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Do you really think Sheldon from "The Big Bang Theory" would pick Ubuntu as his "favorite Linux-based operating system"?

I've seen this show a couple of times (It's slim pickings out there in TV land sometimes. Especially for someone, like myself, without cable).

If you ask me (and I realize you didn't), Sheldon's got Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, Scientific Linux or Fedora written all over him ...

He could even be a tinfoil-hat-wearing OpenBSD advocate ...

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

Every Linux release, from Ubuntu Dapper and Debian Etch, all the way through the present day and my testing of the Ubuntu Lucid beta, I look to see if suspend/resume will ever work on my old laptops.

It's kind of like the Holy Grail ... of geeky Linux/Unix laptop users like myself.

It always seems like it's going to work but never does.

But things are looking up. Right now I can use the power/logout/other-stuff-like-that button in the upper right corner of the screen to select "Suspend," and the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (Intel Celeron 1.2 GHz, Intel 830m chipset) will go into suspend. After that I can press the power button, and a few seconds later the machine will resume (meaning awake from suspend and actually work).

I don't know if this wizardry is due to the efforts of the kernel developers, Xorg developers, Debian developers or even Ubuntu developers, but if I can set GNOME to automatically suspend the laptop at a predetermined time after it has been idle and then come back the next day, hit the power button and have the thing actually turn on, I will hardly be able to believe it.

Saw this on Distrowatch Weekly: The Debian Live project has released live DVD images for Squeeze Alpha 1.

The images are all 1 GB + (except for the Rescue and Standard versions), so that's a bit of a change from the Lenny era. You'll need to use a DVD. Due to my Toshiba's hatred of CD-R but surprising love of DVD+R, I've been burning everything, including CD images, onto DVD, and it's worked quite well.

There are ISOs for GNOME, KDE, LXDE and Xfce, as well as the aforementioned Rescue and Standard (no GUI for both) spins.

One thing that's very notable: There are PowerPC images this time. I remember there most decidedly NOT being PowerPC live Debian CDs for Lenny, and a check of the download area for live Lenny confirms this.

I've written many times about how well Debian Etch runs on my Mac G4/466, and to see more of a commitment to PowerPC rather than less (or none) is a very good thing indeed. I never had much luck with Ubuntu on PowerPC back when it was an official port (the 6.06-7.04 era, if I recall correctly; there are community ports to PowerPC still active, but I've never tried them - Debian is just too good on this hardware to think about using anything else).

Getting back to the live Squeeze images, I downloaded one yesterday and have yet to burn a DVD and give it a spin. For me, live images are practically a must. I need to explore as much hardware compatibility as I can before I commit to a new distribution/project for my operating system. Until now, I've been relying on the excellent Sidux 2009-04 as my main Debian live test environment. But I'm always glad to have alternatives, especially ones that are pure Debian.

I can also report that the current builds of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid are running well on my Toshiba and Gateway laptops (both Intel 830m chipsets) if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the bootline.

And now that I know you can pause the invisible Grub2 menu in an installed Ubuntu Lucid desktop by holding down the Shift key during the beginning of the boot, I know that I can boot into the new installation and fix Grub2 permanently to keep nomodeset in the boot line.

I remain addicted to speed - desktop speed, if you need clarification on what I mean. And Debian is all about that, a bit moreso than Ubuntu. And it's something you can definitely feel on older hardware.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu can be made as fast as Debian, but some tweaking is involved. Not to say Ubuntu is a dog or anything, because it most assuredly is not, but Debian and Slackware especially tend to maximize the power you have in your hardware.

Coincidentally, the system I'm running right now - FreeBSD 7.3-release - is extremely quick as well. More on that later.

Can you install Debian with the live image? I'm not sure you can. There is some talk about modifying the running live system to invoke the installer, but it looks like you're better off grabbing a Squeeze image and creating a real Debian install disc, whether it be the first full CD, a DVD or even Blu-ray image, or a much-smaller network-install or business-card install image (the latter two which I favor, since the newest packages are pulled from the repository and you don't need to do a massive update right out of the box).

As I've reported in too much detail, my Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade didn't go too well. I'm hoping migration issues are fixed by the time Squeeze goes Stable, but at the moment I'm recommending such an in-place upgrade unless you've done a lot of homework as to exactly how to do it. Clearly I haven't done said homework, and that's why I'm not running Debian at this moment.

I needed to find the kernel version used in Sidux 2009-04 and came across this interesting yet negative review.

I guess what I can say is that all projects are not built to please all people. I've admired Sidux for some time and used its live environment to test my systems' compatibility with the future of Debian, and even though my desire to run Debian Sid isn't exactly burning, nor am I a huge fan of KDE (although I do like Xfce quite a bit, and there's a Sidux spin on that), but Sidux tends to run so well — just like Debian, in fact — that I would absolutely consider (and am considering) running it as my main operating system. Once I get FreeBSD out of my system, at any rate.

I've been waiting. And while I don't generally recommend an in-place upgrade of a production machine, especially one with problematic hardware (in my case that "problematic" bit being the Intel 830m chipset and its 82830 CGC graphics controller) and a fully encrypted hard drive, I do have unencrypted backups, and I'm ready to leave Debian Lenny behind and see how well Squeeze does on my machine and for my tasks.

So I did the prep, did an update/upgrade in Lenny, changed my sources.list, did another update in Squeeze, and I'm running the dist-upgrade now, pulling in some 900+ packages and hoping the thing will boot when its all done.

Yes, I have the day off. Thus I have the machine free for just such an upgrade.

And yes, this is the sort of thing I do on my day off. Take it up with my therapist.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.

Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

I booted it, hit Escape as soon as the first screen came up (that's a new one, having to do that), then hit F6 for Modes, arrowed down to nomodeset, hit Enter to select it, then Escape, then Enter again to boot ...

And a short time later I was in the less-brown-more-purple world of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid!

Never mind that it's ... purple.

It works! Video is perfect on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with the Intel 830m chipset.

Whatever wasn't working for me in Alpha 3 has been fixed at the time of this daily build.

I'd like to thank any and all developers who were able to make this happen, and I'd also like to let the rest of the Intel 830m-using community know that the following WILL work if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the boot line:

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (as of this 3/15/10 daily build)
Fedora 12
Sidux 2009-04

I have an alpha image of Fedora 13 but haven't yet burned it, and I have heard that Slackware 13 runs with no problem.

So the future for the older-Intel-video-using world is looking a whole lot brighter than it did a few short weeks again.

At this point I have no comment on purple or the window buttons moving from the right side of the window to the left. I have no comment because I DON'T CARE. I HAVE WORKING VIDEO AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS AT PRESENT.

I'll address purple and window buttons at a later time. One thing I can say for sure is that this ain't the usual orange/brown.

Before I go, I've been testing Firefox 3.6 on the Mac OS X and Windows XP platforms, and this instance of Ubuntu Lucid is the first time I'm seeing FF 3.6 in Linux.

My first impressions are that not much is different in the PowerPC build for OS X, but I'm seeing huge improvements in the browsing experience in terms of speed in both Windows and Linux.

I can't say for sure, but I think it all boils down to a faster Javascript engine in 3.6 vs. 3.0 (and also 3.5 perhaps).

Getting back to Intel 830m for the moment, this means I'm upgrading my Debian Lenny laptop to Squeeze as soon as possible.

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.