In the spirit of humanity I’ve decided to kick off the column with a focus on the ever-popular desktop operating system, Ubuntu in my Linux for human beings article.

In only two short years and millions of users worldwide Ubuntu is a major player in the Linux world and Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has been named one of the ‘Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2007′ by Linux Magazine. It was selected as one of the companies best positioned in the coming year to spur Linux and Open Source adoption, while delivering on the immediate needs of the market.

The Debian Wiki was created solely because I needed something to help me keep track of what I was doing when setting the server up and as such it has developed into a whole series of tutorials if you will. There is a lot of documentation out there for Debian however it is difficult to make that documentation work for the new (soon-to-be) stable release of Debian 4 a.k.a. Etch and the Debian Wiki aims to fix this problem.

Every single HOWTO on the Debian Wiki has had to be tailored to work with Etch and as such I hope that others can find value when needing to setup a similar item on their Debian based server. The Server Category items on the Wiki are confusing to the layman however as time goes on I want to have a whole bunch of Desktop related items so that people who’ve never used Linux before can actually see that it’s not that difficult to operate!

So head on over to http://linux.justinhartman.com and give me your thoughts!

In Ubuntu and Debian it’s not as simple as configuring a shortcut or keymap and it requires a little bug-fix to get it working just as I’m used to it coming from OS X. Here’s a little step-by-step HOW-TO on how to achieve this on both an iBook G4 keyboard as well as the standard Apple USB keyboard.

iBook G4 Keyboard (I guess this will work on most Apple notebooks)

Create a file in your home directory called .Xmodmap by following these steps.

In a terminal window type:

cd $home
vim .Xmodmap

In this new file add these two lines:

keycode 115 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L

From your terminal window:

xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

Restart your computer and the next time you log in to Ubuntu or Debian it will prompt you to load your .Xmodmap file. Select it from the right side of the window and move it to the left and then load it. Once done your left apple key is now a ctrl key.

Standard Apple USB Keyboard

Follow the exact same steps as above but instead of inserting two lines in the .Xmodmap insert the following:

remove Control = Control_L
remove Mod4 = Meta_L
keycode 0x25 = Meta_L
keycode 0x73 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L Control_L
add Mod4 = Meta_L

The second example above will make both your Apple command keys control keys, disabling your control key completely and adds a bit more functionality for the larger Apple keyboards.

For both of these instructions you can also go into your keyboard shortcuts in gnome and change Alt+Tab application switching to Ctrl+Tab to allow you to switch between applications using your command+tab keys.

Mark the problem I am having at the moment is the whole ethics behind Ubuntu and what it actually does support. The concept or idea you came up with initially for Ubuntu was to provide a free desktop for all users in the world and make computing and technology more accessible to the people.

A recent decision however by the dev team at Canonical to drop PPC as a supported distribution concerns me. It concerns me in that it would appear there is no long term revenue in supporting PPC as a technology and it has seriously made me wonder just how true the idealism of Ubuntu really is.

I myself run Ubuntu Edgy on two PCs and my iBook G4 but to know that Ubuntu for PPC will ultimately be turned over to the community to support is a growing concern for me. My initial reaction was to move over to Debian but in chatting on the forum I have decided to, where possible, get involved in the PPC community because clearly there is a market and one that needs supporting.

While I realise that PPC doesn’t provide much commercial value for Ubuntu does this then not go against everything that Ubuntu is supposed to be in providing greater accessibility to the world? I’m curious to know your thoughts because I am certainly damaged in my perception by this recent decision.

Low an behold I received a reply email from Mark this afternoon stating the following.

From: Mark Shuttleworth
To: info@grabble.co.za
Subject: PPC support
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:49:46 +0000

Justin,

It’s difficult to make a philanthropic case for PPC over other architectures. Most people with a PPC desktop or laptop have multiple devices and can afford either to purchase an OS, or to contribute to a free OS like Ubuntu. We see relatively little community contribution, rapidly declining installs (if you read the spec, the details are there). So would it be better to spend three people making the x86 desktop better, or keeping the PPC desktop alive?

At this stage, I think the better philanthropic argument is in favour of improving the desktop of 98% of our users. If you are willing to become one of the community members that it will take to keep PPC officially-supported, then please make your voice heard in the distro mailing lists and channels, sign up, contribute time, make it happen.

Mark

I first became aware that Ubuntu were thinking about dropping PowerPC support about a week ago by reading this forum thread. There was also a petition to save PowerPC support which I signed but despite the lengthy forum pleas and signatures to save PowerPC the decision was made by the developers of Ubuntu.

My initial reaction after reading the initial forum post was mixed with sadness and anger. I replied on the forum saying:-

Really sad to read the PowerPC review as I have only recently installed Edgy on my 1.33Ghz iBook G4 PPC. The fact that PPC is supported by Ubuntu was a huge driving force in migrating over to Linux from OSX and it’s simply disappointing even the notion of discontinuing it.

If I wanted to run Ubuntu off a silly PC I would have done so but reading this now I have to seriously reconsider my options.

I’ve also managed to mess up my file system permissions and was considering a re-install but now I’m actually considering just moving fully over to Debian.

Good old Shuttleworth, being a South African like myself, was another factor why I wanted Ubuntu so bad but I say screw it. If they don’t want to support PPC then I’ll go where I am wanted.

A little harsh I agree but still it’s a decision that has tarnished my whole idea of Ubuntu. I realise full well that PowerPC make up a minuscule minority of Ubuntu users and we ultimately provide no revenue source to Canonical however it was not what I was expecting so soon after my migration. I had these grandiose plans of growing with Ubuntu but now I’m just not sure which direction to go.

I’m no stranger to Linux and have tried a few installations on my personal machines, some of which include Mandrake 10.0, Suse 9 and of course Ubuntu 5.04 (which only lasted about a week on my machine).

I also have experience working on CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat but these are all on a server level as they currently power my various web servers running my sites.

That all said Linux has never really stayed very long on any machine that I own personally and I relate this quite simply to the fact of cross-software capabilities. Now while it has been historically difficult to run various Windows and Apple software on Linux I have found lately that the substitute software available really competes very well with the “money-grabbing” proprietary software giants.

But the key issue has always been that Linux (or GNU/Linux as it should be called) has always been very temperamental for those newbies that have no idea what they are doing on Linux.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to re-install a Linux distro because I quite simply messed it up but I decided to move to Ubuntu because as their pay-off line reads Ubuntu is “Linux for Human beings”.

Within about 20 minutes the installation of my new Ubuntu software was complete and once my Apple rebooted I had every tool necessary to start surfing the web, work with all my office files and download email. It’s a desktop in a box and requires very little additional software for most end users and I can honestly see why people are using it.

My confidence in Ubuntu really came to fruition when I decided to install Ubuntu on my PC at work. I have been using it for some time now at work and it has really been a distro that just works. I have found it can be quite buggy and does tend to crash more than Apple’s OSX software but because I work a lot with servers I like the file structure and the ability to test things out on my machine before deploying them to a server.

No doubt I’ll be having fun the next while setting my system up and I’ll give you an update on my progress with time.