March 31, 2006

Sun Fire T2000 review

Filed under: Archives, Hardware Reviews — @ 2:32 pm

Sun Microsystems has made some bold claims about the new UltraSPARC T1-based Sun Fire T2000 server. Specifically, Sun says that the T2000 is built not only for exceptional speed, but also energy efficiency. These assertions are backed up with SPEC synthetic benchmarks for Web and Java application server performance, which are essentially useless when comparing real-world application performance. Sun sent me a T2000 to test, and I spent several days just trying to get it to work properly. I did manage to record and analyze its power usage though — and it’s nothing to get excited about. The bottom line is, the T2000 won’t displace any AMD64/EM64T servers, but it might be good for existing Sun UltraSPARC server customers. Read more at Hardware in Review or Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

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March 28, 2006

Linux supporters fiddle while OpenSSH burns

Filed under: News Stories — @ 5:07 pm

Once again, the OpenBSD project is asking for donations to keep its operations in motion. It doesn’t ask for much — U.S. $100,000 (small potatoes in the operating system development industry) — yet it provides so much to the software world. Even if you don’t use OpenBSD, you’re likely to be benefiting from it unknowingly. If you’re using Solaris, SCO UnixWare, OS X, SUSE Linux, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, chances are you’re using the OpenBSD-developed OpenSSH for secure shell access to remote machines. If so many are using this software, why are so few paying for it? Official responses (and non-responses) from Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, and Red Hat are below, but if you’re one of the freeloaders who hasn’t contributed to OpenBSD or OpenSSH, what’s your excuse?

OpenSSH: you’ll miss it when it’s gone

“Bigger than OpenBSD, our big contribution is OpenSSH,” OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt told me in a 2004 interview. “It is now included in pretty much every non-Windows operating system made. It is included in network switches, in half of Cisco’s products, and who knows where else. It is used by everything from Arrecibo to the Greek Army to who knows where else. And what have we gotten for it in return? Pretty much nothing at all.”

While there are other, proprietary SSH implementations, OpenSSH is by far the most widely used. And while the proprietary competition is charging $150 per workstation license, OpenSSH is charging nothing.

Other projects could theoretically fork OpenSSH, but shouldn’t a network communications program that has as much power as OpenSSH be developed by programmers who live for greater software security? OpenSSH isn’t some cheap utility like telnet or BSD Mail — it’s the only secure way for most server operating systems to securely communicate with a sysadmin’s client terminal over a TCP/IP connection. Even if you don’t regularly use OpenSSH, a program that you rely on (the scp command, for instance) may need OpenSSH to create a secure tunnel over a network.

OpenSSH also achieves a more secure codebase and more security-related features because the programmers who work on it also work on OpenBSD.

“People seem to think, ‘OpenBSD is not what I run, so I don’t need to help them.’ I worry that this is what holds people back from doing the right thing, which is to fund OpenSSH, and thus OpenBSD will survive and improve, and then any improvements in OpenBSD will drive improvements in OpenSSH.

“Like when OpenBSD got so much address space randomization and propolice, but that magic day when we realized that every OpenSSH sshd process was still an address-space-clone of the parent. That is because every connection you make causes the parent sshd to fork, and this new process has the same propolice cookie, the same address space layout, the same random stack gap at the top, and even the same malloc layout. That is when we re-architectured OpenSSH so that it instead does a fork + execve, so that the new processes would be dissimilar to each other. That kind of approach would never have come out of any other development group.”

Some anti-BSD zealots have privately entreated OpenSSH programmers to split OpenSSH from the OpenBSD project in order to protect it, but OpenBSD’s stewardship is not the issue. While funding for OpenBSD has dwindled below critical levels, OpenSSH will not go down with the OpenBSD ship, so to speak. The issue is that OpenSSH, regardless of which programming team maintains stewardship of it and despite its critical importance to system administration, is not being monetarily supported by the companies and users that rely on it. Without full-time programmers working on it, OpenSSH’s legendary security could suffer.

