Actually a big part of the RAM usage *is* Xubuntu - see the 'simple comparisons' section of http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7520/1.html where it talks about RAM usage immediately after boot including Lubuntu, which is a much lighter LXDE-based variant of Ubuntu. Lubuntu should become an official Ubuntu derivative using LXDE. The RAM usage stats from that page are:
* Lubuntu 58 MB * Xubuntu 157 MB * Ubuntu 154 MB
Yes, Ubuntu used slightly less than Xubuntu, which is a surprise - presumably this was a recent Xubuntu version which is more bloated.
When you have various apps running including Firefox, Lubuntu apparently used about 150 MB vs over 300 MB for Xubuntu / Ubuntu.
Since Lubuntu is quite hard to track down, here are some links:
One of the best things about SSH is rsync - you only need an SSH enabled login on a machine, with a copy of rsync, to be able to efficiently copy data with block-level incremental efficiency. Even better, there are excellent backup tools such as rsnapshot that build on rsync to store multiple versions of a file in the backup file tree, using hard links to avoid storing the same version twice - so every backup is a full backup in terms of easy recovery, but an incremental backup in terms of network and storage efficiency.
Did you even read the article? I guess not, or you'd realize that "dozens of emails", faxes and 2 months is not a "small set of hoops" to allow someone to distribute software (regardless of whether it's free or commercial). If Palm doesn't change this approach, they are just about guaranteed to fail.
Mod parent up even higher... in fact mod down the ones of equal score, this is probably the only comment that matters. It's unlikely Phoronix disabled all the debug features (would probably need a system recompile) so the benchmarks are most likely a waste of time.
You can also install Ubuntu from a mini ISO (from Ubuntu.com) which gives you a really minimal CLI system, from which you can build things up. I did this on a home server recently and it ran comfortably in 128 MB.
Perl has a nice way to generate.exe's from Perl scripts, involving:
cpan -i PAR::Packer
pp -o myprog.exe myprog.pl
The end result is a.exe that can be run directly, no need to install (it unpacks itself then runs). Includes all CPAN libraries that you might use in the script.
Sounds like ZFS is very bleeding edge at the moment - a crash leaving your disks unrecoverable is worse than ext4, for example, which is a newer filesystem.
Having looked a bit at ZFS, it really needs x64 hardware with plenty of RAM (2GB plus), and Solaris has by far the best implementation. FreeBSD 7.x is next, followed by Linux's ZFS/FUSE. All IMHO, but from the reports I've seen it's a bit early to trust it on a non-Solaris platform and even on Solaris there are some bugs. (All IMHO, and there are production users on FreeBSD who are happy with it.)
LVM on Linux lets you do snapshots, but after losing thousands of files and several LVM logical volumes, including the backup filesystem on a separate disk (probably due to write caching being enabled on the hard disks themselves, as is the default), I'm trying to stay away from it.
For a backup server, if Solaris is not an option, I would use ext3 or possibly XFS (for faster deletes), disable write caching on all drives (hdparm -W0/dev/sdX in/etc/rc.local). You will lose some performance but the risk of losing large amounts of data due to a power outage or system crash is far less.
The nice thing about ZFS is the block level checksumming which can detect disk and memory problems, and better snapshots than LVM. However, using ext3 with DAR or rsnapshot, plus par2 (Reed-Solomon checksums for error recovery), gives you some of the same error recovery and a more proven underlying filesystem.
These are all built on top of rsync and turn it into a real backup tool by storing multiple versions of your files. The challenge will be the very large video files, but if you only write to these once, they are a good option.
Rsnapshot uses hard links combined with rsync --delete - rather than actually delete an old copy of a file, it unlinks it, and when there are no changes in a file, it simply creates a link to it under the current snapshot. It's not as space efficient as DAR but your big files are probably already compressed, and perhaps don't change day to day, so it may be a good option here. There are many other rsync-based tools that are equivalent, but this is easy to configure and has an active community. It only does 'pull backups' i.e. the backup server logs into the system to back up, and if you are doing full backups of the whole system, it needs a root login.
rdiff-backup stores block-level incremental diffs within its repository - it apparently has issues dealing with extremely large files so I'd be sure to test this. However it doesn't need a root login on the system you are backing up, and is more space efficient than rsnapshot. It has some level of checksumming to help detect corrupt backup files.
duplicity is a bit like rdiff-backup, but apparently does encryption as well, if that's important.
