Recently in The Self-Reliant Thin Client Category

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

Since the CF card serving as the sole disk drive in the Self-Reliant Thin Client (Maxspeed Maxtor converted to use as a full desktop PC) checked out with fsck via a card reader on another PC, I decided to do a reinstall of Debian, this time Lenny instead of Etch.

I can't seem to use a Debian network mirror on this particular local network. Even though this particular LAN offers DHCP, it doesn't send DNS information, and my supplying the nameserver addresses doesn't jump-start the process. I used to install from this network with a static IP and have no trouble, and I'd like the choice between a dynamic and static IP in the Debian installer. I've been using my Debian Lenny DVD for installs recently, but I don't have a DVD drive pull to connect with the maze of IDE and power cables snaking out of the thin client's box. I did have a recent CD image of Lenny with Xfce and LXDE, so I burned that to a CD-R and used that to do the install on the thin client.

The Xfce desktop installation of Lenny, after the base install, is only 487 files (I believe the GNOME desktop version is some 700 files). So it shouldn't take as long as a network install. Having a CF card as the system's hard drive does lengthen the process. Commercial SSD's might be faster than traditional spinning magnetic hard drives, but garden-variety CF cards meant for digital cameras are definitely not as fast as regular disk drives.

Once the installation is done, I can pull those cables, remove the CD drive from the IDE cable Frankenstein "chain," reconnect the CF-to-IDE adapter that's built into the Maxspeed (using a VIA C3 Samuel CPU spec'd for 1 GHz but running at 500 MHz for some reason, with 256 MB RAM, the maximum for the ECS EVEm motherboard) and have a very portable PC with no spinning hard drives.

I generally install the standard Debian desktop with GNOME, but I have used the Xfce desktop installation, which unlike Ubuntu's Xfce variant Xubuntu doesn't include a whole lot of GNOME utilities.

That means no Synaptic, NetworkManager, Update Manager, etc. I might try managing the network interfaces with Wicd, which I don't think is even in Lenny but is probably available as a .deb package, or will certainly be available in Debian's Testing release, Squeeze.

Memory management: I have a limited number of PC133/PC100 memory sticks, and I had two 256 MB and one 128 MB stuffed into the Debian Mac (G4/466), which is running Debian Etch. (I have to update that box at some point; I hope I don't run into the same problems as I did with the thin client.) I had to pull one of the 256 MB modules to put into the thin client. What I really need to do is find a few cheap 512 MB PC133 memory sticks for the Mac. Not that Debian doesn't run great in 640 MB, but I'm always more comfortable with 1 GB, and the G4/466 maxes out at 1.5 GB. And I always recommend maxing out the RAM on any given computer (and usually do just that).

CF memory card as hard drive: I did most of my early experimenting with Linux and BSD on the Self-Reliant Thin Client using the aforementioned long IDE and hard-drive-power cables, into which I plugged any number of regular hard drives, switching them out at will. But I wanted to try running off the CF card (the thin client, back when it was an actual thin client, used just such a card for its own OS) and see just how long it will last in semi-regular use.

I could've used Puppy Linux as the OS, which is deliberately sparing of write cycles on the flash memory, and I still could. All I need is another CF card and I could easily swap them in and out of the thin client to run as many different OSes as I have cards. In fact, I just might leave the CD drive connected and the thin client case open, get a handful of CF cards and do those installations.

With a frugal install of Puppy Linux, I should be able to update the card without pulling the thin client apart and inserting a CD drive into the IDE chain (there's only one IDE header on the motherboard, otherwise this would be a lot easier).

Instead, I could pop the CF card out of the back of the thin client's CF-to-IDE adapter, replace the relevant files in the Puppy frugal install on another PC with a card reader, reinsert the CF card into the thin client and then have a fully updated Puppy box without needing to burn CDs and get the drive hooked up.

Later that day: I now am running Debian Lenny on the Self-Reliant Thin Client. Since I wasn't able to access a Debian mirror during the install, I used the Debian CD #1 image with Xfce and LXDE, choosing to install the Xfce desktop.

I've run the Xfce installation of Debian many times before, and while I at times appreciate all the GNOME tools in the standard Debian desktop (most of which are included in Ubuntu's Xubuntu variant, which is a lot more GNOMEish than not), I've been using Linux and BSD for about two years and have done my share of manual network configurations.

I'm also comfortable updating installations in the terminal and have gravitated toward Aptitude rather than apt because I tend to get more packages with Aptitude that make the given applications run better. Plus Aptitude keeps records of everything you've done with it — not that I know how to access said records, but I still use Aptitude because it works.

So I can get away without NetworkManager (although I've said I will try Wicd to manage the network interfaces in this installation) and Synaptic, and Xfce has plenty of GUI tools of its own to control the desktop.

Right now the first Aptitude upgrade is still running, and I'm enjoying 1280x1024 video (from an S3 Virage chip) on a LaCie 22-inch CRT monitor (the Daily News is swimming in these boat anchors). The graphics were never lightning-quick on this hardware, and no Linux kernel, Xorg implementation or other magic will change that. I've never been able to watch YouTube video on this box, even in Puppy Linux; and sound is similarly terrible. As a thin client with 2001-era hardware, the Maxspeed was never meant to be a fully functioning PC, even though I've been using it as such since 2007.

At first glance, I can tell you that Debian Lenny boots at least twice as quickly on the thin client with the CF flash card as hard drive than Etch did. That's a performance improvement I can live with.

I said before in this entry that I might keep the thin-client box torn apart in order to get another CF card, install Puppy Linux on it and be able to switch OSes by popping out one CF card and inserting another.

However, after a morning and afternoon screwing around with this in between doing my regular work, I'm ready to seal up the box and let Debian Lenny ride.

I just tried to update a Debian Etch box that hasn't seen any action in about a year, and I got this message when using the Update Manager:

W: GPG error: ... The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

(Note: I don't have the exact error message because I'm not using the box in question to write this post ... but it looks just like this, except with a bit more information and the full

I do have a few Debian Etch boxes hanging around, and today I wanted to update one — the Self-Reliant Thin Client (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with 8 GB CF card as the hard drive) — and I ran into some PGP key issues.

I already dealt with how to fix the Opera key (if you're using the Opera repository for the free but not-open source browser, and I am), but I'll repeat what you should run, in this case specifically for Debian and using a root terminal (instead of sudo).

Open a root terminal (or su to root) and do the following:

# gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key F9A2F76A9D1A0061
# gpg --fingerprint F9A2F76A9D1A0061
# gpg --armor --export F9A2F76A9D1A0061 | apt-key add -

That takes care of the Opera key.

On this Etch box, my Debian key was bad as well. I can see that happening. I probably haven't booted this box in over a year, and since then the whole SSL problem with Debian happened, caused hair-rending, and then was resolved, so that might have caused the problem ... or maybe not.

At any rate, I did get errors when trying to update the box with Synaptic (I eventually used Aptitude in the console, my preferred method at least some of the time), so I needed to get a new Debian key. Here's how I did that one (thanks to Stackoverflow.com for the recipe):

# apt-get install debian-keyring
# gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 1F41B907
# gpg --armor --export 1F41B907 | apt-key add -

Then I still had a problem with libc6. when trying to upgrade/update with:

# aptitude update
# aptitude upgrade

... I kept getting a message about libc6 being a corrupted package.

I got around this problem by first clearing the cache and then installing libc6 (and its dependency, libc6-i686) individually:

# aptitude clean
# aptitude install libc6

That worked. My "corrupted" package was gone, replaced by the presumably uncorrupted libc6, and I was able to then proceed with the update/upgrade:

# aptitude update
# aptitude upgrade

Update: I'm getting checksum errors in the downloaded packages. Could this be the CF card going bad? I cleaned out the packages and am trying another upgrade.

Further update: The box is dead. That half-upgrade made it so I can't even log in ... Guess I'll have to do a reinstall after all.

Even further update: I pulled the CF card and ran fsck on it from another box. It checks out. Why did I keep getting packages with bad checksums?

I'll have to hook up the CD drive and do a reinstall. I can't remember whether or not this particular box will boot Lenny. I could always reinstall Etch and upgrade from there. Since the CF card checks out with fsck, I can hopefully keep the same partitions when doing the reinstall.

Final word on 2.16.18 nostalgia: Before I close this out, the 2.6.18 kernel used in Etch and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and CentOS) 5, PCLinuxOS 2007 and probably a few other distros I've forgotten, has been a very good kernel to me, for my hardware (especially the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450). I'll miss it. I welcome all the new hardware drivers, especially wireless networking drivers, in the newer kernels. I don't welcome the regressions in Xorg, but since the Self-Reliant Thin Client uses an S3 video chip rather than Intel, maybe I can blissfully move to Lenny without trouble ...

Distrowatch guru Ladislav Bodner has been rolling more than a few operating systems onto his ASUS Eee PC 900 netbook — probably the most popular netbook out there at this point (they even sell them at Target now).

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

Ladislav goes over how you can go backward from Linux kernel 2.6.28-11.41 to 2.6.28-11.40 and get your ASUS working again under Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

He also provides a tip for those using SSD (solid-state drive) disks on how not to wear them out:

Finally, a quick reminder for those who are about to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (or any other Linux distribution) on a netbook with solid state drives. Since these drives have a limited life span that depends on the frequency of write access to the drives, you can greatly prolong their life span if you follow these two rules while installing your preferred distribution (here is the source of this information, although there are those who dispute this):

* choose a non-journalling file system (e.g. ext2)

* don't create a swap partition

As Ladislav says, there is some dispute about the life of flash media in everything from those mini USB drives and SD camera memory cards to devices designed to replace traditional IDE and (mostly these days) SATA .

Some people have said that the MTBF (mean time between failures) for SSDs is so low when compared to spinning hard drives that the devices will last much longer than traditional spinning hard drives due to the lack of moving parts in an SSD. They say that worry about killing the flash memory with repeated write cycles is overblown.

But others are worried about killing their flash memory too quickly and take precautions such as the recommendation above not to have swap space on the drive.

For those who might not know, most operating systems do use swap space on the hard drive in the event that your computer's RAM (memory) fills up. I won't go into just how much space you need for swap because that's a whole new topic that's been discussed countless times in countless places. (I generally set aside 300 MB for swap on my systems).

Even Windows uses swap (that's one of the reasons your box tends to slow down after it's been running all day [or week/month/year]) — you've got a lot of critical stuff that the OS has written to the swap area of the drive.

Back to flash/SSD memory: As I say, some people think that worrying about excessive writes to flash is unwarranted. While I'm tempted to say that you shouldn't use an SSD on a server, Sun Microsystems (yep, the company bought recently by Oracle) is offering SSD-equipped servers and storage arrays. Sun thinks SSDs are the (near) future in servers since performance gains are too large to be ignored.

Sun is using single-level cell (SLC) flash memory, which has a much longer life than the cheaper multilevel cell (MLC) devices that pack more memory into the same space but have shorter write/erase lives.

We're a bit far away from the ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu at this point in the post, aren't we?

Maybe. But here's what I want to say about flash-based storage: I'm all for it. I'd like to start moving everything I have to SSDs as soon as fiscally possible.

One thing I really like is a silent PC: no fans, and no spinning hard drives. If you've ever worked on a system with drives snaking out of the back of the case and sitting on a table (I did it for years), you know how much noise traditional hard drives make and how much heat they throw off.

For the energy and noise considerations alone, I'd like to dump spinning hard drives.

To that end, I'm doing one test and hope to do another soon. I've been running my Self-Reliant Thin Client (converted Maxspeed Maxterm) with an 8 GB CF card in the box's built-in CF-to-IDE adapter as the unit's main drive. I am still running Debian Etch on it (and will continue with it until I manage to get networking into the room). The box isn't in heavy use at present, but it is running (and has been this time for more than a week). I do have swap set up on the flash, and with only 256 MB of RAM, it'll probably get used a bit.

I'm running regular backups of the /home files to a 1 GB USB flash drive with rsync, so I have an all-flash system.

It's not fast. A low-end CF card (mine is a Transcend) doesn't have the performance of a top-of-the-line SSD. For one thing, the Transcend uses MLC instead of SLC and for that reason alone should have a shorter life.

I'll keep the box running for quite some time to monitor its progress with the flash memory and see if it can withstand repeated use. An upgrade from Etch to Lenny would definitely tax the CF card.

Another thing I'd like to try is an SSD in one of my laptops — maybe the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which I've recently put back into service. At least the drive is easy to get to.

I've been writing updates in my print column of the things I've bought/used/discarded/loved/hated over the past year, and that got me thinking: I got started with Linux in early 2007 and used many a distro on the machines available to me.

But for the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this:

1) I've found stuff that works

2) see 1)

OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

Anyhow, the other reason I've kept the same operating systems on my half-dozen or so active computers is that I need them to run — and run well. And they do.

Here's the rundown:

On my main laptop, the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've been running OpenBSD 4.4 for nearly six months. The only "sticking" point is not having Flash 9 or 10. Flash 7 works for YouTube but not much else. I have a few things that I do that need more up-to-date Flash, but otherwise the OS and applications in packages and ports have been extremely stable. I just upgraded it from Firefox 2 to 3, and tonight I added Mplayer and successfully played a Quicktime video. (Too bad the sound chip on the Toshiba is broken; the video itself looked great.)

If OpenBSD weren't so good, I'd use the Flash situation as a excuse to run back to Linux. But I've enjoyed using OpenBSD and learned so much over these months that for now I'm going to stick with it.

I have an identical Toshiba Satellite laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It, too, is performing very well, although I seldom use it since I have all of my data on the OpenBSD laptop. I have few complaints about Ubuntu 8.04, and before it came out I vowed to stick with the LTS for at least a year, maybe longer. I could be persuaded to upgrade if I needed to get a newer wireless adapter to work, but so far I haven't needed to do that. Ubuntu remains very solid, and with better Flash support than OpenBSD it's nice to have it as a backup.

Our daughter has what used to be known as the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450. The Gateway could never comfortably run OpenBSD because of its noisy CPU fan, which Linux can manage most of the time (with a simple shell script). FreeBSD managed the fan even better, but only during the first boot after the install. After that, it all went to hell.

Our girl has all her educational games on the Gateway, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04. I still think that the Debian Project packages Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint just that much better than Ubuntu, but all the problems I had with Debian Lenny and X on both the Gateway and later the Toshiba had me running back to Ubuntu and OpenBSD — both of which run X perfectly on both laptops with no xorg.conf file needed.

I'll concede that installing, customizing and maintaining just about any Linux distro is easier than doing the same in OpenBSD, but as I say above, I'm grateful for the learning experience and most of the time can figure out how to do what needs to be done in OpenBSD.

My Self-Reliant Thin Client, the first test machine that I began running Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, ZenWalk, Puppy, DSL and other distros on in 2007 has been running Debian Etch on a bootable 8 GB CF card for quite a few months now. I don't have it networked at the moment, so I can't upgrade to Lenny. I'm keeping the converted thin client powered on these days in another informal long-term test, and I hope to have networking hooked up to it soon. With 128 MB of RAM and less-than-great video and sound hardware, it's not the greatest machine, but I love having something with no moving parts and minimal power consumption.

I have the Mac G4/466, aka the Debian Mac, running Debian Etch, which I continue to think is the best non-OS X operating system for this particular hunk of hardware. I managed to get 640 MB of RAM into it, and it's a great machine. Since it's a PowerPC box, there's no Flash Player in any OS that isn't OS X. I'm considering an OS X 10.4 install to see how that runs. We have dual-500 MHz G4s in the office that run OS X really, really well. I wonder how this single-CPU 466 MHz box will measure up. We could use a Mac OS backup machine in the house.

Earlier this week, I pulled out the $15 Laptop, a 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz CPU and 144 MB RAM and fixed what was ailing it: It wouldn't run X in OpenBSD 4.2 in my user account, but would in root. That's because when it comes to screwing around with X, I don't know what I'm doing some of the time. I had created an .xinitrc file with a single line reading "xset b off" to silence the system bell in X, and that was enough to keep the Fvwm window manager from loading. I killed .xinitrc and all was well with the Compaq. I'll probably do a reinstall of OpenBSD, since upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 to ... is just too much work. Yep, after a long search for the right OS, the Compaq has run OpenBSD for a long, long time.

The real workhorse of our stable is the iBook G4 1 GHz laptop. In the past year I've replaced the hard drive, pumped 1 GB of memory into it and upgraded from OS X 10.3 to 10.4. We needed 10.4 in order to run Firefox 3 and Flash 10. Yep, that's when I upgrade — only when absolutely necessary.

To make a long story short, until I have a burning desire to watch Web video all the time, or until I need to edit and process video into Flash, I just might stick with OpenBSD on my i386 hardware. Otherwise I'll probably move back to Ubuntu or Debian, the latter only if those nagging video problems somehow go away. (I've had similar issues with Slackware ...).

My next "challenge" will be to run OpenBSD -current instead of -release. Since I already hate waiting for things to compile, I don't know how I'll react to keeping a -current installation up to date. There's only one way to find out.

(Here is a screenshot of my Windows XP desktop using PuTTY and Xming to tunnel X over SSH from The Self-Reliant Thin Client running Debian Etch. Click the picture above for a full 1280x1024 image. Clockwise from left, I'm running GNOME's Update Manager, a console with PuTTY and the Rox-filer file manager).

I hadn't used my go-to SSH and X apps in Windows XP to access a Unix-like box in a long while. I actually had to find PuTTY before I could create a shortcut and run it. I already had an Xming shortcut, so I started that and left it in the background until I was ready to begin my X session.

If you use both Windows and Linux/Unix boxes and are not familiar with PuTTY and Xming, you're really missing out. In case it's not totally clear above, PuTTY enables you to run an SSH console session from your networked Unix-like box, and Xming allows you to run X apps over that same connection.

