Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

OpenSUSE never was practical for my little Fujitsu P2120. Little things like it taking 10 minutes to load the software update screen had started to get on my nerves. So I pulled Slackware 12 down, stuck it in the dvd drive, and gave it whirl.

I was pretty happy to see that some things just don’t change. Slackware still has the ncurses-based installer. There’s only subtle differences that suggest that time has not passed Slack by. First, the default kernel is hugemem-smp (useful for modern computer’s, not useful for my little guy). Then the section for adding a swap device acknowledges that modern drives do bad-block checking and therefore it was no-longer a requirement. Not to forget the fact that Slackware now ships on a DVD. Oh, and I liked Pat’s note that using the install method that prompts you for every package would likely take you 1 year to complete for the X11 package set.

Given how bare-bones Slackware is, it’s a good barometer for the usability of the core of Linux, before the likes of Canonical, RedHat, and Novell get to adding the user-friendly layers. I was pretty impressed that X -configure gave me a valid X11 file that worked for my system and that I didn’t have to futz too much to get wireless working without the NetworkManager. Moreover, KDE and Xfce look pretty nice out of the box these days as well.

The next step towards total linux geekdom was to grab the Enlightenment packages from SlackE17. Although E17 is still considered Alpha, it works pretty well and is stable enough. Even with all the effects, it’s surprisingly responsive on this machine. It feels even more responsive than Xfce did on OpenSUSE. Of course, I don’t have any emperical evidence to back up that claim.

Of course, there are somethings that just don’t work. Suspending to RAM is as non-functional as always and suspending to disk will require a kernel patch, which I really don’t feel like doing. The special hotkeys for my screen brightness are also non-functional. Nor do I have any working power management.

On the other hand, I have a lot of shiny effects, which is pretty good for a 3 and a half year old machine that was slow on the day it was bought.

It’s been a while since I installed Zimbra on my mail server and took the opportunity of some free time to perform the update. At first, I was a little apprehensive, since there wasn’t much documentation available. However, I forged ahead, downloaded the new version and ran the install script. When it asked me to update, I said ‘Y’ and walked away from the computer. When I came back, I had an upgraded Zimbra. Apparently, there wasn’t much documentation because there just isn’t much to document.

All in all, the server was down for maybe 5 minutes and my logged in session didn’t even hiccup. It’s always nice when software just works.

When I discovered that my HOA did not have a website, I considered volunteering to create one. After all, building websites is pretty close to what I do for a living. Then I realized that even if there was a website, keeping it updated in a timely manner would still be problematic. Most websites for small-organizations tend to be hopelessly out-of-date. So my thoughts shifted towards WordPress or some CMS-type software. That still has it’s problems, though, since blogs aren’t fantastic for static content and giving people editor status might be a bit of a problem. I’d be doing this for a community, so I needed something community-driven. I need a social network.

I’ve been following Mark Andreesen’s Blog and decided to give Ning a whirl before busting out the rails. I’m glad I did since Ning was extremely easy to setup and has a pretty impressive feature set.

Pretty much all I had to do was visit Ning, create an account, then create my social network. From there, you can edit your social network features (I removed audio and video, for instance), change where elements go (I made the forums more prominent), and configure the theme. This is pretty common stuff, but Ning made it dead simple. There are dozens of default themes, of which you can then customize the CSS. Editing the features is done through a pretty slick drag-and-drop interface.

From conception of the idea to having something that I was pretty happy with took 45 minutes. I spent more time on seed-content than setting things up.

Since launch, almost half of the homeowners have signed up for accounts and many of them have started and contributed to the discussion forum, put pictures online, and customized their own pages. Most of these people aren’t those that you’d consider to be the traditional social networking crowd. The Ning team has done a fantastic job of making the technology accessible.

I think this little experiment shows the merits of focused, localized social-network. Especially in situations like ours, where the physical network is a little disconnected by the geography of our community. The niche for networks built on Ning and Crowdvine is only going to grow as Facebook and Myspace become more feature rich, as they’ve already hit the point where they are overwhelming for new-comers.

This is not really relevant to the conversation, but as someone that’s been around technology almost all my life, I was really surprised that people signed up as couples. It makes sense for a community around homeownership, since most houses are owned and occupied by a family, but that would have never occurred to me. Also, a lot of couples share an email address. Again, I find that odd. Sonali and I don’t even share a phone number anymore. Another thing is that people keep referring to the ‘forum’ as a blog. I was going to explain the difference, until I realized that the differences are pretty minor. The insight gained from seeing how other people use the things you consider mundane can be quite fascinating and insightful.