HalfLoaded.com

So, I found a way to download, burn and install Fedora. This normally wouldn’t be a big deal but I’m roaming house to house until Rose and I find somewhere to live. I survived Iraq with Fedora 8 and I really wanted to try out the latest. I really enjoyed 8. It was stable and served me well on my journey.

But, being the geek I am, I couldn’t resist but install the latest and greatest. And, two days later, I have no regrets. I can honestly say that this is the best distribution I have tried. I used Ubuntu 8.10 as soon as I got home to see what had changed on the Debian front. I wasn’t all that impressed. While it operated smooth, it was missing a few bits which I really wanted. It was lacking the latest OpenOffice.org, Mono and Eclipse and it excluded the Empathy IM package which I wanted to try. It also didn’t have a ready-to-go NetBeans installation in its repositories.

There is really nothing much to say about the installation of F10. The installation was smooth and easy. Everything just worked. When it first booted, I noticed an immediate difference. Not only did the boot process look different, it also booted a lot faster than F8. This is due to the inclusion of Plymouth as a replacement for RHGB. I wasn’t sure why it looked so plain though. It was just a black screen with a progress bar across the bottom. After some searching, I found that adding “vga=0×318″ would allow a more graphical boot screen at 1024×768 with 16M colors. After the change and a subsequent reboot, it looked more like one would expect.

I would have to say that the folks working on NetworkManager have done an outstanding job. I didn’t my Kyocera KPC650 Verizon card with me during installation. However, it didn’t matter. I just plugged it in while working from the desktop and NetworkManager detected it and I was able to connect in seconds. This was much smoother than using wvdial or any of the other older methods. It is also considerably better than Windows approach.

After adding all my bits, I found that I didn’t need to reference any documentation to get my system 100%. It just was. Everything was there and working. I did add the RPMFusion repos to yum but this is as simple as clicking on the download on their site. Viola, libdvdcss, gstreamer-ugly, et. al. were all there and ready.

I do have one complaint with Gnome. The default image viewer application is just too simple. It doesn’t offer any photo touch up tools or anything. I really wish the folks at Gnome would begin pushing gThumb as the default. It is fast, lightweight and simple enough to use as the default. Yet, it offers those that want to crop or adjust color the tools necessary to get the job done.

In conclusion, I would recommend F10 to just about anybody. It is as stable as any release I have ever tried. It is also as bleeding edge as they come. Those two rarely come hand in hand. It’s nice to see they got it right with Fedora 10.

A really interesting post was placed on the Royal Pingdom blog that compared average load time and up time of operating system websites. The author took measurements from October 17th through November 17th. He used 16 Linux distributions, Apple.com and Microsoft.com. While his results were interesting, I felt a correlation between page size and load time should be included. I asked the author about this and he responded, “from a user perspective it doesn’t really matter what size the web page is. All that matters is how they experience the load time.”

I created the chart below based off his data and a current size snapshot of the same web pages. I used a Firefox add-on called lori or Line-of-request info to measure the complete size of the page including images and anything stored in cache.

The following two charts show the actual size of each page including scripts, images and html and their speed to load in KBps based on the data from Pingdom.

OS Vendor Website Speed (KBps)

OS Vendor Page Sizes (KB)

Conclusions

• Most popular, well funded operating systems have main pages which, regardless of size, have ample bandwidth
• If all linux sites are combined, the average speed is 130.35KBps. The median speed is 70.84KBps.
• I’m not sure if the Suse Enterprise site load time was measured correctly. It measures in at a whopping 388KB! However, its load time averaged 591ms giving it amazing results. I am wondering if the flash heavy website wasn’t being measured correctly in Pingdom’s tests.
• There seems to be a direct correlation between the funding, bandwidth and bloat of the website. I guess if you have all the bandwidth you could ever want, file size doesn’t matter. Unless you want to be nice to those of us with SLOW INTERNET!
• It is interesting to point out that even those with the slowest transfer speeds will still usually beat out the loading of the bloated pages from a users perspective. This is ultimately what really matters as pointed out by Pingdom.
• PC Linux OS could really do themselves a favor and get rid of some bloat!
• Apple and Ubuntu seem to be the most balanced between size, bandwidth and load times.

