The short stack

I’ve been stacking up test systems these days, in anticipation of the Mebius finishing with its “stress test” of the CF card. It’s still running, believe it or not, with no errors or problems to report.

Half of these don’t have a snowball’s chance in Helechawa of actually running at 150Mhz on 32Mb, but I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

On top of that, I don’t expect the remaining half to know what to do with that Trident video card, the one that is trapped at VESA1.2, and needs a particular sort of coaxing to actually work.

Most of these are installed via Qemu, but a couple I actually booted into a live environment, then installed to USB disk and copied to a file with dd. In any case, this is the short stack, if I can call it that. In no particular order …

• Feather Linux, which is a little outdated but should be possible.
• Linux Mint Fluxbox, which is an extreme long shot, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
• TurboPup, which is another possibility, and was a bit of a trick to install. That and TeenPup seemed like options; TeenPup wouldn’t install though because of package errors.
• Ubuntu 10.04, as a text-only system. This is mostly to see if it will start at all, and I have my doubts.
• Ubuntu 6.06.1, as a comparison to the above.
• TinyFlux 1.0, which is also dated, but intended for i586 machines and might do the trick.
• Slackware 3.3. I don’t know why. It just sounds crazy.

A couple of others sounded like good ideas, but aren’t as appealing because of size issues.

• Vector Linux, which sounded like a good idea but wants about 6Gb to install and that makes it unappealing.
• grml, which is “text-oriented,” if I can say that, but also wants a rather large space. I’ll try a smaller version, maybe.
• Lubuntu 10.10 alpha. But Ubuntu 10.10, if I remember right, is i686-only so it won’t matter if it works at such low specifications.

Of course, it will be a few days before I can try to mess with any of these. The Mebius is at 68 percent completion and it will need a bit more time before it’s done. I am patient.

The road not taken

I am not an Ubuntu old-timer. I remember as far back as 5.10, but certainly there is a smaller circle of true Ubuntu veterans.

And I am definitely not a Linux old-timer. I am a mere babe in the woods, comparatively speaking, and I try my best to remind myself of that fact regularly. There is always someone who knows more than you.

It has been almost five years since I started out with Ubuntu though, and things have changed dramatically since then.

One thing that sticks out in my mind is a rather strong shift that occurred a few years ago, and personally I think it had a direct influence on where Ubuntu is today.

It was Mazza558‘s graph from a day or two ago that makes me think of this now. It shows a considerable upswing in Ubuntu’s popularity from its start in 2004, but it seems to have reached a plateau about three years later.

And the funny thing is, 2007 is about where I see that shift — when Ubuntu became more obsessed with looks and appearances, and stability and reliability took a back seat.

I’m not saying Ubuntu isn’t stable or reliable — if anything, it is both of those. But late 2006 is when Mark Shuttleworth made his epic “Pretty is a feature” blog entry. A year later, Compiz was enabled by default, and the push for glitz had taken center stage.

I’ll apologize if this sounds a bit too old-timey, but yes, I remember a time when there was no push for accelerated graphics by default, or animated splash screens or proprietary drivers automatically installed.

I remember when you incorporated things like Flash manually, and with a considerable measure of effort, and upgraded things like Firefox through persistence and the ten-finger interface.

Things weren’t necessarily better in those days, and I will admit that freely. And I have no proof that the push toward pretty somehow resulted in the plateau shown in the graph.

But I can’t help but wonder if the upward swing would have continued upward, if Ubuntu had focused on working perfectly every time, instead of working prettily most of the time.

This isn’t the first time I have lamented the direction Ubuntu took, and it probably won’t be the last. I am critical of Ubuntu mostly because I am fond of it. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t even think about it.

The only advantage in this position is that Ubuntu can always move upward from here. When people become uninterested with yet another sparkly Compiz plugin, then perhaps the mob will push the project back towards stability and reliability.

It’s not an impossibility. Personally I would prefer that: I think you establish a reputation by being stable and predictable, and you can build onto that with flash and glitz … available on demand.

