April 2008 Archives

I'm pretty lazy. I turned off the monitor and have pretty much been running a Debian Etch box over SSH on the local network from my Windows box.

I'm using PuTTY to start the session, then Xming to run X apps. Before all this worked, I had to install sshd on the Debian box and then enable X over SSH.

The last time I played around with this, I got over my thing about running a full GNOME desktop over SSH. That just doesn't work. But I can certainly run any X app I want with Xming.

It's pretty sweet. Next thing I want to do is run a terminal over the serial port. I almost had it figured out with my old Powerbook 1400, but not quite. I'll have to try with a Windows box. I just need a DB25-DB9 with the proper genders to get my null modem cable hooked up.

It's Amazon.

I've been researching a story on backups in the cloud, and let me tell you, Google may still be contemplating it's Gdrive service, IBM is making moves to get its cloud offerings off the ground ... BUT GOOGLE IS ALREADY THERE, OPEN FOR BUSINESS, AND IN THE PROCESS GIVING THE NEXT WAVE OF WEB STARTUPS THE PLAYGROUND IN WHICH TO CREATE AND BUILD THEIR BUSINESSES.

Was that loud enough for you?

Thinking that Suspend/Resume was working OK on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), today I was disappointed to see things go downhill.

One time, the laptop wouldn't resume at all. The next, the keyboard and mouse were unresponsive.

Not a good sign.

I want it. MacX, the software that Apple itself used to sell to get an early-'90s Macintosh to do an X session from a Unix box.

Sure, there are solutions for OS 9 Macs, and any OS X box can easily be made to do this. But System 7.6.1, which is what I run on my Powerbook 1400cs, that's another thing entirely. With 48 MB of RAM and a 117 MHz processor, System 7 is what works, and I have the whole System 7 Today site to guide me.

For those who want to explore MacX, here is a PDF of the manual and an intro page (thanks, Stanford), and here's a page from Apple on an update to the program.

Here's an interesting page from The Mac Orchard listing free and nonfree terminal apps for Classic and OS X Macs. The entire Mac Orchard page of Internet apps is worth a look. Or drill down to just those apps for Classic Macs. All the biggies are there.

But what I really need is MacX (1.2, 1.5 or ??? I need to do more research), and I will not rest until I find it.

Here's a page on MacX 1.5, here's a fix for MacX 1.2 on some PowerPCs (it's a 68000 app). Here is a little clarification on the conflict betweeen MacTCP and OpenTransport when using MacX (and I do mean a little ...).

Also:

A page on MacX 1.5

It was my initial frustration with just getting my Powerbook 1400cs to work at all with the "modern" World Wide Web and Internet e-mail that led me to abandon the project (and the resulting This Old Mac blog for the infinitely greener pastures of Linux and BSD on older, cheaper, more-compliant PC (as in IBM-PC, or Windows and MS-DOS compatible) hardware.

But I never forgot about the Powerbook 1400. Sure, I didn't take it out of the bag for over a year, but when I got it in my head that I could use the Powerbook not as a stand-alone Linux box (the only alternative for this vintage of PowerPC-equipped Mac being MkLinux, a distro as dead as can be and not even downloadable) but as a terminal with my many Debian, OpenBSD and various other Linux/Unix setups.

I did get to the point where I had wired and even wireless networking on the Powerbook, and with the most modern browser I could find (the hard-to-get Netscape Communicator 4.8), I could kind of, sort of use the Powerbook with the Macintosh System 7.6.1 for basic Web browsing. Before I go on, everything I know about 7.6.1 I learned from the fine people at System 7 Today, a terrific resource for anybody thinking of running an old Mac on System 7.

That's where I got MacSSH, which, not coincidentally, I managed to configure today to run an SSH session over the local network with my Debian Etch box. First of all, read the documentation for MacSSH. I had to create a "Favorite" for my Debian box, and part of that was creating the SSH keys.

Once I turned off compression and selected MD5 authentication, the connection began working. I typed in the password for my SSH key when the Mac prompted me (I picked a long password, unfortunately). As the MacSSH documentation suggested, I entered my account name for the Debian box, but not the password.

I was prompted for that, and upon entering it, I was in a Debian shell.

Basic commands worked fine, as did the Lynx text-only Web browser. I could even post to LXer.

Things seemed to get a little hinky when using vi and nano to edit configuration files, and I couldn't get the function keys to work (and they're kind of essential for Nano, at least).

And while running X on a computer with a 117-or-so-MHz PPC processor and 48 MB of RAM. But I'd like to try.

See, I get an old Powerbook to actually run a console session with a real, live Linux box, and already I want to get X on a machine that in all likelihood can't handle it.

But I've already got quite a few leads on how to get an X server running, mostly for OS 9, but a few that just might work in System 7.

And while I'm at it, I got into System 7.6.1 and couldn't remember how to open a text editor. I didn't want to use MS Word (which I do have, and which is slow as anything, even though it's the PowerPC build), WriteNow (very quick, but can't make credible text files).

It took me a minute or so to remember SimpleText. I'm not sure whether or not I'm actually generating ASCII text, but it is quick, and yes, simple.

Anyhow, my initial wish, when this project began a few days ago, was to connect to a Linux or BSD box via serial port. I got a cable that connects that weird round printer/modem port on the Powerbook 1400 to a DB9 serial port. I don't know whether or not it's a "null modem" cable, so I also got one of those at Fry's for a couple bucks, with an adapter to get the genders right on the DB9-DB25 connection.

The only problem is that I can't seem to turn the Mac serial port on. I think I do have it. It has something to do with TCP/IP, but if I do turn on the serial port, I think I'll lose the connectivity I have over Ethernet with my PowerPort Platinum card. So since MacSSH is working, I'll stick with it.

I still wouldn't mind getting Zterm to work over the serial port, since I wouldn't even have to open up SSH if I didn't want to (although I would have to enable serial connectivity, which I've done on the Linux end already).

But just getting a 12-year-old, pretty-much-obsolete Macintosh to even run as a terminal with a modern Linux system is a great thing. (Somewhat ironically, but not really, the Powerbook would be less obsolete, I figure, if it had an older Motorola processor; then I'd have a snowball's chance of installing Linux or BSD on it, since many distros still support Motorola 68000 CPUs.)

So I'll play with MacSSH for a few days and bask in the glory of actually finding something useful for the Powerbook 1400 to do. OK ... I could just, you know, use the keyboard connected to the actual Linux box itself, but what's the fun in that?

Before I go: MacSSH seems to die when the Powerbook's screensaver turns on. No big deal, just an observation. The app itself doesn't die, but the session does.

(Note: This entry was written with SimpleText in Mac System 7.6.1. It was then copied and pasted into a file with Nano, running via MacSSH, in Debian Etch. I then started an X session over SSH on my Windows box with PuTTY and Xming, then ran Geany and Iceweasel (aka Firefox) to copy and paste the entry into Movable Type, after which you see it here. Byzantine, yes, but that's part of the whole geek thing. One thing I will say is that the PuTTY/Xming combination is a great way to run X sessions over SSH from Windows boxes. I'd love for the same thing to be true with Mac System 7.6.1, or even OS 8.5 or 9, to which I'm reluctant to upgrade, but I'm not holding out hope, although I will now start looking for MacX 1.1.7, something Apple shipped with A/UX, to further my quest.)

I'm having a bit of a problem lately. I began thinking that Damn Small Linux was the best of all possible distros to run on the memory-challenged $15 Laptop (1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt). But the latest version of DSL, numbered 4.3, teased me with the promise of Firefox 2.

Previous versions of Damn Small Linux have relied on Firefox 1.0.6, which doesn't play nicely with Movable Type, Google Docs, or any number of other Web pages that do more than feed out straight HTML. For my work, basically, I need Firefox 2.

And while Puppy Linux features Seamonkey, the Web suite that works like the old Netscape, only better (and with a Firefox-compatible Mozilla engine), does the job for me quite well, with only 64 MB of RAM in the $15 Laptop, I can't really run Seamonkey without bringing the whole PC crashing down around me. There's just not enough memory. I have no problem with Dillo, of course, and while the Dillo that installs from packages in OpenBSD doesn't enable cookies by default (and I need cookies, unfortunately), they can be enabled. That takes care of LXer, where the forums only work with cookies enabled.

But Dillo has no SSH, and there's plenty I can't do without SSH support. That's what Firefox can do for me. Especially version 2.

So the geekish excitment was palpable. To use yet another cliche, you could feel it in the air.

OK, so the bar is low for me when it comes to operating-system excitement.

Anyway, Damn Small Linux 4.0 runs great on this underpowered laptop. I've got X configured just right, my wireless card works. I've even got sound properly configured.

So I grab my recently burned DSL 4.3 disc (I never tried 4.2; 4.0 was doing so well ...) and boot the Compaq.

I get a few error messages I've never seen before. Modules are either not found or not loading.

Then I'm in a Fluxbox desktop, not the JWM that recent DSL releases have featured. And barely anything works. I can start Firefox (which has been renamed for some unknown reason, and that name escapes me for the moment), but I can't even get the DSL Panel to show up. I also can't exit DSL. On the newer Gateway Solo 1450, DSL 4.3 wouldn't even boot, so I went to my VIA C3 Samuel test box (a converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client).

On the test box I get the JWM desktop, but again, the DSL Panel won't start, nor can I exit the OS and shut down the box without CTRL-ALT-DEL.

So unless I burned a very bad CD (unlikely because the damn thing boots), Damn Small Linux 4.3 has more than a few problems that need immediate attention. I'll have to go back to 4.2 (and the still-being-maintained 3.x series) to see if DSL took its wrong turn at 4.3 or before.

Anyway, I went back to Puppy 2.13. I know they're on 3.01 or something, and I'm using 3.00 on the Gateway laptop, but I still like 2.13, my first Puppy.

For one thing, even in 64 MB, there's a lot to be said for running as much of your system in memory as possible.

One thing I've probably got to give up is running Firefox in 64 MB of RAM. If it can't be done in Dillo or Lynx, I just need to wait for more memory so it can be done. I hope the maximum 144 MB on the Compaq will make a difference. And I hope DSL gets fixed enough so I can use the latest version.

Previously I've found that Puppy Linux is very happy with 256 MB of RAM. I do have swap on the hard drive, and I will see if that makes it happy in 144 MB.

Of course, if the performance of OpenBSD in X improves measurably with 144 MB (and conversely, so does that of Debian), I'll have many more choices of what to run.

Update: Puppy doesn't exactly thrive in 64 MB. I also downloaded a slew of recent Damn Small Linux ISOs -- 3.4.11 (regular and initrd images), 4.3 (aregular and initrd) and 4.2.5. I need to get a better feel for why DSL 4.3 wasn't working. I could've had a bad ISO or burn ... or it could be something else.

Ever since my exploration of the various PCLinuxOS spins, I've been impressed with the project. Now that I'm having so much relative success with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it's unlikely that I will be running PCLinuxOS on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, but a) you never know and b) I'm looking for a good system to install for others, and PCLinuxOS is a top contender in that department.

Since I achieved the holy grail in the world of the Gateway Solo 1450 and Linux, that grail being properly working Suspend/Resume, I know that, at this point in time, Ubuntu is the best distribution for this hardware. But if I could learn more about how Suspend/Resume work, I might be able to level the playing field and run anything I want.

I've reached this point when it comes to managing the Gateway's CPU fan. I can make most any version of Linux turn the fan on and off at the proper times (and temperatures) via ACPI. I can't do the same in OpenBSD (although I really, really want to ... and I think I eventually will do it), and in FreeBSD it works automatically on the day of install and then not at all after that. But in Linux, I've got it down.

I'd like to be at the same place with Suspend/Resume. But where to start? As I've said, Ubuntu 8.04 is the first and only distro to properly Suspend/Resume this laptop. So it's certainly possible to do it with just about any modern Linux kernel, right?

Just to see where I'm at, I did a few tests with live CDs. Fedora 8 and CentOS 5 would suspend the Gateway but wouldn't resume it.

Since PCLinuxOS is renown for its hardware detection, I wanted to see how it did on Suspend/Resume.

I had discs of PCLinux2007, PCLinuxGNOME-2.21.2 and PCLinuxOS-mini-me, but I couldn't find any of them. So I reburned PCLinux2007 and downloaded the newer PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008.

First of all, Suspend/Resume wasn't available as an option in the KDE-based PCLinux2007. When I checked the power management in KDE, I was told that I had to enable ACPI first. Since ACPI was already enabled, I didn't know what to do next.

I moved on to PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008. First of all, the 2008 GNOME disc offers a radically different-looking desktop when compared to that of the GNOME-2.21.2 spin. I thought the earlier GNOME desktop was way, way too boring. The 2008 version, however, has a futuristic, dark theme that reminds me of the mini-me spin. I like it. I don't think it's "me," but I do like what I see.

I tried to suspend the Gateway from PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008, and I got a message that Suspend failed. But I also got some help. There was a link in the message to the HAL Quirk Site, where one of the links focuses on ways to fix poorly sleeping PCs.

I haven't been through it yet, but I do plan to scour the site for hints on how I can tame Suspend/Resume on this laptop. It's a nice touch from the PCLinuxOS team: Something doesn't work, but you immediately get the help you need to tackle the problem. Very nice, indeed.

While I continue to admire PCLinuxOS, I'd love to get Suspend/Resume working in Debian Lenny, the distro I use the most. Without Suspend/Resume working there, however, I will most likely be migrating over to Ubuntu on this laptop. I left the Gateway on for most of the weekend, seeing how the Suspend/Resume worked in Ubuntu 8.04, and I continue to be amazed and impressed at how well Ubuntu is taking care of me. It seems like a little thing, but to me it's huge.

On a desktop, it's not such a big deal. But with global warming, not to mention the cost of electricity, power management should be a top priority for all hardware manufacturers and OS coders.

And if you like GNOME but haven't tried PCLinuxGNOME-2008, I strongly suggest that you take a look.

Note: This post from 9/05/07 was just a couple of URLs. I do remember that it was the key to actually installing DeLi Linux. Once I did the install, I couldn't get networking configured properly, so I abandoned DeLi pretty quickly. But at least I got through the install, something that eluded me until then.

Today is 4/28/08, and while this isn't a great post by any means, it does offer a little help for people who want to actually install DeLi. I had a note on the entry that said something like "why run DeLi instead of Damn Small Linux?" I don't really have an answer for that.

Here is the entry, which I put together so I could run it and get it out of the "unpublished" file:

I could never get DeLi Linux installed. But this post, and this one, helped me get past what was stopping the install.

Here are some DeLi blog entries, including one from April 5, 2008. It led to a pretty nice DeLi page.

I did a column for the Los Angeles Daily News (and presumably all the other Los Angeles Newspaper Group business sections) that ran Saturday. I wrote about the HP Mini-Note, the low-priced Linux (or Windows) laptop, contrasting it with the high-priced Apple MacBook Air.

