Recently in OpenBSD Category

I'm not saying I won't go back to using OpenBSD (or even try FreeBSD on the desktop), but I'm sufficiently busy enough and have had a sufficient number of configuration and upgrade instances either take lots of time or go horribly wrong in OpenBSD that I'm continuing to use Linux (these days Ubuntu) on the desktop if, for no other reason, than that upgrading, configuration and adding the software I need is a whole lot easier.

As I've written recently (OK, I probably "tweeted" it), a true BSD distribution, i.e. one that provided a reasonable installer, timely binary updates and a wide choice of desktop environments easily installed is what I think is needed to take BSD (either Open- Free- or Net- ... or DragonFly ...) to the proverbial "next level," meaning use on the desktop by less-than-qualified geeky types (and maybe even "civilians") like myself.

Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular is just so good at taking care of the less technically minded while still providing a powerful, extendable operating system that can be used at just about every level and for every purpose. That's why I'm using it today.

I plucked this from the noise on Twitter:

A new project dubbed AerieBSD is starting, some say as a fork of OpenBSD (and from the looks of the planned architectures, I'd say they're right).

I'm not as enmeshed in the politics of the various BSD projects and their licenses as you might think, and the site isn't giving all that many clues as to WHY it's forking. Look at this (misspellings as they appear on the project Web site):

The ÆrieBSD project strives to produce a free, multi-platform UNIX-like operating system including the best possible free development environment. This includes (in adition to traditional BSD environment) free compilers, assemblers, linkers and other tools for various architectures as well cross-building capabilities.

The only name I can find on the site is that of a German guy named Michael Shalayeff, who's not hiding the fact that there's nothing to see yet ("we're working on our first release"). He is a (former?) developer of OpenBSD. I saw this reference to his work on the hppa port of OpenBSD and CARP.

I guess what Shalayeff is trying to say is that he doesn't want to use tools such as the GCC compiler or the GNU utilities that are not totally free in a BSD-licensing sense ... but I could be wrong. (And OpenBSD has this same goal, I believe.) So it's aiming to be BSD without the GNU (or the GPL).

To get somewhat of a picture of Shalayeff's involvement with OpenBSD and PCC, look at the mailing lists. (To be honest, I'm getting no clues there ...)

Look at the "about" page (emphasis mine, with my comments in footnotes, spelling theirs):

We are a group of individuals who like to hack operating systems. We are not driven by any kind of corporate agenda or market sales and thus can produce the best software ever, properly written. There is not any business or corporate backing (or even sponsourship) for the project. We even pay for it with our ice cream change! Since our time and resources are limited we use lots of software developed by other peoples and projects. Here is what our goals are (not necessarily in the order of priority):

* First of all hacking shall be fun and thus we resent any sort of political gaming and ego worshipping inside the project¹. If you want to be famous and naked -- here be a wrong place for you.

* Henceforth developers are the only real value that we have and this is who the project is for².

* Be open to the community and provide transparency of how the project works³.

* Provide free and functional best possible development environment. This includes free access to all source code, free development tools (compilers, assemblers, linkers, debuggers, text formatting tools, etc), various libraries and documentation.

* Support various hardware platforms (see Hardware page).

* Implement common standards.

* Pay attention to security and correctness⁴.

* Provide a stable release cycle⁵, although right now we are working on our first release (;

To keep the code free we prefer code licensed with ISC or 2- or 3-clause Berkeley style licenses. GPL is not really acceptable in the tree as through the years it has proven to be alot of trouble and counter-progressive.

OK, here are the footnotes (this is turning out to be easier to explain than I thought):

¹ I assume they're referring to what I call the "benevolent dictatorship" of OpenBSD, which was founded and now run by Theo de Raadt. The wording suggests "Theo doesn't like me/hates me/hates my code," or "my asbestos undies are wearing out."

² The "developers, developers, developers" mantra isn't just a Steve Ballmer thing. Everyone in the OpenBSD project is very open about that fact that the OS is coded by the developers, for the developers, and anybody else is free to use it as they wish, but if they want a certain feature or other, they best get to coding it themselves. And while everybody involved in OpenBSD thinks (and rightly so) that the OS is important to vast numbers of people, they as developers are pretty much scratching their own itch when it comes to their work. So ... I take this to mean, "We're just like OpenBSD, except we're in charge, and not Theo."

³ The whole thing about openness and transparency ... OpenBSD seems as open as they come. The whole tree can be seen by anybody at any time, everything is battled over in the mailing lists ... so it's more "we're just like OpenBSD minus Theo."

⁴ "Security and correctness (of code)" — again, right out of the OpenBSD playbook.

⁵ "Stable Release Cycle" means that, just like OpenBSD, we want it to be released like clockwork, every time ... so again, "just like OpenBSD minus Theo."

So what is AerieBSD and what will it become? I have no idea. If anybody out there knows anything, please post a comment on this entry.

Historical perspective: OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD. Matthew Dillon's DragonFlyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. I guess you could say that all the current BSDs are forks of the earlier BSD projects, principally 4.4BSD-Lite and 386BSD.

And you might not say that Linux is forked from Minix, it was certainly inspired by it.

Related:

• AerieBSD mentioned in the DragonFlyBSD blog
  
• AerieBSD mentioned in the Trivium blog

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

This entry from the OpenBSD-bugs mailing list looks surprisingly like my own problem with X in 4.5 (even though this person is using a VIA video chip and I have an Intel chip).

Morale of this story: I should've checked this out before I gave up on getting 4.5 working on my Toshiba laptop.

Other morale of this story: I should be running -current.

There's been plenty of hue, cry and worse about problems with Intel graphics chips and Ubuntu 9.04.