Because from that plateau there is also a chance to slip back down again, to lose ground with a reputation for being superficial, or useful only on some machines with certain hardware. That too is not an impossibility.

How little it takes

I have a list of software that I use regularly, and recommend as a consequence. It comes as a slight surprise though, to realize how little is truly required to make a functional, useful system.

Take, for example, the bought-for-scrap Pentium that was promoted to file server and torrent slave a week ago. The kernel I built for it is quite possibly the sparsest I’ve ever built — no USB, no sound, not even generalized support for hard drives.

On top of that, here’s the full and complete list of packages I have installed in Crux 2.6.

autoconf automake bash bc bin86 bindutils binutils bison bzip2 coreutils cpio curl db dcron dhcpcd diffutils e2fsprogs ed elinks exim file filesystem findutils flex gawk

gcc gdbm gettext glib glibc grep groff grub gzip htop httpup iana-etc inetutils iproute2 iptables iputils kbd less libarchive libattr libcap libdevmapper libgmp libmpfr libpcre

libsigc++ libstdc++-compat libtool libtorrent m4 make man man-pages mc mlocate module-init-tools nasm ncdu ncurses net-tools nfs-utils ntp openssh openssl patch pciutils perl pkg-config pkgutils portmap

ports procps prt-get prt-utils psmisc rc readline rsync rtorrent screen-vs sed shadow sudo sysfsutils sysklogd sysvinit tar tcp_wrappers time traceroute udev unzip util-linux-ng vim wget

which wireless-tools xz zip zlib

The total space required for the system is around 1.2Gb, which means a whopping 118+ Gb are available for ISOs, file transfers, music and so forth.

More than half of that 1.2Gb is in the kernel source tree. Another 300Mb is in the ports folder, as source and compiled software packages.

So the actual software and system footprint is considerably smaller, although that’s rather hefty for a server system. If I were to throw out the kernel source and clean the ports tree of giant source packages (like gcc ), I could probably fit it in a slimmer partition.

Point of all this is, it’s an underpowered throwaway machine that almost no one would want, and what it requires — in terms of money, energy, software or even hard drive space — to be a fully functional, critical member of the family … is almost nothing.

People are strange

Some questions are so knotted and convoluted as to require an entire different mindset before an answer becomes obvious. Sometimes, just to answer a question, you have to un-teach a huge string of misconceptions, one by one.

Or you could do what I did, and just lie.

The other day my boss — who is not a bad person, just a run-of-the-mill businessman with a rather entrenched world view — asked why Microsoft allowed OpenOffice.org to exist.

This is the same person who, a year ago, dumped an overburdened but otherwise perfectly useful Duron and picked up a mid-grade dual-core running Vista — instead of properly managing the original machine.

With such a disposable view of technology, I was surprised that OpenOffice.org was being discussed.

The context was a memo from a subordinate, asking if OpenOffice.org could be installed on a communal PC, which would give access to newer file formats as opposed to our aging copy of Word 2003.

Naturally my boss assumed this upstart OpenOffice.org was an illegal version of Word, and asked me the aforementioned question.

I could see the long string of misunderstanding that was going to require explanation. I suppose I could have taken the opportunity to educate, but I have a lot of other responsibilities that are waiting in line in real life, so I took a shortcut.

“They can’t,” I said. “They tried but they can’t.”

I suppose in one way that’s true. I am sure Microsoft has told any number of lies to disparage a free competitor, so in a very general sense, I suppose they’ve tried but couldn’t. In any case, it was an easier answer than the unabridged version.

After that I suggested he check their web site and look a little at the explanation of the product, in his native language, and the happy ending to the story is that we now have OpenOffice.org installed for everyone to use.

But that’s not the only mysterious event of the past week or so. A client came into our office looking quite pleased with himself the other day, and the reason was actually rather sad. To me, at least.

It turns out he was happy because he had bought an application that could sever the audio track from a YouTube video.

