Another Ubuntu install bites the dust

I always seem to have trouble with Ubuntu. On the $0 Laptop — the Gateway Solo 1450 — there comes a time in every Ubuntu install when the thing either won’t boot or runs so slowly that I have to wipe the thing off the drive and start over.

It could be something particular to this laptop, the hard drive in it, or my constant dual- and triple-booting of Linux and BSD operating systems in a constantly shifting array.

When I use recovery mode to boot Ubuntu 8.04 and see the messages scrolling across the screen, I can see the point where it stalls. Something about ATA 2.01 is pausing for 5 seconds to look for devices. This pause used to be only 5 minutes, but today it appeared to stretch forever.

I had (and have) work to do, so I ctrl-alt-deleted out of there and booted Debian Lenny. I’ll take the annoying screen artifacts problem in Lenny any day over not being able to boot at all in Ubuntu.

The Ubuntu problem began after an aborted installation of FreeBSD about a month ago. And even though I wiped that partition right away and have reformatted it a few times, Ubuntu still stalls during the boot sequence.

Now that I sort of, kind of know how to use rsync to backup my /home files, I need to delete the Ubuntu partition and start again. I have a funny feeling that I’ll still have a problem. It could be the hard drive. I have an old 30 GB Toshiba drive in here that I bought on eBay, and it’s probably not the ideal drive for daily use, it being old and all, but it’s what I’ve got, and I’ve never had a problem before. … Except for these Ubuntu problems (7.04 and 7.10 didn’t fare too well in this respect; I thought that 8.04 would be OK, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case).

Anyway, gotta get back to work, so I’ll be auditioning distros soon enough to see what’s going to work for me. I’m almost at the point of throwing CentOS on the box. I’m worried that I’ll be missing packages and codecs that I need, and I’m nowhere near good enough with RPM repositories and packages to figure it all out. That’s what I count on the people from Debian and Ubuntu for …

I’ve really enjoyed using Ubuntu this go ’round. Everything has worked better than ever … except for this not being able to boot. That’s quite an “except,” don’t you think?

Update: The Ubuntu partition does boot; it just takes a long time.

My latest warning against dual- and triple-booting Linux and BSDs

My advice is to avoid dual-booting, and especially triple-booting (or even more than that).

If you set up a box to dual-boot with two Linux distros, Linux and Windows, or even a BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD) and Linux, and you leave it alone, you’ll probably be OK.

But me, I’m testing things all the time, and lately I’ve been playing around with triple-booting on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. I’ve done this a lot, and I generally know how to do it so I don’t hose one partition or another.

But I slightly hosed something on the laptop last night.

I’ve been playing around with FreeBSD, trying to figure out why it sometimes manages my CPU fan extremely well but usually not at all.

I have FOUR primary partitions on the 30 GB hard drive. The first is Linux swap, the second is Ubuntu 8.04, the third Debian Lenny, and for a long time the fourth was just an empty Linux ext3 partition where I could stash files large and small.

I started throwing new OSes on it about a week or so ago. I had PC-BSD on there, FreeBSD, Debian Etch …

And last night I did another FreeBSD install. Now remember, I had FOUR primary partitions. As far as I know, no BSDs will install on a secondary partition. And in Linux, — again, as far as I know — you can only have four primary partitions. If you want more than that, you need to make one an ‘extended’ partition, and then you can fill that with a much larger number of secondary partitions (I’m not sure of the total number in Linux, but it’s a lot).

When I was installing FreeBSD to the fourth primary partition, I veered from my usual practice of installing it in a single FreeBSD partition and instead let the installer auto-partition the portion of the drive set aside for FreeBSD.

Long story short, I think I screwed something up.

I deleted the screwed-up FreeBSD partition and replaced it with another Linux ext3 partition, but that didn’t seem to “fix” whatever problem it is I’m having.

