Recently in Ubuntu Category

I always seem to have trouble with Ubuntu. On the $0 Laptop — the Gateway Solo 1450 — there comes a time in every Ubuntu install when the thing either won't boot or runs so slowly that I have to wipe the thing off the drive and start over.

It could be something particular to this laptop, the hard drive in it, or my constant dual- and triple-booting of Linux and BSD operating systems in a constantly shifting array.

When I use recovery mode to boot Ubuntu 8.04 and see the messages scrolling across the screen, I can see the point where it stalls. Something about ATA 2.01 is pausing for 5 seconds to look for devices. This pause used to be only 5 minutes, but today it appeared to stretch forever.

I had (and have) work to do, so I ctrl-alt-deleted out of there and booted Debian Lenny. I'll take the annoying screen artifacts problem in Lenny any day over not being able to boot at all in Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu problem began after an aborted installation of FreeBSD about a month ago. And even though I wiped that partition right away and have reformatted it a few times, Ubuntu still stalls during the boot sequence.

Now that I sort of, kind of know how to use rsync to backup my /home files, I need to delete the Ubuntu partition and start again. I have a funny feeling that I'll still have a problem. It could be the hard drive. I have an old 30 GB Toshiba drive in here that I bought on eBay, and it's probably not the ideal drive for daily use, it being old and all, but it's what I've got, and I've never had a problem before. ... Except for these Ubuntu problems (7.04 and 7.10 didn't fare too well in this respect; I thought that 8.04 would be OK, but that hasn't turned out to be the case).

Anyway, gotta get back to work, so I'll be auditioning distros soon enough to see what's going to work for me. I'm almost at the point of throwing CentOS on the box. I'm worried that I'll be missing packages and codecs that I need, and I'm nowhere near good enough with RPM repositories and packages to figure it all out. That's what I count on the people from Debian and Ubuntu for ...

I've really enjoyed using Ubuntu this go 'round. Everything has worked better than ever ... except for this not being able to boot. That's quite an "except," don't you think?

Update: The Ubuntu partition does boot; it just takes a long time.

Hello boys and girls — That's me in the Debian T-shirt above. Ilene got it for me from AboutDebian I don't think I need to tell any of you that I'm proud to be a Debian user.

Sure I've had (and have) my problems getting Debian to do exactly what I want on every machine on which I have it installed, but I'd call Debian ultra-reliable, easily fixable and extremely useful. I've never mistakenly hosed a Debian installation, and I've never seen a machine on which Debian won't run — and run pretty well.

The only thing that "beats" Debian on my Gateway Solo 1450 (The $0 Laptop) is Ubuntu, which of course is based on Debian. And if I could figure out the mysteries of suspend/resume, the two OSes would be equal on my main platform.

As it is, I'm having some trouble with Ubuntu, and I'm not entirely sure it's my fault. It could be a result of my partition nightmare when I was trying to install FreeBSD on my fourth primary partition, but now that the offending partition has been deleted, I'm still having a problem in Ubuntu 8.04 with stalling during boot. I've narrowed it down to something either with the ATA2 configuration or the USB HID core driver. (Ubuntu eventually does boot, but it takes a bit longer.)

Did I mention that Debian Lenny was unaffected. I look back at my experiences with Ubuntu 7.04, 7.10 and 8.04, and I've had the boot sequence eventually go bad on me with all three. I think Ubuntu doesn't like having the drive's partition scheme messed with. But Debian? It never complains, always boots, always runs.

And if you've been following Debian Lenny through its Testing phase, you've seen it get better and better over the past six months. When Lenny goes Stable, we're going to have an excellent release.

Whether you use Debian or not (and many of us do, even if we don't run Debian itself, since quite a few other distributions use it as their core), the project and those who work and have worked on it are quite a tribute to and example of free, open-source software at its finest.

Today we have hundreds of Linux distributions, a half-dozen or so BSDs and a few other (Haiku, FreeDos) free operating-systems, but looking back 10 or more years ago, being able to install Slackware or Debian and have a full (and FOSS) working environment on the desktop or server was not so easy to come by.

I'm a big proponent of not stealing software, operating systems or applications, and it's only through projects like Debian — and the thousands of packages that go into it — that I'm able to practice what I preach and not habitually install bootleg copies of MS Windows and Office, Photoshop and Illustrator.

I understand why many still use those proprietary tools — even if they know about the vast world of FOSS (though they usually don't). I still begrudgingly have to use a few proprietary applications myself while at work.

The one task for which I use Photoshop could be done with the GIMP and Inkscape, but it can't be done exactly the same way, which leaves me jumping from my desk to a PC that has a licensed copy of Photoshop. (This task could be done just as well with FOSS, but it's not my call ...)

And I'm still searching for a video-editing solution in FOSS, something that can replace iMovie and Final Cut. So far Cinelerra looks like the best choice, but I'm unconvinced and still looking.

But for the vast majority of what I (and most people) do, free, open-source choices are not just "as good" as proprietary solutions, they're much better.

From Linux as the OS on the desktop and server to applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, OpenOffice, K3b, plus the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and the many apps that come with them, the numerous other window managers (everything from Fluxbox and Fvwm to JWM, Enlightment and Xfce), critical server software like Apache, MySQL, OpenSSH and the hundreds of utilities that make it all work.

The simple but critically important fact that I can make a free, open-source operating system work on even my oldest hardware and that every version from the first to the latest is still freely available (try buying an old version of Windows from Microsoft) gives users an important degree of ownership of their own computing experience. Microsoft and Apple want you to dump your hardware every few years and buy new, with new and expensive software to go with it. I guess that's OK; that's their business.

But having an alternative — or hundreds of alternatives — puts power right into the hands (and computers) of the users. If that's not democracy in action, I don't know what is. Call the proprietary alternative what you like.

I did my first Debian install when Etch went Stable in April 2007, and I've been using it ever since. I don't think the installation process is any harder than that in most of the Linux distributions out there, and if you've done even one install of another distro, you can probably install Debian with no problem.

So if you want to celebrate Debian's 15 years, I suggest you grab an ISO of the network installer (go here for Testing, which I recommend at this point, with Lenny so close to going Stable; or go here for Etch, here for the Etch and a Half network installer for i386) and do an install of the monumental achievement that is and continues to be the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

My advice is to avoid dual-booting, and especially triple-booting (or even more than that).

If you set up a box to dual-boot with two Linux distros, Linux and Windows, or even a BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD) and Linux, and you leave it alone, you'll probably be OK.

But me, I'm testing things all the time, and lately I've been playing around with triple-booting on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. I've done this a lot, and I generally know how to do it so I don't hose one partition or another.

But I slightly hosed something on the laptop last night.

I've been playing around with FreeBSD, trying to figure out why it sometimes manages my CPU fan extremely well but usually not at all.

I have FOUR primary partitions on the 30 GB hard drive. The first is Linux swap, the second is Ubuntu 8.04, the third Debian Lenny, and for a long time the fourth was just an empty Linux ext3 partition where I could stash files large and small.

I started throwing new OSes on it about a week or so ago. I had PC-BSD on there, FreeBSD, Debian Etch ...

And last night I did another FreeBSD install. Now remember, I had FOUR primary partitions. As far as I know, no BSDs will install on a secondary partition. And in Linux, — again, as far as I know — you can only have four primary partitions. If you want more than that, you need to make one an 'extended' partition, and then you can fill that with a much larger number of secondary partitions (I'm not sure of the total number in Linux, but it's a lot).

When I was installing FreeBSD to the fourth primary partition, I veered from my usual practice of installing it in a single FreeBSD partition and instead let the installer auto-partition the portion of the drive set aside for FreeBSD.

Long story short, I think I screwed something up.

