I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best.

You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

I've upgraded a stable Debian system to testing maybe once or twice, usually in short order (i.e. installing stable and immediately upgrading to testing).

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my "production" Debian laptop, which I've been using heavily since late last year, from Lenny (stable) to Squeeze (testing). I thought it would be smooth and easy.

Not so much.

I've finally got most things working. I'm still having the kind of sound problems that plagued me in the Ubuntu 8.04 era (Flash and the rest of the system fighting for dominance), but I've overcome quite a bit.

I did have backups of my user data, so if things went totally south, I was covered.

I guess I've had more elaborate setups than this, particularly in OpenBSD, where there's a whole lot of configuration needed.

In reality, I've kept my Lenny install fairly vanilla. I only have GNOME. Never added Xfce, Fluxbox or KDE. I pretty much stick with the GNOME apps. The Epiphany browser is one of my favorite apps. I use Rhythmbox. I have gFTP, but lately I've been using Nautilus' FTP capability more and more.

I do use Thunderbird instead of Evolution, and I have a ton of POP mail on the box.

Recently I added Wine via Bordeaux and have been running the free-as-in-beer Windows image viewer/editor IrfanView (although I'm about to cease needing it for the very specific IPTC-manipulating feature for which I cling to it).

But otherwise it's pretty standard. And I did have that backup.

I had what I thought was enough disk space (1 GB +) in my root partition (I have / and /home in encrypted LVM).

First I made sure Lenny was up to date. Then I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Squeeze repos instead of Lenny.

Then I did a dist-upgrade with apt. Everything seemed to be going OK. Until the udev problem cropped up. Had I seen the page in this link before I started, I might've saved myself a whole lot of trouble.

I didn't know what udev was. The Debian package page has a nice description:

udev is a daemon which dynamically creates and removes device nodes from /dev/, handles hotplug events and loads drivers at boot time.

It seems that the udev in Squeeze requires a newer kernel than the one in Lenny, yet that kernel either doesn't install before udev, or you have to be actually running that new kernel before doing the full upgrade. There's even a fairly uhelpful bug report.

At any rate, I couldn't quite figure out what to do. I ran a few more dist-upgrades and eventually did reboot into the new kernel for Squeeze and redid the dist-upgrade.

In case you were wondering (and I knew you were), I did run out of disk space. I managed to clear apt's cache and get a bit further on the upgrade.

For some reason, X was gone. I used apt to reinstall xorg, which brought the GUI back.

X performance was terrible for awhile. Not sure why, but xorg was eating most of the CPU for quite some time. I tried a few xorg.conf files, but nothing really helped.

At one point, in the flurry of error messages, it was suggested in the terminal that I run apt-get autoclean.

I did that, and that removed a whole lot of packages, a few of which I still needed.

Eventually I added back the bits of GNOME that were missing. I had sound problems, so (cue horrific scream) I actually installed PulseAudio in an attempt to restore some order to the system. I think the GNOME bits did more, but I do have most of my sound capability back.

I was able to get sound in Flash video in the browser, but then Totem kept crashing, so I pulled that and tweaked my account a bit.

I would get specific here with what I did, but truthfully none of it is working well enough for me to do that.

So I have sound in applications, I don't have sound in the Flash plugin, but I do have sound in .flv files on the local drive, as well as in other video and audio.

And from what I understand, "system sounds" in GNOME are broken for all of Squeeze until some package or other is released into the distribution.

I was more troubled than anything by X eating all that CPU. Again, I think adding some GNOME bits (I even had to reinstall GDM) solved that problem.

Right now Pidgin is refusing to connect to my AIM account, saying I've logged in and out too many times in succession.

BEFORE YOU SAY, 'THIS IS TESTING; DON'T RUN IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TROUBLE,' LET ME SAY THAT I HEAR YOU. I've had trouble in Testing before, and I didn't expect not to have it again. I'm just reporting what happened.

Otherwise, everything seems to be working fine. I did have to tweak the config file to get my Ethernet interface managed under NetworkManager (just like I did in Ubuntu Jaunty/Karmic). Now that works great.

