Recently in XP Category

I've probably written a dozen entries in which I wondered aloud about how anybody could use the Google Chrome Web browser when, on my 512 MB Windows XP system, it literally ran aground after maybe a half-hour of use, with screens taking forever to render and sending me scurrying back to the relative comfort of Firefox.

Well since that time I've been running both Firefox and Google Chrome on a Windows box with 1 GB of RAM, and my opinion of Chrome has turned around: It's fast and stays fast.

I guess Chrome is one of those applications that just doesn't do well with 512 MB of RAM.

And now that I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop that also has 1 GB of RAM — and I'm having "issues" with Firefox eating tons of CPU — I've installed a couple of other browsers, including the Webkit-powered GNOME browser-of-choice Epiphany and its close cousin (and Chrome twin) Chromium, both of which are easily added from the refreshingly simple Ubuntu Software Center.

(About the only thing I don't like about the Ubuntu Software Center is its method of installing an application as soon as you select it; I'd rather make a number of software selections and then have the system install them all together. I guess that's what the Synaptic Package Manager is for.)

So how is Chromium in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04?

So far, it's excellent. Everything happens fast. There is absolutely no slowdown when I type into a Web form. I can see in top that when not in active use, Chromium (just like Epiphany) gives back almost all the CPU it uses when rendering a Web page (most unlike Firefox, which holds onto CPU even when you're not in a FF window).

Windows XP runs great in 512 MB. But if you're running a modern Web browser, you really need 1 GB for things to run smoothly. This doesn't mean a modern Web browser — especially Firefox — will run great on a Linux machine with only 512 MB of RAM. But I've never seen it choke so badly with 1 GB of RAM as I have in my current Ubuntu 10.04 installation.

The fact that Chromium is flawless on this configuration and with this CPU (1.2 GHz Celeron) says a whole lot.

My only problem is that the "core" of my Web-based work requires me to use Firefox. ... and if Chromium runs great in Ubuntu, it could only do better in a "lighter" environment, right?

I must've done this before, but I have no memory of ever taking a Windows XP Service Pack 2 installation and upgrading it to SP3.

But I did one tonight. It went pretty much without incident.

However, it took a long, long time. The installer/upgrader/whatever-you-call-it seemingly had a lot of prep, then a lot of backing up, then a lot of installing, then a lot of cleanup to do.

I think it took 3+ hours.

Yes, slower than the average Linux distro installation.

But the positives are that the box didn't blow up. After that long, long wait, it rebooted and is now running. Relief was sighed.

When I installed OpenBSD 4.4 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, I purposefully left Windows XP on the drive. I used the free Linux-based Parted Magic live CD to shrink the Windows partition and leave room for OpenBSD on the hard drive.

The reason I'm so comfortable partitioning a hard drive is because I've done it between 50 and 100 times. For my first three or so OpenBSD installs, however, I gave the whole drive over to OpenBSD since I didn't feel confident setting up a dual- or triple-booting system with it.

So if you ARE comfortable dual-booting lots of Linuxes, Linux and Windows, or what have you, and you have managed to install OpenBSD without killing out your other operating systems, you might want to actually run those other systems, right?

On my most recent OpenBSD install on the Toshiba, I wanted to leave Windows XP on the drive and eventually dual-boot it.

I followed the instructions on the FAQ for installing OpenBSD on a PC with Windows already installed, and I intended NOT to install the OpenBSD bootloader. Well, I didn't do that, but I also managed somehow to kill out the Windows bootloader on the drive's master boot record. That meant I couldn't boot anything.

Luckily the OpenBSD FAQ show me how to boot from the floppy I used for the install (I booted from the floppy because the CD drive isn't working), drop to a shell and install the OpenBSD bootloader. That was easy enough, but I still couldn't dual-boot.

You theoretically can use the Windows bootloader to dual-boot with OpenBSD, but since I had already killed it out and don't have a Windows XP disc to restore it, I turned to GRUB, the bootloader I always use with Linux. It's a package for OpenBSD, and if your system is set up to install packages (with your PKG_PATH in your .profile if you're going to sudo, or in root's .profile if you su to root), you can easily install it.

Since I already added my user account to the sudoers list with visudo, I used sudo at my own shell to install the package. If you su to root instead, use the line with the # prompt:

$ sudo pkg_add -i grub
or
# pkg_add -i grub

After you install grub, you are presented with a path to the Instructions for setting up grub. Those instructions say to do this:

# grub-install --no-floppy hd0

That didn't work for me. The reason is that pkg_add puts all the grub packages in /usr/local/sbin, and either by accident or design, that isn't in my path.

