Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 10, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Do you really need to upgrade your Apple TV’s hard drive?

Let’s head deep into Apple TV video geekiness shall we?

Many users, and I was one of them, looked at the Apple TV’s 40 GB hard drive, and said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

In what seemed like a matter of hours, other Apple TV fans came up with hardware hacks to add a bigger hard drive. Heck, within days, there were Apple authorized resellers who could add a bigger hard drive for you and not blow away your warranty at the same time. But, now I really wonder if you need to go to all that trouble.

I took a long, hard look at the Apple TV’s actual video output, at its networking capabilities, and what happened in the real world when I watched movies and TV by streaming them instead of storing them on my Apple TV’s hard drive. Here’s what I found.

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April 9, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Why the Apple TV is your Best Media Extender Choice

Tens of thousands of words have now been written on the Apple TV. Let me give you some bottom-line words. The Apple TV is the best media extender on the planet. Period. End of statement.

Now, some writers will tell you that an Xbox 360 or another media extender like D-Link’s DSM-520 Wireless HD Media Player, or Media Center Extender WMCE54AG already can give you everything Apple TV does and more. Unlike those people, though, I’ve been using, and getting annoyed at, media extenders for years now. Here’s the key difference: the Apple TV works, the others don’t.

Oh, you can get any of them to work. All it takes is blood, sweat, tears, and an electrical engineering degree. Well, OK, I’m kidding about the degree, but not about the rest.

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April 9, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Debian 4.0 finally arrives… does anyone care?

A few months late, Debian 4.0, aka Etch, has been released, but how many people actually will be running it?

That’s not a trite question. It wasn’t that long ago that a new release of Debian would have the Linux world excited and downloading it. Now… well, Debian Etch isn’t exactly being greeted with yawns — but excitement?… that’s not a word I’d use to describe the reactions I’m hearing.

What I’m hearing about instead, is problems.

Now, some of these are minor. I, for example, find it more than almost stupid beyond my powers of description that Debian’s free software political correctness has them renaming Firefox to IceWeasel, Thunderbird to Icedove, and Seamonkey to Iceape. But, OK, while this will mean that Debian’s Mozilla programs will forever more be not as up to date as all other distributions’ versions, this is petty anti-stuff.

Some of the other problems, however, are down right serious. For example, if you use two or more network interfaces on your Debian server or a Debian system acting as a router, Etch is going to flat out break at least one of your interfaces.

Etch comes with CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH_CACHED (experimental) enabled in its kernel. This setting has long been known to break iproute’s multipath behavior. Iproute is a collection of TCP/IP network utilities. These utilities form the foundation for almost all Linux traffic control and multi-routing. The effect is if you’re running Etch on a system connecting to say multiple ISP (Internet Service Providers), no matter how you set up iproute, you will only be able to use one of those connections. The other one might as well be on Mars.

According to Don Armstrong, a Debian developer, writing on Slashdot, the reason that this “slipped through the release engineering for the new stable release is quite simply because no one reported it as a bug.”

While that’s understandable, it’s not a perfect explanation. After all, this problem with Etch, and its fix, had already been reported on other, albeit unofficial Debian sites such as Debian Help and Debian Administration.

Another problem I’ve been hearing a lot about is the state of the X Window System installer. I’ve heard the X Window System described as “State of the art for 2000.” I’ve worked with Debian Etch enough this morning to agree that that’s a fair description.

Now, in all fairness there are also reasons for this. In a Slashdot note, David Nusinow, a Debian developer, explained. “The Debian X Strike Force burned the entire release cycle moving first from XFree86 to Xorg, and then from the monolithic Xorg to modular Xorg. By the time it all that was finished, about a year and a half had passed and there was a few months to polish things up for the release.”

“During this time,” Nusinow continued, “essentially an entirely new team was built up (only one person from the team that worked on XFree86 in Sarge is still an active member) and there was huge changes as the entire codebase was repackaged for 7.0 and we moved from a private SVN [Subversion, a popular version control system] repo to git.debian.org, which was no small feat while we did our best to keep the updates coming at a good pace.”

