March 2010 Archives

I've set up CUPS printing before in just about every Unix-ish operating system I've run for any length of time (Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD).

Maybe not so curiously, I've always found that dealing with CUPS directly through the Web browser at http://localhost:631 is easier than with any GUIs that ship with a given distro or project.

Not that FreeBSD or OpenBSD have such a thing. You have to do a lot yourself, and through that process you learn quite a bit about how CUPS and networked printers work.

OpenBSD provided excellent instructions, I recall, as does FreeBSD, where I was pleasantly surprised to find that my friend Chess Griffin is responsible for the documentation. Thanks go to him and the many others who make the FreeBSD Handbook, FAQ and the system's comprehensive man pages the great resources they continue to be.

Chess, whose now-ended Linux Reality podcast was a great inspiration to me, has been using both FreeBSD and OpenBSD extensively over the past long while, and his recent e-mails to me have encouraged me to continue running FreeBSD when I might have otherwise given up due to my constant impatience when things don't immediately work as I think they should.

Back to CUPS: It's always dicey. I used old notes I took the last time I set up CUPS (in Debian Lenny) to get the path to my network printer just right.

The BSDs don't tend to install a lot of drivers, which is a good thing because it's easy enough to go to the drivers area of CUPS.org and grab only what you need.

As in OpenBSD, there are maybe a half-dozen things that you need to do configuration-wise to get CUPS running in FreeBSD (and they're all in the Handbook).

I've had a little time to think about it, and I realized that it's not yet time to give up on FreeBSD 7.3. I'm not in any way saying I'll be sticking with it long-term. But I think I should spend some more time running it before I end the test.

Right now I'm rsyncing over a bunch of user files that I hadn't yet moved from my backup drive. Then I can disconnect that drive, protecting it from any filesystem-harming crashes, and proceed to work on the FAT drive automounting problem.

The main reason I decided to stay with FreeBSD 7.3 longer is the incredible performance on the desktop. I don't have any benchmarks to back this up — I'm not a benchmarkish kind of person, I'm just a regular user. And FreeBSD 8.0, in the time I ran it, seemed even faster than 7.3, but since the precompiled binary packages for 7.3-release are a whole lot more up to date than those with 8.0-release, I decided to reinstall with the earlier version to get GNOME 2.28 (instead of 2.26) as well as many packages that for one reason or another (most of which utterly escape me) are not available in 8.0-release, including OpenOffice and vlc, the latter of which has saved me from the always crashing Totem, which doesn't like my X setup, or so I surmise.

Again, I'm no expert, but my time in OpenBSD (4.2 to 4.5) and FreeBSD (8.0 and 7.3), both with versions of the UFS filesystem, crashes or power interruptions hit a bit harder - the fsck procedure takes quite a long time. In Linux with a journaling filesystem such as ext3, recovery is much quicker.

Note: Whether or not it matters, I'm using soft updates in FreeBSD, which are invoked by default. I can't remember whether or not I turned on soft updates in OpenBSD.

I've heard on BSD Talk, which I recommend highly, that some kind of journaling is coming to the FFS/UFS in FreeBSD. I don't know what the real-geek opinion of journaling in BSD is, but it seems to me like a good idea.

So I'll have a whole lot of user files (with my 3 GB+ of Thunderbird mail on an 8 GB ext3-formatted USB stick) on this FreeBSD installation, and I could very well see myself in this environment at least until Debian Squeeze's release as a Stable distribution is imminent.

As I wrote previously, I did manage to get both Java and Flash working in my Web browsers, although Flash is more than a bit problematic performance-wise — I've already turned it off in Firefox and am more than happy to run it solely in GNOME's Epiphany browser for the time being (and couldn't run it all in Firefox 3.6.1 ... but a replacement of 3.6.1 with Firefox 3.5.8 made it all come together).

I've always said that the GNOME desktop is faster than you'd think it would be, and that speed only seems to be maximized in FreeBSD on this hardware (1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 1 GB RAM on this 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop).

I'll be giving Debian Squeeze Alpha 1 a test run on the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 before I decide whether to put Debian Lenny, Debian Squeeze or other (Ubuntu 10.04 ... Slackware 13 ... ) on it to carry me through the next month or three.

In my ongoing quest to bring the latest news about Xorg and its hatred of the Intel 830m chipset that I have on three laptops, today I'm running a long filesystem check in gParted on the Parted Magic 4.9 live CD.

Don't get me wrong: I love Parted Magic. It's my preferred tool for partitioning drives with gParted and doing all sorts of other things. I generally don't burn new Parted Magic discs. I just keep using the same ones. The last time I made one, it was version 4.6.

But since my Toshiba 1100-S101 hates CD-R discs and likes DVD+R, I needed to burn the CD image onto a DVD. (Recently the Toshiba hasn't even been reading commercially created CD-ROM discs, so it looks like DVD-only from here on out.)

Parted Magic 4.9 is doing everything I need it to do. But I'm noticing in the helpful Conky output that Xorg is consuming 50 percent to 60 percent of the CPU at any given time. Hey, that's the same problem I had in Debian Squeeze ....

Whether this is something that can be addressed in xorg.conf, I don't know, but it is disturbing.

In other Parted Magic 4.9 news, I'm using the Chromium browser for the first time. It appears to work great. I'm no fan of Google Chrome on my Windows XP machine, but in Linux the Google-derived Web browser is performing exceptionally well.

I'm getting ready to install either Debian or Ubuntu again, and I'm undecided about whether or not to use encrypted LVM this time. I didn't have any performance issues with the encrypted drive, but my lack of knowledge regarding modifying LVM worries me. Specifically, Debian Squeeze appears to be larger than Lenny, and I'm worried that my root partition will be too small, and I won't know how to grow it and shrink /home — operations I'm very comfortable doing with non-LVM partitions in gParted.

Not only have I been able to crash FreeBSD 7.3-release with GNOME by trying to automount FAT partitions on USB-connected drives, but those crashes rendered both the FAT partitions and the ext3 partitions that otherwise could be mounted automatically on those drives, for lack of a better word, unmountable.

I was able to mount the ext3 partitions once again in FreeBSD after a lengthy fsck courtesy of gParted on the Parted Magic live CD.

Then I did it all over again. I'm running fsck on the drives now. They could always be mounted in Parted Magic 4.9, by the way, just not in FreeBSD.

Once the fsck finishes, I'll boot into FreeBSD, make sure the ext3 partitions are mountable, make a backup of my FreeBSD user and relevant configuration files, and then I'll be moving on.

If this was a true test machine, I'd be able to run FreeBSD longer and perhaps figure out some of these issues (many of which are HAL-related, and if not HAL-specific, at least GNOME-specific).

When I ran OpenBSD 4.4 as my desktop OS, I didn't run into these problems. But I also didn't run GNOME, so it's not apples-to-apples between these two BSDs. In OpenBSD, I began with the default Fvwm2 window manager and eventually added Xfce. And I didn't automount anything.

I imaging that getting FreeBSD to work like any Linux distribution that ships with GNOME is doable, but I just don't have the time and expertise to do it.

I got a lot further a lot faster in FreeBSD than I did with OpenBSD in terms of getting my system set up. But if attempting to mount FAT filesystems is enough to crash the system and lead to endless fsck operations, I really can't stay with FreeBSD for my personal production workflow.

I did manage to get Java installed. The binary package didn't work because the dependencies in FreeBSD 7.3-release are too new. For one reason or other, I was unable to get the diablo-jre port to build, but the diablo-jdk port did successfully install the Java development kit — including the runtime, which is all I really needed.

I even got Flash to work in both Firefox and GNOME's Epiphany browser. I followed the instructions in the FreeBSD Handbook, and when they didn't work in Firefox 3.6.1, I replaced that Firefox package with version 3.5.8 and soon had Flash working.

The problem is that the Flash processes — which run as npviewer.bin, I believe — hog up a whole lot of CPU and aren't terribly good about reducing that load when I leave a page that includes Flash.

I could do without Flash — or maybe install a Linux browser (an option that's certainly available) and just have Flash there, like I did with Opera in OpenBSD.

I was able to mount FAT drives with the -o large switch in mount_msdosfs, but I wasn't able to umount them. I suppose HAL could have played a role, and perhaps running GNOME without hald enabled is the way to go.

But as I said, I need to get this laptop back into a regular production role, and I'll probably return to Debian Lenny just to get things back to where they were. If you'll recall, my Lenny-to-Squeeze dist-upgrade debacle is what led me here in the first place.

One thing I will be doing in the very near future is figuring out how to image a hard drive with either Ghost 4 Linux in Parted Magic, or using the Clonezilla live CD. If I can image the entire drive and be assured that I could completely restore an installation after any upgrade, I'll feel a whole lot better about doing things like this.

What I really need are a couple/few more test machines on which to run things such as FreeBSD until I can figure out just how far my skill level can take me with them.

We could argue the whole Linux distro-vs.-BSD project thing all day, but I'll say two things:

• There's something to be said for a distribution (or project) that ships with a certain desktop environment as far as more things working than not out of the box.
• The PC-BSD project - a desktop-ready system built on FreeBSD - is the best way for anybody from the Linux world wishing to get the most out of FreeBSD. The importance of PC-BSD at this point cannot be overstated (it helps if you like KDE and PC-BSD's PBI packaging). I'd love to see a FreeBSD desktop project based on GNOME.

In conclusion: My skill level and the time I have available to mess around with stuff just isn't where it needs to be for me to run FreeBSD with GNOME. If I had a bigger hard drive, I'd dual-boot Linux and one or more BSDs (now I'm working with 20 GB, which isn't enough for a credible dual-boot). But for a single-boot system, I need to be back in an environment that is a bit more ready out of the box. And this week, that's Linux.

Saw this on Distrowatch Weekly: The Debian Live project has released live DVD images for Squeeze Alpha 1.

The images are all 1 GB + (except for the Rescue and Standard versions), so that's a bit of a change from the Lenny era. You'll need to use a DVD. Due to my Toshiba's hatred of CD-R but surprising love of DVD+R, I've been burning everything, including CD images, onto DVD, and it's worked quite well.

There are ISOs for GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce, as well as the aforementioned Rescue and Standard (no GUI for both) spins.

One thing that's very notable: There are PowerPC images this time. I remember there most decidedly NOT being PowerPC live Debian CDs for Lenny, and a check of the download area for live Lenny confirms this.

I've written many times about how well Debian Etch runs on my Mac G4/466, and to see more of a commitment to PowerPC rather than less (or none) is a very good thing indeed. I never had much luck with Ubuntu on PowerPC back when it was an official port (the 6.06-7.04 era, if I recall correctly; there are community ports to PowerPC still active, but I've never tried them - Debian is just too good on this hardware to think about using anything else).

Getting back to the live Squeeze images, I downloaded one yesterday and have yet to burn a DVD and give it a spin. For me, live images are practically a must. I need to explore as much hardware compatibility as I can before I commit to a new distribution/project for my operating system. Until now, I've been relying on the excellent Sidux 2009-04 as my main Debian live test environment. But I'm always glad to have alternatives, especially ones that are pure Debian.

I can also report that the current builds of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid are running well on my Toshiba and Gateway laptops (both Intel 830m chipsets) if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the bootline.

And now that I know you can pause the invisible Grub2 menu in an installed Ubuntu Lucid desktop by holding down the Shift key during the beginning of the boot, I know that I can boot into the new installation and fix Grub2 permanently to keep nomodeset in the boot line.

I remain addicted to speed - desktop speed, if you need clarification on what I mean. And Debian is all about that, a bit moreso than Ubuntu. And it's something you can definitely feel on older hardware.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu can be made as fast as Debian, but some tweaking is involved. Not to say Ubuntu is a dog or anything, because it most assuredly is not, but Debian and Slackware especially tend to maximize the power you have in your hardware.

Coincidentally, the system I'm running right now - FreeBSD 7.3-release - is extremely quick as well. More on that later.

Can you install Debian with the live image? I'm not sure you can. There is some talk about modifying the running live system to invoke the installer, but it looks like you're better off grabbing a Squeeze image and creating a real Debian install disc, whether it be the first full CD, a DVD or even Blu-ray image, or a much-smaller network-install or business-card install image (the latter two which I favor, since the newest packages are pulled from the repository and you don't need to do a massive update right out of the box).

As I've reported in too much detail, my Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade didn't go too well. I'm hoping migration issues are fixed by the time Squeeze goes Stable, but at the moment I'm recommending such an in-place upgrade unless you've done a lot of homework as to exactly how to do it. Clearly I haven't done said homework, and that's why I'm not running Debian at this moment.

• Fewt
• Keith Cu

I needed to find the kernel version used in Sidux 2009-04 and came across this interesting yet negative review.

I guess what I can say is that all projects are not built to please all people. I've admired Sidux for some time and used its live environment to test my systems' compatibility with the future of Debian, and even though my desire to run Debian Sid isn't exactly burning, nor am I a huge fan of KDE (although I do like Xfce quite a bit, and there's a Sidux spin on that), but Sidux tends to run so well — just like Debian, in fact — that I would absolutely consider (and am considering) running it as my main operating system. Once I get FreeBSD out of my system, at any rate.

I've written about Gmail plenty of times and used it off and on.

Now I'm fully involved. I've piped my main e-mail account through Gmail, and I'm busy creating tags and filters to organize the firehose-level amount of mail. Gmail is designed as a clearinghouse for your outside mail accounts, and I know a few dozen people who use it just in this way.

Now I'm one of them.

I've always liked the tags approach, in which any given message doesn't live in a single folder but can have numerous tags, allowing for a sophisticated archiving and organizational structure.

That's a fancy way of saying that Gmail has a very different way of organizing mail than do traditional mail-client software such as Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird or online clients such as Yahoo! Mail, the latter two of which I've used extensively over the past few years.

Thus far Gmail is doing everything I want it to do.

So why did I do this? I've been POP-ing mail down to my local laptop with Thunderbird for about a year now, and I've got about 3 GB of messages - mostly attachments - clogging my drive.

The convenience and flexibility of having my messages available on any computer at any time is something I really need. And traditional IMAP, which does the same thing with a traditional mail client (I used Evolution for this very purpose this week) is just too slow and not feature-rich enough.

Yes, I know Google is scraping my mail so it can better market to me ... but for now I'm taking that tradeoff for the boost in productivity that Gmail is bringing me.

I was listening to Dru Lavigne's talk on BSD for Linux users (from SCALE I believe).

I first met Dru at SCALE 8x - that was last year's show; I didn't go this year. I've just been working too much, dropped my print column last October, and I've been running Debian Lenny since December and haven't been in the distro hunt and done little but complain about Xorg sucking the very soul from anybody using Intel video chips that haven't been made in the past year or so. (I have three such laptops, and the damage done by Xorg to uptake of X-based GUI-using operating systems among those with "older" Intel video-equipped laptops must be staggeringly high.)

Anyhow, Dru is a tremendously gifted writer whose O'Reilly columns in the early 2000s and her subsequent book "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" has been a great help to me. Not so ironically, Dru along with fellow BSD writer Michael W. Lucas are two of the best out there at explaining Unix to the thick-of-head such as myself. Even if you don't use BSD, both books offer a lot of insight into how to run any Unix-like operating system - even Linux.

While I'm on the subject, has anybody but me noticed that Lucas' "Absolute FreeBSD" book is both out of print and selling for more than $150 a copy used? I wish I had gotten one while the getting was good. Lucas' "Absolute OpenBSD" is a classic Unix manual that I'm very glad to own. Every time I mention it, I have to say that I really didn't understand the power and wisdom behind sudo until Lucas explained it in his OpenBSD book. I'll be looking for "Absolute FreeBSD," and I will probably spring for the PDF from No Starch, which is still available.

Have you noticed that I'm backing into the whole point of this entry, which is the fact that I've been running FreeBSD 8.0-release since last week?

First I tried to fix the sound and video problems I'd been having in my recently upgraded Debian Squeeze install, which didn't go particularly well at all. I managed to kill X completely with one of my package reinstallation experiments. I probably could've saved the install, but I already had a backup and was ready to move on.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx from the March 15 daily build (only three days before the beta-1 image was released; I have a burn of that, too, but haven't yet tried it).

I selected nomodeset in the options to boot into the live environment, turning off kernel mode setting, which doesn't work with my Intel 830m (82830 CGC) video chip on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

Everything looked purple and pretty good besides.

I proceeded with the install, selecting an encrypted home partition (something I'm a bit militant about, having run a fully encrypted Debian Lenny laptop for three months with no discernable performance lag).

All seemed to go well, but when I rebooted, I had no video at all. No boot screen either. And this is Grub2, which as we're all learning is much, much different than Grub1.

I since learned that in a single-boot system (with only one OS on the drive), Ubuntu Lucid makes the Grub2 bootloader screen invisible. Love that.

And the lack of X meant that my nomodeset command was not in the boot line.

I hope there's a way to add that during the install itself, but I haven't yet figured that one out.

What I did figure out subsequently (detailed here) is that in Grub2, when you're booting the machine, holding down the Shift key will pause the boot sequence and bring up the boot menu, allowing users to enter boot parameters (and giving them the chance to modify Grub2 later to include them permanently. Again, a thorough reading of the Ubuntu Grub2 page is something I recommend very strongly.

Anyway, I learned this Grub2 secret on Monday but knew nothing of it on Friday, when I decided to install FreeBSD 8.0 on the laptop and give it a try.

I already had a PC-BSD 8.0 live DVD, which proved the Toshiba and its Intel video chip to be a perfect platform for FreeBSD, upon which PC-BSD is based.

And since the PC-BSD 8.0 disc will also install FreeBSD w/o all the PC-BSD bits, I decided to use it. The install went smoothly, but I recommend that users who wish to install FreeBSD use a DVD image directly from the project. With the PC-BSD disc, I missed a lot of the options that the full FreeBSD installer offers.

Time to mention Dru again: If you're at all interested in PC-BSD or FreeBSD — and I'm saying you definitely should be, check out her new book "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD,", which is slated for release March 31.

Anyhow, the version of FreeBSD I installed is 8.0-release. I'm still getting a handle on the FreeBSD release philosophy, and the availability and performance of packages and ports for the various releases. (I recommend anybody do a thorough examination of what software is available for any given release of any OS before you run it; it's time very well-spent.)

Here's my quick distro review: I installed FreeBSD 8.0-release from the PC-BSD 8.0 DVD. Installation was smooth (I accepted the default partitioning scheme), and while there was more post-install setup than in the average Linux distribution, most of it is well-documented in the massive FreeBSD Handbook, with a good number of tips available from other sites as well.

While OpenBSD is thought of as being extremely locked-down, to my untrained eye, FreeBSD seems equally concerned with security and by including less in the base installation, allows for easy deployment of a security-minded server or desktop. My passing familiarity with OpenBSD did help quite a bit in my configuration and use of FreeBSD, since the projects are more similar in philosophy and structure than not (though they still are quite different).

I'm no fan of ports and compiling, especially with a 20 GB hard drive that fills up fast, so I'm relying on precompiled packages. One app I did need to add from ports was Gthumb, since the FreeBSD packages is compiled with IPTC support turned off, and that is my No. 1 feature in Gthumb. One thing I did add in the basic install was the ports tree, so it was easy to build Gthumb from a port with IPTC turned on.

To my base install I also added xorg (unlike OpenBSD, there's no X in the default FreeBSD installation), gnome2 and gnone2-fifth-toe. The "toe" is a metapackage with lots of GNOME-ish apps, and between the two GNOME packages I had a fairly complete GNOME desktop.

And that GNOME desktop in FreeBSD 8.0 is as fast as any I've used. Faster than Debian and Ubuntu by far.

Sound needed to be turned on manually, but it worked. Networking thus far is way different (and in my unlearned opinion better) than in Linux. I still need to figure out encrypted connections in WiFi, but I was able to make that happen in OpenBSD, so it shouldn't pose a problem in FreeBSD.

Here are my "issues" with this install:

FreeBSD 8.0-release installs GNOME 2.26 from packages. It also installs Firefox 3.0.x or 3.5.x. You can get newer versions from ports, I think, but the last thing I want to do is compile apps for hours and days.

I've since learned that there are multiple development branches in FreeBSD at any given time, either -current or -stable, both of which move incrementally, unlike -release, which stays the same except for security patches (don't quote me ... I'm still learning all of this) until a new release is made.

What's curious to me is that FreeBSD 7.2-release has newer precompiled packages than FreeBSD 8.0-release. 7.2 also has OpenOffice 2.4. 8.0 has no OpenOffice in packages.

No OpenOffice? You've got to be kidding me. I know it takes days to compile. That's why I need the package. 8.0 will eventually get that package, and there are some available from outside the FreeBSD repository, but I really don't want to take that route.

I did add the gnome2-office package, which includes Abiword and Gnumeric, and the fonts in this version of Abiword look way better than I've seen on any Linux distribution in a long, long time. I'm tempted to stick with Abiword, but while the fonts look great on native documents, I haven't figured out a few font issues with my existing OO documents that renders them a bunched-up mess until I change the font througout to something Abiword likes better.

My problems include Java, Flash and other video. I thought that installing Java in FreeBSD would be easier than the geek odyssey that is installing Java in OpenBSD (which I was barely able to accomplish from that OS' ports). But there are no Java packages for FreeBSD 8.0-release, as far as I can tell.

There are such packages for 7.2. Can you see where I'm headed?

Also, while the Firefox and Epiphany browsers perform extremely well in 8.0-release, adding the Flash plugin caused Firefox to crash on any page including Flash. And the plugin didn't work on anything in Epiphany.

The deal-breaker was Totem. It crashes on anything, video or audio. I saw a FreeBSD forum post on the problem but couldn't see a solution.

And in Mplayer, the video has audio but .... no video.

Another annoying thing: I don't know if this is standard FreeBSD policy or something due to using the PC-BSD disc, but my user account had the UID and GID (user ID and group ID) of 1001, which didn't match up with my Linux files on my backup drive and my Debian-derived UID and GID of 1000. It was easy enough to change the UID of my files in the console once I rsync'd them over, but I would rather have the choice of setting my UID and GID to 1000 if that's possible.

Just like in OpenBSD, the FreeBSD man pages are excellent and filled with examples that actually make them useful. I've said many times that the FreeBSD Handbook is an invaluable resource, and it remains that today.

So I'm going to save my /etc/rc.conf and install FreeBSD-7.2 release - which offers a newer GNOME 2.28, Firefox 3.6.x, the abovementioned OpenOffice, and even Java packages (though not in the repository for Sun-nish legal reasons that escape me because I really don't care).

Disclaimer: I didn't turn on Linux compatibility, which might have made the Flash plugin not work, nor did I try a Linux browser (they are available for FreeBSD).

While I can live without Flash, my minimum "requirements" are a working Java runtime environment for my browsers, and the ability to view video in Totem, Mplayer or VLC. (I couldn't find a package anywhere for VLC, but perhaps that's another legal thing ...).

Overall:

Did I mention speed? This GNOME 2.26 desktop just flies. It's a pleasure to use, and if I can manage to install FreeBSD 7.2-release and get the same speed with working Java and Totem, I'll be very, very happy. Working Flash, should I manage it, will be an added bonus.

And thanks, Dru, for the inspiration to do my first serious FreeBSD test.

Updates:

• I can't bring myself to wipe the FreeBSD 8.0 install and try 7.2 (or 7.3, which is available in what looks like release-candidate form. Aside from my Totem issues, it all works so well. But I'll probably do it.
  
• I forgot to mention that I had the usual screen "artifacts" problem with Xorg and my Intel 830m chipset (82830 CGC video). The xorg.conf generated by xorg -configure didn't work at all. But my Debian Lenny xorg.conf worked perfectly. The GNOME screensaver works, but the Power Management screensaver kills X, so I'm using the former, not the latter.
  
• I modified dhclient.conf to keep my dns servers since one of my networks I use is so old-school that it doesn't supply its own, while all the others overwrite whatever I put in there manually. In OpenBSD, I did this by using an /etc/resolv.conf.tail file. In FreeBSD, I added the following to /etc/dhclient.conf (this example using the Google DNS, but you can use whatever servers you want/need):

  option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4

• I'm no expert, but Web apps with heavy Javascript (Google Docs, Gmail) are extremely smooth and quick in both the Firefox and Epiphany browsers.
  

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid from a daily build yet couldn't boot into my fresh new desktop because I needed to add nomodeset to the grub2 boot line and didn't know how to do that because there was no boot screen visible.

The answer? Not esc but shift. More specifically, here's how to deal with a hidden grub2 boot menu:

Hidden

* No menu entries are displayed. The splash screen, if configured, will be displayed.

Do yourself a big favor - read the full Ubuntu Grub2 community page before you try Ubuntu Lucid.

I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best.

You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

I've upgraded a stable Debian system to testing maybe once or twice, usually in short order (i.e. installing stable and immediately upgrading to testing).

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my "production" Debian laptop, which I've been using heavily since late last year, from Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing). I thought it would be smooth and easy.

Not so much.

I've finally got most things working. I'm still having the kind of sound problems that plagued me in the Ubuntu 8.04 era (Flash and the rest of the system fighting for dominance), but I've overcome quite a bit.

I did have backups of my user data, so if things went totally south, I was covered.

I guess I've had more elaborate setups than this, particularly in OpenBSD, where there's a whole lot of configuration needed.

In reality, I've kept my Lenny install fairly vanilla. I only have GNOME. Never added Xfce, Fluxbox or KDE. I pretty much stick with the GNOME apps. The Epiphany browser is one of my favorite apps. I use Rhythmbox. I have gFTP, but lately I've been using Nautilus' FTP capability more and more.

I do use Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and I have a ton of POP mail on the box.

Recently I added Wine via Bordeaux and have been running the free-as-in-beer Windows image viewer/editor IrfanView (although I'm about to cease needing it for the very specific IPTC-manipulating feature for which I cling to it).

But otherwise it's pretty standard. And I did have that backup.

I had what I thought was enough disk space (1 GB +) in my root partition (I have / and /home in encrypted LVM).

First I made sure Lenny was up to date. Then I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Squeeze repos instead of Lenny.

Then I did a dist-upgrade with apt. Everything seemed to be going OK. Until the udev problem cropped up. Had I seen the page in this link before I started, I might've saved myself a whole lot of trouble.

I didn't know what udev was. The Debian package page has a nice description:

udev is a daemon which dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev/, handles hotplug events and loads drivers at boot time.

It seems that the udev in Squeeze requires a newer kernel than the one in Lenny, yet that kernel either doesn't install before udev, or you have to be actually running that new kernel before doing the full upgrade. There's even a fairly uhelpful bug report.

At any rate, I couldn't quite figure out what to do. I ran a few more dist-upgrades and eventually did reboot into the new kernel for Squeeze and redid the dist-upgrade.

In case you were wondering (and I knew you were), I did run out of disk space. I managed to clear apt's cache and get a bit further on the upgrade.

For some reason, X was gone. I used apt to reinstall xorg, which brought the GUI back.

X performance was terrible for awhile. Not sure why, but xorg was eating most of the CPU for quite some time. I tried a few xorg.conf files, but nothing really helped.

At one point, in the flurry of error messages, it was suggested in the terminal that I run apt-get autoclean.

I did that, and that removed a whole lot of packages, a few of which I still needed.

Eventually I added back the bits of GNOME that were missing. I had sound problems, so (cue horrific scream) I actually installed PulseAudio in an attempt to restore some order to the system. I think the GNOME bits did more, but I do have most of my sound capability back.

I was able to get sound in Flash video in the browser, but then Totem kept crashing, so I pulled that and tweaked my account a bit.

I would get specific here with what I did, but truthfully none of it is working well enough for me to do that.

So I have sound in applications, I don't have sound in the Flash plugin, but I do have sound in .flv files on the local drive, as well as in other video and audio.

And from what I understand, "system sounds" in GNOME are broken for all of Squeeze until some package or other is released into the distribution.

I was more troubled than anything by X eating all that CPU. Again, I think adding some GNOME bits (I even had to reinstall GDM) solved that problem.

Right now Pidgin is refusing to connect to my AIM account, saying I've logged in and out too many times in succession.

BEFORE YOU SAY, 'THIS IS TESTING; DON'T RUN IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TROUBLE,' LET ME SAY THAT I HEAR YOU. I've had trouble in Testing before, and I didn't expect not to have it again. I'm just reporting what happened.

Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine. I did have to tweak the config file to get my Ethernet interface managed under NetworkManager (just like I did in Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic). Now that works great.

If I decide to stick with Squeeze, and I'm not saying I will, I probably will do a fresh install. I know I'm missing some GNOME bits that I might want or need. I've been adding stuff back as I run into trouble (I reinstalled gedit, the gnome screensaver app, which I needed to keep X from crashing when the gnome power management app tried to turn that feature on by itself).

I hope this upgrade process goes a whole lot more smoothly at such time as Squeeze gets its official Stable release. I'm somewhat confident about that happening.

So if you were smart and skipped to the end, my Squeeze system is running fairly well at present, and I could very well stick with it. The biggest problem I'm having is with sound (and my USB Headphone Set sound module).

One thing I discovered was the YouTube plugin for Totem. All you do is activate it, and you can search for YouTube videos by keyword and then play the h.264 version in Totem. With sound. That's really cool.

I've got enough things working that I'm going to stick with Squeeze at least until Ubuntu Lucid is released late next month. As I wrote recently, I did try a daily build of Lucid in the live environment, and everything appeared to be working. The purple-Mac theme didn't really bother me. I'll have to do some multimedia tests: I never could get my 3gp cellphone videos to play with sound in Ubuntu (and they still work in Debian).

I could also do a clean install of Debian Lenny. I'm not ruling that out at all. I kept this laptop fairly stock (and tried to keep good notes on what I did) so I could re-create Debian Lenny on it if necessary. One way or the other, I will be reinstalling something on this laptop, be it Lenny, Squeeze or "other."

I can't say that I expected the dist-upgrade to Squeeze to go smoothly. I guess I hoped it would.

I thought to myself, "You should've used a detailed Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade guide on the Web before doing this." I still haven't found one. If you have, please let me know.

I've been waiting. And while I don't generally recommend an in-place upgrade of a production machine, especially one with problematic hardware (in my case that "problematic" bit being the Intel 830m chipset and its 82830 CGC graphics controller) and a fully encrypted hard drive, I do have unencrypted backups, and I'm ready to leave Debian Lenny behind and see how well Squeeze does on my machine and for my tasks.

So I did the prep, did an update/upgrade in Lenny, changed my sources.list, did another update in Squeeze, and I'm running the dist-upgrade now, pulling in some 900+ packages and hoping the thing will boot when its all done.

Yes, I have the day off. Thus I have the machine free for just such an upgrade.

And yes, this is the sort of thing I do on my day off. Take it up with my therapist.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.

Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

I booted it, hit Escape as soon as the first screen came up (that's a new one, having to do that), then hit F6 for Modes, arrowed down to nomodeset, hit Enter to select it, then Escape, then Enter again to boot ...

And a short time later I was in the less-brown-more-purple world of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid!

Never mind that it's ... purple.

It works! Video is perfect on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with the Intel 830m chipset.

Whatever wasn't working for me in Alpha 3 has been fixed at the time of this daily build.

I'd like to thank any and all developers who were able to make this happen, and I'd also like to let the rest of the Intel 830m-using community know that the following WILL work if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the boot line:

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (as of this 3/15/10 daily build)
Fedora 12
Sidux 2009-04

I have an alpha image of Fedora 13 but haven't yet burned it, and I have heard that Slackware 13 runs with no problem.

So the future for the older-Intel-video-using world is looking a whole lot brighter than it did a few short weeks again.

At this point I have no comment on purple or the window buttons moving from the right side of the window to the left. I have no comment because I DON'T CARE. I HAVE WORKING VIDEO AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS AT PRESENT.

I'll address purple and window buttons at a later time. One thing I can say for sure is that this ain't the usual orange/brown.

Before I go, I've been testing Firefox 3.6 on the Mac OS X and Windows XP platforms, and this instance of Ubuntu Lucid is the first time I'm seeing FF 3.6 in Linux.

My first impressions are that not much is different in the PowerPC build for OS X, but I'm seeing huge improvements in the browsing experience in terms of speed in both Windows and Linux.

I can't say for sure, but I think it all boils down to a faster Javascript engine in 3.6 vs. 3.0 (and also 3.5 perhaps).

Getting back to Intel 830m for the moment, this means I'm upgrading my Debian Lenny laptop to Squeeze as soon as possible.

The Google Chrome browser starts out great. But after a few hours, everything turns to sludgy poo. I can't get anything done, scripts and Flash start to time out, the screen takes forever to redraw ... then it crashes.

My hardware/OS ain't the best: Windows XP SP3 on Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM, but I have a whole lot more speed and stability in boring ol' Firefox 3.5.8 (I haven't gotten around to 3.6 ...).

Is it me, or is Google Chrome not so great?

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?

I've kept the Debian Lenny installation on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop as standard as it could be in some respects — I kept GNOME as the desktop environment and didn't add Xfce or anything else (that I can remember anyway).

That's because I want it to work as well as it can since it's my many "production" machine.

Not that I haven't added things like Audacity, gPodder, Inkscape, Icedove (aka Thunderbird), Iceowl (aka Thunderbird calendar plugin Lightning), the Geany text editor (which I don't use all that often) plus a whole lot of codecs and other bits from Debian Multimedia.

On the dark side, I used the Bordeaux .deb package to add Wine and my favorite Windows app, the IrfanView photo viewer/image editor. I also added Skype (with its Debian-aimed repository) but haven't used it yet.

To print out a list of every package on your system if it uses apt for package management (like Debian and its derivatives, including Ubuntu), run the following in a terminal (which in this case pipes the output to a text file you can peruse at your leisure):

$ dpkg --get-selections > my_packages

Now you'll have a file called my_packages with a list of every package installed on your system.

If you want to see a list of all 1,115 packages on my Debian Lenny install, click through to the rest of this entry (and if you don't want to see a 1,115-file list, DON'T CLICK THROUGH).

Never mind that one of my two Debian Lenny Xfce installations is seriously ailing at the moment. I'm not letting that dampen my future enthusiasm for the Xfce spin of Fedora 12, which I downloaded last night via torrent. (It's my first torrent download; luckily Debian Lenny is set up to do this automatically).

One thing you can say about Debian's default Xfce install — it's small and to the point. Aside from GDM, there's no GNOME in it (and my mixing of GNOME after the fact probably is responsible for my ailing box's troubles, but I digress).

Fedora's main desktop, like Ubuntu and Debian, is GNOME. But the project sponsors "spins" that include KDE, LXDE, games and a few more, including one focusing on education and the aforementioned Xfce.

In contrast, Ubuntu's Xfce version, Xubuntu, has quite a bit of GNOME in it, and while I think it looks fabulous and has a lot of functionality, I've actually found it to be slower/more sluggish than the standard GNOME-powered Ubuntu.

In Debian and Slackware, you definitely enjoy a speed boost with Xfce instead of GNOME or KDE. I'll be looking for the same thing in Fedora (and I wish there was a Fedora Xfce spin for PowerPC because the last time I ran Fedora on my Mac G4, it was super-sluggish and beaten in just about every way by Debian Etch for PowerPC — both using GNOME if that means anything).

More on torrents: I've never downloaded via torrent before, but since I seemingly have no choice, I'm doing it now. I guess I've never done it before because I really don't understand it. However, since I'm already set up to do it, it wasn't hard to figure out.

So what do I think of the Fedora 12 Xfce spin? I burned my image (to DVD — and now is as good a time to mention that burning CD images to DVD media definitely works, and it's a good thing, too, because my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop hates CD-R but loves DVD+R discs) and booted into the Xfce desktop.

Just as in the GNOME-powered Fedora 12, adding nomodeset to the boot line got X working.

I really like the look and feel of Fedora 12's Xfce spin. There's no top panel but a very useful lower panel with application launchers plus a few little icons. Unlike the stock Debian Xfce desktop, in Fedora Xfce the GNOMEish NetworkManager is installed — just like in Xubuntu.

I used it to configure my network, and it does work.

Fedora 12 Xfce spin has a nice mix of applications. It has the usual Mousepad text editor, Thunar file manager and Terminal (that's its name, capital T) terminal emulator.

One of my favorite "development" editors, Geany is installed by default. I didn't make a note of everything in the menus, but I did notice GIMP and Inkscape.

I didn't expect OpenOffice, but I also didn't expect the "GNOME Office" apps AbiWord and GNUmeric. No matter. They're both extremely light on resources, although I'm not as much of a fan of AbiWord as I once was. I've found that OpenOffice does more and doesn't really lag as much as you'd think, although with really old computers AbiWord is measurably better.

These days I try to use "office suite" apps as seldom as possible, preferring text editors on my local machine and Google Docs for everything else.

I meant to check the package-management choices in the Xfce spin but forgot. I'll run the live environment again soon and report back.

I did find the Fedora 12 Xfce spin appreciably "fast," not that the GNOMEversion was so terrible. But Xfce is pretty smooth.

Two things that bothered me a bit in the Xfce spin — and which are the same in the regular GNOME Fedora 12 — are that scrolling in Firefox seems smooth but slow, and the fonts look a bit more blurry.

I can't say for sure exactly how different the fonts looked. Now that I'm back in Debian Lenny with GNOME, things aren't all that different, but I did notice something in Fedora. I played with hinting, dots per inch, anti-aliasing, etc. I really don't understand any of that. In Debian and Ubuntu, things seem to look fine without me doing anything.

Something's different in Fedora about font rendering on this particularly troublesome graphics platform. It's not a deal-breaker by any means, but I'd like to somehow figure it out. I'll have to run more tests and do a bit of Googling. A preliminary Googling didn't enlighten me at all.

My quick verdict: Fedora 12's Xfce spin offers a nice, fairly complete environment. You might want to add OpenOffice if you're into that sort of thing. But you could get along quite well with the stock lineup of applications in this well-thought-out spin on Fedora.

I'm not ready to move from Debian to Fedora just yet (after all, I have everything set up pretty darn nicely on this Lenny install), but it's nice to know that I could.

In OMG! Ubuntu!, a report that gThumb replaces F-Spot in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (likely so the heft of Mono can be expunged) actually goes on to say that not only does gThumb not use Mono, but it does more than F-Spot.

For my particular workflow, gThumb has become my main image editor.

Way back in November, OMG! Ubuntu! took a look at gThumb 2.x, going so far as to ask in the title, "Is The New gThumb A Potential F-Spot Killer?"

Of course, I think the answer to that question is an unqualified "yes."

I've been experimenting with "calling" the GIMP in through gThumb to do some extra editing on an image, with the goal being more control over editing (gThumb doesn't sharpen, probably the biggest omission for Web-photo editing) without losing the IPTC metadata in JPEGs that photojournalists routinely use to drop caption and credit information into the image file. I've had a mix of success/not-so-much-success, but I'll continue testing until I know for sure if and how gThumb and GIMP can be used together without killing out the IPTC data (which GIMP, Krita and just about every other Linux/Unix image editor cheerfully kills when saving; exceptions to this unwarranted destruction of JPEG data are gThumb, digiKam and MaPiVi, the best of the latter being, in my opinion, gThumb).

At the recommendation of reader David Gurvich, as well as the enthusiastic endorsement of "Linux Outlaws" co-host Fabian A. Scherschel and Larry "the Free Software Guy" Cafiero, I burned my first Fedora disc in some time and am testing Fedora 12 in the live environment.

My latest foray into distro-hopping — live CD/DVDs only at this point — is prompted by this week's total fail in turning off kernel mode setting and getting the screen to work in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3. That method (turning off kernel mode setting) worked like so much magic in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 and Sidux 2009-04 (basically Debian Sid in late 2009).

But that hack did nothing for me in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3. Yes, dear readers, I know you hate to hear me whine and complain and would rather I file a bug report. I will do so, using my ever-loving Launchpad account, rest assured.

But in the interim I'm looking for any and every solution that will carry my now-two working Intel 830m-equipped laptops through the next year.

I'm crossing my fingers (but have nothing concrete at present) that Debian Squeeze will accommodate Intel 830m, and I'm hopeful that Ubuntu Lucid will work this out (although a regression between alpha releases doesn't bode well).

I've also established that PC-BSD 8.0 (and by extension FreeBSD 8.0) has no problem whatsoever with Intel 830m video.

And today I burned a Fedora 12 live image and am running it right now. Yes, I turned off kernel mode setting with this parameter in the boot line:

nomodeset

And I was off to the races. I did screw a bit with the font rendering under System - Preferences - Appearance - Fonts, ticking the box for "subpixel smoothing," changing the resolution to 90 dots per inch with full hinting (these settings are totally "negotiable" at this point, as I've pretty much never needed to mess with them). I'm not 100 percent happy with the look of the video. I'd say I'm 90 percent happy.

And that 90-percent happiness is in contrast to having no video at all and being 100 percent unhappy.

Thus far here's my verdict on Fedora 12: I like it. I'm extremely glad it's a viable choice for my laptops. I've always admired the documentation that the Fedora team produces. And rather than acting like the testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that it pretty much is, I'm finding this build to be extremely stable.

I have run RHEL clone CentOS on the desktop (and still have it installed on my daughter's Gateway Solo 1450 with Intel 830m video where it dual-boots with Ubuntu Hardy) but never Fedora.

The main advantage of Fedora over CentOS is the huge, up-to-date repository with just about every desktop package you'd ever need.

I know there are alternatives to get more desktop packages into CentOS/RHEL. But if you can get Fedora to work and keep it working, I believe it's a much better choice for the desktop (except in cases where you specifically want a limited number of applications and don't want to do a lot of updating).

At this point, every Fedora release receives 13 months of support (the time during which there are two six-month releases plus an additional month). Potential users will want to factor that into their distro decision-making; you can certainly upgrade every six months but really don't have to.

As you might have gathered from my last few posts, I'm relying heavily on live CD/DVDs to test which operating-system distributions/projects I will be using on my various laptop and desktop computers over the next six months, year and couple of years.

Since my Xorg problems have been so pervasive over the past year and a half, at this point I need to figure out how the display is working (or not) before I commit to any major upgrades or reinstalls.

Fedora 12 and Mono: I'm sure this has been written about before, but in case you missed it, the Fedora 12 live CD, and possibly the default installation itself, does not contain Mono — the controversial open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET technology that enables developers to use C# in the creation of applications for Linux and other systems.

You can still add Mono to your Fedora installation after the fact, but unlike in Ubuntu, it's not in the base install.

