Recently in Slackware 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 always pull the trigger too soon when declaring success with a new WiFi adapter/software/hardware combination, and I'm hoping that's not the case with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and my aging Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

But today I first had trouble connecting with my WEP encryption key (I know I shouldn't be using WEP ... and I will change to WPA2 once I resolve a few issues and get the rest of the house's computers on board ...).

Then when I finally did connect (had to reboot) I had the typical screen-freezes-and-ctrl-alt-backspace-AND-ctrl-alt-delete-have-no-effect-so-I-have-to-do-a-hard-reset.

That's the beauty of blogging where absolutely no one is making any damn money from the entire enterprise: I can just spin out a fake word with 30 or so hyphens and just move on.

OK ... I was reprimanded once for using the kind of language that flows continuously through my favorite podcast, and I considered just chucking the whole blogging-for-the-man thing and doing this on my own time, on my own site and enjoying the tens of dollars yearly I could earn from Google AdSense.

OK, I pretty much do this entirely on my own time as is ...

Anyhow, I'm ready to return to the raw meat of this blog post, which is my trouble with wireless networking.

So I did the hard reset, booted back into Ubuntu and while things seem a bit slow, networking-wise (that could be anything), it's working OK for the moment.

Here's what I'm thinking:

The problem might not be the specific wireless networking adapter; it could be an issue with USB (1.1 in the case of this old hunk of saved-from-the-garbage hardware). Whether Linux-related or not, perhaps the Toshiba just can't handle using the USB inteface that intensely.

I don't recall having any problems with the PCMCIA adapter I use with every damn PCMCIA-equipped computer known to woman and man, namely the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (all I'm saying is if you don't have one of these, go to eBay and get one; for me's it's the geek-networking equivalent of the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman.

So a "newer" Cardbus adapter (maybe another $10 Airlink?) might work better for this particular laptop.

Another thing: If whatever problem I'm having is related to software, it's possible that performance will improve and crashes will diminish (or end entirely) with newer versions of everything from the Linux kernel (remember, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which is pretty much a year and a half old; ancient in Linux terms) to the dreaded NetworkManager in GNOME or anything else in the stack.

But given my recent experience, I'm extremely gunshy and more worried about regressions than either a lack or abundance of "improvements." That's what screwing up Xorg for probably half the PCs out there will do to you, O Xorg developers who decided that working Intel video is for other people, meaning people who don't have Intel video chips embedded in their PCs.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I thought you could.

Of course with the super-fast USB 3 on the horizon for Linux — yep, first for Linux and then for the other 99 percent of the world, I expect we'll be getting more USB-connected hardware and not less, and that includes add-on network adapters, which I suspect will be with us in various forms for quite awhile as PCs' built-in networking (wired and wireless) are superseded by newer devices and protocols.

I'll continue testing the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB adapter and even consider entering the modern era and slapping Ubuntu 9.10 on this laptop. I'll try an in-place upgrade from 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10, and if that doesn't work I can do a reintall with a fresh 9.10. That'll keep me (and my office's ample bandwidth) busy for awhile, I suspect.

I'm always hopeful; "It's only one crash," I say to myself. But one crash usually begets many more. I say usually hoping for the unusual and simultaneously wondering to myself why things have to be this hard (and remembering that these kind of problems reared themselves very well during my time running Windows 98/2000/XP and Mac OS 7.6/9.x/10.x).

Right now with the built-in wired networking, this hardware/software setup is pretty much problem-free (OK ... suspend/resume is a disaster, but I wasn't expecting anything more with hardware of this now-7-year-old vintage).

It's a good time to put my optimism hat atop my head, leave the friendly confines of the Ubuntu LTS behind and leap into the world of the six-month upgrade cycle and hope that improvements drown out regressions.

After all, I can always initiate my own regression and return to 8.04 (or chuck it all for something safe like Slackware 12.2 ...). I called Slackware "safe." Time for more coffee.

It's always news when a new version of Slackware is released, and this week Slackware 13 is available for download or purchase on CD or DVD.

The release announcement details which version of what package/app/feature is included in the new release.

I spent a bit of time running Slackware 12.0, but didn't do much with 12.1 and 12.2.

Part of that has to do with the fact that Slackware doesn't ship with GNOME, and if you choose to install without KDE, intending to use either Xfce, Fluxbox or another window manager, you don't end up with all that many apps.

I have two Debian Lenny-equipped laptops at the moment, with my main laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

The "quicker" of the two Lenny laptops is in backup/test mode right now, with a fully encrypted LVM installation. It's been going pretty well, but if I don't think of another machine I can run Slackware 13 on, that Toshiba laptop might be pressed into service for it. (I've got two resurrected-from-the-dead 2002-era Toshiba Satellites, making a-b testing pretty easy ... both have dead touchpads, one has some kind of inverter going bad, making the screen blank intermittently and also has a dead sound chip.)

