Or should I say, "How Canonical wants to be more like Red Hat," because the profit-seeking company behind Ubuntu, which wants to compete not just on the desktop but in the server room as well, has a new product called Landscape, which for $150 per node (unsupported), will allow for the full administration of any number of remote Ubuntu-equipped boxes:

Landscape provides users with a hosted web interface on which all machines are registered. From this single interface, packages and security updates are deployed to the entire network of servers and/or desktops with a single click. Additionally a wealth of monitoring data is provided graphically to the administrator showing process and resource use as well as flagging any available security fixes for the system.

If "$150 per node" means $150 per box, that can add up pretty quick. But such remote management of a plethora of boxes is something that a lot of people might want, I figure.

By the way, how much does Canonical charge for support? A lot. It makes Red Hat look like a bargain.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've heard of quite a few people still running Debian Sarge -- the stable version of Debian before Etch went stable in April 2007. As per Debian policy, support for what is referred to as "old stable," in this case Sarge, is slated to last for a year after the next Debian release is declared "stable" (Etch).

So now we're bumping up on March 31, 2008, and Debian is telling users about the end of updates for Sarge:

One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 alias 'sarge' the security support for the old distribution (3.1 alias 'sarge') is coming to an end next month. The Debian project is proud to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and even for one year after a new version has been released.

The Debian project released Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' on the 8th of April 2007. Users and Distributors have been given a one-year timeframe to upgrade their old installations to the current stable release. Hence, the security support for the old release of 3.1 is going to end in March 2008 as previously announced.

I've heard incredible stories about people running servers with Sarge and having incredible uptimes stretching into full years and beyond. And I'm as loathe to upgrade something that "just works" as much as the next lazy guy, so I understand. Three years seems like a long time ... and if you want more than three years, there's always Red Hat/CentOS/Scientific Linux and Novell's Suse (really just Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones CentOS and Scientific Linux, because what kind of cheap person like myself is going to pay year after year for updates?).

But going three years without needing to do a reinstall is a pretty great thing. And if you start with a Debian release before it goes stable -- like Debian Lenny, which is still in Testing but appears pretty darn reliable to me -- you'll probably get more than three years. At this point, I imagine that most Debian users think of Etch -- the current Stable -- as too old. That's true for desktop users, but if your hardware likes Etch, I really see no reason to move to Lenny unless you want newer versions of all of the packages.

For me, Lenny is working pretty well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and Etch is doing great on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). And this desktop/server I just set up? I used Etch just because I know it works. And I know that getting Lenny to perform well on the Gateway means I'll be able to stick with it for what could be four years (but actually might be less because the wait between Etch and Lenny becoming stable is probably going to be much shorter than the wait between Sarge and Etch ... or at least that's what I think is going to happen).

Yeah, I probably won't be running Lenny three years from now ... but you never know. As I said recently, Lenny is looking very, very good.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I haven't hooked up my OpenBSD 4.2 drive and booted it for about a week. The last time I left the box, I was playing around with Apache, and I thought all was well.

Today I hook up the drive and boot OpenBSD.

First of all, instead of a console login, I get an XDM login. That's strange. I don't remember XDM ever showing up before.

Then Internet networking doesn't work. I check all the networking settings. Everything is correct.

I can ping IP addresses on the local network, but nothing is working outside of that. Pinging google.com yields nothing. Since I can get local machines, I know it's not a bad cable.

Back to the OpenBSD FAQ. Instead of doing ifconfig, I check all the files that hold network configuration info. Nothing.

To start networking manually, the FAQ says to do this:

# sh /etc/netstart

An error message comes up. There's an error of some kind in /etc/rc.conf.

Now I know what happened. To start Apache automatically at boot, a line must be edited in /etc/rc.conf. I was trying it, and I must've screwed something up. As root, I edit the file. Sure enough, I had erroneously dropped a linefeed in the middle of the comment line to turn Apache on at boot.

I fixed the line, saved /etc/rc.conf and tried to start networking again from the command line.

It didn't work.

I rebooted.

This time, I got my usual console login. I started X manually. And Internet networking worked.

I also configured an anonymous FTP server. I had to manually change the permissions of the directory and files to root, but everything worked as advertised.

That's the strength of OpenBSD, as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD: the documentation is readable, comprehensive and up to date.

Over the past two days, I did a Debian Etch install in order to compare how all of this server configuration goes in Linux as opposed to OpenBSD.

And this is where the lack of documentation (even the man pages aren't all that up-to-date). At least the apache2 man page for Debian told me about the apache2 command. When httpd and apachectl start did nothing, I was in a bit of a quandary. Luckily I figured out that apache2 start and apache2ctl start would both work. Oh yeah, and the config files aren't where the Debian man page says they are. Instead of being in /usr/local/apache2/conf, they're in /etc/apache2.

I did figure out how to change the default directory for Apache in Debian (editing /etc/apache2/sites-available/default does it).

Part of the problem was that I started with Apache version 1.3 in OpenBSD (which doesn't include Apache 2 for licensing reasons) and had Apache 2.3 in Debian. And sure I don't know quite what I'm doing, but this is all on a local network, not the wide-open Internet, so I'm a bit more free to experiment.

All this underscores the value of good documentation. And when it comes to some distros -- Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse -- there are doorstop-thick books available. And the good ones are worth their weight in any precious metal you care to name. Luckily the BSDs have great online FAQs to help get you started. And since integration between the kernel, userland and other packages is so tight in the BSDs, and the need for documentation is that much greater, I'm damn glad it's there.

Not that Linux doesn't need something similar, but I don't see any Linux distribution short of Gentoo providing documentation this comprehensive and finely tuned to its users.

Can anybody prove me wrong? I truly, sincerely hope so.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

One of those people is Orv Beach, publicity chairman for SCALE 6X -- the Southern California Linux Expo -- being held Feb. 8-10 in Los Angeles. Since I'm covering the convention for Click, I took the opportunity to interview Orv after hearing from him about getting press credentials for the event, which I wouldn't miss, by the way. And if you do plan on attending, Orv told me that using the promo code CAST when registering for SCALE can get you 40 percent off of admission.

Orv, where do you live, how old are you, and what do you do for a living?
I live in Simi Valley, California, with my wife Beth. I'm 58, and I have four grown kids and four wonderful grandkids. Professionally, I'm the IT director at Simi Valley Hospital.

How did you first discover open-source software, and what part does it play in your work and home life today?
I've been interested in technology all my life. I got my amateur radio license when I was 17, and enjoyed building radio equipment as much as operating.

I got my first computer in about 1979, and when amateur packet radio was authorized by the FCC, it was a natural to use a computer with it. A popular packet radio program at the time was TNOS, written by Brian Lantz. It ran under DOS, and was a communications program & BBS. Brian had an active users group and was happy to add features to TNOS. As it grew in size, the C compiler he was using had more and more difficulties compiling it (It was Borland Turbo C, I think). So he moved TNOS over to Linux to use GCC as the compiler, and a large percentage of his users followed him.

I got Linux from a programmer at work. At that time it was 16 floppies, and that minimal version didn't include X Windows. I ran it on a 40 MHz 386 with 8 Megs of RAM. I've been using Linux steadily ever since and moved my desktop computer over to it full time about six years ago, and my wife's about four years ago.

At work, while Adventist Health isn't a full-blown user of open-source software, they're edging that way. The web programmers at our corporate office seem to have fallen in love with Plone. Some of the programming groups are moving to Project.Net for project management, too. Locally, I use Nagios to monitor over a hundred devices on our hospital network, and we use ZoneMinder to monitor some video cameras.

Now that SCALE is in its sixth year, how big was the convention the first time around, and what kind of growth has it seen? How many exhibitors, speakers and attendees do you expect this year?
SCALE is an offshoot of the "LUGFests" that SCLUG (the Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group - http://sclug.org) held every 6 months where they met at the Nortel building in Simi Valley. They were miniconferences, with people demonstrating open source software and even a few commercial vendors. Even as limited as they were, they drew Linux users from all over Southern California. SCLUG held 4 of them before Nortel closed down that building. (There's an article on LUGFest III here).

The last LUGFest, LUGFest IV, drew 400 people over two days. Based on the response to the LUGFests, we knew we were filling a need for information and education on open-source software.

So after a hiatus of a year or so, SCLUG, UCLALUG and USCLUG jointly started SCALE. The first was held in the Davidson Conference Center at USC. It was one day, with two session tracks. We had 11 speakers spots and a panel, and it was a struggle to fill them. That first Linux Expo drew 400 attendees.

Contrast that with SCALE 6X, which will be held in February, five years later: The main Expo is now on Saturday and Sunday, has 32 speaker slots and two keynotes spread over four session tracks per day. You'd think that number of topics and speakers would be impossible to come up with. Yet we received over 105 submissions to our call for papers! Whittling them down was difficult, and it was painful, as we had to turn down lots of good proposals. We expect to have about 1,500 attendees for SCALE 6X. The Westin hotel will be bursting at the seams.

Continue reading "SCALE 6X -- An interview with publicity chairman Orv Beach" »

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers.

It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release. And even though the next Ubuntu release -- 8.04 (due 4/08 ... also known as April 2008) -- is going to be a Long Term Support release, with fixes, patches and the like for three years on the desktop, five years on the server, there's still quite a bit of time left for the current Ubuntu LTS, which will be supported until June 2009 on the desktop and June 2011 on the server.

The new installer -- you don't really need it if you can successfully use the old installer, already have a 6.06 LTS install (like I do) and have done all the updates -- underscores Canonical's commitment to the LTS concept. While the twice-yearly releases of Ubuntu get most of the light and heat in the uber-geek community, there are many who depend on the relative stability of the LTS release to keep their hardware running. That's especially true on servers, where major upgrades every six months are impractical at best and detrimential at worst -- nobody wants to break a system that's been running well.

And the LTS is vital as a counterweight to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop, both of which are supported for years on end.

I'd like to say that Debian Stable (currently Etch) and Old Stable (Sarge) are equivalents, but since you can't pin down a date certain for length of their support, there is a bit of an unknown factor there, although once the Stable release goes to Old Stable, you pretty much know that the new Stable release won't give you too many problems.

Sure, many desktop users generally want something more cutting-edge, mainly something like the regular Ubuntu releases, but there are many people -- and many situations -- that warrant hanging on to a Linux installation as long as possible. Over the time I've used Ubuntu and Xubuntu (from 6.06 LTS through 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10), I've seen some parts of the installation improve dramatically, I've seen hardware work better, then worse, and occasionally not at all.

And we all know an individual or organization that hates doing major upgrades, ever. Those coming from a Windows or Macintosh background aren't all used to major OS upgrades. In the case of Windows AND Mac's OS X, major upgrades almost always cost money. $129 for an OS X upgrade might not sound like much, but paying that much every couple of years when your computer runs just fine the way it is? No thanks. That's why I'm still running OS X 10.3 on my Mac. And Windows? I have a disc for Windows 2000, and I'm not about to pay ANYTHING for the privilege of upgrading my sole Windows box (which I boot maybe twice a year) to XP.

And in Linux, just because we can change out distros 10 times a day if we wish, it doesn't mean that we have to -- or should. For people who crave the stability of long-term releases, one thing generally drives upgrade: newer software they need to get their work done, and new hardware that needs new software to run properly.

I did this most recent Ubuntu 6.06 LTS installation for testing purposes, but I've stuck with it because it just works. On this test box, it's flawless. On my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, it manages the fan as well as 7.10 (i.e. not at all without a cron job; but well with said cron job), but less well than 7.04 (which has the ACPI working with no coding needed). (Note: I'm not currently running Ubuntu at all on the Gateway laptop, which is currently dual-booting the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny, which I upgraded from the stable Etch.)

Using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on this test box, sure I'm stuck with Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice 2.0, GMOME 2.14.3 and Evolution 2.6.1, but everything works. And there's nothing I do that I can't do with applications of this "vintage." If I this machine had wireless and it didn't work with 6.06, I might feel differently about LTS, but with the hardware I have now, LTS is a good fit.

So if you're looking for stable, supported releases, especially ones that won't cost you anything, it's nice to have Ubuntu LTS as a choice along with CentOS and Scientific Linux (both free versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SUSE, Debian and Slackware.

As far as stable, long-term releases go, I have run CentOS (3.9. 4.2 and 5), Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Slackware (12), as well as Ubuntu LTS, and Ubuntu holds up very well on the desktop in this crowd. It's more flexible, as far as adding software, than CentOS and Slackware -- it doesn't have as many packages as Debian, but it does have plenty -- and the desktop and menus are a bit more tame than Debian's, with a better out-of-the-box experience, especially for inexperienced users.

And the support available from other Ubuntu users is a major component of the distro's success. All the advice may not be of the best quality, but there's just so much of it that you're bound to find the right answer to whatever it is you're asking. Not that the Debian community isn't helpful (I love DebianHELP and the Debian User Forums, but they just don't have the sheer volume of the Ubuntu Forums. Like I said, there's a lot more noise among the Ubuntu people ... but that's the price you pay, I guess.

And since Ubuntu is based on Debian, what you learn in one community is more often than not directly applicable in the other.

Another thing I discovered today: I enjoy reading the Planet Debian blog posts from Debian developers, and I had no idea that there's a Planet Ubuntu as well. Both are more than worth adding to your favorites and checking on from time to time.

Over the past year, I've used both Debian and Ubuntu extensively, and I always say that Debian isn't as "hard" to use as some would make it appear. Nor is Ubuntu a relative cakewalk. Both require, at times, a bit of wading into the muck to make things work. As far as installation goes, Debian's installer -- upon which Ubuntu's "alternate" installer is very closely based, is quite good, and has succeeded for me many more times than Ubuntu's live CD and alternate-CD discs, but Ubuntu works often enough.

