Linus Torvalds, the guy who started the Linux project some 17 years ago (and whose autobiography I recommend), now has a blog. He talks about it in this interview.
Until now, the easiest place to find words of wisdom from Linus has been in the quotes between entries at Kernel Trap.
However much you understand about the mechanics of the Linux (or any other kind of) kernel — and I understand very little, Linus is a compelling figure by any stretch.
Both Ubuntu and the Debian distribution on which it’s based use the GNOME desktop. Many applications appear in both systems, but there are differences.
Debian is primarily installed with a network-install image of about 150 MB, and most of the 700 or so packages that make up what’s called the Desktop installation come over the Internet.
Ubuntu is primarily installed via a live CD, and all of its packages must fit on a 700 MB CD that the user either burns themself from an ISO image or gets pre-made from another source. There is an alternate install image available that works much like Debian’s text-based installer, but it still pulls all of its packages from the CD and not over the network. Pulling all packages from the CD means a network connection isn’t needed for the install, but many packages will need to be updated once a connection is established. In Debian, since the majority of packages are pulled from networked repositories, there are fewer that mus be upgraded immediately following the installation.
And the Ubuntu philosophy doesn’t call for packing as many things into the installation by default. The menus are more spare, and there is no equivalent to the “Debian Menu,” through which just about every application on the system can be started.
So whether you call it clean and logical or sparse and lacking, the Ubuntu GNOME desktop starts out quite a bit more lean than the equivalent in Debian.
I use both systems on many different boxes, including i386 and Mac Power PC, and I see good reasons to use both.
At this moment in time, I’m seeing the wisdom in the leaner Ubuntu menus, which can be fleshed out with the exact apps the user needs.
But both systems have a whole lot of applications in their repositories, so it’s equally possible to make a Ubuntu system act and look just like a standard Debian system, just as it’s possible to make Debian look like Ubuntu — in terms of application choice and placement in the menus, anyway.
I’ve advocated in the past for a Debian installer and/or live CD that installed the exact same applications as Ubuntu, but in the Debian environment. It’d would be a great way to get Ubuntu people to try Debian, and I think the relatively stripped-down menus in such a version of Debian would be attractive to a great many users.
Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They’re relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you).
But do they mean much? Not really, I think.
Most of the time it’s the usual:
And the list goes on. I feel like writing a shell script that can pose questions and crank out automatic distro reviews.
What’s harder to write — much harder than the quickie distro review — is a long-term review of a distro after a month or more of heavy use.
For one thing, most of us don’t want to spend long periods of time running distros we don’t like or aren’t familiar with.
And for any given user, most of the 300+ active distros out there won’t do anything for our hardware and work patterns that we don’t already get from the distros we’re currently using.
That’s not to say that the many, many dozens of distros out there should just give up and stop trying to do something better and different (even though what they’re doing is usually based on an existing distro and often doesn’t add much, if any value to what they’re already copying).
I’m just saying that after after a year and half of writing this kind of thing, I’m tired of both writing and reading quickie distro reviews that don’t really tell the potential user of a given distribution all that much that they can use in making their decision.
I’ve already done tons of posts on Debian Lenny, and almost every problem has been fixed at some point in the project’s long road from Testing to Stable.
So should I do another distro review on the installation, care and feeding of Debian Lenny when it finally does receive its Stable status?
Do I need to reinstall Ubuntu every six months and write about how that goes? OpenBSD?
Never mind that the development of OpenBSD is purposefully more evolutionary than revolutionary, or that a rolling release might be better/worse than one that comes out every six months or at some other regular (or not so much) interval.
I don’t quite know how to end this tortuous post except to say that I reserve the right to change my mind. Maybe I’m purposefully shoving my own head in the sand by not embracing your favorite distro (usually Slackware or Mandriva) and sticking to what’s been working for me (Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, Puppy … and that’s about it these days).
Maybe it’s part of the evolution (or devolution) of me as a writer about technology, but right now I’m convinced that that there’s a better way to do all of this that doesn’t throw out free, open-source software in favor of what the average guy/gal is using (Windows/Mac) but also does more than preach to the same creaky choir, of which I myself am a warbling member.
