When I told Ilene that I could probably fix the USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu and could then switch her back from Debian Lenny, she told me it would be better to stick with Debian for now, since there are enough little differences between environments to make it confusing, and she was and is doing well with Debian.

She did say she liked Ubuntu a bit better, but for the sake of productivity, Debian was doing more than well enough to keep until I fix her iBook G4.

Among the problems I'm having with Lenny that I don't have with Ubuntu are lack of control over the Alps touchpad by individual users. I can turn the touchpad's tap-to-click function off as the primary user, but my other users can't use the Touchpad configuration feature in GNOME. When they do, a dialog pops up about SHMConfig not being enabled in X.

Except that it is. That's how I am able to control the touchpad in my primary account.

I wouldn't care if all the users had their touchpad tapping controlled by me, the main user, but every once in a while, it seems that the tap-to-click turns on for a split second in Ilene's account.

Since we're using a USB mouse more than 95 percent of the time, this isn't much of an issue, but it is annoying.

This could be a GNOME bug that doesn't allow for different Xorg configurations in each account, but this is nothing more than conjecture on my part.

Otherwise, Ilene is quite amused by Firefox being renamed Iceweasel due to the copyright restrictions imposed on the Firefox name and logo by the Mozilla Foundation. It's one of those things that really confuses new users to Debian.

I remember seeing Iceweasel in Knoppix and having no idea why it looked exactly like Firefox but had a different name. Now I know about Debian's reluctance to use copyrighted material, and while I agree with it, I do acknowledge that it's awkward and confusing to those who don't know the story.

One thing that I did do for my three users is customize their desktops to some extent. In this case, that customization is limited to putting icons for each user's favorite applications on the upper task bar.

Since I use Epiphany a lot, I kept that there, but added Iceweasel (which I use sporadically) along with all the text editors I'm testing or using (Geany, Bluefish, Gedit) the terminal, the root terminal and the network-configuration app.

In Ilene's, I have Iceweasel and the OpenOffice apps she needs (for text documents, presentations and spreadsheets).

The little girl's account has Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating here: Another reason for keeping Lenny over Ubuntu is the fact that all the children's educational games we use work better in Debian than in Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, sound is spotty on all three apps, and Chidsplay is hobbled by a woeful lack of games. Maybe those additional games are available as packages in Ubuntu, but I'm not sure. All I know is that they are all there in Debian.

Before the rant is over, let me add that all three of these education packages are also in great shape in OpenBSD. You don't normally think of OpenBSD and "the education distribution," but it works very well for us in this regard. All I need is some additional memory on the 1999-vintage Compaq Armada 7770dmt to make the experience that much better.

This David M. Williams article for iTWire is titled "Why we love Ubuntu Linux (or maybe we don't)," but I was hooked from the first page, in which he didn't mention Ubuntu at all after the lede.

Instead, he talks about his journey from DEC machines running VAX, to Sun boxes running SunOS and Solaris, to the early Slackware on floppies and then to Red Hat.

It's in this context that he examines Ubuntu -- and whether it lives up to the considerable hype:

Sure enough, Ubuntu didn't seem to have a single bad review when I checked it out. It had gained a reputation for being dead easy to install and a doddle to maintain. Apparently, even one's grandmother could use it, we were told. I theorised in this column I should apply a "Ubuntu test" to every command or output I used. Yet, then the criticism came the other way; hard-core Debian groupies felt slighted anyone would use such a rogue platform which, they felt, stole from the work of Debian.

He then solicits a bunch of reader opinion, but I would've liked to see what the author himself thinks about Ubuntu and its place both in his life as a user as well as in the world around him.

This might be my own bias, since my writing is very much centered in my own experience, but that's what I'd like to see from David -- a continuation of his journey and what he's using today and why.

It's been a week and a bit since I turned comments back on -- this time without anonymous comments allowed due to the massive volume of spam that entails -- and I've been very encouraged to see people making comments.

If you do wish to comment on an entry, once you go to an individual entry and see the "sign-in" link, clicking on that takes you to a login screen.