But the trouble with X and Intel has been getting some attention, too:

http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/openbsd-tech/2009/1/27/4828624

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=124022497415733&w=2

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=124159792429777&w=2

honing in:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=124161045215563&w=2

easier answer:

xorg.conf DEVICE section

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "DDC2" "false"

I'll keep this quick. I followed the advice of Nathan from OpenBSD101 and replaced my upgraded OpenBSD 4.5 installation with an entirely new, reinstalled system.

That took all of 10 minutes.

I followed the advice of my friend Denny and was able to keep my /home partition intact.

And all seemed well when I booted back into my shiny, new OpenBSD 4.5 desktop. X looked great. I saw a brief "artifact" in the form of a couple words out of place in Firefox (yep, I did have to reinstall EVERY app). But all did seem OK.

Until I quit X.

It wouldn't start again. Segmentation faults? Yep. Curiously, my root user could restart X. Just not my user. The system kept creating .Xauthority files and leaving them in my /home directory. I think one of my old dot-files in my /home directory is wreaking some kind of havoc with X. If that's all that's going on, that is.

I shelved the OpenBSD laptop for the time being, but next move is to create a new user account with a new, clean /home directory. Then I'll see how X runs.

Right now I have the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop running. I added my go-to light image editor, MtPaint. I reconfigured the Mail icon to start Thunderbird instead of Evolution.

And I used the Wolvix live CD to run Gparted and greatly shrink my Windows XP partition and increase the size of my Linux root and /home partitions. Eventually I'll wipe XP from this drive. It's very much unpatched, and I really don't need it.

I also turned off Compiz. Aside from stealing CPU and memory that I expect I'll need, it makes me a bit nauseous to see the screen sliding by like that. Yep, Compiz gives me motion sickness. You read it here first.

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

OpenBSD 4.4 basically "saved" me and one of these marginal Toshiba laptops (both were destined for the garbage) last November when I could barely get an install CD of any type to boot. The install floppy in OpenBSD enabled me to quickly set up a system that worked quite well and did almost everything I needed it to do. And stability was almost a given. I rarely had a problem that wasn't inherent to OpenBSD itself (such as the difficulty of installing Java, nothing past Flash Player 7, the extra steps required to properly configure things such as CUPS).

Since the system ran so well — just like Ubuntu 8.04, video on this Intel-based system ran perfectly with no xorg.conf — I kept it going for the entire six months of the OpenBSD 4.4 release's life.

As those who use OpenBSD know, upgrading the operating system is not as easy as it is in your average Linux distribution. It pretty much comes with the territory that a -release upgrade requires preparation, following instructions, and a bit of manual command-line work. Many times I've heard — both in OpenBSD and in Linux for that matter — that it's easier and cleaner to do a full reinstall rather than an in-place upgrade.

I will still try a full reinstall of OpenBSD 4.5. And I'd like to try running -current — the OpenBSD development branch that can be regularly updated and which is famously stable despite the "development" tag.

But right here, right now, I can't spend weeks diagnosing my X issues (briefly, there's some funky junk hanging from the cursor, and "artifacts" linger on the screen, which isn't redrawn fast enough/often enough to make X usable). The same thing turned me away from Debian Lenny on this and my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in the months before the then-Testing distro went Stable. Because of my affection for Debian (still one of my very favorite operating systems), I spent weeks trying to diagnose the problem before realizing that dozens of other distros relieved me of the need to obsess (unsuccessfully) over it.

Right now the Gateway, used by our 5-year-old dual-boots Ubuntu 8.04 for her and CentOS 5.3 just because it runs so extremely well on that particular laptop.

And for months now I've had this other Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 as a backup. I have Java installed, which I do need. Flash, too. The Opera Web browser.

Today I added Inkscape, Thunderbird, gFTP and Gparted.

On the OpenBSD laptop, I had about 1 GB of e-mail in Thunderbird. It makes rsyncing the box such hell that I'm thinking of writing a script that EXCLUDES the Thunderbird files just so the rest of the backup doesn't take so damn long ... but I digress.

I figured out how to bring my Thunderbird settings and mail over to the Ubuntu machine. I did the same with my Firefox bookmarks.

-- Begin tutorial:

Moving bookmarks from one Firefox 3 installation to another:

• Since Firefox now uses the SQlite database to store/organize its bookmarks, simply moving the bookmarks.html file from one Firefox 3 installation to another will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You need to do it another way, which I describe right here. First, grab the bookmarks.html file from your old FF installation and put it somewhere in your /home directory where you can easily find it.

• In the Firefox 3.0 installation where you want to IMPORT the bookmarks, go to the Bookmarks tab and click on/choose Organize Bookmarks.

• Click on the Import and Backup drop-down menu and click Import HTML.

• Then navigate to the bookmarks.html file from your old FF 3 installation (you have moved it over already, haven't you?) and click it to bring it into your new installation.

• Note: In Ubuntu at least, this process WON'T allow you to see hidden files or directories, so before you begin, copy your old bookmarks.html file to a place in your home directory where you don't need to go into your old installation's .mozilla directory, for instance.

• FYI: In both of my Firefox 3 installations, the bookmarks.html file is located here:

  /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html

  In the above example, "username" is your actual username, and the eight x's are the unique alphanumeric prefix that Firefox gives to your "default" directory under /.mozilla/firefox/
  

-- End tutorial.

-- Resume rant.

OK, so I'm fully operational in Ubuntu at this point. My respect and admiration for the developers and users of OpenBSD remains, and I hope to get the other Toshiba fully operational under OpenBSD 4.5 as soon as possible.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say I was relieved to have, in Ubuntu, a machine and system that easily updates all of its software with a few clicks and provides me with what — at this point — is a trouble-free working environment.

