A serious reminder

You’d think, as a person who relies on ancient hardware on a day-to-day basis, that I wouldn’t need to be reminded about some of the repercussions of this effort.

And yet, after watching this quick 20-minute Frontline video, I am ashamed at my dismissive comment the other day, about ecology not being at the forefront of my concerns.

It’s bad enough that I know or have been to some of the places mentioned in the video, and was unaware of what had happened since my visit.

But it’s equally scary to think that even legitimate efforts to properly and safely recycle discarded computer hardware are often hijacked and become, again, an environmental nightmare.

So perhaps holding back a couple of Pentium laptops from the garbage can deserves more of my attention … or more emphasis than I occasionally give it.

Because a computer just gathering dust in my house is still better than one poisoning the lungs of a young Chinese woman, or being burned into a toxic puddle by slum children somewhere in Ghana.

And so long as I — or you, for that matter — can keep using something, then it’s not even gathering dust. For as ignominious as that sounds.

RIP, Dapper Drake

I was going to wait to write my kind words for the (soon-to-be) dearly departed Dapper Drake, but I have the time and inclination right now. I’m feeling nostalgic, and at the same time, I’m feeling benevolent.

So long, Dapper Drake.

Dapper was the first true and complete Linux desktop for me, even if by the time it was released I had already made my first forays into Arch Linux — the path of the Dark side, so to speak.

And Dapper was no picnic. I’ve written before about the Dapper-era desktop — half “just works,” half “just works with a little nudging.” Depending on your hardware, which is always the case.

At the same time though, Dapper had all the right parts and pieces, and due in a large part to the fact that I did have the right hardware, it solidified my emancipation.

More recently I’ve mentioned that Dapper had its mind in the right place though. At a time when function was premier, Dapper had already started collating things that worked, to make Ubuntu work … most of the time, of course.

But those are done days, past and gone. I don’t hold Ubuntu to the same standards any more, mostly because Ubuntu has become something different altogether.

And also because I just don’t use it any more, and the reasons for that are … well, you read them in the last sentence.

I occasionally hold a grudge, and I apologize for that. I critique Ubuntu even now, because it’s a front-line contender and because I have fond memories.

And among those are full-blown desktops that boot on 75Mb of memory.

So long, Dapper Drake.

A note of thanks: vim-stripped

A small note, to give credit where credit is due: I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was trying to rewrite the vim PKGBUILD for Arch.

My goal was to avoid the x11 and GTK2 dependencies that appear in the ConnochaetOS version, for a framebuffer-only system. I wasn’t having much luck.

But Barthalion mentioned vim-stripped in AUR, and that seems to do the trick for me. No need for git, et al., and still handles most of the major chores I have.

I had to adjust the patch level variable slightly before it would run through (I think I set mine to 170, but I expect that will change), otherwise it gave me a cheerful error message.

In any case, thank Barthalion and thanks again AUR, for showing me how things should have been done. As opposed to my battered, fruitless attempts.

Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop i386 bootable USB image

It’s that time again. I know it’s not terrifically popular with everyone and might only appeal to people who are comfortable working with the command line.

But if you’re tired of burning CDs and just want a single image you can write straight to USB with dd and without an intermediary bootup, this might appeal to you.

The standard disclaimers apply. You’re overwriting your USB, of course. There are no special tweaks in place. It’s all default, and only for i386. I’ve just saved you the step of booting a CD and clicking on “Startup Disk Creator.”

Or in the case of Unity, scratching around through the gigantic buttons, finally searching for “USB” and finding the application button hiding somewhere. Or at least, that’s what I ended up doing.

Poor man’s SSD: Confusion and disappointment

I don’t know whether I should be embarrassed, worried or amused. For the greater part of a year I’ve been pushing CF cards as a method of rehabilitating out-of-date hardware.

They’re cheaper than full-size drives, vastly cheaper than SSDs, and in all the time I’ve used mine I haven’t had a single error.

Technically I still haven’t had a problem. But I realize now, that until yesterday, I had never put a CF card into a “new” machine.

In fact, the fastest machine I’d ever used one in … topped out at about 150Mhz.

So you can probably imagine my confusion and disappointment when I put one in a 2.2Ghz Celeron, and wondered why in the heck it was taking so long to do its thing.

Yes, it’s sad but true: It appears that my savior for sub-200Mhz machines is the bane of the supra-1Ghz bracket. I should’ve guessed.

I say I should’ve guessed because I knew full well that the bottleneck on a system running with the card and the adapter is the connecting IO hardware.

In other words, the card works so well with old-old computers because the computer itself can barely keep up with the card.

Reverse the situation — put the card in a fast machine — and suddenly it’s the card that’s holding things up.

Write cycles were particularly bad; I could probably live with an installed system so long as I didn’t have to save a lot of stuff all the time.

