Episode: 175
Title: HPR0175: Sourcecast ep 00
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0175/hpr0175.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:56:57

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Give yourselves.
the
Hi and welcome to SourceCast Episode Zero. I'm your host JD. And I'm Jeremy. And this
show is more going to be, well, we wanted a good Linux podcast because there are very
few of them out there. And most of the ones who are out there are either extremely evangelical
towards one distro or one group of people, radio. Or they involve Jon O'Bacon or in some cases both.
Yes, yes. Or they're like old school slackware for words who have been using Linux since 1993.
And you really don't learn anything. They're just, they're bullshitting the entire time.
We're going to try and be, you know, we're going to try and make this fun, have some humor,
but also we're going to review distros on multiple levels.
Real honest, practical reviews, not the sort of OS news and distro watch crap where it's a bunch
of screenshots. And oh, look, here's a feature that nobody really used, but it's a great to be
little checkbox on the final ship product. Yeah, exactly, exactly. The ratings we're going to
try and give distros that we review are going to be, first, the granny rating, the ease of installation,
ease of basically getting a working distro codex, non-free software like Skype and Flash,
stuff like that. And the default theme because your grandma isn't going to want to go in and
change the theme and go to no look and find a good theme and stuff like that.
Our second is going to be for the power users. Basically, is it customizable,
flexible, and flexible? And what's the ease of compiling stuff? Because you will have to compile
stuff that's, you know, inevitable. And getting bleeding edge software.
The next one is the annoyance factor. This one, yeah, there are going to be a bunch of
distros that get high ratings on this because basically we don't want it to be too annoying
and where the distro gets so much in the way of either of the first two.
My favorite example on this is if you go and try to install support to playback MP3s like
say most of the planet wants. And Richard Stahlman appears on your desktop with a
tambourine singing kumbaya and gives you a 30 minute dissertation on why you are evil for installing
MP3 support. That would be highly annoying. Yes, also, you know, stupid design decisions like,
you know, the door nine, which we might review in the future, perhaps not,
deciding to go with a development version of xorg that no binary driver supported for over a month
after Fedora final release. Very intelligent Fedora guys, go you. Next is the software selection.
How up to data the repos and how big are they? Yes, after three months of using the distro
are you four or five versions behind on Firefox with no hope of upgrading unless you go into it yourself.
Yeah, which if you've ever compiled Firefox by hand, it's well, no fun.
Next is going to be community support. Basically, we're going to go around to their forms and
their IRC. And if we have any problems, we're going to ask for questions and we're going to
look in there a little bit to see how, you know, problems get handled. One of the reasons I kind
of like a booth do, even though Ubuntu sucks, but we'll discuss more of that next episode,
is because it's got such a vast community that at the Ubuntu forms, for example,
you don't even have to make a new post. 90% of the time, your problems already been solved,
asked and solved by people, so all you have to do is search. And finally, performance.
Basically, we're going to be using Geekbench just to do a quick performance test of the distro.
And, you know, if it's, if it makes our Pentium 4s run like, you know,
cell lines, it'll lose some points for that.
Yeah, the number one impact on that is probably going to end up being below more than, you know,
something like Gen 2 or Arch where you can compile and tweak your C flags and so on and so forth.
Ubuntu, you know, compared to Debian and also it'll give you a good comparison of, hey,
Ubuntu got a much lower score than Debian. I wonder why that is. And, you know, you can look
into that more if you feel like it. What we're going to be discussing this episode is,
we've got a bit of news to cover. In the past week, there's been some huge news in the open
source community. And we wanted to explain basically who we are and, you know, what we've done
with Linux. You want to start, Jeremy? Sure. I started with Linux because way back around
Christmas of 2000, I got a new computer, exactly how I wanted it from Compact K, don't laugh,
Compact wasn't that bad back then. But unfortunately, it came pre-loaded with Windows Millennium Edition.
Oh, God. And so it didn't take me very long to say this is a load of shit. There has to be
something, anything out there better than this. And so I tried Mandrake at the time. I think
it was 7.0. And this was mid to late, close to the mid, kernel 2.4. And Mandrake did okay.
