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It’s been a month since I have installed Arch Linux on my workstation and I thought I would talk about this Linux distribution a bit. Arch Linux is pretty much all the rage these days in the world of Linux distributions. If we are to believe the famous Distrowatch stats that were recently published and compared with the data of 2008, Arch Linux is the fastest growing Linux distribution these days. It gained quite many users, probably at the expense of distributions like Gentoo, yet it is not usually considered to be an “user-friendly” distribution. I will briefly outline what have been, and what is, my experience with Arch, and I believe I am going to stick with this particular flavor for a very long time.

I have tested several Linux distributions in the past years, starting with Mandriva and using Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, while having installed Linux several times on my family and friends’ computers. You can read in this previous post of mine that while my “usual” distribution was Fedora I had some rough issues with the upgrade from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12, and that prompted me, after some adventures, to install Ubuntu. Well, I stayed about two weeks with Ubuntu, in the end. There was nothing wrong with it, it’s a beautiful distribution (except for the buggy packaging of Claws Mail, my default email client) everything runs just fine, drivers, 3D, Second Life, third party repositories, etc. But I was somewhat dissatisfied for egotistic reasons: I have been using Linux, as a desktop user, ever since 2001 (with some intervals with OS X) and although I don’t want to fiddle too much with the system, I like to customize it, to tweak it and to gain a technical knowledge of it. So when I found myself at a barcamp in Paris in December sitting next to someone who was less technical than I am using Ubuntu on her desktop, I got the personal, but awful epiphany that I was, just like everyone else, using the Windows XP of the distros. Sorry for this Canonical, sorry for this, Nick, it’s actually a major achievement to be thought of a Windows XP in your industry, but I’m perhaps too much of a twisted, egotistic nerd.

I don’t exactly know how I came to Arch Linux. I guess I was reading an article about it, then in one evening I documented myself, and what attracted me to it was the different packagine, the style, and also the fact that hardware was not a problem (wireless, video card, etc.) So I gave it a try, and the first impression I got, besides thinking I was back in 2001, was that it all made sense. What I mean is that once you have gone past the two minutes of emotional intensity (oh my God, the screen went black and these small white letters are being typed by an invisble hand!) and that you… read what your options are, it’s not that difficult for you to install and configure the system. In a sense, I would even say that since Arch Linux installs only what you want it to install, there is no instant clutter on your desktop. I often found out that I spent more time configuring my desktop by pulling out what I did not need and replacing it sometimes by other programs than the actual time I would be spending installing the system. In this regard, Arch Linux, whith some rough edges at the beginning, was a different experience. You get what you want and it’s all right if you don’t manage it the first time, there is plenty of a well organized documentation for Arch available on their wiki or even as a book. Documentation is clear, well written, and asking on the forums really helps.

In the process, I leaned, or relearned a lot of things. From the point of view of the desktop user, Arch Linux can be configured by using pacman (the package manager available in command line and graphically, through Shaman, a direct competitor to Synaptic), editing the rc.conf file in the /etc/directory (it’s all human readable, don’t worry), and starting or stopping services through /etc/rc.d . You don’t really need to go beyond that on a daily, weekly or even monthly basis.  Package Management is quite interesting. Updates, even when you are not using the testing branch of the distribution, are not updates that are pushed at you and that you have to digest. Arch Linux is a rolling release, which means that it’s a distribution without release. You install a base system (itself on a rolling release) and it “morphs” according to your needs without any need to reinstall. That’s the theory, because I think one would need to reinstall it every few years, unless everything runs perfectly. So this rolling release mode makes it possible for you to use the latest versions of software without the need to wait for the next big release or the issuing of a backport. But it depens on you to understand what you are about to upgrade: Going from Firefox 3.5.6 to 3.5.7 should be no problem, but changing the version of nvidia modules is a different game. That’s why it is recommended to check out announcements and the Arch forums each time you want to update your system.

Package management, however, does not stop there. Arch packages (which are really tarballs of the binary versions of the software compiled from the source) are vanilla packages (except in some very rare instances) but the team maintaining the core and extra repositories is too small. That’s why you can have access to the community repositories and the Arch User repositories. These sources are places where the community contributes packages it has compiled using Arch’s own build system, the ABS. That’s where you can find many interesting software. It is also easy for you to compile any software provided you have the source, and upload it in the distribution.

My big surprize was perhaps the fact that Arch works. It is a system that actually works. By this I mean that there is no “tweaking around” solution. It works and the reason why it works makes sense on Linux, not on one specific distribution only. All this , in the end, brought a lot of fun in using Linux for me. I am not suggesting Arch is for everyone, but if you want to try a rock-solid distribution that’s blazingly fast and in the end, pretty easy to configure, you should give a try to Arch Linux. It’s a good way to start 2010!

Below is a screenshot of my desktop under Gnome.

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This will be the last post of the year 2009.  2010 will be an interesting year to come, for many reasons, and that’s why I have outlined a few predictions below for the year to come. Feel free to comment or add to this list, and happy new year 2010!

• OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
• Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
• The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
• Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
• It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
• In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
• Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

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• So I ended up… installing Arch Linux. And guess what? I love it. Everthing works. The installation process is a bit rough, but everything is logical and if you don’t want to spend time doing it you can even use an impressive live-cd project, Chakra. Package management is also innovative breaks with the rpm and deb tradition of “packaging” for a simple, straightforward way of actually fetching the original versions of the software. The result is that everything works just fine if you take the time to think about what you’re about to install and upgrade. Heck, even Second Life works perfectly, on my 64 bits architecture!
• I’m announcing it with a week late, but lpOD 0.8 has been released. Come on over and test it!
• At the height of his one of kind career as a Microsoft-puppet-pretending-to-be-impartial, Alex Brown wants to take out Brazil out of the ISO. As Berthold Brecht once wrote, if you are not happy with the people, just replace the people.
• Last but not least, you are more and more readers of this blog, so let me thank you for it, and wish you a merry Christmas and happy new year!

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Fall season is one of the busiest times for Linux distributions, and this year is also a very busy time for me.  Ever since two years now I gradually migrated family and friends to Linux. This year these new Linux users gave me quite some work, especially on week-ends, and my own upgrade gave me quite some work. You might think that the people I installed Linux systems on their laptops would be autonomous and relying on forums when help were needed. Think again: Usability of every day applications may have never been easy, but installing new applications is something that still has not gotten through them, at least on a regular basis, and this means they rely on their favourite system administrator (me) to fix whatever issues they have. But it’s somewhat of a vicious circle, because I guess I enjoy helping them myself, and to add to the pleasure I installed different distributions for each of them. Below is the list of the computers I am watching over:

• Melissa’s laptop: running the latest Mandriva
• My father’s laptop: used to run Ubuntu until Karmic Koala that messed up everything, now it runs the latest OpenSuse
• Jeremie and Alexandra’s laptop: running Ubuntu (before it was running Vista, or rather, was coughing up Vista until Ubuntu made it possible to actually do something with the laptop).
• My workstation (my laptop is a Mac): running Fedora by default, now running Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

Let’s start with the easiest: the upgrade of Jeremie and Alexandra’s laptop to Ubuntu. The upgrade was a breeze, contrary to reports in the press and what happened with the upgrade on my father’s laptop. Usually Jeremie uprades its system himself but this time, I insisted on attending in case of a problem. There was none.

Next was Melissa’s laptop. Melissa has a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, but she never really liked it. She tried Mandriva at the beginning of 2009 and was immediately sold on it. The upgrade to the Mandriva 2010 was not overly problematic but somehow did not go all the way till the end. I quickly relaunched the upgrade procedure and everything went fine. Mandriva is graphically one of the most beautiful distributions out there, fares better than Ubuntu in many ways but sometimes fails in the availability of packages. I shall come back to this later.

Next my father upgraded its system as he is used to ever since two years, but this time when he rebooted he found himself with Xubuntu, and Xfce desktop he never wanted and a laptop showing what I call the “Windows symptom”: bloated, noisy, humming, doing everything slow and having an hyperactive hard disk. As I had heard about the problematic upgrade of the newest Ubuntu I was prepared for a total system reinstallation, but having seen the ease of use of Mandriva before I thought that changing distributions would be a good idea. More specifically, Mandriva and OpenSuse have something no other distribution (aside a few others such as Sabayon, Parsix …) has: an all in one, integrated configuration center that does everything from switching wallpaper to configuring the wireless connection and managing packages. Ubuntu desperately needs one, because newbies have only one place to remember in order to manage their system, whether it’s Drake Center or YAST. I burned a couple of live CDs, one with Mandriva and the other one with OpenSuse (both on Gnome, my father does not seem to enjoy KDE 4). Mandriva was ruled out probably because my father did not seem to like the graphical style of Mandriva, and thus we settled for OpenSuse. The installation process was uneventful, although it seems that the ability to upgrade from one version to a more recent one is really experimental. YAST was well accepted, but there is a funny anecdote about the OpenSuse interface: OpenSuse has put the Gnome main task bar at the bottom of the screen, which really annoyed my father as he wanted to have it on top of the screen. I do notice that he completely got out of the “it’s not like Windows” theme only to adopt the “it’s not like the regular version of Gnome”! I can’t wait for Gnome 3.0…

Next, I had to work on my own system, which was a finely tuned Fedora Core 11. Helas, the upgrade was one of the worst experiences I had with Linux distributions. Shortly put, I think it was a bad mistake for Fedora to have claimed its 12 version was ready. It frankly was not ten days ago and I doubt it’s ready even now. First, the special software used to upgrade distributions, “preupgrade” had a bug and was only discovered 24 hours before the release, which forced thousands of users including me to look for the newest version that wasn’t on the official mirrors. The upgrade itself took a long time  but of course it also depends on the system that was installed before. When the upgrade process was finished I found myself with a half baked Fedora 12. Cleaning the installation packages I was not cautious enough in realising that the drivers (both free and proprietary) were still working with the existing kernel although they were marked as “fc 11″. Cleaning the packages, as advised by every manual, erased them and I discovered afterwards that there was no available drivers for nvidia cards on Fedora 12, either free or proprietary (or rather that the packages were not ready yet). So I found myself losing the X server for good, and given my experience with the new Fedora 12, I decided, although I had lost a good day, to make a clean install on the next morning.

On the next morning indeed, I installed a fresh live CD from Fedora 12. But the live system would not recognize my wireless network nor would it even link to any driver for 3D. At that point I got really frustrated but was still willing to go with Fedora if no other distribution were to offer any significant advantage in its configuration. I gave a try to OpenSuse, which automatically recognized my wireless network, and explained me that 3D was not available but that I could enable it by following some simple steps. I was not going to go with OpenSuse, as it always strikes me as a good distribution but one that for some reason is not very appealing to me and has too much of mono everywhere (and no, I don’t consider OpenSuse as being some kind of traitor to Free Software, let alone because it’s clearly out of the deal between Novell and Microsoft!). I hesitated about Mandriva. What hold me back was the lack of certain libs for some special -and a bit obscure- 3D graphic software that I use and also because Second Life does not seem to run well on it. Otherwise I would not have hesitated. Anyway, I ended up testing out the latest Ubuntu. Guess what? Everything was easy, fast, wireless network recognized, 3D drivers enabled in a minute. It was a real relief for me, and so far I must say Karmic is a really good release.

Last but not least, here’s some “post mortem” analysis of the situation: This fall season saw a lot of problematic upgrades. I seem to give a hard time to Fedora, but in retrospect Fedora Core 11 was a good distribution; I am just disappointed at the lack of readiness of the Fedora infrastructure for such a major release. I’ll probably go back to Fedora some time, because it’s targeted at people just like me: power users who like it easy but still a bit rough (hey, it’s like barbecue folks). Fedora has also some unique features for advanced users: Assistants to configure services and security profiles are a must and simply do not exist on Ubuntu (they do on OpenSuse and Mandriva in a different way though). But not shunning away from the command line does not mean having to deal with issues related with poor work, and that’s what made me switch.

As for Ubuntu I felt at first almost bored that I to go for the choice everyone was making. But here’s what I think Ubuntu has become. In some ways Ubuntu, or more exactly the ubiquitous availability of deb packages through the system of PPAs (extra, adhoc software repositories hosted by Ubuntu itself) and the third parties repositories, is turning Ubuntu into an universal distribution, or perhaps a meta-distribution of sorts. The question of the availability of packages had already been solved by Debian and to the same extent by Red Hat. What we’re witnessing now is more and more applications being ported or packaged for Ubuntu, not so much because it’s the more popular distribution du jour but because Canonical made it really easy to have its software available online for millions (yes, millions) of users.

Thus, in a strange display of irony, Ubuntu is becoming what Debian always wanted to be in some way: the universal system for all. Linux distributions will not stop surprising me, after all.

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This post is a follow-up of yesterday’s piece, Predictions & Resolutions. Today I will list many things that do not relate to I.T. , some others that do. But in general, I’ll share what I’m mostly uncertain with for the year 2009.Doubts

•  Israël has the right to exist, live in peace. Palestinians do as well. That’s why a terrorist movement like the Hamas has no right to send missiles on Israeli cities. But Israel’s counter-attack will be ineffective against the Hamas, I’m afraid. The reason for this is the very structure of the Hamas. It’s a distributed group, and so is Al-Quaeda and in general, terrorist movements. You cannot fight against those structures with the usual means of warfare. Another thing I was at pain understanding for years was the seemingly anti-Israeli bias public opinions have all around the world. Some are outrightly manipulated for religious reasons. But some are not, and have nothing in the way of antisemitic views. In short the whole perception is the one of a reverse David vs. Goliath fight. There are several reasons for this. But something need to be done to come back to a more balanced view and more balanced ambitions from both sides. I hope, in this doubt section, that the Obama presidency could help.
• I don’t think governments in general are taking the whole measure of the crisis (perhaps except the upcoming Obama administration). This is why 2009 will be painful. In several European countries, the political and generational gap, not to speak of the social inequalities that have been growing in a way this continent was accustomed to will sparkle riots, and lots of instability. It has already started in Greece.
• European governments all buy into the too worn-off free market ideology. As we have come to understand, this is an ideology (and thus is a factor of danger) that has proven to be a failure, in the same way communism was a failure, allowing some happy few to benefit the system and generating lots of noise. Now don’t get me wrong: free market is a beautiful idea, (perhaps, some might argue, just like communism in the book was) but it is merely just this, an idea, and an economist’s traditional cornucopia of sorts. Now these governments seem to be too busy with exerting pressure on their own citizens by trying to control medias and the Internet than actually addressing people’s problems. They might actually be powerless in front of such a crisis, but they’re also unwilling to bring change to our societies, change that would make their own mental horizon change itself. The power of habits and customs….
• On a different level, OOXML will continue to be pushed by Microsoft and marketed to everyone, governments included. That’s a trap many will fall into, but as you know there’s a way out: ODF. Meanwhile, the deception OOXML is should be fully advertised so that all can be warned.
• Will Apple ever include ODF support in iWork? iWork 09 doesn’t seem to support it, but I might be wrong. TextEdit is not enough. 
• Software Patents will be pushed again and again in Europe. Contrary to my friend Trond Arne Undheim, I don’t think that ex-ante disclosure is that of a good thing: it is merely a much welcome, yet minimal, hygienic measure to an insane situation affecting the I.T. market and innovation.

Hopes

• OpenOffice.org will go out of traditional desktop application.  Perhaps not in 2009, but very likely later. I’ll go back on this in another future post, but you can check this out…
• I have been a strong critic of Novell’s agreement of Microsoft, but there is one thing I have never denied and that would be how great OpenSuse is for a distribution. Now what’s both interesting and unfortunate with OpenSuse is that the Novell’s agreement with Microsoft does explicitely not apply to OpenSuse, and that the distribution really opened itself, as a project and as a platform on which to build on. So my legal question here is to check how much legally chaotic OpenSuse got. By welcoming everyone to contribute code, it might have created a situation where neither Novell, nor Microsoft could  exert any kind of pressure or FUD, as their own intellectual property (whatever that means) is now strongly diluted in packaged mess. 
• I love SecondLife, I really do. But sim crossing and avatar limits? Come on, get real, Linden Labs. Despite those shortcomings, I’m spending more and more times there. 
• ODF has already been adopted by 16 governments. My hope is to see that number double by the end of 2009.
• All in all, I expect 2009 to be a year of crisis, but to be a year of positive change in the world. Or perhaps it will be a year of full-blown crisis. But even then, let’s all remember that the hour before dawn is the darkest time of the night…

Happy new year to everyone!

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