The hiring of Linux-savvy and revenue-minded exec-slash-blogger Matt Asay as the new chief operating officer of Canonical looks like a very good — and telling — move for the Isle of Man- (really London-but-don't-tell-anyone) based company that oversees the growing-by-leaps-bounds-and-all-other-ways Ubuntu Linux distribution and surrounding universe.

Asay is pretty much singular among bloggers for a) being an actual, paid technology and open-source executive for a company that must take care of both community and customers. He helped Novell gain traction in the Linux business, and he continued that success with the Alfresco conten management system (and company of the same name; that there is a company that is out to make money is telling; Canonical desperately wants to become self-sustaining if not world-dominating).

I've thought well of Asay for some time: How many other blogs do you know that have an actual category that bears his name? Not many, I figure. (In case disclosure on my part is not just piling on at this point, yes I'm an avid reader of The Open Road, and Matt and I have exchanged maybe a couple of messages over the past year ... I won't mention the 5,000+ Twitter followers he has while I limp along with fewer than 150.)

It is certainly Matt's business experience and acumen that got him from Novell to Alfresco and now to Canonical, the latter of which to many is the uncontested front-runner in furthering Linux's ambitions on the desktop but also is serious about grabbing its share of the server and cloud markets as well.

But in some small way, or maybe a larger way than that, his work as the Open Road blogger cut the trail for him to go to Canonical. It's a company of big, public personalities: Mark Shuttleworth, Jono Bacon, even Dustin Kirkland (I seem to read his blog posts on encryption and hear him on podcasts a lot ...). And if you're a popular blogger for a huge tech-news site, you're in that big-personality category.

In Matt's own post, he outlines his mission at Canonical:

As COO, I am tasked with aligning the company's strategic goals and operational activities, the optimization of day-to-day operations, and leadership of Canonical marketing and back-office functions. Some of these things are very familiar to me; others aren't. That's precisely the challenge I feel I need.

Before that he calls the position "an opportunity to expand my experience and to work on some really hard and varied problems, including cloud computing, consumer Linux adoption, and community development."

Those are all uphill climbs, even for Ubuntu/Canonical. In the parlance of Steve Jobs (no fan of open source, to be sure), it's the opportunity to do something great.

I've written numerous times that I expect more from Canonical and Ubuntu than I do from any other open-source company and project (and yes, that includes Red Hat, Novell and the Linux distributions they shepherd/produce).

It's not just the Shuttleworth fortune behind the company, but that is part of it. A lot of it is the "Linux for Human Beings" motto of a company that, like Google also doesn't want to "be evil" but is being watched by legions of fanboys for just such evil-doing, which to some is any stab at making actual money.

If anybody can thread that needle — making money while keeping the non-Canonical-employee community, the greater user community and any customers happy — Matt Asay seemingly can.

Or at least I hope he can.

From where I sit, as a technology writer, user of open-source operating systems in my daily work (recently Ubuntu but currently Debian), success for me will be Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular taking a significant share of the operating-system market from Microsoft and Apple both on the desktop and the server (though the former is vastly more important if much less lucrative than the latter).

What is a "significant share"? I'm not sure. Even 3 percent would be a huge number. But it's more about momentum than any given numerical goal.

For me, "significance" means lots of preloads and the marketing to go with them, from major computer manufacturers like Dell, HP, Acer, Asus, etc., and through many, varied retail channels (everything from TigerDirect and Newegg to Staples, Office Depot, Target and Wal-Mart).

Free, open-source software in general and desktop Linux in particular might not be the best solution for everybody, but it sure is a better way to go for many people in many situations, both at home, in the office and across the enterprise world.

If Matt can straighten out the mess with older Intel video hardware that affects the entire Xorg-using world, he'll have earned his first year's salary — and then some — in my opinion.

First thing we'll have to deal with is Matt's Apple-fanboy situation (not that I don't use Macs, too, on a semi-regular basis ... but that's another topic for another day).

More seriously, I wish Matt good luck in his future endeavours. Keep in touch ... have a bitchin' summer ... see you in sixth-grade ... all that yearbooky stuff. I'm expecting a Jono Bacon-Matt Asay hip-hop duo performance at the next convention.

Official announcements are available from Canonical, Alfresco, and how the former COO becoming CEO seemingly places Asay in line for the top non-Mark-Shuttleworth spot at the company.

