I tried to put the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver wireless card into the PCMCIA slot in the $0 Laptop — the Gateway Solo 1450. It didn’t go it.
I looked in the slot. There was a screw wedged in there. I got it out with a plastic knife, but the damage was done. About seven pins are bent.
I hope there’s a way to get access to the pins so I can straighten them out … or that a USB wireless adapter will somehow work.
Sure Zenwalk was doing all right on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450, 1.3 GHz Celeron, 256 MB RAM).
But I had Partition Magic, and it was time to divide the / partition in half to dual-boot.
My first test was PC-BSD 1.3 (I’ve had the CD for a few months.) It’s the first BSD I’ve ever been able to boot. I tried Desktop BSD on the laptop a few days prior, and while the graphical installer began running, all the text was replaced by square boxes. (Since then, that problem has disappeared, only to have others crop up in its place.)
But PC-BSD worked, so I did an install. Problem: Even though the graphical PC-BSD installer was running at 1024 x 768, once the OS was installed, I was stuck at 640 x 480. I could barely get networking configured because of the resolution. Everything I tried — going into the KDE settings, hacking at xorg.conf and XFree86 (is that what it’s called?) didn’t work. I broke X a few times and had to restore the configuration files from the console.
Nice surprise: Unlike Zenwalk, PC-BSD has some kind of laptop power management implemented. The loud fan finally fell silent, only turning on occasionally.
One thing about PC-BSD — it’s a great KDE experience. Everything is super fast. Konqueror loads in about 2 seconds, I got a PBI file of AbiWord, and that loaded just as quickly.
But I couldn’t get the resolution I needed, so I decided, for now, to move on.
I brought a few CDs home, one of them being the Ubuntu 7.04 live CD. It installed without a hitch, and I’m currently doing all the updates. One problem: DHCP networking with my DSL modem was not working. I connected a router between the modem and the Ethernet plug, and that did the trick. There must be some strange way of configuring the DHCP for my ISP, which is DSL Extreme. I’ll look into it, but since I’d need to use a router anyway (we have the Mac iBook G4 connected), it’s by no means an insurmountable.
Ubuntu 7.04 is running great so far, and it, too, has laptop power management implemented. That noisy fan gets annoying pretty quickly, and it’s nice to hear it fall silent without having to do anything.
So right now I’m downloading 120 or so updates to Ubuntu, plus both ISOs for PC-BSD 1.4. Maybe they fixed the resolution problem.
What did PC-BSD remind me of? The great MepisLite, which was designed for older computers yet used KDE and KOffice. If I could somehow replicate that setup with PC-BSD — Konqueror loading in seconds, with similar load times from the KOffice suite, I will zap out Zenwalk and give PC-BSD another try.
Worst thing about PC-BSD: Whatever bootloader they’re using, it’s barbaric. There’s barely any
information there, and I was unable to boot anything but PC-BSD.
But it was so fast, I hardly cared. If I do dual-boot, I will use GRUB, for sure.
Coming up: PC-BSD 1.4, DesktopBSD 1.0, FreeBSD 6.2.
The GParted Live CD hung up when trying to load the RAID controller module. No RAID here. The only help I found in the GParted forum was to look into Parted Magic. I did. It’s repartition my Gateway hard drive now. Go here for the ISO.
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.
That’s what they’re talking about. Pro and con.
In case you didn’t guess, the “pro” viewpoint is from a man (Bruce Byfield), the con from a woman (Tina Gasperson).
He says:
As I see it, the benefit of a woman’s distro would be largely for the participants. It would be a place where women could learn how to package software or test a distribution for quality without having fear of being derided or distracted from the task at hand by the irrelevancies of gender or mistimed expressions of attraction.
I’m not a great believer in the idea that women are less aggressive than or interact differently from men. Yet even I have to admit that most of the regulars on free software mailing lists for women are politer and more supportive than the average poster on general lists. Perhaps a women’s distro might develop forms of governance that are as democratic as Debian’s, but less outspoken or rude. Possibly, too, their supportiveness would lead to more emphasis on documentation and the user experience. Just possibly, a women’s distro could teach the rest of the community a thing or two about organization.
She says:
What would we include in this distro? Pink butterfly themes? Shopping calculators? Does that sound insulting? It should. So I ask again, what exactly would we include in a female version of Linux? The longer you think about this, the more ridiculous it sounds.
