I've been researching a story on backups in the cloud, and let me tell you, Google may still be contemplating it's Gdrive service, IBM is making moves to get its cloud offerings off the ground ... BUT GOOGLE IS ALREADY THERE, OPEN FOR BUSINESS, AND IN THE PROCESS GIVING THE NEXT WAVE OF WEB STARTUPS THE PLAYGROUND IN WHICH TO CREATE AND BUILD THEIR BUSINESSES.

Was that loud enough for you?

One time, the laptop wouldn't resume at all. The next, the keyboard and mouse were unresponsive.

Not a good sign.

Sure, there are solutions for OS 9 Macs, and any OS X box can easily be made to do this. But System 7.6.1, which is what I run on my Powerbook 1400cs, that's another thing entirely. With 48 MB of RAM and a 117 MHz processor, System 7 is what works, and I have the whole System 7 Today site to guide me.

For those who want to explore MacX, here is a PDF of the manual and an intro page (thanks, Stanford), and here's a page from Apple on an update to the program.

Here's an interesting page from The Mac Orchard listing free and nonfree terminal apps for Classic and OS X Macs. The entire Mac Orchard page of Internet apps is worth a look. Or drill down to just those apps for Classic Macs. All the biggies are there.

But what I really need is MacX (1.2, 1.5 or ??? I need to do more research), and I will not rest until I find it.

Here's a page on MacX 1.5, here's a fix for MacX 1.2 on some PowerPCs (it's a 68000 app). Here is a little clarification on the conflict betweeen MacTCP and OpenTransport when using MacX (and I do mean a little ...).

Also:

A page on MacX 1.5

But I never forgot about the Powerbook 1400. Sure, I didn't take it out of the bag for over a year, but when I got it in my head that I could use the Powerbook not as a stand-alone Linux box (the only alternative for this vintage of PowerPC-equipped Mac being MkLinux, a distro as dead as can be and not even downloadable) but as a terminal with my many
Debian, OpenBSD and various other Linux/Unix setups.

I did get to the point where I had wired and even wireless networking on the Powerbook, and with the most modern browser I could find (the hard-to-get Netscape Communicator 4.8), I could kind of, sort of use the Powerbook with the Macintosh System 7.6.1 for basic Web browsing. Before I go on, everything I know about 7.6.1 I learned from the fine people at System 7 Today, a terrific resource for anybody thinking of running an old Mac on System 7.

That's where I got MacSSH, which, not coincidentally, I managed to configure today to run an SSH session over the local network with my Debian Etch box. First of all, read the documentation for MacSSH. I had to create a "Favorite" for my Debian box, and part of that was creating the SSH keys.

Once I turned off compression and selected MD5 authentication, the connection began working. I typed in the password for my SSH key when the Mac prompted me (I picked a long password, unfortunately). As the MacSSH documentation suggested, I entered my account name for the Debian box, but not the password.

I was prompted for that, and upon entering it, I was in a Debian shell.

Basic commands worked fine, as did the Lynx text-only Web browser. I could even post to LXer.

Things seemed to get a little hinky when using vi and nano to edit configuration files, and I couldn't get the function keys to work (and they're kind of essential for Nano, at least).

And while running X on a computer with a 117-or-so-MHz PPC processor and 48 MB of RAM. But I'd like to try.

See, I get an old Powerbook to actually run a console session with a real, live Linux box, and already I want to get X on a machine that in all likelihood can't handle it.

But I've already got quite a few leads on how to get an X server running, mostly for OS 9, but a few that just might work in System 7.

And while I'm at it, I got into System 7.6.1 and couldn't remember how to open a text editor. I didn't want to use MS Word (which I do have, and which is slow as anything, even though it's the PowerPC build), WriteNow (very quick, but can't make credible text files).

It took me a minute or so to remember SimpleText. I'm not sure whether or not I'm actually generating ASCII text, but it is quick, and yes, simple.

