January 2008 Archives

I've been toying with removing Debian Etch from the $15 Laptop -- the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor and 64 MB of RAM. When most computer users -- even those partial to Linux -- talk about "old" hardware, they mean either things in the 1 GHz range, even 3 GHz single-core CPU computers with 512 MB of RAM.

For me, a 1.2 GHz Celeron laptop with 1 GB of RAM is good enough to run just about any Linux distribution out there. And my main Windows machine at the office -- a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM is way more than adequate for desktop use.

As far as the 233 MHz Compaq laptop goes, I'm probably going to bump up the RAM from the current 64 MB to the maximum of 144 MB, but that's pretty much besides the point.

When I first got this laptop (yep, it cost me $15, though I had to shell out $10 for the CD-ROM drive on eBay) I ran into a lot of luck, because it wasonly supposed to have 32 MB of RAM but had double that. It wasn't supposed to have a hard drive, but not only was the hard-drive casing intact, but there was a 3 GB drive inside it. It was loaded with Windows 98 but wouldn't boot. Once I had the CD drive (the incoluded floppy drive doesn't work, and I could get another one for $10, but I really don't need it), I was able to run Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux from live CDs.

At first I loaded Windows 2000 just to see how it ran. Win 2K ran alright, but I'm not in this to run Windows. I had pretty good luck with both Puppy and DSL, but Damn Small Linux is really the more suited of the two for a computer with 64 MB of RAM.

Anyhow, I eventually wanted to try Debian Etch on the Compaq. I've done at least four installs of Debian on this computer, but my first began was the "standard" install, which means no X. After that, I added X and Fluxbox, plus all the apps I though I'd need. ROX-filer, AbiWord, Leafpad, Dillo, Lynx, Elinks, Sylpheed (which didn't work), MtPaint for image editing, and eventually even Iceweasel (aka Debian's renamed Firefox).

I was able to actually get work done on the laptop, which can connect to the outside world only through the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver 802.11b wireless PCMCIA card I had previously bought for This Old Mac (aka my 1996 Powerbook 1400cs). And since the PCMCIA slot in the much-better $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) is inoperable ("busted" is the technical term), the wireless card has remained in the Compaq, which has no Ethernet port or USB capability (though it does have a serial port, parallel printer port, built-in telephone modem and a power supply fully enclosed in the case -- yes, a 120-volt power cord plugs right into the back). They made these Compaq's well -- this one still runs great.

Anyhow, my "roll-your-own-X" Debian install did OK. The display was a bit slow in Abiword, but I had everything running fairly well. Just not well enough.

Since then, I spent quite a bit of time testing DSL 4.0 on the Compaq. Damn Small Linux runs great on this thing, that much I can tell you. And I even ran Puppy 2.13 for a couple of days this week.

But I always had Debian on the hard drive. Just not the original Debian. I had wiped the drive and experimented with Debian Etch and the Xfce desktop install (desktop=xfce as a boot parameter in the installer) as well as Slackware 12.0 without KDE (Xfce and Fluxbox).

Well, Slackware without KDE means you don't even get an office suite, and I still had barely any disk space on the 3 GB drive. (I know, I just need to get a bigger drive ... I know.)

So I went back to Debian Etch, again the Xfce desktop. Surprisingly, this install includes the full OpenOffice suite and I still have about a full GB of space left on the hard drive. I have a separate /home partition with 800 MB in it, and a root partition with 2 GB, with about 150 MB left. The rest of the space is swap -- about 120 MB.

And while on the Gateway laptop (1.2 GHz Celeron CPU) I cannot detect a performance difference between the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers, on this 233 MHz CPU, there's quite a difference. I was about to give up on Etch altogether when I decided to again install AbiWord (I tried Ted ... again ... but the RTF word processor still doesn't work, at least in any Etch install I've had), as well as Fluxbox.

Fluxbox makes it a lot snappier. I still have all the Xfce apps, including Thunar, Mousepad and the great Xfmedia.

In fact, I finally got sound working tonight. I don't think it'll survive a reoot, so I'll have to run this line on startup, but for today it did work:

# modprobe sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 mpu_io=0x330

I can't run alsamixer, but I can play an MP3 in Xfmedia, and it sounds great even on the built-in speakers on this 9-year-old laptop.

I didn't think I could get sound working in Debian Etch, but since I did, Etch will definitely live to fight another day on this laptop.

Before I close out this entry, let men emphasize that the Xfce install of Debian is a quirky distro, to be sure. It's nowhere near as complete as Ubuntu's Xfce variant, Xubuntu.

Etch in its Xfce incarnation includes the full OpenOffice suite, but not Abiword or Gnumeric (which would be good substitutes). There's no Synaptic or Update Manager, so I've been doing what Debian aficionados always tell me to do: use Aptitude. I was running aptitude in a terminal for awhile, but it's much easier to just run it at the command line:

# aptitude update
# aptitude upgrade
# aptitude install abiword

Yep, just like apt-get and apt-get install, but Aptitude is supposed to do an even better job with dependencies and it keeps track of your changes to the system, should there be any problem.

I also need to do a dist-upgrade -- without moving away from Debian Etch -- to get a couple of packages that have been held back, including a new kernel image, but I'm holding off until I repartition the drive somewhat to put more space in the root partition (taking it away from /home):

# aptitude dist-upgrade

Final note: The fact that Debian Etch -- a modern, up-to-date Linux distribution -- can run so well in 233 MHz of CPU and 64 MB of RAM is something truly to behold. Again, my thanks to everybody at the Debian Project, past and present, for all they've done for the rest of us.

Post-final note: If Debian continues to perform so well, I just might blog the SCALE 6x convention with this 1999-vintage laptop.

Positively the last note: Iin case I only mentioned it once above, Fluxbox is really flying on this setup ... but the ROX-filer is only a bit faster than Thunar. And since the 1999 Compaq with Debian Etch and Movable Type 4.0 are playing nicely, I think this laptop is definitely going to SCALE 6x ... unless I succeed in getting wireless working over USB on the $0 Laptop (more to come on that).

Sorry, just one more note: Look for a SCALE 6x feature on Click in the days ahead.

Image of OliveBSD from the project's Web site.

The blogroll at Denny's blog -- Denny being committed to running OpenBSD as a full desktop operating system -- continues to point me toward interesting spins on the various flavors of BSD. Since OpenBSD is the only one of the three major BSD systems (which include NetBSD and FreeBSD) to run on my VIA C3 Samuel-based test box, I wanted to try one of the projects to which Denny linked right away. I've spent quite a bit of time trying to run the three main BSD projects and their various offshoots -- more trying than doing, actually, but I always want to try what's new. And since I have not a prayer of managing my laptop's noisy CPU fan in any BSD (I can do it in Linux), I pretty much want to use my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client. I have actually done a successful OpenBSD 4.2 install on this box in the recent past, but the idea of going from a minimal X install to a fully usable desktop was more than I felt I could do. I'm hopeful that O'Reilly's recent PDF book on OpenBSD will be of help in this regard, but I'm loathe at the moment to part with the $9.95 for the book without a little a) proof that it will work or b) encouragement that OpenBSD is something I should pursue.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. OliveBSD -- a live CD based on OpenBSD 3.8 -- was created by France's Gabriel Paderni in February 2006, and it seems that it has only had this one release. It does have a Distrowatch page, which confirms the 2/18/06 release date, and the only review of the project (I know BSD people hate using the word "distro" to refer to their systems, so I will substitute "project" throughout) was a "first looks" evaluation in Distrowatch on Feb. 20, 2006.

I'm happy to say that my experience with OliveBSD was much more positive than that of the Distrowatch reviewer. I downloaded the ISO, burned a CD on my XP box with ISO Recorder and then started booting the Maxspeed box. I got a few error messages about disk sectors (?), but the CD continued to boot. It tried to get an IP via DHCP, but since I have a static IP in the office, that was predictably unsuccessful. Before I forget to say it, it took a long time for the live CD to boot. But when it did, I had a working IceWM desktop, albeit at 640 x 480 resolution (this box and monitor can do 1024 x 768). I eventually tried to reconfigure X with the command xorgconfig at a prompt, but I didn't get very far. I probably need to get the xorg.conf file from one of my "successful" Linux installs (or even OpenBSD, should I try it again) and work from there.

But I had X, so the next task was configuring my static IP. In OpenBSD, this was part of the installation, and it worked great then. Luckily there's a script for it under the menu in OliveBSD. The script worked, I set my static IP, and I had networking. I started Firefox. It took awhile (just about every action results in the CD being accessed, but it's nothing I didn't expect). But Firefox did open -- the home page is the French rendition of Google. That gave me a bit of a laugh, but I was able to open other pages in Firefox (version 1.0.6) with no trouble.

Another thing, which the Distrowatch review also noted. In OliveBSD, you are logged in as root. That's a funny choice for a security-conscious project like OpenBSD, but it seems to work, so I won't complain any more.

Generally, live CDs for BSD have fewer apps than their Linux counterparts -- I don't think they have the same compression (or any at all, but don't quote me), but the application mix in OliveBSD is fairly good. As I already mentioned, the window manager is IceWM. The desktop isn't as "snappy" as I wanted, but a lot of that was due to live CD issues. Since the hard drive connected to the machine is formatted for Linux, even if OliveBSD was able to access a BSD swap file, I don't have one, so it was working entirely in RAM. And running top in a terminal, I learned that OliveBSD was only recognizing 143 MB of my 256 MB of RAM. That might have an effect on performance.

Back to the apps. Besides Firefox for Web browsing, there's Thunderbird for mail, the GIMP for image processing, SciTE for text editing, Xmms for audio playback, Gaim for text messaging, ghostview and Xpdf, Axyftp, the Abs spreadsheet, the TightVNC viewer, CD-Rchive and a few more. There's enough for me to get my work done, and that's pretty much all I ask. Again, I really appreciate the Network Card Configuration script in the main menu -- for those of us with static IPs, it's nice to get a leg up in that regard, especially for those unfamiliar with OpenBSD (and if you're running OliveBSD, chances are you are just dipping your toe in the BSD pond). I almost forgot to mention that OliveBSD uses one of my favorite file managers, the ROX-filer. ROX is quick, intuitive and powerful, and it's a great fit for OliveBSD.

Like I said, the fact that OpenBSD runs at all on this box seems to be a minor miracle (and it raises my esteem for the project considerably). Ditto for OliveBSD, which I'd love to see updated (are you listening, Gabriel?).

Meanwhile, I just learned that Anonym.OS is also based on OpenBSD. Created by someone who goes by the name dr.kaos, Anonym.OS is designed to allow users to search the Internet with a higher degree of privacy than afforded by conventional systems.

I burned a CD of this back in February of last year, but I never even tried to boot it. That's my next mission, which I have decided to accept. And yes, I am ready for the tape to destruct in five seconds ... four, three, two, one ... (cue Lalo Schifrin ...)

I was pleased to learn that the Los Angeles Daily News' Rick Orlov -- L.A.'s most esteemed City Hall reporter -- recently boutht an ASUS eeePC, and in his quest to make it run as well as it can, has begun reading this blog. Well, if hundreds of rambling posts about my Linux and BSD highs and lows helps, I'm glad to be of service.

Anyway, Rick replaced the eee's Xandros with the eee version of Xubuntu, and he's now open to rolling just about anything onto the diminuitive laptop. While I suggested an eee-optimized Ubuntu (the hardware can handle it, and I've always found that Canonical pays way more attention to the standard Ubuntu than they do to Xubuntu or Kubuntu). He countered by asking me whether or not I've ever tried the No. 1 distro on Distrowatch, PCLinuxOS.

I haven't.

But I had the standard PCLinux OS 2007 downloaded, and I got the GNOME and MiniMe versions, too. I also ran out of CD-R discs. Yesterday I walked over to Fry's and got a stack of 50, so I'm back in the testing business.

I burned a PCLinuxOS disc ... and it wouldn't boot on my test box (the VIA C3 Samuel-based converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client).

I'll have to wait and try it on the Gateway laptop.

Notepad++ is working out pretty well so far. The latest Windows text editor in my quest for a better, freer text-editing experience, Notepad++ is under the GPL license, so it's free and open-source. It's also not a port of a Linux/Unix editor like Geany, and the annoying Geany bug -- in which extra linefeeds (or carriage returns?) are inserted in Windows (CR/LF) formatted text files -- is thankfully not present in Notepad++.

In fact, Notepad++ allows you to set whether you want your text files to be in Windows (CR/LF), Unix (LF) or Mac (CR???) format. Since the files look the way I want (and cut/paste that way) in the default Windows format, I'm pretty happy. I like the way you can change the case of letters -- ctrl-U for lower-case, ctrl-shift-U for upper. I'll have to get used to it, because every other program I use does it a different way.

The search/replace function in Notepad++ is very good. It even keeps your previous search/replace words in a drop down so you can use them again in the session. I haven't yet figured out how to search for text and replace it with a carriage return/linefeed, but if I figure that one out, Notepad++ will become a must-have editor on my Windows box.

