April 2010 Archives

Performance on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop has been fairly consistent lately. I'm not sure whether or not my change in "swappiness" from the default of 60 to the supposedly desktop-friendly 10 has made any difference in actual speediness, but seeing swapping go from 9 MB per session down to nothing did make me feel better. And it's all about feeling better (or at least eliminating potential [if not real] causes of desktop sludginess).

Things are running fine. There is still a bit of halting at times in my ability to input text into web forms (i.e. write this blog in the Movable Type interface) when using the Firefox browser. I suppose I could use Chromium or Epiphany for much of this work (I have both installed), but a less-than-speedy Firefox isn't a ringing endorsement for a platform.

Still, there have been no crashes today. I'm pretty sure suspend/resume is not working (it did briefly before the last kernel update, which sunk that feature on my particular hardware). I did get Ubuntu One to work (see one of today's entries for the "trick" if you have the same problem).

Ubuntu One could be one of those things that makes Ubuntu a must-have distro for some. The ability to sync any individual file to the cloud is huge; even Dropbox doesn't allow any folder on the system to be synced.

I've had trouble with Totem in both FreeBSD and in Ubuntu Lucid. Depending on how the app is started, the video is blank but audio OK until you move the window, at which time video appears until you stop moving it. If you click on a video to open it with Totem, this happens. But if you start Totem and then open the video through the Totem menu, all is perfect, both picture and sound. I'm sure this has something to do with Xorg hating my old Intel video chip. Not a deal-breaker, but this is sure something I'm going to experiment with in the live Ubuntu environment when the Lucid image is released after tomorrow. I'll be doing the same with the live Debian images that are better (and bigger) than ever. I should do a Squeeze alpha test - I have that one on a DVD.

As far as Ubuntu Lucid's social-media interaction goes, I guess it's OK. Gwibber is an average app. I find it to be pretty slow on this hardware, but it's OK in functionality. I'm using HootSuite for that purpose mostly, and while it's a browser app and not native, it's no slower and probably a significant bit faster than the native (yet sloth-like) Gwibber.

I've used Evolution mail only briefly (during my shortish time in FreeBSD), and I'm tempted by its GNOME integration to use it instead of Thunderbird (which I've also mostly abandoned) or Gmail (which I'm using as my main mail client/service).

I've used Empathy, the new GNOME IM client a bit. I don't miss Pidgin (which I could easily install if I did), but truthfully I'm using the IM functionality baked into Gmail more often than not. Empathy is good, fast and will probably get better, but Google Talk makes it so easy.

Don't get me wrong — I do appreciate the integration of "social media" onto the desktop. I think it'll bring more than a few users to the platform who have never used Linux before. It's something that Ubuntu is doing fairly well, and I don't know anybody else who's going this far with it.

Overall, the Ubuntu desktop has quite a bit of polish, and on hardware newer than mine I imagine it all runs extremely well.

The question(s) remain(s): What is it that I need as a user, and what works best with my hardware?

Absent any huge issues, I'll probably spend the next 2 to 6 months in Ubuntu 10.04. After that, maybe I'll return to Debian. It's all a bit up in the air at this point.

Update, the day after: So I solved my Ubuntu One problem, and I fixed my Gwibber/"Me Menu" (or whatever it's called) problem - my advice is don't change your user password unless you want a little pain).

There haven't been any Lucid updates over the past couple of days, and everything that should be working continues to do so.

I still have those halting moments on the screen when typing blog entries into Movable Type, although there's no problem with LXer. That's more a testament to LXer's reliance on PHP for its user interface, whereas there's PHP with a whole mess of Javascript running things for Movable Type.

While I'm cooling off on the use of Gwibber due to its extreme slowness - which for a native app is astounding (and which has sent me running full-speed back to HootSuite, I really do like the ability to update my "social sites" via Ubuntu's "me menu" (is that what they're calling this thing? If you know, let me know).

I don't know how Ubuntu One is affecting my resources on the desktop at present, but I really like the idea of mirroring at least some of my files in the cloud and having them available either in the file manager on other Ubuntu desktops or via the Web interface everywhere else.

I'm considering adding a desktop (i.e. not a laptop) computer of much newer vintage, something with a "modern" processor and hard drive (i.e. quad-core AMD or Intel CPU, 2 to 4 GB RAM and 1.5 TB SATA), and compared with this puny 1.2 GHz Celeron with 1 GB RAM I imagine that Ubuntu (or any other OS for that matter) really flies.

If I decided to go this route (rather than getting a new laptop), the ability to mirror files across desktops would really help me in terms of doing my work from multiple computers. Let's face it, mirrored filesystems are a lot easier to deal with than Google Docs, which I'm also not ruling out using.

Before I end this entry, let me just follow up on previous entries in which I mentioned that I installed a few alternate window managers on this Ubuntu Lucid desktop, specifically Fvwm, Fvwm Crystal and Fluxbox.

If you switch environments in the GDM login screen and select a window manager that isn't GNOME, you'll be in a much lighter environment in more ways than one. A great many of the desktop features that appear in generic GNOME-driven Ubuntu Lucid don't work when you're not running GNOME: Ubuntu One doesn't work, I believe; you don't get the "social" integration; and in my case there are some screensaver issues that I could probably fix but just don't want to deal with at present.

The downside is that it's not the "full" Lucid experience. The upside is that there are probably 50 to 100 fewer processes running at any given time, and that could provide a nice performance boost on older hardware such as mine.

For now GNOME in Lucid is running well enough, and I do enjoy all the baked-in GNOME and Ubuntu features. But I'll be dipping into those other window managers from time to time just to see how things run in that mode.

Now that the Ubuntu One cloud-storage service can sync any directory in the system instead of just things in a Ubuntu One folder, I have been anxious to start using it to sync my files to the cloud for availability not just on any other Ubuntu machines I might set up but also via the Web interface (and hopefully in other OSes, Linux and not, in the future).

So I tried to get Ubuntu One going in this newish 10.04 installation. No go. I logged in, but nothing would sync.

