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Things are happening in Debian Lenny, and not just in my installation.

OK, mostly in my installation.

For one thing, something — I have no idea what — made the GNOME Network Admin package disappear. I couldn't change my network settings from the System--Preferences menu or the icon I have in the panel for that very purpose.

I went into Synaptic and reinstalled it. Now it works.

I'm still having the "work offline" problem with Iceweasel (aka Firefox) 3. Whenever I start the browser, I'm automatically in "work offline" mode, regardless of whether I'm actually online or not.

I also still have the "ghosting" on the upper GNOME panel.

Right now I'm doing a software update. Among the new packages is a kernel update. Will this solve my problems? And will I have to reinstall the ALSA sound modules for my ESS Allegro/Maestro3 chip in the $0 Laptop?

After the update: The Debian Lenny updates included a 2.6.25 Linux kernel, but boot code for the new kernel didn't get written into the menu.lst that controls the Ubuntu-installed GRUB, which controls the master boot record for this dual-boot system.

It turns out that Debian only updated its own /boot/grub/menu.lst, so I copied the new entries over to Ubuntu's /boot/grub/menu.lst to try the new kernel.

This appears to be the SECOND 2.6.25 kernel in Lenny, but it's the first I've seen of it, and without Ubuntu's menu.lst being updated automatically, a new Lenny kernel is easy to miss.

I understand that dual-booting can pose a problem, but I thought that Debian pretty much knew to look for multiple GRUB configurations and update them all. I guess not this time.

In Lenny with the 2.6.25-2 kernel: Sound still works in the new kernel. (After manually jump-starting sound in 2.6.24, I didn't expect it, but thankfully it does.) Either the Debian developers decided to re-support my sound chip, or my manual installation of ALSA drivers stuck.

Iceweasel 3 still defaults to "work offline" status whenever it's launched. The same problem still (again, thankfully) doesn't affect Epiphany.

The upper panel in GNOME still suffers from the same "ghosting" problem.

Looking at the bug reports, which I did in a very recent post, tells me that the Iceweasel problem is not so much with Iceweasel as with NetworkManager. I can pretty much confirm this, since mousing over the NetworkManager icon in the upper GNOME panel says that there is "No network connection," where there indeed there is. I probably should be looking at bug reports for NetworkManager and not Iceweasel.

I couldn't find anything in Debian's bug reports, and nothing leaped right out of this large page of GNOME bug reports.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't mean to be a hater. I'd love to say that Internet Explorer 7 isn't as bad as advertised and that it's a perfectly fine application that holds its own with Firefox 2.

But it doesn't. And Internet Explorer pales in comparison to Firefox by every measure, metric and anecdote I can muster.

Here's the deal: I'm pretty much "forced" to use IE by a single, albeit important, work-related task, and I've taken to using it a bit more just to acclimate myself.

But IE 7 is slower -- a lot slower, crashes more and generally sends me running back to Firefox.

That's it. Mini-rant/review over. Go back to what you were doing.

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 before on how Gmail has an advantage over Yahoo Mail -- and most other Web-based e-mail services -- because you can choose to run a totally secure session (by entering the URL https://gmail.com instead of plain ol' http://gmail.com) and feel safe when reading and writing e-mail over public WiFi connections.

Seems it isn't so. According the Zero Day blog at ZDNet, somebody monitoring the radio traffic of your wireless connection can figure out your password through the use of unencrypted cookies with a technique called "sidejacking":

Sidejacking is a term (Robert) Graham uses to describe his session hijacking hack that can compromise nearly all Web 2.0 applications that rely on saved cookie information to seamlessly log people back in to an account without the need to reenter the password. By listening to and storing radio signals from the airwaves with any laptop, an attacker can harvest cookies from multiple users and go in to their Web 2.0 application. Even though the password wasn’t actually cracked or stolen, possession of the cookies acts as a temporary key to gain access to Web 2.0 applications such as Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. The attacker can even find out what books you ordered on Amazon, where you live from Google maps, acquire digital certificates with your email account in the subject line, and much more.

Gmail in SSL https mode was thought to be safe because it encrypted everything, but it turns out that Gmail’s JavaScript code will fall back to non-encrypted http mode if https isn’t available. This is actually a very common scenario anytime a laptop connects to a hotspot before the user signs in where the laptop will attempt to connect to Gmail if the application is opened but it won’t be able to connect to anything. At that point in time Gmail’s JavaScripts will attempt to communicate via unencrypted http mode and it’s game over if someone is capturing the data.

What’s really sad is the fact that Google Gmail is one of the “better” Web 2.0 applications out there and it still can’t get security right even when a user actually chooses to use SSL mode. Other applications like Microsoft’s MSN/Hotmail and Yahoo don’t even have SSL modes. The fact that they use SSL mode for first time authentication and sign-in is irrelevant because they all drop down to unencrypted mode right after the user authenticates.

