Linux with no X: INX is a distro meant for console-only desktop use

I have to admit, I’m very intrigued by INX, a Ubuntu-based Linux live CD designed for desktop use without the X Window system. I first read about it at Linux Haxor, and after seeing the distro’s screenshots and information page, and given my own wrangling with life at the command line, I’m ready to try it right now.

Right now, INX is a live-CD only distro and isn’t meant to be installed, but what it might be able to do is give you some good ideas on how to flesh out your current Linux or BSD system to make life in the console that much better. That’s the theory in my mind, anyway.

If you want to download the ISO (or get it via Torrent), it’s 188 megabytes.

There are other systems that are, in one way or another, “meant” for console use, but none that I know of that are aimed in any way at the desktop user, with enough apps on board to keep you happy.

Here’s what looks like a list of the packages in INX.

The biggest impediment to most users when it comes to being productive on the command line is the fact that almost all distributions focus on the X environment and not at all on the console. Any distro that puts the console experience first is something well worth looking into for both its own sake and for the greater cause of making the user more productive on the command line in any Linux/Unix system.

INX is something I will definitely be looking at closely.

Update: The first machine I tried to run INX on was the $15 Laptop, the Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz Pentium II MMX and 144 MB RAM. It would start to boot, but at some point during the boot sequence, it got stuck in a loop and wouldn’t get all the way to a prompt.

I’m not surprised because this underpowered laptop has trouble with Xubuntu, the Xfce version of Ubuntu. I thought that a console-only version might do better, but in this case it didn’t. It could have something to do with the kernel being so relatively new and no longer supporting the hardware.

I have yet to try INX on my Dell desktops or the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), which is quite Ubuntu-friendly.

Can you (easily) update a BSD system between releases? Or am I barking up the wrong (ports) tree?

Note: I originally wrote this post on 2/15/08. Today is 4/24/08. Since that time, I’ve looked into updating in the BSDs a bit further. In FreeBSD, it’s certainly possible to update both ports and packages.

In OpenBSD, the Errata for a give release shows you what needs to be fixed in the base system. The updates are easily available, but they do need to be compiled from source. What the OpenBSD team really wants you to do, it seems, is run the -current release, on which all ports can be updated from source. Sounds like a lot of compiling. Still, I might try it at some point.

Anyway, here is the “original” 2/15/08 entry:

While it’s pretty easy to install software from precompiled packages or from ports in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, I’ve hit a bit of a wall when it comes to keeping any of these systems up to date with periodic security and bug patches.

I don’t know if such updates are either not as necessary in the BSDs, even though my Linux boxes have a dozen or so of them every week, or that it’s just to hard to do for the average BSD user.

I see plenty of Web help on how to upgrade from one version of a BSD to another, but I don’t see anything that covers searching for periodically updated packages and updating an installation on, lets say, a weekly basis as security and bug problems arise and are presumably updated in the repositories of packages and ports.

O, BSD users, correct me if I’m wrong — and I do hope that I am wrong. But with apt/Aptitude/Synaptic in Debian-based Linux distributions, rpm/Yum in Red Hat- and Suse-style systems, and upgradepkg (and slapt-get/Gslapt) in Slackware (with security announcements going to the mailing list and the http://www.slackware.com/security page) … need I go on?

The point is that almost all Linux installations are easily upgraded with precompiled binary packages. Gentoo … well, I won’t go there because I know it has its own BSD-like ports system, but I’ve never used it and don’t know how it works.

Again, the point is that all of these Linux distributions have me conditioned to expect — and to install — updates on a regular basis.

But what do I do with BSD? In OpenBSD, for instance, I’ve never even downloaded the ports tree. Everything I’ve installed has been a precompiled binary package for the i386 architecture. It’s very slick, works perfectly … but am I exposing myself to undue risk by running Firefox 2.0.0.6 instead of the newer 2.0.0.12? Is all that extra OpenBSD security for nought if I’m running applications rife with security holes?

I’m being completely serious. Is there something I’m missing here? Since OpenBSD, at least, updates the whole system every six months, am I OK to keep the same packages running until the next release? What does this say about BSD vs. Linux when it comes to security and bugs?

But wait. I did run DesktopBSD for awhile, and I remember that system having a GUI package manager that not only fetched new packages but upgraded those already installed.

