Mint 5 / Ubuntu 8.10 / IBM X30 dump and stir

Mint 5 and 6 have failed me on two different system installs. Very un-Linux-like these days. The first time is my office Dell 745: Neither Mint 5 or Mint 6 will install there. The second time was just Mint 6 and my former IBM X30 laptop: Again, will not install. In both cases it appears that the default graphics mode, as well as the safe mode, just will not work on the computers graphics hardware. Mint is fully spun down to the hard drive, but X just won't work.

In the case of the Dell 745, Ubuntu 8.04 (The basis of Mint 5) and Ubuntu 8.10 (Mint 6's underpinnings) both installed just fine on the 745. That Ubuntu would install and Mint would not is proof that even though Mint is based on Ubuntu, it is *not* Ubuntu. Normally this is not a problem: I have generally preferred Mints defaults for theme and default application selection, and use of whichever driver is needed to make the hardware work. Since Mint 5, I have been running Ubuntu on the office Dell 745. Oddly, Mint 6 works just fine... and in fact, spectacularly well on my Dell D620 laptop.

Ubuntu 8.10 would not install on my IBM X30. Same symptoms. Looks like it is installed, just X will not work.

Backing up a second: I was running Mint 5 on the IBM X30. I decided to give the X30 to my brother for Xmas, and that meant a complete rebuild. Mint 6 would not install: Same behavior as Mint 6 on the Dell 745. It boots, I pick to run the Live CD and then it spins for a bit, and never displays another thing. Same thing in safe graphics mode. Ubuntu 8.10 does the same thing on the X30 though. Ubuntu has a mode Mint deletes where I can just install rather than running the LiveCD. I did this, but the same blank screen appears after the install. The graphics mode is shot. I boot to single user and look, and the xorg.conf file is essentially blank. Just a few empty stanzas.

If this were going to stay my computer, I would have hacked the file and seen if I could get it to work, My brother is not a computer guy: I need to give him a computer that just works. He has a Mint 5 desktop system I built for him a while back, and that has just worked. The laptop needs to be the same.

I decided to try something, and jumping ahead, it worked. I re-installed Mint 5 (more or less Ubuntu 8.04) and got that running easily on the X30. Then, using Synaptic I installed the Ubuntu software updater. Mint has a nifty software updater, designed to create stable systems by only recommending for install software packages that the Mint community has tested. I was going way off that farm. The Ubuntu software updater has a distro update mode.

My working theory was that if I updated to Ubuntu 8.10 on an already configured system that it would use the previous settings and all would be well. Firing up the Ubuntu software update, it did in fact offer to take the system from what it thought was 8.04 to 8.10. I accepted, and it downloaded and installed 1800 software packages. I now had the look and feel and apps of Mint 5, laid over the top of Ubuntu 8.10, not its "native" 8.04.

The system booted and went into X without issue. I updated and installed various software packages like HFS and Macutils so that his laptop would be compatible with his wife's iBook. Used to be a joint laptop, but with the X30, she gets full ownership of the iBook I think. That was part of the idea of the gift: have then be able to both use a laptop at the same time.

I rebooted the X30 a few more times, just to be sure everything stayed put. The boot sequence is unlike Mint or Ubuntu: Looks like part of the bootsplashes are mixed up. I actually like the it better this way, as it gives some details about what it is doing without being too verbose.

There is some very very slight weirdness in the way that the screen is drawn. Maybe a compositing thing with Compiz. Sometimes it appears the X server forgets to turn on or off certain pixels in text. It is not horrible. Just slightly annoying. I am actiually kind of amazed that the Compiz stuff works, and rather quickly, on hardware this old. Vista would be frozen solid trying to use such an "ancient" (in computer years) video system. I thought about just taking it back to Mint 5 and being done with it, but I really wanted everything as updated as I can get it. It will be a long time before this computer gets another update. I decided to leave it as it was.

We had an early Xmas with that corner of the clan. He seemed thrilled with the new toy: It met the definition of a good gift I think: Unlike me, who buys computers all the time, computers are just not something he would buy, even though he uses every one I ever built for him. I included in the X30 package not just the X30 but an extended battery, an Atheros 802.11G PCMCIA card, a dual USB 2.0 port PCMCIA card, since the default USB ports are 1.1, and the 'blade' so that he can have a CDROM should he need it.

The USB 2.0 card came in especially handy, and Linux immediately knew what to do with the card. No driver muss or fuss.

Turns out my brother got a digital camera for Xmas too. An electronic Xmas! First challenge of the Mintish X30 was transferring pictures from the camera to the laptop via the USB 2.0 card. I had not anticipated that camera (but I guess I should have: Who uses film anymore?) but it was easy to have Synaptic grab F-Spot, and then pictures were then transferred easily. It appeared there was a bug in F-Spot: It was set to put the photos in a directory called "Pictures" but it kept putting then in the home directory. I did not have a chance to look into this one yet. I did verify it does the same thing on my Acer Aspire One running Mint 6 though.

Tags: Linux, Linux Laptop, Mint, Mint 5, Mint 6, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu 8.10, IBM X30.

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Mint 5.0 at Home

I recently posted over at TalkBMC about the latest revision of Mint Linux, 5.0 Beta. As usual, when I post things to TalkBMC about Linux I am focused on Enterprise desktop or Enterprise server applications. I said there, in essence that it was hard to believe that this even was a Beta, since it was so stable. At the time I had used it about 24 hours, but as of this writing that has stretched into several days and nothing I wrote there has really changed. Still fast. Still solid. Still beautiful.

Saturday night we decided to stay in. I have been on the road in Boston and Austin for the last two weeks and sitting at home seemed a special treat. It also was a chance to do something I had not been able to for a while: Play with Linux at home. I have had my Apple Macbook with me as my primary computer for weeks now, other than the time I had been able to squeeze in on Mint on my office Dell D620.

I looked over the candidate computers at the house, looking for new place to test out Mint at home. My Acer 5610, of which I have written quite a bit here, is dead now. It stopped having a working trackpad, I took it apart, decided it was not going to be worth messing with, and piled it all in a bag for now. What I do not need is another desktop computer, and a laptop with a broken trackpad is a desktop as far as I can see.