It had a nice control panel which sort of eased me into things. And the hardware support was
really the biggest problem. My Onigee card had a terrible time working. Video support, you know,
I could, I could, it was fine, but 3D acceleration was pretty hopeless. And it had the additional
problem of every six months there was a new release. And if you stuck around on the old one,
you would quickly find things would start breaking. And you'd have to start going to
rpmfind.net and installing manually. And it would just get really messy.
Yeah. And also back in those days, there wasn't anything super easy like nice repos and nice package
managers. If you want to upgrade, you either get a reformat and reinstall. Or you tried manually
getting all the rpm's which were, you know, down with nothing. Craziness.
And I stuck it out with Mandrake all the way until I believe it was 10.2 or so. And at the time,
I bought a Hapog PDR250 with the hopes of using MythTV on my desktop system. And I was like,
because I really researched hard to make sure it was a card that would work and everybody said,
yeah, it'll work fine. It's great. It'll, it's, it's exactly what you want.
Well, what they didn't tell me was that in Mandrake, the installation and setup guide for MythTV
was about six or seven solid pages of commands and crap you would have to do. And of course,
every six months, you would have to turn around and do it again when Mandrake released another
release. And that got a really old, really, really fast. And so I said, you know, there's got to be
a better way. And so I just, in a, in a fury ran through distros trying to see if there was a
better way. I found it was much the same at the time with Fedora. I want to say back then it was,
I was around the time of Mandrake 10, right? You know, one of the last few releases before they
changed to Mandraiva. And I want to say it was like Fedora Core 4, maybe 5 back then.
Something close in there. Now, I tried that. Ubuntu wasn't even really known back then.
Maybe not if it even existed. I tried all the major distros you can think of. I tried
pretty sure sent us. Basically, if it was in the top 10 on distro watch, I gave it a try and found
to be, because basically at the time all you had was red had variants and devian variants.
And ones that weren't really that big of a variant. And all of them had the same problems
regarding myth TV. They might not anymore. But I ended up moving to gen 2. And the sort of
law of using gen 2 is the first time you install it. It's going to kick your ass and you're going
to screw up mightily. And you're going to have to start back over. And I did. And it ended up taking
me probably a full week before I had everything installed and set up decently well.
And I'm actually still running that install from several years ago today
on my desktop. And I use it on all the other machines I have now. All my servers, my laptops,
and so on. And I found that with gen 2 at least I would have to set up the first time. And
gen 2 would actually do most of the hard work for me through use flags. All I really had to do was
tell was set up a database which was that sort of an automated process. It's like one command
and it's done. And set up the back in with the database password credentials. Go create an
account at zap2it to get TV listings. And tell, tell Lyric which dev device was my remote control.
That was it. That's like that's like a quarter of a page compared to how it used to be.
And I was like all of that. This is it. This is a game over. Why bother going through all the pain.
And so I've stuck with that. And what I really like about it is it's got a real palpable speed
increase. And that doesn't come from compiling with oh my god go faster or fun roll loops or
you know any other stupid C flag that anybody who develops GCC would laugh at you for even mentioning.
Exactly. But that's I think that's pretty much mostly from the fact that if you compile your
own kernel you're only throwing in there what you absolutely want. At least if you're at least if
you're man enough not to use gen kernel which pretty much anybody who uses gen 2 will say why the
hell did you use gen kernel. Yeah. And I present my laptop is as an old ThinkPad T21. It's like a
mobile P3 800 with 256 megs of RAM and a bunch of on that thing will be just maddeningly slow
while yank my hair out. But gen 2 want it. Don't try and run Ubuntu or any Ubuntu variant
on anything slower than a one gig of her CPU even if you're running command line online.
But yeah, gen 2 even with a full KDE I found to be much much more usable actually fairly responsive.
And I even got things working that I never could in the binary districts on that ThinkPad. I got
full 3D acceleration on that pathetic GPU on that old ThinkPad, a pro-savage ix like 8 megabytes of
video RAM, a gp2x but I can play tux raised from that thing in gen 2. So yeah, I've stuck with
gen 2 then. I would say what I really like about it is the speed and the fact that I never ever have
to reinstall again. I know a couple of districts have since gone to rolling releases and we'll have
to see if they're able to sway me away from gen 2 because while I love gen 2, I'm no evangelist.
I think there's probably a better solution out there somewhere if not now than in the future
on the desktop. And you hate spending 48 hours compiling open office? Yes.
Yeah, if anybody out there trying gen 2 do not bother trying to compile open office, it will give
you gray hair on my desktop which is a overclocked pinium 4 at 3 and a third gigahertz with 2 gigs of
RAM, 36 hours later it was still compiling and the temp folder for the compile was up to almost
5 gigs. I'm like, gee, good god. How is that even possible? That's just illogical.
In that time span, I could compile KDE meta which is everything KDE related twice over.
But yeah, there's probably a better solution out there for the desktop. If not now,
they're probably in the future and I'm hoping we'll find something out there in a process
of reviewing districts out there but I'll probably have a much harder time being swayed from gen 2
on the server where I found it just having that sort of extreme speed comes in so much handy
in a production environment especially if you get Doug that extra 15, 10, 15, 20 percent performance
increase can be the difference between people mirroring your site and people still able to load it.
Exactly. I mean, you need that customization sometimes like for different stuff. You don't,
you know, for example, with crap. WordPress, if you're using PostgreSQL,
you don't really need MySQL support so it's better to compile that out and speed it up a little bit.
Yeah, and one of the first things that anybody who uses Apache and MySQL in a high-demand production
environment will tell you is, you know, when you say, hey, how do I increase the speed?
They're first going to say, well, did you throw away your distro maintainers binary and compile it
for yourself, for your needs. And if you try and go do that on most binary distros, it's apps,
I'd rather have a root canal, it's awful. Because I mean, if you look at the just the compile time
config options for Apache would like scroll the terminal down three pages, it's crazy. And gen 2 makes
it just ridiculously easy a child's play to roll your own compile versions of any major app.
Use flags are so incredibly handy when it comes to that. And that's pretty much where I'm at
today. I'll go ahead and say that I'm a big KDE fan. I like QT. I'm sort of the exact opposite
of you. I have a theory that anything made in GTK will suck, although I will have to give you
audacious, which you showed me, because I've been missing my classic Winapp and Linux for
so long. And now that audacious finally has a double size working perfectly, I am no longer
using Omroth. Audacious is now the only GTK app I still use now that I dumped Firefox for Opera.
I thought you still use DeLouge for 20. Oh, okay. Yes. Okay. Two. You got me on two.
But DeLouge is so, I may try K Torrent, but DeLouge is, even if it is GTK, it's got to be,
it's like five, ten times more lightweight than Azureus, but that's Java for you.
As I like to say, saying Java is good because it's cross-platform is like saying anal sex is good
because it's cross-gender. That argument does not work. Okay. So where did you get to start?
Well, I got my start in around 1999. I started playing with Distroves. Back then,
pretty much the only two reasonably viable options were Susie or Susa, however the hell you
pronounce it. Red Hat and early, early versions of Mandrake. Basically, I hated it.
I thought, you know, I played with it. I thought it was cool because, you know,
Linux is better than Windows, but with Lyro, I broke Lyro a few times and I was like,
shit, broke it, got a reformat. You know, now I know you can just see it screwed in into a grub install.
But back then, I didn't, you know, back then, I only knew about the two difficult editors,
which are Vi and Emacs and coming from, you know, Windows and notepad and all those easy things,
Vi and Emacs were a little bit too difficult. That's probably an understatement, especially for
Emacs. Yes. And so, you know, also, there was no package management,
girl, limited to what came on the CD. So, I basically, like I said, hated them,
stopped using Linux for about two years. Then a friend of mine turned me on to Debian.
Basically, I played with it, you know, he told me about Debian, he told me about K3B,
which is the greatest disc burning app in the history of anything. He told me about Nano,
and I instantly started to love Debian and I started to love Linux.
And about, probably about six months after I started with Debian, I became a Debian developer.
And, you know, I was still using Windows at that time, mainly. I was just using Debian for
development stuff and for fun. Then one day in December of 2007, yeah. I decided to try Windows
Vista. For about a week, I thought it was the greatest thing since I spread. After that week,
yeah, I thought it was the worst OS any manufacturers ever produced, including Scal.
