August 2008 Archives

The Daily News is leaving the windowless box it has called home since some time in the mid-'80s to move down the street to a newer, window-rich building.

The current spot has lots of space — and that means lots of space filled with old hardware.

The paper's design desk used to subsist on Power Macintosh G4 computers hooked up to 22-inch LaCie monitors.

Some of them are still in service, but mostly we use Windows PCs now.

Resident Mac guru and digital photography expert Roger Vargo announced that anybody who wanted a G4 could get one ... until they were all gone.

I put in my request immediately, and soon I had a hard-drive-less G4/450 MHz box with 128 MB of RAM, plus that huge monitor, at my not-so-clean desk.

Most of my crap is packed for the move. I haven't packed two file drawers filled with old hardware. So I pulled a 14.4 GB IDE hard drive out of the drawer, plugged it in to the first cables I could find (it's just dangling in the box, not even mounted), and found the first PowerPC CD I could find.

It was Xubuntu 7.10. It booted, but was extremely slow and didn't look installable with only 128 MB of RAM.

So I downloaded a fresh ISO of Debian Etch (4.0r4) for PowerPC and did an install.

I did the "standard" install first, without a network mirror, just to see if the thing would boot after it was done. There was a message during the install about not finding a Mac boot partition, but once I said that no, I didn't need it, the install went forward and I rebooted into a Debian GNU/Linux console.

I think the message about a Mac boot partition had something to do with installing Linux on a hard drive that already contains Mac OS, and since this drive did not, the Debian installer took care of making the drive bootable.

The next install, for which I chose the "desktop" set of packages, went perfectly. I entered the LaCie monitor's native resolution (I think it was 1600x1200; I Googled it at the time), and I had a perfect Debian Etch desktop in about a half-hour.

I've been wanting to get a new desktop box for awhile (I've been shopping in my price range, which is free to $25), and it's funny how this thing pretty much dropped in my lap.

Next things to do: Clean out the interior, which is Addams-Family dusty, put that hard drive in a bay, and add some RAM (I have a 512 MB PC-100 module that I really hope works; otherwise I have 256 MB and 128 MB and 64 MB and 32 MB modules ... I've got a lot of old memory).

So how does Debian perform on a Mac PowerPC with 450 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM?

Surprisingly well. And there were absolutely zero configuration issues. Everything came out perfectly. I figured that if any platform would be no trouble for a PowerPC distro, it would be the Mac G4. And it appears that I was right.

I could (and very well might) test this thing out with OpenBSD, NetBSD, Fedora, or even Slackintosh.

More than likely, I'll stick with Etch or try it instead with Lenny.

I've been able to have OpenBSD's /etc/fstab automatically mount the ext2 filesystem on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive with no difficulty lately, but every couple of days or so I get a message while booting OpenBSD that says the Linux filesystem is not clean and that I should run fsck on it.

I then boot Puppy Linux 2.13, run e2fsck on the partition, the errors are cleared up, and all is well until a few more days pass.

I haven't lost any data, but I'm going to do a few experiments.

First, I added noauto to the /etc/fstab line so the Linux filesystem will not be automatically mounted. Then I'm going to run Puppy for a few days and check the filesystem with e2fsck.

It could be that the errors are coming from Puppy alone. I think that's unlikely, but it is a possibility.

Then I'll experiment with manually mounting (with mount) and unmounting (with umount) the Linux filesystem while in OpenBSD.

That way I can see whether or not automounting and unmounting the ext2 filesystem in OpenBSD is what's causing the problem.

Hours later: Looks like OpenBSD is NOT responsible. I ran Puppy totally in RAM (using the puppy pfix=ram boot parameter), than ran e2fsck to clean up the filesystem on my ext2 partition. Then I ran Puppy the "normal" way, in which the system mounts the partition to access the pup_save file. I then rebooted and once again ran Puppy without mounting the partition. At no time did I boot OpenBSD or mount the filesystem in that OS.

Once I was back in Puppy, running pfix=ram to keep the partition unmounted, I ran e2fsck and got this message:

/dev/hda3 was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.

I had one more test to do.

Now that I had run e2fsck on the ext2 filesystem, I needed to boot OpenBSD, mount the filesystem, write a file to it, then unmount it. After that, it would be time to boot Puppy Linux again, using the pfix=ram boot parameter again so as not to mount the filesystem in Linux, and then run e2fsck again to check the filesystem and see if mounting, writing to and then unmounting it caused any errors.

So I booted into OpenBSD 4.2, mounted the ext2 filesystem, modified a few files, added a few, then unmounted it. I rebooted and did the same thing again.

Then I booted into Puppy, again with the pfix=ram boot parameter so as not to mount the Linux partition.

I ran e2fsck. After two boots of OpenBSD, during which I modified files in the Linux filesystem both times, there were no errors in the ext2 filesystem.

I said it was "unlikely," but in fact it's Puppy Linux, NOT OpenBSD that is not "cleanly" unmounting the Linux filesystem. I truly expected it to be the other way around.

I'll have to test this with Damn Small Linux, Wolvix and maybe even Slitaz to see if this is a Linux problem, or just a Puppy (or Puppy 2.13, to be more specific) problem. But right now, OpenBSD has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Mounting the filesystem in:

Damn Small Linux 4.3 caused no errors

Remember the last time I tried using the free Wi-Fi at Starbucks?

I couldn't get it to work with OpenBSD on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt with Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card), but everything worked fine with Puppy.

Yesterday I tried again, but I couldn't remember my AT&T Wi-Fi login or password.

Today I have them, and upon first boot in OpenBSD 4.2, I got an IP, no problem, but DNS wasn't working. I finally got it jump-started by restarting the network:

# sh /etc/netstart

That started DHCP again, and for some reason the nameserver was working.

I started the Opera Web browser, logged in, and now I have free wireless working in OpenBSD 4.2 from everybody's favorite coffee chain.

I need to test this some more to make sure the DNS problem either doesn't persist or is easily corrected. Again, in Linux I've had no problems.

But it's nice to know that AT&T and Starbucks don't have anything against OpenBSD.

In my recent post, in which I related how I missed the fact that Click had reached its 1,000th post, I neglected to mark another blog milestone:

Click is 2 years old. I had forgotten, until I looked at the monthly-archives list on the lower left side of this page, that Click began its life in August 2006, under the auspices of now-former Los Angeles Daily News online guru Josh Kleinbaum. He let me pick the name, which was a nice thing.

I had been doing some technology blogging on my own, but the chance to do it for the Daily News has been, for lack of a more sophisticated cliche, a wonderful experience.

Not the least of that wonderfulness is being able to write exactly what I want with no interference whatsoever. The blog is here, I write, and that's all there is to it.

That said, I'm trying to broaden its appeal somewhat. My weekly print column aims at a more general audience (not that Linux, OpenBSD, old hardware and free, open-source applications don't play a part in it), and I'd like to give that audience more in this blog than the nerdish revelry that comes with succesfully writing to my OpenBSD disklabel and not blowing the whole system to bits while doing it.

Once again, if you work at the Daily News, or any Los Angeles Newspaper Group paper, and you want to write about technology your way, I'd love to have you do it here. I'll set you up right away.

And thanks, readers, for stopping by, writing comments and linking to all of this froth and circumstance.

I've had a bit of a difficult time with my OpenBSD 4.2 installation on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 144 MB RAM, a 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and 3 GB hard drive. I use PCMCIA cards for networking, an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver for 802.11b wireless and a TRENDnet TE-100PCBUSR 10/100mbps for wired Ethernet.

Since I upgraded the memory from 64 MB to the 144 MB maximum for this machine, things are running much, much better.

But I'm running out of room in the /usr partition. I'm not sure whether or not OpenBSD can be installed in a single partition, but since the install FAQ tells you to set up separate partitions for everything, that's what I did.

On this drive, I set aside about 600 MB for Linux filesystems to create swap and a place to store files for Puppy Linux, leaving 2.4 GB for OpenBSD.

At the end of the OpenBSD partitioning, I had 1 GB for /usr, which is where applications are stored in the system.

For awhile things were going fine. I had our daughter's Gcompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay games on here, Firefox, the Geany text editor, plus a few console apps like nano, mc and mutt.

But it's not console apps that are taking up all the space.

I pulled the games and their libraries in order to fit the Opera Web browser and the Linux compatibility package needed to run it. That was the best thing I've done for this install since I did it. On this old hardware, the Linux build of Opera runs much faster than Firefox.

That speed really shows up when blogging with Movable Type. For some reason, even in Linux, scripts keep timing out in Firefox and the Mozilla-based Seamonkey. Now that I have Opera installed in both OpenBSD and Puppy 2.13, I'm a lot happier on this old laptop, which is about as challenged as it gets when it comes to old hardware working with modern operating systems and applications.

Anyhow, I needed to do some more "formatted" writing, and I did have the Ted word processor installed. But Ted isn't great when it comes to centering type, print previews or generating PDF output.

I needed Abiword. But I didn't have enough space.

The only thing big enough: Firefox.

Yep, I got rid of Firefox. One thing about the OpenBSD package manager that isn't helping me out here is that when you install a package, all the dependencies are checked, and the additional packages needed are downloaded and installed. But when you remove a package, the system doesn't check its dependencies for whether or not they're still needed by other applications in the system.

I'm sure there's a reason for this, and there's probably even a way around it (like the great deborphan app that I use in Debian), but I know nothing about it.

Anyhow, I managed to get Abiword installed, and I have 500 MB left in my /usr partition. Unfortunately, the spell-check in Abiword doesn't work in the OpenBSD build. Abiword spell-check doesn't work in Puppy either.
The spell-check installs and works most of the time in Debian (especially when you install it with Aptitude and get all the packages you need, rather than with apt-get, where at least sometimes you don't).

I found an old OpenBSD mailing-list hack about how to fix Abiword's spell-checking capability, but it didn't have enough information, and it didn't look like it would work anyway.

