Recently in Knoppix Category

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

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.

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.

As I look back on the past year's worth of Click entries, I see my adoption of Linux play out. The pace of free, open-source software development is so fast that it makes the year seem very long indeed.

The most fun I had writing these entries was during the month of the original Thin Puppy Torture Test, in which the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client ran on Puppy Linux (I think I was using 2.14 at the time) for a month with no hard drive -- in fact, no storage at all except the onboard RAM.

Since then, I've been able to create and access a pup_save file on an attached USB flash drive, and I thought it would be a good time for a second Thin Puppy Torture Test. This time, I burned a fresh Puppy Linux 3.01 CD, booted the thin client, and "upgraded" an existing pup_save file on the flash drive.

I've been planning to get a 2 GB or 4 GB Compact Flash module on which I can dual-boot Puppy and Damn Small Linux with frugal installs (copying the few and huge CD files over to the flash drive and making it bootable) and no spinning drives of any kind attached whatsoever, but in the interim, I'm doing this new rendition of the torture test.

One of the reasons I'm going back to a long-term Puppy test is the nagging feeling that running Puppy and/or Damn Small Linux from live CDs -- or going all-out and doing the same with Knoppix or Wolvix on a 1 GB RAM box -- is a very viable alternative to traditionally installed Linuxes for desktop computer users.

Having a recent Ubuntu Gutsy install go bad on me (twice!) didn't exactly endear me to traditional Linux installs, and from my use of all the live CDs mentioned -- all of which are designed to be used as live CDs rather than as sludgy demos of what a traditionally installed system will do much quicker -- running a live CD completely in RAM, with no spinning hard drives or whirring CD drives, is a refreshing change.

I originally wanted to do a Damn Small Linux Torture test, but I couldn't get DSL 4.0 (or any previous version; I have CDs for 3.2 and 3.3) to boot from CD without a hard drive connected.

So before I begin the torture, I'll give DSL another try with the USB flash drive connected ... but even as I close out this entry, I know that Puppy, out of the box, has more of the apps I want (AbiWord, MtPaint) even while DSL seems lighter on overall resources. (Note: since the original writing, Damn Small Linux has added MtPaint).

Final thought: The mere fact that you can run Linux in a traditional install, frugal install, as a live CD, and make it even quicker by running completely in RAM, illustrates the wonderful freedom of choice we have with a fully open and modifiable operating system.

My gOS review prompted a thorough investigation of what, exactly, is faster than the billed-as-fast distro's Enlightenment window manager (so far just about everything), and that led me to explore Xfce-based Linux distributions in general, and on the $15 Laptop in particular.

The $15 Laptop is a Compaq Armada 7770dmt, circa 1999, with a Pentium II MMX processor at 233 MHz, 64 MB of RAM, a CD-ROM drive and an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card as its only networking device.

Here's the scorecard (not all Xfce):

Puppy runs pretty well. I had one fixable glitch: Puppy doesn't configure the Orinoco wireless card if it's plugged in before booting. A quick Web search clued me in to this. The solution is to boot puppy, then plug in the Orinoco PCMCIA card and then configure it. Worked immediately. Also, the parameters generated by Puppy 2.13's Xorg configuration helped me get X properly configured in other distributions (Debian, Zenwalk). I had to use Xvesa in Puppy 3.00, but maybe using 2.13's xorg.conf will fix that problem (or I can just run Xvesa, which Damn Small Linux and Slackware do by default).

Puppy update: Making a pup_save file in 2.13 and upgrading to 3.00 resulted in a non-working X configuration. I couldn't even ctrl-alt-backspace out of it.

Damn Small Linux 4.0 runs great. It's probably the best choice for this particular system. And I can't say enough about how nice the new JWM-based DSL desktop is. I had a DSL 4.0 review in the early stages, but I inadvertently erased it in one of my many installs. ... One thing I recommend: keep Knoppix, DSL and Puppy live CDs around and try all of them on every PC you come across.