I’ll add to that comment that on top of all that, Etch is actually shipping with an even newer version of the X.org windows manager, version 7.1. Still, it is troubling that when so many Debian-based Linux distributions, such as the extremely attractive Xandros, can manage to deliver excellent and easy to set up graphical user interfaces, that the base distribution is still stuck in the stone tools and bunny skins age of X-based GUI setups.

What I find especially troublesome is that Nusinow began his note with: “We know it’s a pain, and it’s a major goal for the next release.” I’ve got three problems with this. First, Debian has always been about “We release it when it’s done.” This sure doesn’t look done to me. Second, the last version of Debian, 3.1 Sarge, came out in June 2005. Will it take almost two years to fix this?

Finally, if only one developer made it from one release to another on something as fundamental as the windowing system, can we take that to mean that in the all-volunteer Debian developer force the odds are lousy that a programmer is actually going to stick with the work? We already know that Debian had an enormous internal fight over some developers getting paid and that as a direct result of that dispute other developers slowed down their work on Etch.

With all this, how state of the art can Debian really be? How important is Debian really? It seems to me that while Debian in the past has been the solid foundation of such excellent distributions as Ubuntu and MEPIS, this release shows that openSUSE and Fedora are the community Linuxes of the future.

April 4, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

A first look at SimplyMEPIS 6.5

I have a nomination for the “Worst possible situation to review an operating system” award. Review it, SimplyMEPIS 6.5 release candidate 2, while stuck in a hotel room 2,000 miles from home with food-poisoning.

Trust me, in a situation like this, you are not in the mood to put up with any crap from your computer’s operating system. You’ve got enough going wrong with you without any thing else going wrong.

So, there I was in Salt Lake City, sick as a dog, with my faithful IBM T40 ThinkPad. This system uses a 1.5 GHz Pentium M processor with 1 MB of L2 cache, and a 400 MHz FSB (Front Side Bus). It has 512 MB of DDR SDRAM memory, and a built-in ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 AGP 4x with 32 MB of VRAM for graphics.

The T40s came from the factory with one of three different WiFi cards in a miniPCI slot; mine came equipped with an Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter. It also has a built-in 10/100 Ethernet port. In my case, I also use a NetGear RangeMax WPN511 WiFi card because of its faster — 802.11g — performance and that the card itself has better range than any Centrino-based laptop I’ve ever used

On this system, I had zero — nada — trouble installing the new distribution. Despite what you may read elsewhere about how hard installing Linux is, installing a modern Linux, like MEPIS, which is based on Ubuntu, is a snap on 95 out of 100 systems. I don’t even recall the last time I had to do anything more complicated than hitting the enter button when installing Linux. That’s a good thing, because I don’t think I could have done much more than that on this particular go-around.

SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is built on the 2.6.17 Linux kernel, based on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Service), aka “Dapper Drake,” by the way. Until version 6.0, MEPIS had been built on Debian, but MEPIS designer Warren Woodford found that Debian Stable was too far behind the curve, and Debian Testing/Unstable was advancing too quickly and breaking too often, so he switched to Ubuntu.

Unlike Ubuntu, which uses GNOME for its default desktop, MEPIS uses KDE 3.5.3. As a long-time KDE user, that’s fine by me. The last thing I needed in that hotel room was an interface that I didn’t know by heart.

I was also happy to see all the familiar application faces that I expect to see on a first-rate Linux desktop: Firefox 2.03, OpenOffice 2.02, Thunderbird 1.5.0.10, Gaim 1.5.1 CSV, and so on. The only missing program that I always require on any desktop was the world’s best email/groupware client, Evolution.

That wasn’t really a problem, though, because MEPIS uses the Synaptic 0.57.8 package manager as a front end to the software management apt utility. This is already set to look for new and updated programs on MEPIS’s and Ubuntu’s own repositories, so installing the program took little more than entering its name, and then waiting for the download and installation to complete.

That said, this kind of application installation is only truly easy for someone who already knows what program they’re looking for. Linspire’s forthcoming CNR (“Click ‘N Run”) download and software management service for desktop Linux will go a long way towards making it easy for anyone to download and install Linux applications. While MEPIS has not committed to this system, Ubuntu is joining forces with Linspire in the new CNR. Perhaps MEPIS will eventually follow suit.

