It’s A Binary World 2.0

Posted By Eric Mesa on February 9, 2010

Sometimes the simplest things in life give the best pleasure. I love watching animals do the things they do. I pass by this lake chock-full of geese every day on my way to work. They’re only there in the morning before they go out in search of food and whatever it is geese do during the day. I wanted to catch them when the lake was frozen over to see how they dealt with it. Basically, they mostly treated it as though the shore extended out onto the lake. I shot at least a hundred frames and put up my best few onto flickr. This one became my favorite shot of the day.

Category: Photography | No Comments »
Tags: bird, Goose

Posted By Eric Mesa on February 5, 2010

In this post I decided to take you through my thought process in lighting the photo.  Because I wanted the knife as close to the camera as possible (while still being in focus), I had to lower the intensity of the flash on the camera.  But that meant I would end up too dark, so I had use another flash to light me.  I wanted to make sure that the flash lit only me and did not add any extra light to the knife, so I put a snoot on my flash.  As we covered before, the snoot directs light forward with a very quick drop-off to darkness from the projected circle of light.

Lighting Setup

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Tags: Lighting Techniques

Posted By Eric Mesa on February 4, 2010

I took a look at openSuse 11.1 nearly a year ago and so it’s time to see what’s changed with openSuse 11.2.  For those new to my blog, when I review a new version of a distro I’ve reviewed before, I usually just do a comparison to the previous review.  Also important to know is that I review distros the point of view of ease of installation and ease of use.  While I’ve often been told that I should use a distro for X amount of time before reviewing it, pretty much all Linux distros are the same in day-to-day usage.  The only real difference being whether updates break stuff or not.  But, since all versions of Linux basically all have the same software, I don’t really see what I would gain from using a distro over a number of days.  Also, there are tons of other reviewers that do that.  Finally, I only tend to get those comments whenever I’ve said bad stuff about a distro.  Whenever I say all good stuff I never get people saying that I should spend more time with the distro or that I shouldn’t use a virtual machine.  So, I think there’s something to be said about that.  At any rate…let’s get into openSuse 11.2.

openSuse 11.2 boots up

The openSuse release engineers continue to craft a beautiful experience with openSuse.  Look at the above screenshot as well as the next one.

openSuse 11.2 liveCD desktop

They have the best, most beautiful default KDE 4 desktop I’ve ever seen.  Once again, I think it’s awesome they have the tutorial on how to do stuff in KDE.  And, the following confirms they’ve gone to KDE 4.3.

openSuse 11.2 KDE 4.3

Also, I love the icon for ethernet connectivity:

openSuse 11.2 ethernet connectivity

And then I decide to install openSuse.  Just like last time it warns me about not having enough RAM.

openSuse 11.2 RAM warning

The installer is easy and very matter-of-fact.  It definitely feels like it’s made for a SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) audience.  Here are some screenshots from the install:

The openSuse 11.2 Time Zone selection screen may not be as pretty as Ubuntu's, but it still gets the job done well.

The openSuse 11.2 partitioning screen could do with a little more explanation, but it has everything you need.

It's pretty neat that at this screen openSuse 11.2 allows the user to have the same password as the first user. While it's not the best security practice, it's not any different than using sudo.

openSuse 11.2 goes over all your selections before installing.

And then I reboot.

openSuse 11.2 post install configuration

Again, it has a post-install configuration that runs and then I’m at the desktop.

openSuse 11.2 GIMP logo mod

openSuse’s prettification of the desktop extends even to the load screens of programs such as The GIMP.  And I kept looking around at other parts of the desktop:

openSuse 11.2 Choqok

Choqok is included for updating Twitter and Identica.  It’s pretty nice.

openSuse 11.2 Install Programs

In my previous review I mentioned that I had a bit of trouble finding where to install software.  It is, logically, under the Computer tab off of the menu.

openSuse 11.2 recently run programs

One of the things that I like about KDE is the “recently used” tab on the kicker menu.  This is a feature I make great use of on my Windows computer and I had to setup launchers to accomplish the same in Gnome.

openSuse 11.2 updates!

