Puppy Linux continued…

If you haven’t read my post from yesterday then start off by popping back there and reading that first; this is just an update.

Further to what I wrote yesterday I have since thought of a couple other things worth mentioning. Firstly, I didn’t make it clear that this is far from the first time I’ve put a small (or even full-sized!) distro on a stick before. In the past I’ve had installs of both Peppermint OS and Ubuntu 11.04 on a memory stick that I carried around but the difference is that Puppy feels like it was designed for this purpose. There are things about it that just seem to suit the job better. For example there are many options at boot time for dealing with computers that wont play nicely.

The second thing I thought was worth updating is that I found today from browsing the Puppy Forum that you can add more package repositories to your Puppy install, thus greatly expanding the amount of software that is available to install. This could make the difference between Puppy being a part-time use OS to a full-time use OS if various packages play nicely together.

lupu and the art of distro-hopping

As you may well know I’ve always been a bit of a distro-hopper. I think it stems from the fact that when I first started using Linux I had to stick to using Slackware due to hardware limitations, and the fact that I only had a dial-up connection to the internet. I used to try different distros but always had to go back to slack eventually because I couldn’t get something working and didn’t know enough about computers, linux, or networking to get around the problems I had.

Using Slackware for my first few years put me in a position whereby I envied the shiny “just works” ways of many distros. It also meant that once I was finally able to try different things and get them going properly (broadband internet was the first big thing, then a new computer a couple years later!) I didn’t like the fact that many distros had all these tools to keep you away from the command line.

As I got older and novelty of new distros was less of a concern and getting my work done was more important I found myself edging closer and closer to Ubuntu and Mint for ease of mind. But this has ultimately ruined my geek cred, and I still long for that down and dirty messing around to get shit working that I rarely have to play with any more.

Needless to say I still do try different Linux distributions out and currently I’ve got Mandriva 2011.0 running on my main laptop (don’t like it, too lazy to change it). But this blog post is about something different.

The art of distro-hopping has really changed in the last few years with cheaper USB sticks in supermarkets for £5 and tools like unetbootin. Not even to mention easy-to-use virtualisation tools like VirtualBox. I can now download a newfancylinux.iso in about 10 minutes (compared to 4 hours or even over night in the old days) and be playing with it running live from a USB stick or in a window on my desktop minutes later and in a way it makes the whole process far less exciting!

ENTER LUPU. Lupu, or Lucid Puppy as it is also known is one of many current versions of Puppy Linux. I’ve tried Puppy in the past but never gave it a fair chance until now. I was looking for an iso of FreeBSD to try sticking on my old laptop and I came across an older version of lupu on the same magazine DVD. Knowing I hadn’t tried it recently I stuck it on a USB stick and had a play. And I really love it!

I haven’t taken the time to make it look pretty to my liking yet, but the default set up with Openbox is good; the system is clever and works very well. I can shove the stick in my laptop and do whatever I need, be in browsing, typing, blogging (like now), and then just shut the computer down, drive 20 miles up the road to wherever I may be working, shove the stick in another machine and everything is there, just the same. This is because although the system is like a live CD it also saves everything I do to a file on the USB stick.

There is a modest package repository, but I haven’t really needed anything that isn’t in it and once stuff is installed it gets saved to by save file on the disk and is ready to go next time. I’ve also found that because of it’s super low memory footprint (just 50MB when in JWM) it’s perfect for playing old Windows games under wine! Something else that I really like is that although I’m updating my save file all the time with the stuff I do if I find that there are hardware issues or things just aren’t working properly on someone else’s machine then I can opt to just load the default set up at boot time and that usually fixes it. On top of all this, the fact that it is still essentially a persistent live disk rather than a full install I can still just use my USB stick normally in any computer or even my car stereo.

That’s my brief review, Lupu is great, get it, try it.

Hacker Public Radio

In the last month I’ve had the pleasure of discovering Hacker Public Radio. <– That is a link, click it.

HPR is a daily podcast that is made by the community, for the community. The content guidelines say that anyone is welcome to create a podcast on any subject that is of interest to hackers. Don’t go getting the word “hacker” muddled up with “cracker” please, this has nothing to do with the 1995 film featuring Angelina Jolie.

Well, yesterday I had my first podcast go out on the feed, and I’m definitely going to be making more in future. Please check it out, and if you’ve got the time then consider getting involved. It’s a friendly community, and it’s always welcoming new members.

The podcast that I recorded was on the topic of installing Windows XP on a Virtual Machine using VirtualBox. I did it using the programs Ardour and Audacity, and the microphone mentioned in my previous blog post.

Compiling a studio

Last week I bought a new cable for my computer. This cable is to connect a microphone with an XLR connection to a computer via USB. At the USB end there is also some kind of basic soundcard built into the USB plug as that’s how it’s detected by the computer. I was very pleased to find that it worked faultlessly in a plug’n'play fashion. And within minutes I was making simple recordings using Audacity.

For a while now I’ve been looking for an excuse to give slackermedia a try. Slackermedia is a set of instructions found here on how to turn a Slackware install into a custom multimedia studio. I will be posting updates on here as to how I’ve got on.

At the moment I have sbopkg running through a long list of libs. It doesn’t seem to be taking as long as I thought it would, which is nice.

Smart phone – it’s all in the name!

Here’s a little rant about phones that run android… Let me open by saying this: if you’re thick, don’t buy one!

Now for some more detail. I’m not actually writing about the device, or the related services, I’m ranting about the dumb idiots that use them.

I recently began reading and writing comments for apps that I install on my phone and I invariably find that the comments section of the android market and websites like AndroidZoom are just overwhelmed by comments from people that can’t work out how to use their phone.

Here’s an example: I downloaded an app that I found on AndroidZoom called TapTapKeyboard. The app gives you an optional replacement for your default keyboard that features an unusual layout that the creators claim gives you 3X faster typing in one week. I was naturally curious, installed it, and am using it on my phone. I thought I’d check the comments to see what other people thought only to find the comments absolutely dominated by people who don’t know how to change the keyboard on their phone. There are just torrents of abuse aimed at the creators by people who haven’t even tried the app because they don’t know how to.

I don’t know if this is a problem for Android… that maybe it will lose market share because people are too stupid to find out how it works… or if it’s just an example of poor instruction from the people who make the apps…

What I don’t understand is this: If you install an app but you’re too thick to work out how to turn it on, why do you then feel the need to tell the whole world? Why not simply uninstall and save yourself the embarressment of admitting you can’t use your phone?

BOINC – malariacontrol.net

I’ve been a BOINC user for a few years now. Last year I did a mammoth run of leaving my computer on continuously for about 3 months for the sake of finishing a work unit for the climate prediction project. Thankfully I wasn’t paying the electricity bills at that time… let’s not go into that… Over the years I’ve been signed up to a 10 BOINC projects and I’ve done a fair amount of computing for the Folding@Home project as well.

In recent months I’ve been finding it harder and harder to keep up with the pace of many projects on BOINC and I think it’s a shame because I’ve always enjoyed knowing that whilst I’m geeking away there’s actually some good coming from my computer being on. What prompted me to write this post is that I’ve noticed that the work units coming from malariacontrol.net in recent weeks have had pretty unreasonable deadlines on them and I just can’t keep up. I’ve stopped doing work for climate prediction because a work unit takes about 6 months of heavy devotion and my computer just changes too much for that to be in any way realistic. I’m now having to give up malaria control because they want results in about 3 days.

I think the point worth noting is that I’m not using particularly slow hardware here. When I did my mammoth effort for climate prediction I was using a 3-year-old AMD Sempron that clocks at 1.8GHz with 512MB of RAM and one year later I’m struggling to keep up on a laptop with twice the power (2GHz Dual Core Pentium with 2GB RAM). During 2008 I managed to make a difference to my statistics by running Folding@Home on a 300MHz PII (128MB RAM) laptop that I have and now just two years from then I’m thinking of saving my power for a better YouTube experience…

I thought the idea with BOINC was for people to contribute their spare CPU cycles to these projects, not to have to go out and buy their own Jaguar just to be able to get involved.

For more information about the BOINC project click this link and listen to the episode of FLOSS Weekly on the topic.

New Fluxbox theme

I have edited one of my favourite Fluxbox themes titled “green tea”. I made a blue version called “blue tea”.

See screenshot:

Like my IceWM theme it is hosted on box-look.org. My username is alwaysroomforaboom. Click for download.

Enjoy!