Penguinway

Zenwalk is a Slackware based distribution that is aimed at giving it’s users a fast, stable, and to easy to use machine. It has been ranked 18th on Distrowatch for the past 6 months. Zenwalk 5.2 was released this month so I decided to give it a try on my Dell Inspiron 1150 system. This notebook is few years old so it is a good machine for an agile distribution like Zenwalk. The 1150 has a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz Celeron processor with 1 Gigabyte of RAM. It runs pretty well under Ubuntu provided I don’t turn Compiz on. Being that Zenwalk is based on Slackware and uses XFCE window manager I was hoping it would run faster. Their site claims Zenwalk has very low system requirements. Their manual states that it will run on a Pentium II with 128 MB of memory and 2 GB in hard disk space. By the way, the manual is very well done. It is something you could give to someone who has never used Linux before. They go through the basics like how to burn and ISO in Linux and Windows. Screenshots and complete explainations of the whole install process are also included.

Installation

Zenwalk has 4 different editions: Standard, Core, Live, and Server. I chose the Standard Edition since I wanted to do a hard disk install on my machine. I did not realize this until later, but even with the Live Edition you can still use it to do a hard disk install. The Core Edition is a minimalist install with no X components. Server is, as you might expect, optimized for running a server.

Zenwalk has a nice looking framebuffered installer. After choosing your keyboard map type, you can use Cfdisk manually set up your boot and swap partitions. If you can devote an entire hard disk over 3GB in size Zenwalk has an automatic installation too. For file systems choices you can format your partitions in ext2, ext3, reiserfs, and xfs. Cfdisk is not as pretty as, say Gparted, but it does get the job done and is not difficult to use.

Once you get your drives set up Zenwalk asks you what you want your fstab to look like. The fstab file controls what partitions are mounted and where they are placed in the directory structure. I chose to add both my Ubuntu ext3 and Windows XP NTFS partitions. I had NTFS read/write support out of the box with Zenwalk using ntfs-3g. After I finished setting up fstab the installer started putting packages on the hard drive. I like how they list each package name with a description as it is being installed. I don’t believe in hiding useful system info for the sake of aesthetics.

Just like Slackware itself, Zenwalk uses LILO for the boot loader. If you want it will automatically setup your LILO configuration during the install. I am more used to and prefer GRUB, so I elected to skip this step and configure the bootloader myself later on. To configure GRUB, you use the menu.lst file in the /boot/grub directory. Basically, you need to edit the file and tell GRUB where the kernel and init.rd image is. One thing slightly different I found with Zenwalk is that the init.rd image is called initrd.splash, not initrd.img. I am used to running Ubuntu as my primary system, so I was perplexed when I could not find the .img file anywhere. A trip to the forums and I figured out it was just a difference of names.

After setting up your hardware clock the installer asks you what services you want to run on startup. The default choices are ALSA, Avahi, CUPS, Inetd, Pcmcia, and Syslog. I left these choices as is and added the selection Wicd Wifi manager since I have a wireless card in my notebook. You can change your startup services later on if you need to by going to the Zenpanel. Zenpanel is the place to go to configure the system post-install. Adding modules, users, packages, services, video configuration, and network settings is all done from this control panel. You can get there by going to System menu on a right click. Once I finished choosing my startup services the install CD ejected and I was told to reboot my system using Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

GRUB succesfully found my kernel and after boot up I was shown the GNU license and asked to accept an Adobe and an Intel wireless card license. This is one problem I got into with the installer. I accidently chose not to accept the Adobe license (licenses bore me and I was careless), insuring that Flash would not work out of the box. The installer has no go back key in it, so if you make mistakes, there is no going back and fixing them. I did not know of a way of accepting the license post install so I just re-ran the installer.

First Impressions

Zenwalk uses the latest release of XFCE version 4.4.2 for it’s desktop. I found the simple blue wave theme to be pleasing to the eye. The Tango icons are really sharp looking even when they are made to look big. A bottom XFCE panel provides easy access to browsing (Iceweasel), email (Icedove), multimedia (gMplayer), shell (Terminal), file management (Thunar), system configuration (XFCE Settings Manager), and volume settings (XFCE Mixer). You can autohide this panel if you find it gets in the way by going to Settings>Panel Manager.

Hardware Detection

Videoconfig, the Zenwalk Xorg configuration tool, managed to detect my 82852/855GM integrated graphics card and setup xorg.conf to use the Intel driver. I had a 1024×768x24 resolution screen working right out of the box. I turned on the compositor in XFCE and got some nice effects. No, I couldn’t paint my screen with fire using Compiz, but I got some nice transparent windows and shadowing effects. One side note on using the compositor. I also tried their live CD out on my old Compaq P3 Deskpro with 256 Megs of RAM. Everytime I had the compositor running X would crash if I opened up a terminal window. Some older graphics chipsets don’t play well with the compositor and my card was one of them. Once I turned off compositing the system worked flawlessly and was actually pretty fast for an older machine.

I had no issues with sound or Ethernet networking. Both were working on start up with no problems. The Synaptics touchpad was also detected, it’s driver loaded using xorg.conf, but I had some problems with it. I would get a random clicking action even though I had not touched either buttons. I dug around for a fix for it in the forums. By changing Option MaxTapTime to 0 in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I was able to shut down the buggy tap to click function of my touchpad. Now it works fine and I really don’t care about not having that feature. I had no problem with USB autodetection. I plugged in my 4 GB PQI Flash drive and it automounted and showed as an icon on the desktop. I also plugged in my Fuji Finepix A700 camera to see if I could pull files from it. Although gtkam did not have a driver for that specific camera (it does for many others), I was able to see and pull down my JPEG pictures using Thunar file manager.

My Dell Wireless 1350 Mini-PCI card was the biggest problem I had with the system. This card works out of the box in Ubuntu, Mint, and even little Puppy Linux, but with Zenwalk I ran into a little trouble. The last couple lines of dmesg revealed that that the firmware could not be found:

b43-phy0 ERROR: Firmware file “b43/ucode5.fw” not found or load failed.

b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware and download the latest firmware (version 4).

So I went to linuxwireless.org and grabbed the latest firmware using these directions for fwcutter . After doing this, I got a number of wireless signals when I fired up Wicd, Zenwalk’s Wireless Manager. Zenwalk also has a nice GUI frontend to Ndiswrapper if you want to use the Windows drivers for your card to get wireless working. In my case I chose to use fwcutter instead. The linuxwiress directions for fwcutter vary depending on what kernel you are using. Zenwalk uses the Linux kernel 2.6.25 so I just followed this part of their page:

Follow these instructions if you are using the b43 driver from linux-2.6.25 or compat-wireless-2.6, or from any current GIT tree.

Use version 011 of b43-fwcutter.
Download, extract the b43-fwcutter tarball and build it:

wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2

tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2

cd b43-fwcutter-011

make

cd ..

Use version 4.150.10.5 of Broadcom’s proprietary driver.
Download and extract the firmware from this driver tarball:

export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"

wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver

sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" wl_apsta_mimo.o

Note that you must adjust the FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR path to your distribution. The standard place where firmware is installed to is /lib/firmware. However some distributions put firmware in a different place.

Software

Zenwalk has the philosophy of “one application per task”, a good part of the reason the install CD is only 505 Megabytes. For your office applications you have an excellent word processor (Abiword 2.6.3), spreadsheet (Gnumeric 1.8.3), calendar (Orage 2.4.2), graphics manipulation (Zen Gimp 2.4 ), Email client (Icedove 2.0.0.14), Web browser Iceweasel (2.0.0.14), and an IM client (Pidgin 2.4.2). While there is no Open Office here (you can add yourself with Netpkg), the applications included are probably sufficient for most desktop users. The Zenwalk Companion wiki page at their site is good guide to what software can be added to your system. I know it goes against the “one app per task” rule, but I really wish they had chose to include a second command line based editor on the install CD. They have opted to go with Vim which I understand is an awesome tool if you code for a living, but I can’t code my way out of a paper bag, so something simple like Nano works better for me. If X breaks and all a new user has is a terminal prompt he will have an easier time editing configuration files with Nano. Personally, I need a cheat sheet to get anything done in Vim. I don’t think they should drop Vim, I know Zenwalk is used by alot of coders, just consider adding Nano, Gedit, or the like. Just my two cents.

If you need to add applications Zenwalk makes it real easy with their package managment system. That is where Zenwalk shines. You are running a Slackware based distribution, but like using apt-get in Debian, you don’t have to worry about managing dependencies to install software on your machine. A huge range of packages can be added to your system using Netpkg. Just go to System>Netpkg to get there. I like how Netpkg gives you a nice display of package description along with telling you what dependencies are installed or missing. They also have useful New, Installed, Upgrades, and Downgrades filters to sort your repositories.

