September 2007 Archives

I tried to put the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver wireless card into the PCMCIA slot in the $0 Laptop -- the Gateway Solo 1450. It didn't go it.

I looked in the slot. There was a screw wedged in there. I got it out with a plastic knife, but the damage was done. About seven pins are bent.

I hope there's a way to get access to the pins so I can straighten them out ... or that a USB wireless adapter will somehow work.

Sure Zenwalk was doing all right on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, 1.3 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM).

But I had Partition Magic, and it was time to divide the / partition in half to dual-boot.

My first test was PC-BSD 1.3 (I've had the CD for a few months.) It's the first BSD I've ever been able to boot. I tried Desktop BSD on the laptop a few days prior, and while the graphical installer began running, all the text was replaced by square boxes. (Since then, that problem has disappeared, only to have others crop up in its place.)

But PC-BSD worked, so I did an install. Problem: Even though the graphical PC-BSD installer was running at 1024 x 768, once the OS was installed, I was stuck at 640 x 480. I could barely get networking configured because of the resolution. Everything I tried -- going into the KDE settings, hacking at xorg.conf and XFree86 (is that what it's called?) didn't work. I broke X a few times and had to restore the configuration files from the console.

Nice surprise: Unlike Zenwalk, PC-BSD has some kind of laptop power management implemented. The loud fan finally fell silent, only turning on occasionally.

One thing about PC-BSD -- it's a great KDE experience. Everything is super fast. Konqueror loads in about 2 seconds, I got a PBI file of AbiWord, and that loaded just as quickly.

But I couldn't get the resolution I needed, so I decided, for now, to move on.

I brought a few CDs home, one of them being the Ubuntu 7.04 live CD. It installed without a hitch, and I'm currently doing all the updates. One problem: DHCP networking with my DSL modem was not working. I connected a router between the modem and the Ethernet plug, and that did the trick. There must be some strange way of configuring the DHCP for my ISP, which is DSL Extreme. I'll look into it, but since I'd need to use a router anyway (we have the Mac iBook G4 connected), it's by no means an insurmountable.

Ubuntu 7.04 is running great so far, and it, too, has laptop power management implemented. That noisy fan gets annoying pretty quickly, and it's nice to hear it fall silent without having to do anything.

So right now I'm downloading 120 or so updates to Ubuntu, plus both ISOs for PC-BSD 1.4. Maybe they fixed the resolution problem.

What did PC-BSD remind me of? The great MepisLite, which was designed for older computers yet used KDE and KOffice. If I could somehow replicate that setup with PC-BSD -- Konqueror loading in seconds, with similar load times from the KOffice suite, I will zap out Zenwalk and give PC-BSD another try.

Worst thing about PC-BSD: Whatever bootloader they're using, it's barbaric. There's barely any
information there, and I was unable to boot anything but PC-BSD.

But it was so fast, I hardly cared. If I do dual-boot, I will use GRUB, for sure.

Coming up: PC-BSD 1.4, DesktopBSD 1.0, FreeBSD 6.2.

The GParted Live CD hung up when trying to load the RAID controller module. No RAID here. The only help I found in the GParted forum was to look into Parted Magic. I did. It's repartition my Gateway hard drive now. Go here for the ISO.

One of the best sites out there, How to Forge, shows you how to install Debian while running Windows, ending up with a dual-boot Windows/Debian box.

A great idea, for sure.

Here's another way to do it, good for Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Arch Linux or Debian, the site claims.

That's what they're talking about. Pro and con.

In case you didn't guess, the "pro" viewpoint is from a man (Bruce Byfield), the con from a woman (Tina Gasperson).

He says:

As I see it, the benefit of a woman's distro would be largely for the participants. It would be a place where women could learn how to package software or test a distribution for quality without having fear of being derided or distracted from the task at hand by the irrelevancies of gender or mistimed expressions of attraction.

I'm not a great believer in the idea that women are less aggressive than or interact differently from men. Yet even I have to admit that most of the regulars on free software mailing lists for women are politer and more supportive than the average poster on general lists. Perhaps a women's distro might develop forms of governance that are as democratic as Debian's, but less outspoken or rude. Possibly, too, their supportiveness would lead to more emphasis on documentation and the user experience. Just possibly, a women's distro could teach the rest of the community a thing or two about organization.

She says:

What would we include in this distro? Pink butterfly themes? Shopping calculators? Does that sound insulting? It should. So I ask again, what exactly would we include in a female version of Linux? The longer you think about this, the more ridiculous it sounds.

...

The fact is that most women I know outside of the IT industry are more tech-savvy than the men in their lives. They are the ones who have embraced the Internet and the gadgets that accompany it. They are the ones who communicate mostly by email, and their husbands and boyfriends and fathers and brothers are still stuck on the phone and can't boot the computer without someone holding their hand. According to Nielsen, women make up the majority of Internet users, and they spend a lot more money on technology than men do. Just because most of them do not choose to make a living at it doesn't mean that women are somehow lacking in the ability to understand and absorb the concept of technology.

Creating a special Linux distribution as though it were a delightful surprise that we can use Linux at all is not going to help our image. Special Linuxes are for people with USB keys and religious sensibilities. We women are doing just fine, thanks.

Expect more opinions to make themselves know in the blogosphere in the next few days.

Now that Puppy won't load on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, and Knoppix runs like hell on it, it's time to get the GParted live CD for my disk-partitioning pleasure.

I said I wouldn't dual-boot on the Gateway, but already I'm rethinking that decision. Hence the need for GParted.

And I'm thinking about working with LILO rather than replacing it with GRUB. Well, I'll try it anyway.

It's funny, when Steven J. Vaughn Nichols talks about "old" hardware, he has this in mind:

For my tests, I'm going to use my Insignia 300a, an older, Best Buy house-brand desktop PC with a 2.8GHz Pentium IV CPU, a GB of RAM and an Ultra ATA/100 60GB hard drive. In short, it's a decent, but in no way, shape or form, cutting-edge system.

For me, the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop on which I'm testing Zenwalk 4.6.1 is my newest PC. It's a 1 GHz Celeron, 256 MB of RAM and 30 GB Toshiba hard drive.

And Zenwalk is running GREAT on it. Already I've added MtPaint, J-Pilot and Fluxbox.

Under Fluxbox, it runs even better. No surprise, but this is a sweet setup.

I've gotten quite fond of J-Pilot, the Linux application that syncs with Palm handhelds. I use my Palm all the time for writing, and getting the files into my Linux boxes is a big deal.

First I got pilot-link with Netpkg.

Then I found the J-Pilot package here. It even put an entry in the menus under "office."

I used the great Slackware tool, Pkgtool, to install it.

P.S. Before using this Zenwalk package, I tried about three different Slackware packages, none of which worked.

P.P.S. Anybody who says Slackware doesn't have package management ... tell 'em it does.

P.P.P.S. I have J-Pilot, but I can't get it to sync. (Related info: Easiest sync: Debian Etch; hard but doable: Ubuntu).

P.P.P.S. I find out here that I need to set the device as /dev/pilot1. Thanks Zenwalkers!

P.P.P.P.S. I've used both J-Pilot and GNOME-Pilot. If you spend a lot of time in the Evolution mail program, GNOME-Pilot is a good thing, and in GNOME it's easier to manage your Palm. Plus you can sync at any time, even if Evolution is not open. J-Pilot, in general, is a quite a bit lighter than Evolution, and unless you're using Evolution as your mail client, it might be too much for the task. But both work. I haven't tried Kpilot since I'm not running KDE on anything right now.

Palm's VersaMail pretty much only works with Windows. Even the Mac client doesn't support it, so I'm not all that pissed that it doesn't work in J-Pilot or GNOME-Pilot (to my knowledge anyway). Besides, my Palm Tungsten E doesn't work with most mail systems anyway. For that you need a newer Palm. Great strategy ... right? That's probably why Palm is doing so gosh-darned well.

