DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 456, 14 May 2012

Feature Story (by Ralph Ellis)

A look at OpenBSD 5.1



I have always had a fondness for BSD-based systems. Even though my main desktops have usually been based on openSUSE due to its broad hardware support and software choices, I have experimented with PC-BSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD as alternative desktops and admired their under-the-hood simplicity and strong documentation. I had never stayed long with OpenBSD in the past due to the difficulty in either getting the X Window System to work properly or printer configuration or problems with multimedia files or hardware incompatibility issues. I am pleased to say that the most recent version of OpenBSD addresses most of these issues and deserves serious consideration as a desktop system.



I did not pick an easy test machine for the amd64 edition of OpenBSD 5.1. My Gateway Dx4300 is an AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processor machine with an ATI Radeon HD 3200 on-board graphics chip and an ATI Radeon HD4650 video card. FreeBSD, PC-BSD, NetBSD and earlier versions of OpenBSD would not install on this system and I would experience kernel panics, with video card problems normally being the issue. This time the OpenBSD text-based installer had no problems picking up my hardware and installing to an external USB hard drive. You will want to look at the OpenBSD installation documentation online before you install to have a better knowledge of your choices but the default selections are intuitive.



While the menu selection for which hard drive that I want to install to correctly pulled up all of my various hard drives and partitions, it did not provide me with any information about the drives themselves to identify them. I have more than one USB hard drive so I knew that my installation drive would be either sd6 or sd7 but I could not tell which was which until I started turning off the USB drives in a process of elimination. OpenBSD's install program did not become flustered with this and correctly identified which disks were now available without a reboot. I took the default layout and installed without any issue. The network was properly configured and I booted up into a command line. You can enable XDM as a login manger which I did.



Some video hardware does not require any special configuration for setting up a working video system. With my system though, I needed to run the "X -configure" command as root and edit the file. Because both the on-board and PCI card video chips were enabled, this led to a much more complicated /etc/X11/xorg.conf than necessary. I disabled the on-board video and this resulted in a much more manageable file. The editing consisted of eliminating some extra entries for multiple screens and the listing of both "radeon" and "vesa" cards. There are no proprietary video drivers in OpenBSD so there is no 2D or 3D acceleration. OpenBSD does this for security reasons.



The project's position is that, if the code is not open and available to audit, it will not be allowed into the system. In my case the "radeon" driver provided strong video performance. The only drawback was that if I wanted to play video files via HDMI on my TV, I was limited in my video resolution choices and I couldn't play the audio through the TV, but otherwise it did work just fine with the on-board audio system. The overall video performance was more than adequate. Hard core gamers, though, will prefer a system with proprietary drivers available.



I started to install software with the pkg_add command. You do have to tell OpenBSD where to find the files (see here) and look at a list of the available software on the FTP server. I used a laptop to consult the OpenBSD documentation while I installed software and configured the system. This made life a lot easier. You do need to regularly refer to the documentation on how to setup window managers; the CUPS printing system, etc. Your best window manager choice is probably KDE 3.5.10. Remember to pick up the key KDE programs, CUPS, Ghostscript, Foomatic, and so on.



As a quick side note on printing, I have always had some difficulty in getting printing to work in OpenBSD before. Usually OpenBSD works better with parallel port connections and printing via the LPD system. However, my computer does not have a parallel port and CUPS could not pick up my Brother HL-5170DN via the USB connection. However, once CUPS was enabled and after I connected my printer to the router via an Ethernet port, KDE had no problems finding my printer as a TCP network printer. This was a handy fix to an annoying problem.



OpenBSD 5.1 amd64 does not have Adobe Flash support but the i386 version does. This is less of an issue now that many websites support HTML5. Of the available browsers, SeaMonkey 2.6 handled the HTML5 video content best. There are workarounds though. You can add plugins to redirect the Flash content to an external video player such as VLC which easily handles Flash files or capture and download the Flash content and then play it with a video player. OpenBSD also supports MPlayer and all the necessary codecs to play any video or audio content that you would like to explore.



The range of software available via the packages system covers all of the needed office, multimedia, graphics and development software that you could want. What is not available in the package collections can be build via ports. As a side note, FreeBSD or PC-BSD could never work with my Canon Lide 60 scanner but OpenBSD picked it up immediately once I added my user to the "sane" group. This was a pleasant surprise as this was a consistent graphics issue that I could never resolve in FreeBSD after version 6.1.



The device drivers are cleanly written in OpenBSD and, while not everything works immediately out of the box, all of my desktop requirements were met within two days of reading and configuration. A complete newbie user should not get into OpenBSD without some serious reading of the documentation first. More experienced users will have no problems working with OpenBSD as long as you keep the documentation close at hand. Die-hard tinkerers will have a field day and will be rewarded with a fast, functional desktop with a renowned reputation for software security and quality.





Miscellaneous News (by Ladislav Bodnar)

First alpha of Debian Installer 7.0, The Debian Administrator's Handbook, Ubuntu Studio at UDS, Ubuntu 12.10 features



Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 "Squeeze" was released over 15 months ago, so it shouldn't be too unreasonable to start focusing one's attention on the next stable Debian - version 7.0 "Wheezy". And indeed, it seems that the first tentative building block of the new release was announced over the weekend. It's the initial build of the Debian Installer for "Wheezy". Cyril Brulebois announced the fact on one of the project's mailing lists: " The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the installer for Debian 'Wheezy'. Improvements in this release of the installer: Add WPA support to installer; improvements in link detection and DHCP configuration, which should improve reliability for systems with flaky network cards; release DHCP lease at the end of the install to work around problems with non-RFC compliant DHCP servers; the requirements for hostnames have been clarified, and the parser tightened up to avoid letting through some really dodgy names; added Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) support; Linux kernel version has been updated to 3.2.16; default file system changed to ext4; allow Btrfs /boot partition (GRUB 2 and LILO); add support for Network Block Devices (NBD). " A range of CD, DVD and USB images for a number of architectures, featuring the new Debian installer, can be downloaded from this page.



There is more good news for the users and fans of the world's largest Linux distribution project. After a long and hard fund-raising campaign Debian developers Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas have generated a sufficient amount of money to enable them to work full-time on an English translation of Cahier de l'admin Debian. The translation has now been completed and The Debian Administrator's Handbook released: " I am so glad that we managed to complete this project. Roland and I have spent countless hours on this book since December, both for the translation itself and also for all the things that we tend to forget: a nice book cover, a great book layout for the print version, coordinating the work of reviewers, registering as an editor to get an ISBN, etc. I think I will come back to this in a future article because some parts of the story are interesting. " The book is available for free online viewing and for direct download (in PDF, EPUB, Mobipocket formats), although the authors hope to receive a small contribution for the electronic version. A dead-tree edition is also available, but it costs US$48.86 + shipping. The Debian Administrator's Handbook is presently the most up-to-date English-language book on Debian GNU/Linux.



* * * * * Last week's Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Oakland, USA, provided many interesting articles in the Linux media. One of the participants was Scott Lavender, the founder and lead developer of Ubuntu Studio. Those readers interested in low-latency kernels, multimedia development and related activities should find the author's "confessions" from the conference a refreshing read: " One such meeting resulted in the suggestion that I should attempt to get the Ubuntu kernel team to maintain the -lowlatency kernel instead of the Ubuntu Studio team. The main reason is that the patch to make the changes to the configuration files is very small (a purported 'two lines') and could easy be made into a build option which all could be completely automated. Every security patch would happen concurrently as the main kernels are updated and without any additional effort. In contrast, the Ubuntu Studio team needs to manually update the -lowlatency kernel which is not an inappreciable amount of work, for each security update. And these sometimes lag a bit due to scheduling. This would be a major improvement to remove a significant responsibility and time commitment from our small team. " There is also a second article which expands on "Desktop JuJu".



* * * * * For those readers who didn't have a chance to follow the above-mentioned UDS conference, here is a concise summary of possible Ubuntu 12.10 features, courtesy of OMG! Ubuntu!: " Ubuntu GNOME fans will be excited by word of a potential vanilla GNOME Ubuntu spin (i.e. GNOME-Shell Remix). Elsewhere, GNOME 3.6 will be used as the base of Ubuntu 12.10. Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer will be 'beefed up' to provide all of the features offered by the 'alternate installer', resulting in the latter being dropped as a download option. The installer will also see the Windows settings migration assistant feature removed. The team conclude that it is too untested and buggy to remain in place. LibreOffice will finally ship with AppMenu support out of the box, making it fully HUD accessible. Jockey, Ubuntu’s current 3rd party driver installer, will be replaced with a 'better version integrated with System Settings'. Ubuntu 12.10 will use the 3.5 kernel, with a view to supporting the 3.6 version after its release. Python 3 will ship on the CD by default, meaning that various default applications and utilities will be rewritten to take advantage of this. "





Follow-ups (by Jesse Smith)

Update on Calligra 2.4 Kexi and Krita



A few weeks ago I dedicated a review to the new Calligra office suite, formerly known as KOffice. Most of the experience was a positive one. The few bugs or frustrations I ran into could largely be summed up as either personal preference or a side effect of running a beta version of the suite. At the time I had been running Calligra beta 6 from a Ubuntu PPA repository. One bug which stood out came from trying to use the Kexi application to create databases, specially I was unable to create a new database file and was unable as a result to explore Kexi.



