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My first introduction to Linux was when one of my younger brothers showed me the selection of BBS and communications software in Slackware 96. Linux looked fascinating, but I confess to not being completely convinced it was as useful as he suggested. A few months later, I discovered FreeBSD. I really liked FreeBSD and ended up buying a copy of the FreeBSD handbook in addition to a Walnut Creek FreeBSD subscription. I ran FreeBSD for a number of years until, in a Stalman-esque fashion, I ran into an issue with a driver for an HP Deskjet 710 printer.
After a bit of reading, I discovered that Red Hat 7.1 supported the printer. At the time, Linux was a really hot commodity and boxed editions of Linux distributions could be found on the shelves of just about every major computer retailer. I picked up Red Hat 7.1 and have never really stopped using Linux since.
Over the years, I’ve tried many different Linux distributions on a lot of different hardware. One of the things I’ve learned is that some Linux distributions tend to work better on particular hardware than others. I’ve also learned that I love “distro-hopping” because I get to better see the breadth of software available. Although Full Circle Magazine is primarily an *buntu-based magazine, knowing what else is out there, and how it compares, can only be a good thing.
It’s 2018, the Lenovo Thinkcentre M57 (MT-M: 6072-C1U) was first announced September 2007, making it over 10 years old. At the time this article is being written, Intel is on its 8th generation of Core i-Series processors. The Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 CPU in the M57 is vastly underpowered compared to an i3-8100 CPU. Core 2 Duos remain the most popular donation to our computer refurbishing project despite the fact that they’re a lot less useful now that technologies like VR are becoming more mainstream.
At our refurbishing project, we’ve standardized on Xubuntu, specifically Xubuntu 16.04 LTS. Every year or two we check out other distributions to see if there’s something that makes them a better fit with our project. Manjaro’s rolling release status is attractive because software tends to be more cutting-edge – without sacrificing stability. Having used FreeBSD for years, I liked the idea of ports/source, but I recognize that not everyone wants to compile software all the time.
I burned a Manjaro 17.1 XFCE ISO image to a DVD using K3B. Initially I tried to write Manjaro to a USB key using MultiWriter, a tool for deploying Linux distributions to USB key, but Manjaro hung on the GRUB screen. Rather than retrying with another tool, I just burned Manjaro at the slowest DVD burn speed (10x on my burner) for optimal compatibility.
If you’ve installed Ubuntu before, the Manjaro installation doesn’t feel a whole lot different, but I had an issue (perhaps because I selected Canadian English) with keyboard mapping; our keyboard ended up mapped as Canadian French. This proved to be slightly problematic when we needed to type the @ symbol and got the “ symbol. Like most distributions, the Manjaro XFCE distribution has keyboard selection software. I changed the keyboard to English US and it solved the keyboard character issues.
Another issue I ran into was Firefox didn’t want to get past our “captive portal.” At our project, we use a captive portal to block machines on our subnet from accessing the Internet without signing in to a web page first - the idea is to prevent malware from getting out to the Internet. Quite a few repairs brought in to our project are Windows systems that have been infected with some kind of malicious software. The captive portal allows us to connect to some of our local read-only shares to fix things before the systems are cleared to access the Internet. To get Manjaro to show the captive portal page, we had to close a tab that normally opens to the page and click a button to open a new tab showing the captive portal page.
Installation from DVD took around 25 minutes. Considering the age of the computer, and the fact that we were installing from DVD media, it seemed like a pretty short time. Manjaro installed with the latest packages, everything was completely up to date.
After installation, the date and time were wrong, and I couldn’t just right-click on the date and time and select properties to change it. I used the cli date command to change the time:
sudo date 0107120118
Sun Jan 7 12:01:00 EST 2018
The date still seemed to display incorrectly as 17:01 in the XFCE taskbar. I discovered that the problem was the XFCE version in Manjaro only seems to display the time to UTC. Another thing I found annoying is that Manjaro XFCE doesn’t have a screen capture tool mapped to the Print Screen key; even MS Windows at least puts the screen into a buffer. Manjaro does install xfce4-screenshooter, it’s just not mapped to the Print Screen key. Perhaps I’m too used to Xubuntu, but it was something I expected to work. Like the version of XFCE on Ubuntu, there’s a configuration tool on the whisker menu that can be used to configure most options. Mapping the xfce4-screenshooter tool to the Print Screen key was a matter of clicking: Whisker menu > All Settings > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts > Add
Xubuntu tends to lean on the “lesser is better” side when it comes to applications that get installed with the default Xubuntu installation. Manjaro installs more software “out-of-the-box.” Software I found in the menu included: Audacious (music playback), Bluetooth Manager, Bulk Rename, Catfish (text search), Engrampa (file archiving), Thunar (file management), Firefox, Gufw Firewall, Gcalculator, GIMP, Gparted, Hexchat, HP Device Manager (for configuring HP printers), HTOP, LibreOffice Base, Calc, Draw, Impress, Math, LightDM configuration, mail reader (Thunderbird), CUPS web interfaces for print management, Manjaro Hello (for accessing documentation), Manjaro notifier settings, Manjaro settings manager, Manjaro user guide, menu editor, mousepad, notes, orage calendar, panel, pidgin, power settings, network settings, pulseaudio volume adjuster, qpdfview, qt v42l tester, a screenshot tool (xfce4-screenshooter), preferred applications, sensor view (CPU set as default), Steam, Task Manager, Thunderbird, Viewnoir, VLC, XFBurn and Window Manager tweaks.
I found it noteworthy that Manjaro included Gufw Firewall, HP Device Manager and Qtv42l tester. I tried the Qtv42l tester with a very old Creative Labs VF-0050 webcam. It crashed almost immediately upon detecting the cam, but the second and third time it ran without issue.
Links to Microsoft Word, Excel, Onenote, Outlook, and Powerpoint Online were also in the XFCE menu. I found it pretty bizarre to see anything Microsoft in a Linux distribution. The links take you to a Microsoft Live login page. If you use the Microsoft Office suite this might be a nice touch.
Manjaro XFCE was pretty stable on 4GB of RAM. Youtube video playback was surprisingly good in windowed mode, but full-screen was choppy - a better video card (than the default onboard) might fix this. Our Thinkcenter M57 was connected to a Samsung 22” LCD display running at 1680×1050. There was no extra video card other than the integrated graphics card on the M57’s motherboard.
I couldn’t find a simple device driver installer like Ubuntu has. I tried typing “device” into the whisker menu, but no luck. I eventually found the additional drivers program in the All Settings menu.
Whisker menu > All Settings > Manjaro Settings Manager > Hardware Configuration
It’s a small thing, but I’ve gotten used to finding items by searching the whisker menu. Searching for a term like “drivers” should intuitively bring up the area of the settings menu to check for proprietary/additional drivers. That said, it only ½ works on stock Ubuntu 17.10 which brings up the Software & Updates program but doesn’t switch to the Additional Drivers tab.
One of the best parts of any Debian-based distribution is the apt package management system. Manjaro’s pacman compares favourably with a lot of shorter commands. Pacman tends to use switches rather than words for arguments. While less memorable, once you know the switches, it’s a lot simpler/quicker. A good source of Pacman tips is the Manjaro wiki: https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Pacman_Tips
One aspect of pacman I really liked was that I was able to run a pacman update while browsing the graphical “Pamac” software installer. I tried to simultaneously install software with Pamac and it sensibly provided a message at the bottom indicating that it was waiting for another program (the cli pacman) to finish installing software.
Pamac’s looks simple, but I’m not sure some of the design decisions are completely intuitive for someone looking at it for the first time. When loaded, Pamac displays software currently installed, it’s not until you click on the Categories tab that you see other software. And there’s no obvious way to install software until you’ve marked a program for actual installation - then a bar appears at the bottom where you can “Apply” the software checked for installation. Once you know this is how Pamac works, it’s easy, but I wouldn’t say it’s intuitive for someone learning how to install software for the first time.
Manjaro 17.1 isn’t noticeably faster than Xubuntu, and for me it lacks some of the polish of Xubuntu, but it does include a more end-user friendly set of software out-of-box, and has a more up-to-date and better selection of software overall. There are lots of positives about Manjaro: it performs well, pacman is awesome, the selection of software is great, software out-of-the-box is very end-user friendly, and it works well on 11 year-old hardware. But some things like the date and keyboard issue make it a bit annoying. Would I recommend it as a first introduction to Linux – perhaps, certainly power users will appreciate all it has to offer, but some of the small issues might make me think twice about installing it as a first Linux distribution for someone new to Linux.