Recently in Debian Category

I broke out the Compaq Armada 7770dmt, a 1999-era laptop with a 233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor and 144 MB of RAM.

This unusual laptop (the power brick is inside the case, it has that little "eraser-like" pointer — which still works — on the keyboard, which is very nice as far as laptop keyboards go) has run more than a few OSes since I've owned it.

I had OpenBSD 4.2 on it for a long time and recently wiped the drive and installed Debian Lenny.

Lenny is running as well or better than Etch did on the Compaq. I have a very minimal Xfce setup — no office suite, the Geany editor in the GUI and two Web browsers: Iceweasel/Firefox for when I absolutely need it and Opera 10.01 for when I want to browse on this 10-year-old laptop with only a little frustration.

I can't recommend a 10-year-old computer for intensive work on today's Web, but you can still squeeze a bit out of it.

Jono Bacon goes on at length at his blog on the contrast between the euphoria over the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the reports of problems by users.

Read the 10 or so entries below this one and you can see the problems I've had.

It's time to put this in perspective. I've had plenty of problems with all manner of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems over the past few years. Given all the hardware that a modern OS must contend with (and I'll include Windows in that number since it runs – or is supposed to, anyway – on a wide variety of hardware), there's bound to be breakage.

Apple has it easy because it controls the hardware and the software and hence has an easier time making all the bits work together.

In my experience, Ubuntu generally performs well, and its developers seem genuinely worried about whether or not hardware will work with the distribution's constant stream of releases.

In both Linux and OpenBSD, for instance, wireless support has only gotten better over time.

I wish I could say the same for sound and video. PulseAudio has been somewhat of a disaster over the past year or more. It just wasn't ready for the average user, and the above-average user is demanding Jack and real-time kernels to do sophisticated audio work.

Now PulseAudio seems to be getting better.

For me, my Intel video hardware on a couple of laptops (Gateway Solo 1450 and Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) has been causing problems beginning with Debian Lenny's time in testing. Whenever you need xorg.conf hacks just to make video work, and those hacks aren't crystal clear and easy to find, there will be problems. People will try Linux and run away from it as fast as they can if they can't get the basics (sound and video) to work.

And for my particular Toshiba laptop, the use of Kernel Mode Setting killed X in my Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. Once I figured out how to turn KMS off (with a new line in GRUB), I could run X without an xorg.conf for the first time since Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. That's a nice change.

But to get there — to get basic functionality — I had to bring my 2 years of FOSS knowledge to bear in order to solve the problem.

Then just about every ancillary GNOME app (Brasero, Rhythmbox, Empathy and the non-GNOME Pidgin) stopped working after the upgrade. A quick search determined that my previous installation (in 9.04) of KDEnlive brought in a plugin that kept the other four apps from working. I saw lots of chatter on the problem, but none of the solutions worked for me. I had to remove the offending plugin and then reinstall three opencv libraries to clear things up (you can see all the details in the previous entries on this blog).

Many will say that I should've stuck with the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (with the initials standing for "long-term support"), which performed well for me but wasn't as stable on my particular hardware as 9.10 (for which I had to do some hackery to get NetworkManager to manage my network).

And both Ubuntu 8.04 (I'm still using it on the Gateway laptop, where it's very solid) and Debian Lenny (now stable and running very well for me on two other machines) are viable options, but for my main laptop I want newer packages, especially Firefox 3.5, and I've been more inclined to upgrade the distro itself rather than use backports or PPAs to bring newer apps to older distributions.

Maybe I've got that wrong (or maybe not).

I've been meaning to move all of my user files to a Debian Lenny machine and see how well that performs with my regular abuse of the hardware and software. And there's always Fedora (and Mandriva ... and PCLinuxOS ... Mepis ... and dozens of others).