Anyhow, my initial wish, when this project began a few days ago, was to connect to a Linux or BSD box via serial port. I got a cable that connects that weird round printer/modem port on the Powerbook 1400 to a DB9 serial port. I don't know whether or not it's a "null modem" cable, so I also got one of those at Fry's for a couple bucks, with an adapter to get the genders right on the DB9-DB25 connection.

The only problem is that I can't seem to turn the Mac serial port on. I think I do have it. It has something to do with TCP/IP, but if I do turn on the serial port, I think I'll lose the connectivity I have over Ethernet with my PowerPort Platinum card. So since MacSSH is working, I'll stick with it.

I still wouldn't mind getting Zterm to work over the serial port, since I wouldn't even have to open up SSH if I didn't want to (although I would have to enable serial connectivity, which I've done on the Linux end already).

But just getting a 12-year-old, pretty-much-obsolete Macintosh to even run as a terminal with a modern Linux system is a great thing. (Somewhat ironically, but not really, the Powerbook would be less obsolete, I figure, if it had an older Motorola processor; then I'd have a snowball's chance of installing Linux or BSD on it, since many distros still support Motorola 68000 CPUs.)

So I'll play with MacSSH for a few days and bask in the glory of actually finding something useful for the Powerbook 1400 to do. OK ... I could just, you know, use the keyboard connected to the actual Linux box itself, but what's the fun in that?

Before I go: MacSSH seems to die when the Powerbook's screensaver turns on. No big deal, just an observation. The app itself doesn't die, but the session does.

(Note: This entry was written with SimpleText in Mac System 7.6.1. It was then copied and pasted into a file with Nano, running via MacSSH, in Debian Etch. I then started an X session over SSH on my Windows box with PuTTY and Xming, then ran Geany and Iceweasel (aka Firefox) to copy and paste the entry into Movable Type, after which you see it here. Byzantine, yes, but that's part of the whole geek thing. One thing I will say is that the PuTTY/Xming combination is a great way to run X sessions over SSH from Windows boxes. I'd love for the same thing to be true with Mac System 7.6.1, or even OS 8.5 or 9, to which I'm reluctant to upgrade, but I'm not holding out hope, although I will now start looking for MacX 1.1.7, something Apple shipped with A/UX, to further my quest.)

Previous versions of Damn Small Linux have relied on Firefox 1.0.6, which doesn't play nicely with Movable Type, Google Docs, or any number of other Web pages that do more than feed out straight HTML. For my work, basically, I need Firefox 2.

And while Puppy Linux features Seamonkey, the Web suite that works like the old Netscape, only better (and with a Firefox-compatible Mozilla engine), does the job for me quite well, with only 64 MB of RAM in the $15 Laptop, I can't really run Seamonkey without bringing the whole PC crashing down around me. There's just not enough memory. I have no problem with Dillo, of course, and while the Dillo that installs from packages in OpenBSD doesn't enable cookies by default (and I need cookies, unfortunately), they can be enabled. That takes care of LXer, where the forums only work with cookies enabled.

But Dillo has no SSH, and there's plenty I can't do without SSH support. That's what Firefox can do for me. Especially version 2.

So the geekish excitment was palpable. To use yet another cliche, you could feel it in the air.

OK, so the bar is low for me when it comes to operating-system excitement.

Anyway, Damn Small Linux 4.0 runs great on this underpowered laptop. I've got X configured just right, my wireless card works. I've even got sound properly configured.

So I grab my recently burned DSL 4.3 disc (I never tried 4.2; 4.0 was doing so well ...) and boot the Compaq.

I get a few error messages I've never seen before. Modules are either not found or not loading.

Then I'm in a Fluxbox desktop, not the JWM that recent DSL releases have featured. And barely anything works. I can start Firefox (which has been renamed for some unknown reason, and that name escapes me for the moment), but I can't even get the DSL Panel to show up. I also can't exit DSL. On the newer Gateway Solo 1450, DSL 4.3 wouldn't even boot, so I went to my VIA C3 Samuel test box (a converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client).

On the test box I get the JWM desktop, but again, the DSL Panel won't start, nor can I exit the OS and shut down the box without CTRL-ALT-DEL.

