Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
El 01.11.2017 a las 04:20, Richard Heck escribió: This is a question you could ask of the people at your distro. They made a decision to compile the kernel so that iwlwifi was integrated into it and not a module. Hi Richard, many thanks for your detailed reply. I learned a lot. So I need a distribution that uses kernel modules for the different drivers but also offers a rolling release. What distribution offers this? I see now that NVIDIA is here on Manjaro a kernel module. But all other tings, like keyboard, touchpad, USB, LAN, wifi are no modules. Why can't you use an older kernel? Just install it. I found out that the bug was introduced during Kernel 4.7. I went back step by step and realized that my laptop needs at least Kernel 4.8. With older kernels I cannot start the laptop. And my point is that bugs are a fact of life, and if you have a bug you will get it fixed a whole lot faster by the Linux community than you will by some commercial monopoly. If you want to pay for support, then you can have someone compile the new kernel for you. You can even pay people to fix bugs for you. Much as with LyX. You do not have any of these options with closed-source drivers. I have good experiences with paid support. If a device is not running one will get a fixed driver etc. often within a day. If not, one gets a new PC, external cards or whatever. If a big machine is not running for 24 hours you can easily produce costs up to several thousand €. Then it is cheaper to buy another PC and/or other hardware. However, I could not yet figure out why for example in the field of CAD Linux is not used. There is only the company VariCAD offering a Linux version and support for it. All others have Win-only software and drivers. OK, CAD is a special application. But things like filling out a PDF form are standard. I have to fill out PDF forms every week. I reported the bugs to Evince and Okular 3 months ago and now the problems persist. So I cannot say that bugs are fixed quickly. It is OK because the developers of these programs are all volunteers like we are. Nevertheless it is an example that you don't have an advantage over Windows here. (My workaround is to use the software MasterPDF editor. This works perfectly but is not free software. I found some minor issues in this program and they fixed it within 2 days. This is great and therefore I'll buy the program if I will use Linux daily.) And of course you can compile the new kernel yourself. I compiled my own kernel very shortly after I became a Linux user, for a reason not unlike yours. Compiling things on Linux is so, so much easier than on other platforms, and compiling the kernel is no more difficult than compiling LyX. I spent ages before I could compile LyX. It might be easier on Linux. But this is not my point, I am looking for an OS that I just can use. So with my car example, I just need a car that drives. I don't want to fiddle around with motor settings. If a part is broken I can mount e.g. a new exhaust system and then continue driving. Here's how to do it # copy the existing configuration cp /boot/config-`uname -r`* .config # create the new configuration make defconfig > ... Many thanks, I will try this out. Nevertheless this requires a lot of expert knowledge. I hate console commands because I cannot remember them. How often would one need to compile a kernel? Maybe once a year. I know myself and even after vacation of only 2 weeks I forgot the commands. That is how I came to LyX because I could not remember the TeX commands. Therefore I need an UI and I think this applies for the vast majority of computer users. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/47208/what-is-the-difference-between-kernel-drivers-and-kernel-modules for more info. Thanks. regards Uwe
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
On 10/31/2017 08:21 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote: > El 31.10.2017 a las 03:05, Richard Heck escribió: > >>> I realized that Linux's monolithic kernel is a problem. Every device >>> driver needs to be part of the kernel. >> >> This is a confusion. Linux supports kernel modules, which are the exact >> Linux equivalent of a device driver, and which can be installed >> separately from the kernel itself. > > OK, but the WLAN driver is part of the kernel, not of a kernel module. > This bug cost me many hours to investigate until I learned that I need > to recompile the kernel with the fixed driver. I can also not e.g. use > another version of the Mesa driver - it has to be compiled with the > kernel too. So why are the drivers no modules? This is a question you could ask of the people at your distro. They made a decision to compile the kernel so that iwlwifi was integrated into it and not a module. This page from gentoo https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Iwlwifi specifically explains how one can configure the kernel to make iwlwifi a module, if one wants to do that, so I'm not making it up. One can do this with almost any device driver. Granted, you may not want to reconfigure the kernel yourself. My point was just that it has nothing to do with Linux. It's a choice your distro made when they configured your kernel. The distro could perfectly well decide to configure the kernel so that iwlwifi was a module. Then they could offer updates to it without having to update the whole kernel. That's up to them. >>> Someone in a forum explained me that the kernel needs to be >>> compiled using the fixed driver before it will work. But compiling the >>> kernel as a normal user? No chance. >> >> In the Windows world, you do not even have this option. You have to wait >> until Microsoft or the manufacturer decides to issue a patch. > > No, there I can always go back to a previous driver version that is > known to work. For my WLAN problem I found out that there were older > driver versions without the bug but I could not use them. Why can't you use an older kernel? Just install it. You can even install it alongside the newer one you already have. I have done that many times. If your distro doesn't offer older kernels, then that is a problem you have with them, again. >> Wait until they issue a patch. I'll bet that Linux distros are faster >> to do that >> than Windows is. > > That is my point. Waiting is a no go in real life. Every hour a person > is not productive produces costs. That is why companies have 24h > support contracts. I mean if you cannot e.g. transfer parts from your > CAD to the CAM software of the machine, the machine is not running. > This costs a lot of money every hour. And my point is that bugs are a fact of life, and if you have a bug you will get it fixed a whole lot faster by the Linux community than you will by some commercial monopoly. If you want to pay for support, then you can have someone compile the new kernel for you. You can even pay people to fix bugs for you. Much as with LyX. You do not have any of these options with closed-source drivers. And of course you can compile the new kernel yourself. I compiled my own kernel very shortly after I became a Linux user, for a reason not unlike yours. Compiling things on Linux is so, so much easier than on other platforms, and compiling the kernel is no more difficult than compiling LyX. It's actually very easy, especially if you just want to use the same configuration (what drivers are included, etc) as your default kernel, which in your case would be fine. You just need to fix a bug, not activate a driver your distro didn't include (which is what I needed to do, since I had a weird wifi card). Here's how to do it. Get the source for the kernel you are currently using. Apply the patch you need to fix the bug that's affecting you. (Or get the source for a new kernel.) What follows then happens from within the source directory. # copy the existing configuration cp /boot/config-`uname -r`* .config # create the new configuration make defconfig # build the kernel # this will take a while! make # install the new kernel sudo make modules_install sudo make install # update the bootloader sudo update-grub2 Now reboot and choose your new kernel as the one you want to run. See this page https://kernelnewbies.org/KernelBuild for more info. Note the remarks at the end about how, if the only change was to a module, you only need to recompile that part of the tree. That was all for Ubuntu. You may have to make some minor changes, but they won't affect how easy it is. You may also have to install some packages in order to compile the kernel. Obviously, e.g., you need a compiler! > There must be a reason why no production company I know uses Linux for > other things than server applications. Many massively parallel machines run Linux:
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
El 31.10.2017 a las 03:05, Richard Heck escribió: I realized that Linux's monolithic kernel is a problem. Every device driver needs to be part of the kernel. This is a confusion. Linux supports kernel modules, which are the exact Linux equivalent of a device driver, and which can be installed separately from the kernel itself. OK, but the WLAN driver is part of the kernel, not of a kernel module. This bug cost me many hours to investigate until I learned that I need to recompile the kernel with the fixed driver. I can also not e.g. use another version of the Mesa driver - it has to be compiled with the kernel too. So why are the drivers no modules? I am a newbie and don't know the internals. I only noticed that the driver/kernel thing is for me a problem. Someone in a forum explained me that the kernel needs to be compiled using the fixed driver before it will work. But compiling the kernel as a normal user? No chance. In the Windows world, you do not even have this option. You have to wait until Microsoft or the manufacturer decides to issue a patch. No, there I can always go back to a previous driver version that is known to work. For my WLAN problem I found out that there were older driver versions without the bug but I could not use them. Wait until they issue a patch. I'll bet that Linux distros are faster to do that than Windows is. That is my point. Waiting is a no go in real life. Every hour a person is not productive produces costs. That is why companies have 24h support contracts. I mean if you cannot e.g. transfer parts from your CAD to the CAM software of the machine, the machine is not running. This costs a lot of money every hour. There must be a reason why no production company I know uses Linux for other things than server applications. Maybe the driver architecture is one reason. I don't know. I don't want to judge that one system is better or not. I am just looking around for an alternative that allows me to be as productive as with Windows. As I wrote I will keep Linux as second system. regards Uwe
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
On 31.10.2017 14:24, Paul A. Rubin wrote: That's curious. I didn't have any problems with Xreader and gender radio buttons in PDF-form.lyx. - open the PDF of PDF-form.lyx with the latest Xreader 1.4.4. - then go to sec. 2.3 and you can see that you cannot select "female". - go to sec. 2.1 to see that the second text filed is not filled with the content of the first one as it should be - go to sec. 4 to see that the buttons to save the form and for fullscreen view are not orking - go to sec. 2.4 and yo see that no button there works > In any case, I would definitely recommend getting the Linux version of Acrobat Reader. This version is no longer under development since years and therefore a security risk to use it. regards Uwe
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
On 10/30/2017 07:29 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote: I tried the PDF-form.lyx experiment. The default PDF viewer on my system (Xreader) seemed to handle most of the form features. I also tried Xreader. There are several bugs in all PDF programs under Linux. For me the main bug is that I cannot use radio buttons but these are in most PDF forms (e.g. for sex/gender). Of course I already reported all bugs I found. That's curious. I didn't have any problems with Xreader and gender radio buttons in PDF-form.lyx. In any case, I would definitely recommend getting the Linux version of Acrobat Reader. You can easily make it the default program for opening PDFs. I've never had any problems with it on Linux, and radio buttons work. Paul
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
On 10/30/2017 07:29 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote: > >> For file searching, I can recommend SearchMonkey >> (http://searchmonkey.embeddediq.com/index.php/download), which can >> search both file names and content, understands regex expressions and >> generally does what I need (pretty easily). > > Thanks, I just grabbed it to try it. Nevertheless from a file explorer > like dolphin I expect to find all LyX files in all mounted drives when > I search for "*.lyx". I'm not sure how you're trying to do that. But the truth is, and I'll confess this, that Linux is much more powerful if you're prepared to use the command line. Try this: find / -name *.lyx That will report all the *.lyx files on your system. (It will take a bit to read the whole filesystem.) The power lies not just in being able to do that, but in being able to control the other aspects of the find in really, really subtle ways. Some GUI interfaces to find do exist in dolphin and other file managers. In KDE, you can try kfind. I'd be curious to hear what it can't do that you need to do. Richard
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
On 10/30/2017 06:14 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote: > My camera doesn't work, my scanner doesn't work, To some extent, as I'll say below, this is due to whether the manufacturers of these devices choose to provide device drivers for Linux. Or if some clever Linux users manages to write one themselves (more likely). So one does need to be a bit careful about what NEW hardware one uses. Older stuff is usually supported. > WLAN made problems (see below), CAD is not working well... > > I realized that Linux's monolithic kernel is a problem. Every device > driver needs to be part of the kernel. This is a confusion. Linux supports kernel modules, which are the exact Linux equivalent of a device driver, and which can be installed separately from the kernel itself. Any given *distribution* (Ubuntu, whatever) can choose what drivers it includes in the kernel and which it requires to be installed separately, however, so yours may give the impression of a more "monolithic" kernel than there really is. If a given driver is compiled into the kernel, then it can only be updated by updating the kernel. But this is entirely dependent upon the distribution. If you want something more flexible than what you have, I'm sure it's out there. > This is hard for small manufacturers of e.g. USB microscopes. They can simply write a kernel module (= device driver). If they choose not to do so, then one cannot blame Linux. > Also for CAD the monolithic kernel is a problem. Same point. There's not a monolithic kernel. > An example: I bought a laptop with a built in Wifi chip from Intel. In > Linux kernels 4.8 to 4.12 the Wifi driver iwlwifi had a bug. A fix was > already available and I could download it. But I could not get it to > work. Someone in a forum explained me that the kernel needs to be > compiled using the fixed driver before it will work. But compiling the > kernel as a normal user? No chance. In the Windows world, you do not even have this option. You have to wait until Microsoft or the manufacturer decides to issue a patch. You have the same option with whatever distribution you are using: Wait until they issue a patch. I'll bet that Linux distros are faster to do that than Windows is. My sense is that kernel updates for most distros tend to happen about every week or so, so you probably don't need to wait very long. It only seems slower with Linxu, because you actually can SEE the source code fix. Microsoft will not let you see that. Who knows how long bug fixes there wait until they finally release an update? > And indeed I had to wait until Linux 4.13 was released until I had a > stable WLAN connection with my laptop. So, as with Windows, you can choose to do that. In the Linux world, however, you have a different option: You can recompile the kernel yourself. Yes it's non-trivial to do that, but in the Windows world you can't do that, even if you want to do so. Richard
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
