What do the Taiwanese know that we don't? The country recently decided that all PCs purchased for government use must be Linux compatible. The requirement came into effect last month and affects around 120,000 new desktop PC purchases.

Forget CPUs for a moment, most of the kit running on your computer's motherboard is assembled in Taiwan. Gigabyte, MSI, Abit and Via are all Taiwanses companies, so what hardware changes are on the horizon that might prevent Linux compatibility?

It's long been known that Microsoft aim to lock their operating system into the BIOS, and there's little doubt that Vista - the corporation's five year, five billion dollar development dinosaur - will be the most locked-down, intrusive, snooping, spying Windows ever.

The US has been going Digital Rights Management-crazy for years. The good ole boys of the Recording Industry Association of America don't even want you posting videos of yourself dancing to music now - though maybe that's understandable in the case of this guy. So the sooner they can get some proprietary hardware stitched into the fabric of your system the happier they'll be.

Meanwhile our own sucky government have gone and signed up for another three years of Microsoft mediocreware in a deal that's supposed to save us poor old taxpayers $9 million dollars. Prove it, I say. We can't, they reply, cos the actual amounts spent are secret.

Let's be charitable. Let's say they managed to get a 10% discount. So instead of spending $30 million a year on MS-dross they're only going to be spending $27 million - on software they could be getting for nothing. Wow, some saving!

As a poster to the NZOSS observed,"If you got a 20% discount off bottled water, would you consider the saving compelling enough to wash you car with it?"

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:46 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Here's a summary of the responses from our highly unscientific Vroooom! test last week. I've sorted them by provider and package (where known), then fastest to slowest.

At best, the results give a hint of what to expect from a broadband service. At worst... well they don't tell you much at all.

But we can draw one firm conclusion: with download speeds of almost 5Mbps and uploads of 6Mbps, we all want to work where Mal works!

Provider/Package	Download Speed (kbps)	Upload Speed (kbps)	Tester
ihug 2Mbps Light	1,596	131	Berryb
ihug 2Mbps Light	1,535	131	Berryb
ihug 3.5	3,160	133	Jack Gruschow
Ihug Light	3,390	118	Jeremy
Ihug Light	3,376	127	Zippity
Ihug Light	3,239	131	Robert Murray
ihug Medium	3,405	128	Andrew Crawford
ihug Power	3,357	503	Martyn Chalmers
Inspire Wireless 1Mb	900	850	David Hill
Orcon Starter	260	129	Robert Hall
Orcon Surf Starter	263	128	Oldferix
Orcon Surfer Permium	3,424	131	Fred Low
Paradise 5Gb	2,022	75	Arnie
TelstraClear 2Mbps	2,026	392	personthingy
TelstraClear 2Mbps	1,894	1,470	Geoff Palmer
TelstraClear 2Mbps	1,888	1,683	Anonymous
TelstraClear fibre (work)	2,148	656	Chris
Packing Shed: Jetstream Adv	2,626	104	David Slater
unknown (work)	4,816	6,099	Mal
unknown	2,137	129	Shane
Wave Medium	3,423	131	Peter Harland
WorldxChange Xnet Xtreme	1,913	118	Stephen Heighway
Xnet HLS	1,866	123	Daniel Faulknor
Xnet Xtreme	601	103	roddy_boy
Xtra 3.5Mbps plan	507	130	Anonymous
Xtra Adventure	3,163	125	Terry Porritt
Xtra Adventure	3,100	125	Paul Barratt
Xtra Adventure	2,962	122	Matt Stubbins
Xtra Adventure	2,536	109	stu161204
Xtra Adventure	2,000	110	Paul Barratt
Xtra Adventure	1,445	127	sarel
Xtra Adventure	797	130	someone
Xtra Adventure	772	128	Jason
Xtra Explorer	1,112	129	Kelem
Xtra Explorer	1,062	132	Jim Air
Xtra Explorer	507	130	David Gould
Xtra Jetstream	4,527	657	Brian Wheeler
Xtra Pro	467	130	Greg

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 12:56 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 11 )

Update: Some interesting numbers coming in. More please! (Check the Comments section to see how you compare.)

The lead in this week's print edtion of ComputerWorld has Telecom promising 24Mbit/s broadband connections by the end of this year. How does that compare with what you've got now? Well check out Consumer magazine's Broadband Speed Test. Here's what I got from my TelstraClear HighSpeed 20GB connection...



That translates to a transfer rate of 236.8 KB/sec download and 183.8 KB/sec upload.

What numbers do you get? Post a comment and we'll compare... (The winner of a copy of Norton Save & Restore in our random Comments draw was Brian Wheeler - CK.)

