Josh Saddler

Alternative distros

In the last few weeks I've tried Arch Linux, Zenwalk, and Myah OS.

Arch is mostly the same ol' Arch it always is -- I used to dual-boot it with Gentoo on my old laptop, but I won't be moving to it at any point. It used to be hell on wheels for installed boot times, but now it's slower than many liveCDs. And like Gentoo, it takes a lot of initial configuration. Too much, I discovered. I don't really mind setting up things by hand, but the tools to do so need to be easy to use. Whether this means graphical applications or command-line tools (such as rc-update, which is one of the best selling points of Gentoo), they need to make system configuration quick and straightforward. Arch doesn't have much in this regard. Also, several packages that I consider essential to the light desktop I'll be building are only available as source packages. Binaries only, please. If I'm going to be spending at least as much time configuring and installing stuff on Arch as Gentoo, I may as well just install Gentoo.

Zenwalk's 5.2 release shows much more promise than the last version I tried. Except for the small problem where wireless networking won't work, that is. And I ended up not being able to finish installation or get a bootable desktop. The installation process heated up the CD drive to the point where the media started to become unreadable; packages on the CD would fail their checksums. When the machine was cool, there were no such issues. My laptop almost overheated to the point of shutdown. Once I finally got it to install several tries later, it couldn't boot -- the Lilo screen came up (ugh, Lilo) and tried to boot into Zenwalk, but then the computer reset itself. Repeat ad infinitum. Scratch Zenwalk.

Myah OS is a fairly promising new distribution that offers a "Box" edition built on LXDE, which looked to be perfect for my needs. Unfortunately, it comes with compiz by default and no real support for my GeForce 2 Go graphics chip; Myah includes only the unaccelerated "nv" driver, which is a real POS. So it sticks a heavyweight window manager into an otherwise decent desktop environment. Way to go. Fortunately, openbox is an option, and a few other window managers and desktop environments are available once you have an installed system.

Package selection in the installed environment was quite decent; lots of good, fast apps. LXDE (as configured by Myah) isn't the speediest desktop I've ever used, but it was acceptable. Unfortunately, wireless networking simply will not work. I couldn't figure out if this was because of the stone-age initsystem (and an equally antiquated config layout), or if it was the fault of ath5k. I've never used a kernel with ath5k before now; Myah ships with 2.6.25.2. Up till now I've just used madwifi, which works well. Whatever the cause, I could never get my card to initialize, much less see networks.

Package management is also a cast-iron bitch; the thing uses a weird mix of xterm output and a gtk frontend. The frontend fires up an xterm window with output in the background, but they're both slow as molasses. The frontend is extremely difficult to navigate; you first have to choose whether you want to add, remove, or update packages, then proceed through category menus and select individual packages. Stepping forward or backward through each window is a laborious process, forcing multiminute waits as the installer does whatever the hell it's doing. It's like it's fetching package information via the internet at each screen, and then executing a hell of a lot of code at each stage. Really, I've no idea what was going on under the hood. I just knew that it was a profoundly dissatisfying experience. Scratch Myah -- but I'll look in on this project in the future. It could be going places.

What's next? Well, I downloaded Xubuntu 8.04, so now I'll try a distro that's known for having "easy" configuration and management. Sure, I'll be getting an Xfce desktop (which is in itself too much for my laptop) further bloated with lots of Gnome cruft, but I figure I can use it as a decent base for getting a better environment. It's a lot better than starting with Ubuntu's Gnome desktop. There seem to be packages for everything I need so far.

Alternative desktops

I've also recently switched my workstation's desktop from Gnome and Firefox 2 to gnome-light and Firefox 3. The latter necessitated moving to the former, as right now, too many packages force dependencies on Firefox 2 and/or xulrunner-1.8. Plus, now that I'm on gnome-light, I've discovered the joys of unmerging Epiphany, Evolution, sound-juicer, and sundry other miscellaneous bloat. I've also given up on trying to use Midori and webkitgtk. While I appreciate that both are now in Portage, Midori is just too broken to consider using as a worthwhile browser, even though its rendering speed (thanks to webkitgtk) is second to none.

Besides, the primary advantage of Midori was its integration with my desktop environment. Now that Firefox 3 is installed, it blends in as a proper gtk app. And it's faster than 2.x; Gmail and other AJAX sites load much faster. I must say that I'm impressed with its overall speed despite my initial pessimism over the inclusion of a fricking database (sqlite). I still regard it as so much unnecessary bloat, since I have absolutely no use for all the new bookmarks features, but maybe someone out there will get some good from it.

Gentoo

In other news, we're looking to release 2008.0 final soon, after dealing with lots of security updates and miscellaneous fixes for the snapshot. What's this mean? To new users, it means a newer set of packages will be installed than what's on the beta2 CDs. To current users, it means nothing at all. Gentoo isn't like other distros that force you to reinstall or upgrade your entire system at release time. Releases are made solely to update the installation media -- CDs, stages, etc. -- to bring them up to date.

