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I'm more than a little excited about Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, the price of which has dropped to $249 for the basic Ubuntu Linux/512 MB RAM/8 GB solid-state drive model. I had the pleasure of trying this very-small but quite usable netbook at the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group booth at the recent SCALE 7x show, and I was quite impressed with it.

While my OpenBSD laptop slowly compiles Java (or not ...), I had to pull out the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop (both have identical hardware, Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and quickly slam out a couple hours' work late last night (yes, on the night shift, which I finished at home ... at 1 a.m. through the magic of Wi-Fi and caffeine).

If you want Java in OpenBSD, it's not easy to get it. Not impossible, but definitely not easy. First of all, it's a port, not a package, and due to Sun's licensing restrictions for Java, when you run the build on the port, you are instructed to, on your own, fetch nine files (some source, some binary) from a variety of locations and place those files in /usr/ports/distfiles.

My main laptop has been running OpenBSD 4.4 for a few months now, and that laptop has pretty much become my main PC for getting things done both at home and at the office. And I've been quite happy with the stability and performance of the operating system as well as the applications I've installed from packages and ports. My anxiety comes from upgrading. OpenBSD is on a six-month upgrade cycle. Version 4.5 will be out in May. While I've been using OpenBSD off and on since 4.2, I've only done one upgrade, from 4.2 to 4.3, and while it wasn't the most painful experience, neither was it as easy as firing up Synaptic or running apt-get update apt-get upgrade in Debian. Not by a long shot.

I spent the past few days installing Solaris 9 on the Sparc 20. (I got the OS super-cheap — $1 plus shipping — from eBay, unopened in the box). Solaris is quite a bit different from OpenBSD and Linux. I'm still getting the hang of it. A lot of the trouble I'm having is due to my near-total unfamiliarity with it. I do have "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Solaris 9," which I found remaindered at Fry's for a few bucks, and it's a good resource. It's somewhat short — not "complete," but for the "complete idiot," which I am in this regard.

The free Linux operating system doesn't reveal its charms easily, but charms it has. You just have to know how to make the software work for you. That will become easier next weekend for those in the Los Angeles area, which plays host to the annual Southern California Linux Expo at the LAX Westin hotel.

While Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved. But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

The fact that Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client has no built-in way to export the whole of a user's mail from one installation to another is as close to a fatal flaw as can be for a class of application — the stand-alone mail client — as can be.

I haven't written a long, rambling editorial on why I do what I do in quite some time. Guess I lost the juice for it. But I just got rejuiced (perhaps it's my upcoming speaking engagement, for which I'll sound less rambling, I hope), so here's a lovely stream of geeky consciousness on why software freedom and/of choice is a great thing.

I've had my $10 Sparcstation 20 sitting on the desk for awhile. I don't have a monitor, mouse or keyboard hooked up, so I've been running it over the serial port, which was surprisingly easy to do, via my Windows box and PuTTY, which provides for connections over SSH on the network or via the serial port. (I've also used Tera Term and Minicom (the latter in Linux), as well as the cu utility in Linux and OpenBSD to facilitate serial connection to this box.)

I've been accessing my main e-mail account via IMAP for years now. With IMAP, the mail stays on the server, and the mail client brings down the headers and then any messages necessary. That way I can go anywhere, use any computer and have access to that mail with another mail program, or use the same mail server's Web interface to check up on my latest messages. My main mail client is Thunderbird. I can't say I'm deliriously happy with it. One reason I use Thunderbird is that it's available for Windows and Unix/Linux, so I can use it in any of the hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions, in any BSD system, on my Windows box at work, and even on Mac OS if I felt like it (I don't).

The European Union's new complaint against Microsoft really takes one back. Like, a decade or so. Its objection--that bundling a browser into the operating system violates antitrust law--is the same one that U.S. regulators raised in 1996. The newest allegations stem from a 2007 complaint by Norway's Opera that Microsoft was hurting competition by including Internet Explorer in Windows and by not better adhering to Web standards.

The OpenBSD 4.4-equipped Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (circa 2002) is cranking along very nicely. Who knew you could squeeze so much computing goodness out of 1.3 GHz of processing power? In 768 MB of RAM, I'm running tons of apps at once. I can run Opera, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, the GIMP, Pidgin and Firefox and still not swap to disk. I don't think that's so unusual, but usual or not, it's pretty nice. In my world, 768 MB is a lot of RAM, and I'm glad to find out that it's more than enough to do my work.

Like I say somewhere in this barfed-out mass of words, I saw my problems with Opera in OpenBSD on my Toshiba laptop as an opportunity to get back to Debian, a distro I truly love. I'm reluctant to say this, but in a small way having the same problems in Debian Lenny that plagued my Gateway on a totally different hunk of hardware kind of breaks my FOSS-loving heart. But I know Ubuntu pretty well. And it installed without incident. Call it the path of least resistance, or another case of "Ubuntu saves the day." Ubuntu's color scheme may be poop-brown, but I'll take an easily configured, working system over the alternative any day.

I took Ric Storms' suggestion to remove the Opera Flash plugin from my OpenBSD 4.4 installation to see if that will keep the Opera Web browser from crashing either itself or the whole of X and leaving between two and four errant processes running in its wake.

I've sung the praises of the Opera Web browser many a time. It's a great deal lighter than Firefox, it renders most Web pages well, and most importantly for me, it enables me to use a critical Web-based application that is designed to only work with Internet Explorer, a browser I try to run as little as possible (and which isn't an option in OpenBSD). In OpenBSD, Opera is run with the Linux compatibility layer, so it's basically a Linux binary when it comes into the system from ports.

A long thread at LXer about whether or not Debian should include unsourced binary blobs in its kernel had some commenters if not exactly singing the praises of totally free GNU/Linux distro gNewSense, then at least humming those praises. The point was that if you really are bugged by blobs in the kernel, you should put your geek-boy money where your mouth is, eschew "compromising" distros such as Debian and Ubuntu, and use the Ubuntu-derived, blob-free, Free Software Foundation-approved gNewSense.

When I first installed OpenBSD 4.4 on my Toshiba 1101-S101 laptop (Celeron 1.3 GHz), I kept the stock 256 MB of RAM. Everything was running so well that I didn't hurry to add RAM. But since I do have spare PC133 SODIMMs, I could've bumped it up to 512 MB, 768 MB or 1 GB.

When I set up an OpenBSD box, I generally use CUPS — the Common Unix Printing System. But during the boot sequence for OpenBSD 4.4, the machine would take a few long minutes to load the CUPS daemon, cupsd, before displaying the login prompt. Fortunately, the fix couldn't be easier.