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March 18, 2004

Adventures in Linux

This is a new category. I'm going to begin documenting my adventures as I attempt to use Linux for things.

Let me first describe my computer setup. I use a Dell Precision M60 laptop which runs Windows XP only, and as a desktop I have a PowerMac G5 with two monitors attached that runs Panther. I switch the second monitor to my 2.6GHz custom built minitower, which is running Windows XP and Fedora Core 1. As soon as Mac laptops become as fast as the current desktops, I may abandon Windows too.

I have, you see, become a bit annoyed at the OSes I use. Finder aside, OS X is really a shining jewel in a sea of crap. The fact that Windows' modern shell is a gigantic hack is becoming more apparent every day. But I digress. I've been trying to use Linux, since Firefox is a cross platform app and we need to work well everywhere.

I have a number of complaints.

When I start the machine, the GRUB bootloader doesn't support USB keyboards, so I need to have a separate PS/2 keyboard plugged into the system for the sole purpose o f selecting which OS to load. This means every time I need to reboot the system I have to climb under my desk to work the bootloader keyboard.
The Fedora login screen and default background is drab and oppressive. The whole shell seemed like a scene out of 1984 with dull desaturated colors until I put a bright desktop background picture up.
The system has a Start-menu like button, yet the Windows key on my keyboard won't open it. Windows+D won't show the desktop. Apparently there's some crazy combo involving Alt and a Function key that does it. (Note: when you make me stretch my fingers in odd ways - i.e. you make me hit a Function key, you have failed in your UI design). Bryner said the designers probably avoided using the Windows key because there are some platforms and keyboards that don't have a Windows key. This may be, but an overwhelming majority of keyboards in the world at this point have a Windows key. Why not make the lives of 90%+ people easier? This is what I call "the spirit of linux" - designing a system for the lowest common denominator - where the LCD is a fruitcake Unix that should have died in 1983. Anyhow.
There doesn't seem to be a way of associating icons with files that any of the shells recognize. On Windows almost all executables have a resource section in the Portable Executable format that holds things like the application icon, and the desktop shell uses it when showing the file's icon. On MacOS X this data is either held in the resource fork of the file or in the application's bundle. On Linux it seems because of the different desktop environments and file shells that this critical aspect of desktop UE has simply been omitted. Applications provide icon files and expect users to configure things for themselves.
And now for my feature complaint, File Extraction - pretty much every time I use my Fedora machine I update my Firefox install on it. I always used to do this by using the shell - but now it seems I can double click on tarballs from within the Nautilus shell, so I began doing that.
1. I identify the Firefox tarball in my home directory, and select it. Immediately the icon becomes so darkly highlighted that it's almost impossible to make out what it is, but let's ignore that for the moment.
2. I double click on the icon and another window appears. This window looks superficially almost-the-same as Nautilus, and has no title bar identifier that would suggest it isn't. It has a location bar, some drably colored toolbar buttons, and a file view. I see the folder inside the tarball and think "Oh good, I can drag this out where I want it."
3. I create the target folder, called for this purpose, "Dumbass":
4. I now begin to drag the file. Here's where the problems begin: Every time I try this something different happens. The first time I try and drag, nothing ahppens.
5. The second time I try, as I'm dragging a dialog appears. Now, as a long time Windows user, I'm used to some pretty wacky UI, like right-click-drag and context-menus-on-menus. All of those were at least somewhat useful however. This is an abomination.
  
  What is this "File Roller"? What is it doing? It says it's extracting! I didn't drop the folder anywhere yet! Where is it extracting my files to?
6. Unnerved but still determined, I drag over to the target folder and release. I get nothing.
7. I try again. Same unnerving dialog during drag. This time when I drop I get a message:
  
  Uh... huh? I didn't do anything. No folder extracted though.
8. I try again. Same strange dialog during drag, but this time I get the folder extracted to the place I want it.
9. Then, I try to reproduce this to make a screenshot for this article. This time when I do the same operation I get another dialog, this time for Nautilus:
GAH!

Posted by ben at March 18, 2004 4:23 PM

Comments

I believe that you may have to enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS in order to get GRUB to recognize and use it. I definitely recall being able to use my Apple Pro Keyboard with my Linux box (i815 motherboard) on boot. You don't say what kind of motherboard your Linux box uses, so I can't be any more specific than that.

Posted by: Mihai Parparita at March 18, 2004 5:03 PM

Ctrl+Alt+D will show the Desktop - something I'm grateful for on my ThinkPad (no ThinkPad has a Windows key).

Also, I hope you filed a bug for the extraction problems in File Roller :-)

Posted by: Steven Garrity at March 18, 2004 5:14 PM

Considering there's no commonly used concept of "Disk Images" on linux I actually don't understand why File Roller needs to be a separate app - a compressed archive should just be considered another type of folder that Nautilus can view.

Posted by: Ben at March 18, 2004 5:51 PM

2. You can change the login screen from System Settings > Login Screen. I personally like the dark blue colors, but that's just me. :) It's doubleplus good!

3. Some distributions have something set to the Windows key. I know that Mandrake 9.2 used it for the start menu. In Preferences > Windows, Fedora can use the Windows key for something. Another possibility is to edit the keymap, but I've never done that before (I should, though, 'cause I'm using a laptop with multimedia keys).

5. Wow. I can't really say anything other than something that might account for the random dialogs is that it was finally working after a delay after you dragged it the first time.

I've only been using Linux for less than 6 months, though, so I'm no Expert(TM)! :o) Good luck, though! Fedora's one of my favorite distros.

Posted by: David Holden at March 18, 2004 6:36 PM

[Right click > extract to...] is how I've always done it.

And I like the default Fedora colors. Then again, I may just be a dark, moody kind of guy ;)

Posted by: Alex H. at March 18, 2004 9:13 PM

I have no experience with Fedora. My Mandrake box however extracts files just as you describe it should be.

To David Holden: before playing with XModMaps and stuff, try lineakconfig. Lets you configure special functions for special keys. Don't know if laptop keyboards are supported though...

Posted by: ricky at March 18, 2004 11:22 PM

I've found that SuSE 9.0 seems to handle compressed files sanely and certainly haven't had the fun and games you've had!

Funnily enough, what really bugs me about using Linux is clicking "show" in Firefox's download manager doesn't open Nautlius/Konquerer for the relevant directory like it does in Windows.

Posted by: Rob... at March 19, 2004 1:06 AM

Regarding 4:

All desktops "should" be using the .desktop spec from www.freedesktop.org. If they aren't, then that's a bug.

Anyway, a lot of your problems seemed gnome-specific, but then I suppose your list of complaints would have been different and not shorter in KDE.

Posted by: Joeri at March 19, 2004 2:51 AM

I would recommend that you try KDE (download the new 3.2.1 RPMs for Fedora).

As Joeri says your list of problems are likely to be different and not necessarily shorter but you might find the interface preferable to that of GNOME. I for one do find it much more logical and have had far fewer problems using it than I had with GNOME. YMMV but if you don't try it you will never know.

If the Windows key isn't mapped to the KDE "start" menu by default you can easily change the default mapping in the Control Centre.

IIRC zip files will open in Konqueror and not in a separate app - (I'm not on Linux here and I usually extract from the command line anyway).

A quick search on Google for 'usb keyboard grub' has a Dell forum post (Dimension 8100 range) recommending enabling USB emulation in the Integrated Devices section of the BIOS (as Mihai recommended in the first comment).

Posted by: Robert Wall at March 19, 2004 4:56 AM

Alt+F1 = show applications menu
Ctrl+Alt+D = minimise all

Both, along with others, can be edited in the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel applet.

Posted by: zee at March 19, 2004 5:28 AM

regarding this post, see your previous post on the "complaint department". ;)

Posted by: me at March 19, 2004 7:57 AM

Wow, you people just don't get it.

Ben shouldn't have to do any of these things, (editing keymaps, altering keyboard shortcuts, download a different desktop manager) they should Just Work (tm) out of the box.

This is exactly why I only run blackbox and shells on FreeBSD, none of this mucking about with files that don't work exactly like I expect them to.

Posted by: Eric Hodel at March 19, 2004 7:58 AM

Oh, I almost forgot.

No two of you have given the same solution to the problems Ben experienced. This is why the Linux Desktop is still little better than a toy.

Posted by: Eric Hodel at March 19, 2004 8:01 AM

$ tar xvfz firefox-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz

... if you want to go the easy and fast way.

--Thomas

Posted by: Thomas Kaschwig at March 19, 2004 3:28 PM

eric hodel: Ben shouldn't have to do any of these things, (editing keymaps, altering keyboard shortcuts, download a different desktop manager) they should Just Work (tm) out of the box.
--

Well, Eric, the thing is (aside from the file-roller complaint and the USB keyboard thing, which are very valid complaints) they *do* work out of the box. It's just that they don't work with exactly the same keystrokes as he's been using on windows. People here are just giving helpful suggestions on how he might get GNOME to emulate windows behavior. (personally, i'd look into applications -> preferences -> keyboard shortcuts if you want to change things to work like windows).

I wouldn't try to suggest that the GNOME desktop doesn't have shortcomings, but complaining that it doesn't work out of the box just because it doesn't emulate every windows behavior is pretty unreasonable. Just as it would be unreasonable to complain about windows "not working out of the box" since they don't implement the same keystrokes as GNOME, no?

Posted by: jonner at March 24, 2004 7:36 AM

I avoid anything that is remotely linked to RedHat personally. Mandrake and SuSE work very well, as does Debian but that's a little more than I'm willing to put up with. Mandrake is my personal favourite. Oh, and three magical letters: K. D. E.

Posted by: Darrin at March 24, 2004 3:15 PM

Minutiae nitpick regarding the File Roller Add and Extract toolbar icons:

Add should have an arrow above it pointing into an open box.

Extract should have an arrow partly inside pointing out the top.

Posted by: Daniel J. Wilson at March 29, 2004 5:22 PM

John Gruber would have a field day with you guys. Go read daringfireball.net until you achieve enlightenment.

Posted by: dzd at May 4, 2004 12:09 PM

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March 18, 2004

Adventures in Linux

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