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As the majority of BSD/Linux users, I use X.org for my X Window System.  I have a preference to edit my own xorg.conf to ensure that X runs properly on any of my system.  To this date, I have never failed to get X configured.  It is actually not that difficult.  Today, distros such as Debian Lenny, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Sabayon, to name a few, can automatically create a working xorg.conf for users during installs.  With the distros like Gentoo and Arch Linux, users are required to configure their own xorg.conf.  Regardless of the configuration type you choose, you are eventually going to have to choose whether you want to use a propriety driver or open source driver.  This can be a nightmare in itself if you are not careful.

Regardless of which distro I use, I have a preference to start out with the open source drivers.  vesa is a common open source driver that I tend to start out with.  It ends to work with most video cards.  On my desktop, I have an Nvidia card so I decided to use the nv open source driver.  Both vesa and nv work on my desktop.

I decided to try the nvidia driver on my Arch Linux desktop.  Arch has a good wiki to get nvidia with 3D rendering to work. I got it to work and was quite happy, for about a month at least.  So what happened?

The nvidia drivers, like it’s propriety counterpart, ati, have a tendency to break.  For some computer users, it breaks a lot.  With Gentoo, I never install the latest nvidia drivers.  It breaks X forcing me to either revert to an older driver or switch to nv or vesa.  With Arch, an update to the Gnome desktop broke X with the cause attributed to my nvidia driver.  In Ubuntu, yes Ubuntu systems do break, an update to the kernel caused X to break as well.  In PC-BSD, I was forced to rebuild X.Org.  In all cases, I was either using the nvidia or ati propriety drivers.

When X broke earlier this week on my Arch system, I first had to find out what was the culprit (I mentioned above that I upgraded my Gnome desktop).  X was working but I was getting a low resolution with the nvidia drivers.  It did not matter if I set the Modes to reflect the resolution of my monitor, the lower resolution remained default.

Finally I decided to switch to vesa and the higher resolution (1440X900) returned.  I made some more configurations to xorg.conf and I got the open source nvidia drivers, nv, to work at the higher resolution as well.  The nvidia driver still do not work.  No problem, I will not use them on my desktop again, I will stick to open source drivers which, from my experience, have never broke on me.  Save the headache, stick with nv

I am eagerly waiting for an open source graphics card.  There is one available but the price is quite expensive, $1500 US, higher than many custom-built desktops!  Prices should drop in the future though.

Edit: This is a blog posting, not a news article, Beginner Howto, etc.  The above posting mentioned that I preferred to use open source drivers on my DESKTOP, it does not mention that I use them on my other laptops and systems.  I am also not denying anyone’s RIGHT to use propriety drivers, I use them as well.

See my latest blog posting and response to ‘Two New Software Freedoms’.

Well, I have been running Ubuntu on my desktop for over a month.  In that short period of time, I found that Ubuntu is just not for me.  I love it on my Thinkpad, do not get me wrong but on my desktop, I need something different.

I miss not having to edit something, really.  I even stopped developing on my desktop.  Weird since many developers gave up Gentoo or other distros so they could have a stable system.

Isn’t is strange that I could get a server to run on Gentoo, Arch, or FreeBSD, but not on Ubuntu.  Seriously, this is not right.  Ubuntu is supposed to make things easier for me.  That’s what all the Ubuntu users tell me.

To be honest, I got a lot of things done when I was running Gentoo and FreeBSD systems.  Arch Linux opened up a new world to me as well though I preferred to do things the Gentoo/BSD way.  If it wasn’t for that bad battery in my motherboard, I would probably still be running either PC-BSD or Gentoo now.

Right now I need a stable system to get Django to run properly.  For me, that means doing it with Gentoo, possibly with FreeBSD.

Will I give up on Ubuntu, no way.  As I mentioned many times, Ubuntu is the choice of users in Vietnam. I still need to use it but if I want to go back to my geek roots, I got to use Gentoo again.

I am not a distro hopper, I am just a Gentoo ‘jump back and forth-er’

Using Gentoo Linux, you have to get used to things just breaking, especially in the last couple of years. Portage is probably one of the best package management systems in the open source community. I have been quite impressed with Portage 2 the last couple months. Things seem to be improving.

Yesterday I woke up to check some email. Later I needed to do some web development for an NGO. I booted up and by the time I got to the graphical login screen, I noticed that I had a problem with my screen resolution.

