VCFe talk online / bijou vs Etch //at 00:52 //by abe

With a few days lag, the slides to my VCFe 8.0 talk Aktuelle, freie Software auf alter Hardware (“Up to date, free software on old hardware”, held in German using Kazehakase and S5) are now online. In comparision to my former talks on that subject (held at some DebianDays), this talk was not Debian focused but focused more on not so well known, but resource-friendly free software as well as focused on an audience which has more knowledge of old hardware than of current software. :-)

Additionally, I updated my old blog post about X on my ThinkPad 760ED named bijou so that now also my current XF86Config-4 for Sarge on that box is linked in there.

Apropos bijou: I couldn’t recommend Debian 4.0 Etch that much for old computers with not so much memory since especially aptitude has grown much in regards of it’s memory and performance needs. Regarding my experiences with Etch, any computer with less than 50 MB of RAM will start to swap if aptitude is only started on such a box. I’ve looked throough the aptitude documentation, but I haven’t found a way to switch of some of the tables it generates internally. E.g. I have no need for the tag database it always generates. I really would be happy, if someone knows a way to turn even only that feature off. Then I may dist-upgrade bijou to Etch, since I found that dselect is no real alternative to aptitude anymore.

Oh yeah, and I of course bought new old hardware at the VCFe: A 386SX Thin Client named Flytech Carry-I 9300 from 1991 with about 200 MB of harddisk and 10 MB of RAM.

The Software Museum inside the Software Museum //at 13:40 //by abe

Most Linuxers know that Debian and most of its users prefer stable software over up-to-date software. So do I, but sometimes this goes a little bit too far, e.g. when I find software which has been compiled years before the first line of Linux kernel code has been written:

C:\>ls +version
GNU ls, Version 1.4.0.2 (compiled Sep 19 1990 12:43:10 for MS-DOS)

C:\>ls -alF gnu\
total 521
drwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou     4096 Mar 26 23:16 ./
drwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou     4096 Mar 26 23:17 ../
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    17868 Sep 19  1990 cat.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    20028 Sep 19  1990 cmp.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    26780 Sep 19  1990 cp.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    17948 Sep 19  1990 cut.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    27138 Sep 24  1990 grep.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    16572 Sep 19  1990 head.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    27756 Sep 19  1990 ls.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    23100 Sep 19  1990 mv.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    19820 Sep 23  1990 rm.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    37644 Sep 19  1990 tac.exe*
-rwxrwxrwx   1 anonymou anonymou    20188 Sep 19  1990 tail.exe*

C:\>

And yes, this looks like DOS. This is FreeDOS (1:0.0.b9r5a-3) inside of dosemu, packaged for Debian 4.0 Etch and installed from the original Debian archives.

BTW, the date looks quite authentic: According to the ChangeLog, Version 1.4 of the GNU Fileutils have been released on the 9th of September 1990. The oldest version of the GNU Fileutils (nowadays coreutils) available on the GNU FTP server is version 3.13 from July 1996, though.

I really wonder how many buffer overflows this version has. And I wonder if there’s really a scenario in which this combination (Debian → dosemu → FreeDOS → GNU fileutils) could be exploited.

Yet another old laptop //at 04:13 //by abe

My father got me a nice IBM ThinkPad from 1996 earlier this year, so the next old laptop he digged up was planned to become a christmas present for my brother. But my father didn’t manage to find out, how old nor how fast that laptop was. And when I found out that it was a Pentium I with 90 MHz, it was clear, that my brother wouldn’t have any use for it, so he got “only” the used 850 MHz AMD Duron midi tower and my parents declared that old Compaq LTE 5100 laptop as a christmas present for me. :-)

As my IBM ThinkPad bijou, this Compaq LTE 5100 is from 1996 and has a Pentium I processor. Both also have a 800×600 resolution, a double PCMCIA slot and a floppy drive, which can be replaced by a CD-ROM drive (if I had one). But that are all similarities. Technically the Compaq has 90 MHz instead of the ThinkPad’s 133 MHz, but therefore has 72 MB RAM in comparison to the 48 Megs the ThinkPad has. Also regarding disk space the Compaq outperforms the ThinkPad: 1.6 Gigs of disk space in comparison to the ThinkPad 1.0 GB hard disk. Another difference is the battery: While the ThinkPad can work over 2.5 hours without external power, the Compaq even didn’t manage to completely boot its currently installed Windows 98 (the ThinkPad had a Windows NT installed when I got it) when running on battery. (Will do that test again when I can confirm, that the battery was full before testing. :-) Yet another difference is the keyboard layout: The ThinkPad has an US layout while the Compaq has a Swiss-German layout. But the most obvious difference is the look: The black ThinkPad still looks like having a modern design while the Compaq looks very very outdated in its perfect computer beige and with its quite small display.

So retroperspectively, it was a good a idea to name the ThinkPad “bijou” (French for jewel, jewellery, gem, etc.; named after a very neat british two-door limousine built in the UK by Slough on a 2CV base during the ’50s). Because now I have the choice between a lot of not so nice looking (not to say ugly ;-) 2CV derivatives to name the Compaq after. My favourites currently are the Iranian “Baby Brousse”, the Greek “Namco Pony” and the German “Fiberfab Sherpa”, all canvas and flatbed style 2CV based buggies, similar to the original Citroën Méhari but with steel body instead of the Méhari’s controversial plastic body. And one of the not used names, I can use for further ugly Compaq laptops¹.

Another question yet to answer is the question of what operating system to install on it. Since the ThinkPad runs fine with Debian 3.0 Woody and I have a lot of other Debian boxes at home (running Woody, Sarge or Sid), I currently think about installing the very fresh NetBSD 3.0 (released on Christmas’ Eve 2005), FreeBSD 6.0 (released early November 2005), DragonFly BSD 1.4 (to be released in December :-) or DeLi Linux 0.7 pre (which was also released in early December 2005 and already uses X11R7). Another idea was to install grml 0.5, but since grml is a live CD distribution, it probably would be hard to install it over network. Same counts for ReactOS (version 0.2.9 was released shortly before Christmas 2005), which doesn’t seem to have a floppy disk plus network install. Since I always planed to upgrade my currently defective Toshiba T6400 i486 laptop ayca (maybe after getting an organ donor on eBay or so) to DeLi Linux 0.7 (and perhaps write a review about it for Linux Magazine or so) and I may get an Sun Ultra Enterprise 2 soon (on which NetBSD 3.0 would be the perfect OS since Linux’ performance still seems to suck on Sparc :-), I currently prefer the FreeBSD or DragonFly idea. If the Ultra doesn’t come, it probably will get NetBSD, since I haven’t a NetBSD box yet. (Haven’t a DragonFly box either, but a FreeBSD 4.x running somewhere. :-)

¹: I have two other not yet working Compaq laptops, both from an elder generation than Pentium I. One I got on a Swiss flea market for a few euros and the other was the first laptop of my boss, which he else would have thrown away. Unfortunately both are without power adapter and neither the usual allround laptop power adapters from Conrad, etc. nor the one from the LTE 5100 fits. But since there is eBay, I expect to get such a power adapter once. :-)

Software Freedom Day 2006 //at 02:07 //by abe

Today, well, yesterday was Software Freedom Day and the Chaostreff Zürich organised an information booth with support of the Linux User Group Switzerland at the Orell-Füssli Bookstore at Zurich and giving out Ubuntu CDs — and only Ubuntu. (Ok, and also Kubuntu CDs, but that doesn’t make a big difference.)

After writing a Symlink article about the Software Freedom Day, I went to Orell-Füssl, of course equipped with my 10 years old Pentium-I-ThinkPad bijou which is though running Debian Sarge and the latest Linux kernels, namely 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3, both only about one week old.

Onsite, I tried to get access to the WLAN, but it didn’t work. Asking the network responsible guy from the Chaostreff, the reason was found quickly: The WLAN was WPA secured and older WLAN cards don’t work with that. No problem that far, but what I found very inappropriate was that this guy then told to put away that old computer since we only want to demonstrate on recent hardware.

