March 2007 Archives

After asking users what they wanted to see from Dell in the future -- and seeing an overwhelming hue and cry for pre-installed Linux on Dell boxes, the company tells Desktoplinux.com that it will indeed offer computers with Linux preloaded:

(Quoted material begins here) David Lord, a Dell spokesperson, did say, however, that Dell has been listening to its users and that the users want home and office desktops and laptops. Dell's current offering in this area includes the Inspiron and Latitude laptops and the Dimension and OptiPlex desktops.

The new systems, Lord added, will be true pre-installed Linux systems -- and not just a PC with a blank hard drive and a bootable CD or DVD. Software support is likely to come from the community, however, rather than from Dell. Lord added, however, that hardware support on the Dell Linux systems is likely to be the same as it offers on its Windows-powered systems.

According to Lord, Dell will also make buying the new Linux-powered PCs as easy as possible for customers. Specifically how Dell will to do this -- making Linux an option in Dell's standard sales configuration menu, setting up special pages for Dell Linux systems, or some other approach -- the company is not yet ready to say.

(quoted material ends here)

Dell hasn't yet decided (or revealed) which Linux distribution(s) it will offer, but the company already sells servers and workstations with Linux loaded. The company is also committing to open-source drivers whenever possible. And according to DesktopLinux.com, Novell's SUSE Linux is a heavy favorite to be the No. 1 Dell distro.

Expect HP/Compaq to follow with their own preloaded Linux boxes -- and also expect some behind-the-scenes pressure from Microsoft, which tries to ensure that hardware makers load each and every box with Windows (and gives OEMs low-per-box prices as an incentive). Does this mean that MS will start pulling marketing dollars from PC makers? I've read that while it's $150 to $200 to buy a Windows Vista upgrade at retail, a PC maker is only dinged between $25 and $30 (WARNING: all figures are estimates by me and are not to be taken as gospel) per PC, with much of that money coming back in marketing dollars. How MS actually makes money on these deals is a bit harder for me to see (if, in fact, all or any of this is true), but by preserving the market for MS Office, they make it up on the back end, because people pay for that package (even though they could -- and the Daily News does -- opt for the free Open Office suite instead).

Despite all this Linux talk, my main work box runs XP, and I think very highly of the OS (and the plethora of open-source apps that run on it, by the way), but I'm made less happy by the way MS charges so much for upgrades and ignores all but the most recent hardware in the hopes that you will junk what you've got every two years and buy more MS products in the same cycles.

All I'm saying is if Linux goes legit on the desktop (and while I don't think it is ready, Win 3.1 and 95 weren't so ready either in their time), Microsoft is going to have to do a lot of spin ... not that they've never done that before. Linux is definitely not for everybody, but it could be for more bodies if it came preconfigured and if the GUI utilities to manage networking, printing and application installation get better. The Linux command line is there for all to behold, but most normal people rightly want nothing to do with it.

It's Day 3 of the Thin Puppy torture test, in which the Thin Puppy -- a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client repurposed to run Puppy Linux 2.14 -- will run continuously to test the hardware and OS ... and also because since the Compact Flash memory died, I booted the machine with a CD drive, then disconnected said drive. So the Thin Puppy is running totally in RAM (I have a 256 MB USB flash drive connected in case I want to save anything big, but there's no OS or apps on it), and it can't be rebooted without me cracking the case open and re-plugging the CD drive, or inserting a pre-programmed CF module in the back (the only "disk" this thin client is wired for is the CF, via an IDE adapter that plugs into the motherboard and a floppy power connector.

Again, the Maxspeed Maxterm, which I bought on eBay, is running a Via C3 1 GHz processor with special heatsink that pipes to two auxiliary heatsinks bolted to the metal case; a VT133 chipset, 256 MB of PC133 RAM, all on a Mini-ITX motherboard of undetermined origin (I don't think Via made it, and it could be PC Chips, but I can't confirm that either), plus a small, fanless power supply, also in the case, fed by an external 12 V laptop-style adapter, and the previously mentioned CF-to-IDE adapter with access through the back of the case.

One thing that Puppy Linux offers is a running tally of how much free memory you have for data. I'm currently at 45.2 MB. The computing session began on March 26, with 49.5 MB and has fluctuated all the while. Much of that is taken up in cache for the SeaMonkey browser; emptying the cache restores some of the memory. But as long as things stay at an acceptable level and nothing else crashes the system, the Thin Puppy should keep going.

The system only achieved its current stability when I swapped in the 256 MB RAM stick -- it would buckle on Flash animation elements of Web pages with 128 MB of RAM because Puppy only had about 5 MB of free RAM for data (it's not ALL the free RAM, just that set aside for data -- caches, added programs, downloads NOT made to the USB flash drive and such).

I used the Dillo browser for most of the day. It's much lighter and faster than SeaMonkey, which itself isn't that slow. But Dillo loads instantly and displays pages almost as fast. The way it achieves that speed is, in some part, because it doesn't use CSS style sheets, Java, or any of that other stuff that makes most browsers work hard. For general Web browsing in which you don't have to fill out forms and do other complex things (or need Flash), it's a great app to have on hand. And while SeaMonkey is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS, Dillo is a Linux-only application, as far as I can tell.

I was reading Sal Cangleso's excellent article on his Mini-ITX project, in which he builds small computers that run off of Compact Flash memory (just like the Thin Puppy!), and he mentioned that while he liked Puppy Linux, another small distribution, called Slax, was better. So I went over there and am intrigued -- I downloaded a few ISOs to burn later and try.

It's a small Linux, all right, and the main version is based on KDE, with the wonderful KOffice (smart quotes!!!) also on board. There is also a "Kill Bill" version that includes Wine preloaded to run Windows apps (now you know which Bill we're talking about), and a small version to fit on a 128M USB drive (now if I could only figure out how to make a USB flash drive bootable ....).

While there are a lot of people using Slax, as the forum attests, it is primarily the work of one man, Tomas Matejicek of the Czech Republic. And if you didn't get the reference, Slax is indeed based on that most noble of Linux distributions, Slackware.

For those already knee-deep in Linux, there are many specialized Slax modules available (1,857 to be exact), with options including the Xfce, fwvm, IceWM and Fluxbox window managers. How's that for freedom of choice?

Whether you're interested in Slax or not, you are interested in cool, homebuilt computers, aren't you? Thought so. There are three parts to Sal's Mini-ITX series, and all three are well worth studying before you embark on your own Mini-ITX (or any PC) project.

More from Sal:

Mini-ITX Part 1
Mini-ITX Part 3
The Core 2 Duo Mini-ITX Box

Before I pulled the CD-R drive, I did boot the Thin Puppy with Zen Walk 4.2, another of the Linux distributions that are supposed to run well on lower-spec computers. I did it before I boosted the memory from 128 MB to 256 MB, so it all looked pretty good until I loaded up Firefox, at which point the CPU went crazy and killed X. Then, when I tried to shut down, it wouldn't do it all the way. Maybe things will be different with 256 MB. It made a helluva difference for Puppy Linux.

By the way, Zen Walk is based on Slackware, and it ran, while Xubuntu, based on Debian would not boot.

I thought that it was the power drain from the CD-R drive that made the Thin Puppy's fan turn on, but it turns out that the fan's sudden spin to life had nothing to do with the added drive. I confirmed this by pulling the drive out from the Thin Puppy, which was lying on its side to accomodate the short cables. Once I removed the CD-R, the fan stayed on. When I stood the Thin Puppy upright, the fan went off. Put back on its side again, the fan starts up. Strange. Is there a short in the wiring that somehow resolves itself when the thing is turned at a 90-degree angle? I can't worry about it too much because the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) never gets all that hot. The VT133 portion of the chipset gets the hottest, but the Via C3 1 GHz CPU never gets that hot -- and it's got a heatsink that's piped and connected to the metal case for maximum heat transfer, so there's really nothing to worry about.

I'm disappointed that I couldn't boot any Debian-derived CDs with the CD-R drive hooked up, but I'm happy that Puppy Linux is comfortable with 256 MB of RAM. I pulled the CD-R drive while the thin client was running, so now it'll stay running as long as it doesn't crash ... or I get a new CF card and reboot it ... or ????

I finally got around to stuffing the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) with 256 MB of PC133 RAM, and now I can even load dailynews.com, with all its various Flash animation components, WITHOUT killing the Thin Puppy. With the new memory, there's about 48 MB of RAM left over for Puppy Linux 2.14 to play with. I'd love to see how Damn Small Linux works with this setup, but it -- and all other Debian-based Linuxes I have on CD -- won't even boot. Something about a disk error. Well, whatever's in error there is not with Puppy, which is running fine right now.

I suspect that if I loaded those other Debians on a hard drive (or even Compact Flash), I'd be able to boot them on the Thin Puppy, but now with Puppy Linux itself booting and actually working, I couldn't be happier (for the minute, at least).

Hardware note: Now that the CD-R drive is hooked up, the fan runs continuously on the Thin Puppy, whereas it never ran at all before. Therefore it must be responding to the increased load on the power supply (this is a pretty small DC supply to run actual physical drives, as opposed to a measly CF card).

So I can say now, with some certainty, that Puppy Linux is a bit uncomfortable with 128 MB RAM, but comfortable enough with 256 MB (the maximum the Thin Puppy can address, by the way). Since boosting an old PC to 156 MB is a fairly cheap proposition (you ARE buying your memory on the used market, aren't you?), then Puppy is a very viable system with which to rescue said PCs for productive use.

Memory addendum: In Puppy Linux, downloading to the "My Documents" file stores your data in memory until you exit Puppy, but downloading to an extermal drive -- in this case a USB flash drive -- does NOT ding your RAM, so it is possible to work with big files in Puppy and not bring your system to its knees. Goooood dog.

When was the last time you bought a computer for $20 and had it on the Internet five minutes later?

It just happened to me. I got this HP T5300 thin client -- works like a PC, except it has no disk drives -- for $20 on eBay from a health-care business. These things often sell for a couple hundred dollars but usually go used for $50 or so. This one is based on the Windows CE embedded operating system (others are Linux based), with a 533 MHz processor, 32 MB of flash memory and 64 MB of RAM. It's enough to run Explorer (no Macromedia Flash player, though), and it's enough to post to this blog via Movable Type.

And this thin client is about half the size of the Thin Puppy. Unfortunately, it only uses a USB keyboard and mouse, and I've got PS/2 versions, so I'm sharing the peripherals from the Dell at the moment.

Even so, this thing was blissfully easy to configure for the Internet (I logged on as the administrator and went into the settings). Since it's Windows-based, there's no Linux learning curve, but I'd love to run it off of Linux just the same. That might only be possible by pulling the flash memory module and starting/booting from scratch. But strictly as a Web terminal, this thing is working great.

Ever since its Compact Flash chip died, the Thin Puppy has been out of commission, but I managed to pull one of the two CD drives from This Old PC and meld it with the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client).

