Recently in Ubuntu Category

As much as I've railed against quickie distro reviews, I find myself trying a new version of Ubuntu in live CD form and writing just such a piece. I apologize in advance for not running Ubuntu 9.04 longer, but in this evaluation, which has everything to do with the hardware I'm using, I'll explain why this is a wham-bam distro evaluation:

I've been sticking with Ubuntu 8.04 — the LTS version of the distro — on my main Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop for a number of reasons. For one thing, just about everything works (with exceptions being suspend/resume and some rare-but-troublesome crashes when running a USB Wifi stick), and as a production machine, I need it to continue to work.

And both of my identical Toshiba laptops have extremely flaky CD/DVD-ROM drives that don't like most CD-R discs. I managed to burn a Ubuntu 8.04 CD that did boot and install the OS to get me started on this laptop. Since then, I've discovered that commercially produced CD-ROM discs always boot fine. So does DVD+R media; I managed to burn a huge Debian Lenny DVD+R that I've used to set up the other Toshiba.

But I needed a "commercial" CD or DVD as a backup for this Toshiba, and that led me to request a free Ubuntu disc from Canonical.

I would've gladly accepted an 8.04 LTS disc, even though I do have a working CD-R of the release, but since 9.04 is what was offered, I was glad to receive it (along with the Ubuntu stickers that came in the padded envelope; thanks, Canonical!).

I would've gladly paid for the disc, but Canonical only sells them in quantity. If you want just one, you can't pay — your only option is to get it for free.

If you've tried to log into your Yahoo Messenger account with the Pidgin instant-messaging application on any of the many platforms on which the latter runs, it hasn't worked.

It seems that Yahoo is upgrading/reconfiguring its servers, leaving Pidgin users with non-working Yahoo Messenger accounts when accessed through the IM client that brings together the instant-messaging accounts of everything from Google Talk and AIM to Yahoo Messenger and MSN, plus a few more I haven't heard of.

For a few days I used the Yahoo IM client built into Yahoo Mail. I'm somewhat fond of Yahoo Mail and its IM feature, and I do use it from time to time, but I like having the option of using all my IM accounts in one app.

To fix the problem in the Windows version of Pidgin, I first changed one of the server names in the configuration. That didn't work. In Windows, DON'T DO THIS.

Instead, go to the Pidgin site and download the latest version of the app. That will fix the Yahoo issue.

In Linux/Unix, different distributions are handling the problem differently. Some are pumping new versions of Pidgin through their repositories, and those should show up in the updates on your system.

But in Ubuntu 8.04 — the LTS (long-term support) version of Linux, unless you want to install a new version of Pidgin manually, you'll just have to fix the old one.

Luckily it's easy (I figured it out from this Softpedia page):

Once you're running Pidgin (the version in Ubuntu 8.04 is Pidgin 2.4.1 in case you wanted to know), in the menu, click Accounts, then mouse down to your Yahoo account, mouse over to Edit Account and left-click it.

Then click on the Advanced tab, and under Pager server, if you have this:

scs.msg.yahoo.com

Change that line to read this:

cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com

That's right, just add cn. to the beginning of this line, then click Save, and the fix is done.

I don't know if you necessarily must quit and reload Pidgin to make the fix work, but that's what I did. Once I saved my change, I went to Buddies - Quit to kill Pidgin, then I restarted it from the menu.

For now, at least, Pidgin is working with Yahoo Messenger buddies. I'll report back if that changes.

As far as fixes go, this is a minor one.

I see the resemblance.

I decided that I was tired of brown, brown, brown in Ubuntu, so I changed out the wallpaper on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop to this blue-themed image from the fine folks at GNOME. I also changed the way my "theme" looks by going to System - Preferences - Appearance in the GNOME menu and picking something less brown, more blue.

I know that GNOME-themed distros are usually blueish in hue and that Ubuntu's brown represents a departure from that blueness, but in my case, going all the way back to Ubuntu 6.06, I'm done with brown.

I'm no coding guru. And I feel like having to write my own scripts to get stuff done in Unix/Linux is all too much like reinventing the wheel.

Be that as it may, I hacked together these two short scripts to back up my /home files in Ubuntu 8.04 to an external USB drive. I put the scripts in /usr/local/bin and made them executable. I'm lazy enough that I used the Nautilus file manager to do this.

