joe ferrare's blog

Just got done setting up Linux on the machine of a friend. Her husband got the laptop free (!) for signing up for some service, probably DSL. Anyway, it’s not a killer laptop. It’s got a 1.2 Ghz Via C3 processor, which means it probably runs about as fast as a 600 Mhz Pentium. But it’s got a nice enough 14″ screen and is otherwise OK for laptop kind of computer work he wants to do — surfing, e-mail, writing (we need a new snappy one-liner on the order of readin’ writin’ and ‘ritmatic to capture the surfing, e-mailing and word processing trio a lot of people use their computers for). Hey: my laptop runs at 600 Mhz most of the time, thanks to frequency scaling to save battery life.
It came with Knoppix (and a “designed for Windows XP” label) on it . They seemed to have done a terrible job installing the system. Knoppix is a live CD, which means you don’t have to install it to your hard drive to use it. You can run Linux from the CD. But it’s huge and has all kinds of things the average user doesn’t need. The husband is retired, and it’s his first computer, so I don’t think he needs any high speed stuff. Parts of it also seemed to think it was still running off a CD (disk is not writeable errors), and they set aside 3.5 GB for the swap partition (the usual is about twice your physical RAM, which would be about 512 MB in this case).
Well, after trying to bring the thing up to date (it came with version 3.8 and 5.0 is the current version), I just downloaded Kanotix Lite and installed that. Worked like a charm. Spent a few minutes setting up his KDE preferences, simplifying his panel and so on, and the machine is a good 15 or 20 percent faster (don’t ask me how I know; it’s just snappier to use).

That makes four people I’ve set up with Linux now. That’s out of a pretty small group of people, as the Garmisch American community is pretty small. Now that I think about it, though, neither of them is American. She’s British and he’s Austrian. Anyway, small world to be evangelizing Linux.

I’m going to revisit the other machine I recently installed Linux on. I put Zenwalk on it, and have since discovered STX Linux, and it is perfect for that machine. It’s a 300 Mhz laptop with 128 MB of RAM — and an off-brand machine at that. Zenwalk runs a lot better than Windows 2000 on it (yeah, Windows 2000), but still, STX looks to be perfect. Or maybe I’ll give Kanotix Lite a try. It has IceWM in addition to KDE, and IceWM is about the right speed.
I just realized I have yet to install the same version of Linux twice. The four I’ve installed were Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Zenwalk and now Kanotix Lite. Funny, that, espeically because I’m a die-hard Slackware user. I’ve got one other person asking to try Linux out, and I’m going to install a music-specific version for him, because he’s into mixing his own tunes. It’s a wonderful world, this Linux.

Slashdot has a brief about SiteAdvisor, which is a blog by some people who have decided to download pretty much every free program online and see what it does to your computer. The current article is about the worst examples they’ve come across. They seem to be mostly screensavers, but to get them you have to download and install six or eight or 10 programs. And most of them are adware, spyware and so forth. They run on your computer, leeching on your processor and memory, redirecting your web searches and so on. That’s why so many people running Windows get to watch their computers get slower and slower, why their home page gets switched and they can’t get it back and why so many of them end up having their computers taken over by bad guys who use them to send out spam, attack networks and so forth.

The answer is easy, of course: don’t download crap off the web. These guys have downloaded an incredible 140,000 programs and checked them out. They have virtual PC installed, so they can install the programs on a copy of Windows that’s not really running their PC. It’s an operating system inside their operating system, so if it gets hosed, it’s not fatal.

But as these guys document so well, you don’t know what you’re geting when you download this stuff. Even when people bother to read the user agreement, they usually don’t understand what it says (and the agreements are no doubt written that way on purpose), or really understand what it’s going to do to their systems. So the only thing to do is download nothing, which makes the web a giant candy store where you dare not eat anything. That pretty much sucks.

My answer — of course — is to run Linux (or the Mac, though there are more things targetting the Mac than Linux). The first thing it does is makes the whole 140,000 programs not enticing: they won’t run on Linux, so you’re not tempted to get them. Sounds just as sucky as ever, until you realize there are tons of free programs out there for Linux. Pretty much all the programs the average user would want to run on Linux are free. There are screensavers, games, etc. They’re good, they’re free and they don’t try to take over your computer. If you pick the right version of Linux (and it’s not hard) your computer will be faster, prettier and pretty much bulletproof when you’re surfing the net. And a nice side benefit is that you don’t have to feel bad because you’re using an illegal copy of a program.

This makes me think about writing a “how to choose a Linux distro” article. There are a lot out there, but I’ve never seen one I think is just right.

First, however, I’ve got to write about running Linux on my laptop for TuxMobile.org. I had one up on my old blog on joe.ferrare.net, but when I killed that whole site I forgot to save it.

