In Debian the BIND server will by default append statistics to the file /var/cache/bind/named.stats when the command rndc stats (which seems to be undocumented) is run. The default for RHEL4 seems to be /var/named/chroot/var/named/data/named_stats.txt. The output will include the time-stamp of the log in the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (see my previous post explaining how to convert this to a regular date format [1]). By default this only logs a summary for all zones, which is not particularly useful if you have multiple zones. If you edit the BIND configuration and put zone-statistics 1; in the options section then it will log separate statistics for each zone. Unfortunately if you add this and apply the change via rndc reload I don’t know of any convenient way that you can determine when this change was made and therefore the period of time for which the per-zone statistics were kept. So after applying this to my servers I restarted the named processes so that it will be obvious from the process start time when the statistics started. The reason I became interested in this is when a member of a mailing list that I subscribe to was considering the DNSMadeEasy.com service. That company runs primary DNS servers for $US15 per annum which allows 1,000,000 queries per month, 3 zones, and 120 records (for either a primary or a secondary server). Based on three hours of statistics it seems like my zone coker.com.au is going to get about 360,000 queries a month (between both the primary and the secondary server). So the $15 a year package could accommodate 3 such zones for either primary or secondary (they each got about half the traffic). I’m not considering outsourcing my DNS, but it is interesting to consider how the various offers add up. Another possibility for people who are considering DNS outsourcing is Xname.org which provides free DNS (primary and secondary) but request contributions from business customers (or anyone else). Updated because I first published it without getting stats from my secondary server.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/05/date-1970-01-01/

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The man page for the date command says that the %s option will give “seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC“. I had expected that everything that date did would give output in my time zone unless I requested otherwise.. But it seems that in this case the result is in UTC, and the same seems to be also true for most programs that log dates with the number of seconds. In a quick google search for how to use a shell script to convert from the number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to a more human readable format the only remotely useful result I found was the command date -d "1970-01-01 1212642879 sec", which in my timezone gives an error of ten hours (at the moment - it would give eleven hours in summer). The correct method is date -d "1970-01-01 1212642879 sec utc", you can verify this with the command date -d "1970-01-01 $(date +%s) sec utc" (which should give the same result as date).

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So Obama will be (sorta) kicking off the general election campaign in Bristol VA, right down the road from JR's produce and just over the state line from me in Bristol TN. Why here? It's an interesting, quirky choice. They seem to have put this town hall togther at the last minute, renting VA high's gym only yesterday. The small number of tickets went fast (gone at 10 am this morning), so I didn't hear in time to get one, or even get on the waiting list. I'll try to get up early enough to see the circus outside tomorrow morning.

Probably not that interesting to most people, but Yahoo Search doesn't seem to have craigslist in its index: http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu5xC60ZI8BgB5Byl87UF?p=site%3Acraigslist.org+jobs&ei=UTF-8&iscqry=&fr=sfp Google does, of course. This matters to me because I use Yahoo Search's API to collect statistics for http://www.langpop.com, and one of my sources is craigslist. I let craigslist know about the problem, and hopefully it will be fixed soon, so I can collect the stats for June! Update Looks like it's being indexed again, but still isn't back to where it once was, so it'll probably be a few days until I update langpop again.

I am off to Brazil tonight, first to the city where some locals like to dress their dogs up on Sunday and take them to the park (Porto Alegre and I will be there until June 15th) and then I will be in S o Paulo (from June 15-20th). I would love to get together with the Debian/Free Software folks while there so drop me a line so that we can arrange something. In a day or two I will also post some more details about my trip.

Yay, we're home. It was nice to be back in Vancouver saying hi to folks, but it's tiring being in different places and seeing everyone in a crammed packed visit. It was the longest I've been back there since our wedding ~6 years ago. There were only a few people on my list that I didn't wind up seeing, which is actually pretty good for a trip.

I had originally said that I was going to keep my pain killers where they were for a few weeks, but I realised that I'd managed a couple of times to forget to take some and lasted 5-6 hours, so I dropped one anyone. It means that the flight home was a little creakier than I'd like, but my "hard" gnome-sudoku time has also dropped from ~45 minutes to ~15 minutes. =)

We got our visa renewed successfully, so no there isn't any stress of whether we're suddenly going to have to move, find new jobs, etc. So here's to the start of a boring (life-wise) 12 months starting now!

I'm back in the office tomorrow. We'll see if my stamina really will hold out for the whole day =)

The serial port is still the way to access network components out of band. It is slow, but reliable, and remarkably well standardized. It does not have technical whiz-bangs that can fail when one needs things to just work. That makes it the natural way to access critical infrastructure and still being sure that this access vector still works when most other things are down. Every communication link has two sides, so there is a market for devices with a network link and a bigger number of serial ports to connect the actual devices to. Commercial vendors have a broad choice of serial console servers. Most of them, especially the small products with five to ten ports, are quite expensive, so I have been investigating how do build a serial console server with el cheapo hardware. USB comes to mind here, of course. The hardware side is actually quite easy: A seven-port USB hub, and seven USB-to-serial adaptors (using the widely-deployed Prolific PL2303) are easily purchased for well below a hundred Euros, and naively connected. In my test setup, connected to the hp compaq nc8000 that my blog readers should know only too well by now, the hub does not even need to have its power supply connected. The notebook can power the hub and the seven adaptors just fine. When the UMTS card is plugged in, the ttyUSBx device nodes appear in the order of plugging in the devices. When the system is booted, the order is not very predictable, so one needs - again - udev to give predictable device node names. udevinfo is an important tool to obtain the data set of an USB device which is available to match a device and to act appropriately when it is connected. udevinfo sorts the devices into a tree and shows the relationship of the devices, which device is “behind” which other device from the system’s point of view. udevinfo’s output starts at the leaf of the device tree and shows the information for each node up the tree until its root is reached. One pitfall is that one can only match against the leaf and _one_ other node more up the tree. So you cannot do matches like “the pl2303-based device connected to port 3 on hub 2-3 will be designated USBserial3”. If you try this, your rule will silently be ignored. This is a major turn-off in udev’s implementation. I didn’t try it on sid, but etch definetely shows this behavior. So one can only match like “the tty on the USB subsystem connected to port 3 on hub 2-3 will be designated USBserial3”, but that’s probably as good as it’ll get. The cause for my hub having only seven ports clearly shows itself when one looks at the udevinfo outputs of the fully equipped USB hub: The adapters are connected to ports 1, 2, 3, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4. The seven-port hub is actually two four-port hubs in a single case, with the second one connected to the first one’s port 4. This reflects itself, of course, in the udev rules necessary to address the adapters by the hub port they’re plugged in:

SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.1”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial1”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.2”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial2”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.3”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial3”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.1”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial4”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.2”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial5”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.3”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial6”
SUBSYSTEM==“tty”, SUBSYSTEMS==“usb”, DRIVERS==“usb”, \
   KERNELS==“*-*.4.4”, \
   SYMLINK=“USBserial7”

These rules will only work for a similary structured hub that is directly connected to the notebook. If there are more hubs in between the “final” hub and the host, the address matched against in the KERNELS matches are going to have a different structure. In the test setup, the first two parts of the address needed to be wildcarded since these addresses keep changing when the host is booted or the hub plugged out and in. So I guess that these udev rules are probably going to fail miserably when more hubs and/or USB-to-serial adaptors are connected. But if one does not do too many changes, things are just fine, and it is possible to put numbers on the USB hub ports and be sure that the USB-to-serial adaptor connected to port 4 is going to be /dev/USBserial4 in the host system. I tried plugging in and out the adaptors in random order, unplugged and plugged the hub itself, booted the host, and the relationship between the port and the device node was stable. In the test environment, I only tested one adapter at a time, but all these tests were successful as well. I guess that many more of these adaptors will eventually need a powered USB hub, but with seven adaptors on a single hub, the power from the USB host is sufficient to live without extra power on the hub. And, I guess, there is some hard limit for the number of USB adapters being used, and some soft limit when managing the ports and adapters is going to get harder. But, I think that a site in need of more than, say, sixteen serial ports on the console server can afford a “real” console server from one of the major vendors, which can be accessed via ethernet, UMTS, ISDN and whatever you can think of. This concludes the hardware part of my serial console server for the poor. Tomorrow, I’ll blog about the software side needed on the host to allow the serial ports to be accessed from the network while still being reasonably secure. The next article will involve ssh, /etc/passwd shells, /etc/shells, a small perl script, ser2net and telnet. And, shell escape is the cue word for grey hairs sprouting on my head.