If I decide to stick with Squeeze, and I'm not saying I will, I probably will do a fresh install. I know I'm missing some GNOME bits that I might want or need. I've been adding stuff back as I run into trouble (I reinstalled gedit, the gnome screensaver app, which I needed to keep X from crashing when the gnome power management app tried to turn that feature on by itself).

I hope this upgrade process goes a whole lot more smoothly at such time as Squeeze gets its official Stable release. I'm somewhat confident about that happening.

So if you were smart and skipped to the end, my Squeeze system is running fairly well at present, and I could very well stick with it. The biggest problem I'm having is with sound (and my USB Headphone Set sound module).

One thing I discovered was the YouTube plugin for Totem. All you do is activate it, and you can search for YouTube videos by keyword and then play the h.264 version in Totem. With sound. That's really cool.

I've got enough things working that I'm going to stick with Squeeze at least until Ubuntu Lucid is released late next month. As I wrote recently, I did try a daily build of Lucid in the live environment, and everything appeared to be working. The purple-Mac theme didn't really bother me. I'll have to do some multimedia tests: I never could get my 3gp cellphone videos to play with sound in Ubuntu (and they still work in Debian).

I could also do a clean install of Debian Lenny. I'm not ruling that out at all. I kept this laptop fairly stock (and tried to keep good notes on what I did) so I could re-create Debian Lenny on it if necessary. One way or the other, I will be reinstalling something on this laptop, be it Lenny, Squeeze or "other."

I can't say that I expected the dist-upgrade to Squeeze to go smoothly. I guess I hoped it would.

I thought to myself, "You should've used a detailed Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade guide on the Web before doing this." I still haven't found one. If you have, please let me know.

I've been waiting. And while I don't generally recommend an in-place upgrade of a production machine, especially one with problematic hardware (in my case that "problematic" bit being the Intel 830m chipset and its 82830 CGC graphics controller) and a fully encrypted hard drive, I do have unencrypted backups, and I'm ready to leave Debian Lenny behind and see how well Squeeze does on my machine and for my tasks.

So I did the prep, did an update/upgrade in Lenny, changed my sources.list, did another update in Squeeze, and I'm running the dist-upgrade now, pulling in some 900+ packages and hoping the thing will boot when its all done.

Yes, I have the day off. Thus I have the machine free for just such an upgrade.

And yes, this is the sort of thing I do on my day off. Take it up with my therapist.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up.

Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

I booted it, hit Escape as soon as the first screen came up (that's a new one, having to do that), then hit F6 for Modes, arrowed down to nomodeset, hit Enter to select it, then Escape, then Enter again to boot ...

And a short time later I was in the less-brown-more-purple world of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid!

Never mind that it's ... purple.

It works! Video is perfect on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with the Intel 830m chipset.

Whatever wasn't working for me in Alpha 3 has been fixed at the time of this daily build.

I'd like to thank any and all developers who were able to make this happen, and I'd also like to let the rest of the Intel 830m-using community know that the following WILL work if you turn off kernel mode setting with nomodeset in the boot line:

Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 (as of this 3/15/10 daily build)
Fedora 12
Sidux 2009-04

I have an alpha image of Fedora 13 but haven't yet burned it, and I have heard that Slackware 13 runs with no problem.

So the future for the older-Intel-video-using world is looking a whole lot brighter than it did a few short weeks again.

At this point I have no comment on purple or the window buttons moving from the right side of the window to the left. I have no comment because I DON'T CARE. I HAVE WORKING VIDEO AND THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS AT PRESENT.

I'll address purple and window buttons at a later time. One thing I can say for sure is that this ain't the usual orange/brown.

Before I go, I've been testing Firefox 3.6 on the Mac OS X and Windows XP platforms, and this instance of Ubuntu Lucid is the first time I'm seeing FF 3.6 in Linux.

My first impressions are that not much is different in the PowerPC build for OS X, but I'm seeing huge improvements in the browsing experience in terms of speed in both Windows and Linux.

I can't say for sure, but I think it all boils down to a faster Javascript engine in 3.6 vs. 3.0 (and also 3.5 perhaps).

Getting back to Intel 830m for the moment, this means I'm upgrading my Debian Lenny laptop to Squeeze as soon as possible.

The Google Chrome browser starts out great. But after a few hours, everything turns to sludgy poo. I can't get anything done, scripts and Flash start to time out, the screen takes forever to redraw ... then it crashes.

My hardware/OS ain't the best: Windows XP SP3 on Pentium 4 at 3 GHz, 512 MB RAM, but I have a whole lot more speed and stability in boring ol' Firefox 3.5.8 (I haven't gotten around to 3.6 ...).

Is it me, or is Google Chrome not so great?

I cleared the enormous 22-inch CRT monitor, then the smaller 15-inch LCD monitor and the accompanying keyboards and mice off the desk and plopped the $15 Laptop — the 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt down, booted into my built-from-standard Debian Lenny install with minimal Xfce (with / under 1 GB), updated for the first time in a long time and opened the Opera Web browser (about the only one that will run acceptably well on this aged 233 MHz CPU).

I turned on Opera Turbo browsing — I'm using Netgear power-line networking to my converted-garage office — and aside from some fuzzy graphics, all is looking and working fine.

In contrast with my converted thin client and its somewhat botched Xfce/GNOME hybrid, here I only have a 3 GB hard drive (yep, the original from 11 years ago), so I've kept it Debian and minimal to save space.

I noticed that I didn't have an image editor. My go-to app gThumb was going to bring in a boatload of dependencies, so I opted for MtPaint instead.

Did I mention how great Opera is on these ancient computers? I just got an e-mail from the company that version 10.50 is out. I'll give it a run on my Toshiba before I upgrade here from 10.10. Opera isn't open source, but it's the best graphical browser I've ever found for old hardware that usually chokes the life out of Firefox. Or is it the other way around?

I've kept the Debian Lenny installation on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop as standard as it could be in some respects — I kept GNOME as the desktop environment and didn't add Xfce or anything else (that I can remember anyway).

That's because I want it to work as well as it can since it's my many "production" machine.

Not that I haven't added things like Audacity, gPodder, Inkscape, Icedove (aka Thunderbird), Iceowl (aka Thunderbird calendar plugin Lightning), the Geany text editor (which I don't use all that often) plus a whole lot of codecs and other bits from Debian Multimedia.

On the dark side, I used the Bordeaux .deb package to add Wine and my favorite Windows app, the IrfanView photo viewer/image editor. I also added Skype (with its Debian-aimed repository) but haven't used it yet.

To print out a list of every package on your system if it uses apt for package management (like Debian and its derivatives, including Ubuntu), run the following in a terminal (which in this case pipes the output to a text file you can peruse at your leisure):

$ dpkg --get-selections > my_packages

Now you'll have a file called my_packages with a list of every package installed on your system.

If you want to see a list of all 1,115 packages on my Debian Lenny install, click through to the rest of this entry (and if you don't want to see a 1,115-file list, DON'T CLICK THROUGH).

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 OMG! Ubuntu!, a report that gThumb replaces F-Spot in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (likely so the heft of Mono can be expunged) actually goes on to say that not only does gThumb not use Mono, but it does more than F-Spot.

For my particular workflow, gThumb has become my main image editor.

Way back in November, OMG! Ubuntu! took a look at gThumb 2.x, going so far as to ask in the title, "Is The New gThumb A Potential F-Spot Killer?"

Of course, I think the answer to that question is an unqualified "yes."

I've been experimenting with "calling" the GIMP in through gThumb to do some extra editing on an image, with the goal being more control over editing (gThumb doesn't sharpen, probably the biggest omission for Web-photo editing) without losing the IPTC metadata in JPEGs that photojournalists routinely use to drop caption and credit information into the image file. I've had a mix of success/not-so-much-success, but I'll continue testing until I know for sure if and how gThumb and GIMP can be used together without killing out the IPTC data (which GIMP, Krita and just about every other Linux/Unix image editor cheerfully kills when saving; exceptions to this unwarranted destruction of JPEG data are gThumb, digiKam and MaPiVi, the best of the latter being, in my opinion, gThumb).

