James Japan's Linux Blog

Sept. 6, 2008 I learned to get Text Aloud MP3 to work in Wine by choosing in the Voices and File Options for the SAPI version, "Use SAPI5 only". Now I can use AT&T Natural Voices and hear text read in a very clear synthetic voice with an American accent. I also learned that sapi.dll and sapi.cpl must be in the ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Speech directory for Text Aloud to work properly.

May 26, 2008 I found a better way to get my Nvidia video card driver to be totally supported in Fedora 9. I just followed the tutorial on http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=188645 and it worked perfectly for me. Now Google Earth works whereas before it didn't using the method I used on May 15.

May 15, 2008 After a clean install of Fedora 9 I could not get the Nvidia video driver to work that I installed from the Livna testing repository. I found a fix for the problem from Naresh Kumar on his post entitled ""Fedora 9 Rawhide and Latest Nvidia 173.08 Driver" at http://nareshv.blogspot.com/2008/04/fedora-9-rawhide-and-latest-nvidia-179.html He writes: "THIS METHOD IS COMPLETELY UNSUPPORTED BY FEDORA FOLKS, BUT WORKS." It certainly does! Thanks Naresh!

April 27, 2008 I tried to install Ubuntu 8.4 but the grub installation failed. According to the Ubuntu forum, this error is a bug in the BIOS. However Fedora doesn't have this problem! I still think that Fedora is a much more mature distro compared to Ubuntu. I'm sticking with Fedora!

March 13, 2008 I installed IE7 by following the instructions on this page: http://webexpose.org/2007/01/07/internet-explorer-7-on-linux/ The instructions are very clear and worked perfectly in Fedora 8. I'm only interested in IE7 to see how my web pages appear in it.

Feb. 26, 2008: Today I learned about preload and how to install it to make my system faster. It does seem to speed things up! Run the following commands after logging into root from Termimal with the su - command:

yum install preload -y
chkconfig --level 345 preload on
service preload restart

To remove Limewire, from root enter:

rpm -e LimeWire-free

Note that the case is important.

Dec. 6, 2007 When trying to install ies4linux I kept getting an error message, "no valid cabinets found". All the downloaded cabinet files appeared to be the same size. I realized that Dansguardian was conflicting with the downloading. It would not let cab files be downloaded but was creating an HTML file in the same name as the downloaded file!

Nov. 14, 2007 My latest Ubuntu adventure again came to a miserable failure! There were just too many problems that I could not figure out nor get sufficient support for:

  1. The Gnome log in was slower than it should be and always showed an error message that said, "Gnome settings daemon error ..."
  2. The Volume Control applet would not load or reload. I had to click on cancel after each Gnome log in.
  3. I could not install cryptsetup and therefore could not mount my encrypted file as a directory.
  4. SCIM would not work and therefore I could not type in Japanese when I needed to.
  5. The shutdown and log out always seemed to hang after clicking on the respective icon. I had to press Ctrl Alt and Backspace to kill X to get out of the hang.

In desperation I googled yet more to find the answer how to install Fedora 8 by getting around the Anaconda graphic installer bug. I found the answer by using the 'lowres' option in the kernel line during installation. It worked! Consequently I wrote up a new page of my adventure with Fedora 8. Fedora, banzai!

Nov. 11, 2007 After a full day of trying to install Fedora 8 without success, I decided to try the latest Ubuntu version 7.10 I am very please to report that it installed very easily and I was able to use the same /home/user directory I used in Fedora after a few tweaks to get it working. Here's what I like so far:

I'm sorry to say that it seems Fedora has messed up this time with changes to its Anaconda installer. The default graphic install of Fedora 8 just wouldn't work for me this time though I have the exact same hardware and video card as I had with Fedora 7. It aborted in error. There was no problem using the graphic install in Fedora 7. I found on the Net at least one other person who experienced the same problem.