So unless I burned a very bad CD (unlikely because the damn thing boots), Damn Small Linux 4.3 has more than a few problems that need immediate attention. I'll have to go back to 4.2 (and the still-being-maintained 3.x series) to see if DSL took its wrong turn at 4.3 or before.

Anyway, I went back to Puppy 2.13. I know they're on 3.01 or something, and I'm using 3.00 on the Gateway laptop, but I still like 2.13, my first Puppy.

For one thing, even in 64 MB, there's a lot to be said for running as much of your system in memory as possible.

One thing I've probably got to give up is running Firefox in 64 MB of RAM. If it can't be done in Dillo or Lynx, I just need to wait for more memory so it can be done. I hope the maximum 144 MB on the Compaq will make a difference. And I hope DSL gets fixed enough so I can use the latest version.

Previously I've found that Puppy Linux is very happy with 256 MB of RAM. I do have swap on the hard drive, and I will see if that makes it happy in 144 MB.

Of course, if the performance of OpenBSD in X improves measurably with 144 MB (and conversely, so does that of Debian), I'll have many more choices of what to run.

Update: Puppy doesn't exactly thrive in 64 MB. I also downloaded a slew of recent Damn Small Linux ISOs -- 3.4.11 (regular and initrd images), 4.3 (aregular and initrd) and 4.2.5. I need to get a better feel for why DSL 4.3 wasn't working. I could've had a bad ISO or burn ... or it could be something else.

Since I achieved the holy grail in the world of the Gateway Solo 1450 and Linux, that grail being properly working Suspend/Resume, I know that, at this point in time, Ubuntu is the best distribution for this hardware. But if I could learn more about how Suspend/Resume work, I might be able to level the playing field and run anything I want.

I've reached this point when it comes to managing the Gateway's CPU fan. I can make most any version of Linux turn the fan on and off at the proper times (and temperatures) via ACPI. I can't do the same in OpenBSD (although I really, really want to ... and I think I eventually will do it), and in FreeBSD it works automatically on the day of install and then not at all after that. But in Linux, I've got it down.

I'd like to be at the same place with Suspend/Resume. But where to start? As I've said, Ubuntu 8.04 is the first and only distro to properly Suspend/Resume this laptop. So it's certainly possible to do it with just about any modern Linux kernel, right?

Just to see where I'm at, I did a few tests with live CDs. Fedora 8 and CentOS 5 would suspend the Gateway but wouldn't resume it.

Since PCLinuxOS is renown for its hardware detection, I wanted to see how it did on Suspend/Resume.

I had discs of PCLinux2007, PCLinuxGNOME-2.21.2 and PCLinuxOS-mini-me, but I couldn't find any of them. So I reburned PCLinux2007 and downloaded the newer PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008.

First of all, Suspend/Resume wasn't available as an option in the KDE-based PCLinux2007. When I checked the power management in KDE, I was told that I had to enable ACPI first. Since ACPI was already enabled, I didn't know what to do next.

I moved on to PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008. First of all, the 2008 GNOME disc offers a radically different-looking desktop when compared to that of the GNOME-2.21.2 spin. I thought the earlier GNOME desktop was way, way too boring. The 2008 version, however, has a futuristic, dark theme that reminds me of the mini-me spin. I like it. I don't think it's "me," but I do like what I see.

I tried to suspend the Gateway from PCLinuxOS-GNOME-2008, and I got a message that Suspend failed. But I also got some help. There was a link in the message to the HAL Quirk Site, where one of the links focuses on ways to fix poorly sleeping PCs.

I haven't been through it yet, but I do plan to scour the site for hints on how I can tame Suspend/Resume on this laptop. It's a nice touch from the PCLinuxOS team: Something doesn't work, but you immediately get the help you need to tackle the problem. Very nice, indeed.