It's a TDK CD-R drive, 2002 vintage. I pulled the IDE cable from the CF adapter and powered the drive with the previously unused hard-drive power cable (from the fanless power supply in the thin client).

Since I was having so much trouble with memory while running Puppy from the CF card (the box has 128 MB), I thought I would try Damn Small Linux instead, but that CD wouldn't boot.

So I tried Puppy 2.13, and it booted fine. Except that I have a whopping 4.6 MB of memory left after booting. That's in contrast to about 50 MB when running from the CF drive. (Yes, the Thin Puppy has no HD storage, not even the 1 GB CF -- everything is done in memory).

Predictibly, the SeaMonkey browser was painfully slow, bringing the system to its knees. So I went to the much-lighter Dillo browser -- something I should've done before the CF chip was killed.

Dillo doesn't to half the complex things that "modern" browser do. There's no CSS or Java, for instance, but the result is a blazing-fast Web experience that barely taxes the CPU or scarce memory in the Thin Puppy.

And yes, I am posting now on Dillo.

I am disturbed, however, by Damn Small Linux's refusal to run on the Thin Puppy from CD. I'll have to try DSL-n, the original DSL's larger cousin, which is built on a new version of the Linux kernel.

The little DSL was running great on This Old PC over the weekend, although I didn't get a chance to connect to the Internet, and that's seemingly where all the real problems come in to play.

I recently borrowed an oldish LCD monitor for This Old PC, since its old Gateway monitor is at the office, hooked up to the now-brainless Thin Puppy, and a try of Puppy with the new monitor didn't produce quite the crisp resolution I'm seeking with such a "high-end" screen.

So I popped in Damn Small Linux 3.2, and I was pleasantly surprised to have an EXTREMELY crisp resolution on the LCD, with sound (from the troublesome ISA sound card that Puppy can't find) present on booting. Now the big beef I've had with Damn Small Linux (DSL for short, not to be confused with the DSL that the other 99.999 percent of the population knows) is its inability to find the onboard Ethernet in the newish Dell at the Daily News. But it sure found the cheap ($1.99) Airlink 10/100 Ethernet card I got from Fry's some time ago.

In case you don't know, This Old PC is, indeed about nine years old, with a Pentium II MMX 333 MHz processor, 262 MB RAM (yes, it's not a round number -- I have three different kinds of RAM in there, and something's fishy). DSL runs great on it. And since the screen looks so good, it's a computing environment I could really get used to. ... If only the printer and Wi-Fi were working. I'm not above getting another Wi-Fi adapter, especially one that works through USB so I could use it on multiple machines.

I had DHCP networking running, but since I don't have any wired Internet in The Back Room, all I could do was configure my router.

DSL, like Puppy, couldn't find my wireless card -- but since Windows 2000 has "lost" it recently, I won't hold that against it for now.

I tried, again, the screwy printer-configuration program that comes with DSL, and again I had no luck. The "test" page just shoots out every page in the printer, and when I try to print something normal, I get nothing. So at the moment, Puppy and DSL are neck and neck. DSL looks better on screen, but Puppy can actually print. I'll have to hit the DSL forums and see some solutions for printing and wireless.

And I'm not above getting a different, cheap Wi-Fi adapter, preferably one that runs through USB so I could swap it into the many test computers I have going at the moment.

Note: DSL-n, the bigger version of DSL with different apps and a newer Linux kernel does work with the newish Dell, so at least I've got that covered.

I heard about this Microsoft presentation on how to steer people away from Linux and back to Windows. The link first appeared on Lxer.com, but when word got out, MS took it down.

Luckily the Blog of Helios and others managed to keep a copy so we can all see what Microsoft is up to.

And Mr. Helios also points out that even as MS aims to crush Linux, Ballmer and Co. are still making money off of it with their Novell partnership and the SUSE product.

It's got to be a year since the Daily News got a new editorial-computing system -- and with it new PCs for all of us in the newsroom. Before the switch, we ran Windows 98 on Celeron 400 MHz boxes with 32 MB RAM, and you could barely use Explorer without crashing about 10 times a day.

So when we got new Dells, it was a pleasant shock to the system. All of you out there might've had XP five years ago, but to me it was -- and still is -- brand new, and a big leap forward in usability and reliability, even compared to Windows 2000.

The same holds true for the Dell, an Optiplex GX520 with 3 GHz Pentium III and 512 MB RAM. Everything runs great. I can have dozens of windows open, run The GIMP, do two simultaneous downloads, open additional Web pages, work on copy -- and it never, ever crashes. Sure, individual programs crap out here and there, but the system itself always stays up.

And the look of the type on the E173FP LCD monitor is the best I've ever used. It looks way better than type does on the iBook G4.

And as far as reliability goes, we beat these things to shit, and the Dell can take it. The way XP runs on this thing, I really have no complaints whatsoever.

So why am I screwing around with Linux so much? That's a very good question. Much of it is the "otherness" of it. Running Linux is so different than Windows or even Mac, even though the latter is Unix-based. One thing I've learned is that viruses notwithstanding, Windows at this stage in its development is very, very solid.

The problem comes in paying for it. ... another topic for another blog entry.

Now that the Thin Puppy is out of commission due to the dead CF card, I booted Puppy LInux 2.14 on the Dell (3 GHz, 512 MB RAM), and it ran like a champ. Video looks GREAT. I opened up a bunch of Web pages in SeaMonkey, and all displayed perfectly, even the Flash animation classified ads at DailyNews.com that brought the Thin Puppy to its knees.

I needed to get a bunch of pictures off of an SD card, and the card reader wasn't working in Windows XP, so I fired up Puppy again, and it was extremely easy to get the photos off of the SD card and into a directory on my hard drive. Puppy just makes it so easy to find drives, mount them and navigate with the Rox filer.

So sorry, Puppy, it could be that the Masxpeed MaxTerm thin client's design isn't conducive to working with a full-fledged OS ... or it could be the memory. More testing is needed, but if you have the kind of power that this Dell has, your Puppy Linux experience will be a good one.

It just underscores the rule that one OS doesn't fit all computers or computer users, and it pays to check out an operating system on many different kinds of hardware to determine the proper fit. Yep, it's like shoes. You don't know how good they are until you've walked that proverbial mile.

That said, the next step is to get a CD-ROM drive hooked up to the Thin Puppy and start pumping other OSes into it, everything from Damn Small Linux to the bigger DSL-n, Puppy from CD, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Zen Walk, Mepis Lite, and probably more.

I found my way to this great Computerworld article in which the magazine/Web site's Sharon Marchlis tries to go from Windows XP to SUSE Linux. It gets into everything from configuration to trying to either replace some apps with Linux equivalents or run them under emulation. It's a warts and all look at the challenges facing Linux on the desktop:

I expected to be a poster child for the next wave of Linux desktop adopters. I wanted to be. I like the whole idea of a technically macho, open-source operating system -- one that doesn't assume we all must be protected from an operating system's inner workings. I don't fear command lines, and enjoy fiddling around with programming.

It turns out that an intermediate-level power user may not be the ideal next desktop Linux demographic.

It was possible for me to do most, but not all, of my work on a Linux system. There are some applications I'd miss if I were to make the switch permanently, but I believe I could adequately replace them after sufficient research and time rewriting scripts.

To put it in perspective, she wants to run some crazy stuff, like Lotus Notes (turns out there is a Linux version out there), and a text editor called NoteTab Pro. While I like EditPad a lot (and there is a version for Linux, but development on that platform isn't slated to continue), there are plenty of text editors in the Linux world ... but Lotus Notes??? And she doesn't want to throw out all her Photoshop knowledge to learn The GIMP. For me, I probably spent a total of 10 minutes on Photoshop during my entire life, but now I use The GIMP daily in Windows, and I'm pretty happy with it.

Machlis tries to get her text editor running thorugh Crossover Linux's implementation of Wine, and it doesn't go well. I sure wish I heard more success stories with Wine than I do.

And she also gets it right when it comes to syncing her Palm T/X. I'm sure it's doable in Linux, but it's got to be made a whole lot easier. Palm Desktop for Windows and Mac has the look and feel of a program that hasn't been updated in years. At least it runs fast. If Palm could only port it to Linux ... that would be sweet.

What Machlis is saying is that there are workarounds for many of these problems, but nobody short of the precariously geeky wants to spend hours, days and weeks on trying to get basic functionality working.

I still maintain that there's a place for Linux on the desktop -- and we don't know where the OS will be five years from now.

While trying to prepare the Thin Puppy to dual-boot from Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, the whole thing crashed, with the aftermath being a dead CF card. It has soured me on the use of flash RAM as a boot medium ... and now the Thin Puppy has a heart, but not a brain.

Next for the Thin Puppy: Pulling the spare CD-ROM drive from This Old PC, running MANY Linux distros that way ... or stuffing a 3.5-inch hard drive in there -- there's space for it.

One thing this experiment has done is dampen my enthusiasm for Puppy Linux. Performance with 128 MB of RAM is less than satisfactory. I had a lot of crashes. Downloading large files wreaked havoc with available RAM and made the system unstable. Working entirely in RAM, nothing saves to physical drives until the computing session is finished, meaning data loss in the event of a crash.

Streaming audio and video was choppy -- I expected that from an older VIA-powered board, but -- on the plus side -- Puppy used a very light program that played MP3s downloaded to the system without trouble (something Gxine couldn't do).

Still, configuration of the system has been easier in Puppy than in any other Linux I've tried. Networking, sound, printing, mounting drives, installing a bootable OS -- all goes smoothly in Puppy. And as a live CD, working entirely in RAM is more palatable -- everything saves to your pup_save file when you power down. And it makes the live CD environment work quickly. But with 128 MB of memory, when stress on the system climbs, Puppy starts accessing the drive like mad -- swapping, perhaps? -- and with a CF, that can't be good, especially for a system that is billed as being easy on flash memory. That's true when you work from CD and write to pup_save on flash, but not so true in a HD installation. I don't think Puppy is really meant for that. Like Knoppix, Puppy Linux is designed as a live CD and while it can be installed to HD, I'm not recommending it at this point.

The crashes with 128 MB of RAM are troubling. The Thin Puppy's motherboard maxes out at 256 MB, and once you get to 512 MB of RAM, you can pretty much run any Linux distro. Generally "light" means light on RAM and CPU speed, not just one or the other. Still, I'll have to try Puppy on This Old PC, a traditional box which I can run with 128 MB or 256 MB to compare performance.

Again, to sum up, Puppy is designed to run from a live CD and be shut down and restarted daily. It isn't designed to be installed to a hard drive or flash medium, although it's easy to do so. I really love the working environment of Puppy, but doing everything in RAM memory presents its problems, and I've experienced them.

Question: Is it the Thin Puppy itself, or its RAM (the amount) that's causing the trouble?

It's been so long since my last Google Docs report. And here I am again, back in the world of Docs to see if anything's changed.

I still don't see automatic paragraph indents. And right now, when I printed, I had a little blip bringing back the text I just typed in.

