|
|
Linux and Open Source News for 5th January 2007
|
Linux Today News Service
|
|
Source: Linux Today A substantial grant from Google has enabled notebook computers running Linux and a variety of open source software to be rolled out at rural schools in Fiji
Source: Linux Today The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project will showcase its self-powered, low-cost, XO laptop computer at the 2007 Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next week
Source: Linux Today This is the 'one big page' version of the LWN.net 2006 Linux and Free Software timeline
Source: Linux Today A reader mined through his old emails and came up with a work email from 1998 that included a copy of an Open Letter to SCO from Caldera's then-CEO Sparks, saying: 'We want your VARs '
Source: Linux Today Just months after Red Hat acquired JBoss, it's possible the start-up's leader, Marc Fleury, won't be staying on
Source: Linux Today In 2005, two former Merrill Lynch techies, young and living large in New York City, left their jobs to start a company based on their favorite pastime: playing with yo-yos
Source: Linux Today OpenOffice.org has patched a critical vulnerability in the open-source application suite
Source: Linux Today There will be no more releases of Fedora Core or Fedora Extras
Source: Linux Today More than 7,000 angry Linux users have protested against the European Union after it excluded them from viewing streaming videos
Source: Linux Today In recognition of children being Rwanda's most precious natural resource, the government of Rwanda has committed to provide one laptop per child to all primary school children within five years
Source: Linux Today The ImageMagick (IM) suite of command-line graphics tools is a free software staple; Linux, other Unix-like operating systems, and proprietary OSes like Windows have supported IM for close to two decades
Source: Linux Today OpenVZ, the open source virtualization software akin to SWsoft's Virtuozzo, now runs on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s eco-friendly UltraSPARC T1 chip, in addition to x86, IA-64 and Power 64 processors
Source: Linux Today This tutorial shows how to create a Debian/Ubuntu mirror for your local network with the tool apt-mirror
Source: Linux Today Lately, I've been pining for the simplicity of a text email client. Though Sylpheed has been a reliable workhorse, I decided to survey today's text email clients to see if I should go back to reading email in an xterm
Source: Linux Today Today's security advisories: DenyHosts, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird (Gentoo Linux); and OpenOffice.org and mono-web (SUSE Linux).
Source: Linux Today Altiris would be accretive; XenSource would not. At least, not in the short term
Source: Linux Today Providing a convincing argument why the resulting pleasure will more than offset the pain is therefore imperative
Source: Linux Today With Windows Vista on the horizon, the fate of desktop Linux could rest in open media formats
Source: Linux Today The Supreme Court has been ducking the issues this case has been raising, but has finally agreed (forced) to hear them. Hopefully, the Court will not duck its responsibility to clear this mess up
|
|
News for nerds, stuff that matters
|
|
Source: Slashdot: Linux lisah writes "Serge Wroclawski recently contacted Dell to request a refund on the unwanted copy of Windows XP that came pre-installed on his computer. Somewhat surprisingly, Dell complied. Wroclawski admits that the $52.50 refund was more of a victory in principle than anything else, but it was a success nonetheless. Using his tips and techniques readers can try their hand at getting a refund of their own. Wroclawski cautions that you should be prepared for a long haul: the process could take hours." Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
Source: Slashdot: Linux OSS_ilation writes "IBM touted 2006 as a resurgence year for the mainframe, but not so fast. At R.L. Polk and Co., one of the oldest automobile analytics firms in the U.S., an aging mainframe couldn't cut it, so the IT staff looked elsewhere. Their search led to a grid computing environment — more specifically, a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers. The mainframe's still there, apparently, but after an internal comparison showed the Linux grid outperforming the mainframe by 70% with a 65% reduction in hardware costs, Polk seemed content banishing the big box to a dark, lonely corner for more medial tasks."
Source: Slashdot: Linux An anonymous reader writes "In recent times, a lot of discussion has been generated about the state of KDE version 4.0 and as Linux users we are ever inquisitive about what the final user experience is going to be. This article throws light on some of the features that we can look forward to when KDE 4.0 is finally released some time this year. The article indicates that the most exciting fact about KDE 4.0 is going to be that it is developed using the Qt 4.0 library. This is significant because Qt 4.0 is released under a GPL license even for non-Unix platforms. So this clears the ideological path for KDE 4.0 to be ported to Windows and other non-Unix/X11 platforms."
|
|
The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs
|
|
Source: ONLamp.com You haven’t seen me much since October. You can blame that on my editor - the task master during the days leading up to production and the laid back, friendly guy afterward. I’ll dangle a participle fir you: Writing “Linux System Administration” daunted me. Whoever wrote this got it right:
Linux System Administration (LSA) is not only knowledgeable and practical, but convenient. The ingredients for this book had been scattered throughout mailing lists, forums, and discussion groups, as well as books, periodicals, and the experiences of colleagues. Everything is now in one handy guide. In the course of their research, the authors also solved many problems whose solutions were completely undocumented. They now pass their lessons on to you.
