Recently in Debian Category

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.

I've written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol' GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware.

In last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about, And in the latest Distrowatch, the idea of running "minimal Xubuntu (and Ubuntu)," is discussed.

Basically, the idea is that you use the regular Xubuntu CD but instead of the full install, you start with a command-line-only system and build it up from there. It's something that many Debian users have been doing for years (and which I'm done a couple times myself): start with what in Debian is called the "standard" install (and purposefully NOT including the "Desktop" group of packages), then use apt or Aptitude to build up from there, adding only what you want. You start with X and then build up from there.

This week's Distrowatch article included some timed benchmarks, as well as a table of how much memory is used in Debian 5 with Xfce, the standard Xubuntu, the minimal Xubuntu and Xubuntu with the same packages as Debian with Xfce.

You save a lot of time and RAM with the leaner Xubuntus.

In running Ubuntu vs. most other systems with leaner desktop environments, you can see right away by running the top utility in a terminal. In Ubuntu 8.04, I start out the session with over 100 processes. Right now, in OpenBSD 4.4 with Xfce 4.4 — and with the Opera browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, a terminal window, a couple Mousepad editor windows and way more Xfce widgets than I need (they eat about 10MB of RAM each, so I'm probably going to turn off most of them soon), I only show 53 processes in top.

And when I'm running the default Fvwm2 window manager in OpenBSD, I probably start the session with between 20 and 30 processes (I'll have to check on that). Just running the console before starting X, there are less than 20 processes running (again, I'll check and confirm).

From my experience, Xfce in Debian and Slackware is more like it is in OpenBSD as I have it configured and less like in Xubuntu.

The "problem," although I really don't see it as such, with Xubuntu is that a whole lot of GNOME services are running. The same is true in the KDE-based Kubuntu. The Ubuntu team keeps a lot of the services the same, everything from the Synaptic package manager to the Network Manager, so the experience across the various Ubuntu derivatives is more similar than not.

And I do remember being jarred a bit after installing both the Xfce and KDE versions of Debian. I never could get used to the graphical package manager in KDE. (Kpackage? That's my guess.) And in the Xfce version of Debian, you have to use apt or Aptitude (but you could add Synaptic with these very utilities if you really, truly missed it).

I did use Debian with Xfce for a good period of time, and that provided me with the opportunity to learn more about Aptitude, which more than a few users prefer over apt due to Aptitude's record-keeping ability. (I guess that means Aptitude writes more log files, but I never really looked into it that closely.)

But as I said in my last entry on the topic, If you install Slackware but leave out all the KDE sets, you still end up with a bigger installation than if you use Debian with Xfce. And as I said then, you even get OpenOffice, compared to no office suite in Slackware, and still the install for Debian is smaller. That doesn't really matter for most instances, but this particular install needed to fit on a 3 GB hard drive, and that's pretty tight for many distributions.

Not to hate on Slackware at all. I do grumble about not having as many tools to manage the box when you choose not to install KDE (and I may indeed do this very install in the near future because I still love Slackware and believe I'm better equipped to deal with it now than ever). And while I'm not happy about having to search for prebuilt binary packages or use Slackbuilds for some of the apps I need, Slackware is still a super-fast Xfce system. In fact, Slackware is my No. 1 system for when I (or you) do want to run KDE.

(Small aside: Slackware does include the Koffice suite in the KDE sets. If at the time I was using Slackware the heaviest — the 12.0 days — Kword in particular ran better, I very well could've stuck with it. I can't say anything about more recent Koffice builds, but I haven't heard about it getting much better, not that I've heard much at all. I did end up adding Abiword to my Slackware install with binary packages from Robby Workman's site.)

And if you want to take the time during the install, you can go through Slackware file set by file set, package by package, and install exactly what you want from the CDs/DVDs. So you can have a truly custom installation out of the box without needing to use a network mirror. (Caveat: It seems as if this would take forever to do.)

I don't think you can do the same thing with apt in Debian, but you certainly can start with the minimal or "standard" install (I think some just do the absolute base and don't even use the whole "standard" list of packages) and then build slowly up from there.

Before I lose the thread of exactly what I wanted to say about Xubuntu. I don't know if I spelled it out in the last entry, but in my tests, Xubuntu doesn't really give you much of a speed advantage over standard Ubuntu. I did used to really like the look of Xubuntu; around the 7.04/7.10 era, when I ran a lot of Xubuntu, I really liked the way they had Xfce set up, from the color scheme to the panels (when I could get the panels to stick on the screen ... another story).

But once I saw how Xfce ran in other distributions, I never really looked back. If you prefer the way Xubuntu looks and works over Ubuntu, it's a legitimate choice, but I don't think you'll save a lot of CPU or RAM by choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu.

However, if you really like Ubuntu/Xubuntu and have a compelling reason for using it over Ubuntu — perhaps your hardware just likes Ubuntu more, maybe you want to run the LTS of Ubuntu, or there are some packages that either you can't get in Debian or are more up to date in Ubuntu — doing one of these minimal Ubuntu/Xubuntu installs can be worth it.

As for me, things are going very well in OpenBSD 4.4. I'll probably upgrade when my CD set arrives. And my Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba laptop is also running well.

Ubuntu maintenance aside: On our girl's Gateway laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, it crashed over the weekend (most probably a hardware issue; possibly a flaky power-supply plug) and I had a corrupted root filesystem. I used "recovery mode," and was able to see the dmesg on the terminal. The system dropped me into a root shell, I fsck'ed the root filesystem, which in my case goes like this:

# fsck /dev/sda2

And after that I rebooted and everything was back to normal. I thought that running a journaling filesystem (ext3 in this case) meant you didn't have to fsck, but in this case I most definitely needed to do so. My recent forays into fsck in OpenBSD are also due, I believe, to hardware issues; every once in awhile this Toshiba laptop (again, I have two identical Satellite 1100-S101 models) dies right at the beginning of the boot, no matter what the OS, and in the case of OpenBSD, I easily fsck the root filesystem and commence booting.

So ... what I'm getting around to saying is that I can easily see pulling the hard drive from one of the Toshiba laptops, shoving in a new one and using the entire drive for either Debian or Slackware and doing a long-term test of whichever distro I end up choosing.

Endnote: My complaints still stand about distro reviews — including my own — being nothing more than cursory looks at how a system installs and whether or not the hardware worked and not much more.

I think a lot of this discomfort with quickie reviews stems from my own decision to do much less distro-hopping. I tend to use distributions/projects that offer a lot of packages, a lot of flexibility, plus longevity and relative stability. The operating system must support most or all of the applications I need to get my work done. And since I'm not running a lot of test machines at the moment, anything I do in terms of distro/project testing needs to serve these goals as well as hold my 1 GB of Thunderbird e-mail and about 1 GB of "other" files.

So I've stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 on two laptops (both in fairly frequent use), OpenBSD 4.4 on one laptop (heavy use), OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13 on one laptop (light use — this one needs an upgrade; it ran Debian before and probably will again) and Debian Etch on two desktops (light use).

I used to get a lot of traffic with quickie distro reviews, especially when I managed to get a Distrowatch link. I do miss the traffic, but I didn't feel right cranking out a review within the first day/week after an install. It's certainly important to let people know how goes the installation of an operating system, but I just didn't have the time or desire to burn dozens of ISOs and do installs all the time.

And since my days of distro-hopping, I've depended on FOSS operating systems and applications more than ever before for my day-to-day work. And between Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Debian, I've found a nice combination of comfort (for me as a user/technician) stability, flexibility, application availability and, for the most part, relative speed.

I know I spent half of this entry on how slow Ubuntu can be, but I've run MANY distros that appear to be much slower; I think Ubuntu hits more of a happy medium than others when it comes to the bloat/features equation, I just run hardware that's old enough to need all the help with CPU, RAM and disk space I can get.

The real endnote: The preceding few paragraphs attempted to explain why I'm uncomfortable with the standard distro review, both as a writer and a reader. I hope I got the point across at least a little. When you see one of these reviews, you'll know it. Not that there's no value in rolling a new Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva/Slackware/etc. distribution onto a box and writing about what's different/better/worse. If the writer has been running a given distro/project all along, I tend to take more notice even of a quickie review. But if you run, let's say Slackware, throw the latest Ubuntu on your box and talk all about how Ubuntu is different from Slackware and how everything's in the wrong place, and you do this a few hours after the installation, that I feel is usually of very little value.

So the next time I do this very thing, feel free to write a comment at what a hypocrite I am.

I've done this sort of thing before, but luckily somebody else is comparing the Xfce environments of Debian Lenny and Xubuntu/Ubuntu.

Results are not surprising and are in line with what I found over a year ago when I did a major comparison of everything from Xubuntu and Debian to Slackware and gOS, as well as Wolvix and standard Ubuntu.

Back then, Slackware and Debian with Xfce are indeed very, very fast systems. And while I didn't test them at the time, I expect ZenWalk and Vector with Xfce to perform as well or better.

That said, I've always liked the look of Xubuntu (especially in the 7.04-7.10 era), but it does run a good deal slower than other Xfce-equipped systems — and in fact didn't do much better than Ubuntu with GNOME in my test. Thus I've pretty much just used Ubuntu when I want it, although I did have some issues with crashing on my Gateway laptop that appeared at the time to be solved by adding Xubuntu to the install and running Xfce instead. (Since then, we've been running Ubuntu with GNOME — version 8.04 — on the Gateway, and it has been running very well.)

Despite all of this, I still have two Ubuntu 8.04 installations running right now. Sure Debian and Slackware are faster, but I'm quite happy running GNOME, and I find performance in Ubuntu more than acceptable. But what keeps me running Ubuntu is the ease of installation, configuration (I'm running with no xorg.conf — and perfect video out of the box — on both installs) and patching of the system. Despite all the talk of Ubuntu shipping before everything is "right," I can't remember suffering from a broken app or feature in recent memory. And it seems that even if a new app isn't available for some reason in the Ubuntu repository, the developers behind it are quick to create a package that's designed to run in Ubuntu (even though I prefer to run what's in Ubuntu's own repository).

All things being equal, I prefer Debian, but since Lenny all things have not been equal on my Gateway and Toshiba laptops (both made around 2002-3), with which I've had unsolvable video issues in both Lenny and at least on the Gateway in Slackware as well. No amount of tweaking xorg.conf, installing new drivers, etc., would make Debian Lenny play well with the Intel video in the Gateway, and when a quick Lenny install on the Toshiba brought up the same issue, I ran quickly to the welcoming, trouble-free arms of Ubuntu. Of course OpenBSD 4.4 is running virtually trouble-free on my second, identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, and if OpenBSD can get xorg running perfectly with no configuration (and no xorg.conf needed), you'd think that Debian and Slackware could do the same.

In all fairness, I haven't tried Slackware again since 12.2 came out, so maybe things have changed, and I also haven't tried Lenny since it went stable (my experience was during the three or so months leading up to that point). Put simply, Ubuntu worked, so I use it.

And as I've also said before, many of the replies to requests for help in the Ubuntu Forums might be less than helpful, but the sheer volume of those messages means that finding the answer to your question/solution to your problem not just for Ubuntu but also for Debian is easier than you might think.

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).

This post began its life as a comment on the previous Sparcstation 20 entry, and true to the way I overwrite even a comment, it works well enough as a standalone entry.

And thus, here it is in that form:

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved.

But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

Thus far, that direction is a reinstall of OpenBSD. I haven't tried any ports yet, but all the packages I have installed — a few GUI editors (nedit, which I quite like, and another I can't remember), plus the Dillo browser, which in all fairness ran great in NetBSD, too — did work.