The Xfce install of Debian Etch (type tasks=xfce-desktop at the boot prompt of the netinstall disc) is very promising. Debian and Slackware, under Xfce, blew away everything in my lengthy speed test, and Debian is just so damn easy to use. But ... the Xfce install is VERY barebones. No Synaptic, no network manager, pretty much none of the things that Zenwalk or Xubuntu bring to Xfce. I really don't need all that stuff, and as I say, Debian with Xfce is damn fast. I'm very comfortable with apt, and with a wireless card, it's not like I have a lot of heavy network configuration work to do ... I might stick with it. And the X configuration was fine ... once I booted Puppy 2.13 and tweaked Debian's xorg.conf appropriately (hint: use one of Puppy's two drive-mounting tools to get at /etc/X11/xorg.conf on your Debian install).

Zenwalk, as mentioned above, makes Xfce easier to tweak. The ZenPanel, in my opinion, is the "killer app" among Xfce-based distros. That said, I couldn't seem to turn the frame-buffer feature off, and my console sessions were, shall we say, wavy. Once I got X working (again, with Puppy's help), the menus didn't seem as responsive as Debian's.

I tried Xubuntu. I had an alternate install disk for 6.10 lying around, and the install wouldn't complete. Yes, I checked the CD's integrity. It just didn't want to go all the way.

Slackware 12. I'm installing it now. I only have a 3 GB drive.-- otherwise I'd just do a full GNOME install of Debian and then add xfce-desktop after the fact -- and so in Slackware I opted not to install KDE. The install went pretty well. Without KDE checked off, I barely had any apps, although I did get Seamonkey and Thunderbird in addition to Firefox. Debian, in contrast, has Iceweasel (renamed but otherwise exactly the same as Firefox) but no mail client at all. Not that it would be a problem to add one to Debian. In this Slack install, there isn't any office software. I'd have to add Abiword and maybe OpenOffice ... except that I'm getting very close to running out of disk space. I could probably start removing packages and steal some space back, though. On my other Slackware 12 install, I used the Abiword package from Robby's Slackware Packages, with all dependencies also on Robby's site, and that worked great. He also has OpenOffice.

I was surprised at how great OO Writer worked in the Debian Xfce install. Remember, this is 64 MB of RAM and a 233 MHz CPU. I could probably get rid of the other OO apps that I never use (just about all the rest).

And as far as video configuration go, Slackware 12 was one of the few to correctly set the X parameters for the Compaq. I still had the wavy framebuffer console (gotta figure out how to turn that off), but X works fine.

And now that I figured out how to make Puppy's wireless work (the plug-the-card-in-after-booting trick), I have both of my favorite live CDs (Puppy and DSL) at my disposal for this laptop.

I get the funny feeling I'm going to end up with Debian. I like the idea of being able to keep the same setup for a long, long time, updating it easily with apt. Slackware would last longer, since support seems to go on and on. I could also go back to having a separate /home partition to make swapping out distros easier if and when I start to pile some files into this thing.

The better thing to do would be to bite the bullet and get a reasonably sized hard drive and dual- or triple-boot for awhile. And I've got to max out the memory. It might cost too much to get the 1 GB of PC-133 laptop memory for the $0 Laptop (old memory costs between double and triple what new memory costs ... so buy it NOW people), but the 128 MB of EDO laptop RAM for the $15 Laptop will only set me back a few bucks.

But I can see ending up with Etch on the hard drive, augmented by DSL and/or Puppy as live CDs.

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.

Even if you've never run Linux before in your life -- or if you've been using it daily for a decade -- you need Knoppix, the best usable live-CD OS out there.

I confess. It was my first. My first Linux, that is. And that same version, 5.1.1, is still current (developer Klaus Knopper is very methodical in his work).

