Recently in Old hardware 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 ...)

The highlight of the Daily News moving from its huge, windowless box to a smaller office has been all the old equipment that has been flying out the doors.

Aside from the Power Macintosh G4/466 (not a 450, as I initially thought), I plucked a couple of trashed-looking old laptops from the junk heap.

Neither had batteries or power supplies. Luckily, the power brick for my Gateway worked in one, a Compaq Armada 1125.

The damn thing actually booted ... to a Windows 95 desktop.

It doesn't look like a great candidate for Linux or BSD, unless you're taking pure command line or the barest X desktop possible.

The specs:

Pentium 100 MHz processor
24 MB RAM (the machine's maximum)
640x480, 16-bit color display
3.5-inch floppy drive
1.2 GB hard drive
PCMCIA telephone modem card
Windows 95

What's missing? Enough memory to do much of anything with, a CD drive, easy networking (although I might have an Ethernet card that works).

So what should I do with this thing? Clean it up a bit and see what the intelligent masses on eBay give me for it? Hey, the damn thing boots, which is more than I could say for a lot of gear I come across.

Note: The photo above isn't this exact Compaq Armada 1125, just a representative image plucked from the Web.

Update: Since all I've got is a floppy drive, I pulled my Linux-on-floppy discs and loaded up the two-floppy Basic Linux.

The Compaq booted, and after the second floppy loaded, I was even able to use X.

Among the applications I used during my test were vi, another text editor called wp (with pico keybindings) and the Links text-only browser, all in an xterm window.

I don't yet have networking up, but I'm working on it.

More Basic Linux:

There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.

I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn't everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.

I'm thinking about buying a new test box -- something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.

That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I've accumulated over the past couple of years.

In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.

I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn't do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn't made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.

But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.

Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.

At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.

I'd still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I'm thinking something generically Dell or HP), I'll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It's flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn't come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).

Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.

The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).

As for my new test box, I've seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I'd like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.

I've seen some nice things for $60, but I'd rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.

What I'm saying, basically is that if you're running anywhere near 64MB of RAM and you, say, want to run Firefox, you need more memory.

The $15 Laptop -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU -- ran a Linux console with no problem and even did an X session, provided no "heavy" apps like Firefox were used.

But how can you get along with just Dillo as a Web browser?

It's not easy if you want to do any kind of blogging, which a) uses the more-memory-intense Firefox and b) demands much more out of Firefox and the whole system as well.

Well, I can safely say that a 233 MHz CPU and 144MB of RAM are enough to run Puppy Linux (currently version 2.13, for which I continue to have a soft spot), Damn Small Linux 4.3 and even OpenBSD 4.2.

I'm going to reboot into OpenBSD right now to see just how well the Compaq is doing with it.

(I'm now back with OpenBSD 4.2)

Things appear to work pretty well with OpenBSD as well. Though certainly more secure than almost every other operating system out there (though I miss Debian and now also Ubuntu's ability to encrypt an entire drive with LVM) and as stable as anything out there, OpenBSD is in no way faster than the fastest Linux distributions.

And speed is a bit of a problem on hardware this old.

I'd have to try Debian again. Puppy and DSL are quite a bit quicker when it comes to screen refresh time in Firefox (and generally in X). I don't remember Debian Etch as being all that sprightly in comparison.

(Changing to DSL 4.3)

There's no doubt that DSL runs the graphics in X faster than OpenBSD. The screen does a much better job of keeping up with my keystrokes in Movable Type, and if the main purpose of this laptop is to crank out blog entries, that is an important consideration.

Of course, before I pull OpenBSD off of this drive, I'll have to make sure I have the xorg.conf saved, as well as a number of other configuration files as well as the output of pkg_info so I can remember all the software I have in this install.

I should probably just get a few swappable hard drives for the Compaq. Maybe even something bigger than 3GB. Just a thought.

Other problems with using DSL as the sole distro: no Flash (but OpenBSD doesn't have it either).

... (two weeks later)

I've been running the $15 Laptop a bit more. Having a good wireless connection helps immensely. I've been most happy with Puppy 2.13 thus far, since it has Seamonkey — a very acceptable Mozilla-based browser — and all the graphics work as they should.

I still have OpenBSD 4.2 on the hard drive, and as I say above, I'm reluctant to remove it, even though I can and will save the various configuration files in case I want to do a reinstall.

I'd like to try Wolvix again, just to see if the additional memory makes any difference in loading it. I could — and probably should — try Debian again. I don't know if it'll be as fast as Puppy or DSL, but it is worth trying.

What I'll probably end up with: I might leave OpenBSD on the laptop for awhile, but I can see myself ending up with a hard drive or Compact Flash chip with IDE converter completely devoted to storage and either running Puppy Linux off of the Live CD or as a frugal install on the hard drive or CF card.

I'm ready to throw down $150 for this deal (plus $15 to boost the memory to 512 MB). There are a smattering of low-cost Linux PC deals out there, but this is absolutely the best. Better than Everex, better than the used stuff at Pacific Geek. Better than Mad Tux. Hell, better than anything. You even get an LCD monitor. The $150 doesn't include shipping, and I don't know how much that runs. But holy hell, it's cheap.

A site called linfx.com, which creates computer graphics for PCLinuxOS, among others, is behind the deal. They've also got a less-powerful box for $59 (no monitor, keyboard or other extraneous items).

Here are the specs for the $150 deal:

Refurbished IBM Net Vista Desktop with PCLinuxOS 2007 installed. Intel PIII 900mHz, Intel chipset with onboard graphics and LAN. Also includes 256mb ram, 20GB IDE HDD, 40x CDROM, 15" TFT LCD (see specs. below), keyboard, mouse and a fresh PCLinuxOS 2007 LiveCD.

And here are the details on the monitor:

15" IBM LCD Specifications T541
Size 15 Inch
15" Viewable Screen Size
Resolution Max: 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz
Recommended: 1024 x 768 @ 70 Hz
LCD Panel TFT Active Matrix LCD
Misc. Features ~ Viewing Angle: Horizontal 150°, Vertical 120°
~ Horizontal Freq. 30-61 KHz Vertical Freq. 56-75 Hz
~ Brightness 250 cdm-² (typical)
~ Contrast 350:1 (typical)
~ Hybrid System Attach Offers Maximum Attachment Flexibility and Positions Customer for the Future
~ Lift/Tilt/Swivel Stand Offers Optimum Adjustment for Viewing Comfort
Dimensions Unit: 13.6" x 14.4" x 8"
As Shipped: Unknown
Weight Unit: 10.5 Lbs

Here's what you have to do:

To get yours just email Butch (bdrake@plasticrecovery.com )and request the PCLOS PC Deal, he will then email you a secure invoice.

And here are the specs on the $59 system:

NOW also available an IBM Desktop system including a Intel PIII 600mHz cpu, 384mb ram, Ati AGP graphics, integrated LAN and CDROM ONLY$59.00 This system is just the box, no monitor keyboard or mouse. Just ask Butch about the 59 dollar IBM system.

Pacific Geek also has deals like this on systems. ... But the secret that's not so secret is that old hardware is often free for those who ask and are willing to haul it away. That's usually not true for laptops, but I did luck out on the $0 Laptop because it was five or six years old and not working, with a repair quote of $700. I did the repair myself, the quick and dirty way, for less than $3.

When it comes to desktop systems, you can often find them for free, but this $150 deal is pretty darn good, seeing as you get the keyboard, mouse, memory, CD drive and LCD monitor. It's the monitor that makes me scratch my head -- how can they do it? One thing you might need to add is a CD-R drive if you want to burn your own CDs ... or you could go really crazy and shove a DVD-writer in there. Even I haven't entered the era of burn-your-own DVDs, although the makers of many a Linux and BSD distro act as if we all have (offering DVD ISOs and no CD ISOs for those of us who don't have the more sophisticated -- and expensive -- drives).

For comparison's sake, here are some deals from Pacific Geek:

1.7GHz System 256MB 40GB CD USB /Firewire/ PCMCIA for $109.99

Compaq D51S Pentium 4 2.0GHz 512MB 40GB DVD XP SFF - B

Compaq iPAQ Desktop PC Computer 866 Mhz $59.99 (no CD drive)

So these PCLinuxOS deals are pretty great -- if you can get them and get decent shipping. Read through the whole forum to see more info on the deal and what people think of it.

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.

I'm writing this review on Google Docs in Firefox while running gOS 1.0.1, the Ubuntu-based distribution that steers users toward Web-based applications whenever possible -- mostly those under the auspices of Google -- and which powers the Everex Linux PC being sold for $199 by the truckful at Wal-Mart.