There you can sign up for a Movable Type account, confirm it via e-mail and then begin commenting immediately.

But we have a lot of choices as to how you sign in. You can also create and/or use an existing Typekey account. There is also the provision to use OpenID, LiveJournal or Vox accounts.

That's a lot of choices. I give the Movable Type people a lot of credit. Giving blog administrators such control over comment authentication is a great thing, and if something like OpenID ever really takes off, MT is covered.

But however you sign in, thanks again for being a part of this blog. Special thanks go out to all those who come here from LXer.

CNN in high-definition?

Yep, DISH Network subscribers can see Wolf Blitzer in more detail than ever before and can also enjoy about 20 other HD channels via satellite beginning today (that's May 12, 2008, to you and me).

Among the channels now being offered in HD are Biography, Bravo, CNBC, Sci Fi, the Travel Channel and -- anglers rejoice! -- the World Fishing Network.

Here is the complete list from DISH:

ABC Family HD (DISH Network Ch. 180)
Biography HD (Ch. 119)
Bravo HD (Ch. 129)
Cartoon HD (Ch. 176)
Cinemax 5 Star (Ch. 381)
Cinemax HD West (Ch. 380)
Comcast Sports Network Bay Area HD (Ch. 419)*
Comcast Sports Network New England HD (Ch. 435)*
CNBC HD (Ch. 208)
CNN HD (Ch. 200)
Disney HD East (Ch. 172)
ESPNews HD (Ch. 142)
Hallmark Movie Channel HD (Ch. 187)
MGM HD (Ch. 385)
Sci Fi HD (Ch. 122)
Smithsonian HD (Ch. 374)
Tennis Channel HD (Ch. 400)
Toon Disney HD (Ch. 174)
Travel Channel HD (Ch. 215)
USA HD (Ch. 105)
Weather Channel HD (Ch. 214)
World Fishing Network HD (Ch. 396)

* The two Comcast Sports channels make their HD debut on Wednesday, not today like the rest.

As part of a push for the HD service, DISH is offering new customers a free upgrade to a dishHD DVR receiver like the ViP722, which can receive two channels simultaneously and pipe those channels to two TV sets in different rooms, as well as record 55 hours of HD programming or 350 hours in standard definition.

Canned PR quote begins here:

"Our HD services include innovative packages that are aggressively priced," said Jessica Insalaco, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for DISH Network. "That, combined with our award-winning HD and DVR technology, make DISH Network the clear choice for customers seeking the best value and quality in HD today."

So what does that mean for you, the home viewer?

If you qualify -- and how could you not? -- signing up for a 24-month commitment yields three months of free programming (a $120 value), a free dishDVR like the ViP722 and free installation (a $49.99 value).

That sounds like $40 a month, and this page pegs the monthly cost of HD at $42.99 for "over 100 channels."

Not bad, I think. The pricing at DISH seems less confusing than that of its satellite competitor, DirecTV, but I'd check out both to see which is the best choice for you.

OK, here's the situation: Ilene and our little girl need to use the $0 Laptop. So you figure, "new users, go for Ubuntu."

Well, after having them on Ubuntu for a week, I've switched them over to Debian Lenny, which I dual-boot on this Gateway Solo 1450.

Why?

Well, I think my inability to print to a USB printer is the result of a hardware problem inherent to this Gateway. Printing wouldn't work in Ubuntu, Debian or Puppy 3.00.

But the matter of accessing a USB flash drive is another story entirely.

I just don't have time right now to screw with Ubuntu to get some basic but needed functionality. I was able to mount the USB drive only once after I added the users to the disk group. Yep, the drive mounted, but at the next boot it did not. One of the solutions has something to do with going into gconf and making a slight change.

I'm sure I'll be able to do that eventually, but since Debian Lenny allows me and my users to work with USB flash drives immediately, that's what we're using.

With the switch from Ubuntu to Debian, I lost Suspend/Resume, but I'd rather have the ability to get information on and off of this computer via flash drive than Suspend/Resume, which I will eventually be able to figure out in Debian anyway.

