Recently in The $0 Laptop Category

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 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.

As I write in this week's print column, I'm getting ready to give the Ubuntu- and CentOS-powered $0 Laptop to our 5-year-old daughter.

I mentioned that I do have a replacement that was working out pretty well. Of course that wellness went considerably south in the past few days (as chronicled in Dark Side of the Laptop), but I remained determined to prep the laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 LTS as its No. 1 distro, for our daughter, who used it tonight to run TuxPaint.

Whether or not my new/old Toshiba (or newer/just-as-old/identical Toshiba) works out, I'm ready to move on. I've got boxes I've set up in the past couple of months (The Self-Reliant Thin Client, The Debian Mac, which I bet I could finally set up with OpenBSD and actually get it to boot) that could be used more, and boxes I haven't yet had time to work on (an old Dell with something in the 1 GHz-ish range and for some reason stuffed with 256 MB of ECC server memory).

I'm also thisclose to getting my hands on a Sun Sparcstation 20, a box that was the envy of every self-respecting geek ... in 1995. That could be a fun project, don't you think?

(Image above from http://mike.kruckenberg.com)

We've pretty much reached the point at which it's probably cheaper to buy a laptop computer than it is to purchase a comparable desktop PC with the keyboard, mouse and monitor needed to make it all work.

Of course if you have all of those things — especially the monitor — you will still save money by buying just the desktop box and keeping as many of your old peripherals as will work.

But it seems like the graphs of "laptop cost" and "desktop cost" have finally intersected.

Laptops are convenient. You can carry them almost anywhere, use them almost anywhere ... you always have a keyboard, mouse (in the form of a touchpad) and monitor attached ...

Can you see where I'm headed?

Laptops break. And they're hard to fix. Often really hard.

And instructions on how to fix them are either really detailed (like those for Macs from ifixit.com) or, shall we say, "nonexistent."

I couldn't have replaced our 2003 Macintosh iBook G4's hard drive without the lengthy instructions from ifixit.com, and even with them, the procedure took three hours and had me cursing more than twice.

I thought that PC-based laptops put their hard drives in "civilized" places. On both my 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt and 2002 Gateway Solo 1450, I could swap out a hard drive by removing five screws, switching the drive and reversing the procedure. Five minutes from start to finish.

Now that I'm using this 2002 Toshiba 1100-S101 — hell, I've got TWO IDENTICAL MODELS — I find out little about how to replace their hard drives other than that "it's not easy."

There's no easily-accessible bay like in the Compaq and Gateway. The one forum post I found said that just about everything needs to be torn apart to get at the hard drive.

And now that the Toshiba on which I'm running OpenBSD seems to be slowly dying, the prospect of getting the drive out and trying it in the other Toshiba is looking to be way harder than I'd like it to be.

Clearly I should've spent more time with the other Toshiba before I decided which one I'd be using.

Here are the major parts of each laptop and their problems:

Case:

Toshiba 1 looked better from the outside
Toshiba 2 had a prominent crack that was somehow repaired

Keyboard:

Toshiba 1 has fairly worn keys. The space bar is a bit unresponsive toward the ends
Toshiba 2 seems fine

Touchpad:

Toshiba 1's has a tendency to stop working at all for short periods of time. After a certain length of time it also starts to become very erratic (a USB mouse always works fine).
Toshiba 2's touchpad seems fine, but I haven't used it enough to know for sure.

CD/DVD drive:

Both Toshiba 1 and 2 have very picky optical drives when it comes to reading CD-R discs. Each will only read/boot a few of my many CD-Rs. And each boots different ones.

Screen:

Toshiba 1 came to me with a sticker on it that said "bad screen." But since it seemed to work, I just went forward with my floppy/network install of OpenBSD 4.4. Today, though, the screen began blanking out intermittently. Squeezing the bottom plastic portion of the screen will often (but not always) fix it.
Toshiba 2's screen seems fine.

Sound:

Toshiba 1's sound is intermittent in both Windows and OpenBSD.
Toshiba 2's sound seems fine.

Hard drive:
Toshiba 1's hard drive runs fine.
Toshiba 2's drive seems a bit noisy

Floppy drive:
Both seem fine.

Battery:
I've learned to expect nothing from old laptop batteries. I haven't even tried using them.