I had to cut the piece quite a bit for the print edition. Here is the full column:

Laptops get smaller -- and so do their prices

By Steven Rosenberg
Staff Writer

Did you hear the story about Steven Levy, the Newsweek technology writer who lost the MacBook Air that Apple loaned him? It's so small and thin, it got thrown out with the trash. He thinks.

It wouldn't be such big news if, besides being the techno-lust object of the fortnight, the MacBook Air didn't cost between $1,799 and $3,098.

In my world, that kind of money buys a decent used car, or a serves down payment on a new kidney. Not a computer, least of all a laptop.

Laptops are convenient -- I'm writing this on one right now -- but they're also extremely hard to repair or upgrade, easy to steal and easy to break. That's no recipe for dropping three large. Or even 1.8 large -- you feel me? (This is the part where I pause to reflect on whether I'm watching too many back-to-back episodes of "The Wire" on DVD).

Luckily the rest of the action in these "subnotebooks" is on the low end.

I'm talking about extremely small notebooks like the ASUS Eee PC and the Everex Cloudbook, as well as Intel's Classmate PC and the One Laptop Per Child XO computer that has grabbed plenty of news coverage as the computer aiming to revolutionize education in the Third World.

For me, the subnotebook only became real in the past week with Hewlett-Packard's announcement that it will offer the HP 2100 Mini-Note PC starting at $499 later this month.

The HP Mini-Note weighs about 2 1/2 pounds, features an 8.9-inch screen and -- most importantly -- a keyboard described as being 92 percent of full size, something those typing on the tiny ASUS Eee keyboard are bound to appreciate.

Primarily aimed at the education market, the HP Mini-Note features a sturdy aluminum case, specially durable keys, a mechanism that shuts down the hard drive during sudden movements -- like when it's being dropped -- plus built-in wireless and wired networking.

Did I forget to mention that it costs $499? One of the reasons that HP can hit such a low price point for the Mini-Note is that the base configuration, like that of the wildly popular ASUS Eee, comes with 512 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gigabyte solid-state flash drive and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system.

Linux helps the Mini-Note -- as it does the Eee and the Cloudbook -- in two ways. The machines run splendidly with 512 MB of RAM -- something Microsoft Vista cannot do. And Linux can generally be installed by hardware vendors for free, with no need to pay Microsoft for Windows. I'm not sure whether or not HP is paying Novell to use SUSE, but if they are, it has to be a token amount in comparison.

I'm not sure of the exact software mix on the Mini-Note, but most of today's Linux-equipped PCs either have a full office suite (usually OpenOffice) already installed or available at no cost with the clicking of a few buttons. And OpenOffice can do just about everything that Microsoft Office does. Free. Upgrades are free, too.

The HP Mini-Note is the perfect machine to get young students through high school or college. And spending around $500 can ease the minds of parents who cringe at the way kids -- as well as adults -- treat laptop computers.

One thing missing, though, is a CD/DVD drive. Not that the MacBook Air includes one either. For the Mini-Note, anyway, if you absolutely need a CD/DVD drive, USB-connectable models sell for $50 to $60. Again, with the Linux model, all your software is available over the Internet, so you may not need to read or burn discs.

Want a beefed-up Mini-Note? An extra $50 gives you double the memory and a traditional 120 GB hard disk drive. That's the model I'd recommend. Another $50 after that gives you either Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows XP Professional. If you're intent on Microsoft Windows and want no part of Linux, the choice is yours. But you won't get access to all those free applications, you will be plagued by Windows-targeted viruses, and Linux will run much better -- especially better than Vista.

At this writing, the top-of-the-line Mini-Note includes 2 GB of RAM, a bigger, longer-lasting battery and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. But remember, for $500 or $550, you get HP quality, Linux reliability and more coolness for your dollar than those Apple MacBook Air owners trying to keep their $1,800 baby from being thrown out with the old newspapers.

Steven Rosenberg writes about technology in a most frugal way at Click, http://insidesocal.com/click. Send comments and questions to steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

Click, and the rest of the insidesocal.com blogs that are part of the Los Angeles Daily News and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, are getting a new server, with the transition happening some time during the morning of Monday, April 28.

We've been having more than one problem or another for quite some time -- from the comments being creaky (I just turned them off when the spam got out of hand the and sign-in scripts weren't working) to publishing of entries (and the dozens of category, index and archive pages that go with them) timing out.

Aside from the comments, you, the reader, might not have been all that aware of the pain we as bloggers have experienced. If you've tried to leave a comment and had your screen frozen for an age, you have an inkling of what we're talking about.

In my estimation, the problems up until now have been, in various proportions, server overload, limitations of the Movable Type system that runs these blogs, and generally poor configuration of both Movable Type and the server apps themselves. (Historical note: I believe that insidesocal.com began on a Windows server and subsequently made the transition to Linux.) Until now, the server has been run by an outside company. Hopefully we will address all of the previously mentioned problems with our new server cluster, which is being run by parent company MediaNews in Denver.

Thus far, my far-away assessment of the new setup -- and those who run it -- is very high. We hope to fix a lot of broken things and make all of the insidesocal.com blogs better than they have ever been.

Cliches, I know, but as far as Movable Type setups go, I'm not aware of any that are as complicated as ours. We have hundreds of blogs spread over many different newspaper properties, with lots of add-ons to tie the blogs to our many Web properties. We're also serving ads and trying to actually make this whole damn thing pay.

I'll be spending a lot of time on Monday helping users get acclimated to Movable Type Open Source 4.1. It's a bit different than Movable Type 4.01 (the non-free version), with added features, some things that work better but, thus far, a few new bugs. I think our setup can handle the open-source version, which gets new features and improvements. If I understand the process correctly (and I aim to understand much, much more about Movable Type), the open-source version is a kind of test bed for the non-free version. I'm OK with that.

Actually, if our many-dozen bloggers can manage to get their entries published, their comments moderated, and the whole thing doesn't sink into the ocean, I'll be happy.

Note: This entry was originally written on 11/26/07, but for some reason was never published. My recollection is that I was a little taken aback by the relatively long load times for Firefox in Wolvix when compared to other distros. I suspect that the "quicker" distros left pieces of the app in memory after Firefox was closed, resulting in a quicker second load. But I got over it because every thing else in Volvix is so good.

Since then, I've used Wolvix a whole lot. And I really like it. Having an Xfce-based version of Slackware (albeit Slackware 11) that actually works is a great thing. Just about everything in Wolvix is done well. The installer, the live environment, configuration. It's quite an achievement. If you like KDE, plain ol' Slackware is great, but if you want a usable environment based on Xfce, using Wolvix gets you going a lot quicker than building your own Slackware system.

Another thing: Wolvix ships with slapt-get and Gslapt. It takes all the "hard" work out of keeping a Slackware installation up to date. And even though Slackware 12 is out, the Slack team continues to update Slackware 11, so Wolvix is a great solution for those who like to run Slackware but don't want to deal with downloading and updating individual packages. I've tried Vector and Zenwalk, but I like Wolvix much better. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

The original entry begins here:

Caitlyn Martin is right. Wolvix is screaming fast.

I'm working on my review of gOS, and in order to compare its Enlightenment window manager to something with Xfce, I decided to quickly throw Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 on the box. I probably should've installed Xubuntu Gutsy, but I've been wanting to try Wolvix for awhile, and I had the disc on the top of my teetering stack, beckoning to me.

Quick first impressions: Wolvix has a great control panel application. I opted for a traditional hard drive install, and the process was clear and concise -- yet complete. And did I forget to say quick?

The Wolvix installer even did all the GRUB work, putting gOS in the boot menu without me having to go into /boot/grub/menu.lst. (The fact that I can type the path out without a second thought means I've been in /boot/grub/menu.lst too many times lately).

I easily set my static IP in the Wolvix Control Panel. It's not a no-brainer, but if you've done it a couple of times in other distros, it's pretty easy.

Anyhow, I've had great things to say in the past about both Zenwalk and Vector -- the two big Slackware-based, Xfce-driven distros out there -- and Wolvix is right up there in terms of quickness. It may even be quicker. I'll have to throw Zenwalk or Vector on my spare partition to see how they run (it has been awhile in Linux time, meaning a couple of months).

Note: With my 256 MB of RAM, Wolvix didn't run very well as a live CD, but all that faded away once I installed to the hard drive. While both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux run great on this box -- my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with VIA C3 Samuel CPU -- both as live CDs and in frugal and traditional installs, Wolvix runs so darn well once installed that I think it deserves to be right near the top of the heap when it comes to the most efficient Linux distributions out there.

I'm going to try Wolvix Cub on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 64 MB RAM). That's not a box that can run OpenOffice or the GIMP, but if the even-lighter Cub version of Wolvix can boot on that box and install, I will be very interested in how it does.

I did have a system crash when logging out of Fluxbox and into Xfce. I'll have to see if there's any pattern there. And I was surprised to find that Firefox took quite a bit of time to load, even on repeat use, in Xfce. Something else to look into.

This is just a first impression of Wolvix; more later (and the huge gOS review, too).

It's day 2 for my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS install on the Gateway Solo 1450. Things have gone more smoothly that I expected.

First of all, I got the ISO on Friday -- one day after Ubuntu 8.04's official release -- in under 2 hours. I remember my 7.10 download taking much, much longer. Part of my success this go-round was due to using a good mirror. That speeds things up considerably.

Except for a worrisome 5-minute "freeze" during loading of the live CD -- for hardware detection, I think, but Ubuntu's lack of on-screen messages (presumably so the install experience will be more Windows-like, and the newbies won't be freaked out) was a bit unsettling, as I am accustomed to screens full of information when I boot, say, Debian or Slackware. The more information, the better, especially when things aren't working.

Anyway, the live environment came up perfectly, and the install itself was also almost perfect (my accounts from Debian Lenny didn't transfer, even though I checked the proper box).

And while it took me a good half-hour of head-scratching to get Ubuntu 8.04 to automatically manage my CPU fan (I needed to write a quick, one-line shell script and call it from /etc/rc.local rather than put the single line in that script into /etc/rc.local itself), most everything else was working perfectly. GRUB configured proper entries for my Debian Lenny partition (and its three kernels), screen resolution came in at the expected 1024x768, and as in Ubuntu 7.10 (and Debian Lenny and PCLinuxOS), I could easily turn off my Alps Touchpad's often-annoying "tap to click" function.

And thus far, I haven't had to resort to any tweaking, Googling, or searching through reports of unresolved bugs to make anything work.

Things I noticed right away included a neat little bit of pseudo-animation when shifting from one desktop to another. Ubuntu has been installing with only two virtual desktops for some time; I remember 6.06 as having four. It's extremely easy to bump up the number of desktops, and I'll probably do it fairly soon, as I'm accustomed to having four, though I never seem to use more than three.

One of the first things I do with any new installation on this laptop -- the Gateway Solo 1450 -- is check suspend/resume. It never works. In Debian Lenny, for instance, choosing Suspend just turns the screen-saver on.

Ubuntu 7.10 appeared to suspend this laptop fairly well ... at first. But with 8.04, Suspend has worked very well. So far, I've been unable to Resume once, but a half-dozen subsequent Resumes did work. I think the failed Resume had something to do with my battery being deader than dead and the power plug getting jostled -- I think. So the jury's still out on Suspend/Resume in 8.04, but it looks promising.

Suspend/Resume is one thing I've really wanted on this laptop, since the thing throws off so much heat; you wouldn't want it on your lap for too long, unless you like a hot lap, but I digress.

I plan to investigate CPU frequency scaling in the future. I've been unsuccessful with it in Debian Lenny. I don't know if the Celeron M processor is supported for this operation. All I know is that I haven't gotten it to work. I can't emphasize enough that I'd like to do everything I can to minimize power consumption on and heat from this machine.

My tests of Suspend/Resume will continue. I hope to be able to rely on it. I wouldn't go so far as to get a new battery, and the power-supply connection is not super-tight because the replacement power plug on the laptop isn't an OEM part but instead a kludge on my part that saved the Gateway from a very pricey repair (removing the motherboard, if indeed that can be done, and resoldering one of the OEM power plugs that seem to disintegrate at will in these laptops).

Since this laptop hails from 2001/02, I fear it's now or never as far as hardware detection goes. With the advent of dual-, quad- and more-core everything, the Linux kernel will likely begin leaving this Gateway behind. That's the main reason for my heightened interest in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Its life beginning with a slew of nearly new packages, the release is likely to mature well as it continues its three-year life on the desktop (with five years on the server). I don't know how much longer it'll be as easy to continue rolling new distributions onto this aging machine. The prospect of three years with no worries -- and enough compatibility -- is enticing indeed.

As I've written before, I have an admiration and appreciation for the way the Ubuntu team presents its Linux distribution. I like having a lighter application load to start with -- and the cleaner menus that provides. Every once in awhile I miss a package that I use in Debian; right now it's Childsplay, the educational suite that my daughter likes to use. It's likely available for Ubuntu, but I don't have the proper repository linked up. I'll look into that in the weeks ahead. Since Childsplay has so many dependencies, I'm reluctant to install it as a generic .deb package, or from source, and I hope I won't have to. Still, there's always Debian Lenny, which still lives on this laptop.

I consider Ubuntu's first long-term support release, 6.06, an important milestone in the project's life, and those who rely on it have more than a year of desktop support ahead of them.

Considering all the strides in Linux on the desktop in the past two years, this new LTS is even more important. I can see more than a few hardware vendors offering it on their products, and I also see businesses of all kinds taking another look at using Linux on their desktops, in part, because once they get 8.04 installed, they don't need to do any major upgrades until 2011. And if most companies are like mine, the chances are extremely good that a box installed with a given operating system will continue to run that same system, with the same version, until it either a) dies or b) for some reason stops being used and sits on a desk for an additional five years.

Put it this way: I'd love to stick with Ubuntu 8.04 on this laptop. I'm not anywhere near saying that I'll do that, but for now, things are looking pretty good.

Note: This entry was written on 1/29/08 but was never scheduled to publish. Since it is now publishing as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS -- Ubuntu's second-ever long-term-support release -- has made its debut, there's a bit of added significance here (I hope). Thus far, I've had problems with the 8.04 beta, but at least some of that might hopefully melt away with the official release (and on Day 2 of the final 8.04, so far, so good). All I know is that I continue to be impressed with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which is almost two years old at this point.

The original entry begins here:

Here's the deal: I run Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Ubuntu (formerly 6.10, 7.04, 7.10 and now 6.06 LTS), and while I've run into my share of problems with both, I'm starting to lean closer to Ubuntu as what I recommend to prospective desktop users and what I'll be using myself.

It's not a decision I'm arriving at lightly (and "arriving" means I'm not there just yet).

I've had my problems with Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, but my experience with 6.06 LTS -- which I installed for a benchmarking test but have been using at the office over the past month or so -- has been very positive.

Say what you will about the brown desktop theme, but the way Ubuntu runs, the things it adds to Debian, the number of packages included in the default install, the way they work and the way they're presented in the menus -- I'm more impressed than I've ever been.

