This is my entry for October’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by ZinRicky.
I come from a tiny village on Nova Scotia’s south shore. In case you didn’t know, that is the east coast of Canada (America’s toque).
Us village-folk speak English, or something close enough to English that we get by. Like almost any country of a certain size, there are regional differences, but that is not what we’re here to talk about today.
The theme today is about multilingualism in a global Web, and that quaint little English-speaking village is no longer my home. I live in Europe now, France to be specific. But, I wouldn’t be living here if I hadn’t grown up in that little village and gone to school there and been part of the French Immersion program.
For six years I took all of my classes in French. I didn’t know it, but I was functionally bilingual after those six years. I found out when I made it to university and spoke with native speakers of French. I continued studying French at university and even took part in a project that underlines the importance of multilingualism and the Web.
I helped out with a research project about online learning. It was a straightforward website, with some Flash elements, about learning a specific grammatical feature of French1. Lo and behold, nobody working in the IT department could speak French, and the professor doing the research needed someone who could speak French. So, I helped make the site.
This was in 2005. How many people before or since were unable to share something on the Web due to a language barrier?
Shortly after university I moved to France. I happened to arrive on the eve of Facebook opening the doors to the public. My university was granted access to Facebook in 2004 or 2005. In 2006, none of the French people I was meeting had ever heard of it. They were still enamoured with Myspace and Skyrock.com.
Question: Was Facebook available in French in September 2006?
a. yes
b. no
c. yes, but only Québécois French
If you answered b, you’re right, and we can skip right to the part where the French all made accounts and collectively proclaimed, with great exasperation, that Facebook is nul 2. It was nul because it was only in English (and maybe Spanish?) and you couldn’t change the colours like Myspace. It was nul because even if you created an account, your friends were not, because it was in English only, or because they had already tried it and quit because of the English.
Furthermore, it was also during this period (fall semester 2006) that a French friend and colleague saw me working on my laptop and said, “In France, we are bad at computers and the Web, because we are bad at English. You should stop teaching English and do something with computers here, you could make a lot of money.”
I cannot say that the French are bad at computers. I don’t think they are that bad at English—they just don’t get enough practice. I can sympathize with the statement about language barriers. It is awfully true that knowing English helps me enormously.
Being about to speak, read, and write French and use it on the Web, though, is a powerful thing. The quickest example I could give is Wikipedia. Very often, there are articles on Wikipedia where the English version is the most detailed (i.e. the longest), but the French one is the better version for being concise. Sometimes the sources are different too, so that is great if I’m actually trying to research something.
While, the lingua franca of the Web will likely always be English, I would have been disheartened to have not learned French and miss out on so much. The French Web, and all of its jargon, patois, argot, and parlance made the years of study worthwhile.
and it still lives: https://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/fren/tutor/tutor2005/ ↩︎
it sucks ↩︎
Scrolling through Mastodon a post caught my eye.
To save your the trouble of translating, the gist is this:
A voice message is the height of selfishness, it transfers the burden completely onto the person who didn’t ask for it.
What’s more, 90% of the time it starts with, “I’m sending you a voice message because it’ll be easier for me.”
— @mariejulien@mastodon.social
Now, I’m not sure how this revelation escaped me for all these years, but it hit me like a brick.
I don’t get many voice messages. Actually, I don’t receive loads of messages at all. That’s beside the point. The real point of this quick post is point out the obvious:
While voice messages have a use, they have invaded our lives.
We’ve all seen people talking to themselves while holding their phone in that tell-tale position—you know, palm pointing to the sky, arse-end of their phone either pointing to their mouth or to their ear. While driving, while in public places, and even while eating.
90% of the messages my partner receives are vocals. Luckily you can speed them up. But still, what’s the deal with eight-minute long voice messages? Is it a podcast or a conversation? How are you supposed to converse with a cascade of words?
I could say this is an “old man yelling at clouds” situation, except that over time, I have started doing it too! Only with my partner, mind you, but something peculiar has happened over time.
The messages get longer!
The first time I gave in and sent a voice message, it wasn’t more than a sentence fragment to let them know I would be late. Now? Now I leave audio books that I could sell to BBC or NPR. If I downloaded our exchanges of voice messages, it would be like a soap opera of old.
I’m sure there are some people studying this. It seems like a topic worth studying. At the height of SMS messaging, when people still didn’t have unlimited SMS credit, we learned to be concise. And, during the heyday of ICQ, I recall an anecdote recounted by a colleague.
The colleague had twins who were in their early teens. For fun, one evening my colleague installed ICQ on the family computer. Over the course of a week my colleague would leave and receive messages. He was a changed man after that. He assumed that instant messaging would be silly and that his children would have trouble communicating clearly. They didn’t. He learned about his children’s lives, their friends, school, and so on, by leaving them written messages that they could reply to on their own time.
I think we might be losing something by relying on voice messages, and I’m pretty positive that it is disruptive and annoying in public places. I still communicate with nearly everyone via written messages, but some colleagues have begun using voice messaging. How am I supposed to find the information I need if it is in some audio file that cannot be searched.
I’m therefore giving myself a little challenge: no voice messages for a month!
If you feel like sending me a written message on Signal, my contact is bbbhltz<dot>48.
Having a computer just for work is an unfortunate reality. Some of my colleagues use their personal devices every day. I do as well on occasion, usually when I need to do that one little thing that just frustrates me on Windows.
About eight years ago I was surprised when my employer gave us all laptops for work. Then, about three years ago they had us trade in our laptops for new laptops.
That new computer though. It is one of those Dell convertible deals with a touchscreen. Not complaining, but I have no use for that. I don’t know if any of my colleagues use it. I must gripe though. It is stronger than me. I live in France, this is what people do here!
The new computer is a little heavier and the battery life is not great. The battery life has only been worse since this summer when a new update was pushed (I mean, the employer owns it, they have to update it) and after many reboots there was a new service running in the taskbar—one of those corporate device management things.
Now, not sure if it is the update or the new software installed, but going from a 9-hour battery life to just over two hours is the outcome. This first month back at work for the school year has been a pain in my back carrying around the charger as well as the laptop.
This, combined with not being able to change the featured apps in the start menu, have brought me where I am today: in need of a portable Linux distribution.
I tried the different variations of running a VM. It wasn’t for me. I am not allowed to wipe the drive and install my favourite distro, I am not allowed to dual-install (well, I could probably get away with it).
18 years of being that one annoying person who uses Linux, and I’ve never tried a portable Linux distribution. It turns out there are a few quirks.
That’s actually a pretty deep question. Puppy isn’t a single distribution, it is a family of releases. The particularity of Puppy is that it is one of the distributions that—like Alpine, antiX, and Porteus—can run from RAM. Puppy is meant to be easy to use, come preloaded with minimal tools for daily usage, and be light on resources.
The project dates back to 2003, the rest is history. Today, the mainline collection of Puppy releases includes Ubuntu-, Debian-, Slackware-, and Void-based variants. I decided to use the Debian 12 Bookworm-based version called BookwormPup64 (version 10.0.8). I did this because I am used to Debian and am fine with older software.
Puppy can run from a USB with persistent storage, but many users do install it to their hard drive. The advantage here, at least from my limited knowledge of Puppy, is that you can mess around with your system, and if you make a mistake you can reboot without writing those changes to a special file or folder. I opted for a frugal installation to a USB device.
Parts of this are very similar to other Linux installations: get the ISO > use dd to write it to USB > boot from that USB > run installer. Despite having used Linux for many years, I always like to see how many clicks it takes to find instructions for writing to a USB (in part because I refuse to memorize this command). Puppy is a little confusing here. The homepage has two different links for downloads, a link to the forum, and a link to the wiki (more on that after). From the homepage to the wiki page containing the required information, it is three clicks.
