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FreeBSD 7.3-release has a two-year support life with the option to upgrade to the FreeBSD 8.x branch at any time. More than one -release branch going at the same time? More than one -stable branch, plus a -current branch in constant development? FreeBSD has a whole lot of flexibility depending on what you want out of the system, what your comfort level is with bleeding-edge software, how often you want to update your software, and of course what your hardware and tasks require.

I've been running FreeBSD for more than a week now - first 8.0-release, now 7.3-release (with packages for some reason coming from 7-stable), and as the title of this post says, it's going very well. I started with the idea that I'd run the full GNOME desktop with all the apps I used in Debian, and I pretty much have that setup.

Not only have I been able to crash FreeBSD 7.3-release with GNOME by trying to automount FAT partitions on USB-connected drives, but those crashes rendered both the FAT partitions and the ext3 partitions that otherwise could be mounted automatically on those drives, for lack of a better word, unmountable.

I've had a little time to think about it, and I realized that it's not yet time to give up on FreeBSD 7.3. I'm not in any way saying I'll be sticking with it long-term. But I think I should spend some more time running it before I end the test.

In my ongoing quest to bring the latest news about Xorg and its hatred of the Intel 830m chipset that I have on three laptops, today I'm running a long filesystem check in gParted on the Parted Magic 4.9 live CD.

The Debian Live project has released live DVD images for Squeeze Alpha 1. The images are all 1 GB + (except for the Rescue and Standard versions), so that's a bit of a change from the Lenny era. One thing that's very notable: There are PowerPC images this time.

I began the day listening to Dru Lavigne's BSD talk at SCALE. That same day I installed FreeBSD 8.0-release, which I've been running since last week.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid from a daily build yet couldn't boot into my fresh new desktop because I needed to add nomodeset to the grub2 boot line and didn't know how to do that because there was no boot screen visible.

I put a lot of stock on the ability to do an in-place upgrade of my Linux/Unix desktops. And regarding upgrades from one distribution to another, Debian is supposedly one of the best. You always hear about those hard-core geeks who have been running the same box since Potato, dist-upgrading all the way to whatever the current stable or testing distribution is at any given moment.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up. Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

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

In addition to his first e-mail to me, David Gurvich adds more about his experiences with Intel i830m video in Linux and PC-BSD/FreeBSD: I did think the problems with FreeBSD were due to using PC-BSD and installing a lightweight desktop on top. After testing with a bare install that turns out to not be the case and the issue is with FreeBSD and has nothing to do with the scripts that PC-BSD uses.

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

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my stable of laptops that use Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3? There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail. Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

I'm not the type to run alpha software. Even beta is too cutting-edge for me. I'm a bit better about release candidates, but I tend to wait for the official release (or preferably a few months after that) before I put something into my production flow. Not so these days. I'm planning ahead to see where I'm going with my personal machines in the next few years, and I've been looking at the near futures of both Debian and Ubuntu.

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication. I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux.

Attention developers: This "improvement" you call kernel mode setting is pretty much a regression for users of my particular video chip, the Intel 830m, and could be equally useless for other Intel video hardware. Do you think that maybe figuring out why kernel mode setting doesn't work in these cases is the thing to do? And how about dropping in some code that automatically turns off kernel mode setting on hardware that doesn't like it until you deal with this show-stopping bug?

Remember this little guy, the orangish icon that appears in your upper GNOME panel in Debian Lenny when you have software updates? Ubuntu has a similar yet different icon. Or had it, I guess. Now that the Ubuntu Project decided to completely change the way users are notified of software updates, opening an update window either in the foreground or background at some point during the week the update is released, the cheery orange (or whatever color it used to be in Ubuntu) icon doesn't get much play.

I looked back in the blog, and I began running Debian Lenny as my main desktop distribution just about two months ago. Debian is snappy, as it has always been for me, even with GNOME. I don't even see any performance issues due to using fully encrypted LVM. And with that encryption on my laptop, any anxiety over it being lost or stolen is gone. The machine's worth nothing, and the data on it can't be accessed without the passphrase. I've got unencrypted backups in different locations, so I'm covered for any issues with the laptop disappearing, being destroyed or having some kind of disk issue.

Sure I've tried Wine before. But never successfully. I took the plunge recently, forking over $20 for the Bordeaux GUI front-end for Wine, the non-emulator that allows users of Linux (and Solaris and FreeBSD) to run Windows applications on their Unix-like computers. I decided to use Bordeaux because its developers (or developer singular ... I'm not sure) promised that IrfanView 4.25 — the best image editor on any platform for my particular needs — would run with it. And I saw plenty of Wine users have trouble with Irfanview. Codeweavers, who I'd rather deal with than Bordeaux, doesn't make any promises in regard to Irfanview. Bordeaux does.