June 2010 Archives

In my continuing effort to slim down my Ubuntu Lucid-turned-Xubuntu installation, I'm keeping an eye on the top utility and removing things running in the background that I don't need.

Today's casualty: desktop couch. I'm no longer running Ubuntu One or Gwibber, and I will probably give Evolution a shove, even though I quite like it (but don't need it very often).

Desktop couch — time for you to go.

There were so many parts of Ubuntu's brand of GNOME that had been giving me trouble during the 10.04 cycle that I hoped a move to Xubuntu, and removal of the individual components that have been bothering me the most would bring some sanity to my computing environment.

It's working.

I just replaced gnome-screensaver with xscreensaver, and the repeated crashes I was getting from the former utility are now gone.

I could have dug into the configuration files to turn off gwibber-service and beam, if I knew how. Instead I just went for "complete removal" of gwibber in Synaptic (and I'm keeping the GNOME package manager along with substantial bits of GNOME that I know and like — and that like my hardware).

The gwibber part is a bit sad because I really like the application, despite it slowness. The whole desktop-couch thing probably works better for newer hardware but has been problematic on my laptop. More often than I'd like, gwibber-service and beam take about 80 percent of the CPU. (If HootSuite would just add identi.ca already, I'd have a total microblogging solution; they tell me they're mulling it over.)

I turned off Bluetooth, seeing as this machine doesn't support it. Also gone is GNOME power management (I'm using the Xfce utility to do it now; it looks just about the same).

I got rid of Ubuntu One. Without a multitude of GNOME-running Ubuntu machines, it just isn't terribly useful.

And despite my own misgivings about Xubuntu over plain-vanilla Xfce, desktop operations do seem noticeably faster. Xubuntu has always looked great. My favorite Xubuntu releases were 7.04 and 7.10, if I recall — design-wise they were some of the best-looking Linux desktops I'd ever used (and not a bit brown/orange).

To contrast with the full Xubuntu "experience," the distro now offers the ability to run a presumably less-baggage-heavy Xfce session (as opposed to an Xubuntu session, which I'm running now).

My USB drives still automount. Another of my main concerns is laid to rest.

I'm using the Chromium browser more and more. I suppose I could get rid of Epiphany. Same with Empathy, although both apps are among the high points of GNOME, and I've enjoyed using them during my time with Lucid (and before in the case of the Epiphany browser).

I'm definitely keeping the gThumb image "viewer," which I use as an editor and which is unequaled on the Linux/Unix desktop.

I do have a lot of "doubled" apps right now. My root partition (everything but /swap and /home) is at 5.4 GB, but I have the room for it.

And those parts of Xfce that just rolled in — I've always loved Mousepad, the Xfce terminal and the Thunar file manager.

I've recently become acquainted with Gigolo, described as "a simple frontend to easily connect to remote filesystems." It also rolled in with Xubuntu, and it's a nice way to quickly get to FTP sites (although it won't make me dump FileZilla).

Overall, the simplicity of the Xubuntu environment is exactly what I need right now.

(Click the image above for a 1024x768 image of my totally stock, nothing-at-all-special-about-it Xubuntu desktop)

Come and get me, fanboys.

I'm a complainer and a whiner (and a joker, a smoker and a midnight toker), but not without reason. (OK, I'm neither smoker nor toker, but it just sounds so right.)

Ubuntu, it's been a nice ride, and I fully support what your doing in terms of spreading the full-custom gospel sounds of the free desktop (apologies to the Rev. Horton Heat). I'm OK with the desktop innovation — the "social from the start" initiative and the Ubuntu One integration that define the 10.04 long-term-support release of the GNOME-based Ubuntu desktop operating system.

It's just not for me. It's mostly not for my hardware, but I'll extend that to me, the user.

I'm not saying I won't be back. I probably will be. But now, the still-forming social desktop just doesn't do enough for me in relation to how much CPU and disk space it requires (and at the most inopportune times, such as when I'm just starting the machine and need to get stuff done quickly).

I use Twitter and Identi.ca a lot. And I like the idea of Gwibber. But the slowness on my rig (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, 2002 vintage) just doesn't add up.

I want it to work, to be useful and to not keep me from doing other things at the same time with any degree of comfort. But it's just not there yet.

And Ubuntu One - I love the idea of a cloud backup that can pull from any directory or individual file in the system. But as a backup it just doesn't work because anything untoward that happens on my desktop will migrate to the cloud. I still need a traditional backup — the kind I do with rsync to an external drive.

And Ubuntu One's tight integration with other Ubuntu desktops running GNOME (of which I have none) makes it less useful than things like Dropbox or Jungle Disk, which are not just cross-platform in the Linux universe but also run on Windows and Mac machines.

And with my hardware and software issues (for some reason my "Me Menu" access to Gwibber disappeared again; I'm sure a from-scratch reinstall would solve all problems, but I'm just not going to do that right now, especially with the performance issues) I just need something that does what I want it to do and doesn't waste resources on things that either don't work for me, or just plain don't work.

I've been looking at other desktop solutions — going back to Debian (still my favorite distro of all time), something derived from Slackware (Salix didn't play well with my Intel 830m video), or leaving the reservation entirely and giving Fedora (either the GNOME, Xfce or LXDE spins) a try.

Right now I really don't have the time or energy to do a full reinstall and reconfiguration.

I could've ripped out the parts of Ubuntu Lucid that are giving me trouble. I do have the Fluxbox and Fvwm window managers installed, but doing something as simple as automounting USB drives was eluding my admittedly limited geekery skills.

So I decided to install the xubuntu-desktop package, rip out Ubuntu One, potentially remove gwibber (if the accursed gwibber-service and beam won't fade on their own) and stop using GNOME.

So here I am in Xubuntu 10.04. I've known for a long time that it's not necessarily faster than Ubuntu, but it's always looked nice, worked well. And now it offers something that Ubuntu can't in the Lucid era: simplicity and freedom from the Ubuntu bleeding edge (which as I've said over countless posts doesn't belong in a long-term-support release at all).

I still love Ubuntu and its mission. It's just not for me at the present moment.

But I'm still in the fold with Xubuntu, and if things work out over the next two weeks, I might do a full reinstall of the Xfce-driven distribution on this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

If you're happy with Ubuntu Lucid, I salute you and wish I was among you. My problems at this point are my own — I don't detect any groundswell of geeks moving away from the GNOME build of Ubuntu. And I'm glad Xubuntu is here to provide a stripped-down Ubuntu experience that more closely matches my hardware and workflow.

Yeah, I love freedom. Three cheers.

My new Lenovo G555 shipped with Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit (even though it's running an AMD Athlon II dual-core 64-bit CPU) on its smallish 160 GB hard drive (I didn't expect more for the $329 price I pad for the laptop at Fry's).

Between this and Ilene's new MSI Wind netbook, which also runs Windows 7, I've had a bit of time to get my feet wet in Microsoft's latest desktop OS offering.

It's just an operating system. Nothing too exciting. It automatically found my WiFi hotspot. Both systems have crapware I've been purging.

I use Windows XP all day on my work-supplied Dell box, and with 1 GB of RAM I'm actually not unhappy to be working in it. With 512 MB of RAM it's another story (hated it). Without applications such as a Web browser, Windows XP is OK at 512 MB. With a browser, 1 GB enhances the experience immensely.

Anyhow, XP is a 10-year-old OS. Sure there have been three Service Packs. And I've had plenty of time to add the applications I need to get work done in a Windows environment (FileZilla, Notepad++, IrfanView, OpenOffice, the Firefox and Google Chrome browsers).

I don't need a whole lot to bend Windows to my will.

Thus far what strikes me most about Windows 7 is how much it's like Windows XP. You can actually burn an ISO image without adding a separate application (although such operations are less than intuitive).

One thing about Windows in general (including 7) — you still don't get the full operating environment I've grown accustomed to in the Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and (insert the name of your favorite) Linux distributions.

I could dual-boot on the Windows 7 drive, but I'm probably going to swap in a new hard drive dedicated to Linux.

Thus far I've tried a few Linux live CDs in the Lenovo G555 (3 GB RAM, although some is dedicated to video):

Ubuntu did the best as far as finding the hardware and autoconfiguring it. I had the Ubuntu 9.10 live DVD from Robin Dixon's new "Ubuntu: Up and Running" book from O'Reilly (which I recommend, by the way) the new O'Reilly Ubuntu book. Once I had the system up in the live environment, it prompted me to install (or not) the restricted driver for the ATI Radeon HD 4200 chip. WiFi with the Broadcom BCM4313 chipset was enabled automatically. I entered the key to my network and was off and running.

While I was able to install the ATI driver, I couldn't "invoke" it without rebooting, and in the live environment I figured a reboot would make the package go away, so I couldn't see if there were any differences with that driver installed. I know that without it, desktop effects could not be enabled.

Both Debian Squeeze (the alpha 1 live image) and Fedora 13 (live GNOME) booted fine into their respective live environments. Screen resolution, as in Ubuntu, was perfect.

Neither Debian nor Fedora autoconfigured the Broadcom wireless, but there are websites with instructions on how to do this (Fedora, Debian).

Additionally, reader Rahul offered a link to this Fedora 13 setup guide.

As I've been hinting in my recent blog posts, I'm leaning toward giving Fedora a try. I'd be more comfortable in Debian, but I do feel it's time to try something new. Even though this is new hardware, I still might give the LXDE or Xfce spin a try. And I'll be using RPMFusion for help with the multimedia (Thanks Chess and Rahul for the recommendation).

Even though Ubuntu offers the best experience out of the box, considering where Ubuntu is right now in its 10.04 release with the nascent and very rough-around-the-edges social desktop and resource-grabbing Ubuntu One synchronization (that's of less-than-full value due to my only having the one Ubuntu 10.04-running laptop), I might be better off with something that doesn't have all of those extras running out of the box.

The fact that most of the new Ubuntu services rely on the GNOME desktop cuts both ways: You can opt out by running Xubuntu, which is great unless you want all of that stuff but don't want GNOME.

And there's always Linux Mint ...

Right now the front-runner is Fedora 13 LXDE (maybe an XFCE-LXDE hybrid).

Per my recent post, "Tags and categories — who needs 'em?," I've removed those two elements — the tag cloud and categories listing — from the home page of this blog.

