Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

One of the great, liberating things that comes with using GNU/Linux and other free, open-source software is the moral high ground. I don't think what Microsoft is doing is right -- abandoning old products so we'll all buy new ones every other year or so. Most respond by using pirated software, but it's better to reject the Microsoft model outright and use free, open-source applications as much as you can.

I really wanted to install ZenWalk 4.6.1, but it was not to be. Add it to the list of distros that won't boot on my test machine, the VIA C3 1 GHz thin client. I don't quite understand it, because Slackware 12 boots (with the huge.s kernel), as does Vector Linux 5.8. So I shrunk my Slackware partition just enough to squeeze Vector Standard on there again.

In the "if it ain't broke, then why the hell are you fixing it?" department, maybe I should refocus my energies on Debian and not worry so much about Fedora/Red Hat. ... At the risk of repeating myself, after hearing so many horror stories about how hard it is to install and maintain Debian, I've found it to be extremely easy and trouble-free. It's no harder than Ubuntu, although there's a simplicity to a standard Ubuntu install that isn't there with Debian, meaning there is less stuff installed with Ubuntu, more with Debian.

I am in the middle of installing Slackware on my test box. So far all the Slack fans are right -- it's not hard at all, and dammit, it works. It's like my Linux Bar Mitzvah (insert your own joke here).

After years of sticking with Windows, once I discovered that you could download an ISO file, burn it to a bootable CD and run a whole new operating system, easy as that, I've been distro hopping. It all began with Knoppix, went from Puppy and Damn Small Linux, through Ubuntu to Debian, with many a stop in between. Over the 300 or so entries of this blog, I've run probably 15 to 20 different distributions of Linux and tried unsuccessfully to run maybe another 20. I might be exaggerating, but not by much.

With lots of changes here at the Los Angeles Daily News, I find myself in a good position to put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty to work posting Web content via the Clickability publishing system and for the more mundane tasks of writing memos and reports, reading e-mail and the like. So get ready for my latest dip into the Ubuntu pool, plus some Red Hat/Fedora-based Live CDs and a little bit on my long-delayed Puppy 2.16 review and a detour through Sabayon and Gentoo to Simply Mepis.

My test box seems to like Debian-based distros and dislike Fedora and SUSE. I've never been able to get Fedora, SUSE to even boot, in fact, on this VIA C7-equipped ECS EVEm motherboard. Early in the booting process, the system resets itself, and just keeps rebooting, never getting anywhere. So on my test box, I give up, but both the Red Hat-derived CentOS 5.0 and Scientific Linux 5.0 do load in my Dell Optiplex 3 GHz Pentium 4 work box, on which I can explore them as live CDs but not actually install them to the hard drive.

I pulled the 30 GB hard drive from the $15 Laptop today, swapped in the original 3 GB drive (which wasn't bootable with its original Windows 98 install) and decided to throw distros at it. For those not following along, it's a Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II, with the biggest chink in the armor being RAM -- only 64 MB of it. Here's the scorecard ...

Red Hat is a company that is easy to dislike. Maybe it’s the relationship with IBM. Maybe it’s the way they absorbed JBOSS. Maybe it’s CEO Matthew Szulik, or the proprietary way in which the company operates. Maybe it’s because they’re based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and don’t schmooze the Silicon Valley press corps, which has something in common with that of Washington, D.C. Whatever, I think it’s time we got off Red Hat’s case.

AntiX, the Fluxbox-based, 128 MB RAM-friendly version of Mepis is now in its "pre-final" stage, with a final release from its maker anticapitalista expected in early July, according to the developer himself on the Mepis forum.

This is not a joke. This is a real book, "Debian Für Dummies," written in German and coming to Amazon on Sept. 7, 2007. The authors, Jan-Marek Glogowski and Florian Maier, have been posting blog entries to the book's page on Amazon.

Given Linspire's recent "intellectual property" deal with Microsoft, by which MS agrees not to sue Linspire or its customers over so-called patent violations in Linux (and leaving the rest of us out to dry), should I continue to use the freelinuxemail.com service sponsored by Linspire?

Fluxbuntu is back, says project leader Joe Jaxx at Fluxbuntu.org of the fledgling Ubuntu variant that installs with a Fluxbox window manager (fast, light -- a great alternative to GNOME, KDE or Xfce.

BSD is so mature, so orderly, so ... run by adults. Or so says the PR (what little there is). But whenever I try to actually run BSD, I run into trouble. I haven't tried any BSDs since my review of FreeSBIE back in April, so recently I figured I'd give some BSD distros a spin.

Who thought a 233 MHz laptop with 64 MB of RAM -- one purchased for $15, mind you -- could run so damn well. I've been using Firefox to handle my e-mail (and now to post this entry), with Damn Small Linux 3.3 as the Linux distro, and I must say that I am very, very pleased with the way everything's working.

For some reason, testing and using Linux got me interested in trying to read and manage my e-mail with traditional mail clients, even though it was contrary to my experience, habit and nature. From almost the first time I had access to Internet e-mail, I've sent and received it via an online interface, going all the way back to AOL.

After wiping out my Ubuntu 6.06 LTS install and redoing it because I totally screwed up GRUB, last night I opened up Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" and saw the many errors of my GRUB-installing and -configuring ways.

Buried deep in his blog, Canonical head Mark Shuttleworth discusses his position on the whole Microsoft "intellectual property" claim regarding Linux and open-source software and what, as the man behind Ubuntu, he's comfortable and not comfortable doing with Microsoft.

In his Linspire Letter, CEO Kevin Carmony talks about why he decided to make a deal with Microsoft, trading some technological info for an assurance from Microsoft that the Redmond giant won't sue Linspire's Linux customers for "intellectual property" infringement ... comparing himself to Steve Jobs in the process. Nice ... get yourself neck-deep, then compare yourself to Steve Jobs. Even Steve Jobs knows he's a crazy (expletive of your choice). Or should know. Rich, cunning, possessing uncanny instinct, etc. ... but still kind of crazy.

If running Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux have taught me anything, it's the value of Dillo, the little Web browser that could. It loads wicked fast on my older systems, and while it doesn't do CSS or Java, what it does do -- display Web pages and the images on them -- it does quickly and well.