The suggested command is:
# time sudo dd bs=4M conv=notrunc,fdatasync oflag=direct status=progress if=<DISK IMAGE FILE> of=/dev/sdX
After booting from the USB, choosing the keyboard layout and other options in a very easy-to-use setup program I used one of the provided installation programs to install Puppy to another USB. That’s it. No Calamares, no TUI, just waiting to copy and format. There are more options to dig into but I chose a setup that got me going quickly. The nitty-gritty details are better explained across the Puppy forum, but the end result is an operating system on a USB flash drive that you can write to.
The expectations vs. reality feeling was strong with Puppy. I very much expected something janky—the main website is hosted on GitHub, there are multiple places to find the ISOs, the wiki is a mess, the lexicon seems silly (pups, puplets, kennels, etc.)—but the reality did not give that impression.
It is fast and snappy, looks good (we’re obviously not in GNOME or Plasma territory here), and I was connected to my home network in less than 60 seconds. Within another minute I found the link—through a context menu on the desktop—to remove the many desktop icons. Conky starts automatically, there is a compositor running (picom) and JWM is the window manager.
The applications menu is filled with applications and scripts—many of which I’d never heard of. It is clear that the Puppy team meant for the base install to cover many bases while still being minimal.
A major surprise was opening the terminal and seeing # instead of $. That’s because you are the root user by default when running Puppy.
My workplace, a university, uses an MS-CHAPv2 + Protected EAP method for connecting, requiring an ID and a password. The first day I used Puppy at work I clearly hadn’t had enough coffee and just couldn’t get it to work. This is despite having access to several connections methods all presented in a single wizard.
The Internet Connection Wizard lets you launch and use different network connection tools, like ConnMan, SNS, Network Wizard, and Frisbee.
On the walk home from work my brain rebooted, and I realized that I just needed to edit /etc/frisbee/wpa_supplicant.conf like this:
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
update_config=1
network={
ssid="my_ssid"
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
eap=PEAP
identity="my_identity"
password="my_password"
phase2="MSCHAPV2"
}
This tiny distro is packed with goodies. BookwormPup64 comes with around 900 packages from the Debian repository, and over 1,000 more pre-configured packages. Some of these packages are useful tools and forks that you could find yourself using regularly. PeasyScan, for example, is a lighter version of the XSane image scanner with a simpler interface.
The software from the Debian repository is all marked as “held” by default. That means that if you need to update a particular package, you would need to unmark it. It also means that if you decide to install a package from the Debian repository and update it later, you will only upgrade the packages that you installed.
There are loads of things to find when you start exploring: LXTerminal and lxrandr from the venerable LXDE project, ROX-Filer, JWM, qpdfview, DeaDBeef, EasyTAG, Leafpad, Viewnoir, mpv, CUPS for printing, a firewall and advert blocker, AbiWord, Gnumeric, gFTP, heck, it even comes with jq. That’s just what I can name off the top of my head.
The added helpers and GUI front-ends get the job done. Most, if not all, of the different helpers have a “Help” button that open local documentation or link to a website or forum post that explain the functionalities. I found myself launching some of them out of curiosity and discovering more information than I needed.
JWM, or Joe’s Window Manager, is the first thing you will notice using Puppy. Yes, there is a dated feeling to it. Even so, the modern conveniences are there—keyboard shortcuts for moving windows around, virtual desktops, tonnes of helper apps to make it look the way you want—and, most importantly, it isn’t massive or use loads of memory. I cannot find a decent or recent source, but for a system that runs from RAM, you want to go as low as possible. Some sites say JWM uses as little as 3 MB while others say around 30 MB.
Initially, I thought I might replace JWM with something I have used before, like Openbox or LXQt, but that idea faded fast. In fact, I would even consider installing this on a modern machine.