I checked xorg.conf but there was nothing wrong with it. I kept restarting X only to get a very low resolution screen. Everything worked fine. I experienced this problem before with Sabayon Linux and an earlier version of Gentoo. No configuration files were changed in the last couple of days. I had not emerged and updated newer versions of nvidia-drivers, xorg, or KDE.

Sadly, the same thing happened back in 2005 which forced me to switch to Kubuntu. Yesterday I really needed a stable desktop to do my work. It was my fault, I should not have used Gentoo in a work environment.

Since I did not have the whole day to figure out what my problem was, I decided to back everything up on my Linux Mint Thinkpad. Back in came PC-BSD on my desktop. Within 10 minutes, I had a working FreeBSD desktop. Now I am using portmanager to update my PC-BSD system.

I still consider Gentoo one of the best Linux distros ever. It brought me to Linux but in the last couple of years, Gentoo users have watched developers, after developers leave in large numbers. Packages are no longer maintained and updated in a timely manner. Gentoo is no longer bleeding edge. It is no longer suited for the desktop.

Instead I will focus on using Gentoo more as a server. I will stick with PC-BSD and Linux Mint as my choice for desktop distros.

Amazingly, PC-BSD is the only distro out there that can detect my Intel hda sound card and play sound on all 5 speakers. VirtualBox will be ported to FreeBSD soon as well. Things are looking good for PC-BSD.

Edit: Seems that Compiz-Fusion was the culprit here.  I am not a fan of Compiz so I just needed to remove it and everything worked fine.

PC-BSD 1.5 is now available for download on the Vietnam BSD/Linux Mirror.

From the website:

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD version 1.5! This release includes many new features and fixes, including the following:

• • NEW System Updater tool - Keeps system & PBIs up to date - Allows override variables, so that admins can use their own mirrors / servers to roll out updates to users.
  • NEW sound detection program! Uses XML backend to identify and load modules
  • NEW amd64 build of 1.5, including PBIs that are on our auto-build server
  • NEW PBI icon preview library, now a PBI file shows the embedded icon on your desktop, not the generic “PBI” format icon
  • Xorg 7.3
  • KDE 3.5.8
  • FreeBSD 6.3 Release

PC-BSD 1.5 can be downloaded from the Vietnam BSD/Linux Mirror at the following URIs:

• ftp://ftp.indochinalinux.com/pcBSD/1.5/
• ftp://202.78.230.5/pcBSD/1.5/

Cross-posted at: http://www.saigonlinux.org/?p=26

Wow, I should never gone to class Friday. My fever returned in the afternoon so I canceled my other engagements and headed home. I ended up taking some medicine and slept most of Friday evening. Got some really good sleep too but now it is nearly 2 AM in the morning and I am quite awake.

A lone cricket is making a lot of noise downstairs. I thought it was Ally, the littlest kitten, crying on the terrace so I let her in. When I brought her downstairs, I realized it was a cricket. Crickets normally do not make it out this far from District 1.

Now I am on my custom desktop updating it to FreeBSD 7.0 which was released earlier this week. I am using the freebsdupdate(8) application to update from FreeBSD 6.3 to 7.0. Currently, I am recompiling all the ports with portmanager so they will link to the new 7.0 libraries. It should take most of the night and tomorrow morning to recompile my whole system.

Maybe I will get some more sleep tonight, maybe not. That cricket is sure loud.

FreeBSD Ports for Vietnamese BSD users can be found at the following URL:

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/vietnamese.html

These Ports will work with DesktopBSD and PC-BSD systems.

Cross-posted from the: Saigon Linux Group

Thanks David O’Brien for the link

My Linux roots actually started back at Indiana University (Bloomington) where I was a graduate student with the School and Environmental Affairs in September, 2002. One of my majors was in Information Systems and I was lucky enough to take a Vector-based GIS course where our instructor, Craig Wayson, introduced all of us to Unix. I remember that day very well because one of the first questions he asked us was if anyone ever used Linux. Nobody did, and to be quite honest, I had no idea what Linux was.

I was never a happy Window’s user being a longtime Commodore Amiga 500 guy (I used my Amiga until August, 1996). I had to use Windows 95 when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan because they had no other operating systems in town. When I returned to the States in 1999, I just stuck to using Windows. Plus, being a graduate student at Indiana University, I could easily buy Window’s software on the cheap (Windows XP Professional only cost me $5 US). When Craig mentioned about Linux was similar to the Sun Solaris OS we were using in class, I decided to give Linux a try.

By mid-September, I had installed Red Hat Linux 7.3 on my custom Pentium 3 desktop. It did not impress me due more to my ignorance of Linux and RPMs then with Red Hat. Yeah it was nice to SSH to one of Unix boxes at the GIS lab so I could run ArcGIS but after the class ended, I lost interest. Red Hat Linux 8.0 did not switch me. I tried SUSE Linux but I could not install it. Finally I settled for Red Hat Linux 9.0.

In April, 2003, the Linux guys from UITS at Indiana University were promoting Gentoo Linux at the 2003 Linuxfest. I remembered it very well, first they spent one hour showing students how to install Red Hat Linux. After the session ended,most of the students left and a new, more geeky, crowd arrived. I just remembered them saying that it was now time to show off a Linux distribution for the power Linux user which of course was Gentoo.

UITS gave a great presentation of Gentoo and I can see why they were one of the first ones to host a Gentoo Mirror in the US. They kept telling us that installed Gentoo for the first time was not easy. They even demonstrated a Stage 3 install, which at that time, was not easy. I just remembered that I wanted to try Gentoo when I got the chance.

It was actually quite funny on how I started to use Gentoo. By September, 2003, I had moved back to Seattle. I was still impressed by Gentoo so I decided to order a LiveCD. At that time, Daniel Robbins, the creator of Gentoo, still mailed the LiveCDs from his house with a very detailed installation guide.

I decided to install Gentoo over my Red Hat Linux partition on my Dell Inspiron 8100 notebook which I dual booted with Windows XP. The first time I installed Gentoo, I failed. Even worse, I thought I lost the Windows XP partition because I could no longer access it with bootloader. I had no choice but to try a second attempt at installing Gentoo. This time I was successful (the previous attempt I accidentally skipped a line which meant that GRUB had not installed correctly). I installed XFree86 but it looked funny so I thought I installed it wrong. Thanks to the local LUG guys, found out that XFree86 always looks, well, flaky when you install it. I wish I had known because by that time, I made a third, and now, successful install of Gentoo.

Once I got Gentoo installed, I emerged and compiled KDE from Portage. Then I emerged Quantas Plus, an open source web development tool, that glued me to Linux. The performance of Gentoo was on my notebook was noticeable. By the end of September, the Gentoo users had helped me compile the 2.6 kernel, still in development, for my notebook which further improved performance. I had finally converted to Linux doing things the “Gentoo Way”.

I brought my Gentoo notebook when I moved to Vietnam back in May, 2004. I installed Gentoo on my custom built AMD64 desktop in April, 2005. About six months later, I was migrating my AMD64 desktop to modular x.org when things started breaking. Since I had no time to fix x.org, I decided to install Kubuntu which I had earlier installed on an Opteron server for my previous employer making myself one of the first Ubuntu users in Vietnam.

I kept my eyes on the Gentoo community but the excitement of this distro seemed to be waning, even among devote Gentoo users. Still, I wanted to return back to Gentoo since it was really the only distro I knew how to use. By March, 2006, I found myself running openSUSE Linux on my beloved Thinkpad T60. openSUSE got me interested in Linux again but as my friend told me, I kept doing things the Gentoo way. While manually compile your own kernel when Yast can do it for you. I ran SLED for about a couple months thinking a stable system would be good. Wrong, I broke it within a couple weeks upgrading it. After awhile, there was really no difference between my SLED install and openSUSE 10.2.

Last September I tried Sabayon, an Italian flavor of Gentoo. It was awesome! I still did things the Gentoo way which, well, does not go well with a stable minded distribution. By mid-October, openSUSE 10.3 was back on my Thinkpad T60. It would suffice but within a month, I was not happy with Yast again though things seem to work.

Last December I started to test DesktopBSD and PC-BSD, two different flavors of FreeBSD. When I started using Ports, I was impressed. Portage is a great copy of the Ports package management system. I decided to install PC-BSD on my custom desktop since I see a lot of potential with PBI. After using PC-BSD for over a month now, I wish I had tried FreeBSD earlier. I really love BSD!

Since I am now compiling with PC-BSD again, I started to get the urge to try Gentoo again. It is amazing at how similar Gentoo and FreeBSD is (Daniel Robbins was a FreeBSD developer before creating Gentoo so you can see FreeBSD’s influence). I was exhausted when I tried to install Gentoo last month and I ended up trying Debian Etch for a week (a really great distro). Finally, after being well rested, I made another, rather easy, attempt at installing Gentoo on my Thinkpad again. I did it!

