The Average Week of a Linux Guy in an MS Windows World

Mint 4.0 has been performing flawlessly so far. Here I am on week two of using it, after taking a chance that it would be OK, based on testing of both Ubuntu 7.10 before and things I did on my personal Acer. Along the way I have found a few behaviors that may be helping my overall stability.

First up: OpenOffice 2.3 is just amazing. I have worked on two presentations, where people sent me MS formatted presentations that I had to add content to and then send on to the next person for their edits and updates. Back and forth these things flowed via email, culminating in two presentations, where the presenter was a person running MS Windows with a copy of my slide deck piled into a much bigger slide deck. The formatting looked fine, there were no weird page bleeds. Nothing. No one in the audience ever knew that this was created on anything other than MS Win. It was every bit as boring as every other presentation ever given. :)

These are the OO packages I have been using:

openoffice.org 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-base 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-calc 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-common 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-core 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-core02 2.1.0-6
openoffice.org-debian-menus 2.1-6
openoffice.org-draw 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-evolution 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-filter-mobiledev 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-gnome 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-gtk 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-help-en-us 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu2
openoffice.org-hyphenation 0.2
openoffice.org-impress 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-java-common 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-l10n-common 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu2
openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu2
openoffice.org-l10n-en-za 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu2
openoffice.org-math 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-style-human 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us 1:2.2.0-2ubuntu1
openoffice.org-writer 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3
python-uno 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5.3

A quick scan of those names and it would appear that Mint does not modify them in any way from what Ubuntu provides. These showed up as an update though: originally when I brought up OpenOffice it used to say "Mint Edition", but now it does not. I don't really care what it says, as long as it works.

Clean Screen

Part of "working" is having the screen be clean and easy to read. No one wants to work on a presentation and have their eyes cross after 10 minutes because the fonts looked horrible. The D620's screen resolution is 1440x900, and Mint did not have to be told that, or be told that the dpi was 128, or to turn on anti-aliasing optimized for LCD's. Mint did all that out of the box. Further, while the "915resolution" package is installed, it does not actually appear to be in use. If it is, it is being very quiet, with no messages at boot. Only video related stuff appears to be coming out of agpgart:

[   11.920000] Linux agpgart interface v0.102 (c) Dave Jones
[   11.928000] agpgart: Detected an Intel 945GM Chipset.
[   11.928000] agpgart: Detected 7932K stolen memory.
[   11.944000] agpgart: AGP aperture is 256M @ 0xd0000000

I interpret that to mean that the BIOS patching that the 915resolution package did is not longer needed by the current xorg:

xserver-xorg  1:7.2-5ubuntu13

Which has this intriging set of packages:

xserver-xorg-video-i810 2:1.7.4-0ubuntu5 Intel i8xx, i9xx display driver
xserver-xorg-video-intel  2:2.1.1-0ubuntu9 X.Org X server -- Intel i8xx, i9xx display driver

The /etc/X11 xorg.conf seems to confirm:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
        Driver          "intel"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

All of which begs the question: Why is 915resolution installed anymore? It is not hurting anything, but it is clearly not needed. I have been very happy with the level of GUI performance, and the 3D information settings I settled upon mentioned in my last post, plus adding in the package mentioned in the comment to it by 67GTA, to wit I needed to install compizconfig-settings-manager to get the extra window preview I was looking for without having to run all the extra stuff.

Wait Wait

One possible reason for the new level of stability provided by Mint 4.0, as well as other recent Linuxii is the way an application will darken when it becomes non-responsive. It is not an application specific thing, but something under the covers of X itself. For example, I'll be typing away at the address bar on an email in Evolution. Evolution will be querying the GAL to try an find closest matchs to the mess I am typing. If I get too far ahear, the entire Evoltion window fades to a dark gray to let me know it is no longer paying attention to my meanderings. I can jump over to a different app, like say Firefox, and keep right on working on a different thing. Linux is not hung. Apps are not gated on each other. And when Evolution catches back up, it fades back to normal color. I have even had both Firefox and Evolution grayed out, and hopped over to OpenOffice to work while they sorted themselves out.

So far they have always come back, and when they do they are ready to do more. In Evolutions case, it was horrible when I accidentally set the GAL server to one in France, but even with it set to one in Houston it can gray out from time to time while I am here in San Francisco.

What I am wondering now is that...what did Evolution do *before* the feature appeared. Now I stop typing and let it catch up. Before I probably blustered on and perhaps some of the failures I have seen in Evolution back in the 2.10 days were caused by me just typing away when it was lost in thought. Dunno. Just a theory. Nothing to back it up other than the fact the 2.12 under Mint has been solid as the day is long for two weeks, while remote to the MS Exchange server I am using even.

Evo 2.12 also has one other nice feature. I used to get meetings from time to time from an Outlook user that Evolution would say were too complicated, and would ask me to *save* it to the hard drive, and then open it. I never did. I just hopped over to webmail and accepted them there. That has not happened so far on two weeks of 2.12 despite some deeply complex meetings showing up.

Up to Date

Mint 4.0, on their website, mentioned that they were not going to be pushing out as much service as they had in the past, trying to favor stability. Stable it certainly has been, but a fair amount of updates have come down via the nifty MintUpdate applet. I have accepted everything it has recommended and so far, no issues. Updates besides OpenOffice have been to things like FireFox (at 2.0.10... 2.0.11 came down on the Mac the other day, so still a little behind). Actually, now that I mention it, OpenOffice is slightly behind too, at 2.3.0, not 2.3.1. The release notes for OpenOffice say this .1 version is all fixes, not new functions. I am not having any problems, so it may not matter. A bunch of libmono stuff also landed. Download servers are fast, and probably mostly Ubuntu's.

Meetings, live or otherwise

MS's "Livemeeting" (another app name like Sharepoint: Sharepoint is only for sharing amongst MS Windows folks. All others need not apply)(Yeah, I know there is a "reduced experience" when using other  browsers with Sharepoint. Phooey Wiki is full function no matter what browser or platform I am on). Livemeeting supposedly has a web interface that works from Firefox, and it does work sometimes. I have not figured out the rhyme or reason of the failures, but I assume, based on prejudice and not investigation (at least I admit it), that it is something weird in the code LiveMeeting is sending the browser. For those sad moments when I must use Livemeeting, if FF does not work, there is always Codeweavers Crossover Office and IE6, or worse, VMware and MSWin as a guest. But that always feels like such a failure of purpose.

There is also Opera, which often handles IE stuff better than FF. And there is IEs4Linux and now in Mint something called "Wine-doors" to let you put IE in in ways other than Codeweavers. One way or the other, I can get at Livemeeting when I have to. Todays was IE6 under Codeweavers. I was too sleepy to figure out why FF was hung out to dry by Livemeeting.

Oh. The misnomer of LiveMeeting: When have you ever been to a lively meeting? I mean really. :)

Is Good... Bad?

If MS Windows users do not know I am a Linux user, and think there are no issues using MS Windows specific things all the time, is that really good? What is the incentive to think about Open Standards, and Open document formats? If Linux keeps doing all the heavy lifting of compatibility, that is good for us Linuxii, but is that bad in the large sense of things? I am not sure, but it seems like it.

On the other hand, I know more and more people that are looking at either Linux or OS.X as their full time desktop, and there is all the web 2.0 stuff...

Wait and see. For now, from the vantage point of Mint 4.0