But despite all my grumbling, I do have a functioning Ubuntu 9.10 system. I even ditched my own "blue" theme and wallpaper and brought in the "human" theme and wallpaper that shipped with the upgrade. I'm back to Ubuntu s**t brown and orange, and I'm liking it. The new GNOME icons are cool. And we all have the next Ubuntu release — and 10.04 will be the next LTS — to look forward to with hope that many bugs will be squashed in the service of a stable desktop that will have the customary 3 years of desktop support.

In a nutshell: Ubuntu's under the hot lights. People expect more from it than they do from any other FOSS operating system. And it generally delivers more than any other, if not as much as people are counting on in their lofty expectations.

I use Ubuntu for many reasons: It seems to have the right balance between total "freedom" and the ability to play most multimedia, its developers are focused more on the desktop and less on the server (although Ubuntu is making a big play there), and its vast user base means that when there are problems, the community (including me in this blog) can often solve problems that benefit all users.

We're all looking for the time when Ubuntu (or some other distro, or some other OS entirely) can be easily handled by the average computer owner. That time really isn't here yet. With a Windows preload, the manufacture of the hardware generally makes sure there are drivers for all the hardware. Linux preloads — a few of which do exist — generally do the same. But in the wild and wooly world of geeks burning ISOs and installing Unix-like operating systems on all manner of hardware, a foolproof experience just isn't in the cards. Yet.

Will we ever get there? I hope so. I also have at least a little bit of hope for more preloads of Ubuntu and other Linux distros and maybe even a BSD.

There has been a whole lot of progress over the past few years on the Linux desktop. It's hard to predict where the state of FOSS will be five years from now.

In the near future I'll settle for Xorg and Intel playing well together, mass adoption of a free and open video standard and a move away from proprietary document formats since we barely need to print anything anyway.

I'm surprised that I forgot how this works: When you install Debian without using a network mirror (either from the first CD of the full set or, my preferred method, with the DVD image), /etc/apt/sources.list is set up with a Debian mirror for security updates. However, there is no entry for the Debian software repositories, and if you want to add applications from a network mirror, you'll need to modify /etc/apt/sources.list accordingly.

One thing I noticed in Lenny is that sudo was included in the default. I can't remember whether or not sudo was part of the default Etch install. I seem to think not. I always add it anyway, and I was happy to see sudo part of the default Debian install (the Xfce desktop version at any rate).

So I had sudo and used visudo to give rootly powers to my user account. This is the way Ubutu works by default, and I've grown quite accustomed to using sudo instead of su to root. OpenBSD also includes sudo in the base install, and I used it there pretty much exclusively.

I needed rsync to make my backup scripts work, and that is one package that Debian doesn't include in the default. When I tried to add it with Aptitude, the system couldn't find it. That was because I installed from CD, didn't pick a network mirror due to some kind of problem on my local network.

I took a look at /etc/apt/sources.list and immediately saw that since I didn't use a network mirror, the system didn't (and probably couldn't) put one in that configuration file.

It's easy enough to remedy the situation. Either become the superuser with su, or use sudo (again my preferred method) and edit /etc/apt/sources.list. My changes to the file are in blue type and my coments are in dark red type:

First open your favorite terminal program and become the superuser:

$ su

enter the root password when prompted. If you're successful, you'll get a # prompt, which is the root prompt:

#

Then edit /etc/apt/sources.list. I'm in Xfce, so I used the Mousepad text editor. Use your favorite editor.

# mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

Here is the file and my comments and changes:

# use the pound sign before lines you want the system to ignore. I no longer want apt or Aptitude to look for packages on the install CD, so I'm "pounding out" the next line
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.2a _Lenny_ - Official i386 xfce+lxde-CD Binary-1 20090817-01:32]/ lenny main

# I needed to add the next two lines so I could install packages from the Debian repository. The "basic" way to do this is to hit the main repository, but I added contrib and non-free because I sometimes need packages that aren't totally "free" in a free software sense, especially the Java runtime
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

# The security updates for the main repository were included so all the packages installed by default from the "main" repository are covered; I added contrib and non-free so I would get updates for those packages as well
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

-----------------------

Now that I had /etc/apt/sources.list configured, I installed rsync with Aptitude, did my backup and went about my business .

