. :-/
  • It does not have a BIOS – instead, it has EFI, which means that installing Linux is not as simple as normal.
  • MacOS would crash at startup, leaving me with an all blue screen – I found that this occured whenever it was connected via the KVM! Some kind of nasty bug there…. :-/

Other cool stuff:
If you want a box to run Xen on, the Intel Mac Mini’s support the VT-instructions, that allow you to run unmodified operating systems (eg: MS Windows or legacy OSes) on Xen. If you are interested in that, check out the info here.

Overall, I think it’s a great little unit and would recomend it to anyone after a quiet desktop/small server/media center. :-)

Jedo Linux Status Report

In the last few weeks I have been working on the base packages for Jedo Linux. Today I have completed a bootable system and in another week, I will have finished tweaking it, and fixing small issues.

I would say, I am only about 2 weeks behind the (rough!) schedule given in my last status report, which isn’t bad going really. :-)

Once I have the base packages working reliably and problem-free, I will be turning my attentions to the package manager.

Whilst Portage is quite a nice package manager, the emerge program doesn’t suit my needs in the following ways:

  • strange options like –noreplace being needed for normal operation.
  • quite different options to RPM.
  • updating the ebuilds via HTTP is annoying.
  • limitations of various settings and strange configuration methods.
  • lots of features I have no plans of using, which effectivly adds feature bloat for me.
  • lack of various features that I want.

I will be writing my own package manager, based partially on Portage. Essentially, it will use the ebuild.sh script from Portage (with a whole bunch of changes) which handles the ebuild files.

I will then write a program called JPM (Jedo Package Manager) to replace emerge. This program will:

  • work out dependencies for installing/removing packages
  • have similar style options as YUM and RPM.
  • easy to configure
  • either using Perl or C.
  • easy to use binary or source packages.
  • considering adding bittorrent support for downloading packages.

So that’s what I’ll be working on for the next month. And hopefully in March, I will be ready to start working on the installer, and in April might be able to release a test ISO of the base system. :-)

Coreutils rm -rf problem

I’ve found an interesting problem when I was in the process of building base packages for Jedo Linux. I could compile coreutils okay, but I then found that the command “rm” when used with the -r option, would fail. As an example:

mkdir -p /tmp/junk/foo/bar/mydir
rm -rf /tmp/junk
rm: cannot remove `/tmp/junk': Function not implemented

After spending a long time looking into this problem, making sure my toolchain was okay, etc, I finally got a hint of the problem from this post, relating to a build problem with BeOS that causes the same/simular problem.
The author goes on to mention that it can be reproduced under Linux, by making /proc inaccessible at build time.

Since I’ve been building in a chroot, /proc wasn’t mounted. After mounting it and building coreutils again – it worked!

So: To anyone out there building coreutils – MAKE SURE /proc IS MOUNTED!! :-)

UPDATE
Interesting…. it seems that the problem occurs anytime if /proc is not mounted! I’m not sure if this is a requirement of coreutils, or some kind of weird bug….

Overhead Wire Tangle

A couple of months back they did some work on one of the lamp-posts in my street – I think they might have actually replaced it, but since I always walked past whilst heavily in though about Linux, I can’t be sure as I wasn’t paying too much attention…

However, either way it appears they bodged the job, and the pole appears to be at a slight angle, meaning that a lot of the lower wires and boxes such as fiber can no longer reach the pole.

See my photo of it here, which shows the mess the wiring has become.

I love how they have used some rope to hold the cables in mid-air. :-) The most amazing thing, is that this has managed to survive many strong, windy days for a few months now. But the wires are looking worse every day.