User talk:Steven M.: Difference between revisions

Welcome!

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Steven M.,

Welcome to the Appropedia wiki. Please make yourself at home! If you need a general wiki-tutorial, see the main help page (or the more in-depth one on WikiEducator).

Check your preferences and be sure you verify your email address and turn on email notification if you'd like it -- you can find out when your talk page, or any page on your watchlist, is modified. You may want to upload a photo or information about yourself to your userpage (which is at http://appropedia.org/User:Steven_M.).

If you have a particular interest or project in mind, go ahead and start it! If you have questions or suggestions, the best place to leave them is at the Village pump - you should get a fast response. Or, feel free to leave me a note on my talk page if you have further questions, need help finding your way around, have a cool idea for a project, or just want to chat.

Glad to have you here!

-Chriswaterguy

Hi Steven,

I've been thinking about the porting issue. I do think it's best to have an original page, in the "Original:" namespace, and protected. At least in most cases it makes sense, where the original carries some authority because of who authored it.

If you make any progress on making the porting process smoother, please be sure an make notes of everything. And any questions, please ask - I'll usually respond more quickly than I did this time. Thanks for your work! --Chriswaterguy 07:02, 21 February 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Good work!

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Steven,

Just saw Stoves for Institutional Kitchens (original) - looks good.

How are you finding the porting process? Are the instructions clear, or could they do with improvement? Thanks! --Chriswaterguy 19:43, 10 March 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Thanks

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I was going to thank you on your work on the internal combustion engine page, but I read your user page and it is creepy how much I identify with your sentiments. If you have time this summer, we would love for you to join us in Nicaragua.

--David.reber 18:32, 12 March 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

BRIDGE Nicaragua

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Did you see our Projects Page? --David.reber 17:22, 19 March 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Notes to self

Continue researching GNU agreement and practical ways of getting content under copyright approved. Clean up PATB Pages to port page and create categories. All most done! Find new content...see if there are new briefs to port. Wikipedia has a category: sustainable technologies, although it might be redundant here, maybe the high end tech stuff can have its own category? Ah Green Computing!!!

Highlighted projects and welcoming

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hi Steven,

Great meeting with you today. Here are the notes:

Highlighted project pages:

• Template:Highlighted project
• Appropedia:Highlighted Projects

Suggested next highlights:

• Parabolic basket and tin can solar cooker
• Home biogas system (Philippine BioDigesters)

Standard greeting:

• Template:Welcome
• {{subst:Welcome|yourusername}}

or roll your own, like mine:

• User:Lonny/Welcome
• {{subst:User:Lonny/Welcome}}

Open, in new tabs, all talk pages on people that are all red, then paste the subst code and summarize with Welcome! See this welcoming matrix for some guidelines on greeting:

Thank you, --Lonny 02:22, 9 April 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

E-waste Installing Linux on old PCs

Latest comment: 15 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Great to hear!

My knowledge is limited, but what I've learnt:

• Join a local LUG - look out for days when they help people install Linux.
• Vector & other Slackware distros don't seem user friendly - I looked into it, but with only about 2 years experience in Linux, I didn't feel up to it.
• Openbox (window manager) and LXDE (desktop environment using openbox) are really nice and lean. LXDE is lighter than XFCE, but nicer to use. Expect to see these become more popular. You can add them to any distro, but where they're not one of the standard options, in some cases there can be clashes (probably a bigger problem on a laptop).
• I like to find a distro where it's set up to be lean, but it's easy to use.
• I'm not hung up on installing free stuff only - I want Skype and I want video codecs. (I install Linux firstly because I want an operating system that does what I need, not to make a statement.) Ubuntu makes for a little hassle with this - you have to add repositories and certain packages (programs and codecs), and the new user doesn't know this - they just wonder why things don't work. Debian makes it hard work for a newbie, especially if any of your hardware doesn't have a perfectly free (open source) driver.
• I strongly prefer something that is at least based on a major distro, and uses the package repositories of that distro. There's the potential for better support and in theory for bug fixing (Ubuntu is buggy anyway, in my experience, but it does have good support). It also means far more software choice. Basically, this leaves me with one distro:
• CrunchBang Linux: is based on Ubuntu, but uses Openbox, but with some very cool usability tweaks, including partial use of LXDE, and comes with Skype and video codecs installed. This is the only distro I know that comes with Openbox by default
• Well, actually Debian 5.0 comes with with LXDE as one of its standard options, which means it has Openbox - but Debian was unnecessarily difficult for me. When it didn't even recognize the hard disk on my ThinkPad, I thought: if this is a sign of how things work in Debian, I'm trying something else.
• I've heard good things about Puppy Linux - it was flaky when I tried it ~2006, but may have improved. It's also kind of a backwater in Linux development - a lot of non-standard stuff, running as root by default (which sounds like a bad idea to me and to many Linux people), with its own kind of installation, and far fewer packages than a major distro. So unless you need to go super-light (even lighter than Crunchbang)
• Anything I've said related to something being hard to use (e.g. Debian) becomes much less of an issue if you have geeky friends close by and/or belong to a LUG. My preference though: Get something you can mostly handle yourself. You'll still need help, but no need to make it harder than necessary.

Thanks for the question. I've thought of blogging on this, and I think I've just written my blog post :-). --Chriswaterguy 13:22, 10 April 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

For (much) older PCs (Pentium 2ish, DECTops (AMD's 50x15 boxes, anything that's actually beige) I highly recommend DSL - http://damnsmalllinux.org/ . It's limited, and a bit hasslesome to actually install and to build out on, but I am never without a DSL-on-a-USB stick. DSL (IIRC) uses an older kernel and supports a lot of older hardware settings that have been dropped in the current kernel. It's also super small (it can fit in 50MB) and can run amazingly fast even on klunky hardware (it will try to run from RAM if possible). The big benefit is that the default DSL version is meant to be booted off a CD or USB stick, so you can quickly see how it would actually work on the hardware without going through the whole install process, and the benefits of having an OS optionally run from a removable (and/or unwritable) flash device or CD ROM are numerous, especially in computer lab settings!

For P3 and better computers, I'd recommend Knoppix, which could probably also run off a USB stick, but is much larger, so I usually boot from CD. Knoppix is a full debian system and autoconfigures a lot for you (imagine my surprise when I booted up a powerful computer at work with Knoppix to try to recover a disk and found that it had auto-configured Compiz Fusion, a 3D desktop environment that took me weeks of painful xorg.conf tweaks to get working!).

Knoppix (circa 2003/4, I imaging it's only gotten easier) was also "re-masterable" - which meant you could add your own configurations, programs, and content and re-burn the CD as a partially-customized distribution. I created on with the Ministry of Jamaica's entire (live, interactive) website on it to distribute to schools without internet access so that they could access the PDF'ed curricula guides and interactive aspects of the website. It also went out with a mini-script that could connect to the Internet via cellphones :D

FWIW; I could have never gotten the Knoppix re-mastering working without the support of the Jamaican LUG, http://jalug.org

Joncamfield