Since the CF card serving as the sole disk drive in the Self-Reliant Thin Client (Maxspeed Maxtor converted to use as a full desktop PC) checked out with fsck via a card reader on another PC, I decided to do a reinstall of Debian, this time Lenny instead of Etch.

I can't seem to use a Debian network mirror on this particular local network. Even though this particular LAN offers DHCP, it doesn't send DNS information, and my supplying the nameserver addresses doesn't jump-start the process. I used to install from this network with a static IP and have no trouble, and I'd like the choice between a dynamic and static IP in the Debian installer. I've been using my Debian Lenny DVD for installs recently, but I don't have a DVD drive pull to connect with the maze of IDE and power cables snaking out of the thin client's box. I did have a recent CD image of Lenny with Xfce and LXDE, so I burned that to a CD-R and used that to do the install on the thin client.

The Xfce desktop installation of Lenny, after the base install, is only 487 files (I believe the GNOME desktop version is some 700 files). So it shouldn't take as long as a network install. Having a CF card as the system's hard drive does lengthen the process. Commercial SSD's might be faster than traditional spinning magnetic hard drives, but garden-variety CF cards meant for digital cameras are definitely not as fast as regular disk drives.

Once the installation is done, I can pull those cables, remove the CD drive from the IDE cable Frankenstein "chain," reconnect the CF-to-IDE adapter that's built into the Maxspeed (using a VIA C3 Samuel CPU spec'd for 1 GHz but running at 500 MHz for some reason, with 256 MB RAM, the maximum for the ECS EVEm motherboard) and have a very portable PC with no spinning hard drives.

I generally install the standard Debian desktop with GNOME, but I have used the Xfce desktop installation, which unlike Ubuntu's Xfce variant Xubuntu doesn't include a whole lot of GNOME utilities.

That means no Synaptic, NetworkManager, Update Manager, etc. I might try managing the network interfaces with Wicd, which I don't think is even in Lenny but is probably available as a .deb package, or will certainly be available in Debian's Testing release, Squeeze.

Memory management: I have a limited number of PC133/PC100 memory sticks, and I had two 256 MB and one 128 MB stuffed into the Debian Mac (G4/466), which is running Debian Etch. (I have to update that box at some point; I hope I don't run into the same problems as I did with the thin client.) I had to pull one of the 256 MB modules to put into the thin client. What I really need to do is find a few cheap 512 MB PC133 memory sticks for the Mac. Not that Debian doesn't run great in 640 MB, but I'm always more comfortable with 1 GB, and the G4/466 maxes out at 1.5 GB. And I always recommend maxing out the RAM on any given computer (and usually do just that).

CF memory card as hard drive: I did most of my early experimenting with Linux and BSD on the Self-Reliant Thin Client using the aforementioned long IDE and hard-drive-power cables, into which I plugged any number of regular hard drives, switching them out at will. But I wanted to try running off the CF card (the thin client, back when it was an actual thin client, used just such a card for its own OS) and see just how long it will last in semi-regular use.

I could've used Puppy Linux as the OS, which is deliberately sparing of write cycles on the flash memory, and I still could. All I need is another CF card and I could easily swap them in and out of the thin client to run as many different OSes as I have cards. In fact, I just might leave the CD drive connected and the thin client case open, get a handful of CF cards and do those installations.

With a frugal install of Puppy Linux, I should be able to update the card without pulling the thin client apart and inserting a CD drive into the IDE chain (there's only one IDE header on the motherboard, otherwise this would be a lot easier).

Instead, I could pop the CF card out of the back of the thin client's CF-to-IDE adapter, replace the relevant files in the Puppy frugal install on another PC with a card reader, reinsert the CF card into the thin client and then have a fully updated Puppy box without needing to burn CDs and get the drive hooked up.

