One small Crux bug

I ran into a bug the yesterday, while I was building the Crux machine with Openbox on it.

Since I have been compiling everything off that machine and then syncing the ports tree over USB, I discovered a little quirk with prt-get and/or pkgadd regarding prebuilt packages. The easiest way to explain it is to show it.

bash-4.1# prt-get depinst alpine
prt-get: installing /usr/ports/local/alpine
=======> Package '/usr/ports/local/alpine/alpine#2.00-1.pkg.tar.gz' is up to date.
prt-get: installing alpine 2.00-1
pkgadd: could not install usr/bin/rpload: Write failed
pkgadd: could not install usr/man/man1/pilot.1.gz: Write failed
pkgadd: could not install usr/man/man1/rpdump.1.gz: Write failed
pkgadd: could not install usr/man/man1/rpload.1.gz: Write failed
pkgadd: could not install usr/man/man1/alpine.1.gz: Write failed
pkgadd: could not install usr/man/man1/pico.1.gz: Write failed
/sbin/ldconfig: Writing of cache data failed: No space left on device

-- Packages installed
alpine

Obviously alpine isn’t installed. pkgadd ran out of space on the drive, and in spite of displaying errors, it’s either returning a “success” code or prt-get is displaying the “success” message. If memory serves, this really only happens with precompiled packages.

I posted a bug here, and then Johannes Winkelmann suggested mentioning it in connection with pkgadd, since prt-get really just reports what pkgadd tells it.

X and Openbox in 12Mb

I have not been lax in testing distros with the Mebius, but it is becoming rare to find a system that will start up effectively on 32Mb of memory, let alone install to the disk.

But I do have another miracle of modern science to show: an i586-flavor Crux system running Openbox and Xorg 7.4′s server 1.8.2 on a measly 12Mb of memory, no swap, after a cold boot.

The python memory script I mentioned a year ago confirms that, although it does put usage closer to 14Mb. I never know if I should be mentally subtracting for the space taken up to run it under python.

No matter. That’s not what is important; what’s important is that I thought only Debian could pull off this stunt, but now there are two contenders.

Memory usage is definitely lower in this rendition than in Debian, and start times from Grub to the desktop are under 16 seconds for a 150Mhz machine … with a somewhat quicker hard drive in it, so don’t tout that. Not bad at all, considering some of the speediest Arch machines I have are doing the same.

But it’s also important to note that I build Crux systems with kernels so sparse you can drive a car through them, and without an initramfs, etc., to wait on, things are considerably faster on the startup.

The standard Xorg trident driver was a loss, as was the kernel’s tridentfb module in the 2.6.35.1 kernel. With both the Xorg xvesa and fbdev drivers installed I get an acceptable 16-bit 800×600 graphical desktop.

And it’s not as much of a memory hog as I usually make it out to be. In both screenshots you can see X squished into less than 6Mb of space, which isn’t as good as this was, but it’s still considerable.

Perhaps that is another bonus to using older computers — considerably smaller demands on X.

Openbox is running the desktop in those screenshots too, and while that’s no miracle, it is amazing to me that GTK2 applications like Leafpad or gcolor2 or even obconf run without undue hassle. Yes, everything is still ugly slow, just because 150Mhz is ugly slow. But at least it’s not as bad as GTK2 was at 16Mb.

And because someone is going to ask, here it is:

Yeah, it took me almost half an hour to get that screenshot, so enjoy it. And the screen artifacts are there because it takes 20-25 seconds for a redraw for Firefox, with continuous swapping to the disk. I’d have to time-delay scrot by about two minutes to get rid of that.

For practical use though, I think the standard array of console programs inside rxvt-unicode’s daemon would be an improvement. And maybe dmenu and Musca.

Regardless, this is quite remarkable in its current form. I will continue to sift through some of the other “lightweight” distros and see what I can find, but sometimes it’s just a better idea to build it yourself.

P.S.: Sound is still screwy though. …

VICE keybindings and Berzerk Redux

I have been using VICE as an emulator for nigh on a decade now, and in spite of that, I found out something new about it the other day.

One “shortcoming” that I always regretted in the application was its lack of configurable keystrokes for joysticks, in the xaw-interface. The version built with Gnome dependencies is able to assign new keys to joystick actions, which is important on laptops because the default keys are knucklebusters, what with the NumLk and Fn-keys and triple-pressing and so forth.

What I didn’t realize was that yes, those configuration menus are only available if VICE is built with the Gnome interface, but VICE doesn’t need those dependencies to run.

In other words, if you build VICE with the Gnome UI, you can install it in systems that don’t use Gnome, and still access those menus. To wit:

Well I’ll be darned. All this time I was kicking the wall wishing I could easily assign different keys to VICE, and the net effect was only my banged-up toes.

That alone isn’t worth mentioning in a post, so here’s further proof that the C64 is the immortal computer system: Berzerk Redux, in the 1.10 release.

 
 

Yes, Berzerk is nothing new, and so mentioning a version released as recently as last month doesn’t do much to shake up the world of computer gaming. But if you liked the original stand-up arcade game you’ll probably like this one too. It’s tight to the original, with similar shapes and game play but with much improved sound effects and speech.

I don’t remember playing Berzerk on the C64 as much as the Atari 2600, but this is a good diversion for half an hour or so. And the beauty of it is, now you can manage your keybindings, even if you don’t have Gnome in place.

P.S.: Before you Ubuntu users try installing this out of the repositories, take a look at this.

How to use teapot like a pro

I like to make a big deal out of console applications that really are applications — that actually have a workable “GUI” beyond just a command and a few switches. It’s part of my quest in life: To dispel the irrational repulsion many people brag (yes, brag) about when they discuss using the console with Linux.

It’s been a while since I really walked neatly through a program though, and I feel I should do that with teapot. teapot is a very useful, very lightweight spreadsheet that I like a lot. I don’t need it very often though, and so each time I pick it up I have to relearn it again.

But on top of that, I have mentioned Oleo in the past, which is a very good console spreadsheet. But it’s not the only one out there, isn’t really to my liking, and there are things about teapot that are worth looking at.

The first trick might be getting it installed, since it isn’t in every distro — Ubuntu, for example, draws a blank if you ask the package search pages about it. AUR has it, with the caveat that it’s for “mathy” people, which I don’t dispute. It’s a spreadsheet, so you can expect to see some numbers. I know some people for whom that would be enough to be called “mathy.”

If you decide to build it from scratch, you can take comfort in the thought that teapot only needs ncurses to get going. So I’m guessing with 99 percent certainty that (a), you can build it without too much hassle, and (b), it’s as light as a feather when in action. And that last part is a fact confirmed by htop.

Getting started is easy enough. Enter teapot at the prompt, and you should get something that looks like this.

Fair enough, it looks like a spreadsheet. We were expecting that much.

Except … hold on: The columns aren’t labeled with letters. We have numbers across and numbers down. That’s a little unusual.

Yes, that alone is probably enough to either intrigue you or dismay you — teapot breaks convention by using numbers in both directions. Now the un-”mathy” people in the crowd are probably already considering panicking, but the “mathy” ones might suddenly be interested.

Because it means that there is an x-y coordinate for each cell — and in fact, most of teapot’s instructions and formulas rely on that to work. And best of all for the “mathy” types, there is an unseen z dimension at work here, so the layers beneath this page are also addressable.

You know, maybe that “mathy” label was right.

No matter. Let’s get started. I’m going to make a spreadsheet for this example that shows how much of my lowly paycheck went into my X60s, in the form of memory and a new hard drive. First, I’m going to put the make and model of my hard drive in the upper left block. Type “SATA3G hard drive”, starting and finishing with quotes.

 

My god, it’s full of stars. … Well, we’ve already run into our first problem. It seems that the title is too long for the width of the cell. teapot tells us that by showing those stars, and signaling to us that we should probably widen that column a little.

No problem. Press F10.

teapot has a menu system — I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned GUIs in console programs. Select W)idth, and set the column width to 24.

That’s better. You can see in the bottom line there that the coordinates for the cell — 0,0,0 — contain the quote-enclosed text we entered. Now a little navigation: Use the cursor keys to skip through the spreadsheet, and move down a row. Then enter the next item, “PC2-5300 memory”.

