On a laptop from the second half of the last millennium, i run Linux. It is a Compaq Pressario 1700, it’s small enough, light enough, and the battery sucks. My system info reports it is running on 1.1GHz and ½GB of memory. Kudos to the Australian government for borrowing it to me while i’m here. While i have a desktop computer with a larger screen, the laptop is my computer of choise. Oh yes, and the desktop runs Windows.

It’s not that i have anything against Windows from a user’s point of view (except that it has biodegraded to the level that i manually need to start explorer.exe from the Task manager after i log in), but currently i use it mostly because i like the desk space; to have two screens for work instead of one. And the keyboard is better. But my Windows is b0rken. I can’t print or reach SMB shares (some virus, i’m sure). Spooler goes to 100% once in a while (but then again, i can’t print anyway so it doesn’t really matter). Even Firefox makes the procesor go go wild. Ungood. I use Windows these days to read RSS feeds and to skype.

I here present the moving parts of “my” laptop. People, meet aurora.

Linux distribution: Simply Mepis

I first read about Mepis maybe half a year ago when searching for interesting Live Linux distributions.

In what might seem to be a surprise ignorance, i don’t even know what version of Mepis i am running, but it was recent a few months ago. It runs KDE, version 3.3.2 (which i also had to check from the Control center). Fact is, my Linux runs so well, i don’t have to care which version it is. And this comes from a man who loves to tweak. I’ve spent nights tweaking the title bar on X-Windows, i speak from experience :)Installing Simply Mepis is so easy it almost hurts. Insert the Live CD, look around, be reasonably impressed, and click the Install icon. The installer formats your hard disk for Linux (I suppose the installer can re-partition your hard disk to retain Windows, but i couldn’t be bothered), copies the Linux stuff and helps you with the basic setup and all this happens in ten minutes. A reboot later, and you get to do some final installation steps, and a total of twenty minutes after hitting the Install button, you have a running Linux.

The ones who thought installing Linux is a complicated affair have not seen this.

I’ve installed a small bunch of other, more “proper” Linuxen, and while those installations haven’t been overly complicated, they have just been painstakingly long. Three CDs for Mandrake. Four for Red Hat. Eight for Debian. OK, one for Debian, and load the rest over the ‘Net. Sure, this is a desktop Linux, so it might be unfair to compare it to one of the above distributions, but it still is just amazing to see an installation to go this quickly and painlessly.

Internet applications: Mozilla, konqueror, KMail, Kopete

Mepis comes preloaded with Mozilla, so even though i love Firefox, i didn’t care to “update”. I use just one customization (again, oddly enough — my Firefoxen on other platforms have a bunch of them), and that’s mainly for eye candy. This all sounds very unlike me. Maybe an inner part of me just didn’t want to destroy everything again.

konqueror is the standard file explorer for KDE, but it also serves as a web browser and an sftp client (so i can easily transfer pictures and files to my blog). As a web browser it is quick and clean, as an sftp client it is very convenient and follows Nielsen’s Principle of Least Surprise (any application should always behave in a manner that causes the user the least surprise). It’s like good plumbing. It Just Works.

KMail is again the basic mail application for KDE. It doesn’t seem to sport a single whistle or bell and frankly, i wasn’t very impressed with KMail a year back or so, but here (and with the bandwidth we have), i just haven’t bothered installing Evolution or some other fancy mail client. And behold: KMail Just Works.

The two nicest features with KMail are integrated PGP support and “disconnected” or “cached” IMAP, which means that after dowloading, my mails are here, instantly. On-line or off-line. I had not understood to value this feature until i got connected here, with a connection that somtimes is slow and sometimes is off.

Kopete is an instant messager, which talks with Microsoft Messenger. And Yahoo!, ICQ, irc, and a bunch of other protocols. For me, the MS protocol is quite enough, even if i have a whole host of other IM accounts. I just don’t use them. Kopete also offers a no-surprises experience. It doesn’t support the fancier MS-messenger features like voice, video, file transfer, desktop sharing and online gaming, but frankly, in a situation like this, i can live without ‘em.