Oh, I did I mention Bill Lubanvic who came in during the later innings and rescued us, handling tech review comments and backing me up beautifully. His name goes on the cover for what he contributed.
I’m back now and looking for real work. LSA took my full attention and I could only take short-term assignments during that time. I’m ready to get back in the saddle. So, what’s up?
I’m pretty impressed with Server 2003 and the integration of Realms in AD. Putting together NIS and Kerberos to integrate users makes so much sense to me. I also have open eyes now when it comes to forests and trees. I could go camping.
We’ll see what happens and I’m keep you posted. Meanwhile look for http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596009526/#top the book. It’s due out in March and I promise you have not seen this level of sysadmin before. Thanks to all the people who believed in the concept.
Source: ONLamp.com Was it really two years ago when Curt Hibbs introduced Ruby on Rails to the world at large? In that time, Rails has grown up a lot. Curt and Bill Walton revisit the original tutorial to bring it up to date and show off how much easier it is to get started with the powerful Ruby on Rails web framework. Here's the second half of their update.
Source: ONLamp.com If you’re like me, you never want to lose a command. I’m constantly searching back through them to find out just what those command line flags were, what the esoteric command is (and where it’s located), and most of all: what in Tcl’s name did I do last month when I installed foobazzulator. First thing to know: control-r.
However, bash ships with a ridiculously short memory: 500 commands. That’s not enough: right now, my powerbook’s iTerm prompt is:
[/Users/jwellons]
111280$
Go into your .bash_profile now and add these lines, before you read on:
HISTFILESIZE=1000000000
HISTSIZE=1000000
Unless you’re very precocious, that should square you away for about 10 years (I’m at about 22 months since enlightenment).
Once you develop control-r as a fast way to search your command history, you’ll notice immediate stress relief, and as I do everyday, wish you’d done this years before.
Now that you have commands piling up, you can do more than just use them. You can analyze them too, for fun and profit (since time = money)!
The basic starter is
cut -f1 -d" " .bash_profile | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 30
In other words, just what do you spend so much time typing? Here’s the money: Anything in at least the top ten, assuming it is not from some massive one-time splurge, needs to be aliased to a one or two letter shorthand.
My top command is v for vim, which I’ve executed 9225 times. If those two extra letters, which require me to switch hands, then use adjacent fingers take an extra half-second each time: that’s well over an hour wasted! And what a terribly drudgerous and unhealthy hour it is too: mindlessly typing im 9225 times!
Even worse, who knows how desperately I needed to open that file, and yet I needed to type superfluous characters, probably messing them up on the first three tries.
Actually, that’s only my second highest command. cl tops the list at 11116. You see, last time I did this analysis, I noticed I was spending (yes, spent, like lines of code, there is no glory in using a lot of them) many commands first cd‘ing to a directory, then listing the contents. Here’s cl:
# Compress the cd, ls -l series of commands.
alias lc="cl"
function cl () {
if [ $# = 0 ]; then
cd && ll
else
cd "$*" && ll
fi
}
There you have it, accompanied by its most common typo. Add this to your bash profile now, and you’ll add several hours to your life. Hurry! Don’t wait! It may not seem like much now, but no one lies on her deathbed wishing she had spent more time first changing directories, waiting for it to return, then typing ls.
Since I know you’re dying to see the rest, here’s my whole thirty, unaliased for readability:
11116 cl
9225 vim
7833 ll The alias of ll depends on the OS I’m on, but for my Mac, it’s ls -AGlFT.
