November 2010 Archives

I follow Ina Fried's writing not just because I'm interested in technology (though I am) but also because Ina (then Ian) worked for me as an intern way back in the 1990s at the Glendale News-Press, where I was city editor at the time.

Back then, Ian was wise beyond his years. A former child actor who decided to get an actual education at Miami University of Ohio, where he majored in journalism, Ian arrived in the newsroom ready to work — and surprisingly capable for his age and level of experience (young and not much, respectively). While in Glendale, he learned more and did more that any intern I'd seen (though the Energizer Bunny-ese tenacity of then-teenage reporter Armando Barragan is hard to beat).

Ina did a great job covering Microsoft for Cnet, and today I learned that she has moved over to the Wall Street Journal Digital Network's All Things Digital site to write a blog covering the mobile space (and titled Mobilize).

Mobile isn't one of my "strengths" as far as technology goes, and since I'll be doing more writing about it in the near future, I'll be keeping an eye on Mobilize as I expand my work beyond the dead/dying world of desktops.

I'm also new to All Things Digital, which is not surprising because I primarily write about open-source software and relatively ancient hardware, two areas of the tech universe that don't appear to be well-covered (or covered at all) by ATD. I can understand not covering old hardware because nobody does that. But couldn't they throw Linux a bone? (Remember Walter Mossberg's now-ancient (2007? that's an eon ago in tech terms) Ubuntu laptop review?) Then there's all the BSDs, OpenOffice, GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, Suse/SLES/SLED, Fedora, Red Hat (they don't even seem to cover Red Hat??? What's that about?) ... enough complaining from me (unless that's what you come here for) ...

Mobile is huge. As I've told more than a few people who stop by my desk and don't have the good sense to ignore me, the desktop/laptop segment of the Internet-connected device market is flat while the mobile segment is growing like crazy. We will all be assimilated into the "smartphone/tablet" world within a couple of years, and it's where most of the action is.

Going from a relic of the '80s/'90s (aka Microsoft, though still moneyed not exactly forward-thinking) to the burning-hot technology of the moment (mobile) — looks like a pretty good move for Ina.

I really did like Fedora 13. I liked it enough to solve more than a handful of problems. I liked it enough to use a proprietary graphics driver for the first time (didn't like that; not only was it outside the package-management system and hard to update, it didn't perform so well either).

I love the Fedora community, the openness that's everywhere, the lack of pretense. I liked being on the edge when it came to my favorite Unix/Linux application of the moment, gThumb, which is under heavy development and always available in the latest version days after the upstream release. Fedora 13 looked great. Especially the Xfce spin I chose to run for more than a few months of heavy use. I have nothing but good things to say about Xfce, especially as it was implemented in Fedora. Great file manager (Thunar) that I still like better than just about everything else out there, excellent helper apps all around. Super fast. Stable.

But just as everything was roses, furry kittens and such when I first ran Fedora 13 with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel, it started to go dark with the change — in mid-cycle, mind you — to the 2.6.34 kernel. I got the ability to mute my Lenovo G555's sound when plugging in headphones (no small feat with the terrible, horrible, you-should-avoid-it Conexant 5069 sound chip), albeit with an ALSA driver from outside the Fedora universe (AtRPMs to be exact).

But my video went to hell. Something to do with kernel mode setting. Or not. Who the hell knows? I did file bug reports, so don't get on me about that.

Passing nomodeset in GRUB didn't do anything. Funnily enough, with the latest 2.6.35 kernel in Fedora 14 (I eventually got there after one unsuccessful preupgrade attempt that bricked the F13 install, after which a new F13 install was successfully upgraded via preupgrade, and yes, I am self-hating, in case you wondered) ... I was saying, with the latest kernel in Fedora 14 I could actually get the open-source ati driver to run correctly (and beautifully, mind you) with maybe one boot out of 50 by passing radeon.modeset=1 to the kernel. Very strange but so unrepeatable as to be completely useless.

