XGI has made the news recently for open-sourcing parts of their graphics chip drivers. As a newcomer to the graphics card world, this is a good way to grab the attention of open source operating system users. In this review I’ll show you what you can expect in terms of compatibility and performance from one of XGI’s top-end video cards, the Volari V5.
The Volari series of video cards were borne of the remnants of once-popular video chip maker Trident Microsystems and the former graphics division of Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS). While neither company ever offered any significantly advanced graphics hardware, XGI’s eventual goal is to produce high-end graphics chips for professional use. On their way toward that goal, they’ve brought to market the Volari desktop video card.
The entire Volari series, from the V3 up to the V8, are amazingly inexpensive — none are over U.S. $100. They also provide Linux drivers, and have open-sourced the code that performs 2D hardware acceleration. 3D hardware acceleration is provided as a proprietary binary for now. As of this writing, the current X.org release does not include a specific driver for XGI graphics chips; neither does Linux 2.6.11 include any XGI driver modules. XGI developer Jong Lin did provide some patches for XFree86 and X.org, however, so it is reasonable to assume that they will be included with the next releases. Considering both the X.org and the commercial GNU/Linux distribution release cycles, it could be several months before mainstream distros can fully support XGI video cards without manually applying patches.
Open source 2D: nothing new
According to Red Hat employee and X.org hacker Mike Harris, Nvidia and ATI regularly contribute to the 2D X.org drivers for their video cards, and VIA and Intel contribute to and/or fund both 2D and 3D drivers for X.org and the Linux kernel. XGI is not necessarily doing something revolutionary with the release of their 2D drivers — rather they are keeping up with the competition.
The catch to the kernel driver is that it will only work with 2.4 series kernels as of the time of this writing. The Volari video drivers are only validated for Red Hat 9, which has been unsupported by its vendor for quite some time.
The real boon to the GNU/Linux community will be if or when XGI releases the full 3D driver source code so that it can be integrated into the kernel. This could eliminate the usual obstacles to providing flawless graphics hardware acceleration in GNU/Linux distributions — downloading proprietary binaries and agreeing to restrictive licenses.
So where are the open source 3D drivers? “XGI is working hard to meet the fast-growing market of the Linux community. The release of Linux driver allows us to take baby steps to address the Linux community needs.” When I asked if there was a plan for the release of the 3D code, XGI representative Danny Lee told me, “There is no real timetable for the actual 3D release because we want to see the Linux community’s reaction — and so far it’s been good.”
Features
The XGI Volari V5 has 128MB of DDR video RAM; and DVI, S-Video, and 15-pin VGA outputs. There’s nothing to get upset or excited about in terms of physical design. The card is smaller than most Nvidia and ATI video cards, and the aluminum heatsink and fan unit is slim, unobtrusive, firmly attached, and quiet. The connection standard is AGP 8X, and the graphics processor is optimized for OpenGL 1.5.
Performance
Since the requirements for the kernel driver specify a 2.4 series kernel, I felt it was best to wait until the 2.6 kernel is supported before testing 3D rendering performance. The driver will not install on a computer that uses Linux 2.6, and I did not have a test computer that had an AGP slot and would work with Red Hat Linux 9.
The X11 drivers expect you to use XFree86 version 4.2. If you’re using X.org, you’ll have to copy your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to /etc/X11/XF86Config and let the install script modify it. Then copy XF86Config to xorg.conf and start X11 as you normally do. I did not encounter any problems with the 2D X11 driver — it installed and worked well in X.org 6.8.2.
The test system was an MSI K8T Neo2-FIR motherboard, Athlon 64 4000+, 1GB RAM, using Gentoo Linux 2005.0 for x86, fully updated at the time of testing.
2D performance was measured with the standard x11perf program, which is included with both X.org and XFree86. Since the default mode runs a large number of tests that don’t sufficiently stress the hardware, I chose the more heavy-hitting test modes and created a script to run them automatically:
If you’d like to run this test yourself, just copy the above commands into a text file, save it as test.sh (or whatever you prefer), and make it executable. x11perf will run a variety of 2D rendering tests in a window on your screen and output the results to the command line.
For the purpose of comparison, I also ran these tests with an Albatron GeForce FX5700 Ultra3 with 128MB video RAM. It’s on the lower end of the mid-range Nvidia 3D cards, suitable for most games at a reasonable resolution and detail level. You can usually find it for around $100, or comparable models — such as the FX5750 with 256MB RAM — for a bit less.
The standard X.org nv driver was used for testing the Nvidia card, and the xorg.conf files for both cards were generated using the xorgconfig command.
As you can see in the results table, the Nvidia card buries the Volari V5 in every test except for the GetImage test at the end, and even then it is by a narrow margin. It’s hard to tell if the huge difference in results is due to the immaturity of XGI’s 2D driver, or a vastly inferior rendering engine. Nvidia has had a lot more time to get their X.org driver in order. The reason doesn’t matter to end-users — the results are the same no matter the cause.
Conclusions
XGI claims that the Volari V5 is comparable to the performance of the ATI Radeon 9550 and the Nvidia FX5700LE (that’s a heavily reduced version of the 5700U3 that I used in this review). The tests they used to arrive at that conclusion were run in Windows XP using DirectX 8 and 9, which have no relation to OpenGL tests in GNU/Linux.
My conclusion is a bit different than XGI’s. At this time, XGI does not have mature enough drivers for the Linux kernel or for X.org. When their software supports Linux kernel 2.6 and X.org natively includes some updated and improved 2D drivers, the XGI Volari V5 will be a very good low-cost desktop graphics card. Until that time, I can’t say that the Volari V5 is anything other than a seemingly reliable low-end video card. If you need a video card for a low-end system, the technology and price of the Volari V5 make it a much better choice than older Nvidia cards like the TNT2, older ATI cards like the Radeon 7000, and old Matrox standbys like the G450. If you’re looking for good 3D rendering support in GNU/Linux, look elsewhere for now.
The Sun Fire V40z is Sun Microsystems’ “entry-level” server, but that classification doesn’t fit the performance level and feature set included in this system — it’s far more powerful. I spent two weeks testing this machine in a production environment, trying different operating systems and measuring the performance of database calculations, and I was pretty impressed with its performance.
The system, which according to the vendor retails for about $17,500 in this configuration, came configured with 4 AMD Opteron 850 processors, 8GB of registered ECC DDR333 (there is an option to upgrade to DDR400, which could significantly increase performance of memory-intensive applications), two 73GB SCSI drives, and a large number of 80mm fans.
This is one of the more attractive rackmount systems I’ve played with. The front panel LCD display shows the machine’s IP address and its status with the operating system. I didn’t see it say much except that it was booting the OS; to get it to do anything more, the proprietary nps driver from Sun (available for Solaris, RedHat, SuSE, and Windows2000/2003) must be loaded. This allows the LCD to provide OS status, and to remotely shut down the server from the onboard service processor. Finally it also allows the service processor to capture and log events from the OS and to be aware of device driver versions.
After unpacking the machine, the first thing I did was pull the cover off and see what was inside. The top panel comes off with one thumb screw and a release level, making it easy to access the internal components. Anyone who has had to work on a rack of servers will appreciate the system’s modularity and ease of disassembly.
Once the cover was off I found a large plastic duct for the 80mm fans. After I removed it, I could see two copper heatsinks. Two of the four CPUs were underneath, with four memory slots positioned equidistant from each CPU. The second pair of chips was not immediately visible with only the top cover and fan ducts removed. After some searching, I found them on an easily removable board under the drive cages. The mainboard covers almost the entire bottom of the chassis. I was quite impressed with what I found inside, and all of its major components were industry standard, so drivers shouldn’t be much of a problem.
After connecting the dual power supplies to independent UPSes, I turned the system on and was greeted by perhaps the loudest system I’d heard in a long time. To my surprise it got much louder when I turned it on. That’s no joke — the 80mm fans operate even when the system is powered off, and when you turn it on, you get four large Opteron fans joining them. Once the service processor is finished with its initialization, it reads the CPU temperatures and adjusts the fans down to a more acceptable level. The system took ages to go through the power-on self test, but that’s characteristic of all servers of this kind.
Operating systems
The Sun Fire V40z can come preinstalled with either the 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. I opted for SUSE, but the software was a little too out-of-date to be useful to me, both in testing for this review and in my production environment. After some consideration, I switched to 64-bit Gentoo Linux — specifically, the 2.6.11-gentoo-r5 kernel for i686 and SMP.
