Reading back through the Lightweight Linux blog, I found a post from two months ago entitled "50 Linux Discussion Forums." Many of the 50 are devoted to specific Linux (and Unix) distributions -- excellent sources of help for whatever distro you're using.

I'll just send you over there for the list of links. (Hmmm, maybe I need a new link category in the database here.)

I am indebted to the Lightweight Linux blog for calling my attention to BSD Magazine, which "is now becoming a free monthly online publication." Actually, it looks like back issues have been free for a while. You can get BSD Magazine -- "for novice and advanced users" -- delivered by email, or you can download it from their web site. Note: it isn't obvious from the web site, but you have to register (it's free) before you can download issues.

The latest (March 2010) issue looks particularly relevant for "Goodbye, Microsoft" readers; its theme is "BSD as a Desktop". Be warned, it's a 5 MB PDF file.

I went on an unexpected treasure hunt yesterday while trying to get my life organized.

Between work, home, a couple of hobbies, and volunteer work, I have a fairly large "to do" list. I should say, "lists" -- one of them includes project ideas dating back years, which I will do someday. I'm looking for an easy way to organize and present these -- so that on Monday, I can call up the most important "work" task outstanding, but on Saturday, I can see the "home" list.

Up until now I've been making do with my Palm PDA and Jpilot. The Palm has a fairly well-designed To Do List function, allowing 15 categories of tasks, and five priorities. Unfortunately for me, it's oriented toward showing tasks by due date, and my tasks mostly don't have due dates, only relative importance. Within each priority level, I can't control the order of presentation. Also, I like to plan hierarchical lists -- tasks with subtasks -- and the Palm doesn't do that.

I decided I didn't need to keep the list on my PDA, so I began looking for suitable desktop programs. A Google search for "open source to do list" turned up this recent article on Ars Technica, which was exactly the information I was looking for.

The three that were mentioned were GTG, Tasque, and Korganizer. I'd tried Korganizer years ago, because it would interface with my old Palm; but I found it more clumsy to use than Jpilot, with no better features. But this review said that KOrganizer now supports subtasks, so I decided to give it another look. (It's already installed on my KDE system.)

It does support subtasks -- multiple levels of them! -- and it's easy to move tasks around by clicking and dragging. This is what I'm looking for. There are also nine priority levels instead of five, which just might be enough; and apparently any number of categories (though fifteen is plenty).

So then I began to wonder if it would import tasks from my PDA. And that was a journey.

Thanks to Charles C. for sending this item along.


Today, 90 million Euro is worth about 122 million US Dollars. That's almost $750 per license. Granted, the contract includes 50,000 hours of support, but that's less than 20 minutes of support per license.

I keep hearing that governments everywhere are trying to control expenses. Switching to open-source software would be an easy start.

Thanks to Manny K. for sending this along: a review in the Wall Street Journal of the new versions of Parallels and VMWare Fusion for Mac users. Walt Mossberg writes:


I've mentioned Parallels before, most recently when I was evaluating products to let me run Windows applications on my Linux box. The only reason I didn't try an evaluation copy of Parallels then was because I already had VMWare and VirtualBox, and those turned out to be sufficient for my needs.

It's an impressive achievement that both Parallels Desktop 5 and VMWare Fusion 3 can both run Windows 7 with satisfactory results. This speaks to the continuing development of both products. Both Parallels and VMWare also provide products for Linux, though I see that Parallels Desktop for Linux is still at version 4, and Fusion is strictly a Mac product (Linux users need VMWare Workstation, currently at version 7).

I wish I had more to post about the "other" alternative to Microsoft: FreeBSD Unix. Fortunately TechRepublic's Jack Wallen Vincent Danen has just written a "FreeBSD 8.0 installation walk-through" to guide you through installing the latest version.


I guess I'm in the "comfortable" camp. Debian uses a text-mode installer, and I always use the text-mode installer when I'm putting Ubuntu on a computer. Really, text-mode installs are no different from graphical installs: the questions are the same, you just use the keyboard instead of a mouse to make your selections.

Update: I misread the by-line on the Tech Republic piece. My apologies to Vincent Danen, the actual author.

This is a tale of a very specialized application. I mention it not because I think anyone else reading this site will need this application, but rather, as an example of how to find specialized software for your non-Microsoft computer, and as an illustration of the wealth of software available in open source.

Among my activities, I am an electronics hobbyist. I've even designed my own computer from the logic gates up. (Not anything competitive with a modern PC, just an intellectual exercise.) Over the years, I have used an assortment of EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software including OrCad, PC-Pro, and EZ-Board. And I've encountered two problems. First, the commercial software becomes unsupported, requiring me to pay for an upgrade to the newest version (which sometimes, in turn, requires a newer computer or operating system). Second, should I want to share my designs with other hobbyists, I can't really ask them to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for the software I've chosen to use to draw schematics and lay out printed circuit boards.

So last week I began researching new EDA software for my PC, specifically looking for open-source, cross-platform software. Since a major goal is to share designs with others, I can't require that those others install Linux to use the software, so I want software that Windows users can use. I'd prefer cross-platform software that can run directly on Linux, but as a last resort would use Windows software if it ran well under Linux using Wine.

A few hours' work with Google turned up the following candidates:

KiCad. This is an integrated schematic/PCB (Printed Circuit Board) package that is available for both Windows and Linux. It started as a one-man project but now seems to have several developers, and an active user community.

gEDA. The gEDA project has been around for quite a while, and offers a complete suite of circuit design tools for Linux. The layout program, PCB, seems to be a distinct project. At present there is no Windows offering.

Open Circuit Design. This project offers a schematic program (xcircuit) and its own PCB program (pcb). (As nearly as I can tell, this is a "fork" of the PCB program used by gEDA.) There is a Windows port of xcircuit, but not for pcb (whose latest revision seems to have been in 2006).

Electric. This also is a mature package, and is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. It appears that this is intended as an integrated-circuit design system, and that printed-circuit-board (PCB) design is something of an afterthought. It's a free download, but I don't know if it's open-source. (Update: it is open-source, under the GPL. Thanks to our friends the Millers for this info.)

KiCad, gEDA, Electric, and xcircuit are all available from the Debian repository; another sign that these are reasonably mature packages. Technically, KiCad and gEDA seem to be the best match to my wants. And while gEDA may be more capable, KiCad is capable enough, and is truly cross-platform. And for my purposes, that's the deciding factor.


P.S. I should mention that I found, for Windows, two "free" (no-cost) schematic CAD packages for Windows, and one PCB layout package. But with so many Linux options to choose from, I didn't bother testing to see how well the Windows programs ran under Wine.

It's been over a week now, and my wife is settling in to her new Debian system with no further problems. There were a few extras I needed to install when I first brought Debian up, and a few more I've needed during the last week.

Installed from the repository:

icedove - Debian's rebranding of Thunderbird, which my wife uses for email. The Debian KDE install does not include this by default.
msttcorefonts - the Microsoft TrueType core fonts; needed to make some web pages and some documents render correctly. These are in the Debian "Lenny" contrib repository, which is not enabled by default; I had to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add it.
java - She needs this to visit some web pages. I was surprised to find the Sun Java Run-time Environment in the repository.
gftp - Our customary FTP program, for maintaining web sites.
beagle - She really likes this search engine for her desktop documents.
bum - The Boot-Up Manager, which I use to configure the system.
ssh and rsync - Her computer needs these in order for me to back up her hard drive remotely. (I was surprised that ssh is not installed by default.)

Some programs need to be downloaded and installed manually, not from the repository:

Acrobat Reader 9 - This is "non-free" software and thus not in the Debian repository; since she uses PDFs a lot, and the open-source PDF readers have problems with some documents, I installed this from the Adobe site.
hplip 3.9.12 - The older version in the repository does not include the drivers for her new HP multifunction printer, so I downloaded the latest version directly from HP.

I'll probably be installing GIMP for graphics editing -- from the Debian repository -- in the near future.

Worthy of note is one program I did not install: her old copy of Microsoft Word. She's been using this under CrossOver Linux, as a matter of habit, for all of her writing. On the new system I have added a shortcut for OpenOffice Writer instead. I've installed the MS fonts, and have OO Writer configured to save in .doc format by default, since she so often has to send documents to other people. If it becomes an issue, I can reinstall CrossOver and Word, but as of now, she's happy. (She said some of the changes have taken some getting used to, but it's mostly that accustomed functions appear in different places.)