This isn't a Fedora problem. It's a Linux problem. And in the 2.6.34 days of Fedora 14, I turned to the Catalyst/fglrx driver from ATI/AMD, which worked when built against whatever kernel I happened to be running at the time (requiring rebuilding when a new kernel rolled in). Up-to-date Catalyst packages in RPM Fusion would have made this all much easier, but just as RPM Fusion's developers roll out a new NVIDIA proprietary driver when ready, they pretty much stopped working on the Catalyst driver sometime back in the much-earlier 2.6.34 era, more than a few kernel updates ago.

But as long as the fglrx from ATI worked, it was all good. That stopped for my particular machine in Fedora 14. The fglrx/Catalyst driver bricked X.

Mind you, the fglrx driver in the Ubuntu 10.10 repositories does work with this particular laptop (just as the open-source ati driver doesn't), and Ubuntu remained (and remains) a valid option for my Linux/Unix operating-system needs.

But it was time to return to Debian, the OS that, when I ran it as Lenny for a full six months, was extremely stable, very good about responding to the various fixes I found around the Internet, very flexible as far as audio/video formats go due to the Debian Multimedia project.

Way back then I got bored, tried to dist-upgrade to Squeeze (more than six months ago) and basically blew the whole thing up.

After Fedora 14 proved a non-starter on this Lenovo, I could have gone straight to Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10. But I wanted to get back to Debian, a fast, stable (even though Squeeze isn't technically Stable, capital "S," it's plenty stable, small "s.")

So I did that.

Next: My Thanksgiving installation of Debian Squeeze with encrypted volumes

If you love the food trucks that have gone gourmet in recent years — and trust me, it's a big thing in L.A. — Sprint is doing a promotion for Cyber Monday (AKA Nov. 29) that offers free grub (the food, not the Grand Unified Bootloader) starting at 11 a.m. Monday and continuing until all the food is gone, or 2 p.m., whichever comes first.

Here are the Southland locations and food trucks involved:

• NomNom Truck: Corner of Olympic and Bundy, Santa Monica
• Lardon: Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise (Hope and 9th), downtown Los Angeles
• Dan Dan BBQ: Somewhere to be determined in Orange County
• Louks Greek Gourmet: Corner of W. Chapman Ave. and Harbor Blvd., Anaheim

It's all a promotion for Sprint's 4G cellular network. You know what 4G is, don't you? It's like 3G but with an extra "G." Got it?

In case you've been under a rock for the last year (and being under just such a rock myself, I should know), mobile gourmet-meets-fast food trucks have been tweeting their location and drawing long lines of locals hoping to score a tasty meal.

The tie-in here is that the Lardon, NomNom and Dan Dan BBQ trucks are equipped with faster-and-better Sprint-supplied 4G technology so they can get the word out on the various social networks that much quicker. According to Sprint, the 4G equipment turns the food trucks into "fast mobile hotspots," from which you can experience 4G goodness on your own mobile device.

Yep, Sprint people will be there showing off the latest 4G phones and netbooks. The mobile provider's website is touting a couple of 4G-equipped Dell netbooks (the Mini 10 and Inspiron 11z) as well as the Samsung Epic 4G and so-hot (literally and figuratively) HTC Evo 4G, which everybody who doesn't have an iPhone seems to be flocking to as the Android device of the fortnight.

Sprint is one of many mobile providers elbowing their competitors, including Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, to bring 4G service to metro areas that include Los Angeles.

If you look at the numbers (and I have, although it's a distant — meaning a month ago — memory), you can see how the PC business is basically stalled while the mobile sector of Internet-connected phones is growing like crazy. Remember when we were going to have free, universal WiFi everywhere, and Google was going to buy up a bunch of spectrum and offer free, ad-supported cell-phone service? Neither of those things happened, and the mobile carriers are upping their game with 4G in an effort to get the rest of us on the mobile-data bandwagon.

There is some question as to what really counts as 4G, (and yes, I did cram three links into five words and should have some kind of mouseover in the CSS so you'd know that) but Sprint claims the following:

• 4G is 8-10x faster than 3G
• Sprint is the first true national carrier of 4G
• Sprint 4G is currently in more than 62 markets nationwide and expanding to more in the coming weeks

So we know it's fast. The rest (meaning what's really "4G," and what's just "faster than 3G") should become clearer in the months ahead.

As usual, figuring out the price for 4G service isn't so easy. Sprint appears to offer phone plans with data from $69.95 to $99.95 per month, at least in Los Angeles.

Things do get sweeter for computer users who want mobile broadband, while 3G service is $59.95 per month for 5 GB, the 4G/3G service at the same price offers unlimited 4G along with the 5 GB/month of 3G.

Unlimited mobile broadband on your PC and free food? Sprint really wants you to get 4G.

Preupgrade didn't work.

My Fedora 13 Xfce laptop with the fglrx/catalyst video driver wouldn't start X or give any usable video with the open ati driver, the closed fglrx driver, or the vesa driver after using preupgrade to bring it up to Fedora 14.

The machine segfaults every time I try to run X.

Before I started the preupgrade, I updated my /home backup. And after I couldn't get it the newly upgraded system to run X at all (and could barely get a console unless I messed with the boot line on a couple of the three kernels I had available), I used the Fedora 13 DVD to install a new system. This time I opted for the standard GNOME version of Fedora.

And now I'm in the comfortable 2.6.33 kernel that provides the perfect video for my ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD chip that I so enjoyed in the days before kernel-mode setting in 2.6.34 made the Linux portion of my life miserable.

This xorg-x11-drv-ati driver under 2.6.33 performs so much better than AMD/ATI's fglrx/catalyst driver under 2.6.34, the loss of that speed and functionality not just in Fedora but in all distros that use KMS for ATI doesn't just border on but crosses fully into the realm of tragic.

Right now I'm running a flawless yet woefully unpatched Fedora 13 system that will lose its video capability with the 542 updates I'll be doing tomorrow when I get hooked up to a fast connection. Barring a pre-Christmas miracle, I'll be running Debian Squeeze (or "other") within the next couple of days. If only this open-source ati-driver goodness could continue. In Debian — where even Sid runs 2.6.32 at present — it can.

Let me restate the obvious: The video with the open ati driver is great. It's fast, clear, with no problems at all.

I haven't dropped my /home files in yet. Nor have I hooked up RPM Fusion, Adobe's Linux repo, or the dreaded ATI/AMD Catalyst driver. At least Debian Squeeze allows me to avoid the indignity of kernel mode setting and proprietary drivers. (And if you must use proprietary graphics drivers, Ubuntu allows for them to be updated by the distribution's package-management system.) While I've had less than stellar luck with Slackware-derived Salix and ZenWalk, it would appear that Slackware 13.1 is a potential candidate for "no KMS polluting the kernel" status.

Remembering how great Fedora 13 was at the beginning, with those cool boot-up and shutdown screens (and actual working video), all of which went away with KMS in the 2.6.34 kernel, it's beyond maddening at how the distro itself (and by extension Linux in general, given the "everybody uses the same kernels" nature of this particular beast) broke mid-release. Even if the fglrx driver represented a terrific performance improvement (which in my experience it does not), losing the ability to have the driver work with more than one kernel (i.e. after an update) and having to reinstall again and again — that's not my idea of what Linux is about.

Having kmod-catalyst suddenly stop receiving updates midway through the Fedora 13 cycle, with no kmod-catalyst at all for Fedora 14 shows the level of disconnect out there.

I'll repeat this in a standalone entry, but since I repeat myself ... repeatedly, I'll start it here:

To adopt kernel mode setting for video drivers in order to add functionality to some users while basically removing the ability of the driver to work at all — i.e. ALL functionality for others is not the kind of tradeoff that Linux and Xorg should be making.

In both the Intel and ATI situations, the "old" drivers without KMS should have been maintained, and new drivers utilizing KMS should have been created for those systems that can handle it.

Habitual readers of this blog might wonder why I continually (and continually) complain about the same things. Over and over.

I needed the fglrx driver in Ubuntu 10.10, where it worked well. I don't need it in Debian, and probably never will throughout the Squeeze cycle. If I can figure out Backports and apt-pinning, I should be able to spend a good long time in Debian. Will that be enough time for the open-source world to clean up this mess? Things have finally gotten a bit tolerable for Intel video users whose hardware doesn't do KMS. Maybe the same restoration of sanity will creep into the ati/radeon codebase.