Of course that could all change. I'll see over the next week how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS performs on this hardware, with my chosen applications and for the tasks I have.

I could start the distro-hopping merry-go-round and go back to Debian, try out Slackware, ZenWalk, etc., but right now if Linux in this form does what I need it to do (not crash, run acceptably fast, wash, rinse, repeat), I'll be sticking with Ubuntu as long as it fills the bill.

I don't begin to fully understand how computer networking works, but I can pretty much hack my way through it. (My networking "goal" is to set up VNC over the Internet ... but that's light years ahead of where I am today.) And I'm sure I've had this very same problem before (and should probably just try to find an earlier blog entry with the very same problem/solution instead of reinventing a very squeaky, annoying wheel with all you dear readers.

But if I'm having this problem again, chances are some of you might have it, too. And I don't think it's confined to OpenBSD. This could potentially crop up in any number of Linux distributions.

Here's the problem: For the past few days, my OpenBSD laptop has been slow as sludge in the browser (Firefox and Opera are the same in this regard).

But a speed test or a download of a large file shows no connection problem or speed problem at all.

So what is making my Web browsing so slow?

The answer: A bad nameserver in my /etc/resolv.conf file.

You see, I don't use this laptop in a single location. I have it at home, at the office, at Starbucks, and any number of places in between where I connect either wirelessly or with wired Ethernet.

And I usually do it with dynamic IPs, meaning I have OpenBSD set to get a dynamic IP address from the router providing me with networking, be it my home router or any other.

And my home router, a recent Netgear model, doesn't just pass through the two nameservers from my ISP that I have programmed into it. Instead it gives my laptop the nameserver address 192.168.1.1 (the same IP address as the router itself). I assume that the router is making some kind of translation and pushing the nameserver data through the 192.168.1.1 IP address to my laptop.

For the most part this works. And forgive me if the following explanation is either totally wrong or just incomplete. I'm explaining it the way I understand it, and I welcome your clarification and correction:

Usually when a router sets up a dynamic connection, it sends the router's gateway IP to the local machine, assigns the machine its own IP address and provides nameserver data (i.e. the IP address of the nameserver) as well.

So the local machine now knows the router/gateway address (and subnet), local IP address and nameserver address.

But ... one of the networks to which I connect is a bit old school. The router gives me a dynamic IP but doesn't send nameserver data. It assumes that the local machine already has nameserver data entered into the system and doesn't modify /etc/resolv.conf at all. Hence my old nameserver IP address — 192.168.1.1 — is still at the top of /etc/resolv.conf, with my "real" DNS nameserver IPs below it.

And the reason it takes so long for Web pages to appear is that the system is trying to resolve every alphanumeric HTTP address through a DNS server that on this other local network doesn't even exist.

Once I deleted the nonexistent nameserver address from my /etc/resolv.conf and had two "good" nameservers at the top of the file, everything started flowing as fast as it should.

Analysis: This problem stems from using DHCP to connect at multiple physical sites, and the slight differences in the DHCP protocol at those various locations is what's making my Web browsing slow down when /etc/resolv.conf is not properly configured for a given location.

The best "solution" is to always connect with a static IP on the router that doesn't transmit new nameserver IPs to my client computer.

In OpenBSD as I have it configured, I do all my network "tweaking" with text files, principally /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hostname. (in my case /etc/hostname.rl0 /etc/hostname.wi0 and /etc/hostname.rum0 for the three wireless interfaces I have, one wired and two wireless; yes, the BSDs deal with networking a bit differently than Linux, and I've learned a lot by doing all of this manually).

I generally have each "hostname" file filled with a few lines for the various routers I use (with appropriate DHCP or static IP info and any SSID names and WEP or WPA keys needed), and I "pound out" (or "comment out") the lines I don't need. The problem is that I don't keep as close of an eye on /etc/resolv.conf, which is being changed by some of these DHCP servers and not by others.

Without any GUI tools such as the NetworkManager in GNOME, which I've used in Ubuntu and Debian, I either need to be much more mindful of what my configuration files contain at any given time, or I need to write/beg/borrow/steal some shell scripts that allow both the /etc/hostname.X files and /etc/resolv.conf to be modified by me when I decide to connect to one network or another. For instance, I could have the script give me a menu of networks and then modify the configuration files appropriately.

As it is, in Debian and Ubuntu, I often had to go to the NetworkManager to pick a new "location," of which I had many set up just like in this script I envision.

If only there was such a tool already in OpenBSD that would do this for me without needing GNOME, KDE or .... It could already be there and I just don't know about it.

I fondly remember the netconfig script in Slackware, which is one of the simple but supremely useful things I love about that Linux distribution. I'd love something like that in OpenBSD, but hacking into the text files isn't that big of a deal.

And I'll probably avoid the one local network that has DHCP but doesn't send its own nameserver IPs to the client.

I decided to start using Soft Updates on my FFS partitions in OpenBSD. I'm still running version 4.4 of OpenBSD (still waiting for my CDs to arrive and for time to figure out how to do the upgrade).

According to the portion of the FAQ cited above, using soft updates on a Unix-style Fast File System improves disk performance.

You can really see it, supposedly, in disk-intensive applications such as servers, and since all I'm doing is running a desktop (and at the moment trying to compile as little as possible), I don't expect to really "feel" an improvement, though that could very well happen.

Here is the part of Kirk McKusick's explanation of soft updates that made me want to use them:

In addition to performance enhancement, soft updates can also maintain better disk consistency. By ensuring that the only inconsistencies are unclaimed blocks or inodes, soft updates can eliminate the need to run a filesystem check program after every system crash. Instead, the system is brought up immediately.

Soft updates are invoked in the /etc/fstab file that brings up the various filesystems when you boot your Unix machine. Also see the man page for mount for a little more information.

