Google’s Faithful
The presence of Android, Google does not want to make losing a step of any service provider, to provide mobile applications for all its services. These applications work with a simple interface, and easy to use. Even so, Google also continue to provide access with a special web interface for mobile devices. From time to time service with a special web interface for mobile devices, is also updated and changed appearance to be more intuitive and more convergent with how it looks if we access through the application. Call the main services of Google, Gmail or Google Reader.

Gmail is the most intuitive mobile email service today. Until even if we access it through the  Android stock browser, we still will get an ajax-based GUI with the same ease as the Gmail app on Android. I do not bother with whether Google has finally finished porting Chrome browser to Android or not. Currently favorite browsers that works just fine  are Android stock browser as well as Dophin HD.  Gmail view was also more stylish than the instance-based blog WordPress with a plugin display for mobile devices: WPTouch. Email is not dead, believe me, even after the fanfare of SMS, MMS, various free InstantMessenger or paid like BBM (Blackberry Messenger), email remains the most important for me. Not all things that are sending email messages can be replaced.In fact, in my opinion other than the web, one of the major components of internet is email, not the other. Google is also aware of this, because Gmail is much more intuitive interface than Yahoo Mail or Hotmail.

Google Reader is one RSS aggregator that best meets my needs at this time. Rather than thinking of having to visit the many sites my subscription to listen to the news or content, I chose to explore my RSS collection first. RSS Exploring further saves time and makes us more able to choose the content that we will read first. RSS aggregators are so privileged that I put it as my main daily priority after the email. Some services like corporate reports are also using RSS as a method of distributing content. RSS is one of the results meet the criteria of Internet content creation: a simple and lightweight.

I do not want to ignore other Google services, because I am not a handyman Googleads, but I greatly appreciate the loyalty of Google as its web-based services. Apparently ‘Don`t be Evil’ is still held by Google. Try to distinguish what has been done with Nokia, Micorosoft or even Apple? Are there any of them think out what makes them great not sell first? I mean what is good, free and helps the public with free services? Probably because Android is closest to Linux, so the idea of freedom is more inherent. There are WebOS, Bada, Windows Phone or Meego but almost all are half-hearted develop it if you have to give as freely and  total as Android.

Web’s Not Dead 
I prefer to associate the web with the mobile internet. Connectivity is one key, but trailed behind them is the content presented in a simple and lighter. When some time ago Tim O’Reilly hum Web 2.0,  then inside them, one of the popular formats for the exchange and distribution of content is XML. But it soon turned out.

HTML5 change the format of the HTML more powerful and should not merely be used only as a viewer that is distributed with XML content. Javascript, the language is considered lightly and only used for the viewer and manipulator web page, so it is also an important tool. Even the format JSON (Javascript Object Notation), plucks Javascript clause in it, and presents a way of sending data lighter than XML. JSON ignores many things that must be followed by XML, which makes XML so much fat as the cost of flexibility. Looks like Google is also located in front of this issue, using JSONP in some of their services. Alternatively, the JSONP approach incorporates the use of an encoded callback function passed the between the client and server to allow the client to load JSON-encoded data from third-party domains and to notify the caller function upon completion, although this imposes some security risks and additional requirements upon the server (Wikipedia).

The news that was distributed with a special protocol NNTP, now collected in RSS aggregators. Initially be in the POP email, currently accessed via IMAP and presented to the web interface. Download something first through anonymous FTP, currently bridged in order presented on Web pages and downloaded easily by the public. And the social networking world, is one of the most popular content currently accessible, the most active user generated content site category, also there on the web. Perhaps even most people identify Internet Access is the web, though the Internet contains a lot more other components in addition to the web.

Mobile Interface
But not all existing services on the web refers to the needs of mobile devices. Adherents freestyle like me, certainly not too interested in the Apple ecosystem with the style of the devices: iPod, iPhone and the iPad where not everything is free and can be detected directly as a mobile accessor. So the service maker is the one who should provide mobile applications with an intuitive interface. Tim Berners-Lee expressed the importance of net neutrality, usefulness and independence of its access.

Mobile Interface becomes important if we could always access it from a web browser on our mobile devices. Access of applications, often it makes the service provider shut down access from other ways apart from their application. If we had a 20-50 service with such a model, then we hars cram so many applications anyway just to access them. And its application are locked in a particular platform that we must buy or pay. Not so if we assume the openness and freedom of access. Mobile interface for the web are also promising so much we can dig. Exploration HTML5, the small screen to the optimization function and content, and of course: the simplicity of the light. In addition to HTML5, Javascript also involves making the mobile site does not have to be not rich in style.Some of the toolkit was born precisely focused on providing ease of a web interface for mobile devices, such as Sencha and JQuerymobile.

I guess I understand if some opinion that the flash is wasteful. Interface richness and interactivity are the rent we pay for the price of processor capabilities and fast-drained battery. Flash requires a minimum power of the processor (1 GHz) on the smartphone and tablet, and leave the rest. Adobe even ignoring the Linux and other OS users who already use a 64bit operating system so long, and forcing them to use the wrapper to be able to deal with flash content. Still less evidence with Adobe’s waiver? Even had they ignore pdf plugin for 64bit, until Google came up with Chrome wrap that has been packed inside the plugin doc. I do not know what hinder Mozilla to make Firefox work like that.

HTML5, SVG, Javascript, CSS3 are the components that make us able to provide access to web services and in a rich, intuitive and interactive style. The makers of web services should think about this if you want to achieve greater accessor. Regardless of any criticism to them, today I noticed that Google only looks faithful to their commitment to free services from the web. Apple and Microsoft, are you kidding?

Linux Appliance

Linux Appliance is not a brand new thing from Linux world. It is a Linux ready for a special need. It can be based on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Opensuse or other distros. But we just know that it’s a distro for special needs, such us: mail server, fileserver or gateway. There are a special distros out there for special needs. To mention some of them are: ClearOS for Router and Gateway, Untangle for UTM (Unified Threat Management), Openfiler for NAS/Storage Server, etc. There are special distros for special needs, but it doesn’t make sense to learn all of those special distros. Those special Linux distros developed based on a bigger distros, such as Openfiler is based on CentOS/Redhat. While our system administrator might have been comfortable in Debian environment. It’s the same Linux, yet slightly different. And it is not wise to maintain more than one distro flavour to just serve our special need.

Linux Appliance is more simple than that. It’s is a common distro which already repackaged to meet our needs. It’s not a brand new distro. The distributions of Linux Appliance is not always in an iso based files. It could be a virtualization image of VirtualBox, VMWare, KVM or Xen. I think it’s common sense to only maintain one or two Linux distro in our organization. There are a lot of reasons behind that. Even a newbie like me understand that.

In about last two or three years, I’ve seen some good geek already distribute an image to be used in virtualization environment as a way to distribute Linux. There are image of Ubuntu/Debian/Opensuse in an image of VDI or VMDK. I noticed that DSL is also distributed in VMDK way. It’s a good new way of distribution. But what we need is more than just a common distro. It’s a special distro, such as a common Ubuntu for a special needs. I found what Turnkey do is an excellent way. It’s derived from Ubuntu (currently 8.04.3, I think soon will be 10.4, since it’s also LTS).

VMWare has came with new marketplace for his virtualization appliance. It’s new way to embrace ISV to join and develop appliance in VMWare virtualization platform. Novell expands its appliance platform in SUSE Studio. Zenworks Configuration Management virtual appliance is one of the new technology portofolio of Novell built with SUSE Studio. SUSE Studio is reported to generate 100,000 appliances and more than 40,000 registered users worldwide.

Prepare Your Own Studio

I would not talk as something like Suse Studio. But it’s simplified version of what’s in SUSE Studio or VMWare. We have to provide hardware to build a custom distro we need. But if we can’t provide the bare metal, we still can use virtualization way. I’d prefer to have VirtualBox or KVM than VMWare. These are item list of what we need to build our own Linux Appliance Studio:

• VirtualBox
• Installed Ubuntu
• PCLinuxOS or Ubuntu iso
• Enough hardisk space and RAM

There is no special programming or scripting skill needed to build a special distro we need. Then if a common Linux user like me can build it than an experienced system administrator or Linux developers would found it easy and fun. The reason why it’s not a lot Linux appliance distributions out there, because the geek see no reason to provide it. But for the SME business point of view, it could be different. They need the solutions: reliable, fast and affordabled.

