puppy linux update

Here's a screenshot of my little Eee 900 running Puppy Linux (LUcid PUppy 5.2.5) I upgraded to earlier today. It's hella fast on Puppy, even with a lowly 1gHz Celeron hamster running in there.

It's a free, modern, fully functional operating system that's about 1/20th the size of Windoze. (current .iso is ~130MB)

The stock LuPu 5.2.5 desktop stuff is openbox + fbpanel + conky + ROX-filer --pinboard.

long day, and it's only 3pm

I think I'm gonna go take a nap.

Gardening

I planted another round of seedlings:

• bell peppers, scrounged last year from peppers we ate. No idea what these will do.
• tomatoes, three varieties. One leftover heirloom breed from last year, and two hybrids.
• squash, two varieties
• cucumbers, two varieties
• more lettuce
• corn
• I forget the rest but it's on my garden planning sheet

Following the SFG model the tall/vertical/viney stuff is furthest away from the sun with shorter stuff in front of it. Alternated species instead of planting near each other to limit disease and bugs.

Composting

Tore down one of my composting bins for delivery to the (very kind and lovely) MIL. Will throw that in the truck next time we go to see her. Chickens were Big Helpers, which is to say they stood on top of the pile and kicked it everywhere but where you wanted it. They got pretty brave working around the hoe.

Tore down an active pile and sifted the compost before restacking/wetting the remaining big stuff. The filtered/finished compost was fine and clean-smelling, though both are difficult to judge from this pic. About 20# worth.

I learned this sifting trick from composting master Rob. I might make a two-tiered autosifter like he built. Maybe chicken wire for sifting the big stuff and hardware cloth or something for the smaller stuff?

Lucid Puppy 5.2.5

Upgraded the eee netbook to puppy 5.2.5.

Grocery shopping

Trip to Aldi. Completely full basket was less than $90. Put the groceries in the back of the truck (on the cargo platform I cobbled together quickly) and it worked out great.

µReview: antiX linux

Over the past few weeks I've heard folks talking about a somewhat-lighter distro called antiX. Took it for a spin in virtualbox. Came up quickly with no drama.



RAM usage in the screenshot above is 96MB with the browser open to m.cnn.com (accidentally typed the mobile version by habit).

I'm impressed with the snappiness and memory use of the livecd version. I didn't try to install it yet.

comparison
ISO, minimum ram, minimum HD, WM/DE
antix: 484MB, 128MB, 1.2GB, IceWM/Fluxbox
lubuntu: 546MB, 160MB, unknown, lxde
xubuntu: 726MB (!), 256MB, 2.0GB, xfce

I think this middleweight field is worth watching. I suspect the current economic environment will encourage people to get all the mileage they can out of previous-generation boxes. With middleweights like antiX you can "add lightness" without having to deal with the weirdness of puppy, dsl, tinycore, etc.

Review: jolicloud 1.1

I have heard several trusted sources (on TWIG, Android Central, etc) referring to Jolicloud. One even said Google should quit wasting resources on ChromeOS and just rebadge a tweaked Jolicloud.

I downloaded the .torrent and installed it in a virtualbox instance.

Initial thoughts:

• 698MB? Really? Maybe my basis for comparison is wonky since I've been using small linuxen for a few years, but 698MB for a netbook OS seems excessive.
• Torrent d/l is cool, but doesn't really seem to fit the target demographic.
• live version is a bit wonky; can't do many things.
• hangs for long periods in virtualbox: "initializing virtualbox driver" for several minutes during the install. Less of a problem once installed.
• requires 2.4GB minimum to install. Yikes.
• the integration with my.jolicloud.com is interesting
• the integration with facebook is frightening. I do NOT like this trend.
• requires a net connection - everything is in the cloud as the name suggests
• updates happened automagically. See screenshot below:

Didn't crop some of the screenshots, sorry. In case you're wondering the desktop behind the VM is the fluxbox window manager on xubuntu linux bones.

This type of greatly-simplified interface in the shot above was widely panned a few years ago when it was tried on Xandros:



Reminds me of how everyone mocked the tablet form factor until Saint Steve blessed the iPad. BTW, here's an iPad joke:

Q: how do you know if someone has an iPad?
A: they'll tell you.

True, and annoying.

This is what my little Eee notebook looks like these days. It's running Puppy 5.1.1, weighing in at ~130MB:

rockbox report: sandisk sansa e260

Got my hands on the e260, put it in normal USB mode (MSC "Mass Storage") and plugged it into my linux box.

Ran the installer (requires sudo or root access): it found the device. Pressed the Install Bootloader button (only necessary the first time) then the Install Rockbox button. I looked around and installed some themes while I was at it.

It is not an exaggeration to say from the time I opened the box to the time it booted up into Rockbox was less than 5 mins. Probably less than 4 mins. First track played? Eno's Music for Airports, Track 1, which I bought off Amazon in 2009.

Rockbox makes the stock firmware look like a child's plaything. Rockbox puts the user in control. I recommend rockboxing your player if it's in the list of supported devices.

