If this is the revolution, I’m out

I don’t know if I should call this a trend or just an occurrence, but for some reason I find it distressing that some people are forcing others to use Linux, as a means of converting them. And on top of that, are suggesting other Linux fans do the same.

Here’s one example; I can think of others but they date back a while into the past and it’s harder to find them. One from a month or two ago mentioned a similar effort: Surreptitiously replacing XP with Ubuntu styled to look the same, in an effort to force people out of Windows. (I can remember one from a year or so ago where someone actually hijacked an entire series of computers in a public library, installing Ubuntu over top and eradicating whatever system was originally in place. What a nightmare.)

Now I’ll admit, I occasionally chase an IceWM theme that looks remarkably like the Windows Classic theme out of XP. And there are some quick and painless ways to make Ubuntu look identical to XP. That’s different. That’s changing the look to suit the user.

And I give away dual-boot machines quite often. I have in the past given away machines with only Linux installed, knowing full well that the recipient will erase the drive within minutes of getting it home, and put whatever pirated version of Windows on it. But I don’t consider it prosletysing, I consider it demonstrating that the machine is fully functional.

Tricking the user into using Linux (in some cases after they expressly turned it down). … What can I say? I know with absolute certainty that of course it happens, and it may well even work successfully, for all I know.

But how do you preach freedom and sharing to someone whose first experience with Linux was a complete opposite of that? How can you enjoy a sense of community with someone who was forced to join it? Where’s the logic in saying, “It’s free, it’s open, it’s faster, it’s more secure. … Now use it, because I said so.”

I suppose it’s none of my business. But if the tide of public opinion is turned, and Ubuntu users are shifting from passive to aggressive, then I would like to step out of the revolution now. I don’t agree with any effort to force someone into our community; those aren’t the terms I came to learn when I started using Ubuntu and Linux. Nobody tricked me into getting here, and I wouldn’t trick someone else into it either.

Respect, community, sharing, freedom — including the freedom to say, “No.”

Lubuntu looks promising

Pictures like these make me happy.

 

I’ve been seeding the Lubuntu beta for a day or two, and of course, I had to try it out. It doesn’t look a whole lot different from, say, a plain-Jane installation of Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop installed.

But the beauty of this is perhaps that it is an Ubuntu-sanctioned (is that the correct term?) project running as a live disc on a machine with only 256Mb of memory, and it’s quite usable. That alone is worth applauding. The last time I could do that with Ubuntu was … three years ago? Maybe never.

When the final version is complete, I want to give it a complete shakedown. There are some obvious quirks right now, and it doesn’t seem to follow the Ubuntu style too closely yet (not that it has to; the earliest versions of Xubuntu were quite eccentric, to be nice). I’m sure all of this will come through in time.

Right now it’s just fun to think that there’s another option for underpowered machines. And it looks like it will do well.

A few on-site changes

I’ve made a few small changes on the blog here, not that any of it is really worth mentioning, except that it might incur other, future changes.

First, foremost and probably saddest, is that I finally dropped Kazehakase off my list of software I endorse. “Endorse” is probably a strong word; “suggest” is probably better.

The rumors were true and whatever progress there was with Kazehakase seems to have tapered off a while ago. The last update was around May of last year, and I couldn’t find a way to see if there was any activity on the mailing lists; the links all appeared dead.

It’s a shame: Kazehakase was one of my favorite lightweight browsers. It did a lot of things Firefox couldn’t do — or at least, couldn’t do without the help of an extension — and had its own unique style. But at the same time, it was fairly easy to learn, quick to configure and had enough options to make it quite flexible.

You can still use it, of course — that’s the great part of open-source software, it’s out there and will be for a long time. And it’s not the only option: NetSurf is fantastic for lightweight machines. There’s Midori, which is WebKit-based and quite good. Dillo2 is an utterly amazing piece of work. uzbl is guaranteed to astound. There are others.

So I don’t cry over Kazehakase. I see it as a chance to look for something new.

The other changes are not so dramatic — I trimmed a few (actually, a lot) of the blogs off the side of this site. Quite a few had gone stale … something which had not gone unnoticed.

Originally I kept those links as a convenience to myself, but over time I find I pick-and-read at random a lot less. In the future I’ll probably allow that list to thin itself out, and stop adding them over time. And to be honest, if you just want to jump from site to site for Linux news and information, there are better sources than my humble home page.

But the offer I’ve made repeatedly in the past still stands: If you think you would like your site listed there I’m more than willing. If it goes stale or deviates too far from “Linux” as its core topic, then I might have to trim it away.

But by all means, let me know. Cheers.

Mingetty and dash

I spend a lot of time poking around after lightweight applications and even more time trimming down custom kernels, so I suppose it makes sense that I should be seeking out other core utilities to make this machine more usable.

bash and agetty are the first two in the crosshairs this time; I suspected one or both could be supplanted and shave a little more memory from the total I incur through day-to-day use.

I was both right and wrong, in a manner of speaking. For substitutes I tried both dash and mingetty, as a shell replacement and as a getty, respectively.

Since it was the python memory script that started this little adventure, here’s what it looks like with dash and mingetty running in Crux.