But the good news is that with this amount of memory, Abiword 2.4.5 runs extremely well in OpenBSD 4.2. Additionally, for some reason the fonts in Abiword look better in OpenBSD than then do in most other Linux/Unix systems.

So now I have Abiword, Geany, Opera and the Dillo browser as my "main" applications on this system. I don't want to forget the Rox-filer file manager. I put that on the box awhile ago. I still need space to add the Flash plugin for Abiword, and Rox is a prime target for removal so I can get that space ... or the space to install Gaim/Pidgin for IM.

But I just can't do it. I've loved the Rox-filer ever since I first used it in Puppy, and I just can't give it up.

I probably should. I removed mc (Midnight Commander) for space reasons, even though it probably doesn't take up all that much space, and since I had Rox. If mc didn't have problems with the function keys in the console (it misreads the keys for some reason), I'd be able to fit one more app in. (Note: mc works perfectly in an xterm window, just not in the console).

What I'm going to have to do eventually is reinstall OpenBSD. I need a bigger drive so I can have a big /usr partition, install everything I want on it, as well as have room for a full Linux install as well, something I could use in addition to Puppy.

So the OpenBSD install is really tight, in terms of space for applications, but it's working extremely well. I now have the ability to share files between OpenBSD and Linux via an ext2 partition, and that has added tremendous value to this laptop.

I could be using my Gateway laptop a lot more. It's got way better specs (1 GB RAM, 1.3 GHz CPU) and runs Linux way faster. But it isn't so hot with OpenBSD due to the noisy, uncontrollable-by-BSD CPU fan. And its PCMCIA slot still isn't fixed, so I can't run wireless with it.

The Compaq may be underpowered, but it has a very clear, very bright screen, an excellent keyboard, working wireless, no ACPI issues (since it has no ACPI), and there's just something about getting it to work and keeping it working that I find compelling.

And there's also something about OpenBSD that keeps me coming back to it, even on the desktop.

I've been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions.

I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online tutorials gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)

Since I installed OpenBSD on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive without fully setting up the Linux partitions (all I have is swap and an ext2 partition for my live CD files), OpenBSD didn't know how to properly mount the ext2 partition.

Briefly, I needed to run fdisk in OpenBSD, transfer the Linux information to the OpenBSD disklabel, create a directory in which to mount the Linux filesystem, give the wheel group write access to that directory, then edit /etc/fstab to properly mount the ext2 filesystem at boot.

Once I was sure the Linux filesystem was properly mounting and was writable from OpenBSD, I booted Puppy Linux without mounting the partition and then ran e2fsck to clean up any errors (there were some).

Since then, the filesystem has been error-free, and I can easily exchange files between my OpenBSD and Linux installs on this laptop.

It's nice to solve a problem for a change.

My exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-part series on what OS to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) spent a good deal of time on how Puppy Linux represented the best combination of quickness and out-of-the-box features of any operating system for this old, underpowered hardware.

I based all of that on running Puppy 2.13. I managed to boot Puppy 4, but the relative slowness of Abiword to start had me pausing about an upgrade from 2.13.

I must've forgotten that I couldn't get X to work in Puppy 3.01 on the Compaq. I might be able to figure out the configuration later. Or I might not.

Sticking with Puppy 2.13 is a distinct possibility, as is going to a later build in the Puppy 2 series (probably 2.17) just to get some newer packages and, more importantly, the ability to encrypt my pup_save file.

Considering the possibility of upgrading to Puppy 4.00, a slow Abiword I can handle, especially because I learned something very helpful about the Geany text editor, at least the version in OpenBSD 4.2 (version 0.11) and not that in Puppy 2.13 (version 0.10). That "valuable" something (meaning valuable to me and my work and likely not to you or yours is this:

When you tab before beginning writing a paragraph, the build of Geany in OpenBSD (and likely in most Linux systems with updated packages) will automatically tab when you hit the return key to begin your next paragraph. That means not needing to continually hit the tab key to make my paragraphs look separate when NOT writing for the Web.

For the Web, there are usually two returns (or the <p> HTML code) between paragraphs. For print, the paragraphs don't have space between them and can only be told apart by their indents, something which I've been relying on word processing programs to do for me and which I now will be able to do in Geany.

The ability to create copy for the Web and for the Daily News print system with the same text editor, and to do it with a minimum of formatting, is a very good thing indeed.

There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.

I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn't everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.

I'm thinking about buying a new test box -- something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.

That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I've accumulated over the past couple of years.

In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.

I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn't do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn't made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.

But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.

Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.

At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.

I'd still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I'm thinking something generically Dell or HP), I'll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It's flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn't come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).

Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.

The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).

As for my new test box, I've seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I'd like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.

I've seen some nice things for $60, but I'd rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.

The OpenBSD system on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt) has a 3 GB hard drive mostly devoted to OpenBSD, with about 600 MB set aside for Linux, about 130 MB as Linux swap and the rest an ext2 filesystem on which I have my pup_save file for Puppy Linux and any other Linux files I've generated with other live CDs (Wolvix and Slitaz at the moment).

As I recall, I created the Linux partitions at one end of the drive and reserved the front for OpenBSD.

As a result, OpenBSD wrote its disklabel -- the system's guide to how the drive is partitioned -- to include one big Linux partition and not the separate swap and ext2 partitions I later created.

Check your disklabel this way (as root) (and with the name of your drive, mine being wd0):

# disklabel wd0

You should see any non-OpenBSD partitions at the end of the list.

You can edit the disklabel this way:

# disklabel -e wd0

This opens a file in vi (the default editor in OpenBSD, or whatever the $Editor variable is set to; I'd reset it to Nano if only I knew how).

I tried to modify the disklabel to recognize BOTH Linux partitions, but all I got were errors in both OpenBSD and when booting Puppy 2.13.

To figure out how to edit the disklabel, I ran the following command in OpenBSD:

# fdisk wd0

I figured that copying the "start" and "size" info into the disklabel would make my Linux partitions mountable in OpenBSD.

Nope.

I got some fsck errors when I booted Puppy. I fixed them by a) deleting and re-creating the Linux swap file and b) running Puppy in RAM (boot parameter: Puppy pfix=ram) and running e2fsck on my ext2 partition.

I still don't have my Linux filesystem mountable in OpenBSD, but I didn't lose any files or filesystems either.

Clearly I need to figure out how to take the information from fdisk and properly write it in the disklabel.

I'm just glad (and very much amazed) that I didn't lose anything. It's a tribute of sorts to the OpenBSD system and documentation that I managed not to totally kill the whole installation.

I know that application startup time isn't everything. But it's definitely something.

Here are the numbers for Puppy 2.13 and OpenBSD 4.2 on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM):

OpenBSD
Firefox 2.0.0.6: 120 seconds
Opera 9.22: 37 seconds

Puppy Linux 2.13
Seamonkey (Mozilla-based): 30 seconds
Opera 9.02: 34 seconds

Analysis: Firefox/Mozilla is a fairly heavy application, but the Seamonkey version of Mozilla does quite well in Puppy, where it beats Opera slightly when it comes to start time.

But in OpenBSD, Opera is a standout for some reason, starting in about a third of the time that Firefox takes to start. Opera works with Movable Type much better in OpenBSD, with no stalled-script messages.

Question: Is there any way to run Mozilla browser code faster than Firefox? I need to test Firefox in Puppy (and, if I had the space, Seamonkey in OpenBSD) to fill out the data.

Conclusion: Application startup and response time is extremely critical with older machines. Since most of my computing time is spent in Web browsers, I welcome the speed and functionality of Opera in OpenBSD; it has pretty much given this OS a proverbial "new lease on life."

I've heard about Drivel, the GNOME blogging client that enables users of Linux to write blog posts offline for LiveJournal, Blogger, MovableType, Advogato, Atom, WordPress and Drupal blogs.

I haven't used it yet -- and I was hoping to find something that would work with OpenBSD and not carry the weight of GNOME along with it -- but I will.

More on Drivel from:

Techmania

And from the world of the KDE desktop environment, there's Blokkal.

My Debian Lenny system has a whole lot of KDE on it already, so I can probably add both of these.

Remember the eight-part "Finding an OS for the $15 Laptop"? After considering everything from Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux, through Wolvix, OpenBSD and Debian, I elected to keep OpenBSD on the hard drive and use Puppy as a live CD, with the eventual migration of the system from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3 and Puppy 2.13 to 3.01.

If I thought that a hard-drive install of Debian on this 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt would give me a huge speed advantage over OpenBSD, I'd go in that direction right away. With 233 MHz of CPU and 144 MB of RAM, performance really counts.

But I really like running OpenBSD, and until (or "unless") I can get ACPI management of the CPU fan on the newer $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I'd like to keep this most-secure of Unix-like operating systems on the Compaq, which from a hardware-configuration standpoint has responded better to OpenBSD than to any version of Linux.

The realities of using OpenBSD on this old machine have had me booting Puppy more and more. The reason is that Firefox in OpenBSD can't handle posting to Movable Type. Scripts are constantly timing out, and the experience is more than a little frustrating.

The Dillo browser runs great in OpenBSD. It doesn't have tabs, like some versions of Dillo do. And it was compiled without support for cookies. (Dillo does support cookies in OpenBSD, and you can modify your ~/.dillo/cookiesrc file to implement them on an overall or site-by-site basis, another way that OpenBSD locks things down from a security and privacy standpoint). So But even with cookies turned on, as an interface to something as complicated as Movable Type, Dillo won't work.

Since then, I've discovered the free (but not open-source) browser Opera, which is a good deal faster than Firefox (or anything else based on Mozilla) and in Windows a great deal faster than Internet Explorer.

Could Opera help me in OpenBSD?

First I had to clear some space. This 3 GB hard drive has 1 GB set aside for the /usr partition in OpenBSD.

When I initially set up the system, I added two huge educational packages — Childsplay and GCompris — for my daughter. That pretty much maxed out the /usr partition.

To reclaim some space I started removing packages with pkg_delete. It took me quite a bit of time before I even had enough space to download the OpenBSD ports tree and unpack it.