CMOS battery:
Toshiba 1 powered up with the correct time and date. No problems since.
Toshiba 2 powered up with a 1999 time and date. I suspect that the CMOS battery is dead.

Ever try replacing a CMOS battery in a laptop? Some are easy to replace but super-expensive to buy (my Compaq), others are commonly found and inexpensive but seem impossible to extract (my Gateway).

The bottom line is that laptops are extremely convenient. But they are still quite expensive, and for the most part disposable. In the past few months, I've heard about plenty of bricked laptops — Macintosh and PC.

At my office, I have a Dell Optiplex GX520 that's now probably three or four years old. Actually, we've got quite a few dozen of them. I beat the hell out of the thing, and it just keeps working. I've spilled plenty of things into the keyboard. It still works.

Since it's a Dell and not a generic box assembled from off-the-shelf parts, it wouldn't be as easy to fix as something I put together from TigerDirect or Newegg-purchased components, but if the hard drive, optical drive, mouse, keyboard or monitor died, I'd have it fixed in a few minutes.

I'm as guilty as anybody of spending a lot of time (but in my case almost no money; all these dead and dying machines have been free or nearly so) using laptops. I don't have a "home office" that I actually work in (it's a sordid tale that I won't even begin to relate), so when I do work at home, it's pretty much on a laptop.

When, after suffering for over a year with the Gateway Solo 1450's not-to-be-tamed-by-any-BSD CPU fan, I found in the Toshiba 1100 a laptop with no CPU fan problem in OpenBSD.

Never mind that its optical drive, touchpad, keyboard, sound and display are not exactly ship-shape.

But I can run OpenBSD in peace. And for the past hour, the screen hasn't gone blank. The touchpad has even continued to work.

While the first Toshiba booted Debian Etch and a Half's netinstall CD (and nothing else, leaving me to install OpenBSD from a floppy — and damned glad that's an option), the second Toshiba booted Debian Lenny's business-card CD and Knoppix.

And I'm wondering how useful Windows XP is to me on either of these laptops. Even if I do manage to figure out the admin password and can bring them from Service Pack 1 to whatever it is XP is up to now. (Is it the SP3 that my Dell desktop for some reason refuses to install?)

If I get the time (and if Toshiba No. 1's screen doesn't continue to cooperate), I'll probably be running Debian Lenny from Toshiba No. 2 before the end of this week.

I did pull the memory door on one of the Toshiba's, and I was pleased to learn that the 256 MB is on a single SODIMM, meaning I could pull the module from one and have 512 MB in the other.

I'd probably be better off loading up the other Dell desktop I have waiting in the proverbial wings. It's not a server, but it uses this expensive PC800 Rambus ECC server memory. (What was Dell thinking, other than "mmmm ... expensive memory"?) Maybe it'll do OK with the 256 MB loaded in there now. And there's always my Power Mac G4/466, which runs Debian Etch fairly well in 384 MB of RAM (but without Flash video, since there's no Flash in the world of non-Mac-OS PowerPC). ...

I'll give Toshiba 1's hinky screen another week. Because I'm weak.

Things have gone very smoothly on my third day of using the Xubuntu flavor of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. While in Xfce (Xubuntu's desktop environment), I haven't had the screen, keyboard and mouse freeze at all.

Wondering whether all this good fortune was really due to starting with the Xfce window manager instead of GNOME, I logged out, changed my WM to GNOME and logged back in.

Everything seemed to be going well. But in the mid-afternoon, I had a couple browser windows open and was writing in Gedit when the thing froze up on me. (Had I saved my document in Gedit? Nope.)

So regular old Ubuntu 8.04 hasn't improved at all. My ability to keep this distro running is somehow due to whatever Xubuntu packages take precedence over those in Ubuntu when logged in with Xfce.

By the way, the Trackpad utility in Ubuntu doesn't show up in Xubuntu, so I modified the xorg.conf in Ubuntu/Xubuntu to turn off tapping in my Alps touchpad by adding the line setting "MaxTapTime" to 0:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
# adding next line in attempt to turn off tapping
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

I've always been pretty happy with Xfce. I used it more often than not in Slackware and always in Wolvix. And with all the tools that Ubuntu keeps across all of its companion distros (including Kubuntu and Xubuntu), running Xfce isn't all that different than running GNOME.

