The Paradox of Extravagant Computers
Monday, 19. October 2009, 14:01:42
I'm working on trying to bring some focus to my vast array of interests and activities. Since I'm not quite up to the ideal of Renaissance Man, I have to realize: Time invested in things I will never do well is time wasted. In the process of re-examining just who and what I am supposed to be, there were a few surprises. Part of that package was realizing one of the most important things I can do is write about my faith. The primary expressions of my faith are the utterly spiritual things, and the more practical applications of those things. I have two blogs to handle them.
But I still have a head full of things which don't fit in either of those places. So that breathes new life into what I'll be writing here. That means, for example, some of my computer related stuff.
One of the unexpected twists and turns in my recent self-review was the realization a computer is my one best tool. It's hard to blog without one, no? And the system I had -- the old Inspiron 4100 laptop -- just was not up to the job anymore. Rather, I should say the software available had left that poor little machine behind. While I have a serious complaint about software bloat, and the complete hypocrisy of most nerds who blaze ahead into software bloat which requires throwing away perfectly good hardware, hardware still fully operating, while espousing all manner of Green causes, I can't do much about it. Software which would offer full use of the system, but which isn't bloated, is incredibly hard to find. (Keep your eye on two developing operating systems: Haiku OS and Syllable OS.)
Given my utter conviction these writing activities are God's calling on my life, I naturally turned to Him for guidance first in asking, then specifically requesting He supply the need. I needed a system capable of offering solid performance for the next few years, against the high probability of bloat exceeding the capacity of modest hardware. I'm not greedy. If I could do this job with DOS on an old 386 with green letters on a tiny screen, I'd do it. This is not a hobby, even if it currently offers no monetary compensation. It's a divine calling. What God supplies is fine. So I simply prayed God would provide what I needed for the things I am supposed to do, with the means at hand. After some years of playing with different operating systems, I knew it would be Linux (or BSD), and Windows was out of the question. So whatever I got would need to fit that. The other issue was the aforementioned low income.
Naturally, I made my prayer requests known to others. We prayed together in faith, and it became apparent a donor was needed to bear the brunt of the initial costs, which I would repay later. There was one donor, far away but willing. Then another stepped up, someone close to me. Without all the gory details, I can reveal he helped me purchase a Dell Inspiron 545 MT. For the hardware lovers, the essential specs:
It is extravagant, even decadent. It runs Ubuntu just fine. I tested CentOS 5.3, but it couldn't properly identify the SATA interface for the harddrive. Frankly, I would have preferred CentOS, because it comes closest to how I work. Maybe the next series of 6.x releases will make it happen. So I needed something else in the interim. openSUSE 11.1 did install and work, but it had lots of problems. I've come to the conclusion with Novell at the helm, SUSE has gone completely in the wrong direction on too many things. I have serious doubts they will ever return to being one of the best brands of Linux. In the end, I installed Ubuntu 9.04. It's working just fine, but it isn't for the long term. That is, it's not one of the long term releases of Ubuntu. They won't support this release very long, so I'll have to replace it in the next 6 months or so.
A part of the Ubuntu way of doing things is to offer a long-term support release every few years. The last one was 8.04, and you can tell by the "LTS" designation on the numbers at the Ubuntu website. The next one will probably be something like 10.x. The LTS series gets three years of support, unless you pay for a longer protection. The other releases are generally 6 months. I greatly prefer the way CentOS does things, since it's based on RedHat. They offer a release, with incremental upgrades, and then maintain it for some seven years. That's serious stability. But it means something well established, such as the current 5.3, is already kind of outdated. It didn't recognize the brand new hardware on my computer. So I'm waiting until RedHat/CentOS engineers a newer release, probably the 6.x series, which should cover it.
Why not stay with Ubuntu? There's a hundred different reasons. Answering that is the same answer for why there are several hundred brands of Linux. It's designed by nature to be flexible enough you can come up with your own peculiar philosophy for what an OS should do. One of my complaints is with Debian Linux, which is the basis on which Ubuntu builds -- the font rendering is not the same with other types of Linux. Some like it better, but I prefer the way CentOS does it. I can't explain why it looks different, because I don't know what it is "under the hood" that makes a difference, but I have always noticed it over the years. I am well aware of the issue with Freetype and bytecode rendering, but when I "fix" CentOS Freetype libraries, it still renders more sharply than does Debian. Indeed, as far as I can tell, Debian is alone in how it actually works out. Even FreeBSD looks more like CentOS, which they both share with SUSE, along with Slackware and friends, and just about every other type of Linux I've tested. Oddly, I recall the Mandrake stuff looking like Debian. Again, I don't know what the difference is down at the core, but they are doing something different. Debian fonts have faint color variations at the edges, and the others don't.
So in the middle of these gory details, I'm now having to deal with the hassle of a computer all too new for what I really want to run. It came with Vista, but it's not as if I join all those who despise Vista compared to XP. No, I despise Windows altogether. While the drivers from Dell for running Vista are probably just great, I can't stand Windows itself, since it cannot be made to work the way I do. It's a thousand little things, plus a few very big things, not worth hashing over here. That does not mean Linux is perfect; it's just superior for the way I work. Linux itself offers many gotchas. Most of them right now arise from having some of the latest and fastest hardware I could get.
But I still have a head full of things which don't fit in either of those places. So that breathes new life into what I'll be writing here. That means, for example, some of my computer related stuff.
One of the unexpected twists and turns in my recent self-review was the realization a computer is my one best tool. It's hard to blog without one, no? And the system I had -- the old Inspiron 4100 laptop -- just was not up to the job anymore. Rather, I should say the software available had left that poor little machine behind. While I have a serious complaint about software bloat, and the complete hypocrisy of most nerds who blaze ahead into software bloat which requires throwing away perfectly good hardware, hardware still fully operating, while espousing all manner of Green causes, I can't do much about it. Software which would offer full use of the system, but which isn't bloated, is incredibly hard to find. (Keep your eye on two developing operating systems: Haiku OS and Syllable OS.)
Given my utter conviction these writing activities are God's calling on my life, I naturally turned to Him for guidance first in asking, then specifically requesting He supply the need. I needed a system capable of offering solid performance for the next few years, against the high probability of bloat exceeding the capacity of modest hardware. I'm not greedy. If I could do this job with DOS on an old 386 with green letters on a tiny screen, I'd do it. This is not a hobby, even if it currently offers no monetary compensation. It's a divine calling. What God supplies is fine. So I simply prayed God would provide what I needed for the things I am supposed to do, with the means at hand. After some years of playing with different operating systems, I knew it would be Linux (or BSD), and Windows was out of the question. So whatever I got would need to fit that. The other issue was the aforementioned low income.
Naturally, I made my prayer requests known to others. We prayed together in faith, and it became apparent a donor was needed to bear the brunt of the initial costs, which I would repay later. There was one donor, far away but willing. Then another stepped up, someone close to me. Without all the gory details, I can reveal he helped me purchase a Dell Inspiron 545 MT. For the hardware lovers, the essential specs:
- Intel Dual Core 2.7 Ghz
- 6 GB RAM
- 23" LCD monitor
It is extravagant, even decadent. It runs Ubuntu just fine. I tested CentOS 5.3, but it couldn't properly identify the SATA interface for the harddrive. Frankly, I would have preferred CentOS, because it comes closest to how I work. Maybe the next series of 6.x releases will make it happen. So I needed something else in the interim. openSUSE 11.1 did install and work, but it had lots of problems. I've come to the conclusion with Novell at the helm, SUSE has gone completely in the wrong direction on too many things. I have serious doubts they will ever return to being one of the best brands of Linux. In the end, I installed Ubuntu 9.04. It's working just fine, but it isn't for the long term. That is, it's not one of the long term releases of Ubuntu. They won't support this release very long, so I'll have to replace it in the next 6 months or so.
A part of the Ubuntu way of doing things is to offer a long-term support release every few years. The last one was 8.04, and you can tell by the "LTS" designation on the numbers at the Ubuntu website. The next one will probably be something like 10.x. The LTS series gets three years of support, unless you pay for a longer protection. The other releases are generally 6 months. I greatly prefer the way CentOS does things, since it's based on RedHat. They offer a release, with incremental upgrades, and then maintain it for some seven years. That's serious stability. But it means something well established, such as the current 5.3, is already kind of outdated. It didn't recognize the brand new hardware on my computer. So I'm waiting until RedHat/CentOS engineers a newer release, probably the 6.x series, which should cover it.
Why not stay with Ubuntu? There's a hundred different reasons. Answering that is the same answer for why there are several hundred brands of Linux. It's designed by nature to be flexible enough you can come up with your own peculiar philosophy for what an OS should do. One of my complaints is with Debian Linux, which is the basis on which Ubuntu builds -- the font rendering is not the same with other types of Linux. Some like it better, but I prefer the way CentOS does it. I can't explain why it looks different, because I don't know what it is "under the hood" that makes a difference, but I have always noticed it over the years. I am well aware of the issue with Freetype and bytecode rendering, but when I "fix" CentOS Freetype libraries, it still renders more sharply than does Debian. Indeed, as far as I can tell, Debian is alone in how it actually works out. Even FreeBSD looks more like CentOS, which they both share with SUSE, along with Slackware and friends, and just about every other type of Linux I've tested. Oddly, I recall the Mandrake stuff looking like Debian. Again, I don't know what the difference is down at the core, but they are doing something different. Debian fonts have faint color variations at the edges, and the others don't.
So in the middle of these gory details, I'm now having to deal with the hassle of a computer all too new for what I really want to run. It came with Vista, but it's not as if I join all those who despise Vista compared to XP. No, I despise Windows altogether. While the drivers from Dell for running Vista are probably just great, I can't stand Windows itself, since it cannot be made to work the way I do. It's a thousand little things, plus a few very big things, not worth hashing over here. That does not mean Linux is perfect; it's just superior for the way I work. Linux itself offers many gotchas. Most of them right now arise from having some of the latest and fastest hardware I could get.
WIDGETIZE
Bob # 9. November 2009, 00:47