Notepad++ seems to remember the last directory I saved to, and all newly created files default to that directory. But I don't think it remembers the directory from the last time the program ran. EditPad Lite does remember, and it's a great help. I wouldn't be opposed to setting my "home" directory manually, but I'm not sure this can be done. If using the Notepad++ directory for files causes it to open to the same directory every time, that's a small sacrifice for me to make; I generally store all of my text files in one place, and it doesn't matter where that place is (though it's nice to be able to choose it in advance, though navigating to my text-file directory once per day isn't an insurmountable hardship).

Notepad++ remembers the last eight files I've opened, and they're available for reopening in the File menu. I think I can set it to remember more. For me, the more the better.

Why a text editor? I remember Jerry Pournelle, prolific science-fiction writer and long-winded columnist for Byte magazine way, way back in the day talking about the pre-IBM-PC machines he had set up for word processing in what he called (and still calls) Chaos Manor, and all the technical specs, trials and tribulations he went through. He's definitely an inspiration for this blog and its style, although I've never quite thought of it that way until now. (I used to love Byte back in the '80s.) Pournelle always talked about text editors, and at the time, I had no idea what a "text editor" was. I knew what a word processor was, but it took awhile for the concept of a text editor and what it can do to sink in.

And then came vi. Vi's great when it's the only game in town, as it was on the UC Santa Cruz timeshare Unix box I had an account on in the late '80s. Today I can fake it in vi, but I'm no master.

I still use word processors occasionally -- usually AbiWord, sometimes OpenOffice, occasionally MS Word on the Mac. But more and more -- with all the Web work I do -- text editors are quicker, more flexible, faster -- and most importantly, they give you clean ASCII output that isn't mucked up with extra crap.

End note: I Googled Jerry Pournelle to see if I was spelling his name right. I'm glad to see his Web site, which I'm going to explore at greater length at my earliest opportunity.

I've complained numerous times in the past about the Ted word processor being broken in Debian. On my many Debian installs, I could neither create a new file in Ted nor open an old one.

But on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), after doing my big Debian Lenny update yesterday -- which fixed an annoying Nautilus bug by updating to Nautilus 2.20 -- I decided to give Ted another try.

It works.

I can create new files in Ted and open old ones. I tried Ted again on my Compaq Armada 7700dmt (the $15 Laptop), now a Debian Etch machine (with Xfce and, since last night, Fluxbox) that could really benefit from Ted working. No go.

I figured that it was maybe a Lenny-only thing -- some other dependent package got updated and magically made Ted work. Here's Ted's bug status in Debian. I remember trying this "transcoded fonts" solution and having it not work.

So this morning, on my desktop Debian Lenny install, I tried Ted again, and it didn't work. I even installed the transcoded fonts. Nothing.

Yes, I have three Debian installs (two Lenny, one Etch), and Ted works on one (Lenny) of them. That's better than Ted working on none ... but.

I'm wondering if I should even be running Debian on this 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 64 MB RAM, 3 GB hard-drive laptop. The Compaq performs OK with Puppy Linux and a bit better with Damn Small Linux. And while on my faster, 1.2 GHz laptop I detect almost no difference in response time between Xfce and Fluxbox, on the 233 MHz box, Fluxbox is much snappier, so I take back my previous assertion that Fluxbox doesn't give you much of a performance edge. When you're running really old hardware, Fluxbox can really help.

The problem: I want to have a "full" command-line system in addition to X, and that's harder to do in Puppy or DSL. And I like the fact that Debian and Slackware stay on top of security issues and frequently issue patched packages. And Debian (or Slackware, for that matter) makes it relatively easy to install any console app I want. However, I put a lot of stock in doing as little modification as possible; in my experience, things can get mucked up pretty quickly. And while both Puppy and DSL offer command-line features, neither is a full, modern, updated Debian or Slackware.

And just to provide a little background, Debian, Slackware, Puppy and Damn Small installed just fine on this old Compaq. I can't say the same for Xubuntu, which I did try.

And while I'm mentioning Xubuntu and Debian with Xfce in the same post, let me just say that of the two, Xubuntu is way more ready for prime time. Debian's default Xfce install is missing too many things; I stick by my assertion that Debian is great with the default GNOME, less so in the Xfce and KDE installs that you can do with the Xfce and KDE Debian disks (or desktop= boot parameter in the netinstaller).

Back to the Compaq. Both Puppy and DSL are way better at recognizing and configuring the hardware of this old Compaq laptop. At this point, I'm considering running both Puppy and DSL as live CDs with no OS on the puny hard drive, which would only be used for swap and storage (I could even replace the spinning hard drive with a Compact Flash chip or disk-on-module).

I hate to give up running Debian or Slackware on this laptop -- I've tried both. But when I try to build up the apps on my own, I can never do as well as Puppy and Damn Small Linux -- both of which I've used extensively over the past year and which I value very highly. The people behind Puppy and DSL really know what they're doing.

And while I'm grateful to get Ted running on my Lenny laptop (where I don't really need it), can't Debian just make Ted work everywhere, all the time? Like I've said before, there's probably a good reason that Ubuntu doesn't have Ted in its repository, and I'd say the package not working is a pretty good reason.

I haven't even complained about Ted not showing up where it should in the menus and my not being able to figure out how to put Ted where I want it in GNOME (yes, I used alacarte (here's the Debian bug situation), and no, it didn't let me add menu items (another Lenny bug, perhaps?) -- it almost makes me want to run straight toward Xfce and Fluxbox ... or Ubuntu).

Moral: Debian giveth and taketh away, but it remains damn good.

First of all, thanks to all of you who explained to me how the Debian Project works, how bugs are handled in Debian and GNOME, and how to do minor surgery on Debian, if needed, to get things working right.

But I'm happy to report that today the bug from which I had been suffering has now been fixed. Among the many updates I installed on my Debian Lenny (Testing) box was Nautilus 2.20.0. Now I can use Nautilus to get the properties of a file without the file manager crashing. In case you're really, really interested, here's the GNOME bug report.

Again, I really want to thank everybody along the way who helped me figure out how to determine the status of packages in the various Debian distributions (stable, testing, unstable ...). The Debian Web site is quite a repository of information, if you know where to look and what it means. I'm still working on it.

Penultimate note: When I ran Update Manager today, it told me that I had to go to Synaptic and Mark All Updates, then install them from there, to properly update the installation. I did so, and that's how I got the new Nautilus, as well as many other packages new to Lenny.

Final note: The Debian Project is, indeed, a great thing. I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again soon.

More on Debian: You didn't think that was it, did you? Via one of the best Debian blogs, the Debian User, I just found a) that Planet Debian -- an amalgamation of blog posts from Debian developers -- now has a search function. I also learned about a blog written by Debian package maintainer Miriam Ruiz. Half the entries are in Spanish (she's from Spain, after all), half in English, but in any case it's nice to see what Debian people are thinking, and it's very nice to see someone encouraging more women to get involved in open-source development in general -- and Debian in particular. Here's her bio.
Among other things, she's involved in the Debian-Women project and Planet Ubuntu Women.

I want to close out this entry by thanking the thousands of people all over the world who work on open-source software for all they do and for all they've given and continue to give all of us. At the risk of extraneous hyperbole, I'll just say that the technological world would be a much poorer, darker place without Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware and the many thousands of applications that go into these and other distributions of Linux, BSD and other computing environments. This non-coder salutes you.

I've been changing text editors in Windows like some people change underwear -- clean people that is.

And every time I try a new one, I open a text file and choose the new application. Windows remembers what I chose the last time, and that is presented as the first choice when I open a new text file. I've gone from EdiPad Lite to Geany to Notepad++, and I appreciate Windows remembering the last text editor I've used. I get the same treatment with .doc files, which I sometimes open with OpenOffice but usually go quick-and-dirty with AbiWord.

Anyhow, it's a nice feature in Windows, this remembering the last app I used in a given category. Nice to hear me say something nice about Windows, don't you think?

It's not just Gmail, but Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and even more data in Google's cloud. Can individuals and even corporations trust Google with their information?

I know they have the whole "don't be evil" thing going on, but isn't "evil" in the eye of the beholder.

On the other hand, is Google technically competent enough to keep the data from being damaged or destroyed? And on the other, other hand, maybe Google (or Amazon, IBM or what have you) is way, way better-equipped to be in charge of your data than you are.

The big question: Will Google roll over on you when the goverment comes a-callin'. I don't know what Google's record is on this, and the whole thing is a legal quagmire in the making.

From a purely technical standpoint, it might be a good idea to keep local backups, even if all your data is in Google, Amazon/Red Hat, IBM or whoever's cloud.

But considering how poor most of us (myself included) are at making and keeping backups, cloud computing and data storage is probably a pretty good idea.

But I throw it to you: Do you trust Google?

Whether Windows Vista is a success, failure, bump in the road or GUI revolution -- and the answer varies depending on who you talk to -- those who keep an eye on Microsoft are already abuzz about the next Windows OS release, which is now going by the name Windows 7.

As the link above might already be telling you, I think ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley does very well when it comes to reporting on Microsoft, and she has this to say:

Because Microsoft won’t talk about Windows 7, I can’t quote any Microsoft representatives on what they are planning, thinking and hoping regarding Windows 7.

My opinion? The Softies want Windows 7 to be the anti-Vista. That is not a put-down of Vista, which may not be selling at two times the rate XP did — but which still is selling strongly enough to boost Microsoft’s Q2 FY 2008 client-division revenues by more almost 70 percent.

But Microsoft’s brass do want to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that it encountered with Windows Vista — and who can blame them? They want Windows 7 to be on-time, not polluted by feature-bloat and not overly ambitious. They want the Windows 7 betas to be near-feature-complete the first time that the majority of testers get builds. And most of all, they want Windows 7 to be a predictable, familiar, relatively minor upgrade. Should that take four years (counting from the fall 2006 Vista release-to-manufacturing date) to Microsoft’s stated 2010 Windows 7 ship target to deliver? Probably not; Windows 7 in 2009 looks like a realistic possibility.

So if you love or hate Vista ... a 2009 release of a whole new version of Windows will make today's edition of the OS seem pretty bump-in-the-roadish. ... and a full year from now the hardware will be that much better (quad-core everything, 3 GB standard in laptops, more in desktops ... ) that a release from Microsoft that doesn't further task computing resources would be mighty welcome by Windows users, both home and corporate.

More from Mary Jo:

... Microsoft is in a tricky spot. Apple can put consumers front and center when it designs a new operating system. But Microsoft needs to strike a balance between creating an operating system that appeals to both business users and consumers. If Microsoft only had to appease business users with Windows 7, a minor, no frills point-release update would be perfect. But it also has to fend off Mac OS X with Windows 7 on the retail front.

Another writer I respect, Microsoft-Watch's Joe Wilcox, things all this Windows 7 talk is too much hype:

Microsoft hasn't yet released Windows Vista Service Pack 1, and there are so-called leaks galore about Vista successor Windows Seven. There have been supposed screenshots of Milestone 1 and even a pirated movie-like video. I won't link to any of the stuff, as it would only feed the frenzy.

But he does offer this:

The real work on Windows Seven isn't the shell but the kernel. It's my understanding that the primary Windows Seven development focus, at least for now, is the operating system's plumbing. That's absolutely the right priority, and it is a huge departure from Windows XP and Vista development. Seven's predecessors got wish-listed to death. Previously, the early process was more about compiling huge lists of features the people inside and outside Microsoft wanted in the operating system.

And Wilcox provides a link to his own story about the Shipping Seven blog, presumably by an anonymous Microsoftie, which can be found here.

Having taken a look, Shipping Seven is a pretty good blog, with tips on using Windows now, plus a good bit of opinion. Wilcox smells guerrilla marketing from Microsoft, and I'm inclined to agree.

Glad you asked ... it's the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick, and the Googlites (i.e. the two founders) used the plastic bricks to make cases for hard drives when they were first developing the now-iconic search engine.

Sharp and Tappin's PicoPC, shown next to a coffee mug for size (and no it's not a gigantic prop mug, either -- the computer is really, really small).

I'm always on the lookout for ultra-small PCs that are also a) fanless and b) not super-expensive. I've found a good candidate, via this link on Linux Devices, called the PicoPC, from Devon, England's Sharp and Tappin Technology. They use the pico-ITX boards from VIA, and they look great, are really small ... and don't cost an arm and a leg. Well, maybe an arm, but you can keep (at least half of) your leg.

They run a version of Gentoo Linux, and I imagine they can run just about whatever you throw at them, though you probably need a USB-connected CD or DVD drive to get a Linux distro on there. There are two models, with one of them including space for a 2.5-inch hard drive. Options also include built-in wireless.

The PDF price list is in British pounds, and it looks like 286 pounds for the fully assembled Pico PC10 with 1 GB of RAM, and 289 pounds for the PC20 (with the hard-drive bay). I guess if you convert that to dollars, it's more expensive than I thought, but for something this cool, small and powerful, it might be worth it.

There are also optional flash drives, regular hard drives and the wireless card, and the PicoPC comes in many different colors of anodized aluminum.

For some reason, right now they're shipping PicoPCs without an OS, but I'm sure they can help you figure out what to put on there and how to do it. They don't say whether or not they will provide a 120-volt U.S.-compatible power brick, but I hope that's something they can work out.

