Sabayon-unbelievably bad

In my quest to get a new OS up and running on my Compaq CQ60-210US laptop, I decided to give Sabayon Linux a shot. The LiveDVD worked flawlessly. Installed the OS without incident. Upon reboot, I got a screen stating that something did not install (or was configured) correctly. WTF? Didn't this all get figured out when the LiveDVD booted up? Didn't the configuration get saved to the hard disk upon install? The closest I could get was to a command prompt. Again, if this were a project where people were paid to do it, there would be some firing going on. On to Linux Mint 13 KDE edition.

Don't Slow Down!

Driving Courtesy

I am someone who people accuse of driving like an old man. Maybe so—I don’t know.

I do know that I like to drive at the speed limit. Once I have arrived at the speed limit, I set my cruise control and just sit back and enjoy.

One think that I have noticed around Fort Smith, that I find very irritating, is the habit of drivers, once they are in the vicinity of 1,000 to 1,500 feet of their exit ramp, to slow down. This is uncalled for. That is why they make exit ramps—to give one a place to slow down before they reach their destination that does not impede traffic. Big notation here: IMPEDE TRAFFIC.
On I-540 around Fort Smith, the speed limit is 65 mph. I set my cruise control at this speed, and courteously drive in the right-hand lane (as one is supposed to drive) except when I am passing, or giving room for an emergency vehicle, or someone stranded on the side of the road. I was on 540, behind someone who was getting off at the same exit that I was getting off at (Grand Avenue). Just as they passed the on-ramps from Kelly Highway, I noticed them starting to slow down. There was quite a bit of passing traffic, so I just opted to disengage my cruise control and follow behind them—bad move on my part. By the time that we reached the off-ramp for Grand Avenue, we were doing 45 mph! I usually don’t suffer from road rage, but this made me angry. Why was it necessary to start slowing down 1 mile before the exit, and to slow to 20 mph below the speed limit before tires touched the off-ramp?

This is a true, and somewhat extreme example. Most of the time it is within the one thousand to fifteen hundred feet area that the slowdown occurs.

I usually get off of 540 at SR 59, which is just across the Arkansas River Bridge in Crawford county. Invariably traffic will begin to slow down on the bridge as someone is slowing down in anticipation of the exit that is just off of the bridge. The exit ramp is long enough to safely slow down in time to meet that stop sign near Industrial Park Blvd. but most drivers do not think that this is enough and slow about mid-way across the bridge.

Stop doing this! Slow down once your tires hit the asphalt of the exit ramp, not before. There is no need to do so sooner. If you are worried about your brakes, go down and get them checked. That is what they are made for. Do not start slowing down while you are on the Interstate. This causes unsafe driving conditions and can cause accidents.

Thank you.

PCBSD—Not Ready for Primetime

Even before installing PCBSD, I have thoughts on it. What is up with the slow mirrors?

I tried downloading the new 9.1 Beta and stopped it, thinking that the mirrors must be overloaded due to the horrendous download speeds I was getting.

I tried three and the speed was abysmal. I cannot say exactly what the kbps rate was because I was trying to download it through Chrome, and in the annoying bottom bar, it does not give what the speed is of the files coming across. But after 1/2 hour and the download was at 0.1 % of 3.4 GB, I stopped it.

So I tried bittorrent. I started the download and went to bed. When I got up in the morning, the download was done and I burned it to DVD, just to find out that the file had been corrupted (no, I did not do a hash on it). Fortunately I burned it onto a DVD-RW disc, so I did not make a coaster.

Now I am downloading it with DownLoadThemAll through Firefox.  The download has been running for over 2.5 hours and it tells me that average throughput is about 93 kbps. Come on! That is dialup speed x2! I don’t pay for 20 Mbps from Cox just to download files at twice dialup speeds.

To the folks at PCBSD--get or recruit faster mirrors. Or invest a few bucks in a hosting service such as 1 & 1 that gives unlimited bandwidth for a low monthly fee.

I try to be patient, but 93 kbps is unreasonably slow. These mirrors, that are so slow, are actually an impedance to adoption of PCBSD, rather than a help.

Première partie

Later that same day:

PCBSD finally completed downloading. After successfully completing the hash test on Windows 7 (the program that does this very nicely on Windows 7 is called File Checksum Integrity Verifier (fciv.exe) I was off.

Upon boot-up, I was asked the normal questions. Installation was a breeze. After installation came the mandatory reboot.

The KDE desktop looked very nice--exactly what I expected. I configured it to work with my wireless network with little problems. It did take two tries before it connected to my network via WPA2 encryption. Why there was a delay, I do not know. But it finally got its IP address from the router and all was well.

The first thing that I noticed is that when trying to launch vital KDE applications, KPatience and KMahjongg, the windows would not display. The Window frame would show KPatience or KMahjongg at the top, but inside, the windows were blank.

After a few moments, there was a system notification stating that there were updates ready to install. One of those updates was for KDE—something about memory access.

After all of the updates were installed, the display problem with KDE went away.

This is unacceptable. 9.0 should never have been released with such a problem built-in. To be honest, this turned me off. If there was a known issue in KDE in regards to how it interacts with PCBSD, then why not fix the problem and make THAT fix the 9.0 release?

Though I know that PCBSD is a volunteer-based project, one needs to consider the people who are downloading and using it as being customers. One always wants to make the customer experience as enjoyable as possible. If my laptop had not been connected to a network upon startup, this “issue” would have been a deal-breaker for most people, except for perhaps the most masochistic of geeks.

Then I tried to fire up Ardour. It said it could not find JACK and would not go further. I don’t know JACK (pun intended). Should this have not been set up when PCBSD ran from the DVD? Or if not at that time, upon first boot-up into the operating system? To be fair, I do not know if this is a problem with PCBSD, or with Ardour. But I know that the first time I ran Adobe Soundbooth on my other laptop, it never complained about not knowing JACK or being able to use my laptop’s resources.

Deuxième Partie

I decided that this might not be a fair review of PCBSD, since obviously many changes have gone into the 9.1 Beta release. So I decided to just wipe my laptop to the new version and start my odyssey there.

Installing 9.1 Beta was much the same as installing 9.0. It asked similar questions and seemed to go well. This time it asked me what desktop I would like to use. My Compaq is no piker, but I like a snappy desktop. I find that KDE & Gnome just have this extremely bloated feeling to it. IMO, on the same hardware, Windows 7 is much more responsive that KDE is. It is a shame--I used to love KDE. But I digress.

I choose Xfce for my Window manager--light, quick, perfect. It installed without problem.

Upon the reboot, while the desktop was loading, the machine locked up and went into some sort of loop. See video for details.

The mouse was responsive, and if Ctrl+Alt+F2 were pressed, it would take me out to the command prompt. This tells me that the underlying operating system was okay, it was just Xfce freaking out in some way.

But though the underlying OS was fine, this is still PCBSD’s fault. Before a product is released into beta-land, those types of kinks need to be worked out.

It is unacceptable to release in beta an OS that has an included Windows Manager where the two do not work together--in an alpha release, perhaps. Give the geeks something to work on.

I realize that this damages my geek cred, but that is okay. I am 49 years-old. I remember playing with Linux back in 1996, trying to figure out how to get it to see the floppy disk that I just put into the computer. That was a challenge, then.

Now, I just want the tech to work. I cannot be bothered with interrupts, dependency hells, DLL hells, and the like. Perhaps PCBSD is too young to have such high hopes for it. To be honest, most Linuxes are not there yet either.

Fini

And so, alas, for the time being, my PCBSD test is over even before it has begun. For right now, I will be heading back to Linux, trying out Sabayon Linux.