The strengths of Xfce are that the Thunar file manager and Mousepad text editor are lightning fast and quite functional. I'm also OK managing the desktop with the Xfce tools. I discovered that Xorg.conf line to turn off touchpad tapping when I was setting up CentOS 5.2, and I think this is a much better way to deal with the issue than using the Q/G/Ksynaptics package. I believe that in "regular" Ubuntu each user can set up the touchpad according to their individual preferences, but since I don't have any users, potential or real, who like touchpad tapping, turning it off globally in xorg.conf is definitely the way to go.

Now that I'm sure that Ubuntu with GNOME is still screwing up on this hardware, I'll continue using Xubuntu/Xfce for the next few days to make sure everything continues working.

And while I'm reluctant to move off of the LTS to Ubuntu 8.10, that does remain an option. While the LTS' 3-year support timeframe is something I'd like to have, with the "regular" Ubuntu release, there's still 18 months of support, which means I could keep the same system for quite awhile nonetheless. The quality of support (i.e. bug fixes and security patches) for Ubuntu is not something I feel qualified to judge, but the 18-month life of non-LTS releases is something I'm very much in favor of.

Fedora's releases have a 13-month life, and OpenSUSE's are two years, I believe. I think Ubuntu is right where they should be, given that there's also the LTS release with 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server. I initially hoped that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS would run well enough that I could ride it out for at least a year, maybe two, without running into problems, and while I've "solved" the problem that has cropped up, not being able to use GNOME isn't exactly the solution I was looking for.

In conclusion: It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.

Seeking to isolate what was causing the mysterious screen freezes on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I first tried the Fluxbox window manager, but after some X crashes coming out of the screen-saver, I decided to add the entire Xubuntu environment to my Ubuntu installation.

I pulled in 80-some packages. I booted into Xubuntu and haven't had a crash all day. I've let the screen-saver run, I've even gone into suspend manually and then resumed.

For a day anyway, Xubuntu has not crashed. I still can't close the laptop lid (with the laptop set to blank the screen) and reopen with X awaking properly, but I'm not expecting that.

I'll run Xubuntu for the rest of the week to see if I can definitively say that something in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS' GNOME desktop is causing my random crashes.

Not that I don't like Xfce, because I do, but I wonder if upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10, with newer GNOME packages, could also solve my crashing problem (or would perform the same as 8.04). Having 8.10 be more stable than 8.04 LTS would be a curious outcome, indeed.

In case you were wondering, yes it does occur to me that all the time I'm spending trying to figure out why Ubuntu is crashing (or why my Debian Lenny screen slowly degrades during each computing session) is time better spent finding a system that does work and presents none of these problems.

That's why I'm running the currently trouble-free CentOS 5.2 as my secondary distro on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I've already gone into way too much depth about how I feel about Debian and Ubuntu (very positive, despite all of these problems). With different hardware, I could very well throw Debian Lenny (or Ubuntu Hardy) on the box and have none of my current problems.

And while I'm getting to the point of swapping out my main computer for something from my well-populated boneyard, the Gateway MUST remain in service.

Anyway, back to my Ubuntu 8.04 problem. What happens is that the screen, keyboard and mouse seem to freeze at random. When the freeze happens, the screen image at that particular moment continues to display, but neither movement of the mouse nor typing on the keyboard has any affect whatsoever. Ctrl-alt-backspace won't kill X, ctrl-alt-delete won't reboot the box. I have to hold down the power button and force the machine to turn off.

The first thing I did today was install the Fluxbox window manager. I booted into Fluxbox, and things seemed to be OK, except that loading Nautilus caused GNOME to halfway take over, change my wallpaper and kill out the Fluxbox menu but not replace it with the GNOME menu. Ctrl-alt-backspace worked there. And when the screen saver did turn on, half the time I could get the desktop back, the other half I had to ctrl-alt-backspace and log in again.

In the middle of all this, I installed the rox-filer file manager, which let me navigate among my files without screwing things up with Nautilus, but the screen-saver issue was a deal-breaker.

Then I installed the Xubuntu-desktop meta-package, which brings in the full Xubuntu environment to Ubuntu, including apps like Abiword and the full Xfce desktop.