…
The fact is that most women I know outside of the IT industry are more tech-savvy than the men in their lives. They are the ones who have embraced the Internet and the gadgets that accompany it. They are the ones who communicate mostly by email, and their husbands and boyfriends and fathers and brothers are still stuck on the phone and can’t boot the computer without someone holding their hand. According to Nielsen, women make up the majority of Internet users, and they spend a lot more money on technology than men do. Just because most of them do not choose to make a living at it doesn’t mean that women are somehow lacking in the ability to understand and absorb the concept of technology.
Creating a special Linux distribution as though it were a delightful surprise that we can use Linux at all is not going to help our image. Special Linuxes are for people with USB keys and religious sensibilities. We women are doing just fine, thanks.
Expect more opinions to make themselves know in the blogosphere in the next few days.
Now that Puppy won’t load on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, and Knoppix runs like hell on it, it’s time to get the GParted live CD for my disk-partitioning pleasure.
I said I wouldn’t dual-boot on the Gateway, but already I’m rethinking that decision. Hence the need for GParted.
And I’m thinking about working with LILO rather than replacing it with GRUB. Well, I’ll try it anyway.
It’s funny, when Steven J. Vaughn Nichols talks about “old” hardware, he has this in mind:
For my tests, I’m going to use my Insignia 300a, an older, Best Buy house-brand desktop PC with a 2.8GHz Pentium IV CPU, a GB of RAM and an Ultra ATA/100 60GB hard drive. In short, it’s a decent, but in no way, shape or form, cutting-edge system.
For me, the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop on which I’m testing Zenwalk 4.6.1 is my newest PC. It’s a 1 GHz Celeron, 256 MB of RAM and 30 GB Toshiba hard drive.
And Zenwalk is running GREAT on it. Already I’ve added MtPaint, J-Pilot and Fluxbox.
Under Fluxbox, it runs even better. No surprise, but this is a sweet setup.
I’ve gotten quite fond of J-Pilot, the Linux application that syncs with Palm handhelds. I use my Palm all the time for writing, and getting the files into my Linux boxes is a big deal.
First I got pilot-link with Netpkg.
Then I found the J-Pilot package here. It even put an entry in the menus under “office.”
I used the great Slackware tool, Pkgtool, to install it.
P.S. Before using this Zenwalk package, I tried about three different Slackware packages, none of which worked.
P.P.S. Anybody who says Slackware doesn’t have package management … tell ’em it does.
P.P.P.S. I have J-Pilot, but I can’t get it to sync. (Related info: Easiest sync: Debian Etch; hard but doable: Ubuntu).
P.P.P.S. I find out here that I need to set the device as /dev/pilot1. Thanks Zenwalkers!
P.P.P.P.S. I’ve used both J-Pilot and GNOME-Pilot. If you spend a lot of time in the Evolution mail program, GNOME-Pilot is a good thing, and in GNOME it’s easier to manage your Palm. Plus you can sync at any time, even if Evolution is not open. J-Pilot, in general, is a quite a bit lighter than Evolution, and unless you’re using Evolution as your mail client, it might be too much for the task. But both work. I haven’t tried Kpilot since I’m not running KDE on anything right now.
Palm’s VersaMail pretty much only works with Windows. Even the Mac client doesn’t support it, so I’m not all that pissed that it doesn’t work in J-Pilot or GNOME-Pilot (to my knowledge anyway). Besides, my Palm Tungsten E doesn’t work with most mail systems anyway. For that you need a newer Palm. Great strategy … right? That’s probably why Palm is doing so gosh-darned well.
That’s the question George Ou’s article is really answering. He hits VIA for charging a premium for its mini-ITX mainboards (which go for twice as much as the average micro-ATX board and, while often fanless and low in power consumption, don’t come anywhere near approaching the specs of the mainstream boards).
But he champions Intel for offering its own mini-ITX mainboard for the low, low price of $69.
Hell, I didn’t know about this … and I want one. Now.
I’m a huge mini-ITX fan — a huge fan of PCs that are small, consume little power and have no fans in general. And if Intel wants to take this market, I’m all for it.
One of the great things about the Daily News blog redesign is that Click is now carrying ads. Thanks to Josh Kleinbaum, Ryan Garfat and the outgoing-to-MySpace Greg Sidor for all their work on this project.
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