The laptop I've been using is a Compaq Armada 7800 which is a 266 MHz Pentium II. Sounds a bit dated, doesn't it? It is.

I first ran Ultima Linux on it, and had the problem of wireless being cantankerous. When Ultima's website went *poof* I looked around and switched to Wolvix, which was an improvement. Then Wolvix had a new release, so I upgraded. That was a good idea, almost. Something in the new version chews up CPU. If I stop udevd the CPU usage drops from 100% to a more reasonable 7% or so. But even then there is an annoying seizing of the pointer that happens often enough that the machine is hardly usable. And the Wolvix site has been unreachable for me today. That's not encouraging.

I tried Xubuntu 7.10 (again) and it wouldn't boot the LiveCD fully, even in the "safe" mode. Same thing for TinyMe (a light version of PCLinuxOS that I'd love to be able to run). Anti-X, which is a light version of MEPIS and not a command line only thing despite the name, did the same. All those boot on a much faster desktop machine.

I tried Feather Linux, which actually booted and ran on the laptop. I might try it again and see if I can get wireless working. Or I might try another distribution, such as Absolute Linux.

In all the searching for answers to the boot problems I happened across a review of the laptop. It was dated 1998. This machine is nearly ten years old now. New machines run a few versions of CPU newer and clock a full order of magnitude faster. No wonder I'm having trouble finding something that it will run and run well.

I expect that if I keep looking and keep at things long enough I could get a workable system again. But now I am wondering if it would even be worth the effort. Also, the PCMCIA card doesn't handle WPA. Or rather it can be made to handle it, but only under Windows.

The only three real options right now are:

1. Compaq Armada 7800 (P-II 266 MHz)
...with all the problems above, including the lack of WPA.

2. A newer Dell (P-III 700 MHz ?)
This would have the lack of WPA problem, and I had similar boot problems with it when I was suspicious of the Compaq a few months ago, and it also suffers from being a Dell.

3. PowerBook G4 (G4 867 Mhz)
This one has OS X (yes, the newest version, whatever cat it is this time) so it is unixy underneath, and WPA does work. Unfortunately the surface isn't quite as unixy as it ought to be and I'd be stuck with the color scheme I'd scrap in an instant if only I could. Really, if I could fix that easily, I'd probably already be using this machine. It *is* unix underneath, right? Shouldn't there be a simple .config style file to edit to fix the colors?

So I have a choice of two machines that don't work and one that works but I'd have to stare into a light bulb to use it. Yuck. Though only when using Apple-supplied stuff. If I treated OS X like I treat(ed) Windows -- running programs from third parties whenever possible -- it might just be rendered tolerable. That's what I'm leaning toward right now.

That does bring up another issue: what programs will I need to find replacements for? Right now I suspect I'd need to replace Nedit (tabbed text editor that I can set the colors on), X-chat (x-chat aqua evidently isn't really ready, dagnabbit), Pidgin (formerly gaim). And I'd need these programs to all let me set their colors and not just use the OS non-choice(s).

At least I wouldn't be stuck using Safari (which has the same locked-in color idiocy as OS X itself) since Opera is available for OS X. Though evidently I'd need to tell OS X to get out of the way and let the keys do the things I expect them to so. F12 means "open the Opera quick menu" and not whatever goofy (and as I recall, utterly useless) thing OS X does with it, to me.

I suppose the choice should be whichever one involves the least amount of cussing. No, Mr. Jobs, that does not make #3 automatic. If only Woz had been around to make sure the configuration tools that ought to be there were included...

It is quite frustrating. The MacBook looks seems like a great thing, but only almost.

Current Mood: frustrated

Last night Masem pointed out that /. mentioned a LiveCD Roundup article and yakko quipped that I'd likely tried them all. Not quite, but I have tried a couple of them (Beatrix, knoppix), tried a few that weren't mentioned (DeadCD, Feather, Vector) . A couple that I have yet to try look interesting. I might try PCLinuxOS and Mandrake Move on a faster machine now. And I might have a look at FreesBie and consider running a BSD.

( Not quite a rant. )

Current Mood: discontent

I tried another Linux distribution on icelandic today. This one actually boots, at least.

