This one comes from a beta tester (the final beta is supposed to be released Monday) who actually installed the Xandros beta on five different machines. He explicitly disclaims any allegiance to Xandros and tries to be very even handed. Go check it out. Xandros probably isn’t the distribution for me but I think that it might be the easy Debian derivative that whips the shit out of crap like Lindows. I’m not holding my breath on this but I’ll take the hopeful if not optimistic position on this for the moment however chickenshit that might be.
This should appeal to quite a few folks:
Without fail I have been able to browse and share files over my netowrk with a Windows 2000 server, Windows 98, various Linux distributions including Mandrake 9.0, SuSE 8.0 Pro, Libranet 2.7, Red Hat Null, and even a Windows XP desktop. You can access your removable media, create NFS shares, browse local Windows partitions, transfer over FTP and validate against a Windows PDC to browse the netowrk resources. You can also share your local files with a simple right-click. This is a powerful tool. I have also utilized the Winbind option in the Xandros Control Center (KDE) to authenticate against a Windows PDC to join the local domain. This feature has worked flawlessly. I strongly believe in the mantra “the network is the computer” and thanks to XFM, Xandros networks with greater ease than any other distribution I have used previously.
I’ve never really needed to do any PDC validating but I’ve heard gnashing of teeth and furrowing of brows related to this topic. Nice to see people concentrating on improvements like this rather than one click installs and whatnot. If I can scrape up an extra box at work I might give this a test run.
In case that obnoxious button over on the left hasn’t caught your eye I’m selling some crap now. I just added a Gentoo button and one with the BSD mascot Chuck. There are more on the way whether anyone buys them or not…
Right Quick
Simon Cozens (who I feel is responsible for teaching me Perl through his excellent books) has some clue on why Perl 6 is taking so long and how difficult Larry‘s job is so tricky. Nice.
It seems like Dillo is finally getting some of the attention that it’s long deserved. I’ve seen a couple short pieces in praise of its speed and portability but a fella over at The Montreal Linux Users Group really took some time to work Dillo over and wrote a lengthy article about its strengths and weaknesses.
Give it a shot if you haven’t given it a try because it is the fastest browser I’ve ever used. Stripping out all the geegaws and doohickeys really does speed things up more noticeably than those who falsely claim the title. How about a eyeblink between issuing the command and being in a browser on a PII 366? I just did it. That’s actually faster than Lynx and let’s you click on the pretty pictures instead of pounding on arrow keys. The only real downside for me is the lack of tabbing which is understandable. For some reason I don’t feel like I’m doing something productive on the w3 unless I have thirty tabs open in the same browser window. This may be a reflection on my need to grow the hell up and not on some deficiencyin Dillo. I’ve been slowly migrating to all lightweight applications since the laptop came and I compute entirely from my couch. Dillo is amazing for those times when you want to check out a site without waiting for a fullscale thermonuclear browser to launch. Copy. Open Dillo. Paste. Read. Done. Elapsed time is something like 20 seconds. It launches fast enough to allow you to just open and close it without waiting the eternity it takes for the burlier browsers to grind through their opening paces.
The suck part is that they’re running into financial trouble which could be your new mission. I’m going to try to contact the developers directly and try to convince them to make a PayPal donation account. I’d love to kick down a few bucks but I’m not exactly VC material if you know what I mean. Hopefully some of the big boys in the embedded market will realize that this shit is gold and kick down the necessary scratch.
Yeah, I know. I do actually read my email although I’m getting absolutely terrible about answering it. I haven’t been posting for shit lately. I was sort of waiting for my site to actually cave in but Aaron actually beat me at that one. Granted he was actually out of town so there is there is an actual reason for his vacuum instead of the overt apathy behind mine. Not much going on in the tech world (unless the usual release cycle dog and pony show is captivating for you) that isn’t addressed in a single sentence and I’ve actually been trying to study instead of scraping by with whatever I can absorb through a semi-conscious haze of fatigue and caffeine deficiency during classes. Getting back into that crazy idea that I should actually get something for the thousands of tuition dollars that I’m paying. Anyway, I haven’t felt the urge to do much other than skim analog reports to see who is coming in and from where.
My logs are actually pretty funny. Besides the usual sweaty palmed queries for nude celebrity photos I have a fair number of desperate sounding technology search results come in. The disjointed pile of search terms begin to look like some apocalyptic version of defeatist haiku after reading a couple pages of them:
Monitor flashing grey
broken packages ddd
compile vbscript
how do i undo bonzibuddy
where is config file waimea
flash animation flag waving
Since this site has never exactly been comment heavy despite the ridiculous amount of traffic it sees (thanks!) my only communication with most of you folks are the cryptic telegrams you send Google. It’s a little odd.
Something Slightly Relevant
There’s a nice overview of building a ligher weight Linux desktop. It’s nice to see people documenting ways to strip down the more bloated distributions intstead of just reviewing the minimalist ones. I think this is sort of aimed at lookie loo folks who are trying to install one of the more resource hungry distributions on their extra machine that was powerful and useful six years ago. While I’m not a fan of this practice since anything intended for desktop is going to be a hog I can see the merit of this approach since it does illustrate the breadth of choice inherent in Linux. The author also makes the point that KDE and Gnome applications function happily under almost any windowmanager. Seems like a fair number of folks get pretty confused about this. I seldom run KDE and I can’t recall ever starting a Gnome session on purpose although I like a lot of the applications that both environments offer. There are so many really good lightweight windowmanagers now that I shudder to think of launching one of those hogs when all I want to is use some of the applications tied to their libraries. Can’t say that I’m a huge fan of IceWM but I understand why people like to use it – the taskbar and whatnot.
What is it about RedHat that inspires such fierce loyalty for a commercial distribution that is for the most part the epitome of mediocrity. One fella goes off about all the mean, nasty, and terrible folks criticizing RedHat XP Null. Sorry kiddo but it really is lame. Usuability is one thing but condescension in the name of making user choices simpler (or simply nonexistant) is fucking stupid no matter how many nearly worthless shares you’ve got floating around out there. Either way there are some folks who will tirelessly defend this nonsense against all attempted reasonable criticism. Hope you’re at least getting some kick down for being shills. I’ve heard that OS News could use a few more cranks beating their particular drum in the forums. You might want to check it out. I’ve heard that doing battle with people who think computing began and ended with BeOS (or Amiga) is very productive…
I’m talking about Lindows and AOL here and I’m not being flippant or anything. The deal which some are equating with devils dealing amongst themselves and leaving us mortals completely out of the loop actually makes a lot of sense to me. AOL is not a fan of Microsoft. AOL is a slick, accessible interface for people who can’t be bothered to learn anything new to use a sanitized and tour guided version of the internet. And Lindows? Check, check. Lindows might make more sense as the MSNBC dude termed it: “The AOL OS.” Both are technologically sketchy but what the hell…
God speed and good riddance.
Man. The Debian is losing mindshare article over at Debian Planet has generated a fair amount of controversy (so much that the site was actually inaccessible earlier which was probably due to OS News sending over a bitter mob of old BeOS zealots to snicker at weakness in the community. My feelings on this are pretty mixed.
The article raises some good points like the supposed superiority of apt-get (which I’m still convinced makes RPM look more than a little sad) which is less and less applicable these days. Most of the big guns in the distro game are already wise to the idea that having to install software strictly from CDs to avoid hair tearing dependency hell is a bad thing and many have moved to address this problem with their own updating/installation clients. The problem that I’ve seen with most of them is that they either tend to freeze you at a version (which seems the most rigid with SuSE if only because you can’t go grab and burn an ISO of the newest release) and don’t handle mirroring well enough (yet) to avoid the bottleneck around patch and point release time. Even the RPM-based distros are infinitely better than they were just a few years ago. I would make some joke about it being impossible to get worse but that would just be trolling. Pathetic that I have to restrain myself from trolling my own site.
Another concern is that Gentoo is “stealing” a lot of users and developers away from Debian. This is crazy talk. Gentoo is a cool ass project that deserves as much support as any other. There is a slightly different philosophy adhered to by the Gentoo developers that results in bleeding edge quality without as much emphasis on rock solid stability. For some reason people are really concerned that KDE 3 and Gnome 2 aren’t packaged for Debian quite yet. While this is sort of a bummer cause hey we all want to click on the pretty new icons you also have to give the developers a break here. With an ungodly amount of applications available (it was up to 10,000 a few months ago) there is a lot of infrastructure/interoperability work that needs to be done for the sake of stability (which is one of Debian’s most quantifiable assets) even in the unstable and experimental branches. I can’t think of anything that’s really missing from either the Gnome or KDE environment right now that I can’t wait a few more months for especially after watching KDE 3 misbehave on other machines.
It’s also interesting to me that the article uses the number of reviews for a release as the litmus for mindshare. As is mentioned in the comments section, Debian is a difficult beast to attach a number or effective value to simply because the whole idea of version numbers is a little ridiculous when the whole package structure makes it a continually evolving (and arguably more organic) thing. Once you’ve had Debian on a machine for awhile and have tinkered around with your source.list and pinning a little it becomes very difficult to even estimate what release you’re running. I’m not sure that trying to measure the mindshare Debian has is even productive as there have been plenty of folks who’ve stepped up and said while they use (insert whichever shiny happy desktop distro name here) on the desktop they stuck with Debian (and often Slackware) for the more critical things. Then there are folks like me that run Debian on the desktop (and laptop) and just appreciate the fact that it’s good solid stuff without a bunch of crap forced onto the user. The downside of this is that you often need to know what you want in order to get a machine running well. If you want to call that a downside…
I think the departure of many to the Gentoo camp might end up being a healthy thing in the long run because it may relieve some of the pressure on package maintainers (which exists regardless of the lack of commercial motivations) to keep unstable from being continually broken to keep the version vultures off their backs. As often as I’ve heard people grousing about the lack of the newest versions of KDE or Gnome in unstable I haven’t heard a single reasonable argument why these packages need to be included. Being bleeding edge for the sake of being bleeding edge just seems a little juvenile. God, it’s late… more on this later since my eyes are beginning to bleed.
Damn. I’d forgotten how slick emacs21 really is until I opened it and listened to my poor little laptop swapping like crazy. Seems a little much for a text editor but I guess other folks deal with email, pilot small aircraft, and other things with their text editors so who am I to judge. Man, it’s been a long weekend/week with very little posting here.
Debian is finally on the laptop. I knew what needed to happen (installing Sid) but the thought of the ten CD ordeal (where are the kernel images again?) made me resort to playing around with a few single disc distributions. I had a copy of RedHat sitting around that I assumed was ancient but seems to be only one release behind. I’m pretty impressed since the 5.x days when I gave it a shot. Still heavy into the Gnome thing which just isn’t lightweight enough for me (especially on an underpowered PII 366 laptop) to do anything more than play with.Oh, and listen to the grinding of my swap partition being abused. It didn’t last long but was fun for a little while. I was down to the last couple of CDRs and leery of distros that might be fun to check out but not have the PCMCIA drivers I needed for my weird ass NIC. So, for giggles I downloaded the very pretty but almost useless beta of the new end user version of RedHat. Like I said very pretty but everything is hidden or crippled or dependent on some non-existent RPM. It lasted about fifteen minutes which was a shame since it took something like two hours to install. Bah. First the dreaded RPM package management system which made installing new software into a game of sChutes and Ladders and now an anemic version of the operating system for the desktop user with the one desktop evironment to rule them all. Not much fun or particularly useful. The absolute end of the road was Roaring Penguin refusing to compile. No network, stranded in Candyland, and it’s past time to reinitialize those partitions. I played around with Mandrake for a while as well. I still think Mandrake is the best distribution for the casual user because although it is pretty easy to use there is still power under the ten coats of shiny plastic GUI goop. Unlike the RH beta when you type “lsmod” on the command line you get an answer to your question instead of hunting through a sea of menus in search of a graphical utility to answer this very simple question. Humbug.
