Ubuntu 13.10 review: It’s better than billed (and not quite dead, despite rumors to the contrary)

Just to make sure that nothing suits my needs better than what I’m running right now (that being Fedora 19 with Xfce and GNOME), I did an Ubuntu 13.10 installation this week and have spent a bit of time putting the Unity-driven Linux distribution to the test.

The installation was easy. Ubuntu is very good about that. And from the standpoint of actually knowing what’s going on during the install, Ubuntu beats Fedora handily.

While the installation process was easy and smooth, I was unable to boot the finished installation with UEFI Secure Boot on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop, which has admittedly “difficult” UEFI. I had to turn off Secure Boot to successfully boot Ubuntu 13.10 in EFI mode. Since I’m now having trouble with Fedora 19 and Secure Boot on this same hardware, I’ll chalk that up to an overall Linux kernel problem with secure boot as it stands today. Luckily you can just about always turn off Secure Boot in the computer setup/BIOS, so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment is snappier than billed. But for me it’s just a little bit “broken” compared to and Xfce 4.10 and GNOME 3. For instance, as far as I can tell, in Unity you can’t drag windows from one workspace to another. It’s also hard to tell when you’ve minimized a window, though this is also the case in GNOME 3.

In Unity, alt-tab only works on the windows in your current workspace. This is the “standard” way of doing things. It’s what most people want. Xfce does it this way, too. However, GNOME 3’s alt-tab works across all workspaces, which many find jarring due to its being different, but I like it and miss it in both Unity and Xfce.

My main problem with Unity was an inability to get a list of all of my applications. On the suggestion of the shortcut list accessed via the “super” key (a nice feature, by the way), I typed alt-“hold.” That didn’t do anything, so I was in the dark as to which applications were actually installed on the box. That’s bad.

Regarding the Dash, which allows you to search for applications, files, and apparantly anything else on the Internet, it was much more responsive than I thought it would be. But the supplementary “suggestions” that appear whenever I type in anything are ludicrous. I was looking for Gedit, and typing in “Ged” got me Geddy Lee from Rush. Not terribly useful.

I’m not so much creeped out at the Dash taking my keystrokes and turning them into search results as I am annoyed by those results’ very presence. I like searching for what’s on my computer, and I’d like to do this with one or more of my servers. But I’d prefer that web and commerce-related searches be done in a separate interface. Even the same tool — say a “Filthy Lucre Dash” in a separate container would be OK.

The Ubuntu Software Center is also kind of broken. It feels very “alpha,” even though it’s been around a long time. As an example of how it works (or in this case doesn’t), I tried to install Skype but couldn’t do that from the USC. It couldn’t seem to find it. However, once I opened a terminal, I easily installed Skype with apt.

In a hopfully unrelated matter, once I got Skype installed I was unable to log in. The program halted at that step.

Aside from that, the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t seem as polished as GNOME PackageKit, Synaptic Package Manager or my current favorite package-management utility, Yum Extender.

Still, during my time with Ubuntu 13.10, I did discover a couple of great things going for it:

* It automatically reports crashes as bugs: It reported my failed suspend/resume, and for that I am both grateful and hopeful.

* It also allows for easy installation and removal of proprietary graphics drivers. You can do this in Fedora with a package manager, but it’s easier and more foolproof in Ubuntu.

After a lot of work with Unity, I did install the full GNOME Desktop Environment and found Ubuntu 13.10 to be a very responsive GNOME Shell system. It wasn’t any less responsive than GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy. I mean that in a good way.

Overall I liked Ubuntu 13.10 more than I thought I would, though I still prefer Xfce and GNOME Shell — in that order — as desktop environments. I won’t hesitate to try Xubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME in the future.

I’m surprised to say this, but I see Unity as a very simple and efficient desktop environment. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not for me, but it at least it’s a fast way to get things done.

While I’m evaluating Ubuntu on the desktop (or more specifically, my laptop desktop), I want to say for the record that I do support Ubuntu’s increasing focus on mobile. We’ve got plenty of Linux distros on the desktop, and I’m glad somebody is putting their chips on mobile since we really need free software OSes in that space.