So I instead ran:

# /usr/local/sbin/grub-install --no-floppy hd0

That did work. It installed GRUB in the master boot record as my bootloader.

But unlike in Linux, this GRUB installation didn't create the menu.lst file that GRUB uses to select and boot the various operating systems.

A look through the man and info pages for GRUB plus a little searching on the Web helped me create a menu.lst.

Before I go into that, it's worth pointing out that while most Linux systems store that file as /boot/grub/menu.lst, in OpenBSD it's just /grub/menu.lst. There's no /boot directory. (Instead, boot is an executable in the root directory, the reasons for which both elude me and seem unimportant at this stage.)

Use any text editor you have installed (vi in the base OpenBSD system; or nano or Geany in my system, both of which I've previously added with pkg_add) to create /grub/menu.lst.

Once again, since I have sudo set up, I used it and the nano editor in my shell to create the file. As far as partitions go, on my drive, Windows XP is installed first, followed by OpenBSD. To dual-boot with GRUB, here's how I created menu.lst:

$ sudo nano /grub/menu.lst

That creates the menu.lst file, into which I typed the following:

default 0 timeout 5

title Windows XP
root (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

title OpenBSD
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1

I saved and closed the file (F3 and then ctrl-X in nano) and then rebooted the PC. As yet another aside, here's how I reboot in OpenBSD:

$ sudo shutdown -r now

Upon reboot, GRUB ran and allowed me to choose between Windows and OpenBSD.

I tested both OSes, and both successfully booted.

I'll probably reverse the order so OpenBSD is in the top spot and will boot automatically if I don't purposefully select it. I could also increase the timeout time to have more of a chance to pick one OS or the other, but right now that doesn't seem necessary.

Observations: While documentation in OpenBSD tends to be extremely detailed, it's not always 100 percent correct. The man pages and info pages didn't tell me, for instance, that the grub executables, including grub-install, couldn't be run from the / directory and that the full path to them was needed. I only found that path by poking around in a file manager. Once I did have the path, I was able to use grub-install successfully with the directions as given. Adding the path to the instructions would certainly help others get GRUB working in OpenBSD.

Since both of the OSes on my laptop — Windows XP and OpenBSD have their own bootloaders on their respective root partitions, all GRUB has to do is chainload to the proper partition, after which time the respective systems' bootloaders take over. After using GRUB to dual- and triple-boot GNU/Linux distributions for more than a year, I've discovered that chainloading as much as possible is a very good thing, especially when dual-booting two Linux distros. That way, "automagic" updates to each distro's menu.lst are just about guaranteed to go smoothly.

This technique made things much easier when dual-booting Debian and Ubuntu. When I didn't chainload to one or the other, one of the two OSes never did get the proper menu.lst updates when a new kernel was installed. But by chainloading to all but one of the distros on the hard drive and installing GRUB in all but one of the distros' root partitions, I've avoided countless problems.

(Yes, I do have the OpenBSD T-shirt with this design. It doesn't get more geeky.)

I'm getting ready to give the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) to our daughter to run her educational games (Childsplay, Gcompris, TuxPaint) on Ubuntu Hardy with the non-crashing Xfce window manager instead of the crashy version of GNOME in this Ubuntu build.

To replace that machine for me, I pulled a Toshiba Satellite 1101-S101 laptop from the boneyard.

With a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor, 248 MB RAM (how it has this amount, I don't know) and a 20 GB hard drive, the specs are pretty similar to the Gateway, except for the Gateway's 1 GB of memory, which I'll probably split between the two machines.

The Toshiba came to me with Windows XP, and this time I wanted to preserve Windows and dual-boot it with a FOSS OS. The CD/DVD drive is extremely flaky. I think it's dying. It does better with "commercial" CDs, and I did get it to boot Partition Magic so I could shrink the NTFS Windows partition and set it up for Linux.

The only Linux CD I could boot was Debian's Etch and a Half. Something was squirrely on our network, and I couldn't get DNS working in the installer. I could've done a minimal install, fixed /etc/resolv.conf and then brought the rest of Debian into the box, but I took this opportunity to go in a different direction.

With all the CPU fan issue on the Gateway, I could never run OpenBSD (or NetBSD or even FreeBSD after the first boot) because I couldn't get the noisy CPU fan under control.

I powered up the Toshiba, which couldn't get networking in Windows either. Since I don't yet have the administrator password, I couldn't update the DNS settings.

I went to an OpenBSD mirror and downloaded a floppy image plus a DOS/Windows utility that helped me create a bootable OpenBSD install floppy. (Before anybody mentions this, I know I could've just as easily created a Debian boot floppy.)

The Toshiba successfully booted off the OpenBSD floppy, and I was able to plug in a mirror and do a full install over the network.

This was my first dual-boot install of OpenBSD, and after the install was done, the machine wouldn't boot at all. I hadn't installed a bootloader and thought the box would boot into Windows, where I planned to modify that bootloader to choose between Windows XP and OpenBSD. Instead I got a "no operating system" message.

And I don't have a Windows XP disc from which to "repair" the master boot record.

So I rebooted with the OpenBSD floppy, dropped down to a shell and added the OpenBSD bootloader at the prompt:

# fdisk -u wd0

Then I rebooted and was in OpenBSD. There is a GRUB package for OpenBSD, and I'll probably install that so I can easily dual-boot either Windows and OpenBSD or eventually Linux and OpenBSD. There are other alternatives as far as bootloaders go, but my familiarity with GRUB is what is governing my decision in this case.

I'm also going to add rsync as well. I have no skills when it comes to OpenBSD's dump and restore utilities, so having rsync is another plateful of Linux-like comfort food that will help me get along in OpenBSD.

Other packages I've installed thus far: nano, mc (the Midnight Commander file manager), Rox-filer (my favorite X file manager), Geany (X text editor) and the Firefox (I probably should've gotten the version with Java, but I'm going to try to add the Java developer's kit and get the Java runtime that way) and Opera Web browsers.

Opera came via a port and not a precompiled package, and it took a lot longer to install this time than the last time I installed it in OpenBSD (on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt), if I recall correctly.

When you download the ports tree and install from there, everything is fetched for you and compiled when needed. Looking at all the output in the terminal, it looks like these ports could never work, but in my experience with OpenBSD they always do. This time was no different. It took maybe 45 minutes to get all the dependencies plus Opera, but after that it worked immediately.

I've grown accustomed to OpenBSD's default window manager, Fvwm2, and I'll probably stick with it for at least awhile before adding any others. Unlike Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc., installing an app in OpenBSD doesn't automatically update the menus, so you have to manage this yourself. Getting into the guts of the .fvwmrc file is more instructive than not, and once I figured out how to do it, it got less arduous.

I still don't like waiting for ports to download, compile and install, so having 4000+ precompiled packages for i386 is a very good thing.

After a year of strugging with and complaining about the Gateway fan blasting away under OpenBSD, I couldn't believe that I was running OpenBSD 4.4 on the Toshiba with no CPU fan problem whatsoever. Everything from autoconfiguration of my two network interfaces (one Realtek 8189 wired Ethernet, the other an Orinoco WaveLAN PCMCIA wireless) to a perfect xorg.conf made this OpenBSD install go .

I haven't checked audio yet, but I've never had OpenBSD fail to configure the sound card.

I've always read that most OpenBSD developers use laptops to code in the OS, and now that I have this Toshiba running OpenBSD better than anything I've tried before, I'm amazed at how well it installs and runs on this specific platform.

I've probably written a half-dozen posts about exactly why I'm running OpenBSD, and I'll probably write another one as time allows in the week ahead.

And I'll be either ordering a CD set or contributing directly to the OpenBSD project in the days ahead.

I don't generally need to put things in .zip format. I often have to extract things out of .zip archives, which is easy in just about any computer system these days.

But making a .zip archive is something I've never had the occasion to do — until I was asked how today.

It was an easy bit of Googling (or is it "Googleing"?) to get here:

On Windows XP machines:

1. Start Windows Explorer (right-click the Start menu, then choose Explore).
2. Navigate to the folder in which you want to create a .zip file.
3. On the File menu, point to New, and then click Compressed (zipped) Folder. Type a name for the new folder, and then press ENTER.
4. Using Windows Explorer, drag any files you wish to place into the .zip file.

Go to the page for instructions on using Winzip.

A regular .zip archive isn't all that small. I had the occasion to extract a 7zip file recently and installed a program to do it. 7zip really makes things small. And it's is an open-source technology, which means it's free and open — the way it should be.

In case you're keeping score, Winzip isn't free.

7zip is free and open source (and doubly good) and deserves your support (even financially if you use it to make money, but that's totally up to you).

PKZip is a commercial product, and it seems to have been eclipsed by PKWare's SecureZIP product.

GNU/Linux and a whole bunch of Unix-like operating systems (including OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc.) offer plenty of free, open-source file compression, archiving and backup utilities that can be either installed or invoked with a few keystrokes.