It's all good, clean geeky fun, especially over a local network. One of these days I'm going to experiment with dynamic DNS and figure out how to SSH from a box that isn't in the same building. The stakes there are a bit higher, as the box is out there on the Internet for all to see. But with the proper tools and procedures in place, everything should be secure.

Still, running Linux apps both in the console and in X on a Windows box really never does get old (to me at least).

Related:

As I write in this week's print column, I'm getting ready to give the Ubuntu- and CentOS-powered $0 Laptop to our 5-year-old daughter.

I mentioned that I do have a replacement that was working out pretty well. Of course that wellness went considerably south in the past few days (as chronicled in Dark Side of the Laptop), but I remained determined to prep the laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 LTS as its No. 1 distro, for our daughter, who used it tonight to run TuxPaint.

Whether or not my new/old Toshiba (or newer/just-as-old/identical Toshiba) works out, I'm ready to move on. I've got boxes I've set up in the past couple of months (The Self-Reliant Thin Client, The Debian Mac, which I bet I could finally set up with OpenBSD and actually get it to boot) that could be used more, and boxes I haven't yet had time to work on (an old Dell with something in the 1 GHz-ish range and for some reason stuffed with 256 MB of ECC server memory).

I'm also thisclose to getting my hands on a Sun Sparcstation 20, a box that was the envy of every self-respecting geek ... in 1995. That could be a fun project, don't you think?

The Self-Reliant Thin Client — my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — which has been running Debian Etch now for:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
11:47:52 up 35 days, 19:55, 2 users, load average: 2.79, 1.74, 0.79

with the OS and all files stored on an 8 GB Compact Flash module, and backing up the /home files via rsync to a 1 GB USB Flash drive just received two Iceweasel (aka unbranded Firefox) updates:

iceweasel
Iceweasel-gnome-support

That brings the system's version of the Mozilla-powered browser to 2.0.0.18.

Unless I've failed to hear about it, Debian Lenny hasn't yet been declared Stable, so Etch — first made Stable in April 2007 — remains the Debian distro of record for those who like things to stay predictable (and not break).

And now for an editorial: I know that the Debian Project does things the way it wants, but I'd sure like to see them decide to give each Stable distribution a defined life span of, say, three years. Yep, just like Ubuntu does with its LTS.

At the current pace, I imagine that Etch will get three years of security patches anyway. That's because once Lenny is declared Stable, Etch becomes Old Stable and at that point gets an additional year of bug fixes and security patches from the Debian Project.

The ability for sysadmins to plan and know how long they can ride a given release is something I find very valuable. Red Hat wouldn't do it if customers didn't want it. And while I think the 7-year-life of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release is probably more than a little too long for most uses (not that a print server or internal file server needs to be all that cutting-edge). But three years for Debian (I think at this point that two years of support is pretty much a given) is something that its users — including me — could really get behind.

Note: Ever notice how these entries start off so innocuous and then somehow morph into a diatribe? Yep, me too.

Maybe you're curious about how The Self-Reliant Thin Client is doing.

Here's the uptime output:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
13:08:07 up 24 days, 21:15, 2 users, load average: 1.70, 1.32, 1.31

Yep, the VIA C3 Samuel (rated at 1 GHz but running in Linux at 500 MHz for some reason) based converted thin client, running Debian Etch from an 8 GB Compact Flash card, has been working continuously for about a month now (I did reboot a few times during this test for kernel updates).

It's still no speed demon but handles the GNOME desktop fairly well. I did add Fluxbox for testing purposes, and I also installed the lightweight Dillo Web browser, but I'm still relying on the Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox) and Epiphany (GNOME's Gecko build) browsers, plus OpenOffice 2.0 Writer (works surprisingly well, even with 256 MB of RAM and 500 MHz of CPU) and GNOME's GEdit text editor.

I even used CUPS (The Common Unix Printing System) to set up a printer the other day. Even though most systems include native printer-setup utilities (GNOME's is extremely primitive), I find it's both easier and more instructive to use CUPS directly via a Web browser. For those who have never done it, open a browser and go to the following URL to access the CUPS interface:

http://localhost:631

I usually click on Administration and go from there. If you're asked for a login, that login is generally root, with the password being root's password. I can't remember how this goes in Ubuntu, which doesn't let the users (even the main user) at the root password (if there even is such a password).

Ubuntu's root/sudo situation is another kettle of fish for another post, but for most of us, the key to CUPS is using the root login and password to add or modify printers.

I will close out this entry by praising Debian Etch for being so solid on this (and just about every other) platform.