Later that day: I now am running Debian Lenny on the Self-Reliant Thin Client. Since I wasn't able to access a Debian mirror during the install, I used the Debian CD #1 image with Xfce and LXDE, choosing to install the Xfce desktop.

I've run the Xfce installation of Debian many times before, and while I at times appreciate all the GNOME tools in the standard Debian desktop (most of which are included in Ubuntu's Xubuntu variant, which is a lot more GNOMEish than not), I've been using Linux and BSD for about two years and have done my share of manual network configurations.

I'm also comfortable updating installations in the terminal and have gravitated toward Aptitude rather than apt because I tend to get more packages with Aptitude that make the given applications run better. Plus Aptitude keeps records of everything you've done with it — not that I know how to access said records, but I still use Aptitude because it works.

So I can get away without NetworkManager (although I've said I will try Wicd to manage the network interfaces in this installation) and Synaptic, and Xfce has plenty of GUI tools of its own to control the desktop.

Right now the first Aptitude upgrade is still running, and I'm enjoying 1280x1024 video (from an S3 Virage chip) on a LaCie 22-inch CRT monitor (the Daily News is swimming in these boat anchors). The graphics were never lightning-quick on this hardware, and no Linux kernel, Xorg implementation or other magic will change that. I've never been able to watch YouTube video on this box, even in Puppy Linux; and sound is similarly terrible. As a thin client with 2001-era hardware, the Maxspeed was never meant to be a fully functioning PC, even though I've been using it as such since 2007.

At first glance, I can tell you that Debian Lenny boots at least twice as quickly on the thin client with the CF flash card as hard drive than Etch did. That's a performance improvement I can live with.

I said before in this entry that I might keep the thin-client box torn apart in order to get another CF card, install Puppy Linux on it and be able to switch OSes by popping out one CF card and inserting another.

However, after a morning and afternoon screwing around with this in between doing my regular work, I'm ready to seal up the box and let Debian Lenny ride.

I just tried to update a Debian Etch box that hasn't seen any action in about a year, and I got this message when using the Update Manager:

W: GPG error: ... The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

(Note: I don't have the exact error message because I'm not using the box in question to write this post ... but it looks just like this, except with a bit more information and the full

I do have a few Debian Etch boxes hanging around, and today I wanted to update one — the Self-Reliant Thin Client (Maxspeed Maxterm thin client with 8 GB CF card as the hard drive) — and I ran into some PGP key issues.

I already dealt with how to fix the Opera key (if you're using the Opera repository for the free but not-open source browser, and I am), but I'll repeat what you should run, in this case specifically for Debian and using a root terminal (instead of sudo).

Open a root terminal (or su to root) and do the following:

# gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key F9A2F76A9D1A0061
# gpg --fingerprint F9A2F76A9D1A0061
# gpg --armor --export F9A2F76A9D1A0061 | apt-key add -

That takes care of the Opera key.

On this Etch box, my Debian key was bad as well. I can see that happening. I probably haven't booted this box in over a year, and since then the whole SSL problem with Debian happened, caused hair-rending, and then was resolved, so that might have caused the problem ... or maybe not.

At any rate, I did get errors when trying to update the box with Synaptic (I eventually used Aptitude in the console, my preferred method at least some of the time), so I needed to get a new Debian key. Here's how I did that one (thanks to Stackoverflow.com for the recipe):

# apt-get install debian-keyring
# gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 1F41B907
# gpg --armor --export 1F41B907 | apt-key add -

Then I still had a problem with libc6. when trying to upgrade/update with:

# aptitude update
# aptitude upgrade

... I kept getting a message about libc6 being a corrupted package.