I don't use my DSL Extreme Web mail as often as I should. It has a secure connection the whole time, and it's primitive enough -- I hope -- not to have these same vulnerabilities. Fastmail.fm, on which I also have a free account, will also do a secure session if you choose "secure login" when signing on.

I'm far from a security expert, but it seems to me that we'd be in better shape if we had the option of running a Web browser in secure-server mode all the time.

Let's get to it: I have one Web site that I work on infrequently that requires Internet Explorer, but since I barely have to do anything on it, I am free to use IE, or not.

And I waited at least a year to "upgrade" my IE6 to IE7 on the XP box at work. Yeah, it's an upgrade because now IE has tabbed browsing -- a feature Firefox has had for years, and which IE probably would've never added had FF not had it first.

I like IE6 because it was a fast program -- it opened fast and did the rest of its thing fast. And I could use it as an FTP client.

Now that I have IE7, sure there is tabbed browsing, and it looks a little better, but it's way slower than Firefox, and I pretty much only fire up IE for ONE Web site because it's at the top of my IE favorites and the bottom of my FF favorites.

IE loads more slowly, the favorites come up slower -- basically it gets beat by FF in performance by every measure. (I'm running a 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM.)

And I can run Firefox in Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac OS X ... and I do (though I'm partial to the Mozilla-derived Epiphany in the GNOME desktop, as well as the Seamonkey browser/e-mail client/HTML editor suite -- also based on Mozilla).

Truth be told, if it really bothered me, I'd try to roll the box back to IE6, if that indeed can be done. Since IE7 installs over your IE6, I think it might be a problem to "go back."

Note: While I can't get the same FTP functionality out of IE7, I have a Windows workaround: Open up My Computer from the Start menu, and type your FTP address in the search bar. The window functions pretty much like IE6 -- it's the same "Explorer"-like interface Windows uses to let you examine your own files, and it does FTP just like IE6. Thanks, Microsoft!

I used to think IE was the best browser for OS X, too -- that final version of IE5 for the Mac was a masterful, innovative application, and I'm sorry Microsoft abandoned it. Safari doesn't have enough critical mass to cut it -- many Web sites don't look so hot in it -- so Firefox is pretty much the browser of record for the Mac, too.

And Mozilla is making hand-over-fist money by getting a cut of the Google searches made through the browser. All it means is more money that Microsoft isn't making.

Hope you're happy, Microsoft!

The Thin Puppy ran all the way through Christmas Day (mercifully, I wasn't here), but today something happened, and the power momentarily went out. I might've kicked the power cord, or something else nefarious happened, but the Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client rebooted, and since there was no CD in the drive, I just shut it down. I'm sure it could've gone much longer than 13 days, but I have accepted that 30 days without a reboot won't be happening.

Anyway, I booted Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop (I haven't done the upgrade to 3.01 on the Gateway yet).

One of the bigger changes recently in Puppy Linux has been the dropping of the lightweight Dillo browser in favor of NetSurf, which looks like a similarly lightweight browser based on Mozilla. I can't be sure of its origins, but it seems to work pretty well, is just as fast as Dillo, and -- most importantly -- seems to be currently in development. Work on Dillo has pretty much stalled, or so it appears. So I think of this as a good choice for Puppy Linux -- the lightweight browser is needed, especially for the lower-spec computers than many of us use to run Puppy.

I thought Puppy also had a text-only browser, but I don't see it in the Puppy 3.00 menu. I'd like to see Lynx or Elinks in the Puppy base. If you must have a text Web browser, Elinks is available as an easy-to-add PET package in the Puppy Package Manager. Even Dillo can be restored via a PET package.

The main browser in Puppy continues to be Seamonkey, which also functions as a mail client and HTML editor. I've always liked Seamonkey, and I continue to see it as an application that fits Puppy very well.

I have one nagging problem: One of the Web sites I work on: LA.com has way too much Flash on it for its own good, and while that may or may not be the cause, the home page crashes Seamonkey every time. I'm generally anti-Flash -- it hogs resources and should only be used when you need to show an actual video (and then only after a link is clicked), but I've accepted that today's Web designers have gone Flash-crazy.

Most of these developers also think that everybody runs browsers with Flash and that they have Flash enabled. I suppose it's true for 95 percent of users, but I don't have Flash activated on this very laptop's Debian partition. In Ubuntu, I do have it, and Puppy ships with Flash implemented in Seamonkey, but the ability to easily turn Flash on and off in Firefox would be welcomed by me. More welcome is the new Gnash open-source clone of Flash. I haven't tried it yet, but it's definitely on my to-do list.

$0 Laptop-and-Puppy update: Puppy runs so well on this Gateway Solo 1450, it should be noted. Since I got the fan under control via a cron job (long explanation of this STILL forthcoming -- I promise), Puppy 3.00 has performed very, very well. I've been running it from the live CD (all the better for impending and frequent upgrades, as well as ease in booting) and have a 1.2 GB pup_save in my Debian Etch partition. I've also had good luck with Knoppix 5.1.1 on this laptop, but not so much with Damn Small Linux, which has problems with the X configuration. And with 256 MB of RAM, Puppy is a much better fit than Knoppix.

