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Things in my personal world of Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 are starting to work themselves out, but it hasn't exactly been a smooth ride on my main laptop. If you read to the bottom, you'll find that the hacky-as-hell solution to a bug that has plagued my own desktop is followed by my thoughts (not all good) on what exactly Canonical was thinking about when deciding what goes into a long-term-support release.

After slogging through Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04 for the morning, not the most satisfying experience on my 1.2 GHz Celeron system, I decided to run Tiny Core 2.11 in the afternoon. I added Firefox 3.6, Geany, gFTP, Pidgin, MtPaint, and I was ready to go. Compared to a "real" distribution like Ubuntu, Tiny Core has way fewer processes running on its much-more minimalist desktop, yet the way the apps sit in a doc at the bottom of the screen is very Macintosh OS X-like. Except here I have multiple desktops, many dozens of apps that can be installed by Tiny Core's package manager ... and I'm running a system that's as efficient as any I can remember.

Having successfully bricked not one but two Linux/Unix installations in the same month (Debian Lenny-to-Squeeze and FreeBSD 7.3-release), I jumped on the Ubuntu Lucid bandwagon early — starting with one of the alpha releases. Over the course of the waning days of the alpha, through the beta and now a couple weeks into the release, I've had a few issues to deal with, needing to tweak grub2, Ubuntu One, Gwibber, Totem and various GNOME settings. But things have settled in a bit, and I'm productive and generally enjoying using the distribution and all that comes with it.

Ubuntu was famous for being brown, even though it was probably half-orange for most of its storied existence. Mark Shuttleworth and Co. mostly blew that notion out of the water in Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS), which is purplish and dark. I'm pretty simple about these things, so I looked at what came with the Lucid install and ditched the default Ambiance theme in favor of Radiance. I also dumped the purple wallpaper by clicking on the Background tab and selecting the Cosmos slide-show background, which not only presents a nice outer-space view but periodically changes the image (hence the "slide-show" portion of the name).

I've tried many different things in the hope of solving my Gwibber/Me Menu/Social bar problem in Ubuntu Lucid. That problem, for those not reading along (you're the better for it, I assure you) is that for some reason even after I start Gwibber and send a social-broadcast message (to Twitter in my case), the "social bar" in the upper panel's Me Menu does not appear. Here's how I finally "fixed" my Gwibber/Me Menu situation.

Kernel mode setting hasn't been "fixed" for older Intel video, but at least the kernel knows not to turn it on when you're running an i915-type chipset (of which i810 is seemingly a subset). This is how things should have been handled from the beginning. Better late than never. This remains huge for Linux — and for Ubuntu. Why? Because the potential new user with affected Intel chipsets can now grab a live CD, start up Ubuntu and actually have it work. They won't be stopped and immediately turned off by a totally black screen.

I spent plenty of time running Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and other small live distros during my "early" days (2007-08) with free, open-source operating systems. In the past couple of years I've settled into the routine of using "big" OSes, meaning full-fledged distros/projects installed to the hard drive in the traditional way — you know, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I've been thinking about getting back to the small projects for some time. Today I burned a Slitaz disc. Couldn't get X to start. (And no, none of the vga=xxx boot codes would help.) So I turned to Tiny Core Linux.

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects). But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager. What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

Here's the bug I filed in Launchpad for the misbehaving Me Menu in Ubuntu Lucid: Social bar in Me Menu only shows up when I add an account to Gwibber, the next day it doesn't appear (The Me Menu Bugs — Bug #576688)

Performance on my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop has been fairly consistent lately. I'm not sure whether or not my change in "swappiness" from the default of 60 to the supposedly desktop-friendly 10 has made any difference in actual speediness, but seeing swapping go from 9 MB per session down to nothing did make me feel better. And it's all about feeling better (or at least eliminating potential [if not real] causes of desktop sludginess).

Now that the Ubuntu One cloud-storage service can sync any directory in the system instead of just things in a Ubuntu One folder, I have been anxious to start using it to sync my files to the cloud for availability not just on any other Ubuntu machines I might set up but also via the Web interface (and hopefully in other OSes, Linux and not, in the future). So I tried to get Ubuntu One going in this newish 10.04 installation. No go. I logged in, but nothing would sync. Perhaps my "situation" is unusual (but there are enough Ubuntu users that it could be more common than I think).

My particular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation is not suffering from the Xorg memory leak. So what's my increased use of swap all about? I don't know if it's beneficial or not to have so much swapping going on, but a couple of readers have told me that Ubuntu's "swappiness" is set to a level of 60, which is optimal for servers. Desktops run better with lower "swappiness," and 10 is the suggested level. All of this "swappiness" information is available in the Ubuntu community's Swap FAQ.

Between all that's been happening in the weeks before the release of Ubuntu's third long-term-support release and what's happening in my own computing oeuvre (hey, if you can throw in an obscure French word every once in a while, why not just do that?) I think schizophrenia (hello, LatinGreek) is my personal order of, if not the day then this Debian-FreeBSD-Ubuntu month.

A commenter just wondered if my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid system's increasing use of swap was due to the known memory leak in X on the soon-to-be-released distro. Could be. After 5 hours 30 minutes of uptime, htop shows 9 MB of swap is being used — or at any rate "reserved." Remember, I have 1 GB of RAM on this Intel video-equipped laptop.

OK, so I had a not-so-great night running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx — in release-candidate stage at this writing — and wondered what exactly made things so sluggish during a 2+ hour production session hacking away at Dailynews.com. Was it Firefox 3.6.x swallowing CPU and memory? All the social-networking and cloud-integration stuff running in the background? Xorg issues (which come and go with every kernel and Xorg update)? At this point I really don't know.

I'm no kernel hacker. Hell, I'm no regular hacker. I don't know exactly (or even slightly) how they do it, but after a crash while testing suspend/resume in the 2.6.32.21 kernel while running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid — still in beta as of this writing — I rebooted and got that little "something crashed" icon in my upper panel. It asked me if I wanted to file a bug report, and I did. Whatever the Ubuntu developers have going that enabled me to file this bug automatically with a whole mess of attachments that detail the here and now of my system, I am pretty much in awe.

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists. But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware. Pretty darn well.

I turned on my laptop running the Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid beta (I think we're still technically on "beta 2") and found more than 100 updates ready for me. When I rebooted, I noticed that the button order on application windows changed — again.

I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. I needed to get the laptop back into usable shape, and I did that by installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS beta 2. While trying to do an update on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation, well into the third day of the system building everything from source, I stopped that upgrade and tried to do one from packages only. Nope, it didn't work.

The FreeBSD Handbook appeared cryptic on how exactly to update packages and ports. I'm sure the answer is in there, but I just couldn't find it. However, I do have Dru Lavigne's new book, "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD," and I'm following her instructions on pages 247-251 on how to use csup and portupgrade to update both packages and ports on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation.