Kadin2048's Journal: The $300 Workstation, Part II

So it's been (almost) two months, and I thought I'd record some of my musings, after having lived with my $293 HP xw5000 Intel-based "workstation" for a while.

You can read part I if you want the backstory. Suffice it to say I finally decided to give Linux a fair shot, after being rather dissatisfied with all my previous experiments with it, which all involved trying to run it on sorely outdated hardware.

I have the xw5000 hooked up via a 2-port USB KVM switch, so I can use the same set of input devices to control the Linux machine and my Mac, an aging 400MHz Sawtooth. For a Linux distro, I decided to go with Ubuntu, although not for any particularly scientific reason. I noticed it was at the top of the Distrowatch charts, and had an active user forum and a good release cycle. Sounded good enough for me.

Installation was fine, I can't complain there. Although I really never have had many complaints with installing Linux. I figure there are a lot more important things with an OS than whether or not it uses a text-mode installer or a true GUI. But Ubuntu was fine, it recognized all of the internal hardware without problems. (Which it ought to have, since this machine was desiged to run Linux -- albeit RedHat Enterprise Linux -- from the beginning.)

About the only thing that the installer didn't do a good job on, was detecting my monitor's maximum resolution. My monitor isn't anything special (a MAG 19" CRT), and I had thought it would have done a better autodetect job. But it didn't blow it up, so after some Googling I found out that I could specify the maximum H and V refresh rates in the X.org config file, and it would figure things out from there. Not too bad.

After that, it was wireless card time. As I've written in several Slashdot posts, the wireless situation on Linux is deplorable. Although I'm not sure that it's really the fault of anyone in the Linux community -- more the card manufacturers themselves -- it's a shitty situation. I won't rehash the entire saga here, but I got what I thought was a compatible Linux card, only to bring it home and find out that they'd changed the chipset (made by Marvell, curse them) to one that there aren't any native drivers for. So I ended up using ndiswrappers, and being stuck with an odd side-effect: every time I want to change the SSID of the network I connect to, I have to completely reboot the machine. Not a huge problem on a workstation, but it's something I have to keep in mind whenever I'm re-jiggering my wireless settings.

(It's worth noting that the reason I'm using wireless is because the Mac, which sits 6" away from the Linux machine, acts as the internet gateway to the house and only has one Ethernet port. Perhaps at some point I'll get a router-gateway and do away with the Linux box's wireless card entirely.)

Next stop, NVidia drivers. Can't say I had any problems here; props to NVidia for making the procedure fairly trouble-free. I never played with the system enough to determine whether there's a noticable performance boost as a result of having the drivers installed. The video card that came in the machine is a NVidia Quadro4 200NVS, 64MB -- not particularly perky by today's standards. It's designed to drive dual displays, although I'm only using one through the KVM.

My first comment regarding Ubuntu is that I quickly decided that I'm not a big fan of Gnome. Sorry guys, but I just don't like it. I really did try to like it, because I'd heard all these unflattering things said about KDE (e.g., "it's Windows-ish," "it's a resource hog," "it's poorly designed,"), and perhaps if I had spent time customizing Gnome I would have liked it, but I've got better things to do. I grabbed the Kubuntu packages and never looked back. (Except to use the system-management utilites like the Networking control panel, which don't seem to work for me in KDE.)

The only downside to Kubuntu is that there isn't as much of a user community for it as plain-old (Gnome-based) Ubuntu. If you look at the number of people in each forum at any given time, the numbers usually run 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of Gnome. Also, there's no free CD available of Kubuntu, so you have to either burn it yourself, or install Ubuntu and then grab the Kubuntu-desktop packages.

The other thing I like about KDE is that it offers a MacOS-style screen-top menubar, that changes options depending on the application currently in focus / on top. Also, I think Konqueror is a good web browser, and renders more nicely than Firefox. Both of these things are attributable to my previous experience with Macs and resultant bias -- I use Safari on my Mac, which is based on the same rendering engine as Konqueror -- but they stand just the same. I also like the "fish" feature of Konqueror: you can type a URL in the form "fish://user@remotemachine/~" and it will let you access that machine just as if it was a local volume, through an SSH session. You can view text files, copy things back and forth, etc. -- all without having to set up file sharing on the remote machine (aside from SSH). Personally I think that's worth the price of admission (installing KDE) by itself.