I leave Ubuntu 13.10 with a sense of excitement about how the distribution will change — and hopefully improve — with the addition of the Mir display server and more development on the Unity desktop environment. I’ll continue to watch it and its many spins, including Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and Lubuntu. I’m not big on KDE, but Kubuntu continues to look strong, and I see the whole Ubuntu ecosystem as way more robust than it may seem given all the criticism heaped on Canonical.

I follow lots of mailing lists and forums, and I see the Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu GNOME projects actively looking for and welcoming new contributors and community members. I find that tremendously inspiring.

The same thing is going on with Ubuntu itself, albeit with a focus on Ubuntu Touch. They want you to code for it.

I’ll admit that this review is colored somewhat by the OggCamp episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. Alan Pope (aka Popey), a Canonical employee and frequent apologist for the distro, the company and SABDFL Mark Shuttleworth seemed a little bitter and disillusioned. He appeared tired of being on the defensive. It made me a bit uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s something he ate. However it happened, I still like to see a Popey who’s all about Ubuntu.

And I’m saying this as someone who isn’t a Ubuntu fanboy. I always seem to have Ubuntu or one of its derivatives running somewhere (currently Lubuntu on my daughter’s laptop), but I rarely run it as my main distribution.

I don’t expect Ubuntu to be the one, true distro and savior of all things good and holy in the free-software world. So I’m not disappointed that it isn’t fighting for the traditional desktop in the way it once did. Others find that hard to accept. I’m not like that.

We still have Debian, Fedora, Mint, Slackware and hundreds of others. And then there are the BSDs. There is no shortage of love for the desktop.

Mark Shuttleworth is making a big play for the phone market with Ubuntu Touch. While I really hope Ubuntu succeeds on the phone, I’m not terribly optimistic. Shuttleworth likes to bet big, and I understand that the desktop is far from where the heat is today’s technology world.

And who else is on the phone (and tablet, for that matter)? Nobody. Android, being a Google project and not terribly open and getting less open all the time, does not count. For me anyway.

So I’m happy for Ubuntu to take its focus off the desktop in favor of mobile. When it comes to my desktop use, I’m covered.

Back to Ubuntu 13.10. When you actually slap it on the box, it’s not exciting but does get the job done. And given that Ubuntu- (and Debian-) derived goodness can be yours in myriad ways with just about any desktop environment in the Unix/Linux world, that’s more than all right.

When Xubuntu and Debian fail, Fedora it is for HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop

I’ve spent just about a month with this new HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop that shipped with Windows 8. That means UEFI and Secure Boot.

And new hardware. We all know how difficult Linux can be with new hardware.

During the aforementioned month, I did a lot of work in Windows 8. I sent up my whole environment. Even installed Perl. And Python. (It’s not like I’m a big-time hacker or anything, but I aspire.)

But it’s time for me to get back to Linux. Except that I’m having issues.

Ever tried to make a Windows 8 recovery image? ‘Pain in the ass’ covers it

So I have this new HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop that shipped with Windows 8.

It runs with Secure Boot over UEFI. And the Windows product key? Embedded in the firmware.

Back in the Windows 7 days, which for me were last month, I had an ISO and could (and did) reinstall from it with my product key.

Now I don’t see ISOs and don’t know if they’ll even work.

So I set about trying to make “recovery” images from the D: partition on the hard drive.

I used the HP Recovery Manager, which as far as I know is a wrapper for what Windows uses to do this same task.

I had a choice: six DVDs or a 32 GB USB flash drive. I got a killer deal on the flash drive, and who wants to burn six DVDs?

Anyhow, three failed tries later (at 2 hours each), I gave up on putting the Windows 8 recovery image on the 32 GB flash drive. Fail. After fail.

I buckled, grabbed six DVDs, and now I’m on the fifth out of six.

Then I’ll start torturing Windows 8 proper. I’ll be dual-booting with either Fedora 18 Xfce or Xubuntu 13.04. I’d love to run GNOME 3, but the 3D acceleration needed for that and this HP laptop’s AMD video hardware (part of the combination CPU/graphics chip called the APU) aren’t playing well at all right now.

Eventually the Linux kernel, Xorg and the AMD/Radeon drivers will catch up (and I prefer the open drivers because the closed-source ones are hard to maintain and often, in my case anyway, fail to work at all).