The XO-1 will be getting a new, Fedora based Linux install on it shortly, whenever a small group of XO-1 owners near here next get together. Anne Gentle has the latest and greatest and is ready to get us all in sync. Besides, I am pretty sure the XO-1 would take some serious tweaking to get Ubuntu / Mint going on, and none of what Mint brings to the party is really what the XO-1 is about. Its not about MS WIndows either, but that is another story...

My IBM X30 was running Ubuntu 8.04, and my Dell C400 had Fedora 7. Fedora 9 just released, but I'll not be looking at it for use as a home version of Linux, due to the fact the Redhat has decided that Linux desktops are probably better left to Ubuntu. If you have no idea what I am talking about there, it is a long story, but the ending is that RedHat has decided that consumer desktop computing is not where they want to be right now.

Fedora is not exactly equal to RedHat by any means, but their distro is much harder to get going on home hardware like laptops due to not including any closed source anything, and so many of the wireless cards in laptops still require closed source drivers / firmware.

I needed a laptop for Mint, Fedora 7's old home base was elected. But this led to another problem. The Dell C400 I have I built out of parts, and I never have had a CD for it. It is too old to be able to boot off its USB 1.0 ports with my USB CD drive attached: The BIOS just does not support it. This required pressing into service my IBM X30, and doing something you just can not do with MS Windows.

I took the 80 GB Samsung PATA harddrive out of the C400, and installed it into the IBM X30. I then booted the Mint 5.0 LiveCD, and watched Mint come to life.

The IBM gets its wireless from a D-link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card, since IBM only allows their own 802.11 cards into the mini-PCI slot (#&^$^$*). ALL these stupid 802.11G cards I have laying around here from old laptops and I can't use any of then in the IBM without having to either hack the cards internal ID, or the IBM modified BIOS. And for what? the cards are perfectly good cards. grumble grumble. I digress.

Here is where something weird happened. The wireless card was dead while the LiveCD was running. I have never seen that before. It works under Ubuntu 8.04, and Mint 5 is based off that. What in the world is up there? Maybe this really is a beta....

Whatever: I don't need it to work here. The IBM is just the hard drive host mother. Clicking the install, I go through the standard seven dialog panels, and as usual, answer panel 4 with the pull down rather than the time zone map, which I find useless. I manually set up the disks as well, since I want '/' and '/home' in different partitions.

It takes about twenty minutes for the CD to load up the code to the hard drive, and prompt me to say that it is ready for a reboot. This was about twice what it took on the Dell D620 at the office, and it is purely a sign of how much I/O wait there is in an older CD unit, such as what I have in the IBM. 24x CD rather than 4X DVD. Makes a huge difference.

Now, instead of a reboot, I turned off the X30, and I pulled out the Samsung hard drive, replacing the Hitachi 40GB unit with Ubuntu installed on it, and place the host mother aside. The Samsung goes back into the Dell C400, and boots.

Here is the trick no MS Windows computer can do without all sorts of special stuff, like running Sysprep to get it back to a blank state. Linux does not care that the IBM and the Dell are different computers, with different chipsets, and different wireless cards. The Dell TruMobile 1150 MiniPCI card is correctly configured and finds the WAP in the house without issue.

Even though the '/home' I am using came from Fedora 7 and this is now Mint 5.0 Beta, the desktop is just like it used to look. It migrated to Ubuntu with only a minor issue. I had the gnome hardware sensors applet installed in Fedora, and Ubuntu did not put it in by default. No problem. Synaptic can re-install that.

First I fired up MintUpdate and had it bring down 45 updates. This took less than 3 minutes. Then it found another small set it wanted: Maybe 15 or 20 more: I didn't look. This went in taking less than a minute. I set MintUpdates preferences to show me unsafe updates, but not to automatically select them. A few more updates show up, but nothing that looks like anything I need bad enough right now: an Xorg update to the Intel video driver being the main one of interest.

Exiting Mintupdate, I fired up Synaptic from 'System/Administration' and loaded up the things I usually do. GkrellM, HFSPlus, Avahi, Macutils, hardware sensors and hddtemp: Stuff that tells me how the computer is doing, or lets me work with data exchange via HFS formatted USB disks. Not having MS Windows to deal with, all my data exchange is done on HFS right now. When the Mac and Linux support ZFS, I'll go there next. I know that HFS is not the worlds best File System. It is better than VFAT though.

Nothing of a kernel nature came down, so no reboot required. I exited my userid to restart X and then started to play around with the fully configured Mint 5.0 Beta.

My first point of curiosity had to do with video compositing. MS Windows Vista is a total pig here, needing all sorts of special video hardware to work. My Ubuntu and Mint experience had been that Linux with Compiz requires substantially less hardware: the D620 laptop at the office ran composited video extremely quickly with an Intel video chipset not known for its speed. The C400 is much older, and much much slower. It has the Intel 82830M Graphics controller, a 1.2 Ghz processor rather than two 2.0 Ghz processors, and 1Gb RAM rather than the d620'S 2gb. Its harddrive is PATA rather than SATA, and the C400 is a laptop optimized for power savings and portability, not speed.

I turned on Compiz (System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects), and set it to the custom settings that were pre-existing on the computer: I assume they came with Mint. The computer is slightly slower on screen paints, but not so slow as to be unusable. Not even close. I could use 'System / Preferences / Advanced Desktop Effects Settings' (installed by default now! I used to have to go get that off the CD!) to tweak out a few more effects and go even faster if I wanted. For now my major curiosity has been satisfied: Even on old, minimal hardware, the new video compositing engine of Linux, Compiz, runs rings around MS Windows. I could not even install Vista on this C400 if I wanted to.

Firefox RC1 shipped today, so I imagine it will hit the Mint repositories pretty quickly. Clement Lefebvre, Mint 5.0 guiding light, wrote in his blog the he was keeping on eye of FireFox RC1, and had hoped it would be in the Beta. I had hoped it would too: FireFox 3.0 is a huge improvement over 2.x when it comes to things like memory footprint, memory leakage, etc. Very important on a smallish system like this C400.

