Lightweight Linux

Jumping between operating systems

2011-08-19T22:03:00.002+03:00

I was very pleased to find out that I was allowed to make a choice between two operating systems when I started in my new job. Of course, the choice was to be made between OS X and Windows. At the moment, Linux is used only on our development servers.

I have been quite happy with OS X, even if it lacks some of the command line tools I would like to use for getting things done. After installing some additional tools like Aquamacs, the OS X is more than adequate desktop system for an internet marketing consultant. In addition, using a Mac laptop is probably something that my clients expect from a marketing consultant.

At home, I'm mostly using OpenSUSE on my main desktop. This box is probably about 6-7 years old. A year or two ago I upgraded it with a new memory chip. 1 GB seems to be more than enough for my needs.

A week ago I decided to wipe out the Zenwalk from the harddrive of my old eVectra box. I installed Debian stable on it, and now the venerable 1 GHz box serves my as a development server running Wordpress and some other content management systems. It is a lot more convenient to develop small web sites using a dedicated development server than to hack the site either on my desktop or horrribile dictu directly on the server that is live online.

* * *

In the autumn, I hope to be able to finish my studies of economics and finance. Even if the degree is probably not very useful for my current career, one never knows what the my future will be like.

In any case, I want to be ready for as many different possible futures as possible.

Been busy at work

2011-08-04T16:20:00.003+03:00

During the last year, I've been slower than ever in creating new content for this blog. First I needed the time for my studies, and since two months I work as SEO and Internet marketing consultant in an online marketing company. Thus I never seem to have enough time for my extracurricular activities.

Today I just wanted to inform you that from now on the blog is optimized also for mobile devices. Thus all happy owners of iPhone should be able to read the archives easily :)

Download BSD Magazine

2011-06-04T20:30:00.002+03:00

Even dedicated Linux users should not forget the existence of BSD family of Unix operating systems. For example, Arch users might consider testing NetBSD for a few weeks, Debian users might like FreeBSD and *buntu people could well find themselves comfortable using PC-BSD.

And in case you really don't want to try living on the other side of the fence, you should in any case read the free BSD Magazine. Very often the articles are equally useful for Linux and BSD users -- and the magazine is freely downloadable!

Unlike computers, books have lasting value

2010-10-10T18:12:00.002+03:00

I suppose most of my readers know that it is pretty easy to get usable computer hardware for free. If the hardware is not fast enough for the latest incarnation of MS Windows, OS X or the some of the recent shoot-em-ups most people are willing to update their hardware to something more recent. If their old hardware happens to be more than, for example, five to seven years old, it is probably impossible to sell at any reasonable price. For people like me, those computers are still more than usable.

Unfortunately, I've not been able to find any real use for hardware that is about 20 years old. Of course, I still could write my text files using WordPerfect 5.1 if I just could find somewhere installation floppies still functioning. Or I could use the computer for playing some classic MS DOS games. Just being geekier than the people around me might be a reason for doing that instead of playing the games using a DOS emulator running under Linux. Or I could use a 386 as a terminal for ssh sessions on some of my more recent computers.

Books, on the other hand, do not lose their value as fast as the computers do. I still enjoy reading books printed decades ago. I enjoy reading Roman and Greek classics in translation and sometimes even in the original language -- if I have some extra time to spend with Latin grammar and old dictionaries.

Even computer books can be useful for decades. I found in the local university library a few old books about AWK, Perl and Emacs that are still very helpful for a semi-computer-illiterate like me. Unfortunately, it is a lot more difficult to find classic O'Reilly books for free than it is to get free hardware. But I'll continue my search for them...

Of course, there are some interesting books that can be downloaded for free, for example the Unix Text Processing by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly. The book was originally published in 1987 but you can still learn a lot from it if you are just learning to use the GNU command line tools.

A confession

2010-09-26T11:17:00.002+03:00

I have something to confess.

During the last weeks and months I have alarmingly often thought about buying a new computer. That in itself should not be too worrying, but the fact that I have in fact enjoyed using the Windows 7 at school causes me some headache.

Furthermore, I have started to think about the advantages of having a MS Office license for my small business. Being able to check the compatibility of my text files using the globally most popular word processor might make my life a bit easier.

Unfortunately, the license for MS Office would be more expensive than a new desktop computer. I could, of course, buy a student license for the office package but then I wouldn't be able to use the software legally for my small business. At the moment, the about 50 euros per month needed for a new PC and MS Office are too much for my budget.