If you make a mistake after you enter data, just press return on that cell again to edit it. If you make a mistake and need to back out of the menu, press CTRL+c.

I bought two sticks of memory in different sizes, so it would be nice to just copy that text into the row below. teapot uses block marking, a lot like old-style pre-graphical word processors. You mark a block and then tell teapot what you want done with it.

In this case, press the period (“dot” or .) key twice. This marks the cell as the first corner of the block and the last corner of the block. If you move the selection highlight after that, you can see that the block (or cell, in this case) remains lit.

Now that we have a selection, we can tell teapot to copy it to a new location. Put the selector on the row beneath the memory text, and press F10. Choose B)lock, then C)opy, and confirm it.

That did the trick. One small problem though: We still have the original cell marked. How do we un-mark it? Press period (“dot” or .) again, and it will disappear.

Next, add the text for the last thing on the list, the “SATA enclosure”. At this point, the spreadsheet should look like this.

The problem at this point is that I forgot a header row. It’s not really necessary, but as long as I am going to make this, I might as well make it clear what I am talking about. Let’s insert a row above the whole business.

Navigate back to the top of the page, or just press the less-than key (<). Press F10, then B)lock, I)nsert, R)ow, and then W)hole line.

We used the block menu even though we didn’t have a block defined, and it worked fine this time. And notice that after you’ve inserted the row, you’re still in the menu dialog; press CTRL+c to leave that. I’ll add some headers to this table.

I like a quantity, cost each and total cost for each line. Nothing fancy, just the kind of things you’d expect on an invoice or an order form.

For the quantity column, I can enter 1 for each, since I only bought one each. For the currency I can use the cost in yen for each one, so the table ends up looking something like this.

And I see I made one mistake again: I bought memory of two different sizes but didn’t leave a column for the size. I can insert a column for “Gb” quickly, and add the information where it’s appropriate.

Of course, those headers are skewed off to the left while their information is on the right. Let’s align the headers to the right so they look nice. Mark a block with only the numeric headers highlighted: Press period at the “Gb” column, then skip to the right with the cursor keys until the “Total cost” column is highlighted as well, and then press period again.

If you move away from the marked block, you can see that the entire area is now inverted. Press F10, then A)ttributes, R)epresentation, and R)ight.

So long as you have a block marked, the attributes and representations will be applied to the block. Press CTRL+c to leave the menu dialog, then press period again to unselect the marked block.

Let’s get some totals in here. Obviously, the quantity times the cost will give me the total cost for each line. teapot is flexible enough that there are several different ways to do that, but to avoid being too “mathy,” I’ll take the easiest way.

Go to the first item in the list, to the total cost cell, and we’ll give it a formula to calculate. Enter @(2,1,0)*@(3,1,0) in that box, and the total is shown for that line.

One small problem though, created mostly because human beings are innately lazy: I’d rather not retype that three times over. I can fill the contents of that cell through the cells below it, but then the formula always points back to that first row of numbers.

So instead of specifying the exact x-y-z location for the formula, I’m just going to give it the x location. If teapot doesn’t find a y or z in the location of the cell, it takes the one where it is at the moment. So instead of the multiplication operation above, edit the cell to show @(3)*@(2) — the x locations only of the data I want to multiply.

Then mark the block for that one cell, move down one cell and use F10, B)lock, F)ill. For the number of column-wise repetitions say 1 — the column we’re in. For row-wise, say 3 — the current cell plus the two below it. For depth-wise say 1 — the layer we’re in.

And voila.

Adjusting the quantity or the price will change the values across the sheet, like all good spreadsheets should.

Just for fun, let’s sort a few columns. Select all of the data rows (but not the grand total), and then hit F10, B)lock, S)ort, R)ow. For the “X position of key vector,” and “Z position of key vector,” enter 0. The A)scending and S)ort region.

We sorted the list alphabetically, by the name of the item (X key vector 0) over one level of “sheets” (Z key vector 0). This could be useful if you need to keep day-to-day spreadsheets of the same information, since it means you can sort vertically over a “date” cell.