But I can save this as HTML, .doc, .rtf, .odt, and even .pdf -- outputting the file formats the world needs now.

So is it love, sweet love, for Google Docs? I can pretty much produce any writing I need in this comfortable world and output it in whatever format I need, so that's a kind of love right there. But why is there no .txt output? That's a puzzler.

And why can't I print from Google Docs without the header and footer all my other browser pages have on them? I know I can modify the browser parameters, but there should be some kind of helper app (maybe Java based?) that would allow printable output without the header and footer. But the app is very slick, and the code works so quickly and so well. Google is on to something here. At this point it's a tool that works well for Web-based writing, less so for print. But if you want to write .doc files without Word or Open Office, keep them stored on Google's servers, access them anywhere and easily convert them to a format that can be read by those word processors. Google Docs is good enough for now.

Imagine if there was only one Linux distribution.

One company or group would control the development, direction and philosophy of the operating system and the user environment. Hardware and software compatibility would be strictly controlled, both in terms of what the OS would run on, and what peripherals and programs would run with it.

Everybody's system -- at some levels, anyway -- would be exactly the same. Security patches would come weekly over the system's five years of support -- and for probably an extra five years of "legacy" support.

But would it -- or could it -- be free, like Linux is today? Even now, there's no stopping companies from selling Linux. Novell and Red Hat do it, though they each sponsor open-source, free-distribution projects on the side. The aims, I figure, are to both recruit paid corporate users by wooing their geeky IT staff and to look less like Microsoft in the process.

You could say that an OS has to cost money. How could such a major undertaking come to any kind of bootable, usable fruition otherwise? All I can say in response is to look at the open-source model and the way the Linux kernel and everything else wrapped around it have developed.

It's been said before -- and I'd sure like to figure out who said it first so I can properly credit him or her: Software wants to be free.

And while Novel and Red Hat are in the business of selling Linux, even as their open-source arms give versions of it away, those companies, along with looming Linux giant Canonical (maker of No. 1 distribution Ubuntu) know that the real money is in support.

Whether it's running Microsoft, Mac OS or Linux, equipment and software in the business world (and at home, too) need support -- and the days of dropping a PC box on a desk with OS and software installed and expecting it all to work -- on day 1, day 100 or day 1,000 -- without technical support from real people, those days were never here and never will be. And that goes for Mac, Windows and Linux.

So when we focus on the configuration issues of installing a Linux distro -- and go through it as many times as we download and burn to CD and now DVD the dozens of distributions out there -- remember that Windows and even Mac OS had and still have these same problems.

Case in point: The cheap HP printer I bought was labeled "Windows compatible." Only the look-alike HP printer that cost $40 more offered Mac compatibility.

What did I do? I took the cheaper one home, trolled the Internet and found the solution. Did I find it at HP.com? Fuck no. Amazom.com's buyer comments on the printer gave me the hack: Go to HP.com, download the Mac driver for the "expensive" printer and install. The cheap printer and the Mac itself wouldn't know the difference. It worked immediately.

And how does Apple get around the nightmare of configuring third-party Wi-Fi adapters? By only supporting Apple-made Airport, that's how. You try finding a Wi-Fi card or USB interface that supports Mac. They ain't out there. You're stuck with Airport. Nice work, Cupertino.

I just did some updates on Macs running OS X 10.4 and 10.3, and while I'm too cautious to do anything that would possibly interfere with an update while it's downloading and installing, others aren't so cautions, according to unsanity.org, via Infinite Loop:

Every single time you install an update to Mac OS X whether it be an iTunes update, a QuickTime update, an update for daylight saving time, a security update, an Airport update, or an actual Mac OS X update, you can be hit by this bug. In order to prevent yourself from being smacked in the face by this bug, follow this simple rule: When "Optimize System Performance" appears during the update process do not touch your computer and definitely do not launch any applications. Just back away from your computer box as if it were a swarm of bees. Yes, it does mean that if you install the Mac OS X 10.4.9 update, you may get hit by the bug.

Of course you are doing a full backup to a Firewire-equipped drive before you install your updates, aren't you?

Linux, like Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X, is a computer operating system -- the landscape, if you will, for the work, play and other things we use computers for.

But it gets to the apples (not Apples, cap A) and oranges stage and beyond pretty quickly. While parts of Linux -- the kernel itself, the X windows system, the various graphical user interfaces and other building blocks -- are common across the now-hundreds of distributions that deliver the free OS to desktops and elsewhere, just the fact that there are hundreds of ways to bring Linux to many different kinds of hardware (and for many different working styles) makes it a very distinct fruit (getting back to the apples/oranges thing).

In contrast, there's only one Windows -- Microsoft's. And while XP is still available because the business world demands it (and because much of the new hardware still in the retail channel can't run Vista), good luck if you want to purchase or get support for Windows 2000. Primary support for Win 2K ended in 2005. "Long term" support -- probably security patches and nothing more -- ends in 2010 -- 3 years from now. At least it had a 10-year or so life. But you can't buy Win 2K at retail.

I've heard whisperings about something called "XP Legacy," a cut-down OS that will run on hardware from the Windows 98 and 2000 era. But I can't find any information at Microsoft.com. Apple does the same thing. It's selling OS X 10.4 Tiger for a fairly reasonable $129. But can you get 10.3 Panther from Apple. Not on their Web site. And the new 10.5 Leopard is coming ... I don't know when, but soon. So should I pay $129 to upgrade my Panther to Tiger, then another similar amount to go to Leopard? Nah. I'm sticking with Panther.

But we're starting to get to the point where Mac apps won't run on 10.3, and users will need, at the minimum, 10.4 to install the software they need.

In the Linux space, Ubuntu -- the current No. 1 Linux distribution, according to distrowatch.com -- maintains a six-month release cycle, bringing out new versions of its OS at that interval. And there is one release -- currently 6.06 -- that will receive "long-term support," meaning 18 months of security patches, bug fixes and the like. But you can move to 6.10 and beyond at any time -- for free, of course. Or wait until the next LTS release comes out, if you loathe changing OSes.

Therein lies the beauty of Linux. You can partition a giant hard drive and load 10 separate distros to try them out, upgrade whenever you want -- and delete what you don't. And the only investment is your time and a stank of once-blank CD-R discs.

Ah, but your time ... it is valuable ... and there lies the eternal rub. Linux often takes time to configure and always takes time to learn.

And while hardware configuration troubles can stall a Linux newbie in his or her tracks, I was reminded just this week that Windows doesn't do hardware all that well. The cheap Airlink 101 Wi-Fi card that wouldn't work on This Old PC under Windows 98 is now refusing to work with Windows 2000 -- which I upgraded to for this very purpose. Never mind that the wireless card -- supposedly built by Ralink -- one of the few Wi-Fi card makers to offer an open-source Linux driver, doesn't seem to work under Linux, either (though This Old PC's age as well as my geekery skills, may be at fault). A pending test in the Thin Puppy converted thin client should shed some more electronic light on the issue.

But inherent in the term "distribution," is a generally sizable bundle of software included with a free Linux OS -- usually an office suite, photo-editing program, dozens of utilities, Internet everything (browsers, mail programs, IM and FTP programs, HTML editors). And the big distros offer realtively easy installation of hundreds or thousands of additional applications -- again, all free.

So is "free" the killer app of Linux?

Let's look first at the competition. What are the killer apps of Windows and OS X that make each a must for their adherents? I'll start with the less-obvious for both Windows and Mac -- iTunes (you didn't see that one coming, did you?). Then there's Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook), Adobe Photoshop and ... well, I can't think of anything else.

Mid-editorial news flash: The latest release of Crossover Linux -- the consumer- and business-friendly $40 implementation of Windows emulator Wine reportedly now runs iTunes, in addition to MS Office.

Microsoft Office ... it's another gorilla in the room, but these days not quite the King Kong he used to be.

Linux, without MS Office substitutes Open Office and KOffice, would be the ultimate nonstarter. As it is, these packages offer a very viable alternative -- and did I forget to say free alternative -- to the expensive Microsoft Office.

And there's the GIMP. Though not an full equivalent of Photoshop, it's got plenty of sophistication and is way, way less expensive. Again, it's free. Add to the GIMP at least a half-dozen other image-editing programs, like my current favorite mtPaint, which loads just about instantly in Puppy Linux and does everything I need to prep images for the Web.

And what about the Internet? Linux has everything you need -- even the Evolution mail client -- as well as Mozilla-produced Thunderbird -- to negate of Windows' killer apps, Outlook. And by not being Outlook, they just might avoid lots of nasty spam and system-crippling viruses.

But the free, open-source programs that could be Linux's killer apps -- Opne Office, the GIMP, Mozilla/Firefox -- are for the most part available in Windows versions, too, and often for Mac OS X as well. So it's easy to build an open-source box with everthing but the OS itself available for free. Chances are you're using -- or at least have installed -- Firefox, the current big daddy of open source. And I've also heard that Mac's Safari browser borrows code from Konqueror, the browser/filer for Linux's KDE interface.

So perhaps Linux's killer app is ... the OS itself, the fact that it's not Windows or OS X, not controlled by a single corporation, is free now and in the future, and can be -- and probably already is -- freely modified into a configuration that suits your needs as a user.

Of course free and open top the list. Windows and Mac OS do work well for most of the people, most of the time. But neither, by their very nature, encourage free, upgradable, machine-tuned computing. The advantage Win and Mac OS do have are vast user bases offering many people and resources with which to get help.

And while Ubuntu's forums are nipping at their heels, yet another double-edger for Windows and OS X is that each has only a few variants out there in the world, while there are hundreds of different Linuxes (though they share many, many commonalities).

So whether you choose Windows, OS X or Linux, each presents strengths, weaknesses, challenges and opportunities. And competition for loyalty on the desktop makes everybody better.

I gave Fluxbuntu another try. You remember Fluxbuntu, the erstwhile child of Ubuntu that's even lighter than Xubuntu?

Before booting, I did a little reading around the Fluxbuntu Web site, and I realized that the Fluxbuntu philosophy is to have you configure just about everything from the command line. CLI they call it -- command-line interface. And CLI is like a religion among the Fluxbuntu people. "CLI never crashes," one said somewhere. So true, but it's hell on a new user.

So I went to Linux Headquarters for info on how to configure a network connection from the command line. I followed the instructions (I had to use sudo because I wasn't logged in as root) and everything seemed go go well. I pinged the router and it worked. But nothing came through Firefox ...

I don't know ... a Linux distribution in which you have to use the command line just to get your Internet going? And Fluxbuntu doesn't even have an "off" utility. You pretty much have to hit the power button to tell the system that you want to shut it down.

If only Damn Small Linux would see my Ethernet card -- DSL-n does. Those are better alternatives in this space, I think.

The Thin Puppy (Maxspeed MaxTerm 1 GHz thin client converted to stand-alone Compact Flash-driven Puppy Linux box with 128 MB RAM) is behaving today.

I've done a bunch of Yahoo! e-mail, posted blog entries, edited photos -- and there have been no problems. Oh, and I haven't gone to Dailynews.com, which has a bunch of embedded videos that brought the Thin Puppy to its knees yesterday. Nor did I try to install any new, giant applications, another deal-breaker with 128 MB RAM Puppy (I hear you need 192 MB to successfully download and install bigger packages).

I think part of my problem is that I am running Puppy installed on a hard drive -- even if it's a CF chip acting like a hard drive. If I was running from CD, I think the whole thing would work that much better. It's something I plan to try out, since I do have a spare CD-ROM drive; if only I could pry it out of This Old PC (a screw head broke off, leaving it in there for the duration).

Soon the 512 MB experiment will begin. I feel that I have to write more -- and more -- about Linux, Windows AND Mac OS in regard to memory. I think 512 MB is the minimum for Windows XP. We're running something like 384 MB with OS X 10.3.9, and I know it would run better with more RAM. Windows Vista needs 1 GB minimum. Going back to Windows 2000, it runs pretty good with 256 MB, and I suspect it could handle 128 MB, though I haven't done a real-world test. Windows 98 can run in 32 MB, but it crashes all the time; 128 MB gives 98 the room it needs to run, but I wouldn't recommend anybody actually use it -- 2000 is that much better, as is XP.

For Linux, you have a choice of window managers, everything from Fluxbox to JWM, to IceWm, GNOME, KDE ... so there is a flexibility that you don't have with Windows or Mac OS (although there's noise out there that KDE will be available soon for the Unix-based Mac OS X). There are distros out there that work with low-RAM machines -- Damn Small Linux and DeLi Linux among them. At the DeLi site, they say the test box is a 486 laptop with 16 MB RAM, but they recommend 32 MB. With more RAM, you can run more stuff, like Firefox and Gnumeric. Mannn ... I have a DeLi CD, but it's not a live disc, so you need to do an install. (For those who want to know, DeLi uses the Fluxbox or IceWM window managers, with Abiword for word processing, Dillo for Web browsing, See, that's the difference between a "lite" system with less functionality and a "lite" system that works on hardware that will choke on most of the Linux distros out there. DSL can also run with 16 MB ... but runs entirely in RAM with 128 MB. I believe it. But it's too hard to make a bootable CF. I'll try again, but the Puppy Universal Installer is a gift from the Linux gods that I .

Xubuntu is said to run with 64 MB RAM, but I can't believe it can do well even with 128 MB. Something to test. I couldn't even get the live CD to boot on This Old PC with 262 MB ... so that one will have to wait for a new hard drive and the "alternate install" disc. Zen Walk, which is also for lower-power machines, recommends 128 MB RAM as a minimum.

MepisLite (the small version of SimplyMepis) which hasn't reached release 1.0 yet but is pretty stable in my testing of it, is one of the most intriguing "lite" distributions, since it includes the KDE desktop and KOffice. That one's going to get a major workout vs. Xubuntu and Zen Walk in my experimental future.

So depending on what day it is, Puppy is performing well with 128 MB RAM. When the going gets tough, the system starts swapping, and as I've learned, swapping to Compact Flash is a recipe for disaster. Yesterday I had a couple of loops running and hogging the CPU. I could've just killed X and restarted it, but I instead ran KP and slowly waited for the mouse to work its way through all the processes that were causing the trouble. And that means 24 hours of uptime for the Thin Puppy at this point. As I've also said, I think these problems are minimized or eliminated when running Puppy from CD -- the system isn't really using your hard drive -- in fact, it doesn't even need one -- so there's no swapping. What I have to do is get This Old PC hooked up to the Internet so I can replicate these conditions and see how a 333 MHz box deals with it.

I guess the bottom line is that when you get to low RAM, you have three choices: add more RAM, run an older Windows OS, or run a slighter Linux than the main distros. I think the answer, for me at this point, is dual booting.

In reference to today's work with the Thin Puppy, I'm happy to report that mtPaint, the included image editor in the Puppy Linux distribution, works quickly and easily -- and I even was able to put a border around a photo. Who needs the GIMP? By the way, mtPaint uses the GTK+ toolkit and runs in both Linux and Windows.

I've got to hand it to Phoronix for this excellent short -- yet screen-grab-heavy -- history of Ubuntu, going all the way back to 2004 (yep, it hasn't been all that long) when the distro, which has since become No. 1 with a bullet, made its debut.

Tiger Direct's Web site -- like New Egg's -- is so vast and offers so many products that it's hard to a) keep up and b) find the best deal (or the deal that's right for you).

I signed up for e-mails from Tiger Direct, and I'm glad I did. They have killer deals all the time. Check out this PCChips P23G v3.0 Socket 775 Barebone Kit / Intel Celeron D 360 OEM / 512MB DDR2 PC4200 / ATX Mid-Tower Case with a 450 Watt Power Supply -- yes, it even stuffs in the memory -- for $149. Curiously, you need to add a CPU fan. They've got them from $9.99 and up, though. Yeah, you still need a hard drive, CD drive, keyboard, mouse and monitor, but you've got at least some of that stuff from you old system, don't you?

Well, they've got you covered on all that crap, too. DVD burners start at $31.99. SATA hard drives start at $44.99.

Or go for this system, $109.99 after rebate, but with the CPU fan and without RAM. ...

And if you want EVERYTHING included AND put together, Pacific Geek has an IBM P4 2.8 GHz, 512Mb, 40GB, CD, XP Pro System for $269 -- yep, that's your out-the-door price.

Neither of these companies kill you on the shipping, either.

And while we're on the bargain train, Tiger Direct has a 1 GHz Compaq laptop -- reburbished, of course -- for $299. That's better than you'll do on eBay, where everybody is whacked in the head.

Photos: At top left, the case in the Tiger Direct $149 bundle (before you stuff it with the rest of the parts). At right, Pacific Geek's reburbished IBM box and accessories.

The WSJ looks at the state of Linux on the desktop. At least we agree that there is a place, if not every place. The story also hints at HP and Dell's possible entry into the pre-configured Linux box marketplace:

Whether Linux gains a stronger footing in PCs depends partly on whether PC makers start supporting it more strongly. To date, neither Dell Inc. nor Hewlett-Packard Co. have offered PCs preloaded with Linux. But Dell has been soliciting input from its customers to help guide its plans for Linux -- which some industry observers say could lead the company to start making Linux PCs. Today Dell will start a formal survey on its Web site to determine what Linux products and support customers want, says Bob Pearson, a Dell spokesman.

"We're certainly listening to the comments very closely and trying to determine what we should be doing with the [Linux] community longer term," Mr. Pearson says.

HP says it has recently signed deals -- on an ad hoc, custom basis -- to provide Linux PCs to large customers. Some industry observers expect H-P to detail further plans in coming months for supporting Linux on PCs, although an H-P spokeswoman said the company isn't ready to discuss future plans for Linux PCs.

DirecTV has announced that they plan to add a whopping 100 HD channels while maintaining the same signal quality over its satellite feed. As TV Week reports, DirectTV has been criticized for offering "HD Lite," delivering HD video at a lower transmission rate, but the satellite company says it offers the best picture quality in the HD space.

The new channels will begin beaming down in September, after the launch of a new satellite.

Among the new HD channels: Sci-Fi, USA and MTV. Ah ... who wouldn't want "Viva La Bam" in HD?

I came across the newish blog, Friendly Linux, which had an excellent review of openSUSE, Novell's entry in the free, open-source Linux distro fray. He did an install for his parents and detailed what went wrong and right -- with plenty of screen-grabs. He also did a nice piece on the Lyx text editor, which I'd like to try, now that I've read his review.

The South African guy who's made of money (yep, he blew a bunch of it on going into space -- as in orbit) and is now using a pile of it to bankroll Ubuntu (and the support company Canonical) has a blog that's updated quite frequently.

I'd say that Shuttleworth is the most important guy in the world of Linux at the moment, so what he thinks is way more important than, say, what I think. So do the right thing and bookmark it.

That's the question I'm asking myself at this very moment. Running Puppy Linux 2.14 on the Thin Puppy -- the repurposed Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client -- is a mixed bag at this point in the testing process.

The thin client -- with Puppy on a Compact Flash card -- is built around a Via motherboard with a 1 GHz Via Samuel processor, with a slowish 133 MHz front side bus and equally slowish SDRAM memory. It's spec'd for PC133 memory, but I've got a 128 MB stick of PC100 in there. Previously I've said that Puppy runs OK with 128 MB, but I have rethought that position, and I'm saying now that you need at least 256 MB to be comfortable with Puppy.

One of the features of Puppy is that it's designed to be run from CD-ROM but can be installed to a hard drive, bootable USB flash drive or, in the case of the Thin Puppy, a bootable CF chip plugged into a CF-to-IDE adapter so the motherboard sees it as a standard IDE hard drive. And Puppy is also designed to save to disk only once per computing session -- when you shut down. But with 128 MB, when the processes involved in displaying a complex Web page or streaming video are brought to bear, the CPU starts to strain, the amount of free memory can drop, and Puppy Linux starts accessing the hard drive -- in this case the CF chip -- using a swap file, I presume. That can't be good for the life of the CF chip, nor the computing experience as a whole, since swapping to flash is much, much slower than doing the same operation with a standard hard disk.

And that 133 MHz FSB can't be helping either. While a 1 GHz processor is plenty fast for most pedestrian uses, a quicker FSB with faster memory -- such as today's DDR and DDR2 -- can really make a system work faster.

The dilemma. Puppy is supposedly designed to run well on older systems with less memory. But at 128 MB, you can't even download and install any "major" add-on packages, such as Open Office or Wine -- there just isn't enough memory to do it. And once you get to 512 MB of system memory, Puppy will obey, but you could probably run ANY distribution of Linux out there, like Ubuntu, Mepis, Fedora, OpernSUSE or what have you. If you have the memory but not the CPU speed, the lower-spec'd Xubuntu, MepisLite or Zen Walk distributions might meld well with your hardware.

But on a fast system, Puppy will indeed fly. With less memory, the swapping can really gum things up. Damn Small Linux is designed to work on even lower-spec'd hardware -- down to even 32 MB of RAM, I've heard. It's also designed to be a live CD but can be installed to become a more traditional Debian.

Since it's a thin client, the Thin Puppy isn't awash in peripherals -- or even places to plug them in. I could remove the CF adapter and install a 3.5-inch hard drive, but I doubt that I could hook up a CD-ROM drive, even temporarily, unless both drives could share a single IDE header (as there is only one). I'll have to look into it. Luckily the CF chips can be prepared for Puppy on another computer via a card reader -- the Puppy Universal installer takes care of that. I haven't yet figured out how to make a bootable Damn Small Linux CF chip or USB drive -- and the Thin Puppy won't boot from USB. I wonder if a USB-connected CD-ROM drive would even boot this $75 box. Probably not.

But as it stands now, I'm going to try to stuff the Thin Puppy with more memory at some point and see how she runs. Barring that, I've got to reassemble This Old PC (which has 262 MB of addressable memory) and get that connected to Ethernet to compare and contrast with the Thin Puppy.

