Mono etc...

Just another political statement:

Today, I removed all Mono related stuff (TomBoy, F-Spot, Mono etc...) from my Hardy desktop.
I am not sure which one is ethically better, but I installed, just like I usually do in my Debian boxes, Google Picasa. It is closed sources, it uses Wine, but it works well enough, and it is cross-platform, so I can easily support all those Windows-customers of mine by using that same app...
Mono seems vicious... I do understand however the validity of the research, same thing applies for Moonlight, the FLOSS Silverlight clone...

But if I can avoid those things on my personal box, I would feel much better.
I am heading towards a "Gnu certified" desktop ;o) ... Well not really, since I have all the bad & ugly plugins, and the Nvidia drivers that I don't even use for my graphic card and a bunch of shameful codecs !...

I also installed the Java JRE 1.6... Heck, it's almost free ! But the Mozilla plugin seems to work better than both OpenJDK and Iced-Tea...

I must admit having the msttcorefonts also, mainly for my wife's account, as she does a lot of office work for university students, and they come with .doc from thumbdrives... It needs coherence...

Hey, thanks to the various devs, it's all possible today... Good job !

Swfdec, Gnash and Flash in Hardy...

I have read here and there that Firefox 3 crashes often (yes, Fernand, I am refering to you).

So I grew curious to see that mine had not yet experiment the first crash. I strongly suspected it was an Adobe Flash issue. And I have not installed that plugin, but instead the swfdec one.

You can read more about swfdec here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swfdec

I noticed that I could do most of my regular "Flash needs", such as watching a YouTube video, or regular web-browsing without the annoying warning that one needs to download a plugin. Of course, I don't get to see most Flash banners, as I am extensely using AdBlock Plus, in order to avoid those annoyances... I happily use Opera without any Flash plugin, for a change, and mostly don't notice the difference.

One thing I noticed is my favorite podcast (http://www.europe1.fr/podcast/index.jsp) wouldn't play with sound with swfdec... So it is not "perfect".

It gave me the idea to uninstall Swfdec, and to install Gnash (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash) instead. Indeed, Gnash works fine in my Debian Testing PPC Mac iBook G3.

So I did get Gnash up and running on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. I fired up FF3, headed up too Youtube, and watched the video playing, but... no sound... Problem...

I thought, what the heck ? headed to Synaptic, uninstalled Gnash and went for the "Flash-nonfree", which is the proprietary Adobe Flash.

...Rebooted FF3... Headed to Youtube... Crash... Tried again... Crash...

...Went back to Synaptic, uninstalled  "Flash-nonfree" and went back to Swfdec... It seems it is the "best" of the Flash player available right now for FF3, at least until further updates from Mozilla & Adobe...

I also makes me feel nice to use some Free Software when I can... Maybe I'll end up running Gnewsense ;)   (just kidding..)

Anyway, I wish some readers can pass this info along when it comes to FF3 users complaining about random crashes... Use Swfdec, get rid of Adobe Flash !

Rain, politics, Hardy etc...

Down here in Las Terrenas, we have had some heavy rain... Big showers, for about 40 mn, and then humid sunshine...

Yesterday afternoon, there was a rock-concert on the beach. What a change from the "boring" merengue music :)

Here in Dominican Republic, we will have the presidential elections in less than 3 weeks. The campaign has been idiotic, no debate whatsoever about anything, just finger-pointing towards each other's corruption... Leonel will have another 4 years, as most are not too keen to see PRD back in the Palace...

The week-end has passed and I still enjoy my spanking new Hardy desktop... I feel a bit of a traitor to my newfound love, Debian, but for the time being, this Ubuntu release wors for me.

As stated before, there are annoyances, such as the inability to give a static IP... Or the crashing Nvidia drivers (closed source...) but I trust those issues will gradually be reduced through the updates from now until july, when Canonical issue the "stable" 8.04.1 iso...

I am very glad I came back to a 32bit OS (on my amd64 Sempron cpu)... No exotic 32bits stuff in a 64bit environment... Sounds healthier... I was so disapointed when I had to finally gave up my Debian Testing amd64 system after upgrading from Debian Etch, because of those funny libs needed to run Skype 32bit in amd64... Even when I eventually go back to Debian Lenny, I'll happily go for an i386 iso, unless Skype releases a 64bit Skype !