It’s not a big deal, though, because I needed to rewrite it anyway. I wrote it when I was running Ubuntu, and I’ve since installed Zenwalk, which is quite a bit different — at least to install.

E-week has a story about another “study” Microsoft has done. I understand the PR theory behind why they do these things — you have to reassure the people who agree with you and challenge those who disagree with you while trying to convince the undecided (think political campaigns). But the journalist in me wonders why they bother. They’re so transparent.

I mean, I’m going to do a study (or pay for a study to be done, usually without telling anyone it’s on my dime) and — I’m shocked, shocked I say — that my product comes out on top. Or in this case equal to.

The story is about how Linux isn’t any better than Windows XP on older hardware. So how do they check? They install several Linux distros on a machine and see what happens. Seems fair. Except their choices determine the outcome. Except for Slackware, none of their choices is known for speed. So they pick the distros that compete with XP on capabilities and ignore the distros that are done specifically to run on older hardware. So instead of Kanotix Lite or Mepis Lite, or Vector they use Suse and Linspire. Heck, they must know it’s very easy to get a good low-resource installation of Slackware. It’s just not the standard KDE desktop installation.

I’m sure the desktop environment was KDE, too. As I’ve said before, KDE is great, and so is Gnome. But they’re resource-intensive. IceWM or XFCE would be the way to go on those machines — nice task bar, familiar menus, a fraction of the resources. The standard install of Slackware gives you Apache, development tools, databases, etc. With a little thought you could pick out the desktop apps you need and have the system you need. If you do the standard install you could run a huge web site, an office server, etc. That’s Slackware’s market. But the choices are there.

And instead of using Abiword, which any idiot would do on a machine from 1997 or 1998, they use OpenOffice. Hey, it’s a nice program, but again, it’s one that aims to compete with Microsoft’s current offerings. Abiword aims to be light and give you everything you need in a word processor. Big difference, as any Word user knows.

They make it seem to be a reasonable (which is the key) study by picking Linux distros and programs that compete with XP and doing a standard install of everything. They ignore Linux’s strength — choice and targetted distributions — because they’d get their asses handed to them if they did. They say people trying to use these older computers generally don’t have the IT staff to configure these operating systems to the nth degree, so they would just do a normal install. Here’s the thing: with an hour of googling, you could find out everything you need to know to install the right distro on those kinds of machines.

But it’s better for MS to assume ignorance. And hey: the idea of choice doesn’t come naturally to them, does it?

I wrote an article about Linux that was published yesterday on OSNews. It’s a review of Zenwalk Linux 2.0.1, so it’s nothing Earth-shaking. I like trying out different Linux distros, and this one is a version of Slackware, which is what I mainly use. I actually liked Zenwalk’s speed enough that I wiped Ubuntu off my laptop and installed Zenwalk. It took more work than Ubuntu, because Zenwalk is a minimalist distro and my centrino-based laptop requires special drivers. Ubuntu installed those automatically, but Ubuntu isn’t as fast as Zenwalk. That normally wouldn’t make that big a difference, because the laptop is a 1.6 Ghz Pentium M, which means (I’ve read) it’s roughly equivalent of a 2.4 Ghz Pentium 4. The thing is, centrinos slow down your processor to save battery life (and reduce heat) when you’re not doing anything that taxes your CPU. So it runs at 600 Mhz most of the time. At 1.6 Ghz the difference between Ubuntu and Zenwalk is not worth bothering about. At 600 Mhz, it is.

A couple of people commented that all these Linux distros is a bad thing and the fact there are hundreds of different versions confuses people and maybe scares them off. I disagree, because most people don’t even know what one Linux is. I think those that do look into either have somebody explaining things to them (the classic two-step flow of communication), or they just pick a popular, highly recommended option and give it a whirl. Plus there are live CDs that you don’t even have to install onto your hard drive, so it’s pretty risk-free.

Anyway, I wrote the article because I like to write non-work stuff once in a while. I should write more. I like OSNews because it’s a pretty relaxed site. I’m usually a stickler on grammar and spelling and so forth, and OSNews hasn’t always been the best in that regard. But they publish interesting things and have an interesting community of people who comment on things. That’s one thing about geek sites like OSNews and the big kahuna, Slashdot: you often find out more neat stuff in the comments than you do in the articles.

Well, that about wraps up my self-promotion. I’m off today. Sue is off skiing with friends, so it’s just me and the girl. I was going to walk her into day care, but it’s 1 degree Farenheit out there. It takes me a good 20 minutes to walk in, and with her it’s more like 45. I don’t think she’s up for 45 minutes of walking in 1 degree weather. Not sure I am.

So I’ll probably be blogging more today than usual.