by Rick Lehrbaum (Oct. 4, 2006) Linux Desktop

Like most companies, my employer has a stash of old, “obsolete” PCs and laptops that won’t run the latest versions of Windows worth a darn. Naturally, this represents a great source of systems for testing the latest Linux distributions.

I thought it would be interesting to find out which modern Linux distro made the best OS for a supposedly “obsolete” old laptop. With this in mind, I requisitioned an oldie but goodie: an IBM ThinkPad 2662-35U (pictured here), with a Pentium III 600MHz processor, 192MB of SDRAM, and a 20GB hard drive.

Next, I set about collecting as many suitable 1-CD Linux distros as possible. These included copies of the latest Xandros and Linspire that had been provided to me for evaluation, plus free web-downloads of the latest Freespire, Kubuntu, Mandriva One, PCLinuxOS, and SimplyMEPIS distros.

After that, I compiled a list of basic requirements. My plan was to do a quick run-through of each distro — not spend a week of tweaking and fine-tuning each one — so I needed a check-list that would allow me to rapidly narrow my search down to the one or two that are most likely to work well over the long haul.

Here’s my check-list:

* Installs and runs usably on the old ThinkPad
* Provides KDE window manager
* Customizable to suit my tastes
* Plays audio CDs
* Streams Real media (tested using npr.org hourly news)
* Installs/runs my old LinkSys Wireless-B PCMCIA card
* GUI tool for easy software download/install/update
* Timely and long-term OS/apps update scenario

As part of my tests of each distro, I planned to install the following apps (if they didn’t come preinstalled): Firefox 2, latest Thunderbird, RealPlayer 10, Acroread 7, K3b, Amarok, Xine, Kaffeine, KsCD, OO.o, Kate, Bluefish, Gimp, Opera, Konqueror, Gaim, Skype, Ksnapshot, and the Macromedia Flash Firefox plugin.

For my final step of preparation, I created a scorecard template that would help me quantify my findings:

Scorecard
Installation 0-5 points
Customizable 0-5 points
Hardware/multimedia support 0-5 points
Apps included/available 0-5 points
Total: 0-20 points

After preparing the check-list and scorecard, I set about installing each of the collected distros, one after another, to see what worked and what didn’t in each case.

My observations on each distro appear below (alphabetically arranged), along with the scorecards and a few screenshots of each. Some overall conclusions from this project appear at the end. Bear in mind that this data represents the results of a couple of hours spent on each, not days and days of tweaking and fine tuning.

Click on the screenshots here to see how each distro fared

Then you can read the conclusion here

On a personal note; I’ve been running Mepis for a few months now on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4300, my old lappie has slightly higher specs than Ricks’s Thinkpad, but still “obsolete” by most standards. I was reluctant to install Mepis 6, since I’d tried a much older version months back and it was painfully slow, especially when using KDE. To my surprise SimplyMEPIS 6 ran better than I could have hoped and KDE is very useable! Way to go Warren! Keep up the great work. ~LC

By ROBERT A. GUTH Wall Street Journal

The Linux operating system, having made inroads into corporations’ backroom server computers, is showing hints of inching into a much broader market: employees’ personal computers.

The much-hyped notion that Linux would be viable software to run desktop and notebook PCs seemed dead on arrival a few years ago. But the idea is showing some new vital signs.

Chief information officers have experienced the cost savings that Linux has brought to their server computers, which do narrow and repetitive tasks such as data storage and serving up Web sites. Now some CIOs are taking new interest in installing Linux on workers’ PCs as well, for certain narrow applications.

Auto maker PSA Peugeot Citroën last month said it will start using Linux on 20,000 of its workers’ PCs. Novell Inc., which sells a version of Linux and is supplying it to Peugeot, says it has recently signed up several large U.S. financial institutions that are installing Linux on some employee PCs. Sales of Linux PCs are showing a “really nice uptick” at Novell, says Ronald Hovsepian, chief executive of Novell.

New-Factory Test

Last year, an internal study of TRW Automotive Inc.’s PC strategy found that Linux “looked like it was something we would want to pursue from a cost perspective,” says TRW Chief Information Officer Joe Drouin. He says the auto-parts company may test Linux on PCs in Romania, Hungary or another country where it is building a factory.

First popularized in the late 1990s, Linux was touted initially by its boosters as a replacement for Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system and the Unix operating system. Like Windows and Unix, it runs the basic functions of a computer. In contrast to Microsoft’s highly profitable software, however, Linux grew from a project at the University of Helsinki and was placed on the Internet to be used free of charge. Several companies, including Novell Inc. and Red Hat Inc., refined it and built businesses offering customers support and other services related to Linux.

The allure of desktop Linux is the low entry cost: A typical license for Linux from Novell is $50 a year per PC versus the $299 Microsoft charges for Windows to businesses that don’t have a long-term contract with the software maker. (Contract customers, mostly large businesses, pay less than $299 for Windows; Microsoft charges $199 for an upgrade.)