I'm getting more comfortable with Google Docs all the time, but there are times when you need a traditional text editor. Yet there is no GUI text editor to be found in the gOS distro. There is the entire OpenOffice suite and the GIMP image editor, a smattering of games, Rhythmbox for music and Xine for video, but no stand-alone mail client (you're encouraged by the iconography on the gOS desktop to use Gmail ...). Luckily there is a terminal program, which is named UXterm but looks suspiciously like plain ol' xterm, and with that you can bring up Vim or Nano, but that's pretty much it. Come to think of it, without a terminal in the GUI, and a console text editor, gOS would be in a heap of trouble, so it's good that they included one. But every gOS user's life would be a whole lot easier with a GUI text editor. Since you can add anything in the Ubuntu repositories, holes in gOS are easily filled.

But the more I used the new, green OS, the more I wondered whether the Everex (and everybody else) would be be better off with Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Debian ... or just about anything. While the Everex, with its 1.5 GHz VIA processor and 512 MB of RAM is underpowered when compared to most modern desktops, I regularly run Debian and Ubuntu -- both with GNOME -- and even Slackware with GNOME and Xfce on a machine with similar power but half the memory. And as I found out, the speed and lightness on resources that the Enlightenment window manager promises are just not there.

One thing I do like about gOS -- and this may be a feature of Ubuntu 7.10 for all I know -- is that when you're in a terminal and try to run an application you don't have installed, the terminal outputs what you do need to do to get it.

For instance, I tried to run the Joe editor:

$ joe

and I got the following:

The program 'Joe' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install joe
bash: joe: command not found

Whenever that message comes from, it's a very nice touch and is more than enough to get even a novice user going with apt.

But sheesh, at least give me Leafpad, Mousepad, Gedit ... whatever. Normally I would just add the editor I want, but for this evaluation of gOS, I pledged to stay with Google Docs; that's what they want you to use, so I'll use it. In the past, I've even gone as far as automatically posting a Google Docs item to one of my Blogger blogs, but that feature, in my opinion, is pretty much useless. Why not just write directly in Blogger? And since you can only auto-post from Google Docs to a single blog, the write-to-blog feature won't work for me. However, the post-to-blog feature does work with WordPress and LiveJournal blogs, plus a few others I've never heard of. That makes it more useful, but what I need is for Google Docs to act as more of a "dashboard" app for my various blogs -- I'd like to be able to publish from here to more than one blog (actually about six, and therein lies my sickness).

Update: I was all set to complain about Google Docs' browser-printing problem, but I just printed a document from Docs on my Windows PC, and what Docs did was turn my document into a great-looking PDF, which opened in Adobe Reader and was easily printed on paper. I'm not sure how seamless this integration is in Linux systems, but I plan to find out soon. Printing on actual paper seemed like the weak link in the whole Google Docs scheme, but it looks like they have that problem solved very well -- I may never use a traditional word processor again (especially if the promised offline extension of Docs is ever released).

Google Docs is a whole lot better than many people let on. I never need to insert tables or pictures into my documents. I write stuff. Stuff with words, and if I need to insert photos, I'm generally already in a blog post or on a printed page that I'm dealing with in a publishing program that is a whole lot bigger and more complicated than Google Docs. But Docs CAN insert images, tables, links and more. And it's not a bad HTML generator either. You can look at the HTML source at any time and copy/paste it into your Web content.

For the everyday writer of articles for publication, Google Docs is pretty kick-ass. When not connected to the Internet, or for those who don't want Google to see their documents, there's always the option of using OpenOffice, though I think AbiWord and Gnumeric are more in keeping with the lightness touted by gOS.

Getting back to gOS ... almost: Even though this is supposed to be about gOS, the bare-bones Linux distro relies heavily on the Firefox browser and links to various Web tools like GMail, Google Docs, Wikipedia (see, they're not all Google), Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, Google Maps and Picasa. So any review of gOS must take heavily into account the browser experience.

Since I work on four or five separate computers a day, working with docs online and using Web-based (or IMAP-delivered) e-mail is a must for me. I could add a standalone mail client to gOS as easily as I can with any Ubuntu or Debian system, but for now I won't. Even so, a user with gOS can pretty much make it do anything they could do on Ubuntu. Or they could wipe gOS from the drive and replace it ... or perhaps dual-boot.

One of the most attractive things about gOS and the Everex PC is that the combination promises full power management, making for a more green PC than most anything else out there on the desktop, so if you have the Everex PC, making gOS work the way you want it becomes a more attractive option. Hopefully Linux, as it matures even further, will include better power management for all motherboards.

More mail: I'm divided about the use of mail clients anyway. Most of the time, a Web portal is fine for me, especially if the entire session takes place in a secure connection (thanks, DSL Extreme). And I suspect that the vast majority of computer users have never heard of a mail client -- they barely know what Outlook is -- and have been accessing e-mail through the browser as long as they've had e-mail access, so gOS is going in the right direction there.

Gmail tip: To keep your Gmail session secure throughout, start out in your browser with the following:

https://mail.google.com

Note the "s" for a secure connection. You can also type https://gmail.com. Unsecure e-mail, particularly over unencrypted wireless connections, is a real problem, and it makes me reluctant to use Yahoo Mail because only the password is sent over a secure connection. The rest of your e-mail is right out there for others to intercept and use for ill.

Speaking about the greenish gOS desktop, the Enlightenment window manager isn't that bad. I think gOS could've been done just as well with Xfce -- maybe even better -- but I know that some Enlightenment developers are behind the project, and I'm always happy to see any desktop environment taken to the next level. At least it sets gOS apart from the dozen or so Xfce-based distros out there. But speedy, it's not.

One of the first things I did in gOS was add some virtual desktops; it's one of the best features that Windows doesn't offer, and I think the gOS people should ship the OS with more than a single desktop showing. I like the traditional four, so I left-clicked on the mouse and went to Desktop -- Virtual -- Configure Virtual Desktops. I could've added more than four, but I didn't. Switching between desktops is done with the usual ctrl-alt-arrow keys. You can't tell in gOS which desktop you're on, but at least they're there.

One feature I turned on in Enlightenment that I've never seen before in any other window manager (although I'm pretty sure it's there in most window managers) is the ability to switch or "flip" screens by moving the mouse pointer to the left or right edge of the screen, effectively scrolling to the next desktop. It's kind of neat. I don't know if I need it (I discovered it by accident after forgetting that I set it), but it may just be something that gOS users will grow to like. I had to turn the feature off because I kept triggering it by accident -- I like my Firefox windows to fill up the screen, and more than once I found myself on the next desktop when I didn't want to be there just yet. Ctrl-alt-arrow is good enough for me. But if you like the "flip screen" feature, you can make it look even more groovy with "animated flip."

One successful install, one less so: Both my regular test box (the VIA C3 Samuel-based Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client) and the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) are very Ubuntu friendly, meaning installs of Ubuntu-based distros generally go well on both. gOS installed like a champ on the thin client, but it won't install at all on the Gateway. On the latter, the live CD environment comes up fine (and the graphics are much snappier than on the Maxspeed), but when I do the install, I enter all the relevant information, and about six seconds into the actual install, the program crashes -- and that's it. Since I recently did an install of Ubuntu 7.10 on this very same laptop, it's curious, indeed, that gOS will not install. It's regretful, but at least I got gOS on one box. Hopefully the bug, whatever it is, will be squashed in future editions of gOS.

Potential problem: I'm running top in a terminal window on one of my four desktops, and it consistently shows Enlightenment using 9 percent to 12 percent of my CPU and 12 percent of my 256 MB of memory ... at idle. That's not exactly light. I'll have to go back to Ubuntu and Xubuntu and see how much CPU and memory GNOME and Xfce take up. I don't think it's this much. That said, gOS seems to be running as well as anything else, but not radically better. I'm able to switch windows in Firefox fairly quickly and do the same with my virtual desktops. Again, I'd have a better feel for how gOS compares if I could install it on my Gateway laptop.

So I decided to install the next distro I'm testing -- Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0. In case you haven't heard of Wolvix, it's a live CD based on Slackware that runs the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers. It can be used as a live CD, or put on the hard drive as a frugal install or traditional hard drive install. I opted for the traditional hard drive install.

The Wolvix installation process is excellent. I already had partitions set up, but the Wolvix installer offered to start up Gparted and make some or modify those I have. I also had the option of designating separate partitions for /home and other directories (I declined but would have configured a separate /home if I planned to use Wolvix long-term). The installer also gave me the option of booting Wolvix at the console or in a GUI (I chose the GUI), and it offered to put GRUB on the master boot record (I accepted). It also detected gOS, which allowed me to dual-boot. If whatever I install on the remaining partition messes up GRUB, I can easily reinstall it from Wolvix without having to geek out too much. (Note: Wolvix didn't do so well on GRUB, I instead used the gOS install disk to reinstall GRUB, and it recognized gOS perfectly).

I ran top in a terminal in Wolvix Hunter running Xfce, and at idle, with the Firefox window open on another screen (just like in gOS), the top running process was X at between 2 and 4.6 percent CPU and 7.6 percent memory. In short, a whole lot lighter than Enlightenment.