Of course to upgrade any program, I needed to be connected to the Internet. Even stuck in a hotel room with a strange network, I had no trouble hooking into the net using either of my WiFi interfaces or the Ethernet connection.

Once home, MEPIS also did well with hooking into my home LAN’s Windows/Samba-based network. This LAN uses both NT domain style and AD (Active Directory) authentication, but MEPIS, armed with Samba 3.0.22, was able to find, authenticate, and use my network’s CIFS (Common Internet File Systems) hard drives and printers.

MEPIS 6.5 also comes with the ntfs-3g driver for reading and writing NTFS partitions from user space. This stable, open-source file system manager is invaluable on dual-boot systems. With it, you can both read and write files living on XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, and Vista file systems. I don’t tend to use dual-boot systems myself — desktop Linux is fine for me — but on those systems where I do run both Linux and Windows, I’ve already found this new functionality to be invaluable.

Back at my home office, I was also able to see how MEPIS did with its new 3D desktop support. MEPIS comes with Beryl 0.2.0 Final, which is a combined window manager and composite manager that uses OpenGL to provide graphics acceleration.

Thanks to this outstanding business network support, I wouldn’t hesitate to put MEPIS into a small business. While MEPIS certainly doesn’t have the corporate support that Novell can offer you with SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), I think it would work well in offices that have a Linux expert around to help get users over any rough spots.

Since any kind of graphics magic is just asking for trouble on an older laptop, I tested MEPIS with Beryl on an HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n PC. That system has 2GB of RAM, a hyper-threaded 2.8 GHz Pentium D 920 dual-core processor, and an NVIDIA GeForce 6200SE video card that takes up 256 MB of the system’s main RAM. I figured this system would have no trouble with Beryl, although Vista Aero wants more resources before it will do its magic.

I was not disappointed. Beryl .20 worked well on this system. It was, however, a bit cranky to set up. While MEPIS goes the extra mile to help you with Beryl — for example, it provides a package, mepis-beryl, that implements a basic Beryl setup — you may still have to do a lot of manual tweaking to get it the way you want it.

For example, MEPIS and the Beryl Aquamarine windows decoration set simply do not work well together. You also need to keep your eye on what version of SimplyMEPIS, X.org, and AIGLX and NVIDIA display drivers you’re using, to make sure they’re all in sync. For example, I discovered the hard way that XGL with X.org 7.0, which is what Ubuntu Dapper and MEPIS 6.0 use, will not work with MEPIS 6.5. I made the mistake of doing a partial upgrade from 6.0 to 6.5 and spent far too much trying to get MEPIS 6.0’s X.org 7.0 to work with the MEPIS 6.5’s Beryl .20 and the NVIDIA 1.0.9746 driver. They don’t work together.

Instead, I needed to upgrade to MEPIS 6.5’s X.org 7.1. Since you’re going to need to replace all your existing Beryl files and setup if you upgrade from Ubuntu or MEPIS 6.0 to 6.5, you’ll be better off doing a clean install, rather then try to save time by preserving your existing 3D desktop setup. Otherwise, as I now know to my sorrow, you’ll only end up wasting time.

That said, I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on Beryl and its older brother, Compiz, and I’ve found that MEPIS has lots of good company in having trouble with 3D desktops. More often than not, it seems, getting 3D desktops up and running the first time on many distributions, can be a real pain in the neck.

For me, desktop eye candy is not a necessity. I can live very happily without Aero Glass, Beryl, Compiz, Looking Glass, or any of the other 3D, translucent, etc., desktops. If you really must have this kind of thing today, then you should be running Mac OS X Tiger’s Aqua interface. It’s the only fancy desktop that just flat-out runs out of the box.

But, if what you want is a solid, easy-to-use, fully-featured KDE-based Linux desktop that you can use to get work done even when you’re feeling half-dead, SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is the desktop for you. It certainly was for me!

Since I completed this review, the final of MEPIS has appeared. The major changes include placing the SimplyMEPIS Assitant for Mactel on the CD; Amarok has been updated to support the MagnaTune music store; and Firefox and OpenOffice have been updated with their latest security patches.

The final of SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is now out. You can either buy a subscription to the distribution from the SimplyMEPIS store or download a copy from one of the MEPIS mirrors. If you elect to just download it, MEPIS, which could use your support, asks for contributions to keep building this outstanding desktop Linux distribution.