And the little girl's games -- Gcompris and Childsplay -- work much better in Debian than in Ubuntu. It's apparent that the package maintainers for these two educational suites are much better in Debian than they are in Ubuntu. Hey ... isn't there an Edubuntu version of Ubuntu? Well, when it comes to these two huge FOSS educational applications, Debian does a better job.

I always say that Debian is more polished and ready for the average user that it ever gets credit for. But I always turn to Ubuntu in new-user situations due to its clean menu layout and other "extras."

But when it comes to the GNOME environment, and -- more importantly -- essential functionality, Debian Lenny is ahead of Ubuntu Hardy at this point in time.

I'd love to get my USB printer working, but I need to do some more tests. USB is working (I'm using a USB keyboard and mouse right now), and CUPS finds the printer and suggests a driver, but the jobs don't go to the printer. And since it happened in three different distributions, the problem is deeper than Ubuntu or Debian.

What's the take-away? That Debian's desktop installation is very much ready for both new and experienced users, and if the given box's administrator can properly configure the environment, just about any Linux (or even BSD) distribution -- Debian and even Slackware -- can serve as a solid computing platform for users who've never seen a FOSS desktop in their lives.

The keys are maturity, stability and functionality. Since I'm administrating this computer, have the best luck getting Debian to behave and find in its repositories software that is a) more complete and b) very stable (even in Testing), that's what we're going with.

Ilene's iBook G4 is dying. So I've set her up with the $0 Laptop, which the kid already uses to play her educational games (GCompris and Childsplay).

After using Linux for nearly a year and a half, and overcoming many dozen obstacles, bugs and the like, I was very unhappy to find one problem specific to Ubuntu and another that might be a hardware issue ... or a Linux-wide, soul-crushing situation.

First off, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy will not mount a USB memory stick. It shows up in the selection of drives, but it refuses to mount. I've got to get into the console and see whether or not I can mount it there. I saw a few bug reports that discuss the problem, here and here, and maybe here.

I also see reports of it here: Ubuntu forum post. Possible solution to try. And here is a more promising set of things to try.

Again (and I've had to say this many too many times), in Slackware I can see not being able to mount a drive without reading the FAQ and adding myself to the plugdev group, or whatever other group(s) are necessary. But in Ubuntu, users need to be able to plug in USB devices and have them work immediately.

The USB drive mounts fine in Debian Lenny, and I'd just have everybody switch over to Debian, except that user-switching is broken in Lenny (and I've grown fond of it); and while suspend/resume doesn't work in Lenny, I can do without it ... but neither Ubuntu Hardy nor Debian Lenny will allow me to print to my USB-connected printer, an HP 1020 Laserjet.

CUPS sees the printer and appears to configure it, but when I send a doc to the printer, nothing happens.

I don't think the two USB problems (flash drive and printer) are related because I can mount the flash drive in Lenny. But I'm about to try Puppy 3.00 AND 2.13 to see if I can print from there.

And ... while Suspend/Resume does seem to work most of the time, I just got a report from Ilene that she closed the laptop lid and killed Ubuntu.

I already know that closing the lid in Debian Lenny will hose the box, too, but I figured that Ubuntu 8.04 had this down a little better.

Curiously, or perhaps not so much, I can close the lid with abandon in Puppy 3.00 and have the laptop come back every single damn time.

Bottom line: Using Linux/BSD/what-have-you myself is one thing, but having the rest of my family rely on a FOSS operating system is another matter entirely. Stuff needs to work.

Is ACPI a mess in every operating system, or just in Linux? How does Windows handle it? I ask because I don't have a clue. I imagine that each hardware maker kicks out drivers for every specific machine to go with every specific version of Windows. But when it comes to Linux, the distro handles what it handles, and barring that, you're in configuration hell.

And while Puppy is great, it's not exactly set up as a multiuser system. OK, you can kind of do it, with separate pup_saves and directories created on a separate partition for each user. (I don't recommend saving files in the pup_save because it's nice to be able to get to them from other OSes, something that doesn't work with things stuck in the pup_save.)