Debian Lenny boots fine. But Ubuntu 8.04 stalls in the middle. It eventually does boot, but there’s a stall of a few minutes in the boot sequence. I booted in recovery mode to see what was going on, and it does appear to be disk-related, but I’m not quite sure what to do about it. I already deleted the “offending” partition, but maybe I shouldn’t have replaced it (or so quickly before testing the other partitions)?

It’s been over six months since I hosed a whole box, so in the grand scheme of things I’m not doing too badly.

But I should really start following my own advice and stop dual-booting on what, for me at least, amount to “production machines,” which I rely on to get work done.

When experimenting, I need to swap whole drives instead, like I do with my VIA C3-based converted-thin client test box, which has three drives that are easily swapped via power and IDE cables that extend well outside the thin client’s small case.

I didn’t hose things so badly that I either lost files or can’t boot either of the two Linux distros on the box, but I really need to be more careful, especially when mixing BSDs and Linux.

When doing just that, incidentally, I’ve had a lot more success by installing the given BSD FIRST, then throwing Linux on the box after that.

What I think I’m going to do, when it comes to Linux anyway, is to have the first partition be swap, the second partition for the distro itself and the third partition for /home. That way I can theoretically swap in new distros and keep the same /home file (backing that up, of course).

Now I’m going to think of what to install on the Gateway Solo 1450 to single-boot it for awhile.

Fat lady sings, and Opera is officially my new favorite browser (this week anyway)

I know that the Opera Web browser is not a free, open-source application — which I almost always prefer — but the browser itself is a free download for Windows, Mac and in precompiled packages for many flavors of Linux as well as FreeBSD.

Question: Why another Web browser? While Windows and Mac users overwhelmingly use Internet Explorer and Firefox, with a smattering using Apple’s Safari, there’s plenty of room for other entries in the browser space.

I don’t know about you, but I’m in a Web browser about 80 percent to 90 percent of the time, both for the traditional task of looking at Web pages but increasingly to use Web-based software.

And for something so important, choice is key.

Users of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems are used to having lots of browsers to choose from, among them Firefox (and its non-copyrighted Iceweasel offshoot in Debian), Epiphany (the GNOME browser created from Mozilla’s Gecko engine), Konqueror (the KDE browser/file manager from which Apple took code to create Safari), Seamonkey (the Mozilla-created Web suite that’s modeled after the now-dead Netscape Communicator, offering browsing, e-mail and Web design in one application), Dillo (a very lightweight browser), Netsurf (also lightweight), a few more that I’m probably forgetting, plus text-only browsers that include Elinks, Links, Lynx and W3m.

I’d never used Opera before, mostly because of its closed-source status, although I have been “forced” to use Internet Explorer — also closed source (hey, it’s Microsoft — what do any of us expect?), and besides, IE runs only in Windows and not in Linux (without difficulty, meaning use of WINE or a virtual machine) or Apple’s OS X.

And our main Web application insists on IE not for all, but for the most “advanced” operation.

Imagine my surprise a few weeks back when I saw staff artist and Flash guru Jon Gerung using the Opera browser for the very task that usually demands IE.

Since then, I’ve downloaded Opera and have begun using it to work on Dailynews.com — and for everything else, too.

There are a few instances where the CSS drops out, one situation where a link won’t open, but for 99 percent of my work on this task, Opera does it as good as IE, often times better — and always much, much faster.

That’s the best thing about the Opera Web browser — it’s very fast. And that matters a great deal when doing Web-intensive work. You want to wait as little as possible for the software to do its thing so you can … do your thing.

The company that makes Opera — called Opera Software — provides versions for many platforms. It’s a pity you can’t get the source and compile it yourself for Linux/Unix, but the speed and functionality of Opera is too good for me to pass up at the moment.

I’ll still use Firefox — probably a lot — since it’s the go-to browser for just about everybody out there, and I need to use the Web Developer add-on, but there’s no denying that Opera is simply one of the best applications I’ve seen lately.

Can you (easily) update a BSD system between releases? Or am I barking up the wrong (ports) tree?

Note: I originally wrote this post on 2/15/08. Today is 4/24/08. Since that time, I’ve looked into updating in the BSDs a bit further. In FreeBSD, it’s certainly possible to update both ports and packages.

In OpenBSD, the Errata for a give release shows you what needs to be fixed in the base system. The updates are easily available, but they do need to be compiled from source. What the OpenBSD team really wants you to do, it seems, is run the -current release, on which all ports can be updated from source. Sounds like a lot of compiling. Still, I might try it at some point.

Anyway, here is the “original” 2/15/08 entry:

While it’s pretty easy to install software from precompiled packages or from ports in OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD, I’ve hit a bit of a wall when it comes to keeping any of these systems up to date with periodic security and bug patches.

I don’t know if such updates are either not as necessary in the BSDs, even though my Linux boxes have a dozen or so of them every week, or that it’s just to hard to do for the average BSD user.

I see plenty of Web help on how to upgrade from one version of a BSD to another, but I don’t see anything that covers searching for periodically updated packages and updating an installation on, lets say, a weekly basis as security and bug problems arise and are presumably updated in the repositories of packages and ports.

O, BSD users, correct me if I’m wrong — and I do hope that I am wrong. But with apt/Aptitude/Synaptic in Debian-based Linux distributions, rpm/Yum in Red Hat- and Suse-style systems, and upgradepkg (and slapt-get/Gslapt) in Slackware (with security announcements going to the mailing list and the http://www.slackware.com/security page) … need I go on?

The point is that almost all Linux installations are easily upgraded with precompiled binary packages. Gentoo … well, I won’t go there because I know it has its own BSD-like ports system, but I’ve never used it and don’t know how it works.

Again, the point is that all of these Linux distributions have me conditioned to expect — and to install — updates on a regular basis.

But what do I do with BSD? In OpenBSD, for instance, I’ve never even downloaded the ports tree. Everything I’ve installed has been a precompiled binary package for the i386 architecture. It’s very slick, works perfectly … but am I exposing myself to undue risk by running Firefox 2.0.0.6 instead of the newer 2.0.0.12? Is all that extra OpenBSD security for nought if I’m running applications rife with security holes?

I’m being completely serious. Is there something I’m missing here? Since OpenBSD, at least, updates the whole system every six months, am I OK to keep the same packages running until the next release? What does this say about BSD vs. Linux when it comes to security and bugs?

But wait. I did run DesktopBSD for awhile, and I remember that system having a GUI package manager that not only fetched new packages but upgraded those already installed.

So that’s what Matt Olander was talking about when he said that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD were working together to share technology when it came to package management.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t need to do my updates in a GUI app. I’m perfectly OK with using the console. Just being able to do that updating is enough. That is, unless someone out there can convince me that Linux has conditioned me to think I need something that I really don’t.

Those on all sides of this issue, please enlighten me — and quickly.

Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7, OpenBSD and silencing CPU fans

Quick notes because I’ve got time for no more:

Debian Lenny: I hadn’t updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you’ve been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

Preload in Debian: After reading about preload in Linux Journal, I finally installed it. Preload is supposed to monitor what apps you use most and automatically load them into memory, adjusting if your application habits change. Since I tend to run the same apps a lot, and since I have plenty of memory, I’m anxious to see how well preload works.

FreeBSD and the need for speed: FreeBSD 7 is now beginning its life as a stable OS. It’s supposed to be up 15 percent faster than the fastest Linux kernels, up to 350 percent faster than FreeBSD 6x under normal loads, and up to 1,500 percent faster under heavy loads. I’m anxious to see how the hardware recognition performs. So far, I’ve had quite a bit of luck with DesktopBSD 1.6, which is based on FreeBSD 6, and I can only hope for better things with FreeBSD 7, which I plan to test soon.

OpenBSD update: I’ve been having a lot of fun — and learning quite a bit — with OpenBSD. I have the box on the local network, and I’ve been playing around with the ftp server, Apache Web server and with SSH. First I installed the PuTTY ssh client on my Windows XP box so I could connect from the XP box to the OpenBSD box. I could run any console program I wanted, and while it may not be a huge deal to the more experienced of you out there, it’s a huge deal for me.

I wanted to run X over SSH, so I made the appropriate changes in OpenBSD to allow X11 forwarding over SSH. Ahd with the help of my friends over at LXer, I found out about Xming, an X client for Windows.

It took me awhile to figure out that I had to enable X in PuTTY to make it work. Xming runs in the background on the Windows box, and when I open an X program from the PuTTY console:

$ rox &

… A window opens on my XP desktop with the OpenBSD X program in it (which, in the case of the line above, is the Rox-filer). Pretty slick. (The & after the app name makes the process run in the background. I had one snag: I couldn’t run the Dillo browser over SSH until I installed all the X fonts for Xming. There’s a way to just use Xming to enable the SSH session, but that hasn’t worked for me thus far. But since the PuTTY/Xming combination is working, that’s what I’m going with.

I’d like to run a full X session with a full window manager running in a window on my XP box, but besides being slower than running single apps, I get the feeling that such a thing isn’t exactly looked upon lovingly by the hard-core Unix geeks out there.

But being able to run any OpenBSD (or Linux) app on a network-connected box from a Windows-only PC is so totally cool that I should be sated in my dose of geekdom for the next week at least.

The $0 Laptop and its CPU fan discontents: I’ve been working with controlling my Gateway Solo 1450’s CPU fan for months now. In Linux, I’ve had it controlled pretty well with a cron job, and in the case of Puppy a few added kernel modules.

But since then, I’ve come to realize that the cron job, which checked the CPU temperature every five minutes and turned the fan on or off depending on that temperature, is unnecessary.

All you need to do is turn the fan off at boot, and then ACPI will manage it just fine. This revelation comes after considerable work in the console, checking the temperature, running commands, running scripts and generally seeing what happens during the course of a computing session.

So I turned off my cron jobs, and now all I need to do is add the following line to /etc/rc.local:

echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

That turns the fan off. I initially thought that only this line — echo 0 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state — would turn the CPU fan back on, but that is most definitely not the case. Once the fan is turned off with the “echo 3” command (which you can run from the console, just as you can the “echo 0” line), when the CPU gets warm, the fan turns on and then turns off when the CPU cools down.

So that one line added to /etc/rc.local is enough to get ACPI management of the fan working, at least in the Gateway Solo 1450.

Now there’s the matter of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD and this same CPU fan. So far nothing has worked, but I will keep trying.

Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7, OpenBSD and silencing CPU fans

Quick notes because I’ve got time for no more:

Debian Lenny: I hadn’t updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you’ve been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

Preload in Debian: After reading about preload in Linux Journal, I finally installed it. Preload is supposed to monitor what apps you use most and automatically load them into memory, adjusting if your application habits change. Since I tend to run the same apps a lot, and since I have plenty of memory, I’m anxious to see how well preload works.

FreeBSD and the need for speed: FreeBSD 7 is now beginning its life as a stable OS. It’s supposed to be up 15 percent faster than the fastest Linux kernels, up to 350 percent faster than FreeBSD 6x under normal loads, and up to 1,500 percent faster under heavy loads. I’m anxious to see how the hardware recognition performs. So far, I’ve had quite a bit of luck with DesktopBSD 1.6, which is based on FreeBSD 6, and I can only hope for better things with FreeBSD 7, which I plan to test soon.

OpenBSD update: I’ve been having a lot of fun — and learning quite a bit — with OpenBSD. I have the box on the local network, and I’ve been playing around with the ftp server, Apache Web server and with SSH. First I installed the PuTTY ssh client on my Windows XP box so I could connect from the XP box to the OpenBSD box. I could run any console program I wanted, and while it may not be a huge deal to the more experienced of you out there, it’s a huge deal for me.

