As I skipped 7.10 “Gutsy” release, I preferred to do a fresh install from Hardy Heron LiveCD instead of two-step “Feisty » Gutsy » Hardy” network upgrade. I installed Hardy right into the existing Feisty partition replacing the old installation. Separate home partition was left untouched to keep all my personal preferences and data in new system.

It took ~25 minutes from booting the installation CD to logging into a working system.

Unsurprisingly good

No doubts, Kubuntu developers and packagers spent this year not for nothing. In general, Hardy is a better system than previous Kubuntu versions. It loads essentially faster and many little annoyances was fixed. Good job!

Hardware compatibility

Ubuntu systems are known to have great hardware support. As far back as 7.04 version, it recognized my hardware configuration including such exotic devices like DVB-card and CDMA modem without any problem. The only trouble was my HP LaserJet 1020 printer for which I had to install and configure foo2zjs package manually. So, it was nice to see it’s fixed in Hardy; now my printer is supported via native HP open source drivers and working out the box.

A bad surprise was that Hardy could not detect my monitor automatically and set failsafe 640×480 resolution as a result. It was strange as it was no problem with it in Feisty. Even when I’ve clicked “Detect monitor” button manually, it detected it as default “plug-n-play” monitor. I had to remember a model of my monitor and select it from the list. Not a big deal, but a pity though.

KDE 4

Looking great and nice but apparently, a lot of work is still needed there. Crashes are not unusual everywhere and the single Plasma panel looks more like a prototype than a part of a desktop for the real world. It’s half-baked, almost not configurable and I cannot setup a desktop I need for my tasks (IMHO, an essential fault for any Linux software).

So, I’m use the “solid rock” KDE 3.5.9 as a primary desktop environment for work and sometimes switch to KDE 4 just to get a feeling of  bleeding edge desktop technologies.

Grumbles

• Dolphin – I already grumbled at it and I still have no idea what are the reasons to have yet another desktop file manager. Konqueror was a default KDE file manager for years and a whole generation of Linux users grew up with an idea of this software inspired by Konq. Dolphin’s user experience is different in many ways and totally unusual for me (and I think, I’m not alone). No matter if Dolphin is good or bad, I need Konqueror, thanks!
• Samba didn’t see my home network after installation. And I was unsuccesfull to fix it using configuration GUI in KDE Control Center (though I’m not a sysadmin guru and might miss some options). Finally I managed to configure the network by manual editing ’smb.conf’ taken file from a backup of previous installation. Maybe it sounds trivial for experienced network administrators, however I remember that I didn’t edit any configs to get Samba working in Kubuntu 7.04.

I should say I hate disks. They are taking a lot of space, cluttering all around, getting scratched and getting lost sometimes. I am too lazy to stand up and find a CD/DVD on a shelf just to get a movie or a song. I already got all my music collection in the computer as MP3 files and used to grab every new audio CD immediately. I’d like to do the same with DVD movies – rip them from the disks, convert them to something like MPEG4 and provide shared access to the media collection in our home network.

Our home LAN is small and simple – there are only two workstations connected by an Ethernet cable. There are my main work machine running Kubuntu Feisty Fawn and the children room computer owned by my daughters. The last box runs XP Home Edition, it is weaker and got a smaller harddrive than the Linux box – so server/client roles in the media network were obvious.

As the Linux box already runs Samba, the solution for sharing the media files over the network was ready. I only created a Windows network drive on the client machine and linked it to the Samba share on a server filesystem. I’d like to have more sophisticated solution for media organizing – something like a specialized media server with advanced metadata/annotation/categorization features but found no one so far. All in all, simply movie titles and preview thumbnails are good enough, and my children have no problems to navigate over the movie collection.

Well, my only task was to rip the movies from DVD’s. My first try of ripping DVD using the familiar tools was unsuccessful. Strangely, K3b – a swissknife for all CD/DVD tasks in KDE – could not rip video DVD’s in Feisty. As it was turned out, it is Kubuntu-only limitation and I have no idea is it a result of that copyrights paranoia (though grabbing the audio CD’s works fine), or just a miss of packagers in Canonical. The people said it is still unworkable in 7.10 Gutsy. Of course, I might recompile K3b from sources but I decided to look for another ripping tool first.