The first couple of times I tried, I ran out of space in /usr. But eventually I was able to untar the ports tree and install the Opera browser, which, being non-FOSS, is not available as a precompiled binary package for OpenBSD but only as a port. (Actually, the "port" grabs the Linux binary package and installs that in OpenBSD; you need OpenBSD's fedora_base package to make Linux binary compatibility work, and you then need to modify /etc/sysctl.conf to have Linux binary compatibility automatically started at boot time. I will do a tutorial on this at some point soon, but is there really an OpenBSD user out there who knows less than I do? I'll believe it when I see it.).

Ethical aside: The way OpenBSD works is that the user is given the ultimate freedom. Rather than limiting the system to only free, open-source packages under amenable licenses, the developers of OpenBSD allow the user to decide, on an app-by-app basis, what they are comfortable installing and using on their machine.

The precompiled packages on OpenBSD's servers and mirrors are composed of, as far as I know, all free, open-source software. There are many things less than FOSS (but still free) available via ports, which are a different animal entirely.

A "port" in the world of OpenBSD is just a script (or "recipe") that fetches the appropriate code from the application's source (and NOT from any OpenBSD-controlled server) and compiles it, creating a binary package that is then installed on your system.

Back to Opera: Once I cleared out enough space for the ports tree, I installed Opera (OK, I had to clear out more and more from /usr before I had enough space for Opera to build).

And now I'm running Opera and writing an entry in Movable Type. The screen doesn't exactly keep up with my typing, but I don't have any scripts stalling, and I can produce an entry with little trouble.

Opera's sheer usability on this system has me using it more and more. For a nearly 10-year-old system with this little CPU and RAM, it's pretty much the killer app.

The Web is swimming in numbered lists: "10 most," 10 best," "30 top" ... and most are pretty sloppy. I still read them, but 9 Linux Myths Debunked is better than most.

The same writer, Rami Taibah, also has:

Now that I know what all the crap on my screen is called — "artifacts," I'm getting closer to figuring out how to fix it.

I'm going deep in Google with: Debian Lenny screen artifacts xorg.conf i810

I'm using the Intel i810 video driver, hence that portion of the search.

Right now I'm trying the suggestion that I comment out this line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Module"
Load "i2c"
Load "bitmap"
Load "ddc"
# Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "freetype"
Load "glx"
Load "int10"
Load "vbe"

I'm not sure what the DRI module is, let alone how it could work. I'll report later.

Hours later: This didn't work.

I've been meaning to do a Debian Lenny install so I can see how X behaves in a fresh installation vs. my much-older Debian partition that began life as Etch and has seen many, many packages come and go.

First things first: The Desktop installation of Lenny will not fit in 3 GB. At least the download-and-install software portion wouldn't work in that amount of space when I selected Desktop during the "task select" portion of the Lenny install.

I didn't want to make my root partition any bigger than 3 GB, so I elected to do a Standard installation, which doesn't include X or a desktop environment, although I did notice a few X11-related packages sneaking in.

After the install, I used aptitude to add X, Fluxbox and a few apps.

I started with:

aptitude install xorg fluxbox

With that line, I don't think I would've needed to add xserver-xorg, which I believe is wholly contained in the xorg megapackage. (I'll have to check this out).

I added a few items to get me going:

aptitude install iceweasel ted geany

Since then (it's been 10 or so hours), I've removed X and Fluxbox, replaced X and brought in Xfce with:

# aptitude install xfce-desktop

I had plenty of space for that.

I've also pretty much found out that my problem with "ghosting" on the screen in X continues in this new installation. It's specific to Lenny; I haven't seen it in Etch or any other Linux distro. Sometimes running xrefresh in a terminal clears things up, usually not. I can't figure out what's going on (I'm no PC video or Xorg expert), and everything I've tried hasn't worked.

I need to keep Googling until I find someone with the same problem who's smarter than I am. Shouldn't take long, I hope.

I meant to call attention to Click reaching the 1000-entry mark, except that Entry No. 1,000 appeared four days and about 10 entries ago.

There have been a few others posting on Click here and there, and I'd love to find somebody (or bodies) else to contribute to this blog from the Daily News, or even the vast Los Angeles Newspaper Group empire. (Hint: If you're reading this, you work here, you want to write about technology your way, I'll set you up.)

The Click blog began in August 2006 at the behest of now-former Daily News/LANG online guru Josh Kleinbaum. It was supposed to be a place for "cool things found on Web," "viral video," and stuff that would appeal to the average Web surfer.

Didn't turn out that way. Not that such things don't creep into here from time to time, but I quickly made Click about my technological journey, one borne by frugality, making old crap work as much like new as possible — not just because it's there and it's fun, but because I really don't have a whole lot of discretionary income knocking around.

Hence hundreds of articles on a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) , a 2002 Maxspeed Maxterm thin client
(converted to PC use with 1 GHz VIA C3 Samuel processor that doesn't always run that fast, 256 MB RAM, three swappable 14.4 GB hard drives), a 2002 Gateway Solo 1450 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron Mobile, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB hard drive), a 2003-ish Palm Tungsten E PDA, and even a 1996 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400cs (116 MHz PowerPC with 48 MB RAM and a sub-1GB hard drive), which I've managed to use to log into modern Unix-like boxes with MacSSH. (The Holy Grail of this column still remains finding and installing the MacX program, which should bring X11 capability to Mac's System 7 and allow me to run an X session over SSH on the Powerbook, making it look like it runs Linux or BSD, even if it's just doing it as an X terminal).

How many other technology bloggers/columnists can get excited over a 22-inch HDTV? That's our newest gear purchase, and it was a ponderous journey from thinking about it to spending $350. Ilene and I don't have cable, satellite, we are still using the Motorola V180 cell phones that were made in 2004, and we have and use a landline telephone.

My entire discovery of Linux and BSD on the desktop unfolded in this blog, and that's what most of its posts are about.

But lately things have been changing a bit. I started a print column about five months ago (available at the Daily News Web site) and have been focusing on broader (read: less geeky) issues.

That's where columns about digital TV, cell phones and making backups have come into play.

And I've been ready to stabilize my PCs somewhat, to stick with the same Linux distribution (or, in the case of the Compaq, OpenBSD, which it's still running, although it's a bit slow on that ultra-secure system when compared to how it works with Puppy Linux on live CD).

After all, my work box, a 2003-ish Dell Optiplex, has run Windows XP continuously since the IT people set it up. Not that I have the power to change it, which I don't. And I'm using the Mac more than ever, mostly for video editing, something I'm still pretty awful at, from a technical and creative standpoint. Hence my latest quest for a video-editing solution that runs in Linux. In case you haven't been following my tale of woe (and really, why would you?), the state of Linux video editing is pretty sorry at this point, although I've heard that an app called Kdenlive should change that somewhat (and I will be trying it).

I'd like to thank the readers of Click, whoever you are, and especially those who have come here over the years as the result of links I've gotten from Distrowatch, LXer and elsewhere.

These entries do tend to ramble. When it comes to blogging, I've done a lot of things wrong. I tend to write way too long. I ramble. Blogging is supposed to be about the minutia of the writer, and there's plenty of that here. My hope is that all I've "gone through" trying to get things to work might, in a small or even big way, help some of you out there, just as many other bloggers have helped (and continue to help) me.

Whether this blog can be deemed "successful," or just "there," is something still up for debate, but the key to blogging, successful or otherwise, is obsession and compulsion. I'm sure there's another way to get to 1,000 entries, but if there is, I know nothing about it.

Hello boys and girls — That's me in the Debian T-shirt above. Ilene got it for me from AboutDebian I don't think I need to tell any of you that I'm proud to be a Debian user.

Sure I've had (and have) my problems getting Debian to do exactly what I want on every machine on which I have it installed, but I'd call Debian ultra-reliable, easily fixable and extremely useful. I've never mistakenly hosed a Debian installation, and I've never seen a machine on which Debian won't run — and run pretty well.

The only thing that "beats" Debian on my Gateway Solo 1450 (The $0 Laptop) is Ubuntu, which of course is based on Debian. And if I could figure out the mysteries of suspend/resume, the two OSes would be equal on my main platform.

As it is, I'm having some trouble with Ubuntu, and I'm not entirely sure it's my fault. It could be a result of my partition nightmare when I was trying to install FreeBSD on my fourth primary partition, but now that the offending partition has been deleted, I'm still having a problem in Ubuntu 8.04 with stalling during boot. I've narrowed it down to something either with the ATA2 configuration or the USB HID core driver. (Ubuntu eventually does boot, but it takes a bit longer.)

Did I mention that Debian Lenny was unaffected. I look back at my experiences with Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 and 8.04, and I've had the boot sequence eventually go bad on me with all three. I think Ubuntu doesn't like having the drive's partition scheme messed with. But Debian? It never complains, always boots, always runs.

And if you've been following Debian Lenny through its Testing phase, you've seen it get better and better over the past six months. When Lenny goes Stable, we're going to have an excellent release.

Whether you use Debian or not (and many of us do, even if we don't run Debian itself, since quite a few other distributions use it as their core), the project and those who work and have worked on it are quite a tribute to and example of free, open-source software at its finest.

Today we have hundreds of Linux distributions, a half-dozen or so BSDs and a few other (Haiku, FreeDos) free operating-systems, but looking back 10 or more years ago, being able to install Slackware or Debian and have a full (and FOSS) working environment on the desktop or server was not so easy to come by.

I'm a big proponent of not stealing software, operating systems or applications, and it's only through projects like Debian — and the thousands of packages that go into it — that I'm able to practice what I preach and not habitually install bootleg copies of MS Windows and Office, Photoshop and Illustrator.

I understand why many still use those proprietary tools — even if they know about the vast world of FOSS (though they usually don't). I still begrudgingly have to use a few proprietary applications myself while at work.

The one task for which I use Photoshop could be done with the GIMP and Inkscape, but it can't be done exactly the same way, which leaves me jumping from my desk to a PC that has a licensed copy of Photoshop. (This task could be done just as well with FOSS, but it's not my call ...)

And I'm still searching for a video-editing solution in FOSS, something that can replace iMovie and Final Cut. So far Cinelerra looks like the best choice, but I'm unconvinced and still looking.

But for the vast majority of what I (and most people) do, free, open-source choices are not just "as good" as proprietary solutions, they're much better.

From Linux as the OS on the desktop and server to applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, OpenOffice, K3b, plus the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and the many apps that come with them, the numerous other window managers (everything from Fluxbox and Fvwm to JWM, Enlightment and Xfce), critical server software like Apache, MySQL, OpenSSH and the hundreds of utilities that make it all work.

The simple but critically important fact that I can make a free, open-source operating system work on even my oldest hardware and that every version from the first to the latest is still freely available (try buying an old version of Windows from Microsoft) gives users an important degree of ownership of their own computing experience. Microsoft and Apple want you to dump your hardware every few years and buy new, with new and expensive software to go with it. I guess that's OK; that's their business.

But having an alternative — or hundreds of alternatives — puts power right into the hands (and computers) of the users. If that's not democracy in action, I don't know what is. Call the proprietary alternative what you like.

I did my first Debian install when Etch went Stable in April 2007, and I've been using it ever since. I don't think the installation process is any harder than that in most of the Linux distributions out there, and if you've done even one install of another distro, you can probably install Debian with no problem.

So if you want to celebrate Debian's 15 years, I suggest you grab an ISO of the network installer (go here for Testing, which I recommend at this point, with Lenny so close to going Stable; or go here for Etch, here for the Etch and a Half network installer for i386) and do an install of the monumental achievement that is and continues to be the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

Debian and Ubuntu are supposed to be so close when it comes to code, with one being derived from the other and all, but a look at the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /etc/fstab files of the two distributions shows that each has a different way of doing things.

When it comes to autoconfiguring hardware and mounting drives, there indeed are differences.

I can't say yet whether one or the other is better, but it makes looking at one distro to figure out what's going wrong with the other quite a bit more difficult.

I suppose I could call on a deep understanding of the Linux kernel, autoconfiguration, HAL, the X server and drive-labeling conventions.

Unfortunately I don't really have any expertise in any of these areas. I'm pretty much an armchair hack (as opposed to hacker) who is just trying to get by on the desktop.

I have a certain amount of affection for Debian that spurs me on to figuring out how to make it run well on whatever systems I'm using. A good deal of this goodwill toward Debian is the fact that I just about always seem to be able to figure things out, sometimes quickly, oftentimes not so much, and usually with the help of many Debian users out there who know way more than I do.

One of the great things about over-the-air digital TV is the extra channels that almost all broadcasters offer to viewers.

I'd like to say that my favorites are all the extras on PBS affiliates KCET, KDOC and KLCS, but that was blunted considerably by the fact that at least one of these stations devotes a digital channel to those insipid, soul-sucking "music of our lives" kind of contribution come-on programs that have made me vow to never, ever contribute a dime to public television.

Thus far, both KNBC (Channel 4) and KABC (Channel 7) have done fine jobs with their extra channels. Both have a dedicated weather channel. That's not earth-shattering, but it's pretty damn convenient and probably means I'll be waiting a lot less for Dallas Raines to tell me what's what.

But the best things about both of these stations is their extra feeds of actual programming. KNBC has its "NewsRaw" feed, which has been mostly showing pre-Olympic qualifying events. Why they couldn't show actual Olympic events is beyond me, but at least they're showing real programming.

The KABC extra station tends to run shows that have previously aired on the main ABC station. I saw "This Week" at the more civilized hour of 10 a.m., I recall, instead of the too-early 7 a.m. (is that when they show it?), and I was also graced with an episode of "The Mole," a show I had no idea was still on the air.

OK, so it's mostly potential and not exciting programming just yet. But it's better than infomercials, to which a lot of other stations are devoting a portion of their digital spectrum.

And I guess I was too hard on the three — yes THREE — PBS stations I'm able to get with my decade-old $5 VHF rabbit ears. When they're not on one of those puppy-killing Pledge Breaks, there's more great programming on PBS than anywhere else on broadcast television, and I welcome the opportunity to see more of it.

Shameless plug: Two days from now, my next digital TV article for the Daily News arrives in the printed version of the newspaper (remember those, with the ink and everything?) as well as at the Daily News Technology page

I have three things to try:

1) Boot the 2.6.22 kernel instead of 2.6.25. I don't remember having this problem back when I first started running Lenny.

2) Modify GRUB's menu.lst, removing vga=771 from the kernel line. While searching for fixes, I found this Linux Questions thread, which suggests doing this. I've already modified menu.lst to see if this will work on the next boot.

3) Specify HorizSync and VertRefresh in xorg.conf. Currently these values are not set in the file. Perhaps spelling them out will affect the refresh rate.

Note: So far 1) and 2) all three haven't worked.

Further note: I'm cautiously ready to say that solution 3) HAS worked. I used the HorizSync and VertRefresh values that Puppy 3.01 autoconfigured for me, and so far X is behaving itself. I'll know for sure in a couple of days, but it looks like another Debian problem has been solved. Thanks, users and developers of Debian

Revised note: I did use the HorizSync and VertRefresh from Puppy, but it hasn't worked. Back to the drawing board.

Friday, Aug. 15 update: A new Intel video driver is coming into my Lenny installation right now. Could that help me? No help there, either.

Reports have been swirling around the Web in the past few days about a problem with poor chip design that makes the iPhone 3G sluggish when connected to the very 3G data network for which it's being so highly touted.

Rather than a recall (you try replacing a chip in a portable device; it pretty much can't be done; and replacing the many thousand already sold is ... not an option), Apple thinks it can fix the problem with a software update. The company reportedly will try to do so by the end of the month.

Meanwhile ... people with iPhone lust are still waiting in lines at Apple Store locations around the country. Now Best Buy has been christened as an official iPhone sales outlet, bringing the technological-lust-object-of-the-fortnight-and-then-some to bergs, hamlets and other non-Apple Store gifted areas.

My advice is to avoid dual-booting, and especially triple-booting (or even more than that).

If you set up a box to dual-boot with two Linux distros, Linux and Windows, or even a BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD) and Linux, and you leave it alone, you'll probably be OK.

But me, I'm testing things all the time, and lately I've been playing around with triple-booting on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. I've done this a lot, and I generally know how to do it so I don't hose one partition or another.

But I slightly hosed something on the laptop last night.

I've been playing around with FreeBSD, trying to figure out why it sometimes manages my CPU fan extremely well but usually not at all.

I have FOUR primary partitions on the 30 GB hard drive. The first is Linux swap, the second is Ubuntu 8.04, the third Debian Lenny, and for a long time the fourth was just an empty Linux ext3 partition where I could stash files large and small.

I started throwing new OSes on it about a week or so ago. I had PC-BSD on there, FreeBSD, Debian Etch ...

And last night I did another FreeBSD install. Now remember, I had FOUR primary partitions. As far as I know, no BSDs will install on a secondary partition. And in Linux, — again, as far as I know — you can only have four primary partitions. If you want more than that, you need to make one an 'extended' partition, and then you can fill that with a much larger number of secondary partitions (I'm not sure of the total number in Linux, but it's a lot).

When I was installing FreeBSD to the fourth primary partition, I veered from my usual practice of installing it in a single FreeBSD partition and instead let the installer auto-partition the portion of the drive set aside for FreeBSD.

Long story short, I think I screwed something up.

I deleted the screwed-up FreeBSD partition and replaced it with another Linux ext3 partition, but that didn't seem to "fix" whatever problem it is I'm having.

Debian Lenny boots fine. But Ubuntu 8.04 stalls in the middle. It eventually does boot, but there's a stall of a few minutes in the boot sequence. I booted in recovery mode to see what was going on, and it does appear to be disk-related, but I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I already deleted the "offending" partition, but maybe I shouldn't have replaced it (or so quickly before testing the other partitions)?

It's been over six months since I hosed a whole box, so in the grand scheme of things I'm not doing too badly.

But I should really start following my own advice and stop dual-booting on what, for me at least, amount to "production machines," which I rely on to get work done.

When experimenting, I need to swap whole drives instead, like I do with my VIA C3-based converted-thin client test box, which has three drives that are easily swapped via power and IDE cables that extend well outside the thin client's small case.

I didn't hose things so badly that I either lost files or can't boot either of the two Linux distros on the box, but I really need to be more careful, especially when mixing BSDs and Linux.

When doing just that, incidentally, I've had a lot more success by installing the given BSD FIRST, then throwing Linux on the box after that.

What I think I'm going to do, when it comes to Linux anyway, is to have the first partition be swap, the second partition for the distro itself and the third partition for /home. That way I can theoretically swap in new distros and keep the same /home file (backing that up, of course).

Now I'm going to think of what to install on the Gateway Solo 1450 to single-boot it for awhile.

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible.

I've written before about how preload doesn't seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I'd sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

While on the topic of Open Office, I should mention that I've been using it quite a bit lately. I like the way the fonts look way better than those in Abiword, and OO just seems to be working well, so I've taken to it quite a bit more than in previous months.

Oh, and Google Docs offline under Google Gears has been pretty much a big disappointment.

Since I started using it (with Firefox in Ubuntu), it has lost my database once, and is dog-slow the rest of the time. I hate starting Docs offline in the browser and waiting an age for my files to show up. With this kind of performance — which is in much contrast to Google Docs' swiftness when connected to the Internet, I'd much rather use a traditional word processor or text editor.

Hence my increasing use of OpenOffice.

Like most of you, I use Web browsers a lot. A whole lot. And my problems with screen refresh seem most acute when using the Iceweasel/Firefox browser.

I thought the problem with "ghosting" images on the screen only occurred in GNOME, but now I've seen problems in Xfce, too.

To test my theory, I started using Epiphany, the GNOME Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko engine.

So far things are looking pretty good. I'll have to do this for a few more days before I determine whether or not Iceweasel hates my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I'll leave the jury out on this for the moment and render a verdict in a day or so.

10 minutes later: Nope, it's not Iceweasel. I'm seeing funky stuff in Epiphany, too. And running xrefresh doesn't clear it up, nor does dragging the window off the screen and back again.

Look for it Saturday, Aug. 16, on page 2 of the Faith section (Business is one page after religion ... ponder that one, why don't you).

Of course it should also be appearing on the Daily News Technology page, if all goes according to plan.

I've talked for some time about the ghosting I get on the upper panel and in portions of Iceweasel/Firefox when using GNOME and Xfce in Debian Lenny.

All I have to do to make the problem go away is boot with the Xfce or Fluxbox window managers. It also doesn't happen with Debian Etch, an install of which I did yesterday. OK, I've seen the problem in Xfce, too ... and it seems related to X refresh.

So it's very possible that the problem I'm having isn't X- or driver-related, but something deep in the heart of GNOME.

I don't know if I'm the only one experiencing this problem, but I haven't been able to find any other reference to the problem, most likely because I'm not describing it in anywhere near the same way as anybody else.

A bunch of Xorg packages flowed into Lenny today, and I installed them. I'm still seeing some funky graphics in my "forward" arrow in Iceweasel, and sometime the little Web icon next to the Web page's name goes all green and opaque on me.

The problem with Iceweasel goes away if I drag the window so a portion goes off the screen. When it refreshes, all is well. The same happens when I mouse over icons in the upper GNOME panel. Of course it's hard to drag the upper GNOME panel off the screen, so areas with no icons or menus tend to stay funky.

So the problem has something to do with screen refresh. Perhaps an xorg.conf tweak will help me? Could the problem be somehow related to Iceweasel? (I've started running Epiphany to see how that affects the system.) I have no idea.

All I know is that I don't have the problem in Ubuntu, in Debian Etch, or in any other distro on this very same hardware.

And while I'm on the subject, compare /etc/X11/xorg.conf in Ubuntu Hardy with the same file on a Debian install. They look very, very different. Ubuntu's is much shorter. Autoconfiguration — or different apps/files — must be taking care of a whole lot more, given the short xorg.conf in Ubuntu.

I'm about to do a second install of Lenny on a free partition to see if a fresh installation takes care of the problem. I'm willing to break off /home into its own partition and reinstall Lenny since it works so much better on this laptop than Etch ever did. Aside from this nagging problem, of course.

This video issue and figuring out suspend/resume are pretty much the only things keeping Lenny from being as good as or better than Ubuntu Hardy on this machine. I'd like to say that I got Lenny to work better, but so far that hasn't happened.

I've tried LOTS of distributions, everything from Mandriva to PCLinuxOS to CentOS 5.2 and Fedora 9, and nothing except Ubuntu has working suspend/resume out of the box on this Gateway Solo 1450 (which comes up as "unknown" with s2ram at a console).

Just as I figured out how to control the CPU fan under ACPI, I'd love to have that same mastery over suspend/resume. If only ...

I realize that the whole Debian project ain't about me and my petty problems with my obscure hardware, but I'd like to see things working better. Maybe I'll do that reinstall and see how a fresh Lenny looks.

One of the great things about digital over-the-air television is that when you can get a station at all, it comes in perfectly.

Unlike old analog TV (with pictures transmitted in AM, sound in FM ... long story there), digital is quite the all-or-nothing proposition.

And as I said in my previous post, I had marginal reception of the lower VHF channels, principally 2, 4 and 5. But now with all the digital channels in the UHF frequency range, I'm getting everything with perfect reception, except for Channel 13, which I don't get at all in digital, only in analog, while it lasts.

I'm pretty burned out on "Seinfeld" reruns, so it's not a huge loss.

Before I got a digital TV set or DTV converter box for one of my old ones, I was worried that I'd have trouble receiving high-definition digital signals from the local TV stations.

I say this because at my Van Nuys, Calif., home, we use rabbit ears — not even an outside antenna — and get quite a few analog channels pretty well, and a few critical ones pretty poorly.

The "analog" problem is with the lower VHF channels — 2, 4 and 5. It's hard to get one good without the others looking like hell. And that's when I look for a compromise in how I configure my two sets of rabbit ears so I can at least get 2 and 4 acceptably.

I was worried about digital TV, an unknown quantity in my house. Would I get any channels? I knew that digital signals are generallly an "all or nothing" proposition: They come in with total clarity, or not at all.

Once I had all the cables plugged into our new Vizio 22-inch LCD set (old-school VCR and DVD player), I turned the set on.

The Vizio started automatically scanning for signals. It got all of the analog stations I'm accustomed to receiving plus about 60 digital channels. Many if not most of the broadcast stations "split" their digital signals into between two and eight separate channels (how Channel 18 gets so many channels in there, I don't know).

Once the Vizio finished its scan, I ended up with perfect reception of every local station's digital signal but one, Channel 13.

I suppose I could tweak my rabbit ears a bit to get Channel 13 to come in via digital, and I probably will, but I'm not a big viewer of that station, and I'm honest-to-god impressed with my ability to get five dozen channels in digital with nothing more than a $5 pair of VHF rabbit ears on top of a cabinet (and remember that all HDTV signals are UHF).

I spent the princely sum of $12 on a Philips passive HDTV rabbit-ears antenna, but it looks like I won't need it.

As in all things that have to do with over-the-air reception, your mileage may vary, but if you have good reception of analog TV over the air, chances are good that you'll have good digital reception, too.

And in my case, the nature of digital reception means I have all but a single station with PERFECT reception — a far cry from what I get in analog.

I heard from more than a few readers of my digital TV column in Saturday's Daily News.

One reader contended with my suggestion that a larger TV might not look so swell up close when compared to a smaller screen of similar resolution.

That reader said that the resolution of such TVs are so good that even bigger screens up close look good.

Since getting my own HDTV in the past few days, a low-rent 22-inch Vizio LCD, I'm almost inclined to believe it. I still think, however, that a 46-inch set sitting a mere 7 or 8 feet from my head just might be a bit overwhelming, especially to my small-TV psyche, which has spend quite a bit of time in front of a 13-inch analog set.

However, I'll amend my recommendation to say that you should still measure the distance and angle from which you'll be regularly viewing the set and still audition potential TV purchases from that angle. Look at everything you can, take notes on quality and price, and then make your decision.

And as I said in the column (although I think this part got cut for space reasons), whatever you buy now is going to be a huge leap forward in quality — especially if you're going to be viewing an HD signal (either over the air, or via cable or satellite), and you'll be pretty much amazed at what you're looking at. With the rapid advancement in TV technology, who knows what'll be available five years from now. I bet it'll be cheaper TVs that process bits and bytes faster, output them to better screens and generally improve the viewing experience by huge leaps.

So just like I suggest with computers, don't overspend for a TV today. Digital TV technology is, if not in its infancy, still in its toddler stage. Buy something in the midrange (or for less) and then feel better about getting something a whole lot better five years down the road, knowing you enjoyed your cheap TV while the industry fell all over itself to build something better, faster, stronger and cheaper.

Another reader pointed out that almost all full-power broadcast stations are transmitting in 1080i resolution and not 720p. That's true.

I got that one wrong. I didn't do enough research, and ABC-TV's Web site led me well astray. As I've seen for myself, the dial is full of 1080i signals.

That same reader pointed out something I already did know: That over-the-air broadcasters can't transmit in 1080p because they don't have enough bandwidth in their signals to do so.

This very smart reader (he's an engineer, I think) also said that a 1080p signal could potentially look too jerky on screen because it doesn't refresh as often as a 1080i signal of the same refresh rate due to the doubled number of passes at creating the image that an interlaced signal has over the progressive-scan signal.

Did I get that right?

All of this terminology is way too technical for the average TV viewer, and I'm having a bit of trouble with it, too.

To clarify again: The cheaper TVs with 720p resolution can receive and display the 1080i signals transmitted by most stations. The more expensive 1080p receivers will display the same signals in 1080i mode. They will also render a Blu-ray DVD at 1080p with more detail.

Manufacturers aren't helping the matter any. All TVs with 1080p resolution seem to advertise and label themselves as such. But the lower-resolution sets are sometimes called 720p, sometimes 1080i, sometimes none of the above.

Again, it's very confusing.

But having two kinds of resolution dominate the TV landscape (720p/1080i and 1080p) isn't profoundly confusing.

And I predict that a couple of years down the road, there will be no more 720p/1080i, just 1080p (with the ability to receive and display all of the digital TV modes out there, just like now).

That will make it easier for TV buyers.

So if I, myself, led any readers astray, I apologize. I'm learning about this just like you.

Technological transitions are always difficult, and buying just about anything is a bit of a gamble.

Since my column on buying a digital TV set ran in the Daily News, I've gotten a lot of e-mail, learned quite a bit that I didn't know, both from readers and elsewhere, and we also bought an HDTV set.

I'll go into all of that soon enough, but for now, I'll just say that we went for the low-priced ($350) Vizio 22-inch model at Costco.

That's pretty cheap. I didn't think that the service and warranty of Vizio and the other relatively unknown TV makers (Olevia and others) were all that great, and this article from the HD Guru confirms that.

However, Costco extends the warranty on these TVs to two years, I'm in the same state as Vizio as far as shipping the thing back (and yes, I am saving the original box in which to do it if needed), and if the set dies within the first 90 days, I can take it back to Costco for replacement.

According to the HD Guru, we should have gone with the Samsung at $479, since it is made by a major manufacturer with more sane warranty, parts and return policies.

I acknowledge that Vizio has a less-than-optimal return and repair policy, but I also realize that in this day and age, things like TVs, especially those costing $1,000 or less, are more disposable than we've come to think. I can't remember the last time I had a TV repaired.

I'm older than you think, and I fondly remember taking the TV to the repairman on Oxnard Street near Woodman Avenue (Phillip's TV, I think it was called -- and the guy's name was Phillip), and he would fix whatever was broken, usually a bad tube.

But since the '70s -- and we're talking 30 years here, I haven't had a TV, VCR, DVD player, piece of audio equipment, or anything else repaired.

So I'm more than willing to save $125 over the Samsung and a) have the TV fit in the space I have, b) gamble that it will last 5 years with no trouble and c) be willing to replace it if it craps out before then.

That said, if you're worried about future repairs (instead of future replacement), I'd go for a name brand, and certainly if you're spending a couple thousand on a TV, you'll want a Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, or something of similar ilk.

But down in the low-priced trenches where I live, anything that replaces a nearly-20-year-old 13-inch Sharp color portable is going to be knock-my-socks-off great. The bar is low, and so far, I'm loving every minute of HDTV.

And I'm comfortable rolling the dice on this, especially with 90 days within which to bring the Vizio back to Costco, should it die in that time period. I'm gambling that if set will make it to 90 days, it stands a very good chance of making it 5 years, and you can't ask for much more (although I'm fairly accustomed to getting it).

Coming up:

• Technical clarifications (thanks readers!)
• I get almost every digital channel out there with RABBIT EARS

In response to my item on the Opera Web browser, I received this e-mail from Thomas Ford, communications manager for the company that produces the browser:

Hi Steven,

I read your post about Opera and just wanted to drop a short note to say thanks. We really appreciate the kind words.

You did mention that you use the Web Developer add-on for Firefox. You should also check out our Web dev tool, Opera Dragonfly. It's just in a second alpha, but you'll see where we're going. To access it, just go to Tools > Advanced > Developer tools. This will launch Dragonfly. You can follow development over at http://my.opera.com/dragonfly

Let me know if you have any other questions or comments. If you don't have an iPhone, you ought to try Opera Mini (if you have a Java-enabled phone) or Opera Mobile (if you have a Windows Mobile smartphone), but that may be a conversation for another time. Thanks again!

Best regards,

That's something I'll have to look at. The problem with developing on the Web with Opera is the same problem that Firefox kinda-sorta faces, but not really. That problem is the persistent fact that the majority of the world sees the Web through the eyes of Internet Explorer, and you've got to make sure your sites look good and work well on IE before considering Firefox. When it comes to sheer numbers of Web users, Opera doesn't factor in.

But since Opera seems to be aiming to be a standards-compliant browser, that is very much in its favor as a development platform. If making things work in Opera meant they would be sure to work in IE and Firefox, that would be a point very much in Opera's favor.

I'll be exploring Opera further in the days and weeks ahead. Among the features I'll be looking at:

Last week, I went on about how much I like the Opera Web browser. I've used it in Windows, Mac and Linux thus far, and it made quite a bit of difference especially on the $15 Laptop, which has only 233 MHz of CPU and 144 MB of RAM at its disposal.

I installed Opera in Puppy 2.13 via the project's repository. It was an easy install, and Opera gave me quite a bit of additional speed compared with Puppy's default browser, the Mozilla-based Seamonkey. And since Opera is a full-featured browser, it can do a lot more than the very light Dillo, meaning I can use Opera to post to this blog with Movable Type, work on the Web interface for Dailynews.com (where I've found one thing it can't do, but only one), and to do all of my general browsing.

Again, I'm not entirely happy about using a non-open-source application, but the relative swiftness of Opera, coupled with its functionality, has kept me using it.

What's wrong with:

a) Apple
b) you people?

The iPhone 3G made its much-heralded debut weeks ago, and today I walk by the Apple Store in Santa Monica and y'all are still waiting in line for a shot at securing your coveted iPhone. Are you all high?

And Apple: You stoke demand for a product with such messianic ferver and then can't deliver said wonder-product?

If I had any stomach for paying $70+ per month for iPhone voice and data service, I just might understand. But I don't, and I don't.

Is a Blackberry that awful?

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple's Safari, there's plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don't know about you, but I'm in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla's Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that's modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I'm probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I'd never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been "forced" to use Internet Explorer -- also closed source (hey, it's Microsoft -- what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple's OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most "advanced" operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I've downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com -- and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won't open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better -- and always much, much faster.

That's the best thing about the Opera Web browser -- it's very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can ... do your thing.

The company that makes Opera -- called Opera Software -- provides versions for many platforms. It's a pity you can't get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I'll still use Firefox -- probably a lot -- since it's the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there's no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I've seen lately.

Encrypted private directories are the one thing that would get me to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 this October. Ubuntu's Dustin Kirkland explains it all:

How does it work?

The underlying technology is a cryptographic virtual filesystem in the Linux kernel called eCryptfs, authored by Michael Halcrow of IBM.

When a user logs into an Ubuntu Intrepid system, their login passphrase is automatically used to decrypt a randomly generated mount passphrase. This mount passphrase will then cryptographically mount ~/.Private onto ~/Private. As long as ~/Private is mounted, the user can read and write sensitive data to files and directories under the virtual filesystem on ~/Private. The actual files stored in the underlying filesystem are encrypted, and located in ~/.Private. The only passphrase required is obtained when logging in (via console, ssh, gdm, etc). And the only files encrypted are those that the user consciously places in ~/Private. The user can then incrementally backup the encrypted ~/.Private directory to off-site storage.

I'd really, really, really like to see a backport of this to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS so I can keep the current version of the distro if I so choose.

I'll be looking at Ubuntu Backports and GetDeb to see if installing it in Hardy is possible. ... or I may just upgrade to Intrepid.

More information:

The hot thing right now is virtualization, using VMWare, Xen, KVM or what have you.

The whole thing is touted as easier than pie.

All I want to do is set up a virtual machine under Ubuntu or Debian to run Windows 2000 ... and maybe a few other Linuxes and BSDs.

But I have no idea whatsoever how to do it.

I installed Xen in Debian, but I couldn't get it to boot with a Xen kernel, much less set the whole damn thing up.

And it looks like installing the OS of my choice, especially if it's Windows and not XP, looks damn near impossible.

Is it just me, or is virtualization firmly in geek territory?

While Ubuntu is feverishly working on modifying its distro to work on small mobile PCs and other miniature devices, Debian has been working on making its GNU/Linux distribution easily installable on the Asus Eee PC.

Earlier models are better-supported, but the team involved is aiming to make every Eee Debian-friendly:

Naturally, the earliest DebianEeePC/Models are supported best, but full support for all models is not far off. In particular, the 701 is very well supported, the 900 is almost entirely supported and we have some users reporting success on our mailing list with the model 901. Aided by their participation, we will soon support the 901 and other Atom-based models (1000 and 1000H). When the 904HD and 1000HD become available to us, we will expand our support to include them too.

While the Eee's "original" OS, namely Xandros, is based on Debian, it's not of the same "free" ilk. Whatever that means to you, if anything is one thing, but I've found over the past year and a half that Debian runs pretty darn well on more systems than most Linux distributions and is very flexible, so it may be well worth trying on your Eee.

The biggest problem using Linux or BSDs on hardware they don't ship with is ACPI support (power management, turning the machine on and off via the menus, controlling the various fans) and networking (wired and wireless).

I read a while ago that the Eee might ship with Debian at some point, but talk about that has cooled considerably, and now it seems that Asus is more keen on shipping Eees with Windows and not even Xandros.

It just occurred to me that I've had the preload package installed in Debian for months now, and I've never noticed any increase in speed for Iceweasel, Epiphany, Geany ... or any other application I use all the time.

Now that Debian's current testing release, code name Lenny, has been frozen, we're this much closer to seeing Lenny become a Stable release, a milestone that is projected for September of this year. That would make it a year and four months after the current Stable release, Etch, was so designated in April 2007.

For those using Etch now, keep in mind that once Lenny becomes a Stable release, Etch will receive the designation Old Stable and continue to receive security patches for another year.

While on the subject of Etch, it's interesting to know that the install images have been updated, and along with that update comes a 2.6.24 kernel as an alternative to the 2.6.18 kernel that shipped with the initial release.

This new Etch, dubbed "Etch and a half" by the Debian team. With the new kernel comes additional hardware support. For details on the new packages and bug fixes, go to the release announcement.

I don't think that the decision to add hardware support to Etch at this stage has anything to do with Red Hat's similar move with its Enterprise Linux product, but it's interesting to see both distros going in this direction.

Back to Lenny: I still have 84 updates to do with Lenny, but I'm holding off for the moment because I'm at home, and when I start a big download, I tend to dominate our home DSL connection. My Netgear router tends to dedicate almost all of the bandwidth to the huge download, and my wife, Ilene, who is using the iBook G4 on this same router, can barely use Firefox.

I don't know if there's some kind of setting in the router I can tweak to more equitably share the bandwidth, and if there is, I'd sure like to know about it.

No, really ... back to Lenny: One of today's updates, which I will install later, is a new Abiword, which will go from version 2.4.6 to 2.6.4. I noticed considerable lengthening of the load times for Abiword in Puppy Linux 4, which uses an Abiword from the 2.5 series, over the 2.4.5 version in previous Puppy builds.

The $0 Laptop — a Gateway Solo 1450 with 1.3 GHZ Celeron processor and 1 GB of RAM — loads Abiword almost instantly, and I'll be anxious to see if that changes with this new version.

Since my last Lenny update, Firefox/Iceweasel 3.01 has been performing well. The "work offline" issue has been fixed, and I don't have to uncheck the box every time I start the browser.

One thing about Iceweasel 3 that I like is that the fonts have been cleaned up. Debian has been using what appear to be bitmapped fonts, as opposed to smoother varieties, for quite some time. These look better on LCD displays, but I've grown so used to them that I just leave them on the lone CRT monitor I still use.

But now that the fonts are looking so much better right out of the box, I'm just happy to see the screen looking better in Firefox.

OpenOffice 2.4 has been running very well, and I've been using it quite a bit more in Debian, Ubuntu and Windows, the latter of which needs an update from what I think is version 2.2. Since I don't get prompted for an upgrade on the Windows box, I get very lazy about doing them at all.

Going to Windows for a moment, my main Windows text editor, Notepad++, just pushed an update to me yesterday, and I did download and install it. I really am not good about checking Web sites for updated applications, and I do appreciate when the program itself tells me about a new version. Filezilla also does this in Windows, and of course Firefox and Thunderbird always notify me about updates.

Back to Lenny, again: When I wanted to test the KDE photo editor Krita and camera-interface digiKam, a ton of KDE apps and libraries came along for the ride. Since then I've also added Xfce, and as a result this Debian Lenny installation is quite large. I might want to redo it at some point with just the default GNOME desktop and Xfce added, just to keep it a little more manageable. But to the Debian Project's credit, things are working quite well, and many issues have been resolved on Lenny's road to Stable.

I'm still getting the "ghosting" in the upper panel in GNOME, but it does seem to go away at various times in the computing session. The same thing doesn't happen in Ubuntu, so that makes it a bit of a mystery.

And if I could figure out why and how Ubuntu is able to suspend/resume this Gateway laptop and make Lenny do the same thing, I'd probably use Lenny a whole lot more.

I'm pretty much a "Stable release" kind of person. I would've been content to use Etch all the way through up until Lenny goes Stable, but since Lenny ran so much better on this laptop, most importantly supporting the touchpad better, I decided to follow it through on the road to it becoming a stable Debian 5.0.

Since then, I've also tried Sidux, which takes the unstable Debian Sid and makes it easier to use as a desktop system. My time with Sidux was brief, but it pretty much flew on this system as a live CD loaded entirely into RAM.

I had planned to write a full Sidux review, and I still might, but since I'm more inclined to run a Stable release over Testing, I can't see any reason to run Unstable, even with the Sidux team smoothing the way. I just don't need the latest packages that quickly to get my work done.

Quick Ubuntu note: Being so "Stable," in my own mind at least, I had planned to continue running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for at least a year if not two, but the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release promises something I really want: encrypted folders. Instead of encrypting whole drives or partitions, which Debian (and Ubuntu with the alternate installer) has done since Etch, the ability to only encrypt what is really "sensitive" is something that I could really use. Such an ability would speed up the system, since there will be much less to unencrypt, and it would also make it easier to choose to use or not use encryption.

So will I upgrade when October arrives? I'm not sure yet. 8.04 runs so well on this laptop that I'm loathe to mess with it.

Related:
Debian mailing list announcement of Lenny freeze
Sidux 2008-2 release notes
"Etch and a half" announcement

You heard that right. A team at the MIT International Development Design Summit thinks it can build a $12 computer to help kids in less-high-and-mighty nations learn the ropes of keyboards, mice, bits and bytes.

The project was inspired by ... the $12 computers that are being sold and used today in Bangalore, India, as discovered by graduate student Derek Lomas:

A $12 computer of sorts - a cheap keyboard and Nintendo-like console - already exists in India, where people hook the devices to home TVs to run simple games and programs.

The idea has even more juice because the team wants to model these $12 devices after everybody's favorite late-'70s tech marvel, the Apple II:

"My generation all had Apple IIs that we learned to type and play games on," the 27-year-old said. "If we can get buy-in from programmers, we can develop these devices and give (Third World) schools Apple II computer labs like the ones I grew up with."

You might ask why I'm spending so much time figuring out how to best configure a Compaq Armada 7770dmt — a laptop with an ancient 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor, feeble 144MB of RAM and smallish 3GB hard drive.

For one thing, I almost never abandon a machine that can be used. And this one definitely can be.

Plus, I like the Compaq. It has a nice screen and keyboard, I like the fact that its power supply is totally contained in the laptop case. The thing's pretty solid.

And I remember my long search for a laptop. Just about everything I saw on the used market was overpriced and lacking essential parts (hard drive, power brick, CD drive, memory ...) but still selling for too much.

When I found this laptop for $15 and only had to add a CD-ROM drive that cost an additional $10 and a WiFi card I already had, I was hooked.

The build quality of this 1999 Compaq is much better than my 2002 Gateway, and I expect the Gateway to die long before the Compaq.

And with Linux, I've learned that a nearly 10-year-old PC can be quite usable. That means This Old PC, with a faster Pentium II processor (333MHz), more RAM (256MB) and which uses cheaper desktop IDE drives — and which at 11 years old is even longer in the tooth than the Compaq — is also still quite usable.

The fact that I searched long and hard for one laptop, came up with nothing from Craigslist and eBay, but then ended up with two laptops within months, getting each for next to nothing, was an opportunity to learn about hardware, software and what it takes to get things done in a variety of operating systems (I've run many versions of Linux, plus FreeBSD — including offshoots DesktopBSD and PC-BSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, a couple of projects based on OpenSolaris, and yes, even Windows).

Even if I had $500 or so to buy new laptops every couple of years — and believe me, I don't, there's a lot of nobility, fun and plain old value in keeping these PCs running. And running well.

I guess you could call it a hobby.

I could do a lot worse, no?

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls

I've never had to configure a network interface in OpenBSD. In all of my installs, I set it up and just left it the way it was.

I've done plenty of configuration-file hacking to get interfaces working in various incarnations of FreeBSD and NetBSD, so I didn't think I'd run into any trouble.

And yet another time, the excellent OpenBSD documentation carried me through.

The information on how to configure a network interface can be found here.

Basically, I used the ifconfig command to figure out what the system was calling my new TrendNET PCMCIA Ethernet card. That would be rl0.

Working as the super user, I created the following file:

/etc/hostname.rl0

I needed a static IP and used vi to write in the following line:

inet 10.0.0.38 255.255.255.0 10.0.0.255

In this case, 10.0.0.38 is my IP address, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet and 10.0.0.255 is the broadcast address. Use your own static IP info to fill in these values.

Create the file /etc/mygate and put your gateway address in it (again, this number is an example; so use your own):

10.0.0.254

Edit the /etc/resolv.conf file (adding your own search domain and nameservers):

search example.com
nameserver 125.2.3.4
nameserver 125.2.3.5
lookup file bind

Then restart the network:

# sh /etc/netstart

The OpenBSD FAQ explains it better than I do, and configuring a network interface for DHCP is even easier.

In my exhaustive and exhausting series on finding an OS for the $15 Laptop, I made extensive mention of the fact that I found OpenBSD under X quite a bit slower than Linux. I can't explain it other than to say that speed is very important on extremely old hardware, and I don't envision myself sticking with OpenBSD, although I'd really like to do so.

And if I could get ACPI fan control working for the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I'd definitely be running OpenBSD on it as well, but I'm afraid that might never happen.

Again, for the umpteenth time, OpenBSD is very fun to play with. The documentation makes it easy to learn, and the packages — of which there are many — are of very high quality.

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian's Xfce installation didn't exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack.

Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

And any little utility that Wolvix has can probably be added in Debian. And Aptitude is very good. It's not graphical, but it represents the best of Debian.

And I still trust the security team for Debian more than I do most others — this despite the OpenSSL problem that has recently plagued every Debian-based distro in recent weeks. (At least somebody figured it out, and the whole incident should tighten up things considerably in the Debian Project).

And in Debian, I can easily install all of our little girl's educational programs, although she is fairly vocal about preferring to use the newer, faster $0 Laptop, a 1.3GHz Celeron-based Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM.

The only "stopper" is Google's lack of willingness to easily let users install Google Gears in Mozilla-derived browsers not named Firefox. That means it's a pain in the ass to install Gears with Iceweasel, the Debian-derived, noncopyrighted equivalent to Firefox.

And I haven't tried Debian on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt since I boosted the RAM from 64MB to 144MB. Responsiveness in X could be a lot better with such a relative overabundance of RAM.

So as far as the Compaq goes, I'm down to running Debian or Wolvix on the hard drive and Puppy as a live CD. Like I said previously, I don't want to kill out OpenBSD just yet, so I'll need either a second hard drive or a 4GB Compact Flash card with CF-to-IDE laptop adapter (the latter available for a quite-reasonable $10 at LogicSupply.com). I might even spring for a second hard-drive caddy for the Compaq, should I be able to find one, to make swapping the drives that much easier.

Or I could bite the bullet, get rid of OpenBSD for the time being, try out Debian and Wolvix on the hard drive, and narrow things down. I'll continue to run Puppy, with a separate partition for its encrypted pup_save file.

I've taken to using the Leafpad text editor in Puppy (I'm using it now), and the Leafpad-derived Mousepad editor in Xfce is just as fast, if spartan. Xfce's Terminal app has similar attributes. And I have no problem running xterm or rxvt.

It's really about the text editors and browsers I use, the software my daughter likes to run, stability, security, encryption and ease of maintenance.

Moreover, it's about speed on old hardware. These things look very different on newer computers. My 2002-era Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu very well. I doubt I could even boot Ubuntu on this Compaq. Even the Xubuntu live CD won't boot. With Debian, I have no problem.

On the Gateway, Ubuntu's polish as compared to Debian makes Ubuntu a better choice. But on this older Compaq, Debian's flexibility and added speed (don't ask me why it's faster, it just is) are much needed.

Next moves: I need to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card since I don't have regular access to WiFi. While I'm at it, a PCMCIA card for USB is something I should also look into. Sure, I could transfer files over the network, but USB is ... easier. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

I tested quite a few versions of Puppy Linux in recent days on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt. The bad news is that version 3.01 wouldn't configure X properly. Any attempts to do so and then start X crashed the box.

The other bad news is that while Puppy 4.00 loads fine and runs fine, for some reason the load time for Abiword went from 8 to 10 seconds in previous Puppy builds to 30 seconds. That's quite a rollback. On a more positive note, start times for Seamonkey were about the same.

I don't really use Abiword all that much, but that kind of performance hit is disturbing. It could be due to the new way packages are being compiled for Puppy but is more likely something specific to Abiword, since Seamonkey appears to be unaffected.

I tried Puppy 2.17 just to see how encryption worked. It did fine. And I discovered that in the case of multiple pup_save files on a single system, the ones not in use during the current boot can easily be opened in Puppy.

One bone (pun there, intended or not) I have to pick with newer versions of Puppy Linux is the lack of the Dillo browser. I use it quite a bit. I could still add it from packages, I suppose (and I definitely will), and if the slowness of Abiword wasn't bothering me so much in Puppy 4.00, I'd be using it right now.

As it is, I will continue testing, but for now Puppy 2.13 (hopefully with Firefox added for Google Gears compatibility) remains the front-running distro for the Compaq, especially if I'm able to remove the hard drive and replace it with a Compact Flash module and CF-to-IDE adapter card.

The fact that I can move files from one pup_save to another, providing that the non-mounted one is unencrypted, gives me more flexibility as far as upgrading from one Puppy system to another and creating a new, encrypted pup_save instead of using an old, unencrypted one.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop.

For one thing, Puppy is ideal — and explicitely designed — to run as a live CD or easily upgraded frugal install, the latter either on a traditional hard-disk drive or a Compact Flash memory card mounted in a CF-to-IDE adapter inside the Compaq's hard-drive caddy.

With recent versions of Puppy (2.17 onward, I believe) the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all of the user's files and configurations adds both a needed measure of security to a laptop installation as well as providing an equally easy way to back up the entire system by copying a single large file to just about any storage medium, from USB flash drive to CD-RW to hard disks in formats ranging from old-school FAT to NTFS to Linux's many types of filesystems.

Also in Puppy's favor is that recent versions have heightened compatibility with Slackware 12 packages, promising a greater number of sources for additional applications, should I ever want or need to add anything beyond what Puppy and its own repositories already provide.

To recap, in the time I've had the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (again, with a 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor), I've taken it's RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB, kept the original IBM-made 3GB hard drive, and run the following operating systems:

• Debian Etch "standard," with X and Fluxbox added
• Debian Etch Xfce desktop install
• Slackware 12 without KDE
• Puppy Linux 2.13
• Damn Small Linux 4.0, 4.3 and 4.4
• OpenBSD 4.2
• Wolvix Cub 1.1.0

Truth be told, I liked every one of these installs to one degree or another. While Slackware (installing without KDE but with everything else) took up too much space and offered too few applications I wanted, it still ran great.

Rolling my own X installation into Debian's "standard" install was an excellent exercise, but I just didn't have the expertise to really build it out. The Debian Xfce install was nice, but somewhat curious; all of the Debian desktop installs, even KDE, feature OpenOffice. Surprisingly, OO ran fairly well in 64MB of RAM and 233MHz of CPU. Strange, however, was the lack of GUI package management in the Xfce install. It did get me using Aptitude, so there was nothing lost there, but I got the feeling that Debian's Xfce just didn't offer what I wanted.

However, with Aptitude, Abiword actually installs the dictionary that makes spell-check work. At last look, neither Puppy nor OpenBSD do that.

I continue to enjoy Damn Small Linux, but the most recent versions just don't run as well as they should on this laptop. And little things like having Firefox renamed Bon Echo (why??) made it difficult to use Google Docs with Gears, which is one of the things I want to be doing fairly intensively, made DSL fall behind Puppy in the running.

Puppy has a great selection of apps, is fairly easy to configure, extremely familiar to me and runs great on this hardware. I find myself using this live CD more and more of the time.

Much of my feeling for 2.13 over other versions of Puppy is nostalgic. I first encountered Puppy with this very release, and most likely a simple move of the cute 2.13 desktop wallpaper to a newer version of Puppy would make me extremely happy. The fact that everything in 2.13 continues to work flawlessly, however, is a strong testament to how very well Puppy is put together. I probably will test and subsequently adopt a much newer version of Puppy for use on this laptop, if for no other reason than to use the encrypted-pup_save feature that will greatly add to the security of my data, since laptops — even ones well past their prime — have a way of falling into the wrong hands.

OpenBSD doesn't install with as anywhere near as many GUI features as ... any Linux distribution. Not that any of the BSD projects can't be configured to be as full-featured as any equivalent Linux distribution. It just takes time and effort. With a faster processor and a bit more memory, I'd really consider running OpenBSD as the primary distro on this laptop. On the other hand, hardware detection in OpenBSD excellent. It remains the only operating system to correctly auto-configure sound on this Compaq.

OpenBSD has well over 4,000 precompiled binary packages for i386 and even more software available through ports. It offers fewer packages than Debian or Ubuntu but way more than Slackware. And with the quality of the packages being so high and the tools used to manage them equally high in quality, OpenBSD remains an attractive alternative.

But again, Linux is just that much easier to use on the desktop. OpenBSD is no speed demon in X, and speed is more important when you're running ancient hardware than it is when you have, say, a PC from the past five years at your disposal.

And with OpenBSD, things like Adobe Flash are hard to deal with. And I don't think Google Gears will ever run in OpenBSD. I could be wrong on both counts (since OpenBSD can run Linux apps), but I do know that both are easier to do in Linux.

A bigger drive that could multiboot Debian, Wolvix and OpenBSD, with Puppy running either in a frugal install or as a live CD, is one way to go.

But running only one or two of these systems at a time seems to be more realistic, manageable and ... sane. Using multiple hard drives, like I do with my test box, is another way to go. That way the pain of dual-booting is avoided, as is the tedium of continual reinstalls.

Since OpenBSD offers much of the software I want and is an intriguing diversion from Linux, I could 'll probably leave it on the drive for the near future. In my 500MB or so Linux partition, I will probably grow my pup_save file and update Puppy. Now that I have Firefox 2 running on one of my other Puppy installs, I'll probably begin doing the same with this laptop, and that way I'll be able to use Google Docs with Gears. I can probably even figure out how to make Gears work with Seamonkey, but it's not imperative.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

My personal relationship with Debian is up and down. A recent "down" moment was when Iceweasel (aka noncopyrighted Firefox) 3 replaced version 2 and promptly broke just a little bit.

The nature of my break (and yes, I know it didn't happen to you; that doesn't mean my petty problems don't matter) was that every time I started Iceweasel 3, I was in "Work Offline" mode. It didn't matter that I was, in fact, online. Every restart of Iceweasel began that way. I had to uncheck the box to use the browser. Every time.

A look at the Firefox bug reports indicated that this was a problem with the NetworkManager package and not Firefox, per se, but that the Firefox people were working on it nonetheless.

Whoever (or however) the problem got resolved, I'm damn glad that it did, and now I can use Iceweasel in Lenny without problems.

I didn't have high hopes for Wolvix on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt built in 1999 — since previous attempts to load the live CD resulted in an X configuration that needed a little work.

Since then, I've had quite a bit more experience working in the xorg.conf file, and I was able to get a halfway decent X configuration going so I could test Wolvix Cub (the smaller of the two Wolvix distributions, with fewer packages than the larger Wolvix Hunter).

As I've written on many occasions, I consider Wolvix to be one of the best Slackware-based distributions available. Both the graphical configuration utility and the very flexible installation utility — also an X application — add considerable functionality to a solid Slackware 11 base.

And with Wolvix (and the rest of the Slackware-derived distros such as Zenwalk and Vector), all of the helpful Slackware console utilities are still there. Xwmconfig, netconfig, mouseconfig, even pkgtool can be used in any of these Slackware-based systems. You might not need them as much as you would in a standard Slackware installation, but they do come in handy.

Wolvix also includes slapt-get and Gslapt, the Debian-apt-like utilities that changed the way I look at package management in Slackware.

Before Wolvix, when running Slackware I dutifally downloaded updates from the Slackware FTP site, then used updatepkg to install them. One by one. By one.

One time I figured that using pkgtool for updates would enable me to save time and avoid all that typing of long filenames, or the almost-as-long procedure of copy/pasting them in the file manager for each and every package than needed updating.

I ended up with "doubles" of every updated package, since pkgtool didn't know I was doing an update and just installed the new packages without removing the old ones. So when you're talking about doing updates of Slackware packages with Slack's default tools, it's updatepkg or nothing.

All it means is that slapt-get and Gslapt, which are included in Wolvix and easily added to Slackware itself, are essential for the person whose life doesn't revolve around using the updatepkg utility.

Just the fact that Wolvix — which can operate as a live CD with a Knoppix-like save file, or in "frugal" or traditional hard-drive installs, can be brought up to date in minutes with Gslapt in much the same way that apt and Synaptic work in Debian continues to be a revelation.

Put it this way: How many longtime Slackware users don't have and use slapt-get/Gslapt? I bet not many.

Once I had Wolvix Cub running as a live CD with X properly configured on the 144MB/233MHz Compaq Armada 7770dmt, I used xwmconfig at the console to switch between the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers.

Not surprisingly, both WMs ran quite well, even with only 144MB in the live CD environment.

What astounded me were the extremly quick application-load times. In previous tests of Wolvix, it was quick but not so quick as to beat Debian Etch or Slackware 12 under Xfce and Fluxbox.

In Wolvix Cub running on live CD on the Compaq, a number of text editors, the lightweight Abiword and not-so-light Firefox all loaded relatively quickly. I need to do more tests, but Firefox seemed as responsive or more so than the Mozilla-based Seamonkey browser is in the ultra-fast Puppy Linux.

I wouldn't want to run Wolvix, even the Cub edition, as a live CD in the same way as Puppy or Damn Small Linux — especially in only 144MB of RAM, but when it comes to a traditional install, Wolvix Cub or the more application-rich Hunter would seemingly make an excellent candidate to permanently run on the Compaq.

In contrast to Debian and Slackware, Wolvix installs with just about every application and utility I like, from Abiword to Bluefish, Dillo to MtPaint, and with extremely well-organized menus in both Xfce and Fluxbox. In fact, the Fluxbox menus even include little icons next to each category of applications, something I've never seen before.

I'm "sure" I could replicate all of this goodness in standard Slackware of Debian, but the former's KDE focus and the latter's devotion to GNOME mean that it would take quite a bit of work on my part to have as good an experience in Xfce and Fluxbox as I already enjoy in Wolvix by simply loading the live CD and doing an easy installation from what I consider to be among the best installers of any Linux distribution.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")