One important test of the laptop is how well it web surfs, and so I went to watch Keith Olbermann's special comment a few dozen more times:



I turned on and off Compiz, and tweaked the settings, but the little laptop just can't quite hit the full framerate of the MSNBC video player. Still, it was pretty impressive that no matter whether Compiz was on or off, or at minimal effects or the slightly more I tend to use, the frame rate stayed the same. Compiz was not in the way of the video framerate. The minimal hardware overall was.

When Mint 5.0 GA's, I think I'll be making a trip back to Austin to do an ungrade on my brothers computer. He has not called me even once about Mint 4.0, so it is not giving him any problems. But 5.0 is even better, although I had beeter be sure Google Earth works first: That is his "Killer App"

Update: Suspend / Resume: I forgot to mention here that I had tested the Suspend and Resume functionality. My benchmark for Suspend / Resume is the Apple MacBook Pro.

The default for "Cover Closed' at 'System / Preferences / Power Management" is to blank the screen. I changed that to "suspend" on both the D620 and the C400. Both suspend in about 5 or 6 seconds and the D620 takes about that to resume. The C400 take a little longer, maybe 8-10 seconds. Not as fast as the Apple, but still amazingly good, and a huge improvement over what came before it.

have also tested the hibernate function on Ubuntu 8.04 and the IBM X30. That works as well, but takes more like 30 or so seconds, since it is writing its state to the disk and powering completely down. Power up looks like a normal boot except that at one point it freezes for a bit while it realizes that there is hibernation data, restores than, and then suddenly you are back to where you were. Hibernation appears to have no advantages in terms of boot time over a complete normal power up, other than it saves where you were, which can be handy from time to time.

Upgrades to Mint 4.0 Home Linux Desktop

I recently updated my Mint 4.0 office machine to have dual monitors, which I noted in my post called "Two Heads" over at TalkBMC. I have to say is turning out to be a huge time saver for all sorts of things. The other day I was looking at the wide spreadsheet while on a conference call, and was able to see the whole thing at once, and not have it be ultra-tiny fonts I could not read. There is no substitute for resolution and square inches!

That experience made me feel pretty good about the prospects for success of a weekend project at my brothers house. He wanted four things:

1. A new video card so Google Earth would work better

2. His old email back from his old hard drive and Thunderbird

3. A new printer for school work

4. A scanner

I had an Epson 1240 scanner I was going to give him, since I knew it worked well on Linux.

Video Card

Like the upgrade at BMC I went with a GeForce chipset-ed unit. The video card we selected came from the going out of business sale at CompUSA, and had the nVidia 5700 chipset on it. It pretty much had to work, since CompUSA would not be there to return it to.

We pulled out the old, cheap, and feeble video card, and inserted the new AGP unit in its slot. A quick reboot, and it was clear that all was well so far. Screen was there and at the old resolution: I think the cheapo card had been driven by the generic VESA driver and this one was OK with that. I fired up Envy, and it did its thing, downloading the same pile of packages it had on my work system. When it was done, I rebooted, and was greeted with the oddest looking screen: The center of the desktop. No amount of jacking with the resolution or position buttons would return the far right or far left of the screen. I added a Gnome menu to the center of the task bar, and went into the nVidia setup utility to figure this out, and it appears that it was incorrectly detecting the Compaq P900 monitor as being wide screen, 1600 x 1050 or thereabouts. I forced it into 1280 x 1024, and exited X and re-logged in.

It went back to wide screen. It overrode my override!. Doh.

I thought about hand editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to force the resolution in, but pondered for a second to be sure there was not some not some easier way I was overlooking. Then a light went on. I went into the Mint / Ubuntu provided 'preferences / screen resolution' and overrode it there instead, and that took. Then I remembered that at work I had to run the nVidia setup widget *as Root* if I wanted stuff to stick. /usr/bin/nvidia-settings is the location of that widget, for future reference.

Google Earth was now as smooth as silk. One down.

ThunderBird

As was suggested to a comment here to my "Repairo" post, the problem of the missing email was in the dot file. It was not quite what was suggested, but it was close. It was very simple:

• Old Ubuntu based 7.04 Thunderbird put email in ".thunderbird" hidden file

• New Mint 4.0 (therefore Ubuntu 7.10 based) system put Thunderbird email in ".mozilla-thunderbird"

I do feel silly to have missed that! I moved the new file out of the way (mv .mozilla-thunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird.new), then moved the old file to the new name (mvthunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird).

Mail now back where it belongs. Easy. And of special note: *recovered from an otherwise failed hard drive!*. I love Linux.

I do not know if it was Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 that changes the name of the dot file, or if Mint versioned it to be different.

Printer / Scanner

I start this part with an "Opps", as in "Opps I forgot to bring the scanner with me."

While we were at CompUSA with all the other vultures (that is what it felt like), we looked at printers. My son pointed out an HP F4180 Multifunction Printer / Scanner / Copier. It was nearly twenty USD less expensive as CompUSA corporate carrion than its regular already reasonable price. We talked about it for a sec, and went with it.

First off, I usually only buy printers from Epson and HP. Their Linux support is always terrific. Lexmark, as much as I love their keyboards, is a non-starter because they are very bad on Linux, and by extension, Dells printers are off my list, since they are LexMarks. Brother says it has Linux support, but I have just never tried it to be able to say. Getting a printer from a soon not-to-be company was not the time to be trying new things like that.

My default is always Epson. Six colors, color stable ink, separate color cartridges for each color so I only replace the color I am using, and so forth. HP has color stable ink, in some models, and at a premium price. Most of the HP consumer grade stuff is three colors in a single cartridge plus a separate black cartridge.

The big advantage of HP printers: They put the heads in the cartridges, making them easy to refill. If the head clogs up, you just have to replace the cartridge. With Epson, the cost of fixing the heads means that you might as well replace the printer. Still, I have two Epson R380's at the house and like them well. They work on both Linux and the Macs. In fact, the central printer server at my house is an iMac. But I digress.

The HP F4180 plugged in to the Mint 4.0 computer, turned on, appeared in the printer setup menu, configured, and printed all without issue. I clicked on the "Share this Printer" option in the printer setup menu, and then went to my brothers iBook, and set up the printer over there as well, so that now he has a printer for both of his computers.

I installed the Sane stuff with Synaptic, and the scanner checked out just fine as well. Both Xsane and GIMP were able to scan things and save or edit them. Now my forgetting the Epson 1240 was moot.

