Tell them, my song.

The Pack

Winni — Thu, 16 May 2013 08:42:52 +0000

Meet the pack: Gustav, Junior, Beauty, Ryka.

Xubuntu 12.04.2 LTS: A subtotal

Winni — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 17:54:40 +0000

We’ve been using Xubuntu 12.04 at home for several months now. My wife uses it mostly as a “surf board” and video and music player. Her killer apps are Firefox, smplayer2, Guayadeque and the occasional Shotwell for picture viewing. Naturally, that’s a job that Xubuntu and the Zotac Zbox can handle quite well. While my wife still thinks that no Linux distribution that she’s used so far feels as “whole” as OS X or even Windows (because there are always tiny little things missing everywhere and nothing is ever as polished as it is in the commercial world), she likes Xubuntu and certainly would never trade it for a Windows system. She’s annoyed by anti-virus software, acoustic pop-ups, event sounds and bubble boxes in the system tray. She’d probably describe using Windows as something very similar to reading a boulevard newspaper like the German BILD or the British SUN or like watching what’s called “lower class” TV. These are phrases that I would most certainly use. You could also say that Windows feels “cheap” and mediocre. On the other hand, OS X might be fancy and chic, but as soon as you leave the way Cupertino laid out for you to do things, the system gets in your way all the time. It’s a demanding bitch that eats your money like a slot machine. Even simple programs usually cost a few Euros in the App Store, and the only difference to Windows Freeware or Linux Open Source software is a fancy looking, but usually functionally primitive user interface. The OS X ecosystem is all about looks and design, it’s not about useful features or empowering the user.

Empowering the user is where Linux shines. That is when you are a power user, administrator or software developer. No system lets you do as many geeky things as Linux. No other system gives you so much control, especially on the very low level of things. You want to use VLANs on your Ethernet interface? No problem. You want to scan some host’s ports or capture IP traffic? Be my guest. You want to turn your little desktop system into a full blown LAMP server? Dude, don’t you have any real challenges for your system?

Well, actually you do. You’d like to use ONE piece of software that does as much for you as one of my favorite commercial programs: Apple Aperture. Dang! No go! You want to do edit the videos that you shot yesterday with your smartphone, and you want to use something that is as easy and powerful as Apple’s iMovie. OpenShot might look like your best bet for this, but it can’t hold a candle to iMovie. Heck, even copying multiple large video rips from one USB hard disk to another can become a challenge for Thunar, Xubuntu’s file manager, because it just loves to abort copy jobs with weird error messages when it has to process either too many files or files that exceed a certain size. (That is something that I could observe on several Xubuntu machines, from Thunar 1.2.3. to Thunar 1.6.2). Thunar also lacks many of the simple comforts of Windows Explorer and its context menus are not as functional as those of Windows Explorer. Dragging and dropping files from one Thunar window to another also does not always work as expected, depending on the destination.

Also, you can configure a lot through the GUI in Xubuntu, but not even remotely everything that’s important. It’s also somehow ridiculous that you have to go down to the command line to launch “alacarte” if you want to edit the “start” menu of the Xfce desktop. The default launcher panel in Xfce is of sub quality and the first thing that I remove after a fresh system installation. I use Cairo Dock instead, at least it has that nice little penguin plug-in that lets the cute little Linux penguin do some fun stuff. But Cairo Dock isn’t really stable either. It crashes occasionally and it does not feel 100% integrated into Xfce. It’s okay, but does not feel like it really belongs there.

The real horror begins when you want to keep your base operating system and your applications up to date. That is where Xubuntu/Ubuntu REALLY sucks to the point where you should admit that the whole concept is broken and FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond Any Recognition/Repair).

