As soon as I'm able to begin posting them, my eight-part series on finding the best operating system for my circa-1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt will begin unfolding, one part a day, on Click.

I've been working on this series for about a month, working with everything from Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux to OpenBSD and Wolvix Cub, with a lot of thoughts about past use of Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu and more.

So starting — again, as soon as I can get the entries lined up — look for a long meditation on the best way to make old hardware work in the 21st century.

I hooked up my Starbucks card with AT&T today to draw on the free Wi-Fi now available at the coffee giant, and was pleasantly surprised to have good broadband speed in Puppy Linux 2.13 on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt).

I was even able to sign on using the Dillo browser. I started Seamonkey after that, but just being able to log in with Dillo was a surprise.

Even more of a surprise, however, was that the AT&T Wi-Fi didn't work in OpenBSD 4.2, which I have installed as the primary OS on the laptop.

Now I know that wireless works fine in OpenBSD, because I use it at home and at the Los Angeles Public Library. When OpenBSD booted, I got an IP, and I could ping that IP. I should've written down the location's IP and tried to ping that. Otherwise, I couldn't ping anything, and as a result could not get any services to work. That means I couldn't get data into or out of the laptop.

Why does AT&T Wi-Fi work in Linux but not OpenBSD? That's a good question

I don't really post to my Blogger blogs all that much. They're pretty much in hibernation, since I write most everything here and at Come on Feel the Nuys.

But I occasionally drop a post in This Old PC, This Old Mac, Jazz Guitar Journey, 2,000 Days in the Valley or The CTRL Freak.

Most of these were started long before Google unveiled the "new" Blogger, which is a whole lot easier to configure and reconfigure than the old Blogger.

But I was warned that I would lose whatever formatting I hand-coded in HTML. That pretty much means my blogroll.

Well, it's been awhile, and I decided to throw caution to the proverbial wind and convert each of my blogs to the "new" style.

Surprisingly, all but one actually retained their blogrolls, so I really won't have to do anything. And now I can drag/drop elements in the blog template with GUI goodness.

Yeah, most of my blogging is over here, in the confines of the Daily News, but it doesn't hurt to have a half-dozen other blogs at the ready.

A lot of tech Web sites don't make it easy to find their best stuff. CNet is no exception.

I always say that the best way to present just about any quantity of news is in a sequentionally arranged blog (also known as "just a normal blog").

I've been reading Matt Asay's The Open Road for months now, but I had no idea that I could get his entries and the proverbial "so much more" not at the somewhat worthless CNet News page but at the very useful CNet News Blog site.

It's another one I'm now reading every day. I've even been going there before ZDNet, since the blog format makes it so easy to scan the entries and actually figure out what they're about.

I've been waiting ... and waiting ... for Debian to come to its senses and re-add the sound chip — the ESS 1988 Allegro — in my Gateway Solo 1450 back into the Lenny kernel.

Sound had been fine in Debian Etch (Stable) and in the first two kernels in Debian Lenny (Testing), but once the 2.6.24 kernel was added, I lost sound on the $0 Laptop.

Reverting back to the 2.6.22 kernel restored my sound, and I eventually hunted down the bug report, which — in grand Debian tradition — didn't solve the bug but instead provided a work-around.

Presumably the Debian team didn't like the fact that the ALSA sound module for this chip came in the form of a binary blob, which is non-source, undocumented code, and instead of providing any other way to use sound with these chips, elected to silence the PCs of those using Debian Lenny with this verboten sound chip.

Now if this were the only binary blob traveling in Debian's wagon train, I'd understand. But I'm fairly sure it's not. We're not talking OpenBSD-style religion here.

At least the system could somehow tell me that Debian removed sound support for my chipset and perhaps ask me if I'm OK with using a non-open blob to get the sound working.

No such luck. I suppose I should be so offended at my laptop's use of hardware for which the manufacturers decline to provide open-source drivers that I should soldier on without sound — and like it.

I don't like it. But the reality is that many if not most hardware manufacturers haven't seen the ever-lovin' light and don't know that open-source software in general, and Linux in particular just might take over the world, or at least the geeky portion of it.

Never mind that sound works on this laptop in any number of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Puppy, Slackware, CentOS/Red Hat ... as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD.

But Debian decided to get all high, mighty and just strip sound out of the kernel for what must be a whole lot of potential users who either don't know, don't want to know or don't care to track down the instructions for restoring audio on their machines.

I imagine there are a lot of ESS/Allegro chips out there. In Linux, as in OpenBSD and any number of other projects, a lot of really smart developers are very busy writing open drivers for the proprietary hardware we're stuck with. Sometimes they get cooperation from the manufacturers. Often times they reverse-engineer the whole damn thing. Still, there are a lot of "binary blobs" out there.

If the choice is between binary blob and open-source alternative, there's no question — take the code you can see, modify and distribute freely.

But if the choice is between a blog and ... nothing, it's nice to have the opportunity to take the blob. A project can — and should — let the user have a say in what they'll run on their machines.

I've stuck with Debian for awhile now on this laptop, even though I've been using Ubuntu more (blame it on Ubuntu's working suspend/resume ... and other stuff that just works better).

So far, here are the Debian Lenny problems I've had to solve to get things working:

• Change Gconf configuration so Epiphany browser doesn't default to "working offline" mode
• Download and install driver from the Foo2zjs Project to use HP Laserjet 1020 printer (to be fair, this is also an issue with Ubuntu)
• Tweak xorg.conf so Alps Touchpad's tap-to-click function can be managed (can't quite remember how I did this ...)
• Restore sound for ESS 1988 Allegro with firmware from the ALSA Project

It could've been worse, and in almost all of these instances I got the hacks from the Debian Bug Tracking System. But I'd prefer that at least some of these bugs actually get fixed rather that shuffled aside, with users left searching for the hackish fixes that will make their machines usable with a given distribution.

What most of us know is that users pretty much gravitate toward operating systems that work best with their hardware and the software they wish to use.

So if Ubuntu uses the same Linux kernel but supports my sound chip, properly configures my touchpad, doesn't think I'm working offline when I'm not, properly suspends and resumes, and offers a bit more in terms of functionality and polish (like the GNOME menu editor actually, say, working), I'm inclined to use it.

I still have Debian Lenny on the Gateway, although I might devote its partition to CentOS 5.2 for testing purposes.

Debian is still faster than Ubuntu. Many of the packages I use are better put-together in Debian, especially the educational games my daughter uses.

And I like the setup that Debian defaults to when installed. The fact that I can and have fixed most of the problems I had is a plus.

In Lenny, I'm having a few graphical quirks with GNOME. The top of the screen gets a little funky at times — and I'd love to figure out the suspend/resume problem, but otherwise Debian runs quite well. And as far as compatibility with this specific pile of hardware goes, Lenny has quite an edge over Debian Etch, the project's current stable distribution.

And since Lenny is still in the Testing stage, patches are coming through at a quick pace, and things are bound to improve on the distribution's road to "Stable" status.

I only wish I could know for sure if the things I fixed manually are being fixed automatically for present and future Lenny users.

Next: How exactly to restore sound for ESS Allegro-equipped PCs in Debian Lenny

I booted into Debian Lenny for the first time in a while on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and after doing about 150 updates, I logged out of the GNOME desktop and switched over to Fluxbox.

Now this PC, for me, anyway, is quite powerful — 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM — so GNOME runs quite well on it.

But with Fluxbox (and even with Xfce, I suspect) it really flies. Apps load way quicker than they do in GNOME, and if you can deal with a more minimalist window manager, you get a lot more in terms of performance.

I had my Alps Touchpad's tap-to-click function turned off in GNOME, but in Fluxbox I had to use GSynaptics to turn it off. I wonder if things will be screwed up in GNOME as a result. The first thing I'll do is see if I can easily turn off the touchpad's tapping for my other users. That doesn't work so well in GNOME, where the "primary" user has control over the touchpad but the others do not.

I logged into one of my other user accounts, turned off tapping in GSynaptics, and everything worked. That's the way it's supposed to be in GNOME.

One thing I'd like to do is modify the Fluxbox menu to make things quicker, with my most-used apps higher up so I don't have to mouse through so many menus to get to them.

The extremely lightweight Swiss GNU/Linux distribution Slitaz burst upon the scene in March of this year promising to be easy on system resources yet possessing enough power in the form of basic applications to actually get things done.

In my original non-review, I couldn't really get Slitaz running on any of three PCs, so I ended it this way:

Hopefully they'll get it right with SliTaz 1.1 (or 2.0), but for now, it's a distro with a lot of promise but not a whole lot of delivery -- at least for me.