While I continue to admire PCLinuxOS, I'd love to get Suspend/Resume working in Debian Lenny, the distro I use the most. Without Suspend/Resume working there, however, I will most likely be migrating over to Ubuntu on this laptop. I left the Gateway on for most of the weekend, seeing how the Suspend/Resume worked in Ubuntu 8.04, and I continue to be amazed and impressed at how well Ubuntu is taking care of me. It seems like a little thing, but to me it's huge.

On a desktop, it's not such a big deal. But with global warming, not to mention the cost of electricity, power management should be a top priority for all hardware manufacturers and OS coders.

And if you like GNOME but haven't tried PCLinuxGNOME-2008, I strongly suggest that you take a look.

Here is the entry, which I put together so I could run it and get it out of the "unpublished" file:

I could never get DeLi Linux installed. But this post, and this one, helped me get past what was stopping the install.

Here are some DeLi blog entries, including one from April 5, 2008. It led to a pretty nice DeLi page.

I had to cut the piece quite a bit for the print edition. Here is the full column:

Laptops get smaller -- and so do their prices

By Steven Rosenberg
Staff Writer

Did you hear the story about Steven Levy, the Newsweek technology writer who lost the MacBook Air that Apple loaned him? It's so small and thin, it got thrown out with the trash. He thinks.

It wouldn't be such big news if, besides being the techno-lust object of the fortnight, the MacBook Air didn't cost between $1,799 and $3,098.

In my world, that kind of money buys a decent used car, or a serves down payment on a new kidney. Not a computer, least of all a laptop.

Laptops are convenient -- I'm writing this on one right now -- but they're also extremely hard to repair or upgrade, easy to steal and easy to break. That's no recipe for dropping three large. Or even 1.8 large -- you feel me? (This is the part where I pause to reflect on whether I'm watching too many back-to-back episodes of "The Wire" on DVD).

Luckily the rest of the action in these "subnotebooks" is on the low end.

I'm talking about extremely small notebooks like the ASUS Eee PC and the Everex Cloudbook, as well as Intel's Classmate PC and the One Laptop Per Child XO computer that has grabbed plenty of news coverage as the computer aiming to revolutionize education in the Third World.

For me, the subnotebook only became real in the past week with Hewlett-Packard's announcement that it will offer the HP 2100 Mini-Note PC starting at $499 later this month.

The HP Mini-Note weighs about 2 1/2 pounds, features an 8.9-inch screen and -- most importantly -- a keyboard described as being 92 percent of full size, something those typing on the tiny ASUS Eee keyboard are bound to appreciate.

Primarily aimed at the education market, the HP Mini-Note features a sturdy aluminum case, specially durable keys, a mechanism that shuts down the hard drive during sudden movements -- like when it's being dropped -- plus built-in wireless and wired networking.

Did I forget to mention that it costs $499? One of the reasons that HP can hit such a low price point for the Mini-Note is that the base configuration, like that of the wildly popular ASUS Eee, comes with 512 megabytes of RAM, a 4 gigabyte solid-state flash drive and Novell's SUSE Linux operating system.

Linux helps the Mini-Note -- as it does the Eee and the Cloudbook -- in two ways. The machines run splendidly with 512 MB of RAM -- something Microsoft Vista cannot do. And Linux can generally be installed by hardware vendors for free, with no need to pay Microsoft for Windows. I'm not sure whether or not HP is paying Novell to use SUSE, but if they are, it has to be a token amount in comparison.

I'm not sure of the exact software mix on the Mini-Note, but most of today's Linux-equipped PCs either have a full office suite (usually OpenOffice) already installed or available at no cost with the clicking of a few buttons. And OpenOffice can do just about everything that Microsoft Office does. Free. Upgrades are free, too.

The HP Mini-Note is the perfect machine to get young students through high school or college. And spending around $500 can ease the minds of parents who cringe at the way kids -- as well as adults -- treat laptop computers.

One thing missing, though, is a CD/DVD drive. Not that the MacBook Air includes one either. For the Mini-Note, anyway, if you absolutely need a CD/DVD drive, USB-connectable models sell for $50 to $60. Again, with the Linux model, all your software is available over the Internet, so you may not need to read or burn discs.