Life is full of choices and sometimes it is difficult to make the right decision. Everything seemed to be much simpler when I didn't need to work with clients...

Back in business

2010-09-23T23:05:00.003+03:00

During the last months, I've been busy creating my own start-up business as web copywriter. Starting a business and studying at the same time has demanded a lot of my time which means I have had few moments available for non-profitable blogging.

Today I found something I wanted to share with you: fvwm-crystal. For years I've wanted to use fvwm but I have never had the time to tweak the settings in order to have a good-looking desktop. Today I noticed the Debian package fvwm-crystal which immediately gave me a usable and nice-looking desktop. Unfortunately, the package came with quite a few dependencies.

Anyway, fvwm seems to function very nicely on my 600 MHz iBook. After a few months jumping between framebuffer and openbox, fvwm is a very refreshing window manager.

Looking for new challenges...

2010-04-04T17:06:00.002+03:00

Having just finished my B.Sc. thesis the short Eastern vacation was more than welcome for me. At the end of the day, I was able to do all the writing and typesetting needed using a text only Debian system. LaTeX, Koma Script and Emacs were fully adequate tools for all of my needs.

As usual, the BibTeX caused some headache but most of the problems were solved by Shiro Takeda's econ.bst. Martin J. Osborne's te.bst was another good candidate for building the bibliography. After this experience I'm pretty confident I can use the same combination of software for even bigger writing projects. If my supervisor accepts the slight differences between the final version and the official Word template of the school I will no doubt continue using this system for all the homework I have to write during my final year at the business school.

Today, I've been building a Linux box for my wife to be used mainly for serious writing (she's a humanities PhD) and Impress presentations. The hardware is probably old enough to be considered old hardware by most of my readers: 1.7 GHz processor and 256 MB RAM. Unfortunately, none of the distro's tried seem to be able to connect to the internet using the network card built on the motherboard. At the moment I don't have any extra network cards so I cannot build the system using only the spare parts I have. I just hope the motherboard stays alive for a year or two as at the moment we are living on a rather tight budget.

This time I decided to install Zenwalk 6.2 on the box. It is pretty lightweight, easy to configure and provides everything my wife needs out of the box and not too much software she would never need. Furthermore, Xfce provides all the desktop functionality she expects to find in her desktop system and she should be able to use the system confortably without my help.

B.Sc. Thesis Almost Finished!

2010-03-25T20:02:00.004+02:00

During the last couple of weeks, I've been busy working on my B.Sc. thesis in economics. After some initial hesitation I wrote the thesis using a text only Debian system on my iBook. I first planned to write the thesis using Google Docs which I could have used in the several locations I divided my time during the working week.

After some experimentation with Google Docs I finally took the bull by the horns and decided to write the paper using the tools installed in my Debian laptop. For writing the paper, I used Emacs with AUCTeX using the longlines-mode. I typeset it using LaTeX and KOMA script. Unfortunately, I still have some problems with the bibliography style defined by my school. I just can't figure out e.g. how to remove the full stop after year in the bibliography provided by chicago.bst.

I just hope I'll get the bibliography style fixed as soon as possible. If I succeed in hacking the .bst file there will be no reason not to write my M.Sc. thesis with this combination of very stable software. Of course, there remains the possibility of exporting the paper to rtf, format it with the official Word style provided by the school and format the bibliography by hand.

But being so close to finishing the thesis I would rather not cheat like that...

Experimenting with bleeding edge using an iBook

2010-03-11T23:06:00.002+02:00

Last weekend, after successfully upgrading my 1 GHz PC from Debian stable to unstable, I got the crazy idea that I should upgrade the fully functioning Debian stable on my iBook (600Mhz, 384 Mb) to either Debian testing or unstable. I had already forgotten the udev problems I had encountered and finally solved on this Pentium box.

It was a bad idea. I did not succeed in getting the X configured -- I just had a black screen with a colored horizontal stripe on the bottom half of the screen. Reset, reboot and again. Reset, reconfigure and reboot. Again. And again.

Second try: I burned the CD for Arch Linux. Arch did not give me any more usable X. After some googling around I succeed in getting at least a weird split screen TWM on the screen instead of the now familiar black screen. But still I had no functioning keyboard nor was the touchpad functioning.

After this, I was willing to live on the command line for a while as the Arch at least booted extremely quickly. But then I realized the PPC repositories were not nearly as good and up-to-date as the repositories for 386 Arch.

Ok. After two days of experimenting I decided to go back to the point where I started all this. I had, after all, been quite happy with Debian stable...

Free online BSD Magazine 3/2010 published

2010-03-04T18:24:00.004+02:00

Many Linux users have heard about BSD family of Unix operating systems, but few have had the courage to install a BSD to be used on a regular basis.

Nowadays, most users could probably do their everyday computing with some of the more mainstream BSDs just as easily as with Ubuntu or some other desktop oriented Linux distribution. If you are one of those Linux users, you should have a look at the free online BSD Magazine.

But don't stop there! If you have an extra old computer somewhere, you might as well like to install some BSD variant on it. Those of you who are just looking for an easy-to-install-and-use BSD would probably be very happy with PC-BSD 8.0 released last week. Some of the highlights of the latest release are:
* FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2
* KDE 4.3.5
* Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD
* Run in Live mode directly from DVD
* Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly
* Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

Are you a luddite?

2010-02-28T10:14:00.005+02:00

Since you are reading this blog dedicated to using Linux on older hardware, you might be interested in the techonology luddites:

When it come to technology, newer isn't always better. We head out in search of the people who consider good enough to still be good enough.

Read more about old hardware and retro tech users in the article published in the PCPlus!

Problematic Debian update: udev and kernel

2010-02-24T09:00:00.003+02:00

Normally, I try to remember googling for any problems before doing a major update in any of the Linux systems I use for doing something more important than simply surfing on the Internet. I forgot to do this before updating my stable Debian system to Debian unstable last night.

Of course, I ran into problems that were almost too difficult to solve in the early hours of the morning. My system was not able to solve issue caused by the conflicting version of kernel and udev. It took me some time before I found the solution in the Debian forum.

Now I'm a happy user of Debian unstable. It remains to be seen, if the unstable branch of the distribution is too bleeding edge for my taste. I have used both Debian stable and testing for several years, but I can't remember ever having installed or used Debian unstable. I hope my life does not become too unstable after this upgrade...

Minix 3.1.6 Released!

2010-02-09T20:43:00.005+02:00

The Minix project has released a new stable version of the operating system. The release 3.1.6 was made public yesterday. Minix Wiki lists the following major features for the release:

New drivers: Atheros L2, Intel E1000, Realtek 8169, DEC Tulip
VirtualPC Network Support (DEC Tulip)
PipeFS - removed pipe handling from filesystem drivers
HGFS - support for mounting VMware shared folders as file system
FPU support
System Event Framework (SEF)
Experimental APIC support (disabled by default)
More ports: more recent QEMU, BSD utilities, Benchmarks

Download the image from here. If you are interested in Minix, you should also have a look at the Minix section in the Lightweight Linux Bookstore!

Linux documentation in wiki format

2010-01-14T19:48:00.004+02:00

I am a huge fan of free documentation, even if I like to read printed books as well. In my opinion, the printed book still has the best available user interface that the computer screen and hypertext can only emulate but not surpass.

But on the other hand, Internet and the different forms of social media have several advantages over the printed book. Among the most obvious advantages are the free availability (if you happen to be living in the developed world with cheap broadband connections), and the possibility to update the information easily and often. Furthermore, there are several licenses that allow reusing the free documentation in different forms. Hence it should not come as a surprise that there are many good sources for free Linux documentation on the Internet.

In addition to the Linux Documentation Project, you should take a look at some of the more interesting documentation sites published in wiki format. For example, the Gentoo Linux Wiki includes a useful article about lightweight install of the Gentoo Linux.

Arch Linux is another favorite distribution used by many enthusiasts who want to keep their old hardware in use. Even if you are not ready to install and use Arch, you should take a look at Arch Linux Wiki. The page dedicated to Lightweight Applications is certainly useful for anyone interested in building a system with lightweight software.

And of course, you should not forget Debian Wiki or Crux Wiki, LQWiki and many other good documentation sites using a wiki platform!

Unity Linux 2010 b2

2010-01-10T10:20:00.003+02:00

Unity Linux is a new distribution approaching its first stable release. Last week, the project announced the second beta release the distribution based on Mandriva.

From the release notes:

Currently, Unity Linux offers both 32-bit and 64-bit LiveCDs. Nearly 7,700 packages are available after installation. In an effort to give distribution developers maximum flexibility, the core is kept small and usable, but not too basic. Unity Linux provides developers with the bare minimum– just enough to make use of remaster tools, the smart package manager, a 2.6.31.9 kernel, and rpm5.

You can dowload the beta release from mirrors listed here.