Being more truthful, I won’t stop reading distro reviews, especially when they’re written by writers who know what they’re doing. But I plan to be a whole lot more careful about writing them. I’ve been thinking (and writing) for some time about why it’s more than time for me to stabilize my herd of machines and stop the endless process of cranking one distro after another onto their partitions.
The freedom to change distros like underwear, at more than one level, begins to detract from what a computer operating system is supposed to be for, which is getting stuff done. I guess I want things to be more about ends rather than means.
Not that anything approaching brain-surgery-level thinking was in any way involved here, but I figured out why and how it’s easy to get paragraphs to automatically indent when writing in the Geany text editor.
First of all, it’s not called automatic tabbing or paragraph inentation. The correct term for what I’m enjoying so much is auto-indentation and it can be turned on and off under the Document menu in Geany. The defaults for auto-indentation can also be set in the Edit menu under Preferences–Editor.
When writing for print, where I don’t need — and can’t stand — having two returns between paragraphs. After transferring the file from this laptop to my newspaper’s print publishing system, those double-returns demand that I delete one of them. That’s because in most non-Web publishing, indented first lines make paragraphs distinct from one another, not extra linefeeds.
So having the indents on the first line of every paragraph helps me seen where each paragraph begins.
I know that programmers use indents to help structure their code. But when something so right for coding in C also helps hacks like me, making traditional word processing applications less needed, everybody wins.
(This post was originally written on May 22, 2008; since that time, I’ve added the RAM, and it does indeed make a difference. It’s still not easy to live with 144 MB of RAM and 233 MHz of CPU, but it’s easier than having less than half of that M. What I can say is that 500 MHz of CPU and 256 MB of RAM is positively picnic-ish. Also, I finally did the OpenBSD 4.2-to-4.3 upgrade on the VIA box. It wasn’t easy, but I did get it done.)
If the question is “how low can you go” in terms of computer memory, it’s all about applications.
If you stayed in the Linux console and never ran X, just about anybody could be happy with 32 MB of RAM. It might be hard to actually run Linux or a BSD in 16 MB, but I’ve heard of Linux distributions that will do it, Damn Small Linux, Tom’s RtBt (is that the right spelling?) and DeLi Linux among them.
But as much as the hard-core users talk about how they stay at the command line all the time, it’s hard to get much done strictly in a console when you’re a regular person. Sure you can use Lynx for text-only Web browsing, you can set up Mutt (and Postfix/Sendmail/msmtp/esmtp, Procmail and whatever other helper apps are needed) with highly customized configuration files designed to handle and filter multiple mail accounts, use Vi or Emacs for text editing and all that.
But the bottom line for me is that I need a Web browser. A “real” Web browser, something that works with Movable Type and Google Docs, and that pretty much means Firefox or some Iceweaselish derivative.
I don’t tend to use OpenOffice very much (although it runs better in Debian with 64 MB that you’d think), I barely even use AbiWord these days. I’m not saying that I won’t need OpenOffice in the future, but at present I’m most comfortable using various X text editors, including Geany in most Linuxes and BSDs, Gedit when I’m in GNOME, and Google Docs half the time just for the easy portability of my copy.
And while Geany doesn’t load super quickly from a “traditionally” installed distribution (but is quite quick when loaded into memory as it is in Puppy Linux, once it’s loaded it runs very well indeed.
And the Dillo Web browser — which looks better in its OpenBSD incarnation than it does anywhere else — performs quite well in 64 MB of RAM. The only problem is that Dillo can’t do everything I need to do on the Web. At least the Dillo in Puppy and DSL has https support. That’s not turned on in OpenBSD, and the app needs to be recompiled to add it. I can manage to turn on cookies in OpenBSD, which helps me with some sites, but for anything remotely complicated, Firefox is essential.
And while Firefox will run in 64 MB of RAM, it does so very poorly. There just isn’t enough memory to keep the program from swapping to the drive incessantly whenever doing just about anything.
