Recently in CentOS Category

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication.

I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux. Both ZaReason and System 76 are building small boxes around the Intel Atom/Nvidia platform, some single core, others dual core — and I do recommend the latter.

The one stopping point for me, other than money, is that I'm not sure whether or not these pre-built boxes have CPU fans or use passive cooling from massive heatsinks. For years now I've been leaning toward machines with no spinning fans either in the box itself (on the CPU or elsewhere) or the power supply. With Logic Supply I can easily make this happen.

At ZaReason, the Ion Breeze 4220, starting at $399 for single-core, offers a variety of options, including the above-mentioned dual-core Ion CPU. I don't know if Earl, the ultra-accommodating chief technology officer at ZaReason, is offering the option of a fanless motherboard — I'll ask him.

System 76 offers its Meerkat Ion NetTop with dual-core Ion starting at $359.

One thing that ZaReason offers in the Ion Breeze that I like is an optional external fanless power supply.

I've been running my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client as a standalone Linux/BSD box almost since the beginning of my foray into open-source operating systems, with only a single fan blowing across the Mini-ITX motherboard and its heat-pipe-cooled CPU. The fan doesn't work when the box is upright, so for all intents and purposes this is a fanless computer, and I've never had a problem with thermal issues — in fact, it runs quite cool, if not quickly with its VIA C3 Samuel processor (that's supposed to be a 1 GHz model but for some reason only runs at 500 MHz), maximum of 256 MB RAM and woeful sound and video chips.

Right now the Maxspeed is running Debian Lenny from an 8 GB CF card inserted in the thin client's built-in CF-to-IDE interface. Yep, no spinning hard drives either.

System 76 does offer solid-state drives on the Meerkat Ion, starting at $110 extra for a 40 GB Intel drive.

If the Intel Atom Ion processor isn't what you're looking for, both System 76 and ZaReason have plenty of other desktop, laptop and server machines to look at.

The best thing about buying a computer from a shop that ships with Linux (in the case of these two retailers, Ubuntu) is that your hardware is pretty much guaranteed to work. You'll have audio, video, suspend/resume, all that stuff that sometimes is hard to get straight on the box that shipped to you with Windows.

In the times I've spoken with ZaReason's Earl, and the company will build, test and ship pretty much anything you want. They specialize in Ubuntu, but you can ask for a box to be loaded with Debian or CentOS, and I believe they'll do it.

Do ZaReason and System 76 charge more than your standard computer seller? Probably. You can't get the kind of bottom-of-the-barrel deals that are offered on the cover of the Office Depot circular, but those machines often do have bits of hardware that you'll tear your virtual hair out to get working properly.

When you get a machine from a company that specializes in Linux, not only will everything work, but you'll get support that will help you clear up any issues.

And for many people — and I'm getting more like this myself with less time available for banging-my-head-against-the-wall tinkering — it's worth a little extra money for somebody else to have figured out all the issues, or in the case of these companies, to choose hardware components that work well with free, open-source operating systems from the start.

And even if you are a tinkerer, chances are it ZaReason or System 76 have built you a machine, it won't just work well in Ubuntu but will be a great platform for other Linux distros you might want to run.

Not wanting to leave out BSD, you can get a pre-built and -loaded PC-BSD (based on FreeBSD) laptop as well as two workstations (prices unknown) from IXsystems, the company behind PC-BSD. They seem to specialize in selling servers running FreeBSD and ask that interested buyers request a quote to receive pricing info. They're also offering CD and DVD sets of FreeBSD 8.0 if you don't want to bother downloading the ISOs and burning your own discs.

Not to go off on a tangent or anything, I've been giving FreeBSD a lot more thought lately. I've run OpenBSD on the desktop as my primary system for about six months, and I'm considering FreeBSD instead for a future test for the following reasons:

• Easier upgrades and much longer cycle
• More focus on desktop users with hopefully better (and more meta-style) packages for things like GNOME
• Flash 9 and possibly Flash 10 support through the Linux compatibility layer
• Better performance
• I really don't need it for architectures other than Intel/AMD (although PowerPC and SPARC 64 are available; side note — on the various pages emanating from its platforms page, FreeBSD offers not only official manuals from the makers of the hardware in question but also links to other BSDs that run on the architecture. A very nice touch, I think)
• Community that actually cares about end users who aren't developers

I need to try some live images of recent FreeBSD/PC-BSD releases. (Is PC-BSD a live CD yet? I haven't kept up, but I did utilize the live environment of DesktopBSD back when I was testing it).

