In any case, even though I’m still very much a newbie, I’m starting to get slightly more involved at work. One of the tasks that is currently on my plate right now is setting up a system to completely automate the process of installing a number of different potential Linux distributions (i.e. Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, etc.) from a remote server. The reason for doing this is to streamline the testing process for a new server system. Essentially, the design goal for this system is that it ultimately needs to officially support not only Solaris, but also several different versions of Linux as well as Windows. In order to automate the test process, we need to be able to sequentially roll out an installation of some OS, test that OS, and then move onto the next supported OS. All of this needs to be completely hands-off so that the actual testing process can be done any time (e.g. overnight) and without any user intervention.

A typical system that would be used to accomplish this task is a PXE server which meshes DHCP services for dynamic network discovery and configuration with TFTP services for hosting OS images for automatic download and installation. Now from my own personal research, the concept does not seem terribly difficult. One caveat, though, is that PXE is not often used for completely hands-off installations (i.e. users often must select menu options, etc.) and of course things that seem conceptually simple are always more complicated to implement. Additionally:

• Before a few days ago I had never heard of PXE.
• My boss does not have any experience setting up PXE services either. (Of course that’s why it’s my job to research and carry out an action plan)
• None of the people in the Automation group that I work have experience setting up PXE servers.

Now all of these facts simply make it a challenging task and force me to be resourceful. I have already met with one person from the IT department that has some experience with PXE servers and actually has one set up that we might be able to leverage for our ultimate goal. Of course working with him could prove to be a problem. Because he’s an “IT person,” that means he’s never in his office, has too many things to do, and is needed by 40 other people all at the same time. In any case, we shall see how it goes.

In any case, I still have not taken the plunge and installed Vector, but there was one interesting discussion in the above mentioned review that caused me to take a parallel investigative leap. Up until now, I have relied on both KDE and GNOME to serve my Linux desktop environment needs. For the past couple of years, I used KDE on Mandrake up until just recently when I switched to GNOME on Ubuntu. In both of these cases, I was using my old PIII 900Mhz, 512MB Thinkpad T22. The problem that I’ve run into lately is that GNOME is beginning to have a clunky feel to it on this system. It is well known that GNOME is fairly memory intensive; combine this with an annoying Firefox memory leak, and you have yourself a system that can really bog down. I tend to carry out several parallel tasks using open applications on multiple virtual desktops. The result is a lot of hard drive thrashing because the system keeps running out of physical memory.

Coming back to the original Vector review that I mentioned above, an alternative desktop environment called Enlightenment is discussed. I have seen Enlightenment before, but apparently there is a complete rewrite going on and the newest version, E17, has reached a usable form. Intrigued, I decided to install it on my Ubuntu system and see what it’s like.

The first thing that I will say about E17 is that in its current form, it is very raw. Still in a pre-alpha stage of development, a lot of the functionality isn’t quite there yet and at this point, it is certainly not for the weak. However, it is in a stable form and most of the drawbacks of using it lie in the fact that many of the configuration tools are not very polished and a lot of command line tweaks need to be done and support files need to be created and modified. Once you get it set up, though, it’s a desktop experience like none other. As it is mentioned in the Vector review, once E17 is finished, it will bring Linux on the desktop to a whole other level. It of course has lots of eye candy, it’s light years ahead of most other GUI’s in terms of efficiency and functionality, and most importantly, it does all this with a small memory footprint and no need for any hardware graphics acceleration.

Have a look at a screenshot of my desktop that I started working on configuring today. I’m still trying to muck around with all of the currently available configuration options and modules, but even in its present state it works very well.

Before we get into that though, I suppose I should elaborate on my recent operating system history. Up until two years ago, like most people I used Windows as my main desktop environment. However, as an undergraduate computer science student at the time, I was becoming increasingly familiar with Unix based systems and I felt that in order to fully realize my geek potential, it was necessary to make a total switch to a Linux environment. At the time I only owned my one original Thinkpad T22 from my freshman year and so I wiped it clean and installed a fresh copy of Mandrake Linux (it has since been renamed to Mandriva). Not only did it run well, but it essentially served as my main system up until just recently. I did buy a desktop system with Windows a few months after making the switch to Linux on my laptop, but I’ve had several problems with it already (mostly hardware related) and my laptop still served as my main system.

Despite the fact that Mandrake ran with virtually no hiccups or problems for two years, the one gripe that I have had is that updating and installing new software was more of a pain then I would have liked it to be. They claim that their Red-Hat like rpm system should make the process easy and sometimes this is true. However I found that Mandrake rpm’s of the software that you wanted weren’t always easy to find and in addition, there was always some additional dependancy that was required but you didn’t have. Thus you need to hunt down 5 pieces of software when all you wanted to do was update Gaim. Additionally, because the installation system was in their own rpm style, if you tried to install software with the traditional tar.gz’s and built them yourself, it didn’t always work and sometimes broke something else.

The result of this problem is that while my Mandrake system served its purpose well, I never felt the desire to update software or attempt to download other interesting programs because it was such a hassle to get things running. So just recently I thought it was time for a change. I looked around and thought about Suse, Fedora, Slackware, and even a non-Linux BSD system. I finally settled on Ubuntu (a Debian based distribution) though as it seemed to provide a rock solid base, a user oriented philosophy, and of course I was always drawn to peoples raves about Debian’s amazingly easy installation process.

And so about a week ago I wiped Mandrake off my system and in a half hour I was up and running with Ubuntu. There was one small installation hiccup but that was only because I kept my /home partition from the Mandrake installation and the user id of my user on the Mandrake system did not match my new user id on the Ubuntu system. Thus the file permissions were screwing things up. Once that was cleared up though I have to say that everything that people say about Ubuntu’s (and also Debian’s) apt-get installation system is true. There’s an incredible number of packages available in its repositories and installing any of them takes just one command or a very intuitive navigation of the Synaptic GUI. Additionally, all dependency problems are handled automatically by pulling them from the necessary repositories and installing them as well.

So Ubuntu is my distribution of choice for now. I should also note that I switched from KDE to GNOME and so far I am liking the move. I think I’ll save that for another post though.