kate's infrastructure

I cannot tell you why it is so, but I own a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 tablet PC.  It runs Windows 98 and is massive and awesome.  I can’t even say that I owned it since it’s 1998 release, I bought it cheaply on ebay in around 2005.  It’s sat on a shelf, full of promise, pretty much since then.  I’ve tweaked and played with it plenty, but it really doesn’t do anything.  I’d like it to.

I think I bought it convinced it would make a brilliant giant GPS, but that’s when they were expensive and didn’t come as part of a phone.  I’d been reading about pilots using these in the cockpit to aid complex navigational tasks and for some reason thought this might be relevant to me.

It was also the lure of the tablet PC, and being 2005 they still kind of looked like the next big thing (actually yes, they probably didn’t, I was just in denial).  I just wanted one.

It’s a shame for the computer to sit there and be useless.  Not even being Win98SE meant that network and wireless support was pretty well non-existent.  Sure, I could rock the world on a 56k modem, but it didn’t seem right.  With the lack of wireless support something had to change. 

Reviewing the specs it has less HDD space than my eee and a screen roughly equivalent in size.  This truly is a pointless venture.

My goal is to setup something trim and terrific using Linux.  Being that I don’t yet have a use in mind for the computer, I’m pretty flexible on the result.

My constraints are, inability for the bios to boot from USB, no external CD or floppy.

My main concern here is losing my functioning, albeit useless, system in my efforts to attain Linux glory.  Red Hat was unkind to me once and I haven’t forgotten.

I have nothing to lose.

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Step 1 – Choose a distribution / Choose a different distribution

I realise it’s a pretty religious debate, but as I didn’t have a goal in mind, I was equally ambivalent about my choice of distro (see also goals, constraints).  A 4GB HDD and 32MB of RAM shortened the list of options considerably.  My desire for things that look nice shortened the list again.

I’d wanted a flavour of Ubuntu originally, partly due to hype and partly due to it appearing genuine enterprise class.  Unfortunately my hardware was anything but, so I needed to look elsewhere.

I ended up taking a pretty good look at PuppyLinux, and decided that it was probably my best bet.  The requirements were low, but it still seemed like a reasonable system.  I also like the logo.

Step 2 – Getting to the tabletpc island

A seemingly ridiculous barrier in all this is the lack of input options on the tablet.  I have:

• 1 x USB 1.0 port
• 1 x PS/2 port
• 3 x odd looking serial ports
• 1 x infra-red
• 1 x PCMCIA slot with 56k modem (16bit card)

I do not have a CD-rom, floppy drive or a smart bios that can boot from anything but the primary drive.  Even awesomely useful and lightweight distros like knoppix seem to assume I have such simple things.

Being a decade late to the party not only means that I’m not a pioneer, but it means that the problem has been found and tackled previously.  See my new bible: "Install GNU/Linux without any CD, floppy, USB-key, nor any other removable media"

Actually I stumbled upon the article while look for the latest and greatest edition of InstLux.  I’d read about it ages ago when I was first looking at this.  It’s a windows-user friendly way to take the Linux plunge and basically wraps a pleasant windowsy installer around the new OS setup.  So I downloaded InstLux.  This was plan B.

 

Step 3 – Always as the internet first / Oh my god the MBR

There’s not a lot the internet can’t do, and before taking the plunge into any serious tabletpc changes, I wanted to be sure.

Then I found a page on PupWin98.  I decided to trust it despite the page being written in comic sans.

It’s ridiculous how appropriate this was for my needs.  I had to:

• Download a small zip file (56mb);
• Transfer it to my tabletpc on my 512mb thumb drive (keeping with the 1998 theme);
• Unzip to a pre-defined location;
• Run a single file;

It then kicked into DOS (!) and took me through the entire setup.  I booted up to a happy looking desktop environment.  I now get the option to boot into Puppy everytime I start windows.  It’s actually running from DOS, and will only save stuff when I properly exit my session.  I probably need to consider if there’s any long-term reason to dual boot.

Step 4 – Input devices

The desktop was a surprisingly awesome result so early in the process.  The only drawback was that my only input device was my external keyboard.  Puppy didn’t know about the touchscreen or software keypad just yet. 

Unfortunately I didn’t know about Puppy shortcut keys and so couldn’t really do a lot.  I spent a few awkward moments with Puppy trying to guess shortcut keys, but I was only going to embarrass us both, so I abandoned the venture pretty quickly and went looking for a mouse.

Ironically as I was gathering my historic computer hardware together ready for a successful boot post-mouse I broke the keyboard cable in half.  It was actually the decade old connecter that snapped in half leaving many exposed wires.  I have no backup plan at this point.

It’s a mildly amusing and frustrating end to activities.  I’ll try again another day, I’m damn close.

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What’s next?

Standing between me and a functioning system are:

1. New keyboard or connector;
2. Wireless or Network access;
3. Touch screen driver updates so that the pen works;
4. A purpose.

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I’m not crazy enough to think that I don’t blog more because I’m not online much.  Pretty well the only time I’m not online is for a few minutes each day while I’m commuting.  I have no excuse.  I’ve been looking for an offline blogging tool for an age, convinced that this is the answer to my woes.

Other people seem find drafting in notepad or OpenOffice or something, but I wanted something simple that would fully integrate with WordPress without a second thought.  Surprisingly Microsoft came to the rescue with a pretty handy free tool called Windows Live Writer.  Even more surprising is that it isn’t limited to publishing to Microsoft Spaces, it loved WordPress.

I’ve been playing with it for a few days and it’s perfect and simple.  Truly.  I wish all Microsoft software was more like this. 

It’s a WYSIWYG editor based on my blog’s theme and stylesheet.  It caches my logon credentials and I have a simple publish button at the end.  My favourite shortcut keys from Microsoft Word still work.  I regain the screen space that the online editor doesn’t really allow.  And I spell better.

This is awesome.  I wish it wasn’t windows only, but I’m still exploring options for my eee.

My favourite feature so far is that the shortcut for File > Close is simply ALT+F4.   When you’re done with the program you don’t close it down and wait for the cleanup, you pretty much just terminate the app.  This is perfection.

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I’ve had a bit of a love hate relationship with Vista in the 18 months or so I’ve been running it.  I want to love it, but it wants to be hated.  It’s tough.  Aside from being confused when trying to do simple things (and attributing that to an inevitable learning curve) I’ve found some aspects of Vista frustrating:

• Paranoid security – Yeah it’s unlikely I’ll do anything I don’t intend to, but it’s also pretty ridiculous.  The "I’m a mac…" ads are an alarmingly accurate way to sum up the vista experience;
• iTunes instability – I’ve written about it before here, but I found this to be more than a little frustrating, being rarely able to use iTunes without seeing a dreaded blue screen  I don’t know who to blame as I’ve applied numerous updates to iTunes and windows in the past few months (yes MAC Fanboys, your software also needs updates).  Either way, now it finally just works.
• Performance -  Vista is slow.  I have Vista Home, and yes, this computer has a relatively low Windows "Experience" score, but it was well above the minimum specs.  It was ridiculously slow.  I wasn’t doing anything of value, and I had to wait.  Constantly.  After some failed hardware I was pretty well forced into a RAM upgrade and I’ve seen things improve;
• Windows Sidebar - I love the idea but honestly this always seems to pack a performance wallop.  As recently as yesterday I thought about giving it another shot and went back to the google sidebar after only a few minutes.  I don’t really need anything that’s on there, so it’s hard to justify it not functioning well.

Still, no matter how gleefully Microsoft haters might refer to it as not ready, or the next WindowsME, I will persist.  It’s not that I enjoyed the pain, it’s simply that I thought that there had to be a way.  I’d like to say that I dealt with it in a systematic fashion and approached it as any good IT professional would, but I didn’t.  I looked for empathy out there on the internet, and I slowly tweaked.  The truth is, now I have a system that works and I like it.  I just don’t want to touch it too much.

So after all that, I’m learning to live with Vista.  Until today.  Today I was trying to be the dutiful customer who keeps their software up to date.  I was offered a service pack, and was a little nervous about the magnitude of the change on my ever-fragile system.  I read a little about it in the very well written support article (no sarcasm, I actually like it).

Here’s a little snippet for your enjoyment:

What to do before you install Windows Vista SP1

Before you install Windows Vista SP1, there are several tasks that you can complete that may improve your experience.

• Make sure that you have at least 4.5 gigabytes (GB) of free hard disk space before you start the installation.

To view how much free space is available on your hard disk, follow these steps:

Yep, 4.5 GB for service pack updates.  I bought a cheap computer 18 months ago.  I don’t think the day after I bought it I had that much disk space remaining.  SP1 can now wait until I decide to clean up a little.  But seriously, a 4.5GB service pack?  Wow.  I remember XP SP2 being sizable enough to cause enough concern for me to get it free on a magazine instead.  4.5gb is a fair chunk of my download limit for the month.  Yes, I’m surprised, but also there’s no compelling case for me to act, and so I wait.

UPDATE: It’s also worth noting that one of my favourite websites, lifehacker, is now regularly featuring tips and tweaks for Vista.  They’re good so far, and might make the experience a little better.

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