Vakkotaur

I just updated the kernel for the desktop's Xubuntu install. I will not be doing that for the laptop. At least I'll have a fully working laptop that way.

When Xubuntu comes up, pardon, came up, it would offer a selection of boot choices with fallbacks for debugging and such. Those just disappeared. No, it was NOT an option I checked. Yes, I did do a 'grub-update' to attempt recovery. No luck.

That, by itself, would not matter too much on a system with only Xubuntu (currently) installed. But the SL client I use (Phoenix) and the one I expect I will eventually need to migrate to (Firestorm) are 32 bit... and while Xubuntu has 32 compatibility libraries that work fine - they work fine on -28 kernels and earlier. Everything after -28 has broken things. No, Google doesn't help. That tells me "the libraries are in the wrong place" -- except they can't be since booting with -28 works and anything after doesn't. Conclusion: Something is broken in everything after -28.

So? So before I had the option of booting into -28. Now I don't have any options at all. If I wanted Windows, I know where to look. I don't want Windows. I don't *buntu acting Windows-like at me. Naturally all this happens at the end of my "day" so I can try to sleep (and then not have things working when I wake up and want to use them) or I can lose sleep. Thanks, Ubuntu! Doesn't anyone test this stuff? Whose bright idea was it to remove choices??

I really don't care which bug is fixed or bypassed. If the kernel can do 32-bit compatibility right, no problem. If I can get to a kernel that can, no problem. Right now? Problem.

I can hardly wait for 64-bit PCLinuxOS. PCLinuxOS actually did all the stuff that *buntu tries to claim. The only reason I'm not already running it (and am using Xubuntu...) is that there is no released 64-bit version.

ADDENDUM: Evidently it's a (new to me) default misbehavior of grub2. If there is only one operating system, no choice is given unless one keeps SHIFT pressed from right after the POST. Why does it manifest now? I was always presented with that choice before, even on the initial install which had only the one OS and only the one kernel as such. I was still given a choice of the regular kernel and a failsafe version. I'd call this change a bug: It violates The Principle of Least Surprise.

Further, dropping back to -28 from -33 reveals confirms that -33 seriously broke video. Sure it would still make images, but the simple act of dragging a window across the screen result in weird stops & jitters that reminded me of Windows 3.x. That is not an upgrade.

I am not a fan of the Debian family of distributions, and it's not just because of the idiotic GNU/ prefixing. I had found that *buntu tended to "help" me too much by getting in the way. Even so, I am now running Xubuntu 10.04[1] on the laptop (palomino on the rare occasion I boot it into Windows, andalusian for Linux). Why? Salix had video issues I could not get around and Xubuntu is the lighter of the *buntu family (While I don't mind KDE, it is heavy and Kubuntu has long been the "red-headed stepchild" of *buntu. Gnome? The less said of it the better.) and it's available in 64-bit right now, it boots, it installs, and it doesn't have any video weirdness - although despite the Hardware Driver tool saying it might help, one must not install the fglrx ATI/AMD video driver. It actually makes things worse.

It hasn't been all automatic. I am really glad I had previous Linux experience before this. Getting the wireless working was an adventure. Realtek seems to only acknowledge Windows when one goes driver hunting, though they do have a linux driver. Finding it is a challenge. Downloading it is another challenge. I had to resort to much Google searching to find the right page to find the driver's exact name, then Google search for that and download it from a third party. Once installed, the only real trouble I had was at my folks' place and that was solved by re-setting the wireless router. There are a few wireless networks in the neighborhood here, but only one is wide open.

The Synaptic touchpad had the intensely annoying "tap-to-click" (which means, "bump to screw up focus") that has no simple GUI means of being shut off. Eventually I found someone else had the same issue and there was a post about how to disable tap-to-click. That bit of script saves much cussing.

Getting Phoenix running meant getting the 32-bit libraries (easy enough, ia32 in Synaptic) and disabling the hardware warning since it doesn't know the video is good enough without the lousy fglrx driver installed. Getting streaming audio involved editing the startup script since it disabled gstreamer if it found itself on a 64-bit platform and evidently doesn't play nice with Fmod OpenAL on 64-bit Xubuntu.

The rest, so far, has been installing the programs I expect to be around or finding things close enough in the Xubuntu repository, and tweaking the XFCE setup to also be what I've come to expect. There is more setup to do. This time, I am NOT simply copying over Opera config files, but slowly rebuilding the bookmarks and settings so they're clean. I might copy the config files back from the laptop once that is done.

I still need to figure out to get the internal microphone and camera to work (and how to be sure the camera is disabled when I don't want it on... there's always the surefire method: a bit of tape). I think those are the last of the hardware type issues.

And just as all that is going on, PCLinuxOS's Texstar announces that PCLinuxOS will be getting a 64-bit version, which had it happen earlier would have been the right answer, or at least a better one than *buntu. When it finally is released, I will be trying it. I will be surprised (and disappointed) if it doesn't work better than Xubuntu.

All that said, it's nice having having new hardware. Things are, as expected, fast. While running two sessions of Phoenix does push things (I think one needs at least n+1 cores to properly run n sessions of Phoenix), it doesn't bog down badly, though the CPU usage goes up to near if not quite 100%. The 'desktop' machine (now 7+ years old!) bogs down badly if I try that. And even though I am running Linux, I usually end up needing to reboot (not just restart X) after that.

A couple things are of interest to me in this week's DistroWatch Weekly. The first is open source advocate Eric S. Raymond switching to Ubuntu after over a decade of using RedHat/Fedora. I know where ESR is coming from on at least part of things. Fedora is a pain to set up to use the media codecs that people actually use. Ogg Vorbis might be be a great idea, but people actually use mp3. Ogg Theora might be a great idea, but people actually use .mov, .mpg, and .avi.

ESR has his detractors about this, but I see it as two camps. One, the one Fedora and Debian purists follow, is a nigh-on religious instance avoiding any and all formats even hinting of being proprietary. It's a nice idea, but it's not practical for most. Most people, as ESR realizes, just want things to work. This is the other camp, where practicality is a primary consideration.

People want the file(s) to play, not throw up error messages - and if they get an error message, they want to get it fixed. They do not want a sanctimonious lecture about how fixing it is evil.

Right now I am using Fedora myself. That's how I know how much 'fun' it is to get Fedora fully functional. Because I know that pain, I'm a version or two behind. I do not want to have to do all that work over again. I won't be jumping to Ubuntu right off, but I likely will give it or one of its derivatives (Kubuntu, or the newly Ubuntu-based Freespire when it is released) a try and see how things go.

While Fedora is my primary Linux distribution, I use another, lighter, distribution for older equipment, including the laptop. For a while this was Ultima Linux. When the Ultima site went away for several weeks (it's back now) I eventually switched to Wolvix.

When I noticed that the Ultima site was back, I suggested that the developer have a look at Wolvix as both are Slackware descendants and Wolvix had some good ideas worth adopting. The result of that also made it into this week's DistroWatch weekly with the news that Ultima and Wolvix have "joined forces." This doesn't mean that there will be just one (Ultima or Wolvix), but means that both distributions will benefit together.