I run the scripts with sudo, meaning in my user account, I open a terminal and do this, entering my password when prompted:

$ sudo usb-backup

$ sudo usb-backup-exclude

For the second script, I created an "exclude file," which the script uses to exclude whichever directories or files I wish. In this case I use it to exclude the .gvfs directory, which breaks the script (and doesn't need to be copied anyway) and in this case to exclude my Thunderbird mail files, since they take so damn long to back up that doing it every day is something I'm not fond of. The beauty of the exclude file is that I can modify it while keeping the script the same.

I'm sure there are many of you who can do and have done a better job than this, but these two scripts appear to work, and that's what counts for me anyway.

There are some pounded-out notes for the scripts; feel free to remove them. They won't affect how the scripts work.

Here are the scripts:

usb-backup:

#! /bin/bash
# Use rsync to back up the /home folder to a 4 GB USB flash drive
# --delete allows for deletion of files on the backup that have been previously deleted on the source drive
# using --exclude to keep rsync from trying to back up ~/.gvfs
# Finally able to remove --ignore-errors now that .gvfs is excluded
rsync -av --delete --exclude 'home/steven/.gvfs' /home /media/disk/ubuntu
exit 0

usb-backup exclude:

#! /bin/bash
# Use rsync to back up the /home folder to a 4 GB USB flash drive
# --delete allows for deletion of files on the backup that have been previously deleted on the source drive
# setting up an exclude file to back up some directories and not others.
# Finally able to remove --ignore-errors now that .gvfs is excluded
rsync -av --delete --ignore-errors --exclude-from '/home/steven/Documents/shell_scripts/exclude' /home /media/disk/ubuntu
exit 0

And here is my "exclude" file which, as you can see from the script above, lives at /home/steven/Documents/shell_scripts/exclude:

/home/steven/.gvfs
/home/steven/.mozilla-thunderbird

.gvfs note: I've done similar scripts before in OpenBSD and Debian, and I don't believe either used the GNOME Virtual Filesystem, so there was no need to exclude ~/.gvfs when using rsync.

I've been bringing more data into my main Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation on one of my two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, and I continue to be satisfied with the performance of what by most accounts is the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution.

No, its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

I'm getting used to all the GNOME-ish touches in the Nautilus file manager and in Ubuntu/GNOME in general that makes a full-fledged desktop environment such a nice place to work.

(Begin rant.)

I thought the deal with Ubuntu — at least in the 8.04+ era anyway — was that if you tried to play a not-totally-free form of multimedia, the system would open up a window asking you whether or not you wished to download a proprietary codec or some other form of nastiness to facility the playing of such verboten media.

And I even remember one time downloading a Quicktime movie on a Ubuntu box and having just this sort of dialog pop up, soon after which I was happily playing the video.

But today I decided to bring some podcasts into Ubuntu's Rhythmbox music player.

Yes, they were MP3s. If I had known that a friendly Ubuntu dialog box wouldn't pop up, and I'd have known beforehand that I had to dip into Add/Remove programs and add the "restricted extras," I would've done that.

Instead, I added my podcast feeds to Rhythmbox. (First of all, you have to find the feed on your own and add its RSS URL manually; that's not a deal-breaker, especially since the latest rendition of iTunes makes managing podcasts less fun than ever.)

So far, so good. Then I tried to actually play one of the .mp3 files. Nothing. No warning that says something like, "This is a restricted format, you free-software-hating pig, but if you wish to play it, click here and evil codecs will flow into your formerly pure Ubuntu system and you will be awash in .mp3 goodness."

OK, so it's clear that I'm not in the business of writing dialog boxes for Ubuntu.

But I had to resort to Google and find the customary five unhelpful Ubuntu Forums pages before I stumbled upon this page, which directed me to open up my repositories to include non-free software and then add ubuntu-restricted-extras with the Add/Remove Applications tool and then tried to play an MP3 again in both Rhythmbox and Totem.

Still nothing.

I rebooted the system.

Now I have MP3 support, everything plays fine, and all is (almost) all right in my Ubuntu world.

So is my question/problem the same as yours?

I hope so. I've been running Linux and BSD operating systems for about 2 1/2 years at this point, I've had to do a lot of hacking to get things working properly, and I understand that the average Linux or BSD system is not ready for new-user prime time. I know when things don't work that in many instances a little hacking around with a package manager, at the terminal or even (horror!) in the GUI itself will fix whatever happens to be broken.

Yeah, even Slackware isn't all that hard ... if you've been working at it. And while in Slackware you don't expect things to be easy, you are often surprised when it is.