BackupPC is more work to set up, and really designed to back up a large number of client PCs, but it does provide more features, and has rsync as an option on network level. It does de-duplication across the client PCs which is good for full system backups. However, Windows backups mean you have to mess about with volume shadow copies (VSS), as for all these tools.
If you don't want rsync for some reason (despite it being insanely fast and network efficient) you could use DAR - like tar only much better for disk to disk backups, as you can extract a few files efficiently without reading the entire archive from start to finish (as tar requires). Also it does more granular compression and checksums, so if you lose some blocks due to disk corruption in the middle of the archive, most of the files can still be recovered. The rsync tools have the same granularity to some degree, but don't normally do any compression.
The world really, really needs a guide to the major categories of backup tools, pointing people to the right type of tool based on their requirements...
WiFi in Motion does include a 3 watt amplifier and a high gain antenna, so it should get 3G signal at longer ranges than a normal mobile phone. However, it's not a panacea - satellite is the only way to get really complete coverage everywhere.
For P4s and Celeron Prescott/Northwood using same technology, just install cpufreqd and make sure it's using the ondemand governor. cpufrequtils is also useful and doesn't clash. The actual work is done by the kernel module p4_clockmod, must be in/etc/modules.
This makes some difference to power consumption. As for temperature, the best thing I did was to remove the old thermal paste on the CPU/cooler and apply some new Zaward paste - CPU temperature dropped by 20 degrees C (something like 30F).
I suspect that if displays combining the best of e-ink and LCDs, plus multi-week battery life, become available in a netbook or general tablet format, ebook readers would fall by the wayside, or at least become much less popular. Another way of looking at the Kindle is that it's a specialised ARM-based netbook with a great display for reading books.
One other thing: to get WPA working on Linux, you can simply get rid of Network Manager and use wicd - this is very lightweight and works really well, so it's ideal for older laptops, but still gives you a simple GUI to configure things.
160 MB is not much for a modern Linux distro with a GUI. If you want a Debian/Ubuntu base, try plain Debian using something like LXDE or OpenBox, or try Crunchbang, which is an Ubuntu derivative that should be OK in 160 MB if you use a slim web browser such as Midori/Webkit, Opera or similar. Firefox is just too heavy for 160MB unless you limit yourself to only a few tabs. The nice thing about Debian/Ubuntu as a base is that you have an enormous list of apps available, and very easy security updates.
I also set up a Windows 2000 machine the other day for someone, mostly because it had to run Windows-only accessible apps and I only had a few hours to set it up. It ran well, but then Xubuntu also worked pretty well and was also quite easy to setup, and unlike Windows 2000 will get security updates for a long time with easy upgrades every 3 years for the stable version.. However, Crunchbang would probably run better than Xubuntu as it uses OpenBox rather than XFCE.
If these are too heavy for your requirements, try Tiny Core (10 MB download, can run in very little RAM e.g. 32 to 48 MB for GUI I think), Puppy (very easy to set up) or SliTaz (a little larger than Tiny Core and comes with more "out of the box").
Overall that sounds like a pretty good mix of languages. Far more important to get a wide understanding of different approaches than to learn any one language exclusively, and in the short term a mix is also much more marketable.
The only omission is functional programming, which is not yet commercially important but is incredibly powerful - one example is mlvirsh, which is a rewrite in the OCaml functional language of a C-based library, reducing number of lines of code by 85% - see http://libvirt.org/ocaml/README.txt for the stats.
I've only tried OpenNMS. It looks very powerful, but wasn't at all hard to get installed and configured on Ubuntu - it figures out the type of node it has discovered and shows useful data through SNMP, and can also do uptime monitoring, and is generally very scalable and configurable if needed.