As a fan of classic rock and roll (the stuff that is 50 or so years old now), it is difficult to purchase some material legitimately. So he was pleased that he could at least skim YouTube for decent recordings, and save them for his own enjoyment.

I listened to his story but all I could think was, “Gee, that would take me about four minutes to do with MPlayer, and for free.” Oh well.

To be honest, few people in my office know or even care that I am a Linux proponent, in part because I try hard to separate my online presence from my real life.

All the same, my neighbor with the Celeron laptop asked for Windows to be installed again, after buying an iPhone. I helped with that, adding the caveat that after Windows was in place, I was not involved in managing it.

Two weeks later there was a request for Linux again, and this time rather than wade through all the work of setting up a system to the user’s liking, I just installed the LXDE version of Linux Mint.

And so far, there hasn’t been a peep of complaint, or that anything that needs correcting. Ubuntu was torpid, Xubuntu was sluggish, Arch was a lightning bolt that required too much configuration on my part.

But Mint in the LXDE version is apparently the cat’s meow. My neighbor is happy, which means I am too.

And one last note: The Pentium 4 machine I diagnosed years ago as needing only a $12 inverter to bring back up to full usefulness is … apparently … still being used as a doorstop.

Sad, but to the point of ridiculousness now. I spoke to the owner a day ago and again said I’d take it away for the right price, but by now, the joke is maturing, like cheese or wine. Doing something about it would just spoil it, don’t you think?

Absolute, Dream

My real-life projects are complete (in a sense) and that should give me a lot more time in the coming days. I have a lot of catching up to do.

One machine is still technically engaged though — the Mebius is halfway through its “stress test” of a brand-new 8Gb CF card. Nothing to report there, except an uptime of almost a week now.

So I’ve been left with only the X60s as a guinea pig, and I’ve been in the mood to try out some new flavors of Linux — some of the heavier ones. Or at least they’re heavy for me.

A couple of years ago, one of my first distro-hopping experiences was to tinker with DreamLinux, which (if I remember right) was one of the earliest distros to include Compiz and accelerated graphics by default.

At the time it was quite impressive, and to be honest, it still is. Here it is in its 3.5 rendition for CD.

 

There are a lot of pluses to be seen here, particularly if you’re fresh off Ubuntu and looking for something … bluer, or XFCE-based, or with Debian at its core instead of Ubuntu.

I joke, but the things I read about people installing immediately — like a bouncing, throbbing dock application, or the spinning Compiz cube — are here from the start, along with some nice touches.

For example, much in the same vein as many other contemporary distros that boot from live images, you can set this up to run from a persistent home, recast the ISO for your next reboot, or install straight from the live desktop.

But even better is the installation tool — one dialog with all the settings right in front of you, partitioning, passwords, file formats and Grub options all at once. Press one button, wait 10 minutes, and it’s done.

So if you’re into shiny desktops and you want to get one without too much work and you’re an XFCE fan and you like blue. … Give it a try. (I should mention that there’s a 4.0 beta that appears to be close to release.)

From another side of the camp, here’s Absolute Linux, which I think someone mentioned here as a decent “starter” Slackware-based desktop.

 

That’s version 13.1.42, for the record, installed in full because there is no live CD that I could find. Very clean, very neat, nicely arranged and with enough quirks and surprises to keep you intrigued for a while.

In a larger sense, this sort of validates my mental image of Slackware — clean, neat, well arranged — even if it has some eccentricities.

For example, it has two file managers available by default (ROX and PCManFM) and both have slightly modified interfaces. There is also the inclusion of XMMS and IceWM alongside a crop of KDE applications. OpenOffice.org is bumped up against NEdit.

But everyone has the software they like, and there is absolutely no rule that says you have to stick to one or the other application, just because of the first letter of its name is g or k. What’s here is what the Absolute Linux team wants.

So if you see some strange pairs in this one, or a few unusual applications rubbing shoulders, think of it as an opportunity to try something new, not the pollution of your desktop environment of choice. Change is good.