For analysis that isn't mine, go to brother/sister blogs (both of which I read regularly) WorksWithU and The Var Guy. Also see my other favorite FOSS blogger, SJVN on Matt Asay's move to Canonical.

Run the operating system and accompanying application software that ...

• Works best on your hardware
• That you feel personally/technically competent about (or want to get there)
• That includes the applications you want and need to use
• Which has an acceptable term of support from the project/vendor for your needs
• Which has an acceptable distance from (or to) the cutting-edge of software for your needs

When Debian issues a point release, as it just did with the current Stable distribution Lenny going from the 5.0.3 to 5.0.4, it's no big deal. They happen. But you don't need to throw out your Lenny install CDs or do any kind of reinstallation.

The updates have been flowing to your Debian-running machine (assuming you have one) all along if you've been using the Update Manager that ships in the standard desktop, or regularly checking for updates with Aptitude or apt.

If you are in need of a new Debian install CD, be it the network installer, the business-card size installer or a full CD or DVD, there will be new images with all the patches up through 5.0.4. But you can always install with even a 5.0.0 disc made when Lenny went Stable (Feb. 15, 2009) and then update the box and have everything in 5.0.4.

And Debian installations are generally upgradeable from one distribution to another, say from Lenny to the current Testing branch, Squeeze, or to Squeeze once it becomes stable itself (sending Lenny into Old Stable territory, at which time it will still get security patches for an additional year).

I'm no expert on Debian point releases, but I did think it was unusual to have, as I did, 29 updates waiting for me. I've been waiting to install them until I wrote this blog post, and as such I will be letting Update Manager do its thing.

One thing I noticed was that via the Update Manager, in recent weeks (many, actually) I haven't been able to see the "changes" notes on the various packages ready for upgrade. Now I can. I don't know what fix was made previously in Debian, either to my installation or to the way the packages are configured at the Debian mirrors, but it's nice in any event to see that information in Update Manager.

Once again I'll give my pitch for Debian Stable. It doesn't have the newest packages, but everything is of an acceptable age for my purposes. Debian runs faster than Ubuntu on my old hardware, and I really enjoy not needing to mess around with xorg.conf settings or any kernel mode setting configuration, as I have all too often in the past six months running mostly Ubuntu.

I'm not saying I won't be giving Ubuntu Lucid a try. In fact, I already have. It looks good ... with the VESA driver. If the folks at Xorg/Ubuntu/Debian/the Linux kernel can see fit to allow my Intel 830m video chip to work with either the Intel or i810 drivers (and why the i810 driver has been drummed out of the Xorg world is both a mystery and a personal affront to me).

My whole sense of open-source operating systems used to be that the newest hardware isn't so well-supported since drivers haven't been written/ported, and the very oldest hardware is tough because all of that stuff is falling out of the kernel/system. I found more than a few distributions/projects that could handle my aging stable of computers (with much success using OpenBSD, Debian and Puppy Linux).

But the Xorg issues I began having way back in Debian Lenny's Testing days have caused me a whole lot of trouble. Now that I've overcome enough problems to run X in Lenny, all the Ubuntus up through Karmic, as well as OpenBSD 4.6, I'm worried once again; I've had to resort to the VESA driver not just in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 but also in Sidux 2009-04 (which I tried to give me a clue as to how Debian Squeeze will turn out).

Thus my holding onto Debian Lenny with both hands. I'll be looking into Debian Backports with an eye toward upgrading a few key apps and staying in Lenny longer than I otherwise might.

During much of the time I was running Ubuntu, I told myself that I'd be running Debian instead, if only I could get everything working.

I have tried the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 build, and I still appreciate so many things working out of the box on my 2002-03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

Even the USB Headphone Set sound module I've been using was able to play system sounds and Flash audio in Ubuntu.

However, I recently was able to get that sound module to work in Debian Lenny.

All I had to do was plug it into a different USB port on the Toshiba, and now it's working fine.

I have it plugged directly into the middle USB port.

I had been plugging it into a powered Linksys USB hub, which I've been using to supply enough juice to my Toshiba 500 GB USB backup drive, and while I could get the USB Headphone Set sound module to work in applications such as Totem and Audacity, I couldn't get the system sounds and Flash audio to play.

But now I have full audio working in Debian.

I have Debian Multimedia in my /etc/apt/sources.list. I have working Flash and Java. On hardware of this age and specs (1.3 GHz Celeron and 1 GB RAM), you can feel the relative lightness of the GNOME environment in Debian as compared to Ubuntu. And I appreciate the speed boost.