You've already stopped yourself emigrating before you even started... I'd guess there are tens of thousands of Americans living in the UK - it really isn't that hard to migrate here, you just have to decide to do it. My first job on leaving university was in another country, which admittedly is easier in the EU. There was a lot to organise, but it was quite doable, and living in another country is actually great fun - stretches your brain and you end up learning a lot about another culture.
Have a look at the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890 - as a tab junkie, I've used this for some months and it works pretty well - tabs go down the side and are easily organised into trees, with new tabs by default going under the page where you opened them from. It has some annoyances when used with Tab Mix Plus but the biggest issue I find is that >100 tabs cause stability issues with Firefox on Linux.
Also, have a look for the Tab Hunter extension - lets you search for an open tab based on string in title. Needing this extension is a sure sign that you have too many tabs, of course...
You have a good point: for people to transfer easily to Linux they need at least the default common apps like Office and Photoshop to work in a similar way.
Gimpshop is a customization of Gimp that is meant to look and feel like Photoshop - worth a try. http://www.gimpshop.com/
This already works since Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) released over a year ago: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/AptUrl - just write a link that goes "apt:fortunes;frozen-bubble" instead of http://whatever/ and when an Ubuntu user clicks on this, it runs the equivalent of "apt-get install fortunes frozen-bubble". You can install any number of apps launched with a single click, and it's safe because they come from the repositories defined on the user's machine in/etc/apt/sources.list.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a big part of the RAM usage *is* Xubuntu - see the 'simple comparisons' section of http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7520/1.html where it talks about RAM usage immediately after boot including Lubuntu, which is a much lighter LXDE-based variant of Ubuntu. Lubuntu should become an official Ubuntu derivative using LXDE. The RAM usage stats from that page are:
* Lubuntu 58 MB
* Xubuntu 157 MB
* Ubuntu 154 MB
Yes, Ubuntu used slightly less than Xubuntu, which is a surprise - presumably this was a recent Xubuntu version which is more bloated.
When you have various apps running including Firefox, Lubuntu apparently used about 150 MB vs over 300 MB for Xubuntu / Ubuntu.
Since Lubuntu is quite hard to track down, here are some links:
* http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Lubuntu-50492.shtml - Lubuntu 9.10 Beta 14 - final release was due Oct 29th but isn't yet available.
* http://download.lxde.org/lubuntu-9.10/ - betas 14 and 23.
Or you could try the LXDE project's distro, or Debian with LXDE: http://lxde.org/download
Xubuntu installs more RAM-consuming daemons than some other XFCE-based distro installs such as Debian's - see http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090504#feature for a guide on how to slim down Xubuntu, resulting in about half the memory usage before starting applications. Distrowatch also did a similar guide on how to slim down the main Ubuntu distro here: http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20081215#feature
You could also try Crunchbang, an Ubuntu derivative that uses OpenBox: http://crunchbanglinux.org/ - or U-Lite which is even lighter, or see this thread for discussion of Linux distros for 192 MB RAM: http://www.linux.com/archive/forums/topic/4908
One of the best things about SSH is rsync - you only need an SSH enabled login on a machine, with a copy of rsync, to be able to efficiently copy data with block-level incremental efficiency. Even better, there are excellent backup tools such as rsnapshot that build on rsync to store multiple versions of a file in the backup file tree, using hard links to avoid storing the same version twice - so every backup is a full backup in terms of easy recovery, but an incremental backup in terms of network and storage efficiency.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1371703&cid=29451267 for more about rsnapshot and friends.
Did you even read the article? I guess not, or you'd realize that "dozens of emails", faxes and 2 months is not a "small set of hoops" to allow someone to distribute software (regardless of whether it's free or commercial). If Palm doesn't change this approach, they are just about guaranteed to fail.
Mod parent up even higher... in fact mod down the ones of equal score, this is probably the only comment that matters. It's unlikely Phoronix disabled all the debug features (would probably need a system recompile) so the benchmarks are most likely a waste of time.
You can also install Ubuntu from a mini ISO (from Ubuntu.com) which gives you a really minimal CLI system, from which you can build things up. I did this on a home server recently and it ran comfortably in 128 MB.