Now I have TED. The Ted Word Processor, a Linux/Unix-only application that saves in Rich Text Format, which can be read by Microsoft Word and just about every other word-processing program out there.

I'm getting a little flicker as I type this, but the letters look good. The one thing I hate about Ted and Abiword is that there's no easy way from the keyboard to change the case of letters. In Ted, ctrl-U underlines type. Same for Abiword, which also underlines when ctrl-shift-u is pressed.

Again, since these word processors were created by and for geeks, who feel more comfortable using text editors rather than word processors, the functions that writers and editors take for granted (directional quotes, the ability to easily change the case of letters ...) are just not present. At least in Abiword you can change the case of words and letters by highlighting a word, clicking the Format menu, clicking Change Case, then choosing the appropriate case change, then clicking OK. That's a lot of steps to do what in WordPad (one of my very favorite shareware apps) is done with ctrl-shift-u or -l on any highlighted word or passage.

Now that I'm done griping, I do like Ted. Like Abiword, it's blazingly fast and looks pretty good on screen, too. And now that one of the developers of KOffice told me that saving in Word-compatible .doc format is often just saving in RTF with a .doc suffix, I'm a lot better about using Ted and KWord, the latter of which blows these smaller programs out of the water.

I can't run KOffice on this box, which under Puppy Linux is using Joe's Window Manager (JWM) and not KDE. And with 128 MB of memory, Puppy Linux can't run Open Office , so for the moment it's a shootout between Ted and Abiword for supremacy on this desktop. I pretty much know Abiword is going to win, but I do like Ted. Both are, as I've probably over-mentioned, blazing fast. And that's the best thing a program can be.

(Warning: I couldn't copy and paste from Ted into the SeaMonkey Web browser. I had to save my Ted document, open it with Abiword, then copy and paste into Movable Type. Abiword wins. Over and out.)

You'd think with a 1 GHz processor and a super-fast Internet connection, the Thin Puppy would handle streaming video and audio reasonably well. Not so. It's jerky, and frequently the machine just slows down as Puppy Linux begins accessing the CF drive -- creating a swap file, I presume.

So is it the motherboard's video and audio hardware ... or is it the 128 MB of system memory? I'm betting on the latter. Anything that keeps the system from creating swap space is bound to speed things up considerably, because creating swap files and writing to them is slow, all the slower when your storage medium is flash memory -- which in Puppy isn't supposed to be written to at all during the computing session.

All I know is that when I downloaded a 50 MB ISO image and tried to actually ... work with it .. . the available memory went down by .... 50 MB -- and that's out of 73 MB available after the OS is loaded into RAM. That's one of the weak points of this box -- the FSB (front side bus) runs at 133 MHz ... that's why I can use slow PC-133 memory (and am trying to get by with PC-100) ... but it's gotta hit the performance. ...

So the moral of this story is -- front side bus speed matters (that's why it's listed in all the Fry's ads), fast memory matters, and having a lot of memory also matters. If I can find a 512 MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I bet things get better, even for streaming audio and video.

But at 128 MB, the Thin Puppy is doing very, very well for tasks that don't involve those two resource-intensive tasks.

And this leads me to the entry that will, at some point, be on top of this ...

Let's get it out in the open. Java is slow. Flash, though proprietary and closed-source, rules.

That's why I like the Speakeasy Speed Test for determining the health of your broadband connection -- it uses Flash instead of the usual Java.

I had problems with the Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client -- outfitted with Puppy Linux on the CF card that serves as its disk drive -- and a Dell LCD monitor. The output was a bit dim, and there was some character "ghosting." Nothing major, but not as good as the output from the Dell Optiplex PC itself.

I suspected that a regular CRT monitor would work great with this thin client, which is circa 2003, the days when CRTs still held some sway in the low-end market.

I was right. After finding one dead CRT in the Daily News boneyard, I brought in an old 14-inch Gateway 2000 monitor (yes, it's the monitor that has served so well with This Old PC), and it is working perfectly. I chose 800 x 600 resolution at 16 colors. I've run it with This Old PC at 1024 x 768, and I just might try that, but for now, this looks great.

Moral: Swapping peripherals is the best way to determine a) what's broken and b) what fits best for a particular system. Ask friends to loan you equipment -- or, better yet, to gift you with the old crap they've got clogging their garages and closets.

That's what I should call the Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client, The Black Box. There's no model number anywhere on the box, and that's because the various MaxTerms of this era have identical cases and back-panel layouts. What's different is, to a limited extent, the motherboards, and to a greater extent the operating system software on the CF card connected to that motherboard's IDE input. Everything from Linux to Windows XP Embedded ran on these boxes, with processor speeds from the 533 MHz range (for the Linux models) all the way up to 1 GHz for the XP. So I guess mine is the XP model, although I can't be sure.

I tried to find screws to replace the missing, but was unsuccessful at Fry's. I don't hold out much hope for the hardware store.

I also tried to make a USB-drive bootable Damn Small Linux. Also unsuccessful. The methods by which this is done are somewhat complicated. Nothing like the Puppy Unversal Installer. Score one for Puppy.

I stumbled across this page about a guy who did a whole lot more than I've had to do to get his Wyse WinTerm 3320SE Windows CE based thin client to run on Damn Small Linux and, at this stage, to function as an honest-to-god Web server.

To geek is to live:

For almost a month already, this website is running on a Winterm 3320SE! It's behind an Apache proxy right now. It has a <3MByte (uncompressed) initrd with shell utilities, an SSH daemon, a web server and PHP, thanks to uClibc. It's running pretty well, and at least now we eat our own dogfood! :-)

As you can read, the Wyse is way underpowered compared to the MaxTerm, and it took a lot more geekery to get it going:

... it's a pretty small device. Normally they run Windows CE with RDP (Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop) and ICA (Citrix) terminal clients plus serial terminal software, and it's also possible to install MSIE4 to browse the web. However, that's all. It can't work as an X server, so in non-Windows networks it's not very useful.

The hardware seems to be pretty suitable to run Linux. From the outside you can already see some connectors that probably remind you a lot of regular PC's. And when you look inside you'll indeed find a Cyrix/NS MediaGX chipset with a 166 MHz x86-compatible CPU, 32 MB RAM and 8 MB of flash.

With only 8 MB of flash, it's pretty obvious that we'll have to depend on network-booting if we want to run Linux on these, certainly because we're not even sure if we can use the Flash memory from Linux.

I've been playing around with the Xorg video settings in Puppy Linux -- it doesn't look as good as it could. It could be the video controller on the motherboard, or it could be the settings. I went down to 1024 x 768, back up to 1280 x 1024, 16 colors, and there's a slight "ghosting" of letters on the LCD screen. I bet it looks great in 1024 x 768 on a traditional CRT, but I don't have one to try at the moment.

I'll have to boot puppy on the Dell and see what the settings are. There's always the option of a separate video card -- that'll set me back $10.

"Thin Puppy," that's what I should call this setup. I've had the Maxspeed MaxTerm running all day, and while some of the chips are warm to the touch, nothing's hot, and the fan hasn't gone on at all. Maybe it's there for "harsh" environments, when air temperature doesn't provide convection cooling that's as efficient.

The power brick, which isn't the original, came new in its box -- it's a DVE AC adapter rated at 11-13 V output, 3.8 amp max, 42 W max. It's just barely warm, so this thing isn't drawing much current at all. The brick is rated for 100-240 volts, so it should have no problem dealing with foreign voltages or sub-prime AC power.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, the biggest "hitch" thus far is that the box isn't a champ when it comes to streaming audio and video. It plays back downloaded MP3s just fine with the Gxine player. To hear the audio, I plugged in my headphones. And also, as I said before, audio was automatically configured by Puppy on boot.

Sound on the MaxSpeed Maxterm works at boot with Puppy. YouTube videos and streamed MP3s are a little choppy -- I've heard of this sort of thing happening both with thin clients in general and Via motherboards in particular. But a downloaded MP3 plays fine. I'll have to do a similar test with video. The connection here is very fast, so it must be either the network interface or a combination of too many process going on at one time.

But sound out of the box -- that's a first for me with Puppy. And during the boot sequence, I confirmed that this is a 1 GHz Via Samuel processor. The thing's been on for an hour now, and still no fan has gone one. That's great -- I wanted silent, I got silent.

And Puppy is performing extremly well within the confines of 128 MB of RAM. It shows 70.8 MB free for other uses -- that's a lot more than I have with Puppy on This Old PC, which has 262 MB of RAM in its slots but only shows about 56 MB of RAM free after Puppy loads.

And I had no trouble plugging in and mounting my USB flash drive. I haven't tried to boot from it -- why would I, with Puppy running fine from the CF slot? My next experiment: preparing the USB drive to boot the Maxspeed with Damn Small Linux.

To review, Puppy runs -- and so far runs well (sound excepted for the moment) on a $75 thin client bought over eBay. And with the addition of a $5 stick of RAM and a $17 CF module -- both of which I already had (not to mention the keyboard and mouse I pilfered from This Old PC), I have a working computer that runs Puppy Linux. Give me the Geek Gold Medal right here, right now.

The Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client from Unix Surplus arrived at 12:15, and here I am running Puppy Linux 2.14, connected to the Internet and blogging about it at 12:35, I haven't had something go this smoothly since ... never.

The MaxTerm came well-packed, with enough foam and bubble wrap to survive quite a crushing. It came missing the screws to close up the case, but since I needed it open to install the memory, it was no problem -- I'll just go to the hardware store and get a half-dozen machine screws to bolt the thing together.

The CPU is covered with a heat-pipe-type heatsink arrangement, with a fan below it. The fan hasn't turned on. I think it's switched on through a heat sensor, and at this point, the heatsink is barely warm, so all is good.

The 128 MB of PC-100 memory (worth about $5 on the open market) went in without a hitch, and the CF card adapter was already connected to the IDE slot on the mini-ITX motherboard. I removed the cover from the CF slot (looks like you can insert the CF card and then close it up again -- one of those screws is missing, too, but again, it's no big deal). To eject the CF card, the case needs to be open.

Mouse, keyboard, power-cube and monitor hookup went fine. The internal power supply is fanless and seems to be running cool. The board has Maxspeed printed on it, so it must be a proprietary part. The motherboard looks like standard Via, with a Phoenix D686 BIOS. There's just the one IDE port, and also a floppy port, though there'd be little reason to use it (you'd need to use the floppy power plug, which is currently powering the CF-to-IDE adapter that's part of the MaxTerm.

I put in the CF card, already configured with Puppy 2.14, and the thing booted right away. I didn't know for a minute, because the monitor I had set aside foir this project was dead. So I'm running it through my Dell's LCD monitor. I chose 1024 x 768 resolution with 16 colors, and that's not ideal for the 17-inch LCD, which likes 1280 x 1024 better. I'll try that on my next boot.

It took the SeaMonkey browser a bit of time to load, maybe 20 seconds. I'll have to see if that improves on subsequent loads. (Later: SeaMonkey reloads in 10 seconds. Excellent.)

Abiword boots in 10 seconds -- very acceptable.

Using Xproc to find out exactly what's inside, I get the following:

Processor is a Via Samuel 2, Speed 501.169, BogoMIPS 1003.69. Don't know exactly what those "speed" numbers mean ...

But the big story here is that the MaxSpeed MaxTerm boots Puppy right out of the box. If you're thinking about repurposing a thin client for Linux, this is the one.

The $75 thin client should be arriving today, and I'm ready.

I cannibalized the following from This Old PC and elsewhere:

-- PS/2 keyboard and mouse
-- IDE drive cable (just in case -- the pictures made it look like I might need one)
-- 1 GB Compact Flash module with Puppy Linux installed
-- 128 MB PC-100 memory module (not from This Old PC, but from my spare-parts collection)
-- 256 MB USB drive with Puppy installed (just in case it does boot from USB)
-- Old 14-inch VGA monitor, off of which I've wiped the first layer of grime.

To get Puppy on the CF module, I used a CF-to-IDE adapter that I plugged into the IDE port in This Old PC. Then I installed Puppy onto it from the CD. The Puppy Universal Installer is pretty good -- it turns out I could've made the CF module into an IDE-bootable drive without using the adapter; the installer will prepare the chip while it's connected via a USB card reader (which I also have ready).

The Puppy Universal Installer offers many options for making USB drives and CF chips (as well as IDE and SATA hard drives) bootable if the standard install doesn't work. Kudos to the Puppy developers for making both the mounting of drives as well as the installation of the OS to them so easy.

So all I need to do now is wait for the Maxspeed Maxterm 1 GHz thin client to arrive ...

Photos: The Maxspeed Maxterm, inside and out, from Unix Surplus' eBay listing.

I'm all for building your own PC, but it doesn't always go smoothly. And believe it or not, Fry's doesn't have everything you need all the time.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDnet's Gear for Geeks blog relates his own experience:

The first irritant is the volume of trash that building a PC generates. In fact, the last two PCs I built created such a volume of waste that I was really appalled. From what I can tell, building a PC with parts sourced online seems to mean that you end up with enough cardboard and styrofoam to fill the box that the case came in. It’s not too bad because 99% of the trash can be recycled (so the process is pretty guilt-free) but you do need the space in order to be able to store the parts and work, and I’m certain that over the years that minimum working space that you need has increased.

The second thing that gets me emotional is the quality of SATA cables and connectors. Why is it that when you buy a quality board like an ASUS or Gigabyte you end up with poor quality cabling that it inflexible and has massive end connectors that make it difficult to route the cables in a tidy fashion? Why not just not bother to supply cables? Or, better still, supply decent quality cables with a decently-priced board? I’m buried here in SATA cables. I have dozens laying about the place. I don’t throw them away because they “could come in handy one day” but they never do. To top that off, why do the plastic SATA connectors on a motherboard need to be so brittle and flimsy? Do they really need to break that easily? Might it be possible to design a connector that can actually hold the cable in place?

Despite the problems, just the fact that you can build your own PC is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

At the moment, my favorite vendors for new parts if you're building a traditional PC (with ATX or microATX motherboards) are Tiger Direct, NewEgg and EWorldSale. My favorite place for used parts is Pacific Geek.

If you want to go small, for mini-ITX components I like Cappuccino PC, iDotPC, Logic Supply and the Damn Small Linux Store.

Brian Madden offers a well-thought-out view of whether the thin client model can survive in a world where Dell is selling PCs for $300. Does it make sense to go the thin-client route when you can set up full PCs, either as thin clients themselves, or as "locked down" boxes, for so little money.

He sums it up thusly:

In today’s and future server-based computing environments, it seems like thin clients are losing their advantages. Todays technology allows for you to design fat client configurations in such a way that they provide the same benefits that thin clients do while still delivering better video performance and providing the necessary flexibility. So unless thin client vendors are able to start producing good thin clients at low prices, I think the future of thin clients look bleak.

Do go to the full article and read the extensive comments below it.

I've been getting this "updates are available for your computer" message on my XP box here for the past few days, and since it's for "Windows Genuine Advantage Notification" I have not installed it. Why? Because this is what it does:

The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be a non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows.

More information for this update can be found at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=39157

So I need a 1.2 MB piece of code from MS to tell me whether or not my OS is "genuine"? This box came from Dell ... and Microsoft Windows comes with EVERY FREAKIN' BOX. What if my XP is "fake"? I guess they don't mean it could be fake, but that it could be pirated.

Since I know my XP is "genuine," why do I need MS to tell me that?

According to Ars Technica's former M-Dollar, now One Microsoft Way:

The update is intended to patch the latest hole that hackers have used to work around the WGA utility, which checks to see if the users' copy of Windows is genuine or pirated. According to tests conducted with an Ethernet sniffer program, if the user clicks the close button to cancel the installation of this WGA update, Windows sends some information back to Microsoft over the wires.

This information includes version numbers of both Windows and WGA, the language of the operating system, some registry information, and a cookie. Some hackers are worried that Microsoft is going to use this information to identify potential pirates, but Microsoft claims that the data is only used to try and diagnose failures with the WGA utility itself.

Nice, Microsoft. I guess there is "one Microsoft Way," and it involves taking it in the shorts from Steve Ballmer.

Meanwhile, I thought that XP was the first MS operating system that wouldn't install from one CD to multiple PCs. So where are the non-"genuine" Windows XP and Vistas coming from?

And what's the deal on my purchased copy of Vista? Not that I've made such a purchase, but if I had, would I be able to sell my CD of Vista to somebody else, say on eBay, and would they be able to install it on another PC? What if I wiped Vista from my box before I sold it? If they're being that chintzy about it, they should charge $50 for the OS for one CPU only and call it square.

Despite most Linuxes being free, I don't think an OS necessarily must be a free product. I think it is worth money, but to make your customers pay and pay and pay, as Microsoft seems to do, is just a load of crap. And then to spy on them with this WGA thing? It leaves a bad taste, for sure.

p.s. The only reason I even had the chance to decline the install of WGA is that I never opt for the automatic install of MS upgrades. I always choose the "custom" option. That way I only install what I want. Half the room here has IE7 on their boxes. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but I'd like to keep IE6 and IE7 side by side for awhile just to check the performance. But that's not the way MS rolls, so I'm holding off on IE7 until I absolutely need it.

I always thought Ars Technica was cooler, hipper even, than the average geekified tech blog. In a "I start to melt/turn into a pillar of salt when I leave the San Francisco city limits" kind of way.

That's why they had cool blog names like Infinite Loop for the Apple blog, Opposable Thumbs for video gaming ... and M-Dollar for Microsoft. Kinda gets to the heart of the thing, don't you thing?

Well, now M-Dollar has been renamed One Microsoft Way. At first thought, it seems like a wimp-out, a cop-out, but when you think about it, One Microsoft Way is just as insidious as M-Dollar and gets closer to the core (pardon my apple metaphor) of what MS is all about.

The best changes to Ars' look is that you can now jump from one blog to any other without first clicking on the "Journals" tab -- and eliminating one click is a big deal. There's nothing I hate more than Web sites that make me click one or two extra times to get to what should be a single click away. Whether it's a play for more banner ad displays or higher page views, it's amateurish and just shitty besides. Kudos to Ars Technica for making the user experience better.

And while I still think the name M-Dollar is pretty cool, something like Gates to Hell would've been better.

$75 later, a Maxspeed Maxterm 1 GHz thin client -- made by Neoware -- is headed my way. Will a stick of RAM and either a USB flash drive or Compact Flash chip holding Puppy Linux (or Damn Small Linux) enable it to boot?

Judging from the internal pix of the box from Unix Surplus, from where Im buying it, the CF-to-IDE adapter is mounted so the CF module plugs in the back and is powered by a floppy plug from the power supply. It also looks as if there is a spare hard-drive power cable, plus room to mount a 3.5-inch hard drive, should I decide to go that route.

If the Maxspeed takes PC-100 RAM (and I think it will), boots from CF or USB flash, actually runs Puppy and connects via Ethernet without incident, I will be amazed, astounded and generally all geeked up. Imagine, a $75 1 GHZ computer that's roughly the size of a college dictionary ...

I have PDFs of the user manuals from Neoware for various Maxspeed Maxterm thin clients. I'm not quite sure which is the one I'm getting, but they clearly point out the CF slot in the back, but now what serves as the flash memory in the thin client when delivered from the factory. Is it CF inside the box or ??

I'll just have to boot the thing and see what happens.

If you do want to buy one of these new, I recommend Devon IT, which has them for as little as $140 -- and they'll take your CF chip and actually have the PCI slot facing the right way (at a 90-degree angle) so you can install a PCI wireless card without a 90-degree adapter (which I have no idea where to obtain). For a picture of the innards, go here.

Random thought: One thing I need -- it's always one thing, isn't it? -- is a USB CD-RW or DVD-RW drive -- that would give me yet another way to boot and work on these things.

Photo: Inside Devon IT's NTA 6010A. Note the 90-degree angle on the PCI port, the use of laptop-style SODIMM memory and the placement of the CF adapter and chip at the top -- it looks like you could mount a hard drive right in there. Also, check out the heatsink on the CPU. This box could be yours for $140 retail.

Over the past week, I paid visits to Barnes & Noble and Borders, looking for Linux books. Now, computer books are big business, they sell a lot, and Linux is one of the hottest categories when it comes to computer buzz -- and people need books to help them figure this stuff out.

But the selection at both stores was anemic. The entire Linux section was dwarfed by just about every other section. There are more books on Photoshop than on Linux. More books on networking certification, even more books on Flash. Say what you will, but without Amazon, we'd be in big trouble.

Why is the average PC still a giant rectangular box with expansion bays for days, ever-larger power supplies and increasingly faster, heat-spewing CPUs? The fast part's OK, but the rest? What's the deal?

There has been change in the PC market. Most modern motherboards have far fewer expansion-card plugs than in the past. ISA is dead, and there are maybe 2 PCI slots, sometimes only one. That's mostly because the functions that those add-on cards used to perform are almost always taken care of on the motherboard itself. Networking, USB, sound, video, not to mention parallel and serial "legacy" ports (called "legacy" because nobody uses them, although God help you if you don't live in DSL country and need a telephone modem -- a serial version, connecting OUTSIDE your PC remains your best bet). Even wireless networking is included on most laptops. But aside from the add-on video cards needed by gamers, there's less need than ever for expansion cards.

What about drives? Floppies and ZIPs are long gone. Hard disk drives are smaller than ever, and we went from CD-ROM to CD-RW to DVD-RW in rapid succession.

And thank the computer gods for USB; it ended the nightmare that was SCSI. Remember those thick, expensive cables and the SCSI ID problem? USB is the best thing to happen to PCs since the GUI. USB works for printers, wireless adapters, flash drives, hard drives, CD and DVD drives, even stupid little lights and fans that waste the USB ports on your computer. It's all so very, very good.

