Recently in Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 Category

Even though I said I'd wait a month, or two or more, before upgrading my main laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, I got in early enough today and had a fast enough connection to my chosen mirror that I decided to do the upgrade to Karmic today. Now. The download was quick, and I've as of now got about 45 minutes left for the installation to complete.

This is an upgrade, not a clean install, so I won't be getting (and don't really want) the new GRUB 2 bootloader. I won't get the ext4 filesystem, either (although I would like to try it, I'm not sufficiently motivated at present to do a full reinstall).

I'm fairly confident that all of my hardware — a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and any one of three WiFi adapters — will work.

I'm less confident about the laptop's Intel video. Intel video hasn't just been problematic in Linux for the past couple of years. It's been a problem in the BSDs, too.

It all comes down to Xorg. Or Intel. Depends on who you ask. Or whom you ask.

However you slice it up, upgrades have been hell for anybody with Intel video chips in their computers. And that's a whole lot of people. I can think of bigger "negatives" when it comes to open-source-OS adoption over the past two years ... oh, wait ... I can't.

My basic contention is that video needs to just work. Messing about with xorg.conf should be a last, last, last resort, and if such messing is required, there should be extremely clear and easy-to-find guides on exactly what to put in said xorg.conf file to make the system work.

Then there's the whole switch from EXA to UXA acceleration (like I have even the smallest clue as to what that really means).

But I'm ready enough for X problems. I've posted a few entries of my own on how to clean up Intel video first with EXA and now with UXA acceleration. I applauded the whole idea of running perfect video with absolutely no xorg.conf file for the few months I was able to do it. I hope we get back there.

Anyhow, while you can see that Intel video has dominated my thoughts about the move from 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 (Hardy), but there's more.

I ran the current long-term-support release of Ubuntu, 8.04 (Hardy) for a whole lot longer than I had planned. It ran very well.

But once I made the less-than-painless upgrade through Intrepid (8.10) to Jaunty (9.04) in a single, longish day (and after I finally got the new-to-8.10 NetworkManager to behave — and behave well, I might add), I suddenly had a Ubuntu Linux system with a whole lot more stability than before.

Here's the short version: 9.04 is better than 8.04 on my hardware.

So with all the talk of faster booting and better performance under Karmic (9.10), coupled with more than a couple of clues on how to fix Xorg video if and when it breaks), I was a bit anxious about the upgrade.

And after using the utility in System -- Administration -- Software Sources to find a faster mirror, I was ready for the big download and installation.

I've been doing Linux and BSD installs somewhat regularly since the beginning of 2007, and I'm still a bit worried about some of the things that come up in a Ubuntu upgrade. "Some packages are deprecated and will be removed" (I'm paraphrasing here) ... um ... OK. I can handle that. "Some extra software repositories are being disabled ... re-enable them after the upgrade" ... I dealt with this in the Hardy-Intrepid-Jaunty upgrade, so I remember it. I don't like it, but I remember it.

Then I got the dialog box about replacing the NetworkManager config file. That's the one I had to modify to get Intrepid/Jaunty working after the Hardy upgrade, which I did over wireless, leaving me with a non-managed wired Ethernet port until I figured out how to re-manage it.

Knowing that some or all of my NetworkManager configuration either might or definitely will be blown away by an upgrade? Not the best feeling.

Anyhow, with Karmic, I'll be getting Firefox 3.5 — yes, Ubuntu stuck with 3.0.x for the duration of the Jaunty release. I know I could've gotten 3.5 with a PPA, but I'm not in the habit of grabbing newer versions of things that are already in the distribution, so I kept Firefox 3.0.x around for the duration. There'll be updates on just about everything else, from OpenOffice to digiKam (my current "focus," so to speak) as well as the entire GNOME desktop.

As always, I hope for minimal regression and maximal improvement. I got that going from Hardy to Jaunty. I hope for more of the same as I go from Jaunty to Karmic.

Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10: An opera in three acts:

• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 3: Bringing X back from the dead (and why, oh why didn't the installer just do this for me?)

I always pull the trigger too soon when declaring success with a new WiFi adapter/software/hardware combination, and I'm hoping that's not the case with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and my aging Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

But today I first had trouble connecting with my WEP encryption key (I know I shouldn't be using WEP ... and I will change to WPA2 once I resolve a few issues and get the rest of the house's computers on board ...).

Then when I finally did connect (had to reboot) I had the typical screen-freezes-and-ctrl-alt-backspace-AND-ctrl-alt-delete-have-no-effect-so-I-have-to-do-a-hard-reset.