Reminder: win98 was really, really bad

I threw win98 on that old laptop to see if the win wifi card would work, since I inherited the original win98 install/recovery CDs. Didn't work even under windows.

Things I forgot I hated:

• installing windows
• freaking long software keys you have to key in
  
• rebooting every time you change anything nontrivial.
  
• installing windows drivers
• that "invisible drummer" please wait animation
• "Windows has found new hardware..."

A modern linux vs. old windows isn't a fair fight, but get this: it took 2.5 hours to get win98 installed and browsing the net. The linux distro I put back on it after that was up in 13 minutes -- I timed it. Both installs including fdisk'ing the the hd clean and reformatting. The Win98 time would have been longer but I located/downloaded/burned the drivers on a seperate machine's CD burner while it was installing, so I wouldn't have to wait. I didn't even apply any service packs, which would have added more time.

DSL on a 233mHz laptop

I was given an old laptop yesterday to see if I could make it run. 233mHz, 64MB RAM, 4GB drive. Press releases suggest this was a $1,500 laptop in the late 90s.

It took a bit of guesswork and maneuvering but within a half-hour I had the little beast up and surfing the web on Damn Small Linux, a 50MB distro. DSL uses the 2.4 kernel so it's friendlier to older hardware.

The battery appears to be shot but but runs fine from mains.

OS geekout revisited

A while back I geeked out on several linux distros for the Eee.

I had trouble that day with two of the distros: DSL and Slitaz. I revisited both of them today (two versions of DSL) using the latest recommended release. The pics below are screencaps from the OSes running in a virtual machine on my Ubuntu linux workstation.

Damn Small Linux - Not (DSL-N)
DSL-N is a less minimalist version of DSL. It is not obsessed with keeping to the 50MB limit (see below) so it bloats to a heady 100MB (Windows 7, for comparison purposes, is ~2470MB; DSL-N is 24+ times smaller than Windows 7, and is, you know, free).

DSL-N was a real winner. Loaded like a champ in a virtual machine. I think it was about the same as DSL below, which was the fastest-running OS I've tested in a virtual machine thus far.

Nice, clean desktop, conky info in the upper-right-hand corner, and transparencies in the shell screen. Pretty, and exceptionally fast.

Runs the 2.6.x kernel.

dsl-n-01RC4.iso, ~100MB. Recommended.

Damn Small Linux (DSL)
A bit of explanation is in order. DSL was, AFAIK, the first practical micro-Linux distribution. The 50MB limit was to ensure the entire OS fit on one of those bizcard-sized CD-Rs. Remember those? A little smaller than a floppy (remember those?) DSL makes a few sacrifices to keep it in the 50MB range. For example:

1. DSL currently runs the 2.4 kernel instead of the bigger and more modern 2.6 kernel. Many of the other micro-linuxes choose differently.
2. Some of the icons are cartooney to save space and cpu time
   

DSL runs very quickly, as one might expect. The look/feel of the desktop is nowhere as polished as DSL-N. If a non-techie were looking at your screen you might feel like you have to explain DSL's ugly duckling appearance, while they might comment that DSL-N was pretty and impressive. Things like that can matter in the OS advocacy world.

dsl-4.4.10.iso, ~50MB. Recommended, but DSL-N above is probably better for many people.


slitaz
SliTaz failed to impress.

It stumbled during boot a bit and had to be coaxed along. It's a French distro, so it is understandable that much of the prompts are bilingual. But at a given point you give a language preference and it would be nice if the OS installer respected that.

slitaz-2.0.iso, ~30MB. Not currently recommened.


Tiny Core Linux
I am currently running TCL on my beloved Eee netbook. I like the "frog on a banana leaf" background because it looks like he's stuck on the LCD screen. Doesn't take much to amuse me.

tinycore_2.5.iso, 10MB (247 times smaller than Windows 7!). Not recommend for normal folk, but loads of geeky fun for masochists, hair shirt addicts, and compulsive experimenters.

A word about small linux distros in general

There are a few generalizations we can make about these small distributions:

1. You can run them as a LiveCD/LiveUSB, which is to say you can test-drive them without affecting your PC in any way. If you ever ran a Knoppix cd you know what I'm talking about.
   
2. You can run them in a virtual machine with VMware, Micro$oft Virtual PC, or the freeware QEMU. The nice thing about this is you can keep running your normal OS and not have to reboot off the usb/cd/dvd.
3. the utilities and shells are a smaller, unified busybox version.
   
4. There is generally one user on a micro-linux, and you use sudo to do root-like things
5. the software is generally limited to a relatively small subset of software specially packaged for the project. Generally a few hundred common apps rather than the thousands usually available for linux.
   
6. Very little software comes installed; you installed it using an application browser (you can think of it as an App Store, kinda, only it's all free).

Ok, enough dorkery for one night.

Epiphany

I am flirting with switching to Epiphany, a linux web browser that uses the gecko layout engine and a Gnome-derived front end. It seems to misbehave less than firefox.

Will let you know how it goes.

Rant: control freak companies

Let me me clear; companies (like Micro$oft and Apple) that try to lock customers to their hardware and software, as Apple is doing with iTunes and the Pre, will eventually fail.