What Ubuntu has that Debian lacks is a marketing plan. For some -- especially the average Linux user (read: geek) -- having no marketing plan is, in and of itself, a marketing plan of sorts. Nobody's trying to make Debian "cool," or giving you reasons why you should or shouldn't run it. And while there are a few Debian evangelists out there, and a few for Slackware as well, there's nothing approaching the fervor over Ubuntu.

That might be good, or bad, depending on how you look at it.

A lot of people are running Debian and Slackware -- they're just quieter about it, I guess.

Anyhow, this post has gone on for far too long. All I want to say is that I'm in favor of long-term, "stable" releases with defined periods of support and a smooth upgrade path, and I'm glad that Ubuntu has pretty big foot in this very door.

And I like the fact that 6.06 LTS will be supported for over a year after the next LTS -- 8.04 -- is released a few months from now.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 image from Wolvix.org.

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. One of the reasons I had Ubuntu installed, besides the fact that it works pretty well (when it does work) with this laptop, is that I can easily get Internet Explorer (via IEs4Linux) on the box. There's one Web site I work on that absolutely requires IE, and my need for such access could grow from minimal to critical at just about any time. That hasn't happened yet. What I'd like to see is updated instructions at IEs4Linux to get it set up on Debian. (As far as Debian goes, IEs4Linux remains stuck in the Sarge era).

But suffering through three dead Ubuntu installs in a row has made me weary. For one thing, I'm going back to separate partitions for /home. That's how I have Wolvix set up. Wolvix can be run as a live CD, a frugal install or a full install. I believe the frugal install saves files in the same way as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, and I want to be able to access the partition when booting Debian, so I opted for the full install. I don't think Wolvix provides updates in the way Debian, Ubuntu and other "established" distros do. No matter. It runs even better on this laptop than it did on the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (where Wolvix was tested along with another crop of distros in my gOS comparison).

And Wolvix has another thing going for it: It's a Slackware-based distro that actually installs and runs with no trouble. Slackware 12 runs ... but I just can't get the X configuration right (and just about any other Slack-based distro offers a better Xfce experience in terms of applications and tools than Slackware itself, which remains a KDE-focused distro, albeit a faster KDE distro than any other). Both Zenwalk and Vector have been problematic; I can install, but something funky happens during booting and I can't even get to a console. I suppose I could turn off ACPI, AGP, IRQs and the like ... but if Wolvix can just run, why not the others? I probably will try to put Slackware 11 on the box at some point just to see if it's Slackware 12 that's screwing me over (Wolvix is based on Slack 11).

Anyhow, besides the fact that it runs and installs seamlessly, I really like the look of Wolvix, as well as the software mix in Wolvix Hunter (which features heavier apps like Open Office and the GIMP, along with lighter ones such as MtPaint, AbiWord and Dillo). Wolvix ships with Xfce and Fluxbox as window managers. In my recent tests, I've determined that Fluxbox doesn't provide much of a speed advantage over Xfce, and since Xfce has many more features, I'm pretty much running it exclusively, even on the aged $15 Laptop (a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with a 233 MHz processor and 64 MB of RAM). And while the spread between Xfce and Fluxbox isn't as wide as one would think, Xfce does provide significant speed advantages over GNOME and KDE

The Wolvix Control Panel app is excellent. For everything from configuration to installation, Wolvix is way ahead of most of the distributions I've used. While the network-configuration portion of the control panel can be somewhat confusing (it reminds me of Zenwalk), it does work. Before I figured it out, I tried using Slackware's netconfig utility in Wolvix. It doesn't seem to work, though you can go through the paces. At least Wolvix offers a utility that does work. With a distro like the highly touted gOS offering NO network configuration utility (they think everybody has DHCP), I'm thankful for any kind of help. Yes, I can hack the text files that hold Linux's network configuration, but I'd prefer not to. It's just the way I am.

Since I'm constantly switching between a static IP at the office and dynamic IP at home, it's taking me a few extra steps (I love being able to easily switch between network settings in Debian and Ubuntu), but the trade-off is worth if since Wolvix otherwise performs so well.

And the Debian Lenny honeymoon is way, way over for me. I've considered rolling it back to Etch. My Alps touchpad issues are coming back (it's not as perfect as it is in Wolvix, Ubuntu 7.04 or 7.10), and the fact that the new Lenny kernel seemed able to manage the noisy Gateway CPU fan for a day but not thereafter is very troubling. I can continue to use the Etch kernel with Lenny, and I just might do that, but I'm left wondering what's going on and whether or not there's an easier fix.

What I did do, for both Wolvix AND Debian Lenny, was put my fan-managing cron job to work. It basically checks CPU temp every five minutes and, if it goes above 60C, turns the fan on, then turns it off when it goes below 50C. Rather than a shell script and a cron job, I'd just like a single line of code that I could stick in some config file to make this work. I've seen things similar to what I need, but I haven't yet nailed it down for the Gateway Solo 1450.

I did, however, get the fan to stop in Debian from boot (using @reboot as the time element for the entry in crontab for the first instance of the cron job, then following with */5 * * * * to run it every five minutes thereafter. Again, I will detail the Gateway Solo 1450 fan-control solution, step by step, in a future entry.

And while I think a cron job is a sloppy, hackish way to deal with a CPU fan, I've done it now in Puppy, Wolvix and Debian, so I'm pretty much getting used to it. It's notable that in Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I couldn't get the system to allow me to turn the CPU fan on and off, even when sudoing the command. I guess I needed to write to root's crontab, and sudoing can't quite qet you there. At least that's my six-second analysis of the situation. I would've loved to put Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on the laptop -- perhaps it could stick around without self-destructing like 7.10 and 7.04. I seem to remember Ubuntu, at least in the alternate install, offering to create a root account. Maybe if I install with the alternate CD, I can get control of the fan. But do I really want to run Ubuntu 6.06 LTS?

Briefly, here is where Ubuntu is falling down:

$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

yields the following:

bash: /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state: Permission denied

In every other distro on which I've used this line in my cron job, I need to su to root to run it (Puppy logs you on as root, so it's no problem there). But I can't seem to get it to work in Ubuntu. As it is, 6.06 LTS only has five months of support remaining still has a year and five months of support remaining (I'm no math whiz). Might as well wait until 8.04 comes out as the next LTS (or just stick with CentOS 5). ... Then again, Ubuntu 6.06 is from the Debian Sarge era. I smell another install of MepisLite 3.3 .. or maybe the recently updated -- even though I thought it was dead -- Sarge itself. I could always try to solve my Alps touchpad problems and stop my whining (if only ...).

UPDATE: I figured out how to shut the fan on and off in Ubuntu. Details tomorrow morning.

