Foresight, hindsight, Debian, BSD, Linux books … and the 5 a.m. problem

I’ve taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I’m so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I’m not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I’ll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD.

During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates. Debian Lenny is moving along very quickly. I’m ready to put an Etch install alongside it for comparison’s sake during the wait for Ubuntu 8.04 … which is two months at this writing.

The best text editor for the job: The other day, I needed to do some work at home, and I wasn’t having a great time with the Gedit text editor in Lenny. I somehow thought that Gedit had a way to change the case of words, but the Lenny version (Gedit 2.20.4) didn’t seem to have it. Was I imagining it, or did the Gedit in Ubuntu 7.10 have this feature? (See below for the answer.)

Anyhow, I need a better editor … so I went into Synaptic and installed three: Geany, Bluefish and Scite. I’m going to try them all out. So far I can’t seem to change the case of letters automatically in Bluefish, but there are so many features that can help with Web development that it’s probably worth using. But for the level of work I’m doing, I’m relying on Geany the most at the moment. I haven’t used Scite much, but I do plan to give it a try soon.

But … GEdit does have the ability to change the case of words/letters. Under Edit — Preferences — Plugins, there’s a Change Case plugin. I enabled it, and now I can change case via the menu with Edit — Change Case. I prefer to use the keyboard to do this … so I’ll probably keep the other editors in contention.

Foresight Linux: The Foresight Linux booth at SCALE 6X was fairly busy. I could barely get near it during the show, and since I didn’t really put 2 and 2 together and remember that Foresight is dedicated to presenting the latest in the GNOME desktop environment, I didn’t linger. But I do want to give Foresight a try. It has separate install and live images, so I downloaded the live CD image and am m going to see what it’s like.

I’ll be your server: I’ve never set up a server, and all this work with OpenBSD makes me want to roll one myself. I’m going to try to do one on the local network with NFS, Samba, FTP and Apache. I’ll probably try in OpenBSD and Debian as well as Damn Small Linux.

Two excellent Linux books: Since I’m not made of money, I got both of these from the library. The “Linux Administration Handbook, “ by by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein and an army of more recent contributiors, is a hefty tome that’s long on advice, Unix/Linux history and what people like to call “best practices.”

While much of the book is flying right over my head, and I don’t think you could really administer a system without a secondary reference that’s specific to the Linux distribution you’re using, this is a very valuable book that every serious Linux user should have. Especially when it comes to servers, there’s a lot of information here.

“Linux Administration Handbook” is heavy on the philosophy of how to set up and maintain a system, and amid a sea of distro-specific how-tos that expire with every six-month release, that’s a good thing to have. Still, what books like “Linux Administration Handbook” make evident is that at one level, most Linux systems are more alike than they are different, and the skills you develop using one distribution are very much transferable to the others. However, there are pointers everywhere in the book to specific instructions for Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and Suse.

And if you want to see how professional sysadmins (or at least the good ones) go about their work, this is the book to get. It can’t be the only book on your Linux shelf, but “Linux Administration Handbook” pairs very well with a doorstop-sized distro-specific how-to (like the “Unleashed” series of books, or Mark Sobell’s “Practical” guide series) to help you get a handle on making Linux work for you.

The other book I got from the library, “Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills,” by Roderick W. Smith, is a great book for anyone who wants to figure out how Linux works from the command line. The book doesn’t assume a vast knowledge of Linux or Unix. It offers many tips, instructions, and again, “best practices” on how to configure and manage a Linux system. This book is also not distro-specific; instead, it’s one of the best command-line-centered books I’ve seen when it comes to basic system administration.

I don’t know how good “Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills,” in helping you get actual “certification skills,” but it will definitely help with the basics of setting up and maintaining a server or desktop.

Smith’s style is clear and concise — a rarity in these kind of books, which often leave me more confused than not. I definitely recommend taking a look at this “Street Smarts” volume.

So I had two winners here. I would probably buy both of these books, but that said, I still turn to Carla Schroder’s “Linux Cookbook,” which I’d love to see updated, and Michael Stutz’s same-name-but-different “Linux Cookbook,” which could use an update even more.

If I was in a buying mood, I’d get a more recent O’Reilly book, “Linux System Administration,” by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic, and I really like Chris Negus’ new “Toolbox” series of distro-specific books. They’re fairly cheap and filled with good, timely tips, emphasis on the “timely” part. If only all of these great books were updated every couple of years instead of five years … or never.

Click frequency: The “publish every day at 5 a.m.” thing hasn’t been working out so well of late. I just haven’t had all that much time to do entries in advance, but I have had an entry every day … just not prewritten to publish at 5 a.m.

One man’s FreeBSD: I admire this guy, William Denton, for chronicling eight years of personal use of FreeBSD.

Debian … ah, Debian: In case it’s not evident, I still really enjoy using Debian. While I’m a great believer in the slimmed-down application mix in the default install of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) — with less indeed being more, on many levels I’ve had a whole lot more success with Debian.

I’ve done the default GNOME install of Debian, the Xfce and KDE installs, a “standard” install to which I’ve added X, and a few “standard” installs that were console-only. The flexibility of Debian is legendary, as is its stability and usability.

Some of my hardware has been supported better by Ubuntu at times, but I keep coming back to Debian. I’d love for Debian Lenny to support the Alps touchpad as well as Ubuntu Gutsy does. I’m hoping it’ll happen before Lenny is frozen, and I will be trying Ubuntu Hardy when it comes out, but I’d love for Linux in general to get everything right for my Gateway laptop.