Last week's edition of Ciberpa s included a lengthy article which tried to explain Debian's and Ubuntu's OpenSSL problem to unexperienced computer users, it's impact, what should people do and what happens next. Merc Molist sent in a few questions for me to answer, a small part of which were used in the article. While I don't like a few bits of the article that much, I tried my best to make it clear that Debian is not a bunch of clueless and careless Free Software enthusiasts. The treatment that the incident had in some well known Spanish security-related websites was in my opinion deplorable, so I want to thank Merc for the opportunity to clarify some of the Debian bashing. I expect the full interview will be published either here or at Merc 's website in the following days.

Nowadays it seems that most serious mail servers (IE mail servers suitable for running an ISP) use one file per message. In the old days (before about 1996) almost all Internet email was stored in Mbox format [1]. In Mbox you have a large number of messages in a single file, most users would have a single file with all their mail and the advanced users would have multiple files for storing different categories of mail. A significant problem with Mbox is that it was necessary to read the entire file to determine how many messages were stored, as determining the number of messages was the first thing that was done in a POP connection this caused significant performance problems for POP servers. Even more serious problems occurred when messages were deleted as the Mbox file needed to be compacted. Maildir is a mail storage method developed by Dan Bernstein based around the idea of one file per message [2]. It solves the performance problems of Mbox and also solves some reliability issues (file locking is not needed). It was invented in 1996 and has since become widely used in Unix messaging systems. The Cyrus IMAP server [3] uses a format similar to Maildir. The most significant difference is that the Cyrus data is regarded as being private to the Cyrus system (IE you are not supposed to mess with it) while Maildir is designed to be used by any tools that you wish (EG my Maildir-Bulletin project [4]). One down-side to such formats that many people don’t realise (except at the worst time) is the the difficulty in performing backups. As a test I used LVM volume stored on a RAID-1 array of two 20G 7200rpm IDE disks with 343M of data used (according to “df -h” and 39358 inodes in use (as there were 5000 accounts with maildir storage that means 25,000 directories for the home directories and Maildir directories). So there were 14,358 files. To create a tar file of that (written to /dev/null via dd to avoid tar’s optimisation of /dev/null) took 230.6 seconds, 105MB of data was transferred for a transfer rate of 456KB/s. It seems that tar stores the data in a more space efficient manner than the Ext3 filesystem (105MB vs 343MB). For comparison either of the two disks can deliver 40MB/s for the inner tracks. So it seems that unless the amount of used space is less than 1% of the total disk space it will be faster to transfer a filesystem image. If you have disks that are faster than your network (EG old IDE disks can sustain 40MB/s transfer rates on machines with 100baseT networking and RAID arrays can easily sustain hundreds of megabytes a second on machines with gigabit Ethernet networking) then compression has the potential to improve the speed. Of course the fastest way of transferring such data is to connect the disks to the new machine, this is usually possible when using IDE disks but the vast number of combinations of SCSI bus, disk format, and RAID controller makes it almost impossible on systems with hardware RAID. The first test I made of compression was on a 1GHz Athlon system which could compress (via gzip -1) 100M of data with four seconds of CPU time. This means that compression has the potential to reduce the overall transfer time (the machine in question has 100baseT networking and no realistic option of adding Gig-E). The next test I made was on a 3.2GHz Pentium-4 Xeon system. It compressed 1000M of data in 77 seconds (it didn’t have the same data as the Athlon system so it can’t be directly compared), as 1000M would take something like 10 or 12 seconds to transfer at Gig-E speeds that obviously isn’t a viable option. The gzip -1 compression however compressed the data to 57% of it’s original size, the fact that it compresses so well with gzip -1 suggests to me that there might be a compression method that uses less CPU time while still getting a worth-while amount of compression. If anyone can suggest such a compression method then I would be very interested to try it out. The goal would be a program that can compress 1G of data in significantly less than 10 seconds on a 3.2GHz P4. Without compression the time taken to transfer 500G of data at Gig-E speeds will probably approach two hours. Not a good amount of down-time for a service that runs 24*7. Particularly given that some time would be spent in getting the new machine to actually use the data. As for how to design a system to not have these problems, I’ll write a future post with some ideas for how to alleviate that.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_IMAP_server


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/maildir-bulletin/

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When I moved in Hungary in 2006, I started a direct marketing company. In fact, it is the local local branch of an Italian marketing company where I worked since 2003. The company is growing very slowly: we faced a lot of issues with the local market (I'll probably talk about this topic in another post) and only in the last months things started going on the right path.