You can also order the case only if you want to get your own Pico-ITX board. ... but you need to be able to remove the CPU heat sink and fan to put the whole thing together.

OK already ... because I'm so damn lazy, I used Google to figure out what 289 British pounds is in U.S. dollars, and it turns out it's $572. I still want one.

Buzz-killing note: I had questions for the makers of the PicoPC, but e-mails to two different addresses I found on their Web site bounced back ...

In the past week, I've downloaded, burned and tried out a new version of DesktopBSD, and I also received a comment from Gerard van Essen, creator of the great FreeBSD -- The Unknown Giant blog to tell me about its new URL. Sources of news for the BSD distros are few and far between, and I'm grateful to Gerard for all his work in this area.

For those who don't know, DesktopBSD is an easier-to-use spin on FreeBSD -- the latter being by far the most popular of the BSD offshoots (the other big ones being NetBSD and OpenBSD, the latter for which I also have a whole lot of admiration). All of the three main BSD distros are pretty much focused on servers. They install with minimal apps, and it's up to you, the user, to add what you want. And they all use ports to add packages. My understanding of how ports work is rudimentary at best, but there's a lot of software available that way, and I believe you compile everything for your specific CPU.

DesktopBSD and PC-BSD (the latter also based on FreeBSD) are two attempts -- somewhat successful, I think -- in bringing BSD to the desktop. I've installed both and used them minimally, but since I can't for the life of me figure out how to get ACPI power management to control my noisy laptop CPU fan, I haven't really stuck with them. The only BSD that will install to my desktop text box (based on a somewhat rare VIA C3 Samuel processor) is OpenBSD, and while I liked what I saw, I didn't know enough to really take it where I needed it to be. I probably need that PDF book from O'Reilly to get me further down the road with OpenBSD (there's one by the same author on FreeBSD, too).

I did see this new FreeBSD book from No Starch Press, and I highly recommend it. It didn't really address desktop implementation, and I hope somebody else takes up that cause and writes a great book on the subject. The book's author, Michael W. Lucas, is very good with the technology as well as an excellent writer. If I was more serious about FreeBSD on the server, I'd probably spring for the book. No Starch has another book on FreeBSD server implementation coming out soon, and that might also be worth a look.

Anyhow ... what's great about the new DesktopBSD is that it not only will install the OS, it also functions as a live CD so you can see how your hardware reacts to the system.

Mine doesn't react so well. I did get the proper resolution in X, but just as in PC-BSD, there's this funny little unintelligible graphic box hanging off my mouse pointer, and I also had trouble getting my static IP to work (I've done it before in DesktopBSD but just couldn't get it done this time). If I can't get networking to flow at my office (where I have the static IP), I can't really get too far. When I did the full install of DesktopBSD a while back, networking did work, so it's something in the live CD environment that's keeping it from working.

Again, I'd consider running OpenBSD and building up my own desktop, but it just looks too damn hard. This great blog shows one man's path to using OpenBSD on the desktop, and I'm just nowhere near that smart. This guy Denny White is an absolute genius. I am truly not worthy. This stuff makes Slackware look like child's play.

A project I'm looking forward to is Damn Small BSD -- taking the Damn Small Linux philosophy and applying it to BSD. It's not ready to use yet, but I'm keeping an eye on it.

Overall, I'd love for BSD to be as good on the desktop as Linux. For servers, the general opinion is that a machine running BSD (usually specially compiled for the CPU) will be faster than most precompiled Linux installations. But it's harder to build and maintain. But on the desktop, the BSDs -- and the distros based on them -- are way behind Linux. It makes you appreciate all the work that developers put into distros like Debian, Slackware, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Puppy, Damn Small Linux and the like.

I'd love for the people behind the BSDs to devote more attention to the desktop. DesktopBSD and PC-BSD are doing a lot, but I'd like to see something that compels users to try out and stick with a BSD distro.

Update: I was looking at the blogroll on Denny's Blog, and I saw a link to OliveBSD -- a live CD based on OpenBSD. I'm downloading it now, and as soon as I get some blanks (my stack of 100 CD-Rs being totally spent), I'll boot it up and see how it works. Activity on the distro seems to have stopped in 2006 ...

Quetzal is an OpenBSD-based live DVD (thanks again, Denny!). I don't have DVD-burning capability right now, but I'd love to try it.

And yet another derivation of FreeBSD on Denny's page that I hadn't heard about: MidnightBSD, derived from FreeBSD. It's contained on two discs. And there's supposedly a live CD image, but I couldn't find it.

I decided to give Puppy Linux another tryout on the $15 Laptop (the 1999 vintage Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 64 MB of RAM and 3 GB hard drive). I also wanted to go back in time with Puppy, so I pulled a disc of the first version of Puppy I ever ran -- 2.13, which came out early last year, I believe. New versions of Puppy tend to come out every two or three months (the current version is 3.01, which I've burned but never booted, since I never found anything wrong with 3.00).

I haven't bothered with sound yet, but I did get the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card working, and I even got a WiFi signal -- it's been spotty here of late.

I'm even able to write this entry in Movable Type 4. The screen takes a second or so to catch up with my typing (I'll have to try with Damn Small Linux/Firefox 1.0.5 and Debian Etch/Iceweasel 2.0.0.11). I'll also have to try Google Docs with Puppy's Seamonkey Web browser. I thought that Puppy or DSL might improve video performance, but I think this old laptop is what it is.

One thing I can tell you is that it's much easier to run an old PC like this with a distribution geared to older hardware than it is with a general-purpose distro (even Debian). Everything from booting to hardware configuration goes better for me with Puppy and DSL on this Compaq laptop.

I seem to remember the version of Firefox in DSL not being able to run Google Docs, and as I said before, screen response on Google Docs with Iceweasel in Debian Etch was less than Ideal. The laptop performs much, much better with "regular" apps like text editors, word processors and the like.

I need to do more tests, but I'm leaning toward running this laptop exclusively with Puppy or DSL. I'd consider keeping Debian Etch, but I can't seem to get sound working. I'll have to see how good the sound is in Puppy and DSL before I make any final pronouncements on the matter.

In search of more Windows text editors, I started here, which led me to PSPad, which I will try next week. There's more info at PSPad's English-language site. I've just learned that PSPad was created by Jan Fiala of the Czech Republic.

While Notepad++ is under the GNU GPL license, I think PSPad is distributed as "freeware," with a request for donations. You don't have to pay, but I don't think you get the source code, either. I can't argue with "free."

Notepad++ is doing pretty well. But I have two problems: First, I don't see a function for renaming files. I prefer not to "save as" sometimes and instead change a file's name. Two, when creating a file, I had a little trouble naming it. I wanted the .txt extension to be added automatically, and for some reason my file had .txt in the name and the extension. The latter could be operator error, the former ... well, I'll have to work on it.

However, lack of a "rename" function is not a deal-breaker.

Since Geany in Windows can't manage to get the spacing between lines right without we selecting the LF mode (as opposed to the CR/LF mode) for every file I open, I decided to look elsewhere for my Windows text editor solution. (Note: this "setting" doesn't seem to make a difference in EditPad Lite -- things come out OK no matter which kind of line endings I choose.)

Next up: Notepad++, which unlike my former favorite EditPad Lite, is under the GNU license, meaning it's free and open-source -- a requirement for my new Windows text editor.

So far, Notepad++ is looking very good. I can open multiple files in tabs, I can wrap lines without the wrapping screwing up the file (the biggest detriment -- to me, specifically -- in Linux/Unix console editors -- is when word-wrapping inserts line-feeds everywhere they wrap; I just want to see the wrap, not have the wrap be permanent -- sorry, vi).

Confession: I opened up GVim for Windows, which I've had installed for a while. There's no way that would ever work. I'm just being realistic.

So I'll see how Notepad++ goes and report back.

I'm not saying I'm gonna stick with Geany in Windows, even though I've had nothing but praise for it as a Linux application. I'm not crazy about the paragraph I'm working on going from a white background to gray (and I haven't figured out how to turn this "feature" off), nor am I crazy about the cursor disappearing at times when I scroll down and it's a the far left of the screen ...

But I did figure out the solution to one of my problems:

When I copied and pasted my text from Geany into whatever Web program I'm prepping it for, I ended up with extra lines. I fixed it by going under Document -- Set Line Endings and switching from Convert and Set to CR/LF (Win) to Convert and set to LF (Unix).

(Note: Having to do this for EVERY file is a pain in the ass. Why can't I just set it and forget it?)

I also noticed that Geany -- mainly a text editor for programmers -- has a couple of features that might be useful: Under Tools -- Export, you can choose to output text as HTML or LaTex (the latter being useful for Linux/Unix typesetting but the former being useful for just about everything I do).

Let's get to it: I have one Web site that I work on infrequently that requires Internet Explorer, but since I barely have to do anything on it, I am free to use IE, or not.

And I waited at least a year to "upgrade" my IE6 to IE7 on the XP box at work. Yeah, it's an upgrade because now IE has tabbed browsing -- a feature Firefox has had for years, and which IE probably would've never added had FF not had it first.

I like IE6 because it was a fast program -- it opened fast and did the rest of its thing fast. And I could use it as an FTP client.

Now that I have IE7, sure there is tabbed browsing, and it looks a little better, but it's way slower than Firefox, and I pretty much only fire up IE for ONE Web site because it's at the top of my IE favorites and the bottom of my FF favorites.

IE loads more slowly, the favorites come up slower -- basically it gets beat by FF in performance by every measure. (I'm running a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM.)

And I can run Firefox in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ... and I do (though I'm partial to the Mozilla-derived Epiphany in the GNOME desktop, as well as the Seamonkey browser/e-mail client/HTML editor suite -- also based on Mozilla).

Truth be told, if it really bothered me, I'd try to roll the box back to IE6, if that indeed can be done. Since IE7 installs over your IE6, I think it might be a problem to "go back."

Note: While I can't get the same FTP functionality out of IE7, I have a Windows workaround: Open up My Computer from the Start menu, and type your FTP address in the search bar. The window functions pretty much like IE6 -- it's the same "Explorer"-like interface Windows uses to let you examine your own files, and it does FTP just like IE6. Thanks, Microsoft!

I used to think IE was the best browser for OS X, too -- that final version of IE5 for the Mac was a masterful, innovative application, and I'm sorry Microsoft abandoned it. Safari doesn't have enough critical mass to cut it -- many Web sites don't look so hot in it -- so Firefox is pretty much the browser of record for the Mac, too.

And Mozilla is making hand-over-fist money by getting a cut of the Google searches made through the browser. All it means is more money that Microsoft isn't making.

Hope you're happy, Microsoft!

After yesterday's post on sharware vs. freeware vs. free, open-source software, I decided to install Geany on my Windows box. I've always liked Geany in Puppy Linux, and when I learned from the Geany Web site that the full-featured text editor was available for Windows, I had to try it.

To run in Windows, Geany needs the GTK 2 runtime libraries. Since I already have the GIMP image editor installed on this XP box, I already had GTK 2, so I was able to choose a version that didn't include the libraries.

I just started using Geany in Windows. I opened all the files I was working on last night in EditPad Lite, and now I'm not violating the EditPad license by using the program for "commercial" purposes.

So not only do I feel wrong about using pirated copies of commercial software, I'm not even comfortable running shareware or restricted freeware without paying. And with great FOSS alternatives like Geany, I don't have to.

As I say above, I first used Geany in Puppy Linux, where it is the default GUI text editor. And besides the Windows version, Geany is offered in source code as well as in packages for Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse, Slackware, Mandriva, ArchLinux, AltLinux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Solaris.

And it looks like Geany can run in OS X (if you have the GTK libraries, I presume).

I have plenty of text editors on my Linux boxes, but I just can't work with Microsoft's Notepad. I'm no fan of Apple's text editor in OS X, either -- I'd rather open a shell and use Nano (or is it Pico that's included ... I can't remember).

I've barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to text editors. There are dozens out there, and Wikipedia does a fairly good job of attempting to categorize and compare them.

Back in the BBS days, I actually did pay for a shareware program. I used a couple of related programs that allowed for the reading of and writing to QWK packets, which enabled me to download my Internet mail and USENET messages, read them offline, do my replies, new messages and the like, and assemble them for upload. I can't remember the name of the programs, but I actually paid something like $15 for their use, for which I actually received a couple of 5 1/4-inch floppies in the mail.

Now I prefer FOSS -- free, open-source software -- for everything, and in Linux it's easy to get a distribution with thousands of packages -- all free to use and modify as any of us sees fit.

But back in the worlds of Windows and OS X, there are quite a few FOSS programs, but more that are released under the old terms of "shareware" and "freeware." Not being entirely free at all. Some ask for donations, others say that for "commercial" use, you should pay X amount.

The two I use most in Windows:

IrfanView, which is free for personal use, with a donation requested for businesses. I think the amount requested is $10.

EditPadLite can be used "only for private purposes that do not generate any income and by registered not-for-profit organizations ..." There is the non-free program EditPad Pro for "profitable" usage, which costs "only $49.95."

I'll make my confession now: I use both programs for "business use," though I'm never quite sure if such use is, indeed, generating any profit (even though that is way beside the point).

