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

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

I 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.

Before I get into this entry, after I wrote it I saw the following in the Sidux release notes:

Kernel 2.6.32 doesn't only improve and stabilise hardware support for newer devices, it also allows enabling KMS (kernel based modesetting) for Intel graphic chipset ...

Note to Linux kernel developers: This doesn't work with the Intel 830m. DOESN'T WORK.

And now back to our regularly scheduled post on how turning off kernel mode setting is the best way to get "today's" Linux distributions to boot into graphical desktops on computers with the Intel 830m graphics chipset:

Remember the last time I figured out how to run both Ubuntu Lucid (via the Alpha 2 image) and Sidux 2009-04 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and its Intel 830m video chip (aka Intel 82830 CGC)?

I used two methods: using the VESA driver and turning off kernel mode setting.

Both methods worked in Ubuntu Lucid — the project's upcoming 10.04 LTS (long-term support) release.

I tested the live KDE DVD image of Sidux 2009-04 for a number of reasons, one being that I think Sidux is a great project that allows users to run the "unstable" Debian Sid with a minimum of pain, all the while providing a very usable desktop. The other reason is that I know of no other live image (especially a live DVD+R, which my quirky Toshiba likes much better than a CD-R) with which to test the upcoming Debian Squeeze release, now in Testing but eventually slated for Stable designation.

The equally useful Debian Live project allows prospective Debian users to try out Debian on their hardware before committing to a full installation — just like Ubuntu and many other popular distros. As far as I know, you can't install the distro from the Debian Live image, but it is invaluable in terms of seeing how a given computer will respond to Debian.

But Debian Live doesn't appear to have any DVD images (I'm not sure whether or not a CD image can be burned to a DVD+R disc; if anybody out there knows anything, please let me in on it). And I don't see any Squeeze images. They appear to be in Lenny-only mode.

So I turn to Sidux. Despite the "2009-04" tag line, it was released in December 2009. I'm sure Debian Squeeze will move further along by the time it is released as Debian's stable distribution, but it does allow users to try something farther from Lenny and closer to Squeeze without committing to a full installation.

So today I decided to try to boot Sidux not with the VESA driver but by turning off kernel mode setting.

As with Ubuntu Lucid, I started to boot the Sidux 2009-04 DVD, and at the boot screen I added the following to the boot parameters:

I was soon in the surprisingly snappy KDE 4.3.4 environment.

This leads me to believe that turning off kernel mode setting will allow users of Intel 830m video (and most likely other Intel video of similar vintage) to not only run Ubuntu Lucid but very like Debian Squeeze as well. In case it's not implied, for me this is huge. It means I'll have choices as to where to go after Debian Lenny.

While in the Sidux live environment, which I'm enjoying very much by the way, I worked a bit in both the Kwrite and Kate text editors, both of which run great on this machine (1.3. GHz Celeron, 1 GB RAM) — much better than the last time I moaned and complained about KDE.

Sidux with KDE on this live DVD — and on this not-so-new hardware — seems no less responsive than Debian Lenny with GNOME. I guess that means I'd be more inclined to use KDE in the future, but I imagine I'll be sticking with GNOME at present (if only because it's working well for me).

In case the message got lost in all of this, the main thing I'm trying to say here is that kernel mode setting is becoming an increasingly big deal in Linux, and for users of Intel video, it not only doesn't help but pretty much renders the given distro unusable.

Turning off kernel mode setting is the key to actually having a working computer and if you can't boot either the live disc or resulting installation and get a working desktop, this is a tweak you should try before messing with xorg.conf or pulling what's left of your hair out.

Attention developers: This "improvement" you call kernel mode setting is pretty much a regression for users of my particular video chip, the Intel 830m, and could be equally useless for other Intel video hardware. Maybe figuring out why kernel mode setting doesn't work in these cases is the thing to do? And how about dropping in some code that automatically turns off kernel mode setting on hardware that doesn't like it until this show-&*^-stopping bug is dealt with?

I don't know who to blame here. I'm no expert, but my gut reaction is that this is a kernel-development problem. My question to you users and developers out there is this: Is kernel mode setting working for you and your Intel video hardware?

Before I end this entry, did I mention how much I like Sidux? I could get used to a distro this good. I'm not the kind of person who needs or wants the latest in everything. To me stability and lack of breakage is key. But just like the first time I tried Sidux (with Xfce), I'm extremely impressed by what its developers have done — and by how quick and usable Debian — be it Sid, Squeeze or Lenny — continues to be.

I'll get to Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 LTS Alpha 2 later, but the "safe graphics mode" boot option in that very Ubuntu live DVD helped me figure out how to get Sidux 2009-04 to boot on my Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830m) graphics-running Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

Over the course of two computing sessions I experienced both the Alpha 2 of the upcoming Ubuntu LTS release as well as the Sidux take on Debian Sid, circa early last year, both of which I've wanted to do in order to "plan" this laptop's future when I decide to leave Debian Lenny behind.

To be brief, the answer to all of my video problems can be summed up thusly:

VESA

Yep, the VESA driver seems to be the ticket to getting X to run in the post-Lenny world.

That's what Ubuntu uses for "safe graphics mode," and my ability to boot into Lucid Alpha 2 with that boot parameter led me to reverse my earlier failure with Sidux.

The good news is that with the boot parameter xdriver=vesa I'm able to boot and run Sidux, its 2.6.32.2 kernel, X.org 7.4 and KDE 4.3.4 desktop, the latter of which is quite snappy and doesn't offend me as much as it might a hard-core KDE 3.x user, which I'm definitely not (and at this point in time I can safely say I like KDE 4.3 much better than 3.x).

I probably shouldn't compare Sidux 2009-4 to Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, but at this point I should just get that out of the way by saying that Sidux, being pretty much Debian Sid, is quite a bit snappier than Ubuntu Lucid at this point in the development.

The problem with both Sidux 2009-4 and Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 at this point in time on this specific hardware is that a number of minutes into the session, say 10 minutes, the mouse only "half" works. By "half" I mean the arrow/cursor appears on the screen and it moves when the mouse is moved. But neither the right- or left-click buttons works. Yep, you can move your pointer but can't click on anything. Even the little mouse wheel works. But again, no clicking is very bad.

Sort of makes X less than useful.

Once again, DAMN XORG ...

I've never had to use the VESA driver before, but I must say that the display looks great, probably refreshes faster than using the Intel drivers in Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Hardy through Karmic ... but not having a working mouse is really, really inconvenient.

The fact that both Sidux 2009-4 and Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 share this "bug," says to me that the trouble is upstream. I'll have to start checking the bug reports for everything from Xorg to the kernel itself to see just what the hell is going on.

Other than this showstopping bug, everything else in Sidux 2009-04, especially KDE 4.3, is pretty darn nice.

(Point of order: Most of this entry was composed in the Sidux 2009-04 live environment ... until the mouse died; I returned to finish it up in the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 live environment.)

More on Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 coming up ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's been quite a bit of rumbling about Sidux, a 2-year-old distribution based on the unstable Debian Sid GNU/Linux, with a shortish Carla Schroder review and a "why the hell does it exist" slamming from Matt Asay.

It means I'll have to try it.

An even newer Ubuntu-based distro is wattOS, which is designed to save power.

While still in an alpha state, it appears to be another one to try. Full power management under Linux is extremely important — and not always achievable.