Recently in Gcompris Category

(Yes, I do have the OpenBSD T-shirt with this design. It doesn't get more geeky.)

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build.

To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

With a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor, 248 MB RAM (how it has this amount, I don't know) and a 20 GB hard drive, the specs are pretty similar to the Gateway, except for the Gateway's 1 GB of memory, which I'll probably split between the two machines.

The Toshiba came to me with Windows XP, and this time I wanted to preserve Windows and dual-boot it with a FOSS OS. The CD/DVD drive is extremely flaky. I think it's dying. It does better with "commercial" CDs, and I did get it to boot Partition Magic so I could shrink the NTFS Windows partition and set it up for Linux.

The only Linux CD I could boot was Debian's Etch and a Half. Something was squirrely on our network, and I couldn't get DNS working in the installer. I could've done a minimal install, fixed /etc/resolv.conf and then brought the rest of Debian into the box, but I took this opportunity to go in a different direction.

With all the CPU fan issue on the Gateway, I could never run OpenBSD (or NetBSD or even FreeBSD after the first boot) because I couldn't get the noisy CPU fan under control.

I powered up the Toshiba, which couldn't get networking in Windows either. Since I don't yet have the administrator password, I couldn't update the DNS settings.

I went to an OpenBSD mirror and downloaded a floppy image plus a DOS/Windows utility that helped me create a bootable OpenBSD install floppy. (Before anybody mentions this, I know I could've just as easily created a Debian boot floppy.)

The Toshiba successfully booted off the OpenBSD floppy, and I was able to plug in a mirror and do a full install over the network.

This was my first dual-boot install of OpenBSD, and after the install was done, the machine wouldn't boot at all. I hadn't installed a bootloader and thought the box would boot into Windows, where I planned to modify that bootloader to choose between Windows XP and OpenBSD. Instead I got a "no operating system" message.

And I don't have a Windows XP disc from which to "repair" the master boot record.

So I rebooted with the OpenBSD floppy, dropped down to a shell and added the OpenBSD bootloader at the prompt:

# fdisk -u wd0

Then I rebooted and was in OpenBSD. There is a GRUB package for OpenBSD, and I'll probably install that so I can easily dual-boot either Windows and OpenBSD or eventually Linux and OpenBSD. There are other alternatives as far as bootloaders go, but my familiarity with GRUB is what is governing my decision in this case.

I'm also going to add rsync as well. I have no skills when it comes to OpenBSD's dump and restore utilities, so having rsync is another plateful of Linux-like comfort food that will help me get along in OpenBSD.

Other packages I've installed thus far: nano, mc (the Midnight Commander file manager), Rox-filer (my favorite X file manager), Geany (X text editor) and the Firefox (I probably should've gotten the version with Java, but I'm going to try to add the Java developer's kit and get the Java runtime that way) and Opera Web browsers.

Opera came via a port and not a precompiled package, and it took a lot longer to install this time than the last time I installed it in OpenBSD (on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt), if I recall correctly.

When you download the ports tree and install from there, everything is fetched for you and compiled when needed. Looking at all the output in the terminal, it looks like these ports could never work, but in my experience with OpenBSD they always do. This time was no different. It took maybe 45 minutes to get all the dependencies plus Opera, but after that it worked immediately.

I've grown accustomed to OpenBSD's default window manager, Fvwm2, and I'll probably stick with it for at least awhile before adding any others. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc., installing an app in OpenBSD doesn't automatically update the menus, so you have to manage this yourself. Getting into the guts of the .fvwmrc file is more instructive than not, and once I figured out how to do it, it got less arduous.

I still don't like waiting for ports to download, compile and install, so having 4000+ precompiled packages for i386 is a very good thing.