Fernand was telling me about downgrading Firefox to 2.x from 3.x. Actually, much to my surprise, I haven't encountered any unstability with FF3... I guess it is because I didn't installed Adobe Flash, but SWFDEC... So far it seems to be working ok, I have to give it some time. I would have gone for Gnash otherwise, as it performs just fine on y Mac iBook G3 PPC, with Debian Testing on it...

Lots of work and things to do this week for me in my "regular life".... We'll se how it shall go...

Sarko on TV...

I was watching Nicolas Sarkozy, a couple of days ago...

Interesting from the Dominican Republic, where politic is only a big playground for corruption !

Actually, I felt like the guy was good... Not perfect, but who´s perfect anyway ?

In France, they are too harsh on him... I wish they could live in a corrupted nation, to see how it really is...

The Hardy controversy

As I read in Planète Béranger about Hardy´s shortcoming, it makes me wonder...

I am (as you could realise) a Debianista at heart.

But I gave Hardy a try (still use it now), because the opportunity came, and I had no sound with the 2.6.18 kernel from Debian Stable.

As stated before, we Gnu/Linux users should know first hand the Ubunut world, as regular folks, Mac & Windows users have a tendency to believe that Linux IS Ubuntu. As of me, I still believe there´s no such thing as Debian Stable.

Anyway, here´s what I wrote @ Béranger´s:

"Caraibes - Today at 11:40:50 GMT

Actually, I also was surprised by that "root" free access (!!!!!)

After a great day with a fancy "desktop effects" Hardy, I shut down the PC. When I came back, it simply would not log in. GDM, and nothing more... In cli, it would not startx...

So I did the recovery mode. I am glad it exists. There's a "fix X" option, which worked well. It basically made back to a functional desktop, without the proprietary Nvidia drivers, which seems to have been the cause of the bug... I plan to stick with the free drivers for a while, until some updates fix this disturbing issue.

As of the root access... Bad... -Maybe there's a way to make it ask for a password ? Feel free to post ideas here :)

Anyway, overall, not that bad... I plan to write a bit more in my blog:

"cough" (shameless announcement) "cough"

http://free-las-terrenas.blogspot.com/"

And also:

"Caraibes - Today at 11:56:14 GMT

All those bugs are annoying... I would definitely have kept Debian Stable on my "new" main box, if it wasn't for that "fancier" Nvidia integrated sound card that doesn't work with a 2.6.18 kernel...

For some reason, I was experimenting many Iceweasel and Gtk apps crashes in Debian Testing... Wondering if it was because of the proprietary Nvidia video drivers on an amd64 system.

I am sticking to 32bits distro now (on my amd64 cpu...)... If Hardy really sucks that bad after a week (I have to give a chance to potential updates to fix issues...), I'll go back to Debian Testing, but 32 bits...

Anyway, experimenting is good. We are talking about the "poster child" of the Gnu/Linux universe, whether we like it or not... We better know first hand how it works..."

I am reproducing those here, as it gives an idea of my state of mind...

Anyway, the bottom line is to give some time to this spanking new release, I might set up a dual-boot with Debian Testing... More later, or tomorrow...

Yet another Ubuntu-related post !!!

My readers would think after all those "hardline" Debian statements I would snob the Ubuntu 8.04 release, and go on, business as usual, right ?

I've been reading catastrophic comments about Hardy on Planète Béranger... I was expecting the worst.

But first, let's find out why I arrived to the point of re-installing my OS.

As posted previously, I now have that fancy motherboard, with an AMD64 cpu. I had Debian Etch amd64 on it, but the Nvidia sound chipset was too new for the 2.6.18 kernel. So I did what any faithful Debianista would do, and upgraded to Lenny. All went relatively well, if it wasn't for those damn 32 bits apps that I had to install because Skype doesn't yet produce a native Skype for amd64 !

I just could fix that dependency hell caused by some libc6 something, after a bunch of googling hours...