As usual, wow, I am so amazed at the difference Gentoo has made in the last couple of years. I know back in September, I was unsure about the future of Gentoo Linux. The Gentoo Community is currently facing some problems. We would like Daniel Robbins to take a more active role, if at all possible. If not, well, Gentoo will survive. Portage 2.0 is will definitely put itself at the top of the Linux package management systems. PlusGentoo has many more innovations, one being their Gentoo/FreeBSD Project.

Gentoo/FreeBSD

Gentoo meets FreeBSD, wow, what a combination! I have never taken part in any Linux projects before but I think this particular one might actually interest me.

Another challenge which I can do the Gentoo way

Sorry guys for bailing out on Maxim’s last night. I have two projects due tomorrow morning and another one to complete hopefully before Tet. I have been burning the midnight oil the last couple of days.

Last night I actually had 4 computers going at the same time.  On my 6-year old Dell Inspiron 8100 notebook (bottom-left in below photo), I just installed CentOS 5.  As the night went on, I installed PostreSQL, Sun JDK, Tomcat, Apache Ant and openBravo ERP on the notebook through secure shell from my PC-BSD desktop.

I was running KTorrent on my openSUSE Thinkpad T60 (left of LCD monitor in photo).  I like to watch the latest Gundam anime cartoons from Japan whenever I can.

As I was waiting for openBravo to download, I decided to flash the latest version of OS2007 to my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet and got Apache and SSH running in it as well.  Now I can have my students save their projects on my tiny N800.  No need to carry a laptop on my motorbike anymore.
Everything openBravo finished downloading at around 2 AM (slow bandwidth last night).  I also completed the template for the new Saigon Linux Group website.

I finally crashed by 3 AM and fell asleep.

(Four working BSD/Linux systems at my computer desk)

Yesterday I decided to give PC-BSD a try in my classroom. It was probably not the best day to try out PC-BSD since the electricity kept cutting off. My students were struggling to SSH from PCLinuxOS to my laptop, which was running PC-BSD, as a result.

The goal of the class was for my students to create their own website templates on my laptop (makes it easier for me to grade their projects from my laptop ). Most of them were successful though all preferred doing their projects in Linux, that is what they told me. The bash shell in PCLinuxOS, according to them, was easier since it told them which directory they were in. In short, they got used to seeing $ /usr/home/guest/Desktop in PCLinuxOS while in PC-BSD, they only saw $. pwd I kept telling them

Today, I moved everything over to my openSUSE laptop. Got to have a little more fun with my students.

(PC-BSD on the overhead so my students can “visually” see that they added their folders)

Fifty-five of my students can use PCLinuxOS, openSUSE Linux and PC-BSD now,  three of them can use OSX, and one of them likes Ubuntu.  Several really want me to use Sabayon Linux in class.

Well, about one and a half hours ago, I finally got my customized desktop running. PC-BSD is now installed and I am currently fetching and updating Ports on my desktop.

Before I could install PC-BSD, I had to figure out why my desktop would not reboot Friday night. Checking online, I found out that there were many complaints with the new Asus Intel G35 (P5K-VM) Motherboard. Saturday morning, I decided to replace it with a Gigabyte Intel P35 (P35-D3P) Motherboard. In the evening, it took me about 30 minutes to reassemble my desktop with the new motherboard. I hooked everything up and turned on the power. Only thing that worked were the system fan and CPU fan. I do not know how many times I took the motherboard and accessories apart. Finally today, after I decided to test each memory stick, I found out why my desktop would not power up, or reboot, correctly. One of my 1GB DDR2 memory sticks was defective. Arghh!!!

Well, I pulled it out, and within 5 minutes, got a fully running desktop, for the first time. Tomorrow I will replace the defective memory stick with a new one. May even possibly pick up a 19 inch LCD as well.

Anyway, I am happy that PC-BSD installed on my new desktop with no problem. I am having some problems with sound but that will be easy to resolve.  I justed add snd_hda_load=”YES” to /boot./loader.conf, rebooted, and presto, got sound again (This works for FreeBSD and DesktopBSD as well).

Many of you will probably here Tony and I talk more about PC-BSD in the near future. Due to my Gentoo Linux roots, I am a big fan of FreeBSD which PC-BSD is based on. Read up on PC-BSD to see Linux’s direct competitor

(My customized PC-BSD Desktop)

(Fetching and Updating Ports with crappy ViewSonic monitor)