I wanted to run X over SSH, so I made the appropriate changes in OpenBSD to allow X11 forwarding over SSH. Ahd with the help of my friends over at LXer, I found out about Xming, an X client for Windows.

It took me awhile to figure out that I had to enable X in PuTTY to make it work. Xming runs in the background on the Windows box, and when I open an X program from the PuTTY console:

$ rox &

… A window opens on my XP desktop with the OpenBSD X program in it (which, in the case of the line above, is the Rox-filer). Pretty slick. (The & after the app name makes the process run in the background. I had one snag: I couldn’t run the Dillo browser over SSH until I installed all the X fonts for Xming. There’s a way to just use Xming to enable the SSH session, but that hasn’t worked for me thus far. But since the PuTTY/Xming combination is working, that’s what I’m going with.

I’d like to run a full X session with a full window manager running in a window on my XP box, but besides being slower than running single apps, I get the feeling that such a thing isn’t exactly looked upon lovingly by the hard-core Unix geeks out there.

But being able to run any OpenBSD (or Linux) app on a network-connected box from a Windows-only PC is so totally cool that I should be sated in my dose of geekdom for the next week at least.

The $0 Laptop and its CPU fan discontents: I’ve been working with controlling my Gateway Solo 1450’s CPU fan for months now. In Linux, I’ve had it controlled pretty well with a cron job, and in the case of Puppy a few added kernel modules.

But since then, I’ve come to realize that the cron job, which checked the CPU temperature every five minutes and turned the fan on or off depending on that temperature, is unnecessary.

All you need to do is turn the fan off at boot, and then ACPI will manage it just fine. This revelation comes after considerable work in the console, checking the temperature, running commands, running scripts and generally seeing what happens during the course of a computing session.

So I turned off my cron jobs, and now all I need to do is add the following line to /etc/rc.local:

echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

That turns the fan off. I initially thought that only this line — echo 0 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state — would turn the CPU fan back on, but that is most definitely not the case. Once the fan is turned off with the “echo 3” command (which you can run from the console, just as you can the “echo 0” line), when the CPU gets warm, the fan turns on and then turns off when the CPU cools down.

So that one line added to /etc/rc.local is enough to get ACPI management of the fan working, at least in the Gateway Solo 1450.

Now there’s the matter of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD and this same CPU fan. So far nothing has worked, but I will keep trying.

Strange things happening with my OpenBSD box, but excellent documentation saves the day

I haven’t hooked up my OpenBSD 4.2 drive and booted it for about a week. The last time I left the box, I was playing around with Apache, and I thought all was well.

Today I hook up the drive and boot OpenBSD.

First of all, instead of a console login, I get an XDM login. That’s strange. I don’t remember XDM ever showing up before.

Then Internet networking doesn’t work. I check all the networking settings. Everything is correct.

I can ping IP addresses on the local network, but nothing is working outside of that. Pinging google.com yields nothing. Since I can get local machines, I know it’s not a bad cable.

Back to the OpenBSD FAQ. Instead of doing ifconfig, I check all the files that hold network configuration info. Nothing.

To start networking manually, the FAQ says to do this:

# sh /etc/netstart

An error message comes up. There’s an error of some kind in /etc/rc.conf.

Now I know what happened. To start Apache automatically at boot, a line must be edited in /etc/rc.conf. I was trying it, and I must’ve screwed something up. As root, I edit the file. Sure enough, I had erroneously dropped a linefeed in the middle of the comment line to turn Apache on at boot.

I fixed the line, saved /etc/rc.conf and tried to start networking again from the command line.

It didn’t work.

I rebooted.

This time, I got my usual console login. I started X manually. And Internet networking worked.