As I say, even though I prefer FOSS, I'm inclined to pay the $10 toll for Irfanview. It's worth way more, seeing as I can't find even one application that can do what it does as well and as fast.

The $49.95 for EditPad Pro? That's too rich for my blood.

Sure I could get my frugal employer to pay, but as they say, I've got other fish to fry ... I should probably just find a FOSS editor that works with Windows and be on my merry-friggin-way.

I do have Gvim installed ... but that seems like too much trouble.

I like using Geany in Linux, and there's a build of that for PC. Maybe I'll give that a try.

But again, I ask: Have you ever paid for shareware?

I started here, which led me here and here and finally here.

And now I'm gonna read "A Brief History of Debian." Where's the "lengthy" version?

And I do like this Dive Into Mark blog/site.

I half-expected today's massive Debian Lenny update to solve my Nautilus-crashes-when-I-try-to-get-the-properties-of-a-file bug. It did not, but I'm not disappointed. I went back to the original bug report, which was filed with GNOME, not Debian, but is clearly a Debian-only bug.

I saw the "solution," but didn't understand it until now. I still don't know how to actually "do" the solution, and for now I'm content to let it ride and see if Debian Testing catches up.

Briefly, users have learned that upgrading from the version of Nautilus in Lenny (2.18) to the version in unstable /Sid (2.20) fixes the problem. So all you have to do, theoretically, is switch over to the Sid repositories, reinstall Nautilus, and the bug is gone.

I don't think the package list is "frozen" for Lenny, so it's entirely possible that the Debian people don't think Nautilus 2.20 is ready yet for the Testing distribution. Perhaps there are other problems, or the app has not been checked out. Whatever the reason, and I do hope there is one, I'm eagerly awaiting Lenny to upgrade Nautilus on its own.

I would go back to Debian Etch (stable), but I like the look of the newer GNOME so much that I am reluctant to do so. And the prospect of running Lenny now, while it's still Testing, and continuing to run the same install as it becomes Stable, is an enticing one.

But ... the new Ubuntu LTS is only about three months away, and I just might want to give it an extensive try. The question: Do I replace Wolvix Hunter or Debian Lenny? I might want to run Wolvix as a live CD, freeing up its spot on the hard drive.

It couldn't be more than two weeks -- and probably a bit less -- since I booted Debian Lenny (the "testing" distribution) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). And 100 updates await me. Everything from Fluxbox (I didn't remember that I even had Fluxbox installed) to dpkg to a bunch of GNOME packages (maybe they'll fix my Nautilus bug ... if they do, I'll write a glowing paean to all things Debian, my faith in the world will be restored, and flowers will erupt from every corner of my garden).

While Slackware isn't as hard to use as some would lead you to thing, it is different enough from Ubuntu, Debian and Red Hat that a how-to is in no way a bad thing. In fact, a lot of things are easier in Slackware than in other distros because Slack's command-line tools do more of the work for you than many Slackware users would have you believe. (I love xwmconfig, netconfig and pkgtool and wonder why Debian doesn't have similar utilities ... although apt probably makes up for all other omissions.)

Still, if there were any up-to-date books on running Slackware, I'd be the first in line to buy one or all of them. Alas, there's nothing out there.

But my Slackware guru, Willy Sudiarto Raharjo, points out an online Slackware how-to that has just been updated for Slackware 12.

I recommend this site for anybody who wants to learn Slackware, and I suggest you go to the Slackware Linux Basics home page, where you can choose between the HTML version, a single-page HTML version, or a 234-page PDF (I'll take a PDF any day ... but it's nice to have the HTML version for when you happen to be online). The version for Slackware 10.2 is there as well, and while the Slackware 12 version is called a "work in progress," it's of very high quality.

I'd like to thank Willy for pointing me in the right direction, and I'd also like to thank all of those who work on Slackware Basics for the much-needed service they are doing.

Why there are no up-to-date books on the market for Slackware or Debian ... or pretty much anything that isn't Ubuntu, SUSE or Red Hat ... is something that mystifies me, but then again, I'm not in the technical-book marketing business.

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers.

It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release. And even though the next Ubuntu release -- 8.04 (due 4/08 ... also known as April 2008) -- is going to be a Long Term Support release, with fixes, patches and the like for three years on the desktop, five years on the server, there's still quite a bit of time left for the current Ubuntu LTS, which will be supported until June 2009 on the desktop and June 2011 on the server.

The new installer -- you don't really need it if you can successfully use the old installer, already have a 6.06 LTS install (like I do) and have done all the updates -- underscores Canonical's commitment to the LTS concept. While the twice-yearly releases of Ubuntu get most of the light and heat in the uber-geek community, there are many who depend on the relative stability of the LTS release to keep their hardware running. That's especially true on servers, where major upgrades every six months are impractical at best and detrimential at worst -- nobody wants to break a system that's been running well.

And the LTS is vital as a counterweight to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop, both of which are supported for years on end.

I'd like to say that Debian Stable (currently Etch) and Old Stable (Sarge) are equivalents, but since you can't pin down a date certain for length of their support, there is a bit of an unknown factor there, although once the Stable release goes to Old Stable, you pretty much know that the new Stable release won't give you too many problems.

Sure, many desktop users generally want something more cutting-edge, mainly something like the regular Ubuntu releases, but there are many people -- and many situations -- that warrant hanging on to a Linux installation as long as possible. Over the time I've used Ubuntu and Xubuntu (from 6.06 LTS through 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10), I've seen some parts of the installation improve dramatically, I've seen hardware work better, then worse, and occasionally not at all.

And we all know an individual or organization that hates doing major upgrades, ever. Those coming from a Windows or Macintosh background aren't all used to major OS upgrades. In the case of Windows AND Mac's OS X, major upgrades almost always cost money. $129 for an OS X upgrade might not sound like much, but paying that much every couple of years when your computer runs just fine the way it is? No thanks. That's why I'm still running OS X 10.3 on my Mac. And Windows? I have a disc for Windows 2000, and I'm not about to pay ANYTHING for the privilege of upgrading my sole Windows box (which I boot maybe twice a year) to XP.

And in Linux, just because we can change out distros 10 times a day if we wish, it doesn't mean that we have to -- or should. For people who crave the stability of long-term releases, one thing generally drives upgrade: newer software they need to get their work done, and new hardware that needs new software to run properly.

I did this most recent Ubuntu 6.06 LTS installation for testing purposes, but I've stuck with it because it just works. On this test box, it's flawless. On my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, it manages the fan as well as 7.10 (i.e. not at all without a cron job; but well with said cron job), but less well than 7.04 (which has the ACPI working with no coding needed). (Note: I'm not currently running Ubuntu at all on the Gateway laptop, which is currently dual-booting the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny, which I upgraded from the stable Etch.)

Using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on this test box, sure I'm stuck with Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice 2.0, GMOME 2.14.3 and Evolution 2.6.1, but everything works. And there's nothing I do that I can't do with applications of this "vintage." If I this machine had wireless and it didn't work with 6.06, I might feel differently about LTS, but with the hardware I have now, LTS is a good fit.

So if you're looking for stable, supported releases, especially ones that won't cost you anything, it's nice to have Ubuntu LTS as a choice along with CentOS and Scientific Linux (both free versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SUSE, Debian and Slackware.

As far as stable, long-term releases go, I have run CentOS (3.9. 4.2 and 5), Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Slackware (12), as well as Ubuntu LTS, and Ubuntu holds up very well on the desktop in this crowd. It's more flexible, as far as adding software, than CentOS and Slackware -- it doesn't have as many packages as Debian, but it does have plenty -- and the desktop and menus are a bit more tame than Debian's, with a better out-of-the-box experience, especially for inexperienced users.

And the support available from other Ubuntu users is a major component of the distro's success. All the advice may not be of the best quality, but there's just so much of it that you're bound to find the right answer to whatever it is you're asking. Not that the Debian community isn't helpful (I love DebianHELP and the Debian User Forums, but they just don't have the sheer volume of the Ubuntu Forums. Like I said, there's a lot more noise among the Ubuntu people ... but that's the price you pay, I guess.

And since Ubuntu is based on Debian, what you learn in one community is more often than not directly applicable in the other.

Another thing I discovered today: I enjoy reading the Planet Debian blog posts from Debian developers, and I had no idea that there's a Planet Ubuntu as well. Both are more than worth adding to your favorites and checking on from time to time.

Over the past year, I've used both Debian and Ubuntu extensively, and I always say that Debian isn't as "hard" to use as some would make it appear. Nor is Ubuntu a relative cakewalk. Both require, at times, a bit of wading into the muck to make things work. As far as installation goes, Debian's installer -- upon which Ubuntu's "alternate" installer is very closely based, is quite good, and has succeeded for me many more times than Ubuntu's live CD and alternate-CD discs, but Ubuntu works often enough.

What Ubuntu has that Debian lacks is a marketing plan. For some -- especially the average Linux user (read: geek) -- having no marketing plan is, in and of itself, a marketing plan of sorts. Nobody's trying to make Debian "cool," or giving you reasons why you should or shouldn't run it. And while there are a few Debian evangelists out there, and a few for Slackware as well, there's nothing approaching the fervor over Ubuntu.

That might be good, or bad, depending on how you look at it.

A lot of people are running Debian and Slackware -- they're just quieter about it, I guess.

Anyhow, this post has gone on for far too long. All I want to say is that I'm in favor of long-term, "stable" releases with defined periods of support and a smooth upgrade path, and I'm glad that Ubuntu has pretty big foot in this very door.

And I like the fact that 6.06 LTS will be supported for over a year after the next LTS -- 8.04 -- is released a few months from now.

I had one of those days this morning when I go to the ZDNet blogs page and find literally 20 entries worthy of comment. I'm at work for the first time in five days, and I have about three Firefox windows open with between five and 20 tabs each. I open a few other programs, and the whole thing starts turning to sludge.

I have to close everything and reboot.

I could open all of those entries again, plus the six or so on LXer, worthy of blogging on, but let me just say that ZDNet has hit on a very good formula for tech blogs that are heavy on news in many different sectors of the tech world. Windows, Mac, Linux, SAAS, storage, digital cameras, education, project failures, green technology, mobile technology ... and more that I'm forgetting about. Let's just say there's a lot there -- and you will have a pretty good grip on the day's tech news if and when you visit.

How Distrowatch's Ladislav Bodner does what he does is a complete mystery to me. Like LXer, the organization, leanness and general programming genius behind the Web site itself makes Distrowatch an invaluable resource not just for what's currently happening with just about every version of Linux and BSD, but also for the packages and people that go into making up the many hundreds of operating-system software distributions that Distrowatch tracks on a daily basis.

And "not just currently" also means that you can select a distribution and go back in time, following the news all the way back to when Distrowatch first began publishing on the Web, May 31, 2001 -- eons ago in "Linux years."

Whenever I write about a distribution, looking backward on Distrowatch is essential in order to get a picture in my mind of how far that distro has come and when the milestones in its development happened.

Distrowatch sums up the activity for the past seven days in the DistroWatch Weekly, at the bottom of which you will find what Ladislav is keeping track of. It's staggering. For this week, here's the tally:

* Number of all distributions in the database: 557
* Number of all active distributions in the database: 357
* Number of discontinued distributions: 125
* Number of distributions on the waiting list: 218

That's a lot to follow, and without Distrowatch, we'd all be in much worse shape. If there's any justice in the world, Ladislav is making a mint off of this site.

While I'm pimping Web sites, I might as well put in a plug for LXer, which collects links to posts and articles everywhere about all things Linux and open source.

The beauty of it is that anybody can become a member of LXer and submit their own links of things that look interesting on the Web.

I did it ... and now I'm a contributing editor. I mostly post links to items on Click, but every once in a while I find something not already on LXer that I can post a link to.

The site is valuable because it acts as an intelligent clearinghouse of open-source news. If something's happening in the world of Linux, BSD, or anything in the open-source software (and related hardware) world, chances are the LXer community already knows about it and has links to everything they can find concerning it.

Equally important is LXer's "Latest Discussions," where users bat around the dozens of articles linked from the site.

I've asked my LXer guru, Scott Ruecker more than once: The LXer concept is so novel and works so well -- everything from the conception and ideas behind the site to its programming (no pictures, just ultra-fast PHP and MySQL) -- that I wonder why there aren't LXer-type sites for Windows, Mac, and even for things outside the realm of computer hardware and software. It's a concept that just might work in both larger and different spheres -- everything from politics to quilting could benefit from an identically programmed forum.

LXer isn't as complicated as Digg, nor as chaotic as USENET, and it's not a fiefdom in any sense ... it truly reflects its community. And I couldn't imagine not being a part of it.

I hadn't taken a look at Lifehacker in awhile, but a recent visit proved it to be a good source of tips for the fully geeky, the would-be geek and, occasionally, the rest of us. I should probably start checking it every day.

A site I do manage to get to most days is the great BoingBoing, which once again appeals to the geeky, those who love them and ... yes, there's stuff for everybody.