I'm in there now, using Firefox 3 to write this entry in the Xfce environment. I'll see how the screen-saver does its thing here and whether or not I get a random freeze.

So if GNOME is the culprit, I'll know by the end of today.

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.

This wasn't the first time I tried Fedora — or Fedora 9 for that matter — via live CD. I must have burned my first CD of the distro soon after it was released.

Now that I was resolved to replace Debian Lenny on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) with ... something that didn't have Lenny's seemingly unsolvable screen-refresh issues, I decided to give Fedora 9 a try. I knew that it was a little less than three weeks until the release of Fedora 10, but since I was ready now, Fedora 9 it was.

I first tried the live CD on my Dell desktop. It booted, but not after the usual Fedora disc access errors, which take up a minute of time before the disc boots and then seem to have no effect whatsoever on subsequent loading and performance of the OS and applications.

Fedora 9 loaded, I configured the network and then ran the system for awhile on the Dell.

Then I needed to prepare the Gateway. I plan to keep Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on the laptop, so that part of the installation was going to stay exactly as is.

Before wiping Debian off the drive, I rsynced the Lenny /home files to Ubuntu's /home partition. (I did forget to archive my Puppy 3.01 configuration, which I'm not happy about losing.)

Previously I had Ubuntu set up to have its own separate /home partition on the extended partition. Debian, however, had the root and /home directories on the same partition.

This time I wanted each GNU/Linux distribution to have their own separate /home partitions.

Here's how I divided up the 30 GB hard drive:

I started with a 1 GB swap partition on hda1. Then came Ubuntu's root partition on hda2 and space for a Fedora root partition on hda3, about 10 GB each.

The rest of the drive was configured as extended partition hda4. On that extended partition, Ubuntu's /home directory was living on hda6, and that left hda5 for Fedora's /home directory.

This way, if any of these two distros needs to be replaced, the /home partitions should remain intact and can be used as /home for any other Linux distros that could potentially take their place.

I also planned to keep Ubuntu's GRUB bootloader on the master boot record with a stanza in its menu.lst chainloading to a second GRUB (or LILO or ...) located on the secondary distro's root partition. I've found that setting the bootloaders up this way solves all problems with menu.lst updating when new kernels roll through the two distros on the drive.

Before I began, I downloaded a new Fedora 9 ISO and burned a new disc. I booted the new disc on the Gateway, and while I got the same errors early in the boot sequence on the Gateway as I did on the Dell, the disc did load, and I was in the GNOME desktop in fairly good time.

After checking out Fedora for awhile in the live environment, I was ready to install.

I always like live CDs that allow you to install while in the live environment. It's one of the things that makes distros like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS so successful. You can try the distro with a live CD and if the hardware responds even halfway well, install right then and there.

I clicked Fedora 9's "Install Fedora to disc" icon.

Nothing happened. I clicked again. And again. Still nothing.

I rebooted the live CD and tried to install again. It wasn't working.

At this point I could've begun downloading the install images and burning them to disc, but I didn't.

I liked the fact that Fedora has a fairly deep repository that included most of the applications I wanted. I wasn't crazy about needing to upgrade every six months — especially upon seeing the Fedora Project's recommendation that you do a full install instead of the kinds of upgrades you're encouraged to do in Debian and Ubuntu (as in changing your sources.list and update/dist-upgrade).

And I don't know whether it was my hardware that refused to install Fedora from the live CD, or a glitch that affected every user of the live image, but I was ready to move on.

Wiping Debian Lenny from the drive was a big step, since I'd been running the distro for well over six months on the laptop and had grown quite fond of its many improvements over Etch. But my X configuration's refusal to cease slowly degrading during every computing session made it easy to run Ubuntu more as well as consider jumping back into distro-hopping mode for a secondary system.

At this point, it's all about having a reliable pair of distros on the laptop that each allow me to get work done without causing problems.

Coming up next: Now that Debian Lenny was gone and Fedora wouldn't install, I turned my attentions to CentOS 5. I had done a couple of successful CentOS 3 installs on a different system, and ever since Red Hat shook up its Enterprise Linux with newer packages and a greater emphasis on the desktop experience with version 5.2, I had been eager to see how it played out in CentOS's 5.2 clone of RHEL.

Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf.

I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

I'm already running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on this system, and I've been thinking about what to do for the second distro. I'd go back to Debian Etch, but I had problems with the speed of the USB-connected mouse vs. the Alps touchpad, plus problems controlling the touchpad on its own.

In Lenny, the problems I've dealt with (and mostly solved) over the past six or more months have included suddenly disappearing sound (fixed with manually installed ESS Allegro modules), and an Epiphany browser that would always start in offline mode (fixed with a modification to Gconf2, if I have the name of the app right).

Nothing major — and nothing that couldn't be fixed with some help from either the bug reports themselves or other helpful people on the Web.

But this screen-refresh problem persists. I keep hoping that a routine software upgrade will take care of it, but that hasn't happened in countless xorg, driver and kernel updates. I don't think it's going to happen, either.

If you're running something that's very popular that catches the attention of developers (like the Asus Eee PC), chances are good that issues will be resolved. But I can't imagine any developers anywhere are paying any attention whatsoever to my 2002-era Gateway laptop. I'm no C hacker, so there's nothing much I can do, either.

I love Debian. I'm running two newish Etch installs right now (one PowerPC, one i386), and I could very well add a third with my $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), or even more to a couple of testing desktops I have waiting in the wings. Whenever Lenny goes Stable, Etch will have another year's worth of patches as Old Stable before it reaches its end of life.

Etch has been great, and Lenny has made dozens of improvements. But this one regression has made it very hard to keep my favorite distro on my main laptop.

So I have been thinking for months about what to do, all the while hoping that I could fix the X problem in Lenny.

First of all, I need to rewire the power supply plug. I think that is what is responsible for my intermittent freezes in Ubuntu (which don't seem to happen in Lenny, for reasons unknown). When I have the laptop on a desk, it never freezes, but when it's on my actual lap, as it was when I was trying to work on last-minute election programming yesterday morning, those freezes can really throw me off. I moved over to Debian, but I needed the Java runtime, didn't have it installed and didn't have the time to do that.

And then there's the video issue.

So I've been thinking, what should I install in place of Debian Lenny? I'm a big fan of long-term support releases, especially for older hardware, so I strongly considered CentOS 5, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. But the relative lack of consumer-oriented software had me worried. I could add the Dag Wieers repositories to deal with that issue, but even that repository doesn't cover everything I need.

Mandriva is also on the table, as is one of my favorite distros, Wolvix. The Slackware 11-based Wolvix is due for a new version soon. While its package mix addresses most of my issues, there are a few things that I can't easily find for it. And I worry in Wolvix's case (as well as Slackware's in general) about how long the kernel goes without getting patched.

I almost never see new kernels for older Slackware releases. I don't know if that's because they are unnecessary, but with patched kernels rolling into Debian and Ubuntu fairly regularly, I wonder why Slackware does things differently.

I'd run "regular" Slackware, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting X configured, and I'd rather use GNOME than KDE. I know there are GNOME projects for Slackware, but what I'm trying to do is install something that works well, comes together easily and has lots of available packages.

Given all the Mandriva fans on LXer, I considered it. I've used the Mandriva-derived PCLinuxOS and thought highly of it — and I may in fact go that way. The 2.6.18 kernel in PCLinuxOS 2007 (Debian Etch is also built on that kernel) is perhaps the best ever for the Gateway in that it controls the CPU fan with no intervention. The intervention needed in other kernels is slight (a single line in /etc/rc.local usually does it), but it's nice to have it done automatically.

Again, I'm not a huge fan of KDE, and I find that distros that are either KDE- or GNOME-centric tend to treat the other desktop environment as something of a second-class citizen.

I've had Fedora in the back of my mind for a while. Seeing all the packages available is very encouraging. And the Fedora community looks like a very good resource in terms of getting things working. I imagine that quite a bit of RHEL information would apply to Fedora as well, giving the distro an even deeper bench.

I'm not crazy about the length of support for a given Fedora release, which looks to be 12 to 13 months. I'd feel better with the 18 months that Ubuntu's non-LTS releases get, or even a full 2 years. Compromising on length of support is something I'm willing to do at this time for something that potentially gives me all the packages I want and that runs well besides.

