New Linuxes, Old Problems
Several new distributions make communicating with a Windows network more difficult than it should be.Matthew Newton, PC World
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I have had a frustrating few weeks with Linux. I've lost count of the number of installations I've done, and I don't want to think about the number of hours I've lost to troubleshooting. I'm used to having a far happier, far more productive relationship with my Linux boxes.
Two forces in particular have conspired lately to make my computing life hell: First is the fact that I've been working with distributions I'm not very familiar with; second, I need to work with the Windows network here at PC World HQ. I've done a lot of hitting my head against the wall, meeting with some success and some failure. Now it's the time of the month when I get to tell you all about it, in the hope that you might save yourself some head banging of your own.
First Up: SuSE 9.2
One set of problems began when I gave SuSE Linux Professional 9.2 a test drive. SuSE is the venerable German distribution that is now owned by Novell. Historically, SuSE has been very KDE-centric; but that's beginning to change, given that Novell also owns Ximian, the company that employs the bulk of the Gnome desktop's brain trust. I was keen to see how well Gnome 2.6 works in SuSE 9.2, and also wanted to reacquaint myself with the distro in general.
SuSE's installation and configuration program, YAST2 ("Yet Another Setup Tool" 2), is the most flexible and powerful Linux setup routine I've ever seen. It looks like a million bucks, too. Newbies, however, should beware: This is not the type of stripped-down, four-click installation you find with Xandros Desktop, but a multifaceted, lengthier process that allows a power user to tweak all sorts of key system settings before the OS boots for the first time. Longtime Linux users will find the "include all-devel packages" option especially helpful: Selecting this option ensures that all the code libraries necessary to compile fresh software will be installed on the system, saving you the time and trouble of hunting them down yourself. Nifty.
Installation takes a good long while: SuSE comes on five CDs, and it tends to install far more packages than your average distribution. I added to my wait by opting to install both the KDE and Gnome desktops.
A Promising Start With KDE
SuSE's KDE desktop: Not the rolling hills of Windows XP, but bucolic enough.
Logging in to SuSE's KDE 3.3.0 was shocking--in a good way. I usually can't stand the look-and-feel of KDE; as I've copped to in this space many times before, I'm a Gnome man. But SuSE's got a KDE desktop that I could settle down in: nice bright icons, beautiful fonts, a very well-organized start menu. I clicked the "Network Browsing" icon on the desktop and was delighted to discover that, after supplying a network name and password, I could browse the machines on PC World's Windows network. Great! Now, would everything be as peachy on the Gnome side of the system?
Alas, no. Logging in to Gnome 2.6.0, I found no way to access the network. The familiar "Browse Filesystem" and "Network Servers" selections that are a staple of any healthy Gnome start menu were missing. Being a savvy Gnome user, I know that the brute force way to access the network in this case is to open a terminal window, type nautilus--browser and enter network:/// in the resulting Nautilus window. So I gave that a shot--and lo, there appeared a "Windows Network" icon. But double-clicking it just led to a series of blank windows and unhelpful error messages. Nuts.
SuSE's Gnome provides a Help menu at the top of the screen, so I clicked there and selected User's Manual. Oddly, the KDE Help Center launched, displaying a "Gnome 2.6 User Guide" that I've not seen in the Fedora or Mandrake versions of Gnome 2.6 I'm familiar with. I poked around that document a bit, and it told me that I should be able to find a "Windows Network" icon in the "Computer" folder on the Gnome desktop. It wasn't there.
Welcome to Troubleshooting Hell
Logging back in to KDE, I decided to try to tweak the configuration so that I wouldn't have to enter my user name and password every time I opened a network share (a folder whose owner, or a network administrator, has authorized access to by other computers on a Windows network). Firing up the KDE Control Center, I found four separate areas where interaction with Windows networks is controlled. I've complained about the KDE Control Center before, but never have I seen it so overgrown and scary as on a SuSE box.
See, YAST2, the setup program I told you about, also functions as a system configuration tool; and the SuSE team has integrated YAST2 components into the KDE Control Center. So in addition to the standard bevy of KDE configuration applets, you've got YAST2's applets thrown in for good measure. This is how you end up with a Control Center featuring four competing modules that control Samba, the part of the system that talks to a Windows network.
I tweaked the settings in a way that I thought would give me what I wanted--but instead, I found myself frozen out of the Windows network. KDE kept responding with an error dialog stating that no network shares could be found. So I reverted back to the settings that had worked--and remained unable to browse the network.
Just to be clear: Network access had been working. I changed three settings; it stopped working. I changed them right back, but that didn't solve the problem. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now in troubleshooting mode. And I'd forgotten how difficult that can be when you're working with an unfamiliar distribution.
YAST2 as seen from SuSE's Gnome desktop. On the KDE side of the system, YAST2 is integrated with the KDE Control Center.
Every distribution has a different approach to system configuration. If something at the system level is broken--if there's something to be fixed that requires the root user to take some action--your plan of attack is different depending on what distro you're running. Fedora has its stable of system-configuration-* tools; Mandrake has the Mandrakelinux Control Center; SuSE has YAST2; and so on. And some distributions (cough cough Sun Java Desktop cough) provide very little in the way of GUI-based system configuration, instead expecting you to simply drop to a command line for a treasure hunt through the /etc branch of your file system, where hundreds of plain-text config files slink around in the dark. This approach can be confusing even for a Linux pro, as the location of various important files in /etc can vary from distro to distro.
