ZevenOS 4.0 in VirtualBox

Works great on my MacBook:

Searching for a User Interface

The GUI has changed little in the last thirty years or so - its desktop metaphor with windows, icons, files and folders. Of course it's become much slicker-looking, but with all that eye candy comes bloat.

Over the last twelve years, for good or bad, I have committed myself to the Apple ecosystem and Mac OS X has matured into arguably the best modern OS. But I am always looking at fast and lightweight alternatives.

With ZevenOS 4.0 I may have found my ideal Linux-based OS. It's based on Ubuntu 11.10, so its core is modern with access to all the Ubuntu software repositories, but it uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment which has been tweaked to look like the beautiful BeOS. And I've installed Window Maker, my favourite window manager:

The Iron Lady

"Plenty of leftists resent her success. They cannot forgive the fact that she rescued a country that they had dishonoured and impoverished, that she inherited a Britain that was sclerotic, indebted and declining and left it proud, wealthy and free and that she never lost an election to them. Their rage, in truth, can never be assuaged of. It is the rage of Caliban."

Read more...

Go MSL

Making Ubuntu Look Like BeOS

So that I don't have to, there's ZevenOS 4.0. As good as Haiku? For the moment, better than Haiku.

TP-Link TD-W8960N Modem Router

Last Monday my telephone exchange was upgraded to 21CN ADSL2+ and my ISP regraded my service accordingly for free. Because of my distance from the exchange I am now getting download speeds in the region of 10Mbps (up from 7Mbps). I also decided that I should replace my old Belkin F5D7632-4, which has been an excellent modem router.

I opted for the TP-Link TD-W8960N (V1) on the advice of a friend.

I installed it and got everything working without any trouble, however NAT loopback wasn't working and I thought it was a problem (it worked OK on the five-year-old Belkin). After hours of troubleshooting, it transpired the router needed a firmware update. So I duly downloaded and installed the appropriate update and everything seemed fine. Until I decided to perform a factory reset and reconfigure it, whereupon I was unable to connect to the Internet. After several more hours I gave up and returned to the Belkin.

Yesterday, I decided to give it one last try and checked my ISP's web site to see what VPI/VCI settings to use. After manually entering these I was able to connect again. It appears that the firmware update cripples the Quick Setup routine on the router.

My New Favourite Synth

NLogPoly Synth:

Campaigners finish re-enactment of Jarrow March

Well, bully for them.

Apparently government cuts are "affecting everyone apart from the rich". But let's not forget that some people become "rich" through sheer determination and hard work - and good luck to them.

Other "rich" people are celebrities and Premier League footballers whose pockets are most likely lined by the very people who are protesting.

Life is unfair - there is no such thing as equality - humans are at the mercy of their genes, environment and instincts; we are animals and we behave like animals, including the envious, baying mobs that are always complaining about how unfair life is.

Read more...

And Now OpenStep

Thanks to this I was able to get a VMware image of OpenStep 4.2. And yet in spite of the instructions (also here) it still took me hours to get both the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep installations connected to the Internet. And only then if I used Google's Public DNS (thanks Google). I blame the wine (and the fact that I'm a dumbass). Now I really must do some housework...

I Took the NeXTSTEP

In memory of Steve Jobs. Window Maker is great, but it's not NeXTSTEP, so I decided to see if I could get hold of a copy and install on VMware Fusion 4. After scouring the Internet I discovered several resources (notably here, here, here and here) which enabled me to obtain NeXTSTEP 3.3 and install it. It's a pretty basic installation, sound doesn't work on later versions of VMware Fusion and networking isn't set up (yet), but as an exercise in retro-computing it's a lot of fun. Now for OpenStep 4.2.