MicroClient Sr. //at 04:35 //by abe

About a year ago, I bought a Norhtec MicroClient Jr., a complete 200 MHz MMX-compatible SoC (“Vortex86”) PC so small that it fits into your hand or onto VESA mountings. Althought thought as thin client, the machine has 128 MB RAM and runs Debian from either netboot, USB stick, CF card or 2.5” harddisk without problems and not even that slow.

Later last year, we needed more MicroClient Jrs. at work and since the MicroClient JrSX had a 300 MHz 486SX-compatible SoC processor (“Vortex86SX”) from MSTi and 128 MB DDR RAM instead of SD RAM, we expected them at least in the same performance range and bought a few for ETH and I also bought one for myself. Well, they were about three times slower, since the FPU is missing, not all programs from Debian Etch work fine, e.g. X doesn’t work without patching and recompiling (with Sid, X works, but not the kernel anymore – Update, 26-Jul-2008: See #454776 for a solution for this problem)…

BTW: I had both machines with me at FOSDEM ‘08 at the Debian booth and the MMX-compatible machine also at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) at the Symlink booth and in Kurt Gramlich’s talk about ecological computers. So if you saw them there, just imagine the same case, with a twice to three times faster CPU and four times the amount of RAM, but with roughly the same carbon foot-print!

For our thin client purposes at work we now use ALIX boards from PC Engines (Mini-ITX format) with 500 MHz AMD Geode processors. They’re much faster than the MicroClient Jr. and need even less power.

Today, while surfing around on some Mini-ITX shops, I found some computer in obviously MicroClient Jr. case, but with 500 MHz VIA Eden processor and 512 MB of RAM. I first couldn’t believe it. They are selling it as eTC-2500. Since eTC-2300 was one of the brandings of the MicroClient Jr. which is called eBox-2300 officially by the manufacturer DM&P, I searched for eBox-2500, but didn’t find anything useful. Then I looked at the manufacturer’s product page at CompactPC.com.tw and found the eBox-4300 — so it’s really true, they managed to fit a board with 500 MHz VIA processor and half a Gig of RAM into the already fscking small space inside the MicroClient Jr. case, and even without needing more power: Still 15W from the power adaptor. Next stop was Norhtec’s Website. And yes, they also have a new MicroClient product: The MicroClient Sr.. I really need to have one of those for my MicroClient collection! ;-)

Is ikiwiki a Website Meta Language killer? //at 22:29 //by abe

On this year’s Chemitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, engl. “Chemnitz Linux Days’) I attended a few talks of which especially formorer’s ikiwiki talk was very interesting.

I attended his talk since I found out that ikiwiki is command line wiki compiler in contrary to the thousands of solely web based wikis out there. As a big fan of statically generated content this idea sounded very interesting to me.

But just having a short look at ikiwiki’s web page didn’t help to get started and it seemed as if I had not the right idea of how ikiwiki works to get started. So formorer’s talk seemed to be a good possibility to get an idea of how ikiwiki works without much effort.

During the talk I noticed that ikiwiki can many things I do with the Website Meta Language (WML), but can do some more things WML can’t do out of the box:

1. It’s not only a framework to generate web pages, it’s more like a content management system (CMS).
2. Versioning is intergal part of ikiwiki without reinventing the wheel: It works out of the box with — beyond others — Subversion, Git and Mercurical (Hg).

And when formorer showed that even Tobi Oetiker uses ikiwiki, I noticed that ikiwiki probably could be a WML killer, since I knew Tobi as a WML fan. And ikiwiki looks very appealing for the WML fan inside me, too…

OTOH: Intergrating WML as a backend to ikiwiki could be an interesting idea, though.

Hearing what kind of input files ikiwiki can process, I also got the idea of using hnb (Hierachical Notebook) files as input for ikiwiki. hnb files are already XML and so a conversion to XHTML shouldn’t be that hard.

But when searching the web for “ikiwiki hnb” I found the blog postings of a few people switching away from hnb, e.g. to vimoutliner. Since I’m an Emacs addict and don’t like vim very much (if I use a vi, I use nvi or elvis), I searched for “emacs hnb” and indeed found someone who switched from hnb to org-mode – of which I never heard before. Unfortunately org-mode doesn’t seem to be in Debian (Update 00:23: Yeah, yeah, I now know it’s included in emacs22, but emacs22 hasn’t made it into kfreebsd-i386 yet, so I didn’t notice. See the comments. :-) but I’ll play around with it a little bit. Unfortunately a first test wasn’t that promising. But we’ll see.

Now playing: Men at Work — Down Under

Back from Chemnitz //at 09:50 //by abe

I’m back from Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT) which were really great. The CLT organizers really know how to make an event for the community without forgetting the business people.

So, although Murphy hunted me with forgotten laptop power supplies, forgotten laptop power supply power cords (Thanks for the spare, Venty!), missed trains, late trains, unfitting train schedules, defective mobile phones (Hi Sven! :-), heavy snowing, addictive Play Station Portables and no time for attending a single talk except mine (I’m sorry, blindcoder), I held all three talks as planned — maybe except the duration — and had a lot of fun as expected.