Besides being a great system to use -- and to use as a rescue disk when things are broken -- Knoppix lets you see what a Debian Linux system can do (and in this case, a Debian system running the KDE desktop and packed with apps). For even more software, get or burn the Knoppix DVD. I have a DVD-ROM but not a burner, and I'm thinking of ordering a DVD. And just as you can run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux in RAM (if you've got 128 MB for the former, 256 MB for the latter -- though those are just my estimates), Knoppix can be booted to run in RAM (with the toram boot command) on systems with ... is it 1 GB, or 512 MB, I can't remember.

Right now Knoppix 5.2 is starting to float around. It was released in a German magazine in July, and was supposed to be out this summer.

There are some great Knoppix tips in Carla Schroder's Linux Cookbook, as well as books that apply specifically to Knoppix.

I recommend "Knoppix Hacks," by Kyle Rankin. A new edition is forthcoming.

As one of the ways to keep track of my journey through the world of Linux and BSD distributions, on every CD I try to write the date I burned it. I can't remember how I found out about my first Linux live CD, Knoppix 5.1.1 (some Web story must've gone on about how great it was to run a full Linux without doing a hard-drive install), but the date I wrote on the case is Jan. 29, 2007 -- soon after the 5.1.1 release came out. And it wasn't just my first live CD, it was also the first Linux CD of any kind I made -- and my first experience with a Unix-like operating system since leaving adm3a and VT-100 terminals behind after my college days in the 1980s.

I remember running that Knoppix CD on my Dell box. I didn't know what Debian was. I had no idea that KDE was Knoppix's desktop environment -- or that there were many alternatives. I didn't know why the Web browser that looked like Firefox was called Iceweasel.

Since then I've spent considerable time running Puppy and Damn Small Linux from live CDs (and in hard-drive installs, usually of the three-or-so-file "frugal" variety).

I recently burned both Puppy Linux 3.0 and Damn Small Linux 4.0. On the one hand, I'm thinking about doing reviews of both. On the other, I think it's time to replace the Debian setup on the $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt. I've been running it for months with a very basic Debian Etch install. I started with the "standard" install, then added X and Fluxbox, along with the apps I wanted. It's been running fairly well, but the problems with various applications have been piling up. I know that if I use Puppy or DSL, the apps I want should work perfectly from the get-go. Of course I could also do a fuller Debian install -- say the Xfce version -- which would include many more applications ...

So before I dive back into live CDs, here's what's been troubling me with my Debian Etch install. The laptop is so old (probably circa '98) that it doesn't have USB ports. I have my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card installed -- it works with just about every Linux distro out there -- and I have the CD drive plugged in. The floppy drive is dead, but who needs it? I have the original 3 GB hard drive, and it's pretty full, even though I've got nowhere near the full Debian install on it. I really should buy a new hard drive that's way bigger and less prone to failure.

Anyhow, the 233 MHz, 64 MB system probably could run Xfce, but I've been conservative, running both the console and Fluxbox as needed. Maximum memory for the Compaq is 144 MB, but I've been too lazy and cheap to buy the RAM. The CMOS battery is dead, and I've really been too lazy to crack the case (TORX screws aplenty) and see how to switch it out. I have the network time server app installed, and that resets the clock at each boot.

I originally wanted to handle my work e-mail over IMAP with Mutt and MSMTP. Never mind that to get a Mutt setup seems to be the height of geek competence (a height to which I do not reach), but since my original push to get the .muttrc and .msmtprc files just right, something changed and I can no longer send mail. I could never figure out how to handle multiple mail accounts over IMAP (POP is easier, since you can POP all the mail down and filter it ... and by "easier," I mean harder but doable).

So I installed Sylpheed, which I figured would be light enough for the 233 MHz box. I've always liked Sylpheed, although I've migrated over to Evolution and Thunderbird on my other boxes.

On first launch of Sylpheed, I got an error message that some parameter in some file (I confess, I didn't recognize any of it) was missing. So I went ahead and configured Sylpheed. It didn't work.

I have AbiWord installed -- my go-to lightweight word processor -- but the graphics of the laptop just can't keep up. I type, and the letters appear seconds later. Ted might work better, but it's broken in Etch. You can neither create a new file nor open an old one.

On the brighter side, the Dillo browser works great (although the fonts are better in Damn Small Linux and Vector), and I also have had no problem with Iceweasel (aka Firefox), Lynx or my favorite light image editor, MtPaint (which should be an official Debian package available via apt-get but for some reason can only be found at Sourceforge and on other distros like Vector and Zenwalk). I've also been very pleased with Mousepad as a text editor, with Nano and Vi as backups. (I'm more of a Nano users because I just don't spend a lot of time in console editors and have ragged Vi chops).

So I'm able to get my work done in Etch, but I have a feeling that I'd be better off -- especially at 64 MB of RAM -- with Damn Small Linux.

And with the release of version 4.0, what better time to re-evaluate the distro, which has been in or near the Distrowatch top 10 for quite some time.

So I pulled the CDs for Puppy 3.00, DSL 4.0 and Knoppix 5.1.1. I'm not ready to break out the Compaq laptop just yet, so I used my main test box, the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that runs a VIA C3 Samuel 1 GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM.

I plugged in a USB drive, with my hope being that I could then unplug the hard drive, boot from CD and then have no drives whirring for the duration.

That worked with Knoppix, Puppy, even with a Vector SOHO live CD I burned a week ago (and let me say that just as Vector excels with the Xfce desktop, it also does remarkably well in KDE).

But Damn Small Linux? No, it wouldn't boot with the hard drive disconnected. I tried versions 3.3 and 3.2 as well. No go for any of them.

My USB key is a little unsual. It was a freebie, and has a CD advertising image (detected almost always as drive sr0) as well as a 256 MB flash memory. Puppy found the flash just fine (I've always had great luck with hardware detection, especially of drives, with Puppy), and I was able to boot without a hard drive, run entirely in RAM, and save my settings and files to the pup_save on the USB drive. Brilliant, as usual.

Neither Knoppix nor DSL could find the USB flash drive, but I suspect with a "pure" USB drive the results would be different.

Even so, I've done quite a few Puppy reviews, and I wanted to start out with Damn Small Linux. So I plugged in a hard drive, booted DSL (using the dsl toram boot code that loads the whole distro into RAM) and was off.

Quickly, things that are better in DSL 4.0: network configuration is smoother than ever. Once I entered my static IP, DSL guessed the rest of the info pretty darn well. I entered my local name servers, but the gateway and broadcast addresses were correct without me doing anything. I was able to get printing working with apsfilter (I could never replicate my success in Etch, by the way).

The default window manager in DSL is now JWM, and the thing I miss most is the menu that used to come up with a right mouse click. It's easy enough, however, to change window managers to the old DSL's Fluxbox, and then everything is the way I like it. But I'm getting used to JWM (Joe's Window Manager) in DSL, and I like the clickable folders on the desktop -- it's easier and more intuitive than using the file manager.

Anyhow ... I'm not ready yet for a full DSL review, so let me just tell you that to me -- and many others, I suspect -- Puppy, DSL and Knoppix are VERY important distros in the Linux universe. Going from Windows or Mac to the world of Linux might not have happened for many of us if we didn't have live CDs that actually work that way with which to experiment.

And in many cases, working with a live CD or frugal install that allows files and parameters to be saved, either on the hard drive or on removable media, can be an easy, secure and preferable way to use a PC. Especially when it comes to DSL and Puppy, upgrading can be as easy as downloading and burning the latest ISO. And if you don't want to upgrade? No problem -- just use the version you want.