5145 cd
4858 clear
4563 rm
3950 alias to log into the master db server at my old workplace
3740 lt version of ll that puts most recently modified stuff at the bottom. Mandatory! Add -tr to ll above
3435 mod a function that does lt, but runs it through tail
3236 mv
2103 ls
1887 grep
1863 perl
1834 df
1767 mzscheme
1679 alias to log into my personal server
1580 g++
1544 cat
1186 scp
1080 find
988 man
925 echo
921 mkdir
907 sudo
888 history
841 alias to log into the dev server at my old workplace
831 cp
763 gpg
758 locate
733 gzip
Depending on response, we may do another section with pie charts, finding all the typo permutations for simple commands (there’s a lot), and searching for common sequences.
What I really want to see, though, is your top commands.
Source: ONLamp.com A while ago I wrote the Learning Perl Study Guide for O’Reilly. It’s 64 pages of additional exercises and answers for the end-of-chapter exercises in Learning Perl, 4th Edition. At the moment it’s available through Pearson educational channels as a bundle with Learning Perl. At Stonehenge we use these guides in our Perl trainings.
To make my study guide available to everyone, I bought a big box of them and am selling them at cost myself. O’Reilly’s already paid me for the work and I just want to make the study guide available to anyone who wants it. The cover price is $19.99 (US) and $25.99 (Canada), but I’m selling it at $14 (North America) and $18 (everywhere else). That’s a flat price that already includes taxes, shipping, and everything else.
And, since it’s just me selling these out of my home office, I can give people a break on bulk orders and special deals. Just ask!
|
|
The O'Reilly Network's Linux DevCenter Articles and Weblogs
|
|
Source: Linux DevCenter Once upon a time there was a small, lightweight distribution based on Slackware. It wasn’t all that different from any of a number of small, lightweight distros designed to work on older hardware though it seemed to be well thought out. That was Vector Linux 1.8 six years ago. Since then VL has grown into a full featured distribution available in several different configurations. The latest release, Vector Linux 5.8, appeared on December 18th and it is clearly the most mature yet, in many ways equaling or even surpassing more popular distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. If the developers manage to smooth out the few remaining rough edges they may find themselves with a distro that is as popular as any of those.
Vector Linux comes in four flavors: Standard, Deluxe, SOHO, and Live. SOHO, with KDE as the default desktop and all the most popular applications, is the full featured version. Standard is the descendant of the original Vector Linux and is designed to be fast and lightweight. It is based on the Xfce4 desktop and provides superior speed and performance especially on older hardware. Both are freely downloadable. Deluxe, available for purchase, is Standard plus a second CD with additional applications as well as Gnome and Enlightenment DR17, the latter packaged from a recent CVS build. Live, as the name implies, is a live CD version of Standard. So far only new Standard and Deluxe versions have been released.
Much like Xubuntu Edgy which I reviewed three weeks ago, Vector is built around the Xfce4 desktop and mostly uses applications that don’t have KDE or Gnome dependencies. The Standard version of Vector Linux is polished enough to be used almost anywhere, not just on older hardware, provided you get through some potential installation and configuration issues.
I’ve used Vector Linux 5.8 Standard on two systems so far. The first is my general purpose laptop, a four year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 (1 GHz Celeron processor, 512MB RAM). Though this system has adequate memory for any current Linux distro it’s sufficiently challenged in terms of processing power for KDE to be sluggish and for Gnome to be noticeably slower than Xfce4. The second system is a tiny little Toshiba Libretto SS1010, a machine barely larger than a paperback book. This is an old Libretto model with just a mobile Pentium 266MHz MMX processor, 96MB of RAM, and a puny 2.1GB hard drive. The published system requirements claim that 128MB of RAM is a minimum for VL 5.8 but I found that with the exception of the absolutely heaviest applications included that performance is crisp and smooth on the little Libretto.
Installation and Configuration
Vector Linux 5.8 Standard is available for download as a single iso image. I’ve used both supported installation methods: a conventional installation booted from CD-ROM and a hosted installation booted from another Linux distribution already running on the system. There are two scripts provided for hosted installs: one which runs from an iso image on a mounted filesystem and one which runs from a CD-ROM that isn’t bootable. I used the latter, albeit slightly modified, running under Damn Small Linux 3.1 to load VL 5.8 on my Libretto from an Addonics PCMCIA CD-ROM drive.
Directions and all the tools needed for a hosted installation from DOS or Windows are also provided. Installation across a network and automated installations, such as Red Hat’s kickstart, are not supported unless I’ve missed something somewhere.
Installation and configuration is one area where Vector Linux really falls down compared to almost all the more popular distributions. I have no problem with an old fashioned text based installer and even praised the one included in Xubuntu. The issue is that the VL installer is rather inflexible and lacks some basic sanity checking to prevent it from failing and leaving the user with a system that may not even boot. If you try to install your root filesystem into a partition that’s too small the installer will merrily go ahead until it fills the available space and then it starts spitting out errors, eventually crashing. The amount of space the installer claims it needs (about 1.6MB for a base install with X) is actually inadequate. The real number, which is correctly stated in the documentation, is 1.8MB. I found this out the hard way the first time I tried to load VL on my Libretto.
Another potential pitfall for someone who doesn’t know Linux well is in choosing the type of filesystem to install the root partition into. The Vector Linux installer supports ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and xfs. Here’s the catch: Vector Linux still uses lilo and only lilo for the bootloader. Poor old lilo can only read ext2 and ext3 partitions. So, if you format your root partition with reiserfs or xfs and try to install lilo on your MBR it will fail. There is no warning for those who might not know this. The normal workaround would be to create a small ext2 /boot partition but the Vector Linux installer doesn’t offer that as an option. Unless you create a boot floppy or you already have grub installed on a dual or multi boot system you are just plain stuck.
Strangely the installer only supports xfs on the root partition, not anywhere else.
Hardware detection is relatively poor compared to other distributions as well. For example when I booted up to the GUI for the first time I learned that X had been poorly configured for my Toshiba Satellite laptop. I was left with a small display in the middle of my screen surrounded by lots of black space. No amount of fiddling with X configuration in vasm (the GUI configuration tool) could make it work the way it should. I ended up copying the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file from my Xubuntu installation to fix the problem. By comparison recent versions of Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise, Xubuntu, and Ehad Linux have all been installed on this laptop and have all automagically configured X with no problems whatsoever. On my Libretto once again X configuration failed. This time VL couldn’t come up with a working X configuration at all. I manually edited the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to get it working.
One very clever installation option is to put /tmp as tmpfs in RAM. This is recommended by the installer if you have 192MB of RAM on your system and it really does improve performance by eliminating a lot of disk I/O. However, as I learned the hard way under Vector Linux 5.1, this is a really bad idea if you ever want to compile anything rather large. The compiler will hum along until it fills your /tmp space in RAM and then crash and burn. If you do any significant development or compiling of large applications from source this is one option I do NOT recommend. This option can be enabled or disabled from vasm with the change taking effect at the next reboot.
Printing and wireless networking aren’t handled by the installer at all and have to be configured after the system boots up for the first time. Expect to go into vasm to choose what services to start at boot as well. A very clear, very well written, and significantly outdated installation guide for Vector Linux 5.0 is included. Finally, both the installer and the documentation are in English, period. No other languages are supported which I find very strange for a distribution that calls itself “truly an international endeavor”.
Changes Since Vector Linux 5.1
There have been a large number of changes in the applications offered since version 5.1 was released over a year ago. Seamonkey is now the default broswer, though Firefox and Dillo both remain available as optional packages at install time. Opera is also available as an option. The default e-mail client is now Seamonkey Mail. Sylpheed has been dropped but an updated version is available for download. AbiWord has been upgraded to version 2.4.6 and Gnumeric 1.7.4 has been added. Xara LX has been added as an optional package for vector graphics.
Xfce 4.3.99 RC2 is now the default and only desktop provided. Both Fluxbox and IceWM have been dropped but are available for download. All the packages for a complete installation of KDE 3.5.4 are also available for download. Thunar is now the default file manager and ROX Filer is no longer included. Xfe is still also installed by default. I was disappointed by the fact that many of the Xfce applets available in Xubuntu have not been included in VL 5.8.
The biggest steps forward are the tools to manage and configure the system. vasm, the graphical system configuration tool, still isn’t the prettiest out there but it has a lot of added functionality and works flawlessly. vl-hot is a new graphical manager for removable media. It correctly automounts not only USB and Firewire media but PCMCIA as well, popping up icons for both access via Thunar and unmounting the media on the desktop. No other distribution I’ve seen so far automounts and correctly handles PCMCIA media such as a compact flash to PCMCIA adapter. In handling removable media Vector Linux 5.8 is second to none in terms of ease of use. The new, graphical wifi-radar application for finding and managing wireless connections is also excellent.
Under the hood Vector Linux now runs on a patched 2.6.18 kernel. Kernel level support for popular laptops works as expected. However, tools for included in Xubuntu and other distributions, such as the Toshiba utilities and toshset for my laptops, are still not included and not offered.
