Cheap hardware loves Linux

I haven’t linked to Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Desktoplinux.com in awhile, and he had a great opinion piece today about the $150 PCLinuxOS box and other cheap computer solutions called “How low can you go and still run Linux?”

He does a good job of going through the distributions and recommending many low-spec software solutions for hardware of less than current vintage. He mentions many of my favorites, including Damn Small Linux, AntiX (which I haven’t tried in awhile …), Zenwalk, plus another I really should try: the PCLinuxOS “Mini-Me” spin.

He also talks up gOS, which is going from version 1 to 2. I booted into gOS today to see if Synaptic would magically do this upgrade for me. It did not. I got a couple dozen Ubuntu updates, but nothing indicating anything new or improved. And gOS is still as much of a dog as it ever was. On my hardware anyway, Ubuntu runs way better.

And I’m disappointed that Vaughn-Nichols didn’t mention Slackware derivatives Vector or Wolvix (the latter being my current favorite distro), or even Slackware itself. He could’ve also put in a word for Debian and even Ubuntu.

One thing I’ve learned is that whatever anybody says about how fast or slow a particular Linux distribution is, a little experimentation on your own hardware is in order before settling down with any one setup. I recommend creating a partition for /home, which you can keep intact (and backed up) while rolling different distributions in and out of there. That’s what I’m starting to do; my New Year’s resolution is “less dual- and triple-booting, more separate /home partitions.” See, I’m setting the New Year’s resolution bar very low — then I’ll be sure to succeed (unless I’m caught triple-booting anytime soon).

Anyway, I’m still using Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny on the Gateway Solo 1450. I’m packing the Lenny install with a whole lot of software, including lots of educational stuff for our 4-year-old.

I have Wolvix using a separate /home partition but not Debian. I might change that in the weeks ahead and see if they can share /home. I still can use Puppy 3.00 as a live CD — I have a pup_save on the Debian partition. For me, this is total, complete stability, the likes of which I haven’t seen in the past year.

I still have Debian Etch with Xfce on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, with Damn Small Linux 4.0 as a live CD. I’m thinking of trying Wolvix Cub on it, but with 64 MB of RAM, it could be a little dicey. What I need to do there is bump up the RAM to 144 MB (maximum of this circa 1999 laptop).

Why did I install MepisLite 3.3.2-1 RC1?

After Antix M7 refused to even boot on my Maxspeed Maxterm thin client (VIA C3 Samuel processor) — which has successfuly run the first version of Mepis-based AntiX, as well as SimplyMepis 6, I went back to a Linux distro I remember fondly — and which died well before its time.

I speak of MepisLite. It was Warren Woodford’s idea of a lighter-than-SimplyMepis distro — and a good idea it was. I believe Woodford sold the OS to Tafusion/Pioneer Linux. And while I did run SimplyMepis on this box, it was so, so slow that I couldn’t stay with it for more than a couple of days.

And now that I have a free drive — OpenBSD is never going to work for me — I figured I’d play around a bit.

So I started a MepisLite install. Going into Synaptic, it looks like MepisLite is based on Debian Sarge. I’m doing what kind of upgrade there is right now. If it doesn’t totally break, I’ll keep it around a while. Thus far, MepisLite isn’t freakishly fast. but it does have one thing going for it that even my favorite KDE distro — Slackware — doesn’t possess: Kwrite with “typographical” quotes that work. In Slack, Kwrite’s initial quote marks face the wrong way. In many other distros they don’t work at all.

I should probably just get/stick with Debian Etch (and try it with KDE) and stop my bitching.

AntiX is out

AntiX (pronounced “antics”), the lightweight rendition of SimplyMepis (which I’ve found to be unusually heavy), has a new release available for download.

I liked the first version of AntiX — it’s based on the Mepis core (which, in turn, now tracks Debian rather than Ubuntu) but uses the Fluxbox window manager rather than Mepis’ KDE. AntiX also features many more lightweight apps that perform better on older, weaker hardware.

In the past, I’ve wondered what Mepis can offer that you can’t get by running Fluxbox in Debian, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, Zenwalk and Vector. I guess you have to try it.

In the past, I’ve had very good things to say about both Vector and Zenwalk (both derivatives of Slackware) with Fluxbox. And I run my 233 MHz, 64 MB laptop with Debian and Fluxbox.