This time I think I'll go for the full KDE experience. Aside from a few mellow-harshing bugs, I did enjoy using KOffice at one time. And if I did "get used to" KDE, the software mix in Slackware without adding anything else is pretty darn good.

The problem is that even with Slackbuilds and other repositories, there's nowhere near as many apps readily available for Slackware as there is for Debian-based distributions.

But Slackware is still Slackware, and the aforementioned Slackbuilds go a long way toward assembling a complete system, and there ARE tools such as slapt-get and Gslapt that make updating a Slackware box much less nightmarish (I got in the weeds pretty quickly on a Slack 12.0 install when I had to manually download packages and use updatepkg to roll them in one by one).

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 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.

I haven't tried ZenWalk in a very long time, but I'm thinking about it.

When I first started using Linux, ZenWalk was one of the first systems I played around with. I had a nice install at one point, and that particular machine would install the old version of ZenWalk at the time but not whatever the new version happened to be. As a last-ditch effort/experiment, I tried to upgrade the old system, but since ZenWalk pretty much stopped supporting my old system but kept everything in the same repository, the upgrade pretty much bricked the install.

Still, ZenWalk is a super-fast system with excellent hardware detection and less geeky pain than in Slackware, upon which Zenwalk is based.

Then there was/is the controversy about whether or not ZenWalk was complying with the GPL when it didn't make source code available. (I can't find a good item to link to, but the issue was discussed hotly and at extreme length in the LXer forums.)

But with every new ZenWalk release, including the current beta of version 5.4, I'm tempted to give ZenWalk another try.

I have old hardware, love fast systems, love the default Xfce desktop environment (which is right there in Slackware but somewhat of a red-headed stepchild to KDE), love the look of ZenWalk and appreciate its very extensive repository.

When it comes to Slackware-for-the-rest-of-us distros, I've been more than partial to Wolvix, even though I worry about it's relative speed (I get the feeling it's slower than ZenWalk, Vector and plain ol' Slackware, though I have not much to back this feeling up), I worry about whether or not I've updated the kernel properly (it requires some hackery in slapt-get and/or Gslapt that I'm a bit unsure about), and I worry that Wolvix in general isn't as up to date as it could/should be.

But Wolvix — most of it, at leat — continues to be updatable via slapt-get/Gslapt without the whole thing going to hell.

In contrast, if I were to install ZenWalk today, I'd be sure to create a separate partition for /home (which I always do anyway these days) so I could wipe and reinstall between releases. Or I could do the not-unthinkable and dual- or triple-boot a bunch of Slackware-derived distros on a single box and see how I feel about it in a month or so.

I've got a laptop that needs a FOSS OS, and while I've been thinking Debian or Ubuntu because that's my "default" choice, I may give ZenWalk a try just to see how it runs. All of these new features do look like things I'd enjoy having:

Kernel 2.6.27.10 with gspca (supports many USB webcams)

XFCE 4.6 (beta2, already very stable)

Faster boot (tunned init scripts, with realtime I/O scheduler)

PAM authentication has been added to the system

Wicd is becoming the main network configuration tool

Improved suspend/hibernate, with XFCE Power Manager

new Netpkg with orphan dependencies and "offline operation" support

New Zenpanel with integrated Disk Manager, Wifi and Wired Network Manager

Gksu keyring based desktop granting system

New artwork

Many new applications

And it looks (from this 5.2 announcement) that the license-violation issue is at least beginning to be taken care of:

Source repository: many faithful users asked us to provide an online source repository rather than sending source Dvds on-demand. So we have been working on a mechanism to allow the development team to instantly publish source tarballs for any new package we release. This source repository is now 100% ready for ISO packages, and the contributed packages (aka "extra") source repository is being populated actively.

Zenwalk's Community Spirit: As the community thrives, Zenwalk now has a web-accessible Package Database and a conveniently arranged User Repository. Please also have a look at the Zenwalk Companion - a guide to the extra packages available to Zenwalk. Please see the zenwalk.org website for more information, and welcome to support.zenwalk.org for bug reports and friendly discussion between Linux purists :)

Of course while I love systems that are updated forever (as in Wolvix), I'd love even more to see a new version of Wolvix to appear — and if that happened, I'd be a very happy camper, indeed.

It's been a long time since I ran ZenWalk, and I can't say how its application mix would meet my needs, but the thing I like so much about Wolvix is that it has virtually everything I want or need as far as applications go, and its installer and control panel also match my needs better than just about everything else out there, too.

Not that I've run Wolvix in the past six or more months, due to a combination of the issues I raised above, then the time I spent running Debian and Ubuntu, and now having my "main" laptop run OpenBSD, which I've been quite happy with by the way.

But some time back in the Linux world, and not necessarily in Ubuntu or Debian, is starting to sound pretty good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there's the video issue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could change my mind ... or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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