All take, no give

Some of the OpenSSH freeloaders, like Apple Computer and The SCO Group, are notorious for reaping financial rewards from selling open source software bundled with their proprietary products. It’s no surprise that both of these corporations include OpenSSH in their operating systems without giving back to the programmers who make it all happen, but what about companies that are vocal in their support of open source software?

When asked what Novell would do if OpenSSH were no longer an option, and how much the alternatives would cost, company representative Bruce Lowry had this to say:

“As I know you’re aware, Novell is an active and constructive member of the open source community. We participate significantly in more then 30 open source projects including AppArmor, Hula, Gnome, KDE, Mono, OCFS2, openSUSE.org, Samba, YaST and XEN. We participate in many different roles, in some cases sponsoring the whole project, in others employing key maintainers or giving back enhancements and bugfixes to the community. We acknowledge that openSSH is an important piece of our operating system. But the SUSE Linux distro also includes around 1000 other open source projects.”

“Instead of supporting projects with financial resources, our policy is to give and share code. This is largely how the community works and this is what our customers and users expect from us. Projects which think they need more then code exchanges to survive have generally had to look at establishing a business plan and structure to support long term viability.

“With regard to your specific questions, these are all speculative, so we can’t really reply concretely. If openSSH halted development, Novell would evaulate next steps. It’s possible that Novell and a consortium of Linux vendors would agree to continue the work. We would cross that bridge when we came to it. On question two, it’s difficult to estimate to possible costs of a project that is not currently planned. Successful open source projects are very organic, and are driven by community and vendor interests. If work on the openSSH project were to cease, it’s likely that other community members would step up and help keep the development going. It’s impossible to guess what Novell’s role in a new openSSH project might be.”

Since the release of Solaris 10, who has been a larger open source software cheerleader than Sun Microsystems? I asked Sun representatives what they would do if OpenSSH were to disappear. The only response I got was that there are parts of Solaris that compete with OpenSSH, and that because of this, the company would rather not comment further on the issue. Presumably Sun is referring to SunSSH, an OpenSSH derivative included with Solaris, though it’s likely that the Sun no-commenters were not aware of SunSSH’s heritage.

Upon learning of Sun’s competitive view of OpenSSH, Theo de Raadt told me, “People who care about having the best SSH on their Solaris machine immediately replace SunSSH with OpenSSH, because SunSSH is based on a 5 year old version of OpenSSH. Even more scary, Sun disabled our privilege separation security code for the pre-authentication phase (i.e. in the most risky part of the software). SunSSH was heavily tweaked to support Trusted Solaris, but in the process they totally demolished it.”

International Business Machines (IBM) is also a public supporter of open source software — primarily GNU/Linux — but are they all hat and no cattle when it comes to supporting actual open source developers? IBM includes OpenSSH in z/OS, AIX, and OS/400, which in turn control the company’s most expensive and powerful machines. But when pressed for comment on what they would do in the event that OpenSSH should slow development, no one seemed to have an answer for me. My questions were passed from employee to employee, never finding someone who knew what OpenSSH was or what AIX and z/OS would do without it. At the time of this article’s publication, IBM did not have any comments to offer. Perhaps they were too busy punting their customer support complaints to the OpenSSH programmers:

“As a side note,” said de Raadt on an OpenSSH mailing list, “earlier today IBM Support actually sent an energy company with whom they have a multi-million [dollar] support contract to our private development mailing list saying we had to fix a customer bug. I was shown an extensive set of IBM support emails with the customer where they were refusing to take responsibility for the issue, and finally told their customer that OpenSSH was responsible for fixing their problem. I say shame you, IBM, SHAME ON YOU. You take their money and want us to make your customers happy.”