I was already going into my /etc/fstab because I wanted to put the information for mounting a USB flash drive into the file to make it easier for me to mount the drive when I have it plugged in. Now all I have to do is:

$ sudo mount usbdrive

and the drive is mounted. I chose "noauto" as an option in /etc/fstab because I don't always have the drive plugged it. If you wish to mount a drive every session that's always connected, feel free to leave noauto out of your fstab.

Here's what my /etc/fstab looks like now (with the softdep option added to all the FFS partitions):

/dev/wd0a / ffs rw,softdep 1 1
/dev/wd0h /home ffs rw,nodev,nosuid,softdep 1 2
/dev/wd0d /tmp ffs rw,nodev,nosuid,softdep 1 2
/dev/wd0g /usr ffs rw,nodev,softdep 1 2
/dev/wd0e /var ffs rw,nodev,nosuid,softdep 1 2
/dev/sd0i /home/steven/usbdrive msdos rw,noauto,noatime 0 0

Note: since the USB drive is formatted with the FAT filesystem and not OpenBSD's FFS, I can't use soft updates on it. I could reformat it as a native FFS drive, but since I'm using it with my other, non-OpenBSD machines, I need to keep it FAT.

I've written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol' GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware.

In last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about, And in the latest Distrowatch, the idea of running "minimal Xubuntu (and Ubuntu)," is discussed.

Basically, the idea is that you use the regular Xubuntu CD but instead of the full install, you start with a command-line-only system and build it up from there. It's something that many Debian users have been doing for years (and which I'm done a couple times myself): start with what in Debian is called the "standard" install (and purposefully NOT including the "Desktop" group of packages), then use apt or Aptitude to build up from there, adding only what you want. You start with X and then build up from there.

This week's Distrowatch article included some timed benchmarks, as well as a table of how much memory is used in Debian 5 with Xfce, the standard Xubuntu, the minimal Xubuntu and Xubuntu with the same packages as Debian with Xfce.

You save a lot of time and RAM with the leaner Xubuntus.

In running Ubuntu vs. most other systems with leaner desktop environments, you can see right away by running the top utility in a terminal. In Ubuntu 8.04, I start out the session with over 100 processes. Right now, in OpenBSD 4.4 with Xfce 4.4 — and with the Opera browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, a terminal window, a couple Mousepad editor windows and way more Xfce widgets than I need (they eat about 10MB of RAM each, so I'm probably going to turn off most of them soon), I only show 53 processes in top.

And when I'm running the default Fvwm2 window manager in OpenBSD, I probably start the session with between 20 and 30 processes (I'll have to check on that). Just running the console before starting X, there are less than 20 processes running (again, I'll check and confirm).

From my experience, Xfce in Debian and Slackware is more like it is in OpenBSD as I have it configured and less like in Xubuntu.

The "problem," although I really don't see it as such, with Xubuntu is that a whole lot of GNOME services are running. The same is true in the KDE-based Kubuntu. The Ubuntu team keeps a lot of the services the same, everything from the Synaptic package manager to the Network Manager, so the experience across the various Ubuntu derivatives is more similar than not.

And I do remember being jarred a bit after installing both the Xfce and KDE versions of Debian. I never could get used to the graphical package manager in KDE. (Kpackage? That's my guess.) And in the Xfce version of Debian, you have to use apt or Aptitude (but you could add Synaptic with these very utilities if you really, truly missed it).

I did use Debian with Xfce for a good period of time, and that provided me with the opportunity to learn more about Aptitude, which more than a few users prefer over apt due to Aptitude's record-keeping ability. (I guess that means Aptitude writes more log files, but I never really looked into it that closely.)

But as I said in my last entry on the topic, If you install Slackware but leave out all the KDE sets, you still end up with a bigger installation than if you use Debian with Xfce. And as I said then, you even get OpenOffice, compared to no office suite in Slackware, and still the install for Debian is smaller. That doesn't really matter for most instances, but this particular install needed to fit on a 3 GB hard drive, and that's pretty tight for many distributions.

Not to hate on Slackware at all. I do grumble about not having as many tools to manage the box when you choose not to install KDE (and I may indeed do this very install in the near future because I still love Slackware and believe I'm better equipped to deal with it now than ever). And while I'm not happy about having to search for prebuilt binary packages or use Slackbuilds for some of the apps I need, Slackware is still a super-fast Xfce system. In fact, Slackware is my No. 1 system for when I (or you) do want to run KDE.

(Small aside: Slackware does include the Koffice suite in the KDE sets. If at the time I was using Slackware the heaviest — the 12.0 days — Kword in particular ran better, I very well could've stuck with it. I can't say anything about more recent Koffice builds, but I haven't heard about it getting much better, not that I've heard much at all. I did end up adding Abiword to my Slackware install with binary packages from Robby Workman's site.)

And if you want to take the time during the install, you can go through Slackware file set by file set, package by package, and install exactly what you want from the CDs/DVDs. So you can have a truly custom installation out of the box without needing to use a network mirror. (Caveat: It seems as if this would take forever to do.)

I don't think you can do the same thing with apt in Debian, but you certainly can start with the minimal or "standard" install (I think some just do the absolute base and don't even use the whole "standard" list of packages) and then build slowly up from there.

Before I lose the thread of exactly what I wanted to say about Xubuntu. I don't know if I spelled it out in the last entry, but in my tests, Xubuntu doesn't really give you much of a speed advantage over standard Ubuntu. I did used to really like the look of Xubuntu; around the 7.04/7.10 era, when I ran a lot of Xubuntu, I really liked the way they had Xfce set up, from the color scheme to the panels (when I could get the panels to stick on the screen ... another story).