Wherever I am on the "geek scale," I do like the bigger default installation of Debian, and I like that it's just that much quicker, but the extra polish in Ubuntu makes for a better desktop experience. Sure, Ubuntu uses a lot of packages that Debian thinks too iffy to include in the Stable or even Testing releases, but I have to say that I've had more problems overall with packages in Debian than I have had in Ubuntu. That doesn't make up for the overall problems I've had with Ubuntu 7.10 (and which I couldn't attribute to a specific package because I'm just not anywhere near that knowledgeable).

While my Debian Lenny install is going great on my Gateway laptop, I have half a mind to give Ubuntu 6.06 LTS a try on the other partition, even though the machine has had trouble with Ubuntus 7.04 and 7.10. I hope the upcoming Ubuntu LTS works as well -- or better -- for me. Again, seeing and using is believing.

Caitlyn Martin looks at the state of Linux today in Is Linux Really Outgrowing Its Stereotypes? Does It Matter?

She's right to cite the Asus Eee as a Linux success story that can and should be replicated with other hardware, and she's right in many other ways, too.

Note: Here's another "old" entry, written on 1/23/08 but not published until today, which should be 4/25/08. I'm trying to clear out the backlog, as you can see. This is pretty much in the "strident opinion" category, and I thought it should see publication.

The entry begins here:

One of the reasons the Ubuntu project is doing so well is that it puts a cleaner, slightly more polished face on what starts out as Debian.

The new user doesn't know that Ubuntu pulls a lot of packages from Debian Unstable. Instead, they think of the Canonical-run distribution as "a Linux for the rest of us." Sure, marketing is involved, but at the core, Ubuntu is a fairly solid system -- mostly because it's based on Debian.

It's not even all that much easier to install Ubuntu than Debian, but having a live CD with which to try out the system, and then install if desired, goes a long way toward getting users to cross over from Windows.

Sure, a desktop installation of Debian contains more packages than Ubuntu, with more in the menus to choose from, but Ubuntu is limited by the size of the single CD, and the people behind Ubuntu have chosen to give users the basics of what they need, with everything else available in the repositories to be installed later, if desired.

And the Ubuntu project is committed to pushing as much additional hardware detection into the system as they can. Other distros like SimplyMepis and PCLinuxOS also do this. I don't know how far behind Debian is on this count, but I think the solution to configuration of new peripherals -- especially wireless networking devices -- is a continuing problem for the entire Linux and BSD community, and I wish there was an easier, more standardized way for users of all distros to get their problematic hardware -- whether connected to PCMCIA, PCI, USB, and even the serial port -- working as quickly and as well as possible.

So with Ubuntu you get a more manageable menu, which is great if you're not a "power user." I guess I want it both ways. I love the Debian menu, with its many layers opening up dozens of applications. And I pretty much prefer the Epiphany browser over its close, but way more well-known cousin Firefox (the latter renamed Iceweasel in Debian due to restrictive copyrights on the Firefox name and image).

I appreciate the solid nature of Debian Stable. I can install it and know it will be supported a couple of years down the line. It's not quite like the multiple years of support that Red Hat/CentOS gets, but it's more than enough. And sticking with the same frozen applications for five years -- especially on the desktop -- might be more frustrating than not.

As I watch the Linux "scene," I see that Debian is a lot bigger in Europe than it is in the United States. And overall, Linux has a bigger footprint in Europe, a continent less enamored with Microsoft than many of us over here are. Nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with Ubuntu, Mepis and others taking the work of Debian (as Wolvix, Vector and Zenwalk do with Slackware) and moving it in one direction or another. That's what FOSS -- free, open-source software -- is all about.

Openness breeds innovation, but there's an argument running through all of this over whether the FOSS community is blunting its impact by having hundreds of Linux distributions rather than a few biggies. In my opinion, that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, limiting ourselves to Linux alone isn't even wise. I'd like to see us all encourage the development of new distributions based on the various BSDs, and even the seemingly stalled GNU/Hurd.

And if there are other candidates for the next big open-source operating system, at the kernel level and above, I'd like to see them grow and develop. We don't need to put all of our collective eggs in any one basket, even Linux's. That's how we got into this mess (read: Microsoft controlling an overwhelming majority of the world's desktops) in the first place.

I know that Ubuntu is doing a great job marketing itself to the "casual" geek who might not be a Linux expert, but is anybody really conveying to users who know nothing about FOSS or Linux what they're missing? I don't think we have to grab Windows users off the street, install Debian on their box and hope they'll figure it out. Wouldn't want to do it with Ubuntu, either, although the dozen or so current books on running the brownish desktop do nothing but help spread the word about the distribution and educate users on how to get the most out of it.

And while the Ubuntu system is pretty solid, there's plenty of marketing afoot. The Ubuntu Forums, the Ubuntu Web site itself, the free CDs, a plan to deal with restricted media formats, deals with Dell to include the OS on selected boxes, optional paid support. It all adds up.

Robert Shingledecker told me at the SCALE 6X show earlier this year that he planned to add version 2 of Firefox to Damn Small Linux, and it's finally here in DSL 4.3.

Damn Small Linux hasn't yet moved to a 2.6 kernel -- Robert said he would maintain versions with 2.4 and 2.6 eventually -- but I can wait for that. Just having Firefox 2 is enough to let me use Movable Type, Google Docs and the rest of the Web-based applications that I've come to rely heavily upon.

I just downloaded the ISO, and once I burn it and give it a try -- probably on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999, 64 MB of RAM, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX) -- I will report back.

DSL, like Puppy Linux, is one of those systems that has benefited from continual improvement. Both projects set the bar very high for others that want to play in the small-sized live CD space.

And I do use both -- often.

Update: While DSL has always run great on my VIA C3 Samuel test box and the $15 Laptop, it has barely run on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). That hasn't changed. Luckily Puppy runs great on the Gateway, even though I'm mostly running Debian Lenny (and will soon be testing Ubuntu 8.04 on it).

Note: I originally wrote this post on 2/15/08. Today is 4/24/08. Since that time, I've looked into updating in the BSDs a bit further. In FreeBSD, it's certainly possible to update both ports and packages.

In OpenBSD, the Errata for a give release shows you what needs to be fixed in the base system. The updates are easily available, but they do need to be compiled from source. What the OpenBSD team really wants you to do, it seems, is run the -current release, on which all ports can be updated from source. Sounds like a lot of compiling. Still, I might try it at some point.

Anyway, here is the "original" 2/15/08 entry:

While it's pretty easy to install software from precompiled packages or from ports in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, I've hit a bit of a wall when it comes to keeping any of these systems up to date with periodic security and bug patches.

I don't know if such updates are either not as necessary in the BSDs, even though my Linux boxes have a dozen or so of them every week, or that it's just to hard to do for the average BSD user.

I see plenty of Web help on how to upgrade from one version of a BSD to another, but I don't see anything that covers searching for periodically updated packages and updating an installation on, lets say, a weekly basis as security and bug problems arise and are presumably updated in the repositories of packages and ports.

O, BSD users, correct me if I'm wrong -- and I do hope that I am wrong. But with apt/Aptitude/Synaptic in Debian-based Linux distributions, rpm/Yum in Red Hat- and Suse-style systems, and upgradepkg (and slapt-get/Gslapt) in Slackware (with security announcements going to the mailing list and the www.slackware.com/security page) ... need I go on?

The point is that almost all Linux installations are easily upgraded with precompiled binary packages. Gentoo ... well, I won't go there because I know it has its own BSD-like ports system, but I've never used it and don't know how it works.

Again, the point is that all of these Linux distributions have me conditioned to expect -- and to install -- updates on a regular basis.

But what do I do with BSD? In OpenBSD, for instance, I've never even downloaded the ports tree. Everything I've installed has been a precompiled binary package for the i386 architecture. It's very slick, works perfectly ... but am I exposing myself to undue risk by running Firefox 2.0.0.6 instead of the newer 2.0.0.12? Is all that extra OpenBSD security for nought if I'm running applications rife with security holes?

I'm being completely serious. Is there something I'm missing here? Since OpenBSD, at least, updates the whole system every six months, am I OK to keep the same packages running until the next release? What does this say about BSD vs. Linux when it comes to security and bugs?

But wait. I did run DesktopBSD for awhile, and I remember that system having a GUI package manager that not only fetched new packages but upgraded those already installed.

So that's what Matt Olander was talking about when he said that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD were working together to share technology when it came to package management.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't need to do my updates in a GUI app. I'm perfectly OK with using the console. Just being able to do that updating is enough. That is, unless someone out there can convince me that Linux has conditioned me to think I need something that I really don't.

Those on all sides of this issue, please enlighten me -- and quickly.

Ubuntu 8.04 will be released tomorrow, and today I turned on my 8.04 "beta" box for the first time in a week and then some. I've got 129 updates rolling down, and the mirrors are already very, very slow.

I'm sitting here with three networked computers, so I don't care how long it takes the Ubuntu box to download and build the updates. Right now I'm looking at 2 and a half hours or so. It'll only get worse if you want to download the full ISO on Thursday.

While I gave Ubuntu 8.04 a cautiously positive review, I fear that it's leaving my hardware behind. Already it doesn't run as well on my VIA C3 based converted thin client, which is built around a motherboard made in 2002. I fear it'll be worse on the $0 Laptop, which has a Celeron M processor and was made in 2001. That's the rub about Linux; the newest hardware isn't always detected perfectly, and it seems that full support for older hardware is being left out of the kernel. I guess there's a sweet spot in the middle where you have a better chance of having every damn thing work as easily as possible.

For instance, I've never been able to suspend/resume my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. And now that it's 7 years old, what are the chances that such support will be added? None.

Sorry for the negativity ... but I'm using this laptop a lot these days, and I'd love to have suspend.

Microsoft didn't get where it is today by being stupid.

And they've got a plan. From the Novell deal over intellectual property in Linux to the company's less legalistic initiatives, Microsoft has its hands in the free, open-source software pie, and it wants to dig even deeper.

Here are a few things to keep an eye on:

• CNet blogger Matt Asay writes about open source in The Open Road from a decidedly business-friendly perspective. He's pretty cozy with Microsoft. And he's all over the Sun/MySQL story. So when it comes to FOSS and the huge corporations involved in it, Matt has a lot of info that we would all do well to keep track of. Again, his apparent closeness to Microsoft might rub you the wrong way, but Matt's perspective is a very important one -- to me, anyway. From Red Hat to Sun, Google, MySQL, IBM and more. I find him less biased and way more realistic than a lot of writers out there. He did work for Novell, and now he's an executive at Alfresco, a company that bills itself as "the open-source alternative for enterprise content management," and if the point doesn't get across, there's this from the Alfresco Web site: "Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings such as Documentum or Microsoft® SharePoint® in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community." He may be cozy with the huge companies that have interests, positive or negative, in open source, but somebody's gotta be on the inside.
• O'Reilly has a Microsoft-sponsored open-source page called Port 25. It's yet another page we would all do well to keep track of.
• And in the "Microsoft is smart" category, the company, along with Novell, is starting to push Moonlight, an open-source version of MS' Silverlight technology. Silverlight is seen as a competitor to Adobe's Flash, and an open-source version of the software, even if it originates from Microsoft, could gain some significant traction ... or it could prompt Adobe to open-source Flash. (If open-source Flash clone Gnash would work for me, I'd say there's another Flash-killer in our midst, but I need to see an app that actually shows a damn YouTube video ... or anything else).

The average Linux geek isn't going to buy any of this, but Linux geeks in the proverbial basement aren't who this is aimed at.

Instead, Microsoft wants to reach the free-spending people in the enterprise who are now using a mix of proprietary and FOSS solutions. Those IT managers want everything to work better -- and especially to work better together -- and they want to keep people happy, both their users and the people who sign off on their budgets.

In other FOSS news, Microsoft is also pushing Novell's SUSE Linux pretty hard ... in China, as I learned in this Matt Asay post.

I don't think we're going to see an open-source version of Windows anytime soon, but you never know what's going to happen with Microsoft.

So Port 25 and Matt Asay's The Open Road -- both things I need to add to the blogroll.

When I had a column in the paper recently, I put out the word that readers could send me questions, and I would try to answer them. Well, one reader wanted to know how to change the fonts in Windows menus.

I had no idea, that being something I've never done before.

But while perusing Carol Bean's excellent blog, I found the answer.

Looks easy enough. Thanks, Carol.

To the reader who e-mailed me, Hugh T. Hoskins, I hope this helps. And thanks for the question.

During the next five days, I'll be dipping into the archives of unpublished Click entries that, for one reason or another, never made it to the live blog.

They're "classic" entries in so much as they're many months old, but they are worthy of publication. A few others were not. The half-baked, stream-of-consciousness ravings were deleted. But get ready for five days of "Classic Unseen Click."

Here is the schedule:

• April 24: Can you (easily) update a BSD system between releases? Or am I barking up the wrong (ports) tree?
• April 25: In the world of open-source operating systems, first impressions count
• April 26: Ubuntu rising
• April 27: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 -- fasten your damn seatbelts
• April 28: DeLi Linux -- finally!

I read through Planet Debian -- which aggregates the blogs of Debian developers -- on a regular basis, and today I found something very intriguing. Not satisfied with any of the traditional Linux/Windows/Mac e-mail tools, David Moreno Garza began using Gmail -- not exactly the go-to geek solution. He eventually added an app called SUP to handle the mail on his own machine. He explains it better then I can:

Then I found Sup, which I think is like GMail but on mutt. It is written in Ruby and distributed as a gem (I’d prefer it to be in C/C++, but I’ll always give the benefit of doubt). Its main feature? A console mail client featuring GMail’s features, such as, one inbox, one big archive and labels all over the place, which is exactly what I was (probably) looking for. As the time of writing,Sup can only connect to IMAPs remote servers or read a number of local file formats. So, I undusted fetchmail and set it up. Since all my mail accounts now are forwarded to the main GMail account, I only need to handle one fetchmail config to get messages with POP (and some procmail recipes salting touch).

Here comes the sweetest thing from all this setup, by enabling GMail’s POP support, you can also specify if you want it to delete the GMail copy or store it. Since I’ve used 2% of all my storage, the best thing to do right now is to store and archive, which means that while i download all my email everyday and several times a day, all downloaded copies are also being stored on GMail, so in case I don’t have access to my machine, I can still find messages on the web interface. GMail also works nicely when you are sending an email from your remote mail client and using GMail’s SMTP, then also the mail you are sending gets stored on your GMail web interface, which is totally cool.

So I think I’m mildly content now with what I have. This also leads me to another awesome feature for me: Spam gets processed by GMail before I fetch it, so most of my downloaded POP mail is ham. In case I want to see some spam, the web interface will have it as usual for 30 days before being deleted.

I don't use Gmail, although I do use Google Docs. But having the flexibility of online Gmail with more powerful mail handling on my desktop sounds like a great thing, indeed.

I'm not ready to try this yet, but if you are, have at it.

So I figure I'll try OpenSUSE 10.3 today. Before that I tried out the Fedora 8 live CD. Not super impressive, although I'm not saying I won't take a look at Fedora 9 when it comes out.

Anyhow, I install OpenSUSE on one of my free partitions. For some reason, I can't get the network configured. My static IP information just won't stick.