File Management

Zenwalk uses Thunar for it’s file manager. With the Tango icons it is a sharp looking on the desktop. You have a lot of features available with a right click. Zooming in and out to make icons bigger is great for people with vision problems. You can also search a folder, turn on Samba browsing, create an archive, and open up Brasero to burn files to CD. Zenwalk has an interesting tool called Catfish for file searches. It’s a GUI front end where you have the choice to use find, locate, or slocate to search files. You can also select to search specifically for documents, images, music, or videos by clicking one of the four icons in the program.

Multimedia

I fired up youtube to see if I had Flash working out of the box. Flash worked in the Iceweasel browser with no problems. I also had Mp3 playback working out of the box too. I popped in an encrypted DVD movie to see if Mplayer would work with what Hollywood puts out. No luck. Mplayer would not even open, let alone, show me any errors messages. You need to grab two packages using Netpkg to get this working. The files are libdvdcss and libdvdread. Zenwalk does not include them on the CD because of copyright issues. Some distributions like Mint include these codecs out of the box, but I can appreciate Zenwalk’s stance by not doing this. If you are not concerned about the legal issues getting the files is not big deal. They can be found in the Zenwalk repositories using Netpkg. The legal issues are also the reason why Zenwalk ships with Iceweasel and Icedove rather than Firefox and Thunderbird.

According to this Wikipedia article, “The Mozilla foundation requested that the Mozilla standards for use of the Firefox trademark be complied with by the Debian Project when it redistributed the software. The Debian Project then rebranded the Mozilla Firefox program, and other software released by Mozilla, so that Debian could continue to distribute the software with modifications permitted, without being bound by the use of trademark requirements that the Mozilla Foundation had required.”

Conclusion

I’ve been running with Zenwalk for about a week and am really liking it. I have tried both the Standard and Live versions and they each have impressed me. The Live version has a CD ISO remastering tool so you can make someone your very own custom version of Zenwalk. Hardware detection and configuation was very good with this distribution, the wireless and touchpad issues only being a minor problem. Configuring the system using Zenpanel is a breeze. I like the use of compositing in XFCE. It is used sensibily, rather than turning your desktop into a toy. The thing that most impressed me was the package management. Netpkg is what makes a Slackware based system useable for the masses. Managing dependencies yourself has it’s merits, like understanding your system better, but as more and more software is released for Linux doing this yourself is too time consuming for most people.

DSL 4.4 was just released on June 9th, so this past weekend I installed it on my Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 800 Mhz machine. It only has 256 megs of RAM, so a lightweight distribution like DSL is a good choice for it. Their site claims you can run DSL 486 DX with 16 megs of RAM, so even this old Compaq should fly with what it’s got. A link to the release notes is here.

DSL is an incredibly small distribution, hence the name. According to their site it started as an experiement to see how many useful applications they could fit on a 50 megabyte live CD. Even though DSL is a live CD, you still have option of installing to a hard drive or a USB pen drive. They even have an installation that lets you run DSL using QEMU on a Windows host machine. I chose to install DSL to my hard drive using the frugal install. This creates a Grub menu for you and puts the compressed DSL CD image onto your hard drive. I found it cut the boot time to about 1/3 what is was with the CD.

There are a couple of things done differently in DSL than say, an Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, to get the under 50 megabyte size. For instance, you are using an older 2.4.31 Linux kernel and Gtk1 applications. An older kernel and Gtk1 apps use less system resources than a newer kernel and Gtk2 apps do . If you need a 2.6 kernel and Gtk2 apps they have a spin off of DSL called DSL-N that might be a better choice.

For the window manager, there is no Gnome or KDE here, they would use to much memory and computer cycles. Intead, you have the choice of Joe’s Window Manager or Fluxbox, either one of which is pretty good in my opinion. Unfortunately, you will have to look elsewhere if you need spinning cubes or wobbling windows. There is no Compiz in these window managers.

BOOTING THE CD:

When I booted off the CD I was given a prompt with a number of cheat codes that I could use. You can put things in like having DSL load entirely into RAM to increase speed, having the DSL CD copied to you hard drive, or choosing which window manager you would like to use. A list of the cheat codes available are at this wiki. For my first boot, I just went with the default and did not use any cheat codes.