That's the question George Ou's article is really answering. He hits VIA for charging a premium for its mini-ITX mainboards (which go for twice as much as the average micro-ATX board and, while often fanless and low in power consumption, don't come anywhere near approaching the specs of the mainstream boards).

But he champions Intel for offering its own mini-ITX mainboard for the low, low price of $69.

Hell, I didn't know about this ... and I want one. Now.

I'm a huge mini-ITX fan -- a huge fan of PCs that are small, consume little power and have no fans in general. And if Intel wants to take this market, I'm all for it.

One of the great things about the Daily News blog redesign is that Click is now carrying ads. Thanks to Josh Kleinbaum, Ryan Garfat and the outgoing-to-MySpace Greg Sidor for all their work on this project.

It's a manic-depressive swing with the comments these past few days. They're currently broken. Once they return, Typekey authentication will be required. Oh, the joy of it!

For now, the comments are wide open again. Something's fishy, and I'm sure it'll be sorted out at some point. It's the classic IT cluster-fill-in-the-blank. Some IT guy, probably in another city, made some kind of global change. Nobody tells the users what's happening, or what to do, and whatever it is they did works in some ways, not so much in others.

For what it's worth, if I can keep the comments wide open like this but have less spam, the whole thing will be a huge success.

Remember all my posts about turning on TypeKey authentication for comments? Well, since then, the entire Los Angeles Daily News blog system at http://insidesocal.com has decided to implement stronger spam filters and mandatory authentication.

The problem? Now comments don't work at all.

They're working on it, I'm told.

If you do want to comment in the interim, send me an e-mail -- I will answer.

Remember yesterday, when I was railing against -- in no particular order -- Gateway, Ubuntu, Puppy, the Alps touchpad and Vector?

A cooler head prevailed today. I stuck with Zenwalk 4.6.1. I may even install the 4.8 release candidate.

Already I added Fluxbox and MtPaint from the repositories. Netpkg is an OK package manager. That first update was tough -- you can't just "select all" and get the updates to flow. You have to click on each one. It's easier than doing them all with upgradepkg. But probably not as easy as slapt-get. And not as easy as apt-get. But it works.

And I started to get comfortable with the touchy Alps touchpad. Since it left-clicks when tapped upon, I was opening windows all over the place.

But tapping to left-click is quicker than actually left-clicking, and with a little practice and adjustment of the mouse parameters in Xfce, I've been using the tapping technique and doing better and better with it.

Still, the screen on this Gateway Solo 1450 is a bit dark for my taste. It only adjusts through software, and in Xfce, there's brightness in the Desktop Preferences setup menu and then gamma correction in the Display menu. I need good ol' contrast. I can't seem to get it bright enough to look good. I guess I'll have to dig into xorg.conf.

One thing I've discovered about the Gateway Solo 1450: While it has the same processor speed as my VIA C3 thin client and same front-side-bus speed and RAM (1 GHz, 133 MHz and 256 MB, respectively), video performance is like night and day. Video runs flawlessly on the Gateway and is choppy as hell on the VIA (mainboard by ECS). Still, I'd love to build out a mini-ITX box with a fanless motherboard and power supply ... if I could be assured of good audio and video.

So all in all, I'm enjoying the $0 Laptop and Zenwalk. And my touchpad training.

Movable Type isn't exactly crystal clear on this "trusted" commenter issue, and I'm thisclose to opening the comment floodgates. But for now, I'm going to continue trying to make the authenticated comments system works.

I thought I could make people into "trusted" commenters just by designating them as such, but there's one problem: In order to be a "trusted" commenter, you first have to "authenticate" yourself with the TypeKey service. I really wanted to avoid requiring people to sign up for yet another service with yet another password, but with the way this system is set up, that's how you've got to do it.

So for now, I'm asking commenters to go through the motions with TypeKey, and THEN I can make you an authenticated and trusted commenter.

I think the whole thing stinks, but it is what it is.

I call it the $0 Laptop, because that's what I paid for it. The dead Gateway Solo 1450 I got a few months back now runs.

The Gateway's previous owner abandoned it because its DC power plug pretty much disintegrated -- a common problem in these machines because the plug in question is a PC-board-mounted piece of plastic.

I spent all of $2 to get a 1/4-inch, 2.1mm DC power plug. After removing about 20 screws, I still couldn't get the case all the way apart, so I propped it open, soldered wires to what was left of the original power plug (two twisted metal pieces and one trace atop the PC board), pulled out a "knock-out" panel over a convenient 1/4-inch hole in the case, wired up the plug and screwed the whole damn thing together. I had a hard drive ready. (Months ago, I pulled the original and gave it back to its owner.)

So now I have experience with the Gateway and the older $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770DMT.

It's night and friggin' day. While the Compaq is much, much slower than the Gateway, from a design and construction standpoint, the Compaq is better in every way.

But the Gateway was free. So I decided to try to get some Linux and BSD distros on it.

Xubuntu 7.04 had a promising start. After booting the live CD, I even had the panels that went missing in my other installs. But the install crashed, and on subsequent tries, those panels disappeared, so I decided to move on. I tried the Ubuntu alternate-install disc and got stopped by debootstrap errors. It's a problem I've had before. I could've used my tried-and-true method -- install Xubuntu 6.10 and upgrade to 7.04 with Update Manager -- but I decided to move forward.

I figured I'd try a BSD. I put Desktop BSD in and got further than ever before -- all the way to the graphical install sequence. Except instead of letters making up words, I had little boxes ... and couldn't tell what to do next.

I should've tried PC-BSD, but I was ready to move on.

I installed Vector Standard. All looked good. I couldn't wait to get Fluxbox on it and see what it was really made of. But when trying to run Vector, the display blanked. No X. If I could somehow figure out how to start in a console, I could've probably hacked Xorg.conf, but I couldn't figure that out.

Even Puppy blanked out. No X. A machine that can't boot Puppy? What the hell. It turns out that Caitlyn Martin of O'Reilly has this same problem.

So I tried Zenwalk 4.6.1. A perfect install. Runs great.

There's one problem. It's a Gateway Solo 1450 problem, not a Linux problem (though Linux could be better about fixing it). Just tapping on the Alps touchpad generates a left mouse click. It's great if you're a very disciplined touchpad user, but nobody's that disciplined. Just about every time I moused over anything, it opened up. Pain in the ass.

I did a bit of Googling. The Synaptics touchpad suggestion of putting this in xorg.conf didn't work:

Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

Again, this DIDN'T work. And the first time through, I had a typo in the word "Option" and killed X. Knoppix wouldn't let me edit xorg.conf, Puppy (as I said) didn't work, but the Ubuntu live CD did, and I fixed xorg.conf. I had X, but the damn touchpad remains touchy.

Also, by default the fan runs all the time. I Googled, again, and saw all sorts of cron jobs and other machinations for getting some kind of sane laptop power management. Guess I need Klaptop or something -- maybe even GNOME. Who the hell knows?

If Linux can't get power management for laptops right, we've got a huge, looming problem.

My first hunch was to install Debian or Slackware. And I just might do that tomorrow. I set up the partitions to have 1 GB of swap, 10 GB for / and the remaining 19 GB or so for /home. That way, if I ever actually use this laptop, I can keep /home intact while changing Linux distros at will. At least that's the theory.

So tomorrow it's either the previously mentioned Debian or Slackware, or perhaps Ubuntu/Xubuntu 6.06.

I'm still mourning the fact that it can't/won't run Puppy.

It's no secret that the spam-protection features of Movable Type stink. Who hates Captchas? The swirly letters you must type in to make a comment at most blogs -- Blogger calls it "word verification" -- are hated by one group -- the blind. I sympathize. I don't want to discriminate against any group. Luckily with Movable Type I don't have the choice. No Captchas, and if you leave comments wide open, it's spam all day and night.

Well, with Authenticated Comments enabled and Typekey verification loaded, the spam still comes into the server. It just doesn't show up on the blog. It's supposed to be deleted at predetermined intervals, but that isn't happening.

In any event, I really, really, really want the real readers -- those who don't want to sell ringtones, porn, prescription medications and the like -- to be able to comment as easily and as often as possible.

To that end, I will try to make every previous commenter to this blog a "trusted" commenter. And if you do make a comment and somehow can brave all this Typekey bullshit, then I will make you a trusted commenter at that point.

I don't know if this will work, but if you wish to be a "trusted" commenter and don't want to deal with Typekey, send me an e-mail, and I will put you into the system.

And if you are blind and read Click, welcome. I am very interested in how the blind use technology in their work and home lives. I'd love to hear from you.

Except for the discriminating-against-the-blind-part, I love Captchas. They provide the best way of keeping spam comments out while not requiring readers to register in order to make a comment. I rarely will register with a site. I read ZDNet all the time but have never registered. With LXer, I registered because I wanted to post there, and now I'm a contributing editor, so that one was worth it. But for a little blog like this? I don't know.

Here's what I'd like: audio Captchas for the blind. It'd would be the same as a regular Captcha but with an audio component so sight-impaired users could hear and then type in the letter/number sequence. That's my idea -- now somebody run with it and make me happy.

On a related matter ... if you are in any way involved in the programming, marketing or sale of Movable Type, can you tell me why Blogger and WordPress work with an easy-to-modify database and don't require minutes-long waits every time an entry is modified but Movable Type sticks with a technology that leaves bloggers screaming "WHY, for the love of God, WHY???" several times a day. Thanks for that.

When you get between 40 and 100 spam comments per hour and decide to take a little break to, say, sleep, and when that puts you 1,000 to 2,000 spam comments in the hole, it's time to turn off the tap.

I hate to make commenters to Click use the Typekey service, but that's pretty much all Movable Type 3.2 has to offer.

One of the best things about this blog is the comments. It's usually people helping me more than me helping them, and I appreciate it, but any way you parse it, it's helpful, entertaining and what makes blogging different than just about every form of media out there.

And I like to leave the comments wide open so anybody can participate without any registration or other arduous procedures. And I don't really care who comments or whether or not they're anonymous. Anonymous is OK.

But thousands of ads for everything from Viagra, Cialis, Tramadol (I still don't know what that is) and "soma" to every kind of porn, ringtones (probably even porn ringtones) and who knows what else, I just can't keep up. Even a "select all" button to delete comments en masse would help. But no, Movable Type makes you check each and every one (instead of deselecting the one good comment among 200 or 300 bad ones) and then delete them, during which time the server in Denver (eighth circle of Hell -- sorry Denverites -- believe me, it's not you) times out.

So to make a long story short, as a 4-year-old tugs on my sleeve (and so she should), there are many things more important than trashing thousands of junk comments a week.

Just about f'n everything.

So I apologize for the TypeKey inconvenience, and I'll hope for a better way to deal with spam comments in as near a future as there can be in MediaNews Corp. land.

Thanks everybody,

Steven

Remember Ubuntu Lite? The lighter-than-Xubuntu, more-graphical-than-Fluxbuntu variant of Ubuntu seemed about to get off the ground last year. Then it disappeared. In that time, Fluxbuntu has floundered, too. And while Xubuntu has never looked better and generally runs pretty well, I'd like to see Ubuntu play in the space occupied by Puppy, Damn Small Linux, DeLi and AntiX.

To that end, Ubuntulite is back. Rather than being its own ISO, the Ubuntulite install begins with a server install of Ubuntu and then uses a script to add the Lite-ness from the Ubuntu and Ubuntulite repositories. Here are the instructions. One thing I learned: There's a Ubuntu Feisty net install CD. I'm a great believer in the network install -- one of the greatest things about Debian.

The new Ubuntulite was announced today:

Ubuntulite 0.6 is now officially available by means of the repository. It now features the addition of menu, slim, and mtpaint and the removal of xdm, gimp, slocate, scrollkeeper, genisoimage, fetchmail, and bogofilter as dependencies.

The install script is now updated and is now version 1. Please update How-to's for the new package. Hopefully updates to the install script will now be less often thanks to a change I made to its coding. The mini.iso is now named mini-feisty.iso too, so please update accordingly.

From the Ubuntulite "about us" page:

History

Evidences points to Matic Ahacic creating the Ubuntulite project in May 2005. Another person instrumental to the beginnings of Ubuntulite is Colin McDermott who designed the original site. Matoc Ahacic and Colin McDermott, however, could no longer contribute to the project around May 2006. Then the current project leader, Shae Smittle, took over. Progress was slow at first, but the results are a changed program selection and a renewed vigor for development. The future for Ubuntulite is bright.

Mission Statement

Ubuntulite strives to make modern software available for older computers in an easy-to-use distribution while upholding the Ubuntu Code of Conduct and contributing back to the community.

Goal

Provide a distribution with regular releases that can comfortably run on computers that currently run Microsoft Windows 98.

There's already a Google Group for the emerging distro.

The window manager for Ubuntulite is Openbox. Here's where you can get the needed files to do the install. I can't believe that an 8.8 MB image can do the network install. Debian's installer is much larger, if I remember correctly.

I wish much luck to the people putting Ubuntulite together. The quicker they get their own installer, the better. Going up against projects like Puppy and DSL is daunting, as is trying to add a flavor to the Ubuntu ice-cream truck and actually get it to official status. It'll be interesting to see what happens (if anything).

Catching my eye from this week's Distrowatch Weekly: MACH BOOT - a live CD that boots in 10 seconds.

TEN seconds? I'm lucky to get anything to boot in less than three minutes. And I've never heard of Mach Boot. But I am intrigued. When an obscure distro gets mentioned in Distrowatch, it's a recipe for an overloaded server, but I will try to download, burn and boot Mach Boot to see how quickly it, in fact does boot. And whether it works at all.

(Hours later)

I am now running Mach Boot. I had the rest of this entry all written out, but I foolishly tried to print it -- just to see what would happen -- and my Firefox window disappeared, along with the rest of this entry.

I'll write it again. Love doing that.

Mach Boot didn't boot on my first try. It hung. Designed to squeeze every last second out of the wait from power-on to desktop, Mach Boot has no delay in the bootloader sequence. And since the standard boot parameters didn't work for me, I had to reboot and hit the spacebar really, really fast to get the bootloader to pause long enough for me to choose to boot with Safe VESA, which worked for my test machine, as did Save FB.

Mach Boot then booted. Very quickly. I didn't time it, but it was less than 30 seconds, and this is an old box, so I consider that part of the MB come-on to be truth in advertising.

But once you go from starting a live CD to the IceWM desktop, what do you get? Not much.

Mach Boot is classic Debian. It even looks like Debian with the IceWM desktop because ... that's what it is. As IceWM loaded, an X Window also opened into which I entered my static IP address. Another window opened for my gateway. I added those numbers and I was off and running with Firefox. That's the killer app in Mach Boot. It's just about the only app. It could've been worse. If I was going to have an ultra-fast loading and ultra-fast running live-CD environment and could only have one or two apps, you can bet one of them would be Firefox.

The IceWM menus in Mach Boot are pretty bare, Besides Firefox (Version 1.5.0.7), there is the nano text editor, xterm, xclock, xcalculator, xkill and xclipboard. Python 2.3 and 2.4 open in terminal windows.

Among the programs in the menus that don't run (because they are not installed, I think) are mutt, xedit, w3m and links.