There were some updates to install and so I did so.

openSuse 11.2 update info

Here are the programs that were available to upload.  I like that it told you what was being updated.  After that was done I gave it a reboot.

openSuse 11.2 installation

Here’s the installation screen.  This sticks out like a sore thumb as such an ugly program in such an otherwise beautiful distro.  Come on guys, this is such an eyesore!  I know you can make beautiful distros!  For example, yast:

openSuse 11.2 yast

That looks very nice.  Ok, so the last thing I wanted to do is see what happens when I attempt MP3 playback.  So I grab an MP3 from last.fm.  Then I launch it in Amarok.

openSuse 11.2 amarok

But the music wouldn’t play.

openSuse 11.2 amarok not playing an MP3

Although MP3s don’t work automatically, some instructions are available here.  As well as instructions on how to fix Amarok.  Basically you have to configure an outside repository to grab the dodgy codecs.  This is where openSuse falls over.  Up until now it was up there with Fedora and Ubuntu in my mind.  But it just doesn’t handle MP3 playback gracefully.  I don’t expect it to be able to play MP3s because of patents, but they should either do what Fedora does or what Ubuntu does.  Fedora leads you to legally purchase the codecs from Fluendo.  Ubuntu lets you download the codecs as long as you promise you aren’t doing anything bad.  openSuse doesn’t do either one.  It just lets playback fail.  This is very bad, Novell.  This is something that needs to be fixed yesterday.

So, that’s all the traditional review stuff.  Now to talk about my experience a bit.  openSuse 11.2 is a very, very nice KDE implementation.  It’s beautiful, the menus aren’t cluttered and, unlike Fedora (at least on my installed system) KDE is stable.  It feels very professional and I was starting to think that if I were going to install a KDE-based distro for my wife that I would go with openSuse.  I’m going to be looking at Mandriva soon, but openSuse sets a high bar to cross for a KDE distro.  There are a few niggles here and there like MP3 playback, but for someone in my house I wouldn’t mind figuring out how to make that work.  For someone for whom I cannot provide local tech support, I think, for now, I’m still sticking with Mint or Ubuntu.  So, unless Mandriva is hot stuff, it looks like openSuse is in a fight with Mandriva for third place.

I mention this every time, but there might be some issues with Novell and openSuse vis-a-vie their agreement with Microsoft.  But, years later, so far the world has not crumbled apart for Linux.  On technical merit alone, openSuse has a lot working for it.  It looks nice and I wouldn’t feel bad putting it in front of my employees if I were a business employer.  It also appears to be well-geared for a home computer, although perhaps not as much as some of the other distros.  I would definitely give openSuse a try if you’re in the market for a new Linux distro.

Category: Linux | No Comments »
Tags: openSuSe, openSuse 11.2

Posted By Eric Mesa on February 3, 2010

This one’s another subtle one because it’s so obvious, but if, like me a few months ago, you’ve only shot with available light, on camera flash, or bounced your light because you were told to – you probably haven’t thought about how light affects your portraits.  And so you have always taken portraits where they came out good enough if the people were photogenic and not so good if they were average.  Well, the key is creating realistic, but soft shadows.  (Although, in fashion photography and other styles you may eliminate all shadows)  The problem with on camera flash is that you end up with super harsh shadows.  (Also, the behind-the-head ugly shadows that make the person look like they grew an afro) What you want to do is to soften up the shadows and move them to the side.  Just remember this thing you learned as a child – shadows appear where light is blocked.