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux.

April 4, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

A first look at SimplyMEPIS 6.5

I have a nomination for the “Worst possible situation to review an operating system” award. Review it, SimplyMEPIS 6.5 release candidate 2, while stuck in a hotel room 2,000 miles from home with food-poisoning.

Trust me, in a situation like this, you are not in the mood to put up with any crap from your computer’s operating system. You’ve got enough going wrong with you without any thing else going wrong.

So, there I was in Salt Lake City, sick as a dog, with my faithful IBM T40 ThinkPad. This system uses a 1.5 GHz Pentium M processor with 1 MB of L2 cache, and a 400 MHz FSB (Front Side Bus). It has 512 MB of DDR SDRAM memory, and a built-in ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 AGP 4x with 32 MB of VRAM for graphics.

The T40s came from the factory with one of three different WiFi cards in a miniPCI slot; mine came equipped with an Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter. It also has a built-in 10/100 Ethernet port. In my case, I also use a NetGear RangeMax WPN511 WiFi card because of its faster — 802.11g — performance and that the card itself has better range than any Centrino-based laptop I’ve ever used

On this system, I had zero — nada — trouble installing the new distribution. Despite what you may read elsewhere about how hard installing Linux is, installing a modern Linux, like MEPIS, which is based on Ubuntu, is a snap on 95 out of 100 systems. I don’t even recall the last time I had to do anything more complicated than hitting the enter button when installing Linux. That’s a good thing, because I don’t think I could have done much more than that on this particular go-around.

SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is built on the 2.6.17 Linux kernel, based on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Service), aka “Dapper Drake,” by the way. Until version 6.0, MEPIS had been built on Debian, but MEPIS designer Warren Woodford found that Debian Stable was too far behind the curve, and Debian Testing/Unstable was advancing too quickly and breaking too often, so he switched to Ubuntu.

Unlike Ubuntu, which uses GNOME for its default desktop, MEPIS uses KDE 3.5.3. As a long-time KDE user, that’s fine by me. The last thing I needed in that hotel room was an interface that I didn’t know by heart.

I was also happy to see all the familiar application faces that I expect to see on a first-rate Linux desktop: Firefox 2.03, OpenOffice 2.02, Thunderbird 1.5.0.10, Gaim 1.5.1 CSV, and so on. The only missing program that I always require on any desktop was the world’s best email/groupware client, Evolution.

That wasn’t really a problem, though, because MEPIS uses the Synaptic 0.57.8 package manager as a front end to the software management apt utility. This is already set to look for new and updated programs on MEPIS’s and Ubuntu’s own repositories, so installing the program took little more than entering its name, and then waiting for the download and installation to complete.

That said, this kind of application installation is only truly easy for someone who already knows what program they’re looking for. Linspire’s forthcoming CNR (“Click ‘N Run”) download and software management service for desktop Linux will go a long way towards making it easy for anyone to download and install Linux applications. While MEPIS has not committed to this system, Ubuntu is joining forces with Linspire in the new CNR. Perhaps MEPIS will eventually follow suit.

Of course to upgrade any program, I needed to be connected to the Internet. Even stuck in a hotel room with a strange network, I had no trouble hooking into the net using either of my WiFi interfaces or the Ethernet connection.

Once home, MEPIS also did well with hooking into my home LAN’s Windows/Samba-based network. This LAN uses both NT domain style and AD (Active Directory) authentication, but MEPIS, armed with Samba 3.0.22, was able to find, authenticate, and use my network’s CIFS (Common Internet File Systems) hard drives and printers.

MEPIS 6.5 also comes with the ntfs-3g driver for reading and writing NTFS partitions from user space. This stable, open-source file system manager is invaluable on dual-boot systems. With it, you can both read and write files living on XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, and Vista file systems. I don’t tend to use dual-boot systems myself — desktop Linux is fine for me — but on those systems where I do run both Linux and Windows, I’ve already found this new functionality to be invaluable.

Back at my home office, I was also able to see how MEPIS did with its new 3D desktop support. MEPIS comes with Beryl 0.2.0 Final, which is a combined window manager and composite manager that uses OpenGL to provide graphics acceleration.