I also configured an anonymous FTP server. I had to manually change the permissions of the directory and files to root, but everything worked as advertised.

That’s the strength of OpenBSD, as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD: the documentation is readable, comprehensive and up to date.

Over the past two days, I did a Debian Etch install in order to compare how all of this server configuration goes in Linux as opposed to OpenBSD.

And this is where the lack of documentation (even the man pages aren’t all that up-to-date). At least the apache2 man page for Debian told me about the apache2 command. When httpd and apachectl start did nothing, I was in a bit of a quandary. Luckily I figured out that apache2 start and apache2ctl start would both work. Oh yeah, and the config files aren’t where the Debian man page says they are. Instead of being in /usr/local/apache2/conf, they’re in /etc/apache2.

I did figure out how to change the default directory for Apache in Debian (editing /etc/apache2/sites-available/default does it).

Part of the problem was that I started with Apache version 1.3 in OpenBSD (which doesn’t include Apache 2 for licensing reasons) and had Apache 2.3 in Debian. And sure I don’t know quite what I’m doing, but this is all on a local network, not the wide-open Internet, so I’m a bit more free to experiment.

All this underscores the value of good documentation. And when it comes to some distros — Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse — there are doorstop-thick books available. And the good ones are worth their weight in any precious metal you care to name. Luckily the BSDs have great online FAQs to help get you started. And since integration between the kernel, userland and other packages is so tight in the BSDs, and the need for documentation is that much greater, I’m damn glad it’s there.

Not that Linux doesn’t need something similar, but I don’t see any Linux distribution short of Gentoo providing documentation this comprehensive and finely tuned to its users.

Can anybody prove me wrong? I truly, sincerely hope so.

Strange things happening with my OpenBSD box, but excellent documentation saves the day

I haven’t hooked up my OpenBSD 4.2 drive and booted it for about a week. The last time I left the box, I was playing around with Apache, and I thought all was well.

Today I hook up the drive and boot OpenBSD.

First of all, instead of a console login, I get an XDM login. That’s strange. I don’t remember XDM ever showing up before.

Then Internet networking doesn’t work. I check all the networking settings. Everything is correct.

I can ping IP addresses on the local network, but nothing is working outside of that. Pinging google.com yields nothing. Since I can get local machines, I know it’s not a bad cable.

Back to the OpenBSD FAQ. Instead of doing ifconfig, I check all the files that hold network configuration info. Nothing.

To start networking manually, the FAQ says to do this:

# sh /etc/netstart

An error message comes up. There’s an error of some kind in /etc/rc.conf.

Now I know what happened. To start Apache automatically at boot, a line must be edited in /etc/rc.conf. I was trying it, and I must’ve screwed something up. As root, I edit the file. Sure enough, I had erroneously dropped a linefeed in the middle of the comment line to turn Apache on at boot.

I fixed the line, saved /etc/rc.conf and tried to start networking again from the command line.

It didn’t work.

I rebooted.

This time, I got my usual console login. I started X manually. And Internet networking worked.

I also configured an anonymous FTP server. I had to manually change the permissions of the directory and files to root, but everything worked as advertised.

That’s the strength of OpenBSD, as well as FreeBSD and NetBSD: the documentation is readable, comprehensive and up to date.

Over the past two days, I did a Debian Etch install in order to compare how all of this server configuration goes in Linux as opposed to OpenBSD.

And this is where the lack of documentation (even the man pages aren’t all that up-to-date). At least the apache2 man page for Debian told me about the apache2 command. When httpd and apachectl start did nothing, I was in a bit of a quandary. Luckily I figured out that apache2 start and apache2ctl start would both work. Oh yeah, and the config files aren’t where the Debian man page says they are. Instead of being in /usr/local/apache2/conf, they’re in /etc/apache2.

I did figure out how to change the default directory for Apache in Debian (editing /etc/apache2/sites-available/default does it).