The case is not just to maintain and backup server configuration, but also to deploy the same server solutions to several branch. Linux appliance is the shortcut to provide those special needs. A common distro that already remastered as a Fileserver, a Mail server, or a Router.

Remastering PCLinuxOS is an easy way. It’s sloghtly different with Ubuntu, but I think PCLinuxOS remastering is more natural. Here they are the steps:

• Prepare a blank disk or enough hard drive space, make two primary partitions: ext3 and swap.
• Root partition (/) at least 3GB (based application you will need, and at least 2 GB swap partition.
• Booting your computer with a CD of PCLinuxOS (download or buy).
• Install PCLinuxOS on your hard disk by clicking on Live-CD install icon on the desktop.
• Follow every step, until PCLinuxOS installed on the hard drive and boot.
• Make the desired changes, eg uninstalls unnecessary applications (with synaptic), increase / decrease or change user settings, change the display: wallpapers, styles, icons, window-decoration and so on.
• su from the console.
• mklivecd eg. mklivecd remastered.iso (additional option mklivecd can you read the documentation).
• open K3b burn the results on the CD iso image.
• Booting with CD burning results, so we’ll get results.

Remastering Ubuntu isn’t that hard. But the result is a Linux Appliance of what we need. Note that Ubuntu remastering is using Ubuntu Desktop LiveCD. So, during remastering, if necessary you can change the desktop kernel to be server kernel image and remove all of X applications (desktop applications). There are some of kernel choices to fit our needs in Ubuntu: generic, server, virtual and ec2. PCLinuxOS is one of the easiest distro to be remastered. The mklivecd and remasterme script of PCLinuxOS ease a lot of things. It’s too bad PCLinuxOS not providing 64Bit kernel and software packages. But since pae kernel is enabled, then PCLinuxOS based derivation will recognize more than 4GB RAM.

The whole process or remastering can be done in the virtualization environment, such as VirtualBox. Later we can try and test the result also in the virtualization environment. The rematering process can redo from start to refine the result to meet what we really need.

Turnkey is the best site of Linux Appliance provider based on Ubuntu. They’re already repackage and rebranding Ubuntu as new derived distro. We don’t have to go that far direction as Turnkey. This just a simple remastering with the additional effort of install and uninstall software packages. They key effort is on the remastering. I choose Ubuntu as one of distro to remaster, because of popularity, familiarity and the richness of Ubuntu software repository. Popularity is reflected to the mirror number. This later would ease us to maintain the installed Linux appliance.


Virtual Appliance Image

When we already have installed, customized and configured the distro in the virtualization environment, we could also distribute it directly as virtual appliance image, as VDI of VirtualBox or Img of KVM/QEMU. It’s a new flavour of appliance distribution. When I first found somebody out there distribute Linux distro as a virtual image, I realized is just a matter of time to find a custom built Linux from any distros. Now there’s Turnkey provide them, and VMWare commercially setup new Virtual Appliance marketplace.

There’s Open Virtualization Format. Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances or more generally software to be run in virtual machines. Current supported platform are VMWare and VirtualBox.


Conclusion

What Turnkey provided is a new flavour of distro. True, it’s derived from Ubuntu, but the focus it’s not on the distro itself, but more on the function, service and our special need. If Turnkey hasn’t provided yet or we haven’t really been familiar with Ubuntu, we can build or own Linux Appliance Studio easily. We don’t need SUSE Studio or purchase SUSE just to get Linux Appliance we need. Ubuntu already provided all we need to build our own studio and PCLinuxOS provided the easy and smooth remastering way to customize its content. It’s about buying time to deploy a special need server in many machines. Please note, we can do it all with fun. It’s serious project with fun touch, anyway.

By year 2010, I check Chromium again. Version 4 is quite matured. Extension was already supported, I jut haven’t find the extension I need. The extension of Firefox keeps growing. Chromium has been faster than Firefox 3.5. But some sites benchmark that Firefox 3.6 has been already exceeded by Chromium. But at the same time, my firefox 3.6 often got crashed. It’s very annoying, it happens especially when we’re downloading something. Some plugin doesn’t work anymore, my fave one: Adobe pdf viewer plugin.

