Lin­ux seems like the per­fect so­lu­tion for the new brand of portable PCs, net­books. It’s ef­fi­cient, re­quires few re­sources, and can run most if not all of the pro­grams one usu­al­ly runs on such small com­put­ers – word pro­cess­ing, email, web brows­ing, and so on. Large, com­plex soft­ware pack­ages that re­quire Win­dows to run per­form abysmal­ly on low-pow­er com­put­ers like net­books, so ef­fec­tive­ly the need to run Win­dows is nul­li­fied.

Why, then, do con­sumers (and re­view­ers!) choose Win­dows over Lin­ux for net­books?

(In the re­main­der of this ar­ti­cle, I will refer to “Lin­ux” when I some­times mean “the Lin­ux com­mu­ni­ty” and oc­ca­sion­al­ly “the open-source com­mu­ni­ty at large”.)

User In­ter­face

I think the prob­lem is two-fold. First, Lin­ux’s user-in­ter­face is still not up to par with that of Win­dows, even Win­dows XP. GNOME’s user-in­ter­face has not been tru­ly up­dat­ed for years, and the ba­sic com­po­nents of a Lin­ux UI – the file man­ager (Nau­tilus), the web browser (Fire­fox) sim­ply don’t run as well as their Win­dows coun­ter­parts. By some trick or sleight of hand, Win­dows Ex­plor­er and Fire­fox on Win­dows sim­ply run faster than on Lin­ux. No, it’s not mea­sured in raw per­for­mance – if any­thing, web page ren­der rates on Lin­ux should be faster. When the user clicks a but­ton in Win­dows, or dou­ble-clicks a file fold­er, or any­thing of the sort, the com­put­er sim­ply re­sponds faster. Espe­cial­ly if the com­put­er is new, com­put­er re­spon­se time in Win­dows is al­most in­stant.

This is not true with Lin­ux. Even though Win­dows tends to slow down far past the level of Lin­ux with time, and Lin­ux more con­sis­tent­ly main­tains re­spon­se time, that first im­pres­sion of the Win­dows in­stant re­spon­se is pow­er­ful. I can’t put my fin­ger on what caus­es it right now, but cer­tain op­tions in the Lin­ux ker­nel con­fig seem to help. On the whole though, the Lin­ux sys­tem is tuned more for con­sis­tent per­for­mance than in­stant­ly over­rid­able user re­spon­se.

This is ev­i­dent when run­ning mul­ti­ple, in­ten­sive tasks at on­ce. Lin­ux slows down, but ev­ery­thing in the GUI is still click­able. Win­dows, how­ev­er, is much less ca­pable at han­dling com­plex mul­ti­task­ing. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the or­di­nary user doesn’t care.

Over­all, Win­dows is just more pleas­ant to use. This is a com­bi­na­tion of the above-de­tailed re­spon­se time ef­fect, and al­so be­cause Lin­ux’s in­creased flex­i­bil­i­ty, al­so per­tain­ing to the UI, hin­ders us­abil­i­ty. Sim­ply put, the Lin­ux UI needs to be bet­ter de­signed, for or­di­nary users and not for de­vel­op­ers or hack­ers or pow­er users.

Eco­nomics

The sec­ond prob­lem is one of eco­nomics. There are two types of goods in a sim­ple eco­nomic anal­y­sis – nor­mal goods and in­fe­ri­or goods. Nor­mal goods are those that you buy more of as your in­come in­creas­es. In­fe­ri­or goods, on the other hand, are goods that you buy on­ly when your in­come is very low. A com­mon ex­am­ple in eco­nomics is sin­gle-ply toi­let pa­per – nor­mal­ly, peo­ple on­ly buy cheap toi­let pa­per when they have a great need to save money. Wealth­ier in­di­vid­u­als avoid the pro­duct al­to­geth­er.

My propo­si­tion is that Lin­ux is cur­rent­ly be­ing seen as an in­fe­ri­or good. This ZD­net blog post ex­plains the si­t­u­a­tion per­tain­ing to Lin­ux in Africa. Ra­dio sta­tions, an im­por­tant tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion in Africa, prefer to use pi­rat­ed ver­sions of Win­dows in­stead of le­gal­ly ob­tained copies of Lin­ux. The Lin­ux dis­tri­bu­tions pro­posed are specif­i­cal­ly de­signed for their broad­cast­ing pur­pos­es, and in ba­si­cal­ly all re­spects have bet­ter-de­signed UIs (for broad­cast­ing) than Win­dows. In this case, Lin­ux is ob­jec­tive­ly more suit­ed for their pur­pos­es, so why do the ra­dio op­er­a­tors prefer Win­dows?

Ac­cord­ing to that post, Win­dows is seen as a “first world stan­dard”, and to the ra­dio sta­tions, en­cour­ag­ing them to use Lin­ux seems like try­ing to “cheat lo­cal peo­ple out of get­ting the same qual­i­ty of soft­ware that is used in the de­vel­oped world”. In this case, Lin­ux is seen as the in­fe­ri­or good. It is seen as the pro­duct that one choos­es to use on­ly when one does not have the eco­nomic re­sources to use a “bet­ter” pro­duct, like Win­dows.

Part­ly, I blame pre­vi­ous (and in some cas­es still on­go­ing) ad­ver­tis­ing and pub­lic­i­ty for Lin­ux as a “low-cost al­ter­na­tive” to Win­dows. The use of both those terms have cre­at­ed huge prob­lems for Lin­ux’s im­age to­day. It is seen as be­ing the cheap­er “ver­sion” of Win­dows – that which one would buy on­ly if they lacked the abil­i­ty to pay for Win­dows. It is al­so paint­ed as an “al­ter­na­tive”, and com­bined with the ef­forts (well-placed!) of such pro­jects as wine and OpenOf­fice.org to en­sure Win­dows com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, cre­ates again an im­pres­sion that Lin­ux is try­ing to live up to Win­dows, and should on­ly be used when one has no other choice. In­stead of cre­at­ing choice, Lin­ux seems to have in a way lim­it­ed it.

So­lu­tions?

I hon­est­ly don’t think very many peo­ple, if any­one, has a so­lu­tion to Lin­ux’s per­sis­tent im­age and mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion prob­lems. I think Ubun­tu, my pre­ferred and fa­vorite Lin­ux dis­tro, is the on­ly dis­tri­bu­tion so far to even come close to a us­able, well-re­spect­ed Lin­ux dis­tri­bu­tion. (In my opin­ion, it’s more well-re­spect­ed than us­able.) I don’t claim to have the an­swers ei­ther. How­ev­er, I do think that Lin­ux needs to stop copy­ing Win­dows. I don’t think that Mi­crosoft’s UI is nec­es­sar­i­ly the best ei­ther. OpenOf­fice.org doesn’t have to look ex­act­ly like Mi­crosoft Of­fice 2003. More UI in­no­va­tion from with­in the open-source com­mu­ni­ty, and al­so more open-source UI de­sign­ers, are need­ed. Lin­ux should be aim­ing for in­creased us­abil­i­ty, not sim­ply look-alike Win­dows func­tion­al­i­ty. UIs for pro­grams need to be de­signed, re­viewed, and test­ed, with third-par­ty test sub­jects, if pos­si­ble.

I do not con­done, how­ev­er, de­creased Win­dows com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Lin­ux needs to work flaw­less­ly with Win­dows file for­mats and net­works (and, to some ex­tent, Win­dows ap­pli­ca­tions) in order to be com­pet­i­tive. De­vel­op­ment al­so needs to be easier on Lin­ux. Face it friends, au­to­conf and au­tomake are out­dat­ed and clum­sy. Make­files are out­dat­ed. IDEs, such as KDe­vel­op (in all other re­spects an ex­cel­lent IDE!), that re­quire the use of au­to­conf and au­tomake are, by ex­ten­sion, out­dat­ed. Soft­ware de­vel­op­ment is too slow and clum­sy right now on Lin­ux. This is not to say that Lin­ux-based soft­ware de­vel­op­ment tech­nolo­gies are bad! Sub­ver­sion, for ex­am­ple, is an ex­cel­lent ver­sion con­trol sys­tem. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it’s most easi­ly used in con­junc­tion with a Win­dows-based IDE. Soft­ware de­vel­op­ment needs to be re­moved from the do­main of the text-based ed­i­tors and com­mand-line hack­ers, and in­to the do­main of easy, rapid, com­mer­cial (and vol­un­teer) de­vel­op­ment. User-in­ter­face de­vel­op­ment, for ex­am­ple, is ex­treme­ly easy on Win­dows due to Mi­crosoft’s well-de­signed tools for UI de­vel­op­ment. Sure, Qt De­sign­er fills the same shoes, but Mi­crosoft’s tools are bet­ter-made, and more flex­i­ble with­out sac­ri­ficing us­abil­i­ty. If Lin­ux could adopt a con­sis­tent pol­i­cy on which UI toolk­it to use, and then make that UI toolk­it very easy to pro­gram with, I’m cer­tain that ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment on Lin­ux would blos­som.

