-
Users of Internet Explorer or Maxthon These are the most useless browsers know to man on the internet. Download a GOOD one NOW!
-
Does a purist attitude hurt the development of Linux?
When you have something like Linux which is available FOR free and IS free, you have the inevitable issues of people taking advantage of the situation and giving nothing in return. This is something that unfortunately is just a fact of life, if you offer something at no cost, people will take it, however if you offer something that is free “as in liberty”, not everyone will want it, nor will they care, if you combine the two you’ll attract both types of people. This is why Linux appeals to so many people already and why it’s user-base and developer-base is expanding daily. You have the people in this world who are idealists and want everyone to be nice to everybody else and be ethical, you have the freeloaders, the cheapskates and the pompous, then you have the realists, like me. Linux manages to cover all these people quite nicely, with Red Hat, Canonical, Debian, Novell and the volunteer only operations.
Red Hat does not have a purist attitude
As far as the purist attitude goes, Red Hat shouldn’t really exist, or if they do, they certainly shouldn’t charge for what they do. In the purist’s eyes, Red Hat is a corporate company, capitalizing on the freedom of Linux and other GPL software, even if they do give back development. The truth is, without corporates, money, trade and a marketplace, the world would almost literally stop rotating, and then we all float off into space and we can’t breath anymore, that’s not a good thing in case you were wondering. To the best of my knowledge, when Linus, Richard and the other Open Source pioneers invented their respective softwares and laid down the rules & regulations that became the GPL and the “mantra” if you will of Open Source Software, there was nothing said about being unable to charge for the software, or for services pertaining to it, the only rule that came close, was that it had to also be available freely and you had to provide the source code with it, along with any copyright notices, the GPL itself and maintain the credits of any original works. So is Red Hat a bad company? Not in my opinion no, they provide direct competition for Microsoft in the server market and they don’t really do all that much in Desktops, except at the “Super Corporate” level.
Is it wrong to be a freeloader?
Not entirely no. Freeloaders are actually required in order to make anything grow, let’s face it, without all the people who use Linux and other GPL software on a day to day basis, that don’t have the knowledge or expertise to do anything other than use it, there would be no reason for the developers to improve things so much, on such a regular basis. This is almost the same as asking if money is a bad thing, it is in many ways the root of all evil, but the fact is, without it, there would be very little motivation for people to make things, invent things or develop existing creation. Now don’t get me wrong, things would still get invented, developed and refined, it’s human nature to do these things, the difference without money and/or demand though, is that the motivation to do these things is much less. Without companies like Canonical and Red Hat for example, who ARE in it for money, regardless of how much or how little they actually make at present, the current state of the Linux Desktop would be NOWHERE NEAR what it is today. If companies like these weren’t out there, constantly trying to develop a product that they can use to make money, in order to compete with the ultimate corporate (MS), the desktop would still get developed, but it would be done at a very slow rate in comparison.
Without compliance there can be no harmony
So the purists believe that we should rid our systems of anything proprietary, that includes NVidia and ATi drivers, it also includes any proprietary software such as Adobe Reader, Flash or Photoshop, not to mention the various other programs that are required to do certain jobs, which I’m sorry, there just isn’t an equivalent for in FOSS sometimes. One of the things Symsys does for it’s customers is produce ready to print images, these can be for anything from articles in a newspaper or magazine, to a flier, brochure, business card, car graphics or even a 50ft billboard advertisement. Unfortunately, as much as we adore FOSS, Linux and all that is GPL, we have absolutely no choice in some of these situations, but to use proprietary software to get the job done. Before the purists jump on their bandwagon of, “You just can’t be bothered to look for the software”, we have, we found some in certain circumstances and it either didn’t do the job at all or it didn’t do it anywhere near well enough, quickly enough or without a severe amount of intervention, now that’s not FOSS fault, it’s not the developers fault, it’s the proprietary software developers fault, for developing industry standards and not giving anything away to the FOSS developers to work with, regardless of your views on how imoral that may be, they have the legal right to do so. Unfortunately if there just isn’t any FOSS available to do the job, we need to find software that will, or turn the job away to a competitor, that just wouldn’t be good business and unfortunately feeding my family is my number one moral.