Chromium and Its Extensions

Continue to explore Chromium extension, I found the other extension, it’s Firebug-lite. I don’t care with term “lite”. In a glance, seems to be just as I need. Another interesting extension is Auto-Translate. It’s linked to Google translator page. It’s easy, lite and instant translation result. Just hightlite the text we’d like to translate, the Auto-Translate will then pop-up the result as we configured in its option.

YouTube downloader is my another extenstension list. Sometimes I found an interesting content from YouTube and just want to keep it locally to replay later. Sometimes even works like converter. From YouTube video streaming content to mp3 for I want to extract just the sound of the video streaming content.

Lite Desktop
Moblin is designed to be an alternative OS of Atom based computer we now call it as netbook and nettop, other Mobile Internet Devices and embedded devices. Although my primary netbook is not categorized as netbook, but because of the impression of mutter gui and the lightness, I just easily made up my mind to setup Moblin in my primary notebook.

Ok, let me start from the very basic of my need of some lightness computation: internet browsing. I won’t say that cloud computing is more suiteable for it. I must still have an ability to do anything offline. I like the idea of Jolicloud or ChromeOS but to depend on the internet that much, I’m not ready. I’m in the country where internet broadband connection is not always available anywhere I go and still quite expensive. So OpenOffice should be included, for my Office paper works and dia as my diagram tool, at least.

Back to Firefox, Bye Moblin Internet Browser
My favorit browser is Firefox. Extensions is one of Firefox features that I love. So many extensions I could use, and the most important extension for me is adblock plus. Moblin Internet Browser engine is gecko engine in the foundation, just like Firefox. But the problem is Moblin Internet Browser is meant to be easy and lite with consequences several basic functionality is gone. No right click, not able to print (to printer or pdf) and cannot add adblock plus yet. Yes, I know adblock has announced that they have support Moblin Internet Browser but untested.

Since I use Ubuntu Moblin Remix, I’d prefer to go back to use Firefox instead of the default browser of Moblin. But unfortunately Firefox is crash. I’ve got “segmentation fault” message running it. For months since I’ve installed UMR, I switched to Opera and left Moblin Internet Browser unusable. Opera is running well with complete plugins enabled: flash, pdf, multimedia player. But I missed my Firefox.

Then I found the bug report from Ubuntu, that Firefox crash because of the different xulrunner compiled with the one that Moblin Internet Browser compiled with. When we renamed or moved xulrunner of Moblin Internet Browser to other name, reinstall Firefox then Firefox will fly perfectly because Firefox will use xulrunner-1.9.1. That’s what I did. I reinstall Firefox, renamed xulrunner-1.9.2x of Moblin Internet Browser to other name, and run Firefox. But this renaming directory will make Moblin Internet Browser cannot run. And after restart desktop later, I found that Internet icon on the Moblin Panel has gone too. It’s ok, after all I’d prefer to use Firefox as my daily primary browsing tool.

Additional Ingredients
The same thing happened on Multimedia Player. Moblin multimedia player can not play some format and I have no idea how to plug the library to make it play. But I’d prefer to use my other favorit media player: Totem Movie Player. Eventhough Totem is more movie player, but since it also provide playlist so basically I could add any of my multimedia file into the playlist. Ubuntu has made easier when I cannot play some format by offering to download or use other repositories where these propietary format can be found. I simply just want to play my mp3, 3gp, dat, or avi and then build all of those format in a playlist. So I change my Moblin not to be as fat as my Karmic Koala, but Moblin with custom needs.

Moblin is meant to be lite. I thought a simple firewall that I usually use: Shorewall is not costed to much on my CPU/RAM load. Then simple single interface shorewall configuration is up now to secure my Moblin. It’s going to be a daily desktop, so at least it’s quite secured from the open world. Finally, it’s the time to fully enjoy my Moblin.

My Moblin (Karmic Moblin Remix) Desktop
Back then, I was starting to get comfortable using KMR as my main desktop. As I considered that KMR is just another Ubuntu Desktop, then I could install anything as replacement of some applications. When KMR media player cannot play a particular format, then I just switch the default media player to Totem media player and add any plugins that I need to play some format. And so is the other main tool, the web browser. Moblin default web browser is using firefox engine, but I cannot treat it as I use the real Firefox. But when I installed Firefox, I got segementation fault. Firefox is useless then. The other alternative that I could trust is Opera. I installed Opera, and everything seems to be good. Why do I need another browser, why opera?

