New OS and DE

[Robert Arkiletian]

I'm wondering what people (Kamloops, Saanich and elsewhere) are doing
for Sept. in terms of OS and desktop environments?

I'm leaning towards CentOS 6 as I know it the best, but also
considering Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

If I go Ubuntu, I think I would have to setup XFCE as default. I don't
think I can handle all the support issues with Unity. Am I being too
scared of Unity?

CentOS 6 uses good ol' gnome2 and is supported for a LONG time but
doesn't have as many desktop app packages as Ubuntu.

Fedora is no longer an option as DRBL doesn't work with systemd.

--
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada

[Freddie Cash]

On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Robert Arkiletian <rob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm wondering what people (Kamloops, Saanich and elsewhere) are doing
> for Sept. in terms of OS and desktop environments?

Dean has been testing various OSes and DEs in his diskless setup,
trying to find one that works well on systems with only 1 GB of RAM
and no swap, without being too disruptive compared to what we
currently run (KDE 3.10.x).

So far, he's eliminated the following:
- Ubuntu with GNOME3 using Unity
- Ubuntu with GNOME3 using GNOME-Shell
- Ubuntu with GNOME3 using fallback (2D interface that resembles GNOME2)
- Kubuntu with KDE4

All of the above require solid 3D acceleration and solid video drivers
and use a lot of RAM even in slimmed down interfaces. Unity and
GNOME-Shell are horrid to use, and too much of a change from KDE3 to
be picked up quickly and easily. NX connections also disable 3D
acceleration, so Unity/GNOME-Shell fall-back to the GNOME2 interface,
meaning you get a different desktop depending on how you login, which
is something we want to avoid.

He's currently testing Linux MINT (an off-shoot of Ubuntu) that uses
GNOME3 framework, but with a GNOME2 interface. So far, things are
looking good. There's a few issues to work out before it's deemed
worthy, but they don't appear to be insurmountable.

If that doesn't work out, he's going to look into XFCE, possibly via Xubuntu.

Another option is the Matte desktop, which is a continuation of
GNOME2, but it's future is a little fuzzy as there aren't that many
developers working on it. Same with Trinity, which is a continuation
of KDE3.

If you want more details on any of the above, Dean should be able to
fill you in on any specifics. :)

--
Freddie Cash
fjw...@gmail.com

[DeanMontgomery]

On Saturday, 14 July 2012 22:16:23 UTC-7, Robert Arkiletian wrote:

I'm wondering what people (Kamloops, Saanich and elsewhere) are doing
for Sept. in terms of OS and desktop environments?

Freddie summarized it well in his last email.

One of the reasons why I switched to Linux was because it was rock-solid stable, never crashed even if it was a bit behind in a few features. In the last few years desktop developers sacrificed stability for frequent-release with "new features".  Every change-log and release announcement page is topped with the new features like: "fixed stability issues"...    As everyone knows Linus Trovalds summarized the desktop in 2011 as an "unholy mess".  Linux desktops programmers thought it would be a bright idea to follow the path of Vista - add a bunch of bloat and eye-candy at the cost of stability/size/speed.  Why move the desktop to 3D space when 3D drivers are sparse, incomplete, and unstable?

* We have been running KDE 3.5 since 2006.  It has been great - starts in a few seconds, lots of features and never crashes. Low memory footprint.  However it is now old, with no new developers/packages and needs to be retired.

* KDE4 is too resource intensive for disk-less clients with 1G of RAM.  Some things just don't work well on NFS e.g. mysql datatabase to store system settings.

* KDE4 and Ubuntu Unity desktops use too much RAM for 1G client machines.  See chart at the bottom of the page.

* Ubuntu Unity is horrible to navigate!  It takes twice as long for kids to find & launch things.  Yes the idea of making your phone and your desktop interchangeable in one device is wonderful... but... who really want's a phone interface to a desktop PC?  Unity's blunder pushed Mint Linux to the top of the distrowatch.com charts.

* Gnome 3 ... is great if it would not crash.  It is just too new.  Memorizing a keyboard shortcut to reload the desktop is well... umm...

* Mint 13 ...  Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu mirrors and emphasizes listening to end-user needs.  Their desktop is called Cinnamon.  They have been at the top of the distrowatch.com charts ever since Ubuntu did their Unity oopsie.  I've been testing mint 13 for about a month now and it crashes probably once per week.  Not as good as as kde3/gnome2 but better than kde4/gnome3.

* XFCE - Linus switch from KDE4 to Gnome2 then from Gnome3 to XFCE in his hunt for a sane desktop.  I have yet to install and re-try to latest XFCE.  XFCE is on my todo list this month.

* Any Desktop environment that includes file content-indexing must have that indexing feature turned off - as it thrashes the server's RAID.  I have more detailed notes on things that should be checked & turned off for diskless if you want.

...
 

 

CentOS 6 uses good ol' gnome2 and is supported for a LONG time but
doesn't have as many desktop app packages as Ubuntu.

Yes Ubuntu + PPA packages has the biggest desktop user base and the most readily available up-to-date packages.  I've been trying to stick to a package base that is extensive and fairly up-to-date.  Also 12.04 LTS is good till April 2017.  Most end-users hate change and want to be able to sit down and do a task without having to re-learn the interface.
 