I didn’t experience many issues with the install; thankfully, everything went well. I did have a problem with the onboard Trident video chip in the V40z. GNU/Linux doesn’t support a wide range of features with this graphics processor. It would have been nice to be able to use the frame buffer, and X11 didn’t support any decent video modes. For the cost of the machine, I would have expected Sun to use something a little more compatible, like the ATI Rage or SiS graphics chips.
Software installed
To test database performance, I installed Progress OpenEdge version 10.B — this is what we use in production. One of Progress’s requirements is a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so I installed the sun-jre-bin package from Gentoo’s Portage software distribution system, which consisted of Sun’s binary Java package (version 1.4.2_07) compiled for 32-bit.
In addition to Java, I needed a few more packages to complete the software stack required for production:
Samba
MySQL
Apache 2
Java Runtime Environment 1.4.2_07
Progress OpenEdge 10.0B for Linux
WebSpeed
I spent about three hours installing software and preparing the server for production. Normally I expect to spend a lot more time compiling and configuring everything.
Processing speed on this system strikes me as above entry-level. I’m not sure why Sun chose to market this machine as an entry-level server except for the fact that it doesn’t use the more expensive UltraSPARC CPUs. With 8GB of system RAM, I found the system to be more than adequate for anything I could think about using it for at my company. The only performance bottleneck I found was the disk drives — they weren’t fast enough to keep up with the rest of the system. As shipped, this system came with two 73GB SCSI Ultra-320 10,000RPM drives. Sun offers an optional 15,000 RPM drive, which probably would have improved disk I/O performance for my database.
Our current database server is a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC, which has two Intel Xeon 2.4GHz processors, 2GB of RAM, and six Ultra-160 10,000RPM drives in three mirrored containers, running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. With Progress version 9.1D running on this system, we get at best 145,000 logical reads per second, and can service no more than four local connections before the processors are completely used. This is an acceptable speed, but the system still requires several hours to run some reports. With the Sun Fire V40z server running Gentoo Linux (x86) on a 2.6.11-gentoo-r5 kernel, I saw considerably higher throughput with less load on the system. The system was able to achieve 300,000 logical reads per second while supporting 11 clients.
Next, I ran an accounting report on the V40z that deals heavily with reads from the database, with a number of calculations performed on each record in the database. I ran the report as a single user, as well as four simultaneous users. Progress is not threaded, and I wanted to see if I would see any slowdown using all four chips at the same time. The report takes between 1,000 and 1,200 seconds on the Dell system; it took only 330 to 350 seconds on the Sun machine. Running the reports four at a time took an average of about 4,300 seconds on the Dell, and 1,500 to 1,600 on the Sun. In both tests, the V40z took only about a third as much time as the Dell.
Conclusions
There’s a lot to like about the Sun Fire V40z. It is fast and well-engineered, with good expansion capabilities and nearly all redundant components; the power supplies are hot-swappable, for instance, as are the disk drives. The chassis is well-designed and attractive, and the handles on the side of the case make it easy to move. An onboard remote management subsystem gives an administrator the power to work with the system even when it is powered off.
There were some things I didn’t like about it, but none of them were deal-breakers. The system is louder than the rest of my rack combined, and produces a great deal of heat. It’s also heavy, and required two people to place it on a workbench. It’s a bit light on drive bays — five, or six if you remove the CD-ROM — which prevents the Sun Fire V40z from being used effectively as a high-volume file server. That is characteristic of servers of this size, so I don’t see that as being a failure. The most disturbing drawback was the graphics chip. Granted, servers generally don’t need good graphics, but frame buffer and X11 support are nice to have, especially if you’re managing the server locally.
Before this review I had never worked with a system with this high a level of processor performance. I was impressed by the speed of the four Opteron 850 processors (Sun now offers the new Opteron 852 in this machine, which is dual-core ready), and by the quality of the components in the system. In any server, quality and reliability translate directly to uptime, which is important to any business.
Overall I enjoyed working with this system. It exceeded my expectations, even though they were high from the beginning. I think this system would do well as a high-volume Web, database, or email server, or almost anything else you might want to use it for.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Commentary: In the 8 years I’ve worked in IT, I’ve probably called tech support more than 50 times. That doesn’t seem like such a large number considering the timespan, but the primary reason for the low number of support calls compared with the number of mysterious problems I’ve had is because phone support is a joke. After a while I gave up asking for help and just turned to Google and reliable message forums for assistance. My experiences with “corporate” support have been just as fruitless. Staffing phone centers with script-readers seems to be a big, billowing cloud of smoke blown at me from the companies that I buy hardware and software from. Do we really need to continue this charade? There are better methods of end-user support than this.
You need support… or do you?
No corporation should buy software or hardware that its IT staff does not know how to set up, use, maintain, and fix. If they don’t know how, send them to training seminars to learn. If your business is relying on the manufacturer’s “support” over the phone, unless you’re paying big bucks for top-tier support, you’re in for a surprise when something goes wrong.
When I attended the Solaris 10 launch last fall, one of the questions I posed to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy was to compare Solaris 10 with anything but Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Bashing Red Hat seemed to be a significant focus for him, despite the fact that the GNU/Linux world is bigger than Red Hat. How does Solaris stand up to other commercial distributions like SUSE and Mandriva, which have features similar to Solaris 10’s?
That question didn’t parse for him. Ignoring what I’d asked, he launched into a diatribe about how Red Hat will not support Debian and other community-developed GNU/Linux distributions. The impression I got from him was, the universe would grind to a halt if production operating systems do not have corporate support from big software companies.
I wanted to stand up and tell him how much of a disaster the “support” is for Java Desktop System 2, but I was there to report, not to reform the world of tech support. JDS2 support really was that bad. The installer would not partition my hard drive, so I called the standard tech support phone number. The line was answered by a voice mail system, recorded by someone with a too-thick UK accent asking me to leave a message. Someone would get back to me shortly, I was assured. Someone did get back to me within a half hour — someone whose first language was not English. We had so much trouble understanding each other that the length of the call was more than doubled due to communication issues. Eventually I was told that I had to file a support request through Sun’s Web site before anyone could help me. When, a few days later, I received an answer to my online support request, the support technician didn’t know how to fix the problem — he’d never heard of it. The best he could do was tell me that my hardware was probably unsupported. He gave me The Mantra. Eventually I got JDS2 working on an old Dell laptop system which, astonishingly, was also not supported.
Good thing I don’t have a business that depends on Java Desktop System 2. Not that I would have ever bought it, considering how lean the hardware compatibility list apparently is. Is this what I can expect from Sun Microsystems for operating system support, Mr. McNealy? Why is this so much better than whatever Red Hat does? Why is this so much better than community-staffed mailing lists and message forums?
We don’t support that
The above-linked Salon article is no joke; it is the reality of tech support. If they can’t fix it by reformatting the drive and reinstalling Windows or by reading the manual to you, then they search for something unsupported in your computer that they can blame it on.
When you call the standard tech support number, you’re not getting an expert on the phone. You’re getting someone who has a precompiled list of problems and solutions, and if your problem isn’t in the list, they usually can’t help you. If you’re lucky they will transfer you to someone who knows more, but first you’ll have to face trial by fire. They have a lot of tricks to get you off the phone, but the most common one is finding some element of the equation that involves something “unsupported,” regardless of its relation to the problem you’re calling about.
Heaven forbid you should use an operating system other than Windows, or occasionally OS X. The other day I called Comcast tech support because my Internet connection kept going out. The support technician first insisted that Comcast’s network was operating normally and that the problem was likely on my end. “Go ahead and click on the Start button for me,” she began.
I’ve been down this road before. If I tell them that I’m using GNU/Linux, I’ll get the standard “I’m sorry, but we don’t support… whatever it is that you said you’re using.” And that’s the end of the call. So now I play along and tell them that I’m clicking on Start, uh-huh, click on Properties, select this and that, restart my computer and… nope, still not working!
“Are you using a router?” the technician asked. I’m wise to this trick, too. If I say yes, the problem will be blamed on the router and not on the connection. It doesn’t matter that I have tried another router, or that I have tried connecting the cable modem directly to the computer. If I say I have a router, I will be informed of Comcast’s lack of support for it. So no, I do not have a router as far as they know.
“Hold one moment please,” said the technician. A few minutes later she came back on the line and told me that Comcast had been having trouble with their DNS servers over the past few days, and that it should be cleared up shortly.
