I'm not much of a phone person, preferring email for most business and personal purposes, so had never got around to looking at internet telephony. But I have been wanting to try video chat with family back in the U.K., and the reason that gave me the push to actually do something about it was wanting to encourage my daughters to speak more English (for instance a weekly video call with Grannie). Oh, and a niece I have only seen in photos.
I'm on Linux, my brother is on Mac, and my Mum would be on Windows, and I assumed Linux would be the hardest of those to satisfy. Skype was the first name I recognized in my search, so I went for that! Installation went smoothly, and it auto-detected my web cam. The first time I started it it prompted me to create a user. Easy, simple. Impressed.
I emailed my brother and he also got setup quickly. It took us a few days to find a time when we were both around to try it, but when we did it worked first time. Impressed. And my family got to meet my new niece. I say "meet", because it really felt like it. Okay, I didn't get a cuddle, didn't get to smell the dirty nappy, and didn't get the dribble down the front of my t-shirt. But there was interaction, and there is nothing like seeing a baby's smile happen live!
So, then I set it up on the Windows XP notebook in our lounge. Not easy. Not impressed. The hard part was getting the Logitech webcam installed. I plugged it in. It popped up a box saying unknown USB device, and offered to search for a driver for me. A few long minutes later it gives up. Having thrown out the packaging a long time ago, I tried the Logitech web site. It wants to know what device I have. On the device it says "Logitech" and no other information at all! On the cable is a label with "M/N" (model number??), "P/N" (part number??) and "PID" (???). No luck with any of those.
So, here is what I did. I plugged the webcam back in Linux! The log then told me it is a "Logicool" camera. Still no model number, but it turned out that was enough information to find the correct driver. I then got a 50Mb "driver" to download. I ran it and without asking any questions it chugged away for a couple of minutes, then said it needed to reboot. Ok. After a reboot it opens up and asks if I want to install just the driver or the Logitech software too. Sadly those were the only two choices. The button labelled "Please explain to me what you've been doing for the past 10 minutes and why I had to reboot the machine when you haven't even installed a driver yet you moronic piece of time-wasting software" was missing.
For contrast, as long as you have a 2.6 kernel (i.e. any linux distro from the last 2-3 years ago), the webcam was genuine plug-n-play, a 1 minute install, rather than the above 45-minute marathon.
Anyway, finally the webcam installs. Skype install and setup was reasonably straightforward - not quite as easy as on linux as there are a lot more options compared to the clean linux version. Also when adding a new contact you are forced to send them a text message. Or I misunderstood the over-complex user interface. But, anyway, it works.
For both ease of use and power Linux caught up with Windows about two years ago (as a desktop machine; it has been superior as a server machine, in my opinion, since about 1998.) But it seems the trend has continued and Linux is now far superior. I remember Microsoft ads trying to claim that even though Linux was free its Total Cost Of Ownership was much higher than Windows. As it turns out Windows Total Cost Of Ownership is about 12 times higher: 60 minutes to install a web cam and Skype, compared to 5 minutes on Linux.
In particular if you've bought a simple Logitech webcam and discovered you are running Windows, and you only use Windows for email, browsing the web, office applications, Skype, photos, etc., etc. then I suggest you wipe your disk and install Ubuntu Linux, rather than try to install the Logitech drivers. It is going to be easier, and you also get a better and more secure operating system to boot.
By the way, the video on Windows is much jerkier, and the camera takes five seconds longer to start, compared to Linux, but my desktop machine is more powerful than the notebook. So that may just be a hardware difference rather than the combined incompetence of Microsoft and Logitech.
Anyway back to the main point: video conferencing actually works! And I can recommend Skype as the platform to choose.
Showing posts with label OS/distro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OS/distro. Show all posts
14 Dec 2007
Ubuntu 7.10
To put this review in context, my previous workstation was running Fedora Core 5, with Gnome, and I've been using Fedora since it was called RedHat 6. I prefer to get work done instead of reading man pages and configuration files; I know how to edit httpd.conf or /etc/hosts in vi, but I just don't enjoy it.
My new machine had modern hardware (Intel ICH5 chipset) that Fedora Core 7 choked on, and basically the just-released Ubuntu ended up being chosen as it was the first user-friendly distro I tried that would install. (CentOS also failed, as did the Fedora 8 pre-release; I didn't get to Suse as some web searching hinted it would fail.)
