I'm starting with the sensorsd.conf and sensorsd man pages. And this page from Calomel.org has some tips on what /etc/sensorsd.conf does, how to start the sensorsd daemon.

I'm not holding my breath, but if I could run OpenBSD (or FreeBSD or NetBSD) on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop with the fan properly managed, I'd love to be dual-booting it with Debian.

Debian Lenny note: While many bugs seemingly got fixed in the Epiphany Web browser in Lenny, one new bug unfortunately has crept in.

Whenever you start the Epiphany browser, the check box to "work offline" is automatically checked. And the result is that you get versions of Web pages that you looked at the last time you were working "online." It's like a freaky time machine. Right now, you have to go under the file menu and uncheck the "work offiline" box to get Epiphany to pull up real live Web pages. I did see a bug report for this, sort of, but it doesn't seem current, and it seems to say that the problem is with the network manager (gconf??) rather than with Epiphany itself. This Ubuntu report is exactly what is happening. Whatever's causing the problem, I hope it gets resolved soon; I'm partial to Epiphany when using GNOME, but I've switched over to Iceweasel (aka Firefox) just to be rid of this bug.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've heard of quite a few people still running Debian Sarge -- the stable version of Debian before Etch went stable in April 2007. As per Debian policy, support for what is referred to as "old stable," in this case Sarge, is slated to last for a year after the next Debian release is declared "stable" (Etch).

So now we're bumping up on March 31, 2008, and Debian is telling users about the end of updates for Sarge:

One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 alias 'sarge' the security support for the old distribution (3.1 alias 'sarge') is coming to an end next month. The Debian project is proud to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and even for one year after a new version has been released.

The Debian project released Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' on the 8th of April 2007. Users and Distributors have been given a one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current stable release. Hence, the security support for the old release of 3.1 is going to end in March 2008 as previously announced.

I've heard incredible stories about people running servers with Sarge and having incredible uptimes stretching into full years and beyond. And I'm as loathe to upgrade something that "just works" as much as the next lazy guy, so I understand. Three years seems like a long time ... and if you want more than three years, there's always Red Hat/CentOS/Scientific Linux and Novell's Suse (really just Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones CentOS and Scientific Linux, because what kind of cheap person like myself is going to pay year after year for updates?).

But going three years without needing to do a reinstall is a pretty great thing. And if you start with a Debian release before it goes stable -- like Debian Lenny, which is still in Testing but appears pretty darn reliable to me -- you'll probably get more than three years. At this point, I imagine that most Debian users think of Etch -- the current Stable -- as too old. That's true for desktop users, but if your hardware likes Etch, I really see no reason to move to Lenny unless you want newer versions of all of the packages.

For me, Lenny is working pretty well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and Etch is doing great on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). And this desktop/server I just set up? I used Etch just because I know it works. And I know that getting Lenny to perform well on the Gateway means I'll be able to stick with it for what could be four years (but actually might be less because the wait between Etch and Lenny becoming stable is probably going to be much shorter than the wait between Sarge and Etch ... or at least that's what I think is going to happen).

Yeah, I probably won't be running Lenny three years from now ... but you never know. As I said recently, Lenny is looking very, very good.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Quick notes because I've got time for no more:

Debian Lenny: I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you've been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

Preload in Debian: After reading about preload in Linux Journal, I finally installed it. Preload is supposed to monitor what apps you use most and automatically load them into memory, adjusting if your application habits change. Since I tend to run the same apps a lot, and since I have plenty of memory, I'm anxious to see how well preload works.

FreeBSD and the need for speed: FreeBSD 7 is now beginning its life as a stable OS. It's supposed to be up 15 percent faster than the fastest Linux kernels, up to 350 percent faster than FreeBSD 6x under normal loads, and up to 1,500 percent faster under heavy loads. I'm anxious to see how the hardware recognition performs. So far, I've had quite a bit of luck with DesktopBSD 1.6, which is based on FreeBSD 6, and I can only hope for better things with FreeBSD 7, which I plan to test soon.

OpenBSD update: I've been having a lot of fun -- and learning quite a bit -- with OpenBSD. I have the box on the local network, and I've been playing around with the ftp server, Apache Web server and with SSH. First I installed the PuTTY ssh client on my Windows XP box so I could connect from the XP box to the OpenBSD box. I could run any console program I wanted, and while it may not be a huge deal to the more experienced of you out there, it's a huge deal for me.

I wanted to run X over SSH, so I made the appropriate changes in OpenBSD to allow X11 forwarding over SSH. Ahd with the help of my friends over at LXer, I found out about Xming, an X client for Windows.

It took me awhile to figure out that I had to enable X in PuTTY to make it work. Xming runs in the background on the Windows box, and when I open an X program from the PuTTY console:

$ rox &

... A window opens on my XP desktop with the OpenBSD X program in it (which, in the case of the line above, is the Rox-filer). Pretty slick. (The & after the app name makes the process run in the background. I had one snag: I couldn't run the Dillo browser over SSH until I installed all the X fonts for Xming. There's a way to just use Xming to enable the SSH session, but that hasn't worked for me thus far. But since the PuTTY/Xming combination is working, that's what I'm going with.

I'd like to run a full X session with a full window manager running in a window on my XP box, but besides being slower than running single apps, I get the feeling that such a thing isn't exactly looked upon lovingly by the hard-core Unix geeks out there.

But being able to run any OpenBSD (or Linux) app on a network-connected box from a Windows-only PC is so totally cool that I should be sated in my dose of geekdom for the next week at least.

The $0 Laptop and its CPU fan discontents: I've been working with controlling my Gateway Solo 1450's CPU fan for months now. In Linux, I've had it controlled pretty well with a cron job, and in the case of Puppy a few added kernel modules.

But since then, I've come to realize that the cron job, which checked the CPU temperature every five minutes and turned the fan on or off depending on that temperature, is unnecessary.

All you need to do is turn the fan off at boot, and then ACPI will manage it just fine. This revelation comes after considerable work in the console, checking the temperature, running commands, running scripts and generally seeing what happens during the course of a computing session.

So I turned off my cron jobs, and now all I need to do is add the following line to /etc/rc.local:

echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

That turns the fan off. I initially thought that only this line -- echo 0 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state -- would turn the CPU fan back on, but that is most definitely not the case. Once the fan is turned off with the "echo 3" command (which you can run from the console, just as you can the "echo 0" line), when the CPU gets warm, the fan turns on and then turns off when the CPU cools down.

So that one line added to /etc/rc.local is enough to get ACPI management of the fan working, at least in the Gateway Solo 1450.

Now there's the matter of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD and this same CPU fan. So far nothing has worked, but I will keep trying.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just read that Debian is removing Flash from its repository:

Flashplugin-nonfree has been removed (see below), as this is closed source and we don't get security support for it. For security reasons, we recommend to immediately remove any version of flashplugin-nonfree and any remaining files of the Adobe Flash Player. Tested updates will be made available via backports.org.

Since adding Flash from the repository never seemed to work for me in Debian -- I always have to get it through the browser dialogs -- it's kind of a moot point. I haven't yet investigated Gnash -- the free, open-source Flash clone -- but I'd sure like to do so. Flash is a resource hog, and I wish it would go away, but that's probably not going to happen. I just hope that Gnash or some other open-source alternative can replace it -- and quickly.

Back to Debian: The Flash news is part of Debian's main announcement that there's a new netinstall image for Etch:

The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update against ftp.debian.org after an installation, in order to incorporate those late changes.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

So you don't really need it, unless you don't already have it, in which case you need it.

I've been running Debian Lenny (testing) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and it's making significant progress -- it works way better than it did a month ago. I'm dual-booting with PCLinuxOS 2007 at the moment.

The older, weaker $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt) is still running Debian Etch (Stable), with the Xfce build's software, but now set to use Fluxbox as the window manager.

I can't decide whether or not to install Etch again on the Gateway just to see if any other bugs were fixed. For me, Lenny has resolved most of my issues, and I'll be happy to stick with it as it goes Stable.

