Not with a whimper but a bang

There are times in life when you have to accept the prevailing winds, recognize the signs, acknowledge that there may indeed be higher powers at work in the universe, and that their plans may take precedence over your own.

I was willing to forgive a row of suddenly lifeless keys, or the rattling fan, or even the thixotropic 4200rpm hard drive. But the list of hindrances mounted quickly, and even in its last burst of beauty, it was obviously time for the Celeron to retire.

That fan rattle has only gotten worse over time, and the spindle or casing or whatever is loose is clacking like a pebble in a blender. At some point soon I really expect it to break completely, although that might be a blessing considering the quiet that would probably follow. Probably.

And without a long string of function and number keys at the top of the keyboard, it’s tough to use. That Arch system I set up a day ago to show off fbterm et al. took a long time to get into place, because I couldn’t use some of the keys I needed to configure stuff. It’s difficult to point your network card at a router when the station ID includes the number “7,” but your 7 key isn’t responding.

To add insult to injury, the CD drive is kicking back errors now, and it’s usually on CDs I am sure are error-free. Discs I have used in two or three machines in recent history are suddenly suspect, like a Debian install disc. But it’s never the same package or part of installation that reports an error — it’s random and inconsistent. Hmm.

Worst of all though, my Debian Etch boot floppy is now jammed in the drive. I don’t know if I should be angry at the loss of the floppy or the sudden futility of the entire floppy drive. I know what you’re thinking: “It’s a floppy drive.” But hey, that was more useful than you would think.

I admit I bought the machine looking for an underdog, and I got what I paid for. Sound is weak, the hard drive is slow and 64Mb of memory is useful only to someone like me. Just about the only redeeming quality — and this alone is rather surprising — is that the screen is in such good condition.

My brief, two-day solo flight with this machine reminded me that a solid large-size screen with a decent resolution is quite pleasant to look at. My day-to-day computer use is generally with porthole 800×600 machines or with 1024×768 machines compressed into 12″ frames, so this was a nice change.

I had a lot of plans for it, but I feel no remorse. It’s a half-eaten machine with only a few redeeming points, and the month or two it lived with me was a nice swan song. It almost tasted a little fame too, if grafting together a terminal environment with wallpaper decorations and drawing a few clicks can be called “fame.”

It’s time to heed the signs, acknowledge the greater plan for the universe, and set this one free. Who knows, maybe someone wiser and more patient than I will discover it, and it will go on to become even more famous.

Not particularly worried

I noticed a few weeks ago that there would be no support for pre-i686 machines in Ubuntu 10.10, and to be honest, I had no reaction. And a short while ago, when bug reports started showing up on Launchpad about incompatibility with new i586 systems, I was likewise nonplussed. And even now that the issue is getting a little more attention, and a few possible solutions are being discussed, my level of interest is hovering somewhere between “meager” and “mild.”

That might sound odd coming from a person who uses a true Pentium as the main system in the house, and relies on that 14-year-old computer to do everything (short of watching movies or writing to DVDs ) every day.

But really, I’ve installed Ubuntu in earlier releases on the same machine, and the results are likewise “meager” or “mild.” Ubuntu doesn’t stand as a contender in my book when discussing alternatives for hardware from a dozen years ago. Even in its sparsest forms, the sheer chunk of Ubuntu x.xx discounts it from much of anything before a Pentium III, in my humble opinion.

So if the Ubuntu party train stonewalls the pre-i686 crowd, I really don’t see any problem with that. It’s rather like saying my VCR won’t read DVDs. I wouldn’t consider putting a DVD in my VCR anyway. It’s not a very good idea.

Of course, there are some real repercussions to that choice, and one of them is the slew of low-power devices — not least of which is the OLPC — which are suddenly out in the cold if their owners want to run Ubuntu on them.

But then again, I owned an OLPC, and to be honest, I wouldn’t put Ubuntu on that either (I did, with only lukewarm results). There were a lot of things to like about the OLPC, but my first choice in a distro for a little green machine would not be the purple, orange and black behemoth. I can’t speak for every i586 device out there, but for some reason, the idea of Ubuntu 10.04 on an OLPC conjures an image of Jabba the Hutt riding a bicycle. …

I’m one of those people that believes there are distros that are well suited to some hardware, and there are distros that are ill-suited to certain hardware. If you’re running a new quad-core system with a full 12Gb of RAM and dual video cards then you might be able to boot Gnome Ubuntu 10.10 in under a minute.

