Recently in Xfce Category

Never mind that one of my two Debian Lenny Xfce installations is seriously ailing at the moment. I'm not letting that dampen my future enthusiasm for the Xfce spin of Fedora 12, which I downloaded last night via torrent. (It's my first torrent download; luckily Debian Lenny is set up to do this automatically).

One thing you can say about Debian's default Xfce install — it's small and to the point. Aside from GDM, there's no GNOME in it (and my mixing of GNOME after the fact probably is responsible for my ailing box's troubles, but I digress).

Fedora's main desktop, like Ubuntu and Debian, is GNOME. But the project sponsors "spins" that include KDE, LXDE, games and a few more, including one focusing on education and the aforementioned Xfce.

In contrast, Ubuntu's Xfce version, Xubuntu, has quite a bit of GNOME in it, and while I think it looks fabulous and has a lot of functionality, I've actually found it to be slower/more sluggish than the standard GNOME-powered Ubuntu.

In Debian and Slackware, you definitely enjoy a speed boost with Xfce instead of GNOME or KDE. I'll be looking for the same thing in Fedora (and I wish there was a Fedora Xfce spin for PowerPC because the last time I ran Fedora on my Mac G4, it was super-sluggish and beaten in just about every way by Debian Etch for PowerPC — both using GNOME if that means anything).

More on torrents: I've never downloaded via torrent before, but since I seemingly have no choice, I'm doing it now. I guess I've never done it before because I really don't understand it. However, since I'm already set up to do it, it wasn't hard to figure out.

So what do I think of the Fedora 12 Xfce spin? I burned my image (to DVD — and now is as good a time to mention that burning CD images to DVD media definitely works, and it's a good thing, too, because my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop hates CD-R but loves DVD+R discs) and booted into the Xfce desktop.

Just as in the GNOME-powered Fedora 12, adding nomodeset to the boot line got X working.

I really like the look and feel of Fedora 12's Xfce spin. There's no top panel but a very useful lower panel with application launchers plus a few little icons. Unlike the stock Debian Xfce desktop, in Fedora Xfce the GNOMEish NetworkManager is installed — just like in Xubuntu.

I used it to configure my network, and it does work.

Fedora 12 Xfce spin has a nice mix of applications. It has the usual Mousepad text editor, Thunar file manager and Terminal (that's its name, capital T) terminal emulator.

One of my favorite "development" editors, Geany is installed by default. I didn't make a note of everything in the menus, but I did notice GIMP and Inkscape.

I didn't expect OpenOffice, but I also didn't expect the "GNOME Office" apps AbiWord and GNUmeric. No matter. They're both extremely light on resources, although I'm not as much of a fan of AbiWord as I once was. I've found that OpenOffice does more and doesn't really lag as much as you'd think, although with really old computers AbiWord is measurably better.

These days I try to use "office suite" apps as seldom as possible, preferring text editors on my local machine and Google Docs for everything else.

I meant to check the package-management choices in the Xfce spin but forgot. I'll run the live environment again soon and report back.

I did find the Fedora 12 Xfce spin appreciably "fast," not that the GNOMEversion was so terrible. But Xfce is pretty smooth.

Two things that bothered me a bit in the Xfce spin — and which are the same in the regular GNOME Fedora 12 — are that scrolling in Firefox seems smooth but slow, and the fonts look a bit more blurry.

I can't say for sure exactly how different the fonts looked. Now that I'm back in Debian Lenny with GNOME, things aren't all that different, but I did notice something in Fedora. I played with hinting, dots per inch, anti-aliasing, etc. I really don't understand any of that. In Debian and Ubuntu, things seem to look fine without me doing anything.

Something's different in Fedora about font rendering on this particularly troublesome graphics platform. It's not a deal-breaker by any means, but I'd like to somehow figure it out. I'll have to run more tests and do a bit of Googling. A preliminary Googling didn't enlighten me at all.

My quick verdict: Fedora 12's Xfce spin offers a nice, fairly complete environment. You might want to add OpenOffice if you're into that sort of thing. But you could get along quite well with the stock lineup of applications in this well-thought-out spin on Fedora.