I did keep Debian Lenny (upgraded from Etch). And I know this is the testing distribution and not stable, but I was alarmed by a bug I discovered in the Nautilus file manager. When in a Nautilus window, if you right-click on a file and try to get its properties, Nautilus crashes, a bug report screen comes up, and then Nautilus relaunches. I filled out the bug report and went to the Web page for the bug. While there are about 500 reports of the same bug, it looks like the bug itself has been "closed." Well, it's not fixed, but the report is closed. It says that the bug goes away in Gnome 2.20.1. I have 2.20.2, and it hasn't gone away. I'm hoping that it will, but if the problem with the Ted word processor being catastrophically broken in both Etch and Lenny is any indication, I won't hold my breath. I guess I don't quite understand how bugs are dealt with.

As I said, I'm considering rolling it back to Etch. I'm also considering an installation of CentOS 5.0, which manages the CPU fan fine. Pros: CentOS, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will be supporting this distro for YEARS; if it works now, it'll get security patches for a long, long time. Cons: it's harder -- at least for me -- to find as much variety in software as there is for Debian, Ubuntu, even Slackware. I'm sure there's plenty of software out there -- and there's nothing stopping me from compiling my own -- but I just couldn't get the hang of adding repositories and GPG keys. Just finding and installing AbiWord was beyond my capabilities. Perhaps a RHEL 5 book would help me; they've got to be out there. Another con: RHEL -- and, by extension , CentOS -- doesn't play MP3s or even Ogg audio files. I'm sure the codecs are out there, but I like the fact that most Linux distros -- whatever philosophy of freedom they espouse -- at least play an MP3. Hell -- I even can play Oggs in Windows Media Player on my XP box.

But what I did do with Lenny today was pack a bunch of software onto it. I threw all the kids' educational stuff I could find, the GIMP (I can't believe Debian doesn't ship with the GIMP), plus digiKam, which the esteemed Carla Schroder recommended to me as the best Linux image editor -- one that also deals with the IPTC caption info that I need to both preserve and edit. (Both the GIMP, as well as Krita and MtPaint not only won't edit the IPTC text embedded in a JPEG by Photoshop, they completely erase the info; NOT NICE.)

By the way, I thought about doing a frugal install of Puppy Linux, but what I did was preserve my pup_save on the Debian partition so I can continue running Puppy from CD (I'm still on 3.00; I've had no problems, so I haven't tried the 3.01 CD yet, although I do have it).

I wish Damn Small Linux would run better on the Gateway, but I'm still running DSL 4.0 on the older $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt). There are new releases of DSL in the 4 series and also in the 3 series. I have to say that I like both of them. I did a lot of work with DSL 3.2 and 3.3, and I'm glad the developers are keeping both going. I am disappointed, however, that the version of Firefox (it's 1.0.something) in DSL does not work with Google Docs. I was hoping to run DSL instead of Debian Etch (the main distro on the Compaq's puny 3 GB hard drive) and gain some speed in Google Docs, but it is not to be. For better or worse, it's another point in Puppy's favor -- Puppy's Seamonkey browser/e-mail/HTML-generator app can handle Google Docs. But now that both Puppy and DSL feature MtPaint, at least they're equal in terms of image editing; for me, MtPaint is the best lightweight image editor for Linux. If it edited the IPTC info, I'd be in geek heaven. Since it doesn't, I remain on geek terra firma.

And I continue to prefer Geany as a text editor over DSL's Beaver (and over Xfce's Mousepad, GNOME's Gedit, anything that comes with KDE ... should I go on?).

I'm having one problem with Puppy: One of the Web sites I work on -- LA.com -- has an obscene amount of Flash animation, and it crashes Seamonkey every time I try to access it. I thought that Firefox might make a difference, so I installed the PET package. But the site crashes Firefox, too. I don't have this problem in any other Linux distro or in Windows or Mac, so something fishy is going on. Yeah, the amount of Flash is obnoxious, but it's not my call.

This entry is way too long, and I didn't even mention my re-flirtation with PC-BSD. After I deleted Ubuntu and before I put Wolvix on the laptop, I decided to do another PC-BSD install. The install itself went fine. I still had that weird graphic blob below the cursor. And I downloaded three PBI files to update my 1.4 release (I didn't feel like burning a new CD, since's I've only got two left in my formerly 100-CD stack). One PBI took it from 1.4 to 1.4.1, the next to 1.4.1.1, and the last to 1.4.1.2. They couldn't do this in a regular software update? Anyway, I couldn't go from 1.4.1.1 to 1.4.1.2 -- it said something about only updating from 1.4.1. And BSD is different enough from Linux that the prospect of adapting my fan-quieting cron job to BSD is and will remain way beyond my capabilities.

So PC-BSD met the same fate as it did the last few times I installed it; it came down quickly. I'm enjoying Wolvix Hunter right now.

So here's where I stand this week with the $0 Laptop: Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the hard drive (Wolvix with its own /home, so I can roll a new distro over it without killing out my files) and Puppy 3.00 as a live CD. But I'm thisclose to slapping Ubuntu 6.06 LTS or CentOS 5.0 in there.

Like many of you, I'm stuck between changing Linux and BSD distributions like underwear and finding something that can serve me for years without it either falling apart or me yearning for something better.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The upcoming Red Hat desktop product -- called Red Hat Global Desktop, I believe -- has been delayed due to licensing of the codecs needed to provide what is promised to be full support for multimedia, filling in the gaps of most free Linux products, the developers of which often don't include non-free software and usually won't pay royalties either.

But here's one thing I didn't know about the new Red Hat OS: it'll be free:

For some time, getting free and legitimate codecs for Linux has been a problem. While most distros make it very easy to download the codecs required to play proprietary media formats, these codecs are basically illegal in the US. It is possible to purchase legal codecs and most commercial Linux distros do include legal codecs, but there are still many users out there who will not bother to get legal codecs until they are free.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

PayPal processes $1,571 worth of transactions per second in 17 different currencies on about 4,000 servers running a specially stripped-down and security-enhanced version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, according to Information Week.

(PayPal Chief Technology Officer Scott) Thompson supervises a payment system that operates on about 4,000 servers running Red Hat Linux in the same manner that eBay and Google conduct their business on top of a grid of Linux servers. "I have been pleasantly surprised at how much we've been able to do with this approach. It operates like a mainframe," he said.

As PayPal grows it's much easier to grow the grid with Intel-based servers than it would be to upgrade a mainframe, he said. In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% "is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions," he said.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those who don't know, the corporate world, when it uses Linux, pretty much splits its loyalty between Red Hat and Novell's Suse. Both cost money but include either Web or telephone support.

And when it comes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the server and desktop, there's another, freer way.

CentOS. Since everything based on Linux and the GNU software tools that make it run is subject to the GPL license -- making all sources open and the code freely distributable and modifiable -- CentOS is carving its own sizable niche in the Linux landscape with its clones of Red Hat Linux distributions. You can get everything from version 2 to the current version 5.

And you don't have to pay a thing.

And since Red Hat recently upped its flagship RHEL 5 product to version 5.1, CentOS has done the same with its clone. (It usually takes a couple weeks or so for CentOS to get the changes from upstream and roll them into their own distro).

So if you want a Red Hat-like system for your desktop or server -- or just want to see how it runs (very well, in my tests), give CentOS a try.

One of the best things about Red Hat and CentOS is the Anaconda installer. It's the best I've seen. (Yes, that means better than Ubuntu, too.) And you can count on quite a few years of support for any of these releases. They're still supporting Version 2, I believe.

But for me, the biggest news is that there is now a netinstall image for CentOS. That's a big deal, because you usually need to download two or three ISO images and burn each on a separate CD to get the full CentOS distribution on your computer. I think the netinstall process for Debian is one of its great strengths, and having a similar image for CentOS is, indeed, a great thing.

Note: If I was about to do a CentOS install, I'd get the netinstall image, but there's also a single DVD image for those with DVD burners (I don't have one; I'm still stuck in the CD era). At least that way you can do the full install without a networking connection. It's nice to have choices, at any rate.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The anticipation for Fedora 8 -- the community-based Linux distribution from Red Hat that's set to debut nine days from now-- is high. There wasn't much to brag about with Fedora 7, I'm told, but the increase in community involvement at that time is something that is continuing, with Red Hat ceding more control over the free distro than ever before. And when it comes to Fedora 8 --codenamed "Werewolf" -- genuine improvements are promised:

-- The Codec Buddy will suggest free alternatives to proprietary codecs for playing multimedia files.
-- Iced Tea is a free, open-source version of Java
-- Improved laptop support, in which the holy grail of power management -- suspend that works -- is supposed to be addressed (probably the No. 1 problem with Linux after wireless support)

I've been experimenting with CentOS, a free version of the mainline Red Hat Enterprise Linux product that costs between $80 (for the desktop version and a year's online support) all the way up to $1,299 (for the server edition with up to 2 sockets and a year's telephone support). CentOS (I've been running version 3.9, but the latest release is version 5) is reassembled from the Red Hat open source by the CentOS people to work just like the real thing (minus the cost, of course). And like Red Hat, CentOS has long periods of support (in the form of security updates) for all of its releases. So if you're the type who doesn't want to upgrade every six months (Ubuntu types) or every couple of years (Slackware, Debian), CentOS may be for you.

CentOS, and by extension Red Hat, has impressed me with its installer (the superb Anaconda), hardware detection and functionality. It's perfect for the office desktop. (Although SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and even Slackware are strong contenders for the server room and the desktop, in my opinion).

Fedora, by its nature, is not as locked-down as Red Hat in terms of features. It functions as a test bed of sorts for the mainline Red Hat product, and Fedora's community orientation makes it perfect for the home/nerd user who wants to use something close to RHEL but more cutting-edge. I'm anxious to see how the latest from Fedora runs on my $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

Fedora's main competitor -- openSUSE, Novell's free rendition of SUSE -- released its latest, version 10.3, on Oct. 4. Among its new features is easier implementation of proprietary codecs for multimedia (sound familiar?), Novell's anti-malware program AppArmor, virtualization tools (something Fedora is also including), improved package management and much quicker boot time.

At this point, however, all the buzz is still about Ubuntu, whose 7.10 "Gutsy" release has dominated Web discussion for the past month or so. I'm running it on my laptop now, and at this point I feel confident saying that its the best thing I've run on this PC. One thing I've learned is that while some things run on my Gateway laptop that never did on the VIA thin client, a laptop poses its own unique problems -- mostly touchpad and fan issues (the thin client's fan almost never runs, and you can't hear it when it does; the laptop's fan is loud, and thus far only Debian, Ubuntu without the latest kernel, and Red Hat/CentOS manage the fan properly) and the dreaded suspend which only partially works in Ubuntu).

As always, the way to find out if a Linux distro works for you is to install and give it a test drive. Your PC -- and you -- might like it (or not).

Remember, if SUSE or Fedora don't float your boat, there's always Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, Slackware, Sabayon, Mandriva, Linspire, Zenwalk, Vector, Gentoo, the BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD) and dozens more.

It's freedom of choice that's truly free.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A quick look at Distrowatch today tells me that Damn Small Linux has released its landmark 4.0 release, and the business version of Sabayon has its 1.1 version ready for download.

If you have older hardware, Damn Small Linux very well could be the way to go, especially if you want to run a live CD or a "frugal" install (in which two or three large files act pretty much as a live-CD environment, but are stored on the hard drive). I've generally preferred Puppy Linux, but depending on your hardware and what you want to do, DSL might be a better choice. Go here for a detailed list of changes to DSL. A bonus for users of DSL is the new book, "The Official Damn Small Linux Book: The Tiny Adaptable Linux That Runs on Anything." I've definitely had a lot of fun with DSL. If it had a better image-editing program (i.e. I want MtPaint), I'd be a bigger fan. But otherwise, it runs better than Puppy on low-ram systems -- especially my 64-MB laptop.

I've tried Sabayon before, and it's a very nice KDE implementation. The "Professional" edition is the one you want because it includes OpenOffice. Among other things, Sabayon handles auto-configuration very well. Check the release notes.

I'm also eager to take a look at Fedora 8 when it comes out. Now that I have a laptop that will boot it, I'm anxious to see how Fedora handles hardware detection (including suspend/resume and wireless) and how quick (or slow) the distro is. Here's where the release stands now at the "test 3" stage.

For me, hardware detection is the live-and-die test that Linux (or BSD or anything else, for that matter) must pass in order to gain traction. The easier a distro makes it for you to have the proper monitor resolution, mouse settings, wireless settings (including encryption), power management and USB detection, the better.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 1:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the best sites out there, How to Forge, shows you how to install Debian while running Windows, ending up with a dual-boot Windows/Debian box.

A great idea, for sure.

Here's another way to do it, good for Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, Arch Linux or Debian, the site claims.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

The current versions of Fedora and Red Hat clones Scientific Linux and CentOS -- live CDs, install CDs, net-install CDs -- wouldn't just refuse to install, they wouldn't even boot. I tried special boot codes. Nothing.

Then it dawned on me: CentOS, the leading clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, doesn't just offer its current release, CentOS 5. It also has versions 2, 3 and 4 -- all still receiving support in the form of security updates. Maybe I could go back in time, in Linux time anyway, to an era when Red Hat wasn't so hostile to the VIA C3 Samuel.

So I downloaded and burned the CentOS 4.4 Live CD. It wouldn't boot, either.

Not to be deterred, I downloaded the ISOs for the first discs of CentOS 3.9 and 2.1.

CentOS 2.1 downloaded first, and unlike versions 5 and 4.4, it booted successfully into a graphical installer. Everything looked good, but I wanted to install CentOS on one of my hard drive's pre-existing partitions. The installer wouldn't continue unless I set the target partition as the root partition. I didn't know whether or not that would break the triple-boot situation that I have going on this drive (currently Ubuntu/Xubuntu 7.04, Slackware 12 and Puppy 2.17). I already blew out GRUB with the Puppy install and didn't feel like going through that again -- this week, at least. (I was able to get everything to boot again after a bit of amateur hackery. Through it all, Slackware always booted, by the way.)

