Friday, August 28, 2009

Life in Linuxville

Linuxville is a lot like "The Village" in the old TV show "The Prisoner", a lot of old school characters that have settled in and new detainees who have yet to learn why they are here. You keep saying "I am not a penguin". Relax, we are not stranded on an iceberg, that's the air conditioning on high......and there are more than one kind of penguin! Besides, you look good in black and white, fish is healthy (omega3) and the guy in the Batman comics is not one of us.

Day to day life here is intoxicating, there is so much to explore and Linux makes this possible through the Live-CD and bootable jump drives. It is hard to resist changing your whole computer install. There is always a more interesting distro, with features other distros don't have. You will find yourself wondering how to get that feature in your distro of choice. I'm not trying to stir up the wonderlust for distro-hopping. But if you are prone, it is good to be prepaired.

Dual disk drives, USB drives, jump drives all help if you want to make switching distros permanent. Most just want to look and see (live-CDs are so cool!). If you are prone to change, put your data files on a separate drive.

In a dusty corner of my hobble I have some old laptops I wanted to put a skinny Linux on. You know tiny hard drives and meager RAM, Win 95 units. I fished around through various Linux distros, two seemed to work, Feather Linux and Dynebolic 1.4.1 (older version).

I also found a lean-n-mean Ubuntu based distro, a rather surprising find someone mentioned, "Crunchbang Linux". It uses Openbox for the GUI, so it is so uncluttered with gadgets it's unencumbered, fast. Like Yoda says, "just do, there is no try!", quite snappy. The black theme is black but not sinister, or evil as some think black is. If black is evil then the current trend for black packaged computer cases is taking us all to heck. I know with Ubuntu the brown themes are hard to swallow for some. White can be evil, if you think that. It is said that dark themes are more energy conserving that light ones on a monitor. Now blue as in BSOD (blue screen of death) is evil!?! Black is very clean, crisp, modern and can be changed, if you don't do black. There is a on-screen list of keyboard shortcuts on the Crunchbang desktop which is pure genius. Learning keyboard shortcuts takes constant reminding to get the habit down. All GUIs might benefit from a pop up app that does this. Hit the Win/Lin key, the shortcut pop up pops up and you never grab your mouse. Oh, the end of the mouse as we know it is near.

I have often ranted about the demise of the ATX case desktop in favor of a laptop without the screen. I have one of the older laptops and the screen is busted, so I took it off, plugged my extra monitor in the back. It looks good, just a tad bigger than my desktop keyboard because it is a laptop, but it is the whole computer. It slides where the keyboard goes and I don't have to reach under the desk to use the CD or USB ports. Gamers like their ATX but general users might appreciate a desktop that is no different from a laptop. Laptop makers might consider making the clam shell screen optional. With the clam shell LCD it's a laptop, without it's a compact desktop. I like this concept, it helps also to extend the life of laptops.

The wierd thing about computer life extension is that older RAM memory is more expensive than new RAM memory. Buying memory upgrades for an older computer is more expensive. It's not like they have to scrounge to find the older memory sticks. They are making you pay a premium price to upgrade your existing computer as an incentive to buy a whole new computer. But they don't give you a discount on the new computer for recycling the old computer. If you just curb it or closet it and it still works, you or somebody will want to upgrade it to use it. It's a conspiracy, they are trying to ram the RAM down our throats!?!

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