At the recommendation of reader David Gurvich, as well as the enthusiastic endorsement of "Linux Outlaws" co-host Fabian A. Scherschel and Larry "the Free Software Guy" Cafiero, I burned my first Fedora disc in some time and am testing Fedora 12 in the live environment.

My latest foray into distro-hopping — live CD/DVDs only at this point — is prompted by this week's total fail in turning off kernel mode setting and getting the screen to work in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3. That method (turning off kernel mode setting) worked like so much magic in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2 and Sidux 2009-04 (basically Debian Sid in late 2009).

But that hack did nothing for me in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3. Yes, dear readers, I know you hate to hear me whine and complain and would rather I file a bug report. I will do so, using my ever-loving Launchpad account, rest assured.

But in the interim I'm looking for any and every solution that will carry my now-two working Intel 830m-equipped laptops through the next year.

I'm crossing my fingers (but have nothing concrete at present) that Debian Squeeze will accommodate Intel 830m, and I'm hopeful that Ubuntu Lucid will work this out (although a regression between alpha releases doesn't bode well).

I've also established that PC-BSD 8.0 (and by extension FreeBSD 8.0) has no problem whatsoever with Intel 830m video.

And today I burned a Fedora 12 live image and am running it right now. Yes, I turned off kernel mode setting with this parameter in the boot line:

nomodeset

And I was off to the races. I did screw a bit with the font rendering under System - Preferences - Appearance - Fonts, ticking the box for "subpixel smoothing," changing the resolution to 90 dots per inch with full hinting (these settings are totally "negotiable" at this point, as I've pretty much never needed to mess with them). I'm not 100 percent happy with the look of the video. I'd say I'm 90 percent happy.

And that 90-percent happiness is in contrast to having no video at all and being 100 percent unhappy.

Thus far here's my verdict on Fedora 12: I like it. I'm extremely glad it's a viable choice for my laptops. I've always admired the documentation that the Fedora team produces. And rather than acting like the testing ground for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that it pretty much is, I'm finding this build to be extremely stable.

I have run RHEL clone CentOS on the desktop (and still have it installed on my daughter's Gateway Solo 1450 with Intel 830m video where it dual-boots with Ubuntu Hardy) but never Fedora.

The main advantage of Fedora over CentOS is the huge, up-to-date repository with just about every desktop package you'd ever need.

I know there are alternatives to get more desktop packages into CentOS/RHEL. But if you can get Fedora to work and keep it working, I believe it's a much better choice for the desktop (except in cases where you specifically want a limited number of applications and don't want to do a lot of updating).

At this point, every Fedora release receives 13 months of support (the time during which there are two six-month releases plus an additional month). Potential users will want to factor that into their distro decision-making; you can certainly upgrade every six months but really don't have to.

As you might have gathered from my last few posts, I'm relying heavily on live CD/DVDs to test which operating-system distributions/projects I will be using on my various laptop and desktop computers over the next six months, year and couple of years.

Since my Xorg problems have been so pervasive over the past year and a half, at this point I need to figure out how the display is working (or not) before I commit to any major upgrades or reinstalls.

Fedora 12 and Mono: I'm sure this has been written about before, but in case you missed it, the Fedora 12 live CD, and possibly the default installation itself, does not contain Mono — the controversial open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET technology that enables developers to use C# in the creation of applications for Linux and other systems.

You can still add Mono to your Fedora installation after the fact, but unlike in Ubuntu, it's not in the base install.

I've written more than a few times that I'm not completely against Mono but am not all that comfortable with Microsoft's different levels of patent promise to users of Novell-sponsored distributions (Suse) and everybody else. And if the Mono apps aren't better than the non-Mono alternatives, what's the point?

Fedora 12, like Debian Lenny, installs with the Gthumb image viewer/editor, not F-Spot. Gthumb is so good, it's pretty much my default photo editor in Linux and just about my most-used application.

