Recently in 8.04 LTS Category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been approaching the point over the past year where I'm becoming much less a free, open-source software-using hobbyist, trying out the various Linux distributions and BSD projects to see how they run, and am now pretty much a regular user of one open-source operating environment, with productivity and stability being the only thing that matters.

And if you've read the past 20 or so entries, you know that means I'm running one of the driest distributions around, Debian Lenny. (You can pretty much follow my whole OS progression from 2007 to the present in the blog archives.)

In the last week I've gone from the Los Angeles Daily News' Web developer to online editor, which means the ramp up in my work that I've experienced over the past many months is getting that much more intense.

I don't have time to fix broken networking, video, hot-plugging, screen-saving, kernel mode setting, or any of the other things that have gone wrong since my use of OpenBSD 4.4 led into the Xorg disaster that was 4.5 in May 2009, leading me to Ubuntu 8.04 soon thereafter.

My mistake was upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10, where things really started to go badly. After the hardware on which I was running Ubuntu Karmic took an unrelated turn for the worse (LCD cracking onto death), I took that as a sign to return to the OS I've used on more machines and probably for more time than any other: Debian GNU/Linux (Debian uses the GNU, so I will too, for the moment anyway).

I started running Debian Etch soon after it went stable in April 2007, and in December 2009, I again returned to the Stable branch of Debian, now Lenny (yes, every Debian release is named after a "Toy Story" character)

Sure the temptation is there to upgrade to the current Debian Testing branch (code-name Squeeze), but mindful of all the trouble I've had with my 2001/02-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, especially with its Intel video chip, the need to stay productive with a minimum of tinkering is keeping me in the Debian Lenny camp.

You see, I expected to have some configuration work to do when I ran OpenBSD 4.4 as my primary desktop from May through November 2009. But when I made the move to Ubuntu, with its "Linux for Human Beings" mantra, I figured a whole lot would be done for me by the system itself (and, by extension, the developers who put it together).

But whether it was my relatively aged hardware, the lack of luck in having Intel video (which is very, very common, by the way), or just the way it is, I ended up doing just as much configuration in Ubuntu as I did in the past for Debian Lenny when I used it during its Testing phase.

Except with Ubuntu I had to fix broken things not just with every six-month-release upgrade but often in between as package updates started to break things large and small.

With Debian Lenny, I figured everything out, got the laptop running as well as I could, and over the last month all I've been doing is using my computer. Sure I'd like the newer packages in Ubuntu (or Debian Squeeze, for that matter), but right now I just need to get work done, and between the large number of packages in the repository and the stable, staid and secure base system, Debian Lenny is doing the job.

Most of the time I'm not all that broken up about the older packages in Lenny. When it comes to my day-to-day, there's very little I can't do, and I appreciate not having to drop into uber-geek mode every time there's a kernel or Xorg update.

I'm not saying I won't use Ubuntu again. I still maintain one machine running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (and doing very well with it). I have three running Lenny exclusively, with my Mac G4/466 booting into Debian Etch on one drive, OS X 10.4 on the other.

And that doesn't mean I won't be back in OpenBSD on the desktop at some future time. Or FreeBSD.

But for now, it's Debian Lenny on my desktop.

I've been running Debian Lenny exclusively for more than a week now, and I can tell you that in an apples-to-apples comparison with Ubuntus 8.04 through 9.10, my immediate impression is that you do get a recognizable speed boost in just about all operations between the generic Lenny and generic Ubuntu on my 9-ish-year-old hardware, a Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB of PC133 RAM.

By "generic," I mean each distro's default GNOME desktop and mostly default applications.

Things just happen a bit quicker the way Debian ships over Ubuntu's stockish build.

I don't know if such a difference can be detected on newer hardware since I'm pretty much not running any. But I've always noticed that Debian and Slackware offer a pretty good speed advantage over many other distributions on the older, underpowered and often under-memoried machines I happen to run.

I happened to run all the recent Ubuntu releases, as well as Debian Lenny, on the same hardware.

And did I forget to mention that I'm running Lenny with fully encrypted LVM?

I originally set up this laptop as a test for encryption, which I think is a must on a laptop — who wants to lose it and have all of your data potentially compromised? I chose fully encrypted LVM in the installer along with the standard GNOME desktop, and that's pretty much what I'm running right now.

And even with whatever overhead the encryption adds to the CPU load, I still feel a lot more quickness (and use a lot less memory) than in Ubuntu.

I know Ubuntu has more services running by default, and I expect that Ubuntu can be tuned and tweaked to run as fast as Debian, but in this case I didn't have to do anything.

Of course I did make adjustments here and there to make Debian Lenny work the way I want:

• In Nautilus, clicking on a folder doesn't open a new window like in stock Debian GNOME. Instead it opens in the same window (like stock Ubuntu GNOME).
• I configured Iceweasel to transmit its browser name as Firefox because I have an SAAS app that demands it.
• I added Java from the Debian non-free repository and Flash from Adobe's .deb package
• I'm slowly adding fonts so I can see more foreign-language and other characters in applications. The main thing I need to figure out is which font will let me see Unicode "smart quotes," which show up in Ubuntu but not in Debian; I know Debian is using Unicode, but I'm wondering why all those characters don't display.
• I use Thunderbird and not Evolution as my mail client, so I added Icedove and the Debian equivalent of Ubuntu's Sunbird/Lightning calendar app, Iceowl.
• Debian already doesn't ship F-Spot but instead uses Gthumb by default; that's exactly what I want.
• I haven't yet started using Debian Backports, but if I feel the need to use the Tomboy replacement Gnote (which is faster and Mono-free), I can get it there.

That's about it.

I'm in the process once again of modifying my rsync scripts to back up the Debian installation's /home files. This time I used Gparted via the PartedMagic live CD to label the partitions on my Toshiba backup drive, so the drives now mount with those names, making modifying the scripts extremely easy.

If I think about it too much, I might start "missing" the newer applications that Ubuntu's six-month releases offer, and I could always upgrade this Debian installation from Lenny to Squeeze, the current Testing release, which includes Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5.x and OpenOffice 3.1.x (as opposed to 3.0.x and 2.4.x, respectively, in Lenny), but when it comes to my day-to-day work (which has a) limited my time for futzing around with software and b) made having a working computer more important than ever), Debian Lenny, old packages and all, is getting the job done just fine.

And speed is good ...