In this very 64 MB, I’ve run just about everything that will load on this Compaq laptop: Puppy, DSL, Debian (the Xfce install, plus a “standard” install with Fluxbox), Slackware (without KDE) and OpenBSD.
Truth be told, Almost all of these OSes run just about the same. Damn Small Linux has a bit of an edge, and if DSL 4.3 ran as well as 4.0, its inclusion of Firefox 2 would put it over the top. As it is, I’ve lost my desktop wallpaper, and I can’t figure out how to display the menu in Fluxbox (even though I prefer to run JWM).
Puppy definitely needs more memory, especially to run the Mozilla-derived Seamonkey Web suite.
Debian Etch was OK. While the Xfce install is odd in many ways, as I say, I was surprised to see OpenOffice run at all — and not too badly at that. Iceweasel was, again, an exercise in frustration. But Debian remains a distinct possibility for this machine.
It’s main OS for awhile has been OpenBSD, with a partition set aside for the Linux files generated by the Puppy and DSL live CDs.
OpenBSD runs pretty well, but as I said, Firefox remains an issue.
The question: Will things improve with the boost of RAM from 64 MB to the Compaq Armada 7770dmt’s maximum 144 MB? From my past experience, I know that Puppy can run in 128 MB if you have swap space, and DSL is certainly comfortable with 128 MB.
To answer the question, I could reduce the memory in my Via test box from 256 MB to 128 MB and see how OpenBSD (now version 4.3) runs in that configuration. But I’d have to pull the cover from my converted thin client and find a 128 MB SIMM. I’ve probably got one … somewhere.
Better to just wait for my Compaq memory to come in the mail (luckily it’s cheap).
I’ve know for awhile that 256 MB is a significant sweet spot for Linux, but I’d love for 144 MB to be just sweet enough to give this laptop a new lease on open-source life.
And while I managed to upgrade my VIA box from OpenBSD 4.2 to 4.3, it takes a lot more work than a simple apt-get, and I’m reluctant to do it
ITWire is one of those mildly cheeky tech news sites that I enjoy reading very much, despite its annoying habit of breaking longer items into as many as six different screens.
Lately its writers have been waging a good-humored battle on why you might want to use Windows Vista or Linux, giving numbered reasons for one position or the other.
Actually, numbered lists are somewhat pandemic in the blog world, and I usually take little note of them. But these from iTWire are worth taking a look at:
I’ve been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions.
I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online tutorials gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)
Since I installed OpenBSD on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt’s hard drive without fully setting up the Linux partitions (all I have is swap and an ext2 partition for my live CD files), OpenBSD didn’t know how to properly mount the ext2 partition.
Briefly, I needed to run fdisk in OpenBSD, transfer the Linux information to the OpenBSD disklabel, create a directory in which to mount the Linux filesystem, give the wheel group write access to that directory, then edit /etc/fstab to properly mount the ext2 filesystem at boot.
Once I was sure the Linux filesystem was properly mounting and was writable from OpenBSD, I booted Puppy Linux without mounting the partition and then ran e2fsck to clean up any errors (there were some).
Since then, the filesystem has been error-free, and I can easily exchange files between my OpenBSD and Linux installs on this laptop.
It’s nice to solve a problem for a change.
I’ve been trying to mount a Linux filesystem in OpenBSD 4.2 for awhile, and finally I figured out how to do it (and do it automatically at boot) without screwing up either my OpenBSD or Linux partitions.
I have a tutorial on this about 1/2 of the way done, but this was another situation where the excellent OpenBSD FAQ and man pages, as well as a couple of good general Linux/Unix online tutorials gave me all the help I needed. (I can never remember quite how to make chmod do what I want without looking it up.)
Since I installed OpenBSD on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt’s hard drive without fully setting up the Linux partitions (all I have is swap and an ext2 partition for my live CD files), OpenBSD didn’t know how to properly mount the ext2 partition.