Changing it back is simply reversing the same process, but using the X key vector for the “Cost each” column — 3. And don’t forget to use “descending.”

There’s one more thing that teapot will do that is worth looking at, because it changes how you can use the entire spreadsheet — or the entire idea behind a spreadsheet, really. Try this: Go to the top of the total cost column, press F10 then A)ttributes then L)abel. Now call this “first”.

The status line near the bottom changed, with the label included. Now go to the last in that column, and give that the label “last”.

Now skip down one more line and enter this for the grand total of that column: sum(first,last).

“Okay, great,” you say. “It knows how to sum things, and it can use those labels to do it. So what?”

Well the “so what” part is principle, not action this time. It essentially means you can label, refer to and connect from any cell over the three dimensions of the spreadsheet, and not need coordinates to do it.

You can skew a column of numbers, sum them over a series of cells, insert wide gaping holes in pages, but the labels are what determines how numbers are calculated. teapot takes its labels seriously and allows you to do some cool things with them, and the results are about what you need.

It also means that those text labels we put on the left, or the column headers on the right are completely superfluous now. They’re only there for uninitiated humans to find there way around the page. We could just as easily label cells as “quantity1″, “quantity2″ and so forth. Then call the cost cells “cost1″, “cost2″ and so on, and just sum the opposite corners of a range.

It’s not a mind-blowing or life-altering idea, but it does mean that formulas and number-crunching become easier to think about, and don’t require you to second-guess because a cell shifted to allow for more data. So long as the labels stay the same, the calculations work the same.

The next obvious question is, “Where can I go with my spreadsheet?” To which, I can say that teapot saves in XDR natively for mathematical precision, and exports to at least four or maybe five others. I see that two of those — CSV and HTML — are something Google documents can open, albeit as word processor pages.

Beyond that, I am not up-to-snuff on what is the file format du jour for spreadsheet programs. I am guessing a modern one can probably handle something teapot exports to.

teapot does a lot of other things; the list of formulas available to you, and the way you can access cells or run counts is very impressive. The source package includes a teapot-driven variation on Conway’s game of life too, so it’s not all serious stuff.

Of course there are quite a lot of things teapot doesn’t do, like export in Excel format or draw exploding pie charts in three dimensions and 64,000 colors. For things like that you will probably want to investigate, bigger, bulkier and slower spreadsheets, built by other people.

But if you want something that will run in a slice of memory thinner than a piece of paper, this is a good choice. It’s fast, light, sensible and flexible and comes with a very good documentation file (check the source package for the doc folder). And while there’s a degree of “mathy-ness” that you can’t get away from, it’s certainly nothing to be afraid of.

Another Arch repository for i586

There have been so many started-and-stalled i586 renditions of the Arch Linux project that I’ve lost my way through some of them. To make things worse, I occasionally stumble upon sites that mention one offshoot, but seem to merge into another.

This time it’s a concise and to-the-point page from a while back, that talks about bumping Lowarch up to a more current rendition. If I remember right from the last time I tried that stunt, there were problems with pacman and with building software from scratch.

I haven’t tried this yet so I can’t be sure, but it may be that the script on that page puts Lowarch within striking distance of a version of pacman that can step even further forward.

Why you would want to do that, over installing from something more recent, like the archlinux-i586 ISO?

I don’t know. But repositories are still accessible, even if a lot of the software is already out of date. But one or two packages — like glibc — are stamped as recently as June.

I’m no expert, but it seems to me that you could splice together an almost-up-to-date i586 system between that and the repos at archlinux-i586.org. Even if you don’t install from the Lowarch ISO, there seems to be enough in the way of “current” packages between the two, that you could probably keep your i586 within a month or two of “up-to-date.”

What’s left you’ll probably have to build from scratch. Enter abs, etc.

But waitaminute … Lowarch? Why are we talking about the original Lowarch? Didn’t that die in 2008 or something? Where in the world is the ISO to install that … ?

Still more LXDE desktops

I keep running into LXDE derivatives. Not physically of course, but it could be an unintended side effect of being on the lookout for distros to try on the Mebius.

For example, I mentioned the Lubuntu spinoff Peppermint about a few months ago, adding my own warning that little time would elapse before it too morphed into something else. I was right (of course); here is Peppermint Ice.

