SwiftLinux-Regular-An Update

While everybody was focusing on new trends and tablets, I was keeping an eye on SwiftLinux.
My last report of it was unsatisfactory since it did not boot up in my old IBM and fonts were missing.
It is a Debian (Mepis antiX clone) derivative and it has come out with SwiftLinux 0-1-2 and the latest one is sleek fast to boot and work on both my old and new IBM (Relatively).
It is light on your computer and like Puppy very light on the RAM and and amazingly uses less than 100 MIB for the live CD.
That is very good feature of this distribution.

It has AbiWord and OpenOffice (prefer LibreOffice-next time round please) and Python but no Vi.
Its graphic memory usage (Debian terminal memusage is not there- but why should it have both graphic and terminal mem utilities) is revolutionary idea going back to Linux development of Memory part of the kernel. Below is a rough breakdown of the memory usage.
Python less than 4 MiB
Abi Less than 5 MiB.
Open Office from 18 to 25 depending of what part of the suite is used.
Terminal also takes about 12 MiB surprisingly.

Thanks guys and girls of SwiftLinux living up to the reputation for old computers and low memory guys.
Mind you it can be used with new too.
Now i have no hesitation of recommending it and it is going to take lot of points from my point scheme and it will now start rivalling Puppy in a constructive way for newbies.
Puppy of course is my number one.
Knoppix 2 and Debian 3 and when it becomes stable SwiftLinux will certainly occupy the 4th or fifth place if they introduce utilities for visually handicapped who do not need lot of graphic utilities for obvious reasons.
Please think of the days when Linus had the 386 and developing multitasking utilities for his resource poor computer bought on student loan.
There are lot of poor guys in the African and Asian subcontinent.
Ubuntu moving away from the low end and poor end of the market (which is essential for different reasons I have stated elsewhere) we must not lose track of the majority who are poor including senior citizens (pensioners) who will be visually handicapped and struggling to survive with low budget.
Mind you these facts are true for poor Americans too.

SUMO Linux

SuMo Linux is a compilation of 4 security Linux headed by Backtrack 3, Helix, Smurai Linux, Damn Vulnerable Linux and DBAN.

Even though Backtrack is into version 5 (five) and even backtrack 3 which is a Ubuntu derivative is good enough to track compromised computer and deliver offensive counter attack when a hacker tries to enter into your system.

This is for the Geeks and Savvy Linux developers but even a newbie can download and learn the geeky stuff like a professional guy.

As far as I was concerned I used it once when a guy from India, probably with the knowledge of some proprietary commercial distributions initiative tried to stop my download of Linux which I detected in about 3 hours and traced it back to India.

Since then I have used certain amount of firewall and I am not paranoid about attacks now and if somebody attacks me I will trace back and counterattack appropriately even if the computer happen to a be zombie and destroy its ability to act as a zombie or destroyed it totally out of web context.

I hope nobody ventures that far so that I have to explore the dark side of web episodes and Linux pro-activity.
Even Sumurai will do the needful for me.

My Selection of Linux Utilities that Should make a Standard Distribution-Archives-08

My Selection of Linux Utilities that Should make a Standard Distribution-Archives-08

Archiving is essential if one is downloading images like me.
I use CD/ DVD and and external hard drives for that purpose.
If one is archiving music and video then the requirements are different.
Real archiving is into different electronic media like good old dates mechanical tapes.
Amanda was Linux utility that are used storing huge amount of data including server output.
I am not referring to that.
RAIDs and other methods are for industrial needs and mission critical 24/7 services but what I am referring here is for an ordinary desktop user who has files that can be managed easily.
If the hard disk size is a problem one does not have lot of partitions ARK is a compression utility one can use I am not personally in favour compression and encryption (if you forget the password, you are in for trouble) and if one wants to open a file in Windows setup you are in for a big headache.
The list can be very simple.
1. K3b is my favorite
2. Light Scribe if you have a similar DVD ROM
3. LaCe
4. AcetoneISO for images
5. K9copy
6. QPxTool is comprehensive and covers all types of data (I have not used it, since my requirement are simple enough to cover with K3B and a external hard drive)

My Selection of Linux Utilities that should make a Standard Linux Distribution-Internet-05-Update

Earlier I have refrained from including internet  browsers and due to lot of them making subtle intrusion into ones private life and feed ones  interests to the commercial elements I decided to update this category.

My personnel preference is Iceweasel of Debian and Dilo of Puppy (good old days).

I was off the track of Linux for some time since Bunki Moon was playing Pandu and Chuckgudu with 20 million peace loving people not knowing whether he is moving forward or backwards in time. He is a confused man like a CEO who is waiting for his removal or extension in office with so much anxiety created within himself which he is trying to divert into body politics of U.N.O.

Time will tell his strategy of securing his job first and then think of 20 million people and their welfare second would work.

Probably not.

Coming back to Linux distributions and essential utilities, I am a believer in time to come all O.E.M products should have Linux Internet utilities as default (no cost to them0 even without installing any OS one should be able to browse Internet by default.
In that context, Debian’s Iceweasel (or even Dilo) should be the one that should be ported with the O.E.M with all the unnecessary cookies removed and probably Dropbox (or a cloud entity) also accompanied with the basic (minimal) kernel.

till then the list of Internet utilities should be as follows with no intention of giving any merit to any but despising all the utilities that track the uses interests and feed them back to commercial entities to make inroads by way of subtle advertisements.
I believe user is now mature enough to chose what s/he wishes to have in his system.
Without any intended recommendations or of any perceived benefits to me or the user are as follows.

1. Putty.
2. Kget
3.KTorrent
4. Transmission bit torrent
5. FilZilla
6. Kmail
7.Thunderbird
8. Opera
9. Firefox
10. Chromium Browser
11. Skype
12. Vodafone
13. Dropbox
14. Pidgin
15. Web Editor- Bluefish editor

I personally go for Iceweasel or Dilo since that do not have intrusion utilities embedded in them for tracking the user unnecessarily.

My Selection of Linux Utilities that should make a Standard Linux Distribution-Office Utilities-07

Office packages are the ones that are generally used by almost all the users.
before getting to the standard office utilities PDF editors are the ones that one has to pay (Adobe to get some real work done) pay attention.
PDF
1. Xjournel come to my mind first.
2. PDFedit.
3. PDF chain

Then for visually handicapped user
4. Okular

For Experts text editors

5. LateX for the experts. We should not forget this utility which did all the hard work before office packages emerged.

General user
6. Abiword is my favorite because of its simplicity
7. LibreOffice for OpenOffice (It is huge resource drainer like a gorilla in a dinner party)

Page Layouts

8. Scribus

Productivity

9.Gnucash
10.Gnemeric

11. And any that I may have missed.

At this point I must make a reference to FM Setup in FullMonty.
It is a refine way of presenting utilities in an organized workplace that user in mind.
If they add some user editing capabilities and customization it is going to be a top hit in desktops.
I hope everybody should (developer and the user) look at this nice utility and make some improvements to it without adding bulk that may slow down the boot up time.

UNetBootIn-Must Have Utility in a Standard Distribution that one can carries in a Pendrive-06

It is easy as plugging a Flash Drive to boot a Pendrive with Linux utlity called UNetbootIn.
It does the job in four steps and the it is a graphic and not command line utility.

1. download the Iso image
2. Extract and copy iso file
3. Install the boot loader called GRUB
4. Reboot and enjoy

Only a few Linux distributions are supported by this utility as at present and I use Puppy (100 MiB) for my work.

Remember DSL, Backtrack, PCLinux (not Knoppix) and a host of Linux distribution now can be mounted on a Pendrive.

This is just to let you know that I have booted Puppy Linux 4.2, the first of all the Puppies I used (now it is Puppy Lupu 5.2.5) on a Flash Drive and configured the internet and edited this page on seamonkey (while I am doing this see monkey is telling me a new version is available) web browser.

