November 2008 Archives

(Image above from http://mike.kruckenberg.com)

We've pretty much reached the point at which it's probably cheaper to buy a laptop computer than it is to purchase a comparable desktop PC with the keyboard, mouse and monitor needed to make it all work.

Of course if you have all of those things — especially the monitor — you will still save money by buying just the desktop box and keeping as many of your old peripherals as will work.

But it seems like the graphs of "laptop cost" and "desktop cost" have finally intersected.

Laptops are convenient. You can carry them almost anywhere, use them almost anywhere ... you always have a keyboard, mouse (in the form of a touchpad) and monitor attached ...

Can you see where I'm headed?

Laptops break. And they're hard to fix. Often really hard.

And instructions on how to fix them are either really detailed (like those for Macs from ifixit.com) or, shall we say, "nonexistent."

I couldn't have replaced our 2003 Macintosh iBook G4's hard drive without the lengthy instructions from ifixit.com, and even with them, the procedure took three hours and had me cursing more than twice.

I thought that PC-based laptops put their hard drives in "civilized" places. On both my 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt and 2002 Gateway Solo 1450, I could swap out a hard drive by removing five screws, switching the drive and reversing the procedure. Five minutes from start to finish.

Now that I'm using this 2002 Toshiba 1100-S101 — hell, I've got TWO IDENTICAL MODELS — I find out little about how to replace their hard drives other than that "it's not easy."

There's no easily-accessible bay like in the Compaq and Gateway. The one forum post I found said that just about everything needs to be torn apart to get at the hard drive.

And now that the Toshiba on which I'm running OpenBSD seems to be slowly dying, the prospect of getting the drive out and trying it in the other Toshiba is looking to be way harder than I'd like it to be.

Clearly I should've spent more time with the other Toshiba before I decided which one I'd be using.

Here are the major parts of each laptop and their problems:

Case:

Toshiba 1 looked better from the outside
Toshiba 2 had a prominent crack that was somehow repaired

Keyboard:

Toshiba 1 has fairly worn keys. The space bar is a bit unresponsive toward the ends
Toshiba 2 seems fine

Touchpad:

Toshiba 1's has a tendency to stop working at all for short periods of time. After a certain length of time it also starts to become very erratic (a USB mouse always works fine).
Toshiba 2's touchpad seems fine, but I haven't used it enough to know for sure.

CD/DVD drive:

Both Toshiba 1 and 2 have very picky optical drives when it comes to reading CD-R discs. Each will only read/boot a few of my many CD-Rs. And each boots different ones.

Screen:

Toshiba 1 came to me with a sticker on it that said "bad screen." But since it seemed to work, I just went forward with my floppy/network install of OpenBSD 4.4. Today, though, the screen began blanking out intermittently. Squeezing the bottom plastic portion of the screen will often (but not always) fix it.
Toshiba 2's screen seems fine.

Sound:

Toshiba 1's sound is intermittent in both Windows and OpenBSD.
Toshiba 2's sound seems fine.

Hard drive:
Toshiba 1's hard drive runs fine.
Toshiba 2's drive seems a bit noisy

Floppy drive:
Both seem fine.

Battery:
I've learned to expect nothing from old laptop batteries. I haven't even tried using them.

CMOS battery:
Toshiba 1 powered up with the correct time and date. No problems since.
Toshiba 2 powered up with a 1999 time and date. I suspect that the CMOS battery is dead.

Ever try replacing a CMOS battery in a laptop? Some are easy to replace but super-expensive to buy (my Compaq), others are commonly found and inexpensive but seem impossible to extract (my Gateway).

The bottom line is that laptops are extremely convenient. But they are still quite expensive, and for the most part disposable. In the past few months, I've heard about plenty of bricked laptops — Macintosh and PC.

At my office, I have a Dell Optiplex GX520 that's now probably three or four years old. Actually, we've got quite a few dozen of them. I beat the hell out of the thing, and it just keeps working. I've spilled plenty of things into the keyboard. It still works.

Since it's a Dell and not a generic box assembled from off-the-shelf parts, it wouldn't be as easy to fix as something I put together from TigerDirect or Newegg-purchased components, but if the hard drive, optical drive, mouse, keyboard or monitor died, I'd have it fixed in a few minutes.

I'm as guilty as anybody of spending a lot of time (but in my case almost no money; all these dead and dying machines have been free or nearly so) using laptops. I don't have a "home office" that I actually work in (it's a sordid tale that I won't even begin to relate), so when I do work at home, it's pretty much on a laptop.

When, after suffering for over a year with the Gateway Solo 1450's not-to-be-tamed-by-any-BSD CPU fan, I found in the Toshiba 1100 a laptop with no CPU fan problem in OpenBSD.

Never mind that its optical drive, touchpad, keyboard, sound and display are not exactly ship-shape.

But I can run OpenBSD in peace. And for the past hour, the screen hasn't gone blank. The touchpad has even continued to work.

While the first Toshiba booted Debian Etch and a Half's netinstall CD (and nothing else, leaving me to install OpenBSD from a floppy — and damned glad that's an option), the second Toshiba booted Debian Lenny's business-card CD and Knoppix.

And I'm wondering how useful Windows XP is to me on either of these laptops. Even if I do manage to figure out the admin password and can bring them from Service Pack 1 to whatever it is XP is up to now. (Is it the SP3 that my Dell desktop for some reason refuses to install?)

If I get the time (and if Toshiba No. 1's screen doesn't continue to cooperate), I'll probably be running Debian Lenny from Toshiba No. 2 before the end of this week.

I did pull the memory door on one of the Toshiba's, and I was pleased to learn that the 256 MB is on a single SODIMM, meaning I could pull the module from one and have 512 MB in the other.

I'd probably be better off loading up the other Dell desktop I have waiting in the proverbial wings. It's not a server, but it uses this expensive PC800 Rambus ECC server memory. (What was Dell thinking, other than "mmmm ... expensive memory"?) Maybe it'll do OK with the 256 MB loaded in there now. And there's always my Power Mac G4/466, which runs Debian Etch fairly well in 384 MB of RAM (but without Flash video, since there's no Flash in the world of non-Mac-OS PowerPC). ...

I'll give Toshiba 1's hinky screen another week. Because I'm weak.

