Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

When we left off, Fedora was taking quite a long time to install over the network on this Power Mac G4/466. I returned to the office to find the Fedora 9 install finished. I rebooted. No X. After Debian Etch installed with no problems whatsoever, I don't know why I expected Fedora 9 to do the same thing, but I did.

I didn't have any complaints about the way Debian Etch performed on my new/old Power Macintosh G4/466. The install went smoothly, the system performed better than I had reason to expect with only 128 MB of RAM, and I can unreservedly recommend Etch to anybody with a box of this pedigree (PowerPC) and vintage (circa 2001). But since this was my first PowerPC install, I can't leave things where they are without taking a few more distros for a spin. Right now I'm installing Fedora 9.

I always seem to have trouble with Ubuntu. On the $0 Laptop — the Gateway Solo 1450 — there comes a time in every Ubuntu install when the thing either won't boot or runs so slowly that I have to wipe the thing off the drive and start over. It could be something particular to this laptop, the hard drive in it, or my constant dual- and triple-booting of Linux and BSD operating systems in a constantly shifting array.

The Daily News is leaving the windowless box it has called home since some time in the '80s to move down the street to a newer, window-rich building. The current spot has lots of space — and that means lots of space filled with old hardware. The paper's design desk used to subsist on Power Macintosh G4 computers hooked up to 22-inch LaCie monitors. Resident Mac guru and digital photography expert Roger Vargo announced that anybody who wanted a G4 could get one ... until they were all gone. So how does Debian perform on a Mac PowerPC with 450 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM? Surprisingly well. And there were absolutely zero configuration issues. Everything came out perfectly.

been able to have OpenBSD's /etc/fstab automatically mount the ext2 filesystem on my Compaq Armada 7770dmt's hard drive with no difficulty lately, but every couple of days or so I get a message while booting OpenBSD that says the Linux filesystem is not clean and that I should run fsck on it. I then boot Puppy Linux 2.13, run e2fsck on the partition, the errors are cleared up, and all is well until a few more days pass.

I've been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions. I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online resources gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)

I've had a bit of a difficult time with my OpenBSD 4.2 installation on the $15 Laptop — a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 144 MB RAM, a 233 MHz Pentium II CPU and 3 GB hard drive. Since I upgraded the memory from 64 MB to the 144 MB maximum for this machine, things are running much, much better. But I'm running out of room in the /usr partition. I'm not sure whether or not OpenBSD can be installed in a single partition, but since the install FAQ tells you to set up separate partitions for everything, that's what I did.

My exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-part series on what OS to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) spent a good deal of time on how Puppy Linux represented the best combination of quickness and out-of-the-box features of any operating system for this old, underpowered hardware. I based all of that on running Puppy 2.13. I managed to boot Puppy 4, but the relative slowness of Abiword to start had me pausing about an upgrade from 2.13. However, I discovered something about the Geany text editor that could prompt me to use word processing apps even less than I already do.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts, was a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box. I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

This week, Microsoft renewed their union with Novell, to the tune of an additional 100 million dollars in commitment to buy more SUSE Linux support certificates that it can sell to its customers. Dang, Ballmer, for that kind of cash, you can get your vows renewed in Vegas, with the REAL Elvis. I’m not even going to mention what kind of a group package you can get at the Mustang Ranch.

[Don't let the less-than-scintillating headline fool you -- the rest of the story is as good as the lead -- sr]

Cloud computing promises to liberate its adherents from the bother of messy implementations of software, while also freeing them from the constraints of hardware capacity. At the same time, however, cloud computing has the potential to deliver the ultimate in vendor lock-in. My colleague, James Urquhart, has put together a proposed "cloud computing bill of rights" to help guide would-be cloud customers to those clouds best able to guarantee their freedom. Just as some are now clamoring for open-data commitments, James' suggestions are intended to deliver the value of the cloud without the lock-in.

Adobe could port its Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, In-Design and other subsystems, to Linux as a shot across Redmond's bow. Then the company should embrace Linux in-house and develop a complete, optimized Linux OS designed to run a high-performance version of its Creative Suite on Linux optimized for Adobe products, to be sold as a bootable bundle for multicore-workstation hardware. The idea is to produce a near-dedicated Adobe computer designed to use all the power of the newest chips to run the Adobe software under Linux. Since Linux is under the hood, users could exit the Adobe programs and run their word processors and whatever else on the Linux boxes.

The realities of using OpenBSD on this old machine have had me booting Puppy more and more. The reason is that Firefox in OpenBSD can't handle posting to Movable Type. Scripts are constantly timing out, and the experience is more than a little frustrating. The Dillo browser runs great in OpenBSD. It doesn't have tabs, like some versions of Dillo do. But as an interface to something as complicated as Movable Type, Dillo won't work. Since then, I've discovered the free (but not open-source) browser Opera, which is a good deal faster than Firefox (or anything else based on Mozilla) and in Windows a great deal faster than Internet Explorer. Could Opera help me in OpenBSD?

Hello boys and girls — That's me in the Debian T-shirt above. Ilene got it for me from AboutDebian.com. I don't think I need to tell any of you that I'm proud to be a Debian user. Sure I've had (and have) my problems getting Debian to do exactly what I want on every machine on which I have it installed, but I'd call Debian ultra-reliable, easily fixable and extremely useful. I've never mistakenly hosed a Debian installation, and I've never seen a machine on which Debian won't run — and run pretty well.

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible. I've written before about how preload doesn't seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I'd sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

My advice is to avoid dual-booting, and especially triple-booting (or even more than that). If you set up a box to dual-boot with two Linux distros, Linux and Windows, or even a BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD) and Linux, and you leave it alone, you'll probably be OK. But me, I'm testing things all the time, and lately I've been playing around with triple-booting on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. I've done this a lot, and I generally know how to do it so I don't hose one partition or another. But I slightly hosed something on the laptop last night.

ow that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Encrypted private directories are the one thing that would get me to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 this October.

Now that Debian's current testing release, code name Lenny, has been frozen, we're this much closer to seeing Lenny become a Stable release, a milestone that is projected for September of this year. That would make it a year and four months after the current Stable release, Etch, was so designated in April 2007.

You might ask why I'm spending so much time figuring out how to best configure a Compaq Armada 7770dmt — a laptop with an ancient 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor, feeble 144MB of RAM and smallish 3GB hard drive. For one thing, I almost never abandon a machine that can be used. And this one definitely can be. Plus, I like the Compaq. It has a nice screen and keyboard, I like the fact that its power supply is totally contained in the laptop case. The thing's pretty solid.