I did spend at least half a day running Knoppix with no hard drive. As I said above, Knoppix didn't find my USB drive (a situation that might be remedied with a more standard flash drive). As the king of live CDs, Knoppix, which is not one of those distros that is continually coming out with new releases, runs very, very well. Even when not running it in RAM, Knoppix is surprisingly quick, even with KDE. And if you do have 1 GB of RAM, I highly recommend running it with the toram boot option. I definitely plan to get the book "Knoppix Hacks," which has a new release slated for this month, as well as the new Damn Small Linux book.

And this thought has crossed my mind: I just might hack together a PC with 2 GB of RAM, and either a Compact Flash card or USB flash drive for storage, with no hard drive at all, to run Knoppix entirely in RAM.

(By the way, Puppy seems to know when it has enough memory to run in RAM -- I don't think you have to pass that information in a boot code).

And while the live CDs of Ubuntu, Mepis and others are helpful in terms of evaluating hardware detection, they're not designed to be used day-to-day in that manner. But DSL, Puppy and Knopix are -- and they all can be installed to the hard drive if you wish.

Before I wrap up this entry, I want to say that everybody should try Puppy, DSL and Knoppix. Download the ISOs, burn the CDs and start experimenting with all the boxes you can find. I've had more fun with live CDs than in anything else I've done with Linux. After a few months in Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu, it's a nice change of pace (and yes, I've tried Slax -- which I like -- and I plan to give Wolvix a spin soon).

So burn yourself some live CDs -- and make a half-dozen or so extras to hand out at will. It's the best way to get people started on exploring the non-Windows world of computing.

I spent the day upgrading my new Xubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) installation to Xubuntu 7.04 (Feisty), and since Xubuntu is derived from Ubuntu, far and away the most popular Linux distribution for the desktop, I expected -- and still expect -- a lot more from it.

During my nearly month-long Thin Puppy Torture Test (chronicled extensively in this blog), I managed to get quite a bit of work done with my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (1 GHz VIA processor, 256 MB RAM, no disk drives at all), most of it related to producing this and other Daily News blogs. From extensive Web surfing to light photo editing, heavy writing and use of Movable Type for Web publishing, Puppy Linux 2.14 performed admirably, even if, along the way, I lost the ability to mount external drives and couldn't really deal with large audio files due to the lack of available memory. But for the basics, Puppy did the job, day in and day out.

With Xubuntu, I hooked up a 14.4 GB hard drive and a 32x CD-RW drive. And by the time I installed Xubuntu, I expected to get even more real work done. This time I seek to up the ante, doing work for Dailynews.com, which entails working with larger photo files (downloaded from services such as GettyImages.com and WireImage.com, although the latter offers a choice of smaller images to begin with).

And eventually, it means, installing some version of Wine (allowing use of Windows programs without the Windows OS installed), with Internet Explorer 6 running, because the Daily News Web publishing system requires IE. (And for the love of God, WHY??)

As far as text editors go, I can use just about anything. Even the anemic Mousepad editor that comes with Xubuntu would be OK, even though I prefer Geany, and even EditPad for Windows. And since Xubuntu's word processor, AbiWord is so light on resources and quick-loading, that could really serve as a text editor for my purposes.

And when it came to image editing, Xubuntu offers the GIMP, which though part of the GNOME office suite (featuring the loosely tied-together AbiWord, Gnumeric for spreadsheets and the GIMP), is a true resource hog, taking a full minute to load in Xubuntu on my 1 GHz box. For my purposes at least, I'm very familiar with the GIMP, as I've been using the Windows version for at least a year (and never having used Photoshop, had nothing to "unlearn"). So already the GIMP is a mismatch for Xubuntu, if indeed one is running it on "low-spec" hardware. I missed mtPaint from Puppy (which I just might install for Xubuntu, if I can figure it out), but I didn't miss the paint program that comes with Damn Small Linux, which doesn't do nearly what I need.

