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Abstract:In this podcast, I tell about my experience rejuvinating and giving a "make-over" to my 5 y/o LapTop. This script was written in February of 2010.
So the thing in fashion now is netbooks, right? Those underpowered miniature laptops that are supposed to be just terminals to the cloud. Well, to me an Atom processor is not exactly underpowered. I currently own a five year old laptop with a Pentium 4 processor that runs at different speeds up to 1.6 Ghz. My understanding is that the Atom is a 1.6 Ghz processor also.
But we must be extremely careful when we compare these these things, because I would bet that the P4 would get more done in the same time than the Atom. I remember the days when computer people were hoping for the “RISC revolution” to come. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, it was discovered that if you made a cpu that had less commands (“RISC” stands for “Reduced Instruction Set Computer,”) that it would be faster, even at a lower clock speed, than a full fledged CPU. Further, assembly language was starting to wane back then, so the thinking was that you needed just enough of a command set for a compiler to use.
That was then, now I would bet it would be more important to have those nice fat special “multimedia” registers in the chip. Especially if you wanted to watch movies “on the road.” I would love to hear from anyone who can email the show with a better comparison of the CPU differences between the Atom and the current “big” Intel CPU’s.
Before we leave talking about CPU’s, lets talk about the real babies of the CPU world, the ARM chips. These CPU’s are usually slower than 1000 Mhz, usually don’t have floating point registers, and happen to run the world’s cell phone population. I recently listened to a “Shot of Jaq” episode where a recent statement was made that the price point can be so low with Linux laptops made from these, that some industry spokespeople expected that they could dominate the netbook market in scant two years. It is a sensational statement, but is it realistic? First, I went to Google “shopping” and queried “arm processor laptop,” and discovered a few websites that featured “Chinese” products. These websites featured a few $130 dollar netbooks that ran with ARM processors and ran “Windows CE.”
The idea is tantalizing, especially when you consider that these CPUs just don’t need fans. The battery life would be great without any fans in the computer I’m sure.
However, I remain skepticle. I was very interested in RISC, and even thought of getting a Playstation 3 with a IBM cell processor. But I found out that the distros really weren’t set up to take advantage of the cell. Meanwhile, it’s cousin, “The Power PC chip,” ran great, but it’s main commercial proponent, Apple, abandoned it. Even they wanted the coveted “386” compatability. As I understand things, Linux has more apps already compiled for 64 bit than the Windows world, but even Linux falls back on the “386 compatability” for fringe applications. I also listen to the Knightwise podcast, and he recently did this whole episode about going out on a quest for a netbook with a better CPU then the Intel Atom. Even if I were a gambling man, I would not bet on any ARM processor revolution anytime soon. I’d much rather hole up behind my current Laptop a while longer and see what happens.
Still, I itched for change. The same laptop for five years gets a little dull, even if you are not a heavy laptop user. I began to feel the itch for a “laptop makeover” of some kind. I reasoned that if I were to somehow give my laptop another round of improvements (I already maxed out the memory, and already upgraded to my favorite brand of disk, the Seagate,) I could live with my laptop for a few more years.
Instead of looking at ads on the interweb, and letting sales copy writers tell me what to want, I decided to create a little list of desires for my laptop. Kind of like a manifest of requirments, but less formal. Currently, I used the laptop for writing scripts, (just like I am writing this script now,) but I decided I wanted to do more. This is what I dreamed up.
Of course we all want fast, and longer battery life. But what I needed was the following capabilites. Lyx document processing, movie and audio playback. KDM to make it a spare terminal to my “big desktop” computer when the misses uses it to play mafia wars. The ability to hook up as a web browser in public. Audio editing with Audacity (to get those podcasts spruced up on the road, but I did not need to encode on the road.) Lastly, to be able to read on it while away.
Interesting enough, a list of about seven capabilities. It stood to reason that if I picked aplications to use about the same libraries, and skimped wisely (like skipping a graphical audio player when command-line and mplayer would cover me,) that I could probably get a pretty small software footprint.
I began to formulate my plan. First, I noticed that with such a small footprint, that there was one motor I could eliminate. The disk drive. I decided to really get as lightweight as I could, and stuff my software on a Compact Flash drive. Second, I decided that if I was familiar with alternatives (like two kinds of PDF readers,) that I would choose whatever would take up less space on the drive. This initially sounds drastic, but actually it’s not. This is because I don’t know any alternatives to KDM (that is, I am unfamiliar with GDM, and XDM is too hard to configure for remote X session of this kind.) I therefore knew that my system would lean on the KDE family of apps.
(Some may not know the true functionality of KDM, so bear with me while I explain for only some of my dear listeners. Most think of KDM as a program to create a pretty GUI login screen. But it actually does more. With KDM, you can use your computer as a X-terminal to another computer on your LAN that is also running KDM. This is why I mentioned my wife’s computer game. She likes to use the big computer because of it’s big screen. She actually plays while logged in to my account. With KDM on a laptop, I can actually be a second user, logged in to my personal account on my main computer, because KDM turns my laptop into a temporary “second terminal” for the big computer. This is a little different than using SSH or telnet to kick off individual apps, because you actually are using all your apps and data and all of your setup and customizations all on the big computer, where with SSH and Telnet, you are running an app or two from your other computer.)
So, I said I was chasing a small footprint. I should say I have to. While I plan to carry also an USB thumbdrive, I am still gonna want to get all I can out of that Compact Flash drive.
There are a few concepts to cover about apt-get and chasing this small footprint. When you say “apt-get install such-and-such,” if there are no dependencies or reccomends for that package, it goes straight to an install. Now “depends” and “recommends” are two different things, and if you use the flag, “–no-install-recommends” you can actually install a lot less software. Dependencies are other programs, like libraries, that are necessary to run an application, while the reccomends are strongly urged extras to enhance the functioning. When you install a program and apt-get needs to install dependencies, it stops and tells you what dependencies, and the disk space that will be used. So when I start by installing KDM, it tells me it needs a bunch of libraries. After that, if I tell it to load kuickshow, it just loads kuickshow because kuickshow’s dependencies are already covered by KDM’s. It’s like a free ride, because not only do you use less space, but once KDM’s dependencies are cached, kuickshow, if invoked, starts that much quicker. Lots of “trial and error” with apt-get, and of course it leads to a very customized personal selection.
On the other hand, you don’t want to go too far with the self-limitation of software. For instance, I do want to have some measure of “slickness” to my new system, because of course you can do it all from the command line, but if somebody was admiring your computer it would take a rare geek indeed to admire such a thing as a “CLI only” laptop. So, theme packages for the window manager (Icewm in my case,) Iceweasel, and KDM are all in. A few games. I also included things like Bywater Basic and Lisp, just in case I feel like a little programming challenge. Gotta find the midle ground between minimal and heavy systems.
So, for a complete list of what I installed, I will have that as an appendix to this show’s script. Here are some highlights. Lyx for a document processor with Hevea to help it convert things to HTML. Kuickshow for images. Kpdf for pdfs. Lynx for text-mode and gopher browsing. Ace-of-penguins, which is a lightweight group of simple games like solitaire and mastermind and stuff, and ksudoku, yeah, I’m in for sudoku. BTW, to garner shoulder surfers in airports ksudoku has a version that is three-dimensional on the computer screen, you rotate the puzzle, it looks like a weird “Rubiks Cube” with sudoku all around. Gui web browsers, Iceweasel (with gtk-chtheme to customize,) and Opera.
Okay, don’t like throw vegatables at your speakers because I am adding Opera. Well, not adding. I am replacing konqueror with Opera. Opera is faster, is QT based, handles web banking, has less requirements, and boots faster. It also has a rocking RSS reader built in, as well as all the functions I added to Iceweasel built in. I know it is not free software, but I am not so far on the Stallman scale that I would reject it. There are no full featured browsers that fast on the Debian repositories, and I do think it is fair to resort to a program that is merely “free as in free beer” in such situations.
So, a few hiccups getting the Disk out of there. This laptop still has a laptop IDE in it. The company that makes the convertor, startech.com, has ceased manufacture of this converter. I had to find the converter (called a dual card ide converter for laptop) on their website, and chase it down on ebay. I ended up getting a new on from Ritz Camera through ebay. They were not the best web retailers, as I normally shop USPS to a PO box whenever I can. Their website did not kick out my PO box address, and they tried to ship over FedEx. Apparantly when confronted with a PO box address, FedEx drivers just walk it to whatever store is near them and hand it to them. I had to chase down my package by going to a small store in my city based on the receipt records of the package their telephone person gave me. I hate FedEx.
This particular adapter has two CF card slots, and I put cards in both of them. The second card conflicted with the CDROM in my laptop, and it took me longer than I care to admit to figure that one out. Eventually I got it in there with my old 300x two-gig card in there, and booted the install CD.
I will include in the show script a link to my old HPR on converting my desktop to CF card, but to give those unfamiliar with my Hacker Public Radio shows a little context, heres a brief run down. In short, you can run Linux off a chip. Compact Flash cards are laid out like disk drives on the inside electronically. If you get a card that is faster than the average time it takes to seek a sector on a disk, you can actually go faster than a disk drive because there is no seek time on a chip. That speed specification, “300x,” is simular to the speed specification on a cdrom drive. So this chip is about six times faster than a 52x cdrom drive.
The conversion itself is just plugging things togther. On the desktop it was, lets say 10-25% faster than the 7600 RPM seagate disks. It was a lot less flexible though, updateing the distribution was a pain in the neck! However, since this is just a “spare terminal” thing, I don’t feel the same need to keep the software up to date. However, I must say I was shocked to see how much faster this was over the 5200 RPM laptop seagate drive! I was shocked that I never saw the laptop boot this fast! On top of that, I found out that while shopping around, you can now get 600x speed chip. If I had the scratch now, I might just build a raid array out of two 600x chips on the desktop, that would be fun. However, these chips are more expensive, because they are more expensive by the megabyte as well as not being available in such small chip sizes.
So I get the Debian base system onto the laptop, and I do my apt-get’s. It takes a little trial and error, and I eventually have a laptop in 1.2 gigs of “disk” space. A little under 800 MB is my /usr directory. I converted the /usr direcory to a squashfs file instance (another old HPR of mine, I’ll put the link in the show notes.) That got the /usr direcory compressed downto about 300 mb! All together, I have a complete, but hard to update, system running faster than my original system, using less battery and running faster than before. Pretty sweet!
One last bit of customization. After about five years of owning this laptop, I finally got sick and tired of looking at that stupid Gateway logo on the back of the screen! Now, I want it to be presentable, so even though at the place I was, even just covering the logo with thick, black electrical tape would have madw me happy! But no-good, too tacky. Same goes for putting a little hacker bumper sticker over it. I found at staples 8x11 inch stickers, and had the misses print a nice looking Bloom County comic image I found on the web. You guys know Mickey Mouse is a little too corporate america for me, right?! I originally wanted Major Kusanigi from Ghost in the Shell, but the misses said no to that one. Still, I kinda got rid of that Gateway logo!