Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I'm tired of debating the relative merits of Linux's various desktop environments and distributions. Tired of reading about them, tired of writing about them. So today an experiment begins: My month at the command line. I'm going back. To the $ prompt. No GNOME. No KDE. Not even Xfce, IceWM or Fluxbox. No X at all. Just the console.

It's not official, but sources tell Desktoplinux.com that when Dell begins offering PCs pre-equipped with Linux, the distribution that will go on those boxes will be ... Ubuntu.

If most of the Linux distributions derive from either Slackware or Debian, why not just go to the source? Slackware looks way too hard to figure out, but Debian, which just released version 4.0, offers a net-install ISO -- and I've always wanted to install a distro over the Internet -- so I burned the CD this morning and am currently installing a Debian system over the Internet.

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?

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.

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, 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.

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).

Sorry about the long title, but some things just piss me off so much. In this case, I want to make it clear that Microsoft isn't 100 percent to blame -- maybe 80 percent, since half the times that Microsoft tries to add value to their operating system, software companies that make money downstream by selling you stuff that would be made obsolete by that added value start bitching about it -- and the feds tell MS to back off. And while I'm no Microsoft apologist, the consumer often gets screwed in the process. But that doesn't have to happen. ... So now on to my point -- and I do have one. The state of multimedia -- audio and video -- on the Internet is a big hot mess.

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.

After thinking that I'm "breaking" some kind of news on Fluxbuntu becoming an official port of Ubuntu, I go back to the Ubuntu Forums and find out that the April 1 day meant that it was an April Fool's joke from Fluxbuntu principal Joe Jaxx, reports bodhi.zazen, the other Fluxbuntu biggie who posted it in the first place.

It happened April 1, according to this portion of the Ubuntu forums. I've given Fluxbuntu middling marks in the past, but I see why the Linux community needs it. To have the lightness of Damn Small Linux (albeit without the ease of use) along with the repositories, support and sheer numbers of Ubuntu would be a very powerful thing indeed.

Every once in awhile, I check Amazon to see what books are upcoming in various categories (using the "publication date" option), and just such a search has uncovered what looks to be the first Damn Small Linux book, "The Official Damn Small Linux Book: The Tiny Adaptable Linux That Runs on Anything," by Robert Singledecker, John Andrews and Christopher Negus -- and set for release in July.

I'm gonna be busy, because both Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux have issued updates. Here are the announcements at Distrowatch for Puppy 2.15 and DSL 3.3.

SUSE root is a nice evangelist-type site about Novell's SUSE -- specifically openSUSE, that tries to answer the questions that could be asked by a potential user of this extremely popular distro. Looking at The Distrowatch top 100 distributions, there's Ubuntu at No. 1, followed by openSUSE and Fedora. I'm thinking of trying openSUSE because it's so darn popular, is meant for business use -- and I just want to see how it runs.

Here's a plug for Geany, the primary text editor in Puppy Linux. I've been using Geany for a few weeks now, and it's really a nice piece of software. For one thing, it's not foreign to someone who primarily uses full-fledged word processors -- and Windows ones, at that.

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.

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.

SimplyMEPIS 6.5 for 32 and 64 bit Intel and AMD based PCs and MacTels has been released by MEPIS. 6.5 started as a minor update to the Ubuntu pool compatible 6.0 release of SimplyMEPIS but the project quickly expanded to add the 7.1 X window manager, newer display and wireless drivers, Mac Intel support, Amarok music player with music store and mtp support, and the experimental Beryl 3D desktop.

At this point, I've run about 15 or so live Linux CDs with varying degrees of success. And yes, I have manually configured a static networking connection before -- Fluxbuntu's "command line interface is EVERYTHING" philosophy sent me to the Web for instructions on how to do so. But I'm not a full card-carrying geek, so I'm not all that crazy about going to the command line with no help whatsoever just to get freakin' Internet flowing into the box with a live CD I've never run before on an OS I've also never run before.

Most of us have older PCs that we have little use for. Linux advocates often suggest turning such systems into home data servers. A number of people have written how this can be done, with one recent article suggesting the use of Ubuntu. Now, I’m all for the reuse of old hardware wherever possible. It’s damaging to the environment to improperly dispose of such systems, for instance. In business settings, we can often repurpose older PCs and servers in a number of ways. Older PCs often make excellent firewalls and web proxies. By installing an OS like OpenBSD or NetBSD on such hardware, one can get a secure, affordable and yet powerful system. But I’m not sure this holds true for the home data server suggestions.