OpenBSD: March 2010 Archives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.