I've sent in the final documentation tarballs to the rest of the releng team and updated the tentative release schedule with the info provided by Chris, so now I can focus on finishing up the next issue of the GMN. There's one article in particular that I'm excited about, so stay tuned . . . it's coming soon!

I'm in search of a lightweight distro for an ancient 1ghz, 128MB RAM laptop. One of these days, I'll find a distro that properly supports ACPI and VGA-out. I hope.

In the first article of this series, I test-drove three lightweight distros: Fluxbuntu, TinyMe, and SliTaz.

In the second article of this series, I tested Linux Mint 4.0 Fluxbox Community Edition.

In the third article of this series, I tried Puppy Linux and antiX.

Now it's time for DeLi Linux.

DeLi: the good
DeLi Linux is specifically designed for older hardware, and declares it will only use lightweight software. Good news so far. I actually seem to have working hardware support for both CLI and X session. For most distros, I get proper screen blanking and automatic fan control only during a console session; once an X session is started (and/or HAL, that damned dirty animal) the fan kicks in and can't be turned off. And neither can the screen. But DeLi succeeds there.

DeLi: the bad
The 0.8 liveCD is actually just an installer; there's no try-before-you-install desktop environment. And it's an ugly installer. It's probably the absolute worst installation experience I've ever had, for any operating system.

For starters, though you can partition your hard drive however you like (indeed, the installer assumes you've run fdisk ahead of time), DeLi will use just one partition for everything. Also, it insists on ext3; other filesystems aren't an option. As if that isn't bad enough, it forces a complete format of the whole partition. None of the usual 5-seconds-to-mkfs.ext3 quick creation found in every other distro. Oh, no. It went sector-by-sector, bit-by-bit for my entire 60GB disk. Yeah, thanks.

You already have a completely formatted ext3 partition? (Perhaps from a previous DeLi installation attempt?) Too bad. There's an option to skip this step, but this just ends the installation process immediately. You're forced to format the partition if you want to proceed.

And it comes with the ancient and user-unfriendly Lilo bootloader. I'm a grub man, and I felt like control was being taken out of my hands. Fortunately, lilo installation to the MBR worked correctly, so it boots properly.

The installer is, surprisingly, even more painful to get through than the old curses-based Ubuntu installers, worse even than Fluxbuntu's installer. The DeLi installer is an arcane mess. Instead of doing all the initial user-specified configuration up front and then waiting for the automated install process to finish, the DeLi installer treats you to the sit-and-wait game, complete with extremely scattered bits of user input followed by long waits and progress bars that don't actually move. The user config bits are the worst, as once you select an option, there usually isn't an obvious way to move on to the next screen. Take the keyboard maps and language selection screens. I picked en_US, and hit enter. Nothing happens. Huh? Scroll back up to the top. Nope, nothing there. K, let's go the other way. Way down at the bottom, dozens and dozens of language selections later, is a single button for the next step, but get this, it's pointing backwards, as if to say "go back a step, because you screwed up, genius!" I dunno if this is leftover from some right-to-left version, but it ain't nice, considering the installer is written in English.

Also, I realize that, as a Gentoo guy, I may not have much room to talk about "sit-and-wait" installation methods, but hey, at least with the CLI-based Gentoo install, it's a busy activity. You can run much of the install in parallel, on different terminals, excepting a few critical steps. Also, assuming you have a working network for the minimal CD, you can always do stuff online. You're not forced to babysit the install process. Well, not the same way, at least. Plus the Gentoo install is scriptable. It's possible to get it started and then walk away.

Not so with DeLi -- this thing has to be monitored constantly, so that you can deal with the elusive bits of user input.

DeLi: the ugly
The installer is a chore, but the real work lies ahead. For starters, I had a rough time getting a (semi)working desktop. IceWM was installed, but there's no X session started by default. Good thing I know how to setup ~/.xinitrc on my own. Also, several services that I take for granted, including net, GPM, and pcmcia, weren't started by default. Not nice. As a "desktop" distribution, all this should have been setup ahead of time.

I could do it the manual way, or I could use the delisetup tool. This is a CLI app to configure things like keyboard, language, lilo, network access, X server, WM, mail, package installation, and local services to run at boot.

Unfortunately, it's buggy as hell. Though it seems to remember the last items selected, it doesn't actually do anything. No real configuration changes were made, and yes, it's properly run as root. Also, the "mail" and "services to run at boot" sections crashed the app entirely, with no traceback or error output. "Install additional packages" seems limited only to installing inetd, gpm, coldplug, net, pcmcia, and a few other basic daemons. Basically, the things I thought I'd already dealt with during installation.