Source: Wall Street Journal

bash ninja (iii)

In this bash ninja article, we’ll look at some more advanced commands, and how these can be used in day to day tasks on your linux box.

Redirection

Before we look at specific commands, there is a “technique” that you should know about that can be very useful when using the command line. Redirection is the technique of taking the output of one command and using it as the input for another command or action. This is part of the unix philosophy of taking small single purpose programmes and stringing them together in ways that are only limited by a users imagination. The main ways to link programs together is using the | symbol and the > symbol. The | is a pipe, and takes the output of one command, and feeds it to another. The > symbol redirects output to a file rather than to the screen. If you put two >>’s together, then the output of a command is appended to the end of the file. So, if you wanted to create a file with a directory listing in it, you can do:

ls -al > listfile

If you want to find a long command you recently typed, rather than having to try and remember it, you could search through your command history by piping the output of the history command through a parser called grep (see below for more on grep):

history | grep ‘keyword’

cat

cat is a strange command, because its real purpose is to join files together. However, it is also useful for just displaying the contents of a file. So to see what’s in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, type:

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

less

less is also used to display files, but in an interactive way. less displays all of the file that it can on the current screen, and then you use the up and down arrows to navigate through the file. To exit the screen, just press q. One cool thing I found out after a long time of using less, is that you can search a file while using less. You do this by pressing the / key, entering the string that you are searching for and pressing enter.

heads or tails

You can look at the top or bottom part of a file using the head (for the top) and tail (for the bottom). tail is very useful for looking at log files. For example, if you want to look what happened when you connected your ipod to the usb port, you would type:

sudo tail /var/log/messages

This will list the last 10 lines of the main log file. If you need to see more lines, you can specify this with:

sudo tail -n 50 /var/log/messages

Please note that the sudo is not necessary, it’s just that you generally need to be root to look at /var/log/messages. If you’re looking at the end of an ordinary file, you won’t need sudo.

Another cool thing tail will do is show you the last 10 lines of a file in real time, as it is updated. So if you want to see what happens when you plug in your ipod in real time, you just type:

sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

grep

grep is a very powerful regular expression tool for searching for text either in a file, or in output. grep allows you to use the power of regular expressions to find what you’re looking for. grep prints out all the lines of a file, or output that have the word or expression you are looking for. Providing a tutorial on regular expressions is beyond the scope of this article, but there is quite a good resource here. For simple tasks like seeing if you have direct rendering for 3d effects on your graphics card, you would type:

glxinfo | grep ‘direct’

To see what drivers X is using as part of your xorg.conf, you would type:

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep ‘Driver’

One final thing is that grep only prints out the lines that match. Sometimes you need some context as to where in a file a line appears, or what appears above and below the matching line. Say you wanted to see 5 lines before the match, and 10 lines after, you would type:

man mplayer | grep -B 5 -A 10 ‘xv’

ps

ps is a command which shows you all the processes running on your machine. To get a listing of all processes of all users type:

ps aux

This is most useful for finding the process ID of a running programme – usually, so you can kill it (see here to learn more about killing things).

top

If your cpu is running at 100%, and you don’t know what’s doing it, or you want to find out what application has eaten all your memory, you can find out using the top command. Just type top at the command line, and you’ll get a list of the top processes ordered by various crieria. This lists the processes by cpu usage by default, but by pressing shift+M, you can also list them based on memory usage. If you want to kill a process, you can press k and enter the pid number. To exit, press q

dmesg

dmesg is a programme that displays hardware message from the kernel. It is useful for seeing what’s happening with your hardware – particularly when you connect a new piece of hardware to your computer. You can use tools like less, tail and grep to help you navigate the output.

Source: everyday linux howtos

bash ninja (ii)

In the previous bash ninja article, I looked at getting around the bash shell fast. This article looks at very basic everyday useful commands on the command line. It is not a comprehensive exposition on all possible options for all possible commands, but simply a (hopefully) helpful list of practical commands for everyday tasks. For more advanced everyday bash commands, have a look at this article. These are commands that I use every day – and don’t make the mistake of assuming that anything on the command line is by definition harder than a gui method. There are many things that are in fact much easier and quicker on the command line. Doing the same thing to a large number of files is often much easier and quicker on the command line. Memorising a few commands that you use all the time means that often you don’t even need to think about them anymore, your fingers often just do it for you. So on with the show.

Globbing

We should start with some basics about globbing. Globbing is similar to the concept of a wildcard. Wildcards can be used to specify a number of files with similar name attributes, and perform a command on those files. You can use the following globbing symbols in the bash shell:

** – matches any number of any character;
? – matches a single character;
[abc] – matches a, b or c – or any one of a group of characters you put between square brackets;
[a-c] – matches all the letters between a and c inclusive (listed alphabeticaly);
{a*,[b-f]*,*test*} – matches any one of a list of globbed patterns.

