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I've enjoyed Zack Whittaker's iGeneration blog on ZDNet for a while now, but his most recent entry really hits you where you live — if you have a lot of stuff on a computer hard drive that you'd really not like to lose in an instant.

Zack accidentally kicked out the power plug on his computer, scrambled his hard drive ... and faces a huge, huge bill if he wants to recover years' worth of data:

Through no will of trying, I have now come to a sound, unfortunate conclusion, that my hard drive is well and truly screwed. My data is fully intact but I have absolutely no way of accessing it. And did I back up my machine? Of course I did – but on a separate partition, and on that hard drive.

A backup on the same drive? Bad idea.

That's why we all should ignore the garment-rending in the geek arena over the privacy implications of storing data in the cloud with a service such as Amazon S3 (via something like JungleDisk) or with DropBox, Mozy or any number of competing services.

Yes, there are problems in the cloud and with off-site, networked backups. But the benefits far, far outweigh the risks of not doing multiple backups in multiple ways and at multiple locations.

By all means, follow Zach's advice and back up to a detachable, external hard drive (preferably more than one). But don't think that's enough.

You don't just need a backup. You need a backup plan — one with the kind of redundancy that a cloud backup can add to one that also includes multiple hard drives stored in different places.

I'm getting increasingly comfortable keeping and viewing all of my photos online. Printing them? Yeah, every once in a while, but not every one, multiple times, like we used to.

I've got thousands of e-mails, most of which I probably could lose without tears but which serve as a huge database of information that I'd rather preserve than do without.

I probably should be making printouts of my "important" writing, should I do anything like that at some point in the future. Yep, paper — though bulky — can be the ultimate backup. Clay tablets are good, too.

But the reality is that my aversion to clutter (yes, despite my immersion in it) means keeping more and more things on bigger and bigger hard drives (I just saw a 2TB model from Seagate ... 1.5 TB is old hat, I guess) and making sure, through multiple backups (and backups in the cloud that are worth paying for), that I don't lose all of this data due to my own propensity for kicking out power plugs, or any number of natural and man-made disasters.

I always pull the trigger too soon when declaring success with a new WiFi adapter/software/hardware combination, and I'm hoping that's not the case with the Airlink 101 AWLL3028, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and my aging Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101.

But today I first had trouble connecting with my WEP encryption key (I know I shouldn't be using WEP ... and I will change to WPA2 once I resolve a few issues and get the rest of the house's computers on board ...).

Then when I finally did connect (had to reboot) I had the typical screen-freezes-and-ctrl-alt-backspace-AND-ctrl-alt-delete-have-no-effect-so-I-have-to-do-a-hard-reset.

That's the beauty of blogging where absolutely no one is making any damn money from the entire enterprise: I can just spin out a fake word with 30 or so hyphens and just move on.

OK ... I was reprimanded once for using the kind of language that flows continuously through my favorite podcast, and I considered just chucking the whole blogging-for-the-man thing and doing this on my own time, on my own site and enjoying the tens of dollars yearly I could earn from Google AdSense.

OK, I pretty much do this entirely on my own time as is ...

Anyhow, I'm ready to return to the raw meat of this blog post, which is my trouble with wireless networking.

So I did the hard reset, booted back into Ubuntu and while things seem a bit slow, networking-wise (that could be anything), it's working OK for the moment.

Here's what I'm thinking:

The problem might not be the specific wireless networking adapter; it could be an issue with USB (1.1 in the case of this old hunk of saved-from-the-garbage hardware). Whether Linux-related or not, perhaps the Toshiba just can't handle using the USB inteface that intensely.

I don't recall having any problems with the PCMCIA adapter I use with every damn PCMCIA-equipped computer known to woman and man, namely the Orinoco WaveLAN Silver (all I'm saying is if you don't have one of these, go to eBay and get one; for me's it's the geek-networking equivalent of the Swiss Army knife or Leatherman.

So a "newer" Cardbus adapter (maybe another $10 Airlink?) might work better for this particular laptop.

Another thing: If whatever problem I'm having is related to software, it's possible that performance will improve and crashes will diminish (or end entirely) with newer versions of everything from the Linux kernel (remember, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, which is pretty much a year and a half old; ancient in Linux terms) to the dreaded NetworkManager in GNOME or anything else in the stack.

But given my recent experience, I'm extremely gunshy and more worried about regressions than either a lack or abundance of "improvements." That's what screwing up Xorg for probably half the PCs out there will do to you, O Xorg developers who decided that working Intel video is for other people, meaning people who don't have Intel video chips embedded in their PCs.

