Here at Chaos Central, we’ve been wildly excited about our new crop of Ubuntu 11.10 Linux computers from Zareason, the arrival of which was discussed here a couple of weeks ago.  But, thrilled as we are with the speed and capacity of these boxes, there is a learning curve–for the box, not the user.  Unix, and, by extension, Linux, has been evolving for more than 40 years now, and has a huge library of Useful Things accumulated, and a history of competing distributions, each with its own “flavor” and set of favorite tools.

In the beginning, Unix was a toolbox for scientists and engineers to build things quickly and cheaply: initially, document processors, and utility software, and, later, the Internet itself.  The growing popularity of Linux, and particularly the Ubuntu distribution, has driven the need to make it useful for the things “ordinary” people–i.e., those who don’t make a living from tweaking the innards of Big Iron computing–like to do, like surf the net and manage their music, video, and image collections.  And, since Linux is still what to do with your old PC when it gets too bloated with malware and  spyware, the popular distributions still need to fit on a CD.

Most industrial-strength distros now come on DVDS, sometimes more than one, containing the entire Linux collection of free software. but, for the masses, armed with CD-only PCs, something has to give, which often are the venerable, legacy Unix features that most home users will never need.  But, many of those are what we’ve been lugging around on our hard drives for 20 years or more:  venerable editors like emacs and vi, superceded by menu-driven simple editors or integrated graphical development environments but still more powerful and with more features than anyone will ever use, and for which the ones I’ve learned, are extremely useful and well-practiced enough to be second nature, so I keep using them, even if they don’t come with the system anymore.  And, more recently, enterprise-level tools for building massive compute clusters, like GridEngine and MPICH2, along with software development libraries and specialized utility libraries for science and engineering.  We also need a lot more development tools than come with a standard desktop, since we develop software for the web and for high-performance computing clusters.

Fortunately, the Ubuntu software repositories have a lot of those tools packaged up and loadable from the Software Center application, so we don’t need to go through the ritual of downloading, unpacking, configuring, compling, and installing nested sets of dependent programs like the old days.  But, our old computers have accumulated a unique set of software over the four or five years of their busy lives, so the new ones have a lot to learn:  we first had to load the no-longer-included Synaptic Package Manager to grab some of the software libraries and utilities not available in the Software Center catalog.  And, of course, get rid of that silly Unity desktop that only works well for folks who only do one thing at a time with their computers.  We have to have lots of toolbars visible and lots of  workspaces to which we can jump with a single click, which Gnome gives us.

Not surprisingly, some of the more esoteric and least-used packaged software still have a few surprise unresolved dependency issues.  To my delight, GridEngine, a distributed job control system for compute clusters created by Sun Microsystems a dozen or more years ago, was available in the Software Center.  Since Oracle bought Sun a couple years ago, a lot of these tools have disappeared off the free download list at Oracle, folded back into the supported product lines, and the old packages are sometmes hard to find.

GridEngine is one of those transitional systems that, unlike the new applications designed to run under Gnome or KDE desktop management systems, was born and developed during the days of OpenWindows (contemporary with Microsoft Windows 2) and the Common Desktop Environment (CDE, which predates Windows 95), both high-end X-Window System desktop managers in their day.  X11 programs used to be a lot harder to write, and designed for networking more than having the client and server on the same workstation, so they tended to leverage the Unix philosophy of lots of little programs, each doing one thing well, working together, much more than the more integrated and abstracted desktop applications of today.

GridEngine is more likely to be installed on an Ubuntu machine as a client or, at most, an execution node in an ad hoc cluster, rather than a master host, so would not usually run the graphical grid manager, qmon.  But, Open Source being what it is, the whole package is available.  However, the “just works” philosophy of Ubuntu breaks down here, as the dependencies of the archaic and arcane OpenWindows flavor of the graphical component aren’t checked very thoroughly, and there is a bit of a problem.  The application depends on the X11 font server, a client-server application designed to facilitate running X11 clients on a server and displaying them on a different X11 server that might not have all of the requisite fonts loaded.  Also, because CDE relied heavily on licensed Adobe Truetype fonts, the chain of dependency gets broken when it comes to fitting old non-GPL’d software into a Linux distribution.

When you get a GNU/Linux system distribution, everything in it is licensed under the GNU Public License.  You can install anything you want in addition to that, but you can’t package the extras and redistribute it  This also extends to the packaging system.  The Ubuntu Software Center has provisions for adding non-free (i.e., non-GPL) software repositories, but they aren’t going to intereact with each other, so complex packages like GridEngine, that depend on non-free components, come with “some assembly required.”  In my case, someone had already solved the problem for Ubuntu, so a Google search turned up a list of the missing packages and how to install them.  I’ve used GridEngine for years, but on Solaris and RedHat Linux systems.  Solaris, of course, was licensed from Sun (now Oracle) and had full support.  The old Sun GridEngine for Linux packages came with the non-free fonts and dependent packages integrated, because you got them from Sun–they weren’t on any of the five or six CDs (now two DVDs) that comprise the full Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or, as many of us who don’t need any hand-holding support from Red Hat use–CentOS).

So, at Chaos Central, the new dogs are gradually getting housebroken and have largely quit chewing on the furniture, i.e, have learned enough so they–to use another analogy, don’t respond–like HAL9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “I’m afraid I can’t do that…” when asked to perform tasks the other computers have been doing for years.  They’ve even learned, with larger memory and faster processors, to do new things.