I should probably wait to blog about how running OpenBSD has been going on the Toshiba laptop until I have more time.

But in the interest of just throwing something up here, I'll say that it's going pretty well.

Most of my problems have been in the "creaky hardware" department. The touchpad gets hinky after the laptop has been running for awhile. This also happens in Windows (which I left on the drive; at some point I'll get around to finding out the admin password ... or not).

Sound indeed does work, but is also intermittent in both Windows and OpenBSD (i.e. it's a hardware problem). I did figure out how to play an MP3 in Xmms (tutorial forthcoming).

I also re-learned how to make CUPS work (another tutorial forthcoming). I also figured out how to make the function keys work in the Midnight Commander file manager while in the console (yet another tutorial forthcoming).

And I now have Firefox, Opera, Pidgin, Geany, OpenOffice 2.4, the GIMP, the Rox Filer, nano, mc, Xmms, mpg321 and a few other things installed. And they're all in the Fvwm menu, too.

The Self-Reliant Thin Client — my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — which has been running Debian Etch now for:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
11:47:52 up 35 days, 19:55, 2 users, load average: 2.79, 1.74, 0.79

with the OS and all files stored on an 8 GB Compact Flash module, and backing up the /home files via rsync to a 1 GB USB Flash drive just received two Iceweasel (aka unbranded Firefox) updates:

iceweasel
Iceweasel-gnome-support

That brings the system's version of the Mozilla-powered browser to 2.0.0.18.

Unless I've failed to hear about it, Debian Lenny hasn't yet been declared Stable, so Etch — first made Stable in April 2007 — remains the Debian distro of record for those who like things to stay predictable (and not break).

And now for an editorial: I know that the Debian Project does things the way it wants, but I'd sure like to see them decide to give each Stable distribution a defined life span of, say, three years. Yep, just like Ubuntu does with its LTS.

At the current pace, I imagine that Etch will get three years of security patches anyway. That's because once Lenny is declared Stable, Etch becomes Old Stable and at that point gets an additional year of bug fixes and security patches from the Debian Project.

The ability for sysadmins to plan and know how long they can ride a given release is something I find very valuable. Red Hat wouldn't do it if customers didn't want it. And while I think the 7-year-life of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release is probably more than a little too long for most uses (not that a print server or internal file server needs to be all that cutting-edge). But three years for Debian (I think at this point that two years of support is pretty much a given) is something that its users — including me — could really get behind.

Note: Ever notice how these entries start off so innocuous and then somehow morph into a diatribe? Yep, me too.

I brought my newly built OpenBSD 4.4 laptop to Starbucks in Tarzana/Reseda (actually the corner of Victory Boulevard and Tampa Avenue) to see how the free AT&T-powered WiFi would work in OpenBSD, which I've learned from my last OpenBSD laptop isn't a slam-dunk when it comes to getting logged in to Starbucks' not-open-to-the-world WiFi service.

What usually goes awry is that the laptop — in this case a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 — picks up an IP address with no problem from the AT&T router. (I'm using my trusty, works-with-everything Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA wireless card.)

But once I start a browser, I don't often get the login screen that actually tells AT&T's lovely router to start passing packets through my IP address.

I actually did have some luck months ago with the Compaq Armada 7770dmt running OpenBSD 4.2 with the Opera and Dillo Web browsers.

But today with the Toshiba running OpenBSD 4.4, I couldn't get anything going with Firefox or Opera. No Web pages would load. I couldn't get a login screen. Never mind that I forget my password every time I try to use this WiFi (that tends to happen when you do something every four months or so).

This laptop does have Windows XP on it, and I was ready to try it when I quit X and ran the Lynx text-only browser from the console.

I got the AT&T Wifi login page, was able to reset my password and log in to the service. Then I launched Firefox, somehow got to an AT&T WiFi page and changed my password.

One thing I'll be trying next time if I don't get a login screen in the browser is to go to this URL, which seems to be the root of all AT&T WiFi-ness in this corner of the country.

It should've come up automatically this way, but hopefully having this URL in my bookmarks will make all this jockeying a thing of the past.

By the way, I didn't have any of these problems using GNU/Linux (Puppy Linux 2.13, to be more specific) to connect to AT&T's Starbucks WiFi.

Bottom line: If Starbucks Wi-Fi isn't coming up in your browser and you're in California, go to https://secure3.sbc.com/ and try your luck there.
Next I'll be trying the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf free WiFi, which unlike that at Starbucks doesn't require any purchases, registering of any cards, and hopefully not the entry of any logins or passwords.

Yep, I'll expect it to just work. Update forthcoming

I hadn't checked in on Ars Technica, one of the better tech news sites, in some time, and when I went to the site's journals page last night I was surprised to see the Open Ended open-source journal/blog and the Kit hardware blog get equal billing in the navigation on the Journals page.

Due to both blogs' previous absence from this navigation, I probably wasn't the only one who never knew they existed.

Open Ended still isn't getting anywhere near the level of posting that the Infinite Loop (Apple), Opposable Thumbs (games) and One Microsoft Way (subject obvious) blogs enjoy. I'm sure the open-source blog doesn't get anywhere near the amount of traffic that the more-established Ars blogs get, either.

But both Open Ended and Kit do stand to get a lot more traffic now that they're as easy to get to as the other Ars Technica blogs.

When I installed OpenBSD 4.4 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, I purposefully left Windows XP on the drive. I used the free Linux-based Parted Magic live CD to shrink the Windows partition and leave room for OpenBSD on the hard drive.

The reason I'm so comfortable partitioning a hard drive is because I've done it between 50 and 100 times. For my first three or so OpenBSD installs, however, I gave the whole drive over to OpenBSD since I didn't feel confident setting up a dual- or triple-booting system with it.

So if you ARE comfortable dual-booting lots of Linuxes, Linux and Windows, or what have you, and you have managed to install OpenBSD without killing out your other operating systems, you might want to actually run those other systems, right?

On my most recent OpenBSD install on the Toshiba, I wanted to leave Windows XP on the drive and eventually dual-boot it.

I followed the instructions on the FAQ for installing OpenBSD on a PC with Windows already installed, and I intended NOT to install the OpenBSD bootloader. Well, I didn't do that, but I also managed somehow to kill out the Windows bootloader on the drive's master boot record. That meant I couldn't boot anything.

Luckily the OpenBSD FAQ show me how to boot from the floppy I used for the install (I booted from the floppy because the CD drive isn't working), drop to a shell and install the OpenBSD bootloader. That was easy enough, but I still couldn't dual-boot.

You theoretically can use the Windows bootloader to dual-boot with OpenBSD, but since I had already killed it out and don't have a Windows XP disc to restore it, I turned to GRUB, the bootloader I always use with Linux. It's a package for OpenBSD, and if your system is set up to install packages (with your PKG_PATH in your .profile if you're going to sudo, or in root's .profile if you su to root), you can easily install it.

Since I already added my user account to the sudoers list with visudo, I used sudo at my own shell to install the package. If you su to root instead, use the line with the # prompt:

$ sudo pkg_add -i grub
or
# pkg_add -i grub

After you install grub, you are presented with a path to the Instructions for setting up grub. Those instructions say to do this:

# grub-install --no-floppy hd0

That didn't work for me. The reason is that pkg_add puts all the grub packages in /usr/local/sbin, and either by accident or design, that isn't in my path.

So I instead ran:

# /usr/local/sbin/grub-install --no-floppy hd0

That did work. It installed GRUB in the master boot record as my bootloader.

But unlike in Linux, this GRUB installation didn't create the menu.lst file that GRUB uses to select and boot the various operating systems.

A look through the man and info pages for GRUB plus a little searching on the Web helped me create a menu.lst.

Before I go into that, it's worth pointing out that while most Linux systems store that file as /boot/grub/menu.lst, in OpenBSD it's just /grub/menu.lst. There's no /boot directory. (Instead, boot is an executable in the root directory, the reasons for which both elude me and seem unimportant at this stage.)

Use any text editor you have installed (vi in the base OpenBSD system; or nano or Geany in my system, both of which I've previously added with pkg_add) to create /grub/menu.lst.

Once again, since I have sudo set up, I used it and the nano editor in my shell to create the file. As far as partitions go, on my drive, Windows XP is installed first, followed by OpenBSD. To dual-boot with GRUB, here's how I created menu.lst:

$ sudo nano /grub/menu.lst

That creates the menu.lst file, into which I typed the following:

default 0 timeout 5

title Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title OpenBSD
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

I saved and closed the file (F3 and then ctrl-X in nano) and then rebooted the PC. As yet another aside, here's how I reboot in OpenBSD:

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Upon reboot, GRUB ran and allowed me to choose between Windows and OpenBSD.

I tested both OSes, and both successfully booted.

I'll probably reverse the order so OpenBSD is in the top spot and will boot automatically if I don't purposefully select it. I could also increase the timeout time to have more of a chance to pick one OS or the other, but right now that doesn't seem necessary.

Observations: While documentation in OpenBSD tends to be extremely detailed, it's not always 100 percent correct. The man pages and info pages didn't tell me, for instance, that the grub executables, including grub-install, couldn't be run from the / directory and that the full path to them was needed. I only found that path by poking around in a file manager. Once I did have the path, I was able to use grub-install successfully with the directions as given. Adding the path to the instructions would certainly help others get GRUB working in OpenBSD.

Since both of the OSes on my laptop — Windows XP and OpenBSD have their own bootloaders on their respective root partitions, all GRUB has to do is chainload to the proper partition, after which time the respective systems' bootloaders take over. After using GRUB to dual- and triple-boot GNU/Linux distributions for more than a year, I've discovered that chainloading as much as possible is a very good thing, especially when dual-booting two Linux distros. That way, "automagic" updates to each distro's menu.lst are just about guaranteed to go smoothly.

This technique made things much easier when dual-booting Debian and Ubuntu. When I didn't chainload to one or the other, one of the two OSes never did get the proper menu.lst updates when a new kernel was installed. But by chainloading to all but one of the distros on the hard drive and installing GRUB in all but one of the distros' root partitions, I've avoided countless problems.

(Yes, I do have the OpenBSD T-shirt with this design. It doesn't get more geeky.)

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build.

To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

With a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor, 248 MB RAM (how it has this amount, I don't know) and a 20 GB hard drive, the specs are pretty similar to the Gateway, except for the Gateway's 1 GB of memory, which I'll probably split between the two machines.

The Toshiba came to me with Windows XP, and this time I wanted to preserve Windows and dual-boot it with a FOSS OS. The CD/DVD drive is extremely flaky. I think it's dying. It does better with "commercial" CDs, and I did get it to boot Partition Magic so I could shrink the NTFS Windows partition and set it up for Linux.

The only Linux CD I could boot was Debian's Etch and a Half. Something was squirrely on our network, and I couldn't get DNS working in the installer. I could've done a minimal install, fixed /etc/resolv.conf and then brought the rest of Debian into the box, but I took this opportunity to go in a different direction.

With all the CPU fan issue on the Gateway, I could never run OpenBSD (or NetBSD or even FreeBSD after the first boot) because I couldn't get the noisy CPU fan under control.

I powered up the Toshiba, which couldn't get networking in Windows either. Since I don't yet have the administrator password, I couldn't update the DNS settings.

I went to an OpenBSD mirror and downloaded a floppy image plus a DOS/Windows utility that helped me create a bootable OpenBSD install floppy. (Before anybody mentions this, I know I could've just as easily created a Debian boot floppy.)

The Toshiba successfully booted off the OpenBSD floppy, and I was able to plug in a mirror and do a full install over the network.

This was my first dual-boot install of OpenBSD, and after the install was done, the machine wouldn't boot at all. I hadn't installed a bootloader and thought the box would boot into Windows, where I planned to modify that bootloader to choose between Windows XP and OpenBSD. Instead I got a "no operating system" message.

And I don't have a Windows XP disc from which to "repair" the master boot record.

So I rebooted with the OpenBSD floppy, dropped down to a shell and added the OpenBSD bootloader at the prompt:

# fdisk -u wd0

Then I rebooted and was in OpenBSD. There is a GRUB package for OpenBSD, and I'll probably install that so I can easily dual-boot either Windows and OpenBSD or eventually Linux and OpenBSD. There are other alternatives as far as bootloaders go, but my familiarity with GRUB is what is governing my decision in this case.

I'm also going to add rsync as well. I have no skills when it comes to OpenBSD's dump and restore utilities, so having rsync is another plateful of Linux-like comfort food that will help me get along in OpenBSD.

Other packages I've installed thus far: nano, mc (the Midnight Commander file manager), Rox-filer (my favorite X file manager), Geany (X text editor) and the Firefox (I probably should've gotten the version with Java, but I'm going to try to add the Java developer's kit and get the Java runtime that way) and Opera Web browsers.

Opera came via a port and not a precompiled package, and it took a lot longer to install this time than the last time I installed it in OpenBSD (on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt), if I recall correctly.

When you download the ports tree and install from there, everything is fetched for you and compiled when needed. Looking at all the output in the terminal, it looks like these ports could never work, but in my experience with OpenBSD they always do. This time was no different. It took maybe 45 minutes to get all the dependencies plus Opera, but after that it worked immediately.

I've grown accustomed to OpenBSD's default window manager, Fvwm2, and I'll probably stick with it for at least awhile before adding any others. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc., installing an app in OpenBSD doesn't automatically update the menus, so you have to manage this yourself. Getting into the guts of the .fvwmrc file is more instructive than not, and once I figured out how to do it, it got less arduous.

I still don't like waiting for ports to download, compile and install, so having 4000+ precompiled packages for i386 is a very good thing.

After a year of strugging with and complaining about the Gateway fan blasting away under OpenBSD, I couldn't believe that I was running OpenBSD 4.4 on the Toshiba with no CPU fan problem whatsoever. Everything from autoconfiguration of my two network interfaces (one Realtek 8189 wired Ethernet, the other an Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA wireless) to a perfect xorg.conf made this OpenBSD install go .

I haven't checked audio yet, but I've never had OpenBSD fail to configure the sound card.

I've always read that most OpenBSD developers use laptops to code in the OS, and now that I have this Toshiba running OpenBSD better than anything I've tried before, I'm amazed at how well it installs and runs on this specific platform.

I've probably written a half-dozen posts about exactly why I'm running OpenBSD, and I'll probably write another one as time allows in the week ahead.

And I'll be either ordering a CD set or contributing directly to the OpenBSD project in the days ahead.

I don't generally need to put things in .zip format. I often have to extract things out of .zip archives, which is easy in just about any computer system these days.

But making a .zip archive is something I've never had the occasion to do — until I was asked how today.

It was an easy bit of Googling (or is it "Googleing"?) to get here:

On Windows XP machines:

1. Start Windows Explorer (right-click the Start menu, then choose Explore).
2. Navigate to the folder in which you want to create a .zip file.
3. On the File menu, point to New, and then click Compressed (zipped) Folder. Type a name for the new folder, and then press ENTER.
4. Using Windows Explorer, drag any files you wish to place into the .zip file.

Go to the page for instructions on using Winzip.

A regular .zip archive isn't all that small. I had the occasion to extract a 7zip file recently and installed a program to do it. 7zip really makes things small. And it's is an open-source technology, which means it's free and open — the way it should be.

In case you're keeping score, Winzip isn't free.

7zip is free and open source (and doubly good) and deserves your support (even financially if you use it to make money, but that's totally up to you).

PKZip is a commercial product, and it seems to have been eclipsed by PKWare's SecureZIP product.

GNU/Linux and a whole bunch of Unix-like operating systems (including OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc.) offer plenty of free, open-source file compression, archiving and backup utilities that can be either installed or invoked with a few keystrokes.

Now that Amazon has taken on the chore of processing orders for the One Laptop Per Child program, which aims to put forward-thinking, rugged and cheap computers in the hands of children throughout the developing world, now is the perfect time to either "give one" to a child in need ($199) or "give one, get one" ($399) and both provide one for a child while getting one for your own kid (or yourself, since the comments at Amazon make it clear that adults really dig this little laptop).

While there has been a lot of controversy over the OLPC, mainly due to Intel not being happy that the project chose an AMD processor and Microsoft not being happy that the Fedora GNU/Linux-derived Sugar operating system was ... not Windows.

Now that the OLPC is being modified to run Windows XP, supposedly because foreign governments have been demaning such, the OLPC project is slashing and burning any goodwill it had in the free, open-source software community for the moneyed arms of Microsoft.

At any rate, as it stands right at this very moment, the OLPC still runs Sugar and looks to be a great educational tool for kids all around the world ... so if you're rolling in it, why not roll a little their way?

Maybe you're curious about how The Self-Reliant Thin Client is doing.

Here's the uptime output:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
13:08:07 up 24 days, 21:15, 2 users, load average: 1.70, 1.32, 1.31

Yep, the VIA C3 Samuel (rated at 1 GHz but running in Linux at 500 MHz for some reason) based converted thin client, running Debian Etch from an 8 GB Compact Flash card, has been working continuously for about a month now (I did reboot a few times during this test for kernel updates).

It's still no speed demon but handles the GNOME desktop fairly well. I did add Fluxbox for testing purposes, and I also installed the lightweight Dillo Web browser, but I'm still relying on the Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox) and Epiphany (GNOME's Gecko build) browsers, plus OpenOffice 2.0 Writer (works surprisingly well, even with 256 MB of RAM and 500 MHz of CPU) and GNOME's GEdit text editor.

I even used CUPS (The Common Unix Printing System) to set up a printer the other day. Even though most systems include native printer-setup utilities (GNOME's is extremely primitive), I find it's both easier and more instructive to use CUPS directly via a Web browser. For those who have never done it, open a browser and go to the following URL to access the CUPS interface:

http://localhost:631

I usually click on Administration and go from there. If you're asked for a login, that login is generally root, with the password being root's password. I can't remember how this goes in Ubuntu, which doesn't let the users (even the main user) at the root password (if there even is such a password).

Ubuntu's root/sudo situation is another kettle of fish for another post, but for most of us, the key to CUPS is using the root login and password to add or modify printers.

I will close out this entry by praising Debian Etch for being so solid on this (and just about every other) platform.

It's been over a month since I booted OpenBSD on the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop. This happens to be a very agreeable hunk of hardware when it comes to OpenBSD.

If I could find a box with better specs (i.e. more than 233 MHz of CPU and 144 MB of RAM) and no problem with CPU fans (i.e. not my Gateway laptop), I'd be more than happy to spend a whole lot more time in this OS.

Even on this 9-year-old laptop, OpenBSD runs well. Discovering the Opera Web browser has made a lot of difference. When you're running something with a GHz of CPU and a GB of RAM, the differences between Firefox and Opera are barely noticeable. But when resources are paltry, using a browser like Opera (or even Dillo), a word processor like Abiword (or even a really good text editor) can really improve the experience.

I will be looking for another platform on which to run OpenBSD in the very near future, and I'd like before then to rebuild this installation so I have some room in /usr, which remains full at 1 GB in size (when it should have been 5 GB).

I don't know how I've missed debiantutorials.org for so long. Luckily the guy who runs the site and goes by the name of machiner has begun posting at LXer, so now I know about it. I'll add it to the blogroll here as well.

It's nice to see somebody who loves Debian put together such a nice site. If you've been following along here over the past six months or so, you'll know that while I've been struggling with Debian Lenny on one laptop, I've done two recent Etch installs and am contemplating another.

Debian is closer to its goal of being "The Universal Operating System," than many other projects.

If you are running Debian, or considering it, machiner has quite a few good configuration tips on this site.

I hope he hits it hard for Lenny, which he predicts will go Stable during the last week of December 2008 or first week of January 2009.

Not getting satisfactory X performance in Lenny has been very disappointing. I still hold out hope that whatever's broken in Lenny does get fixed. Since the problem doesn't exist in Etch or any Ubuntu derivatives of Debian, it's been very perplexing.

Things have gone very smoothly on my third day of using the Xubuntu flavor of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. While in Xfce (Xubuntu's desktop environment), I haven't had the screen, keyboard and mouse freeze at all.

Wondering whether all this good fortune was really due to starting with the Xfce window manager instead of GNOME, I logged out, changed my WM to GNOME and logged back in.

Everything seemed to be going well. But in the mid-afternoon, I had a couple browser windows open and was writing in Gedit when the thing froze up on me. (Had I saved my document in Gedit? Nope.)

So regular old Ubuntu 8.04 hasn't improved at all. My ability to keep this distro running is somehow due to whatever Xubuntu packages take precedence over those in Ubuntu when logged in with Xfce.

By the way, the Trackpad utility in Ubuntu doesn't show up in Xubuntu, so I modified the xorg.conf in Ubuntu/Xubuntu to turn off tapping in my Alps touchpad by adding the line setting "MaxTapTime" to 0:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
# adding next line in attempt to turn off tapping
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

I've always been pretty happy with Xfce. I used it more often than not in Slackware and always in Wolvix. And with all the tools that Ubuntu keeps across all of its companion distros (including Kubuntu and Xubuntu), running Xfce isn't all that different than running GNOME.

The strengths of Xfce are that the Thunar file manager and Mousepad text editor are lightning fast and quite functional. I'm also OK managing the desktop with the Xfce tools. I discovered that Xorg.conf line to turn off touchpad tapping when I was setting up CentOS 5.2, and I think this is a much better way to deal with the issue than using the Q/G/Ksynaptics package. I believe that in "regular" Ubuntu each user can set up the touchpad according to their individual preferences, but since I don't have any users, potential or real, who like touchpad tapping, turning it off globally in xorg.conf is definitely the way to go.

Now that I'm sure that Ubuntu with GNOME is still screwing up on this hardware, I'll continue using Xubuntu/Xfce for the next few days to make sure everything continues working.

And while I'm reluctant to move off of the LTS to Ubuntu 8.10, that does remain an option. While the LTS' 3-year support timeframe is something I'd like to have, with the "regular" Ubuntu release, there's still 18 months of support, which means I could keep the same system for quite awhile nonetheless. The quality of support (i.e. bug fixes and security patches) for Ubuntu is not something I feel qualified to judge, but the 18-month life of non-LTS releases is something I'm very much in favor of.

Fedora's releases have a 13-month life, and OpenSUSE's are two years, I believe. I think Ubuntu is right where they should be, given that there's also the LTS release with 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server. I initially hoped that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS would run well enough that I could ride it out for at least a year, maybe two, without running into problems, and while I've "solved" the problem that has cropped up, not being able to use GNOME isn't exactly the solution I was looking for.

In conclusion: It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.

Seeking to isolate what was causing the mysterious screen freezes on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I first tried the Fluxbox window manager, but after some X crashes coming out of the screen-saver, I decided to add the entire Xubuntu environment to my Ubuntu installation.

I pulled in 80-some packages. I booted into Xubuntu and haven't had a crash all day. I've let the screen-saver run, I've even gone into suspend manually and then resumed.

For a day anyway, Xubuntu has not crashed. I still can't close the laptop lid (with the laptop set to blank the screen) and reopen with X awaking properly, but I'm not expecting that.

I'll run Xubuntu for the rest of the week to see if I can definitively say that something in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS' GNOME desktop is causing my random crashes.

Not that I don't like Xfce, because I do, but I wonder if upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, with newer GNOME packages, could also solve my crashing problem (or would perform the same as 8.04). Having 8.10 be more stable than 8.04 LTS would be a curious outcome, indeed.

In case you were wondering, yes it does occur to me that all the time I'm spending trying to figure out why Ubuntu is crashing (or why my Debian Lenny screen slowly degrades during each computing session) is time better spent finding a system that does work and presents none of these problems.

That's why I'm running the currently trouble-free CentOS 5.2 as my secondary distro on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I've already gone into way too much depth about how I feel about Debian and Ubuntu (very positive, despite all of these problems). With different hardware, I could very well throw Debian Lenny (or Ubuntu Hardy) on the box and have none of my current problems.

And while I'm getting to the point of swapping out my main computer for something from my well-populated boneyard, the Gateway MUST remain in service.

Anyway, back to my Ubuntu 8.04 problem. What happens is that the screen, keyboard and mouse seem to freeze at random. When the freeze happens, the screen image at that particular moment continues to display, but neither movement of the mouse nor typing on the keyboard has any affect whatsoever. Ctrl-alt-backspace won't kill X, ctrl-alt-delete won't reboot the box. I have to hold down the power button and force the machine to turn off.

The first thing I did today was install the Fluxbox window manager. I booted into Fluxbox, and things seemed to be OK, except that loading Nautilus caused GNOME to halfway take over, change my wallpaper and kill out the Fluxbox menu but not replace it with the GNOME menu. Ctrl-alt-backspace worked there. And when the screen saver did turn on, half the time I could get the desktop back, the other half I had to ctrl-alt-backspace and log in again.

In the middle of all this, I installed the rox-filer file manager, which let me navigate among my files without screwing things up with Nautilus, but the screen-saver issue was a deal-breaker.

Then I installed the Xubuntu-desktop meta-package, which brings in the full Xubuntu environment to Ubuntu, including apps like Abiword and the full Xfce desktop.

I'm in there now, using Firefox 3 to write this entry in the Xfce environment. I'll see how the screen-saver does its thing here and whether or not I get a random freeze.

So if GNOME is the culprit, I'll know by the end of today.

I feel like I'm booting children off a train.

Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it.

But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so.

But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

After fighting with Debian Lenny for months over the Gateway's screen-refresh problems (which basically render much of that screen unreadable after a half-hour or so of use), I finally decided that I couldn't stick with the Testing branch of my favorite Linux distro on its road to becoming Stable. While many other problems cropped up and were mowed down either by me or the Debian Project itself, this last issue just wouldn't go away. And since I see not even one other person with this same problem, I fear the issue will never be resolved. I don't even know which package to file a bug against.

Remember when I thought I fixed my random-screen-freeze problem on this same laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS? I thought that turning off automatic suspend in GNOME fixed the problem.

That didn't work. I still have random freezes. And I can't really blame it on the power plug because I've been in conditions where that plug does not move, and moreover these freezes never happened in Debian (when my screen image was not totally disintegrating, that is).

I was trying to get some pre-election work done on http://www.dailynews.com, and when I found that I didn't have the Java runtime installed (and needed it), I moved over to Ubuntu 8.04. In a half-hour, I had three unrecoverable crashes.

Again, I haven't heard of this happening to anybody but me.

I have TWO surplus laptops waiting in the wings. I'll see if any of them perform as well as or better than this Gateway. But whatever happens with those two machines, the Gateway will remain in service.

Once I decided to let go of Debian Lenny, I thought I would try Fedora 9, but when the live CD wouldn't let me install it, I turned to CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux — instead.

I first booted the live CD, then used the live CD to do a network install (NOT from the live environment but as a boot option). Once I determined that an http install wouldn't work but an ftp install would, I was off and running.

I've been testing CentOS 5.2 for about a week now. I've been slowly solving problems (adding things like Pidgin and Flash), and at this point I can say that CentOS 5.2 boots quickly, seems as snappy on this hardware as Ubuntu or Debian and runs extremely well.

I have yet to see a bug, and it has never crashed.

I have a full review and how-to for CentOS 5.2 in the works.

I hadn't anticipated replacing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I've had trouble with Ubuntu on this laptop since 7.04, and I've gone back and forth with it. Until I pulled it last week, I always had either Debian Etch or Lenny running on it. I've run Puppy 3.01 from live CD and the Slackware-based Wolvix Hunter — both with few problems.

The 2.6.18 kernel in CentOS 5 has always run better than any other on the Gateway. Other distros that share this kernel (albeit in slightly different versions) include PCLinuxOS 2007 and Debian Lenny.

And with support for RHEL/CentOS 5 slated to last a very, very long time, the fact that it runs so exceedingly well on this hardware gives me a true long-term solution.

I suspect that if I rolled the older Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — which has a little over seven months of support left before it EOLs — onto this laptop, it would run flawlessly. But it's packages are even older than Debian Etch's ...

As it stands right now, I'm going to stick with CentOS 5.2, and as much as I don't want to do it, I need to drop Ubuntu 8.04. I love Ubuntu — its philosophy and package mix, if not its brown color scheme. But I can't deal with the random freezes (after which ctrl-alt-backspace and ctrl-alt-delete are useless and only a hard reboot will work).

Aside from the screen-refresh problem, Debian Lenny was doing great. It improves on Etch in many, many ways.

I could see myself returning to Etch, which will have a full year of support as Debian's Old Stable distribution once Lenny is declared stable.

Whether I continue using this laptop or not, it has to run my daughter's educational games (GCompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay), and it has to be as stable as possible.

With Etch on the Gateway, I had trouble with the Alps touchpad, but since those problems were so easily solved in CentOS 5.2, perhaps I've learned enough to figure them out in Etch, where in addition to the touchpad-tapping issue the speed differences between the touchpad and a plugged-in USB mouse were more than a little incovenient.

I remember PCLinuxOS running as well as anything during the week or so I used it. I wonder how much support is left for the 2007 edition of that distro. The hype over PCLinuxOS has really slowed down over the past year, but I still think it's a very solid distro (based on Mandriva but with Debian-style apt and Synaptic package tools).

I've had trouble with X in Slackware on this platform, never seeming to get xorg.conf right, although Slack-based Wolvix runs perfectly for some reason. Slackware-based ZenWalk has all the packages I need and during the brief times I've run it has show itself to be extremely fast.

And since I'm running with separate /home partitions for both distros on this PC, switching those distros in and out should be less traumatic than in the past.

Even though I've taken great pains, after the fact (when it's harder to reconcile), to keep my user accounts' UID and GID numbers in Debian- and Red Hat- based distros compatible, I will probably dual-boot Fedora and CentOS for a while just to see how they match up on this hardware.

Depending on how things go with CentOS 5.2, I could eventually simplify things and do the unthinkable: not dual-boot anything.

CentOS seems terribly boring. But ever since Red Hat rolled a bunch of newer apps into its RHEL 5.2 (the base for CentOS), including Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 2.3, I've seen it as a very real alternative for the desktop.

And I neither expected it to run so well or for Debian and Ubuntu to run so comparatively poorly on this specific hunk of hardware.

If I had 10 test machines and Debian or Ubuntu ran flawlessly on them, I would be telling a different story, but from the perspective of this 6-year-old Gateway, RHEL/CentOS is pulling way out in front.

This wasn't the first time I tried Fedora — or Fedora 9 for that matter — via live CD. I must have burned my first CD of the distro soon after it was released.

Now that I was resolved to replace Debian Lenny on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) with ... something that didn't have Lenny's seemingly unsolvable screen-refresh issues, I decided to give Fedora 9 a try. I knew that it was a little less than three weeks until the release of Fedora 10, but since I was ready now, Fedora 9 it was.

I first tried the live CD on my Dell desktop. It booted, but not after the usual Fedora disc access errors, which take up a minute of time before the disc boots and then seem to have no effect whatsoever on subsequent loading and performance of the OS and applications.

Fedora 9 loaded, I configured the network and then ran the system for awhile on the Dell.

Then I needed to prepare the Gateway. I plan to keep Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on the laptop, so that part of the installation was going to stay exactly as is.

Before wiping Debian off the drive, I rsynced the Lenny /home files to Ubuntu's /home partition. (I did forget to archive my Puppy 3.01 configuration, which I'm not happy about losing.)

Previously I had Ubuntu set up to have its own separate /home partition on the extended partition. Debian, however, had the root and /home directories on the same partition.

This time I wanted each GNU/Linux distribution to have their own separate /home partitions.

Here's how I divided up the 30 GB hard drive:

I started with a 1 GB swap partition on hda1. Then came Ubuntu's root partition on hda2 and space for a Fedora root partition on hda3, about 10 GB each.

The rest of the drive was configured as extended partition hda4. On that extended partition, Ubuntu's /home directory was living on hda6, and that left hda5 for Fedora's /home directory.

This way, if any of these two distros needs to be replaced, the /home partitions should remain intact and can be used as /home for any other Linux distros that could potentially take their place.

I also planned to keep Ubuntu's GRUB bootloader on the master boot record with a stanza in its menu.lst chainloading to a second GRUB (or LILO or ...) located on the secondary distro's root partition. I've found that setting the bootloaders up this way solves all problems with menu.lst updating when new kernels roll through the two distros on the drive.

Before I began, I downloaded a new Fedora 9 ISO and burned a new disc. I booted the new disc on the Gateway, and while I got the same errors early in the boot sequence on the Gateway as I did on the Dell, the disc did load, and I was in the GNOME desktop in fairly good time.

After checking out Fedora for awhile in the live environment, I was ready to install.

I always like live CDs that allow you to install while in the live environment. It's one of the things that makes distros like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS so successful. You can try the distro with a live CD and if the hardware responds even halfway well, install right then and there.

I clicked Fedora 9's "Install Fedora to disc" icon.

Nothing happened. I clicked again. And again. Still nothing.

I rebooted the live CD and tried to install again. It wasn't working.

At this point I could've begun downloading the install images and burning them to disc, but I didn't.

I liked the fact that Fedora has a fairly deep repository that included most of the applications I wanted. I wasn't crazy about needing to upgrade every six months — especially upon seeing the Fedora Project's recommendation that you do a full install instead of the kinds of upgrades you're encouraged to do in Debian and Ubuntu (as in changing your sources.list and update/dist-upgrade).

And I don't know whether it was my hardware that refused to install Fedora from the live CD, or a glitch that affected every user of the live image, but I was ready to move on.

Wiping Debian Lenny from the drive was a big step, since I'd been running the distro for well over six months on the laptop and had grown quite fond of its many improvements over Etch. But my X configuration's refusal to cease slowly degrading during every computing session made it easy to run Ubuntu more as well as consider jumping back into distro-hopping mode for a secondary system.

At this point, it's all about having a reliable pair of distros on the laptop that each allow me to get work done without causing problems.

Coming up next: Now that Debian Lenny was gone and Fedora wouldn't install, I turned my attentions to CentOS 5. I had done a couple of successful CentOS 3 installs on a different system, and ever since Red Hat shook up its Enterprise Linux with newer packages and a greater emphasis on the desktop experience with version 5.2, I had been eager to see how it played out in CentOS's 5.2 clone of RHEL.

Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf.

I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

I'm already running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on this system, and I've been thinking about what to do for the second distro. I'd go back to Debian Etch, but I had problems with the speed of the USB-connected mouse vs. the Alps touchpad, plus problems controlling the touchpad on its own.

In Lenny, the problems I've dealt with (and mostly solved) over the past six or more months have included suddenly disappearing sound (fixed with manually installed ESS Allegro modules), and an Epiphany browser that would always start in offline mode (fixed with a modification to Gconf2, if I have the name of the app right).

Nothing major — and nothing that couldn't be fixed with some help from either the bug reports themselves or other helpful people on the Web.

But this screen-refresh problem persists. I keep hoping that a routine software upgrade will take care of it, but that hasn't happened in countless xorg, driver and kernel updates. I don't think it's going to happen, either.

If you're running something that's very popular that catches the attention of developers (like the Asus Eee PC), chances are good that issues will be resolved. But I can't imagine any developers anywhere are paying any attention whatsoever to my 2002-era Gateway laptop. I'm no C hacker, so there's nothing much I can do, either.

I love Debian. I'm running two newish Etch installs right now (one PowerPC, one i386), and I could very well add a third with my $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), or even more to a couple of testing desktops I have waiting in the wings. Whenever Lenny goes Stable, Etch will have another year's worth of patches as Old Stable before it reaches its end of life.

Etch has been great, and Lenny has made dozens of improvements. But this one regression has made it very hard to keep my favorite distro on my main laptop.

So I have been thinking for months about what to do, all the while hoping that I could fix the X problem in Lenny.

First of all, I need to rewire the power supply plug. I think that is what is responsible for my intermittent freezes in Ubuntu (which don't seem to happen in Lenny, for reasons unknown). When I have the laptop on a desk, it never freezes, but when it's on my actual lap, as it was when I was trying to work on last-minute election programming yesterday morning, those freezes can really throw me off. I moved over to Debian, but I needed the Java runtime, didn't have it installed and didn't have the time to do that.

And then there's the video issue.

So I've been thinking, what should I install in place of Debian Lenny? I'm a big fan of long-term support releases, especially for older hardware, so I strongly considered CentOS 5, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. But the relative lack of consumer-oriented software had me worried. I could add the Dag Wieers repositories to deal with that issue, but even that repository doesn't cover everything I need.

Mandriva is also on the table, as is one of my favorite distros, Wolvix. The Slackware 11-based Wolvix is due for a new version soon. While its package mix addresses most of my issues, there are a few things that I can't easily find for it. And I worry in Wolvix's case (as well as Slackware's in general) about how long the kernel goes without getting patched.

I almost never see new kernels for older Slackware releases. I don't know if that's because they are unnecessary, but with patched kernels rolling into Debian and Ubuntu fairly regularly, I wonder why Slackware does things differently.

I'd run "regular" Slackware, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting X configured, and I'd rather use GNOME than KDE. I know there are GNOME projects for Slackware, but what I'm trying to do is install something that works well, comes together easily and has lots of available packages.

Given all the Mandriva fans on LXer, I considered it. I've used the Mandriva-derived PCLinuxOS and thought highly of it — and I may in fact go that way. The 2.6.18 kernel in PCLinuxOS 2007 (Debian Etch is also built on that kernel) is perhaps the best ever for the Gateway in that it controls the CPU fan with no intervention. The intervention needed in other kernels is slight (a single line in /etc/rc.local usually does it), but it's nice to have it done automatically.

Again, I'm not a huge fan of KDE, and I find that distros that are either KDE- or GNOME-centric tend to treat the other desktop environment as something of a second-class citizen.

I've had Fedora in the back of my mind for a while. Seeing all the packages available is very encouraging. And the Fedora community looks like a very good resource in terms of getting things working. I imagine that quite a bit of RHEL information would apply to Fedora as well, giving the distro an even deeper bench.

I'm not crazy about the length of support for a given Fedora release, which looks to be 12 to 13 months. I'd feel better with the 18 months that Ubuntu's non-LTS releases get, or even a full 2 years. Compromising on length of support is something I'm willing to do at this time for something that potentially gives me all the packages I want and that runs well besides.

As far as the availability of packages goes, Fedora acquits itself well. I have run it from the live CD before, and it seemed to do well on the Gateway.

In a slightly related matter, my install of Fedora 9 on my Power Mac G4/466 didn't go so well. The X configuration was horrible, and the distro ran much slower than Debian Etch on the same hardware. And Debian did a perfect X configuration for the internal graphics card and huge LaCie electron22blue monitor. Sure I could've used the information from the xorg.conf in Debian to properly modify the same config file in Fedora, but with such a performance hit, it didn't seem worth it.

Since the 1.3 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM in the Gateway offers much more power than the 466 MHz and 384 MB in the G4, Fedora seems to run fine on the faster machine.

And now that I have the Ubuntu LTS as my main distro (and hopefully a trouble-free one once I replace that shaky power plug), it's time to try something else.

First I need to keep copies of the xorg.conf, my CPU-fan script and rc.local from Debian Lenny in case I do a reinstall. Then I need to back up the /home files and consider adding a separate /home partition for the secondary distro (Ubuntu already has a separate /home partition).

Again, I'm not happy about the 13-month life cycle of any given Fedora release, and I really don't need a cutting-edge kernel for my not-cutting-edge hardware (unless, of course, it makes a cheap wireless adapter work), but with /home on its own partition, and Fedora installing GRUB on the root partition instead of the master boot record, with the GRUB on the MBR chainloading to the Fedora partition, it shouldn't be hard to roll Fedora out and something else in.

I could change my mind ... or not.

Update: OpenSUSE offers about two years of support per release, and that is enough to get me interested.

I'm downloading new OpenSUSE 11 and Fedora 9 ISOs now, and I'll burn them in the morning.

I've heard so much praise for Amazon's Kindle electronic reading device but little dissent.

I've only seen the Sony version of the reader, which uses much of the same hardware as the Amazon model. What stopped me from gushing over the device was its screen. The way the words look is more than a little bit crude, and I found that page turns took too long. I'd much rather have a regular book or even a PDF on a PC than what the Kindle and Sony models offer.

Today I see a ZDNet post from David Morgenstern, who also doesn't think the Kindle has what it takes to beat either the iPhone as an e-reader or a real book:

One of my neighbors, a designer of hardware interfaces for professional video editing systems, bought a Kindle a couple of months ago. He put it up for sale on eBay less than a day later. He said the hardware design was "terrible."

After borrowing and using his Kindle, I understood his rejection of the device. It presents a cluttered interface. And worse, it changed pages when I picked it up, with my fingers touching the long Previous and Next Page bars on the sides. This was his experience as well. (I notice from most publicity photos that the Kindle is held in the left hand from the lower left corner. Maybe that's the secret but that's awkward.)

In addition, I found the roller bar and its cursor track icon difficult to line up with items on the screen. And its browser was very slow.

It hadn't occurred to me that if you — like me — are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, upgrading to the just-released Ubuntu 8.10 requires a little operator intervention.

In non-LTS installations, the system prompts you with the choice of upgrading to the newest version, but since 8.04 is a long-term support (hence the LTS) release, it defaults to waiting for the next LTS before automatically offering to make the upgrade.

But you still can easily go from 8.04 LTS to 8.10. You just have to change a setting in Software Sources (get there from the System--Administration--Software Sources menu item).

The Ubuntu Geek Web site explains it better — and in greater detail, so go there for the full instructions.

I'm not in any hurry to upgrade my Ubuntu-equipped Gateway laptop, especially since I've just "stabilized" the whole installation by turning off automatic suspend/resume feature in the Power Manager.

Like I said then, once the Ubuntu download mirrors quiet down a bit, I will grab the entire ISO file, burn it to disc and run the live CD to see how my hardware reacts and whether or not my Airlink 101 AWLL 3028 USB wireless adapter works automatically. If it did, I would probably upgrade, since this particular laptop has a busted PCMCIA card slot and the only USB wireless adapter I have is the Airlink, which I got for $10.

By the way, if you are "fortunate" enough to have the Airlink 101 AWLL 3026 USB wireless adapter, which looks the same as the 3028 but is based on an entirely different chipset, you're in luck because it reportedly works with Ubuntu 8.04. And yes, I wish I had one (and thought that by now the 3028 would/should/could have a native driver for Linux).

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.