But once I saw how Xfce ran in other distributions, I never really looked back. If you prefer the way Xubuntu looks and works over Ubuntu, it's a legitimate choice, but I don't think you'll save a lot of CPU or RAM by choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu.

However, if you really like Ubuntu/Xubuntu and have a compelling reason for using it over Ubuntu — perhaps your hardware just likes Ubuntu more, maybe you want to run the LTS of Ubuntu, or there are some packages that either you can't get in Debian or are more up to date in Ubuntu — doing one of these minimal Ubuntu/Xubuntu installs can be worth it.

As for me, things are going very well in OpenBSD 4.4. I'll probably upgrade when my CD set arrives. And my Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba laptop is also running well.

Ubuntu maintenance aside: On our girl's Gateway laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, it crashed over the weekend (most probably a hardware issue; possibly a flaky power-supply plug) and I had a corrupted root filesystem. I used "recovery mode," and was able to see the dmesg on the terminal. The system dropped me into a root shell, I fsck'ed the root filesystem, which in my case goes like this:

# fsck /dev/sda2

And after that I rebooted and everything was back to normal. I thought that running a journaling filesystem (ext3 in this case) meant you didn't have to fsck, but in this case I most definitely needed to do so. My recent forays into fsck in OpenBSD are also due, I believe, to hardware issues; every once in awhile this Toshiba laptop (again, I have two identical Satellite 1100-S101 models) dies right at the beginning of the boot, no matter what the OS, and in the case of OpenBSD, I easily fsck the root filesystem and commence booting.

So ... what I'm getting around to saying is that I can easily see pulling the hard drive from one of the Toshiba laptops, shoving in a new one and using the entire drive for either Debian or Slackware and doing a long-term test of whichever distro I end up choosing.

Endnote: My complaints still stand about distro reviews — including my own — being nothing more than cursory looks at how a system installs and whether or not the hardware worked and not much more.

I think a lot of this discomfort with quickie reviews stems from my own decision to do much less distro-hopping. I tend to use distributions/projects that offer a lot of packages, a lot of flexibility, plus longevity and relative stability. The operating system must support most or all of the applications I need to get my work done. And since I'm not running a lot of test machines at the moment, anything I do in terms of distro/project testing needs to serve these goals as well as hold my 1 GB of Thunderbird e-mail and about 1 GB of "other" files.

So I've stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 on two laptops (both in fairly frequent use), OpenBSD 4.4 on one laptop (heavy use), OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13 on one laptop (light use — this one needs an upgrade; it ran Debian before and probably will again) and Debian Etch on two desktops (light use).

I used to get a lot of traffic with quickie distro reviews, especially when I managed to get a Distrowatch link. I do miss the traffic, but I didn't feel right cranking out a review within the first day/week after an install. It's certainly important to let people know how goes the installation of an operating system, but I just didn't have the time or desire to burn dozens of ISOs and do installs all the time.

And since my days of distro-hopping, I've depended on FOSS operating systems and applications more than ever before for my day-to-day work. And between Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Debian, I've found a nice combination of comfort (for me as a user/technician) stability, flexibility, application availability and, for the most part, relative speed.

I know I spent half of this entry on how slow Ubuntu can be, but I've run MANY distros that appear to be much slower; I think Ubuntu hits more of a happy medium than others when it comes to the bloat/features equation, I just run hardware that's old enough to need all the help with CPU, RAM and disk space I can get.

The real endnote: The preceding few paragraphs attempted to explain why I'm uncomfortable with the standard distro review, both as a writer and a reader. I hope I got the point across at least a little. When you see one of these reviews, you'll know it. Not that there's no value in rolling a new Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva/Slackware/etc. distribution onto a box and writing about what's different/better/worse. If the writer has been running a given distro/project all along, I tend to take more notice even of a quickie review. But if you run, let's say Slackware, throw the latest Ubuntu on your box and talk all about how Ubuntu is different from Slackware and how everything's in the wrong place, and you do this a few hours after the installation, that I feel is usually of very little value.

So the next time I do this very thing, feel free to write a comment at what a hypocrite I am.

Once I filled up a few screens complaining about how LogMeIn failed me in OpenBSD, I was too far along to report how I feel about Ubuntu 8.04 after not booting into it for almost a month, during which time I used a nearly identical Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4, lately using the Xfce desktop environment.

OK, there is a difference: The OpenBSD Toshiba 1100-S101 has 768 MB of RAM. The Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba 1100-S101 has 512 MB.

It makes a huge difference. As does running GNOME and Ubuntu instead of Xfce and OpenBSD.

For one thing, I don't think the OpenBSD laptop has needed to use the swap partition even once in four intense months of work. True, it has more RAM.

In Ubuntu with less RAM, but still 512 MB, not less than that, I'm using tons of swap. That slows things considerably. As I reported in a recent entry, I don't think Ubuntu in its default state (GNOME) is all that usable in 256 MB of RAM. And one of the things that was stressing the system is/was a Synaptic update.

In 25 days of not booting the laptop, I still only had 46 packages to upgrade. That's one of the advantages of the LTS version of Ubuntu. I bet the 8.10 and 9.04 releases, especially the latter, have had hundreds of package updates in that same period of time (especially since 9.04 was only recently released).

So I'm happy that Ubuntu didn't make me roll in 100-200 new packages after almost a month, and I still appreciate the easy upgrades that Linux in general and Debian/GNOME/Ubuntu offer in particular. Upgrading OpenBSD isn't anywhere near as easy, and the whole process is as apples-oranges as it gets when compared to an apt-fueled Linux distribution.

