Results tagged “The $0 Laptop” from CLICK

I've been writing updates in my print column of the things I've bought/used/discarded/loved/hated over the past year, and that got me thinking: I got started with Linux in early 2007 and used many a distro on the machines available to me.

But for the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this:

1) I've found stuff that works

2) see 1)

OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

Anyhow, the other reason I've kept the same operating systems on my half-dozen or so active computers is that I need them to run — and run well. And they do.

Here's the rundown:

On my main laptop, the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've been running OpenBSD 4.4 for nearly six months. The only "sticking" point is not having Flash 9 or 10. Flash 7 works for YouTube but not much else. I have a few things that I do that need more up-to-date Flash, but otherwise the OS and applications in packages and ports have been extremely stable. I just upgraded it from Firefox 2 to 3, and tonight I added Mplayer and successfully played a Quicktime video. (Too bad the sound chip on the Toshiba is broken; the video itself looked great.)

If OpenBSD weren't so good, I'd use the Flash situation as a excuse to run back to Linux. But I've enjoyed using OpenBSD and learned so much over these months that for now I'm going to stick with it.

I have an identical Toshiba Satellite laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. It, too, is performing very well, although I seldom use it since I have all of my data on the OpenBSD laptop. I have few complaints about Ubuntu 8.04, and before it came out I vowed to stick with the LTS for at least a year, maybe longer. I could be persuaded to upgrade if I needed to get a newer wireless adapter to work, but so far I haven't needed to do that. Ubuntu remains very solid, and with better Flash support than OpenBSD it's nice to have it as a backup.

Our daughter has what used to be known as the $0 Laptop, a Gateway Solo 1450. The Gateway could never comfortably run OpenBSD because of its noisy CPU fan, which Linux can manage most of the time (with a simple shell script). FreeBSD managed the fan even better, but only during the first boot after the install. After that, it all went to hell.

Our girl has all her educational games on the Gateway, which is also running Ubuntu 8.04. I still think that the Debian Project packages Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint just that much better than Ubuntu, but all the problems I had with Debian Lenny and X on both the Gateway and later the Toshiba had me running back to Ubuntu and OpenBSD — both of which run X perfectly on both laptops with no xorg.conf file needed.

I'll concede that installing, customizing and maintaining just about any Linux distro is easier than doing the same in OpenBSD, but as I say above, I'm grateful for the learning experience and most of the time can figure out how to do what needs to be done in OpenBSD.

My Self-Reliant Thin Client, the first test machine that I began running Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, ZenWalk, Puppy, DSL and other distros on in 2007 has been running Debian Etch on a bootable 8 GB CF card for quite a few months now. I don't have it networked at the moment, so I can't upgrade to Lenny. I'm keeping the converted thin client powered on these days in another informal long-term test, and I hope to have networking hooked up to it soon. With 128 MB of RAM and less-than-great video and sound hardware, it's not the greatest machine, but I love having something with no moving parts and minimal power consumption.

I have the Mac G4/466, aka the Debian Mac, running Debian Etch, which I continue to think is the best non-OS X operating system for this particular hunk of hardware. I managed to get 640 MB of RAM into it, and it's a great machine. Since it's a PowerPC box, there's no Flash Player in any OS that isn't OS X. I'm considering an OS X 10.4 install to see how that runs. We have dual-500 MHz G4s in the office that run OS X really, really well. I wonder how this single-CPU 466 MHz box will measure up. We could use a Mac OS backup machine in the house.

Earlier this week, I pulled out the $15 Laptop, a 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt with 233 MHz CPU and 144 MB RAM and fixed what was ailing it: It wouldn't run X in OpenBSD 4.2 in my user account, but would in root. That's because when it comes to screwing around with X, I don't know what I'm doing some of the time. I had created an .xinitrc file with a single line reading "xset b off" to silence the system bell in X, and that was enough to keep the Fvwm window manager from loading. I killed .xinitrc and all was well with the Compaq. I'll probably do a reinstall of OpenBSD, since upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3 to 4.4 to ... is just too much work. Yep, after a long search for the right OS, the Compaq has run OpenBSD for a long, long time.

The real workhorse of our stable is the iBook G4 1 GHz laptop. In the past year I've replaced the hard drive, pumped 1 GB of memory into it and upgraded from OS X 10.3 to 10.4. We needed 10.4 in order to run Firefox 3 and Flash 10. Yep, that's when I upgrade — only when absolutely necessary.

To make a long story short, until I have a burning desire to watch Web video all the time, or until I need to edit and process video into Flash, I just might stick with OpenBSD on my i386 hardware. Otherwise I'll probably move back to Ubuntu or Debian, the latter only if those nagging video problems somehow go away. (I've had similar issues with Slackware ...).

My next "challenge" will be to run OpenBSD -current instead of -release. Since I already hate waiting for things to compile, I don't know how I'll react to keeping a -current installation up to date. There's only one way to find out.

As I write in this week's print column, I'm getting ready to give the Ubuntu- and CentOS-powered $0 Laptop to our 5-year-old daughter.

I mentioned that I do have a replacement that was working out pretty well. Of course that wellness went considerably south in the past few days (as chronicled in Dark Side of the Laptop), but I remained determined to prep the laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu/Xubuntu 8.04 LTS as its No. 1 distro, for our daughter, who used it tonight to run TuxPaint.

Whether or not my new/old Toshiba (or newer/just-as-old/identical Toshiba) works out, I'm ready to move on. I've got boxes I've set up in the past couple of months (The Self-Reliant Thin Client, The Debian Mac, which I bet I could finally set up with OpenBSD and actually get it to boot) that could be used more, and boxes I haven't yet had time to work on (an old Dell with something in the 1 GHz-ish range and for some reason stuffed with 256 MB of ECC server memory).

I'm also thisclose to getting my hands on a Sun Sparcstation 20, a box that was the envy of every self-respecting geek ... in 1995. That could be a fun project, don't you think?

Things have gone very smoothly on my third day of using the Xubuntu flavor of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. While in Xfce (Xubuntu's desktop environment), I haven't had the screen, keyboard and mouse freeze at all.

Wondering whether all this good fortune was really due to starting with the Xfce window manager instead of GNOME, I logged out, changed my WM to GNOME and logged back in.

Everything seemed to be going well. But in the mid-afternoon, I had a couple browser windows open and was writing in Gedit when the thing froze up on me. (Had I saved my document in Gedit? Nope.)

So regular old Ubuntu 8.04 hasn't improved at all. My ability to keep this distro running is somehow due to whatever Xubuntu packages take precedence over those in Ubuntu when logged in with Xfce.

By the way, the Trackpad utility in Ubuntu doesn't show up in Xubuntu, so I modified the xorg.conf in Ubuntu/Xubuntu to turn off tapping in my Alps touchpad by adding the line setting "MaxTapTime" to 0:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
# adding next line in attempt to turn off tapping
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

I've always been pretty happy with Xfce. I used it more often than not in Slackware and always in Wolvix. And with all the tools that Ubuntu keeps across all of its companion distros (including Kubuntu and Xubuntu), running Xfce isn't all that different than running GNOME.

The strengths of Xfce are that the Thunar file manager and Mousepad text editor are lightning fast and quite functional. I'm also OK managing the desktop with the Xfce tools. I discovered that Xorg.conf line to turn off touchpad tapping when I was setting up CentOS 5.2, and I think this is a much better way to deal with the issue than using the Q/G/Ksynaptics package. I believe that in "regular" Ubuntu each user can set up the touchpad according to their individual preferences, but since I don't have any users, potential or real, who like touchpad tapping, turning it off globally in xorg.conf is definitely the way to go.

Now that I'm sure that Ubuntu with GNOME is still screwing up on this hardware, I'll continue using Xubuntu/Xfce for the next few days to make sure everything continues working.

And while I'm reluctant to move off of the LTS to Ubuntu 8.10, that does remain an option. While the LTS' 3-year support timeframe is something I'd like to have, with the "regular" Ubuntu release, there's still 18 months of support, which means I could keep the same system for quite awhile nonetheless. The quality of support (i.e. bug fixes and security patches) for Ubuntu is not something I feel qualified to judge, but the 18-month life of non-LTS releases is something I'm very much in favor of.

Fedora's releases have a 13-month life, and OpenSUSE's are two years, I believe. I think Ubuntu is right where they should be, given that there's also the LTS release with 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server. I initially hoped that Ubuntu 8.04 LTS would run well enough that I could ride it out for at least a year, maybe two, without running into problems, and while I've "solved" the problem that has cropped up, not being able to use GNOME isn't exactly the solution I was looking for.

In conclusion: It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.

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.

It hadn't occurred to me that if you — like me — are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, upgrading to the just-released Ubuntu 8.10 requires a little operator intervention.

In non-LTS installations, the system prompts you with the choice of upgrading to the newest version, but since 8.04 is a long-term support (hence the LTS) release, it defaults to waiting for the next LTS before automatically offering to make the upgrade.

But you still can easily go from 8.04 LTS to 8.10. You just have to change a setting in Software Sources (get there from the System--Administration--Software Sources menu item).

The Ubuntu Geek Web site explains it better — and in greater detail, so go there for the full instructions.

I'm not in any hurry to upgrade my Ubuntu-equipped Gateway laptop, especially since I've just "stabilized" the whole installation by turning off automatic suspend/resume feature in the Power Manager.

Like I said then, once the Ubuntu download mirrors quiet down a bit, I will grab the entire ISO file, burn it to disc and run the live CD to see how my hardware reacts and whether or not my Airlink 101 AWLL 3028 USB wireless adapter works automatically. If it did, I would probably upgrade, since this particular laptop has a busted PCMCIA card slot and the only USB wireless adapter I have is the Airlink, which I got for $10.

By the way, if you are "fortunate" enough to have the Airlink 101 AWLL 3026 USB wireless adapter, which looks the same as the 3028 but is based on an entirely different chipset, you're in luck because it reportedly works with Ubuntu 8.04. And yes, I wish I had one (and thought that by now the 3028 would/should/could have a native driver for Linux).