I've here are some desktop memory usage numbers:
www.sd73.bc.ca/download/Desktop_Mem_usage_2012.pdf

[Ryan Tandy]

On 12-07-14 10:16 PM, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
> I'm wondering what people (Kamloops, Saanich and elsewhere) are doing
> for Sept. in terms of OS and desktop environments?

We finished upgrading all our schools to Ubuntu 10.04 this year and have
no plans to make a big change soon. We do run several backports and
PPAs (notably LibreOffice) on top of the standard 10.04 packages. At
the moment I'm thinking about trying to go for Ubuntu 12.04 either next
summer, or school by school over the course of 2013/14.

My development time at the moment is going into backend administration
and management sorts of things: amalgamating our per-site LDAP
directories into a single district-wide directory, creating Ubuntu
packages of our modifications and tools, introducing configuration
management, etc.

We haven't made a final decision on where we're going next. Staff in
this department are all running Ubuntu 12.04 with Unity on our
workstations and I think that will be where we end up unless a really
great alternative emerges. This summer we are upgrading diskless client
RAM from 1GB (elem/mid)/2GB (sec) to 3GB/4GB resp. which we hope will
help with the increased requirements of newer software.

I personally don't have much sympathy for the eye-candy crowd ;) but our
users do want a fully-featured desktop, and we are getting quite a few
instances lately where people are purchasing Macs in response to
(perceived) shortcomings of the Linux desktops so we are having to
compete a bit to provide a desktop that they won't simply avoid using.
I don't think a transition to XFCE or LXDE would work well in this
situation.

Ubuntu 12.04 does contain Unity-2D (Qt based) as a fallback for the case
where 3D isn't well supported; I haven't tested it under NX yet though
and I don't believe NX supports Composite so I guess some features might
not work completely. Nonetheless I do plan to test both Unity and
Unity-2D thoroughly on diskless clients and I am considering making
Unity-2D the default session when we migrate to 12.04.

--
Ryan Tandy - Programmer/Analyst rta...@sd63.bc.ca
School District 63 (Saanich) +1 250 652 7385

[Seema Ali]

This is probably obvious, but what do the Macs have that Linux is not providing for those users who are using Macs?

From Seema
________________________________________
From: bcf...@googlegroups.com [bcf...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Ryan Tandy [rta...@sd63.bc.ca]
Sent: 16 July 2012 11:41
To: bcf...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Information Technology Department
Subject: Re: [bcfosss] New OS and DE

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[Ryan Tandy]

On 12-07-16 12:41 PM, Seema Ali wrote:
> This is probably obvious, but what do the Macs have that Linux is not providing for those users who are using Macs?

I'm not an expert on this so I hope someone from my department [cc'ed]
will correct me if I'm mistaken here...

The most frequently cited reason is the iLife suite: especially iPhoto
and iMovie are said to be quite a bit superior to the equivalents that
we currently provide on Linux, resp. Picasa/F-spot and Kino/OpenShot.

Some users also require specialized software such as the Adobe Creative
Suite or Microsoft Office; in cases where users purchase a device to
support that software without our input or approval, they often choose a
Mac rather than a Windows-based device.

The "without our input or approval" bit is an annoyance that we're
working on...

[DeanMontgomery]

The most frequently cited reason is the iLife suite: especially iPhoto
and iMovie are said to be quite a bit superior to the equivalents that
we currently provide on Linux, resp. Picasa/F-spot and Kino/OpenShot.

This last year we piloted Kdenlive with Ubuntu Studio in one elementary school. The video editing workstations got a local hard drive for scratch space to keep disk-io down on the server plus an AMD Athalon II X3 CPU to handle the real-time video effects.  Plus we provided on-line and on-site support
http://ehelp.sd73.bc.ca/course/view.php?id=42  Unfortunately there were no keen staff members that wanted to try it out.  All it takes is one or two keen staff members to try something then they start sharing it amongst themselves and requesting pro-d day tutorials etc.  This next year we are going to try a single Ubuntu Studio video editing machine in each school to see if it will catch on.

We are also finding it very interesting with the move toward online cloud-based solutions for media Picasa, Youtube etc.. Keeping the browser up-to-date in the schools is a high priority especially: Firefox and the official Chrome (not Chromium).

I'm guessing that Mac users are more willing to spend time learning how to use their Mac software because they spent a large sum of money which in turn motivates them to demonstrate that the product is worth the money.  I've actually spent over a day supporting a Mac lover trying to get iMovie to produce a video that was playable on their school website - I didn't find iMovie made things any easier.... Actually both of us found it a bit awkward in how and where iMovie imported/exported it's video not to mention that the Mac's cpu was slow to render.  Uploading to Youtube was easiest.  Then there is the Mac zooming doc bar which looks pretty until you start installing allot of apps - suddenly the zooming is a mission-critical feature because the doc-bar icons are slightly larger than a pixel - not to mention the not-so-logical order in which they appear on the bar.

The one thing Linux can gain from Mac is to make a decent effort to the "look beautiful" + "less is more" concept.