First I still can’t understand why such intolerance happens even on a day having the word “Freedom” in its name and secondly I think that especially the ability to give old computers a second (or third) life is notable feature of Free and Open Source Software, Windows can’t offer at all.

So I did not feel like explaining someone the advantages of Free Software or Linux, since I’m not allowed to show some of it nicest features. I started folding some flyers which just had been printed. I accidently also started reading them and I found two grave errors in the content, especially in the context of a day about “Software Freedom” and not about “Open Source” or “Linux”:

1. Free Software and Open Source Software were declared as being the same thing.
2. Only the Open Source concept was explained.

So I used the rest of the event to chat with some of the SheGeeks I knew and a few people like Fabrizio who I just knew from mails and never met in real life before. I also had no guilty conscience to leave the event earlier since I didn’t like it — even if it probably was a huge success and I met there many people I like.

The late afternoon I helped a friend of mine moving. Well, actually I helped him transporting all the new furnitures he bought at IKEA to his new home with my CX Break.

And after returning home, I had to read on Symlink, that Rob Levin aka lilo from Freenode died yesterday after being hit by car while riding on his bike on Tuesday. May he rest in peace.

So somehow the Software Freedom Day 2006 was quite a sad day to me. :-(

Now playing (from compact cassette :-): David Hasselhoff — Looking For Freedom

FrOSCon, COSIN und ein zu Kazehakase bekehrter Ex-Galeon-Fan //at 03:16 //by abe

Bereits zwei Wochen her, aber trotzdem nett, war die FrOSCon (Free and Open Source Software Conference), auf der ich im normalen Vortragsprogramm drei Vorträge und am Debian Day einen weiteren gehalten habe. (Die Folien zu diesen Vorträgen sind seit dem Wochenende nun auch alle online.) Wie ich schon auf schrieb (und von der Online-Zeitung doppelpunkt: der Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg bereits zitiert wurde), war ich von der FrOSCon recht beeindruckt: Dafür, dass es diese Veranstaltung dieses Jahr zum ersten Mal lief, war sie verdammt gut organisiert. Und trotzdem schien keiner der Orgas Stress zu haben oder liess sich diesen zumindest nicht anmerken.

Die FrOSCon hat in meinen Augen definitiv das Potential, um sich neben den Chemnitzer Linuxtagen zu der Community-Konferenz im deutschsprachigen Raum zu mausern: Eine im Westen, eine im Osten. Ich freue mich jedenfalls schon auf das nächste Mal.

Dieses Wochenende war ich auf dem nächsten Event, der (oder “dem”?) Chaos Singularity (COSIN) im Kulturzentrum Bremgarten (KuZeB), einem bisher noch kleinen, aber dennoch feinen Schweizer Hacker-Treffen, welches von den verschiedenen Chaostreffs der Schweiz, den SheGeeks und trash.net organisiert wurde.

Neben dem Wiedertreffen bekannter Namen und Gesichter habe ich auch viele neue Leute kennen- und schätzen gelernt. Ich muss auf jeden Fall auch mal den Zürcher Chaostreff besuchen.

Und natürlich habe ich auch wieder mal einen Kommandozeilen-Workshop mit Lynx als Präsentationsprogramm auf meinem Pentium-1-ThinkPad bijou (ein Restaurant um die Ecke hieß witzigerweise genauso) gehalten, der anscheinend, wie im Rückblick behauptet wird, dafür sorgte, daß »einige der Besucher […] in bisher nicht gekannte Sphären ihrer Shell eintauchten«. Beeindruckend beim Workshp war für mich, daß extrem viele Zuhörer mitdachten, interessante Fragen stellten und z.T. auch gleich selbst beantworteten. Der beste Dank an den Referent war aber auch hier wieder die leuchtenden Gesichter von Spielkindern, die gerade ein neues Spielzeug gezeigt bekamen. :-)

