Recently in Jggimi's OpenBSD LiveCD Category

I've had this crack in the screen on one of my two identical 8-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops — the one on which I run Ubuntu 9.10.

Originally it only affected the lower right side of the screen, and the laptop was still somewhat usable. I moved my desktop-switcher and trash basket over to the left so I could see them, and at the office I started using an external CRT monitor and keyboard (the trackpads on both Toshibas have been dead longer than I can remember, so I always use an external USB mouse).

Well, tonight I'm finishing up my production shift at home and I discover that the crack has migrated all the way across the LCD screen, making it unusable.

I've been planning awhile to possibly swap LCDs between the two Toshibas. After all, while the Ubuntu Toshiba has a bad screen and bad CMOS battery, it has a better space bar (one that works all the time) a non-flaky inverter for the screen and working sound. The Debian Lenny Toshiba — on which I now type — has, if you're following, dead sound, dead touchpad, flaky inverter ("fix" is pressing on the lid-closing switch when the screen blanks out; an easy fix if there ever was one), flaky space bar ... but working screen, Debian Lenny (the Stable release of the distro upon which Ubuntu and dozens of others are built) and a setup with fully encrypted LVM, which doesn't seem to slow things down too much when compared to Ubuntu on an almost identical machine.

Oh, the Ubuntu Toshiba has 1 GB of RAM. The Debian Toshiba has 512 MB. Again they pretty much run the same — and I bet that wouldn't be the case if the RAM situation were reversed, which it soon will be if I move my user files over to the Debian machine.

I've had this Debian laptop ready as a backup for quite awhile now. It has Java and Flash installed. I have the RT73 firmware needed (but not in the default install) for the CNet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter. No sound, true. But that's really not a deal-breaker.

If pulling the hard drive from the Toshiba were only as easy as it is from the kid's Gateway Solo 1450 ... No, Toshiba decided to NOT allow the user to easily remove the hard drive. Basically the whole piece of crap needs to be disassembled to get at the hard disk drive.

I continue to be astounded at all the laptop manufacturers who assume you'll never want to either change the hard drive, especially after the thing is out of warranty, or never want to easily remove it when "retiring" the laptop for security's sake.

Idiots. The same idiocy came into play in the design of our Apple iBook G4, which needed a new hard drive, resulting in an operation that took me more than two sweaty hours to tear down and put back together in order to do the repair. Steve Jobs, I don't forgive you.

Anyhow, I've been keeping pretty good backups (two, in fact) of the Ubuntu laptop's user files, and I'm more than able to update those backups and then rsync the files into the Debian laptop. I just might do that tomorrow.

And I probably mentioned as recently as yesterday that I was fairly gung-ho during Lenny's Testing phase ... until Xorg decided to start messing with the Intel drivers and I couldn't figure out how to make the display on the aforementioned Gateway laptop behave without artifacts messing up the screen.

I eventually went with OpenBSD, which had no trouble and performed spectacularly until the in-place upgrade (which I'm told no one ever does, opting instead for reinstalls every time) from 4.4 to 4.5 that, again due to Xorg issues, made X inoperable.

At that point Ubuntu Hardy installed easily and ran X perfectly, so I went with it, eventually upgrading to 8.10 and 9.04 in a couple of days in preparation for 9.10, which while at a "good place" currently (excepting the dying LCD) has taken considerable tinkering to get there.

I'm sure that the versions of Xorg newer than what's in Lenny today might cause similar problems with the Toshiba's Intel 830m video chip. But my recent test of OpenBSD 4.6 via jggimi's live DVD (the GNOME version) shows that its version of X is pretty much perfect on this chip. ... If only I could get a couple of Web-based apps, one using Java, the other the dreaded Flash, to behave in my favorite BSD, I'd be using it right now.

But as it stands, Debian is getting the job done, and circumstances (those being my reluctance to pull not one but two LCDs and swap them without killing the "good" one in the process) dictate that I spend some time in the world according to Lenny.

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've used Josh Grosse's jggimi live CD version of OpenBSD to test hardware compatibility recently, but now there's a new live CD project based on OpenBSD called BSDanywhere.

From the BSDanywhere site:

What is BSDanywhere?

BSDanywhere is a bootable Live-CD image based on OpenBSD. It consists of the entire OpenBSD base system (without compiler) plus graphical desktop, an unrepresentative collection of software, automatic hardware detection and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices as well as other peripherals.

BSDanywhere can be used as a productive Unix system for the desktop, educational CD, rescue system or hardware testing platform. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk, so your already installed data will be left alone.

BSDanywhere packs in a lot more software than jggimi's live CD. All of BSDanywhere's packages are listed on its Web site, but a few that are notable for their inclusion (to me at least) are:

abiword-2.4.6p3 free cross-platform WYSIWYG word processor
audacious-1.3.2p1 GTK+-2 media player based on BMP and XMMS
clamav-0.92.1 virus scanner
e-20071211p3 the enlightened window manager
gimp-2.4.3p0 GNU Image Manipulation Program
mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.12 redesign of Mozilla's browser component
mozilla-thunderbird-2.0.0.12 redesign of Mozilla's mail component
mutt-1.5.17p0-sasl-sidebar-compressed tty-based e-mail client, development version
tor-0.1.2.19 anonymity service using onion routing

While BSDanywhere is currently in beta, I plan on downloading and burning a copy very soon.