The slides for my commandline beginner’s talk on Sunday were finished the same day at about 2am and are online since then. It was too long, but except the next presenter (Hi Werner!), nobody told me. I even thought that all those people entering the room were late listeners. I just didn’t notice at all that time was flying by so fast, since there was a lot of interesting discussion with and in the audience, something I didn’t expect from a beginners talk.

Thanks to all who already gave feedback to my talks. And thanks to Jens Kühnel and Henrik Heigl with whom I could drive back to Frankfurt.

Slides for Berlin and Chemnitz online //at 01:47 //by abe

The slides for my next two shell efficiency talks are now online.

I’ll hold one 1.5h talk on Thursday, 2nd of March, 19:30h at the New Thinking Store in Berlin Mitte. Thanks to Sven Guckes for the idea and for bringing me in contact (again) with New Thinking.

The second will be a 3h workshop on Saturday, 4th of March at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage.

I’ll also hold a short 30min talk for beginners about the “Command line helper” on Sunday, the 5th of March, 10:00h at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage. The slides for this talk will follow during this week.

All talks will be held in German.

Update, 12:57h: I’ll travel from Berlin to Chemnitz with the famous LinuxBus and there are still some seats free. So if you plan to come from Berlin to Chemnitz and want us to join, please quickly contact Frank Hofmann <linuxbus@efho.de> for reservation.

Talk proposal for Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2006 accepted //at 01:47 //by abe

My workshop proposal for the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2006 has been accepted last week. But in addition to it, they asked if I can also hold a talk for beginners about the basic command line utilities, since one presenter had to cancel his offer. But nevertheless they wanted such a talk in their schedule. So I’ll also give a short 30 minutes introduction to basic command line utilities as e.g. ls, rm, cp and mv.

Since I heard no contrary statement, I expect the talks to be held in German.

Now playing: Rockapella — Zombie Jamboree

Last day at work //at 19:00 //by abe

As some of my friends already know, I’ve quit my current job and will start working at the Department of Physics of the ETH Zurich in May.

Today is my last day at work here and I feel a little bit sentimental. Most co-workers became friends during the last four and a half years and I’ll move away from a bunch of friends at Darmstadt and from some friends in Mainz and Frankfurt/M. And I’ll leave the Rhine-Main area just shortly before LinuxTag moves in. Fsck.

But it had to be. Although I like creating dynamic web pages with Embperl and Apache, I became sick of working with SuSE Linux, sick of developing with OpenLDAP, sick of developing web applications which must (also) run with Apache under Windows or with MS Access. Since I understand that for the success of my current employer the use of these products can’t be changed that easily, the only solution for me was to quit the job.

My new job at the ETH Zurich will be administrating mostly Unix systems at the Department of Physics as well as some Unix user training. I won’t get rid of Windows and OpenLDAP there though, but I won’t have to develop software with them. What I’ll get rid of is SuSE: I will have my beloved Debian around me (which I can use here only for building Debian packages for customers) and some FreeBSD (no change here ;-), too. So I really look forward to my new job.

Therefore I’ll move to Zurich soon. And since I have down there a lot of friends, too — not only through Symlink and the Linux User Group Switzerland but also people from the 2CV scene — it’s not so hard to the leave the current environment and jump into a new one. Another advantage of moving more southwards is that I’ll be closer again to the rest of the Beckert family, at least the part I’m related to. (The biggest number of Beckerts seem to live near Chemnitz according to Geogen, so perhaps I should pay attention to this when visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage the next time.)

But I’ll come back and visit the Rhine-Main area probably quite often, not only for LinuxTag.

P.S.: It maybe that further blog postings about my move to Zurich only appear in the German written part of my blog and therefore not on Planet Debian (but Planet Symlink).

Next planned shell efficiency talks //at 02:28 //by abe

Today is the deadline for proposing talks for this year’s LinuxTag (3rd to 6th of May, Wiesbaden, Germany) and last week was the deadline for talk proposals for this year’s Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (CLT, 4th and 5th of March 2006, Chemnitz, Germany). For both events I submitted my already at other events held Shell Efficiency talk. For LinuxTag I marked the proposal as “German preferred, English possible”, so if they ask for the English version, I’ll offer the slides in English, too, of course. I’ll probably also build a DocBook version of the talk, since LinuxTag prefers the DocBook format.

But even if these both talk proposals are not accepted, I’ll be on both events together with the rest of the Symlink crew and have fun! ;-)

Additionally I will hold the talk a few days before CLT on Thursday the 2nd of March 2006 at the New Thinking Store in Berlin-Mitte, Tucholskystraße 48 at 19:30 (which is unfortunately in parallel to this year’s German Perl Workshop from 1st to 3rd of March 2006 in Bochum). The entrance to the talk is free. (Thanks to Sven Guckes for suggesting this talk and bringing me in contact with New Thinking.)

Now Playing: Jethro Tull — Orion