Recently in Lenny Category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best.

You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

I've upgraded a stable Debian system to testing maybe once or twice, usually in short order (i.e. installing stable and immediately upgrading to testing).

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my "production" Debian laptop, which I've been using heavily since late last year, from Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing). I thought it would be smooth and easy.

Not so much.

I've finally got most things working. I'm still having the kind of sound problems that plagued me in the Ubuntu 8.04 era (Flash and the rest of the system fighting for dominance), but I've overcome quite a bit.

I did have backups of my user data, so if things went totally south, I was covered.

I guess I've had more elaborate setups than this, particularly in OpenBSD, where there's a whole lot of configuration needed.

In reality, I've kept my Lenny install fairly vanilla. I only have GNOME. Never added Xfce, Fluxbox or KDE. I pretty much stick with the GNOME apps. The Epiphany browser is one of my favorite apps. I use Rhythmbox. I have gFTP, but lately I've been using Nautilus' FTP capability more and more.

I do use Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and I have a ton of POP mail on the box.

Recently I added Wine via Bordeaux and have been running the free-as-in-beer Windows image viewer/editor IrfanView (although I'm about to cease needing it for the very specific IPTC-manipulating feature for which I cling to it).

But otherwise it's pretty standard. And I did have that backup.

I had what I thought was enough disk space (1 GB +) in my root partition (I have / and /home in encrypted LVM).

First I made sure Lenny was up to date. Then I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Squeeze repos instead of Lenny.

Then I did a dist-upgrade with apt. Everything seemed to be going OK. Until the udev problem cropped up. Had I seen the page in this link before I started, I might've saved myself a whole lot of trouble.

I didn't know what udev was. The Debian package page has a nice description:

udev is a daemon which dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev/, handles hotplug events and loads drivers at boot time.

It seems that the udev in Squeeze requires a newer kernel than the one in Lenny, yet that kernel either doesn't install before udev, or you have to be actually running that new kernel before doing the full upgrade. There's even a fairly uhelpful bug report.

At any rate, I couldn't quite figure out what to do. I ran a few more dist-upgrades and eventually did reboot into the new kernel for Squeeze and redid the dist-upgrade.

In case you were wondering (and I knew you were), I did run out of disk space. I managed to clear apt's cache and get a bit further on the upgrade.

For some reason, X was gone. I used apt to reinstall xorg, which brought the GUI back.

X performance was terrible for awhile. Not sure why, but xorg was eating most of the CPU for quite some time. I tried a few xorg.conf files, but nothing really helped.

At one point, in the flurry of error messages, it was suggested in the terminal that I run apt-get autoclean.

I did that, and that removed a whole lot of packages, a few of which I still needed.

Eventually I added back the bits of GNOME that were missing. I had sound problems, so (cue horrific scream) I actually installed PulseAudio in an attempt to restore some order to the system. I think the GNOME bits did more, but I do have most of my sound capability back.

I was able to get sound in Flash video in the browser, but then Totem kept crashing, so I pulled that and tweaked my account a bit.

I would get specific here with what I did, but truthfully none of it is working well enough for me to do that.

So I have sound in applications, I don't have sound in the Flash plugin, but I do have sound in .flv files on the local drive, as well as in other video and audio.

And from what I understand, "system sounds" in GNOME are broken for all of Squeeze until some package or other is released into the distribution.

I was more troubled than anything by X eating all that CPU. Again, I think adding some GNOME bits (I even had to reinstall GDM) solved that problem.

Right now Pidgin is refusing to connect to my AIM account, saying I've logged in and out too many times in succession.

BEFORE YOU SAY, 'THIS IS TESTING; DON'T RUN IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TROUBLE,' LET ME SAY THAT I HEAR YOU. I've had trouble in Testing before, and I didn't expect not to have it again. I'm just reporting what happened.

Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine. I did have to tweak the config file to get my Ethernet interface managed under NetworkManager (just like I did in Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic). Now that works great.

If I decide to stick with Squeeze, and I'm not saying I will, I probably will do a fresh install. I know I'm missing some GNOME bits that I might want or need. I've been adding stuff back as I run into trouble (I reinstalled gedit, the gnome screensaver app, which I needed to keep X from crashing when the gnome power management app tried to turn that feature on by itself).

I hope this upgrade process goes a whole lot more smoothly at such time as Squeeze gets its official Stable release. I'm somewhat confident about that happening.

So if you were smart and skipped to the end, my Squeeze system is running fairly well at present, and I could very well stick with it. The biggest problem I'm having is with sound (and my USB Headphone Set sound module).

One thing I discovered was the YouTube plugin for Totem. All you do is activate it, and you can search for YouTube videos by keyword and then play the h.264 version in Totem. With sound. That's really cool.

I've got enough things working that I'm going to stick with Squeeze at least until Ubuntu Lucid is released late next month. As I wrote recently, I did try a daily build of Lucid in the live environment, and everything appeared to be working. The purple-Mac theme didn't really bother me. I'll have to do some multimedia tests: I never could get my 3gp cellphone videos to play with sound in Ubuntu (and they still work in Debian).

