Full Circle Magazine FR

As a computer refurbisher, I work with used equipment. In fact, until December of last year, I worked almost exclusively with used equipment. I say almost because I bought a new fanless PCIe video card and 2TB hard drive for our XBMC media center over the past couple of years. December marked the first time since 2001 that a system I built contained almost all new parts - and what a difference! The system I built contains: an AMD A8-5600K 3.6GHz Quad-Core Processor (overclockable to 3.9GHz), a Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-D3H Micro ATX FM2 Motherboard, G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory, an Antec Three Hundred Two ATX Mid Tower Case, a Corsair 430 watt power supply unit, and the single used part a 250GB Seagate Hard Drive. Compared to the Core 2 Duos and my lovely wife’s AMD AM3+ quad core from several years ago, the new system is a dream. An average DVD rip+encode takes about 13-15 minutes. I can actually open 5 or 6 photographs in GIMP without waiting and waiting. Best of all, it’s one of the quietest systems we have in the house. It’s been a busy several months at home and work, so I never really got much of a chance to tinker with the new system other than putting Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon 64-bit on it and doing a few small tasks. Over the past several months, I’ve been finding small annoyances with Mint, so I decided to check out some other Linux distributions, the first of which was PinguyOS.

PinguyOS claims it’s designed to “look good, work well, and, most importantly, to be simple to use.” The PinguyOS website suggests that it’s designed to appeal to people who are new to the Linux world. I’ll let you decide whether the claims are true after reading my experience with it. I chose to boot the live environment before installing. PinguyOS booted up just fine except it detected my screen as if it was a 1440×1024 (a weird resolution). I had to mouse around to access all areas of the desktop. During the install I also had to replug in the receiver for my wireless keyboard, which stopped working the moment the PinguyOS Live DVD loaded. Once I installed the proprietary drivers, things looked and worked at a normal 1920×1080 resolution. PinguyOS looks pretty cool - there are 2 docks, one on the left and one at the bottom (Docky), plus Conky on the right side of the screen for loads of system information. PinguyOS uses Webilder, a program that changes wallpaper from Flickr based on tags (or Webshots based on a webshots account) so the wallpaper is changing constantly. The default Conky theme looks good and is well implemented.

PinguyOS 12.04 (the version available on the web site downloads section) included the broken/defunct mediabuntu repository. It also included a repository with an invalid/mismatched security certificate. This wouldn’t be a big deal for someone with Debian/Ubuntu experience, but new users might get frustrated trying to understand why their Linux updates are broken. Another annoyance was the amount of network traffic (which ironically was more pronounced thanks to the cool looking conky setup). Imagine for a second those limited to using a pay-per-gigabyte connection limited to so many gigabytes; extra traffic isn’t what these people want/expect. I decided to look into the network traffic problem and pinned it down to webilder downloading images and the fact I had Firefox open. You might think, okay what’s the big deal unless you’re streaming a video? The big deal is the Extensions, no less than: Adblock Plus, the British English dictionary, DownloadHelper, Download Statusbar, DownloadThemAll, Email This, Flash Aid, Novell Moonlight, Plaintext Links, Rehost Image, Resurrect pages, Search Preview, Shareaholic, SkipScreen, Speeddial, Ubuntu Firefox modifications, YoutubeIT, and Addon Compatibility add-ons were installed. This doesn’t even include the plugins which include: the DivX plugin, Gnome Shell integration, the Google Talk plugin, a video accelerator for Google Talk, the IcedTea plugin, MozPlugger, geko-mediaplayer, the QuickTime and Realplayer plugins, Shockwave Flash, and finally a Windows Media player plugin. Did I mention the included Firefox was version 13.0.1?

I know the feeling of wanting to help new computer users. There was a time when our organization put together systems and installed lots of “useful” extra software (SuperTux 2, LinCity, half a dozen other games, plus a dozen other programs). What we found out after several months was that the software tended to slow the systems down more than it helped people discover useful FLOSS. The Drupal CMS mantra of not going crazy with modules seems to apply equally when installing software or plug-ins. It might be nice to have that extra functionality, but you risk performance. The same rule applies to the interface. Docky looks great, but it crashed a lot while I was doing normal work. I might expect this kind of behaviour on a machine with low resources, but not on something with a fair amount of CPU power and 16GB of RAM. Yes, I only had to run Docky to get the docks back, but who wants to do that six times in an hour? The upside of PinguyOS is the impressive collection of interesting software. The games menu is sparse but includes djl and PlayOnLinux, a wine front-end to help play Windows games on Linux. I tried Diablo III and it failed to install. This is by no means the fault of PinguyOS, but I can see some users getting frustrated at this point. The graphics menu includes several programs including DiscWrapper (a cover designer for discs), Evince document viewer, LibreOffice Draw, a viewer for SONY ebook files, Pinta image editor, Rapid photo downloader, Shotwell (for organizing photographs), Simple Scan (scanning), and Webilder desktop. If you’re used to Ubuntu and Mint, these choices are a pleasant deviation from the typically installed applications. I missed GIMP, but checking out Pinta made me think again about what to install as an image editor. GIMP still feels more polished, but Pinta looks good too. I liked the fact that PinguyOS includes software I don’t regularly use. While I’m not fond of the webilder software it’s one more tool in the arsenal of tools when someone asks me “how can I automatically change my wallpaper in Linux?”