Maybe Wolvix isn't the best distro with which to compare gOS, but the Xfce vs. Enlightenment comparison is more than valid. Is it possible that the Everex PC could perform better with Xubuntu instead of gOS? (The answer is yes.)

Anyway, since Wolvix includes Fluxbox, I decided to go further and check top again. I opened Firefox, opened this document, switched to another window, opened a terminal and ran top. X was still the top running process and veered between 0.3 percent and 1.7 percent of CPU, and 6.1 percent of memory. Again, much better than Enlightenment in gOS.

To provide an even clearer picture of the performance of gOS and Enlightenment, I tested the load times of Firefox and OpenOffice Writer in a variety of Linux distributions and window managers. (Note: Slackware 12 doesn't include OpenOffice, and I haven't bothered to add it, so times are provided for KOffice's KWord -- which is generally quicker to load than OO). Load times were checked twice for each setup, since the second load of each of these two applications often happens much more quickly than the first.

Other variables that may have affected the times: Ubuntu 6.06 uses Firefox 1.5. All others used variants of Firefox 2.0. OpenOffice versions ranged from 2.0 in Ubuntu 6.06 to 2.3 in gOS.

The distros and window managers tested on the Maxspeed converted thin client (1 GHz VIA C3 processor, ECS eveM motherboard, 256 MB RAM) were:

gOS 1.0.1 (Enlightenment)
Ubuntu 6.0.6 LTS (GNOME)
Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Xfce and Fluxbox)
Slackware 12 (KDE, Xfce and Fluxbox)
Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME)
Xubuntu 7.04 (Xfce)
Debian 4.0 Etch (Xfce)

To sum up before the results are given, gOS was the slowest of the bunch -- even slower than Slackware under KDE -- and also slower than Ubuntu. It may be surprising, but Ubuntu with GNOME compares somewhat favorably to other distros running Xfce; you don't lose much speed by running GNOME as opposed to Xfce. Slackware and Debian with Xfce were another story; both were extremely fast when it came to loading applications. I didn't include Debian Etch with GNOME in the test because I didn't have it installed on one of the thin client's drives. But Debian compared very well to Slackware when both used the Xfce desktop environment. Curiously, Xubuntu -- Ubuntu's Xfce variant -- was slower than Debian with Xfce; in fact (as I already mentioned), Xubuntu didn't provide much of a speed advantage over regular Ubuntu.

I expected Wolvix to be the fastest, or at least as fast as Slackware. but it was buried by Slack. Not surprisingly, when Xfce was chosen for the window manager instead of KDE, Slackware was the undisputed winner, with a first-load time for Firefox of 8 seconds. That said, Ubuntu was slower, but not overly much, so if you prefer Ubuntu and GNOME to Slackware and Xfce, it's not like night and day in terms of application load time; it's more like noon and 2:30 p.m. -- a difference, but not so much as to make the slower of the two unusable.

The reason I even did this test was that from a "desktop feel" standpoint on my underpowered test box, gOS lacked the quickness of most of the other distros, including the Dapper and Feisty versions of Ubuntu.

And while Ubuntu has made some performance gains between 6.06 and 7.04, compatibility with hardware and desire for (or lack of interest in) more up-to-date apps should govern users' choice of the LTS vs. regular releases of the distro. For instance, on the converted thin client, hardware recognition is great in both versions, but on my Gateway laptop, ACPI and touchpad configuration work better in 7.10, and almost as well in 7.04. But ACPI management of the CPU fan only works with the kernel provided in 7.04.

Another aside: I saw practically no difference in application load times between Xfce and Fluxbox. So if you prefer Fluxbox, go ahead and use it, but you won't be gaining any performance over Xfce, at least in 256 MB of RAM. On the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which only has 64 MB of RAM, I ran Debian with Fluxbox for months, and it runs just as well now that I have Xfce on it. And the superior tools included in Xfce put it ahead of Fluxbox when it comes to usability on the desktop.

The Slackware KDE vs. Slackware Xfce numbers are the most startling; using Slack with Xfce will save considerable load time on slower systems.

On "modern" PCs, however, much of this is moot. With a dual-core processor and 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM, everything loads so quickly that for desktop use, personal preference for one window manager or another holds more sway than load times, which will be acceptably short in just about any desktop environment. And for those who like all the bells and widgets of KDE, if you have enough power to enjoy them, it's probably worth it. Just Konqueror alone, with its ability to function as a Web browser, file manager, file viewer, FTP client and configuration portal, makes KDE very attractive. If only I could get X configured properly in Slackware on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

Here are the test results:

gOS 1.0.1 (Enlightenment)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 30 sec.
                 2nd load: 15 sec.
OpenOffice 2.3   1st load: 56 sec.
                 2nd load: 21 sec.  

Ubuntu 6.06 (GNOME)
Firefox 1.5.0.13 1st load: 21 sec.
                 2nd load: 10 sec.
Open Office 2.0  1st load: 44 sec.
                 2nd load: 26 sec.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.6 1st load: 19 sec.
                2nd load: 12 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2  1st load: 37 sec.
                2nd load: 23 sec.

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (Fluxbox)
Firefox 2.0.0.6 1st load: 22 sec.
                2nd load: 12 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2  1st load: 42 sec.
                2nd load: 23 sec.

Slackware 12 (KDE)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load: 24 sec.
                2nd load: 14 sec.
KOffice         1st load: 19 sec.
                2nd load: 16 sec.

Slackware 12 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.8 1st load:  8 sec.
                2nd load:  8 sec.
KOffice         1st load: 15 sec.
                2nd load: 13 sec.

Slackware 12 (Fluxbox)
Firefox 2.0.0.8  1st load: 9 sec.
                 2nd load: 9 sec.
Koffice         1st load: 15 sec.
                2nd load: 13 sec.

Xubuntu 7.04 (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 18 sec.
                 2nd load:  9 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2   1st load: 36 sec.
                 2nd load: 22 sec.

Ubuntu 7.04 (GNOME)
Firefox 2.0.0.10 1st load: 17 sec.
                 2nd load: 10 sec.
OpenOffice 2.2   1st load: 40 sec.
                 2nd load: 18 sec.

Debian 4.0 Etch (Xfce)
Firefox 2.0.0.8  1st load: 10 sec.
                 2nd load: 10 sec.
Open Office 2.0  1st load: 17 sec.
                 2nd load: 17 sec.

As I say above the biggest thing to emerge is the speed advantage of Slackware and Debian, especially with Xfce. The relative slowness of Slackware 11-based Wolvix was puzzling. And while I didn't have OpenOffice installed in Slackware, and KOffice is pretty much a quicker program, I included its load numbers for comparison's sake. I did first and second loads of all apps because the second load is often -- but not always -- much quicker. Times for office suites were the number of seconds it took to open up a new OO Writer or KWord document.

While I didn't expect Debian to be slow, I also didn't expect it to be so comparable to Slackware. That's good news for Debian users.

But the biggest thing to come out of this test is that standard Ubuntu pretty much crushes gOS. The new, hot distro may be green in color, but it's incomplete and slow.

That said, the idea of doing most work in the browser and drawing on Web-based portals for not just e-mail and "social networking" purposes, but also document creation, photo editing and storage is becoming more attractive and viable all the time. In this realm, gOS is making a big "idea" contribution to the OS game, but in terms of sheer performance, polish and basic tools, it has a long way to go.

The average user -- even newbies -- would be better off with Ubuntu or Xubuntu on the Everex. And as these tests show, the Xfce desktop environment, in most instances, provides more bang for your MHz.

I wanted gOS to be great, but when it comes to Linux and BSD distros, greatness only comes with time and painstaking effort. After all the hype over the gOS-Everex-Wal-Mart effort -- some of it even generated by yours truly -- I didn't expect to see gOS beaten by every single established distro I threw at it. I don't usually do extensive time tests, but the sludginess of gOS drove me to it.

And while I expected Slackware and Debian to acquit themselves well, I wasn't prepared for out-of-the-box Ubuntu to best gOS. It wouldn't make as great a story -- "Wal-Mart chooses Ubuntu" -- but it would be way better for those buying the $199 box from the world's largest retailer.

I've been using Damn Small Linux a lot lately, especially the recent 4.0 release, and now 4.1 is out.

Probably the biggest change in 4.0 was the new, more intuitive implementation of the JWM (Joe's Window Manager) desktop. Fluxbox used to be the default window manager for DSL -- don't worry, it's still there and easily switched to -- but with the new JWM version of DSL, there are actually folder icons on the desktop that can be clicked open to run programs and open files.

On the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), DSL runs better than anything else I've tried on it. Even with 64 MB of RAM. I'd normally use Puppy Linux, but this low-spec laptop runs better under DSL -- and Puppy doesn't recognize the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card, while DSL (and Debian, for that matter) does. Right now I'm running Debian Etch with Xfce (MUCH more about this later) on the hard drive and DSL 4.0 from the live CD. When I up the Compaq's memory to the lofty maximum of 144 MB, this thing's gonna really fly (and yes, I can hear you all groaning right now).