I deleted the screwed-up FreeBSD partition and replaced it with another Linux ext3 partition, but that didn't seem to "fix" whatever problem it is I'm having.

Debian Lenny boots fine. But Ubuntu 8.04 stalls in the middle. It eventually does boot, but there's a stall of a few minutes in the boot sequence. I booted in recovery mode to see what was going on, and it does appear to be disk-related, but I'm not quite sure what to do about it. I already deleted the "offending" partition, but maybe I shouldn't have replaced it (or so quickly before testing the other partitions)?

It's been over six months since I hosed a whole box, so in the grand scheme of things I'm not doing too badly.

But I should really start following my own advice and stop dual-booting on what, for me at least, amount to "production machines," which I rely on to get work done.

When experimenting, I need to swap whole drives instead, like I do with my VIA C3-based converted-thin client test box, which has three drives that are easily swapped via power and IDE cables that extend well outside the thin client's small case.

I didn't hose things so badly that I either lost files or can't boot either of the two Linux distros on the box, but I really need to be more careful, especially when mixing BSDs and Linux.

When doing just that, incidentally, I've had a lot more success by installing the given BSD FIRST, then throwing Linux on the box after that.

What I think I'm going to do, when it comes to Linux anyway, is to have the first partition be swap, the second partition for the distro itself and the third partition for /home. That way I can theoretically swap in new distros and keep the same /home file (backing that up, of course).

Now I'm going to think of what to install on the Gateway Solo 1450 to single-boot it for awhile.

OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible.

I've written before about how preload doesn't seem to have any effect on Iceweasel and Epiphany, which I'd sure like to start more quickly, but with OpenOffice, preload seems to be doing its job.

While on the topic of Open Office, I should mention that I've been using it quite a bit lately. I like the way the fonts look way better than those in Abiword, and OO just seems to be working well, so I've taken to it quite a bit more than in previous months.

Oh, and Google Docs offline under Google Gears has been pretty much a big disappointment.

Since I started using it (with Firefox in Ubuntu), it has lost my database once, and is dog-slow the rest of the time. I hate starting Docs offline in the browser and waiting an age for my files to show up. With this kind of performance — which is in much contrast to Google Docs' swiftness when connected to the Internet, I'd much rather use a traditional word processor or text editor.

Hence my increasing use of OpenOffice.

I've talked for some time about the ghosting I get on the upper panel and in portions of Iceweasel/Firefox when using GNOME and Xfce in Debian Lenny.

All I have to do to make the problem go away is boot with the Xfce or Fluxbox window managers. It also doesn't happen with Debian Etch, an install of which I did yesterday. OK, I've seen the problem in Xfce, too ... and it seems related to X refresh.

So it's very possible that the problem I'm having isn't X- or driver-related, but something deep in the heart of GNOME.

I don't know if I'm the only one experiencing this problem, but I haven't been able to find any other reference to the problem, most likely because I'm not describing it in anywhere near the same way as anybody else.

A bunch of Xorg packages flowed into Lenny today, and I installed them. I'm still seeing some funky graphics in my "forward" arrow in Iceweasel, and sometime the little Web icon next to the Web page's name goes all green and opaque on me.

The problem with Iceweasel goes away if I drag the window so a portion goes off the screen. When it refreshes, all is well. The same happens when I mouse over icons in the upper GNOME panel. Of course it's hard to drag the upper GNOME panel off the screen, so areas with no icons or menus tend to stay funky.

So the problem has something to do with screen refresh. Perhaps an xorg.conf tweak will help me? Could the problem be somehow related to Iceweasel? (I've started running Epiphany to see how that affects the system.) I have no idea.

All I know is that I don't have the problem in Ubuntu, in Debian Etch, or in any other distro on this very same hardware.

And while I'm on the subject, compare /etc/X11/xorg.conf in Ubuntu Hardy with the same file on a Debian install. They look very, very different. Ubuntu's is much shorter. Autoconfiguration — or different apps/files — must be taking care of a whole lot more, given the short xorg.conf in Ubuntu.