Worst than Emmy? Worst than Emmy. Impressive. The problem with Emmy is, it was crashy,
and it had like no features, whereas Vista was crashy. It had a crap ton of features that were
all useless, and it was very, very, very slow. Which version of Vista did you get? Home super
ultimate Leetman edition? Yeah, I pirated. Super leak guy. I am awesome edition.
The internet, all the piracy, none of the scurvy. I hated it. So basically, I decided to go to
Debian. I went with Debian for six months, and then I started to get really upset Debian community,
because I started noticing that I didn't notice in my, you know, five years of being a Debian
developer, a bunch of infighting, because I was watching closer than ever, because at this point,
I was using it on my main desktop. So I did the stupid thing, and I went to a boom-doo.
For about six months, for about another six months. I pretty much
did not enjoy Ubuntu. I'll put it that way. With Ubuntu, not only is there a bunch of infighting,
but the devs have a fun with their brains being missing. So now I am back to Debian. I am back
as a Debian developer, and that's pretty much my story, and just to end it, you know, I'm a known guy,
I think. I don't think GTK is the greatest thing since I've read, but I kind of think it's better
than QT, because GTK is written in C. Okay, well let me ask you this. At what point did you leave
Windows entirely? I mean, did you keep a dual boot around, keep your safe comfort? I kept,
though I did dump Emmy entirely, I didn't dump Windows. At that point XP was around, and I kept
an XP dual boot, and I kept that all the way up until probably two weeks after I installed Gen2,
and I said, and at that point I was like, I haven't touched Windows since I installed this,
and then I made that sort of great leap of faith to go ahead and go all the way.
I didn't dump, well technically I still haven't dumped Windows because I'm forced to use
that work, and it's on my gaming box at home, but I stopped using Windows for like 95% of what I do
in January of 2007. Yeah, I mean that's pretty much my story, and as I said in the beginning of the
show, you know, I decided to start this podcast with Jeremy, because I think there is a quite
serious lack of Linux media. I mean, you know, there are hundreds of podcasts like Mac break and,
you know, typical Mac user podcast, and all these podcasts covering Mac and like Windows weekly,
and I'm sure there are others covering Windows, but really I can only think of two shows covering Linux,
and both of those shows mostly cover centralized towards beginners. One's called going Linux,
obviously, center towards beginners, and the other is the Linux action show, which is a very fun
show, but they don't cover many distros outside of the typical Ubuntu Fedora open source.
Yeah, there's a couple that is out there I subscribe to, but they're not really all about
distros. They tend to be more about professionals in the industry, you know, interviews with, you know,
people from Sun and people from Big Blue are talking about, you know, technologies they're
delivering. The sort of thing you really don't care about if you're a desktop Linux user.
And like, you know, the word or the MySQL people talking about how great MySQL is, sure, it's great,
you know, we all use it on our web servers, but why do I need to watch and interview with the guy
who created it who's not telling me anything I didn't know? If anything you need to watch and
pray that Sun just doesn't screw it up and that needs to be the sum total of your watching for MySQL.
Well, I'll start off. This was going to be a new story, but right now it's the perfect time to say
it because it involves MySQL. MySQL has basically failed in my book and I am about to in the near
future. My great, everything I have that runs on MySQL to postgreSQL.
What was the big problem that tipped you? Well, to the people who don't know,
Launchpad is Ubuntu's bug tracker, source code, center, kind of home of everything. MySQL
moved their SVN and their bug tracker over to Launchpad. I just feel like that is a massive
failure because since the launch, since Launchpad itself is not open source, they're depending on
Ubuntu for, you know, like I said, hosting their SVN and hosting their bug tracker where Ubuntu,
like I said, we'll talk about next episode because next episode is the Ubuntu review
is possibly the worst destroyer in the stupid developers on the planet.
I probably won't bash this hard as you, but I do have some peace to take up with the Ubuntu as well.
But yeah, that's a real head scratching decision. You have to wonder if behind the scenes there
wasn't some sort of exchange taking place and maybe canonical gets the only prepared binary
for a future feature or something or that's really, I mean, that's a head scratcher.
Canonical does that a lot where they get, for example, binary, free binaries across over office
are in the Ubuntu partner repository, but for everybody else, you got the fact.
Also parallels, parallels is like $30 on Mac, Windows, and every distro, but Ubuntu.
I mean, that's not like they have a shortage of options out there. There's source forwards,
there's fresh meat, there's Google code, there's probably a dozen major, major open source sort
of developer areas. Also, I mean, the other thing is, they're owned by Sun. I think Sun can
afford to rack a dedicated server for them. That is like a copy of Apache Subversion and like
BugZilla R. Laffably that is Sun's entire bottom line is server enterprise solutions.
Yeah, so why could they not, you know, spend 100 bucks a month, which is nothing for a huge
company like Sun, to rack a dedicated, rack a callover, you know, MySQL makes no sense, but
that's what they decide to do. So, you know, hopefully they will, Sun will start to run when
people start moving away from VirtualBox because it will start getting worse MySQL because it will
quickly start getting worse, you know. I hope not for VirtualBox. That's one of the few apps
that I really, really love in Linux. Well, what I think people are going to do, if, you know,
it starts to go to crap, is I think people will take, you know, 1.5 and fork it because really,
I mean, that's, you know, that's when they were still working with, you know, tech and everything
was nice and happy and open. Oh, okay. So, onto some of the big news that has happened recently,
I guess we'll start with the one that's just finished up recently that's all over the news.
Firefox 3 has been released and I'll go ahead and get your take on it before I sour the whole deal.
Well, I know. I'll say this right off the bat because, yeah, you told me about this earlier.
Yeah, you're an Alpha fanboy, but I've been using Firefox 3 since before beta 1, since like Alpha
8 and I'm in love. It's never crashed once. The RAM usage is probably about half of what Firefox
2's RAM music is and loading webpages and rendering stuff is blazingly fast.
Well, I would say probably a month or two ago, I got tired of Firefox to
sautomizing my computers for RAM. It got to the point where if I was using Firefox on my old
ThinkPad laptop, even if I was running nothing else, it would be exhausting RAM and swapping
out heavily. And so, I tried Opera 9.5 at the time. It was like beta 1 or something like that.
I was like, oh, there's no question. It was how I expected Firefox 2 to have been.
And it had little extra things that you could tell that Opera eats their own dog meat.
Little extra features that are really handy for somebody who's browsing a lot,
like the option to make it a background tab or just a new tab. And I know you can add all
these features in with plugins and Firefox, but then you only make the memory problem much, much worse.
Right, but like I said, in Firefox 3, the memory problem is almost nonexistent to the point where
it's almost as good as Opera for RAM. And the other thing that I'd like about Opera, oddly enough,
and I haven't used a browser for email and browsing since a way back. Since before Firefox
didn't exist and all you really had in Linux was Opera with the banner ads or maybe a late
net scape in early Mozilla. And I ended up using early Mozilla. I actually love Opera's built-in
email client. It's lightweight, but it does such a good job with multiple accounts that I've
sort of followed and loved with it. I'll be honest, I have two problems with Opera. One,
it's a QT app, which doesn't bother me a little bit, but it doesn't bother me much.
The problem with it is, it's a QT app that looks like shit. K3B, I'm happy with K3B's look,
under no. I'm happy with the look of Copied under no. I'm happy with the look of Conquer
under no. And this is all K3 stuff. I don't run any QT for stuff except for Skype.
But for some reason, Opera looks like shit under QTK. I don't know what it is.
This is one of the reasons this is going to be a good podcast. You, you are a, you live
openly Northeast United States. I'm down in the southeast. You're a big gnome fan. I'm a big KDE
fan. You like most everything, GTK. I like most everything QT. So generally speaking, if we both
like it, it's great. And if we both hate it, it's a total piece of shit. And the other problem I have
with Opera is adblock plus spoils me simply because I know Opera can do adblocking. You have to
edit that I and I file in your profile. But the problem with Opera's adblocking is it's not
although updated. Yeah, there's no, there's no real subscription list. The only thing you have,
if you haven't added slips by the I and I list that I found is probably 99% effective. But for
something that slips by your, your, your resort is to right click on the page and go to something
called block content. And it sort of has this overlay of the whole screen that fades everything out.