Next I was given a choice of what X server I wanted to use, Xvesa or Xfbdev. I chose Xvesa since it supposed to be faster. I used the default resolution and color depth 1024×768x32 and I got a desktop with some funky colors. Fortunately, I could see the screen well enough to navigate to the control panel icon on the bottom. After I clicked the Panel button and then the Xvesa button, I saw that the highest setting I could use was 800×600x16. Once I selected this setting my desktop was normal looking. I’m going to have to dig around for a better driver for my graphics chipset, the Intel 82815. DSL has other X servers available in MyDSL testing, but I didn’t think any of them would work with my chipset. In both Ubuntu and Puppy my graphics chipset was working at 1024×768 out of the box, but they were using Xorg, not Xvesa. I booted the DSL CD on my Athlon 3800 X2 System with an Nvidia 7600 card to see if I would get a better result with Xvesa. With the Nvidia card, I had a whole range of choices for resolution. The default 1024×768x32 worked right out of the box, so your mileage with Xvesa will vary depending on what graphics card you use.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

Now that I could see the screen I was presented with a nice simple green gradient background with the DSL logo in the center. DSL uses a program called Torsmo, which gives you some handy system statistics in the top right corner of the desktop. How much memory you are using, upload/download speeds, number of processes, CPU usage, and file systems mounted. I was stunned to see that I was using under 20 megabytes of memory while I was running a window manager.

On the bottom of the desktop you get 5 buttons that will give you a control panel, a terminal, the emel file manager, the lightweight browser Dillo, or Firefox 2.0. Your also given 4 virtual desktops in the center, a DSL Windows-like start button on the left, and and a digital clock on the right. You can set the time on this clock automagically by clicking the DSL>Setup>DateTimeSetup>ViaInternetTimeServer.

Even with it’s small size, DSL has a wide range of applications available. You have a word processor (Ted), spreadsheet (Siag), PDF viewer (XPDF), Calendar (XCalendar), paint program (mtPaint), 4 editors (Beaver, VIM, Nano, and Notepad), an audio player (XMMS), FTP client (AxY FTP), Email client (Slypheed), File manager (emelFM), 3 browsers (Firefox, Dillo, and Netrik), a Web server (Monkey Web Server), and a host of other applications.

HARDWARE DETECTION:

First thing I checked was to see if my Ethernet was working. I opened up Firefox and tried to do some browsing. Fortunately, this was working right out of the box. I’ve got a Compaq EtherExpress 82801 network card. I went to youtube to see if Flash was installed. No luck. Flash is not included out of the box.

Next up I tried sound. I went to emelFM and picked an MP3 and clicked on it. Xmms opened up and it played with no problems. I also mounted a NTFS Windows partition on my hard drive and tried playing a MP3 from it. Again, it worked with no problems so I could read NTFS out of the box too. While working with the sound issue, I did notice one problem with the Dmix sound mixer. It has a drop down box where you choose what device you want to adjust and the print is so tiny you can’t see what it is your adjusting.

Last thing I tried to get working was my printer. It is a Samsung Ml-1430 printer. To get printing working in DSL you need to go and click DSL>System>Printing>ConfigurePrinter. They use a program called apsfilter to setup your printer. In the setup they had a number of printer drivers available, but mine was not one of them. Since I did not know how to add an additional printer driver to apsfilter I went to MyDSL and pulled down CUPS. I just got my printer working with Puppy 4.0 last week using CUPS so I thought this would work with DSL the same way. My printer is not included in the default install of CUPS, but I was able to pull down the .ppd file for my printer from the linuxprinting.org site. After that, I placed it in the /usr/share/cups/model directory. I started setup and typed that directory in the box where it says location. Setup showed that it was using the ML-1430 ppd file so I tried to print a test page. No luck, I didn’t even get a data light blinking on the printer.

PACKAGE MANAGEMENT:

To add applications go to the MyDsl browser by clicking on DSL>MyDSL>MyDSLBrowser. There is quite a range of selections here. If you want to use Gtk2 apps, you can get the library by installing gtk2-2.10.9.dsl package. This will let you use newer flashier Gtk2 apps, but you will be using more memory doing so. I noticed as I added applications to the system, JWM would sometimes put double entries for the application in the menu. I went over to Fluxbox to see it was doing the same thing. It was listing each installed app once, not twice. I also had a weird problem with Mplayer. I installed it via the MyDSL browser and it locked up running under JWM, but under Fluxbox it looked loaded fine. I had the same problem in Puppy 4.0 with JWM, so it is a problem with JWM and not something specific to Damn Small Linux.

Since DSL is based on Debian, one of the cool things you can do with it is use Synaptic to download from the Debian Woody repositories. First you need to go to MyDSL Browser and install dsl-dpkg.dsl. Next, you will need to pull down synaptic.dsl. Now you can go to DSL>MyDSL>Synaptic and you will find a huge range of packages available.

FILE MANAGMENT:

For an icon based file manager, DSL uses the DFM. To mount file systems in DFM you right click on a file folder and go to mount, then click on the square radio button of the file system you want mounted. It’s just my opinion, but I would go with the better looking Rox for a lightweight icon based file manager. The icons in DFM look pretty bad. Rather than use DFM, I took a liking to the included emelFM file manager. It’s a simple two pane old school file manager with a command line at the bottom. I find it’s setup to be the fastest way to get file management done.

CONCLUSION:

In conclusion, I think DSL is a cool little distribution. DSL is one of the two lightweight distros of choice, the other being Puppy Linux. DSL has the advantage in the range of packages available when you consider you can add Debian Woody repository to the mix. DSL also uses slightly less system resources. It also is a multi-user operating system, so your not running as root all the time. If I were going to run a server I would definitely pick DSL over Puppy. In Puppy’s favor, you are using GTK2 apps, a Linux 2.6 kernel, and Xorg. The use of Xorg and the 2.6 kernel made Puppy alot easier to run on the systems I have tried. For instance, for better Wi-FI reception I like to use a Hawking USB Wifi Dish that needs a zd1211rw module to work. This module is included in the 2.6.18 and above kernel. Flash was also working out of the box with Puppy. Lastly, I also preferred the Arctic Ocean wallpaper and icon set of Puppy over DSL.

The obligitory screenshots:

I got a chance to check out the latest Puppy release this week. Puppy Linux is a small Linux distribution (roughly 87 megabytes) that runs off of CD. It is ideal for running on older hardware or for people who just want a lean system. A couple years ago I put Puppy on a Pentium II 233 Mhz computer with 64 megabytes of RAM. I wiped Windows 98 off the 4 gigabyte hard drive and donated the computer to Goodwill. I was sad to see the system go after the Puppy install. The system ran better than it ever had. Not to mention the fact that it was far more secure.

This week I booted the Puppy 4.0 “Dingo” CD on my trusty Dell Inspiron 1150 notebook. The system has a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz Celeron, 1 gig of memory, and a 80 gigabyte hard drive. I generated a report on the system using Puppy’s HardInfo program. HardInfo is available under the System menu in Puppy. It is nice utility for getting info on your computer.

Here is a snippet of the changes in Puppy 4.0 from the release notes:

• Puppy 3.01 was built from Slackware-12 binary packages, however to reduce the size 4.00 has been totally compiled from source, using the T2-project. Thus, less dependencies (smaller size) and later versions of packages than 3.01.
• GTK1 and Tcl/Tk abandoned. The decision was made to go for a totally GTK2-based system. This meant that there could be a consistent user-interface throughout and further reduced the size. It also meant that GTK2 replacements had to be found for some applications.
• Exciting new GTK2 applications: ePDFView (PDF viewer), Pschedule (cron GUI), Osmo (personal organiser), Pcdripper (audio CD ripper), RipOff (audio CD ripper), mhWaveEdit (audio editor), Pburn (CD/DVD burner), MTR (traceroute), Pnethood (Samba client), Pwireless (wireless scanner), pStopWatch (stopwatch), HomeBank (personal finances), ExpenseTracker (personal finances), ChmSee (CHM help viewer), Gmeasures (units converter), Fotox (image viewer), Gwhere (disk catalogger), Prename (batch file renamer), gFnRename (batch file renamer), Pfind (file search), Pprocess (process manager), Chtheme (GTK theme chooser), HardInfo (hardware information), PcurlFtp (simple network file sharing), Pidgin (multiprotocol chat client), Gadm-Rsync (GUI for rsync), Wireless Autoconnect, Gtkam (digital camera interface), Xsane (scanner interface), Figaro’s Password Manager 2, HotPup (drive icons on desktop). Note, this is not a complete list nor in any particular order.

First off, everything works on the notebook out of the box. I was able to select 1024×768 resolution and X Server started with no problems. My Synaptics touchpad was working with no glitches. I had problems with this touchpad when I installed Puppy 2.14 on this system so I am glad they resolved the problem with Puppy 4.0. My Ethernet adapter was picked up using the b44 module. The biggest concern I had was with the wireless, which can be problematic in Linux because the hardware vendors don’t often support it. Fortunately, Puppy saw the Broadcomm wireless chipset in my notebook and it was able to get the card running using the bcm43xx module. My Hawking HWU-8DD USB wireless dish was also picked up using the zd1211rw module. So I had two choices for getting online wirelessly in Network Wizard. I was pleased to see that the wizard also has an interface to Ndiswrapper if you have a card without a Linux driver.

Puppy uses Joe’s Window Manager (JWM) for the default desktop. It is fast and uses very little system resources. Puppy has a free memory applet on the taskbar and even with several programs running it showed that I was only using 200 megs of memory. This is even more impressive when you realize that Puppy loads the entire operating system into RAM.

I like the Arctic Ocean theme and the icons they chose to use. My only gripe would be that the task bar has a Windows 98 feel to it. JWM was intentionally designed to look like this since Windows 98 users with older systems are likely converts.

Puppy 4.0 uses Seamonkey version 1.1.8 for it’s Web browser. I am not sure why this is, but when you go to sites like Yahoo the page does not look completely right. There is some minor overlap in graphics on the page. My own Wordpress blog has some minor overlapping too. I resolved this problem by going to the Puppy Package Manager and installing Firefox 2.0.

A quick trip to youtube revealed that I had Flash videos working out of the box. Flash games also played without a hitch in Seamonkey and Firefox browsers. I tried a DVD movie with the Gxine movie player and it worked. The movie played but the quality was a little lacking so I went back to the Puppy Package Manager and downloaded Mplayer 1.0rc2. I don’t know if it is because it is a release candidate, but it locks up the system when I run it. I can’t close the 2 windows it opens and it forces me to restart X server with CTL-Alt-Backspace. Fortunately, Mplayer does work when running it at the command line so this is just a minor nuisance.

After a little bit of effort, I made a bootable USB key with the Puppy Univeral Installer. You can get to the installer by going to Menu>Setup>Puppy Universal Installer. I had to use the ComboFormat method to get the key to boot. ComboFormat partitions the drive into FAT16 and EXT2 partitions and is an experimental way of making a USB key installation. I tried the standard way using all 5 bootloader choices and Puppy would not boot off the key. So far with the ComboFormat method I have been able to boot off the key and it is saving the changes with no problems. Changes I make to Puppy are saved in a file called pup_save.2fs. You can store this file on a hard drive as well as a USB key. There is a way to secure this file by encrypting it. Puppy also has a way make your own remastered live CD but I have yet to try that feature out.

For whatever task you have in mind, Puppy seems to have a program for it. Abiword for word processing, Gnumeric for spreadsheets, Mozilla Composer for Web publishing, InkLite and mtPaint for graphics, and RoxFiler for your file management. A software firewall is included in Puppy for when you are out on the road and without a router. It is simple to use and only takes a few clicks to get running. It is a frontend to iptables. You can find it by going to Menu>Network>LinuxFirewall. This version of Puppy even has it’s own Podcast client. To run, goto Menu>Internet>PuppyPodcastGrabber. It uses .txt file to store the feeds which is pretty easy to edit. My current podcatcher uses .opml files so I was not able to do an easy export of my podcasts to Puppy’s PodcastGrabber.

In conclusion, if you are looking for something different I would give Puppy a try. This version is all built from source to maximize speed. Every program on my machine seems to open instaneously. Even with Compiz functionality turned off in Gnome, my Ubuntu install is no where near as fast. There are many features in Puppy that are lacking in other distributions. Installation to thumb drivers, remastering your own custom cd, and wizards to aid new users are just a few.

Update to Post:

A couple people have asked me about security in Puppy. Puppy is a single user operating system so you are running as root all the time. From what I have read this was done to simplify it’s usage. Windows 95/98 single user operating systems are the most likely ones to get changed to Puppy. The transition to Linux is made easier since Puppy, like Windows 95/98, doesn’t have multiple accounts and permissions to to worry about.

In the event your system gets compromised you can start a fresh copy of Puppy by booting the CD with the puppy pfix=ram option. This will ignore your compromised pup_save.2fs file and you can start saving your changes to a new one. For more on why Puppy is always root and it’s security implications you can check out this Puppy forum topic on the subject.

I hooked up my Samsung ML-1430 laser printer to see if it would work with Puppy 4.0. To setup a printer in Puppy you need to go to Setup>Cups Printer Wizard. Puppy uses CUPS to configure it’s printers. My printer driver was not included with the installation, but it was no big deal since I was able to add the driver from www.linuxprinting.org. I pulled down the .ppd file for my printer and placed it in the /usr/share/cups/model directory. I started the setup again and typed that directory in the box where it says location. After that, I was able to print a test page using CUPS. Linuxprinting has a wide range of printer drivers available, so I would check them out if your printer driver is not included in Puppy.

In episode 13 of ProductiveLinux, Nathan Hale does a fine podcast review of Puppy 4.0. It is worth a listen if you want to find out some more about Puppy.

In February 2009 NASA is going to launch the Kepler Mission. The mission will use a photometer to detect the presence of extra-solar planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. Basically, the photometer works by sensing the change in light as a planet orbits a star. The planet needs to be line of sight from photometer for this to work. According to Wikipedia, Kepler can monitor 100,000 stars simultaneously, giving it good odds that it will be able to find many Earth-like terrestrial planets.

You can get your name sent along with the mission if you like. A DVD is being sent up on Kepler with people’s names and the reasons why they support the mission. You can go to this page at SETI to sign up. In my opinion, this is a great way for people to feel more connected with the mission and NASA in general.

I bought a Canon Digital Rebel Xti 400d recently to take on a trip to the Grand Canyon. One of the things I like about the camera is that it shoots images in Adobe Camera RAW. You have the option of shooting either JPEG or RAW, but RAW gives you the best color depth and by not using compression, better image quality. There are some drawbacks with the RAW image format. The first of is that the image sizes are huge. Fortunately, this is getting to be less of a problem since Compact Flash memory is getting cheaper. The second problem is that camera companies have not been nice when it comes to reading their RAW files. This is a short quote from a Wikipedia article on the RAW file format:

Providing a detailed and concise description of the content of raw files is highly problematic. There is no single raw format; formats can be similar or radically different. Different manufacturers use their own proprietary and typically undocumented formats, which are collectively known as raw format. Often they also change the format from one camera model to the next. Multiple major manufacturers, including Nikon, Canon (company), and Sony encrypt portions of the file in an attempt to prevent third-party tools from accessing them.

Because of the article above I was concerned if my Canon RAW images would play nicely with Linux. I should not have been though, because when I connected the Digital Rebel to my Ubuntu Gutsy notebook it was able to pull the RAW images down using a program called GPhoto2. It turns out GPhoto2 supports 900 different cameras, so more than likely anyone you buy should be supported. I was able to see my images using gThumb, F-Spot, and digiKam. So I had plug and play RAW viewing in Ubuntu Gutsy with no fuss.

However, I ran into a little problem when I tried to edit the RAW files in the Gimp 2.4.2. I got a screenshot of what happened here. It tried to open up the image as a .TIFF file and threw out a whole bunch of errors.

It turns out you need a Gimp plugin called dcraw to import RAW files. The download is available in the Ubuntu repositories. The package you need is called gimp-dcraw. I am not sure why this plugin is not included with the installation of the Gimp. With even the low end digital cameras having RAW capability, everyone is going to be looking to import RAW in the Gimp.

I have put up 32 shots taken at the Grand Canyon and Sedona, Arizona. The only editing I did was with curves in the Gimp. I put up a gallery of the pictures using jigl. Jigl is a simple to use program for putting up an online photo album. It is Open Source Software (released under GPL) and works for me. I am using the default theme with it. They have other themes available if you choose to use on your site and you want a different look.

For those Ubuntu fans out there, the latest release of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron is supposed to be available for download on April 24th. This being a long term support release, I would expect it to be more stable than Ubuntu Edgy, Feisty, or Gutsy, which were all non LTS releases.

For those that don’t know, Canonical supports LTS versions for three years, hence they call them long term releases. LTS versions are geared more towards businesses where upgrading the OS every six months is difficult when you have hundreds or thousands of machines. The last LTS was Dapper Drake and it was released in June 2006. Dapper was my first version of Ubuntu and it’s simple installation made the transition from Windows XP easy.

I found a useful cheat sheet over at FOSSwire. They have updated it for this latest release of Ubuntu. In my opinion, it is worth printing up for both new and veteran users alike.