Thanks to this outstanding business network support, I wouldn’t hesitate to put MEPIS into a small business. While MEPIS certainly doesn’t have the corporate support that Novell can offer you with SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), I think it would work well in offices that have a Linux expert around to help get users over any rough spots.

Since any kind of graphics magic is just asking for trouble on an older laptop, I tested MEPIS with Beryl on an HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n PC. That system has 2GB of RAM, a hyper-threaded 2.8 GHz Pentium D 920 dual-core processor, and an NVIDIA GeForce 6200SE video card that takes up 256 MB of the system’s main RAM. I figured this system would have no trouble with Beryl, although Vista Aero wants more resources before it will do its magic.

I was not disappointed. Beryl .20 worked well on this system. It was, however, a bit cranky to set up. While MEPIS goes the extra mile to help you with Beryl — for example, it provides a package, mepis-beryl, that implements a basic Beryl setup — you may still have to do a lot of manual tweaking to get it the way you want it.

For example, MEPIS and the Beryl Aquamarine windows decoration set simply do not work well together. You also need to keep your eye on what version of SimplyMEPIS, X.org, and AIGLX and NVIDIA display drivers you’re using, to make sure they’re all in sync. For example, I discovered the hard way that XGL with X.org 7.0, which is what Ubuntu Dapper and MEPIS 6.0 use, will not work with MEPIS 6.5. I made the mistake of doing a partial upgrade from 6.0 to 6.5 and spent far too much trying to get MEPIS 6.0’s X.org 7.0 to work with the MEPIS 6.5’s Beryl .20 and the NVIDIA 1.0.9746 driver. They don’t work together.

Instead, I needed to upgrade to MEPIS 6.5’s X.org 7.1. Since you’re going to need to replace all your existing Beryl files and setup if you upgrade from Ubuntu or MEPIS 6.0 to 6.5, you’ll be better off doing a clean install, rather then try to save time by preserving your existing 3D desktop setup. Otherwise, as I now know to my sorrow, you’ll only end up wasting time.

That said, I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on Beryl and its older brother, Compiz, and I’ve found that MEPIS has lots of good company in having trouble with 3D desktops. More often than not, it seems, getting 3D desktops up and running the first time on many distributions, can be a real pain in the neck.

For me, desktop eye candy is not a necessity. I can live very happily without Aero Glass, Beryl, Compiz, Looking Glass, or any of the other 3D, translucent, etc., desktops. If you really must have this kind of thing today, then you should be running Mac OS X Tiger’s Aqua interface. It’s the only fancy desktop that just flat-out runs out of the box.

But, if what you want is a solid, easy-to-use, fully-featured KDE-based Linux desktop that you can use to get work done even when you’re feeling half-dead, SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is the desktop for you. It certainly was for me!

Mepis has always include a few handy little utility programs, and 6.5 makes them easier to use then ever. Here, for example, is a utility to put entire directories, or your own Mepis desktop for that matter, on a USB drive. No fuss, no muss.

Since I completed this review, the final of MEPIS has appeared. The major changes include placing the SimplyMEPIS Assitant for Mactel on the CD; Amarok has been updated to support the MagnaTune music store; and Firefox and OpenOffice have been updated with their latest security patches.

The final of SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is now out. You can either buy a subscription to the distribution from the SimplyMEPIS store or download a copy from one of the MEPIS mirrors. If you elect to just download it, MEPIS, which could use your support, asks for contributions to keep building this outstanding desktop Linux distribution.

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux,

March 28, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Bye HP Digital Entertainment Center, Hi HP MediaSmart TV

According to a report in CEPro, a publication for people in the custom electronics installation and support business, Hewlett-Packard is dropping out of the DEC (Digital Entertainment Center) biz.

DECs, for those of you who haven’t met them, are computers that look like A/V (audio/video) equipment so you can put them right into your entertainment center. The latest and greatest of these was the HP DEC z565

It sounds like a good idea doesn’t it? Instead of fooling around with media extenders like the Apple TV or a D-Link DSM-520 MediaLounge Wireless HD Media Player, you can just put the whole PC nine-yards in your media room without it looking techno-shabby.

So, why is HP bringing it to a close? They’re not telling me, but I know I know the answer: Price.

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