Perhaps my "situation" is unusual (but there are enough Ubuntu users that it could be more common than I think). Here it is:

I briefly had Ubuntu 9.10 installed on a different computer, with which I created an account and used Ubuntu One. That computer has since been parted out to make this current laptop work.

Now I have this "new" computer with Ubuntu 10.04. Logging into Ubuntu One, the system listed my "old" computer as a synced device. There was nowhere to add a new computer on the Web page, as detailed in the Ubuntu One how-to. Yep, no "add this computer" button.

I did a bit of searching and found this Ubuntu forum post in which Ubuntu One developer Joshua Hoover gives these instructions:

I'm sorry this process isn't as streamlined as it could be. We're working on fixing that, but in the time being, you should be able to open System->Preferences->Ubuntu One and then get prompted in a web browser window to add your computer to your Ubuntu One account. If this never happens, can you do the following?

1. Open Applications->Accessories->Passwords and Encryption Keys

2. If you have an UbuntuOne token (under Passwords: default), right-click and select delete

3. Open a terminal session (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and run:
killall ubuntuone-login ubuntuone-syncdaemon

4. Open System->Preferences->Ubuntu One

5. A browser window should open and you should be prompted to add your computer

In my case, doing steps 1 and 2, there were no UbuntuOne tokens in the Passwords and encryption keys.

So I went to step 3, and ran this line in the terminal:

$ killall ubuntuone-login ubuntuone-syncdaemon

Then I went to the Ubuntu One application (System-Preferences-Ubuntu One), and I was then prompted to add my current computer.

Now all looks good in the Ubuntu One window. But none of my files are yet visible at https://one.ubuntu.com/files/.

I'll wait a bit. More later.

Later: I rebooted, and when I logged in, Ubuntu One was active, but none of my files were syncing.

Before I was able to actually add this computer to the Ubuntu One account, I had only chosen one folder to sync - which I did in the file browser by right-clicking on it and then left-clicking on "Synchronize to Ubuntu One" in the resulting menu.

Now that the machine was hooked up to Ubuntu One, I did this again - right-clicked on the folder and then syncronized it. The sync began immediately, and a minute or so later the folder was accessible in my Web interface at https://one.ubuntu.com/files/.

Hopefully this process is super-intuitive for new users who don't have Ubuntu One accounts left over from previous machines.

So now it's working. I'm not treating this as a backup. I've heard stories about people who accidentally deleted files on their Ubuntu machine and hoped to pull them from their Ubuntu One backup. But since their Ubuntu One account had already synced, the files were gone from the cloud, too. So my existing backup routines will continue.

Like most users I expect, I'm sticking with the free 2 GB plan. Sure I have more than 2 GB of files, and the 50 GB plan would take care of that, but $10/month is a bit pricey for my current needs, which are probably somewhere in the 5-10 GB range. I'd rather pay for a backup service like rsync.net that doesn't automatically sync, or something Time Machinish that does snapshots that will allow me to go back and grab old files.

And I'm ramping up my use of Google Docs - my complaint about syntax highlighting seems to be solved, as I wrote some HTML in Docs — and it was pleasantly colored. I'll probably be taking advantage of the bulk upload to Docs once I separate my image files from my text files, a separation I used to adhere to but abandoned due to laziness. (I don't need a bunch of JPEGs mucking up my Google Docs files ...).

What Google Docs and Gmail are allowing me to do is work not just across Ubuntu machines but with any computer I happen to be using, whether it's one of mine or not. At the moment anyway, that flexibility is worth letting Google spy on me and market to me based on that spying.

However, Google One and technologies like it — with files in the cloud (either synced or cloud-only) and local applications accessing them — seems to allow for a more full-featured computing experience than the current crop of Web-based applications such as Google Docs. However, I am enjoying all the features of Gmail that traditional mail clients such as Thunderbird and Evolution don't have.

First things first: My particular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation is not suffering from the Xorg memory leak.

I added mesa-utils so I could run:

glxinfo | grep "GLX version"

My output is:

GLX version: 1.2

If it was version 1.4, I'd have the newer, leaky Xorg, but the machine is properly reverted back to 1.2.

So what's my increased use of swap all about? I don't know if it's beneficial or not to have so much swapping going on, but a couple of readers have told me that Ubuntu's "swappiness" is set to a level of 60, which is optimal for servers. Desktops run better with lower "swappiness," and 10 is the suggested level.

All of this "swappiness" information is available in the Ubuntu community's Swap FAQ, which offers the following:

--------------- begin quoted material ----------------

What is swappiness and how do I change it?

The swappiness parameter controls the tendency of the kernel to move processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk. Because disks are much slower than RAM, this can lead to slower response times for system and applications if processes are too aggressively moved out of memory.

* swappiness can have a value of between 0 and 100
* swappiness=0 tells the kernel to avoid swapping processes out of physical memory for as long as possible
* swappiness=100 tells the kernel to aggressively swap processes out of physical memory and move them to swap cache

The default setting in Ubuntu is swappiness=60. Reducing the default value of swappiness will probably improve overall performance for a typical Ubuntu desktop installation. A value of swappiness=10 is recommended, but feel free to experiment. Note: Ubuntu server installations have different performance requirements to desktop systems, and the default value of 60 is likely more suitable.

To check the swappiness value

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To change the swappiness value A temporary change (lost on reboot) with a swappiness value of 10 can be made with

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

To make a change permanent, edit the configuration file with your favorite editor:

gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Search for vm.swappiness and change its value as desired. If vm.swappiness does not exist, add it to the end of the file like so:

vm.swappiness=10

Save the file and reboot.

--------------- end quoted material ----------------

At first I changed my swappiness temporarily. But now I'm ready make the fix permanent. Thanks for the tip, readers ctk and Mike. And thanks to the Ubuntu community for this nice little bit of how-to documentation on swap, plus the rest of the community documentation, all searchable, too.

A new way to sudo: I've never heard of gksudo before, but this FAQ recommend using it, and it worked perfectly. From the man page for gksudo:

gksu is a frontend to su and gksudo is a frontend to sudo. Their primary purpose is to run graphical commands that need root without the need to run an X terminal emulator and using su directly.