I also took to opportunity to clean up the rickety code upon which this Movable Type blog is built and "modularize" it a bit more — meaning taking discrete bits of code out of the main blog template, recasting them as distinct modules and then calling those modules into the main template as needed.

It's cleaner, easier to modify, and did I mention cleaner? I did, didn't I?

Anyway, as I said in the previous post on this topic, all the microblogging I've been doing on Twitter and Identi.ca has led me to think that the time spent adding tags and categories to "full-sized" blog posts is an impediment to doing more, quicker blog posts.

And if I'm not using the tag and category features of the blog CMS (in this case Movable Type), why have them display with old data?

For now they're not displaying in the home page. I'll check the new entries to see what's happening there and adjust the code accordingly.

I probably won't rebuild the previous 1,000+ entries in this blog because such extensive rebuilds clog up the server like crazy — so I avoid unnecessary rebuilds whenever possible.

See what you're missing by running WordPress instead of Movable Type?

I'm calling this the tip of the year because it's easy to do and dramatically improves the Web-browsing experience in Firefox for users of Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS. I wish I had figured it out years ago because it's a simple way to increase your scrolling speed in the browser.

I asked an open question in this blog yesterday regarding why scrolling in Firefox is so much slower in Fedora than in Ubuntu, and reader Dirk Meijer wrote in that it's due to a user-settable parameter in Firefox:

Is this firefox?

you may want to go to Preferences -> Advanced and uncheck "smooth scrolling"

Sure enough, I went into Edit - Preferences - Advanced, then clicked the General tab.

Under Browsing, the Use Smooth Scrolling box is checked on my Fedora system, but unchecked on my Ubuntu system.

I'd rather have speed over smooth any day, so I unchecked the box in Fedora, and now Firefox works just as quickly in Fedora as it does in Ubuntu.

I've noticed this "issue"/"problem" all the way back to Fedora 9 and CentOS 4.x and 5.x, and I wondered what Red Hat/Fedora was doing to screw up my Firefox "experience."

Had I known that it was so easy to fix, I would have shouted it from the virtual rooftops long before know. Consider this post my web-delivered bout of shouting over what I still consider The Tip of the Year.

I'm looking into Linux Mint as my next possible operating system, and I found this extremely refreshing blog post that the project appears to repeat every month detailing how much it collected in donations (and from whom), what kind of traffic its servers are receiving and how the project is ranking on Distrowatch.

I hate to trot out a cliche (OK, I don't hate it so much, or I wouldn't do it so often), but this kind of openness from Mint is very refreshing.

For more on Linux Mint, try the project's main website.

I'm as fickle as they get. Sure I solve the problems I have in one system or another. But I just as easily think about jumping to another distribution, or even away from Linux entirely to Open- or FreeBSD.

The last few entries here are about my look-see at Fedora, principally the Xfce and LXDE spins.

They look great, but so does Ubuntu Lucid. And when it is working well, I'm happy where I am. Debian? It's like an old, comfortable shoe (albeit one with a major rock in the sole when I tried to upgrade a Lenny installation to Squeeze and killed the whole thing in the process).

I probably should spend some time in Fedora just to have that experience, but the pull of just staying where I am is strong. Ubuntu's not so bad, especially at this point in the release when everything appears to be working.

Fedora seems as fast as anything else, but one thing keeps needling me: It seems that scrolling down a Web page in Fedora is a bit slower than it is in Ubuntu or Debian.

I've noticed this when testing Fedora and CentOS in the past. Could it be my specific hardware (Intel video from the early '00s)? Or is this something everybody else is experiencing?

If you'd be so kind, leave a comment below, telling me whether or not I'm crazy (regarding this particular matter at any rate).

One thing I'm bringing from microblogging on Twitter and Identi.ca to "real" blogging in Movable Type and WordPress is the lack of a real need for categories and tags.

Sure it's theoretically nice to have that tag cloud on the left and the categories going down the side forever on the right.

But the extra effort to check all the category boxes and type in the tags (even with autocompletion) is just too much. I'd rather kick the entries out faster and let searches — either over engines such as Google or this blog's own search box — help readers find the content they want.

In my current state of mind, categories and tags in a blog overcomplicate things. The relative "pureness" of microblogging — no subject line, small size, no categorization/tagging — is something that translates very well to ... should we call it macroblogging?

While I like short posts in regular blogs, I very much realize that I almost never write short. But it's nice to have the option to write short or long, and for now anyway I'm happy to leave the tags and categories behind.

If I continue down this simpler blogging path, I'll hide the tag cloud and category list and clean up this mess (and have more room for the blogroll, I expect).

The Fedora 13 Xfce spin has more applications than the LXDE spin. So far the machine crashed on the screensaver (in Xfce, not in LXDE, and the same thing has been happening with Ubuntu Lucid if I don't choose blanking the screen instead of a random screensaver).

Otherwise it's been running well (and I'm using it right now).

I can't say that Xfce is slower or faster than LXDE in Fedora 13. Right now I'm running the Midori browser in the Xfce spin, which though not in the LXDE could easily be added.

Javascript performance is better in Midori than in Firefox, but I don't see Midori blowing FF out of the water with other Web operations that I'm accustomed to doing.