I've written more than a few times that I'm not completely against Mono but am not all that comfortable with Microsoft's different levels of patent promise to users of Novell-sponsored distributions (Suse) and everybody else. And if the Mono apps aren't better than the non-Mono alternatives, what's the point?

Fedora 12, like Debian Lenny, installs with the Gthumb image viewer/editor, not F-Spot. Gthumb is so good, it's pretty much my default photo editor in Linux and just about my most-used application.

Also in Fedora 12, Gnote replaces the Mono-powered Tomboy Notes. I don't have much use for either of these applications, although I do have Gnote installed on my Debian box, and I replaced Tomboy with Gnote on my now-dead Ubuntu Karmic laptop. Why use a Mono app coded in C# when somebody creates a C++ app that appears to do the exact same thing?

And as I said, there's nothing in F-Spot that's better than what's in Gthumb, and there's plenty F-Spot lacks that Gthumb offers.

That's enough Mono talk. Sorry about the tangent.

Let me wrap up by saying I've liked CentOS in the past, and I'm very happy with the performance of Fedora 12's live CD on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, a 2002-made laptop with a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB RAM. I could easily see moving to this distribution for my daily work.

How is Fedora different from Ubuntu? I'd like to start both myself and all of you thinking about the differences between Fedora and Ubuntu. I'm not just talking about the technical merits and choices each project makes, but about audience and mission for each project/distribution.

I'd like to spin this into a separate entry, but for now I'll start it here:

• Ubuntu's motto is "Linux for human beings," and while it wants to accommodate the so-called "power user," the focus of the project is to make the transition from a proprietary operating system to Linux as seamless as possible. Fedora exists as a community project that aims to feed the latest technology to Red Hat's enterprise products and serve as a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux while offering users a "free" version of Linux that's aimed at developers and "power users."
• The Ubuntu project is a community endeavor, with the distibution "controlled" by the for-profit company Canonical that is bankrolled by Mark Shuttleworth while it seeks revenue through support contracts and services. The Fedora Project appears to be a nonprofit entity, "controlled" (to an extent I don't quite know at present) by Red Hat. The Fedora Project itself isn't interested in revenue, but Red Hat's enterprise products/services are a proven source of revenue for the company.
• Ubuntu is based on Debian. Fedora is pretty much its own project, on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based.
• Ubuntu's community of users is huge and growing. Its community of volunteers is also growing. Excitement around the project is extremely high. Even though Canonical is a for-profit entity, many think its mission is to spread free, open-source software and gain share for Linux on the server and desktop. I'm unsure of the size of Fedora's user community. I'm similarly unsure of the size of its developer community, although like Ubuntu it actively seeks new community members (both projects are very, very proactive in this regard; and that's something I really like). Many Red Hat developers do extensive work on Fedora. While Fedora is doing well, you don't see levels of enthusiasm as high or widespread as with Ubuntu. Ubuntu seems "cool," while Fedora seems to be a niche offering for developers and power users.

If you think I've got anything (or everything) wrong here, or if you have something to add, please let me know.

Perception of the projects must compete with sheer usability for the tasks and on the hardware of the user base. A simpler way to say that is, "Use what works for you." Whether it's Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Arch, Gentoo or what have you, use what works. Along with that admonition, it's a good idea to keep your eyes open for better solutions — that's what I'm doing.

On this very laptop, with this very install of Debian Lenny, I'm getting more done and doing it better and easier than in any other operating system, any other desktop environment and with any other collection of software.

Thanks, Linux, Debian, GNOME and others!

In addition to his first e-mail to me, David Gurvich adds more about his experiences with Intel i830m video in Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD:

I did think the problems with FreeBSD were due to using PC-BSD and installing a lightweight desktop on top. After testing with a bare install that turns out to not be the case and the issue is with FreeBSD and has nothing to do with the scripts that PC-BSD uses.

I have not tested OpenBSD but most of the wireless drivers on FreeBSD have been ported from there. I suspect there is a difference between the two that causes these drivers to crash the system on FreeBSD. The primary reason that I was interested in FreeBSD was ZFS support and wanted to setup a file server. The network issue stopped that in it's tracks.

There is a graphical network tool in the FreeBSD ports that seems to work ok but most of my settings were with wpa_supplicant and rc.conf. I believe that PC-BSD has it's own graphical network configuration tool but didn't use that.

Flash does have issues on FreeBSD and I don't recommend installing the linux compatibility to use flash. Instead, use wine with a windows browser. There is a memory leak in the linux flashplugin on FreeBSD that will eventually cause your system to freeze until you kill nspluginwrapper. The same technique may work on OpenBSD.

I have tried Fedora 12 on this laptop and that worked somewhat after tweaking a number of parameters. By somewhat I mean that I had random Xorg crashes and the tweaks simply mitigated the frequency. I gave F12 about 2 months but just could not take the crashes. Fedora 12 is working well on the other systems that I've installed it on but there was a problem with one that had ATI video which required building an xorg module from git.

I am currently using Arch linux on the X30 and, since configuring the boot parameters with 'nomodeset' and locking the xf86-video-intel driver to 2.9.1, have not had any issues with video. The main problem has been with the networking scripts and I am still not sure what the issue is there but installing wicd-1.7 seems to have worked around that. I am impressed with the speed vs Fedora 12. The reason I am impressed is that, prior to Arch, Fedora 12 had been among the fastest distributions on the X30 with a useable firefox in under 2 minutes. The X30 from startup to a working firefox connection takes 45 seconds in Arch.

The main issue I will have with Arch is likely the very reason Arch is so responsive. Rolling releases don't keep old packages around and new versions can cause random failures on working systems. That means that I will need to maintain a list of packages that should not be upraded and be careful on upgrades. Nothing new to anyone who has used Gentoo.

I've currently had Arch installed on the X30 for a month and have had no issues to deal with since the video and networking were fixed. The livecd boots to a text console and I recommend looking at the arch installation guide. Pretty much everything needs to be configured but the wiki makes that simple.

David Gurvich

David, you hit on a number of important points. I will definitely try Fedora 12 to see how it works with i830m, and I agree with you that Arch is an excellent choice. I've written many times about how the Arch community has been a great resource for me in solving my X issues with i830m all the way from Debian Lenny through now.

I neglected to mention ZFS in FreeBSD. That certainly is something to recommend in its favor. There's also a project bringing journaling to soft updates in FreeBSD's UFS filesystem that I heard about in this BSD Talk episode.

I'm not terribly happy about Flash being so problematic in FreeBSD. I forget all the trouble I had with the Opera browser in OpenBSD. That browser and its Flash plugin uses OpenBSD's Linux compatibility layer, and I was eventually able to stop most crashes by changing a parameter in Opera.

Here's what I'm hoping for:

• People smarter than me will figure this out and either make allowances in the kernel and xorg, or will create some other kind of mechanism that doesn't leave users of Intel 830m video chips out in the cold
• HTML 5 will sooner than later take hold with an open video codec and return Flash to what it's good at, which is little applications that I can safely ignore, and stop doing what it's bad at, which is delivering video that can better be handled by a plethora of other formats. The easiest way for this to happen would be for Google to open-source the on2 video codec it recently acquired. (Except that Google already converted the entire YouTube library to the loved-by-Apple patent-encumbered H.264.)

  I've run BSD before, and if Linux/Xorg throws Intel 830m under the bus, I'll be an enthusiastic user of any system that doesn't follow along.

Reader David Gurvich writes the following:

Hello,

I also have a system that uses the i830m chipset for graphics, the Thinkpad X30. All of the problems are related to kernel mode setting, particularly your current one. The new xorg video driver eliminates all user mode setting and is useless on systems that use i830. I've never gotten kernel mode setting to work with i830 systems and now that is the only option on new installs.

The only solution has been to install the 2.9.1 driver. That works for now but I am worried about future releases of Xorg that will not work with this driver. I suspect that I will need to maintain my own branch of Xorg. That will probably require a personal repository that includes older kernels, hal, and dbus along with any associated libraries.

My hope is that FreeBSD will have improved enough in user latency and other areas that I will be able to use that when the time comes. I have tried PC-BSD but the default install is too slow for daily use. I thought the problem might have been KDE4 but the issue persisted with a lightweight desktop environment. There are also some issues with hardware that don't exist on Linux. The one that springs to mind is my system locking up completely when the wireless card can't find a network on boot.

Thank you,

David Gurvich

Yeah, I'm not the only person hacked off about this. Here's what I wrote to David (knowing also that I'd run here as well):

Starting with Ubuntu Karmic and up through Lucid Alpha 2, and including Debian Sid (via Sidux 2009-04) at the end of 2009, I've been able to turn off kernel mode setting and get X to work.

So it was extremely disturbing to find that turning off kernel mode setting in Lucid Alpha 3 didn't work. Very disturbing.

I spent 6 months running OpenBSD 4.4 as my primary OS on this i830m laptop, and I didn't have any performance issues running both the stock Fvwm2 window manager as well as Xfce. The whole thing blew up when I upgraded to OpenBSD 4.5, and yes it was Xorg-related, but I've since tested OpenBSd 4.6 via the BSDanywhere and Jggimi live CDs, and Xorg is working again (can't remember if I needed an xorg.conf, but it must've either been easy to roll it together, or I'd have remembered.

The problems for me with OpenBSD are a) Flash 7 only (and only in Opera) b) too difficult to upgrade (which might be overcome if I can figure it out) c) hard to install Java (although I've done it and probably have the binary package I created in the process squirreled away on this hard drive) and d) no journaling filesystem, and on this creaky old hardware I lose power enough that all the fsck-ing I need to do in OpenBSD's FFS is relatively painful.

Not that I won't return to OpenBSD ...

FreeBSD is supposed to be much, much faster in every respect. There was a Phoronix test recently in which FreeBSD didn't blow Linux out of the proverbial water but did do OK. And it has at least Flash 9, precompiled Java packages, a much longer support cycle than OpenBSD, Ubuntu or Fedora.

If you tried PC-BSD but used, say, Fluxbox instead of KDE, I imagine the system would be much slower than if you installed vanilla FreeBSD and added the desktop environment and applications yourself. At least that's the theory anyway.

I don't know how FreeBSD uses memory, but I can tell you for sure that Linux and OpenBSD use it much differently. Linux seems to want to grab as much memory as possible and reserve it for whatever uses it thinks it's going to have. I don't know how this affects system performance - it could improve it, or it could hurt it. I'm really not sure.

But OpenBSD is very sparing on the memory it uses. I ran 768 MB for that six months in OpenBSD 4.4 and don't think I ever tapped the swap space even once. Now with 1 GB in both Ubuntu (Hardy, Karmic) and Debian (Lenny), the machine isn't relying heavily on swap but does use a little bit of it at least a little bit of the time. Again, I'm not sure which scenario is better for performance (or how FreeBSD factors into all of this), but it's at least a curiosity.

David, I don't know if you've tried Fedora 12 yet. I downloaded the image but haven't had a chance yet to burn it. Like you I'm looking for any bright spot in this whole mess. I don't know who to blame: the kernel team or Xorg (or the distros themselves). Intel i830m video can't be so obscure that nobody is suffering from this, and I can imagine hundreds or thousands of potential users being turned off when they can't get the live CD to boot to anything but a blank screen.

Before I forget to mention it, my experience with wireless on this platform with OpenBSD at least, is the opposite of what happened to you. Not only did wireless perform better with absolutely no crashes, I also was able to more easily configure my cheap NIC with a Ralink chipset in OpenBSD before I could get it working in Linux.

And crashes with wireless were precisely the reason I upgraded from Ubuntu Hardy to Karmic. I think a kernel update in Hardy eventually fixed the problem (I still have a Hardy i830m laptop running and can test this), and I wish I had stayed with it on the other i830m laptop. But networking in OpenBSD at least is a relative pleasure; networking and drivers are very important to the developers, so they get a lot of attention. However, you can't use the GUI tools like NetworkManager, I think, because of the vast differences in configuration between BSD and Linux (I could be wrong about this). Learning manual network configuration isn't the worst thing in the world.

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and Gateway Solo 1450 laptops — both with Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3?

There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail.

Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

The closest I was able to get was a working display with an invisible mouse pointer. Unfortunately I had forgotten which combination of parameters I typed into the boot line (a combination of turning off kernel mode settting one of two ways and setting a vga=xxx resolution), and after trying just about every VGA number I could find here, I've got nothing; no video at all on this Intel 830m system in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3.

In some way bowing to my issues — in my own mind at least — after booting the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3 live disc (CD or DVD), unlike the Alpha 2 you can now choose the nomodeset parameter from the F6 Other Options menu on the boot screen.

That's great, except that it no longer works for me.

How many potential new users of Linux have Intel video chips that are like mine? Do others besides the 830m have this problem?

All I know is booting a live CD and having absolutely no video is no way to get new users ...

In a related matter, I burned a DVD of PC-BSD 8. While the live environment is not exactly scintillating — it's KDE with barely any apps, it does boot into a graphical desktop that looks absolutely perfect with no intervention on my part. Yep, the FreeBSD and PC-BSD developers seem to understand that the video should just work, even for those of us unfortunate enough to be running 2002-era laptops with Intel video chips.

Should this not be the fault of Ubuntu but something that plagues all versions of Linux including Debian, at least I'll have PC-BSD 8.0 to turn to.

Or I could use the xorg.conf that makes Debian Lenny work for me and run Slackware 12 or 13.

As has been written in the comments recently, I should file a bug on this. If only I understood how to extract the seemingly dozens of log files needed to substantiate such a bug report (and to do so with a non-working screen), I'd probably go that route.

Regressions like this verge on the catastrophic. You can't just go cutting off entire swaths of hardware. I do seem like the only person complaining about this, so maybe there are fewer people using laptops with Intel 830m chipsets than you might think.

At this rate, my recent practice of burning these alpha discs is pretty much over. The Ubuntu Lucid release day is less than two months away, and I'm going to wait until that time to try this LTS (long-term-support) release again.

That also means I'll be sticking with Debian Lenny until there's some kind of live environment that I can test before any upgrade to Squeeze.

Before I wrap this up, yes I realize that this isn't even beta software but alpha, and there's a good chance my video issue will be resolved, but seeing things go from "pretty good" to "no can do" instead of the other way around is more than a little disconcerting.