My answer is simple. As a Firefox user, I have my fave plugins as a must have extensions, such as: adblock (I don’t wanna to waste my bandwidth and be annoyed by banner ads, firebug (as my web development weapon and debugger), pdf viewer plugin from Adobe etc. At least I could use urlfilter in Opera blocked content feature as adblock substitution in Opera, an so is pdf viewer.

The rest of KMR software were just like Ubuntu Desktop. I got a complete Office Suite: OpenOffice, while the original Moblin just offered Abiword. The connection applet doesn’t work as the original Moblin. But in Ubuntu I could still do the old fashion way to setup network as in Debian, without NetworkManager or Connman applet. I could even setup my 3G connection manually using wvdial. I could use: aptitude (apt-get), synaptic or the new Ubuntu Software Center.

My notebook is Acer 1810T, Intel Core 2 Solo with 4 GB RAM. The original KMR only read my RAM 3GB more, I was wasting more or less 1GB. My Moblin was still running fine, but I wasn’t satisfied till I got at least closer to 4 GB RAM utilization. Well I knew after googling that I could change my 32 bit kernel to 64 bit or use server kernel instead. Another search I found googling that the keyword is PAE (Physical Address Extension). This PAE recipe works on Windows XP 32bit, too. This special compiled kernel with pae is availabled since Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. This is one of what makes me love using Debian/Ubuntu. It’s always great to find new tool/software/module already availabled in your mirror repository. No need to sweat compiling or reconfigured.

$sudo apt-get update && apt-get install linux-generic-pae
$free -m

Now I got 3950 MB RAM capacity, it’s enough for me and I consider it as 4 GB.

Conclusion
Well, now my moblin is fully able to utilize 4GB RAM in my notebook. I think KMR is promising. The concept of user interface is very different with UNR, Jolicloud or the new tiny cloud distro: xPUD. Moblin is not considered as a small distro. But I love the lightness (and the Ubuntu) within. Though I thought this final 2.1 Moblin was still unmatured. But I have no objections using it as my daily work desktop, I just feel confident with Moblin.

Damn Small Linux

Talking about mini distro, we can’t omit DamnSmallLinux (DSL). DamnSmallLinux is a 50MB liveCD distro, that can be installed to harddisk to be a Debian, the great distro ever. DSL is an easy liveCD desktop that fit into a bizcard cd, run from usb pendrive/thumbdrive or embedded OS. Eventhough that small, DSL still can act as an SSH/HTTP/FTP server.  With a very small media, we’ll have almost all about what we need in a desktop computing: XMMS (MP3, CD Music, and MPEG), FTP client, Dillo web browser, Netrik web browser, FireFox, spreadsheet, Sylpheed email, spellcheck (US English), a word-processor (Ted), three editors (Beaver, Vim, and Nano [Pico clone]), graphics editing and viewing (Xpaint, and xzgv), Xpdf (PDF Viewer), emelFM (file manager), Naim (AIM, ICQ, IRC), VNCviwer, Rdesktop, SSH/SCP server and client, DHCP client, PPP, PPPoE (ADSL), a web server, calculator, generic and GhostScript printer support, NFS, Fluxbox and JWM window managers, games, system monitoring apps, a host of command line tools, USB support, and pcmcia support, some wireless support.

Do we really need this kind of distro? For daily desktop computing: may be not. But for an emergency situation: saving data from Windows crash desktop, forbidden harddisk usage on some PC, etc, yes it the distro we need. With just USB enable PC boot or CDROM, we can start to work: browsing, tranfer file, editing documents/graphic, printing or instant messaging, DSL is just about all of those things. The size of DSL is effected on how fast the Operating System ready to be used. Everything running fast and smooth.

Puppy Linux

Puppy Linux is another mini distro with just about anything to start working on a desktop PC.  Puppy size is slightly bigger than DSL, about 100 MB. As what DSL offer, Puppy is doing fine with old PC or notebook. The booting takes only less than one minute. When I tried in my old notebook Pentium M 2.4 GHz 768 MB was fast indeed. And the desktop is also well polished. In the old days, when your Windows crashed, nothing you can do but repair or worse: reinstall. But we need to save our data or any configuration first, before we were going to reinstall or reformat our harddisk. Because of the size, is portable then. We can carry it into a USB thumdrive or liveCD.

