Recently in SCALE Category

I've taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I'm so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I'm not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I'll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD.

During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates. Debian Lenny is moving along very quickly. I'm ready to put an Etch install alongside it for comparison's sake during the wait for Ubuntu 8.04 ... which is two months at this writing.

The best text editor for the job: The other day, I needed to do some work at home, and I wasn't having a great time with the Gedit text editor in Lenny. I somehow thought that Gedit had a way to change the case of words, but the Lenny version (Gedit 2.20.4) didn't seem to have it. Was I imagining it, or did the Gedit in Ubuntu 7.10 have this feature? (See below for the answer.)

Anyhow, I need a better editor ... so I went into Synaptic and installed three: Geany, Bluefish and Scite. I'm going to try them all out. So far I can't seem to change the case of letters automatically in Bluefish, but there are so many features that can help with Web development that it's probably worth using. But for the level of work I'm doing, I'm relying on Geany the most at the moment. I haven't used Scite much, but I do plan to give it a try soon.

But ... GEdit does have the ability to change the case of words/letters. Under Edit -- Preferences -- Plugins, there's a Change Case plugin. I enabled it, and now I can change case via the menu with Edit -- Change Case. I prefer to use the keyboard to do this ... so I'll probably keep the other editors in contention.

Foresight Linux: The Foresight Linux booth at SCALE 6X was fairly busy. I could barely get near it during the show, and since I didn't really put 2 and 2 together and remember that Foresight is dedicated to presenting the latest in the GNOME desktop environment, I didn't linger. But I do want to give Foresight a try. It has separate install and live images, so I downloaded the live CD image and am m going to see what it's like.

I'll be your server: I've never set up a server, and all this work with OpenBSD makes me want to roll one myself. I'm going to try to do one on the local network with NFS, Samba, FTP and Apache. I'll probably try in OpenBSD and Debian as well as Damn Small Linux.

Two excellent Linux books: Since I'm not made of money, I got both of these from the library. The "Linux Administration Handbook, " by by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein and an army of more recent contributiors, is a hefty tome that's long on advice, Unix/Linux history and what people like to call "best practices."

While much of the book is flying right over my head, and I don't think you could really administer a system without a secondary reference that's specific to the Linux distribution you're using, this is a very valuable book that every serious Linux user should have. Especially when it comes to servers, there's a lot of information here.

"Linux Administration Handbook" is heavy on the philosophy of how to set up and maintain a system, and amid a sea of distro-specific how-tos that expire with every six-month release, that's a good thing to have. Still, what books like "Linux Administration Handbook" make evident is that at one level, most Linux systems are more alike than they are different, and the skills you develop using one distribution are very much transferable to the others. However, there are pointers everywhere in the book to specific instructions for Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and Suse.

And if you want to see how professional sysadmins (or at least the good ones) go about their work, this is the book to get. It can't be the only book on your Linux shelf, but "Linux Administration Handbook" pairs very well with a doorstop-sized distro-specific how-to (like the "Unleashed" series of books, or Mark Sobell's "Practical" guide series) to help you get a handle on making Linux work for you.

The other book I got from the library, "Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills," by Roderick W. Smith, is a great book for anyone who wants to figure out how Linux works from the command line. The book doesn't assume a vast knowledge of Linux or Unix. It offers many tips, instructions, and again, "best practices" on how to configure and manage a Linux system. This book is also not distro-specific; instead, it's one of the best command-line-centered books I've seen when it comes to basic system administration.

I don't know how good "Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills," in helping you get actual "certification skills," but it will definitely help with the basics of setting up and maintaining a server or desktop.

Smith's style is clear and concise -- a rarity in these kind of books, which often leave me more confused than not. I definitely recommend taking a look at this "Street Smarts" volume.

So I had two winners here. I would probably buy both of these books, but that said, I still turn to Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook," which I'd love to see updated, and Michael Stutz's same-name-but-different "Linux Cookbook," which could use an update even more.

If I was in a buying mood, I'd get a more recent O'Reilly book, "Linux System Administration," by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic, and I really like Chris Negus' new "Toolbox" series of distro-specific books. They're fairly cheap and filled with good, timely tips, emphasis on the "timely" part. If only all of these great books were updated every couple of years instead of five years ... or never.

Click frequency: The "publish every day at 5 a.m." thing hasn't been working out so well of late. I just haven't had all that much time to do entries in advance, but I have had an entry every day ... just not prewritten to publish at 5 a.m.

One man's FreeBSD: I admire this guy, William Denton, for chronicling eight years of personal use of FreeBSD.

Debian ... ah, Debian: In case it's not evident, I still really enjoy using Debian. While I'm a great believer in the slimmed-down application mix in the default install of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) -- with less indeed being more, on many levels I've had a whole lot more success with Debian.

I've done the default GNOME install of Debian, the Xfce and KDE installs, a "standard" install to which I've added X, and a few "standard" installs that were console-only. The flexibility of Debian is legendary, as is its stability and usability.

Some of my hardware has been supported better by Ubuntu at times, but I keep coming back to Debian. I'd love for Debian Lenny to support the Alps touchpad as well as Ubuntu Gutsy does. I'm hoping it'll happen before Lenny is frozen, and I will be trying Ubuntu Hardy when it comes out, but I'd love for Linux in general to get everything right for my Gateway laptop.

But since fan management has gotten worse, not better, over the past six months in the Linux kernels I've used, I'm only cautiously optimistic.

Getting my feet wet in OpenBSD has gotten me thinking about how different operating systems handle software updates -- and how important security patches and bug fixes really are.

I'm thinking most of you will say they're very important. If you have a Debian-based Linux system, for instance, there are updates available almost every day, both security- and bug-related.

Live CDs are different. Knopix 5.1.1 has been around a very long time -- over a year at this point -- and plenty of people are using it, even though it's had no update of any kind in that period of time. But live-CD distros like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux have a new release every two or three months, and while the developers don't patch every single conceivable thing, I imagine that quite a bit of upgrading is done over the course of, let's say, six months.

OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD all offer apps in the form of ports, which are source files that you download and compile on your own machine, as well as precompiled binary packages for a variety of architectures (i386, powerpc, sparc, etc.). And the method for updating these ports and packages is something I'm still investigating.

m no expert yet, but I think the bulk of the updating for these BSD systems is done with ports through a CVS server. Taking OpenBSD as an example -- especially because that's what I'm running at the moment -- there are precompiled binaries for OpenBSD 4.2 that haven't changed since the version's release. So if you point to the packages created for OpenBSD 4.2 in your PKG_PATH, you get Firefox 2.0.0.6.

But if you look in snapshots, OpenBSD has a 2.0.0.12 package for Firefox on i386 that was uploaded two days ago.

(A quick check of the NetBSD repository for binary packages yielded Firefox 2.0.0.11, as well as preliminary versions of Firefox 3, for NetBSD 4.0.

So is it better to stick with the 4.2 packages, or to use the newer "snapshot" packages?

I'll give myself the answer: RTFM. While much is the same in the various BSD projects when compared to the hundreds of Linuxes out there, much is different -- and in the service of user choice.

But when it comes to getting the latest versions of ... well, everything, thus far I haven't yet figured out if there's a prebuilt script for updating binary packages en masse in OpenBSD and NetBSD. I know that FreeBSD has an app called freebsd-update that accomplishes this task, and I'm anxious to try it, but I'd like to know if I'm missing a similar utility in NetBSD and OpenBSD, or if the absence of this sort of tool is intentional.

My question: Am I compromising my OpenBSD system by running older precompiled binary apps? Does it really matter?

I'm conditioned by using Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware to expect updates on a continual basis and I wonder if I need to have the same level of vigilance with the BSDs. And should I be using ports instead of packages? While I'm on the subject, here's a way to keep up with new ports for OpenBSD. And here's the listing for Firefox.

Helpful site for OpenBSD: From OpenBSDSupport.org comes this page on how to replace Windows with OpenBSD. While it's based on OpenBSD 3.7 instead of the current 4.2, and that makes some of the information out of date, there are more than a few tips that can be applied to the newer version.

Plugging into OpenBSD: I've just signed up for a bunch of OpenBSD mailing lists, but there's also the OpenBSD Journal to help you keep up with what's going on.

Summing up: So far I'm having a lot of fun looking into the BSD operating systems. I met networking and security instructor, as well as prolific author Dru Lavigne at SCALE 6X, and she's going to send me a copy of her new book, "The Best of FreeBSD Basics," which means I'll be doing some work in FreeBSD in order to evaluate the book. In case you want your own copy, here it is on Amazon.