I'm about to do a second install of Lenny on a free partition to see if a fresh installation takes care of the problem. I'm willing to break off /home into its own partition and reinstall Lenny since it works so much better on this laptop than Etch ever did. Aside from this nagging problem, of course.

This video issue and figuring out suspend/resume are pretty much the only things keeping Lenny from being as good as or better than Ubuntu Hardy on this machine. I'd like to say that I got Lenny to work better, but so far that hasn't happened.

I've tried LOTS of distributions, everything from Mandriva to PCLinuxOS to CentOS 5.2 and Fedora 9, and nothing except Ubuntu has working suspend/resume out of the box on this Gateway Solo 1450 (which comes up as "unknown" with s2ram at a console).

Just as I figured out how to control the CPU fan under ACPI, I'd love to have that same mastery over suspend/resume. If only ...

I realize that the whole Debian project ain't about me and my petty problems with my obscure hardware, but I'd like to see things working better. Maybe I'll do that reinstall and see how a fresh Lenny looks.

Encrypted private directories are the one thing that would get me to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 this October. Ubuntu's Dustin Kirkland explains it all:

How does it work?

The underlying technology is a cryptographic virtual filesystem in the Linux kernel called eCryptfs, authored by Michael Halcrow of IBM.

When a user logs into an Ubuntu Intrepid system, their login passphrase is automatically used to decrypt a randomly generated mount passphrase. This mount passphrase will then cryptographically mount ~/.Private onto ~/Private. As long as ~/Private is mounted, the user can read and write sensitive data to files and directories under the virtual filesystem on ~/Private. The actual files stored in the underlying filesystem are encrypted, and located in ~/.Private. The only passphrase required is obtained when logging in (via console, ssh, gdm, etc). And the only files encrypted are those that the user consciously places in ~/Private. The user can then incrementally backup the encrypted ~/.Private directory to off-site storage.

I'd really, really, really like to see a backport of this to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS so I can keep the current version of the distro if I so choose.

I'll be looking at Ubuntu Backports and GetDeb to see if installing it in Hardy is possible. ... or I may just upgrade to Intrepid.

More information:

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian's Xfce installation didn't exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack.

Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

And any little utility that Wolvix has can probably be added in Debian. And Aptitude is very good. It's not graphical, but it represents the best of Debian.

And I still trust the security team for Debian more than I do most others — this despite the OpenSSL problem that has recently plagued every Debian-based distro in recent weeks. (At least somebody figured it out, and the whole incident should tighten up things considerably in the Debian Project).

And in Debian, I can easily install all of our little girl's educational programs, although she is fairly vocal about preferring to use the newer, faster $0 Laptop, a 1.3GHz Celeron-based Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM.

The only "stopper" is Google's lack of willingness to easily let users install Google Gears in Mozilla-derived browsers not named Firefox. That means it's a pain in the ass to install Gears with Iceweasel, the Debian-derived, noncopyrighted equivalent to Firefox.

And I haven't tried Debian on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt since I boosted the RAM from 64MB to 144MB. Responsiveness in X could be a lot better with such a relative overabundance of RAM.

So as far as the Compaq goes, I'm down to running Debian or Wolvix on the hard drive and Puppy as a live CD. Like I said previously, I don't want to kill out OpenBSD just yet, so I'll need either a second hard drive or a 4GB Compact Flash card with CF-to-IDE laptop adapter (the latter available for a quite-reasonable $10 at LogicSupply.com). I might even spring for a second hard-drive caddy for the Compaq, should I be able to find one, to make swapping the drives that much easier.

Or I could bite the bullet, get rid of OpenBSD for the time being, try out Debian and Wolvix on the hard drive, and narrow things down. I'll continue to run Puppy, with a separate partition for its encrypted pup_save file.