Direkt nach dem Workshop bin ich noch mit Folken ins Gespräch gekommen und er hat irgendwann zwischendrin mal über Webbrowser geflucht und als in diesem Bereich in der Zwischenzeit sehr sensible Person konnte ich nicht anders und etwas in der anscheinend noch offenen Wunde herumstochern: Und siehe da, ein weiterer Galeon-1.2-Fan, der von Galeon 1.3 und von Epiphany und Firefox erst recht massiv enttäuscht ist. Während ich über viel Konfigurationsgerödel mit gconf-editor und anderen wilden Sachen meinen Galeon 1.3 einigermaßen gefügig machte, bis ich Kazehakase entdeckte, ging er einen wesentlich radikaleren Weg: Er stellte auf links2 im grafischen Modus um. Als ich ihm dann nach etwas Zappeln-Lassen Kazehakase und die wichtigsten Einstellungen (UI-Level auf “Expert” setzen) zeigte, gab es ein zweites Mal an diesem Abend leuchtende Augen. Wieder einen zum einzig wahren Browser™ bekehrt. ;-)

Sehr gut war auch noch das Essen (Dank an Beni vom KuZeB!) und sehr nett auch noch die abendliche Beschallung mit Welle-Erdball-SIDs von einem echten C64 aus. (Deswegen einen anlachen werde ich mir trotzdem nicht. :-)

Und da Venty ja dieses Wochenende im Triemlispital lag, hat er mir für diese Zeit sein TomTom zur Verfügung gestellt. Für die Hinfahrt war das ganz nett und funktionierte wunderbar, aber auf der Rückfahrt (mit tiCo zusammen zum Triemlispital um Venty zu besuchen) hat es uns sooft fehlgeleitet, daß wir per Landkarte vermutlich schneller gewesen wären, weil ich mir dann den ganzen Weg einmal im Voraus angeschaut hätte und nicht nach jeder vom TomTom fehlgeleiteten Kreuzung erstmal rätseln mußten, was jetzt schon wieder schiefgegangen war und wo wir wirklich hin sollten. Mal ganz davon abgesehen, daß eine Ente mit Navigationsgerät doch schon sehr komisch anmutete und Landkarten da einfach stilgerechter sind. ;-)

Vintage Computer Festival Europe 7.0 ahead //at 09:50 //by abe

It’s only seven weeks to the most important vintage computing event in Europe, the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe) in Munich, which for the first time will be three days this year because of May the 1st being a Monday this year and an official holiday in Germany and some of the swiss cantons (at least Zürich). So the VCFe 7.0 will take place from April the 29th to May the 1st 2006 in Munich and it’s focus this year is:

Home Made Brains
Kit-Computers and Individual Designs

I’m currently thinking about which old hardware I’ll present at this year’s VCFe. There are a few ideas flowing around in my head:

• Old x86 laptops (1989-1996). This was my exhibition last year, but ayca, my i486 Toshiba laptop is broke (probably the display controller) and the “new” Compaq LTE pony hasn’t been setup yet. Nevertheless, I’ll bring my (nearly) everyday ThinkPad bijou with me since it’s now 10 years old and therefore ontopic now. Yeah!
• The HP 9000 Apollo Series 400 I got from dwalin and dyfa, if I manage to get a NetBSD installed on that box.
• Buying a tux case but installing some old hardware in it instead of the current FOX board. On the other hand: There should be at least a Linux running on that box.

Anyway, I’ll be there, many other Symlinker (at least dino and Venty) also will be there. And I hope to see you there, too. :-)

Oh, and btw: One wish to the Debian community regarding the VCFe: Perhaps someone who’s familiar with the Debian m68k Port could give a talk about how Debian plans to save this port although the old hardware isn’t fast enough to fit the requirements for inclusion in a Debian release. This would give a really interesting talk about old and new hardware. Talks can be held at least in German or Englisch IIRC. TIA. :-)

Update 16:26h: I thought of this mail by Wouter Verhelst about how modern ColdFire computers could run buildds for a hybrid m68k and ColdFire port when writing this paragraph. See also this Symlink story [German] about that topic.

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