I could also do a clean install of Debian Lenny. I'm not ruling that out at all. I kept this laptop fairly stock (and tried to keep good notes on what I did) so I could re-create Debian Lenny on it if necessary. One way or the other, I will be reinstalling something on this laptop, be it Lenny, Squeeze or "other."

I can't say that I expected the dist-upgrade to Squeeze to go smoothly. I guess I hoped it would.

I thought to myself, "You should've used a detailed Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade guide on the Web before doing this." I still haven't found one. If you have, please let me know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind that it's ... purple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?

I've kept the Debian Lenny installation on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop as standard as it could be in some respects — I kept GNOME as the desktop environment and didn't add Xfce or anything else (that I can remember anyway).

That's because I want it to work as well as it can since it's my many "production" machine.

Not that I haven't added things like Audacity, gPodder, Inkscape, Icedove (aka Thunderbird), Iceowl (aka Thunderbird calendar plugin Lightning), the Geany text editor (which I don't use all that often) plus a whole lot of codecs and other bits from Debian Multimedia.

On the dark side, I used the Bordeaux .deb package to add Wine and my favorite Windows app, the IrfanView photo viewer/image editor. I also added Skype (with its Debian-aimed repository) but haven't used it yet.

To print out a list of every package on your system if it uses apt for package management (like Debian and its derivatives, including Ubuntu), run the following in a terminal (which in this case pipes the output to a text file you can peruse at your leisure):

$ dpkg --get-selections > my_packages

Now you'll have a file called my_packages with a list of every package installed on your system.

If you want to see a list of all 1,115 packages on my Debian Lenny install, click through to the rest of this entry (and if you don't want to see a 1,115-file list, DON'T CLICK THROUGH).

In addition to his first e-mail to me, David Gurvich adds more about his experiences with Intel i830m video in Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD:

I did think the problems with FreeBSD were due to using PC-BSD and installing a lightweight desktop on top. After testing with a bare install that turns out to not be the case and the issue is with FreeBSD and has nothing to do with the scripts that PC-BSD uses.

I have not tested OpenBSD but most of the wireless drivers on FreeBSD have been ported from there. I suspect there is a difference between the two that causes these drivers to crash the system on FreeBSD. The primary reason that I was interested in FreeBSD was ZFS support and wanted to setup a file server. The network issue stopped that in it's tracks.

There is a graphical network tool in the FreeBSD ports that seems to work ok but most of my settings were with wpa_supplicant and rc.conf. I believe that PC-BSD has it's own graphical network configuration tool but didn't use that.

Flash does have issues on FreeBSD and I don't recommend installing the linux compatibility to use flash. Instead, use wine with a windows browser. There is a memory leak in the linux flashplugin on FreeBSD that will eventually cause your system to freeze until you kill nspluginwrapper. The same technique may work on OpenBSD.

I have tried Fedora 12 on this laptop and that worked somewhat after tweaking a number of parameters. By somewhat I mean that I had random Xorg crashes and the tweaks simply mitigated the frequency. I gave F12 about 2 months but just could not take the crashes. Fedora 12 is working well on the other systems that I've installed it on but there was a problem with one that had ATI video which required building an xorg module from git.

I am currently using Arch linux on the X30 and, since configuring the boot parameters with 'nomodeset' and locking the xf86-video-intel driver to 2.9.1, have not had any issues with video. The main problem has been with the networking scripts and I am still not sure what the issue is there but installing wicd-1.7 seems to have worked around that. I am impressed with the speed vs Fedora 12. The reason I am impressed is that, prior to Arch, Fedora 12 had been among the fastest distributions on the X30 with a useable firefox in under 2 minutes. The X30 from startup to a working firefox connection takes 45 seconds in Arch.

The main issue I will have with Arch is likely the very reason Arch is so responsive. Rolling releases don't keep old packages around and new versions can cause random failures on working systems. That means that I will need to maintain a list of packages that should not be upraded and be careful on upgrades. Nothing new to anyone who has used Gentoo.

I've currently had Arch installed on the X30 for a month and have had no issues to deal with since the video and networking were fixed. The livecd boots to a text console and I recommend looking at the arch installation guide. Pretty much everything needs to be configured but the wiki makes that simple.

David Gurvich

David, you hit on a number of important points. I will definitely try Fedora 12 to see how it works with i830m, and I agree with you that Arch is an excellent choice. I've written many times about how the Arch community has been a great resource for me in solving my X issues with i830m all the way from Debian Lenny through now.

I neglected to mention ZFS in FreeBSD. That certainly is something to recommend in its favor. There's also a project bringing journaling to soft updates in FreeBSD's UFS filesystem that I heard about in this BSD Talk episode.

I'm not terribly happy about Flash being so problematic in FreeBSD. I forget all the trouble I had with the Opera browser in OpenBSD. That browser and its Flash plugin uses OpenBSD's Linux compatibility layer, and I was eventually able to stop most crashes by changing a parameter in Opera.

Here's what I'm hoping for:

• People smarter than me will figure this out and either make allowances in the kernel and xorg, or will create some other kind of mechanism that doesn't leave users of Intel 830m video chips out in the cold
• HTML 5 will sooner than later take hold with an open video codec and return Flash to what it's good at, which is little applications that I can safely ignore, and stop doing what it's bad at, which is delivering video that can better be handled by a plethora of other formats. The easiest way for this to happen would be for Google to open-source the on2 video codec it recently acquired. (Except that Google already converted the entire YouTube library to the loved-by-Apple patent-encumbered H.264.)

  I've run BSD before, and if Linux/Xorg throws Intel 830m under the bus, I'll be an enthusiastic user of any system that doesn't follow along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remember this little guy, the orangish icon that appears in your upper GNOME panel in Debian Lenny when you have software updates?

Ubuntu has a similar yet different icon (which you can see in the screen-grab below this paragraph). Or had it, I guess. Now that the Ubuntu Project decided to completely change the way users are notified of software updates, opening an update window either in the foreground or background (I seemed to get both at random) at some point during the week the update is released, the cheery orange (or whatever color it used to be in Ubuntu) icon doesn't get much play.

I like the software-update icon. I know what it means. If I didn't know, I could either mouse over it, or actually click it to determine its purpose in my computing life and act accordingly.

I wasn't fond of those randomly opening update windows in Ubuntu Karmic. (Did they have them in Jaunty also? Who can remember?) You see, sometimes I turn the computer on, after which it checks the repos for updates and puts the orange icon on my upper panel.

But I'm not always ready to drop everything and update the system. (That's why I don't mind that the Xfce install of Debian doesn't include the GNOME update manager ... because it's part of GNOME, after all; it's not all that hard to use apt-get or Aptitude to check for updates periodically. But I do like the Update Manager, and it's one of those things I like about GNOME and one of many reasons I use GNOME as my desktop environment.)

No, sometimes I need to get stuff done and don't want to run the update. The orange icon doesn't complain. It waits until I'm ready. It doesn't open any windows on my screen unless I click on it.

And that's the way I like it. It's one of those things that Ubuntu did right in the Hardy days and Debian still does right, Lenny being just about the same age as Hardy.

I guess Ubuntu changed the update notification system in an attempt to, in the minds of its developers, either help new users not accustomed to the ways of things not-Windows, or somehow do updates better than they've been done before.

I'm not sure about the outcome. I guess new users wouldn't know to click on an update icon and might let it sit unclicked for days, weeks or months at a time. They won't ignore an open window on their desktop that tells them they have an update.

But I seem to remember a little dialog shooting out from the Ubuntu update icon that told the user that updates were available. The little dialog - that's a subtle innovation that, in my opinion, addresses users new and experienced equally well.

No matter how GNOME, Debian, Ubuntu and any other projects or distributions treat update notifications going forward, I'm letting it be known that I like a little icon at the top of my panel that doesn't badger me into doing anything but just lets me know that I can do something about updating the box when I have the time.

I looked back in the blog, and I began running Debian Lenny as my main desktop distribution just about two months ago.

I've got pretty much everything working. I even get sound in 3gp videos from my cell phone. I think I have Debian Multimedia to thank for that one (and all my other codec issues, for that matter).

Debian is snappy, as it has always been for me, even with GNOME. I don't even see any performance issues due to using fully encrypted LVM. And with that encryption on my laptop, any anxiety over it being lost or stolen is gone. The machine's worth nothing, and the data on it can't be accessed without the passphrase. I've got unencrypted backups in different locations, so I'm covered for any issues with the laptop disappearing, being destroyed or having some kind of disk issue.

I've pretty much stayed in the GNOME world for this install. I don't have Xfce, which I usually do install.

There's no Mono on this machine. Gthumb was the default, so there was no F-Spot, and I don't think there was Tomboy notes.I didn't install the C++ equivalent Gnote because I really don't need a notes application. I just use regular text files.

I thought about using some Debian Backports, but I really see no need. I'm more than OK for now with Iceweasel/Firefox from the 3.0.x series, and I haven't needed anything beyond OpenOffice 2.4. I've had enough of Ubuntu's six-month Intel video-killing cycle for the time being.

What's different about my use of free, open-source operating systems and applications in 2009 and now 2010 than in 2007 and 2008 is that now I'm not in the testing, installing, wash-rinse-repeating phase.

For the past nearly two years I've been using OpenBSD and now Linux to do a great deal of my work. I still have a company-supplied XP box on my desk, but my personal laptop, which I use for work as well, has never run anything but OpenBSD and Linux. I have a whole lot of data on here, including a growing mound of e-mail in Thunderbird, and since 2009 it's been through OpenBSD, Ubuntu and now Debian.

I don't have time to distro-hop and continually fix the breakage that results, especially on this hardware.

So it looks like I'll be sticking with Debian Lenny for awhile. I did resolve my Intel video issues in Ubuntu Lucid, which is an LTS release, and hence something I'll be considering for future use.

But I won't be jumping on that release until at least three months after its April 2010 debut ... so I've got another six months ahead of me in the Debian Lenny world.