So the first part of this technique is the put the flash to the side of the person you are photographing.  I like the shadows a lot, so I usually put it 90 degrees to the person’s face.  You can angle it depending upon where you want the shadows to be.  Another really good technique is to have the person look slightly towards the flash so that all of the front of the face is lit, but from the cheeks back you get shadow.  It’s up to you.  The second part of this technique is the soften the shadows.  You do this by putting a softbox (or diffusion panel) in front of your flash or bouncing into (or through) an umbrella.  The first time you do this for yourself and see the amazing difference in your photographs you’ll be amazed at the results.  The resulting photograph will look more like what the pros produce than any portrait you’ve shot before.  There’s one final (and semi-optional) step.  You take a reflector (usually gold) and bounce some light back into the shadow area.  (You could also use another flash to do this.)

As a general rule, you want to leave more shadows for a man and less for a women.  It’s just a general rule – you will find plenty of shots of men with little to know shadow and maybe some of women with lots of shadow.  It mostly has to do with psychology and biology.  Psychologically, there’s something powerful (and other stereo-typical manly traits) about a man being in shadow.  Somehow the almost sinister look (of deep shadows) is awesomely manly.  Conversely, at least in our western culture, there’s something wrong about women being sinister.  Women are supposed to look immaculate and soft and so on.  Biologically, men’s faces tend (TEND!  it’s not a hard/fast rule) to be more angular and we tend to emphasize this in male portraits.  Shadows tend to emphasize this geometry.  Again, with women we want softer, rounder faces so we try and minimize the shadows.  I’ll just say it one more time – this is only a general rule.  You need to experiment and, who knows, your shtick could be to do the opposite and that will make you unique and different from all other photographers.  (Although, you need to have patrons that are ok with portraits that look “wrong”)  And you need to base it on the person you’re photographing.  The deep shadows in a male portrait look awesome as a portraiture study (basically art), but you probably don’t want to do that for a portrait of a CEO.  (If they’re paying for it.  Or if you ever want to be invited back.)

Below is a lighting diagram demonstrating this technique.

Softbox and Reflector Lighting Setup

Category: Photography | No Comments »
Tags: Lighting Techniques

Posted By Eric Mesa on February 2, 2010

Here’s an email I sent to some of my friends based on an piece I heard on The Naked Scientist:

This group did a study and found that women who were lap dancers and not on the pill (ie they had a normal menstrual cycle) go more tips on their fertile days.  (I can’t imagine the grant application process for that study.  “Yeah, we need to study strip clubs…this is important, somehow….”)

So another group wanted to explore this.  They selected a bunch of women who were not on the pill and told them to wear a t-shirt to sleep during their fertile days.  (No perfume or garlic allowed on those days because it would bias the results.  Also, they had to bathe with non-scented soap)  Then they had to wear a t-shirt to sleep on their menstruation days.  Then they got a bunch of guys to sniff the shirts.  (This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of a t-shirt sniffing test in science.  How do they get people to sign up for these???)  After testing their saliva before and after the sniffing, they found that the men had increased testosterone in their system during the women’s fertile period.

So, not only do woman get hornier during their fertile period, they apparently “force” guys into it the same state.  Makes sense from a biological point of view.  Increased changes of offspring.  And, in the modern day, more tips for strippers.  (Well, lap dancers – I think you had to be within sniffing distance) One unintended consequence:  when men sense other men with elevated levels of testosterone, they have an increased chance of getting into fights.  Probably to ensure the female gets the offspring with the best genes.

And here’s some of the response from our good friend, Duffy, a sociology PhD candidate:

The first and most influential study in the field on this now-hugely-popular topic (Simpson & Gangestad, if I remember correctly, somewhere around the hear 2000) actually studied it from the other direction, with olfaction and t-shirt sniffing. They had men wear tshirts instead and found that women can actually pick more symmetrical men (supposedly the ones with better genes who are more attractive) just by smelling them; they can also pick men who have the most complementary Major Histocompatibility Complex to theirs (MHC-1, which is an indicator of genetic compatibility). Again, the pill actually ruins everything and reverses this, them pick the LEAST compatible men with respect to MHC-1.

Also, more fun stuff about the ovulatory cycle — during the fertile phase (compared to the luteal phase) women actually dress to look sexier (e.g. show more skin), prefer men with more masculine features (e.g. a more square jawline), and are more highly skilled at picking up flirting nonverbals. In the luteal phase they dress more conservatively and prefer more babyfaced men. In truth, it’s not all about the best genes — it’s about conditional mating strategies, which I’ll explain when I haven’t already typed out an entire email essay for you, haha.

Which leads me to wonder how much free will we actually have?  At what point are we being controlled by hormones and at what point are we making our own decisions?  I’m dang near 100% sure that those women in the second study Duffy mentions aren’t consciously thinking, “I’m ovulating!  Better dress sexier!”  First of all, most women I know aren’t monitoring when they are ovulating unless they’re actively TRYING to get pregnant.  Second, over the course of a woman’s fertile years, a huge percentage of the time that she’s ovulating she will actively be trying to remain free from pregnancy.  (For example – probably 100% of the time – from, say middle school through the end of college – at least)  Yet there they are behaving in ways that will lead to an outcome they don’t want.  At the same time, no guy is, upon coming close enough to smell a woman, thinking, “Oh man, she’s ovulating!  It’s gonna be so easy to convince her to have sex!”  And, in fact, while his testosterone levels may be elevated, he will not know why he finds himself so attracted to this woman.

So we’re left wondering how much free will this leaves us?  After all, if something as mechanical as a menstrual cycle is dictating how women dress, who they are attracted to that night, and how easy it will be to bed them, where does that leave us?  Of course, it’s not automatic, so we do have free will.  Every day people will find themselves sexually attracted to people and they don’t act on it, but something just seems sinister about the fact that it’s all based on chemicals rather than a person’s personality.  Let’s say in a scenario where two women are equally visually attractive (and with the same general personality), but one is ovulating and therefore is the one the guy ends up with – it could potentially lead to a completely different life if this one meeting led to marriage.  Had the chemicals been reversed, the man would have ended up with the other girl.  This just seems wrong…

Category: Psychology, philosophy | 2 Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Eric Mesa on February 1, 2010

You may have seen a photo like the one above where the light fades away as if it were a flashlight.  How do photographers do that?  It’s pretty easy, they snoot their flashes.  A snoot is basically a light tunnel and professional snoots have a honeycomb grid at the end.  The snoot directs the light and keeps it from spilling out to the sides so it all goes forward.  The grid pattern at the end affects how wide the beam appears.

I happen to be using a professional kit snoot, but it’s pretty easy to make your own.  You can use black construction paper rolled around your flash unit or a cereal box or a bunch of straws taped together.  A quick search on google will help you on your way.

Snooted Flash on Camera

Category: Photography | 1 Comment »
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Posted By Eric Mesa on January 31, 2010

Here’s a non-obvious problem that photographers come up against all the time – I bought a white background so why doesn’t it look white in my portraits?  The reason that it’s a non-obvious problem is that you have to remember that the camera doesn’t see the world the same way you do.  The internal circuitry of the camera wants to meter for neutral grey.  So the cure is simple as long as you have an extra flash unit – you have to use it to light up the background.  One important thing to remember if you’re using a small flash (speedlite or speedlight), you need to pop a diffuser cap on that lens to spread out the light over the whole background.  In fact, if the background is wide enough you might need two or more strobes.  Another tip is that it may help to put your flash unit into manual mode so the flash itself doesn’t try to make the background neutral grey.

Lighting Diagram for this post

Category: Photography | No Comments »
Tags: Lighting Techniques

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 30, 2010

Here’s the calendar for February.  Click on it to get the full size so you can make it your background.  (edit:  I noticed a bug in the way the calendar appeared and fixed it on 31 Jan 2010 so just download a new version, thanks!)

For square screens:

Feb 2010 - 1024x768 calendar (fixed)

For wide screens:

Feb 2010 - 1680x1050 calendar (fixed)

Category: Photography | No Comments »
Tags: bird, Blue Jay, calendar, snow

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 30, 2010

Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD boots up

I last looked at Ubuntu 9.04 a little over six months ago.  So I decided it was time to see what has changed.  Since I’m now testing on a 64-bit machine, I decided to test the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.  So here we go:

Ubuntu 9.10 loading

I like the desktop, it looks pretty good. I liked 9.04 a little better, but there’s nothing wrong with this one.

Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD desktop

I decided to go right into installation.  Once again it was quick and easy with easy dialogs that made sense and with lots of information.  I like that it gives you the option to encrypt your home folder.  I decided to take up its offer on that this time.  And it had a nice little presentation while it installed with some good info on programs available.

Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD Installation 1

Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD Installation 2

And so, after a while I had my installation.  The GDM screen goes really well with the loading screen (see above near the beginning of this review), but I preferred the look of 9.04.

Ubuntu 9.10 GDM

I just wanted to quickly highlight all the great accessibility features available from the GDM screen:

GDM accessibility options

Here’s my initial desktop:

Ubuntu 9.10 installed desktop

It asked me to setup my password for encrypting/decrypting my desktop (I would have preferred to have seen that integrated with Seahorse).

Ubuntu 9.10 home directory encryption

And then I had some updates to run.  I decided to update instead of faulting Ubuntu for something that might not be its fault.

Ubuntu 9.10 updates

Again, I like how it says “Welcome to Ubuntu” as well as telling you how to do the updates later if you don’t feel like dealing with them now.  Once the updates were complete I rebooted because it asked me to.  Note to those new to Linux, you generally don’t have to reboot Linux computers after installing something, but you do have to do this when you install certain updates (like to the Kernel) that update parts of the system that are so necessary they cannot be updated while it is running.  After I was back into my desktop I decided to take a look around.  First of all, I love the icon set Ubuntu is using.  Check this out:

Ubuntu 9.10 icons

Just by looking at the icons you get a quick and dirty understanding of what the folders are.  I think visual reinforcement always helps when your home folder gets chock-full of folders and you’re trying to find the one labeld “music”.  Also, I think the top right of the Gnome desktop is pretty nice-looking.  Again, take a look:

Ubuntu 9.10 Gnome Desktop top right

I think Mark Shuttleworth’s desire to make Ubuntu look slick is really, really paying off.  Looking at my own Fedora desktop now and comparing it to this makes me think my desktop is ugly.

Ubuntu 9.10 Gnome Games

Ubuntu includes the standard Gnome games package.  You can see the games above.  They’re simple games, but can be good time killers.  And here’s what Ubuntu has on offer for the Internet category:

Ubuntu 9.10 Internet

Empathy is the replacement for Pidgin that most Linux distros are choosing now.  After all this time, Gnome has finally decided to have an IM client as part of their suite of everything and, for whatever reason, did not go with Pidgin.  I discussed my feelings on Empathy a while ago.  I decided to give it a shot and see what I was missing.  I just IMed myself so that I wouldn’t have to bother anyone.

Ubuntu 9.10 Empathy

It’s OK.  Appears to have kept all the custom names I gave my contacts although not the groupings.  I also like the status icons better in Pidgin, but I’m sure that’s something someone can create a custom icon set for.

Ubuntu One is a neat little service where you can mark a folder on your computer to be synchronized to the net and have it also synchronize with other computers you own.  The team has big plans for this such as synchronizing desktop settings and Tomboy notes so that you can always have your settings no matter where you are as long as you login to Ubuntu One.  I can see it being most useful for people with a desktop and a laptop.

I keep hearing people complain that Ubuntu had gotten rid of GIMP on initial installation.  I still see it here, so perhaps that’s for Ubuntu 10.4?  I think that would be a horrible idea as GIMP is a great tool to show people what great FLOSS software we have and it would already be on the disc for people in countries where the bandwidth is so bad they order Ubuntu discs to be sent to them instead of downloading them.

The big thing debuting in Ubuntu 9.10 was the software center so I definitely wanted to check that out.

Ubuntu 9.10 Software Center

I think it looks very nice and has good categories with nice icons.  The left leaves room in the future for non-free software like Adobe Reader.  I clicked on the graphics category and found Blender.

