Recently in KDE Category

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.

The FreeBSD - The Unknown Giant news page (which I refer to often) offers an announcement of the PC-BSD 8.0 live DVD that told me a few things I'm very happy about:

• It's a live DVD (didn't used to be but could've been so longer than I know), which means it's a great way to test the compatibility of a given machine with not just PC-BSD but also FreeBSD 8.0.
• The disc allows for the installation of both PC-BSD and FreeBSD

I like that. I tested PC-BSD back in the 1.x days, and I've thought the installer was one of the best for any open-source operating system. I wasn't in love with the PBI packaging system (and still am not), and I wasn't crazy about being forced to use KDE and not having the option of GNOME or Xfce during the install.

So I'd probably be better off with FreeBSD, adding the packages or ports I want after the fact.

Now I can test my systems' response to FreeBSD and install either the KDE-based PC-BSD or the roll-what-you-want FreeBSD from a single DVD image.

I'll be downloading and burning this one as soon as possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was soon in the surprisingly snappy KDE 4.3.4 environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

I've been using digiKam a bit more to edit images for Web publication. I still find it awkward as hell, I haven't yet figured out the "right" way to sharpen a photo, and I'm puzzled as to why you can't edit an image's metadata and the image itself at the same time.

But edit the image's metadata — including the all-important IPTC data that each and every photojournalist in the world embeds into JPEGs — you can.

Every single other free, open-source image editing application in Linux/Unix not only doesn't edit that metadata, they cheerfully erase it entirely if and when you deign to modify and save an image while using them.

What is digiKam's "secret"? It's the Kipi plugins that allow editing of metadata in JPEGs. The developers of digiKam and the Kipi plugins both deserve my thanks.

So thus far digiKam stands alone as the one application that allows me to do my work on images in Linux (and the BSD projects, if I so choose).

And it only took digiKam and 62 other packages to bring this functionality to Ubuntu.

Was it worth it? You bet.

Will I consider the full KDE desktop environment solely because this single application does what I need it to do? Yes.

Would I like to see this same ability to edit IPTC metadata in Krita, KDE's "traditional" paint/image editor? Yes.

All I can say is that I'm ready to try the KDEnlive video editor. If I can figure it out, and it works, that's it — I'm turning to KDE.

Not that you absolutely need to run KDE to use these or any KDE apps. But it couldn't hurt.

Then ... I'm not all that big on office suites these days (I hardly ever need them), but if KOffice 2 fixes some of the glaring issues in the previous release ... it would be another positive in KDE's favor.

And ... a text editor with highlighting that isn't a dog of an app. K3b and Amarok ...

My only dilemma will be what distro to use with KDE: Debian, Kubuntu, Slackware, Fedora, OpenSuse ...