We use FOSS where and whenever physically possible, we even custom write software occassionally to make it do what we want, but that isn’t always practical, possible or financially viable with deadlines, customer expectations and workloads. The fact that I run dual 19″ screens and our designer runs dual 22″ screens, means that without Nvidia drivers we’d be running one screen each, because getting them working, to a standard that is acceptable, usable and productive, would be completely futile in terms of time, money and resources to make it happen in-house. Instead we use NVidia drivers, we want the functionallity that comes with using Adobe Reader to read PDFs and we want the compatibility that you only get when using Flash player to watch Flash movies, Gnash is great but it just isn’t Flash.
Purists are doing the very thing they supposedly hate
In expecting every single user of FOSS to return something, they are themselves demanding the software be paid for in some way, collaboration and co-operation is imperitive to FOSS and the world itself, the fact is though, so are freeloaders. Without freeloaders there is less demand, without demand, there is very little production, simple. Most FOSS is developed initially, because it fills the purpose of the person developing it, or the person that hired them to develop it, later though it is developed further because a demand exists. The developer chooses to make it freely available to anyone, anywhere, anytime and they also make a conscious decision that they allow people to do what they want with the source code (for the most part), change it, make addons for it, convert it to different platforms etc. and in doing so they also acknowledge that people can go and sell it as a boxed product and make money from it, even though they’ve done nothing but burn it to disc and stick it in a box. People and companies are also free to charge for services pertaining to that software, no matter what, they didn’t have to develop it, change it in any way or even have anything to do with it, up to the point that they advertised the service relating to it. If they didn’t, the adoption and spread of Linux would be far slower, thus lowering demand, thus slowing production and development.
Purism itself isn’t evil, it has the best of intentions
There’s nothing wrong with idealism, there’s is certainly nothing wrong with purism if you can obtain it, however preaching about purism in the open media and insisting that everyone follow your lead, makes you seem very much like a cult/religious evangelist, and certainly makes you seem very immature and unrealistic. Trying to enforce your views and your methods on the rest of the world around you, that just isn’t groovy baby and it certainly isn’t the way of FOSS. The ability to make Open Source business models financially rewarding and viable, is imperetive to FOSS development, as is the ability for people to use it freely, with no investment whatsoever, be that time, money or skills. Without these two primarily and unfortunately “unfree” attributes, FOSS would surely be underdeveloped. To enable the adoption of FOSS and reduce the market share of proprietary software, FOSS must first keep it’s enemies closer than it keeps it’s friends, it must enable it’s users to interact with people that have not yet seen the light, in order that they might see it in the future. When looking at things practically, without the ability to sell services for FOSS, I wouldn’t be in business, without the ability to use NVidia drivers, I wouldn’t be able to use Linux productively and without the freeloaders, Linux wouldn’t even be developed enough for my customers to want to use it so I’d have no target market. The previous paragraph may sound selfish because I’ve used my own business as an example, but I need freeloaders, Linux and FOSS needs freeloaders, Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Novell, they all need freeloaders and so indeed does the world itself. I admire purists for their ability to make themselves completely vendor independant, to make their own choices without detrimental effects to others and having such a clean concience, they need to realise though that not everyone can do that, no matter how much they may want to.
Filed under: Linux Reviews ... Comments (0)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email
Over the years I’ve been a helpdesk agent, a telecommunications network administrator, an I.T. engineer, a .NET programmer, a web applications programmer and a Linux evangelist (The last one is a full time job but it doesn’t pay as well as the others). Needless to say that in these roles and over such a long period of time I’ve used my fair share of cloning programs and definitely used more than my fair share of partitioning tools. Clonezilla and GParted have really made an impression on me though.
Let’s just take a scenario where you might use these programs. You’ve installed your Linux Desktop machine, you used guided installation for partitioning, but you were clever enough to make home a seperate partition. Automatically Linux installers tend to assume (On guided partitioning) that you only need 7 – 8GB of space for the main operating system and gives the rest of the drive to swap and home. This is absolutely fine, until of course you install too many programs that require /usr/sbin /opt and /etc, at which point you find yourself quickly running out of space on your main partition and the rest of you’re entire disk is used up with free space.
So given this scenario what do you do? Well if you’ve got a free hard drive you could boot up a Live CD, mount your partitions, create new partitions on your second hard drive for /etc, /var, /opt, /usr or any other folder that has a lot of data in it and could free up some space by moving the data there, then mounting them with fstab spreading your file system around another one or more disks. The problem with that is that you’re then using up another/more hard drive(s) and worse yet you’re also spreading your file system accross lots of different drives, some people actually choose to do this, it gives multiple points of failure instead of just the one, the problem though is what happens if the drive that holds your /etc /opt and /var folders dies while everything else stays in tact? Or what happens if on a boot up, one of these very important mount points fails. There are pro’s and con’s for it and against it as with everything. My personal choice if the primary drive was big enough, and I had a second drive to move data to temporarily would be ….
Create folders in /media for the data you need to move around, for example mkdir /media/TempHome, then (If your other drive is sdb with 1 partition, formatted as ext3 for example)
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/TempHome,
then
mkdir /media/TempHome/home/
cp -Rp /home/* /media/TempHome/home/
This will copy everything from the /home/ directory (Including other peoples home folders if it’s a multi-user system) to the second drive (sdb1, mounted at /media/TempHome) maintaining all permissions on files and folders so that the same command later, with locations swapped around, will bring everything back, without the need to mess around setting permissions back. The next thing to do is obtain a copy of clonezilla, and burn it to a disc as a bootable CD. Reboot with Clonezilla in the CD drive and once it boots up you have a very self explanatory guide to help you “Clone” your main hard drive (Probably sda or hda on most systems, but it can be different), effectively backing up your existing system, “as-is” without changing anything, to a different drive, network location or removable media as a clonezilla image. This is an important step in the process because when you’re playing with partitions you never know if it’s definitely going to work without breaking things and having that clonezilla image allows you to just boot back up into clonezilla upon finding your broken system, select the image, select the primary drive and hit restore.
So you’ve copied your /home data to a seperate hard drive, you’ve cloned your entire system “as-is” and saved the clone image to the second drive with the use of Clonezilla, what you need to do now, is change your existing partitions around to make them more usable and give your main system more space. Sounds easy right? Well it is. You should have already downloaded GParted (Although I didn’t tell you to yet you should have guessed 
) and burned it to disc. Stick the GParted CD in the drive and boot up your machine, you’ll automatically boot into a fluxbox interface and the GParted program will start automatically as well. From previous experience GParted doesn’t usually have a problem, deleting, re-sizing or adding new partitions, but everytime I’ve tried to move one, it’s failed on me, so my recommendation is to delete your home partition on /dev/sda6 in GParted(Remember you’ve copied your entire home folder to sdb already AND you’ve cloned the drive, so you’ve double backed everything up already in case of disaster), delete the swap partition as well if it’s in the same extended partition, then delete the extended partition, this shouldn’t take much time at all.
Next on the list is to enlarge your main partition (we’re assuming /dev/sda1) to an appropriate size, now regardless of what size your hard drive is, you don’t want to waste space, and unless you’re a software hoarder (I am) then you probably won’t need an sda1 partition any larger than about 50GB maximum. So let’s re-size that partition in GParted using the GUI, make it 50GB in size (50000MB), this can take a bit of time, as it tends to do two file checks while re-sizing (This is a good thing that lots of partition manipulators don’t do). Once it’s done we can go ahead and create a new extended partition that spans the entire free space on the drive. Next create a new SWAP partition, this needs to be EITHER twice the size of your RAM, so if you’ve got 1GB of RAM you should make SWAP 2GB but I usually just go for 2.5GB no matter what, if you’ve got less RAM you’re more likely to run out and if you’ve got more RAM then it won’t hurt because you’ve likely got a large hard drive anyway. Anyway, once you’ve created the partition, you’ll need to highlight it and choose swapon from the menus in GParted, this will activate the swap partition for your system to use.
Now that you’ve created swap you need to create your home partition again, obviously the size just needs to be the remaining space left on the hard drive, unless you want other partitions on it because you’ve got a 1TB drive or something. That should be set to ext3 when you format the partition. Next you can close the GParted GUI but don’t reboot yet. Click on the console icon on your desktop and type the following commands.
mkdir /media/Home/
mkdir /media/OldHome/
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda6 /media/Home/
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/OldHome/
cp -Rp /media/OldHome/home/* /media/Home/
Now working on the assumption (As we have been throughout) that you’re using sda as your main hard drive, it has /dev/sda1 as the primary partition, then an extended partition of /dev/sda2, then swap is /dev/sda5 (Remember the first LOGICAL partition on a hard drive is ALWAYS 5) and finally /dev/sda6 is going to be mounted as /home on your main system and you had two seperate partitions in the first place for home and your main system, this should be it and you SHOULD be able to reboot.
If however you didn’t have a seperate home partition in the first place and have been following this to perform specifically the task of creating a seperate home partition, you’ll still need to do the following before you reboot. You should now have all your data in the right place, with the right permissions and you should also still have the data backed up in both normal files and the form of a clonezilla image on that second hard drive, so we’re nearly finished. All you need to do now is edit you’re /etc/fstab file on your main system before booting into it, otherwise you won’t be able to login. So follow the remaining commands before rebooting.
mkdir /media/System
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 /media/System
cd /media/System/etc/
nano fstab
Then add the following line to it, to make sure it mounts your /home partition on boot:
/dev/sda6 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
Be careful when editing /etc/fstab, make sure you have the correct partition number (/dev/sda6 for example) and make sure you have the right mount point (/home in this case) and the right file system (ext3 usually but occasionally people use ext2 or other file systems) and you should be fine.
Either way, hopefully you can see from the seriously low amount of command line actions required in this guide, Clonezilla and GParted are excellent tools for people who need to do all the technical stuff, but just aren’t strong on the command line or prefer something graphical, or even if you just don’t have the time to type all the commands, plus it’s far less risky to use a program specifically designed to only issue certain commands and does it with everything unmounted, than trying to unmount the right partitions at the right time, issuing all the commands by hand which could be proned to errors and you’ll still need something like Clonezilla to clone the drive instead of just copying it elsewhere anyway.
Filed under: Linux Reviews ... Comments (0)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
When I first got in to Linux as a hobby many years ago, and just like many others did, gaming was an un-spoken subject. I wanted to play Half Life and Counter Strike in Linux and I was pretty much told to forget it. Not being the sort of person to really just forget anything, I didn’t, instead I installed Wine (I think it was on version 0.2 or something back then I can’t remember), and proceeded to install Steam and HL, then CS. Sure enough the graphics had serious issues, there was no sound and I seemed to always have a huge ping on the servers I joined. So I gave it up as a bad job, but safe in the knowledge that Wine would improve and some day I’d be able to play all my favorite games in Linux.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
Well that day hasn’t quite come yet, we still can’t play EVERYTHING or run EVERY program from Windows in Wine, but we’re getting bloody close now. I can play CSS and HL2 seemlessly in Wine, sound works, graphics are fine, installers, save games etc, everything just works, you can now run programs like Photoshop CS2 (CS3 kinda works I’m told) and Dreamweaver CS2 without any problems that would really phase you and now that the Quake and Doom engines have been OSS’d there are all sorts of open source games, released under the GPL, that are freely available to play on Linux without the aid of Wine.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
Nexuiz is one I’vebeen toying with recently, it was actually my partner who brought it to my attention, she was looking through the lists of open source programs on wikipedia and just for a laugh decided to take a look at games, she spotted nexuiz and told me to try it on my Debian Lenny system. I was a little apprehensive as I run dual screens and that never seems to work well for games in Linux, but I apt-get install nexuiz anyway. Once installed I disabled my second monitor (Who needs it anyway when you’re gaming and it’s easy as you like with the Nvidia-Settings-Manager these days) and loaded up the game expecting to see a re-vamped Alien Arena or Open Arena, I was surprised to say the least.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
Nexuiz on Debian Linux.
This game is brilliant, yes it looks like it might use the quake engine but I don’t care, it’s just so good. Incredibly playable, the menus work great, the graphics are brilliant and I was just immediately hooked. I played for about half an hour before I remembered I had work to do and reluctantly turned the game off, re-enabled my second screen and began coding again.
The reason for this post, is now to put more propoganda out there for Linux, but to make some of the Linux users realise that just because we can’t run Windows games all the time and perfectly in Linux, doesn’t mean there aren’t alternatives out there ready and waiting for us. So if you’re using a Debian or Debian-based system, go ahead and apt-get install nexuiz and try it out for yourself, let me know how you get on and whether you liked the game or not.
Filed under: Linux Reviews ... Comments (0)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email
What is available for the Graphic Designer
on Linux?
I think it is probably safe to say, that if you have searched for this article, you may already realise the benefits of dumping the Windows or Mac installation …. but what about all that proprietry software that you have been using for years?
I agree that it is a good thing to be able to include some big software names on your CV but at the end of the day it is your creative ability that sings the song of greatness in your portfolio. If you have experienced a variety of graphics packages, you of all people should know that using a different or lesser known package to get the result does not affect your ability to use a chosen proprietary package or the quality of the result achieved one iota.
Specifically raised as important to the Graphics Professional are the following programs. All of these are part of what we would normally include in a custom Linux install service at Symsys Ltd.
Vector Graphics Software for Linux
INKSCAPE is the most popular choice for industry professionals within the Linux community. Whether you are used to Illustrator or Corel (two very different packages) Inkscape has literally combined all the best functions into one and allows you to customize the package layout and panels to suit your way of working. There are now no CMYK issues, it includes colour mixing palettes, barcoding, diagram building, node editing and so on. This will open AI, PDF… even ICO and WMF. EPS import does work on the Linux version, but it has bugs that are being currently ironed out. The best thing is, you know the cure is never far behind and as with most open software, a huge community is there to help you and each other out.
Photo Editing Suite for Linux
As a graphic Designer for some 15+ years now (crikey), I know that we need something much more than just a meager ‘paint program’ or ‘digicam suite’.
GIMP is THE Photo Suite solution for Linux. Like Inkscape, do not be suprized if you feel a bit like it is Photoshop or Paintshop Pro re-skinned, because of the familiarity. I assure you it is 100% built as new from the ground up between thousands of minds, as an open source project. At the end of the day, all the icons, menus and features are built upon common sense and popular preference. Yes, it will open your layered PSD’s and TIF’s complete with colour profiles as well as EPS with no problem:)
We would normally also include ’ Digikam ’ on Graphic Design Linux systems as well as any standard home user installation. Digikam is a light version that gives the capability of importing photo libraries from your camera with common editing features. Digikam now allows you to batch process red eye correction – that can be handy.
CAD Package for the Linux User
Now in all honesty, I have not personally had the occasion to use CAD packages all that extensively, but being experienced in pre-press and other design scenarios, it has been required on a few occasions.
KCAD seems to be the number one option and looking at the screen shots I do see a lot of familiarity in the layout and use of the program. It is confirmed that KCAD does open and saves files in DXF format which satisfies one of the main determining factors of program selection – compatibility.
A related Graphics tool included in the designers pack is the Gwenview image viewer.
PDF and Printing for the Linux System
Naturally, Adobe now finally offer a free PDF viewing program for Linux just as well as it does for any other platform.
Most Linux distributions are equipped with CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System, by default, however any that don’t have it in their repositories so they are simply a command away or a few clicks if you’re using a GUI front-end for the package manager.
Pstoedit - This converts PDF files to Vectors – EPS, EMF, AI etc and back again in most cases.
Xpdf is a very efficient open source viewer for PDF files. Even though Adobe do supply a free viewer these days, I include this in a Graphic Design package for Linux for other valuable features that Xpdf has. The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor (PDFtoTEXT), PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities. It can use Type 1 or TrueType fonts.
TC PDF is a good PDF creation program to try out. It supports Barcodes, spot colour, gradient, transparency etc.
Refer to ‘Page Layout’ and Scribus at the end of this post for everything you could possibly need to know.
Even More Design Pro Software
I have outlined the Linux solutions above that are main concerns for the graphic designer. After that, you will soon find that there are absolutely tons of gadgets out there once you know what you are looking for. Just always remember to put keywords into Google like ‘Open Source’, ‘GPL’, ‘GNU’, ‘Linux’ etc… then what you are looking for and you’ll be sure to find one or more alternatives.
FONTS
Fontforge – A Font editing tool.
On the subject of what can be every designers nightmare – Font Management.
Have you tried Fontmatrix? There is a good reason that we choose Debian Lenny for new installations. Debian seem to be really on the ball when it comes to developing better solutions on things that matter to the Designer. Get Font matrix from Debian.
PAGE LAYOUT
Scribus is what you need. You will find that Scribus offers everything you require to produce professional page layout for everything for pre-press simple layout to award winning magazines. Go to the Scribus website to find many well informed resources for DTP including quite a bit for PDF tools.
You should now be really beginning to wonder why companies continue to strangle themselves financially, with keeping up extortionately overpriced packages like Quark and Adobe. If you are out on your own though, hopefully I have shown you the way to a productive and creative career without having to take out a small mortgage to pay for the packages to succeed.
Some of you may start to look at certain design and production centers in a new light.
Some companies are more like ‘sweat shops’. I have worked in a variety of situations that may sound very familiar to some of you, such as the company that cannot afford enough licenses for you to do your job without borrowing someone else’s machine, ofter resulting in lowered pride in work, poor budget on necessary equipment and even having to share computers. Bad decisions like spending the maximum amount on software and minimum amount on the increased caliber of equipment to run it, makes for nothing but poor wages and miserable staff, which leads to a high staff turnover, and ultimately lower standards, which all leads to making a lower profit.
Some companies invest so much into proprietary software that they cannot or stubbornly will not let it go when it becomes desperately outdated, or no longer fills the requirement. It is very poor management to take preference to a big brand name … that in reality doesn’t to the job any better, over your staff, and sometimes if not usually these days, this software is not as good as an available open source equivalent.
Donate Donate Donate!!!!!
Keep the Open Source projects alive and well. Remember these incredibly powerful tools are provided to you free (Mostly “as in beer” AND “as in speech”, but at the very least “as in beer”), but the time and money required to allow this to be possible doesnt grow on trees (Even though it’s made of paper, which is made of wood ….. never mind you get the idea). So, If I just saved you $5,000 NZD or more, per computer, because you didn’t need Windows, or that Adobe Creative Suite CS3/Corel Draw after all .. Please donate to the relevant sources and keep the community going.
Following Editions:
Linux PC Setup for the Web Designer,
Linux PC Setup for the Multimedia Designer
And on to the Geek, the Office, the Corporate, Fun and recreation, and for the kids.
Filed under: Advice,Links,Product Reviews ... Comments (1)
Subscribe in a Reader or by Email