But Ubuntu is supposed to be different. Maybe something got screwed up in this particular Ubuntu 8.04 installation, but I thought that at the very least an attempt to play an MP3 on a system without the proper codecs to do so would at the very least bring up a dialog box with some kind of direction as to what the next step would be.

Having NOTHING happen just isn't a good option if Ubuntu in particular, and Linux and other FOSS operating systems in general ever hope to bring non- or less-geeky users into the fold.

I'm a huge believer in the ogg audio format and in open media formats in general. And depending on how important that sort of thing is to you, I applaud the lengths the most fervent of us will go to in order to keep whatever degree of purity is in keeping with your own personal software philosophy.

I ran an OpenBSD system as my main desktop for a full six months. And before my audio hardware just plain broke, I knew that adding a GUI music player and the proper packages to play the various audio formats was something I needed to do. And I did just that. Getting xmms to play MP3 and OGG files was relatively easy, and nobody who runs OpenBSD expects "easy." (And for the purposes of this rant I'm ignoring the fact that X is pretty much broken on my Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop in OpenBSD 4.5 after having not a single problem with it in 4.4. And while I'm on that subject, I really miss running OpenBSD. I became quite accustomed to it, had done a lot of setup, and now getting segmentation faults and core dumps every time I run X has really shaken my faith in it as an OS.)

I know — I know — that if I or any user wants all the multimedia to work right away, there are always distros like Mint that can make it happen.

And Ubuntu already takes enough crap for not being as pure as Debian (which in turns takes crap for not being as pure as GNewSense).

But for a project/distro/movement that wants to preach not to the choir but instead to the unwashed, Windows-using masses, either let 'em play MP3s out of the box, make it easy to add that functionality (i.e. don't make 'em Google it, for heaven's sake) while at the same time educate them as to why MP3s, MOVs, Flash and all that other royalty-carrying, proprietary crap is bad, or just say right out front: "If you're geeky enough to figure out how to play multimedia, go ahead. But otherwise, reinstall Windows and everything will be fine."

It took a little more Googling before I figured out that merely opening up my repositories either in Add/Remove Programs or Synaptic (or directly in /etc/apt/sources.list) would be enough to get the automatic Ubuntu dialogs to pop up and ask me about restricted-media codecs.

So you have to KNOW you need a restricted driver before the system will prompt you to install one.

OK, I understand that Ubuntu/Canonical is treading a fine line with free-software purists, but in the minds of said purists, the distro has already crossed far over that line.

Here's what I think: Ubuntu should let new users who click on a restricted-media file know that there is indeed a way to play said file, even if they haven't yet opened up their repositories to non-free software. Only giving helpful information to people who really don't need that help is just not ... helpful.

I want ogg to succeed. And I also believe that Flash is the worst thing to happen to open-source software, freedom, security and everything else in the past five years. But with Linux and other free operating systems continuing to languish in the low single digits (some say 1 percent) of the market, not giving new users an easily made choice of what kinds of media they wish to play on their computers is no way to increase the uptake of free software among those who barely know what it is.

The people we need to bring over to free software wouldn't know "Debian" if it put on dark eyeshadow and started picking fights with too-close cousins on "Jerry Springer."

When a lifelong Windows user finds his or herself in a system awash in applications, icons and ways of doing things they've neither seen nor heard of, something like allowing them the choice of whether or not their music files will play is the least we can do to keep them from running away from the keyboard with their heads in their collective hands.

I hold Ubuntu up to a higher standard than I do almost any other Linux distribution or BSD project. That's because I think that Ubuntu is currently free software's best shot at breaking the Microsoft/Apple stranglehold on desktop computing.

I might even run GNewSense myself now that it supports my Ethernet card on my laptop. And I love the Debian Project, Slackware and OpenBSD. I'm getting ready to convert my now-testing laptop to NetBSD just to see how it performs in my work environment.

But when it comes to bringing new people into the free-software world, Ubuntu has a critical role. I think it's up there with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice as one of the key pieces/collections of software that can change hearts and minds.

And a little help for new users when it comes to media files, even when it doesn't toe the free-software party line is, in my opinion, a very small price to pay for the opportunity to educate those users about the bigger, greater picture.

(End rant.)

I'll keep this quick. I followed the advice of Nathan from OpenBSD101 and replaced my upgraded OpenBSD 4.5 installation with an entirely new, reinstalled system.

