Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I call it the $0 Laptop, because that's what I paid for it. The dead Gateway Solo 1450 I got a few months back now runs. The Gateway's previous owner abandoned it because its DC power plug pretty much disintegrated -- a common problem in these machines because the plug in question is a PC-board-mounted piece of plastic. With a new power plug in place, I decided to try to get some Linux and BSD distros on it. Xubuntu 7.04 had a promising start. After booting the live CD, I even had the panels that went missing in my other installs. But the install crashed, and on subsequent tries, those panels disappeared, so I decided to move on.

Remember Ubuntu Lite? The lighter-than-Xubuntu, more-graphical-than-Fluxbuntu variant of Ubuntu seemed about to get off the ground last year. Then it disappeared. In that time, Fluxbuntu has floundered, too. And while Xubuntu has never looked better and generally runs pretty well, I'd like to see Ubuntu play in the space occupied by Puppy, Damn Small Linux, DeLi and AntiX.

Catching my eye from this week's Distrowatch Weekly: MACH BOOT - a live CD that boots in 10 seconds. TEN seconds? I'm lucky to get anything to boot in less than three minutes. And I've never heard of Mach Boot. But I am intrigued. When an obscure distro gets mentioned in Distrowatch, it's a recipe for an overloaded server, but I will try to download, burn and boot Mach Boot to see how quickly it, in fact does boot. And whether it works at all.

I'm at the tail end of my CentOS 4.5 install. Once again, I continue to be impressed with the Anaconda installer. It's one of the best I've seen. It gives you a lot of freedom to pick which packages you want to install. I bulked up on the KDE -- I wanted everything to be as ready as it could be when the install finished. Once the install was done, I clicked the icon to run up2date. It seemed to be taking forever and then I noticed the notes in one of the boxes: Up2date needs to be up to date before using it. So I opened a terminal and used yum to update Up2date. Then I clicked the update icon again, and everything started flowing.

You might have seen this already, but Bruce Byfield's post on his personal blog, Why I'm Staying With Debian should be read by every Linux user: "Almost as important as Debian’s technical excellence and arrangements is the community around the distribution. This community is one of the most outspoken and free-thinking in free and open source software."

Thanks, Johnny Hughes. He commented on my previous CentOS odyssey, which led me to install version 3.9 on my VIA C3-equipped test box. He said CentOS 4.5 would run on it. I had previously tried the 4.4 live CD, and that wouldn't boot, so I never bothered to burn a 4.5 install disc. Johnny was right. I did burn the first CentOS 4.5 disc, and typing i586 at the boot prompt worked.

When Walt Mossberg talks, people listen. He's the big tech writer at the Wall Street Journal, and for those who don't know, he's generally regarded as being in the Apple camp. Here he gives Ubuntu a try. Having the WSJ report on Linux and Ubuntu is huge. There will be a whole lot more downloads of Ubuntu than usual as the result of this kind of exposure, and one major-media piece generally begats more than a few others.

I haven't actually had the time to listen to one of the 77 -- SEVENTY-SEVEN!!!! -- podcasts on Linux at the Linux Reality Web site, but I'm going to soon. They seem to be aimed at the new Linux user, and they cover everything from what an ISO is and how to burn one, to browsers, desktop environments, various distributions, the shell ... And there are more Linux podcasts: The Linux Links Tech Show, Lotta Linux Links, Open News and LQ Radio.

I can't believe I've never heard of Slackbuilds.org. It's a great way to get the software you want on your Slackware box.

It's not in the "one small step for man" category, but my quest to run something -- anything -- from Red Hat on my VIA C3 Samuel-equipped test box has finally been successful. But not without a lot of effort.

Slackware is the Un-Buntu. It's almost the Un-Debian, but definitely the Un-Buntu. Whether this is good or bad is not something I'm going to talk about. It's just different. As I get deeper into using Slackware 12.0, I find myself reading more and more about the distribution, which is not exactly front-burner blog material.

While it's not as easy as apt-get update, apt-get upgrade in Debian/Ubuntu (or the Update Manager), there's something very sane about maintaining a Slackware box. For one thing, you know way more about what goes into it. One thing with Slackware -- it pays to read. Read the documentation, keep up with blogs and Web sites that write about Slack.

Slackware provides security updates all the way back to version 8.1 along with 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 11.0 and 12.0, so if there is a reason you're using an older version of Slack, it is still being supported by the distro's creator, Patrick Volkerding and his team. ... Slackware is still supporting version 8.1 a full five years after its release. That's the kind of commitment I like to see for a distribution. If you want to install it, you won't be left out in the cold if you want to stay with an older version that does what you want it to do.

I decided that I needed the Palm back in my life. I can maybe steal a minute or two hear and there to write, and if I use pen and paper, chances are whatever it is will never make it into print/online because things change and what I wrote is no longer up to the minute. My Palm Tungsten E had gone totally dead. I had to restore everything with a sync, and by some kind of magic, my Palm infrared keyboard suddenly started working again. So it was time to get the Palm and Linux talking to each other.

Thinking back to my Vector Linux 5.8 Standard install of a month or so ago, I decided to try it again. This time I wouldn't use the Puppy 2.14 live CD to make my partitions and would instead use the Vector CD all the way. First of all, while I like the installer overall, it makes you do your own partitioning in Cfdisk with no provision for a "standard" partitioning scheme, the latter option -- available in many other distros -- very helpful to new users and those uncomfortable with manual partitioning.

I downloaded and burned the Xubuntu Gutsy Tribe 5 live CD and loaded it up. I realize that this is beta and not all the bugs are worked out, and with that criterion, things are working very well. But I'm left wondering "Why?"

Fluxbox seems like an afterthought in most distros. You can add it, sure, but it doesn't look or function that great without some work. I wasn't prepared for how great Fluxbox would be in Vector.

Ubuntu and its sister Linux distributions -- including Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Edbuntu -- finds themselves in an enviable yet thankless position in the Linux universe. That the 'Buntus are the most popular choice among Linux users is without question. Ubuntu is nearly always at the top of Distrowatch.com's popularity list, its forums are busy -- make that very busy -- and also very friendly. New users are welcomed, their hands are held, and command-line fixes are offered along with gentle encourgement.

I liked what I saw in the Puppy 2.15CE "Community Edition," but felt it strayed too far from the traditional Puppy, and I was glad to be back in familiar territory with 2.16. I know that Puppy 2.17 is already out, but the crew behind Puppy is releasing new versions quicker than I can evaluate them.

Every time I boot the $15 Laptop, I want to party like it's 1999, because that's the year it reverts to each and every time. I could set the system clock at the command line every session, but who wants to do that? I'd replace the battery, if I only knew how. I'd be $10 poorer, too. But there's really no need: Enter the Network Time Protocol.