Want a beefed-up Mini-Note? An extra $50 gives you double the memory and a traditional 120 GB hard disk drive. That's the model I'd recommend. Another $50 after that gives you either Windows Vista Home Basic or Windows XP Professional. If you're intent on Microsoft Windows and want no part of Linux, the choice is yours. But you won't get access to all those free applications, you will be plagued by Windows-targeted viruses, and Linux will run much better -- especially better than Vista.

At this writing, the top-of-the-line Mini-Note includes 2 GB of RAM, a bigger, longer-lasting battery and Bluetooth wireless connectivity. But remember, for $500 or $550, you get HP quality, Linux reliability and more coolness for your dollar than those Apple MacBook Air owners trying to keep their $1,800 baby from being thrown out with the old newspapers.

Steven Rosenberg writes about technology in a most frugal way at Click, http://insidesocal.com/click. Send comments and questions to steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

We've been having more than one problem or another for quite some time -- from the comments being creaky (I just turned them off when the spam got out of hand the and sign-in scripts weren't working) to publishing of entries (and the dozens of category, index and archive pages that go with them) timing out.

Aside from the comments, you, the reader, might not have been all that aware of the pain we as bloggers have experienced. If you've tried to leave a comment and had your screen frozen for an age, you have an inkling of what we're talking about.

In my estimation, the problems up until now have been, in various proportions, server overload, limitations of the Movable Type system that runs these blogs, and generally poor configuration of both Movable Type and the server apps themselves. (Historical note: I believe that insidesocal.com began on a Windows server and subsequently made the transition to Linux.) Until now, the server has been run by an outside company. Hopefully we will address all of the previously mentioned problems with our new server cluster, which is being run by parent company MediaNews in Denver.

Thus far, my far-away assessment of the new setup -- and those who run it -- is very high. We hope to fix a lot of broken things and make all of the insidesocal.com blogs better than they have ever been.

Cliches, I know, but as far as Movable Type setups go, I'm not aware of any that are as complicated as ours. We have hundreds of blogs spread over many different newspaper properties, with lots of add-ons to tie the blogs to our many Web properties. We're also serving ads and trying to actually make this whole damn thing pay.

I'll be spending a lot of time on Monday helping users get acclimated to Movable Type Open Source 4.1. It's a bit different than Movable Type 4.01 (the non-free version), with added features, some things that work better but, thus far, a few new bugs. I think our setup can handle the open-source version, which gets new features and improvements. If I understand the process correctly (and I aim to understand much, much more about Movable Type), the open-source version is a kind of test bed for the non-free version. I'm OK with that.

Actually, if our many-dozen bloggers can manage to get their entries published, their comments moderated, and the whole thing doesn't sink into the ocean, I'll be happy.

The original entry begins here:

Caitlyn Martin is right. Wolvix is screaming fast.

I'm working on my review of gOS, and in order to compare its Enlightenment window manager to something with Xfce, I decided to quickly throw Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 on the box. I probably should've installed Xubuntu Gutsy, but I've been wanting to try Wolvix for awhile, and I had the disc on the top of my teetering stack, beckoning to me.

Quick first impressions: Wolvix has a great control panel application. I opted for a traditional hard drive install, and the process was clear and concise -- yet complete. And did I forget to say quick?

The Wolvix installer even did all the GRUB work, putting gOS in the boot menu without me having to go into /boot/grub/menu.lst. (The fact that I can type the path out without a second thought means I've been in /boot/grub/menu.lst too many times lately).

I easily set my static IP in the Wolvix Control Panel. It's not a no-brainer, but if you've done it a couple of times in other distros, it's pretty easy.

Anyhow, I've had great things to say in the past about both Zenwalk and Vector -- the two big Slackware-based, Xfce-driven distros out there -- and Wolvix is right up there in terms of quickness. It may even be quicker. I'll have to throw Zenwalk or Vector on my spare partition to see how they run (it has been awhile in Linux time, meaning a couple of months).