But there was also this:

I'll try it in the $15 Laptop (based on a Pentium II MMX and with the Orinoco WaveLAN wireless card) ...

Coincidentally, I've been looking for new distros to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I decided to finally give Slitaz a spin in it.

It works.

And so far, it's quicker than anything I've tried on it before. The closest thing I can compare it to is Damn Small Linux.

As of DSL version 4.4, both have the "Bon Echo" version of Firefox, with Slitaz using a more-recent build of what basically is Firefox.

Having Firefox named Bon Echo presents one problem: It's harder to install Google Gears, which would enable Google Docs to function in offline mode. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but so far that's been the big stopper for me with DSL (and now Slitaz).

Another stopper: Slitaz seems to want the user to store data on a USB-connected drive. But this laptop, made somewhere around 1999, doesn't have USB. Hell, it doesn't have Ethernet. My connectivity comes via a Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card, and even if I did have a WiFi signal, which I don't, I'm not sure Slitaz 1.0 supports wireless connectivity. Otherwise, I'd be trying some packages from the Slitaz repository.

But in its "raw" configuration, Slitaz is a 25 MB ISO — smaller than Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, and with fewer apps as well.

The beauty of it is that Slitaz 1.0 is running entirely in RAM — and I've only got 144MB on this laptop.

Again: 144MB and running entirely in RAM. I don't think there's a system out there with X that'll do this without tapping into Linux swap (although Damn Small Linux might be coming close).

Like Puppy and DSL, Slitaz is based on the JWM window manager, which has plenty of features and lots of speed to go with it. Right-clicking gets you a small menu, but for the full menu, you need to left-click on the Slitaz spider icon at the top of the screen.

Slitaz is lean but does have enough apps to get by.

Besides Firefox/Bon Echo (version 2.0.0.12 on the live CD), there's:

• My favorite development editor Geany
• The mhWaveEdit audio editor (at least that's what I think it is)
• emelFM2 file manager
• Clex File manager
• mtPaint image editor (one of my favorites)
• Grab screenshot
• GPicView Image Viewer
• Gparted partition manager
• Htop processes viewer
• Lighttpd Web server
• gFTP client
• Grsync
• LostIRC
• Retawq Web browser
• Scpbox secure copy app
• Transmission Bittorrent app
• ePDFView PDF viewer
• Listpatron (I can't figure out what this does, but it appears to "make lists")
• OSMO personal organizer
• SQlite database
• Wikiss PHP Wiki
• Bc calculator
• Burn ISO
• ISO Master
• Leafpad editor
• Nano editor
• Xpad sticky note editor
• Xterm

I'm not sure yet how extensive the Web-server capabilities of Slitaz are as yet, but it does have the Lighttpd server, SQLite database, along with PHP, so you can seemingly roll out a dynamic Web page on the system as configured.

Once I get to a live Internet connection on the Compaq, I plan to check out the Slitaz repository, which has some applications that aren't on the live CD, including Abiword and the GIMP.

I'll have to deal with how to save my settings in Slitaz without USB, but in that quest, I found a great utility called Mountbox that enabled me to easily mount partitions from my hard drive and then look at them with emelFM2. Not that it's hard to mount partitions from live CDs, but this app is as good as the mount tools in Puppy or DSL, and I'm glad to have it.

However, upon mounting a hard-drive partition, I could see all the files there, but I was unable to write a new file to it. That's something I'll have to work on.

(Hint: When you boot Slitaz, the standard user is hacker, with no password. Root's password is root.)

After a read through the online documentation, I settled on the following boot codes for my laptop:

boot: slitaz vga=788 lang=en kmap=us home=hda3 sound=noconf

I was still asked by the system (in French, no less) what resolution to use for X. But the boot process was a bit quicker, since I wasn't asked this time to choose a language or keyboard, nor was I asked to configure sound, something that didn't work automatically (and never does for this laptop in Linux).

I created a file, saved it in the Slitaz filesystem and rebooted without the cheat codes. The file wasn't there. I tried again with the boot codes, and my file was there. The same thing worked for a Firefox bookmark. As long as I used the home=hda3 boot code (since hda3 was the hard drive partition I chose on which to put my Slitaz save file) when booting, everything works.

So it turns out you don't need a USB drive to save files in Slitaz.

There's a "Cooking" release of Slitaz that looks much changed from the 1.0 release, and I will try it soon and hope that perhaps some and hopefully many of my problems will be addressed. It uses Openbox instead of JWM, features desktop icons, uses HAL to automatically mount media and even has Firefox 3.

Another addition, among many, to the latest build of Slitaz is wireless support. Again, I'll have to burn a disc tonight and give it a try when I'm near a WiFi signal.

Thus far, Slitaz 1.0 is absolutely the fastest operating system I've ever used. While it's still fairly young, it boasts of a lot of functionality, and if it runs on your particular hardware, it's a live CD that's well worth having in your laptop bag.

I'd love to have another alternative to Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux, both extremely lightweight — and extremely well-formed — distributions designed to be run as live CDs (but also capable of being installed to the hard drive). And again, running entirely in RAM with only 144MB is as lightweight as they come.

Right now, I can't use Slitaz with the same "expertise" with which I can use Puppy or DSL. But for a quick-booting, quick-working live CD, Slitaz does exceedingly well for such an early stage in its life.

I'll be watching Slitaz very closely, and I expect big things for it in the future, should development continue — and I really do hope it does.

Point of order: According to the boot screen, Slitaz stands for "Simple, Light, Incredible, Temporary Autonomous Zone."

So far, Slitaz lives up to that name.

More on Slitaz:
Slitaz on Distrowatch
Distrowatch review of Slitaz
My first Slitaz post from April 2008
K.Mandla's review of Slitaz
TechieMoe review of Slitaz
TechSource review of Slitaz

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here.

I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it's really ready.

Here are the release notes from the CentOS team.

There are DVDs, CDs and a 7.7MB netinstall image. No live CD yet, but that will be coming soon enough, I figure.

For the past few CentOS releases, I've been trying the live CD just to see what kind of hardware detection I can get on my various PCs. I'll be anxious to give 5.2 a spin because Red Hat is promising better support for laptops.

Already CentOS/Red Hat 5.0 has been pretty good on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. Not so good as to bump Ubuntu or Debian off of it, but good nonetheless.

And Fedora 9 didn't suspend/resume it. So it doesn't look good for CentOS/RHEL 5.2, but I will still give it a try.

One thing that's new about RHEL is that Red Hat has pledged four years of "intensive" support, up from three, followed by what appears to be three years of less-"intensive" support, but support nonetheless.

So you can count on seven years of security patches on any Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and that means CentOS will do the same.

Previously in Click:

• Red Hat's desktop strategy: Can you figure it out?
• Why yes, you can use apt and Synaptic in Red Hat or CentOS
• CentOS 5.2 almost here
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — a way bigger deal than you might think

Red Hat has a Linux desktop plan. It's just a little difficult to figure out exactly what it is.

I think Red Hat knows this. And it's OK with it.

One day Red Hat bigwigs are saying that they are not interested in aggressively pursuing the Linux desktop market, that Ubuntu has much of it sewn up, and why do it anyway when all the money is in servers and the support Red Hat so richly provides to those who want it?

Good question.

But I see a strategy in there somewhere. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, late of Ziff Davis, now writing just about everywhere else, including his own Practical Technology, has met recently with a bunch of Red Hatters. In SJVN's recent post, the Red Hat people still push Fedora, the community distribution that serves as a testing ground for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, but the company is sometimes not-so-quietly working on making its flagship RHEL product a better fit for the desktop — and laptops, too. And Red Hat does see a niche for RHEL apart from the server:

What Red Hat is working on is continuing to make RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) business desktop friendly. Whitehurst said many business customers want the Linux desktop. They don't want to move their desktops lock, stock, and barrel to RHEL, or any other Linux desktop. What Fortune 500 companies do want though is to start moving up to 25% of their desktops to Linux.

Why? Because they want the benefits of Linux. Besides the usual advantages of improved TCO (total cost of ownership) and improved security, Red Hat's corporate customers want a Linux desktop that can be carried as a virtual machine on a USB key and can be be managed by Red Hat's management tools. Is this for someone who wants a Windows XP Home replacement? No. It's not. It is, however, something that can catch the attention of CIOs who want a Windows XP Pro replacement.