Can you tell I'm bitter? I thought you could.

Of course with the super-fast USB 3 on the horizon for Linux — yep, first for Linux and then for the other 99 percent of the world, I expect we'll be getting more USB-connected hardware and not less, and that includes add-on network adapters, which I suspect will be with us in various forms for quite awhile as PCs' built-in networking (wired and wireless) are superseded by newer devices and protocols.

I'll continue testing the Airlink 101 AWLL3028 USB adapter and even consider entering the modern era and slapping Ubuntu 9.10 on this laptop. I'll try an in-place upgrade from 8.04-8.10-9.04-9.10, and if that doesn't work I can do a reintall with a fresh 9.10. That'll keep me (and my office's ample bandwidth) busy for awhile, I suspect.

I'm always hopeful; "It's only one crash," I say to myself. But one crash usually begets many more. I say usually hoping for the unusual and simultaneously wondering to myself why things have to be this hard (and remembering that these kind of problems reared themselves very well during my time running Windows 98/2000/XP and Mac OS 7.6/9.x/10.x).

Right now with the built-in wired networking, this hardware/software setup is pretty much problem-free (OK ... suspend/resume is a disaster, but I wasn't expecting anything more with hardware of this now-7-year-old vintage).

It's a good time to put my optimism hat atop my head, leave the friendly confines of the Ubuntu LTS behind and leap into the world of the six-month upgrade cycle and hope that improvements drown out regressions.

After all, I can always initiate my own regression and return to 8.04 (or chuck it all for something safe like Slackware 12.2 ...). I called Slackware "safe." Time for more coffee.

I don't think it's in my blogroll, but it should be (and will once I get to it). Webware, which subtitles itself "cool Web apps for everyone" is, indeed one of the best technology blogs out there.

The number of entries is astounding, and the quality of those entries is high.

If you want or need to keep up with what's happening — and going to happen — in Web-delivered services. The number of companies, devices and types of services they cover are too numerous to list.

Just read Webware already.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

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.

I haven't written a long, rambling editorial on why I do what I do in quite some time. Guess I lost the juice for it. But I just got rejuiced (perhaps it's my upcoming speaking engagement, for which I'll sound less rambling, I hope), so here's a lovely stream of geeky consciousness on why software freedom and/of choice is a great thing:

Much of what I write about here concerns how I aim to do everything I can to match up the best hardware and software to get a given job or jobs done.

That's why I don't advocate GNU/Linux or OpenBSD for everything, even though I spend most of my time using them on my systems.

There are times when Mac OS X is the best system for the job. That's especially true for me when it comes to editing video. I'm sure there are apps on Windows that are as good as Final Cut, but I sure haven't heard about them. And I'm pretty confident in saying that there's not much out their in free, open-source software world to match it.

There are also probably times when Windows is a reasonable system to use. I'd love to say there was an image editor for Mac or Unix/Linux that was as good as IrfanView at what it does. I haven't found that, either.

I'm not talking about servers at all here, just desktops. For the great majority of uses, a Linux or BSD desktop can run better and do just about everything you did on a proprietary operating system. And most Unix-like systems can do quite a few things your Windows box can't do, including (in my case) running the whole damn day without the apps robbing all of my memory and sending the box into a cascade of soul-killing swapping.

Right now, when I'm not cutting video, I can — and do — get just about all of my work done on a 2002-era 1.3 GHz Celeron-powered Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4. I have an identical laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS that I set up when the Opera browser was acting up. I've since fixed up Opera in OpenBSD (putting the words opera:config in the URL window, then clicking open Performance and clicking the Synchronus DNS Lookup box) and haven't needed to use the Ubuntu laptop.

But if I suddenly needed access to an up-to-date Flash player (Opera's Flash player works, just not in all instances), I have the Ubuntu Toshiba. And if I wanted to experiment with video editing in Cinelerra, KDEnlive or any of the other up-and-coming video-editing apps for Linux, I could use Ubuntu, for which most developers seem all too eager to build a package of their app.

(If I needed sound, however, the OpenBSD laptop can't help me. The system configures sound fine, but the sound hardware itself broke. That's what happens when you pull a laptop from a pile destined for the trash and somehow get it working. The sound works in the Ubuntu Toshiba, and I could always swap the drives if I absolutely needed sound in OpenBSD ... if I could figure out how to extract the hard drives, that is.)

Say I really needed to edit video in a super-professional kind of way. I imagine that whatever employer was asking me to do just that would provide me with a modern-day Mac, Final Cut Pro (or Express) and a huge hard drive that could hold all that video. (You can't do much with 10 GB on an old laptop drive.)

(Another somewhat related aside: On my 14-year-old Sun Sparcstation 20, acquired strictly for masochistic hobbyist purposes, OpenBSD runs great, but NetBSD will probably win out due to a much-larger number of precompiled binary applications for the 32-bit Sparc platform. That and Debian's stubborn refusal to install ...)

Getting back to the bread-and-butter computing I do with Web browsers, text editors, anything I need an office suite for, most image editing (right now I'm trying to figure out how to best batch-process images in Unix), even audio editing, which is 98 percent of what I need to get done, I can do it in a FOSS operating system and the applications that go with it.

Why I use OpenBSD instead of Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, FreeBSD or any number of other systems is both a decision for the moment (one that could change at any time) and a function of what I want to do with that system. Part of the whole equation is learning and having fun, and OpenBSD has certainly succeeded on that score. Not only do you have to get a bit deeper into the configuration files of the OS itself and of the apps to make things happen, but usually the documentation is good enough to guide you to the right solution.

And even if the systems aren't all that similar, what I learn in one OS is generally helpful and applicable in another. That's where the hobby portion of this whole thing enters the picture. I have a good time taking this old hardware and making it work as well as I can with whatever software tools are available to me, and my decision to use OpenBSD right now means that in my own personal/technical journey, this system seems to have what I want technically and philosophically. And the OS handles this hardware as well as anything else, sometimes better.

It's only been a few weeks since I made the decision to use my Windows box at the office less and less (due to ... Windows) and set up the laptop every day and use it not just to test new OSes and apps but to get 90 percent of my work done on any given day. To go from installs all the time, a bit of blogging and Web-browsing in FOSS OSes to coding and editing all day on them is a big evolutionary change for me.

And it's been going very well.

I've said it before: We're very lucky to have so much FOSS out there and not be forced in most cases to use proprietary operating systems and applications to make our computers useful. (Here's the point where I thank all the developers out there who have put this stuff together over the last many years.)

I don't know if we're at the point where every casual user can pick up a Ubuntu-equipped PC and be totally happy. That state of total happiness doesn't exist for Windows or Mac users, either.

But we're getting closer (and not just with Ubuntu). There's got to be the proverbial Malcolm Gladwellian "Tipping Point" somewhere in this realm, and while I'm not ready to declare 2009 "The year of" anything, you never know what's going to bring free, open-source software to the next level for an individual (or groups small, large and enormous). I could list a bunch of things, but I've got work to pretend to do ...

I feel like I'm booting children off a train.

Sure I've had my times when I installed a GNU/Linux distribution, used it for a couple of hours and then pulled it.

But for the past year or so, I've stuck with Debian, first with Etch and then Lenny since Etch went stable in April 2007. And when Ubuntu rolled out its new LTS distro in April of this year, I installed it and have been using it since. My older Compaq laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.2 for over a year, and I've done two very satisfactory Etch installs in the past month or so.

But on my main machine, a 2002-era Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, there's been trouble in GNU/Linux paradise.

After fighting with Debian Lenny for months over the Gateway's screen-refresh problems (which basically render much of that screen unreadable after a half-hour or so of use), I finally decided that I couldn't stick with the Testing branch of my favorite Linux distro on its road to becoming Stable. While many other problems cropped up and were mowed down either by me or the Debian Project itself, this last issue just wouldn't go away. And since I see not even one other person with this same problem, I fear the issue will never be resolved. I don't even know which package to file a bug against.

Remember when I thought I fixed my random-screen-freeze problem on this same laptop in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS? I thought that turning off automatic suspend in GNOME fixed the problem.

That didn't work. I still have random freezes. And I can't really blame it on the power plug because I've been in conditions where that plug does not move, and moreover these freezes never happened in Debian (when my screen image was not totally disintegrating, that is).

I was trying to get some pre-election work done on http://www.dailynews.com, and when I found that I didn't have the Java runtime installed (and needed it), I moved over to Ubuntu 8.04. In a half-hour, I had three unrecoverable crashes.

Again, I haven't heard of this happening to anybody but me.

I have TWO surplus laptops waiting in the wings. I'll see if any of them perform as well as or better than this Gateway. But whatever happens with those two machines, the Gateway will remain in service.

Once I decided to let go of Debian Lenny, I thought I would try Fedora 9, but when the live CD wouldn't let me install it, I turned to CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux — instead.

I first booted the live CD, then used the live CD to do a network install (NOT from the live environment but as a boot option). Once I determined that an http install wouldn't work but an ftp install would, I was off and running.

I've been testing CentOS 5.2 for about a week now. I've been slowly solving problems (adding things like Pidgin and Flash), and at this point I can say that CentOS 5.2 boots quickly, seems as snappy on this hardware as Ubuntu or Debian and runs extremely well.

I have yet to see a bug, and it has never crashed.

I have a full review and how-to for CentOS 5.2 in the works.

I hadn't anticipated replacing Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. I've had trouble with Ubuntu on this laptop since 7.04, and I've gone back and forth with it. Until I pulled it last week, I always had either Debian Etch or Lenny running on it. I've run Puppy 3.01 from live CD and the Slackware-based Wolvix Hunter — both with few problems.

The 2.6.18 kernel in CentOS 5 has always run better than any other on the Gateway. Other distros that share this kernel (albeit in slightly different versions) include PCLinuxOS 2007 and Debian Lenny.

And with support for RHEL/CentOS 5 slated to last a very, very long time, the fact that it runs so exceedingly well on this hardware gives me a true long-term solution.

I suspect that if I rolled the older Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — which has a little over seven months of support left before it EOLs — onto this laptop, it would run flawlessly. But it's packages are even older than Debian Etch's ...

As it stands right now, I'm going to stick with CentOS 5.2, and as much as I don't want to do it, I need to drop Ubuntu 8.04. I love Ubuntu — its philosophy and package mix, if not its brown color scheme. But I can't deal with the random freezes (after which ctrl-alt-backspace and ctrl-alt-delete are useless and only a hard reboot will work).

Aside from the screen-refresh problem, Debian Lenny was doing great. It improves on Etch in many, many ways.

I could see myself returning to Etch, which will have a full year of support as Debian's Old Stable distribution once Lenny is declared stable.

Whether I continue using this laptop or not, it has to run my daughter's educational games (GCompris, TuxPaint and Childsplay), and it has to be as stable as possible.

With Etch on the Gateway, I had trouble with the Alps touchpad, but since those problems were so easily solved in CentOS 5.2, perhaps I've learned enough to figure them out in Etch, where in addition to the touchpad-tapping issue the speed differences between the touchpad and a plugged-in USB mouse were more than a little incovenient.

I remember PCLinuxOS running as well as anything during the week or so I used it. I wonder how much support is left for the 2007 edition of that distro. The hype over PCLinuxOS has really slowed down over the past year, but I still think it's a very solid distro (based on Mandriva but with Debian-style apt and Synaptic package tools).

I've had trouble with X in Slackware on this platform, never seeming to get xorg.conf right, although Slack-based Wolvix runs perfectly for some reason. Slackware-based ZenWalk has all the packages I need and during the brief times I've run it has show itself to be extremely fast.

And since I'm running with separate /home partitions for both distros on this PC, switching those distros in and out should be less traumatic than in the past.

Even though I've taken great pains, after the fact (when it's harder to reconcile), to keep my user accounts' UID and GID numbers in Debian- and Red Hat- based distros compatible, I will probably dual-boot Fedora and CentOS for a while just to see how they match up on this hardware.

Depending on how things go with CentOS 5.2, I could eventually simplify things and do the unthinkable: not dual-boot anything.

CentOS seems terribly boring. But ever since Red Hat rolled a bunch of newer apps into its RHEL 5.2 (the base for CentOS), including Firefox 3 and OpenOffice 2.3, I've seen it as a very real alternative for the desktop.

And I neither expected it to run so well or for Debian and Ubuntu to run so comparatively poorly on this specific hunk of hardware.

If I had 10 test machines and Debian or Ubuntu ran flawlessly on them, I would be telling a different story, but from the perspective of this 6-year-old Gateway, RHEL/CentOS is pulling way out in front.

Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They're relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you).

But do they mean much? Not really, I think.

Most of the time it's the usual:

• "Here's what happened when I tried/failed/succeeded in installing Distro X on Hardware Y"
• "The installer is good/bad/barbaric"
• "Networking/printing/X was easy/hard/impossible to set up"
• "Package management is like Debian/Red Hat/Slackware and is good/bad/barbaric"
• "Repositories are big/small/good/bad"
• "My favorite apps are present/absent/broken"
• "The default desktop/menus/window manager are good/bad"
• "The community is active/nonexistant/helpful/hostile"

And the list goes on. I feel like writing a shell script that can pose questions and crank out automatic distro reviews.

What's harder to write — much harder than the quickie distro review — is a long-term review of a distro after a month or more of heavy use.

