January 2007 - KCLUG

WOSWJU
by James R. Sissel 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

Interesting, how to start a long running, controversial subject. I want to try this. So I ask: "What OS would Jesus use?"

5 4

FW: Your Daily Dilbert
by Jeremy Fowler 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

1 0

Re: from the libertarian newspaper
by Jared 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

>> I have been a socialist. I have been a libertarian. I have >> been an anarchist. And not just from the armchair. I have been >> arrested as an anarchist protesting the government. > > I think a funny scene in a political comedy -- sort of like the scene in > Woody Allen's Zelig where Zelig tries to play cello in a marching band -- > would be someone bringing an armchair with them to a rally or protest > event, getting arrested along with their armchair, seeing the character > in a jail cell with his armchair with him. That would be funny, > would it not? Yes, and a powerful parable as well. Perhaps he could receive a more severe sentence than the flag burners. And in other news, > The master shook his head, and said "No shoes will let me outrun a lion. > Fortunately, I don't need to do that. I only have to run faster than the > slowest of my companions." With this, the students were enlightened. Some teachers give the running shoes to the slowest student, and provide a whole nuther kind of enlightenment. And now for something completly on topic: >> Linux *is* centralized, in a hiearchy even. Anti-"IP" is not >> anti-property, but rather anti-usury. Socialism is by definition >> statist. > > I was with you on your comments (and strangely even agreed with them) > until I got to "anti-usury." I am against "intellectual property" as > defined by software patents, but I can't make the connection to usury. Usury. The well-known "Microsoft Tax." Made sense to me. -Jared

10 34

RE: Political Blather
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

Don't flip-flop on this subject. You wanted a dead easy system for people you know that are computer illiterate, that they couldn't possibly screw-up, that wouldn't get infected, that wouldn't leave personal info on the system. I gave that to you. DSL or KioskCD. If you start trying to make a thinclient system you run into a real big problem, a server. You need something to host the OS image and apps they use. This requires a separate box, just so some people can surf. This only makes sense if you have a setup with multiple stations for surfing. Say in a library, school, business, shopping mall or if you have a passel of kids like hald and you want several similar, low requirement PCs so each may have their own. And it requires someone that knows how to setup and maintain the setup. If a person has broadband and ONE PC, you need something that will just boot and go. If you have 2 or more, you need either a firewall appliance, router, wifi/switch/router, gateway PC, whatever. One of the good points about a KisokCD if you have one PC is that you don't have to worry about viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, zombies, anything like that. Set your kid loose for his allotted hour after booting to the KioskCD and then reboot the PC without it when he is done. If your friend or whatever graduates from just web browsing or wants a more capable, yet still simple, low requirement system, you can give him a full DSL distro. What is the big deal? If you still want to go the thinclient route, look at http://www.thinstation.org/ You can build your own CD from that and it is as small as you will likely get. You can even use ThinStation-O-Matic to customize it. http://struktur.kemi.dtu.dk/thinstation/TSoM/ Just be careful on the page where it allows you to load a build image. If you just went thru and made all kinds of changes, you don't want to hit the "load" button. It makes changes to the selections to match the example build files or your custom build file you created before. This TSoM looks a lot like what we were talking about in IRC the other day for an online custom ISO build setup. >-----Original Message----- >From: Oren Beck >Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 12:14 PM > >On 1/23/07, David Nicol wrote: >> On 1/23/07, Oren Beck wrote: >> > Ok- When I mentioned usability - it meant to appliance operators. >> >> Hmm. network drivers plus X plus lwm and instead of giving any kind >> of log-in the system just starts Firefox? AJAX >drag-and-drop kinds of things live inside the web browser (the ghost of a fifteen year old >> issue of "InfoMoment" screams "you mean the thin client?") instead of in the >> window manager, so they aren't a problem. >> >> Let the appliance operators use the Google document editors if they >> must have productivity software. >The summary of your comments to my understanding is calling >for a "thin client". >Ok- let-s work with this a bit- how thin can we go? > >What of a floppy based or CD based distro that has the minimal >hardware detect to bring up a net session, then by default >bring up a browser with any advanced config done thru web >interfaces. That is, if the target users for this proposal >even would do so. >The kiosk mode locking is indeed a Very Good Thing for public >users or the skill lacking relatives we support. Then again- >an intermediate level of "are you sure?" >guarded settings may cover the exceptions.

1 0

RE: DSL minimized was Re: Political Blather
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

Ask and ye shall receive. There is an nxclient that is pkged for DSL, but it is older, from 2005. You could drop it in a /mydsl directory on a customized DSL disk and it would load at boot. You can also do VNC at boot, see the wiki. You might have to alter the .xinitrc file. If you got ambitious, you could create an updated pkg of NXClient. http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Category:MyDSL http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions# How_can_I_have_a_VNC_server_start_automatically_at_boot.3F >-----Original Message----- >From: Luke -Jr >Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 2:24 PM > >On Wednesday 24 January 2007 14:01, Jared wrote: >> > Eh... if DSL is so small, why does it need to be compressed to fit >> > on a CD? >> >> Because the CD fits in your wallet. It's a 50MB business-card CD. > >Ah, makes sense. ;) >But would would be cooler is a wallet-CD uncompressed that >just boots to a NX terminal or recovery cmd prompt...

1 0

Where is it written? (Actually GPL)
by David Nicol 24 Jan '07

24 Jan '07

On 1/24/07, Luke -Jr <luke(a)dashjr.org> wrote: > incompatibly licensed .o blob, the GPL forbids its distribution. the GPL doesn't forbid anything. The GPL permits. The GPL permits this, and permits that. Where does GPL forbid. Chapter, verse, and quotation.

2 1

Re: DSL minimized was Re: Political Blather
by Jared 24 Jan '07

24 Jan '07

> Eh... if DSL is so small, why does it need to be compressed to fit on a CD? Because the CD fits in your wallet. It's a 50MB business-card CD. Spend a few minutes on the DSL site. It's very cool, even if they left out ethereal... :) http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/usb.html -Jared

3 2

Political Blather
by Jonathan Hutchins 24 Jan '07

24 Jan '07

A Snow Penguin is off topic, but this intense exposure of sociological ignorance isn't? Windows sells because Windows works. Most of the time, for most people, who need it specifically for one thing or another. Linux can be made to work better if a) you're very lucky or b) you are or have access to a Linux guru. My dad tried Linux - I think it was a Knoppix disk I sent him - and he couldn't get his printer to work. That's a deal killer - and probably a permanent loss of a potential user. Not everybody would have an easier time using a Linux computer, even one running Gnome. There's a reason there isn't a "College of Conservative Arts".

8 28

DSL minimized was Re: Political Blather
by Jon Pruente 24 Jan '07

24 Jan '07

On 1/23/07, Jon Pruente <jdpruente(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I can appreciate > using very low-end machines for certain tasks, as I've got a pair of > old Toshiba laptops that just can't take any more than 48MB RAM total. > i've run DSL on those before. > > Jon. > I just spent the better part of the night being my usual insomniac tinkerer. I played with DSL and various limitation configs on my machine. Mostly I was trying to see what RAM limits are effective for using Firefox on DSL. I'd let it boot, kill off Dillo and start FF. Then try to read the BBC headline stories from the RSS feed button in the FF toolbar. boot: lowram dma noswap mem=64M Ok performance, ok browsing. Useful even. It's nice to know that a cheap system and a bit of RAM, and no HDD, can mean a decent surfing box with a modern browser. boot: lowram dma noswap mem=48M desktop=jwm Slower than previous, but still functional. boot: lowram dma noswap mem=40M desktop=jwm Slow, not truely useable, but passable in a pinch with time on hand. boot: lowram dma mem=40M desktop=jwm Better than noswap, and performs somewhere around the 48M/noswap, but not nearly as good as 64M/noswap. boot: lowram dma mem=32M desktop=jwm Slower than 40M noswap, but even Dillo ran slow. Dillo acted like FF on 40M noswap. All of these were booted from the LiveCD of DSL 3.2. I feel confident that if installed to HDD it would perform much better, as it wouldn't have to constantly deal with a compressed filesystem in low RAM. With low RAM there isn't much buffer space, so it must keep reading/decompressing/flushing the same stuff over and over to get something done. An uncompressed system would be able to read as needed right off the drive and would save quite a few cycles and some RAM space. Swap certainly helps when diving under 48MB. Of course, if the RAM is available, running boot: dsl toram gives a very fast and responsive system. I've even run BeatrIX and BeaFanatIX with toram, and they run great.With a decent CD-ROM and a smaller distro, it boots in a decent time. Jon.

4 3

RE: Political Blather
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 23 Jan '07

23 Jan '07

If you don't need Java or Flash, you could fairly easily remaster KioskCD to use some other smaller browser, like links or dillo. >-----Original Message----- >From: Luke -Jr >Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2007 12:37 PM > >On Tuesday 23 January 2007 12:08, David Nicol wrote: >> Hmm. network drivers plus X plus lwm and instead of giving any kind >> of log-in the system just starts Firefox? > >Ugh, what happened to the LOW-END requirement? Firefox eats >memory and CPU.

1 0