I promised that I was going to document the Debian install but there really isn’t that much to tell. Stay away from 2.2 kernels with laptops. I was locking up the whole system whenever I breathed too hard in the direction of eth0 or tried to configure it through the PPPoE client. It’s hard to get much accomplished when you’re sitting through fsck after fsck. The drivers for my slightly weird NIC worked flawlessly from the 2.4.19 kernel. I should’ve guessed this right off the bat. The fact that my cards were being detected at boot time (and even under the right name) made me hesitant. Between the newer drivers and discover the install is pretty straightforward. It’s a Toshiba Tecra 8000 in case that means anything to you. This also means that I probably need to include the first disk of the stable CD set along with the unstable sets. It’s impossible to boot from a floppy drive (at least as far as I can tell and I had lots of practice this weekend) without it since there are no floppy images that I could find. There are probably workable images in testing but since the jigdo images are broken for that particular branch right now I’m not going to bother trying to assemble them. I’m happy to have a functioning machine with an operating system that isn’t hellish running on it.
Guiding Lights
Linux Compatible
The Complete List of PCMCIA cards supported by the pcmcia-cs driver.
PCMCIA HowTo
and there’s some other stuff I consulted that I’m not remembering and it’s not like I have bookmarks left over from any of those crazy installs.
I’m taking a day off in theory to wait for the clowns in brown to deliver some signature-required packages (one of which is just 75′ of ethernet cable) but mainly because I burned myself out this weekend working with a new machine with difficult to configure components.Yuck. The beauty of Linux is that if one distribution doesn’t work for your particular situation you can just download one that does. This somewhat disappointing since I happen to very hung up on a specific distribution that doesn’t work (right now) with my particular set of crappy proprietary hardware. Neverthless, I’m sitting on my couch watching Judge Hatchett make teenagers cry (which probably isn’t a good thing – the watching TV part anyway I still think crying teenagers are pretty funny) and playing around on the web. Goal accomplished but not exactly in the way that I wanted. This is the part where you call you me a whiny little bitch…
There’s an interview with one of the sources of all evil Jack Valenti. The tricky part about Valenti is that he’s basically a likeable guy who is eloquent and persuasive speaker who dodges questions skillfully. Valenti might just be the Ronald Reagan (in his prime when he was lying about welfare queens before all the drooling started) of the entertainment industry. Gillmor promises a rebuttal in future columns. I’ll be waiting.
Wil Wheaton writes the exhilarated first week on a Linux box post. I followed that link in from elsewhere because Wil’s site is one of the few places (excepting Segfault before the comments were shut down) where the comments are more stupid, obnoxious, and pointless than Slashdot. Transitions are getting more painless all the time. Yay. Right now I’m wishing for a deadpan tag in HTML. Oh wait, I guess that post did get a healthy slashdotting which might explain the negative IQ points in the comment section. Like I need to explain this.
I’ve been pretty busy tinkering with the new laptop. I thought I had things nailed down with the first Debian install until the entire machine would lock up everytime I tried to configure or use eth0. No ethernet, no network, no interweb for your and my entertainment. Since I need a functioning machine I just installed whatever else I had laying around which turned out to be an older version of RedHat which worked flawlessly but made me feel like a tool of the man. I ended up installing a fairly recent version of Mandrake which made me feel like a feeb instead of a tool. That sort of feels better. I’ve spent way too much time searching mailing lists and whatnot for the secret of my network card which makes Debian installs impossible right now. It’s frustrating and I’m fresh out of patience. This isn’t to say that I had a whole lot to begin with. Once I get started making boot floppies it’s all over.
Before using Macromedia Flash content on their sites, developers want to know what percentage of Web browsers will be able to see it. Because of the wide preinstallation of Macromedia Flash and its ease of download, this percentage is very high.
In June 2002, NPD Research, the parent company of MediaMetrix, conducted a study to determine what percentage of Web browsers have Macromedia Flash preinstalled. The results show that 97.8% of Web users can experience Macromedia Flash content without having to download and install a player.*
from a “white paper” celebrating the ubiquity of Flash. Oh my.
Again I make a trip to OS News and find something thought provoking, somewhat offensive, and very sincere. I don’t like most of the opinions the editors have about GNU/Linux but I nearly always read them. Hell, I usually read the comments because despite their total infection with trolls the reader opinions are usually from a pretty diverse span of perspectives at least where geek stuff is concerned.
The latest editorial/rant is no exception to this. Adam Scheinberg makes a stab at defining two broad categories of Linux user and divides them into end user and hardcore more or less. It’s a thankless job (the alternating flames and hot air is enough to make you wonder exactly which circle of the underworld you’ve fallen into) and I don’t think Adam nails it by any stretch of the imagination but I understand where he’s coming from.
One thing I do like about the article is the often mistaken notion that the “hardcore” are mean, elitist, and completely disinterested in what end user types have to say about their work. This is a point that needs to be made more often especially by people who don’t code. There are a lot of heated opinions about this division and I’m always going to favor the coders here if only because they actually code instead of spending eons of manhours ranting about how much xxxx sucks because this feature hasn’t been implemented. If developers were so unfriendly to end users (or as I call them in times of ill temperedness the “clickety” bunch) they wouldn’t be clicking on the pretty widgets or even installing Linux to begin with.
Anyone here install Slackware back in the day or download xfree86 as a tarball? Those were brutal installs where a successful install felt like hacking. I’m not saying that this was some kind of golden age or anything but there was a certain clue or willingness to learn and experiment prerequsite that sort of tempered people who approached Linux for the first time. There were far less instances of people buying a boxed set at CompUSA or something and complaining because all of their hardware wasn’t detected or, god forbid, there were too many options when installing the operating system.
The article written by just such an intimidated user from a couple of days back really sums up this change in how people look at Linux. He was essentially scared of by choices between file systems and the availibility of patches and upgrades. This complaint was (and should still be) a laughable one. It isn’t though. People nod their heads in sage sympathy like this is some kind of fundamental problem with the state of Linux. I mourn for the hours lost by some talented hacker in an effort to circumvent Darwinism and enable someone who can’t be bothered to read documentation to determine the course of things. The worst part is that a lot of people interpret the reluctance to cater to this sort of clueless arrogance as elitism on the part of developers.
The first dillemma that I faced is what company should I go with? As a Windows user I really never heard of the many different companies that produce Linux. I have heard of Red Hat and Mandrake (I saw it at Borders). I have read about them sort of on web pages, but since I never wanted to use Linux before I did not pay much attention. I wanted to find a version that was easy to install, I have heard the nightmares of having to configure all the hardware yourself. I read the web pages and decided to go with Mandrake. I really could not make heads or tails of the different distros.even in the reviews. I picked Mandrake because it seemed like an easy install. Why did I have to pick? Why no just go to store and buy what ever and it is the right one?
The install process was long but fairly easy (Thank God) but I was still confused a bit by the File System option. Which was is the best one? Which one is the most stable? Which one is fastest? I don’t want to make that choice. I had to stop and do some research online to find out which one I wanted to use. I never had to do that with Windows. What if I picked the wrong one? Would it taint my experience? What are KDE and Gnome? Which is better? Damn another stall; back to the Net to find out which is better. It seems most people are using KDE so I choose it. Argggg.. why do I need a root password?
I find it very difficult to take this sort of argument very seriously because it comes (I think) from not taking your operating system very seriously. Apply this attitude towards any other consumer decision and you’d look like a moron but somehow when applied to Linux it’s some kind of valid complaint. The truly killer part about that line of thinking is that these are Windows customers that need to stick with Windows. Really. I really do think some people shouldn’t bother because fleeing to Linux to escape a set of problems will invariably lead to another set of problems on another platform where people will want to smack you for angrily questioning the need for a root password. Anyway, I think the point I’m groping for is the lack of curiousity and willingness to learn can’t be overcome by flashy installers and patient measured tones in help forums. This deficiency is not the fault of any codebase or developer. When you refuse to make tentative steps towards something new you need to prepare for a lifetime immersed in mediocrity.
If you fit into this vague, broad, and somewhat common category I suggest you stick with Windows. Is this because I’m some mean ubergeek who doesn’t want you messing up my command line utopia? Not really but feel free to take that back to the forums. Seriously, though, Linux is not a reactionary measure against Microsoft as much as some seriously deluded folks would love to believe it is. It’s an entirely different ball of wax that requires a little bit of compromise on the part of the user. If you’re not willing to go there then please don’t. It doesn’t help anyone and certainly won’t solve your problems because, at least where operating systems are concerned, the problem is much deeper than one interface, filesystem, or widget set.