Ubuntu 9.10 Software Center Blender

and I clicked through to see what it said:

Ubuntu 9.10 Software Center Blender Description

Very, very nice.  In acidrip I clicked on the screenshot and it brings it up at a larger size:

Ubuntu 9.10 Software Center acidrip Screenshot

This is big.  With software center, Ubuntu finally has an installation method that rivals that of Mint!  I decided to see what would happen if I tried to play an MP3.  I went to last.fm and downloaded one of the free MP3s they have on offer.

Ubuntu 9.10 codec searching

No surprise when it didn’t play.  Afterall, MP3s are covered by patents in the US and some other Western countries.  I clicked search and got:

Ubuntu 9.10 codec searching 2

Which I know from experience are the right packages to install.  So I hit install and got this hilarious message.

Yeah.....of course I am...

Well, whatever.  Canonical is a company and they need to cover their butts.  Afterwards the song played.

Ubuntu 9.10 MP3 plays

Yay!  One more thing to try.  I heard that Gnome Shell (the interface for Gnome 3.0) could be tried out in Ubuntu.  If it’s easy I’ll check it out.  If it’s hard, no big loss it’ll probably be in 10.10.  I install the gnome-shell package.  Afterwards, naturally nothing had changed so I log out and log back in.  Still nothing had changed, but before giving up I check google.  Typing gnome-shell –replace does the trick.  It works, kinda.  But that’s just my setup.  It probably works a lot better installed on a machine rather than in a virtual machine.  At least it was easy to check it out.  I wonder how easy to get back to the original.

OK!  Conclusions time!  I think Ubuntu 9.10 is a top notch release!  The desktop looks slick, the icons are nice, Empathy and Evolution are well integrated into the panel, and it is easy to install.  With the new Software Center, they are really starting to make them a very good contender against Linux Mint.  So what’s keeping them from the top slot?  Basically just one thing now – that Linux Mint comes with all the non-free software/codecs installed.  I understand why Ubuntu can’t do it.  Heck, Fedora doesn’t do it either.  But try explaining this to a new Linux user.  They want to be able to play their DVDs and MP3 content.  So Linux Mint is still my top recommendation for a new user, but – MAN! – is Ubuntu right behind.

Category: Internet, ubuntu | 19 Comments »
Tags: Ubuntu 9.10, Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 29, 2010

The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version.  I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB.  I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.

Tiny Core Linux boots options

As you can see you can enter some boot options or just hit enter (which is what I did).  And the bootup looked similar to other liveCDs other than going insanely fast.

Tiny Core Linux boots up

and this dropped me off at this spartan desktop:

Tiny Core Linux desktop

interestingly, for a distro that only takes up 10 MB they were able to have Mac dock-like effects in the panel:

Tiny Core Linux panel

So, let’s see how this works for getting programs and what kinds of programs they have.  I clicked on the apps icon and ended up in the empty app browser.  So I click on file->connect to see if that did anything.  Indeed I now had an alphabetized list of programs to install:

Tiny Core Linux app browser

I saw one shortfall right away, the programs are not categorized in any way.  How do I find an app for a particular purpose?  In other words, I know that pidgin is an IM client, but how do I know that’s the one they’ve chosen to support?  I decide to install a program to see how it works.  I choose the Chromium browser.  I select it and hit install.

Chromium and required bits download

And then it was installed and appeared on the dock at the bottom.