And to be honest, I could probably see myself using one in much the same way I do already — with a built system that I turn on once a day, answer some e-mails, and never do much more than that.

But anything that needs heavy disk access — torrent slave, low-memory system — would be a nightmare. Brr, I shudder at the thought.

Tell me if your setup is working better for you. For me, this is a backup solution at best, and my “supra-1Ghz” comment above is really just a ballpark estimate.

If you’ve actually got something comparable in a 1.7Ghz machine and it’s working well for you with a CF card in it, I’ll assume the best, and figure the error is on my end.

Which it usually is. This time too, it seems.

The ebb and flow

Lots of changes are afoot in this tiny corner of the planet, which accounts in part for the silence over the past few days.

First of all, one of the computers I was expecting to inherit has arrived on my doorstep. I can properly introduce the NEC VersaPro VY22X/RX-M, or just vy22x, as I like to call it.

This is the 2.2Ghz Celeron I mentioned oh-so-many times over the past year or two. It’s not at all a bad computer — ATI graphics, 512Mb and more is possible, 1024×768 in a nice big size. …

It’s of very similar dimensions and specifications as the Toshiba, although it is obviously a completely different computer.

The hard drive is another ancient creaking wheel though — 20Gb 4200rpm, the omnipresent Hitachi MK2023GAS I keep finding — and will be the first thing to go.

The chassis needs a cleaning, and the previous owner liked to slather stickers on everything in the house. So I’ll need to scrape away some glue and goo.

Otherwise it’s in pretty good shape, and should be fun to experiment with.

But where there is an ebb, there must be a flow … so the 120Mhz and 133Mhz Fujitsu laptops are out of the house now, having moved on to a new owner.

It felt a little sad to see them go — particularly the slower of the two, given as many adventures as I had with it.

I was tempted to convert one or the other into some sort of photo frame or wall clock, but their value was in their completeness and good condition, not their Frankenstein factor.

I did not, however, include the CF cards. Those I intend to use in future machines.

I should also mention, though it’s a lesser point, that I’ve moved everything back to Arch Linux on the fastest machine.

That noisy romp through the Ubuntu betas was instructive, but not particularly productive. It was nice to see how some of those distros do things, but it reinforced where my preferences lie.

So all of this means there needs to be a few updates around this site. A couple of machines are new, a couple more are gone … life goes on.

An unlikely hero: Xubuntu

Part of that unfortunate rant from a day ago came about after spending a day or two in Xubuntu, after spending an equal amount of time in Kubuntu.

Originally my foray back into the *buntus was meant to give fair time to alternative renditions of Ubuntu, and avoiding tainting the entire set with tirades against the flagship.

On the one hand, it was important to do that. And it has been a while since I’ve used some of these versions, even if I still feel a tinge of disappointment when I try them.

 

I’m not going to dwell long on my failed relationship with Xubuntu, mostly because it’s ancient history. I stopped using it, that’s about all.

It appears to be working in a lighter direction though, so I will give it that. The default desktop, unless I am mistaken, is more “traditional” than straight Ubuntu 11.04, and relies only the native XFCE compositor for shadow effects.

It may just be that the desktop “style” is a cycle or two behind what vanilla Gnome does though. Like I suggested, I don’t follow the outlying desktops so I don’t know the plan.

It has a few peculiarities though. The pop-up notification boxes for networking or volume control don’t seem to vanish automatically for me, which means they completely block anything underneath, until it’s explicitly closed. Perhaps I just don’t wait long enough.

The pop-up launcher bar at the bottom of the screen is vaguely clever, in that it uses the standard XFCE panel and adjusts its settings to behave like wbar or AWN.

Speedwise, I can’t tell you if it’s necessarily an improvement over any *buntu, or even a past version of itself. The computer I tried it on is really too fast to make a comparison.

Granted, it’s a carrying a lot of Gnome already. But that just means the way it works and behaves is a little more conventional.

I can tell you that adjusting it to a little more traditional XFCE arrangement, like you see above, did make me more comfortable and make the desktop a little easier to manage.

Which means that ultimately — and it’s strange to say this — if the new Ubuntu desktop proves too cumbersome or counterintuitive for you, like it did for me, Xubuntu might be an answer.

Xubuntu to the rescue. Who would’ve thought?

Two small additions

I apologize if your blood pressure is up; I managed to stir up the pot quite neatly with that last post.

I don’t ever troll though: The questions were legitimate and quite clear to me when I wrote them yesterday.

And they still are. I feel no differently about the issue than I did a day ago, even with the swirl of opinions that came forth.

I do have a couple of ancillary points that I want to touch on, before I drop the topic for a while.

First, invariably someone mentions video editing as a task that requires beefy hardware and consequentially beefy software.

