Backing Bernie

I have made some small donations in the past to environmental causes, but this is the first time that I have contributed money to an individual political candidate.  My thirty bucks went to support the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders.

I like Sanders' focus on wealth and income inequality and his proposed remedies.  His proposals for reforming health care and education if enacted would put the U.S. back into a position of leadership in the developed world rather than bringing up the rear as is now the case..

Of equal importance to all the other policy proposals is Sanders' demand that the distortions of the democratic process caused by big money be eliminated.  Sanders is the only major party candidate who has turned away super pacs in favor of small donors, and he has mounted a credible challenge to all the rest who have not found the courage to follow his lead.

While it is widely agreed that the Supreme Court decision on campaign financing has undermined popular democracy, it should also be recognized that the decision does not require any candidate to accept super pac support.  There are clearly great hurdles to turning back the lure of big money to campaigns via legislative channels, but it seems given Sanders' example that it would be much more productive to simply demand of any candidates for office that they reject super pac funding.

K-Meleon

I'm always on the lookout for programs that run well on my old hardware.  My latest good find is the K-Meleon web browser, a Mozilla off-shoot.  Here's a snippet from the homepage:

K-Meleon - The Browser You Control

K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser based on the Gecko layout engine developed by Mozilla which is also used by Firefox. K-Meleon is Free, Open Source software released under the GNU General Public License and is designed specifically for Microsoft Windows (Win32) operating systems




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I have the browser running on my old Compaq laptop with a Pentium III and a gig of memory for Windows XP.  It loads as quiickly as Opera, and it runs quite a bit faster than Firefox.  The browser is fully compliant with modern standards, and the interface is familiar to anyone using any of the other currently popular browsers.  K-Meleon delivers particularly impressive performance in running youtube videos, showing no degradation of the video or audio streams.

Update:
I recently refurbished a Dell Inspiron 6400 with the dual core processor and 2 gigs of RAM.  It is fast enough to run the Chrome browser well, but is seemed worthwhile to try K-Meleon too.  I don't see much difference between the two in this case..  With both the Dell and the old Compaq, I am running the currently next-to-last version (75.) with Win XP on the Compaq and Windows Vista on the Dell.

Budget Networking

I downloaded the Apache web server and installed it on the $5 computer seen in the back row of the above picture.  I copied all of my photography web site files into Apache's htdocs folder and started the program as a service under Windows 2000.  Everything worked perfectly with no changes to the Apache configuration file.  I opened port 80 in my router, making the web site visible from anywhere on the web.  

The blue screen over on the left is my Dell Pecision 690; it is running Handylinux in a virtual machine under Windows XP.  Opening port 22 on my router lets me access Handylinux remotely through the secure shell program.  To test that arrangement I took the Compaq laptop on the right down to the Old Town Plaza where there is a free city internet connection.  I fired up Tiny Core Linux, opened a terminal window and typed in "ssh mike@(my router ip address) -Y" to establish the connection.  

That "-Y" at the end of the ssh command allowed me to run virtually any program on Handylinux in a window on the laptop, including the graphics.  In fact, it is even possible to run programs that cannot normally be run on the Compaq with its old Pentium III cpu because the heavy lifting is being done by Handylinux on the Dell desktop and the laptop just has to handle the display.  So, I can have Firefox, Chromium and any number of other gui heavyweights operating on the the old laptop screen.

I was particularly pleased to get the ssh connection going because I had previously been unsuccessful in doing so.  I had been able to easily make standard terminal connections with quite a few Linux and Windows systems, but I just couldn't get the X11 graphics enabled.  I finally hit on the idea of trying a connection to Handylinux, and that did the trick, along with the use of the "-Y" option in the ssh command line.  It seems that the out-of-the-box ssh configuration in Handylinux is up to the task while none of the others were.  So, my next task is to compare the Handylinux configuration file to some of the others.

The $5+ Computer

As related in a previous post, my efforts to salvage a 15-year-old laptop computer purchased for $5 at a thrift store were successful.  The Windows 2000 operating system is still quite functional, though a little slow for web browsing.  Still, the project has provided me with some real satisfaction, perhaps similar to that which one might get from putting an antique car back on the road.  For everyday practical use, however, both the jalopy and the computer need some souping up.

The Dell does Linux with a little help.

