Dirty little Windows secret

After running about four different kinds of Linux, and also having run OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.6 (albeit sparingly for the latter), I’ve come to the conclusion that Windows and MS Office are a lot zippier than they get credit for.

If what you need to do is get work done, Windows (and I’m mainly talking about 2000 and XP here) is a workhorse. And there are free apps from today till tomorrow and into the next millennium. And so far, my screen looks better in Windows than it does in any flavor of Linux. Best I’ve seen so far is the Gnome GUI that comes with Ubuntu. KDE, available for Knoppix or Ubuntu is slower. Too slow, I think.

One thing I’m gonna tell you right now: The whole thing about Linux being able to “save” an old PC from obsolesence. I don’t buy it at this point. But if you want to set up a PC to run modern browsers and working e-mail programs, along with Office-compatible free apps, and you don’t have a Microsoft Windows OS disc, Linux can provide a very credible working environment. Is it a better one than Windows? No, just different.

What Linux does have going for it, especially the big distributions, is free upgrades forever. And the smug satisfaction that you’re not running Windows or OS X. If that kind of smugness is your thing.

Linux on the brain

Now that I can download and make my own bootable CDs of ISO images, I’m collecting and sampling all the CD-bootable Linux flavors out there.

So far I’ve got:

Knoppix
Ubuntu
Xubuntu
Fluxbuntu
DSL (Damn Small Linux)
DSN-n (Damn Small Linux, but a little bigger)

I’ve managed to make CDs of about half of them. I tried to make a bootable USB stick with DSL, but it didn’t work. It can be done, say geeks.

DSL runs great, although it sometimes leaves the mouse behind on the Dell, depending on if/where the USB drive is plugged in. It won’t recognize the Ethernet card either. But it’s wicked fast. Maybe DSL-n, bigger as it is, will do better.

And Xubuntu is supposedly lighter in resources, which I need for This Old PC, with Fluxbuntu even lighter still (with DSL the absolute lightest). But if I can’t get wired Internet or wireless going, it’s all terribly academic and not at all useful.

In other news, I downloaded Abisoft for PC to get a feel for it. It’s a very light Word-compatible word processor that also runs under Linux and is being included in more and more distributions.

What I like about these Unix distributions: The ones that are meant to be run from a hard drive (the Ubuntu family) allow for easy updating and equally easy search and downloading of new, compatible applications. Huzzah!

Taking the Palm and Windows Moble pulse of America’s electronics retailers

I went on a mission. Call it CES – Woodland Hills. I wanted to see all there was to see in pocket-size computing. I wanted to try the latest Palm models as well as compare them with Windows Mobile devices.

Would the Microsoft-powered portables work as quickly and intuitively as the Palm? Would Windows Mobile’s version of Word solve my “smart” quote and em dash problems?

And what about the latest from Palm? The E2, T/X and Lifedrive beckoned. I’ve only been using Ilene’s Tungsten E hardcore for about three weeks, so it’s my infancy/honeymoon with the whole Palm concept. The fact that I’m composing entire blog posts in Palm’s Graffiti 2 script language with the E’s metal stylus means I’ve either gone crazy or discovered the missing link in my own writing workflow.

How hard could it be to see all that is new in Palms, iPAQs and the like?And since Woodland Hills is a hotbed of electronics retail, I assumed my task would be an easy one.

Little did I know that the state of PDA retail would range from borderline adequate (Frys) through wholly deplorable (Best Buy) to suspiciously absent (Circuit City). Some of this could be due to the general withering of the PDA category, but much of it must be due to basic neglect by the manufacturers of their products’ position and very presence in the retail arena.

HP, maker of the iPaq, could be focusing on desktop and laptop PCs, while Palm is moving toward becoming a cell-phone-only player.

Or it could be sheer incompetence and business-category suicide.

On my first trip to Frys, neither Windows Mobile-equipped iPaq was in working condition. All the Palms worked. That’s when I discovered the LifeDrive’s lag due to its reliance on a disk drive as opposed to memory to load applications. None of the Palms had a working Wi-Fi connection, something I very much wanted to test.

The cheapest Palm, the Zire, at $99, was dismaying after my weeks with the Tungsten E. No e-mail, a low-res, smallish screen, no Documents to Go — what exactly was the Zire good for? The extra $100 for the Tungsten E2 is mandatory. The next $100 for the TX is strongly suggested. But the final extra $100 for the LifeDrive is ill-advised. The TX is the sweetest of spots in the Palm PDA line, though the E2 will do very well.

Briefly, because even I’m tiring of this entry, here’s the rest of my search.

Circuit City: No PDAs at all.

CompUSA: The TX, Zire and E2 are all running. No PC-based PDAs are available for demo.

Staples: TX is running. Others not. No PC-based PDAs running.

Best Buy: Two Palms (TX and maybe LifeDrive) are behind plastic, barely seen. Not avaliable for demo. Prices ABOVE retail. No PC-based PDAs Smartphones have plastic “fake” screen and can’t be demoed.

Second visit to Fry’s: Two IPaq’s are now running. Is there any provision for stylus-based writing? If not, there’s not even a keyboard. What gives?

In the famous “smart quote” search, it appears the Word-like app on Windows Mobile devices does not do smart quotes. Since you can get them in any Palm application if you put them in a Shortcut (or use the Targus wireless keyboard), Palm wins the smart-quotes battle, hands (or Palms) down.

Ubuntu Linux on This Old PC

I spent a little time trying to boot Ubuntu Linux on the Pentium II MMX 333 MHz. I couldn’t force a boot from CD with the F keys, so I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order to CD first, then HD. That worked.

The Linux boot from CD was taking forever. I haven’t timed my newish PC’s boots of Linux, but on the older one, it was taking forever. At least 7 minutes. I wanted to see if I could get wireless running under Ubuntu, but I hadn’t a clue.

Knoppix has a visible wireless configuration utility — I’ll have to try it. Ubuntu might have something. A look at the help pages might shed some light.

But the long boot time is troublesome. Maybe a hard-disk installation will speed things up. All I know is that taking a major performance hit is not what Linux is supposed to be about.

Update: Knoppix was faster on This Old PC.

Fleeting obsession or natural progression?

There are two ways to look at my technological laundry list over the past many months. Old PC rehab, old Mac rehab (everything from new OS to wireless), through the Palm (the search not for Spock but for smart quotes, the importance of which is … not so much, now that I’ve found them) and now Linux.

If Palm Desktop ran on Linux, this “progression” would be that much more natural. Ah, if things were only that easy.

Update: There are ways for Palm and Linux to talk to each other. Evolution on Ubuntu Linux seems to be able to do it, and this page has a bunch of other apps that claim to do it, too.

RAM still faster than flash memory

With all the trumpets and fanfare over nonvolatile flash memory getting cheaper as chip capacities rise and use of the product widens, remember that as a replacement for traditional electronic components, results may vary.

Simply put, when flash replaces a hard drive, access times could very well improve. But when flash replaces traditional random access memory, be prepared for a slowdown.

One of the novel features of the new Windows Vista is the ability to add to available system RAM by plugging in a flash drive. Not a bad idea, since Vista reportedly needs 2 GB of RAM to be comfortable. But as early Vista users are learning, only the newest, fastest flash cards and drives will even work at all.

New and recent Palm handhelds illustrates this point well. The newish LifeDrive, which deviates from traditional Palm devices in that it is built around a 4 GB hard drlve (hence the name — LifeDRIVE), is markedly slower to start applications than other Palms. Once started, the apps stay in RAM, so speed improves, but the LifeDrive does appear quite sluggish in comparison to its cheaper Palm cousins.

The Palm TX and Tungsten E2 models are the company’s first handhelds to use flash memory instead of battery-backed RAM. I was surprised that both handhelds were slower to start applications than my older Tungsten E with its 32 MB of traditional RAM.

