Recently in Open Office Category

I'm having a very, very, very hard time believing this is not a joke. Apparently there's a group of people developing an 18-button mouse for use not just with OpenOffice but a bevy of other applications both free and proprietary.

And not only are there 18 buttons, there's also a joystick (seen at right).

Adding to any supposed authenticity of this project, it has a Web site and a development blog.

It's said all the time that many a free, open-source software project is borne out of a developer "scratching an itch," and building something that he or she really wants to use themselves. And if anybody else finds it useful, that's great, too.

This mouse — this 18-button, single-joystick mouse — looks like the itch-scratcher to scratch all itches. I'm surprised an actual scratching device doesn't burst forth from the plastic casing and offer to scratch a real itch on one's back, front, or wherever itches crop up.

I still really don't believe this is real. It just can't be.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

I've written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol' GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware.

In last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about, And in the latest Distrowatch, the idea of running "minimal Xubuntu (and Ubuntu)," is discussed.

Basically, the idea is that you use the regular Xubuntu CD but instead of the full install, you start with a command-line-only system and build it up from there. It's something that many Debian users have been doing for years (and which I'm done a couple times myself): start with what in Debian is called the "standard" install (and purposefully NOT including the "Desktop" group of packages), then use apt or Aptitude to build up from there, adding only what you want. You start with X and then build up from there.

This week's Distrowatch article included some timed benchmarks, as well as a table of how much memory is used in Debian 5 with Xfce, the standard Xubuntu, the minimal Xubuntu and Xubuntu with the same packages as Debian with Xfce.

You save a lot of time and RAM with the leaner Xubuntus.

In running Ubuntu vs. most other systems with leaner desktop environments, you can see right away by running the top utility in a terminal. In Ubuntu 8.04, I start out the session with over 100 processes. Right now, in OpenBSD 4.4 with Xfce 4.4 — and with the Opera browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, a terminal window, a couple Mousepad editor windows and way more Xfce widgets than I need (they eat about 10MB of RAM each, so I'm probably going to turn off most of them soon), I only show 53 processes in top.

And when I'm running the default Fvwm2 window manager in OpenBSD, I probably start the session with between 20 and 30 processes (I'll have to check on that). Just running the console before starting X, there are less than 20 processes running (again, I'll check and confirm).

From my experience, Xfce in Debian and Slackware is more like it is in OpenBSD as I have it configured and less like in Xubuntu.

The "problem," although I really don't see it as such, with Xubuntu is that a whole lot of GNOME services are running. The same is true in the KDE-based Kubuntu. The Ubuntu team keeps a lot of the services the same, everything from the Synaptic package manager to the Network Manager, so the experience across the various Ubuntu derivatives is more similar than not.

And I do remember being jarred a bit after installing both the Xfce and KDE versions of Debian. I never could get used to the graphical package manager in KDE. (Kpackage? That's my guess.) And in the Xfce version of Debian, you have to use apt or Aptitude (but you could add Synaptic with these very utilities if you really, truly missed it).

I did use Debian with Xfce for a good period of time, and that provided me with the opportunity to learn more about Aptitude, which more than a few users prefer over apt due to Aptitude's record-keeping ability. (I guess that means Aptitude writes more log files, but I never really looked into it that closely.)

But as I said in my last entry on the topic, If you install Slackware but leave out all the KDE sets, you still end up with a bigger installation than if you use Debian with Xfce. And as I said then, you even get OpenOffice, compared to no office suite in Slackware, and still the install for Debian is smaller. That doesn't really matter for most instances, but this particular install needed to fit on a 3 GB hard drive, and that's pretty tight for many distributions.

Not to hate on Slackware at all. I do grumble about not having as many tools to manage the box when you choose not to install KDE (and I may indeed do this very install in the near future because I still love Slackware and believe I'm better equipped to deal with it now than ever). And while I'm not happy about having to search for prebuilt binary packages or use Slackbuilds for some of the apps I need, Slackware is still a super-fast Xfce system. In fact, Slackware is my No. 1 system for when I (or you) do want to run KDE.

(Small aside: Slackware does include the Koffice suite in the KDE sets. If at the time I was using Slackware the heaviest — the 12.0 days — Kword in particular ran better, I very well could've stuck with it. I can't say anything about more recent Koffice builds, but I haven't heard about it getting much better, not that I've heard much at all. I did end up adding Abiword to my Slackware install with binary packages from Robby Workman's site.)

And if you want to take the time during the install, you can go through Slackware file set by file set, package by package, and install exactly what you want from the CDs/DVDs. So you can have a truly custom installation out of the box without needing to use a network mirror. (Caveat: It seems as if this would take forever to do.)

I don't think you can do the same thing with apt in Debian, but you certainly can start with the minimal or "standard" install (I think some just do the absolute base and don't even use the whole "standard" list of packages) and then build slowly up from there.

Before I lose the thread of exactly what I wanted to say about Xubuntu. I don't know if I spelled it out in the last entry, but in my tests, Xubuntu doesn't really give you much of a speed advantage over standard Ubuntu. I did used to really like the look of Xubuntu; around the 7.04/7.10 era, when I ran a lot of Xubuntu, I really liked the way they had Xfce set up, from the color scheme to the panels (when I could get the panels to stick on the screen ... another story).

But once I saw how Xfce ran in other distributions, I never really looked back. If you prefer the way Xubuntu looks and works over Ubuntu, it's a legitimate choice, but I don't think you'll save a lot of CPU or RAM by choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu.

However, if you really like Ubuntu/Xubuntu and have a compelling reason for using it over Ubuntu — perhaps your hardware just likes Ubuntu more, maybe you want to run the LTS of Ubuntu, or there are some packages that either you can't get in Debian or are more up to date in Ubuntu — doing one of these minimal Ubuntu/Xubuntu installs can be worth it.

As for me, things are going very well in OpenBSD 4.4. I'll probably upgrade when my CD set arrives. And my Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba laptop is also running well.

Ubuntu maintenance aside: On our girl's Gateway laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, it crashed over the weekend (most probably a hardware issue; possibly a flaky power-supply plug) and I had a corrupted root filesystem. I used "recovery mode," and was able to see the dmesg on the terminal. The system dropped me into a root shell, I fsck'ed the root filesystem, which in my case goes like this:

# fsck /dev/sda2

And after that I rebooted and everything was back to normal. I thought that running a journaling filesystem (ext3 in this case) meant you didn't have to fsck, but in this case I most definitely needed to do so. My recent forays into fsck in OpenBSD are also due, I believe, to hardware issues; every once in awhile this Toshiba laptop (again, I have two identical Satellite 1100-S101 models) dies right at the beginning of the boot, no matter what the OS, and in the case of OpenBSD, I easily fsck the root filesystem and commence booting.

So ... what I'm getting around to saying is that I can easily see pulling the hard drive from one of the Toshiba laptops, shoving in a new one and using the entire drive for either Debian or Slackware and doing a long-term test of whichever distro I end up choosing.

Endnote: My complaints still stand about distro reviews — including my own — being nothing more than cursory looks at how a system installs and whether or not the hardware worked and not much more.

I think a lot of this discomfort with quickie reviews stems from my own decision to do much less distro-hopping. I tend to use distributions/projects that offer a lot of packages, a lot of flexibility, plus longevity and relative stability. The operating system must support most or all of the applications I need to get my work done. And since I'm not running a lot of test machines at the moment, anything I do in terms of distro/project testing needs to serve these goals as well as hold my 1 GB of Thunderbird e-mail and about 1 GB of "other" files.

So I've stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 on two laptops (both in fairly frequent use), OpenBSD 4.4 on one laptop (heavy use), OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13 on one laptop (light use — this one needs an upgrade; it ran Debian before and probably will again) and Debian Etch on two desktops (light use).

I used to get a lot of traffic with quickie distro reviews, especially when I managed to get a Distrowatch link. I do miss the traffic, but I didn't feel right cranking out a review within the first day/week after an install. It's certainly important to let people know how goes the installation of an operating system, but I just didn't have the time or desire to burn dozens of ISOs and do installs all the time.

And since my days of distro-hopping, I've depended on FOSS operating systems and applications more than ever before for my day-to-day work. And between Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Debian, I've found a nice combination of comfort (for me as a user/technician) stability, flexibility, application availability and, for the most part, relative speed.

I know I spent half of this entry on how slow Ubuntu can be, but I've run MANY distros that appear to be much slower; I think Ubuntu hits more of a happy medium than others when it comes to the bloat/features equation, I just run hardware that's old enough to need all the help with CPU, RAM and disk space I can get.

The real endnote: The preceding few paragraphs attempted to explain why I'm uncomfortable with the standard distro review, both as a writer and a reader. I hope I got the point across at least a little. When you see one of these reviews, you'll know it. Not that there's no value in rolling a new Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva/Slackware/etc. distribution onto a box and writing about what's different/better/worse. If the writer has been running a given distro/project all along, I tend to take more notice even of a quickie review. But if you run, let's say Slackware, throw the latest Ubuntu on your box and talk all about how Ubuntu is different from Slackware and how everything's in the wrong place, and you do this a few hours after the installation, that I feel is usually of very little value.

So the next time I do this very thing, feel free to write a comment at what a hypocrite I am.

When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1.

I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows quite a bit, and I finally began running it in Mac OS now that I finally upgraded the iBook to OS X 10.4.

But until now I stuck with FF2 on this OpenBSD laptop.

By the time OpenBSD 4.5 is released in May, FF2 will be no more. That was another factor governing my decision to finally upgrade to FF3.

I finally decided to make the leap from FF2 to FF3. (Remember that OpenBSD doesn't generally update binary packages after each release. Unless you run -current and compile everything, it's six months between upgrades for the OS and the applications.)

I was prepared for trouble, but everything went well. It didn't hurt a bit. All of my FF2 settings and bookmarks are intact, as are my add-ons (including Web Developer). Java still works, too. And performance of FF3 seems more than a little bit snappier than FF2. I can really feel the difference with Web-based apps that use a lot of Javascript.

Yeah, I'm months late to the FF3 party (at least on this platform), but I can more than safely say that I'm damn glad I finally and painlessly made the switch.

To replace FF2 with FF3, here's what I did in an xterm window:

$ sudo pkg_delete mozilla-firefox
Password:
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.16p3: complete
Clean shared items: complete
$ sudo pkg_add -i firefox3
firefox3-3.0.1p3: complete
--- firefox3-3.0.1p3 -------------------
Please see /usr/local/mozilla-firefox/README.OpenBSD
for information about running Firefox on OpenBSD.

OpenBSD users face a similar dilemma in version 4.5, in which OpenOffice 2.4 will co-exist along with OO3. For the release after that, just like with FF, OO2.4 will be gone, and only OO3.x will remain. I'm OK with that, too. I just started using OO3 in Windows, and I think it's a pretty good release thus far.

I love it when things work. It happens more often than not in OpenBSD, and that's why I've stuck with it. If things were breaking down software-wise, I'd be sprinting back to Linux. But as long as not having Flash 9 or 10 doesn't totally harsh my proverbial mellow (OpenBSD is mired in Flash 7 due to subsequent Linux Flash Players insisting on ALSA sound, which the BSDs don't have), I'm comfortable.

And if I could manage to edit video in Blender, I would work around the lack of up-to-date Flash.

Now ... back to the OpenBSD way of keeping things up to date (or not ...).

I can't decide whether, and if so how much, I'm troubled by keeping the same version of various apps on my machine for six months at at time. At one level, I'm happy not to be constantly doing apt-get update apt-get upgrade or having the Update Manager pop up every day.

But if you want to keep current in OpenBSD, you need to either patch your box to -stable, or just run -current which is what developers and other edgy types install on their own equipment. I'll confess that if I understood a little better how to make a -release box -stable, or keep a -current box current, I'd be more game for doing it (and I might get there at some point). I do know that a lot of compiling is involved, and I'm no fan of sitting and waiting for ports to build. But if Firefox 3.0.8 is what I craved, I could get it now either in by running -current or by and building the port. Even in Ports, Firefox is stuck at 3.0.1 in my 4.4 environment.

I've seen a few users claim that keeping an OpenBSD box at -stable or running -current and updating it is no big deal. I'd love for that to be the case.

Right now, on this install, I have maybe 2.5 GB in /usr, and after my experience running out of space to build Java, I'm reluctant when it comes to bringing down the source of OpenBSD and compiling it. This is just about as close to a "production" machine as I have, and I can't risk bricking the install, so I'll be ordering my OpenBSD 4.5 CDs very soon (make that very, very soon) and upgrading that way. I've done it once, and hopefully I can do it again.

I tried quite a few OpenBSD ports during my last run on the Sparcstation 20. None of them would build (Firefox, Seamonkey, Geany).

Curiously, when I ran NetBSD on the Sparc, the Firefox PACKAGE wouldn't install. Not a port that needed to be compiled, but a precompiled package built for the 32-bit Sparc architecture. That didn't give me a whole lot of hope for pkgsrc, which theoretically can be used to bring NetBSD packages into OpenBSD and other OSes. (DragonFlyBSD uses NetBSD packages, and that's a great way for the FreeBSD-derived DragonFly to have a huge package repository, and it makes me want to try it on my i386 hardware).

I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box).

Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard. There are quite a few other Solaris 9 books out there, including a "Dummies" book by Dave Taylor, who wrote a general Unix book I quite liked (here's everything Amazon has that he wrote).

Back to the Sparcstation 20 after the Solaris 9 installation: With 50 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM, it's far from ideal. GNOME &mddash; which ships with Solaris 9 — is almost unusable, but the CDE desktop is pretty responsive. It reminds me quite a bit of Fvwm in OpenBSD.

StarOffice 6 is included among the many discs in the Solaris box. When I installed it as root, only root could run it, so I started over again in my user account. The answer to this mystery is probably somewhere in my "Complete Idiots" book.

I found a Firefox 2.0.0.20 package built for Solaris 8 at the great SunFreeware site. Again, installing as root meant only root could use it. Even after installing it through the user account with su didn't work all the way. I can still run Firefox as root, but I get errors relating to patches that I need to do when I try to run it as my user. I'll have to read up on Solaris admin and eventually find and install all the Solaris patches.

But I did get Firefox to run, and it's WAY faster than Netscape 4.7, which shipped with Solaris. Yes, I did just type the words "Netscape 4.7."

I could very well keep Solaris on the box, but one idea is to run OpenBSD and then try to use the Solaris binary packages for Firefox and OpenOffice (since none of the OpenBSD ports of Firefox or Seamonkey will install on the Sparc 20).

Running Solaris binaries in OpenBSD is supposed to work. And yes, OpenBSD is a better, faster OS, for my use anyway, than Solaris on this platform.

Sun Sparcstation 5 image from the OSIAH: Online Sun Information ArcHive.