Peppermint rips out a lot of what Lubuntu throws in by default; if you can imagine, Peppermint Ice seems to go a step further by ripping out more of what was in Peppermint, leaving an almost-purely Internet-reliant operating system.

Naturally there are stipulations to be made with that, but it’s more-or-less true: Short of a calculator, file manager or terminal emulator, almost everything here will require a solid, speedy Internet connection to use.

In that sense it might be a completely online desktop system. Whether or not you like that is going to depend on your personal proclivities; myself, I’m not a huge fan of the cloud, so Peppermint Ice does not entice. (Ha! I made a kind of pun! )

My prediction: The next step in the Peppermint evolution is of course Peppermint Icicle, which will boot directly from the Internet, no on-disk system at all. It can be done.

So is it faster? is it lighter than its progenitor? You tell me.

Here’s Linux Mint LXDE, which is another LXDE adventure.

Green and black is good. Mint fans seem to love the fact that they get codecs, etc., from the word go, so this is about what I expected. Applications are the standard LXDE-driven fare, which I don’t begrudge anyone at all.

And it’s quite a bit “fuller” than its Peppermint cousins Tools and programs you might prefer, as a regular user of a desktop Linux, are on hand in Mint LXDE and I see almost no Web-only applications.

So is it lighter? is it faster than its competition? You tell me.

Masonux is something I looked at a long time ago, then felt sorry I never mentioned because the developer called it quits. For old time’s sake, here is what it looked like (notice the past tense) in the 9.04 version.

Masonux’s call to glory — or claim to fame — may have been its early adoption of the LXDE tool set; before it was cool to have an LXDE spinoff, Masonux had dedicated itself to That Ideal. earthpigg said himself (herself?) a few months ago that the niche no longer existed, and perhaps he was right.

In any case, since it’s Ubuntu-driven there’s nothing stopping you from installing the last version and updating manually. As you can see, it’s functional and clean — and exceptionally slim. The ISO was only +/- 325Mb, and your choice of software on startup is quite thin. And that’s a good, because it gives you a solid starting point. Build up from there.

So is it faster? is it lighter than the newcomers? You tell me.

WattOS is something I have a hard time putting in a box mentally. I see that it’s supposed to be somehow more power-conscious, which in turn probably suggests it is more energy-efficient, which in turn is somehow better for the planet.

For what I’ve seen though, there is only one tool in particular that really sets it apart from any other distro: an amalgamated power control panel. I read somewhere that it’s not accessible until you install the system, but I am a sneaky person so I managed to get it on screen from the live environment.

I understand WattOS’s goal — even linux-mag.com fawns over it for its power-conscientiousness. As far as I can tell though, by skimming through dpkg -l and poking around elsewhere, it seems to be using a standard Ubuntu kernel, standard applications (Abiword, Gnumeric, et al.) and quite a few Gnome underpinnings. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

No matter. You gotta have a gimmick these days, if you want to stick out in the crowd. An original power monitor is enough to draw a few eyes.

So is it lighter? is it faster? Is it more energy-efficient? You tell me.

I could go on and list quite a few more. Ubuntu seems to be the grandfather of most of these (and Debian the great-grandfather), and there are in-house versions of LXDE desktops in almost every major distro. And where there isn’t, you can usually put together your own rendition.

It’s a good thing. LXDE reinforces the idea that you don’t need a quad-core with 12Gb of memory to run a Linux desktop, no matter what the Gnome or KDE camps tell you. It also, in a roundabout way, reminds people that older machines are still viable.

Of course, everything I’ve shown you here still requires far more muscle and power than the Mebius has on hand. It might be that they are all better solutions for older machines … just not really, really old ones.

So in that sense, are they lighter? are they faster? Are they better than full-blown desktop environments? You tell me.

Happy fourth birthday

Four years seems like a long time. The first World War lasted four years. Four years is an American presidency. Four years is a cycle of Olympic sports, and World Cup championships. Most higher education systems are a four-year term: A person can leave secondary school and pass through tertiary education in that time. Four years is eight Ubuntu releases. There are lots of other things.