But since fan management has gotten worse, not better, over the past six months in the Linux kernels I’ve used, I’m only cautiously optimistic.

Is Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo to keep Amazon from getting it first?

You think? That’s one of the stories out there right now. Makes sense to me: Amazon could definitely use Yahoo as both partner and source of revenue. Amazon could also conceivably tap Yahoo’s pool of developers to help bolster the Amazon cloud computing initiative.

And tamping down any mojo that Microsoft might gain in the SAAS (software as a service) and overall cloud computing sector only helps Amazon’s own foray into what many people think is the future of computing (though others think it’s much ado about little).

Clearly it’s good business for Microsoft to buy Yahoo and entrench itself as a firm No. 2 in search advertising. And … while I’m touting the alleged skills of Yahoo’s developers, Yahoo itself is way behind Google when it comes to Web-based applications. Yahoo has nothing like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, nor does it seem to have a Google-like plan to leverage Docs, Gmail and network storage as a fee-based service for the enterprise.

I still think Yahoo Mail has an edge over Gmail, excepting the fact that Gmail can run a totally secure session (which, nevertheless can be hacked into through unencrypted cookies) and Yahoo Mail cannot, but to me Yahoo Mail keeps that edge with usability and functionality … but … Gmail offers free POP mail, Yahoo charges for it, and Gmail is also rolling out IMAP, with no similar plan for Yahoo that I know about.

On the other hand, the latest rendition of Yahoo Mail, if run on fast-enough hardware, does an admirable job of mimicking a stand-alone e-mail client. It’s the kind of app that makes me think Yahoo can develop a credible alternative to Google Docs if they wanted to do so.

Anyhow, back to business. One of the perils of being a publicly traded company without huge mounds of cash on hand is that somebody like Microsoft can swoop in and buy you when your stock is tanking.

Yahoo is a valuable brand with good core technologies. Given the time, they can manage their way out of this mess. But in today’s world, time is scarce.

There are two kinds of tech companies out there: those who would love to be bought by Microsoft, and those who loathe it. OK, there’s a third kind: those likely to be threatened with legal action by Microsoft, but I’m getting off-track here.

Remember this, Yahooligans: The Web isn’t set in stone. If Yahoo is assimilated, you can always cash out and start something newer and better.

As for Microsoft, the company has never been shy about acquiring the technology and market share it needs in order to survive and grow. They’ve got the money, so this acquisition is a no-brainer for them. The clash-of-culture thing could be a problem, but for most people, if the checks keep coming (and they don’t make people move to Seattle) and they see some kind of mission in their work, many will keep going. If it doesn’t go so well, Microsoft parts with cash to crush the No. 2 player in search advertising and effectively assumes that mantle itself.

But letting anybody else — especially someone with the scale and ambition of Amazon — get Yahoo, that would only hurt Microsoft’s search-ad, networked-application and plain-craven-moneymaking mojo. What’s a big load of cash good for when you can’t use it to crush your rivals?

Unless Yahoo can somehow find someone, somewhere with a bigger load of ready money or pricey stock, it looks like Redmond will win this round.

And whether the merger succeeds or fails, if it happens at all, it’s huge-upside time for the folks in Redmond.

I’m also pissed at Amazon for requiring RealPlayer

I hadn’t listened to the excerpts of a CD on Amazon in a long time, but I had the occasion to last Friday, and I was unhappy to find out that Amazon switched away from its self-contained music-sampling system (maybe it was Windows Media, but I didn’t have to do anything to make it work, so I have no idea, really) to something else entirely. Something else that required the download of RealPlayer.

Now I haven’t actually WANTED to have anything to do with RealPlayer since, probably, 2001, and I really don’t need another proprietary program f’ing up my system and constantly trying to sell me crap that I have no intention whatsoever of buying. I couldn’t believe RealPlayer and RealAudio were even still around.

The installer was long and complicated, and once it asked me for my name, e-mail address, etc., I bailed out of it. All I need is more spam and another f’ing conglomerate getting its mitts on my personal information.

Luckily that was enough to get the minute-30 song excerpts flowing from Amazon, but sheesh, I hope somebody made a lot of money in this transaction that kind-of, sort-of screws up Amazon’s ability to not piss me off.

Did you miss these Click entries?

Here are some recent Click entries that don’t have a lot to do with me installing Linux-based system software:

I have two items (here and here) I did last night on the new Kindle electronic reading device being pushed by Amazon. On the cover of Newsweek this week, the $399 Kindle is being touted as “the next iPod,” or “the iPod for books, magazines and newspapers” (yes, the New York Times is available by subscription) It could be huge, but it might not be ready — or priced — for prime time. I try to cut through the hype.

And I have my choice as the BEST free photo-editing software for Windows (I’ve been using it for LA.com images, and it’s better than even Photoshop for that purpose).

Look at this pointer to a YouTube video in which Google co-founder and gazillionaire Sergey Brin discusses Google’s new Android cell-phone operating system (which should knock the iPhone on its ass by the middle of next year):

If you don’t know what the latest thing in servers is, see my roundup of recent news on “cloud computing,” in which the vast server farms of Amazon and soon IBM are/will be converted into virtual computing environments, with virtual servers being rented out “from the cloud” to businesses that want what looks and acts like a dedicated server — running all the applications a server can run — but is not in the company’s back room and instead is built and maintained by these huge companies. Yes, they rent them by the hour:

And there’s also my coverage of Wal-Mart’s new $199 desktop computer that DOESN’T use Windows (here and here).