Note: With my 256 MB of RAM, Wolvix didn't run very well as a live CD, but all that faded away once I installed to the hard drive. While both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux run great on this box -- my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with VIA C3 Samuel CPU -- both as live CDs and in frugal and traditional installs, Wolvix runs so darn well once installed that I think it deserves to be right near the top of the heap when it comes to the most efficient Linux distributions out there.

I'm going to try Wolvix Cub on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 64 MB RAM). That's not a box that can run OpenOffice or the GIMP, but if the even-lighter Cub version of Wolvix can boot on that box and install, I will be very interested in how it does.

I did have a system crash when logging out of Fluxbox and into Xfce. I'll have to see if there's any pattern there. And I was surprised to find that Firefox took quite a bit of time to load, even on repeat use, in Xfce. Something else to look into.

This is just a first impression of Wolvix; more later (and the huge gOS review, too).

First of all, I got the ISO on Friday -- one day after Ubuntu 8.04's official release -- in under 2 hours. I remember my 7.10 download taking much, much longer. Part of my success this go-round was due to using a good mirror. That speeds things up considerably.

Except for a worrisome 5-minute "freeze" during loading of the live CD -- for hardware detection, I think, but Ubuntu's lack of on-screen messages (presumably so the install experience will be more Windows-like, and the newbies won't be freaked out) was a bit unsettling, as I am accustomed to screens full of information when I boot, say, Debian or Slackware. The more information, the better, especially when things aren't working.

Anyway, the live environment came up perfectly, and the install itself was also almost perfect (my accounts from Debian Lenny didn't transfer, even though I checked the proper box).

And while it took me a good half-hour of head-scratching to get Ubuntu 8.04 to automatically manage my CPU fan (I needed to write a quick, one-line shell script and call it from /etc/rc.local rather than put the single line in that script into /etc/rc.local itself), most everything else was working perfectly. GRUB configured proper entries for my Debian Lenny partition (and its three kernels), screen resolution came in at the expected 1024x768, and as in Ubuntu 7.10 (and Debian Lenny and PCLinuxOS), I could easily turn off my Alps Touchpad's often-annoying "tap to click" function.

And thus far, I haven't had to resort to any tweaking, Googling, or searching through reports of unresolved bugs to make anything work.

Things I noticed right away included a neat little bit of pseudo-animation when shifting from one desktop to another. Ubuntu has been installing with only two virtual desktops for some time; I remember 6.06 as having four. It's extremely easy to bump up the number of desktops, and I'll probably do it fairly soon, as I'm accustomed to having four, though I never seem to use more than three.

One of the first things I do with any new installation on this laptop -- the Gateway Solo 1450 -- is check suspend/resume. It never works. In Debian Lenny, for instance, choosing Suspend just turns the screen-saver on.

Ubuntu 7.10 appeared to suspend this laptop fairly well ... at first. But with 8.04, Suspend has worked very well. So far, I've been unable to Resume once, but a half-dozen subsequent Resumes did work. I think the failed Resume had something to do with my battery being deader than dead and the power plug getting jostled -- I think. So the jury's still out on Suspend/Resume in 8.04, but it looks promising.

Suspend/Resume is one thing I've really wanted on this laptop, since the thing throws off so much heat; you wouldn't want it on your lap for too long, unless you like a hot lap, but I digress.

I plan to investigate CPU frequency scaling in the future. I've been unsuccessful with it in Debian Lenny. I don't know if the Celeron M processor is supported for this operation. All I know is that I haven't gotten it to work. I can't emphasize enough that I'd like to do everything I can to minimize power consumption on and heat from this machine.

My tests of Suspend/Resume will continue. I hope to be able to rely on it. I wouldn't go so far as to get a new battery, and the power-supply connection is not super-tight because the replacement power plug on the laptop isn't an OEM part but instead a kludge on my part that saved the Gateway from a very pricey repair (removing the motherboard, if indeed that can be done, and resoldering one of the OEM power plugs that seem to disintegrate at will in these laptops).