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 54 )

If you're a Windows user you'd better not miss your monthly Patch Tuesdays especially as this month's - released on June 13 - contained eight "Critical", three "Important" and one "Moderate" update for "the most secure Windows ever". How important is this one? According to scurrilous UK tech news website The Register;

Put simply, all Windows users, unless they're running Windows 95 in an underground Siberian bunker without access to the net, are going to need to update their systems.

Patch size depends on the components you have installed and this month ranges from 161MB to a staggering 1.3GB. And that's just the patches! (It's all the more staggering when you consider you can download a complete Linux operating system - including OpenOffice.org and a heap of other common tools and applications - in under 700MB.)

Of course Linux suffers the occasional security glitch too, but most 'criticals' are patched within 24 hours and updates issued. Users aren't left waiting around for up to a month hoping they won't get hit. Like most major Linuxes, my SUSE system checks daily and advises if anything's amiss. Not bad service from a free OS!

Hopefully after this update you won't be left with one of the 1-in-300 PCs that contains malware - and that's a Microsoft figure!

Happy downloading...  ;-)

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 7 )

(Catchup: Part I. Part II, Part III)

Handy though it may be, you can't really judge an operating system running it from CD. File access times are diabolical compared with a hard disk installation. Kicking off OpenOffice.org for example takes around 40 seconds from the SimplyMepis CD. From hard disk it takes less than half that time.

Before you begin, boot Windows and defragment the drive. Also backup any important files.

So how do you install SimplyMepis locally? Start by clicking the Install Me icon on the desktop or choose Mepis Config from the K-Menu then select Install Mepis on Hard Drive.


Linux identifies disk drives by letter, starting, logically enough, with "a". The Use Disk drop-down list will show all available hard disk drives.

Unless you want to dedicate an entire drive to Linux, you'll almost certainly want to click the Run QTParted button. As its name suggests, QTParted is a partition editor. It'll show devices in their full Linux-qualified form such as /dev/hda. Select the drive you want to install to and let QTParted scan its layout.

Most Windows installations occupy the entire disk so QTParted will only show one partition. That's fine, we just need to resize it to make room for Mepis. Right-click the partition, choose Resize and adjust the slider to make some room.

How much space do you need? You can get away with as little as 3GB but I'd suggest at least of 5GB. 10GB is even better.


At present I only have one partition, so here I'm resizing it to add 10GB of free space. Here's what the partition table looks like now...
 



The new partition appears right away but changes aren't actually made to the drive till you click the Commit button. You can undo changes - up until you Commit them - by clicking Undo.

Now right-click the new partition, choose Create and select Create As: Extended Partition. QTParted will look something like this...




There are a number of reasons for turning the free space into an Extended partition. Due to historical reasons, disk drives can't handle more than four Primary partitions, and Windows won't work if more than one Primary partition is active. (Linux isn't so fussy.) What's more, you can sub-divide the disk into more than four areas under an Extended partition.

So let's do just that. I want to create a root partition (identified by the "/" symbol), a swap partition, and a home partition (identified as "/home"). Technically, Linux only requires a / and a swap partition, but keeping /home in its own area means you can upgrade the operating system without losing any of your work or settings. That makes life much, much easier!

Right-click the free space line and choose Create. This 5GB area will be for our / partition.


I'm allowing half a gigabyte for swap space as the machine I'm using has 1GB of RAM. As a general rule, set the swap space to equal your PC's RAM up to a maximum of 512MB. (Note the partition type differs for swap space.)


And the remaining space will become my /home drive...



QTParted's partition table looks a bit more complicated now, yet still strangely logical...



When you're happy with your new layout, click the Commit button to write it to disk then close QTParted. You'll find yourself back in the Installation Dialog 1 so click Next to proceed.



This should be pretty straightforward. Simply click the drop-down arrows and select the partitions you just created for each of the three partition types.

The Next button takes us to the actual Mepis installation. This will typically take between 10 and 45 minutes depending on the speed of your machine.



Once everything's installed. you're then prompted for where to put the boot loader. This is a clever piece of software that presents a menu, allowing you to choose whether to boot Windows or Linux. Unless you're a guru, stick with the defaults...



Now you're prompted to create a user account and set your own root password. (Remember when running from the CD the default user was "demo" and the root password was "root".) I suggest use more sophisticated passwords for your hard disk installation...



You're now prompted for a computer and a domain name. The machine Mepis is running on is called Boris, so...

The domain name can be anything and in most cases isn't used - unless you have a special network setup.

Note that I've set the Workgroup name to "workgroup". If your PC's part of a Windows workgroup you should set the appropriate name here. (Windows machines default to a workgroup name of "workgroup".)



In Localization Defaults I set the Locale to en_NZ (English/New Zealand). This informs the system that we use the "$" sign for currency, format our dates dd-mm-yyyy, and so forth.



And the very last option is to choose which services to enable at boot. The defaults are shown below. (Note that you can change these once the system is up and running.)



