Recently in Blogging Category

A comment in one of my "backup" blogs (i.e. little used and just sitting there ... waiting) alerted me to a new blog, Tropic of Vector, which chronicles one guy's effort to find the right operating system for a Pentium III-era laptop. After trying everything from Xubuntu down to Puppy and Damn Small Linux, he settled on Vector Linux Light, which aims to make the already resource-sparing Vector Linux run even better with slower CPUs and smaller memory footprints.

And while scanning the Vector Linux site, I found a great reference for all the VL systems, The Vector Linux Cookbook of Common Tasks.

This is just the sort of thing that users new and old can really use when wading into a new Linux distribution (or any Linux distribution) for the first time.

Many but not all distributions and projects have similar wikis/handbooks, and they are a great resource. I've seen great "handbook" type docs for ZenWalk, Slackware and of course the many BSD projects.

And for those of you running Ubuntu or its variants, there's a lot there, too. I also recommend that new Ubuntu users get an actual printed book (my favorites are by Keir Thomas and Rickford Grant).

Man pages are great (OK, often they're lousy, especially in Linux when compared to a project such as OpenBSD that actually cares about man-page quality), but most people Google for info they need, and to go along with Web searches, having a definable and huge reference in one place can be a big help.

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 ...)

While Googling for information on encrypting filesystems for something I'm working on, I came across many a good Ubuntu blog — yep, there's lots out there for the Ubuntu user who wants to figure things out, and that makes the Canonical-sponsored rendition of Linux even more attractive to people whose geek skills are less than complete (and yes, I count myself in that number).

One blog that looked really good, despite an awful name, is I' Been to Ubuntu, which has many, many good articles and appears to be updated quite often. The blog is subtitled, "Videos and articles helping you understand Debian and its derivatives," and I always appreciate a site that gives Debian its due (and I continue to believe that it's not really any harder to run Debian than Ubuntu, and if Debian treats your hardware well, then it's a no-brainer; unfortunately my hardware hasn't been so well-treated in the Lenny era.)

After Andrew Hurvitz moved Here in Van Nuys from Blogger to WordPress, something I've never done (moving a blog from one platform to another), I decided to do a test.

I made a backup of a Movable Type blog, which generates a giant text file, and then uploaded that file into WordPress.

It took a couple of passes to get all the entries (the operation timed out), but I had a huge WordPress blog in mere minutes.

Since the Movable Type blog was archived in a text file, all of the image links referred back to the old blog, and the images displayed in the WordPress blog were still on the old system.

But as far as entries, categories and tags go, everything moved over perfectly.

The ability to take your blog with you gives the user quite a bit of power. Aside from the problem with hosted images, it's extremely easy to move years' worth of blog entries between platforms like WordPress, Movable Type/Typepad and Blogger.

The whole concept of storing blog entries in database format and using protocols such as XML (I'm guessing) to enable data portability is a truly great thing.

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 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.

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?")

Seriously, people, I do a lot of work on this Movable Type installation, and I never knew that the archives page for each of the L.A. Daily News blogs features a link to every single post in the blog.

It also features links to every category page, separated by months, as well as author category pages (which most blogs, including this one, really don't need because they're basically one-wo/man shows).

It basically offers a link to every static HTML page generated by Movable Type for this blog. Yep, MT builds a whole lot of pages.

A lot of tech Web sites don't make it easy to find their best stuff. CNet is no exception.

I always say that the best way to present just about any quantity of news is in a sequentionally arranged blog (also known as "just a normal blog").

I've been reading Matt Asay's The Open Road for months now, but I had no idea that I could get his entries and the proverbial "so much more" not at the somewhat worthless CNet News page but at the very useful CNet News Blog site.

It's another one I'm now reading every day. I've even been going there before ZDNet, since the blog format makes it so easy to scan the entries and actually figure out what they're about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I also added the following to the blogroll:

Debian Administration

Debian Admin

Debian Weather

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

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

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

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

His bio:

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

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

I can hardly believe that I'm composing an entry in Movable Type Open Source 4.1 using Damn Small Linux.

Now that version 4.3 of the low-spec Linux distribution has added Firefox 2 to its software mix, I can use the browser -- here named Bon Echo for reasons that escape me -- for many more things than I could the Firefox 1.06 browser included in previous incarnations of DSL.

And on the $15 Laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and only 64 MB of RAM -- Damn Small Linux remains the best operating system and is that much better with a browser that can do so many things FF 1 couldn't handle.

Like Movable Type.

And Google Docs, where I just had a very pleasant writing experience.

There are a few niggly things that don't work as well in DSL 4.3 as they did in DSL 4.0 on this laptop, among them the desktop background, which for some reason is absent (but shows up when I run DSL 4.3 on other PCs), and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the menu to show up in Fluxbox. All I get is the DFM menu, not the Fluxbox application menu. Since I'm happy using the JWM window manager, that's not a big deal, but having Firefox 2 instead of 1.06 is a big, huge, game-changing deal that makes Damn Small Linux a must have for hardware at this level.

Thanks to Robert Shingledecker of DSL for continually improving his distribution and saving many an old computer (this one in its ninth year of service) from obscurity.

I burned a DSL 4.4 RC1 CD today, but I couldn't get it to boot on the Compaq. I don't know if it's a bad CD or a bug in the release candidate, but I do plan to try again as the development process continues. I'm also planning to give DSL 4.2 a try to see just where the desktop wallpaper stopped appearing on this laptop. Again, it's not a big deal because the extreme responsiveness and stability and usability of this distribution on a PC with these specs cannot be found in any other Linux distribution -- Puppy and Debian included.

When I make the leap from 64 MB of RAM to 144 MB, things could very well change. I might be able to more successfully run Puppy, Debian or OpenBSD with X, but DSL will also be that much better as well.

I've blogged a bit recently on how hard it is to install Movable Type and have it actually work on your own server. After getting and configuring Apache and MySQL (or PostgreSQL or SQlite), making sure you get the static files in the right place and the CGI/Perl files in the other right place, then making sure everything has the proper permissions ... I found it to be way beyond my capabilities.

And the instructions are rudimentary at best. I think the people at Six Apart pretty much want you to hire time to configure your Movable Type setup. In a way, I don't blame them, but they've also got to think about WordPress breathing down their necks.

To be fair, I haven't yet tried to install WordPress, but I recently found out something very interesting:

There are WordPress packages available in many of the major Linux and BSD distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu and even OpenBSD.

Luckily, the same thing is now happening for Movable Type.

So if you're using the Debian GNU/Linux distribution -- and I strongly suggest you do -- you can now install Movable Type as a Debian package.

Read about it at the Movable Type site, and find out more about the package at the Debian site.

And for those using -- or about to use -- Debian, since the Movable Type package is new, it's not in the Stable distribution, which is named Etch. Instead, you need to install or upgrade to the Testing distribution of Debian, named Lenny. I'm already using Lenny in one of my desktop installs, where it happens to work better than Etch, but my Debian server still runs with Etch, and I'm loathe to change that.

I'm not sure how either of these packages -- WordPress or Movable Type -- handles dependencies as far as Apache and MySQL are concerned (e.g. whether or not you have to install the Web server and database software before you install the blog software), but I plan to find out very soon.

After two unsuccessful attempts at rolling out my own MT installations, I'm cautiously guarded about these packages actually working without a lot of post-installation tweaking (and I hope the man pages provide considerable insight).

I decided to start from scratch with my Debian server project. Last time I was too hasty in adding the open-source version of Movable Type to my installation and intermingling files before I was ready.

This time I'm going to be a lot more methodical and make sure that Apache and MySQL are working properly -- meaning I can run CGI scripts and have a directory dedicated to same -- before I start with Movable Type.

I could've removed Apache, done some cleanup and gone from there, but since I didn't have much "invested" in the install, I wiped the drive and started over.

I did want to change a few things:

Last time I used encrypted LVM. Since I don't have any grasp about how to work with LVM partitions after the fact, and since I'm not confident enough to have an encrypted drive that I can't get to from a live CD rescue disc, I went with a standard partitioning scheme. I initially was going to roll out separate partitions for everything, but since I don't know how extensively I'm going to use /var -- and since the automatic partitioning in Debian tends to make the root partition too small for my taste (and with a 14.5 GB hard drive, I don't have a whole lot of space to waste), I went with a separate /home partition and one big partition for everything else. That way, even if I'm using /var for my Web files, I can always rsync them to the /home partition and then rebuild the whole damn thing if I need to, yet still have all the files right there.

Another thing I learned: When you check off "SQL server" during a Debian Etch install, you get PostgreSQL, not MySQL. I'll write more about this in an upcoming post, but I'm at such an early stage in my interaction with databases (i.e. smack dab at the very beginning) that I'm going to use MySQL just because of its sheer ubiquity (and because that's what Movable Type recommendseven though Movable Type supports PostgreSQL just fine -- and also allows use of SQLite).

I'm not ruling out using PostgreSQL in the future, but since this is my very first installation of a SQL database -- hell, it's the first time I've even used a SQL database and actually knew I was using it, so I'm going with the flow as much as possible.

In the last install, I also selected "file server," and ended up with a lot of stuff loading at boot that I don't need. What I really do need is an ftp server (and preferably a secure one) as well as the OpenSSH server, both of which are easy enough to install and configure (easy since I've successfully done it before).

And while I considered not installing the "Desktop environment," which brings GNOME and everything that goes with it, I didn't want to leave all that GUI goodness behind just yet; I'd rather have Synaptic, especially, at my disposal.

So right now I have the stock Debian Etch install with the desktop environment and Web server options.

And I need to add:

• Anything I'm missing to make Apache work with PHP and CGI/Perl scripts (that was my big stopper in last week's install)
• MySQL and the phpMyAdmin program to help me configure the database
• The ftp and OpenSSH server packages
• Movable Type

At this point, everything is on the local network, not right out there on the Internet, and I just want to see how hard it is to roll one's own blogging-equipped Web server. Would I rather use Drupal, WordPress ... or anything else? Sure, but since our shop makes extensive use of Movable Type, that's where I'm putting my energy.

I'm getting some help setting up Apache2 from this Debian Admin page. And Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" has some good tips on rolling out Apache (look in Chapter 22 -- and if you don't have this book, you really do need it).

One thing that's screwing me up is the presence of multiple configuration files in Apache2 (apache2.conf and httpd.conf), the placement of those and other files in different directories on different systems, and general confusion of what the proper commands are between Apache 1.3, 2.0 and 2.2.

But since I'm being more deliberate this time, I won't move to the next step in the process until everything works with the previous step. That means I need to get CGI working in Apache, then add MySQL, create the database, and then add MovableType. ... and in between I'll get the FTP and SSH servers going.

Update: I installed a bunch of MySQL and PHP stuff that I saw in Synaptic. I also installed phpMyAdmin, which I already confirmed is working. I also added the proftpd ftp server, which has a MySQL-specific version (not sure what I'm getting myself into there). I also put openssh-server on the box, which worked perfectly in my last Debian Etch install.

A very good tip: This is true for most configuration files, as well as for those in Apache2, especially because there are a whole lot of them: SAVE copies of everything before you mess with it. Look at ALL of the configuration files and attempt to understand them before you mess with them.

By looking, I learned that the default Apache2 installation in Debian is already set up to use /usr/lib/cgi-bin as the CGI directory. This information wasn't in /etc/apache2.conf or /etc/httpd.conf (which is empty, with the implication -- for me at least -- being that this configuration file is no longer necessary in Apache 2.2 ... but don't quote me because I could be totally and completely wrong).

I found out about the CGI situation in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default and /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.

OK, I realize that Apache is a huge deal. It's production-ready, hugely scalable, time-tested, and all that other good stuff that makes for a bullet-hardened app. Did I throw in enough cliches?

But holy crap -- I've got FOUR configuration files in front of me.

I somehow in my previous installation was able to get the "home" of my Web server out of /apache2-default/, and now that I know where the cgi-bin area is (and presumably how to move it) ... I just might get this thing off the ground.

All I do know is that the online Apache docs led me astray (and were extremely vague about where exactly to put the various configuration lines I needed).

Here's what I'm going to do now: NOTHING. I'm going to sit on this for a day or so and think about how to proceed without screwing the whole thing up.