Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I don't pretend to know enough about whether ZDNet's Jason Perlow is right about Linux missing the boat when it comes to massive scaling and how OpenSolaris has the upper hand in the world of big iron. I have a feeling that if there's a demand for a Linux kernel aimed at massively huge-scale computing, that will happen. Certainly the open-sourcing of Solaris will provide more competition for Linux, but there's room enough out there for everybody, I figure. And whether or not the "open" part of OpenSolaris will extend much beyond the i386 architecture is, in my mind, more of a question than a certainty.

Ilene's iBook G4 is dying. So I've set her up with the $0 Laptop, which the kid already uses to play her educational games (GCompris and Childsplay). After using Linux for nearly a year and a half, and overcoming many dozen obstacles, bugs and the like, I was very unhappy to find one problem specific to Ubuntu and another that might be a hardware issue ... or a Linux-wide, soul-crushing situation (but most likely is a hardware issue plaguing this specific laptop).

I don't follow Sun or OpenSolaris all that closely, although I have tried Project Indiana, been intrigued by a "Damn Small" take on OpenSolaris, and generally think that Sun is doing all the right things to survive and thrive in the post-proprietary world. I still want an old Sun SPARCstation, but I can't seem to get that hooked up ... but be that as it may, OpenSolaris -- the open-source, community-fueled version of Sun's Unix-like Solaris operating system -- has been officially launched.

After a few instances where the keyboard and mouse locked up in Ubuntu 8.04 on the $0 Laptop, I decided to write my weekly column for the Daily News' Tech Talk space entirely in Ubuntu. I've got about 10 Firefox windows open, I'm switching between them madly, doing searches, writing and generally beating the hell out of the keyboard and touchpad (I didn't connect the USB mouse today). No crashes, no freezes. Nothing but trouble-free computing.

It took me a few tries to get a good burn on Damn Small Linux 4.3. Once I did, it worked great on my Dell Optiplex GX 520. It also performed flawlessly on my VIA C3 test box. It didn't do so well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where the colors were totally whacked out (blue looked like orange, etc. ...). But DSL has never run well on the Gateway, so I didn't expect anything. The biggest "get" in DSL 4.3 is Firefox 2, which for some reason has been renamed Bon Echo for the purposes of this distribution. Going from Firefox version 1.06 to 2 is a huge deal for DSL. Quite a few Web sites require at least FF 1.5 to work at all, including many Web e-mail services and the Movable Type and Blogger interfaces.

I want it. MacX, the software that Apple itself used to sell to get an early-'90s Macintosh to do an X session from a Unix box. Sure, there are solutions for OS 9 Macs, and any OS X box can easily be made to do this. But System 7.6.1, which is what I run on my Powerbook 1400cs, that's another thing entirely.

It was my initial frustration with just getting my Powerbook 1400cs to work at all with the "modern" World Wide Web and Internet e-mail that led me to abandon the project (and the resulting This Old Mac blog for the infinitely greener pastures of Linux and BSD on older, cheaper, more-compliant PC (as in IBM-PC, or Windows and MS-DOS compatible) hardware. But I never forgot about the Powerbook 1400. Sure, I didn't take it out of the bag for over a year, but when I got it in my head that I could use the Powerbook not as a stand-alone Linux box (the only alternative for this vintage of PowerPC-equipped Mac being MkLinux, a distro as dead as can be and not even downloadable) but as a terminal with my many Debian, OpenBSD and various other Linux/Unix setups.

Ever since my exploration of the various PCLinuxOS spins, I've been impressed with the project. Now that I'm having so much relative success with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it's unlikely that I will be running PCLinuxOS on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, but a) you never know and b) I'm looking for a good system to install for others, and PCLinuxOS is a top contender in that department.

The OpenBSD project is ready to announce the new release, OpenBSD 4.3, that will be officially available on May 1st (the only way to get it earlier is ordering the CD package). As usual there are a lot of improvements and new tools and features, and it sounds amazing that they keep delivering these results with a six month release cycle.

It's day 2 for my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS install. Things have gone more smoothly that I expected. First of all, I got the ISO on Friday -- one day after Ubuntu 8.04's official release -- in under 2 hours. I remember my 7.10 download taking much, much longer. Part of my success this go-round was that I used a good mirror. That speeds things up considerably.