I continue to warn against dual- and triple-booting, even as I continue to do it with this laptop (still, avoid pain and DON'T dual-boot -- I'm telling you). But I encourage the use of live CDs on computers with existing Linux (and even Windows) installs. It gives you a nice option and is not likely to screw anything up.

I'm writing this review on Google Docs in Firefox while running gOS 1.0.1, the Ubuntu-based distribution that steers users toward Web-based applications whenever possible -- mostly those under the auspices of Google -- and which powers the Everex Linux PC being sold for $199 by the truckful at Wal-Mart.

I'm getting more comfortable with Google Docs all the time, but there are times when you need a traditional text editor. Yet there is no GUI text editor to be found in the gOS distro. There is the entire OpenOffice suite and the GIMP image editor, a smattering of games, Rhythmbox for music and Xine for video, but no stand-alone mail client (you're encouraged by the iconography on the gOS desktop to use Gmail ...). Luckily there is a terminal program, which is named UXterm but looks suspiciously like plain ol' xterm, and with that you can bring up Vim or Nano, but that's pretty much it. Come to think of it, without a terminal in the GUI, and a console text editor, gOS would be in a heap of trouble, so it's good that they included one. But every gOS user's life would be a whole lot easier with a GUI text editor. Since you can add anything in the Ubuntu repositories, holes in gOS are easily filled.

But the more I used the new, green OS, the more I wondered whether the Everex (and everybody else) would be be better off with Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Debian ... or just about anything. While the Everex, with its 1.5 GHz VIA processor and 512 MB of RAM is underpowered when compared to most modern desktops, I regularly run Debian and Ubuntu -- both with GNOME -- and even Slackware with GNOME and Xfce on a machine with similar power but half the memory. And as I found out, the speed and lightness on resources that the Enlightenment window manager promises are just not there.

One thing I do like about gOS -- and this may be a feature of Ubuntu 7.10 for all I know -- is that when you're in a terminal and try to run an application you don't have installed, the terminal outputs what you do need to do to get it.

For instance, I tried to run the Joe editor:

$ joe

and I got the following:

The program 'Joe' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install joe
bash: joe: command not found

Whenever that message comes from, it's a very nice touch and is more than enough to get even a novice user going with apt.

But sheesh, at least give me Leafpad, Mousepad, Gedit ... whatever. Normally I would just add the editor I want, but for this evaluation of gOS, I pledged to stay with Google Docs; that's what they want you to use, so I'll use it. In the past, I've even gone as far as automatically posting a Google Docs item to one of my Blogger blogs, but that feature, in my opinion, is pretty much useless. Why not just write directly in Blogger? And since you can only auto-post from Google Docs to a single blog, the write-to-blog feature won't work for me. However, the post-to-blog feature does work with WordPress and LiveJournal blogs, plus a few others I've never heard of. That makes it more useful, but what I need is for Google Docs to act as more of a "dashboard" app for my various blogs -- I'd like to be able to publish from here to more than one blog (actually about six, and therein lies my sickness).

Update: I was all set to complain about Google Docs' browser-printing problem, but I just printed a document from Docs on my Windows PC, and what Docs did was turn my document into a great-looking PDF, which opened in Adobe Reader and was easily printed on paper. I'm not sure how seamless this integration is in Linux systems, but I plan to find out soon. Printing on actual paper seemed like the weak link in the whole Google Docs scheme, but it looks like they have that problem solved very well -- I may never use a traditional word processor again (especially if the promised offline extension of Docs is ever released).

Google Docs is a whole lot better than many people let on. I never need to insert tables or pictures into my documents. I write stuff. Stuff with words, and if I need to insert photos, I'm generally already in a blog post or on a printed page that I'm dealing with in a publishing program that is a whole lot bigger and more complicated than Google Docs. But Docs CAN insert images, tables, links and more. And it's not a bad HTML generator either. You can look at the HTML source at any time and copy/paste it into your Web content.

For the everyday writer of articles for publication, Google Docs is pretty kick-ass. When not connected to the Internet, or for those who don't want Google to see their documents, there's always the option of using OpenOffice, though I think AbiWord and Gnumeric are more in keeping with the lightness touted by gOS.

Getting back to gOS ... almost: Even though this is supposed to be about gOS, the bare-bones Linux distro relies heavily on the Firefox browser and links to various Web tools like GMail, Google Docs, Wikipedia (see, they're not all Google), Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Google Maps and Picasa. So any review of gOS must take heavily into account the browser experience.

Since I work on four or five separate computers a day, working with docs online and using Web-based (or IMAP-delivered) e-mail is a must for me. I could add a standalone mail client to gOS as easily as I can with any Ubuntu or Debian system, but for now I won't. Even so, a user with gOS can pretty much make it do anything they could do on Ubuntu. Or they could wipe gOS from the drive and replace it ... or perhaps dual-boot.