The USB flash drive problem -- it's all Ubuntu. The ACPI problems -- Ubuntu is better at it than anything else I've seen. It's just a matter of telling Ilene and the kid not to close the lid. I don't like it, and I'd like to code around it, but can I?

Again, if Debian Lenny, right here, right now, worked with my USB-connected printer, I'd be giving Ubuntu the big heave-ho, but I suspect the problem is deeper than just Debian or Ubuntu. I don't want to go as far as setting up a USB-to-Ethernet print server like this one (especially because the closely related HP Laserjet 1022 is listed as NOT WORKING with this device), but the Gateway has been great with networked printers at the office, and I'd just like to solve this problem one way or the other. At least then I'd have the printer networked and could use it with more than one machine at a time. I'm starting to like the idea already.

Still, can getting the Gateway to actually print to a USB printer be so hard? CUPS has no problem seeing the printer, but no data is being transferred, I think.

Back to the drawing board, but in the interim, I did get a Firewire-equipped backup drive for the ailing iBook G4. I do have a backup of the user files on an iPod (yep, I use an iPod as a backup drive; I'm just not much for listening to iPods, so at least the thing is useful), but that backup is a bit old. I'll try to do a second user-file backup to another iPod before using SuperDuper to do a full, bootable backup on the Firewire drive.

If I can get that full backup done and then successfully boot and run the iBook from the Firewire drive, I'll know that the iBook's main hard drive is the problem.

I could change the hard drive in the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450) in about 5 minutes. It would take maybe an extra minute to change out the drive in the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). But pulling the hard drive from the iBook is going to take a major operation that involves cracking the case, removing all kinds of parts and then putting the whole mess back together again.

Apple may be renown for design, but that didn't include easy access to the hard drive. It's easier to put in a SODIMM memory module, although you do have to remove the keyboard and take out the wireless module first. Again, harder than in any of my PC-compatible laptops, but not as difficult as this hard-drive replacement.

I will curse Steve Jobs at regular intervals.

And even though the proprietary nature of Apple's Macintosh line and OS X in no way makes me happy, the iBook has worked perfectly -- in heavy use -- for five years now, and if a new hard drive can bring it back, I'll be very happy, indeed.

It's a tradeoff: all the good stuff that comes with your average Linux distribution vs. having every damn thing work without needing to do much.

I did have to do a bit of detective work to get the USB-connected HP 1020 printer configured on the Mac, only because HP, in its infinite wisdom, didn't offer an exact OS X driver for this printer because they wanted to upsell Mac users on the HP 1022, which went for a few extra bucks for no good reason. ... but I digress, and I've gotten very much used to the perfect power management on the iBook.

Laptops are hard, in any OS, since there's more going on, and if we want to drag more people over from proprietary OSes, Linux had to do a whole lot better.

Not me, but Blogger.com. Have you been to a Blogger blog today? They're slower than I've ever seen. Something big and bad is happening in the land of Google, which owns Blogger.

What's going on? In the past I've spanked Movable Type for not being as fast as the Blogger interface, but today both the Blogger Dashboard and the Blogger blogs themselves are working like crap, and coincidentally, our Movable Type installation is doing better than ever.

Want proof? Go to my buddy Willy's Slackware blog, Ilene's Drawerspace in a Cluttered Mind, or even my own This Old Mac.

Like sludge.

One of the best live CD projects out there, Puppy Linux, has kicked it up a definite notch with the announcement of Puppy 4.00.

I began using Puppy with 2.13, and it has always performed extremely well. Here is one of the changes in 4.00:

Puppy 3.01 was built from Slackware-12 binary packages, however to reduce the size 4.00 has been totally compiled from source, using the T2-project. Thus, less dependencies (smaller size) and later versions of packages than 3.01.

The main 4.00 release uses the 2.6.21.7 kernel -- same as 3.01 -- but there's also a version with 2.6.25. One note in the announcement says that some older PCs boot better with the newer kernel, so it might be a good idea to try both.