Like IBM, Red Hat passed my questions around from desk to desk, eventually telling me that they had no comment on what they would do if OpenSSH were to cease development. Perhaps it’s just too difficult a task to find an engineer who can comment on one of the most important networking tools in the operating system your company is selling. This could just be a coincidental, collective PR failure by several companies that, for the most part, generally have no trouble commenting on highly technical software issues. Perhaps, though, there is more to it — Sun, IBM, Red Hat, and Novell all sell Linux-based operating systems that compete with OpenBSD. Do they have an interest in watching OpenBSD suffer and fail, even if it means losing OpenSSH in the process? Such an attitude could be the biggest case of nose amputation the face of the operating system world has yet seen.

Other OpenBSD contributions

OpenBSD’s contributions to the larger software world are not limited to OpenSSH, and you don’t have to use OpenBSD to benefit from them. Many of the technologies developed for OpenBSD are ported to other operating systems, such as the packet filter (pf), an advanced firewall framework. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD include this OpenBSD-authored software in their base system. pf is often combined with another OpenBSD creation, Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP), for firewall failover protection.

Among OpenBSD’s greatest contributions to programming are the strlcpy and strlcat C libraries. These make the process of copying and combining strings in C programs more secure. Since being incorporated into OpenBSD several years ago, they have also been added to Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OS X.

OpenBSD programmers also squash important bugs in ancillary software such as X.org. In one recent example, OpenBSD helped discover and fix bugs in X.org’s pixmap library that had been there for ten years:

“The X.org bugs we fixed are indeed a good illustration of how the work we do on OpenBSD benefits a larger community,” said Mark Kettenis of the OpenBSD project. “We were able to catch the bug because we now have a memory allocator that is very unforgiving, and have it turned on by default. That made many people see X11 crashing and eventually provided us with enough clues to fix the bug. Other systems have a similar memory allocator, but since it’s not turned on by default, most people run without it. The interesting thing about these particular bugs is that they don’t disappear when you use a more forgiving memory allocator; that would just make X11 crash less often. For desktop users, having X11 crash is just as annoying as having the entire machine crash, so fixing these bugs is important even if they wouldn’t have an impact on security of the system.

“Once we find bugs, we usually go through our entire base system to fix similar bugs. Since we have several other pieces of software in our base systems that are also used on other operating systems (gcc, sendmail, perl, apache, etc.), we fix bugs in those packages too. In most cases we send our fixes to the maintainers of that software, so in the end everybody using the software will get the fixes. And in many cases, even before they’d have noticed the problem themselves.”

How you can help

If the big corporations won’t help support the software that they rely on, perhaps it is up to the users to take action. So how can you help keep OpenSSH and OpenBSD going? The easiest way is to make a donation to the OpenSSH project (or, if you prefer, to OpenBSD). But if you want something more than mere satisfaction, you might consider buying an OpenBSD CD set. Aside from helping to support OpenSSH and OpenBSD development and the general benefit to computer software security that the continued development of these projects provides, it’s also the best way to get one of the world’s most interesting operating systems onto your computer.

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March 24, 2006

Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 6000 review

Filed under: Archives, Hardware Reviews — @ 4:42 pm

Using the touchpad or pressure button on your notebook computer isn’t terribly comfortable, especially when you have a lot of work to do. The only reasonable alternative is a laptop mouse — something portable and functional. I’ve reviewed a couple of laptop mice in the past — one optical wireless, one optical wired — and they were okay, but for reasons of Linux compatibility, tracking quality, and ergonomics, I prefer this new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser 6000 over both of them. Read more at Hardware in Review or Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

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March 22, 2006

The Cult of iPod review

Filed under: Tech Book Reviews — @ 11:28 am

Do you know someone who can’t stop talking about their latest purchase from Apple? You’ve found a gift they’ll enjoy. Do you know someone who spends hours trying to convince the first person they could have gotten a far better computer for much less from Dell? You’ve found a gift that they’ll completely loathe. From the very outset, it is fairly obvious this book is aimed at Apple devotees.

