No Youtube for you, Linux fans!

No Youtube for you, Linux fans!

This is a followup to my earlier post on degradation of Firefox.

Apparently Youtube now requires Flash 10+ to play videos. Flash 10 is not available under Linux at all at the moment, while Flash 9 crashes under Linux Firefox.

The only solution I have is a WinXP virtual machine in VirtualBOX.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Gnome 3 turns your PC into a big heavy cellphone

Gnome 3 turns your PC into a big heavy cellphone

or why I will never install Fedora 15

Currently running F14 with Gnome 2, which comes with panel where I dropped menubar, window selector, log out and shutdown buttons, a handful of application shortcuts, disk mounter, notification area, Fish, Netspeed, Sensors and clock.

None of that is available in Gnome 3. As a root I don't even have a popup menu and can't configure the panel. Off it goes into the trashcan.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Firefox is getting worse and worse

Firefox is getting worse and worse

Long time ago I switched from using IE to Firefox. It was a robust stable browser, well supported by add-ons that made my life simple.

It was approximately 6 years ago. Down the road I am at the point where all I can do is bid farewell to Firefox and stop using it. The reason being it simply does not work in more and more sites. Examples are numerous, but Google maps, comfree.ca and trader.ca were the tipping point.

I had to win a small war against the "Mozilla community" just to get MLS a.k.a realtor.ca to display the map. That cost me some gray hair and there is no way in hell I am going thru this process again, if the rest of the world does not care.

If Epiphany can do it, Mozilla should.

So in Woody Allen's voice: So long, assholes!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 01:51 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Realtek 8111 onboard gigabit chip is not supported in Linux

Realtek 8111 onboard gigabit chip is not supported in Linux

This travesty is dragging on since at least 2006.

The author of the driver is clearly incompetent and simply incapable of writing gigabit support. As a result this most widespread built-in chip performs under Linux as only 1/10th of what it can do under Windows.

How "Linux open-source community" can continue to tolerate this drawback is simply beyond me. They have gigabit and 10 gigabit drivers for other chips, but no one seems to be willing to kick an incompetent impostor of a developer out of the project and re-assign this work to someone more capable. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:29 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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LibreOffice is not parallel-enabled

LibreOffice is not parallel-enabled

You can see yourself that LibreOffice is not using multi-core CPUs (at least not under Linux).

Scroll Calc spreadsheet quickly to the right far enough for LO to allocate lots of RAM. Only the core #1 will be 100% busy for a little while.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Incredible mess with Linux multimedia

Incredible mess with Linux multimedia

There is a bunch of computers in our lab which I was tasked with setting up for music production. The original idea was to research site linuxmusician.com and follow their writeups and FAQs.

Initially I had some success but things never were stable. With time machines one after another stopped playing and capturing music one way or the other. I felt like a boy tasked with putting out forest fire with a screwdriver. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:03 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Last drop convinces me that ASUS makes nothing but crap

Last drop convinces me that ASUS makes nothing but crap

My history with ASUS began with A7V880 motherboard, which would not detect the last ~300MB of RAM out of 2GB installed.

That got me confused into thinking the memory was defective, which it was not. Those 2 sticks of RAM (on the ASUS recommended list) worked fine in a number of different motherboards. The 2 sticks I got as a replacement (not on the ASUS recommended list) behaved exactly same. In the end A7V880 died soon after the warranty period expired - it just stopped POSTing.

I swore to never buy ASUS again, but found myself in a situation where I had to rush purchase a board and ASUS was the only one in stock which satisfied the requirements. That was M4A89GTD-PRO. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Conflict of distributions vs. application developers

Conflict of distribution maintainers vs. application developers

How various parties in Linux world pull the blanket in all directions leaving the user in the cold

Just a quick post on something which I see more and more as a trend: there is a conflict between the distribution maintainers and software developers.

The former want you to use the software version from the repositories, motivating that with belief that repositories contain the packages, tailored for a particular distribution and expected to run smoothly.

The later believe that repositories introduce problems and want you to compile software from the source code, distributed by their teams. They are not worried that 'make install' would not necessarily copy the files into the proper directories or properly configure the package to the standards of Linux distribution.

The user is caught between the rock and a hard object, as they can't aggravate either party, otherwise they would loose those bits and shreds of support they are hoping for. This is nothing but a blame game and the Linux users are the victims.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Printing from Acrobat Reader is N times slower under Linux

Printing from Acrobat Reader is N times slower than from Windows

Another lie: Linux is just as fast as Windows

Something I've never noticed as I am doing the bulk of PDF printing under Linux. Probably not for long now that I noticed how Acrobat Reader under Linux only uses 1 out of 4 CPU cores to submit a print job and once submitted, it take about 3-4 times longer for each page to be printed.

Using same version 9 Acrobat Reader under both Win7 and Fedora, both 64bit. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 10:26 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Uncooperative developer

Open source developer demonstrates his arrogance

Just proving the point of this blog, one of the Gnash developers has demonstrated that he does not care about his users. Developer demands a test case after being told by 2 separate users that issue occurred on every web page with multiple flash objects. He is told that again and closes the bug with the reason of 'uncooperative user'.

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?32130

Arrogance of these people is startling.

It's sufficient to slightly tick them off and they refuse to fix a critical bug. Touchy-feely. None of them gets hired for my team in real life.

Posted by: LinuxLies at 03:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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With every new update Firefox is getting worse and worse

Firefox is becoming less and less responsive with every new update.

I am on version 3.6.13 and when it is loading heavily Javascripted pages in one tab, everything freezes and it is impossible to continue using other pages.
more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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How new kernel can leave Linux 'speechless'

No sound in flash

Another kernel upgrade has literally muted Flash objects on my system. Only Flash was affected: the system sounds, Skype and some other applications continued working just fine. After checking this and that I discovered, that the order of sound interfaces with new kernel was different from the old one:

$cat /proc/snd/cards

had the sound interfaces in reverse order. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 02:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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64bit Skype under Fedora is possible

Kudos to Joey Hess!

Skype.com does not provide a 64bit package for Fedora Linux, but you can make your own out of their Debian package.

For that you will need Alien program from http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/ which converts among several distribution formats. Just run Alien on the DEB package and rpm -ivh the resulting RPM package and you are all set.

You can try that for other formats too.

UPDATE: Both 32 and 64bit versions of Skype Linux Beta have a bug, which causes the audio card settings page to forget the interface the input is set to. more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 08:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Linux: It's getting worse and worse

Fedora 14 released. Nothing but problems!

This post will be updated with a log of issues I am facing on upgrade. Do they test software at all? Hello!

Current issue count: 7

Solved issues count: 2 more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 07:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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[STICKY] The top 10 lies about Linux (What Linux is and what it is not)

The top 10 lies about Linux

What Linux is and what it is not

Preface

My first experience with Linux dates back to 1995, when I got a hold of Slackware 2 CD and installed it on my then 486 machine with 2 MB RAM and 120 MB hard drive. When Red Hat later came out, I switched to use it instead and spent countless hours learning and using that then free distribution. At the same time I had IBM OS/2 Warp and MS DOS running from other partitions.

Using Linux back then was quite a different experience, especially in Eastern Europe with its lack of Internet access. The files could be obtained thru the Newsgroups or from the rare BBS which was run by someone with Internet access.

Linux soon appeared to be a convenient platform for everything Internet related, and I started taking contracts installing and configuring Red Hat, Mandrake and Slackware primarily for the file servers and web sites with Apache and MySQL or for the web browsing and instant messaging use on the desktop.

Currently I am supporting IT operations of a large corporation with global presence and some our applications run on Redhat Enterprise Linux.

Over time I came to realization that not all understand, that Linux is not a magic bullet. Lots of frustration could be avoided if there was understanding, that there are several lies spread about Linux (intentionally or not).

more...

Posted by: LinuxLies at 11:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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