After problems like these, iPhoto gives me that unsettling feeling

We have a Mac at home, and we have a digital camera, too.

Nothing unusual there, right?

So we use iPhoto, part of the often-free-with-your-Mac iLife suite, to download and manage our digital photos.

OK, Ilene does it. Truth be told, I look to her to help me with most things Mac since the iBook G4 is her main computer, which she uses for everything related to the classes she teaches, from research and preparing PowerPoint presentations to delivering those presentations, creating tests and assignments, logging grades, blogging and way more.

I did rescue the iBook from an ailing hard drive, an operation that took more than a couple hours of sweaty, painstaking work to complete.

Once I set up a backup drive with SuperDuper for this 10.3.9-equipped laptop (which doesn’t have and won’t be getting OS X 10.5’s Time Machine), I figured I was done with Mac crises for the time being.

Then iPhoto “forgot” how to display our many thousand photos.

Upon starting the application, the screen would read “Loading Photos …” forever. Yet the photos, in their many iPhoto-created folders, were right where they always have been. A check of iPhoto in a smaller account with only a few hundred photos revealed that iPhoto, the application, was working.

It was just the database holding our 3,000+ photos that wasn’t working.

I did everything recommended in David Pogue’s excellent “iLife ’05: The Missing Manual.” I threw out Preferences files, ditched database files, relaunched iPhoto a half-dozen times.

Nothing worked.

Finally I resorted to the last remaining tip from “iLife ’05: The Missing Manual”: The iPhoto Extractor application.

I installed iPhoto Extractor, turned it loose on my “damaged” iPhoto database, extracted the 3,000+ photos, then reimported them into iPhoto.

Sure, any changes we made to individual photos (including rotating them so they were right-side up), any albums we may have created to organize said photos (and yes, we had many) were gone.

But the photos themselves were all there.

I have my idol David Pogue to thank for that (any tech journalist with his own book imprint richly deserves idolatry — and gets it from me, big time).

I also have the people behind iPhoto Extractor to thank for dragging all of those photos out of the many, many folders created by iPhoto in which they’re stored and allowing me to see them all, back them up without all that iPhoto baggage and then reimport them into iPhoto, something I did but am not very happy about at all.

I’d be more happy just creating my own system of folders and files which wouldn’t be compromised by the application that created them.

For the time being, I’ll keep using iPhoto (although I should probably upgrade to a newer version than the Version 4 we have now), but I’ll be very, very interested to know what my non-iLife options are for managing and archiving photos in OS X.

Ubuntu/GNOME: When laptop lid closes, suspend the computer

I’m giving this a try. Having the screen blank when I close the laptop lid in Ubuntu hasn’t worked out so well. That usually hangs the system with the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I went into the Power Management settings in GNOME and changed them. Now when the lid is closed, the laptop should go into suspend.

So far that seems to be working. Upon opening the lid, I hit the power button to resume the computer.

I’m wondering if my freezing-cursor problem (from which I can only recover with a hard reboot) is somehow related to suspend/resume. That would be logical, since I don’t have suspend/resume turned on in Debian Lenny due to that feature not working in that distro.

Irrespective of the cursor-freezing issue, having the machine suspend with lid closing is better than having the screen blank. At least this way X doesn’t crash.

Ubuntu/GNOME: When laptop lid closes, suspend the computer

I’m giving this a try. Having the screen blank when I close the laptop lid in Ubuntu hasn’t worked out so well. That usually hangs the system with the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450).

I went into the Power Management settings in GNOME and changed them. Now when the lid is closed, the laptop should go into suspend.

So far that seems to be working. Upon opening the lid, I hit the power button to resume the computer.

I’m wondering if my freezing-cursor problem (from which I can only recover with a hard reboot) is somehow related to suspend/resume. That would be logical, since I don’t have suspend/resume turned on in Debian Lenny due to that feature not working in that distro.

Irrespective of the cursor-freezing issue, having the machine suspend with lid closing is better than having the screen blank. At least this way X doesn’t crash.

I was about to praise Ubuntu …

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.

You can buy the ultra-small Fit-PC

Remember my fit-PC post of a few days ago, in which the announcement of an ultra-small, somewhat-reasonably price, Linux-running PC wasn’t accompanied by a working link on where and how to buy it?

Well, reader ludovicus came through with a working link at which to purchase the fit-PC in the U.S. and Canada. (Click here for worldwide shipping).

With the AMD Geode LX800 processor (500MHz), 512 MB of RAM, built-in WiFi, a 60 GB hard drive and preinstalled with Ubuntu 8.04 and Gentoo 2008.1 in a dual-boot configuration, the fit-PC Slim is $295 plus $20 shipping, also known as $315. (I’m not sure why more than a few users would want to dual-boot Ubuntu and Gentoo; I’d rather have one or the other.)

When compared to other small-PC offerings, the fit-PC comes out rather well, given its specs. Having the hard drive, half-megabyte of RAM and WiFi certainly puts it ahead of the competition. The Linutop 2 (pictured at right) has a faster AMD Geode processor (800 MHz), and 1 GB internal flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive (which one is preferable depends on your application). No WiFi, either. Linutop does its own Ubuntu-based distro which fits on the 1 GB flash chip and gives you 400 MB to spare for your files.

The problem with Linutop: It costs 280 euros, which is well north of $500.

The fit-PC is small and fanless, but some might be cautious about running a full Linux (or Windows) desktop in 500 MHz of CPU. Having the 512 MB of RAM (as opposed to 256 or 128 MB) will really help speed things up, but a test of this box is definitely in order. If the overall hardware (including video and sound) is good, performance should be acceptable. The problem with more CPU is the need for more power — and the generation of much additional heat.

In regards to what will and won’t run on the fit-PC, start here. As far as what will run and how well, I’d love for Debian to be farther along.

The fit-PC box:

More fit-PC:

• fit-PC slim specifications
• The fit-PC Forum
• OpenBSD runs on the fit-PC

Why President Bush is addressing the nation at 9 p.m. EDT and not earlier

You might wonder why President Bush is scheduled to address the nation at 9 p.m. EDT (watch here on AP’s live feed if you have Internet Explorer).

My guess? It’s because “Dancing With the Stars” starts at 8 p.m., when we find out who’s getting dumped from the show (aside from Jeff Ross, who I’ve never heard of and who already got booted, the ABC Web site tells me) in its first week:

What will the president be up against at 9 p.m. Eastern? On ABC, “David Blaine: Dive of Death,” in which the quirky magician/illusionist/nutcase presumably dives to what could very well be his death. Quite the metaphor for President Bush.

Luckily (or not), the speech starts at 6 p.m. on the West Coast, so watchers of “Dancing With the Stars” and “David Blaine: Dive of Death” have absolutely nothing to worry about.

President Bush is going up against a plethora of death at 9 p.m. On Fox, the Brad Garrett sitcom ” ‘Til Death” airs. CBS has “Criminal Minds,” and no, I’m not going there, but you are welcome to do so. NBC has “America’s Got Talent,” where I presume they’re not looking for the nation’s best CEOs, and the CW has a repeat of the not-old-enough-to-be-in-repeats “Beverly Hills, 91210” remake.

Why the AP’s live video plays in Internet Explorer only: Microsoft developed the application for the Associated Press. Can you tell? The whole AP video service used to be IE only, but now the prerecorded videos can be played on any computer with Flash. But the live videos are still IE only. I’m not happy about it, but there it is.

Craziest ‘I am a PC’ bit yet: Ballmer gets in your face … and Seinfeld sells Apples

If Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer were to make a Windows commercial, it would be very much unlike those “crafted” by Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.

In fact, Ballmer has already done this. Watch the above video, if you dare.

And don’t think that Seinfeld hasn’t done TV ad duty for Apple as well (look for him at the end of this “genius” ad; I think it’s a legit ad and not something put together by Apple fanboys to make a point, but I can’t be 100 percent sure … and I really don’t know how Seinfeld fits in with Gandhi and Picasso):

Why I haven’t written a traditional distro review in a long time

Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They’re relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you).

But do they mean much? Not really, I think.

Most of the time it’s the usual:

• “Here’s what happened when I tried/failed/succeeded in installing Distro X on Hardware Y”
• “The installer is good/bad/barbaric”
• “Networking/printing/X was easy/hard/impossible to set up”
• “Package management is like Debian/Red Hat/Slackware and is good/bad/barbaric”
• “Repositories are big/small/good/bad”
• “My favorite apps are present/absent/broken”
• “The default desktop/menus/window manager are good/bad”
• “The community is active/nonexistant/helpful/hostile”

And the list goes on. I feel like writing a shell script that can pose questions and crank out automatic distro reviews.

What’s harder to write — much harder than the quickie distro review — is a long-term review of a distro after a month or more of heavy use.

For one thing, most of us don’t want to spend long periods of time running distros we don’t like or aren’t familiar with.

And for any given user, most of the 300+ active distros out there won’t do anything for our hardware and work patterns that we don’t already get from the distros we’re currently using.