Since this laptop hails from 2001/02, I fear it's now or never as far as hardware detection goes. With the advent of dual-, quad- and more-core everything, the Linux kernel will likely begin leaving this Gateway behind. That's the main reason for my heightened interest in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Its life beginning with a slew of nearly new packages, the release is likely to mature well as it continues its three-year life on the desktop (with five years on the server). I don't know how much longer it'll be as easy to continue rolling new distributions onto this aging machine. The prospect of three years with no worries -- and enough compatibility -- is enticing indeed.

As I've written before, I have an admiration and appreciation for the way the Ubuntu team presents its Linux distribution. I like having a lighter application load to start with -- and the cleaner menus that provides. Every once in awhile I miss a package that I use in Debian; right now it's Childsplay, the educational suite that my daughter likes to use. It's likely available for Ubuntu, but I don't have the proper repository linked up. I'll look into that in the weeks ahead. Since Childsplay has so many dependencies, I'm reluctant to install it as a generic .deb package, or from source, and I hope I won't have to. Still, there's always Debian Lenny, which still lives on this laptop.

I consider Ubuntu's first long-term support release, 6.06, an important milestone in the project's life, and those who rely on it have more than a year of desktop support ahead of them.

Considering all the strides in Linux on the desktop in the past two years, this new LTS is even more important. I can see more than a few hardware vendors offering it on their products, and I also see businesses of all kinds taking another look at using Linux on their desktops, in part, because once they get 8.04 installed, they don't need to do any major upgrades until 2011. And if most companies are like mine, the chances are extremely good that a box installed with a given operating system will continue to run that same system, with the same version, until it either a) dies or b) for some reason stops being used and sits on a desk for an additional five years.

Put it this way: I'd love to stick with Ubuntu 8.04 on this laptop. I'm not anywhere near saying that I'll do that, but for now, things are looking pretty good.

The original entry begins here:

Here's the deal: I run Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Ubuntu (formerly 6.10, 7.04, 7.10 and now 6.06 LTS), and while I've run into my share of problems with both, I'm starting to lean closer to Ubuntu as what I recommend to prospective desktop users and what I'll be using myself.

It's not a decision I'm arriving at lightly (and "arriving" means I'm not there just yet).

I've had my problems with Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, but my experience with 6.06 LTS -- which I installed for a benchmarking test but have been using at the office over the past month or so -- has been very positive.

Say what you will about the brown desktop theme, but the way Ubuntu runs, the things it adds to Debian, the number of packages included in the default install, the way they work and the way they're presented in the menus -- I'm more impressed than I've ever been.

Wherever I am on the "geek scale," I do like the bigger default installation of Debian, and I like that it's just that much quicker, but the extra polish in Ubuntu makes for a better desktop experience. Sure, Ubuntu uses a lot of packages that Debian thinks too iffy to include in the Stable or even Testing releases, but I have to say that I've had more problems overall with packages in Debian than I have had in Ubuntu. That doesn't make up for the overall problems I've had with Ubuntu 7.10 (and which I couldn't attribute to a specific package because I'm just not anywhere near that knowledgeable).

While my Debian Lenny install is going great on my Gateway laptop, I have half a mind to give Ubuntu 6.06 LTS a try on the other partition, even though the machine has had trouble with Ubuntus 7.04 and 7.10. I hope the upcoming Ubuntu LTS works as well -- or better -- for me. Again, seeing and using is believing.

She's right to cite the Asus Eee as a Linux success story that can and should be replicated with other hardware, and she's right in many other ways, too.

The entry begins here:

One of the reasons the Ubuntu project is doing so well is that it puts a cleaner, slightly more polished face on what starts out as Debian.

The new user doesn't know that Ubuntu pulls a lot of packages from Debian Unstable. Instead, they think of the Canonical-run distribution as "a Linux for the rest of us." Sure, marketing is involved, but at the core, Ubuntu is a fairly solid system -- mostly because it's based on Debian.

It's not even all that much easier to install Ubuntu than Debian, but having a live CD with which to try out the system, and then install if desired, goes a long way toward getting users to cross over from Windows.

