This Old Blog

Ubuntu 8.04, a.k.a. Hardy Heron, Alpha 5 hit the wires late Friday evening. I downloaded my copy around 8pm Orlando local time (EST). After super and kitchen duty I sat down and ran the release around the four systems I have at home to see how it worked. It's definitely an alpha, and a very raw alpha. Unlike my experiences with 7.04 and 7.10, the testing of the 8.04 alphas has been much rougher, so rough in fact that I probably won't upgrade to 8.04 until the final release. And that's assuming that openSUSE 11 is another disaster like 10.3 was. The four test computers consist of two desktops and two notebooks. All the computers are 32-bit, and only one, the M685 Gateway, is a dual core (Intel Core Duo). All the computers run Linux, and three of the four dual-boot between Windows XP SP2 and Linux. The notebooks dual boot between WinXP and openSUSE 10.2, and the desktops run Ubuntu 7.10. All operating systems are running with the latest patches from their respective suppliers...

With the final release of Fedora 8 last Thursday, I decided to perform a simple experiment with four distributions. I'd boot them on my two Gateway notebooks. I didn't want to try anything fancy or complicated. I just wanted to see if they'd boot up to their default graphical desktop. The four distributions I tried were Fedora 8, Ubuntu 7.10, openSUSE 10.3, and Indiana (Open Solaris) Developer Preview. All of the Linux distributions were final releases. The following table compares the notebook models I used and their respective graphics subsystems. Notebook Model Grahics Subsystem Purchase Date Gateway M680 AMD/ATI Mobility Radeon X700 June 2005 Gateway M685 nVidia GeForce Go 7800 June 2006 Note that these notebooks are between 1.5 and 2.5 years old. So these are not bleeding-edge machines, but they're quite capable none-the-less. Both machines currently dual-boot between Windows XP and openSUSE 10.2. And to cut to the chase the following table shows the results of att...

I downloaded three ISOs; the Gnome and KDE Live CDs, and the binary DVD. I burned all three and tested three machines with the two live CDs. Test Machines Gateway M680 with 2.13 GHz Pentium M, 1GB memory, ATI Mobility X700 Gateway M685 with 2 GHz Core Duo, 2GB memory, nVidia Go 7800 DIY with 2GHz Athlon XP 3200+, 1GB memory, ATI 9700 Pro All three machines currently dual boot between Windows XP SP2 and openSuse 10.2. All features work on each platform. General Results All Live CDs booted successfully on all three platforms. Every major subsystem worked including video, audio, hard drives, CD/DVD drives, networking (note exceptions below), and USB devices. The graphic rendering on the notebooks in was particularly crisp, especially with regards to text. It should be noted however that the use of DejaVu Condensed is the preferred font for both Sans and Sans Serif for just about any rendering, especially on the Firefox browser. DejaVu gives the best user experience when rendering complex ...

Downloaded and installed the latest release of Google Earth, 4.2.0180.1134 (beta). Here's a simple screenshot of it running on openSuse 10.2 and algol. The latest version has a Sky mode ( YouTube product demo ), which is selected via a switch at the top of the window. I've spent a few minutes just looking at some of the pre-selected destinations under the Hubble Showcase. The example above is Messier 101. There's just something seductive about flying around interstellar space from star to star, galaxy to nebula. I feel like a kid again in the 60's when I bought my first telescope at K-mart in Atlanta, a basic Newtonian with three eye pieces and a sun filter. It cost $50 of hard-earned yard mowing profits. The place I lived in at the time had a high hill in the back yard that allowed me to look down and over the roof of the house and into wide open sky. I remember seeing Saturn's rings, Jupiter and its moons, Mars, our moon, and the transit of Mercury across the Sun....

Here's a neat trick. I installed tonight's NetBeans 6 nightly build (20708201200) and then installed the NetBeans OpenGL Pack . From there I proceeded to create and simply run one of the JOGL demos, JOGL Vertex Program Refraction Demo. The demo is a slowly rotating glass bunny in the middle of a very (very) basic 3D scene. Remember in the last post where I threw out some very lame graphics performance numbers using glxgears? In this example I have NetBeans 6 nightly builds installed on both algol (nVidia) and triton (ATI). I can't offer numbers as with glxgears, but in both cases the demos build and run flawlessly, and their performance is indistinguishable both in rendering as well as overall performance. I have Java 6 Update 2 installed on algol and NetBeans is running with it. Algol is a potent little Linux platform. Java 6 and NetBeans 6 are a combination ripe with possibilities on this platform.

Previously I posted about my experiences installing openSuse 10.2 on algol, the Dual Core Gateway. For the kind of work I am involved in and based on past interests, I like to use and write applications that take advantage of the graphics hardware on the machine. One of the tests I perform is the build and installation of TrollTech's Qt toolkit on all of my machines. I always download and build the latest releases. In this case I've been installing and using version 4.3.1. As you can see below, this version of Qt installs and everything runs, and runs quite speedily I might add. Because this notebook uses an nVidia graphics chipset and its native drivers (100.14.11), it appears to support every OpenGL feature that Qt provides in its framework. What's more, OpenGL under the nVidia GeForce 7800 Go appears to be considerably more efficient than under the older Gateway running with the ATI Mobility X700 and its native drivers. For a very simple comparison, glxgears on algol (nV...