As of today, here are all the machines I use and what they run:

At the office:

Work box:
Dell Optiplex GX520
Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
512 MB RAM
Windows XP SP2

The Debian Mac:
Power Macintosh G4
466MHz single PowerPC processor
384 MB RAM
Debian Etch

The Self-Reliant Thin Client:
Maxspeed Maxterm 5300(??) thin client
VIA C3 Samuel (1 GHz, running at 500 MHz for some reason)
256 MB RAM
8 GB Transcend Compact Flash module as boot drive
1 GB USB flash drive for backup
Debian Etch

At home:

iBook G4
1 GHz CPU
384 MB RAM
120 GB Fujitsu hard drive (replaced by me in a 3-hour odyssey)
OS X 10.3

This Old PC:
Pentium II MMX (333 MHz)
256 MB RAM
10 GB hard drive
Windows 2000 (I haven't booted this or connected it to the Internet in over a year)

The $0 Laptop:
Gateway Solo 1450
Mobile Celeron (1.3 GHz)
1 GB RAM
30 GB Toshiba hard drive
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Debian Lenny, Puppy 3.01

The $15 Laptop:
Compaq Armada 7770dmt
Pentium II MMX (233 MHz)
144 MB RAM
3 GB IBM hard drive
OpenBSD 4.2

I have quite a few machines in various states of repair that I might resurrect over the next year if and when I get the time, but this is what I have right now. With the exception of the white-box This Old PC, all of these get fairly regular use.

Every time I write about Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, which I've been running on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop since its release in April, I mention that it's the only GNU/Linux distribution I've used that successfully suspends and resume the computer.

And I've made that feature — suspend and resume — the bar over which other distros must jump to "beat" 8.04 on this platform.

Make no mistake, I've "enjoyed" a working suspend/resume capability. But I haven't enjoyed returning to the laptop after a while to find the screen looking normal but the keyboard and mouse completely dead. CTRL-ALT-backspace won't kill X. CTRL-ALT-delete won't reboot the machine. I need to do a hard boot with the power button to get things working again.

I've had X issues in many distros, most severely with Debian Lenny, my preferred distro for this PC, which has serious problems with refreshing the screen, leaving the upper panel in GNOME and many graphical elements of various applications virtually unrecognizable after about a half-hour of use.

I appeared to have a similar X issue in Slackware 12, which I installed only briefly (and too briefly to make a determination, especially since I never got a "perfect" X configuration), but other systems, including CentOS 5, Fedora 9, and Puppy 3.00 had none of these issues.

Nor did Ubuntu 8.04, which automatically wrote an xorg.conf that was much different — being way more spares — than any other I'd seen before. But X performs flawlessly.

Even though suspend/resume works in Ubuntu, I'm now about 80 percent sure my intermittent keyboard/mouse freezesare caused by whatever daemon is responsible for automatically checking whether or not to suspend the system.

I pretty much arrived at this point through the process of elimination with the addition of a little bit of logic. Since no other distro appeared to be freezing like this, and since I only have automatic suspend/resume set on Ubuntu, that seemed to be the most likely cause.

So I went into the GNOME Power Manager utility and turned off the "put the computer to sleep after XX minutes" feature.

Since then, I've had no freezing whatsoever in Ubuntu 8.04. A month from now, I'll be sure.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out the problem with screen refresh in Debian Lenny. I'm considering wiping it from the laptop and trying another secondary distro, maybe CentOS or Fedora. Even Sidux — a more "tame" version Debian Sid — is something to try just to see if I continue to have the screen issues.

Or I could just stick with Ubuntu 8.04. I'm not thinking about upgrading to 8.10, which not coincidentally is available for download today.

Click that last link to see the major new features in Ubuntu 8.10. I'm very unlikely to need 3G wireless, but if I find that 8.10 supports my Airlink 101 AWLL 3028 USB wireless adapter, I would strongly consider doing the upgrade.

I'm sure all of the Ubuntu mirrors are straining mightily with everybody trying to download the whole 8.10 image or upgrading their current installations. I'll be waiting at least a couple of weeks before I try to download the ISO and burn a live CD. If that loads and then the wireless works out of the box (I won't be holding my breath), I'll go forward.

Otherwise, I'll stick with 8.04 LTS — the long-term-support edition of Ubuntu that will be supported until 2011 on the desktop.

But with suspend/resume off the table, Ubuntu has lost its edge over every other GNU/Linux distribution (and even FreeBSD/PC-BSD) on this laptop.

I've been sticking with my installs much longer than usual — I'm still using a now-year-old installation of OpenBSD 4.2 on my $15 Laptop (and OpenBSD 4.4 will be released on Nov. 1).

See tomorrow's post for a breakdown on what I'm running on every machine.

I still might be in a position to heap praise upon Ubuntu 8.04 for its performance on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) since I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago with a separate /home partition and a not-screwed-up UUID scenario.

But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button.

Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

I need to figure out whether my freezes in Ubuntu are due to the OS itself or due to the flaky power situation.

I finally got a replacement power jack at Fry's that I could use on the power brick to make a foolproof connection.

It could be chance, but this freezing problem never happens in Debian Lenny, which has problems of its own (related to X refresh, and chronicled in agonizing detail on this very blog).

I will confirm that suspend/resume continues to work, as does everything else. Except for this cursor-freezing.

Again, I'm not ready to blame Ubuntu and am more inclined to blame the power jack/plug situation. I am keeping an eye on the problem.

Another 150 or so updates rolled into Debian Lenny recently, including new Xorg and Intel video driver packages. For the upteenth time, I'm hoping for the miracle of properly refreshing X. It didn't do so well yesterday just after the updates, but there were some "enhancements" to the Debian login screen, principally the word "Debian" appearing in the upper left portion of the screen.

Again, my hope is that this X problem somehow solves itself and I can continue using Debian on this laptop. Again, no breath being held.

I know I said in a previous entry that Debian's Xfce installation didn't exactly provide what I wanted, but looking at what I need, Debian rises to the top of the pack.

Top of my list: Installing Debian with encrypted LVM. Especially in a laptop, encryption is a must to secure your data from prying eyes, should the laptop be lost or stolen.

And any little utility that Wolvix has can probably be added in Debian. And Aptitude is very good. It's not graphical, but it represents the best of Debian.

And I still trust the security team for Debian more than I do most others — this despite the OpenSSL problem that has recently plagued every Debian-based distro in recent weeks. (At least somebody figured it out, and the whole incident should tighten up things considerably in the Debian Project).

And in Debian, I can easily install all of our little girl's educational programs, although she is fairly vocal about preferring to use the newer, faster $0 Laptop, a 1.3GHz Celeron-based Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM.

The only "stopper" is Google's lack of willingness to easily let users install Google Gears in Mozilla-derived browsers not named Firefox. That means it's a pain in the ass to install Gears with Iceweasel, the Debian-derived, noncopyrighted equivalent to Firefox.

And I haven't tried Debian on the Compaq Armada 7770dmt since I boosted the RAM from 64MB to 144MB. Responsiveness in X could be a lot better with such a relative overabundance of RAM.

So as far as the Compaq goes, I'm down to running Debian or Wolvix on the hard drive and Puppy as a live CD. Like I said previously, I don't want to kill out OpenBSD just yet, so I'll need either a second hard drive or a 4GB Compact Flash card with CF-to-IDE laptop adapter (the latter available for a quite-reasonable $10 at LogicSupply.com). I might even spring for a second hard-drive caddy for the Compaq, should I be able to find one, to make swapping the drives that much easier.

Or I could bite the bullet, get rid of OpenBSD for the time being, try out Debian and Wolvix on the hard drive, and narrow things down. I'll continue to run Puppy, with a separate partition for its encrypted pup_save file.

I've taken to using the Leafpad text editor in Puppy (I'm using it now), and the Leafpad-derived Mousepad editor in Xfce is just as fast, if spartan. Xfce's Terminal app has similar attributes. And I have no problem running xterm or rxvt.

It's really about the text editors and browsers I use, the software my daughter likes to run, stability, security, encryption and ease of maintenance.

Moreover, it's about speed on old hardware. These things look very different on newer computers. My 2002-era Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu very well. I doubt I could even boot Ubuntu on this Compaq. Even the Xubuntu live CD won't boot. With Debian, I have no problem.

On the Gateway, Ubuntu's polish as compared to Debian makes Ubuntu a better choice. But on this older Compaq, Debian's flexibility and added speed (don't ask me why it's faster, it just is) are much needed.

Next moves: I need to get a PCMCIA Ethernet card since I don't have regular access to WiFi. While I'm at it, a PCMCIA card for USB is something I should also look into. Sure, I could transfer files over the network, but USB is ... easier. (Note: Since this post was originally written, I have gotten an Ethernet card for the Compaq).

Previously:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part I — Puppy or Damn Small Linux
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part II — OpenBSD or Debian?
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part III — Browsers and wireless
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part IV — Wolvix Cub is surprisingly strong
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I'm headed
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VI — Younger Puppies

Coming up:
In search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part VIII — Final thoughts (aka "Why?")

It's been a little while since my last report on how Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has been doing on the $0 Laptop.

In short, all continues to go very, very well. At this point I could see ratcheting down my use of Debian on this machine and pretty much devoting it to Ubuntu all the way.

Why? Everything in Ubuntu works with as little effort as possible.

I have made some strides in getting Debian Lenny working better on the Gateway Solo 1450. I got sound to return by installing the ALSA modules myself. I'm having a problem with the upper GNOME panel looking a bit funky at times, with graphical "ghosting" marring its appearance. It's not a deal-breaker, but it also doesn't happen in any other distro.

And again, Ubuntu just does what it's supposed to do.

I still haven't conquered suspend-resume in any other distro. In Ubuntu, that just worked.

If for some miraculous reason suspend/resume works in CentOS/RHEL 5.2, I'll re-evaluate things, but a test of 5.1 today confirmed that it does not work out of the box. And I tried to install 5.2 on a free partition with the super-small network installer, which hung up early in the process. I bailed out of it and figured I'd forget about the whole thing until the CentOS 5.2 live CD image is released.

Heather Clancy at the Green Tech Pastures blog from ZDNet writes about Faronics' power-management software, which now runs in Mac's OS X in addition to Windows:

The Power Save Mac 2.0 software includes intelligent shutdown functions; the ability to schedule when a system should be awake, asleep or in standby; the ability to customize what "inactivity" means for a particular system; enterprise control; and a reports feature that generates records of energy and cost savings. The report generator creates a "before" record of your computer, as well, which serves as a benchmark against which savings are calculated.

Faronics estimates that using the utility will save you $25 per year. How much does the package cost? $14.10 per year.

Power management has been one of my biggest headaches in Linux and the BSDs. For me, even getting the CPU fan under control in my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop usually requires a bit of work. For a short bit of time, the 2.6.18 Linux kernel did this automatically, but since then I've had to write simple scripts to get the fan to only turn on when CPU temperature warrants it.

And as far as CPU throttling goes, — slowing down and using less power when it's not needed, I haven't yet been able to implement that, even though it seemingly should work on a Celeron M processor.

The biggest power-management issue I have is with suspend/resume. I suspect that suspend/resume hasn't worked that well for that long on most PCs even in Windows, but these days I figure that hardware manufacturers of Windows-compatible PCs supply drivers to implement power management to at least some degree.

Power-management is great on our iBook G4. Using that laptop has made me expect good power-management from all of my other machines. And yes, I'd like to get it.

I'm even willing to work at the command line to make it happen, but the information I have, for the Gateway anyway, is sparse at best, and plain wrong at worst.

At the risk of repeating myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works great

When it comes to my main computer — a late-2002 Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the best operating system I've ever run.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu, which will have three years of updates and patches on the desktop.

I keep cranking live CDs of new Linux distributions into the laptop to see if they can do Suspend/Resume, how their desktop environments look and work, and basically whether or not they can do as well.

Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3, nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

I'm still waiting for CentOS to release its free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which might offer greater hardware detection on the Gateway than Fedora, or might not.

And I'm open to any distribution that can meld as well with what I call the $0 Laptop.

But for now, I'm reluctant to mess with what, since its release in April, has been a very good thing.

I don't know why I'm compelled to continually report on how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is running on the $0 Laptop, but I keep doing it.

From the graphical polish to Suspend/Resume, Alps touchpad control and everything else I've done with it, this is the most impressive Linux distribution I've run thus far.

For use on this laptop -- a Gateway Solo 1450 -- it's better than Debian Lenny, my other go-to OS.

Today I tried a live CD of Fedora 9, since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 supposedly has beefed up its support of Suspend/Resume on laptops, I figured that maybe, just maybe, that functionality was present in Fedora 9.

It very well might be, but in the Fedora 9 live environment, Suspend/Resume doesn't work on this laptop.

Moving on to Debian, in the Lenny updates I installed today, there was a new kernel among them. I booted into it after the update, and the new 2.6.24 kernel still doesn't support the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip on the Gateway.

In order to have working sound, I'm still using the original Lenny 2.6.22 kernel, which does support the chip. I do understand that I can manually add the module I need to support sound in the new kernel, but I'm waiting to see if and when Debian decides that it would like a certain number of its users to enjoy sound. Until then, I'll stick with 2.6.22.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS supports sound just fine on the laptop, even with a 2.6.24 kernel. Score another one for Ubuntu. If the binary blob in the kernel for the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip were the only such blob left in the kernel as configured by Debian, then I'd understand its sudden exclusion from the distribution, but I have a very good feeling that this is not the case.

I will consider adding the sound modules myself, as detailed in one of the relevant bug reports, but I'll more than likely turn to Ubuntu for the simple reason that it just runs better. And this is coming from a person who has championed Debian quite a bit. (As an aside, I love bug reports that give you a fix for the problem that often works but leaves the bug intact to a) annoy some users and b) drive others away.)

I've thought about it quite a bit. If you're running a standard desktop computer, it's easy to make just about any Linux distribution work well, if it will work at all. You're not often worrying about unsupported touchpads, uncontrolled CPU fans, flaky or nonexistant Suspend/Resume, other power-management issues and the like. I can run Debian Etch with carefree abandon on some of my desktop systems, but getting Etch to work well with an Alps Touchpad is just not in the cards ... or maybe it is, since I found some new suggestions for configuring xorg.conf to make the Alps perform better. But since I've made the move to Lenny, I'm probably not going back to Etch on that system, even though the sound-chip issue continues to piss me off.

... after the Great Linux At-Home Test, and I forgot about the little Ubuntu bugs that are ... bothering me.

Why isn't the Update Manager telling me about the dozens of updates I have waiting for me. I kind of like not being bothered by it sitting there flashing at me while I'm trying to "work," but every other Ubuntu and Debian system I've ever installed with GNOME automatically checks for updates and tells me to get on it.

A typical Ubuntu Forums thread sheds little light on the problem ... but for some reason, about 20 minutes after I log in, the funky "updates are available" arrow appears.

I'm thinking: It could have something to do with the Ubuntu repositories being VERY busy. Or not. A built-in delay?

I opened up System -- Administration -- Services, as suggested in the forum thread, but I didn't even unlock the thing when suddenly the icon appeared. Oh well, I'll do the updates and keep an eye on it.

Is it mere impatience on my part? Will the "update" icon begin appearing on a regular basis? Is the mere opening of System -- Administration -- Services without changing a thing enough to jump-start the thing?

Hey, there's an Update Manager update ready to install ... maybe all will become clear.

Like I've said in numerous posts over the past two weeks, Ubuntu has an extra bit of polish on the desktop that Debian lacks, but there are a few niggly issues that keep Ubuntu from, as they say, being all it can be on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

I've probably got the printing issue down, but I have yet to solve the USB flash drive problem, which I will begin working on again.