For one thing, most of us don't want to spend long periods of time running distros we don't like or aren't familiar with.

And for any given user, most of the 300+ active distros out there won't do anything for our hardware and work patterns that we don't already get from the distros we're currently using.

That's not to say that the many, many dozens of distros out there should just give up and stop trying to do something better and different (even though what they're doing is usually based on an existing distro and often doesn't add much, if any value to what they're already copying).

I'm just saying that after after a year and half of writing this kind of thing, I'm tired of both writing and reading quickie distro reviews that don't really tell the potential user of a given distribution all that much that they can use in making their decision.

I've already done tons of posts on Debian Lenny, and almost every problem has been fixed at some point in the project's long road from Testing to Stable.

So should I do another distro review on the installation, care and feeding of Debian Lenny when it finally does receive its Stable status?

Do I need to reinstall Ubuntu every six months and write about how that goes? OpenBSD?

Never mind that the development of OpenBSD is purposefully more evolutionary than revolutionary, or that a rolling release might be better/worse than one that comes out every six months or at some other regular (or not so much) interval.

I don't quite know how to end this tortuous post except to say that I reserve the right to change my mind. Maybe I'm purposefully shoving my own head in the sand by not embracing your favorite distro (usually Slackware or Mandriva) and sticking to what's been working for me (Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, Puppy ... and that's about it these days).

Maybe it's part of the evolution (or devolution) of me as a writer about technology, but right now I'm convinced that that there's a better way to do all of this that doesn't throw out free, open-source software in favor of what the average guy/gal is using (Windows/Mac) but also does more than preach to the same creaky choir, of which I myself am a warbling member.

Being more truthful, I won't stop reading distro reviews, especially when they're written by writers who know what they're doing. But I plan to be a whole lot more careful about writing them. I've been thinking (and writing) for some time about why it's more than time for me to stabilize my herd of machines and stop the endless process of cranking one distro after another onto their partitions.

The freedom to change distros like underwear, at more than one level, begins to detract from what a computer operating system is supposed to be for, which is getting stuff done. I guess I want things to be more about ends rather than means.

If you know the LAMP stack and want to live in Boston, the Obama campaign wants to hire you:

They need a programmer and a security expert.

That Obama ... in addition to being so gosh-darned dreamy, he embraces Linux and other free, open-source technologies.

How's John McCain gonna compete with that?

Related links:

• Technology Voters' Guide: Barack Obama
  
• Technology Voters' Guide: John McCain

Excerpts from the two guides above:

We have to know: what's your favorite gadget?

Obama: BlackBerry.
McCain: My slim, stylish gold Razr phone and I are inseparable.

And for the equal time's sake, here's a picture of John McCain back in the day:

It's all over the place — what The Associated Press is doing, supposedly in response to members wanting it to crack down on bloggers using AP stories. Let's begin at BoingBoing:

In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that "fair use" — the right to copy without permission — means "Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").

Think BoingBoing wants to charge me for that quote? No, because I'm linking back to them, giving them credit, and generally helping promote their site at no cost to them.

The thing about the snitches — if anything's over the top, that most certainly is.

BoingBoing got much of its info from this Making Light post. which in turn got its information from The Carpetbagger Report, which got its information from the good ol' New York Times.

Note: I originally wrote this post on 2/15/08. Today is 4/24/08. Since that time, I've looked into updating in the BSDs a bit further. In FreeBSD, it's certainly possible to update both ports and packages.

Anyway, here is the "original" 2/15/08 entry:

While it's pretty easy to install software from precompiled packages or from ports in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, I've hit a bit of a wall when it comes to keeping any of these systems up to date with periodic security and bug patches.

I don't know if such updates are either not as necessary in the BSDs, even though my Linux boxes have a dozen or so of them every week, or that it's just to hard to do for the average BSD user.

I see plenty of Web help on how to upgrade from one version of a BSD to another, but I don't see anything that covers searching for periodically updated packages and updating an installation on, lets say, a weekly basis as security and bug problems arise and are presumably updated in the repositories of packages and ports.

O, BSD users, correct me if I'm wrong -- and I do hope that I am wrong. But with apt/Aptitude/Synaptic in Debian-based Linux distributions, rpm/Yum in Red Hat- and Suse-style systems, and upgradepkg (and slapt-get/Gslapt) in Slackware (with security announcements going to the mailing list and the www.slackware.com/security page) ... need I go on?