( Feather Linux )

( Linux from a DeadCD )

Current Mood: impressed, well mostly

I tried to install Peanut Linux on icelandic and had some trouble. The latest version, 9.6, needs 140MB RAM to install, rather than the 64MB as claimed on the Peanut web site. Further, 9.6 is beta, according to a few forum entries. So I went and got the not so well mirrored 9.5 and that could install. But every time it had a chance to impress me, it ticked me off instead. It wants to be small and light, but can't because it's too busy being coolkewl. So I decided after trying to whack it into shape that it wasn't worth the effort.

I tried BeatrIX which is meant to be a super simple LiveCD with a graphic interface so friendly Aunt Flo could use it and never know she wasn't running Windows. It's a wonderful idea - for faster hardware and a faster CD drive. But it could be installed to hard drive, which would bypass the slow CD drive and let me create a proper user account. This was slow going as it was several seconds from key-press to response due to the slow CD drive I have. But I did get it installed, eventually.

BeatrIX is a Debian/Ubuntu derivative with pretty much everything not needed for the graphic desktop stripped out. A couple things bugged me. First, the wonderful autodetection found my serial trackball and lit up the LED in it.. for a moment, and then decided that the pointing device was an unused (and disabled in the BIOS) PS/2 port. Second, the window manager was gnome - and even on the hard drive it was slow. Fine, I'm willing to blame my ancient hardware there - but it shouldn't slow down the console response in another virtual terminal, at least not so as I notice it.

After the HDD install, the network had to be brought up manually. And I wanted to edit something. Console editor, what's a console editor? The thing, so help me, didn't even have vi ! I'm no fan of vi but its one redeeming feature is that it's always there - until BeatrIX, evidently. I tried other editor possibilities and had just as little luck. After more struggling to tell it about the network and the outside world, apt-get was finally working. And then I tried to look something up with man and it wasn't there. It's not that the man page I sought wasn't there, man itself was missing! Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. No console editor and no man ? What else does it not have? I've decided I don't care. I'm not wasting any more time fiddling with a deplorably incomplete distribution.

Addendum: Excluding vi isn't a problem by itself. Not having an editor is a problem. It would be really nice if trying to invoke vi (which is the nearly universal fallback editor) would run a simple script to tell the operator what the installed editor is. It shouldn't start the other editor, just tell a person about it.

Current Mood: shocked

( More computery stuff )

Current Mood: calm, really

After making some progress cleaning up the machine room I naturally had to fiddle with a couple of the machines therein. The good news is that they're going again when I thought they had been having problems. I think it was simply that one CD drive is not something that can be booted from.

I recalled needing DOS or Windows 3.x for something and so set up my first dual-boot (maybe more than dual, but that'll be later) machine. A small partition for DOS and WfW 3.11 and a larger partition for DeLi Linux. After whacking DeLi into shape (sshd needs to have stuff aimed right, su needs to have the right permissions, suauth needs to exist...) I got to adding the newest version of rhapsody - which promptly failed to compile.

Turns out the developer has been using ncurses 5.4 rather than 5.0 as listed on the rhapsody web site. So I grabbed ncurses 5.4 and compiled it. This takes quite a while on a Pentium 90. A. Long. While. That's just ncurses. I now realize I don't have the patience for a gentoo install save perhaps on damnfast hardware. However, after that compile and install, rhapsody did compile and install.

Current Mood: better now

2005 is starting better than 2004 ended. I wound up pulling all (two) cards from breton and moving the motherboard partly out, still leaving it mounted onto the side of the case, and could get at the memory slots more easily. The memory sticks snapped right in as they should. Now breton has 64 MB and is quite happy, as am I.

How happy is the machine? Let's see, I have four desktops on IceWM and I'm using them all. Spread across them, one xterm shows top. Another is just a shell access. And another is running rhapsody IRC. I have three Dillo web browser windows open, as well as the Pathetic Writer (that really is its name) word processor, a PDF viewer, and a file manager.

The top monitor reports:

CPU states: 3.4% user, 1.8% system, 0.0% nice, 94.6% idle
Mem: 63088K av, 58504K used, 4584K free, 41332K shrd, 2100K buff
Swap: 62492K av, 0K used, 62492K free 24604K cached


All that, and DeLi has yet to start hitting swap.

Current Mood: pleased
Current Music: Brainstem - Pinky and the Brain

The donated computer that turned out to be a Pentium 166 is still in the dining room for now. I'll likely move it into the machine room soon, where it can take the place of Pa's machine that was returned to him (so he has a backup).

This machine, currently dubbed vector rather than a horse breed or Animaniacs character name, runs Vector linux - just barely. With only 32 MB it hits swap pretty hard. Tonight I tried to get that up to 64 MB and discovered that the motherboard evidently only has two working memory slots, so it's stuck at 32 MB. While Vector is less than wonderful on it, it'll stay until jmaynard decides if he wants to try Vector on colin the iOpener in the living room or not. After that, who knows?

Having tried to get more memory into vector at least revealed what a few sticks of memory were. I figured I might as well try to get breton up to 64 MB, since it too was at only 32 MB. DeLi, unlike Vector, performs rather well with that, but more RAM is better. That hasn't worked out either. The memory sticks just don't want to fit. Not even the one that I pulled out to get more room to install the others. That's annoying. How'd I get it in there in the first place? I gave up on it for the night a while ago. maybe it'll make more sense in morning. Or maybe I'll have enough patience to take the whole machine apart and not have anything in my way. But it's too late to get into that sort of thing tonight. Some things are bad ideas when tired. Hrm, I wonder if I could swap processors... and find the right jumper settings. Eh, one problem at a time.

Well, maybe 2005 will start out better than 2004 is ending.

Current Mood: tired

( Not that much. )

Current Mood: calm

( Pastrami on rye )

( Preserved comment(s) )

Current Mood: pleased

( DeLi-ght )

Current Mood: accomplished

( DeLi-ghtful, not quite. )

Current Mood: a bit geeky

...but it can be made more tolerable than it is "out of the box."

Generally when I find I need some application for Windows, the first place I look is TinyApps which has links to programs that are for DOS or Window(95/98/NT/2k/XP) and small enough to fit on a floppy. Even if floppies are fading into history, it's a nice measurement. A small program doesn't take up much space, probably doesn't take up much memory, and has fewer places for bugs to hide. Also, small is beautiful - generally there isn't anything unnecessary, like ugly style-breaking default skins.

I had need of a stopwatch today. Looking at TinyApps (under Misc) I found a simple timer. There was also a simple calendar. Something I've gotten used to on Linux is being able to click on the clock and get a simple calendar that I can flip through the months. No scheduling or anything, it just shows me the days of the month(s). It sounds trivial, but it's one of those little things a person starts to just expect. So on Windows it's annoying when it's not there. I don't have it exactly as on Linux, but now there is a calendar icon next to the clock. And now XP is just that little bit more tolerable.

( Preserved comment(s) )

Current Mood: pleased

Pasofino is my first Linux computer. I haven't used it much in some time (CPU is a C6-200, not exactly high speed nowadays) and was going to use it as a testbed for trying out different operating systems and distributions. But it wasn't booting from the CD right, and was acting generally weird. So, A little troubleshooting was in order.

The CD drive might be flaky, but it might not. I don't know yet. I spent part of last night doing things the hard way. Pulled the cover, pulled a memory stick, tried booting from CD and from HDD, and saw the same errors over and over. Swapped memory sticks. Same thing. Put all memory back. Same thing. Then a realization finally dawned.

The thing would boot from the hard drive, but would blank the screen as X started up. Maybe it was booting fine and I just couldn't see it? Tried pinging it. Yep, there it was. I tried logging into it remotely. Yep, there it was. Things seemed to be behaving. (D'oh, should have tried one of the non-X consoles, too.) So it looks like the video card is flaking out. It bugs me that I didn't check things the easy way first and wound up crawling around swapping hardware that didn't need swapping.

I shut pasofino down and as it was getting late did nothing more. Tonight I get to pull the video card and re-seat it and see if that's all it was. If I'm lucky, it is just a card seating issue and I'll have a working system again. If not, well, maybe a trip to Mankato for a replacement video card will be how I spend part of Saturday. If that's the case, maybe I can get a card like the one I have (only working) so I don't have to fiddle with driver issues. But if not, well, I was going to wipe the system anyway. And then I can see if the problems are over or if the CD drive really is bad.