June 29, 2007 After two full months of using Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, I switched back to my old friend Fedora. This time Fedora 7. There's just something about Fedora I like. Here's what:

  1. Better security. The firewall is easier to configure and is turned on by default. Not so in Ubuntu.
  2. KDE apps in Ubuntu were lacking certain icons which made the program harder to use.
  3. Wine works better. I had trouble running certain Windows programs in Ubuntu.
  4. More GUI's to do administrative tasks.
  5. Windows networking with Samba worked from the beginning. I had to run extra commands to get it to work in Ubuntu.
  6. Every time I need to use my SCSI scanner, I had to manually change permissions in Ubuntu. Don't need to in Fedora.
  7. Ubuntu doesn't allow root log in from the greeter screen but that is exactly what I need sometimes in order to fix a Gnome start up problem.
  8. The root and user password in Fedora are different, whereas in Ubuntu they are the same. I prefer them different.
  9. In Fedora 7 and can now read and write to my USB NTFS formatted hard disk! In Ubuntu I could only read from it. Way to go Fedora!
  10. Bittorrent is easier to use because I can run it from startup and do multiple downloads. I couldn't figure out how to do that in Ubuntu.
  11. Fedora has /home/user/bin set in the command line path which makes it easier to run my own scripts.
  12. Fedora 7 has Thunderbird version 2 but Feisty Fawn uses 1.5.

I think the Fedora forum is more helpful than the Ubuntu forum in finding solutions to problems. Though an answer was posted on the Ubuntu for my SCSI scanner problem, that answer didn't work for me.

Yes, there is a bit more command line work in Fedora after installation in order to get everything running correctly, but this is the fun part of Linux for me. Ubuntu is perhaps easier overall for newbies to install and setup, but I think that Fedora is a more powerful system in the long run.

May 12, 2007 In order to be able to play a rented DVD from the video shop, I had to follow the instructions on http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/12/04/libdvdcss2-and-w32codecs-for-ubuntu/

May 5, 2007 Downloaded and installed a script to convert Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu Christian Edition version 3. This includes a good web content filter called Dansguardian which protects both me and the kids from inappropriate web content. The installation went smooth but I had to redo the quick start applications afterward.

April 27, 2007 Downloaded and installed the latest Ubuntu version 7.04 Feisty Fawn to a second hard disk on my Fedora Core 6 PC to keep the Fedora system intact. This is the first Ubuntu that has recognized all the hardware on my PC! I was impressed how easy it was to install. The package manager Synpatic is much faster than Fedora Yumex, and the command line apt-get command is much faster than Yum. And so I'm not sold on Ubuntu and have converted over.

April 1, 2007 Installed Ubuntu Christian Edition 2 to a Celeron 700 PC to check out any good games for children for my friend's English school. Found a few that are very good. Ubuntu Christian Edition installed very easily. I like the fact that it comes with Dansguardian which filters Internet content. It's impossible for any kid to view morally corrupting web site even by accident using Dansguardian! I use it in Fedora Core too. However the setup in Fedora is not nearly as easy as it is in Ubuntu.

March 30, 2007 I learned how to monitor the temperatures of my CPU, video card and motherboard on my Fedora Core 6 box by running:

$ su -
# sensor-detect

and replying yes to all questions. After that I installed gkrellm with yum and added it to the session manager to have it startup automatically.

March 19, 2007 I learned how to dual boot from VectorLinux by running liloconfig from root and using the menu. Trying to edit /etc/lilo.conf to include my Windows partition didn't do the trick.

March 4, 2007 Thunderbird had been constantly promoting me every time I sent email saying that the Security Certificate for the server was out of date! I learned that it was because I had the SMTP settings set to use a secure connection and "TLS if available". After I changed it to "No" I'm not prompted anymore.

March 3, 2007 I found a great text editor called "Tea" which is much more powerful than Gedit. It can even change the case of a line of text with a simple keyboard hot key combination!

Feb. 28, 2007 I learned how to install Japanese fonts and the SCIM Asian character input system in VectorLinux. Inputting Japanese characters and viewing Japanese web pages is now no problem. However sad to say, SCIM conflicted with Firefox and Thunderbird and so I had to un-install it.

Feb, 25, 2007: I learned it is possible to add Gnome to VectorLinux by installing dropLine GNOME, a Gnome distribution for Slackware. Because VectorLinux is based on Slackware, it was very simple to install Gnome in VectorLinux with dropline GNOME and just two commands in root from Terminal. See the download page of dropline Gnome if interested.

Well, I did that and installed Gnome and rebooted the PC. Unfortunately I got some errors in loading Gnome saying that it couldn't find the Message Bus address, and some functions would not work as a result. I logged out out of Gnome and tried to get back into the Xfce desktop manager, but apparently the Gnome installation broke it and it won't load anymore. Such is the life of a Linux user. Next time I'll just be satisfied with the Xfce desktop and try to learn how to do certain operations in it that I could do in Gnome.

Feb. 24. 2007: I read that VectorLinux, a distribution based on Slackware, boasted to be the fastest Linux distribution available that would run well on older hardware and so I thought to try it. The VectorLinux-5.8-standard-GOLD 551 Megabyte ISO download was very quick. I installed it on a Celeron 600 MHz processor with 318 MB of RAM and a 20 GB IDE HDD. The installation was text based, unlike Fedora Core, but was fairly simple to follow. I'm very impressed with VectorLinux that it does indeed boot fairly quick on my older machine, about one minute and 5 seconds faster than Fedora Core 6 boots on my 3GHz Pentium 4 CPU with 1Gigabyte of RAM and 250GB SATA HDD! By comparison Freespire took 2.5 minutes to boot on the same type of machine that the VectorLinux OS is installed on now.

The default desktop manager is Xfce which I like because it is somewhat simliar to Gnome but runs quicker. OpenOffice was not part of the default installation but was available to download via its Package Manager named Glsapt. I found it similar to the Ubuntu Package Manager. The default list of packages availiable did not include OpenOffice or Thunderbird and other applications I use in Fedora, and so I looked for and found a way to include more respositories to it. When I did that and refreshed the Package Manager, the list grew to include all the main apps I use.

OpenOffice Writer loads in 20 seconds the first time, and 10 seconds the second time - faster than it did in Ubuntu.

I was also impressed that VectorLinux out of the box included with no additional tweaks:

Note: Because Vector Linux uses a text based installer, if you are a newbie to Linux I would not recommend you try it unless you already have experience installing Linux with other distributions and know the basics of partitioning a hard drive and are familiar with basic Linux concepts and terms. I myself would only use it on an older machine. Vector Linux doesn't compare to Fedora with the number of features and abundant amount of software available. I still think Fedora is the best distribution overall.

Jan. 13. 2007: I used to recommend that if people wanted to stick with Microsoft, they should upgrade to Windows Vista as soon as it comes out. But after reading A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection by Peter Gutman, I recant that recommendation. If Linux is not your cup of tea, I recommend you buy a Mac.

Jan. 11, 2007: Found a Ubuntu blog admitting that Fedora Core applications do indeed load quicker, and that Fedora Core's Gnome is faster than Ubuntu's Gnome thanks to the fact that, "All Fedora Core applications have been rebuilt using `DT_GNU_HASH`, which provides a significant performance boost during start-up for applications using dynamic linking". (Quote from Fedora Core 6 Release Notes).

Jan. 9, 2007: A friend recommended that I try a Linux distro called "Freespire" because he said that it supported many proprietary codecs for files like MP3, AVI, WMV, ASF right out of the box. And so I downloaded Freespire 1.0.13 with Bittorrent (a very fast download!), burned the ISO image to a CD, and then installed it on an older Pentium 3 desktop with 256 MB of Ram and 20 GB ATA HDD. The installation was fairly quick and it recognized every device I have on the PC. I was impressed that Freespire did indeed play MP3 files and every video file I tried without having to do any extra tweaking! But because it uses KDE desktop with no option to change to Gnome (as other distros have), and because it doesn't have (yet) the great feature Fedora Core 6 introduced called "DT_GNU_HASH and prelinking" which speeds up the loading of applications, I'm still sticking with Fedora Core 6 for now.

Dec. 26, 2006: A local company gave me 5 older computers, 2 of which work as is! The rest need hard disk drives. One of them is a Toshiba Satellite 4260 laptop with 192 megabytes of RAM and a 5 Gigabyte Hard disk. I installed Ubuntu 6.10 on it to see how it runs. It installed fine and found all the devices on my laptop including the LAN device.

I did a benchmark test to compare the loading time of OpenOffice with my main desktop PC. It took 45 seconds to get to the blank compose window of OpenOffice on the laptop! I completely exited the program and tried again. Still 45 seconds. On my Pentium desktop it was 7 seconds the first time and only 3 seconds the second.

A couple days later I installed Fedora Core 6 on the same laptop because I was interested to compare the OfficeOffice load time with the benchmark that Ubuntu gave me. The first time it took OpenOffice over a minute to load to a blank screen in Writer, but the second time only 20 seconds and the third time only 8 seconds! This is thanks to a feature introduced in Fedora Core 6 called "DT_GNU_HASH and prelinking" which increases performance. Way to go Fedora Core!

Something new I learned on how to improve performance in Fedora Core 6: Remove beagle with this command in root:

# yum -y remove beagle

Beagle is the file indexing service. It takes a lot of CPU power and disk usage when it is indexing. Most people don't use it or need it.

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