djst's nest

My new digital camera?

I've always been interested in photographing, but never owned a decent camera. My current Olympus 1.3 megapixel point-and-shoot camera is really a crappy piece of product with no optical zoom and a really poor lens, resulting in blurry, noisy pictures. I got it for just $40 a few years ago though, so for being almost free, I can't complain about it that much.

This summer, Sofie and I will travel abroad together for the first time and it would be a miss not to have a better camera then. Since I enjoy taking slightly more advanced pictures than the standard blurry, red-eyed party images most people are perfectly happy with, I don't want a simple compact camera with 3x optical zoom. I like experimenting with pictures, taking landscape pictures and zooming in on objects without loosing image quality because of the digital zoom. I also admire my father's macro photos of flowers and raindrops and would like to try some of that too. On the other hand, a full blown system camera would be too expensive and too cumbersome to carry and use, especially when travelling. Therefore, I'm thinking of choosing something in between.

Originally, I was going for the Minolta Dimage Z20, which seems to be a great camera with a very small price tag. It has a decent 8x optical zoom lens and compared to most compact digital cameras I've tried so far, the picture quality is excellent. However, both Sofie and I enjoy filming small video clips (one of the few features of my Sony Ericsson K700 mobile phone that is actually fun to use, although the video quality is as poor as it gets), and unfortunately, the Z20 doesn't support video with audio. Video without sound is not very interesting, is it?

Therefore, I think I'll go for Z20's bigger brother, Z5 (the silver version), which supports video with sound. Furthermore, it has a whopping 12x optical zoom lens and an anti-shake mechanism that's likely to produce even better pictures than the Z20, at least in my not-made-of-stone-hands. Of course, it's a bit more expensive, but I plan on keeping it for a few years so it might be worth it.

I'll probably not buy it just yet, since the vacation isn't until June. Also, the price may drop in a few months since the camera is still very new on the market.

Does anyone have experience with the Z5, or other cameras of the Z-series? Is it a good buy or are there better alternatives within the same price range?

New Thunderbird Start Page

I just updated the Thunderbird start page a bit. I think this one looks more modern than stylish compared to my original design.

Old vs New.

How to kill a few hours of your time

I was a bit surprised about the vast amount of gmail requests in my Get your gmail account post, especially since Asa's original post only received about half of the requests. He must have a lot more visitors than this blog, so the only explanation I can think of is that his visitors are already using gmail. :)

Anyway, I'm glad I could help you all out and hope you'll enjoy your new e-mail address.

Get your gmail account!

Inspired by Asa's initiative, I'm giving away my 50 gmail invites to whoever wants them. Include your full e-mail in the blog comment so I can just copy it and paste it in the invitation box. Do not obscure the e-mail address! If I can't just copy and paste it, you won't get an invite.

Update: There are now a hundred new gmail users out there. Sorry, but I have no invites left.

The Ubuntu People's Reactions

Every time you write something negative about a product, you end up making a small group of people from that product's community mad because you don't agree entirely with them. To those people: I said that it was just my personal opinion.

Looking back at my experiences with Ubuntu after knowing about apt-source and the sudo feature, I think the approach of disabling the root account makes more sense today than I did yesterday. But it's not what I expected as a former Linux user and it deserves an explanation in the installer so people like myself would know why they can't log in as root anymore. It should also be mentioned in the installer how important the password for the first user is because of this, since it basically becomes the root account. Finally, this apt-source feature should not be completely hidden. Instead, it should be integraded with Synaptic Package Manager to make it easy to install any software, not just the pre-compiled ones.

Of course, I was wrong when saying Ubuntu was the hardest distro to install. I completely forgot Gentoo. What I ment was the hardest to install mainstream distro. Gentoo is a geek distro. ;) But one thing's for sure: a installer that wants to wipe all your partitions by default really isn't helping the average user. And the truth is, I've never failed to enable the sound card in any other ALSA-based distro. It has always worked from the beginning, only with muted channels. The hardware detection in Ubuntu needs work and I'm sure it will work better in their next release.

I've never said VidaLinux is perfect, but it's the best distro I've installed and used so far. There are lots of things that needs work there too, such as Porthole (which I mentioned in the VidaLinux review). Anyway, I will be sure to test Ubuntu's upcoming Hoary release once it's out. And I look forward to try apt-source, now that I know it exists.

Hands on Ubuntu Linux

As I promised in my Gentoo Linux review a couple of weeks ago, I would also review Ubuntu Linux to see if it was a viable alternative. Between now and then, I've also had the wonderful opportunity to test VidaLinux Desktop OS, which already has turned into my default operating system. I knew before installing Ubuntu that it would be virtually impossible for it to convince me to switch distro again, and perhaps that biased me a bit. Anyway, my impression of Ubuntu is that it has potential for people who don't want to fiddle too much with their system, but it's far from perfect. Read on to get the details...

The Installer

Quite surprisingly for me who got the impression that Ubuntu were trying to make one of the easiest-to-use distros out there, the installer is text-based, meaning no mouse support and not the familiar graphical interface. While even the Windows XP installer is text-only, most people never have to install it, so it's not meaningful to compare the two. The most confusing part for newbies would probably be to figure out how to move between elements. Some screens required you to use the Tab key, but it wasn't documented anywhere. In the Fedora and VidaLinux installer (anaconda), there are always a line at the bottom of the screen explaining what keys to navigate with. In Ubuntu, you just had to know how to navigate, and I can assure you the installation would have ended right there if I were to ask e.g. my girlfriend to do it. Alternatively, I would have to stand behind her back and instruct her, which would make her even more frustrated. ;) So despite my assumptions, installing Ubuntu was actually harder than installing any other Linux distro I've tried so far (except for Gentoo, of course).