Multimedia applications including XMMS, Xine, and optionally MPlayer have all been updated. Canada has no equivalent to the DMCA so all the libraries and Win32 codecs are installed by default. Vector Linux is ready to play your mp3 files and DVDs right out of the (virtual) box. People in the United States will need to remove some packages after installation, particularly libdvdcss and w32codecs, in order to comply with the law.
A new optional games package has been added. It consists mainly of graphic intensive arcade style games many of which require significantly better video cards and much more processing power than either laptop I’ve installed on. There were a few games which ran just fine on my Satellite and the story of Don Ceferino Hazana definitely is worth a chuckle.
Running Vector Linux 5.8 Standard
Unlike Xubuntu the VL installer doesn’t leave you with a stripped down system to build on. It takes the approach used by larger distributions (i.e.: Fedora, SuSe, Mandriva) and gives you a system with a fairly comprehensive set of applications immediately available after installation and configuration. Vector also provides more truly useful lightweight applications, some of which aren’t packaged for Ubuntu as of yet.
One of the main reasons I ran Vector Linux 5.1 was that it was clearly the fastest distribution with a decent set of applications and features for my older hardware, particularly the aforementioned Toshiba Libretto SS1010. Vector Linux 5.8 and Xubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) are now the two fastest current distributions and I notice no significant performance difference between them. Once you get past installation and configuration I’d give Vector Linux a slight edge in terms of a user friendly, well thought out desktop, owing largely to their handling of wireless connections and removable media.
One bug I did run into was that while cups was installed by default on my systems the libraries it depends on were not. Once those libraries are downloaded and installed with slapt-get or gslapt you can then start and configure cups. While Xubuntu disables the cups web interface there is an option to enable it in vasm and that is the preferred printer management tool in Vector Linux.
The Vector Linux 5.8 repositories, both the main one and extra, include far more packages than ever before. Still, they fall far short of what is available for distributions like Debian, Mandriva, and Ubuntu or what is offered in Fedora Extras. The Vector Linux Forum shows more packages being added constantly so this may become a non-issue very quickly. Also, VL 5.8 is based on Slackware 11 and any Slackware packages, including those from third party sources like linuxpackages.net, should work on Vector with one caveat: no dependency checking will be done. It’s pretty easy to end up in dependency hell with third party packages if you aren’t careful.
As I described in my previous reviews of Xubuntu Edgy and Dapper, Xfce4 is highly configurable and quite intuitive and user friendly. It’s features are just a subset of what you get with Gnome or KDE. Although some things are quite sophisticated overall Xfce4 stresses simplicity and ease of use over lots of gee whiz bells and whistles. For those who find Xfce4 lacking it’s a simple matter to install the KDE 3.5.4 packages under Vector Linux Standard.
Package Management
For many years one of the major weaknesses in Slackware and it’s derivative distributions, including Vector Linux, was a total lack of sane package management. There was nothing like apt or rpm and dependency issues were common. Vector Linux started tackling this with vlapt a few releases back, which has since been replaced with slapt (Slackware apt). slapt is designed to work almost exactly the same way apt works on a Debian based system. Dependency checking, however, is still limited to installation. If you install a package from a VL repository with slapt-get or gslapt (the equivalent to Synaptic on a Debian or Ubuntu system) it will correctly identify and install any dependencies. What slapt still can’t do is check for impacts on already installed packages or check what might break when you remove a package.
Running Vector Linux 5.1 and treating slapt like apt caused major headaches. In recent months if you decided to close any potential security holes and get the latest and greatest apps by running
slapt-get –update
slapt-get –upgrade
or by using gslapt you probably ended up with a rather broken system. For example, upgrading gimp also upgraded to a newer version of pango, a dependency. Upgrading pango broke Xfce 4.2.x. That was just one of a bunch of problems. I felt like I had been slapt upside the head.
The good news is that so far there is no problem upgrading Vector Linux 5.8 the way you might upgrade Debian or Ubuntu. It works. Due to the limitations still inherent in slapt keeping upgrades working properly is going to require a lot of testing and caution from Vector Linux packagers and repository maintainers. VL clearly has some very sharp developers so I am hopeful. My one note of caution to end users is that you keep the Testing repository out of your configuration.
I should also note that VL 5.8 also comes with scripts to unpackage and/or install both rpm and deb packages. It also provides the tools necessary to convert them to Slackware packages. Once again, no dependency checking is available for third party software, but for the knowledgeable user this may be more convenient that compiling from source for software not in the VL repositories, especially on older, slow hardware where compilation can be quite time consuming.
Internationalization and Localization
Support for languages other than English is the other area where Vector Linux is weak compared to other distributions. The developers have begun to address this in the 5.x releases. KDE i18n packages are in the main repository. In Vector Linux 5.8 Cyrillic fonts are installed for the first time. fribidi, the software at the core of support for languages written right to left such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, is installed by default. The Xfce4 keyboard switching applet is also included.
Spell checkers, dictionaries, and fonts for languages using other than Latin or Cyrillic characters are all not included and not available in the VL repositories. In order to have reasonable support for any language other than English you will need to get Slackware packages or sources directly from the developers. After hunting down and installing the necessary packages you should have basic internationalization done. I can now read web pages and create documents in French and Hebrew in addition to English with no problem. Still, it would be nice if these packages were somewhere in the Vector Linux repositories. How-tos for adding Japanese and Korean language support are available in the Vector Linux forum.
If your goal is a truly localized system, not just a system running in English with support for other languages, you need to do significant work to make it happen in Vector Linux Standard. KDE is the only desktop environment for which any translations are provided. Even Xfce4 localization files are missing. No localized applications are provided at all. In addition, the default display manager is kdm-small. Language switching at login is not supported. If you want to change the default language or locale you have to do it at the command line and by editing appropriate configuration files. There is a how-to published for French language localization.
Conclusion
Once you have Vector Linux installed, configured, and customized to your needs it’s an absolute pleasure to run. It’s fast and sleek and well thought out. Some features, such as those for managing WiFi connections and removable hardware, are absolutely second to none.
Unfortunately the installer still needs work. In my experience once initial installation is done you have a lot more configuration and customization left to do than with other distributions. vasm, the main GUI configuration tool, is very powerful but assumes you know what you are doing. It isn’t dumbed down at all. While experienced users and those willing to role up their sleeves and learn will likely appreciate this, newcomers and anyone else who just wants things to work after a simple installation may find Vector Linux 5.8 exceedingly frustrating. Those whose primary language is something other than English are likely better served with another distribution unless they are ready to do some significant work.
Despite some complaints and caveats Vector Linux remains a favorite distribution of mine. Vector Linux 5.8 is by far their best release yet. I always grumble at VL for several days after installing a new version but once I get everything just right it is actually pretty hard to beat. It just isn’t for everyone. I guess what bothers me is that Vector Linux is about 90% of the way to being about the best distro out there. I’d just like to see the developers conquer the other 10%.
Source: Linux DevCenter Last May I wrote about reviving a pair of ancient laptops using Damn Small Linux. I called them “atticware” (a term I can’t take credit for inventing, BTW) because the attic is where computers that old often end up. My point is that there are current Linux distributions that can allow even decade old hardware to run a current if lightweight OS and software. The uses for this should be obvious: non-profits, the proverbial starving students, anyone of limited means, developing countries, and so on. Various programs to recycle old system and get them into deserving hands have sprung up like weeds though I suspect few if any bother to load Linux on such systems.
Anyway, I wrote a follow up piece in July linking to step-by-step installation instructions. I’ve received lots of responses since then. The interesting quirks I reported in the Damn Small Linux (DSL) frugal installation were fixed in version 3.1 along with lots of other improvements.. As a result I’ve updated the web page to reflect changes with the new version. I know the DSL developers had read and commented favorably on the page. DSL developers famously respond to their user community and this is just one example of that. This is one of the many advantages of running something under current development.
Another response I received informed me that Memory Ten sells 64MB and 128MB memory upgrades for the Mitsubishi Amity CN, which raises the possibility of running a somewhat heavier distribution or at least using more and varied MyDSL extensions on the machine. You still won’t be able to run a full sized Linux distro without upgrading the hard drive as well. It’s more memory than Mitsubishi ever intended for those machines but heck.. I’m told it works just fine. Thanks to Todd Bergey for the information.
I’ve been experimenting with various distributions on my two Toshiba Libretto SS1010 systems. These are itty bitty laptops just a bit bigger than a standard paperback book. They have 233MHz and 266MHz mobile Pentium MMX processors and 64MB or 96MB of RAM, respectively. I’ll post some of the results soon.
|
|