New in 4.1, among many things, is the ability to boot a frugal install (a small number of large files on the hard drive instead of the usual "full" install) with the toram option (toram loads the entire DSL OS into RAM for faster loading of applications).

DSL 4.1 also makes it easier to accommodate multiple users and to automatically set the time with a network server when booting -- both very much needed. The one problem I have is that DSL assumes I'm on the U.S. East Coast when grabbing the time. I'll have to hack in there and figure out how to make it set West Coast time.

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.

It's not in the "one small step for man" category, but my quest to run something -- anything -- from Red Hat on my VIA C3 Samuel-equipped test box has finally been successful. But not without a lot of effort.

The current versions of Fedora and Red Hat clones Scientific Linux and CentOS -- live CDs, install CDs, net-install CDs -- wouldn't just refuse to install, they wouldn't even boot. I tried special boot codes. Nothing.

Then it dawned on me: CentOS, the leading clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, doesn't just offer its current release, CentOS 5. It also has versions 2, 3 and 4 -- all still receiving support in the form of security updates. Maybe I could go back in time, in Linux time anyway, to an era when Red Hat wasn't so hostile to the VIA C3 Samuel.

So I downloaded and burned the CentOS 4.4 Live CD. It wouldn't boot, either.

Not to be deterred, I downloaded the ISOs for the first discs of CentOS 3.9 and 2.1.

CentOS 2.1 downloaded first, and unlike versions 5 and 4.4, it booted successfully into a graphical installer. Everything looked good, but I wanted to install CentOS on one of my hard drive's pre-existing partitions. The installer wouldn't continue unless I set the target partition as the root partition. I didn't know whether or not that would break the triple-boot situation that I have going on this drive (currently Ubuntu/Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17). I already blew out GRUB with the Puppy install and didn't feel like going through that again -- this week, at least. (I was able to get everything to boot again after a bit of amateur hackery. Through it all, Slackware always booted, by the way.)

For those who don't know, CentOS is a nearly exact copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- as close as the CentOS people can get it (and that's very, very close) for users who want to use RHEL but don't want to pay Red Hat for support they either don't want or need.

Now that CentOS 5 (and by extension RHEL 5) is out, CentOS 2 seems positively ancient. But it's not: The Distrowatch announcement of CentOS 2 Final was on May 25, 2004. That's three years ago for those a little shaky on the math.

The first ISO of my CentOS 3.9 install set finally came through. I swapped in a hard drive that would be dedicated to this install -- no dual-booting.

I chose the graphical install. It worked. This version, unlike CentOS 2, allowed me to configure my wheel mouse. A good sign. Throughout the install process, the help on the left side of the screen is appreciated.

The next screen allowed me to choose from four types of installs: Personal Desktop, Workstation, Server and Custom. I chose Personal Desktop.

And since I had a whole drive devoted to this install, I chose Automatically Partition on the Disk Partitioning Setup screen.

In Boot Loader Configuration, there is the provision to password-protect the GRUB bootloader. It sounded like a good idea, but I didn't need it at present.

I kept going in the installer -- this is Anaconda, I believe -- and as graphical installers go, it's a very good one. I like how it shows the number of packages being installed, how many are done, how many are left, all listed with times elapsed and remaining.

My geeky self was getting a little giddy at the thought of running something that smells of Red Hat. CentOS 3.9 may not be CentOS 5, but this 3.9 release is dated July 26, 2007 -- not even two months old. And according to CentOS, it will be supported with maintenance updates until Oct. 31, 2010. Even CentOS 2 is still being supported with security patches, and that support will continue until May 31, 2009. So if CentOS does work for your setup, you can stay with it. I imagine every release of CentOS will be supported as long as Red Hat supports the releases on which they're based. In other words, a long time.

I'll take it.

If, for some reason, you have hardware frozen in time (and I most certainly do) that runs well on one of these older distributions, it's nice to know there are distributions out there that are committed to true long-term support.

(A few days pass)

I finally got to use CentOS 3.9. I know it's old, and yes, there are quite a few apps that don't work so well. OpenOffice is version 1.1.2, meaning no ODF support. It's strange that OO is not even version 2, but instead of GAIM there's the very-new Pidgin on the system. Must have something to do with security. I like Pidgin and use it every day, so nothing's lost there.

One problem: There's no way, no how, to get AbiWord on this thing, and after screwing around with yum and rpm for awhile, I did get the flash plugin installed but struck out with the Ted word processor, even though I had a bona fide RPM of it. It installed, but then it wouldn't run, even from a terminal. And I couldn't find the GNOME app that lets you add things to the menus.

I took a peek at Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" for a quick how-to on RPMs, and it doesn't seem like I'm doing anything wrong, but Ted still won't load.

Also, XMMS didn't work with .mp3 files (it's not supposed to -- for some reason Red Hat purposefully doesn't include the proper CODECs). But it won't work with .ogg files, either. Nothing happens. And while my sound does work -- the test sound plays perfectly -- there's no audio in any browser (SeaMonkey is the default here). Hmmmm.

But there are many good things bout this ol' Red Hat clone:

The install is on three CDs, and I never needed the third one. It's nice to get both the GNOME and KDE desktops installed by default and be able to experience both without having to do much of anything. Both GNOME and KDE run pretty well on my old hardware (I think the VIA C3 is running a lot slower than its rated 1 GHz -- maybe half that, and I'm working with a 133 MHz FSB, 256 MB of RAM).

It's kind of cool how in GNOME the menus show Gedit, but in KDE you get Kate. Pretty slick.

Konqueror runs way faster here than in newer distros. I think that the browser/file manager got some kind of major makeover, because I remember it being this fast in the old, now-orphaned MepisLite but was surprised to find out how slow it has been in recent distros (Slackware 12, SimplyMepis 5). It's fast here, all right, but not so great on most Web pages -- CSS rendering isn't working all that great.

The Add/Remove Applications utility works very well. I used it to beef up KDE with ... everything they had. Everything, in this case didn't include KOffice. I understand that this is due to Red Hat's decision to support OpenOffice above all other office software. No AbiWord, no Ted, and no KOffice. That's a mistake -- Red Hat (and by extension CentOS) would do its users nothing but good by giving them a choice in office suites. I'd be OK with it if they were only shipping GNOME, but if you include KDE, you really should put KOffice with it.

I couldn't get my network printer to work with the Red Hat/CentOS utility, but now that I've used the CUPS Web-browser interface successfully a few times, I went in that direction and got networked printing going in about two minutes.

The GIMP is back at version 1.2. The good thing is that it loads in 15 seconds. That's way faster than the current version loads in just about any OS I use.

The older version of OpenOffice, on the other hand, is much slower. It takes a full minute and then some to load the Writer application. The OO team must've tightened it up a bit since then, because 2.2 runs better than this older version. And I'm uncomfortable without ODF support.

RHEL/CentOS desktop users -- not that Red Hat has much stake in or focus on the desktop -- pretty much have to make due with OpenOffice. I'm sure there's a way to add KOffice, AbiWord, even Ted, but the official repositories don't have those applications. And as I write above, I was unsuccessful in getting Ted to install. Well, it's installed -- I just can't run it.

It could be me. This is my first experience with anything derived from Red Hat, and I didn't exactly spend the weekend studying up on it. But so far, Debian and Ubuntu are obviously easier to deal with when it comes to adding packages. Even Slackware is easier. I figured out how to add a Slack package pretty easily. I'm doing something wrong with rpm and yum, I just don't know what.

Otherwise, both the GNOME and KDE environments in CentOS 3.9 are quite complete. All the tools you'd expect in the somewhat older incarnations of these desktops are there.

One RPM that did install right was Flash. I followed the instructions from the Adobe site, and upon relaunching Seamonkey, I had Flash video. Still no sound, but could at least watch a silent YouTube.

For a moment, if I can forget all the stuff that didn't work -- sound, installing software NOT in the main repositories -- the Red Hat/CentOS desktop would make an excellent install for corporate environments. It seems solid and has an excellent installer. And the lengthy period of support in the form of security patches is exactly what a typical business needs. Do you think my company-maintained Windows XP box gets a visit from the IT department once a month unless I have a problem? Once a year? It NEVER gets any attention unless I ask for it.

That's the reality out there, and the more a Linux desktop can have a set-it-and-forget-it configuration, the better it will fare in most corporate settings. Nothing that is re-released every six months -- or even every year -- will ever take hold in most office situations. And some people don't like change. That's what Red Hat (and, again, by extension CentOS) is all about in the server market.

The same philosophy applies to the office desktop -- keep it simple, keep it the same, keep it secure. On Windows, nothing is all that simple or secure -- but it sure is the same. With that in mind, a little sameness on the desktop isn't such a bad thing when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of users in a single company.

Until I get a better testing environment running (and I am close), I'll only be able to speculate on how much CentOS 5 has improved the desktop experience. I suspect quite a bit. But based on what I see in 3.9, if you want a secure, stable desktop workhorse, you could do a whole lot worse than the rock-solid CentOS.