Add this blog to that list now. I am ashamed to admit that for four years now, I’ve jotted daily and sometimes more-than-daily notes about Linux, et al., to this site.

For better or for worse that means over 1,600 posts (I think this one is number 1,614), 8,500 comments and very nearly 2,000,000 page views (which unfortunately includes the spammers).

It’s been an interesting run — and don’t worry, it’s not finished yet. I don’t have a very high opinion of blogging, but I’ll admit that I’m not likely to quit soon. From the start this site was — and still is today — is a tool to remind me of things I did and how things worked, and I started it because it was the most obvious method at the time. If you also glean some benefit from it, then we are both lucky.

In any case, cheers and thanks for stopping by.
K.Mandla

P.S.: Obligatory link to the otherwise-hidden “first post”.

Favorite computer myths

Henry David Thoreau said you should always challenge the wisdom of your elders, and try things for yourself before you take someone else’s advice. It might sound a little backwards, but that’s the way it comes across on the page, although he was definitely more eloquent than I.

This experiment with the CF card is turning out to be a perfect example of that. Just about every promise I was given by the naysayers has proved to be wrong, from the “it’ll last a week” threat to “it won’t boot a CF card” prediction.

If I had listened to any of them, I would have missed out on one of the best improvements I’ve ever personally made to a computer. Short of painting it chili-pepper red.

So it looks like I get to add that to my list of favorite computer myths. The list is short, but distinguished.

1. You can’t put that CF card in a Pentium! At a time when SSDs are still over a hundred US dollars for a relatively wimpy size, dropping US$45 on a card and adapter was a quick, cheap and painless way to get the same thing done at less than half the price. It is 100 percent compatible, thus-far reliable, and the Pentium’s BIOS has never even blinked. Totally silent, totally heat-less and a speed improvement too. Go out there and get one of your own.
2. Those old computers are huge wastes of power! Some of them were. But to be honest, I find it hard to believe that a quad-core, 12Gb, dual drive, dual video card machine — something along the lines of this, which probably required its own power substation just to idle — is somehow more efficient than a K6-2 450 with a mid-grade 180W power supply. Think about what you’re saying before you say it: Is my 14-year-old Pentium laptop, with an AC adapter pulling roughly 40W, really much more of a drain than your dual core desktop machine? I doubt it. And this page doubts it too.
3. More memory makes your computer faster! No, more memory means a memory retailer just made money off of you. There are very specific circumstances that must exist before adding memory will make your computer faster, and Reacocard did the best job summarizing them here. If you want actual, in-your-face scientific proof that it doesn’t work, you can look at my experiment here, or any of a number of other similar experiments elsewhere on the Web; Google is your friend. Don’t feel bad if you were suckered into thinking more was better; I was too. Windows was designed to keep you spending money, and it still is.

Feel free to disagree on any point, of course. I would guess that you and I are both equally stubborn and intractable, so unless you can offer facts and links — and not just personal anecdotes — your argument could fall on deaf ears. Thoreauvians are like that.

A reasonable investment or two

I made a few upgrades today, this time in the X60s. It’s been about six months since I bought it, and I have yet to be disappointed in anything it does. Start to finish it has been a wonderful machine.

And an evaluation like that means it’s more than likely going to be around for a little while to come. With that in mind, I went ahead and spent US$100 or so on some upgrades: a 7200rpm SATA3G hard drive and the largest memory configuration it can handle, 3Gb.

Now the first thing I get to say at this point is, the machine didn’t run faster with three gigabytes of memory in it. I swapped the 512Mb out first, while I still had a standing Arch Linux installation in place. And you’ll probably be quite disappointed to learn that the boot times and the general “snappiness” of the machine were the same.

I don’t cling to the myth that dumping gobs of memory into your machine will arbitrarily make it run faster. I have in the past, but I never will again. Yes, under certain circumstances you will see improvements with more memory, but a clean boot to a lightweight desktop does not improve by sextupling a system’s memory. Not in this household.

Swapping out the hard drive, on the other hand, made a huge difference. The old one was an 80Gb 5400rpm drive, and while I bear it no ill will, there was a big improvement once I had an identical system in place. No comparison.

But that makes sense. The new drive simply reads and transfers faster than the old one could, by virtue of its technology. And subsequently, anything that relied on drive access (like boot times or installing software) was improved as a result.

The only downside — if it is a downside, which I suppose it isn’t — is that the smallest drive size I could find with those transfer and read rates was a whopping 320Gb. Good grief. I have no idea what to do with all that space. I’m not even using the first 10Gb of it, with system files and a home folder.

Pricewise I think I did pretty good for myself. An online retailer sold me the drive for less than US$60 with a USB enclosure as part of the deal, and the memory was only US$40 for a 2Gb stick of PC2-5300, and US$20 for a 1Gb stick of the same. All in all, I think the total was around US$140.

Money well spent, I say. I didn’t truly need the extra RAM or disk space (definitely not the disk space). But I am in the habit of pampering the machines I like — like the maxed out memory and giant 120Gb drive in the Thinkpad, or the 80Mb of memory and the 8GB CF card in the Pentium I’m typing on now.

And so long as I intend to keep this machine, it’s worth the extra money put into it. And the speed I get out of it.

Reports from the home counties

I am not the only person I know who uses Linux, speaking of my immediate sphere of relationships (in other words aside from you, humble reader). I have mentioned some of them in the past, and they’re probably worth an update, since some have Linux resumes that date back as long as mine. Some longer.

For example, about two and a half years ago I put Ubuntu on two laptops for friends — one was an Asus W3J, and the other was a Toshiba Centrino machine.

Both were, at the time, quirky in their own way, but at latest correspondence (those two both live in the United States now) they had both purchased new laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled. And to the best of my knowledge, they’re still using it today.

In the “cautious adoption” department, my brother has tapdanced around Linux for years — even longer than I have, and can even claim firsthand experience with System V on an Intergraph CLIX machine.

These days he seems to be slowly encroaching on a full-time Linux installation, and even sent this photo a day or two ago, showing a Dell Optiplex 745 with 9.10 on it.

That particular machine is a Celeron D, with 1Gb of memory, the Radeon X1300 and about 160Gb of storage space. The aforementioned dv7 has had both Ubuntu and Windows on it in comparable amounts, but the rumor mill says it will be showing up on eBay sometime soon.

My mother has a time-in-service with Ubuntu that rivals mine, and actually exceeds it if my general desertion for lighter distributions is taken into account.

She started with 5.10 and hasn’t looked back. The same Inspiron 600m that ran Dapper was traded in for a preinstalled Dell dual-core machine, and that has been in service on a daily basis for years now. Two or three self-managed upgrades and there is no sign of it quitting, from a software or hardware point. Which is how it should be.

Locally I have had one machine prove to be a little more cumbersome than others — my neighbor’s Celeron. It’s a nice machine and works great; the problem is now and has been that Ubuntu has bloated to such a point as to make it nigh-unusable.

As mentioned a while ago, putting a little more memory in the computer helped quite a bit, but the system was still sluggish and crept along at times.

An obligatory (and pointless) downshift to Xubuntu was only a tiny bit better, and as a result it now runs Arch Linux. Arch is leaps and bounds faster, as anyone will tell you, and runs the full Gnome suite on (literally) a fragment of the memory that Ubuntu requires.

The difference is night and day, with the only “downside” being that the Gnome version of Arch holds your hand less than the Ubuntu version. I’ve had to add two or three things manually, to include things like a certain music player, or VLC.

I’ve also been looking for a graphical front-end to pacman — gtkpacman seems okay — if only for my neighbor’s general peace of mind. Humans require the illusion of control, but some don’t take well to the CLI. That is nature.

On the other hand, putting together a system with the same array of software as what was used in Ubuntu is easier, really. Not only does pacman take a fragment of the time of aptitude, but for some reason the rolling-release system is proving more trustworthy, if you can believe that.

Twice now the Radeon-based graphics card in the machine has gone to an unrecoverable “safe graphics” mode. Once it was fixable with a system update, but the second time was the last straw. Slow performance, repeated video failures and my own advice that Ubuntu was not the only (or best) solution, and we have another Archer on our hands.

That too is nature.