Windows vs. Ubuntu Linux • An Experiment

Here are 10 “test” subjects. I will catalog them below.

Jeanne C.
Occupation: Shop Foreman
Age: 31
HP Pavilion
2G Ram
AMD Sempron
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 SE Graphics
320GB HD
Ethernet Direct from 3m Cable Modem

OS: Windows (XP)
Primary Uses: Word Processor, Browsing the Web
Games: Yahoo Games, Solitaire, Nintendo Wii

Sandra S.
Occupation: Janitorial
Age: 53
Custom Build
2G Ram
AMD Dual Core Athlon XP 3200+
250G HD
Nvidia GeForce 7900
Ethernet to Router, 512k DSL

OS: Windows XP
Primary Uses: DeVry Online Courses, MS Office, Web Browsing, Email, Messenger
Games: Solitaire, Bejeweled, Zuma (Yahoo Games)

Alyssa I.
Occupation: Activities Coordinator.
Age: 33
Compaq Presario
1G Ram
Celeron 1.6 GHz
40G HD
Onboard Intel 740
Ethernet to Router, 512K DSL

OS: Windows XP
Primary Uses: Web Browsing, Email, Messenger, Watch DVD’s.
Games: Solitaire, Spider Solitaire.

Jack K.
Occupation: Electronics Store Manager
Age: 36
Averatec 1575
2G Ram
AMD Turion 64 x2
250G HD
ATI RS690T Integrated Graphics
Wireless to Router, 3m Cable Modem

OS: Windows Vista 32-Bit
Primary Uses: Web Browsing, Email, Messenger, Xvid Playback, Webcam, Photos, iPhone.
Games: Nope.

Joey A.
Occupation: Print Shop Owner / Operator
Age: 42
Mac Pro
16G Ram
8-Core (2) 2.93Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 Processors
2 x 1TB HD
4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB of GDDR3
Ethernet to Router, 3m Cable Modem

OS: Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
Primary Uses: Graphic Design Station, High Resolution Graphics, Adobe CS4 (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign)
Games: Nope.

(This guy spent about $9000 on this computer, 24″ Apple display included… Along with a “Holy Sh*t!” I think they gave him an iPod Touch for free.)

Peggy A.
Occupation: Accountant
Age: 57
Dell Inspiron 1525
2G Ram
Dual Core Pentium T4200 2.0GHz
250G HD
Intel (i9xx) Graphics Adapter
Wireless to Router, 512k DSL

OS: Windows Vista (HP 32-Bit)
Primary Uses: Email, Web-Browsing, MS Office (Word, Excel, Power Point)
Games: Nope

Rose R.
Occupation: T-Shirt Shop, Manager
Age: 36
Sony Vaio CS
2G Ram
2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
400GB HD
Intel 4500MHD
Wireless Router, 512k DSL

OS: Windows Vista (HP, 32-Bit)
Primary Uses: Email, Web-Browsing, Watching DVD’s
Games: Galaga, Solitaire, Yahoo Games.

Nick A.
Occupation: Graphic Designer
Age: 33
Custom Built Something…
1G Ram
3.0 GHz Pentium 4
160G HD
Nvidia GeForce 4 MX
Ethernet to Router, 5m Cable Modem

OS: Windows Vista XP – SP3
Primary Uses: Email, Web-Browsing, Running a Large Format Vinyl Printer (Work Related), Design Adobe CS4

(Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign)
Games: Not on this Computer.

Nick K.
Occupation: Electronics Store Sales Manager
Age: 22
Slapped Together (Old Faithful)
1G Ram
1.6 GHz Duron
120G HD
Onboard Intel 740
Ethernet to Router, 5m Cable Modem

OS: Windows XP (No SP’s at all)
Primary Uses: Web Browsing, Email
Games: Xbox 360.

Brett J.
Occupation: Car Audio Installer
Age: 31
Dell Dimension 2400
512M Ram
2.0 GHZ Celeron
80G HD
Onboard Intel 82845G
Dial-Up

OS: Windows (XP – SP1)
Primary Uses: Web Browsing, Email, iPod
Games: PS2

So to start we have:

Jeanne C. – Uses it to check her MYSpace in the evenings, and chat on messenger. Does some web-browsing as well. Never uses a mail client program, only checks her mail within a web-browser. Board and card games on Yahoo mostly, sometimes throws a mean game of bowling on the Wii. Jeannie will do a Wubi Install.

Sandra S. – Thinks she knows everything there is to know about computers. She truly doesn’t know a damn thing. Comes up with the lamest definitions of how she solved certain problems on her PC. “I must have downloaded a virus, so I defragged the drive, it that fixed it.” DeVry Online actually told her that she “ABSOLUTELY CANNOT” use any other OS besides XP. Sandra will be running off of a LiveCD.

Alyssa I. – Uses her computer to browse the web, and check her email through the web-browser. She’ll kick back every so often and throw a DVD in to watch. Alyssa will do a Wubi Installation.

Jack K. - Windows Power User. This guy knows the ins and outs of Windows. Spent some time building his own PC’s back in the day, over clocking processors and such, but has relinquished that hobby because it took too much of his time. He knows how to milk every last bit of performance out of a PC. Jack went dual boot via GRUB on his Laptop.

