Ubuntu 10.04 - Running before release, maybe schizophrenia is part of the deal

At the writing of this entry, the official release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS - official nickname "Lucid Lynx" (am I the only person who's tired of software releases getting not-so-clever names?) - is a mere three days away.

I've been running Lucid (look, I used the nickname, so maybe there's something to it) for at least a couple weeks now. A couple nights ago I did the heavy version of what for me can be termed "production," which means Web production with a few local apps but mostly interacting with our content-management system via the Web, specifically via the Firefox Web browser, which this CMS deems to be the only one besides Internet Explorer and (for reasons unknown to normal people) Safari - you know, that browser that runs OK in Apple's OS X but like sludgy crap in Windows (taking after all other Apple software ported to Windows, in case you were wondering, although I know you're not yet am telling you anyway).

So I'm running Firefox and "little" apps like the Geany text editor and gthumb photo viewer/editor, and on Saturday night (yeah, my hot Saturday night included production of the massive Sunday L.A. Life section and its Summer Film Preview) Firefox was halting big-time. I'm not convinced that it was the Javascript slowdown that regularly plagues me when running FF in Windows (and which can be solved by quitting FF and then starting it again).

In Ubuntu, I type in this Movable Type window and fairly regularly the screen needs a few seconds to catch up with my typing. When pages render, I need to wait more than a couple of seconds for things on that page to be clickable.

By the end of that night, the top utility showed that I was tapping about 2 MB of swap on my machine (1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 1 GB RAM). It's not that I don't expect to use swap (even though I pretty much don't). Every once in awhile while running GNOME in Debian Lenny the system would grab a little bit of swap. I don't think I ever used swap in OpenBSD 4.4 running Xfce with 768 MB of RAM - and that's kind of my benchmark for such things.

FreeBSD 7.3 with GNOME grabbed a little swap, but the GNOME environment in that system was super-fast at all times. Sure Totem didn't work and Web-browser-delivered video was less than optimal ... and I didn't know enough not to totally screw up the system with an ill-wrought software update, but the speed I became accustomed to running GNOME in Debian was there in FreeBSD.

I want the same thing in Ubuntu. Yes, I know there is more going on in Ubuntu's modified GNOME desktop. All that database stuff to run the cloud connectivity, the backgrounded Gwibber for social networking - don't get me wrong, I really like where Ubuntu is going and how it's differentiating itself not just from Debian and other Linux distributions but how its desktop is attempting to offer features and package itself as a value-added alternative to Windows and OS X.

My question is, can my hardware handle it?

That is a very open question. What's great about the world of free, open-source operating systems is that if Ubuntu doesn't work for this particular machine and this particular set of tasks, I have many dozen alternatives.

As I said in this blog's previous entry, I'm planning now to stick with Ubuntu 10.04 for at least another month. And while I'm continually seeing the signs of imminent death my sole remaining Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (I had two, but now only enough working parts to keep one in service), while it's still among the working, I will consider the following configurations to make my work more pleasant:

OpenBSD/Debian dual boot
FreeBSD/Debian dual boot
Debian
Debian/Ubuntu dual boot
OpenBSD with Puppy live CD
FreeBSD with Puppy live CD
Slackware
ZenWalk
OpenBSD/Wolvix dual boot
Puppy live CD with Ubuntu
Ubuntu with alternate desktops (I already have Fvwm, Fvwm Crystal and Fluxbox on this 10.04 installation)

I'm only working with 20 GB of hard-disk space at the moment, and the wonderful design of this Toshiba laptop makes it damn hard to swap out the drive, so a dual-boot is a bit cramped since I do have some actual data on here as well.

Looking forward, however, I'm not so much giving up on this hardware as it's giving up in general, as I alluded to above.

Regular readers (oh, you lucky few) know that this Toshiba does have a working CMOS battery but has a dead internal sound module which has been replaced by an el-cheapo USB external sound device. The power inverter for the LCD screen went bad, and I pulled the part from the other Toshiba laptop and swapped it into this laptop. Now the "good" inverter is starting to fail - I need to press the lid-closing switch at times to turn on the screen's backlight, especially before that inverter "warms up" (it does get very warm).

I'm looking at new computers - either laptop or desktop because I might want a desktop in our crap-packed home office instead of another failure-prone laptop, especially one that costs more than this one, which ran me a big fat $0 when I pulled it from a stack headed to the e-waste bin.

That's where Ubuntu comes in. I'm already trying to do more in the cloud. Instead of POP-ing my e-mail into Thunderbird, I'm routing it through Gmail, which has been a success so far. I'm using Google Calendar instead of the Lightning extension for Thunderbird (although I might try syncing them if I can figure it out). I've always used Google Docs a bit, and while it's less than ideal for writing code (no syntax highlighting, you have to download from Google before you can upload via FTP), the fact that I can get my files from any computer is huge.

Part of this Ubuntu-delivered hugeness that I haven't yet explored in 10.04 is Ubuntu One, the cloud-based storage system that finally does the one thing I needed it to do before using it - allowing any directory or combination of directories on the local system to be synced, not just a designated Ubuntu One directory - or in the case of Dropbox, the single directory/folder that allows synchronization with that multiplatform file-sharing service.

That means with Ubuntu One I can have any number of synced directories that will look the same on any number of Ubuntu-running machines. So in addition to (or maybe instead of) Google Docs, I'll have my local files synced and available from multiple desktops.

That is if my stable of machines can all run Ubuntu - and if my slowdown/memory issues are either solved or "become manageable."

So 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 [and thanks gus3 for the classical clarification]) is my personal order of, if not the day then this Debian-FreeBSD-Ubuntu month.