After a year of strugging with and complaining about the Gateway fan blasting away under OpenBSD, I couldn't believe that I was running OpenBSD 4.4 on the Toshiba with no CPU fan problem whatsoever. Everything from autoconfiguration of my two network interfaces (one Realtek 8189 wired Ethernet, the other an Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA wireless) to a perfect xorg.conf made this OpenBSD install go .

I haven't checked audio yet, but I've never had OpenBSD fail to configure the sound card.

I've always read that most OpenBSD developers use laptops to code in the OS, and now that I have this Toshiba running OpenBSD better than anything I've tried before, I'm amazed at how well it installs and runs on this specific platform.

I've probably written a half-dozen posts about exactly why I'm running OpenBSD, and I'll probably write another one as time allows in the week ahead.

And I'll be either ordering a CD set or contributing directly to the OpenBSD project in the days ahead.

I feel like I'm booting children off a train.

Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it.

But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so.

But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

After fighting with Debian Lenny for months over the Gateway's screen-refresh problems (which basically render much of that screen unreadable after a half-hour or so of use), I finally decided that I couldn't stick with the Testing branch of my favorite Linux distro on its road to becoming Stable. While many other problems cropped up and were mowed down either by me or the Debian Project itself, this last issue just wouldn't go away. And since I see not even one other person with this same problem, I fear the issue will never be resolved. I don't even know which package to file a bug against.

Remember when I thought I fixed my random-screen-freeze problem on this same laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS? I thought that turning off automatic suspend in GNOME fixed the problem.

That didn't work. I still have random freezes. And I can't really blame it on the power plug because I've been in conditions where that plug does not move, and moreover these freezes never happened in Debian (when my screen image was not totally disintegrating, that is).

I was trying to get some pre-election work done on http://www.dailynews.com, and when I found that I didn't have the Java runtime installed (and needed it), I moved over to Ubuntu 8.04. In a half-hour, I had three unrecoverable crashes.

Again, I haven't heard of this happening to anybody but me.

I have TWO surplus laptops waiting in the wings. I'll see if any of them perform as well as or better than this Gateway. But whatever happens with those two machines, the Gateway will remain in service.

Once I decided to let go of Debian Lenny, I thought I would try Fedora 9, but when the live CD wouldn't let me install it, I turned to CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux — instead.

I first booted the live CD, then used the live CD to do a network install (NOT from the live environment but as a boot option). Once I determined that an http install wouldn't work but an ftp install would, I was off and running.

I've been testing CentOS 5.2 for about a week now. I've been slowly solving problems (adding things like Pidgin and Flash), and at this point I can say that CentOS 5.2 boots quickly, seems as snappy on this hardware as Ubuntu or Debian and runs extremely well.

I have yet to see a bug, and it has never crashed.

I have a full review and how-to for CentOS 5.2 in the works.

I hadn't anticipated replacing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I've had trouble with Ubuntu on this laptop since 7.04, and I've gone back and forth with it. Until I pulled it last week, I always had either Debian Etch or Lenny running on it. I've run Puppy 3.01 from live CD and the Slackware-based Wolvix Hunter — both with few problems.

The 2.6.18 kernel in CentOS 5 has always run better than any other on the Gateway. Other distros that share this kernel (albeit in slightly different versions) include PCLinuxOS 2007 and Debian Lenny.

And with support for RHEL/CentOS 5 slated to last a very, very long time, the fact that it runs so exceedingly well on this hardware gives me a true long-term solution.

I suspect that if I rolled the older Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — which has a little over seven months of support left before it EOLs — onto this laptop, it would run flawlessly. But it's packages are even older than Debian Etch's ...

As it stands right now, I'm going to stick with CentOS 5.2, and as much as I don't want to do it, I need to drop Ubuntu 8.04. I love Ubuntu — its philosophy and package mix, if not its brown color scheme. But I can't deal with the random freezes (after which ctrl-alt-backspace and ctrl-alt-delete are useless and only a hard reboot will work).

Aside from the screen-refresh problem, Debian Lenny was doing great. It improves on Etch in many, many ways.

I could see myself returning to Etch, which will have a full year of support as Debian's Old Stable distribution once Lenny is declared stable.

Whether I continue using this laptop or not, it has to run my daughter's educational games (GCompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay), and it has to be as stable as possible.

With Etch on the Gateway, I had trouble with the Alps touchpad, but since those problems were so easily solved in CentOS 5.2, perhaps I've learned enough to figure them out in Etch, where in addition to the touchpad-tapping issue the speed differences between the touchpad and a plugged-in USB mouse were more than a little incovenient.

I remember PCLinuxOS running as well as anything during the week or so I used it. I wonder how much support is left for the 2007 edition of that distro. The hype over PCLinuxOS has really slowed down over the past year, but I still think it's a very solid distro (based on Mandriva but with Debian-style apt and Synaptic package tools).

I've had trouble with X in Slackware on this platform, never seeming to get xorg.conf right, although Slack-based Wolvix runs perfectly for some reason. Slackware-based ZenWalk has all the packages I need and during the brief times I've run it has show itself to be extremely fast.

And since I'm running with separate /home partitions for both distros on this PC, switching those distros in and out should be less traumatic than in the past.

Even though I've taken great pains, after the fact (when it's harder to reconcile), to keep my user accounts' UID and GID numbers in Debian- and Red Hat- based distros compatible, I will probably dual-boot Fedora and CentOS for a while just to see how they match up on this hardware.

Depending on how things go with CentOS 5.2, I could eventually simplify things and do the unthinkable: not dual-boot anything.

CentOS seems terribly boring. But ever since Red Hat rolled a bunch of newer apps into its RHEL 5.2 (the base for CentOS), including Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 2.3, I've seen it as a very real alternative for the desktop.

And I neither expected it to run so well or for Debian and Ubuntu to run so comparatively poorly on this specific hunk of hardware.

If I had 10 test machines and Debian or Ubuntu ran flawlessly on them, I would be telling a different story, but from the perspective of this 6-year-old Gateway, RHEL/CentOS is pulling way out in front.

Once you have the proper Ubuntu repository added to get Childsplay (is it Universe?), in order to get sound for GCompris, Childsplay and Tuxpaint, make sure to add the proper packages. For some reason, the sound packages aren't added as dependencies.

Everything comes together in Debian and OpenBSD, but in Ubuntu, you have to add extra packages to get the sound working in GCompris and Tux Paint. And in Childsplay, if you don't add an extra package, you won't get the full slate of games.

These three educational games work every bit as well in Ubuntu as they do in Debian, but you just have to make sure you have all the pieces on your system.

Even though this post is aimed at Ubuntu users, I continue to be amazed at how well these educational packages work in OpenBSD -- and how easy it is to install them.

But I'm dedicated to keeping Ubuntu 8.04 running on this laptop for the foreseeable future, so everything our little girl wants to run on this laptop has to run as well as it can.

Now Ubuntu dutifully informs me with the Update Notifier that I have packages that need updating. I'm doing it, my connection is very fast, and I'll have an up-to-date 8.04 LTS box in the next few minutes.

I added the Childsplay plugins, which gives our daughter the full complement of games on that platform.

And I also added the Gcompris package for English sounds, which will hopefully improve sound in that educational suite.

Both of these things came together more easily in Debian and OpenBSD than they have in Ubuntu, but it wasn't that hard to add a repository and make sure I installed all the packages I need.

And best of all, something somewhere has solved my USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu 8.04. I now can plug in a flash drive and read and write to it with no problem whatsoever. The only caveat is that the user who plugs in the drive has write privileges, so if a different user wants to write to the flash drive, he/she must be the one who plugs it in, just like in Debian.

And Suspend/Resume has performed admirably tonight. (Can the new Red Hat do as well? I definitely want to find out.)

So I'm at the point where all my current Ubuntu issues have been solved. Sweet!