And who can resist SJVN's money quote from Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst?:

"There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?"

It's a riddle, right?

OK, forget about all of that. Just read Red Hat's own press release for RHEL 5.2, which not only talks up all the work they're doing to make suspend/resume work but highlighting the inclusion of desktop applications that aren't a generation too old for office use. I'm talking about OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3, the latter of which just had its final release this week.

Here are a few quotes from the RHEL 5.2 press release:

"We took part in the beta program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2," said William Cattey, Linux Platform Coodinator, MIT Information Services & Technology. "Re-basing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop to have the latest Firefox, OpenOffice and Adobe Reader is very important to us because it gives our users the same key applications available on other platforms."

"LVM is very satisfied with our experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop on the certified Lenovo T61 and X61 laptops," said Werner Schmidt, LVM's CIO. "We have deployed over 2,000 Lenovo laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and plan to roll out several thousand more over the next several months."

The key in all of this is the corporate/enterprise connection, the idea not of wholly changing desktop platforms but bringing needed diversity to the desktop with Linux where appropriate, and leveraging the whole Red Hat relationship with server customers to solve problems on the desktop while adding incremental revenue and giving those customers even more reasons to stick with — and continue paying for — Red Hat.

And all those management tools, most of which I know nothing about, that Red Hat offers to keep servers in line and up to date — all that stuff can also make desktop management a more orderly procedure than the absolute mess that's going on now with Joe Worker's desktop PC.

Not that Ubuntu isn't also working on corporate, managed solutions for desktop PC management, but when it comes to paying for support, Ubuntu doesn't seem to be offering any deep discounts over what Red Hat is charging. And if a huge enterprise already has a lot of Red Hat on the premises, a little more doesn't hurt, right?

And there's another side to this valuable coin: While Ubuntu is mainly thought of as a desktop system, it's no secret at all that parent company Canonical is making a huge push into servers, with certifications coming for use on hardware from any number of vendors, commitments of long-term support and the same kind of sysadmin-helping tools that help leverage things for Red Hat.

So if Ubuntu is leveraging its desktop success to build a potentially lucrative server business, Red Hat needs to expand its own desktop commitment to keep and grow the already lucrative server market it currently dominates.

Who wins?

Damn near everybody, I figure. More competition means better products, most of which can be had for free. Remember, if you don't want to pay for Red Hat, there's always Fedora, or the RHEL clones put together by CentOS and Scientific Linux. And if you're deploying Ubuntu in an enterprise situation, you can pay Canonical, or leverage the substantial Ubuntu community to solve problems.

And while some of us can't imagine paying thousands of dollars a year for support on a server, that kind of thing starts to make sense in the enterprise when you weigh it with your own labor costs.

It's an equation that has worked in Red Hat's favor for a long time. And a few extra variables in said equation are just part of the game.

I feel for this guy:

He wanted to replace cable broadband with cheaper DSL, but as you can see, his DSL speed is abysmal. (FYI, my mom's DSL speed in North Hollywood is similar; at my house in Van Nuys we do quite a bit better, but nothing stellar either).

If you're good at doing math in your head (I used a calculator), you can see that download speed on cable is 68 times faster than on DSL at his location.

Upload speed is only 10 times faster on cable.

In his area:

Cost of cable broadband: $65
Cost of DSL broadband: $40

He does mention that the cable service does go out a bit, and speeds can drop when there's a lot of activity from other users, but the promise of a service that's 6,800 percent faster ... the mind is boggled.

File this under "holy crap."

Matthew Miller of ZDNet elaborates:

AT&T is subsidizing the iPhone this time, much like the other mobile phone purchases made in the United States and may be paying Apple as much as US$325 for each iPhone 3G that is purchased.

...

Don't worry about AT&T though, since they will make up this $325 and a bit more with the increased data and text message rates. Plus, with the new lower initial out-of-the pocket price for new subscribers we may see a lot more iPhones flying off the shelves next month than when the first generation iPhone started off at $599 last year.

For the record, I wasn't worried.

In other iPhone news: AT&T wants 3G users to pay more for data and text messages.

An observation from one poor SOB: That's me, in case you hadn't figured it out. I've found a lot more people out there with cell-phone data plans than I expected. Many people are happy to pay $70 a month to talk/text/browse/e-mail from their mobile handset, be it a Blackberry, iPhone or other such keyboard-equipped device.