Joey A. – Never bought a PC in his life. Hard Core Mac User. Owns a Mac-Book Air for portability, and bought the beefiest computer I’ve ever heard of for processing large size graphics. Because of the primarily business use of this computer, Joey ran a LiveCD.

Peggy A. – Mom knows somewhat how to work a PC. She calls me when things go wrong, like not being able to connect to the Wireless Router. And I respond with “Flip the Wi-Fi Switch on your laptop, mom.” Mom is doing a Wubi Installation.

Rose R. – My original test subject! Not computer-savvy, at all. Rose is about as computer illiterate (to coin the phrase) as your great-grandmother. If asked what she is running on her system, she would respond with “I don’t know, it says ‘Vaio’ on it.” She asks questions like “If I got a bigger hard drive, would my computer run faster?” and “How do I get more hertz?” Rose did a Wubi Install.

Nick A. – Only uses his computer at work for work. No other apps are on his PC except his design software, and proprietary RIP software. Because of the nature of the computer, Nick is running a LiveCD.

Nick K. – Only for Email, Facebook, and browsing the web for product information. Old Faithful is what he calls the PC, because it’s pushing 6 years old, has nothing special about it, and just keeps on a-chuggin’ along. Nick’s a bit of a turd, so he would only run LiveCD.

Brett J. - For a joke, we call his computer “Brawny” because of the amount of crap it seems to pick up. Brett doesn’t care what he does or where he goes on the internet, and refuses to use a virus scanner, even AVG. His friends have told him that any free software is spyware, and he believes it. He constantly has viruses, spyware, adware, funkware, crapware, and more goofy little utilities on his machine than you can possibly imagine. Brett ran a Wubi installation.

Here we go.

Jeannie C.

Jeannie is Quite happy with Ubuntu. All of her web activities could be accomplished with Firefox just as easily as Internet Explorer 7.

Brett J. This was almost done just for the pure comedy of it all. But I wanted to find someone who has problem after problem with Windows, and see if could be eliminated. And to much surprise, it was. Completely eliminated. He did still suffer from the familiarity complex, and wanted things to be the same, just different.

MTR – Network Diagnostic Tool

Traceroute

You may have used traceroute in a Micrsoft OS or in Linux.  It’s quite simple and can tell you a few things about the connection between you and any other device on the internet.   Just type in traceroute <domain name> and hit enter.  You should see something like the following.

The second column lists the name (or IP) of the next device interface, and then the next column it’s IP address.  This goes on until you hit the destination.  All the while you are given the time it has taken to send the ICMP message to each device and then the return message.  If you notice, the further away the device is, the longer it takes.  But not always, as the last two devices show ~66ms while #11 had ~82ms to ~87ms.

If you were having problems on the internet and it seemed there were a bottleneck somewhere, this nice little tool can help you identify if one exists.  Perhaps if one of those above was returning ~70ms and then the next device gave you ~250ms.   That’s a noticeable difference, and it could indicate the the link between those two devices has maxed it’s bandwidth at that particular time.   Not that you could do anything about it.

MTR

So what if the problem were intermittent, or traceroute did not show any problems because perhaps the chokepoint is experiencing intermittent bursts of data?  Enter MTR, the big brother to traceroute.  MTR (or My Trace Route) can show you a constant display of each link and how it’s holding up.  Take a look.

If you have MTR installed (aptitude install mtr), run it as you would traceroute.  i.e. MTR YAHOO.COM

Click to see full image

The default display looks much like a regular traceroute display, aside from the data is constantly changing and there’s a few more columns of information.  The data changes due to the fact that it’s constantly getting data for you, no once, but constantly until you quit.

After the hostname, you are given columns telling you how much packet loss you get.  How many packets were sent.  Then you get to see how the pings are doing.  You get what the last time it took for the response, the average time, the best it’s been to that particular host and the worst time.  You also get a standard deviation.   Not exactly sure on this one yet, but lower seems better.

As you can see from the example above, once we went from device #4 to  #5, the pings doubled and then from # 5 to #6, the pings doubled again.   The first time it doubled, it’s not too bad because that’s an increase in 30ms whereas the second jump was a good 72+ ms.

Not that I’m saying here’s a bottleneck, by no means.  However, if anywhere between me and nandomedia.com there would be one, that’s my first suspect.   This trace is pretty simple anyway.  If I were to see much larger numbers then I would be concerned.  Again, not that I can do anything about it, but at least I know it’s not my network, unless the problem was on my network, then I’ll point fingers.

Click to see full image

Hit the D key.  Here you can change the display.   You get a nice view of the packets as they are returned.  This first view does not offer much, so hit the D key again.   DO IT!!!  You’ll like it.  At least better than this view.

Click to see full image

Now this is much more informational.  On the bottom of the screen is a scale.  It shows you what each dot, number and letter up above mean.  The period is 7ms and as you can see from my PC to my router, that’s what it should be.  The next hop is to my ISP and there’s 3’s all along there and the other 2 routers at that location.  The 3 is less than 54ms, but since it’s not a 2, it’s greater than 29ms.  You see an ‘a’ and a ‘b’ up there too.  So the return just from my ISP had a ping return over 54ms and one over 120ms just in these 57 pings.

The display is nice because it scrolls nicely to the left and you can see if there’s just a burp as in the ‘c’ at location #9 or if there’s a serious problem.  And if you need to resize your terminal window, MTR will adjust what it displays with ease.  Above it’s got room to show the last 57 pings, but if I widened it, it would quickly change accordingly.

So, as traceroute is handy, it’s not constant, it gives a snapshot and things may be fine at that moment.  Ping is okay, but does not provide very much info.   MTR is the all around tool to replace both.

Web Server

Web Pages

So now you’ve got an older computer on your home or business network with Linux running on it.  It’s not doing much, perhaps monitoring your network.  What else can you do?  Oh, as I find every day, the possibilities are endless.

One thing that most may think is hard to do, is set up a web server.  Yes, you can serve up web pages without having to sign up for a web-hosting service.  Do it yourself.

You can have them available on the net even if you don’t have a static IP address or even a domain name, just by using a dynamic dns service.  Or you can keep them available just to your private network.  Each user can have their own section to themselves.  I use one of mine for testing before moving them to whatever web hosting server that hosts the working site.  I have another one just for my personal site that I share with family & friends.

APACHE

Apache

One of the most famous of Apache is Geronimo, but we are not going to be discussing that Apache, but rather the most widely distributed and used web server software available.  It’s no accident that it holds this top spot, it not only works, but does a great job.  Much like myself.

Get it.  Install it.

Now if you’ve got Debian or Ubuntu (or derivitive) you can install with:  aptitude install apache2.  If you have a distro such as Red Hat, Fedora or Mandrake, you can use: yum install apache2.

I’m not going to go over the whole installation and configuration process here, but a wealth of that knowledge can be found here.  However, once you get the installation completed, you’ll be able to host your own web pages.

Additional Web Apps

Now that you’ve got your Web Server up and running, you can do so much more.  For starters, you can install Nagios for keeping tabs on your network.  You can install webalizer to keep stats on your web server.  I installed coppermine for serving up picture galleries (although, this also involved having PHP and mySQL being installed as well).  The possibilities are never ending.  Anything you’ve seen on the net, you can pretty much find an open source app to add to your own server.

apt-get or aptitude

Installing Software

When you install software for windows, there is many ways to go about that.  You can have a CD-ROM with the program and install directly from that.  You can download a zip file, extract the files and install the extracted program.  You can download an installer that will then download the necessary files off the net.

With Linux, there is also a variety of ways.  One of these is using apt-get or aptitude.  You may have seen on the internet instructions on installing some software within debian or ubuntu where someone gave the command apt-get install <program>.  The alternative is to replace apt-get with aptitude.  What’s the difference?

From the users point of view, there is no difference.  However confirmed reliable sources have brought out the fact that aptitude will handle dependencies much better.

To quote IRONWALKER from the linuxquestions.org forum:

Aptitude is said to deal with dependencies better than apt-get. For example, say you install a package which automatically installs some library packages because it depends on them. When you remove this package with apt-get, it won’t remove the libraries this package installed, although they aren’t used anymore.

When you install that package with aptitude and remove it with aptitude, aptitude ‘detects’ that those library packages aren’t used anymore and will therefore automatically remove them.

To sum up, aptitude will clean things up when you remove a program.  It will also check to make sure no other program needs the files it wants to remove before doing so.

The thing to keep in mind is that if you chose to use one over the other, be consistent.

Graphical Interface

Synaptic Package Manager

For those who are running Gnome desktop interface (or KDE), you can use Synaptic.  This nice program will divide up the available programs into categories for you.  You can even search for whatever type of app you are interested in.

If you prefer to hang out in the CLI, you can issue aptitude by itself on the command line and get this interface.

aptitude package manager

It’s fairly easy and similar to the Synaptic Package Manager.  You can search for applications you’re interested in, you can install packages and uninstall them.  Not only can you navigate using your arrow keys on your keyboard, it also responds to your mouse.  Click on the menu above, or an item to the left to open it up.

This is one sweet app you should familiarize yourself if you like to move around the CLI, especially if you have a system setup without a GUI.

Of course, if you know the name of an application, you can just command line it and not enter the package manager.  For instance, you can just enter sudo aptitude install <filename>.  If you are unsure if an app exists, or perhaps it’s name, use aptitude search <filename>.    AND, as if that’s not enough, if you know just part of the name, enter that in.

The following command yields these results:  aptitude search blend

p   blender                                                     – Very fast and versatile 3D modeller/renderer
p   blender-ogrexml                                  – Blender Exporter for Ogre
p   enblend                                                    – Tool for compositing images
p   kwin-style-blended                             – a window decoration theme for KDE

Surprise

If you do bring up the aptitude package manager and find yourself in need of a little time killer, hit Ctrl-T and then P.

This works on my Debian system, but on my Ubuntu box it drops me back to the command line with the following message: “Ouch!  Got SIGABRT, dying..”   –  Weird.  I’ll have to figure that out another day.