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.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Nothing much to report today, except that the monitor does go into power-saving mode when idle. It just takes awhile.

Everything is running great. I almost forgot how much I like using Seamonkey as a Web browser. I haven't yet set up the mail-client portion yet, but I do plan to.

I still think Geany is one of the best text editors out there. And despite it's lack of typographical, "smart" quotes, AbiWord is a model of how light yet powerful a word-processing application can and should be. And MtPaint continues to get the job done when it comes to preparing images for the Web (although I'd just about kill for a Linux-compatible photo editor that didn't obliterate and even allowed editing of the Photoshop-implanted IPTC info embedded in JPEG images).

Today's "free memory" in the Puppy Memory Applet: 113 MB.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in the days before the Thin Puppy's CF card died, I was running my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with flash memory instead of a conventional hard drive. And since Puppy Linux takes great care NOT to write to flash very often, the media is supposed to last virtually forever. Why mine died is a mystery, but it wasn't due to wear (more likely I killed it with static electricity).

Now that I'm running Puppy 2.16 (new to me this week!), I've been thinking about going back to flash for this thin-client box -- I'm booting from CD and also have a regular-sized 14 GB hard drive connected outside the box (yes, I truly am thinking outside the box -- or my PC is).

But the conventional wisdom is that for "normal" operating systems that don't use RAM disks, you'll kill flash quickly with the constant writes required by the OS.

But today on Low End Mac, that question didn't come up for these guys who are running their Mac laptops from flash memory. That link was to the letters about this original article, which, in turn, refers to this article about doing it with a Powerbook 1400 (one of which I have ... but which is too frustrating at this point to even contemplate using for my everyday computing for reasons that have nothing to do with flash). This final article -- filled with woe about flash cards that didn't work with the 1400 -- does address longevity of the flash media, saying it should work for "years and years."

I'm going to try it again (maybe even with Debian), but I'm also going to back up all my data ...

And again, if you want to boot from flash but are nervous, give the new Puppy 2.16 a try. I'm in my first full day of use, but so far all is going very, very well.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made some progress -- and some discoveries -- today with my Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty installation on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client.

First of all, can we all agree that the GIMP, in its heaviness, doesn't really fit in with the Xubuntu philosophy of lighter apps for a lighter window manager?

And with this heaviness in mind, today I installed my first Debian package -- mtPaint, which despite having greater capabilities than GNU Paint while being as quick to load, is not available as a Ubuntu package, either in Universe, Multiverse, or any other 'verse. I found it and downloaded it from the Web, then clicked on it to install. I couldn't figure out how to add it to the Applications menu, but I was able with Xfce to create a desktop shortcut.

Incidentally, I did try out GNU Paint, which is a Ubuntu-approved application, and quite nice for what it does, except that it can't resize images, which is the main thing I need an image-editing program to do.

But the result is that I have, indeed, installed a Debian package in Xubuntu, and it couldn't have been easier. I'll look into getting mtPaint into the Graphics menu under Applications -- how hard can it be? But another thing I did learn is that while the GIMP is torturously slow to load, and probably is quite a memory hog on this 256 MB box, once you have it loaded, it's not any slower or faster at actually processing images. I didn't detect any speed boost using mtPaint ... except for the fact that it loads in about 3 seconds ... as opposed to the GIMP's 60 or so seconds.

The other thing I did was add Wine and Internet Explorer 6 in my quest to do work on Dailynews.com in Linux. Wine is about as mysterious to me as it gets, but I did go into the Ubuntu Multiverse (or whatever 'verse it is) and install Wine from the Synaptic Package Manager. As an aside, it's interesting that besides Synaptic, there's the Add/Remove Programs utility, and I almost prefer it to Synaptic at this early stage.

Back to Wine: I installed Wine from Synaptic and then used IES4Linux to get Internet Explorer into the Wine world. I did this successfully once before with Xubuntu when running it as a live CD, so I knew that this worked. I had IE6 on my desktop, and it actually worked. And while I was able to use the Daily News Web-publishing software (which is browser-based and requires IE), that system is so buggy that I really couldn't run it under Wine due to repeated crashes. The problem is more ours than Wine's, but it's disappointing nonetheless. I tried to install some other publishing software under Wine by moving entire directories from my Windows box to the Xubuntu box, but nothing would run. I'll have to delve further into Wine to see exactly what I need to do. It may be a lost cause, but I'm not expecting much. Still, I'm not above giving Codeweavers a try.

That said, it was only with the IES4Linux package that I got Internet Explorer at all. I wish I didn't have to use it at all, because sticking with Linux-specific browsers and not dealing with Wine at all is a whole lot easier than the alternative.

And what about the 256 MB memory ceiling of this thin client? Some commenters said that it's not an enviable position, to be with this little memory. All I can say at this point is that while there's been quite a bit of use of the swap partition on the hard drive, the system hasn't gone down once, even with all the stress I'm putting on it.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 9:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

After trying -- and failing -- to install about 10 distros yesterday on my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, with a CD-RW drive and hard drive connected but sitting on the outside of the thin client box, I slid my Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty alternate-install disc into the drive and hoped for the best. Keep reading for an account of my day in the Edgy-Feisty trenches.

Since I'd previously installed Damn Small Linux 3.3 on a different hard drive, I tried to install it again on the drive I had connected at the time, an 80 GB Seagate ATA. But even DSL wouldn't boot from the drive, so I reached into my stack of IBM-labeled 14.4 GB hard drives and tried Feisty again. I did a command-line system install, and that went without a hitch. But since I'm not going to be doing everything with vi (I did that in college, thank you), I immediately began to reinstall Feisty in full.

The first time, it hung up somewhere in the middle -- my disc light was pegged on, but none of the drives were doing anything, so I had to reboot. Now it looks like the install is going to happen. I didn't time it, but it hasn't been quick. I'm currently on the "Select and install software," which just failed. But I have the option to try again.

We'll see how it goes.

Update (2:45 p.m.): The installer just won't go past "Select and install software." After a couple of failures, I skipped ahead and installed GRUB, then went back. Why, WHY isn't this part working? (I previously checked CD integrity, and it's fine). As I've written before, this is no typical hardware installation, being a hacked thin client, but I'd still like things to work.

Update (2:55 p.m.): Since it looks like the "Select and install software" step is just completing when I get the error message, and since I already skipped ahead and installed GRUB, I decide to skip ahead again and "Finish the installation." That goes fine, and the CD drawer opens. I move the CD and reboot ... AND get a command-line system again. No GUI.

Update (3:15 p.m.): I had the Live-CD ISO of Ubuntu 6.10, but I had never burned a CD of it. I decide to do so. By mistake, I burn Xubuntu 6.10 (now I've got two), so I load that as a live CD.

Update (3:50 p.m.): The Xubuntu install from live CD is proceeding swimmingly. If this install sticks, I'm going to keep it for awhile. I don't know how the traffic is now on the mirrors for the Ubuntu 7.04 live CD, but I just might wait until the Xubuntu Feisty upgrade is ready ... if this install sticks, that is.

Update (4:10 p.m.): The Xubuntu 6.10 install is almost done. It's currently REMOVING stuff -- language packages, GNOME utilities ... but I'm 97 percent done with the install.

Update (4:12 p.m.): The install finishes, the CD drawer opens, the screen goes blank. I hit return a couple of times and the system proceeds to reboot.