Another trip to the thrift store turned up a $3 optical mouse with a PS2 connector that frees up the one available USB port.  On ebay I found a floppy drive for 3.5-inch disks for $10 that connects to the computer via the parallel port and provides a way to boot up another operating system, getting around the fact that the old Dell doesn't know how to boot from the USB port.  I burned a copy of  the PLOP boot manager onto a floppy and am able to use that to coax the computer into booting to a linux live system contained on a usb flash drive.

Tiny Core Linux running inside a vbox virtual machine on my desktop

There are several linux live systems available which are compatible with the storage and memory capabilities of old computers.  SliTaz, Porteus and Puppy Linux all run well in small amounts of Random Access Memory (RAM).  However, the smallest -- and in many ways the best, I think -- is Tiny Core Linux which only occupies 10MB of space on a usb stick and unpacks into as little as 48MB of RAM.  The base system loads entirely into memory and is blazingly fast as a result.  The distribution is equipped with a spare, but functional FLWM GUI desktop and the basic linux utilities you need to get started, including ethernet capability.  A huge software repository is available on line and applications or extensions can be downloaded and installed with just a couple mouse clicks.  Saving settings, files and installed extensions, a feature referred to as persistence, is particularly trouble-free in Tiny Core provided you use the Core2usb installer which can be downloaded from the site.

Links 2.8 was tested first in the virtual machine before installing on the live usb system.

Configuring a basic, fully functional Tiny Core system can be accomplished by anyone with only the slightest familiarity with open source software.  Tailoring the system to meet your own requirements will take a little more effort and experience, and likely several fresh starts.  The choice of a web browser, for instance,  is crucial as it tends to occupy a relatively large amount of memory space.  Firefox runs just fine on my slightly newer Compac laptop with a gig of RAM, but the mozilla is kind of a clunky choice for the Dell with just 256MB.  My own choice for a small-footprint browser is Links 2.8, a text-based web viewer with pretty good graphics capabilities.  Links tends to iron out complicated web site designs and present them in single columns; and you aren't going to be viewing any youtube videos of dancing cats with it.  However, most sites will load in a fraction of a second, and it really doesn't take very long to get used to the trade-off.  Links also doesn't set any cookies and will ignore efforts to track you by advertisers.  In fact, I think one is losing very little in the way of useful information by using Links at the great majority of web sites.

$ $ $

My impression is that fully half of what is presented on line is either graphic frills or attempts to manipulate you into buying stuff.  The corollary to that is that half of the money you are spending on hardware and software is buying the privilege of being tracked and deceived.  That said, I should probably point out that I don't do social media of any kind, and I almost never feel the need to click on video links.  So, your mileage may vary from mine.

HandyLinux

Every few years I troll through the offerings of the major Linux distributions and their variants.  When I did that a couple years ago, the outstanding find for me was Puppy Linux, which is a very light-weight distribution that runs well on old, underpowered hardware.  I still use a couple versions of Puppy as it fits my hardware profile, but it is getting difficult to find up-to-date applications for it such as web browsers.  So, back to the hunt.

And the winner is:

HandyLinux

HandyLinux is protrayed by its designers as being especially suitable for Linux neophytes.  That's no doubt true, but once past the simplified graphical menu system, the underlying Linux system is as powerful and versatile as any of the more traditional Linux distributions.  In terms of speed of loading, responsiveness and adaptability to a wide range of hardware capabilities, HandyLinux blows everything else out of the water.  As I write this, HandyLinux has arrived a its 2.1 version after several years of development; it provides access to a vast array of applications, and it has an overall  design characterized by supreme elegance with just a trace of arrogance, as one would expect of a product from a French design team.

My first eye-opening experience with HandyLinux came after downloading a copy of the iso file and writing the image to a 2 gig USB stick using the free Universal USB Installer.  I then set my computer to boot from usb, and the program loaded itself into memory and took off like a rocket.  Having just looked at around a dozen other relatively new Linux distributions it was very clear to me that the designers  behind those efforts really need to use HandyLinux as their initial point of reference.

Running the live usb version of the program permits you to do a lot of useful work; a full array of applications is present, including an up-to-date version of FireFox called Iceweasel.  If, however, you want to save work or install additional apps, you probably want to do a full installations of the program.  That is very easily done with a completely automated routine available on the initial splash screen.