Static Network Assignments. Well, my research has revealed that the static IP problem is a known bug in Debian 5 "Lenny," and has been known for a year. And isn't going to be fixed. Instead, it has been fixed in the experimental version of Debian, so the bug report has been marked as "closed."

Thanks a bunch, guys. It's still a bug in the current version.

The problem appears to be in Network Manager, which was added to make life easier for wireless users. The problem is, as long as it is running, it overrides the manual configuration in the /etc/network/interfaces file. Fortunately, I've previously learned about the Boot-Up Manager program, which controls which services get started at boot time. So for anyone else in this predicament, here are the relevant steps:

1. Edit (as root) the text file /etc/network/interfaces, and change the Ethernet interface (typically eth0) to static addressing. Something like this:


where, of course, the numbers will be different depending on your local network.

2. Edit (as root) the text file /etc/resolv.conf, and add "nameserver" lines like this (these are for OpenDNS):


3. Use Boot-Up Manager (bum) to disable network-manager and network-manager-dispatcher (both listed as "network manager framework daemon"). If you don't have this, you can install it from Synaptic or with "apt-get install bum".

Sound. A serendipitous find: I decided to get a minimal set of KDE configuration files by adding a new user to the system. When I logged in as that new user, it didn't have sound either! At this point a bell rang in the back of my mind, and I decided to check if access to the sound system is restricted by user group.

It is. The group is called "audio", and for some inexplicable reason, only the first user gets added to that group. To fix this, go to System->User Manager, click on the user name, click Edit, click the Groups tab, check the "audio" box, and click OK. (Damned if I know why this isn't the default for all new users.)

Once again I learn the lesson that Debian is not a distro for the newbie.

I should mention that the installation of Debian 5 "Lenny" on my wife's computer went smoothly. It started right up, and had no problem connecting to the Internet for updates. And I was able to add a new user account and install some needed packages (about which I shall report later). But then, wham! Two brick walls.

Static Network Assignments. Like every other desktop OS, by default Debian uses dynamic configuration (via DHCP) for networking. But I need to assign this machine a static IP address, and I want to manually select DNS servers (OpenDNS). So, I went into the KDE Control Center, under "Internet and Network", "Network Settings." Under the "Network Interfaces" tab I specified the static IP address (and netmask and gateway), and under the "Domain Name System" tab I specified the DNS servers. All worked fine.

That is, until the next time I rebooted. It seems that Debian remembered the static IP address, but failed to remember the gateway and DNS servers. I tried specifying those directly in /etc/network/interfaces, and doing "/etc/init.d/networking restart", and that worked. Until the next reboot.

To summarize a few hours of experimentation, I can either
(a) use DHCP, or
(b) manually type "/etc/init.d/networking restart" every time I reboot.
The latter is not a requirement I want to impose on my wife. She will quite rightly ask, "why doesn't my computer just work?"

I should note that I was able to make these very changes on my own desktop when I installed Debian. I can think of only two differences: (a) I originally installed Debian 4, and upgraded to 5; and (b) because I installed the Gnome CD-ROM by mistake, and later switched to KDE, I used the Gnome Network Manager instead of the KDE Control Center to set my configuration.

(As an aside, I note that on my own machine the KDE Control Center now reports "Your platform is not supported" and requires me to specify my distro. I guess this happened since I upgraded from Debian 4 to Debian 5. I can specify Debian 5, but it doesn't remember the choice.)

I may try loading the Gnome Network Manager (with a lot of added baggage!) to see if that makes a difference. And I'll do some Internet research. But if I can't get this straightened out, I'll yank Debian from this computer and switch to something else.

Sound. Sound cards are often a weak point for Linux distros, so I was relieved when the sound worked right away after I installed Debian.

Then, the next day, my wife reported that the sound wasn't working. And I confirmed this -- it wasn't working at all.

This morning I discovered, quite by accident, that when I log in on her machine using my account, the sound works. When I log in as her, there's no sound. This leads me to think there's a problem with the KDE configuration files. I just moved her home directory over to Debian, without regenerating those files; so it's likely that some configuration switch from her previous distro (Xandros 4/KDE 3) is failing in the new distro (with KDE 3.5).

I should be able to find this by comparing her KDE configuration to mine. But once again, this is not something that a new user would be able -- or should be required -- to do. C'mon, people: it needs to "just work."