Update (4:20 p.m.): I open Firefox, and it says "Welcome to Xubuntu 6.06." I've got Xubuntu, but did I burn the wrong version? Also, the graphical installer never asked me for my networking settings, so I'll have to do those manually. Only I would burn the wrong CD ... But I do have a legitimate 'Buntu installed on the hard drive connected to my thin client. ... Should I call it Thin Xubuntu, or Thinbuntu? Maxbuntu?

Update (5:05 p.m.): I check my other Xubuntu 6.10 CD ... it seems that they never changed the "welcome" page in Firefox, and even 6.10 says 6.06. One thing's for sure -- Xubuntu isn't as snappy as Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux. And when I try to shut down the system, the monitor goes blank, but the box stays on. I have to push and hold the power button to get the box to power down all the way. (I didn't have to do that with Puppy or DSL.)

Update (5:10 p.m.): In the Xubuntu menu, I go to System--Update Manager, which tells me that "New distribution release '7.04' is available." I click the Upgrade button. I get this message: "Authentication failed." Is it the traffic on the Internet, or a flaw in the process? I check for other software updates, and there are 90, totalling 139.2 MB. I start it. As an aside, I miss being able to bring up a menu anywhere on the desktop with a right-click, like I can in the Fluxbox and JWM window managers.

Update (5:55 p.m.): The updates download and install fine. Another try at the 7.04 upgrade. It fails for the same reason. But I do have Xubuntu installed on the thin client. And I'm about 80 percent sure it's 6.10. Time to turn the box off and go home. I'll live to fight another day on Monday.

Update (10:05 p.m.): I neglected to mention that the DesktopBSD install CD will NOT boot on the thin client. Just won't do it. I'd love to get a BSD on there -- will I have to build up from FreeBSD? I'm not completely opposed, but I hoped to get my feet wet with DesktopBSD. And as far as Xubuntu goes, the text editor is not as good as Geany. It's a bit basic, and doesn't have word count. But the word processor with Xubuntu is AbiWord, which is quick enough to launch that I serves as a nice text editor for my purpose, which is writing blog entries and not programming. And yes, I can use vi to hack at config files in the shell.

One of my projects should be digging through my boxes of crap in the shed and seeing if my copy of "Unix for Luddites" is there. I'd love to scan it in and have it available to all, in all its 1980s glory. That photocopied book by UC Santa Cruz's Scott Brookie got me going on Unix during college to write my papers. We used vi to write, nroff to format, and the printouts on a laser printer (in the '80s, for shit's sake) could be collected at the computer center on the far-flung campus, which had dumb terminals to access the system at every one of its eight colleges, as well as at the campus library.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I probably should've tried Zenwalk Live 4.4.1, which was released Wednesday, but I figured that since Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 is out today (or at least that's when Distrowatch announced it), I might as well get Feisty. I thought I would try Xubuntu instead, given that my hardware is generally as old as the hills, but Xubuntu seems to be the only official 'Buntu NOT to have a release at this time. Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edbuntu are all available ... that is if you can get them. All the mirrors are crazy busy -- I started one download that said it would take 36 hours (and I have a wicked-fast connection). I couldn't seem to even start any more downloads of the ISO for the Ubuntu 7.04 Live CD, and I was surprised when I was able to begin a much-faster download of the alternate-install CD.

In my last post, I recounted how the Xubuntu 6.10 alternate CD would not install on my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client. Well, today I decided to shove a few more CDs into the drive to see what would happen. I began with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, the long-term support edition of Ubuntu. It booted, no problem. But I hesitate to continue with the install because my Feisty download should be done in 3.5 hours.

I did like Zenwalk 4.2, and I will be looking at 4.4.1, but let's face it, in a month that has seen new releases of Debian and Mepis, plus my personal favorites Puppy and Damn Small Linux, Ubuntu is the 9,000-pound gorilla of Linux, and it must be contended with.

... Now my download is saying four hours ... time to install 6.06.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I wrote in the final Thin Puppy Torture Test entry, I wanted to try some other distributions with the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, so I finally shut it down.

After that, I opened up the box, unplugged the CF-to-IDE adapter and plugged in a 14.4 GB IDE hard drive by IBM and a 32X TDK CD-RW drive. I had trouble before even booting many Debian-derived Linux distributions, and I'm not exactly well-versed in the jumper settings for a hard drive and CD drive chained to a single IDE interface (there's only one IDE plug on this VIA-equipped Mini-ITX motherboard).

After leaving both drives as masters, nothing was happening, so I made the HD the master and the CD the slave, and then both were recognized by the BIOS.

And since this is a thin client, there's nowhere to physically mount any drives, so the thin client box is on its side, with the power cable (I had to use a splitter to power both drives from the single power plug) and IDE ribbon cable poking out from the box and the drives stacked on top of it. Man, I didn't know that a hard drive throws off so much heat. It's a far cry from when the thin client was running Puppy 2.14 from a Compact Flash card.

So I had a bunch of discs ready to try. I had previously booted Zen Walk 4.2, so I didn't want to try that one right away. The Fedora Core live CD wouldn't boot -- it kept rebooting the machine in a loop without actually doing anything. I tried to run the alternate install CD of Xubuntu 6.10, and the install went pretty far before I got repeated warnings like this:

Debootstrap Warning
Warning: Failure while installing base packages. This will be re-attempted up to 5 times.

I hit enter and kept going a bunch of times, but the install just wouldn't happen. Previously, the Xubuntu live CD wouldn't run, so I didn't even try it.

I tried openSUSE's net-install CD, and that wouldn't boot either.

Now this box is pretty untypical and tempermental -- when I first got it, the only thing that would run was Puppy Linux. DSL wouldn't boot then, but I tried it again and it not only booted but installed on the hard drive. Near the end of the install, the installer script told me I'd have to reboot, and I figured the system would do it automatically. It didn't, so I rebooted with ctrl-alt-del. The machine restarted and asked me to set root and user passwords (I elected multi-user during the install). I set the password and was off and running with the new DSL 3.3 on my hard drive!

The fact that of all the Linux distributions I've tried, I've only gotten Puppy, DSL and Zen Walk to boot is a testament to the people who put them together.

I should probably try to install Xubuntu again ... or Zen Walk, possibly dual-booting with DSL (I selected Grub as the boot loader, not that I know how to tweak it yet).

But so far, DSL 3.3 is running great on the thin client. Configuration of static IP networking was easy -- it's pretty much the same as in Knoppix, with a terminal window opening and a standard script running. I haven't checked the sound yet (gotta plug in the headphones), but I'll do that soon.

And I'm writing this entry on Firefox 1.0.6, the main browser with DSL 3.3, which also offers the light Dillo that runs so great in Puppy (but which really can't do Movable Type as well as a CSS-equipped browser).

As I wrap up this entry, I have no doubt that just about all of these distros mentioned would install on a "normal" system, and I acknowledge and understand that a thin client with a rare motherboard, non-Intel (or AMD) CPU and single IDE header might be far from normal, but the fact that some distros will boot on this somewhat exotic platform begs the question -- why won't they all?

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Given how similar Puppy 2.14 was to 2.13, I was wholly unprepared for how different the latest Puppy release, 2.15CE (community edition), is from its predecessors.

First of all, it looks completely different. That's because IceWM is the default window manager for Puppy 2.15, although the old standby JWM (Joe's Window Manager) is still available. And aside from the radical change in GUI, the desktop background is darker (and less "puppy" themed) than in distros past. Still, the Menu key on the bottom left does have a paw print.

Under Settings-Themes in the main Puppy menu (accessible, as always, by right-clicking anywhere on the screen), you can alter the look of your desktop very easily.