For the most part, both of these will require a rather strong machine to run, although I say that knowing that a high-end Pentium III with a decent graphics card would have no problem with either. That, to me, is a strong computer.

Of the pair, Absolute is probably going to tax your system less, even if it does pack as much into an ISO of the same size. Spin them up and see what you think.

FOX Desktop and some graphical apps

Not everything in the house is console-based, as you might have guessed from some of the screenshots around this site. And I do occasionally tinker with new graphical applications too.

Or even entire desktops, like the little-known ROX desktop from a while back. Before I show you another one like that, here are a few applications that are — and some that aren’t — inter-related.

This is qutim.

qutim looks, for most intents and purposes, to be a straightforward IM client with access to a goodly number of networks. Check the home page for the full list; of course the usefulness of any particular client lies with the networks it can access.

But if you’re after something that doesn’t stain your desktop theme with arbitrary icons and bizarre color schemes, you might like this QT-based one.

I haven’t exactly used it; I don’t IM with my blog address, but as you can see, it hooked up nicely to Jabber with my GMail account. Beyond that though, I haven’t really tested it. Give it a spin and see if it suits you.

Another independent project, and an image viewer this time: Viewnior.

I think I found Viewnior in the latest Slitaz, if I remember right. Considering that’s been out for quite a while, I’ve been sitting on this one for too long without mentioning it.

Nice and light (it wouldn’t be in Slitaz if it wasn’t ), speedy and clean, not too many flashy parts and a clean focus on image viewing. I sometimes still mispronounce it as if it was a film genre though — view-noir.

Moving on from that poor attempt at a joke, here’s barpanel.

barpanel reminds me slightly of my early days with fbpanel. I have a feeling it’s about as challenging to manage, since the only config I could find was an XML file.

But if you’re an Openbox fan, or just have no fear of the keyboard, that shouldn’t stop you. I adjusted the one in the photo slightly to fit the desktop better, but didn’t go beyond that.

If you want a lightweight panel to take over from some other, heavier applications, that might do the trick for you.

The next three are interlaced, and form the desktop I hinted at earlier. Take a peek at fxdesktop.

Most people know the Fox toolkit from Xfe, which is a great little file manager and something I use daily in my phony Windows XP Classic setups.

You get a lot more than just that when you install the Fox subsystem though. In that photo alone you can see a panel, a calculator, an editor and a control panel, and that wasn’t all that was available.

(Getting it started might be a tiny bit tricky: Try installing Openbox as well, starting the X environment with exec openbox in your .xinitrc file, then opening a terminal and entering export FOX_DESKTOP_WM="openbox" and then entering fxdesktop. That’s what did it for me.)

To highlight one or two, here’s adie, the editor, running solo as a downloaded binary from the Fox website.

It’s reminiscent of Beaver to me, but it’s obvious that this does quite a bit more and is meant to handle heavier coding chores. Likewise, here’s Shutterbug, a screen capture tool, performing independently of fxdesktop but included when Xfe was installed (I think … ).

No, the bug doesn’t show up in your captured images, and actually it’s a nice touch since you can push that around the screen to wherever is convenient, and snap screenshots with a single click.

There’s more there and it all runs very light and relatively speedy. Any one of these things alone might be worthwhile on an underpowered, decade-old machine that doesn’t deserve retirement.

And you don’t have to feel trapped and powerless at the command line to use them. As if that were even the case. …

Screenshots from 120Mhz

I have a few moments this morning, and I’ve been stacking up screenshots just for kicks. Here are a few from the slowest machine in the house — a 120Mhz Pentium Classic running Crux Linux on 80Mb at 800×600.

screen with the vertical split patch is what makes this fun; if you want to put that together look here, and if you want to get started swapping panes around, look here.

Here’s one from a couple days ago, when I was wasting time playing Crawl while watching my e-mail and the #archlinux channel.

It’s a good layout for wasting time, keeping the larger window in focus while adding a few smaller options within reach around the sides.

Here’s something I do sometimes, when I’m testing software or converting between PKGBUILDs and Pkgfiles.

ncdu is running there only because it shows the size of the directories in the ports tree; mc is what I really need to manage crashed compilations or shift quickly between other folders. At the bottom, where I can edit and compile and see if things worked.

I am ashamed to admit it, but when I write up posts for this site, I have a tendency to do one of two things.

dict is running at the bottom, along with charm at the left and elinks in the middle, so I can bounce between them both as I write. On the right is ticker, which is fun to have running.

I sometimes just do this though.

A simple four-way split this time, which is quick and easy to set up, and can pop applications in and out at a whim. Some programs rebel if they’re asked to appear in such small dimensions, but those are exceptions, not the rule.

One small bonus: the Crux server in the closet, running at an ungodly 133Mhz on a mere 32Mb, and keeping the whole house connected at the same time.

That’s mostly just for fun there though. Usually I use ssh to connect and manage that machine, so the actual physical screen shows nothing. That picture is taken across the network, using the fonts and screen dimensions of the slower machine.

That’s all for now. I should have a little more free time by the middle of the week, and maybe I can publish something substantial.

Bloat is in the eye of the beholder

I use that word a lot, so you’d think I would have a proper, precise definition at the ready, for times like this.

To be honest though, I don’t. I don’t think I can adequately define bloat, although I am completely confident I can show what it is. Here’s an example:

kmandla@cc99p01:~$ sudo aptitude install firefox
 Reading package lists... Done
 Building dependency tree
 Reading state information... Done
 Reading extended state information
 Initializing package states... Done
 Building tag database... Done
 The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
   acl app-install-data apturl consolekit dbus dbus-x11 deborphan dialog
   docbook-xml esound-clients esound-common firefox-3.0 gamin gconf2
   gconf2-common gettext-base gksu gnome-app-install gnome-icon-theme
   gnome-keyring gnome-mime-data gnome-mount hal hal-info hicolor-icon-theme
   iso-codes launchpad-integration libart-2.0-2 libaudiofile0
   libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libavahi-glib1
   libbonobo2-0 libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common
   libcairo-perl libck-connector0 libcroco3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libenchant1c2a
   libesd-alsa0 libgail-common libgail18 libgamin0 libgconf2-4 libgksu2-0
   libglib-perl libgnome-keyring0 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-canvas-perl
   libgnome2-common libgnome2-perl libgnome2-vfs-perl libgnomecanvas2-0
   libgnomecanvas2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0
   libgnomevfs2-common libgnomevfs2-extra libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common
   libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-0 libgtk2-perl
   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtop2-7 libgtop2-common libhal-storage1
   libhunspell-1.1-0 libidl0 liblaunchpad-integration1 libnotify1
   libnspr4-0d libnss3-1d liborbit2 libpam-ck-connector libpam-gnome-keyring
   libpolkit-dbus2 libpolkit-gnome0 libpolkit-grant2 libpolkit2 librsvg2-2
   librsvg2-common libscrollkeeper0 libsexy2 libsmbclient libsmbios-bin
   libsmbios1 libsmbiosxml1 libvte-common libvte9 libwnck-common libwnck22
   libx86-1 libxres1 libxslt1.1 lsb-release notification-daemon pm-utils
   policykit policykit-gnome powermgmt-base python-apt python-dbus
   python-gconf python-gdbm python-gnupginterface python-gst0.10
   python-gtkhtml2 python-launchpad-integration python-pyorbit python-sexy
   python-software-properties python-vte python-xdg radeontool scrollkeeper
   sgml-base sgml-data shared-mime-info software-properties-gtk synaptic
   ubufox unattended-upgrades usbutils uswsusp vbetool xbase-clients
   xml-core xulrunner-1.9
 The following NEW packages will be installed:
   acl app-install-data apturl consolekit dbus dbus-x11 deborphan dialog
   docbook-xml esound-clients esound-common firefox firefox-3.0 gamin gconf2
   gconf2-common gettext-base gksu gnome-app-install gnome-icon-theme
   gnome-keyring gnome-mime-data gnome-mount hal hal-info hicolor-icon-theme
   iso-codes launchpad-integration libart-2.0-2 libaudiofile0
   libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libavahi-glib1
   libbonobo2-0 libbonobo2-common libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common
   libcairo-perl libck-connector0 libcroco3 libdbus-glib-1-2 libenchant1c2a
   libesd-alsa0 libgail-common libgail18 libgamin0 libgconf2-4 libgksu2-0
   libglib-perl libgnome-keyring0 libgnome2-0 libgnome2-canvas-perl
   libgnome2-common libgnome2-perl libgnome2-vfs-perl libgnomecanvas2-0
   libgnomecanvas2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgnomevfs2-0
   libgnomevfs2-common libgnomevfs2-extra libgsf-1-114 libgsf-1-common
   libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 libgstreamer0.10-0 libgtk2-perl
   libgtkhtml2-0 libgtop2-7 libgtop2-common libhal-storage1
   libhunspell-1.1-0 libidl0 liblaunchpad-integration1 libnotify1
   libnspr4-0d libnss3-1d liborbit2 libpam-ck-connector libpam-gnome-keyring
   libpolkit-dbus2 libpolkit-gnome0 libpolkit-grant2 libpolkit2 librsvg2-2
   librsvg2-common libscrollkeeper0 libsexy2 libsmbclient libsmbios-bin
   libsmbios1 libsmbiosxml1 libvte-common libvte9 libwnck-common libwnck22
   libx86-1 libxres1 libxslt1.1 lsb-release notification-daemon pm-utils
   policykit policykit-gnome powermgmt-base python-apt python-dbus
   python-gconf python-gdbm python-gnupginterface python-gst0.10
   python-gtkhtml2 python-launchpad-integration python-pyorbit python-sexy
   python-software-properties python-vte python-xdg radeontool scrollkeeper
   sgml-base sgml-data shared-mime-info software-properties-gtk synaptic
   ubufox unattended-upgrades usbutils uswsusp vbetool xbase-clients
   xml-core xulrunner-1.9
 0 packages upgraded, 134 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
 Need to get 38.2MB of archives. After unpacking 186MB will be used.
 Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

