Mystic Paint

For anyone who doesn’t know what Linux is, it is an operating system, which means that it is the basic software that turns what would otherwise be an electric paperweight into something called a computer. If you are reading this, statistically your computer is probably running one of the Microsoft Windows operating systems. You can think of Ubuntu as an alternative to Windows.

How different is Ubuntu from Windows? Well, you might say it is as different from Windows as a Macintosh is. If that doesn’t describe it well enough for you, basically you can do all the same things on Ubuntu as you can in Winodws or on a Mac, but will likely do it with different software than you would have in Windows or on a Mac.

If you already have Windows, why should you care about Linux and/or Ubuntu? To an average person, knowing an alternative to Windows means you will have the knowledge required to be a more savvy consumer as far as computers are concerned, and with all honesty, depending exclusively on Microsoft is a little like putting all your eggs into one basket. If you are a technical minded person, interested in programming, interested in tech support, or see yourself managing technology for a business or corporation, you absolutely NEED to learn about Linux or you may find yourself falling behind your peers.

Is Ubuntu strictly for novice computer users? No, it isn’t, but it is very nice for novice computer users. Experienced Linux users will find it does essentially everything that any Linux distribution can do, but is simply a very nice concise set of defaults. If you want to compare it with Windows, you may think of it as an easy to use, clean system that is free of all that shareware and advertising that seem to pile on heavier and heavier in each new version of Windows on systems purchased from PC manufacturers.

From what perspective am I writing about this? Well, my first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 (it still works). My first IBM compatible system was a 386 running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0. Collecting older versions of DOS and Windows was a bit of a fun hobby, and reading about them is fun computer history and trivia. Anyone who is wondering, Windows 1 can be run from a pair of 5¼ inch floppy disks on an 8086 system with no hard drive. Since my 386 I’ve dealt with pretty much every version of Windows, and have been performing PC and server support since 486 roamed the earth. As for Linux, I dabbled with Slackware back in the late 90’s, but finding no software that interested me at the time, I abandoned Linux until a couple of years ago. I tinkered with many many distros, and decided I liked Debian a whole lot. I liked Debain enough that I resisted even trying Ubuntu, but when I finally did try I decided it was absolutely terrific. Ubuntu filled me with enthusiasm that the older versions Windows used to provide, back before Microsoft seemed to loose their way and sort-of ruined Windows. I realize that there are people who actually like Windows Vista, but having supported so many other versions, Vista just seems sour by comparison to older superior versions of Windows. Ah NT4, how I love thee… Anyhow, With Vista’s general crumminess, and Ubuntu’s ability to run great even on older hardware, there has never been a better time to switch to Linux. Just so I don’t leave them out, Macintosh are fine, but I ain’t made of Money; When you buy a Mac, you buy into a world of fairly pricey Apple products.

Time to get to the meat. As I type this, it is September of 2007. Ubuntu 7.10 is set for release in October. I’ve been tinkering with the beta of Ubuntu for a couple of months, and have had it installed as the OS on my tablet PC for roughly a month. Prior to that, my tablet was running Ubuntu 7.04, and prior to that my tablet was running Windows XP.

Installation went fine. The “test system” is a Toshiba Satellite R10 tablet PC, with Intel chipsets running though most of it. Intel is good about Linux driver support, so already my system had a good advantage and Ubuntu 7.10 detected all my device, just as 7.04 had before. The tablet functionality from my understanding comes from a Wacom chip, and Ubuntu saw and let me use my pen just fine. My only real compliant might be that Ubuntu doesn’t know when I flip my screen around. To be fair, Windows didn’t see it either. Back when the system ran Windows, flipping the screen was something that was handled by utilities that came from Toshiba. It’s not that big of a deal, because I can just rotate the whole thing myself easily enough, but the option would have been nice. On the whole it detected my hardware better than Windows XP, which is expected because it is a newer OS than Windows XP.

In all honesty, when I first downloaded and ran the iso for 7.10 I was very wary of it. From what I could see at the time it bore a great resemblance to 7.04, but lacked any of the stability that 7.04 had. happily this seems to have cleared up, especially in the past few weeks. I must have downloaded half a gig or updates in the last month alone, and the difference has been very noticeable. Thats not to say that is has all the kinks worked out yet. Gnome still pauses and goes gray a little every now and then when I’m browsing folders, but it hasn’t been restarting in a while. The only real standout in instability for me has been the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. Ubuntu 7.10 comes with a GIMP 2.4 release candidate installed, and it is still far from stable.