It's it for flashes, a flash and I frames and images. And it lets you click on them to block them
out. But I think somewhere out there, I wonder if there isn't a third party plugin. I mean,
worst case scenario, the I and I block list are fairly consistent. I'm sure you could
bodge up a script out there and throw it in as a cron job that would just keep, keep fetching. Yeah,
exactly. But my thought is an arson binary is very small. It's maybe a hundred K. And you know,
they should buy it. If that they should binary. So I mean, I know I know why Opera doesn't want to
include adblock by default. They don't want to get you know. So for the same reasons Firefox
doesn't they don't want to be frowned upon by, you know, people like Google who ultimately fund
their efforts through ad related, you know, through through that little search box that has ads
on the results. And they don't want to go. Or people who like, you know, do their video podcasts
and get the money to support themselves through the Google ads and you're not watching them. So
you're not supporting that. Exactly. Well, you're not looking at the Google ads.
But still, I mean, you know, at least it should be available as a plug in there as something like
that that uses something like our sync to check and update stuff automatically because really,
yes, it blocks them what it blocks them well now. But you have to remember like once a month
to go in and say, hey, time to update my block list. Exactly. I just don't want to do that. I want
things to just work. I totally agree there. That's sort of the only thing I don't like about Opera
right now. I wish there was a better solution that didn't require me to go bash scripting.
You know, and that's just not even fun to do. It's just a pain me ass. And we've sort of in a
secondary nature covered one of the other big analysis, which is opera 9.5 itself, which I
absolutely love. I gotta say, I keep playing with opera. I currently haven't installed on my main
machine. And opera 9.5 is a lot better than 9.5. Yes, much, much better. And I'm glad they fixed
a lot of the issues with the betas. You could tell they were definitely betas. It wasn't like
Firefox 3 release candidates where you could say, you know, hey, this is this is pretty much 99%
there. The betas had real issues. At times, the rendering performance would drop by double
with some releases. Facebook would stop working in some releases. That would be definitely bad for
market share and a browser. Yeah. And I'm glad to see that by the time they had the final release,
they cleaned all that up. I think most of the benchmarks I've seen at places like ours,
Technica have opera by far the fastest and Firefox 3, surprisingly pretty close behind opera.
Now, I have a question for you and for the listeners. What do you all think of WebKit? WebKit. WebKit.
WebKit is Apple's rendering engine. Like opera 9.5 has Kestrel or whatever the hell they're calling it.
Firefox has Gecko 1.9 for Firefox 3. WebKit is Apple's and supposedly, you know, like right now,
Conqueror coming with KDE 4.1 uses WebKit by default. Qt 4.4 has WebKit in the Qt framework.
So, you know, anything that is Qt can easily integrate with WebKit. And Epiphany, which is the
known browser other than Firefox, is also dropping their Gecko back end for WebKit only.
Well, WebKit is really good for standards compliance. I know that's one of the absolute best for
passing the various acid tests out there for a browser. But that being said, it tends to be
shit for practical use of the Web. Major websites, guess what, aren't standards compliant most of the
time. And so, you'll find it just doesn't work in Safari or Conqueror. And if you think you're missing
plugins and features in opera, just wait till you fire up Conqueror and you'll be yanking your hair out.
The only way to block ads with Conqueror is to run Privacy and then run a filter on the proxy.
Actually, that is very incorrect because-
Oh, they got a new one.
I have, uh, in Conqueror 3, and I have it in stock right now, I have an ad block.
But, frankly, for Conqueror, I think Conqueror is on the way to dying a slow,
painful death. It's the file manager has been replaced by Dolphin or whatever. I think it's Dolphin,
right, and KDE4. And really, I mean, I get several million hits on one of my websites and
when I go and I look at the backend statistics, more people are using a PDA than are coming in off
Conqueror. I mean, there's like nobody out there using it.
Well, right now, at least according to my Debian Conqueror, by default, again, at least in Debian,
it claims that it's Gecko.
Yeah, I think really that Conqueror, and probably Epiphany 2, because no one is using Firefox now
for the default browser, right? It's all integrated into the system and-
Yeah, it's all integrated, but it's still, um, still crap. Epiphany by default?