That’s not news, really. I borrow that from a post from almost two years ago, when I was speaking in a roundabout way about the same thing.

Are all those dependencies still required? I wouldn’t doubt it, but I’m not going to check on it either. If anything, I think I am safe in assuming that it’s worse now than it was two years ago.

That, to me, is bloat. You need one application — a web browser — and you get a huge list of suggested software, including libraries and applications that are, by some reports, completely unrelated to the task at hand.

It’s true, you can thin that list out considerably, simply by telling Ubuntu that you don’t want its recommendations, only its requirements.

Whether or not the remainder is sufficiently lean is for you to decide. For me, it’s not — not when there is a 9.8Mb precompiled static-linked version available straight from getfirefox.com, needing almost nothing additional to get started.

That might be what is at the core of the issue though: Bloat is almost purely subjective. What looks horrific and stomach-churning to me is quite acceptable to someone else on the planet, and probably more than just one.

So much in the same vein of default desktops, bloat is what you decide it is. If more than 186Mb of disk drive space is an acceptable sacrifice just to look at videos of snails racing, then you may proceed at your leisure. No one will stop you.

On the other hand, I will rely on my 364Kb prerelease version of elinks 0.12 to surf the web, because from where I sit, they do the same thing. Of course, I don’t get to watch snails race.

To say software bloat is bad and that you should avoid bloated desktops or inefficient operating systems is simply one person’s opinion. You’re free to agree or disagree, and run your system as you like.

You determine your own level of involvement. Enervate your system with as much or as little software as you like, because it’s yours and no one gets to tell you how to use your computer.