I have a bit of experience in Xfce, which I've run before quite a few times, and I like seeing things like the Thunar file manager (still super quick and powerful), the Mousepad text editor and Xfce Terminal app. The office-software lineup of Abiword and Gnumeric is in both Xfce and LXDE spins. But Xfce includes the Orage calendar app, whereas the LXDE spin has the Osmo personal organizer.

I'm doing most office-software-related work in Google Docs these days, including calendaring, so I don't really care much about office apps.

The Gigolo app is in both spins. It seems to be a way to explore not just the system's own drives in file-manager fashion but also FTP sites - kind of like the Nautilus file manager in GNOME, which has these added capabilities. Gigolo does seem to work well.

The PCManFM file manager in the LXDE version is pretty good, but again, I really like Thunar and find it as fast or faster than anything else I've ever used (including the ROX Filer).

While the LXDE spin uses Sylpheed for mail, the XFCE spin uses Claws. I still do like to access a couple of mail accounts with IMAP, and I'd have to test both of these. I had been having trouble configuring Thunderbird for my less-than-orthodox mail servers, and those troubles went away with Evolution, the GNOME mail client. And here I'm far enough away from GNOME that I'd have to think pretty hard about which client to use. As it is, my "main" mail is on Gmail, which I find superior to any standard mail client for my use.

The thing to remember about both of these Fedora spins is that it's easy enough to add any or all of the applications from one spin to another. I'm not sure exactly what the LXDE spin's policy on GTK 1/2 apps are, but on my hardware it looks like it'll come down to personal preference and not vast performance differences.

The screensaver issue in the Xfce spin might be a factor. I'll have to experiment a bit to see how this aspect of the Fedora spins shakes out.

Right now, while I love Xfce, I'm leaning toward going with LXDE because it's something new, looks like it's getting the same small-app ecosystem as the one that grew around Xfce, and its an extremely fast operating environment.

One of the things I really like about Xfce in Fedora is the left-most button on the right side of the application windows that allows an app's window to "roll up" and just leave the application header there. You can have lots of little bars sitting there, only opening up the ones you want at that moment.

For my work, I need an image editor that will handle the IPTC tagging in JPEGs, and that means either gThumb (and all the GNOME-ishness it brings) or IrfanView via Wine.

Otherwise both of these spins are extremely capable systems that can do just about all I require. I like the Geany text editor/IDE, and while it's in the Xfce default, I could easily bring it into LXDE, where it won't cause havoc if GTK2 is already there (or even if it isn't).

And remember, I could always run either of these desktop environments in Ubuntu or Debian.

So far the Midori browser has been performing quite well. The more I can do with a non-Firefox browser, the better.

The only "stopper" when it comes to using Fedora is multimedia. You can't so much as play an MP3 without installing the codec, and while Ubuntu prompts you to do this, in Fedora (as in Debian) there's a bit of hunting involved. With Debian there's the Debian Multimedia repository (one of the best things about Debian is this repo). I've heard that RPM Fusion does the same thing for Fedora and Red Hat. If I end up installing one of these Fedora spins, I'll most definitely be looking into that.

I did download an Ogg file in the Xfce spin, and it played fine in the Parole Media Player, an Xfce app I've never heard of before.

The more I think about it, I'd be very happy to have both of these "spins" on one installation, and if there are metapackages for both the Xfce and LXDE spins (and I'm fairly sure there are), that's just what I might do.

So my pre-installation (live CD only) verdict on both the Xfce and LXDE spins of Fedora 13 (available with others at the Fedora Spins page) is that you really can't go wrong with either of these two iterations of Fedora 13 (and by extension F13 itself is looking pretty good).

Once I get to the installer stage, I'm sure I'll have much more to say about Fedora, and I'm already prepared for the user-ID difference between Debian-based distros (first UID is 1000) and Red Hat-based (first UID is 500), and having spent more than a little time with chown (FreeBSD's 1st user is UID 1001 for some reason ...) I have no fear.

Note: The screensaver in Xfce appeared to be redeeming itself. I'll have to do more testing, but it's looking good.

Sure, Ubuntu Lucid is running OK on my aging 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

But I feel the strain of all that gwibber-service/desktop-couch activity in the Ubuntu LTS. And while I'm making fairly regular use of the social-desktop features in Lucid, I'm aware of both the performance hit as well as the decidedly alpha feel of those features — and I'm including the Ubuntu One syncing service in that lot.

So I've been looking around for my next distro.

I've been experimenting with live CD systems such as Tiny Core and Puppy, and I quite like what I see in Debian Squeeze, having tried the alpha in a live image.

But I've run Debian before and will again.

I'm looking for something new. New to me, anyway.

I have enough "power" in my 8-year-old laptop to run GNOME, which I'm doing in Ubuntu, and did in Debian and FreeBSD. And I know full well that it's not GNOME dragging the system down at times so much as Firefox and, in the case of Ubuntu Lucid, all of that background processing that runs the social desktop and the cloud storage features.

When I tried Fedora more than few releases ago (the full, regular GNOME version) on my PowerPC-running Mac G4, besides not configuring the video correctly out of the box, I found it so much slower than Debian that I opted for the latter without a second thought.

But now I'm reconsidering Fedora. For one thing, a lot of people I respect in the Linux community are using it, and all the people I've met who work on the project are very open, friendly and committed to what they're doing.