I know that for sure, Conqueror is probably going to end up dying a very slow death. I mean,
I really see that if anything, the KDE guys will probably just go and add browser capabilities
to Dolphin or add like a drop-in, because you can take Opera Firefox now and through their
various APIs, you can with a button drop-in and embedded window that's really Opera or Firefox,
but as far as you would know, using Dolphin, it would look like that was Dolphin itself.
Right, using kind of, you know, a kind of sandboxes on sort of-
I forget the specific name, I think, for Firefox, it's like ZoolRunner or something like that,
I could be wrong, I could be totally wrong. Yeah, yeah.
Also, the fun with Opera though is, like Firefox, there is a separate XUL runner and Firefox,
like in, you know, Debian-based disk rows, XUL runner does all the heavy lifting, Firefox is just
the browser GUI, but with Opera, Opera is Opera is Opera, there is no separation between core
and GUI, which I don't really like that much. I think, yeah, I believe the API says you have to
call Opera with some parameters or something and it becomes more minimal and gets out of the way
and so on. Oh, one thing I actually forgot to bring up because this will happen when you're doing
a podcast for anyone who's thinking about doing a podcast themselves, you will forget things,
but since we're right back show, I'll bring it up now. One of the things that makes me kind of great
for this podcast that will help make this podcast great is, even just recently, I've used pretty
much every disk row that you can possibly think of. It isn't just like Debian with, you know,
Arabic language support, you know, I've used CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise, Sous,
you know, Slackware, Gen2, Arch Linux, the list goes on. We'll save it for when we review Sous,
but I'll go ahead and throw it out there. I really, really love some of the features it's in,
at least open Sousa. Yes, I love it. I'm just wondering why in the hell they're still stuck in
2003 where you have to download four, six, eight, however many way too many CDs. Why not just one CD,
even if you have to go and fetch stuff you're missing. Yeah, the package manager is still just as
crap plastic as every package manager. We'll have to save some of this for when we get to Sousa,
since they just released Sousa 11. We'll have to sort of save some of our haste and see if they've
corrected their ways. Yes, Sousa 11 was released today. Yeah, everyone's happy, you know, that they're not.
And the other major news thing we were wanting to cover was wine 1.0, 15 years in the making,
that's not a bad age for a wine. No, that is not. That's not. But I profess most of my use of wine
is through crossover office because it just makes it so easy and so ridiculously seamless.
I mean, installing Internet Explorer is one click. I mean, come on.
Well, yeah, it's not that easy wine. No, no, it's not. But see, the thing is is, well, with wine,
it just, they've tried it and they've gotten decent with it. They've got to make it fit more into
native for everyone to be happier. Yes, if wine would simply present you with an easy gooey
for programs that work, our programs that need known options to work because if you, I mean,
Photoshop 7 is one of the classic examples because it works so very well in wine.
But it requires a certain some tweaks to get it really working. And if you just run it with the
fault wine, you'll have some problems. But in crossover, they already have the tweak set and ready
for you. So it's seamless. It's it's a one click install again. If wine would just have a gooey
that integrates nicely into KDE and gnome and has basically a wizard to let you install all the
known applications with their special settings easily, it would just make it's, it'd be
Nirvana. It'd be awesome. They'd have to do it not just for the office software,
but for the games too. Because if I want to think if I'm going to pay for versions of wine to
run Windows software, I want to be able to get Sadega and office in one. I don't want to have to go and
pay a subscription for both. Exactly. Exactly. But see what I was referring to with wine things
fitting natively is when you install an app in wine, it feels like you're running whatever app
in window, you know, unless it's like full screen without any, you know, with a custom menu and
not the typical Windows file edit, whatever menu, it looks like Windows 95. That's not a bad thing
compared to current, you know, versions of Windows. This is true, but I'd like it to look more like,
you know, 2000 XP, because at least that would, or, you know, make it fit my GTK or my KDE thing.
Yeah, now that, that is probably a much nastier coding challenge than it probably seems on the face
of it. Well, the thing is Firefox that uses nasty JavaScript for all their code, they pull it off
with the surprisingly decent ability. And the downside is, you know, Firefox, they kind of say,
this place where I know, it's okay in KDE, it'll suck if you're using XFC, oh, not XFC, it'll
suck if you're using FluxBox. Wine, wines a lot more, you know, it's not just one application.