Perl has a nice way to generate .exe's from Perl scripts, involving:
cpan -i PAR::Packer
pp -o myprog.exe myprog.pl
The end result is a .exe that can be run directly, no need to install (it unpacks itself then runs). Includes all CPAN libraries that you might use in the script.
See http://search.cpan.org/dist/PAR-Packer/lib/pp.pm - on Windows, install Strawberry Perl, and everything above will 'just work'.
Sounds like ZFS is very bleeding edge at the moment - a crash leaving your disks unrecoverable is worse than ext4, for example, which is a newer filesystem.
Having looked a bit at ZFS, it really needs x64 hardware with plenty of RAM (2GB plus), and Solaris has by far the best implementation. FreeBSD 7.x is next, followed by Linux's ZFS/FUSE. All IMHO, but from the reports I've seen it's a bit early to trust it on a non-Solaris platform and even on Solaris there are some bugs. (All IMHO, and there are production users on FreeBSD who are happy with it.)
LVM on Linux lets you do snapshots, but after losing thousands of files and several LVM logical volumes, including the backup filesystem on a separate disk (probably due to write caching being enabled on the hard disks themselves, as is the default), I'm trying to stay away from it.
For a backup server, if Solaris is not an option, I would use ext3 or possibly XFS (for faster deletes), disable write caching on all drives (hdparm -W0 /dev/sdX in /etc/rc.local). You will lose some performance but the risk of losing large amounts of data due to a power outage or system crash is far less.
The nice thing about ZFS is the block level checksumming which can detect disk and memory problems, and better snapshots than LVM. However, using ext3 with DAR or rsnapshot, plus par2 (Reed-Solomon checksums for error recovery), gives you some of the same error recovery and a more proven underlying filesystem.
These are all built on top of rsync and turn it into a real backup tool by storing multiple versions of your files. The challenge will be the very large video files, but if you only write to these once, they are a good option.
Rsnapshot uses hard links combined with rsync --delete - rather than actually delete an old copy of a file, it unlinks it, and when there are no changes in a file, it simply creates a link to it under the current snapshot. It's not as space efficient as DAR but your big files are probably already compressed, and perhaps don't change day to day, so it may be a good option here. There are many other rsync-based tools that are equivalent, but this is easy to configure and has an active community. It only does 'pull backups' i.e. the backup server logs into the system to back up, and if you are doing full backups of the whole system, it needs a root login.
rdiff-backup stores block-level incremental diffs within its repository - it apparently has issues dealing with extremely large files so I'd be sure to test this. However it doesn't need a root login on the system you are backing up, and is more space efficient than rsnapshot. It has some level of checksumming to help detect corrupt backup files.
duplicity is a bit like rdiff-backup, but apparently does encryption as well, if that's important.
BackupPC is more work to set up, and really designed to back up a large number of client PCs, but it does provide more features, and has rsync as an option on network level. It does de-duplication across the client PCs which is good for full system backups. However, Windows backups mean you have to mess about with volume shadow copies (VSS), as for all these tools.
If you don't want rsync for some reason (despite it being insanely fast and network efficient) you could use DAR - like tar only much better for disk to disk backups, as you can extract a few files efficiently without reading the entire archive from start to finish (as tar requires). Also it does more granular compression and checksums, so if you lose some blocks due to disk corruption in the middle of the archive, most of the files can still be recovered. The rsync tools have the same granularity to some degree, but don't normally do any compression.
The world really, really needs a guide to the major categories of backup tools, pointing people to the right type of tool based on their requirements...
WiFi in Motion does include a 3 watt amplifier and a high gain antenna, so it should get 3G signal at longer ranges than a normal mobile phone. However, it's not a panacea - satellite is the only way to get really complete coverage everywhere.
For P4s and Celeron Prescott/Northwood using same technology, just install cpufreqd and make sure it's using the ondemand governor. cpufrequtils is also useful and doesn't clash. The actual work is done by the kernel module p4_clockmod, must be in /etc/modules.
This makes some difference to power consumption. As for temperature, the best thing I did was to remove the old thermal paste on the CPU/cooler and apply some new Zaward paste - CPU temperature dropped by 20 degrees C (something like 30F).
I suspect that if displays combining the best of e-ink and LCDs, plus multi-week battery life, become available in a netbook or general tablet format, ebook readers would fall by the wayside, or at least become much less popular. Another way of looking at the Kindle is that it's a specialised ARM-based netbook with a great display for reading books.
Nintendo disagrees with you about the Wii - it does support WPA2/AES apparently: http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/wii/en_na/onlineWirelessRouterWEPWPA.jsp
One other thing: to get WPA working on Linux, you can simply get rid of Network Manager and use wicd - this is very lightweight and works really well, so it's ideal for older laptops, but still gives you a simple GUI to configure things.
160 MB is not much for a modern Linux distro with a GUI. If you want a Debian/Ubuntu base, try plain Debian using something like LXDE or OpenBox, or try Crunchbang, which is an Ubuntu derivative that should be OK in 160 MB if you use a slim web browser such as Midori/Webkit, Opera or similar. Firefox is just too heavy for 160MB unless you limit yourself to only a few tabs. The nice thing about Debian/Ubuntu as a base is that you have an enormous list of apps available, and very easy security updates.
I also set up a Windows 2000 machine the other day for someone, mostly because it had to run Windows-only accessible apps and I only had a few hours to set it up. It ran well, but then Xubuntu also worked pretty well and was also quite easy to setup, and unlike Windows 2000 will get security updates for a long time with easy upgrades every 3 years for the stable version.. However, Crunchbang would probably run better than Xubuntu as it uses OpenBox rather than XFCE.
If these are too heavy for your requirements, try Tiny Core (10 MB download, can run in very little RAM e.g. 32 to 48 MB for GUI I think), Puppy (very easy to set up) or SliTaz (a little larger than Tiny Core and comes with more "out of the box").
I didn't find this patch on Linux or Windows through Check For Updates - currently the about:config change is the way to go.
Overall that sounds like a pretty good mix of languages. Far more important to get a wide understanding of different approaches than to learn any one language exclusively, and in the short term a mix is also much more marketable.
The only omission is functional programming, which is not yet commercially important but is incredibly powerful - one example is mlvirsh, which is a rewrite in the OCaml functional language of a C-based library, reducing number of lines of code by 85% - see http://libvirt.org/ocaml/README.txt for the stats.
Here's a similar thread from a while back that covers most of the options: http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/05/1812247
I've only tried OpenNMS. It looks very powerful, but wasn't at all hard to get installed and configured on Ubuntu - it figures out the type of node it has discovered and shows useful data through SNMP, and can also do uptime monitoring, and is generally very scalable and configurable if needed.
You've already stopped yourself emigrating before you even started... I'd guess there are tens of thousands of Americans living in the UK - it really isn't that hard to migrate here, you just have to decide to do it. My first job on leaving university was in another country, which admittedly is easier in the EU. There was a lot to organise, but it was quite doable, and living in another country is actually great fun - stretches your brain and you end up learning a lot about another culture.
Have a look at the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890 - as a tab junkie, I've used this for some months and it works pretty well - tabs go down the side and are easily organised into trees, with new tabs by default going under the page where you opened them from. It has some annoyances when used with Tab Mix Plus but the biggest issue I find is that >100 tabs cause stability issues with Firefox on Linux.
Also, have a look for the Tab Hunter extension - lets you search for an open tab based on string in title. Needing this extension is a sure sign that you have too many tabs, of course...
You have a good point: for people to transfer easily to Linux they need at least the default common apps like Office and Photoshop to work in a similar way.
Gimpshop is a customization of Gimp that is meant to look and feel like Photoshop - worth a try. http://www.gimpshop.com/
This already works since Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) released over a year ago: https://wiki.edubuntu.org/AptUrl - just write a link that goes "apt:fortunes;frozen-bubble" instead of http://whatever/ and when an Ubuntu user clicks on this, it runs the equivalent of "apt-get install fortunes frozen-bubble". You can install any number of apps launched with a single click, and it's safe because they come from the repositories defined on the user's machine in /etc/apt/sources.list.
Thanks for the tip. At least for Firefox 3 on Linux, this is set to true by default.