The Linux Extremist

I recently started working for a publishing company as their Development Manager. I love it here, but there are things which fall under the “effing mess” category. The website for the company, and its IT infrastructure deserve this classification - hence why I was hired to sort it all out.

You would think that for such a big task, there would be a PC waiting for me. Not so - in fact, I’m on week 2 and I had been using my personal laptop to do my work. I got tired of it, so I started looking around the office, once I actually had an office and desk of my own, to see what I could come up with.

The company had stashed away some very old Dells in a cupboard - we’re talking systems from the Pentium II era with 128 MB of RAM. Knowing that the new Xubuntu variant of Ubuntu is supposed to be for low end machines, I gave it a try. While apparently they could boot up the Live CD, the installer was too much, it crashed.

Fortunately I managed to dig up a Pentium III Dell Dimension XPS T600 with a bit more than 400 MB of RAM. It had very strange things - such as two CD drives and two graphics cards. I removed the graphics cards and one of the drives. I put in an old GeForce4 MX 420 card I had lying around, along with an old spare MA311 Netgear PCI wireless card; I then proceeded to install Xubuntu.

The installation was near painless - the system performs, while not particularly speedily, sufficiently and at the very least, one can use a modern browser and office software without a problem. The sole difficulty I had was with hooking up a printer - the printer management software that came with XFce (the graphical interface bundled with Xubuntu) was next to useless. It is far better to use CUPS, which can be accessed using http://localhost:631/.

So kudos to the Xubuntu development folks  - it’s a modern OS that runs off of dust-encrusted rubbish, a rare feat indeed.

I still wish my company would give me the promised laptop however!

Firefox is a great browser on its own. On Linux, it is the fastest browser I’ve experienced (Opera comes close).

It is possible to make this fast, light browser even faster. Just follow these tips, which have been circulating on the web and now reproduced here:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries: network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows: Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true” Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you’re using a broadband connection the load times should be reduced substantially. Firefox on Linux is decidedly the fastest browsing experience.

Linux can be problematic to install on laptops. However, on a 2 year old Compaq nx7000, barring two minor hiccups, it was extremely easy.

My laptop has the following specification:

1. Centrino (1.5) processor

2. ATI Radeon 9200 (64 MB Video RAM)

3. 1.2 GB of RAM (after having installed a 1 GB RAM module - relatively inexpensive)

4. 80 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM hard drive (I replaced the 4200 rpm Hitachi Travelstar with this)

5. Intel 802.11b wireless card.

6. Soundblaster compatible sound with special “media” keys to raise or lower volume and mute sound.

Some items I added myself - unsatisfied with the speed of the in-built wireless card, I bought the following PCMCIA wireless card - a US Robotics Wireless Turbo PC Card (Model 5410).

Most of these items work straight out of the box on the installation of Ubuntu, including the special media keys (it should be mentioned that these keys do not work with the Xubuntu or Kubuntu variants). The two exceptions were the additional Wireless card, which required the following minor adjustment -

Go into Applications > Accessories > Terminal.

Type:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/options

Enter your password; Gedit, a text editor will boot. Then add the following line to the document:

options acx firmware_ver=1.2.1.34

Save the file and close Gedit down. Reboot.

The card should be working now, but it will not be your default interface until you set it up under System > Administration > Networking; to make doubly sure, unconfigure the eth1 interface which is likely to be the native wireless chipset. Also ensure the wireless monitor is picking up on the card by double clicking on it. The US Robotics card should be the wlan0 option.

The other hiccup has to do with 3D acceleration. The latest ATI drivers do not function with it; the native ati driver installed with the OS should be fine for the moment until ATI corrects the problem. Overall however, the experience was easy and it appeared to outperform a Powerbook G4 running Mac OS X on most tasks - though I must emphasise getting the new hard drive and additional memory certainly added to the laptop’s abilities.
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