Since the release of Windows 7, I’ve heard plenty of good reviews about this latest Windows version and I decided to give it a try.  A month ago, I installed it on my MSI netbook so I could travel lightweight and give a paper presentation using PowerPoint.  Shortly thereafter, Ubuntu released its latest version into the wild and after using both Windows and Linux for about a month, I’ve been able to come up with some strong and weak points on both.  Some of my comments apply to Windows and Linux in general and not just to these latest versions or distributions.

Windows 7

Pros

• A solid UI.  I’m a real fan of the Aero theme, system fonts, and improved start menu.  The taskbar really takes the cake by using icons and clustering multiple instances of the same program.  Hovering over the taskbar gives a cool preview of each open window.
• Fast.  My netbook with Windows 7 feels just as responsive as it did when it ran Linux.  Boot times are a little slower, however.
• Robustness.  I had no difficulty with the Windows 7 install on my netbook and Microsoft even provides a Windows 7 CD to USB image utility for netbooks.  Unlike my Ubuntu experience, there aren’t any weird hacks to go through in order to get your display or wireless connection working correctly following a fresh install.  Furthermore, I haven’t encountered any system crashes and Windows seems to keep any malfunctioning program from taking down the whole system.
• Good hardware support.  I plug in a camera and it’s automatically recognized and drivers are installed from the internet.  I plug in an external monitor or projector and the correct model is detected and my desktop is extended on to it with the correct resolution.  It’s great for presentations since there isn’t much fiddling with the projector or Control Panel settings to get everything looking good.
• Software availability.  Everything has a Windows version, even most open source software.  I find that most developers put more effort into Windows versions since that’s what most people are running.  For example, I’ve had fewer crashes and slowdowns with the Windows versions of Firefox and Skype.  The Windows version of Skype is also much more polished than its Linux counterpart.  Furthermore, many software programs are only available on Windows.  MS Office, despite its incredible price tag, is still far superior to Open Office, and of course, only runs on Windows.
• Games.  Most of the latest AAA titles are available for Windows, a few might be available for Mac, and I’ve heard of only one or two released right off the bat for Linux.  If you’re into PC gaming, Windows is the only way to go.

Cons

• Lack of a centralized software repository.  This makes it a real pain to download and  install software since I have to go to a separate website for each program I want to install, find the download page, and click through a bunch of installation dialogs.  Even worse is that nearly every Windows program I install runs a background process on startup that constantly checks for updates and bogs down my system.  Also because of this lack of a centralized repository, programs inconsistently install themselves in many different places.
• Difficult to configure system settings.  The Control Panel is a real maze of links, buttons, and dialogs which are dumbed down at the highest level and utterly confusing once I drill down into specific settings.  Some settings can’t even be accessed with the Control Panel: for example, I still find myself using msconfig.exe to remove unwanted startup items.
• Windows Update is still very intrusive.  A large number of updates require me to reboot and will display a nag timer forcing me to do so.  I really don’t like the OS to get in the way and nag at me.  Some of the system updates take quite awhile to install and can bring my system to a crawl.
• Libraries.  This feature, which wasn’t in XP, is similar to Unix symlinks.  A library clusters together files and folders from several locations in the filesystem, making it unclear where the files are really located.  I would prefer that all my music, movies, or PowerPoint slideshows be stored in a single location in the directory structure such that I can easily back everything up or find something via Windows Explorer.  Windows seems to want you to not have any knowledge about its directory structure and instead rely on searches and libraries.
• Developer Tools.  This is the exception to the software availability and quality rule.  I’ve been using Eclipse for Linux and Windows and it works well enough on both platforms with plugins for Subversion and LaTeX editing.  However, other tools such as a basic text editor, LaTeX compiler, and command line tools such as make are either lacking or nonexistent.  I find it much easier to work with the command line than a GUI when creating plots with Gnuplot and documents with LaTeX.  I can quickly switch from one thing to the next without clicking through a whole pile of menus and dialogs.

Ubuntu 10.04

Pros

• A centralized software repository.  This is the main reason I like Debian and its variants so much. “apt-get install” will give me any program I want and provide automatic updates.  Removal is just as easy.
• Fast boot times.  On my 3 year old laptop, Ubuntu is up and running in 30 seconds or less from the moment I hit the power button.
• Easy to configure and control.  Adjusting a system setting is easily performed from a GUI tool or from the command line.  Configurations are stored in well documented text files as opposed to the nasty Windows Registry.  It’s really easy to track down where a program’s install directory is located and tweak something.
• A customizable UI.  The sheer number of themes available is astounding, with Compiz providing some really cool desktop visual effects that rivals anything Windows has to offer.
• Enthusiastic user base (support).  I’ve found that tons other Linux enthusiasts are more than willing to help with problems on message boards and websites.  For things I’ve had trouble with, a quick google search or message board post will return tons of answers with other people who had the exact same problem and had already solved it.  With Windows issues, answers seem a lot more difficult to come by and the user base isn’t nearly as friendly.
• Developer Tools.  Just about everything under the sun is readily available for developers in Linux, including a plethora of compilers, text editors, and command line tools.  Working from the command line makes things a snap compared to painstakingly navigating through different dialogs and menus.

Cons

• New software versions take time to be added to the repository.  For example, Firefox 3.6 has been out for months but was only recently included in the 10.04 Lucid Lynx release.  Prior to that, I had to compile and install Firefox 3.6 from source.
• Installation headaches still persist.  With every Ubuntu release, something doesn’t work post-install.  With 10.04, it was my video drivers.  During the upgrade process from 9.10, the installer whined about my video drivers and supposedly aborted the install.  Upon rebooting my computer, however, it was clear that the install had not aborted and my display was completely messed up.  After rebooting again, Ubuntu downloaded and installed the required video drivers automatically.  Also, Ubuntu now tries on boot to mount a remote drive in my /etc/fstab for which I don’t have a saved key, halting the boot process until I manually override the mounting process.
• Software quality and robustness.  Productivity software, such as Open Office, isn’t nearly as capable or as featureful as Microsoft Office.  I’ve had trouble with Flash causing browser crashes and other programs crashing all on their own which run stably in Windows.  I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out why some fonts are rendered terribly and look blurry in some programs, among other things.  More effort should be placed on creating polished products in order for open source software to really take off.
• Lacking hardware support.  This goes with the above bullet: I plug in an external monitor or projector and I still have to fidget with resolutions and positioning to get everything to work.  Suspending to disk often borks the external monitor configuration and then I have to do it all over again.

In all, I can’t say that either the latest Windows or Linux versions are better.  Windows provides a more robust and polished solution, while Linux gives more power and control to its users.  I find Linux to be a better choice for development, but Windows is the clear winner for gaming.  Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04 run reasonably fast — Windows 7 does quite well on my netbook, but Ubuntu clearly takes the cake with boot times.  Until open source software takes quality up a notch and Windows provides a better development environment, I’ll probably be dual booting, running virtual machines, or using multiple computers with both operating systems.

I tried desperately to fix the fonts, summoning the help of the Ubuntu forums.  I tried editing font rendering settings in my local .fonts.conf.  I deleted the font cache and reconfigured fontconfig.  I tried adjusting a font quality parameter in Firefox’s about:config. For some forums posters, these solutions worked.  For me, nothing seemed to help.  Finally, I was able to get Firefox 3.6 installed with normal fonts by downloading and compiling the source code and installing the binaries compiled on my own system.

I’m not the only one who is frustrated by this.  This was probably the first time I’ve resorted to compiling a third party application from source since first using Ubuntu and Debian in 2006.  Normally, it’s just apt-get install whatever program you want.  The package manager automatically updates everything and keeps out of my way, rarely nagging to reboot unless the kernel was updated.  The package repository was one of the main reasons I switched to Linux in the first place: an easy, single step way to install anything and keep it up to date.  No hunting for a download website somewhere on the internet or clicking through a bunch of dialogs in an install wizard.

With such lag before new third party applications get added to the Ubuntu software repository, plenty argue that Linux isn’t ready for the mainstream.  I agree completely.  Most people will have to go through similar steps as I to get many of the latest third party applications installed, and it can be a real pain.  However, in Linux, I am free (as in speech) to customize or rewrite any part of the operating system and share my changes with others.  It also gives me a free (as in beer), top notch development environment for my work.  The problem is that such freedom comes at a cost: tinkering to get everything to work correctly.  Every time I’ve upgraded to the latest Ubuntu version, something doesn’t work and has to be fixed.  In another example, I recently installed the netbook remix version on my netbook and was rewarded by a flickering screen, which was fixed with a BIOS update.

Mainstream users just don’t want to be faced with flickering screens and BIOS updates, they want something that just works.  Consequently, they are willing to give up some of that freedom (as in speech and beer) to have a device that boots normally and doesn’t have font rendering issues when they install the latest version of a program.  Such users are better off with an Apple, and indeed Apple charges them a price in terms of money and control.

The iPad has launched a storm of controversy over its lack of user control.  Essentially, the device is a large iPhone, except there is no phone.  All applications must be purchased from the Apple-controlled App Store.  The real question is: do  mainstream users really need fine-grained control over their devices?  One comment on a Slashdot post really makes an interesting argument:

What has choice done? It’s given us the chaos of spam, malware, worms etc…  The average consumer should get a locked down device such as what Apple are proposing, a limited device with a closed market. And you do realise this is really no different to a games console.  Full blown computers should be reserved for those of us who know how to manage them responsibly…Computers as they are today are simply too complex and difficult to manage for the average consumer, so you either give them something simple or you take the management out of their hands.

Combined with the “Linux is not for mainstream” argument, this really makes the case that perhaps devices that work well but allow little user freedom may be the best for most people.  Most of the time, it’s the best choice for me.  I’ve got a phone, media player, GPS device, and others that I want to just work and perform a very specific function.  In these cases, I would rather they perform their jobs reliably than be extensively customizable.  However, I do think that the option to exercise greater control should be there for those who want it, no matter how few.  In the case of PCs, I’ll take that option, stick to Linux, and keep compiling from source when I have to.

Fortunately, the drive was mostly unused and had nothing really useful in it, while most everything remained safe on the primary WD Raptor.  The really important stuff is already backed up on my network drive or on my department disk space, so if anything else blows up I’ll still be okay.  When I removed the offending drive and tried to boot, only the power supply and CPU fans started spinning, leaving me with only a blank screen.  Somehow I managed to have unseated the video card from its connection to the motherboard and after I reseated it, everything returned to normal.

Quite a few people try to salvage failing computer components, but I don’t think it’s worth it.  The main idea is to patch stuff up just enough to transfer off any important data.  There’s the legend of  sticking the drive in the freezer overnight to get it working again.  Someone even got their video card working by baking it in the oven.  The fear of losing data is so great to some that there even exists a sound library of hard drive failures.

I don’t think my computer has much life left in it.  I don’t want to switch to my laptop for everything since it only has a VGA output and no digital connection, rendering my monitor useless.  I suppose I could get a docking station, but I can’t believe that Lenovo still makes laptops without digital outputs for external monitors.  Despite buying it last year, it even came with a pile of serial ports, a dial-up modem, and a PCMCIA slot that nobody would ever use.  A new desktop would be good for games but that was the purpose of buying an Xbox, and besides, high end desktops are still pretty expensive.  Of course something beefy would also be good for my schoolwork, since the last two projects had implementations that were extremely CPU intensive.

Regardless, I think I’m running on borrowed time.

Constant “routine” disk checks on boot

Ubuntu 9.04 is lauded by critics for its improved boot times, and in most cases my machines running it boot to the login screen in less than 45 seconds.  This is a solid improvement and it’s supposed to be under 10 seconds by the release of 10.04.  The improved boot time in 9.04 is great: when I turn my computer on, I want to use it, not wait for an hour while the hard drive clicks and groans and the mouse cursor spins endlessly.  It’s all well and good except that about every tenth boot takes forever thanks to an annoying disk checking routine.  Are drive failures really that common that my drive has to be picked over by a fine-toothed comb every week?  If so, a new storage technology is desperately needed.  In the past 20 years or so, I’ve only had one memorable drive failure.

So, to fix the irritating disk checks on boot:

sudo tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sda1

-c specifies the rate at which your disk is checked on boot and /dev/sda1 is your boot partition.

PC Speaker

Aside from the Caps Lock key, the PC speaker is an extremely annoying and useless “feature” of nearly every PC.  Depending on your configuration, quite a few things can cause the PC speaker to beep, such as hitting backspace in a console when you haven’t typed anything.  For some reason, when I shut down the computer using the Gnome shut down menu, I get several beeps from the PC speaker.  This appears to be a bug.  The best solution appears to be preventing the PC speaker module from loading at all.   Create a blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d called blacklist-custom.conf:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-custom.conf

Then, add the following line to blacklist-custom.conf, save the file, and exit:

blacklist pcspkr

This will cause the “pcspkr” module not to load on boot. You can unload the module without rebooting by running the following in a terminal window:

sudo modprobe -r pcspkr

Update Manager Pop-under

Update nags are one of the worst “features” of many current operating systems. On Windows XP, I am spammed by a torrent of nag balloons forcing me to install updates and restart when the installation is complete. In OS X, a similar update manager jumps out at me in the dock until I deal with it. Until 9.04, Ubuntu had it right. In previous versions of Ubuntu, a small notification balloon would appear once and go away when new updates were available to install. I could either click on it to install the updates, or ignore it if I was in the middle of something. Now, what happens is about ten minutes after turning on my computer, which is right about the time I really get to working on something, the whole system grinds to a halt with the hard drive going nuts. Then, the Update Manager window opens underneath all the windows I have running, blinking and nagging at me to install whatever it found.

To go back to the original notification window functionality, run the following in a terminal window:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false


Force Shutdown

When I click the “Shut Down” button to turn off my computer, I want it to turn off.  No exceptions.  Instead, if Firefox takes its merry time to save its session or something is running in the background (mounted drive through nfs or samba that won’t unmount), I get a nice “x is not responding.  Logout anyway?” prompt.  I don’t care if something isn’t responding: kill everything and shut down.  To force shutdowns, edit your menu.lst:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst


Scroll down and add “acpi=force noapic” to the kernel line of the default boot option:

title Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
uuid f9d46e73-4aae-4203-ad97-93df87196054
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=... ro quiet splash acpi=force noapic
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet


I recall a discussion in the locker room after cross country practice about a teammate I had never met.  I don’t recall his name, but this guy had graduated before I even got to college.  John, one of the well respected fifth year seniors said this guy wanted to go to NCAAs as part of the seven-man travel squad, but only “wanted to travel to the course, warm up with the team, and get a t-shirt.”  He did not want to actually run the race.  This guy never made the travel squad to NCAAs.  To him, and many others, it’s all about instant gratification without any of the work.  Running competitively isn’t like a movie where all the hard work is abstracted away and all that’s shown is the glorious win over the evil opponents.  To date, our team has qualified for every national meet since 1997, one of only five schools.   To do that takes considerable effort and years of training for hours every day.  You can’t just fast forward to the good parts.

The zeitgeist of today is marked by a lack of intrinsic motivation to undertake any long term efforts.  In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites James Flynn’s work on how Asian students work harder and longer on problems than their American counterparts.  Given a tough math problem, most American students will work on it for only a short while before giving up.  This ethos carries over into other areas.  An article in the New York Times states that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, many of which only have one post.  The torrents of traffic and commenters envisioned by these blog posters just doesn’t happen overnight.  They think blogging fame will come immediately, but it doesn’t.  It takes time to build a reader base.  More to the point, the blog also has to have content that people are willing to read.  I’ll be surprised if many people read this post or others like it concerning my opinions and everyday life, but most of my traffic comes from my software troubleshooting/debugging and knee microfracture posts.  Even in my little corner of the Internet, I have made gradual traffic gains over the months.  People just don’t swarm in overnight:

Apparently, the same is true for Twitter: most users either abandon their account after signing up or just make one post.  Again, the problem boils down to effort: few are willing to make the effort and post meaningful content at frequent intervals.  Followers just don’t appear because you signed up.  Like blogs, it isn’t just the frequency of posts, but the value of the content: I really don’t care what you ate for lunch today.  I especially don’t care that you got a front row seat at the Apple Developer’s Conference after waiting in line since 4 AM.  Most Twitter posts aren’t much better than spam.  To attract followers, the posts have to carry some value to those beyond a small circle of friends.

Everyone just wants the massive blog readership or the Twitter following, but couldn’t care less about the content required to generate such traffic.   Sometimes, when the desired outcome can’t be achieved with lackluster efforts, many try to lower the bar.  Currently, there’s an effort in Virginia Beach to relax the public school grading scale from 7 point to 10 point.  Parents think this will even the playing field with other school systems that have switched to a 10 point scale, but it’s really just lowering the standards.  Parents want their kid to get in to his or her college of choice and to do it by studying less.  Also along these lines, a state representive recently proposed that more in state students should be accepted to Virginia public universities because a constituent complained that the acceptance standards were too tough and he didn’t get in.  I’m guessing that this “constituent” was probably the representative’s kid.  What is the real secret to getting in to your college of choice?  It isn’t done by getting easier As or by pushing out extremely well qualified out of state students.  Work harder, and anything can happen.

It’s pretty bad that so many people give up when they realize some effort is involved.  It’s worse when people lower their standards of success when their current efforts are clearly lacking.  Believe it or not, there are even worse characters out there that will do anything to get instant gratification: cheaters.  Instead of working hard for ten months researching state-of-the-art, tweaking out a system design, implementing the design, testing the design against existing works, and finally writing and submitting a research paper, some people are willing to cheat.  A recent study reports that an astounding  2% of researchers fake their results.  In a similar instance, some colleges are willing to fudge the statistics to improve their rankings.  They play with class sizes and give peer institutions poor reviews to improve their standing.  Instead of improving the school in an honest way, taking the time to hire more and better qualified faculty, increasing employee pay, and attracting better students, Clemson faked its way up 16 places in U.S. News reviews.

What is the real solution to this lack of motivation?  How can more people motivate themselves to post regularly on their blog?  How can people stick with something and work hard enough to achieve just rewards?  Some slick researchers tried paying students for earning good grades.  This approach improved state test scores by nearly 40 percentage points.  Did money provide the motivation for these students to work harder and longer on their math problems and not give up?  Apparently.  Proponents of this system argue that the “real world” functions much in this way: perform better and get paid more.  But money can’t be added as an outcome in every scenario.  How many blogs or Twitter accounts are raking in the dough?  Almost zero, I would guess.  Instead, people need intrinsic motivation to produce results over the long term.  I don’t write this post because I envision piles of Internet surfers reading and commenting on this.  I do it because there’s satisfaction in organizing my thoughts and ideas and writing them down.  I don’t care that nobody else will read this, but if someone else finds it interesting, then more power to them.

Aside from writing these inane blog posts, it is intrinsic motivation that keeps me working on long research projects.  It’s what gets me up in the morning with the hope that I’ll be able to run normally again after knee surgery.  I run slow, go out every other day,  only go ten minutes, and feel terrible, but I know if I do it enough I’ll be able to run faster and longer.  By keeping at it and going one step at a time, things will get done.

I use VLC as my default media player. During an Ubuntu upgrade (I think it was 8.04 to 8.10), video playback in VLC started flickering.

In VLC, go to Tools->Preferences and click the Video button. Change output to X11 video output. This fixed the problem for me. There may be some way to change the output system-wide if you use other players, but I’ve had no reason to do this. Also, I don’t think I’ve had any issues with Internet Flash videos.

Looking here and here I found that you can mount a remote filesystem as a particular local user and/or group.  I modified my /etc/fstab accordingly so that all users of the “fuse” group can correctly mount my remote filesystem:

sshfs#username@remotehost:/remotedir /path/to/mountpoint fuse user,noauto 0 0

You can also specify a user or group id by replacing user with uid=xxxx,gid=xxxx.

I even had to screw around in Ubuntu to get the drive mounted.  The floppy has been seriously neglected, but what do you do when you’ve got an old BIOS that won’t flash from USB?

Fortunately, the flash worked, but I hope the CPU fan issue is resolved.  I really hate looking down to see if the fan has started up when I turn on the computer.  I used to just leave it on indefinitely so I wouldn’t have to worry, but it gets too hot in here.