So that’s what Matt Olander was talking about when he said that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD were working together to share technology when it came to package management.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t need to do my updates in a GUI app. I’m perfectly OK with using the console. Just being able to do that updating is enough. That is, unless someone out there can convince me that Linux has conditioned me to think I need something that I really don’t.

Those on all sides of this issue, please enlighten me — and quickly.

Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7, OpenBSD and silencing CPU fans

Quick notes because I’ve got time for no more:

Debian Lenny: I hadn’t updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you’ve been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

Preload in Debian: After reading about preload in Linux Journal, I finally installed it. Preload is supposed to monitor what apps you use most and automatically load them into memory, adjusting if your application habits change. Since I tend to run the same apps a lot, and since I have plenty of memory, I’m anxious to see how well preload works.

FreeBSD and the need for speed: FreeBSD 7 is now beginning its life as a stable OS. It’s supposed to be up 15 percent faster than the fastest Linux kernels, up to 350 percent faster than FreeBSD 6x under normal loads, and up to 1,500 percent faster under heavy loads. I’m anxious to see how the hardware recognition performs. So far, I’ve had quite a bit of luck with DesktopBSD 1.6, which is based on FreeBSD 6, and I can only hope for better things with FreeBSD 7, which I plan to test soon.

OpenBSD update: I’ve been having a lot of fun — and learning quite a bit — with OpenBSD. I have the box on the local network, and I’ve been playing around with the ftp server, Apache Web server and with SSH. First I installed the PuTTY ssh client on my Windows XP box so I could connect from the XP box to the OpenBSD box. I could run any console program I wanted, and while it may not be a huge deal to the more experienced of you out there, it’s a huge deal for me.

I wanted to run X over SSH, so I made the appropriate changes in OpenBSD to allow X11 forwarding over SSH. Ahd with the help of my friends over at LXer, I found out about Xming, an X client for Windows.

It took me awhile to figure out that I had to enable X in PuTTY to make it work. Xming runs in the background on the Windows box, and when I open an X program from the PuTTY console:

$ rox &

… A window opens on my XP desktop with the OpenBSD X program in it (which, in the case of the line above, is the Rox-filer). Pretty slick. (The & after the app name makes the process run in the background. I had one snag: I couldn’t run the Dillo browser over SSH until I installed all the X fonts for Xming. There’s a way to just use Xming to enable the SSH session, but that hasn’t worked for me thus far. But since the PuTTY/Xming combination is working, that’s what I’m going with.

I’d like to run a full X session with a full window manager running in a window on my XP box, but besides being slower than running single apps, I get the feeling that such a thing isn’t exactly looked upon lovingly by the hard-core Unix geeks out there.

But being able to run any OpenBSD (or Linux) app on a network-connected box from a Windows-only PC is so totally cool that I should be sated in my dose of geekdom for the next week at least.

The $0 Laptop and its CPU fan discontents: I’ve been working with controlling my Gateway Solo 1450’s CPU fan for months now. In Linux, I’ve had it controlled pretty well with a cron job, and in the case of Puppy a few added kernel modules.

But since then, I’ve come to realize that the cron job, which checked the CPU temperature every five minutes and turned the fan on or off depending on that temperature, is unnecessary.

All you need to do is turn the fan off at boot, and then ACPI will manage it just fine. This revelation comes after considerable work in the console, checking the temperature, running commands, running scripts and generally seeing what happens during the course of a computing session.

So I turned off my cron jobs, and now all I need to do is add the following line to /etc/rc.local:

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

That turns the fan off. I initially thought that only this line — echo 0 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state — would turn the CPU fan back on, but that is most definitely not the case. Once the fan is turned off with the “echo 3” command (which you can run from the console, just as you can the “echo 0” line), when the CPU gets warm, the fan turns on and then turns off when the CPU cools down.

So that one line added to /etc/rc.local is enough to get ACPI management of the fan working, at least in the Gateway Solo 1450.

Now there’s the matter of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD and this same CPU fan. So far nothing has worked, but I will keep trying.

Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7, OpenBSD and silencing CPU fans

Quick notes because I’ve got time for no more:

Debian Lenny: I hadn’t updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you’ve been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

Preload in Debian: After reading about preload in Linux Journal, I finally installed it. Preload is supposed to monitor what apps you use most and automatically load them into memory, adjusting if your application habits change. Since I tend to run the same apps a lot, and since I have plenty of memory, I’m anxious to see how well preload works.

FreeBSD and the need for speed: FreeBSD 7 is now beginning its life as a stable OS. It’s supposed to be up 15 percent faster than the fastest Linux kernels, up to 350 percent faster than FreeBSD 6x under normal loads, and up to 1,500 percent faster under heavy loads. I’m anxious to see how the hardware recognition performs. So far, I’ve had quite a bit of luck with DesktopBSD 1.6, which is based on FreeBSD 6, and I can only hope for better things with FreeBSD 7, which I plan to test soon.

OpenBSD update: I’ve been having a lot of fun — and learning quite a bit — with OpenBSD. I have the box on the local network, and I’ve been playing around with the ftp server, Apache Web server and with SSH. First I installed the PuTTY ssh client on my Windows XP box so I could connect from the XP box to the OpenBSD box. I could run any console program I wanted, and while it may not be a huge deal to the more experienced of you out there, it’s a huge deal for me.

I wanted to run X over SSH, so I made the appropriate changes in OpenBSD to allow X11 forwarding over SSH. Ahd with the help of my friends over at LXer, I found out about Xming, an X client for Windows.

It took me awhile to figure out that I had to enable X in PuTTY to make it work. Xming runs in the background on the Windows box, and when I open an X program from the PuTTY console:

$ rox &

… A window opens on my XP desktop with the OpenBSD X program in it (which, in the case of the line above, is the Rox-filer). Pretty slick. (The & after the app name makes the process run in the background. I had one snag: I couldn’t run the Dillo browser over SSH until I installed all the X fonts for Xming. There’s a way to just use Xming to enable the SSH session, but that hasn’t worked for me thus far. But since the PuTTY/Xming combination is working, that’s what I’m going with.

I’d like to run a full X session with a full window manager running in a window on my XP box, but besides being slower than running single apps, I get the feeling that such a thing isn’t exactly looked upon lovingly by the hard-core Unix geeks out there.

But being able to run any OpenBSD (or Linux) app on a network-connected box from a Windows-only PC is so totally cool that I should be sated in my dose of geekdom for the next week at least.

The $0 Laptop and its CPU fan discontents: I’ve been working with controlling my Gateway Solo 1450’s CPU fan for months now. In Linux, I’ve had it controlled pretty well with a cron job, and in the case of Puppy a few added kernel modules.

But since then, I’ve come to realize that the cron job, which checked the CPU temperature every five minutes and turned the fan on or off depending on that temperature, is unnecessary.

All you need to do is turn the fan off at boot, and then ACPI will manage it just fine. This revelation comes after considerable work in the console, checking the temperature, running commands, running scripts and generally seeing what happens during the course of a computing session.

So I turned off my cron jobs, and now all I need to do is add the following line to /etc/rc.local:

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

That turns the fan off. I initially thought that only this line — echo 0 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state — would turn the CPU fan back on, but that is most definitely not the case. Once the fan is turned off with the “echo 3” command (which you can run from the console, just as you can the “echo 0” line), when the CPU gets warm, the fan turns on and then turns off when the CPU cools down.

So that one line added to /etc/rc.local is enough to get ACPI management of the fan working, at least in the Gateway Solo 1450.

Now there’s the matter of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD and this same CPU fan. So far nothing has worked, but I will keep trying.

More reasons gOS is nowhere near ready for use by just about anybody

Since Puppy Linux uses local time, I had reset my test box’s clock for the now-aborted Thin Puppy Torture Test II (we’ve had even more power outages lately, and I’m glad to stop where I did but keep writing about Puppy just the same). But now that I’m back in gOS, I needed to reset the clock to UTC. I’m perfectly capable of opening a terminal and using the command line to set the clock, but I can’t believe that the casual, new-to-Linux user with gOS has no other way to set the time. No GUI, big problem.

It’s just plain wrong. Ubuntu has a GUI time-setting utility. gOS should have one, too.

Already there’s no way to set a static IP in gOS except by opening a terminal and either using the command line or editing the relevant configuration files. And I’ve already complained extensively about gOS’ lack of a GUI text editor; it wouldn’t have killed them to throw Gedit or Mousepad on the thing. Instead, you have to run nano or Vim from a terminal. I can use both of these editors, although I’m more rusty in vi/Vim than many. But I still prefer to use a GUI editor when working in X — it’s nice to be able to easily copy and paste in X, and I shudder to think of someone who’s never seen a terminal program or text editor before in their entire lives having to use xterm and nano, or even worse, vi.

Again, it’s sloppy, and it’s wrong.

Assuming that everybody has a dynamic IP is one thing, but assuming that the clock will set itself? Unbelievable.

I just did an update on gOS — 47 packages, and I had hoped that some of these issues would be solved. But not one was. And I’ve already had X crash once today, and GRUB isn’t working so well, either. That could be due to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS not getting the configuration right for gOS (those long Ubuntu disk IDs — not quite sure what they are or why they’re used — screw it up often). At one point in the boot, I get to a console and hit ctrl-alt-del, at which point the gOS boot continues, finally leading me to the GUI where I can log on.

The average gOS user is NOT dual-booting, so it’s not a huge deal, but it’s just another example of general messiness (and more of a warning against dual-booting on any critical systems).

But overall, the more I get to know gOS, the less I like it.

Anyhow, if you came here via a search because you’re frustrated with gOS, here’s how to set the time (this also works in Ubuntu, which can do this with an easy-to-use utility, but if you’re a glutton for punishment, by all means do it this way):

Left-click on the desktop and navigate to Applications — System Tools — UXterm

UXterm — gOS’ terminal program — will load when you click on it.

Once you get a prompt ending in $, you must click on the window to make it active (another bug in gOS that’s just plain annoying).

The Linux format for setting time and date at the command line is somewhat arcane, but not overly so. This is how to set the time and date for 10:15 a.m. Dec. 27, 2007. Times must be in 24-hour mode; i.e. 1:15 p.m. would be 13:15. You begin using the date command. The 12-digit format for the date command is month (01 to 12) date (01 to 31) hour (00 to 23) minute (00 to 59) and year (generally 2007), Type the following after the $ prompt (and enter your password when asked for it). Don’t forget the double-quote marks (not two single quotes, but the shift-quote key):

$ sudo date “122710152007”

Enter your password when needed (as in all sudo commands)

Then you need to set the hardware clock (make sure the double-dashes are spaced properly, which means they need to be attached to the words they proceed):

$ sudo hwclock –systohc –utc

Enter your password again when asked.

To check the clock:

$ date

For the software clock

$ hwclock

For the hardware clock

Both should output the proper date and time:

Thu Dec 27 10:15:00 PST 2007 (or whatever time it happens to be)

Again, users of gOS SHOULD NOT be made to do this. But they have no choice. Personally, I’d slap Ubuntu or Xubuntu on my Everex box ASAP.

gOS sounds like a great idea … until you actually start using it. At that point you gain a new appreciation for all the work that has gone into such relatively trouble-free LInux distributions as Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware (yes, even Slackware), Red Hat/CentOS, Fedora, Suse, Puppy, Damn Small Linux, PCLinuxOS .. in fact, I could name just about every distribution I’ve tried over the past year (at least a couple dozen).

Again, if the CEO of Wal-Mart asked me how to clean up this mess, I’d tell him to move the Everex to Ubuntu immediately. The hardware can handle it, and it’s ready in a way that gOS most certainly is not.

Thin Puppy Torture Test II — Day 5

I did two things today: First, I set up printing with CUPS. I never had trouble with Puppy’s pre-CUPS printer-configuration program, but since I’ve learned enough of CUPS to find my sometimes-hard-to-find network printer (one of about 20 in the vicinity), I’m generally a happy CUPS camper.

There was one problem, however. CUPS asked me for a password. I get the same query when adding this same network printer in Ubuntu, but I enter my login and password and move forward. But Puppy runs in the root account. So what’s root’s password? I couldn’t figure it out. It wasn’t nothing, not “root,” not “toor.” The Puppy forums told me to change root’s password:

# passwd root

And then I typed in my usual password. I went back to CUPS started adding the printer, used the new root password … and it worked.

Remember though, for most normal printers, they’ll already be preconfigured in CUPS and you won’t have to do any of this.