The latest entry into the Linux-powered low-cost PC space is a Sears/Linspire box that features the Freespire version of the propretary-friendly operating system, with specs that seem to beat the $199 Everex PC featuring the gOS version of Linux and selling through Wal-Mart.

On the face of it, the Sears box has a faster processor, twice the memory, and a dialup modem -- important for the still-significant portion of the country that doesn't have broadband service via DSL or cable lines.

Though I've never used Linspire or Freespire -- both made by a company that courted controversy by signing an intellectual-property deal with Microsoft -- I have a feeling that Freespire is quite a bit more ready for prime time than is gOS, which in my opinion needs another year or so before it even has a chance to be "mature" enough for the average (not to mention totally new-to-Linux) user.

Sears is already selling the thing online. The price is $100 higher than you'd think because there is a $100 mail-in rebate (and yes, I hate mail-in rebates).

The NYT gets some face time with the big man.

My lack of enthusiasm for the gOS Linux distribution notwithstanding, the Everex Cloudbook -- a light, small and relatively cheap laptop running the aforementioned gOS -- is coming to a Wal-Mart near you on Jan. 25.

It sure looks nice. Main competition? The ASUS EeePc. WARNING: don't click on this last link unless you enjoy annoying Flash-heavy trainwrecks). If you value not being annoyed by Flash, just go to Amazon, which is selling the ASUS for $399.

I thank Linuxdevices.com for the link, and for cluing me in to Everex's own site (I already know about the gOS Web page).

Here's everything Everex has to say about the laptop:

Think CloudBook

Experience the Ultimate in Mobility
9 Inches, 2 pounds, 5 hours of battery life. Surf, email, blog, IM, Skype, compute. Cloud computing makes it simple and easy for everyone.

Based on the latest gOS Rocket operating system, the ultra-mobile Everex PC comes with popular applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype, OpenOffice.org and more.

Find your $399 CloudBook at Walmart.com beginning 1/25/08.

Additional Preinstalled and Linked Software
Mozilla Firefox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xing Movie Player, RythemBox, Faqly, Facebook and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (includes WRITER, IMPRESS, DRAW, CALC, BASE)

Hardware Specifications
1.2GHz, VIA C7®-M Processor ULV, 512MB DDR2 533MHz, SDRAM, 30GB Hard Disk Drive, 7" WVGA TFT Display (800 x 480), VIA UniChrome Pro IGP Graphics, VIA High-Definition Audio, 802.11b/g, (1) 10/100 Ethernet Port, (1) DVI-I Port, (2) USB 2.0 Ports, (1) 4-in1 Media Card Reader, (1) 1.3MP Webcam, (1) Headphone/Line-Out Port, (1) Microphone/Line-In Port, (1) Set of Stereo Speaker, (1) Touchpad, (1) 4-Cell Lithium-Ion Battery

Curious aside: Both the Everex and ASUS notebooks feature an 800 x 480 screen. Hmmmmmm......

Personally, that's not enough screen for me. I'm chafing in 1024 x 768 and positively cramped in 800 x 600. I've read that the Xandros Linux OS in the ASUS has been optimized for the screen size. Given how unpolished gOS is right now, I can't believe they're going to do nearly as well.

My buddy Stevie (yep, I call him "Stevie"; don't know what he calls me back) announced the new MacBook Air today. It's the ultra-small Apple laptop we've all been waiting for. And by "we," I mean people who use hundreds to wipe certain unmentionable areas (note to rich folks: those bills ain't all that sanitary).

The thing looks absolutely stunning -- and for $1,799 it damn well better be. Anyhow, Apple really knows how to break new ground, and this is new ground, alrighty.

Notable: The low-end MacBook Air comes with a garden-variety spinning 80 GB hard drive. For more cash, you get a 64 GB solid-state drive. Hell, the drive alone (the flash drive, that is) must cost $500.

And the thing weighs 3 pounds. That comes out to $599.67 per pound or $37.48 an ounce. At least it's not worth its weight in gold, 3 pounds of which would cost you $43,320 if you paid today's closing price for gold futures on the Comex exchange of $902.50 per ounce. So call the MacBook Air a bargain.

But it does look great, right? And while I might suggest that Stevie Jobs make something -- any damn thing -- under $1,000 (and no, Mac Minis don't count), he's a whole lot richer than I am, so why should he listen to me?

I've been looking into getting a dumb terminal. I've seen quite a few used ones. I don't want to pay much, but I do want it to work. US Computer Exchange has a quite few that fit the bill, but I have no idea whether the keyboard is included, or what exactly I'd be getting.

Ideally, I'd like to find a working DEC terminal, or even an old adm3a (hopefully one with lower case ... yep, they made them with upper-case only), even though they were dying when I first used them in the 1980s. I can only imagine what shape they're in 20 years later.

Ideally, I'd like to spend no more than $25.

I found this interesting Web page on dealing with dumb terminals and Unix. It might be helpful.

Also: check out VT100.net, one of the best sources of information for DEC terminals.

And that site led me to The Archive of Video Terminal Information, which includes the "interesting Web page on dealing with dumb terminals" link above. So I'm in a terminal loop, or so it appears.

I don't think I've mentioned yet one of the great things about Wolvix, the Slackware-derived GNU/Linux distribution that has installed without complaint for me on two occasions thus far.

It uses GRUB, not LILO (like Slackware, Vector and Zenwalk).

I don't want to debate the merits of GRUB vs. LILO, but since the overwhelming majority of Linux distributions use GRUB, I'm way, way, way more comfortable with it.

And I've never, ever done an install with LILO when it picked up any other distribution I already had on the box. Never.

That's why I'm very OK with Wolvix using GRUB.

What I'm going to do the next time I do a Slackware install: I've had trouble figuring out how to configure GRUB to boot Slackware, but the solution is close at hand -- on Slackware disc 3, to be exact.

First: Install Slackware with the LILO bootloader.

Second: Get the GRUB package from Disc 3 of Slackware and install it. It should do everything for you and replace LILO with GRUB.

I have a good feeling that this will work.

Or ... just install Wolvix.

Once you figure out how to turn a downloaded ISO file into a bootable CD or DVD, you've got all the tools you need to begin exploring the hundreds of Linux and BSD distributions that offers users the flexibility they crave -- and the right price (i.e. free) -- to see what runs best on their various computers.

I don't know if I've blogged on this yet, but PolishLinux.com has a nice tutorial on how to burn ISOs with various software tools in Windows and Linux.

I'm feeling a bit deja-vuish about this post, but if ever there was a post to do twice, this is the one.

Since I'm usually at work when I download these on our fat broadband pipe, I tend to use Windows to make my CDs and I use ISO Recorder, a fine application.

I use the built-in disk utility in OS X to turn ISOs into bootable CDs. Here's how to do it. Here's an even shorter explanation.

So here's the deal. In most Linux distributions and all version of OS X, you can burn an ISO with tools you already have. Only Windows makes you add a software package. Many people use Nero, which is great if you've got it.

I have the feeling that even if Microsoft added ISO-burning capability to Windows, people would be squacking about it for anti-competitive reasons. Or, MS might thing that anything capable of making bootable CDs encourages Windows users to try other operating systems (it does!). But Windows still should have it.

If you do have Nero and want to use it, here's how it burns an ISO.

Like I said, on Windows, ISO Recorder is blissfully easy to use. There are versions for XP and Vista. It appears that the Vista version allows the burning of images to DVDs, but since I neither have a DVD burner nor a Vista box, I can't test this feature.

... and I need a DVD burner ...

Read all about it at LXer, and yes, I will be there.

I'm pretty excited about the variety. There will be a lot of commercial vendors, and BSD will be very well-represented:

The commercial booths have all been filled. Several non-profit groups have recently been added to the SCALE expo floor: Enlightenment, which will be showcasing the work going into E17. Enlightenment is rarely seen at conferences, so this is your opportunity to learn about the desktop that first defined the term "eye candy". Also added were OpenMoko and Damn Small Linux. And for the first time all three of the major BSDs, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD will have booths at SCALE.

Look for an interview with SCALE publicity guru Orv Beach coming up on Click.

I've learned a lot from polishlinux.com, and here's another great article: SLAX 6.0: How does it work?

I've been a little worried about Slax -- it seems that its main developer is taking a break. The Slax site itself is linking to a blog.

I've always been very impressed with Slax -- and it's the basis for Wolvix, my current No. 1 distribution, so I hope Tomas Matejicek, who lives in the Czech Republic, continues his work on Slax.

According to the blog, he is retiring Slax 5, but planning working on both Slax 6 and 7. He has restored the old Slax site and is hosting it here.

In case you didn't know, Slax is a live CD based on Slackware, with a standard edition based on KDE, the Kill Bill edition with Wine, a server edition, a smaller desktop version called Popcorn and a minimal command-line version called Frodo that the others are built upon. Find them all here.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Slax.

I haven't linked to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Desktoplinux.com in awhile, and he had a great opinion piece today about the $150 PCLinuxOS box and other cheap computer solutions called "How low can you go and still run Linux?"

He does a good job of going through the distributions and recommending many low-spec software solutions for hardware of less than current vintage. He mentions many of my favorites, including Damn Small Linux, AntiX (which I haven't tried in awhile ...), Zenwalk, plus another I really should try: the PCLinuxOS "Mini-Me" spin.

He also talks up gOS, which is going from version 1 to 2. I booted into gOS today to see if Synaptic would magically do this upgrade for me. It did not. I got a couple dozen Ubuntu updates, but nothing indicating anything new or improved. And gOS is still as much of a dog as it ever was. On my hardware anyway, Ubuntu runs way better.

And I'm disappointed that Vaughn-Nichols didn't mention Slackware derivatives Vector or Wolvix (the latter being my current favorite distro), or even Slackware itself. He could've also put in a word for Debian and even Ubuntu.

One thing I've learned is that whatever anybody says about how fast or slow a particular Linux distribution is, a little experimentation on your own hardware is in order before settling down with any one setup. I recommend creating a partition for /home, which you can keep intact (and backed up) while rolling different distributions in and out of there. That's what I'm starting to do; my New Year's resolution is "less dual- and triple-booting, more separate /home partitions." See, I'm setting the New Year's resolution bar very low -- then I'll be sure to succeed (unless I'm caught triple-booting anytime soon).

Anyway, I'm still using Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the Gateway Solo 1450. I'm packing the Lenny install with a whole lot of software, including lots of educational stuff for our 4-year-old.

I have Wolvix using a separate /home partition but not Debian. I might change that in the weeks ahead and see if they can share /home. I still can use Puppy 3.00 as a live CD -- I have a pup_save on the Debian partition. For me, this is total, complete stability, the likes of which I haven't seen in the past year.

I still have Debian Etch with Xfce on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, with Damn Small Linux 4.0 as a live CD. I'm thinking of trying Wolvix Cub on it, but with 64 MB of RAM, it could be a little dicey. What I need to do there is bump up the RAM to 144 MB (maximum of this circa 1999 laptop).

I used the laptop last night, with the new, old xorg.conf settings. I still have xset m 1/1000 in my .xninitrc (I created the file; it didn't previously exist in my /home/(login name here) directory.

Everything worked great.

The qsynaptics "fix" for my Alps touchpad and mouse speed would only work if qsynaptics was run -- WITH boxes being clicked -- after every login.

So I decided to REALLY slow down the mouse and remove the "alps" configuration line from the Synaptics portion of xorg.conf.

Holy hell -- that "fix" has been screwing me up all along. I don't have time to really play with it right now, but it looks like the standard Debian configuration ... in Lenny anyway ... is better than anything else I had with all that tweaking.

I'd still like to turn off the tap-to-click function, and I suspect that's a feature of the GNOME desktop in Ubuntu Gutsy, not of Ubuntu itself. And that supposed newer version of GNOME might (or might not) come to Lenny. I'll take a look at some point to see if what I'm spouting here is true ... it's just a suspicion at this point.

All this does is make Debian (and Ubuntu, too) look better ...

I've tried Qsynaptics before to control the touchiness of my Alps touchpad, but I figured I'd try again. I didn't know last time that I needed to add the following line (in bold italics below) to this portion of my xorg.conf (and then restart X):

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"

I didn't really expect it to work with the Alps touchpad.

I did this in the deep, dark past to make the Alps touchpad go from totally slow to, now, too fast.

But today I tried Qsynaptics again after modifying my xorg.conf. It's a simple apt-get install qsynaptics at a root prompt.

Again, it didn't control the tap-to-click feature of the Alps touchpad. I tried turning off the touchpad with qsynaptics. That didn't work, either, but it did slow down the touchpad speed enough that I can use GNOME's mouse settings to make it just the right speed. It did the same for my USB mouse -- which was way too fast also.

Now the mouse action is perfect, and all I have to do to make the touchpad perfect is add a little speed in the GNOME configuration.

I also put xset m 1/1000 (don't know if it goes to 1/1000 ... but it had some effect) in .xinitrc, so I don't know which of these three things (xset in .xinitrc, qsynaptics or Option "SHMConfig" "true" in xorg.cong) did the trick, or if it was a combination thereof. It's hacky as shit, that's for sure. But it's also almost working (I still couldn't kill the tap-to-click feature, even though I'm pretty much used to it).