Under IceWM, Puppy remains lightning-fast -- it sure was on my Dell 3 GHz Optiplex GX520 with 512 MB RAM.

All my configuration information from the previous Puppy version was picked up from my pup_save.2fs file when I booted 2.15 for the first time, so my networking, screen resolution and printing were already set up.

When I brought up a Web page, the fonts in the SeaMonkey browser looked "funny," or at least different. The change was due to SeaMonkey being configured to use a serif font instead of the usual sans-serif. Pages looked strange to me, but everything is displaying normally enough. It's nothing that can't be fixed, though, because it's easy to change to sans-serif under the SeaMonkey Edit menu (go to Preferences, then Appearance, then Fonts, then pick sans-serif for whatever seems appropriate. I did just that, and everything then looked like it was "supposed to."

Despite the SeaMonkey change, other apps in the new Puppy, like AbiWord, look terrific with the new window manager. The fonts appear crisper, and as I said, it's just as quick in IceWM as in JWM.

But here's the big "secret" in Puppy 2.15: Restart with JWM (from the Shutdown manager) and you are back in the old Puppy window manager -- and when you do, it looks like you have about TWICE AS MANY APPS in the menus. Open Office, yep. Scribus, yes; the Gimp, Blender ... but none of these apps actually run until you download the proper packages (I haven't gotten to that yet). I assume that they will be accessible from both window managers at that point. (Note: these apps are characteristic of the GrafPup package.)

The Puppy Software Installer (a new utility) is where these packages seem to be, and it looks easy to use. The PETget package manager is still there, and it appears to duplicate the work of the PSI, albeit with fewer apps. I think the PETget packages are more "official," while the PSI contains the old "dotpup" applications. I've heard about apps availabe as .SFS "squash files," especially the ones that crop up in the JWM menus so that's something else I'll have to look into.

When you first load the SeaMonkey Web browser, it tells you all about 2.15CE's downloadable Expansion Packs -- just click on what you want (from Open Office to the GIMP, Opera, Audacity, even KDE, and follow the instructions (or at least that's what I'm led to believe).

Also new -- and on the Seamonkey home page -- are "online applications" -- things you can do via the browser for word processing, presentation, spreadsheets, image editing, office suite, chess and more. I plan to check these out, sinc I have a great insterest in apps delivered over the Web.

There is also 3DCC (under System) to "install drm-modules to enable accelleration for your kernel," Open GL for 3d apps, and the Nvidia drivers for those who have monitors that require them.

The many configuration Wizards under the Setup menu are one of the best parts of Puppy. They make setting up a system easier than any other Linux distribution I've tried. A new Wizard -- the Defaults Wizard -- enables you to see the "default" program that will run for 15 separate tasks, from Web browsing to word processing, drawing, spreadsheet, contacts and more. And it makes it easy to change those apps. For instance, if you want your "write" icon on the desktop to load AbiWord, that's the default, but if you have installed Ted or even Open Office Write, you can make those the go-to app when you click that "write" icon. A great tool.

For some reason, the "free ram" counter did not show up in JWM, as it does in previous Puppies. But it's there in the default IceWM desktop environment.

Another new thing in Puppy 2.15: When you're in ROX-Filer, photo-file icons now feature minature images (like in Windows XP) -- a very welcome addition.

The Shutdown menu from 2.13/2.14 is missing in the IceWM version of Puppy 2.15. In the new GUI, i can quit X from the menu (or ctrl-alt-backspace from the keyboard), go down to a shell prompt and then poweroff or reboot (text instructions are on the screen), but I miss the elegance of directly rebooting and shutting down from the GUI. I know itn's not Unix-geeky enolug, but I like the way it worked before.

Luckily when running JWM, the old Shutdown menu is right there. It all boils down to what you're used to -- and I'm the kind of peroson who doesn't like to change things unless there's a good reason ... call me conservative, but hey, I'm running Linux, not Windows 2000 or XP, so I've got a little daredevil in me, right?

Curiously -- at the prompt, xwin or startx will start IceWM. Some systems will only start a window manager with startx, and it's nice to see Puppy allow for both commands.

Flash video still works great -- Puppy being one of the select distros to provide Macromedia Flash right out of the box. Sure, it's not open source, but Macromedia Flash has pretty much crushed Java and all the other streaming-video technologies in its YouTube-propelled wake. At least it's better than Windows Media, right? (YES, right.)

At one point, I tried the "Change window manager" command in the menu, but instead of going from JWM to IceWM, I got a blank screen. Ctrl-alt-backspace wouldn't kill X at this point, but ctrl-alt-del did shut it down. I didn't do a whole lot of "change window manager" type stuff in 2.13 and 2.14, being a big JWM fan, so this could've been a problem in previous Puppies -- I'll have to look into it further.

Another thing that seemed to change in Puppy 2.15CE is the location of my SATA hard drive in the directory tree. In previous versions, it used to be under /mnt, but in 2.15 it is under /initrd/mnt and is called dev_save instead of sda1. It also was auto-mounted -- something that didn't happen in previous Puppies, in which you have to mount drives you're not booting from. It's an interesting change. Some people don't like drives to be auto-mounted, but I'm on the fence with this one. Still, Puppy's Mounting Utility Tool (a.k.a. MUT) remains easy to use if you want to check and change the status of other drives in your system.

And despite the different look, all the apps I've grown accustomed to using in Puppy are there: the AbiWord word processor, the Geany text editor, the SeaMonkey browser/e-mail/html editor suite, the light Dillo browser, the Gaim instant-messaging program, the ROX-Filer and the mtPaint image editor.

My overall impression of Puppy 2.15CE is a good one. But I wish all the packages I see on the JWM menus were included on the CD, along with clear instructions on how to either install or enable them. And from a quick perusal, it appears that adding the packages while using Puppy 2.15 as a live CD is one thing, but adding them to a hard-disk install is another. If it hasn't been worked out already, I expect it will at some time soon. In Puppy, problems tend to get solved quickly, and the online community at the Puppy Forums is second to none in its ability to help users.

Still, I'm not prepared to give up Puppy 2.14, which I've been running for 22 days straight now on the Thin Puppy (a Maxspeed Maxterm 1 GHz thin client with 256 MB RAM and, since it died, no Compact Flash storage, nor a hard drive or CD drive). I'm used to it. And that's the beauty of Puppy and other distros that are designed primarily to be used as live CDs. You can have a stack of them, with the option of booting any version that works for you -- for your hardware and the work you're trying to do.

The Puppy developers have been issuing new versions at a very quick pace. Looking at Distrowatch, between Sept. 14, 2006 (Puppy 2.10) and April 6, 2007 (Puppy 2.15), there have been six Puppy releases in under eight months -- quite a pace.

One of the neatest features of Puppy is the pup_save.2fs file. When you are running from the live CD, you have the option of creating such a file when you shut down the system. I think it's limited to 512 MB in size, but contained in that file are your downloaded applications and files. And when running from CD, you can keep the pup_save.2fs file on a USB flash drive. Or it can live on your system's main hard drive, even if you're not using that drive as a boot device. As for me, I like to keep a separate pup_save file on each box I run Puppy on. That way I have the settings unique to that computing environment saved.

As far as files go, I prefer to keep them on a USB flash drive so I can take them wherever I need them -- and since Puppy plays well with both NTFS and FAT file systems, I generally format the drives as FAT so they can be read on a Windows system (and so I can work in any environment). The other advantage of keeping files on an external drive is that Puppy's own file system, after booting, is contained entirely in RAM. That's great for speed, but when you download anything large (like giant audio or video files), it all eats away at your free RAM and can really affect the system. But if you store your files on any other drive, be it flash or traditional hard disk, your memory stays fairly intact (except for things such as browser cache) and the whole computing experience under Puppy goes much better.