Ubuntu LTS claims to come with five years of long term support and Xubuntu comes with three years. That’s nice and dandy. The problem is that this does NOT cover the applications that you find in the Software Center; at least not really. For example, there is no chance in hell that 12.04 LTS would ever get LibreOffice 4, you will have to stick with LibreOffice 3 until you upgrade to another release of the operating system. In this case, you would have to upgrade to 13.04, because that is going to be the first release where LibreOffice 4 appears in official Software Center. 12.10 still has LibreOffice 3, but in order to upgrade from 12.04 to 13.04, you actually have to upgrade to 12.10 first.

A few core applications like Firefox and Thunderbird are being constantly updated to the latest versions even in the LTS release, but those are exceptions, not the norm. As a general rule of thumb, if you want to use the latest versions of your favorite applications, forget about the LTS releases and join the six-months upgrade cycle of the interim releases. And pray that the upgrade to the next interim release works and does not break your entire system.

“But there are PPAs for the applications”, you say. Yes, of course you can use PPAs and manually install your favorite apps on the LTS version. But as you might know, PPAs are being purged whenever you upgrade to a new OS release and PPAs are definitely not a user friendly solution to the problem. They are a mess and not supported on a level that would be acceptable for most business or corporate users, for example. PPAs are workarounds for the quickly abandoned software center of each Ubuntu release, nothing more, nothing less. That’s okay for advanced users, it’s a horrible situation for non-technical users who trust an LTS to be worth its name: Long Term SUPPORT. At this point, I consider Ubuntu LTS releases to be a cynical joke because of the application situation. If you think that “stable” is synonymous with “static” or “stagnant”, then the LTS really is the stable release you are looking for.

That leads me to another thing that I encountered only yesterday: The broken “LTS Enablement Stack” that was recently introduced. This thing was meant to back port the latest Linux kernels and X Server stack to the LTS releases. But what I experienced yesterday on two systems made one thing clear: Nobody gives this feature enough care and very obviously nobody tests it thoroughly enough. After having installed the X Server backports, two Xubuntu desktops no longer had visible window titles. From what I’ve found on the Internet, I was lucky: Other people all of a sudden had systems that could no longer boot after a kernel upgrade. I could relatively easily fix my systems by uninstalling the LTS Enablement stuff and re-install some older components. No real harm done. I only lost a couple of hours of my life time on this hack.

But this reminded me of another system update horror scenario that I experienced sometime last year when Canonical decided to push new nVidia graphics drives to the LTS releases. Those drivers were somehow broken and after the installation, the system no longer booted into the graphical user interface and just stayed on the command line. Another example of lousy QA on Canonical’s end, and unfortunately nother example why Ubuntu still is not a good option for end users. These things are not supposed to happen. At all. The system should at least launch in some low resolution VESA mode so that John and Jane Doe still have some graphical user interface. Throwing a command prompt in their face will quickly make them run to a shop and buy a Windows DVD.

Now don’t get me wrong: I like Xubuntu/Ubuntu. I really do. Most of our servers at work run on it and Ubuntu allows us to do a lot of things that we otherwise could not do that easily if at all. Unlike the average user, I make my living in the IT industry and can help myself. Stuff like the problems that I mentioned above doesn’t scare me, it only annoys me and sometimes frustrates me because of the wasted time. However, things like that just shouldn’t be normal anymore for Linux in the year 2013. But still, they are. Which is why even Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of the Gnome and the Mono projects, moved on to using OS X instead of Linux. When a guy who created one of the desktop environments for Linux gives up and rather uses a commercial product instead, what can we expect from John and Jane Doe?

I know that Canonical are putting a lot of effort into making their platform end user friendly (well, at least on the forthcoming phone and tablet editions that currently get all the attention). I also know that the upgrade problem is currently being addressed and that several proposals are on the table to change the situation. What comes out of it remains to be seen. Even if Canonical manages to fix most of the base problems of the platform, there will still be a shortage of what is commonly called commercial grade software. It will still be hard to find gadgets and computers in your local electronic store that have Ubuntu pre-installed. And then it might still be questionable if the switch to that platform will be worthwhile for most normal users – users who don’t care whether something is Free and Open Source, because they will never ever want to see or modify the source code of something and they just don’t care about such things. They just want a reliable computer or gadget to play Angry Birds, surf the web, do Internet banking, edit their pictures and videos and do all those other casual home user things. Some of them might also want to use the same gadget or computer to work from home. But I’m pretty sure that nobody of them wants to do systems and network administration. They want to USE software, not work on that software.