I'm not ready to move from Debian to Fedora just yet (after all, I have everything set up pretty darn nicely on this Lenny install), but it's nice to know that I could.

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.

I don't know whether or not this is just me that Ubuntu and/or Xorg is trying to kill, but my latest Intel-graphics honeymoon is most definitely over.

Yesterday I used Aptitude to pull in the latest Ubuntu Karmic updates for the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (with the Intel 82830 CGC, aka 830M). If you'll recall, the last series of updates I installed for Karmic allowed me to use kernel mode setting for the X server, and I was once again able to run Ubuntu (with no xorg.conf, by the way) and have the onboard Intel graphics run as well as they ever have.

But after yesterday's bag full of updates, which were mostly Xorg-related, everything worked OK until the screensaver blanked the screen, after which the screen could not be restored either with the keyboard or mouse.

I haven't yet bothered to return ctrl-alt-backspace functionality to kill the X server in Ubuntu, so I don't know whether or not that would bring X back.

As it stands now, if the screensaver is invoked, I need to do a hard reset with the power button to bring the machine back.

The closest bug I could find is this one specific to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Bug #491302 in Launchpad. I do have a Launchpad account, and I did add a comment to the bug. Right now I'm not running the Ubuntu laptop, so I can't attach dmesg, lspci, etc.

Before setting up the Ubuntu Toshiba laptop, I pulled out the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt (Pentium II MMX 233 MHz, 144 MB RAM) and updated its Debian Lenny system ("customized" with a minimal Xfce desktop), writing this entry via the just-updated Opera 10 browser.

My next course of action with Ubuntu Karmic will be to try the xorg.conf I used in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). Hopes remain low.

It's always news when a new version of Slackware is released, and this week Slackware 13 is available for download or purchase on CD or DVD.

The release announcement details which version of what package/app/feature is included in the new release.

I spent a bit of time running Slackware 12.0, but didn't do much with 12.1 and 12.2.

Part of that has to do with the fact that Slackware doesn't ship with GNOME, and if you choose to install without KDE, intending to use either Xfce, Fluxbox or another window manager, you don't end up with all that many apps.

I have two Debian Lenny-equipped laptops at the moment, with my main laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

The "quicker" of the two Lenny laptops is in backup/test mode right now, with a fully encrypted LVM installation. It's been going pretty well, but if I don't think of another machine I can run Slackware 13 on, that Toshiba laptop might be pressed into service for it. (I've got two resurrected-from-the-dead 2002-era Toshiba Satellites, making a-b testing pretty easy ... both have dead touchpads, one has some kind of inverter going bad, making the screen blank intermittently and also has a dead sound chip.)

This time I think I'll go for the full KDE experience. Aside from a few mellow-harshing bugs, I did enjoy using KOffice at one time. And if I did "get used to" KDE, the software mix in Slackware without adding anything else is pretty darn good.

The problem is that even with Slackbuilds and other repositories, there's nowhere near as many apps readily available for Slackware as there is for Debian-based distributions.

But Slackware is still Slackware, and the aforementioned Slackbuilds go a long way toward assembling a complete system, and there ARE tools such as slapt-get and Gslapt that make updating a Slackware box much less nightmarish (I got in the weeds pretty quickly on a Slack 12.0 install when I had to manually download packages and use updatepkg to roll them in one by one).

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.

Look at what I have running in Xfce 4.4 on my OpenBSD 4.4 laptop. Do you think I should stop some of these Xfce services that I have in my panels? There are maybe seven or eight in there that use about 10 MB of RAM each. On this 768 MB system, should I be giving up 70 MB of RAM to panel apps in Xfce? I like seeing them in the panel. I like knowing when the CPU is spiking, seeing how the network is running and how I'm doing on disk space (I'm monitoring both /usr and /home in the panel).

The desktop looks like this, only more so — I've added a few apps to the panel, plus the Xfce notes app.

But clearly I could turn all this junk off and free up some memory (and probably some CPU, too).