From the book: “Fire, the wheel, and the iPod. In the history of invention, gadgets don’t get more iconic than Apple’s digital music player. The iPod is to the 21st century what the big band was to the ’20s, the radio to the ’40s, or the jukebox to the ’50s — the signature technology that defines the musical culture of the era. And what a marvelous technology the iPod is. Inside Apple’s little white box is magic — pure magic — in the guise of music.”

Despite its obvious bias, The Cult of iPod is a fascinating look at Apple’s signature product, its impact on how people listen to music, and ultimately how they relate to each other.

Doing it with style

The book can be separated into two sections. The first section spans the first three chapters which introduce us to the iPod, telling us what it is, how it affects us, and where it came from. The second section spans the rest of the book, covering a diverse range of iPod-related topics. What makes the second section so interesting is that it is almost completely random. It goes from homemade iPod ads, to various celebrities’ custom iPods, to iPod DJs, to iPod-inspired products. It’s almost as if they placed all the material on an iPod and hit the shuffle button.

This brings up an interesting point about the book — in fact, almost the first thing I noticed: The Cult of iPod is designed to resemble the iPod. From the cover (which resembles the front of an iPod), to the table of contents (which resembles the iTunes library list), to the arrangement of photos intermixed with the text of the book, the reader cannot help but compare the layout with the iPod and the Macintosh computer they probably use every day. Physically, the book is printed on heavy stock, and is easy to read, with vivid, colorful photos on nearly every page. In fact, despite being 160 pages long, the reader can easily read the book in less than a couple of hours due to the sheer number of pictures. You’ll probably spend more time looking over the many photos than you do reading.

Style and substance

While the book talks about the iPod, it is more about how the iPod affects us as individuals and influences society as a whole. The exploded view of the iPod internals on pages 36 and 37 is fascinating, but the discussion on iPod jacking starting on page 103 is eye-opening to those who haven’t encountered this phenomenon. Imagine walking along the sidewalk and having a perfect stranger unplug your headphones to plug them into their own iPod. Then we have the diametric opposite — people who use their iPods to block out the rest of the world. We read about people who use the white ear buds to show they are part of the clique, and about people who deliberately use ordinary headphones to hide the fact that they are one of the millions hooked on the iPod.

The book ranges from humorous, such as the section relating the perils of being a Microsoft employee and an iPod user, to thought-provoking, such as the section on iRAQ — posters mimicking the iPod ads but which protest the Iraq war. We are presented with photos like P. Diddy’s diamond-encrusted iPod, and iPod skins spanning the range from bunnies to a dominatrix straddling a giant hotdog. The wide variety of material will keep you turning the pages until you reach the end of the book. Then you’ll flip back to the start and go through it again, since you cannot possible absorb it all in one sitting. In the end, that is what stuck with me. This book might seem light on the surface, but the depth is enough to keep your interest long after you’ve forgotten the latest thriller novel.

Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum.

Title	The Cult of iPod
Publisher	No Starch Press
Author	Leander Kahney
ISBN	1593270666
Pages	Paperback, 160 pages
Rating	8 out of 10
Summary	Wired News editor Leander Kahney examines Apple’s hit portable player, its impact on the way people list to music, and ultimately, how they interact with each other.
Price (retail)	U.S. $16 Buy it from Amazon.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Writing analysis

Beginning Python’s format is designed to accommodate both the beginner and the advanced programmer. Reading the book straight through will give you not only a good overview of the Python language, but also good programming principles. You don’t just learn what to do, you learn why doing it that way is a good idea.

Unlike many other programming books that tend toward the boring side, Beginning Python is both informative and entertaining. The author includes occasional Monty Python references throughout the book, some of which made me laugh out loud.

At the end of every chapter is a summary of the new concepts and techniques covered in the preceding text. This provides for an excellent review of the material you’ve just read, and also gives a good check-up for your notes.

