Ad Terras Per Aspera

I’ve finally decided to switch back to Debian. In fact, I did so about a week ago. Both my workstation and laptop now run Debian; and I’m much happier with Debian than I ever was with Ubuntu.

Way back when, I was one of the first people to switch to Ubuntu, under the promise of both Mark Shuttleworth and his people, and all of the Debian developers switching sides (apparently, since then, many of those developers either develop for both Debian and Ubuntu now, or switched back to Debian only), that Ubuntu would be what Debian was supposed to be: an easy to maintain, perfectly stable, often updated, desktop distro.

I believe, now, that Ubuntu is none of those things. Ubuntu, instead, is nothing but an attempt to turn Debian into something like Fedora: a desktop distro that puts user friendlyness over sane software development.

I deleted my /bin, /sbin, and /usr/* directories, and appended .old to /etc, /home, and /var, and used the 20060829 daily built Etch Debian-Install netinst CD to install in my already existing parition. I can say the new installer is way better than the one I used back in the Potato days (which was the last time I actually installed Linux on my workstation, I only dist-upgraded to Ubuntu instead of reinstalling).

I’m actually surprised how modern this installer is. For one, which surprised me, is that it automatically detects and sets up my Firewire port to be able to network on, the only flaw here is that it gives me an option of using eth1 as my default network adapter but doesn’t actually tell me eth1 is my Firewire port.

Second, it can automatically retrieve my computer’s hostname and domain because I statically assign IP and FQDN based on MAC with dnsmasq (which provides both dhcpd and dnsd) on my router. It saves me a few keystrokes, sure, but it is still a neat feature.

The only missing features I’d like to see is a mention of console output on F5, and a terminal on F2, which I only knew were there from previous experience with Debian installers. Plus, I’d also like to see the ability to add a pre-existing directory to use debs from, so I don’t have to re-download things if I already have downloaded them once.

After install, I quickly ugraded to Sid.

A few other things I noticed Debian has and Ubuntu doesn’t, is that Debian’s apt-get now has the abilty to download just the updated parts of a package index instead of the whole index (on supported mirrors, anyways). Even on DSL, downloading 5+ megs of package indexes takes a good 30 to 45 seconds, now it just takes less than 5.

In addition, and I’m not sure what caused this, I no longer have very sluggish apt-get performance when installing or removing packages. I think this may be because my Debian install was ancient and had eventually gotten dpkg‘s various state files gummed up, but where a simple apt-get install of a small package would take a few minutes, it now takes a few seconds.

All in all, Debian is still the distro I remember it: clean, lean, well designed, a dream to administer, and not bloated to hell and back with lots of defaultly installed packages no one uses. Also, is it me, or does Debian also boot a good ten seconds faster than Ubuntu?

“Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either . . .; that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical; that even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern …”

– Thomas Jefferson, A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State.”

– Thomas Jefferson, 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association

Today I found out about a little Ubuntu fork called Christian Ubuntu. As far as I can tell, it exists with the full knowledge of not only Mark Shuttleworth, but with his and many of the developer’s blessing. As such, Ubuntu inadvertantly promotes Christianity.

And I find this offensive.

I messaged the Ubuntu-devel mailing list over my concerns over the existance of Christian Ubuntu, and at the time, I did not know that Ubuntu apparently supports their efforts. For my attempt to warn the Ubuntu developers of this gross misuse of the Ubuntu name, logo, and trademark, I was called a troll because I found Christian Ubuntu offensive.

Yeah, you heard me; apparently finding Christian Ubuntu offensive and alerting Ubuntu about the existance of the distro, I am trolling. According to this logic, Thomas Jefferson is trolling because he believes in a seperation of church and state.

To paraphrase Jefferson: to compel a man to furnish contributions of code and development resources for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical. I contemplate with the sovereign reverence that act of the whole Linux development community which declaired that their code be used to help all of mankind no matter race, religion, or class, that their licensing should, “make no rule respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of seperation between church and Linux.

Wow, I just was cleaning out my Gmail account to cut down on the size (it was over 75% full), and I deleted all the mail sent to LKML. Over 23 thousand conversations since July 2004, taking up a little over 500 megs.

Effectively, the LKML produces a quarter of a gig of archives every year, which is amazing.

I’ve just found a pretty neat website: KLive, the Linux kernel live usage monitor. It shows many stats, from what file systems people use, to what modules they use, to what hardware they run.

However, the stats are very lopsided and show many Gentoo users and many ReiserFS users, which gives a very inaccurate impression that Gentoo and ReiserFS are popular, or even recommended for usage.

I encourage Linux users (especially Debian and Ubuntu users) to run the KLive client to give a more accurate picture of the machines that run Linux.

About five years ago, my mouse of choice, a Radioshack re-branded trackball, with pretty good precision, two wheels, and half a billion buttons, died. Just flat out quit working. So, I didn’t feel like tracking down a new replacement mouse, so I bought a $5 Compaq optical midnight special, so I can go buy a better mouse later on.

This temporary mouse, originally bought for my Pentium 133, ends up being plugged into my new workstation, the Pentium 3 550. So, you know, the mouse still works, might as well keep using it, right? It’s got two buttons, and a clickable wheel, and it doesn’t suck, right? Wrong.

I finally gut my computer, and put a Sempron 2600+ in it, and did so about 9 months ago. This mouse is still around, and whoever built the mouse (it wasn’t Compaq, they don’t actually build hardware), they did a pretty decent job.

About the time I upgraded my computer, I started playing the classic Quakeworld, the father of all online multiplayer first person shooters, again. And I kept playing, and playing, and playing, and I notice that the sensitivity on my mouse is so bad, I can’t even aim the lightning gun properly… so one day, I got tired of it.

A week ago, I decided to finally order a new mouse, and I chose the Logitech G5. I went from a crappy, old, 200 DPI, three button with wheel mouse to a 2000 DPI, four button with tiltable wheel.

This mouse, my loyal readers, is a monster. It is a God among mice. It is the Cadillac of input devices.

And now on to the review

The Logitech G5 is the next generation flagship product of their gaming mouse line. Here’s what it can do:

• A high resolution sensor (measuring 30×30 pixels) rated at a sensitivity of 2000 DPI allows maximum precision with the included ability to change the DPI (between 2000, 800, and 400) on the fly, using two buttons located below the wheel, without needing to install the included driver.
• The ability to change precision on the fly without needing a driver allows you to do so on literally any platform that supports USB mice, including Linux and OSX.
• The G5 can poll the sensor at 500 times a second on any platform that supports it (such as Windows 2000/XP or Linux) providing increased precision and lower input lag.
• The G5 also uses an expanded protocol allowing higher precision output (16-bit, vs what most mice use, 8-bit or 12-bit). This allows you to use 2000 DPI mode, and move the mouse very fast without precision loss.
• Four buttons, one smooth scrolling wheel, and Logitech’s “TiltWheel” functionality, allowing you to press the wheel left and right to do application specific functions.
• Braided fiber wire covering, to reduce wear and tear on the USB cable.
• A weight cartridge, allowing you to weight your mouse however you want.
• Last, but not least, very smooth feet, allowing the mouse to move smoothly, even if you load the weight cartridge with all 36 grams of weight.

Now, first, I want to actually get to the feet. This is probably the best feature of the mouse. Sure, current and upcoming gaming mice will have 2000 or higher DPI, but these feet, even with all 36 grams loaded into the weight cartridge, glide smoother than any mouse I’ve ever used. This impresses me very much. To put this in perspective, three alkaline AA batteries, or two rechargable AA batteries weigh about 36 grams; that is very heavy.

Now, onto the more important stuff: I earlier mentioned that I couldn’t use Quakeworld’s lightning gun precise enough to be much use due to my mouse. Well, now, with 2000 DPI at my command, I can precision hit fast moving targets at long distances with ease.

Not impressed enough? The lightning gun in Quakeworld requires more precision than any hitscan weapon in any game ever. You thought the Quake3 lightning gun was hard? QW’s is even worse.

Another neat feature is the tilt wheel. You can press the wheel left and right, and generate input events. In Firefox, I can tilt the wheel left, and it goes back in my history; tilting the wheel right goes forward in my history. Other applications can be configured to do other things.

How to get it to work in Linux

As a USB HID device, it already works in Linux; however, to get the full use out of the mouse (such as being able to use the tilt function correctly) edit your/etc/X11/xorg.conf‘s InputDevice section for your mouse to say:

and run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap to update your map. On logging in again, Gnome will ask if you want to load this file: click on the file, click “Load”, and click “Ok”.

See chuck’s comments on May 1st 2008 (on page 5) below, newer X’s require that config.

Summary

Compared to all the mice I’ve used in all my years of computing, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with a mouse. Actually, I didn’t even know it was possible to be happy with a mouse. Most people overlook the importance of a mouse in both gaming and other environments, and now that I have this mouse, I don’t think I can ever go back to ‘normal’ mouse. The only way they could possibly improve this is tighten up the wheel a little bit as to make clicking the middle button and not accidently scrolling a little easier.

Note: I have not reviewed the included drivers or software, as I don’t game in Windows.

Score: 9 out of 10.