I'm not ready to give up my existing Windows system on my desktop machine and I don't particularly like dual-boot solutions.  My strategy for moving forward with a more substantial installation of HandyLinux was to do a full installation within a hypervisor or virtual machine, allowing the full Linux system to run inside of Windows.  For this purpose, I downloaded Oracle's VirtualBox and, thanks to its very easy graphical interface, I had a completely enabled HandyLinux system running in a matter of minutes.  Windows XP and HandyLinux don't seem to mind much when I split my RAM in two to run them simultaneously, and it is very nice to be able to flip easily from one operating system to the other by just a movement of the mouse.

The one serious hitch I encountered in the whole process of running HandyLinux with VirtualBox was that I could not summon up a window for HandyLinux larger than 1024 x 768.  It turns out that to get HandyLinux to occupy your PC's fullscreen capability, you need to install some VirtualBox Guest Additions which enable connections to your hardware including video management.  Try as I might, however, I was initially unable to get the Guest Additions installed in spite of the seeming simplicity of the process as described in the documentation.

Poking around on the Web I could see that a lot of other users of HandyLinux and other modern distributions were encountering the same problem in getting VirtualBox and Linux to cooperate at the hardware level.  There were a lot of solutions offered, but none really seemed to fit the current versions of the the two programs.  What finally got me on the right track was an article entitled How to install Virtualbox Guest Additions for a Linux Guest?.  In order to make that recommended procedure work, I also had to reset the HandyLinux root passward using the "passwd" command within the rescue mode which is accessible from the initial login screen in HandyLinux.  So, now I've got the best of two worlds, and I'm enjoying the exploration of the extraordinary capabilities offered by the elegant and functional HandyLinux environment.

geeky diversion

The 5-dollar price tag on this old Dell laptop caught my eye while I was browsing in the back room of the local thrift shop.  

The computer, a Dell Latitude CSx, had a power supply with it, so I plugged it into a wall outlet and was surprised to see the screen light up with Windows 2000.  At that price I just couldn't pass it up.

A few problems presented when I got my find home.  The first being that there was a log-in screen demanding an unknown password.  I figured I could get by that via the set-up utility accessed by pressing the F-8 function key as the computer is in the bootup stage.  Except that there was a diagonal row of keys that did not work, including the F-8 key.  So, another trip to another thrift store where I picked up a 2-dollar keyboard with a PS2 connector.  That let me get at the setup screen and I was able to set a new Administrator password and get myself into Windows 2000.

So far, so good, but it's awkward to carry around a full-size desktop keyboard along with a laptop.  I opened up the case to get at the keyboard and found that the keys were a very simple mechanical type which did not appear to have anything wrong with them.  In fact, I found that just lifting the keyboard slightly restored the full functioning of all the keys, so it was clear that the problem was with the ribbon cable connecting the keyboard to the main board.  A small paper shim tightened the connector on the keyboard-end of the cable and I was back in business with Windows 2000 running on a Pentium III.  Wow!

Dell's approach was to market a basic machine with peripherals and accessories that attached via external connectors.  Luckily, mine came with a card with a pop-out ethernet connector.  I am also able to attach a wifi adapter with the single usb port on the back.

A Pentium III processor and 256K of RAM is a pretty minimal machine these days for any kind of on-line work.  The current version of Google's Chrome browser will not run on such a set-up, but Firefox works ok and an older version of Opera is even a little quicker.  Looking back fifteen years, however, this was a pretty nice little machine at the time.  The Microsoft Office applications including Word all work fine and would have been perfectly adequate in a transitional business environment in which producing end-user paper copy was still the dominant paradigm. Windows 2000 was a product of Microsoft's NT system which was really a revolutionary step forward, providing the basis for much of what we can do today with personal computers.  I doubt I'll actually get a lot of use from this old laptop, but I got at least five bucks of fun from restoring it, and it provided a good opportunity to look back fifteen years to near the beginnings of the digital revolution.

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The Dell Latitude just has one slot for RAM and I believe that the max it could take was 512K.  I'll keep my eyes open for the 512 replacement for my 256K so I can see how much of a difference that would yield in performance.  I have an old Compaq Evo N600c with similar specs and it does very well on the web with a gig of RAM and running Windows XP.

Killer Heels

No one who has met me would mistake me for a fashionista.  However, I really liked the current show at the Albuquerque Museum, Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe.