All roads lead to Ubuntu

OK, enough preface. If you've made it this far, get yourself a cookie (the flour-sugar-chocolate-chip kind) — you deserve it.

Long story short (and you can read the long story in the entries directly preceding this one), I've been very happy with the first Toshiba running OpenBSD 4.4. The system is quite fast (not something OpenBSD is known for), so far all the applications perform extremely well, I've had no problems with X, every damn thing autoconfigures great, and I'm continuing to enjoy working in the system's default window manager, which is Fvwm (and which can be replaced/augmented with just about anything in the Unix-like world).

So I've got that first Toshiba set up pretty well. I have Firefox, OpenOffice, the Geany text editor, the GIMP (there's no package or port for my favorite light image editor, MtPaint), gFTP, the ROX-Filer file manager (I've loved it since I first used it in Puppy Linux 2.13), Pidgin ... and the Opera Web browser.

It's Opera that's driven me to set up a second laptop with Linux.

Don't get me wrong — I love the Opera browser. It's fast, it makes a lot of my older hardware run a lot better, it works in instances when Firefox is cranky (233 MHz processors, less than 200 MB of RAM), and it's just faster.

And there's a single critical Web-based application I run that demands use of Internet Explorer ... but which works with Opera.

So even though Opera is free but not open source, until my duties somehow change I absolutely need to run Opera.

In OpenBSD, Opera comes in as a port. It's also a Linux app; there's no source from which to build a native OpenBSD application. Generally OpenBSD is great at running Linux applications with a compatibility layer, and until recently, I've never had trouble with Opera. In fact, on my ancient Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop running OpenBSD 4.2, Opera is my only "full-sized" browser. The 1999-era machine pretty much can't handle Firefox.

But on the Toshiba, which happily runs Firefox 2 (I could install FF 3 but haven't), I still need Opera to get my work done.

But Opera has problems in OpenBSD 4.4. The browser has a habit of crashing. It usually doesn't take the whole of X with it, but I do have to kill the window (which Fvwm makes easy with its "Destroy" capability in every X window's menu). Then I have to kill a bunch of Opera processes at the console. And if I'm running the Flash plugin I have to kill those processes, too.

And after many months during which I've never had a single app crash in OpenBSD, suddenly I'm killing processes for Opera every hour or so.

And that Flash plugin barely works. The OpenBSD port must be a tad old; I can get YouTube videos to show, but not anything that requires Flash 10 and not all that requires Flash 9. So I removed Flash. But Opera continues crashing and leaving processes that must be killed from the console.

Another long story short: Once I don't need to do this one particular task that requires Opera ... ... and somehow the Opera-OpenBSD issues are fixed ... and I don't need Flash capability ... and the Gnash project somehow catches up with Flash and starts actually working (or I can somehow figure out the proper magic), I need another OS.

I didn't have enough disk space on the first Toshiba to triple-boot, so I rolled out the second Toshiba laptop.

Like the first, its DVD drive is extremely temperamental. Each will boot from only a few CDs I've burned. And each will boot different ones.

I wanted to return to Debian, and after all the trouble I had in Lenny on the Gateway Solo 1450, I thought that totally new hardware just might work without show-stopping glitches.

Luckily a Lenny "business card" image would boot.

I did the install, loading the "standard" system only. I didn't have enough time to bring in the whole desktop environment.

The next day (today, that is) I loaded Xfce and all the applications with Aptitude.

Right away I had problems. The screensaver wasn't working in X. I tried to add the line xscreensaver & to the proper XDM configuration file, but that file didn't yet exist. No problem. I could get around that.

But before I hit that point, I discovered that the Debian menu was messed up. OK, it wasn't there. That's messed up. (If you use Debian, you know what the Debian menu is. If you don't, it's another tree off the main menu that offers clickable access to just about every application in the system, and I've grown quite fond of it, if not so fond of the menu-updating issues that seem to plague Debian).

And then my screen started developing the same artifacts that led me to abandon Debian Lenny on the Gateway after weeks of trying just about every damn thing had no effect whatsoever on the problem.

Is is the Intel i810 driver? I couldn't figure it out then, and I thought either the problem was limited to an obscure platform (the Gateway) that no developer had seen, or — horror of development horrors — the bug had somehow been fixed in the 6-plus months during which I haven't run Lenny.

But once my screen started going to hell, I dug through my stacks of CDs and pulled a dozen candidates.

I previously was unable to boot into the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS disc, but I tried another CD of the same distro and was surprised to find that it booted. I didn't even go into the live environment. I went straight to the install, reformatted the relevant partitions and threw Ubuntu on the drive.

The install went perfectly. Everything works. All I need to do now is find the time to update the system, which is 329 packages behind at this writing. So another couple hours of downloading and installing and I'll have a fully patched Ubuntu laptop.

At that point I'll add the Opera repository, bring in the browser and see if I can run it without problems. Right now I have a good feeling about it. I don't know why Opera 9.51 and OpenBSD 4.4 aren't playing nicely together. I hope the problem goes away in the next release of OpenBSD, which should have an updated Opera port in the tree, but I won't expect the issue to be resolved. It could be a Linux compatibility issue between the app and OpenBSD. I don't know.

Like I said somewhere in this barfed-out mass of words, I saw this as an opportunity to get back to Debian, a distro I truly love. I'm reluctant to say this, but in a small way having the same problems in Lenny on a totally different hunk of hardware kind of breaks my FOSS-loving heart. I could've held out and tried Slackware 12.1, Wolvix Hunter, ZenWalk (when the current beta goes final), even Fedora, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, CentOS (which is super-solid on the Gateway) or even FreeBSD (or easy-to-install PC-BSD).

But I know Ubuntu pretty well. And it installed without incident. Not that I haven't had X issues in Ubuntu on the Gateway (which haven't reoccurred in my daughter's use of that machine but which very well might not be resolved) But I have a very strong suspicion that I won't have those same problems with the Toshiba. It's been chugging along with no problem for the past hour of me hammering on it.

Call it the path of least resistance, or call it another case of "Ubuntu saves the day." Ubuntu's color scheme may be poop-brown, but I'll take an easily configured, working system over the alternative any day.

All I know is that I've got another chance at getting work done without things falling apart. Today anyway.