I'm about to look into rolling newer apps (Iceweasel/Firefox, OpenOffice) into Lenny via Debian Backports.

Except that I really don't need Firefox 3.5.x or OO 3.1 ... so I just might let that go for awhile.

And with all the trouble with Xorg and these "older" Intel video chips, I'm not eager to move to Debian Squeeze, and I'll probably wait until it goes stable and then try a Debian Live CD to see how the video reacts on this laptop, should I still be running it at that point.

But as the title says, I've got everything working and have hit the sweet spot with Debian.

Productivity, lack of fiddling and blissfully fewer updates are all things I welcome.

And if my past many-dozen entries haven't spelled it out, I don't consider Debian any harder to install, configure and use than Ubuntu. Most of the Ubuntu help out there will work in Debian (the former being based on the latter), and there's quite a bit of Debian-specific help available.

I'd sure like to see at least one Debian how-to book out there (and while "The Debian System," slated to be updated this year, will be a very welcome addition to my bookshelf, if it's anything like the last edition it'll be more philsophical than hard-core how-to).

Don't get me wrong, Ubuntu is a great thing. But the shoulders upon which it stands — those of the Debian Project — are more than capable of supporting desktop users.

It's a funny thing, but some of the problems I have with the display when I use Movable Type in Firefox/Iceweasel go away when I'm using it in the Epiphany Web browser that ships with the GNOME desktop environment.

The funny thing is that I'm in Debian Lenny, and that means I'm running Epiphany with Gecko, the same rendering engine that Firefox/Iceweasel users, and not Webkit, which is the engine in Google Chrome and newer versions of Epiphany.

Why do I run Epiphany whenever I can instead of Firefox? For uses where Firefox is not absolutely required to make the given Web site or Web-based app work, or where I'm not using the Web Developer and Firebug add-ons for Firefox, I prefer Epiphany because it's faster and uses less CPU.

Having Epiphany work so well with Movable Type is one of those little bonuses.

That brings me to GNOME. The GNOME environment and many of its applications (Epiphany, the Nautilus file manager, Gedit, gThumb, and a bunch of others) just seem to suit the way I work.

It'd be more "cool" to use Xfce or maybe KDE (or Fluxbox or Fvwm), but I just seem to have a better experience in GNOME.

As much as I'd like to try OpenSolaris, I've never even gotten it to boot all the way on any machines I have at my disposal. That's kind of a deal-breaker, not being able to actually use the operating system.

But there actually are laptops that ship preloaded with OpenSolaris. Toshiba has four of them (OK, three, but one has two configuration options).

They're pricey for the most part: $1,599, $1,199, $1,099 and a netbook that curiously dual-boots OpenSolaris and Windows XP Home for the much-lower price of $379.

I'd almost go for that $379 model, even though it ships with only 1 GB of RAM (that's a limitation that Microsoft puts on vendors who want to offer XP instead of Windows 7 on their netbooks). You can boost the memory to 2 GB for $39, and I'd probably do that.

That's if I a) had money to burn and b) used Solaris all the live-long day and really wanted the same environment on my netbook. As it stands, I don't user Solaris much at all. I do have Solaris 9 for my 1995-era Sparcstation 20, but that 55 MHz, 128 MB beast can't do all that much in Solaris or even OpenBSD. I can't run a "modern" Web browser, and I probably have a better dual-processor board in my boxes of SPARC parts, but not being able to enter the world of Firefox 3.0.x is kind of a deal-breaker.

And OpenBSD won't recognize a second CPU in SPARC 32-bit, I think. I've never had any luck running Firefox in OpenBSD or NetBSD in SPARC 32. They either won't build all the way (OpenBSD) or the available, machine-built package won't run (NetBSD).

For desktop use, anyway, I'm not hankering for what OpenSolaris is offering, but the mere fact that they do have a working Adobe Flash Player is something that most BSD projects can't quite do (except in Linux emulation and not so well at that).

However, just having a preloaded version of OpenSolaris, and on a laptop at that, is something I admire about the whole project.

One thing does worry me about the Toshiba laptops. The one-year OpenSolaris subscription is included in the laptop prices. A three-year subscription at the time of purchase is an additional $499. Ouch. Hopefully you can get software updates past one year without having to drop that additional $499.

At the risk of over-repeating myself, I do think this is pretty cool: I've always said the only way for Linux to get any traction on the desktop is with preloads. OpenSolaris is already there, at least in a limited way. Now all the project, or Sun, has to do is make the case for why desktop users should want a machine with OpenSolaris.

If you can make that case, I'm all ears.

I know that Google Chrome is supposed to be so gosh, darned fast, but on the Dell Optiplex GX520s with Windows XP, 3 GHz P4 processors and 512 MB of RAM (yes, we're stuck in 2005, thank you for asking), the Chrome browser starts off the session with promise but soon bogs down. Going from one window to another not visited in the past few minutes means slow, painful redrawing of said window.

So any speed or stability advantages over Firefox 3.5.x are ... just not there.

That means if I want to get work done in the browser (and that's pretty much what I do ...), I need to use Firefox.

IE - too slow, but I do use it for development because my readers use it. Opera - it just can't handle my Web-based apps (it's the apps' fault, but I can't change that equation) though it remains super fast. Chrome - those screen redraws are killing me. Firefox - it may be a CPU hog, but I can use it all day and it stays mighty consistent, plus I have my beloved Firebug and Web Developer add-ons.

I'd like to love Chrome, but in my situation, I can't. Firefox wins.

I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I've been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year.

And right here, right now, with a collection of old and dying hardware, my main laptop being a 2002/03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've moved from OpenBSD 4.4 to Ubuntus 8.04-9.10 and now to Debian Lenny, and things now are going better than I ever thought they would.

For this moment anyway, I have X working great, sound works through my USB Headphone Set sub-$3 module, I have all the multimedia functionality I need through Debian Multimedia, I'm about to update a few key apps, including Firefox/Iceweasel with Backports (see the wiki, too), and I've found more than a few apps that I really like and rely on.

I've grown very accustomed to and reliant on GNOME. I use Gedit, the Epiphany browser when possible (it's quicker than Iceweasel/Firefox), and my "killer app" for Web photo-editing is Gthumb, which is one of the few FOSS apps that preserves and edits the critical IPTC data in JPEGs that all of the photographers I work with (and all the outside suppliers of images I use) use to caption their images.

I have OpenOffice when I need it, which isn't often.

I use Rhythmbox for music, Gpodder for podcasts, Icedove/Thunderbird with Iceowl/Lightning for mail and calendar, gFTP, Pidgin and Audacity. I have Java and Flash. I use LogMeIn to control Windows desktops remotely when needed.

Did I mention that everything (just about) works?

It's a great thing, and the speed I'm getting in Debian makes Windows, if hadn't wiped it from the Toshiba's 20 GB hard drive, something I don't really need.

At this point I'm worried about the future of this 2002/03 laptop, principally its Intel video. Xorg has not been kind to Intel video over these past few years. Thus far I need to use the VESA driver to get Debian Sid (via Sidux) or Ubuntu Lucid to run.

That's acceptable, but I'd still like to get the Intel driver to work. Hell, this is Intel video; you'd think there would be a working Intel driver for it in the Xorg world as implemented in Linux and the BSDs.

But I do have the VESA solution ready, and between Debian Lenny, Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid, I have a future upgrade path already in place, even as I hold onto Lenny with both hands due to the fact that I've already done all of the setup and tweaking and have everything working as well as ever.

How's your Linux or BSD machine running these days? Let me know either in the comments or via e-mail at steven (dot) rosenberg (at) dailynews (dot) com.

Michael Larabel of Phoronix told me awhile ago that he was working on adding OpenBSD to his popular benchmarking application Phoronix Test Suite, and now he has an article benchmarking Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze, Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I don't think anybody expects OpenBSD to blow any doors off in terms of the usual Phoronix benchmarks. The whole mantra of the OpenBSD project is that it's not about raw speed, benchmarks, etc. Instead the focus is on correctness of code, security, cryptography and interoperability across platforms.

Here's what Larabel says in terms of his conclusion (emphasis mine):

There is a lot to gather from these benchmark results that directly compare the "out of the box" performance on Fedora, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OpenSolaris. If looking solely at the number of first place wins for each operating system, Fedora 12 and Debian GNU/Linux (2010-01-14) were tied with each having seven wins. Behind the Linux distributions, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and FreeBSD 8.0 were tied with each having two wins. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and FreeBSD 7.2 each had one win. OpenBSD 4.6 had not won in any of our 20 operating system benchmarks. However, in this article we are just looking at some areas of the 64-bit OS performance and depending upon the system's configuration, tweaking, compiler changes, and other optimizations these results could certainly shake out quite differently. There are also features in some operating systems that make them more favorable than others depending upon your individual needs.

So in case you were wondering about performance across OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Linux (Fedora and Debian) and even the FreeBSD/Debian mashup, here are some answers.

All said, I remain interested in using FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the desktop as well as the server. I'm looking more closely at FreeBSD than I have in the past because of the project's willingness to support releases for what appears to be quite a few years. There's still a FreeBSD 6.x branch receiving updates, and that means that FreeBSD 8 has quite a life ahead of it.

The biggest stoppers for me with OpenBSD were the lack of binary updates to both base and packages during the life of a release (six months) and my general lack of ability to upgrade from one version of OpenBSD to another, either via an in-place upgrade or reinstall, without killing the whole installation in the process.

For those keeping score, I'm mostly running Debian Lenny right now, but I'm looking at the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 as something I might want to move to later this year.

My feelings for Ubuntu have run hot and cold since I first discovered the "Linux for human beings"-nicknamed reimagination of Debian during the Dapper (6.06) era.

I've had Ubuntu be the best distro on a given computer, sometimes it won't even boot, I've had terrible trouble with Intel video, and upgrade-delivered changes have forced me to rewrite scripts on the fly. OK, it's mostly Intel video, which for any user of Xorg over the past 2+ years has been an absolute nightmare.

And lately I've thrown another wrinkle into the mix: I fixed my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (circa 2001) laptop's dead sound with a sub-$3 USB Headphone Set sound module from DealExtreme.com. In Debian Lenny I managed to configure it to play all sounds except system sounds and Flash sound. That means audio and video files will play, but the system beeps and bleeps and any sound from Flash video or audio can't be heard. I can even record via the USB sound module I got for a couple bucks and change (shipping included).

I've been using Debian Lenny for the last few weeks, ever since my other Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 running Ubuntu Karmic developed an eventually fatal crack in its LCD screen. I had the other "backup" laptop set up to test fully encrypted LVM in Debian Lenny, and I pretty much had everything configured, so I took my Ubuntu backups and rolled my files into the Debian laptop, where I've been ever since.

The constant X issues I had during my time with Ubuntu Karmic didn't exactly endear me to the distro at that point. I know the problems are most likely upstream with either Xorg, the Intel driver or the Linux kernel itself, but the average user like myself can be totally thrown by the seemingly constant breakage.

Anyhow, nothing lasts forever in the world of operating-system software, especially the free, open-source variety, so I'm on the lookout for where I want to go with the hardware I have now as the year wears on.

To take a peek at the near-future of Debian, particularly the Squeeze testing branch, I chose to run the live DVD of Sidux 2009-04.

In anticipation of the next version of Ubuntu, which will be an LTS (long-term support) release that will get three years of support on the desktop (and five years on the server) when it is officially released in April of this year, I downloaded a DVD image of Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2.

Why DVD? My Toshiba's DVD/CD-ROM drive neither burns discs nor likes to properly read CD-Rs burned just about anywhere. It has no problem with traditional CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs. And curiously it also has no trouble booting from and running distros burned to DVD+R discs, so unless I get a CD directly from Ubuntu, or use a commercially made OpenBSD disc, I pretty much have to use DVD images that I burn on other computers (remember — this laptop doesn't have a burner).

So I burned the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 DVD image and booted the Toshiba Satellite 1100 on it.

At first X died. I tried "safe graphics mode," which worked. I was soon in the usual orange/brown world of Ubuntu. A look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf revealed that I was running the VESA driver. I've known for a long time that VESA can get many a troubled PC to run X, but I've rarely had to resort to it in order to make things work on my particular PCs.

Well, now I guess my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) chip needs VESA to work with the current Xorg. That would've been good to know over the past few months.

But now I do know, and I not only booted Ubuntu Lucid but also Sidux 2009-04 using this information.

Now on to Ubuntu Lucid: I quickly configured the system to use my USB Headphone Set sound module, and I was pleased to, for the first time since I got the $2-and-change USB sound card, actually have system sounds and sound in Flash.

Yep, everything works. As in the past, when Ubuntu works, it works well. It recognizes lots of hardware, plays multimedia without a lot of jumping through hoops ...