I even had a not-so-spirited Twitter exchange with Microsoft over this. When you’re used to sub-1 GB Linux distributions that include a full range of applications, having to make SIX 4.7 GB DVDs to restore Windows WITHOUT almost any applications seems so very, very wrong.

I’m one DVD away from being done with this “recovery” operation. It can’t be soon enough.

Fedora 18 with Xfce on the HP Pavilion g6-2210us — all systems are very, very ‘go’

Just a quick post to tell you that my Fedora 18 with Xfce installation on the HP Pavilion g6-2210us is doing very well indeed.

Unlike Xubuntu 13.04, Fedora 18 WILL run under Secure Boot after installation.

I’m using full disk encryption and working on a separate hard drive (not the Windows 8 drive that shipped with the laptop).

Also unlike Xubuntu 13.04, I had no trouble with sound in Skype. Yep, I already installed Skype in Fedora. And it’s working perfectly.

Like Xubuntu 13.04, overall sound levels are fine once volume is upped via the Pulse Audio Volume Control.

In addition to Skype, things I also added to Fedora 18 without incident included the RPM Fusion repositories, the Adobe Flash browser plugin, gPodder and Xchat. I also found a new kernel and installed it (you’ll see why below).

All went smoothly.

So far Xfce in Fedora looks great. It runs great. It’s super-fast.

The only problem with this laptop and its new AMD APU (CPU plus graphics) is video. The 2D video in Xfce runs with no problem. GNOME 3 is a total mess. Unity is workable but has artifacts (though there was some improvement in the final release of Ubuntu 13.04 that I saw with live media).

And what all of these systems have in common — Ubuntu and Fedora included — is that suspend doesn’t work.

The laptop does go into suspend, but there’s no waking it (i.e. resume is broken). That’s bad because I’m a huge user of suspend/resume. The new kernel I tried from Fedora’s Koji service didn’t help. Eventually Linux, X, radeon and catalyst will catch up to this HD 7000-series video chip. It just hasn’t happened yet.

But I can say right now that Fedora 18 is good enough, configurable enough with proprietary bits, and stable enough for my daily use.

This is the first time I’ve used the Yum Extender for package management, and it’s a terrific, exceedingly quick tool.

What do I miss most not running Linux? Easy, usable FTP via the file manager and text editors (I can’t believe this is so f’d up in Windows8), and easy management of my old, old iPod, which I’m shocked is pretty much impossible to do in Windows without iTunes. I’ve tried a half-dozen music-manager/podcast manager apps, and none of them in Windows can do a damn thing half well.

Getting back to Linux’s gPodder (the Windows version doesn’t do iPod) and Rhythmbox will solve all of my Windows problems. For almost everything else I have mostly free open-source apps that just happen to run on Windows.

But a pure Linux environment would make my life better and easier. That and working suspend/resume and I’ll be a most happy camper. If I were confident that a dual-boot with Windows 8 wouldn’t fail, I’d do it today.

Update: It’s been about 2 1/2 years, and I’m still running Fedora on this laptop. Now I’m on Fedora 22, so that means four in-place upgrades without it blowing up. And I should upgrade to F23 soon.

Now I don’t need the Catalyst driver. The free Radeon driver works great. I don’t even need any hacks for suspend/resume, though I did have one for quite some time. And there are no sound issues — switching between HDMI and native laptop sound is seamless with the pavu (aka PulseAudio Volume Control) application.

My experience is that with new hardware, Linux can be difficult at first, gets better in a year, and now I can say it’s very solid after two years. While that’s a nice thing for people with 2-year-old hardware (like me now), we really need to get to the point where things are pretty good out of the box and totally locked down in six months.

What constitutes totally locked down?

• Boots from ISO with no issues
• Installs with no issues, especially no EFI/UEFI problems
• Installs in dual-boot with Windows with no issues
• Boots from disk after installation with no issues and allows boot to Linux by default
• Video works perfectly with free drivers, including HDMI
• Audio works perfectly, including HDMI
• Suspend/resume works without any hacks
• CPU heat and fan usage is comparable to what hardware achieves in Windows

Holy crap: Xubuntu 13.04’s Secure Boot fail and Fedora 18 with Xfce’s Secure Boot success

I still can’t believe it.

I’m testing distros on my HP Pavilion g6-2210us, which has optional Secure Boot for Windows 8, and I’ve run into a huge problem.