On the other hand, a distro that uses Fluxbox as its main window manager should be set up better than one that uses it as an afterthought.

As always, when it comes to Linux, it’s all about choice and variety.

AntiX is out

AntiX (pronounced “antics”), the lightweight rendition of SimplyMepis (which I’ve found to be unusually heavy), has a new release available for download.

I liked the first version of AntiX — it’s based on the Mepis core (which, in turn, now tracks Debian rather than Ubuntu) but uses the Fluxbox window manager rather than Mepis’ KDE. AntiX also features many more lightweight apps that perform better on older, weaker hardware.

In the past, I’ve wondered what Mepis can offer that you can’t get by running Fluxbox in Debian, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, Zenwalk and Vector. I guess you have to try it.

In the past, I’ve had very good things to say about both Vector and Zenwalk (both derivatives of Slackware) with Fluxbox. And I run my 233 MHz, 64 MB laptop with Debian and Fluxbox.

On the other hand, a distro that uses Fluxbox as its main window manager should be set up better than one that uses it as an afterthought.

As always, when it comes to Linux, it’s all about choice and variety.

PC-BSD and Ubuntu on the $0 Laptop

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.

From Fedora, through Ubuntu and Slackware, getting close to ZenWalk

In the “if it ain’t broke, then why the hell are you fixing it?” department, maybe I should refocus my energies on Debian and not worry so much about Fedora/Red Hat. But there’s something about Fedora/RHEL that is calling to me. I did get the package manager working in Fedora on the night I ran the live CD in my Dell 3 GHz box, and I found out how to add Open Office but didn’t have time to actually do it.

At the risk of repeating myself, after hearing so many horror stories about how hard it is to install and maintain Debian, I’ve found it to be extremely easy and trouble-free. It’s no harder than Ubuntu, although there’s a simplicity to a standard Ubuntu install that isn’t there with Debian, meaning there is less stuff installed with Ubuntu, more with Debian (although between the two there’s probably nothing that isn’t available as far as apps go). For a corporate office environment, less is probably better — but in a big company, there would probably be a custom spin on a distro to install just the software that is needed and no more.

(Two and a half weeks pass …)

Hankering to try new distros, I spent plenty of time shoving BSD and Linux discs into the text box (the often-mentioned VIA C3-based thin client lashed to a hard drive and CD-RW), and spent a bit of time with SimplyMepis (more forthcoming), Slackware, briefly with Vector, and more than I would’ve thought with Xubuntu/Ubuntu 7.04.

On my 1 GHz/256 MB RAM system, the KDE desktop in Mepis 6.5 is way too sluggish. Implementation of KDE is fairly good, I did appreciate the Mepis setup tools, the fact that Flash was preinstalled, and the ability to play MP3s right out of the box. I wasn’t so happy with having OpenOffice installed instead of KOffice — I’d rather have both, actually, and I really wished that Mepis shipped with more than KDE for a window manager. Yes, I know I can try AntiX, and I just might, but it’s nice that Slackware includes KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox and a few more in the basic install. I did enjoy Mepis’ eye candy — the KWeather icon that I could set to show my local weather, plus a whole bunch of other stuff.

KDE in Mepis didn’t come preconfigured for multiple desktops, something I’ve grown to find essential, but it was easy enough to add them and also add the icon for choosing between them to the panel.

But I was uneasy in Mepis’ KDE, so I moved on to Slackware, which has a terrific implementation of KDE and a great mix of programs. The Slackware KDE desktop was much faster, and while getting everything working in Slack requires getting one’s hands a little dirty (again, more later), I did pretty much get the results I wanted. While Slack isn’t aimed at the novice user, you don’t have to be some kind of super Linux genius, either, to make it work.

Slack defaults to a very safe setup. You can’t mount any other drives or even burn CDs until you make a few adjustments. In my mind, it makes Slack more ready for the enterprise desktop than many more popular distros — it’s set up from the beginning in such a way as not to be easily f’d up. But most people who run Linux want to mount CDs and flash drives, burn ISOs and the like. And I’ve been able to do all that with Slackware, learning a bit in the process.