CD Writer

The CD writer inside the case had failed, and we were using an external, USB attached, generic CD Writer to do that work. My brother wanted to simplify the desk though. Fewer wires laying about. Most of these external USB CD writers are really internal PATA CD drives in a special case, with a special power supply and USB to PATA converter in them. I thought this cheapie CD writer would be like that, and it was. I pulled out the broken CD writer, took the case off the USB CD writer, pulled off the USB to PATA adapter, and installed it in the internal rails. Everything checked out immediately. My operating assumption was that if Linux drove it via USB then via PATA cables was not going to be an issue, but it was nice to see that born out. Now he has a USB/PATA adapter for use with draining data from PATA hard drives, should the need arise.

And Now, the Point

All of this work happened in one day (one small part of day in fact), and was almost trivially easy. Sure, I knew what I was doing going it. I had tried that chipset on Mint already. I knew what kind of printers worked on Linux already. My experience as a Linux person made these upgrades a non-event for my brother. He will now return to happily being a user that can surf the world with Google Earth, print out things, and scan things, and never really know anything about the underlying complexities of it. To him, it will just be a simple computer that does what he needs it to do.

Any vendor supporting Linux can do the same thing, and do it more easily than other OS's because they will have the source code to see how it all works (See my most recent post over at TalkBMC for some thoughts around that).

More evidence that Linux is ready.

Repairo: Fixing a hand-built Ubuntu based Linux computer

Linux has a reputation, well earned, that it will run on much more marginal hardware than most other OSes. I have brought it up on some truly itty-bitty gear over the years, and the embedded / Cell phone end of the Linux market certainly runs on tiny CPU / Memory footprints.

For all is capabilities though, Linux is not magic (thus the Harry Potter reference... well, that and the fact that I drive my daughter nuts by knowing more Harry Potter quotes than she does). Linux can not solve all the problems of the world (although OLPC is making a mighty effort in that regard), and it can not run on utterly non-boot-able, busted to the rafters hardware. Case in point, my brothers Ubuntu 7.04 system.

The Hardware

The hardware in question has a long sad history. The computer is a hand-built that contains bits of my daughters first Linux computer, a Mandrake unit back then. As various parts have failed over the years: Mother boards, Power supplies, video cards, it has sort of become the proverbial 'favorite hammer' (I.E.: This is my favorite hammer. I like it so much that I have kept it for years and year, replacing the bits when they broke. Why, I have replaced the handle three times and the head once...)

This hodgepodge of computer bits had been in for a new MB with 1Gb if RAM in the recent past, and was sporting a AMD processor that was rated faster than the new MB could clock it out: 1.8 Ghz under-clocked to 1.6 Ghz. The Sempron runs very cool though. The video card was the cheapest thing they had at Fry's about 3 or 5 years ago, and there were three Maxtor hard drives from three different generations of the computer all snuggled into the desktop computer frame rails. Two were seriously whacked out. Bad I/O, unrecoverable data checks, you name it. They were not even connected anymore. The third one decided to commit computer-hari-kari. It was the newest, a 250GB unit that was not more than about three years old. When a hard drive decides its time has come, you pretty much have to just let it go along its dark and random path. It is sad of course. Like most things in the area of dieing, it is those who are left behind that feel the pain. In this case, non-booting computer equals no access to email, Internet, or holiday gift giving lists lovingly crafted on the machine before the hard drive set out on its own.

The Software

A previous MS Windows computer resident at my brothers house had been rebuilt for the last time. The Semi-annual Windows re-installs had become more and more tiresome, and I had a brainwave: I had this hardware sitting at my house, and I hardly used it. I have switched to all laptops for work, play, and testing with one exception at the office. My hand-built home system, running Fedora 6, was idling quietly in the corner doing nothing. The iMac had supplanted it's role as print server and file server.

For all its hand-built past, the computer spec'ed out better than the gear my brother had: his MS Windows systems were also hand-me-downs from other in the family when they had upgraded, and that was all he needed or wanted. He is an amazing carpenter, and to him, a computer is just a tool, not a lifestyle. He uses them, but he also just wants them to work. His laptop is an iBook that my daughter and I built for him out of parts off eBay, and he likes the Mac well because it is painless. I thought Linux could be similarly painless

Dell had just announced they were going to support Ubuntu, and my brother lives in Austin where Dell is. The news was everywhere, and it seemed like it might be time to propose a move off MS Windows. My hand-built unit had no MS Windows license, and I doubted MS Win would even work on the hodge-podge of gear without some serious driver TLC. Work I was not going to do. I love my brother, but really: I am done with fixing MS Windows. Call it a quality of life issue.

I proposed the new-to-him computer and Ubuntu, and all my brother wanted to know was whether or not Google Earth would run on it. That was the killer app for him, As Ubuntu had that as an option, I told him it would, and formatted the 250GB unit and installed Ubuntu 7.04. I thought about Mint, but went with Ubuntu because of all the buzz around it at the time. Sure, Mint starts with Ubuntu and adds stuff, but I decided to go "Marquee" here.

This should have been the end of the story, except that I spent all that time mentioning the history of the hardware (repeating things I have posted elsewhere) to lead up to what happened a year or so after my brother got his Linux unit.

The Linux Experience

In the year or so that that Ubuntu 7.04 computer was there, it hummed along and just did it's job. No muss, no fuss. I used the default Gnome interface, and laid it out to somewhat resemble the Mac: Task bar at the top, etc.

Then one day when I got a call about the video being all wacky. The computer video card had come loose when the computer was moved, and needed to be reseated. Not really a Linux problem: Linux has to be able to tell the MB to send electrons to the video card. It's just picky that way. All was quiet again till a few weeks ago. I was in SanFran. It was cold and rainy, and the call came in that the computer would not boot. He read me some stuff off the screen. I walked him through a quick FSCK of the 250GB drive, but it was bad. Really bad. Permanent damaged hard drive bad. Like the video card thing, except that there is not way to put the little bits back onto the hard drive. It was not going to boot, and that was all there was to it. No operating system in the world, not even Linux, can deal with having a hard drive lobotomy, at least not when that was where Linux was storing its brain. Sure, I could boot the Ubuntu install disk, and run in LiveCD mode. This was not considered optimal though.