Long story short, I did work on about five photos for Dailynews.com, but the times required to save them in the GIMP really had me thinking about whether or not Xubuntu on this platform could handle this level of work. But I had to stop myself. I don't recall working with original images this big in Puppy 2.14. I mostly took images already sized for the Web and then made them even smaller. Even the GIMP in Xubuntu could make relatively quick work of that. And as far as general Web work with Firefox in Xubuntu, it went smoothly. I was even able to add the Flash plug-in for Firefox without working up a geekish sweat (translation: no command line needed, no Synaptic Package Manager, just clicking in the bar on Firefox to get the needed plug-in -- it was positively Windows-like).

When I write my full-length review of Xubuntu, I'll recount my odyssey of getting network printing working. Yes, it did take me most of the day, and yes, I'm surprised at how unintuitive Xubuntu's printer-configuration utility actually is (I gave up and used the CUPS interface), and I'm shocked that I got printing working much, much easier in both Puppy and DSL (and MepisLite ... and Slax and Knoppix and even standard Ubuntu Dapper). But that's another battle to recount on another day.

Suffice it to say that my first full day with Xubuntu Feisty was maybe a bit less bumpy than expected, especially given the high expectations I have for something that's billed as a speedier version of the hottest desktop Linux distribution on the planet -- however dubious such a distinction may be.

But in my search for answers on whether or not Xubuntu and its Xfce desktop interface is truly ready for real work (or at least for what it is that I do to put out Web pages and newspapers), I'm going to have to compare it to Zenwalk 4.4.1, which features the same interface but is built upon Slackware, as opposed to Ubuntu/Xubuntu's base of Debian. And I'll have to do a traditional hard-drive install of Puppy to see how it performs in that kind of traditional install (and whether that kind of setup allows me to deal with the kinds of large files that I do, in fact, have to process during the course of my day).

And last ... and only least if you think of it that way ... I will do a standard Windows 2000 install on the 1 GHz thin client (because I've got a 2000 disc and not one with XP on it) ... load it up with the requisite open-source apps (Open Office, AbiWord, the GIMP, Avast antivirus, Firefox, even SeaMonkey) to have a truly well-played field on the same hardware before drawing any definite conclusions in the battle for OS supremacy on my low-spec desktop. And honestly, as I work on this entry at home on an iBook G4 1 GHz/384MB laptop with OS X 10.3.9, and seeing how well it runs, I can't leave Apple and its BSD-derived operating system out of the equation.

I tried opening a terminal window and using alsamixer, and sure enough, the mono sound was muted, so I unmuted and seconds later was enjoying a live stream from the BBC World Service via Gxine.

So I can now get sound in just about every live-CD Linux I've tried. I can't remember whether or not I did this sound hack with Knoppix, but I plan to try it for sure.

I looked into "solid state" disk drives, which Tiger Direct does sell, and IDE-to-Compact Flash adapters, which it does not. I finally found the adapters at a price that wouldn't kill me via Froogle (I'll supply the link later). The solid-state drives -- used in a lot of military applications where the jostling and other sundry sand and crap is adverse to a regular, spinning hard drive -- are minimum of $100 for a 4 GB model.

I'm going to opt for the IDE-to-CF adapter, which goes for between $10 and $20, with shipping all over the map, and a 2 GB 80x CF card. That should run me a total of about $30, and I can have a bootable CF-based hard drive to pop into This Old PC.

Back to the Linuxes. If I can get sound from This Old PC -- the Pentium II MMX 333 MHz ... and then wireless (almost too much to ask at this point) I will have accomplished my basic goals with Linux.

See, I set the bar low ...

I downloaded the .iso for the live-CD version of Zen Walk, which is based on GNU/Linux. It runs on the Xfce window manager, which I like so much in Xubuntu, and since it comes from a different branch of the Linux tree (GNU for Zen, Debian for the 'Buntus), I figured I'd give it a try.

I like the application set. It's got Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim, Gimp, Abiword, Gnumeric and more. And I like the clean look of Xfce -- it's that much cleaner than IceWM.

The first test is network configuration. In Zen Walk, you need the root password to get into the Zenpanel (it's ZenLive, case sensitive) and then you need to click on the various items a bunch of times. I kept getting hung up, so I would log out and then log back in. Finally I got it. Total time, about 10 minutes. At least I got Ethernet running.

Zen Walk also has an app called Wi-Fi Radar ... not sure what it does, but any acknowledgement that Wi-Fi exists and just might work on a Linux distro is a-OK by me.

As far as hardware requirements, the Zen Walk people say it's Pentium III minimum, but you can try Pentium II:

Hardware requirements:

These are the minimal hardware requirements to run Zenwalk in Xwindow mode, with correct performance (some lower configs work - ie : PII - , but might be slow) :

* Pentium III class processor

* 128 Mb RAM

* 2Gb HDD

Well, at least it's realistic. I really do like the way this distro works so far (clunky net config notwithstanding). I've gotta tell you, the net config of Puppy, Knoppix and Ubuntu/Xubuntu is a whole lot easier. As I said, Damn Small Linux won't even admit that I've got an Ethernet card, let alone allow me to configure it. At least Zen Walk let me run network services. Now ... if I could only get sound.

Of all my various projects over the past year, documented here and on This Old PC and This Old Mac, the most fun so far has been the discovery and use of bootable-CD versions of Linux. I've got about a half-dozen burned so far, with a few more than that ready to try. I still like Knoppix and Ubuntu and was intrigued by Damn Small Linux, but it's Puppy Linux that has worked the best -- it boots from the CD and then loads the entire OS and all apps into memory, so it's blindingly fast (in contrast to the bigger CDs, which are less so).

I'll do a giant Linux link dump later today, but for now, here's this list of all the known CD-bootable Linux flavors.

The one thing you have to be able to do is download the .iso images (faster connections are better, of course) and then make CDs out of them. It's not as easy as it should be. If you have Nero (a real CD-making program), you can do it, but with naked Windows, it's not possible without a helper application. From the Knoppix help pages, I learned how to use ISO Recorder, which is XP- and Vista-specific. I think the instructions that come on the Ubuntu Wiki pages are better because they cover everything from Windows 95 on forward, plus Mac OS X (good for Ubuntu's PowerPC distribution AND for making a PC-compatible disc, by the way) and even Linux itself.

Of course Ubuntu will send you a free CD, and just about every Linux CD and DVD is available on the Web very cheaply. Knoppix, for one, offers this extensive list of places that sell Linux CDs and DVDs, many of which go for $2 or less each. The best thing, though is a fast connection, your own CD or DVD burner, and a big stack of blanks. (I'm headed to Frys to replenish my supply.)

Once you can burn your own discs, you're well on your way to sampling all that the many Linux distributions have to offer -- and you can really find what works best with your hardware, your work ... and you.

And did I mention that my favorite app of the day is Abiword, available for Windows, Linux and OS X, and way, way lighter in resources than Word, but able to create compatible files nonetheless.

My tour through the world of Linux distributions
bootable from CD has taught me one thing. There are
about 100 different flavors of Linux that are bootable
from CD (I will give the link later to a list of just
about that many).

I tried Damn Small Linux yesterday (couldn't get
network services established) and was set to try
DSL-n, which is bigger and presumably has more
flexibility in drivers, but I stumbled across href="http://puppylinux.com/">Puppy, another
small, CD- and USB-drive-bootable version of Linux.
The best thing about it (and yes, I am using it right
now) is that once it boots from CD, the entire OS and
all apps load into RAM (assuming you have enough,
which is somewhere around 200 MB, I think).

That means no accessing the CD every time you load an
app (like Ubuntu
and Knoppix). I
wanted to try Abiword, the lighter (than Open Office)
word processor that produces Word-compatible files. I
wasn't prepared for it to start in under a second. But
it did. Running everything in RAM. It's like starting
every program you're going to use and having it in
your taskbar, or whatever it is they are calling that
thing at the bottom of the screen.

To keep Puppy small, it uses the SeaMonkey Web
browser, which is working great. I'm not sure what the
GUI is, but it looks great. And supposedly it's easier
to make a bootable USB drive out of Puppy than it is
from DSL (a task at which I didn't succeed yesterday).
I plan to try it.

Another thing about Puppy. You can burn an "open" CD
or DVD and save your work on the disc for as long as
you have free space. Or you can create space on your
system's hard drive, save to a plugged-in USB drive
... or to a ZIP drive (something that excites me since
I've got about a half-dozen of them in various states
of usability). You can even boot off of a ZIP disk.

But running everything in memory is brilliant. Now you
are giving up some things to do this. No GIMP, like in
Knoppix and Ubuntu. That might be hard to give up, as
I do a lot of photo editing for the Web. But maybe
there's something good enough in Puppy. This little
Linux can also be installed to the hard drive, and
then additional software can be added, so if I feel
like I need to use this Linux distribution, I can run
it like any regular HD-based OS.

I had to answer a few questions about my display
preferences while Puppy booted, but configuring the
network services was easy. I'm not quite sure how to
get a printer hooked up over the network. I think you
have to choose the model of printer and then select
from a list of available printers on the network.
Since there are about 200 or so printers hooked up
around here, I guess I'll have to do a walk-around and
see what's available. Ubuntu and Knoppix were very
smooth when it came to printer config.

And I am having one glitch in the SeaMonkey browser.
It does automatic Web links just fine, but when trying
to create a new category, a blank window opens, never
to be filled. Puppy also offers the Dillo browser, so
maybe that will work better. I'll try to upload a
photo and see how that goes.
But this running in RAM, apps available nearly
instantly. I could really get used to this. And while
the fatter Linuxes are sometimes billed as able to
resurrect older PCs, a distribution like this really
can do that. Breaking the chain to the hard drive and
running light apps is key to maximizing limited PC
resources.

Now pet the Puppy.

Now that I can download and make my own bootable CDs of ISO images, I'm collecting and sampling all the CD-bootable Linux flavors out there.

So far I've got:

Knoppix
Ubuntu
Xubuntu
Fluxbuntu
DSL (Damn Small Linux)
DSN-n (Damn Small Linux, but a little bigger)

I've managed to make CDs of about half of them. I tried to make a bootable USB stick with DSL, but it didn't work. It can be done, say geeks.

DSL runs great, although it sometimes leaves the mouse behind on the Dell, depending on if/where the USB drive is plugged in. It won't recognize the Ethernet card either. But it's wicked fast. Maybe DSL-n, bigger as it is, will do better.

And Xubuntu is supposedly lighter in resources, which I need for This Old PC, with Fluxbuntu even lighter still (with DSL the absolute lightest). But if I can't get wired Internet or wireless going, it's all terribly academic and not at all useful.

In other news, I downloaded Abisoft for PC to get a feel for it. It's a very light Word-compatible word processor that also runs under Linux and is being included in more and more distributions.

What I like about these Unix distributions: The ones that are meant to be run from a hard drive (the Ubuntu family) allow for easy updating and equally easy search and downloading of new, compatible applications. Huzzah!

Knoppix has so many things to choose from. Multiple text editors, both in the KDE GUI and in terminal windows. A bunch of browsers, including Firefox, and Konquerer.

There aren't so many choices in Ubuntu, although I expect everything you need is available for free download.

One thing: I couldn't get Knoppix to recognize my thumb drive, but I can get to it easily in Ubuntu to save my work when booting off the CD.

Neither version of Linux has Abisoft, an open-source word processor I've been wanting to try, although Ubuntu says somewhere that it includes it. Maybe it's in 6.1.0. I'm running 6.0.6.

Another thing, I was able to up the screen resolution, and Ubuntu looks even better at 1280 by 1024.

(Note: This is being posted from Ubuntu with Firefox)