Since the review appeared on DistroWatch I've received a good deal of feedback, all of which I appreciated. There was one e-mail in particular which caught my attention and I'd like to share it here: " I'd like to say thank you for reviewing the Calligra 2.4 release. As a Kexi maintainer, I checked availability of Kexi for Ubuntu since you wrote about issues with even a simple setup. Kexi is available for Ubuntu 12.04 and is used by quite a few people with success, apparently works out of the box for them. Please note that we do not deploy the software -- so maybe Ubuntu had not tested some applications (including Kexi) in their beta versions. So the answer is to test the final 2.4.0. I understand a packaging problem was spotted. Thanks again for your interest in Calligra. Regards, Jaroslaw Staniek. "



Since Mr Staniek took the time to track down the problem and confirm that the final release of Kexi was working and was available in the Ubuntu repositories I thought it only fair to give Kexi a second try. Kexi (the final release version) is available in the Ubuntu 12.04 repositories and the Kexi application can be downloaded on its own, without requiring us to download the entire Calligra suite. The package is under 10 MB in size, making for a very small download if we already have the necessary KDE libraries installed.



From the point of view of its interface Kexi is perhaps the odd one out when viewed next to the other Calligra applications. Where the other members of the Calligra suite have mostly stuck to a traditional menu system with a very flexible arrangement of toolbars and toolboxes, Kexi presents something more akin to the ribbon interface. Along the top of the screen we find tabs for handling files, creating various components, managing data, importing & exporting, a tools tab and a help menu. When we're working with a database, components of that database (tables, queries, forms, etc) are displayed down the left side of the screen. Opening any of these components will cause information to display on the right side of the window and further present us with two or more tabs. Typically one tab will deal with design (table layout, constructing queries and forms) and another tab will deal with the raw data available in the table or query results.







Calligra 2.4 Kexi - viewing data tables

(full image size: 61kB, screen resolution 1024x702 pixels)

At first glance it's a lot to take in and the interface, being a bit different than the other Calligra components, may take time to become familiar. However, I did find that the design and function of each component, each tab, was consistent. Once a user becomes accustomed to how Kexi works, I found that Kexi provides a very straightforward point-and-click approach to dealing with databases. As with the other members of the Calligra suite I found Kexi to be focused on basic features, but these core features it does well. Import and export controls worked smoothly and I didn't encounter any problems with this stable release. I haven't used Kexi enough to determine how well it scales, but my experience so far suggests it is a good tool for home and small business use. I especially find the table design screen to be surprisingly easy to use compared to other database front-ends as data types and key options are made as simple as possible for us.







Calligra 2.4 Kexi - designing queries

(full image size: 62kB, screen resolution 1024x702 pixels)

The previous week I also received a few messages from fans of the Krita application asking why it was left out of the Calligra review. It's a fair question and I'm sorry to say my answer is simply that journalism is literature in a hurry and, having already reviewed one drawing program from the Calligra collection, I cut Krita from the review. My apologies to its developers and its fans.



In brief, Krita is a bitmap-drawing and image-editing application which is quite a bit more advanced than most simple image editors. I'm not well versed in high-end graphic editors, but Krita appears to be nearly on par with the GNU Image Manipulation Program in features. Like most of the other members of the Calligra suite, Krita presents a menu bar across the top of the screen and toolboxes down the left and right sides of the window. These widgets can be moved around, making for a flexible interface. Where I felt Krita deviated from other Calligra applications was with regards to the number of features and controls. Most of the Calligra programs appear to be focused on a small core of features, making menus uncluttered and easy to navigate. Krita, in carrying so many features, presents a much busier interface and packed menus. Most controls I was able to find with little difficulty, but a few items sent me digging through the menu structure.







Calligra 2.4 Krita - creating an image

(full image size: 139kB, screen resolution 910x702 pixels)

Again, though I'm not much of a graphic artist, I was able to fumble my way through, make multi-layered images, draw shapes, make use of airbrushing, scaling features, etc. One of the few real problems I ran into was manipulating selected regions, though I'm not sure how much of this is my lack of experience and how much is the behaviour of Krita. The other issue I encountered was that parts of the documentation appear to be missing from the website, resulting in broken links when searching for help. Otherwise Krita, like the other Calligra programs, is functional, flexible and a makes for a capable image editor. It feels heavier than its Calligra siblings, but otherwise nicely rounds out the suite.





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