June 2008 Archives

I booted into Debian Lenny for the first time in a while on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and after doing about 150 updates, I logged out of the GNOME desktop and switched over to Fluxbox.

Now this PC, for me, anyway, is quite powerful — 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM — so GNOME runs quite well on it.

But with Fluxbox (and even with Xfce, I suspect) it really flies. Apps load way quicker than they do in GNOME, and if you can deal with a more minimalist window manager, you get a lot more in terms of performance.

I had my Alps Touchpad's tap-to-click function turned off in GNOME, but in Fluxbox I had to use GSynaptics to turn it off. I wonder if things will be screwed up in GNOME as a result. The first thing I'll do is see if I can easily turn off the touchpad's tapping for my other users. That doesn't work so well in GNOME, where the "primary" user has control over the touchpad but the others do not.

I logged into one of my other user accounts, turned off tapping in GSynaptics, and everything worked. That's the way it's supposed to be in GNOME.

One thing I'd like to do is modify the Fluxbox menu to make things quicker, with my most-used apps higher up so I don't have to mouse through so many menus to get to them.

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done.

In my original non-review, I couldn't really get Slitaz running on any of three PCs, so I ended it this way:

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.

But there was also this:

I'll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card) ...

Coincidentally, I've been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

It works.

And so far, it's quicker than anything I've tried on it before. The closest thing I can compare it to is Damn Small Linux.

As of DSL version 4.4, both have the "Bon Echo" version of Firefox, with Slitaz using a more-recent build of what basically is Firefox.

Having Firefox named Bon Echo presents one problem: It's harder to install Google Gears, which would enable Google Docs to function in offline mode. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but so far that's been the big stopper for me with DSL (and now Slitaz).

Another stopper: Slitaz seems to want the user to store data on a USB-connected drive. But this laptop, made somewhere around 1999, doesn't have USB. Hell, it doesn't have Ethernet. My connectivity comes via a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, and even if I did have a WiFi signal, which I don't, I'm not sure Slitaz 1.0 supports wireless connectivity. Otherwise, I'd be trying some packages from the Slitaz repository.

But in its "raw" configuration, Slitaz is a 25 MB ISO — smaller than Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, and with fewer apps as well.

The beauty of it is that Slitaz 1.0 is running entirely in RAM — and I've only got 144MB on this laptop.

Again: 144MB and running entirely in RAM. I don't think there's a system out there with X that'll do this without tapping into Linux swap (although Damn Small Linux might be coming close).

Like Puppy and DSL, Slitaz is based on the JWM window manager, which has plenty of features and lots of speed to go with it. Right-clicking gets you a small menu, but for the full menu, you need to left-click on the Slitaz spider icon at the top of the screen.

Slitaz is lean but does have enough apps to get by.

Besides Firefox/Bon Echo (version 2.0.0.12 on the live CD), there's:

• My favorite development editor Geany
• The mhWaveEdit audio editor (at least that's what I think it is)
• emelFM2 file manager
• Clex File manager
• mtPaint image editor (one of my favorites)
• Grab screenshot
• GPicView Image Viewer
• Gparted partition manager
• Htop processes viewer
• Lighttpd Web server
• gFTP client
• Grsync
• LostIRC
• Retawq Web browser
• Scpbox secure copy app
• Transmission Bittorrent app
• ePDFView PDF viewer
• Listpatron (I can't figure out what this does, but it appears to "make lists")
• OSMO personal organizer
• SQlite database
• Wikiss PHP Wiki
• Bc calculator
• Burn ISO
• ISO Master
• Leafpad editor
• Nano editor
• Xpad sticky note editor
• Xterm

I'm not sure yet how extensive the Web-server capabilities of Slitaz are as yet, but it does have the Lighttpd server, SQLite database, along with PHP, so you can seemingly roll out a dynamic Web page on the system as configured.

Once I get to a live Internet connection on the Compaq, I plan to check out the Slitaz repository, which has some applications that aren't on the live CD, including Abiword and the GIMP.

I'll have to deal with how to save my settings in Slitaz without USB, but in that quest, I found a great utility called Mountbox that enabled me to easily mount partitions from my hard drive and then look at them with emelFM2. Not that it's hard to mount partitions from live CDs, but this app is as good as the mount tools in Puppy or DSL, and I'm glad to have it.

However, upon mounting a hard-drive partition, I could see all the files there, but I was unable to write a new file to it. That's something I'll have to work on.

(Hint: When you boot Slitaz, the standard user is hacker, with no password. Root's password is root.)

After a read through the online documentation, I settled on the following boot codes for my laptop:

boot: slitaz vga=788 lang=en kmap=us home=hda3 sound=noconf

I was still asked by the system (in French, no less) what resolution to use for X. But the boot process was a bit quicker, since I wasn't asked this time to choose a language or keyboard, nor was I asked to configure sound, something that didn't work automatically (and never does for this laptop in Linux).

I created a file, saved it in the Slitaz filesystem and rebooted without the cheat codes. The file wasn't there. I tried again with the boot codes, and my file was there. The same thing worked for a Firefox bookmark. As long as I used the home=hda3 boot code (since hda3 was the hard drive partition I chose on which to put my Slitaz save file) when booting, everything works.

So it turns out you don't need a USB drive to save files in Slitaz.

There's a "Cooking" release of Slitaz that looks much changed from the 1.0 release, and I will try it soon and hope that perhaps some and hopefully many of my problems will be addressed. It uses Openbox instead of JWM, features desktop icons, uses HAL to automatically mount media and even has Firefox 3.

Another addition, among many, to the latest build of Slitaz is wireless support. Again, I'll have to burn a disc tonight and give it a try when I'm near a WiFi signal.

Thus far, Slitaz 1.0 is absolutely the fastest operating system I've ever used. While it's still fairly young, it boasts of a lot of functionality, and if it runs on your particular hardware, it's a live CD that's well worth having in your laptop bag.

I'd love to have another alternative to Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, both extremely lightweight — and extremely well-formed — distributions designed to be run as live CDs (but also capable of being installed to the hard drive). And again, running entirely in RAM with only 144MB is as lightweight as they come.

Right now, I can't use Slitaz with the same "expertise" with which I can use Puppy or DSL. But for a quick-booting, quick-working live CD, Slitaz does exceedingly well for such an early stage in its life.

I'll be watching Slitaz very closely, and I expect big things for it in the future, should development continue — and I really do hope it does.

Point of order: According to the boot screen, Slitaz stands for "Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone."

So far, Slitaz lives up to that name.

More on Slitaz:
Slitaz on Distrowatch
Distrowatch review of Slitaz
My first Slitaz post from April 2008
K.Mandla's review of Slitaz
TechieMoe review of Slitaz
TechSource review of Slitaz

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here.

I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it's really ready.

Here are the release notes from the CentOS team.

There are DVDs, CDs and a 7.7MB netinstall image. No live CD yet, but that will be coming soon enough, I figure.

For the past few CentOS releases, I've been trying the live CD just to see what kind of hardware detection I can get on my various PCs. I'll be anxious to give 5.2 a spin because Red Hat is promising better support for laptops.

Already CentOS/Red Hat 5.0 has been pretty good on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. Not so good as to bump Ubuntu or Debian off of it, but good nonetheless.

And Fedora 9 didn't suspend/resume it. So it doesn't look good for CentOS/RHEL 5.2, but I will still give it a try.

One thing that's new about RHEL is that Red Hat has pledged four years of "intensive" support, up from three, followed by what appears to be three years of less-"intensive" support, but support nonetheless.

So you can count on seven years of security patches on any Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and that means CentOS will do the same.

Previously in Click:

• Red Hat's desktop strategy: Can you figure it out?
• Why yes, you can use apt and Synaptic in Red Hat or CentOS
• CentOS 5.2 almost here
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — a way bigger deal than you might think

Red Hat has a Linux desktop plan. It's just a little difficult to figure out exactly what it is.

I think Red Hat knows this. And it's OK with it.

One day Red Hat bigwigs are saying that they are not interested in aggressively pursuing the Linux desktop market, that Ubuntu has much of it sewn up, and why do it anyway when all the money is in servers and the support Red Hat so richly provides to those who want it?

Good question.