I suppose in it’s current state, desktop video editing does require a certain measure of supporting software to get the job done. To the satisfaction of casual computer user Joe Public? Sure.

But remember that video editing was not invented in 2005. Steve Jobs and iWhatever didn’t build the niche from scratch. In fact, Steve and Co. are johnny-come-latelys, if anything.

Chew on this for a little bit: Way, way back in 1990 it was possible to do professional-grade video editing on a machine that was running at just over seven megahertz with a cruel baseline of only 512 kilobytes — expandable to a meager nine megabytes.

Pause for effect.

Of course, that machine was the almighty Amiga 2000 paired with Video Toaster and some external hardware. I don’t need to tell you the pure, distilled genius of that ensemble. Amiga fans can take over from here.

Yes, your desktop video editing system might do more now and at a better pace. But please don’t hold out that singular task as some sort of validation of desktop software bloat. I don’t buy it.

And invariably someone mentions Game X running on System Y as a convoluted justification for increased desktop ballast.

Linux users aren’t as noisy in that category, but I did get one or two e-mails saying, “Ja, you’re right, but I play Game X which needs System Y which won’t run on anything less than Hardware Z.”

The mind boggles. Let me introduce you to my little friend.

That’s Oolite, an open-source OpenGL rendition of Elite, a game that holds more No.-1 spots on best-of-all-time lists than you knew existed.

This is a game that incorporated wire-frame 3D graphics, a trading and economics system that includes fluctuating market prices, a series of eight galaxies all with 256 planets each having discrete and predetermined characteristics, spaceflight and physics models, radar and target tracking systems, weapons arrays, ranking systems … you name it.

Original release date was 1984, and was initially written to fit into 14 kilobytes of machine code.

You don’t need to convince me. I am sure and completely confident that Game X is so, so, so much better than Elite ever was.

My point is that there is a history to computer software that goes back decades, and each generation did the same if not better with less.

The fact that you need hardware strong enough to run a certain grade of software that lets you do that same sort of thing as a decade ago … well, that’s where the logic fails for me.

And that’s where I’ll put a cap on this for a while. I have a lot of other things that need note, and I don’t care to spend too much time debating whether 1984 is an improvement over 2011.

A failure of logic

Here’s a legitimate question, and one you should consider: If your CPU is 20 times faster than hardware from a decade ago, why does it take the same amount of time — sometimes longer — to go from a cold start to online and reading e-mail?

In light of desktop advances over the past few months, and ones that are due over the next few more, it becomes more and more curious.

Unity, KDE 4.6, Gnome 3 … are they all improvements, if they’re requiring the same amount of time, but more powerful hardware?

If I rephrase the question, it becomes easily blurred: If you have thirty to forty times the memory your computer had ten years ago, why does it require a proportionate — or perhaps even greater portion — amount of resources to manage day-to-day tasks?

At this point, conventional wisdom says, “Well, it’s easy and cheap to bolster the amount of resources available to a computer, so the question is moot.”

Quite to the contrary. Jamming a PC to the brim with the fastest processor and biggest hard drive and most memory does not erase the fact that the software it runs is becoming less efficient.

Which is a point asserted by the original question.

Which, by the way, was not mine. It’s from a Linux Journal article.

From nearly ten years ago.

It’s sad to think that, over the course of nearly a decade, the issue is still lurking. And oddly enough (or perhaps not), Marco Fioretti’s rationale for the RULE project is still lurking too.

But I’m just an end-user. I don’t code — I haven’t the time or the skills at this point in my life to make a meaningful and considerable contribution.

So perhaps pointing out the incongruity — the perversity, almost — of relying on stronger hardware to run heavier software to do the same tasks as a decade ago … well, maybe that’s rude.

But I am just an end-user, and that means I have the option of throwing my meager weight behind projects that don’t follow that trend.

It does not serve my interests to use or endorse software that needs additional hardware, not because of the financial implications, or ecological self-righteousness, or because of underprivileged communities elsewhere on the planet.

It’s because logically, at its core, the situation and popular prescription make no sense.

So no, I won’t be buying additional hardware to meet the demands of Unity or KDE 4.6 or Gnome 3, nor would I with Windows 7 or Mac OS … whatever Mac is up to these days.

When software and desktops follow a curve that suggests speed and efficiency over glitz and gluttony, I will be on board.

But until then, I am doing fine with a 15-year-old Pentium and a few razor-sharp console programs. To each his own.

Quick interlude: AssaultCube

Just a brief note right now: I’ve had a quick run at AssaultCube, and found it worthy.

I like that the original Cube/Sauerbraten game has gotten a makeover and gotten a little more … focused. It retains its speed and playability, and adopts a much more … focused … theme.

Give it a try.