Older blog entries for leio (starting at number 2)

User-friendly GNU/Linux distributions exist?

I've always in the past year told to my friends, that Linux being hard is just a myth, and there are easy for beginners distributions out there, like Fedora core, Ubuntu, Mandrive, suse, and so on. Lately I've been suggesting Ubuntu based on the hype to friends that I certainly can't classify as complete dumb-users, but quite knowledgeable people with computers - but not GNU/Linux.

Results:

One could install Ubuntu and talk with me over MSN, only to let out the frustration about it: estonian keyboard layout didn't work despite best efforts in configuring it in the keyboard preferences of GNOME; could after long messing around get just one program to work with mp3's (I hope Fluendo's recent MP3 plugin for gst will have a remedy there); NTFS partitions were inaccessible; videos didn't work (codecs likely).

So him I walked through editing xorg.conf to get a more permanent solution than setxkbcomp after each reboot. I also instructed him to edit /etc/fstab accordingly - turnt out it did have the mountpoints in /media, but only accessible to root. After failing with a proper umask, a uid option did the trick in /etc/fstab. No way he could have figured that out by himself without looking hours for the answer. To be honest, I don't know if there is a GUI front-end to fstab in Ubuntu, but it certainly wasn't findable for him. Video playing support is postponed right now.

Update: He got videos to work after messing on his own for a couple hours (extra repositories, and so on).

Another one tried Ubuntu too. Result: reboots during installation process, leading to nowhere near of getting the thing even installed.

In the first half of last year I suggested Fedora to another friend. He could get it installed, but to get it close to usable to his needs, I had to hack on the system myself for quite many hours, after he failed in a couple days of trying.

So, what distribution ought I suggest for my friends who want to get away from the (to me) inferior OS?

On the xorg mailing list Benjamin Herrenschmidt posted "Radeon mem map fix(#2): Need regression tests please", that includes a patch that hopefully makes the "radeon memory map finally sane, removing all sort of hacks, and possibly fixing all sort of weird bugs".

Well, here's a modularized version of this patch, and here's a little overlay for bleeding-edge gentoo users that includes this patch. Use it at your own risk, you might end up having to restart your system, or worse... or get something fixed. Please follow the mailing list for details, I'm just publicizing an ebuild and modularized patch of this.

This appears to be my first blog (diary?) post - ever. So don't reprimand me in any way ;)

I suppose I should introduce myself for starters:

I'm your 21 year old regular hacker from Estonia. I currently reside in the capital city, Tallinn, and work at the Centre of Registers of Ministry of Justice. In my free time from college and work I have been mostly involved with various GUI related libraries and applications. I'm a member of the wxWidgets development team, working mostly on various areas of the wxGTK port. I became closer involved with wxWidgets by working on an advanced cross-platform graphical MUD client called wxMUD, of which I promise to make a first release one nice day (this time I'm not giving any promised deadlines, however). From there I've been slowly moving to lower levels too, such as diving into the internals of pango and GTK+, test release candidates of Xorg, and so on.

I am also the GTK+ port maintainer and developer of the OMGUI open source multiplatform GUI toolkit, which is still in its infancy, but progressing steadily thanks to Robin McNeill's tremendous efforts in moving it forward and making me and others catch up with the various ports.

My OS of choice is GNU/Linux and distribution of choice Gentoo Linux. I will probably mostly blog in the future about wxGTK, OMGUI, wxMUD, GTK+, pango, X.org, and things related to GNOME and open source overall.

It appears that writing this all isn't all that quick of an effort (in case of the first time at least), so as its quite late, I shall go to sleep now and write more at a later date.