Now all that remains is to remove the installation CD and restart your PC.


So what are you waiting for...?

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

(Catchup: Part I. Part II.) Not interested in Linux? Check out this awesome video clip instead.

The nice thing about the SimplyMepis boot CD is that you can save your work and your preferences without having to install LInux. All you need is a USB flash drive.

When you first plug the USB drive in it'll show up on the desktop with an icon and the device name...

Single-click the icon to open the Konqueror file manager or just drag and drop files onto the icon to write the to the drive. But that's just the beginning. You may have noticed a user named "onthego" when you first booted Mepis. If you add an "onthego" file to your USB drive, you can automatically save not only your work but all your prefered settings too.

Before you begin, make sure the USB drive is unmounted. That doesn't mean disconnected! Linux recognises two states with devices like disk drives; unmounted and mounted. The former simply means that Linux is aware of the device but it hasn't yet been authorised to work with the system. The latter means it has. With things like USB drives, mounting is done automatically as soon as you click on the icon. Hard disk partitions, on the other hand, must first be authorised by root. To unmount the USB drive, right-click the icon and choose Safely unmount. (There's even a visual indicator of the drive's status. When mounted, the icon shows a little green diamond underneath it, as above. Unmounted, the diamond disappears.)

Now click K-Menu, choose Mepis Config and, under System Maintenance, Create OnTheGo Disk. The Disk and Partition tags should show information about your USB drive. The default size of the OnTheGo partition is 100MB and you can choose a standard ISO file format or a password-protected AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) one.


Simply click Create to create the file.

Now it's time to set Linux up the way you like it. There are far too many options to detail here but you might like to start by ditching that boring background pic. Right-click the desktop and choose Configure Desktop then Background. There's a whole load more options under Control Centre on the K-menu that allow you to change everything from icon size to double-click behaviour.

Once you've set up Mepis just the way you like it and are ready to shut down, go back into Mepis Config and this time choose Copy Between Desktops. You want to Copy From: demo (the account you signed in on) To: onthego.


You also have the option of What to Copy. The default Home folder's a mere 600KB. OnTheGo defaults to 100MB, so that leaves you plenty of room for your own stuff. The Entire home option will save everything including your emails, browser settings, documents, items on your desktop and all your configuration settings. Click Copy and you're done.

To test your new configuration choose Logout from the K-menu followed by End Current Session. With the USB drive still connected, log in again as onthego (password "onthego") and you should find everything magically restored.

Now armed with just the SimplyMepis CD and your USB drive, you can take your complete Linux setup anywhere!

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

(Missed Part I? Click here.)

Don't boot your SimplyMepis CD yet! While you're still in your old operating system make a note of your current modem and/or network settings. And your ISP's connection settings too. Now simply re-start the PC.

On boot SimplyMephis presents a number of choices. The default, BOOT NORMAL, is best for newer systems. If you have display problems, try BOOT VESA. On older systems use BOOT MINIMUM. SM's recommended configuration is a Pentium-III or better and 256MB of RAM. It will work with older CPUs and as little as 64MB of RAM but be warned that "performance may be poor."

Also keep in mind that you are, initially at least, running from CD which is way slower than running from a hard drive.

First up you'll find a login window containing three pre-configured users;


Along the top of the box is the name and version number of the distribution. The garbage in brackets is the build number of the system's kernel build number. Paswords mirror user names so sign-in as demo, password demo.

And that's it. You're running Linux!

SimplyMepis opens two windows on startup, a selection of tips and a sound mixer called KMix. The reason for the latter is that some systems default to silence when booting so if you didn't hear a startup tune, check the volume slider.

Like all Linux systems, SimplyMepis protects key configuration settings from general user tampering by requiring a root password. Root = God in Linux (or "Administrator" in Windows.) The default root password is "root" (without the quotes) and you'll need it for some of the following.

To configure network settings, click the K-Menu button, choose Mepis Config and select Network Interfaces. SM handles wired and wireless networks in all possible flavours. Note that the first network card is always "eth0" in Linux.

Modem users should click the K-Menu button, choose Internet, Connection then the Internet Dialup Tool to set your configuration. If you're using a winmodem, be warned that not all are usable under Linux on account of their tie-in to the Windows operating system. I have had some success in getting them to work but if you don't fancy messing around you can pick up Linux-compatible modem for under $30 from DSE.

With luck and good management that's all you'll need for a fully functional internet-connected Linux system. If you're having problems, the Documents folder on the desktop contains a couple of files called Quick Start and Tips. You can also download the Mepis User Guide (it's around 2.6MB) from this link.

Go ahead and try out your new environment. Do whatever you like. You can't actually break anything - even as root - since you're running from CD. Next time we'll look personalising the configuration and how to keep those new settings, and even take them from PC to PC.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )