I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y510 from Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy, which I’ve been running since around May 2008, to Linux Mint 8, Helena (which is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10). I used to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu every 6 months, but it got a bit tiring keeping up on the upgrade treadmill, running around fixing things, especially things that worked before. I decided to stick to the Long-Term Support version (LTS), as the intermediate versions tend to have more regressions.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.

First published on Neverness.

As the title says I’m going to talk about some of the differences between all of the above.

This is also my first blog so I’m hoping that I don’t do it to badly. WINE is  basically a windows emulator for Linux operating systems. WINE allows you to run some applications on Linux that does not have Linux support or installers ie: Office 2007, World of Warcraft and many others. This is not a how-to but more a idea of what is going around and what its all about. WINE is the underlying technology for all the above applications. But lets face it, this was made so we could run the nice M$ games on our Linux distros. I for one love to game and I really would like to have more games written for M$ and Linux. I can’t figure out what the big deal is as most games are written in C++ and could be compiled for any OS type.

Games is a major stumbling block when it comes to people moving from M$ to Linux and most don’t have the knowledge or time to sit and try figure out how to play there favorite games on Linux. Here comes the solutions. Some are free and others not but lets take a look at them a little more.

WINE

WINE is easy to setup but hard to configure. Most of the time you need to install things like flash, msfonts and direct X to make things work. So far I found that if you don’t want to physically install something from a CD or download it, the best option is to use WINE on its own and check out WINE AppDb for some useful tips on how to run some of the applications. WINE has some add-on tools to make life a little easier like winetricks and others.

Cedega also known as WINEX

Cedega is a commercial application that will cost you around $5 a month if you want to play games on Linux but it does support some really nice games. It’s a frontend that was built on top of WINE which runs basic scripts to install the needed applications to run specific games. Now, as South Africans in a recession this is not a viable option as we already have to pay monthly subs for some games and then also just to run it on our system.

Crossover

Crossover has two versions: Crossover Linux Professional and Crossover games for Linux. And as you can guess it is WINE with some scripts and uses WINEPREFIX to run its applications. I must say if I had to pay for applications this would be  the one. Its a once-off charge of $39.95 and no monthly subs.

PlayOnLinux

This is exactly the same as all of the above its uses WINE with scripts to make installations easy. The big difference here is that its absolutely free and according to their site will remain free. But with all free things there comes a price. Their application support is not as big as WINE and they are still working out what all is needed to run what applications.

Now for my 2 cents worth on the entire subject is that if you have all the install CDs and your looking for less fuss and more play time then get either Crossover or PlayOnLinux as they are reasonable and less hard to work with. If you have all your games on a external hdd like me from Windows past then WINE with winetricks is about the best option. This is a work around for playing games on Linux and until supplies start recognizing that the Linux gaming community is growing rapidly and start selling games for all OS’s this will have to be the workaround.

Oh, the one thing that all the others do is use WINEPREFIX with different names. Crossover calls it bottles and PlayOnLinux something else. But what it basically does is install your game on its own little windows framework so that if you install something that might help one application but break another then they don’t affect each other. CodeWeavers Crossover also gives you a 30-day trial on CrossOver Games Linux if you want to check it out before you buy it.

Some useful links

http://www.winehq.org/
http://www.codeweavers.com/
http://www.playonlinux.com/en
http://www.cedega.com/

Sometime over the past week Google quietly increased the version number of its Chromium development browser to 4.0 and it is every bit as fast at rendering web pages as version 3.0 was.

Officially Google only releases its browser as Chrome, and it doesn’t actually have a Linux version available yet so many Linux users have yet to give Chrome a spin. But Google does also regularly release development versions of Chromium for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms which offers all the benefits of bleeding edge Chrome development without the assurance of a “stable” tag.

Earlier this month Google released a beta version of Chrome 3.0 for Windows and said that it was as much as 30% faster than any other browser. I haven’t had an opportunity to test Chrome 3.0 on Windows so I don’t know how true that is but I did test a Chromium 3.0 version on Linux and – here’s the thing – it is almost 50% faster than Firefox3.5 on the same platform at rendering web pages.

I ran Opera 9.63, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chromium 3x through the SunSpider Javascript test (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html). Firefox 3.5 turned in a very respectable 1766ms turn of speed. Which is enough to put it miles ahead of Opera’s sluggish 7613ms but not a patch on Google Chromium 3.0 which turned a score of 719ms. So, when it comes to rending pages it seems that Chrome has some legitimate claim to the fastest browser title.

Subsequently, however, a Chromium 4.0 version was released (I’m currently running version 4.0.204.0) and it is proving to be every bot as good as 3.0.

Instructions for installing Chromium builds on Linux can be found on the Chromium dev website. There are also a number of distro-specific builds available including for Ubuntu and Fedora.