Green Tech Girl

Just what we need – another reason to upgrade our televisions and create more electronic waste! Though, at least this TV will save some space in the landfill once it’s thrown out. It’s the new LG super flat flatscreen. It is less than 7 millimeters thick. There’s no official name for it. Just think of it as the skinny jeans of the TV world:

So I downloaded and burned a copy of Fedora 11 Linux and found it won’t work at all on my Gateway laptop with the ATI built-in graphics card. The LiveCD wouldn’t work. Couldn’t even get to a desktop. I tried a bunch of different boot options (and yes, I tried “nomodeset”) and still it didn’t work.

Apparently, the latest bleeding edge Linux kernel doesn’t have ATI drivers that work with it. OK…why release a distro that won’t even work with a large number of graphics cards? That’s just strange to me.

I’ve downloaded Dreamlinux 3.5 instead. The LiveCD works perfectly and I’m installing it now, over a Linux Mint Elyssa installation, which was out of date. Review of Dreamlinux to come. (I still like Mint and I use it on my main computer.)

Thing is, I hate burning these CDs and then wasting them when they don’t work. A lot of useless techno-trash. I’ll give the Fedora CD to a friend who can hopefully use it.

My old Pentium III laptop has served as my testbed for Linux distributions that can work on older computers. So far, I’ve had Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint, and Puppy Linux installed. Most worked fairly well, except Linux Mint had a problem recognizing the 1400×1050 pixel monitor, and Puppy Linux screwed up my USB mouse.

I did like how fast Puppy Linux was, but the USB mouse problem was something I was unable to fix and made it not worth keeping the distro. (I also found Puppy to be a bit too techie in its style.) PCLinuxOS 2007 was actually the best, most stable Linux distro I’d had on here, but I was concerned they were moving to KDE 4 and knew that would never work on an old computer. Concerned about upgrades, I dropped PCLinuxOS to test other distros.

Fortunately, the PCLOS community has come out with a new flavor based on the LXDE desktop, so I can stop worrying about a forced KDE 4 upgrade. (They’ve also decided to stick to KDE 3.5 for their main release as well.)

Of course, I opted for the LXDE install. I’d never tried it, much less heard of it, but the screenshots looked nice enough. The LXDE version of PCLinuxOS comes as Live CD that doubles as the install disk. Installation was fairly easy, but I missed the information about logging in as root when I signed in. Because I was logged in as “guest,” when I hit the install button, I was asked for a password. You’d think after years of playing around with Linux I might have figured out to type in “root,” but I had no clue what to do. (I had to search the Wiki to see what to enter.) This could truly throw off a newbie.

This minor gripe aside, the rest of the installation was a snap, and I had the system running in no time. No painful configuration to deal with – pretty much everything worked out of the box. Even video including, amazingly, Flash in the web browser! PCLXDE comes with Midori as the default web browser. I have no idea what Midori is based on, but it works great on this old laptop.

The stripped down LXDE version of PCLOS includes a small selection of programs, including the AbiWord word processor, a simple soltaire card game, and a few basic Internet tools. OpenOffice.org is easily installed with pretty much the click of a button. Synaptic Package Manager is available on the toolbar for easy installation of other programs. And the best part about PCLXDE is the Control Center, which makes it easy manage the system. This is really one of the most professional-looking aspects of PCLinuxOs, which is sure to impress non-Linux friends who might be otherwise skeptical of Linux.

As for LXDE, it is an amazing desktop. Fast, attractive, and very easy to use. I have Gnome running on my Linux Mint installations, and I am never quite happy with it. It just doesn’t feel “modern” to me. But LXDE has that nice polished feel that makes you feel like you are actually using a modern-day piece of desktop software. I don’t feel like I’m using “Linux” here…I’m just using a computer.

I had a few minor problems: I screwed up installing my wifi card but somehow managed to get it working after some poking around. For a moment there, though, I thought I had really screwed up my wifi drivers. This could be improved in terms of making it a bit more bulletproof.