To be honest, when I’m at home, I more and more belong to that simple user group, too. At work I get paid too fiddle with things, setup new stuff or fix and maintain existing things. At home, I don’t want a software upgrade to break my machine, because I actually only want to watch a movie on that machine or do some writing. I still use computers in my private time, but that time should not be about the computer itself anymore. Unfortunately, in the current state of things, Xubuntu/Ubuntu demands more of time for self-purposes than Windows or OS X would. And that is not good.

My comment on Mark Shuttleworth’s “Let’s go faster while preserving what works best”

Winni — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:10:39 +0000

I tried to post this as a comment on Mark Shuttleworth’s latest blog post “Let’s go faster while preserving what works best“, but apparently it did not pass his Akismet filter:

I’ve always thought that it was wrong to advertise the interim-releases in the first place. The entire Ubuntu family of desktop operating systems is targeted at users, not developers, not Linux-geeks, not power users. So the LTS version should be the only one clearly visible on the homepage, not the interim releases. Following this line of thought, it’s still a problem that the LTS releases only have out-dated, old software in the Software Center. Where is the latest GIMP? Where is the latest LibreOffice? VLC? smplayer? Users usually don’t care about the latest OS features, they care about up-to-date apps. Because believe it or not, users user applications – not operating systems! So it would be great to have a stable LTS version and point releases that include backports of new features until there is a new LTS releases. Actually, this is what a certain big company located in Redmond, Washington does with Service Packs. And that is a GOOD approach. It’s been tested and it’s been widely accepted.

I think this also means that you should completely separate the core OS from the applications. If I want applications, I go to the Software Center – and everything in there should be CURRENT and, most importantly, fully compatible with the last two LTS releases. This will be a tough but important job. Tag the interim releases “development releases” and whoever wants them will find them. But they shouldn’t be the focus. I am one of the millions of Ubuntu users who don’t want to fiddle with interim-, beta- or development releases. I need something that “just works”. And by the very definition, this has to be the LTS. However, I also want to use CURRENT applications, not old and forgotten releases. With the situation as it is today, I cannot really take an Ubuntu LTS release serious because you guys do NOT seriously support it! What good is a platform with five years of support when all that I can do with it is using five years old software from the Software Center? I know that this is not entirely true; there are PPAs. But let’s be frank here: Using a PPA is far beyond the capabilities of the average USER. And you want to attract USERS to Ubuntu, don’t you? Not some elitist system administrator and system developer club.

Let’s once again compare this to that big company in Redmond: They still support an operating system that will soon turn 14 years. Almost ALL new software still runs on that old operating system. THIS is what USERS expect from a reliable and trustworthy platform. If you cannot or do not want to deliver this experience, then simply stop putting the “LTS” label on something. Nobody who is just a user cares for “rolling releases” – and certainly nobody who is a corporate user would want such a thing. In the business/corporate world, you need a well defined, fixed point against which to test your applications. This cannot be a moving target. If you don’t believe me, talk with someone from the pharmaceutical industry, for example. You will be horrified, because this world is the exact opposite of everything that most Linux developers believe in. But this is one of your target audiences – at least when you are really serious about attracting “users”.

Another thing that you should think about is this: Maybe it’s time for you guys to shift your attention from the core platform to APPLICATIONS. Where are the Photoshop, iMovie, Garageband, Logic Studio, Scrivener, Aperture and Lightroom of the Open Source world? And I mean software of the same caliber and the SAME level of usability, not something that is supposed to deliver the same functionality after you’ve spent four years on a university studying it. Heck, where are even the commercial/proprietary versions for Linux? Any platform is only as good as the software that is available for it. It’s the year 2013 and the only reason that Linux is usable on the desktop are the available web browsers and the fact that most of the things that we do today have moved to the Internet.
The core platform is more than good enough already. Just make it a stable target, find OEM partners for it and then focus on software for USERS. Just my 2 cents.

Life without Windows, OS X and the need for constant paid upgrades

Winni — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 12:39:50 +0000

After a long period of experimenting, fiddling, trying, installing and uninstalling, we have now settled on Xubuntu LTS 12.04.2 x64 as our workhorse environment at home. I’m past the age where I want to be a constant beta-tester, so it had to be a platform with long term support. It also had to be something fast and stable. Xubuntu is all that, and with Cairo Dock – which I found to be MUCH more stable and comfortable than Docky – Xubuntu even has a nice Mac-feel to it — just without all the commerce, brainwashing and annoying hype.
Xubuntu runs very well on the Dell XPS M1330 notebook that I could grab from my company for a small donation to our BBQ piggy bank. It also runs great on the little Zbox that my wife uses most of the time. All systems that I have come across run faster and feel more responsive under Xubuntu than they do under Windows or OS X respectively. If you want to breathe new life into a seemingly old machine, do yourself a favor and boot it from a Xubuntu LIVE USB stick just to get an impression of what this machine could still do for you if it ran a system that was not designed with planned obsolescence in mind. Linux doesn’t force you to buy a new computer every few years just to keep on doing the same things.
But as Steve Jobs once said, people don’t use operating systems, they use applications. That quote actually came from a time before the Internet was open to the public and let’s face it, nowadays we spend more than 90% of our computing time in the web browser. Firefox and Chrome don’t care whether you run them on Windows, OS X or Linux. The behave they same everywhere and that makes their user independent from a specific underlying platform.
The rest of the time we might use media players (like VLC, which is also multi-platform) and smartphone/tablet synchronization tools (if those are even still needed; my Samsung doesn’t need such software). Most people don’t even use eMail clients anymore to write and read eMails – they usually go to their provider’s web interface for that.
In the life of the average home user, games are probably the last remaining bastion of locally installed software. And thanks to Valve’s efforts for porting Steam to Linux and even planning to bring an own Linux-based “Steambox” to the market, Microsoft’s last stronghold is now also crumbling into dust.
Yes, there is Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, that fancy video and audio editing software and all that business software that doesn’t run on the penguin (or even on the lately very successful Mac for that matter). But since I was talking about home use, those are no real arguments. NOBODY needs such software on a home computer. And no home user can tell me with a straight face that they BOUGHT all those expensive things to use them at home for sending a postcard to their grandma. And they certainly don’t need Photoshop Extended CS6 to edit the photos that they took with their smartphones. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. There are FREE alternatives available that are probably not as powerful or comfortable to use as the “big guys”, but they usually get the job done even for semi-professional to professional use. The stuff is just different and doesn’t come with the hyped name, that’s all.
Me, I spent most of my work time in command shells and browser windows anyway. At home, VLC and smplayer2 are the most important desktop applications for me. Scrivener exists for all three major platforms and for everything else I have by now found the one or the other open source substitute. I think that in the future, games will be the only software that I will still be spending money for.
Am I missing something? Yes, the comfort and power of Aperture for managing my photo library. Aperture, despite all its shortcomings, still is undefeated in that specific area. But I can survive without Aperture, and the feeling of having escaped the consumer treadmill easily outweighs the bought comfort.
Other than that, I enjoy the complete control over my digital life that Linux gives me. But I also know that this only works so well for me because I’m a professional system and network administrator — I make my living with this stuff, so naturally I judge these things from a completely different perspective than John and Jane Doe would.
But to be fair and honest, setting up and installing either a Mac or Windows machine from scratch is also beyond the abilities of an average home user. When an admin sets up the machine for them, the end user won’t feel much of a difference between Linux, OS X or Windows anymore. All three systems have individual strengths and weaknesses, and all have become very user friendly once they are up and running.
In the end, the only difference between them is the attached price tag. Not just for the base system, but for the whole ecosystem around them. Yes, I know that you don’t have to always update to the latest and greatest version of some commercial software. But that doesn’t change the reality that in a networked world, you have to stay up-to-date in order to be compatible and to protect yourself from malicious software and cyber attacks.
In the Microsoft and Apple ecosystems, staying up-to-date constantly costs money. In the Open Source world, things work differently. I don’t know about you, but I rather feed my dogs than constantly pumping money into computer software updates.