That took all of 10 minutes.

I followed the advice of my friend Denny and was able to keep my /home partition intact.

And all seemed well when I booted back into my shiny, new OpenBSD 4.5 desktop. X looked great. I saw a brief "artifact" in the form of a couple words out of place in Firefox (yep, I did have to reinstall EVERY app). But all did seem OK.

Until I quit X.

It wouldn't start again. Segmentation faults? Yep. Curiously, my root user could restart X. Just not my user. The system kept creating .Xauthority files and leaving them in my /home directory. I think one of my old dot-files in my /home directory is wreaking some kind of havoc with X. If that's all that's going on, that is.

I shelved the OpenBSD laptop for the time being, but next move is to create a new user account with a new, clean /home directory. Then I'll see how X runs.

Right now I have the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop running. I added my go-to light image editor, MtPaint. I reconfigured the Mail icon to start Thunderbird instead of Evolution.

And I used the Wolvix live CD to run Gparted and greatly shrink my Windows XP partition and increase the size of my Linux root and /home partitions. Eventually I'll wipe XP from this drive. It's very much unpatched, and I really don't need it.

I also turned off Compiz. Aside from stealing CPU and memory that I expect I'll need, it makes me a bit nauseous to see the screen sliding by like that. Yep, Compiz gives me motion sickness. You read it here first.

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

OpenBSD 4.4 basically "saved" me and one of these marginal Toshiba laptops (both were destined for the garbage) last November when I could barely get an install CD of any type to boot. The install floppy in OpenBSD enabled me to quickly set up a system that worked quite well and did almost everything I needed it to do. And stability was almost a given. I rarely had a problem that wasn't inherent to OpenBSD itself (such as the difficulty of installing Java, nothing past Flash Player 7, the extra steps required to properly configure things such as CUPS).

Since the system ran so well — just like Ubuntu 8.04, video on this Intel-based system ran perfectly with no xorg.conf — I kept it going for the entire six months of the OpenBSD 4.4 release's life.

As those who use OpenBSD know, upgrading the operating system is not as easy as it is in your average Linux distribution. It pretty much comes with the territory that a -release upgrade requires preparation, following instructions, and a bit of manual command-line work. Many times I've heard — both in OpenBSD and in Linux for that matter — that it's easier and cleaner to do a full reinstall rather than an in-place upgrade.

I will still try a full reinstall of OpenBSD 4.5. And I'd like to try running -current — the OpenBSD development branch that can be regularly updated and which is famously stable despite the "development" tag.

But right here, right now, I can't spend weeks diagnosing my X issues (briefly, there's some funky junk hanging from the cursor, and "artifacts" linger on the screen, which isn't redrawn fast enough/often enough to make X usable). The same thing turned me away from Debian Lenny on this and my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop in the months before the then-Testing distro went Stable. Because of my affection for Debian (still one of my very favorite operating systems), I spent weeks trying to diagnose the problem before realizing that dozens of other distros relieved me of the need to obsess (unsuccessfully) over it.

Right now the Gateway, used by our 5-year-old dual-boots Ubuntu 8.04 for her and CentOS 5.3 just because it runs so extremely well on that particular laptop.

And for months now I've had this other Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 as a backup. I have Java installed, which I do need. Flash, too. The Opera Web browser.

Today I added Inkscape, Thunderbird, gFTP and Gparted.

On the OpenBSD laptop, I had about 1 GB of e-mail in Thunderbird. It makes rsyncing the box such hell that I'm thinking of writing a script that EXCLUDES the Thunderbird files just so the rest of the backup doesn't take so damn long ... but I digress.

I figured out how to bring my Thunderbird settings and mail over to the Ubuntu machine. I did the same with my Firefox bookmarks.

-- Begin tutorial:

Moving bookmarks from one Firefox 3 installation to another:

• Since Firefox now uses the SQlite database to store/organize its bookmarks, simply moving the bookmarks.html file from one Firefox 3 installation to another will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. You need to do it another way, which I describe right here. First, grab the bookmarks.html file from your old FF installation and put it somewhere in your /home directory where you can easily find it.

• In the Firefox 3.0 installation where you want to IMPORT the bookmarks, go to the Bookmarks tab and click on/choose Organize Bookmarks.

• Click on the Import and Backup drop-down menu and click Import HTML.

• Then navigate to the bookmarks.html file from your old FF 3 installation (you have moved it over already, haven't you?) and click it to bring it into your new installation.

• Note: In Ubuntu at least, this process WON'T allow you to see hidden files or directories, so before you begin, copy your old bookmarks.html file to a place in your home directory where you don't need to go into your old installation's .mozilla directory, for instance.

• FYI: In both of my Firefox 3 installations, the bookmarks.html file is located here:

  /home/username/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html

  In the above example, "username" is your actual username, and the eight x's are the unique alphanumeric prefix that Firefox gives to your "default" directory under /.mozilla/firefox/
  

-- End tutorial.

-- Resume rant.

OK, so I'm fully operational in Ubuntu at this point. My respect and admiration for the developers and users of OpenBSD remains, and I hope to get the other Toshiba fully operational under OpenBSD 4.5 as soon as possible.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say I was relieved to have, in Ubuntu, a machine and system that easily updates all of its software with a few clicks and provides me with what — at this point — is a trouble-free working environment.

Of course that could all change. I'll see over the next week how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS performs on this hardware, with my chosen applications and for the tasks I have.

I could start the distro-hopping merry-go-round and go back to Debian, try out Slackware, ZenWalk, etc., but right now if Linux in this form does what I need it to do (not crash, run acceptably fast, wash, rinse, repeat), I'll be sticking with Ubuntu as long as it fills the bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# fsck /dev/sda2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once I filled up a few screens complaining about how LogMeIn failed me in OpenBSD, I was too far along to report how I feel about Ubuntu 8.04 after not booting into it for almost a month, during which time I used a nearly identical Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4, lately using the Xfce desktop environment.

OK, there is a difference: The OpenBSD Toshiba 1100-S101 has 768 MB of RAM. The Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba 1100-S101 has 512 MB.

It makes a huge difference. As does running GNOME and Ubuntu instead of Xfce and OpenBSD.

For one thing, I don't think the OpenBSD laptop has needed to use the swap partition even once in four intense months of work. True, it has more RAM.

In Ubuntu with less RAM, but still 512 MB, not less than that, I'm using tons of swap. That slows things considerably. As I reported in a recent entry, I don't think Ubuntu in its default state (GNOME) is all that usable in 256 MB of RAM. And one of the things that was stressing the system is/was a Synaptic update.

In 25 days of not booting the laptop, I still only had 46 packages to upgrade. That's one of the advantages of the LTS version of Ubuntu. I bet the 8.10 and 9.04 releases, especially the latter, have had hundreds of package updates in that same period of time (especially since 9.04 was only recently released).

So I'm happy that Ubuntu didn't make me roll in 100-200 new packages after almost a month, and I still appreciate the easy upgrades that Linux in general and Debian/GNOME/Ubuntu offer in particular. Upgrading OpenBSD isn't anywhere near as easy, and the whole process is as apples-oranges as it gets when compared to an apt-fueled Linux distribution.

But just from a look-and-feel standpoint, using Ubuntu with GNOME on this hunk of hardware (1.3 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM) is measurably slower than using OpenBSD with Xfce on a nearly identical-except-for-the-memory hunk (1.3 GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM).

So that extra 256 MB of RAM in the OpenBSD Toshiba makes quite a difference, as does running Xfce instead of GNOME ... or that would appear to be the case. I can't account for every process, every service running in both of these operating systems.

And even though I have the OpenBSD 4.5 CD set on its way to my mailbox as we speak, I'm considering ... CONSIDERING ... spending the next few months in a Linux environment (maybe this very distro, Ubuntu) just to see a) how I get along in it and b) how it and I respond as I beat the hell out of it in the course of my day-to-day work.

About the only operational difference between Ubuntu and OpenBSD at this point (forgetting the differences in package/upgrade management) is the state of Flash video on both platforms. I'm not doing much work in video these days, so not having Flash 9 or 10 in OpenBSD isn't as much of a burden as it could be if I were doing more video work.

And I've pretty much accepted that if I don't run -current in OpenBSD, my applications will be frozen in time for the six months between releases. As long as everything works, I'm OK with that — although it does take quite a mental adjustment to go from apt-get update/apt-get upgrade or its equivalent in Aptitude or Synaptic (or get-slapt/Gslapt, RPM/yum, etc.) every day or every week to ... not doing that in OpenBSD. Yeah, I should probably run -current and see how that goes ...

But ... I could transfer over my considerable hunk of files to this other laptop, which also has the distinct advantage of a non-broken sound chip (with which I could not only watch more video but actually, you know, hear the sound that goes with it.