But I see a strategy in there somewhere. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, late of Ziff Davis, now writing just about everywhere else, including his own Practical Technology, has met recently with a bunch of Red Hatters. In SJVN's recent post, the Red Hat people still push Fedora, the community distribution that serves as a testing ground for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, but the company is sometimes not-so-quietly working on making its flagship RHEL product a better fit for the desktop — and laptops, too. And Red Hat does see a niche for RHEL apart from the server:

What Red Hat is working on is continuing to make RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) business desktop friendly. Whitehurst said many business customers want the Linux desktop. They don't want to move their desktops lock, stock, and barrel to RHEL, or any other Linux desktop. What Fortune 500 companies do want though is to start moving up to 25% of their desktops to Linux.

Why? Because they want the benefits of Linux. Besides the usual advantages of improved TCO (total cost of ownership) and improved security, Red Hat's corporate customers want a Linux desktop that can be carried as a virtual machine on a USB key and can be be managed by Red Hat's management tools. Is this for someone who wants a Windows XP Home replacement? No. It's not. It is, however, something that can catch the attention of CIOs who want a Windows XP Pro replacement.

And who can resist SJVN's money quote from Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst?:

"There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?"

It's a riddle, right?

OK, forget about all of that. Just read Red Hat's own press release for RHEL 5.2, which not only talks up all the work they're doing to make suspend/resume work but highlighting the inclusion of desktop applications that aren't a generation too old for office use. I'm talking about OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3, the latter of which just had its final release this week.

Here are a few quotes from the RHEL 5.2 press release:

"We took part in the beta program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2," said William Cattey, Linux Platform Coodinator, MIT Information Services & Technology. "Re-basing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop to have the latest Firefox, OpenOffice and Adobe Reader is very important to us because it gives our users the same key applications available on other platforms."

"LVM is very satisfied with our experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop on the certified Lenovo T61 and X61 laptops," said Werner Schmidt, LVM's CIO. "We have deployed over 2,000 Lenovo laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and plan to roll out several thousand more over the next several months."

The key in all of this is the corporate/enterprise connection, the idea not of wholly changing desktop platforms but bringing needed diversity to the desktop with Linux where appropriate, and leveraging the whole Red Hat relationship with server customers to solve problems on the desktop while adding incremental revenue and giving those customers even more reasons to stick with — and continue paying for — Red Hat.

And all those management tools, most of which I know nothing about, that Red Hat offers to keep servers in line and up to date — all that stuff can also make desktop management a more orderly procedure than the absolute mess that's going on now with Joe Worker's desktop PC.

Not that Ubuntu isn't also working on corporate, managed solutions for desktop PC management, but when it comes to paying for support, Ubuntu doesn't seem to be offering any deep discounts over what Red Hat is charging. And if a huge enterprise already has a lot of Red Hat on the premises, a little more doesn't hurt, right?

And there's another side to this valuable coin: While Ubuntu is mainly thought of as a desktop system, it's no secret at all that parent company Canonical is making a huge push into servers, with certifications coming for use on hardware from any number of vendors, commitments of long-term support and the same kind of sysadmin-helping tools that help leverage things for Red Hat.

So if Ubuntu is leveraging its desktop success to build a potentially lucrative server business, Red Hat needs to expand its own desktop commitment to keep and grow the already lucrative server market it currently dominates.

Who wins?

Damn near everybody, I figure. More competition means better products, most of which can be had for free. Remember, if you don't want to pay for Red Hat, there's always Fedora, or the RHEL clones put together by CentOS and Scientific Linux. And if you're deploying Ubuntu in an enterprise situation, you can pay Canonical, or leverage the substantial Ubuntu community to solve problems.

And while some of us can't imagine paying thousands of dollars a year for support on a server, that kind of thing starts to make sense in the enterprise when you weigh it with your own labor costs.

It's an equation that has worked in Red Hat's favor for a long time. And a few extra variables in said equation are just part of the game.

I feel for this guy:

He wanted to replace cable broadband with cheaper DSL, but as you can see, his DSL speed is abysmal. (FYI, my mom's DSL speed in North Hollywood is similar; at my house in Van Nuys we do quite a bit better, but nothing stellar either).

If you're good at doing math in your head (I used a calculator), you can see that download speed on cable is 68 times faster than on DSL at his location.

Upload speed is only 10 times faster on cable.

In his area:

Cost of cable broadband: $65
Cost of DSL broadband: $40

He does mention that the cable service does go out a bit, and speeds can drop when there's a lot of activity from other users, but the promise of a service that's 6,800 percent faster ... the mind is boggled.

File this under "holy crap."

Matthew Miller of ZDNet elaborates:

AT&T is subsidizing the iPhone this time, much like the other mobile phone purchases made in the United States and may be paying Apple as much as US$325 for each iPhone 3G that is purchased.

...

Don't worry about AT&T though, since they will make up this $325 and a bit more with the increased data and text message rates. Plus, with the new lower initial out-of-the pocket price for new subscribers we may see a lot more iPhones flying off the shelves next month than when the first generation iPhone started off at $599 last year.

For the record, I wasn't worried.

In other iPhone news: AT&T wants 3G users to pay more for data and text messages.

An observation from one poor SOB: That's me, in case you hadn't figured it out. I've found a lot more people out there with cell-phone data plans than I expected. Many people are happy to pay $70 a month to talk/text/browse/e-mail from their mobile handset, be it a Blackberry, iPhone or other such keyboard-equipped device.

Not being a user of either the iPhone, Blackberry or ... anything beyond my now-ancient Motorola phone, if e-mail is really important, a Blackberry or Palm Treo with a full QWERTY button keyboard seems to be a better choice than the iPhone's touchscreen. I say seems because I really don't know, but I'd like for anybody out there who has experience with such devices to tell me.

Send me an e-mail at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

In case you've never seen George Carlin's groundbreaking "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine, YouTube is here to help you with this 1978 rendition:

And a more recent video, George Carlin on Language:

George Carlin: "We Like War:"

George Carlin on The American Dream:

George Carlin on Natural Disasters:

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. (And here's another post along the same lines.)

I happen to have a Mac — a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive — and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

I've been reading an O'Reilly book on the subject, and here are two places that seem essential for bringing free, open-source apps to the Mac:

• The MacPorts Project
• The Fink Project

If anything, the relative uniformity of hardware in the Macintosh world, and the tight integration between OS X and the machines on which it runs, makes a lot of the Linux/BSD problems we have in terms of hardware compatibility go away.

What I can't get with, though, is the high cost of Mac hardware and software (and yes, you are paying for both when you buy an Apple machine).

Still, this does bear thinking about. And so I will.

Why this could work for my company: While there are a great many image-editing programs in the free, open-source software world, the work we do here, fortunately or not, depends on features that only Adobe Photoshop offers. Yes, I've been learning to use Photoshop because for some of the things I need to do, there's no alternative.

And then there's Flash. I don't like technologies for which the development tools are not free and open. But there's Adobe again, with Flash development nestled in its Creative Suite.

And then there's the print publishing system that our company only supports on Windows.

And I still want to run the free, open-source applications I've grown to depend on, including OpenOffice (which is coming to Mac natively in version 3 anyway), the lightweight image editors that I still can use (MtPaint!!) for some tasks, excellent text editors (Geany, the HTML-focused Bluefish) and even full desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

If costs be damned, the Mac with Adobe CS, Windows and X11 with all the Unix apps I want just might be the ideal platform.

But I'm not throwing Linux over the side of the boat just yet. There's the part about Apple's hardware and software being closely guarded and ... closed source. Then there's the cost. More to start with, and more continually for operating-system upgrades and proprietary software upgrades as well.

In the corporate world, where money is supposed to flow like so much water, this Mac solution very well could work.

But in the real world, who can afford it?

For many, the solution remains free, open-source operating systems with greater stability, longer support, better hardware detection and configuration, full power management and better applications that can do all the things we need to get done.

And as Linux in general, and distributions like Ubuntu in specific, gain(s) traction, hardware makers just might start paying attention to drivers that make their equipment work seamlessly with Linux without making the user dive head-first into geekery. That would level the playing field considerably, but the issue of mixing proprietary software with FOSS still looms over the discussion. (And yes, I'm not mentioning WINE on purpose, though maybe I should.)

I really liked this Computerworld piece on how to revitalize a five-year-old Thinkpad laptop for $125.

While an IBM Thinkpad is worthier of restoration than most, the fact is that if you have a laptop on hand, a little maintenance can give it quite a bit of extra life.

