PCLinuxOS 2007 and Mint 4.0: ELDs?

Featuring an old desktop Linux guy...

Happy New Year!

Since I last posted anything here, having spent three weeks on vacation in Far West Texas, some things have changed on the Enterprise Linux Desktop (ELD) in my office.

First off, a new Dell Optiplex 745 appeared on my desk. It never booted anything before it booted my Mint 4.0 LiveCD. I messed for a bit with the LiveCD, surfing and editing and generally making sure it looked like Mint liked this new hardware. Once that checked out OK, Mint 4.0 spun down the the hard-drive, replacing whatever OS that was on there before. Pretty sure it was not Linux in any case. Whatever it was, it is not there now!:

/dev/sda1   *           1        1216     9767488+  83  Linux
/dev/sda2            1217        1459     1951897+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3            1460       19452   144528772+  83  Linux

This is my normal "/" separated from "/home" config.

The Optiplex 745 replaced a Precision 340. The 340 was running Mint 3.1. The new gear is better in every possible way: Dual Core. More memory, etc. It lines up like this:

You'd be tempted, based on that specification lineup, to think that the new system is twice as fast as the old one, and you'd be correct. Mostly. The dual processors make it so a single runaway thread is easy to cancel and recover from, and of course Linux is beautifully SMP these days, so it feels 2x fast. But there is more than meets the eye - or - at least that meets the BogoMIPS here. BogoMIPS aren't called that for nothing. Core processors are far better at out-of-order instruction execution and predictive pipe-lining, and the Intel 6300 has VT so that VMware Server is a better at guest hosting on the new system than the old. 

None of that shows up in a BogoMIPS rating. Bogo is short for Bogus. That is a good name. It is not that a BogoMIPS rating is useless. It just has to be kept in perspective.

The hard drives in each computer are both 7200 RPM units, and there is just one arm, so anything that goes I/O intensive is not seeing 2x. SATA w/ 8MB cache is better than ATA with 2MB cache, but not that much better.

Random thought of the day: Anyone recall when IBM called these things "Hardfiles"?

Mint 4.0 Install

Mint 4.0 installed without any issues in the 745. Compiz enabled. The newer graphics card handles the Compiz effects without any apparent strain. Of course, I keep most of them turned off except for things like window preview and other functional or informational effects. Be that as it may, the 340 would not run Compiz on its Rage 128 card. Not in any reduced mode that I tried anyway. Evolution, Openoffice, everything all just snap along. OO 2.3 launches in particular are about 1 second. Wow.

Evolution 2.12.1 has not had any issues at all. It blazes along, and very clearly benefits from the underlying speedy hardware.

One interesting thing is that the Dell E197FP LCD flat panel is supported much better. I have no idea what exactly made it better, but the OS detects and sets up the panel in /etc/X11/xorg.conf without any interference on my part. The fonts are nicer looking, better aliased, and the overall effect is that the entire screen is much bigger and more useful than it was before. I changed out the OS and the computer, so only the flat panel is the same, so no way to know what fixed this. More on this later in this program.

In late breaking news about video: I put a new version of Compiz on and now the 3D desktop does not work anymore. I don't actually care that much, since there are few things  in there I really use other than the Expose-like feature and the Window preview, but this is a bummer from the point of view of stability. In a real ELD of course this Compiz package change would have been tested by the desktop support folks before it was certified to roll out to the environment.

A new PCLinuxOS 2007 system

With Mint 4.0 happily spinning on the 745, and my Evolution email and other Enterprise desktop stuff brought over, it was time to decide what to do with the 340. It is not a bad little box. Sure, it would not run Vista well or anything, but then, it is over three years old. Vista is not a valid benchmark of computer / OS viability. Linux runs well on way less than this Dell 340 box, especially with the 1.25 GB RAM in place.

I gave some thought to Ubuntu Server, just to see it in action... and to see what its GFS code looks like. In a soon-to-happen post, GFS has been a real pain on the CentOS cluster and we have been giving serious thought to what to do about it. More on that in another post.

I decided to load back up PCLinuxOS 2007. I had never run it on a desktop class system, only laptops. On old grungy laptops it felt really crisp, so I wondered how it would do on this fairly good spec 340.

It runs crisply.

Installing it was not the pain free Mint 4.0 experience though. Not horrible or anything, Just two issues.

1. GRUB does not work
2. The default video settings were a slight pain.

GRUB / LILO and the Dell 340

I fixed GRUB by re-installing PCLinuxOS and selecting LILO as the boot loader. I messed around with GRUB for a bit first, and finally determined that for some reason that GRUB could not see /dev/hda, which it thinks of as hd0. Well, it should have thought that. But it didn't. It would boot the MBR, then fall into the GRUB prompt and nothing manual I tried would load the kernel. I booted back to the LiveCD, and used chroot to mess around with it for a while and then decided I was having a bad GRUB / PC BIOS interaction.

