Recently in BSD Category

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything looked purple and pretty good besides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are my "issues" with this install:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall:

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

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

Updates:

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

  option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Gurvich

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

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

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

Here's what I'm hoping for:

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

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

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

Run the operating system and accompanying application software that ...

• Works best on your hardware
• That you feel personally/technically competent about (or want to get there)
• That includes the applications you want and need to use
• Which has an acceptable term of support from the project/vendor for your needs
• Which has an acceptable distance from (or to) the cutting-edge of software for your needs

Michael Larabel of Phoronix told me awhile ago that he was working on adding OpenBSD to his popular benchmarking application Phoronix Test Suite, and now he has an article benchmarking Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze, Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

I don't think anybody expects OpenBSD to blow any doors off in terms of the usual Phoronix benchmarks. The whole mantra of the OpenBSD project is that it's not about raw speed, benchmarks, etc. Instead the focus is on correctness of code, security, cryptography and interoperability across platforms.

Here's what Larabel says in terms of his conclusion (emphasis mine):

There is a lot to gather from these benchmark results that directly compare the "out of the box" performance on Fedora, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and OpenSolaris. If looking solely at the number of first place wins for each operating system, Fedora 12 and Debian GNU/Linux (2010-01-14) were tied with each having seven wins. Behind the Linux distributions, OpenSolaris 2009.06 and FreeBSD 8.0 were tied with each having two wins. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and FreeBSD 7.2 each had one win. OpenBSD 4.6 had not won in any of our 20 operating system benchmarks. However, in this article we are just looking at some areas of the 64-bit OS performance and depending upon the system's configuration, tweaking, compiler changes, and other optimizations these results could certainly shake out quite differently. There are also features in some operating systems that make them more favorable than others depending upon your individual needs.

So in case you were wondering about performance across OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Linux (Fedora and Debian) and even the FreeBSD/Debian mashup, here are some answers.

All said, I remain interested in using FreeBSD and OpenBSD on the desktop as well as the server. I'm looking more closely at FreeBSD than I have in the past because of the project's willingness to support releases for what appears to be quite a few years. There's still a FreeBSD 6.x branch receiving updates, and that means that FreeBSD 8 has quite a life ahead of it.

The biggest stoppers for me with OpenBSD were the lack of binary updates to both base and packages during the life of a release (six months) and my general lack of ability to upgrade from one version of OpenBSD to another, either via an in-place upgrade or reinstall, without killing the whole installation in the process.

For those keeping score, I'm mostly running Debian Lenny right now, but I'm looking at the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 as something I might want to move to later this year.