Okay, so how about the rest of the desktop/CLI experience? Slow and glitchy. Both console and X are filled with constant, irritating flickering, when entering commands (and especially tab-completion), and during scrolling output. The X session is no exception. I've never used a slower IceWM setup, ever. My laptop can run Gnome from a liveCD faster than whatever setup DeLi uses for IceWM. It's also replete with flickering and excrutiating slowly redrawn windows. Opening up the ROX file manager is an exercise in frustration. Moving it or resizing it is even worse. Same goes for the hideous stock xterms. If you're going to ship plain ol' xterm (instead of something like aterm, urxvt, or Sakura), at least give it a different color scheme and something besides its default eye-gouging fonts, okay?

The included webbrowser is NetSurf, and it actually comes up fairly quicky, considering the poor performance of everything else. Same goes for the email client, Sylpheed. Unfortunately, they can't access the internet, because the delisetup configuration tool doesn't work. Also, despite manually starting up the appropriate initscripts and manually configuring my system for DHCP, I still can't get net access. Chalk up another failure for DeLi where every other distro succeeds here.

While on the subject of daemons, initscripts, and config file locations, DeLi is a bit weird. It feel like it took the most failtastic parts of Slackware and Arch Linux. Which is weird; both those distros on their own do much better.

DeLi does include pacman (from Arch) for software installation, but it's no good without a working internet connection. Too bad; despite installing everything available on the CD, there's hardly anything there. Sylpheed, NetSurf, xterm, ROX, Gnumeric, Abiword, ePDFview, and GQview. That's it. Oh, and an unnamed calculator. That's a bit too minimal.

But it's not like I'm able to actually do anything with this system. Time to close down this DeLi.

Coming up: PCFluxboxOS, Damn Small Linux, Arch Linux, and possibly even NimbleX. Stay tuned.

I'm in search of a lightweight distro for an ancient 1ghz, 128MB RAM laptop. One of these days, I'll find a distro that properly supports ACPI and VGA-out. I hope.

In the first article of this series, I test-drove three lightweight distros: Fluxbuntu, TinyMe, and SliTaz.

In the second article of this series, I tested Linux Mint 4.0 Fluxbox Community Edition.

Now, I'll sum up my impressions of Puppy Linux and antiX.

Puppy Linux is a homegrown mini-distro with several different flavors available. It's well-known for being lightweight, able to run entirely in RAM even. It's also the distro that has introduced me to several different applications I've never heard of before, including some CD burning programs. A fair amount of the applications and configuration utilities available on the liveCD are written specifically for Puppy; they're definitely newbie-friendly, and seem to be especially focused on Windows-to-Linux converts.

So, let's talk about the CD itself. It had just about the fastest boot I've ever seen, wasting no time to get me into a JWM environment, which ran quite speedily. It loaded itself into RAM by default, and provided a handy panel applet that displayed free memory available. Unfortunately, it was rather broken in my case; it showed that I had at least 512MB total memory, and that Puppy was using about half that. Oops, not quite -- I only have 128MB installed.

Still, the CD had quite a nice selection of packages; it's amazing how much was crammed in. It came with the Seamonkey suite for internet access (and for HTML editing). I was a bit worried about this, as the ol' discontinued Mozilla has always felt bloated to me in the past. Not so in this case; Seamonkey ran better than the typical Firefox on every other LiveCD I've used. It felt like an embedded browser, actually, in terms of quick response. Puppy has the most comprehensive array of packages I've come across on a mini-LiveCD so far. There's even a CD remastering tool available, similar to the one SliTaz offers. Want your own Puppy variety? A few clicks will do it!

However, Puppy's support for ACPI and the other necessary bits of my laptop wasn't working in the slightest. I opened up a root terminal to start loading modules, but ran into tons of "module not found/does not exist" errors. I checked /lib/modules to verify that the ACPI-related modules I was looking for did in fact exist, but they still could not be found. What's up with that?

Puppy has a lot to offer, and like SliTaz, I'll be watching it closely in the future. but for now . . . no way to turn off the fan o'doom or get dynamic CPU scaling means this Puppy is going back to the pet shop. Next!

I gave the MEPIS-based antiX a try simply because a reader mentioned it in a comment on one of the earlier articles. It definitely sounded interesting, so I downloaded the "base" edition and got to work.

It booted reasonably fast, and dropped me into a pretty SLiM screen. The liveCD has both IceWM and Fluxbox, so I went with the latter. The "base" CD was indeed quite minimal. Though it ran speedily enough, much better than most other distros I've tested so far, it didn't come with much in the way of software. Most menu entries were to plain ol' xterms that launched some CLI application or another. There's not much in the way of graphical configuration apps, and there's nothing resembling a real power/ACPI manager.

Which brings me to the biggest failing of antiX: it doesn't have working ACPI or APM for my Toshiba. Sure, the toshiba_acpi kernel module can be loaded, but I can't do anything with it from there. Can't turn off the blasted fan, nor did CPU speeds ever seem to vary as needed, despite opening the antiX control center and checking the appropriate box.

antiX has promise as a lightweight distribution; it's speedy enough, but it can't handle the hardware. So long, antiX.

Coming up: PCFluxboxOS, Damn Small Linux, DeLi Linux, and Arch Linux. Stay tuned.