Linux for My Wife
I’ve been through a lot lately. Even though by profession I am a network engineer with a popular cable channel, I am first and second tier desktop support for my home network. Sometimes the support calls are far more sensitive from home than from work. I think most married geeks can sympathize. I figured I would share my experiences here.
My wife has a laptop, an HP dv6626 which sports an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Intel graphics and sound, built in webcam, built-in wireless and several on board connection options such as wired ethernet, firewire, USB and S-Video.
As a preface, I’ll say I do not get religious over what Linux distribution to use. I have a few favorites, but it’s all pretty much the same thing. I’ve had good experiences with them all so I really don’t care which one I’m using. My choice for this machine would be based on how much works with the least amount of effort and which one is best configured out of the box for reliable operation. My network is pretty solid but if my wife’s machine has constant issues it will cause issues.
I first downloaded and burned the 700MByte Ubuntu version 7.10. Ubuntu is intended to be geared to be easy to operate and administer. In many ways it is a very nice system based on Debian. While I am not as familiar with the Debian package management system, it is certainly workable. The on-line documentation is good which is typical given that the community writes it. The mission of Ubuntu is to make Linux accessible, and they seem to be doing a very good job. It was a good bet.
The machine loaded Ubuntu cleanly with everything including the webcam working straight away. Wireless networking came up fine as well as the display and all other hardware. The only thing lacking was sound. A quick search of the Ubuntu archives pointed to some obscure package for backports. Once this was installed, sound worked just fine. The downside was the mixer didn’t always change sound levels on the channel you intended. I admit I have a knowledge gap here which I will attempt to close someday. Over time I noticed a horrible problem with the wireless networking though. It would essentially lock up and not pass any traffic. No matter what I did, a reboot was all I could do to bring the laptop back on-line. I did try to look into the issue, but it is hard to take a machine away from someone who needs to use it long enough to troubleshoot that kind of issue.
I decided to punt due to the wireless network issues. I honestly have no idea what I expected. A driver written for this wireless card is very likely to be the same between different distributions anyway. Oh well, what the heck, right? I downloaded and burned the 4.2GByte DVD install of OpenSuSE 10.3 which is a huge prospect.
Installing SuSE Linux is a substantial process. It seems like it takes longer to complete than Ubuntu of Fedora. It’s probably a mind trick of some sort. At any rate, the DVD booted fine. I didn’t have to add any trickery to get the machine to boot. Fedora 7 was tossed to the side early on just because I was going to have to troubleshoot a boot issue.
The SuSE installation process via Yast was reliably predictable. The wireless network was detected and one input from me for the encryption key saw me through a successful update at the end of the install. I was pleased with the first boot as there was no tweaking necessary to get the X configuration running. I guess the only thing I really did was tell Yast to turn on 3D acceleration. Guess what? Sound didn’t work.
I searched the opensuse forums and found a link to someone with packages for 1.0.15 alsa packages. After installing these things, downloading and compiling and installing the kernel modules of the same version and rebooting, things came up roses. I have no idea why I had to reboot but I was missing something and getting an annoying symbol error when trying to load the snd-intel-hd module, so I gave up and rebooted… then it worked. Next, I right-clicked the kmixer icon and set the primary channel to the PCM which allowed the volume control keys on the keyboard to operate the sound. I probably need to change this to “Front” now that I think about it though because there are times you need to reduce the volume of PCM and other times where PCM won’t change the output volume.
So why the blog? Because I figure you care. I just wanted to endorse an old friend, SuSE. It’s a great distribution. If you are a yum addict, install yum and use it to manage packages. I don’t care though because yast and YOU is just fine for installing software and keeping things up to date. I still haven’t had a chance to try getting the webcam to work yet. Maybe I’ll do that next weekend. I’ll also test the firewire, USB and other connections to ensure everything is working.
Oh, and so far the wireless networking has not dropped out once…
Update 11/9/2007
Firefox keeps crashing. I don’t know why yet.
Fixed: When I restored her Firefox cache and settings, I left the old cache directory. I removed it and made sure her profile was referenced in the correct directory and things smoothed out right.
Update 11/12/2007
I became stupid. I succumbed to the temptation of reinstalling Windows due to some foreseeable issues with software. How dumb. Ellyn immediately started having issues with things not working. It wasn’t that Windows was misconfigured. It was that Windows Vista is just pretty much garbage. She couldn’t even print to our network printer. It starts a print job then just stops half way through the first page. What a crock. How does anyone use it? I am reinstalling Linux. She was mad.
Update 11/14/2007
This is the last installment for this post. After a couple more days of Linux, everything is quiet. I was concerned about the management of network connections, easily moving from wireless network to wireless network to wired network. These concerns seem to be unfounded. OpenSuSE has the NetworkManager function working fine. I think this is scheduled for inclusion in Fedora 9 as well. I am pleased with SuSE which is no surprise. This distribution has been unyielding in it’s consistency for many years. The desktop features and end-user niceties are testament to the lengths Linux has gone to integrate with everyday users and are fairly universal amongst major distributions. My whole-hearted recommendation for anyone with ordinary desktop user needs is to try Linux. I installed the free VMware Server software on my wife’s laptop and installed a copy of Windows XP Pro I had left over from another machine. That allowed me to install iTunes, which works flawlessly for her. That said, I recommend cutting all ties to other software. Use OpenOffice and the myriad other software available and don’t try to run Windows based software anymore. The cost will be not buying software at Wal-Mart. The benefits include stability and reliability but don’t end there. There is a plethora of commercial and free software on the market today for both Windows and Linux. Many of these packages have evolved into great competition for the big names. For image processing, The Gimp is by far beyond your expectations for free software; you will no longer be saving your pennies to buy Adobe Photoshop! Forget Nero and either go command line, or use K3B. You will miss nothing. There is also plenty of DVD authoring tools available as well as multimedia applications to satisfy every need. While I recognize moving from Windows to Linux represents a huge change and one that will not be altogether intuitive, I also recognize that the new versions of Windows being thrust upon us are in themselves aggravations. Besides, ask yourself this question: If I can’t figure it out in Linux with the aid of awesome user forums from each distribution and the search power of Google, is it really Linux’s fault or would I have trouble with Windows, too? Ha!