Latest Puppy has been using kernel 2.6 while DSL are still using kernel 2.4. Booting up DSL is about three or more times faster than Puppy. But consider that nowadays, bringing USB thumbdrive 4 or 8 GB is no special, DSL or Puppy are good distro to bring along, anywhere anytime any old Pentium PC.

Moblin

I won’t continue to other small distro that double or even triple times bigger that Puppy such as TinyMe of MiniMe from PCLinuxOS or Slax from Slackware based distro. The 2008-2009 is the year of netbook, 7-10 inch laptop with Intel Atom inside. This Intel Atom processor is new Intel Processor platform that designed to be a lighter notebook, low power, low cost and application-readliness. Intel had also designed an operating system for this kind of processor, then bring it to Moblin Foundation. Currently, Moblin has already finalized and released as version 2. The version 2 Moblin has a streamline desktop, beautiful but lite.

Moblin is not considered as tiny distro. the 700 MB more size is a normal liveCD distro. Moblin is based on Fedora. Ubuntu, Mandriva and OpenSUSE have also announced their support on this project. Ubuntu is the first follower, with Ubuntu Karmic Moblin Remix. The Window Manager is not KDE, GNOME, or even the lightest Fluxbox. Karmic Moblin Remix is a Moblin with Ubuntu flavour. What run inside is Ubuntu kernel, then appeared as what Moblin look with clutter and metacity.

Currently, Moblin is my favorit distro. I choose Karmic Moblin Remix because of the faster booting and simplicity. Now tagline of PCLinusOS “Radically Simple” is taken over by Moblin in the real world. Some simple things is: we won’t find shutdown menu/icon/button in the OS, because there’s  power button in any notebook, netbook or PC. Push the power button, means shutdown with a confirmation. Some user reported needs only less than 10 seconds to start&boot until ready.

Conclusion

Though Netbook is now coming with 160 GB or 16 GB SSD, quite big space for any Linux distro for starting. Moblin is talking more than just size, but new concept of look and make normal distro feel so lite to load in such an entry level laptop. I think Lite is beautiful, indeed. Everything could be as simple as possible, as fast as possible to boot and run, yet remain look elegant. Moblin is a humble lite distro, especially for netbook. Or in Milan Kundera words: “the unbearable lightness of distro”

PCLinuxOS is a great distro. While I wrote this, I stopped by distrowatch. It is on top ten distro by page hit ranking. From the desktop view point, PCLinuxOS is nice as Mandriva but with the ease of package management as Debian/Ubuntu. The repository is undeniable richer than Ubuntu. My last check on the number of software package

#apt-cache stats

and the result I got from my PCLXDE (one of PCLinuxOS varian using LXDE desktop):

Total Package Names : 51739 (2070k)
Normal Packages: 0
Pure Virtual Packages: 2122
Single Virtual Packages: 36563
Mixed Virtual Packages: 11684
Missing: 1370
Total Distinct Versions: 11792 (566k)
Total Dependencies: 195649 (5478k)
Total Ver/File relations: 12917 (207k)
Total Provides Mappings: 54449 (1089k)
Total Globbed Strings: 134 (2257)
Total Dependency Version space: 113k
Total Slack space: 108k
Total Space Accounted for: 9520k

AFAIK, Ubuntu is the derivative of Debian with (I thought) even richer than PCLinuxOS. But the lastest Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10), standard repository has this.