When users say the documentation is excellent in the BSD operating systems, they're not lying. Besides the excellent handbook/FAQs available for download or online browsing for NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the man pages are way more valuable than I ever though.

In OpenBSD, they're up to date -- and they have plenty of plain language throughout.

I've been looking for the file that enables me to modify the menus in the default fvwm window manager in OpenBSD, and I was having a little trouble. Here's where I went:

$ man fvwm

And besides an exhaustive explanation of every feature in fvwm, the man page told me the exact location of the file: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm. (The exact file name in that directory is system.fvwm2rc.) The man page also told me that fvwm looks first for .fvwmrc in the user's home directory and then looks for the systemwide file in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fvwm.

I met Dru Lavigne at SCALE 6x: I plan to write more about it in the near future, but I did meet author and BSD expert Dru Lavigne at the FreeBSD/PC-BSD booth at the Southern California Linux Expo on Saturday. We chatted for a good 10 minutes before I found out her name, and I really should've written down more of what we talked about. At any rate, she is a powerful advocate for running any of the BSD operating systems, especially FreeBSD. She has a new book out, "The Best of FreeBSD Basics." Given how smart and well-spoken she is, I have high hopes for the book.

Also at the FreeBSD/PC-BSD booth was Matt Olander, the CTO for iXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. He also does PR for FreeBSD, the system behind PC-BSD (and DesktopBSD). Like Dru, he's enthusiastic -- and way smarter than I am. Among the things he told me was that the next version of PC-BSD will be a live CD/installer combo -- just like the latest version of the FreeBSD-based DesktopBSD.

Matt also said that while it's early in the process, the teams at PC-BSD and FreeBSD are working together to bring DesktopBSD's graphical ports interface to PC-BSD so users of the latter can make use of ports without using the command line. I don't know whether or not PC-BSD's PBI files -- applications that can be installed with one click -- is something that DesktopBSD will adopt in kind, but it's nice to see these two desktop BSD projects work together to benefit all of their users.

Among the things Matt and I talked about were the inclusion of Sun's ZFS filesystem in FreeBSD 7. And Wikipedia also says that ZFS is coming to NetBSD as well.

Dru, Matt and I talked about more than this. I'll write up the rest in the days ahead.

More BSD: I really like the new "toolbox" series of books by Christopher Negus. Looks like there's going to be one for the three BSD's soon: "BSD UNIX Toolbox: 1000+ Commands for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD." Release date is May 12, 2008.

Damn Small Linux won't add just any application to its 50 MB distribution. But when there's a big hue and cry, things that users really need tend to get added. I thanked Robert Shingledecker for adding my favorite lightweight image editor, MtPaint, to DSL, and I'm anxiously awaiting another improvement:

Firefox in DSL will move from the current version 1 to the GTK 1 version of Firefox 2. That's a big deal because a lot of Web sites require at least Firefox 1.5 for full functionality. It means, for one thing that it'll be possible to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets with Damn Small Linux.

Robert has two machines running DSL at the booth. One was that really, really small Sony laptop, on which DSL looked great. The other was one of those great little Damn Small Machine fanless Mini-ITX PC's that are sold at the DSL Store. It had no hard drive. DSL booted off of a USB key, which was then pulled out of its jack.

I really, really want one of these little computers. I'm a huge fan of Mini-ITX and fanless machines in general. They save space as well as energy, and I really enjoy the quiet.

As far as the 3 series of Damn Small Linux, Robert is keeping its development going for at least the near future because it's the version that the Damn Small Linux book is based on.

As far as competition among the smaller-footprint distros go, Robert said there's no bad blood between DSL and Puppy Linux. "We're doing our own thing -- there's no rivalry," he said.

I mentioned the nascent Damn Small BSD project to Robert, and all he would say was that DSL's John Andrews was looking into the situation. I took that to mean they're not ecstatic about another project appropriating the "Damn Small" name.

The highlight of SCALE 6x for me so far has been meeting Robert Shingledecker, whose Damn Small Linux is one of the best distributions out there for hardware that's seen better days.

I won't go into all we talked about, but in the way of news, Robert told me that Damn Small Linux will soo go beyond the 2.4 Linux kernel and put out a release based on 2.6 at some point in the near future. Robert plans to keep the 2.4-based version of DSL going because he foresees continued demand for it, but the newer kernel will be welcome news to many DSL users.

Robert talked a little about replacing Fluxbox with JWM as the main window manager for DSL. One of the reasons was the fact that JWM is smaller than Fluxbox and makes it easier for DSL to stay within its 50 MB size limit. That limit appears to be something that Robert is content to stick with going forward.

I hadn't yet tried DSL 4.2, but Robert showed me how the right-click application menu has come back into the distro, and he explained how the DFM file manager, besides being smaller in size than the ROX-filer, works well -- and shares icons with JWM.

The "L" in SCALE may stand for Linux, but each of the three major BSD projects has a table at the Southern California Linux Expo. While the FreeBSD booth was giving away PC-BSD CDs (they still have about 500 left, so have at it, people), the OpenBSD booth was selling Version 4.2 CD sets for $45, and the NetBSD people were selling T-shirts for $15.

But it's not all about stuff.

I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin Lahey, a developer for NetBSD who is also a programmer for the Information Sciences Institute under the auspices of the University of Southern California. His organization does work for the Department of Homeland Security, and in the past Kevin has worked for the NASA Ames Research Center, and he told me that NetBSD has a lot of uptake in both government and university settings.

The NetBSD project began in May 1993, and is edging closer to its 15th birthday. It was nice to see Kevin's IBM Thinkpad running NetBSD with a GUI desktop. I've been impressed by the way NetBSD both looked and performed in the 2006-era live CD I tried on Friday, and while NetBSD is increasingly aimed at embedded applications, I think it's a great candidate for desktop use.

Kevin told me that NetBSD has over 200 active developers, most of whom do IT-related work for companies, many of which use NetBSD as part of their business.

As far as the desktop goes, NetBSD is getting better all the time at supporting the ACPI standard for power management -- something that will also see considerable improvement in the forthcoming OpenBSD release, as I learned at that booth. The NetBSD kernel also supports gigabit and even 10GB Ethernet, so it plays very well in many networked environments.

While OpenBSD encourages users to use the precompiled packages for the various architectures, NetBSD users rely on ports for adding applications. Also at the NetBSD booth was David Maxwell, and he told me that thera are about 16,000 ports for NetBSD. It always amazes me that there is so many applications available for the BSD operating systems.

I didn't quite get how NetBSD handles software updates, and Kevin tried to explain it to me, but there is some mechanism at work that can bring the needed updates down to your box as needed. It's something I'll have to look into more. Luckily, every one of the three BSD projects includes excellent, comprehensive documentation on their Web site.

As far as that documentation goes, David told me that NetBSD takes extra care to make sure its man pages are up to date.

Again, it's great to see a worthy project and the very smart people behind it.

Chief technology officer Earl Malmrose of the Berkeley, Calif.-based ZaReason and I didn't just talk about the Everex Cloudbook.

Also on display were a $299 desktop machine and a few laptops (beginning at $899), all running Ubuntu 7.10, which ZaReason preinstalls and configures for its customers.

Why buy from ZaReason? I thought they just took off-the-shelf laptops and slapped Ubuntu on them, but they in fact have the computers made for them by ASUS, with final assembly and tuning taking place at their Berkeley headquarters.

And they're doing the entire thing with 5 employees -- final assembly, support, shipping. Earl said business is growing, and the company is set to open a site in in Germany to take care of its European Union customers.

Things are getting even more cozy for the company, which is close to the Fremont-headquartered Everex and now to gOS, which recently gave up its Wilshire Boulevard digs in Los Angeles for Berkeley to be closer to Everex.

Earl also told me that ZaReason is committed to rolling out its machines with the latest version of Ubuntu. When 7.10 ships in April, that's what will go on ZaReason's computers immediately.

So if you're in the market for a new desktop or laptop computer and want it to "just work" out of the box, and you like the idea of a 1-year warranty backed by some pretty nice people, ZaReason is a great company with which to do it.

I've been as critical of gOS as anybody, maybe even more so. The Ubuntu-derived OS that first ran the $199 Everex desktop offering that sold through Wal-Mart and a few others was a distribution that was far from ready for prime time, as they say.

At the ZaReason booth, the company, which sells Everex in addition to Ubuntu-friendly desktops and laptops, had an Everex Cloudbook running. Sure it's small, but the screen looks great.

The gOS desktop was as green as ever, but something looked different. Earl Malmrose, the CTO of ZaReason told me that the version of gOS on the Cloudbook includes the GNOME desktop and all the GNOME tools. It's still green in hue, still has that toolbar across the bottom for all the Web 2.0 applications that gOS is built around, but with GNOME instead of Enlightenment, doing any kind of configuration will be much, much easier.

I don't know who's whose idea this is, but whoever it is, we're thinking alike.

I'm filing this from the SCALE 6x "E-Mail Room" in the Los Angeles Westin. They've got a little thin-client network going, with little client boxes from Solar Systems PC running Fluxbox. And since the browser is Iceweasel, I figure it's Debian based.

The good part -- I was able to drag the $15 Laptop -- the Compaq Armada 7770dmt -- back to the car.

I got to SCALE 6x today just in time to hear Ubuntu's Jono Bacon deliver the keynote speech to a standing-room-only audience in the theater at the Los Angeles Airport Westin hotel.

The room was packed, with people bunched up in the back and along the sides.

His talk focused on the importance and purpose of community in the entire open-source world, not just the Ubuntu project. The point was that the community -- from developers all the way down to users -- will make some year (maybe not this year) "the year of the Linux desktop."

"The desktop is rubbish," he said. I'm not sure exactly what he meant by that, but he did say that keys to the implementation of open-source software on the desktop hinges on an effort that's "managed, reliable and sustained." As far as the "sustained" component goes, Bacon talked about the importance of "regular releases, predictible releases."

That's what Ubuntu is all about -- setting a six-month interval between releases, with those releases supported for a fixed length of time.

And when it comes to businesses, "they want reliability," Bacon said, but when it comes to the biggest part of the open-source world -- community -- the business world (and the rest of the computer-using world that isn't using open source right now) can't quite wrap their collective heads around it.

"Businesses don't understand community -- they just don't understand how it works," Bacon said. "It's so alien to them."

And open source breeds a different kind of community, Bacon said. "We're a community that builds stuff. It all boils down to us -- everybody has an impact."

But don't let it go to your head, Linux geeks. While open source in general, Linux in particular and Ubuntu in specific are certainly growing, open-source software has a 1.77-percent share of the market. Yes, it's almost doubled from the 1-percent share of previous years, but there are other ways to measure it, Bacon said.

"It really doesn't matter -- what's more important is 'mindshare.' You may not use it, but everybody's talking about it."

Bacon cited Google Trends, which keeps track of what people are searching for from year to year, showing how searches for the keyword Linux have gone down while those for the keyword Ubuntu have gone up. "We're feeling a change in mindshare toward distributions," he said.

"More and more people are talking about Ubuntu and Red Hat as opposed to just talking about Linux."

And the open-source community is vital to the success of the technogies it's producing, polishing and using.

"The community can make the year of the desktop happen -- everybody in this room can make a difference in how it works."

To that end, Bacon said that being a member of the community includes everything from filing bug reports (which can be followed by anybody, since they're as open as the software that produces them) to learning how to build packages and basically not being a big ol' jerk.

That led to the reasons for Ubuntu's Code of Conduct. "It basically boils down to 'be excellent to each other,' " Bacon said. And key to that excellence is inclusion, diversity and, again, making it so everybody feels they have an impact.

Tip of the day: When registering for SCALE 6x, the Southern California Linux Expo, use the promo code CAST when registering and get 40 percent off.

Every once in awhile, I write for a, shall we say, less specialized audience. Here's a story about this weekend's Southern California Linux Expo aimed at a more general audience. If all goes as planned, this will run in Saturday's print edition of the Daily News:

By Steven Rosenberg
Staff Writer

Google will be at this weekend's Southern California Linux Expo, but talk about the search giant's effort to keep Microsoft from buying Yahoo! won't be at the tip of everyone's tongue.

Instead, the talk among the exhibitors and in the meeting rooms will be about free, open-source software (yes, the very same software that made Google into a massively-scaled search-engine powerhouse), the hardware that runs it, and what you can do in everything from medicine to education to concert-ticket distribution with tools that anyone can download and run without paying a dime.

While the focus is on the Linux operating system -- made to work like the mainframe stalwart Unix but now available for servers and desktop computers of all kinds, a big part of the SCALE 6X show Saturday and Sunday at the Los Angeles Airport Westin hotel will be how companies like Google, Ticketmaster and Shopzilla use free, open-source software to build huge businesses.

And there's plenty for home computer users to learn, said Simi Valley resident Orv Beach, publicity chairman for the show and also the information-technology director at Simi Valley Hospital.

"SCALE has always had a focus on the end-user of Linux and the education of that end-user, whether they're in IT or not. We try to fill the booths with people who have stories to tell about free and open-source software and who are eager to show attendees cool stuff," he said.

To that end, exhibitors will include Damn Small Linux, an operating system assembled specifically for use on older, less powerful computers, as well as IBM and Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, which will show off the latest technologies based on free software.

"The interest and excitement on the expo floor is palpable," Beach said. "It's a fun show and is a great place to come for both the experienced computer user and the newcomer to open-source software."

For more information on SCALE 6X, go to the convention Web site, www.socallinuxexpo.org, or read about it on the Daily News' Click blog, http://insidesocal.com/click.

I've tried OpenBSD before, and I always said I'd try it again.

In the interim, I was able to try OpenBSD in a desktop configuration with the OliveBSD live CD, and that made me want to try a hard-drive installation of OpenBSD, which not coincidentally is the only one of the three major BSD projects (which include NetBSD and FreeBSD) to boot on my test machine -- a converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with a VIA C3 Samuel CPU.

First of all, OpenBSD has excellent online documentation, and since I have two computers right next to each other, I was able to use my Windows box to follow along as I installed OpenBSD on the converted thin client.

As was the case the last time I installed it, OpenBSD went on the box without a hitch. I created a user account, added it to the wheel group, which gave me sudo privileges, and I added the path to an FTP site for the precompiled packages to my .profile file. That enabled me to begin adding applications.

If you select all packages during the install OpenBSD begins its life on your computer with enough to get you going. You do get the X Window system along with the Fvwm window manager -- which I'm going to stick with for at least awhile this time. You also get the Lynx text-only Web browser, and things like xterm and vi (of course).

This time, since I figured out how to set the path to my local FTP mirror, I was able to begin turning my OpenBSD box into a usable desktop system. As I might've said above, I'm trying to be way more methodical this time about how I proceed. So far, everything's working perfectly.

I've added the following applications:

Dillo (lightweight X Web browser)
Geany (GUI text editor)
Firefox
Nano (console editor)
MC (Midnight Commander console file manager)
Rox (the ROX-filer GUI file manager)
Abiword (also added aspell, but Abiword and aspell aren't working together as yet)
Xscreensaver (which tended to freeze X, so I removed it)

That's all I've added for now.

What I'm going to do next:

-- Attempt to configure X for my 1024 x 768 CRT monitor (Done 2/6/08 with help from the Anonym.OS live CD ... and a little help from Puppy Linux after X began crashing)
-- Add applications to the Fvwm menus (I think Fvwm uses the Twm configuration file, and I've already located it) (Still working on it ... adding to the Twm configuration file didn't work, and I can't find the Fvwm configuration file)

A big part of this is the SCALE 6X convention this weekend in Los Angeles. All three of the major BSD projects will have booths at the show, and I wanted to have a successful BSD install under my belt, so to speak, before I hit the floor (literally and figuratively).

An aside: If I had a chance in hell of figuring out ACPI and my Gateway laptop's CPU fan, I would've installed OpenBSD on it -- and I still might do that on my older Compaq laptop -- but for now I'm sticking with the desktop and wired Ethernet.

Another thing that prompted me to do the install was finding Jem Matzan's Web page. There's a whole lot of good stuff to read there on Linux and BSD, and Jem is the author of two PDF-only books, one on FreeBSD, the other on OpenBSD. I definitely plan to get the latter one.

Michael Lukas has a new FreeBSD book out, but his OpenBSD book is out of print, though it is available as a PDF, which I think I'm going to spring for. I've seen Lukas' new FreeBSD book, and he's both very good as a technician and as a writer. I highly recommend anything he's written.

Another inspiration in this has been Denny White, a desktop OpenBSD user with a whole lot of knowledge -- and a willingness to share it.

I've also learned that it's relatively easy to create your own BSD live CD -- something I just might do in the future.

But the main reason I wanted to install, configure and use OpenBSD was that it's different -- and fun.

And again, if you're anywhere in Southern California, you are going to SCALE 6X, aren't you?

Denny White, OpenBSD desktop expert, left a comment recently, and I wanted to point people to his main blog as well as his OpenBSD tutorial pages. I use Denny's blogroll all the time -- that's how I found out about OliveBSD, an OpenBSD live CD project. He has another good link to http://www.openbsd101.com/ site that's different from his own.

While FreeBSD gets most of the publicity among the BSD projects, I am very much interested in OpenBSD's development -- especially because of its focus on security.

For those in the Southern California area, representatives from all three of the major BSD projects -- OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD -- are slated to have booths at the upcoming SCALE 6X show, Feb. 8-10, in Los Angeles.

We all know that Linux is a kernel, an operating system, maybe even a socio-political movement (it depends on whom you ask), but in a sense, Linux is about people -- those who create, use and promote it.

One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles. Since I'm covering the convention for Click, I took the opportunity to interview Orv after hearing from him about getting press credentials for the event, which I wouldn't miss, by the way. And if you do plan on attending, Orv told me that using the promo code CAST when registering for SCALE can get you 40 percent off of admission.

Orv, where do you live, how old are you, and what do you do for a living?
I live in Simi Valley, California, with my wife Beth. I'm 58, and I have four grown kids and four wonderful grandkids. Professionally, I'm the IT director at Simi Valley Hospital.

How did you first discover open-source software, and what part does it play in your work and home life today?
I've been interested in technology all my life. I got my amateur radio license when I was 17, and enjoyed building radio equipment as much as operating.

I got my first computer in about 1979, and when amateur packet radio was authorized by the FCC, it was a natural to use a computer with it. A popular packet radio program at the time was TNOS, written by Brian Lantz. It ran under DOS, and was a communications program & BBS. Brian had an active users group and was happy to add features to TNOS. As it grew in size, the C compiler he was using had more and more difficulties compiling it (It was Borland Turbo C, I think). So he moved TNOS over to Linux to use GCC as the compiler, and a large percentage of his users followed him.

I got Linux from a programmer at work. At that time it was 16 floppies, and that minimal version didn't include X Windows. I ran it on a 40 MHz 386 with 8 Megs of RAM. I've been using Linux steadily ever since and moved my desktop computer over to it full time about six years ago, and my wife's about four years ago.

At work, while Adventist Health isn't a full-blown user of open-source software, they're edging that way. The web programmers at our corporate office seem to have fallen in love with Plone. Some of the programming groups are moving to Project.Net for project management, too. Locally, I use Nagios to monitor over a hundred devices on our hospital network, and we use ZoneMinder to monitor some video cameras.

Now that SCALE is in its sixth year, how big was the convention the first time around, and what kind of growth has it seen? How many exhibitors, speakers and attendees do you expect this year?
SCALE is an offshoot of the "LUGFests" that SCLUG (the Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group - http://sclug.org) held every 6 months where they met at the Nortel building in Simi Valley. They were miniconferences, with people demonstrating open source software and even a few commercial vendors. Even as limited as they were, they drew Linux users from all over Southern California. SCLUG held 4 of them before Nortel closed down that building. (There's an article on LUGFest III here).

The last LUGFest, LUGFest IV, drew 400 people over two days. Based on the response to the LUGFests, we knew we were filling a need for information and education on open-source software.

So after a hiatus of a year or so, SCLUG, UCLALUG and USCLUG jointly started SCALE. The first was held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC. It was one day, with two session tracks. We had 11 speakers spots and a panel, and it was a struggle to fill them. That first Linux Expo drew 400 attendees.

Contrast that with SCALE 6X, which will be held in February, five years later: The main Expo is now on Saturday and Sunday, has 32 speaker slots and two keynotes spread over four session tracks per day. You'd think that number of topics and speakers would be impossible to come up with. Yet we received over 105 submissions to our call for papers! Whittling them down was difficult, and it was painful, as we had to turn down lots of good proposals. We expect to have about 1,500 attendees for SCALE 6X. The Westin hotel will be bursting at the seams.