Ob­vi­ous­ly the open-source de­vel­op­ment mod­el has been rel­a­tive­ly suc­cess­ful up to this point. Its free flow of in­for­ma­tion and code en­cour­ages it­er­a­tive de­vel­op­ment and widens the net for pro­gram­ming tal­ent. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it still has a long way to go. Lin­ux’s rep­u­ta­tion can­not be fixed by more ef­fec­tive cod­ing alone. The user-in­ter­face prob­lems that many Lin­ux pro­grams face can­not be fixed with­out a more com­mer­cial-like de­vel­op­ment mod­el, or more full-time (may­be paid!) work­ers. Un­til that hap­pens, Lin­ux is like­ly to re­main an in­fe­ri­or pro­duct in the eyes of the pub­lic.

It doesn’t work.

Okay, that’s a lit­tle bit un­fair; it’s prob­a­bly more ac­cu­rate to say that it doesn’t work as ex­pect­ed. The Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive en­clo­sure is a 5.25″ bay de­vice that holds a 3.5″ (or small­er, I sup­pose) hard drive, and pur­port­ed­ly not on­ly re­duces the noise out­put of the drive but al­so helps to keep it cool. This de­vice, un­for­tu­nate­ly, ex­cels at one aspect of its claimed pur­pose and fails at the other. While it does in­deed keep noise levels down very ac­cept­ably, the Tu­niq Sanc­tum en­clo­sure, due to the lack of air­flow in­side the de­vice, fails to cool the hard drive ad­e­quate­ly. In fact, leav­ing the hard drive in­side the en­clo­sure will prob­a­bly de­crease the hard drive’s life­time due to the 60+ de­grees Cel­sius tem­per­a­tures some­times ex­pe­ri­enced in­side the de­vice.

There are other prob­lems with the Sanc­tum. Ca­bles pass­ing in­to the de­vice to con­nect to the hard drive, as seen here, are ob­struct­ed by a piece of foam at the back of the de­vice. The foam puts pres­sure on the ca­bles, which could be dev­as­tat­ing for weak­er con­nec­tors like SA­TA ca­bles. The in­dents you can see above are caused by the wires push­ing down on the foam.

When in­stalling the hard drive in­to the Sanc­tum, one is sup­posed to at­tach two “ther­mal pads” to the hard drive. (The­se pads can be seen in the first pho­to.) The pads sup­pos­ed­ly con­duct heat away from the drive to the alu­minum fins on the out­side. I didn’t at­tach them dur­ing my in­stal­la­tion, be­cause they would have forced me to con­tin­ue us­ing the Sanc­tum with that drive for all eter­ni­ty – the pads would make the drive thick­er than an or­di­nary 3.5″ bay. I don’t think the pads can do much to af­fect the ther­mals any­way, as foam (no mat­ter how “ther­mal”) can nev­er be a re­al­ly good heat con­duc­tor.

To con­clude, the Tu­niq Sanc­tum is prob­a­bly not worth the money. While it keeps the noise of the hard drive down, its in­abil­i­ty to cool the drive ad­e­quate­ly makes it ba­si­cal­ly use­less to any­one want­ing high per­for­mance or longevi­ty from their drive. For new builders, the money spent on this en­clo­sure would be bet­ter put to­ward a qui­eter or cool­er-run­ning hard drive.

This is a mouse that was on­ce bro­ken but is now healed. (A me­chan­i­cal switch on the cir­cuit board was bro­ken; upon fix­ing that, the mouse works al­most like-new.) I was ac­tu­al­ly quite sur­prised at the ex­treme sim­plic­i­ty of the ac­tu­al mouse hard­ware – a cou­ple of re­sis­tors, ca­pac­i­tors, an LED for the sen­sor, and the sen­sor chip it­self. It seems to me that the costs for build­ing such a mouse must be rather cheap in­deed. In fact, I won­der now about the op­ti­cal track­balls out on the mar­ket to­day – mine (the Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse) is to all ap­pear­ances just an up­side-down op­ti­cal mouse with a ball and a cou­ple of ex­tra but­tons; would it be per­haps pos­si­ble to con­struct my own per­fect­ly-func­tion­ing track­ball with on­ly cheap op­ti­cal mouse parts?

Fas­ci­nat­ing as that may seem, there are in­deed more ex­cit­ing pro­jects to at­tend to first.

(orig­i­nal­ly read here)

One of the prob­lems with us­ing hy­brid Win­dows and Lin­ux en­vi­ron­ments is that one needs to watch close­ly for filesys­tem and file anoma­lies and in­con­sis­ten­cies. Dif­fer­ing end-of-line mark­ers, for ex­am­ple, cause many prob­lems when shar­ing files be­tween the two op­er­at­ing sys­tems. One par­tic­u­lar prob­lem I’ve run in­to is that of hav­ing du­pli­cate files, or in other words, mul­ti­ple files with the same file­name. This can hap­pen if, say, you copy a di­rec­to­ry some­where in Win­dows, then switch to Lin­ux and use a tool such as rsync to copy that same di­rec­to­ry over again. If the cap­i­tal­iza­tion is dif­fer­ent, Lin­ux will not re­place the old files, be­cause Lin­ux, un­like Win­dows, is case-sen­si­tive. This will even hap­pen, and is tech­ni­cal­ly ac­cept­able, on NTFS filesys­tems.

The so­lu­tion I’ve come up with is this sim­ple script, called Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py. Ob­vi­ous­ly, you need Python in­stalled to run it, but it has no ad­di­tion­al de­pen­den­cies. Sim­ply run it in the di­rec­to­ry you wish to clean, and it should do the rest. Note that you shouldn’t use this for en­tire filesys­tems (yet), be­cause it will use ridicu­lous amounts of mem­o­ry if it is given a high num­ber of files. Down­load it here!

P.S. Al­so, I can­not guar­an­tee that this tool will work as in­tend­ed or will be bug-free. Use wise­ly.

My disk ac­cess prob­lems prob­a­bly stem from the fact that my VMware disk and my sys­tem boot disk are both the same par­ti­tion and the same disk. This prob­a­bly caus­es all sorts of ac­cess is­sues, espe­cial­ly while my com­put­er is boot­ing (I have no­ticed that my com­put­er takes forever to stop thrash­ing the disk after log­ging in). The net­work prob­lems are more eva­sive, how­ev­er. I’m us­ing the NAT net­work­ing in­ter­face so that I can as­sign my Ubun­tu a stat­ic IP ad­dress that will nev­er change, even if my phys­i­cal com­put­er changes lo­ca­tion (and it will, often). How­ev­er, pret­ty fre­quent­ly the DNS “server” that VMware pro­vides breaks down, and while Ubun­tu is able to send pack­ets to the net­work, it can­not per­form DNS queries through the lo­cal DNS ser­vice. Oc­ca­sion­al­ly, the net­work will fail to op­er­ate al­to­geth­er, and Ubun­tu will be un­able to send any pack­ets any­where (in­clud­ing to the host com­put­er!). This is a prob­lem which I’ve looked for so­lu­tions for on­line, but have so far come up with noth­ing.

Fi­nal­ly, I would like to be able to serve files from the host com­put­er through a web server on Ubun­tu, and my cur­rent method of mount­ing the host shares with CIFS and then shar­ing them with Apache is not op­ti­mal (the least of the prob­lems with this method is re­dun­dant net­work usage). I would like to get the VMware shared fold­ers fea­ture work­ing, ex­cept that I can­not seem to com­pile the VMware tools’ ker­nel mod­ules on Ubun­tu 8.04 (even fol­low­ing other ref­er­ences on­line). VMware’s ker­nel mod­ule builder is not quite as pol­ished, ev­i­dent­ly, as others’ (like nVidia).

Hope­ful­ly I will find so­lu­tions to the­se prob­lems soon, as I re­al­ly like the idea of run­ning a vir­tu­al­ized Lin­ux server on a Win­dows host, and hope that this sort of ar­range­ment will prove fruit­ful.