Or ... I could give Debian or Slackware (with Xfce in both cases) another try. But I'm a little wary after all the video issues I've had in my last few installs of both Linux stalwarts. That's the thing about Ubuntu: On my hardware, it tends to work without fuss.

Scrolling through this week's Distrowatch, I came across an interesting new distribution in the "waiting list" of projects that will eventually be tracked by Distrowatch, should they survive long enough to ...get through the waiting list.

Lin-X aims to follow the Ubuntu distribution on which it's based but look as much like Apple's OS X as possible.

While I'm a user of OS X as well as Ubuntu (and Windows and OpenBSD ...) and I do like many things about the OS X user interface — the chief of which is the ability to keep an application running but NOT have a window of that application open at the time if I choose not to — I'm not one of those people who think OS X has it all over GNOME, KDE or even Windows XP.

But others might feel differently, and the ability to create a distro such as Lin-X from the parts provided by Ubuntu (and before that by Debian, and before that the Linux kernel, GNU userland, Xorg, GNOME and the many thousands of applications and utilities that go into many Linux distributions) ... that ability is something to be celebrated, since it gives us, the users, more choice and more freedom.

Anyhow ... while the OS X look of Lin-X is somewhat intriguing, what's even more intriguing about the distro is its revenue model.

Revenue model?

Yep, it has one. Aside from donations (which enter you in a drawing for a free Macintosh, there's an offer of e-mail support at $15 a year.

While it's not free, it's extremely cheap. Desktop support from the likes of Canonical, Red Hat or what have you will cost much, much more.

I won't get into why people who want to run an OS X-looking Ubuntu/Linux-acting OS on their PC hardware would be overly interested in winning some free Macintosh hardware — OK, maybe it's not as incongruous as it seems to me — but if this support is worth anything at all, it could be an extremely good deal for a business or individual who wants to run Ubuntu on the desktop, especially a Ubuntu designed to look as much as possible like OS X.

If you have any interest in Lin-X, download it here via Torrent, direct link via Adrive or Megaupload (the latter two of which I've never heard of ... but they appear to be legitimate ways of getting the ISO).

The only "stopper" here is that I can't find the name of the person or persons behind Lin-X, also known as probably the guy who wants your $15 and is promising you the chance at a free Macintosh in order to get it. Neither the About page nor the FAQ mention a single name.

That makes me a little squirrely about the whole endeavor, but then again, if you download Lin-X, run it and like it, $15 isn't much to part with even if you don't expect any support in return. So if you expect little, you probably won't be disappointed.

Disclaimer: I have neither download nor run Lin-X; I'm basing all of this on my reading of the Distrowatch article and the Lin-X Web site. My interest in running Ubuntu-derived distributions is limited to those that offer scads of audio-, graphic- and especially video-editing software; if it includes Cinelerra or whatever Cinelerra is morphing into by default, or anything aspiring to be the next Final Cut for FOSS, I'm there. In that aspect, I'll probably need a Mac eventually, but I'd much rather edit video in an all-FOSS environment, and that remains my goal.

While Googling for information on encrypting filesystems for something I'm working on, I came across many a good Ubuntu blog — yep, there's lots out there for the Ubuntu user who wants to figure things out, and that makes the Canonical-sponsored rendition of Linux even more attractive to people whose geek skills are less than complete (and yes, I count myself in that number).

One blog that looked really good, despite an awful name, is I' Been to Ubuntu, which has many, many good articles and appears to be updated quite often. The blog is subtitled, "Videos and articles helping you understand Debian and its derivatives," and I always appreciate a site that gives Debian its due (and I continue to believe that it's not really any harder to run Debian than Ubuntu, and if Debian treats your hardware well, then it's a no-brainer; unfortunately my hardware hasn't been so well-treated in the Lenny era.)

Distrowatch guru Ladislav Bodner has been rolling more than a few operating systems onto his ASUS Eee PC 900 netbook — probably the most popular netbook out there at this point (they even sell them at Target now).

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

Ladislav goes over how you can go backward from Linux kernel 2.6.28-11.41 to 2.6.28-11.40 and get your ASUS working again under Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

He also provides a tip for those using SSD (solid-state drive) disks on how not to wear them out:

Finally, a quick reminder for those who are about to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (or any other Linux distribution) on a netbook with solid state drives. Since these drives have a limited life span that depends on the frequency of write access to the drives, you can greatly prolong their life span if you follow these two rules while installing your preferred distribution (here is the source of this information, although there are those who dispute this):

* choose a non-journalling file system (e.g. ext2)

* don't create a swap partition

As Ladislav says, there is some dispute about the life of flash media in everything from those mini USB drives and SD camera memory cards to devices designed to replace traditional IDE and (mostly these days) SATA .

Some people have said that the MTBF (mean time between failures) for SSDs is so low when compared to spinning hard drives that the devices will last much longer than traditional spinning hard drives due to the lack of moving parts in an SSD. They say that worry about killing the flash memory with repeated write cycles is overblown.

But others are worried about killing their flash memory too quickly and take precautions such as the recommendation above not to have swap space on the drive.

For those who might not know, most operating systems do use swap space on the hard drive in the event that your computer's RAM (memory) fills up. I won't go into just how much space you need for swap because that's a whole new topic that's been discussed countless times in countless places. (I generally set aside 300 MB for swap on my systems).

Even Windows uses swap (that's one of the reasons your box tends to slow down after it's been running all day [or week/month/year]) — you've got a lot of critical stuff that the OS has written to the swap area of the drive.

Back to flash/SSD memory: As I say, some people think that worrying about excessive writes to flash is unwarranted. While I'm tempted to say that you shouldn't use an SSD on a server, Sun Microsystems (yep, the company bought recently by Oracle) is offering SSD-equipped servers and storage arrays. Sun thinks SSDs are the (near) future in servers since performance gains are too large to be ignored.

Sun is using single-level cell (SLC) flash memory, which has a much longer life than the cheaper multilevel cell (MLC) devices that pack more memory into the same space but have shorter write/erase lives.

We're a bit far away from the ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu at this point in the post, aren't we?

Maybe. But here's what I want to say about flash-based storage: I'm all for it. I'd like to start moving everything I have to SSDs as soon as fiscally possible.

One thing I really like is a silent PC: no fans, and no spinning hard drives. If you've ever worked on a system with drives snaking out of the back of the case and sitting on a table (I did it for years), you know how much noise traditional hard drives make and how much heat they throw off.

For the energy and noise considerations alone, I'd like to dump spinning hard drives.

To that end, I'm doing one test and hope to do another soon. I've been running my Self-Reliant Thin Client (converted Maxspeed Maxterm) with an 8 GB CF card in the box's built-in CF-to-IDE adapter as the unit's main drive. I am still running Debian Etch on it (and will continue with it until I manage to get networking into the room). The box isn't in heavy use at present, but it is running (and has been this time for more than a week). I do have swap set up on the flash, and with only 256 MB of RAM, it'll probably get used a bit.

I'm running regular backups of the /home files to a 1 GB USB flash drive with rsync, so I have an all-flash system.

It's not fast. A low-end CF card (mine is a Transcend) doesn't have the performance of a top-of-the-line SSD. For one thing, the Transcend uses MLC instead of SLC and for that reason alone should have a shorter life.

I'll keep the box running for quite some time to monitor its progress with the flash memory and see if it can withstand repeated use. An upgrade from Etch to Lenny would definitely tax the CF card.

Another thing I'd like to try is an SSD in one of my laptops — maybe the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which I've recently put back into service. At least the drive is easy to get to.

Dell may not have the absolute best laptop deals available — you can often do better with the HP/Compaq/Acer/Gateway specials in Office Depot's Sunday newspaper circular (see, there IS a reason to subscribe to a genuine dead-tree newspaper like our own ever-lovin' Los Angeles Daily News).

But Dell is trying to earn your business, and right now (and through April 2) the company is running a "9 great systems under $499" laptop promotion.

True, the $399 Inspiron 13 is no great shakes specs-wise, with a measly 2.13 GHz single-core Celeron processor. But it does feature 1 GB of RAM (barely adequate for the included Windows Vista but quite enough for Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) and a fairly roomy 160 GB hard drive. A 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor adds $100 to the price, and an extra gigabyte of RAM adds another $50 (yes, Dell SHOULD be ashamed to charge $50 for something that couldn't be costing them more than $10 wholesale), and for $550 you have a very respectable laptop that should serve you for at least three years (or 7-10 years if you're me).

What I'm much more excited about is Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook (pictured above), the price of which has dropped to $249 for the basic Ubuntu Linux/512 MB RAM/8 GB solid-state drive model.