The good news was that we were already planning a family get-together, so he brought it along.

We can rebuild it: We have the technology

As much use as the Ubuntu computer might be, that does not map to wanting to spend a huge amount of money to fix it. Any time a computer has to be repaired, it is an exercise in the same math one uses to decide whether to repair the car one more time. Everyone probably has different ideas as to what is worth repairing, and what is not. My number right now is about 500 USD. More than that and the computer should probably be replaced. The is a personal number of course, and I base it off the cost of a new system. In this case, I could by a new Acer 5000 series laptop for a around that price on sale someplace, and have a computer that works as well or better than this desktop-unit of-suspect-parentage.

This was a failed hard drive. Everything else worked. Fry's had a 320GB unit on sale for about 70 USD, so that followed us home.

I brought Mint 4.0 with me this time. Last time I was going for Marquee, but my brother was now comfortable with Linux and the Gnome interface. It took a couple of minutes to replace the hard drive, and a couple more to boot Mint 4.0, and then about 10 more to go through an install. He had not watched me do Ubuntu 7.04, but after watching Mint 4.0, and having been witness to years of MS Windows rebuilds he asked me the unanswerable: 'Why do people still use Windows?". I admitted that I had no idea. I have had people try to explain it to me, but it seems to be like Color. I like Blue. I can't tell you why. I just do. Except in cars, where I prefer White. Go figure.

I explained as I did it my manual intervention with the default disk layout: I always lay out 10/2/remainder for this kind of system. 10 GB for "/", 2 GB for swap, and the rest of the hard drive for "/home". Makes upgrades easier, and especially ones where I cross distributions.

A reboot, and Mint was on the air...err... on the hard drive.

I also quickly put the default Gnome menu back, since that is what he knows.

Even Better

Now I had my fingers crossed. I installed the failed 250GB hard drive into a USB/Firewire external enclosure, and attached it to the new Mint 4.0 unit. And what I had not dared to hope happened: Linux could read the old "/home" partition! All the damage was up front, in the OS partition. We pulled over all his personal data with only one issue.

Thunderbird.

I thought Thunderbird uses either .thunderbird or .mozilla as the place to keep it's brains when it is not running. Those were what I copied over. When he got home, and re-connected to the Internet, and fired up, Thunderbird went into "New Account Set up". Doh. Looks like I'll make at least one more house call on this unit to get that figured out: There are emails they want to keep .. someplace.

I was planning a house call anyway. That hand-built's video card is slow slow slow. Even the cheapest card at Frys today is four times better than the one he has now. A new card would help Google Earth run way better. And that after all is the "killer app".

Not Quite Dead Yet, plus Ubuntu and Mint

OK, sure. It has been a while since I wrote anything here. It has been everything I can do to keep my corporate Blog up to date recently.

Since my last post from India (back in the end of October), I have been to Vancouver, the Gulf Coast twice, Far West Texas (Home), and right now for the last two weeks, San Francisco. To write about home use of Linux or Open Source, I would have to actually have been home! I did use my iPhone a great deal to stay hooked in, but I have already posted a fair amount about that. The only new thing there is that I finally downgraded from 1.0.2 of the firmware to 1.1.1, and re-installed all the hacks and everything to re-enable all the cool things Apple left out. I finally have Solitaire on the iPhone! Thank you Chris Miles!

Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0 on the Acer 5610

In my most recent post over at talk.bmc, I mention using Ubuntu 7.10 and then Mint 4.0 on my office desktop system, a Dell D620. What I did not mention there was that tested each of those release first on my personal Acer 5610.

The very most interesting thing that is different for me between Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0 did not show up on the Dell at all. On the Acer, the SD flash card reader that is built in to the left hand side of the unit has never worked under any previous version of Linux. It was present in the hardware inventory, but nothing ever mounted when the chip was inserted. Research said that support was coming for the specific chipset from ENE Technologies, and should arrive along about 2.6.22 or so. Ubuntu 7.10 did not appear to see the reader any better than 7.04, or Mint 3.1. But Mint 4.0 had the reader, and the chip in it (I left it there for testing long ago) mounted and ready for use!

Mint 4.0 has many other nifty features over Ubuntu 7.10. As Ubuntu has matured and picked up some of the functionality of Mint, I was wondering what the Mint folks were going to do to stay ahead of the curve. The answer is, they continue to innovate.

The major new nifty thing I have found is the new updater. At first I was very skeptical about whether Linux really needs YAUT (Yet Another Update Tool). I mean really: Adept, Apt, Synaptic, Yum, Yumex, YAST, UP2DATE, ... to name but a few. But the new MintUpdate does a risk classification for each patch on how likely the patch is going to be to cause your system to have problems. The update screen is clean, easy to read. I like it.

One problem I had was that I wanted a very specific feature of the new Compiz Fustion enabled: The one where the cursor hovered over the task bar reveals a small composited screen of the application. I find this very handy for checking on things I started running and then left to go do other things. I use this almost in preference to putting application screens on multiple workspaces. I could not find in Mint how to turn that back on, and said so in my talk.bmc post. The answer came in at once via a comment from "67GTA":

You have to install "compizconfig-settings-manager". It was left out of Mint by default. There you can tweak the effects. It was Advanced Desktop Effects Settings in Ubuntu 7.10.

Sure enough, with this installed, I could turn on the window preview, and I was good to go.

Linux has been good enough for a long while to be a complete enterprise desktop, although it helps if the place you work is smart about the infrastructure they deploy. The more attention to open standards they have paid, the easier it is. The more they have deployed closed stuff like MS Exchange, the more coping skills required.

Oddly, most home usage has been ahead of the corporate environment in this regard. Webmail, POP, IMAP, SMTP, AJAX web applications, and so forth have been staples of most ISP's / Broadband carriers for years. You only get into trouble when you want to do things like play MS Windows specific games, and Linux is even starting to be able to do that. Mint's broad hardware support and easy installability make it hard to ignore as a viable home OS. Between Linx and the Mac, I have not used MS Windows at the house (other than to experiment with Vista) for years.

Hard Drives Not Included

My brother has been running Ubuntu 7.04 on a hand built computer for a while now. I have never had to do anything to support him (unlike MS WIndows days) till now.