The exceptions
The best tech support I have ever seen came from two distinctly different sources. The first was when I was installing a small network for a veterinary office. They were using some kind of proprietary invoicing and customer management software specially made for equine veterinarians. It used MSSQL for its database, and that had to be on a dedicated server along with some other files that determined licensing rights. I had never seen the program before, and there was no paper manual or support Web site to get installation instructions from. With all of my usual trick responses in mind, I called the tech support line and had to leave a message. I was called back within twenty minutes. The man on the other end of the phone was a one-man support machine. He knew every problem, every bug and glitch, every workaround, and had seen it all. He raced me through setting up the database server and connecting the client software to it. It was the best commercial support experience of my life. The company — the name of which I do not remember — was small enough that I could have been speaking directly with one of the developers. The entire company may have even been a one-man operation.
The other case of outstanding support? The Gentoo Linux forums. Every problem I have, no matter how technical and complicated, has been addressed there. In nearly every case it is a known issue and by the time I experience it, someone has already posted a procedure to fix it. I run a production server and my home office workstation on Gentoo Linux, and I honestly don’t think I could buy better support from any company.
I’m not sure how much the veterinarian paid for that proprietary software, but I’m guessing it was in the tens of thousands of dollars. I suppose when you pay that much, you’re entitled to competent support. Ironically, I paid nothing for Gentoo Linux and also get world-class support. It’s not a matter of “you get what you pay for,” it’s a matter of a company or project’s dedication to their customers or users. Call centers are focused on getting the user off the phone; Gentoo’s forums are focused on solving the problem. The forum participants are not being paid — they’re helping the community because it’s fun and challenging to solve problems.
When big companies pay lots of extra money for support, they usually also expect more than just experts on the other end of the phone. They may expect their well-paid vendor to listen to them when it’s time to develop the next version, and to fix software bugs in a timely manner (or upon request). I’ve heard rumors to the effect that Microsoft makes custom patches for Office and Windows for big-ticket customers. Again, without paying lots of money, it’s far easier to get the software you need by choosing an open source project over a proprietary commercial product. If you need a change made, a feature added, or a bug fixed, you can contract a programmer to do it for you. You can offer a bounty on that job. You can even hire a full-time developer to maintain your own personal version of that program.
Let’s call a truce
I don’t expect commercial tech support to improve; I expect it to get worse. Someday I believe we will be talking to voice menus entirely, with no option to speak with a support representative. Executives like Scott McNealy, who have never had to deal with phone support in their entire lives, will still claim that this pitiful support offering provides an advantage over open source alternatives. The reality of the matter is that I got better support from the same community-developed distributions that Sun’s CEO was scoffing at, yet I was left stranded by his own $100 per year GNU/Linux distribution and the big multibillion-dollar corporation that was supposed to stand behind it.
How much money would I have to have spent as a customer to be treated like my sale meant something? Would I have to have a business with 15 computers? 50? 1000? At what point is it cost-effective for vendors to take my support request seriously? Not that I’m going to pay it — I’m just curious.
Maybe it would be better to end the charade of end-user support. We users know you’re faking it, you corporations know you’re faking it, so let’s just try to help each other. Instead of investing money in an overseas call center, put up a Web site with forums, ask your developers to peruse them now and then, and hire some moderators to make sure everyone plays nice. Put that support Web address everywhere — in the documentation, on your main Web site, in press releases, everything. Users will get better support, the vendors will save money, and we can go back to using our computers instead of cursing at them. Learn from open source projects like Gentoo — give your user community a place to help one another, foster a positive environment for communication, and watch the magic of great tech support take care of your customer service troubles.
If the bad tech support continues, The Mantra will still be “we don’t support that,” but it will not be the vendors who are saying it.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
With last month’s release of VMware Workstation 5, the virtual machine software is better than ever. VMware Workstation now has 64-bit host support, the ability to capture multiple snapshots for each virtual machine, easier sharing of virtual machines, and the ability to connect multiple virtual machines in a “team” setting. Perhaps most importantly, GNU/Linux support is improved in version 5.
VMware is a framework that allows multiple operating systems to install and run inside of another one. There are a variety of different VMware products and tools designed for specialized uses, but the Workstation product is the core technology. VMware Workstation supports Windows and GNU/Linux host operating systems, and a somewhat larger number of guest OSes. You must choose which host version you want, and if you want both, you have to pay two license fees. There is some loss in performance in comparison to a native operating system installation, and users must dedicate resources to each OS instance while it is running. Extensive use of VMware can cause your hard drive’s free space to quickly diminish, as you need to create and assign a virtual partition for each guest OS.
One valuable feature that has been present in VMware for the past several versions is the ability to take a “snapshot” of a working guest operating system. This allows you to save an entire OS configuration, making it easier to “reinstall” an operating system if you need to.
What’s new in 5.0
VMware 5.0 mainly introduces collaboration features that make it easier to share common configurations with co-workers. GNU/Linux support has also been enhanced, and there is preliminary support for Solaris x86 and more recent builds of Microsoft Windows “Longhorn” beta. Here is a breakdown of the major improvements to VMware:
Multiple snapshots
Cloning
Teams
64-bit host support
Previously you could only take one snapshot per guest OS. Version 5.0 eliminates this limitation. Multiple snapshots are useful for testing an operating system in multiple states; for instance, you could save snapshots of Windows XP with SP1, SP2, and with experimental patches applied.
The cloning feature allows you to do two things: access shared virtual machines on a shared drive, so that multiple clients can access them; and make a complete local copy of that VM if you need to make special modifications to it. The virtual machine file size has been greatly reduced in Workstation 5.0, which frees up network bandwidth and hard drive space. That makes sharing VMs less costly in terms of system resources, hardware and infrastructure requirements, and time.
VMware’s teams feature allows you to connect multiple VMs into one environment. It’s like being a sysadmin of a virtual network or lab, allocating bandwidth and resources for each team VM, and having the ability to power them on and off and make any other necessary changes. You get a common control interface for each team to more easily manage them.
VMware’s proprietary Linux kernel modules are now 64-bit clean, and support RHEL 3 and 4, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 7, 8, and 9. Windows XP and 2003 for 64-bit systems are also supported experimentally.
VMware in production
Many GNU/Linux users fantasize about using VMware as an alternative to dual-booting with GNU/Linux and Windows. There are always those one or two programs that don’t work through CrossOver Office, but are indispensable to some people. While it is more than capable of providing a perfect Windows environment in GNU/Linux, VMware’s primary use is as a tool for programmers and software testers.
Cliff Thornton, quality control manager of Cognos Solution Interoperability, relies on VMware to provide greater efficiency for his team. He needs to have a clean, quick environment, and does not want testers doing anything but testing — no operating system installation and configuration, if at all possible. VMware Workstation 5.0 allows him to eliminate time-consuming reinstalls and problems due to old installations.
“We set up installs of our products so others can utilize those installs on our lab machines. Our documentation writers, product managers, and developers do not have the time or resources to set up the installs, so we do it for them, as this allows them to go through the work they need to perform.”
The hardware that Thornton uses to populate his testing environment are Hewlett-Packard xw8200 workstations. Each has two Intel Xeon 3.4GHz CPUs with 5GB RAM and 15,000RPM SCSI drives. They’re also using laptop systems, but have found the IDE laptop hard drives to be too slow for large virtual machine images. Although the Xeon processors in the HP workstations are 64-bit capable, Thornton does not yet use 64-bit host operating systems.
Cognos has between 30 and 40 machines running VMware Workstation 5.0 right now, all running on Windows. Why not use GNU/Linux as a host? Thornton says the Cognos IT department does not have the ability to support it.
What about other virtual machines and emulators? “We tried Microsoft’s virtual machine, but it did not meet our expectations. It had a completely different emulation system.” VMware Workstation’s features allow for a perfectly emulated environment. “If it weren’t for VMware, we’d have to use separate machines.”
Installation, licensing, and pricing
The last time I reviewed VMware Workstation, I reviewed it from the Windows perspective, running GNU/Linux and FreeBSD clients. This time I tested mainly on GNU/Linux, with a focus on running Windows clients.
The main difference between installing VMware Workstation on both platforms is the kernel requirements. With Windows, VMware installs like any other program — click OK a few times and you’re done. A GNU/Linux host machine requires more technical knowledge and a compatible kernel. Instead of being able to use a fancy installation shell, you install the entire program via a Perl script. You need to check about a dozen specific structural requirements beforehand, mostly in the organization of the /etc directory, the location of the kernel headers, and the layout of the startup scripts.
I first tried installing VMware Workstation 5.0 on Gentoo Linux for AMD64, just to see how difficult it would be to install it on an unsupported distribution. Since the way Gentoo organizes its /etc directory and init scripts is drastically different from the officially supported GNU/Linux distros, I’d have to have created several rc directories and possibly some other files. I wasn’t willing to mess with my workstation that much to get VMware to work. In the past I’ve had VMware 4.5 working on similar machines with Gentoo, so I know it can be done with the right amount of tweaking. I suspect other unsupported GNU/Linux distributions could be made to work with a similar amount of effort.