But if you’re running something slower than that, you might want to consider downscaling to something a little more sane. There are plenty of options for software to match your hardware, and I would suggest something that allows you to not only avoid the incredible bloat that comes with Ubuntu, but also allows you to take advantage of the power your machine has. It works for me.

Testing a theory of usability

I made a comment a few months ago about conceivably downscaling everything and learning to live off the fat of the land … plus a 300Mhz Pentium II-era machine. Well, it’s time to put my money where my mouth is.

For the record, the computer you see in that picture is a Celeron, running at 300Mhz with 64Mb of memory. The hard drive is 4Gb and it’s running Arch Linux with screen-vs and fbterm. The usual array of software is installed, with very few exceptions (I think I left out freecell ). This machine has a single USB1.1 port, is using the finicky Corega ath5k-based wireless card and I have a CD reader as well.

It’s definitely the technology of the last century; I had a faster computer than this before the dials turned on 2000. And in addition to being something of a thumbsucker, I have the added joy of a row of lifeless keys which means the teeny-tiny external keyboard is in the picture too. Luckily I have an ancient USB hub that I got nobody-knows-where, so I can expand on that one port, to a small degree.

If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you’ll remember that, about a year and a half ago, I shoved everything into the closet and ran at 100Mhz for a week. This is not an attempt to reproduce that experiment, particularly because after that stunt, living at 300Mhz isn’t even a tiny challenge. This is really just a test run of sorts, to get an answer to my theory that 300Mhz would be a bottom-of-the-barrel compromise between practical and minimal, for me at least.

And this is nowhere near as spartan an arrangement as before. I still have my Thinkpad on the other side of the room, playing music and seeding torrents, and I control that through ssh. I will still be checking this site with another computer, to make sure no one is dumping spam image links in here (I learned my lesson ). And I have my addiction to Warzone 2100 v2.3 to feed.

But maybe for a day, maybe for two or three days, or maybe for a week, I’ll give this a try. A banged up, beaten down, ugly, cantankerous and somewhat functional Celeron with a dozen years of service under its belt might not be a dream machine for most people, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do something useful around the house. …

In praise of PLoP

The shortest posts I seem to have are always for the tools that are the quickest, most efficient and most effective. PLoP Bootmanager is one of those things, and for that reason, I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about it.

A long time ago I kept Smart BootManager on hand, for times when a machine wouldn’t boot from a CD. Any more though, PLoP has supplanted it, and won a place in my little CD binder.

It’s mostly useful these days because I would rather not burn a bunch of CDs to get the Celeron to start. Naturally (or I guess I should say, originally) it lacks the ability to boot from a USB drive, but with a PLoP CD, I can boot from USB, floppy or any other media I can stick in the machine.

And on top of that, it has a cool techno font, a starfield background and fading zooming menus. (And yes, you can customize its behavior.) What could be cooler than that?

Like everything, it’s not 100 percent perfect; in the past I have used PLoP to boot an external DVDRW over USB, but for example, with the Celeron, it doesn’t quite work. That I blame on the hardware though, and not PLoP itself.

But it’s something that works so well that there’s little I can say in addition. I recommend downloading and burning it to a CD, and keeping it in your closet for those times when you have an old Pentium II that needs a little coaxing. It’s a great tool to have and will save you mounds of time and money on CDs, and both of those things can only be good.

Some commandlinefu.com favorites

There are worse things I could be doing with my time than sifting through commandlinefu.com, looking for diamonds among the diamonds. I have a few favorites, although the word “favorite” doesn’t really make sense here; it’s more like a list of commands that, after discovering them, I’ve become emotionally attached to. In other words, these are the ones I tend to re-use most often.

sudo !!

Now to be perfectly honest, I knew this one long before I saw it at the top of that stack, so maybe it doesn’t count. In the days when I was shifting from Ubuntu to Arch, this became exceptionally helpful — and it still does. To be painfully honest, I don’t use sudo much when I’m using Arch or Crux, and so any time I jump back to Ubuntu, I find myself relying on this again.