Linux is pretty good. Probably better than pretty good. But no OS can withstand having its hard drive fall apart. FSCK's show low level corruption that just can not be repaired.

My first house call ever on his Linux box will be to rebuild it on a fresh hard drive. Ubuntu 7.04 will become Mint 4.0 in the process. Hopefully we'll be able to get something off his old harddrive... but I am not holding my breath. This thing was *toast*.

Schism

When one is young, and asking questions about the new world unfolding before them for the first time, the answers often given by the adult being are less than satisfying to the questioner. It is a common situation: I dare say it is universal. It is the fuel for all sorts of jokes on American TV sitcoms, such as "Dad, what is Sex?" and after much consternation that answer we all knew was coming is "Go ask your mother". She answers "Go ask your Father", and the kid says "I did. He told me to ask you." And she says "He did did he... Boy is he in trouble.". Much hilarity ensues, and the ultimate answer given is usually something along the lines of "Wait till you are older" or "Go ask your friends at school: why do you think we send you to public school?". I watch too much TV....

When I was pretty young (I do not recall the exact age: somewhere around five or so I think) My mother and I were driving past a church. I learned how to read by looking at street signs and asking my parents what they said. This particular church had a very long name. I don't recall it, but I remember it was longer than I could read in the time I had as we drove past it. I was intrigued. The church building itself was very small: Like a one room schoolhouse from Deadwood in the late 1880's. I asked my mother what that church was. It went something like this:

Me: Why is that churches name so long?

Mom: I don't know exactly. I have never been to it.

Me: Why do churches have different names? Aren't they all Christian churches?

Mom: [starting to look uncomfortable] That one is. But no, not all churches are Christian churches. There are many different religions.

Me: But that Christian church has a different name than the one near our house...

Mom: Just like there are many different religions, inside Christianity there are many different churches. People sometimes believe different things, and when they decide that they believe too differently, they decide to form a different church, so that people that believe the same things can go to church together.

Mom never talked down to me when I was young. Even if she was uncomfortable with the subject of what I was asking about, she gave it her best shot. Maybe in this case she was just glad I was not asking where babies came from. :)

Later I heard a minister call this "Left Foot Washers", and being different from "Right Foot Washers". His point was that the points of schism can seem incredibly small things when viewed from a third party point of view.

And this Relates to Linux or Open Source how?

I have now brought up sex and religion. Maybe I'll skip politics today, not go for the trifecta and have a post that has something to PO everyone. I have a theory. Just a personal speculation, but it seems to make sense to me.

Whatever it is about people that causes such fractures to occur, and elevates preference to things people will argue over: Whatever the "Engine of Schism"(tm) is, it is at least part of what makes Open Source so diverse. It is just that in Open Source what is divisive has been turned into a strength. In the same way that Biodiversty helps life on earth.

My starting point for my text today (boy, I am really asking for it here...) is a comment made to apost of mine over at TalkBMC. In this comment, there is one sentence, one central assertion, that one version of Linux is 100 times better than another version of Linux. The two Linuxii in question are both of recent vintage, running the 2.6 kernel.

It is hard to tell on a written comment how much is tongue in cheek, how much is intentional hyperbole, and how much is something the person truly believed to the core of their being.

This is clearly subjective, since I can think of no easy way to create a measurement systems that would let you measure the goodness of one version of Linux distro compared to another... or to any other OS for that matter. While I am on the record as not being deeply interested in running MS Windows for example, I will tell you that a big part of that preference is just that I resent all the hours of my life I have lost to MS Windows systems breaking, plus all the hours I have spent trying to make MS Windows systems play nice with others. I know the basis of my preference, even if I can not quantify it.

My recent set of posts about Fedora and Mint (both here and at TalkBMC) were in part based on a Fedora schism point. Fedora holds it as extremely important that they try and stay pure open source rather than include any unencumbered but not open binary bits. My point was that while this was admirable, it was also going to hurt their adoption rate. This is the difference in my point of view or preference: I would like to see Linux more widely adopted, and I see their position as being hardline and inflexible. I think that if they are more inclusive, then vendors might come to see the value of Open Source and relax their "Binary Only" positions.

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC I looked at PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) 2007 as a corporate Linux desktop candidate. PCLOS is a fork from Mandrake / Mandriva a while back, and its guiding star is Texstar. He has been packaging Linux stuff for years. I do not know exactly all the things that drove Texstar away from Mandrake such that he felt is necessary to create his own distro (At least part of it was that he grew interested in LiveCD's, which Mandriva did not have back then, but now they have in spades. Maybe they leveraged Texstars work?), but once on his own he says that he started pulling in patches and fixes from all over the place: Debian, Fedora, etc. PCLOS is a schism point... and it is also inclusive. More on this is a sec.

GUI

Also over at TalkBMC, a while back, I spent some time thinking out loud about peoples preferences for KDE or Gnome or Afterstep of whatever. Linux is rife with GUI projects, and while most of the gravity has formed large planetary bodies around KDE and Gnome, there are still a bunch of others. The schism point for Gnome was that they did not like the tookit at the core of KDE (Qt, from a company called Trolltech) being commercial in nature. They wanted a totally Open Source solution, and so took GIMP as their starting place to create the Gnome Toolkit (GTK), now in version 2 (GTK2). Funny thing is that now that toolkit for KDE has been GPl'ed, but not before we had two pretty nice GUI's. The early days of Gnome and KDE were bad times: the applications developed for one GUI were famous for not working under the other GUI. I never see that anymore.

Another recent schism of interest was the one where Beryl was split off Compiz, and they have now joined forces to create the compositing engine for 3D stuff on Linux.

The reason for each of these schisms was different. Purity of cause, people not getting along on a project, a project not being inclusive enough so some folks decided to just go form a new project... whatever. The reasons are technical, emotional, legal, external, internal. They are powered also by this weird thing we have called preference. I talked about this a bit in "Color Theory".

The "Engine of Schism" is the ultimate in flex fueled engines. It feeds off all sorts of things. It drives wedges between groups of otherwise rational people. It feeds of real issues and trivialities with equal ease. it seems to be completely in human nature that this engine exists though. We do not seem, as a race, able to do otherwise.