It's been a year and a half since I started using Linux (or GNU/Linux, if you prefer) for much of my day-to-day computing, but the past week or so marks the first time I've had to support another user -- in this case my wife, Ilene, whose Macintosh iBook G4 is awaiting the end of the semester at California State University Northridge, where she teaches.

Coincidentally, that semester ends today. Soon I will try to image the iBook's drive to a Firewire-connected external hard drive (picked up for $99 at Fry's) and then have her boot from that drive until I can a) get a new laptop hard-drive to replace the currently dying one, and b) go through the arduous process of removing and replacing the internal drive (thanks to ifixit.com for the instructions on the procedure.

But back to Linux and supporting a new user.

It has been a lot harder than I thought. We don't think like our users. But we need to learn.

Ilene does things differently that I do, and as the person doing the installation and support, I needed to recognize that and tune the system accordingly.

I started with Ubuntu 8.04. That worked well enough, except I couldn't get the HP Laserjet 1020 USB printer to work, and I couldn't manage to get USB flash drives mounted.

I also didn't have a lot of time with the machine.

I quickly switched over to Debian Lenny, the other OS on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450 that I got for free and resurrected from the premature death it suffered due to a busted power plug). With Lenny, we can now use USB flash drives, except that to write to the drive, the current user has to be the person to plug the drive in. If I plug it in and log out, Ilene can't sign in and write to the drive. So between logins, the drive needs to be pulled in order to get the permissions right. Before that, I added Ilene to the disk, plugdev and floppy groups. I don't know if that helped or did nothing, but since I saw that sda1, the flash drive was owned by the floppy group, I added her to that last.

I haven't checked if a full reboot allows Ilene to sign in and have write permission to the flash drive without re-plugging it, but I'll try that soon.

So we had the flash drive -- which had all her essential files from the Mac -- working fine.

Ilene was as amused as she should be (i.e. very) at Firefox being renamed Iceweasel. She had no problem using OpenOffice Writer and Calc, and she's eager to test Impress (she uses PowerPoint quite a bit for her classes).

I don't know how she stumbled upon AbiWord (probably because it's the first app with the words "word processor" in the menu), but she used it to write a bit and liked it, except for the small size of the type. I will soon tell her that OpenOffice Writer might be a better choice when it comes to formatting documents that will look better when she returns to her Mac and MS Word.

She liked Pidgin a lot. The open-source instant-messaging app enabled her to use her Yahoo! Messenger account for IMing, and it also notified her about new e-mail coming in to her Yahoo! Mail account.

Pidgin works very well. I use it in Windows, too, where it keeps track of my Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and AIM accounts.

Two things Ilene needed were the ability to print to PDF from any application (Macs do that) and print ... to an actual printer. Ubuntu, I think, ships with PDF capability (though don't quote me), but in Debian, you have to add the cups-pdf package, which I did through Synaptic. Then I added the PDF printer with the GNOME printer utility and made it the default.

But I still had one hope for getting printing with the HP Laserjet 1020 working. In both Ubuntu and Debian, the systems had no problem finding the USB printer, they just wouldn't print.

In one of my recent entries, reader Natxo Asenjo pointed me to the foo2zjs project, which offers a different Linux driver for the HP LaserJet 1020 and quite a few other printers. There are even detailed instructions for most of the major distros.

I downloaded, unpacked and installed the files, then added the printer via CUPS. I don't know if it was the driver itself or this instruction that did it:

# make install install-hotplug cups

... but I finally got my HP printer to work in Linux.

Again, this shouldn't have been so hard. The utilities in Debian and Ubuntu, or the CUPS interface itself, should have properly configured this USB printer.

Why have I never run into this problem before? Because I only use networked printers at the office, and this is the first time I've tried to print via USB. I thought it would be easier. Much easier.

At any rate, I have this fine project to thank for helping me with this problem. They accept donations, and I was happy to give one.

So now I have a fully working system here for Ilene, myself and the 4-year-old.

And with the semester ending today, it's just about time to get to work on the iBook's ailing disk drive.

But Linux will have at least a few more days as this home's primary desktop.

And I've learned quite a bit about what "normal" people (i.e. not Linux geeks) need when they make the move from the proprietary OS they know to the FOSS OS they don't.

One last thing: I began this installation with Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted as easy a transition for Ilene as possible, and I thought that Ubuntu provided that. It also had suspend/resume, which I wanted to have, since the laptop would be on for most of the day.

First off, suspend/resume works way better on the Mac, where you hit the space bar to bring the computer back. On the Gateway, you hit the power button, and the whole thing takes quite a bit longer.

Secondly, while Debian is a bit more "locked down" than Ubuntu (and I wanted to do as little manual "unlocking" as possible), I had limited time in which to get the installation working as well as possible, and that pushed Debian Lenny over the top. If the USB flash drive had worked immediately in Ubuntu, and had I figured out the printing problem (which spans all Linux distros), I would've stuck with the new 8.04 LTS.

But since things came together just that much quicker in Debian, that's what we went with. Ilene even told me that once she got started in Debian, she wanted to stick with it. It's just too jarring to continually switch distros (although many of us do it all the time because we've got other problems ... and I think you know what I'm talking about).

Final words: I know that the Gateway is a bit more than five years old, and the HP Laserjet 1020 is at least three years old. But a big-time Linux distribution like Ubuntu -- which has positioned itself as the distro for the rest of us -- shouldn't install without the ability to immediately read and write to USB flash media and should be able to print without resorting to a third-party driver project. Debian did the flash drives well but also couldn't output to this printer. In the case of the printing, I lay the blame on CUPS and not the individual distros.

