Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

You can determine that from the Addons listing. I suspect it's EPUBReader

Thanks Dennis. Yep the reader is EPUBReader. Lucifox sounds demonic.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I have Sigil here, and recommend it. Development has largely stopped, but what is there works. The Sigil foilks are pointing at Calibre now because Kovid is adding eBook editing features comparable to what Calibre does.


That's been discussed elsewhere, and isn't true. People have successfully created Mobi files in Calibre and uploaded to Amazon. Probably safest to use the Kindlegen app, but you can use Calibre.

Yeah, I'll probably use Calibre's epub editor some day (when Sigil starts wigging). But for now I'm still a true-blue Sigil guy--I trust it.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Ubuntu also has gksudo, which does similar things from the GUI. If you try to do something that requires admin rights, it pops up the box asking for your password and gives you the required elevated permissions for the operation.

There's a flavor of Linux called Puppy Linux where you always run as root. Indeed, the ability to create and use non-root IDs has been removed.

It gets away with it because Puppy is explicitly a single-user system, intended for lower end hardware, and if you break something, you only shoot yourself in the foot. (And Puppy's design makes it relatively easy to recover if you do shoot yourself in the foot.) Having been an admin an machines that migh have a hundred or more users logged on and active at a time, the idea of always running as root gives me hives. I changed Ubuntu here to allow me to log on as root, but seldom do so. Easy enough to sudo when I need to, and I prefer to run as a normal user otherwise.
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Dennis

Puppy. Love the name. Yeah, sudo works for me. And I'm finding more and more I don't really have much to do on the command line anyway.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Specifically, with regard to calibre and uploading to Amazon the problem is using calibre to convert a book to dual mobi -- old mobi works fine, but the presence of new mobi (Kf8) will cause them to reject the book.

Creating an EPUB wih calibre and using kindlegen or directly uploading the EPUB is not a problem according to what I've heard.

Thanks eschwartz. That clarifies things. And it's certainly easy enough to use Kindlegen in the command line the way you showed me. (I'm still a little nervous about using Calibre to make the epub though. Doesn't Calibre have the sizing stuff? Input and output? For a 6" reader? kind of stuff? Sigil just gets you the epub. Simple.)

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks Dennis. Yep the reader is EPUBReader. Lucifox sounds demonic.
Yeah, I'll probably use Calibre's epub editor some day (when Sigil starts wigging). But for now I'm still a true-blue Sigil guy--I trust it.

I do too, and have/use it here. What's there works. There simply isn't likely to be anything further added. Like I said, development has largely ceased.

Puppy. Love the name.

The mascot is a Chihuahua the guy who started the distro used to own.

It's intended for lower end hardware. One poster in the Puppy forums described how he got a Puppy instance up as a dedicated media server on an ancient Toshiba laptop with a whopping 16MB of RAM. (He had to delete everything that could be deleted and still have a running system, and actually build the Puppy image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive to the Toshiba to run it.)

You can do things like run it from a thumb drive if your machine can boot from USB.

It has too many quirks for me to run it as a production OS, but it has a number of devoted users.

Yeah, sudo works for me. And I'm finding more and more I don't really have much to do on the command line anyway.

The command line can be the fastest and most efficient way to do things.

But generally, you don't need to run as root. You generally need administrative rights for specific operations and can use sudo to get them.
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Dennis

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The mascot is a Chihuahua the guy who started the distro used to own.

It's intended for lower end hardware. One poster in the Puppy forums described how he got a Puppy instance up as a dedicated media server on an ancient Toshiba laptop with a whopping 16MB of RAM. (He had to delete everything that could be deleted and still have a running system, and actually build the Puppy image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive to the Toshiba to run it.)

You can do things like run it from a thumb drive if your machine can boot from USB.

It has too many quirks for me to run it as a production OS, but it has a number of devoted users.

I wish someone would bring Damn Small Linux into the modern age... I loved that little thing, but it won't run on any of my machines.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I wish someone would bring Damn Small Linux into the modern age... I loved that little thing, but it won't run on any of my machines.