A light went on about something Mint 3.0 / 3.1 has been doing on the 340. It would not boot on the 340 either, but it was failing in a different way. Mint booting would fail FSCK on /dev/hda1. I'd then mount /dev/hda1 (/) and /dev/hda3(/home) and type exit and it would come up. 

PCLinuxOS failed to see the disk at all with GRUB.

LILO fixed everything, and thank goodness PCLinuxOS still includes the option of using either Bootloader!

<gripe>GRUB changes the names of the disks just enough to be confusing. The first disk it finds (be it hda or sda) is called HD0. That is just close enough to HDA visually to be confusing. I wish it was DISK0, or even better, DISK1 instead.</gripe>

Video Set Up

PCLinuxOS is KDE 3.5.8, where Mint uses Gnome (unless you load up the KDE packages or the Kubuntu-ish version [of which there is no 4.0 GA version yet]{At the time of this writing, and that will just about be enough on the brackets!}).

On the 340, Mint did the right thing as far as screen resolution and whatnot. PCLinuxOS came in at 1024x768. To fix this required going into DrakConf (System / Configuration / Configuring Your Computer). The KDE Control Center app for configuring the display will not help you, even though it is not greyed out or anything. Really, would it be a huge mode to the KDE code to put a little note in the KDE Control Center to tell people to go use DrakConf?

Two things had to be changed: First I had to tell it that the display was a generic 1280x1024 flat panel (It is a Dell E172FP, but this was not detected). This is at Hardware / Configure your monitor in DrakConf aka the "PCLinuxOS Control Center".

Also in that same place is "Hardware / Change the screen resolution". Once this is done, and X is restarted, I had 1280x1024. At it was lovely. Far nicer anti-aliasing than what Mint had done with this particular video card. But this is not Apples and Apples. This could be KDE and the way PCLinuxOS sets it up rather than anything about xorg. Mint used Gnome and I have started to notice that there are some corner cases in hardware where Gnome does a better job, and others where KDE looks better. I have not chased this to ground.

General Linux Video Ramblings

There is greatness in the way Linux does video support. Having different layers like X and the desktop, it (like any other OS done this way) is able to keep the look and feel stuff largely separate from the hardware support, allowing different groups to focus on what they are are interested in. At the same time, KDE and Gnome drive enough stuff that they do have a very tight level of reliance upon the X server. It is a testament to Open Standards that KDE/Gnome do not seem to care if they are installed on top of XFree86 or Xorg. Still, despite all this abstraction, it remains that there are some set ups where one looks better than the other. 

Case in point:

Previous set up was the 340 with the Dell E197FP display. Distro was Mint. It looked OK, but not as good as Mint on the Dell 620, or my personal Acer. I could never figure it out, never get the fonts to look smooth and anti-aliased.

I moved the E197FP to the 745, and added a Dell E172FP to the 340. Same sync speeds, same resolution: 1280x1024. Mint still looked jaggy on the 340 / E172, but the 745 / E197 now looks great. Smooth a and clean: In a funny way it feels like the E197FP gained more screen real estate. I guess because everything can be smaller and be readable without looking jagged.

Then PCLOS rolled in to the 340/E172 combo, and now it looks great. Every bit as nice to look at as the 745 / E197.

There are subtle interactions in the stack of OS, X Server, Video Card, Monitor, Distro, and chosen desktop environment that can make a huge difference in the way the whole shooting match looks and feels.

ELD and PCLOS

As noted in my previous PCLOS on a laptop foray, PCLOS works great as an Enterprise Linux Desktop. It would be an easy argument to make in fact that Kubuntu / PCLOS would be a better choice for ELD, at least if the people using it were recently using an OS from Redmond. The KDE 3.5 user interface paradigm is closer to the one on MS's XP than the Gnome 2.20 of Mint 4.0. When I give the ELD lab at places like LinuxWorld or SHARE, I always use a KDE based desktop.

And "Yes, there is a KDE version of Mint 4.0 coming soon". The Mint blog says that they are having to work harder than they thought porting the Mint add-in tools to KDE.

Dell and Linux

Even though these are not officially supported for Linux by Dell, both of these computers run it without issue. The Ubuntu Linux supported hardware is an Inspiron 530 N at this writing. Other than the GRUB thing on the 340, both these distros work great. Either one is viable as an Enterprise Linux desktop.

While I have looked at many Distros over the years of this blog as Enterprise Linux, I ususally do it on laptops. This was my first all-real-desktop hardware look. My theory has always been that laptop hardware is harder to support for the OS, and if laptops work, desktops should be a breeze.

I don't think I have totally invalidated that idea here today. The GRUB issue on the 340, but not on the 745 does show that *all* hardware needs to be evaluated before a particular Linux distro is deployed to the enterprise desktop.

The point is more that there are other viable distros for the ELD role than just SUSE/Novell and RedHat. These two work fine.