I've taken to using the Leafpad text editor in Puppy (I'm using it now), and the Leafpad-derived Mousepad editor in Xfce is just as fast, if spartan. Xfce's Terminal app has similar attributes. And I have no problem running xterm or rxvt.

It's really about the text editors and browsers I use, the software my daughter likes to run, stability, security, encryption and ease of maintenance.

Moreover, it's about speed on old hardware. These things look very different on newer computers. My 2002-era Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu very well. I doubt I could even boot Ubuntu on this Compaq. Even the Xubuntu live CD won't boot. With Debian, I have no problem.

On the Gateway, Ubuntu's polish as compared to Debian makes Ubuntu a better choice. But on this older Compaq, Debian's flexibility and added speed (don't ask me why it's faster, it just is) are much needed.

Next moves: I need to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card since I don't have regular access to WiFi. While I'm at it, a PCMCIA card for USB is something I should also look into. Sure, I could transfer files over the network, but USB is ... easier. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop.

For one thing, Puppy is ideal — and explicitely designed — to run as a live CD or easily upgraded frugal install, the latter either on a traditional hard-disk drive or a Compact Flash memory card mounted in a CF-to-IDE adapter inside the Compaq's hard-drive caddy.

With recent versions of Puppy (2.17 onward, I believe) the ability to encrypt the pup_save file that holds all of the user's files and configurations adds both a needed measure of security to a laptop installation as well as providing an equally easy way to back up the entire system by copying a single large file to just about any storage medium, from USB flash drive to CD-RW to hard disks in formats ranging from old-school FAT to NTFS to Linux's many types of filesystems.

Also in Puppy's favor is that recent versions have heightened compatibility with Slackware 12 packages, promising a greater number of sources for additional applications, should I ever want or need to add anything beyond what Puppy and its own repositories already provide.

To recap, in the time I've had the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (again, with a 233MHz Pentium II MMX processor), I've taken it's RAM from 64MB to the maximum of 144MB, kept the original IBM-made 3GB hard drive, and run the following operating systems:

• Debian Etch "standard," with X and Fluxbox added
• Debian Etch Xfce desktop install
• Slackware 12 without KDE
• Puppy Linux 2.13
• Damn Small Linux 4.0, 4.3 and 4.4
• OpenBSD 4.2
• Wolvix Cub 1.1.0

Truth be told, I liked every one of these installs to one degree or another. While Slackware (installing without KDE but with everything else) took up too much space and offered too few applications I wanted, it still ran great.

Rolling my own X installation into Debian's "standard" install was an excellent exercise, but I just didn't have the expertise to really build it out. The Debian Xfce install was nice, but somewhat curious; all of the Debian desktop installs, even KDE, feature OpenOffice. Surprisingly, OO ran fairly well in 64MB of RAM and 233MHz of CPU. Strange, however, was the lack of GUI package management in the Xfce install. It did get me using Aptitude, so there was nothing lost there, but I got the feeling that Debian's Xfce just didn't offer what I wanted.

However, with Aptitude, Abiword actually installs the dictionary that makes spell-check work. At last look, neither Puppy nor OpenBSD do that.

I continue to enjoy Damn Small Linux, but the most recent versions just don't run as well as they should on this laptop. And little things like having Firefox renamed Bon Echo (why??) made it difficult to use Google Docs with Gears, which is one of the things I want to be doing fairly intensively, made DSL fall behind Puppy in the running.

Puppy has a great selection of apps, is fairly easy to configure, extremely familiar to me and runs great on this hardware. I find myself using this live CD more and more of the time.

Much of my feeling for 2.13 over other versions of Puppy is nostalgic. I first encountered Puppy with this very release, and most likely a simple move of the cute 2.13 desktop wallpaper to a newer version of Puppy would make me extremely happy. The fact that everything in 2.13 continues to work flawlessly, however, is a strong testament to how very well Puppy is put together. I probably will test and subsequently adopt a much newer version of Puppy for use on this laptop, if for no other reason than to use the encrypted-pup_save feature that will greatly add to the security of my data, since laptops — even ones well past their prime — have a way of falling into the wrong hands.

OpenBSD doesn't install with as anywhere near as many GUI features as ... any Linux distribution. Not that any of the BSD projects can't be configured to be as full-featured as any equivalent Linux distribution. It just takes time and effort. With a faster processor and a bit more memory, I'd really consider running OpenBSD as the primary distro on this laptop. On the other hand, hardware detection in OpenBSD excellent. It remains the only operating system to correctly auto-configure sound on this Compaq.

OpenBSD has well over 4,000 precompiled binary packages for i386 and even more software available through ports. It offers fewer packages than Debian or Ubuntu but way more than Slackware. And with the quality of the packages being so high and the tools used to manage them equally high in quality, OpenBSD remains an attractive alternative.

But again, Linux is just that much easier to use on the desktop. OpenBSD is no speed demon in X, and speed is more important when you're running ancient hardware than it is when you have, say, a PC from the past five years at your disposal.

And with OpenBSD, things like Adobe Flash are hard to deal with. And I don't think Google Gears will ever run in OpenBSD. I could be wrong on both counts (since OpenBSD can run Linux apps), but I do know that both are easier to do in Linux.

A bigger drive that could multiboot Debian, Wolvix and OpenBSD, with Puppy running either in a frugal install or as a live CD, is one way to go.

But running only one or two of these systems at a time seems to be more realistic, manageable and ... sane. Using multiple hard drives, like I do with my test box, is another way to go. That way the pain of dual-booting is avoided, as is the tedium of continual reinstalls.

Since OpenBSD offers much of the software I want and is an intriguing diversion from Linux, I could 'll probably leave it on the drive for the near future. In my 500MB or so Linux partition, I will probably grow my pup_save file and update Puppy. Now that I have Firefox 2 running on one of my other Puppy installs, I'll probably begin doing the same with this laptop, and that way I'll be able to use Google Docs with Gears. I can probably even figure out how to make Gears work with Seamonkey, but it's not imperative.

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VII — Debian with Xfce and Fluxbox calls
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

It's been a little while since my last report on how Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has been doing on the $0 Laptop.

In short, all continues to go very, very well. At this point I could see ratcheting down my use of Debian on this machine and pretty much devoting it to Ubuntu all the way.

Why? Everything in Ubuntu works with as little effort as possible.

I have made some strides in getting Debian Lenny working better on the Gateway Solo 1450. I got sound to return by installing the ALSA modules myself. I'm having a problem with the upper GNOME panel looking a bit funky at times, with graphical "ghosting" marring its appearance. It's not a deal-breaker, but it also doesn't happen in any other distro.

And again, Ubuntu just does what it's supposed to do.

I still haven't conquered suspend-resume in any other distro. In Ubuntu, that just worked.

If for some miraculous reason suspend/resume works in CentOS/RHEL 5.2, I'll re-evaluate things, but a test of 5.1 today confirmed that it does not work out of the box. And I tried to install 5.2 on a free partition with the super-small network installer, which hung up early in the process. I bailed out of it and figured I'd forget about the whole thing until the CentOS 5.2 live CD image is released.

I've been saying that Ubuntu should do this for a long time, and now they have: You can get Ubuntu — the biggest desktop GNU/Linux system going — for $19.99 in a boxed edition at Best Buy stores.

I found out from the excellent Linux Loop, at which writer Thomas Teisberg actually saw the box in the operating-system section of the store.

He, in turn, found out about it at the Best Buy site — from which you can actually order the Ubuntu box for the same $19.95.

If you're not particularly geeky and can't or don't want to figure out how to download a huge ISO file and turn it into a bootable CD with Nero, my free favorite ISO Recorder or any other applicable program (no, Microsoft does not include this capability in Windows for obvious reasons, those being that they don't want you to ever even contemplate using another OS), then spending a mere $19.99 on this Ubuntu box is a very good deal.