Also in Fedora 12, Gnote replaces the Mono-powered Tomboy Notes. I don't have much use for either of these applications, although I do have Gnote installed on my Debian box, and I replaced Tomboy with Gnote on my now-dead Ubuntu Karmic laptop. Why use a Mono app coded in C# when somebody creates a C++ app that appears to do the exact same thing?

And as I said, there's nothing in F-Spot that's better than what's in Gthumb, and there's plenty F-Spot lacks that Gthumb offers.

That's enough Mono talk. Sorry about the tangent.

Let me wrap up by saying I've liked CentOS in the past, and I'm very happy with the performance of Fedora 12's live CD on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, a 2002-made laptop with a 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB RAM. I could easily see moving to this distribution for my daily work.

How is Fedora different from Ubuntu? I'd like to start both myself and all of you thinking about the differences between Fedora and Ubuntu. I'm not just talking about the technical merits and choices each project makes, but about audience and mission for each project/distribution.

I'd like to spin this into a separate entry, but for now I'll start it here:

• Ubuntu's motto is "Linux for human beings," and while it wants to accommodate the so-called "power user," the focus of the project is to make the transition from a proprietary operating system to Linux as seamless as possible. Fedora exists as a community project that aims to feed the latest technology to Red Hat's enterprise products and serve as a test bed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux while offering users a "free" version of Linux that's aimed at developers and "power users."
• The Ubuntu project is a community endeavor, with the distibution "controlled" by the for-profit company Canonical that is bankrolled by Mark Shuttleworth while it seeks revenue through support contracts and services. The Fedora Project appears to be a nonprofit entity, "controlled" (to an extent I don't quite know at present) by Red Hat. The Fedora Project itself isn't interested in revenue, but Red Hat's enterprise products/services are a proven source of revenue for the company.
• Ubuntu is based on Debian. Fedora is pretty much its own project, on which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based.
• Ubuntu's community of users is huge and growing. Its community of volunteers is also growing. Excitement around the project is extremely high. Even though Canonical is a for-profit entity, many think its mission is to spread free, open-source software and gain share for Linux on the server and desktop. I'm unsure of the size of Fedora's user community. I'm similarly unsure of the size of its developer community, although like Ubuntu it actively seeks new community members (both projects are very, very proactive in this regard; and that's something I really like). Many Red Hat developers do extensive work on Fedora. While Fedora is doing well, you don't see levels of enthusiasm as high or widespread as with Ubuntu. Ubuntu seems "cool," while Fedora seems to be a niche offering for developers and power users.

If you think I've got anything (or everything) wrong here, or if you have something to add, please let me know.

Perception of the projects must compete with sheer usability for the tasks and on the hardware of the user base. A simpler way to say that is, "Use what works for you." Whether it's Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, FreeBSD, Arch, Gentoo or what have you, use what works. Along with that admonition, it's a good idea to keep your eyes open for better solutions — that's what I'm doing.

On this very laptop, with this very install of Debian Lenny, I'm getting more done and doing it better and easier than in any other operating system, any other desktop environment and with any other collection of software.

Thanks, Linux, Debian, GNOME and others!

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.

Reader David Gurvich writes the following:

Hello,

I also have a system that uses the i830m chipset for graphics, the Thinkpad X30. All of the problems are related to kernel mode setting, particularly your current one. The new xorg video driver eliminates all user mode setting and is useless on systems that use i830. I've never gotten kernel mode setting to work with i830 systems and now that is the only option on new installs.

The only solution has been to install the 2.9.1 driver. That works for now but I am worried about future releases of Xorg that will not work with this driver. I suspect that I will need to maintain my own branch of Xorg. That will probably require a personal repository that includes older kernels, hal, and dbus along with any associated libraries.

My hope is that FreeBSD will have improved enough in user latency and other areas that I will be able to use that when the time comes. I have tried PC-BSD but the default install is too slow for daily use. I thought the problem might have been KDE4 but the issue persisted with a lightweight desktop environment. There are also some issues with hardware that don't exist on Linux. The one that springs to mind is my system locking up completely when the wireless card can't find a network on boot.

Thank you,

David Gurvich

Yeah, I'm not the only person hacked off about this. Here's what I wrote to David (knowing also that I'd run here as well):

Starting with Ubuntu Karmic and up through Lucid Alpha 2, and including Debian Sid (via Sidux 2009-04) at the end of 2009, I've been able to turn off kernel mode setting and get X to work.

So it was extremely disturbing to find that turning off kernel mode setting in Lucid Alpha 3 didn't work. Very disturbing.

I spent 6 months running OpenBSD 4.4 as my primary OS on this i830m laptop, and I didn't have any performance issues running both the stock Fvwm2 window manager as well as Xfce. The whole thing blew up when I upgraded to OpenBSD 4.5, and yes it was Xorg-related, but I've since tested OpenBSd 4.6 via the BSDanywhere and Jggimi live CDs, and Xorg is working again (can't remember if I needed an xorg.conf, but it must've either been easy to roll it together, or I'd have remembered.

The problems for me with OpenBSD are a) Flash 7 only (and only in Opera) b) too difficult to upgrade (which might be overcome if I can figure it out) c) hard to install Java (although I've done it and probably have the binary package I created in the process squirreled away on this hard drive) and d) no journaling filesystem, and on this creaky old hardware I lose power enough that all the fsck-ing I need to do in OpenBSD's FFS is relatively painful.

Not that I won't return to OpenBSD ...

FreeBSD is supposed to be much, much faster in every respect. There was a Phoronix test recently in which FreeBSD didn't blow Linux out of the proverbial water but did do OK. And it has at least Flash 9, precompiled Java packages, a much longer support cycle than OpenBSD, Ubuntu or Fedora.

If you tried PC-BSD but used, say, Fluxbox instead of KDE, I imagine the system would be much slower than if you installed vanilla FreeBSD and added the desktop environment and applications yourself. At least that's the theory anyway.

I don't know how FreeBSD uses memory, but I can tell you for sure that Linux and OpenBSD use it much differently. Linux seems to want to grab as much memory as possible and reserve it for whatever uses it thinks it's going to have. I don't know how this affects system performance - it could improve it, or it could hurt it. I'm really not sure.

But OpenBSD is very sparing on the memory it uses. I ran 768 MB for that six months in OpenBSD 4.4 and don't think I ever tapped the swap space even once. Now with 1 GB in both Ubuntu (Hardy, Karmic) and Debian (Lenny), the machine isn't relying heavily on swap but does use a little bit of it at least a little bit of the time. Again, I'm not sure which scenario is better for performance (or how FreeBSD factors into all of this), but it's at least a curiosity.

David, I don't know if you've tried Fedora 12 yet. I downloaded the image but haven't had a chance yet to burn it. Like you I'm looking for any bright spot in this whole mess. I don't know who to blame: the kernel team or Xorg (or the distros themselves). Intel i830m video can't be so obscure that nobody is suffering from this, and I can imagine hundreds or thousands of potential users being turned off when they can't get the live CD to boot to anything but a blank screen.

Before I forget to mention it, my experience with wireless on this platform with OpenBSD at least, is the opposite of what happened to you. Not only did wireless perform better with absolutely no crashes, I also was able to more easily configure my cheap NIC with a Ralink chipset in OpenBSD before I could get it working in Linux.

And crashes with wireless were precisely the reason I upgraded from Ubuntu Hardy to Karmic. I think a kernel update in Hardy eventually fixed the problem (I still have a Hardy i830m laptop running and can test this), and I wish I had stayed with it on the other i830m laptop. But networking in OpenBSD at least is a relative pleasure; networking and drivers are very important to the developers, so they get a lot of attention. However, you can't use the GUI tools like NetworkManager, I think, because of the vast differences in configuration between BSD and Linux (I could be wrong about this). Learning manual network configuration isn't the worst thing in the world.

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and Gateway Solo 1450 laptops — both with Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3?

There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail.

Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

The closest I was able to get was a working display with an invisible mouse pointer. Unfortunately I had forgotten which combination of parameters I typed into the boot line (a combination of turning off kernel mode settting one of two ways and setting a vga=xxx resolution), and after trying just about every VGA number I could find here, I've got nothing; no video at all on this Intel 830m system in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3.

In some way bowing to my issues — in my own mind at least — after booting the Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 3 live disc (CD or DVD), unlike the Alpha 2 you can now choose the nomodeset parameter from the F6 Other Options menu on the boot screen.

That's great, except that it no longer works for me.

How many potential new users of Linux have Intel video chips that are like mine? Do others besides the 830m have this problem?

All I know is booting a live CD and having absolutely no video is no way to get new users ...

In a related matter, I burned a DVD of PC-BSD 8. While the live environment is not exactly scintillating — it's KDE with barely any apps, it does boot into a graphical desktop that looks absolutely perfect with no intervention on my part. Yep, the FreeBSD and PC-BSD developers seem to understand that the video should just work, even for those of us unfortunate enough to be running 2002-era laptops with Intel video chips.

Should this not be the fault of Ubuntu but something that plagues all versions of Linux including Debian, at least I'll have PC-BSD 8.0 to turn to.

Or I could use the xorg.conf that makes Debian Lenny work for me and run Slackware 12 or 13.

As has been written in the comments recently, I should file a bug on this. If only I understood how to extract the seemingly dozens of log files needed to substantiate such a bug report (and to do so with a non-working screen), I'd probably go that route.

Regressions like this verge on the catastrophic. You can't just go cutting off entire swaths of hardware. I do seem like the only person complaining about this, so maybe there are fewer people using laptops with Intel 830m chipsets than you might think.

At this rate, my recent practice of burning these alpha discs is pretty much over. The Ubuntu Lucid release day is less than two months away, and I'm going to wait until that time to try this LTS (long-term-support) release again.

That also means I'll be sticking with Debian Lenny until there's some kind of live environment that I can test before any upgrade to Squeeze.

Before I wrap this up, yes I realize that this isn't even beta software but alpha, and there's a good chance my video issue will be resolved, but seeing things go from "pretty good" to "no can do" instead of the other way around is more than a little disconcerting.

My whole "relationship" with and to Ubuntu has been all over the place since I first discovered it in the 6.10 era (using 6.06 LTS more than anything else at the time).

Now that I've resolved my Xorg issues with Intel i830m video, I can concentrate on using Lucid, at this point in the live environment with the Alpha 2 DVD image.

Things are appreciably quick, everything seems to work, and it's a nice environment in which to work. Today I got MP3s to play after the dialog to install the restricted extras popped up while I was running the Rhythmbox player. Works great.

My laptops using Intel 830m (aka i830m ... aka 82830 CGC) video don't like kernel mode setting. They don't work with it.

But turning it off, they work wonderfully with no xorg.conf in anything with a 2.6.32 Linux kernel — and that means Ubuntu Lucid (currently in Alpha 3 stage, though I'm using the Alpha 2 image at the moment) and Sidux 2009-04 (and presumably Debian Squeeze, the current Testing release for the distribution).

Until now I've been turning off kernel mode setting in the boot line with:

i915.modeset=0

I just discovered, tested and confirmed that this boot parameter does the job just as well:

nomodeset

The latter's a bit "cleaner," don't you think. I promised in a comment that I would look into bugs related to this problem, but things look in a whole lot of disarray. Some people submit so many log files, outputs and other things that I wouldn't have the expertise to assemble in a dozen years. Others haven't yet landed on the solution I've written about in a couple dozen of these entries.

So unless someone out there can direct me to the "best" bug in either Debian, Ubuntu, Xorg or the Linux kernel itself, I'm gonna stay out of it and just continue writing about it here.

Am I the only person out there with not just one but THREE laptops using the Intel 830m chipset?

If not, either of the two boot parameters mentioned above make the X problem go away. I'm sure kernel mode setting is a wonderful thing, just not for this particular graphics chipset.