Current Mood: diagnostic

( Strange dream(s) )

Current Mood: Eh

I was putting off an upgrade of Mandrake until 9.2 was officially released as stable. But it looks like maybe I should not even consider running Mandrake anymore. This [http://www.mandrakesoft.com/partners/advertising] isn't exactly a day brightener. I set things to avoid spammy ads. I certainly don't want some clown making my screen advertise at me (or anyone else) when the screensaver kicks in. Nor do I want any "default pages" that I do not have 100% control over. My machine, my rules dammit.

Yes, this is only in the download version. But if I'm gonna pay for a distribution, you know what? I'll pay for a different one. And besides, maybe xine will actually work then. Though it will be annoying to move all my data files and get my preferred programs and settings going again. It might be simple enough to remove the ads, at least beyond the install, but I'd rather not have to.

Okkay, I'm not a deep hacker in linux. That was why I was using Mandrake. Recommendations for alternatives? What I'm looking for is something with ease of installation, ease of use, decent security, and ideally the good sense to not prepend Linux with three letters and a slash. And no damned ads.

Or maybe I should ask about experiences with recent versions of various distributions.

Current Mood: annoyed

( Operating systems )

Current Mood: satisfied

A lot of travel, but still good. Thursday afternoon we (Jay and I) started off, and hit the Twin Cities during the anything but a rush hour. Rather than wait in the car in traffic, we waited at Lindey's and had some great steak. Then back on the road. XM's old time radio channel again was good to have.

Friday was a bit of shopping (I got - and spent - part of birthday present early). The trip to the shoe store went well. Hard to argue with steel-toed leather Oxfords for $10. And then it was dinner time with the usual excess that holiday meals always seem to be. Visited some with my grandmothers. One of them will be ninety this Wednesday.

Saturday was the trip back, by way of the Minnesota Repeater Council meeting. A couple things threatened to take far longer than they needed to, but finally were taken care of. I doubt the issues have gone away, but the compromise should hopefully mean things won't run quite as hot as they had been before. Got home not too late, but didn't do very much. Just as well.

Sunday was a pleasantly slow day of recovery. I did, eventually, manage to work on the COLT again and finished up Looney Tunes #10 from January 1995. Hopefully I can get through, or at least well into, #72 (Jan. '01) this week. Then there won't be any completely empty years - just gaps.

Last night I did ask KinkyTurtle to do for #100 what he did for Animaniacs #25 as the cover has (almost?) every Looney Tunes character on it. Excluding the odd one-shots, of course. I think. I doubt I'll be able get to #100 all that soon, though. Next week would be probably be the earliest. And I'm wondering if I can keep up the one issue per week rate. That would get me caught up on three old issues per month, while not falling behind on new issues. But I'd need to keep that up for 14 months.

And now, a somewhat delayed rant: ( xchat color rant/how-to )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Something not quite identifiable, and just as well, too.

Yep, things are normal. I just get started on Mandrake 9.0 and Mandrake 9.1 is finally released. I've decided to hold off for a while. If nothing else, let the ftp servers get less swamped. And, do I really want to try updating/upgrading after getting things (mostly) working the way I want them?

So far, aside from Audacity and windows file sharing, things have pretty much just worked. Some fiddling and learning, of course, but no complete defeats. The file sharing problem can be worked around with ftp. Yakko might have something on Audacity yet. I might just try Sweep if Audacity is too problematic.

I still need to find out how to rip CDs, and how to burn them. And I need to find what file types may have problems. These are mainly video clips. Nautilus is nice, and will allow me to sort out files and directories with relative ease. The XMMS default skin is kewl. Kewl skins, like kewl pages, suck. Fortunately there are other skins and a couple are non-sucking.

I'm sure I have a lot to learn, probably even to do simple things. Yet most things haven't presented any great difficulty, so I'm not too concerned. I expect I will still use Windows from time to time, but probably not too often. The last few days my Windows use (at home) was just to get a few files from percheron (W2k) to belgian (linux).

I must be getting comfortable with things. This morning, I shut the Windows machine down - and I don't know when I might turn it on again.

Current Mood: good