The quick summary: No regrets. Ubuntu is good. Better than Fedora. Better overall than Microsoft Windows. (Far better than OS/X, but Macs and I have never really got on - we just don't seem to understand each other.)
Install starts with a live CD boot, where you can play with the system. Then install. The install went smoothly. There were very few questions, which is a criticism - I had to spend a lot of time after the install completed realizing things were not installed and having to install them. On the other hand Synaptic Package Manager is easy to use, and I can generally have the software I need installed and running within 60 seconds. I had been very reluctant to switch from a familiar RPM distro like Fedora to a deb distro, but in fact I have not had to be aware of the differences so far.
Support, via Google, is excellent. "Ubuntu xxx" has almost always given me a helpful page telling me how to setup or troubleshoot xxx.
Lots of things Just Work. Printer just worked when I plugged it in. The samba network drive was found first time. Setting up an encrypted partition was easy, as was setting up special encrypted directories, again following Ubuntu-specific tutorials. Burning DVDs just worked. My USB thumb drive just worked. My scanner too. Sound too. Gigabit ethernet too.
Getting scim-anthy working required a bit of effort. See http://tlug.jp/ML/0710/msg00295.html and http://tlug.jp/ML/0710/msg00305.html. But it was roughly the same steps I had to go through on Fedora: I need to simultaneously use Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. in an English environment, which is not a common need, so I can accept a little work. I am not even sure it can be done at all on Windows?
Webcam just worked. Google on "ubuntu webcam" took me to a page suggesting I use Camorama. I went to the package manager and that was installed within a minute. And it just worked first time. It took longer to find my scissors to get it out of the packaging that it did to plug it in, install the software I needed and get as far as taking a snapshot and emailing it to my Mum.
Two problems stand out. First multimedia (Fedora was terrible here too). I had to follow a tutorial to get most audio and movie formats to play. I then had to hunt and follow another one (the one that talks about mediaubuntu.org) before DVDs would play. There are two formats I still cannot get to work: VCD (and Google tells me no-one else is having much luck there) and Real Media. The latter is irritating as, despite there being video formats that are superior in all respects, some web sites still insist on only publishing in that format (e.g. the BBC, and MIT open lectures). I ended up having to install RealPlayer on Windows to be able to watch some things. (Real Media's own Real Player For Linux installed without complaint but crashes with a segmentation fault every time I run it.)
Second problem was the 19" 1440x900 wide-screen monitor. I installed using a spare 15" monitor, no problems, then when I was ready to switch to it to be my main system I plugged in this monitor. Seven hours later I finally cracked it: in the x11 conf file it has to be referred to as Monitor-VGA-1, the "-1" on the end being critical. Without that the configuration I thought I was adding was being ignored and then it was falling back on its clever auto-detecting, and (as it had no knowledge of this particular monitor model) it was choosing 800x600 or something.
One more thing. After installing I suggest you go to this obscure place: Systems|Preferences|Sessions, where you can disable a number of services you don't need. I disabled Evolution alarm notifier (I'd stripped out the default-installed Evolution, as I prefer to use Thunderbird), bluetooth manager, tracker and visual (a mysterious one but nothing has broken since I did that). Tracker is the key one you must disable - it will continuously index your entire home partition for some search program that as far as I can tell I have never used or needed. And according to some web searching it is unreliable and will sometimes use 100% CPU.
Other other minor comments. bash has intelligent tab completion, just like zsh, but while still being bash apparently. Nice. Firefox 2.0, and especially Thunderbird 2.0, run more slowly than the 1.5 versions I was using under Fedora Core 5, without a single useful feature to compensate that I've been able to notice so far. Gnome file manager was also a bit sluggish, but killing "Tracker" (see above) seems to have helped there. Having changed three things at the same time (hardware, distro, version) I am unable to say if the slower performance is due to the way ubuntu builds them compared to Fedora, or due to bloat caused by bigger version numbers, or due to my new, faster hardware.
Overall, Ubuntu 7.10 is good, and is now my first choice of OS to install on a new machine.