Now that I'm running not the box's original, jet-plane-noisy 2 GB Seagate hard drive but a super-cheap-on-eBay 35 GB Hitachi SCSI drive that's pleasantly quiet, maybe the installation of an OpenBSD port of a "modern" Web browser will work. Maybe not. I'll also try to roll Abiword onto the box, as well as Geany (for comparison's sake, if anything else).

And there's always Solaris.

I know there are Solaris-compatible packages for just about everything, so if I can't manage to get Seamonkey or Firefox installed from OpenBSD's ports with the extra disk space, my next move will be installing Solaris 9 (I got an unopened box of the software for $1 — yep, that little, plus shipping — on eBay) and see how that OS runs on the box.

One thing: Sound on the 32-bit Sparc platform doesn't work in OpenBSD. It does in NetBSD. Of course it does in Solaris, since Sun's OS was written with the Sparc in mind.

It may be that Solaris is the best OS for desktop use on the Sparc 20. Probably the best thing to do is get a CPU module faster then the current 50 MHz processor I'm now running, and also upping the memory to the max of 512 MB (right now I have the 128 MB the box had when I got it).

But make no mistake, for sheer out-of-the-box configuration on a Sparcstation 20 (sound nothwithstanding), OpenBSD is way ahead of NetBSD.

My next line of attack is trying a few (or more) OpenBSD ports. Even if this experiment goes well, I'll have to roll Solaris 9 onto the Sparc 20 before I decide on any long-term OS for the box.

Before I finish this entry, it's worth pointing out that Debian Etch for Sparc boots but won't install. It hangs when trying to load the CD driver. I don't know if the Sparc port of Debian is broken for EVERY 32-bit Sparc model, but it sure doesn't work for the Sparcstation 20.

Image above right: This isn't my Sparc; it's a Sparcstation 5 from http://www.computermuseum.org.uk. They look exactly alike (and in many ways are).

Here's the deal. I've been using one of my two nearly identical Toshiba 1100-S101 laptops for a growing share of my day-to-day work, and not just at home.

The degradation of my Windows XP-running Dell box over the course of the day (OK, it's not that great in the morning after a fresh boot, either) has driven me to use my older, slower laptops, which under non-Windows OSes actually do things better and faster.

I basically resurrected both Toshibas from death in the form of recycling, which is what would have happened to them had I not pulled them from the haul-me-away pile. Both had XP installed. Until this point, I didn't have any personal machines running XP, and if you don't count the Windows 2000-running Pentium II box I rarely turn on, these are really my only Windows-running PCs I use besides my main work box — the one that barely works.

Think of that last paragraph as somewhat of an explanation for why I'm dual-booting both laptops, the first into OpenBSD 4.4 and the second, as of this afternoon, into Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I really have little use for Windows, but in the course of whatever it is that I do in these blog entries and my print column, I just might need a Windows machine. Or not. Since I can't reinstall Windows XP whenever I wish due to not having an install CD, I'm leaving those now-shrunken NTFS partitions intact until I decide a) I really need the disk space or b) figure out how to get the hard drives out of the Toshibas and put them aside in the unlikely event that I absolutely need to run XP some time in the far future.

I had no expectation that it would work, but I decided to shove my trusty Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA 802.11b wireless networking card into the meant-for-Airport-only slot in my Power Macintosh G4/466 running Debian Etch.

I had never heard that this sort of thing would work.

I shoved the card it. It's quite a bit longer than the pricey Airport card, which I've seen go for near $100 on eBay.

The Mac's antenna plug matched. I connected the antenna wire.

I booted Debian. I opened the Desktop -- Administration -- Networking tool.

There it was, eth2, my wireless card.

I configured it for DHCP. It found a network. I now had wireless networking on a Power Macintosh G4 under Debian without having to buy a thing.

One problem: Since the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver card is quite a bit longer than the Airport card this slot was meant for, there's no way I can even close the case of the G4 while using the Wi-Fi card.

That's a bit of a dilemma, no?

Maybe a PCI card will work better? I wonder what might work ... and if I'll have to upgrade to Lenny to increase my chances of this actually working.

But wireless in Linux on a G4. Amazing.

I was impressed with this easy explanation in MDLog:/sysadmin of how to upgrade a box from Debian Etch (currently Stable) to Lenny (hopefully soon to be Stable).

One of the great things about Debian (which does trickle down to those distros based on it, including Ubuntu) is the ability to continually upgrade without needing to reinstall the whole OS.

I've done this about a half-dozen times, and it has worked every time.

I haven't booted the Power Mac G4/466 running Debian Etch in a while, but I did so today because I'm about to move the box and its massive LaCie electron22blue monitor. So I wanted to power it up, do a software update and get it on the cart.

This is a nice box on which to run Debian. I've complained at length at how poorly Fedora 9 installed and autoconfigured on this box and how startlingly better Debian Etch did with that same task. Sorry to repeat that, but it bears repeating.

Since I've set up this box, I've discovered both an original set of PowerPC G4 Macintosh install CDs, which I suspect are OS 9, with a slew of equally original discs for Classic Mac applications, everything from Adobe Pagemaker and Illustrator to MS Office.

I'm not about to install Mac OS (but at least I'd get Flash support from Adobe, which sees some kind of screwed-up wisdom in supporting the all-but-dead PowerPC OS 9 but not PowerPC Linux, which isn't exactly a front-burner OS but at least is currently supported and would get more use if Flash and a modern version of Java ran on it).

I suppose I'd consider throwing OS 9 or OS X on this box, but with Debian running great, I just don't see it happening.

I had trouble when I tried to install OpenBSD on this PowerPC box, but now I think I have a handle on how to get it to boot:

If I'm not wrong, I can make the disk bootable with:

# fdisk -u wd0

On a not-totally-unrelated, our photo-department systems guru Roger Vargo keeps Macintoshes of many vintages and OSes running as well as I've ever seen them, and he's got a handful of Power Mac G4s running OS 9.

I was surprised recently to see a G4 running OS X 10.4 and doing it very quickly. The last G4 I saw running OS X before this was a total disaster, with any action on the user's part taking many seconds to even begin taking effect.

But this G4 was as fast as you'd want it to be.

It did have dual CPUs — maybe 400 MHz each — and at least 1 GB of RAM. Yep, you can stuff those G4's with up to 1.5 GB, I believe. It screams fairly well in OS X. Could you imagine getting near 1 GHz of CPU and 1 GB of RAM on the PowerPC platform in Debian, OpenBSD (and at that level, maybe even in Fedora)?

And they tend to have DVD-ROM/CD-R drives, plus gigabit Ethernet built it. Apple had gigabit Ethernet in the late '90s? Yep, it seems they did.

And the ATI video card built into my G4 does a great job with this huge, hefty LaCie monitor. The generic onboard video circuitry in my el-cheapo Maxspeed Maxterm thin client delivers a much fainter image on the same CRT monitor (and didn't do well at all when I hooked it up to an LCD monitor an age ago). But this G4 delivers superb graphics in Debian.

In other words, if you have a G4 or G5 at your disposal (and Flash isn't important to you or what you do), you might want to go off the reservation and try GNU/Linux or one of the BSD projects on it. (NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD all maintain PowerPC ports).

As it is, I can see this G4 being my main home box in our office, should we ever get all the accumulated junk removed enough to return the space to genuine office use. I kind of, sort of need Flash, but it's not a total deal-breaker.

I can only hope that upgrading the G4 from Etch to Lenny keeps all of the Debian goodness I've been enjoying so much. And there's always that next install of OpenBSD.

Endnote: Since we're not allowed to keep boxes (computer or otherwise) on the floor at the Daily News' new digs, I've had a desk packed with boxes (computer and otherwise) ever since we moved here. I hate to take the G4 down, but right now the G4 case has served me better as a Post-It bulletin board than as a working computer, and I hope to somehow rectify that with this change of CPU scenery.