I still remember the old days when I spent the whole working day alone, in the office, struggling to find the good motivation to work on something which almost everybody around me considered a failure even before starting. I always considered my company as a family, where trust and respect are the glue for the team members. I remember the old times when Aron, my first employee and now business partner, started learning the internals of the direct marketing: he trusted me, sharing with me the duties of starting up the company.  Looking back I feel proud of what we did and more conscious about what we can do in the future.

Growing also means enlarging the team. To say the truth, I didn't expect to have so many problems looking for new people to add to our team: I interviewed a lot of people for our "python programmer" position, spending a lot of time and energy. I know that living in Hungary also means dealing with a local, small, atypical environment, but we offer the possibility to learn and develop IT and non-IT skills in a young, international environment.

We finally found an interesting guy, with PHP experiences but willing to learn Python. He told us that he could leave his job by the 16th of June, and he could work with us part-time till that date. Everything worked fine for three weeks then, suddenly, he disappeared. For one week, his mobile phone rang, but nobody picked up the line. No answer to e-mails, IRC, MSN or any other communication channel. I was worried, I hoped he was fine somewhere. This morning he called Aron telling him that he was sick, he had an issue with his eye. He visited a lot of doctors. He was busy. So busy that he couldn't call us to tell us so. For one week. After he started working with us four weeks ago. What is more annoying is that he didn't appear worried about his position, about our project, about our company. If I'd have quit from my job, I'd be very very worried about my new employer who is looking for me for one whole week without being able to reach me.

We are a growing company based on a small team, without a strict organigram and a horizontal structure. I trust my workmates, I trust them so much to put in their hands my investments, my reputation, my customers. The best team members knows that errors in this phase (eg. lost customers) can influence the company future and their job position

In this case, I gave out trust, but I didn't get back respect. I'm starting to think that being friendly and building a collaborative environment, a horizontal structure is not helping but damaging the company. Maybe if I'd be a boss with strong authority, then people wouldn't behave in this way.

And yes, of course, the problem with the eye was just an excuse.

The last weeks have been very active. A lot of e-mails from people and magazines, a lot of congratulations and a lot of free beer made me feel like a rock star :) Thanks a lot to everyone. I really appreciated that.

And maybe this petition would sound you like an abuse of this situation. And maybe you are right.

The fact is, I need an sponsor to travel to Defcon16, in Las Vegas, the next August. I need a flight ticket, 3 or 4 nights in a hotel and 2 meals per day.

I've been accepted to explain the Debian/OpenSSL problem and I'm dying to be there. If you work for a company which is looking for a nice way to say "thank you", please consider this option :)

Contact me at luciano <alt+64> debian.org for more details. Thanks.

update (13 minutes later): I just received confirmation from the Black Hat organization to be an alternative speaker there too! So I will need to fund 5 extra nights... :D

Switching to Perl 5.10 for Debian unstable uncovered a bunch of little problems with the Pod::Man based on Pod::Simple that's included with it. I've unfortunately been slow to fix those problems due to being buried in other work, but this release finally cleans up the ones that have been reported, namely:

• Font problems with two or more C<> blocks in a =head
• Fix subheadings with leading *roff metacharacters
• Fix hyphen escaping to not corrupt eth characters

However, the big change is that pod2man now supports a -u (--utf8) option saying to not munge input characters into ASCII and *roff escapes that only work with troff and instead output literal UTF-8 characters and assume one's man program can cope. This will now be true of Debian as of lenny. I have no good ideas for how to do the transition, since the resulting *roff is not portable and, if copied to another system, can even cause deficient nroff programs to segfault. One of the goals of Pod::Man was always to produce portable *roff output, so this option is not the default. However, it is clearly the Right Thing To Do for systems whose man and/or nroff are sufficiently intelligent; any other option either requires embedding groff-specific character escapes (same portability problem) or corrupting non-ASCII characters badly (the previous approach). Any bright ideas welcome. In the meantime, people who know they're working on systems with modern nroff and man can at least get correct output now. Hopefully podlators 2.1.0 will make it into lenny (as part of the Perl package, since it's a Perl core module), either as 5.10.1 if upstream is fast enough or as a Debian-local modification. (We definitely need a new Perl release before lenny; #480428 would be embarassing and is already driving me nuts by producing spurious output from lots of cron jobs. I'm thinking about asking for an upgrade of the priority.)

[Attention] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting technical or organizational content, go ahead and skip it.
Sometimes, when you don't want something to happen... You don't even talk about it. Sometimes you try hard not even to think about it - Well, it wasn't so in this case, as it has been a long time devoted to... Thinking, thinking a lot.
The important thing is that I feel there is a fact I should have shared with the people I consider close to me. And some people do know it, of course, but it has been hardest for me to share this with who I consider my closest friends - maybe out of hope that the result will be something different?
Anyway... the fact is I have been living on my own for the last two months. Nadezhda and I decided to take a three month period to... Decide what comes next. And most of the time since this strange period began has been quite decent... But the last week or so has been... A bit different. I have been much more... introspective. Maybe it could be seen as more depressive, more introverted.
So, what does this mean? Do I have my mind clear on what to do? No. Not by far. But I am working on finding my feelings and my reality, full-time. I might be under-achieving both in my Real-Life works and in Debian - please cope with me. There is a reason for it, as you now see.
And, no, this post is not aiming at getting sympathy and hugs... It is just... Because I need to finally share this thing I am going through with. Think of it as finally stepping out of the closet, more as a step for myself than for anything else... A significant share of who I consider dear to me, even though we share no contact besides mailing lists I have mostly abandoned and two cathartic and beautiful (and, of course, technically productive!) weeks a year, lives in different timezones and countries - I do hope to have stabilized on either of the two possible realities by the time I meet my Debian fellows. As for my Mexican friends following my life by this blog... Well, just excuse me for not speaking out face to face, as this should have been done.
Comments intentionally closed. Want to say something? Just think it hard enough, it will get to its destination ;-)

I think this is the first time this happens since etch was released: French translations of po-debconf templates are now "virtually" complete. It means that all packages with an incomplete translation in the above linked page do indeed have a bug reported against them with the corrected translation. It's just a matter of the maintainer uploading..:-) For several of these, a NMU work is under progress. For some others, the maintainer *will* upload. In short, we're now targeting the *real* 100%. For what's is worth, German is now very close to "virtual 100%" and so should be Portuguese (I've not checked, this is what they claim) and Czech shouldn't be far as well.

I ogled with an ASUS EeePC since it was announced, but didn’t want to order one abroad. So I waited until they became available in Switzerland. Digitec is the official EeePC importer for Switzerland and seeems also to be the moving power for yet to come the Swiss localisation of the EeePC. But initially they only offered imported EeePCs with German keyboard layout, but since I really got used to the US layout, I didn’t want to buy ay new laptops or keyboards with German layout. When asking them about US layouts they told me they won’t import from the US and that their competitor Steg Computer is importing US models. But I wasn’t comfortable with Steg and EeePCs also were more expensive there, so I hesitated ordering at Steg. So it was quite unexpected for me when US models showed up on digitec’s website. (Interestingly I never received any mail from their advertised EeePC newsletter, not even when they added 2G models t their repertoire.) So at the end of March (and therefore later as most other geeks ;-) I ordered an ASUS EeePC at digitec. For me, white laptops look like Macs (and Macs are for sissies or masochists ;-) — so I had no problems to decide that I want a black EeePC with US keyboard layout. 2G was to small for my purposes (and also not that much cheaper) and 8G not available. So I went with the 4G, since Debian doesn’t need so much space if you choose the right packages (i.e. neither or at least not that much of GNOME or KDE ;-). I preferred the 4G over the 4G Surf because of the bigger battery capacity (and not because of the webcam which I consider funny but useless:-). Initially the delivery date was set the 28th of March. Then it was subsequently set to “beginning of April”, “mid of April”, “end of April” and “beginning of May”. It finally arrived on 8th of May. In the meanwhile there were reports that even the 4G has been equipped with the smaller battery of the 4G Surf because of some battery shortage after some battery plant burnt down. But fortunately the delivery problems with black 4G US models doesn’t seem to have its reason there and my 4G has a 5200 mAh battery (at least according to its label and ACPI). I also ordered a 2 GB bar of Corsair ValueSelect RAM so that I can pump up the RAM of my EeePC by factor four (for about 10% of the price of the EeePC itself) resulting in having half as much RAM as disk space. Well, I guess, I won’t do suspend to disk in that configuration… ;-) The original Xandros based Linux only noticed 1 GB of the installed 2 GB as already noted on many other places in the web. But that doesn’t really matter, since it only lasted until I found out how to restore it from DVD in case I want to sell the EeePC later (e.g. for getting the successor). It’s fine for novices, but Linuxes feel strange if you can’t even get a console or a terminal with a command line. ;-) The Debian EeePC installer worked fine except that it argued over a checksum error on our mirror which wasn’t reproducable after the installation anymore. I’ve chosen the EeePC to be my first (nearly) pure Lenny installation — compared to the three machines running Sid (i386, amd64 and kfreebsd-i386). It though has a few packages from experimental (mostly xulrunner-1.9) installed. As window managers I have installed ratpoison, FLWM and FVWM. ratpoison — best described as screen for X (although you can’t detach and reattach) since it’s my personal preferences for being productive without big screen resolutions and flwm for a low-resource window manager which can be used intuitivly by both, geeks and non-geeks (and still doesn’t look like Windows at all ;-). And FVWM is installed because it’s my default window manager on all machines with bigger or multiple screens – to be able to compare it with my usual environment. As web browser I’ve got Opera as primary browser (as everywhere else, too) and Conkeror (the EeePC is the test-case for upcoming Debian package of Conkeror) as well as links2 and lynx on the (nearly) text-only side on it, although I need them seldomly. As office programs (as I would ever need some ;-) I’ve got AbiWord and Gnumeric installed since I already use a few GNOME applications (e.g. Network Manager, Twitux, etc.) and OpenOffice.org would take up 170 MB more disk space (then including OOo Draw and OOo Impress) and Siag Office is no more in Debian since years. (Initially I had OpenOffice.org installed instead of AbiWord and Gnumeric until I noticed that I need some of the GNOME libraries anyway.) I also decided that I will need LaTeX then and when so TeX Live also got its chunk of the 4 GB of disk space. I also have a bunch of games on the EeePC. Unfortunately there are a few games which don’t work well on the EeePC due to it’s resolution being smaller than 800x600, so I deinstalled them already again, e.g. I can’t play Cuyo on the EeePC but flobopuyo. Sauerbraten segfaults, but Doom (prboom with freedoom WADs) works fine. Further non-working games unfortunately include Battle of Wesnoth and XFrisk. Still, although quite some parts of GNOME and GNOME Office, TeX Live, ScummVM with Flight of the Amazon Queen and Beneath a Steel Sky, GNU Emacs 22, Iceweasel 3 (aka Mozilla Firefox 3), Icedove (aka Mozilla Thunderbird) and the Iceowl (aka Mozilla Sunbird) are installed, only 2.3 GB of the available hard disk space are used by the installation (i.e. without my home directory). Oh, and btw: Although except the very compact and a little bit wobbly keyboard the EeePC doesn’t feel really small to me (I’ve got quite small hands), but when I sat down in front of my 14” ThinkPad T61 after a day or two with EeePC, the T61, — especially screen and keyboard — felt huge as if it would be some 17” or even bigger notebook. ;-) OTOH I still think that a 1920×1200 (which means nearly four xterms in a row) resolution on a 14” notebook would be a good idea, especially compared to the 1440×900 (which means nearly three xterms in a row) my T61 has. ;-) Personal Resumée after one month Pro EeePC