I had the pleasure of trying this very-small but quite usable netbook at the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group booth at the recent SCALE 7x show, and I was quite impressed with it. I've seen quite a few ultra-small netbooks over the past couple of years -- the Asus Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook, the HP 2133 Mini-Note, and this Dell is the best one I've encountered yet.

The smallish keyboard, while not super comfortable, is definitely usable, and unlike some other netbooks, the Dell Mini 9 doesn't run hot. It has a nice display and is fairly snappy with Ubuntu GNU/Linux 8.04 (the long-term support edition I'm using on the little girl's Gateway laptop and my extra Toshiba 1100-S101). It handled multimedia well when I saw it, and the small size makes it extremely convenient. It's easier to tuck it in a bag or backpack and open it up at will.

Battery life is supposed to be 4 hours. Not bad, but the talk recently of basing the netxt generation of netbooks on power-sipping ARM processors, like those used in cellphones,
and promising all-day battery life, is something to look forward to.

Anyhow, while the base Dell Mini 9 is $249, bringing the memory up to 1 GB adds only $25 to the cost. (Now you're talking, Dell ...) Going from the 8 GB solid-state hard drive to 16 GB adds an extra $50, but that isn't completely necessary (although I'd probably do it) because you can easily save to those miniature SD cards used in digital cameras — most netbooks have a slot for this — and keep your main drive fairly clean.

One catch with netbooks is that they don't have built-in CD/DVD drives, so you can pop for one from Dell for $89, or take your chances and pick one up for possibly less at Fry's or online from an outlet like TigerDirect.com, where USB-connected CD/DVD burners run from $60-80, or not much of a savings.

Again, if you fully embrace the "netbook concept," you won't need an optical drive or a even a huge main hard drive. These little notebooks are supposed to be for casual Web surfing, jotting down notes and the like.

But I still predict that the netbook will become a whole lot more ubiquitous than many hardware manufacturers and especially software giant Microsoft ever thought.

And while Microsoft is making moves to have an operating system other than Windows XP that will run on such lower-spec devices, I think it's just silently waiting and not-so-silently cajoling hardware makers to up the specs of these little laptops so they can more comfortably run not Windows Vista but the upcoming (and said-to-be-lighter-and-higher) Windows 7.

We'll see. The rumors of a shift from Intel-based processors like the netbook-aimed Atom to even-lower-power-using ARM CPUs could throw a considerable wrench into Microsoft's quest to move into the netbook market — a class of hardware the company didn't see coming.

Right now I still recommend running Ubuntu on those netbooks that ship with that version of the Linux operating system. I've heard less-than-glowing things about the netbooks that use modified versions of Xandros and Linpus, but I'll admit right now that I have nothing beyond the anecdotal to go by.

There are many people interested in running everything from Mandriva and Debian to OpenBSD and Novell's SUSE (either the OpenSUSE or SLED varieties) on their netbooks with the help in many cases of active projects porting these OSes to various netbooks.

Maybe you don't want a netbooks. I understand. I do a whole lot of writing on laptops, and that smallish keyboard might not get such a glowing review when I'm cranking 500-word articles on deadline.

But then again, I do the majority of my work on a 7-year-old Toshiba laptop with a dead sound chip and the ultra-reliable OpenBSD operating system, now equipped with Java and Flash Player 7 (the "newest" Flash player available in the BSD world). Right now the Toshiba — with 1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 768 MB of RAM and 20 GB hard drive split between OpenBSD and Windows XP, which for testing reasons I haven't killed out — is serving me quite well.

And I always have the Toshiba's "twin," running Ubuntu 8.04, at the ready. And that one even has working sound (and with Ubuntu I have Java and either Flash 9 or 10 – I can't remember). If I have to do more with video than currently (now = almost none), I'll have to move back to Linux both for the Flash capability and the availability of more video-editing software.

But for the basics — Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, the Geany text editor, the Xpdf and Adobe PDF readers, the GIMP image editor, Pidgin for IM, gFTP and the Rox-filer file manager — I have a pretty nice setup in OpenBSD. I've been using this OS on this hunk of hardware for about three months now, so I should be in a position soon to write yet another distro review, except this one will be based on that three months of use and not the "I installed it, here's how that went, and here's how it's different from what I usually run" reviews that I and many others find so easy to crank out.

Winding back around to netbooks, what I mean to say is that $250 is a better price than $300 for the basic model, and for that Dell deserves at least some praise (and more than a little business).