Let me start this entry by showing a simple screen capture of Ubuntu 7.04 running on my Gateway M685. All I had to do this time was drop the Ubuntu CDROM in the DVD drive, reboot the notebook, and wait for Ubuntu to start up. It was as smooth as proverbial silk. Here's a quick rundown of what I was able to initially check out about 7.04 running on the Gateway. Screen: The good news is that it booted and used the screen. Every pre-release version of 7.04 before this final release had screen issues; the screen booted up black and disabled. But this time It Just Worked. The bad news is that its resolution is limited to 1024 by 768. This is No Big Deal. All I have to do to fix this is install 7.04 and then install the nVidia drivers to enable the built-in Go 7800's hardware capabilities (including 1680 x 1050 resolution). I've had to do this with every release of Suse. It's No Big Deal. Network: 7.04 detected and allowed me to connect to my home wireless network without a...

I was running Google Earth 4 on SLED 10 this morning when I decided to go and 'visit' Denver, Colorado. You can see the screenshot of it below, taken right before the desktop crashed and kicked me back out to the login screen. Before I get into the gory details of the crash, let me describe what happened up to that point. I'd navigated to Denver and oriented the view as you see above. I had 3D buildings enabled. I noticed that it took 15 minutes for the view to completey render, which was far, far longer than another other city I've been to via Google Earth. While it was rendering is was chewing processor time up like nobodies business (according to the Gnome system monitor). Moving from screen to screen was sluggish, so much so that when flipping to Google Earth's screen it froze for a number of seconds in mid-turn, before showing full on. This, on a machine running SLED for X86_64 using an Athlon FX-55 with 4GB of memory. It has never taken this long to render any...

Ubuntu Beta hit the virtual streets today. Since I've been faithfully installing every update via Update Manager, I don't have a need to download the ISO and do a re-install on rhea. Never-the-less I downloaded the workstation ISO, burned the CD, and used it to boot my Gateway M685 notebook. That machine is notorious for not giving Linux a break, and it proved once again what a royal PITA it is to work with Linux. Ubuntu Beta failed to boot properly just like every other version of 7.04 has. Once again video failed completely. But Ubuntu Beta pulled a big surprise this time. It was able to enable the sound on the notebook so that even though the video screen was black I heard the login audible greeting. No distribution to date has enabled sound on that machine, not even Suse 10.1, which is currently installed. If Ubuntu 7.04 could just get its video issues fixed with the nVidia Go 7800 on that notebook, then it would be a serious winner, possible kicking Suse off completely. O...

Lately I've been working on enabling network shares on most of the systems that run in my house. They're the various computers that have shown up over the years and are now parked in corners of rooms around my house. With the exception of the iMac and europa, every one came with Windows pre-installed. If they run Linux, it was installed well after the fact. The three systems I concentrate most of my time on are algol, the Gateway M685 running Windows, rhea, an aging Compaq Presario testing Ubuntu 7.04, and europa, a DIY system that runs Suse 10.2. I've got all three of them sharing folders via cifs. Rhea and europa use Samba, while algol is Windows XP native (Algol spends the majority of its time running Windows). Algol is a notebook system provided to me by my employer, Sparta. I have two docking stations at my two office locations located in and near to Orlando's Research Park area . While docked algol is hard-wired into a network. At home I have no docking station, s...

Once again, just enthusing about the obvious for the rest of the computing world. This time, it's a YouTube video showcasing many of the new features of World Wind 1.4 . I haven't had time to download and try out the latest World Wind release, but it looks quite tasty. And it's written in .Net 2.0. The .Net 2.0 release was finished by an open source crew using the free-as-in-beer Visual Studio Express . Here's a sad commentary: So what is so great about 1.4? First of all it is written using .NET 2.0 which allows for some cool new features but more importantly, thanks to Microsoft allowing developers to use visual C# express for free we were able to easily increase the development team, who simply could not afford to purchase visual studio . I'd also like to point out that the audio portion of every multimedia clip and movie I've played actually sounds better under Suse 10.2 on this old hardware than it does under Windows XP. I know that's highly subjective, ...

I downloaded the FC6 live CD ISO and booted it on my Gateway M685. It was just a quick look to see if there was any chance of it replacing Suse 10.1. I found good and bad news during the trial. Unfortunately the bad news overcame the good. The good is that the kernel (2.6.18.1) enabled audio on the notebook. Audio has been broken under Suse 10.1 on this machine since day one. That means no music and no DVD playback under Suse. When FC6 booted on this machine it found it and I was able to successfully test and play back test audio. The bad is lack of wireless (802.11g) support. I don't know if this is a problem with the FC6 live CD or a problem with FC6 in general. But I need wireless support, and Suse 10.1 gives it to me out-of-the-box without any special tweaks or installs. It Just Works. Other features I found pleasant were The recognition of the proper screen resolution of this notebook (1680 by 1050). As you can see by the two screen captures everything started up and used the ...