Sure, a desktop installation of Debian contains more packages than Ubuntu, with more in the menus to choose from, but Ubuntu is limited by the size of the single CD, and the people behind Ubuntu have chosen to give users the basics of what they need, with everything else available in the repositories to be installed later, if desired.

And the Ubuntu project is committed to pushing as much additional hardware detection into the system as they can. Other distros like SimplyMepis and PCLinuxOS also do this. I don't know how far behind Debian is on this count, but I think the solution to configuration of new peripherals -- especially wireless networking devices -- is a continuing problem for the entire Linux and BSD community, and I wish there was an easier, more standardized way for users of all distros to get their problematic hardware -- whether connected to PCMCIA, PCI, USB, and even the serial port -- working as quickly and as well as possible.

So with Ubuntu you get a more manageable menu, which is great if you're not a "power user." I guess I want it both ways. I love the Debian menu, with its many layers opening up dozens of applications. And I pretty much prefer the Epiphany browser over its close, but way more well-known cousin Firefox (the latter renamed Iceweasel in Debian due to restrictive copyrights on the Firefox name and image).

I appreciate the solid nature of Debian Stable. I can install it and know it will be supported a couple of years down the line. It's not quite like the multiple years of support that Red Hat/CentOS gets, but it's more than enough. And sticking with the same frozen applications for five years -- especially on the desktop -- might be more frustrating than not.

As I watch the Linux "scene," I see that Debian is a lot bigger in Europe than it is in the United States. And overall, Linux has a bigger footprint in Europe, a continent less enamored with Microsoft than many of us over here are. Nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with Ubuntu, Mepis and others taking the work of Debian (as Wolvix, Vector and Zenwalk do with Slackware) and moving it in one direction or another. That's what FOSS -- free, open-source software -- is all about.

Openness breeds innovation, but there's an argument running through all of this over whether the FOSS community is blunting its impact by having hundreds of Linux distributions rather than a few biggies. In my opinion, that couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, limiting ourselves to Linux alone isn't even wise. I'd like to see us all encourage the development of new distributions based on the various BSDs, and even the seemingly stalled GNU/Hurd.

And if there are other candidates for the next big open-source operating system, at the kernel level and above, I'd like to see them grow and develop. We don't need to put all of our collective eggs in any one basket, even Linux's. That's how we got into this mess (read: Microsoft controlling an overwhelming majority of the world's desktops) in the first place.

I know that Ubuntu is doing a great job marketing itself to the "casual" geek who might not be a Linux expert, but is anybody really conveying to users who know nothing about FOSS or Linux what they're missing? I don't think we have to grab Windows users off the street, install Debian on their box and hope they'll figure it out. Wouldn't want to do it with Ubuntu, either, although the dozen or so current books on running the brownish desktop do nothing but help spread the word about the distribution and educate users on how to get the most out of it.

And while the Ubuntu system is pretty solid, there's plenty of marketing afoot. The Ubuntu Forums, the Ubuntu Web site itself, the free CDs, a plan to deal with restricted media formats, deals with Dell to include the OS on selected boxes, optional paid support. It all adds up.

Damn Small Linux hasn't yet moved to a 2.6 kernel -- Robert said he would maintain versions with 2.4 and 2.6 eventually -- but I can wait for that. Just having Firefox 2 is enough to let me use Movable Type, Google Docs and the rest of the Web-based applications that I've come to rely heavily upon.

I just downloaded the ISO, and once I burn it and give it a try -- probably on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999, 64 MB of RAM, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX) -- I will report back.

DSL, like Puppy Linux, is one of those systems that has benefited from continual improvement. Both projects set the bar very high for others that want to play in the small-sized live CD space.

And I do use both -- often.

Update: While DSL has always run great on my VIA C3 Samuel test box and the $15 Laptop, it has barely run on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450). That hasn't changed. Luckily Puppy runs great on the Gateway, even though I'm mostly running Debian Lenny (and will soon be testing Ubuntu 8.04 on it).