Then I decided to give Gnumeric a try. I can barely use a spreadsheet at all. I just don’t have the occasion to do so, although knowing how to create one would probably be of some use.

The one thing I do with spreadsheets is get them from Web sites. Nielsen Media Research distributes TV ratings via Excel spreadsheets on their Web site (you need to be a registered user, which I am). I could never print one of these things out in OpenOffice — I always get one line per page, meaning the job would be about 200 pages if I didn’t kill it before it ran through half a ream of paper.

Well, I went to the page, clicked on the .xls document, and it opened just right in Gnumeric.

And then I went to print it. The first printout cut off one side of the spreadsheeet just a bit. But the whole damn thing printed out on four landscape pages (8 1/2 x 11 size). So I went into the Gnumeric printer settings, told the program to center the spreadsheet and did a print preview. Then I printed it for real. Looks great.

Not a huge deal, but I got printing set up and was able to read and print an Excel spreadsheet, and I’m happy enough.

Today’s Puppy “free memory”: 113 MB

I’m having trouble booting Slackware 12 from GRUB

I did a successful install of Slackware 12 on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and my two problems are configuring X (I can’t get enough colors … I think I’m stuck at 16 colors — aka 4-bit color) and getting GRUB to boot it.

I know that Slack will boot because I did the original install with LILO (as usual LILO didn’t pick up any of my other Linuxes) and ran Slackware for a day. Man is it nice, the X problems notwithstanding. It’s the fastest KDE distro I’ve ever tried and makes KDE a viable alternative on my desktop. And I love a distro that automatically includes Xfce and Fluxbox as alternate window managers … AND I like booting into a console and typing startx to go into the GUI (along with Slackware’s easy-as-pie xwmconfig command-line utility to switch window managers).

But I can’t get GRUB to boot Slack, no matter how hard I try (OK … I can only try so hard because I don’t have that many skills).

I don’t have the laptop with me at the moment, but I found this page, which has some tips for Slackware booting in GRUB. The best is the “chainloader” method, putting Slack’s LILO on its own partition and then chainloading to it to boot Slackware. I have a feeling that is going to work for me.

The author of the Just Linux entry goes by the name of Saikee and calls him (or her) self “A chainloader +1 believer.”

I’m happy enough to discover Just Linux — looks like a good place to find the info you need to make Linux work for you.

I haven’t been keeping up with the Slackware security patches on the one Slack install I do have. That’s because a) I’m lazy and b) I’m using that box for the Thin Puppy Torture Test II and don’t have a hard drive connected (the test is being conducted with a CD-ROM drive for booting and an USB flash drive for storage). One of Slackware’s greatest strengths (and weaknesses, depending on how you look at it) is that security patches must be downloaded and applied individually with the upgradepkg utility. I’m sure this can be automated with Kpackage or gslapt, but that’s beyond my current capability (and my short foray with Kpackage in Debian left me less than a believer; I’ll stick to Synaptic for the time being).

I still have X to deal with (I tried a bunch of xorg.conf versions and tweaks, none of them doing exactly what I want/need) but booting from GRUB into Slackware is hopefully just a little bit closer to reality.

Note: X in Slackware 12 set up really well on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I only needed to tweak the number of colors to make it work). The problem is that I only have a 3 GB hard drive on that laptop, and the full Slackware 12 install is 4 GB+. So I opted not to install anything even remotely connected to KDE and ended up with no office suite and very little free disk space anyway. I wiped the drive and returned to Debian with Xfce, which gives me OpenOffice (which runs surprisingly well on a 233 MHz CPU) and almost twice the free disk space. And it’s just so much easier to run apt or Aptitude for updates and adding software. And I didn’t mention that learning to use Aptitude (Debian’s catch-all command-line package manager) is something I’ve been meaning to do.

But Debian didn’t find my sound card on the $15 Laptop. Gotta figure that one out. I’m using DSL 4.0 and Puppy 3.01 from live CDs as alternate distros for the Compaq, so I’ll be evaluating what works better for the hardware and the things I want the computer to do.

Final Slackware-and-X note: I was able to boot Wolvix Hunter from GRUB, and it has perfect screen resolution, too, so maybe I’ll boot it again and peek in on the xorg.conf to get Slackware 12 looking as it should.

Command Line Warriors

I saw a plug for the Command Line Warriors blog in a British Linux magazine.

