Recently in The $0 Laptop Category

At the recommendation of reader David Gurvich, as well as the enthusiastic endorsement of "Linux Outlaws" co-host Fabian A. Scherschel and Larry "the Free Software Guy" Cafiero, I burned my first Fedora disc in some time and am testing Fedora 12 in the live environment.

My latest foray into distro-hopping — live CD/DVDs only at this point — is prompted by this week's total fail in turning off kernel mode setting and getting the screen to work in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3. That method (turning off kernel mode setting) worked like so much magic in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 and Sidux 2009-04 (basically Debian Sid in late 2009).

But that hack did nothing for me in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3. Yes, dear readers, I know you hate to hear me whine and complain and would rather I file a bug report. I will do so, using my ever-loving Launchpad account, rest assured.

But in the interim I'm looking for any and every solution that will carry my now-two working Intel 830m-equipped laptops through the next year.

I'm crossing my fingers (but have nothing concrete at present) that Debian Squeeze will accommodate Intel 830m, and I'm hopeful that Ubuntu Lucid will work this out (although a regression between alpha releases doesn't bode well).

I've also established that PC-BSD 8.0 (and by extension FreeBSD 8.0) has no problem whatsoever with Intel 830m video.

And today I burned a Fedora 12 live image and am running it right now. Yes, I turned off kernel mode setting with this parameter in the boot line:

nomodeset

And I was off to the races. I did screw a bit with the font rendering under System - Preferences - Appearance - Fonts, ticking the box for "subpixel smoothing," changing the resolution to 90 dots per inch with full hinting (these settings are totally "negotiable" at this point, as I've pretty much never needed to mess with them). I'm not 100 percent happy with the look of the video. I'd say I'm 90 percent happy.

And that 90-percent happiness is in contrast to having no video at all and being 100 percent unhappy.

Thus far here's my verdict on Fedora 12: I like it. I'm extremely glad it's a viable choice for my laptops. I've always admired the documentation that the Fedora team produces. And rather than acting like the testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that it pretty much is, I'm finding this build to be extremely stable.

I have run RHEL clone CentOS on the desktop (and still have it installed on my daughter's Gateway Solo 1450 with Intel 830m video where it dual-boots with Ubuntu Hardy) but never Fedora.

The main advantage of Fedora over CentOS is the huge, up-to-date repository with just about every desktop package you'd ever need.

I know there are alternatives to get more desktop packages into CentOS/RHEL. But if you can get Fedora to work and keep it working, I believe it's a much better choice for the desktop (except in cases where you specifically want a limited number of applications and don't want to do a lot of updating).

At this point, every Fedora release receives 13 months of support (the time during which there are two six-month releases plus an additional month). Potential users will want to factor that into their distro decision-making; you can certainly upgrade every six months but really don't have to.

As you might have gathered from my last few posts, I'm relying heavily on live CD/DVDs to test which operating-system distributions/projects I will be using on my various laptop and desktop computers over the next six months, year and couple of years.

Since my Xorg problems have been so pervasive over the past year and a half, at this point I need to figure out how the display is working (or not) before I commit to any major upgrades or reinstalls.

Fedora 12 and Mono: I'm sure this has been written about before, but in case you missed it, the Fedora 12 live CD, and possibly the default installation itself, does not contain Mono — the controversial open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET technology that enables developers to use C# in the creation of applications for Linux and other systems.

You can still add Mono to your Fedora installation after the fact, but unlike in Ubuntu, it's not in the base install.

I've written more than a few times that I'm not completely against Mono but am not all that comfortable with Microsoft's different levels of patent promise to users of Novell-sponsored distributions (Suse) and everybody else. And if the Mono apps aren't better than the non-Mono alternatives, what's the point?

Fedora 12, like Debian Lenny, installs with the Gthumb image viewer/editor, not F-Spot. Gthumb is so good, it's pretty much my default photo editor in Linux and just about my most-used application.