The last I knew, DSL had sort of hit a wall. A key part of "small" was the the distribution ISO would not be larger than 50MB. It reached a point where nothing more could be added without bumping over the limit.

You might want to look at Tiny Core Linux, which has the same sort of model as DSL and Puppy: a Linux kernel and Busybox to provide the expected utilities, then add from there. See http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/

IIRC, it's more modular than DSL: you start with the base system, then add what you want from their repo.

One issue with lower end hardware is apps. I have Puppy multibooting on a Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 notebook. It was a pass along from a friend, who had upgraded to a more powerful machine, but wanted the Lifebook to go to a new home, and not just get thrown out.

The Lifebook came with an 867mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU, a 30GB IDE HD, and a whopping 256MB RAM, of which the Crusoe CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came from the friend with WinXP SP2, and was frozen snail slow. It took 8 minutes just to boot to XP, and longer than that to actually do anything. (XP wants 512MB RAM to even think about performing.)

I swapped the 30GB HD for a 40 from the SO's dead laptop, reformated and repartitioned, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu, Puppy, and FreeDOS in a multiboot configuration. Win2K actually runs more or less acceptably in 240MB RAM. Puppy was straightforward. I tried Xubuntu, but it was slow, so I installed from the Minimal CD to get a working command line installation, then used apt-get to install Lxde and selected apps. It's not speedy, but does run. FreeDOS flies. :-)

Puppy's distro includes basic apps chosen for small size, so Puppy and it's bundled apps perform fairly well. Beyond that, things change fast. The big issue for me is the HD is IDE4, with low transfer rates. That's a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive isn't an option. I have Puppy and Ubuntu installed on ext4 file systems to take advantage of extents, which provides about 25% better throughput than other options, and each mounts the other's slice, so I can access files in the Linux distros form either OS. I found an open source Windows droiver that lets 2K read/write the ext4 filesystems. FreeDOS can only see its own FAT32 partition, but I don't care.

Slow HD speeds bite in Windows and Linux. Small apps load and run quickly. Big ones are another matter. For instance, I use Firefox as my production browser, but I don't even try to run a current version under Linux on the p2110. It takes 45 seconds to load, and is perceptibly slow once up.

The p2110 was mostly an experiment to see what sort of performance I could wring out of low end HW without spending money. I had low expectations going in and wasn't disappointed by the results.
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Dennis

[eschwartz]

I am currently trying to do something useful with an old laptop of my mother's. It's the Dell Inspiron B130, WinXP, 40 GB HDD, Intel Celeron M 420 processor, and has 256 MB RAM also... I just ordered a RAM upgrade to 2x1 GB so when I get it hopefully I can get something to actually run...

Looking around for a replacement HDD, it's been suggested on various places the hardware can't handle larger than 120 GB. But I can go all the way to EIDE. W00t!!

I was thinking of installing Arch Linux, because it sounds fun

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I am currently trying to do something useful with an old laptop of my mother's. It's the Dell Inspiron B130, WinXP, 40 GB HDD, Intel Celeron M 420 processor, and has 256 MB RAM also... I just ordered a RAM upgrade to 2x1 GB so when I get it hopefully I can get something to actually run...

2GB RAM will provide a very nice performance boost for XP.

XP, like other moderns OSes, is a virtual memory system. The total memory for the system will be the amount of installed RAM, plus the swap file.

XP divides RAM into 4K pages. When you do something that wants RAM, and there isn't enough free RAM to fulfill the request, XP swaps pages not recently used to the swap file to free enough for what you need. If something tries to access a page that is swapped out, a page fault occurs, and the page(s) affected are swapped back into RAM.

PCs are I/O bound, not compute bound. The system is usually in a wait state, waiting for things to be read from/written to disk, and as a wag once said, "all machines wait at the same speed."

RAM is an order of magnitude faster than disk, so one thing current systems do is cache disk requests. Generally, what is desired is already in the cache, and can be read from there rather than being fetched from disk.

Adding more RAM means the system can do a better job of caching, and be less likely to need to swap. Adding more RAM is the first thing I recommend to improve performance on an existing system. A faster processor won't normally help that much, because the bottleneck is usually I/O.

