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Lycoris (Build 46)© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Because my NT4 configuration is so stable, I have not looked forward to this migration journey. Yet, nobody ever claimed that life was easy. Although I have been around computers for 20 years (Apple II, Commodore 64, Amiga 1000 and 3000, DOS, Windows 3.x, etc.), I had grown away from being an unpaid beta tester for the sloppy commercial software market. As commercial software grew more bloated and more cantankerous I grew to loath any software installation. Not that I did not know how, but that vendors have an attitude that they can install anything they wanted on my computer and with full impunity. Missing was the simple concept that I owned the computer and I had the right to decide what got installed—and where. Linux is a different beast. I remember my exposure to Unix many years ago with some college classes I took. Unix is something a person needs to just be around in order to get the big picture. Unix is not a natural environment but one that is adaptable. Although many of the Linux distributions today include a familiar graphical interface, there is still the underlying Unix structure. As an individual who prefers to usually have a plan B available, I did not want to be a mere point-and-click user of Linux. I wanted some understanding of what was underneath. Although I do not have to, I still personally change the engine oil on my truck. Yet, changing the oil requires knowledge beyond jumping on to the seat and turning the ignition key to head to the store. Similarly, therefore, I knew my Linux learning curve would be steeper than the typical user’s. A friend advised me that a new Linux startup company might be on the right track to providing a user-friendly desktop Linux. Personally, after 20 years of computers, I empathize with the masses that computers are still on the user-hostile side rather than the user-friendly side. My friend is a professional IT guy, and gets to play with computers all day—even when he doesn’t want to. Years ago I could have stayed on that career path had I wanted to, but I instead chose to pursue technical writing. Thus, computers became a tool to me and that is all. Turn ’em on, write, save, go home. The distribution my friend recommended I try was Lycoris. He thought Lycoris had done a good job of creating a desktop rather than the typical Linux get-under-the-hood installation. So I asked him to burn me the ISO and away I went. I decided to stay with one computer and go dual boot for a while. Down the road a second box is possible, but dual boot would serve for the interim. Therefore, I had to prepare for that transition. For the past dozen years or so I have run my computers with a partitioned hard drive. I have used a C:, D:, and E: drive for all of that time. Thus, I knew I’d have to make room for Linux. I had a removable hard drive bay in my computer and some spare drives. I copied my D: and E: drives, repartitioned using the NT Disk Administrator, and then restored my files to smaller partitions. I had 13GB of space to play with Linux. Installing Lycoris Linux (Build 46) went as smoothly as I could expect, although not flawless. The old EGA-like install screen was snowy, the mouse did not work during the install or after booting into the GUI, and did not work until after rebooting. Thereafter my mouse wheel would not work. I had to make a manual change in a config file. Not exactly what I would imagine for a distro designed for newbies. I also had trouble using the expert mode to create separate Linux partitions for various mounts I wanted. I envisioned playing with several distros, and from the get-go I wanted a clean, flexible and adaptable Linux partition system. I could not get Lycoris to create those separate partitions and boot. I wanted to get on-line, figuring I could more easily learn that way rather than boot to Windows, surf, and then reboot back to Linux with my notes; but I was not going on-line without a firewall. For several years I had been using the combination of the BlackIce Defender intrusion detection system and Tiny Personal Firewall (2.0.15), although eventually only TPF remained. Works for me and I do not worry about intruders. So I went looking for the Lycoris built-in firewall. I finally found the firewall, and to enable the firewall required finding the correct portal in the Lycoris Control Center; but the only option provided was the ability to enable the firewall. I have yet to find a way to set any rules or various levels of protection. Again, not exactly intuitive for a distro designed for newbies. I was unimpressed at how slooooooow the KDE (2.2.2) desktop can be. Sometimes I waited 15 to 20 seconds after making a selection before anything happened. Very, very frustrating. I also understood that some delay was expected because in the different approach Linux takes in loading software. Windows loads several software libraries into memory when the system boots, and those embedded libraries help Windows programs load faster. In Linux, most libraries are loaded along with the program, and are unloaded when the program exits. Thus, although I expected some delay and although my system is not a speed burner, a K6-III+ is not exactly a slouch either. Something was simply not right. So I began to look for ways to reduce resource overhead. I made a few changes, but overall I found this problem is inherent to KDE 2.x. Apparently the KDE designers thought everybody could afford or wants a 2GHz machine. In Windows my system is fast enough and if I had a decent internet connection, I’d probably be a pig in mud. But this problem of 15 to 20 seconds for a response is simply unacceptable. I still have found no answers to this problem. I had read that KDE 3.x is faster and at I plan to eventually investigate that claim. I also noticed that Lycoris had adopted the M$ “My Personal Files” concept. Gagh. Add another option to my to-do list to rid myself of that icon. Eventually I simply became frustrated with Lycoris. Yes, I was expecting too much from myself, but Lycoris is sold as a distro for newbies. I was not exactly experiencing a point-and-click installation. The Lycoris installation is not designed for the person who wants to watch under the hood. You install, answer some minimal questions and a while later you’re done. What I experienced is probably no worse or better than typical Windows installations; and the Lycoris people want to provide a Windows clone with respect to a controlled desktop environment, and certainly have adopted the Bill Gates perspective: what you see is what you get and don’t ask for anything