I didn't expect printing to work from Firefox, but I didn't expect trying to print to kill FF and cause me to lose this entire entry. You live, you learn.

So how does Mach Boot do it? I'm no expert, but it looks like the distro is set up to load as few services as possible. Doing so in any other Linux distro would probably achieve some of these same gains. At any given time, Mach Boot is running between 25 and 35 processes vs. 70 to 80 for most Linux distros. That's gotta help. IceWM is also incredibly fast.

For me, the ability to load a live CD in 30 seconds or less and have a working network connection with Firefox is a pretty good thing. And having that Firefox browser be incredibly quick is another good thing. I do a lot of work on the Web, and this could turn out to be a pretty good tool.

But the problem with Mach Boot is that I need a GUI text editor (how about Leafpad?), word processor (preferably AbiWord), a simple image editor (my vote remains with MtPaint) and an FTP program to really get anything done.

If Mach Boot adds even a few of these apps, it could easily become my live CD of choice. Right now, it's not ready for prime time. But if it gets even one other live-CD distro to decrease its boot time and use an ultra-light window manager, Mach Boot will have done its job.

According to the Mach Boot web page, the method by which it boots so quickly can be adapted to other distros. I would encourage developers to take a look.

Lots of geek types are always talking about how fast Linux can be and about how much quicker it is than Windows. I don't usually find this to be the case, but the Mach Boot live CD proves otherwise. With a more complete environment, I wouldn't mind staying longer in the world of Mach Boot. Again, by "more complete" I mean more than Firefox, xterm and nano.

Mach Boot won't replace Knoppix, and it won't replace Puppy, DSL or NimbleX either. But it's a tool all its own, one that could be very useful with a little more development time.

I'll be watching it, for sure.

Final note: After this was written, about three hours into my Mach Boot session, Firefox died. I had about five tabs open, and it just froze. The process was no longer visible in Top, and I couldn't find the process number to kill it from the terminal. I couldn't kill the window, either. So I rebooted. And in case you want to shut down your system, the logout button doesn't work, at least in my system. You have to hit the REBOOT icon in the toolbar and hit the switch after services are shut down.

Post-final note: Mach Boot would not boot on my newish Dell Optiplex GX520 box (Pentium 4 at 3 GHz). I think the live CD had video driver issues. It boots on my VIA C3 but not on a Pentium 4? Strange, indeed.

You might have seen this already, but Bruce Byfield's post on his personal blog, Why I'm Staying With Debian should be read by every Linux user. A sample:

Almost as important as Debian’s technical excellence and arrangements is the community around the distribution. This community is one of the most outspoken and free-thinking in free and open source software. This behavior is a source of irritation to many, including Ian Murdock, the founder of the distribution and my former boss, who thinks that the distribution would run more smoothly if its organization was more corporate. And, admittedly, reaching consensus or, in some cases, voting on a policy can be slow, and has problems scaling — problems that Debian members are well-aware of and gradually developing mechanism to correct without changing the basic nature of the community.

Yet it seems to me that Debian is, in many ways, the logical outcome of free software principles. If you empower users, then of course they are going to want a say in what is happening. And, despite the problems, Debian works, even if it seems somewhat punctilious and quarrelsome at times, insisting on a standard of purity that, once or twice, has even been greater than the Free Software Foundation’s. The community is really a daring social experiment, and its independence deserves far more admiration than criticism.

And he sums up:

And Debian, for all its endless squabbles and the posturing of some of its developers, has overall proven itself a community I can trust. So, at least for the time being, I’ll be sticking with Debian.

I'm at the tail end of my CentOS 4.5 install. Once again, I continue to be impressed with the Anaconda installer. It's one of the best I've seen. It gives you a lot of freedom to pick which packages you want to install. I bulked up on the KDE -- I wanted everything to be as ready as it could be when the install finished.

Once the install was done, I clicked the icon to run up2date. It seemed to be taking forever and then I noticed the notes in one of the boxes: Up2date needs to be up to date before using it. So I opened a terminal and used yum to update up2date. Then I clicked the update icon again, and everything started flowing.

I'm in the middle of an hour-plus update (the first one always hurts). During the install, there were a lot of useful messages about documentation and how to run the system. One thing I'll have to do is look on the CentOS site for how to get some kind of version 2 of OpenOffice. CentOS 4.5 still runs version 1.1.5, and I really want to have ODF compatibility. But since my last endeavor to add outside software to CentOS 3.9 went so poorly, I'm a little update-shy about it.

One thing's annoying me: The screen saver is password-protected. I think that's a good default for security's sake, but the first thing I'm going to do is turn that off. It's annoying.

So far the desktop looks great, and if they do one thing -- and that thing is making sound work in applications -- I'll be happy.

(the next day ...)

My Up2date of the rest of the system died overnight. I restarted it. Most of the files downloaded fine and were somewhere in /var, but even so, it took forever for the installation process to really get going.

I did eventually have a fully updated CentOS 4.5 box. This is the newest (and probably last) Red Hat-derived distribution I will be able to run on this machine.

One good thing: CentOS 4.5 is light years ahead of CentOS 3.9. Everything is updated. I still want a newer version of OpenOffice (see the comments to this post to find out how to get one).

And unlike in CentOS 3.9, in this version, sound works. I got the RPM package for Flash, installed it and checked it out. Video is as choppy as any distro on this box -- I didn't expect anything better -- but at least sound worked.

During the install, I chose to have XMMS as one of my extra packages. CentOS (and, presumably, Red Hat) still doesn't play MP3s, and I still couldn't get it to play an OGG file, either.

Other than that, the GNOME desktop works great. KDE was, predictably, a little slower, but since I added every KDE extra I could, there's plenty of software on this box.

Another curious thing: I let the installer automatically take over the entire drive, and I think it used LVM (logical volume management), because when I run gparted from the Puppy live CD, there are only two partitions, a very small /boot and another one with "unknown" file type. I don't know enough about LVM at this point, but it does appear to be working fine.

The Internet was VERY slow today in this building, so I couldn't really comment on how Net-based apps were running, but as in CentOS 3.9, OpenOffice is very, very slow to load. Curiously, the Nautilus file manager opens very quickly when the Home icon is clicked, and menus appear almost instantly, which is not the case in all distros I've used with this hardware.

I continue to be impressed with the way CentOS/Red Hat is laid out. There are tons of management tools, and mousing over just about anything on the screen causes small "help" boxes to open up. Nice touch.

Again, it's nice to have both GNOME and KDE loaded up, but would it kill them to offer Xfce, Fluxbox and IceWM during the install process as well? I guess RHEL is all about the enterprise -- the corporate desktop -- and that means GNOME or KDE, so I'll shut up about it.

I did turn off the password-protection on the screen saver, and I also tweaked the sleep settings for the monitor. Configuration in CentOS/Red Hat is very straightforward, and ACPI works perfectly.

One significant upgrade from 3.9 to 4.5. Firefox is the default browser in lieu of Seamonkey.

I don't know much about the upcoming Red Hat Global Desktop, which I presume will be cheaper than the current $80 for RHEL's desktop version, but if Red Hat gets serious about pursuing the desktop market and really gets under the hood to make a better desktop experience, they could be a significant player in the corporate desktop space where security, ease of administration and low cost are priorities. And if you don't need Red Hat's support, CentOS is there to give you the whole distro for nothing.

I spent the better part of a year avoiding all stats having to do with this blog. I didn't want to sully the purity of the blogging experience.

I got over it.

Now I get the stats every day, and I'm happy to say that for the past two days, Click is the No. 7 Los Angeles Daily News blog, No. 2 if you don't count sports blogs. Sports dwarfs everything else we do in an astounding way. The biggies are Scott Wolf's Inside USC, Brian Dohn's Inside UCLA and Rich Hammond's Inside the Kings. Maybe if I renamed this blog Inside Click, it would do better. (Ba-DUM-bump.) No, it would probably make no difference. People love sports.