For example:

matt@laptop:~/tmp$ ls vpn*
vpnclient-linux-4.6.00.0045-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.6.03.0190-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.7.00.0640-k9.tar.gz

matt@laptop:~/tmp$ ls [t-z]pn*
vpnclient-linux-4.6.00.0045-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.6.03.0190-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.7.00.0640-k9.tar.gz

matt@laptop:~/tmp$ ls v?n*
vpnclient-linux-4.6.00.0045-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-4.8.00.0490-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.6.03.0190-k9.tar.gz
vpnclient-linux-x86_64-4.7.00.0640-k9.tar.gz

Listing Files

To list files, use the ls command. There are a number of arguments you can add different arguments to get different listings:

ls

Will list all files and directories, and the contents of any subdirectory in the current directory, but excludes any hidden files (ie files whose filenames begin with a ‘.’. Remove the *, and you’ll just get a list of files and directories without also listing the contents of subdirectories.

ls -l

Will give you a list of all files, including their attributes, like permissions and size etc.

ls -a

Will give you a list of all files, including hidden . files.

Changing Directories

To change to another directory using an absolute path:

cd /home/user/path/to/directory

To change to another directory relative to the current directory you are in:

cd path/to/file/directory

Notice how the first path to the directory starts with a /. The absolute path starts from the root of the file system, which is /. If you leave out the starting /, the path starts from the current directory.

Don’t forget about dots. Dots are used to identify either the current directory, or the next directory up the directory tree. So if you want to specify the current directory, you use a single dot. If you want to go up a directory, you use two dots. So to change to the directory two above the current one:

cd ../../

To change to a different directory which is two above the current one:

cd ../../otherdirectory/

Copying a File or Directory

The command to copy a file(s) or directory(s) is cp. To copy a file:

cp file1 new/location/

or:

cp file1 new/location/newname

This second example shows that you can copy a file, and change its name in the rpocess. This means that you can duplicate a file in the same directory. To copy a directory and all its contents and subdirectories:

cp -R directory1/ new/location/

Again, you can duplicate a directory by copying it to a location with a new name.

Moving a File or Directory

To move a file to another directory, use the mv command. This is used in exactly the same way as the cp command. However, you do not need the -R argument. The mv command can also be used to change a file name. Just:

mv filename1 filename2

Another excellent CLI howto
from: everyday linux howtos

One of the best ways you can participate in the free and open source software (FOSS) revolution is by helping to test software and reporting bugs and issues to project developers to help them improve their code. Even in the wild and woolly, sometimes undisciplined approach to development that we see in FOSS projects, there are ways to test more effectively. Here are more than a dozen tips suggested by testing gurus and developers that can help you become a successful tester.

When I first began programming in the 1960s, testing was done to prove that code worked. The first big change to that approach came with IBM’s Black Team, which took the opposite tack and tried to break the code — an approach that was radical at the time. In the next popular phase, the color of testing changed, and white box testing, in which you know what a program is supposed to do and check that it does it, was all the vogue.

Those approaches come from the world of closed source, proprietary software. Testing in the FOSS world is different. For one thing, bug reports can come from anywhere, not just from a team assigned to test the product. The transparency of the code invites everyone to explore.

Former Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr advises, “If you want to test something, run the latest version. This may sound obvious but apparently it’s not. If you run Debian, upgrade to unstable and maybe pull in some packages from experimental. For other software, try the latest version from the project’s version control system and see what breakage you can find.

Source: By: Joe Barr linux.com

Create and manage large documents in OpenOffice.org

All hail the lazy, for they will find the most efficient way to work a computer in general, and a word processor in particular. In this article, I’ll look at three lazy writer’s tricks that can relieve you of most of the drudgery involved in creating a fairly large document in OpenOffice.org Writer (henceforth, OOo Writer or simply Writer).

Make the computer do most of the work

A word processor such as Writer is “bloated” for a reason — it has features that save you a whole lot of work. Of course, masochists or uber-workaholics might hate these features, but the lazy user can’t imagine life without them.

These are the three things I’ll show you how to do:

* create a title page,
* create a table of contents,
* and change the page numbering styles

…the lazy way, of course.

Source: By Daniel Escasa www.freesoftwaremagazine.com

Ever since Dell launched its IdeaStorm Web site earlier this year, the company has been inundated with customers — and potential customers — clamoring for Dell to offer Linux preinstalled on desktop and laptop PCs. In February, Dell said it would certify Novell’s Suse Linux on business desktop and laptop PCs, but stopped short of saying it would offer Linux on consumer-oriented PCs. All that has changed: Dell is putting consumer Linux back on the table.

I was even contacted by a Dell rep here to thank me for the link to the survey and to tell me that yes all the survey’s are being read and yes other distro’s will be available when the home computers are released, Baldy.

Source: Dell Invites Customers to Pick Favorite Linux Flavors

PDFedit is not the first tool for editing PDF files on the GNU/Linux desktop, but it does have a strong claim to being the first truly practical one. Although only at version 0.2.5, PDFedit is already a practical solution for manipulating pages and…

 

Technorati tags: Linux, Software

Source: PDFedit fills hole in the desktop