This after a weekend during which every time I booted into PC-BSD 1.5 it looked worse. First my ACPI fan management went away, then my KDE "bouncing icon" cursor thingy returned to its pre-1.5 blurriness when a new app is launched..

So I had SUSE on the box. Even though the live CD booted in 1024x768, after the install (during which you'd think the system would ASK me whether or not I wanted a static IP ... but I digress) I had only 800x600 resolution. It was easy enough to choose 1024x768, 24-bit, reboot and get the right resolution, but do they have to make networking so hard?

I should probably give Fedora 8 a run at the hard drive ... or maybe I should just wait for Ubuntu 8.04, which is only a few days away at this point.

Before I did anything, since things were already screwed up, I did a NetBSD 4.0 install to the SUSE partition. It wasn't the prettiest looking thing -- the installer, that is -- and I tried NOT to install a new Master Boot Record. But I did end up with one, and I booted straight into NetBSD. It looks exactly like FreeBSD when you start X. Twm is the window manager. And no, I still couldn't exit X from the Twm menu. I had to use ctrl-alt-backspace. So either Twm, or NetBSD and FreeBSD, do not like the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I wantws to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

Here's how the laptop is set up. The drive is 30 GB. I have Linux swap on hda1. My "experimental" partition, which went from PC-BSD to SUSE to NetBSD in about an hour, is 10 GB on hda2. Debian Lenny is on hda3, also 10 GB. I have an extended partition (hda5) which is formatted to ext3, on which I back up files from the other installs.

To fix GRUB, I booted into Knoppix 5.1.1, opened up a terminal, did su to root and then the following (thanks to Kyle Rankin's excellent "Knoppix Hacks"; and yes, we all need a copy of this very valuable book):

My Lenny filesystem (which had a "good" /boot/grub/menu.lst) was automatically mounted by Knoppix, so I remounted it with the dev option and write permission:

# mount -o remount,dev,rw /mnt/hda3

Then I restored GRUB:

# chroot /mnt/hda3

# grub-install /dev/hda

Again, thanks to Kyle Rankin's "Knoppix Hacks" for the tip.

I'd heard of and read Debian Admin before, but Debian Administration is a new one for me as far as how-to sites go. I found Debian Administration while Googling the words "Debian Administration" to find Debian Admin. I'll have to add both to my links list.

While I'm at it, I want to put in a plug for "The Debian System," which I'm reading now, and which has its own Web page. I'd love to see an updated version of this book to coincide with Lenny going stable, but I don't think it's going to happen. Even though it's from the Sarge era, "The Debian System" is worthwhile as both a historical document and useful treatise on how Debian works, then and even now.

I'm not one to give up, although I seem to do it all the time. If I install an OS, and it doesn't work out, chances are I'll pull it off and replace it with something else. But I keep going back to what didn't quite work all the way, and so I'm back in the world of PC-BSD.

Why both desktop FreeBSD projects -- DesktopBSD and PC-BSD-- insist on pushing KDE and not offering even a spin on Xfce, or GNOME, I don't know. Whether it's habit, preference, or prejudice, I'm more comfortable in GNOME, although I like a well-appointed Fluxbox, Fvwm, or Xfce desktop, and use them fairly often. The fact that PC-BSD installs with Fluxbox means I'll have an alternative environment to play with right away.

I guess coming from a couple of years using machines less powerful than this not-so-powerful laptop (Gateway Solo 1450 with 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM), KDE can be very slow. I love Konqueror, K3B and Krita, but have been less in love with KOffice, and never much liked any of the K text editors (Kate, Kwrite, KEdit).

Right now, I miss the GNOME app that lets me switch easily between network settings (I have static IP at the office, dynamic IP at home).

I've been initially very happy with the way FreeBSD and PC-BSD has treated this laptop. But that happiness gives way to frustration in about 24 hours.

I start out with ACPI management of the CPU fan that eludes most Linux kernels (until I put one quick line in /etc/rc.local). And then I suffered through the bouncing KDE icons that looked like graphical mush whenever I launched an application.

This last time, I happened to install PC-BSD 1.4, and it worked well. But the next day, I rolled in the 1.5 upgrade via PBI, and it all fell apart. My cursor's bouncing launch icons turned back into unrecognizable blobs, and to top it off, ACPI fan management stopped working.

I lost ACPI fan management in just as little time with FreeBSD 7. And suffering through a day of the Twm window manager didn't help. I tried to install Fluxbox, but I couldn't figure it out, and since I couldn't even quit X without doing ctrl-alt-backspace, I quickly fled.

But today, after OpenBSD 4.3 didn't spark an immediate ACPI love affair (I'll try again when 4.3 is released, and again with the release after that -- I will NOT give up), I began looking for things to occupy my free primary partition (BSDs don't like secondary partitions). I thought about OpenSUSE, but that's too boring.

The Internet was moving quickly today in the office, so I downloaded and burned the two PC-BSD 1.5 CDs. The install went perfectly.

Since this is really a Debian Lenny machine -- that's what I use most of the time -- I opted NOT to install a bootloader with PC-BSD 1.5. I already had entries for FreeBSD 7 and OpenBSD 4.3.

One thing I did differently during this PC-BSD install was to create a separate slice for /home (I think it's /usr/home, as the system told me; all I know is I have it). That way I can presumably reinstall without wiping out whatever files I happen to produce with this installation.

And while the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5 screwed up X (even though the xorg.conf files were identical), the straight 1.5 install has left me with a perfect X configuration.

I'd hoped that my daughter's favorite educational game would be available as easy-to-install PBIs, but alas, only TuxPaint has made the PBI cut.

I'm sure that the others -- gCompris and Childsplay -- are available as FreeBSD packages or ports, and I'll get around to installing them as soon as I can.

And I'll be hoping that PC-BSD 1.5 will boot tomorrow with full CPU fan management. One thing I've noticed in my past three FreeBSD-type installs is that the fan cycles much more quickly under FreeBSD than under Linux. This laptop still runs too damned hot, though.

Later that night: OK, so I boot into PC-BSD 1.5 a mere few hours after it was working fine. ACPI control of the CPU fan is a mere memory, as said fan is blasting away unabated. What is the deal? Either the OS controls the fan, or it doesn't. I'm doing a software update right now, and I'm going to resist the urge to wipe PC-BSD off of the drive tonight.

PC-BSD looks great, but there's something about FreeBSD; if my fan starts and stops normally the first time(s) I use it, why does that functionality suddenly fall away?

Konqueror doesn't conquer Movable Type: I've always loved the Konqueror browser. Still do. But it doesn't play nicely with Movable Type. None of the buttons work for styling text or creating links. Sure looks nice, though. And starts quicker than anything. If only GNOME had a browser that was so well-integrated into the desktop environment ... Epiphany is more autonomous. Probably not a bad thing, but who the hell knows?

In response to my last entry on bug reports in Debian, and the distro's propensity to offer workarounds in the messages that follow bug reports without coming right out and saying whether or not the bug is going to be "fixed" (if it's not a bug, it must be a "feature," no?), a discussion started on LXer about whether you should run Stable (currently Etch) or Testing (Lenny).

My point of view is basically that if Etch works for you, it's stable all right. But if things aren't working quite right for your hardware in Debian's Stable release, you might want to start looking elsewhere. Stable isn't going to start sprouting features out of its nether regions just because it doesn't work for you.

Only in Lenny -- with its newer GNOME tools -- did Debian work well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). And Lenny runs better on all my other boxes, too. I haven't had to turn back to Etch on any of my computers to get the best functionality I can out of Debian.

With Ubuntu, not so much. On my main test box, 8.04 is running, but not as well as 6.06 and 7.04. If both Etch and Lenny didn't do so well on this VIA C3 Samuel-based box, I'd probably be running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS for the next year and so of its life before Canonical ends support for it.

Besides running well once installed, for me Debian's installer has never failed me. With one disc, I can install a barebones system, an Xfce, KDE or GNOME desktop, a server, or anything in between with the use of apt/Aptitude/Synaptic.

I read in the now-out-of-date "The Debian System" about some Debian-produces spins of the distro aimed at office use, as well as other segments of the user base, such audio fanatics, kids and others. I'll have to look back again for specifics, but to get to my point, I see no such distros from Debian today -- and I've said all along that Debian could -- and should -- produce an official live CD that has a package mix much like Ubuntu's and installs in pretty much the same way. But it would be Debian, not Ubuntu, and that would mean more speed, greater stability ... and just more Debiany. If "Debiany" is not a word, I'd like to create it right now.

I'm not saying I won't continue to run other distros. I'd like to try Slackware with Dropline GNOME (I like GNOME -- sue me, fanboys), but right here, right now, Debian is what does it for me.

I'm always using a mix of machines and OSes for my work, but until this week, my main "home" machine -- The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- has been mostly used at home for a bit of Web browsing, testing Linux distributions, and my daughter's favorite educational games (gCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, Potato Guy).

But this week I've needed to use the laptop a lot more, while I'm in the office.

We're testing a new blog server, so I'm using my main computer (the Dell Pentium 4 box with Windows XP) to work on the new server, with the $0 Laptop and Debian Lenny for the old server). It's just easier to keep two computers running, given the situation.

I often use my test box at the office, but despite remarkably similar specs (VIA 1 GHz C3 processor in the test box vs. Celeron 1.3 GHz in the laptop), the Gateway computes circles around the VIA box, a converted thin client hobbled by less-than-optimal graphics and sound chips.

Anyway, I'm using the Gateway with Lenny -- and while still the Testing distribution of Debian, Lenny has been running very well on my various computers.

I've been using the Epiphany browser very heavily. I can just as easily use Iceweasel (aka Firefox), but I've grown used to Epiphany. The one thing I miss is the built-in spell-checker of Firefox.

I'm divided on the way Epiphany handles bookmarks. The browser encourages the user to categorize every bookmark, even in multiple ways. So I have categories for BSD, Linux, Debian, etc. The bookmarks themselves are arranged alphabetically, not in the order that they were created.

That's both good and bad. On the one hand, it's easy to find things when they're alphabetical, assuming you've given them an appropriate name (or accepted the one provided by the Web site in question). I'd like a feature by which the most used bookmarks float to the top, but with categorization, it's easy to slice up a bunch of bookmarks into manageable chunks.

For photo editing, I haven't needed to preserve Photoshop-style captions lately, so I've been using MtPaint. I don't remember it being in the repositories for Etch, but I'm sure glad it's there for Lenny. Not that grabbing and installing the .deb package was difficult, because it wasn't, but it's nice to see the package easily available to all. There's a lot to be said for a quick-loading, quick-working image editor for small jobs.

But there's a bit of a gap for me in all of this. I use Linux and recently OpenBSD a lot. But not exclusively. I spend quite a bit of time fighting with XP. Yep, I was pretty happy with it when I first got my Dell box at the office. Even in 512 MB of RAM, the thing was fast. I could open tons of programs, a dozen or more Firefox windows, IE6 wasn't that bad, etc.

But a few years down the road -- and I don't have administrative access to the box, so I can't really fix anything -- the thing slows down to a sludgy crawl halfway through the day. And don't get me started on IE7. I waited over a year after it was released to "upgrade," and to gain tabbed browsing (which I already had with Firefox, my preferred browser in Windows) I had to lose speed and GUI FTP functionality (which I've retained with the windows file interface itself).

Anyway, I'm hammering away in Debian Lenny right now, and I can pretty much say that it does what I need it to do.

While I have my CPU fan under control in pretty much every Linux kernel I've run, I'd love to take the next step and get suspend/resume working. Right now ACPI isn't perfect on this Gateway laptop. Closing the lid, in Debian at least, causes a crash. It doesn't in Puppy Linux, but does in Debian Lenny.

I should probably make that my next project -- getting deeper into ACPI. With suspend/resume working, this laptop would throw off a lot less heat during times I wasn't using it ... which truth be told has been very little time of late.

Even though I did an OpenBSD install on my free primary partition on this laptop, I'm probably going to move on. I want to roll OpenSuse 10.3 onto it before I try out Ubuntu 8.04. My live CD foray with the 8.04 beta on the Gateway didn't go very well, and I'm having ACPI issues with it on my text box as well (a first for Ubuntu; but I saw similar things with Xubuntu).

I have a net install disc for OpenSuse 10.3, but I also picked up a full DVD of the distro at SCALE 6X, and that's what I might try out, possibly this weekend if I get time. The prospect of the new HP Mini-Note, which will be preloaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop has me in a Novell-friendly frame of mind, despite the company's previous intellectual-property deal with Microsoft.

So I'll give OpenSuse a roll before Ubuntu 8.04 goes into release. ... I'm nowhere near getting ACPI working properly in OpenBSD 4.3. I'll wait for a live CD of 4.3 -- should appear sometime soon after the official May release -- and experiment with that.

I've seen the snarkish postings of Reg Developer before. To say that British and Australian Web sites covering technology are way more entertaining than those in the U.S. is a bit of an understatement.

And Reg Developer doesn't disappoint. Its writers know what's important, and they aren't afraid of stirring controversy.

It's the newest addition to my links, which you can usually see to the right of the top post on this blog.

What drew me this morning was an article on the slow, slow process of approving new Debian developers.

Another that got some attention is The Missing Five-Minute Linux Manual for Morons:

At any given time, in various places and languages around the world, there are simultaneously 14 blog entries being written by Linux neophytes, documenting their first faltering steps.

This rate is well down from the 2002 peak of 37 such articles generated per hour, but is still impressive, especially when you remember that back in the old days most blog software defaulted to subject line 'I try Linux!!!' .

It describes this blog very well.

Things are getting a little uncomfortable, it seems, for Psystar, the company that announced on its Web site that it is putting together something first called the Open Mac, then the Open Computer, that takes commodity PC hardware and turns it into a box that either comes with OS X preinstalled or allows the buyers to do it themselves.

Everything from Google Earth searches to out and out surveillance of the company's various alleged addresses has been going on. Steve Jobs doesn't even have to hire Anthony Pellicano -- he's got the geek squad all over it.

Psystar has a message on their site today that attempts to, er, explain the situation:

We're in the process of moving to a new location which is now listed on our contact page. The first new address posted (10481) was in error and our correct address is 10475 NW 28th Street. PSYSTAR was, prior to this past week, not ready to handle the enormous production capacity demanded by the online community. Due to the incredible response we have now expanded to a larger commercial unit to handle the supplies and assembly of Open Computers. THANK YOU for all of your orders.

Midday yesterday our store was not receiving any orders. This was due to the fact that our merchant gateway, Powerpay, dropped the ball on us and refused to process any more transactions from our company. We have reverted to Paypal until we can find a high-volume merchant. Apparently Powerpay was not ready to handle the community's demand for Open Computing.

I guess we'll know what's what when somebody buys one of these boxes, receives it and runs the damn thing.

So is the whole thing a proverbial tempest in a teapot, or does this signal some kind of sea change (cliches? I've got a million of 'em!) in the world of OS X?