But we're at the point where more things need to work out of the box for more people, more of the time (feel free to replace "more" with "most").

I still recommend Ubuntu to new users, especially because most of the third-party how-to books out there focus on it, and I wouldn't cast a new user adrift without a hefty book that might at least answer some of their questions.

And it's not like Windows and Mac users don't have their share of driver problems. I remember this very HP printer being somewhat of a pain to get working in OS X, too (I had to download a driver from HP ... for a different printer), but Linux had to be better. It already is, in may respects, and I think we're almost there. The key word is "almost."

I won't hesitate to set up others with Linux, but I know that supporting any OS -- be it Windows, OS X or Linux -- for someone else can entail quite a bit of work.

And I did enjoy seeing Ilene gets some hands-on time with Linux.

(Begin cliche mode)

From a cost, functionality and non-thievary perspective, open-source software isn't just the best game in town, it's the only game.

(End cliche mode)

When I told Ilene that I could probably fix the USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu and could then switch her back from Debian Lenny, she told me it would be better to stick with Debian for now, since there are enough little differences between environments to make it confusing, and she was and is doing well with Debian.

She did say she liked Ubuntu a bit better, but for the sake of productivity, Debian was doing more than well enough to keep until I fix her iBook G4.

Among the problems I'm having with Lenny that I don't have with Ubuntu are lack of control over the Alps touchpad by individual users. I can turn the touchpad's tap-to-click function off as the primary user, but my other users can't use the Touchpad configuration feature in GNOME. When they do, a dialog pops up about SHMConfig not being enabled in X.

Except that it is. That's how I am able to control the touchpad in my primary account.

I wouldn't care if all the users had their touchpad tapping controlled by me, the main user, but every once in a while, it seems that the tap-to-click turns on for a split second in Ilene's account.

Since we're using a USB mouse more than 95 percent of the time, this isn't much of an issue, but it is annoying.

This could be a GNOME bug that doesn't allow for different Xorg configurations in each account, but this is nothing more than conjecture on my part.

Otherwise, Ilene is quite amused by Firefox being renamed Iceweasel due to the copyright restrictions imposed on the Firefox name and logo by the Mozilla Foundation. It's one of those things that really confuses new users to Debian.

I remember seeing Iceweasel in Knoppix and having no idea why it looked exactly like Firefox but had a different name. Now I know about Debian's reluctance to use copyrighted material, and while I agree with it, I do acknowledge that it's awkward and confusing to those who don't know the story.

One thing that I did do for my three users is customize their desktops to some extent. In this case, that customization is limited to putting icons for each user's favorite applications on the upper task bar.

Since I use Epiphany a lot, I kept that there, but added Iceweasel (which I use sporadically) along with all the text editors I'm testing or using (Geany, Bluefish, Gedit) the terminal, the root terminal and the network-configuration app.

In Ilene's, I have Iceweasel and the OpenOffice apps she needs (for text documents, presentations and spreadsheets).

The little girl's account has Gcompris, Childsplay and TuxPaint.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating here: Another reason for keeping Lenny over Ubuntu is the fact that all the children's educational games we use work better in Debian than in Ubuntu. In Ubuntu, sound is spotty on all three apps, and Chidsplay is hobbled by a woeful lack of games. Maybe those additional games are available as packages in Ubuntu, but I'm not sure. All I know is that they are all there in Debian.

Before the rant is over, let me add that all three of these education packages are also in great shape in OpenBSD. You don't normally think of OpenBSD and "the education distribution," but it works very well for us in this regard. All I need is some additional memory on the 1999-vintage Compaq Armada 7770dmt to make the experience that much better.

OK, here's the situation: Ilene and our little girl need to use the $0 Laptop. So you figure, "new users, go for Ubuntu."

Well, after having them on Ubuntu for a week, I've switched them over to Debian Lenny, which I dual-boot on this Gateway Solo 1450.

Why?

Well, I think my inability to print to a USB printer is the result of a hardware problem inherent to this Gateway. Printing wouldn't work in Ubuntu, Debian or Puppy 3.00.

But the matter of accessing a USB flash drive is another story entirely.

I just don't have time right now to screw with Ubuntu to get some basic but needed functionality. I was able to mount the USB drive only once after I added the users to the disk group. Yep, the drive mounted, but at the next boot it did not. One of the solutions has something to do with going into gconf and making a slight change.

I'm sure I'll be able to do that eventually, but since Debian Lenny allows me and my users to work with USB flash drives immediately, that's what we're using.

With the switch from Ubuntu to Debian, I lost Suspend/Resume, but I'd rather have the ability to get information on and off of this computer via flash drive than Suspend/Resume, which I will eventually be able to figure out in Debian anyway.

And the little girl's games -- Gcompris and Childsplay -- work much better in Debian than in Ubuntu. It's apparent that the package maintainers for these two educational suites are much better in Debian than they are in Ubuntu. Hey ... isn't there an Edubuntu version of Ubuntu? Well, when it comes to these two huge FOSS educational applications, Debian does a better job.

I always say that Debian is more polished and ready for the average user that it ever gets credit for. But I always turn to Ubuntu in new-user situations due to its clean menu layout and other "extras."

But when it comes to the GNOME environment, and -- more importantly -- essential functionality, Debian Lenny is ahead of Ubuntu Hardy at this point in time.

I'd love to get my USB printer working, but I need to do some more tests. USB is working (I'm using a USB keyboard and mouse right now), and CUPS finds the printer and suggests a driver, but the jobs don't go to the printer. And since it happened in three different distributions, the problem is deeper than Ubuntu or Debian.

What's the take-away? That Debian's desktop installation is very much ready for both new and experienced users, and if the given box's administrator can properly configure the environment, just about any Linux (or even BSD) distribution -- Debian and even Slackware -- can serve as a solid computing platform for users who've never seen a FOSS desktop in their lives.

The keys are maturity, stability and functionality. Since I'm administrating this computer, have the best luck getting Debian to behave and find in its repositories software that is a) more complete and b) very stable (even in Testing), that's what we're going with.

It took me a few tries to get a good burn on Damn Small Linux 4.3.

Once I did, it worked great on my Dell Optiplex GX 520. It also performed flawlessly on my VIA C3 test box. It didn't do so well on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where the colors were totally whacked out (blue looked like orange, etc. ...). But DSL has never run well on the Gateway, so I didn't expect anything.

The biggest "get" in DSL 4.3 is Firefox 2, which for some reason has been renamed Bon Echo for the purposes of this distribution.

Going from Firefox version 1.06 to 2 is a huge deal. Quite a few Web sites require at least FF 1.5 to work at all, including many Web e-mail services and the Movable Type and Blogger interfaces.

And on my 64 MB Compaq laptop, Damn Small Linux is pretty much the only thing that'll run Firefox without continuous swapping and long delays between operations. So having FF 2 is very important to me.

DSL 4.3 did load and run on the Compaq, but for some reason the desktop wallpaper did not appear. I've been running DSL 4.0 on the Compaq, and that does X perfectly, along with the desktop design. I don't know what's wrong with the 4.3 configuration, but it does make the screen look rather gray, also the machine status information unreadable on the upper right side of the screen.

And when I ran Fluxbox instead of JWM, I couldn't figure out how to get the Fluxbox menu to show up. Right-clicking brought up the DFM file manager (which I quite like while using JWM; it made DSL 4.0 a lot easier to use).

If I can manage to bump up the RAM on my Compaq laptop (aka The $15 Laptop) to the maximum of 144 MB, I might be able to comfortably run Firefox/IceWeasel in OpenBSD or Debian. Right now, I can't even run Seamonkey (the Mozilla-based Web suite) in Puppy Linux. Basically I can run the Dillo browser in any OS, but that doesn't allow me to do all the things I need to do on the Web. Only DSL allows me to run Firefox with some measure of comfort in my small amount of RAM.

Aside from the Firefox upgrade, I don't see a lot of major differences in Damn Small Linux, and that's as it should be. DSL has a fairly rapid development pace, and lead developer Robert Shingledecker puts a lot into fixing bugs from release to release.

Even without resolving the desktop-wallpaper issue, DSL 4.3 is a huge leap for any user with only 64 MB of RAM. Fixing this little problem will cement Damn Small Linux as the best distribution for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

My initial elation with Ubuntu 8.04's ability to Suspend/Resume the Gateway Solo 1450 has given way to doubt.

First of all, Suspend/Resume doesn't work all of the time. I've had a few situations where I lose keyboard and mouse/touchpad functionality.

And ... in a very-much-related matter, sometimes the keyboard and mouse or touchpad die for no particular reason.

So the Suspend/Resume problem might be related to the keyboard/mouse issue.

At any rate, I need more reliability, especially because my wife and daughter are using this laptop more and more.

Why? Well, the 4-year-old has all her educational games on here, and Ilene's now-5-year-old iBook G4 is starting to die. It gets really hot and shuts down after a period of use. I think it's the CPU fan, but I have to get my hands on the laptop. First I'll have to find an app that lets me monitor CPU temperature and fan speed on this PowerPC-equipped machine. Then I have to crack the case and get a visual on the fan to see whether or not it's, in fact, spinning at all.

Back to Ubuntu 8.04. I will try to track down what's making the keyboard and mouse fail. It could be that whatever in ACPI that allows Suspend/Resume to work is causing the problem. I'd bet on that.

In Debian Lenny, I don't have Suspend/Resume, and closing the laptop lid leads to a crash (I might have that one fixed, however). But there are no random crashes of X or the box itself. Yep, Debian continues to be rock-solidly reliable. In times of Ubuntu-esq trouble, I always turn to Debian, and I've been running it pretty continuously since Etch came out in April 2007.

I never had a problem on the $0 Laptop with the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0, either. Something to think about.

I turned tap-to-click back on for the Gateway Solo 1450's touchpad in Debian Lenny. At first tap, it seemed like it wasn't working.

But that I discovered that I had to double-tap to click. That means regular tapping -- such as when simply moving the finger on the touchpad -- doesn't inadvertently lead to clicking things I don't want clicked.

So intead of tapping, now I'm double-tapping. It's curious because I see no way to go from double- to single-taps. Must be a GNOME "feature."

In any case, I approve.