Recently in GNOME Category

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution.

Read the well-wrought entry linked above for the drawn-out reasoning behind moving the "professional"-quality Photoshop killer GIMP from the Ubuntu base (it'll be available in the Ubuntu Software Center, or your other favorite package-management tool).

Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user.

Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one. I still haven't made my decision on whether I'm for Mono (using the Microsoft-compatible open-source tools) apps or against them (and F-Spot, along with Tomboy notes and, if you've added it, the Banshee music player seem in my mind anyway to be the highest-profile Mono apps in the GNOME world).

All I can say is that with the geek-political climate these days, more Mono rather than the same or less will just give more users a reason to jump off of GNOME (and Ubuntu) in order to keep one's collective hands, if not clean, than at least Microsoft-free.

Again, I haven't made a personal decision about Mono as yet, but I'm far from happy with F-Spot.

And yes, I've been using it somewhat regularly. For my purposes, I'm not crazy about having to import images into F-Spot. digiKam can deal with images in any directory structure, and I'd like my photo-organizing program to do the same. I understand that F-Spot is more iPhoto-like in this aspect. I still don't like it. It's OK for my personal images, but I can't keep my businessy images separate. Everything's in one big pile in F-Spot, except when you dig into the actual directory structure the app creates. Yep, just like iPhoto.

In F-Spot I can add a caption in the "comments" area. Unfortunately that data does not come up in any other applications I use to edit or view photos. I can't edit the IPTC data that 100 percent of professional photojournalists use (and those are the guys whose images I handle day in and out).

F-Spot will sharpen and adjust the color of images. It will crop them. But it won't resize them. Huge, huge deal-breaker for my "professional" use of this application. (And why would I use something for my "home" images that won't do the job with my real work if I don't have to?)

Truth be told, I don't require all that Photoshop offers. On the PC I use IrfanView. And basically my "quest" for a Linux/Unix image viewing/editing program runs along the lines of "give me something that does what IrfanView can do."

Even the GIMP (and Krita, too, O fans of KDE) can't deal with the IPTC data in JPEG images, which I absolutely need.

The digiKam image manager in KDE, through the great Kipi Plugins, CAN deal with this data, and pretty well, too (although the limit on the length of the IPTC credit line is a bit grating and seemingly unnecessary).

So I've been using digiKam for the past few weeks somewhat regularly. (Truth be told, I tend to work in IrfanView on my Windows box at the office about 80 percent of the time when editing photos; it's the environment I know, and that does what I want it to do.)

digiKam is a bit unwieldly. Like many KDE apps, there are menus for days, along with choices to match. It resizes. Good. It sharpens (although the results aren't as good, seemingly, as in every other app that sharpens images; there are, again, lots of choices, and I barely understand — and can't get a great result — from them. digiKam can crop, but you can't enter the exact dimensions of your crop in pixels and then drag the box around to make the perfect crop like I do in IrfanView. Not a deal-breaker, but not good either.

And did I say digiKam is unwieldy. Why are there separate "edit" modes for the metadata and the image data?

I've had little ol' gThumb on this Ubuntu machine for awhile. And hearing that the UDS suggested and then rejected it as a "replacement" for either GIMP and/or F-Spot prompted me to try it out. Sure I had opened a few images, but I hadn't yet done any heavy lifting with gThumb.

It was time.

Gthumb, little ol' gThumb (that's what I'll call it for the purposes of this entry), does almost everything I need:

-- Deals with images in their current directory structure
-- Resizes images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Crops images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Can edit/add IPTC caption info (to the main caption area only) with the "comments" feature
-- Allows for easy save-as of images

The only thing gThumb doesn't seem to do (and I could be missing it, though I don't think I am) is sharpen images. I can live without that, especially if gThumb can create and won't destroy existing IPTC data in JPEGs.

(Note: Besides Krita and GIMP, my previous favorite light image editor for Linux, MtPaint, is also an IPTC-data-destroyer and therefore can't be used for my "real" work.)

So thanks UDS people, for mentioning gThumb. And if you're asking my advice, and I know for damn sure that you're not, keep the GIMP or don't. I'll install it anyway.

But look deep into your geeky, geeky hearts and find it within them to replace F-Spot with gThumb. Or at very least make gThumb part of the Ubuntu base, make it the default image-organizing app, and let the rest of the free, open-source software-using world discover this most worthy of applications that for the most part can free me from the purgatory of Windows-based photo editing applications for good.

(And while I'm on the well-trod soapbox, let me mention that I wrote this entire entry using the newish Webkit-based Epiphany Web browser, another lovely bit of GNOME that I liked in its Gecko days but like even more now.)

(And sorry [really] about all those parentheses, within which I'm thinking all too often these days.)

Jono Bacon goes on at length at his blog on the contrast between the euphoria over the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the reports of problems by users.

Read the 10 or so entries below this one and you can see the problems I've had.

It's time to put this in perspective. I've had plenty of problems with all manner of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems over the past few years. Given all the hardware that a modern OS must contend with (and I'll include Windows in that number since it runs – or is supposed to, anyway – on a wide variety of hardware), there's bound to be breakage.

Apple has it easy because it controls the hardware and the software and hence has an easier time making all the bits work together.

In my experience, Ubuntu generally performs well, and its developers seem genuinely worried about whether or not hardware will work with the distribution's constant stream of releases.

In both Linux and OpenBSD, for instance, wireless support has only gotten better over time.

I wish I could say the same for sound and video. PulseAudio has been somewhat of a disaster over the past year or more. It just wasn't ready for the average user, and the above-average user is demanding Jack and real-time kernels to do sophisticated audio work.

Now PulseAudio seems to be getting better.

For me, my Intel video hardware on a couple of laptops (Gateway Solo 1450 and Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) has been causing problems beginning with Debian Lenny's time in testing. Whenever you need xorg.conf hacks just to make video work, and those hacks aren't crystal clear and easy to find, there will be problems. People will try Linux and run away from it as fast as they can if they can't get the basics (sound and video) to work.

And for my particular Toshiba laptop, the use of Kernel Mode Setting killed X in my Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. Once I figured out how to turn KMS off (with a new line in GRUB), I could run X without an xorg.conf for the first time since Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. That's a nice change.

But to get there — to get basic functionality — I had to bring my 2 years of FOSS knowledge to bear in order to solve the problem.

Then just about every ancillary GNOME app (Brasero, Rhythmbox, Empathy and the non-GNOME Pidgin) stopped working after the upgrade. A quick search determined that my previous installation (in 9.04) of KDEnlive brought in a plugin that kept the other four apps from working. I saw lots of chatter on the problem, but none of the solutions worked for me. I had to remove the offending plugin and then reinstall three opencv libraries to clear things up (you can see all the details in the previous entries on this blog).

Many will say that I should've stuck with the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (with the initials standing for "long-term support"), which performed well for me but wasn't as stable on my particular hardware as 9.10 (for which I had to do some hackery to get NetworkManager to manage my network).

And both Ubuntu 8.04 (I'm still using it on the Gateway laptop, where it's very solid) and Debian Lenny (now stable and running very well for me on two other machines) are viable options, but for my main laptop I want newer packages, especially Firefox 3.5, and I've been more inclined to upgrade the distro itself rather than use backports or PPAs to bring newer apps to older distributions.

Maybe I've got that wrong (or maybe not).

I've been meaning to move all of my user files to a Debian Lenny machine and see how well that performs with my regular abuse of the hardware and software. And there's always Fedora (and Mandriva ... and PCLinuxOS ... Mepis ... and dozens of others).

But despite all my grumbling, I do have a functioning Ubuntu 9.10 system. I even ditched my own "blue" theme and wallpaper and brought in the "human" theme and wallpaper that shipped with the upgrade. I'm back to Ubuntu s**t brown and orange, and I'm liking it. The new GNOME icons are cool. And we all have the next Ubuntu release — and 10.04 will be the next LTS — to look forward to with hope that many bugs will be squashed in the service of a stable desktop that will have the customary 3 years of desktop support.

In a nutshell: Ubuntu's under the hot lights. People expect more from it than they do from any other FOSS operating system. And it generally delivers more than any other, if not as much as people are counting on in their lofty expectations.

I use Ubuntu for many reasons: It seems to have the right balance between total "freedom" and the ability to play most multimedia, its developers are focused more on the desktop and less on the server (although Ubuntu is making a big play there), and its vast user base means that when there are problems, the community (including me in this blog) can often solve problems that benefit all users.

We're all looking for the time when Ubuntu (or some other distro, or some other OS entirely) can be easily handled by the average computer owner. That time really isn't here yet. With a Windows preload, the manufacture of the hardware generally makes sure there are drivers for all the hardware. Linux preloads — a few of which do exist — generally do the same. But in the wild and wooly world of geeks burning ISOs and installing Unix-like operating systems on all manner of hardware, a foolproof experience just isn't in the cards. Yet.

Will we ever get there? I hope so. I also have at least a little bit of hope for more preloads of Ubuntu and other Linux distros and maybe even a BSD.

There has been a whole lot of progress over the past few years on the Linux desktop. It's hard to predict where the state of FOSS will be five years from now.

In the near future I'll settle for Xorg and Intel playing well together, mass adoption of a free and open video standard and a move away from proprietary document formats since we barely need to print anything anyway.

I haven't loaded up an IM client since I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

But I did today, and neither Pidgin nor the new GNOMEish Empathy would run. (Whether this matters or not, I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, as opposed to doing a reinstall.)

I started both IM clients in the terminal to see if I could determine what the problem might be:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ pidgin
ERROR: Could not load classifier cascade /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
Illegal instruction
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ empathy
ERROR: Could not load classifier cascade /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
Run 'empathy --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

(empathy:2527): empathy-WARNING **: Error in empathy init: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$

At least both apps seem to be suffering from the same problem, and luckily there is already a bug (#459940) on it in Launchpad. The bug is for the package opencv, and

According to notes on the bug, other GNOME applications affected by the problem include the Totem video player, the Brasero disc burner and Rhythmbox music player.

I can confirm that on my system, every one of those apps will not run.

I also confirmed that the XML file in question is NOT on my box:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ cat /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
cat: /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml: No such file or directory

One of the comments in the bug report says:

Thomas DEBESSE wrote on 2009-10-29: #6

seems to appear when installing frei0r-plugins (example: for kdenlive). When removing frei0r-plugins from my karmic I've no error messages at all, and totem (and other apps) runs fine.

Hey, I do have KDEnlive on this laptop. I would've removed the offending plugins package, but I decided first to do a software update to see if Ubuntu's package maintainers took care of the problem.

I opened a terminal and used aptitude to do it:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude update
[sudo] password for steven:

Reading package lists... Done

(listing of mirrors hit has been removed for brevity)

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
W: The "upgrade" command is deprecated; use "safe-upgrade" instead.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
binutils brasero empathy empathy-doc f-spot libbrasero-media0
libempathy-common libempathy-gtk-common libempathy-gtk28 libempathy30
nvidia-common python python-minimal ubuntu-xsplash-artwork xsplash
15 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 5,715kB of archives. After unpacking 160kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

That seems like it would take care of the problem, but the missing file still hadn't shown up. Would a reboot fix things?

After the software update didn't solve the problem, I decided to go into the Synaptic Package Manager and reinstall the opencv packages, which I guessed were libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1.

That didn't work either.

The next step would be either removing KDEnlive or the offending package, frei0r-plugins.

I went into Synaptic and removed frei0r-plugins.

Nothing changed.

I reinstalled the three opencv libraries (libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1).

That worked. I was able to run Pidgin, Empathy (which has a nice dialog that offered to import my Pidgin settings, an offer I accepted), Rhythmbox, Brasero and Totem once again.

And KDEnlive seemed to be working, too. It at least loaded.

Let's review: If Pidgin, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Brasero and Totem are not running on your Ubuntu 9.10 system, first update the box, then use the Synaptic Package Manager to remove frei0r-plugins and reinstall libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1.

I'm a bit surprised that the software update alone didn't fix the problem. While the fix is easy, it's a little bit of "dependency hell" for a package-management system (apt) that is not supposed to suffer from that particular malady.

While I've solved my X issue and now this in 9.10, I probably should have waited an extra month or so before upgrading so these bugs could be shaken out.

Bug #459940 should be closed eventually, but at present it appears that the removal of the offending package and the replacement of those the offender affected is the way out of this problem.

I do have a Launchpad account (I had to create it in order to buy stuff at the Canonical U.S. shop), and I subscribed to this bug so I can keep an eye on it.

I've seen a lot of comments directed at me and others in regard to reporting bugs, and following this bug is hopefully a step in that direction for me personally as a Ubuntu user.

Everybody has a story about Ubuntu 10.04 adopting the name "Lucid Lynx," planning to be released on time and being the next LTS (long-term support) release.

I'm choosing to link to The Register's story because a) it has an embedded YouTube video of Ubuntu head Mark Shuttleworth explaining all and b) they use the word "distie," and the evocative headline, "Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx sprays sweet perfume at freeloader."

Shuttleworth himself came up with the deodorant connection, saying "Lynx is well-known as a global brand of deodorant." Not in the U.S., but it's also well-known that we stink over here, so that's unsurprising.

Update: OK, in the U.S. that stuff is called Axe, not Lynx. I have heard of it but don't use it. I didn't expect such a detailed Wikipedia entry. On deodorant.

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 see the resemblance.

I decided that I was tired of brown, brown, brown in Ubuntu, so I changed out the wallpaper on my Ubuntu 8.04 desktop to this blue-themed image from the fine folks at GNOME. I also changed the way my "theme" looks by going to System - Preferences - Appearance in the GNOME menu and picking something less brown, more blue.

I know that GNOME-themed distros are usually blueish in hue and that Ubuntu's brown represents a departure from that blueness, but in my case, going all the way back to Ubuntu 6.06, I'm done with brown.

I've been bringing more data into my main Ubuntu 8.04 LTS installation on one of my two Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops, and I continue to be satisfied with the performance of what by most accounts is the world's most popular desktop Linux distribution.

No, its GNOME desktop isn't as fast as Debian's. But even though I do have Xfce (and not the full Xubuntu) installed on this Ubuntu laptop, I'm still using the brownish-themed GNOME that ships with the distro.

I'm getting used to all the GNOME-ish touches in the Nautilus file manager and in Ubuntu/GNOME in general that makes a full-fledged desktop environment such a nice place to work.

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've done this sort of thing before, but luckily somebody else is comparing the Xfce environments of Debian Lenny and Xubuntu/Ubuntu.

Results are not surprising and are in line with what I found over a year ago when I did a major comparison of everything from Xubuntu and Debian to Slackware and gOS, as well as Wolvix and standard Ubuntu.

Back then, Slackware and Debian with Xfce are indeed very, very fast systems. And while I didn't test them at the time, I expect ZenWalk and Vector with Xfce to perform as well or better.

That said, I've always liked the look of Xubuntu (especially in the 7.04-7.10 era), but it does run a good deal slower than other Xfce-equipped systems — and in fact didn't do much better than Ubuntu with GNOME in my test. Thus I've pretty much just used Ubuntu when I want it, although I did have some issues with crashing on my Gateway laptop that appeared at the time to be solved by adding Xubuntu to the install and running Xfce instead. (Since then, we've been running Ubuntu with GNOME — version 8.04 — on the Gateway, and it has been running very well.)

Despite all of this, I still have two Ubuntu 8.04 installations running right now. Sure Debian and Slackware are faster, but I'm quite happy running GNOME, and I find performance in Ubuntu more than acceptable. But what keeps me running Ubuntu is the ease of installation, configuration (I'm running with no xorg.conf — and perfect video out of the box — on both installs) and patching of the system. Despite all the talk of Ubuntu shipping before everything is "right," I can't remember suffering from a broken app or feature in recent memory. And it seems that even if a new app isn't available for some reason in the Ubuntu repository, the developers behind it are quick to create a package that's designed to run in Ubuntu (even though I prefer to run what's in Ubuntu's own repository).

All things being equal, I prefer Debian, but since Lenny all things have not been equal on my Gateway and Toshiba laptops (both made around 2002-3), with which I've had unsolvable video issues in both Lenny and at least on the Gateway in Slackware as well. No amount of tweaking xorg.conf, installing new drivers, etc., would make Debian Lenny play well with the Intel video in the Gateway, and when a quick Lenny install on the Toshiba brought up the same issue, I ran quickly to the welcoming, trouble-free arms of Ubuntu. Of course OpenBSD 4.4 is running virtually trouble-free on my second, identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, and if OpenBSD can get xorg running perfectly with no configuration (and no xorg.conf needed), you'd think that Debian and Slackware could do the same.

In all fairness, I haven't tried Slackware again since 12.2 came out, so maybe things have changed, and I also haven't tried Lenny since it went stable (my experience was during the three or so months leading up to that point). Put simply, Ubuntu worked, so I use it.

And as I've also said before, many of the replies to requests for help in the Ubuntu Forums might be less than helpful, but the sheer volume of those messages means that finding the answer to your question/solution to your problem not just for Ubuntu but also for Debian is easier than you might think.

Now that I've pretty much got my Xfce 4.4 desktop where I want it in OpenBSD, I've been spending more and more time not in Xfce but in the Fvwm2 window manager that's the default for this OS.

Sure, Fvwm isn't as full-featured as Xfce, it's not as pretty, but it works very well, the documentation is excellent, and most importantly, it doesn't use nearly as much memory.

Don't get me wrong, Xfce is no hog, especially compared with GNOME and KDE, but when I looked at top in a terminal and saw more than a half-dozen little Xfce widgets/apps using 10 MB each, I started to get a little squirrely about it.

Not that system performance was poor, since it was and is anything but. I'm happy with Xfce's look, feel and speed on this 1.2 GHz/768 MB laptop, and I'm not in danger of running out of memory. And if I'm that bugged by it, I could remove all the stuff from my panels that is using that memory. A leaner Xfce just might be in my future now that I've gotten the full-panel look out of my system.

And I did enjoy monitoring my network interfaces, disk activity, swap space (which I don't think I've needed to use, ever, on this machine), and CPU and RAM use.

But I don't really need all that stuff.

So today I started the laptop and launched X with Fvwm as my window manager.

And there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

While I'm in a griping mood, I'll say that while I like the look and feel of Xfce's Terminal and Mousepad applications, for the former I can get along just fine in Xterm, and for the latter I chafed at Mousepad's inability to open multiple documents with tabs (and the seeming inability to default to UTF-8 instead of ASCII).

Sure I could easily use Geany as my main editor in Xfce, and I did have Geany in the panel right next to Mousepad.

I still like Xfce's Thunar file manager, although I'm more than comfortable with the Rox-filer.

And even in Fvwm, I could easily continue running Thunar, Terminal and Mousepad just as easily as I could use Rox, Xterm and Geany in Xfce.

And thinking that Xfce is "heavy" when I could very well be using KDE or GNOME is just geeky BS on my part. I was only reacting to what I saw in top, not actual system performance. And again, I can easily lighten up Xfce's load by dumping all those doodads from the lower panel.

But right here, right now, Fvwm is getting the job done. But geeky users are fickle. I could be back in Xfce tomorrow. And if I did a reinstall and had 20 GB set aside for /usr rather than the 6 GB I have now, I could roll GNOME onto the box and try that, too.

So why am I OK with GNOME in Ubuntu but not in OpenBSD? I guess that the OpenBSD philosophy of starting out with a minimal install and building up from there (the same philosophy with a "standard," non "desktop" installation of Debian, now that I think about it) makes it seem more natural to add the X apps I like best to the system rather than try to re-create some huge GNOMEish configuration.

Not that I don't have GNOME-based Debian and Ubuntu installations on three other boxes in my stable.

What I want to say at this point in this rambling entry is that the freedom to roll so many desktop environments/window managers into a Unix-like system is something that really sets it apart from the Windows and Mac OS X environments. And it's something we should celebrate — and educate the non-Linux/BSD-using public about in an effort to let them know what alternatives are out there.

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.

Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf.

I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

I'm already running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the main distro on this system, and I've been thinking about what to do for the second distro. I'd go back to Debian Etch, but I had problems with the speed of the USB-connected mouse vs. the Alps touchpad, plus problems controlling the touchpad on its own.

In Lenny, the problems I've dealt with (and mostly solved) over the past six or more months have included suddenly disappearing sound (fixed with manually installed ESS Allegro modules), and an Epiphany browser that would always start in offline mode (fixed with a modification to Gconf2, if I have the name of the app right).

Nothing major — and nothing that couldn't be fixed with some help from either the bug reports themselves or other helpful people on the Web.

But this screen-refresh problem persists. I keep hoping that a routine software upgrade will take care of it, but that hasn't happened in countless xorg, driver and kernel updates. I don't think it's going to happen, either.

If you're running something that's very popular that catches the attention of developers (like the Asus Eee PC), chances are good that issues will be resolved. But I can't imagine any developers anywhere are paying any attention whatsoever to my 2002-era Gateway laptop. I'm no C hacker, so there's nothing much I can do, either.

I love Debian. I'm running two newish Etch installs right now (one PowerPC, one i386), and I could very well add a third with my $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), or even more to a couple of testing desktops I have waiting in the wings. Whenever Lenny goes Stable, Etch will have another year's worth of patches as Old Stable before it reaches its end of life.

Etch has been great, and Lenny has made dozens of improvements. But this one regression has made it very hard to keep my favorite distro on my main laptop.

So I have been thinking for months about what to do, all the while hoping that I could fix the X problem in Lenny.

First of all, I need to rewire the power supply plug. I think that is what is responsible for my intermittent freezes in Ubuntu (which don't seem to happen in Lenny, for reasons unknown). When I have the laptop on a desk, it never freezes, but when it's on my actual lap, as it was when I was trying to work on last-minute election programming yesterday morning, those freezes can really throw me off. I moved over to Debian, but I needed the Java runtime, didn't have it installed and didn't have the time to do that.

And then there's the video issue.

So I've been thinking, what should I install in place of Debian Lenny? I'm a big fan of long-term support releases, especially for older hardware, so I strongly considered CentOS 5, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. But the relative lack of consumer-oriented software had me worried. I could add the Dag Wieers repositories to deal with that issue, but even that repository doesn't cover everything I need.

Mandriva is also on the table, as is one of my favorite distros, Wolvix. The Slackware 11-based Wolvix is due for a new version soon. While its package mix addresses most of my issues, there are a few things that I can't easily find for it. And I worry in Wolvix's case (as well as Slackware's in general) about how long the kernel goes without getting patched.

I almost never see new kernels for older Slackware releases. I don't know if that's because they are unnecessary, but with patched kernels rolling into Debian and Ubuntu fairly regularly, I wonder why Slackware does things differently.

I'd run "regular" Slackware, but I had quite a bit of trouble getting X configured, and I'd rather use GNOME than KDE. I know there are GNOME projects for Slackware, but what I'm trying to do is install something that works well, comes together easily and has lots of available packages.

Given all the Mandriva fans on LXer, I considered it. I've used the Mandriva-derived PCLinuxOS and thought highly of it — and I may in fact go that way. The 2.6.18 kernel in PCLinuxOS 2007 (Debian Etch is also built on that kernel) is perhaps the best ever for the Gateway in that it controls the CPU fan with no intervention. The intervention needed in other kernels is slight (a single line in /etc/rc.local usually does it), but it's nice to have it done automatically.

Again, I'm not a huge fan of KDE, and I find that distros that are either KDE- or GNOME-centric tend to treat the other desktop environment as something of a second-class citizen.

I've had Fedora in the back of my mind for a while. Seeing all the packages available is very encouraging. And the Fedora community looks like a very good resource in terms of getting things working. I imagine that quite a bit of RHEL information would apply to Fedora as well, giving the distro an even deeper bench.

I'm not crazy about the length of support for a given Fedora release, which looks to be 12 to 13 months. I'd feel better with the 18 months that Ubuntu's non-LTS releases get, or even a full 2 years. Compromising on length of support is something I'm willing to do at this time for something that potentially gives me all the packages I want and that runs well besides.

As far as the availability of packages goes, Fedora acquits itself well. I have run it from the live CD before, and it seemed to do well on the Gateway.

In a slightly related matter, my install of Fedora 9 on my Power Mac G4/466 didn't go so well. The X configuration was horrible, and the distro ran much slower than Debian Etch on the same hardware. And Debian did a perfect X configuration for the internal graphics card and huge LaCie electron22blue monitor. Sure I could've used the information from the xorg.conf in Debian to properly modify the same config file in Fedora, but with such a performance hit, it didn't seem worth it.

Since the 1.3 GHz CPU and 1 GB of RAM in the Gateway offers much more power than the 466 MHz and 384 MB in the G4, Fedora seems to run fine on the faster machine.

And now that I have the Ubuntu LTS as my main distro (and hopefully a trouble-free one once I replace that shaky power plug), it's time to try something else.

First I need to keep copies of the xorg.conf, my CPU-fan script and rc.local from Debian Lenny in case I do a reinstall. Then I need to back up the /home files and consider adding a separate /home partition for the secondary distro (Ubuntu already has a separate /home partition).

Again, I'm not happy about the 13-month life cycle of any given Fedora release, and I really don't need a cutting-edge kernel for my not-cutting-edge hardware (unless, of course, it makes a cheap wireless adapter work), but with /home on its own partition, and Fedora installing GRUB on the root partition instead of the master boot record, with the GRUB on the MBR chainloading to the Fedora partition, it shouldn't be hard to roll Fedora out and something else in.

I could change my mind ... or not.

Update: OpenSUSE offers about two years of support per release, and that is enough to get me interested.

I'm downloading new OpenSUSE 11 and Fedora 9 ISOs now, and I'll burn them in the morning.

I decided to start adding apps to the Self-Reliant Thin Client, which is running Debian Etch from an 8GB CF card as the boot drive with a 1 GHz VIA CPU that insists at running at 500 MHz, plus 256 MB of RAM.

I used aptitude to add the Geany text editor and the Fluxbox window manager.

Fluxbox runs great, as usual, but I really don't see any app-speed improvement with Iceweasel, OpenOffice, Geany or Gedit.

In previous tests, I saw a real advantage to using Fluxbox or Xfce over GNOME, but here in Debian, GNOME is running well enough that I'll probably use it quite a bit. I'll continue testing Fluxbox, but I imagine that GNOME will continue to be my main window manager on this box (as it has been when running off of a traditional hard drive).

It definitely depends on the specific box, and especially on the available RAM. I guess that 256 MB of RAM is enough for good GNOME performance. With 128 MB of RAM, Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm or other lightweight window managers might dramatically improve performance vs. GNOME.

One thing I have to do is run top when running the same apps in both GNOME and Fluxbox. If the same amount of swap, relatively speaking, is being used in both window managers, that tells me why my GNOME performance is so relatively good. But if there was a lot more swap used in GNOME vs. Fluxbox, then I'd know that the lighter-weight window managers are really making a difference.

Both Ubuntu and the Debian distribution on which it's based use the GNOME desktop. Many applications appear in both systems, but there are differences.

Debian is primarily installed with a network-install image of about 150 MB, and most of the 700 or so packages that make up what's called the Desktop installation come over the Internet.

Ubuntu is primarily installed via a live CD, and all of its packages must fit on a 700 MB CD that the user either burns themself from an ISO image or gets pre-made from another source. There is an alternate install image available that works much like Debian's text-based installer, but it still pulls all of its packages from the CD and not over the network. Pulling all packages from the CD means a network connection isn't needed for the install, but many packages will need to be updated once a connection is established. In Debian, since the majority of packages are pulled from networked repositories, there are fewer that mus be upgraded immediately following the installation.

And the Ubuntu philosophy doesn't call for packing as many things into the installation by default. The menus are more spare, and there is no equivalent to the "Debian Menu," through which just about every application on the system can be started.

So whether you call it clean and logical or sparse and lacking, the Ubuntu GNOME desktop starts out quite a bit more lean than the equivalent in Debian.

I use both systems on many different boxes, including i386 and Mac Power PC, and I see good reasons to use both.

At this moment in time, I'm seeing the wisdom in the leaner Ubuntu menus, which can be fleshed out with the exact apps the user needs.

But both systems have a whole lot of applications in their repositories, so it's equally possible to make a Ubuntu system act and look just like a standard Debian system, just as it's possible to make Debian look like Ubuntu -- in terms of application choice and placement in the menus, anyway.

I've advocated in the past for a Debian installer and/or live CD that installed the exact same applications as Ubuntu, but in the Debian environment. It'd would be a great way to get Ubuntu people to try Debian, and I think the relatively stripped-down menus in such a version of Debian would be attractive to a great many users.