Upon closer inspection of the photos at Linux Loop, this box contains a CD-ROM, so even if you don't have a DVD-ROM drive, you can use this disc to load up Ubuntu.

I'm not sure whether or not there's a There is a smallish book in the box or not, but if you want a bigger-book/disc combo, you can always opt for "The Official Ubuntu Book," which just came out in a new edition and which also includes a DVD of Ubuntu (as well as Kubuntu and Edubuntu).

For the more advanced user, "Ubuntu Unleashed 2008 Edition" will be out in a few weeks and will also include a DVD.

Another very good book that also includes a DVD is "Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Third Edition."

So you don't need to get a blank CD-R, download a huge Ubuntu image and figure out how to burn it if you don't want to. Once you install Ubuntu, burning ISO images onto bootable CDs is easy to do, and any one of the abovementioned books will walk you through it.

Of course, you can always request a free Ubuntu CD, which will be delivered to you free of charge (but not quickly).

However you get it (if you do "get it"), Ubuntu at retail is a huge thing, and I hope it continues.

Update:

• This person bought the Ubuntu software box, opened it up and took pictures.
• Computerworld reports on Ubuntu at Best Buy
• The Canonical Blog explains the whole thing
• Desktop Linux on the Ubuntu box
• InternetNews.com on the Ubuntu box

Canonical just announced the release of Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS, the first "point release" after April's initial release of the GNU/Linux distribution's latest long-term-support edition.

If you already have Ubuntu 8.04 installed, you get everything in the point-release just by updating your box. But if you're doing a new installation, the point-releases mean that the new disc images will enable you to do the install from the CD and then need many fewer updates after the system is set up.

As you can see in Mark Shuttleworth's blog post on the very same topic, the first point-release came out three months after the initial 8.04 release, and following 8.04.1, there will be a new point-release every six months until the next LTS edition of Ubuntu is itself released. And if Ubuntu follows its schedule — and we have no reason to believe it won't — that next LTS will come out two years after the previous one, meaning we will have Ubuntu 10.04 LTS right when the version number says we will (10 for 2010, 04 for April).

As has been the case since Ubuntu's first LTS release (6.06), the long-term support means three years on the desktop and five years on the server, so if you're not the type who wants to roll the dice every six months on a new Linux distribution, and if Ubuntu's LTS release works well with the hardware you have (as it does for my Gateway Solo 1450), I know that I can leave 8.04 on my system for three years but have a new LTS in two years. Or I could track the regular Ubuntu release schedule and upgrade every six months.

It all depends on how you want to run your system. And choice is very good.

As a point of order, Ubuntu is based on Debian, and while Debian doesn't have a pre-set release schedule, it does have the very orderly process of having packages start in the Experimental branch before moving to Unstable, Testing and finally Stable. The current Stable release of Debian, named Etch, was released in April 2007, and the current Testing branch of Debian, named Lenny, is tentatively set to achieve Stable status in September of this year.

Now stay with me ... Once Debian "promotes" a Testing release to Stable, the Stable release it is replacing goes into "Old Stable" status and is maintained, as far as security updates go, for one year. That means the current "Old Stable," aka Debian Sarge, became Old Stable in April 2007 and was updated through April 2008.

Keep following ... And if Lenny goes Stable in September, then Etch will become Old Stable at that point and receive security updates through September 2009.

So if you only began using Etch when it achieved Stable status, you will have received two years, five months worth of updates from the Debian Project. Of course many jump on the Testing release before it becomes Stable.

I've been using Lenny (currently Testing) for months now because it runs so much better on the Gateway and is very stable despite still being a "Testing" release.

In summary: I know that Debian does its thing the Debian way, but I'd like to at least see a definite period of support for the project's releases. That means I don't care when they come out; it doesn't have to be every six months or even every year. But I'd like to see the project pledge to support Etch for five years, regardless of when the next Debian release achieves Stable status.

In other words, I'd like to see Debian treat itself a little more like the "enterprise" Linux releases from Red Hat and Novell — and like Ubuntu — by taking the guesswork out of how long distributions will receive support.

As soon as I'm able to begin posting them, my eight-part series on finding the best operating system for my circa-1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt will begin unfolding, one part a day, on Click.

I've been working on this series for about a month, working with everything from Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux to OpenBSD and Wolvix Cub, with a lot of thoughts about past use of Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu and more.

So starting — again, as soon as I can get the entries lined up — look for a long meditation on the best way to make old hardware work in the 21st century.

I really liked this Computerworld piece on how to revitalize a five-year-old Thinkpad laptop for $125.

While an IBM Thinkpad is worthier of restoration than most, the fact is that if you have a laptop on hand, a little maintenance can give it quite a bit of extra life.

Among the things Brian Nadel did to his Thinkpad R50:

• Added memory
• Replaced hard drive
• Reinstalled Windows
• Got second hard-drive caddy and installed Ubuntu on original hard drive so he can switch from Windows to Ubuntu by pulling and replacing the caddy
• Replacing a damaged keyboard
• Cleaning the inside, outside and especially the fan
• Defragmenting the hard drive

I've done some experimenting with encrypted filesystems in Debian, which are easy to do with the Debian installer — and which are just as easy to do in Ubuntu if you use the alternate installer.

Like I said, it's easy to do and to manage, unless you want to have a bunch of partitions under a single passphrase. This blog post helps you figure it out.

While full encryption is something you might want to use on a home desktop, although I wouldn't, it's almost mandatory for a laptop. If the thing gets stolen, whoever gets that drive has access to everything on it. And you really don't want that happening, do you?

Right now, neither of my two Linux laptops are encrypted, since I use them for testing and need to see one system's hard-drive partitions from the other, but in the near future, if I decided to single-boot either or both of these, you can bet I'll be encrypting the hard drive.

Now that Firefox 3 has been officially released, the Google Gears team wasted no time in pounding out a new version of the API that works with FF3.

Coincidentally, this means that Google Gears now works with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which began its life a couple of months ago with the then-non-Gears-supported FF 3 beta.

According to the blog post cited above, the change was made on June 11, but I don't think the Gears link worked for Linux systems with Firefox 3 (i.e. everybody running Ubuntu 8.04) on that day.

But now that FF3 is officially official, I expect Gears to install in the latest Firefox browser, and I in turn expect my laptop (and me) to be enjoying offline access to my Google Docs files real soon now.

I tried Google Docs with Gears a week ago on Firefox 2 in the Slackware-derived Wolvix Hunter last week, and I was very impressed. Editing of existing Docs files was seamless, and while I miss the ability to create new files in Google Docs while offline, I'm fairly confident that the big brains at Google are hard at work adding this needed bit of functionality to the Docs/Gears world.

By way of explanation, here's what I know about using Google Gears:

Google Gears is what's called an API (which stands for Application Programming Interface), and it installs as a Firefox add-on. If you don't have a live Internet connection, Gears detects this and uses a SQlite database set up in the user's Firefox directory to allow the ability to read and edit files in Google Docs.

When Gears is first installed, the database is created and populated with all the user's Google Docs files, after which Gears attempts at the earliest opportunity to sync that database with the files on the online version of Google Docs.

Like I said, I've tried it, it's brilliant, and it's finally come to the one computer that is regularly offline — my Gateway Solo 1450, which for the time being has no wireless connectivity (something I hope to remedy with a new PCMCIA assembly, should I be able to figure out how to pull the old one and replace it).

Google Gears/Docs update: I installed it in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and it works. I plan to use it often.

Gears/Docs tip: I think I have a way to get around Google Docs/Gears inability to create new documents while offline.

I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to create a half-dozen to a dozen "dummy" documents in Google Docs while online so I'll have pre-created, empty documents in which to work when I'm not connected and using Docs via Gears.