That's the beauty of blogging where absolutely no one is making any damn money from the entire enterprise: I can just spin out a fake word with 30 or so hyphens and just move on.

OK ... I was reprimanded once for using the kind of language that flows continuously through my favorite podcast, and I considered just chucking the whole blogging-for-the-man thing and doing this on my own time, on my own site and enjoying the tens of dollars yearly I could earn from Google AdSense.

OK, I pretty much do this entirely on my own time as is ...

Anyhow, I'm ready to return to the raw meat of this blog post, which is my trouble with wireless networking.

So I did the hard reset, booted back into Ubuntu and while things seem a bit slow, networking-wise (that could be anything), it's working OK for the moment.

Here's what I'm thinking:

The problem might not be the specific wireless networking adapter; it could be an issue with USB (1.1 in the case of this old hunk of saved-from-the-garbage hardware). Whether Linux-related or not, perhaps the Toshiba just can't handle using the USB inteface that intensely.

I don't recall having any problems with the PCMCIA adapter I use with every damn PCMCIA-equipped computer known to woman and man, namely the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (all I'm saying is if you don't have one of these, go to eBay and get one; for me's it's the geek-networking equivalent of the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman.

So a "newer" Cardbus adapter (maybe another $10 Airlink?) might work better for this particular laptop.

Another thing: If whatever problem I'm having is related to software, it's possible that performance will improve and crashes will diminish (or end entirely) with newer versions of everything from the Linux kernel (remember, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which is pretty much a year and a half old; ancient in Linux terms) to the dreaded NetworkManager in GNOME or anything else in the stack.

But given my recent experience, I'm extremely gunshy and more worried about regressions than either a lack or abundance of "improvements." That's what screwing up Xorg for probably half the PCs out there will do to you, O Xorg developers who decided that working Intel video is for other people, meaning people who don't have Intel video chips embedded in their PCs.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I thought you could.

Of course with the super-fast USB 3 on the horizon for Linux — yep, first for Linux and then for the other 99 percent of the world, I expect we'll be getting more USB-connected hardware and not less, and that includes add-on network adapters, which I suspect will be with us in various forms for quite awhile as PCs' built-in networking (wired and wireless) are superseded by newer devices and protocols.

I'll continue testing the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB adapter and even consider entering the modern era and slapping Ubuntu 9.10 on this laptop. I'll try an in-place upgrade from 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10, and if that doesn't work I can do a reintall with a fresh 9.10. That'll keep me (and my office's ample bandwidth) busy for awhile, I suspect.

I'm always hopeful; "It's only one crash," I say to myself. But one crash usually begets many more. I say usually hoping for the unusual and simultaneously wondering to myself why things have to be this hard (and remembering that these kind of problems reared themselves very well during my time running Windows 98/2000/XP and Mac OS 7.6/9.x/10.x).

Right now with the built-in wired networking, this hardware/software setup is pretty much problem-free (OK ... suspend/resume is a disaster, but I wasn't expecting anything more with hardware of this now-7-year-old vintage).

It's a good time to put my optimism hat atop my head, leave the friendly confines of the Ubuntu LTS behind and leap into the world of the six-month upgrade cycle and hope that improvements drown out regressions.

After all, I can always initiate my own regression and return to 8.04 (or chuck it all for something safe like Slackware 12.2 ...). I called Slackware "safe." Time for more coffee.

After finally figuring out how to make Xorg work in Debian Lenny (and presumably in Slackware 12.2 and ...), my new method didn't work in Ubuntu 9.04, and I was worried that my Intel 82830 CGC graphics chip would be left behind by Xorg (and by extension Linux and the BSDs and anything else that happens to use Xorg).

Here's what I did to get X working again in Debian Lenny. I added this line to the Device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option          "AccelMethod"          "XAA"

But that didn't work in Ubuntu 9.04.

I tried various other suggestions, but nothing worked.

Then I came across this LinuxQuestions.org page, which had this suggestion specifically for the Intel 82830 CGC:

add these to the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Option      "AccelMethod"   "EXA"
Option      "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

It works!

What's funny is that after following the link through from LinuxQuestions, it turns out this tip/hack comes from the very same thread from the Arch Linux forum that helped me the first time.

I consider this ArchLinux thread to be the best ... thread ... ever. I haven't yet taken the proverbial plunge and actually tried Arch Linux, but if ever a single forum thread would prompt me to move to a new distro, this is that thread.

Begin rant: But I'm also worried that your average new Linux user with 5-year-old Intel video hardware won't figure this out and will abandon Linux quickly as a result. I've been doing this for a couple of years now, and the solution wasn't so easy to find.

Very, very clearly, either the configuration utilities that are part of Xorg, or configuration utilities in the distributions themselves, have to somehow add these lines to xorg.conf or somehow compensate and not screw up X when this specific chipset comes up.

If you Googled your way here because you're having problems with your Intel video in Linux, add these two lines to your xorg.conf under the Device section, restart X (either by logging out or rebooting) and try it again. This fixed my Xorg problems and cleared the way for me to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 9.04 — and to the next version of Debian, to Slackware 13.0 ... and just about everything else Unix-like out there on my 2002-era Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop (and probably on my Gateway Solo 1450 as well, but I'll have to test that with the live CD). And you can bet I'll be trying this with OpenBSD 4.5, too.

Final words: Xorg has been a mess for my Intel video-using laptops since Lenny was in Testing. It only got worse with the newer Xorg in Ubuntu 9.04. This fix to xorg.conf seems to solve the problem. I'm committed to using FOSS operating systems, but this is just another example of why Linux really isn't ready for the average user. In short, users shouldn't have to jump through hoops like this in order to get basic functionality.

I hope your visit to this page fixed your broken Intel video. If so (or not), either leave a comment below, or if you don't want to sign up for that, send me an e-mail at steven.rosenberg@dailynews.com.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

I decided that I was tired of brown, brown, brown in Ubuntu, so I changed out the wallpaper on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop to this blue-themed image from the fine folks at GNOME. I also changed the way my "theme" looks by going to System - Preferences - Appearance in the GNOME menu and picking something less brown, more blue.

I know that GNOME-themed distros are usually blueish in hue and that Ubuntu's brown represents a departure from that blueness, but in my case, going all the way back to Ubuntu 6.06, I'm done with brown.

I've been bringing more data into my main Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation on one of my two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, and I continue to be satisfied with the performance of what by most accounts is the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution.

No, its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

I'm getting used to all the GNOME-ish touches in the Nautilus file manager and in Ubuntu/GNOME in general that makes a full-fledged desktop environment such a nice place to work.

I've written hundreds of posts about Debian, and maybe just as many about trouble I've had with my Intel-graphics-using laptops and screen artifacts in the X Window System graphical environment for Unix/Linux operating systems.

Now I've got a fresh, working Debian Lenny installation on a test machine and have solved the artifacts-in-X problem that has plagued me in Slackware and Debian (and a few other distros that escape me) for probably a year or more.

One of the hardest things I ever did in my Unix/Linux journey was give up Debian Lenny back in its Testing days when I couldn't solve the screen-artifact problem.

I worked for weeks, maybe months, hacking away at the problem, tweaking /etc/X11/xorg.conf any number of ways. But I could never solve it.

Among all the Linux distros I tried at the time (roughly all of 2008), only Ubuntu, it seems, was free of screen artifacts. And it was running without an xorg.conf.

Point of order: The screen-artifacts problem wasn't always a problem. I ran numerous distros on laptops with this Intel graphics chip in 2007, and it never happened. Debian Etch, CentOS 5, many, many Puppy Linuxes, Damn Small Linux, PCLinuxOS, Fedora. At one point in Debian Lenny's development, it started to happen. My conclusion at this point is that changes in Xorg, not in the OS itself, are responsible for the problem.

Further point of order: OpenBSD 4.4 also didn't have this problem. I wasn't so lucky in OpenBSD 4.5, where quitting X causes a segmentation fault and core dump. And the xorg.conf I generated with Xorg -configure in 4.5 crashed X entirely. To run it at all, I needed to use the xorg.conf I generated in the same way in 4.4. I don't think it's using the new intel driver in 4.5 vs. the old i810 driver in 4.4, but it very well could be.

Back to X artifacts in Linux: To attack/potentially solve the problem this time, instead of Googling my laptops' names (Gateway Solo 1450 or Toshiba 1100-S101) I instead Googled X artifacts and the graphics chip's name (which I got from running dmesg in a terminal), which is the Intel Corporation 82830 CGC.

I came up with this page from the Arch Linux forums, which gave this advice:

had this exact same problem. put:

Option          "AccelMethod"   "XAA"

into your xorg.conf in the Device section. should fix it!

That worked. After literally hundreds of changes in my own xorg.conf files on a half-dozen or more installs, adding this line to/etc/X11/xorg.conf in Debian Lenny solved my video-artifacts problem.

For me, this is huge. It's my Linux/Unix tip of the year for 2009. Even though there are still seven months left in the year, no tip can trump this one in my own personal FOSS world.

Back to Lenny: A full how-I-installed-Lenny post is forthcoming, but right now I'm in a test environment and will probably change a few things before I nail the tutorial down.