As it now stands, I don't thing Psystar is going to amount to much -- although I've been wrong before. It's possible that Psystar, or any number of other PC builders, will offer such a box -- something that makes putting OS X, with the work done by the OSX86 Project, on a non-Apple box. When you get right down to it, $129, which is what it costs for a copy of OS X, isn't that bad of a deal. Free Linux is a better deal, but I'm getting out of the bucket on that one.

Long story short, even though OpenBSD 4.3 isn't scheduled to be released until May, it is available in the mirrors under snapshots.

Since version 4.3 is supposed to have ACPI enabled by default, I figured I'd burn a CD and try it on the $0 Laptop, on which I'd love to control my noisy CPU fan. I've written recently on how FreeBSD seems to do a fine job in this regard, but only for a day before reverting to the previous noisiness.

Now, I've never actually seen any concrete tips on exactly how to control a CPU fan in OpenBSD, but just maybe ... maybe it would work automatically.

No such luck. The CPU fan blew. I'll give it a bit of time, and I might even try FreeBSD again. Am I the only person with this problem? Seems like it.

Anyway, this is my third or fourth OpenBSD install, and the process is quite quick. I figured out how to boot the OpenBSD partition with GRUB (a first for me). Here's the /boot/grub/menu.lst entry for OpenBSD, which I installed on hda2:

title                 OpenBSD on hda2
rootnoverify    (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

Yep, I used the ol' chainloader.

Just for variety's sake, here's the menu.lst for FreeBSD 7:

title         FreeBSD on hda2
root        (hd0,1,a)
kernel     /boot/loader

Next time I multiboot Slackware, I'm using the chainloader, since I've never been able to figure out how to get Slackware 12 to boot from GRUB. Or ... the best way is to install Slackware with LILO, then add the GRUB package (on disc 3 ... or the Slackware FTP), which should write GRUB to the master boot record and create a /boot/grub/menu.lst in Slackware that has the proper entry. That's the theory anyway.

Summing up, I didn't really expect OpenBSD to magically control the Gateway's CPU fan, and I wasn't too disappointed. OK, so I was. I'll file it under "projects," and see how things go in the weeks ahead.

Meanwhile, despite all my complaining, Debian is running great on all my boxes, and I expect the new Ubuntu, due in 9 days at this point, to be a somewhat solid system, which I might multi-boot on this laptop just to see if it holds together for me.

It's funny -- I now officially work for the Daily News' Interactive department after a whole lot of years as a copy editor in the Features department, and I had a story/column in last Saturday's paper, an introduction to Google Docs, and the story itself didn't make it to the Daily News Web site.

I'll fix that when I get in today (I'm working the night shift ...), but here's the version of the story before I had to cut a third of it for space reasons (the story was written in Google Docs, as shown in the image above. That image was sized for this blog with MtPaint, my favorite lightweight image editor for Linux and BSD):

Free Google Docs office suite follows you everywhere

By Steven Rosenberg
Staff Writer

You may be using traditional spreadsheet, word-processing and presentation applications at home, work and school, but the future is already here for these everday tasks -- and that future is online. Google already offers a powerful -- and free -- office suite of applications that live, along with your data, on the company's vast network of servers.

You don't have to download anything to use Google Docs. Just open your Web browser and go to http://docs.google.com. Supported browsers include Firefox and Internet Explorer. If you already have a Google account that you use for Gmail, Blogger or any other Google services, use that as your sign-in. Otherwise, create a Google account by clicking on the Get Started button.

Once you are signed in to Google Docs, you can create and edit text documents, spreadsheets, presentations pretty much the same way you do in Microsoft Office. But again, you pay nothing for the use of Google Docs, although Google does offer a paid plan with additional storage and support for businesses that need it. While many companies want to hold their data close, keeping it on their own servers, others don't want the hassle and expense of maintaining the file servers and software that employees are now using for their day-to-day work.

Among the places Google Docs has caught on is the Los Angeles Daily News, where reporters and editors are using the service to create documents and spreadsheets.

Among the reasons workers at the Daily News and elsewhere use Google Docs -- aside from it being free -- are its collaboration and portability features.

Already me and my colleagues create documents like phone lists and data-laden spreadsheets that we can share and work on from wherever we are. All we do is click the Share button and choose the users we want to have read and/or write access to any particular file.

Documents can also be e-mailed or posted to a blog directly from Google Docs. And more features like these are being added all the time.

And possibly the greatest thing about Google Docs is the access to your documents from any Web-connected computer. Just open a Web browser and log in from wherever you happen to be, and all your Google Docs files are right there. Spell-checking? It's there, too.

But can you print -- you know, on paper -- your documents and spreadsheets in Google Docs? Of course. And Google does it in a pretty clever way, too. When you click the Print icon or select it from the File menu, Google Docs created a PDF file and opens it in Adobe Reader, or whatever PDF application your computer uses (including Preview in Mac OS X). Then you can print that PDF and have a document that looks as good as any one printed from a traditional word-processing or spreadsheet application.

Now before you go chucking your regular office suite, be it Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or iWork, you need to know that Google Docs doesn't match them feature for feature. Easily indenting your paragraphs isn't something that Google Docs is very good at. Sure, you can hit the tab key before each paragraph, but that's a bit barbaric for the nitpickers among us. And those typographical or "smart" quotes that make documents look just a little bit more professional are also difficult -- but not impossible -- to create in Google Docs.

However, for basic functionality, Google Docs can meet the needs of many of the people most of the time. And for convenience (high) and cost (none), it can't be beat.

And Google is preparing to offer many more online-based applications. This week, the company announced a service called Google App Engine that allows programmers to create new applications that will live on Google's servers in the same way as Google Docs. There are already 10,000 coders at work -- that's how many got free access to the new system from Google when the still-developing service was announced this week.

So you can enjoy a free office suite today -- and who knows what Google will be offering next week.

Did I forget to mention Microsoft? The behemoth in Redmond, Wash., is hard at work on its own suite of online applications. You didn't think they'd let Google steal all of their customers, did you?

Steven Rosenberg blogs about technology in a most frugal manner at http://insidesocal.com/click. If you have a question, comment or suggestion, e-mail him at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

Why Debian decided at this juncture to remove the binary blog that supports sound for those with ESS Allegro/Maestro3 chips -- including The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- I don't know.

The problem -- i.e. no sound -- reared itself in the newish 2.6.24-1 kernel that recently rolled into Debian Lenny. It took me awhile before I figured out that booting the previous kernel -- 2.6.22-3 -- brought sound back.

But what if I have to reinstall Lenny and don't get the older kernel? Or what if want to use the new kernel ... and those that follow?

Well, I checked back with the bug report, and there's a fix that involves getting the binary blobs yourself, courtesy of Gabor Burjan:

You do not need to recompile the kernel, you need the appropriate binary firmware blob. Get the firmware package

ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/firmware/alsa-firmware-1.0.16.tar.bz2

and run ./configure && make && make install

After this you should have the following files present:

/lib/firmware/ess/maestro3_assp_kernel.fw
/lib/firmware/ess/maestro3_assp_minisrc.fw

Then, run rmmod snd_maestro3 and modprobe snd_maestro3 again.

I haven't tried it yet, since I still do have the older kernel. I probably will try it, but I'm not happy about it. I have half a mind to wait until the next kernel upgrade to see if the Debian team has come to its collective senses. I can understand distros/projects that really could care less if you used their code or not (OpenBSD comes to mind, but since it's so good, I'm using it anyway ... and the growling and grumbling is part of its charm), but Debian doesn't strike me as one of those projects that either wants to, or can afford to, alienate users new and old with crap like this.

Along this same line, I hope they will fix Debian Lenny's Epiphany bug (which I already fixed on my own, but again, it's something that would send a sane user running into the arms of Ubuntu, or even Windows). That bug appears "closed," but I hope that future users of Lenny don't have to suffer through it.

Even though I've had to do a bit of tweaking, this Gateway laptop responds very well to Debian Lenny. My daughter uses the laptop all the time for her games (Childsplay, gCompris, Potato Guy, Tuxpaint), and it's doing pretty well.

I did another Lenny install today on my test box, on which I did the "standard" install, added X and Fvwm (the window manager that comes standard with OpenBSD and is growing on me) and a few apps -- Geany, Ted, Dillo, Lynx, Iceweasel, sudo and xterm (yep, a "standard" install doesn't include sudo and xterm).

So far the box is performing very well. And yes, Ted did work. I tried Ted on an Etch install yesterday, and it still hasn't been fixed there, but the RTF word processing program works great in Lenny. Thanks, Debian!

Hint: I hadn't built up a Debian box from the "standard" install to include X in awhile. One thing that ensures success when doing this in Debian: use aptitude instead of apt.

I just run aptitude at the command line; I still can't figure it out when you run it as an application and it actually opens up with menus and stuff.

The reason I say to use aptitude instead of apt-get, is that aptitude seems to pick up more packages that you need for stuff to look right and work right.

For instance:

# aptitude install abiword

picks up lots more packages than:

# apt-get install abiword

After using aptitude to install Abiword, you get all the "common" files, plus all the plugins, including the spell checker.

And as far as installing X on the system, which installed with the command line only:

# aptitude install xserver-xorg-core fvwm

was enough to get me going. There was a strange menu that came up in Fvwm that asked me about configuration. I just checked every box, and after that I had my own .fvwm2rc file in my home directory. Fvwm can also use a common configuration file for all users. Read the man page for fvwm to find out more. I was surprised at how good the man page in Debian was. I'll have to compare it with OpenBSD's man page for Fvwm.

So the takeaway is:

• Debian sends you to the Web for help every once in awhile, and you usually get the help you need ... but the Debian team needs to fix stuff that's broken in order to attract and keep as many users as possible.
• Once Debian is working on a machine, it tends to keep working great (barring issues like the sound-less kernel). Debian is fast, has just about everything you could ever want ... and did I forget to say that even Testing is pretty darn stable (they're not lying about that).
• Aptitude is better than apt (yes, I know that Aptitude is based on apt, as is Synaptic, but using Aptitude just works better than either Synaptic or apt).
• I've been running Lenny (Testing) for a few months now, and I plan to stick with it on this laptop when it goes stable. That should mean a long, long run of good computing. Again -- thanks, Debian!

Two more things: I actually like running the Epiphany browser. I find myself using it more and more. I should probably install a KDE-something or other again, just for comparison's sake, but I'm pretty happy with GNOME (although I still use Fvwm, Fluxbox and JWM, depending on the distro and the machine).

Debian Lenny gets OpenOffice 2.4: Among my updates today were the latest version of OpenOffice. I don't use OO much these days, but it's nice to see Lenny get it so relatively quickly. I don't think it's more than a week or two behind the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS beta in this regard.

One thing I hate about writing on the $15 Laptop (currently using OpenBSD, but it really doesn't matter what OS I'm using) is that I don't have Ethernet. My sole means of connectivity is WiFi via an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card.

Don't get me wrong, the Orinoco card works great. It's just that we have no WiFi at the Daily News, nor does it seem like we will get it. I also don't have WiFi working at home. My Netgear router does output 802.11b, but that portion of the router stopped working quite some time ago, and I'm in no hurry to get a new router, although maybe I should be.

Even though it might not have a whole lot of basis in fact, there's something about having a 2.4 GHz wireless connection running 24/7 a couple of feet from my head (which is where the router currently sits -- right next to the bed).

On my old Netgear router, you couldn't switch off WiFi and only use Ethernet, so I just unscrewed the antenna, and perhaps that helped kill the transmitter. Perhaps not, but at any event, it's dead.

A newer router would no doubt enable me to switch the radio on and off, so I wouldn't have to leave the WiFi running all the time. I should probably do that.

In the absence of my own WiFi, yes, I've been piggybacking on my neighbors' WiFi connections. I live near quite a few apartment buildings and condos, and there are quite a few routers putting out signals. None of them is particularly strong. At least none of the ones that are wide open to all users are particularly strong, to be more accurate.

So sometimes I can hit a signal, sometimes not. And I'm not in the habit of doing a lot of major blogging at home. I've got "other things" to do at home. And most don't involve blogging, which I pretty much confine to the other times in my day/week/month.

As a result, entries often languish on this laptop until I can get them posted to the blog. That's probably not the worst thing. It's better than all the entries I've written in notebooks and then superseded by writing an actual entry in the blogging interface, effectively doubling my work, albeit in a very time-shifted sort of way.

Maybe once a week or so I need to take this laptop to the library, where WiFi is free and oh-so-strong, to post these entries.

Or I could just get a PCMCIA Ethernet card ...

ZDNet went the nostalgia route to remember the good ol', stunt-filled days of Power Computing, the company that cranked out licensed Macintosh clones in the '90s before real Steve Jobs shut the @#$^ down.

But with the OSX86 project closing in on letting you me and the other guy run OS X on generic PC hardware, you knew that somebody out there was ready to bring Macintosh-clone goodness to the rest of us.

Enter a company, entity or imaginary figment (I'm not sure what to call it at the moment) called Psystar (the Web site has gotten so hammered, don't even try clicking).

Here's what they claim (with thanks to Jason D. O'Grady at ZDNet for posting what the rest of us can't even see at present):

The company is offering “OpenMac” a US$399 Mac-compatible tower built from generic PC components:

* 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2GB of DDR2 667 memory
* Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics
* 20x DVD+/-R Drive
* 4 USB Ports
* 250GB 7200RPM Drive

For another US$110 and you add an NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT and for another USS$50 you can add FireWire.Apple’s current, lowest-cost machine is the Mac mini which starts at US$599.

Here it is in a nutshell:

Psystar has assembled a system that is completely operational with Leopard called the OpenMac. We call it the OpenMac to reflect the opening of what has previously been a hardware monopoly.

ArsTechnica also has the story, and I have them to thank for the picture above.

In the Ars Technica article, they nail down the price for a box with OS X preinstalled:

Psystar, a plucky little company from Miami, Florida is, for the moment, selling OpenMac, a Mac clone with Leopard pre-installed for $554.

Not to throw too much cold water on the whole thing, the cheapest Mac Mini (which doesn't have quite the specs of the proposed Psystar machine, but nonetheless is a "real" OS X machine) is $599. However, the $799 Mac Mini also doesn't meet the Psystar specs. A Mac Pro -- which the proposed Psystar machine decidedly is not -- is way more than twice as good as this proposed clone, but way more than twice the price, too, starting at $2,799

This story is developing, so expect more -- much, much more -- in the hours and days ahead.

More stories on the Psystar clone:

PC World
Gizmodo
Ubergizmo
The Mac Observer
Insanely Great Mac
Mac Daily News
Wired
I4U News
Yahoo! Tech
Geek.com
Hot Hardware
Electric Pig
The Inquirer

Maybe now we can all see why Psystar's Web site is inoperable. That puppy's taking quite a hammering. If you absolutely must see it, here's Google's cached, graphics-free version.

For one thing, having a kernel and userland developed by the same group of people not only makes sense, it also makes for a system that runs better.

And the quality of the packages is much better than I'm used to. Everything I've tried works. From resolving dependencies to sheer functionality, the apps I've added to my OpenBSD installs have performed as well or better than I'm used to after a year and a half of Linux use.