Interoperability and openness will rule. This doesn't have to mean Free and Open Source Software, but it will certainly include it and learn from it.

"Markets are conversations" with between companies and customers, not commands, directives, or control freak, jerky manipulations by douchebag companies. Get a clue[train].

The whole quote is:

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

Geekout: different OSes on the Eee

The Eee is very happy to run OSes off flashdrive. And since much of the action on a netbook actually happens in the cloud you can play with LiveCD/LiveUSB OSes painlessly.

Here's what I've done so far:

* Windows XP (came installed on the Eee). 2700MB installed. XP will not run off flashdrive and has a heavy footprint, so it's gone. But it did work out of the box (OOB hereafter) at least as much as I tested. I understand one can use nLite against one's XP install disk to strip all the crap out and end up with a reasonable experience. 2.7GB. Holy crap.

WIN:
* Puppy Linux 4.2.1, 101MB installed. Everything other than wifi worked OOB. Installed madwifi-hal driver pet and all is well. This is my current OS. Understand that this fully functional OS is 1/27th the size of the XP installation. That's 3.7% of the size, people. WTH is going on at Micro$oft?

* TinyCore, 11MB installed (!). Holy crap, this booted in like 10 seconds. Ethernet worked fine. Fought with it for a couple of hours to get savefile persistence and the Wifi up. Did get it running, though. I felt like I won a fistfight. BTW, TCL boots so fast that some users have to artificially insert delays in order to let slower peripherals to initialize. Truly amazing, but a bit of a hairshirt. Not sure I'm man enough for it. Still, it's 1/10th the size of Puppy (and 1/270th the size of XP) . That's just crazy talk.

* pupeee-b4, 100MB installed. Based on Puppy Linux 3.x. Worked OOB.

* pupeee-4.2, 100MB installed. Based on Puppy Linux 4.2. Worked OOB.

LOSE:
* Easy Peasey: 900MB installed. would not finish loading kernel image.
* Damn Small Linux: 50MB installed. Would not finish live boot.
* slitaz-eeepc: 25MB installed. Would not finish live boot. Hung at "configuring ath0". Known issue.

Honorable Mention:
* Eeebuntu: 500MB installed. Completely gorgeous. Slow load. Too frakking big.

* Boxpup 4.1: 85MB installed. Based on the lightweight, fluxbox-like OpenBox window manager. Very nice, but seems to lag further behind Puppy than the Pupeee variant.


You have been geekified.

Proverbs 26:11 and Microsoft

Like a dog returns to its vomit...

The newer netbooks are perfect for my needs, but I don't want to end up with an operating system that will soon be obsolete, and I want to stay with Microsoft.

1. I don't want to get stuck with an obsolete OS.
2. Microsoft obsoletes OSes to force you into buying another one.
3. Therefore, I want to stay with Microsoft.

WTF?

You want to stay with a company who does exactly what you don't want it to do?

I am reminded of the common definition of insanity.

Seen here.

eee!

I do not have a laptop. I avoided buying one for the last few years because I had a work-provisioned one, but I had been glancing at those tiny EEE PCs.


I like the idea of ultraportable "netbooks" because of the solid state storage, the small size, and the rabid developer/user community.

Buy.com is dumping some of the last-gen 16MB Eee 900 refurb units for under $200 shipped so I pulled the trigger on it. Comes w/XP but I plan on putting the tiny/superfast Puppy Linux on it. Since Puppy (or "puppeee", as the Eee variant is called) is entirely RAM-resident I picked up the max 2GB ram for $20.

Will keep you posted.

Sync your smartphone/PPC with Google Sync

Right now it only does Calendar and Contacts, but that is pretty cool. That means I don't have to keep a Windoze around for syncing duties. Works great. When they start syncing Tasks then my smartphone life will be complete.

I use synce to move files back and forth between the linux workstation and the phone. Doesn't work great. No wildcard support, so when you are moving files you have to do some shell scripting to build the list of files, strip out the path and other data, etc. Works, but barely.

Landline

It appears we are joining the crowd of folks who do not have a landline in the house. Before we moved the phone sat there and kept the answering machine company.

Every once in a while we'd get phonecalls from telemarketers but that was about it. Both the wife and I carry cellphones everywhere and generally only call each other. So when we are at home no one is calling anyone. Even then I only had a landline because at that time it was difficult to get a naked DSL circuit.

So now I'm running TW cable broadband through a tasty-hacked WRT54GL linux-based router running OpenWRT. Functional Quality of Service manipulation in a $50 router. Awesome and geeky. Awesomely geeky. Which I've tuned for VoIP.

Which brings me to the current topic. I'm a latecomer to Skype, but it loaded and runs fine on my 1ghz linux box. I sprung the $3 for the upgraded version that lets you call US/Canada numbers for free. Neat.

Since the Dear Wife luvs her some old-style phones, I ordered a box off Amazon that appears to let you jack a normal phone into your Skype feed. I've got a cordless phone that we'll press back into duty. I'll let you know how it goes.