Thinking back to my Vector Linux 5.8 Standard install of a month or so ago, I decided to try it again. This time I wouldn't use the Puppy 2.14 live CD to make my partitions and would instead use the Vector CD all the way. First of all, while I like the installer overall, it makes you do your own partitioning in Cfdisk with no provision for a "standard" partitioning scheme, the latter option -- available in many other distros -- very helpful to new users and those uncomfortable with manual partitioning.

I'm comfortable enough, so I went ahead and made swap, root and home partitions, in that order, on the hard drive. Then I was able to deselect some packages I didn't want (games mostly), and the install continued. At one point during the process, my screen went blank, but the install appeared unaffected. Not comforting, for sure. Turns out it was the screensaver, and the moving the mouse didn't affect it. Hitting the space bar did the trick, though.

Once the files all loaded, it was time for the extensive Vector configuration, including everything from mouse to monitor resolution, with a whole lot in between. Besides creating a root password and deciding which services start up at boot, one of the great things in Vector is the option to run the /tmp directory in RAM. I've heard that this can be a problem if you plan to do a lot of compiling, but since I don't imagine I'll do much of that, I gladly checked off this feature. Anything to speed up the system.

One thing was a bit unusual: When creating user accounts, the system said they had to include at least one number. I picked my usual login and added a 1 to it. Weird, but not that big of a deal.

Vector's Xfce desktop isn't of the minimalist style. Its lower panel includes a bunch of icons, a clickable desktop-switcher, clock, volume control and more. I'm not as in love with the look of Vector as I am Xubuntu, but I'm definitely in love with everything working at first boot, unlike my recent Xubuntu 7.04 install.

My first test: A YouTube video. Flash is included in the distro, so I try a video. It's choppy, but that's to be expected on my hardware, which doesn't handle video or audio especially well. I try an MP3 audio track. XMMS plays it -- and plays it well. The audio is excellent, with no skipping. Mplayer in Xubuntu doesn't do this well. And unlike Xubuntu, Vector has no problem playing an MP3 right away -- no codec downloads needed.

One thing's for sure, Vector is well-equipped for multimedia with XMMS, Mplayer, Xine, Graveman, mhWaveEdit and RipperX. It looks like it can handle DVDs, though I don't have anything better than a CD drive, so I can't check it.

Abiword, Gnumeric and one of my favorite image editors, mtPaint, are included. These are all applications of appropriate weight for an Xfce system. J-Pilot is there, too, and as a Palm handheld user, that's a nice touch. I'd love it if it actually worked. I'll have to dig out the Palm and give it a try.

Xfce's Thunar file manager opens almost instantly. Most apps respond about the same as they do in Xubuntu, some a little slower (AbiWord, Firefox), others a good bit faster (the GIMP). But all in all, I don't see any great speed boost over Xubuntu.

In addition to Mousepad, there's the Adie editor. I'm not familiar with it, but it loads quick and looks promising. For browsing, Firefox is joined by Dillo, Opera and SeaMonkey. It's nice to have Web-browsing choices, especially because most users -- including myself -- spend a lot of time on the Web. Grsync is included for backups -- another nice thing to have.

Right after the install, I wasn't yet ready to do the first software update, but I did want to see how Vector dealt with shutdown and my box's ACPI power-management situation. Vector passes that test and turns everything off. If only Xubuntu did as well (it doesn't, in case you didn't get my inference).

(Days pass ...)

I booted into Vector after a week of ... other things (Slackware, Debian, Xubuntu, actual work), and my network connection didn't work. Like I would do in Slackware, I went to a terminal window, did su to root and ran netconfig. It didn't work. I did it a couple of other times using Vector's VASM configuration application. VASM is kind of clunky -- it's pretty much the same thing you'd get from doing the various Slackware configuration scripts from the command line, except in a GUI window -- but I guess it works. It needs polishing, but it's better than nothing.

After a couple of times through the configuration, I got networking back. I don't know what happened, but it's something I'll be keeping an eye out for.

The Vector boot manager is pretty nice -- and a little different from what I'm used to. Vector Standard doesn't ship with Fluxbox -- I wish it did, but there is the provision to add desktop environments via Gslapt and then choose a different one by clicking Session. If you click System, however, you can select a console login, and since I set up Vector to boot to the GUI (you can choose a console login, I think), I like the option of logging in to a console from the GUI. When I did start at a console, I found Vi, Nano and Midnight Commander. But no Mutt. I imagine that Mutt is easy to find for Slack-related distros, and after adding an SMTP program, I could run my mail from the console.

Now that I've done at least a fifth of the software updating I need to do in my newish Slackware system with upgradepkg at the command line, I have to say that Gslapt in Vector is easier to use. It works much like Synaptic. Of course, installing Gslapt in Slackware would make both systems equal. I could also use Slapt-get, but I don't know much about it.

I like Vector Standard's focus on Xfce. It uses the latest version of the desktop environment, and all the apps seemed to be up-to-date as well. From my limited experience, it's hard to find up-to-date packages for Slackware that aren't already included in the distro. I'd love to add AbiWord to Slackware, but I can't seem to find all the dependencies on Linuxpackages.net. Nor is its version of Abi the latest. But Vector (and ZenWalk, for that matter) champion AbiWord and offer version 2.4.6. Maybe I can get the packages from the Vector or ZenWalk repositories and install them in Slack.

Fluxbox in Vector I used Gslapt to add Fluxbox, and it's the best-looking out-of-the-box Fluxbox setup I've seen so far. The background looks the same as in Vector Standard's Xfce desktop -- a nice blue pattern with the Vector logo. The default "system style" is Magick-X, and it looks and works great. In Vector, as in all distros, applications totally speed up with Fluxbox as opposed to Xfce. The GIMP loads in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds in Xfce. I noted similar gains with the rest of the applications.

Vector does offer a KDE version -- and that is the direction I think they're going in, with the Xfce "Standard" version fading somewhat into the background. I hope I'm wrong and that Vector keeps developing its Xfce platform.

Still, I can't say enough how Fluxbox really, really rocks in Vector. Most stock Fluxbox configurations are heavy on gray, but not this one. I'm sure the expert Fluxbox user can make the window manager look this good and function this well on any system, but it's very nice to have such a positive experience right away. It's so good that I think Vector should do a Fluxbox-only spin of the distro. At the very least, Fluxbox should be included in the ISO -- it's too good not to.

Package managment: Some complain there's "no package management" in Slackware. Well, there is. It's not as comprehensive as apt in Debian, but it's there. Vector, like other Slack-derived distros, makes it even easier for users by including Gslapt and pointing it to the distro's own repository. And you can still use pkgtool and all the other Slackware packaging commands, but for a straight update of the system, Gslapt does a fine job. So Vector is easier to maintain than stock Slackware, but it's nowhere as easy to update as Debian, Ubuntu and the like.

One thing, though: Debian has way more packages than Slackware, and while the Vector and ZenWalk crews are doing their own packaging (a great service, to be sure), you might have trouble finding your favorite apps. On the plus side, Vector has a terrific selections of pre-installed apps and handles multimedia better than average.

Why Vector -- why not ZenWalk? I've wanted to test ZenWalk for awhile, but the current version, 4.6, will not boot on my VIA C3 Samuel-based box. I still have a 4.4.1 disc, and that did install. I tried to do a software update with Gslapt on it, knowing full well that I would probably break the thing. I did. I guess ZenWalk just wasn't made for this CPU. I just heard that ZenWalk 4.8 is in beta. I'll try it out, but I'm not holding my breath about it booting.

The Linux travails of a VIA C3 Samuel CPU: For the record, I've had no problems booting this CPU with Vector or Slackware. However, this box won't boot any Red Hat-based distros. Nor will it boot anything based on BSD. That leaves out Fedora, CentOS, Scientific Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DesktopBSD and PC-BSD. Gentoo does boot but dies during the net configuration part of the install. Everything derived from Debian does boot and run. So it's a big deal for a distro to actually boot and install on this box. If I ever get my Gateway (Pentium-based) laptop fixed, it'll be a whole new distro-testing ballgame, but for now there's a lot of the Linux and BSD world out there that's closed to me.

But if I can run Debian and all its derivatives, Slackware and most of its derivatives, that leaves quite a lot to look at.

Community: The Vector forum has 10,296 posts (going back to the very end of 2006, with other forums before that); ZenWalk's forum has 58,850 (going back to about March 2006); and the Slackware portion of LinuxQuestions.org has 11,136 posts. I don't want to draw any conclusion from these numbers, especially because it doesn't take into account alternate forums and Usenet newsgroups, but at minimum I will say that there are active communities for all of these distros. And especially for Vector and ZenWalk, I see nothing but growth as far as community support and involvement.