So what's the No. 1 nonsports blog under the auspices of the Daily News? It's Greg Hernandez's Out in Hollywood, which draws WAY more traffic than Click, by the way. Greg is a tireless, relentless blogger with a unique voice, and he more than deserves all the success he has earned in the blogging world. I don't know how he keeps the pace he has set, just as I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up mine. In any event, it's all good for now. And if blogging is about anything it's now.

But having Click be the No. 2 nonsports blog -- for today anyway -- is good enough for me. I owe a lot to LXer and Distrowatch, which have linked to many and a few key posts, respectively, and brought a whole lot of people over here.

This just in: Click was No. 5 overall on Friday, still No. 2 nonsports (there's no beating Out in Hollywood, that's for sure.)

Thanks, Johnny Hughes. He commented on my previous CentOS odyssey, which led me to install version 3.9 on my VIA C3-equipped test box. He said CentOS 4.5 would run on it. I had previously tried the 4.4 live CD, and that wouldn't boot, so I never bothered to burn a 4.5 install disc.

Johnny was right. I did burn the first CentOS 4.5 disc, and typing i586 at the boot prompt worked.

So I'm about to redo this drive as CentOS 4.5. If I don't think about the fact that the sound is kind of screwed up, CentOS 3.9 is a very, very good desktop operating system, one that I would definitely recommend for small to medium sized businesses as well as the enterprise. It's a great implementation of GNOME, and KDE is also here if you want it.

Will CentOS 4.5 perform as well or better? It's time to find out.

I'm always interested in the opinions of people on the ground -- IT professionals who like open-source software but who spend considerable time working with the 100-pound gorilla, namely Microsoft Windows. There are good reasons why, fortunately or not (depending on your place and position in all of this) open-source operating systems and applications aren't taking over the world -- this week, anyway.

To that end, check out these two blogs: Technology & Life Integration: Fiction or Future and Linux in the Enterprise.

When Walt Mossberg talks, people listen. He's the big tech writer at the Wall Street Journal, and for those who don't know, he's generally regarded as being in the Apple camp. Here he gives Ubuntu a try. Having the WSJ report on Linux and Ubuntu is huge. There will be a whole lot more downloads of Ubuntu than usual as the result of this kind of exposure, and one major-media piece generally begats more than a few others.

Mossberg says he's avoided writing about Linux because it's too techy-geeky ... but:

Lately, however, I’ve received a steady stream of emails from readers urging me to take a look at a variant of Linux called Ubuntu, which, these folks claimed, is finally polished enough for a mainstream user to handle. My interest increased when Dell began to sell a few computer models preloaded with Ubuntu instead of Windows.

So he gets a preloaded Dell/Ubuntu laptop. He gets right to it:

My verdict: Even in the relatively slick Ubuntu variation, Linux is still too rough around the edges for the vast majority of computer users. While Ubuntu looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X, it is full of little complications and hassles that will quickly frustrate most people who just want to use their computers, not maintain or tweak them.

He didn't have the best experience, and even though the laptop he was given retailed for $1,400, he still had problems with intermittent, less-than-smooth video.

His final conclusion:

... for now, I still advise mainstream, nontechnical users to avoid Linux.

In a way, he's right. Both the GNU/Linux community and Dell need to do better. Dell needs to make sure its hardware works with the OS it provides, and there needs to be a Linux distribution that combines performance with extreme ease of use and full multimedia capability.

Still, what if Mr. Mossberg tried out 10 different LInux distributions? What if he threw a Puppy CD into his Windows box and gave that a spin?

Maybe the famed PCLinuxOS would've worked better for him? If I were you, O geniuses behind the various and sundry Linux distros, I'd send a CD to ol' Walt along with a personal letter about why your distro is better than Ubuntu.

Here's his e-mail, his All Things Digital Web page and his ethics policy.

His snail-mail address? I can't help you. But why not e-mail him a great pitch along with a link for the ISOs of your distro? Make him download it and burn the CD like the rest of us -- that way he'll get the real Linux experience. He needs to do an install and not just pick up a pre-loaded Dell.

C'mon, Walt -- you can do it -- become a Linux geek. When was the last time a column you wrote got dissected by five-dozen bloggers?

I haven't actually had the time to listen to one of the 77 -- SEVENTY-SEVEN!!!! -- podcasts on Linux at the Linux Reality Web site, but I'm going to soon.

They seem to be aimed at the new Linux user, and they cover everything from what an ISO is and how to burn one, to browsers, desktop environments, various distributions, the shell ... I could go on. You can get the podcasts in mp3 or Ogg format on the home page, via subscription, or even through the iTunes store. (Yes, I do have an iPod, we have a Mac at home, and that's probably the way I'll do it. I haven't made the leap to letting Amarok manage my iPod -- but I'm not saying I won't.)

Anyhow, if these podcasts are any good at all, you can bet I'll be blogging again about Linux Reality.

And there are more Linux podcasts: The Linux Links Tech Show, Lotta Linux Links, Open News and LQ Radio from LinuxQuestions.org.

That's a lot of podcasting, but am I missing anything? Let me know.

"Memory is cheap." Not really. When the kind of memory you're using is currently being made in huge quantities, it can be cheap-er. Witness the great deals you can get at Tiger Direct or Newegg.

But when it comes to laptops -- and older ones especially, not getting enough memory when you buy the damn thing can bite you in the ass.

I'm in the process of fixing up the Free Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 with a busted power plug. I have the part ready, and I'm going to get power to the thing soon. I pulled the memory cover and found out it shipped with 128 MB of RAM -- a PC133 SODIMM.

128 MB? Were they high? This thing also shipped with Windows XP. (I pulled the drive and gave it to the laptop's owner -- I have another drive ready and waiting). How good can XP run in 128 MB?

The thing maxes out at 1 GB. How much could it be, I figured. I see 1 GB of RAM going for $40 to $50 all the time in the Fry's ads ... but that's for CURRENT memory, and usually desktop memory.

But PC133 SODIMM memory? I'll be lucky to get a GB for $75. 512 MB will run me about $40. Hold the f'n phone! That's too much. I'm at the horns of a RAM dilemma.

What I really want: A full GB for $40. Ain't gonna happen.

I can't believe I've never heard of Slackbuilds.org. It's a great way to get the software you want on your Slackware box. Here's what it's all about:

One of the frequent criticisms of Slackware is the lack of official packages available. While the official package set provides a good, stable, and flexible operating system (and is quite adequate for many individuals), the fact remains that many users want/need quite a few additional applications in order for it to meet their needs.

...

In our opinion, the best solution to this problem is for the admin to automate the compile process using a SlackBuild script. Patrick Volkerding, the maintainer of Slackware, uses SlackBuild scripts to compile the official packages, so it makes sense for us to use the same idea for extra applications we want to add.

Our goal is to have the largest collection of SlackBuild scripts available while still ensuring that they are of the highest quality - we test every submission prior to inclusion in the repository. We do not now nor will we ever provide precompiled packages for any of the applications for which we have SlackBuild scripts - instead, we want the system administrator (that's you) to be responsible for building the packages.

You'll still have to take care of dependencies (but they're probably all here, too) -- but this sounds like a very noble project, indeed.

They've got AbiWord (I already got that from Robby's Slackware Packages), OpenOffice 2.2.1, and a bunch more. One that I'm going to grab is msmtp -- the small smtp program that I like to use with mutt. And upon looking at the info on Slackbuilds.org, I see that Robby Workman is involved in this project, too.

It's another great reason to run Slackware.

It's not in the "one small step for man" category, but my quest to run something -- anything -- from Red Hat on my VIA C3 Samuel-equipped test box has finally been successful. But not without a lot of effort.