This time at least, I started with a minimal install of Etch and a Half (I'm having CD-reading issues with the Toshiba, and this is the only Debian CD it'll boot from; and I'm also having networking issues with Debian install CDs that are particular to the local network through which I connect to the Internet).

After the minimal install was done from the CD, I then upgraded (aptitude update, then aptitude upgrade, both at a root prompt), added Xfce and a few apps, then changed all references from Etch to Lenny in /etc/apt/sources.list, dist-upgraded to Lenny, added a Lenny kernel (the system didn't do this automatically), did another dist-upgrade, added some more apps, and got Flash and Java working in Iceweasel (the non-branded Debian build of Firefox).

Now I have a working machine that's doesn't quite sip memory like my identically configured (but now written-over) OpenBSD installation but is both faster than my favorite BSD as well as Ubuntu (yes, I know GNOME vs. Xfce isn't a fair fight).

Here's roughly what I have installed on the Lenny laptop:

OpenOffice 2.4
Iceweasel (Firefox w/o copyrighted names or graphics)
Icedove (Thunderbird w/o copyrighted names or graphics)
sudo (I consider it an essential utility, even on systems whose names aren't Ubuntu)
xfce4
xfce4-goodies
2.6.26 Lenny kernel
mtpaint (I'll get around to the GIMP at some point, but this small image editor does most of what I need)
Flash 10 (I used the .deb package from Adobe)
Java in Iceweasel (after adding contrib non-free to the repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list, I added the sun-java6-plugin)
CUPS
xpdf
menus (so I could use update-menus in the console)
GDM (makes it easier to run multiple window managers; unfortunately there's nothing in Debian like Slackware's excellent xwmconfig console utility)

I don't have the networkmanager app that usually runs in standard Debian with GNOME (and with every form of Ubuntu). I re-learned how to manage the network with config files (a lot different than in OpenBSD, that's for sure) and all network-manager-gnome did was screw things up — I couldn't get to it.

Either I'll get deeper into manual configuration in Linux (likely) and get a couple of NICs set up (wired and wireless), or I'll either figure out how to get the GNOME network manager to install (not as likely) or do a "standard" Debian desktop with GNOME and then add Xfce the next time I do an install (could happen).

As I and others have written before, Xfce in Debian is a whole lot lighter desktop than it is in Xubuntu. It's a bit harder to manage, but after the aforementioned six months using OpenBSD, I'm accustomed enough to using the terminal that I'm very happy to use Debian's excellent aptitude in the console/terminal to update and add/remove applications and really don't need Synaptic (which I could easily add).

As I also mention above, I started with the minimal install because I had problems with networking in the Debian installer (my network's problems, not Debian's), but the next time I do this, I'll probably select Xfce as my desktop either in the installer menu itself (if I can get a Lenny disc to boot) or at the boot line in the Etch and a Half installer (desktop=xfce, I believe the line is). My goal is to find a Lenny install disc (possibly the entire "disc 1" of either the GNOME or Xfce builds ...) that the Toshiba 1100-S101 will boot from. I've made them on various PCs and Macs, and it's hit or miss. The Toshiba will read the CDs, it just won't always (OK, will only seldom) boot from them.

Just to get all the GUI tools you might want in a pinch, it's probably a good idea to start with the "standard" GNOME desktop, but in this case I wanted to save disk space and keep the system lean.

As nice as it is to have Lenny back on one of my desktop systems (I haven't yet made the decision to replace Ubuntu 8.04 on my main production system, and despite all philosophical rants to the contrary, I'm sticking with it at present), it's even nicer to solve that X-artifacts problem that has kept me from using so many good systems for so long.

Helpful links for this install:

• Debian Lenny: Upgrade from previous releases (From the excellent Debian Lenny release notes)
• The Debian Menu System
• Arch Linux Forums: [solved] Intel Corporation 82830 CGC: Artifacts appear in X
• Debian Packages page

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.

Once I filled up a few screens complaining about how LogMeIn failed me in OpenBSD, I was too far along to report how I feel about Ubuntu 8.04 after not booting into it for almost a month, during which time I used a nearly identical Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4, lately using the Xfce desktop environment.

OK, there is a difference: The OpenBSD Toshiba 1100-S101 has 768 MB of RAM. The Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba 1100-S101 has 512 MB.

It makes a huge difference. As does running GNOME and Ubuntu instead of Xfce and OpenBSD.

For one thing, I don't think the OpenBSD laptop has needed to use the swap partition even once in four intense months of work. True, it has more RAM.