If you don’t deal with editing photos, you may not be bothered by the lack of a stable functioning GIMP, but I use it a lot, and it irritates me no end. GIMP 2.4 on Ubuntu 7.10 currently locks up in several situations. It may lock up during an image resize, it may lock up when creating a new image, and it may lock up while perusing the preferences menus. The SVG import has yet to function correctly for me, which bugs me somewhat because the graphics for this site are essentially built using SVG and PNG. I remain hopeful that these issues will be resolved soon, so that I can use my tablet PC the way I would like to. On the bright side, GIMP 2.4 does seem to have an improved toolbox, with a a few nice new features. The menus seem to have a different layout than GIMP 2.2 had, which actually bugs me a little because I liked them the way they were. I don’t think it will be hard to get accustomed to.

As for eye candy. Ubuntu 7.04 came with Beryl, but Ubuntu 7.10 comes with Compiz Fusion to provide it’s eye candy. It has been pretty slick. My tablet has an Intel graphics chipset, so unlike owners of Nvidia and ATI, my system ran it with pretty much no effort. Whether owners of those more powerful graphics chipsets get rewarded with better and fancier effects I couldn’t say. This is a tablet PC, so thoughts of upgrading my video card are not very realistic and therefore not something I generally put much concern into. Anyhow, Ive got wobbly windows that stick to the sides of my screen like boiled spaghetti, detaching like snagged springs when I pull far enough. This kind of fun can only hurt my productivity, but I like it and I’m keeping it. Up until a few minutes ago, it gave me a nice rotating cube for my desktops, but at the moment it’s giving me sliding desktops. Nothing wrong with sliding desktops, it’s very clean looking and quick, but these effects are about fun and I think I’m going to look into turning my rotating cube back on.

PDF creation. To many people, PDF’s may not be important. PDF isn’t perfect, but hey, they print how they look and almost any computer made in the last 20 years can read them. Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice, which has terrific PDF export ability. For any apps that don’t have PDF export abilty, you can print to an imaginary printer that will create PDFs from essentially any application that can print. In Ubuntu 7.04 PDF support provided by the cups-pdf package was pretty easy to grab and install. In Ubuntu 7.10 it comes pre-installed. On the surface that seems good, but they seem to have goofed a little on it. Rather than asking you where to leave the file, and rather than simply putting in your documents or on your desktop, it defaults to leaving the output in the /var/spool/cups-pdf/ANONYMOUS directory. To new folks the PDF may as well not exist, because they won’t know where it is. As if hiding it weren’t enough, the permissions on that folder are fairly restrictive, so you need root access to do anything with it. Hopefully they will address this problem. To anyone compelled to compare this with Windows, Windows simply doesn’t come with the ability to print to PDFs at all, though if you want you can go out and look for software to do that (I recommend PDF Creator).

OpenOffice is included with Ubuntu, and with Ubuntu 7.10 they are even nice enough to create a link for the drawing application. Just as with previous versions, OpenOffice is swell. It supports the OpenDocument standard format, as well as many proprietary formats including but not limited to most Microsoft Office document formats. One of the oddest things to realize when transitioning away from Microsoft products, has been how obvious that is is that there are two worlds of document out there. There are documents supported and used by Microsoft, and then there is essentially everyone else in the world. This barrier is something that Microsoft has created to help retain customers by making it hard for them to switch away, and for the most part it works out for Microsoft. In their defense, they didn’t invent the idea of vendor lock-in, they were just the ones who were successful at it.

For the most part, the remained of the software that comes with Ubuntu 7.10 is the same that comes with 7.04. The menus have changed, and while the preference menu may still be a little on the long side, it’s still very usable. One minor, but excellent change is what you receive when you change desktop background via right-clicking the desktop, you get nice tabbed access to many other display settings. There are other ways in there, but this is pleasant change. The only downside to this change, is that when setting the wallpaper from within the Gnome image viewer, the wallpaper dialog is not loaded as it was in Ubuntu 7.04. With the dialog not being displayed, the wallpaper you are setting is not necessarily kept in the wallpaper memory for easy access later. This is really only an issue if you are using the image viewer to populate the list with several wallpapers at once, and an easy workaround is to simply open the dialog yourself before you start and let it sit in the background. If you are using Windows, you are kind missing out in regards to wallpaper selection. I’m actually a bit surprised I haven’t seen any third party apps to approximate this function in Windows. Unlike Windows, you can use PNG and SVG in addition to the image formats you may be used to, all the while enjoying many more scaling options and a memory of the Wallpapers you have used before along with the customized settings of that wallpaper.

I could go on about minutia forever, but to wrap it it, Ubuntu 7.10 is pretty darn nice. While a month ago I wasn’t sure it would be ready when they released it, it seems pretty obvious now that it will be. In fact, it might be nice to beat the rush and just go ahead and get the thing now.