Putting the book to the test

The only true negative point in Beginning Python is that the author never challenges readers to apply the concepts that they’re learning. There are no exercises or case studies, so you never have the chance to apply the knowledge you’re gaining. For many, this means that they can learn how to follow a Python program, but might not be able to write one on their own.

I do like the fact that experienced programmers can skip ahead to the appendix to get a crash course on how Python is used from the perspective of a C or C++ programmer. There are a few parts of the book where the author tells you what chapter to skip to if you don’t understand a fundamental concept, or if you’re too advanced for the subject of the chapter.

Conclusions

Due to the lack of exercises, experienced programmers will get more out of Beginning Python than beginners will. Despite that, this book is definitely worth buying if you have any interest in the Python language. It probably won’t convince you that Python is superior to your favorite programming language, but that’s more of a shortcoming of Python (and interpreted languages in general) than the book that teaches it.

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Title	Beginning Python
Publisher	Apress
Author	Magnus Lie Hetland
ISBN	159059519X
Pages	Paperback, 604 pages
Rating	7 out of 10
Tagline	Master Python’s key features with this comprehensive guide to one of the world’s most opular open source programming languages.
Price (retail)	U.S. $30. Buy it from Amazon.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Snopes.com: busting myths or busting chops?

If you browse through the Snopes Web site, you might come across a special area that is designed to look like every other part of the site, but with some very subtle yet significant differences. The page in question is here, and it is titled, “The Repository of Lost Legends.” This page is a collection of Snopes untruths; they are stories that Snopes.com says are true, but in fact are not. If you click around and investigate further, you’ll find this informational page which starts out by saying, “You’ve just had an encounter with False Authority Syndrome.” The authors go on to say that they are trying to teach us stupid readers a lesson about relying on sites like Snopes to provide accurate information. I agree that it’s a good idea to verify facts in some cases, but casual readers shouldn’t have to be researchers in order to have access to the facts. That’s, like, kind of the whole point of journalism. Snopes.com is not a newspaper, but if something about their publishing a whole page full of lies doesn’t sit right with you, you’re not alone.

Pages of false information

If you’re always suspicious of what you’re reading, you might notice that the title’s acronym is TROLL. That is no disclaimer, though — many people don’t know what an Internet troll is, and many who do know may count it as a coincidence.

If you navigate to each Lost Legend page from the Lost Legends index and read everything carefully, you’ll know that something’s up. There are little disclaimers and hints in fine print here and there, but no obvious indicator that what you’re reading is pure fiction — especially if you’re already familiar with Snopes and skip all of the fine print, figuring that you’ve read it before. The Snopes authors could, however, make a case that they give fair warning in this instance. That doesn’t make their actions any less unethical.

What if you go directly to an individual Lost Legends entry, though? If the first page you saw were, for instance, this Lost Legends entry on Mr. Ed, you would have no way of knowing that you’ve been the victim of Snopes.com’s prank unless you click the “More information about this page” link in the “Additional Information” section near the bottom. The only references given are books (and one link to an informational page about zebras that doesn’t mention Mr. Ed at all), so if you want to verify the sources, you’ll have to actually go out and borrow or buy the information necessary to understand that the Snopes authors are lying to you.

Playing Russian roulette with the facts

At what point does a lesson become a lie? Anyone who has used Snopes in the past knows that it’s the go-to site for debunking urban legends. It is, in itself, a trusted resource. The lesson that the Snopes authors are trying to teach us is that no source is 100% trustworthy. That’s a bit paranoid, from my frame of reference. The collective human culture is based on locating trustworthy sources — not just of information, but of safety as well. Our home is a place we trust; our friends are acquaintances whom we trust; our spouses are people of the opposite sex whom we have decided that we implicitly trust. People generally trust news reporting, though we recognize that errors are made and corrections are issued from time to time. Trust is, sometimes, broken; rarely is this an act of malice. Trust is not betrayed for the sake of entertainment, or to teach lessons. The message that Snopes authors Barbara and David Mikkelson are sending us is, essentially, “Don’t trust us.”

But Snopes is not the first site to purposefully publish bunk articles. The Register posted an article saying that one of the Wikipedia co-founders had been murdered. Again, reading and re-reading very carefully, you can detect that something is wrong with the article. However, since the piece meanders for several unnecessary paragraphs, many readers will just read the specifics at the beginning and not realize that they are reading a poorly crafted satire or lampoon. Humor is a necessary ingredient in satire — without it, readers are left confused and misinformed — and it is notably absent from the Register piece on Jimmy Wales.

How are we supposed to tell the difference between the good articles and the bad articles? How far do we have to read before we know if what we are reading is fact-based or some passive-aggressive and/or underskilled writer’s idea of humor?

Stop being the teacher

Casual readers should not have to go on fact-finding missions to verify everything they read. Students and professionals are required to verify information, but even they do casual reading. Who wants to have to call or email the source of every article and review?

I hope to see the Mikkelsons take down their disinformation pages someday. Unfortunately, they seem pretty adamant about keeping them, as pointed out in this email from Barbara Mikkelson:

“The moral of the story is that you should never take anyone’s word for anything, including ours. That is why we list our references at the bottom of our pages, so that you can independently verify our work.

We are the Urban Legends Reference Pages — we provide references so that people can do their own research. We do not claim to be the ultimate arbiters of fact.”

No one does, Barbara, but the writers and publishers who have integrity do their best.

I guess what she’s getting at is, you don’t need Snopes.com, and you should trust no one. Just go to the library, Amazon.com, Google, and Wikipedia and find multiple sources on your own. This is, after all, what researchers actually do. So cut out the Snopes middlemen and their silly lessons, and become a professional researcher for everything you read. Don’t trust anything you see in books, on TV, on the Internet, or hear by word of mouth — you could be being fed a load of bullshit. Verify the sources, and then verify the sources of the sources — hell, maybe they were lying, too! Lock your doors and windows, prepare all food yourself, X-ray your mail, verify email with phone calls, hire a private investigator to check out your wife, then hire another PI to investigate the first PI — maybe he’s sleeping with her.

You never know, right?

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Most common laptop OS problems

Any modern (released within the last 6 months) desktop GNU/Linux distribution will almost certainly mostly work. It will install, boot, and the majority of your devices will work without incident. But there are some hardware components that consistently cause trouble:

Modems — or more specifically, “winmodems.” Such devices often achieve much of their functionality from proprietary Windows-only drivers or other software. Good modems rely on hardware for everything. PCMCIA modems are more frequently supported in GNU/Linux than internal modems are, so if you really need a modem and the one built into your computer doesn’t work, you can buy a PCMCIA replacement for a reasonable price.
Wireless network cards. Before you buy a computer with onboard wireless networking, check the network chip against this list from the linux-wlan project. It’s a little out of date, but the information is still good. There are other projects to accommodate other wireless NICs, like Intel’s Centrino chips (the IPW2100 and IPW2200); and the madwifi project for Atheros-based cards. Some manufacturers of AMD-based laptop computers (and non-Centrino Intel laptops) use proprietary wireless LAN chips that are as-yet unsupported in the Linux kernel. One common workaround is to use the NDISwrapper to make Windows wireless network drivers work in GNU/Linux. If none of these solutions will work to your satisfaction, you can buy a Linux-compatible (using an Atheros or Prism 2/2.5/3 chip) wireless LAN PCMCIA card for around US $60-$80. Commercial GNU/Linux distributions are likely to have all of the above-mentioned wireless drivers and workarounds already installed — including NDISwrapper. Non-commercial distros will probably require more legwork on your part.
Video cards. Laptop video chips are always significantly different than their desktop counterparts, and driver development can occasionally fall behind. If you buy a top-end laptop computer with the latest ATI or Nvidia graphics processor, you may have to wait a while before you can have hardware 3D acceleration. If you want to check, ATI provides a compatibility list, but it can’t be directly linked to. To see it, click here, then click on Linux Display Drivers and Software, then Notebooks With ATI Graphics, then ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Drivers, then RELEASE NOTES, then ATI Mobility Product support. For Nvidia, click here, then click on the topmost driver — that’s always the most recent release — then click on Supported Products List in the box on the left.
Special keys. All of those fancy keys and buttons on your laptop computer that aren’t part of the standard keyboard set — things like a sleep or suspend button, multimedia controls, and Web and email buttons — might not work in GNU/Linux. Many people don’t use these extra buttons anyway, so this isn’t a big deal. Certainly if there is no support for the power-saving functions of your computer (see the next point for more information), the corresponding buttons will not work.
Power-saving, suspend, and sleep functions. I haven’t found a good way to figure out if a computer will support these functions in GNU/Linux without actually installing it. All of the ACPI resources I’ve found are light on details or out of date. Your best bet is to do a Google search for the laptop model you’re interested in and Linux. There’s also this site, which documents which distros have been tested with various laptop computers. Or go to some of the more popular GNU/Linux discussion forums and see if anyone else has experience with the machine you want to buy. Sometimes you just have to take a risk, and if ACPI ends up being a no-go, it will be supported eventually — very often in the next release of your distribution of choice.