Sys­tem en­vi­ron­ment:

• nVidia graph­ics card
• Win­dows Vis­ta Home Premi­um 32-bit
• 2 GB RAM
• In­te­grat­ed “HD” au­dio

The so­lu­tion for me:

1. Re­mem­ber to set CoD2 to com­pat­i­bil­i­ty mode with Win­dows XP SP2! You can do this by right-click­ing the short­cut and se­lect­ing “Prop­er­ties”, then open­ing the “Com­pat­i­bil­i­ty” tab at the top.
2. First tried up­dat­ing Di­rec­tX 9. Vis­ta users should note that Di­rec­tX 9 and Di­rec­tX 10, while both com­ing pre-in­stalled on Vis­ta, are sep­a­rate com­po­nents. You should still up­date to the lat­est Di­rec­tX 9 even if you have Di­rec­tX 10. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, while a good first step, this didn’t work for me.
3. Then, added “+set com_in­tro­played 1″ to the end of the short­cuts. You can do this by open­ing the short­cut prop­er­ties (see step 0) and adding those char­ac­ters, with­out quotes, to the end of the “Tar­get:” box, so that the full line looks like: “C:\Pro­gram Files\Ac­tivi­sion\Call of Du­ty 2\cod2sp_s.exe” +set com_in­tro­played 1 This fixed the sin­gle-play­er for me, but I still could not open mul­ti­play­er.
4. I found on NT­com­pat­i­ble.com a seem­ing­ly-ridicu­lous lit­tle propo­si­tion. The poster sug­gest­ed that, to run CoD2 mul­ti­play­er, one should plug some­thing in to the mi­cro­phone jack. So, I did, and lo and be­hold, it worked! Rather a strange so­lu­tion, I do say. It like­ly has some­thing to do with the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween my in­te­grat­ed au­dio and the voice chat fea­tures of CoD2, so turn­ing off voice chat might al­low it to run with­out a mi­cro­phone plugged in.

Any­ways, that’s how I got this game to work on Vis­ta; hope it helps some­body else too!

And like ev­ery­thing else that Google puts out, it is a glo­ri­ous­ly in­cred­i­ble piece of work. It has the best char­ac­ter­is­tics a piece of soft­ware could have: it’s sim­ple, fast, re­spon­sive, and stable. I’ve been run­ning it for just a lit­tle while now, and while We­bKit’s ren­der­ing (espe­cial­ly of fonts) is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from Gecko’s, ev­ery­thing works just about the same as in Fire­fox… it’s all just way, way faster. Open­ing new tabs is faster. Us­ing Gmail is faster (thanks, no doubt, to the new V8 JavaScript engine). Writ­ing posts is faster. It’s re­al­ly quite in­cred­i­ble… in fact, pos­si­bly one of the most im­pres­sive open-source de­vel­op­ments to date, right up there with Fire­fox 1 and the Lin­ux ker­nel. Give it a spin your­self and see.

Fans/air­flow:

• 2 x qui­et 60mm fans be­hind the CPU cool­er
• 1 x SilenX 60mm fan next to video card, dou­bles as case ex­haust
• 1 x 120mm fan in PSU, helps move air through CPU cool­er
• 1 x Arc­tic Cool­ing 90mm PWM fan on other side of CPU cool­er

Heatsinks:

• Ther­mal­take Big Ty­phoon (mod­i­fied) on CPU (re­moved fan and fan mount)
• Arc­tic Cool­ing Ac­celero S2 on video card
• Tu­niq Sanc­tum hard drive si­lencer/cool­er

Ef­fec­tive­ness? CPU tem­per­a­tures at 37-40 de­grees C at idle. Not too shab­by, I sup­pose. I’m plan­ning to use (and al­ready us­ing) this ma­chine for some se­ri­ous com­put­er work, in­clud­ing 3D pro­gram­ming and graph­ics. I’ve ac­tu­al­ly re­cent­ly in­stalled Vi­su­al C# 2008 Ex­press Edi­tion, and I’m find­ing C# (and Mi­crosoft’s IDE) to be an in­cred­i­bly pow­er­ful and in­tu­itive lan­guage. I think I might switch to us­ing C# in­def­i­nite­ly, un­til some­one writes a de­cent­ly sim­ple and pow­er­ful IDE for D, my cross-plat­form lan­guage of choice. Oh, and fix X11 and give us one win­dow­ing toolk­it that works and has amaz­ing graph­i­cal tools while you’re at it, please?

I’m al­so run­ning VMware server (and hav­ing lots of prob­lems with that…) with an Ubun­tu 8.04 Server guest, to han­dle my req­ui­site Apache and MySQL stuff, and al­so to keep up with the very few Lin­ux-on­ly soft­wares I use.