Puppy and UnetBootIn rocks the Linux World which is 20 years young.

My Selection of Utilities for a Standard Linux Distribution-Internet-05

First of all let me send my condolences to the Family of Chesterfield who passed away yesterday morning.He risked his health to go to the cricket field to report to us almost live unlike our sport arm chair pundits.
May he rise to high heaven.

This selection (Internet collection) is bit difficult and I would go by utility value.
1. Number one is Skype

2. Number two is Dropbox

3. Number three is K-torrent which I have already discussed.

4. Number four is email manager and thunderbird /Kmail would foot the bill.

5. Internet TV- Miro Internet TV

6. Browser I have no selection here because they (browsers) are becoming groggy except perhaps Iceweasel

7. For Linux package download in a terminal KDE get or Gnome get

This selection has to be made keeping in mind whether the distribution is light weight and bundled in a CD or heavy weight and DVD under 1 GiB.

If one is packing it over 1 GiB limit there should be a reason, say the distribution is like ArtistX, or XMBC or Education or Games.

Abiword one of my favourite Light Weight Office Packages and LibreOffice-04

My next category should be Internet if I am a young enthusiast but I prefer the office packages that one has to use daily before we browse the Internet since one tends to waste, me too, waste lot of time browsing rather than doing some real work.

As a writer, again I go for light weight Abiword and I should look for Sinhala font at the very outset.

Its light weight character makes it suitable for CD version of a distribution keeping in mind the download speed is painfully slow in the third world.

Downloading a DVD takes days and even the Simply Mepis 11, I downloaded today with 1.2 GiB took 22 hours.

In this contest for the third time the point to point download link broke down for Pocketwriter (Slakware) and currently downloading at 5.5 KB per second and the overnight downloading touched 125 MiB.

We are pretty efficient in the third world. That is why I included K-Torrent first which is very good.I have now changed to LibreOffice since Oracle is trying to make some investment (which it never contributed at the beginning) on Sun Java products including Vesta1. I must congratulate the Open Document team for the excellent work they are doing and I love the French accent of it. It should be a multinational effort and it should include Sinhala capability soon, taking a leaf out of Debian and Fedora.Sad to say OpenOffice, which I used from it’s first version and used it proudly in the latter part of my thesis completion also is the third due to its heavy consumption of MiBs and commercial take over. I

t has multi-language capability and that is the reason it is consuming so much of precious MiB and the need a DVD for inclusion in a distribution.

The biggest hindrance is it’s Gorilla size weightage and I never see it goes on a diet.

I hate Mega images especially the political and corporate type.

My Selection of Linux Utilities that should make a standard-Utilities for Visually Handicapped-03

One of the features I always look for in a distribution is whether it supports blind and the visually handicapped persons.

Ubuntu is well known for supporting blind users with Orcas which is a Debian based utility for keyboards and Linux support for braille is unsurpassed by proprietary operating systems. Most of the stable version Debian support visually handicapped users.

Along with this facility multi-language support is essential and many Linux distributions are only in English and some are only in French or Spanish.
But lately many distributions are supporting several languages. Debian is the leader in this and it now supports Sinhala too.

Third utility should go with this is virtual keyboard.

Often with the frequent use keys of the keyboard some of them get stuck and if this happens when entering a password one may not be able to get started which is a little embarrassment to say the least.

Virtual keyboard is value added utility.

All these must be bundled out in the accessibility corner.
I am not sure where the sweeper, the cleaning utility should be placed and I prefer it with the accessibility option. The sweeper removes unnecessary and temporary files and  the history tree which tend to accumulate and get bigger and bigger in almost every Linux distribution.

Only in PCLinux I find the utility that removes temporary files at boot time which one can select at the time f installation.

Unlike servers where every data and every little movement are necessary for recovery purposes when a servers fails but all these details of history tree are not necessary even though very valuable when break into a system is suspected for a desktop.