Regardless of your opinion on the whole root-vs-sudo affair, it’s good to know that you can save yourself a little time with sudo-double-bang.

cp filename{,.bak}

This is a miracle time saver. For as many times as I’ve wanted to just duplicate a file without taking the time to type the file name over again, or tell a cumbersome graphical file manager to copy and then past the same thing … this is perfect. No more keystrokes than it takes to type out the name anyway (hooray for tab completion), plus four or five extra. Genius.

!whatever:p

With or without the :p trailer, this is a useful command. I use CTRL+R a lot to search backwards through my command history, but this is actually quicker, if I’m certain I know what that last command was.

I suppose that’s where the :p trailer comes in after all: If I’m not sure I’m grabbing the right command, I can at least check first, before executing the wrong thing. Oh, and notice that there’s no space between the “whatever” and the :p. For a little while there, I thought my system was broken. …

I’m not going to bother trickling through any others, because the site itself does a better job than I can. And if you want to know the how and why, it’s worth looking at Peter Krumins’ blog, which breaks many of them apart and inspects their shiny parts. Or something like that. …

A quick swing past autofs

If I were to cross off an imaginary list of things that most modern desktops “do,” automounting would be about the only thing left that I haven’t really conquered. Other things like international keyboards, switching languages and even mimicking a decade-old desktop layout are all old hat. But automounting I just don’t bother with.

Part of that is personal; I am not the kind of person who wants to stick a USB drive into a machine and see an icon pop up on the desktop. Just in principle that seems to cross over the line between my sense of control and allowing the computer to decide what is best for itself. Never send a machine to do a human’s work.

Out of rabid curiosity though I took a look at the Arch Wiki page on autofs the other day, and came away satisfied … for the most part.

Setting it up was very easy, with only a couple of configuration files to manage, and no real challenge when using something like Arch. (I left out kernel support for autofs when I built the kernels on my Crux systems, so I didn’t bother with those. ) In fact, I am afraid I don’t have anything to add to what you see on the Arch wiki, in terms of how to configure it. Start to finish, the information there worked perfectly for me.

For the most part. USB flash drives, SD cards and CDROMs all worked without a hitch, being accessible within seconds of insertion. On the other hand, hard drives in USB enclosures — which make up the majority of what I use for external storage — seemed to be ignored. I am not sure what the difference is that would make a 2Gb flash drive “detectable,” and a 4Gb hard drive in a USB casing “undetectable,” but for my own purposes that was a bit of a deal-breaker.

And I didn’t add my nfs servers to autofs, preferring to keep them as manual mount points. So in that direction, I don’t have any guidance. But if you want a method of automounting that doesn’t require an entire desktop environment to prop it up, it might serve as a solution.

As far as making an icon pop up on your desktop though … you’re on your own for that.

P.S.: Score one more point for the Arch Wiki, which is still simply the best place to go when you need information. …

Compiling effortlessly … sort of

It took me a while, but I finally ironed out my upgrade from kernel 2.6.30.7 to 2.6.34 this morning, on my Pentium machine. Ordinarily I don’t wait so long to make a jump, but things were going very well with 2.6.30.7, and since there is rarely any good reason to shift up, I let it stagnate for a while.

But fear of obsolescence is a powerful thing, and realizing I had a kernel that dated back the better part of a year made me a little queasy. I know in the back of my mind that a 14-year-old machine has little to benefit between a kernel written in September 2009 and one written a few weeks ago, but it seemed worth the effort.

Not that it was a huge effort though. Usually I roll configuration between kernels with make oldconfig, but this time I started from a clean page, and pruned out all the unnecessary parts. It took me a little while to fine-tune the framebuffer and a network parts, and the sound was the last thing I needed to fix. And now it’s done.

The odd part of the entire experience, and the reason why I mention it here, is that while the machine is slowly and faithfully correcting the modules I set, there’s no slowdown or lag or performance hit. That’s strange to me because on other hardware, for example my long-running Inspiron, compiling or building a kernel more or less precluded using the machine outside of very trivial tasks.

But this Pentium barely notices. Memory use peaks around 22-29Mb (alongside all the other software I normally run) and the CPU is pegged at 100 percent of course, but I can still type at normal speed, switch windows in screen or ttys at the console, manage remote systems with ssh, etc., etc., and not notice any stutter or lapse.

I wonder why that is?

Of course, this is all moot point because it still takes 20 minutes to compile a single sound module, and most of a day and night to build an entire kernel. Praising it for not lagging while it meanders through the chore of building new software is like praising a snail for traveling in a straight line for a day. You’re still frighteningly slow, and hardly covered any distance.

But it does mean that troubleshooting is a little easier, even if it takes longer. I can wait 20 minutes for a module to build, see if it works, and then go back to what I was doing without waiting or needing to switch machines.

And all that being said, if there are a large number of packages to update or if there is a particularly large program to build (such as gcc), I yank the drive and connect it over USB to the fast computer. That’s why I bought the fast one, and I’m not such a glutton for punishment that I have to build software for days and days at 120Mhz. There are limits to my fanaticism.

The Code Monkey script project

Tom Swartz is heading up a small project called Code Monkey, which collects useful scripts into a package. As it stands there are about 10 small scripts in Code Monkey, ranging from bash one-liners, to python scripts that inject Google Reader subscriptions into conky, to a world sunlight map wallpaper fetcher.

The scripts aren’t necessarily intended for command-line only use, although one or two, like the rsync backup script, could run either in a terminal emulator or completely free of a graphical environment.

Tom is looking for suggestions or ideas, and if you have one you’d like to submit (or if you just want to see what he has collected already), you could contact him through the Launchpad page for Code Monkey, or probably catch his eye with a post to this thread in the Ubuntu Forums.

Three floppy-based distros

This might sound strange, but I generally don’t endorse the floppy distros that are still available here and there on the Internet, and as a general rule, still work fine. I don’t hold any prejudice toward them, but I find that they’re out of date, intended for specific hardware arrangements, or just a bit too … personalized.

I can vouch for two or three as possibilities though, if you’re working with hardware that is terrifically old, or extremely underpowered. Usually these are offered as solutions to machines with very, very little memory (4Mb or 8Mb) , and if that’s the case they will probably be lifesavers.

muLinux is mentioned quite often as a possibility for older machines, and actually, if you have a working CD drive, this might be a better solution for you.

I had to use the ISO version of muLinux 14.0 because the installer scripts packaged in the floppy version wouldn’t run for me on an Arch-based system. The ISO version was no disappointment though, and technically you’ll probably get more in that 68Mb than you would from floppy after floppy.

muLinux has several versions with an array of add-ons that will get you closer to what you want the machine to do. Everything is text-driven from the startup, but there is support for an early graphical desktop, and the console system has a lot of software that you’ll probably find useful. Once it’s up and running, it can clone itself to a hard drive, and if you cross your fingers, it will boot up into a native system.

It’s still rather old though, with the 2.0.36 kernel and gcc 2.7.2.1. If you install it you might have some luck bringing everything up to current, but that might be a huge, uphill task.

For a strictly floppy-based distro, BasicLinux is a good example. One floppy boots the system, and the other is a compressed file tree. Memory use is trivial, with only about 4Mb or so taken up.

Amazingly this also has a graphical desktop that will give you JWM and a few utilities, to include (of all things) a slideshow presentation tool (works great on this machine, too). So if you really want to score some geek points, you can boot this up on the dual-core laptop in your office, and give the budget report on the overhead projector with BasicLinux.

It’s still quite a bit out of date though, so it’s usefulness beyond budget meetings, troubleshooting or data recovery is shaky … and considering that much has changed in file systems and hardware, a 2.2.26 kernel might not be able to get to that hard drive like you want.

On the other hand, this one has strong PCMCIA support, so if you’re riding the information wave on an old NE2000 network card, like I am, then this will be great for checking e-mail or looking up technical specifications.

Probably the one floppy distro that I would consider keeping around is blueflops, and it’s for that same reason — hardware support. Another two-floppy adventure, this one lists quite a few network cards as options, particularly for desktops. And since blueflops has the 2.6.18-ck1 kernel, I would almost consider using that as a jumping-off point for upgrading to a current kernel. Almost.

blueflops says it will run on an i386 with 8Mb and swap, and I’ve tried it on machines with only 16Mb and gotten fair results. The software list isn’t as long as some of the others, but it will probably get you online and from there, you can decide on your direction.

For my own part, I have had much better luck getting older machines running with customized, transplanted systems built with newer software, than by bending someone else’s floppy-based system to my will. There’s no reason not to try these things though, since it could possibly be what keeps a machine out of a landfill. And hey, maybe a current, up-to-date floppy-based distro can be my next project. …