And this: I'd love to try Slackintosh, the Slackware port to PowerPC, on this box.

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?

The Self-Reliant Thin Client — my converted Maxspeed Maxterm thin client — which has been running Debian Etch now for:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
11:47:52 up 35 days, 19:55, 2 users, load average: 2.79, 1.74, 0.79

with the OS and all files stored on an 8 GB Compact Flash module, and backing up the /home files via rsync to a 1 GB USB Flash drive just received two Iceweasel (aka unbranded Firefox) updates:

iceweasel
Iceweasel-gnome-support

That brings the system's version of the Mozilla-powered browser to 2.0.0.18.

Unless I've failed to hear about it, Debian Lenny hasn't yet been declared Stable, so Etch — first made Stable in April 2007 — remains the Debian distro of record for those who like things to stay predictable (and not break).

And now for an editorial: I know that the Debian Project does things the way it wants, but I'd sure like to see them decide to give each Stable distribution a defined life span of, say, three years. Yep, just like Ubuntu does with its LTS.

At the current pace, I imagine that Etch will get three years of security patches anyway. That's because once Lenny is declared Stable, Etch becomes Old Stable and at that point gets an additional year of bug fixes and security patches from the Debian Project.

The ability for sysadmins to plan and know how long they can ride a given release is something I find very valuable. Red Hat wouldn't do it if customers didn't want it. And while I think the 7-year-life of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release is probably more than a little too long for most uses (not that a print server or internal file server needs to be all that cutting-edge). But three years for Debian (I think at this point that two years of support is pretty much a given) is something that its users — including me — could really get behind.

Note: Ever notice how these entries start off so innocuous and then somehow morph into a diatribe? Yep, me too.

(Yes, I do have the OpenBSD T-shirt with this design. It doesn't get more geeky.)

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build.

To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

With a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor, 248 MB RAM (how it has this amount, I don't know) and a 20 GB hard drive, the specs are pretty similar to the Gateway, except for the Gateway's 1 GB of memory, which I'll probably split between the two machines.

The Toshiba came to me with Windows XP, and this time I wanted to preserve Windows and dual-boot it with a FOSS OS. The CD/DVD drive is extremely flaky. I think it's dying. It does better with "commercial" CDs, and I did get it to boot Partition Magic so I could shrink the NTFS Windows partition and set it up for Linux.

The only Linux CD I could boot was Debian's Etch and a Half. Something was squirrely on our network, and I couldn't get DNS working in the installer. I could've done a minimal install, fixed /etc/resolv.conf and then brought the rest of Debian into the box, but I took this opportunity to go in a different direction.

With all the CPU fan issue on the Gateway, I could never run OpenBSD (or NetBSD or even FreeBSD after the first boot) because I couldn't get the noisy CPU fan under control.

I powered up the Toshiba, which couldn't get networking in Windows either. Since I don't yet have the administrator password, I couldn't update the DNS settings.

I went to an OpenBSD mirror and downloaded a floppy image plus a DOS/Windows utility that helped me create a bootable OpenBSD install floppy. (Before anybody mentions this, I know I could've just as easily created a Debian boot floppy.)

The Toshiba successfully booted off the OpenBSD floppy, and I was able to plug in a mirror and do a full install over the network.

This was my first dual-boot install of OpenBSD, and after the install was done, the machine wouldn't boot at all. I hadn't installed a bootloader and thought the box would boot into Windows, where I planned to modify that bootloader to choose between Windows XP and OpenBSD. Instead I got a "no operating system" message.

And I don't have a Windows XP disc from which to "repair" the master boot record.

So I rebooted with the OpenBSD floppy, dropped down to a shell and added the OpenBSD bootloader at the prompt:

# fdisk -u wd0

Then I rebooted and was in OpenBSD. There is a GRUB package for OpenBSD, and I'll probably install that so I can easily dual-boot either Windows and OpenBSD or eventually Linux and OpenBSD. There are other alternatives as far as bootloaders go, but my familiarity with GRUB is what is governing my decision in this case.