My new machine had modern hardware (Intel ICH5 chipset) that Fedora Core 7 choked on, and basically the just-released Ubuntu ended up being chosen as it was the first user-friendly distro I tried that would install. (CentOS also failed, as did the Fedora 8 pre-release; I didn't get to Suse as some web searching hinted it would fail.)
The quick summary: No regrets. Ubuntu is good. Better than Fedora. Better overall than Microsoft Windows. (Far better than OS/X, but Macs and I have never really got on - we just don't seem to understand each other.)
Install starts with a live CD boot, where you can play with the system. Then install. The install went smoothly. There were very few questions, which is a criticism - I had to spend a lot of time after the install completed realizing things were not installed and having to install them. On the other hand Synaptic Package Manager is easy to use, and I can generally have the software I need installed and running within 60 seconds. I had been very reluctant to switch from a familiar RPM distro like Fedora to a deb distro, but in fact I have not had to be aware of the differences so far.
Support, via Google, is excellent. "Ubuntu xxx" has almost always given me a helpful page telling me how to setup or troubleshoot xxx.
Lots of things Just Work. Printer just worked when I plugged it in. The samba network drive was found first time. Setting up an encrypted partition was easy, as was setting up special encrypted directories, again following Ubuntu-specific tutorials. Burning DVDs just worked. My USB thumb drive just worked. My scanner too. Sound too. Gigabit ethernet too.
Getting scim-anthy working required a bit of effort. See http://tlug.jp/ML/0710/msg00295.html and http://tlug.jp/ML/0710/msg00305.html. But it was roughly the same steps I had to go through on Fedora: I need to simultaneously use Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. in an English environment, which is not a common need, so I can accept a little work. I am not even sure it can be done at all on Windows?
Webcam just worked. Google on "ubuntu webcam" took me to a page suggesting I use Camorama. I went to the package manager and that was installed within a minute. And it just worked first time. It took longer to find my scissors to get it out of the packaging that it did to plug it in, install the software I needed and get as far as taking a snapshot and emailing it to my Mum.
Two problems stand out. First multimedia (Fedora was terrible here too). I had to follow a tutorial to get most audio and movie formats to play. I then had to hunt and follow another one (the one that talks about mediaubuntu.org) before DVDs would play. There are two formats I still cannot get to work: VCD (and Google tells me no-one else is having much luck there) and Real Media. The latter is irritating as, despite there being video formats that are superior in all respects, some web sites still insist on only publishing in that format (e.g. the BBC, and MIT open lectures). I ended up having to install RealPlayer on Windows to be able to watch some things. (Real Media's own Real Player For Linux installed without complaint but crashes with a segmentation fault every time I run it.)
Second problem was the 19" 1440x900 wide-screen monitor. I installed using a spare 15" monitor, no problems, then when I was ready to switch to it to be my main system I plugged in this monitor. Seven hours later I finally cracked it: in the x11 conf file it has to be referred to as Monitor-VGA-1, the "-1" on the end being critical. Without that the configuration I thought I was adding was being ignored and then it was falling back on its clever auto-detecting, and (as it had no knowledge of this particular monitor model) it was choosing 800x600 or something.
One more thing. After installing I suggest you go to this obscure place: Systems|Preferences|Sessions, where you can disable a number of services you don't need. I disabled Evolution alarm notifier (I'd stripped out the default-installed Evolution, as I prefer to use Thunderbird), bluetooth manager, tracker and visual (a mysterious one but nothing has broken since I did that). Tracker is the key one you must disable - it will continuously index your entire home partition for some search program that as far as I can tell I have never used or needed. And according to some web searching it is unreliable and will sometimes use 100% CPU.
Other other minor comments. bash has intelligent tab completion, just like zsh, but while still being bash apparently. Nice. Firefox 2.0, and especially Thunderbird 2.0, run more slowly than the 1.5 versions I was using under Fedora Core 5, without a single useful feature to compensate that I've been able to notice so far. Gnome file manager was also a bit sluggish, but killing "Tracker" (see above) seems to have helped there. Having changed three things at the same time (hardware, distro, version) I am unable to say if the slower performance is due to the way ubuntu builds them compared to Fedora, or due to bloat caused by bigger version numbers, or due to my new, faster hardware.
Overall, Ubuntu 7.10 is good, and is now my first choice of OS to install on a new machine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)