Xubuntu 13.04 boots from a DVD just fine with Secure Boot switched on. The image has no problem booting to the live desktop and doing the install.

But when I reboot into my new Xubuntu system on the hard drive, the kernel (or whatever else is involved) won’t validate, and the system won’t start. The only thing I can do is go into the laptop’s setup and turn off Secure Boot.

This is the Beta 2 image. I don’t know if there was a fix before the final release yesterday, but not being able to start an installed distro with Secure Boot is a pretty huge bug. Even though 3D video performance is extremely poor at this stage for this hardware, I’m downloading an Ubuntu 13.04 final ISO to see if the bug persists in Ubuntu proper.

I confirmed that it wasn’t my hardware by installing Fedora 18 with Xfce from live media. The ISO booted fine, the install went fine (even though the new Anaconda is more awkward than not), and the system started right up upon reboot. With Secure Boot enabled.

I’m doing a huge update right now in Yum Extender, an application I’ve never heard of before. But it’s not a bad GUI front end for Yum. You get a whole lot more information on the screen than with PackageKit in GNOME.

If I can get Skype running in Fedora 18, this is pretty much a done deal.

And a working (and working-under-Secure Boot) Fedora system is a powerful incentive not to screw with what sure looks like success.

Linux on the HP Pavilion g6-2210us — today’s tests: Debian Wheezy and Xubuntu 13.04

I swapped an old hard drive into the HP Pavilion g6-2210us and gave a few Linux distros a spin today.

Why a separate drive? I’m not at all confident about a successful Linux-Windows 8 dual boot. For those keeping score, this laptop features an AMD A4-4300M APU processor with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics. The wireless NIC is by Atheros, and the wired NIC is a Realtek. (I’ll report later on specific NIC chips for wired and wireless Ethernet.)

First up was Debian Wheezy. I had to turn off Secure Boot because Debian doesn’t support it. That was no problem. You can toggle Secure Boot on this HP Pavilion g6, and you can also toggle UEFI and “legacy” BIOS mode. So really I’m only limited by what “works” with the hardware itself. Given my angst lately over video (no GNOME 3 due to shaky 3D acceleration support for this newish AMD chip), that’s cold comfort.

Debian seemed to install perfectly. Except that, early in the install, it wanted me to supply nonfree firmware for the wired networking port (a Realtek NIC) on removable media. I actually got the nonfree .deb package (all Wheezy firmware is here, unpacked it and put the required files on a USB flash drive (formatted as FAT), plugged it in and continued with the install. That didn’t work. Debian didn’t “see” the firmware.

Give what happened later (the laptop stalled during boot), this was strange because the system continued installing from the netboot image — using that very NIC to download all of the required files.

I knew I would have trouble with the 3D acceleration in GNOME 3 (and I later confirmed that the proprietary 3D driver for ATI/AMD does not work on this video card), but I was doing a test install and could always bring in Xfce later.

That wouldn’t matter.

I did the entire installation. But as I hinted above, Debian Wheezy wouldn’t reboot into the new system. It hung during configuration of the wired Ethernet port. I guess I can try again with install media that includes the nonfree firmware.

Later: I did look at the installation guide for Wheezy, where I saw that you need to leave the firmware in .deb package form. I also found install images with the firmware included.

Next up was Xubuntu.

The install went fine with Secure Boot turned on. But on reboot, I had to turn off Secure Boot to get the system up and running. It could have had something to do with the fully encrypted LVM option that I chose during the install. I’ll have to do an install without encrypted LVM to see if it makes a difference in Xubuntu’s ability to run with Secure Boot enabled.

Everything looked good once I was in the system. I installed a boatload of updates. I brought in Skype with the service’s own .deb package. I managed to get audio working in Skype. But upon reboot it was not to be. The audio left Skype, as did the configuration options I had to choose from to make it work in the first place. it might come back on the next boot. Who knows?

Unfortunately I need Skype to work at the moment. I never had such trouble in Debian Wheezy on my now-dead Lenovo G555. Until it died, that is.

Otherwise I was happy with audio. That was a major concern of mine. However, I was able to boost audio levels with the Pulse Audio Volume Control, and audio was every bit as good as it is in Windows 8.