That’s not to say that the many, many dozens of distros out there should just give up and stop trying to do something better and different (even though what they’re doing is usually based on an existing distro and often doesn’t add much, if any value to what they’re already copying).

I’m just saying that after after a year and half of writing this kind of thing, I’m tired of both writing and reading quickie distro reviews that don’t really tell the potential user of a given distribution all that much that they can use in making their decision.

I’ve already done tons of posts on Debian Lenny, and almost every problem has been fixed at some point in the project’s long road from Testing to Stable.

So should I do another distro review on the installation, care and feeding of Debian Lenny when it finally does receive its Stable status?

Do I need to reinstall Ubuntu every six months and write about how that goes? OpenBSD?

Never mind that the development of OpenBSD is purposefully more evolutionary than revolutionary, or that a rolling release might be better/worse than one that comes out every six months or at some other regular (or not so much) interval.

I don’t quite know how to end this tortuous post except to say that I reserve the right to change my mind. Maybe I’m purposefully shoving my own head in the sand by not embracing your favorite distro (usually Slackware or Mandriva) and sticking to what’s been working for me (Ubuntu, Debian, OpenBSD, Puppy … and that’s about it these days).

Maybe it’s part of the evolution (or devolution) of me as a writer about technology, but right now I’m convinced that that there’s a better way to do all of this that doesn’t throw out free, open-source software in favor of what the average guy/gal is using (Windows/Mac) but also does more than preach to the same creaky choir, of which I myself am a warbling member.

Being more truthful, I won’t stop reading distro reviews, especially when they’re written by writers who know what they’re doing. But I plan to be a whole lot more careful about writing them. I’ve been thinking (and writing) for some time about why it’s more than time for me to stabilize my herd of machines and stop the endless process of cranking one distro after another onto their partitions.

The freedom to change distros like underwear, at more than one level, begins to detract from what a computer operating system is supposed to be for, which is getting stuff done. I guess I want things to be more about ends rather than means.

Debian Etch: like a comfortable pair of old shoes

I’ve been running Debian in one form or another, on one box or another, ever since Etch went stable in April 2007.

Lately most of my work in Debian has been on my Gateway laptop (aka The $0 Laptop), which from a hardware standpoint responds better to Lenny (Testing) than to Etch (Stable), so I’d been using Lenny about 100 percent of the time until I got what I’m calling The Debian Mac, a Power Macintosh G4/466, in a mass giveaway of old Apple hardware.

I tried a Xubuntu live CD, but once I burned a Debian PowerPC image and installed Etch, I knew that this chunk of hardware — especially the ATI video card and LaCie 22-inch monitor — responded to the distro extremely well.

I last ran Etch extensively both on my VIA converted thin client and on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), but since then the VIA has been used to compare Ubuntu and Wolvix, and the Compaq has been running OpenBSD and Puppy.

So it had been a long time since I had worked with Etch.

It really is like a comfortable pair of old shoes.

On the Mac, anyway, everything works perfectly. I didn’t have to do anything beyond enter my LaCie electron22blue II monitor’s native resolution (1600×1200) when prompted during automatic X configuration while the install was running.

Sure there are a lot of old packages in Etch: OpenOffice 2.0, Gaim instead of Pidgin, Firefox 2 instead of 3.

But again, everything works, and I could really get used to not having to wait for dozens or hundreds of new packages to download and install every week, like I do when running Lenny.

Eventually Lenny will be as old-shoeish as Etch is now, with the rush of revised packages slowing to a familiar trickle, and with the whole system working as well as it ever will (and hopefully that will be well enough.

I already see this process happening in my Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy install on the Gateway, where everything is settling in (and where I recently did a reinstall after what I suspect were UUID conflicts after I monkeyed around with the partitions more than one too many times).

I’ll be hoping that for the next 2 1/2 years, the Canonical team can give the same quality of attention to security and bug-patching in 8.04 — the distro’s second “long-term support” release — as the Debian Project does for its Stable release and Red Hat does for its RHEL products.

I kind of, sort of planned to remain with Ubuntu 8.04 on the laptop for at least two of the three years for which it will receive support, especially now that I’m continuing to have problems with X in Lenny on that machine that I can’t seem to solve. The same problems don’t occur in Etch on the laptop, but there are so many things that Lenny does bring to that particular platform that rolling back to Etch isn’t an option.

Also, I see using more desktop machines, as opposed to laptops, in my near future, and that breaks things wide open, since the ACPI problems I have with laptops and FOSS operating systems aren’t nearly as much of a factor on desktops, where CPU fans generally run all the time and I don’t care about suspend/resume.

It’s been suggested that I try Slackintosh — an unofficial port of Slackware to the PowerPC — on the G4. That’s intriguing. I’ve always found that KDE runs quicker in Slackware than in any other Linux distribution. KDE probably runs about as fast in Debian, and I could add that desktop (as well as Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm, or what have you) to this Etch install.

In my experience, it’s easier and better to run a given distribution with its “main” window manager: Debian and Ubuntu with GNOME, Slackware and Mandriva with KDE, etc. Everything seems to “fit” better and work better, too.

I do appreciate that things like the GNOME NetworkManager and Synaptic Package Manager appear across the Ubuntu offshoots (Kubuntu, Xubuntu), unifying the experience somewhat. Going into the KDE version of Debian and using whatever it is that KDE uses to update packages, or into the Xfce version and relying on Aptitude (not a bad alternative; I use and appreciate Aptitude more and more these days) is a bit jarring, and I credit the Ubuntu developers for maintaining a core of helpful applications across their different distros.

And as I’ve said many times, both GNOME and Debian take a lot of bashing out there in blogland, but I’ve found GNOME to be extremely fast and quite capable of doing what I want to do, and in tests between Debian and Slackware (running Xfce and Fluxbox), Debian more than holds its own in terms of speed on the desktop.

Not that I wouldn’t or won’t run Slackware in the future. The fact that Patrick Volkerding and crew seem to maintain Slackware’s various versions for years and years says a lot for how long you can safely run it. I don’t know if that same longetivity applies to running Slackintosh; I suppose it depends on how many of the packages come from Slackintosh and how many come from Slackware.

But it’s hard to argue with “Debian just works.” When Lenny goes from Testing status to Stable, Etch will become what Debian calls “Old Stable,” and receive security patches for another year. That gives those of us running it — on the desktop, the server, in embedded systems, etc. — ample time to figure out what to do next.

This being a Linux PowerPC box, I wonder how long I’ll be happy without the ability to run Flash (which Adobe doesn’t code for Linux on this platform; guess I could always dual boot Linux and OS X if I really, really need Flash. Or I could just give up on PowerPC and run i386. I have a promising Pentium 4 machine that ideally will be my next OS test bed, replacing the VIA converted thin client that has spawned dozens of reviews and hundreds of blog posts since I began writing this particular brand of blather at the beginning of 2007.

Taking another tangential trip in this already-too-tangential entry, it’s tempting to try each and every new distro, to write a quickie review and reap the substantial boost in traffic that one gets from links in places like Distrowatch.

Truth be told, I’ve exposed my family to Linux quite a bit. When our iBook was awaiting the 3-hour operation to replace its ailing hard drive, I had a laptop set up dual-booting Ubuntu 8.04 and Debian Lenny (before Lenny’s X problem surfaced). My wife prefers Ubuntu, and my daughter prefers Debian, if only because I have her Lenny account set up to quickly access her favorite educational games, which run that much better in Debian (the main difference being that launching TuxPaint through GCompris in Ubuntu results in a lack of the usual sound effects, which return when starting TuxPaint by itself, or starting the program either way in Debian.

And with the Mac’s giant, wonderfully-clear monitor, I can see getting a whole lot of work done on this G4. With its 466 MHz CPU, it’s not as fast as the 1+ GHz machines I seem to have in abundance, but for a hack writer, it’s plenty fast.

And with a drive inside the box set up for and dedicated to backups (something I could do in any i386 desktop box with a case of sufficient capacity), a solid if unsexy distro (Etch), I could get a lot done if I manage not to screw the whole thing up.

(I’m not saying I won’t try again to install OpenBSD and actually get it to boot, but it’ll be on a different drive so I can preserve this Debian goodness. If I can dual-boot both systems, I will, but it doesn’t look good at present.)

All that means is that I won’t be dist-upgrading this Mac anytime soon from Etch to Lenny, even if the latter actually goes Stable, as scheduled, some time this month. I might try a cautious test of Lenny on a separate hard drive, or I might hold onto Etch with my cold, dying fingers until the last possible moment.

But like many, it only takes a little promise of something better to change my mind. If Gnash would play Flash video with any kind of consistency, I’d jump this box to Lenny in a second. If Gnash gets that good, will somebody let me know?

The Debian Mac: Does boosting memory from 128 MB to 384 MB make a difference?

The answer is yes: Tripling the memory on a Power Macintosh G4/466 running Debian Etch makes a dramatic difference in the responsiveness of the system.

It makes the system way, way more usable, cutting down on swapping tremendously and boosting free memory, also tremendously, when doing normal desktop tasks.