"You like Blue?... err, then my favorite is Purple. yeah. Purple. Maybe Red. No. Definitely Purple. Are you sure you like Blue best?"

Politics

Here is an example from Politics. I said I was not going here,but what the heck. Lets have some schism with our "Post Toasties" today.

In the US, from 1861-1865, a huge war was fought [changed verbiage per Richard's comment:SC] between neighbors in the same nation. It was called "The Civil War" here, because it was so huge and so deadly and so bitter that is seemed like it could only ever be singular. It was "The" because to have another like it even to this day seems unthinkable. It ignores the fact that there have been smaller uprisings and civil disobediences for all the history of the US. The others were small enough as to pale in comparison to what the horror of "The" Civil War was.

The schism point was slavery. A deeply immoral evil practice that went on in this country for far too many years. There were lots of compromises along the way of the early history of the country that in retrospect made "The" war inevitable. However, when it broke out, in the south it was widely rationalized as a war for self determination. States Rights. In this case 'The' war was about the right of a state to determine whether or not they were going to stay a slave state, but that last part was sort of glossed over.

This is a hugely serious schism. It caused a huge war, tore a country apart, had brothers killing each other, and it is still healing all this time later.

When I view splits in Open Source projects from that perspective, they seem so innocent.

Making a Weakness a Strength

What is unique to Open Source is that for all the schisms that projects might have, and all the fifty thousand different directions that people might pull, all of it generates products. Code. Doc. Things that other projects, by the terms of the Open Source licenses, can re-use, Even if they don't use a line of code from a project, but just take inspiration, it is an engine that reverses the ill effects of the "Engine of Schism".

Circle back to PCLOS for a second: the current issue of "PCLinuxOS Magazine" has an interview with Texstar about the birth of the distro. In it, it is pretty clear that Texstar uses diversity to his advantage. Here is a small quote:

In November 2006 we utilized a one time source
code snapshot from our friends at Mandriva to pull in an updated
glibc/gcc core and associated libraries. We spent the following 6
months rebuilding, debugging, customizing, patching and updating our
new code base. We pulled in stuff from our old code base, utilized
patches/code from Fedora, Gentoo and Debian just to name a few. This
is why you will never see me [Texstar] distro bashing as it would be
hypocritical to do such a thing since we are still dependent in many
areas on other distros development processes due to our limited but
hard working volunteer development team.

The only thing that bothers me in the slightest about that quote (and I do not think it was meant this way) is where Texstar says that they are 'Still' dependent on other distros. My assertion is that "All distros are dependent on each other, and the folks in the core projects". Linux is not really 'PCLOS" in a pure sense. Linux is the bit you get from kernel.org. You are still a thousand projects away from a distro at that point.

Schism is bad, when it leads to things like wars. Schism is good, when its resultant diversity is leveraged.

Computer Religion

And that brings me to why I brought up sex and religion in this post. When someone says a recent Linux Distro is 100 times better than another recent Linux distro, I worry a little that schism has lead to computer religion. Taken on its face, examined rationally, you have to ask "how can that be?". They all feed off the same kernel stock, and pull in the same sets of office projects and same GUI projects and so forth.

It is not a trivial thing to package up a Linux distro (See Texstar's quote above for the amount of work that went into just one point release). Any Distro with a following will have people testing it, feeding back to it, and over time that distro will stabilize and improve, and because the chewy Linux goodness is inside, it will be a good distro. It almost can not help but be. Have a look at distrowatch.com, and look at the number of downloads of any given distro. The ones that are the most downloaded have the greatest community around them, therefore the most testing and feedback, therefore are likely to be pretty good, useful versions of Linux et al.

They will be different from each other. Some will be better on laptops or desktops. Others may be focused on technology exploration for later inclusion in server versions of the OS. Some will be installed with one GUI, or another. Some will be focused on education. Others personal usage. Others business usage.

So, a commandant of computer religion should be "Computer User, Know Thyself, but Tolerate Others"

Like any other religion, it will be something that we strive for rather than achieve all the time. Being human, we'll fail, and just have to get back up and try again.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Open Source, Diversity, PCLinuxOS, PCLOS, Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora

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On Being Open

In my most recent post over at TalkBMC, "The Secret Linux Agenda", I spent a fair amount of time trying to think out loud about some of the disconnects in the world of Open Source. I am given a pretty hard time at BMC about the fact that I write long posts, so I worked hard to keep the "Agenda" post as short as I could, but still touch on at least a few examples of some of the disconnects people have when they talk about being open. Or Open. Or open source. or Open Source. I also mentioned the negative image some of this "open" stuff has because of the behaviors of some people in the various communities.

I wrote that post before I went to my first ever Austin Social Media Club meeting. Whurley was the speaker at the event, and he made a metric ton of terrific points about this during his talk.

Open Confusion

There was one particularly ticklish question from the room at the Austin Social Media Club meeting (Anne Gentle and I there) that I think really boiled all of this down. That comment / question was:

If people are doing "Open Source", why aren't they more Open?

It was a great question and really underlined the confusion about what the term "Open" means. Given the amount of audible agreement in the room with that question, for many in a social media club, "Open" in "Open Source" had connotations of "Accessible", "Easy to get along with", and "Willing to have civil conversations".

The Rainbow of Open Source

Spend any time in an Open Source product forum, and you can easily see what the folks in the social media club were talking about. Someone asks a question. Usually it is an innocent question being made by someone that does not know anything about the product. They, for their part, feel that they are doing the right thing. They are showing interest, and willingness to learn. They are being "open".

You know what happens next: In an un-moderated forum, some will actually try to help, and answer the question. At the very least, they will tell them where the first-timer documents are located, and some might even point out how to use the search facility to find every other time that question was asked, and the answers that they got then. All of those things are classifies as what we call "signal". Useful information.

The middle ground response happens when a response is given, but the person who asked the question has no way to parse the answer. That breaks down further as:

• The answer was given in a way that assumed the person to have knowledge they did not.
  
• The answer was given in such a way as to question whether the person is actually responding in the same language as the questioner.

Either of these examples are about communications styles, and whether or not the person who is doing the technical work can enter the requisite frame of mind (empathy, if you will) to have conversations with those less technical than themselves.