Alas, the day’s experimenting had to come to an end. I swapped back in the Windows 8 hard drive, re-enabled Secure Boot and had a working Win 8 system once again. Yep, it’s as exciting as you thought it was.

Linux on the HP Pavilion g6-2210us, video isn’t perfect, but I’m more worried about audio

I did some tests today with different Linux releases on my new HP Pavilion g6-2210us, and while I’m pretty sure that 3D-accelerated video is something that will come along later — leaving me with some very nice 2D-video desktop environments like Xfce, what’s really worrying me is audio.

Audio was a definite problem in Fedora 18 with Xfce. It was slightly better in Xubuntu 13.04 beta 2 (which will be a final release in two days). I could deal with it in Xubuntu.

What worries me — even with Xubuntu is the basics: It’s not loud enough. Playback on YouTube videos is louder in Windows. Could it have something to do with using HTML 5 on the Linux side and Flash on the Windows side? That is certainly fodder for another test. As is playing audio that isn’t a YouTube video.

I’m too tired to find the links, but I distinctly remember audio being a problem when my now-dead Lenovo G555 laptop was new in 2010. Audio issues were eventually solved with new kernels and new ALSA drivers. Hopefully the same will be true for this now-new HP Pavilion g6.

Earlier today: Linux on the new HP Pavilion g6-2210us — It’s looking like Xfce until video catches up

The next day: I did a full install of Xubuntu, and I was satisfied with audio output as managed by the Pulse Audio volume control.

I tried the fglrx proprietary AMD Radeon video driver, and X wouldn’t start. So much for the closed-source binary driver.

It looks like Linux and X will have to catch up to this video chip.

Linux video and the AMD Radeon HD 7420G in my new HP Pavilion g6-2210us

It’s not looking great for this hunk of new hardware — an HP Pavilion g6-2210us laptop with AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics — and Linux at this moment.

Things look good in 2D, meaning Xubuntu is probably my best choice right now. But distros running GNOME 3 (so far Fedora 18, Ubuntu GNOME Remix 13.04 beta 2) and Unity (Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2) are problematic. They go from screen tearing to complete video fail.

What I’ve been able to find on this video chip is not encouraging.

What is encouraging (and I hope helpful) is this week’s Fedora Test Days for Radeon, Nouveau and Intel video cards. Fedora gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling when they do things like this. It helps everybody.

Linux and its video drivers eventually catch up to new chips (the same being true for networking and sound chips), but there is usually a wait.

Not so encouraging is my apprehension at dual-booting with Windows 8. Back (a few weeks ago) when I was running a Windows 7 machine, I had wiped the crapware-ridden Windows 32-bit from my 64-bit Lenovo (yep, they cheaped out on that) and replaced it with a “clean” 64-bit Win 7 install from an ISO.

I can’t find any ISO for Windows 8, and I have no idea how many discs it will take to make a restore set from the machine itself.

Add to that: It looks like there are five partitions just for Windows on this drive. How will Ubuntu or Fedora handle that? I don’t see a lot of specific documentation on how the Linux installers deal with existing Windows 8 installations. Except for “it didn’t work” forum posts.

So I’m thinking of working with Linux on a separate hard drive. That would mean I could turn off Secure Boot and have a much wider variety of install choices.

I could also experiment with OpenBSD this way. They keep it quiet, but OpenBSD 5.3 will feature GNOME 3.6.2. I still think it’s the only BSD offering GNOME 3 at all. I would love to kick the tires on this one.

I’ll probably end up with Linux so I can run Skype.

You know your Linux installation is getting a bit old and crusty when …

While there’s always a pack of geeks telling me how they’ve been running the same Debian system since Potato, I’ve found that most desktop systems under any kind of heavy use by those of us who do a lot of experimenting and install a lot of software don’t last forever.

Or they won’t last a long time without a great deal of maintenance and fixing mistakes made along the way.

Xfce in Ubuntu/Xubuntu and Debian(/Slackware/fill in the blank)

I’ve written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol’ GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware.

In last week’s Distrowatch, which I also blogged about, And in the latest Distrowatch, the idea of running “minimal Xubuntu (and Ubuntu),” is discussed.

Basically, the idea is that you use the regular Xubuntu CD but instead of the full install, you start with a command-line-only system and build it up from there. It’s something that many Debian users have been doing for years (and which I’m done a couple times myself): start with what in Debian is called the “standard” install (and purposefully NOT including the “Desktop” group of packages), then use apt or Aptitude to build up from there, adding only what you want. You start with X and then build up from there.

This week’s Distrowatch article included some timed benchmarks, as well as a table of how much memory is used in Debian 5 with Xfce, the standard Xubuntu, the minimal Xubuntu and Xubuntu with the same packages as Debian with Xfce.

You save a lot of time and RAM with the leaner Xubuntus.

In running Ubuntu vs. most other systems with leaner desktop environments, you can see right away by running the top utility in a terminal. In Ubuntu 8.04, I start out the session with over 100 processes. Right now, in OpenBSD 4.4 with Xfce 4.4 — and with the Opera browser, Thunderbird e-mail client, a terminal window, a couple Mousepad editor windows and way more Xfce widgets than I need (they eat about 10MB of RAM each, so I’m probably going to turn off most of them soon), I only show 53 processes in top.

And when I’m running the default Fvwm2 window manager in OpenBSD, I probably start the session with between 20 and 30 processes (I’ll have to check on that). Just running the console before starting X, there are less than 20 processes running (again, I’ll check and confirm).

From my experience, Xfce in Debian and Slackware is more like it is in OpenBSD as I have it configured and less like in Xubuntu.

The “problem,” although I really don’t see it as such, with Xubuntu is that a whole lot of GNOME services are running. The same is true in the KDE-based Kubuntu. The Ubuntu team keeps a lot of the services the same, everything from the Synaptic package manager to the Network Manager, so the experience across the various Ubuntu derivatives is more similar than not.

And I do remember being jarred a bit after installing both the Xfce and KDE versions of Debian. I never could get used to the graphical package manager in KDE. (Kpackage? That’s my guess.) And in the Xfce version of Debian, you have to use apt or Aptitude (but you could add Synaptic with these very utilities if you really, truly missed it).

I did use Debian with Xfce for a good period of time, and that provided me with the opportunity to learn more about Aptitude, which more than a few users prefer over apt due to Aptitude’s record-keeping ability. (I guess that means Aptitude writes more log files, but I never really looked into it that closely.)

But as I said in my last entry on the topic, If you install Slackware but leave out all the KDE sets, you still end up with a bigger installation than if you use Debian with Xfce. And as I said then, you even get OpenOffice, compared to no office suite in Slackware, and still the install for Debian is smaller. That doesn’t really matter for most instances, but this particular install needed to fit on a 3 GB hard drive, and that’s pretty tight for many distributions.

Not to hate on Slackware at all. I do grumble about not having as many tools to manage the box when you choose not to install KDE (and I may indeed do this very install in the near future because I still love Slackware and believe I’m better equipped to deal with it now than ever). And while I’m not happy about having to search for prebuilt binary packages or use Slackbuilds for some of the apps I need, Slackware is still a super-fast Xfce system. In fact, Slackware is my No. 1 system for when I (or you) do want to run KDE.

(Small aside: Slackware does include the Koffice suite in the KDE sets. If at the time I was using Slackware the heaviest — the 12.0 days — Kword in particular ran better, I very well could’ve stuck with it. I can’t say anything about more recent Koffice builds, but I haven’t heard about it getting much better, not that I’ve heard much at all. I did end up adding Abiword to my Slackware install with binary packages from Robby Workman’s site.)

And if you want to take the time during the install, you can go through Slackware file set by file set, package by package, and install exactly what you want from the CDs/DVDs. So you can have a truly custom installation out of the box without needing to use a network mirror. (Caveat: It seems as if this would take forever to do.)

I don’t think you can do the same thing with apt in Debian, but you certainly can start with the minimal or “standard” install (I think some just do the absolute base and don’t even use the whole “standard” list of packages) and then build slowly up from there.

Before I lose the thread of exactly what I wanted to say about Xubuntu. I don’t know if I spelled it out in the last entry, but in my tests, Xubuntu doesn’t really give you much of a speed advantage over standard Ubuntu. I did used to really like the look of Xubuntu; around the 7.04/7.10 era, when I ran a lot of Xubuntu, I really liked the way they had Xfce set up, from the color scheme to the panels (when I could get the panels to stick on the screen … another story).

But once I saw how Xfce ran in other distributions, I never really looked back. If you prefer the way Xubuntu looks and works over Ubuntu, it’s a legitimate choice, but I don’t think you’ll save a lot of CPU or RAM by choosing Xubuntu over Ubuntu.

However, if you really like Ubuntu/Xubuntu and have a compelling reason for using it over Ubuntu — perhaps your hardware just likes Ubuntu more, maybe you want to run the LTS of Ubuntu, or there are some packages that either you can’t get in Debian or are more up to date in Ubuntu — doing one of these minimal Ubuntu/Xubuntu installs can be worth it.

As for me, things are going very well in OpenBSD 4.4. I’ll probably upgrade when my CD set arrives. And my Ubuntu 8.04 Toshiba laptop is also running well.

Ubuntu maintenance aside: On our girl’s Gateway laptop running Ubuntu 8.04, it crashed over the weekend (most probably a hardware issue; possibly a flaky power-supply plug) and I had a corrupted root filesystem. I used “recovery mode,” and was able to see the dmesg on the terminal. The system dropped me into a root shell, I fsck’ed the root filesystem, which in my case goes like this:

# fsck /dev/sda2

And after that I rebooted and everything was back to normal. I thought that running a journaling filesystem (ext3 in this case) meant you didn’t have to fsck, but in this case I most definitely needed to do so. My recent forays into fsck in OpenBSD are also due, I believe, to hardware issues; every once in awhile this Toshiba laptop (again, I have two identical Satellite 1100-S101 models) dies right at the beginning of the boot, no matter what the OS, and in the case of OpenBSD, I easily fsck the root filesystem and commence booting.

So … what I’m getting around to saying is that I can easily see pulling the hard drive from one of the Toshiba laptops, shoving in a new one and using the entire drive for either Debian or Slackware and doing a long-term test of whichever distro I end up choosing.

Endnote: My complaints still stand about distro reviews — including my own — being nothing more than cursory looks at how a system installs and whether or not the hardware worked and not much more.

I think a lot of this discomfort with quickie reviews stems from my own decision to do much less distro-hopping. I tend to use distributions/projects that offer a lot of packages, a lot of flexibility, plus longevity and relative stability. The operating system must support most or all of the applications I need to get my work done. And since I’m not running a lot of test machines at the moment, anything I do in terms of distro/project testing needs to serve these goals as well as hold my 1 GB of Thunderbird e-mail and about 1 GB of “other” files.

So I’ve stuck with Ubuntu 8.04 on two laptops (both in fairly frequent use), OpenBSD 4.4 on one laptop (heavy use), OpenBSD 4.2 and Puppy 2.13 on one laptop (light use — this one needs an upgrade; it ran Debian before and probably will again) and Debian Etch on two desktops (light use).

I used to get a lot of traffic with quickie distro reviews, especially when I managed to get a Distrowatch link. I do miss the traffic, but I didn’t feel right cranking out a review within the first day/week after an install. It’s certainly important to let people know how goes the installation of an operating system, but I just didn’t have the time or desire to burn dozens of ISOs and do installs all the time.

And since my days of distro-hopping, I’ve depended on FOSS operating systems and applications more than ever before for my day-to-day work. And between Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Debian, I’ve found a nice combination of comfort (for me as a user/technician) stability, flexibility, application availability and, for the most part, relative speed.

I know I spent half of this entry on how slow Ubuntu can be, but I’ve run MANY distros that appear to be much slower; I think Ubuntu hits more of a happy medium than others when it comes to the bloat/features equation, I just run hardware that’s old enough to need all the help with CPU, RAM and disk space I can get.

The real endnote: The preceding few paragraphs attempted to explain why I’m uncomfortable with the standard distro review, both as a writer and a reader. I hope I got the point across at least a little. When you see one of these reviews, you’ll know it. Not that there’s no value in rolling a new Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva/Slackware/etc. distribution onto a box and writing about what’s different/better/worse. If the writer has been running a given distro/project all along, I tend to take more notice even of a quickie review. But if you run, let’s say Slackware, throw the latest Ubuntu on your box and talk all about how Ubuntu is different from Slackware and how everything’s in the wrong place, and you do this a few hours after the installation, that I feel is usually of very little value.

So the next time I do this very thing, feel free to write a comment at what a hypocrite I am.