All this brings me to the incredible shrinking PC, except if you're not using a Mac, you don't see it. PCs -- laptops excepted, of course (and many of today's laptops are gargantuan in their own right -- yes, even Apple's) -- I say PCs are still usually freakin' large. Never mind that the standard motherboard has shrunken to what is now "micro-ATX" size -- 9.6 by 9.6 inches, down from the 12 x 9.6 inches of standard ATX.

Let's assess: Personal computers are still too big, too loud (damn fans!), use too much energy (especially when kept turned on 24 hours a day, every day), boot too slowly, load applications too slowly and are prone to quick obsolescence.

The problem can be attacked in various ways. First, there's a company called Via Technologies, which came up with the mini-ITX motherboard form factor, a mainboard measuring 6.7 x 6.7 inches -- and now there's even nano-ITX at 4.7 x 4.7 inches. Also, Via's CPUs are famed for low-power consumption and often fanless operation, and there are correspondingly smaller cases, fanless power supplies and drives -- HD, CD and flash -- that measure up (or is it down?) to the small motherboards. Sure, this is all par for the course in laptop production -- and these boards are not, as a rule, as fast as the average Intel- or AMD-stuffed variety, but this is a good time to remember that the PC industry has been selling more laptops than desktops as a whole for years now. Still, the revolution in desktops -- where America and the computing world works -- is nigh, or rather should be ... nigh.

One way that business has delivered computing power to the workplace has been with what is called a "thin client," meaning a computer with no disk drives, perhaps a few basic applications stored on the circuit board itself (lately in flash memory) with data and bigger applications fed over a network server.

Hey ... PCs also get data from servers ... and the Internet ... and flash memory is continually getting cheaper and growing in capacity -- a 1 GB chip is now $20, 8 GB is $80, and a 32 GB flash drive is in the pipeline from Sandisk.

So, back to thin clients. They're basically stripped-down PCs -- motherboard and power supply in a small box. Wyse and HP are huge players in the thin-client world, and companies like Devon IT and Neoware are nipping at their heels. And with the mini-ITX credo of small, low-power-consuming, if not the cheapest or the fastest, today's thin clients -- some of which retail for as little as $140 -- are prime to be converted to desktop use wiht Linux, pumped up with bigger flash drives (some already use industry-standard Compact Flash) and loaded up like a traditional PC.

While concern over flash memory's write-rewrite life span is real, some operating systems, like Puppy Linux, write to the drive only once per computing session, extending the flash RAM's life indefinitely. And backups of data to a server, the Internet or to a CD/DVD drive -- which you should be doing anyway, people -- are a small price to pay for compact, relatively swift, silent and now freakishly inexpensive computing.

To this end, I've been trolling eBay for suitable thin clients to fatten up as Linux PCs. It's hard to know what's actually going to be inside the case of any given thin client, but it's easier to purchase on of recent vintage on the cheap -- certainly easier and way cheaper than it is to buy 8-year-old laptops running at 300 MHz, which, as a matter of course, sell for $150-$200 on eBay, even though it's still possible to buy a new freakin' laptop for $400 to $500.

I digress.

The cheapest barebones mini-ITX system is still $200 to $250 -- without memory, drives or flash. But there are thin clients out there with similar -- and often faster -- CPUs for $75 to $100, and sometimes for as little as $30 to $50.

I smell an opportunity. A geek opportunity. But opportunity nevertheless.

To that end, I am on the hunt for sub-$100 thin clients that could be pressed into service with Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, or even Ubuntu or Xubuntu (the latter with a 4 GB or 8 GB flash drive -- or even a small IDE hard drive bolted into the case).

My plan is to take a $75 thin client running at 1 GHz, add the flash memory, SDRAM, keyboard, mouse and monitor I already have collected, and try to get one of the popular small Linuxes running on it. The beauty of it is that I've got all this other junk lying around -- all I need is the box itself -- and in the case of a thin client, it's more cereal box, less ... uh, giant PC box.

After going through my 10th or 13th eBay auction for old PC laptops that, if the world wasn't crazy, should be selling for $100 and often less, but usually sell for $150 to even $250. Even 233 MHz laptops with 5 GB hard drives, 64 MB RAM, Windows 95, no USB ports and no onboard Ethernet are bringing $150 to $200. THAT'S A DOORSTOP, PEOPLE. It's not worth more than $30. But the demand is out there, on Craigslist AND on eBay. You don't see anything older than a Pentium I, and barely even those. It's mostly Pentium II-class, and if it's running more than 400 MHz, look out -- it's going to cost you.

What's wrong with you people? You can get a freaking Dual Core notebook NEW for $500 if you wait for the right sale at Staples or Circuit City. An 8-year-old has-been piece of crap should NOT be selling for $150 to $200. Have you all lost your minds?

I got pissed enough to fire up This Old Mac -- the 117 MHz PowerPC-based Powerbook 1400, circa 1996, that forms the basis of my relationship to old computers.

Now don't get me wrong. Nobody's paying big money, on eBay or anywhere else, for PB 1400s -- and with good reason: They max out at 64 MB of RAM (I've got 48 MB stuffed in mine) and have a hell of a time running Mac System 8, let alone OS 9 -- and forget about OS X. That will never, ever in a million years happen. I'm running System 7.6.1, regarded by many as the perfect OS for this laptop. The only mail program that works with today's POP and IMAP services is Netscape 4.x. and it's damned slow. I always say you've got to use apps tuned to the system, apps which are processor-speed- and memory-appropriate. Well, that would be Claris E-Mailer, and it plain doesn't work. Same is true for MS Office 6.0, supposedly rewritten for PowerPC at the time of the 1400's release, but which takes forever to load. Again, ClarisWorks is a better fit, and WriteNow even better still. But neither offers credible Word-compatible formatting.

All I'm saying is that a PC-compatible laptop running at 300 MHz is better than the 1400, but not THAT much better. And if you skipped over that line -- NOBODY IS PAYING CRAZY PRICES OF ANY SORT FOR POWERBOOK 1400s. Now Pismo and Walstreet laptops still command crazy prices, and that holds true for other Powerbook G3s and G4s. But they all cost about $1K new. There's no new $400 or $500 Mac laptop ... so it takes them that much longer to get down below $200 ... or so goes the theory.

But the silver lining is ... if you either already own a laptop or are considering buying one, your investment is safe. Three to five years from now, or even longer, you can turn it around on eBay and get a chunk of money for your trouble. Capitalism, baby ...

The reason MepisLite's KDE desktop looks blurry on the Dell is that the monitor is not happy with the 1024 x 768 screen resolution automatically set up by the live CD. In fact, going into the KDE settings, I was unable to select a different resolution.

Under Windows XP, the screen also looks like crap at 1024 x 768. The monitor -- a Dell E173FP 17-inch LCD -- only comes into its own at the maximum resolution of 1280 x 1024, so a higher resolution in KDE, if that's possible, should make it look better in MepisLite.

On This Old PC, however, the 15-inch CRT looks great at 1024 x 768, and CRT monitors seem more forgiving in general at the various resolutions available, from 680 X 480 to 800 x 600 and the aforementioned 1024 x 768 -- pretty much the maximum resolution for a 15-inch monitor.

So I'll have to look into KDE further -- with Knoppix, which doesn't seem to have this problem, and perhaps with the full SimplyMepis, the big bro of MepisLite (remembering that MepisLite is still in RC -- or "release candidate" status, so bugs are to be expected).

Before I knew about the KDE-GNOME battle, I liked GNOME better because the screen looks cleaner, the lines finer, the fonts better looking. I didn't know anything about functionality regarding the two desktop managers.

But as I work in KDE on MepisLite, I see that some letters come out blurrier than others. I don't know if it's a display-compatibility problem, the wrong resolution or something else. I'll have to look into it. So far, KOffice is so good, as is the Konquerer browser/file manager with which I'm writing this entry, that I will give KDE some serious consideration. Now if only I got sound to work in MepisLite -- this is the first distribution that didn't auto-detect the newish Dell Optiplex GX520's sound setup.

On the flip side, if MepisLite is able to deal with the Airlink wireless card on This Old PC, all bets are off, and Mepis wins my personal desktop war.

I’m writing this from MepisLite — the ‘lite’ version of the well-regarded SimplyMepis Linux distribution, which though configured for older systems (just how old I’ve yet to determine) nevertheless uses the KDE desktop environment, which many prefer over the GNOME desktop that runs Ubuntu (although KDE is available for Ubuntu either in its Kubuntu incarnation or as an add-on package).

I was thinking, as I drove in today, how Abiword is such a nice program — fast loading, able to read and write Microsoft Word-format files (a must for the publishing world, even though the Daily News publishing system handles Word and text files with equal aplomb). But its one fatal flaw is a lack of smart quotes — or any ability to easily type directional quotes manually.

The argument against smart quotes (and directional quotes, for that matter) is that they’re not needed (meaning true geeks don’t use them) and that they’re the spawn of Microsoft, and therefore inherently evil. All I can say is that these people are not writers or editors, or at the very most not writers or editors outside the world of blogs, which by default don’t have smart quotes. But the print world does have directional quotation marks, and a word processor, by convention, is different than a plain text editor in that it inserts more formatting to make a printed document look good.

Yesterday, in frustration at not being able to acquire an older PC-compatible laptop (in the 300-500 MHz) range for a price that I consider sane (that price being $100 or less), I fired up This Old Mac, the 117 MHz PowerPC-based Powerbook 1400 that runs System 7.6.1. It does the Internet begrudgingly with Internet Explorer 5 (still the best browser for 7.6.1), a little less well with Netscape 4.x, which I also use as a very slow mail client and newsgroup reader. That said, Netscape is currently the ONLY mail client runs under 7.6.1 and works with today’s POP and IMAP e-mail systems. Not Eudora, Claris, or even Outlook 4.5 (you need at least version 5.something). I’ve tried them all.

But getting back to my point. I ran the supremely fast WriteNow — a program whose copywright is somewhere around 1990 — that’s 17 years ago, my friends, and IT HAS SMART QUOTES. Same for the writing portion of ClarisWorks. But neither can make an acceptable MS Word-compatible document. I don’t even know if they can do Rich Text Format. They’re fast as hell (especially WriteNow), but without file compatibility, not very useful. I do have Office 6.0 on the Powerbook, which, despite being written for PowerPC, isn’t very swift at all.

So if an 11-year-old Powerbook has THREE word processing programs with smart quotes, the Linux of today should offer that feature — and allow it to be turned on or off — on each and every word processor available for the platform. Open Office has it, but for older systems, it would be better to run Abiword or Ted. Abiword, as I said, is ideal, because it saves in Word format. But it doesn’t offer smart quotes. It did at one time. It was buggy, so I read, but instead of fixing it, the programmers decided to keep it geek friendly (and writer unfriendly) and offer straight quotes only.