But just from a look-and-feel standpoint, using Ubuntu with GNOME on this hunk of hardware (1.3 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM) is measurably slower than using OpenBSD with Xfce on a nearly identical-except-for-the-memory hunk (1.3 GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM).

So that extra 256 MB of RAM in the OpenBSD Toshiba makes quite a difference, as does running Xfce instead of GNOME ... or that would appear to be the case. I can't account for every process, every service running in both of these operating systems.

And even though I have the OpenBSD 4.5 CD set on its way to my mailbox as we speak, I'm considering ... CONSIDERING ... spending the next few months in a Linux environment (maybe this very distro, Ubuntu) just to see a) how I get along in it and b) how it and I respond as I beat the hell out of it in the course of my day-to-day work.

About the only operational difference between Ubuntu and OpenBSD at this point (forgetting the differences in package/upgrade management) is the state of Flash video on both platforms. I'm not doing much work in video these days, so not having Flash 9 or 10 in OpenBSD isn't as much of a burden as it could be if I were doing more video work.

And I've pretty much accepted that if I don't run -current in OpenBSD, my applications will be frozen in time for the six months between releases. As long as everything works, I'm OK with that — although it does take quite a mental adjustment to go from apt-get update/apt-get upgrade or its equivalent in Aptitude or Synaptic (or get-slapt/Gslapt, RPM/yum, etc.) every day or every week to ... not doing that in OpenBSD. Yeah, I should probably run -current and see how that goes ...

But ... I could transfer over my considerable hunk of files to this other laptop, which also has the distinct advantage of a non-broken sound chip (with which I could not only watch more video but actually, you know, hear the sound that goes with it.

Or ... I could give Debian or Slackware (with Xfce in both cases) another try. But I'm a little wary after all the video issues I've had in my last few installs of both Linux stalwarts. That's the thing about Ubuntu: On my hardware, it tends to work without fuss.

I booted the Toshiba 1100-S101 with Ubuntu 8.04 for the first time in 25 days, according to the Update Manager. Or at least it was 25 days since I updated the install.

Either way, I've been running a nearly carbon copy of this laptop with OpenBSD 4.4, lately with the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, and I'd gotten quite used to it. While I still had only Flash Player 7 through the Opera browser in OpenBSD, I did have the Java runtime installed, so I thought ... thought I could use all the Web-based applications I need to use that require Java. Thought.

Here I am, 10 p.m., working at home, and I discover that LogMeIn just doesn't like OpenBSD. Even in Linux, when you don't have Java you can still use LogMeIn. It's way, way, way better with Java, which is why I installed Java both in Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. My other Java-based applet I use, a fairly simple uploading mechanism (for which I could use FTP but the company I'm dealing with has it hooked up so images take forever to process when you FTP them but process immediately when you use the Java app ... so you can guess which one I've begrudgingly turned to), and that works fine with the Java in OpenBSD as well as in Ubuntu.

But LogMeIn ... oh, LogMeIn ... you piss me off. I set up, tested and used Java in Ubuntu 8.04 to control a remote Windows desktop with LogMeIn Free (and I'm announcing right here, right now, if I can get LogMeIn to work in OpenBSD, I will stop being a freeloader and buy your damn service ... but I'm not opening up my wallet just yet.

Anyhow, I'm merrily doing my work on the OpenBSD Toshiba laptop when I fire up LogMeIn in Firefox. I try to bring up my remote machine and I get a blank screen. It appears from my feeble attempts at figuring out the problem that LogMeIn is trying to use ActiveX even though I'm not running it on a Windows box or using Internet Explorer. LogMeIn doesn't need ActiveX. It doesn't even need Java (though, as I say, it's damn near unusable without it). Don't get me wrong, it works great from Windows box to Windows box with ActiveX. It's nearly as seamless with Java, and thus I have Java — with the express purpose being the enjoyment of said seamlessness.

But I had no LogMeIn. So I did my work, doing everything as best as I could. Then I booted into the Windows XP partition on my OpenBSD laptop. Yep, it came with Windows loaded, and I just shrunk the NTFS partition and slapped OpenBSD 4.4 on the newly freed half of the hard drive (and yes, dividing a 20 GB drive between XP and OpenBSD doesn't exactly give you a ton of room in either OS).

My XP partition even has Service Pack 3 and IE7. So I fired up IE, allowed it to install ActiveX (is it ActivX or ActiveX — 'e' or 'no e' ... I have no idea).

LogMeIn ran great in XP, I did my thing, turned off the laptop and went to bed at midnight.

The next day, which is right now, I pulled out the Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba, cranked it on and tried out LogMeIn. Works great in Ubuntu with Java.

For the Ubuntu update, wait for the next entry ...

For the first time, I decided to purchase the OpenBSD CD set to both support the project and make it easier for me to upgrade my two OpenBSD laptops and install the OS on some new boxes.

I've had been using OpenBSD off and on since version 4.2, but only in the past five or so months has OpenBSD 4.4 been my main operating system on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop. And it has performed admirably, doing everything I need to do, with the exception being able to view Flash video that requires anything newer than the Flash Player 7 that runs in the Opera Web browser. And since I'm not doing all that much work with video at present, I haven't missed Flash 9 or 10 that much. Moreover, I recently discovered http://keepvid.com and the ability to turn many Flash videos into MP4s (including everything on YouTube, which is viewable in Flash 7 anyway) and watch them with Mplayer, even that issue is more of a ... nonissue than ever.

All the apps I want/need, from Firefox to Thunderbird, OpenOffice to the GIMP, gFTP and Pidgin, the Opera browser, Geany text editor, and the thus-far little-explored Inkscape and Blender (the latter of which I hope to use not as a 3D animation app but as a video editor) — they all installed easily and run well. I've also recently added the Xfce 4.4 desktop, but I still see much value in the default Fvwm2 window manager, with which I divide my time in the OS.

Never mind that the sound chip in this particular laptop is dead. I do have an identical Toshiba laptop that does have working sound (and I'd like to move the install from this Toshiba to the other).

Things in OpenBSD aren't always as easy to get working the way I want as they are in Linux. Everything is more "locked down." I needed to do more to get CUPS working, but adding the proper script in the proper place, and then configuring my printers was much more valuable learning experience and less drudgery than you'd think.

And networking — a specialty of sorts for the OS — is excellent, made all the more so by the detailed man pages and FAQ. And when those don't go far enough, I use marc.info to search the OpenBSD mailing lists (especially misc) for tips on how to get my system running properly. There's also the newish Daemon Forums, plus the valuable news from Undeadly, the OpenBSD Journal.

The OpenBSD community may have a somewhat prickly reputation, but I've found dozens of helpful people out there who are happy to help you (especially if you've done your homework, and by that I mean man pages ... FAQ ... mailing lists ...).

Amid all of this, I'm not saying I'm 100 percent going to stick with OpenBSD as my main OS. But with wireless networking working so well, an easy installation (yes, it's easy once you've done it a few times; quick, too) that can be done with a CD, a floppy (that's how I did it on this laptop) or via PXE boot over the network, some 5,000 packages in i386 (and with a package quality that is of an extremely high level — meaning the packages work well and are rarely broken — along with excellent package management in the base system) and the choice of either a six-month upgrade cycle (like a certain Linux OS you might have heard of ... or maybe not so much like it due to the incremental and conservative nature of OpenBSD development) or following the -current tree, which actually aims to be more stable than the twice-yearly releases ... (sentence WILL wind to a close ... I promise), there's a lot to like in OpenBSD on the desktop when it comes to what I need in an OS, and that is the ability to get work done in a solid and stable environment.

I've had to wrap my head around -release / -stable / -current instead of Debian's apt-get update/upgrade, but in turn I start with a minimal system (just like Debian's non-desktop "standard" install but unlike Ubuntu), add exactly what I want, and thus far have excellent X performance (something that Debian hasn't given me in the Lenny era) and a rock-solid environment in which to run the apps I need.

My CDs haven't arrived yet, but when they do, I'll let you all know.

In OpenBSD, Flash support isn't exactly something to crow about. Flash Player 7 is all that works due to subsequent Linux Flash players needing ALSA sound support, a feature none of the BSD projects possess. And that player only works in the Opera Web browser — and only on i386.

But it turns out that you can watch Flash video in OpenBSD on any platform that runs Mplayer. And this clever hack is something that even Linux, Windows and Mac users can benefit from.

Here's how to do it: While perusing the OpenBSD mailing lists, I saw this post about KeepVid.

Basically what you do is enter the URL of the video in the proper box at http://keepvid.com, and then you get an MP4 video to download. Then you can play that video with Mplayer.

YouTube videos do play in OpenBSD's Opera with Flash, since they don't require Flash 9 or 10, but again, if you have a non-i386 machine (or don't want to run Opera) and want to watch them, this is a great way to do it.

Three things:

1) Not all Flash content has an easily grabbable URL, so I'm not sure http://keepvid.com will work in those instances.

2) Turning a Flash video into an MP4 means you now have a copy on your local machine that you can keep and watch at your leisure and archive as you see fit.

3) http://keepvid.com can be mighty useful even if you don't run a BSD, even if you don't run Linux. If you have no trouble viewing Flash video on your Linux, Windows or Mac OS box, http://keepvid.com still offers you a way to save a Flash movie in MP4 format on your local drive to watch at will with your favorite video player.

For me, anything that knocks Flash off its proprietary pedestal is A-OK.

Now that I've pretty much got my Xfce 4.4 desktop where I want it in OpenBSD, I've been spending more and more time not in Xfce but in the Fvwm2 window manager that's the default for this OS.

Sure, Fvwm isn't as full-featured as Xfce, it's not as pretty, but it works very well, the documentation is excellent, and most importantly, it doesn't use nearly as much memory.

Don't get me wrong, Xfce is no hog, especially compared with GNOME and KDE, but when I looked at top in a terminal and saw more than a half-dozen little Xfce widgets/apps using 10 MB each, I started to get a little squirrely about it.

Not that system performance was poor, since it was and is anything but. I'm happy with Xfce's look, feel and speed on this 1.2 GHz/768 MB laptop, and I'm not in danger of running out of memory. And if I'm that bugged by it, I could remove all the stuff from my panels that is using that memory. A leaner Xfce just might be in my future now that I've gotten the full-panel look out of my system.

And I did enjoy monitoring my network interfaces, disk activity, swap space (which I don't think I've needed to use, ever, on this machine), and CPU and RAM use.

But I don't really need all that stuff.

So today I started the laptop and launched X with Fvwm as my window manager.

And there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

While I'm in a griping mood, I'll say that while I like the look and feel of Xfce's Terminal and Mousepad applications, for the former I can get along just fine in Xterm, and for the latter I chafed at Mousepad's inability to open multiple documents with tabs (and the seeming inability to default to UTF-8 instead of ASCII).

Sure I could easily use Geany as my main editor in Xfce, and I did have Geany in the panel right next to Mousepad.

I still like Xfce's Thunar file manager, although I'm more than comfortable with the Rox-filer.

And even in Fvwm, I could easily continue running Thunar, Terminal and Mousepad just as easily as I could use Rox, Xterm and Geany in Xfce.

And thinking that Xfce is "heavy" when I could very well be using KDE or GNOME is just geeky BS on my part. I was only reacting to what I saw in top, not actual system performance. And again, I can easily lighten up Xfce's load by dumping all those doodads from the lower panel.

But right here, right now, Fvwm is getting the job done. But geeky users are fickle. I could be back in Xfce tomorrow. And if I did a reinstall and had 20 GB set aside for /usr rather than the 6 GB I have now, I could roll GNOME onto the box and try that, too.

So why am I OK with GNOME in Ubuntu but not in OpenBSD? I guess that the OpenBSD philosophy of starting out with a minimal install and building up from there (the same philosophy with a "standard," non "desktop" installation of Debian, now that I think about it) makes it seem more natural to add the X apps I like best to the system rather than try to re-create some huge GNOMEish configuration.

Not that I don't have GNOME-based Debian and Ubuntu installations on three other boxes in my stable.

What I want to say at this point in this rambling entry is that the freedom to roll so many desktop environments/window managers into a Unix-like system is something that really sets it apart from the Windows and Mac OS X environments. And it's something we should celebrate — and educate the non-Linux/BSD-using public about in an effort to let them know what alternatives are out there.

I've been writing updates in my print column of the things I've bought/used/discarded/loved/hated over the past year, and that got me thinking: I got started with Linux in early 2007 and used many a distro on the machines available to me.

But for the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this:

1) I've found stuff that works

2) see 1)

OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

Anyhow, the other reason I've kept the same operating systems on my half-dozen or so active computers is that I need them to run — and run well. And they do.

Here's the rundown:

On my main laptop, the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've been running OpenBSD 4.4 for nearly six months. The only "sticking" point is not having Flash 9 or 10. Flash 7 works for YouTube but not much else. I have a few things that I do that need more up-to-date Flash, but otherwise the OS and applications in packages and ports have been extremely stable. I just upgraded it from Firefox 2 to 3, and tonight I added Mplayer and successfully played a Quicktime video. (Too bad the sound chip on the Toshiba is broken; the video itself looked great.)

If OpenBSD weren't so good, I'd use the Flash situation as a excuse to run back to Linux. But I've enjoyed using OpenBSD and learned so much over these months that for now I'm going to stick with it.

I have an identical Toshiba Satellite laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It, too, is performing very well, although I seldom use it since I have all of my data on the OpenBSD laptop. I have few complaints about Ubuntu 8.04, and before it came out I vowed to stick with the LTS for at least a year, maybe longer. I could be persuaded to upgrade if I needed to get a newer wireless adapter to work, but so far I haven't needed to do that. Ubuntu remains very solid, and with better Flash support than OpenBSD it's nice to have it as a backup.

Our daughter has what used to be known as the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450. The Gateway could never comfortably run OpenBSD because of its noisy CPU fan, which Linux can manage most of the time (with a simple shell script). FreeBSD managed the fan even better, but only during the first boot after the install. After that, it all went to hell.

Our girl has all her educational games on the Gateway, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04. I still think that the Debian Project packages Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint just that much better than Ubuntu, but all the problems I had with Debian Lenny and X on both the Gateway and later the Toshiba had me running back to Ubuntu and OpenBSD — both of which run X perfectly on both laptops with no xorg.conf file needed.

I'll concede that installing, customizing and maintaining just about any Linux distro is easier than doing the same in OpenBSD, but as I say above, I'm grateful for the learning experience and most of the time can figure out how to do what needs to be done in OpenBSD.

My Self-Reliant Thin Client, the first test machine that I began running Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, ZenWalk, Puppy, DSL and other distros on in 2007 has been running Debian Etch on a bootable 8 GB CF card for quite a few months now. I don't have it networked at the moment, so I can't upgrade to Lenny. I'm keeping the converted thin client powered on these days in another informal long-term test, and I hope to have networking hooked up to it soon. With 128 MB of RAM and less-than-great video and sound hardware, it's not the greatest machine, but I love having something with no moving parts and minimal power consumption.

I have the Mac G4/466, aka the Debian Mac, running Debian Etch, which I continue to think is the best non-OS X operating system for this particular hunk of hardware. I managed to get 640 MB of RAM into it, and it's a great machine. Since it's a PowerPC box, there's no Flash Player in any OS that isn't OS X. I'm considering an OS X 10.4 install to see how that runs. We have dual-500 MHz G4s in the office that run OS X really, really well. I wonder how this single-CPU 466 MHz box will measure up. We could use a Mac OS backup machine in the house.

Earlier this week, I pulled out the $15 Laptop, a 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz CPU and 144 MB RAM and fixed what was ailing it: It wouldn't run X in OpenBSD 4.2 in my user account, but would in root. That's because when it comes to screwing around with X, I don't know what I'm doing some of the time. I had created an .xinitrc file with a single line reading "xset b off" to silence the system bell in X, and that was enough to keep the Fvwm window manager from loading. I killed .xinitrc and all was well with the Compaq. I'll probably do a reinstall of OpenBSD, since upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 to ... is just too much work. Yep, after a long search for the right OS, the Compaq has run OpenBSD for a long, long time.

The real workhorse of our stable is the iBook G4 1 GHz laptop. In the past year I've replaced the hard drive, pumped 1 GB of memory into it and upgraded from OS X 10.3 to 10.4. We needed 10.4 in order to run Firefox 3 and Flash 10. Yep, that's when I upgrade — only when absolutely necessary.

To make a long story short, until I have a burning desire to watch Web video all the time, or until I need to edit and process video into Flash, I just might stick with OpenBSD on my i386 hardware. Otherwise I'll probably move back to Ubuntu or Debian, the latter only if those nagging video problems somehow go away. (I've had similar issues with Slackware ...).

My next "challenge" will be to run OpenBSD -current instead of -release. Since I already hate waiting for things to compile, I don't know how I'll react to keeping a -current installation up to date. There's only one way to find out.