I’m responsible for creating and maintaining the website of my church. As with all the church’s activities, accessability for everyone is very important. With this in mind, the website is designed for full XHTML 1.0 compatability, with support for pretty much any device (not wap yet though). Anyhow, it’s common knowledge these days that publishing your email address in cleartext will swamp any legitimate incoming email with spam. So, I created a lovely form which emailed it’s contents to me. That took a couple of months before the spammers found it. Then I started getting dozens of unintelligable sales pitches per day. So I eliminated that quick, and I’ve come up with what I think is a well balanced replacement. The address is displayed as an image, and the alternate text for the image is a set of human-readable instructions for composing the address. Hopefully this will thwart the spammers and allow my email through. The page itself is here: www.brewerroadchurch.org/contact/
More Linux 486 distributions:
ttylinux
The goal of the ttylinux project is to provide a small, up-to-date Linux distribution that runs on the smallest x86 system possible, yet does provide an environment very similar to a larger distribution. The key features are listed below.
Hardware requirements
* 386SX processor or better
* 5 MB of RAM for hard disk installation, 10 MB for ramdisk installation
* 4 MB filesystem size for hard disk installation
* modem or ISDN card (if you want Internet dial-out)
Software features
* command line interface, no graphical user interface (GUI)
* Internet dial-out (firewalled) via modem or ISDN card
* text mode web browser installed by default
* SSH (secure shell) client and server
* e3 text editor using WordStar-like commands
* package manager for easy installation of additional software
* all packages updated on a regular basis
http://www.minimalinux.org/ttylinux/
DragonLinux
Recently resurrected…
DragonLinux is a complete Linux operating system distribution that has been customized to install on top of versions of Microsoft Windows or any version of DOS. This version is ideal for the new or beginning user who needs to learn, evaluate, teach or demonstrate Linux. Even more advanced users will enjoy the quick install and ability to co-exist with their existing desktop environment. DragonLinux offers simplicity through ease of installation, minimal initial configuration and no repartitioning of hard drives. Unlike most major Linux distributions, DragonLinux does not require you to risk your data by forcing you to repartition your hard drive.
New in this version of DragonLinux is the Loopback file-system. This allows for installation on Windows and DOS partitions, while utilizing the Native Linux (ext2) file system with almost no performance loss. DragonLinux does not require an extremely powerful system to run. Recommended system requirements: 486 or Pentium class CPU; 8MB RAM for console, 32-64MB for X-Windows; A FAT16 or FAT32 partition with 50-130 megabytes of hard disk space free for minimal install. DragonLinux is fully compatible with Slackware v7.1 packages, and contains limited support for RPM packages. Other packages are available from both Linux Mafia and the Slackware FTP Site.
http://dragonlinux.sourceforge.net/
Linux Timon
Linux Timon is a minidistribution that only fits on a Diskette and it allows us to connect to a Telnet server or a 2000/2003 Windows Terminal Server, and it’s under development the possibility to connect to a VNCServer and a Citrix. To sum up, Linux Timon is a Telnet Client and a Terminal Server Client.
Linux Timon has a 2.4.27 Kernel, the root is a busybox 1,0 compiled with uclib, and for the Terminal Server Client it has an rdesktop that’s compiled with uclib and svgalib.
http://www.linuxtimon.com.ar/index.php?pais=en-us
muLinux
muLinux is a minimalistic Linux distribution, suitable for old computers. X11, GCC, VNC, SSH, Samba, Netscape etc. are supported on additional addon floppies. It can be installed from DOS/Win9x or Linux, without repartitioning.
The “mu” stands for a Greek letter (see Unicode Latin-1 char 0x0b5) frequently used for indicating the millionth part of something. for example: “mu meter” (µm) stands for micro meter and is the one millionth part of a meter. The reason for the name “muLinux” is its tiny size.
http://mulinux.dotsrc.org/
So far, the Adsense experiment is not going according to plan. My Adsense account now stands at the grand total of $0.48. At that rate, I should recieve my first cheque round about the end of 2007. I was interested to discover this article about adsense by Joel Spolsky of the widely respected ‘Joel on Software’ column. Essentially, he believes that Google’s Adsense programme is falling victim to spammers cashing in on fake clickthoughs. Since I remember people discussing this problem from at least 5 years ago, I doubt Google are facing a significant new problem, but it’s an interesting read – Joel on Software – Monday, October 24, 2005
I created a Google Adsense account the other day, and I’ve just had the confirmation through. I get quite a lot of hits on my site, but I’ve never tried putting any adverts on it before, since I don’t see the point of annoying people with both my scribblings and adverts. Still, some tens of thousands of people download car photos from me every month, and since they largely ignore my scribblings I won’t feel guilty about an unobtrusive text ad there.
The one page that takes the largest number of hits is my favourite car pictures, so I’ve included a small ad there. I’ll see how that goes.
Setting up Adsense was pretty painless, and my first money has appeared in my account while I was typing this. Only $0.12 so far, but that’s not bad at all. More than I was expecting from the first few minutes anyway!
Another trademark dispute means Gmail is becoming Google Mail in the UK. Worse than that, we’re likely to loose our ‘@gmail.com’ address too at some point in the future. The details were linked from my gmail screen this morning, and the BBC picked this one up too.
I see the story I submitted to slashdot on this has been accepted. I wonder if that means it will appear too? I submitted this story a little while back, which was accepted, yet marked as rejected in the list. Not too slick, that. I emailed them, and they responded by removing it from the list entirely. Since then, I’ve had a couple more accepted without issue.
EDIT: That answers that one
This is probably one of the scariest and saddest stories I’ve ever heard. When I was a kid I had nightmares about this happening to me. I wonder how many more sane people are imprisoned by error or malice?
Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com
Two useful tips I learnt today. One is that not having a loopback address on your linux machine really screws things up. If you are having wierd problems connecting to stuff on your machine and you cannot ping localhost, but there is an entry for localhost in /etc/hosts/, and you do:
ifconfig
and you only get ‘eth0′ or something, but no ‘lo’ then you should probably do something about it.
I did this:
ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 up
and that fixed it.
Second tip. If you’ve played around with webmin in the past and discovered that webmin fails to start, with things this in the miniserv.error file:
Cannot assign requested address at miniserv.pl
then you could try checking the miniserv.conf file to see if you’ve managed to put a duff IP address on the bind= line.
I’ve never had a problem with people hotlinking images off my server, which is as well, because it makes up the bulk of my traffic. One of my most popular pages is My 5 cars and 1 bike. This guy used my all but one of the images on his home page. That’s fine, I have no problem with using my list or my images, but what exactly is his problem with the MG SV XPower? He swapped it out for a BMW! That’s just rude.
The Association of British Drivers tirelessly document the worst abuses of the UK road network. Some of the amusing highlights include the parking wars pages, with links to media articles on unscrupulous traffic wardens handing out tickets to buses picking up passengers, car crash victims, Swedish snowmobiles, a milk float delivering milk and even rabbit hutches.
This is the final one that made me laugh. A slight error by the Highways Agency has resulted in two intersecting roads having the same number. This was left uncorrected, and you can clearly see on maps where B1106 crosses itself.
I’ve been doing some more research in the hope of finding a more up to date Linux distro which is still suitable for a 486. Turns out a good place to start is Distrowatch’s ‘old computers’ category. You can also search by architecture, with a ‘i486′ option, but that will not give you any sensible results.
The hot list of options is:
There’s an interesting post on the DSL forums about installing DSL on really old laptops like mine:
iB::Topic::Questions about DSL and a REALLY Old Laptop
The most noticeable problems with this installation are my requirements. Cue a long story which you can skip if you’re only interesting in how to cram a decent operating system onto atticware:
I live in a flat. Flats are known for convenience, cheapness, and low hoovering requirements, but not for their surplus of space. My wife, a much wiser character than me, regards filling the flat with computer equipment instead of dull things like furniture as a daft idea. So my collection of 4 desktop computers is allocated 1 small corner desk. It’s a nice desk, but you wouldn’t get more than one person seated there, or more than a single monitor. How to fit 4 computers in? Well, there are two on a Linksys KVM switch, a headless server, and the remaining one got stripped for spares and the remaining pieces dumped at my parents. All sorted, but now only one of us can use the computer, and it’s stuck in the corner of the lounge. So what do I do when the computer desk is occupied? Or the lounge required for more worthy projects – or indeed anything requiring peace, quiet, and a lack of geek tapping at keyboard? Well, I get another computer. Or rather, I dug out an archaic computer dumped on me by a friend. It should last me until someone decidedes to become my best friend ever and get me the best laptop in the world. The tablet version, preferebly with the larger hard disk and the memory upgrade. And I’ll need the docking station of course.
Anyway, back to 486 laptops. In addition to a standalone system, I want a (nearly) dumb terminal capable of controlling the much more powerful desktop machines. For that, I need some kind of communications, and wireless will be a whole lot easier than wired for that. So, for the holy grail, I want something that supports PCMCIA and wireless networking (yes, I know wireless networking on a 486 is insane, that’s why I’m going to give it a shot).
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