The point is that almost all Linux installations are easily upgraded with precompiled binary packages. Gentoo ... well, I won't go there because I know it has its own BSD-like ports system, but I've never used it and don't know how it works.

Again, the point is that all of these Linux distributions have me conditioned to expect -- and to install -- updates on a regular basis.

But what do I do with BSD? In OpenBSD, for instance, I've never even downloaded the ports tree. Everything I've installed has been a precompiled binary package for the i386 architecture. It's very slick, works perfectly ... but am I exposing myself to undue risk by running Firefox 2.0.0.6 instead of the newer 2.0.0.12? Is all that extra OpenBSD security for nought if I'm running applications rife with security holes?

I'm being completely serious. Is there something I'm missing here? Since OpenBSD, at least, updates the whole system every six months, am I OK to keep the same packages running until the next release? What does this say about BSD vs. Linux when it comes to security and bugs?

But wait. I did run DesktopBSD for awhile, and I remember that system having a GUI package manager that not only fetched new packages but upgraded those already installed.

So that's what Matt Olander was talking about when he said that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD were working together to share technology when it came to package management.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't need to do my updates in a GUI app. I'm perfectly OK with using the console. Just being able to do that updating is enough. That is, unless someone out there can convince me that Linux has conditioned me to think I need something that I really don't.

Those on all sides of this issue, please enlighten me -- and quickly.

I haven't hooked up my OpenBSD 4.2 drive and booted it for about a week. The last time I left the box, I was playing around with Apache, and I thought all was well.

Today I hook up the drive and boot OpenBSD.

First of all, instead of a console login, I get an XDM login. That's strange. I don't remember XDM ever showing up before.

Then Internet networking doesn't work. I check all the networking settings. Everything is correct.

I can ping IP addresses on the local network, but nothing is working outside of that. Pinging google.com yields nothing. Since I can get local machines, I know it's not a bad cable.

Back to the OpenBSD FAQ. Instead of doing ifconfig, I check all the files that hold network configuration info. Nothing.

To start networking manually, the FAQ says to do this:

# sh /etc/netstart

An error message comes up. There's an error of some kind in /etc/rc.conf.

Now I know what happened. To start Apache automatically at boot, a line must be edited in /etc/rc.conf. I was trying it, and I must've screwed something up. As root, I edit the file. Sure enough, I had erroneously dropped a linefeed in the middle of the comment line to turn Apache on at boot.

I fixed the line, saved /etc/rc.conf and tried to start networking again from the command line.

It didn't work.

I rebooted.

This time, I got my usual console login. I started X manually. And Internet networking worked.

I also configured an anonymous FTP server. I had to manually change the permissions of the directory and files to root, but everything worked as advertised.

That's the strength of OpenBSD, as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD: the documentation is readable, comprehensive and up to date.

Over the past two days, I did a Debian Etch install in order to compare how all of this server configuration goes in Linux as opposed to OpenBSD.

And this is where the lack of documentation (even the man pages aren't all that up-to-date). At least the apache2 man page for Debian told me about the apache2 command. When httpd and apachectl start did nothing, I was in a bit of a quandary. Luckily I figured out that apache2 start and apache2ctl start would both work. Oh yeah, and the config files aren't where the Debian man page says they are. Instead of being in /usr/local/apache2/conf, they're in /etc/apache2.

I did figure out how to change the default directory for Apache in Debian (editing /etc/apache2/sites-available/default does it).

Part of the problem was that I started with Apache version 1.3 in OpenBSD (which doesn't include Apache 2 for licensing reasons) and had Apache 2.3 in Debian. And sure I don't know quite what I'm doing, but this is all on a local network, not the wide-open Internet, so I'm a bit more free to experiment.

All this underscores the value of good documentation. And when it comes to some distros -- Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse -- there are doorstop-thick books available. And the good ones are worth their weight in any precious metal you care to name. Luckily the BSDs have great online FAQs to help get you started. And since integration between the kernel, userland and other packages is so tight in the BSDs, and the need for documentation is that much greater, I'm damn glad it's there.

Not that Linux doesn't need something similar, but I don't see any Linux distribution short of Gentoo providing documentation this comprehensive and finely tuned to its users.

Can anybody prove me wrong? I truly, sincerely hope so.

I just read that Debian is removing Flash from its repository:

Flashplugin-nonfree has been removed (see below), as this is closed source and we don't get security support for it. For security reasons, we recommend to immediately remove any version of flashplugin-nonfree and any remaining files of the Adobe Flash Player. Tested updates will be made available via backports.org.