As far as the availability of packages goes, Fedora acquits itself well. I have run it from the live CD before, and it seemed to do well on the Gateway.

In a slightly related matter, my install of Fedora 9 on my Power Mac G4/466 didn't go so well. The X configuration was horrible, and the distro ran much slower than Debian Etch on the same hardware. And Debian did a perfect X configuration for the internal graphics card and huge LaCie electron22blue monitor. Sure I could've used the information from the xorg.conf in Debian to properly modify the same config file in Fedora, but with such a performance hit, it didn't seem worth it.

Since the 1.3 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM in the Gateway offers much more power than the 466 MHz and 384 MB in the G4, Fedora seems to run fine on the faster machine.

And now that I have the Ubuntu LTS as my main distro (and hopefully a trouble-free one once I replace that shaky power plug), it's time to try something else.

First I need to keep copies of the xorg.conf, my CPU-fan script and rc.local from Debian Lenny in case I do a reinstall. Then I need to back up the /home files and consider adding a separate /home partition for the secondary distro (Ubuntu already has a separate /home partition).

Again, I'm not happy about the 13-month life cycle of any given Fedora release, and I really don't need a cutting-edge kernel for my not-cutting-edge hardware (unless, of course, it makes a cheap wireless adapter work), but with /home on its own partition, and Fedora installing GRUB on the root partition instead of the master boot record, with the GRUB on the MBR chainloading to the Fedora partition, it shouldn't be hard to roll Fedora out and something else in.

I could change my mind ... or not.

Update: OpenSUSE offers about two years of support per release, and that is enough to get me interested.

I'm downloading new OpenSUSE 11 and Fedora 9 ISOs now, and I'll burn them in the morning.

It hadn't occurred to me that if you — like me — are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, upgrading to the just-released Ubuntu 8.10 requires a little operator intervention.

In non-LTS installations, the system prompts you with the choice of upgrading to the newest version, but since 8.04 is a long-term support (hence the LTS) release, it defaults to waiting for the next LTS before automatically offering to make the upgrade.

But you still can easily go from 8.04 LTS to 8.10. You just have to change a setting in Software Sources (get there from the System--Administration--Software Sources menu item).

The Ubuntu Geek Web site explains it better — and in greater detail, so go there for the full instructions.

I'm not in any hurry to upgrade my Ubuntu-equipped Gateway laptop, especially since I've just "stabilized" the whole installation by turning off automatic suspend/resume feature in the Power Manager.

Like I said then, once the Ubuntu download mirrors quiet down a bit, I will grab the entire ISO file, burn it to disc and run the live CD to see how my hardware reacts and whether or not my Airlink 101 AWLL 3028 USB wireless adapter works automatically. If it did, I would probably upgrade, since this particular laptop has a busted PCMCIA card slot and the only USB wireless adapter I have is the Airlink, which I got for $10.

By the way, if you are "fortunate" enough to have the Airlink 101 AWLL 3026 USB wireless adapter, which looks the same as the 3028 but is based on an entirely different chipset, you're in luck because it reportedly works with Ubuntu 8.04. And yes, I wish I had one (and thought that by now the 3028 would/should/could have a native driver for Linux).

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.

Every time I write about Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which I've been running on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop since its release in April, I mention that it's the only GNU/Linux distribution I've used that successfully suspends and resume the computer.

And I've made that feature — suspend and resume — the bar over which other distros must jump to "beat" 8.04 on this platform.

Make no mistake, I've "enjoyed" a working suspend/resume capability. But I haven't enjoyed returning to the laptop after a while to find the screen looking normal but the keyboard and mouse completely dead. CTRL-ALT-backspace won't kill X. CTRL-ALT-delete won't reboot the machine. I need to do a hard boot with the power button to get things working again.

I've had X issues in many distros, most severely with Debian Lenny, my preferred distro for this PC, which has serious problems with refreshing the screen, leaving the upper panel in GNOME and many graphical elements of various applications virtually unrecognizable after about a half-hour of use.

I appeared to have a similar X issue in Slackware 12, which I installed only briefly (and too briefly to make a determination, especially since I never got a "perfect" X configuration), but other systems, including CentOS 5, Fedora 9, and Puppy 3.00 had none of these issues.

