Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

Upon seeing 17 software updates waiting for me on my Debian Etch box this morning, I hurried over to the Debian security site and learned that the Debian security team issued a flurry of patches on Oct. 29, 2008, for all versions of OpenOffice. On my system, this is a relatively huge 101 MB download.

Since I'm keeping my Self-Reliant Thin Client running all the time, every morning that there are new updates to Debian Etch, I seem them right away. We had three yesterday and three more today (for my architecture anyway): libmyspell3c2, linux-image-2.6.18-6-486, tzdata.

I have my Self-Reliant Thin Client running Debian Etch turned on all of the time. I haven't been able to find power-usage specs for the Maxspeed Maxterm (it could be a 5300, but there are no model numbers on the box), but with no moving parts, a Mini-ITX-size motherboard, Mini-ITX-type fanless power supply and fanless VIA C3 Samuel CPU, as well as non-working case fan (except when tilting said case at a 45-degree angle) and a Compact Flash chip instead of a spinning hard drive and no optical drive, the thing is totally silent and must be fairly sparing on electricity use. I don't think I even moved the mouse yesterday, but today when I brought it out of screen-saver mode, there were three updates to Debian Etch.

I'm running what I call The Self-Reliant Thin Client on Debian Etch, a GNU/Linux distribution I haven't run intensively in quite some time. I also recently installed the PowerPC build of Etch on my Power Macintosh G4/466, but I've been using the converted thin client almost exclusively since I built it last week using an 8 GB Compact Flash module as the system's sole hard drive.

I have to admit, I'm very intrigued by INX, a Ubuntu-based Linux live CD designed for desktop use without the X Window system. I first read about it at Linux Haxor, and after seeing the distro's screenshots and information page, and given my own wrangling with life at the command line, I'm ready to try it right now. Right now, INX is a live-CD only distro and isn't meant to be installed, but what it might be able to do is give you some good ideas on how to flesh out your current Linux or BSD system to make life in the console that much better. That's my theory, anyway.

One reason I love Linux is that when there's a problem, it gets fixed. Usually, it gets fixed in a hurry and that's exactly what happened with the e1000e Ethernet bug.

I have been impressed with the way that popular Linux distros like Ubuntu have improved with each new release; these days, Linux is a great choice for technically sophisticated users who don’t mind being far, far out of the mainstream. But for people who don’t have the time or the inclination to make fundamental changes, it’s a nonstarter.

Do people who pay $299 to $399 for a Linux notebook suffer greater levels of buyer’s remorse compared to those buying Windows machines?

Jiri Kosina cautioned that there is still an unknown bug affecting the e1000e driver currently in the 2.6.27 kernel, "rendering the cards unusable for most of the i-am-not-a-hacker users (and remember, even Dave Airlie bricked his laptop completely to death, when trying to restore eeprom contents)" When asked how to duplicate the bug, Jiri noted that the inability to reliably reproduce the bug added to the difficulty in debugging the problem, "apparently it is some kind of race, as it usually takes multiple cycles to trigger".

That's right; you heard me. Here are – count 'em – one hundred reasons why Linux beats Windows.

I still might be in a position to heap praise upon Ubuntu 8.04 for its performance on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) since I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago with a separate /home partition and a not-screwed-up UUID scenario. But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button. Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They're relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you). But do they mean much? Not really, I think.

I've been running Debian in one form or another, on one box or another, ever since Etch went stable in April 2007. I last ran Etch extensively both on my VIA converted thin client and on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), but since then the VIA has been used to compare Ubuntu and Wolvix, and the Compaq has been running OpenBSD and Puppy. So it had been a long time since I had worked with Etch (as opposed to the newer, soon-to-be-stable Lenny I've been battling on my Gateway laptop). Debian Etch really is like a comfortable pair of old shoes.

Since the Power Macintosh G4/466 has enough space for four hard drives, I decided to put a second one in the box. I set the second drive's jumpers to make it a "slave." Then I used an extra IDE cable as an "extension cable" so I could plug the second IDE input from the too-short motherboard cable into the second drive. I booted into Debian Etch, ran the GNOME Partition Editor to create an ext3 filesystem on the backup drive, then mounted it and did a few tests with rsync.

Not that anything approaching brain-surgery-level thinking was in any way involved here, but I figured out why and how it's easy to get paragraphs to automatically indent when writing in the Geany text editor. First of all, it's not called automatic tabbing or paragraph inentation. The correct term for what I'm enjoying so much is "auto-indentation," and it can be turned on and off under the Document menu in Geany.

CompuLab introduced a tiny fanless PC using 4-6 Watts of power. The Linux-ready "Fit-PC Slim" measures 4.3 x 3.9 x 1.2 inches (110 x 100 x 30mm), but includes a 500MHz AMD Geode LX800, Ethernet, VGA output, WiFi, and a 2.5-inch hard drive option, says CompuLab. The Fit-PC Slim apparently includes much the same ingredients as CompuLab's earlier Fit-PC, introduced last year.

[The only problem -- where can we buy this? It's not at all clear -- steve]

I've taken to calling my Power Macintosh G4/466 the Debian Mac. I continue to be amazed at how well Debian Etch runs on this thing with 466 MHz of PowerPC CPU and a smallish 128 MB of RAM. (I'll take this opportunity to repeat that on this box, Etch runs many a ring around Fedora 9's PowerPC port). The best thing I could do for the usability of this box is to up the RAM.

My inability to do more-than-simple mathematics at times has really put a cramp in my computing style. In the case of OpenBSD and the $15 Laptop — the Compaq Armada 7770dmt — it has cost me 32 MB of RAM ever since I upgraded from 64 MB to the maximum 144 MB. The reason is that in some Compaq's OpenBSD will not address more than 16 MB of RAM without some intervention on the part of the user.

If the question is "how low can you go" in terms of computer memory, it's all about applications. If you stayed in the Linux console and never ran X, just about anybody could be happy with 32 MB of RAM. It might be hard to actually run Linux or a BSD in 16 MB, but I've heard of Linux distributions that will do it, Damn Small Linux, Tom's RtBt and DeLi Linux among them. But as much as the hard-core users talk about how they stay at the command line all the time, it's hard to get much done strictly in a console when you're a regular person.

The combination of the Xfce and Fluxbox window managers, plus the excellent choice of apps (it has pretty much everything I use day to day) makes the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Cub and Hunter two of the best choices out there — for me anyway. Adding to Wolvix's flexibility, it can run as a live CD, or be installed in a traditional or "frugal" manner. I've chosen traditional installs, and the install process in Wolvix is excellent. It's easy to create as many partitions as you need, you get a choice of GRUB or LILO bootloaders, and once you do have it installed, slapt-get and Gslapt are ready to bring all the apps up to date from both the Wolvix and Slackware repositories.