One of the reasons the Ubuntu project is doing so well is that it puts a cleaner, slightly more polished face on what starts out as Debian. The new user doesn't know that Ubuntu pulls a lot of packages from Debian Unstable. Instead, they think of the Canonical-run distribution as "a Linux for the rest of us." Sure, marketing is involved, but at the core, Ubuntu is a fairly solid system -- mostly because it's based on Debian.

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Debian Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I want to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

I'm not one to give up, although I seem to do it all the time. If I install an OS, and it doesn't work out, chances are I'll pull it off and replace it with something else. But I keep going back to what didn't quite work all the way, and so I'm back in the world of PC-BSD. Why both desktop FreeBSD projects -- DesktopBSD and PC-BSD -- insist on pushing KDE and not offering even a spin on Xfce, or GNOME, I don't know. Whether it's habit, preference, or prejudice, I'm more comfortable in GNOME, although I like a well-appointed Fluxbox, Fvwm, or Xfce desktop, and use them fairly often. The fact that PC-BSD installs with Fluxbox as an alternate window manager means I'll have an alternative environment to play with right away.

In response to my last entry on bug reports in Debian, and the distro's propensity to offer workarounds in the messages that follow bug reports without coming right out and saying whether or not the bug is going to be "fixed" (if it's not a bug, it must be a "feature," no?), a discussion started on LXer about whether you should run Stable (currently Etch) or Testing (Lenny). My point of view is basically that if Etch works for you, it's stable all right. But if things aren't working quite right for your hardware in Debian's Stable release, you might want to start looking elsewhere. Stable isn't going to start sprouting features out of its nether regions just because it doesn't work for you.

I'm always using a mix of machines and OSes for my work, but until this week, my main "home" machine -- The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- has been mostly used at home for a bit of Web browsing, testing Linux distributions, and my daughter's favorite educational games (gCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, Potato Guy). But this week I've needed to use the laptop a lot more while I'm in the office.

when I woke up today (after sleeping in for the first time with my new roll-top in front of my bedroom window) I was surprised & confused by a couple of "congratulations!" messages in my irc away-log. it took me a bit of time & coffee (& looking into my mailbox) to begin to realize that my Debian account had indeed been created while I was asleep. — in fact I guess I still haven't completely realized my new status as Debian Developer.

[So the wheels are turning once again for Debian - Steve]

Long story short, even though OpenBSD 4.3 isn't scheduled to be released until May, it is available in the mirrors under snapshots. Since version 4.3 is supposed to have ACPI enabled by default, I figured I'd burn a CD and try it on the $0 Laptop, on which I'd love to control my noisy CPU fan. I've written recently on how FreeBSD seems to do a fine job in this regard, but only for a day before reverting to the previous noisiness. Now, I've never actually seen any concrete tips on exactly how to control a CPU fan in OpenBSD, but just maybe ... maybe it would work automatically. No such luck.

Why Debian decided at this juncture to remove the binary blob that supports sound for those with ESS Allegro/Maestro3 chips -- including The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- I don't know. The problem -- i.e. no sound -- reared itself in the newish 2.6.24-1 kernel that recently rolled into Debian Lenny. It took me awhile before I figured out that booting the previous kernel -- 2.6.22-3 -- brought sound back. But what if I have to reinstall Lenny and don't get the older kernel? Or what if want to use the new kernel ... and those that follow?

Even though the 4,000+ packages and ports for OpenBSD include just about every text editor you could want, the out-of-the-box installation includes just one editor. I bet you can guess which one it is. If you guessed vi, you win. If you didn't, what's wrong with you? I'm not saying you've got to love vi -- and it's perfectly all right if you hate it. But something as hard core as OpenBSD just says "you'll use vi -- and you'll like it."

I've been running OpenBSD 4.2 on my test box -- the VIA C3 Samuel-based thin client -- for a couple of months now. That's at least a year in dog months, and since I'm anxious to put Dru Lavigne's new "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book to work, I wanted to do something I've never done before: Install a BSD on the $15 Laptop, the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt.