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In addition to his first e-mail to me, David Gurvich adds more about his experiences with Intel i830m video in Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD:

I did think the problems with FreeBSD were due to using PC-BSD and installing a lightweight desktop on top. After testing with a bare install that turns out to not be the case and the issue is with FreeBSD and has nothing to do with the scripts that PC-BSD uses.

I have not tested OpenBSD but most of the wireless drivers on FreeBSD have been ported from there. I suspect there is a difference between the two that causes these drivers to crash the system on FreeBSD. The primary reason that I was interested in FreeBSD was ZFS support and wanted to setup a file server. The network issue stopped that in it's tracks.

There is a graphical network tool in the FreeBSD ports that seems to work ok but most of my settings were with wpa_supplicant and rc.conf. I believe that PC-BSD has it's own graphical network configuration tool but didn't use that.

Flash does have issues on FreeBSD and I don't recommend installing the linux compatibility to use flash. Instead, use wine with a windows browser. There is a memory leak in the linux flashplugin on FreeBSD that will eventually cause your system to freeze until you kill nspluginwrapper. The same technique may work on OpenBSD.

I have tried Fedora 12 on this laptop and that worked somewhat after tweaking a number of parameters. By somewhat I mean that I had random Xorg crashes and the tweaks simply mitigated the frequency. I gave F12 about 2 months but just could not take the crashes. Fedora 12 is working well on the other systems that I've installed it on but there was a problem with one that had ATI video which required building an xorg module from git.

I am currently using Arch linux on the X30 and, since configuring the boot parameters with 'nomodeset' and locking the xf86-video-intel driver to 2.9.1, have not had any issues with video. The main problem has been with the networking scripts and I am still not sure what the issue is there but installing wicd-1.7 seems to have worked around that. I am impressed with the speed vs Fedora 12. The reason I am impressed is that, prior to Arch, Fedora 12 had been among the fastest distributions on the X30 with a useable firefox in under 2 minutes. The X30 from startup to a working firefox connection takes 45 seconds in Arch.

The main issue I will have with Arch is likely the very reason Arch is so responsive. Rolling releases don't keep old packages around and new versions can cause random failures on working systems. That means that I will need to maintain a list of packages that should not be upraded and be careful on upgrades. Nothing new to anyone who has used Gentoo.

I've currently had Arch installed on the X30 for a month and have had no issues to deal with since the video and networking were fixed. The livecd boots to a text console and I recommend looking at the arch installation guide. Pretty much everything needs to be configured but the wiki makes that simple.

David Gurvich

David, you hit on a number of important points. I will definitely try Fedora 12 to see how it works with i830m, and I agree with you that Arch is an excellent choice. I've written many times about how the Arch community has been a great resource for me in solving my X issues with i830m all the way from Debian Lenny through now.

I neglected to mention ZFS in FreeBSD. That certainly is something to recommend in its favor. There's also a project bringing journaling to soft updates in FreeBSD's UFS filesystem that I heard about in this BSD Talk episode.

I'm not terribly happy about Flash being so problematic in FreeBSD. I forget all the trouble I had with the Opera browser in OpenBSD. That browser and its Flash plugin uses OpenBSD's Linux compatibility layer, and I was eventually able to stop most crashes by changing a parameter in Opera.

Here's what I'm hoping for:

• People smarter than me will figure this out and either make allowances in the kernel and xorg, or will create some other kind of mechanism that doesn't leave users of Intel 830m video chips out in the cold
• HTML 5 will sooner than later take hold with an open video codec and return Flash to what it's good at, which is little applications that I can safely ignore, and stop doing what it's bad at, which is delivering video that can better be handled by a plethora of other formats. The easiest way for this to happen would be for Google to open-source the on2 video codec it recently acquired. (Except that Google already converted the entire YouTube library to the loved-by-Apple patent-encumbered H.264.)

  I've run BSD before, and if Linux/Xorg throws Intel 830m under the bus, I'll be an enthusiastic user of any system that doesn't follow along.

I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I've been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year.

And right here, right now, with a collection of old and dying hardware, my main laptop being a 2002/03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've moved from OpenBSD 4.4 to Ubuntus 8.04-9.10 and now to Debian Lenny, and things now are going better than I ever thought they would.

For this moment anyway, I have X working great, sound works through my USB Headphone Set sub-$3 module, I have all the multimedia functionality I need through Debian Multimedia, I'm about to update a few key apps, including Firefox/Iceweasel with Backports (see the wiki, too), and I've found more than a few apps that I really like and rely on.

I've grown very accustomed to and reliant on GNOME. I use Gedit, the Epiphany browser when possible (it's quicker than Iceweasel/Firefox), and my "killer app" for Web photo-editing is Gthumb, which is one of the few FOSS apps that preserves and edits the critical IPTC data in JPEGs that all of the photographers I work with (and all the outside suppliers of images I use) use to caption their images.

I have OpenOffice when I need it, which isn't often.

I use Rhythmbox for music, Gpodder for podcasts, Icedove/Thunderbird with Iceowl/Lightning for mail and calendar, gFTP, Pidgin and Audacity. I have Java and Flash. I use LogMeIn to control Windows desktops remotely when needed.

Did I mention that everything (just about) works?

It's a great thing, and the speed I'm getting in Debian makes Windows, if hadn't wiped it from the Toshiba's 20 GB hard drive, something I don't really need.

At this point I'm worried about the future of this 2002/03 laptop, principally its Intel video. Xorg has not been kind to Intel video over these past few years. Thus far I need to use the VESA driver to get Debian Sid (via Sidux) or Ubuntu Lucid to run.

That's acceptable, but I'd still like to get the Intel driver to work. Hell, this is Intel video; you'd think there would be a working Intel driver for it in the Xorg world as implemented in Linux and the BSDs.

But I do have the VESA solution ready, and between Debian Lenny, Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid, I have a future upgrade path already in place, even as I hold onto Lenny with both hands due to the fact that I've already done all of the setup and tweaking and have everything working as well as ever.

How's your Linux or BSD machine running these days? Let me know either in the comments or via e-mail at steven (dot) rosenberg (at) dailynews (dot) com.

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.