There is Skype for voice messaging (or Internet telephony, if you wish), but this i haven’t experimented with yet. I use Skype on my Windows box. And i am still missing RSSowl, which i am using on my Windows box.

Office applications

I use Open Office (dot org), version 1.1.something. I don’t do anything extraordinarily complicated from the user’s point of view, but technically speaking, editing Microsoft Office files with a non-Microsoft application is pretty impressive. Still, OOo provides text editing, spreadsheets and presentations (Word, Excel, Power point) well enough for me. The next OOo is supposed to include database features like MS Access, which should be fun.

For picture editing, i use Gimp, though not that much and just the simpler things like cropping, resizing and playing with colours and levels. For vector graphics, i use Inkscape, which is a very nifty SVG graphics editor. Give it another year, and you will have an Open source FreeHand or CorelDraw.

For writing blog articles like this, i use KWrite, basically notepad for KDE (with paren-matching, folding, auto-indenting and syntax highlighting for just about any language) and konqueror to sftp it to the server. Or i just copy-paste it to the ssh session on the other side.

One office application i am missing from my Windows box is FreeMind. This is a Java application that is supposed to work on Linux as well as Windows. I just have to install them.

Multimedia: amaroK, Xine, Kaffeine, Digikam, K3b

amaroK is a music player that strives to be a little different. This is to Linux what iTunes is for MacOS X or Windows. Except that this uses the Internet to look up music information (and album art) using samples of the music itself. It has excellent search/filtering features, an automagic facitily to rate the music’s popularity (that i haven’t quite grasped yet) and a fun info pane to show what other tracks the currently playing artist are available in your collection.

When i don’t use amaroK, i use JuK, which is another excellent music player, or good old xmms. Xmms i mainly use to play automagically downloaded radio shows from The Dividing Line, which aren’t officially part of my music collection until i get a proper vcut that can dissect the archives into songs and get them filed in their proper directories, based on ogginfo metadata. OK, enough geekspeek.

ine is a DVD player which is just as ugly as xmms, but it works. And after all, you’re not looking at the user interface but the movie. Xine is best used as a helper application for Kaffeine, which is a “meta-player”, meaning that in true Unix tradition, it uses other applications to do the actual work. I have also used mplayer, not to watch a DVD but rather to extract the sound from it. I have this Rush Cronicles DVD but none of my Rush music collection with me…

Digikam is a program to download pictures from the digital camera (duh) and organize them. It works almost as well as Zoombrowser for Windows, which came with my Ixus. Digikam downloads pictures into “albums”, whereas Zoombrowser puts the pictures into folders based on the current date. A question of taste, i guess, but i like Zoombrowser’s choise better. And there is always Flickr which combines these both and it’s online.

Finally, K3b is a truly nifty and well-executed program to burn CDs. And DVDs, if your hardware can. The features i’ve used are just audio CD and data CD, but K3b can also burn Live multimedia CDs using Movix. Haven’t tried that one just yet.

Anything else?

I do use a few other programmes above those listed here (Emacs, ssh, nmap, Tcl and of course the konsole for development and fun) and occasionally i play a game or two, but that’s the bulk of it anyway and it gets me through most of my waking hours. Oh, and i use Fuzzy clock to tell me approximately what time it is

I have constant problems updating the system, and this is probably because the network connection is not as reliable as back home. I guess it takes some more tweaking. Shortly before i had my R&R in Tokyo, i managed to break my system by manually editing the apt sources list to only one given directory where i had placed a package i wanted to install, and then pressed Yes, i want to remove the unused packages. Bad idea. I was without KDE for a while and felt utterly dumb. Thankfully, re-installing the KDE environment was as simple as selecting the KDE metapackage for installation (using aptitude) and pressing Go. And KDE came back, over the network (in Tokyo, not Dili, mind you), with all the updates, whistles and bells. Show me the Windows equivalent to that.