And while I'm considering building an experimental server with OpenBSD, I might make it easy on myself and use Debian Etch instead.

My advice: If you're worried that either Debian or Slackware is too hard to figure out, don't be so worried. The not-so-hidden secret out there is that Ubuntu isn't that much easier. If you've got Ubuntu figured out even a little, you can handle Debian (and it's a bit faster, with more in the default install, besides). Slackware, you can probably figure out with a little hand-holding. Adding software and doing updates isn't as easy as in Debian/Ubuntu, but it's still fairly easy -- and you'll definitely learn something; actually quite a few somethings.

The flexibility of Debian is legendary. With one little netinstall CD, you can roll out a GNOME, KDE or Xfce desktop, a minimal console-only system (from which you can build what you want), plus any number of server configurations.

Slackware is also very flexible, but in a different way. It can't compete with Debian's 20,000+ packages, but there's a lot in the full Slack install. A full KDE desktop (with Xfce and Fluxbox, too). And if you want to spend a lot of time on the install process, you can pick and choose each individual package before committing to the final install.

Both put a lot of power in the hands of the user. And you do want power, don't you?

Flash update: Sander Marechal provided this very illuminating bug report (in this LXer thread) about the discussion in the Debian community over whether or not (and if so, then how) to include Flash in Debian.

At this point, it looks like the flashplugin-nonfree will be available to Debian users via Backports.org.

In the bug report, Ramond Wan says:

As a Debian user, but someone who isn't related to how Debian is run...I think you are correct and more importantly, what makes you think that Debian isn't political? Every time I visit a web site with Iceweasel and the server pops up an annoying message saying that Firefox is supported but not my browser, I sense only a part of the overall politics in Debian. In this case, I blame the server developers, too, for having such a message (how about if I used lynx?).

Anyway, there is a lot of politics within Debian and it stems from them
drawing a line that forms the basis of what Debian is (i.e., "free").
If they start making exceptions, then that line has no meaning.
Backports is a patch that helps make it easy for many of us. We give up
some things to be able to use Debian (rather than one of the many other
Linux distributions).

Carlo Wood says:

I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to let the debian users of stable and testing suffer like this. It's not like Adobe is going to be like "Oh My God!" and change their ways. They clearly don't give a damn.

I can't help but sense a political reason not to
support flash, just because it's "non-free", the
maintainers of debian WANT it to be broken, almost,
and certainly don't look hard for a way to give
their users an easy way to use flash. Just as long
as the result is that the users blame Adobe, and
not debian, it's ok - regardless of how much the
users suffer because of it.

And Timo Jyrinki says:

YouTube already works with Gnash the free Flash player, so that in particular should not be a problem. Many other sites are not yet working, but Gnash could be possibly defined as working "well enough" in time for the Lenny. At least I'm using it exclusively anyway, and I'm just using the 0.8.1 version, which lacks development for the last four months. But I don't find it problematic to skip sites that don't work with Gnash, so I'm not an average user.

In summary, Gnash works rather well for Flash 7 sites, but quite a large
portion of sites has moved to Flash 8 and 9 which are only a
work-in-progress with regards to Gnash, and most do not work properly.
Time will tell how fast Gnash will progress.

And here's what I say: I'm ambivalent about Flash. Some sites -- yes, even some that I personally help maintain -- use way too much Flash. You can barely navigate a site when you have two to four Flash apps running on a given page. The people who are all hot to use this much Flash obviously don't spend much, if any time using their own sites.

As far as video goes, Flash just seems easier than the alternatives. I know that QuickTime, for instance, runs like an old, three-legged dog on non-Apple hardware. It's just a lousy app.

So as far as video goes, I'd love to see some alternatives to Flash, especially open-source alternatives.

But as I say above, it may be a security issue, but on Debian I've always just gotten the Flash plugin straight from Mozilla through the browser itself.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

What version of Linux has been at the top of the Distrowatch rankings for months now that I've never tried until today? PCLinuxOS.

Everybody I know who has runs PCLinuxOS has good things to say about it. Scott Ruecker of LXer and the Los Angeles Daily News' own City Hall reporter Rick Orlov are among those who have used and liked it.

I couldn't boot the CD on my test machine (VIA C3-based converted thin client), but on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) it's booting just fine.

To start with the live CD, I selected the "copy2ram" option because I have 1 GB to play with on this machine. It takes quite a while to copy the system files to RAM, but once that's done, the system should run very fast.

The 2007 version of PCLinuxOS has received continual updates and is a sort of rolling release -- the coders behind it don't create new ISO images on a continual basis like we get from Ubuntu, for instance. Once you install PCLinuxOS, it's easy to bring it up to day. Actually, I prefer it this way. I'd rather do a bunch of updates than continually burn new CDs.

Continue reading "Review: PCLinuxOS 2007, GNOME and MiniMe" »

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

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.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After not succeeding in getting the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter working in Debian Lenny and Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0, my first thought was to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), since I had a trouble-free ndiswrapper experience on my test box in Ubuntu 6.06, but since there's no WiFi in this building, I can't really see if it works, short of hauling the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client home ... with all the drives haphazardly connected to it. No, not going to do that.

I'm disappointed that I couldn't get the wireless adapter working in Wolvix. I could see the network with iwconfig, but I just couldn't get DHCP running properly.

So I went back to my Linux roots: Puppy.

I've been running Puppy 3.00 on this laptop for awhile -- I have the CPU fan managed by a cron job (Gcrontab is a bitch ... I'd rather have regular crontab anyday ... and I wish the Puppy people would fix it so crontab works with the e3 console editor ... it's hard-wired somehow to vi, which isn't part of Puppy).

So I hooked up the Airlink adapter, fired up Puppy, used the network setup wizard ... navigated to the "more" part of searching for networking drivers, selected ndiswrapper, navigated to the part of the drive on which I have a copy of the Windows 98 driver for the Airlink ... and the thing lights up.

It's the clearest, easiest configuration with ndiswrapper I've tried so far. Let's see if it works. (I'm not above trying Ubuntu, and I'll probably do that at some point).

Now all I have to do is get the laptop somewhere there's a live WiFi connection to see whether or not I can actually get wireless networking flowing.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've complained numerous times in the past about the Ted word processor being broken in Debian. On my many Debian installs, I could neither create a new file in Ted nor open an old one.

But on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), after doing my big Debian Lenny update yesterday -- which fixed an annoying Nautilus bug by updating to Nautilus 2.20 -- I decided to give Ted another try.

It works.

I can create new files in Ted and open old ones. I tried Ted again on my Compaq Armada 7700dmt (the $15 Laptop), now a Debian Etch machine (with Xfce and, since last night, Fluxbox) that could really benefit from Ted working. No go.

I figured that it was maybe a Lenny-only thing -- some other dependent package got updated and magically made Ted work. Here's Ted's bug status in Debian. I remember trying this "transcoded fonts" solution and having it not work.

So this morning, on my desktop Debian Lenny install, I tried Ted again, and it didn't work. I even installed the transcoded fonts. Nothing.

Yes, I have three Debian installs (two Lenny, one Etch), and Ted works on one (Lenny) of them. That's better than Ted working on none ... but.

I'm wondering if I should even be running Debian on this 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 64 MB RAM, 3 GB hard-drive laptop. The Compaq performs OK with Puppy Linux and a bit better with Damn Small Linux. And while on my faster, 1.2 GHz laptop I detect almost no difference in response time between Xfce and Fluxbox, on the 233 MHz box, Fluxbox is much snappier, so I take back my previous assertion that Fluxbox doesn't give you much of a performance edge. When you're running really old hardware, Fluxbox can really help.