And if you do run Puppy with a traditional hard-drive install, it's probably a good idea to either partition your drive and save your files on the partition, or use an external flash drive to keep those files portable. That's because even when booting from hard disk, Puppy still keeps its file system in RAM. Again, it's fast, but you run the risk of losing some of your work if you put the available RAM under too much stress. It's not as much of a problem on machines with 512 MB or even 1 GB of RAM, but with 256 MB it's essential, with 128 MB mandatory.

That said, if you've got some free memory left, saving standard text and image files (which is what I do generally) doesn't even dent the free memory, and it's OK to keep those in the RAM-based file system -- Puppy even has a "My Documents" folder to make Windows types feel better. It's probably a good idea, since in Puppy you're always logged on as root, and there are no "user" files characteristic of a "normal" Linux system. There's a bit of a debate about this on the Puppy forums, but those who program the system generally have a reason for it, and if I knew more about it, I'd delve further. As it is, I'm content to use the system as is.

And while many people do install Puppy to their hard drives, the majority probably run it from live CD with a pup_save file on the hard drive or an external USB flash drive. That's probably the best-case use of Puppy. Your file system is easily backed up (just copy the pup_save.2fs file to another drive). And one of the benefits of Puppy running its file system in RAM is that writes to your flash media are kept to an absolute minimum, extending the life of your flash memory indefinitely.

But remember, if you want to download a 600 MB ISO file, you're gonna have to put it on another drive or partition, or you'll soon be in memory trouble. As long as you keep this in mind, Puppy is ultra-stable and is just so plain usable and fun, it remains my go-to distro.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Yesterday I took the Thin Puppy -- the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client now running Puppy Linux 2.14 -- to the brink. This thin client -- with no storage other than RAM memory (I booted it from CD and then disconnected that drive; I lost the ability to mount the external USB flash drive on day 8), has been running with about 41 MB of free RAM for storage. And as I learned before the Thin Puppy Torture Test, when I only had 128 MB of RAM (I'm now at the maximum for this motherboard, 256 MB), Puppy doesn't like it when you get really low on RAM.

I downloaded a podcast -- about 35 MB, I think, and that took RAM very low. It was "Linux Action Show's" interview with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu (and I encourage you to listen to the show, since it's very well-done).

Well, downloads to the RAM-based filesystem take away from ... free RAM, and as I dipped below 8 MB free, the system didn't exactly cooperate. I couldn't run Gxine to listen to the podcast in OGG format -- it just wouldn't run, and there are two processes that I can't seem to kill out of memory.

Eventually I downloaded the .mp3 version and played it with madplayer, which can't be stopped or paused, but which does play .mp3s without skipping on this audio-challenged thin client.

So the Thin Puppy is now on its 18th day. I've been testing the new version of Puppy Linux (2.15CE) on my other box, and it's quite a radical departure from previous versions. First of all, IceWM is the default desktop, and there are many other differences and enhancements. A full review is forthcoming.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's Day 11. That's how long Puppy Linux 2.14 has been running on the Thin Puppy. To recap, the Thin Puppy is a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, with the internal CF card removed (and with the Puppy-loaded replacement since fried). It's based on a mini-ITX motherboard of undetermined origin, running a Via C3 Samuel 1 GHz processor, VT133 chipset, with what look like s proprietary (to Maxspeed) CF-to-IDE adapter and fanless power supply.

The box has a fan, but it only runs when the client is tilted about 70 or 80-degrees in either direction. Otherwise, the unusual heat sink on the CPU seems to be working. It has copper pipes going from the top of the CPU to additional heat sink material bolted to the metal case.

The box has 256 MB of PC133 RAM installed.

Since the CF card died, I hooked up a CD drive and loaded Puppy, then disconnected the drive and sealed up the case. So the Thin Puppy is running totally in RAM, with no boot device attached. I used to have a USB flash drive connected, but since then the MUT utility that mounts drives in Puppy has flaked out, and I can't mount anything, nor can I seem to kill out the processes that keep me from doing so.

But the Thin Puppy continues to run, and I have been using it heavily these past 11 days. It has given me a good appreciation of this minimal hardware platform and of Puppy Linux as an OS and distribution. I even gave away my Puppy 2.14 disc away since then to somebody who was interested in it. I'll have to burn a new one, although I've got a couple of 2.13 discs for booting my other computers.

Like I've said before, Puppy is the first Linux distro on which I've been able to configure EVERYTHING ... except wireless. But I think my $9 Airlink AWLH3026 wireless card from Fry's is cursed and won't run in any Linux distro.

But other than that, Puppy has been as good as ... yes, OS gold. It wasn't so good with 128 MB of RAM, but ever since I doubled that, it's been running great.

And I expect I'll eventually get a new CF card and turn the Thin Puppy off. But not yet.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Slax is a live CD that I've been very anxious to try. Any distro that claims to be light on hardware -- yet features the KDE desktop -- is something I've got to try. I'm beginning to think KDE gets a bad rap. It runs pretty darn well in this distro, as well as in MepisLite. And I think KOffice is a terrific package, with KWrite being one of the best programs out there for writers.

First things first. Slax is a cutdown version of Slackware, one of the first Linux distributions, and one that remains wildly popular (it's No. 10 on Distrowatch). And it's not Debian, if that means anything. I guess I mention that because so many distros use Debian as their base, it's nice to try something different.

The boot process is pretty good. The script displayed on the screen asks you to log on as root with password "toor" And there are on-screen hints, such as startx to get KDE running, flux to use Fluxbox instead, mc to run Midnight Commander and xconf to autoconfigure the graphics adapter. Startx didn't work for me -- my display didn't cooperate, so I killed X and used xconf, which did work. I got the message, "creating /etc/corg.conf ... all done. Run startx now. If you get black screen, hit Ctrl+Alt+Plus. But all was well, and I was off and running. Later, I changed resolutions in KDE, and the screen looked absolutely terrific in all its 1280 x 1024 majesty. Thanks, KDE!

And if you want to put Slax on your hard drive, slax-install will do just that. Configsave and configrestore will save and restore your file systems,
fileswap will create a swap file. Pretty simple.

Once Slax KillBill goes into KDE, you see a yellow desktop and samurai sword that means you're in KillBill -- named because Wine is included and you can run Windows apps without Win being installed (hence the "Kill Bill" -- as in Gates -- reference).

On the menu, in addition to the KDE button that can launch just about everything, there is a console button, Konqueror, JuK (music), KPlayer (video??) and K3B for CD and DVD burning.

I easily configured my ethernet card for static IP with KDE -- it was as clear and easy as any other distro I've used.

While KillBill has Wine installed, I couldn't manage to get any Win apps to run. Perhaps I'm missing something? I'll try again later.

Another thing: The version of KWord in Slax killbill is 1.5.2, with KDE 3.5.4. I some trouble getting "smart" quotes working -- it just wouldn't do it. I didn't have this problem in MepisLite, the distro in which I fell in love with KWord. The "current" version of KWord is 1.6.2, so maybe this is a bug that got squashed.

The KDE desktop in Slax killbill is surprisingly responsive. Menus appear immediately (this being a 3 GHz Dell, I expect that, but I don't always get it).

And I got a nice surprise: Many printers on my network were automatically configured and usable without me doing anything. I was able to print to one immediately ... I wasn't able to configure an additional printer, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it, since I could print elsewhere.