I never did the full review I promised of Dru Lavigne's excellent "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, but I find it to be an excellent reference for the FreeBSD and PC-BSD user. Dru is one of the best writers around in the Unix community, and even if you don't run BSD you can learn a lot about using Unix/Linux from this book. I got a whole lot about the shell, file permissions and other Unix sys-admin tasks, from "Basics," just as Michael Lucas' discussion of sudo in "Absolute OpenBSD" makes that now-way-out-of-date book extremely relevant and useful for anybody running any kind of Unix/Linux today who wants to make the most of sudo in their own environment (and especially on the server).

On the same tangentially arrived-at topic, Dru Lavigne's latest book, "Beginning PC-BSD: Frugal Unix for Power Users," is slated to be released three days from now. If past work is any indication, this will be an excellent book for anybody contemplating the use of PC-BSD.

I'd rather Dru write a book on using FreeBSD on the desktop — not necessarily PC-BSD but building out a FreeBSD-based desktop through ports or packages — but I can understand her focusing on PC-BSD given that the iXSystems-led project is a lot closer to what Linux users are used to.

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'm very interested in Dag Wieers' recent post on why he chose a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s as his new laptop.

Using what developers use is always a good idea. Chances are that more things will work at the beginning, and then it will only get better as those developers start fixing what's broken.

Among the interesting features on the X200s:

• 80 GB solid-state hard drive
• Small and light, yet with full-size keyboard
• Complete hardware-maintenance manual available (VERY important, since laptops tend to break)
• Trackpoint instead of touchpad (I really like the trackpoint on my Compaq Armada 7700dmt; both the functionality and the saving of space with no touchpad) Wi-fi, Bluetooth, fingerprint reader, media-card reader (it would be great if this all worked under Linux)

I was pleased as the proverbial punch to receive a link in the latest Distrowatch Weekly, and I didn't even have to stoop to my usual begging. (Thanks Caitlyn!)

What I also saw in the column was the announcement of a new distribution, CentServer, which is based on CentOS. For those who might not know, CentOS is itself a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I've run CentOS as a desktop system, and lately especially (since 5.2) been extremely pleased.

But CentServer, and those behind it, care not. They want a SERVER OS, with none of the trimmings. No X (because real admins don't use X ... or is it because of the hit on performance?).

Here are CentServer's features:

• Optmized for server
• No X window
• Minimal server components included
• Automate installation support (without any interaction)
• 1 CD (384MB)
• Setup from scratch in 5 minutes

I like. A single CD, automatic install (although real server geeks like the fine-grained control you get in the Slackware installer, where you can choose what will install package by package). Five-minute setup — great for getting a box up quickly.

Here's another distro I'll be watching. I don't exactly know what makes it more secure than plain-vanilla CentOS, and I'd certainly like to find out.

CentServer's big problem: This might not be a problem for you (the global you) but it's a problem for me: CentServer is 64-bit only. It runs on both AMD and Intel 64-bit CPUs, but I don't have a single 64-bit CPU in my herd. ... OK I might have a old AMD laptop in the junk pile, but I'm not about to turn it into a server ...

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there's the video issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could change my mind ... or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every time I write about wanting to use CentOS — the free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux &mash; but don't know where to find the many desktop applications not maintained by Red Hat, somebody suggests that I use the Dag Wieers repositories.

I have been looking, and there indeed is quite a bit of software that Mr. Wieers, himself a developer for CentOS, has compiled into RPM packages. Things that aren't easy to find in CentOS, like the video-editing app Cinelerra and the Geany text editor, are right there.

I found it interesting that Wieers suggests Debian's apt package manager on your RH/CentOS system because of the way it handles dependencies.