So, as most of those who know could have guessed, I’ve become the computer fix-it guy over here. Between our firewalls, proxies and lack of reliable phones, troubleshooting is made difficult. The past week, I have had to fix four computers. That makes nine complete format and OS reinstalls. Of those, all nine had Windows Vista installed. I’m not a Vista guru but it seems to me that Vista was rushed to market. In every case, the only resort available was to upgrade them to XP. I say upgrade because the stability and performance after moving them to XP was remarkable. Every Marine was glad to have the reboots snappy and system stable. Most of them just figured the slowness of their computers was due to the laptop and not due to the bloated operating system Microsoft released.

Only one of them I was able to salvage. I found a nice little hack to reset any users password using Linux and some intuitive programming. This is definitely one of those “must have”’s for the toolbox. The funny thing was, once I restored the Marine’s password, he asked if I could put XP on his laptop just because Vista was so annoying, bloated and slow.

I was also reading a story on how RedHat plans to capitalize on Microsoft’s release of Vista and the slowdown in the economy. I guess both of these type of events have, historically, led to the adoption of alternative software and operating systems. I really hope so. It would be nice to see some more competition out there. Mac has made a nice stand recently with their products. I guess we will see.

For me, I look forward to the late November release of Fedora 10. I’m going to be building up a new computer based on the “Ultimate Budget Box” on Ars Technica’s website. Sub-$500 isn’t bad for a full system with speakers, LCD monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Plus, it only pulls 90 watts which will help with the electricity bill.

Anyway, I guess this is all wishful thinking.

I have been flipping between Windows and Linux for quite some time now and I’ve finally decided to stick to Linux for the remainder of my “vacation”. I’ve been looking into object oriented programming for a while. I think it’s time I either get serious about technology or get out of the sector.

Java offers a unique opportunity. Sun has announced plans to open source java and it is beginning to take shape. I think this will help guarantee it will be around a while. On top of that, Java and C# share a lot of similarities so it won’t lock me in to one language for life. I find I actually use more Java based programs than C# based. So, I began looking into learning Java and found that it is a real pain trying to get any software in this part of the world. I plugged in my linux hard drive and found that I already had Eclipse installed (an open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment)). Next thing I knew, I had everything in front of me to begin coding away. The best part is, it is all free. Free as in beer. Free as in speech.

A little searching on the web found a plethora of Computer Science courses related to OOP and Java. And people wonder why I love the internet and open source so much.

So, I am pleasantly surprised with Fedora 8. This has to be the best release yet. So far, the only thing I am missing is Cinelerra. I’m having some dependency issues with the freshrpms repository so I guess I just need to compile from source. The only other issue I have had is with NetworkManager-vpnc. Removing NetworkManager and reinstalling it form the development tree fixed the issues. I check the changelog and it looks like the fixes should make their way into the tree.

Other than those little things, everything works like a top. I am constantly amazed at the quality of software put out by the community. It’s too bad more people don’t see what OSS does and can do for them. I can’t thank the community enough. With their help, I’m able to do everything I could ever imagine on my pc (and more). They are the ones who have and will be helping me keep in contact with my family while I am deployed to Iraq. Thank you!

So, I can finally start getting my systems ready for my upcoming deployment. Today, Fedora 8 was released to the masses. It took me a good 15 minutes to find an FTP server that had actually sync’d (ftp.fi.muni.cz). I was actually surprised to find it still had bandwidth. As the morning has progressed, the mirrors have progressively become bogged down. Sucks for them! I got my copy! I hate to leech but I can’t use bittorrent at work so I guess that is my only option.

My goal is to get a steamlined Fedora 8 install setup with all the perf tweaks I can. This is going to be my home away from home while I am gone so I want to get it setup as nice as I can. I am going to try putting a lot of software on it so I can evaluate the many applications I have never had the chance to.

It’s time to burn a DVD. I’ll be writing about Fedora 8 a lot so stay tuned if you are interested. BTW, the hardware I am running it on is a Dell D610 w/ 1.5GB RAM and a 200GB 7200RPM disk. Nothin’ too out of the ordinary.