Just Passing Through

Got my Windows 7 Upgrade Kit from Dell a couple of days ago. It took over an hour to do its thing, but I'm very glad I went through the hassle. Keep in mind, this refers to the 64-bit version of Win7 Home Premium.

You can easily read up on all the visual improvements from lots of technology websites. Believe me, Windows 7 is a lot prettier. There were two things I noticed which may not appear in any reviews.

1. Win7 uses a lot less horsepower to get the same work done. I have been running a meter on the desktop which measures something called RAM caching. The amount of my RAM which is kept by the system just for normal use was almost cut in half from what Vista required.

2. Some things work better, like Firefox. Opera works less well. Under Vista, Firefox locked up and crashed a lot. Under Win7, it runs very nicely. Opera has become cranky, but that's not really news.

So I'm blessed, and quite unlikely to ever bother with running Linux again. No, neither is inherently superior, it's just a matter of what I do with a computer. At one time, Linux carried the load better for what I did. Things change, and so did my needs. Win7 is now the winner for what I do. I'll still be glad to help anyone who has Linux questions.

Apparently my hardware is just a little too new for Ubuntu and friends. I never could get it talk to my DVD-R. Since burning CDs and DVDs are critical to my volunteer work, that means I had to find something else. SUSE had released the full version of 11.2, so I gave it a try.

So far, it's working quite nicely. I'll let you know if anything bothers me too much.

Update: I won't go into gory details, but I had to fix a few things.

• sound -- I had to tell ALSA the hardware (Intel HDA) was configured by Dell using the Realtek ALC888 codec so it could operate the various sound ports properly.
  
• aisleriot -- GNOME project folks decided to drop the older card faces and forced everyone to accept this ugly, unreadable "cool" looking design. I hunted down the graphical source file (bonded.svg) for the original card set and fixed that.
  
• screensaver -- The GNOME screensaver has been broken for a long time, and it seems the same on every Linux distro. It tries to put desktop machines into suspend mode, and most will not recover without rebooting. I cut it off and changed the controls to run the original Xscreensaver, since it works better and has better options.
  

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:

• 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.

I still look as ugly as before, but now I show my mug in more places. Lately I have felt very burdened with concern about my fellow Americans. Notice I'm not saying I worry about my nation; it's too late for America as a nation. God's wrath has already fallen on us, and the noble experiment has died. Talk politics all you like, but this thing is sinking fast into a police state. There are a whole host of sins against the Covenant of Noah, and so many different ways our government seeks to be like Babylon. But I do care a great deal about American people, as with people everywhere. God's wrath is upon us, and individuals who repent can expect some help from God. So I've been carrying a sign up and down major thoroughfares in my area: >>

On the back the sign says, "God's wrath is upon us!" in black letters the same size as these in red.

For now, I've been doing this about twice each week. I plan to cover most of the main travel routes in the county. After that, I have no idea, but I have plenty of time to get creative.

Oh, and I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I chose that because it gets support until sometime in 2011. It's working fine, and I have no idea why it would not install the first time I tried it. I broke CentOS, and Etch didn't have proper support of suspend and hibernate for this laptop. While I did have to edit the configuration files on Ubuntu, at least it works consistently.

Some while back I decided it was time to create a Linux distribution for people who didn't really like computers, but needed them to work. The big headache was finding a Linux base which didn't change as often as I changed my underwear. This constant upgrading, adding features, always fixing, always broken, always... In other words, I wanted a Linux for common, ordinary, non-hobby users. The vast majority of Linux people are all about hobby, and very few consider what this means for actual human needs.

So I began first by sounding my complaints among the Linux groupies about this thing called "stability" and "long term support." Is it possible to have a Linux distribution which could be installed just once on a machine, and supported as long as the average computer lasted? Statistics indicate that's about five to seven years, but we'll go for five. Actually, there is such a distribution, but you have to pay for it -- RedHat Enterprise Linux. However, there are a couple of projects which clone this, legally: CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Whitebox. Those are the ones about which I know something. That first one is the biggest and best by far, but it is all about the enterprise, not the home user.

So I decided perhaps we could just repackage that CentOS and make it more what folks would expect for their home computers. I have currently one guy helping me, and he's actually capable of creating a CD from packages we might decide to put together. It would mean adding stuff you don't normally get when you install CentOS, and leaving off a bunch of stuff typically installed which home users don't need. It worked okay on the desktop systems I tried, but not so good on laptops. There were some shortcomings.

That is, until this last week. The latest version, 5.3, includes a lot of enhancements for laptops. I decided I just had to try it, since the Debian Etch install I mentioned in my previous post was just a little bit broken in a few places. So I installed it this morning. I'm stunned. While a few things were broken -- this is Linux -- I was able to fix everything. Best of all, this issue of laptops going into suspend or hibernate is fixed, at least for my Inspiron. This is the first Linux distribution I've tried that could do both without me having to tweak any settings or rewrite configuration files manually. It just worked on the first try.

That's amazing to me, after all these years of trying to get Linux to work right on laptops. It gives me hope to think perhaps, finally, God has granted something my friend and I can work with and not have to waste a whole year getting things usable. We hope to have this ready in a couple of months. Stay tuned.