OpenSolaris on a Pavilion dv6

I decided to get adventurous and try out OpenSolaris on my HP Pavilion dv6 laptop. My goal: to find a solid OS that works out of the box or with little configuration on this fairly new laptop. In particular, sound and wireless are important criteria. My findings?

First of all, when I booted into the live CD, I got a horrible static noise from the speakers. It only took me a minute to think of plugging in my headphones to divert the racket. It turns out that the headphones don’t get any static. In fact, sound works perfectly on them (something Ubuntu can’t boast on my machine, try as I may to work through possible solutions). Lack of sound under Ubuntu was one of my main motivations to try another OS. But constant static is obviously worse than no sound at all, and I don’t always have my headphones plugged in.

Next, wireless support is practically nonexistent out of the box. The OpenSolaris community touts the availability of several wireless tools, but these don’t come installed and ready to go, which is one of my criteria. (I’m not the only one who has had this setback.) But wired ethernet works just fine. (In fact, I’m writing this post while still on the live CD on my laptop.)

Screen resolution is another disappointment. It thinks my widescreen is 1024×768 (which it’s not), and that this is the only supported resolution on my screen (which it’s not).

Nimbus

On the bright side, OpenSolaris has a nice GNOME theme: Nimbus. And the applications that come preinstalled are pretty standard: Firefox, Thunderbird, the usual GNOME tools. But if you want OpenOffice.org (or any office suite, for that matter), you’ll have to get it yourself from the package manager.

If you’re looking for a ready-to-go, easy to use desktop operating system that will support your hardware right from the start, OpenSolaris is not the choice for you. However, if you want some of the cool features it offers for server installations or robust workstations without these hardware issues, it may well be a good choice.

Eliminating the hierarchy: GNOME Do and Google

This week I became acquainted with two applications: GNOME Do and Google Chrome.

GNOME Do is a program similar in concept to the Mac Spotlight. Although not quite as simple as Spotlight, it still allows you to find files, launch programs, and even search Gmail contacts.

GNOME Do and Spotlight both illustrate a concept Alan Cooper addresses in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. (See my recent post on this book.) Cooper suggests how incredibly confusing hierarchial filesystems can be to users (see, e.g., pp. 9-11). Humans don’t think of file storage in a hierarchial way. When you’re writing something on a pad of paper, you might tear the sheet off and leave it on your desk. Or you might put it in your file drawer. That physical drawer has an advantage over a computer’s filesystem–it is much easier to see and comprehend the whole thing at once. You open the drawer and see all the folders inside it all together.

Now imagine your computer’s filesystem. You just wrote something on your virtual pad of paper. You “tear off” the page and want to put it somewhere. You click Save As…, and it opens to your usual My Documents folder. You put the file there and forget about it.

That isn’t so hard to deal with until you have to dig into the hierarchy of your hard drive. Imagine that you want to locate a file you worked on six months ago. It was a poster for the company barbeque you had in the spring, and you need it again. But where in the world did you put it? How are you going to find it now?

You could start clicking through all the folders on the hard drive until you find it. Or you could use a tool that eliminates the need to comprehend the hierarchial file structure in the first place, such as GNOME Do or Spotlight. Or the Windows search, if that’s the best you’ve got….

Those programs will let you search the file name or (more understandable for a human user) the full text of the file. Once it finds possibilities, you’ll still probably have to wade through a disorganized list to find the actual file. But at least you didn’t have to click through a hundred folders to get to it.

Google does a good job of implementing non-hierarchial file systems in their web apps, such as Gmail and Docs. You simply have lists of things, which you can further organize them with labels (and even use the labels as a sort of file-folder system if you really want to). And full-text searching is a standard, simple necessity.

Google Chrome also does an excellent job eliminating the hierarchy from the web browser: it has very few menus; your address bar, history, and web searching are all in the same box; you open a new tab and see a list of your most frequently-visited sites. No searching through menus of bookmarks or a confusing history pane. Just type in a keyword and it finds it for you.

After all, the computer knows where everything is anyway. Why not make it find things for you?

One window manager to rule them all…?

Every Linux hacker has his favorite window manager (or maybe even just the console!). What is mine? Fluxbox.

I’ve used GNOME, Xfce, fluxbox, and xmonad, and I like fluxbox the best. Here is my reasoning:

1. Speed It’s fast. Really fast. Not as fast as xmonad, but it retains enough of the elements of the more mainstream GUI WMs that you don’t feel quite so intimidated by it.
2. Customizability Fluxbox lets you customize your theme, menu, hotkeys, and a few other things, and it gives you more control over those things than do GNOME or Xfce. Given, it’s all done from text files (unless you use fluxconf), so it takes some time to learn. But it’s quite powerful.
3. Compatability All my normal software still runs fine under fluxbox. This might be just because I have GNOME installed, too, I’m not sure. But it works.
4. Keyboard use It’s pretty easy to use virtually all the fluxbox-specific features from the keyboard (although it sometimes requires tweaking, as with the Alt+Tab behavior). And the terminal always occupies a front row seat on my desktop.
5. Lean, green, computing machine Fluxbox just has the stuff you need, and no heavyweight GUIs to manage it. Of couse, that makes it harder for the beginning user, but both the power user and the novice can be productive with it.

I started using Linux under GNOME, and I still like it. Especially on Ubuntu (the distro I run), it makes it easy to do everything from text editing to web browsing to system administration from the GUI. And that’s good. But once I became more accustomed to the terminal and the command-oriented way of doing things, fluxbox was a great step forward.

All the same, I still don’t believe there is “one window manager to rule them all.” What are your thoughts on the plethora of window managers? Should it be a battle for the fittest, is the community headed in the right direction by providing so many choices?

Xfce desktop environment

I started using the Xfce desktop environment under Ubuntu the other day and have loved it so far. GNOME is a bit too heavyweight for me, so I’ve been using Fluxbox for a few months. It’s lightning fast and really slick, but there’s no eye candy whatsoever.

So the other day I decided to download Xfce and try it out. It looks quite similar to GNOME but runs a lot faster. It’s much easier to customize than fluxbox and it supports my keyboard metakeys much better. Plus the eye candy is great without taking too much toll on the speed. I really like the themes, too. (There are even some windows-esque ones.) And everything runs just as well or better under Xfce as it did under fluxbox.

Another cool feature is the ability to create multiple “sessions” or startup profiles. You can set Xfce to prompt you for which session you want when you log in. So I can create one for play, one for work, and one with nothing special.

So there you have some ramblings about the wonders of Xfce.