Ubuntu Pennsylvania Planet

After purchasing a Dell Mini9 a couple weeks ago, I decided to use a photo from my climb at Nelson rocks for the desktop.

(Click the photo for full 1024×600 goodness.)

If you’d like this for your larger screen (or smaller) let me know and I’ll prepare one for any other resolution from the original.

A short drop was all it took to break the filter that was on my camera…

Thankfully, the damage was limited to just the filter and lens cap.

Following my Saturday trip up to NYC, I spent Sunday with Stephen down at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. We spent all their open hours there, from 1-5PM, and what a great little museum! I never even knew it was there!

Sadly after charging my camera after my NYC trip, I completely forgot the battery in the charger when I went down to Philly, I spent the entire museum visit with just the camera on my g1. I’m not the biggest fan of using cellphone for cameras, but the g1 didn’t do so bad! I actually shrunk all the full-size photos in this entry a bit.

Skeleton in Ancient Egyptian exhibit

An ancient Greek on a laptop ;D

Necklace from the Painted Metaphors Exhibit

At 5 we were shooed out of the museum and drove over to the new Chipotle in University City for dinner. Earlier in the day I had twittered about being downtown and my friend DarKrow dropped me a tweet to meet up, so he joined us for dinner. After dinner he introduced us to the best gelato I’ve ever had at a chain called Capogiro Gelato. I ended up with a cone of their Tiramisu and Chocolate Banana. Following that I headed home.

This weekend I’m heading out to San Francisco for a long weekend visit with MJ. I’m flying out Thursday evening and taking a redeye home Sunday night/Monday morning. Plans? Sushi! 4th of July celebrations! Snuggles! Samurai (…in a museum)! OK, maybe won’t get to everything, but it should be a fun weekend :)

Where does the time go? Hannah loves standing so we busted out the walker so she can scoot around the kitchen.



And, much to her delight, she has found her toes!



Zoe's friend Ava came over yesterday to show off her newborn baby sister. The girls had lots of fun playing and were especially happy that the ice cream truck came by!



Here is the artist hard at work. Zoe loves drawing and Hannah loves watching her. This frees me up for doing dishes, which I do not love.



A little while after that snap, Zoe said "Mom, look I drew Zoe." Quite an impressive first self-portrait, no?



Hannah is already learning to get irritated by her mother. Enough with the camera, woman!



Here is Zoe earning her keep:



And fresh pictures from today! Zoe on her whistle-stop tour:



And Hannah (and those delicious toes!) napping while Zoe plays at the park!

Yesterday I left home around 9AM to head over to New Jersey to meet up with my friend Mike who I was traveling up to New York City with. Plans to head up there came together when I learned my friend Wilmer of the Bitlbee project was going to be up there. Then learned via twitter that Nikkiana would also be in town! Mike was headed up for different reasons anyway so going together seemed to make sense.

The work Mike was doing in the city required use of his car, so for the only the second time in my life I got to ride a car into NYC (the last time was with my grand parents, YEARS ago, even they normally took the train). This was the first time I’d ever been through the Lincoln Tunnel, and was delighted to learn that I still had cellphone reception there, so I twittered from under a river! We parked on 7th Ave, touched base with our respective friends and then headed to Burgers & Cupcakes for lunch. On the way down 7th we saw this smashed car, yikes!

Burgers & Cupcakes was awesome. We had planned on hitting a burger joint that Mike’s friend recommended, but then learned they don’t open until 4PM. By then burgers were on our mind so Friday night we were searching for burger places to eat at. What could be better than burgers and cupcakes?

I snagged a salmon burger, which while not your typical giant-american-burger was immensely satisfying. They had a burger and milkshake special so I couldn’t help but order a chocolate shake to go along with it. And dessert? A delicious carrot cupcake.

After lunch Mike left for his engagement I had some time to kill before meeting up with Nikki and Wilmer. I wandered around 7th Ave for a bit, then got bored and headed toward 6th. To my surprise a long stretch of 6th was shut down for vendors of all sorts, and made for a lot of fun to walk through.

I met up with Nikki around 2:30 and we continued the wandering. Having known her only online until then via Ubuntu stuff it was very cool to meet up and talk in person finally. We snagged some $1 lemonades and enjoyed wandering. Around 3:30 I found Wilmer finally (grin, we were supposed to meet at 2!) and he joined us. We headed toward the Empire State Building to see about going up to the top, but the wait was a bit long so we satisfied ourselves by taking pictures of it instead. It’s a very big building.

Unfortunately Mike’s plans changed unexpectedly and caused us to have to leave the city around 4:30PM - d’oh! I think next time I’ll see about parking my car at a train station in NJ and braving the trip up myself.

In spite of the shortened trip, I am very glad I went up and was able to see people for a little while. And New York City! I quite like Manhattan, going up is always a fun adventure. Plus, now that Nikki is up there I have at least two friends in the city who I’d be comfortable calling to meet up, fun!

pleia2 and nikkiana

Wilmer and pleia2

Today the weather is beautiful yet again! And I’m going down to Philadelphia with Stephen to go to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. I just learned it existed a few weeks ago and have been trying to find a day to go. Then I think we’ll be hitting Chipotle for dinner, yum!

This Saturday Project was the IBM Thinkpad A21m:

model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
cpu MHz : 700.000

Mem: 121520

I think that this machine should be able to handle Ubuntu Jaunty, so I give that a whirl.

Unfortunately, Gnome Desktop environment put too much of a strain on it, so once again, it's time to find the best Window Manager/Desktop Environment for this particular machine.

The Players:
1) Gnome Desktop
2) Xubuntu Desktop (whole meta package)
3) xlde
4) Fluxbox
5) Openbox
6) E16 (Enlightenment)

The install was a full-blown Ubuntu Jaunty install. After the Gnome failure, I added Xubuntu-desktop, xlde, fluxbox, openbox, and e16. I then removed the ubuntu-desktop.

*Note* I chose to start with the full install to create a machine that was as end-user friendly as possible. I have in the past used the 'CLI only' install via the F6 install disk boot option. This CLI only option is fine for me, but again, for the typical end-user it may not be complete enough.

The Jaunty boot time is a very respectable ONE minute and 5 seconds.

Now to the Window Managers. A quick chart to show from login manager to complete window manager readiness:

Gnome (Ubuntu) 2 minutes 50 seconds
Xfce (Xubuntu) 2 minutes 20 seconds
Xlde 25 seconds
Fluxbox 24 seconds
Openbox 5 seconds
E16 5 seconds

The responsiveness of the above window managers seems to be directly proportional to their load times.

I do realize that xlde is an Openbox derivative, but that 20 extra seconds adds configuration that I feel may be relevant to the typical end-user; desktop icons, panel with launchers, etc.

I again, would probably use e16, although, openbox has me interested as well. But for the purpose of this machine's build,the typical end-user; the choice is xlde.

Application preferences so far:

File Manager: Thunar over Pcmanfm
Web Browser: Epiphany over Firefox

Ok, so this time I am going to try Damn Small Linux to hard drive install with APT.

When done using this, it uses the Debian Woody repositories. Just have to be careful that updating and upgrading don't interfere with anything specifically compiled for the DSL os. The exact warning quote is very telling:

DSL is not derived purely from Debian, if you 'apt-get install' the wrong application you may break something, for instance, the X servers. You may have trouble if you try to upgrade your whole DSL distro to debian (apt-get upgrade)! Another caveat is that some of the dsl binaries use BusyBox multi call binary (instead of separate binaries for find, ls etc). It causes problems when used in some of the scripts inside certain debian packages, for example xpdf. Use apt to grab individual
packages, but only the expert should try major system upgrades.

I have now done this twice - once with 3.4.x and with 4.4.10 - both with apt enabled.

DSL 3.8. on:


DSL 4.4.10 on:

Ubuntu Jaunty cli only ~ 377 megs

add xorg about 200 megs more - 575M

add xfce4 - not xubuntu desktop - 155mb will be used - 702M now

let's see....perfect. Now for some applications.

Web Browser: Dillo

Documents: Mousepad

Images: Gpicviewer

Nmap - have to have.


That's my basic install - using on a Dell Latitude LM 166MHz Ram: