Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

In my geeky haze, I forgot to blog about my triumph last week: I set up the $15 Laptop, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt (233 MHZ Pentium II with a whopping 64 MB RAM) to triple-boot Windows 2000, Puppy Linux 2.14 and Damn Small Linux 3.3. So yesterday I figure I can perform the same magic on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, the 1 GHz VIA C3 processor/256 MB RAM box that I use to test distros.

Today it's Linspire agreeing to a Linux technology deal with Microsoft that includes "IP protection" for customers, with IP standing for "intellectual property," and Microsoft basically agreeing not to sue users of Linspire's Linux distro. Curiously, Freespire -- Linspire's "free" version -- isn't included in the IP protection deal but will benefit from greater integration between Open Office and MS Office.

I decided to connect the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) drive today, and I've spent quite a bit of time using it for work. Now this isn't the highest-spec machine (only 256 MB of ram, 1 GHz processor), but it's doing pretty well. Even IE under Wine performed swimmingly (as good as or better than on my Xubuntu setup). Same for the GIMP. I had a GIMP crash in Windows today, but the GIMP is generally rock-solid on both platforms -- and certainly was in 6.06 today.

Have you heard me moan? You must have. "Why, oh why are used laptops so expensive?" Even old, doggy ones go for way too far north of $100 -- and we're starting to talk doggy and unusable. "Are those people on eBay high (on drugs -- they're already high on prices)?"

Windows is not slow. Some Linux distros are. On new hardware, you might not notice. On old hardware, you will. I'm talking mostly about Windows 2000 here, and to a lesser extent Windows XP. I've run Win 2K on many, many platforms, and I'm continually surprised on how well it runs, even with low RAM. It may not be secure at all, may need lots of add-ons just to be usable and may be orphaned by Microsoft in a few years, but for now it's blazingly fast.

By making "intellectual property" deals with commercially oriented distributors of Linux, Microsoft isn't alienating anybody it hasn't turned off already. So far, the two companies that have inked such deals -- Xandros and Novell -- are focused on selling server operating systems to large businesses. And while they may have community involvement, they're not community-oriented, like the Debian distro from which Xandros is derived, or even the wildly popular Ubuntu (itself a Debian derivative).

Microsoft, shrugging off licensing moves to prevent it from repeating its controversial patent deal with Novell, has signed a set of broad collaboration agreements with Linux provider Xandros that include an intellectual property assurance under which Microsoft will provide patent covenants for Xandros customers.

When I did my Xubuntu install (the same is true for Ubuntu), I immediately started Firefox and went to my first Web page with embedded Flash. And then it happened. Firefox asked me if I wanted to download and install the Flash plugin. Why say no? So I said yes. But how to get rid of Flash? It's not so easy.

Following up on my previous post, and in answer to the recent piece by our own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on the failure of desktop Linux, I would like to make a modest proposal. An all-in Linux laptop. That is you sell a laptop with a Linux, a user interface, and all the applications you need to happen, pre-installed and ready to go. You click the on switch and it works. This is not hard to do. Ubuntu, GNOME, and Open Office are all easy to get. Add some nifty utilities, WiFi capability, networking, and you’ve got a $500 laptop with no additional software necessary.

On May 31, Red Hat's sponsored and community supported open source Fedora Project released the latest version of its distribution: Fedora 7. Besides being a cutting edge Linux distribution, it features a new build capability that enables users to create their own custom distributions. Fedora 7 now boasts a completely open-source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances and distributions that can be targeted to meet individual needs.

Palm has used Linux to build a "new class" of mobile device. The Foleo aims to expand the email, Internet, and productivity application capabilities of mobile phones such as the Palm Treo, by adding a full-size keyboard and a larger screen. Very few details about the Foleo are known at this point. Opera, which supplied its Opera 9 browser for the device, has confirmed the Foleo to be based on Linux. For its part, Palm has published a few photos and brief videos of the device, while promising to release more details tomorrow.

After a few weeks of wrangling with e-mail at the console, I now have a working setup that allows me to send and receive mail from two accounts, one personal, the other for work, on my Debian Etch box.

... it's just a subset of the overall Dell forum, but it has a Linux logo, complete with Tux (that's it above). And here's the Dell Linux Engineering Web Site, where the project's Wiki lives.

My task today was a simple one: Pull four Quicktime videos from an SD card and burn them on a CD. I booted Xubuntu Feisty, and after a few minutes found xfburn, which came standard with 7.10. I had a couple of Thunar windows open, that was it, but xfburn pretty much crashed on launch. I went into the process manager, killed it, then closed my Thunar windows and restarted xfburn.

Today's debut of Dell PCs with Linux preinstalled threatened to be eclipsed by another Dell bombshell -- the Round Rock, Texas, PC giant will supplement it's direct-to-you sales method with a heaping helping of Middle American retail through Wal-Mart.

With the help of My First Mutt, I figured out how to import POP mail into mutt: To browse a POP3 mailbox, just hit c to change mailboxes. Then, instead of typing the name of a local mailbox, you can enter the location of your POP3 server. This is much like typing the URL for a page in a web-browser: pop://username@mail.example.com/

After days and days of being able to receive IMAP mail but not send it with mutt, I finally cracked the problem. What took me a little while to understand -- that mutt needed a separate SMTP client to send Internet e-mail -- took a lot longer to actually get working.

When was the last time you installed Windows NT 4.0? If your answer is "never," I believe you. If you've done it countless times, do I have your sympathy? I need it. My most recent major Windows upgrade (chronicled on my This Old PC blog) was taking a Win 98se box to Windows 2000. For those who think Windows has some kind of compatibility advantage over Linux, let me recount how in Windows 98 I didn't have a prayer of getting my cheap Airlink 101 wireless card to work, USB was spotty, and the thing was painfully slow to boot and to run.

In keeping with its frantic pace of development and improvement, today the Puppy Linux team has released the beta of Puppy 2.16. The good news, for me anyway, is the "minimalist look" (see above), and the "Save" icon on the desktop for USB users. Also welcome are an improved Pmount drive-mounter -- an alternative to the MUT (Mounting Utility Tool).

Blogging from the command line without a GUI -- and no e-mail gateway -- can be done ... almost. Using the command-line, text-only Elinks browser to post blog entries -- or to complete Web forms in general -- is a lesson in trial, error and frustration. But disciplined use of keystrokes -- and a little dumb luck -- allows these browsers to post to Movable Type blogs such as this one.