I was able to get into the newish NetworkManager applet and tweak the network settings to suit the quirks of my own networking situation. Firefox 3.5 ran great. And even in the live environment I found the GNOME-based Ubuntu very responsive.

I wrote plenty about the value to users of long-term-support releases in Ubuntu, Debian (where every release is an LTS), Red Hat/CentOS (ditto the LTS philosophy) and even FreeBSD and NetBSD, which don't send those like myself into a flurry of configuration nightmares every six months ... or more often as in the case of Ubuntu Karmic, where Xorg and kernel updates continually broke and fixed my system in a seemingly random fashion.

Anyhow, with the VESA driver I was able to successfully boot and run Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, I had none of the X issues that plagued my system in recent years, sound worked great, Flash ran well, and the desktop, which looks pretty much like it does in Karmic, offers plenty of functionality.

"Everything works" is what I want. And thus far, except for a potentially ominous failure of the system to recognize the mouse buttons (it happened during my first Ubuntu Lucid session but not at all during the second), the near future of Linux is going swimmingly for my aging Toshiba Satellite laptop.

Curious aside: Having sound work in Flash with my USB Headphone Set sound module was a major "breakthrough." After I quit out of Ubuntu Lucid the first time, I booted into Debian Lenny, where I still had the ability to hear sound in Flash. However, after today's Ubuntu session, I again booted into Debian Lenny and didn't have sound in Flash anymore. Another Linux mystery.

But once again (and after much Ubuntu bashing on my part as the transition from Hardy to Karmic caused me untold — OK, mostly told — grief), Ubuntu appears to be the OS with the best fit for my current hardware.

I'll miss the speed of Debian (it's that much faster than Ubuntu, I've found), and I may indeed give Squeeze a tryout in the future, but I'll be keeping my eye on Ubuntu Lucid as it wends its way toward release in three months.

If I know what's good for me (and clearly that's not often the case), I'll wait a month or three after Lucid's April release, then roll it onto one of the Toshibas and see how well everything works at that point.

All I know is the prospect of two to three years of "stability" is something I would welcome at this point in my computing life, where I'm using free, open-source operating systems and applications to get increasing amounts of work done and just don't have the time to continually fix update-delivered breakage or get new hardware that is presumably more in the minds of developers and potentially is better served by "today's" software.

Unlike previous Ubuntu released based on (I think ...) a snapshot of Debian Sid, Ubuntu Lucid, an LTS release, is supposedly being pulled from Debian Testing (currently Squeeze), making for greater stability out of the box. I'll take it.

Ubuntu Lucid isn't even in the beta stage, let alone a release-candidate or fully baked release, and on my hardware it's looking very, very good. I'm no fan of free-software hyperbole, but Ubuntu Lucid really does look like the best Ubuntu LTS release ever, and I'm anxious to see it at release time in April.

I'll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the "safe graphics mode" boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I've wanted to do in order to "plan" this laptop's future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.

To be brief, the answer to all of my video problems can be summed up thusly:

VESA

Yep, the VESA driver seems to be the ticket to getting X to run in the post-Lenny world.

That's what Ubuntu uses for "safe graphics mode," and my ability to boot into Lucid Alpha 2 with that boot parameter led me to reverse my earlier failure with Sidux.

The good news is that with the boot parameter xdriver=vesa I'm able to boot and run Sidux, its 2.6.32.2 kernel, X.org 7.4 and KDE 4.3.4 desktop, the latter of which is quite snappy and doesn't offend me as much as it might a hard-core KDE 3.x user, which I'm definitely not (and at this point in time I can safely say I like KDE 4.3 much better than 3.x).

I probably shouldn't compare Sidux 2009-4 to Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, but at this point I should just get that out of the way by saying that Sidux, being pretty much Debian Sid, is quite a bit snappier than Ubuntu Lucid at this point in the development.

The problem with both Sidux 2009-4 and Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 at this point in time on this specific hardware is that a number of minutes into the session, say 10 minutes, the mouse only "half" works. By "half" I mean the arrow/cursor appears on the screen and it moves when the mouse is moved. But neither the right- or left-click buttons works. Yep, you can move your pointer but can't click on anything. Even the little mouse wheel works. But again, no clicking is very bad.

Sort of makes X less than useful.

Once again, DAMN XORG ...

I've never had to use the VESA driver before, but I must say that the display looks great, probably refreshes faster than using the Intel drivers in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Hardy through Karmic ... but not having a working mouse is really, really inconvenient.