What makes a good laptop OS?

If you’re really motivated, you can make just about any modern operating system work to some degree. It’s usually a good idea to go with an OS that you know isn’t going to give you trouble when you’re in the field or otherwise dependent on your notebook computer and don’t have the time to spend messing with problems.

Commercial desktop GNU/Linux distributions are always going to trump the free ones when it comes to automatic device detection, proprietary hardware drivers, and time spent installing and configuring everything. Aside from supporting the above-mentioned problematic hardware, it’s also nice to have some of the proprietary extras that most computer users are accustomed to.

You may not be able to use your desktop distribution on your laptop computer. I, for instance, use Gentoo and FreeBSD on my workstation, but have SUSE OSS 10.0 on my laptop at the moment. I like a challenging operating system, but when I’m on my laptop computer, I need to focus on work before the battery runs out. I also need to be able to find open wireless networks quickly, and SUSE’s NetApplet makes that happen. Aside from SUSE Linux, here are some excellent distributions that are generally laptop-friendly:

Mandriva Linux: Like SUSE, Mandriva has a NetApplet-like utility for finding and joining wireless networks. Mandriva PowerPack Edition comes with all of the software that you’ll need, has decent support for ACPI, video card, and proprietary wireless NIC hardware. Installs quickly, but requires large and frequent updates.

Linspire: This distro used to have a laptop edition, but apparently its laptop-specific functionality has been integrated into the main distro. Linspire also has a NetApplet-like utility for detecting and joining wireless networks. It installs quickly and seldom requires updates, but the software packages in its Click N Run database are sometimes several versions old. Speaking of CNR, you will have to pay an annual membership fee for it.

Xandros: It’s like Linspire, only the CNR-like application installer has far fewer programs than Linspire. Xandros seems to have superior wireless networking capabilities than the others.

Your favorite distro here: Every time I recommend distributions, people complain that I didn’t include theirs (hello Ubuntu trolls!). Like I said above, you can make just about anything work if you’re willing to sacrifice time and possibly functionality. But that’s not really why we have laptop computers, is it?

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

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March 10, 2006

How to move Windows fonts to Linux

Filed under: Archives, Linux News — @ 11:45 am

Fonts are often overlooked when switching or reinstalling operating systems, and when they’re gone, it’s a real hassle to try to get the right ones back again. You can spend hours or days trying to figure out where your favorite anti-aliased serif font came from and how to get it back onto your system, and for some people, not having Windows fonts in GNU/Linux is a dealbreaker. So here’s how to back up your fonts and install them into GNU/Linux. Read more at Software in Review or Discuss this article or get technical support on our forum..

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