Chromium installed in Tiny Core Linux

Unfortunately, I couldn’t launch Chromium.  Well, Chromium is somewhat experimental on Linux, right?  So I decided to install Abiword.  That’s a nice, traditional app that was sure to work.  Again, post install it was on the dock and again it would not launch.  I suspected a bug with the panel and opened up a terminal.  What I saw cemented why the programs would not run:

Why Chromium and Abiword won't launch in Tiny Core Linux

Apparently it couldn’t find the files it had just installed.  Determined to see if the install system was failing I tried zsnes.  That one worked.

zsnes working in Tiny Core Linux

This gave me hope.  Perhaps there was just a bug with Chromium and Abiword, but, no, Firefox would not load either.  So I hit the irc.  Unfortunately, that proved fruitless.  It was working for them and not for me and it wasn’t obvious why.  So I have to say that while Tiny Core Linux is a very neat concept – you only need 10 MB and you install only the programs you will need, it obviously has some problems in execution.  I’ll keep an eye on it to see if it improves in the future, but right now I see it as unsuitable to recommend.

Category: Linux | 3 Comments »
Tags: Tiny Core Linux, TinyCore Linux

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 28, 2010

This Northern Mockingbird is one of the many birds in my yard.  I can’t quite pinpoint what it is about birds that fascinate Danielle and I, but we love to watch them cavorting around the yard and interacting with each other.

Category: Photography | No Comments »
Tags: bird, Northern Mockingbird

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 27, 2010

I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now.  They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up.  You only add the things you need.  So you don’t have any cruft on your system based on what some other people think you should have.  So let’s pop this CD in and see what happens!  (I’m also following the directions on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide)  The disc is the 2009.08 snapshot.  I booted into the LiveCD.

Arch Linux LiveCD

This is not what I expected for a LiveCD (not in a bad way, I just thought it would be a graphical desktop like most LiveCDs are)  After looking at the documentation I decide to do an interactive install, so I login as root and get going.

Arch Linux Installation Begins

Since I’m following the instructions online, I will only comment here on whatever I find interesting or difficult.  I went with all the defaults on everything up to when it came time to select the file system and I selected ext4.  After I partitioned, it died when I tried to select packages.

Arch Linux dies if the repo doesn't have the base-devel option

After that it refused to partition again and kept erroring out.  Very, very b ad.  Right now if I’m trying to install this on my main machine I’m thinking that Arch Linux sucks.  I’ll try a reboot and see if that fixes the problem.  Before rebooting I go in there and mess with all the stuff.  Eventually it gets rolled back and we can finally create some partitions again.  Again I get the same installation error.  This is annoying.  It looks like it may have been a problem with the repo.  Still something they should be careful with.  On my third go-around I select the CD for my source instead of the net and I get past that error.

Arch Linux installation begins

Installation was REALLY quick!  All I did for configuration was set the root password.  Stayed with all the defaults.  And then it’s eventually done and ….

Arch Linux post-installation

that’s all you get.  So I login and take a look around.  It’s a pretty bare install.  So let’s get some programs!  I decide to sync up the packages.  It fails, so I check to see if the mirror list is all commented up.  Sure enough, that was the problem.  I should have looked at that during the installation.  OK…. no big deal.  Not their fault – it’s my fault.  I decide to install emacs because nano is annoying.  Some weird thing was conflicting and keeping me from doing that.  Whatever.  I’ll follow the instructions on getting Gnome.  The same package conflicted with this, too.  Grr….  I did a system upgrade and that ran.  So maybe that was part of the problem.  So I wait for that to finish up.  Yes!  It works now!  So I install emacs.  Next will be Gnome.  As Gnome installed, I realized – Arch Linux is not for those in countries without broadband.  I think in the last 45 minutes I’ve downloaded over a gigabyte worth of packages.  Then Gnome extras.  Finally got it all installed a couple hours later, created a new user, and rebooted.  I logged in and hit startx.  It didn’t work and neither did gnome-session.  It fails out with “cannot open display”.  I decide to give it a shot with root.  Didn’t work there either.  I had to change my /etc/inittab to runlevel 5 and gdm instead of xdm.  Rebooted.  Hmm….still got some weird error.  Now what?  I had to install xorg-xinit….That didn’t work.  So I installed some more xorg packages.  FINALLY!!!  Woohoo!

Arch Linux GDM

And I login.  And there we go, the LASTEST Gnome.