Works for me.

How other distros set their "swappiness": I've done a bit of checking, and it seems that most Linux distros, including Fedora, Debian, PCLinuxOS and Suse, also set their default swappiness at 60. Most of what I found about swappiness is in agreement with the Ubuntu FAQ, with desktop users setting swappiness to 10. I saw a few posts about MySQL servers that recommended setting swappiness to 0; I couldn't tell you anything about that.

What I will be doing is running with swappiness at 10. Whether or not I see or feel any change, I'll write again with an update.

Think about this: Sure, changing the swappiness from 60 to 10 is going to reduce what I saw as excessive swapping in Ubuntu. Will performance on the desktop really improve? And if swappiness has been at 60 in most distros for a long while, why am I suddenly seeing a problem in Ubuntu 10.04 that I never saw previously.

More to think about: The Linux kernel tends to take memory and hold onto it for what is presumably the greater good. As I understand it, the system isn't so much using all the memory you see it taking while monitoring a utility such at top. That memory will be used when the system needs it.

I don't begin to understand the gritty details of all this, nor of swap and swappiness, and I'm just comparing my experience now with that of running Linux distributions and BSD projects in the recent past.

Update, 3 p.m.: It's been a few hours since I made this change, and so far the system is using no swap and is running as well as or better than it did before.

I've probably mentioned this in passing, but I suppose I should directly address the issue of alternate window managers in Ubuntu, specifically in my 10.04 installation.

Ever since my unscientific tests showed that a Xubuntu installation with Xfce was no faster than a Ubuntu installation with GNOME, I've been adding the window manager packages themselves and not the entire alternative desktop packages.

In my last Ubuntu installation (9.10), I had Xfce but not the full Xubuntu.

Now, with things too sluggish in Ubuntu Lucid, I'm giving some lightweight window managers a try.

I've installed Fvwm, which I grew quite accustomed to in OpenBSD. I also installed Fvwm Crystal, which looks quite nice, and the light-desktop workhorse Fluxbox, which I've used in many different Linux/Unix environments over the years.

I've had some X issues in these non-GNOME window managers - i.e. with video not returning after screensaver mode, but with the number of patches coming into Ubuntu over the past few weeks, I need to spend a great deal more time in the distribution before making any pronouncements about how well or poorly a mostly stock Ubuntu installation performs with other window managers.

One thing I can say about setting up window managers in Ubuntu (and Debian, for that matter) is that it's quite a bit easier than in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. The latter two systems' do-it-yourself ethos means that the user has to do a lot more tweaking in order to have a usable desktop.

Now there are pros and cons to both scenarios. To be sure, in the BSDs you learn a lot a whole lot more quickly about the configuration of the system itself and the programs you use, but it conversely takes you a lot longer to get an efficient desktop.

Right now I'm lazy enough that I'm happy for the package maintainer in Ubuntu/Debian to get me started.

A commenter just wondered if my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid system's increasing use of swap was due to the known memory leak in X on the soon-to-be-released distro.

Could be. After 5 hours 30 minutes of uptime, htop shows 9 MB of swap is being used - or at any rate "reserved."

Remember, I have 1 GB of RAM on this laptop.

An entry or two ago I was marveling at how the Chromium browser didn't suffer from the same delays as Firefox at entering text into forms. Now Chromium's not doing so well at that, either.

Is this all related?

Ubuntu and Debian are both replacing the newer, broken Xorg with the slightly older, less-broken version. Do I have this patch yet? Hell if I know. I'll open up a terminal and see.

Update, 3 p.m.: I just updated the installation with Aptitude (I'm back to Aptitude after apt bit me in the ass on my less-than-successful dist-upgrade from Debian Lenny to Squeeze).

There were 15 new packages, one of which is the Intel driver for Xorg, but not Xorg itself.

I rebooted, and I'll keep any eye on swap as the day goes on.

Update, 4 p.m.: Looks like the system is starting to eat swap again. At uptime 55 minutes the system has grabbed 240k of swap, and all I'm running is Firefox.

Update, 5 p.m.: Swap usage at 3.3MB.

I've probably written a dozen entries in which I wondered aloud about how anybody could use the Google Chrome Web browser when, on my 512 MB Windows XP system, it literally ran aground after maybe a half-hour of use, with screens taking forever to render and sending me scurrying back to the relative comfort of Firefox.

Well since that time I've been running both Firefox and Google Chrome on a Windows box with 1 GB of RAM, and my opinion of Chrome has turned around: It's fast and stays fast.

I guess Chrome is one of those applications that just doesn't do well with 512 MB of RAM.

And now that I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop that also has 1 GB of RAM — and I'm having "issues" with Firefox eating tons of CPU — I've installed a couple of other browsers, including the Webkit-powered GNOME browser-of-choice Epiphany and its close cousin (and Chrome twin) Chromium, both of which are easily added from the refreshingly simple Ubuntu Software Center.

(About the only thing I don't like about the Ubuntu Software Center is its method of installing an application as soon as you select it; I'd rather make a number of software selections and then have the system install them all together. I guess that's what the Synaptic Package Manager is for.)

So how is Chromium in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04?

So far, it's excellent. Everything happens fast. There is absolutely no slowdown when I type into a Web form. I can see in top that when not in active use, Chromium (just like Epiphany) gives back almost all the CPU it uses when rendering a Web page (most unlike Firefox, which holds onto CPU even when you're not in a FF window).

Windows XP runs great in 512 MB. But if you're running a modern Web browser, you really need 1 GB for things to run smoothly. This doesn't mean a modern Web browser — especially Firefox — will run great on a Linux machine with only 512 MB of RAM. But I've never seen it choke so badly with 1 GB of RAM as I have in my current Ubuntu 10.04 installation.

The fact that Chromium is flawless on this configuration and with this CPU (1.2 GHz Celeron) says a whole lot.

My only problem is that the "core" of my Web-based work requires me to use Firefox. ... and if Chromium runs great in Ubuntu, it could only do better in a "lighter" environment, right?

At the writing of this entry, the official release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - official nickname "Lucid Lynx" (am I the only person who's tired of software releases getting not-so-clever names?) - is a mere three days away.

I've been running Lucid (look, I used the nickname, so maybe there's something to it) for at least a couple weeks now. A couple nights ago I did the heavy version of what for me can be termed "production," which means Web production with a few local apps but mostly interacting with our content-management system via the Web, specifically via the Firefox Web browser, which this CMS deems to be the only one besides Internet Explorer and (for reasons unknown to normal people) Safari - you know, that browser that runs OK in Apple's OS X but like sludgy crap in Windows (taking after all other Apple software ported to Windows, in case you were wondering, although I know you're not yet am telling you anyway).

So I'm running Firefox and "little" apps like the Geany text editor and gthumb photo viewer/editor, and on Saturday night (yeah, my hot Saturday night included production of the massive Sunday L.A. Life section and its Summer Film Preview) Firefox was halting big-time. I'm not convinced that it was the Javascript slowdown that regularly plagues me when running FF in Windows (and which can be solved by quitting FF and then starting it again).

In Ubuntu, I type in this Movable Type window and fairly regularly the screen needs a few seconds to catch up with my typing. When pages render, I need to wait more than a couple of seconds for things on that page to be clickable.

By the end of that night, the top utility showed that I was tapping about 2 MB of swap on my machine (1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 1 GB RAM). It's not that I don't expect to use swap (even though I pretty much don't). Every once in awhile while running GNOME in Debian Lenny the system would grab a little bit of swap. I don't think I ever used swap in OpenBSD 4.4 running Xfce with 768 MB of RAM - and that's kind of my benchmark for such things.

FreeBSD 7.3 with GNOME grabbed a little swap, but the GNOME environment in that system was super-fast at all times. Sure Totem didn't work and Web-browser-delivered video was less than optimal ... and I didn't know enough not to totally screw up the system with an ill-wrought software update, but the speed I became accustomed to running GNOME in Debian was there in FreeBSD.

I want the same thing in Ubuntu. Yes, I know there is more going on in Ubuntu's modified GNOME desktop. All that database stuff to run the cloud connectivity, the backgrounded Gwibber for social networking - don't get me wrong, I really like where Ubuntu is going and how it's differentiating itself not just from Debian and other Linux distributions but how its desktop is attempting to offer features and package itself as a value-added alternative to Windows and OS X.

My question is, can my hardware handle it?

That is a very open question. What's great about the world of free, open-source operating systems is that if Ubuntu doesn't work for this particular machine and this particular set of tasks, I have many dozen alternatives.

As I said in this blog's previous entry, I'm planning now to stick with Ubuntu 10.04 for at least another month. And while I'm continually seeing the signs of imminent death my sole remaining Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (I had two, but now only enough working parts to keep one in service), while it's still among the working, I will consider the following configurations to make my work more pleasant:

OpenBSD/Debian dual boot
FreeBSD/Debian dual boot
Debian
Debian/Ubuntu dual boot
OpenBSD with Puppy live CD
FreeBSD with Puppy live CD
Slackware
ZenWalk
OpenBSD/Wolvix dual boot
Puppy live CD with Ubuntu
Ubuntu with alternate desktops (I already have Fvwm, Fvwm Crystal and Fluxbox on this 10.04 installation)

I'm only working with 20 GB of hard-disk space at the moment, and the wonderful design of this Toshiba laptop makes it damn hard to swap out the drive, so a dual-boot is a bit cramped since I do have some actual data on here as well.

Looking forward, however, I'm not so much giving up on this hardware as it's giving up in general, as I alluded to above.

Regular readers (oh, you lucky few) know that this Toshiba does have a working CMOS battery but has a dead internal sound module which has been replaced by an el-cheapo USB external sound device. The power inverter for the LCD screen went bad, and I pulled the part from the other Toshiba laptop and swapped it into this laptop. Now the "good" inverter is starting to fail - I need to press the lid-closing switch at times to turn on the screen's backlight, especially before that inverter "warms up" (it does get very warm).

I'm looking at new computers - either laptop or desktop because I might want a desktop in our crap-packed home office instead of another failure-prone laptop, especially one that costs more than this one, which ran me a big fat $0 when I pulled it from a stack headed to the e-waste bin.

That's where Ubuntu comes in. I'm already trying to do more in the cloud. Instead of POP-ing my e-mail into Thunderbird, I'm routing it through Gmail, which has been a success so far. I'm using Google Calendar instead of the Lightning extension for Thunderbird (although I might try syncing them if I can figure it out). I've always used Google Docs a bit, and while it's less than ideal for writing code (no syntax highlighting, you have to download from Google before you can upload via FTP), the fact that I can get my files from any computer is huge.

Part of this Ubuntu-delivered hugeness that I haven't yet explored in 10.04 is Ubuntu One, the cloud-based storage system that finally does the one thing I needed it to do before using it - allowing any directory or combination of directories on the local system to be synced, not just a designated Ubuntu One directory - or in the case of Dropbox, the single directory/folder that allows synchronization with that multiplatform file-sharing service.

That means with Ubuntu One I can have any number of synced directories that will look the same on any number of Ubuntu-running machines. So in addition to (or maybe instead of) Google Docs, I'll have my local files synced and available from multiple desktops.

That is if my stable of machines can all run Ubuntu - and if my slowdown/memory issues are either solved or "become manageable."

So between all that's been happening in the weeks before the release of Ubuntu's third long-term-support release and what's happening in my own computing oeuvre (hey, if you can throw in an obscure French word every once in a while, why not just do that?) I think schizophrenia (hello, LatinGreek [and thanks gus3 for the classical clarification]) is my personal order of, if not the day then this Debian-FreeBSD-Ubuntu month.

OK, so I had a not-so-great night running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx — in release-candidate stage at this writing — and wondered what exactly made things so sluggish during a 2+ hour production session hacking away at Dailynews.com.

Was it Firefox 3.6.x swallowing CPU and memory? All the social-networking and cloud-integration stuff running in the background? Xorg issues (which come and go with every kernel and Xorg update)?