KDE is such a nice desktop -- the screen resize and rotate button on the lower right allowed me to immediately pick my favored resolution -- 1280 x 1024, and as I said above, it looks terrific.

I still love KWord. It's my favorite Linux word processor by far. It's much lighter on resources than Open Office, and I've read that it's even lighter than Abiword.

KDE's Konquerer browser responds fast and displays pages well. There was no Flash player installed, though.

Sound worked fine. I had to tweak it with ALSA Mixer in a terminal window, but that's normal for my PC.

At this stage, the sticking points are the smart quotes in Kword, and for the killbill edition, figuring out how Wine works. (Wine remains a mystery to me. The only time I could do anything with Wine was when I installed IEs4Linux in Xubuntu -- that worked. Now I see why Codeweavers has a business.)

Maybe I need to run Winecfg or something. The reason I burned the KillBill version of Slax first was because one of my goals in running Linux is to port over the two Windows apps that I need at the Daily News -- Internet Explorer (because our in-house Web system requires it -- and no, Firefox won't work) and the Hermes publishing system from Unisys, which is our main software for putting out the paper. I'm not against giving $40 to Codeweavers to make it happen, but I figured that a distro with Wine in it already would somehow be easier to use.

Still, my first impression of Slax is a favorable one. I've already burned CDs of the plain Slax and the smaller Popcorn edition, meant to install on 128 MB flash media. I'll try these in the Dell, and hopefully soon in the Thin Puppy (the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I'm using to write this post). If it works, will I have to rename that machine Thin Slax? Yes, I will.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here's an update on the HP t5300 thin client that I got for the low, low price of $20 on eBay. (And yes, I'm writing this with the thin client hooked up to the network).

It runs the Windows CE embeddes system (in 32 MB of flash memory) with only 64 MB of RAM.

When I was researching these, there isn't much documentation out there specific to the t5300 -- HP docs cover the whole 5000 series, so I didn't know that this client has its memory hard-wired to the circuit board -- and there is no way to add additional memory. That's problematic, because I wanted to bump it up to at least 128 MB. The IDE input on the board looks like a 44-pin laptop-drive plug (and there's no additional power leads, so that makes it more likely that it's for a laptop drive). And that input is very close to the edge of the case, making it look like it would need an extension cable leading away from the side, if I were to insert a Compact Flash adapter. By the way, it has a 533 MHz VIA processor and chipset, and the motherboard is so small besides, I think it's a laptop-specific product repurposed here for a thin client ... except that the non-expandable RAM makes it seem like a thin-client design.

But since the thin client's BIOS will boot from USB, I can theoretically create a bootable USB flash drive and boot from there without cracking the case. I couldn't boot from Puppy 2.14 on the USB, but I have yet to try all the available permutations when it comes to creating a bootable USB device.

My best hope now is to a) Use the HP t5300 as a Web terminal with the version of IE 5 in its flash memory (what I'm doing now), try to create a bootable USB drive with Damn Small Linux on it, or turn it around on eBay.

I wouldn't have bought this in the first place had it not been $20, but for those who want to turn thin clients into stand-alone Linux boxes, make sure you can add memory, and also make sure that you can replace the IDE device inside and/or boot from USB.

As far as the IE included in the client, CSS stylesheets are a little funky on some sites, but I am able to use Movable Type with few formatting problems -- this is IE, after all. I bumped the screen resolution up to 1280 x 1024, and it looks great with an LCD monitor.

I'm going to try to update the "image" on the thin client via HP -- wish me luck.

(Minutes later) The update was successful, but the thin client already had this update installed. Given that the amount of flash memory is fixed at 32 MB, I guess I shouldn't expect HP to offer a full-fledged update of the Windows CE OS, along with a IE6-level browser, but it would've been nice.

Considering the matter for a moment (during which I was unsuccessful at printing over the network ... and this box doesn't have a parallel port, so the options are network or COM port -- I don't know if it will print to a USB printer) ... I could actually try to use the HP thin client ... as a THIN CLIENT connected via the Linux Terminal Server Project system.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought that it was the power drain from the CD-R drive that made the Thin Puppy's fan turn on, but it turns out that the fan's sudden spin to life had nothing to do with the added drive. I confirmed this by pulling the drive out from the Thin Puppy, which was lying on its side to accomodate the short cables. Once I removed the CD-R, the fan stayed on. When I stood the Thin Puppy upright, the fan went off. Put back on its side again, the fan starts up. Strange. Is there a short in the wiring that somehow resolves itself when the thing is turned at a 90-degree angle? I can't worry about it too much because the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) never gets all that hot. The VT133 portion of the chipset gets the hottest, but the Via C3 1 GHz CPU never gets that hot -- and it's got a heatsink that's piped and connected to the metal case for maximum heat transfer, so there's really nothing to worry about.

I'm disappointed that I couldn't boot any Debian-derived CDs with the CD-R drive hooked up, but I'm happy that Puppy Linux is comfortable with 256 MB of RAM. I pulled the CD-R drive while the thin client was running, so now it'll stay running as long as it doesn't crash ... or I get a new CF card and reboot it ... or ????

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finally got around to stuffing the Thin Puppy (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client) with 256 MB of PC133 RAM, and now I can even load dailynews.com, with all its various Flash animation components, WITHOUT killing the Thin Puppy. With the new memory, there's about 48 MB of RAM left over for Puppy Linux 2.14 to play with. I'd love to see how Damn Small Linux works with this setup, but it -- and all other Debian-based Linuxes I have on CD -- won't even boot. Something about a disk error. Well, whatever's in error there is not with Puppy, which is running fine right now.

I suspect that if I loaded those other Debians on a hard drive (or even Compact Flash), I'd be able to boot them on the Thin Puppy, but now with Puppy Linux itself booting and actually working, I couldn't be happier (for the minute, at least).

Hardware note: Now that the CD-R drive is hooked up, the fan runs continuously on the Thin Puppy, whereas it never ran at all before. Therefore it must be responding to the increased load on the power supply (this is a pretty small DC supply to run actual physical drives, as opposed to a measly CF card).

So I can say now, with some certainty, that Puppy Linux is a bit uncomfortable with 128 MB RAM, but comfortable enough with 256 MB (the maximum the Thin Puppy can address, by the way). Since boosting an old PC to 156 MB is a fairly cheap proposition (you ARE buying your memory on the used market, aren't you?), then Puppy is a very viable system with which to rescue said PCs for productive use.

Memory addendum: In Puppy Linux, downloading to the "My Documents" file stores your data in memory until you exit Puppy, but downloading to an extermal drive -- in this case a USB flash drive -- does NOT ding your RAM, so it is possible to work with big files in Puppy and not bring your system to its knees. Goooood dog.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When was the last time you bought a computer for $20 and had it on the Internet five minutes later?

It just happened to me. I got this HP T5300 thin client -- works like a PC, except it has no disk drives -- for $20 on eBay from a health-care business. These things often sell for a couple hundred dollars but usually go used for $50 or so. This one is based on the Windows CE embedded operating system (others are Linux based), with a 533 MHz processor, 32 MB of flash memory and 64 MB of RAM. It's enough to run Explorer (no Macromedia Flash player, though), and it's enough to post to this blog via Movable Type.

And this thin client is about half the size of the Thin Puppy. Unfortunately, it only uses a USB keyboard and mouse, and I've got PS/2 versions, so I'm sharing the peripherals from the Dell at the moment.