Also in Fedora 12, Gnote replaces the Mono-powered Tomboy Notes. I don't have much use for either of these applications, although I do have Gnote installed on my Debian box, and I replaced Tomboy with Gnote on my now-dead Ubuntu Karmic laptop. Why use a Mono app coded in C# when somebody creates a C++ app that appears to do the exact same thing?

And as I said, there's nothing in F-Spot that's better than what's in Gthumb, and there's plenty F-Spot lacks that Gthumb offers.

That's enough Mono talk. Sorry about the tangent.

Let me wrap up by saying I've liked CentOS in the past, and I'm very happy with the performance of Fedora 12's live CD on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, a 2002-made laptop with a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB RAM. I could easily see moving to this distribution for my daily work.

How is Fedora different from Ubuntu? I'd like to start both myself and all of you thinking about the differences between Fedora and Ubuntu. I'm not just talking about the technical merits and choices each project makes, but about audience and mission for each project/distribution.

I'd like to spin this into a separate entry, but for now I'll start it here:

• Ubuntu's motto is "Linux for human beings," and while it wants to accommodate the so-called "power user," the focus of the project is to make the transition from a proprietary operating system to Linux as seamless as possible. Fedora exists as a community project that aims to feed the latest technology to Red Hat's enterprise products and serve as a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux while offering users a "free" version of Linux that's aimed at developers and "power users."
• The Ubuntu project is a community endeavor, with the distibution "controlled" by the for-profit company Canonical that is bankrolled by Mark Shuttleworth while it seeks revenue through support contracts and services. The Fedora Project appears to be a nonprofit entity, "controlled" (to an extent I don't quite know at present) by Red Hat. The Fedora Project itself isn't interested in revenue, but Red Hat's enterprise products/services are a proven source of revenue for the company.
• Ubuntu is based on Debian. Fedora is pretty much its own project, on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based.
• Ubuntu's community of users is huge and growing. Its community of volunteers is also growing. Excitement around the project is extremely high. Even though Canonical is a for-profit entity, many think its mission is to spread free, open-source software and gain share for Linux on the server and desktop. I'm unsure of the size of Fedora's user community. I'm similarly unsure of the size of its developer community, although like Ubuntu it actively seeks new community members (both projects are very, very proactive in this regard; and that's something I really like). Many Red Hat developers do extensive work on Fedora. While Fedora is doing well, you don't see levels of enthusiasm as high or widespread as with Ubuntu. Ubuntu seems "cool," while Fedora seems to be a niche offering for developers and power users.

If you think I've got anything (or everything) wrong here, or if you have something to add, please let me know.

Perception of the projects must compete with sheer usability for the tasks and on the hardware of the user base. A simpler way to say that is, "Use what works for you." Whether it's Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Arch, Gentoo or what have you, use what works. Along with that admonition, it's a good idea to keep your eyes open for better solutions — that's what I'm doing.

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.

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and Gateway Solo 1450 laptops — both with Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3?

There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail.

Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

The closest I was able to get was a working display with an invisible mouse pointer. Unfortunately I had forgotten which combination of parameters I typed into the boot line (a combination of turning off kernel mode settting one of two ways and setting a vga=xxx resolution), and after trying just about every VGA number I could find here, I've got nothing; no video at all on this Intel 830m system in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3.

In some way bowing to my issues — in my own mind at least — after booting the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3 live disc (CD or DVD), unlike the Alpha 2 you can now choose the nomodeset parameter from the F6 Other Options menu on the boot screen.

That's great, except that it no longer works for me.

How many potential new users of Linux have Intel video chips that are like mine? Do others besides the 830m have this problem?

All I know is booting a live CD and having absolutely no video is no way to get new users ...

In a related matter, I burned a DVD of PC-BSD 8. While the live environment is not exactly scintillating — it's KDE with barely any apps, it does boot into a graphical desktop that looks absolutely perfect with no intervention on my part. Yep, the FreeBSD and PC-BSD developers seem to understand that the video should just work, even for those of us unfortunate enough to be running 2002-era laptops with Intel video chips.

Should this not be the fault of Ubuntu but something that plagues all versions of Linux including Debian, at least I'll have PC-BSD 8.0 to turn to.

Or I could use the xorg.conf that makes Debian Lenny work for me and run Slackware 12 or 13.

As has been written in the comments recently, I should file a bug on this. If only I understood how to extract the seemingly dozens of log files needed to substantiate such a bug report (and to do so with a non-working screen), I'd probably go that route.

Regressions like this verge on the catastrophic. You can't just go cutting off entire swaths of hardware. I do seem like the only person complaining about this, so maybe there are fewer people using laptops with Intel 830m chipsets than you might think.

At this rate, my recent practice of burning these alpha discs is pretty much over. The Ubuntu Lucid release day is less than two months away, and I'm going to wait until that time to try this LTS (long-term-support) release again.

That also means I'll be sticking with Debian Lenny until there's some kind of live environment that I can test before any upgrade to Squeeze.

Before I wrap this up, yes I realize that this isn't even beta software but alpha, and there's a good chance my video issue will be resolved, but seeing things go from "pretty good" to "no can do" instead of the other way around is more than a little disconcerting.

I did an update today on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop that our 6-year-old uses mostly for the educational games GCompris, Childsplay and the excellent TuxPaint.

The Gateway (aka The $0 Laptop) isn't normally connected to the Internet, although that could very well change as our daughter gets old.

So it goes a long time between updates. When I do sit down to update it, I plug the Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter into the laptop's sole working USB port. It originally had two but the plastic tab inside the jack broke off quite some time ago. Luckily the touchpad still works on this 2000-era laptop, since I have to unplug the mouse in order to do the update over WiFi. (I'll eventually spring for the $5 to get a USB hub for this thing).

The update went without incident. It had been over two months since the last update on this installation of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, yet there were surprisingly few packages that needed replacing: Firefox and its ancillary packages, the kernel and tzdata.

I do have the Opera Web browser on this computer, even though I don't really need it to be on here, but in order to update it from the Opera repository, I had to reimport the GPG key. I followed my own recipe ignore the Debian Etch problems and go right to the Opera portion of the entry) and then updated Opera from 9.64 to 10.01.

At some point in the recent past, the "h" key popped off the keyboard, and after replacing it, the "h" had to be pressed really, really hard in order to make the letter appear.

I looked into a replacement keyboard, but I had an idea on how to fix the "h.":

I popped the key off again, placed a very small piece of paper, folded over once, between the "h" key cover and the key membrane itself, then snapped the "h" back into place.

That did it; we can safely type "h" again.

As laptops go, this Gateway is no "best of breed," but it does have a very nice keyboard (better than my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and unlike the Toshiba, the Gateway still has a working touchpad.

Unfortunately the Cardbus slot's pins are horribly bent — there was a screw lodged in there, and when I tried to plug a PCMCIA card in there for the first time, that was enough to bend the pins. I tried straightening them, but it didn't work. I suppose I could find a replacement Cardbus assembly, but since the laptop does work with USB WiFi (and very well; better than the Toshiba did with this same adapter and OS), this laptop that cost me nothing a few years ago is still quite serviceable.

I did have to buy a new hard drive (I pulled the old one and gave it to the laptop's original owner). I also had to do a quick/dirty power plug replacement (the reason the laptop was dead and given to me; the repair quote was $800; a new motherboard just to replace a very poorly designed power plug). I did the repair guerrilla style for $3.

At one point the Gateway had 1 GB of RAM (I did buy the modules used), but since the Toshibas use the same PC133 SODIMM modules, I've moved them around a bit, and now the Gateway is running with 512 MB. That's a serviceable amount of RAM. More is always better, but 512 MB gets it done.

Since I'm having no stability or networking issues with the Gateway, I will not be upgrading it through 8.10 to 9.04 and then 9.10. When the next Ubuntu LTS comes out in 2010, I'll consider doing that upgrade, but I'll be worried as I always am about breakage on this now-9-year-old platform.

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.