At this point I really don't know.

What I do know is that memory use went up as the night wore on. Running Firefox, gthumb and a terminal, the system was using 2 MB of swap after a couple of hours.

Not that use of 2 MB of swap is earth-shattering, it's just that I don't recall ever using even that much since I boosted the laptop's RAM to 1 GB. That's not enough to run the average Linux desktop with GNOME? Guess not extremely comfortably.

I've always said that GNOME isn't as much of a resource hog as many think it is. While it's true that apps such as Firefox tend to grab CPU and hold onto it, I really don't know why things went so poorly.

Since then I've done yet another software update as Lucid leaps toward the final 10.04 release, which is mere days away at this point.

I also installed the Chromium (nee Google Chrome) browser, which like its Webkit cousin Epiphany (installed that a week ago) and even the Gecko-based Epiphany of releases past doesn't monopolize CPU like Firefox.

That would be great if a majority of my work on a Web-accessed CMS required the use of Firefox ... or worse — Internet Explorer, which I'm obviously not running in Linux because I'm not that self-hating and also not running on my work-supplied Windows XP box because of (see reason I'm not running IE in Linux with the lovely Wine).

Anyhow, despite things going less than swimmingly, right now I'm committing myself to sticking with Ubuntu 10.04 for at least the next month.

I'm always saying that a Ubuntu release doesn't settle into true usability until at least a month after its release date, sometimes longer. Not that Ubuntu is in the habit of making improvements after a release date, but the inevitable show-stoppers often get at least a little attention.

Tonight at least, when I'm blogging as opposed to doing full "Web production," and using Chromium instead of Firefox, I'm quite enjoying Ubuntu 10.04.

I have used Gwibber to update a couple of Twitter feeds as well as my Facebook status - and to read others' updates on those same services. I like what the app does, but I can see my system and the app itself straining to do the job. I don't know all that much about Gwibber, but as much as its potential is something I'd like to have at my disposal, I'm inclined to figure out what I need to do to shut it off so it won't grab so much CPU even when I'm not using it.

More later ...

I'm no kernel hacker. Hell, I'm no regular hacker. The most I can code that isn't a Web page is a three-line shell script so I don't rsync into the wrong directory. I'm just a user with a big mouth.

I don't know exactly (or even slightly) how they do it, but after a crash while testing suspend/resume in the 2.6.32.21 kernel while running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid — still in beta as of this writing — I rebooted and got that little "something crashed" icon in my upper panel.

It asked me if I wanted to file a bug report, and I did, so after clicking a few boxes, a Firefox window opens in Launchpad (I have a Launchpad account, and if you're a habitual Ubuntu user, you should, too) with the shell of a bug report, first asking me if my bug is similar to about a dozen others.

What? My problems be shared by others? Not in this case — to the best of my feeble knowledge, at any rate.

Anyhow, the short version is that suspend/resume works on my hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with Intel Celeron 1.2 GHz, Intel 830m chipset) in the 2.6.32.20 kernel but not in 2.6.32.21.

So it's a regression. The mere fact that suspend/resume worked at all on any gear I have is monumental, and I was sad to see it go away as quickly as it arrived.

As if anybody anywhere with the word "developer" adjacent to their name cares about my petty problems on my 8-year-old dying hardware.

(I'm looking into the best $400-$500 laptop I can buy, but first I need to do a great deal of research and find $400-$500 ... but that's another story for another blog entry.)

Meanwhile, whatever the Ubuntu developers have going that enabled me to file this bug automatically with a whole mess of attachments that detail the here and now of my system, I am pretty much in awe.

Allowing a regular user to file a bug - especially one that might even have enough data in it to be useful, that's huge. (And I hope it's working in terms of letting developers know about what's broken in the upcoming release (and those in the future).

Are there other projects, be they distributions, applications or other, that have a setup like this for bug reporting? I sure haven't seen any.

All I can say is that this is something that separates Ubuntu from the pack (in a good way).

I had heard that gthumb was being downgraded in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid because the 2.11 build was supposedly not stable enough for an LTS release.

Well, it did happen today. The differences between gthumb 2.11 and 2.10 are startling. The enhancements to the IPTC metadata framework are gone, but the ability to do a slideshow (which I don't care about) and perhaps the ability to open images in other editors (which I do care about but couldn't figure out in 2.11 whether that feature was removed or just "moved") are back where I can see and use them.

Webupd8 is all over this change and also plans to offer a PPA for gthumb 2.11.3, which I'll either be using soon unless I decide to compile my own package.

Ubuntu can't make up its mind on how to arrange the buttons on application windows. In today's patches, the buttons moved yet again.

Here's what they look like today:

And here's what they looked like yesterday (or, in my case, mere minutes ago):

And a few days before that, they look like they do now. I prefer the Red X to be the "outside" button, whether the buttons as a group are on the left (as they are now) or the right (as they were before this controversial change in Ubuntu).

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists.

But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware.

Pretty darn well Slowly. And with all the things that Lucid brings to the desktop in terms of the back end of the social media and cloud integration features, a commensurate bite is taken out of RAM.

As you have no doubt committed to memory if you're read the previous 500 or so entries in this blog, my main machine right now is a circa-2002 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with a 1.2-GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 1 GB of RAM (the maximum the machine will take; you should max out whatever machine you have, too), the original 20 GB hard drive (it's just not easy to swap out a drive on this poorly designed and built laptop, or I'd have done it already) and a USB mouse (touchpad is dead), plus USB Headphone Set $2 sound module (dead internal sound module — yes it does come out and I do have a second "working" internal sound module but am too lazy to do anything about it now that the el-cheapo USB thing is working) ... plus a Linksys powered USB hub because my Toshiba USB backup drive doesn't get enough power from the Satellite's USB ports.

So it's not a power-user machine. But the 1 GB is nice.

However, in Ubuntu 10.04, things are appreciably snappy in the GNOME desktop. What else can I say? Everything runs well. I'm not missing any extra speed from Debian Lenny - this Ubuntu build seems just as good.

Update on April 25, 2010: OK, it's 10 days later than I originally wrote this entry, and after a long night of production at Dailynews.com on the Ubuntu 10.04 laptop, I was a bit surprised (although I'm not sure why I was "surprised") by the overall sluggishness of the machine running Firefox and gthumb.

While moving between windows on the GNOME desktop was extremely quick (perhaps causing me to believe the whole Lucid experience was one of snappiness rather than sluggishness), in Firefox itself things weren't going so well. There were waits between tabs, waits for pages to render, huge CPU spikes in the system as a whole (I had a terminal with top open so I could watch CPU, RAM and swap use).

While using Firefox, the CPU was straining, and much to my dismay, by the time I had been using the system a couple of hours, I was using about 2 MB of swap. Not that using swap is so bad, but with 1 GB of RAM and running basically a Web browser, a light photo viewer/editor and a terminal, I've never used that much swap before. The machine was clearly straining. I could see the various processes having to do with things like gwibber (which I wasn't "actively" running at the time, but which was using quite a bit of CPU in the background) that I sort of understand, as well as those I'm a bit dodgy on, such as desktopcouch.

I added the Chromium browser - basically Google Chrome, and I can say that so far it performs quite well and uses a whole lot less CPU than Firefox. However, my Web-based CMS requires that I use Firefox, which means an environment that runs Firefox well with 1.2 GHz of CPU and 1 GB of RAM is essential. If Ubuntu is "tuned," i.e. is enough of a hog, to run well on "modern" systems, perhaps starting with 3 GHz Pentium 4 or the various and sundry dual-core CPUs out there with a minimum of 2 GB RAM (and I have no reason to either believe or doubt this scenario other than my own experience), then I'll really have to look elsewhere for a usable operating system for my two remaining 2002-era laptops (the Toshiba and the Gateway Solo 1450, the latter which has only 512 MB of RAM with a 1.3 GHz Celeron CPU).

Looks-wise, I guess the purple, the dark windows and the button shenanigans is something you either love, hate or don't care about. For me, it's mostly the latter, although for now I'm enjoying some of the design elements.

One problem I'm having in 10.04 beta 2 is with Totem, which didn't work at all during my recent FreeBSD test.

In Ubuntu 10.04, if I want to watch a video and click on that video to open it in Totem, I get sound but no image. I can see the image if I move the window around or use full-screen mode.

However, if I open Totem first and then navigate to the video through the application, everything looks and works fine.

Video in the Firefox Web browser is fine in all cases.

I need to file a bug on this ... and I will.

Every Linux release, from Ubuntu Dapper and Debian Etch, all the way through the present day and my testing of the Ubuntu Lucid beta, I look to see if suspend/resume will ever work on my old laptops.

It's kind of like the Holy Grail ... of geeky Linux/Unix laptop users like myself.

It always seems like it's going to work but never does.

But things are looking up. Right now I can use the power/logout/other-stuff-like-that button in the upper right corner of the screen to select "Suspend," and the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (Intel Celeron 1.2 GHz, Intel 830m chipset) will go into suspend. After that I can press the power button, and a few seconds later the machine will resume (meaning awake from suspend and actually work).

I don't know if this wizardry is due to the efforts of the kernel developers, Xorg developers, Debian developers or even Ubuntu developers, but if I can set GNOME to automatically suspend the laptop at a predetermined time after it has been idle and then come back the next day, hit the power button and have the thing actually turn on, I will hardly be able to believe it.

I turned on my laptop running the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid beta (I think we're still technically on "beta 2") and found more than 100 updates ready for me.

I did these from the console with apt, and I had to remove Thunderbird before the apt-get upgrade would work. I hadn't started using Thunderbird yet, so that was no problem. Once I removed Thunderbird, the upgrade went forward without incident.

But when I rebooted, I noticed that the button order in application windows changed again. The picture above shows what the buttons look like at the time of this entry.

I can't remember what they looked like when they were first moved from the right side of the window to the left, but in recent days the "close" button - the red X - moved to the left-most spot.

But today after the upgrade the red X is in the right-most spot - still on the left side of the window.

And yes, I'm still habitually looking on the right side of the window for the buttons that are now all the way over on the other side.

As I said recently, I think left-side button placement only works for Apple's OS X because the buttons are colored red, yellow and green. Even though the traffic-light analogy doesn't exactly hold up, the colors do catch the eye.

In the case of Ubuntu Lucid, you have white with an up arrow, white with a down arrow and red with an X. Not so eye-catching ...

This doesn't fall under the "deal-breaker" category for me as a user (things like how X, video in general and sound work are much more important), but it's just funny to see the UI's schizophrenic action as Ubuntu trudges forward to the official Lucid release later this month.

Now I have a reason to grab onto Ubuntu 10.04 - or any system that includes gThumb 2.11.2.1.

This little image-viewer that could is now even better for anybody who works with JPEG images with embedded captions in IPTC format, which most photographers (and all photojournalists) use for caption and credit information, and which sits with the image in something called the "XML sidecar" (technical term, no?) and which makes my life as a Web editor much, much, much easier.

You know what the GIMP, Krita and almost all "image editing" software in the free and open-source world does to this IPTC/XML data? It cheerfully deletes it when you open and save a JPEG that previously contained it.

Helpful, right?

So people like me have to resort to using non-FOSS apps on non-FOSS platforms - you know Photoshop, and maybe even Photo Mechanic, the app my photographers all use to tag and process images.

No. I won't.

I do use IrfanView, a great image viewer for Windows that's free but not FOSS, and I've even used it in Wine (Bordeaux makes it easy).

Now I really don't need IrfanView, Bordeaux, Wine, Windows, Photoshop ... or GIMP, Krita or anything else.

For basic photo "editing," the two "top" Linux/Unix image-viewers — digiKam with Kipi Plugins (the latter brings the IPTC capability to the app) and gthumb (with a built-in extension that does IPTC) are really the only games in town.

Yes, there's another app - Mapivi - that deals with IPTC, but it's got nowhere near the polish of the KDE and GNOME photo viewers.

Notice I've left out F-Spot. That's because you can do almost nothing with it of a photo-editing nature. Gthumb beats it eight different ways.

Now you might be saying, "Just use digiKam - it's got more features." That is true, digiKam deals with most IPTC fields, does quite a bit of editing, and meets most of my specs.

But a) I'm not crazy about using a KDE app in a mostly-GNOME environment, and the digiKam interface is more than a little cluttered ... and it creates database files that I'm not interested in having on my system.

It does one thing gthumb doesn't do. That is sharpen images. But it's so hard to sharpen an image properly in digiKam - I've never been able to figure it out. They all come out looking horrible. gthumb doesn't sharpen, and truthfully I can live without it.

But gthumb edits the IPTC caption/credit and other data, it crops, it resizes and shrinks file size - that's 98 percent of what I need.

I've used gThumb in Ubuntu 8.04, Debian Lenny and FreeBSD 7.3-release.

The version I'm now running in Ubuntu 10.04 is the best yet - the interface is different (I'm still getting used to it), but the developers' expansion of the "metadata" feature has made it all worth it.

Previously gthumb could only get at the "caption" portion of the IPTC metadata. Now in this new version I can see credit information, tags, time and date — and all sorts of other data, most of which I don't need but a lot of which I definitely do.

In short, gthumb has been my personal "killer app" in Unix/Linux for the past six months, and now it's better by an order of magnitude.

All I need now is "sharpen" capability, and the final piece of my image-editing puzzle will be in place.

It would be great if the GIMP would finally add full IPTC editing capability, but it hasn't happened up to now and probably won't. And yes, if I knew how to do it, I'd code it myself, but I don't (and therefore can't).

But I couldn't be more grateful to the developers of gthumb for making my workflow even better than they've already made it over the past few months.

Debian Lenny didn't have Gwibber in its repositories, and just about the only Twitter client in those repos was the less-than-ideal Twitux, which didn't really work for me.

Now that I'm running Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 beta 2, Gwibber is baked into the desktop, and it's pretty obvious that the Ubuntu developers are striving for as much social-networking, cloud-services and e-mail/IM integration as possible.

So I'm giving Gwibber a try.

On another front, at the Daily News, we're managing our Twitter feeds with HootSuite, which has quasi-native applications on some platforms, a Firefox add-on, various mobile-client apps and a Web interface. So it's flexible.

I'll be using both Gwibber and HootSuite over the next few weeks, seeing if Gwibber offers me anything more than HootSuite.

I'll probably end up using both, but at this point both are also quite new to me, and I don't know what each can really do.

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I needed to get the laptop back into usable shape, and I did that by installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS beta 2.

While trying to do an update on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, well into the third day of the system building everything from source, I stopped that upgrade and tried to do one from packages only.

Nope, it didn't work.

I still couldn't tell you how to do a binary-only (or even binary/ports mixture) upgrade of the applications in a FreeBSD system and have it work. There are many ways to do it, it seems, and I must've picked the wrong one.

Anyhow, my FreeBSD system started working in a less-than-optimal manner. I backed up what I could (actually I uploaded my FreeBSD-created files via FTP since rsync crashed the box) and then decided to go with Ubuntu Lucid.

I had a beta 1 disc, and I installed from there and a day later did the 500+ package update. The release is currently at beta 2, with updates coming in all of the time.

For all of you Intel 830m users out there (i830 video, if you must call it that, or the 82830 CGC in my specific case), in the Lucid kernels starting with beta 2, I haven't been able to use nomodeset to boot (once you install Ubuntu Lucid, get to the GRUB 2 boot screen by holding down the shift key when starting the computer).

But i915.modeset=0 is working, and that's what I rolled into my Grub 2 parameters.

I've heard/read that the ability to turn off kernel mode setting might either be changing or going away in future kernels. I have nothing confirming or denying this. I only know that the Xorg developers really don't care about what users of older Intel video chips have had to go through for the past couple of years.

But I do have video working with the last-mentioned kernel parameter. No 3D graphics, but I haven't had that in awhile (though I did in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS).

Most things seem to be working fairly well. FTP with Nautilus has been a little shaky, but otherwise I don't have any major complaints.

I have tried suspend/resume, and while I'm encouraged by my early findings, I'm not ready to say "it works."

I did install Flash and Java. Neither was as easy to do as it should be for Ubuntu, but I did make both happen. Flash performance is excellent (relatively speaking, meaning it's crap, but slightly better crap than I'm used to).

This is one of the great things about FreeBSD: They make a release, and you know right then how long it will be supported by the security team.

Look at this post by Remko Lodder (linked to from Planet FreeBSD) on the March 23, 2010 release of FreeBSD 7.3-release (which I'm running right now):

The FreeBSD Security Team currently plans to support FreeBSD 7.3 until March 31st 2012. Users of FreeBSD 7.2 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.0 before the FreeBSD 7.2 End of Life on June 30th 2010.

A two-year support life with the option to upgrade to the FreeBSD 8.x branch at any time? That's great. More than one -release branch going at the same time? More than one -stable branch, plus a -current branch if you want it? FreeBSD has a whole lot of flexibility depending on what you want out of the system and what your comfort level is with bleeding-edge software, frequency and quantity of updates, and of course what your hardware and tasks require.

I chose 7.3-release for a couple of reasons: I wanted to run a -release branch, and at present 8.0-release doesn't have as many precompiled binary packages as 7.3-release, and since 7.3-release is newer, all of its packages are newer as well.

The next 8.x release will probably take care of that, and I'll be more comfortable upgrading to it, but for now 7.3-release is working great for me.

Following Remko's suggestion to look at the FreeBSD Security page, you can see that every other release in a given numerical series is an "extended" release, meaning it gets two years of support.

So 7.2-release, being a "Normal" release, has an "estimated EOL (end of life)" of about a year and a month.

FreeBSD 8.0-release is also a "Normal" release, supported until Nov. 30, 2010. And when 8.1-release is finally released (no date set), it will be an "extended" release and be supported for two years after its release date.