Not being a user of either the iPhone, Blackberry or ... anything beyond my now-ancient Motorola phone, if e-mail is really important, a Blackberry or Palm Treo with a full QWERTY button keyboard seems to be a better choice than the iPhone's touchscreen. I say seems because I really don't know, but I'd like for anybody out there who has experience with such devices to tell me.

Send me an e-mail at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

In case you've never seen George Carlin's groundbreaking "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" routine, YouTube is here to help you with this 1978 rendition:

And a more recent video, George Carlin on Language:

George Carlin: "We Like War:"

George Carlin on The American Dream:

George Carlin on Natural Disasters:

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. (And here's another post along the same lines.)

I happen to have a Mac — a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive — and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

I've been reading an O'Reilly book on the subject, and here are two places that seem essential for bringing free, open-source apps to the Mac:

• The MacPorts Project
• The Fink Project

If anything, the relative uniformity of hardware in the Macintosh world, and the tight integration between OS X and the machines on which it runs, makes a lot of the Linux/BSD problems we have in terms of hardware compatibility go away.

What I can't get with, though, is the high cost of Mac hardware and software (and yes, you are paying for both when you buy an Apple machine).

Still, this does bear thinking about. And so I will.

Why this could work for my company: While there are a great many image-editing programs in the free, open-source software world, the work we do here, fortunately or not, depends on features that only Adobe Photoshop offers. Yes, I've been learning to use Photoshop because for some of the things I need to do, there's no alternative.

And then there's Flash. I don't like technologies for which the development tools are not free and open. But there's Adobe again, with Flash development nestled in its Creative Suite.

And then there's the print publishing system that our company only supports on Windows.

And I still want to run the free, open-source applications I've grown to depend on, including OpenOffice (which is coming to Mac natively in version 3 anyway), the lightweight image editors that I still can use (MtPaint!!) for some tasks, excellent text editors (Geany, the HTML-focused Bluefish) and even full desktop environments like GNOME and KDE.

If costs be damned, the Mac with Adobe CS, Windows and X11 with all the Unix apps I want just might be the ideal platform.

But I'm not throwing Linux over the side of the boat just yet. There's the part about Apple's hardware and software being closely guarded and ... closed source. Then there's the cost. More to start with, and more continually for operating-system upgrades and proprietary software upgrades as well.

In the corporate world, where money is supposed to flow like so much water, this Mac solution very well could work.

But in the real world, who can afford it?

For many, the solution remains free, open-source operating systems with greater stability, longer support, better hardware detection and configuration, full power management and better applications that can do all the things we need to get done.

And as Linux in general, and distributions like Ubuntu in specific, gain(s) traction, hardware makers just might start paying attention to drivers that make their equipment work seamlessly with Linux without making the user dive head-first into geekery. That would level the playing field considerably, but the issue of mixing proprietary software with FOSS still looms over the discussion. (And yes, I'm not mentioning WINE on purpose, though maybe I should.)

I really liked this Computerworld piece on how to revitalize a five-year-old Thinkpad laptop for $125.

While an IBM Thinkpad is worthier of restoration than most, the fact is that if you have a laptop on hand, a little maintenance can give it quite a bit of extra life.

Among the things Brian Nadel did to his Thinkpad R50:

• Added memory
• Replaced hard drive
• Reinstalled Windows
• Got second hard-drive caddy and installed Ubuntu on original hard drive so he can switch from Windows to Ubuntu by pulling and replacing the caddy
• Replacing a damaged keyboard
• Cleaning the inside, outside and especially the fan
• Defragmenting the hard drive

I've done some experimenting with encrypted filesystems in Debian, which are easy to do with the Debian installer — and which are just as easy to do in Ubuntu if you use the alternate installer.

Like I said, it's easy to do and to manage, unless you want to have a bunch of partitions under a single passphrase. This blog post helps you figure it out.

While full encryption is something you might want to use on a home desktop, although I wouldn't, it's almost mandatory for a laptop. If the thing gets stolen, whoever gets that drive has access to everything on it. And you really don't want that happening, do you?

Right now, neither of my two Linux laptops are encrypted, since I use them for testing and need to see one system's hard-drive partitions from the other, but in the near future, if I decided to single-boot either or both of these, you can bet I'll be encrypting the hard drive.