We all freed ourselves of that bloat when we stopped using Windows and Macs.

P.S.: Don’t think for a second that this “bloat is subjective” nonsense is going to keep me from harassing you about bloat.

In-house shuffle

I am absorbed by two different real-life projects these days, both with due dates in close succession, so I’ll apologize for the gaps over the past few days, and the gaps that are sure to follow over the coming week.

But just because I haven’t updated doesn’t mean things haven’t changed around the house.

Probably most significant is the departure of my treasured Thinkpad, which you might remember had burst free of its earthly bonds and went from pristine antique to worthless junk in the space of about 15 seconds.

I made a few obligatory attempts to recover the damage, but the plastic bezel and frame were literally crumbling every time I touched it. Releasing pressure on the lid caused the opposite hinge to twist and make matters worse.

It was a little bit sad because I had a very strong affection for that machine, but after a while it became clear I was doing more damage than good. The power bracket was coming free of the motherboard and the bezel was shredding into pieces, and I called it quits.

I scavenged the memory and the hard drive, and put the shell and the remainder out for recycling.

So the king is dead, long live the king. Of course that does mean that three major tasks around the house now have to be delegated to other machines: Download slave, in-house server and music playback.

The first two are easy enough to foist onto another computer, which I immediately did. I was whining the other day about how there didn’t seem to be any work for the 133Mhz Pentium I brought home for salvage, but now suddenly it is a ship-of-the-line.

So it takes over two major tasks — file hosting and downloading — and because it can handle CardBus PCMCIA cards, it is living in the closet, using the erstwhile quirky ath5k-based network card to download 24/7 over wireless. Much like the old 600m did.

Those two chores require almost no effort, even from a Pentium. At peak upload and download, processor strain is a meager 68 percent, with only 10Mb of its 32Mb of memory used, plus scattered swap use. No problem.

So that is solved. As far as music playback, that has fallen to the X60s recently, which I don’t like doing but I’m willing to sacrifice.

Why? No reason. It’s just a very minor chore that can be handled with something far less powerful, so it seems a tiny bit of a waste to use a rather powerful machine to handle it.

Speaking of powerful machines, the second CF card arrived about a week ago, and I immediately put it to use in the Mebius. It’s every bit as amazing in that machine as it is in the first Pentium.

After about a week of use, I went ahead and mirrored the system and set it to work thrashing away at the card. I looked into several different “drive testing” suites, but few would run on such a lowly machine.

In the end I used dban with the most outrageous settings I could find — kernel entropy with Mersenne Twister for DoD 5220.22 M and verify on all passes over 99 rounds, if you want to know — and set it loose.

It’s been running for a day or two now, and if my primitive math skills are correct, it is promising to keep writing and reading and writing and reading for the next month or so, if I let it.

Which I probably won’t. The idea is to try to degrade the card, if that’s possible … not consume my entire life waiting for it to finish, and mounds of electricity at the same time. Science, yes. Science fiction, no.

Finally, the side effect of all these machines dying, and hard drives being replaced with CF cards, and machines getting upgrades, is that I actually have three or four conventional hard drives lying around, all blank and needing attention.

I keep a 120Gb IDE drive in a USB enclosure as a matter of course, and most of my files and Clonezilla’d systems are on that. Now I have a second one: the original SATA drive out of the X60s, which also has an enclosure.

But three more are now just lying around, preventing dust from crashing into the floor. I’ll have to write a post entitled, “Things to do with an old hard drive” …

An Ubuntu social network

My free time is exceptionally scarce this week, so I don’t have much to write about today. I will, however, leave you with a link that you might find interesting or useful: My Ubuntu Network, which is a social networking site with Ubuntu as its locus.

I can’t vouch for it personally, but I know that it is managed by Ms_Angel_D, who is also a moderator on the Ubuntu Forums. So I am confident you are in good hands.

In the mean time I have a few real-life projects that are monopolizing my free time, so if you will excuse me. …