An enjoyable read, to be sure, with lots of GUI content, Mac OS X stuff, general Britannia and even shell account info.

Especially notable are the iPod and Linux series, Installing Gentoo series and Intro to the OS X command line.

My quick hint for OS X users:

Go to Applications, then to the System Utilities folder, then run Terminal. That’s the OS X command line (your box is running BSD Unix, and it’s there in all its glory).

at the prompt type this:

top

You will see most of the running processes on your machine and the percentage of memory and CPU power they are using.

To turn off top, on the PC it’s ctrl-C. Maybe it’s the same in OS X. If not, try Apple-C, or just close the Terminal window.

Inconvenient truths: PC vs. Mac, Windows vs. Linux, us vs. them, et al.

I don’t like to generalize, so I’ll get specific on the following inconvenient truths:

If you’ve got a 10-year-old PC and a 10-year-old Mac, you’ll get way further with the PC if you want a decade-old computer that’s productive today.

This is mostly due to the fact that the Classic Mac OS was abandoned by Apple, and there are almost no apps that have been updated so as to be useful in today’s world of computing. In my experience, browsers and e-mail clients that run under the Classic Mac OS just don’t work very well with today’s Web pages and mail servers. On the other hand, most 10-year-old PCs will run Windows 2000 (or 98), and many will even run XP. And you can also run Firefox, IE, Abiword, Open Office, the GIMP, IrfanView, free antivirus software, EditPad Lite, even the dreaded Outlook Express for e-mail … and the list goes on.

Windows is not slow. Some Linux distros are. On new hardware, you might not notice. On old hardware, you will.

I’m talking mostly about Windows 2000 here, and to a lesser extent Windows XP. I’ve run Win 2K on many, many platforms, and I’m continually surprised on how well it runs, even with low RAM. It may not be secure at all, may need lots of add-ons just to be usable and may be orphaned by Microsoft in a few years, but for now it’s blazingly fast. I wish I had an XP disc so I could run the same tests with it.

While the Linux command line smokes anything Windows has to offer in terms of sheer speed, offers hundreds of up-to-date apps and can be a boon to productivity (as I learned during my Month at the Command Line), most of the Linux GUIs I’ve tried are a bit of a strain on the graphics capability of a PC, particularly of an older one with less than 512 MB of RAM.

Puppy Linux works great on most low-spec PCs, but in my experience, things like Flash and other multimedia files play with less trouble in Windows 2000.

Still, Puppy is much better than Xubuntu, which even though boasting a “fast” XFCE desktop, starts to chug considerably when Web pages have Flash on them. For an even faster experience than Puppy, there’s Damn Small Linux.

But no matter the window manager, the apps themselves have much to do with performance. I suspect that much of my video problems stem from the Flash player in Windows being a better-written app than the one in Linux. All the more reason for Flash to be opened up to the community — there’s got to be a better player out there to be written. (Maybe the Democracy Player? So far, Gxine has been a disappointment.) If you happen to have an iPod, you’re stuck. Apple doesn’t appear to be interested in porting iTunes to Linux. I’m not happy about it, and you shouldn’t be, either.

Still, there’s much about Linux that Windows will never have, including:

a) a free, open-source base,
b) NOT being owned by Microsoft,
c) an extremely customizable desktop experience (from the command line, through basic X and small window managers, to the complex desktop environments of GNOME and KDE),
d) and did I forget to say that Linux is free?

Many, many people use pirated software — I have, too — and I don’t like the feeling I get from doing it. Even if the apps are too expensive to begin with, and buying them would be out of the question, I don’t think stealing the use of them is justified — even if they’re older versions that have been abandoned. (OK, I feel less bad about that, but I still feel way better running Linux and open-source apps whose developers want us to use them … for free. And when it comes to much commercial software, asking paying customers to fork over hundreds of dollars on a yearly basis to keep their apps current — is often abusive).

While I’ve seen many benefits from using Linux instead of Windows, I really don’t think that sheer speed is one of them. Anybody who says that Linux is “faster” than Windows (NOT Vista) or Mac OS X, for that matter, at common desktop tasks has not had the same experiences I’ve had. As always, your mileage may vary, but I’ve been most disappointed in the XFCE-based Xubuntu, which doesn’t seem any faster than regular Ubuntu with GNOME (or fasther than any number of KDE distros, of which NimbleX is my current favorite).

While Ubuntu and a standard desktop Debian both use GNOME, Debian runs faster.

And I’m not sure why. If you only read Web news about Ubuntu and Debian, you’d think that the people behind the extremely popular Ubuntu took an unformed, hard-to-use Debian and performed some kind of magic, bringing some kind of mystical computing power to the people. But Debian is surprisingly well-formed on the desktop, the install procedure is surprisingly like the alternate install of Ubuntu, and once you’re up and running, there’s not all that much different (except that Debian 4.0 Etch comes standard with more applications and, as I’ve said, runs just that much faster). And I haven’t found running or maintaining Debian to be something only an “expert” can be — especially since I’m far from being one myself.

It’s marketing. Brilliant marketing. Ubuntu’s best feature is its huge and helpful community at Ubuntuforums.org. There’s a big Debian community out there too, but the Ubuntu people are just so dominant, even Debian users are wise to turn there for technical help since, at their core, the two distros are so similar (given that Ubuntu is derived from Debian, for those who don’t know).

And while I’m on the subject, the Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux users are also extremely helpful — they’ve come to this blog often with tips and suggestions, and I appreciate it greatly.

The only “modern” PC I have access to is my Dell 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB RAM, and I’m not at liberty to install anything huge (read: a Linux distro) to the hard drive.

I suspect that on a newish PC, the big Linux distributions run like so much buttah and that any speed advantages that an old version of Windows offers is far outshined by the added security, equality and fraternity of free Linux.

It’s always better to have new, maxed-out hardware — a luxury I’ve never had (besides that, I’m too cheap). And it’s mandatory to try before you buy. With Linux, it’s easy. Once you have a broadband Internet connection and a CD (or preferably DVD) burner and have learned how to turn an ISO into a bootable disc, you have the keys to quite a kingdom. (Now’s the time to rant about how Windows DOES NOT include a utility that can burn a bootable CD. I use and recommend ISO Recorder. Mac OS X also does a good job of burning ISOs with its Disk Utility).

If I were buying a new PC today, would I want it preloaded with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/RHEL SUSE/SLED, Mepis or PCLinuxOS?

None of the above. I’d prefer a blank hard drive. Any computer user has much to gain by a) experimenting with many distributions, and going through the installation process is part of that experience. Just knowing that you can reinstall your OS if necessary is a powerful and necessary thing for any savvy computer user (and even for some less savvy). Let me install my own OS, thank you.

Are Macs too expensive?

Yes.

What makes you blog day after day after day?

I began blogging on technology with This Old Mac and This Old PC two years ago this month, and I’ve been posting at Click since September 2006 (that’s nine months, by my count), and it’s been an enjoyable ride thus far. I haven’t lost my enthusiasm for learning about all this stuff, and that’s what keeps me going. It’s no secret that I’ve gotten the best response since I began writing about Linux (with many, many thanks to Lxer, which lets me pimp this blog as much as I can. Lxer is, hands down, the best place for news on Linux and free, open-source software).

And finally …

Linux — and the choice to use (or not to use) Linux — is political. There’s no denying it or getting around it

It’s the same if you choose to run Windows or Mac OS. Cost, convenience, knowledge, passion, maybe even ignorance all factor in, but making the choice to run one, some, all or none of the many computer operating systems out there says something about you and about the OSes themselves (and the companies and communities that produce and support them).

Do the moral, technological and intensely personal factor in? You bet they do. And that’s what makes all this so damned interesting and important.

A month on the command line — Day 2: Blogging disappointment

While I did get my flash drive mounted without difficulty, I spent considerable time trying to post to this Movable Type-powered blog with Lynx and Elinks. Both let me do everything, except actually SAVING the entry. I’ve had similar trouble with the Dillo browser, and that’s a full-fledged X application, so there’s something squirrely about the Save button in Movabble type.

But for general browsing of Web sites, including this blog, the text-only browsers are more than adequate — and quite sophisticated in what they can do.

I did get a few entries through as tests, and I think it was Elinks that produced them. I hit something, somewhere that enabled the posts to save, but I couldn’t replicate my actions for the real blog post, which sits on the hard drive on my Debian box, awaiting the beginning of the week ahead.