elementary OS 5.1 Hera - a review and a revisit

 It's been ages since I used a desktop Linux distribution - being up to my ears in the horror of implementing ISO 27001 doesn't leave you much time to play around with computers - too busy writing policies, auditing and generally trying to improve security to a formally acceptable and risk managed level. I need a quick, small OS though to do the occasional network scan, view the contents of a dodgy file on and for general, low impact activities. I remembered reviewing elementary OS ( elementary.io) some time ago ( see https://www.ryv.id.au/2015/01/elementary-os-review.html ) from 2015 so I thought it was worth a revisit. 

I downloaded the ISO from their website, forgoing to donation for the moment while I review it. If it turns out I'm going to keep using it, I'll send them some love. The ISO is 1.38GB in size and I booted it in a VMware Player instance. From go to whoa (I won't include the install photos here) it took about 10 minutes with a dual vCPU and 4GB of RAM instance on my HP ProBook. It's really a lovely looking distribution, and within a few minutes of being logged in, it asked to install updates and identified the virtual OS package to be installed as well. After this, the screen re-size worked nicely and the thing picked up some speed as the virtualisation became more optimised. So what does it look like?

A nice clean desktop experience to begin with. Status bar up the top, menu down the bottom. The icons and images are rendered beautifully and the whole thing has a polished finished to the graphics. It reminds me of the Apple's attention to detail.

The Application menu expanded out. Not much in there yet, just the basics so far.

System settings are neatly laid out and everything is easy to find.

This is a nice touch - I'm very used to have fl.ux running on my machines and having a built in night light is great. Note the icons - neat and elegant.

Finally, the browser on the desktop. elementary OS uses grouped apps - curated and non-curated. Curated apps have: "Each has been reviewed and curated by elementary to ensure a native, privacy-respecting, and secure experience."

I have yet to ascertain the veracity of these claims, however, so stay tuned while I play with this thing a bit more. That being said, the AppCentre looks really good:

Pretty! When you install non-curated apps it throws up some warnings thusly:

Good to know these things going forward. There is quite a breadth of curated applications so generally I'll stick with them. 

There are dollar amounts next to some of the apps in the AppCentre - some of them are pay-what-you-want which is a great concept. I like to try stuff out before I invest and this works for me. Once I like a product I tend to spend on it - particularly to help people continue development.

From a performance perspective I'm pretty happy so far. Everything goes quickly, apps launch in a timely manner and it puts very little strain on the system. The Chrome tab I'm typing this in now is using more RAM and CPU than the Elementary OS virtual machine is, and I have the AppCentre, web browser and applications tabs all open while I take screenshots and mess about. It's billed as a system to re-invigorate old hardware (something I enjoy doing) and it's clear that the demand on resources has been managed well. Unlike Windows 10 for example.

The final word is this: download it and try it out. You've got nothing to lose and it really is a lovely looking OS that is quick and fully functional. I take my hat off to the team there and look forward to their future work.

Upgrading pi-hole on Ubuntu 18.04 problems

 If you've tried to upgrade pi-hole running on 18.04LTS then you might have gotten an error like this:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
       lighttpd : Depends: libssl1.1 (>= 1.1.0) but it is not going to be installed
      E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

I've spent a bit of time poking around at this to no avail, until I stumbled upon a solution that is - install aptitude and use it to fix the dependency issue!

Indeed.

root@domains:~# apt install aptitude

then:

root@domains:~# aptitude install lighttpd

and choose downgrade libss1.1

and lighttpd installs and pi-hole works again.

This was a much harder solution to find than it should have been and something is really screwy with these packages. 

Hope this helps!

HP 450 G7 Review

Recently I upgraded from a Lenovo T560 to the HP 450 G7. While the T560 was a terrific machine, it lacked USB-C so I couldn’t integrate it to my USB-C Dock, it was a big heavy laptop and had an i5 processor. It was time for an upgrade, so I got onto this HP 450 G7. Here’s the link to one very similar on the HP website: https://h20386.www2.hp.com/AustraliaStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=9UR34PA&opt=&sel=NTB

There are a bunch of quite technical reviews on this laptop and I’ll leave that to the experts to discuss – my focus is on the usability of this device in a business environment, and how I’ve felt it’s performed. Now, I’ve had this device for about 2 months and during that period I’ve been intensively involved in working to ISO27001 Information Management Systems accreditation. It’s quite a complex standard and capturing the aspects of our business where we meet the standard, and write up the plans and procedures to meet other parts of the standard has been quite intense. I’ve probably written around 25,000 words and fully half of them on the HP. So, let’s get into the use of this thing and what I’ve found so far.

The price on the HP website is pretty much what I spent on mine, so for $1950 I had some pretty high expectations. They have been met. It’s fast, it’s light (for a 15.6” laptop) and I really like both the screen and keyboard. I’ve really been spoilt on keyboard side of things having access to Lenovo keyboards and my preferred keyboard the Microsoft Sculpt natural keyboard. I’ve also gone from a Lenovo X1 to a MacBook Pro (which I hate the keyboard on), side by side with the T560 and now onto the HP 450. It’s great – nicely tactile, good feedback and easy on the fingers. It’s a pretty standard layout and the keys are nicely spaced. I’ve probably made more use of the numeric keypad than ever before too and it’s been great. Sticking with the physical aspects of the laptop let’s talk mouse and screen.

On the T560 I like the little Lenovo mouse thing built into the keyboard and the HP doesn’t have that. I do find though that the larger mouse pad on the HP has a nice feel to it and a nice touch using multiple fingers (not that I do this often). It’s precise and the feedback from it is good. On to the monitor and I didn’t realise I purchased the touch screen model. I’ve had touchscreens before and never really used it – generally I’ve found them a bit gimmicky, however with the HP I’ve used it quite a lot – particularly scrolling on the screen while I jump around on the ISO 27001 documents and the standard itself. I actually really love this screen – I’m not sure if it’s the anti-glare or the type of LED, but I find it easy on the eyes, particularly after a 10 hour day, it’s nice and clear and quite big – 15.6” which is perfect. The laptop only weighs a bit over 2KG so it’s not like the big screen makes the thing unwieldy or unpleasant to use. In fact, I think the screen is one of my favourite things about this laptop.

From a performance perspective this laptop packs an i7, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. The battery lasted about 6 hours with a heap of web browser windows open and me jumping around all over the place. I use Power BI for some business functions and analyse some quite large datasets. The HP has been excellent for this – although that was my expectation of a 10^th Generation i7 processor. Nonetheless it’s been very good for these larger datasets and that’s pretty much all I’ve used it for from a heavy processing perspective. While the HP 450 has a discrete graphics card in this configuration, I haven’t really used it for much gaming or 3D work, so I can’t really comment on it. It’s an NVIDIA GeForce MX130 for those of you interested. It’s been great for watching HD videos.

Final thoughts – this was quite an expensive laptop for me to purchase and my expectations were quite high based on the specifications of the device. I am pleased to report that this laptop has lived up to those expectations. From an ergonomic perspective I really enjoy using it, from a performance viewpoint all my requirements have definitely been met. It’s reasonably portable for a 15.6” laptop and it’s been a valuable addition to the office for the work I’ve been doing. I’ll seriously look at rolling these out for staff requiring a more powerful laptop over the standard Lenovo L15 we’re now deploying.