My Linux Rig

The Future of Fuduntu

I was pretty sad when I heard Fuduntu was going end-of-life. It seemed like a very promising distro was being mothballed just as it seemed to be gaining attention within the Linux community. I reached out to Lee Ward, who handles communication for Fuduntu, about the future of the distro, and he had some interesting details to reveal, including the idea that the future distro could be a rolling, curated version of OpenSUSE. It’ll be interesting to see what the new distro shapes up to be.

My Linux Rig: What are the plans for the post-Fuduntu distro? Any ideas what it’ll be based upon? Will it be rolling? What will the desktop environment (DE) be?

Lee Ward: Those of us moving on to the new distro have been discussing and evaluating our options. Right now, we are leaning heavily on going with an openSUSE base. Our devs have been working with openSUSE the last few days to see how viable it will be and things are going well. While a final decision has not been made, that is how we are all leaning at the moment. We do plan to continue with the rolling release in the same fashion we did with Fuduntu. That worked very well and we plan on continuing with that. As for the DE, no decision has been made. We’re looking at all the options to see what will fit best for our goal.

What we want to do is keep the same ideals that Fuduntu had alive. We want to be close to our community and be able to offer things that others have decided aren’t important. We want to help keep the low-end systems going and also to help with the gaming on Fuduntu. Many have said that bringing gaming to Linux would be huge. We were one of the first authorized by Valve to redistribute Steam and we think that was a huge step. We want to keep doing that. Keep bringing the community what it wants.

This Sunday (April 21), we will be having a public meeting on the future and the DE will be one of the things discussed. We are hoping to get participation and input from the community. The community was one of the things that made Fuduntu great and we want to include them as much as possible as we move forward. The meeting will be at 3 p.m., Eastern in #fuduntu on Freenode and we strongly encourage users to come in and help us in making this decision.

My Linux Rig: Did you look into keeping Fuduntu going using another DE, like Xfce?

LW: The real issue when it came to the DE was the underlying libraries. Several functions had been deprecated in glibc and glib2 without any consideration for backwards compatibility. In addition, Fedora decided to locate gtk2 headers in /usr/include/gtk-2.0 but left the sources default. This meant building GTK2 packages broke due to the header locations being different than they were installed.

Trying to fix these issues was too much for our small team. It just wasn’t sustainable. Our devs actually started working on it to see what all needed to be done and found that as they were fixing one thing, something else would break. The lack of backwards compatibility hurt us.

My Linux Rig: Do you regret sticking with GNOME 2 as long as you did?

LW: We do not. While, ultimately, we were not able to sustain it, we are glad that we were able to give something to the community that was wanted when everyone else had abandoned the wishes of a large part of the community. The popularity that Fuduntu began receiving and the rave reviews are, in part, because we were delivering what was requested. Unfortunately, upstream did not seem to care as much about that and, being a small distro, we were shut out and we had no chance to survive.

My Linux Rig: Fuduntu seemed to gaining popularity right as you announced it was going EOL — do you think it’ll be hard to regain that momentum with a new distro?

LW: This is a really hard one to answer since it all hinges on speculation. We’ve heard, in a few places, that people will be keeping an eye out for the new distro. We also have some time. We still have one more Fuduntu release and we still have five months before Fuduntu shuts down. We have an opportunity to say, “Fuduntu is closed, but we’ve got the first release of the new distro ready!” We’ll be able to work on trying to get the new system up as well as packages going and such to the point that we can try to smooth the process out as much as possible. Obviously, there may be some hiccups but we’re going to try to minimize that as much as possible.

One of the important things we want to remind people is we haven’t stopped supporting Fuduntu, yet. Our support team is still dedicated to working with people to get issues resolved and our developers and packagers are still dedicated to getting fixes out there as soon as possible. Asking people to reinstall will be rough, but many other distro users are used to reinstalling every time there’s a new release. We’ve been able to keep it as a rolling release for a long time and, even though this would be a new install, it’s the first time in a while where it’ll be required.