Total package names: 37346 (1,793k)
Normal packages: 28503
Pure virtual packages: 414
Single virtual packages: 2418
Mixed virtual packages: 274
Missing: 5737
Total distinct versions: 29643 (1,660k)
Total distinct descriptions: 29643 (711k)
Total dependencies: 190663 (5,339k)
Total ver/file relations: 31591 (505k)
Total Desc/File relations: 29643 (474k)
Total Provides mappings: 5094 (102k)
Total globbed strings: 176 (2,318)
Total dependency version space: 895k
Total slack space: 54.4k
Total space accounted for: 9,455k

Remastering PCLinuxOS is unbeatable by any distro that now has the same way to do. The remastersys tool of Ubuntu is not as perfect as PCLinuxOS, yet. PCLinuxOS also has the amazing remastering tool: mklivecd.  Let me back to years a go when I was searching for the Mandrake (old name of Mandriva) LiveCD. I found MCNLive and PCLinuxOS. MCNLive is not meant to be a desktop OS, since there was no option to install to harddisk. But PCLinuxOS has it. We can then installed into our harddisk, made any customization. And if neccessary the we can remaster our harddisk install to a liveCD again, to be brought anywhere we go.

I used this method to deliver my application (mostly web based application) to my client. I found this very easy way to develop, test and deploy an application or system. Well, I didn’t have powerful machine, and virtualization was not as easy and chead as nowaydays. In my case, I developed my sms based system using kannel as the sms gateway. I developed the system in the Debian. I found that the deployment as even more harder than the development itself. I need to reconfigure the client’s machine from the start just to use my application.

My colleague, a Debian master,  helped me, to remaster my whole system, application, environment completely with all configuration needed. This method is still running well, but when I asked him to do that procedure twice or tripple times following the system refinement, it was going to be crazy thing to do. Well, it has to be done anyway. PCLinuxOS is quite young distro. But has a good package management, and for those whom are Debian users, they will enter easily to PCLinuxOS. It’s apt-get there, the rest is just a toy for them.

The other amazing tool is apt (aptitude). Apt has been Debian great tool to manage its .deb packages. Apt is all about the easy way to install a software package with all of dependency libraries/packages. Urpmi of Mandriva got this idea from Debian, too. Redhat has been great because of .rpm, compare to oldie Slackware who force user to download, extract, compile and install. For Slackware and Gentoo, they play with optimization purpose, so fine with it. But ordinary and newbie Linux users need to be as easy as it can be to just install and use Linux. Debian solved this thing. The package management is great and apt ease all things that has to do with software package instalation and management. Now is also coming with synaptic, the impresive GUI for apt.

Thanks to Texstar who brough apt into PCLinuxOS. No package manager can beat Debian way on how easy to manage our software package.  But the weird thing is, PCLinuxOS use .rpm like Mandriva and RedHat. But instead of bringing urpmi (Mandriva package tool), Texstar choose to adopt apt of Debian. Before I found PCLinuxOS, I was also the fan of Mandriva as I installed Mandriva in my home desktop. Mandriva always has a beautiful desktop, very easy to install, and recognize all of my cheap peripherals (RedHat has disappointed me on this matter, long time a go when there was no Fedora, yet).

Things never go as easy as when I was in PCLinuxOS. New distro born and death, but I never have a plan to switch over from PCLinuxOS to others. Until the day Ubuntu got into my office. For a corporation, a vendor name and support does matter. If you choose to go on Linux, there has to be an established company who can support our choice. There was a Progeny, a commercial company founded by Debian founder, Ian Murdock, who can support Debian. Debian has been my company’s main distro choice for quite some time. But Progeny was not making a good way in its business. And like me, my boss just didnt’ like Redhat or Suse so we had to look for Debian based distro with commercial support. Here came the Ubuntu. Brand new distro, shinny way to emerge from Debian way with the backup from Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical. Here came the pragmatic reason my Ubuntu environment got into the server and desktop field in my company.

Still I never leave completely my PCLinuxOS. When virtualization came to my mind as the born and establishment popularity of VirtualBox. My first VeeDeeEye was PCLinuxOS. I always have PCLinuxOS iso in my distros repository. Now, I tend to extend any development, test and deployment model in the virtualization way. But for a small system or application I develope, I am still using the liveCD deployment model. My old laptop of Pentium M, is  PCLXDE 2009. Fast and easy to install, recognized all of my peripheral, is more than enough to keep my love for PCLinuxOS. Now even my new netbook is Ubuntu Netbook Remix and my main notebook is Karmic Koala, there’s always a room for my PCLinuxOS, at least in my VeeDeeEyes collection. When I need it, I run the PCLXDE, install my work and remaster it in the VirtualBox. There it comes my work, ready to be tested and deployed to other machine. No additional configuration needed, run and install the liveCD. Fast and Clean.