• It’s geeky. If you show up with it, people want to lift it to see how much it weights and try the tiny keyboard. They’re surprised that 800x480 aren’t that small and that the performance isn’t that bad.
• Very compact and robust. With the T61 I always fear that its edges are too close to the the outside of my backpack and could be damaged that way.
• The price of course: CHF 499 at digitec (plus CHF 54 for the 2 GB RAM)
• Runs Linux ex factory. So yu don’t have to expect that many driver hassles.
• RAM upgrades are very straight forward and do not void the warranty. (BTW: The sticker over one of the screws which probably should prove the integrity can be removed and placed again easily… :-)
• The weight. 0.92 kg can be easily held wit one hand, also because of less leverage effect as with full-size laptops.
• The SSD despite it’s size. Being such lightweight you accelerate the EeePC unmindfully even when it runs. But it doesn’t matter, at least not to the hard disk. And it boots very fast, especially after the usage of insserv.
• Intergrated Ethernet network interface. (Hey, the MacBook Air hasn’t a builtin one, not even an external shipped with it! ;-)
• Three USB sockets (the MacBook Air has only one which is usually taken for the Ethernet network adaptor — Ok, with the EeePC usually one is taken for the Bluetooth dongle, but then are still two sockets left… ;-)
• Great contrast on the builtin screen.
• External VGA output. You have to configure X.org to make the virtual screen big enough (e.g. 2048×2048 instead of the default 800×800).
• Despite its size quite a lot of space for modifications inside the case. Especially a bluetooth case mode should be no big deal.

Contra EeePC

• The keyboard: keys smaller than usually (ok, wouldn’t work otherwise ;-), very wobbly, no precise contact depth (pressing Shift and Fn with one finger often doesn’t press Fn right), not all keys on the same plane, unusual offsets between the key rows (the number row has about half a key width offset to the left) or position of keys (I often hit Ins when I want Home, Del when I want Backspace or Fn when I want Ctrl, the ~ key is between Esc and F1, Up is between Slash and Right Shift, etc.)
• The position of the power button: It’s exactly where I want to put thumb when holding the EeePC solely with the right hand. And yes, I already accidentially switch it off several times because of that. For luck the button doesn’t work at all when the lid is closed, because you still can reach it easily while it’s closed.
• The mouse button(s): It only has two buttons which are one part you can press more to the left and more to the right side. And if you press it in the middle you randomly get either a left or a right click. You have to press it very hard to get both clicks at the same time. (e.g. to emulate a third middle button). Three separated mouse buttons would have been way better.
• It has (only) a touchpad. I definitely prefer thumbsticks as the ThinkPads have, but got used to it, though. I have seen worse touchpads, too.
• The noisy and not very precisely beared fan, which seems to strife its environment when the EeePC is being accelerated. Whih happens quite often because of its size and weight and because the SSD doesn’t mind acceleration. The fan does mind – and you hear it. :-(
• Some programs need minimum 800x600 resolution to work well.

Pro ThinkPad (in direct comparision)

• Thumbstick.
• One of the best laptop keyboards around.
• Three easy to distinguish mouse buttons.
• Even ressource-hungry programs like Liferea work fine.
• Quite big screen resolution (1440×900).
• Bigger battery, space for additional batteries.
• Could be a workstation replacement.

Pro Lenny on the EeePC

• The installer image of the Debian EeePC Project works out of the box. All necessary drivers are available, if you include the non-free repositories and the eeepc.debian.net repositories.
• Stable enough for daily use. (IMHO Debian Testing – and even Debian Unstable – is more stable as many other distribution’s stable releases, e.g. those from SuSE.)

Con Lenny on the EeePC

• My favourite feed reader Liferea has changed its cache format since the version in Debian Etch, so I can’t sync Liferea caches between my Debian Etch running T61 and the Testing running EeePC. Well, fortunately the version of Liferea in Debian Etch still works on Debian Lenny, so I just downgraded the package to the version from Etch and set it on hold. I don’t use it on the EeePC though since it needs way too long to start (about 10 to 15 minutes compared to 1 to 3 minutes on the T61)

Summary I’m very happy with the EeePC and I didn’t expect that it would replace my 14” ThinkPad in so many (but still not all) situations. :-)