In Ubuntu with less RAM, but still 512 MB, not less than that, I'm using tons of swap. That slows things considerably. As I reported in a recent entry, I don't think Ubuntu in its default state (GNOME) is all that usable in 256 MB of RAM. And one of the things that was stressing the system is/was a Synaptic update.

In 25 days of not booting the laptop, I still only had 46 packages to upgrade. That's one of the advantages of the LTS version of Ubuntu. I bet the 8.10 and 9.04 releases, especially the latter, have had hundreds of package updates in that same period of time (especially since 9.04 was only recently released).

So I'm happy that Ubuntu didn't make me roll in 100-200 new packages after almost a month, and I still appreciate the easy upgrades that Linux in general and Debian/GNOME/Ubuntu offer in particular. Upgrading OpenBSD isn't anywhere near as easy, and the whole process is as apples-oranges as it gets when compared to an apt-fueled Linux distribution.

But just from a look-and-feel standpoint, using Ubuntu with GNOME on this hunk of hardware (1.3 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM) is measurably slower than using OpenBSD with Xfce on a nearly identical-except-for-the-memory hunk (1.3 GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM).

So that extra 256 MB of RAM in the OpenBSD Toshiba makes quite a difference, as does running Xfce instead of GNOME ... or that would appear to be the case. I can't account for every process, every service running in both of these operating systems.

And even though I have the OpenBSD 4.5 CD set on its way to my mailbox as we speak, I'm considering ... CONSIDERING ... spending the next few months in a Linux environment (maybe this very distro, Ubuntu) just to see a) how I get along in it and b) how it and I respond as I beat the hell out of it in the course of my day-to-day work.

About the only operational difference between Ubuntu and OpenBSD at this point (forgetting the differences in package/upgrade management) is the state of Flash video on both platforms. I'm not doing much work in video these days, so not having Flash 9 or 10 in OpenBSD isn't as much of a burden as it could be if I were doing more video work.

And I've pretty much accepted that if I don't run -current in OpenBSD, my applications will be frozen in time for the six months between releases. As long as everything works, I'm OK with that — although it does take quite a mental adjustment to go from apt-get update/apt-get upgrade or its equivalent in Aptitude or Synaptic (or get-slapt/Gslapt, RPM/yum, etc.) every day or every week to ... not doing that in OpenBSD. Yeah, I should probably run -current and see how that goes ...

But ... I could transfer over my considerable hunk of files to this other laptop, which also has the distinct advantage of a non-broken sound chip (with which I could not only watch more video but actually, you know, hear the sound that goes with it.

Or ... I could give Debian or Slackware (with Xfce in both cases) another try. But I'm a little wary after all the video issues I've had in my last few installs of both Linux stalwarts. That's the thing about Ubuntu: On my hardware, it tends to work without fuss.

I booted the Toshiba 1100-S101 with Ubuntu 8.04 for the first time in 25 days, according to the Update Manager. Or at least it was 25 days since I updated the install.

Either way, I've been running a nearly carbon copy of this laptop with OpenBSD 4.4, lately with the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, and I'd gotten quite used to it. While I still had only Flash Player 7 through the Opera browser in OpenBSD, I did have the Java runtime installed, so I thought ... thought I could use all the Web-based applications I need to use that require Java. Thought.

Here I am, 10 p.m., working at home, and I discover that LogMeIn just doesn't like OpenBSD. Even in Linux, when you don't have Java you can still use LogMeIn. It's way, way, way better with Java, which is why I installed Java both in Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. My other Java-based applet I use, a fairly simple uploading mechanism (for which I could use FTP but the company I'm dealing with has it hooked up so images take forever to process when you FTP them but process immediately when you use the Java app ... so you can guess which one I've begrudgingly turned to), and that works fine with the Java in OpenBSD as well as in Ubuntu.

But LogMeIn ... oh, LogMeIn ... you piss me off. I set up, tested and used Java in Ubuntu 8.04 to control a remote Windows desktop with LogMeIn Free (and I'm announcing right here, right now, if I can get LogMeIn to work in OpenBSD, I will stop being a freeloader and buy your damn service ... but I'm not opening up my wallet just yet.

Anyhow, I'm merrily doing my work on the OpenBSD Toshiba laptop when I fire up LogMeIn in Firefox. I try to bring up my remote machine and I get a blank screen. It appears from my feeble attempts at figuring out the problem that LogMeIn is trying to use ActiveX even though I'm not running it on a Windows box or using Internet Explorer. LogMeIn doesn't need ActiveX. It doesn't even need Java (though, as I say, it's damn near unusable without it). Don't get me wrong, it works great from Windows box to Windows box with ActiveX. It's nearly as seamless with Java, and thus I have Java — with the express purpose being the enjoyment of said seamlessness.

But I had no LogMeIn. So I did my work, doing everything as best as I could. Then I booted into the Windows XP partition on my OpenBSD laptop. Yep, it came with Windows loaded, and I just shrunk the NTFS partition and slapped OpenBSD 4.4 on the newly freed half of the hard drive (and yes, dividing a 20 GB drive between XP and OpenBSD doesn't exactly give you a ton of room in either OS).

My XP partition even has Service Pack 3 and IE7. So I fired up IE, allowed it to install ActiveX (is it ActivX or ActiveX — 'e' or 'no e' ... I have no idea).

LogMeIn ran great in XP, I did my thing, turned off the laptop and went to bed at midnight.

The next day, which is right now, I pulled out the Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba, cranked it on and tried out LogMeIn. Works great in Ubuntu with Java.

For the Ubuntu update, wait for the next entry ...

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.

Dell may not have the absolute best laptop deals available — you can often do better with the HP/Compaq/Acer/Gateway specials in Office Depot's Sunday newspaper circular (see, there IS a reason to subscribe to a genuine dead-tree newspaper like our own ever-lovin' Los Angeles Daily News).

But Dell is trying to earn your business, and right now (and through April 2) the company is running a "9 great systems under $499" laptop promotion.

True, the $399 Inspiron 13 is no great shakes specs-wise, with a measly 2.13 GHz single-core Celeron processor. But it does feature 1 GB of RAM (barely adequate for the included Windows Vista but quite enough for Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) and a fairly roomy 160 GB hard drive. A 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor adds $100 to the price, and an extra gigabyte of RAM adds another $50 (yes, Dell SHOULD be ashamed to charge $50 for something that couldn't be costing them more than $10 wholesale), and for $550 you have a very respectable laptop that should serve you for at least three years (or 7-10 years if you're me).

What I'm much more excited about is Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook (pictured above), the price of which has dropped to $249 for the basic Ubuntu Linux/512 MB RAM/8 GB solid-state drive model.

I had the pleasure of trying this very-small but quite usable netbook at the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group booth at the recent SCALE 7x show, and I was quite impressed with it. I've seen quite a few ultra-small netbooks over the past couple of years -- the Asus Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook, the HP 2133 Mini-Note, and this Dell is the best one I've encountered yet.

The smallish keyboard, while not super comfortable, is definitely usable, and unlike some other netbooks, the Dell Mini 9 doesn't run hot. It has a nice display and is fairly snappy with Ubuntu GNU/Linux 8.04 (the long-term support edition I'm using on the little girl's Gateway laptop and my extra Toshiba 1100-S101). It handled multimedia well when I saw it, and the small size makes it extremely convenient. It's easier to tuck it in a bag or backpack and open it up at will.

Battery life is supposed to be 4 hours. Not bad, but the talk recently of basing the netxt generation of netbooks on power-sipping ARM processors, like those used in cellphones,
and promising all-day battery life, is something to look forward to.

Anyhow, while the base Dell Mini 9 is $249, bringing the memory up to 1 GB adds only $25 to the cost. (Now you're talking, Dell ...) Going from the 8 GB solid-state hard drive to 16 GB adds an extra $50, but that isn't completely necessary (although I'd probably do it) because you can easily save to those miniature SD cards used in digital cameras — most netbooks have a slot for this — and keep your main drive fairly clean.

One catch with netbooks is that they don't have built-in CD/DVD drives, so you can pop for one from Dell for $89, or take your chances and pick one up for possibly less at Fry's or online from an outlet like TigerDirect.com, where USB-connected CD/DVD burners run from $60-80, or not much of a savings.

Again, if you fully embrace the "netbook concept," you won't need an optical drive or a even a huge main hard drive. These little notebooks are supposed to be for casual Web surfing, jotting down notes and the like.

But I still predict that the netbook will become a whole lot more ubiquitous than many hardware manufacturers and especially software giant Microsoft ever thought.

And while Microsoft is making moves to have an operating system other than Windows XP that will run on such lower-spec devices, I think it's just silently waiting and not-so-silently cajoling hardware makers to up the specs of these little laptops so they can more comfortably run not Windows Vista but the upcoming (and said-to-be-lighter-and-higher) Windows 7.

We'll see. The rumors of a shift from Intel-based processors like the netbook-aimed Atom to even-lower-power-using ARM CPUs could throw a considerable wrench into Microsoft's quest to move into the netbook market — a class of hardware the company didn't see coming.