I got around this problem by first clearing the cache and then installing libc6 (and its dependency, libc6-i686) individually:

# aptitude clean
# aptitude install libc6

That worked. My "corrupted" package was gone, replaced by the presumably uncorrupted libc6, and I was able to then proceed with the update/upgrade:

# aptitude update
# aptitude upgrade

Update: I'm getting checksum errors in the downloaded packages. Could this be the CF card going bad? I cleaned out the packages and am trying another upgrade.

Further update: The box is dead. That half-upgrade made it so I can't even log in ... Guess I'll have to do a reinstall after all.

Even further update: I pulled the CF card and ran fsck on it from another box. It checks out. Why did I keep getting packages with bad checksums?

I'll have to hook up the CD drive and do a reinstall. I can't remember whether or not this particular box will boot Lenny. I could always reinstall Etch and upgrade from there. Since the CF card checks out with fsck, I can hopefully keep the same partitions when doing the reinstall.

Final word on 2.16.18 nostalgia: Before I close this out, the 2.6.18 kernel used in Etch and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and CentOS) 5, PCLinuxOS 2007 and probably a few other distros I've forgotten, has been a very good kernel to me, for my hardware (especially the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450). I'll miss it. I welcome all the new hardware drivers, especially wireless networking drivers, in the newer kernels. I don't welcome the regressions in Xorg, but since the Self-Reliant Thin Client uses an S3 video chip rather than Intel, maybe I can blissfully move to Lenny without trouble ...

That's what I'm going to try to do. I have a Macintosh G4/466 box that has been running Debian Etch for quite some time. I don't have it connected to a network at the moment, and I'd like to update it to Lenny without having to move it to a network connection.

So I'm going to use a DVD. I'm downloading the Debian Lenny DVD image for PowerPC, and I'm going to try to add that disc to the sources.list and do the initial upgrade that way.

Eventually I'll probably get networking into the box (especially if the kernel includes drivers for at least some of the NICs I have laying around), but just to jump-start it into the world of Debian Lenny, I hope this works.

It's usually not this easy.

Ever since I did this test Debian Lenny installation with encrypted LVM, I've had trouble with NetworkManager, the package that allows for "easy" management of networking settings. A lot of people dislike this package and prefer to do everything manually. I'm OK with manual configuration, but I like the easy of using this utility.

The problem was that when I went to System - Administration - Network in the GNOME desktop in Debian Lenny, I would get the applet but not the sign-in. I didn't have to supply the root password to modify the settings.

But none of those settings would stick, either. I had to manually configure the network to get the bits flowing.

I had the idea that if I reinstalled all the NetworkManager-related packages, that action might set things right.

So in the Synaptic Package Manager, I searched for NetworkManager. I reinstalled everything that had to do with it:

libnm-glib0
libnm-util0
network-manager
network-manager-gnome

Then I rebooted. I went back into NetworkManager to change my networking (the networks I had set up were still there).

A check of ifconfig in a root terminal:

# ifconfig

revealed that my networking STILL hadn't changed. But a check of /etc/resolv.conf showed that my nameservers DID change.

So I used the root terminal and vi to edit /etc/network/interfaces and REMOVED the static IP lines in there, leaving only these for eth0:

# The primary network interface
allow-hotplug eth0
auto eth0

I rebooted again, tried NetworkManager again ... and it worked. I'm back in business in Debian Lenny.

Geek addendum: I still feel a lot more comfortable hacking into the basic networking configuration files in OpenBSD due to a) familiarity, b) better design and c) better documentation.

Further geek addendum: I toyed with the idea of setting up multiple NICs (wired and wireless) manually with /etc/network/interfaces containing separate nameservers for each NIC. I couldn't figure it out, but I'm sure it's doable.

What this means: I'm ready to go with the Debian Lenny fully encrypted LVM test. I've always enjoyed the relative quickness of Debian over Ubuntu, and I don't see the encryption slowing me down all that much. We'll see how I feel if and when I rsync everything onto this laptop.

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'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).