One of the most attractive things about gOS and the Everex PC is that the combination promises full power management, making for a more green PC than most anything else out there on the desktop, so if you have the Everex PC, making gOS work the way you want it becomes a more attractive option. Hopefully Linux, as it matures even further, will include better power management for all motherboards.

More mail: I'm divided about the use of mail clients anyway. Most of the time, a Web portal is fine for me, especially if the entire session takes place in a secure connection (thanks, DSL Extreme). And I suspect that the vast majority of computer users have never heard of a mail client -- they barely know what Outlook is -- and have been accessing e-mail through the browser as long as they've had e-mail access, so gOS is going in the right direction there.

Gmail tip: To keep your Gmail session secure throughout, start out in your browser with the following:

https://mail.google.com

Note the "s" for a secure connection. You can also type https://gmail.com. Unsecure e-mail, particularly over unencrypted wireless connections, is a real problem, and it makes me reluctant to use Yahoo Mail because only the password is sent over a secure connection. The rest of your e-mail is right out there for others to intercept and use for ill.

Speaking about the greenish gOS desktop, the Enlightenment window manager isn't that bad. I think gOS could've been done just as well with Xfce -- maybe even better -- but I know that some Enlightenment developers are behind the project, and I'm always happy to see any desktop environment taken to the next level. At least it sets gOS apart from the dozen or so Xfce-based distros out there. But speedy, it's not.

One of the first things I did in gOS was add some virtual desktops; it's one of the best features that Windows doesn't offer, and I think the gOS people should ship the OS with more than a single desktop showing. I like the traditional four, so I left-clicked on the mouse and went to Desktop -- Virtual -- Configure Virtual Desktops. I could've added more than four, but I didn't. Switching between desktops is done with the usual ctrl-alt-arrow keys. You can't tell in gOS which desktop you're on, but at least they're there.

One feature I turned on in Enlightenment that I've never seen before in any other window manager (although I'm pretty sure it's there in most window managers) is the ability to switch or "flip" screens by moving the mouse pointer to the left or right edge of the screen, effectively scrolling to the next desktop. It's kind of neat. I don't know if I need it (I discovered it by accident after forgetting that I set it), but it may just be something that gOS users will grow to like. I had to turn the feature off because I kept triggering it by accident -- I like my Firefox windows to fill up the screen, and more than once I found myself on the next desktop when I didn't want to be there just yet. Ctrl-alt-arrow is good enough for me. But if you like the "flip screen" feature, you can make it look even more groovy with "animated flip."

One successful install, one less so: Both my regular test box (the VIA C3 Samuel-based Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client) and the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) are very Ubuntu friendly, meaning installs of Ubuntu-based distros generally go well on both. gOS installed like a champ on the thin client, but it won't install at all on the Gateway. On the latter, the live CD environment comes up fine (and the graphics are much snappier than on the Maxspeed), but when I do the install, I enter all the relevant information, and about six seconds into the actual install, the program crashes -- and that's it. Since I recently did an install of Ubuntu 7.10 on this very same laptop, it's curious, indeed, that gOS will not install. It's regretful, but at least I got gOS on one box. Hopefully the bug, whatever it is, will be squashed in future editions of gOS.

Potential problem: I'm running top in a terminal window on one of my four desktops, and it consistently shows Enlightenment using 9 percent to 12 percent of my CPU and 12 percent of my 256 MB of memory ... at idle. That's not exactly light. I'll have to go back to Ubuntu and Xubuntu and see how much CPU and memory GNOME and Xfce take up. I don't think it's this much. That said, gOS seems to be running as well as anything else, but not radically better. I'm able to switch windows in Firefox fairly quickly and do the same with my virtual desktops. Again, I'd have a better feel for how gOS compares if I could install it on my Gateway laptop.

So I decided to install the next distro I'm testing -- Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0. In case you haven't heard of Wolvix, it's a live CD based on Slackware that runs the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers. It can be used as a live CD, or put on the hard drive as a frugal install or traditional hard drive install. I opted for the traditional hard drive install.

The Wolvix installation process is excellent. I already had partitions set up, but the Wolvix installer offered to start up Gparted and make some or modify those I have. I also had the option of designating separate partitions for /home and other directories (I declined but would have configured a separate /home if I planned to use Wolvix long-term). The installer also gave me the option of booting Wolvix at the console or in a GUI (I chose the GUI), and it offered to put GRUB on the master boot record (I accepted). It also detected gOS, which allowed me to dual-boot. If whatever I install on the remaining partition messes up GRUB, I can easily reinstall it from Wolvix without having to geek out too much. (Note: Wolvix didn't do so well on GRUB, I instead used the gOS install disk to reinstall GRUB, and it recognized gOS perfectly).

I ran top in a terminal in Wolvix Hunter running Xfce, and at idle, with the Firefox window open on another screen (just like in gOS), the top running process was X at between 2 and 4.6 percent CPU and 7.6 percent memory. In short, a whole lot lighter than Enlightenment.

Maybe Wolvix isn't the best distro with which to compare gOS, but the Xfce vs. Enlightenment comparison is more than valid. Is it possible that the Everex PC could perform better with Xubuntu instead of gOS? (The answer is yes.)

Anyway, since Wolvix includes Fluxbox, I decided to go further and check top again. I opened Firefox, opened this document, switched to another window, opened a terminal and ran top. X was still the top running process and veered between 0.3 percent and 1.7 percent of CPU, and 6.1 percent of memory. Again, much better than Enlightenment in gOS.

To provide an even clearer picture of the performance of gOS and Enlightenment, I tested the load times of Firefox and OpenOffice Writer in a variety of Linux distributions and window managers. (Note: Slackware 12 doesn't include OpenOffice, and I haven't bothered to add it, so times are provided for KOffice's KWord -- which is generally quicker to load than OO). Load times were checked twice for each setup, since the second load of each of these two applications often happens much more quickly than the first.

Other variables that may have affected the times: Ubuntu 6.06 uses Firefox 1.5. All others used variants of Firefox 2.0. OpenOffice versions ranged from 2.0 in Ubuntu 6.06 to 2.3 in gOS.

The distros and window managers tested on the Maxspeed converted thin client (1 GHz VIA C3 processor, ECS eveM motherboard, 256 MB RAM) were:

gOS 1.0.1 (Enlightenment)
Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS (GNOME)
Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Xfce and Fluxbox)
Slackware 12 (KDE, Xfce and Fluxbox)
Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME)
Xubuntu 7.04 (Xfce)
Debian 4.0 Etch (Xfce)

To sum up before the results are given, gOS was the slowest of the bunch -- even slower than Slackware under KDE -- and also slower than Ubuntu. It may be surprising, but Ubuntu with GNOME compares somewhat favorably to other distros running Xfce; you don't lose much speed by running GNOME as opposed to Xfce. Slackware and Debian with Xfce were another story; both were extremely fast when it came to loading applications. I didn't include Debian Etch with GNOME in the test because I didn't have it installed on one of the thin client's drives. But Debian compared very well to Slackware when both used the Xfce desktop environment. Curiously, Xubuntu -- Ubuntu's Xfce variant -- was slower than Debian with Xfce; in fact (as I already mentioned), Xubuntu didn't provide much of a speed advantage over regular Ubuntu.

I expected Wolvix to be the fastest, or at least as fast as Slackware. but it was buried by Slack. Not surprisingly, when Xfce was chosen for the window manager instead of KDE, Slackware was the undisputed winner, with a first-load time for Firefox of 8 seconds. That said, Ubuntu was slower, but not overly much, so if you prefer Ubuntu and GNOME to Slackware and Xfce, it's not like night and day in terms of application load time; it's more like noon and 2:30 p.m. -- a difference, but not so much as to make the slower of the two unusable.

The reason I even did this test was that from a "desktop feel" standpoint on my underpowered test box, gOS lacked the quickness of most of the other distros, including the Dapper and Feisty versions of Ubuntu.

And while Ubuntu has made some performance gains between 6.06 and 7.04, compatibility with hardware and desire for (or lack of interest in) more up-to-date apps should govern users' choice of the LTS vs. regular releases of the distro. For instance, on the converted thin client, hardware recognition is great in both versions, but on my Gateway laptop, ACPI and touchpad configuration work better in 7.10, and almost as well in 7.04. But ACPI management of the CPU fan only works with the kernel provided in 7.04.

Another aside: I saw practically no difference in application load times between Xfce and Fluxbox. So if you prefer Fluxbox, go ahead and use it, but you won't be gaining any performance over Xfce, at least in 256 MB of RAM. On the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which only has 64 MB of RAM, I ran Debian with Fluxbox for months, and it runs just as well now that I have Xfce on it. And the superior tools included in Xfce put it ahead of Fluxbox when it comes to usability on the desktop.

The Slackware KDE vs. Slackware Xfce numbers are the most startling; using Slack with Xfce will save considerable load time on slower systems.

On "modern" PCs, however, much of this is moot. With a dual-core processor and 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM, everything loads so quickly that for desktop use, personal preference for one window manager or another holds more sway than load times, which will be acceptably short in just about any desktop environment. And for those who like all the bells and widgets of KDE, if you have enough power to enjoy them, it's probably worth it. Just Konqueror alone, with its ability to function as a Web browser, file manager, file viewer, FTP client and configuration portal, makes KDE very attractive. If only I could get X configured properly in Slackware on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

Here are the test results:

gOS 1.0.1 (Enlightenment)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 30 sec.
                 2nd load: 15 sec.
OpenOffice 2.3   1st load: 56 sec.
                 2nd load: 21 sec.  

Ubuntu 6.06 (GNOME)
Firefox 1.5.0.13 1st load: 21 sec.
                 2nd load: 10 sec.
Open Office 2.0  1st load: 44 sec.
                 2nd load: 26 sec.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.6 1st load: 19 sec.
                2nd load: 12 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2  1st load: 37 sec.
                2nd load: 23 sec.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Fluxbox)
Firefox 2.0.0.6 1st load: 22 sec.
                2nd load: 12 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2  1st load: 42 sec.
                2nd load: 23 sec.

Slackware 12 (KDE)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load: 24 sec.
                2nd load: 14 sec.
KOffice         1st load: 19 sec.
                2nd load: 16 sec.

Slackware 12 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load:  8 sec.
                2nd load:  8 sec.
KOffice         1st load: 15 sec.
                2nd load: 13 sec.

Slackware 12 (Fluxbox)
Firefox 2.0.0.8  1st load: 9 sec.
                 2nd load: 9 sec.
Koffice         1st load: 15 sec.
                2nd load: 13 sec.

Xubuntu 7.04 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 18 sec.
                 2nd load:  9 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2   1st load: 36 sec.
                 2nd load: 22 sec.

Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 17 sec.
                 2nd load: 10 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2   1st load: 40 sec.
                 2nd load: 18 sec.

Debian 4.0 Etch (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.8  1st load: 10 sec.
                 2nd load: 10 sec.
Open Office 2.0  1st load: 17 sec.
                 2nd load: 17 sec.

As I say above the biggest thing to emerge is the speed advantage of Slackware and Debian, especially with Xfce. The relative slowness of Slackware 11-based Wolvix was puzzling. And while I didn't have OpenOffice installed in Slackware, and KOffice is pretty much a quicker program, I included its load numbers for comparison's sake. I did first and second loads of all apps because the second load is often -- but not always -- much quicker. Times for office suites were the number of seconds it took to open up a new OO Writer or KWord document.

While I didn't expect Debian to be slow, I also didn't expect it to be so comparable to Slackware. That's good news for Debian users.

But the biggest thing to come out of this test is that standard Ubuntu pretty much crushes gOS. The new, hot distro may be green in color, but it's incomplete and slow.

That said, the idea of doing most work in the browser and drawing on Web-based portals for not just e-mail and "social networking" purposes, but also document creation, photo editing and storage is becoming more attractive and viable all the time. In this realm, gOS is making a big "idea" contribution to the OS game, but in terms of sheer performance, polish and basic tools, it has a long way to go.

The average user -- even newbies -- would be better off with Ubuntu or Xubuntu on the Everex. And as these tests show, the Xfce desktop environment, in most instances, provides more bang for your MHz.

I wanted gOS to be great, but when it comes to Linux and BSD distros, greatness only comes with time and painstaking effort. After all the hype over the gOS-Everex-Wal-Mart effort -- some of it even generated by yours truly -- I didn't expect to see gOS beaten by every single established distro I threw at it. I don't usually do extensive time tests, but the sludginess of gOS drove me to it.

And while I expected Slackware and Debian to acquit themselves well, I wasn't prepared for out-of-the-box Ubuntu to best gOS. It wouldn't make as great a story -- "Wal-Mart chooses Ubuntu" -- but it would be way better for those buying the $199 box from the world's largest retailer.

The beta version of RealPlayer 11 is out and it's free.

Among the new features, RealPlayer 11 allows users to burn videos
to CDs in the VCD format. (You will need to buy the $29.99 RealPlayer Plus to burn to DVDs).

RealPlayer 11 is also capable of recognizing video content protected by DRM (digital rights management) and blocking it from being recorded.

RealNetworks is also planning additional features - such as allowing video content to be downloaded to iPods and other portable devices.

Huh? What? Why?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for (or perhaps not), the Safari browser that Apple bundles with each and every Macintosh computer sold is now coming to a Windows desktop near you. (Stories here, here and here).

No longer content with Microsoft orphaning its IE browser (no doubt because of the initial development of Safari at Apple), the folks in Cupertino are bringing Safari to the masses -- the Windows-using masses.

You might inquire as to what Steve Jobs is smoking? But he's Steve Jobs ... so whatever it is he in fact is smoking, he's using $100 bills as rolling papers.

Again, why?

But Jobs and Co. have a plan: You will use Safari, O Windows user, because it will be the only way to run Web-compatible apps with the soon-to-debut iPhone. And you will also use Safari, you Windows XP and Vista users, you, because it will be distributed with the wildly popular, culture-changing content-pushing engine known as iTunes.

Jobs cites a 5 percent share of the browser market for Safari, 78 percent for IE, and 15 percent for Firefox.

As for the iTunes connection:

(Jobs) noted that there are a million downloads of iTunes a day, with 500 million of those going to Windows machines.

“We know how to reach these (Windows) customers,” Jobs said.

And Jobs says Safari is faster than Firefox and IE. Want to find out for yourself? Download the beta.

My 2 cents: I was initially a big fan of the Safari browser in OS X. IE on the Mac was dead, killed by Microsoft (for reasons that continue to escape me -- the development of Safari itself not being sufficient), and I thought that Firefox just took too long to load. So I got used to Safari, and it was running pretty well ... until most "sophisticated" Web apps started breaking like crazy. Blogger never worked that well, even before it had a total Googlized redo, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets wouldn't even try to work. Notice that it's Google in both cases? I don't know what that says about the whole deal, but I want to use both Blogger and Google Docs (formerly Writely), and Safari just can't do it.

So I started to use Firefox on the Mac, and I'm pretty darn happy with it. Once you load it (yep, it does take a long time on my iBook G4 1GHz), you can just leave it running and open a new Firefox window in seconds. Now if Safari for Mac "catches up" to Firefox in terms of sheer functionality, I'd be inclined to give it another try. (I'm on 10.3.9, and the Safari developers abandoned that platform long ago ... if Firefox does the same, I'll have to upgrade to 10.4, I guess. But for Mac at least, Safari is in pretty big trouble, in my opinion.)

On my Windows XP box, it's a bit different. I have Firefox loaded, but I rarely use it. I'm pretty happy with IE 6 (I haven't yet made the leap to IE 7 -- I could use the tabbed browsing, but I'm loathe to give up something that "just works.")

Safari for Windows? I'll probably try it. But as I've said before, if Steve Jobs really wants to shake this shit up, he'll release OS X -- IN IT'S FREAKIN' ENTIRETY -- for PC and knock Microsoft and the rest of the computer industry on its collective ass.

So while Safari for Windows is something, it ain't everything by one gigantic, bare-assed longshot.

It's Day 3 of the Thin Puppy torture test, in which the Thin Puppy -- a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client repurposed to run Puppy Linux 2.14 -- will run continuously to test the hardware and OS ... and also because since the Compact Flash memory died, I booted the machine with a CD drive, then disconnected said drive. So the Thin Puppy is running totally in RAM (I have a 256 MB USB flash drive connected in case I want to save anything big, but there's no OS or apps on it), and it can't be rebooted without me cracking the case open and re-plugging the CD drive, or inserting a pre-programmed CF module in the back (the only "disk" this thin client is wired for is the CF, via an IDE adapter that plugs into the motherboard and a floppy power connector.

Again, the Maxspeed Maxterm, which I bought on eBay, is running a Via C3 1 GHz processor with special heatsink that pipes to two auxiliary heatsinks bolted to the metal case; a VT133 chipset, 256 MB of PC133 RAM, all on a Mini-ITX motherboard of undetermined origin (I don't think Via made it, and it could be PC Chips, but I can't confirm that either), plus a small, fanless power supply, also in the case, fed by an external 12 V laptop-style adapter, and the previously mentioned CF-to-IDE adapter with access through the back of the case.

One thing that Puppy Linux offers is a running tally of how much free memory you have for data. I'm currently at 45.2 MB. The computing session began on March 26, with 49.5 MB and has fluctuated all the while. Much of that is taken up in cache for the SeaMonkey browser; emptying the cache restores some of the memory. But as long as things stay at an acceptable level and nothing else crashes the system, the Thin Puppy should keep going.

The system only achieved its current stability when I swapped in the 256 MB RAM stick -- it would buckle on Flash animation elements of Web pages with 128 MB of RAM because Puppy only had about 5 MB of free RAM for data (it's not ALL the free RAM, just that set aside for data -- caches, added programs, downloads NOT made to the USB flash drive and such).

I used the Dillo browser for most of the day. It's much lighter and faster than SeaMonkey, which itself isn't that slow. But Dillo loads instantly and displays pages almost as fast. The way it achieves that speed is, in some part, because it doesn't use CSS style sheets, Java, or any of that other stuff that makes most browsers work hard. For general Web browsing in which you don't have to fill out forms and do other complex things (or need Flash), it's a great app to have on hand. And while SeaMonkey is available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS, Dillo is a Linux-only application, as far as I can tell.

The G5 CPU is fairly new, super fast ... and fading into obsolescence.

The same is true for the G4 (except the "new" and "super fast" parts).

The G3: down on all counts.

Many G4s can comfortably run OS X 10.3.9, and I bet most will run 10.4.6 and the soon-debuting 10.5. But that will likely be the last Apple OS upgrade that will even be compiled for any chip in the PowerPC family, I think.

A G3 can run OS X, if it's fast enough. But those machines really thrive on OS 9.2.2. Except that there's no modern Web browser that'll run on them. Oh, and there's been no innovation, support or applications coming down the pike for, say ... seven years now.

Did you know that you can bring a G3 Mac into the era of current browsers and more free apps with Linux? Well ... you can, but it's not all so rosy.

There are a few Linux distributions that compile for PowerPC (going back to G3 and previous PPC chips, but not all the way back), the most popular being the fast-rising, easy-loading Ubuntu.

I have burned PowerPC CDs for Ubuntu and Xubuntu. On my iBook G4, Ubuntu ran right away, with sound and Ethernet auto-configured to work. I've never before gotten sound to work on anything without a little tweaking. Would I dump OS X 10.3.9 for Ubuntu? Probably not, but I'd consider dual-booting for the time being. (Since that machine is used mostly by Ilene, I'm going to leave it as is.)

The relationship between Ubuntu (funded by a weathy South African whose name escapes me) and the PowerPC chip is straining. Since PPC accounts for about 5 percent of Ubuntu users, Ubuntu creator Canonical has recently converted the PowerPC versions of all the 'Buntus from fully supported product with twice-yearly updates to a "community maintained" port ... and a more tenuous status overall.

There is much hair-rending and teeth gnashing in the very busy Ubuntu forums over the distancing from PPC, but the beauty of Linux is that there are hundreds of distributions -- and at least a few of them have PowerPC ports and will maintain them. (Yellow Dog and Suse come to mind).

Let me emphasize: If you're running OS 9 on a G3 or early G4, you might want to give Ubuntu Linux (or its less-powerful cousin Xubuntu) for PowerPC a try.

While the live CD of Ubuntu worked perfectly in the iBook, it didn't fare so well on a Power Mac G4 tower, which pretty much screams on OS 9. On that machine, Ubuntu booted slowly (slow CD drive, I think), Ethernet wouldn't work (I did a quick config and got nothing) and upon launch of Open Office, the whole thing crashes. No 'Buntu live CDs would even load on the iMac G3 500 MHz. Many commenters have said that using the alternative install CD of Xubuntu allows installation to the hard drive, and that method does work.

The upshot: If Ubuntu, or any other distribution, can bring a modern Web browser to G3 Macs, that is huge.

PowerPC -- it's not the beginning of the end. It's more like the middle (of the end).

By now it's old news that Apple abandoned the IBM-made PowerPC line of CPUs in favor of Intel inside (or is it Inside, capital I?). For the first time, Apple shares a processor family with its Windows-running bretheren. Now if the market share between Mac and PC was 50-50, or even 20-70, this would be even bigger news than it already is. But Apple is still in single digits when it comes to percentage of market share in the computing landscape.

What would really turn the computing world on its ear? An official Mac OS X port for the PC platform. It could be done. Apple could make billions.

They'd piss off everybody in Redmond, and Microsoft might pull the plug on Office for Mac. But Apple has already seen that kind of "trouble," with MS orphaning Internet Explorer for Mac. In that case, Apple thrived with its own Safari browser and the widely used Firefox, now the only browser to run on OS X, Windows and Linux (and yes, I am counting all the Mozilla derivatives as part of the Firefox family, even if Mozilla's the daddy and Firefox the fast-growing baby).

While on the subject, any software that has versions for all three major platforms -- Mac, Windows and Linux -- is a-OK by me. In addition to Firefox, the Abiword word processor and the Open Office suite are fine examples. It just makes it glaringly obvious how badly iTunes needs a Linux port. Keep it closed-source -- I don't care, just get iTunes on Linux already

Now back to our regularly scheduled computer whining ...!

Anything Microsoft did to "punish" Apple in the unlikely event that OS X for Windows is ever released would be dwarfed by fanfare, sales and sheer market-changing force by a real Windows competitor. After all, OS X 10.4 is the product upon which Windows Vista is modeled.

Hey, wasn't it the Classic Mac OS that drove Microsoft to develop Windows in the first place? (Answer: yes, for those of you too young to remember.)

OS X on a PC? You can already run Windows apps on an Intel Mac with Bootcamp or Parallels, and that has -- in some way -- boosted the esteem for Mac in the greater Windows-dependent world.

But a full OS X for PC can be done -- and should be. The fact that it hasn't, though, probably means it never will.

My previous Ubuntu post on my inability to boot from the live CD of Ubuntu (or Xubuntu) on an iMac G5 500 MHz has sparked a few comments from G3 users who installed both Ubuntu and Xubuntu directly to their hard drives.

The best report was for Xubuntu -- something I'd second due to its lighter graphics load on the system. Unfortunately, I don't have a G3 on which I can do such an install ... but I will be on the lookout for one.

The situation isn't so dire for most older PCs, as they can run Firefox and IE6, even with Windows 98, but these older Macs have basically been thrown under the bus by both Apple and the browser makers. Hell, Microsoft doesn't even allow its IE for Mac to be downloaded anymore. And I am disappointed in the people behind Firefox for not porting to classic Mac.

But with Xubuntu, you can bring modern browsing back to the G3, plus get apps for writing, spreadsheets, photo editing and just about anything else in the Linux world. It's the best solution today for keeping a G3 relevant and ready for action.