For those who don't know, CentOS is a nearly exact copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- as close as the CentOS people can get it (and that's very, very close) for users who want to use RHEL but don't want to pay Red Hat for support they either don't want or need.

Now that CentOS 5 (and by extension RHEL 5) is out, CentOS 2 seems positively ancient. But it's not: The Distrowatch announcement of CentOS 2 Final was on May 25, 2004. That's three years ago for those a little shaky on the math.

The first ISO of my CentOS 3.9 install set finally came through. I swapped in a hard drive that would be dedicated to this install -- no dual-booting.

I chose the graphical install. It worked. This version, unlike CentOS 2, allowed me to configure my wheel mouse. A good sign. Throughout the install process, the help on the left side of the screen is appreciated.

The next screen allowed me to choose from four types of installs: Personal Desktop, Workstation, Server and Custom. I chose Personal Desktop.

And since I had a whole drive devoted to this install, I chose Automatically Partition on the Disk Partitioning Setup screen.

In Boot Loader Configuration, there is the provision to password-protect the GRUB bootloader. It sounded like a good idea, but I didn't need it at present.

I kept going in the installer -- this is Anaconda, I believe -- and as graphical installers go, it's a very good one. I like how it shows the number of packages being installed, how many are done, how many are left, all listed with times elapsed and remaining.

My geeky self was getting a little giddy at the thought of running something that smells of Red Hat. CentOS 3.9 may not be CentOS 5, but this 3.9 release is dated July 26, 2007 -- not even two months old. And according to CentOS, it will be supported with maintenance updates until Oct. 31, 2010. Even CentOS 2 is still being supported with security patches, and that support will continue until May 31, 2009. So if CentOS does work for your setup, you can stay with it. I imagine every release of CentOS will be supported as long as Red Hat supports the releases on which they're based. In other words, a long time.

I'll take it.

If, for some reason, you have hardware frozen in time (and I most certainly do) that runs well on one of these older distributions, it's nice to know there are distributions out there that are committed to true long-term support.

(A few days pass)

I finally got to use CentOS 3.9. I know it's old, and yes, there are quite a few apps that don't work so well. OpenOffice is version 1.1.2, meaning no ODF support. It's strange that OO is not even version 2, but instead of GAIM there's the very-new Pidgin on the system. Must have something to do with security. I like Pidgin and use it every day, so nothing's lost there.

One problem: There's no way, no how, to get AbiWord on this thing, and after screwing around with yum and rpm for awhile, I did get the flash plugin installed but struck out with the Ted word processor, even though I had a bona fide RPM of it. It installed, but then it wouldn't run, even from a terminal. And I couldn't find the GNOME app that lets you add things to the menus.

I took a peek at Carla Schroder's "Linux Cookbook" for a quick how-to on RPMs, and it doesn't seem like I'm doing anything wrong, but Ted still won't load.

Also, XMMS didn't work with .mp3 files (it's not supposed to -- for some reason Red Hat purposefully doesn't include the proper CODECs). But it won't work with .ogg files, either. Nothing happens. And while my sound does work -- the test sound plays perfectly -- there's no audio in any browser (SeaMonkey is the default here). Hmmmm.

But there are many good things bout this ol' Red Hat clone:

The install is on three CDs, and I never needed the third one. It's nice to get both the GNOME and KDE desktops installed by default and be able to experience both without having to do much of anything. Both GNOME and KDE run pretty well on my old hardware (I think the VIA C3 is running a lot slower than its rated 1 GHz -- maybe half that, and I'm working with a 133 MHz FSB, 256 MB of RAM).

It's kind of cool how in GNOME the menus show Gedit, but in KDE you get Kate. Pretty slick.

Konqueror runs way faster here than in newer distros. I think that the browser/file manager got some kind of major makeover, because I remember it being this fast in the old, now-orphaned MepisLite but was surprised to find out how slow it has been in recent distros (Slackware 12, SimplyMepis 5). It's fast here, all right, but not so great on most Web pages -- CSS rendering isn't working all that great.

The Add/Remove Applications utility works very well. I used it to beef up KDE with ... everything they had. Everything, in this case didn't include KOffice. I understand that this is due to Red Hat's decision to support OpenOffice above all other office software. No AbiWord, no Ted, and no KOffice. That's a mistake -- Red Hat (and by extension CentOS) would do its users nothing but good by giving them a choice in office suites. I'd be OK with it if they were only shipping GNOME, but if you include KDE, you really should put KOffice with it.

I couldn't get my network printer to work with the Red Hat/CentOS utility, but now that I've used the CUPS Web-browser interface successfully a few times, I went in that direction and got networked printing going in about two minutes.

The GIMP is back at version 1.2. The good thing is that it loads in 15 seconds. That's way faster than the current version loads in just about any OS I use.

The older version of OpenOffice, on the other hand, is much slower. It takes a full minute and then some to load the Writer application. The OO team must've tightened it up a bit since then, because 2.2 runs better than this older version. And I'm uncomfortable without ODF support.

RHEL/CentOS desktop users -- not that Red Hat has much stake in or focus on the desktop -- pretty much have to make due with OpenOffice. I'm sure there's a way to add KOffice, AbiWord, even Ted, but the official repositories don't have those applications. And as I write above, I was unsuccessful in getting Ted to install. Well, it's installed -- I just can't run it.

It could be me. This is my first experience with anything derived from Red Hat, and I didn't exactly spend the weekend studying up on it. But so far, Debian and Ubuntu are obviously easier to deal with when it comes to adding packages. Even Slackware is easier. I figured out how to add a Slack package pretty easily. I'm doing something wrong with rpm and yum, I just don't know what.

Otherwise, both the GNOME and KDE environments in CentOS 3.9 are quite complete. All the tools you'd expect in the somewhat older incarnations of these desktops are there.

One RPM that did install right was Flash. I followed the instructions from the Adobe site, and upon relaunching Seamonkey, I had Flash video. Still no sound, but could at least watch a silent YouTube.

For a moment, if I can forget all the stuff that didn't work -- sound, installing software NOT in the main repositories -- the Red Hat/CentOS desktop would make an excellent install for corporate environments. It seems solid and has an excellent installer. And the lengthy period of support in the form of security patches is exactly what a typical business needs. Do you think my company-maintained Windows XP box gets a visit from the IT department once a month unless I have a problem? Once a year? It NEVER gets any attention unless I ask for it.

That's the reality out there, and the more a Linux desktop can have a set-it-and-forget-it configuration, the better it will fare in most corporate settings. Nothing that is re-released every six months -- or even every year -- will ever take hold in most office situations. And some people don't like change. That's what Red Hat (and, again, by extension CentOS) is all about in the server market.

The same philosophy applies to the office desktop -- keep it simple, keep it the same, keep it secure. On Windows, nothing is all that simple or secure -- but it sure is the same. With that in mind, a little sameness on the desktop isn't such a bad thing when you're talking about hundreds or thousands of users in a single company.

