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Ubuntu should let new users who click on a restricted-media file know that there is indeed a way to play said file, even if they haven't yet opened up their repositories to non-free software. The way the 8.04 LTS edition is set up, it seems you must KNOW you need a restricted driver — and indeed must know what a driver, a repository, the fact that MP3 is an non-free, hostile-to-open-source media format and what a restricted driver or codec is — before the system will prompt you to install one. Only giving helpful information to people who really don't need it is just not ... helpful. Ubuntu, by the very nature of its mission, popularity and target audience (new users of free, open-source software), must be held to a different, higher standard. Educate users by all means, but don't hobble their machines and drive them away before they've even gotten their FOSS feet wet.

I'll keep this quick. I followed the advice of Nathan from OpenBSD101 and replaced my upgraded OpenBSD 4.5 installation with an entirely new, reinstalled system. That took all of 10 minutes. I followed the advice of my friend Denny and was able to keep my /home partition intact. And all seemed well when I booted back into my shiny, new OpenBSD 4.5 desktop.

After planning for weeks to take my main production laptop from OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, I sweated through the upgrade only to lose what was perfect X compatibility and subsequently pull the "kill switch," which in this case was transferring everything in my freshly rsync'd backup to my identical Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, a system I've been running for quite awhile on this and another laptop — and which has thus far proven itself to be stable enough for the pounding I give these machines in my daily work.

I decided to start using Soft Updates on my FFS partitions in OpenBSD. I'm still running version 4.4 of the Unix-like OS (and am still waiting for my CDs to arrive and for time to figure out how to do the upgrade to 4.5). According to the OpenBSD FAQ, using soft updates on a Unix-style Fast File System improves disk performance.

Look at what I have running in Xfce 4.4 on my OpenBSD 4.4 laptop. Do you think I should stop some of the Xfce services I have in my panels? There are maybe seven or eight in there that use about 10 MB of RAM each. On this 768 MB system, should I be giving up 70 MB of RAM to panel apps in Xfce?

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. The speed of Xubuntu was covered in last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about. In the latest Distrowatch, we learn how to strip down the distro and run "minimal" Xubuntu.

Photo gallery: This CNet CWD-854 USB Wi-Fi adapter cost only $22.40 at Amazon.com, and is automatically detected in both the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux and OpenBSD 4.4 operating systems — no small feat for those looking for compatible Wi-Fi adapters for FOSS OSes.

Once I filled up a few screens complaining about how LogMeIn failed me in OpenBSD, I was too far along to report how I feel about Ubuntu 8.04 after not booting into it for almost a month, during which time I used a nearly identical Toshiba laptop running OpenBSD 4.4, lately using the Xfce desktop environment.

I booted the Toshiba 1100-S101 with Ubuntu 8.04 for the first time in 25 days, according to the Update Manager. Or at least it was 25 days since I updated the install. Either way, I've been running a nearly carbon copy of this laptop with OpenBSD 4.4, lately with the Xfce 4.4 desktop environment, and I'd gotten quite used to it. But last night, here I am, 10 p.m., working at home, and I discover that LogMeIn — the service that makes it easy to control an XP box from (allegedly) any other box in any other OS with a Web browser — just doesn't like OpenBSD.

Scrolling through this week's Distrowatch, I came across an interesting new distribution in the "waiting list" of projects that will eventually be tracked by Distrowatch, should they survive long enough to get through the waiting list. Lin-X aims to follow the Ubuntu distribution on which it's based but look as much like Apple's OS X as possible. While I'm a user of OS X as well as Ubuntu (and Windows and OpenBSD ...) and do like many things about the OS X user interface — the chief of which is the ability to keep an application running but NOT have a window of that application open at the time if I choose not to — I'm not one of those people who think OS X has it all over GNOME, KDE or even Windows XP.

I've done this sort of thing before, but luckily somebody else is comparing the Xfce environments of Debian Lenny and Xubuntu/Ubuntu. Results are not surprising and are in line with what I found over a year ago when I did a major comparison of everything from Xubuntu and Debian to Slackware and gOS, as well as Wolvix and standard Ubuntu. Back then, Slackware and Debian with Xfce were indeed very, very fast systems. And while I didn't test them at the time, I expect ZenWalk and Vector with Xfce to perform as well or better.

For the first time, I decided to purchase the OpenBSD CD set to both support the project and make it easier for me to upgrade my two OpenBSD laptops and install the OS on some new boxes. I've had been using OpenBSD off and on since version 4.2, but only in the past five or so months has OpenBSD 4.4 been my main operating system on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

While Googling for information on encrypting filesystems for something I'm working on, I came across many a good Ubuntu blog — yep, there's lots out there for the Ubuntu user who wants to figure things out. One blog that looked really good, despite an awful name, is I' Been to Ubuntu.

In OpenBSD, Flash support isn't exactly something to crow about. Flash Player 7 is all that works due to subsequent Linux Flash players needing ALSA sound support, a feature none of the BSD projects possess. And that player only works in the Opera Web browser — and only on i386. But it turns out that you can watch Flash video in OpenBSD on any platform that runs Mplayer. And this clever hack is something that even Linux, Windows and Mac users can benefit from.

Now that I've pretty much got my Xfce 4.4 desktop where I want it in OpenBSD, I've been spending more and more time not in Xfce but in the Fvwm2 window manager that's the default for this OS.

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav Bodner writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

If you’ve read anything about Windows 7 Starter Edition, your first reaction was probably the same as mine: Is Microsoft nuts? This ultra-cheap edition is intended for use on netbooks, but its biggest restriction sounds like a complete deal-breaker: it only runs three applications at once.

[It's like they're giving the market to Linux — Steven R.]

For the last six months, I've pretty much stuck with the same OSes on the same machines. There are two reasons for this: 1) I've found stuff that works. 2) see 1) OK, that's one reason, but it sure feels better as two.

When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1. I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows quite a bit, and I finally began running it in Mac OS now that I finally upgraded the iBook to OS X 10.4. But until now I stuck with FF2 on this OpenBSD laptop. I finally decided to make the leap from FF2 to FF3.

As with most things in OpenBSD, adding Xfce to the operating system isn't as easy as it is in Debian, Ubuntu or many other Linux distros. There is no "meta package" in OpenBSD for Xfce. I believe that with GNOME and KDE, it's possible to add one or two packages from the OpenBSD repository that call in most of what you need for the desktop environment. To install Xfce, however, you must use pkg_add to bring down more than asome three dozen individual Xfce packages.