[Seema Ali]

Maybe you could have a show down during one of the staff meetings =].  Mac vs Linux. Set up the 2 computers, with 2 or 3 projectors and have a list of things to do to create a video and see which one is faster.  I'm not a video editor but if you can do some key things in a 5-10 minutes show down, at the end have a list of facts between the 2 including price, speed, availability, prettiness, etc,  then people will get the point and may come around to trying it out.

It might help to break some preconceived notions that Mac is significantly better.

From Seema.

---

From: bcf...@googlegroups.com [bcf...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of DeanMontgomery [montgom...@gmail.com]
Sent: 16 July 2012 15:28

To: bcf...@googlegroups.com
Cc: Information Technology Department
Subject: Re: [bcfosss] New OS and DE

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[Robert Arkiletian]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Freddie Cash <fjw...@gmail.com> wrote:
...

> If that doesn't work out, he's going to look into XFCE, possibly via Xubuntu.

I think Xubuntu 12.04 is only supported for 3 years. But you can get
the Xubuntu desktop on Ubuntu with the xubuntu-desktop meta package.

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 10:58 AM, DeanMontgomery
<montgom...@gmail.com> wrote:
...

> * Mint 13 ... Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu mirrors and emphasizes
> listening to end-user needs. Their desktop is called Cinnamon. They have
> been at the top of the distrowatch.com charts ever since Ubuntu did their
> Unity oopsie. I've been testing mint 13 for about a month now and it
> crashes probably once per week. Not as good as as kde3/gnome2 but better
> than kde4/gnome3.
>
> * XFCE - Linus switch from KDE4 to Gnome2 then from Gnome3 to XFCE in his
> hunt for a sane desktop. I have yet to install and re-try to latest XFCE.
> XFCE is on my todo list this month.
>

I think you will like XFCE it's gotten more attention now that many
more people are using it. I have found it to be very stable. I can't
remember having a crash with it. I think 12.04 comes with xfce 4.8 but
4.10 is out. It's not the most lightweight DE like say icewm but it is
a nice balance between elegance and footprint. I think you will be
pleasantly surprised by it. I have never tried Mint so I can't comment
but I have more faith in Ubuntu being around in 5 years than I do
Mint.

> * Any Desktop environment that includes file content-indexing must have that
> indexing feature turned off - as it thrashes the server's RAID. I have more
> detailed notes on things that should be checked & turned off for diskless if
> you want.
>

Yes please could you send me that offlist. Thanks.

[Robert Arkiletian]

On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Ryan Tandy <rta...@sd63.bc.ca> wrote:
...

> I personally don't have much sympathy for the eye-candy crowd ;) but our
> users do want a fully-featured desktop, and we are getting quite a few
> instances lately where people are purchasing Macs in response to (perceived)
> shortcomings of the Linux desktops so we are having to compete a bit to
> provide a desktop that they won't simply avoid using. I don't think a
> transition to XFCE or LXDE would work well in this situation.

Bit of fun.

Macbuntu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DrhZSoB6OE

Set it up and tell them Apple just bought Linux. They will love it. ;)

[Freddie Cash]

Heresy! Anathema! A pox on thee! How dare you sully the great history of the BSD OSes which make up the Darwin underpinnings of MacOS X, by claiming to be Linux!

:)

[DeanMontgomery]

Trimming the fat off of diskless clients allows for less disk IO on the server, faster client bootup,  and more client RAM free end-user desktop apps. Things to look for depends on your distro:

• automatic network managers
• file content indexers(nepomuk)
• software package management. update checkers
• 3rd party driver installers (jockey)
• smartboard tools
• cron & anacron
• cupsd - replace with /etc/cups/client.conf
• useless server daemons for diskless: samba, apache, mysql, etc.  ( some distros have these installed by default )

Here are the folders to look for various start-up scripts:

• /etc/init/ /etc/rc*.d
  
• /usr/share/autostart/  /usr/local/share/autostart
  
• /etc/xdg/autostart/
• /etc/X11/Xsession.d/
• /etc/rc.local

Here are some performance tips for both server and client:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Maximizing_Performance
  
• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=111878
• zram swap will compress RAM on the fly when the diskless machine uses up too much RAM - we found it helps keep the diskless client more stable as it reaches it's RAM limits.
• run top and atop on the client and sort the list my memory usage.
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_Tweaks
• definatly turn off antiphishing ( block... attacks ) it downloads 80MB database to disk - causing server disks to thrash.
• sqlite databases which contain bookmarks and history can become corrupt causing people to loose their bookmarks.   I have some scripts to detect corrupt sqlite databases for all users an any given server.
• automatically boot the lab before people sit down to use the computers and run preload on the clients to preload apps into RAM.
  

[Freddie Cash]

Here's an interesting article on how to re-GNOME-ify the Unity shell
on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Along with hints on installing other GNOME
shells like GNOME Classic, GNOME-Shell, and even ... Cinnamon. :) No
need to run an entirely different distro (Linux Mint).

http://www.osnews.com/story/26192/How_to_Undo_Unity

--
Freddie Cash
fjw...@gmail.com