The tradeoff: The Palms with flash memory enjoy increased battery life, and you’ll never lose the content of your Palm to a dead battery. However, users of older Palms say that even a handheld that won’t power on will retain its data in RAM for some time and can still be backed up with a HotSync if it’s done in a somewhat timely manner.

Still, the speed differential between more modern flash and RAM is not a total deal-breaker in some devices, but for now, flash is a better substitute for disk-drive-like storage than it is for heavily accessed system memory.

To further complicate it all, some flash is slower than the average hard disk. And since disk speed is typically measured in milliseconds of access time, while flash memory is measured in megabytes transferred per second, nothing is easy.

Evolution, a PIM client, in Ubuntu

Ubuntu includes Evolution, which is billed as a “PIM client.” Maybe it’ll work with my Palm handheld. If I can get the Palm and Linux talking … my life, from a technological standpoint, will be complete.

It turns out that Evolution is, indeed a mail client, and it does handle PIM syncing for Palm. Hmmmm…

Knoppix has more apps than Ubuntu

Knoppix has so many things to choose from. Multiple text editors, both in the KDE GUI and in terminal windows. A bunch of browsers, including Firefox, and Konquerer.

There aren’t so many choices in Ubuntu, although I expect everything you need is available for free download.

One thing: I couldn’t get Knoppix to recognize my thumb drive, but I can get to it easily in Ubuntu to save my work when booting off the CD.

Neither version of Linux has Abisoft, an open-source word processor I’ve been wanting to try, although Ubuntu says somewhere that it includes it. Maybe it’s in 6.1.0. I’m running 6.0.6.

Another thing, I was able to up the screen resolution, and Ubuntu looks even better at 1280 by 1024.

(Note: This is being posted from Ubuntu with Firefox)

Let’s stay together — Palm and Linux edition

I came across this very cool and helpful Web site, Palm Heads: Cool Palm, Tandy and Linux Stuff We Actually Use. There’s information on how to make the Palm handheld computer play with Linux, including pointers to the J-Pilot desktop PIM, Pilot mailsync for Linux and more.

Also, check out PalmHeads’ Tandy 102 page, on the first great portable computer, which, believe it or not, some sportswriters at the Daily News still use:

This computer shared alot of the similarities with the PalmPilot now. It has an Address Book, a built-in Text Editor, an Appointment Book. What it had that a PalmPilot doesn’t is a built-in modem (at a frightning speed of 300 baud), & a full travel keyboard. It also only had 24K (expandable to 32K) & an 8-bit processor! Chuck in 20 hours battery life on 4 AA batteries & you can start to see its advantages over modern laptops.

Go to Club 100 to find out more from the users group for Tandy 100, 102 and 200 owners.

Windows Vista debuts today

I heard Bill Gates talking about Windows Vista on NPR this morning, along with a tech writer from PC Magazine saying that we’ll all be using Windows Vista eventually if we’re using Windows today. Even Gates said being compared to Mac’s OS X isn’t a bad thing, because you have to be compared to something, and that’s the only other thing out there.

What they didn’t talk about was whether or not most of the hardware out there could even handle Vista’s memory, processor and graphics requirements. For the most part, the answer is no, and I predict a good year ahead for memory manufacturers, as well as the entire PC sector in general. Expect everybody from Dell on down to move a whole lot more gray, tan and black boxes over the next couple of years.

For my money, of which I’m not spending any, I’ve found Windows XP to be a very stable, well-appointed operating system. I even like things like Windows Media Player, the My Documents and My Pictures folders and the way XP handles photos and files. Nothing earth-shaking, just a solid environment in which to work. And the right-clicking? I’m a big fan of right-clicking, and I think Mac OS X would benefit from a two-button mouse with a similiar philosophy in regard to right-clicking.

One thing that changed with XP is that you have to be a registered user to install it — no passing around a CD and installing on multiple computers without paying … not that I’d ever do such a thing (I really wouldn’t, but that’s another bucket of brine).

Photo: Bill Gates back in the day, from a blog post titled “Bill Gates: Nerd Stud.”