Right now I still recommend running Ubuntu on those netbooks that ship with that version of the Linux operating system. I've heard less-than-glowing things about the netbooks that use modified versions of Xandros and Linpus, but I'll admit right now that I have nothing beyond the anecdotal to go by.

There are many people interested in running everything from Mandriva and Debian to OpenBSD and Novell's SUSE (either the OpenSUSE or SLED varieties) on their netbooks with the help in many cases of active projects porting these OSes to various netbooks.

Maybe you don't want a netbooks. I understand. I do a whole lot of writing on laptops, and that smallish keyboard might not get such a glowing review when I'm cranking 500-word articles on deadline.

But then again, I do the majority of my work on a 7-year-old Toshiba laptop with a dead sound chip and the ultra-reliable OpenBSD operating system, now equipped with Java and Flash Player 7 (the "newest" Flash player available in the BSD world). Right now the Toshiba — with 1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 768 MB of RAM and 20 GB hard drive split between OpenBSD and Windows XP, which for testing reasons I haven't killed out — is serving me quite well.

And I always have the Toshiba's "twin," running Ubuntu 8.04, at the ready. And that one even has working sound (and with Ubuntu I have Java and either Flash 9 or 10 – I can't remember). If I have to do more with video than currently (now = almost none), I'll have to move back to Linux both for the Flash capability and the availability of more video-editing software.

But for the basics — Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, the Geany text editor, the Xpdf and Adobe PDF readers, the GIMP image editor, Pidgin for IM, gFTP and the Rox-filer file manager — I have a pretty nice setup in OpenBSD. I've been using this OS on this hunk of hardware for about three months now, so I should be in a position soon to write yet another distro review, except this one will be based on that three months of use and not the "I installed it, here's how that went, and here's how it's different from what I usually run" reviews that I and many others find so easy to crank out.

Winding back around to netbooks, what I mean to say is that $250 is a better price than $300 for the basic model, and for that Dell deserves at least some praise (and more than a little business).

While my OpenBSD laptop slowly compiles Java (or not ...), I had to pull out the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop (both have identical hardware, Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and quickly slam out a couple hours' work late last night (yes, on the night shift, which I finished at home ... at 1 a.m. through the magic of Wi-Fi and caffeine).

On the way home I forgot that the Ubuntu laptop, which had a fairly up-to-date 8.04 install, only had 256 MB of RAM installed. The last time I tried to use Ubuntu Linux with it, I was more than frustrated with the extreme amount of swapping and general waiting around for things to happen. You know, like switching desktops and starting stuff.

Luckily I remembered that I had a compatible 256 MB memory module I pulled awhile ago from another laptop.

I flipped the Toshiba over, unscrewed the memory door, popped in the SODIMM, closed it back up and had 512 MB of RAM.

It makes all the difference.

I've always said, doubling RAM provides MANY dividends, which the less RAM you start with, the more dramatic they are.

That means going from 64 MB to 128 MB is huge, as is going from 128 to 256 and 256 to 512.

For me, going from 512 to 1 GB doesn't do all that much since 512 MB seems to work so well for desktop use in Linux and OpenBSD (and probably the other BSDs, too).

My OpenBSD laptop has 768 MB of RAM, and it's never swapped during my use of it over the past few months.

And I can say after a few hours of pounding away on Ubuntu 8.04 that the Hardy edition of the GNU/Linux distribution does quite well in 512 MB of RAM.

In other Ubuntu 8.04 news and observations, I had to install Java (again ...). And true to form, it was a mild pain in the ass.

Nowhere in the Firefox browser does it tell you what you need to do to make Java work.

I finally Googled my way out of it.

Just typing Java in the Synaptic Package Manager won't get you there. My first Googling reminded me that you need to search for java6 in Synaptic, not the simple java) .

Even adding sun-java6-bin and all that comes with it won't get you there.

No, you have to choose this package: sun-java6-plugin. Then quit Firefox and restart it.

You should have working Java at that point. (If not, in Firefox, click Edit - Preferences - Content, then click the "Enable Java" box.)

I understand that Java is not as free as the Linux kernel and that Sun requires users to check off an "I accept your obscure license" box and all that. What I don't understand is why Ubuntu doesn't use one of the freer implementations of the Java runtime by default. (OK, I really don't know enough about all the options for Java users to be spouting off right here, but at least a little help for the newbie would be appreciated.) At the very least, Ubuntu should look at this situation and figure out a way to make this easier for people who aren't accustomed to searching in Synaptic after a vigorous Googling. ("Vigorous Googling" ... I'll have to look into trademarking that one.)