The current versions of Fedora and Red Hat clones Scientific Linux and CentOS -- live CDs, install CDs, net-install CDs -- wouldn't just refuse to install, they wouldn't even boot. I tried special boot codes. Nothing.

Then it dawned on me: CentOS, the leading clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, doesn't just offer its current release, CentOS 5. It also has versions 2, 3 and 4 -- all still receiving support in the form of security updates. Maybe I could go back in time, in Linux time anyway, to an era when Red Hat wasn't so hostile to the VIA C3 Samuel.

So I downloaded and burned the CentOS 4.4 Live CD. It wouldn't boot, either.

Not to be deterred, I downloaded the ISOs for the first discs of CentOS 3.9 and 2.1.

CentOS 2.1 downloaded first, and unlike versions 5 and 4.4, it booted successfully into a graphical installer. Everything looked good, but I wanted to install CentOS on one of my hard drive's pre-existing partitions. The installer wouldn't continue unless I set the target partition as the root partition. I didn't know whether or not that would break the triple-boot situation that I have going on this drive (currently Ubuntu/Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17). I already blew out GRUB with the Puppy install and didn't feel like going through that again -- this week, at least. (I was able to get everything to boot again after a bit of amateur hackery. Through it all, Slackware always booted, by the way.)

For those who don't know, CentOS is a nearly exact copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- as close as the CentOS people can get it (and that's very, very close) for users who want to use RHEL but don't want to pay Red Hat for support they either don't want or need.

Now that CentOS 5 (and by extension RHEL 5) is out, CentOS 2 seems positively ancient. But it's not: The Distrowatch announcement of CentOS 2 Final was on May 25, 2004. That's three years ago for those a little shaky on the math.

The first ISO of my CentOS 3.9 install set finally came through. I swapped in a hard drive that would be dedicated to this install -- no dual-booting.

I chose the graphical install. It worked. This version, unlike CentOS 2, allowed me to configure my wheel mouse. A good sign. Throughout the install process, the help on the left side of the screen is appreciated.

The next screen allowed me to choose from four types of installs: Personal Desktop, Workstation, Server and Custom. I chose Personal Desktop.

And since I had a whole drive devoted to this install, I chose Automatically Partition on the Disk Partitioning Setup screen.

In Boot Loader Configuration, there is the provision to password-protect the GRUB bootloader. It sounded like a good idea, but I didn't need it at present.

I kept going in the installer -- this is Anaconda, I believe -- and as graphical installers go, it's a very good one. I like how it shows the number of packages being installed, how many are done, how many are left, all listed with times elapsed and remaining.

My geeky self was getting a little giddy at the thought of running something that smells of Red Hat. CentOS 3.9 may not be CentOS 5, but this 3.9 release is dated July 26, 2007 -- not even two months old. And according to CentOS, it will be supported with maintenance updates until Oct. 31, 2010. Even CentOS 2 is still being supported with security patches, and that support will continue until May 31, 2009. So if CentOS does work for your setup, you can stay with it. I imagine every release of CentOS will be supported as long as Red Hat supports the releases on which they're based. In other words, a long time.

I'll take it.

If, for some reason, you have hardware frozen in time (and I most certainly do) that runs well on one of these older distributions, it's nice to know there are distributions out there that are committed to true long-term support.

(A few days pass)

I finally got to use CentOS 3.9. I know it's old, and yes, there are quite a few apps that don't work so well. OpenOffice is version 1.1.2, meaning no ODF support. It's strange that OO is not even version 2, but instead of GAIM there's the very-new Pidgin on the system. Must have something to do with security. I like Pidgin and use it every day, so nothing's lost there.

One problem: There's no way, no how, to get AbiWord on this thing, and after screwing around with yum and rpm for awhile, I did get the flash plugin installed but struck out with the Ted word processor, even though I had a bona fide RPM of it. It installed, but then it wouldn't run, even from a terminal. And I couldn't find the GNOME app that lets you add things to the menus.

I took a peek at Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" for a quick how-to on RPMs, and it doesn't seem like I'm doing anything wrong, but Ted still won't load.

Also, XMMS didn't work with .mp3 files (it's not supposed to -- for some reason Red Hat purposefully doesn't include the proper CODECs). But it won't work with .ogg files, either. Nothing happens. And while my sound does work -- the test sound plays perfectly -- there's no audio in any browser (SeaMonkey is the default here). Hmmmm.

But there are many good things bout this ol' Red Hat clone:

The install is on three CDs, and I never needed the third one. It's nice to get both the GNOME and KDE desktops installed by default and be able to experience both without having to do much of anything. Both GNOME and KDE run pretty well on my old hardware (I think the VIA C3 is running a lot slower than its rated 1 GHz -- maybe half that, and I'm working with a 133 MHz FSB, 256 MB of RAM).

It's kind of cool how in GNOME the menus show Gedit, but in KDE you get Kate. Pretty slick.

Konqueror runs way faster here than in newer distros. I think that the browser/file manager got some kind of major makeover, because I remember it being this fast in the old, now-orphaned MepisLite but was surprised to find out how slow it has been in recent distros (Slackware 12, SimplyMepis 5). It's fast here, all right, but not so great on most Web pages -- CSS rendering isn't working all that great.

The Add/Remove Applications utility works very well. I used it to beef up KDE with ... everything they had. Everything, in this case didn't include KOffice. I understand that this is due to Red Hat's decision to support OpenOffice above all other office software. No AbiWord, no Ted, and no KOffice. That's a mistake -- Red Hat (and by extension CentOS) would do its users nothing but good by giving them a choice in office suites. I'd be OK with it if they were only shipping GNOME, but if you include KDE, you really should put KOffice with it.

I couldn't get my network printer to work with the Red Hat/CentOS utility, but now that I've used the CUPS Web-browser interface successfully a few times, I went in that direction and got networked printing going in about two minutes.

The GIMP is back at version 1.2. The good thing is that it loads in 15 seconds. That's way faster than the current version loads in just about any OS I use.

The older version of OpenOffice, on the other hand, is much slower. It takes a full minute and then some to load the Writer application. The OO team must've tightened it up a bit since then, because 2.2 runs better than this older version. And I'm uncomfortable without ODF support.

RHEL/CentOS desktop users -- not that Red Hat has much stake in or focus on the desktop -- pretty much have to make due with OpenOffice. I'm sure there's a way to add KOffice, AbiWord, even Ted, but the official repositories don't have those applications. And as I write above, I was unsuccessful in getting Ted to install. Well, it's installed -- I just can't run it.

It could be me. This is my first experience with anything derived from Red Hat, and I didn't exactly spend the weekend studying up on it. But so far, Debian and Ubuntu are obviously easier to deal with when it comes to adding packages. Even Slackware is easier. I figured out how to add a Slack package pretty easily. I'm doing something wrong with rpm and yum, I just don't know what.

Otherwise, both the GNOME and KDE environments in CentOS 3.9 are quite complete. All the tools you'd expect in the somewhat older incarnations of these desktops are there.

One RPM that did install right was Flash. I followed the instructions from the Adobe site, and upon relaunching Seamonkey, I had Flash video. Still no sound, but could at least watch a silent YouTube.

For a moment, if I can forget all the stuff that didn't work -- sound, installing software NOT in the main repositories -- the Red Hat/CentOS desktop would make an excellent install for corporate environments. It seems solid and has an excellent installer. And the lengthy period of support in the form of security patches is exactly what a typical business needs. Do you think my company-maintained Windows XP box gets a visit from the IT department once a month unless I have a problem? Once a year? It NEVER gets any attention unless I ask for it.

That's the reality out there, and the more a Linux desktop can have a set-it-and-forget-it configuration, the better it will fare in most corporate settings. Nothing that is re-released every six months -- or even every year -- will ever take hold in most office situations. And some people don't like change. That's what Red Hat (and, again, by extension CentOS) is all about in the server market.

The same philosophy applies to the office desktop -- keep it simple, keep it the same, keep it secure. On Windows, nothing is all that simple or secure -- but it sure is the same. With that in mind, a little sameness on the desktop isn't such a bad thing when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of users in a single company.

Until I get a better testing environment running (and I am close), I'll only be able to speculate on how much CentOS 5 has improved the desktop experience. I suspect quite a bit. But based on what I see in 3.9, if you want a secure, stable desktop workhorse, you could do a whole lot worse than the rock-solid CentOS.

Slackware is the Un-Buntu. It's almost the Un-Debian, but definitely the Un-Buntu. Whether this is good or bad is not something I'm going to talk about. It's just different. As I get deeper into using Slackware 12.0, I find myself reading more and more about the distribution, which is not exactly front-burner blog material. To start off, I found this great item from tuxmachhines.org, Slackware 12: The anti-'buntu. Un-Buntu, anti-'buntu ... I don't know which term to use.

I keep thinking, Slackware's pretty cool, but as the link above says, Slack has maybe 800 packages vs. 18,000 for Debian. What does Slack have to offer that Debian does not? It's a bit of a different experience; you tend to get your hands a bit dirtier.

And while the main repository for Slackware packages seems to be Linux Packages, go to Robby's Slackware Pages for some of the stuff missing from Slack. For me, that means OpenOffice, plus AbiWord and the libraries you need to use it. (This version of OpenOffice for Slackware 11 from LinuxPackages may work, but here's Robby's for Slackware 12.

I added AbiWord, the word processor that separates Slackware from the two popular distributions derived from it --ZenWalk and Vector Standard. Slackware really should ship with AbiWord -- that's my 2 cents.

The version of AbiWord at LinuxPackages.net is 2.4.1, and that site listed the required dependencies -- other packages I needed to install to make Abi work in Slack. But when I found Robby's Slackware Packages, his version of AbiWord was current, so I grabbed it and all the dependencies except for enchant, which I got from LinuxPackages.net.

Since Robby didn't have enchant, I wonder if I really needed it, but I decided to grab them all, put them in a directory and use pkgtool to install. Using pkgtool couldn't be easier -- I feel like I'm cheating in the same way I do when using apt in Debian.

Here are the packages I installed:

Abiword 2.4.6
libgnomecanvas 2.14.0 (The GNOME canvas graphics engine)
libgnomeprint 2.18.0 (the GNOME printing library)
libgnomeprintui 2.18.0

I didn't install libgnomecups 0.2.2 (GNOME library for CUPS access) because it wasn't mentioned at LinuxPackages.net, but since it was grouped together with the other libraries on Robby's site, I thought it might be necessary for printing from Abiword. I grabbed it in case I needed it. Turns out I didn't.

Once I got the files downloaded and used pkgtool, Abiword was in the menu, and it launched without incident. My love-hate relationship with AbiWord is now in a big-time love phase. I've been using it all the time, even though it doesn't have the typographical quote marks and em dashes that I like to see in a word processing program.

Now that Abi was running, that made it time to configure printing to my favored network printer (out of dozens at the Daily News). I've had trouble in the past with CUPS, and it's probably more about me not understanding how it works than anything, but I'm determined to figure it out.

Once again, Slackware is supposed to be complicated and hard to manage, but this experience proved to be different -- and very satisfying. In the Xfce printer settings, I selected CUPS to manage my printing. Then I went to CUPS configuration in the Slackware menu. The Seamonkey browser opened with the local CUPS interface. As usual, my favored printer didn't appear on the list (it never does). Then I clicked Administration, and under "additional printers found," there it was. I clicked through, selected the proper driver and had network printing under CUPS.

And it was easier than ever. Easier than in Ubuntu, Debian, even Puppy (which just added CUPS in the current release, 2.17). Slackware easier than Puppy and Ubuntu? What's that all about?

Slackware provides security updates all the way back to version 8.1 along with 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 11.0 and 12.0, so if there is a reason you're using an older version of Slack, it is still being supported by the distro's creator, Patrick Volkerding and his team. If you didn't follow the link, you won't know (until now, anyway) that the box running Slackware.com is a 600 MHz Pentium II with 512 MB of RAM. That's plenty old for such a busy server.

A great way to explore the history of Slackware is one of my very favorite sites, Distrowatch. Start here and scroll down for news, reviews and more about Slackware. As I explored, I learned that Slackware 8.1 was released in June 2002. The item appeared June 19, with the announcement that CDs would be available for shipment beginning June 28, 2002 (not everybody had broadband in those days, and downloading a 689 MB ISO over dialup was a prescription for frustration).

Here is part of the Slack 8.1 announcement, as it appears in Distrowatch:

"Highlights of this release include KDE 3.0.1, GNOME 1.4.1 (with new additions like Evolution), the long-awaited Mozilla 1.0 browser, support for many new file systems like ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS, and support for several new SCSI and ATA RAID controllers.

Another interesting fact: A Distrowatch story from April 28, 2002, reported that at the time, only 16 percent of visitors to the site were using Linux (it was 2002 -- give us all a break!!). Of those, here is the breakdown:

The complete list of the top 10: Slackware 33%, Gentoo 31%, Red Hat 28%, Beehive 24%, Debian 24%, Sorcerer 24%, Lycoris 23%, SuSE 22%, Mandrake 17%, Lindows 16%.

So Slackware was No. 1.

But back to my point: Slackware is still supporting version 8.1 a full five years after its release. That's the kind of commitment I like to see for a distribution. If you want to install it, you won't be left out in the cold if you want to stay with an older version that does what you want it to do. That five years of support (and I don't see any signs of Slack dropping updates for 8.1) is equal to what Ubuntu is doing with the server version of its LTS product, and it compares to what Red Hat offers on its enterprise offering (is that five or seven years?)

One thing I'm learning: Sometimes old hardware runs better with old software.

I finally finished all the security updates for my newish Slackware 12.0 install, and another trip to the Slackware site revealed that there was an additional update posted on Aug. 31. Using the Slack FTP site, these updates take forever to download at 8 KB/s. There's a helpful note on the security update page about faster mirrors -- I'll have to look into it.

However fast the downloads have been, I've been very successful using gFTP to do them. In Windows, I use Internet Explorer for my FTP needs -- I'm just lazy about it, I guess.

Back to Slackware: I probably should get on the mailing list for security updates so I'll know when they come out.

While it's not as easy as apt-get update, apt-get upgrade in Debian/Ubuntu (or the Update Manager), there's something very sane about maintaining a Slackware box. For one thing, you know way more about what goes into it. One thing with Slackware -- it pays to read. Read the documentation, keep up with blogs and Web sites that write about Slack. Another thing: Thank the makers of Slackware, led by Patrick Volkerding for such great command-line utilities like xwmconfig, netconfig, pkgtool, upgradepkg, installpkg and many more that I don't yet know about. If this kind of stuff was available in Fluxbuntu, it would be more than just a vanity project that appears to be going nowhere. Slackware hard? You set up networking by typing netconfig at a prompt and filling in the blanks. What could be easier? Installing software with pkgtool? Except for the dependency problems, which at least make you more aware of what your system is all about, it's easy and intuitive.

While I initially was put off by not being automatically added to the proper groups to mount CDs and USB drives, I later saw the wisdom of the OS not being wide open in its default configuration. It makes Slackware a good choice for an office environment, believe it or not, because your end users won't be able to screw things up to the extent that they would in a stock Ubuntu install with sudo privileges.

And the process of getting Slackware to mount devices and burn CDs was a valuable learning experience.