Among the things Brian Nadel did to his Thinkpad R50:

• Added memory
• Replaced hard drive
• Reinstalled Windows
• Got second hard-drive caddy and installed Ubuntu on original hard drive so he can switch from Windows to Ubuntu by pulling and replacing the caddy
• Replacing a damaged keyboard
• Cleaning the inside, outside and especially the fan
• Defragmenting the hard drive

I've done some experimenting with encrypted filesystems in Debian, which are easy to do with the Debian installer — and which are just as easy to do in Ubuntu if you use the alternate installer.

Like I said, it's easy to do and to manage, unless you want to have a bunch of partitions under a single passphrase. This blog post helps you figure it out.

While full encryption is something you might want to use on a home desktop, although I wouldn't, it's almost mandatory for a laptop. If the thing gets stolen, whoever gets that drive has access to everything on it. And you really don't want that happening, do you?

Right now, neither of my two Linux laptops are encrypted, since I use them for testing and need to see one system's hard-drive partitions from the other, but in the near future, if I decided to single-boot either or both of these, you can bet I'll be encrypting the hard drive.

I'm supposed to have a meeting with Dell next week, during which they'll talk about their consumer-focused plans for the near future and at the same time show me some hot new product that I'll be bound not to talk about for a specified period of time.

Great.

I told the PR guy, "What I really want to know about is the soon-to-be-released Dell E," meaning Dell's answer to the Asus Eee (note the similar names) and HP Mini-Note.

The flack was pretty cool about it. He didn't let anything slip.

so I looked around for Dell E info, found some — saw that Linux is a big part of the whole shebang — and concluded that I really, really want one:

• More details surface regarding Dell's UMPC by Gina Hughes, the Techie Diva
• Dell E and E Slim revealed, taking on Eee and Air in one fell swoop by Engadget's Paul Miller
• Dell Mini Inspiron by Gizmodo

(Photo above from Gizmodo, below from Engadget)

Today's rumor, which suggests that Oracle may buy Red Hat, or something along those lines, comes from Matt Asay.

Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog has quickly become a must-read. His post on The Killer Apps of Academia is well worth bookmarking for future reference.

He mentions quite a few apps I use every day, from the obvious (Firefox, OpenOffice) to the less-so (Notepad++, Audacity).

Among the ones I hadn't heard of but want to try immediately are LogMeIn Free, which, if the description is correct, is like GoToMyPC, letting you control a Windows PC from a remote location, but without the costs involved. There is a "Pro" version with more features, but the fact that there even is a free version warms my cockles considerably.

What I'm saying, basically is that if you're running anywhere near 64MB of RAM and you, say, want to run Firefox, you need more memory.

The $15 Laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU -- ran a Linux console with no problem and even did an X session, provided no "heavy" apps like Firefox were used.

But how can you get along with just Dillo as a Web browser?

It's not easy if you want to do any kind of blogging, which a) uses the more-memory-intense Firefox and b) demands much more out of Firefox and the whole system as well.

Well, I can safely say that a 233 MHz CPU and 144MB of RAM are enough to run Puppy Linux (currently version 2.13, for which I continue to have a soft spot), Damn Small Linux 4.3 and even OpenBSD 4.2.

I'm going to reboot into OpenBSD right now to see just how well the Compaq is doing with it.

(I'm now back with OpenBSD 4.2)

Things appear to work pretty well with OpenBSD as well. Though certainly more secure than almost every other operating system out there (though I miss Debian and now also Ubuntu's ability to encrypt an entire drive with LVM) and as stable as anything out there, OpenBSD is in no way faster than the fastest Linux distributions.

And speed is a bit of a problem on hardware this old.

I'd have to try Debian again. Puppy and DSL are quite a bit quicker when it comes to screen refresh time in Firefox (and generally in X). I don't remember Debian Etch as being all that sprightly in comparison.

(Changing to DSL 4.3)

There's no doubt that DSL runs the graphics in X faster than OpenBSD. The screen does a much better job of keeping up with my keystrokes in Movable Type, and if the main purpose of this laptop is to crank out blog entries, that is an important consideration.

Of course, before I pull OpenBSD off of this drive, I'll have to make sure I have the xorg.conf saved, as well as a number of other configuration files as well as the output of pkg_info so I can remember all the software I have in this install.

I should probably just get a few swappable hard drives for the Compaq. Maybe even something bigger than 3GB. Just a thought.

Other problems with using DSL as the sole distro: no Flash (but OpenBSD doesn't have it either).

... (two weeks later)

I've been running the $15 Laptop a bit more. Having a good wireless connection helps immensely. I've been most happy with Puppy 2.13 thus far, since it has Seamonkey — a very acceptable Mozilla-based browser — and all the graphics work as they should.

I still have OpenBSD 4.2 on the hard drive, and as I say above, I'm reluctant to remove it, even though I can and will save the various configuration files in case I want to do a reinstall.

I'd like to try Wolvix again, just to see if the additional memory makes any difference in loading it. I could — and probably should — try Debian again. I don't know if it'll be as fast as Puppy or DSL, but it is worth trying.

What I'll probably end up with: I might leave OpenBSD on the laptop for awhile, but I can see myself ending up with a hard drive or Compact Flash chip with IDE converter completely devoted to storage and either running Puppy Linux off of the Live CD or as a frugal install on the hard drive or CF card.

File this under "why didn't I think of it before?"

I've been complaining for at least a month about how I can't install Google Gears to gain offline functionality for Google Docs because Gears only supported Firefox 1.5 to 2.x, and I was running Ubuntu with FF3 and Debian with Iceweasel.

Sure, there are ways to make Gears work with Mozilla browsers that don't go by the name "Firefox," but it seemed a bit above my capability.

And just today, on the first day of Firefox 3's official release, I finally installed Gears in Ubuntu 8.04 with FF3.

But I could've done this weeks ago, had I only come up with this solution:

I could (and now am) running Google Gears with Docs in Puppy Linux.

I occasionally run Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop, but since the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser/suite isn't Firefox, Gears refuses to install.

But ... there's a PET package for Firefox, and I figured that if I install it, I can add Google Gears and gain the offline functionality for Google Docs that I need.

Know what? It works. Sure, the version of Firefox (2.0.0.4) is a bit old, but I'm pretty much going to be using it for this one purpose.

And I'm just so damn stoked that I can run Google Gears with Docs in both Ubuntu 8.04 and Puppy 3.00.

Note: This should work for just about every version of Puppy out there from the 2's to the 4's. If you can run the Mozilla-Firefox PET package, you can run Gears.

Now maybe I'll try that trick on getting Gears working with non-Firefox browsers based on Mozilla.

I predicted that Dell would cling to Windows XP as long as possible, with the sole reason being that customers want it.

But now you'll have to pay between $20 and $50 extra for the privilege on the low-cost Vostro line of desktop and laptop PCs, as I read at ZDNet, via Computerworld.

Yes, you heard right. To "downgrade" to XP from Vista, it'll cost you. And the downgrade is only available for Vista Business and Vista Ultimate. If the machine you choose ships Vista Home, you're out of luck.

But if you're like some of my readers, who really, really want XP, that might not be too much to ask.

The good news: Other Dell business computers, specifically those in the Latitude, OptiPlex and Precision lines, will have an XP option at no additional charge.

And the consumer-aimed Inspiron? No XP for you.

Now that Firefox 3 has been officially released, the Google Gears team wasted no time in pounding out a new version of the API that works with FF3.

Coincidentally, this means that Google Gears now works with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which began its life a couple of months ago with the then-non-Gears-supported FF 3 beta.

According to the blog post cited above, the change was made on June 11, but I don't think the Gears link worked for Linux systems with Firefox 3 (i.e. everybody running Ubuntu 8.04) on that day.

But now that FF3 is officially official, I expect Gears to install in the latest Firefox browser, and I in turn expect my laptop (and me) to be enjoying offline access to my Google Docs files real soon now.

I tried Google Docs with Gears a week ago on Firefox 2 in the Slackware-derived Wolvix Hunter last week, and I was very impressed. Editing of existing Docs files was seamless, and while I miss the ability to create new files in Google Docs while offline, I'm fairly confident that the big brains at Google are hard at work adding this needed bit of functionality to the Docs/Gears world.