All this to say that I think we have the opportunity to get the momentum back. It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but we’re dedicated. Andrew Wyatt brought the community a very stable distro that was what the people asked for. We want to keep that going and we think we can. While I do expect a small drop, I think we’ll be able to get it back and we’ll be able to show that the new distro is as dedicated to stability and the community as Fuduntu was.

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The Linux Setup - Brian Proffitt, Writer

I love Brian Proffitt’s setup for two reasons. First of all, it’s OpenSUSE, my current distro of choice, and I always love to see that represented here. But also, Brian’s setup is shockingly stock. And in more and more of these interviews, we’re seeing people who are able to get an impressive amount of work done without a lot of configuring or manipulating. It makes me appreciate what a great time it is for desktop Linux. And reading some of this week’s Windows 8 reviews, I wonder if a lot of Windows users might be jealous of just how easy Linux has become.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow us on Google+ here.

1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   My name is Brian Proffitt, a technology writer and analyst who contracts with a number of publications, including ITworld, ReadWriteWeb, Computerworld, and Linux Pro Magazine. The primary focus of my work deals with Linux and free and open source software, but lately my work at ReadWriteWeb has taken me in new directions, such as consumer and retail technology.

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   My primary Linux distro is openSUSE 12.2, running GNOME out of the box. I’ve always come back to openSUSE, though I’ve certainly used Ubuntu and Fedora in the past. It’s hard to quantify why; less hassle, less politics, more work gets done, I suppose.

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   My go-to apps are gedit, GIMP, and Firefox. 90% of my writing and research is done with these apps. I also have a LAMP stack running for when I need to load up Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress to conduct a review of those platforms or something that runs on them.

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   Right now my production machine is a Lenovo G570 laptop, stock. I don’t need a lot of firepower in the processor or graphics for what I am doing right now. This is portable and travels well, but I can plug it into a 27-inch monitor and connect a wireless keyboard and mouse and I am good to go in the office.

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   Basically the same setup I have now, with perhaps more disk space, memory, and graphics power so I could run multiple VMs on one machine so I can test applications and tools in different environments without switching machines.

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

   Sure, but it’s rather plain. I am not a big one for fancying up my work machine, mostly because as a writer it’s not a good idea to put in a lot of eye candy to distract me.

Interview conducted 9/30/2012

The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.

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The Linux Setup - Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE

I targeted Jos Poortvliet for an interview because I’ve been hitting up a bunch of openSUSE people. The 12.1 release is so fantastic, I’ve become very curious about the people who work on openSUSE. Jos’ interview doesn’t disappoint, with tricked-out hardware and a KDE-centric workflow that includes vertical and horizontal monitors. People who love KDE really love it, but it seems like a tough desktop to learn. I’ve tried to work with it a few times, but the barrier to entry was too high for me. Jos explains it well, describing KDE as about workflow and GNOME Shell as about ease-of-use. It’s an interesting distinction.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow us on Google+ here.

1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   I’m Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE Community Manager for SUSE Linux. My job description boils down to “help openSUSE be successful.” As my skills are mostly in marketing and people stuff, I focus on those: helping the openSUSE developers get the word out on what they do and helping in social and organizational matters. I travel a fair bit — to conferences, talking about openSUSE. And I (help) organize events, get ‘cool stuff’ to openSUSE ambassadors who represent us at events and discuss such vague things as ‘strategy’ and ‘guiding principles’ within our community.

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   On my desktop I have, of course, openSUSE with KDE’s Plasma Desktop. My laptop also runs openSUSE with GNOME Shell. And my wife insists on running Arch Linux, also with KDE Plasma Desktop ;-) .

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   With my work, which is mostly writing and talking, communication software is invaluable. I can work with only one mail client: Kontact. Despite its recent stability issues due to the re-architecture, it is still miles ahead of any competition in terms of workflow efficiency. That is also why I run KDE’s Plasma Desktop: I have a lot of work to do and want my desktop set up to be as efficient as possible, fitting my workflow. On my laptop, I often value ease-of-use more than efficiency or smooth workflow and thus I use GNOME Shell there.