Archiving utilities are universal in Linux distributions and if one uses them judiciously may be able to save disk space.
In my case it is not the hard disk (which I format once a year) that I use but CD and DVDs and burner utility either K3B or Brasso is essential for this purpose.

So I have lumped all the good housekeeping utilities in one category which are useful if one is using one computer for all the day to day activities.

Why I have a FAT partition in my Hard Disk

I must confess here that I had to revise my wisdom of using FAT parttions. FAT partions cannot store a file bigger than 4 GiB and most of Linux distributions are over 4 GiB and now I use ntfs partition for storing files bigger than 4 GiB.

It is not like good old days my hard disks are at least 80 x 2=160 GiB (removed 20s and 40s) and I now go for SATA disks which come in 160, 320 and 500. I have two external hard disks one which bought for half the price (they are twice the price here unfortunately) in a kid’s store abroad with adequate space for my images and ntfs partitions.

But I still have small FAT partitions among various Linux partitions.

I reserve a FAT partition of Generous 20 MiB in my hard disk would be mystery for you since I do not install Microsoft even for testing now.

I will list few of the reasons.

1. Sometime back when (I was not testing live CDs then) I lay my hands on a new Linux distribution I try to install them and many had no methods to install and some had what is called persistent and try to install in a FAT partition.

Two of them come to my mind, one was Knoppix and the other was GoBo Linux. Now of course both of them can be installed into hard disk. Knoppix now installs on a reserfs pation and needs at least 1 GiB of SWAP partition and I give liberal 2GiB which is my minimum.

2.Since I had many distributions in my hard disk most of them run short of space in home partition and even writing an image was not possible. The Linux has the habit of collecting junk called history in tmp folders without automatic cleaning. So I used to take all my data files and place them in the FAT partition. External drives were expensive and I could not afford them. So FAT partition was the temporary shelter for my data till I write them to a CD or DVD.

3. Third reason was when I started downloading Linux Live images I use to shift them to a folder in the FAT partition when home folder is  full. By doing this it is possible to remove most of the tmp files cluttering the Linux system (it is one of my beliefs and i may be wrong here). In any case it gives me breathing space.

4. When I do cleaning up job for my friends with rotten Microsoft hard disks removed from the computer and mounted on a external drive, it was easy for me to transfer the data file to my FAT partition after doing the cleaning up process for burning / cutting it to a CD or DVD. Then I give them the CD / DVD with data and freshly formatted disk and say I don’t install Microsoft any more and don’t come back again with Microsoft problems to me and virtually chase them away.

5. The latest is a very delicate issue. With data security paranoia most new Linux distributions let you encrypt your data (asks you whether you want to do that while installing) in home folder. This I did recently and took some photos of my dog and nephews and nieces and saved them. So after that I did testing Sinhala Linux and for some reason forgot about the whole issue. Then when I wanted to boot that image it had some problems with it’s boot file. I could not get those photos. I tried many methods and I could not open the encrypted photos.

This was where I had to sit back and work out a strategy to recover the encrypted data ( only six photos). This was a Live distribution and I tried to recover the files while Live CD was running but could not.

Then finally I reinstalled the distribution without formatting the home partition (this is the value of home partition) with the same password and booted it up and formatted a free Linux partition to FAT transferred the opened photos to FAT partition without encrypting. The job was done and I recovered the encrypted photos. I also copied the encrypted file to another home partition of my computer using some devious methods to see whether I could open that in a another Linux distribution.

I could not.

This was the longest period for me to solve a simple problem without using unencrypting software (which I am not interested and I am not in the habit of cracking passwords).

So do not be paranoid when encrypting your data. If you forget the password the data is as bad as in the dustbin or thrash.

I have to confess the longest period I spent was resurrecting an old Japanese Laptop with faulty CD/DVD ROM and no USB booting facility. It is working now and my friend use s it only for accessing internet and there in no more viruses or  Microsoft traces in there.

It was fun for me to get rid of Microsoft but not for my dear friend.