And the more I learn about how Fedora works so closely and seemingly well with the upstream projects that by the dozens go into creating a full Linux distribution, the more I want to find out what the project itself is doing.

Even the Red Hat connection is looking like more of a positive than a negative. I'd still like to see more of a commitment to desktop Linux from Red Hat (and still wish the company had pursued the Red Hat Global Desktop strategy), but Red Hat's commitment to the Linux kernel, GNOME and much of upstream is admirable.

So I grabbed the ISOs for the LXDE and Xfce spins of Fedora 13. I'd like to spend some time in a lighter desktop environment than GNOME (yes, even though I continue to say that GNOME isn't the problem).

And I'd be lying if I didn't say that I want to get away from all the CPU-, memory- and disk-hogging things that are dragging my Ubuntu Lucid system down. While I like the social desktop, I don't need it as much as I need the extra resources for the rest of my computing tasks.

While I really don't care much whether my window buttons are on the left or right, the whole rancor over that change in Ubuntu, as well as the SABDFL (Self-Appointed Dictator for Life) status and recent pronouncements of Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth aren't exactly warming my heart at this particular moment.

It's complicated. I'm not interested in a distro by and for fanboys (and I hope that's not what Fedora is all about, although I'm sure that element exists in many if not most FOSS projects at this point), and I am interested in an operating environment for "regular" (i.e. non-fanboy) people, which I hope not just Ubuntu but other distros as well will become.

And Fedora's Red Hat connection can be seen in a similar light as Ubuntu's ties to parent company Canonical.

As I say, all of this is a bit complicated.

And when it comes to Ubuntu Lucid, I could run LXDE or Xfce in Lubuntu or Xubuntu, respectively, and dodge all the resource-sapping innovation in the GNOME-driven Ubuntu.

It gets even more complicated and convoluted — in my mind, anway.

For one thing, my liking of long-term-support releases is not something that Fedora is at all about.

But something stable enough to use, combined with continuing innovation — and hopefully not too much breakage or multimedia-codec-hunting pain — might be nice for awhile.

I'm running Fedora 13's LXDE spin from the live image right now, and I was able to use NetworkManager (some GNOME survives) to set up my nameservers. I was able to easily add a networked printer and get the relevant packages installed to run it. And I wrote this blog post in Firefox with minimal trouble.

And the fonts look great. LXDE is super-fast. And I was able to print out of LeafPad (which I've always heard doesn't support printing; guess now it does).

I should probably think about running the full GNOME, and I will test the Xfce spin from the live disc before I commit to one thing or another and move my files over from the backup drive.

But I'm looking forward to something new.

Note: If you came here from a link, here are my first impressions of the Xfce spin of Fedora along with more on the differences between the Xfce and LXDE spins and my "final" thoughts on the live environments.

After my last pronouncement that I had sound in Tiny Core, upon further examination I only had test sound out of OSS through my USB Headphone Set sound module. Real sound from applications eluded me in OSS.

That elusiveness continued with ALSA, so I put Tiny Core on the shelf for awhile. I kept my USB key with my persistent Tiny Core setup, but I spent more time in Ubuntu Lucid and with the Lucid Puppy live CD (which I also recommend).

I did get sound working through ALSA and the USB sound module in Lucid Puppy (AKA Puppy 5).

My frustrations with Ubuntu come and go. Right now I'm in a pretty good Ubuntu place, meaning everything's working pretty well.

But I still want at least one "alternate" system, and Tiny Core was something I still wanted to work.

Since then, while creating a second user account in Ubuntu, I discovered by accident that my Toshiba laptop's long-dead internal sound module was somehow working. I heard creaky sound through the speakers.

A few days later, the speakers themselves stopped working, but the headphone jack does supply audio that I've been pumping into external speakers.

I tried Tiny Core again. I had already removed both OSS and ALSA (easy to do in TC), so I had no sound software at all. I rolled in OSS and Flash and tried a YouTube video in the Minefield/Firefox 3.0.4 browser.

It worked.

I installed mpg123 and played an mp3 file in the console.

Sound was perfect.

Maybe it could be better (or better configured) in ALSA ... but I had sound.

Now I have not one but two very nice alternate-OS setups on my usually Ubuntu-running laptop — Tiny Core 2.11 and Puppy 5.

But why couldn't I mount my Ubuntu Lucid partition with Tiny Core 2.11?

My /home in Ubuntu Lucid is encrypted, so mounting that wasn't a factor, but I figured I could carve out some space in the root partition. And Lucid Puppy had no trouble mounting the / partition and putting its pup_save there.

As far as Tiny Core goes, it took about a minute of Googling (and in the world of Googling, a minute is a long time) to find out that the Linux kernel in Tiny Core 2.11 does not support the ext4 filesystem, which is the default in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid).

I suppose I could convert the ext4 filesystems to ext3, but what I might do is open up space for an unencrypted ext3 filesystem on the hard drive and use that either to share files between Ubuntu and Tiny Core, or to store the TC persistent files, which load more slowly than not from their current home on a 2 GB USB flash drive over USB 1.1 (no USB 2 on this 8-year-old laptop).

Tiny Core remains a sweet and very different operating environment. I like FLTK — with its FLWM window manager and supporting library/toolkit — so much that I'm anxious to try it out in other operating systems. Truthfully I'm not all that sure I have even a tenuous grasp on exactly what FLTK can do.

The Tiny Core tools and packages are great, and I like being able to cleanly remove applications by pulling them out of the /tce/optional directory.

The whole system is fast, very functional and as lean as you want it, given the Tiny Core, which grows less so with each added application/package but is nonetheless extremely efficient in terms of CPU and memory use as well as on drive space.

I'd still like to get sound working through the USB sound module, but since I have it through the laptop's built-in hardware, I'm happy enough to keep on going with Tiny Core.

It's stuff like this that makes Linux fun for me, so I thank the entire Tiny Core community for creating something quite original and truly great.

My Ubuntu rants hold not a candle to this reasoned, impassioned commentary on what's wrong with open-source software in general — and the Ubuntu project in particular — from Benjamin Humphrey, who just happens to be a Ubuntu contributor.

It appears in the nearly never-negative OMG! Ubuntu! blog with the title "Many hands make the light work; few make it shine."

At this point I'll just say that I agree and wish that the open-source community in general would work harder on polishing the apps we have and putting more work into bugs and the user interface and experience, and less into new features.

That's why I called for the current Ubuntu LTS, 10.04, to be a bug-fix release that didn't "innovate" on 9.10.

Ubuntu Lucid seems "stable" enough from a "it doesn't crash" standpoint, but putting dozens of untested new UI features into an LTS release just doesn't pass the smell test for me.

My worry is that the desire to please fanboys with bling ends up costing the project many more potential users who would benefit from a more-thought-out and tightened-up operating environment.

Yep, Benjamin hits this one right on its proverbial head.

One of the hiccups in Bordeaux, a for-profit, costs-$20 implementation of Wine that allows for easy installation of a variety of Windows applications in Unix/Linux environments, is that while installing the IrfanView image editor is clickably easy, users are on their own when it comes to the IrfanView plugins.

In my workflow, the IrfanView plugins are an essential part of the IrfanView experience. That's a fancy way of saying I need the plugins.

I managed to get those plugins installed the last time I installed Bordeaux (and for the record, I'm a paying customer), and along with some incompatibility between the newer Wine base supplied by Bordeaux and the older environment of Debian Lenny, the experience wasn't as smooth as it should be.

In distributions built with newer packages, such as Ubuntu, the Wine supplied with Bordeaux should work well (in Debian all I had to do was use the distro's own, older Wine and all began working).

And with support for easy installation of the IrfanView plugins, Bordeaux should make the installation of Windows applications under Wine even easier than before.

I don't have Wine or Bordeaux running on my relatively new Ubuntu Lucid installation, and with improvements in gThumb I need IrfanView less and less, but I'm thinking about giving Wine/Bordeaux another test anyway ... I'm just not quite there yet.

Thanks to FreeBSD - The Unknown Giant for the link, which reminds me to say that Wine and Bordeaux are available not just for Linux but also for FreeBSD/PC-BSD and Solaris.

Many people have commented both here and elsewhere that you don't need to spend $20 on Bordeaux and that it's easy enough to install Wine and Winetrick s and spend nothing on a Wine implementation. That may be true (though I find pure, unadulterated Wine a bit of a mystery), but Bordeaux does make installing its core list of supported applications extremely easy. That's worth $20 to me. Not necessarily $40, $60 or more — but $20 for sure.

And since that's what Bordeaux is asking, I'm surprisingly OK with it.

I always liked DesktopBSD and feel very strongly that the more BSD-based projects, the better. Now I hear that DesktopBSD, which halted development last July, is now on track to continue as a project.

Thanks to FreeBSD - The Unknown Giant for the link.

According to this much-linked blog post, Ubuntu appears to be headed toward a default without Debian's console-based package-management tool Aptitude (and without tasksel as well) in some kind of bizarre quest to continually pare down the ISO for live-CD use:

Nothing conservative about this Maverick... it's time to bid farewell to your old pals, aptitude and tasksel! At least in the default desktop install anyway, as the minimal and standard ubuntu-meta packages no longer directly depend on them. That's a swingeing cut to the install footprint of 13.5MB! Sure, that may not seem like much given the size of modern hard drives, but consider the impact on mobile install profiles (tablets and the like), smaller SSDs and most importantly, the LiveCD.

One of the arguments is that apt can do most if not all of the things, in the same ways, that Aptitude does.

Especially with the screwed-up way Ubuntu handles the GUI Update Manager, with no icon in the panel and the app itself launching and minimizing itself at the most inopportune times, I find myself using Aptitude more and more for updates (and to manage packages, too).

A lot of experts seem to recommend Aptitude over apt.

I suppose it's not the end of the world, especially since Aptitude will continue to be available in Ubuntu for those who wish to install it. And I have a feeling that Aptitude will creep back into Ubuntu's base as the project makes its way toward the Maverick release in October — set for a numerically pleasing 10/10/10 release date, I believe.

Whether we as users agree with the deviations Ubuntu makes from Debian, in some ways the more the two distros differ, the more it opens up the space for other distributions to do things differently and grab their own share of the community.

I haven't looked in on Debian Squeeze since the last live Alpha image, but like many users I'm anxious to see the direction Debian takes both for the upcoming Stable release and after that. I'm sure in many ways Ubuntu's relentless push for change in its own code has some effect on the upstream projects, including GNOME and Debian itself, but a lot of that depends on how successful Ubuntu is at picking up users via not just the download/burn/install method but increasingly as preloads on machines in the channel.

Maybe I'm missing them, but I don't see Ubuntu closing a lot of big deals with OEMs in either the business or home-user markets.

The campaign to let the non-Linux-user know what a modern distribution is all about — I just don't see it happening very much at the moment.

Google Chrome OS has a shot at changing the hardware/software game, but will its impact be blunted by the iPad? And will all of that noise drown out whatever the rest of the Linux world is doing on the desktop?

At this point in the ramble, I've gotten away from the whole "Who moved my cheese Aptitude?" question.

In the next couple of years, some non-Windows OS will step up the marketing and really begin grabbing some market share. That's the theory anyway. I make no predictions.

It's not like Lucid Puppy — aka Puppy 5 — is the world's best Linux release.

But it's pretty darn good.

And as with previous Puppy releases, expect a new spin with bug fixes sometime in the near future.

I'm still in evaluation mode, and I'm still running the "real" Ubuntu Lucid (with GNOME, Fluxbox, Fvwm and Fvwm Crystal) on this system's hard drive.

But I need an "alternate" system that promises faster response on my aging hardware, offers the applications I need and delivers them in the easiest way possible.

And that works.

Thus far Puppy 5 is doing all of that well.

I managed to get sound via my USB Headphone Set module to work (and to persist after a reboot, something that for some reason didn't work yesterday).

I am able to write to the Ubuntu installation's main partition, which doesn't include the encrypted /home.

I have a recent Firefox 3.6 browser as my "default." Firefox isn't all that much better in the comparatively light Puppy environment than it is in the full-on Ubuntu. But I need it, unfortunately.

Just like in recent versions of CUPS in Ubuntu and elsewhere, detecting and setting up my networked printer was easy.

Flash was already installed. I added the Java runtime with the extremely useful Quickpet version of Puppy's PET package manager. With its simplified offering of the most popular add-on packages for Puppy, I think Quickpet is a great addition to the distro.

I have run OpenOffice on Puppy in the past, usually adding it with an SFS "squash filesystem." These days I'm doing more and more with Google Docs, preferring to store as few documents as possible on my local drive.

However, I still find Web development hard to do with Google Docs. I need to write or modify code, then either FTP it onto the appropriate server or copy/paste it into a CMS. And I still need to deal with images locally, processing and then FTPing them onto the server.

So even though I find it easier to deal with non-code documents in Google Docs, for the HTML and CSS I'm working with on a daily basis there needs to be a better way. For now that way is keeping things on local drives that unfortunately are not networked or shared.

One of the reasons I wanted to run Ubuntu Lucid in the first place was the sharing of any combination of directories and files with other machines via the Ubuntu One cloud sharing service.

The only problem is that file-manager-level sharing in Ubuntu One is only possible with other desktops running Ubuntu Lucid. And I'm using a whole lot of OSes, with Lucid on a sole laptop. I have machines running Debian, Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.4.

Even Dropbox, which allows for syncing of anything in the designated Dropbox directory across machines with OSes that aren't just Ubuntu Lucid, the problem is that I really don't want copies of those files on every machine, syncing as they are modified.

What I'd really like, and what I hope Amazon S3, Google's new cloud service, or even Dropbox or Ubuntu One to become are true cloud-accessible file repositories that look like regular directories/folders/files — sort of like what you (not me, but maybe you, if you understand it, which I don't) can do with fuse. I've heard about a fuse filesystem being deployed on Amazon S3, but if this sort of thing were easy to do, we'd already be doing it.

I do suspect that you can already so this sort of thing with JungleDisk or some other cloud-based service, but if you really could, wouldn't we all be doing it? (Note: It looks like JungleDisk offers this.)

Sorry to get so far off the Lucid Puppy track, but while many Linux/Unix users think cloud-based computing is the worst thing in the world, I continue to believe that a blend of Web-based apps and local apps that access networked files is the wave of the very near future — or should be. And Linux/Unix can, should and probably will be at the forefront of this shift in the way we use computers and store, access and manipulate our data.

In my last entry on the topic, I reveled in getting sound working in Tiny Core Linux 2.11.

Well, I did get sound with OSS, using the osstest utility to play through both my dead internal and not-dead USB external sound modules. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to get sound other than with osstest. And after trying the full ALSA, it wouldn't detect my USB sound module at all.

And ... (there's always another and ...) I couldn't seem to write to the root partition in my Ubuntu Lucid installation on the hard drive with Tiny Core. I had my "persistent" setup on a USB key, but with USB 1.1 it took forever to start up and to shut down.

I decided to give Puppy another try - in this case Lucid Puppy aka Puppy 5, which is built with Ubuntu Lucid packages.

I previously tested the sound and was able to use the ALSA configuration utility to detect and select the USB sound module.

Now I have the Firefox Web browser ... and that's all I've added so far.

Even in Puppy Linux, running from RAM, Firefox 3.6.x runs like crap. It's my hardware that can't handle it. Much like in Ubuntu Lucid proper, the Chromium browser (or any browser that isn't Firefox) will run better. But I need Firefox to do my Web-based work, so I have to deal with it.

I made a pup_save on the hard drive, and I'll see how it performs.