I'm pretty much running Slackware with the Xfce desktop. KDE runs faster in Slack than anywhere I've seen, but it's still too slow for my hardware. Patrick made a big deal out of dropping GNOME from Slack, but one thing I've learned about GNOME is that it's much quicker than KDE. I'm getting comfortable in Xfce, however.

Did I mention that configuring CUPS printing for my difficult-to-dial-in networked printer was easier in Slackware than in anything else I've tried? I'm mentioning it now. For some reason, while my printer didn't show up on the list of networked printers in CUPS, clicking on the Administration button was enough to find it. I'll have to try that in Puppy 2.17, which just got CUPS support.

The Daily News isn't known for being on the technological bleeding edge. Not three years ago, we were all cursing Windows 98 for crashing with a single Explorer window open. We were running 400 MB Celerons (not bad) with 32 MB of RAM (very bad).

When we got a new publishing system a couple years ago, that meant new PCs to go with it. They are Dell Optiplexes with Pentium 4 processors at 3 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. Not even a full GB. But I can't complain. With XP, everything runs great. Except for those unexplained instances where everything slows to a crawl.

Aside from our networked publishing system (Unisys Hermes, for those who follow such things) and the antivirus package (can't remember what it is at the moment), every last thing is freeware or shareware.

The company installed OpenOffice. I added The GIMP and IrfanView for image editing and EditPad Lite for text editing. That's pretty much it.

So much of what I do happens via Web interface (software applications as services) that at this point I don't really need to run any applications that aren't available in better and freer versions on the Linux platform.

The exception is one of our Web-based apps that, for some reason, requires Internet Explorer. Even on Mac. Yes, you have to use an outdated, security-compromised browser that Microsoft abandoned years ago in order to make the application work. I'm glad that most of my SAAS work is now on the Clickability Web publishing system, which supports both IE and Firefox.

My big revelation this week is that Clickability works much better on Firefox than on IE. Now even on Windows, where I've continued to use IE heavily even up until this very week, I'm migrating over to Firefox (and away from Outlook and toward Thunderbird as well). See, all this use of Linux just makes you want to use the same apps, even when you must work in Windows.

And it goes both ways. I always say that the best way to get people using free, open-source software is to give them applications on their current platforms. OpenOffice, AbiWord, Thunderbird, Firefox, the GIMP -- use them in Windows and Mac OS X, and it's that much easier and way less foreign to switch to the Linux or BSD operating systems and still be using your new, free favorites.

Only the Daily News' Unisys Hermes publishing system has no open-source client solution. (The product was recently purchased from Unisys by newspaper-system giant Atex, I just learned. I don't know what effect that has on anything. But I bet SAAS is even coming to the print-publishing world, and future newspaper systems will be even less reliant on specialized client software and run on any system that has a compatible browser.)

I decided that I needed the Palm back in my life. I can maybe steal a minute or two hear and there to write, and if I use pen and paper, chances are whatever it is will never make it into print/online because things change and what I wrote is no longer up to the minute.

My Palm Tungsten E had gone totally dead. I had to restore everything with a sync, and by some kind of magic, my Palm infrared keyboard suddenly started working again.

So it was time to get the Palm and Linux talking to each other.

The usual suspects are J-Pilot, Kpilot and GNOME-Pilot, the latter of which works with the Evolution mail client.

I'd had bad experiences before in Ubuntu with J-Pilot -- it's hell just to get the Palm to sync with the Linux box.

This time it was different.

I began with GNOME-Pilot in Debian. I managed to add Palm to the GNOME panel and turn it on. Then all I did was hit sync on the Palm, and the transfer began. All my data flowed to the box, and much of it was accessible via Evolution. I really only need to access the Memos from the Palm, but it was a bonus to have Addresses and Calendar there, too. My Word-compatible files from Documents to Go are probably in there, too, but I'm in no hurry to find them just yet.

Now that my Palm and Evolution were talking, I figured it was time to give the mail client a try. Previously I had problems configuring Evolution, but not this time. I programmed my IMAP account and was reading mail in about three minutes. Turns out I like Evolution. I've already given up Sylpheed for Thunderbird and Seamonkey, and at this point I like Evolution. I can't say whether it's better or worse than Thunderbird at this point. It seems about the same, except that Evolution has the aforementioned Palm hookup.

However, I also tried J-Pilot in Xubuntu, and after some frustration, I did a little Googling and found out that I needed to open a terminal and type:

sudo modprobe visor

I already had /dev/ttyUSB1 as my device, and after the modprobe command, it started working. I can hit the J-pilot sync button, then the Palm's sync button, and the data begins flowing.

J-Pilot has a nice interface, and it's less complicated than Evolution, because it's devoted to the Palm.

P.S. I tried awhile back to install the Windows version of Palm Desktop under WINE, and that didn't work. Palm Desktop may be old, but it's ultra-quick and efficient.

Back to the Palm and Linux. Now that I have the Palm working in Debian and Ubuntu/Xubuntu, I'm pretty happy, and I'll probably be using my Debian-equipped 233 MHz Compaq laptop a bit less. There's something about hitting a button on the Palm and being able to write within a half-second that totally works for me.

So even though I see some promise in the new iPod Touch, but I hope it makes the Palm people think that maybe everybody doesn't want their PDA to have a phone in it. A new Palm is long overdue. And a native Palm client for Linux is equally overdue. But for now, J-Pilot and GNOME-Pilot are doing the job pretty well.

I put some notes at the top of my "first look" at Puppy Linux 2.17.

Basically, I did finally get CUPS configured for my somewhat difficult network printer. While I had about 12 printers that auto-configured, my favored printer -- i.e. the one closest to my desk, is never found automatically by CUPS. So while CUPS has proved to be more difficult for me personally, it should be a boon to other Puppy users who probably won't have to configure anything in a networked printing environment.

I had some kind of amnesia. I had forgotten that back in Puppy 2.16, I had installed Ted and Sylpheed as PET packages. They stuck around when I "upgraded" to 2.17. I put upgraded in quote marks because upgrading in Puppy is as simple as downloading a new ISO, burning it to CD and booting from it. Puppy uses your old pup_save file and picks up most of your settings. I say "most" because, as I write above, I did have to configure the printer since Puppy changes its printing system from whatever it was before (easy to use, at least) to CUPS (easy for most, but not for me). But since most Puppy setup is "set it and forget it," I'm ready to do a full evaluation of Puppy 2.17 in the near future.

I can't believe I didn't think of this before. When the GUI text
editor Geany wouldn't cooperate with the X setup on my Debian 4.0
laptop, I took the advice of all the users of self-described "crap
computers" at ubuntuforums.org and went for the smaller, faster Leafpad
editor. Problem solved. Many of those posting listed all the apps they
user on their low-end systems, many running Xubuntu, some Fluxbuntu but
quite a few Debian with Fluxbox, just like this laptop.

I already knew that the Ubuntu community can be a great help not just
for users of the various 'Buntu Linux distros but also Debian, Mepis,
Mint, and just about every other distribution of the operating system.
Remember, when you get down to the kernel, Linux is pretty much the
same, and a humongous, growing community with lots of newbies is bound
to be helpful.

Back to the low-spec app list. I'm already on board with Sylpheed as the
quickest GUI mail client, AbiWord as the best light word processor,
Dillo as a great GUI browser in addition to the Elinks, Lynx and W3m
text-only browsers, with Lynx my current favorite. (Note: I've been warming up to the e-mail component of Seamonkey when I use Puppy and Vector.)

One thing to remember with a true low-spec computer -- you need to plan
for both GUI (the X Window system) and CLI (command-line interface, in
this case the bash shell) environments. All CLI programs will work in a
GUI environment -- just open a terminal window (generally Xterm, but
there are more than a dozen others) and type in the program's name. But
GUI apps will not run in a console (i.e. the shell).