I did get Java going. It wasn't as hard by a long, long, longshot as it is in OpenBSD. But in the latter OS, one expects a little hardship, a little geekery and getting ones hands dirty.

In Ubuntu, not so much.

Luckily for those purchasing pre-installed Ubuntu from Dell at least, all multimedia is enabled and I imagine that Java is, too, making out-of-the-box use that much easier for those who don't yet live and breathe Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

All of that said, I do have a working, updated Ubuntu 8.04 laptop with Java, Flash and the Opera browser, and it's running very well. Sure GNOME isn't as snappy as Fvwm in OpenBSD, but if ever there was a apple-and-oranges comparison between window managers, this is it. (And I could and probably should install Fvwm or Fluxbox just to prove my feeble point.)

Complaining aside, all of this means I'm pretty set in terms of having a working backup to the OpenBSD laptop.

I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

I'm always looking for platforms on which I can do all my Daily News-related work, which means I need the Java runtime and Flash video.

Well, there is a Java package for Puppy. I'm surprised Java isn't part of the base install, but it appears not. I installed the package, and I even brought in the Opera Web browser to augment Seamonkey.

Both browsers are performing well, but for some reason Flash doesn't work in either. I distinctly remember Flash working in all of the Puppy 2 and 3 releases I've used previously, and now I'm left wondering what happened.

Also, Java did NOT work in either browser, so easy use of the LogMeIn remote-desktop service is not something happening in Puppy. I'm getting to the point where I'll need to bit the proverbial bullet and install Java from source in OpenBSD on this laptop so I can get that functionality. I can live without Flash (and the Flash I do have in i386 OpenBSD via Opera is marginal at best; it works in YouTube but not in Brightcove). I can sort of live without Java.

But it's better for the work that I do to have both of these things working well.

Also, I was surprised to see not Pidgin or Gaim as the IM client in Puppy but something I'd never heard of. Pidgin is available as a package, so that's not such a problem.

The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

And while Flash remains somewhat of a problem in OpenBSD (I probably need to be running an up-to-date Linux such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Slackware, Zenwalk ... take your pick) I'll probably stick with it for the time being as my primary OS.

Time's short, so I'll hit the high points:

• The fix for all the problems I was having in Opera 9.51 (the Linux version) in OpenBSD was easy. All I had to do was change from asynchronous DNS lookup to synchronous. I even reinstalled Flash for Opera. Regarding the fix, l'll elaborate later.

• Now that I can run Opera, I've been using this circa-2002-03 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron) for just about all of my daily work. The laptop's running great, with excellent performance from OpenBSD 4.4 itself and its default Fvwm window manager.

• I wanted to change from IMAP to POP for one of my main e-mail accounts. I had been using Thunderbird in Windows with IMAP. That worked pretty well, but in OpenBSD, I wanted to use POP and have all the mail on the hard drive.

  Either Thunderbird itself, or the entire POP protocol, won't go into nested folders on an IMAP server and grab everything. At least it didn't in my case. So I tried to bring all those IMAP folders onto the local drive en masse. That didn't work so well. I suspect the server won't stay connected long enough to move many hundreds of messages at a time.

  I'm sure I lost quite a few messages, but I also have many hundred that I'll try to move from one Thunderbird installation to the other.

  Knowing what I know now, it would have been better to get EVERYTHING in order on the first Thunderbird installation and then move the entire "profile" over to the second PC. As it stands now, I'll have to figure out how to tap those exact folders/directories and move them over individually. The Thunderbird menus aren't much help with this. Thunderbird needs a robust backup utility built into it.

• In 768 MB of RAM, I'm running tons of apps at once. I can run Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin and Firefox and still not swap to disk. I don't think that's so unusual, but usual or not, it's pretty nice. In my world, 768 MB is a lot of RAM, and I'm glad to find out that it's more than enough to do my work.

• Before I figured out how to fix Opera, I rolled out an identical Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu 8.04. That installation went perfectly fine. No problems at all. That laptop has 256 MB of RAM at the moment, and during the 300+ package update after the initial install, there was a whole lot of swapping. Have you noticed in Debian and Ubuntu that the package management uses as many resources as you can throw at them? The machine was unusable during the long update (for which I ran the Update Manager in GNOME).

  You don't have to roll in 300 packages every day, month ... or just about ever, so that's an unusual circumstance.

  I'll keep the Ubuntu laptop at the ready in case I need it for video editing (a task I'm not sure can be done in OpenBSD; if anybody can point me to a package or port, I'd be grateful).

  But for now, the OpenBSD Toshiba is cranking along very nicely. Who knew you could squeeze so much computing goodness out of 1.3 GHz of processing power.