Do you run your desktop with lots of little widgets?

load averages:  0.57,  0.39,  0.29                                     16:43:12
53 processes:  1 running, 51 idle, 1 on processor
CPU states:  8.8% user,  1.4% nice,  1.4% system,  0.1% interrupt, 88.2% idle
Memory: Real: 224M/344M act/tot  Free: 396M  Swap: 0K/306M used/tot

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    WAIT      TIME    CPU COMMAND

 5255 steven     2    0   44M   71M sleep    poll      0:26 11.08% firefox-bin

26867 steven    34    0   18M   32M run      -         9:53  4.05% Xorg

26938 steven     2    0 3864K   12M sleep    poll      0:08  0.15% xfce4-panel

10055 steven     2    0   41M   69M sleep    poll      2:39  0.00% thunderbird-

19491 steven     2    0 2324K 9260K sleep    poll      1:11  0.00% xfce4-netloa

22662 steven     2    0 2292K 9224K sleep    poll      0:53  0.00% xfce4-system

  643 steven     2    0 2456K 9268K sleep    poll      0:29  0.00% xfce4-netloa

26276 steven     2    0 4456K   15M sleep    poll      0:15  0.00% xfdesktop

 8416 steven     2    0 2340K 9148K sleep    poll      0:13  0.00% xfce4-diskpe

 6606 steven     2    0 2900K   10M sleep    poll      0:09  0.00% xfce4-menu-p

12216 steven     2    0 2992K   10M sleep    poll      0:09  0.00% xfce4-fsguar

16991 steven     2    0 2980K   10M sleep    poll      0:09  0.00% xfce4-fsguar

30681 steven     2    0 5456K   16M sleep    poll      0:07  0.00% Terminal

11545 steven     2    0 2156K 9872K sleep    poll      0:06  0.00% xfwm4

21196 steven     2    0 5464K   16M sleep    poll      0:05  0.00% Thunar

28220 steven     2    0 2752K 7108K sleep    poll      0:04  0.00% xfce-mcs-man

11890 steven     2    0 2928K   11M sleep    poll      0:02  0.00% mousepad

15329 root       2    0 1160K 1436K sleep    select    0:00  0.00% sendmail

 2150 steven     2    0 3104K   10M idle     poll      0:00  0.00% xfce4-notes-

 7773 _ntp       2    0  468K  732K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% ntpd

21843 root       2    0 1232K 2496K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% cupsd

30306 steven     2    0 1256K 3768K sleep    select    0:00  0.00% xterm

13675 steven     2    0 1500K 6484K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% xfce4-sessio

 2409 steven     2    0  936K 3120K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% gconfd-2

 8113 steven     2    0  676K 1376K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% top

12504 _syslogd   2    0  536K  664K sleep    poll      0:00  0.00% syslogd

 9988 root       2    0  516K  792K sleep    select    0:00  0.00% cron

17621 root       2    0  676K  776K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% ntpd

 2399 steven    18    0  444K  404K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% ksh

 6990 steven     2    0  420K 1092K idle     netio     0:00  0.00% gnome-pty-he

29096 steven     2    0  628K 1220K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% dbus-daemon

 5514 steven    18    0  480K  396K sleep    pause     0:00  0.00% ksh

13069 steven    18    0  480K  428K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

23547 steven    10    0  416K 1056K idle     wait      0:00  0.00% xinit

32715 steven    18    0  580K  412K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

20774 steven    18    0  460K  404K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

16958 steven    18    0  416K  460K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

11067 steven    18    0  592K  396K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% ksh

    1 root      10    0  396K  272K idle     wait      0:00  0.00% init

10244 steven    18    0  588K  460K idle     pause     0:00  0.00% sh

 3423 root       3    0  312K  756K idle     ttyin     0:00  0.00% getty

24277 steven     2    0  412K 1264K idle     poll      0:00  0.00% dbus-launch

31493 root       2    0  388K  692K idle     select    0:00  0.00% inetd

19182 root       3    0  212K  756K idle     ttyin     0:00  0.00% getty

10476 root       3    0  212K  764K idle     ttyin     0:00  0.00% getty

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.