   I also use Konversation for IRC, Kate for handling lots of documents I’m working on/with and Dropbox (soon to be replaced by ownCloud) to share these documents between my laptop and my desktop. Inkscape, Gwenview and GIMP for working with images, Dolphin for working with remote and local files as well as git and SVN repositories and I mix Chromium, Konqueror and Firefox for browsing. Chromium is the fastest and most convenient but very memory hungry; Firefox handles thus more ‘background’ tabs. And Konqi is the fastest for quickly viewing things and has some unique features you sometimes crave, like the powerful screen splitting.

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   My desktop has a decent Core i5 (quadcore) with 8GB RAM and a few drives totaling up 2TB including a 60GB SSD to boot up fast. My laptop is an old Sony Vaio TZ — ultraportable before the Ultrabook fad (also ultra-expensive back then). It has taken the IT world an annoying five years to almost catch up to that kind of portable power: only now can you buy Ultrabooks with a similar combination of portability, performance and battery life. Hence, I have ordered a Samsung Series 9 13” laptop (awesome stuff, really) to replace my Sony as it’s literally falling apart.

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   The one on my desktop: two full-HD screens, one horizontal, the other vertical. The vertical for notes, mail & IRC (on all desktops in the same position) and the horizontal for ‘the work,’ which I almost always do full-screen. The flexibility of Plasma means that I can actually have this setup exactly how I want it — I wouldn’t take any desktop project seriously that can’t do something like that…

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

Interview conducted July 30, 2012

The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.

You can follow us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.

The Linux Setup - Michael Meeks, SUSE Labs

I’m a huge OpenSUSE fan so it’s great to have someone from SUSE labs. Michael’s work seems to require more power and processing than your average desktop Linux user. Hopefully, hardware will catch up with Michael’s work needs and the price points for organizations that don’t have insanely huge budgets. Especially since the work of Michael and his colleagues helps improve LibreOffice, which so many of us enjoy.

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow us on Google+ here.

1. Who are you, and what do you do?

   I’m Michael Meeks, Christian, Husband, Hacker. I work inside SUSE labs, primarily on LibreOffice. I’m a board member of The Document Foundation, and do a diverse set of hacking and development tasks around our exciting and rapidly improving code-base.

2. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

   Primarily openSUSE 12.1. Normally I’d run SLES11, but I had to do some hackery recently for our LibreOffice online prototype, which uses the very latest gtk3 and infrastructure. It was easier to switch to 12.1 at that stage.

3. What software do you depend upon with this distribution?

   For my daily work, I use Emacs, Firefox, Evolution, Xchat, gnome-terminal, VirtualBox (for our windows builds), and that’s about it. Of course, that is the end-user visible software - really I depend very heavily on the excellent work from the SUSE gcc/binutils team without which our lives would be very much harder: LibreOffice is a substantial piece of C++ software and tends to exercise the compiler quite hard. Similarly we like to link and use most Linux desktop infrastructure, so really a lot of dependencies.

4. What kind of hardware do you run it on?

   I have a Lenovo W500, which combines a rather nice big, wide screen for multiple side-by-side Emacs buffers with a reasonably fast Core 2 Duo CPU. I run a near identical backup setup on an 8 core desktop machine next to me that provides more compilation grunt. Using that to share compilation via icecream takes my from-clean build times down to 45 minutes from several hours before it arrived. Another nice feature of this setup is Intel’s kind provision of an SSD sample, which not only makes it perform excellently, but removes the fear of losing data by dropping a hard-disk that plagued me in the past.

5. What is your ideal Linux setup?

   Working on one of the most challenging, and exciting projects out there in Free Software at the moment, and doing large scale code changes just now, I need speed. So, anything with a lot of parallel CPUs is great for me. There are lots of (lame, two disk) NAS boxes in the world, but really my ideal Linux seutp would be a (cheap) network attached CPU box with no disk that would run icecream, and provide a plug-and-play build accelerator. If we could specify and buy those cheaply, the Document Foundation would probably fund sending some to our best volunteers to improve their productivity. Unfortunately, it seems a cheap, disk-less, network-attached beefy CPU machine doesn’t exist. That’s a shame, since we can now build our software with a parallelism measured in the thousands of modules.

6. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

   My desktop generally looks quite boring — I tend to hide it behind lots of full-screen windows on a 3x4 virtual workspace grid, which I flick through fast, in a two dimensional/spatial way. This muscle memory (e.g., my mail-client is at the top-right) is one reason why I’ve not been able to move to the new GNOME 3 shell. So, you’ll notice I’m using the under-advertised fallback mode, which (if only more people knew about) might make the over-busy, power-user fringe a lot less annoyed with GNOME 3.

Interview conducted June 25, 2012

The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.

You can follow us on Google+ here and subscribe to our feed here.

GNOME 3.2: Who Invited Nautilus to this Environment?

So to no one’s surprise, I made the switch to OpenSUSE 12.1 on my main laptop, a Lenovo T420i.

The main reason? I fell in love with GNOME shell. Sabayon LXDE was nice, but tiny things kept creeping up, like clamz not working to unpack Amazon music. It was nothing that impacted the usability of the machine, but it was just enough to make me open to switching distros.

Again.

I still like all of the OpenSUSE things I liked when I reviewed it a few weeks ago.

I’ve been reading up on GNOME 3 and one thing I didn’t pick up in my review was that OpenSUSE has a curated GNOME shell implementation. They pre-installed some GNOME extensions that have made GNOME much better. For instance, OpenSUSE uses the extension that gives shell an option to power off. They also install the GNOME tweak tool by default.

Of course, that’s a little less necessary thanks to the GNOME extensions site that recently went live as an alpha. It allows one-click extension installation (and removal) from a web interface (as long as that interface is Firefox). There are some cool extensions, but I was most interested in the one that brings back traditional alt-tab behavior (GNOME 3 lets you tab between applications, not windows. To tab through application windows, you need to use alt-`, which just wasn’t ideal for me).

One thing that’s not so great about GNOME shell? The Nautilus file manager. For instance, to delete a file, you actually need to click ctrl-delete. Delete by itself doesn’t actually delete. Also, you can’t drag files into bookmarked folders via the file tree navigation. And apparently, it’s deliberate functionality. I didn’t want to uninstall it, since GNOME seems to have Nautilus do a lot of different things, so I just installed my beloved PCManFM file manager. GNOME treats it as the default, so I don’t even really see Nautilus anymore.

I wish the desktop calendar, which lives along the top panel, could read your Google Calendar directly. There’s a script to make that happen, but it seems easier to just have Evolution import the calendars for me (although it would also be nice if you could choose the calendar GNOME uses — I’m not a huge Evolution fan).

In general, I’m getting used to OpenSUSE. YaST, the software manager, is logical. OpenSUSE uses a lot of repositories, so I’m getting used to finding and adding those sorts of things. For example, KeePassX, my password manager, isn’t in one of the default repositories. I had to add a password management repository. And the restricted codecs are all in another repository. It’s a bit of a shift from Ubuntu and Sabayon, where just about everything is in one giant repository.

In general, though, I’m loving GNOME and OpenSUSE. It’s a very fast desktop environment, but also a very nice looking one. I mentioned the word cohesive in my previous review and I keep coming back to that concept. LXDE felt like a lot of nice parts that worked independently of each other. GNOME feels like all of the parts are in sync. It’s not a knock against LXDE, which is a great desktop environment in its own right, so much as its a tribute to OpenSUSE’s GNOME implementation.

Now, if they could just somehow extract Nautilus from the equation.