Byebye, Mint!

Winni — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:34:57 +0000

In my last post, I mainly wrote about my experience with Mint 13 on a PC at work. However, until last night, I also had been giving Mint 13 Cinnamon on my system at home a longer test run. In the beginning, it looked rather promising and nice – even though I never got rid off the feeling that Mint is an illegitimate bastard child of Ubuntu that doesn’t belong into its parents’ world and at the same time hasn’t yet found its own place. Somehow, for maybe irrational reasons, Mint just never felt “right”. But the Cinnamon desktop had a lot going for itself, and that kept me interested.
I even could live with the annoying, almost daily updates. What became unacceptable, though, was the fact that Mint constantly failed to retrieve certain “translations” files from the official repository servers and that it literally always required dozens of retries to receive the files.
What put the final nail in Mint’s coffin were last night’s updates: After a normal “apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade, apt-get autoremove, reboot” cycle – the system failed to enter GUI mode and stayed on the console.
I wasn’t in the mood to fix something that should never have happened after a regular OS update. Instead, I wiped out the Mint installation and installed a fresh copy of Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on that machine. Xubuntu updated everything properly, including the latest Xfce version. (Note: Mint Xfce does not run properly on my machine at all, it always freezes after a few minutes.)
Xubuntu might not be the “sexiest” desktop Linux out there, but it’s fast, reliable and “just works”.
Mint showed a lot of promise, but eventually failed to deliver. Your experience might be completely different than mine and maybe you will be one of the many users who just fall in love with the distribution. Mint could be great – the team behind it “only” needs to fix the repository server situation and maybe also put the distribution more on its own feet. As of now, it’s a bit too close to Ubuntu for my taste, and even the Mint update mechanisms sometimes get an identity crisis: After one round of updates, certain configuration files actually had the OS name “Ubuntu” instead of “Linux Mint” in them. That’s another thing that should not happen, but I’m afraid that goes with the territory when you base your own work too closely to a constantly moving target.

Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon LTS

Winni — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 09:57:16 +0000

Why am I writing something about Mint 13 when its successor is already available? Because I only care for LTS (Long Term Support) releases, that’s why. And the next LTS releases in the Ubuntu family of operating systems, to which Mint belongs, are only due in April 2014.
To make this short: I like Mint 13. Its desktop is a lot like the good parts of Windows 7, which means that Mint is a “traditional” but nice looking desktop environment. It doesn’t follow any of the current hypes and trends and does not try to put a smartphone or tablet user interface on your notebook or desktop PC. That is a good thing, and this philosophy turned Linux Mint into one of the most successful Linux distributions.
As I’ve already mentioned, Linux Mint is based upon Ubuntu. They take the core parts of Ubuntu and in case of the “Cinnamon” and “Mate” put a self-developed desktop interface on it. Then they spice it up with all the necessary (proprietary, closed source, patented and what not) software components to have all multimedia codecs known to the world and even Java pre-installed on the distribution so that watching your latest movies is only a mouse-click away. And you still have full access to all Ubuntu software repositories and you are compatible with everything that is compatible with the “original” Ubuntu. The distribution even is stable and fast and a pleasure to use.
For the most part.
But like all members of the Open Source family of operating systems, Mint also suffers from the “give us our daily update today” syndrome. There hardly is a day when the system does not inform you about available software updates after you’ve logged in. And this is where Linux Mint appears to have a serious problem: It tells you that software updates are available, but most of the time when you try to download and install them, the system fires error messages that the “packages.linuxmint.com” repository server is not responding. You have to keep trying and hoping that you find a time slot when the server is responding. And even then, downloads will be very slow – and I have a Gigabit Internet connection here at work.
Yes, I know about the available mirror repository servers, and I’ve tried several of them. Some of them are not responding either, and the ones that are responding don’t seem to mirror the “backports” repository. Unfortunately, I use the backports repository to obtain the latest version of the Cinnamon desktop. So for me the only thing that the mirror servers do is showing me an error message faster than the original servers. I’m not sure if that really is an improvement.
Linux Mint claims to be the 4th most widely used desktop operating system, after Windows, OS X and Ubuntu. And yet, it appears that they have serious hosting problems that need fixing yesterday.
This situation with constantly failing updates entirely ruins the experience and it made me insert an Ubuntu installation medium on my test machine at work.

Seasonal Greetings

Winni — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:22:19 +0000

Ryka, Junior and Gustav send their seasonal greetings.

Stallman thinks that Ubuntu is Spyware

Winni — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 13:07:27 +0000

Richard Stallman (also known on the web as “rms”), the creator of one of the most important Open Source licenses, the General Public License (GPL), recently wrote that the Amazon shopping lens in Ubuntu 12.10 basically works like Spyware, invades the privacy of the user and thus nobody should use Ubuntu anymore and and that everybody in the free software community should vocally advocate against Ubuntu.

For me, this is a witch hunt and Richard behaves like a High Inquisitor from the dark ages. Things like this are very typical for him, and it is what made him one of the most visible, famous and also one of the most notorious figures of the Open Source movement.

You see, Stallman believes that all software has to be “free as in speech” and that all users should have the right to do with the software whatever they want as long as the software and all the modificatons that the respective user might have made remain free for others to take, use, modify and re-distribute. (And that is a right that most USERS will never take advantage of because, well, they are USERS, not DEVELOPERS. But that is another story entirely.)

In his world, people are not supposed to pay for the software. However, he said that it is fine to charge for technical support or the distribution media.

For me, this translates to this: Artists are supposed to work for free, but it is totally okay when record labels make money with their music.

This statutes the biggest flaw in Richard Stallman’s ideology. People who want to write code neither have the time and in most not the interest or the capabilities to give technical support. You either spend twelve hours a day giving technical support or you spend twelve hours a day working on your software. In my experience, you cannot do both at the same time because both things are full town jobs. And usually, developers are not good at interacting with human beings who require technical support.

It’s the same with technical writing. People who write code usually suck at writing comprehensible texts in human language. Technical writing is a different form of art and requires different skills than writing code.

Running a software distribution business also requires completely different skills than writing code. You might be great at writing an operating system kernel in the C programming language, but you probably lack all the necessary business skills to keep a company going.

Software developers write software because they are good at that and want to do that. And since writing software is hard work that requires very specific knowledge and skills, it should be something that pays the bills, puts food on the table and gets the children through school and college.

Asking for donations never kept a business alive either. All the “donations” to Canonical and Ubuntu come from the wallet of one single person: Mark Shuttleworth. He’s been financing the Ubuntu project with his own money for years, and if he is now looking for a way to let Ubuntu pay for itself, that’s completely legitimate.

But in Richard Stallman’s ideology, there is no room for such earthly needs, and since he has not provided a working business model for software developers in all these many years that he has been “advocating” free software, I think he should simply shut up when a company like Canonical tries to find a way to ship an Open Source product that is supposed to pay for itself, provide for its developers and still benefit its users.

It would have sufficed if he had said that the Amazon shopping lens is not a good idea in its current implementation and he then could have mentioned the two very simple ways how it can be de-activated (turn off “Internet search results” in Ubuntu’s Privacy settings) or even uninstalled (“sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping”). But no, it had to be a witch hunt again.

The Ubuntu family of operating systems in all its flavors are a great software platform. Ubuntu is there to empower its users and it is governed by a social contract that guarantees that it will always be free. However, there are mouths to feed and bills to pay. If Ubuntu One, Google Search and the Amazon shopping lens help them covering their costs – great! You are NOT forced to use any of these things! If you don’t want them, turn them off!

But don’t crawl around the web telling everybody that features like this are “Spyware” and “unethical”. It’s no more unethical than freeloading all this stuff without ever contributing anything back. I have more problems with witch hunters who are trying to plant weird ideas into the minds of their followers than I have with a built-in shopping feature that many people actually like and use.

Everybody has their own definition of freedom. And mine is certainly different from yours. But unlike some, I don’t try to force my definition of freedom onto you. And unlike some, I understand the need to earn an income because when the month is over, there won’t be any miraculous donations on my bank account that will pay for my mortgage and fill my fridge with food.

I don’t need a further discussion about this on my website. I posted the same thoughts on various websites already and just keep this post as a constant reminder. If you have anything to say about this subject, please do it on Stallman’s or the Free Software Foundation’s website where it belongs.

Give us today our daily update

Winni — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:23:01 +0000

It’s 12:46 and something feels very strange: Xubuntu has not yet displayed that ugly little icon that indicates the availability of software updates. Why does it feel strange? Because with the settings that I use, *buntu’s Software Updater does not only look for updates on a daily basis, it actually finds updates on an almost daily basis, and in some cases even more than just once per day. It’s as if the developers answer to an own version of the Lord’s prayer: “Give us today our daily update…”
One point of view is that this is a good thing. Obviously, someone cares about his software and wants to provide a good service to his users. The other not so sympathetic perspective is that the system you are using is completely immature and has been shipped way too early, because why else would it require almost daily fixes?
Frequent updates are good, but too frequent updates leave the impression of a construction site and ruin the user experience as quickly as they appear.
The question is, how can this be changed to receive frequent updates and not feel like a construction site anymore? Usually, I like to be in control over when a system installs updates, hence the notification icon that requires my interaction. I have now changed the settings to automatically download and install security updates. Let’s see if that makes a subjective difference. If not, maybe I will decide to leave the system on over night and create a little cron job that runs apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y && apt-get autoremove -y && reboot with root privileges every night automatically. I know that this is how some people actually do it.

Xubuntu 12.10 on a Zotac Zbox ID41+

Winni — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:55:15 +0000

A Zotac Zbox ID41+ is a nice, quiet little machine with very low power consumption. It features an Intel Atom D525 CPU and an nVidia ION2 graphics processor that is also used to accelerate video playback. I upgraded the RAM to the maximum of 4 GB and have it connected to a 40″ Toshiba 3D TV display (which I use only as a monitor, since it is not connected to an antenna or SAT or cable receiver). I also don’t take advantage of the 3D features, by the way.

1080p MKV playback is the only thing that lets the Zbox struggle. I tried different video players and different operating systems on the machine to find out which works best on that hardware for my purposes.

Yes, I even had 64-Bit Windows 7 on it for a couple of days, but I didn’t want to go back to Windows land, so it was only a short-lived experience. On Windows 7, only Xbmc did a spotless job at playing 1080p MKVs. I bought CoreAVC and tried Media Player Classic, but that did not really work for me. Anyway, Win7 is now history.

Other candidates were Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, Xubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 and Linux Mint 13 Xfce.

Mint actually provided the smoothest video playback experience (with smplayer2), but it came at a price: Mint 13 froze three times in less than an hour and also showed several strange graphical glitches on the desktop. For example, fonts all of a sudden looked more like the Klingon alphabet than our own Roman alphabet. The strange thing is, I saw the same glitches a year ago on Mint 12 on a 27″ iMac i5 which had an ATI graphics card. So something seems to be buggy in Mint. The random system freezes were an inexcusable show stopper, so Mint went into the same waste basket as Windows 7.

Some of the Compiz settings in Ubuntu cause stuttering video playback in VLC and even in smplayer2. It gets better when you use Unity 2D instead of the regular Unity, but unfortunately, Unity 2D is no longer available in Ubuntu 12.10. I also found another workaround on the web that recommends turning off V-Sync both in the nVidia drivers and in the Compiz settings. That really speeds up things, but it also lets videos appear as if you looked at them through a water curtain, which is suboptimal.

So the “original” Ubuntu is not a viable option for the Zbox either.

Eventually, 64-Bit Xubuntu 12.10 works the best. Xbmc provides the best video playback on all operating systems, but I only have it installed as a last resort fallback solution. I prefer simple media players over full blown media center software. VLC on Linux performs not nearly as well as it does on OS X or Windows and its “GPU acceleration” is a rather bad joke compared to the hardware acceleration that smplayer2 or Xbmc have. I’ve read that the playback code in VLC supposedly is the same as it is in Xbmc, but I honestly doubt it — if it were, video playback should be as smooth and fast in VLC as it is in Xbmc, but it simply isn’t. When it comes to playing 720p or 1080p MKV files, VLC is the worst of the three players.

So, the following software setup is what makes Xubuntu 12.10 a great DESKTOP solution for a Zotac Zbox ID41+.

I don’t know what keyboard you use, but I have a wireless Logitech keyboard that I use with the Zbox that reveals a bug in (X)Ubuntu: The OS does not switch to the German keyboard layout. As a workaround, I add “setxkbmap de” as the last line to the file .profile in my home directory.

Then I start with the system updates and after a reboot, I begin installing some tools that I find essential:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo reboot

Now the restricted extras and some other basic tools:

sudo apt-get install joe aptitude build-essential traceroute xubuntu-restricted-extras

I also like to have Shotwell, The GIMP and LibreOffice on my computer.

sudo apt-get install shotwell gimp libreoffice

The VDPAU library is essential for video playback on that machine; without VDPAU, there will be NO GPU acceleration, so make sure that it is installed:

sudo apt-get install libva1 vdpau-va-driver vainfo

Now the video and music players (I use Guayadeque as my default music player because I think it has the best support for Internet Radio streams):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:motumedia/mplayer-daily 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:smplayer2/daily
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install mplayer2 smplayer2 vlc xbmc guayadeque

I then install Caffeine to prevent the screensaver from interrupting video playback:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-notify-0.7
sudo apt-get install caffeine
caffeine -p &

Add the following processes to caffeine’s list:

vlc
xbmc
smplayer2
mplayer
parole

Then install Wine 1.5, if you need to run some old Windows applications. I use it to play the nice old game “Zeus”, and it works well for that.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.5
winetricks

I also need Java for a couple of things:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

I also like to share access to some of my hard disks to the notebooks in our house. For this, I need Samba on that machine:

sudo apt-get install samba system-config-samba

The rest of the necessary Samba configuration can be done through the graphical configuration utility.
What’s now left to do are the visual tweaks of the desktop environment. That’s rather individual. Some of my personal preferences include moving the close/minimize/maximize buttons from the right window corner to the left, adding a weather indicator panel to the upper bar, making the “dock” always visible, adding launchers for all my favorite applications to it and putting a trash bin applet to the dock as well.
Well, I think that this gives you a nice basic Xubuntu system. Enjoy!

UPDATE

To obtain a more Mac-like feeling, install and use Docky instead of the default lower panel:

sudo apt-get install docky

For browsing the network with the Thunar file manager, create a file

~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list

and add the following three lines to it:

x-directory/gnome-default-handler=Thunar.desktop
inode/directory=Thunar.desktop
x-directory/normal=Thunar.desktop

This requires that “Gigolo” and “gvfs-backends” are installed and working (which was the case on my machine.) The next time you login, Thunar’s sidebar will show a “Network” icon and you can browse your network from there.