Another thing I read in the announcement is that there's a new Puppy 2.14R, which is an update to the original Puppy 2.14 with "the latest features of Puppy." That's also good. I remember 2.14 as being a very good release, even though I still boot 2.13 on occasion.

And the Puppy team is committed to keeping the Puppy 3 series going, with version 3.02 of the Slackware 12-compatible distro on the way.

Again, Puppy is a great project that's just getting better with each new release. Aside from my affinity for 2.13, I use 3.00 all the time on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). I would've upgraded to 3.01, but I never had a problem with 3.00, so I've stuck with it.

I don't pretend to know enough about whether ZDNet's Jason Perlow is right about Linux missing the boat when it comes to massive scaling, and how OpenSolaris has the upper hand in the world of big iron.

He goes into a lengthy discussion of the ramifications of OpenSolaris coming under the GPLv3 license and what that would mean for Linux. He says that he can see the Free Software Foundation and Richard M. Stallman embracing OpenSolaris, as well as Debian moving away from GNU/Linux to something that could only be called GNU/OpenSolaris.

He wrote the "Unixfication II" item in response to another OpenSolaris/Ubuntu entry called "What Ubuntu Wants to Be When it Groups Up"

Pretty heady stuff, all around. Again, I have no idea if there's anything to this. All I know is that the OpenSolaris 2008.05 CD runs like crap in 512 MB of RAM. But the MilaX spin on OpenSolaris -- a "Damn Small" take on the Sun OS -- runs great.

Here's a few excerpts from Jason's "Unixfication" piece:

But what about mainframes? Those got big amounts of memory and I/O, right? The IBM zSeries mainframe implements Linux on a hypervisor (zVM) and is also partitioned, so essentially it runs lots of little virtualized systems at once. This again is not true monolithic scalability, this is using virtualization technology to perform resource allocation. It's wicked cool, it will be a great solution for a lot of customers, but it's not where Linux kernel development should end. We will still need bare metal monolithic scalability for some time to come - the hypervisor hasn't eliminated the traditional computing model yet, because many kinds of apps should not be virtualized - such as anything requiring heavy I/O -- and I suspect it will be a while until it becomes the conventional way of doing things.

...

Linux and UNIX will eventually merge into the same operating system. Who's kernel and what the kernel ends up looking like and who's pieces it incorporates is irrelevant. The question is, how difficult are we going to make it for ourselves to get there?

...

If OpenSolaris is released under GPL version 3, then we now have the inevitable situation where there are two GPL-licensed Oses in the wild. This has never been an issue before, because Linux was the only game in town. From the perspective of the Free Software Foundation, GPL3 is going to be the preferred license under which many, if not all - with the possible exception of the Linux kernel itself - will fall under. That means with OpenSolaris, we would have a complete GPL3 OS stack. Unless Linus decides to change his mind and move Linux to GPLv3, our favorite kernel is likely be left behind. You got that right people - Free Software Civil War.

The FSF has always referred to Linux as GNU/Linux. This isn't just Richard Stallman being bitter - this is the official name of which the Debian distribution, which forms the basis for Ubuntu, is referred to. It might be a little bit of a stretch, but what if the OpenSolaris kernel and many of its other components were to fall under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation? Surely, Sun would have to give up some control, but if you follow the natural course of things, GNU/Solaris is not out of the question. With the "Kosher Certification" of the FSF and Richard Stallman, migrating Debian to a Solaris kernel would simply be an academic exercise. Or to put it this way -- "GNU -is- UNIX" would become their new motto.

We can avoid all the petty squabbling and unpleasantness as a result of a GPL versioning divide between the two players if Linux is changed to GPL3. Sun can then cooperate and license its OS into GPL3 as well, and we can get on with more productive work of engineering the Free Software OS of the future.

Again, read the whole damn thing here. And the first article here.

From my humble corner, I'm not sure whether or not there needs to be one monolithic kernel to handle everything from the biggest of big iron all the way down to plain-vanilla servers, personal desktops and embedded devices.