My "major" problem with my previous running of Lucid Puppy was gxine crashing. Now I see that I'm not the only one suffering from this bug. Hopefully all will be fixed in the next Puppy release (or Quirky, for that matter).

I still really like both the concept and execution of Tiny Core. But once I started building up the apps I wanted, it wasn't so tiny. Since it's easier to get sound with Puppy, and since I really like the Puppy application mix, it's just easier to run Puppy as my "secondary" live CD distro, which I'll do for the time being.

The answer is yes. There is a bit of desktop quickness added to my daily computing by using Fluxbox instead of GNOME. In the past I've said that GNOME is not appreciably slower than Xfce, so using one or another of those two environments comes down to preference.

But Fluxbox is faster. You don't get all that GNOME goodness and, especially in Ubuntu Lucid, all the social-desktop and Ubuntu One integration.

But the full-bore Lucid is straining my system's 1.2 GHz CPU and Intel 830m chipset enough that a bit of added performance is more than welcome. And I've been comfortable in Fluxbox and Fvwm in the past, so it's not some kind of computer culture shock.

I'll certainly be returning to GNOME from time to time, and if I happen to acquire some new/newer hardware I'll probably run Ubuntu or Debian with GNOME.

And Debian with GNOME is appreciably faster and lighter than Ubuntu with GNOME — probably even more so since all of this desktop-couch/Ubuntu One stuff was added.

I also think desktop couch is consuming a whole lot of disk space. That won't change unless I get rid of its files. But since I'm committed to keeping GNOME intact on this particular installation, I'll live with the bloat for now. It's not easy on a 20 GB hard drive.

And as I've also said many times, Firefox remains a dog of an application, but switching between tabs has gotten more than a little quicker in the Fluxbox environment.

A recent Google search led me back to a site I hadn't seen in quite some time, Darrell Anderson's Human Readable, which despite a somewhat awkward arrangement of links is one of the deepest, most useful (to me anyway) websites I've seen having to do with actual use of Linux on old hardware by mere mortals.

Darrell's focus in the past has been Slackware, and his Slackware Desktop Enhancement Guide should be required reading for every non-super-geeky Slackware user.

And pay particular attention to the 2010 archive for the four-part Beyond Slackware, the seven-part Finding an Operating System for Old Hardware, and the stunningly long and comprehensive 14-part Learning Debian.

One thing I kind of like about Human Readable is that the entries within each section are in chronological order, rather than — as blogging convention dictates — reverse-chronological order.

So what you do is go to the main page, click on a year, and then click on an entry and start reading.

It's not so easy running Ubuntu but not using GNOME as your window manager.

In my case I have the "full" Ubuntu running, with GNOME and all that comes with it, but I now have Fluxbox installed as an alternate window manager I can select at the login screen instead of GNOME. (I also have Fvwm and Fvwm Crystal, but for now I'm focusing on Fluxbox.)

The problem is that more services than you think are part of the GNOME desktop and won't work if you're not using GNOME.

The reason I like having a "full" desktop environment such as GNOME along for the ride, even if I'm not using it all the time, is that it makes configuring the system easier for mortals like myself. I can always log in with GNOME, or more likely use the many GNOME utilities that are still in the Fluxbox menus, to make changes in NetworkManager, to my sound settings (my USB sound module makes things a bit more complicated), etc.

Even so, you want to have as many non-GNOME applications and utilities as possible so you don't have to "invoke" your system's GNOME-ishness unless you absolutely have to.

In my case I've added the Geany text editor, the Rox-filer file manager ... and not a whole lot else. Not that running gedit or even Nautilus will cause your system to drop to its knees resource-wise, because it won't. I just like having as little GNOME as possible running when I'm not ... actually running GNOME. (And truthfully I'm using Geany more than gedit because the keyboard commands for changing the case of letters — something I do all the time — is handled poorly in gedit and well in ... just about every other GUI text editor, Geany among them.)

One of the many things that doesn't work in non-GNOME Ubuntu is the automounting of USB drives. In the past (and in systems such as OpenBSD), I've done things the "old-fashioned" way, creating directories and using root privileges to mount USB drives.

I did a bit of Googling and came across this Web page that talks about using pmount, ivman and rox-filer to automount USB drives.

In the past I've just used root privileges to mount USB drives, and I suppose I could do that this time as well.

But the gPodder podcast client doesn't want to work with my root-owned USB audio player, so I have to do the mounting as my user.

I could take care of this in /etc/fstab, and I probably should (and probably will).

But I decided to try this pmount/ivman/rox combination, especially since I already know and love the Rox filer.

I couldn't get the ivman portion of the recipe to work. The drives will not automount when plugged in. Nor will Rox mount them from /dev.

But I can use pmount to mount my USB drives in my user account:

$ pmount sdb1

And with the pmount configuration done as in the page above, I can do this without specifying the path to sdb1, or where I want it to mount, which is /media.

So this is a nice little thing, just having pmount work. I don't know what's not making ivman work.

If I decide to go with this setup (Fluxbox + Ubuntu Lucid) long-term, I should probably just get into /etc/fstab and tell it how to mount the drives (and to allow my user account to do it). You know, do it the "real Unix way."

But for "casual" plugging in of USB flash drives, pmount is a nice way to go.