El 31.10.2017 a las 00:08, Paul A. Rubin escribió: That said, I've been happy with my move to Linux Mint. Hi Paul, the problems I encountered are independent of the distribution. The bugs are in the drivers and/or libraries. (I started with the distribution Manjaro then tested OpenSuse, Ubuntu and NixOS. I am back to Manjaro as it just works the most for my laptop regarding drivers and kernels.) I tried the PDF-form.lyx experiment. The default PDF viewer on my system (Xreader) seemed to handle most of the form features. I also tried Xreader. There are several bugs in all PDF programs under Linux. For me the main bug is that I cannot use radio buttons but these are in most PDF forms (e.g. for sex/gender). Of course I already reported all bugs I found. You've probably already done this, but I always start with a Google search with the make and model of a device and "linux" or "ubuntu" (Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu) to see if any additional libraries or proprietary hardware drivers are recommended. Yes, I have done so. I installed the driver from Samsung and after that CUPS found the printer while SANE failed to find the scanner. SANE is a mess by the way. This is not a user-friendly interface compared to e.g. CUPS. For file searching, I can recommend SearchMonkey (http://searchmonkey.embeddediq.com/index.php/download), which can search both file names and content, understands regex expressions and generally does what I need (pretty easily). Thanks, I just grabbed it to try it. Nevertheless from a file explorer like dolphin I expect to find all LyX files in all mounted drives when I search for "*.lyx". regards Uwe
Re: off topic: feedback after 3 months with Linux
On 10/30/2017 06:14 PM, Uwe Stöhr wrote: El 30.10.2017 a las 08:29, Scott Kostyshak escribió: > Do you still have access to Linux? Yes. I work with Linux as testing system for 3 months now. Long story short, I am a bit disappointed. Linux is OK for Internet, office and email. But that is it. I mean I even cannot fill out a PDF form on Linux because poppler doesn't yet support everything. (You can test this by filling out LyX's PDF-form.lyx after exporting it as PDF (pdflatex).) Sorry to hear you're having problems with Linux. I agree that it requires more technical tweaking than Windows typically does (or did, back when I was still using Windows). That said, I've been happy with my move to Linux Mint. I tried the PDF-form.lyx experiment. The default PDF viewer on my system (Xreader) seemed to handle most of the form features. Acrobat Reader handled all of them (other than those I could not test because I do not have the insdljs LaTeX package). The version of Acrobat Reader available for Linux (9.5.5) is not the latest, but I've never found it lacking. My camera doesn't work, my scanner doesn't work, WLAN made problems (see below), CAD is not working well... My USB web cam worked out of the box, as did my HP printer/scanner/copier. There's a bunch of HP packages for Linux, including a printer driver (that plugs into the Linux CUPS printing system) and a control panel that pops up when I use the scanner feature. I realized that Linux's monolithic kernel is a problem. Every device driver needs to be part of the kernel. This is hard for small manufacturers of e.g. USB microscopes. Also for CAD the monolithic kernel is a problem. I mean at work things just have to work because every minute counts. So if for example a CAD program has problems I can easily switch the driver (go back to an older version usually) and after only 5 minutes of reinstalling I am productive again. With Linux I cannot do that. An example: I bought a laptop with a built in Wifi chip from Intel. In Linux kernels 4.8 to 4.12 the Wifi driver iwlwifi had a bug. A fix was already available and I could download it. But I could not get it to work. Someone in a forum explained me that the kernel needs to be compiled using the fixed driver before it will work. But compiling the kernel as a normal user? No chance. And indeed I had to wait until Linux 4.13 was released until I had a stable WLAN connection with my laptop. (I could not use an older kernel because the components of my laptop required kernel 4.8 or newer.) Drivers can indeed be an adventure, although the WiFi on my laptop worked out of the box with Mint. That is sad because I really like KDE. This is a much more versatile desktop than the one of Windows 10. But doesn't help me if I cannot use devices I need every day like my scanner. I even managed to get help from a student who administrates Linux PCs and also he failed to get my scanner to work (I own an 8 year old scanner/printer and the printer part worked fine out of the box.) You've probably already done this, but I always start with a Google search with the make and model of a device and "linux" or "ubuntu" (Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu) to see if any additional libraries or proprietary hardware drivers are recommended. There are at least some proprietary drivers that can be installed without recompiling the kernel. I'm using a proprietary NVIDIA driver on the PC on which I'm typing this, and installing it just involved telling the system to install it and then maybe rebooting. I've never compiled a Linux kernel in my life (a streak I hope to maintain). Nevertheless I will continue using Linux as second OS. I hope that in future things like filling PDF forms will work. I also hope that developers of Linux applications unite and not split. I mean there are now about 8 proper Linux desktop environments while the libraries everybody uses like e.g. poppler lack manpower. I tried many desktop environments and all are poor when it comes to searching in the file explorer for filenames and for content in files. But searching is essential. Windows is here much better and provides therefore more productivity. Linux leaves a lot of functionality to third-party applications, rather than baking it into the operating system. The primary advantage is variety: if you don't like the way something is done, find an alternative package that does it more to your taste. The disadvantage is that you need to do more customization. For file searching, I can recommend SearchMonkey (http://searchmonkey.embeddediq.com/index.php/download), which can search both file names and content, understands regex expressions and generally does what I need (pretty easily). Cheers, Paul