Arch Linux Gnome 2.28

So, it has all the Gnome games, Epiphany, Empathy, and all the official Gnome packages.  So, after a few hours I have Gnome up and running and things are good.  I think the installation information could be a little better organized on how to get X running, but it’s not too bad.  Usually in my Linux reviews I talk about which programs are installed by default.  In some ways it’s not important because you can get tons of packages online (well, it depends on how busy system maintainers for your chosen distro are), but in other ways it can be important.  For example, users with slow internet connections may be dependent upon whatever comes installed on the disc.  Also, a good distro will usually have done the most quality assurance on the packages on the disc.  They don’t want the user to have a bad experience out of the gate.  But with Arch Linux it doesn’t make sense to talk about this because nothing (other than a bare bones system) is installed by default.  It’s up to you to add what you want.  So, to wrap things up I’m going to search the repositories for some programs I use every day:  Gwibber, gPodder, liferea, and Blender.  First up is gwibber.  Gwibber was not in the repositories.  Blender 2.49, liferea 1.6.1 and gPodder 2.1 were in the repositories.   So, of the programs I use every day, only one wasn’t in there, not too bad.  Virtualbox open source and closed source editions appeared to be available.

So, it’s conclusion time.  What do I have to say about Arch Linux?  Arch Linux is hard.  It’s way, way harder than Slackware (which LO says is for those who like to bring the pain).  Arch Linux is for the user who wants complete and total control over his or her system.  (And this is indeed what they claim on their website)  While there were some little glitches here and there with the installation and with the documentation w.r.t. getting X up and running, I really don’t have anything to fault Arch Linux about.  What you need to know is that it’s hard, it’s time consuming, you need broadband (or a LOT of patience), and you should have a lot of Linux know-how.  This should NOT be your first Linux system unless you are a computer prodigy.  You should probably even try Slackware before you try Arch.  But if you’re all about controlling exactly which bits of which programs are installed on your system, I think Arch Linux is definitely the place for you.

Category: Linux | 24 Comments »
Tags: Arch, Arch Linux

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 26, 2010

I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out.  I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed.  This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same.  One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS.  The install was basically the same.

The final part of the Zenwalk 6.2 install

This time, however, there were no problems with the X server.  I figured this would definitely be fixed from Zenwalk 6.0 to Zenwalk 6.x.  It just came up and we had another great login screen.  I can’t stress enough how important this is for the new user.

Zenwalk 6.2 login screen

The icon theme is basically the same.  So, my only other real grip last time was with Netpkg.  Let’s see if that has improved.  Took me a few tries to get a mirror that worked, but eventually I got a mirror loaded.  You still need to hit “not installed” on the filters to see what’s not installed.  For whatever reason this doesn’t bother me as much as before – perhaps because I was expecting it.  Again, Gwibber was not available, but Conky was.

So, what do I think about Zenwalk 6.2?  Basically, as the version number indicates, it’s an incremental update on Zenwalk 6.0.  A bunch of programs got bumped to the latest versions.  The installer has a few little improvements (like X working).  Basically, everything I saw about Zenwalk 6.0 still stands.  It’s a very pretty looking distro, works well, is stable, has a good selection of programs, and is built on the great Slackware base/tradition.  Again, it was a pretty short review, but there wasn’t much that had changed vs 6.0.  And, to reiterate from my 6.0 review, I’d recommend it for anyone slightly past beginner and more.  So if you have used a few Linux distros, give this one a shot.  I think you’ll like how it feels and how responsive it is.  I thought it was really fast AND I had it running in a VM!

Category: Linux | 1 Comment »
Tags: Zenwalk, Zenwalk 6.2

Posted By Eric Mesa on January 25, 2010

This was taken as I was testing the effects of different f-stops on diffraction.

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Posted By Eric Mesa on January 24, 2010

It’s been a very snow-filled winter this 2009-2010 winter season compared to the last five or so years I’ve lived here.  I think I’m over it.  Spring couldn’t come quickly enough.

Category: Photography | No Comments »
Tags: snow