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! ;-)

New virtual home //at 01:36 //by abe

There were quite a lot of small changes in my personal e-mail, web server and DNS infrastructure during the last months. While for more than ten years all my mails came together on a Linux account at the Students Representatives of Computer Science (German: Fachschaftsrat Informatik, short: FS Info) at the University of Saarland and all but one domain was hosted at my former employer, now nearly everything (including this blog) has moved to a Hetzner root server run by me and some friends and running Debian Sarge for AMD64. Most of these moves happend divided in small steps during January and February this year.

Only one move happend a little earlier than expected: Without any notice all external mail to my FS Info account got lost in a black hole one hop in front of the FS Info mail server. It looks like the RBG of the Dept. of CS at the University of Saarland didn’t like my face —eh— mails anymore and just dropped them. No bounces, no notices. Not that I knew them as friendly and kind, but blackholing active e-mail accounts without notice leads to dismissal at other places. They should really go and hear alphascorpii’s BOFH talk.

So my long-time e-mail address abe@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de is no more valid and any mail there won’t get read or answered. But I don’t mind if you send any junk there, it’s not my job anymore.

For luck the hoster of my deuxchevaux.org domain, Internett, which I used for all non-university e-mail, changed the forward within a good hour, so I only lost incoming mails of about one and a half day (which was the time until I noticed the blackholing), namely most mails written to all of my addresses at 30th and 31st of January 2007. If you wrote me around that time and miss the answers, you now know why. The few people I expected mail from, already have been contacted.

So for the future, write emails only to abe@ either deuxchevaux.org or — if you can’t remember how to spell that (no, you’re not the only one ;-) — noone.org (“no one” as in “nobody”, not “no. one” as in “the best” ;-)

And so since then none of my coworkers can make fun of me because I don’t have root on the box where my mail is received. ;-)

One of the moves also gave me the possibility to get “my own” Jabber server, so the time with those two jabber addresses (abe@jabber.noxa.de and abe@amessage.de), where usually at least one had some problems with some gateways are also over. If you want to contact me using Jabber, use abe@noone.org, equal to my easier to remember e-mail address. ;-)

So there’s still left to move: web, mail and DNS of deuxchevaux.org and beckert.at (domain of my parents) and my old web pages on fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de as well as Planet Symlink. And of course the redesign of my web pages, which I’ve planned since more than a half decade… ;-)

The infrastructure in my real-life home also changed: My gateway to the world is now a 266 MHz MIPS based ASUS WL500g Premium (which I named “pluriel” after the multifunctional Citroën C3 Pluriel) running FreeWRT 1.0.1 which replaced tryane, an as noisy (power supply fan) as compact Unisys Aquanta CP mini-desktop with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX.

New talk proposal, new Linux distribution found //at 01:47 //by abe

After talking with some LinuxTag guys about which kind of talks are still missing for the upcoming LinuxTag, I submitted another proposal for a still only roughly sketched talk: KISS – Keep it simple and stupid, also on the web.

KISS – “Keep it simple and stupid” is an old and successful principle in the Unix world: Small and simple programs, doing only one thing, but they’re doing perfect, fast and reliable. This principle can also work on the web and make webservers or surf terminals out of already discharged computers.

I planned to show “simple” (or at least “simple to use”) tools like Blosxom or the Website Meta Language, a more slim webserver than Apache (e.g. fefe’s fnord or one of the ACME webservers thttpd, mini_httpd or micro_httpd), slim web-browsers (e.g. like Dillo, Opera, glinks, ViewML or Minimo) and one or more Linux distributions optimized for low end PCs. While thinking about low end PCs, usually the following distributions come to my mind: DeLi Linux, fli4l and Debian Woody.

But none of them seems to fit for my talk as perfectly as I would like:

• DeLi Linux is no bad distribution, since it’s designed especially for 386 to Pentium I, but I have some strong disagreements with the maintainer of DeLi Linux, since he sees a very small package list as necessary requirement for a distribution for old PCs. He states that distributions for old PCs “don’t have that many harddisk space” (beyond other, more realistic arguments — but it seemed to be his main argument) while I see a rich package diversity as an quality criteria. (One of the reasons, why I like Debian and dislike Ubuntu.) So I’m not sure if I should present a very raped DeLi Linux to the audience, just to make it fit my needs, although I’m quite curious about his upcoming 0.7 release with the low end, KHTML based ViewML webbrowser. (Apart from me seeing PHP5 and KDE as a big nono on old PCs…)
• Although I still like Debian Woody very much (you know that old story… ;-), it is just too old for making a talk about how to turn old PCs into being usable again. Sarge would be fine, but it was suggested to showcase an easy and fast way to get something ready to run, and I can’t give the auditors a list of all the Debian packages with low resource consumption and therefore usable on low end PCs.
• I haven’t used it yet, but fli4l seems to be very good distribution to turn an old PC into a ISDN or DSL router, even without harddisk. The last time I had a look at fli4l, it used an Apache as (optional) webserver, which wouldn’t fit into my scheme, since I would like to show an alternative to Apache. But as I found out today the recently released version 3.0 of fli4l uses the already mentioned ACME mini_httpd. Cool! They’re on the right way! ;-) Unfortunately it only seems to be used for serving information pages about the fli4l status and not as common webserver. (Please correct me, if this is wrong! I would appreciate it, if I’m wrong at this point. :-)

Since I first read about viewml on the DeLi Linux page, I looked for Debian packages of viewml today. apt-cache search hasn’t found anything on Woody or Sarge and packages.debian.org is still down, so I used Google. I found out,  that there at least was a viewml package in Debian since at least 2001, so I expect, it just didn’t make it to stable.

But I also found this interesting page on a webserver called www.ubuntulite.org. Ubuntu Lite? That sounds very interesting, since I see Ubuntu not as the baddest idea (expect for it’s horribly resource hunger and only offering one package per application by default ;-), but having an Ubuntu derivative prepackaged for low end PCs and with several webbrowsers instead of only Epiphany (and probably Firefox, don’t they?) would be perfect for my purpose.

So I’m currently downloading an Ubuntu Lite ISO and will give it a try on one of my Pentium MMX boxes. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support Pentium I or AMD K5 since Ubuntu itself only supports i686 and upwards. :-/

But this also means, that it’s no occasion for my Pentium I Compaq LTE 5100 (which I probably will name pony), but currently, after Bartosz’ recent post on Planet Debian, it looks like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD could also be an interesting OS, since it fits all requirements perfectly: Free, Modern, Exotic and all conveniences of Debian. ;-)

Now Playing: Jefferson Starship — We Built This City

New old computers //at 23:41 //by abe

My employer cleared out old hardware this week and besides saving an old Compaq laptop docking-station from the junkyard (will bring it together with a second one to the flea market of the next Vintage Computer Festival Europe in Munich), I got a bunch of old PCs (about 5 or so), starting with an old 486 DX 33, which was our firewall when I came into the company, ranging to my old workstation (without processor), which was thrown out after two harddisks left there life in there with a offset of only four months. Unfortunately three further gigahertz ranged mini desktops were not working anymore…

But the optical highlight was an Unisys Aquanta CP mini desktop (picture) with a passively cooled 200 MHz Pentium MMX, which I now call tryane. This nice monitor post probably becomes my new Sarge based gateway and firewall since the old Woody based one, called azu needs more space and current and had some ext3 filesystem problems which looked like setting it up from scratch wouldn’t be the baddest idea.