Fedora Core is not officially supported by VMware, but since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4 are both supported, I hoped Fedora Core 3 would work. It installed and ran perfectly, although the installation utility had to compile a kernel module — the precompiled modules would not work with my updated kernel.
Officially supported guest operating systems worked very well — even better than they do natively, because they’re guaranteed to have the proper drivers for your hardware. As for unsupported guest OSes, I didn’t have much luck with OpenBSD 3.6. It got partway through the OpenBSD installation routine, then failed trying to initialize the OpenBSD partitions.
Once a guest OS is installed, you have to install the VMware Tools to achieve optimal network and video performance. I tried this with Windows XP as a guest OS, and it added better video resolution and color depth to the display. When running in full-screen mode, users can’t tell the difference between a native Windows installation and a virtualized Windows installation through VMware.
Guest OS support is excellent in some ways, sub-par in others. Windows, for instance, has full or experimental support from version 3.1 up to recent Longhorn builds and all stops in between. GNU/Linux, on the other hand, has distribution-specific support only for various versions of Red Hat, SUSE, Sun Java Desktop System, and Mandrakelinux. Some versions of Novell Netware, MS-DOS, FreeBSD, and Sun Solaris are also supported.
In my testing, VMware worked as expected. Install a guest operating system just as you would natively, install VMware Tools when that is complete, and you’re left with a fully functional, native-compatible, networkable virtual operating system. On fast 64-bit systems with RAM and hard drive space to spare, the slight performance loss in the virtual environment is hardly noticeable.
Click to enlarge
VMware’s license is proprietary and restrictive in all the usual ways, but I was surprised to see that the VMware lawyers actually named every open source program that is used in or included with their product. Individual licenses cost $190 apiece. If you already have VMware Workstation 3.x or 4.x, you qualify for an upgrade license at $100, although after June 30 you will no longer be able to upgrade from 3.x. If you bought VMware Workstation after December 16, you qualify for a free upgrade to version 5.0.
Conclusions
VMware Workstation is supposed to be for software developers and testers and support personnel. It’s also useful as a tool for system administrators. Instead of having discrete test servers, you can have an exact copy of your production servers in VMware and experiment all you want without harming the production environment. If you’re running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 as a file server, you could install VMware on it, install RHEL 3 as a virtual machine, then go crazy with experimental changes and see how the virtual test server reacts. If you create a snapshot of the virtual server as it is in production, you can “roll back” your changes to the original state — no matter how much damage they might have done — in a matter of minutes.
VMware is probably too expensive for non-commercial users, but Workstation 5.0 is just as valid for home use as it is for software testing. If you hate dual-booting, it’s going to cost you $190 to get the closest thing to it.
Using VMware Workstation as a testing environment has more advantages than just snapshots, teams, and cloning. With a virtualized operating system, you no longer have to go on an hours-long expedition for the proper hardware drivers for newer computers. Once the guest OS is installed, all it lacks is patches and updates since its release.
Should you upgrade if you’re a current 3.x or 4.x user? If you’re happy with the way VMware currently operates, there isn’t much of a need to buy the upgrade, unless you’re on 3.x and are worried that you might need the new features someday. The newest version offers are no revolutionary changes.
Purpose
Virtual machine
Manufacturer
EMC, Inc.
Architectures
x86, AMD64/EM64T
License
Proprietary, restrictive
Market
Support centers, multi-platform software developers
Price (retail)
$190 for the download edition (Windows or GNU/Linux), and $200 for the boxed edition
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
A few months ago I moved from New York to Florida, leaving behind all of the friends and family that depended on me for computer support. At least once per month I used to get a phone call asking me to go to someone’s house and reinstall Windows or fix some other software problem. Rarely was there an actual hardware problem — usually all I had to do was back up some personal data and reinstall Windows. But it’s impossible to do that remotely, and I had no desire to spend hours on the phone after I moved walking people through driver downloads and various other tasks related to setting up a Microsoft operating system. So, two weeks before I left, I moved several of my accidental “clients” to GNU/Linux and helped them make the transition. The result, after six months, is an end to the annoying phone calls and a much easier time diagnosing hardware problems.
Hardware is easy to diagnose; you observe the system, figure out what isn’t working, and replace the defective component. Occasionally you run into a problem that isn’t what it seems, or you can’t tell what’s wrong just by looking at it. In these instances it helps to have some spare parts around to try.
The real challenge comes into play when you bring Microsoft Windows into the equation. Contrary to popular opinion, untrained, inexperienced users cannot manage Windows by themselves. It takes a knowledgeable, skilled user to keep a Windows system properly maintained. That means applying updates and patches, setting up a firewall, using a virus scanner (or simply knowing what is and is not a suspicious email), and defragmenting the disk every month or so. Unfortunately, the kind of people who need my help do not know how to do this, even for all the times I’ve shown them. They are not stupid people, but many are older and grew up in a time when their friends would not send them messages that could harm them. They understand mechanical maintenance, but don’t quite comprehend the fact that computers require electronic maintenance. Some don’t care about system maintenance at all; they are content to pay someone else to fix it when it breaks, rather than properly care for their software. In short, they need an operating system that, for all their trying, they cannot screw up. Windows isn’t it.
Windows fails in ways that totally confound my hardware troubleshooting abilities. A “blue screen of death” or STOP error can mean that a BIOS setting is incorrect, a memory stick has failed, the motherboard is dying, the power supply is starting to flake out, or that the hard drive has bad sectors. It can also mean that the Windows registry has been corrupted by spyware or viruses, a third-party program has caused a bad crash, or Windows Update has mis-applied a security patch or driver update. Where do you begin when there are so many possibilities? The professional technicians I’ve spoken with recently tend to start with the operating system, and rather than try to diagnose which part of the software has failed, the usual recommendation is to erase the hard drive and reinstall Windows, then work from there. And, not surprisingly, this solution often works.
To me, completely destroying a software installation is a bad solution. It’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But it is often the solution that takes the least time and has the best long-term success, even if it takes the most know-how to accomplish. That’s why they pay me to do it. But being more than a thousand miles away, I can no longer do these things for family and friends, and I don’t know any other technicians that I can trust. The final solution — the one that I don’t have to worry about anymore — is GNU/Linux.
Yes, mom can use Linux
GNU/Linux does not pose the kinds of problems that Windows does. There is no registry to easily corrupt, and the operating system does not fail in generic, catch-all ways. The user has no power to alter the system software, so important files are not accidentally deleted, and potential viruses and spyware programs have no ability to wreck the system.
The test case was my mother, a Windows user since the Windows 95 days. I built her a new computer and installed Fedora Core 2 on it, then added support for Flash, Java, PDF, Windows Media, and hardware 3D acceleration through ATI’s proprietary driver. She needed Microsoft Office for her job, so I bought her a CrossOver Office license and installed her copy of Office XP. I moved her off America Online (which does not have a GNU/Linux edition and won’t run through CrossOver) and onto Frontier DSL for Internet service.
Other than a few questions about which programs to use for what tasks, she had no trouble adjusting to Fedora Core. Everything worked perfectly. The biggest problem I had was finding a USB scanner that I was certain would work well with Fedora Core — and that’s not a very big problem, thanks to the SANE Web site.
Next was my father, who had two computers: one for working from home, and a laptop system for working on the road. The desktop system got Fedora Core 2 with the same setup that my mother had, except he needed VMware instead of CrossOver Office — his company has an old proprietary software application that won’t run through CrossOver. He chose to leave the laptop system with Windows XP for the time being.
The setup
I chose Fedora Core 2 because at the time it was the most recent version of Fedora Core. I’d tested it and knew it worked well. It was easy to add to it the extra programs and functionality I needed. In fact, at the time, Fedora Core worked better as a desktop OS than any of the expensive commercial GNU/Linux distributions that I’d used.
To create your own “perfect desktop” using Fedora Core — one your mother can use — follow these steps. Most of this information was taken from the Fedora FAQ, an excellent resource for Fedora Core tips and tricks.
Before you begin, give your friend a day or two to think about what information he wants to save from the old Windows system — browser bookmarks, documents, photos, email messages, etc. Back up the data before you begin. If you can still get to Windows, import the email into Thunderbird and save the Thunderbird profile to a CD.
When you’re ready, install Fedora Core 3 as you usually would. Choose the customizable option for software package groups and choose the ones you know your user will need. There’s no harm in selecting too much, but it can make updating take longer and your user could be confused by extra menu entries.
During disk partitioning, use a separate partition for the home directory; this makes it easier to locate and back up data, and easier to switch or upgrade the distribution later. If you’re planning on using VMware, remember to make the home directory large enough to accommodate a full Windows environment plus programs.
You’ll have to explain to the user about root permissions and when they are necessary. The only time they should ever need their root password is when updating. If your user is particularly computer-illiterate, you can make the root password the same as his user password to make it easier for him to remember, or have him write it down someplace safe — this is someone’s home, after all, not a corporation with sensitive data.
After installation, run up2date and get the system patched and updated. Next, you’ll need to replace your /etc/yum.conf file with this one from the Unofficial Fedora FAQ. Then run the following commands from a root terminal to add the usual browser plug-ins:
Next, set up an email client for your user's email accounts. If he previously used Outlook, set him up on Evolution. If he was on Outlook Express, have him try both Thunderbird and KMail and see which one he prefers. If you had to use Thunderbird to backup his email from Windows, it might be best to stick with that. Transfer all of his personal data and browser bookmarks from Windows, and show him how to access his old files.
I like to create desktop icons that make it more obvious what the most important programs do. I made a desktop icon for K3b called "CD writing," for instance, and an XMMS icon for "Music player," among others.
Down the road
More than six months have passed since I switched over my New York "customers," and in that time I've received three calls for computer help. Two were from my father, needing help with his Windows laptop -- software problems again, and this time they happened in the field when he really needed his computer. The other was from my mother. She was having a lot of odd problems with the computer, including slower performance, missing files, and program errors. "Sounds like a bad hard drive," I said, knowing that some strange program or OS glitch couldn't cause all of those problems. So she sent me the computer, I replaced the hard drive and managed to save her data from the old one. The entire repair took about as long as it would have to reinstall Windows, except all of her program settings, preferences, and data were untouched. I didn't have to go on a hardware driver expedition, either -- everything was natively supported in Fedora Core.
Yes, they're all still using GNU/Linux. It's what they imagined computing would be in the first place -- no hassles, no threats, no worries. It's like a dream come true, not just for them, but for me too -- no more troubleshooting nightmares and monthly service calls.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Last month CodeWeavers Inc. released version 4.2 of its WINE-based Windows binary compatibility application, three months after the previous release. If you’ve used CrossOver Office in the past, you won’t see much different with the new version. Most of its enhancements and updates are internal, adding better support for more applications and some bug fixes in the installer and menu creation utility.
While the original release allowed Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes to run on GNU/Linux, CrossOver Office now supports many more programs. There are varying degrees of functionality for many of them — some flawless, some usable, some barely able to be installed. Check out the compatibility list, and keep in mind that not all of these programs have been updated to reflect changes made in version 4.2, as most entries rely on user and volunteer feedback for CodeWeavers’ rating system.
In 4.2 CodeWeavers specifically concentrated on Thomson EndNote 8, Intuit Quicken 2005, and Apple iTunes 4.70. It also added bug fixes to enhance compatibility with Microsoft Excel, Outlook, NetMeeting, IBM Lotus Notes, Apple QuickTime, and others.
Several bugs were also fixed in the CrossOver Office utilities that create menus. Many of these problems were specific to GNOME and certain distributions that change the way users modify menus.
Putting 4.2 to the test
One of the Windows programs I miss in Linux is Corel WordPerfect 12. In previous encounters with CrossOver Office I was unable to get WordPerfect to install or work reasonably well. CrossOver Office 4.2 not only installed WordPerfect Office, but WordPerfect 12 worked almost perfectly. The only tweak I had to make, as documented here, was to disable the “enhanced menu” option within WordPerfect. In 15 minutes of opening large (130,000+ words) documents and navigating the menus trying to make it crash, I didn’t discover any problems with WordPerfect at all. I could only run WordPerfect once per session. In other words, I couldn’t start WP12 more than once without restarting the X server, even if I tried using the CrossOver tools to simulate a Windows reboot or reset the software.
Click to enlarge
The usual Microsoft Office XP programs worked as well as I remember them working in the past, which is to say that I found no problems with them.
I tested CrossOver Office 4.2 on two Linux distributions: 32-bit Fedora Core 3, and 64-bit Gentoo (neither Gentoo Linux nor 64-bit GNU/Linux in general is officially supported by CodeWeavers). Everything worked perfectly on FC3, but with Gentoo I had trouble getting CrossOver to add menu items to the GNOME 2.6 menu structure. I fixed part of the problem by deleting the ~/.gnome2/vfolders directory, which erased the two custom menu entries I had. That gave me the CrossOver tools in a menu folder called “Other,” but it would not add individual Windows applications. When I tried to manually add the menus from the command line by running ~/cxoffice/bin/create_icon --crossover, I noticed several errors relating to the XML:DOM and XML:Parser Perl extensions. Re-emerging them did not change anything. I tried re-emerging Perl with threading support (as this is a dual processor system), but that didn’t seem to make any difference either. KDE menus in KDE 3.3 were added without any trouble.
Versions
CrossOver Office is available in two editions: Standard and Professional. The two are essentially the same, except Professional has multi-user support and special deployability functions. Professional is designed for businesses, Standard for home users. There is also a CrossOver Office Server Edition, which allows CrossOver Office to run on thin clients.
Rights vs. tools redux
CrossOver Office is the kind of software product that, as a GNU/Linux user, I hope to never need to use. It’s a proprietary software application that allows proprietary Windows software to work on GNU/Linux. Rights-wise, it’s a double curse. On the other hand, it just may be the tool that you need to switch over your friends and family to GNU/Linux.
Virtual machines a la VMWare and Win4Lin are usually more expensive than CrossOver Office and require a Windows license to run a Windows virtual machine. That can put your operating system costs at $200 or more. CrossOver Office is cheaper and doesn’t require a Windows license, but it’s more limited in what it can do. With a virtual machine, you can run any Windows program without any trouble, although system performance may not be as good as a native Windows installation. With CrossOver Office, you’re limited to the programs that it currently supports — certainly not every Windows program under the sun, but most of the important ones do work to some degree.
CrossOver Office could also become more limited in the future despite its growing software compatibility list. What if Microsoft and other proprietary companies decided to amend their license agreements to be platform- or operating system-specific? It would violate the license agreement to run the program through CrossOver Office — or WINE, or any other API emulator — on GNU/Linux, Solaris, *BSD, or other OSes.
The future of CrossOver Office
I spoke to CodeWeavers COO Jon Parshall and asked him what we can expect in the next version of CrossOver Office, 5.0, due this summer.
“Our next release will include support for Microsoft Office 2003, as well as newer versions of Visio, QuickBooks, and Quicken. Other applications are determined by pledges,” he said, referring to the pledge system integrated into the CodeWeavers site. This system allows users to pledge money or any number of CrossOver Office licenses to influence CodeWeavers to work harder on improving support for a specific application.
I asked Parshall if those pledges usually come through when the pledged application becomes supported. “We have mixed results with pledges. Some have been honored, but we typically do not recover all of the money pledged — not by a long shot. But it helps us determine market demand.”
Most potential customers will probably find themselves in the same boat I’m in: there are a few Windows programs that you’d like to have, but not all of them work properly with CrossOver Office yet. The product’s license agreement allows CrossOver Office customers to get free upgrades for six months. Looking back at the frequency of CrossOver Office releases, this could mean two or three free upgrades before another license must be purchased. Having a few free upgrades gives us hope that the programs we want will soon be supported — or at least work well enough to use.
Conclusions
CrossOver Office is an important program; it can make or break a decision to switch to GNU/Linux. While the software’s WINE core is available for free and licensed under the GNU General Public License, it requires a significant amount of tweaking to get it to work properly. WINE also does not yet have the capability of adding menu items for newly installed Windows programs, nor does it have the other utilities that CrossOver Office has. WINE may be fine for experienced GNU/Linux gurus, but it is all but useless to less technical people. That’s where CrossOver Office comes in, and it fills that niche nicely.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
It has been 14 years since the first 64-bit processor — the MIPS R4000 — found its way into a workstation. 64-bit workstations once cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, but the introduction of high-performance, low-cost 64-bit CPUs from AMD and Intel has changed the industry’s attitude toward workstation design. New architectures are forcing old hardware into obsolescence, but free software can extend those old systems’ useful life.