Briefly, I needed to run fdisk in OpenBSD, transfer the Linux information to the OpenBSD disklabel, create a directory in which to mount the Linux filesystem, give the wheel group write access to that directory, then edit /etc/fstab to properly mount the ext2 filesystem at boot.
Once I was sure the Linux filesystem was properly mounting and was writable from OpenBSD, I booted Puppy Linux without mounting the partition and then ran e2fsck to clean up any errors (there were some).
Since then, the filesystem has been error-free, and I can easily exchange files between my OpenBSD and Linux installs on this laptop.
It’s nice to solve a problem for a change.
There was a time when I was fascinated with the idea of using thin clients as actual computers.
My “first” Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts was a Maxspeed Maxterm thn client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box.
I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.
At that point, the Maxspeed functioned pretty much like any other computer. Anything that could run on a VIA C3 Samuel processor could run on the box. That wasn’t everything, mind you, but it was enough to get by.
I’m thinking about buying a new test box — something cheap (I never want to spend more than $50 on any computer), probably in the Pentium III range, maybe a Pentium 4 if I get a deal.
That and the fact that the Daily News is moving a few blocks down the road to a new office, which has me throwing away massive amounts of paper and inventorying all the tech garbage I’ve accumulated over the past couple of years.
In one of my file drawers, I found an HP/Compaq t5300 533MHz 32/64 thin client that I got for about $10 on eBay.
I wanted to see if I could run Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux on it, but once I got the thin client in the mail (hey, for $10 I didn’t do a whole lot of research on it), I pulled it open and saw that replacing the flash memory with something programmable would be difficult. It wasn’t made of off-the-shelf-parts like the Maxspeed.
But it did work. The 32MB RAM, 64MB flash, 533MHz box, with keyboard, mouse and monitor connected, booted to what looks like a Windows CE desktop. Included is a CE version of Internet Explorer (something from the IE4 era, I think), and enough utilities to enable me to set a static IP and get networking into the box.
Not every Web site looks pretty in a cutdown IE4, but surprisingly the thing can (almost but not quite) post an entry to Movable Type 4.1 with relative ease, even if it crashed repeatedly crashing the browser when I saved the entry.
At least it saved. And since the browser starts in about 2 seconds on this little, fanless and completely silent HP box, there are worse things than crashing the browser. I eventually crashed the entire thin client, but it does recover remarkably quickly.
I’d still like to get a thin client working with Linux, not as a quasi-PC with full hard drives but with nothing but solid-state memory. Once I finally get a new text box (I’m thinking something generically Dell or HP), I’ll use the Maxspeed in the way it was intended — almost. It’s flash memory is a CF card (and no, it didn’t come with the original), and I plan to install Puppy Linux on that CF card and run it as a silent workstation, perhaps saving my files on a USB flash drive (or on the CF itself).
Let me just say that in the days before I got my hands on two nearly free laptops, I had a lot of fun with thin clients.
The HP has built-in terminal software in addition to RDP and Citrix capability (I hardly know what either of those means), so I could use it as a non-X terminal (not terribly exciting) or try to sell it for what I can get on eBay (likely).
As for my new test box, I’ve seen quite a few promising candidates in the Pentium III and 4 range. I’d like something that can run 1 GB of RAM, but I will take 512 MB if necessary. I did see one with 1.5 GB capability. I have a pretty good feeling that a nearly 2 GHz CPU with 1 GB of RAM will run things very, very well when it comes to Linux and the BSDs.
I’ve seen some nice things for $60, but I’d rather part with $25, or get something for free. The latter has happened before, and it could happen again.
I’ve heard about Drivel, the GNOME blogging client that enables users of Linux to write blog posts offline for LiveJournal, Blogger, MovableType, Advogato, Atom, WordPress and Drupal blogs.
I haven’t used it yet — and I was hoping to find something that would work with OpenBSD and not carry the weight of GNOME along with it — but I will.
More on Drivel from:
And from the world of the KDE desktop environment, there’s Blokkal.
My Debian Lenny system has a whole lot of KDE on it already, so I can probably add both of these.
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