Since adding Flash from the repository never seemed to work for me in Debian -- I always have to get it through the browser dialogs -- it's kind of a moot point. I haven't yet investigated Gnash -- the free, open-source Flash clone -- but I'd sure like to do so. Flash is a resource hog, and I wish it would go away, but that's probably not going to happen. I just hope that Gnash or some other open-source alternative can replace it -- and quickly.

Back to Debian: The Flash news is part of Debian's main announcement that there's a new netinstall image for Etch:

The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update against ftp.debian.org after an installation, in order to incorporate those late changes.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

So you don't really need it, unless you don't already have it, in which case you need it.

I've been running Debian Lenny (testing) on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), and it's making significant progress -- it works way better than it did a month ago. I'm dual-booting with PCLinuxOS 2007 at the moment.

The older, weaker $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt) is still running Debian Etch (Stable), with the Xfce build's software, but now set to use Fluxbox as the window manager.

I can't decide whether or not to install Etch again on the Gateway just to see if any other bugs were fixed. For me, Lenny has resolved most of my issues, and I'll be happy to stick with it as it goes Stable.

And while I'm considering building an experimental server with OpenBSD, I might make it easy on myself and use Debian Etch instead.

My advice: If you're worried that either Debian or Slackware is too hard to figure out, don't be so worried. The not-so-hidden secret out there is that Ubuntu isn't that much easier. If you've got Ubuntu figured out even a little, you can handle Debian (and it's a bit faster, with more in the default install, besides). Slackware, you can probably figure out with a little hand-holding. Adding software and doing updates isn't as easy as in Debian/Ubuntu, but it's still fairly easy -- and you'll definitely learn something; actually quite a few somethings.

The flexibility of Debian is legendary. With one little netinstall CD, you can roll out a GNOME, KDE or Xfce desktop, a minimal console-only system (from which you can build what you want), plus any number of server configurations.

Slackware is also very flexible, but in a different way. It can't compete with Debian's 20,000+ packages, but there's a lot in the full Slack install. A full KDE desktop (with Xfce and Fluxbox, too). And if you want to spend a lot of time on the install process, you can pick and choose each individual package before committing to the final install.

Both put a lot of power in the hands of the user. And you do want power, don't you?

Flash update: Sander Marechal provided this very illuminating bug report (in this LXer thread) about the discussion in the Debian community over whether or not (and if so, then how) to include Flash in Debian.

At this point, it looks like the flashplugin-nonfree will be available to Debian users via Backports.org.

In the bug report, Ramond Wan says:

As a Debian user, but someone who isn't related to how Debian is run...I think you are correct and more importantly, what makes you think that Debian isn't political? Every time I visit a web site with Iceweasel and the server pops up an annoying message saying that Firefox is supported but not my browser, I sense only a part of the overall politics in Debian. In this case, I blame the server developers, too, for having such a message (how about if I used lynx?).

Anyway, there is a lot of politics within Debian and it stems from them
drawing a line that forms the basis of what Debian is (i.e., "free").
If they start making exceptions, then that line has no meaning.
Backports is a patch that helps make it easy for many of us. We give up
some things to be able to use Debian (rather than one of the many other
Linux distributions).

Carlo Wood says:

I'm sorry, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to let the debian users of stable and testing suffer like this. It's not like Adobe is going to be like "Oh My God!" and change their ways. They clearly don't give a damn.

I can't help but sense a political reason not to
support flash, just because it's "non-free", the
maintainers of debian WANT it to be broken, almost,
and certainly don't look hard for a way to give
their users an easy way to use flash. Just as long
as the result is that the users blame Adobe, and
not debian, it's ok - regardless of how much the
users suffer because of it.

And Timo Jyrinki says:

YouTube already works with Gnash the free Flash player, so that in particular should not be a problem. Many other sites are not yet working, but Gnash could be possibly defined as working "well enough" in time for the Lenny. At least I'm using it exclusively anyway, and I'm just using the 0.8.1 version, which lacks development for the last four months. But I don't find it problematic to skip sites that don't work with Gnash, so I'm not an average user.

In summary, Gnash works rather well for Flash 7 sites, but quite a large
portion of sites has moved to Flash 8 and 9 which are only a
work-in-progress with regards to Gnash, and most do not work properly.
Time will tell how fast Gnash will progress.

And here's what I say: I'm ambivalent about Flash. Some sites -- yes, even some that I personally help maintain -- use way too much Flash. You can barely navigate a site when you have two to four Flash apps running on a given page. The people who are all hot to use this much Flash obviously don't spend much, if any time using their own sites.