So right now you can run FreeBSD 6.x, 7.x and 8.x -release branches with support from the FreeBSD security team.

I've been running free, open-source operating systems on my main laptop for about two years now, and especially in the past six months I don't just load on an OS, play around and then write a quickie review (although I have been known to do that on occasion).

No, I'm actually using these systems. I put in a full 6 months with OpenBSD 4.4, maybe 6 months with Ubuntus 8.04-9.10) then 3 to 4 months with Debian Lenny.

Now I'm running FreeBSD 7.3-release, and while like OpenBSD (but somewhat less so) it takes more work to set up than your average Linux distribution, I'm finding the system to be extremely stable. Even calling Flash "problematic" is something I do with qualifications: Video is a bit choppy, audio is perfect, and while the npviewer.bin processes can eat quite a bit of CPU, once you close the page that spawned them, they go away, which is very nice.

Java performance has been great, and the desktop (for me GNOME and Fvwm2) is extremely fast.

I've used packages and ports, and everything has built/run just fine.

I must have forgotten the -P switch to portupgrade when updating my FreeBSD 7.3-release packages and ports. That switch would have tried to use packages instead of ports when possible to do the upgrade. I'm really not sure if I typed -P as part of the command or not.

All I know is that ports are building, and I can't hang around to answer the inevitable pre-build questions before many of them, meaning I'll return to the computer in the morning as it's waiting for user input and continue the process that started in the afternoon and threatens to continue well into tomorrow.

There's something to be said for operating systems that rely solely on binary updates. I knew there was a reason for PC-BSD ...

The FreeBSD Handbook appeared cryptic on how exactly to update packages and ports. I'm sure the answer is in there, but I just couldn't find it.

However, I do have Dru Lavigne's new book, "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD," and I'm following her instructions on pages 247-251 on how to use csup and portupgrade to update both packages and ports on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation.

Yep, her PC-BSD book is helping me with FreeBSD — which isn't so unusual since PC-BSD 8.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.0.

Yesterday I fixed my problem with pkg_add, which was pulling packages from 7-stable instead of 7.3-release. I'll write that up soon.

My short review of Dru's PC-BSD book is that it's a must for the novice PC-BSD user and has more than enough tips for the advanced BSD user who wants to run PC-BSD or even FreeBSD. It's a great companion for her "Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, which I also highly recommend.

I'm still in the middle of my csup, so I'll report on how it turns out. And while I'm sure I have a GhostBSD (FreeBSD live with GNOME) disc somewhere, I'm about to burn a new one and see how its GNOME environment compares to my own. Hopefully I'll glean a few tips that will help me in my GNOMEish FreeBSD 7.3-release install.

I've been running FreeBSD for more than a week now - first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it's going very well.

I started with the idea that I'd run the full GNOME desktop with all the apps I used in Debian, and I pretty much have that setup.

But late last week I set up the Fvwm2 window manager - and just like in any other Unix-like OS, running something like Fvwm2 (or Fluxbox, which I also have in this install) does consume fewer resources than GNOME. Not that GNOME is by any means slow in FreeBSD on this hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with 1.2 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM).

But I could see in the top utility that Fvwm was easier on both CPU and RAM.

Not that I'm doing everything in Fvwm2. I'm working right now and am doing so in GNOME.

As I alluded to above, I'm not sure whether or not it has been the case since I did the install of 7.3-release, but it looks like when I use pkg_add to install binary packages that my system is pulling from the 7-stable repository and not the 7.3-release repo.

I noticed because I've had to "force" a couple of packages to install due to slight differences in the versions of dependencies that are already part of the system. I'm unsure whether to a) change PACKAGESITE to point to 7.3-release, b) upgrade the system itself from 7.3-release to 7-stable, c) upgrade to 8.0-release or 8-stable, or d) don't do anything.

At the moment everything is working, so I'm leanign toward answer "d" - doing nothing.

I even solved my X problems, some of which were caused by my starting X with the command startx in a root shell rather than my user shell.

Once I figured that out and then invoked DPMS in my xorg.conf:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	"Configured Monitor"
	Option		"DPMS"

Then I had my screensaver issues solved. The computer goes into regular screensaver mode, then eventually the system turns the screen off entirely, and I can get back from either screensaver mode by moving the mouse.

I even installed a few ports, as opposed to precompiled binary packages, which I generally prefer due to the speed with which they are installed, my own laziness, and my worry about running out of disk space (I'm working with 20 GB total here ....).

I built gThumb from ports because I needed IPTC capability baked in. The ports system in FreeBSD lets you choose this option from a handy menu when you are building the application. I've since found out that gThumb in Debian is built with IPTC support - which is how I discovered that it's exactly what I need for Web photo editing - but gThumb in Ubuntu leaves IPTC out, rendering it mostly useless for my work.

It's great that in FreeBSD building the package from source the way I want/need it is so easy to do.

In order to get CUPS printing working, I had to reinstall a couple of packages for which I used ports.

So I have a nice setup here with GNOME 2.28, Fvwm2, Fluxbox if I decide to use it, all the apps I generally use, and I have all of my user files on this system now. I kept my 3+GB of Thunderbird mail on a USB stick that I can access from this machine, and I've been using Gmail as my main mail client, through which I'm filtering a whole bunch of mail.

I never thought POP-ing down mail with Thunderbird was the best solution, and having to back up that Thunderbird mail, which always takes an eon or two, made me want to continue in that mode even less.

I know Google is targeting ads to me based on what's in my e-mail and documents, but the service is just too good for me to pass it up at this juncture.

I should probably mention again that I do have Java working in my Web browsers, I have Flash 9 installed, even though it's problematic resources-wise (and I have it turned off in Firefox for that reason, leaving Epiphany as my "Flash browser").

Overall, many more things work than don't in this FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, so I think I'll be sticking with it for a while.

Getting wireless working was easy. I had this guide on my hard drive (and readable in a Web browser at file:///usr/share/doc/handbook/network-wireless.html), and my Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter (as rum0) was easy to configure.

Just like in OpenBSD, networking in FreeBSD is extremely solid.