There is a nifty command line utility: transcode. It can convert video from one format to another using lots of import and export codecs – and directly from a DVD too. In fact, you need to install it if you want to rip DVD’s with K3b, though it had no help in my case. Using transcode has only problem – you should be a video engineering guru to understand its manpage with lots of all transcoding options. I didn’t want to learn all that stuff – I only needed to convert videos from DVD into AVI/MPEG4 files with the same frame size and without visible loss of quality.

I finally chose dvd::rip – a GUI frontend to transcode written in Perl and GTK+. In Kubuntu, you can found it in multiverse/graphics repository section. If you want to get compressed MPEG-4 files, you will also need XVid codec (multiverse/libs/libxvidcore4) or another DivX/XVid library for transcode.

Ripping DVD with dvd:rip is an easy two-step process: at first stage it copies the selected titles from DVD to the harddisk and lets you clip and scale the resulting movie. The program allows to choose from few presets of movie format and quality with previewing the results. Video gurus can also get into all codec’s fine-tuning options, while others can just go to the next stage by clicking on “Transcode” button letting the program to do its job with defaults. The second stage is quite long and finishes with a MPEG4 file in a container of a selected type (AVI, OGG or MPEG).

After spending some time on googling and reading the comments and opinions of those who have answered “yes”, I finally decided not to upgrade. Well, not now.

Don’t get me wrong – I am not devoid of neophilia attacks and not afraid of experimenting with my environment and tools. I even love it. But I want to be sure that the results would improve my life’s quality or, at least, the things are exciting new and interesting to try.

The sum of innovations in Kubuntu 7.10 doesn’t worth a time, a bandwith, and (as it turns out) a degree of a risk to break working Feisty installation. I am pretty happy with it – perhaps it is the best Linux I ever had – and I am definitely unwilling to change the things without essential reasons.

The reasons they tell why do I need an upgrade look strange. Dolphin as a default file manager? Sorry, but I don’t need a file manager – I need also a local documentation browser and a client for SSH and for FTP and for Samba and WebDAV and SVN and for other stuff and it should have the tabs and a console at the bottom and… In short, I need Konqueror. Replacing it with a file manager (even if it is a really good one) – it’s nothing but downgrade.

Strigi search? Everyone says it is still an alpha so putting it into production release looks weird. KDE old file search worked fine and it is stable and well tested. And (excuse me for this product-placement) I use SCAN which does a lot more except basic full-text search.

OpenOffice 2.3? But to install it I don’t need to upgrade a whole system.

No, thanks. What might drive me to upgrade is KDE 4 Final, for instance. Or Beryl/Compiz, gettin’ fuckin’ stable, integrated seamlessly and not conflicting with basic KDE stuff. Or maybe, NEPOMUK or similar bleeding edge technologies released into production.

I am far from blaming Kubuntu maintainers and pretty well understand them. This is what happens sometimes when you have to provide a fixed release cycle but fully depend on other’s work. The fact is that the Linux world had no visible technology breakthrough in the last six months. Alas.

So let’s wait for the April, 2008.

So far, it was GPRS. Very slow, very expensive and unstable. It’s not a secret that GPRS internet traffic has lowest priority in GSM networks. So, sometimes it shuts down because of voice traffic overload. I was annoyed and was looking for an alternative.

So, it was a really good news about CDMA/EV-DO coverage. I’ve brought CDMA modem to test and it works well. There is drastic difference from GPRS. An average time of ping latency in the satellite tunnel is reduced in 4-5 times (from 600-800 to 150-200 ms), so web surfing is smoother and faster now. The speed test shows about 600 Kbps for download (satellite channel was turned off, so it’s CDMA real speed) and 80 Kbps for upload. It saves money also – the megabyte is 4 times cheaper there than on GPRS.

The modem

It is Anydata ADU-E100 USB-modem on Qualcomm chipset:

There is a special software for Windows, so I worried a bit how it would work in Linux. As it turned out, it needs nothing in my Feisty. I just plugged the modem in and immediately found it as ‘/dev/ttyUSB0′. After some PPP configuration (dial number and account data) i got it working in minutes.

The modem can be powered from few supplies – USB, external 5V supply or from the battery in its cradle (if I would buy a laptop someday). It’s small, light and thin, especially without the battery:

The external antenna socket is a great thing. With the antenna outdoors I found it working much more stable and fast.

They told also it can work as a CDMA phone with an external headset (a Motorola one is compatible) and send/receive SMS. But it seems those features are available with AnyData proprietary software (Win32-only). All in all, they are not my most wanted features.

A lot of people know about Beryl due to its show-stopper feature – a 3D-dimensional “Desktop cube” where each edge of it is a separate desktop. You can place the windows on separate edges and rotate the cube to change the current desktop. For those who are not on Linux, I should say that multiple desktops is a common practice in Linux desktop environments, and Beryl’s cube is just a metaphor for to visualise that old concept.

What’s good

• Switching between windows using their scaled live previews (like in OS X) is great.

• It is an eye-candy. True transparency and realistic shadows effects make the windows looking awesome.

• It is very customizable. You can spend hours to explore all options and adjust Beryl settings by your taste.
• A rich set of customizable window decoration themes.
• Zooming the screen is amusing and pays for accessibility.

What’s bad

• Beryl didn’t work out of the box with ATI Radeon graphic card. This howto helped to fix the problem.
• Java applications do not display correctly. See the solution.
• I could not find an option to display taskbar icons only for a current desktop, as I used to do in default KDE mode.
• There is a sort of conflict of Beryl and default KDE desktop switcher (“Pager”). It is better to turn it off when using Beryl.

[Upd: Unfortunately, the bad things list is growing]

• Beryl makes SuperKaramba widgets invisible if SuperKaramba is started first. See a trick with autostarting order.
• Beryl prevents the system to awake from Hibernate or Suspend mode. The solution is to kill Beryl before hibernating and to start it automatically on awakening.

[/Upd]
Resume: Install it if you care about the desktop aesthetics or want to amaze your Windows friends.

The difference between good and not-so-good Linux distribution is how often you have to keep a hammer and file in your hands while making the system good for living. In this sense, Ubuntu is a good system.

The last week I’ve almost upgraded my fresh Kubuntu 7.04 installation to an environment where I could grow roots, work and live in peace. There are the things that I needed to install absolutely:

• Sun Java 5. I kindly appreciate efforts of the GNU Java projects (default in Ubuntu) but sorry, they cannot replace Sun’s implementation so far.
• Eclipse. I cannot program without it.
• Firefox. Konqueror is good, but many modern ajaxian web interfaces have problems with it. So, Fox rocks.
• Extra multimedia codecs. How could I live without my old huge MP3 collection?
• Apache, PHP and MySQL. I am a web-developer, huh.
• GIMP and Inkscape for graphics.
• And lots of other thingies.

First problems

Bug #91368. I was unable to fetch ‘universe’ packages list when ‘apt-get update’, because the downloaded gzip file was broken and stuck in the ‘/var/lib/apt/lists/partial’ dir. I removed it and tried to update again but it had no help – I got the same broken file. And it was happening only with the ‘universe’ list (maybe, ‘coz it was a largest one). Finally, I downloaded it with wget, gunzipped, renamed an moved into ‘list’ manually and it worked! Later I found on Ubuntu Forums that replacing ‘http:’ protocol to ‘ftp:’ everywhere in ’sources.list’ fixes the problem. Sort of apt and proxy issue, I think.

Bug #102742. Not so critical but sad also – KNemo network monitor (a very useful thing that shows nice connection icons in the system tray, connection speed graphs and keeps network usage statistics) strangely eats up to 100% CPU time and makes the rest of the system crowling slowly. I didn’t see this behavior in my previous installations. I have no idea how to fix it, so, I simply turned it off waiting for update.

So far, it’s all.

Contents of the Desktop CD is not too rich but enough as a basic kit for the most of home/office tasks. Now I am in the process of installing all extra stuff I need and moving all my environment from old (Fedora) installation. So, my system is dual-booted until this process is done.

Eric’s criticism concerning Red Hat/Fedora is 100% true. It is what I, Fedora Core unlucky user, may confirm. I installed FC-4 on my shine new box in 2005, looking for simplicity and manageability after almost 3 years of struggling with Gentoo’s portages. Before I was on few Red Hats and Mandrakes so RPM-based package management was quite familiar for me with all its problems and “dependency hell” nightmares. But I hoped that for these years the things were improved and there was a lot of talking about yum, so I believed my life on my new machine and a system from respected Red Hat brand would be easy as it was never before.

I was wrong. In fact, Fedora package management worked fine only on initial stage of installing its own packages from DVD. So, I was almost happy until I tried to upgrade something. Heck, how it may be happened that the main system package-management tool (yeah, I mean yum) simply didn’t work in a production release? There was a problem with Python libraries and when I finally managed to fix it, my system already was a spaghetti of Fedora “native” packages, RPM’s downloaded manually from anywhere in the world, sourcecode builds and so on. Even when I got yum working, I am afraid to run it on the whole system, because it told me it was going to replace my already installed software with older versions, castrated multimedia packages with no MP3 support (whatever all that licensing stuff means, this is a foolish decision, imho), gcc versions which were deprecated in the most of the sourcecode releases and so on. I suspected it would end up with breaking all the things down and burying the months of working on make my system usable.

So, this is what the system (which long ago was “Fedora Core IV”) is now:

• Custom 2.6.14 kernel built from sources. I replaced FC default kernel almost immediately after installation, because I really needed a custom kernel – all right, nothing wrong with Fedora here.
• KDE and KDE apps installed and managed via Konstruct. In fact, this is the most stable and manageable part of my system and I upgrade it regularly and painlessly (maybe ‘coz it is completely independent from distro ;-) )
• Few Fedora packages managed via yum. Really a few – only X.org, Eclipse, GIMP and GTK+ libs come in my mind.
• A bunch of RPM packages installed outside of yum as well as the software installed separately and compiled from source tarballs.

As 8 years ago, my favorite commands sequence is “configure-make-make install” and the web-sites like this and this are the top hits in my bookmarks.

Should we be surprised to hear that Linux is hard to use and all that stuff?

Resume:
If someone say “wow! he is kinda advanced Linux user if he can live with that mash-up” I’d answer – Shut up! I hate to be this “advanced user”! I’m tired and annoyed and I’m not gonna spend the days of my life to make my tools working. Indeed, I’ve got a lot of more interesting and important things to do. And I’m not so young to compile software from sources.

All what I want is to enter “apt-get something” to get what I need. Yes, I’m moving to Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu ‘coz I’m not a fan of Gnome) immediately after 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” final release.

Just ‘coz a life is too short.

What is SourceKibitzer

SourceKibitzer is an online service for automated (so, unbiased) assessment, analysis and benchmarking of Java source code. For the moment, over 500 open source Java projects are analyzed (including, e.g. the whole Jakarta pool) and Kibitzers plan to “Measure all available Open Source projects written in Java”. SourceKibitzer works directly with CVS and SVN repositories to monitor the code development, so the reports are always in actual state.

SourceKibitzer methodology contains a number of various metrics and many of them are really useful and interesting.

Progress analysis
It is similar to Sourceforge “project activity” info, but on more detailed level. Kibitzer’s report contains progress information for each compilation unit (a package or even a single source file) – how many statements, methods and comments were changed during the last week.

Size analysis
Gives the total numbers of lines, statements, methods and comments in each package and source file.

Complexity analysis
It evaluates code complexity by measuring different metrics: the number of instaniations of classes (“Data Abstraction Coupling”), the number of classes given source file relies on (“Fan Out Complexity”), the number of possible execution paths through the methods (“NPath Complexity”), McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity of the methods and boolean expressions complexity.

Completeness analysis
It is based on assumption that number of conventional “todo labels” in the comments (“TODO”, “FIXME”, “XXX” etc) and total comments density mean the level of project’s maturity.

Kibitzer’s team say they are working on improving the methodology and plan to implement more metrics measurements in the future. You can submit your own Java project to kibitz it.

Sun believes deeply in creating communities and sharing innovations and technologies to foster more participation. Today in a historic move, Sun is opening the door to greater innovation by open sourcing key Java implementations—Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE), Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME), and Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE)—under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2), the same license as GNU/Linux.

What parts of Java family had been released actually?

• A full buildable version of Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME)
• A part of Java Standard Edition (Java SE), specifically javac, HotSpot and JavaHelp. Releasing of a full version (including libraries code) is scheduled “in the first half of 2007″.

Cafe au Lait thinks that “Part of the hold up is simply that Java 6 is not currently fully buildable with open source tools” and it seems it is very likely so. For good or for bad, software code is still closely tied with bulding and managing infrastructure and I can foresee all complexity of moving Java libraries on conventional open source framework. If the reasons is really in that, it forgives Sun and we should be thankful for they are taking care for we, users, would be able to, say, simply type “ant” to build the whole codebase.

Why GPL? A week ago I wrote that the question of a Java license seemed debatable inside the Sun staff. In my opinion, the final choice was made by two essential reasons. First, it is straightforward compatibility with GNU/Linux, which seems to be a general strategy of the company. Second, there was a lot of (reasonable) criticism that Sun makes a needless mess with invention of their own open source licenses (such as CDDL).

Open source Java is available as OpenJDK project on java.net.