else. You can choose any color you want as long as you choose black. Such a model is acceptable for people who do not want to explore, but Lycoris needs to do a better job advertising that fact. In the process, Lycoris installed GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader). Because I had a parallel minimal secondary installation of NT4 installed on my hard drive—used for emergencies to restore locked files on my primary partition and corrupted registries—Lycoris had detected this and had provided me three boot options in GRUB. The two NT options do not work as you might think. Choose either one and I still ended up with my familiar NT boot.ini screen. Thus, if I wanted to boot to my parallel partition, I still had to manually select that option. Not a big deal, just a nit. Later, after I became more familiar with the Linux KDE Control Center and GRUB config files, I removed the second NT option and changed the automatic boot time to 3 seconds. The Lycoris default desktop is very XPish and nauseated me. I like my “old” NT4 “flat” look. I do not like the new XP style at all. Familiarity breeds contempt, I guess. Thus, aesthetically, I was subconsciously irritated every time I booted into Lycoris Linux to explore and learn. Therefore, one of my first projects was to learn how to change the look and feel of the desktop. I finally succeeded, but took the long way to get there. As with many distros, Lycoris is packaged with its own Control Center. Although many of the KDE Control Center tools are available from within the Lycoris Control Center, the Lycoris front end interface does not look like the traditional KDE Control Center (and is, in fact, actually just an HTML page). Being a newbie to Linux, I was greatly confused because the KDE Help documentation described options that I simply did not see. What was going on? In the Lycoris Control Center was an option called “Classic Control Center.” A few days after I had minimally explored my way around, I wondered what that link was. Lo and behold, there was the KDE Control Center and there I could finally make sense of the KDE Help docs. I wish Lycoris had not tried to be fancy with words, and instead had labeled the link as “KDE Control Center.” That simple change would have saved me some frustration, and I could have more quickly eliminated the butt-ugly XP look too. Although I could see my friend’s point that perhaps the Lycoris distro was ready for prime time (although we amiably disagree), one thing for certain was that Lycoris was not ready for my desktop. As I stated earlier, I like to power on, go to work, save, power down. I use my hammer in the same way. That desktop model is familiar to long-time M$ Windows users, but also different enough to confuse newbies. As I mentioned to my friend, I knew what I wanted to do, I just didn’t know where to find the tools. I respond similarly if my hammer or tape measure are not stored in my tool box where I expect to find them. But there were some other anomalies too. I was hearing a peculiar motorboating sound from my speakers. A very irritating noise. Surely my speakers were picking some stray crosstalk noise, but why with the Linux OS was the noise so noticeable but with my Windows side I strained to hear the noise. I needed several days of playing around before I discovered that the KMix volume control was defaulted to maximum. I finally figured out to lower the output level, and then save those settings. These kind of little things can begin to wear on a guy. [Note: I eventually traced the motorboating sound to having the speakers plugged into the incorrect sound card jack. Still, why does a vendor default to maximum volume? And why was the problem exaggerated more on the Linux side, even after adjusting the volume?] One thing that did impress me with the Lycoris installation was that all my NT4 hard drive partitions were automatically mounted. Yes, Linux still can only read NTFS (but not write in a trusted manner), but that is nonetheless still a help with a dual boot system. I could at least still surf from the Windows side, download help files, docs, and tips, then read them from the Linux side while I explored and learned. Nice. I always have used my E: partition as my data files drive. Because Linux can read across the hard drive and see those files, I have been considering converting my E: to a FAT partition. NT4 does not directly support FAT32, although a third-party tool is freely available to use FAT32 from within NT4. That would allow me to somewhat simulate a network, where I could work with data files from either OS. However, after installing the FAT32 driver, I stumbled into another issue: my aging Symantec tools did not support FAT32, nor did the NT4 chkdsk tool. I could install a newer version of the Symantec tools, but that seemed like more expense and bother when eventually I intended to be free of Windows anyway. So for now I continue with my NT4 partitions. I eventually gave up on Lycoris because of the speed issues. I started wondering if to successfully migrate I might be “forced” to buy new hardware. Instead I began investigating other GUI window managers. I simply figured the KDE desktop environment was out of the question. My problem was that overall I liked the KDE. I eventually tried the Mandrake distro because unlike the Lycoris marketing approach, Mandrake provides just about everything but the kitchen sink. Thus, I would have plenty of window managers to experiment with. Later, after successfully using Mandrake to create several partitions for my Linux file systems, I tried installing Lycoris as another distro. Lycoris recognized my Linux partitions, but refused to proceed unless allowed to fully format the /usr partition. Although later I would learn that the /usr partition essentially is specific to each distro, the Lycoris people provided no expanation or documentation to explain why they insisted upon reformatting the /usr partition. This was confusing to me as a new Linux user Lycoris is using a rational market model to introduce Linux to the computing world, but many months after my trials the Lycoris people still are packaging KDE 2.2 and the same “stable” Build 46. I have sinced learned through my experience with Mandrake that KDE 3.x is much faster than KDE 2.2. My Lycoris CD now sits on the shelf and will remain there for a long time. That is not a reflection on the Lycoris model, only on my own desires and interests. Once transitioned to KDE 3.x I think Lycoris will do well in the market. Indeed, like Mandrake, had Lycoris came packaged with KDE 3.x I might still be using only that distro. Finis. |
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