Conclusions

Best things about Vector: While I don't think Vector has the best looking Xfce desktop out there, it's far from the worst. Vector is fast, though not appreciably faster than other distros running Xfce. App choice is excellent; Vector gets points for including MtPaint as a low-spec companion to the GIMP, and there are plenty of browsers and editors. I haven't tried Xara Xtreme -- another graphics editor -- but it's nice to be introduced to a new app. Vector excels in multimedia apps and includes Flash and the ability to play MP3s out of the box. Adding Flash to Firefox isn't as easy as it should be. In Ubuntu, I've been able to do it easily, but for most distros you have to deal with tarballs, compiling and the like. I just tried to get Flash working in Debian by using Synaptic, but it doesn't work. Yes, even Debian isn't perfect, and I prefer to have Flash pre-installed, even though it's not open-source (though it is free). Also, thanks to the Vector crew for including the very-light Dillo browser. It's a handy app to have around when you want to instantly open a browser.

Another good thing: Vector is available preinstalled on PCs that cost well south of $200. I like the commitment they show to low-priced hardware. Best of all, once Fluxbox is installed, Vector still looks great and only gets better when it comes to performance.

What needs work: Gslapt is good, but I'd love a friendlier package management front end. Vector's VASM configuration utility is kind of bare-bones and not all that elegant. The installer needs to hold newbies' hands a little more, especially when it comes to drive partitioning. Also, I'd like the choice between LILO and GRUB for my bootloader to be made during the install, not later. Another thing, and this isn't that big a deal: The pointer in Vector is a little large for my taste. I imagine this is configurable in Xfce, but I'm used to smaller pointers.

Final words: When it comes to easier-to-use renditions of Slackware, I suggest trying both Vector and ZenWalk to see what works best with your hardware. If speed is important, and if your hardware isn't new, any of these Xfce-based distros can really bring some sanity to your computing life. Vector with Xfce is really good, but Vector with Fluxbox is excellent. Try it.

(Screen shot of Puppy 2.16.1 with Open Office 2.2 -- notice the six OO icons in the upper-center of the desktop)

Everybody loves a new Puppy. And those behind the Puppy Linux distro are happy to oblige, releasing a new version every couple of months. For the user or reviewer, it's a lot to keep up with. Luckily, upgrading is as easy as popping in a new CD. Puppy excels as a live-CD Linux distribution, and for those who want to run it in a "frugal" install to a hard drive, upgrading is as easy as copying a few new files. For traditional hard drive installs (recommended for low RAM), you have to reinstall the whole system, but just like with Damn Small Linux, even that process is quick, easy and intuitive. Or you can choose not to upgrade and stay with the Puppy that works for you.

I liked what I saw in the Puppy 2.15CE "Community Edition," but felt it strayed too far from the traditional Puppy, and I was glad to be back in familiar territory with 2.16. I know that Puppy 2.17 is already out, but the crew behind Puppy is releasing new versions quicker than I can evaluate them.

So even though new Puppies are being born like puppies themselves, I'm a person of habit and familiarity, and I've pretty much stuck with Puppy 2.14 all this time.

After the IceWM window manager used in 2.15CE, Puppy 2.16 brought the distro back to its JWM roots, and the biggest thing 2.16 adds is the ability to encrypt the pup_save file (the single large file that holds the user's files and settings). This adds a measure of security to Puppy that wasn't previously available. As Carla Schroder of "Linux Cookbook" fame is fond of writing, s/he who has physical access to the machine owns the machine, and before encryption was added, the only way to keep pup_save secure was to store it on removable media and take it with you.

While working in Puppy 2.16, I placed my pup_save file on the same hard drive as Debian 4.0 Etch. When I originally partitioned the drive for Debian, I elected to have the /home directory on its own partition. And at the end of my first Puppy session, when creating the pup_save, I chose to locate it on the same partition. When I subsequently created a /home file for Puppy in which to save the SFS file for Open Office, Puppy somehow merged it with the /home file in Debian, so now my Puppy files show up in my Debian /home file -- which is more than OK by me because I can more easily navigate to everything I might need in the Debian portion of my system. I'm not sure if this would've happened if I had not created the /home folder (which I did since SFS files must go in /mnt/home, and I had /mnt but no /home), but so far it's working out great. Later I learned that you're not supposed to create /home. Either it's there and you can use it, or you don't need it. Despite my error, everything worked anyway,

But it's not all good in Puppy 2.16. The Gparted partition manager, the program that makes Puppy Linux so impressive as a live CD, is somewhat broken in 2.16. It scans for drives, but instead of finding them in a minute or so, takes much longer. For awhile I thought that it never found them, but I left Gparted running on my second desktop and returned sometime later to find all my partitions waving hello and waiting to be tinkered with. I don't know what is causing the slowdown, but I suspect it's the updated version of Gparted in this version of Puppy, and I hope the problem is addresses in subsequent releases of the distro.

Until then, I'm happy to keep the Puppy 2.14 CD handy for when a partitioning job arises and I don't have a full 15 minutes to wait for the partitions to show up in Gparted.

Visually, Puppy 2.16 does move the distro forward. Scroll bars and other little desktop features look slightly different (perhaps a tweak to JWM). 2.16 does look more modern and finished -- perhaps a concession to all the eye candy of 2.15CE.

For those unfamiliar with Puppy, one of its biggest features is that it is designed primarily to be run as a live CD, in many cases loading entirely into RAM (if you've got enough) and running extremely fast. With enough memory, you can even remove the CD during the computing session in order to burn a music or data CD, or to rip music or date from a disc. And yes, Puppy includes all the software to do these things.

One thing Puppy remains is robust. It's as solid as it was during my monthlong Thin Puppy Torture Test, during which Puppy 2.14 ran without a hard drive or storage of any kind besides RAM.

New in 2.16

-- Pmount replaces the superior MUT as the default mounting tool for all kinds of drives (hard disk, floppy, CD and flash). Thankfully both remain in the Puppy menus.

-- There's a new RAM-based filesystem designed, as in past Pups, to minimize writes to the disk, especially to flash drives, extending their lives indefinitely. I'm not qualified to go into the specifics of the filesystem, but I'm happy to know that the Puppy people are working to improve the very basis of the system.

-- As mentioned before, toolbars and windows look more modern. But JWM is still the window manager, and the great ROX Filer remains the file manager. Once you experience the speed of ROX on an older system, it's hard to even wait for Thunar to do its thing.

-- New since Puppy 2.15, and continuing in 2.16, is the use of SFS-based applications -- squash files that make it much easier to install large programs such as OpenOffice. Before the SFS packages appeared, I always had trouble installing bigger applications with the PET and DotPup packaging systems. I never seemed to have enough memory. Problem solved.

Puppy vs. Damn Small Linux

While I love Damn Small Linux and in a number of ways prefer it, Puppy wins in many key areas. It has many applications I need. Puppy also is built on some of the best configuration utilities of any Linux distribution I've used.

First of all, I need a photo-editing program that re-sizes JPGs, and mtPaint is the lightest, best Linux app I know of that can do the job. DSL's Xpaint doesn't come close. (MtPaint is also part of Vector Linux and is available in packages for Debian-, RPM- and Slackware-based distros).

For an instant-messaging client, Puppy's GAIM (now called Pidgin in its latest version) works with AOL's AIM system and Yahoo Messenger, as well as IRC. DSL's NAIM works on AOL only, I believe.

I prefer DSL's default mail client, Sylpheed, over Puppy's SeaMonkey. But I've already installed the Sylpheed PET package in Puppy, so I can use the mail program of my choice.

DSL offers my preferred console text editor, Nano. I have yet to find Nano for Puppy. An older version of Puppy -- One-Bone Puppy (hard to find but worth burning a CD of) does include vi (as does DSL), and I'd like to see either better console support in Puppy included in the base distro or easily added in bulk as an SFS file or with PET packages. For me, that would include fetchmail, procmail, mutt, msmtp, Midnight Commander, Lynx and Elinks, Nano, Vim and Emacs. I know at least a few of them are available for Puppy, but I'd really like it to be easier to run Puppy from the command line.

Still, I understand that Puppy is meant to be, well, Puppy-like, usually equipped with a single program for every task, sometimes up to three, but not 30. And I've discovered many fine apps in Puppy and DSL that I would've otherwise never known about.

One of the things I noticed in Puppy 2.15CE but can't yet find in 2.16 is the ability to easily change which app is launched by the system's generic desktop icons -- say having Sylpheed instead of SeaMonkey launch when the "e-mail" icon is clicked. But for the most part, I'm happy with Puppy's app choices, so this is far from a big issue with me.

The single best thing about Puppy 2.16 -- and the best reason to upgrade -- is the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all your data in Puppy. In the process, this feature adds a kind of password protection that was lacking in the Puppy environment. It's not the same as separate Unix-style accounts (you still run as root), but it does offer some measure of security and allows for multiple users on a single system. There are provisions for normal, strong or no encryption, and with either choice, multiple pup_save files can be created and chosen from during booting.