The file manager that comes with Puppy is ROX-Filer. 18 years on Linux and I’ve never heard of this piece of software. That makes sense because I’ve never heard of ROX Desktop. There are enough options under the hood appearance-wise, and it is more flexible than it looks. It has thumbnails and drag-and-drop and other niceties. Some keyboard shortcuts are a must, / opens the location bar, for instance, and CTRL+E will resize the window, so there is no white space.
Bottom line: ROX-Filer is light and works perfectly for this distribution.
Again, an expectations vs. reality situation: Firefox is pre-configured to reduce annoyances, and disable unwanted features, for example:
privacy.donottrackheader.enabled=true);extensions.pocket.enabled=false);identity.fxaccounts.enabled=false)This makes it a better experience than the default Firefox-ESR on Debian and was totally unexpected. The same goes for staying up-to-date. This Firefox-ESR is not from the Debian repository, it is installed by default and updates in place. Some people might find this annoying, but then again other people will want to have the latest version without checking the repository first.
Firefox and other Internet applications, like Claws Mail, all run as a special user, spot, instead of root.
In Puppy Linux, spot is a restricted user account that allows you to run certain Internet applications with reduced permissions, enhancing security.
For example, the home directory for spot is in /root/spot/ and a browser will be limited to editing files in this directory.
When it comes to adding new software, you will want to stop and read the manual. There are different ways to handle this. Yes, you can straight up install something from the repository. But, installing large apps, like LibreOffice, can be handled more efficiently by choosing to install a PET or SFS version, or using an AppImage or Flatpak. I threw caution to the wind and decided to install TeX Live in order to do some work, and I’ve had no problems.
Still, judging from what I’ve gleaned from my dive into the forums, the rule of thumb is: if it is big, check for other methods of installation first.
EDIT: Using this version of Puppy (because it is based on Debian), it is recommended to prioritize the use of apt and install from the repository rather than using PET or SFS files. Obviously, Flatpak remains an option.
Speaking of the Puppy Linux Discussion Forums, that is where you will want to go for documentation. There is a wiki, but it needs some TLC. The forum has 3600+ members and a small team of administrators and moderators that can help out with lots of issues. I highly recommended reading through the different posts on the Getting Started subforum. Thankfully, it is not hosted on Discord or some closed community, it is good ol’ phpBB.
The more time spent browsing the forums, the more I came to realize that this easy to use distribution is quite complicated. In comparison to bog-standard Linux experience—download ISO; install; create account; use—there are elements to this distribution that are so unique that the solution to some problems are only on this forum and not discussed elsewhere. And this is not taking into the account that some threads veer off into discussions about derivatives and build scripts and remixes.
I do have a few things to nitpick.
First, the website needs clarity. There are two download buttons on the navigation pane and the wiki has less information than the forum, for example.
Next, some of the helper GUI’s lack consistency. Sometimes a word is capitalized, sometimes not. Small details.
Finally, this distribution has a bit of an issue depending on some conditions:
sudo when Puppy does not, or other questions particular to Puppy.pupmode?. You will find yourself double-checking how things work and asking why the hell anyone would download a package from MediaFire that a random person on the Internet linked to on a forum. You might try to install one of your favourite applications, not understand why it won’t run, and then remember that not every application will run as root.Those ifs are just nitpicking, because if you had taken the time to peruse the forum, you’d have realized that this is not your average GNU/Linux affair. This is Puppy.
tl;dr YES.
After the Wi-Fi mishap, it was smooth sailing. I did add ARandR to help with connecting to projectors, but beyond that I could do what I needed:
(That is not a comprehensive list, obviously.)
While Puppy, by name, was not unknown to me, the way it works was. Discovering it was akin to teaching an old dog a new trick. It beat my expectations and the out-of-the-box software works like a charm. I wouldn’t, however, consider it as something easier to use than Mint or even Debian.
You’re a good dog, yes you are! 7/10.
I don’t normally do this, but I decided to put this post on more than just my Mastodon…