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Deer vs. Chameleon, the Pre-fight Show
By Corvus | May 11, 2007
I went to a bon voyage get together Thursday evening and stayed up a bit later than usual, which made my 4:00 AM wake up call considerably less fun than usual.
So, unable to thoroughly focus on writing, or coding, or studying, or gaming, I did what any geek does when he’s got some down time… I installed a new operating system.
I’ve been a loyal openSUSE user since before Novell purchased them and, on one level, I’ve grown quite fond of the control Panel’esque YaST and other little SUSE touches. True, the patch and update process has been undergoing some growing pains and, like any operating system, openSUSE has its quirks that you learn to compensate for.
Also, thanks to openSUSE, Ms. Z now prefers Linux to Windows. I’ve lost track of the number of times she’s complained about the Windows experience after a long day of wrestling with XP at work. She’s even signed up for a free online Linux course that I found this week (link).
But lately, I’ve been feeling like openSUSE’s luxuries are getting in my way. I’ve become pretty good at finding my way out of tricksy situations using the command line when I need to. More and more I’ve been compiling applications and drivers from source rather than rely on the provided packages. In other words, I long to head into uncharted territories and see new sites again.
Additionally, I seem to have a pretty low Microsoft tolerance these days and their recent deal with Novell had already been making me twitchy. Dell’s recent announcement that they would install Ubuntu on their desktops was countered by Microsoft insisting they also offer SUSE. Fine, if it stops there. Which it probably won’t. So my tolerance level took another hit.
Silverlight’s “cross platform” release which conveniently failed to include Linux as a platform and ignored SVG in favor of a proprietary format made me a bit hot. Florida’s failure to pass an open document access bill after Microsoft spent a chunk of change in the state made me downright angry.
So, the pressure had to give somewhere. I already had an unused Vista partition on my new desktop PC and plans to buy a Wanx 360 this summer or fall (probably fall as I wanted a model with the new fab). In a fit of pique last week I declared total abstinence from Microsoft. No more Vista partition, no more openSUSE, no more plans for a new 360.
This morning, I deleted the Vista partition and installed Kubuntu in its place. Amazingly, the pressure decreased almost instantly and it looks like there might be tolerance for a new 360 at some point after all. To ensure I don’t have some psychological fall out, I’m considering going ahead and turning the original Xbox into a Linux-running media device ahead of the purchase. My primary console gaming is all focused on Nintendo products right now anyway and the Xbox is only being used as a DVD player. Perhaps I’m a one-MS product license per occupant sort of geek?
Regardless, this post isn’t about MS or the 360, but about how two popular Linux distros stack up against each other — openSUSE 10.2 and Kubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn). I’m going to write it in stages, focusing on one or two feature comparisons per post. This isn’t meant to be an instructional series, but an experiential one. However, if you stumble across any of these posts and want to know technical specifics, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to provide them.
My ultimate goal here is to have a speedy and stable Linux install which includes a full featured development environment — from coding, to art, to music.
The single-disk Kubuntu install went very quickly, much more quickly than the five-disk openSUSE install had. Of course, that’s because openSUSE installs far more packages by default than Kubuntu does.
Additionally, Kubuntu boots more quickly than openSUSE. Almost twice as fast by my estimation. We’ll see if that remains the case once I get all the services I need installed and running.
My only complaint about the install is that Kubuntu did not recognize my openSUSE partition and place an entry in the bootloader for it. Not that big of a deal in the long run, as I merely mounted the openSUSE partition, copied the boot entry from my old /boot/grub/menu.lst and inserted into the new file. It would have been nice if I didn’t have to bother with that, but I wanted a more hands on experience, so I’m getting it!
My next post in this series will address package management and update utilities, including the install of proprietary drivers and illicit media codecs.
Tagged:Linux. | 2 Comments »
May 11th, 2007 at 11:49 am
I recently turned my Xbox into a Media Center (www.xboxmediacenter.com) and it works amazingly well. I’ve never used my Xbox this much, and I’ve had it for 2 years already. Best thing I’ve ever done with a M$ product.
May 11th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Did you soft-mod, or mod-chip your box? If the latter, did you do it yourself and get someone to do it for you? Did you upgrade your hard drive?