The first of the recent generation of 64-bit processors debuted when Intel introduced the Itanium (which has since gone out of production) in June 2001. It followed up a year later with the Itanium 2, which fixed most of the problems that the original Itanium had, and has gone through many revisions since then. Both use Intel’s IA64 instruction set architecture. Since IA64 was not based on the IA32 (x86) ISA, the new instruction set would enable Intel to maintain control over it — competitors such as AMD would not be able to use it without a license.
While the Itanium was a great idea, it was poorly implemented — comparably clocked x86 processors of the era performed as well as or better than the Itanium. The Itanium 2, however, still dominates SPEC’s list of most efficient processors.
AMD introduced its AMD64 architecture in September 2003. Processors thus far include the Athlon 64 for desktop systems; the Athlon 64 FX on the high end of the single-CPU market; and the Opteron for high-end workstations and servers. All of them can run 32-bit and 64-bit binaries at the same time with no significant loss in performance.
Intel rushed to match AMD’s success with the AMD64-compatible EM64T architecture, which is currently being sold in the newer Pentium 4 processors; the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition for single-CPU performance enthusiasts; and the Xeon and Xeon MP processors for high-end workstations and servers. The Itanium was originally expected to replace the first-generation Xeons, but poor market acceptance and substandard performance of the Itanium kept Xeon alive. The Xeon is Intel’s flagship workstation and server processor, with the Itanium 2 being its high-end server offering.
Both the AMD and Intel 64-bit processors (with the exception of the Itanium 2, which is designed to be integrated into systems sold by OEMs like SGI and Hewlett-Packard) are sold individually to consumers at affordable prices. You can buy an AMD64 or EM64T processor, a supported motherboard, and the rest of the components for a workstation and build it yourself inexpensively in comparison to other 64-bit architectures. The rest of the CPUs in this section are only available as part of complete integrated computer systems.
IBM’s 64-bit POWER architecture is best known as the basis for the PowerPC processors at the heart of Apple’s G5 workstations. IBM has its own implementation of the POWER instruction set, found in its IntelliStation POWER series of high-end workstations. POWER-based processors of various kinds are found in a wide variety of electronic devices outside of the personal computer market.
Sun Microsystems’ SPARC architecture started out as 32-bit, and in that form it is sometimes referred to as SPARC32. In 1995 Sun introduced the UltraSPARC 64-bit processor, with the architecture usually referred to as SPARC64. The design has been licensed by other manufacturers such as Fujitsu, but Sun still dominates the UltraSPARC workstation world.
SGI bought MIPS, the developer of the first 64-bit workstation processor, in 1992. As a workstation microprocessor, MIPS CPUs are primarily sold in SGI machines, although SGI licenses the design to a variety of other manufacturers. SGI has long been considering switching its workstations from MIPS to Itanium 2. The Intel 64-bit processor performs better and has the backing of the world’s largest chip maker.
Other 64-bit architectures are already dead, victims of a swiftly moving market. Digital Equipment Corp.’s Alpha was the fastest microprocessor in the world when it was released in 1992, and survived throughout the 1990s as DEC’s heavy-duty workstation CPU. Eventually Compaq acquired DEC, then HP acquired Compaq. HP finally announced the last of the Alpha processor line last August, and plans to replace Alpha-based systems with Itanium 2s, as it is replacing its own PA-RISC chips.
You might wonder how well-accepted each of these architectures is in the field. So did we, but we couldn’t find a market analyst who could tell us the percentage of currently installed workstations that use these 64-bit architectures.
Compatibility issues
Where other architectures struggle to achieve 32-bit and 64-bit binary compatibility without losing performance or inconveniencing developers and users, the perfect 32-bit binary compatibility of AMD64 and EM64T is a valuable advantage to businesses.
“From a development standpoint,” said Michael Dortch, principal business analyst with the Robert Frances Group, “Successful new architectures, 64-bit and otherwise, allow maximum leverage of current skills and resources, while requiring minimal investment in new skills and resources. This is especially true for internal enterprise developers, and for the more resource-constrained among commercial developers.”
Software availability, price, service, and quality of manufacture remain the most important considerations in the success of 64-bit systems, Dortch said. “Enterprises don’t buy chips, or computers, or even computing, per se. They buy solutions to business problems, and the solutions that offer the best applicability to those problems with the best reliability and performance at the best price will win. It’s up to the developers of 64-bit architectures to build around those technologies the ‘ecosystems’ of applications, partners, and support necessary to generate and promote such solutions. Otherwise, 64-bit architectures are just one more opportunity for geeks to talk with other geeks about geek stuff most business people neither understand nor care much about.”
Dortch also said it’s a telling sign that the volume leader in AMD Opteron-based server sales is Sun Microsystems, which used to rely solely on UltraSPARC processors for its high-end machines. “Other 64-bit architectures are largely perceived as being only marginally significant to enterprises, except within specific compute-intensive niches,” he said. Those compute-intensive niches these days are filled more and more by the Itanium 2. So since powerful, inexpensive 64-bit machines are starting to take over the workstation market, the older, much more expensive architectures can no longer compete in terms of price or performance.
The exception, for the time being, is the vertical scalability of SPARC64. For tasks for which more than 8 CPUs are needed in a single system, UltraSPARC scales more efficiently than the Opteron or Xeon, neither of which is designed for systems larger than 8-way.
Along with its advantages for vertical scalability, SPARC64 also has some architectural disadvantages. Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project, who has dealt with problems relating to binary compatibility on many platforms, says, “SPARC64 in complete 64-bit mode is running big-endian 64-bit. Big-endian and little-endian errors cause problems all the time, and so do 32-bit vs. 64-bit issues. But when you combine 64-bit and big-endian you end up with the most finicky programming architecture. This causes bugs for us, which we then fix, and since it is code shared between lots of architectures, all the code improves.”
One of the factors that affects the longevity of a hardware architecture is its software support. Free software tends to be ported to dead or dying architectures, giving them new life as well as freedom from old proprietary Unix variants. The NetBSD project is famous for its portability, fully supporting more than 50 hardware architectures. GNU/Linux is available on more than 20 different architectures, and OpenBSD on 16. All will run on SPARC32 and most SPARC64 systems, AMD64/EM64T, Alpha, PA-RISC, and various implementations of MIPS and PPC.
Free software operating systems make old 64-bit systems useful again. With the BSDs or GNU/Linux, you can achieve some level of desktop functionality, or make an old workstation into a small server. And you can often find amazingly inexpensive workstations on eBay to play with.
The future
In the end, all this talk of architectures and 64-bit design wars is purely academic. 64-bit architectures will come and go as the market dictates. Only the cheapest, most reliable, best supported, and most powerful players will remain in the game. Michael Dortch noted this point especially well:
“From a user (or non-IT executive) standpoint, the best 64-bit architectures are invisible — all users know and see are applications that run faster and are more available than they used to be. From an IT executive’s perspective, the most successful 64-bit architectures are similarly transparent. They ‘play well’ with incumbent 32-bit and other environments, delivering enhancements to availability, performance, or other operational characteristics as and when those translate into demonstrable business value with minimal disruption. In other words, ‘no fork lifts required.’”
Well, maybe you would need a forklift to get that pallet of old Alphastations out of storage so you can use GNU/Linux to cluster them into a new backup server. Someday maybe we won’t be so concerned with what is inside our computer so much as what software is running on it and what it enables us to do.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Whether you’re moving from Windows to GNU/Linux, or just from the proprietary Microsoft Office to the free software OpenOffice.org suite, one of the challenges you’ll face is learning how to use OpenOffice.org Writer effectively if you’re used to Microsoft Word. In this article I’ll show you around OpenOffice.org Writer, where to find familiar Word tools, and how to customize the interface and preferences to make it a little more Word-friendly.
First, don’t worry; you won’t have much trouble adjusting to OpenOffice.org Writer. The interface isn’t terribly different; the menu and toolbar layout are similar to Word’s. If you prefer a custom display you’ll be much happier with Writer, as it doesn’t have a lot of the annoying Word features that people often disable. If the first thing you do when you install Word XP is disable personalized menus and eliminate the superfluous and space-hogging task pane, you’ll find it easy and convenient to switch over to Writer.
If, on the other hand, you regularly use the task pane, you’re going to have to make some adjustments to work efficiently in Writer. While the task pane does not offer any unique functionality, it does make it more convenient to reach certain tools and commands.
Standard functions and features
The OpenOffice.org Writer menu bar titles are nearly identical to Word’s, with the one exception being Word’s Table menu. The major functions of Word’s Table menu are integrated into the Table dialogue in the Insert menu in Writer.
The button bars of the two products are also similar. One obvious difference is the Writer button bar field called Load URL, which lets you specify a file to open and shows the path and filename of the document you’re working on. It’s actually quite convenient if you have to load files remotely, but if you want your button bar to more closely resemble Microsoft Word, you’ll have to move it over a little. Right-click on an empty space in the OpenOffice.org Writer button bar and then click on Customize from the popup dialogue. You can then modify the button bar by clicking and dragging icons; you can drag an icon out of the button bar to make it go away, or you can drag a new icon from the Customize Toolbars command selection window onto the button bar to add another function, or you can simply rearrange the currently placed buttons. In this case you’ll probably want to click and drag the Load URL field over to the right side of the button bar. When you’re done, press the OK button in the Customize Toolbars window.
The document view, which is the window in which you edit documents, is not centered on the screen by default in Writer. To change this, go to the View menu, then click on Zoom. In the dialogue that follows, click on Page Width and click OK — your document is now zoomed in slightly and centered on the screen. You can experiment with different views and zoom levels until you find one that you prefer.
Word XP and 2000 have background spell-checking turned on by default. This function underlines misspelled words in red. OpenOffice.org Writer does not usually have this function turned on by default (default options may vary between versions and distributions). To turn it on, click on the ABC button — the one with the squiggly red line underneath it — on the button bar that runs vertically along the left side of the screen.
OpenOffice.org Writer does not have a grammar-checking module built in; that’s one Word function that you’ll have to live without for now.
Writer usually has the Autocomplete, Autocorrection, and Autoformat functions on by default. These functions complete words, correct various typos and replace special characters, and add indentation and other formatting while you type. If you don’t like any or all of these tools, go to the Tools menu, click on Autocorrect/Autoformat, and set the options to your preference.
You may see a separate window already up in OpenOffice.org Writer, on the right side of the screen. This is the Stylist, and it allows you to quickly change formatting styles. If you don’t know what those are or how to use them, you’ll probably want to close the Stylist window for now to get it out of your way. If you need it later, you can make it reappear by pressing F11 or by clicking on Stylist in the Format menu.
You probably want OpenOffice.org Writer to open your Word documents by default. When you install OpenOffice.org, the installation utility asks you if you want OpenOffice.org Writer to be associated with Word documents — choose yes for this option.
You can also force Writer to save all of its documents in Word format by default. There are advantages to saving in the OpenOffice.org file format, such as its basis in XML and its better interoperability with other open source word processors. However, if you’re primarily going to be exchanging documents with Word users, you’ll want to set the default file format to Microsoft’s, as Word is unable to read the OpenOffice.org file format. To do so, click on the Tools menu, then on Options. This brings up a window with several categories of customizable choices. Click on the + sign next to the Load/Save category to expand its option tree. Click on the General subcategory. On the right side of the Options window you’ll see a heading called Standard File Format. Click on the Always Save As field, then scroll up and select Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP, then click on the OK button.
The rest of the transition from Word to Writer is a matter of finding the same old options and tools in slightly different places in the menu.
Snags
Like Word, OpenOffice.org Writer is programmable through macros, but you can’t bring over your old macros from Word to Writer — they’ll have to be reprogrammed.
The dictionary in Writer is slightly less competent than its Word counterpart; you’ll have to customize it a little, but it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to add an unrecognized word to the custom dictionary.
Writer does not have the extensive watermarking features that Word does. If you need a watermark, you can insert a graphic from the Insert menu, then slect Watermark from the drop-down box in the upper left. Alternatively you can create a partially transparent graphic with a graphics program like the GIMP, then insert it as either a background or as an anchored graphic. To set it as the background, right-click on the white space in your document and click on Page. Select the Background tab, then select As Graphic from the dropdown menu. Choose your preferred orientation and then click OK. If you’d like to simply insert a graphic file, do so from the Insert menu. When you’ve positioned the graphic where you want it, left-click on it to select it, then right-click on it and choose the Wrap submenu. Select both the In Background and Wrap Through options.
OpenOffice.org Writer has a thesaurus built in, but it’s not as easy to get to as Word’s is. In Word, you right-click on a word in the document and a popup dialogue comes up with an option to show you synonyms. In Writer, you have to select a word, then click on Thesaurus in the Tools menu. Optionally you can add a Thesaurus button to your button bar by using the procedure outlined above for customizing the button bar.
Extras
If you need a tool to look up words in the dictionary like the one found in Word 2003, you can add a lookup window to your desktop environment. If you’re using GNOME, right-click on an empty space in either the top or the bottom panels, then click on Add to Panel. Select Dictionary Lookup from the proceeding dialogue, then click on the Add button. Position the new dictionary field to wherever you prefer it. If you’re using KDE, the procedure is similar: right-click on on an empty space in the KDE panel at the bottom of the screen, then click on Add in the popup dialogue. Choose Applet, and select Dictionary. You now have a handy tool for looking up words using Princeton University’s WordNet; ultimately you may find this far more convenient and useful than the dictionary feature built into Word.
Need to translate a word or phrase from one language to another? Word XP and 2003 have a very basic translation tool built in, but you can get to the excellent AltaVista Babel Fish translation tool on the Web just as easily, and it has support for many more languages.
Word and Writer have so many features that it’s impossible to cover each one in an article. As with any transition from one application to another, you have to spend time finding where each new function is and how to make things look and feel as they did in the old program, but we hope this article gives you a better starting point for switching from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice.org Writer.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Shortly after announcing the merger of Mandrakesoft and Conectiva into Mandriva, the newly combined company released a transitional “limited edition” GNU/Linux distribution to bridge the gap between the two parent distributions. Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 may look a little different, but it’s the same great Mandrakelinux desktop distribution that you’re used to.
Mandriva has changed more cosmetically in this version than Mandrakelinux has in the past several releases. While the Galaxy theme is still the default, there are new splash screens and graphical changes here and there that make you feel like you’re using a different — or at least newer — distribution.
Mandriva is, as Mandrake was, a user-friendly desktop distribution that focuses on providing the newest tested software available. Mandriva Linux presents a themed KDE-based desktop with intelligently designed, easy-to-navigate menus. Configuration tools such as HardDrake, DrakConf, and MenuDrake make desktop system administration simple.
The distribution recognizes external hardware and automatically configures it. Flash drives and removable media are automounted and given an icon on the desktop.
Mandriva installs by default hardware-accelerated 3D video drivers for Nvidia, ATI, and Intel-based graphics processors.
Proprietary software is kept to a minimum — just browser plug-ins and hardware drivers. The entire distribution is not governed by a restrictive proprietary license like most other commercial desktop operating systems. Mandriva is a much more freedom-friendly distribution than many of the alternatives.
Installation and software updates
If you install from the DVD, Mandriva allows you to store all of the software packages on your hard drive. This makes it easier to install new software packages from the distribution — you won’t need your DVD again unless you have to reinstall the operating system. Mandriva also offers a 6-CD edition of Mandriva Limited Edition 2005, as well as a “mini” CD, which downloads the required software packages over a broadband Internet connection.
Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 includes new versions of these major packages:
KDE 3.3.2
GNOME 2.8.3
Linux kernel 2.6.11.6
Firefox 1.0.2
The GIMP 2.2
OpenOffice.org 1.1.4
In addition, you’ll find K3b for CD and DVD writing, Screem and Bluefish for Web development, a recent build of WINE for running some Windows programs, RealPlayer for playing RealMedia files, X-Chat for IRC, GAIM for instant messaging, Grip for ripping CDs, BitTorrent for file downloads, Acrobat Reader for PDFs, Opera 7.54 and Mozilla Firefox 1.02 for the Web, and hundreds of other programs. Included with the Web browsers are plug-ins for Flash, PDF, RealPlayer, and Java.
The window managers included in the optional graphical environments package set are Blackbox, Window Maker, and IceWM.
Installation time was just over one hour with an older 7200RPM IDE hard drive, and about 40 minutes with a new Seagate SATA-V disk. System speed did not significantly impact installation time.
Improvements
One of the most convenient features of Mandriva Linux is the way it handles commercial DVD movies. Put an encrypted DVD into your DVD-ROM and the Kaffeine video player pops up a window that checks for the required libraries and codecs. If some are not found — Win32 and libdvdcss are not installed with the distribution because of legal issues in some countries — you’re told where to go to get them. Click the provided links, download the RPMs, install them using Mandriva’s software installer, and within five minutes you have DVD and Windows media file playback capabilities. Many distributions try to force you to buy proprietary DVD players or provide disabled versions of video players that can’t use the libdvdcss decryption library, making it inconvenient for the user to add this functionality.
