Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

There's been a lot of blog noise lately about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Asus EeePC, Everex Cloudbook and other laptops that sell for anywhere for $250 to $400 ... if you can get your hands on them at all. But this is the first I've heard of a planned $75 laptop being spun off of the OLPC project. There's a new company called Pixel Qi that exhibited at CES and is run by Mary Lou Jepson, the founding chief technology officer of OLPC.

There are quite a few good Web sites for free-software users, but when it comes to sheer volume and organization, Distrowatch tops them all. I don't know how Ladislav Bodner does it. He tracks many hundred Linux and BSD distributions, plus the applications that go into them. I hope he's making a mint, because otherwise there's little to no justice in the world. Anyhow, the latest edition of Distrowatch Weekly is bigger than usual -- there's a lot going on in the Linux and BSD world.

Los Angeles may be the second-largest city in the United States, but when it comes to overt, shouting-at-the-rooftops open-source software evangelism, you'd never know it. But there's one shining beacon of activity in the City of Angels, and that's SCALE -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- coming to the Westin Los Angeles Airport hotel Feb. 8-10. With its full title of SCALE 6x -- (it's the sixth-annual show) -- the event features exhibitors, speakers and, I hope, a lot of open-source geekery.

After dual-booting Ubuntu (at times 7.04 and 7.10) and Debian (first Etch, then Lenny, then a couple of Lennies for a couple of days) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), I've said goodbye to Ubuntu for the time being and decided to install the dependable Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 (the bigger of the two Wolvix distros) and keep Debian (still Lenny). After "losing" two Ubuntu 7.10 installs to unknown causes -- both times processes began slowing to a crawl -- I thought rolling back to Ubuntu 7.04 would give me something stable. But the boot process for 7.04 began stalling at something having to do with the CD drive (I turned off "quiet spash" in GRUB so I could see where it was dying). I'm thinking that either my laptop or Ubuntu itself must be somehow cursed.

I'm ready to throw down $150 for this deal (plus $15 to boost the memory to 512 MB). There are a smattering of low-cost Linux PC deals out there, but this is absolutely the best. Better than Everex, better than the used stuff at Pacific Geek. Better than Mad Tux. Hell, better than anything. You even get an LCD monitor. The $150 doesn't include shipping, and I don't know how much that runs. But holy hell, it's cheap.

Even though my Debian upgrade from Etch to Lenny on the test box went very well, I was a little bit wary of plunging right into it on the $0 Laptop because the Gateway Solo 1450 -- which I did get for $0 -- is a computer I actually rely on (i.e. I don't swap drives in and out of it like I do with the converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client I use for distro testing).

Over the past year or two I’ve been drifting away from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva towards distros derived from Slackware for desktop use. The reason is simple: these distributions tend to have the best performance I’ve found, particularly on older or limited hardware. Slackware itself lacks some graphical tools and user friendly features that more popular distros have but is outstanding in terms of stability and reliability. A number of Slackware derived distros retain those benefits while offering the ease of use many of us have come to expect. AliXe is such a distro, albeit one designed to be small and compact, making it particularly suitable for older hardware. True to it’s Canadian heritage, AliXe also offers full support for both French and English despite it’s small size.

After reading Wolfgang's blog entry on how easy it is to upgrade a Debian installation (and I recommend his blog, The Debian User, to any and all Debian and Ubuntu users), I decided to do it myself. I have a testing hard drive (one of three I can easily swap in and out of my Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client) that began as a Debian Etch Xfce box and recently got GNOME added. Now I'm doing the easy upgrade from Etch (stable) to Lenny (testing).

The Debian GNU/Linux distribution is, in my opinion, the crowning achievement of free, open-source software. But figuring out what Debian is all about and what's happening in every inch of the Debian universe is difficult. I've always wondered how long a Debian release will be supported with security updates and bug fixes. I don't know if there's even a set length of time that a Stable version of Debian will be supported. The current Stable edition -- Etch -- received its "stable" designation in April of this year. And Debian has no set release schedule, preferring to go by the "it's ready when it's ready" dictum. I'm more than OK with that. I assumed that once a release is declared stable, the old stable release fades into unsupported oblivion. Not so.

Since Puppy Linux uses local time, I had reset my test box's clock for the now-aborted Thin Puppy Torture Test II (we've had even more power outages lately, and I'm glad to stop where I did but keep writing about Puppy just the same). But now that I'm back in gOS, I needed to reset the clock to UTC. I'm perfectly capable of opening a terminal and using the command line to set the clock, but I can't believe that the casual, new-to-Linux user with gOS has no other way to set the time. No GUI, big problem.

I continue to praise Geany, the GUI text editor in Puppy Linux. I'm not a programmer, but I use text editors just about every day. Especially for Web work, text editors are must-have tools for writers and editors. And for me, a text editor needs to do a few things -- and do them well.

I've had Debian Etch with the Xfce desktop on the $15 Laptop for a couple of weeks. It took up a lot less space than Slackware 12 with Xfce (and NOT KDE), so I left Debian on the computer, a Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 64 MB of RAM. I had a trick to get the ALSA sound working in Damn Small Linux, but it wouldn't work in Debian. I don't have the soundcore module installed, and that's the next step in getting the sound working. I also found out that doing a Google Docs session in Debian on this box is ... frustrating. The screen moves way too slow. So I went in a different direction. I popped in the Damn Small Linux 4.0 CD (I know they're up to 4.2, but I haven't downloaded and burned the new ISO yet ... I plan to soon).

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.

As I look back on the past year's worth of Click entries, I see my adoption of Linux play out. The pace of free, open-source software development is so fast that it makes the year seem very long indeed. 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. ... 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 USB flash drive.

I found out through Distrowatch that the next release of Damn Small Linux, version 4.2, will replace Xpaint with the unusually light, highly usable MtPaint -- pretty much my favorite Linux image editor. (If it dealt with IPTC info in JPGs, it would be my favorite photo-editing program on all platforms.)

Zonbu has started shipping a laptop version of its Linux-based computing appliance for home users. The Zonbu Notebook or "Zonbook 1" is based on a power-efficient Via processor, runs Gentoo Linux and 20 open source applications, and sells for $280 with a managed service plan.

I made this same point over the weekend in a post or three. But when it comes from Linus Torvalds, it means more. When asked in an InformationWeek Q&A how Linux compares with Windows, Torvalds didn't go into a marketing discussion of Feature Y over Feature X. Instead, he discussed the strength of Linux's process/approach over Windows' "We are Microsoft--trust us to be your god" approach.

I’m a sucker for a Linux or BSD distro with a live CD. Even if you can’t do an install directly from the disc, at least you can figure out whether the damn thing will boot and how your hardware will react when it does. One of my favorites, ZenWalk, just released Zenwalk 4.8 Live. Both Zenwalk and Vector — the top Xfce-based, Slackware-derived distributions — are very good, but I like the way Zenwalk looks and works just that much better.

In response to one of my Everex articles, commenter Alan Rochester clued me in to the Canada-based Linux store, which is offering a somewhat similar $199 PC preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10.

Apparently, a fair number of my readers think I am either clueless about Linux or worse, that I am just plain anti-Linux. Actually, both assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth! ... From 1991 through 1996, I was a UNIX systems administrator. At home, I piddled extensively with Slackware but I soon grew bored with the experimentation required to use Linux. (In those days, OpenOffice didn’t exist so I was still tied to Windows for much of my personal productivity needs.) Nevertheless, I never stopped watching Linux.