Another annoying thing with the installer: when choosing language it automatically chose keyboard layout and locale. I like having my operating systems in English, because I often spend time helping people with their computers and it helps having an English setup so I can give the exact instructions, not some lame translations. However, the Ubuntu installation forced me to choose keyboard layout, language and locale in one step, so I had to choose Swedish since my keyboard us using the Swedish layout.

On the other hand, the installer was pretty clever in one respect, as I mentioned yesterday. It didn't leave my system in an unbootable state just because I had used a broken CD-RW disc. The anaconda installer (at least in the Fedora releases I've tested) always halted whenever it detected problems with a package due to a CD read failure and this was quite frustrating at a time when I didn't know what was wrong with the CD's I burned (it was my SD-RAM memory chips that were faulty).

One final note about the installer: there's no choice of which applications to install. Defaults are used for everything, including Gnome, Evolution and Firefox. For me (a geek), this is a bit annoying, but at the same time I think regular users will not care much about changing defaults, so it's not a big drawback. You can always install or uninstall programs once you're up and running.

The Desktop

Once all applications are installed and you've created a default user, you get to the Ubuntu login screen (which is gdm with an Ubuntu theme). The desktop is brown, as shown in the screenshot. I'm not too fond of the appearance, but of course, that can be changed with a few clicks. The Gnome menu was arranged in a different manner compared to other distros, and I must say I liked that arrangement better. Ubuntu uses Program and Computer instead of the default Gnome setup which is Applications and Actions. Ubuntu's choice made more sense for a former Windows user.

Being used to hack a lot on my Linux systems after using Gnome and VidaLinux for a couple of weeks, I was quite surprised when I found out that I couldn't even log in as root in a virtual terminal. I then realized that the installer hadn't asked me for a root password! After spending some time trying to find the solution, I tried the Root Terminal item in the Program menu. It asked me to enter my password, so I entered the only password I've created so far (the one for the djst account) and it worked! In other words, I had direct access to the root account, by just using the password for the current account. Very strange, to say the least...

Synaptic Package Manager

This is the reason I was so sure beforehand that I wouldn't like Ubuntu as much as a Gentoo-based distro like VidaLinux: the package system. As with most Linux distributions, Ubuntu uses pre-compiled programs, also known as packages. This means that you can't easily install programs directly from the source code and optimize it for your hardware. Instead, you download pre-compiled packages that are built with generic optimization to work on most PCs. But that's just the minor downside of using packages. The major reason why I think a system like Portage (which uses source code instead of packages) is superior is the vast amount of software available. A server hosting pre-compiled packages needs someone to compile it and distribute it. That's not needed to the same extent when using plain source code. This all translates to a much higher probability that you'll find the software you want in Portage than it is with a system like the one in Ubuntu.

Here's to prove my point: On the default Synaptic server, I couldn't even find mplayer. MP3 support is not included either, for legal reasons. Firefox is strangely listed as version "mozilla-firefox (version 0.99+1.0PR.1+revertedto0.9.3-0ubuntu3)". Wow, that's a fancy name for Firefox 0.9.3. I can't wait for their "mozilla-firefox 2.0+2.0PR.1+revertedto1.0-ubuntu3" upgrade...

If I had the motivation, I could probably find out how to add more repositories and probably find both mplayer and MP3 support, but this is just the tip of an ice berg. I would eventually find programs not listed, or not being able to upgrade a program that was just released because of dependency problems. This is one of the reasons I never really liked Fedora. The ability to really customize your system is too limited.

However, for people who only need the mainstream software and who are not interested in staying up to date with updated software releases, Synaptic is probably sufficient. After all, it's really easy to use. As an example, I tried to install the Apache server software and within a minute, the http server was up and running. It even started itself automatically, so I have no idea how to turn it off. I assume /etc/init.d/apache2 stop is specific to Gentoo.

Harware Support

This was the biggest surprise for me. When booting, I got a lot of errors from modprobe about permission problems on modules and problems with hotplug. Either the installer is known to have problems with hardware or my computer is extremely unique. I couldn't get my sound card to work at all, and I tried to use all sorts of settings (ALSA being the one that really should work). Even though I've had problems with the sound card on every distro, it has always worked, just not properly. In Ubuntu it doesn't seem to work at all. Also, Totem Media Player couldn't play any of my videos. It just closed itself without leavning a trace of error messages or anything.

The verdict

This is of course my personal opinion, but I'd say there's no reason to use a package-based Linux distro when source-code-based distros exist. Even the installer was more convenient in VidaLinux when comparing with Ubuntu's, so you can't even argue that it would be easier to install a package based distro. Ubuntu and VidaLinux offer roughly the same default programs and roughly the same setup, but what's really making the difference is the ease of maintenance offered with a Linux distro using Portage. The ability to install anything, anytime is hard to beat. The system takes care of all dependency problems for you and you don't need to wait until someone else compiles the package for you.

The bottom line: if you're looking for an easy to install and easy to use Linux distribution, yet you want the ability to customize and optimize it, install VidaLinux, not Ubuntu. It's easier to install, easier to maintain and so much more flexible.

Improved Login Manager in gdm

I had to install this login manager theme, it's awesome. :)

Tried Ubuntu - Failed

The CD-RW disc I was using was no good. Fortunately the installer was decent enough to allow me to abort the installation without leaving the MBR in an unfinished state. I will give it a new shot once I get a better disc.