Until I get a better testing environment running (and I am close), I'll only be able to speculate on how much CentOS 5 has improved the desktop experience. I suspect quite a bit. But based on what I see in 3.9, if you want a secure, stable desktop workhorse, you could do a whole lot worse than the rock-solid CentOS.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

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. But there's something about Fedora/RHEL that is calling to me. I did get the package manager working in Fedora on the night I ran the live CD in my Dell 3 GHz box, and I found out how to add Open Office but didn't have time to actually do it.

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 (although between the two there's probably nothing that isn't available as far as apps go). For a corporate office environment, less is probably better -- but in a big company, there would probably be a custom spin on a distro to install just the software that is needed and no more.

(Two and a half weeks pass ...)

Hankering to try new distros, I spent plenty of time shoving BSD and Linux discs into the text box (the often-mentioned VIA C3-based thin client lashed to a hard drive and CD-RW), and spent a bit of time with SimplyMepis (more forthcoming), Slackware, briefly with Vector, and more than I would've thought with Xubuntu/Ubuntu 7.04.

On my 1 GHz/256 MB RAM system, the KDE desktop in Mepis 6.5 is way too sluggish. Implementation of KDE is fairly good, I did appreciate the Mepis setup tools, the fact that Flash was preinstalled, and the ability to play MP3s right out of the box. I wasn't so happy with having OpenOffice installed instead of KOffice -- I'd rather have both, actually, and I really wished that Mepis shipped with more than KDE for a window manager. Yes, I know I can try AntiX, and I just might, but it's nice that Slackware includes KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox and a few more in the basic install. I did enjoy Mepis' eye candy -- the KWeather icon that I could set to show my local weather, plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

KDE in Mepis didn't come preconfigured for multiple desktops, something I've grown to find essential, but it was easy enough to add them and also add the icon for choosing between them to the panel.

But I was uneasy in Mepis' KDE, so I moved on to Slackware, which has a terrific implementation of KDE and a great mix of programs. The Slackware KDE desktop was much faster, and while getting everything working in Slack requires getting one's hands a little dirty (again, more later), I did pretty much get the results I wanted. While Slack isn't aimed at the novice user, you don't have to be some kind of super Linux genius, either, to make it work.

Slack defaults to a very safe setup. You can't mount any other drives or even burn CDs until you make a few adjustments. In my mind, it makes Slack more ready for the enterprise desktop than many more popular distros -- it's set up from the beginning in such a way as not to be easily f'd up. But most people who run Linux want to mount CDs and flash drives, burn ISOs and the like. And I've been able to do all that with Slackware, learning a bit in the process.

All of this led me to a new appreciation for Ubuntu (and the Xubuntu desktop as well). The distro might not ship with the ability to play MP3s, and you need to add Flash to Firefox, should you want it, but the package-management that comes from Debian, along with the Ubuntu repositories, the huge and usually helpful Ubuntu community -- and the distro handling USB devices, multiple partitions, bootloader configuration and so much more very well -- make me forgive it not being as swift as Debian or Slackware. I did a bit of testing and did determine that most programs run faster under Xfce than they do in GNOME (not a revelation, I know) even though I don't see all that much difference in the desktop speed itself.

Along the way, I thought I had a problem with Synaptic in Xubuntu when it crashed the system a couple of times (screen frozen, drive chunking away, no ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete working), but when the same problem happened when switching between Konqueror windows in Slackware, I figured the problem was with the box more than the OS. I'll have to keep an eye on it.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying being in the KDE environment of Slackware, and I haven't booted into Debian 4.0 in some time (I have them on separate hard drives, easily swapped out). I need to repartition the Xubuntu/Slackware drive and try to make room for one more distro -- ZenWalk, which I've been anxious to try. Having three Xfce-equipped distros on one drive should really tell me a lot. I'd love for ZenWalk to really grow on me -- we'll see. So far I like what I see in the ZenWalk forums -- always a good sign when evaluating a distro. I also need to spend more time in Slack's Xfce and Fluxbox environments.

And I haven't had my drive with the full Debian desktop hooked up in weeks. I have to confess that part of the reason I run Ubuntu so much is that for the purposes of writing this blog, its popularity is just so massive, I feel that I can't ignore it (or you might say that it's a shameless ploy to get more readers). But as I say somewhere in this ramble, there are many distros out there that make my proverbial heart grow fonder for the many comforts of Ubuntu.

Still, it's getting to the time in my distro-hopping life when I should settle down with only a couple of different setups, max. I still want to run Puppy and Damn Small Linux, but I need to get some stability in my Linux life and really get to know a single system. My $15 laptop is still running Debian with Fluxbox, and that's working about as well as I can expect, if not a little bit better. I'm reluctant to bump up the RAM from the current 64 MB to the max of 144 MB only because I have another laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 given to me because the power plug broke and it doesn't work.

I removed about 15 screws from the Gateway -- all that I could see, but I still couldn't crack the case. I've already got a couple of new power plugs to solder to the circuit board, and I have a 30 GB drive ready to install (I had to pull the original drive and give it to the person who gave me the laptop -- a small price, to be sure, for a free computer). I just haven't had time lately to get back in there and try to take the Gateway apart without destroying it in the process. The idea of having a 1.2 GHz processor AND 1 GB of RAM may not be earth-shattering, but it could really allow me to run GNOME or KDE with much more comfort (and hopefully Xfce with a whole lot of said comfort). Still, I guess I'll have to look for a 3 GHz box (or a Core Duo) that isn't owned by the company.

And if sticking to a single distro (or two) is where I'm headed, Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu are all good candidates, as they allow for many desktop environments and a lot of flexibility for my very divergent hardware. And I have to say that I've been thinking lately about getting a "real" computer to run Linux on. I'd feel a lot better about Linux on the desktop with a whole lot of CPU and RAM, plus a super-fast front-side bus to make it all flow.

On another note, I've been using the GIMP intensively to cut images for the LA.com Web site, on which I've been doing a lot of work lately. About half the people I work with have heard of the GIMP and have it installed, but their opinion of it isn't very high. Mostly I chalk that up to their own familiarity with Photoshop and lack of same for the GIMP. It is different. But with the help of one of these GIMP doubters, I was able to figure out how to easily crop an image to exact pixel-by-pixel specs (something I've never needed to do before, width being king over depth in my design consciousness). But it's nice to spend much of my work day in free, open-source apps on Windows and Linux platforms -- mostly the GIMP and AbiWord (along with a passel of text editors, from EditPad Lite on Windows to Mousepad and KWrite in Linux).

And as regular readers might've noticed, I haven't been posting nearly as often -- it's been busy at the Daily News, for all of us, with the new (to me, at least) Web site, the entire print section undergoing a massive redesign, plus all my posting to the New York Times News Service wire.

But my long-gestating Puppy 2.16 review is coming, as will be a bit more on SimplyMepis and Slackware, plus hopefully something on ZenWalk if I can clear some space on one of my three hard drives.

