Explaining the "Single Speed" Philosophy

In previous posts, I have made reference to the term "Single Speed", so what the hell does it mean?

If you google "single speed", you'll get a bunch of hits relating to bicycles. In its simplest term, a single speed is a bike without gears and a bike without gears is simplicity defined. So what's that got to do with computers, Linux, OS X and why do I care?


The idea of a single speed bike is that there is nothing between the rider and the road, other than what is absolutely necessary. It could be considered a reaction to the ever increasing use of technology to make both mountain biking and road cycling more accessible to ordinary Joes with fat wallets, and we couldn't have that not, could we? Multiple suspension points on the rear and front, disc brakes and 21 or 27 gear bikes are quite common. Mountain biking on a modern bike can be akin to sitting on a large soafer, bobbing up and down and throwing mud on your face... although not too much mud, those $300 mud guards will catch most of it.

So Mountain Bikers cyclists decided to drop the rear suspension, the disc brakes and in some cases the front suspension and gears too. The bikes would be lighter and meaner and the rider would
have the opportunity to test his or her skill, rather than just the quality of the suspension.

Computers have followed a similar trend to bikes (stay with me, it makes sense honest!). Just about anyone can get to grips with a modern computer. Simple interfaces, wizards, automatic installations and millions of dollars worth of R+D to make life simple has all resulted in computers that are now simple to use by anyone. The days of typing 3 or 4 lines of code just to get your word processor to save a file are long gone. Computers are smart - the users are stupid - and that sells software.

So can the single speed philosophy be applied to computers? What would a single speed computer be like to use. My wife wanted one... and I thought it was a great idea. The obvious choice was Linux... simple, no complex wizards and nothing to distract the user from getting on with what is important. Using the damn thing!

Hard Wearing Hardware

Those beautiful Apple Macs look very fragile. They are. My wife (Maria's) Mac was small, beautiful but didn't like getting bumped about. Although we'll never know quite what killed it, high on the list of suspects was a recent small fall from the sofa to our hardwood floor.

The machine is dead. All that is salvagable is 512MB of RAM, which was an upgrade from the machine's miserly built in 128MBs, an airport card (very rare now for Mac iBook G3s) and possibly the hard disk drive.

In choosing replacement hardware, we're looking for a laptop certainly. Maria's only request is that it fits into her existing Crumpler bag, which means realistically we're looking for a machine with a 12 - 13 inch screen (no more). Being the techie, I have some slightly more stringent requirements.

CPU

The Mac G3 had a 700mhz processor and I think getting something slightly faster but relatively cheap, should not be a problem. Therefore I am looking to get something in the 1 - 1.5 ghz region, but preferably with some power saving features. This most likely means a Celeron M based machine, or if I am lucky a Centrino.

RAM

The best kept secret amongst geeks is that it is RAM, not CPU speed, that actually affects the day to day performance of most people's machines the most. One reason why laptops always feel so much slower than desktops is that they usually ship with so little memory. It is still no unusual to see brand new budget laptops selling with 256MB of RAM and even Apple's own cutting edge machines come with a miserable 512MB (when OS X demands at least twice that amount).

Linux is fairly resource friendly, but still I am hoping to make use of the spare 512MB of memory from the old G3 and unite it with a machine with perhaps 256MB for a healthy 768MBs.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive)

The second most common reason for laptops being so slow is the HDD. Not because they often lack capacity (which they do) but because the disk speed is usually so much slower than in desktop machines. It is only very recently, and in high spec expensive laptops, that this has begun to change. Therefore a generously roomy, albiet slow, HDD is the best I can hope for. 60GB would be great, but I'll settle for 40GB.

Other

I am hoping for a good battery, although second had laptops nearly always come with batteries in poor condition, so I am going to budget to have to buy a new one. Wireless is a must, but again wireless cards are easy to come buy and adding one should not be a problem. Finally a screen in good condition with no burn-ins or dead pixels is a must.

Finally the machine should be tough... which is why I fancy an IBM Thinkpad. Ugly, functional but as tough as hell. The Thinkpad is pretty much the antithesis of the Apple Mac and is about as uncool as you can get (perhaps apart from getting a Dell). There is also something mildly poetic about buying an IBM machine to run Linux.

My budget - $400 including a new battery if necessary and wireless card. No room for any mistakes...

Linux Linux everywhere, and ice cream...

The moment you peek your head into the world of Linux is a moment that you realise things are not going to be a confusing as you thought. In fact, it is going to be far more confusing. You see, whereas Windows and OS X are kinda like icecream from Mr Softy, only one flavour, Linux is like an ice cream emporium in Florence - too much choice and you have no idea what you're choosing anyway. There are no fewer than 12 major distributions of Linux and literally hundreds of minor ones. A version of Linux is available for just about every type of computer out there, including the Playstation 2 and even the iPOD. Amazing.

What I found out is that each distribution of Linux pretty much runs the same engine under the bonnet, but the applications that come with it, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop are all subtlely, although occasionally fundamentally different.

So today I spent a few hours browsing several Linux forums, including www.linux.org and www.linuxquestions.org These forums are full of newbies asking questions about where to start and the forum members are only too happy to impart their knowledge and experience.

For the newbie, the flavour of linux seemed to boil down to 3 finalists. SuSE, Fedora and Ubuntu. So, setting aside just an hour or so to research each one, here is what I found out.

SuSE (Mint with Chocolate Chips)

SuSE is a big hitter in the Linux world. A quick visit to the SuSE website (http://www.novell.com/linux/) reveals that this version of Linux has some heavy backing. Novell is a big industry player and their flavour of Linux comes with all the bells and whistles you could ever dream of. There are basically two versions of SuSE. An Enterprise edition, that costs $60 and a free version which takes a little bit of finding on the site.
SuSE is huge, even the free version requires 6 CDs to install (or a single DVD). A quick glance at what comes with SuSE soon reveals why this is the case, an insane amount of software including several GUIs, developer tools, office solutions and networking tools. Whilst this may be the answer for some people, the overly corporate feel and bloaty package rapidly put me off.

Fedora (Strawberry)

Fedora is a continuation of an old Linux favourite, Red Hat. In fact, I remember seeing Red Hat in computer shops years ago and wondering what it was. A visit to the Fedora website reveals something a lot simpler and attracively more modest than we got with SuSE. However, whereas with SuSE you got everything except the kitchen sink, with Fedora it looks as though they forgot their toothbrush. The website (http://fedora.redhat.com/) is so simple, it doesn't actually tell you anything. There are no lovely screenshots, no promised of an easy install and easy life and even the introduction is full of scary acronyms such as PIE which apparently stands for Position Independent Executables. Sounds all a bit scary to me!

Ubuntu (Chocolate Flavour)

And so finally to Ubuntu, subtitled "Linux for Human Beings". Their website (http://www.ubuntu.com/) is clean, friendly looking and full of pretty pictures. Just the kind of thing to lure the shallow Mac user or lazy Windows drone into the waiting arms of OpenSource. The site promises 3 key factors that are the essence of this project. Ease of use, simplicity and holding dear what Linux is all about - it's free. Ubuntu also has a small download and this can be used as a bootable CD so you can try it out on almost any machine before installing anything and taking the plunge.

So, distro chosen, all I need now is a machine to install it on...

Single Speed and the Art of Simplicity

I guess the first entry of any blog is the hardest. "Hi, I'm Mark..." er... "welcome to my blog" or perhaps "this blog is about..."

Ahh...

About a month ago, my wife's Apple Mac decided to switch itself off and has been in a coma ever since. A quick trip to Tekserve on 23rd Street here in New York City revealed that to get the little fellow fixed would cost somewhere close to $900, including taxes. Just a sniff less than a brand new Apple Mac (exclusing taces of course).

Several weeks later and my wife is no longer a Mac lover. Apple's relentless drive to lock in its customers into a proprietry nightmare (iTunes, iPOD etc) from which there is no escape seems to be alienating some Mac affecionados. This, along with some rather questionable marketing practices, factories out in China, court cases to expose journalists' sources within the company, less than reliable hardware and no new machines for under $1,000 made the choice not to buy a new Apple a fairly easy one. Macs maybe cool, but they are no longer "PC".

Having had a vague interest in OpenSource for some time, I mentioned to her that an alternative to both Macs and Windows machines was an operating system called Linux. Thus the idea of a "single speed" computer was born. A machine that is functional, robust and runs only free software supporting her modest needs as a journalist, writer and internet junkie. The challenge, to build a Linux machine with everything she needs, that is easy to use, stable and free of the needless bloat offered by both OS X and the soon to be released behemoth that is Vista.

I myself am a Windows user, with virtually no Linux knowledge or experience myself. If I can get my wife onto Linux, I may also follow suite.

So, the journey begins from one of the coolest and most user friendly operating systems ever created, to one which is more often associated with geeks than writers.