EasyLinuxGuide Blog

Today I spent a lot of time going through packages on the ELG repository and doing any updates necessary. For anyone who is using our repo, you will notice a lot of upgrades. One of the feature upgrades was the major one for Sonata which is a fantastic front end to the music player daemon. This new release feature two very useful new features – tag editing and lyric retrieval. Sonata is now at release 1.0 and it has achieved this incremental step at an appropriate time where these new features were added. I suppose I had some excess energy while watching the Bears defeat the Saints and earn their place in the Superbowl. If there are any outdated packages or issues, let me know via the contact info on the main page. Enjoy the upgrades!

On a side note, I would like to thank those programmers and developers that write clean code and make package building easy for people like me, whether this is incidental or not, it is appreciated. Also, when download locations or the way a package is built gets changed frequently, it makes it not only more difficult and tedious to build your application but some people may even consider it too much of a bother and not even build it anymore. Take it however you like, but if you want your hard work on an application to be widely used please take the following into consideration:

• Try to use a fairly standard way of building your package such as make/make install or setup.py
• Unless you are switching to a better way to build your code, don’t change the build style
• Pick a naming scheme that is typical for building – using all lowercase, no spaces or odd symbols
• Although it is somewhat out of your control, try to keep your application on the same server

Thanks to all of those people who develop such amazing free applications for all of us to use. The GPL is a fantastic thing but it wouldn’t do much without all of those people (almost all unpaid and still have to work a full time job otherwise) who allow everyone the benefit of using such well developed software!

When I bought my Thinkpad off Ebay about 3 or 4 years ago, I was quite happy to receive my first laptop. My A21m model has been rock solid for all these years but inevitablly, over time, any hardware begins to show its age. It’s original specs were P3 – 750, 256mb sdram, 20gb hard drive, 15″ screen. Laptops are not very upgradeable, but there are a few things you can do to enhance performance. I ended up adding anothef stick of ram to take it to its highest capacity of 512mb about 2 years ago. Since then I have no made any other changes other than using wireless on it. I am currently using this product and driver for ENPWI-G and you will notice that it announces that “This device does not support Linux” which is quite interesting because apparently I have really screwed something up because I am writing this post using Linux with that card and have been enjoying a nice wireless connection from this laptop using this driver. I found that the CVS driver for my rt2500 worked the best. Of course this means that you will need to know how to undergo the menial task of compiling a driver.

Anyway, back to the hard drive. I managed to pick up a brand new Samsung 100GB drive at 5400rpm for $120 Canadian. This was a reasonable price. This upgrade was justifiable for a few reasons: 1 – it was a huge upgrade in a space going from a 20 to a 100 which meant that I could put a lot more of my music on it and assorted files and not worry about running out of space, 2- it would enable a more reasonable opportunity to multiboot on this portable device, 3 – a speed increase in the sense that my previous drive was only spinning at 4200 rpm. It has worked out great overall and I would recommend it to anyone wanting more space. The hard drives are universal so as long as you get sata or pata that is compatible with your laptop, then the rest is easy. My hard drive was very easy to remove and replace. Although I did end up reinstalling Linux, it was very easy to backup my original data across the network and then copy it back after the reinstall. I do notice a difference in speed.

For my leftover 20GB previous drive, I went out and picked up a 2.5″ external casing which is very small and can fit into most jacket pockets. This was around $20 Canadian. Now I can use this drive as a portable device if I like. When I decide to get a new laptop, I can also transfer this 100GB to it down the road if I want so the investment is something that can be relatively long lasting.

Every once in a while I make the switch between Gnome and Fluxbox as my Desktop Environment / Window Manager. Recently I went back to Fluxbox and I have noticed some very nice enhancements:

• Very easy to customize hotkeys using the ~/.fluxbox/keys file including setting up hotkeys for mpc which does an excellent job at controlling mpd (Music Player Daemon). Also, the Ctrl, Alt and Windows Keys can be used in conjunction with any command you choose to enter.

• The ’startup’ file allows you to add in any program or command to start when fluxbox starts. This again, is fully customizable.

• My favorite feature of Fluxbox that I found was being able to fuse any application with another using the tab option. You can middle click and drag the tab at the top left of any window and attach it to another open one. This is especially good for multiple terminal windows if you are using something like Eterm. I find that using Nautilus with the –no-desktop flag and tabbing 3 or 4 of these together is very convenient when you need to view different directories quickly or copy and paste between each of them.

As always the ‘menu’ file is one of the most flexible of any Window Manager. You can enter virtually any command you like. As long as you have your permissions set accordingly, you may set your mount, eject as well as shutdown and restart.

Probably one of the biggest advantages of Fluxbox is the speed it affords you. When you open windows for most applications, they snap right open. Fluxbox may take a little bit of extra time to set up to your liking but it is definitely worth it. If you like fluxbox but really like to have the applets from gnome, you can simply add gnome-applets & to your ~/.fluxbox/startup file and you are all set. Using Flux on a new system will demonstrate the speed and efficiency while using it on an older system will make it a lot more usable and responsive.

OK, I won’t give away the story here, but I was as unimpressed as I could have been. Finally a movie comes along with a slightly unique idea and this gets passed aside as an afterthought while guns and chaos are in the forefront. The story of the world where women have stopped being capable of child birth ends up clumsily falling into an admittedly scenic version of Mad Max, ruining any sense of depth into the souls of the characters who inhabit an earth where procreation is indefinitely suspended. A lot of people I have talked to enjoyed this movie, I felt that it was a colossal waste of time. This stars Clive Owen who was fantastic in “Closer” and Julianne Moore. Judge for yourself. This is based on the book by PD James.

This post is in response to every recent article or post I see that still talks about dependency hell and people who speak about package management from a perspective pervasive about 4 years ago.

I first started using Linux about 4 or 5 years ago and the first distro I tried was SuSE which was freshly around version 8 at the time. I won’t get into my distro experience which includes installation of over 50 distinct versions, but I can say that I have encountered my fair share of package management systems. While it is true that ‘dependency hell’ was a valid term at one time, referring to virtually any distro as suffering from a current state of dependency hell is absolutely unfounded and downright foolish. This is especially true Fedora Core 5/6 which uses RPMs.

Let’s backtrack for a few moments here and talk about package management and how it works. The truth is that there are several different types of package extensions and each version of Linux makes its choice of which one to endorse. Sometimes this means creating its own entirely from scratch and sometimes it means ‘borrowing’ someone else’s and using it (as long it complies with the GPL). With the exception of source based distributions which compile each package from its source code, each version of Linux uses a compressed package containing files that when installed for lac of better terms, extract into their predestined directories. The installation is really that simple. It’s in how you come to obtain the packages that causes the confusion. This means that the fact that one distro uses RPM verses PKG or DEB makes absolutely no difference whatsoever. It is in how the package lists are generated, which packages are available on the selected server and how well maintained those servers are that makes all the difference.

RPM got a bad name simply because it was the package of choice of Red Hat which years ago had a poorly maintained package management system. People directed the term “dependency hell” at RPMs simply because of its association. In recent years, Red Hat and the community based extension of itself referred to as Fedora have evolved vastly, improving their repositories to include all required packages needed by installation candidates. I never hear about missing packages or missing dependencies with Fedora.

All that is needed, if you so choose, is to enable a couple of extra repos to get specialized packages if they are not available on the main server. So, you say this is still a pain to have to do this and therefore it is dependency hell? Well, Ubuntu does the same thing and it uses DEBs as their package set and it seems to work the exact same way and no one refers to Ubuntu or Debian based distros as suffering from ‘dependency hell’. Again, saying anything relating to Fedora and tying in the term dependency hell is simply guilt by association and this is an antiquated tradition as it hasn’t even been close to being a problem for several years.

My disclaimer is that I have no vested interest in Fedora Core itself. While I do think it has improved vastly over the years and it is a fairly robust Linux distro these days, I do not use it as a main distro. My distro of choice is Arch Linux. I am no fanboy, I tell it like it is. People can use what they want and what suits their needs. For me, that is Arch. I have installed Ubuntu on several boxes for people who want to try out a distro and even Arch in a few cases. The bottom line is to be able to describe the advantages and disadvantages of different distros based on what the user needs, not based on what you may have heard as a trendy expression. There are plenty of ways to improve Linux by offering concrete and useful suggestions instead of throwing out blanket expressions that don’t even apply to today’s current Linux userbase. Dependency hell is a thing of the past, leave it there, let it die and move forward.