50 Linux Discussion Forums

2010-01-06T10:17:00.007+02:00

More than a year ago, I posted three articles listing a few dozen Linux discussion forums. I suppose it is time to republish the list, now in one article. Furthermore, I added a few more discussion forums just in order to have a nice title with exactly 50 discussion forums dedicated to Linux and other free Unix like operating systems.

If your favourite discussion forum is missing from the list, please add it in the comment box!

My Emacs configuration

2009-12-21T21:21:00.003+02:00

I'm by no means an expert in using Emacs, but it has been my favorite editor for some time if I need to write anything more than a short note or a simple one-line script. Unfortunately, I will probably never have time to learn Lisp, which means I'll never be able to write my own functions or modify the existing modes or functions written for the Emacs. Luckily, with some googling one can usually find a ready solution for just about any problem one encounters using Emacs.

The following code contains some of the tweaks I have added to the configuration of Emacs on most of my boxes. Just copy and paste the code (or parts of it) to ~./emacs. If you don't have .emacs file in your home directory, you can create it with any editor you like (you might even like to use vi for the task!). In openSUSE the tweaks can also be included in ~/.gnu-emacs-custom.

Please suggest some more tweaks in the comment box!


;; == disable splash screen & toolbar to save screen space ==
(setq inhibit-splash-screen t)
(tool-bar-mode -1)

;; == disable menu bar as well ==
;; (menu-bar-mode -1)

;; == use text mode as default mode and use longlines-mode with text files ==
(setq default-major-mode 'text-mode)
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'longlines-mode)

;;; == use org-mode for .org files ==
(add-to-list 'load-path (expand-file-name "~/git/org-mode/lisp"))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.\\(org\\)$" . org-mode))
(require 'org-install)

;; == enable mouse wheel ==
(mouse-wheel-mode t)

;; == save backup files in ~/.emacs-backups
(setq make-backup-files t)
(setq version-control t)
(setq backup-directory-alist (quote ((".*" . "~/.emacs-backups/"))))

;; === pretty colors on blackground ==
(set-background-color "black")
(set-foreground-color "green")
(set-cursor-color "yellow")

;;== count words with Esc x wc
(defun wc ()
  (interactive)
  (message "Word count: %s" (how-many "\\w+" (point-min) (point-max))))

Free software for economists

2009-12-17T18:50:00.002+02:00

As an economics and business student, I somehow googled my way to Alan G. Isaac's Software for Economists. Alan presents a nice collection of free software that can be used by economists and other scholars as well.

Linux Ecology-HOWTO updated

2009-12-07T19:40:00.004+02:00

I just noticed that the Linux Ecology HOWTO has been updated in September. If you have never read the HOWTO, you certainly should take a look at it. And don't forget to check the latest updates in the Guides section of the Linux Documentation Project as well.

New releases: openSUSE, TinyMe 2009 alpha, ZevenOS 2.0

2009-11-17T18:14:00.005+02:00

During the last weekend, I upgraded my main desktop to the latest and greatest 11.2 release of openSUSE. Finally, KDE4 is fully usable as an everyday desktop and I was able to come back from the GNOME world to the KDE. AMD2800 processor, 1 GB RAM and Geforce 7600 seem to be more than enough for being able to comfortably use this system. I would not, however, suggest anyone to install the distro on an old computer, like these 1 GHz desktop systems I currently use in my second location.

Anyway, there are some new distribution releases even for us who want to keep the old hardware still in productive use. ZevenOS is a distro that I have never actually used but it is certainly worth considering when I decide to have some fun with distrohopping. The distro is based on Ubuntu 9.10.

The minimal hardware requirements for the distro are given as follows:

192 MB RAM
3 GB free space on the hard drive
16 MB graphics board, mouse, keyboard and screen device.

Of course, these requirements are probably too high for some of my readers. If you are one of them, I suggest you to help KDulcimer by testing the latest alpha release of TinyMe. TinyMe is a Unity-based distribution and it is specifically targeted at older computers and people who want a very light desktop environment. Read the release notes for more information about the alpha release!

Play Tetris in Emacs!

2009-11-09T20:57:00.003+02:00

One finds every now and then something surprising in any installed Linux system. For several years I have known that with Emacs one can do just about everything one really needs to do with a computer. Well, at least if you don't want to edit video clips or compose music with it.

Today I realized that it is possible to play Tetris using the XEmacs of my Debian box. Just type ESC x tetris and you are ready to forget coding or writing your next article for the top journal of your field!