The problem: I want to have a "full" command-line system in addition to X, and that's harder to do in Puppy or DSL. And I like the fact that Debian and Slackware stay on top of security issues and frequently issue patched packages. And Debian (or Slackware, for that matter) makes it relatively easy to install any console app I want. However, I put a lot of stock in doing as little modification as possible; in my experience, things can get mucked up pretty quickly. And while both Puppy and DSL offer command-line features, neither is a full, modern, updated Debian or Slackware.

And just to provide a little background, Debian, Slackware, Puppy and Damn Small installed just fine on this old Compaq. I can't say the same for Xubuntu, which I did try.

And while I'm mentioning Xubuntu and Debian with Xfce in the same post, let me just say that of the two, Xubuntu is way more ready for prime time. Debian's default Xfce install is missing too many things; I stick by my assertion that Debian is great with the default GNOME, less so in the Xfce and KDE installs that you can do with the Xfce and KDE Debian disks (or desktop= boot parameter in the netinstaller).

Back to the Compaq. Both Puppy and DSL are way better at recognizing and configuring the hardware of this old Compaq laptop. At this point, I'm considering running both Puppy and DSL as live CDs with no OS on the puny hard drive, which would only be used for swap and storage (I could even replace the spinning hard drive with a Compact Flash chip or disk-on-module).

I hate to give up running Debian or Slackware on this laptop -- I've tried both. But when I try to build up the apps on my own, I can never do as well as Puppy and Damn Small Linux -- both of which I've used extensively over the past year and which I value very highly. The people behind Puppy and DSL really know what they're doing.

And while I'm grateful to get Ted running on my Lenny laptop (where I don't really need it), can't Debian just make Ted work everywhere, all the time? Like I've said before, there's probably a good reason that Ubuntu doesn't have Ted in its repository, and I'd say the package not working is a pretty good reason.

I haven't even complained about Ted not showing up where it should in the menus and my not being able to figure out how to put Ted where I want it in GNOME (yes, I used alacarte (here's the Debian bug situation), and no, it didn't let me add menu items (another Lenny bug, perhaps?) -- it almost makes me want to run straight toward Xfce and Fluxbox ... or Ubuntu).

Moral: Debian giveth and taketh away, but it remains damn good.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I half-expected today's massive Debian Lenny update to solve my Nautilus-crashes-when-I-try-to-get-the-properties-of-a-file bug. It did not, but I'm not disappointed. I went back to the original bug report, which was filed with GNOME, not Debian, but is clearly a Debian-only bug.

I saw the "solution," but didn't understand it until now. I still don't know how to actually "do" the solution, and for now I'm content to let it ride and see if Debian Testing catches up.

Briefly, users have learned that upgrading from the version of Nautilus in Lenny (2.18) to the version in unstable /Sid (2.20) fixes the problem. So all you have to do, theoretically, is switch over to the Sid repositories, reinstall Nautilus, and the bug is gone.

I don't think the package list is "frozen" for Lenny, so it's entirely possible that the Debian people don't think Nautilus 2.20 is ready yet for the Testing distribution. Perhaps there are other problems, or the app has not been checked out. Whatever the reason, and I do hope there is one, I'm eagerly awaiting Lenny to upgrade Nautilus on its own.

I would go back to Debian Etch (stable), but I like the look of the newer GNOME so much that I am reluctant to do so. And the prospect of running Lenny now, while it's still Testing, and continuing to run the same install as it becomes Stable, is an enticing one.

But ... the new Ubuntu LTS is only about three months away, and I just might want to give it an extensive try. The question: Do I replace Wolvix Hunter or Debian Lenny? I might want to run Wolvix as a live CD, freeing up its spot on the hard drive.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

It couldn't be more than two weeks -- and probably a bit less -- since I booted Debian Lenny (the "testing" distribution) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). And 100 updates await me. Everything from Fluxbox (I didn't remember that I even had Fluxbox installed) to dpkg to a bunch of GNOME packages (maybe they'll fix my Nautilus bug ... if they do, I'll write a glowing paean to all things Debian, my faith in the world will be restored, and flowers will erupt from every corner of my garden).

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers.

It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release. And even though the next Ubuntu release -- 8.04 (due 4/08 ... also known as April 2008) -- is going to be a Long Term Support release, with fixes, patches and the like for three years on the desktop, five years on the server, there's still quite a bit of time left for the current Ubuntu LTS, which will be supported until June 2009 on the desktop and June 2011 on the server.

The new installer -- you don't really need it if you can successfully use the old installer, already have a 6.06 LTS install (like I do) and have done all the updates -- underscores Canonical's commitment to the LTS concept. While the twice-yearly releases of Ubuntu get most of the light and heat in the uber-geek community, there are many who depend on the relative stability of the LTS release to keep their hardware running. That's especially true on servers, where major upgrades every six months are impractical at best and detrimential at worst -- nobody wants to break a system that's been running well.

And the LTS is vital as a counterweight to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop, both of which are supported for years on end.

I'd like to say that Debian Stable (currently Etch) and Old Stable (Sarge) are equivalents, but since you can't pin down a date certain for length of their support, there is a bit of an unknown factor there, although once the Stable release goes to Old Stable, you pretty much know that the new Stable release won't give you too many problems.

Sure, many desktop users generally want something more cutting-edge, mainly something like the regular Ubuntu releases, but there are many people -- and many situations -- that warrant hanging on to a Linux installation as long as possible. Over the time I've used Ubuntu and Xubuntu (from 6.06 LTS through 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10), I've seen some parts of the installation improve dramatically, I've seen hardware work better, then worse, and occasionally not at all.

And we all know an individual or organization that hates doing major upgrades, ever. Those coming from a Windows or Macintosh background aren't all used to major OS upgrades. In the case of Windows AND Mac's OS X, major upgrades almost always cost money. $129 for an OS X upgrade might not sound like much, but paying that much every couple of years when your computer runs just fine the way it is? No thanks. That's why I'm still running OS X 10.3 on my Mac. And Windows? I have a disc for Windows 2000, and I'm not about to pay ANYTHING for the privilege of upgrading my sole Windows box (which I boot maybe twice a year) to XP.

And in Linux, just because we can change out distros 10 times a day if we wish, it doesn't mean that we have to -- or should. For people who crave the stability of long-term releases, one thing generally drives upgrade: newer software they need to get their work done, and new hardware that needs new software to run properly.

I did this most recent Ubuntu 6.06 LTS installation for testing purposes, but I've stuck with it because it just works. On this test box, it's flawless. On my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, it manages the fan as well as 7.10 (i.e. not at all without a cron job; but well with said cron job), but less well than 7.04 (which has the ACPI working with no coding needed). (Note: I'm not currently running Ubuntu at all on the Gateway laptop, which is currently dual-booting the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny, which I upgraded from the stable Etch.)

Using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on this test box, sure I'm stuck with Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice 2.0, GMOME 2.14.3 and Evolution 2.6.1, but everything works. And there's nothing I do that I can't do with applications of this "vintage." If I this machine had wireless and it didn't work with 6.06, I might feel differently about LTS, but with the hardware I have now, LTS is a good fit.

So if you're looking for stable, supported releases, especially ones that won't cost you anything, it's nice to have Ubuntu LTS as a choice along with CentOS and Scientific Linux (both free versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SUSE, Debian and Slackware.

As far as stable, long-term releases go, I have run CentOS (3.9. 4.2 and 5), Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Slackware (12), as well as Ubuntu LTS, and Ubuntu holds up very well on the desktop in this crowd. It's more flexible, as far as adding software, than CentOS and Slackware -- it doesn't have as many packages as Debian, but it does have plenty -- and the desktop and menus are a bit more tame than Debian's, with a better out-of-the-box experience, especially for inexperienced users.

And the support available from other Ubuntu users is a major component of the distro's success. All the advice may not be of the best quality, but there's just so much of it that you're bound to find the right answer to whatever it is you're asking. Not that the Debian community isn't helpful (I love DebianHELP and the Debian User Forums, but they just don't have the sheer volume of the Ubuntu Forums. Like I said, there's a lot more noise among the Ubuntu people ... but that's the price you pay, I guess.

And since Ubuntu is based on Debian, what you learn in one community is more often than not directly applicable in the other.

Another thing I discovered today: I enjoy reading the Planet Debian blog posts from Debian developers, and I had no idea that there's a Planet Ubuntu as well. Both are more than worth adding to your favorites and checking on from time to time.

Over the past year, I've used both Debian and Ubuntu extensively, and I always say that Debian isn't as "hard" to use as some would make it appear. Nor is Ubuntu a relative cakewalk. Both require, at times, a bit of wading into the muck to make things work. As far as installation goes, Debian's installer -- upon which Ubuntu's "alternate" installer is very closely based, is quite good, and has succeeded for me many more times than Ubuntu's live CD and alternate-CD discs, but Ubuntu works often enough.

What Ubuntu has that Debian lacks is a marketing plan. For some -- especially the average Linux user (read: geek) -- having no marketing plan is, in and of itself, a marketing plan of sorts. Nobody's trying to make Debian "cool," or giving you reasons why you should or shouldn't run it. And while there are a few Debian evangelists out there, and a few for Slackware as well, there's nothing approaching the fervor over Ubuntu.

That might be good, or bad, depending on how you look at it.

A lot of people are running Debian and Slackware -- they're just quieter about it, I guess.

Anyhow, this post has gone on for far too long. All I want to say is that I'm in favor of long-term, "stable" releases with defined periods of support and a smooth upgrade path, and I'm glad that Ubuntu has pretty big foot in this very door.

And I like the fact that 6.06 LTS will be supported for over a year after the next LTS -- 8.04 -- is released a few months from now.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I haven't linked to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Desktoplinux.com in awhile, and he had a great opinion piece today about the $150 PCLinuxOS box and other cheap computer solutions called "How low can you go and still run Linux?"

He does a good job of going through the distributions and recommending many low-spec software solutions for hardware of less than current vintage. He mentions many of my favorites, including Damn Small Linux, AntiX (which I haven't tried in awhile ...), Zenwalk, plus another I really should try: the PCLinuxOS "Mini-Me" spin.

He also talks up gOS, which is going from version 1 to 2. I booted into gOS today to see if Synaptic would magically do this upgrade for me. It did not. I got a couple dozen Ubuntu updates, but nothing indicating anything new or improved. And gOS is still as much of a dog as it ever was. On my hardware anyway, Ubuntu runs way better.

And I'm disappointed that Vaughn-Nichols didn't mention Slackware derivatives Vector or Wolvix (the latter being my current favorite distro), or even Slackware itself. He could've also put in a word for Debian and even Ubuntu.

One thing I've learned is that whatever anybody says about how fast or slow a particular Linux distribution is, a little experimentation on your own hardware is in order before settling down with any one setup. I recommend creating a partition for /home, which you can keep intact (and backed up) while rolling different distributions in and out of there. That's what I'm starting to do; my New Year's resolution is "less dual- and triple-booting, more separate /home partitions." See, I'm setting the New Year's resolution bar very low -- then I'll be sure to succeed (unless I'm caught triple-booting anytime soon).

Anyway, I'm still using Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the Gateway Solo 1450. I'm packing the Lenny install with a whole lot of software, including lots of educational stuff for our 4-year-old.

I have Wolvix using a separate /home partition but not Debian. I might change that in the weeks ahead and see if they can share /home. I still can use Puppy 3.00 as a live CD -- I have a pup_save on the Debian partition. For me, this is total, complete stability, the likes of which I haven't seen in the past year.

I still have Debian Etch with Xfce on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, with Damn Small Linux 4.0 as a live CD. I'm thinking of trying Wolvix Cub on it, but with 64 MB of RAM, it could be a little dicey. What I need to do there is bump up the RAM to 144 MB (maximum of this circa 1999 laptop).

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

I couldn't run my Gateway Solo 1450 fan-quieting cron job in Ubuntu because I kept getting a "permission denied" message from the bash shell when I tried the following:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

(which should turn the fan off; I run the line after su to root in other distros).

But a little Googling about sudo and root in Ubuntu gave me the answer:

$ sudo -i

That gives you a # prompt, and the line works!

Now I can run versions of Ubuntu that don't automatically manage the Gateway's fan (6.06, 7.10).

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 image from Wolvix.org.

After dual-booting Ubuntu (at times 7.04 and 7.10) and Debian (first Etch, then Lenny, then a couple of Lennies for a couple of days) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I've said goodbye to Ubuntu for the time being and decided to install the dependable Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (the bigger of the two Wolvix distros) and keep Debian (still Lenny). After "losing" two Ubuntu 7.10 installs to unknown causes -- both times processes began slowing to a crawl -- I thought rolling back to Ubuntu 7.04 would give me something stable.

But the boot process for 7.04 began stalling at something having to do with the CD drive (I turned off "quiet spash" in GRUB so I could see where it was dying). I'm thinking that either my laptop or Ubuntu itself must be somehow cursed. One of the reasons I had Ubuntu installed, besides the fact that it works pretty well (when it does work) with this laptop, is that I can easily get Internet Explorer (via IEs4Linux) on the box. There's one Web site I work on that absolutely requires IE, and my need for such access could grow from minimal to critical at just about any time. That hasn't happened yet. What I'd like to see is updated instructions at IEs4Linux to get it set up on Debian. (As far as Debian goes, IEs4Linux remains stuck in the Sarge era).

But suffering through three dead Ubuntu installs in a row has made me weary. For one thing, I'm going back to separate partitions for /home. That's how I have Wolvix set up. Wolvix can be run as a live CD, a frugal install or a full install. I believe the frugal install saves files in the same way as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, and I want to be able to access the partition when booting Debian, so I opted for the full install. I don't think Wolvix provides updates in the way Debian, Ubuntu and other "established" distros do. No matter. It runs even better on this laptop than it did on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (where Wolvix was tested along with another crop of distros in my gOS comparison).

And Wolvix has another thing going for it: It's a Slackware-based distro that actually installs and runs with no trouble. Slackware 12 runs ... but I just can't get the X configuration right (and just about any other Slack-based distro offers a better Xfce experience in terms of applications and tools than Slackware itself, which remains a KDE-focused distro, albeit a faster KDE distro than any other). Both Zenwalk and Vector have been problematic; I can install, but something funky happens during booting and I can't even get to a console. I suppose I could turn off ACPI, AGP, IRQs and the like ... but if Wolvix can just run, why not the others? I probably will try to put Slackware 11 on the box at some point just to see if it's Slackware 12 that's screwing me over (Wolvix is based on Slack 11).

Anyhow, besides the fact that it runs and installs seamlessly, I really like the look of Wolvix, as well as the software mix in Wolvix Hunter (which features heavier apps like Open Office and the GIMP, along with lighter ones such as MtPaint, AbiWord and Dillo). Wolvix ships with Xfce and Fluxbox as window managers. In my recent tests, I've determined that Fluxbox doesn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce, and since Xfce has many more features, I'm pretty much running it exclusively, even on the aged $15 Laptop (a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM). And while the spread between Xfce and Fluxbox isn't as wide as one would think, Xfce does provide significant speed advantages over GNOME and KDE

The Wolvix Control Panel app is excellent. For everything from configuration to installation, Wolvix is way ahead of most of the distributions I've used. While the network-configuration portion of the control panel can be somewhat confusing (it reminds me of Zenwalk), it does work. Before I figured it out, I tried using Slackware's netconfig utility in Wolvix. It doesn't seem to work, though you can go through the paces. At least Wolvix offers a utility that does work. With a distro like the highly touted gOS offering NO network configuration utility (they think everybody has DHCP), I'm thankful for any kind of help. Yes, I can hack the text files that hold Linux's network configuration, but I'd prefer not to. It's just the way I am.

Since I'm constantly switching between a static IP at the office and dynamic IP at home, it's taking me a few extra steps (I love being able to easily switch between network settings in Debian and Ubuntu), but the trade-off is worth if since Wolvix otherwise performs so well.

And the Debian Lenny honeymoon is way, way over for me. I've considered rolling it back to Etch. My Alps touchpad issues are coming back (it's not as perfect as it is in Wolvix, Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10), and the fact that the new Lenny kernel seemed able to manage the noisy Gateway CPU fan for a day but not thereafter is very troubling. I can continue to use the Etch kernel with Lenny, and I just might do that, but I'm left wondering what's going on and whether or not there's an easier fix.

What I did do, for both Wolvix AND Debian Lenny, was put my fan-managing cron job to work. It basically checks CPU temp every five minutes and, if it goes above 60C, turns the fan on, then turns it off when it goes below 50C. Rather than a shell script and a cron job, I'd just like a single line of code that I could stick in some config file to make this work. I've seen things similar to what I need, but I haven't yet nailed it down for the Gateway Solo 1450.

I did, however, get the fan to stop in Debian from boot (using @reboot as the time element for the entry in crontab for the first instance of the cron job, then following with */5 * * * * to run it every five minutes thereafter. Again, I will detail the Gateway Solo 1450 fan-control solution, step by step, in a future entry.

And while I think a cron job is a sloppy, hackish way to deal with a CPU fan, I've done it now in Puppy, Wolvix and Debian, so I'm pretty much getting used to it. It's notable that in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I couldn't get the system to allow me to turn the CPU fan on and off, even when sudoing the command. I guess I needed to write to root's crontab, and sudoing can't quite qet you there. At least that's my six-second analysis of the situation. I would've loved to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the laptop -- perhaps it could stick around without self-destructing like 7.10 and 7.04. I seem to remember Ubuntu, at least in the alternate install, offering to create a root account. Maybe if I install with the alternate CD, I can get control of the fan. But do I really want to run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?

Briefly, here is where Ubuntu is falling down:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

yields the following:

bash: /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state: Permission denied

In every other distro on which I've used this line in my cron job, I need to su to root to run it (Puppy logs you on as root, so it's no problem there). But I can't seem to get it to work in Ubuntu. As it is, 6.06 LTS only has five months of support remaining still has a year and five months of support remaining (I'm no math whiz). Might as well wait until 8.04 comes out as the next LTS (or just stick with CentOS 5). ... Then again, Ubuntu 6.06 is from the Debian Sarge era. I smell another install of MepisLite 3.3 .. or maybe the recently updated -- even though I thought it was dead -- Sarge itself. I could always try to solve my Alps touchpad problems and stop my whining (if only ...).

UPDATE: I figured out how to shut the fan on and off in Ubuntu. Details tomorrow morning.

I did keep Debian Lenny (upgraded from Etch). And I know this is the testing distribution and not stable, but I was alarmed by a bug I discovered in the Nautilus file manager. When in a Nautilus window, if you right-click on a file and try to get its properties, Nautilus crashes, a bug report screen comes up, and then Nautilus relaunches. I filled out the bug report and went to the Web page for the bug. While there are about 500 reports of the same bug, it looks like the bug itself has been "closed." Well, it's not fixed, but the report is closed. It says that the bug goes away in Gnome 2.20.1. I have 2.20.2, and it hasn't gone away. I'm hoping that it will, but if the problem with the Ted word processor being catastrophically broken in both Etch and Lenny is any indication, I won't hold my breath. I guess I don't quite understand how bugs are dealt with.

As I said, I'm considering rolling it back to Etch. I'm also considering an installation of CentOS 5.0, which manages the CPU fan fine. Pros: CentOS, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be supporting this distro for YEARS; if it works now, it'll get security patches for a long, long time. Cons: it's harder -- at least for me -- to find as much variety in software as there is for Debian, Ubuntu, even Slackware. I'm sure there's plenty of software out there -- and there's nothing stopping me from compiling my own -- but I just couldn't get the hang of adding repositories and GPG keys. Just finding and installing AbiWord was beyond my capabilities. Perhaps a RHEL 5 book would help me; they've got to be out there. Another con: RHEL -- and, by extension , CentOS -- doesn't play MP3s or even Ogg audio files. I'm sure the codecs are out there, but I like the fact that most Linux distros -- whatever philosophy of freedom they espouse -- at least play an MP3. Hell -- I even can play Oggs in Windows Media Player on my XP box.

But what I did do with Lenny today was pack a bunch of software onto it. I threw all the kids' educational stuff I could find, the GIMP (I can't believe Debian doesn't ship with the GIMP), plus digiKam, which the esteemed Carla Schroder recommended to me as the best Linux image editor -- one that also deals with the IPTC caption info that I need to both preserve and edit. (Both the GIMP, as well as Krita and MtPaint not only won't edit the IPTC text embedded in a JPEG by Photoshop, they completely erase the info; NOT NICE.)

By the way, I thought about doing a frugal install of Puppy Linux, but what I did was preserve my pup_save on the Debian partition so I can continue running Puppy from CD (I'm still on 3.00; I've had no problems, so I haven't tried the 3.01 CD yet, although I do have it).

I wish Damn Small Linux would run better on the Gateway, but I'm still running DSL 4.0 on the older $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). There are new releases of DSL in the 4 series and also in the 3 series. I have to say that I like both of them. I did a lot of work with DSL 3.2 and 3.3, and I'm glad the developers are keeping both going. I am disappointed, however, that the version of Firefox (it's 1.0.something) in DSL does not work with Google Docs. I was hoping to run DSL instead of Debian Etch (the main distro on the Compaq's puny 3 GB hard drive) and gain some speed in Google Docs, but it is not to be. For better or worse, it's another point in Puppy's favor -- Puppy's Seamonkey browser/e-mail/HTML-generator app can handle Google Docs. But now that both Puppy and DSL feature MtPaint, at least they're equal in terms of image editing; for me, MtPaint is the best lightweight image editor for Linux. If it edited the IPTC info, I'd be in geek heaven. Since it doesn't, I remain on geek terra firma.

And I continue to prefer Geany as a text editor over DSL's Beaver (and over Xfce's Mousepad, GNOME's Gedit, anything that comes with KDE ... should I go on?).

I'm having one problem with Puppy: One of the Web sites I work on -- LA.com -- has an obscene amount of Flash animation, and it crashes Seamonkey every time I try to access it. I thought that Firefox might make a difference, so I installed the PET package. But the site crashes Firefox, too. I don't have this problem in any other Linux distro or in Windows or Mac, so something fishy is going on. Yeah, the amount of Flash is obnoxious, but it's not my call.

This entry is way too long, and I didn't even mention my re-flirtation with PC-BSD. After I deleted Ubuntu and before I put Wolvix on the laptop, I decided to do another PC-BSD install. The install itself went fine. I still had that weird graphic blob below the cursor. And I downloaded three PBI files to update my 1.4 release (I didn't feel like burning a new CD, since's I've only got two left in my formerly 100-CD stack). One PBI took it from 1.4 to 1.4.1, the next to 1.4.1.1, and the last to 1.4.1.2. They couldn't do this in a regular software update? Anyway, I couldn't go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.4.1.2 -- it said something about only updating from 1.4.1. And BSD is different enough from Linux that the prospect of adapting my fan-quieting cron job to BSD is and will remain way beyond my capabilities.

So PC-BSD met the same fate as it did the last few times I installed it; it came down quickly. I'm enjoying Wolvix Hunter right now.

So here's where I stand this week with the $0 Laptop: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the hard drive (Wolvix with its own /home, so I can roll a new distro over it without killing out my files) and Puppy 3.00 as a live CD. But I'm thisclose to slapping Ubuntu 6.06 LTS or CentOS 5.0 in there.

Like many of you, I'm stuck between changing Linux and BSD distributions like underwear and finding something that can serve me for years without it either falling apart or me yearning for something better.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Even though my Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny on the test box went very well, I was a little bit wary of plunging right into it on the $0 Laptop because the Gateway Solo 1450 -- which I did get for $0 -- is a computer I actually rely on (i.e. I don't swap drives in and out of it like I do with the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I use for distro testing).

The $0 Laptop began the day dual-booting Debian Etch and Ubuntu 7.04 (I rolled it back after 7.10 mysteriously slowed every process to a crawl after one upgrade and did it again following a subsequent full install.). The Gateway was supposed to triple-boot, with Slackware 12 as the third OS, but I could never get GRUB to boot Slack. I don't know if it's because Slackware was on an extended partition, but nothing I could do would get Slack booting. I previously had Wolvix 1.1.0 Hunter (based on Slackware 11) on the very same partition and had no trouble booting that, but I just couldn't get Slack 12 going with GRUB. Slackware 12 did boot with LILO (which, in turn, didn't set up any entries for Ubuntu and Debian, and which, given my woeful lack of LILO knowledge simply had to give way to GRUB). Once I reinstalled GRUB from the Ubuntu 7.04 alternate CD, nothing I tried would work for Slackware.

And anyway, before I replaced LILO with GRUB, I also couldn't get the proper number of colors on the X server in Slackware. I had the right resolution, but I couldn't get anything more than 16 colors, no matter what I tried. And yes, I went through all the xorg.conf files that came with Slackware, plus a bunch of whole and partial ones from a bunch of other successful distros on this laptop, and I tweaked xorg.conf files for hours with no luck.

So my desire to keep Slackware on the box was low.

That's quite a preamble, but what it meant was that I had a free partition on which to try Debian Lenny before committing my "main" Etch partition to the upgrade. Better safe than sorry, I say.

I started with a Lenny business-card CD. It worked for me on the Maxspeed, so I figured it would be just as good on the Gateway. Not so much.

I already have a slight problem with the Debian Etch installer on the Gateway; it won't properly configure the video during the install in either the text version or the GUI. In fact, the GUI installer won't run at all -- Debian defaults to the text-based installer every time, even with installgui as a boot command. And when the text-based installer runs, it's really "wavy" and feint on the screen but readable enough to do the install, which usually goes flawlessly in every other way.

But with the Lenny CD on the Gateway laptop, what started out as a "fuzzy" install display at one point turned into an unintelligible mishmash of colors that was completely unreadable. I couldn't complete the install and had to begin again.

I returned to the Etch installer -- the network install image -- and did a full Etch install on the partition. That went fine (as usual). Then I opened up /etc/apt/sources.list in a root terminal and changed all mentions of Etch to Lenny, saved the file and then did apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade at the root prompt.

The slowness of my networking connection notwithstanding (it did improve about 2/3rds of the way through the install), the upgrade from Etch to Lenny went without a hitch. There were a few arcane questions along the way about stopping and starting services, but no showstoppers.

The big test for Lenny was whether or not the new kernel would manage the noisy CPU fan on the Gateway Solo 1450. This is one of the areas in which Ubuntu 7.10 dropped the ball big-time. I've been worried that the newer kernels are "forgetting" about the Gateway Solo 1450 -- mine is of 2002 vintage -- and screwing me in the ACPI department. Having to use the older 7.04 kernel in Ubuntu 7.10 was very disappointing, but having the system suddenly become very unusable due to reasons that totally escape me pretty much sealed the deal. I'm not saying I won't try Gutsy again, because I will ... but I'm sticking with Feisty for the foreseeable future and may not upgrade at all until the next LTS version of Ubuntu hits the street.

Anyway ... apologizing for this entry having more tangents than my high-school trig class ... I booted into the new Lenny kernel (the Etch kernel remains, should I want or need it), it took a few extra seconds, but the roaring CPU fan fell silent. I won't go into all the recent distributions that don't manage this fan properly. It would be easier to list those that do: Debian, Knoppix, pre-Gutsy Ubuntu and CentOS. (And yes, that means Fedora and SUSE did NOT.)

Advantage: Debian.

And all the great GNOME 2.20 stuff that I first saw in Gutsy is here in Lenny.

Immediate improvements specific to the Gateway Solo 1450: The "touchy" Alps touchpad can't have its touchiness turned on and off like it can in Gutsy, but tapping to click on menu entries no longer causes them to flash on and off in a split second, like in Debian Etch. Instead, tapping on the menu with the touchpad in Lenny does exactly what it is supposed to do: open the menu.

And now the slowwwww touchpad problem, which plagued the Alps touchpad in Etch until a fix was applied, no longer exists in Lenny.

Doing an upgrade and having fewer problems -- that's progress, and I'll gladly take it.

I haven't looked at every facet of Lenny just yet, but for now, I'll say that desktop users should be very pleased with the move from Etch to Lenny.

Practical note: I'm getting a confusing message in the Update Manager about evolution-webcal, that I have to update it in Synaptic before I can do an Update Manager update. I go into Synaptic and "mark" the package to upgrade, and it says that will result in a few other Evolution-related packages being removed. I'm not sure whether or not I should do this, though this is a "test" install, so I'm going to wait a bit and see what happens over the next couple of days. But still, Lenny is looking very, very good.

Philosophical note: I've learned that Ubuntu is pretty much drawn from Debian unstable (Sid), and Debian testing (Lenny) is a very nice compromise between the instability of Sid (and Ubuntu) and the all-out conservatism of Etch. I'm a little worried about the speed of security updates for Debian testing (which are released more slowly than for stable Etch), but you get so much in terms of newer but still relatively stable packages with Lenny that it looks well worth it for the desktop.

Servers are another matter, and I defer to those who know more about it than I do. The other good thing about running Debian testing is that I potentially have a whole lot of time to run it on this old-and-getting-older-by-the-day hardware as Lenny itself goes from testing to stable. In other words, Lenny has a longer life ahead of it than does Etch ... and if Lenny works, I'm buying myself that much more time on my aged laptop.

To sum up: Debian Lenny, at this early stage, is giving Ubuntu a serious run for the money in terms of hardware detection and configuration on the $0 Laptop, and its relative stability and long life make it a very attractive choice.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 7:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yeah, I'm posting on Christmas. I don't know if it was the Debian Etch kernel update I did tonight, or something else entirely, but the little Alps touchpad quirk I had on the $0 Laptop, in which tapping on a menu item made it appear and disappear immediately, somehow fixed itself (or was fixed with no work on my part).

Thanks, Debian!

The next day: What Debian giveth, it taketh away. Tapping action has returned to its dysfuctional norm. Tapping on a menu entry now produces the same flickering as before. I wonder what happened?

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I did a successful install of Slackware 12 on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and my two problems are configuring X (I can't get enough colors ... I think I'm stuck at 16 colors -- aka 4-bit color) and getting GRUB to boot it.

I know that Slack will boot because I did the original install with LILO (as usual LILO didn't pick up any of my other Linuxes) and ran Slackware for a day. Man is it nice, the X problems notwithstanding. It's the fastest KDE distro I've ever tried and makes KDE a viable alternative on my desktop. And I love a distro that automatically includes Xfce and Fluxbox as alternate window managers ... AND I like booting into a console and typing startx to go into the GUI (along with Slackware's easy-as-pie xwmconfig command-line utility to switch window managers).

But I can't get GRUB to boot Slack, no matter how hard I try (OK ... I can only try so hard because I don't have that many skills).

I don't have the laptop with me at the moment, but I found this page, which has some tips for Slackware booting in GRUB. The best is the "chainloader" method, putting Slack's LILO on its own partition and then chainloading to it to boot Slackware. I have a feeling that is going to work for me.

The author of the Just Linux entry goes by the name of Saikee and calls him (or her) self "A chainloader +1 believer."

I'm happy enough to discover Just Linux -- looks like a good place to find the info you need to make Linux work for you.

I haven't been keeping up with the Slackware security patches on the one Slack install I do have. That's because a) I'm lazy and b) I'm using that box for the Thin Puppy Torture Test II and don't have a hard drive connected (the test is being conducted with a CD-ROM drive for booting and an USB flash drive for storage). One of Slackware's greatest strengths (and weaknesses, depending on how you look at it) is that security patches must be downloaded and applied individually with the upgradepkg utility. I'm sure this can be automated with Kpackage or gslapt, but that's beyond my current capability (and my short foray with Kpackage in Debian left me less than a believer; I'll stick to Synaptic for the time being).

I still have X to deal with (I tried a bunch of xorg.conf versions and tweaks, none of them doing exactly what I want/need) but booting from GRUB into Slackware is hopefully just a little bit closer to reality.

Note: X in Slackware 12 set up really well on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I only needed to tweak the number of colors to make it work). The problem is that I only have a 3 GB hard drive on that laptop, and the full Slackware 12 install is 4 GB+. So I opted not to install anything even remotely connected to KDE and ended up with no office suite and very little free disk space anyway. I wiped the drive and returned to Debian with Xfce, which gives me OpenOffice (which runs surprisingly well on a 233 MHz CPU) and almost twice the free disk space. And it's just so much easier to run apt or Aptitude for updates and adding software. And I didn't mention that learning to use Aptitude (Debian's catch-all command-line package manager) is something I've been meaning to do.

But Debian didn't find my sound card on the $15 Laptop. Gotta figure that one out. I'm using DSL 4.0 and Puppy 3.01 from live CDs as alternate distros for the Compaq, so I'll be evaluating what works better for the hardware and the things I want the computer to do.

Final Slackware-and-X note: I was able to boot Wolvix Hunter from GRUB, and it has perfect screen resolution, too, so maybe I'll boot it again and peek in on the xorg.conf to get Slackware 12 looking as it should.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My Ubuntu 7.10 Feisty install is still working great. I'm very reluctant to do the Gutsy upgrade because of all the problems I had with it on the $0 Laptop. And while I appreciated the full control I had over the "touchy" Alps touchpad and it's sometimes annoying tap-to-click function, I've grown to like tapping-to-click and really don't see anything in Gutsy, other than that, that I can't get/do in Feisty.

And since non-LTS releases from Ubuntu get 18 months of support, I can easily make it to the next LTS (long-term support) release in April 2008. I could also go beyond that, all the way to October 2008, without upgrading.

I'll might buckle before then and give Gutsy another try, but I'm more likely to wait until the 8.04 LTS release, which has a three-year lifespan in the Ubuntu world.

Still, running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- which is scheduled to receive security updates through June 2009 -- is a VERY conservative thing to do. I hope the 8.04 LTS release starts out rock solid and remains so for its projected life.

That said, I wonder how long Debian Etch (which was released in April 2007) will be supported. Debian Sarge was released in June 2005, so it was less than two years between Sarge and Etch as stable releases.

I guess the question remains: How long should the lifespan be of a Linux install? The question would be even more relevant if I wasn't dual- and triple-booting. (Right now I'm back to dual-booting because I can't get GRUB to boot Slackware 12).

Again, I vowed to stop dual-booting and instead mantain separate /home partitions with single-boot installs. That way I could theoretically swap distros in and out but keep my files (backed up elsewhere, of course) on the /home partition in between installs.

I continue to have the feeling that when the hardware stays the same, the makers of Linux distributions (and the Linux kernel) concentrate their efforts on the newest computers, often leaving older ones behind. This is problematic for many reasons, the most important being that users of old computers often turn to Linux when the latest version of Windows a) won't run or b) costs money they don't want to spend. Just telling the new Linux user that they might have to go through a half-dozen or more distros before finding the best Linux for their box is a daunting prospect.

But once you get through the first half-dozen installs. ... It is a bit of a sickness, isn't it?

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I still haven't finished writing the saga of how I got control over the CPU fan in Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop. But I do want to say that the help I got from the Puppy Linux forum was invaluable. A great community is one of Puppy's strongest assets. The same goes for the Damn Small Linux people. Not only are both groups extremely active, but their advice usually solves most problems right away.

Unrelated Puppy issue: While the pup_save file in Puppy Linux holds all settings and can accommodate as many files as its size will allow, I think bigger files, like Linux ISOs, large amounts of music, video and images, should be stored on a mountable drive outside the pup_save. That way, if you want to access the material with another Linux distro, it's not stuck in a pup_save file that can only be opened while using Puppy.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy install on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) performed admirably for its first few months, but after a couple weeks of inactivity I had trouble during a software update. Everything slowed to a crawl. Apt and Aptitude worked, but any other kind of package management (Add/Del Programs, Synaptic) slowed the system to point that the only way to regain control was a hard reset.

So I reinstalled Gutsy from scratch. Gone was the Feisty-era kernel that expertly managed the $0 Laptop's CPU fan, and this install started exhibiting the same sludgy symptoms almost immediately.

Did a recent update break Gutsy?

I found no evidence to support this from the Ubuntu forums, nor anywhere else.

But I wanted to install wine and Internet Explorer the easy way, and even that wasn't working in Gutsy.

Then I broke my vow to stop dual- and triple-booting and put Slackware 12 in my last available partition. I purposefully installed LILO, and could boot Slackware from the $0 Laptop for the first time. And while I got X working with the frame-buffer version of xorg.conf, resolution was way less than optimal. It was probably running at 16 colors. Still, Slackware -- even in KDE -- was very, very fast. Had I been able to get X right, I would've been tempted to turn the entire laptop over to Slackware.

I tried every xorg.conf that Slackware had in /etc/X11. I tried both the whole file plus the monitor portions of xorg.conf files from Ubuntu 7.10, Debian 4.0 and Puppy 3.00. Nope.

Then it was time to reinstall Ubuntu. I did the only reasonable thing. I put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty in the No. 1 slot. That brought back GRUB, and I was able to boot Ubuntu -- running fine now -- and Debian. But the GRUB entries for Slackware? None of them work. Kernel panic on all. Then I replaced references to sda with hda. Two got farther than that, but I was left with blank screens and no login prompt. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to set GRUB to successfully boot Slackware 12.

Here's what I had:

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-generic-2.6.21.5 root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-generic-smp-2.6.21.5-smp root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-2.6.21.5 root=/dev/hda5 ro vga=791
savedefault
boot

# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for an existing
# linux installation on /dev/sda5.
title Slackware Linux (Slackware 12.0.0) (on /dev/sda5)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.21.5-smp root=/dev/hda5
savedefault
boot

Next thing I'll try: adding initrd lines to see if that gets it going.

I'm not ready to give up on Slackware via GRUB yet, but does it have to be so damn hard?

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The $0 Laptop's fan isn't going on any more -- in fact, it barely goes on at all in Knoppix 5.1.1, and I've been monitoring the CPU temperature, which is staying in the 56 to 60 degrees C range.

On a recent session in Ubuntu 7.10, the CPU temp hit 70 regularly. And the fan went on a lot more often. (See update below.)

Next: How does the laptop CPU temp vary in Debian Etch.

And did I mention what a pleasure it is to run Knoppix?

Update:> I ran Ubuntu tonight, all night, and the $0 Laptop maintained a 55-57 degree CPU temp. I guess the whole thing's tempermental.

Sorry, Ubuntu, you don't run hotter.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So far, Ubuntu is outpacing Debian on the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 that I resurrected from the dead by replacing its shattered power plug.

While both Debian Etch 4.0 and Ubuntu 7.04 are doing fine in the power-management department, Ubuntu is pulling ahead when it comes to touchpad and mouse configuration.

Since this laptop has an Alps touchpad instead of the more common Synaptic, there have been problems, but overall the touchpad works better in Debian. When tapping on a menu item in Debian, it flashes quickly and disappears. In Ubuntu, the menu stays open -- as it should.

In Debian, the touchpad was initially slow as molasses. I did find the solution, but that made it way, way too fast. In the GNOME settings, I was able to slow it down, but not nearly enough.

In Ubuntu, however, I can get optimal speed and sensitivity for the touchpad.