Linux systems behave the same way, though the details differ, and the same considerations apply. A 2GB RAM system should provide a very nice Linux platform.

(My p2110 can be expanded to 384MB with a daughter card, but that's it. And while I can still get the 128 MB daughter card, it costs more multiple gigabytes of RAM for a more modern system. No thanks. Not worth it.)

Looking around for a replacement HDD, it's been suggested on various places the hardware can't handle larger than 120 GB. But I can go all the way to EIDE. W00t!!

The 120 GB barrier is likely a BIOS limitation. ISTR hearing about that elsewhere. What you might look at is an SSD drive.

I was thinking of installing Arch Linux, because it sounds fun

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Dennis

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I am currently trying to do something useful with an old laptop of my mother's. It's the Dell Inspiron B130, WinXP, 40 GB HDD, Intel Celeron M 420 processor, and has 256 MB RAM also... I just ordered a RAM upgrade to 2x1 GB so when I get it hopefully I can get something to actually run...

Looking around for a replacement HDD, it's been suggested on various places the hardware can't handle larger than 120 GB. But I can go all the way to EIDE. W00t!!

I was thinking of installing Arch Linux, because it sounds fun

Have a look at MX-14.

It should run well on that system, especially with that much RAM. It has a Debian base with the XFCE desktop. It's a hybrid of Mepis and antiX. (antiX itself should run on the 256MB of RAM.)

[eschwartz]

@DMcCunney,

In fact I believe it was BIOS limitations I was thinking of.

Hmm, I wonder if I could upgrade the BIOS somehow...
I don't know anything about them, though. Do you?

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

@DMcCunney,

In fact I believe it was BIOS limitations I was thinking of.

Hmm, I wonder if I could upgrade the BIOS somehow...
I don't know anything about them, though. Do you?

Google says the latest BIOS for the Dell is ME051A10.EXE, dating from April 2007. According to Dell:

Issues Fixed:
=============
1. Fix sometimes intermittent pops or stutters while playing music.

If the machine won't take a drive bigger than 120GB, I think you're stuck with it.

The question is how big an HD you actually need. If 120GB is the biggest the machine will take, that's more than adequate for a working Linux system. The biggest disk hogs will be user data, especially if you have any quantity of photos, video, or music. For that, I'd use an external HD.

As mentioned, I'd look at an SSD as an HD replacement.

The BIOS isn't upgradeable on my p2110, so I'm saddled with IDE4, and even if I was willing to spend the money, the interface would limit performance.

On my homebuilt desktop, I was triple-booting Win2K, WinXP, and Ubuntu. It's a mid-tower case, and I had multiple drives installed, courtesy of addon cards that provided additional IDE slots. (At one point years back, I had 10 HDs in the box.)

I ran into a interesting quirk. The motherboard I used for a bit had a documented limit of four IDE devices, and because of the addon IDE extender, I had more. When I booted the machine, all was well for a while, but drives had a tendency to disappear from the system while it was running. I had that happen while I was in Ubuntu. The drive Ubuntu lived on disappeared. Ubuntu was running entirely in RAM, and I didn't even realize it had happened until updates being downloaded from Canonical were failing to apply because the file system they needed to be written to was not there.

I could only imagine what might have happened had I been in Windows and the Windows drive dropped out...

The desktop has 4GB RAM. For technical reasons, 32 bit Windows can't see/use more than 3.2GB of it. I found a freeware driver that could see the rest of the RAM and allocate it as a ramdisk, so I had a 768MB ramdisk seen as drive Z. Since I spend most time in my browser, I had Firefox set to run from the ramdisk. Scripts copied Firefox and the profile I used to the ramdisk on boot, and saved changes back to the HD on shutdown. Sped things up a treat.

Ubuntu could see/use the whole 4GB.
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Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I do too, and have/use it here. What's there works. There simply isn't likely to be anything further added. Like I said, development has largely ceased.

Isn't it possible that somebody will pick up the reins at some point?

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The mascot is a Chihuahua the guy who started the distro used to own.