To bypass all current pup_save files and create a new one, at the boot prompt, type:

puppy pfix=ram

and create the new pup_save when shutting down or rebooting.

The right tool for the job

Throughout the time I've been using Puppy and Damn Small Linux, I learned the value of using the appropriate apps for the given computing environment. This means paying attention to everything from hardware and the choice of window manager to an awareness of shared libraries and the user's needs from the platform.

That means AbiWord as the word processor in Puppy, Ted in DSL.

But sometimes you need the full power of, say, OpenOffice. As previously mentioned, installing large applications via the established PET package and Dotpup methods is often difficult. The filesystem in Puppy is prone to running out of space during the install.

But with an SFS squash file, installation of large programs goes much more smoothly. I downloaded the OpenOffice 2.2 SFS file into /mnt/home (just put it in /mnt if there is no /mnt/home in your Puppy system). After a reboot, a dialog box opens and asks which SFS files you'd like to load -- up to three at any given time.

Once you have successfully placed the SFS file in the proper directory and Puppy acknowledges its presence, upon the next boot, the entire up-to-date OpenOffice suite (word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation program and some kind of mathematical-equation generator) is there -- in the menus and as icons on the desktop.

Whether or not a suite the size of OpenOffice is in keeping with the Puppy ethos is debatable, but if you need what OpenOffice offers (and for me that's a word processor with way more features than the still-great AbiWord), Puppy can accommodate you.

Even so, OpenOfice runs surprisingly well under Puppy, loading much faster than in Ubuntu, for instance.

Word processor vs. text editor

When it comes to the many word processors that don't make it easy to use typographical (or "smart") quotes and em (long) dashes, I find it hard to see what they offer over a plain text editor. (I know: bold, italic, margin control ...) Since beginning this review, I've been using AbiWord more than any other program for writing, and it handles most of what I'm doing on the Linux, Mac and Windows platforms (and yes, I use all three on a very regular basis).

Certainly when it comes to items for Web publication, HTML coding takes care of all formatting, and "straight" quotation marks are perfectly OK, there's no need for a word processor, and the only thing better than a bare-bones text editor is one that automates as much of the HTML coding process as possible without adding lots of extraneous code. This is where the HTML-generating Composor portion of Puppy's SeaMonkey suite fails me.

I haven't had much success, either, with the "save to HTML" options in OpenOffice Write or AbiWord. But to be honest, I haven't spent much time trying to make them work in my situation. What I need to do is be able to copy and past from the document I'm working on and have the HTML come with it. In these apps, usually the text itself is all I get, and to bring the HTML along with it, I need to open a text editor and delete the HTML I don't need.

And if what I need is a text editor, why not just use one in the first place?

Actually -- and this is getting more off-track -- the "save as HTML" option in the online Google Docs program is a pretty good way to generate HTML. It makes up for the Google program's shortcomings when it comes to creating docs for any medium besides the Web.

So the short answer is: I wish AbiWord was better, and it's nice to have OpenOffice, even though it's slow to load (about half a minute compared to Abi's 5 to 8 seconds).

Have I mentioned MTpaint? It's the best lightweight image editor in the Linux world, loading in 3 to 5 seconds (as opposed to the GIMP's 60-second load time). MTpaint uses far fewer resources yet manages to do almost everything I need when it comes to cropping and sizing images for Web publication. Not only do I use it in Puppy, but I grab the Debian package of MTpaint for all my Ubuntu and Debian installs. It's that good.

Vector Linux 5.8 Standard also includes MTpaint -- so there's a Slackware package out there, too. MTpaint is another example of an application appropriate for the system it's running on and the tasks it helps the user perform.

On the Internet

For me, Web browsing, e-mail and FTP are a large part of what I do in any OS. Puppy introduced me, way back in version 2.13, to SeaMonkey, the Mozilla Internet suite modeled after the old Netscape Communicator. SeaMonkey includes a Web browser, e-mail client and HTML editor, all in a single application.

I find Web browsing in SeaMonkey almost identical to using Firefox, and Puppy always has Flash enabled. One thing I enjoy about SeaMonkey is its ability to use Internet search engine by typing a query in the main URL box and clicking on "search," instead of hitting Return. Internet Explorer 6 offers the same feature. (Firefox uses separate boxes for URLs and search.) And now that I have IE6 configured, like Puppy, to use Google as my default search engine, I use the feature many times per day.

SeaMonkey's mail program doesn't excite me as much on my low-spec hardware. I prefer the added speed of Sylpheed, which I easily installed in Puppy with a PET package. But for more modern systems, SeaMonkey's mail client is as good as Thunderbird.

There's also Dillo, the very-low-spec Web browser that loads in 2 to 5 seconds on any Linux box. For quick Web browsing on pages that don't rely on Flash, Java and heavy CSS, Dillo's speed can't be beat.

Puppy also includes a text-based browser, but I prefer Lynx and Elinks -- both available as easy-to-install PET packages.

More than one way to run Puppy

Recently I've had the opportunity to run Puppy as a live CD, as a "frugal" install (in which the three main Puppy files are copied to the hard drive, where they become a full Linux filesystem upon booting) and with the "standard" install (not surprisingly like a traditional install of GNU/Linux).

The latter method, while not as easily upgradable as the first two, did allow me to comfortable run Puppy in 64 MB of RAM. (As always, a Linux swap file outside of your main hard-drive partition can be your best friend.) While I had trouble in the past running Puppy in 128 MB with no swap (or pup_save or any hard drive at all), with either a swap file or a large pup_save file, the distro is quite comfortable in 64 MB of RAM. It's also not bad with 233 MHz of CPU, although Damn Small Linux is just that much better tuned to such low power -- and that has as much to do with the apps chosen for the two distros as it does with any underlying code, scripts or tools.

And while most modern Linux systems try to autoconfigure as much as possible (I've yet to find a distro that won't recognize my Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card), Puppy is -- hands down -- the best distro for configuring what the system doesn't catch at boot.

The Puppy "Wizards" for networking (wired and wireless), printing, sounds, graphics and modems are exclusive to the platform, and they just plain work. And since for most users, getting their hardware working is more than half the battle, Pupy stands very high in the top tier of distros I've tried.

Good dog, bad dog

Places where I do quibble with Puppy include the version of Gparted that came with 2.16. The 15-minute wait to read partitions needs to be addressed in future releases, and I very much hope it will be. And I've never had much luck with the Gxine media player. I much prefer XMMS (included in Damn Small Linux). But Puppy's command-line Madplayer for MP3s works flawlessly on my aging systems, and for that I am thankful.

Using both Puppy and Damn Small Linux has inspired me to install barebones Debian systems on a couple of PCs. First I do the "standard" install, then I add X, the Fluxbox window manager and my favorite apps (many of which are part of Puppy and DSL) to replicate the small-distro look and feel but with the stability and security of Debian 4.0 Etch and -- most of all -- the powerful utility apt to manage applications and the system itself.

But there's still more polish and expertise in Puppy (and DSL, for that matter) than I can bring to my own Debian build, and for that reason I recommend Puppy 2.16, especially as a live CD that can be used on a daily basis, even on a PC with no other Linux distro installed, but also with current Linux boxes. As I've said, for computers with extremely low specs (like my 233 MHz CPU, 64 MB RAM, 3 GB hard-drive laptop), a traditional Puppy install can turn an olde system into an up-to-date workhorse and keep it productive for years to come.

And Puppy 2.16's optional encryption of the pup_save file (a feature that Knoppix has had for years, I understand) adds a welcome measure of security that makes it perfect to use in a workplace environment where many others have access to your PC. The protection is especially important for laptops, which are lost or stolen all too often. At least the casual thief won't be able to steal your data, too.

I'm not sure what the memory cutoff is for running Puppy exclusively in RAM -- it might be 256 MB, maybe 512, but the system tends to access the disc as little as possible, making all the hardware appear to be faster that it is when running standard distros.

Many critize Puppy for having the user run as root -- the so-called "super user." Puppy experts say that the nature of the live CD and the use of pup_save files make it OK to run without traditional user files. I'm not technically astute enough to question this claim, but partisans of Damn Small Linux say that their distro's reliance on a user account (with the option of adding multiple users) is safer and better.

I have a pup_save file stored on my main Debian box, my Ubuntu box and my Windows box. I use the Puppy CD on just about every install I do to partition the drive, and I know that I can get my work done with Puppy's apps on just about any PC. And with the technical advances in version 2.16, Puppy is indeed better than ever -- and well worth having as a live CD in your GNU/Linux arsenal.

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Puppy versions I've used

Puppies 2.13, 2.14, 2.15CE, 2.16, One-Bone Puppy

One-Bone Puppy?

After much Googling, I managed to download and burn a disc for One-Bone Puppy. It boots to a command line and includes Elinks for browsing, Vi for text editing and Midnight Commander as a file manager. I never managed to get my static IP address configured, but I'm sure I could do it. What separates it from other live CDs that feature a command-line-only environment (what? there are others?) is the use of a pup_save to retain settings from one boot to the next.

Puppy I'm using right now and why

I use Puppy 2.14 about half the time because I need to have a well-working Gparted. However, I am using 2.16 more and more because a) I like the encrypted pup_save and b) I like the option of using OpenOffice.

Rich Text Format vs. .doc

Some time ago, a developer for KOffice told me that when AbiWord saves a .doc file, it's really saving it in Rich Text Format instead of true Word .doc format. I confirmed this when a .doc file I created in AbiWord opened in Rich Text Format in Word for OSX. The question is whether or not this matters. MS Word will always open RTF documents, and Abiword, at least, will just about always open Word .doc documents. At least the less-complex ones, anyway. So ... if AbiWord is really just creating RTF documents with .doc extensions, then the Ted word processor -- which uses RTF exclusively -- is more than worth looking into.

As mentioned above, Ted comes standard with Damn Small Linux and is a PET package in Puppy. One problem: I can't print from Ted in Puppy. I can print from everything else, just not Ted.

Puppy 2.17 reviewed

A site called ReviLinux did a nice, short review of Puppy 2.17, and the reviewer uses an aged laptop similar to (but better than) my Compaq.

What the future holds for Puppy

Barry Kauler reveals future plans for Puppy Linux on the developer's blog.

Since this blog has a category called "The $15 Laptop," you know the following:

a) I love keeping old hardware running
and b) I'm cheap.

The $15 Laptop itself -- a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM, an Orinoco WaveLAN Silver wireless card and a 3 GB hard drive running Debian Etch -- has been a trouper. I did the standard install of Debian and used apt to add X and Fluxbox. It's been great for Web browsing with IceWeasel (nee Firefox), Dillo, Lynx and Elinks. I handle mail with Sylpheed. I use AbiWord, Leafpad and Nano for writing.

Every time I boot the $15 Laptop, I want to party like it's 1999, because that's the year it reverts to each and every time. I could set the system clock at the command line every session, but who wants to do that? I'd replace the battery, if I only knew how. I'd be $10 poorer, too. But there's really no need: Enter the Network Time Protocol.

The Debian Admin site had all the info:

apt-get install ntpdate

That's it. Now my Debian-equipped laptop grabs the time over the Internet every time I boot, and I can stop thinking about where in the hell the CMOS battery even is, let alone how many screws I'd have to remove to get to it.

P.S. I bet ntpdate is a great thing to have even if you're CMOS battery is just fine.

I pulled the 30 GB hard drive from the $15 Laptop today, swapped in the original 3 GB drive (which wasn't bootable with its original Windows 98 install) and decided to throw distros at it. For those not following along, it's a Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II, with the biggest chink in the armor being RAM -- only 64 MB of it.

Here's the scorecard:

FreeBSD: I got pretty far, but the installer refused to write partitioning info to the drive.

DesktopBSD: Graphics flaked out before I could get too far in the install process.

Xubuntu 6.10 alternate install: Got very far, but it wouldn't copy apps to the drive, so the install stopped there.

OpenSUSE net install: Wouldn't boot.

Scientific Linux (science-lab spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux): Wouldn't boot.

DeLi Linux 0.7.1: Everytime I get to the point where I'm supposed to tell the installer where the CD is, I forget to type in hdb, if that's indeed where it is. If I'm booting off of CD, shouldn't the system itself know where the CD is?

Damn Small Linux 3.3: Runs flawlessly from CD, frugal install to hard drive went without a hitch, and it runs well with a 233 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM.

Puppy Linux 2.14: Due to the slowness of Gparted in Puppy 2.16 and my preference of the plain Puppy over the 2.15 Community Edition, I did a conventional install of Puppy 2.14 (conventional being recommended over frugal install due to my low RAM). All runs well, and while not as snappy as Damn Small Linux (mostly due to the choice of apps in both distro), I could be very happy running Puppy on this nearly-10-year-old laptop.

(Editor's note: This entry, originally slated to run June 25, somehow never got posted. The material below has been added in the last few hours.)

After running a frugal install of DSL for awhile, I decided to build my own Debian system on the laptop. I did a standard install, added X, then Fluxbox. The biggest surprise thus far has been that when I apt-get a new app, it automatically shows up in the Fluxbox menus. That doesn't happen on my other Debian box, which was a Desktop install with GNOME, adding Fluxbox as an alternate window manager. Whatever they're doing over at Debian, they are doing it right. I'm having a lot of fun building up the system just the way I want it.

While I intended to work a lot from the command line, I also needed GUI capability. Dillo runs great, but I needed more. I installed IceWeasel, Debian's renamed version of Firefox, and it's running great. Takes about a minute to load, but after that it responds well. Remember, this is 233 MHz and 64 MB. The only nagging problem is that the laptop's clock battery is dead, so when I start it up, Debian does a lot of filesystem checking. Gotta figure out how to pull that battery and get a new one in there.

So add to the list above:

Debian 4.0: Flawless install. Started with "standard" install, added X, Fluxbox and my favorite apps with apt-get. Running great with low specs.

COMING UP: A full review of Puppy 2.16.1

Fluxbuntu is back, says project leader Joe Jaxx at Fluxbuntu.org of the fledgling Ubuntu variant that installs with a Fluxbox window manager (fast, light -- a great alternative to GNOME, KDE or Xfce.

Jaxx writes:

We were really expecting to release Fluxbuntu Feisty as the Final and First version of Fluxbuntu but we ran into the following problems which were critical:

1. We started 3 months into the Ubuntu Feisty development cycle, which means we lost 3 months in development time compared to everyone else (Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu). This also came from starting late within the Dapper/Edgy development cycle.

...

Now we could fix all these things in Feisty, but by the time we do and release, we might have just released Gutsy (and it will also delay Gutsy Development another three months). So I have decided to have Fluxbuntu Final when Gutsy Gibbon is released in October.

...

Standard Features:

1. The ability to choose whether you want to have just VESA support or card specific support

2. The ability to choose which variant of the Fluxbuntu Desktop Environment you wish to use

3. Automounting of Removable Devices

4. On System Documentation on how to use Fluxbuntu

5. Graphical System Configuration Utilities

6. More Intuitive Menu

7. REALLY Nice Artwork

Experimental Features:

Here are some features we are looking at (might or might not be in Gutsy):

1. Document revision control

2. The ability to take your desktop with you and use it on any Fluxbuntu computer.

I liked the Fluxbox window manager so much from my use of it in Damn Small Linux that I recently took my Debian box running GNOME and installed Fluxbox on it. Once I figured out (from the Mepis help pages, no less) how to get a menu on the thing, I started to build it just the way I want it, fine-tuning the apps and menus. And now I have Fluxbox with the power and stability of Debian beneath it. All I need now is a terminal program that defaults to bigger type than Xterm (I have to ctrl-right-click every time to bump up the type size, and I'd rather have it as a default. I'm not above using the GNOME terminal, which is surprisingly quick).

I also like the new AntiX spin on Mepis that is also based on Fluxbox, which is great for low-spec systems ... as long as they have 128 MB RAM, since AntiX (and probably the Mepis code underneath it) can't handle the 64 MB limit of my $15 Laptop but runs great on my test box (Via C3 1 GHz-based thin client, CD and hard drives out of the box via a long cable, 256 MB RAM).

One of the attractions of AntiX, besides a lot of apps that I really like, is that it has Synaptic, although that feature wasn't working the last time I tried it. AntiX isn't even in beta yet, so I'm giving its developer, a guy who goes by the handle Anticapitalista, the benefit of the doubt).

Since Mepis' founder Warren Woodford ended development on MepisLite, I'd been hoping somebody would reconfigure Mepis for the rest of us ... i.e. the low-spec-running world that I'm pretty much working in all the time. And AntiX is a great step in that direction. It's what Fluxbuntu should be aspiring to.

Back to Fluxbuntu: Having a lightweight environment wrapped around the Ubuntu base is a very worthy project, and I hope Jaxx and Co. really do get things back on track.

My impressions of Fluxbuntu's last release candidate were less than glowing. Its developers have a worshipful view of the Linux command line, which is great if you're running a command-line distro -- and anybody can install a stripped-down Ubuntu and build it up from there. But in Fluxbuntu, it all seemed to be done at the expense of even script-drive configuration help (I didn't expect any GUI configuration utilities). If you do throw people into an environment meant for experts only, it's nice to give the non-experts the tools they need to make use of what you're offering them.

When I tried the last Fluxbuntu release candidate, right out of the box I had to figure out how to set a static IP address at the command line. It's really not that hard -- except when you've never done it before. What's needed with Fluxbuntu is extensive documentation on how to set up and use it. Having a couple of good Linux reference books is a must for anybody using the OS, more so for a distro like Fluxbuntu, in which getting your hands dirty, so to speak, is needed on a regular basis.

Even so, I'd sure like to see Fluxbuntu rise again and become a full member of the Ubuntu family.