In the mean time, I had made up my mind to go for a 32 bits distro. I had 2 cd's in front of me: a DebianTesting netinst and the spanking new Ubuntu 8.04. I knew it would take a while to set up my Debian box (being a netinst, I have to download everything...) So, out of "distro-hopper" curiousity, I went straight for the Ubuntu.

It installed in about 10mn (or less), I could not believe it. Everything seemed to "just work"...

That was yesterday... This morning, I tweaked it to my taste, and I must say I am very impressed !

Don't misunderstand me here, this is not a Fanboy speaking. I saw the "static IP" bug...annoying !

I also saw the Firefox plugins that were not supported by FF3...

 More later...

New hardware... Finally !

I got it !

That nice MSI motherboard, a K9N Neo v3... Looks nice, with aan AMD Sempron LE-1100 and 1 gig od DDR2 ram !

Finally I end up getting some better hardware, instead of running on those older parts that I usually salvage...

One small issue: It has only 1 IDE connector. And I have 2 IDE hdd's and 2 IDE DVD burners...

So far, I just plugged in my hdd's, and I'll end up spending money on a big SATA hdd next month, when I'll get some cash.

Other small issue: the audio driver from Nvidia (hda Nvidia) is not supported under Debian Etch, I guess it is because of the older kernel 2.6.18...

So I am in the process of upgrading everything to Lenny. I am saying "Lenny" and not "Testing", because when Lenny will reach the "Stable" status in September, I plan on sticking with it, and not going on with Testing... (at least for a while, in theory...)

I feel better, mentally... We are all just a bunch of big kids... A toy makes us feel like a million dollars !!

There are days like this...

yeah...

still quite busy today, work, kids...

My motherboard is being exchanged, I'll get another type, some MSI socket 754... Finally I'll be able to set up my main desktop again...

In the mean time, there was funny crashes on my "replacement" box. Nautilus crashed in Stable (???). So I upgraded to Testing overnight, that fixed it, but it would only boot the old kernel (2.6.18)... I figured it was a bad install originally, and just cloned some of my Internet-café's Debian partition so I could have a 100% complete and tweaked Debian Stable... Worked out just fine...

I used some closed source software from the Hiren Boot CD (Acronis clone utility, forgot the name...) It took about 40 mn altogether...

Great, so now I feel "at home" on my replacement box... Good...

Still a bunch of work to do, gotta visit a customer's place to check his wireless lan...

One of my kids is at the doctor... It worries me.

I wish I would take the time to set up those nice logos Béranger sent me... I want to make that place look a bit better. Will do it tomorrow, hopefully... But we have a internet sat connection to perform...

Anyway I'll work on some good articles... Today it's just my naked feelings "telegraphic style"...

Sunny monday...

You guys would think that sun shines all the time down here... Well, we had a rain flood last week !

But today it is really hot... I am back to work... Same thing, fixing and supporting Windows PC's... Downgrading Vista laptops to xp...

My own desktop has been rebuilt last month, when I purchased a cheap combo (motherboard+cpu+ram)... A non-name board, with an AMD Sempron 3000+ and 512 megs of ddr ram.

Now I am paying the price for this cheap stuff... The board won't handle any other ram. The shop swapped the board for me... Same thing. I put in a gig of ram, next to the 512 stick, it works fine for couple of days, and then things freeze. I run Memtest, and it's all red with errors...

What I did was cannibalizing various parts to make a "replacement" box, without having to touch the internet-café's PC's... I installed Debian Stable, and here I am, in my Fluxbox and IceWeasel.

Yes, I send my problematic motherboard back to the shop. I told the owner that I was ok to pay a bit more, and buy another type of board...

What the heck, I have so many old PC's here... I'll survive :)

This morning, sipping coffee and reading Planète Béranger. How nice from my Romanian friend to mention this humble "Tropical Blog" ;)

Gotta start somewhere... Gotta get my thoughts clear...

Distro-hopping...

Ok, why is it that I am running Debian on all my computers ?

Just like most of the other users, I started using PC's with Windows... 3.1 on an Olivetti laptop in 1995, then all the others, 98, ME, 2k and XP...

But I am a sucker for Freedom, and around 2003 I started reading about Linux... It was Mandrake and Red Hat... But I was on dial-up... Never made it until a friend gave me a Knoppix 3.2 live-cd.

It looked good. But I couldn't use my winmodem :(

I also received 10 Ubuntu 4.10 cd's in 2004, I gave most to friends... On my PC's the sound didn't work...

I then downloaded Mepis 3.3 (over a dial-up connection... it took ages !) in early 2005.

Warren (the Mepis dev) included the winmodem driver, so I could really install it in dual-boot and surf the net over my dial-up. My Linux life was starting "for real".

I finally subscribed to ADSL in july 2005. Then a real distro-fever started for me, and lasted until this winter, when I totally settled on Debian.

Over those past 3 years, I used and installed Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, Debian, Knoppix, Kanotix, Blag, PCLOS, Mint, Mepis, OpenSUSE, Vector, Zenwalk, Slackware, Pardus, Wolvix of various versions... I used often live-cd's such as Puppy, DSL, Dyne:Bolic...

I used KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, IceWM, but most of all Gnome, my DE of choice.

In the Debian Sarge days, there was a guy who issued an iso with Debian Sarge+codecs... It was called PureDebian... I enjoyed it a lot, as it was easy to set up... It doesn't exists anymore, and it's good, because I had to learn how to do things in Debian.

For the most part of those 3 years I used Fedora (starting with Blag, then going for the "original")... It worked well on my hardware.

But the Debian Social Contract (here: http://www.debian.org/social_contract ) made a strong impression on me. I wanted to be part of that...

A year ago (spring 2007) I installed Debian Etch on most my PC's except my main desktop. I wasn't educated enough about Debian to get all the stuff to work (my TV card, for instance...)

So I stuck with Fedora. Last fall (2007), I tested the big 4 (Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora Suse). They were all good. But I wanted to escape that 6 months release cycle, as it didn't felt right for my own needs. I used Fedora 8 a bit, I used Mint a bit... Couldn't make up my mind, until one day I just downloaded a Debian Testing netinst, and made it !

I really enjoyed Debian Testing... But suddenly I changed motherboard+cpu. I went from k7 to amd64. So I decided on a clean install, but went for Debian Stable instead.

-Why Debian Stable when Testing looks so much more fun ?

Testing was the fast rolling release concept, just like Arch, for instance...

But Stable was really what I need. It still can be a rolling release, in the sense that one can change one's sources.list and upgrade from Sarge to Etch to Lenny (never tried yet...)

So this is it, I have most my boxes using Debian Stable. I plan on giving more details later...

putting things in perpective...

Sunday morning... Wife & kids are away.... I took advantage to bicycle to the beach, and then take a good walk.

That gives me a bit of perspective, since this past year has been mentally confusing.

I tend to just brush off reality, and get deeper into exploring the Linux world to fill the gap. But walking alone on the beach on a Sunday morning for an hour and a half helps.

The problem I mostly can't deal with is the noise. I live in the Dominican part of the village. Despite being a tropical paradise, it is also a very noisy Carribean "barrio". People tend to play very loud music (merengue, bachata, reggaeton) all the time. They speak loud, and there's a lot of traffic (motos, cars...).

I slowly grew to use ear-plugs, but it is not efficient enough. I need something that really cuts the noise. I don't have the funds (nor the will) to build a "soundproof" house, but I have to soudproof somehow... Anyway, my house is well located because it is downtown, and I have my workshop right there... It is cheap, efficient, it works... That is why I am brainstorming about soundproofing my own ears, which is the "easy" way.

The reason why...

It's been years I am posting comments on other people's blog... I never made the move.

I am dong it today...

-Why ?

So many blogs,so many posts all over...

Well, I am bit of an alien, since I have a European heritage, grew up there, but live in a "Tropical Paradise" since the last 6 years...

-What do I plan to write about it ?

My opinions and experience in the Linux Word, since I am mostly a Debian user, but have a history of distro hopping. Yeah, I am one of those Linux geeks... Strange, for a "Tropical bump" ;)

But also I plan to write about those contradictions I am living... I plan on exposing the good and the bad, the paradoxical things about being a "long-term" European in the Carribean. I shall go ahead and write it down, for what it is, the naked truth.