Nor did Ubuntu 8.04, which automatically wrote an xorg.conf that was much different — being way more spares — than any other I'd seen before. But X performs flawlessly.

Even though suspend/resume works in Ubuntu, I'm now about 80 percent sure my intermittent keyboard/mouse freezesare caused by whatever daemon is responsible for automatically checking whether or not to suspend the system.

I pretty much arrived at this point through the process of elimination with the addition of a little bit of logic. Since no other distro appeared to be freezing like this, and since I only have automatic suspend/resume set on Ubuntu, that seemed to be the most likely cause.

So I went into the GNOME Power Manager utility and turned off the "put the computer to sleep after XX minutes" feature.

Since then, I've had no freezing whatsoever in Ubuntu 8.04. A month from now, I'll be sure.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out the problem with screen refresh in Debian Lenny. I'm considering wiping it from the laptop and trying another secondary distro, maybe CentOS or Fedora. Even Sidux — a more "tame" version Debian Sid — is something to try just to see if I continue to have the screen issues.

Or I could just stick with Ubuntu 8.04. I'm not thinking about upgrading to 8.10, which not coincidentally is available for download today.

Click that last link to see the major new features in Ubuntu 8.10. I'm very unlikely to need 3G wireless, but if I find that 8.10 supports my Airlink 101 AWLL 3028 USB wireless adapter, I would strongly consider doing the upgrade.

I'm sure all of the Ubuntu mirrors are straining mightily with everybody trying to download the whole 8.10 image or upgrading their current installations. I'll be waiting at least a couple of weeks before I try to download the ISO and burn a live CD. If that loads and then the wireless works out of the box (I won't be holding my breath), I'll go forward.

Otherwise, I'll stick with 8.04 LTS — the long-term-support edition of Ubuntu that will be supported until 2011 on the desktop.

But with suspend/resume off the table, Ubuntu has lost its edge over every other GNU/Linux distribution (and even FreeBSD/PC-BSD) on this laptop.

I've been sticking with my installs much longer than usual — I'm still using a now-year-old installation of OpenBSD 4.2 on my $15 Laptop (and OpenBSD 4.4 will be released on Nov. 1).

See tomorrow's post for a breakdown on what I'm running on every machine.

I ran the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) all day today and didn't have a single crash, a single problem with X, or any other kind of problem.

Among the things I did today:

• I used rsync to bring the /home file from my previous Ubuntu 8.04 installation into the new one (which now has /home on its own partition). It only took me three tries to get the right rsync command to a) work and b) put everything in its proper place. Rsync is too geeky, but I was able to muddle through.
• I somehow managed to get Google Docs working offline with Gears. While the Docs/Gears offline thing came together immediately for me in Wolvix Hunter a couple of months ago, getting my documents to show up offline with Firefox 3 in Ubuntu 8.04 has been a bit of a challenge. Something happened today — I can't say what — but it appears to be working fine. We'll see what happens when I fire up the laptop later. P.S. Google Docs offline is still a bit too slow for comfort.
• Debian Lenny's X problems (artifacts on screen) persist. I remain unhappy in that respect.
• Three geeky cheers for Ubuntu, eh?

I still might be in a position to heap praise upon Ubuntu 8.04 for its performance on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) since I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago with a separate /home partition and a not-screwed-up UUID scenario.

But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button.

Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

I need to figure out whether my freezes in Ubuntu are due to the OS itself or due to the flaky power situation.

I finally got a replacement power jack at Fry's that I could use on the power brick to make a foolproof connection.

It could be chance, but this freezing problem never happens in Debian Lenny, which has problems of its own (related to X refresh, and chronicled in agonizing detail on this very blog).

I will confirm that suspend/resume continues to work, as does everything else. Except for this cursor-freezing.

Again, I'm not ready to blame Ubuntu and am more inclined to blame the power jack/plug situation. I am keeping an eye on the problem.

Another 150 or so updates rolled into Debian Lenny recently, including new Xorg and Intel video driver packages. For the upteenth time, I'm hoping for the miracle of properly refreshing X. It didn't do so well yesterday just after the updates, but there were some "enhancements" to the Debian login screen, principally the word "Debian" appearing in the upper left portion of the screen.

Again, my hope is that this X problem somehow solves itself and I can continue using Debian on this laptop. Again, no breath being held.