The fact that both Sidux 2009-4 and Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 share this "bug," says to me that the trouble is upstream. I'll have to start checking the bug reports for everything from Xorg to the kernel itself to see just what the hell is going on.

Other than this showstopping bug, everything else in Sidux 2009-04, especially KDE 4.3, is pretty darn nice.

(Point of order: Most of this entry was composed in the Sidux 2009-04 live environment ... until the mouse died; I returned to finish it up in the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 live environment.)

More on Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 coming up ...

Image above of the Debian Etch GNOME desktop from Wikimedia Commons. I always liked this version of the Debian swirl on the wallpaper.

I just saw the news that Debian Etch will no longer receive updates from the Debian Security Team as of Feb. 15, 2010.

As you may or may not know, the current Stable version of Debian is Lenny, which received that "Stable" designation on Feb. 15, 2009.

See the pattern? In the world of Debian, once a release is declared Stable, the previous release moves from Stable to what the project calls Old Stable, at which time it receives security patches for an additional year. That gives users a full year during which to upgrade to the current Stable distribution, which in case you haven't been reading closely is Lenny.

Truth time: I still have an Etch installation — an Apple PowerPC box, in fact. I'm not running the Etch drive, but it's still in the box waiting to be hooked up (I have the OS X drive connected and running). So if and when I hook the Debian drive up, I'd have to update the Etch installation, which hasn't seen an update in about a year, then dist-upgrade to Lenny (which I'm running on my main laptop as well as two other machines).

I remember Debian Etch fondly. It was released in April 2007, mere months after I started mucking around with Linux, and its 2.6.18 kernel played very well with the machines I ran for the next two years. I did run other things between then and now (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Slackware, CentOS, OpenBSD, Wolvix, Puppy), but for reasons that one can deduce from the past 100 entries in this blog, I'm back in the Debian camp with Lenny (and not feeling all that good about my Intel video-running laptop and the future of Linux and Xorg, meaning I'll be sticking with Lenny for quite some time).

Just as one can have a very good experience running the Debian Testing branch, Squeeze, right now, with no date certain for going Stable, one could have run Etch that same way before April 2007. But if you're the conservative type (and I usually am when it comes to my old machines and the software they run) and you began running Debian Etch in April 2007, the release's life from Stable through Old Stable to the end of its patched life will be roughly 2 years, 10 months (unless I miscounted my fingers). Not bad for a "long-term release," which in the world of Debian is EVERY release.

The thing I like most about Mac OS X is that you can close all of a program's windows yet still keep that program running (and selectable with the apple-tab key combination).

No irony is intended here. I really do like this feature and wish it was at least an option in the desktop environments available in Linux/Unix.

I'm working on the 2003-era iBook G4 we've had since it was new, and give or take one dead hard drive, and the infamous iPhoto database debacle, we've had a way-better-than-expected run with it.

I've upgraded from OS X 10.3 to 10.4, went from 384 MB to 1.1 GB of RAM, added WiFi, replaced the aforementioned hard drive (a three-hour odyssey I don't recommend, especially when compared to the 2-minute drive swap I can do with a laptop designed to have its hard drive replaced), and seven years on now, the thing performs very well.

I just set up a 2000/01-era G4/466 with OS X 10.4. Compared with the iBook's 1 GHz PowerPC processor, this 466 MHz PPC is even more underpowered in today's computing world. And I only have 384 MB of RAM in it. ... But for Web browsing with Safari (all I've done is install and update the base software), it runs quite well. It'll probably be better if I can find a 512 MB PC100 or PC133 SIMM to stuff in there.

So my feelings, this month anyway, about OS X and even Apple hardware (nowhere near as good as it's made out to be in the fanboy realm) is quite positive. Except for the iBook hard-drive fiasco, for which Steve "Design Guru" Jobs will never be forgiven.

Now that I'm running Debian Lenny, naturally I'm looking ahead to see how Squeeze might run on my hardware. Debian Live has no Squeeze image at present, I believe, so I decided to try Sidux, a somewhat tamed version of Debian Sid.

I've had success with Sidux in the past, and I figure what's in Sid today will be in Squeeze tomorrow ... or sometime thereafter.

So I download a DVD image, the i686/amd64 KDE-full one.

It boots OK at first, but once X kicks in, the whole thing goes to hell.

About the only thing I can do now is look for the boot code for console-only and try some xorg.conf tricks to get X working.

In short: It doesn't look good.