The Internet menu also boasts an impressive array of software including: Deluge Bittorrent client, Desktop Sharing preferences, Dropbox, Empathy (instant messaging), Firefox, Gwibber, Mumble, PS3 Media Server, Remmina remote desktop client, Skype, Teamviewer 7, Thunderbird mail client, and Xchat. I’m not trying to slag PinguyOS but if you’re at all concerned about privacy, you probably don’t want to run either Dropbox or Skype. Also, in my experience, Teamviewer only tends to work with clients using the same version of Teamviewer. Teamviewer 9 is the current version. I didn’t test to see if version 7 worked, but I expect it likely does – provided you connect to other version 7 clients. Missing from the Internet menu is an FTP client. Firefox, Gwibber and Empathy are all pretty standard choices and I always install Remmina on any machine, it’s a great choice for a remote desktop client. PS3 media server is useful if you want to stream your media to DLNA/UPnP clients (XBMC or UPnP software on a tablet for example). The office menu includes Calibre ereader, Evince document viewer, the standard LibreOffice software, and wxBanker Finance Manager. WxBanker is sparse compared to GNUCash, but I like the fact that it’s something I might have not checked out normally. I was surprised to see Lightscribe software included in PinguyOS. This isn’t the text-only Lightscribe software, but a version that lets you burn pictures plus text on Lightscribe CD/DVDs (provided you also have a Lightscribe DVD-Writer). Very cool.

The sound and video menu includes Arista transcoder, Brasero disc burner, Cheese photobooth, Clementine music player, DeVede DVD/CD creator, gtkpod for downloading from iPods, Handbrake video encoder, OpenShot video editor, PS3 media server, Sound recorder, VLC and XBMC. When I put a DVD in, PinguyOS prompted me to select the software to open the DVD with. I chose VLC and the DVD displayed for a brief moment before returning back to the VLC interface. I know enough to run /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh (to install DVD decryption software), but new users whom PinguyOS is targeted at may not. I also needed to choose the correct device for my Blueray player (/dev/dvd doesn’t work). Of course, distributions like Ubuntu are no different in this respect, but, after I installed libdvdcss, VLC behaved really badly when I tried opening one disc. Deleting the .config/vlc and the .local/share/vlc folders didn’t seem to fix the problem. I thought like a Windows user would, and tried rebooting. None of these solutions solved the DVD playback problem. I haven’t had a problem with VLC on other distributions. When VLC didn’t work for me I thought I’d try some of the other sound and video applications. Cheese also had issues, it didn’t detect the Logitech webcam I was previously using with Cheese under Linux Mint. I wish I could say these were the only problems, but after opening a few programs, conky was showing the CPUs at 100% usage and PinguyOS was working sluggishly.

Like the other menus, the system tools menu shows a lot of programs installed. Again, I like the effort undertaken to provide some interesting tools. I’ve heard of, but not used Bleachbit before. Bleachbit clears cache files, temporary files and discards various junk files. There are approximately 17 tools (excluding the sub-menus). PinguyOS uses Ubuntu Software Centre as the graphical package manager and Linux Mint Updater to handle updates. I like the choice of Mint updater since it lists the severity of each update. The Ubuntu Software Centre worked without a hitch, but, as I mentioned before, Mint Updater had some issues because of the broken repository and the repository with an invalid security certificate. Forums for PinguyOS are located at: http://forum.pinguyos.com/. New users might look to forums for answers, but as a refurbisher who has worked with a lot of new Linux users, it’s less likely – unless the person has a lot of interest in the system itself (most just want things to work). PinguyOS also maintains an IRC chat channel #PinguyOS on FreeNode.

So is PinguyOS just another abandoned distribution? Absolutely not, the latest from the PinguyOS blog shows work done on version 14.04. The blog also shows work done for version 13.10, but the downloads page shows only 12.04. Even with updates, PinguyOS 12.04 seems to be less stable than running Xubuntu or Linux Mint. Given my experience, going crazy installing gobs of software on systems before I know some things are going to be broken. There are lots of cool things to be said about PinguyOS, the software selection is great, the look is cool, and it’s pretty complete as a desktop distribution. But to me the stability issues (docky, vlc), broken repositories, lack of support for my common webcam under cheese, and resource hogging (100% CPUs, extra network traffic from webilder and Firefox plugins) detract from the overall usefulness of PinguyOS as a new user distribution. Don’t get me wrong, I think PinguyOS is pretty cool, but I wouldn’t use it as my default distribution. My search for a new distribution continues…