I'm not even sure this is what Jason Perlow is getting at, but I have a feeling if there's a demand for a Linux kernel aimed at massively huge-scale computing, that will happen. Certainly the open-sourcing of Solaris will provide more competition for Linux, but there's room enough out there for everybody, I figure. And whether or not the "open" part of OpenSolaris will extend much beyond the i386 architecture is, in my mind, more of a question than a certainty.

And if the OpenSolaris CD didn't run like a two-legged dog on my 512 MB box, I'd think the future quite a bit brighter for OpenSolaris. Hell, if I wanted an OS that only ran with 1 GB, I'd use Vista.

I don't follow Sun or OpenSolaris all that closely, although I have tried Project Indiana, been intrigued by a "Damn Small" take on OpenSolaris, and generally think that Sun is doing all the right things to survive and thrive in the post-proprietary world.

I still want an old Sun SPARCstation, but I can't seem to get that hooked up ... but be that as it may, OpenSolaris -- the open-source, community-fueled version of Sun's Unix-like Solaris operating system -- has been officially launched, as I read in Desktop Linux.

Officially launched? Who knew they hadn't already done that. The OpenSolaris project gets a lot of credibility due to Debian founder Ian Murdock's shepherding of the project in his current capacity at Sun, but it has lost a bit of that credibility over recent months due to a power struggle of sorts -- and I really don't know much about it, so don't rely on me for any understanding whatsoever of said struggle -- between Sun and members of the OpenSolaris community.

My experience was also much worse than that of the reviewer at Phoronix.

I keep thinking it strange that the Update Manager in Ubuntu 8.04 has been surprisingly quiet. In Debian Lenny, I've got updates to do all the time.

And in a new Ubuntu install, you'd expect a lot of updates. A lot.

So even though I didn't see the icon at the top of the screen, I opened the Update Manager anyway and checked for updates.

I had 57 to install, which I'm now doing. When was Ubuntu going to tell me about it?

I'll hang back for a week or so and see if it's my imagination, or if the Update Manager in Ubuntu is either not working properly or is configured to not automatically inform me of updates.

Otherwise, as I wrote earlier today, Ubuntu 8.04 is performing very well, and I'm more inclined all the time to stick with it.

We traced most of our Movable Type woes for the Insidesocal.con blogs to a bad plug-in. Now that we've obliterated all reference to the plug-in (Feeds.app, if you must know), our new Movable Type Open Source 4.1 system is really flying.

The servers are extremely fast, it's quicker than ever to write and publish an entry (mostly due to use of MT's publishing queue option), and it's less frustrating than ever to redesign and rebuild a blog. I did one yesterday -- Inside the Kings, and the process verged on pleasant.

The best part of all this is that for the moment, I'm not pining for the trouble-free worlds of Blogger and Wordpress. Movable Type is chugging along quite nicely, and now our bloggers can concentrate on feeding the beast and building their audiences in the process.

It's a great moment. I will bask in it, if you don't mind.

After a few instances where the keyboard and mouse locked up in Ubuntu 8.04 on the $0 Laptop, I decided to write my weekly column for the Daily News' Tech Talk space entirely in Ubuntu.

I use Google Docs because I need instant access to my documents from any computer I happen to be at, and while Docs works well in Ubuntu's Firefox 3 beta, Google's Gears extension doesn't yet support Firefox 3, so I'm out of luck with offline functionality for Docs, which I sorely need because this laptop doesn't have wireless connectivity and it's not always hooked up to Ethernet.

At any rate, I've got about 10 Firefox windows open, I'm switching between them madly, doing searches, writing, and generally beating the hell out of the keyboard and touchpad (I didn't connect the USB mouse today).

No crashes, no freezes. Nothing but trouble-free computing.

It's possible that the keyboard/mouse freezes were due to the somewhat precarious nature of my power connection. The kludgy DC power jack that I added to the $0 Laptop to bring it back from the dead isn't a perfect fit for the Gateway Solo 1450's power supply. And when the laptop is not on a desk, the power connector can get jostled. The battery is dead enough not to help much in this situation. I'm thinking of building a little adapter that will allow me to tighten up the power connection without resoldering the power jack, mostly because I don't think I can find one with an "exact" fit except for the original Gateway part, which I a) do have but b) can't install because there's no way I'm pulling the motherboard from this laptop.

I will be opening it up eventually to replace the PCMCIA slot, which unfortunately suffered from bent pins when a screw got lodged in there and I subsequently tried to insert a WiFi card.

In other Ubuntu 8.04 news, I've had trouble finding the Childsplay package in Ubuntu. I never bother to enable the various Universe and Multiverse options in Ubuntu's package management, but a search for Childsplay and Ubuntu told me that the children's-educational package is in the Universe. I switched the "Show:" option in Add/Remove Applications to "all open-source applications," and installed it right away. Now my daughter can use Ubuntu instead of Debian and have all of her games at the ready.

I have another short Ubuntu item coming up later this afternoon.

It took me a few tries to get a good burn on Damn Small Linux 4.3.

Once I did, it worked great on my Dell Optiplex GX 520. It also performed flawlessly on my VIA C3 test box. It didn't do so well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where the colors were totally whacked out (blue looked like orange, etc. ...). But DSL has never run well on the Gateway, so I didn't expect anything.

The biggest "get" in DSL 4.3 is Firefox 2, which for some reason has been renamed Bon Echo for the purposes of this distribution.

Going from Firefox version 1.06 to 2 is a huge deal. Quite a few Web sites require at least FF 1.5 to work at all, including many Web e-mail services and the Movable Type and Blogger interfaces.

And on my 64 MB Compaq laptop, Damn Small Linux is pretty much the only thing that'll run Firefox without continuous swapping and long delays between operations. So having FF 2 is very important to me.

DSL 4.3 did load and run on the Compaq, but for some reason the desktop wallpaper did not appear. I've been running DSL 4.0 on the Compaq, and that does X perfectly, along with the desktop design. I don't know what's wrong with the 4.3 configuration, but it does make the screen look rather gray, also the machine status information unreadable on the upper right side of the screen.

And when I ran Fluxbox instead of JWM, I couldn't figure out how to get the Fluxbox menu to show up. Right-clicking brought up the DFM file manager (which I quite like while using JWM; it made DSL 4.0 a lot easier to use).

If I can manage to bump up the RAM on my Compaq laptop (aka The $15 Laptop) to the maximum of 144 MB, I might be able to comfortably run Firefox/IceWeasel in OpenBSD or Debian. Right now, I can't even run Seamonkey (the Mozilla-based Web suite) in Puppy Linux. Basically I can run the Dillo browser in any OS, but that doesn't allow me to do all the things I need to do on the Web. Only DSL allows me to run Firefox with some measure of comfort in my small amount of RAM.

Aside from the Firefox upgrade, I don't see a lot of major differences in Damn Small Linux, and that's as it should be. DSL has a fairly rapid development pace, and lead developer Robert Shingledecker puts a lot into fixing bugs from release to release.

Even without resolving the desktop-wallpaper issue, DSL 4.3 is a huge leap for any user with only 64 MB of RAM. Fixing this little problem will cement Damn Small Linux as the best distribution for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

Fastmail.fm offers a completely secure Webmail session. just type in https://fastmail.fm (remember the "s") instead of http://fastmail.fm, and your entire e-mail session, from login to logout, will be encrypted.

This is especially important when you're using an open, public WiFi connection. Even Gmail's secure option (https://gmail.com) has been shown to be faulty, since cookies are saved on the local machine that can be extracted to reveal your login and password.

I'm not sure how Fastmail.fm stacks up in this regard, but I have a good feeling that it is more secure in https mode.

By the way: I use my DSL Extreme Webmail quite a bit because it is also encrypted. But the site doesn't work with Netscape 4.8, which I use on the 12-year-old Powerbook 1400cs. Luckily Fastmail.fm does.