It's intended for lower end hardware. One poster in the Puppy forums described how he got a Puppy instance up as a dedicated media server on an ancient Toshiba laptop with a whopping 16MB of RAM. (He had to delete everything that could be deleted and still have a running system, and actually build the Puppy image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive to the Toshiba to run it.)

You can do things like run it from a thumb drive if your machine can boot from USB.

It has too many quirks for me to run it as a production OS, but it has a number of devoted users.

______

Now I have Xubuntu on a laptop (Dell 125MB RAM) that is really slow, even when directly hooked up to an ethernet cable. I also compose on this laptop on LibreOffice and once it warms up the LO is pretty responsive. I don't really need the laptop for anything but composing but would getting Puppy or something like that speed things up for me?

[Gregg Bell]

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yM24sPbdURQ

[eschwartz]

What would probably help is doing what I did -- buying a $20 upgrade to 2 GB RAM.

Check on http://Crucial.com to see what kind of upgrades are compatible with your system, then price shop for it on Newegg, Amazon, Ebay, etc.

Memory is pretty cheap, and also the best way to give a computer a speed boost.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Isn't it possible that somebody will pick up the reins at some point?

Possible, but unlikely. They were looking for donations to help fund development and more folks to get involved in development, and neither was forthcoming. (Sigil was a masters thesis in Computer Science project for the original author. It impressed Google enough that they hired him, so his time to do much more on it is limited.)

Now I have Xubuntu on a laptop (Dell 125MB RAM) that is really slow, even when directly hooked up to an ethernet cable. I also compose on this laptop on LibreOffice and once it warms up the LO is pretty responsive. I don't really need the laptop for anything but composing but would getting Puppy or something like that speed things up for me?

Probably not enough to matter. Linux likes RAM, and you need more. There are distros like Puppy and Tiny Core that will run in 125MB RAM, but that's for suitable values of "run"

My p2110 is an example. It has 256MB RAM, but the CPU grabs 16MB off the top. Puppy itself runs pretty well, but apps of any size are another matter. Things like LO take a long time to load and aren't the quickest things in creation once up.

The problem is that there isn't enough RAM to hold everything, so the system has to do a lot of swapping to the swap partition. That's slow. You have Linux itself and the disk cache it maintains occupying RAM before you even start to load programs and do work. (And the p2110 has a relatively slow IDE4 HD which is a BIOS limitation, and that makes it worse.) The biggest thing you can do is minimize disk access.

You didn't say anything else about the system other than low RAM, so it's hard to give advice, but the first thing I'd do is give it more RAM. 512MB would be nice. More would be better. (How much it can take will depend on exactly what make/model it is.) Crucial.com and memoryx.com are where I would look to get more RAM. They probably have memory that will work in your machine. The issue will be cost. For instance, I can still get a 128MB daughtercard to take my p2110 to 384MB, but it costs too much to be worth doing. Memory for older systems is a lot more expensive per MB than for newer ones.

I tried Xubuntu on the p2110, and it was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums suggested that too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and that Canonical had a steadily increasing idea of what "low end" was. They suggested what I did - get and install from the Minimal CD, which gave me a working command line environment (including networking, which can be a major PITA to get working.) I could then use apt-get to install what I needed. I installed Lxde, which is about the lightest weight GUI, and that brought Xorg, the X-Windows framework with it.) From there I could pick and choose other things. The result was not a speed demon, but was usable.

See what a RAM upgrade would cost, and decide what's it's worth to you.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

What would probbly help is doing what I did -- buying a $20 upgrade to 2 GB RAM.

If his machine is as old as I suspect, a RAM upgrade is likely to cost a chunk more than $20.

Check on http://Crucial.com to see what kind of upgrades are compatible with your system, then price shop or it on Newegg, Amazon, Ebay, etc.

Between Crucial and Memoryx, I'd be a bit surprised if Newegg and the like were significantly cheaper.

Memory is pretty cheap, and also the best way to give a computer a speed boost.

It's the first thing I recommend.

The issue is whether it's really cheap. Current memory is very cheap. Memory for older systems gets expensive enough that it starts to be questionable about whether it's worth it.
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Dennis