All of this led me to a new appreciation for Ubuntu (and the Xubuntu desktop as well). The distro might not ship with the ability to play MP3s, and you need to add Flash to Firefox, should you want it, but the package-management that comes from Debian, along with the Ubuntu repositories, the huge and usually helpful Ubuntu community — and the distro handling USB devices, multiple partitions, bootloader configuration and so much more very well — make me forgive it not being as swift as Debian or Slackware. I did a bit of testing and did determine that most programs run faster under Xfce than they do in GNOME (not a revelation, I know) even though I don’t see all that much difference in the desktop speed itself.

Along the way, I thought I had a problem with Synaptic in Xubuntu when it crashed the system a couple of times (screen frozen, drive chunking away, no ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete working), but when the same problem happened when switching between Konqueror windows in Slackware, I figured the problem was with the box more than the OS. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

Anyway, I’m really enjoying being in the KDE environment of Slackware, and I haven’t booted into Debian 4.0 in some time (I have them on separate hard drives, easily swapped out). I need to repartition the Xubuntu/Slackware drive and try to make room for one more distro — ZenWalk, which I’ve been anxious to try. Having three Xfce-equipped distros on one drive should really tell me a lot. I’d love for ZenWalk to really grow on me — we’ll see. So far I like what I see in the ZenWalk forums — always a good sign when evaluating a distro. I also need to spend more time in Slack’s Xfce and Fluxbox environments.

And I haven’t had my drive with the full Debian desktop hooked up in weeks. I have to confess that part of the reason I run Ubuntu so much is that for the purposes of writing this blog, its popularity is just so massive, I feel that I can’t ignore it (or you might say that it’s a shameless ploy to get more readers). But as I say somewhere in this ramble, there are many distros out there that make my proverbial heart grow fonder for the many comforts of Ubuntu.

Still, it’s getting to the time in my distro-hopping life when I should settle down with only a couple of different setups, max. I still want to run Puppy and Damn Small Linux, but I need to get some stability in my Linux life and really get to know a single system. My $15 laptop is still running Debian with Fluxbox, and that’s working about as well as I can expect, if not a little bit better. I’m reluctant to bump up the RAM from the current 64 MB to the max of 144 MB only because I have another laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450 given to me because the power plug broke and it doesn’t work.

I removed about 15 screws from the Gateway — all that I could see, but I still couldn’t crack the case. I’ve already got a couple of new power plugs to solder to the circuit board, and I have a 30 GB drive ready to install (I had to pull the original drive and give it to the person who gave me the laptop — a small price, to be sure, for a free computer). I just haven’t had time lately to get back in there and try to take the Gateway apart without destroying it in the process. The idea of having a 1.2 GHz processor AND 1 GB of RAM may not be earth-shattering, but it could really allow me to run GNOME or KDE with much more comfort (and hopefully Xfce with a whole lot of said comfort). Still, I guess I’ll have to look for a 3 GHz box (or a Core Duo) that isn’t owned by the company.

And if sticking to a single distro (or two) is where I’m headed, Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu are all good candidates, as they allow for many desktop environments and a lot of flexibility for my very divergent hardware. And I have to say that I’ve been thinking lately about getting a “real” computer to run Linux on. I’d feel a lot better about Linux on the desktop with a whole lot of CPU and RAM, plus a super-fast front-side bus to make it all flow.

On another note, I’ve been using the GIMP intensively to cut images for the LA.com Web site, on which I’ve been doing a lot of work lately. About half the people I work with have heard of the GIMP and have it installed, but their opinion of it isn’t very high. Mostly I chalk that up to their own familiarity with Photoshop and lack of same for the GIMP. It is different. But with the help of one of these GIMP doubters, I was able to figure out how to easily crop an image to exact pixel-by-pixel specs (something I’ve never needed to do before, width being king over depth in my design consciousness). But it’s nice to spend much of my work day in free, open-source apps on Windows and Linux platforms — mostly the GIMP and AbiWord (along with a passel of text editors, from EditPad Lite on Windows to Mousepad and KWrite in Linux).

And as regular readers might’ve noticed, I haven’t been posting nearly as often — it’s been busy at the Daily News, for all of us, with the new (to me, at least) Web site, the entire print section undergoing a massive redesign, plus all my posting to the New York Times News Service wire.

But my long-gestating Puppy 2.16 review is coming, as will be a bit more on SimplyMepis and Slackware, plus hopefully something on ZenWalk if I can clear some space on one of my three hard drives.

If you made it this far in the rambling rant, you get a gold star, to be sure.