Ah, Fedora. It's been an interesting ride. I liked the easy access to all those new packages. You look terrific, especially in Xfce where I've never seen a better design. While RPM Fusion is at best a minor inconvenience, at worst a hole-filled repository, you did all the multimedia playback and recording I needed you to do.

Tomorrow morning, 542 updated packages later, I'll know how things stand.

I decided to start early today and attempt the Fedora 13-to-14 upgrade on my main "production" laptop.

As I wrote in previous entries, I removed the ATI fglrx/Catalyst driver, the alsa-driver 1.0.23 and the xorg.conf that the installation of the fglrx driver created.

I then did a backup and a yum upgrade.

After that, I determined that I needed to install preupgrade, which I did.

I ran preupgrade from a terminal as root and let it run. It's been going for well over an hour now.

So far everything seems to be going well.

After the upgrade finishes, I'll test the headphone-jack sound muting (there should be version 1.0.23 of the ALSA driver in the kernel this time around) and will reinstall the fglrx video driver. (Hopefully the open-source ati/radeon driver will be fixed for my video chip someday.)

I've been keeping my backups current. I have in my head how I want to do it, and I'm ready, when I've got a block of time during which I can let the machine do its thing.

Ready for what? you might say if you didn't read the subject line.

I'm planning to make the move from Fedora 13 to 14. I've been running the Xfce spin for months now and have mostly enjoyed it. I still have Fedora 15's release day plus one month of patches for Fedora 13 coming my way, but given that F14 isn't a "landmark" release, I'm feeling more comfortable than usual in contemplating the upgrade.

I plan to use preupgrade to make this happen.

After doing yet another backup, I'll do a yum update to the F13 installation.

Then I'll remove the alsa-driver package from AtRPMs. I won't need it with F14 because the ALSA driver in the kernel should be at 1.0.23 or later.

Then I'll use the AMD/ATI uninstall script to remove the fglrx/catalyst driver, and I will copy the xorg.conf generated by the installation of the proprietary driver for reference, removing xorg.conf itself in the process.

My "outside" repositories are RPM Fusion, Spot's Chromium repo and Adobe's Linuxy repo. I imagine that I can let these repositories and the resulting packages "ride" into F14 land.

Then I'll run preupgrade from the console and see what happens.

Have you been following the growing world of "plug" computing? They look like wall worts, but the SheevaPlug and other low-profile, low-power ARM-based computers plug into an electrical outlet, and boom, you have a server. (Note: look for the "but" below on how these devices aren't exactly bullet-proof.)

Like many of you perhaps, I've followed these devices from afar, and today I came across this Linux User article about the latest SheevaPlug, the eSATA Sheeva, which as you might have gathered offers eSATA connectivity to an external drive.

See, that's the thing, these SheevaPlug devices, which run Ubuntu or any other OS compiled for the ARM architecture (low-price and thrifty on power) typically include 512 MB of RAM along with 512 MB of non-volatile storage. If you look at the picture above, you'll see ports for USB, Ethernet (it's a Gigabit port) and an SDHC card slot, which I gather is also bootable.

The eSATA means you can hook up a huge hard drive for fast transfers, especially in comparison to USB (1.0 or 2.0). Sure having a full-sized (desktop or laptop) hard drive sort of defeats the purpose of a wall-wort-sized computer, but I like the fact that I can unplug the hard drive if I wish and store it away.

I've often thought of doing my home server with mini-ITX, which is also low-power and low-profile, but with these plug computers you don't have to worry about assembly, cases, power supplies, or even OS installation. you don't have a display, and there's no display port, so the way to administer these things is over the wire via SSH.

While I'm tempted to just set this up as an rsync server (using the instructions of my favorite Linux writer Carla Schroder in her aging but still excellent "Linux Cookbook"), I'd most likely run this as a file server (NFS and/or Samba), rsync server, maybe even a print server (with a USB printer connected) with the possibility of also doing local DNS. All of this might be too much for a sole SheevaPlug, but it's worth trying.

I'm still wondering whether or not the SheevaPlug would run OpenBSD. I'll have to look into that. I'd probably be happy running whatever Linux is on it when it ships, especially if it's of the LTS variety (if we're talking Ubuntu), or Debian.

I'm not contemplating this as forward-facing on the open Internet but just something for my LAN at home to help with backups, file sharing and printer networking. One report has the SheevaPlug drawing about 2.3 watts at idle and a maximum of 7 watts, with another says it draws 3 watts when running and "tens of milliwatts" when "asleep" (whatever that means; I know that Red Hat is optimizing to lower power consumption, and Ubuntu is also concerned with power usage on the server).

One site that gathers information on plug computing and offers news, forums, a wiki and other resources is PlugComputing.org, which I plan to start following in an effort to get up to speed on this technology. I haven't paid much attention to it lately, but the former LinuxDevices.com, which still carries a logo bearing that URRL but appears at http://linuxfordevices.com, is also a good source of news in this area.

In the past I've been reluctant to commit to running a home server because I feel guilty about the power consumption inherent in leaving a machine running 24/7/365. A server that uses 7 watts of power or less makes that worry go away.

And how can you not like a price of ~$100?

But ... there are problems. Some say the SheevaPlug runs hot and is prone to power-supply failure. So maybe mini-ITX or pico-ITX is the way to go. In that case, my favorite mini-ITX vendor is LogicSupply.com. I'm not sure where everything in the mini-ITX world stands on power consumption, but LogicSupply has a pretty good line available under their Ubuntu Linux Systems link.

There's been a lot of garment-rending of late about Ubuntu's decision to steer away from GNOME 3 and GNOME-shell and instead pursue it's own desktop environment (or is it a window manager?) in the form of Unity, as well as its intent to drop or marginalize Xorg in favor of Wayland for its graphical display.

In my view, community considerations aside, the moves are risky and bold, and they could either set Ubuntu apart as a technological leader, or they could scuttle the distribution entirely as an inefficient platform that nobody wants to use.

Yep. Risky.

I'm not sure how I'll like an interface meant for mobile clients, and while I do like GNOME 2 and am unsure about the performance penalty of GNOME 3/GNOME-shell and/or Unity, I'll certainly take a look at what Ubuntu's doing with its next couple of releases.

These days I'm pretty much staying in the Xfce world as far as desktops go. While Xfce isn't the fastest desktop out there, it's far from the slowest, and more importantly offers a great deal of functionality. Many complain that the Xfce environments in Fedora and Ubuntu are laden with GNOME bits. Truthfully I'm OK with that. I really appreciate having NetworkManager, for one thing. I even have Totem installed on this Xfce system. It does take more resources than Xfce's excellent Parole Media Player, but I like having a choice of players.

It's funny. In Debian I like to run GNOME. In Fedora it's Xfce. In OpenBSD these days I've been rolling in GNOME. In Ubuntu I volley between Xfce and GNOME.

All the complaining about Ubuntu not contributing enough to GNOME and now basically creating their own code from scratch doesn't bother me all that much. I understand that Ubuntu wants to move faster than GNOME and have control over the development. They could end up producing something really great (or awful).

We already have KDE in addition to GNOME. And Xfce, LXDE, etc., are there too. Another desktop environment/window manager won't cause the world to cease spinning on its axis.

And instead of worrying about Ubuntu being more different from other GNOME-based distributions than it already is, think of this as an opportunity for those distributions (Fedora and Debian among them) to truly offer something different (and potentially better) than Ubuntu.

Update: I've since learned that Fedora is also contemplating a move to Wayland for its display. I don't know what the implications of this change are for existing (or random) hardware, but I have a feeling there will be a significant number of distributions that chose to stick with regular X that the collective we won't be left out in the cold.

It's been five months since I gave up using tags and categories on this blog. Since then I've added Google Custom Search to the right-hand column as a way for readers to find entries on topics they want to read about.

I got rid of the categories and tags because choosing them during the composition of a blog entry was too cumbersome (or at least it is in Movable Type). I like the simplicity of just having entries and archives.

That and the fact that I had hundreds of categories — and not terribly well-organized categories either. The other thing I hated about tags and categories in Movable Type was that they seemed to only go back so far. It was just the most-recent entries in a particular category/with a particular tag. I wanted everything. Or nothing.

Aside from the monthly archives accessible from the left-hand column, at the bottom of the blog home page there's a little link called archives that leads to a monster page with every entry ever written in the history of Click. What I usually do is search that page for keywords to see how often I've written about a particular topic.

