Penultimate Reality

It’s yet another epsiode in my ever-continuing saga of switching between Linux distributions every few months. This time, I’m back to Ubuntu, and I’m running version 8.10 on all of my desktop machines. For the most part, it’s been a great experience with few problems. At this point (after a few weeks), I barely even notice the difference to my previous Gentoo setup. However, one issue just keeps driving me to the brink of insanity: the sound system.

Contrary to the experiences of most, this is one area on Linux that I’ve usually had a great experience with. My Sound Blaster Audigy card is capable of mixing several separate audio streams in hardware. No annoying blocking of the sound device. I’ve never had a need for the various software mixing solutions, such as ESD, aRts, ALSA’s dmix, and most recently, PulseAudio.

However, since switching from my well-functioning Gentoo installation to Ubuntu, it’s been just nothing but trouble. Applications using the sound system (Pidgin, mplayer, Amarok) seem to randomly freeze and need to be restarted. After having some mixer issues with mplayer, I noticed that applications seem to be using PulseAudio by default, even if I’ve configured them to use ALSA. (The default ALSA device seems to be going through PulseAudio for reasons I can’t figure out. Either that, or through some other goofy ALSA plugins. It’s definitely not going straight to the hardware, though, and whatever it’s using has its own independent mixer.) The whole thing is awfully voodoo-like. If there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s computer voodoo.

At this point, I’ve managed to make mplayer behave by forcing it to use the hardware directly (-ao alsa:device=hw=0), but that doesn’t help the other applications. Amarok, however, at least has the advantage of also having had this problem in Gentoo, so it seems more likely to be a bug in Amarok, xine, or even the audio driver.

So, it seems that I have little need for PulseAudio at all, but since it’s depended on by the ubuntu-desktop package (which I prefer to keep installed), it’s not going anywhere. It’s issues like this that make me want to run back to Gentoo, despite shortcomings of its own.

It’s always something, isn’t it. A bug-free environment would just be too much to ask.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with Debian sid in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is now my virtual machine of choice) for reasons that are entirely beyond me. That said, it looks like it could be potentially useful as a desktop system. I only worry about what kind of breakage I might experience. It’d be nice to get some feedback on perhaps some best practices for maintaining a sid-based system. But I guess you might want some background first…

I’ve become increasingly bored with maintaining my Gentoo machines. This culminated with me reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop a few weeks ago, At this point, I don’t even notice except that I am no longer repeatedly compiling packages every day. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that package versions are sometimes a little outdated (which is to be expected, given Ubuntu’s six month update cycle). This led me to examine what versions of packages are in the sid repository of Debian. As it turns out, it’s quite updated, with new versions of packages appearing very quickly. It’s led me to believe it might be all right for a desktop system.

My desktop system is rapidly becoming obsolete, and it slowly feels slower and slower as time goes on. (It’s using an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ which was originally purchased in late 2002.) Keeping the copy of Gentoo I have running on it up to date is increasingly becoming a dull procedure, and given my penchant for micromanagement… In any case, I’m slowly coming around to consider installing Debian on it, though I don’t know if I want to risk breaking it. After all, it isn’t broken, and I intend on replacing it within the next year. Maybe I just play around too much…

I could always just install Linux from Scratch. That’d be great for a laugh.

(By the way, if any of you happen to be looking for shared web hosting, consider buying from me at www.calindora.com. Why, you ask? I got tired of seeing hosting companies (probably dishonestly?) offering 600GB or 34TB or whatever amounts of disk space they’re claiming to offer these days. I feel bad for anyone who actually intends to try to use all that space.)

As a long-time Gentoo user, I notice that every time I try a new distribution for a short while (in this case Ubuntu), I find myself eventually with an urge to switch back. It never takes more than a month, really. It’s kind of strange, but I suppose I’ve become attached to Gentoo in some weird way. The short of it is that I started feeling the urge again today. (My desktop and server still run Gentoo, so they’re not even an issue. But then there’s my laptop.)

Don’t get me wrong. Ubuntu is a fine distribution, and everything I said in my previous post still stands. It just never quite feels quite right, however. The straw that broke the camel’s back in this case was that I went to install a particular game and the version in Ubuntu’s repositories was slightly old. I know the newer version will be available in just a few short months, but there’s something comforting about being able to access what I want almost immediately in Gentoo.

It’s looking increasingly likely that I’ll make the switch back to Gentoo in a day or two, but there will definitely be a few things I miss about Ubuntu. First, upgrades so far have been a breeze. There haven’t been that many, but they installed quickly and simply. I’ve never experienced a major upgrade, however, and I’m not sure I ever want to. One advantage of Gentoo in this respect is that the upgrades get spread out a bit instead of thrown all at you at once. You have time to explore each upgrade as it comes in, with whatever new features it happens to bring. With the Ubuntu way, thousands of packages will be upgraded, and I’ll have very little idea just what changed. The system may completely change under me with no transition. It’s an unsettling feeling.

Also, NetworkManager has been nice, but Gentoo’s networking isn’t completely awful, and actually works reasonably well at this point. I’ll also miss not having to configure a kernel. It’s not difficult, but there are a lot of options, many of which I have little need to see.

Other than that, there isn’t much I’ll miss about Ubuntu. When it comes down to it, both Ubuntu and Gentoo are Linux operating systems and the differences are less important than one might think. The one point that Gentoo has going for it is that I’ve never switched away because it didn’t feel right; only to try new things.

Maybe I’m wrong, but at least I won’t feel so unsettled.