Part of the problem was that I started with Apache version 1.3 in OpenBSD (which doesn’t include Apache 2 for licensing reasons) and had Apache 2.3 in Debian. And sure I don’t know quite what I’m doing, but this is all on a local network, not the wide-open Internet, so I’m a bit more free to experiment.

All this underscores the value of good documentation. And when it comes to some distros — Ubuntu, Red Hat and Suse — there are doorstop-thick books available. And the good ones are worth their weight in any precious metal you care to name. Luckily the BSDs have great online FAQs to help get you started. And since integration between the kernel, userland and other packages is so tight in the BSDs, and the need for documentation is that much greater, I’m damn glad it’s there.

Not that Linux doesn’t need something similar, but I don’t see any Linux distribution short of Gentoo providing documentation this comprehensive and finely tuned to its users.

Can anybody prove me wrong? I truly, sincerely hope so.

DesktopBSD’s brief, shining moment

I’ve been shuttling CDs in and out of my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, just seeing what works and how well.

I’ve also been fiddling around with the BIOS settings, trying to get the CPU fan under control in both Linux and the various BSDs. A select few Linux kernels do this automatically … most don’t. I can control the fan with a cron job, but I’ve never, ever been able to do this with any version of BSD.

Until today. For some reason, I ran DesktopBSD 1.6 as a live CD, and the fan fell silent, turning on at various intervals, then off.

Like it’s supposed to do.

I rebooted.

It worked again.

A couple of boots later, it stopped working. I changed nothing between boots. It could’ve had something to do with going from Debian Lenny to DesktopBSD …

So while ACPI fan control is possible with FreeBSD — upon which DesktopBSD is based — I’ve got nothing in the bag. And it may never work again.

I tried PC-BSD 1.4 and FreeBSD 6.3 (just booting, not installing) … and the fan roared as always. I thought I could control it from a console, but that didn’t work.

But for two brief, shining moments, I had a FreeBSD-based system running with CPU fan management working perfectly.

If only it would happen again.

Foresight, hindsight, Debian, BSD, Linux books … and the 5 a.m. problem

I’ve taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I’m so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I’m not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I’ll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD.

During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates. Debian Lenny is moving along very quickly. I’m ready to put an Etch install alongside it for comparison’s sake during the wait for Ubuntu 8.04 … which is two months at this writing.

The best text editor for the job: The other day, I needed to do some work at home, and I wasn’t having a great time with the Gedit text editor in Lenny. I somehow thought that Gedit had a way to change the case of words, but the Lenny version (Gedit 2.20.4) didn’t seem to have it. Was I imagining it, or did the Gedit in Ubuntu 7.10 have this feature? (See below for the answer.)

Anyhow, I need a better editor … so I went into Synaptic and installed three: Geany, Bluefish and Scite. I’m going to try them all out. So far I can’t seem to change the case of letters automatically in Bluefish, but there are so many features that can help with Web development that it’s probably worth using. But for the level of work I’m doing, I’m relying on Geany the most at the moment. I haven’t used Scite much, but I do plan to give it a try soon.

But … GEdit does have the ability to change the case of words/letters. Under Edit — Preferences — Plugins, there’s a Change Case plugin. I enabled it, and now I can change case via the menu with Edit — Change Case. I prefer to use the keyboard to do this … so I’ll probably keep the other editors in contention.

Foresight Linux: The Foresight Linux booth at SCALE 6X was fairly busy. I could barely get near it during the show, and since I didn’t really put 2 and 2 together and remember that Foresight is dedicated to presenting the latest in the GNOME desktop environment, I didn’t linger. But I do want to give Foresight a try. It has separate install and live images, so I downloaded the live CD image and am m going to see what it’s like.

I’ll be your server: I’ve never set up a server, and all this work with OpenBSD makes me want to roll one myself. I’m going to try to do one on the local network with NFS, Samba, FTP and Apache. I’ll probably try in OpenBSD and Debian as well as Damn Small Linux.

Two excellent Linux books: Since I’m not made of money, I got both of these from the library. The “Linux Administration Handbook, “ by by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein and an army of more recent contributiors, is a hefty tome that’s long on advice, Unix/Linux history and what people like to call “best practices.”

While much of the book is flying right over my head, and I don’t think you could really administer a system without a secondary reference that’s specific to the Linux distribution you’re using, this is a very valuable book that every serious Linux user should have. Especially when it comes to servers, there’s a lot of information here.

“Linux Administration Handbook” is heavy on the philosophy of how to set up and maintain a system, and amid a sea of distro-specific how-tos that expire with every six-month release, that’s a good thing to have. Still, what books like “Linux Administration Handbook” make evident is that at one level, most Linux systems are more alike than they are different, and the skills you develop using one distribution are very much transferable to the others. However, there are pointers everywhere in the book to specific instructions for Red Hat/Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu and Suse.

And if you want to see how professional sysadmins (or at least the good ones) go about their work, this is the book to get. It can’t be the only book on your Linux shelf, but “Linux Administration Handbook” pairs very well with a doorstop-sized distro-specific how-to (like the “Unleashed” series of books, or Mark Sobell’s “Practical” guide series) to help you get a handle on making Linux work for you.

The other book I got from the library, “Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills,” by Roderick W. Smith, is a great book for anyone who wants to figure out how Linux works from the command line. The book doesn’t assume a vast knowledge of Linux or Unix. It offers many tips, instructions, and again, “best practices” on how to configure and manage a Linux system. This book is also not distro-specific; instead, it’s one of the best command-line-centered books I’ve seen when it comes to basic system administration.

I don’t know how good “Linux Administrator Street Smarts: A Real-World Guide to Linux Certification Skills,” in helping you get actual “certification skills,” but it will definitely help with the basics of setting up and maintaining a server or desktop.

Smith’s style is clear and concise — a rarity in these kind of books, which often leave me more confused than not. I definitely recommend taking a look at this “Street Smarts” volume.

So I had two winners here. I would probably buy both of these books, but that said, I still turn to Carla Schroder’s “Linux Cookbook,” which I’d love to see updated, and Michael Stutz’s same-name-but-different “Linux Cookbook,” which could use an update even more.

If I was in a buying mood, I’d get a more recent O’Reilly book, “Linux System Administration,” by Tom Adelstein and Bill Lubanovic, and I really like Chris Negus’ new “Toolbox” series of distro-specific books. They’re fairly cheap and filled with good, timely tips, emphasis on the “timely” part. If only all of these great books were updated every couple of years instead of five years … or never.

Click frequency: The “publish every day at 5 a.m.” thing hasn’t been working out so well of late. I just haven’t had all that much time to do entries in advance, but I have had an entry every day … just not prewritten to publish at 5 a.m.

One man’s FreeBSD: I admire this guy, William Denton, for chronicling eight years of personal use of FreeBSD.

Debian … ah, Debian: In case it’s not evident, I still really enjoy using Debian. While I’m a great believer in the slimmed-down application mix in the default install of Ubuntu (which is based on Debian) — with less indeed being more, on many levels I’ve had a whole lot more success with Debian.

I’ve done the default GNOME install of Debian, the Xfce and KDE installs, a “standard” install to which I’ve added X, and a few “standard” installs that were console-only. The flexibility of Debian is legendary, as is its stability and usability.

Some of my hardware has been supported better by Ubuntu at times, but I keep coming back to Debian. I’d love for Debian Lenny to support the Alps touchpad as well as Ubuntu Gutsy does. I’m hoping it’ll happen before Lenny is frozen, and I will be trying Ubuntu Hardy when it comes out, but I’d love for Linux in general to get everything right for my Gateway laptop.

But since fan management has gotten worse, not better, over the past six months in the Linux kernels I’ve used, I’m only cautiously optimistic.