I'm telling you all this so I don't sound like a complete fool when I say that, as of this writing, KDE still can't Samba on my SuSE box. I've only begun poking around under the hood to find out what broke when I changed three settings in the Control Center. Perhaps I've have a eureka! moment, perhaps not. Perhaps I'll be a complete weenie and end up reinstalling the whole thing. Perhaps by the time I get around to that, it'll be time to try yet another new version of yet another distribution.
If the Germans Can't Do It, How About the French?
It took several tries before I got the download edition of French-built Mandrakelinux 10.1 running on my trusty Thinkpad. In the end, I came to realize that a nagging problem--the inability to suspend the machine--is kernel-related. When I boot 10.1 with the 2.6.3 kernel that shipped in 10.0, everything is fine. Boot with kernel 2.6.8, as supplied in 10.1, and power management is completely broken. For now I'm using the older kernel with no ill effects; and I'm hoping that whatever bug I've encountered is affecting others as well, so that a fix will be present in later kernels.
But we're not here to talk about kernels. We're here to talk desktops, and how they interact with the Windows-based world we live in. Mandrake has always offered its users the choice between Gnome and KDE. Though its primary emphasis is on KDE, I've been using Gnome on Mandrake for many years now; it tends to be solid and good-looking.
There is one little tweak you've got to make, though, if you want to see Gnome-specific icons in your start menu (such as the all-important "Browse Filesystem" and "Network Servers" entries):
But here's the terrible pity: On any Mandrake box I attached to PC World's Windows network, I was never able to see any network information in the Network Servers folder. This was a surprise, so I logged in to Mandrake's KDE 3.2.3 looking for an entry point to the network, as I had seen on my SuSE box. No such luck.
The only way I can find to interact with a Windows network on a Mandrake system is to use the Mandrakelinux Control Center to attach a specific network path to a local mount point: For instance, if you've got a file server named "pennylane" you can mount it at /mnt/pennylane and have that resource made available at boot time. But as for on-the-fly browsing of the network, as I had for one fleeting moment in SuSE (and as I enjoy every time I've got Xandros Desktop running), I can't seem to make that happen in Mandrake 10.1.
The Brits Fail, Too
I had the same problem with the initial release of Ubuntu Linux, which I mentioned briefly in my last column. Ubuntu is produced by a British outfit whose aim is to provide and support a version of the Debian project's distribution.
Ubuntu uses the new Debian installer. Like SuSE's YAST2, it's extremely flexible; but unlike YAST2, it runs in text mode. It gets the job done, certainly, but it looks like a throwback to 1986. Once you're through with that experience, what you've got is an extremely clean Gnome desktop (version 2.8.0) with nary a desktop icon in sight. Ubuntu has added a "Computer" menu to Gnome's top-of-screen menu bar; this menu contains entries for the drives and network servers that would otherwise live as icons on your desktop. This is an interesting approach, but I'm not sure what the intended usability gain is. I'd be happier with Ubuntu if its Gnome knew how to pull files off the Windows network I need it to talk to. So far, no luck.
Such difficulties are disappointing, but somehow not surprising: Xandros Desktop remains the sole Linux distribution that can be counted on to quickly and easily connect to and interact fully with any Windows network it encounters.
Is there hope on the horizon for Linux users who need to spend their days sharing data across a Windows network? There's a short-term answer, and a long-term answer: Luckily, they're both "yes."
Fail-Safe Samba-ing
XSMBrowser is your ace in the hole if you can't get your Linux box to talk to a Windows network.
First up is a solution you can use now that has worked for me on every Linux machine that has ever refused to Samba. XSMBrowser is a Free tool that interfaces directly with Samba's command-line tools to give you access to a Windows network. The tool is neither pretty nor terribly intuitive--it works sort of like an FTP client from hell--but unlike the Samba interfaces in Gnome and KDE, you can tell XSMBrowser exactly how to connect to the Windows network. The available configuration options are simple enough that even with trial and error you're likely to hit upon a magic combo in pretty short order.
Keep XSMBrowser in mind if you're hit with Samba woes. It's not a permanent solution, but it gets the job done in a pinch. And it's a heck of a lot better than slapping a file onto a floppy or a CD to feed to a machine that can access the network.
In the longer term, it's only a matter of time before one distribution or another takes a good hard look at this issue and follows in Xandros's footsteps, doing the work it takes to make a distro play nice with Windows right out of the box. Clearly it's possible to have a foolproof setup; the only mystery is why this isn't a higher priority for distributions that aren't Xandros.
Novell paid us a visit the other week, showing off not SuSE Linux, but Novell Linux Desktop 9.0. This new offering is the first Novell-branded distribution of Linux. It is based on SuSE 9.0, so its components are not quite as up-to-date as those in SuSE 9.2. But Novell has taken additional steps to ensure that Novell Linux Desktop is ready for certain niche markets, including businesses where Windows networks are likely already in place. My hunch is that Novell Linux Desktop is actually SuSE with some fine Ximian hacking applied to it, but I won't know for sure until I get a copy to play with. I'm just hoping against hope that some way, somehow, Novell Linux Desktop will know enough Windows networking lingo to let me access the network by the time my next column is due. Wouldn't that be nice?