By way of explanation, here's what I know about using Google Gears:

Google Gears is what's called an API (which stands for Application Programming Interface), and it installs as a Firefox add-on. If you don't have a live Internet connection, Gears detects this and uses a SQlite database set up in the user's Firefox directory to allow the ability to read and edit files in Google Docs.

When Gears is first installed, the database is created and populated with all the user's Google Docs files, after which Gears attempts at the earliest opportunity to sync that database with the files on the online version of Google Docs.

Like I said, I've tried it, it's brilliant, and it's finally come to the one computer that is regularly offline — my Gateway Solo 1450, which for the time being has no wireless connectivity (something I hope to remedy with a new PCMCIA assembly, should I be able to figure out how to pull the old one and replace it).

Google Gears/Docs update: I installed it in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and it works. I plan to use it often.

Gears/Docs tip: I think I have a way to get around Google Docs/Gears inability to create new documents while offline.

I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to create a half-dozen to a dozen "dummy" documents in Google Docs while online so I'll have pre-created, empty documents in which to work when I'm not connected and using Docs via Gears.

I had no idea that the Debian-derived apt and Synaptic are viable choices for package management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free RHEL-like CentOS. Not that I have anything against RPM and Yum, but it's nice to have choices.

Dag Wieers shows you how on his blog, which I found via Planet CentOS. (Have you noticed that Planet CentOS is a great place to find out stuff?)

It's all courtesy of a project called APT-RPM.

One of the best — and longest running — Linux sites is LWN.net, which I should get into the blogroll, by the way, and it has an excellent interview with Ubuntu founder and leader Mark Shuttleworth.

On Ubuntu's push into the server market:

Given that Ubuntu's roots are on the desktop, what's behind the recent shift in strategy to address the server side too?

That's not a change in strategy, it's more a pull through. We started with a very narrow focus on the desktop, and that allowed us to punch in. As we've penetrated the industry, there's a natural pull through where someone who's started using us on their desktop has now started setting up Ubuntu on a server.

You could always run Ubuntu on a server; there was never a significant reason not to. That body of users has now reached a critical mass on the server, and so our server work is now more responding to that than a shift in strategy. We continue to make the desktop our labor of love, the server requires a very enterprise-oriented approach. We've built out a dedicated team that just handles that. We haven't re-assigned people who are desktop specialists and asked them to test a server.

You're not worried you're spreading yourselves too thinly?

That is a risk, and that's something we discuss here a lot. There are benefits to offering a platform that can be used in both configurations. We see companies often saying: "We love your desktop. We would definitely choose your desktop if we could also use you on the server."

Companies don't like to introduce arbitrary diversity in technology. Everybody has heterogeneous systems, but they don't like to make that situation worse without a very good reason for it. Ubuntu is a very good server for certain use-cases now, just like Ubuntu is a very good desktop for certain use-cases. Our challenge over the next couple of years is just to broaden the base to which it appeals on both fronts.

Firefox 3 is supposed to be faster, use less memory and generally be all things to all Web browsers. And today it's being unleashed on the public with a "set a Guinness Book of Records" stunt, even though there's no previous record for the most downloads in a day.

I'll leave it at first to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes to explain the new and better of Firefox 3 and then to comment on whether you should download and install today ... or wait until the dust settles.

It's all over the place — what The Associated Press is doing, supposedly in response to members wanting it to crack down on bloggers using AP stories. Let's begin at BoingBoing:

In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" — the right to copy without permission — means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").

Think BoingBoing wants to charge me for that quote? No, because I'm linking back to them, giving them credit, and generally helping promote their site at no cost to them.

The thing about the snitches — if anything's over the top, that most certainly is.

BoingBoing got much of its info from this Making Light post. which in turn got its information from The Carpetbagger Report, which got its information from the good ol' New York Times.

I found a bunch of very relevant blog posts via Debian-News.net, which I plan to add to the blogroll immediately.

I also added the following to the blogroll:

Debian Administration

Debian Admin

Debian Weather

The two "administration" sites often have good tips, and I don't know how I didn't get them in the blogroll before.

Debian Weather is a new one &mdash to me, anyway. It has something to do with "quality assurance" for a given build of Debian on a given day. I'm not sure how useful it is, but I did put it in the blogroll and plan to keep an eye on it.

If anything, it says not to try to run Sid at all on some of the more obscure architectures, although it's a sunny day for Sid on i386 and amd64.

I'm a huge fan of Google Docs, and a huge critic of the iPhone's lack of ability to create or edit documents by its expensive lonesome.

So it's great news that Google Docs works on the iPhone. Read this blog post, click here for a Google search on this very topic, or watch the extremely geeky video:

Google Docs might not change your life, but it certainly has the potential to do so, and I continue to think that it's the application of the year.

• You can watch YouTube videos on the iPhone, but you don't have Flash in the Web browser, but it's coming
• There's no Java in iPhone-ville, but Sun sure wants to put it there
• You can't create or edit documents (say what?) on the iPhone. You can't even cut and paste (what the f---?). Every other smartphone has the excellent DocumentsToGo, which reads, writes and even creates docments and spreadsheets in a plethora of MS Office formats. Even the Blackberry is getting DocumentsToGo.
• According to the iPhone Blog, things that still stink in the iPhone 3G include: crappy camera, no video recording, not enough storage.

So if you want to really use your iPhone as a substitute for a laptop computer, even in small doses, you'll have a hell of a time working with actual files. But there is a way, which I will reveal in the next Click post, a mere five hours from now.

It never occurred to me, but Microsoft buying eBay is something that could really happen.

Via ZDNet's Between the Lines blog:

Microsoft has $44 billion or so burning a hole in its pocket, but there's one little hitch: There are few companies that the software giant could buy to get scale quickly. Enter eBay. Enter speculation. Enter eBay as the acquisition target.

What makes it work? The ability to spin off PayPal and/or Skype to pay for the damn thing.

Question: What's the reserve on this auction?

Even though this Wired article is six months old, it sheds a lot of insight on the initial development of the iPhone, including all the problems leading up to its release, plus a lot of detail on how the financial arrangement works between Apple and AT&T:

The demo was not going well.

Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."

...

And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines.

There's a lot more than this in the four-screen article.

If you've been reading this blog for awhile (or spent a few hours back in the archives), you know that I run Debian, Ubuntu, Puppy, OpenBSD and Damn Small Linux a lot.

I have had a Slackware box in the past, but I didn't stick with it. Still, one of my very favorite distributions is Wolvix, which is based on Slackware 11.

While I'm generally a GNOME fan, especially on faster boxes, and not a big user of KDE, even on faster boxes, there's a lot of software in the full Slackware installation. Since I'm OK using KWord (and not OpenOffice Writer or Abiword) for the few times I need to kick out a .doc file, I don't feel the need at this very moment to install one of the GNOME add-on projects for Slackware.

If I could, I would install Dropline GNOME, but since the box I'm using is NOT i686 compatible, I can't do that. GNOME Slackbuild looks like it will work, and I might install it, but since the default Slackware installation is working so well, I'm loathe to mess up a good thing.

Here's what I like about Slackware:

In the default installation, just about everything works

Easy-to-use console utilities make managing the box relatively easy. I'm talking about:

xwmconfig
netconfig
mouseconfig
pkgtool (surprisingly helpful when adding or removing packages)

A bunch of window managers, easily selectable before starting X with the xwmconfig utility. It may not have GNOME, but a full Slackware installation does have:

KDE
XFCE
Fluxbox
Blackbox
WindowMaker
Fvwm2
Twm

On occasion, I do use Fvwm2, which I grew to like from OpenBSD, where it's the default WM. Things really speed up on slow boxes when you use Xfce, Fluxbox or any of the window managers that are not KDE.

Other things I like about Slackware:

Long-term support. The Slackware team keeps the security patches coming for many of its releases. I still see updates for Slackware 8.1, which was released in 2002. Six years is pretty impressive. It's up there with the "enterprise" releases from Red Hat and SUSE.

Slapt-get. After using Wolvix and now Slackware itself with slapt-get, I'm a total believer. It makes maintaining a Slackware box much, much easier. Get it here.