Firefox, it's every Windows application, so they have to make it work and everything.
Yeah, well, and since you, like you mentioned earlier, you will forget things in a podcast,
you've reminded me, the only real beef I have with Firefox 3 is that if you have Flash 10 beta,
which by the way, I love as a release because I can actually view Flash videos in full screen
without it mugging my CPU, you know, and looking like, you know, stop motion animation in Firefox 3,
with Flash 10, it crashes ridiculously often for me. It's okay if you go one at a time,
but if you open up a page, it's got like six YouTube embeds in it, it can become a problem.
Just wondering for, you know, the sake of the audience, you mentioned that, you know, before
full screen Flash makes it look like stop motion video, what happens if you are watching actual
stop motion video on YouTube? Well, if you're using Flash 9, it will only get worse.
Like I said, my desktop is a overclocked Pentium 4 and 3 and a third gigahertz,
and a pretty decent Nvidia 6600 GT. I mean, that setup is good enough to play Doom 3 maxed out,
so we're not talking about, you know, you know, system, sisters of the poor integrated systems here.
But that isn't enough in Flash 9, after I think it was like 9.0, point something, point 4.7.
When they started playing around with GPU acceleration, and it became awful, but that machine couldn't
play YouTube full screen it more than maybe 10 frames a second. And it's got to be something with
what Flash is doing, because if you go and download the FLV file and pull it up and play it in
InPlayer, even on a really slow machine, it's fine. It's totally fine. It's got to be the way
they're rendering it out. Yeah, see, that's the thing. InPlayer is using XV, it's using
actual extensions to play it. Flash is doing 100% CPU rendering, and that's probably why it looks
like ASP, because the Flash developers are lazy idiots, and they said, you know, let's not care
about people, and let's just, you know, make one API, so we only have to maintain one code
that works on all three OSs. Oh, make no mistake about it. They are lazy. I brought up my thinkpad,
and it's really crappy Pro Savage GPU, and I do have working 3D acceleration on that, but
the 3D acceleration comes in X. It's one of the direct rendering extensions for the, for the
have for like Savage and somebody integrated Intel chips. And if you look at the GLX info output,
it has some SGI strings in there, and the way Flash very uncleverly checks to see if you have
proper 3D rendering is they check for the absence of SGI strings in GLX info, because software
rendering software OpenGL will have a whole bunch of SGI crap in there. So if you happen to have
a GPU that is 3D accelerated through DRI with X, you're screwed, even if you have fully working 3D,
just because they're too lazy to do it properly. Also, too lazy to release a 64-bit native of Flash
to make it run maybe a little bit better on any system that's been made since 2005.
Yeah, I mean, you kind of wonder what it will take to motivate them to make an actual release
that doesn't suck to use in Apple and MacOS, especially for a PowerPC version, or for Linux,
because if they keep screwing around like this silver light is going to, you know, because think
about Microsoft's already got 90% market leverage to play around with, and if they keep screwing
the boot here, we could have silver light replacing Flash, and we all know what Microsoft does when
they become the standard, they stop playing with everybody else. Sure, but silver light, I played with
Moonlight, which is the kind of mono-ified version of silver light. Yeah, it sucks about 10 times
worse than Flash on Linux. You don't say a product from Microsoft that was then ported in
.NET to Linux, and it sucks. I'm shocked. I know. It's amazing, isn't it? Well, I think that about
wraps it up in terms of the news we wanted to cover, and telling you guys a little bit about us,
and you'll definitely want to check out our next show, which will be sort of the, how would you
call it, the skewering of Ubuntu? Yes, the skewering of Ubuntu, and perhaps the, well-wrapping of
John O'Bacon. No, not earwrape for you sick bastards out there. You've been listening to source
castus was episode zero. Check out the website sourcecast.org, check out the forums, we're going to be
putting a poll up there to see where you want to go with the show, what you think about things,
we always value input, and anything to take us out on? You've been listening to sourcecast,
and this is not John O'Bacon. And this is also not John O'Bacon. See you later, guys.
Thank you for listening to Active Public Radio. HBR is sponsored by caro.net,
so head on over to see rO.nct for all of us to meet.