If you made it this far in the rambling rant, you get a gold star, to be sure.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I guess I should wait more than five minutes before "reviewing" a live CD, but then again, I only have five minutes, so here goes.

I load the Fedora 7 Live CD on my Dell (3 GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM). It loads smooth. No password required to either log on as a user or configure my static IP. AbiWord is standard (guess they couldn't or wouldn't cram Open Office into it). It's actually smoother than the Scientific Linux and CentOS CDs I tried yesterday.

Flash is not installed (I believe that both Scientific Linux and CentOS come with Flash pre-configured). So I click on the "install missing plugin" icon where the Flash content would be in Firefox. It installs. The page refreshes. No problems.

There's a desktop icon, "Install to Hard Drive." Unfortunately this isn't the system on which I want to install Fedora. My test box, with a VIA processor, is famously hostile to all Red Hat-based distros -- it won't even boot a live CD to do the install. I'll try tomorrow with the "rescue CD." Perhaps it can rescue my test system from a life without Fedora.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 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.

CentOS 5.0 loads OK, if a little slow (it was flummoxed for a minute by an unused SATA port), but upon launch looks much like Fedora, which is should, since CentOS is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. It's a way to get Red Hat functionality for servers and desktops without paying Red Hat fees.

Just like in Fedora, CentOS runs a nice GNOME desktop with the usual apps. But there's no information anywhere on the root password, so I can't configure my static IP and get Internet into the box. If you have a DHCP connection, no doubt this isn't a problem, and you might like using a RHEL workalike. But since I need to do a little configuration, the CentOS live CD isn't of all that much use to me.

So I pump the Scientific Linux CD into the Dell. It's another RHEL clone, this one made by a group of real scientists, including those at Fermilab.

During the boot process for Scientific Linux, I'm told the root password is sluser; so are the standard, non-root login and password. Simple enough.

It boots, and since Scientific Linux, like CentOS, is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the app choices look pretty much the same. Only the desktop art looks different. I'm quite comfortable in GNOME, since I also have a Debian box that is set up with it.

So I configure the network. I've never done a static IP configuration (or any other kind) in Red Hat before, and it takes me a few minutes. But I manage to get Internet flowing through the box. I also start Open Office Writer on one workspace, the GIMP on the next.

Even though this is a live CD, things are surprisingly snappy (I'm running with 512 MB of RAM). Since Scientific Linux is a RHEL clone, I give much credit to Red Hat. While the Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux leader is known for its server installs, this system is functioning quite well indeed as my desktop for the moment, and I wouldn't hesitate at this point to make Scientific Linux (or Fedora or RHEL, for that matter) my default desktop OS.

Now I haven't tried to install any additional apps, and I am running this on my best box, so this all goes for a new, modern system. I'm not saying that Dell made an error in shipping their new non-Windows desktops and laptops with Ubuntu, but here I am using a polished desktop environment, Flash is already installed, sound works right away with no configuration, and the thing is more responsive than Ubuntu, at least in this live CD environment (the Ubuntu live CD doesn't run nearly as well, but since I haven't done a Linux install to this box, I can't vouch for the way it works with a hard drive install).

Before I reboot and get back to my "real" work, I figure I'll try to install some applications and see how that works. I go to the Applications menu and select Add/Remove Software. There's not much there -- most of the apps are already installed. I have Open Office, but I want to install AbiWord. Where is it?

I find Yum. I figure out how to add the repositories. Then Yum crashes. I reload. I add repositories again. I can't seem to find AbiWord, but it just might not be there. Clearly I need some Red Hat tutoring. That's where six months of Debian, apt and Synaptic will get you ...

But overall I'm impressed with Scientific Linux (and by extension RHEL). Aside from the package-management trouble (which at this point I think is solely due to my inability to figure it out), this is a fine desktop setup. And did I mention that it's fast?

All I need now is a new PC that I can install either CentOS, Scientific Linux or Fedora on -- maybe Dell will sell me one.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Can you believe this bullshit? In Microsoft's new Word 2007, the .doc format has taken a back seat to .docx. Luckily there's a way to handle these files in Open Office, the free, open-source office suite -- at least for the Linux version. Novell had an ODF Converter that works on .docx word processor documents ... and this Linux Planet article shows you how to take the .RPM Novell package and convert it to a .DEB package that can be installed in Debian and the various Ubuntus.

I imagine a future version of Open Office will support .docx natively, but for now, there's this solution. Or ... you could tell people NOT to use .docx, stick with their old MS Office software or, for the love of god, just start using Open Office, AbiWord/Gnumeric, KOffice, or even Ted.

Soapbox time: I support the move to the OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is native to OpenOffice 2, and I hope it goes forward. I'm naturally skeptical about Microsoft's own open-document format, OpenXML, simply because having a company generally opposed to open standards creating and controlling an open standard is counterintuitive and probably counterproductive.

And like it or not, at this point Microsoft's .doc and .xls file formats for Word and Excel, respectively have pretty much become universal -- with many non-MS programs able to read and write them in most cases. That's probably why MS created the .docx format in Office 2007 -- they need to give users a reason to purchase yet another version of Office that they probably don't need. Most Word and Excel documents (or, if you prefer, and I do, word-processing documents and spreadsheets) are fairly simple and don't need a whole new generation of features and formatting. It's nice if you need it, overkill (and costly overkill at that) if you don't.

Now mind you, this is coming from someone that reads an occasional spreadsheet if it comes preloaded with data, and uses word processors for WRITING. I don't generally drop photos, tables, spreadsheets, other graphics, et al., into my documents. I just write it and post/send it where it needs to go. Some people use Open Office (and MS Word, too) to produce publication-quality documents, and I say more power to you, but for the rest of us, we don't need any new proprietary formats that prevent us from freely exchanging documents and being able to actually open, read and edit them.

The days when everybody needed to have Word and Excel -- the branded versions -- on their PC, or risk not being able to do their work are long, long past. And that's why we need ODF. I'd love to switch the default in my Open Office Writer from .doc to .odf -- and that day is coming, methinks, sooner than later.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After inking "intellectual property"/interoperability deals with Novell, Xandros and now Linspire, there's nobody Microsoft would like to bring to the mat more than Red Hat, according to PC World:

"We'd love to do the same deal with Red Hat," said Tom Robertson, general manager of corporate interoperability and standards at Microsoft in an interview Friday. "We're always open to talking with them."

That sentiment so far has not been the same on Red Hat's end, as the company has said it's not interested in a deal. Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said Friday that is still the case.

"We continue to believe that open source and the innovation it represents should not be subject to an unsubstantiated tax that lacks transparency," she said in an e-mail.

Aside from the breaking-news aspect, this is a good article to read for a little background, including the dubious financial arrangements involved in Microsoft's move into the Linux space.

And for those who haven't read the 6,000 stories between then and now, this whole megilla began with a May 28 Fortune article in which Microsoft Steve Ballmer throws down the gauntlet on so-called patent infringement.

Posted by Steven Rosenberg at 5:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)