Even so, this thing was blissfully easy to configure for the Internet (I logged on as the administrator and went into the settings). Since it's Windows-based, there's no Linux learning curve, but I'd love to run it off of Linux just the same. That might only be possible by pulling the flash memory module and starting/booting from scratch. But strictly as a Web terminal, this thing is working great.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that the Thin Puppy is out of commission due to the dead CF card, I booted Puppy LInux 2.14 on the Dell (3 GHz, 512 MB RAM), and it ran like a champ. Video looks GREAT. I opened up a bunch of Web pages in SeaMonkey, and all displayed perfectly, even the Flash animation classified ads at DailyNews.com that brought the Thin Puppy to its knees.

I needed to get a bunch of pictures off of an SD card, and the card reader wasn't working in Windows XP, so I fired up Puppy again, and it was extremely easy to get the photos off of the SD card and into a directory on my hard drive. Puppy just makes it so easy to find drives, mount them and navigate with the Rox filer.

So sorry, Puppy, it could be that the Masxpeed MaxTerm thin client's design isn't conducive to working with a full-fledged OS ... or it could be the memory. More testing is needed, but if you have the kind of power that this Dell has, your Puppy Linux experience will be a good one.

It just underscores the rule that one OS doesn't fit all computers or computer users, and it pays to check out an operating system on many different kinds of hardware to determine the proper fit. Yep, it's like shoes. You don't know how good they are until you've walked that proverbial mile.

That said, the next step is to get a CD-ROM drive hooked up to the Thin Puppy and start pumping other OSes into it, everything from Damn Small Linux to the bigger DSL-n, Puppy from CD, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Zen Walk, Mepis Lite, and probably more.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While trying to prepare the Thin Puppy to dual-boot from Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, the whole thing crashed, with the aftermath being a dead CF card. It has soured me on the use of flash RAM as a boot medium ... and now the Thin Puppy has a heart, but not a brain.

Next for the Thin Puppy: Pulling the spare CD-ROM drive from This Old PC, running MANY Linux distros that way ... or stuffing a 3.5-inch hard drive in there -- there's space for it.

One thing this experiment has done is dampen my enthusiasm for Puppy Linux. Performance with 128 MB of RAM is less than satisfactory. I had a lot of crashes. Downloading large files wreaked havoc with available RAM and made the system unstable. Working entirely in RAM, nothing saves to physical drives until the computing session is finished, meaning data loss in the event of a crash.

Streaming audio and video was choppy -- I expected that from an older VIA-powered board, but -- on the plus side -- Puppy used a very light program that played MP3s downloaded to the system without trouble (something Gxine couldn't do).

Still, configuration of the system has been easier in Puppy than in any other Linux I've tried. Networking, sound, printing, mounting drives, installing a bootable OS -- all goes smoothly in Puppy. And as a live CD, working entirely in RAM is more palatable -- everything saves to your pup_save file when you power down. And it makes the live CD environment work quickly. But with 128 MB of memory, when stress on the system climbs, Puppy starts accessing the drive like mad -- swapping, perhaps? -- and with a CF, that can't be good, especially for a system that is billed as being easy on flash memory. That's true when you work from CD and write to pup_save on flash, but not so true in a HD installation. I don't think Puppy is really meant for that. Like Knoppix, Puppy Linux is designed as a live CD and while it can be installed to HD, I'm not recommending it at this point.

The crashes with 128 MB of RAM are troubling. The Thin Puppy's motherboard maxes out at 256 MB, and once you get to 512 MB of RAM, you can pretty much run any Linux distro. Generally "light" means light on RAM and CPU speed, not just one or the other. Still, I'll have to try Puppy on This Old PC, a traditional box which I can run with 128 MB or 256 MB to compare performance.

Again, to sum up, Puppy is designed to run from a live CD and be shut down and restarted daily. It isn't designed to be installed to a hard drive or flash medium, although it's easy to do so. I really love the working environment of Puppy, but doing everything in RAM memory presents its problems, and I've experienced them.

Question: Is it the Thin Puppy itself, or its RAM (the amount) that's causing the trouble?

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You'd think with a 1 GHz processor and a super-fast Internet connection, the Thin Puppy would handle streaming video and audio reasonably well. Not so. It's jerky, and frequently the machine just slows down as Puppy Linux begins accessing the CF drive -- creating a swap file, I presume.

So is it the motherboard's video and audio hardware ... or is it the 128 MB of system memory? I'm betting on the latter. Anything that keeps the system from creating swap space is bound to speed things up considerably, because creating swap files and writing to them is slow, all the slower when your storage medium is flash memory -- which in Puppy isn't supposed to be written to at all during the computing session.

All I know is that when I downloaded a 50 MB ISO image and tried to actually ... work with it .. . the available memory went down by .... 50 MB -- and that's out of 73 MB available after the OS is loaded into RAM. That's one of the weak points of this box -- the FSB (front side bus) runs at 133 MHz ... that's why I can use slow PC-133 memory (and am trying to get by with PC-100) ... but it's gotta hit the performance. ...

So the moral of this story is -- front side bus speed matters (that's why it's listed in all the Fry's ads), fast memory matters, and having a lot of memory also matters. If I can find a 512 MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I bet things get better, even for streaming audio and video.

But at 128 MB, the Thin Puppy is doing very, very well for tasks that don't involve those two resource-intensive tasks.

And this leads me to the entry that will, at some point, be on top of this ...

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had problems with the Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client -- outfitted with Puppy Linux on the CF card that serves as its disk drive -- and a Dell LCD monitor. The output was a bit dim, and there was some character "ghosting." Nothing major, but not as good as the output from the Dell Optiplex PC itself.

I suspected that a regular CRT monitor would work great with this thin client, which is circa 2003, the days when CRTs still held some sway in the low-end market.

I was right. After finding one dead CRT in the Daily News boneyard, I brought in an old 14-inch Gateway 2000 monitor (yes, it's the monitor that has served so well with This Old PC), and it is working perfectly. I chose 800 x 600 resolution at 16 colors. I've run it with This Old PC at 1024 x 768, and I just might try that, but for now, this looks great.

Moral: Swapping peripherals is the best way to determine a) what's broken and b) what fits best for a particular system. Ask friends to loan you equipment -- or, better yet, to gift you with the old crap they've got clogging their garages and closets.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's what I should call the Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client, The Black Box. There's no model number anywhere on the box, and that's because the various MaxTerms of this era have identical cases and back-panel layouts. What's different is, to a limited extent, the motherboards, and to a greater extent the operating system software on the CF card connected to that motherboard's IDE input. Everything from Linux to Windows XP Embedded ran on these boxes, with processor speeds from the 533 MHz range (for the Linux models) all the way up to 1 GHz for the XP. So I guess mine is the XP model, although I can't be sure.

I tried to find screws to replace the missing, but was unsuccessful at Fry's. I don't hold out much hope for the hardware store.

I also tried to make a USB-drive bootable Damn Small Linux. Also unsuccessful. The methods by which this is done are somewhat complicated. Nothing like the Puppy Unversal Installer. Score one for Puppy.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I stumbled across this page about a guy who did a whole lot more than I've had to do to get his Wyse WinTerm 3320SE Windows CE based thin client to run on Damn Small Linux and, at this stage, to function as an honest-to-god Web server.