I'm also going to add rsync as well. I have no skills when it comes to OpenBSD's dump and restore utilities, so having rsync is another plateful of Linux-like comfort food that will help me get along in OpenBSD.

Other packages I've installed thus far: nano, mc (the Midnight Commander file manager), Rox-filer (my favorite X file manager), Geany (X text editor) and the Firefox (I probably should've gotten the version with Java, but I'm going to try to add the Java developer's kit and get the Java runtime that way) and Opera Web browsers.

Opera came via a port and not a precompiled package, and it took a lot longer to install this time than the last time I installed it in OpenBSD (on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt), if I recall correctly.

When you download the ports tree and install from there, everything is fetched for you and compiled when needed. Looking at all the output in the terminal, it looks like these ports could never work, but in my experience with OpenBSD they always do. This time was no different. It took maybe 45 minutes to get all the dependencies plus Opera, but after that it worked immediately.

I've grown accustomed to OpenBSD's default window manager, Fvwm2, and I'll probably stick with it for at least awhile before adding any others. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc., installing an app in OpenBSD doesn't automatically update the menus, so you have to manage this yourself. Getting into the guts of the .fvwmrc file is more instructive than not, and once I figured out how to do it, it got less arduous.

I still don't like waiting for ports to download, compile and install, so having 4000+ precompiled packages for i386 is a very good thing.

After a year of strugging with and complaining about the Gateway fan blasting away under OpenBSD, I couldn't believe that I was running OpenBSD 4.4 on the Toshiba with no CPU fan problem whatsoever. Everything from autoconfiguration of my two network interfaces (one Realtek 8189 wired Ethernet, the other an Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA wireless) to a perfect xorg.conf made this OpenBSD install go .

I haven't checked audio yet, but I've never had OpenBSD fail to configure the sound card.

I've always read that most OpenBSD developers use laptops to code in the OS, and now that I have this Toshiba running OpenBSD better than anything I've tried before, I'm amazed at how well it installs and runs on this specific platform.

I've probably written a half-dozen posts about exactly why I'm running OpenBSD, and I'll probably write another one as time allows in the week ahead.

And I'll be either ordering a CD set or contributing directly to the OpenBSD project in the days ahead.

Maybe you're curious about how The Self-Reliant Thin Client is doing.

Here's the uptime output:

steven@maxterm:~$ uptime
13:08:07 up 24 days, 21:15, 2 users, load average: 1.70, 1.32, 1.31

Yep, the VIA C3 Samuel (rated at 1 GHz but running in Linux at 500 MHz for some reason) based converted thin client, running Debian Etch from an 8 GB Compact Flash card, has been working continuously for about a month now (I did reboot a few times during this test for kernel updates).

It's still no speed demon but handles the GNOME desktop fairly well. I did add Fluxbox for testing purposes, and I also installed the lightweight Dillo Web browser, but I'm still relying on the Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox) and Epiphany (GNOME's Gecko build) browsers, plus OpenOffice 2.0 Writer (works surprisingly well, even with 256 MB of RAM and 500 MHz of CPU) and GNOME's GEdit text editor.

I even used CUPS (The Common Unix Printing System) to set up a printer the other day. Even though most systems include native printer-setup utilities (GNOME's is extremely primitive), I find it's both easier and more instructive to use CUPS directly via a Web browser. For those who have never done it, open a browser and go to the following URL to access the CUPS interface:

http://localhost:631

I usually click on Administration and go from there. If you're asked for a login, that login is generally root, with the password being root's password. I can't remember how this goes in Ubuntu, which doesn't let the users (even the main user) at the root password (if there even is such a password).

Ubuntu's root/sudo situation is another kettle of fish for another post, but for most of us, the key to CUPS is using the root login and password to add or modify printers.

I will close out this entry by praising Debian Etch for being so solid on this (and just about every other) platform.