The same holds true for an external USB mouse. In Ubuntu, there is a greater range available with the configuration tool. Not so with Debian. Curiously, the xorg.conf entries look surprisingly similar. Even the part of the Debian xorg.conf that I changed was right there in Ubuntu without the change (and, as I say, it works better).

Despite all of this, there is probably some kind of xorg.conf magic I can do that is specific to either the Alps touchpad or the Gateway Solo 1450, but I'll have to look into it. The fact that I can't seem to get the external mouse to behave just the way I want only adds to the mystery.

One area, however, where Debian is ahead is in implementation of the Fluxbox window manager. In Ubuntu, when right-clicking on a link to download a file, the Save As box flutters, with the real box opening below the active window. In Debian, everything works fine.

Most apps are a bit faster in Debian, but it's not enough to make that much of a difference on this hardware.

I almost forgot to mention that when using the Debian net install disc on this laptop, the display gets VERY fuzzy. Even though it's text-based, something funky is happening. I was still able to do the install, but it was made a bit more difficult that it should be. I can't figure out the reason, because once Debian is installed, video performs perfectly. In contrast, the Ubuntu alternate install disc displays its menus perfectly. I guess there's something a little flaky in the initial hardware detection in the Debian net installer. I haven't been able to find out anything about this problem by Googling.

Conclusion: It's not like I haven't spent substantial time using Debian, Slackware, Puppy, Damn Small Linux, in addition to Ubuntu and Xubuntu. It's no secret that when it comes to the full desktop implementation of Debian, it's not all that different from Ubuntu. But for this particular laptop, Ubuntu just seems to handle things better.

One more contender: The Gateway Solo 1450 did pretty well with the CentOS 5.0 live CD. An install of CentOS and/or Fedora is something I'd like to try.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After being disappointed by Puppy 2.16 and Damn Small Linux 3.3's lack of ability to run on the $0 Laptop -- a Gateway Solo 1450 -- and then being able to run Zenwalk 4.6.1 but neither Vector 5.8 nor Slackware 12, I didn't hold out much hope that the new Puppy 3.00 -- said to be compatible with the current release of Slackware -- would run at all.

But I downloaded and burned a CD anyway.

Pleasant surprise.

It does run, with the usual excellent hardware detection of Puppy. It got Xorg right (that's what's screwing me up in Slackware and PC-BSD), detected the internal modem (and Ethernet, which I'm using right now). I'll have to try it tomorrow with the Airlink101 AWLL3028 USB wireless adapter.

It's nice to put in a CD, boot in a couple of minutes and have the Puppy environment I love right there for me. Abiword, Geany, Seamonkey, Pidgin, ROX-Filer, MtPaint. Every one works great and loads quickly.

Another plus: The "touchy" Alps touchpad on the Gateway works normally -- tapping on it doesn't mimic a left-click, so I'm not clicking links all over the place when I don't want to.

The only thing I need to work on: power management. Since Debian and Ubuntu do so well with this laptop -- allowing the noisy fan to turn off most of the time -- power management isbecoming a litmus test for Linux and BSD distros on this PC. PC-BSD 1.3 got this right, too, even if it could do no better than 640 x 480 on the display.

I'd even be willing to set up a cron job to manage the CPU heat.

Gotta close out this entry while the battery is holding out (forgot the AC brick).

Puppy -- you've made my day!

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I tried to put the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver wireless card into the PCMCIA slot in the $0 Laptop -- the Gateway Solo 1450. It didn't go it.

I looked in the slot. There was a screw wedged in there. I got it out with a plastic knife, but the damage was done. About seven pins are bent.

I hope there's a way to get access to the pins so I can straighten them out ... or that a USB wireless adapter will somehow work.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sure Zenwalk was doing all right on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, 1.3 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM).

But I had Partition Magic, and it was time to divide the / partition in half to dual-boot.

My first test was PC-BSD 1.3 (I've had the CD for a few months.) It's the first BSD I've ever been able to boot. I tried Desktop BSD on the laptop a few days prior, and while the graphical installer began running, all the text was replaced by square boxes. (Since then, that problem has disappeared, only to have others crop up in its place.)

But PC-BSD worked, so I did an install. Problem: Even though the graphical PC-BSD installer was running at 1024 x 768, once the OS was installed, I was stuck at 640 x 480. I could barely get networking configured because of the resolution. Everything I tried -- going into the KDE settings, hacking at xorg.conf and XFree86 (is that what it's called?) didn't work. I broke X a few times and had to restore the configuration files from the console.

Nice surprise: Unlike Zenwalk, PC-BSD has some kind of laptop power management implemented. The loud fan finally fell silent, only turning on occasionally.

One thing about PC-BSD -- it's a great KDE experience. Everything is super fast. Konqueror loads in about 2 seconds, I got a PBI file of AbiWord, and that loaded just as quickly.

But I couldn't get the resolution I needed, so I decided, for now, to move on.

I brought a few CDs home, one of them being the Ubuntu 7.04 live CD. It installed without a hitch, and I'm currently doing all the updates. One problem: DHCP networking with my DSL modem was not working. I connected a router between the modem and the Ethernet plug, and that did the trick. There must be some strange way of configuring the DHCP for my ISP, which is DSL Extreme. I'll look into it, but since I'd need to use a router anyway (we have the Mac iBook G4 connected), it's by no means an insurmountable.

Ubuntu 7.04 is running great so far, and it, too, has laptop power management implemented. That noisy fan gets annoying pretty quickly, and it's nice to hear it fall silent without having to do anything.

So right now I'm downloading 120 or so updates to Ubuntu, plus both ISOs for PC-BSD 1.4. Maybe they fixed the resolution problem.

What did PC-BSD remind me of? The great MepisLite, which was designed for older computers yet used KDE and KOffice. If I could somehow replicate that setup with PC-BSD -- Konqueror loading in seconds, with similar load times from the KOffice suite, I will zap out Zenwalk and give PC-BSD another try.

Worst thing about PC-BSD: Whatever bootloader they're using, it's barbaric. There's barely any
information there, and I was unable to boot anything but PC-BSD.

But it was so fast, I hardly cared. If I do dual-boot, I will use GRUB, for sure.

Coming up: PC-BSD 1.4, DesktopBSD 1.0, FreeBSD 6.2.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember yesterday, when I was railing against -- in no particular order -- Gateway, Ubuntu, Puppy, the Alps touchpad and Vector?

A cooler head prevailed today. I stuck with Zenwalk 4.6.1. I may even install the 4.8 release candidate.

Already I added Fluxbox and MtPaint from the repositories. Netpkg is an OK package manager. That first update was tough -- you can't just "select all" and get the updates to flow. You have to click on each one. It's easier than doing them all with upgradepkg. But probably not as easy as slapt-get. And not as easy as apt-get. But it works.

And I started to get comfortable with the touchy Alps touchpad. Since it left-clicks when tapped upon, I was opening windows all over the place.

But tapping to left-click is quicker than actually left-clicking, and with a little practice and adjustment of the mouse parameters in Xfce, I've been using the tapping technique and doing better and better with it.

Still, the screen on this Gateway Solo 1450 is a bit dark for my taste. It only adjusts through software, and in Xfce, there's brightness in the Desktop Preferences setup menu and then gamma correction in the Display menu. I need good ol' contrast. I can't seem to get it bright enough to look good. I guess I'll have to dig into xorg.conf.

One thing I've discovered about the Gateway Solo 1450: While it has the same processor speed as my VIA C3 thin client and same front-side-bus speed and RAM (1 GHz, 133 MHz and 256 MB, respectively), video performance is like night and day. Video runs flawlessly on the Gateway and is choppy as hell on the VIA (mainboard by ECS). Still, I'd love to build out a mini-ITX box with a fanless motherboard and power supply ... if I could be assured of good audio and video.

So all in all, I'm enjoying the $0 Laptop and Zenwalk. And my touchpad training.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)