To geek is to live:

For almost a month already, this website is running on a Winterm 3320SE! It's behind an Apache proxy right now. It has a <3MByte (uncompressed) initrd with shell utilities, an SSH daemon, a web server and PHP, thanks to uClibc. It's running pretty well, and at least now we eat our own dogfood! :-)

As you can read, the Wyse is way underpowered compared to the MaxTerm, and it took a lot more geekery to get it going:

... it's a pretty small device. Normally they run Windows CE with RDP (Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop) and ICA (Citrix) terminal clients plus serial terminal software, and it's also possible to install MSIE4 to browse the web. However, that's all. It can't work as an X server, so in non-Windows networks it's not very useful.

The hardware seems to be pretty suitable to run Linux. From the outside you can already see some connectors that probably remind you a lot of regular PC's. And when you look inside you'll indeed find a Cyrix/NS MediaGX chipset with a 166 MHz x86-compatible CPU, 32 MB RAM and 8 MB of flash.

With only 8 MB of flash, it's pretty obvious that we'll have to depend on network-booting if we want to run Linux on these, certainly because we're not even sure if we can use the Flash memory from Linux.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been playing around with the Xorg video settings in Puppy Linux -- it doesn't look as good as it could. It could be the video controller on the motherboard, or it could be the settings. I went down to 1024 x 768, back up to 1280 x 1024, 16 colors, and there's a slight "ghosting" of letters on the LCD screen. I bet it looks great in 1024 x 768 on a traditional CRT, but I don't have one to try at the moment.

I'll have to boot puppy on the Dell and see what the settings are. There's always the option of a separate video card -- that'll set me back $10.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Thin Puppy," that's what I should call this setup. I've had the Maxspeed MaxTerm running all day, and while some of the chips are warm to the touch, nothing's hot, and the fan hasn't gone on at all. Maybe it's there for "harsh" environments, when air temperature doesn't provide convection cooling that's as efficient.

The power brick, which isn't the original, came new in its box -- it's a DVE AC adapter rated at 11-13 V output, 3.8 amp max, 42 W max. It's just barely warm, so this thing isn't drawing much current at all. The brick is rated for 100-240 volts, so it should have no problem dealing with foreign voltages or sub-prime AC power.

As I mentioned in a previous entry, the biggest "hitch" thus far is that the box isn't a champ when it comes to streaming audio and video. It plays back downloaded MP3s just fine with the Gxine player. To hear the audio, I plugged in my headphones. And also, as I said before, audio was automatically configured by Puppy on boot.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sound on the MaxSpeed Maxterm works at boot with Puppy. YouTube videos and streamed MP3s are a little choppy -- I've heard of this sort of thing happening both with thin clients in general and Via motherboards in particular. But a downloaded MP3 plays fine. I'll have to do a similar test with video. The connection here is very fast, so it must be either the network interface or a combination of too many process going on at one time.

But sound out of the box -- that's a first for me with Puppy. And during the boot sequence, I confirmed that this is a 1 GHz Via Samuel processor. The thing's been on for an hour now, and still no fan has gone one. That's great -- I wanted silent, I got silent.

And Puppy is performing extremly well within the confines of 128 MB of RAM. It shows 70.8 MB free for other uses -- that's a lot more than I have with Puppy on This Old PC, which has 262 MB of RAM in its slots but only shows about 56 MB of RAM free after Puppy loads.

And I had no trouble plugging in and mounting my USB flash drive. I haven't tried to boot from it -- why would I, with Puppy running fine from the CF slot? My next experiment: preparing the USB drive to boot the Maxspeed with Damn Small Linux.

To review, Puppy runs -- and so far runs well (sound excepted for the moment) on a $75 thin client bought over eBay. And with the addition of a $5 stick of RAM and a $17 CF module -- both of which I already had (not to mention the keyboard and mouse I pilfered from This Old PC), I have a working computer that runs Puppy Linux. Give me the Geek Gold Medal right here, right now.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Maxspeed MaxTerm thin client from Unix Surplus arrived at 12:15, and here I am running Puppy Linux 2.14, connected to the Internet and blogging about it at 12:35, I haven't had something go this smoothly since ... never.

The MaxTerm came well-packed, with enough foam and bubble wrap to survive quite a crushing. It came missing the screws to close up the case, but since I needed it open to install the memory, it was no problem -- I'll just go to the hardware store and get a half-dozen machine screws to bolt the thing together.

The CPU is covered with a heat-pipe-type heatsink arrangement, with a fan below it. The fan hasn't turned on. I think it's switched on through a heat sensor, and at this point, the heatsink is barely warm, so all is good.

The 128 MB of PC-100 memory (worth about $5 on the open market) went in without a hitch, and the CF card adapter was already connected to the IDE slot on the mini-ITX motherboard. I removed the cover from the CF slot (looks like you can insert the CF card and then close it up again -- one of those screws is missing, too, but again, it's no big deal). To eject the CF card, the case needs to be open.

Mouse, keyboard, power-cube and monitor hookup went fine. The internal power supply is fanless and seems to be running cool. The board has Maxspeed printed on it, so it must be a proprietary part. The motherboard looks like standard Via, with a Phoenix D686 BIOS. There's just the one IDE port, and also a floppy port, though there'd be little reason to use it (you'd need to use the floppy power plug, which is currently powering the CF-to-IDE adapter that's part of the MaxTerm.

I put in the CF card, already configured with Puppy 2.14, and the thing booted right away. I didn't know for a minute, because the monitor I had set aside foir this project was dead. So I'm running it through my Dell's LCD monitor. I chose 1024 x 768 resolution with 16 colors, and that's not ideal for the 17-inch LCD, which likes 1280 x 1024 better. I'll try that on my next boot.

It took the SeaMonkey browser a bit of time to load, maybe 20 seconds. I'll have to see if that improves on subsequent loads. (Later: SeaMonkey reloads in 10 seconds. Excellent.)

Abiword boots in 10 seconds -- very acceptable.

Using Xproc to find out exactly what's inside, I get the following:

Processor is a Via Samuel 2, Speed 501.169, BogoMIPS 1003.69. Don't know exactly what those "speed" numbers mean ...

But the big story here is that the MaxSpeed MaxTerm boots Puppy right out of the box. If you're thinking about repurposing a thin client for Linux, this is the one.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The $75 thin client should be arriving today, and I'm ready.

I cannibalized the following from This Old PC and elsewhere:

-- PS/2 keyboard and mouse
-- IDE drive cable (just in case -- the pictures made it look like I might need one)
-- 1 GB Compact Flash module with Puppy Linux installed
-- 128 MB PC-100 memory module (not from This Old PC, but from my spare-parts collection)
-- 256 MB USB drive with Puppy installed (just in case it does boot from USB)
-- Old 14-inch VGA monitor, off of which I've wiped the first layer of grime.

To get Puppy on the CF module, I used a CF-to-IDE adapter that I plugged into the IDE port in This Old PC. Then I installed Puppy onto it from the CD. The Puppy Universal Installer is pretty good -- it turns out I could've made the CF module into an IDE-bootable drive without using the adapter; the installer will prepare the chip while it's connected via a USB card reader (which I also have ready).

The Puppy Universal Installer offers many options for making USB drives and CF chips (as well as IDE and SATA hard drives) bootable if the standard install doesn't work. Kudos to the Puppy developers for making both the mounting of drives as well as the installation of the OS to them so easy.

So all I need to do now is wait for the Maxspeed Maxterm 1 GHz thin client to arrive ...

Photos: The Maxspeed Maxterm, inside and out, from Unix Surplus' eBay listing.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brian Madden offers a well-thought-out view of whether the thin client model can survive in a world where Dell is selling PCs for $300. Does it make sense to go the thin-client route when you can set up full PCs, either as thin clients themselves, or as "locked down" boxes, for so little money.

He sums it up thusly:

In today’s and future server-based computing environments, it seems like thin clients are losing their advantages. Todays technology allows for you to design fat client configurations in such a way that they provide the same benefits that thin clients do while still delivering better video performance and providing the necessary flexibility. So unless thin client vendors are able to start producing good thin clients at low prices, I think the future of thin clients look bleak.

Do go to the full article and read the extensive comments below it.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

$75 later, a Maxspeed Maxterm 1 GHz thin client -- made by Neoware -- is headed my way. Will a stick of RAM and either a USB flash drive or Compact Flash chip holding Puppy Linux (or Damn Small Linux) enable it to boot?

Judging from the internal pix of the box from Unix Surplus, from where Im buying it, the CF-to-IDE adapter is mounted so the CF module plugs in the back and is powered by a floppy plug from the power supply. It also looks as if there is a spare hard-drive power cable, plus room to mount a 3.5-inch hard drive, should I decide to go that route.

If the Maxspeed takes PC-100 RAM (and I think it will), boots from CF or USB flash, actually runs Puppy and connects via Ethernet without incident, I will be amazed, astounded and generally all geeked up. Imagine, a $75 1 GHZ computer that's roughly the size of a college dictionary ...

I have PDFs of the user manuals from Neoware for various Maxspeed Maxterm thin clients. I'm not quite sure which is the one I'm getting, but they clearly point out the CF slot in the back, but now what serves as the flash memory in the thin client when delivered from the factory. Is it CF inside the box or ??

I'll just have to boot the thing and see what happens.

If you do want to buy one of these new, I recommend Devon IT, which has them for as little as $140 -- and they'll take your CF chip and actually have the PCI slot facing the right way (at a 90-degree angle) so you can install a PCI wireless card without a 90-degree adapter (which I have no idea where to obtain). For a picture of the innards, go here.

Random thought: One thing I need -- it's always one thing, isn't it? -- is a USB CD-RW or DVD-RW drive -- that would give me yet another way to boot and work on these things.

Photo: Inside Devon IT's NTA 6010A. Note the 90-degree angle on the PCI port, the use of laptop-style SODIMM memory and the placement of the CF adapter and chip at the top -- it looks like you could mount a hard drive right in there. Also, check out the heatsink on the CPU. This box could be yours for $140 retail.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why is the average PC still a giant rectangular box with expansion bays for days, ever-larger power supplies and increasingly faster, heat-spewing CPUs? The fast part's OK, but the rest? What's the deal?

There has been change in the PC market. Most modern motherboards have far fewer expansion-card plugs than in the past. ISA is dead, and there are maybe 2 PCI slots, sometimes only one. That's mostly because the functions that those add-on cards used to perform are almost always taken care of on the motherboard itself. Networking, USB, sound, video, not to mention parallel and serial "legacy" ports (called "legacy" because nobody uses them, although God help you if you don't live in DSL country and need a telephone modem -- a serial version, connecting OUTSIDE your PC remains your best bet). Even wireless networking is included on most laptops. But aside from the add-on video cards needed by gamers, there's less need than ever for expansion cards.

What about drives? Floppies and ZIPs are long gone. Hard disk drives are smaller than ever, and we went from CD-ROM to CD-RW to DVD-RW in rapid succession.

And thank the computer gods for USB; it ended the nightmare that was SCSI. Remember those thick, expensive cables and the SCSI ID problem? USB is the best thing to happen to PCs since the GUI. USB works for printers, wireless adapters, flash drives, hard drives, CD and DVD drives, even stupid little lights and fans that waste the USB ports on your computer. It's all so very, very good.

All this brings me to the incredible shrinking PC, except if you're not using a Mac, you don't see it. PCs -- laptops excepted, of course (and many of today's laptops are gargantuan in their own right -- yes, even Apple's) -- I say PCs are still usually freakin' large. Never mind that the standard motherboard has shrunken to what is now "micro-ATX" size -- 9.6 by 9.6 inches, down from the 12 x 9.6 inches of standard ATX.

Let's assess: Personal computers are still too big, too loud (damn fans!), use too much energy (especially when kept turned on 24 hours a day, every day), boot too slowly, load applications too slowly and are prone to quick obsolescence.

The problem can be attacked in various ways. First, there's a company called Via Technologies, which came up with the mini-ITX motherboard form factor, a mainboard measuring 6.7 x 6.7 inches -- and now there's even nano-ITX at 4.7 x 4.7 inches. Also, Via's CPUs are famed for low-power consumption and often fanless operation, and there are correspondingly smaller cases, fanless power supplies and drives -- HD, CD and flash -- that measure up (or is it down?) to the small motherboards. Sure, this is all par for the course in laptop production -- and these boards are not, as a rule, as fast as the average Intel- or AMD-stuffed variety, but this is a good time to remember that the PC industry has been selling more laptops than desktops as a whole for years now. Still, the revolution in desktops -- where America and the computing world works -- is nigh, or rather should be ... nigh.

One way that business has delivered computing power to the workplace has been with what is called a "thin client," meaning a computer with no disk drives, perhaps a few basic applications stored on the circuit board itself (lately in flash memory) with data and bigger applications fed over a network server.

Hey ... PCs also get data from servers ... and the Internet ... and flash memory is continually getting cheaper and growing in capacity -- a 1 GB chip is now $20, 8 GB is $80, and a 32 GB flash drive is in the pipeline from Sandisk.

So, back to thin clients. They're basically stripped-down PCs -- motherboard and power supply in a small box. Wyse and HP are huge players in the thin-client world, and companies like Devon IT and Neoware are nipping at their heels. And with the mini-ITX credo of small, low-power-consuming, if not the cheapest or the fastest, today's thin clients -- some of which retail for as little as $140 -- are prime to be converted to desktop use wiht Linux, pumped up with bigger flash drives (some already use industry-standard Compact Flash) and loaded up like a traditional PC.

While concern over flash memory's write-rewrite life span is real, some operating systems, like Puppy Linux, write to the drive only once per computing session, extending the flash RAM's life indefinitely. And backups of data to a server, the Internet or to a CD/DVD drive -- which you should be doing anyway, people -- are a small price to pay for compact, relatively swift, silent and now freakishly inexpensive computing.

To this end, I've been trolling eBay for suitable thin clients to fatten up as Linux PCs. It's hard to know what's actually going to be inside the case of any given thin client, but it's easier to purchase on of recent vintage on the cheap -- certainly easier and way cheaper than it is to buy 8-year-old laptops running at 300 MHz, which, as a matter of course, sell for $150-$200 on eBay, even though it's still possible to buy a new freakin' laptop for $400 to $500.

I digress.

The cheapest barebones mini-ITX system is still $200 to $250 -- without memory, drives or flash. But there are thin clients out there with similar -- and often faster -- CPUs for $75 to $100, and sometimes for as little as $30 to $50.

I smell an opportunity. A geek opportunity. But opportunity nevertheless.

To that end, I am on the hunt for sub-$100 thin clients that could be pressed into service with Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, or even Ubuntu or Xubuntu (the latter with a 4 GB or 8 GB flash drive -- or even a small IDE hard drive bolted into the case).

My plan is to take a $75 thin client running at 1 GHz, add the flash memory, SDRAM, keyboard, mouse and monitor I already have collected, and try to get one of the popular small Linuxes running on it. The beauty of it is that I've got all this other junk lying around -- all I need is the box itself -- and in the case of a thin client, it's more cereal box, less ... uh, giant PC box.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)