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used	Program 

  0.0 KiB +  10.0 KiB =  10.0 KiB	dhcpcd
  0.0 KiB +  11.0 KiB =  11.0 KiB	startx
  0.0 KiB +  11.0 KiB =  11.0 KiB	mingetty
  0.0 KiB +  12.0 KiB =  12.0 KiB	udevd
  0.0 KiB +  17.5 KiB =  17.5 KiB	xinit
  0.0 KiB +  27.5 KiB =  27.5 KiB	vim
  0.0 KiB +  30.0 KiB =  30.0 KiB	hnb
 40.0 KiB +  11.5 KiB =  51.5 KiB	init
  0.0 KiB +  57.5 KiB =  57.5 KiB	musca
  0.0 KiB +  63.0 KiB =  63.0 KiB	mc
112.0 KiB +  94.0 KiB = 206.0 KiB	centerim
124.0 KiB +  90.0 KiB = 214.0 KiB	dash (5)
288.0 KiB +  69.5 KiB = 357.5 KiB	htop
328.0 KiB +  48.0 KiB = 376.0 KiB	alpine
516.0 KiB + 133.0 KiB = 649.0 KiB	calcurse
  1.0 MiB +  68.0 KiB =   1.1 MiB	Xorg
  1.0 MiB + 109.0 KiB =   1.1 MiB	urxvtd
---------------------------------
                          4.3 MiB
=================================

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used	Program

Gasp! Xorg is taking up 1.1MiB this time! I must be doing somthing wrong. …

mingetty, if you compare it with agetty from last time, is only a teeny improvement in terms of memory footprint. Eleven kilobytes versus 11.5 is nothing to crow about. On the other hand, it was fairly easy to put into place, with only an adjustment to the /etc/inittab file to trigger it instead of agetty.

And since it technically evaporates when the user logs in, I suppose it’s not really getting in the way. On the plus side, it seems a little quicker on the draw; I can’t measure or quantify that though, so I probably shouldn’t even say it.

dash, however, is both a blessing and a curse. As you can see above, it’s considerably smaller than bash, with about 43KiB per instance (roughly calculated) against 185KiB for bash. On a machine with only 16MiB to spare, that’s a considerable sum. And all the more important when 99 percent of the applications are terminal based.

On the other hand, dash is somehow … eccentric, to pick a word that doesn’t sound too loaded. It’s easy enough to install, and I selected it as a shell of choice for both root and the user accounts by way of the usermod -s /bin/dash command. Maybe that was overkill, but it worked right. (I also edited a few scripts to pick dash over bash, just because.)

But there is one feature that I am used to in bash that catches me every time in dash — autocompletion. I smack the tab key as a matter of course almost any time I move a file or start a script, and dash can’t do that (I don’t think ).

So I find that a little grating. dash also has trouble interpreting escape characters and some of the PS1 codes that bash uses, which means my terminal prompt became a messy string. And there’s no history, which is kind of a good thing to me.

Most of all, I found I couldn’t use dash alone, with bash uninstalled. I kept my path variables in place and removed bash, but dash claimed it couldn’t find anything — startx, certain commands, and so forth — even when the prompt was sitting in the same directory. Replacing bash corrected that problem; perhaps there was another way.

I am still only into the first day or so of using either dash or mingetty, and these things take time to figure out. I’ll probably keep them around so long as they don’t become encumbrances or prove somehow less functional.

After all, saving only half of a kilobyte on one, while suffering without autocompletion plus the need to keep around bash on the other … might not warrant keeping them around.

Unsolved mysteries: X in 1Mb

I must first apologize for the short span of silence over the last few days; the end of the month brought a few real-life issues that needed resolved.

When last I typed, I mentioned that python script that encapsulates the memory usage for a machine, organizing it into a neat bundle. As someone mentioned, and as htop confirms for me, memory use by X is exceptionally slender for this machine — topping out around 1Mb or so.

I don’t know why that is, but I do have some theories … none of which I am in a position to authoritatively prove or disprove. My own observations though, tell me a few things.

First, the size and weight of X is going to change with each distro, since the method for building it is going to differ with each. That’s sort of a “cop-out” answer, if I am correctly paraphrasing some of my American friends, but it is probably a safe bet that Xorg in Crux is probably going to be less demanding than in Ubuntu, just as an example.

And I can probably suggest that compiling a custom version of X, with flags appropriate to the hardware (which is what I usually do) is going to run easier than a generic one too. That might be a bit weak for a reason, but you never know. Or at least, I never know.

But also keep in mind that X in that post is a year-old version. Over the past year, X has incurred a lot of bloat — or what I would call bloat — and that too can come into play. It’s almost preferable to me to run an outdated version of X than to put up with hal and dbus and so forth, on an old machine.

After that, I should probably mention that I comment out some of the modules from my xorg.conf file, although I don’t know what effect that has on the running size of X. A 13-year-old graphics card doesn’t have much use for things like glx, so I take those out of play.

In addition, I know that the memory footprint for X differs from machine to machine, which says to me that hardware comes into play too. The amount of space taken up by X on my Inspiron is quite a bit more than the Pentium, although it can do more too.

But if hardware is a factor, so is how you use the hardware; a screen resolution of 800×600 seems to require less space than one twice as large. That was one of the things I tried as a test measure a few months ago, when I originally noticed the ultralight X in action.

And I suppose if all of those other things can influence the size of X, then perhaps the driver you use, and even the kernel you build could likewise be factors. I don’t doubt for a second that the proprietary nvidia driver on my Inspiron is chunkier than any of the open-source ones, and whether or not my custom kernel comes into play … I can’t be sure.

Like I said: I am no expert, and I’m not in a position to test or even troubleshoot any of these theories. (And to be honest, I’m only obliquely interested in finding out the answers.) There is a chat channel for X at #xorg on freenode, as well as the hardware-specific driver channels at #ati and #nvidia. And of course, the mailing lists are an option too. Anyone who answers will be far more qualified than me.

But if you do find out how X can squeeze into 1Mb, please explain. I have some floppy discs in the closet, and I find it amusing that they could apparently hold graphical system on them, with space left over.