This brings me to KOffice, with which I’m writing this entry. So far the program works great. It’s very Word-like — but very fast, with great auto correction. And under Settings---Configure Autocorrection there is the provision to turn on or off smart quotes and other various kinds of auto correction that are typically offered in Word and Open Office.

But KOffice doesn’t offer a direct, simple “save as” Word format. There’s Abiword, Open Office (for which even Word is getting an optional filter), HTML (actually freakin’ useful), even Palm (why? unless KOffice will sync my Palm, and it just might, but who knows?) Lotus Amipro (does ANYBODY use that?), Word Perfect, Microsoft Write (at least it’s close) and RTF, which is labeled as “Microsoft Word compatible.” No Word.

Well, maybe it’s time for me to get comfortable with Rich Text Format, since that’s offered in Ted as well, and since I like KOffice so well at this point, being in giddy smart-quote heaven, I just might learn to live with it.

(As an aside, I realize that blogs entries do not commonly use directional quotation marks, but would it kill you to see them? No worry, back to straight quotes in the blog after this.)

The Neoware m100 is a thin-client notebook designed for the business market. With Wi-Fi built in for remote access to data, there's no onboard disk drive -- and hence no potentially sensitive information to be compromized if the hardware is stolen.

Here's the spiel from Neoware:

Unlike traditional mobile devices that place intellectual property and customer data at risk by storing information locally on the notebook hard drive, Neoware m100 thin client notebooks pose no data risk, as they have no hard drive, and no information is stored locally. All data files and software applications remain on the server where they are better protected from data theft and the threat of viruses, worms and other malware.

With no hard drive or fan, the Neoware m100 thin client notebook has no moving parts, allowing it to operate quickly and silently, with superior reliability, and a battery accessory option that delivers more than six hours of operational time between recharges.

Neoware m100 features a 15-inch screen, a variety of available country keyboards, and has the capability for Ethernet, USB, built-in Wi-Fi, and a PCMCIA slot for cellular connectivity. Wherever you can access a network – from remote offices, conference rooms, homes, and hotels – you can use Neoware m100.

Check the PDF for full specs.

Neoware sells a lot of thin clients, with prices starting at $259 and maxing out at $4,000 and up for a battle-hardened, industrial variety (see the I/O panel at right).

And along these same lines, big-time thin-client maker Devon IT is offering its own thin-client notebook for $799.

When I talk about thin clients -- hell, even I didn't know what they were a month ago -- I do so with the belief that in the future, perhaps near but definitely far, we will all be working on computers that, like today's thin clients:

-- Will have no moving parts

-- Will be much smaller than standard PC boxes.

-- And will work with tight applications loaded into solid-state memory, augmented greatly by both applications and data served over the Internet (or, more likely, the freakisly fast and vast successor to today's Internet that, one day, will replace every other media, information and communications delivery system and make today's Web look like a smoke-belching Model T).

Along those lines:

-- Expect laptops with "disk on module" (basically giant flash drives) replacing traditional spinning hard-disk technology in the next six months.

-- Look for Google and Microsoft to up the stakes in their Web-delivered applications technology in the next year.

-- And expect a major broadcast network to offer a 24-hour online feed in the next two years.

Via a link from Low End Mac, I came across this great Wired roundup of tools for writers, electronic and not, which brings together some of the other gadgets I've meant to blog on, and introduced me to some new things I've got to check out.

I've already heard about the Alphasmart Neo, a $250 laptop-like device with a full-keyboard and smallish LCD screen. It's aimed at a pure writing experience, and the best thing is that it weighs less than 2 pounds and runs 700 hours on a set of three AA batteries. Yes, I didn't say 7 hours, but 700. It's already been blogged about by the O'Reilly people here and here.

The Wired people also discuss their favorite pens, laptops, and two writing programs that intrigue me enough to try them out:

RoughDraft for Windows and Scrivener for Mac OS X. The best news about these two programs is that RoughDraft is sold on a "donation" basis, and Scrivener, although needing OS X 10.4 to run, costs only $34.99 after a 30-day trial. I don't have 10.4 on the iBook at home, and I don't do much writing on it, either, but I will give RoughDraft a try and report back.

I was rooting around the HP site for information on Linux-equipped HP desktops, and I'm not exactly sure they'll ship you one with Linux pre-installed just yet.

But HP is in the thin-client business, and they offer the relatively inexpensive, diskless workstations in many configurations, including with Linux installed. They've got one with a lot of power for between $450 and $700 (that's a lot to pay for a thin client) -- but it does have adequate memory, a 1 GHz CPU and Debian.

For $199, the systems run 400 MHz Via processors with 128 MB RAM (16 MB reserved for video, unfortunately), and between 34 and 64 MB of flash memory. Underpowered, yes, but that depends on the job they're doing. There are also good deals out there from Devon IT and Cappuccino PC, among others, but HP is surprisingly competitive in this space.

Photo: HP Compaq t5125 Thin Client

Besides its current play to remain king of the desktop with Vista, Microsoft is quietly (or not so much, depending on your definition of "quietly" -- see the fake newspaper above) making a case for Windows Server over Linux for delivering Web pages, running databases and the like. Check out this Microsoft page, peppered with testimonials and full "case studies" from entities that found Linux hard to manage and, as a result, turned from Linux back to the boys and girls of Redmond.

Here are a couple of quotes:

"Many people underestimate how complex a Linux cluster is to set up and manage. After that, it’s a long learning curve just to be able to use it."

— David Dai, Computer Science PhD Student, Advanced Research Institute Virginia Tech

"One of our scientific programmers had to spend a large portion of his time being ‘the Linux guy.’ Now he can focus on creating chemistry applications instead of on cluster maintenance."

— Matt Wortman, Genome Research Institute, University of Cincinnati

Funny, it is, that the "case studies" are downloadable ... in Microsoft Word format. Glad I have Open Office (and now Abiword) so I can read the damn thing.

Here's a bit of the case study on Continental AG:

IT experts at Continental AG first tested the options of a Linux platform. Supported by Sun, Continental had also evaluated StarOffice. According to Rölz, however, using a Linux/open-source solution would have necessitated an “unmanageable migration expense,” especially because individual Microsoft Office documents and solutions would not have been convertible. Moreover, a series of important applications that run exclusively on Microsoft software would have made it necessary to run virtualization software on a Citrix application server in the background of any new Linux platform.

So ... they clearly haven't heard of Open Office. If they do have a number of "important applications" that only run in Windows, I'll give them that one, but ... what ... exactly ... are ... those "important apps"? In-house hacks, or commericially available programs for which Linux-compatible equivalents could be found?

Then:

Continental chose a uniform client-server infrastructure based on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system (for its server computers) and the Windows® XP Professional operating system (for workstations and portable computers). The company decided to equip each client computer with Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003.

They bought the whole shebangy --- the Server software, plus XP and Office for all desktops.

By way of explanation:

“We were especially concerned about Microsoft Excel macros and Microsoft Access databases that had been developed over the years by many employees at different sites and that over time had evolved into important tools without anyone’s noticing,” reports Dr. Bernd Thomas, Manager of Corporate IT Infrastructure at Continental AG.

What can you do? I'm not an Excel guy, so I don't know how Excel macros migrate over to Open Office's spreadsheet, or Gnumeric, for that matter. But did they test this? Did they try to migrate some of these files over to even the Windows version of Open Office to see how they run?

If you're married to Microsoft Office, I can't tell you to change. And if you're a big, moneyed corporation like Continental AG, I guess price is, if not "no object," at least not as much of an object as it is here, at the Daily News, where we run XP, but no other Microsoft apps. And our main editorial software from the Unisys company runs on Windows and Mac (although we don't run it on OS X), and I believe also will run on Linux (but I'll have to check that one) -- it's very platform-independent, as far as that goes. We all have Open Office, and nobody has complained that it's not as good as Word. I know OO isn't as good as MS Office, but it's plenty good enough -- and free, with no looming, expensive upgrades down the road.

There's been plenty of talk lately about whether or not Linux is ready for the desktop. In a touch of irony, I think it's not ready for the casual home user -- it's still in the realm of hobbyist types, even though reatailers such as Wal-Mart are offering Linspire-equipped boxes to consumers.

On the business desktop, I think Linux has an even better chance. After all, when cost is king, Linux can offer a better deal ... out of the box, as it were. If the choice of hardware and OS is based on applications -- and with many business applications becoming Web-based (such as the way I'm writing this blog in Movable Type), it doesn't matter whether the box is running Windows, Linux or Mac OS -- all that matters is whether or not it has a Web browser and some kind of office suite when needed. The temptation to save $200 a box on the OS and somewhere between $300 and $600 on suite software -- and even more on antivirus and related security products -- is powerful indeed. And if the IT people in charge are committed to making Linux work with the hardware chosen, a savings of $800 to $1000 per workstation on software costs, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of PCs, becomes very real money indeed. That's where Linux has its "in," from the cubicle to the shop floor and beyond.

I'm not coming at this as a Microsoft hater -- I use XP every day, and my experience has been very, very good. But I am not using any MS apps, simply because my employer didn't want to pay for them. A wise choice, because our need for that functionality is secondary -- and ably satisfied with Open Office. I even applaud the decision not to purchase Photoshop for everybody. Sure, the photo-department pros have it on their Macs, but for the rest of us, who are pretty much just shrinking and cropping JPGs for the Web, the GIMP is more than sufficient. In fact, I'd like a program with fewer features that loads faster, but nothing else out there will do the job. The best I've found is IrfanView, which is a great photo viewer and pretty good image manipulator -- just not as good as the GIMP.

But since both programs are free, I was able to test them on actual work before I committed to learning one or the other -- and I tested those two and many more.

I applaud the many programmers out there who are offering their work either as shareware or in time-limited trial versions, with a nominal fee due if you continue to use the program. That way, you can decide if it's valuable enough to merit continued use. Codeweavers, the grown-up version of Wine emulation for Linux, and Parallels, which enables Windows and Linux programs to run on OS X are two such programs that allow you to try before you buy -- and which don't cost an arm and a leg if you do decide to pay up. Add to that EditPad, which is free for non-commercial use, and available in a commercial version for $49.99. So between free and $100 per app, there are many ways to get stuff done with a computer.

OK, I realize I'm totally off-track, but another school of thought says that Vista's late and incomplete arrival, coupled with the impending release of the new version of OS X will make things very, very dicey for Microsoft. And if even one of the current or even future Linux distributions steps up and brings true ease of use when it comes to installation, automatic hardware configuration and software management, the whole business of operating systems could shift. (And at this point, that distro is Ubuntu, especially after its alliance with Linspire and impending use of the latters's CNR click-and-run software installation system.)

And remember, there's money to be made with Linux, especially when it comes to support. Ubuntu's parent, Canonical is doing it, and even HP is making good money propping up Linux, bringing in $25 million in fiscal 2006 alone.

See -- when you don't own the OS, you follow the money. And when you're an IT consumer at the business level, you seek savings and relative sanity. So, workers of America, your next PC just might be running Linux; and remember, it's a money thing.