I added all the educational software I need for our 4-year-old -- Childsplay, GCompris, Potato Guy (unhelpfully called Ktubering) -- and I could've added way more games if I wanted (I didn't add the entire kdegames package, of which Ktubering is but one part). I'd never heard of Childsplay before, but it looks very promising.

So it looks like it'll be "computer lab" time this weekend for me and the little one, this time in Debian instead of Ubuntu.

I'm still considering replacing Debian Lenny with Ubuntu (either Dapper or Gutsy ... such is my dilemma), but my current plan is to keep Lenny around until Ubuntu's 8.04 LTS release is ready.

Sure it ran in RedmondMag, the "independent voice of the Microsoft IT community," but Google's Secret Weapon by Glyn Moody lays out very clear how and why Google is leveraging open-source software -- and the people who make it -- in its battle against Microsoft. While I've heard much of it before, it's still the best thing I've read all week.

I knew that Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 had Gslapt -- the graphical front end to the get-slapt package manager for Slackware -- but for some reason I had no idea that it would be useful for updates.

But commenter Morten Juhl-Johansen Zölde-Fejér gently told me that Wolvix's get-slapt/Gslapt indeed points to a Slackware 11 mirror, as well as Wolvix's own repository.

So I opened up Gslapt, updated and upgraded. I didn't add anything, so I can't vouch for get-slapt/Gslapt's ability to satisfy dependencies, but the upgrade went perfectly, and now I've got a fully up-to-date Wolvix distribution.

Already I've said that Wolvix (and perhaps by extension Slackware 11 -- not 12) is the best-performing Slackware-derived distribution I've tried. I've had no configuration problems whatsoever. And a look in Gslapt shows me that there's a huge number of Slackware packages that I could potentially install.

But one of the great things about Wolvix Hunter is that it pretty much has everything I want. It looks great, now has the latest Firefox browser, OpenOffice, MtPaint, the GIMP, AbiWord, a ton of multimedia apps, just as many networking apps, even a bunch of text editors (I'm currently exploring what Bluefish has to offer, but there's also Mousepad, KompoZer, SciTE, medit, vi, GNU nano and JOE). Mail clients? Hunter has Claws Mail and Thunderbird in the GUI, plus mutt at the console.

And the Wolvix Control Panel is one of the best configuration GUIs I've seen.

Never mind that the current versions of Zenwalk and Vector won't run (they'll install, but they won't even give me a shell login; it's probably something having to do with a hardware hangup).

The more I use it, the more I like Wolvix.

Just an observation: I'm much more productive using my 1280 x 1024 Dell monitor than I am on the 1024 x 768 monitors on my laptop and alternate desktop box.

Having that extra real estate makes it much easier to see more of a document, do a photo edit, etc.

It's especially helpful in mail clients. I was writing about how I don't use a mail client much on my laptop, and it occurred to me that I just can't see enough information on the screen in 1024 x 768 to make it worthwhile; I'd rather just use the Web interface for mail.

But on 1280 x 1024, I love using Thunderbird (and it's much quicker to do mail that way anyway).

I don't always think bigger is better -- although I am a big proponent of desktop PCs over laptops when it comes to productivity -- but when it comes to your monitor, a bigger screen is a huge help.

A Wired article, seen via BoingBoing, makes an argument for running your wireless router completely open and unencrypted.

Bruce Schneier's argument takes into account security, potential violations of law and ISP policies, as well as the social benefit of both providing free WiFi and using it yourself when needed.

He does emphasize that keeping good security on your computer itself is important, and that the benefits of an open network outweigh the risks:

Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people -- and attracts the most criticism -- is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password. There's no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.

To me, it's basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it's both wrong and dangerous.

...

Security is always a trade-off. I know people who rarely lock their front door, who drive in the rain (and, while using a cellphone) and who talk to strangers. In my opinion, securing my wireless network isn't worth it. And I appreciate everyone else who keeps an open wireless network, including all the coffee shops, bars and libraries I have visited in the past, the Dayton International Airport where I started writing this and the Four Points Sheraton where I finished. You all make the world a better place.

What I'd like to know is what security precautions he is taking to protect his machines on the open network.

I'm far from an expert in this department, and the one guy I do trust in this realm -- George Ou -- thinks WPA encryption is the only way to go. Read some good articles by Mr. Ou:

How to protect your online privacy

A secure Wireless LAN hotspot for anonymous users

Why VPN can’t replace Wi-Fi security

Wireless LAN security myths that won’t die

I'm about 98 percent sure this is a real product: aerosol cans that shoot out pancake batter. Ilene says they're not even that bad for you.

I'm not exactly in the market for a digital camera, being cheap as hell, but if I was, I'd be reading Janice Chen's new blog at ZDnet.

The One Laptop Per Child project hasn't hit its target price of $100, but already one of its creators is talking about a $75 device.

There's been a lot of blog noise lately about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Asus EeePC, Everex Cloudbook and other laptops that sell for anywhere for $250 to $400 ... if you can get your hands on them at all.

But this is the first I've heard of a planned $75 laptop being spun off of the OLPC project. There's a new company called Pixel Qi that exhibited at CES and is run by Mary Lou Jepson, the founding chief technology officer of OLPC.

Here's their manifesto:

What computing can be, the XO laptop was just the first step.

Pixel Qi is currently pursuing the $75 laptop, while also aiming to bring sunlight readable, low-cost and low-power screens into mainstream laptops, cellphones and digital cameras.

Spinning out from OLPC enables the development of a new machine, beyond the XO, while leveraging a larger market for new technologies, beyond just OLPC: prices for next-generation hardware can be brought down by allowing multiple uses of the key technology advances. Pixel Qi will give OLPC products at cost, while also selling the sub-systems and devices at a profit for commercial use.

More from Jepson:

I believe that looking at computers in a new, holistic, systemic way, with a clean-sheet approach to computer design - rather than incrementally increasing the horsepower of the CPU - is critical to bringing computing and Internet access to more than the 1 billion affluent who now are its beneficiaries. The key is a new generation of low-cost, low power, durable, networked computers, leveraging open-design principles.

Los Angeles may be the second-largest city in the United States, but when it comes to overt, shouting-at-the-rooftops open-source software evangelism, you'd never know it. But there's one shining beacon of activity in the City of Angels, and that's SCALE -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- coming to the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel Feb. 8-10.

With it's full title of SCALE 6x -- (it's the sixth-annual show) -- the event features exhibitors, speakers and, I hope, a lot of open-source geekery.

See, I write this blog, hammering home the joys and sorrows of Linux and BSD, but many of us do this kind of work in near isolation. Sure, I turned on my friend Bruce to Linux (he's running Ubuntu and Mint right now), but he was tearing apart mainframes from the big-iron age for scrap while I was still launching GI Joes off of the roof and watching "Speed Racer" on L.A.'s Channel 52. So he had a bit of familiarity with Unix (he still waxes rhapsodically about coding with Emacs).

The point is, I don't often get out among "my own kind," when it comes to this kind of stuff.

But I will at SCALE 6x. Already I've heard that my fellow LXer Scott Ruecker will be there, and with exhibitors representing Damn Small Linux, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Google, Sun and more, I'll have plenty of fodder for my next couple dozen blog entries, hopefully meeting enough people to being steering this blog in a little more of a "journalistic" direction, meaning getting experts to comment on things, over and above my own opinions and noodlings about the open-source movement (and the business behind it).

Check out the list of sponsors, which, in addition to the usual heavy hitters, includes our very own LXer, Linux Pro magazine, Linux Journal, Free Software Magazine, Trusted Computer Solutions, Wind River, and the previously mentioned Linux giants.

Among the major emphases at SCALE is women in open-source, with many speakers on that topic, open source in education, and open source in health care (you don't want your medical data held hostage to proprietary apps, do you?), as well as a barrelful of others http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale6x/conference-info/schedules/ .

I guess what I'm saying is if you're in any way involved in open-source software -- Linux, BSD (there's a lot of BSD here for a convention with "Linux" in the title) -- or want to be, and you're anywhere in the Los Angeles area, you should get yourself registered and get down there.

And for more SCALE news, follow along at the convention's own blog.

And if you want to hear about SCALE, L.A.'s KPFK is the place. A show called "The Digital Village" will welcome the convention's Gareth J. Greenaway and Orv Beach to talk about what's in store at 10 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 26, on KPFK-FM (90.7).

Final note: Remember how I lamented about Los Angeles' lack of vocal open-source activity? Well, I tried to find out what the SCLUG acronym after many of the SCALE principals' names stood for. It's not the Southern California Linux Users Group. Instead, SCLUG stands for the Simi Conejo Linux Users Group, which started way, way back in 1998, and now meets every other Saturday at the Simi Valley YWCA. And they put together this huge show. Clearly, they're better men and women than me, and I salute them.

And if you need a visual, check out this banner from the SCALE site:

I hit this link by accident (that's what you get with a tap-to-click touchpad). It's the company that provides the FREE software that runs the PCLinuxOS forum, Simple Machines Forum. The app brings together open-source software biggies MySQL and PHP and allows you to set up your very own forum on the Web.

I'm ready to throw down $150 for this deal (plus $15 to boost the memory to 512 MB). There are a smattering of low-cost Linux PC deals out there, but this is absolutely the best. Better than Everex, better than the used stuff at Pacific Geek. Better than Mad Tux. Hell, better than anything. You even get an LCD monitor. The $150 doesn't include shipping, and I don't know how much that runs. But holy hell, it's cheap.

A site called linfx.com, which creates computer graphics for PCLinuxOS, among others, is behind the deal. They've also got a less-powerful box for $59 (no monitor, keyboard or other extraneous items).

Here are the specs for the $150 deal:

Refurbished IBM Net Vista Desktop with PCLinuxOS 2007 installed. Intel PIII 900mHz, Intel chipset with onboard graphics and LAN. Also includes 256mb ram, 20GB IDE HDD, 40x CDROM, 15" TFT LCD (see specs. below), keyboard, mouse and a fresh PCLinuxOS 2007 LiveCD.

And here are the details on the monitor:

15" IBM LCD Specifications T541
Size 15 Inch
15" Viewable Screen Size
Resolution Max: 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz
Recommended: 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz
LCD Panel TFT Active Matrix LCD
Misc. Features ~ Viewing Angle: Horizontal 150°, Vertical 120°
~ Horizontal Freq. 30-61 KHz Vertical Freq. 56-75 Hz
~ Brightness 250 cdm-² (typical)
~ Contrast 350:1 (typical)
~ Hybrid System Attach Offers Maximum Attachment Flexibility and Positions Customer for the Future
~ Lift/Tilt/Swivel Stand Offers Optimum Adjustment for Viewing Comfort
Dimensions Unit: 13.6" x 14.4" x 8"
As Shipped: Unknown
Weight Unit: 10.5 Lbs

Here's what you have to do:

To get yours just email Butch (bdrake@plasticrecovery.com )and request the PCLOS PC Deal, he will then email you a secure invoice.

And here are the specs on the $59 system:

NOW also available an IBM Desktop system including a Intel PIII 600mHz cpu, 384mb ram, Ati AGP graphics, integrated LAN and CDROM ONLY$59.00 This system is just the box, no monitor keyboard or mouse. Just ask Butch about the 59 dollar IBM system.

Pacific Geek also has deals like this on systems. ... But the secret that's not so secret is that old hardware is often free for those who ask and are willing to haul it away. That's usually not true for laptops, but I did luck out on the $0 Laptop because it was five or six years old and not working, with a repair quote of $700. I did the repair myself, the quick and dirty way, for less than $3.

When it comes to desktop systems, you can often find them for free, but this $150 deal is pretty darn good, seeing as you get the keyboard, mouse, memory, CD drive and LCD monitor. It's the monitor that makes me scratch my head -- how can they do it? One thing you might need to add is a CD-R drive if you want to burn your own CDs ... or you could go really crazy and shove a DVD-writer in there. Even I haven't entered the era of burn-your-own DVDs, although the makers of many a Linux and BSD distro act as if we all have (offering DVD ISOs and no CD ISOs for those of us who don't have the more sophisticated -- and expensive -- drives).

For comparison's sake, here are some deals from Pacific Geek:

1.7GHz System 256MB 40GB CD USB /Firewire/ PCMCIA for $109.99

Compaq D51S Pentium 4 2.0GHz 512MB 40GB DVD XP SFF - B

Compaq iPAQ Desktop PC Computer 866 Mhz $59.99 (no CD drive)

So these PCLinuxOS deals are pretty great -- if you can get them and get decent shipping. Read through the whole forum to see more info on the deal and what people think of it.

There are quite a few good Web sites for free-software users, but when it comes to sheer volume and organization, Distrowatch tops them all. I don't know how Ladislav Bodner does it. He tracks many hundred Linux and BSD distributions, plus the applications that go into them. I hope he's making a mint, because otherwise there's little to no justice in the world.

Anyhow, the latest edition of Distrowatch Weekly is bigger than usual -- there's a lot going on in the Linux and BSD world.