Uncompress files using CLI

2009-11-08T11:52:00.006+02:00

I usually uncompress all kinds of packaged files from the command line. Unfortunately, I rarely remember which command line tool I should use for some specific packaging format. It is even more difficult to remember all the options needed for the appropriate tool.

Now that I found a cool hack in the ArchWiki, I never need to look for more information about how to uncompress a .tbz2, .tgz or .bz2 file -- I just use extract filename.

Add the following snippet of code to your .bashrc and you are ready to extract any file (if your system has the corresponding tool installed).


extract () {
  if [ -f $1 ] ; then
      case $1 in
          *.tar.bz2)   tar xvjf $1    ;;
          *.tar.gz)    tar xvzf $1    ;;
          *.tar.xz)    tar xvJf $1    ;;
          *.bz2)       bunzip2 $1     ;;
          *.rar)       unrar x $1     ;;
          *.gz)        gunzip $1      ;;
          *.tar)       tar xvf $1     ;;
          *.tbz2)      tar xvjf $1    ;;
          *.tgz)       tar xvzf $1    ;;
          *.zip)       unzip $1       ;;
          *.Z)         uncompress $1  ;;
          *.7z)        7z x $1        ;;
          *.xz)        unxz $1        ;;
          *.exe)       cabextract $1  ;;
          *)           echo "\`$1': unrecognized file compression" ;;
      esac
  else
      echo "\`$1' is not a valid file"
  fi
}

Less time spent hacking means more time for studies!

2009-11-03T19:48:00.004+02:00

It's been a while since my last blog posting. During the last two months I've spent most of my hours awake studying economics and finance with little time left for following the open source news or testing distributions and applications.

At the moment I use two desktop systems simultaneously. One of them is an old Pentium box running Debian stable and the other is an eMac with OS X. During the last two months I've become more and more OS agnostic, the OS itself is not as important as the fact that I get things done using whatever system and software I use either because I chose it or because the school policy forces me to use the software.

Unfortunately, I have noticed that using a couple of years old version of Excel for OS X is not a substitute for Excel 2007. But unfortunately for me, I cannot learn to write Visual Basic macros using OpenOffice.

During the last two months, most of my "real" computing was done with GNU Octave. It was really helpful for checking the solutions for some of the trickier problems in linear algebra. I hope I'll have time to learn more Octave during the spring when I'll take an advanced course in finance. Of course, we are expected to use Excel and VB for the coursework, but I think learning to solve the problems using Octave could not do any harm. On the other hand, it was a pleasant surprise to see that R will be used for advanced econometrics. I looking forward to participating in the course!

Using a mixed environment - OS X and Debian

2009-09-08T22:22:00.008+03:00

Some time ago, I wrote about my first experiences with an old eMac I got from my parents. I've been pretty happy with the system, even if the OS X 10.3.9 is not as fancy as the latest incarnations of this extremely user friendly OS.

I decided to keep the best of two worlds: I kept the OS X installed (no Debian or NetBSD on this system!). Thus I can still use Excel that is unfortunately absolutely necessary for anyone studying economics and business administration. Of course one can probably calculate everything with OpenOffice Calc, but using OpenOffice at home just does not help me in learning for the spreadsheet exam I have to pass using Excel in the computer lab at the school.

For word processing and some occasional hacking, I decided to install Aquamacs. For typesetting the texts, I installed MacTeX.

As I have too much old boxes in my room in the dorm, I decided not to install more open source apps in the eMac. At the moment I mostly use the Debian box (eVectra 1 GHz, 256 Mb RAM) in the console mode using a ssh connection. The box is not connected to a monitor or to a keyboard, but it does have a pair of loadspeakers for playing my collection of ogg files ripped with ripit. In addition, the Debian box is used for doing some math with GNU Octave.

I am sure, there are many readers who would just "liberate" the eMac but, alas, we are not living in a perfect world where we could freely decide which software to use. The world is a dirty place, just like Ivo Welch writes in Corporate Finance: An Introduction after a discussion of finance in perfect markets:

The real world is definitely dirtier than our perfect one, and you can't just close your eyes and wish you were still in Kansas.

Lubuntu test release

2009-09-05T20:26:00.004+03:00

Lubuntu (download) is Ubuntu 9.10 with LXDE desktop environment. FA quote from the LXDE blog:

The lubuntu project is advancing. lynxis just published a lubuntu test iso based on the seeds by David Sugar and additional patches. It is just 381 MB and a second one only 292 MB.

Lubuntu is probably interesting especially for the Ubuntu users who have been looking for a lightweight Ubuntu derivative to use on some old box.