The quick launch icons in Mandriva Linux have been changed to reflect a more developer-friendly selection of programs. KDevelop, XEmacs, and the KDE terminal program all have icons in this area, along with the Firefox browser, the Show Desktop button, and the DrakConf system configuration utility.
The DVD and CD writing utility, cdrecord, has been updated to allow writing to dual-layer DVD+R discs.
Click to enlarge
KDE seems a little faster in its rendering of menus and windows, and program execution also feels a little more speedy. Mandriva says this is due to adding the fvisibility GCC flag when compiling the KDE binaries.
The x86_64 and x86 editions both work equally well with no apparent difference in the software that is offered for both. A Mandriva representative says that the only major software application in the 64-bit edition that is still 32-bit is OpenOffice.org, which is not yet 64-bit clean.
Included by default in Mandriva is the ndiswrapper package, which allows Windows wireless networking drivers to work with the Linux kernel, thereby enabling support for otherwise unsupported wireless NICs.
What didn’t work
All of the foregoing is good, but not everything in the distribution works perfectly. Automounting of removable media and USB flash drives did not work upon first use. I had to remove and then re-insert the media or drive to get Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 to recognize them.
Mandriva claims support for “multimedia keyboards,” but none of the extra functions on my Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard were operational, nor did I discover a utility to activate them.
The installer choked on my VIA VT8237 SATA controller, halting the installation routine. The workaround was to use the other onboard controller on my MSI K8T Neo2-FIR motherboard, which was a Promise 20579.
Summary
Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005 is a superb commercial desktop distribution, and perhaps the finest choice for first-time GNU/Linux users. It has all of the necessary desktop software, plus alternate desktop environments and window managers for those who want to try out other interfaces, and it works reasonably well with modern hardware. I purposefully use “difficult” test systems to try to break operating systems, and in this case the only snag I ran into was the VIA SATA driver. Since most modern motherboards come with two kinds of SATA controllers, and since the VIA chip is not used as often as the Intel or Promise chips, I don’t consider this a significant problem.
One thing I always liked about Mandrakelinux was that it didn’t hide the terminal or consistently treat users like dummies. That hasn’t changed in Mandriva Linux — it’s still an operating system for experts and beginners alike.
As I used the software, I didn’t see where the Conectiva connection was — there didn’t seem to be anything new and different about Mandriva that would suggest that it is a conglomeration of two distinct distributions. It appears as though the name change and the altered release schedule were the primary reasons for the Limited Edition release. Just the same, it’s an improvement over 10.1 in the age of the software, the expanded hardware compatibility, and the ease of adding DVD decryption support.
Considering what this distro can do, it’s a bargain at $65.
Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Mandrakesoft released its Corporate Server 3.0 product in February. It’s a significant upgrade to the older 2.1 edition. With a newer kernel and a competent GUI management utility for its services, Corporate Server 3.0 is a good, inexpensive choice for businesses that need a powerful and secure server operating system with as little overhead as possible.
If you’re used to Mandriva’s desktop distributions, Corporate Server 3.0’s default configuration will be a bit of a change. While you can manually add KDE and GNOME packages during the installation process, only the IceWM and twm window managers are installed by default. Your default console is a Galaxy-themed, bare-bones IceWM with no desktop applications. All you’ve got is the Mandriva Control Center with its GUI administrative tools, including setup wizards for all of the servers you’ve installed. If you choose to install all of the predefined package sets, you’ll have a helper wizard for DHCP, DNS, FTP, news, groupware, OpenLDAP, email, proxy, Samba, time, Web, NIS/autofs, and installation servers as well as PXE configuration for network booting. For most of these wizards you don’t have to know much about the technologies to start and configure them, but you do have to know what they are and what they do.
Postfix 2.1.1 with cyrus-imap are the default mail packages, and Apache 2.0.48, Samba 3.0.6, ProFTPd 1.2.9, BIND 9.2.3, and OpenLDAP 2.1.25 are among the network applications. SpamAssassin and SquirrelMail are installed with the mail server package group, but there is no other mail transfer agent (MTA) option besides Postfix.
Problems
In addition to Mandrivalinux Control Center, the distribution includes Webmin for local or remote administration, but to use it locally you’ll have to add a graphical Web browser from the manual package selection screen during installation. I was surprised to discover that Webmin was not properly configured for Apache, and that there were Webmin modules installed for many programs that I didn’t have. After adjusting the module configuration I was able to get the Apache module working (the config expected /usr/bin/httpd and the actual executable was /usr/bin/httpd2), but I didn’t spend much time messing with the DHCP module configuration, because DHCP wasn’t installed. Not only was dhcpd not installed by default, but it wasn’t even an option during the installation procedure. The only way to properly install a DHCP server was to use the DHCP wizard in the Control Center, which prompted me for the first install disc to retrieve the package.
Although Postfix was the only MTA installed, Webmin had modules for Sendmail and Qmail, which cluttered up the interface and provided some initial confusion as to which MTA I had installed.
The network gave me a lot of trouble, specifically with DHCP — it didn’t work “out of the box” as I had expected it to. Ordinarily my router acts as a DHCP server and assigns dynamic IP addresses to each connected machine, but all I could get in Corporate Server 3.0 was an IPv6 address — no IPv4, and no connection to anything outside of the local machine. I tried two test systems — an Intel D915GUX-based computer and an MSI K8T Neo2-FIR-based computer, and in addition to their onboard NICs I also tested with a “tried and true” D-Link external 10/100 card to ensure that it was not a hardware-specific problem. Corporate Server detected them all, but none were properly connected to the local intranet nor the public Internet. I tried reconfiguring my Internet settings with the GUI config tool, but it detected no connection. I tried to edit the /etc/modules.conf file in an attempt to troubleshoot the problem, but my changes were erased and replaced by an autogenerated file at some point after I rebooted.
Speaking of rebooting, there is no option in the IceWM menu to perform this task. You can log out back to the XDM screen, but you can’t shutdown or restart. I used the terminal for these functions.
Interoperability and compatibility
The server operating system’s hardware compatibility was good. However, I couldn’t get Serial ATA hard drives to be recognized through the three onboard SATA controllers on both motherboards: Intel’s ICH5RW, VIA’s VT8237, and Promise’s 20579. The installation stopped responding to input when it got to the hard drive detection with each of these controllers. The video and sound chips were detected and worked reasonably well, although I didn’t test for hardware 3D acceleration or sound quality.
As far as software and connection standards are concerned, Mandriva Corporate Server 3.0 can provide authentication through OpenLDAP, and Windows clients can access file and printer sharing through Samba.
Support
As with Mandriva’s Corporate Desktop product, Mandriva Corporate Server 3.0 is on a five-year support cycle. The included support is pretty lean: one year under the standard contract, but as always, upgraded and extended support options are available. The upgrade cycle is 12 to 18 months, which is comparable with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The exact details of what each support tier offers confused me. If you’re interested in Corporate Server 3.0 and want to learn more about its support plans, Mandriva has a page for it.
Summary and conclusions
I’ve always liked Mandriva’s various distributions, but I’ve often had trouble getting them to work properly — especially when they first come out and are in need of updates. The concept of Mandriva Corporate Server 3.0 is a good one — it’s lighter, faster to install and boot, and cheaper than comparable products from Red Hat and Novell. It’s got nice GUI configuration tools that make it easy to manage.
However, while the concept may be good, the implementation fails; on two high-powered systems suitable for small business Web/email/DNS/DHCP/MySQL servers, I couldn’t get Corporate Server 3.0 to work properly in a reasonable amount of time. It took less time for me to set up similar servers for Web, email, DNS, SSH, and MySQL using FreeBSD and Gentoo, which are both configured entirely by hand (unless you install and configure Webmin or some other graphical management tools). Considering the advantages that Mandriva Corporate Server 3.0 was supposed to provide, I found it disappointing.
The graphical configuration tools are a good idea — especially Webmin — but they should never interfere with hand-edited command line tweaks. It also takes too long to configure Webmin to make it fully functional, and even longer to eliminate unnecessary modules. I’d like to see Mandrivasoft pre-customize Webmin’s modules to match the installed software in the next release.
I’m puzzled as to why dhcpd was not included in the base system or as an option. I did get it installed eventually, in a roundabout sort of way. In future releases, it might also pay to include courier-imap for those who prefer it over Cyrus, and Qmail and Exim for those who don’t like Postfix.
With time and attention, you can get this operating system up and running. You can easily get corporate support and software updates, so Mandriva Corporate Server 3.0 has its advantages over community distributions. However, if you have a bigger budget, you may find more value and less hassle in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