Do you miss categories and tags? Are you OK without them? Did you even notice? (It's perfectly OK if you didn't.)

I'm on the gThumb mailing list now, and my current favorite developer Paolo Bacchilega (so favored because he's working on my favorite application and improving it all the time) recently announced that gThumb 2.12.1 is out and has fixed the one bug I've found in 2.12.0, which was a tendency to crash when you monkey around in a file manager with the same directory you're in with gThumb.

Thanks, Paolo. When your talking about photojournalism and editing news photos for Web publication, there's really no tool better than gThumb. KDE's digiKam is a close second, but gThumb is just that much better. And the improvements in 2.11 with refinements in 2.12 have made gThumb better than ever for editing news photos. Aside from cropping, reducing size and full editing of IPTC caption metadata, gThumb is a great way to organize photos as well. It's extremely light, doesn't bother with an external database and because of that very lack of dependency doesn't lock you in to any single photo-managing application.

I can't wait for gThumb 2.12.1 to roll into Fedora. (Yes, I know I can build my own package, but I'm very bad at that sort of thing, and I'm happy to wait for Fedora's Koji Build System to cough up a new package for Fedora 13.)

I'm pondering it now. Should I upgrade this Fedora 13 laptop to Fedora 14? I could do it. I do constant backups.

But everything's working so damn well. Why mess with what, for all intents and purposes, looks like success?

I've been sitting on old kernels for too long in Fedora 13. First I kept 2.6.33.8-149 because I could use the open-source ati video driver, but then I moved to 2.6.34.7-56, where I had working and speedy video with the fglrx driver direct from ATI/AMD as well as the ability to mute the speakers fed by my Lenovo G555's Conexant 5069 sound chip.

Video was terrible in the new 2.6.34.7-61 kernel, and the sound didn't mute either. I think this was due to the ATI script building fglrx against the kernel I was using at the time (2.6.34.7-56). And sound-muting only worked because I installed the alsa-driver package from ATrpms against that same kernel (2.6.34.7-56).

But I wanted to start using the newest kernel pushed out to Fedora 13 users as well as the recently released Catalyst 10.10 video driver from ATI.

To start, here is where I'm getting my packages/scripts:

• ATI Catalyst (fglrx) driver direct from ATI/AMD (with release notes and installer instructions)
• alsa-driver-1.0.23-84.fc13.x86_64.rpm and alsa-kmdl-2.6.34.7-61.fc13-1.0.23-84.fc13.x86_64.rpm from the ALSA page for Fedora 13 at ATrpms

Note: I would prefer to install the fglrx/Catalyst driver from RPM Fusion, which I already have in my repo list, but the driver hasn't been updated to the latest Fedora kernel in a long time. I also experimented with adding ATrpms to my repo list, but I started getting conflicts in yum with packages in my other repos (most likely RPM Fusion), so I removed ATrpms from my repository list and installed its packages manually with the GUI Package Installer in Fedora.

The next day: Upon resuming after suspend, thus far the wireless network seems to be holding up fine and reconnecting quickly. I haven't done a full test with the wired neetwork. Sound is an other matter.

When it comes to sound behaving, long suspends seem to have more effect than short ones. If there are no headphones plugged in, the speakers work fine after the resume, but the headphones neither mute the speakers nor have any sound of their own when plugged in. And if headphones are plugged in at the time of the resume, I believe that they work but the speakers don't — even when the headphones are unplugged.

When I was having trouble with NetworkManager after the resume, I was able to restart that particular service. With this kernel, I haven't had to do that yet. But I've been trying to find a similar way to stop and restart sound (ALSA and/or PulseAudio) and have both headphones and speakers work properly following the resume. I've tried $ /etc/init.d/alsasound stop followed by $ /etc/init.d/alsasound restart or $ /etc/init.d/alsasound start. I've also tried # alsactl store and $ alsactl restore, as well as pulseaudio -k. None of this has restored the sound parameters that are present before suspend/resume.

(While on the subject, I encourage all to read the man pages for alsactl and pulseaudio.)

So ALSA/PulseAudio gurus, I'm all ears. My audio chip sometimes shows up as Conexant 5069, currently in alsamixer as Conexant CX20585, and a recent bug report for Ubuntu is here, (I'm using options snd-hda-intel model=ideapad in /etc/modeprobe.d/alsa-base.conf; options snd-hda-intel model=thinkpad seems to work equally well). In the world of Fedora, tons of bugs (including those I opened or contributed to) are here. Since everything is behaving before a lengthy suspend/resume, the logical conclusion is not to use suspend. I might just take that route.

If I could figure out how to mute the speakers with the headphone jack in OpenBSD or FreeBSD (and this is entirely possible), that would be a nice outcome.

This isn't a new problem with these Conexant chips, which I advise anybody and everybody to avoid like the plague they are upon the world of free, open-source operating systems.

Though I spend more than half my computing time in Linux, currently Fedora 13, my favorite text editor across all platforms remains Notepad++, a free, open-source (GPL-licensed) text editor for Windows.

It's syntax highlighting isn't as good as most every other Unix/Linux editor, but when it comes to the features I need, it does a slightly better job than Geany, my favored editor in Unix/Linux.

It's not "better" enough for me to run Notepad++ under Wine, but I'm not throwing it over for the GTK-fueled Windows port of Geany.

Right off the top of my head, Notepad++ is better at remembering things I search/replace. It effortlessly allows me to change the case of text. Without it, Windows would be a much darker place than it already is.

I've gotten rid of a great deal of hardware over the past year and then some. I don't have any desktop systems left in my computer herd.

We've just set up our home office in the home-office space we built more than 7 years ago (another topic, another time, another blog), and I elected to bring my Compaq Armada 7700dmt — circa 1999 — back here for the time being.

Even though my long-gone white box known as This Old PC was more powerful (333 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive) than the Compaq, known as The $15 Laptop (233 MHz Pentium II, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive), I really like the Compaq, a marvel of laptop design and engineering for its technologically ancient time.

Yes, you can live (but not terribly comfortably) in 144 MB of RAM, a more critical limitation than a 233 MHz CPU. To make it work, you need to have your operating system/environment set up to match.

In this case, the Opera web browser, more that a little bit lighter than Firefox/Iceweasel, running over Debian Lenny (installed on this machine for at least a year, maybe longer) provides an adequate platform on which to do most web browsing.

I haven't installed Flash or the Java runtime. And with only 3 GB of disk space you can't just install a full distro unless it's Puppy or TinyCore, both of which I definitely recommend for this kind of hardware by the way.

I do need to grab a bigger IDE laptop drive from my boneyard, which just donated a 20 GB drive to my new/old IBM Thinkpad R32 (yet another machine made in 2002). I still have an 8 GB laptop drive lurking somewhere.

I've run OpenBSD on this Compaq Armada and recommend that as well. But I have Debian Lenny on it right now. Debian installs on most anything and runs quicker than most anything else. It's tremendously flexible and easy to keep patched for extended periods of time. When you start with the "standard" install (as opposed to the full GNOME or Xfce desktops), and build up from there with X, your lightweight window manager of choice (Xfce in this case) and the applications you absolutely need, Debian is very frugal with disk space. Aside from Opera, I do install Iceweasel, even though I rarely use it on this particular machine. The Vi and Nano text editors are included in the Debian "standard" install. I add the Geany and Mousepad text editors, the Xfce and Xterm terminals, gFTP, the htop utility and the MtPaint image editor.

In this case I don't use encrypted LVM. I set up a standard partitioning layout with a separate /home. Running sudo aptitude clean every once in awhile keeps my root partition size manageable. Yes, I do install sudo, which isn't in the Debian default. Ubuntu and its derivatives include sudo by default, as does OpenBSD, and I use it everywhere.

I'm not likely to upgrade to Debian Squeeze for some time and will consider swapping in the bigger hard drive, should I find it, with a fresh Squeeze install.

Since the Ted word processor is no longer in the Debian repo, last night I grabbed the .deb package from the project web site and installed it. While not exactly optimized for the Compaq's 800x600 screen, it does work well, and I'll be experimenting with it in the weeks ahead for writing projects even though I pretty much favor text editors like Geany for as much of my work as possible.

(Readers: Feel the tangent begin ...)