Lots of editors. Slackware may not include my favorite (Geany) but nonetheless has tons of editors built in:

Vi
Vim
Gvim
Nano
Xedit
Kwrite
Kate
Kedit
Emacs
Jed
Joe
Mousepad
(and some I probably missed)

Three major Web browsers:

Firefox
Seamonkey (which also features a mail client and HTML-generating app)
Konqueror

I've grown fond of Seamonkey, which is the main browser in Puppy Linux. I usually use Firefox, but it's nice to have Seamonkey there in case I need the Composer app to do some HTML, or to use the mail client (even though I'm pretty much accustomed to Thunderbird).

I like a lot of choices, and while I'd really like Slackware to include Abiword and maybe even OpenOffice, I can add these packages later if I decide I really need them. But I probably don't and won't.

I haven't made the leap to Slackbuilds yet, but I have had success with Robby Workman's precompiled packages.

Great projects derived from Slackware:

Wolvix
ZenWalk
Vector
Slax

I'm VERY partial to Wolvix. If I need to set up a box quickly with all the software I want/need, Wolvix Hunter is the way to do it. Wolvix has one of the best, most flexible installers I've ever seen. You can run Wolvix as a live CD, or in a "frugal" or full hard-drive installation. All are easy to do.

Default fonts in Slackware look better than default fonts in Debian

I like to gave good-looking fonts right out of the gate. Slackware is as good as any modern distribution in this regard. Debian fonts look OK on an LCD screen, horrible on a CRT. I've gotten used to them, and I no longer change them, but I still prefer nice, smooth fonts.

If you're going to run KDE, Slackware's the fastest way to do it

SimplyMepis with KDE is simply unusable on this 2002-era box. It's too slow by far. Slackware makes KDE usable on this old PC.

Granted, KDE is just as fast in Debian, so that's another good choice for the KDE fan who wants to use their favorite window manager on an old box.

A little advice: If you use KDE in Debian, save yourself a lot of trouble and use Aptitude or apt; Kpackage didn't work for me. And conversely, in Slackware use pkgtool/installpkg/upgradepkg or slapt-get/Gslapt, not Kpackage. Maybe some of you have had a better experience with Kpackage. For whatever reason, I don't like it.

Coming soon: Things I don't like about Slackware

The best way to follow CentOS news is at Planet CentOS, which is just like Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu, only more succinct.

All three of these blog-aggregator sites, which collect posts from developers, package maintainers and others involved in their respective Linux projects are very much worth reading on a regular basis.

But the reason for this post is that CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 assembled by the CentOS team from the source code of RHEL — is just about ready for release, according to Tim Verhoeven:

We are currently in the progress of doing QA testing. All packages have been build. The current plan is to be able to finish all QA test this week so we might be able to release 5.2 next weekend or in the days after it.

While Fedora 9 didn't properly suspend/resume my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, I'm still holding out hope that RHEL/CentOS 5.2 will, since greater laptop compatibility is one of the selling points of this significant new RHEL release.

I call it significant because it is bringing some new, very-much-up-to-date versions of popular applications to RHEL/CentOS. Until now, I think that desktop users of RHEL/CentOS have had to be content with Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0.

Among the big changes: Firefox 3, which hasn't even had its final release yet, and Open Office 2.3.

So while the people at Red Hat may be downplaying any aspirations they have on the desktop, this new release, even though it's 5.2 and not 6, shows that they aren't relying on Fedora 100 percent for desktop users, many of whom are not anxious to do a major upgrade every six months.

Another thing about CentOS: Lately CentOS has been releasing a live CD and a small network installer image in addition to the full set of CDs and DVD.

I plan to grab the live CD as soon as it's available to see how the Gateway likes it.

But what about my VIA C3 Samuel test box? It runs CentOS 3.9 and won't boot anything after that ...

Here are a few quick tips to make Slackware work a bit better.

Groups for your primary user account

When creating your first user account, make sure you pick the right groups.

Slackware is a bit unusual as far as Linux distributions go in that it doesn't create a user account during the installation process.

After the installation is complete, you need to log in as root with the password you chose during the install. Then create an account with adduser. I do this before starting X:

# adduser

It's pretty simple. Just fill in the information requested.

The key is to add the right groups. In order to have control over the CD-ROM, plug-in USB drives and audio, I type in the following additional groups for my first user account (i.e. my account:

audio,disk,floppy,video,plugdev,cdrom,wheel

If and when you create additional user accounts, you can either add them to these groups or not. It's up to you. I'd probably leave out a few of these for my additional users; I don't think they'd need disk or floppy, and I wouldn't want them to have wheel.

And if you forget to add your user account to a particular group, go to /etc/group as root and add your user to the appropriate group or groups.

Note: I could do this in the console with vi, but when I'm in X, I use Mousepad. Feel free to use your favorite GUI or console editor.

I open a terminal, su to root and do this:

# mousepad /etc/group

When I'm done, I save the file in Mousepad and close the window.

Want to use sudo?

I've grown accustomed to using sudo, so I add my user account to the sudoers file *— for which you MUST use visudo and NOT a direct edit on /etc/sudoers — while logged in as root (either directly or by su to root:

# visudo

the sudoers file comes up in vi. You do know enough vi to get by don't you? I can hack my way through vi well enough, and this is one of those cases where a little experience with the default text editor in Slackware and most other systems comes in very handy.

Unless you are already somewhat proficient in vi, look for an online tutorial and figure out the difference between the edit and command modes and how to move your cursor around, delete text, etc.

Back to the sudoers file. Many Unix/Linux gurus may cringe at my advice, and I'll just say that I'm concerned here with a desktop system, not a server. For a server, especially an "important" one, permissions must be finely grained and mostly restricted, with some users getting more permissions than others.

But for a desktop box, if you as the sole or primary person maintaining the box wants to use sudo, just add yourself to the sudoers file right below root:

ROOT    ALL=(ALL)    ALL
MYUSERNAME    ALL=(ALL)    ALL

Use your user name, not MYUSERNAME, of course.

Save the file in vi (in command mode, which you reach with esc, type :wq and hit Enter), and you will be able to sudo.

I guess Ubuntu got me in the habit of using sudo, even though lots of things require su to root (like using visudo), and I like to have it at my disposal.

Get your wheel mouse working right

Even though the Slackware installer asks me what kind of mouse I have — it's a wheel mouse (you know, with the scroll wheel), it is never properly configured.

I dutifully enter IMPS/2 during the installer, but the wheel never makes the screen scroll.

So I edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fix the problem:

# sudo mousepad /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Then I change this:

# The available mouse protocols types that you can set below are:
#    Auto BusMouse GlidePoint GlidePointPS/2 IntelliMouse IMPS/2
#    Logitech Microsoft MMHitTab MMSeries Mouseman MouseManPlusPS/2
#    MouseSystems NetMousePS/2 NetScrollPS/2 OSMouse PS/2 SysMouse
#    ThinkingMouse ThinkingMousePS/2 Xqueue
    Option "Protocol"    "PS/2"

to this:

# The available mouse protocols types that you can set below are:
#    Auto BusMouse GlidePoint GlidePointPS/2 IntelliMouse IMPS/2
#    Logitech Microsoft MMHitTab MMSeries Mouseman MouseManPlusPS/2
#    MouseSystems NetMousePS/2 NetScrollPS/2 OSMouse PS/2 SysMouse
#    ThinkingMouse ThinkingMousePS/2 Xqueue
    Option "Protocol"    "IMPS/2"

The line I changed is in bold for emphasis.

Slapt-get

I used to update my Slackware box the old-fashioned way, by bringing down the security patches from the Slackware site by FTP and then using updatepkg to install each one individually.

Now I do two things differently: First, I use a faster mirror — anything is faster than Slack's main FTP site — and second, as of yesterday, I use slapt-get.

I got slapt-get from the GNOME Slackbuild site, and after my first attempt at installing GNOME didn't go so well, the second time I installed Slackware this go-round, I commented out the GNOME Slackbuild mirror (I can always uncomment it later) and updated my Slackware packages only. (I recommend that you get slapt-get from ... the slapt-get people, as I detail below).

Once you find and install the proper slapt-get package for your version (mine is 12.0), go into /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc as root to select a Slackware mirror, and, if you used the GNOME Slackbuild version of slapt-get, to comment out the GNOME Slackbuild mirror until you're ready to install GNOME, if you (or I) ever are.

At this point, I'm pretty happy with Slackware the way it is, especially with slapt-get, so I'm holding off on adding GNOME.

You could always get slapt-get from its "official" site. The easiest thing to do is to find the precompiled slapt-get package for your version of Slackware, download it and use Slackware's pkgtool utility to install it.

I haven't yet installed Gslapt, the GUI for slapt-get, but I plan to do it in the future. It's also at software.jaos.com

I've said in the past that I feel a little squirelly about using slapt-get to install NEW packages, the only reason being that I don't know enough about it, but for updating official Slackware packages, I feel really, really, really good about it.

The last time I used Slackware, I fell behind in my security updates, mostly because you need to use upgradepkg and can't make it easier by using pkgtool directly. (Believe me, there are a lot of EASY Slackware console utilities that, in some ways, make Slack a cakewalk to configure).

Once I used Wolvix, which is based on Slackware 11, and which includes slapt-get and Gslapt, I saw how easy it was to update a Slackware box. Slapt-get levels the playing field vis a vis Debian quite a bit.

I didn't really need Geany, but I wanted to try Slackbuilds.

The instructions are too brief. I only say this because I can't make it work.

I extract the Slackbuild script, download the source to the proper directory, run the script as root and then get an error message.

The output says: "tar: This does not look like a tar archive," or "bzip2: (stdin) is not a bzip2 file."

I'm sure I'm missing something, but what?

Not one to wait, I went to LinuxPackages.net and got Geany for Slackware 12.0. I used pkgtool to install it. Worked perfectly.

Still, I'd like to figure out Slackbuilds. I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.

I sent Slackware expert Willy Sudiarto Raharjo an e-mail asking for help. I've exchanged e-mail with Robby Workman before, and he's responsible for many Slackbuilds scripts, but I figured I'd ask Willy first and see what he comes up with.

Now that I have a working Slackware installation on my test box, which has seen Slackware before, everything is working so well that I'm reluctant to install one of the GNOME add-on projects just yet.

A lot of this is due to the fact that while Slackware is KDE-centric, it also installs with the XFCE, Fluxbox and FVWM window managers, among others, and I'm content to use XFCE at the moment, along with Firefox for Web browsing, KWord if I need it, and Mousepad for text editing.

I haven't even added Abiword, which I've done in the past in Slackware.

What I did add was slapt-get. The apt-like package manager for Slackware seemed like a very good idea due to the relatively large number of updates since Slackware 12 was first released. It worked great.

The box upgraded overnight, and everything came up fine in the morning.

I would like to be running Slackware 12.1, but as I wrote previously, none of the install kernels would boot on this VIA C3 Samuel-based machine. I got a message about not having enough memory, even though I have 256MB — more than enough.

I'd like to try an upgrade from 12.0 to 12.1, but it looks as hard or harder than the OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3 upgrade I did recently, except with instructions that are less detailed.

But as always, Slackware runs as fast as anything, and everything pretty much works.

After participating in a huge thread on LXer about the pros, cons, highs, lows of Slackware, ye olde Linux distribution with rabid fans and equally rabid detractors, I decided to give Slack another run myself.

This very box — a VIA C3 Samuel-based converted thin client with 256 MB of RAM — installed and ran Slackware 12.0 without complaint several months ago.

But it won't even load the installer of Slackware 12.1.

With both the hugesmp.s and huge.s kernels, I get the same error message:

Not enough memory to load specified kernel.

What gives? If 256MB isn't enough to install and run Slackware, then we've got a big, big problem.

I cranked a Slackware 12.0 install disc into the box and the huge.s kernel booted just fine (hugesmp.s wouldn't boot on this CPU).

I'll do a 12.0 installation and try to upgrade to 12.1.

But why won't 12.1 even boot the first install disc?

Any ideas?

At the risk of repeating myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works great

When it comes to my main computer — a late-2002 Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the best operating system I've ever run.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu, which will have three years of updates and patches on the desktop.

I keep cranking live CDs of new Linux distributions into the laptop to see if they can do Suspend/Resume, how their desktop environments look and work, and basically whether or not they can do as well.

Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3, nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

I'm still waiting for CentOS to release its free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which might offer greater hardware detection on the Gateway than Fedora, or might not.

And I'm open to any distribution that can meld as well with what I call the $0 Laptop.

But for now, I'm reluctant to mess with what, since its release in April, has been a very good thing.

That's my analysis of the iPhone situation.

A dramatic price drop for what is admittedly the coolest gadget out there is a significant breakthrough.

But paying AT&T $60 per month or more, even with the promise of unlimited 3G Web access, is just too much — for the likes of me, anyway.

For those willing to pony up the $720/year (plus whatever fees and taxes can be sneaked in), 3G represents a significant performance boost for iPhone users.

And it's still the coolest device out there.

Drop the monthly fee to $30, and I'll be a whole lot more interested.

Lower the price of the iPod Touch (like an iPhone without the phone) to $199, or even better, $99, and me and my money will soon be parted.

My predictions:

• The iPhone 3G will kill off what little is left of the Palm platform, and every other handset maker is going to be in a whole new world of hurt.


• Expect cell carriers that are not AT&T to be clamoring for the opportunity to offer the iPhone. Hopefully a price war of sorts will ensue.


• Look for Google to either put a full-court press on its Android platform or begin offering a Google-branded handset.

After seemingly losing my Master Password for the second time when running Thunderbird on Windows XP, I didn't reset the MP like I did the last time.

Instead, I turned the box off. This morning, I turned it back on and started Thunderbird. I tried my Master Password. It worked.

So rebooting made everything right with Thunderbird.

I feel better already. What's the use of a Master Password if it gets irretrievably scrambled every time Thunderbird crashes. Not that I like Thunderbird to be crashing at all, but that's another matter.

For the moment, my faith is restored in Thunderbird in general and in mail clients in particular. Mail — particularly in multiple accounts — is much easier to deal with in a stand-alone mail client.

I have two IMAP accounts under Thunderbird, plus a bunch of local folders into which I'm stashing various messages in an attempt to bring some kind of logic and order to my mail, and it's working.

As long as Thunderbird is working, it's working, anyway.

Remember the last time Thunderbird killed my Master Password?

It happened again.

This time I know a little bit more about what led the Mozilla mail client to screw up so badly. (I'm running Windows XP, in case you want to know).

I was moving some mail into a folder — lately I've been moving all my mail into one folder or another, trying to keep the inbox clear.

Thunderbird appeared to be crashing. My mail wasn't going into the proper folder, I got a message when I tried to do something else in Thunderbird to the effect that "the Inbox folder is locked."

So I ctrl-alt-deleted to get the task manager, then quit out of Thunderbird.

When I restarted it, my Master Password wouldn't work. Yep, just like the last time.

Luckily, as I also found out the last time this happened, there is a fix

But what good is a Master Password — or Thunderbird, for that matter — if I keep having to forcibly reset the damn thing every time the mail client crashes.

And why in the hell is Thunderbird crashing so much, anyway? Should I be blaming Thunderbird or XP?

Clearly this is going to require a little more digging.

I've probably written a dozen or more times about how I think that OpenOffice is the killer app of free, open-source software, and is the software suite that most worries the folks at Microsoft while empowering more and more regular people every day ... but that I have little call to use it myself.

That has changed.

Since I've been writing a weekly print column for the Los Angeles Daily News called Tech Talk (on Page 2 of the B section on Saturdays), our editorial production system likes to see files in Microsoft Word's .doc format.

And I've been generating those files with OpenOffice 2.4's Writer application.

My "requirements" for a word-processing application are pretty minimal:

I like to see typographical "smart" quotes. OpenOffice does that.

Easily accessible word count. No problem there.

And on my Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM) under Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, OpenOffice 2.4 starts quickly and runs quickly.

I still use the Gedit text editor to work on things like blog posts when I'm offline, or the Geany editor when I have it installed (which I have yet to do in this particular Ubuntu setup), but anything I've ever had to do in Microsoft Word — which for a regular writer is ... just writing — I can do in the no-cost-to-me OpenOffice.

A project sponsored by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice also has spreadsheet, presentation, database, drawing and mathematical-display applications. There are versions for Windows, and most Linux and BSD systems.

And the now-in-beta OpenOffice 3.0 now works without the addition of X11 in the Mac's OS X. All that means is that you really don't need to pony up for Microsoft Office on the Mac — or any other platform — ever again. You don't have to pay for upgrades ever again, either.

Everybody from students to office workers to professional writers can do everything they need to do in OpenOffice.

Along with Firefox, it's the best thing ever to happen for you and me — the computer user who hates to be taken for a ride by huge software companies.

With Google, Microsoft, Amazon and everybody else positioning themselves in the exploding world of cloud computing — in which data, applications and all that goes on with it lives not on your very own server or desktop but in server farms far, far away — you didn't expect Apple to ignore the whole damn thing, did you?

Buried amid the iPhone 3G frenzy at the WWDC is Apple's announcement of MobileMe.

I don't know much yet, except that it costs $99/year for 20 GB of space, and it's supposed to not suck, unlike the now-dead .Mac.

From Engadget:

The rumors were true, Apple just announced their new MobileMe service. Push mail, contacts and calendar data all in the cloud and synced back to your iPhone over the air. Works with the Mac's Mail.app, iCal, and Address Book as well as on PCs for those using Microsoft's Outlook. It's built around Ajax and fully "web 2.0" so that you can access the service from your favorite web browser while maintaining the look and feel of your desktop applications. Syncs photos from your iPhone too. Available at me.com for $99/year and 20GB of on-line storage -- 60 day free trial in early July. Dot mac (.Mac) is gone, baby gone.

Read Engadget for all the Steve Jobs WWDC keynote minutia, but take this away:

The new, better-than-ever iPhone retails for $199.

And is it just me, or does Steve Jobs look a little on the thin side?

Update: More on the iPhone 3G from Engadget.
More on the keynote from Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng

(Photos from Engadget).

Engadget is covering it live.

Honestly, I don't know how they — meaning Engadget — does it, but they do.

Also covering Steve Jobs at WWDC live:

Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng
ZDNet's Ed Burnette
Barron's Tech Trader Daily

More links from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes ...

But Engadget has all the up-to-the-minute photos.

I've used Josh Grosse's jggimi live CD version of OpenBSD to test hardware compatibility recently, but now there's a new live CD project based on OpenBSD called BSDanywhere.

From the BSDanywhere site:

What is BSDanywhere?

BSDanywhere is a bootable Live-CD image based on OpenBSD. It consists of the entire OpenBSD base system (without compiler) plus graphical desktop, an unrepresentative collection of software, automatic hardware detection and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices as well as other peripherals.

BSDanywhere can be used as a productive Unix system for the desktop, educational CD, rescue system or hardware testing platform. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk, so your already installed data will be left alone.

BSDanywhere packs in a lot more software than jggimi's live CD. All of BSDanywhere's packages are listed on its Web site, but a few that are notable for their inclusion (to me at least) are:

abiword-2.4.6p3 free cross-platform WYSIWYG word processor
audacious-1.3.2p1 GTK+-2 media player based on BMP and XMMS
clamav-0.92.1 virus scanner
e-20071211p3 the enlightened window manager
gimp-2.4.3p0 GNU Image Manipulation Program
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.12 redesign of Mozilla's browser component
mozilla-thunderbird-2.0.0.12 redesign of Mozilla's mail component
mutt-1.5.17p0-sasl-sidebar-compressed tty-based e-mail client, development version
tor-0.1.2.19 anonymity service using onion routing

While BSDanywhere is currently in beta, I plan on downloading and burning a copy very soon.

I'm a simple guy.

In Windows, I used to use Internet Explorer 6 as my FTP client. Yep, you can do that.

And when I installed IE7 after much kicking and a little screaming, I was dismayed to learn that I lost my ability to use the Web browser and a drag-and-drop, fully graphical, albeit extremely simple FTP client.

I quickly learned that the Windows file browser, which I get to by going to Start -- My Computer (since I'm locked out of My Network Places by my paranoid sysadmin) and enter the FTP address as ftp://10.10.10.10 (that's a fake, not-real address for those who are wondering), and then do my FTP work just as I did in IE6.

And yes, I've tried the FTP plugin for Firefox.

I needed a real FTP client for Windows.

I tried a few that weren't free, open-source applications. They included CuteFTP and another I can't remember.

But I'm not happy with 30-day trials, and why pay for an app when you can use FOSS?

I finally downloaded Filezilla, which has FTP clients for Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you've been reading this blog for even a little while, you know I love apps that go across as many platforms as possible.

So far it works great. I set Notepad++ as my default editor, and I've already edited my first file on the FTP server.

So I have a fully FOSS FTP solution in Windows, and I'm happy.

P.S. In Ubuntu and Debian, I just use gFTP, which for some reason I also remember using in Slackware.

I've been all excited about how well the Geany text editor has been working in Windows.

But I never even tried to print a text file with Geany in Windows.

Until now.

First it did some kind of shell command. I don't have access to my shell, per my lovely employer, so that didn't work.

When I installed Geany, I used the "nogtk" version because I already had the GTK+ runtime libraries as a result of installing the GIMP image editor on a previous occasion.

So I reinstalled Geany with new GTK+ libraries. Then I went into the Geany preferences and turned on GTK printing.

It works.

But it looks HORRIBLE.

Each and every letter is separated by two lines in various stages of thickness.

Ugly. Horrible.

I wonder if there's a fix for this.

As it is, I had to return to Notepad++ just to print a text file.

So ... it's back to Notepad++.

I'm a fickle user of applications and operating systems. If something doesn't work for me, I'll switch things up in a minute.

Daily News online leader Ryan Garfat uses EditPlus, which is NOT a free, open-source program, but which does edit HTML exceptionally well. It offers a 30-day trial, then costs $35 for a single user.

But y'all know me. I want FOSS.

So does anybody out there have a favorite free, open-source text editor for Windows?

Ubuntu 8.04 doesn't handle ACPI as well as 6.06 did on this VIA C3 Samuel-based converted thin client.

With 6.06, the screensaver eventually doesn't just blank the screen but puts it into "power-saver" mode.

And when I shutdown, ACPI turns the box off all the way.

These features used to work in Ubuntu but not in Xubuntu.

Now they don't work in Ubuntu either.

I get a message while booting about "forcing ACPI," which I suspect is a symptom of/clue about the problem.

It's annoying because for this box I've lost functionality going from one Ubuntu LTS to another.

It's also annoying because most other distros — everything from Debian Etch and Lenny to Slackware, Wolvix, CentOS, Mepis, Puppy and even Damn Small Linux handle shutdown with ACPI much better.

So why is Ubuntu doing me this way?

Again, I can't get too mad about it because 8.04 runs so great on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop ... but a problem is a problem, and I should try to get to the bottom of it.

In case you were wondering, BoingBoing is the world's greatest blog.

One example is this post, which introduced me to two wonderful ukulele players/singers:

Via BoingBoing, via the Fire Wire.

I'm back using the Geany text editor in Windows. I also use it in OpenBSD and in Linux.

I like applications that I can use across platforms. Things like Firefox, OpenOffice, Abiword, Pidgin, and other too numerous to name make life easier for those of us who use three or more different operating systems. The apps also showcase free, open-source software for those who are using proprietary operating systems and give them a reason to explore FOSS further, perhaps even trying something like Linux.

If you learn to love a bunch of free applications, why not try the OS that is just as free?

Anyway, I have a lot of requirements for a text editor, as I'm sure do most of us who use them heavily.

One thing that Geany doesn't do that I need is an easy way to rename files. It's easy enough in a Unix-like shell, or in the finder in Windows, OS X or anything else, to change a file name, but I like to be able to change the name of a file right in the text editor.

Sure, you could always do a "save as" and have the old file with the old name and a new file with the new name, but I like to save steps and have the application do it all for me.

EditPadLite, which isn't FOSS, has a "Rename/Move" function. I don't believe that Notepad++ has it, either.

At any rate, my life would be that much more complete if Geany had a "rename file" feature.

Now that I've got that off my chest, it's back to work.

July's Vanity Fair presents an extensive oral history of the Internet in eight chapters.

I will be reading every word.

Via BoingBoing.

Intel is making tiny, tiny flash-memory drives for the cell phone, media player and mini-notebook market.

Pictures via Intel, via ZDNet, where I also heard about the story from Storage Bits writer Robin Harris.

This is pretty cool on two counts.

First count: It's the 1979 "Disco Handbook."

Second: I just learned about this service called Scribd, which is presenting this scanned book:

heard via BoingBoing.

Aside from all the disco sweetness, Scribd is something I'm going to investigate further.

