Thin Puppy Torture Test II: Day 14

I continue to praise Geany, the GUI text editor in Puppy Linux.

I’m not a programmer, but I use text editors just about every day. Especially for Web work, text editors are must-have tools for writers and editors.

And for me, a text editor needs to do a few things — and do them well.

Here is my list:

It needs to start up quickly.

It must open ALL files, not just those with .txt suffixes.

It must have word wrap but NOT actually wrap the lines in the text file itself (i.e. wrap for display purposes only).

It must have a search/replace function.

It must have word count.

It must change upper-case to lower-case … and lower-case to upper-case.

Not an extensive list, but many, many text editors cannot do these simple tasks. Mousepad in Xfce can’t (though it is fast), Gedit in GNOME can’t. Beaver in Damn Small Linux also doesn’t do all of these things.

What I use in Windows: The free EditPad Lite — a great text editor.

Mac OS X: the default GUI text editor in OS X (I think it’s called TextEdit, or something like that) is pathetic. Sorry Mac people. I’d love to have someting better for when I use the Mac, which is often.

Do I use command-line editors? Yes, I do, but it’s just much easier to use a GUI editor when I’m working in a GUI. Half of the time, I’m cutting and pasting type from Web pages, e-mails and the like, and it’s just too hard to do with console editors. I tend to stick to Nano (Pico in the OS X console) because I just don’t use vi enough to keep my skills fresh. And I don’t want to get anywhere near Emacs — I just don’t have the desire or the time. Give me Nano, and I’m happy at the console.

Again, I don’t program — I just write, so my requirements for a good text editor are probably very different than the usual crowd at which text editors are named, meaning coders.

Thin Puppy Torture Test II: Unlucky Day 13 — Power problem

The Thin Puppy ran all the way through Christmas Day (mercifully, I wasn’t here), but today something happened, and the power momentarily went out. I might’ve kicked the power cord, or something else nefarious happened, but the Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client rebooted, and since there was no CD in the drive, I just shut it down. I’m sure it could’ve gone much longer than 13 days, but I have accepted that 30 days without a reboot won’t be happening.

Anyway, I booted Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop (I haven’t done the upgrade to 3.01 on the Gateway yet).

One of the bigger changes recently in Puppy Linux has been the dropping of the lightweight Dillo browser in favor of NetSurf, which looks like a similarly lightweight browser based on Mozilla. I can’t be sure of its origins, but it seems to work pretty well, is just as fast as Dillo, and — most importantly — seems to be currently in development. Work on Dillo has pretty much stalled, or so it appears. So I think of this as a good choice for Puppy Linux — the lightweight browser is needed, especially for the lower-spec computers than many of us use to run Puppy.

I thought Puppy also had a text-only browser, but I don’t see it in the Puppy 3.00 menu. I’d like to see Lynx or Elinks in the Puppy base. If you must have a text Web browser, Elinks is available as an easy-to-add PET package in the Puppy Package Manager. Even Dillo can be restored via a PET package.

The main browser in Puppy continues to be Seamonkey, which also functions as a mail client and HTML editor. I’ve always liked Seamonkey, and I continue to see it as an application that fits Puppy very well.

I have one nagging problem: One of the Web sites I work on: LA.com has way too much Flash on it for its own good, and while that may or may not be the cause, the home page crashes Seamonkey every time. I’m generally anti-Flash — it hogs resources and should only be used when you need to show an actual video (and then only after a link is clicked), but I’ve accepted that today’s Web designers have gone Flash-crazy.

Most of these developers also think that everybody runs browsers with Flash and that they have Flash enabled. I suppose it’s true for 95 percent of users, but I don’t have Flash activated on this very laptop’s Debian partition. In Ubuntu, I do have it, and Puppy ships with Flash implemented in Seamonkey, but the ability to easily turn Flash on and off in Firefox would be welcomed by me. More welcome is the new Gnash open-source clone of Flash. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s definitely on my to-do list.

$0 Laptop-and-Puppy update: Puppy runs so well on this Gateway Solo 1450, it should be noted. Since I got the fan under control via a cron job (long explanation of this STILL forthcoming — I promise), Puppy 3.00 has performed very, very well. I’ve been running it from the live CD (all the better for impending and frequent upgrades, as well as ease in booting) and have a 1.2 GB pup_save in my Debian Etch partition. I’ve also had good luck with Knoppix 5.1.1 on this laptop, but not so much with Damn Small Linux, which has problems with the X configuration. And with 256 MB of RAM, Puppy is a much better fit than Knoppix.

I continue to warn against dual- and triple-booting, even as I continue to do it with this laptop (still, avoid pain and DON’T dual-boot — I’m telling you). But I encourage the use of live CDs on computers with existing Linux (and even Windows) installs. It gives you a nice option and is not likely to screw anything up.

Thin Puppy Torture Test II: Unlucky Day 13 — Power problem

The Thin Puppy ran all the way through Christmas Day (mercifully, I wasn’t here), but today something happened, and the power momentarily went out. I might’ve kicked the power cord, or something else nefarious happened, but the Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client rebooted, and since there was no CD in the drive, I just shut it down. I’m sure it could’ve gone much longer than 13 days, but I have accepted that 30 days without a reboot won’t be happening.

Anyway, I booted Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop (I haven’t done the upgrade to 3.01 on the Gateway yet).

One of the bigger changes recently in Puppy Linux has been the dropping of the lightweight Dillo browser in favor of NetSurf, which looks like a similarly lightweight browser based on Mozilla. I can’t be sure of its origins, but it seems to work pretty well, is just as fast as Dillo, and — most importantly — seems to be currently in development. Work on Dillo has pretty much stalled, or so it appears. So I think of this as a good choice for Puppy Linux — the lightweight browser is needed, especially for the lower-spec computers than many of us use to run Puppy.

I thought Puppy also had a text-only browser, but I don’t see it in the Puppy 3.00 menu. I’d like to see Lynx or Elinks in the Puppy base. If you must have a text Web browser, Elinks is available as an easy-to-add PET package in the Puppy Package Manager. Even Dillo can be restored via a PET package.

The main browser in Puppy continues to be Seamonkey, which also functions as a mail client and HTML editor. I’ve always liked Seamonkey, and I continue to see it as an application that fits Puppy very well.

I have one nagging problem: One of the Web sites I work on: LA.com has way too much Flash on it for its own good, and while that may or may not be the cause, the home page crashes Seamonkey every time. I’m generally anti-Flash — it hogs resources and should only be used when you need to show an actual video (and then only after a link is clicked), but I’ve accepted that today’s Web designers have gone Flash-crazy.

Most of these developers also think that everybody runs browsers with Flash and that they have Flash enabled. I suppose it’s true for 95 percent of users, but I don’t have Flash activated on this very laptop’s Debian partition. In Ubuntu, I do have it, and Puppy ships with Flash implemented in Seamonkey, but the ability to easily turn Flash on and off in Firefox would be welcomed by me. More welcome is the new Gnash open-source clone of Flash. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s definitely on my to-do list.

$0 Laptop-and-Puppy update: Puppy runs so well on this Gateway Solo 1450, it should be noted. Since I got the fan under control via a cron job (long explanation of this STILL forthcoming — I promise), Puppy 3.00 has performed very, very well. I’ve been running it from the live CD (all the better for impending and frequent upgrades, as well as ease in booting) and have a 1.2 GB pup_save in my Debian Etch partition. I’ve also had good luck with Knoppix 5.1.1 on this laptop, but not so much with Damn Small Linux, which has problems with the X configuration. And with 256 MB of RAM, Puppy is a much better fit than Knoppix.

I continue to warn against dual- and triple-booting, even as I continue to do it with this laptop (still, avoid pain and DON’T dual-boot — I’m telling you). But I encourage the use of live CDs on computers with existing Linux (and even Windows) installs. It gives you a nice option and is not likely to screw anything up.

Thin Puppy Torture Test II, Day 11

I haven’t updated much in the past few days because I haven’t used the Puppy box much in that time. I finished up my long gOS review — and come to think of it, Puppy would be perfect for the Everex Linux PC. You could keep gOS on there but boot Puppy from the CD/DVD drive and have a super-fast system that blows the standard gOS install out of the proverbial water.

But back to the second Thin Puppy Torture Test. The box has been chugging along, no problem.

Today I had somebody ask me to grab a bunch of photos off of two SD Flash memory cards. I plugged my card reader into the remaining USB port, used the Puppy Drive Mounter to mount and open it, and then I dragged a bunch of images to the My-Documents folder, which if you’ve used Puppy before, is owned by root.

And in Puppy, you run as root, not in a normal user account. There have been all kinds of arguments about the wisdom of running as root — and it’s many people’s main complaint about Puppy, that running as root is not safe. Damn Small Linux creates a user account when you boot the live CD, and you can go multiuser and create named accounts if you want. I believe the GrafPup spin of Puppy also allows the use of user accounts. … And Puppy allows you to create any number of pup_save files, booting into whichever one you wish (and also encrypting and password-protecting them if you want), allowing for multiple users on the same computer (but still running as root).

I’m not really qualified to comment on the root vs. user debate, but I’ve never had any problems, and I understand that especially in the live CD environment, it doesn’t matter as much. Again, I leave it to the experts.

But back to the photos. There were quite a few of them, and I only have a 256 MB Flash drive connected to the Thin Puppy box, so I didn’t/couldn’t transfer them all to Puppy’s filesystem.

Still, after I transferred some and then later deleted them, my Puppy “free RAM” indicator dropped from 111 MB to 89.9 MB and stayed there. I’ve been told that this indicator is not a true picture of free RAM on the system, but it’s curious that it drops and, at this point at least, doesn’t rebound after files are deleted.

I pulled the card reader before unmounting the Flash card, and I got a warning message from Puppy. Remember to unmount your media!! The message suggested that I reboot, but since this is the Thin Puppy Torture Test II, I ignored that warning.

The system is still running fine, and I got the chance to use MtPaint and GTKSee as image viewers. MtPaint isn’t really designed to look at images in a “slide show” fashion, but one good thing is that you can open an image in a directory, use ctrl-mouse wheel to shrink it so it fits in the window, and then retain that image size when viewing all the other images in the directory, opening them up as needed.

But GTKSee is better for doing a slide show. Just open the application (under Graphics), navigate to the proper directory, and start the slide show under the Tools menu (or by typing ctrl-S).

P.S. Since I didn’t have enough memory in the Thin Puppy to burn a CD with all those images, I started up Puppy 2.17 (it was the first Puppy CD I found) on my Windows box, mounted the SD chip and threw everything into a directory on the Windows drive. I got the usual warnings about writing to NTFS partitions, but I ignored them. I got a warning the next time I booted into Windows, but everything was there, and everything was fine. (I burned my CD in Windows, not Puppy because I had work to do with the proprietary publishing software that I need for my “real” job).

I’ll have to experiment with Puppy’s CD burning applications later.

But one thing I always forget is that Puppy runs GREAT on my 3 GHz Pentium 4 Dell. I’m not used to running Linux of any kind on such a “powerful” machine. I’d love to run all my Linux distros on something so “good” (its 512 MB RAM is twice what I have on any other box).

One thing about low-spec Linux distros like Puppy. As well as they run on old, old hardware, if you can get everything configured, they really fly on “modern” PCs.

Pup_save thoughts: The pup_save in Puppy Linux has a predetermined size. Usually the largest you can make is 1.25 GB. There is a warning message that crops up (I can’t remember where) that says you can make a pup_save up to 1.83 GB, but that is the largest tested configuration. I don’t know if there is a limit on the size of a “save” file in Damn Small Linux or Knoppix (both of which use the same “save” technology, I think — but don’t quote me), and having a limit on how big the pup_save can be is somewhat of a limitation in Puppy. I suggest having additional storage space outside of the pup_save on which to store large files — and large amounts of files, for that matter.

On this Thin Puppy, unless I add another Flash drive, I’m stuck with the 256 MB on the primary USB Flash drive.

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.

Thin Puppy Torture Test II, Day 4

Nothing much to report today, except that the monitor does go into power-saving mode when idle. It just takes awhile.

Everything is running great. I almost forgot how much I like using Seamonkey as a Web browser. I haven’t yet set up the mail-client portion yet, but I do plan to.

I still think Geany is one of the best text editors out there. And despite it’s lack of typographical, “smart” quotes, AbiWord is a model of how light yet powerful a word-processing application can and should be. And MtPaint continues to get the job done when it comes to preparing images for the Web (although I’d just about kill for a Linux-compatible photo editor that didn’t obliterate and even allowed editing of the Photoshop-implanted IPTC info embedded in JPEG images).

Today’s “free memory” in the Puppy Memory Applet: 113 MB.

Thin Puppy Torture Test — Day 1, Part II

I still haven’t finished writing the saga of how I got control over the CPU fan in Puppy 3.00 on the $0 Laptop. But I do want to say that the help I got from the Puppy Linux forum was invaluable. A great community is one of Puppy’s strongest assets. The same goes for the Damn Small Linux people. Not only are both groups extremely active, but their advice usually solves most problems right away.

Unrelated Puppy issue: While the pup_save file in Puppy Linux holds all settings and can accommodate as many files as its size will allow, I think bigger files, like Linux ISOs, large amounts of music, video and images, should be stored on a mountable drive outside the pup_save. That way, if you want to access the material with another Linux distro, it’s not stuck in a pup_save file that can only be opened while using Puppy.