Recently in 9.10 Category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was soon in the surprisingly snappy KDE 4.3.4 environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

I'm reading one of my very favorite FOSS writers, Ryan Paul, on the changes afoot for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (codename Lucid ... and I hope so), and before I continue, I heartily recommend reading everything Ryan writes in Ars Technica's Open-Ended blog, but this comment (among the many) leapt right out at me:

"I'm looking forward to this release. 9.10 is mostly stable, I could use a good update that breaks my intel video and wireless chips even though they were fine, plus overhauls the USB method so not much works anymore."

That's exactly where I'm at. I had a pretty good thing going in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Everything that was ever going to work pretty much did. Yeah I had a bit of instability with one of my wireless adapters, fixed in 8.10/9.04, and I fairly quickly figured out how to tame the new NetworkManager (upgrading with wireless from 8.04 is NOT recommended, by me anyway, if you plan to use a wired interface after the fact).

And I did the upgrade from 8.04 through 8.10 to 9.04 in a single weekend solely to be ready for 9.10. As I've said more than once, I wanted newer apps, and I had no idea so many things would break.

But break they did.

If I hadn't suffered through similar problems — all since solved — in the transition from Debian Etch to Lenny on my Intel video hardware, I'd be more critical of Ubuntu than I already am. (Hard to believe, you say? I agree.)

I realize this is one of the problems inherent not in software distributed under free, open-source licenses and developed by the community.

No, it's due to one thing and one thing only: Hardware manufacturers.

These hardware manufactures have spent untold hours making sure their equipment has the proper drivers to function under an increasing number of Windows operating systems. I've seen drivers offered for everything from Windows 95 through 98, 2000, XP and now Vista and 7.

If these hardware companies paid the same kind of attention to Linux, and in addition didn't just push binary blobs out the tube but offered open-source code that could be used in any number of operating systems, from those based on Linux to BSD and beyond, then we'd be getting somewhere,

I spend a lot of time bitching, moaning, complaining and rending garments over the problems I have when Ubuntu or OpenBSD does a six-month update that takes my X video compatibility and rips it apart. And while I think the lion's share of responsibility for the huge regressions in Intel video compatibility belongs to the Xorg developers, I really don't know how and why Intel either aided or allowed this to happen, as well as why so many operating-system projects just took this code, rolled it into their OSes and made me and so many others suffer so much (and again ... this has been going on for me at least since Debian Lenny was in Testing).

I've had a few comments that my now-8-year-old, most-likely-crappy-from-inception Intel hardware is being cast adrift to make things "better" for the newer video hardware out there. To that I say, bullshit.

My 2001 laptop with 1 GB RAM and a 1.3 GHz Celeron is perfectly capable of running "today's" Linux and BSD operating systems, as well as Windows XP (which I wiped from this PCs hard drive many months ago).

As I've said before, I don't know if there's any way of telling just what the mix of machines running Linux and BSD is out there, but I have a very good feeling that there are a whole lot more "older" machines than "newer" ones running FOSS operating systems.

If I knew more about Xorg, Intel video chips of a certain age, kernels and drivers, I would no doubt be better equipped to place blame for what I and many thousands of others have gone through over the past 2+ years.

I'll leave Ubuntu's seemingly silent decision to change the way it deals with USB drives (as the commenter mentions, as have I) since that's yet another issue I've dealt with (I had to modify all of my rsync shell scripts).

Would I do better with a Thinkpad? More developers use those than Toshibas like mine, so that would be a good choice.

But for what I pay for hardware (and that's as close to nothing as I can), I pretty much run the machines that find their way to my doorstep.

All I want are upgrades that don't completely break the OS. That's it. I like new apps, but what happened to this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with Ubuntu 9.10 is not OK.

Like I said in a recent entry, there's a lot about Ubuntu to like, and many things about the operating system itself and the project philosophy have kept me using it in one form or another since 6.06 LTS. (And if OpenBSD hadn't blown up on me between 4.4 and 4.5, I probably would've stuck with that even longer than the six months I did; different story, different circumstances.)

I realize this is free software, but I don't think most developers and users think we're in this for anything but victory over the ways and means of proprietary software and the conglomerates behind it.

And I also realize I'm not a developer, just a user with logorrhea.

But come Lucid time in April of next year, the way I feel now I'm not going there in any kind of rush. Maybe three months, maybe more ... maybe not.