The monitor also had to be manually set to the 1400×1050 size, though at least this setting held once I adjusted it (as for some reason Mint didn’t like those monitor specs and kept starting up X server with the wrong monitor resolution). And the installed Twitter application would not let you open your account unless you had put in your “default keyring” password, which you would not know because you haven’t set it yet. (You have to go into your home directory and delete the default keyring file hidden in there to get this to work…kind of annoying.)

Otherwise, I am excited to be web browsing and even watching YouTube on this old computer – though it’s a bit jerky due to the low RAM I have on here (only 256 MB). I have had so many problems with Flash on my other computers with Mint installs that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just switch them to PCLOS. We’ll see.

Verdict: Big thumbs up. I would highly recommend PCLinuxOS 2009, the LXDE version, to anyone who has an old computer that needs new life breathed into it. This is probably the best Linux distro I’ve found for this computer, and I’m going to keep it.

Computer:

Sony Vaio
Pentium III
850 MHz
256 MB RAM
20 Gig harddrive
Netgear PCMCIA Wifi Card (WG511)

PCLXDE default installed software:

Midori – Web Browser with Flash and Multimedia playback
Abiword -Word Processor (Get Open Office available after hd install)
ePDFView – PDF Viewer
Leafpad -Tex Editor.
Transmission – Bittorrent Client
Emesene – Instant Messenger
XChat – IRC Client
Sylpheed – Email and News Reader
GRDC – Remote Desktop Client
GPicView – Graphic Viewer
MTPaint – Graphic Drawing Client
Alsaplayer – Music Player
Mplayer – Video Player
PCMan – File Manager
Simple Backup – Backup Software
Xfburn – CD/DVD Burning Software
Gnome  PPP – Dial up Client
File Roller – Archiving Software
PCLinuxOS Control Center – Adminstration Tool
LXDECC – LXDE Control Center (provided by Lord UnR34l)
AddLocale – Convert LXDE into your language
XPat2 – Card Playing Suite
Tiwtux – Twitter Client
Grsync – Graphical Rsync Client
Virtualbox Additions added

Apple is making new enemies apparently by banning the new Google Voice app from the iPhone. Pity.

I was lucky and got an invite to Google Voice back when it was GrandCentral. It’s a free service that gives you a phone number that you can forward to your cellphone or home number. (I guess the plan to make money off of this by charging a low fee for outbound international calls. Otherwise, the service is free.) Your voice mails are emailed or available via a web interface. The best part was you could have the GrandCentral (now Google Voice) number forward to a few phones at a time, which made it a nice number to have instead of handing out separate home and cellphone numbers.

Google took it over and has made some improvements, but in the process has taken away some other features that I liked, such as the fun custom ring chimes that you could attach to your ringer. Bummer. The interface has also gone all “Google,” which is that very scrunched up minimalistic Google email look that I’m not totally keen on.

On the positive, they’ve added voice transcripts, which are pretty buggy but still somewhat useful. Generally speaking, you can get a gist of the message from the transcript, even though the names don’t come through well. On one of my messages, Google translated the name of my friend Craig to Chris Dodd. I was wondering what Senator Dodd might be doing calling me!

You can also send SMS messages through the web interface, which is handy to have if you have text-happy friends and a phone without a keypad. (Wish I had this before I got my Blackberry!) Inbound calls can also be recorded, but I haven’t tried this feature yet.

If there’s one thing blatantly missing it’s fax capability…I would love to have that…I got rid of my JFax number last year because with all the new technology, it was a waste to pay $15/month for a voice mail and fax number that had no forwarding or email capabilities.

I have been using my Google Voice number now for business calls, so I don’t have to worry about people getting my cellphone (if I don’t want them to have it) or changing landline numbers when I move. Once in a while, when Google Voice was still Grand Central, I had a few problems with dropped calls but it was few and far between.

I was excited to install the new Blackberry app for Google Voice, which allows me to view and hear messages directly from my cellphone. Now I might just give out my Google number instead of my cell number.

So why is Apple doing this bone-headed thing of blocking the Google Voice app? I don’t know if they’ve figured this out yet, but the Google Voice number does not replace a cellphone! You still need some sort of outside cellphone or landline to use it when away from the computer.

Apple…starting to act like Microsoft…stupid stupid stupid…meanwhile, Google is out taking over the world.