As far as video goes, Flash just seems easier than the alternatives. I know that QuickTime, for instance, runs like an old, three-legged dog on non-Apple hardware. It's just a lousy app.

So as far as video goes, I'd love to see some alternatives to Flash, especially open-source alternatives.

But as I say above, it may be a security issue, but on Debian I've always just gotten the Flash plugin straight from Mozilla through the browser itself.

What version of Linux has been at the top of the Distrowatch rankings for months now that I've never tried until today? PCLinuxOS.

Everybody I know who has runs PCLinuxOS has good things to say about it. Scott Ruecker of LXer and the Los Angeles Daily News' own City Hall reporter Rick Orlov are among those who have used and liked it.

I couldn't boot the CD on my test machine (VIA C3-based converted thin client), but on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) it's booting just fine.

To start with the live CD, I selected the "copy2ram" option because I have 1 GB to play with on this machine. It takes quite a while to copy the system files to RAM, but once that's done, the system should run very fast.

The 2007 version of PCLinuxOS has received continual updates and is a sort of rolling release -- the coders behind it don't create new ISO images on a continual basis like we get from Ubuntu, for instance. Once you install PCLinuxOS, it's easy to bring it up to day. Actually, I prefer it this way. I'd rather do a bunch of updates than continually burn new CDs.

Getting my feet wet in OpenBSD has gotten me thinking about how different operating systems handle software updates -- and how important security patches and bug fixes really are.

I'm thinking most of you will say they're very important. If you have a Debian-based Linux system, for instance, there are updates available almost every day, both security- and bug-related.

Live CDs are different. Knopix 5.1.1 has been around a very long time -- over a year at this point -- and plenty of people are using it, even though it's had no update of any kind in that period of time. But live-CD distros like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux have a new release every two or three months, and while the developers don't patch every single conceivable thing, I imagine that quite a bit of upgrading is done over the course of, let's say, six months.

OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD all offer apps in the form of ports, which are source files that you download and compile on your own machine, as well as precompiled binary packages for a variety of architectures (i386, powerpc, sparc, etc.). And the method for updating these ports and packages is something I'm still investigating.

m no expert yet, but I think the bulk of the updating for these BSD systems is done with ports through a CVS server. Taking OpenBSD as an example -- especially because that's what I'm running at the moment -- there are precompiled binaries for OpenBSD 4.2 that haven't changed since the version's release. So if you point to the packages created for OpenBSD 4.2 in your PKG_PATH, you get Firefox 2.0.0.6.

But if you look in snapshots, OpenBSD has a 2.0.0.12 package for Firefox on i386 that was uploaded two days ago.

(A quick check of the NetBSD repository for binary packages yielded Firefox 2.0.0.11, as well as preliminary versions of Firefox 3, for NetBSD 4.0.

So is it better to stick with the 4.2 packages, or to use the newer "snapshot" packages?

I'll give myself the answer: RTFM. While much is the same in the various BSD projects when compared to the hundreds of Linuxes out there, much is different -- and in the service of user choice.

But when it comes to getting the latest versions of ... well, everything, thus far I haven't yet figured out if there's a prebuilt script for updating binary packages en masse in OpenBSD and NetBSD. I know that FreeBSD has an app called freebsd-update that accomplishes this task, and I'm anxious to try it, but I'd like to know if I'm missing a similar utility in NetBSD and OpenBSD, or if the absence of this sort of tool is intentional.

My question: Am I compromising my OpenBSD system by running older precompiled binary apps? Does it really matter?

I'm conditioned by using Debian, Ubuntu and Slackware to expect updates on a continual basis and I wonder if I need to have the same level of vigilance with the BSDs. And should I be using ports instead of packages? While I'm on the subject, here's a way to keep up with new ports for OpenBSD. And here's the listing for Firefox.

Helpful site for OpenBSD: From OpenBSDSupport.org comes this page on how to replace Windows with OpenBSD. While it's based on OpenBSD 3.7 instead of the current 4.2, and that makes some of the information out of date, there are more than a few tips that can be applied to the newer version.

Plugging into OpenBSD: I've just signed up for a bunch of OpenBSD mailing lists, but there's also the OpenBSD Journal to help you keep up with what's going on.

Summing up: So far I'm having a lot of fun looking into the BSD operating systems. I met networking and security instructor, as well as prolific author Dru Lavigne at SCALE 6X, and she's going to send me a copy of her new book, "The Best of FreeBSD Basics," which means I'll be doing some work in FreeBSD in order to evaluate the book. In case you want your own copy, here it is on Amazon.