Why do I have to do anything when Matt Asay is writing all the good stuff?

I'll just do a link dump:

WSJ's Walt Mossberg: "Firefox is the best"
Google embrace OpenOffice? Probably not
Google gets serious about the Mac
WSJ to Microsoft: You need to open source Windows
The eBay "fad" is wearing off
Would we hate Microsoft if it were Apple?
The most important open-source projects...to Google
Does OpenOffice's speed even matter?
When all else fails, try porn

Matt is a big wheel at open-source company Alfresco, but he isn't afraid to write about his own company: Try doing this with proprietary software

Here he hints at his almost-working for Microsoft and former position at Novell:
Why I won't work for Microsoft:

Several years ago while still working for Novell, I considered going to work for Microsoft in Europe. (Had I waited long enough, I could have worked for Microsoft while still at Novell, but that's another story, albeit one that is paying off well for Novell.) I thought I could help the company figure out open source and navigate the thorny issues that prevent it from embracing open source.

I gave up on that quixotic quest, and in retrospect it was the right decision. Sam Ramji, Bill Hilf, and others are doing a far better job of nudging Microsoft toward open source than I would have. But the bigger reason is that Microsoft has placed an apparently insurmountable hurdle in its path to fully engaging the open-source community, and to my ability to fully support its embrace of open source:

Patents

A few more links:

The Mac's allure for open-source developers
Twitter is the Wonderbread of intellectual nutrition

GetDeb is an interesting project. It's a collection of packages that are compatible with Ubuntu but not yet in the official Ubuntu repositories.

I haven't tried any of these — there's plenty that Ubuntu does include, and I haven't needed anything I couldn't find. But GetDeb is worth keeping an eye on.

The project has a blog, and despite its relative lack of traffic, it merits a look.

Here are the top 10 packages for the day at GetDeb:

Startup Manager
(1.9.11)
Screenlets
(0.1.1)
Wine-Doors
(0.1.2)
gBrainy
(0.70)
Ubuntu Tweak
(0.3.1)
gPodder
(0.11.3)
Wormux
(0.8final)
LiVES
(0.9.8.12)
ManDVD
(2.4)
Songbird
(0.5)

Some of these look pretty good, so if you're the inquisitive type, see what GetDeb has to offer.

I've had this problem on one machine ever since I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It's a triple boot, with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on one of the other partitions, and I never had this problem with the older LTS installation.

Basically, the Ubuntu login screen in 8.04 is too large to fit in the dimensions of the monitor. Once I'm logged in, my resolution is 1024x768, which is exactly how I want it.

But the login screen is so huge, I don't get the Options menu on the bottom, which comes in handy if I want to log in with another window manager.

And besides that, it's just not right.

Here's how I fixed the problem:

Ubuntu auto-configures /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and it puts in a lot of code that I've never seen before.

Before you start working on an xorg.conf file, it's a good idea to back up the old one:

$ sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.original

Then edit xorg.conf:

$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Here's the relevant portion of xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
       Identifier               "Default Screen"
       Monitor                 "Configured Monitor"
       Device                   "Configured Video Device"
       Defaultdepth           24
       SubSecton "Display"
              Depth   24
              Virtual 1280      960

I have never seen a "Virtual" setting in an xorg.conf before, but I knew that 1280x960 wasn't right.

The change was simple. I just made the "Virtual" setting what it needed to be, which is 1024x768:

Section "Screen"
       Identifier               "Default Screen"
       Monitor                 "Configured Monitor"
       Device                   "Configured Video Device"
       Defaultdepth           24
       SubSecton "Display"
              Depth   24
              Virtual 1024 768

I saved the file in gedit, closed the window and then logged out.

After logging out, my login screen was the proper size for my monitor.

An easy fix, to be sure, but why did the Ubuntu installer screw up this part of the X configuration in the first place?

I did start this install out when 8.04 was still in beta, so perhaps this problem has been fixed since then.

At any rate, it's an easy fix to make.

I hate to be down on Thunderbird, which I use as my default mail client in Windows XP. But today I turn on the box, start Thunderbird, and things don't go well.

Since I have two IMAP accounts plus local folders set up in Thunderbird, I use the "Master Password" feature so I don't have to enter passwords for each of my accounts, and I figure I'm adding some measure of security that way.

I type in my Master Password when prompted.

It doesn't work.

I type it in about 10 more times.

Still nothing.

So I try to CHANGE or get rid of the Master Password. It seems that you can't do that without knowing the Master Password in the first place.

Are my local folders locked forever? Will I have to completely reinstall Thunderbird?

Answers: No and no.

It is possible to remove the Master Password without knowing it:

If you have lost or forgotten your Master Password or you want to disable the feature, you can reset your master password. Upon resetting, you will lose all the stored information in the Password Manager as this is a built-in security feature to prevent people from simply resetting your Master Password to gaining access to your passwords.

Thunderbird 2: Choose Tools - Error Console, paste the expression: openDialog("chrome://pippki/content/resetpassword.xul") and press the Evaluate button. That will open a dialog asking you if you want to reset your password.

Sure enough, that worked. I reset my Master Password, but I'm still in the dark as to why Thunderbird broke in the first place.

Thanks, Bargain Lady!

Adobe's Acrobat.com is the PDF/Flash/Photoshop maker's entry in the free-of-charge online office suite wars.

Biggest competitor: The also-free Google Docs.

Real competitor: The far-from-free Microsoft Office.

While I don't think Google Docs has anything to worry about at the moment, Acrobat.com sure does look nice.

It makes extensive use of Flash, which could be good or bad, depending on how you feel about Flash.

Adobe, as the owner of Flash (and PDF, for that matter) probably feels pretty damn good about it.

I'm just scratching the surface of Acrobat.com, but I managed to create an account and this document above in the Buzzword application. I also found out that users get 5GB of space for their documents and other files. There are some restrictions on what you can stow with Adobe, but 5GB is still a lot of space.

One thing I do like about Acrobat.com: You can print a document without first making a PDF, but you can, if you like export a PDF (or in Word's .doc, XML and newer .docx formats, Rich Text Format, zipped HTML -- why zipped, I don't know -- and plain ol' text).

One thing I don't like: Passwords are limited to 12 characters in length. I like a longer password (please hold .... your snide comments ... or don't).

Like Google Docs, Acrobat.com is all about collaboration on documents, something I've found very handy in Google Docs.

As I said, I'm not ready to throw Google Docs overboard, especially since I don't know all that much about Acrobat.com and its Buzzword app, and am not a particularly huge fan of Flash, but it's nice to see Adobe innovating and doing something that doesn't cost $800 for a copy.

And while Buzzword seems to be part of a whole suite, I don't see the other icons on the Acrobat.com screen as being much more than supporting players to Buzzword itself.

Click on the picture below for a bigger view of the Acrobat.com main screen:

All I can say is that Google now has somebody breathing down its neck ... and it sure isn't Yahoo ...

And everybody from students to professionals has another way to create, format and store documents without being hassled by the man (i.e. paying for office software).

More on Adobe's Acrobat.com (all from ZDNet):

• Adobe's Acrobat.com could be an Office killer; Will interface matter?
• Screenshots: Adobe's Acrobat.com office suite
• Adobe merging desktop and web with Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com

And I almost forgot to mention Adobe's free online photo-editing program Photoshop Express, which doesn't do what I need it to do (namely size JPEGs by pixels) but might do what you want it to do.

I'm really only doing this entry for the killer title. But behind it is a new ZDNet blog called iGeneration and written by a seemingly youngish Brit named Zack Whittaker:

His bio:

Zack Whittaker started playing with computers before he could even tie his shoelaces; although that skill wasn't discovered until he was 10. Amongst many things, he is a good-for-nothing, pink sock wearing, British student at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK studying computer science. In between studying, drinking, and occasionally sleeping, he works with researchers studying neurological illnesses like Tourette's syndrome (of which he suffers from), gives talks and lectures on disabilities, and throws in a little child protection and family safety work now and then.

He grew up in "Robin Hood Country" in Nottinghamshire, UK for the best part of his life, but still heads there on occasion to see his ever-supporting and loving family, godchildren and his friends. Although due to his age he may seem inexperienced and misguided, but he's already totalled up many years of work, education, knowledge and general (mis)adventure.

Read Matt Asay's The Open Road. It's one of the best.