Now when it comes to sheer speed on the desktop, OpenBSD doesn't win. On my test system, apps load way faster in Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware. But as I've said before, the stability, security and just plain goodness of OpenBSD has kept me using it, especially on the $15 Laptop, challenged as it is with only 64 MB of RAM and a 233 MHz CPU.

I've also been thinking about whether it's "safe" to run OpenBSD-stable, which doesn't get binary updates to its applications between six-month release cycles. Many OpenBSD users run -current, which can be updated all the time, but which does use uncompiled ports to do so.

I figure that OpenBSD's emphasis on security makes the system less vulnerable to problems stemming from unpatched applications, but I may be fooling myself.

It would be ironic if running OpenBSD-stable was a major security risk, and only running a patched OpenBSD-current was safe enough to use.

I only know that most of the big OpenBSD people on the mailing lists are running -current, and hence they don't pay much attention to those running -stable. And I will eventually give -current a try just to see if I can do it, as well as how easy/hard it is to keep patched.

I suppose it's one of those things: I could just run Linux, or FreeBSD, which does try to patch binaries on a regular basis. But for now I'm having fun running OpenBSD, and I'll be continuing on that path for the near future, at any rate.

Even though the 4,000+ packages and ports for OpenBSD include just about every text editor you could want, the out-of-the-box installation includes just one editor. I bet you can guess which one it is.

If you guessed vi, you win. If you didn't, what's wrong with you? I'm not saying you've got to love vi -- and it's perfectly all right if you hate it. But something as hard core as OpenBSD just says "you'll use vi -- and you'll like it."

Like I said, it's not as if you can't add just about any editor you want. I've already put Nano and Geany on my two OpenBSD boxes. But even though Nano -- the default console editor in Debian and Ubuntu -- seems easier to use for the occasional console user with its F3-to-save, none-of-this-two-modes-crap functionality.

And if all you're doing is hacking away at config files in /etc and /home, either editor will do just fine.

But if you're using the console to really write stuff, you'd think that Nano would be the better choice, since you don't have to program your fingers and mind to do things the vi way, switching between text mode and command mode.

For me, the problem with Nano is that it's set by default to justify text. And in doing that, linefeeds are entered into the copy. That mucks things up when I'm taking the text files and pasting them into this blog, for instance. But with justification turned off, the lines careen off the side of the screen, and I can't really see what I'm working on.

But in vi, unjustified text doesn't wrap pretty (although it can easily be set to do so, either in a user's configuration file or in command mode during any vi session). But it does wrap -- even if it breaks between words. And you can see your entire text file on the screen at all times.

And now that I figured out how to cut and past with the mouse in the console (by highlighting the text and clicking both mouse buttons at the same time), I'm way more productive in both vi and Nano than I've ever been. I know that using the mouse is tre wimpy, especially when you've got dozens of buffers at your disposal in most console editors. I'll get there, but for now, I'm using vi more than ever -- and I'm not hating it.

But in the interest of full disclosure, I'm a lot more productive using Geany in X. I just happen to like Geany, and I like having multiple windows open in the same application, the ability to save my Geany session by simply not closing any files, and the general ability of X editors to show type wrapped while not adding any linefeeds to the type itself.

And in a totally unrelated note, I don't really use Abiword much these days, but I really liked the way, when I installed it via Aptitude in Debian, Abiword automatically had the spell checker plugin configured. I can't seem to get spell checking working in Abiword in OpenBSD, and again, it's not something at which I'm an all-out expert in any case. But it's nice to have something to work on.

I've been running OpenBSD 4.2 on my test box -- the VIA C3 Samuel-based thin client -- for a couple of months now. That's at least a year in dog months, and since I'm anxious to put Dru Lavigne's new "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book to work, I wanted to do something I've never done before: Install a BSD on the $15 Laptop, the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

Since I had the aforementioned month and then some experience with OpenBSD, it was naturally time to try something else.

The Compaq had successfully booted the NetBSD 2007 Live CD to a console; I didn't expect the laptop's 64 MB of RAM to run X with KDE, and I was in no way surprised when that didn't happen. But I figured that I could easily do a hard-drive install NetBSD 4.0.

That's where I began. But the NetBSD 4.0 install disc hung early in the pre-booting phase. It's funny, because as I said, a live CD from the same version did boot and run. To make sure I didn't have a bum CD, I tried it on my VIA test box. I got to the boot prompt, a point I couldn't reach on the Compaq. I even tried NetBSD 3.1. It stopped at the same point.

So I moved on to FreeBSD. Version 7.0 just went stable, so I downloaded and burned it. Everything was going fine ... except FreeBSD wasn't having much luck working with my hard drive. It took awhile just to get to the point where I could partition the drive. While the BSD partitioning process isn't as crystal clear as that of your average Linux distribution by any margin, at least it offers some defaults to start with.

I wanted to preserve a little Linux partition on the Compaq's small 3GB drive. I had everything backed up and was willing to lose the whole thing if necessary.

I chose the default partitioning scheme, but when I instructed the installer to write my partitions, the operation failed.

I'm not saying that FreeBSD won't install on this 1999 Compaq laptop -- I'm pretty sure I could make it happen with a little attention paid to reformatting the hard drive.

But I still had OpenBSD 4.2 at my disposal.

And yes it did install. And that's what I'm using now to write this entry. My experience with OpenBSD on the VIA test box didn't hurt, nor did the excellent OpenBSD FAQ.

OpenBSD has been extremely solid when it comes to installing and running on the equipment I have at my disposal, and this install was yet another testament to the quality and depth of the project.

If I've learned anything in the past year and a half, it is this: You can run many flavors of Linux and BSD, even with the X Window System, in only 64 MB of RAM. It's not ideal, and everything runs way better on my 256 MB VIA box and 1 GB Gateway laptop (the $0).

But you can have a graphical display, up-to-date applications and a credible computing experience with 9- or 10-year-old hardware.

(I think This Old PC, my Pentium II MMX-equipped, 256 MB white box is now in its 11th year of service, and it would be a great candidate for Debian, OpenBSD, Puppy or any number of other operating systems and user environments. I only wish my 1996 Macintosh Powerbook 1400 offered a sole credible choice beyond Mac OS 7.6-9.)

And if you enjoy using the command line, it really doesn't matter if your PC is older, slower and equipped with even less memory. Even 16 MB will do it. My way-old Dell 386SX-25 (that's 25 MHz) that started with 2 MB of RAM and eventually topped out at 8 or 10 MB wouldn't do so well -- no modern Linux would even boot on it -- but anything from the 486 era and all things Pentium could run ... something.

I keep meaning to broaden my OS horizons. That's why I wanted to investigate the three main BSD projects in the first place. I'm drawn to them by the development teams' control of and care for a larger portion of the system, extending beyond the kernel and into what is called userland. And in the case of OpenBSD, the emphasis on out-of-the-box security, bolstered with plenty of cryptography, is something I'm very interested in, both on the server and the desktop.

I also greatly appreciate the prodigious amount of high-quality documentation that accompanies each of the top three BSD projects. FreeBSD has a handbook that hovers around 1,000 pages in PDF form. It more than makes up for the small number of aftermarket book titles on the leading BSD flavor, although those that are out there are also of very high quality.

NetBSD and OpenBSD also have lengthy FAQs that measure a couple hundred pages in PDF, and all three projects put a lot of work into making man pages, comprehensive and up to date.

Note: Since I wrote this entry, I've figured out the not-so-mysterious mystery regarding where the "master" Fvwm configuration file lives, and that's made it easier for me to customize my X menus and have them looking the way I want (which begins with OpenBSD's default Fvwm configuration, one I prefer to the three other samples included on the base system).

I was encouraged to learn this morning that one of my favorite vendors, Logic Supply, one of the very best places to get those very small and power-sparing Mini-ITX motherboards, plus all the other parts you need to put one together (or a completely assembled and tested system) is now preinstalling Ubuntu on its systems. Logic Supply is also installing Ubuntu on Pico-ITX boards. Yep, they're even smaller than Mini-ITX.

I heard via Desktop Linux, not coincidentally one of the best places to find out what's happening in the world of GNU/Linux.

Since Mini-ITX and Pico-ITX are used all the time in embedded applications -- everything from controlling remote weather stations to traffic signs -- and with Linux being one of the major platforms of choice for such uses, it's great to see Logic Supply and Ubuntu's parent company Canonical getting together on this venture.

For more detailed info on which motherboard are supported for Ubuntu, go to Logic Supply's Ubuntu FAQ. There you find out not only what motherboards (they call them "mainboards," but it's the same thing) work well with Ubuntu, but also those that work less well or not at all. Here are more details on the "quirks," as they call them.

(Photo above: the VIA EPIA PX10000G Pico-ITX, one of the Logic Supply mainboards listed as compatible with Ubuntu. The board costs $231).

OpenBSD 4.3 is being released on May 1, 2008, but if you pre-ordered the CDs, they're already being shipped. Another good reason to order the CDs. Yeah, I know it's $50, and we're accustomed to getting everything for free ... but it's nice to support the project.

I've been keeping an eye on the OpenBSD Journal, and this entry has some of the editors of the site (http://undeadly.org -- who doesn't love that URL?) were discussing the new features. If this works, it'll be a pig-in-shit-happy moment for me (emphasis mine):

Johan M:son Lindman (johan), on ACPI:

ACPI is as of the 4.3 release turned on by default. This means that a fair amount of newer computers that would previously require manual configuring by means of UKC or config will now "just work". As with most large changes acpi(4) is still a tad rough around the edges but the fundamental pieces are in and this should make it easier for developers to further extend and add features to it. One much anticipated feature will be suspend/wake, it is not yet working so a lot of OpenBSD laptop users will be looking forward to this being added in the future.

I would love suspend/wake, but what I would really love is my CPU fan to be under ACPI control. I have a feeling I could make it happen, but I'm not yet worthy.

(Thanks to Paul de Weerd for the picture of his OpenBSD CDs and packaging)

I've been using OpenBSD for a few months now, and one of the problems I've had is the inability to find the master configuration file for .fvwmrc. I've read the man page for fvwm but didnt' read it closely enough. The answer was there all the time.

I've grown quite fond of the Fvwm window manager. These days I prefer it to Fluxbox, even, and I have OpenBSD to thank for introducing me to it. (Note: I didn't have the same feeling about Twm, the default window manager in FreeBSD. Even though Fvwm is based on Twm, the former is way, way better than the latter.)

I, for the life of me, couldn't find the master Fvwm configuration file. As the man page said, the .fvwmrc file in the user's home directory is the first place Fvwm looks for its configuration file. That enables every user on the system to have his or her own customized desktop. If ~/.fvwmrc is not present, then the window manager looks in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/ for a configuration file.

Here's where I didn't read closely.

I plainly see system.fvwm2rc, system.fvwm2rc-sample-1 and system.fvwm2rc-sample-2. Changes made in any of these three do not change the default Fvwm configuration. Copying any of these three into your home directory as .fvwmrc does provide a usable Fvwm configuration file, but they're all radically different than the default version, which I prefer for a number of reasons; the people rolling OpenBSD out for us are very good at what they do.

But where -- WHERE? -- is the master Fvwm configuration file? Read the man page more carefully:

During initialization, fvwm will search for a configura- tion file which describes key and button bindings, and a few other things. The format of these files will be described later. First, fvwm will search for a file named .fvwmrc in the user's home directory, then in ${sysconfdir} (typically /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm). Fail- ing that, it will look for system.fvwmrc in ${sysconfdir} for system-wide defaults. If that file is not found, fvwm will be basically useless.

And pay particular attention to this part (emphasis mine): First, fvwm will search for a file named .fvwmrc in the user's home directory, then in ${sysconfdir} (typically /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm).

I always did a standard ls command while in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm. That didn't give me the dot-files. Doing ls -a shows the dot-files, too, and I see that there is a file called .fvwmrc in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/.

Problem solved.

I made a copy of the original /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/.fvwmrc file so I'll always have it in its original state. Now I can copy it into my home directory as .fvwmrc and have only my own account's configuration set by it, or I can, as root, modify /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/.fvwmrc and have the window manager configured the same way for all users who don't have their own .fvwmrc in their home directories.

Note: Make sure you copy .fvwmrc over to your user account while logged on as that user and not as root. Otherwise you won't have write privileges in your own .fvwmrc file. I only know this because I did it that way. I used sudo (I gave myself sudo privileges awhile ago) to copy .fvwmrc as temp.fvwmrc (call it whatever you want), and then made a copy as .fvwmrc instead of monkeying around with the permissions:

$ sudo cp .fvwmrc temp.fvwmrc
$ sudo rm .fvwmrc
$ cp temp.fvwmrc .fvwmrc
$ sudo rm temp.fvwmrc

Remember, you only have to do this if you screwed up like me. If you make the backup of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/.fvwmrc as root, then copy the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm/.fvwmrc file to your home directory as your user, all the permissions will be right as the proverbial rain.

Fun facts from the fvwm man page:. While Fvwm comes configured with nine virtual desktops, you are free to add more. But how many can you have? "Approximately 4 billion," says the man page. Also, Fvwm is extremely flexible. Just about every parameter can be adjusted by the users -- hence Fvwm can be whatever you want it to be, only limited by your knowledge of the program and the time you have. One thing that's great is the ability to configure where on the various desktops (and where exactly on each individual desktop) a given application will launch, as well as exactly how big a window the application will open in.

Flexible, powerful and efficient. That's what OpenBSD and Fvwm are all about.

I haven't begun to scratch the surface yet, but I now have a Fvwm configuration to begin with that I like (the default one) much better than the other samples provided in the system. Again, thanks to the entire OpenBSD team for rolling out such a fine OS.

An observation: Deciding to use OpenBSD as a desktop operating system isn't a slam dunk in any way. While the quality of the system is high, and the security aspects -- most designed to protect servers -- are very much attractive on the desktop, using the stable version of OpenBSD isn't at all like running Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, or even FreeBSD.

Every six months, the OpenBSD team issues a "stable" release -- now version 4.2, with 4.3 coming out in May. In the interim, you need to monitor the security mailing list or check the errata on the Web site for possible problems with the base system. As far as applications go, the binary packages are generally not updated at all between releases. And there's really no mechanism in OpenBSD to do periodic updates of precompiled binary packages. So if you're used to getting a new version of Firefox every couple weeks or so, it's not going to happen.

Some would argue that OpenBSD's difference from most other operating systems, and its emphasis on security, makes it less vulnerable to things such as Firefox breaches. I can't really say whether or not this is true. And the OpenBSD team encourages users to install the -current branch instead of -stable. -Current is updated all the time, but such updates require users to continually compile the source updates into executable binaries for your system.

It's not all that difficult, but it can be time-consuming. My short experience using ports in FreeBSD made me, at first anyway, wonder how long I could stand all that compiling, especially when it's so much quicker to download and install a precompiled package, if your architecture has the package you need. I know that many architectures in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD have few, if any binary packages, and everything must be installed from ports.

There's a bit of a tempest brewing on the OpenBSD mailing lists right now over whether users of OpenBSD -stable (i.e. 4.2) are subjecting themselves to undue risk by running Firefox 2.0.0.6 instead of 2.0.0.13 or wherever it's at right now. Users of -current can roll in the newer version from ports. Again, since I'm running 4.2-stable, I haven't done it.

And again, I don't know exactly how necessary it is to do all of these updates in OpenBSD. I do know that I will install 4.3 when it comes out, and for awhile at least, I'll have more up-to-date packages all around. And I'll probably take the plunge eventually and install -current.

One more thing: I've been doing a few tests, and OpenBSD is a bit slower on the desktop than, say, Debian and Ubuntu. Once again, I have no idea why. But the added security and stability of OpenBSD, as well as its overall quality, gives the user something in exchange for somewhat slower performance. OpenBSD is certainly not as quick as Slackware, but OpenBSD starts out in much better "shape" as far as the default configuration goes -- for me anyway. The package management in OpenBSD makes it much easier for me to customize my system than does Slackware. In OpenBSD, there are over 4,000 packages for i386 in the repositories, and dependencies are taken care of. While I can grab packages and figure out the dependencies, or use Slackbuilds for Slackware, it's a much more time-consuming process. Of course Debian has apt, and a barebones installation can be quickly built up.

It all depends on what floats your geekish boat. And for now, it's a combination of Debian and OpenBSD, with a smattering of Ubuntu on the side. And I've still got one Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 installation that I enjoy using. Wolvix manages to take a Slackware 11 base and add all the applications that I like to use, while taking away all the KDE stuff -- including the KDE desktop itself -- that I really prefer not to have on my system. Wolvix's Xfce/Fluxbox combo is much better equipped than plain Slackware, which also has Xfce and Fluxbox but doesn't have enough non-KDE apps to make the lighter desktop usable.

For now I'm having a lot of fun with OpenBSD. Figuring out how the ACPI works for my Gateway laptop's CPU fan would be a major step forward for me, but I fear I will never get there. That's why I'm running only Linux on the $0 Laptop. In Linux, I've got fan management down pat. In FreeBSD it's pretty flaky, and in OpenBSD, I have no idea where to begin. Since the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt) doesn't have ACPI, it's the perfect machine on which to run OpenBSD, and that's exactly what I'm doing. The same goes for my VIA C3 Samuel-based test box. I'd love to tame the laptop with OpenBSD, but I just don't think I'll ever get there.

The UMPC -- or mini-notebook -- segment of the laptop market is exploding -- and a major player has just raised the stakes considerably with an entry that looks better than just about everything else out there, while being very competitive on price and features.

The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC weighs a bit under 3 pounds, uses a power-saving VIA C7 CPU and costs $500 for the basic model, which ships with a 9-inch, 1280 x 768 pixel scratch-resistant display, 512 MB of RAM, a 4 GB Flash drive for storage and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop operating system.

For $50 more, you get double the memory and a traditional 120 GB hard drive. Add another $50 and the Mini-Note will ship with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows XP Professional. A $750 model includes Windows, 2 GB of memory, a bigger battery and Bluetooth.

All models include built-in Ethernet and WiFi.

And the best thing about HP's mini? The nearly full-sized keyboard that's much more comfortable for my full-sized fingers.

The HP mini competes with such sub-notebooks as the ASUS Eee and Everex Cloudbook, both in the $500 range. Initial reports indicate that the HP notebook offers better build quality than its competition.

So if you want a mini-notebook and don't want to part with $1,799 to $3,098 for a MacBook Air, you've got more choices than ever.

Here are reviews from Laptop Mag and Notebooks.com.

(Thanks to Linux Devices for the picture above).

Never mind that what I really need is an up-to-date "Absolutely OpenBSD," but since I'm in an I'll-take-what-I-can-get mood, I just secured a copy of "The Book of PF: A No-Nonsense Guide to the OpenBSD Firewall," which for all practical purposes is the most up-to-date book out there that has at least some focus on OpenBSD.

In this book by Peter N.M. Hansteen, I hope to get somewhat up to speed on PF, the packet filter that originated in OpenBSD but which now is available in the other BSDs as well -- though not in Linux.

Among other things, the book will teach you how to:

• Use PF to create a wireless access point and lock it down tight with authpf and special access restrictions
• Create rule sets for all kinds of network traffic, whether it is crossing a simple home LAN, hiding behing NAT, traversing DMZs, or spanning bridges

OK, I barely understood half of that, but I really like the whole No Starch Press vibe. I have a copy of the now-out-of-print "Absolute OpenBSD" on its way to me now, and I'm also waiting for the out-of-date-but-still-in-print "The Debian System" to get here. I guess I have a thing for oldish books.

Back to "The Book of PF." Since I'm interested in all things OpenBSD, networking among them, I'm anxious to see this 2008 book, which has plenty of advocacy in its pages for OpenBSD as an operating system.

I'd like to commend No Starch for the choices it has made thus far, and while I'm happy that they're putting out a third edition of their Ubuntu book, and am way more happy that Michael Lucas has revised his FreeBSD book, again, I'd like to see Lucas take another crack at OpenBSD.

Google fired its latest shot across the bow, this time aimed not only at Microsoft's bread and butter but at Amazon, too.

Google's new Apps Appliance, which has just been opened -- for free -- to 10,000 developers, enables those programmers to use the open-source Python programming language (with more languages on the way) to develop online applications that will live in Google's computing cloud -- much like the current MS Office-killer Google Apps.

The initiative also aims directly at Amazon, which has not so quietly been developing and marketing its own computing cloud, offering storage, Web, online payment and database services, among others.

And not at all coincidentally, Microsoft is developing its own online-application initiative, with plans to reportedly sell a software bundle that includes the traditional MS Office apps along with online access to those very same programs for those who wish to work that way.

But when Google's in the house, can Microsoft (or even Amazon) play with the big boys when it comes to online apps?

I didn't think tape had a chance, but right now, digital videotape -- especially a form of it called LTO, or linear tape-open -- is a superior medium for archiving high-grade digital video, says an expert at Woodland Hills-based Panavision, a maker of high-grade camera systems for the movie and TV industry.

John Galt, senior vice president of the Advanced Digital Imaging Group at Panavision, in a conversation with MTI Film CEO Larry Chernoff at last year's HD Expo in Burbank, recently posted by Panavision, said that hard drives just aren't up to the task.

"Conceptually, if we look at recording media reliability, I think at the bottom of the reliability heap I would put disk drives. ... They fail more often than the manufacturers would like us to believe; however, with appropriate application of striping or RAID-type arrays, often you can recover. Many facilities use large disk arrarys for the post process ... but they do have backup because things do fail."

According to Panavision's Web site, the company's equipment has been used on scores of productions, including (and I do realize this list could use an update) motion pictures "Master and Commander," "Seabiscuit," "The Last Samurai," "Mystic River," and "Cold Mountain," along with TV shows "Everybody Loves Raymond," "CSI" and "24."

Chertoff, of MTI Film -- which specializes in software for post-production work in a digital environment, says that magnetic hard drives have their place in film production -- but they can't stand alone.

"To have a complete hard drive environment and to administrate that hard drive environment ... I'd rather shoot myself. But the idea of using hard drive technology is absolutely important for online access. ... For near line access, whether it's videotape or LTO, or whatever tape format you wish, that's an inexpensive, accessible way of archiving your material until you need to bring it online.

LTO -- linear tape-open -- currently has a capacity of 800 GB per tape and transfers data at 120 MB per second, according to Wikipedia. Future renditions of LTO are expected to double that capacity and then double it again.

Both Galt and Chernoff agree that dailies are a particular problem in digital production.

"The idea of seeing high-quality dailies in a timely manner ... is extremely important," Galt said. "It was something that used to happen when we shot film and looked at print dailies. And now it's completely gone. ... We need to reconsider how we do production and post-production. ... Sometimes problems exist that are not seen in a cursory viewing of highly compressed low-definition images."

And while digital filmmaking is one of the leading examples of a task that produces a whole lot of data that has to be processed, stored and archived very quickly, almost any task that relies on large amounts of constantly changing data needs to make sure that their storage and archiving situation is as ready for anything as it can be.

(Author's note: I'd watch the video myself, but since it requires the QuickTime plugin, and since QuickTime is one of the worst applications to run on Windows that I've ever seen, I'll be content to a) read the PDF transcript and b) watch it on a Mac, where QuickTime runs great.)

The same thing has happened to me more than once. I install a FreeBSD-derived operating system on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450) and I marvel at the way it manages the noisy CPU fan right out of the box.

Then, the next day, it's all over. The fan blows. And blows. Even a complete reinstall won't get back my fan-managed bliss.

Another thing that impressed me about PC-BSD 1.4 was the fact that the bouncing icon on my KDE cursor was rendered properly. Before 1.4, it was an annoying graphical blog that didn't look anything like it was supposed to.

But when I rolled PC-BSD 1.4 onto the box, the X configuration utility fixed that problem for me. For a day I had a FreeBSD-based system with a fan that didn't blow all the time and a perfect X configuration.

The next day, I started PC-BSD 1.4 on the laptop. The fan blew, as I said, with no relief. I then downloaded the PC-BSD 1.5 upgrade, and even my lovely, perfectly rendered cursor icon reverted to a graphical blob -- the same blog I see in DesktopBSD and in older versions of PC-BSD.

No fan management (and it doesn't look easy to fix it, either), a crappy looking cursor ... I'm not happy. Another upgrade that made things worse, not better.

I've been wondering if and when OpenOffice 2.3 would give way to version 2.4 in the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS beta. It finally happened with one of my recent updates of the system.

Like I said in my review of the 8.04 beta, I rarely use OpenOffice, preferring a plain ol' text editor or more-fancy "development" editor (Geany, Bluefish, Scite, Mousepad, Nano, even vi) for most writing, using a lighter-weight word processor (AbiWord, Ted) on occasion.

But for "fancy" writing -- i.e. stuff that needs to see print in a certain, specific format (which for me means "smart" or "typographical" quotation marks), OpenOffice is essential. It's one of free, open-source software's killer apps -- and the fact that it runs on Linux, all the major BSD projects, Windows and sorta, kinda on the Mac (depending on whether you run the X11 environment or Mac's normal Aqua interface) only adds to its power.

And since Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has a desktop life of three years (beginning on April 24, 2008), and at that point the package versions will, to some extent, be locked in, I'm glad that the Ubuntu team continues to front-load 8.04 -- nicknamed Hardy Heron -- with the most recent packages. It'll make the prospect of sticking with 8.04 for a year, two or three (remember that Ubuntu issues a new release every six months, and the non-LTS releases receive 18 months of desktop support) becomes more palatable with every new version of an app that Ubuntu offers.

To that end, the Firefox 3 Beta in Ubuntu 8.04 hasn't been performing as well as I'd like. For one thing, whenever I quit Firefox and then try to reload it, a screen pops up telling me that I'm already running FF and should close that process before starting another. I click OK on the box, then start FF again, and all is well, but it's still annoying.

And the bigger issue is Flash. As I said in my review, Ubuntu has tied the implementation of Firefox plugins to Ubuntu's own package management system. That's a good thing. In both Ubuntu and Debian, I've had more success adding plugins like Flash through the browser itself than by installing them through the systems' respective package management utilities (Synaptic, apt or Aptitude).

First I tried the newish, open-source Gnash, which is an attempt to offer Flash compatibility in a package that is not controlled by Adobe. And while Gnash installed fine, it didn't work on any of the Flash-equipped pages on which I tried it. Even YouTube. And if it doesn't work on YouTube, then what the hell is it good for?

So I removed Gnash with Synaptic and installed Flash through the browser. But after that, the browser ran as if Flash was not installed. When I got to a page with Flash, Firefox would offer to install the plugin, but when I clicked the "install plugin" window, Firefox would say it was already installed. Be that as it may, I still didn't have Flash capability in Firefox.

I removed the Flash plugin in Synaptic (I still can't figure out how to do it through Firefox itself) and reinstalled from the browser a few times. It still didn't work.

But today I decided to reinstall the Flash plugin in the Synaptic Package Manager. The package was already on the system, so I didn't even have to download it from the repositories again. It reinstalled, I started Firefox, and I finally have Flash capability.

I still see a little hinkiness in the graphics in the Firefox 3 beta. My test system doesn't have the best graphics chipset, but still, that's a few too many blurry boxes for my taste.

I'll probably install the Epiphany Web browser -- a key component in the GNOME desktop -- to do a comparison. I've grown quite fond of Epiphany through using it in Debian, and those running Ubuntu should know that they have a Mozilla-like counterpart to Iceweasel/Firefox.

Soon I hear that Epiphany will be built upon something called Webkit instead of Mozilla, and at that point Epiphany will diverge from Firefox in a major way, I predict. It could be better, could be worse. Whatever happens, I'll certainly be following it. Browser diversity, such as it is, is a huge deal for me because I -- and I suspect many of you -- spend most of our time in the Web browser. For that reason alone, it's probably the most important application on the desktop. It is for me, at any rate

Just yesterday I was extolling the virtues of using Rich Text Format in Movable Type.

Well after a day of using it, the slight bit of slowness it adds to an already-slow application (i.e. Movable Type in general) is more than I can take. So I turned it off.

Now that I'm back in "convert line breaks" mode, things are still a bit slow, so it's more a reflection of my system than anything else. But after having problems putting the cursor where I want it to be, and then dealing with all the extra tags that Rich Text Format mode inserts into my entries, I think I'll stick with the code-heavy mode I know when using Movable Type.

If I want to use Rich Text Format now, I can always use the drop-down menu on the entry box to invoke it at any time. I'll continue to experiment with it, but for now I don't want it as the default.

Storage Bits blogger Robin Harris of ZDNet thinks it's Microsoft in full retreat mode:

Today’s mid-range Vista PC is tomorrow’s ULCPC. The reasons vendors
and customers balk at Microsoft’s $50 Vista tax today won’t change.
Consumers will pay $50 on a $600 machine. But $50 on a $200 machine? No
way.

People are realizing that for much of what they do - web surfing,
email, online video - can be handled by much smaller and cheaper
systems. As Linux continue to refine the GUI and simplify its distros,
the Windows advantage continues to fade.

The Storage Bits take

First time users who learn Linux will have no reason to ever pay for
Windows. Just as I deciphered the Apple II’s CLI 30 years ago, today’s
eager, but poor, first timers will figure Linux out.

Microsoft’s Vista is a slow-motion disaster. Bloated and inflexible,
expensive and late, Vista is a continuing drag on Microsoft’s business
flexibility.

For another view from ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes says it's time to pull the plug on Windows XP:

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t like XP, but that time
has passed.  Long passed.  The last few XP installs that I’ve carried
out have shown me how painful the process is compared to Vista.  First,
the install process demands that you stand around the system for an
extended period of time to answer a variety of questions.  With Vista
the process has been cut down to a few choices at the beginning of the
installations process and afterwards I can walk away and leave it to
finish on its own.  Then there’s finding all the necessary drivers.  A
system that needs me to find half a dozen or so drivers with XP
installed doesn’t need any with Vista.  That’s a hassle I’m happy not
to have any more

Also, as I increasingly move over from 32-bit to 64-bit, with
Vista I finally have a 64-bit platform that works reliably and allows
me to break the 4GB barrier without having to suffer much in the way of
downsides.  XP Pro 64-bit couldn’t deliver me that no matter how often
I tried.

...

Maybe SP3 will rejuvenate XP a bit, maybe it won’t.  Either way, I
doubt that the service pack will change the fact that XP is long in the
tooth on a number of fronts.  It’s time for me to put my XP CDs into
the drawer of doom.

And what would an analysis of a Microsoft vs. Linux issue be without Rob Enderle, as quoted by eWeek, on the continuing availability of Windows XP Home for ultra-portable machines like the Asus Eee that are currently shipping with Linux:

But to Rob Enderle, the
principal analyst for The Enderle Group, Vista just is too heavy for
many of these devices and likely would not have been sold on them.

"For Microsoft, it was a choice of letting Linux go unchallenged in
this segment or block it using XP, which provides a slightly better
user experience and has some software compatibility advantages over
most of the Linux implementations I’ve seen so far," he said. "They
wisely chose not to hand this market to Linux on a silver platter, but
Linux will improve while XP won’t, and some of the Linux stuff I’ve
seen lately is actually competitive with Apple."

And there's always Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols of Desktop Linux playing up the problems with Vista in another eWeek story:

Goodbye Vista. It has not been fun knowing you.

I predicted that Microsoft was giving up on Vista in January. It seems I was right. Microsoft's own top brass had hated Vista when it first came out, why should they expect anyone else to like it?

Vista SP1 has proven to be a painful upgrade and its performance still lags behind XP SP2 and, the still unreleased XP SP3. Worse still, from a Microsoft executive's viewpoint, Windows is actually losing desktop market share to Mac OS X and Linux. Microsoft never loses desktop market share. But with Vista Microsoft is finally losing customers.

So where do I stand on all of this? My opinion of Windows XP was a whole lot higher a few years ago when I first got my main work box, a Dell with a Pentium 4 at 3 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. I don't thing anybody's eager to run Vista on this kind of hardware, and for the great majority of us, the OS stays the same throughout the life of the box -- there ain't gonna be no upgrading in this office, that I can tell you.

Among the things I'm not happy with are IE 7, which looks better than IE 6 but is dog-slow and doesn't allow me to use it as a full FTP client (which I can still do by opening a "My Computer" window from XP itself, thankfully).

And much of the speed I enjoyed overall when running a fresh XP box has evaporated over the years -- and I have neither the administrator's access nor anybody in tech support who will do anything but wipe the whole box without backing up any of my data (our main publishing system has remote servers, and so our local boxes have no other network storage or backups aside from CD-R discs).

One thing I can tell you is that my 2003-era iBook G4 with OS X 10.3.9 is runniing just as well today as it did when we got it five years ago. Wish I could say the same for XP.

As far as my own boxes, I have one Windows 2000 install left that I never turn on. I'll probably pull the drive at some point and run OpenBSD or Debian on it. I haven't done a Windows install in over a year -- I do have a Win 2000 disc if I need to do it.

I got tired of not wanting to pay for software like MS Office and Adobe Photoshop -- and not wanting to steal it, either, like most of the people out there.

That's why free, open-source software like Linux, the various BSDs and the thousands of applications that run with them are a complete godsend. Why let a couple of very powerful, very rich corporations have such a stranglehold over our technological lives? And no, you're not sticking it to the man by stealing his software either. Two wrongs do not make any kind of right. They shouldn't charge so much, but you shouldn't pirate it either. And with things like Linux, you don't have to.

Yeah, there are quite a few hardware vendors who, like Microsoft and Apple, don't provide open-source drivers for non-proprietary systems and also don't open up their hardware and software specs so others can create those drivers. But there are many vendors who do, who want to create a whole lot of goodwill with the techy-geeky types who run Linux or BSD, because they know these are the kind of people who help others -- both individuals and companies large and small -- make decisions on what kind of hardware and software to use.

And while you can safely run Mac's OS X without a cadre of antivirus and third-party utility products, you can't do that with any version of Windows. Once you pay, you've got to keep on paying to safeguard your system, and even then you can run into plenty of problems.

Don't get me wrong -- Linux, as it exists in today's distributions, is not perfect. But it's getting better all the damn time. And it remains free. And not just free of cost, but free as in freedom.

I'm not saying the world of nonfree software should go away, but for the great majority of users out there, free is what works the most -- and the best.

Free software exists because people want it that way. Most of the developers working on the Linux kernel don't work for free, though many do. Companies that stand to gain from open-source software pay these coders to work on projects that matter to their business. And we all benefit.

I'm not one of those people who say it's Linux or bust. That's why I've done quite a bit of work with OpenBSD especially, as well as NetBSD and FreeBSD. The now open (see, it's in the name) OpenSolaris is going through a rocky patch with its community, but it's yet another alternative, especially for servers. I'm also rooting for projects like Haiku to add more diversity to the desktop.

You see, it's not about free vs. nonfree (although it kind of is). It's about choice, avoiding vendor lock-in and the abuse that comes from that, and about the innovation that comes only from competition. Do you think Microsoft would be working on a next-generation operating system if all these free alternatives weren't holding its feet to the fire? I don't think so.

To sum up, I wholeheartedly believe that freedom on our computers and other devices (be they phones, music players, e-book readers, video devices or just about anything else) is vital to our freedom as a collective people and more importantly as individuals.

So I started with XP's swan song and ended with a "free as in freedom" diatribe. Until next week, that's it from me.

It's kind of funny that I blog about technology yet I've never -- until today -- looked at the Daily News' technology page.

It's got a lot of stuff from our sister paper the San Jose Mercury News, which being in the middle of Silicon Valley should have an insider's take on this sort of thing, no?

And another thing: On the technology page, the upper right corner features a box with the most recent Click entries. Now that's something I can support wholeheartedly.

I did an install of FreeBSD 7 on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) a couple of weeks ago for a number of reasons.

First, I wanted to see how the new FreeBSD would run. It's supposed to be light years faster than the previous releases, at least in server situations, and I'm very much interested in how it performs on the desktop as well.

Besides Linux, which I'm still running plenty, I'm determined to see what the non-Linux alternatives have to offer. Due to it being the first BSD I could successfully install on my VIA C3 Samuel test box, I began with OpenBSD, a system I continue to be very impressed with. Sure, I had to do a bit of reading in order to do the install, but I followed the FAQ and was able to get a working system very quickly.

Now that I'm building new blogs in Movable Type as part of my job at the Daily News, I've been able to peer under the proverbial hood and learn a thing or two.

One thing I did pick up was the option to use Rich Text Format to compose blog entries. You can select RTF in the little format drop-down window at the upper right corner of your entry box while writing the post, or you can go into Preferences -- Blog Settings -- Entry and, in our case, change from "convert line breaks" to "rich text format."

And the best thing is that you can always switch back, either for a single post or for all of your blogging.

And when you're in Rich Text Format, bold looks like bold, italic like italic, and you can actually see the art you drop into your blog without previewing the entry.

There are a couple of buttons on the Create Entry box below the Format drop-down -- with the letters A and <A>. Click on A for WYSWYG, and <A> for HTML mode to see the code in your post.

WYSWYG -- it's the one thing that I thought was missing from Movable Type, the biggest thing that separates it from Wordpress and Blogger as a blogging platform. But with Rich Text Format turned on, you can compose a blog entry in all the WYSWYG splendor of Movable Type's competitors.

You know what they say: Once you go WYSWYG, you never go back. They do say that, don't they?

Microsoft has been trying to kill Windows XP for months. They really, really want you to use Vista. Now they've set a date, and that date is June 30. Unless you're buying an underpowered UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) that would otherwise ship with Linux, or you live in a country that isn't shipping the most modern systems, you've got less than three months to phone up your favorite PC vendor and have a box configured with XP.

Or maybe you've got a little longer. I can't really figure out where Micorsoft is on this. From Mary Jo Foley's post:

For plain-vanilla PCs, Microsoft is holding fast to its June 30 preload cut-off for XP. (In September, Microsoft granted PC makers a five-month extension, allowing them to continue preloading and selling at retail Windows XP until June 30 of this year. ) As Microsoft noted previously, users still will be able to get XP preloaded on new machines from white-box vendors/system builders through January 31, 2009. And Vista Business and Ultimate customers with volume-license contracts can still get XP via their “downgrade” rights.

What does that mean for Dell, HP, Lenovo, or your favorite seller of hardware? I have no idea. But I do know that the end is near -- for Windows XP, anyway. Vista might not be so bad, but I think most in the industry are looking ahead to Microsoft's next OS. They think of Vista as "Windows Me II," and are waiting for something better, faster and, yes, stronger from the boys and girls in Redmond.

I generally don't run beta releases, let alone review them, but I'm having a hard time waiting to find out what Ubuntu 8.04 LTS -- nicknamed Hardy Heron and set for an April 24 release -- is all about.

Why am I so excited about Ubuntu 8.04? First of all, I'm very much in favor of the LTS -- Ubuntu's long-term support release -- which will receive updates for three years on the desktop and five years on the server. And since the Ubuntu team is intent of packing this new LTS with as many bleeding-edge packages as possible -- the Firefox 3 beta for instance -- 8.04 LTS should remain comfortable for a lot longer than other distribution releases that offer long-term support.

I finally got around to filling in a bunch of links on the right side of the blog page. The links I chose should reveal a bit regarding what I'm all about these days. I'll probably bulk it up even more, adding some Apple-oriented items, as well as stuff that has nothing to do with desktop computers.

You may have read about my networking problems with the Ubuntu 8.04 beta. Today I decided to drill down a bit and figure out whether or not I could fix the problem myself.

I'm sure that the Ubuntu team will get around to fixing this ... eventually. But since I want to use Ubuntu 8.04 with as little pain as possible right now, 22 days before the official release, here's the fix I made so my network interface is properly configured when I boot into the Hardy beta release:

Here's the problem. I'm using a static IP, which I configured with the Network Settings application when I first installed Ubuntu 8.04. But every time I reboot, the network is not configured, and I can't get to the Internet or my local network. My static IP information is right there in the Network Settings boxes, but when I do:

$ ifconfig

... the interface is up, but the static IP numbers are not there. And that means no networking.

I checked the relevant Ubuntu 8.04 configuration file, /etc/network/interfaces, and here's what I found:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eth0 inet static
address 192.9.200.24
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.9.200.254

Something was missing, To be sure, I booted into Ubuntu 6.06 and checked the same config file.

Here's what I found in Ubuntu 6.06 (I've put the missing line in bold so you won't miss it):

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.9.200.24
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.9.200.254

I booted back into Ubuntu 8.04, opened a terminal (Appications -- Accessories -- Terminal) and did the following:

$ sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

I added this line in the proper place (so it looks like the Ubuntu 6.06 example above):

auto eth0

And then I saved and closed the file.

I didn't even have to reboot to see whether or not it worked. I just brought the network down, then up again:

$ sudo ifdown eth0
$ sudo ifup eth0

I then had networking via my static IP. I rebooted Ubuntu 8.04, and networking continued to work.

Problem solved.

It's an easy fix; I'm really not much of a hacker/mucker-around, and the majority of Ubuntu users are probably less so, especially when they're just starting out.

This is a minor bug with major consequences: It definitely needs to be resolved before the release date. It may have escaped notice because it has to do with a static IP, and most people use DHCP, but hopefully they're on it over in Ubuntu land.

Update: See below for my first attempts to boot and use SliTaz. It hasn't been going so well.

In this week's Distrowatch, I read about a new, small Linux distribution called SliTaz GNU/Linux that packs itself into 25 MB of space, loads and runs quickly -- and entirely into memory with 128 MB of RAM -- and can even run with 16 MB of RAM. Sounds a lot like Damn Small Linux and Puppy, but there's always room for one more project that runs like the proverbial wind on new hardware (SliTaz features a modern 2.6.24 kernel) and keeps the old hardware I use working as well as it can.

From Distrowatch:

So what have the SliTaz developers managed to fit into 25 MB? A lot more than one would expect. The system boots into the JWM window manager with four virtual desktops and a Xfce-like toolbar at the top. It is based on the latest Linux kernel (2.6.24), with glibc 2.3.6, GTK+ libraries and X.Org 7.2. It includes hardware auto-detection modules for network and audio cards, and sets up X with a VESA driver (several screen resolution choices are available during the initial configuration step). Among applications there is the latest Firefox, Ghost In The Mail (email client), gFTP, Transmission (BitTorrent client), mtPaint (image editor), GPicView (image viewer), AlsaPlayer, Asunder (CD ripping tool), Geany (a light-weight IDE) and other small applications. Also included are a CD burning tool and a PDF viewer, while web developers will no doubt welcome the addition of the lighttpd web server with support for CGI and PHP.

The default configuration includes two of my favorite lightweight apps: mtPaint and Geany. That's a very good sign.

So even though I'm mired in Ubuntu 8.04 for my upcoming review of the beta version, I'm going to download and burn SliTaz very soon so I can try it for myself.

The next day: One problem. I couldn't get SliTaz 1.0 to boot at all on my VIA C3 Samuel test box, and on the Dell Optiplex GX 520 (Pentium 4), It booted fine, allowed me to choose English as my language, a US keyboard ... but the system wouldn't recognize my Ethernet card, so I couldn't get networking going.

I'll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card), but so far I'm 0 for 2 in the SliTaz game.

The day after that: I tried to run SliTaz on the $0 Laptop -- the Gateway Solo 1450. It booted fine, but I couldn't get past the login screen. Funny -- I didn't have to login on the Dell. But on the Gateway, neither the "hacker" account, nor root, would log me in, even with the supplied passwords.

Hopefully they'll get it right with SliTaz 1.1 (or 2.0), but for now, it's a distro with a lot of promise but not a whole lot of delivery -- at least for me.

One of my favorite tech bloggers, George Ou, has been laid off from ZDNet, in yet another move by the mega-site that leaves me scratching my very head.

First they revamp their site in a way that marginalized a great many of their bloggers, making favorite writers -- and what they've written -- harder to find. OK, I'm getting used to the new look; I don't think it's an improvement in any way, but the content at ZDNet, hard to find as it now is, is in the top tier of tech news providers.

Then they get rid of one of their best writers.

George Ou might have been a Microsoft partisan, but he was -- and is -- so technically solid, that I can't believe he won't land on his feet before the week is out.

From George I learned plenty about network security, WiFi, getting the most out of hardware, as well as how to evaluate performance of PCs and their software.

I don't begrudge ZDNet's need to cut back if they're not making enough money, but cutting content lowers costs as well as quality, and it's a bad spiral. Not that it isn't happening, unfortunately, where I work, too.

For those who enjoyed his posts on ZDNet, George will update his situation at LANArchitect. I'll be checking often to see where he goes.