I plan to blog individually about a half-dozen or more of Ladislav's news items, but in the interest of remembering what they were, here's what caught my eye:

Darkstar Linux is an easy-to-use variation on Slackware

PCLinuxOS releases a "MiniMe" live CD with minimalist KDE desktop

PCLinuxOS announces $150 computer with PCLinuxOS installed

A new distro, Damn Small BSD, promises a 50 MB live CD based on FreeBSD. Few other projects have me as excited as this one, especially now that so many other BSD distros are going DVD only.

There's way more news than this. Keeping up with Distrowatch is one way to stay on top of it. (And don't forget LXer, where links to everything open-source are updated many times a day.

I've had time to think about it. I'm ready to pull Debian off of the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) and replace it with Ubuntu. I could go with Xubuntu, as I have in the past, but since Ubuntu runs so well on it, I might stick with the mainline product.

I thought I'd go with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS because it appears to run well and will carry me to the next Ubuntu LTS (set for release in April of this year) and beyond if I wish.

I already have Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 on the drive, and I'm going to keep it for awhile. It's the first Slackware-based, Xfce-focused distribution that has installed and run without flaws -- so far, anyway.

But with a few hours of sleep behind me, I wonder if I shouldn't give Ubuntu 7.10 another try. Sure, I lost two installations of it to unknown, process-slowing problems, but maybe a "virgin" installation of 7.10 will behave better.

At this point, it all comes down to drivers. The PCMCIA slot on the Gateway is hopelessly broken -- the pins are bent (a screw was lodged in there at one point). I can get the replacement part, but will I be able to do the work and replace the PCMCIA cage assembly? I can barely get the two halves of the laptop apart -- there's still a hidden screw somewhere keeping me from complete access to the parts inside.

But if I did manage to get PCMCIA going, that would mean I could use a PCMCIA wireless card. Of course, I still have one of the two USB ports working. On one of the USB inputs, the plastic piece cracked and fell out. I have the broken piece, but getting the motherboard out of the chassis looks like an impossible procedure. When I replaced the power plug, I just soldered to the traces on the top of the board -- there was no getting it detached and then put back together again.

Another reason why laptops, for all their convenience, are nearly impossible to fix, maintain and upgrade. But they are convenient. Still, the more I use laptops, the more I like what desktops have to offer in terms of price, power, reliability and ability to be repaired and rebuilt.

But since this laptop fell into my lap (hence it's $0 name), and it's the best computer I have at my Linux-using disposal, I'm committed to making it work. In many ways, it's nice to know that a 1.3 GHz Celeron laptop with 256 MB of RAM can run the mainline Linux distros quite well.

I've already got Wolvix set up with a separate /home partition, and I don't know if I want to share it with Ubuntu. It might be OK if I keep Ubuntu a GNOME installation and Wolvix with Xfce. It's worth a try, anyway, but I might opt for either an additional /home partition for Ubuntu or /home in the main partition, backing it up regularly to the separate Wolvix /home partition.

I've said it before (and thought it more), one's allegiance to Linux or BSD distributions has a whole lot to do with how those distros run on the hardware one has. OK, instead of "one," I should say "me."

I've spent a lot of time running Debian over the last year, but when it comes to the $0 Laptop, I've scanned dozens of xorg.conf files looking for the secrets of the Alps touchpad, but I've determined that it's very hard to control it. And Ubuntu (as well as CentOS, Puppy and now Wolvix) runs better on this Gateway laptop than many, many other distributions, some of which run with problems, others not at all.

On my desktop system, I can't run CentOS 5 at all (I think I had 3.9 installed for awhile), but Slackware and Debian run great, as does Ubuntu (and Puppy and Damn Small Linux). I could use a new desktop system (my Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client runs considerably worse than the Gateway laptop), but for not it's all about the laptop, and I've just got to come to terms with the fact that Debian just isn't running as well as it should. Still, I never had a Debian install on the Gateway go "bad" like the Ubuntus ...

I prefer a "consumer/enthusiast" distro like Debian or Slackware to an "enterprise" distro like Red Hat/CentOS, mostly because the enterprise market is very focused on servers and not on the desktop. And I also don't have a very firm grasp on rpm and yum, the package management tools in Red Hat. Trying to add a repository was beyond my skills, but it might be time for me to give it another go. I need a book -- that's for sure.

But ... if I could find a wireless adapter that worked either through USB or PCMCIA and a distribution that would allow it to work with WPA encryption, that would be a strong motivator to install that distro and hang on for dear life.

Final words: Wolvix is looking awfully good. I did the full install, and any performance lags I found with Wolvix on the Maxspeed Maxterm have evaporated on the Gateway laptop, where it's a very snappy environment. I plan to keep a close eye on Wolvix and learn more about who puts it together and who uses it.

I couldn't run my Gateway Solo 1450 fan-quieting cron job in Ubuntu because I kept getting a "permission denied" message from the bash shell when I tried the following:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

(which should turn the fan off; I run the line after su to root in other distros).

But a little Googling about sudo and root in Ubuntu gave me the answer:

$ sudo -i

That gives you a # prompt, and the line works!

Now I can run versions of Ubuntu that don't automatically manage the Gateway's fan (6.06, 7.10).

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 image from Wolvix.org.

After dual-booting Ubuntu (at times 7.04 and 7.10) and Debian (first Etch, then Lenny, then a couple of Lennies for a couple of days) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I've said goodbye to Ubuntu for the time being and decided to install the dependable Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (the bigger of the two Wolvix distros) and keep Debian (still Lenny). After "losing" two Ubuntu 7.10 installs to unknown causes -- both times processes began slowing to a crawl -- I thought rolling back to Ubuntu 7.04 would give me something stable.

But the boot process for 7.04 began stalling at something having to do with the CD drive (I turned off "quiet spash" in GRUB so I could see where it was dying). I'm thinking that either my laptop or Ubuntu itself must be somehow cursed. One of the reasons I had Ubuntu installed, besides the fact that it works pretty well (when it does work) with this laptop, is that I can easily get Internet Explorer (via IEs4Linux) on the box. There's one Web site I work on that absolutely requires IE, and my need for such access could grow from minimal to critical at just about any time. That hasn't happened yet. What I'd like to see is updated instructions at IEs4Linux to get it set up on Debian. (As far as Debian goes, IEs4Linux remains stuck in the Sarge era).

But suffering through three dead Ubuntu installs in a row has made me weary. For one thing, I'm going back to separate partitions for /home. That's how I have Wolvix set up. Wolvix can be run as a live CD, a frugal install or a full install. I believe the frugal install saves files in the same way as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, and I want to be able to access the partition when booting Debian, so I opted for the full install. I don't think Wolvix provides updates in the way Debian, Ubuntu and other "established" distros do. No matter. It runs even better on this laptop than it did on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (where Wolvix was tested along with another crop of distros in my gOS comparison).

And Wolvix has another thing going for it: It's a Slackware-based distro that actually installs and runs with no trouble. Slackware 12 runs ... but I just can't get the X configuration right (and just about any other Slack-based distro offers a better Xfce experience in terms of applications and tools than Slackware itself, which remains a KDE-focused distro, albeit a faster KDE distro than any other). Both Zenwalk and Vector have been problematic; I can install, but something funky happens during booting and I can't even get to a console. I suppose I could turn off ACPI, AGP, IRQs and the like ... but if Wolvix can just run, why not the others? I probably will try to put Slackware 11 on the box at some point just to see if it's Slackware 12 that's screwing me over (Wolvix is based on Slack 11).

Anyhow, besides the fact that it runs and installs seamlessly, I really like the look of Wolvix, as well as the software mix in Wolvix Hunter (which features heavier apps like Open Office and the GIMP, along with lighter ones such as MtPaint, AbiWord and Dillo). Wolvix ships with Xfce and Fluxbox as window managers. In my recent tests, I've determined that Fluxbox doesn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce, and since Xfce has many more features, I'm pretty much running it exclusively, even on the aged $15 Laptop (a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM). And while the spread between Xfce and Fluxbox isn't as wide as one would think, Xfce does provide significant speed advantages over GNOME and KDE

The Wolvix Control Panel app is excellent. For everything from configuration to installation, Wolvix is way ahead of most of the distributions I've used. While the network-configuration portion of the control panel can be somewhat confusing (it reminds me of Zenwalk), it does work. Before I figured it out, I tried using Slackware's netconfig utility in Wolvix. It doesn't seem to work, though you can go through the paces. At least Wolvix offers a utility that does work. With a distro like the highly touted gOS offering NO network configuration utility (they think everybody has DHCP), I'm thankful for any kind of help. Yes, I can hack the text files that hold Linux's network configuration, but I'd prefer not to. It's just the way I am.

Since I'm constantly switching between a static IP at the office and dynamic IP at home, it's taking me a few extra steps (I love being able to easily switch between network settings in Debian and Ubuntu), but the trade-off is worth if since Wolvix otherwise performs so well.

And the Debian Lenny honeymoon is way, way over for me. I've considered rolling it back to Etch. My Alps touchpad issues are coming back (it's not as perfect as it is in Wolvix, Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10), and the fact that the new Lenny kernel seemed able to manage the noisy Gateway CPU fan for a day but not thereafter is very troubling. I can continue to use the Etch kernel with Lenny, and I just might do that, but I'm left wondering what's going on and whether or not there's an easier fix.

What I did do, for both Wolvix AND Debian Lenny, was put my fan-managing cron job to work. It basically checks CPU temp every five minutes and, if it goes above 60C, turns the fan on, then turns it off when it goes below 50C. Rather than a shell script and a cron job, I'd just like a single line of code that I could stick in some config file to make this work. I've seen things similar to what I need, but I haven't yet nailed it down for the Gateway Solo 1450.

I did, however, get the fan to stop in Debian from boot (using @reboot as the time element for the entry in crontab for the first instance of the cron job, then following with */5 * * * * to run it every five minutes thereafter. Again, I will detail the Gateway Solo 1450 fan-control solution, step by step, in a future entry.

And while I think a cron job is a sloppy, hackish way to deal with a CPU fan, I've done it now in Puppy, Wolvix and Debian, so I'm pretty much getting used to it. It's notable that in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I couldn't get the system to allow me to turn the CPU fan on and off, even when sudoing the command. I guess I needed to write to root's crontab, and sudoing can't quite qet you there. At least that's my six-second analysis of the situation. I would've loved to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the laptop -- perhaps it could stick around without self-destructing like 7.10 and 7.04. I seem to remember Ubuntu, at least in the alternate install, offering to create a root account. Maybe if I install with the alternate CD, I can get control of the fan. But do I really want to run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?

Briefly, here is where Ubuntu is falling down:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

yields the following:

bash: /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state: Permission denied

In every other distro on which I've used this line in my cron job, I need to su to root to run it (Puppy logs you on as root, so it's no problem there). But I can't seem to get it to work in Ubuntu. As it is, 6.06 LTS only has five months of support remaining still has a year and five months of support remaining (I'm no math whiz). Might as well wait until 8.04 comes out as the next LTS (or just stick with CentOS 5). ... Then again, Ubuntu 6.06 is from the Debian Sarge era. I smell another install of MepisLite 3.3 .. or maybe the recently updated -- even though I thought it was dead -- Sarge itself. I could always try to solve my Alps touchpad problems and stop my whining (if only ...).

UPDATE: I figured out how to shut the fan on and off in Ubuntu. Details tomorrow morning.

I did keep Debian Lenny (upgraded from Etch). And I know this is the testing distribution and not stable, but I was alarmed by a bug I discovered in the Nautilus file manager. When in a Nautilus window, if you right-click on a file and try to get its properties, Nautilus crashes, a bug report screen comes up, and then Nautilus relaunches. I filled out the bug report and went to the Web page for the bug. While there are about 500 reports of the same bug, it looks like the bug itself has been "closed." Well, it's not fixed, but the report is closed. It says that the bug goes away in Gnome 2.20.1. I have 2.20.2, and it hasn't gone away. I'm hoping that it will, but if the problem with the Ted word processor being catastrophically broken in both Etch and Lenny is any indication, I won't hold my breath. I guess I don't quite understand how bugs are dealt with.

As I said, I'm considering rolling it back to Etch. I'm also considering an installation of CentOS 5.0, which manages the CPU fan fine. Pros: CentOS, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be supporting this distro for YEARS; if it works now, it'll get security patches for a long, long time. Cons: it's harder -- at least for me -- to find as much variety in software as there is for Debian, Ubuntu, even Slackware. I'm sure there's plenty of software out there -- and there's nothing stopping me from compiling my own -- but I just couldn't get the hang of adding repositories and GPG keys. Just finding and installing AbiWord was beyond my capabilities. Perhaps a RHEL 5 book would help me; they've got to be out there. Another con: RHEL -- and, by extension , CentOS -- doesn't play MP3s or even Ogg audio files. I'm sure the codecs are out there, but I like the fact that most Linux distros -- whatever philosophy of freedom they espouse -- at least play an MP3. Hell -- I even can play Oggs in Windows Media Player on my XP box.

But what I did do with Lenny today was pack a bunch of software onto it. I threw all the kids' educational stuff I could find, the GIMP (I can't believe Debian doesn't ship with the GIMP), plus digiKam, which the esteemed Carla Schroder recommended to me as the best Linux image editor -- one that also deals with the IPTC caption info that I need to both preserve and edit. (Both the GIMP, as well as Krita and MtPaint not only won't edit the IPTC text embedded in a JPEG by Photoshop, they completely erase the info; NOT NICE.)

By the way, I thought about doing a frugal install of Puppy Linux, but what I did was preserve my pup_save on the Debian partition so I can continue running Puppy from CD (I'm still on 3.00; I've had no problems, so I haven't tried the 3.01 CD yet, although I do have it).

I wish Damn Small Linux would run better on the Gateway, but I'm still running DSL 4.0 on the older $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). There are new releases of DSL in the 4 series and also in the 3 series. I have to say that I like both of them. I did a lot of work with DSL 3.2 and 3.3, and I'm glad the developers are keeping both going. I am disappointed, however, that the version of Firefox (it's 1.0.something) in DSL does not work with Google Docs. I was hoping to run DSL instead of Debian Etch (the main distro on the Compaq's puny 3 GB hard drive) and gain some speed in Google Docs, but it is not to be. For better or worse, it's another point in Puppy's favor -- Puppy's Seamonkey browser/e-mail/HTML-generator app can handle Google Docs. But now that both Puppy and DSL feature MtPaint, at least they're equal in terms of image editing; for me, MtPaint is the best lightweight image editor for Linux. If it edited the IPTC info, I'd be in geek heaven. Since it doesn't, I remain on geek terra firma.

And I continue to prefer Geany as a text editor over DSL's Beaver (and over Xfce's Mousepad, GNOME's Gedit, anything that comes with KDE ... should I go on?).

I'm having one problem with Puppy: One of the Web sites I work on -- LA.com -- has an obscene amount of Flash animation, and it crashes Seamonkey every time I try to access it. I thought that Firefox might make a difference, so I installed the PET package. But the site crashes Firefox, too. I don't have this problem in any other Linux distro or in Windows or Mac, so something fishy is going on. Yeah, the amount of Flash is obnoxious, but it's not my call.

This entry is way too long, and I didn't even mention my re-flirtation with PC-BSD. After I deleted Ubuntu and before I put Wolvix on the laptop, I decided to do another PC-BSD install. The install itself went fine. I still had that weird graphic blob below the cursor. And I downloaded three PBI files to update my 1.4 release (I didn't feel like burning a new CD, since's I've only got two left in my formerly 100-CD stack). One PBI took it from 1.4 to 1.4.1, the next to 1.4.1.1, and the last to 1.4.1.2. They couldn't do this in a regular software update? Anyway, I couldn't go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.4.1.2 -- it said something about only updating from 1.4.1. And BSD is different enough from Linux that the prospect of adapting my fan-quieting cron job to BSD is and will remain way beyond my capabilities.

So PC-BSD met the same fate as it did the last few times I installed it; it came down quickly. I'm enjoying Wolvix Hunter right now.

So here's where I stand this week with the $0 Laptop: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the hard drive (Wolvix with its own /home, so I can roll a new distro over it without killing out my files) and Puppy 3.00 as a live CD. But I'm thisclose to slapping Ubuntu 6.06 LTS or CentOS 5.0 in there.

Like many of you, I'm stuck between changing Linux and BSD distributions like underwear and finding something that can serve me for years without it either falling apart or me yearning for something better.

Here's what happened. The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) allows its noisy CPU fan to be managed by a few, proud Linux kernels. The rest do nothing. Most situations can be fixed by a cron job (the details of which I will -- finally, eventually -- publish in full). Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is one of those on which I can't even get the cron job to run, but most (including Puppy Linux, on which I write this now) can be tamed.

Debian Etch managed the fan right from the first boot. And I thought the new kernel in Debian Lenny did so too. That would make it the first "newish" kernel to do so. I thought the kernel developers had pretty much forsaken this Gateway. Thus I was surprised on first boot of the new Lenny kernel that the fan did fall silent.

It didn't last long. A few days later, the fan noise returned, the CPU fan blew constantly, and it could only be managed with the cron job, or by booting the old Etch kernel. I'm at odds as to how to handle it, but the cron job works pretty well in Puppy, and I'm about 80 percent sure I'll have similar success with Lenny. Or, as I said, I can use the 2.6.18 kernel in Etch for the foreseeable future, since it does stick around when an Etch install is upgraded to Lenny. I did the same thing with Ubuntu when going from 7.04 to 7.10, only since then I've had such bad luck with 7.10 that I've rolled back to 7.04. And now the boot sequence with Ubuntu 7.04 is stalling halfway through on something having to do with the CD drive. I had to turn off the "quiet" boot parameter in GRUB to even figure this out ...

And the touchy touchpad problem in Debian is better in Lenny than in Etch, but not 100 percent tamed. Tapping on the GNOME menus at the top of the screen no longer causes them to flash, but tapping on menus within applications still produces the same momentary flashes as in Etch. I figure that this whole problem can be solved in xorg.conf, or I can just stop tapping to click (Puppy doesn't seem to support that feature, and I'm more than fine with it).

Yep, just to keep my sanity over the weekend, I booted into Puppy Linux 3.00 and stayed there ...

That's all. Back to your regularly scheduled weekend (and mine).

Even though my Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny on the test box went very well, I was a little bit wary of plunging right into it on the $0 Laptop because the Gateway Solo 1450 -- which I did get for $0 -- is a computer I actually rely on (i.e. I don't swap drives in and out of it like I do with the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I use for distro testing).

The $0 Laptop began the day dual-booting Debian Etch and Ubuntu 7.04 (I rolled it back after 7.10 mysteriously slowed every process to a crawl after one upgrade and did it again following a subsequent full install.). The Gateway was supposed to triple-boot, with Slackware 12 as the third OS, but I could never get GRUB to boot Slack. I don't know if it's because Slackware was on an extended partition, but nothing I could do would get Slack booting. I previously had Wolvix 1.1.0 Hunter (based on Slackware 11) on the very same partition and had no trouble booting that, but I just couldn't get Slack 12 going with GRUB. Slackware 12 did boot with LILO (which, in turn, didn't set up any entries for Ubuntu and Debian, and which, given my woeful lack of LILO knowledge simply had to give way to GRUB). Once I reinstalled GRUB from the Ubuntu 7.04 alternate CD, nothing I tried would work for Slackware.

And anyway, before I replaced LILO with GRUB, I also couldn't get the proper number of colors on the X server in Slackware. I had the right resolution, but I couldn't get anything more than 16 colors, no matter what I tried. And yes, I went through all the xorg.conf files that came with Slackware, plus a bunch of whole and partial ones from a bunch of other successful distros on this laptop, and I tweaked xorg.conf files for hours with no luck.

So my desire to keep Slackware on the box was low.

That's quite a preamble, but what it meant was that I had a free partition on which to try Debian Lenny before committing my "main" Etch partition to the upgrade. Better safe than sorry, I say.

I started with a Lenny business-card CD. It worked for me on the Maxspeed, so I figured it would be just as good on the Gateway. Not so much.

I already have a slight problem with the Debian Etch installer on the Gateway; it won't properly configure the video during the install in either the text version or the GUI. In fact, the GUI installer won't run at all -- Debian defaults to the text-based installer every time, even with installgui as a boot command. And when the text-based installer runs, it's really "wavy" and feint on the screen but readable enough to do the install, which usually goes flawlessly in every other way.

But with the Lenny CD on the Gateway laptop, what started out as a "fuzzy" install display at one point turned into an unintelligible mishmash of colors that was completely unreadable. I couldn't complete the install and had to begin again.

I returned to the Etch installer -- the network install image -- and did a full Etch install on the partition. That went fine (as usual). Then I opened up /etc/apt/sources.list in a root terminal and changed all mentions of Etch to Lenny, saved the file and then did apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade at the root prompt.

The slowness of my networking connection notwithstanding (it did improve about 2/3rds of the way through the install), the upgrade from Etch to Lenny went without a hitch. There were a few arcane questions along the way about stopping and starting services, but no showstoppers.

The big test for Lenny was whether or not the new kernel would manage the noisy CPU fan on the Gateway Solo 1450. This is one of the areas in which Ubuntu 7.10 dropped the ball big-time. I've been worried that the newer kernels are "forgetting" about the Gateway Solo 1450 -- mine is of 2002 vintage -- and screwing me in the ACPI department. Having to use the older 7.04 kernel in Ubuntu 7.10 was very disappointing, but having the system suddenly become very unusable due to reasons that totally escape me pretty much sealed the deal. I'm not saying I won't try Gutsy again, because I will ... but I'm sticking with Feisty for the foreseeable future and may not upgrade at all until the next LTS version of Ubuntu hits the street.

Anyway ... apologizing for this entry having more tangents than my high-school trig class ... I booted into the new Lenny kernel (the Etch kernel remains, should I want or need it), it took a few extra seconds, but the roaring CPU fan fell silent. I won't go into all the recent distributions that don't manage this fan properly. It would be easier to list those that do: Debian, Knoppix, pre-Gutsy Ubuntu and CentOS. (And yes, that means Fedora and SUSE did NOT.)

Advantage: Debian.

And all the great GNOME 2.20 stuff that I first saw in Gutsy is here in Lenny.

Immediate improvements specific to the Gateway Solo 1450: The "touchy" Alps touchpad can't have its touchiness turned on and off like it can in Gutsy, but tapping to click on menu entries no longer causes them to flash on and off in a split second, like in Debian Etch. Instead, tapping on the menu with the touchpad in Lenny does exactly what it is supposed to do: open the menu.

And now the slowwwww touchpad problem, which plagued the Alps touchpad in Etch until a fix was applied, no longer exists in Lenny.

Doing an upgrade and having fewer problems -- that's progress, and I'll gladly take it.

I haven't looked at every facet of Lenny just yet, but for now, I'll say that desktop users should be very pleased with the move from Etch to Lenny.

Practical note: I'm getting a confusing message in the Update Manager about evolution-webcal, that I have to update it in Synaptic before I can do an Update Manager update. I go into Synaptic and "mark" the package to upgrade, and it says that will result in a few other Evolution-related packages being removed. I'm not sure whether or not I should do this, though this is a "test" install, so I'm going to wait a bit and see what happens over the next couple of days. But still, Lenny is looking very, very good.

Philosophical note: I've learned that Ubuntu is pretty much drawn from Debian unstable (Sid), and Debian testing (Lenny) is a very nice compromise between the instability of Sid (and Ubuntu) and the all-out conservatism of Etch. I'm a little worried about the speed of security updates for Debian testing (which are released more slowly than for stable Etch), but you get so much in terms of newer but still relatively stable packages with Lenny that it looks well worth it for the desktop.

Servers are another matter, and I defer to those who know more about it than I do. The other good thing about running Debian testing is that I potentially have a whole lot of time to run it on this old-and-getting-older-by-the-day hardware as Lenny itself goes from testing to stable. In other words, Lenny has a longer life ahead of it than does Etch ... and if Lenny works, I'm buying myself that much more time on my aged laptop.

To sum up: Debian Lenny, at this early stage, is giving Ubuntu a serious run for the money in terms of hardware detection and configuration on the $0 Laptop, and its relative stability and long life make it a very attractive choice.

I've made a few changes in my spam-fighting techniques for Movable Type 4. I had the spam filter set at +3, but just about every "legitimate" comment was ending up in the spam file.

I changed the spam-filter setting to +2, and now I'm getting only a few obvious spam comments per day in the "non-spam" comment area (none of them are published until I do so manually, so it's not like all the effort behind sending out this large volume of spam is doing anything for those foisting it upon me).

And I think I figured out why some legitimate comments are ending up marked as spam: fake e-mail addresses. I'm not sure why Movable Type asks you for your e-mail address and Web site (as if every one of us even has a Web site ...), but the system appears to check whether or not the e-mail address supplied by a commenter is legitimate. If it's not, you can guess what happens (the comment is marked as spam).

So all those commenters who think they're being clever by not providing their real e-mail address -- NOBODY but me sees it, by the way -- all it does is get your comment routed to the spam file, where I can usually recover it before it gets automatically deleted. But still ...

Anyhow, since I'm habitually checking the spam comments for legitimate comments that are stuck in there, I started DELETING the spam comments after I check them. I was running up 2,000 spam comments per five days (the length of time I have them set to remain in the system). Since it's so easy and quick to erase ALL spam comments (there's a button for it -- and did I forget to say it's fast?), I've been getting rid of the spam as soon as I check it. It makes it way, way easier to check the spam the next time -- and it takes a load off of the system as well.

So in a nutshell, I've "weakened" the spam filter slightly, but I'm also zapping the spam myself instead of letting the system do it automatically. Less spam means plucking your comment out of said spam, should it land there, is much easier.

So far, this is working for me. ... I'll probably have the whole thing nailed down by the time we go to Movable Type logins for commenters.

Click was conceived by Josh Kleinbaum as a way to share cool crap we find on the Web. I usually don't care enough to go beyond looking at the aformentioned myself; I usually am not compelled to share it.

But the 1962 Sears Catalog is a different story. There's no better way to see the way we were (in the cobwebs not of my mind) than an old Sears Catalog. And yes, I'm old enough to remember poring through the toy section during the holidays.