Looking for a new Linux

For the record, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Mac person, but for some perverse reason, I've had a continuing fascination with the GNU/Linux operating systems for the past few years. I've long been a fan of free and open source software (FOSS). I've used Mozilla and later Firefox as my browser of choice, and although I use M$ Office in my work out of necessity, my preferred productivity suite for the past decade has been OpenOffice.org, although lately I've switched my allegiance to its progeny, LibreOffice.

I first encountered Linux up close and personal early in 2009 when I helped a buddy of mine install Ubuntu Linux on another friend's laptop. His WindowsXP installation had a terminal case of "Windows Rot" and he had lost the installation and recovery discs, so the only alternative was a "nuclear" option of reformatting the hard drive and installing Linux. Once we got it up and running, I was sufficiently impressed to obtain a cheap used laptop on eBay, install Linux on it, and write an article about the experience for PCSolutions magazine.

I installed OpenSUSE Linux on that laptop because it had relatively modest graphics requirements and although I'm not a Windows fan, the modified GNOME interface, which mimicked WindowsXP in many respects, made the transition to Linux fairly intuitive. Most amazingly, the computer ran much faster on Linux than it did on Windows.

I made good use of that computer for about three years, periodically updating the OS as new versions of OpenSUSE came out. Each new version ran a little better on that machine, except for the one time I decided to try the KDE interface. It finally died in a horrible hard drive crash a few weeks ago, and because the hardware was so outdated, I just couldn't justify replacing the drive. Instead, I went back to eBay to see what might be available in a used laptop on which to further my Linux experimentations.

The replacement was an HP nc6000 laptop. Although it's five years old, it was a high-end piece of hardware when it was new, so it has aged relatively gracefully. I got the thing for a paltry sum, partially because it was loaded with Fedora Linux instead of WindowsXP. That suited me just fine, except the computer is running version 14 of Fedora, for which support will end in a few weeks when the final release version of Fedora 16 comes out.

For that reason, I've been shopping for a new Linux distribution to replace Fedora 14. My front runners are Fedora 16 (now in beta release), OpenSUSE 12.1 (now in beta release), and Ubuntu 10.10 (now in full release). All three of these releases will take some getting used to as they all sport revised user interfaces. Fedora and OpenSUSE will have GNOME 3.2 and Ubuntu will have Ubuntu's proprietary Unity interface.

I recently downloaded a live CD of Fedora 15, which also uses GNOME 3.x, and I was less than impressed. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but much of the way it worked seemed counter intuitive. For this reason, I'm shying away from Fedora 16, although I am willing to load up a live CD and take it around the block. One mark against Fedora is it contains no proprietary software like Adobe Flash Player or even codecs for playing mp3 files or DVDs. It's taken me a while to get that stuff working under Fedora 14 and I still can't play a DVD.

I have not yet run OpenSUSE 12 from a live CD and will probably wait at least until it comes out in a release candidate version. I have read that its interface is virtually identical to that of Fedora 16. The big difference, in my experience, is OpenSUSE makes it a bit easier to install proprietary software when needed.

Although I've spent a lot of time with the 11.x releases of OpenSUSE, I'm somewhat inclined to let this one go because I have had difficulty getting wireless networking up and running on other machines I've loaded OpenSUSE onto. By contrast, wireless networking on Fedora and Ubuntu have been up and running from the proverbial git-go. All I've had to do is enter my WEP key and I'm off to the races, even running from a live CD.

Right now, Ubuntu 10.10 is my favorite of the three. Although its Unity interface has GNOME 3 underpinnings, it is much more refined and somehow more intuitive despite the fact that it's quite different from more conventional Windows and Mac OS  X interfaces. The other big selling point for me is that everything works from the first start-up and the aforementioned proprietary pieces can be downloaded and installed when you're installing the operating system, provided you have a working Internet connection. That's all good stuff in my book.

The only reservation I have about Ubuntu is it seems to run a little sluggishly at times. I'm sure this will improve when I'm running it from the internal hard drive, but it does give me pause. Fedora 14 is lightning quick by comparison.

Another option that I have not yet explored is to install Fedora 16 with the xfce interface. It's more basic, more Windows like, but it should run well since it's designed to take up minimal system resources. I read not too long ago that Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux, has switched over to xfce from GNOME as his interface of choice since the introduction of GNOME 3.x.

When it comes to choices for this little Linux box, it seems I've got an embarrassment of riches. When I make a final decision, I'll let you know.

Streaming simplicity

For the past few years, I've been fond of listening to streaming radio stations while I work on the computer. When I first got broadband around 2004, I discovered the radio tab in iTunes and was instantly hooked. My enduring favorites include:

• Haveyouherd radio--If you're into bands like Donna the Buffalo and Railroad Earth, this is your slice of Internet heaven.
• Reallymusic Radio--I'd swear someone's rifling through my record collection and playing them online when I'm not looking.
• WNCW FM--Probably the most original public radio station in North Carolina. Curiously, their stream consistently goes silent on Fridays from 12:00 noon 'til 1:00 p.m. when they play "Frank on Fridays," an hourlong weekly exploration of the music of Frank Zappa.

My usual method for connecting to Internet radio is to open iTunes and choose my preferred station from playlists menu. It takes a minute or two to get the stream going, but then I can usually minimize iTunes and get back to work. The only problem is that if I'm doing anything that's too processor intensive, I have to shut down iTunes to free up some resources. When that happens, I just get my iPod out and plug it into an extra pair of computer speakers.

Last night, I found a better way to listen to Internet radio streams, if only on my laptop, which runs Fedora Linux. My new best friend for streaming is a little application called Radio Tray, which puts a little icon on the system tray and allows one to select a stream to listen to. Its simplicity is sheer elegance. The interface is nothing but a drop down menu from which I can choose a stream. The best part is I can get to any of my favorite Internet radio stations with a single mouse click and have tunes streaming from my speakers in a matter of seconds.

Right-clicking the icon brings up a preferences menu from which one can add more stations or set a sleep timer so you can listen to your favorite stream while you drift off. This truly is a case where less is more. I just wish they would come up with a version for Mac OS X.

Sad Macs and black turtlenecks...

Today, I am wearing a charcoal gray long sleeve pullover shirt and blue jeans. It's not a black mock turtleneck, but it's the closest thing my wardrobe had to offer. It's just my way of honoring  Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday, October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.

Ironically, his passing comes almost exactly 20 years to the day after I took delivery of my first Macintosh computer--a Mac Classic with two megabytes of RAM and a 40-megabyte hard drive. It came with a monochrome StyleWriter ink jet printer and I felt like I was ready to take on the world. Two decades, 10 Macs and two iPods later, I still consider myself among the Apple faithful, grateful to Jobs, his early partner Steve Wozniak, and their vision that has so greatly changed our world. I'm not going to recount his exploits and accomplishments. That's been done to death (sorry, bad pun). Instead, I'll concentrate on how Jobs' vision has impacted my own life. 

At the time I got that first Mac, Jobs was in the midst of his exile from Apple and the company was heading into its darkest days. I was just beginning graduate school. The Humanities Computer Lab at N.C. State University had a whole bunch of IBM PCs with green screen monitors sporting WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS, but in the back were four or five Macs. They were the original all-in-ones with nine-inch black-and-white screens, but sitting down at one of those was a whole different experience. I knew within minutes of touching one for the first time that it was the computer for me. Less than a month later, I ordered one from the campus bookstore and I haven't looked back.

Having a Mac back in the early '90s made me feel like I was part of the cool kids' club, something I've seldom experienced in my life. For once in my life, I was the one with the cool toys,  especially compared to the DOS-based PCs most people had. But more than that, I had a machine that would allow me to unlock my creative side in a way that I had never before been able to do.

Although to be completely honest, had I started graduate school a year later, I might well have settled blithely into the world of Windows as those DOS PCs were replaced in the lab the following year with newer Windows models. Instead, I've always seen Windows for the derivative work it is. Microsoft developed Windows after getting a look at the Mac operating system's source code in order to create Word, which was originally a Mac application.

Of course, the graphical user interface didn't originate with Apple. Legend has it Apple stole the design from Xerox after examining Alto, a prototype project developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The more accurate version of the story, as told by Steve Wozniak in his autobiography iWoz, is that Apple adapted the graphical interface first to the Lisa and then the Macintosh with Xerox's blessing because unlike the upstarts from Apple, they didn't see it as having any commercial viability. Jobs, on the other hand said he realized almost instantly that he was seeing the very future of computing. It was that laser focused vision, the ability to see what the market wanted before the market even knew it existed, that will be sorely be missed at Apple and in the technology industry as a whole.

That's why I show my tech writing students a YouTube video of how Jobs crafted his presentations when we talk about oral communication. I want to expose them to a little of that passion and vision so that maybe, just maybe, one of them will catch the spark and do something insanely great with his or her life. That would be the highest tribute anyone could pay Steve--or me.


Update--Shortly after I posted this, I went out to run some errands and found myself at a nearby thrift shop. My only purchase was a black turtleneck shirt.