I had this experience growing up when I was talking to my Dad about math. He is a EE at NASA. A real rocket scientist. They exist! He knows so much math (some of it pretty esoteric and useful largely in his speciality of antenna design), and has for so long, that my simple frustrations with things like Freshman Algebra were in some ways a mystery to him. In one particularly memorable conversation, I asked why something worked in a particular way, and after a bit of time he said that once I knew a certain higher level of math this would become obvious. I was temporarily stuck: I would never *see* the next level of math till I grokked this one!

And Then Came Maude....

Sooner or later, intolerance strikes. Someone will post a response to the new person that contains anything from mild abuse to questioning their patriotism in a time of war. Something like:

"Are you NUTS!!! Why the H*LL are you posting such stupid dumb*** question. Why do you hate our troops? Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries (From the Monty Python Phrasebook: "Useful things to tell customers when they are calling and bothering you")".

It may be more ... err... sophisticated:

"We do not tolerate fools lightly in this forum. Please remove yourself to other places, so that you do not annoy us in the future, and so that we may concentrate on real issues."

This new, trying to do the right thing, be "open" person is now deeply confused and hurt. Is this not Open source. Is this not a public forum? Even if they don't know anything about this tool or product, they still need help on it.

In a forum for a paid product, no support professional would post such a response. If they did, their career would be at an end in short order. A company would not tolerate paying customers being abused by people from their company.

There are a lot of reasons why the maladaptive response to the newbie question is occurring in the Open Source forum:

• I am doing this "for free"
• This is not my day job
• I answered that same question endlessly already
• I only have so many hours in the day. I can spent them repeating myself, or being productive
• PUUUULEASE!!!! They asked me why this didn't work the same as Windows!!!! AS-IF!!!!!
  
• I am out of caffeine, and I have no money to get fresh. I hate being poor and brilliant
• I have not been on a date in a decade
• Combinations of several or all of the above

The reason does not matter. In a customer support situation, if someone was thinking about trying the new "Open" thing, and gets that response, the damage is done.

Smug and Arrogant?

A post came out recently about Apple users being "Smug and Arrogant", and when I looked at it there was a poll. 2/3's or those who had read the post agreed that Applen were guilty as charged. You could take that post and change all the Apple references to Linux or other Open Source projects, and I think the poll would be about the same. And it is because of the same reasons. Well... maybe not the Apple advertising campaign part. But as smug as those ads may be, I like 'em. I think they kind of actually miss a point criticising the ads saying that John Hodgeman plays "PC" as bumbling. John Hodgeman gets all the good lines! In many ways, he is the more likable of the two. I have in fact often viewed the ads as being sort of a misstep for Apple because "PC" is more endearing in his own, can't stop blue-screening, kind of way. Maybe it's just me though...

Fedora and Ubuntu

Now I want to circle around to part of what I was trying to get at with my recent posts both here and at TalkBMC about Fedora and Ubuntu. Another aspect of "open", "closed", and the new users experience.

Fedora is a great Distro, if you already know what you are doing. Fedora, like OpenSUSE, lives in the middle of the road. It is not as challenging to install as MS Vista or rolling your own Linux distro starting with a download from Kernel.org. Fedora is easier and faster than installing GenToo. It is not as easy as Ubuntu or Linspire or Xandros. Yes: I know Xandros is in bed with Microsoft these days. See the bit above about arrogant and smug though: I know why the Xandros/MS deal is not optimal, but does the average person that just wants this stuff to work?

Fedora has an admirable stance on why they do not include any software in the Distro that is not really Open Source. My example in the other posts was Wifi cards like Intel and Atheros where even though the vendor has supplied driver code, they hold back the code to the cards driver loadable firmware and only provide a binary. With Fedora, you will have to work hard to get that card going, and their point in acting closed to closed source is to incent card manufacturers to be more open.

I love it. I think card manufacturers are wrong to think their microcode is all that splendidly different in a commodity market like Wifi, and that being more open and easier to install would be an advantage in the marketplace!

However....

Being hard to install for the right reasons means by default you are NOT after the casual installer. The person just trying to use the computer as a tool to get something or the other done. The person who heard that Linux was really cool and was willing to try it to see what it is all about.

The Spectrum

On one end we have the Xandros / Microsoft lashup. Xandros is licensing closed protocols from Microsoft that will allow them among other things to create programs to access content on MS Exchange. They call this mash "Mixed Source". If I sound a bit leery, it is because I used to run BMC's email system, back when we used HP's OpenMail, and I watched HP make a similar deal, and then not to long after that, see OpenMail sold to Samsung, where it later died. The problem from my point of view was that having the protocols was only half the battle. Someone still had to write all the programs to use them. MS has spent years layering all this stuff together, RPC's and Protocols like MAPI and CIFS so that it is no trivial thing to create programs that use them. Ask the folks at Samba.org. There is a reason MS Vista took seven years and billions of dollars in R&D, and came out looking like a gussied up version of XP with compatibility issues.

Middle ground is Ubuntu/Mint. Closed source, binary only bits are not only allowed but supplied. A message is sent to the person at boot that "Restricted Source" is in use, and if you click on it, a display of all the restricted source bits that the OS had to load to run on this hardware is displayed. You know who is playing nice, and who still keeps their cards close to their chest, source code wise.

Then there is the completely open. And Open. Supporting only that which is fully Open, and fully unencumbered, projects like Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE reward openness by inclusion. Open is a wide world of things, where you can build whatever you need, as long as you know what you are doing and have the time.

Support

Stretched across the span of closed to open is another dimension. Support. Whurley likes to say that "people" (and these people include companies) have one of two things: Time or Money. I would add to that "Expertise", which came at least in part with time, and now costs money.

If you are paying for support, you probably have money, and you also expect that you will *never* have the conversation I outlined in the "Maude" section above. You are paying for the right to have a throat to choke. You can also spend money on a person who is your local expert, and whose throat you'll being squeezing. Or both.

Novell,RedHat and Ubuntu walks between all these worlds with their commercial Linuxii. Novell, like Xandros, has some sort of deal in place with Microsoft although I am not sure it is quite as "deep" as Xandros's. You can buy a Dell with Ubuntu on it, and it will be supported by Canonical. Etc. Etc.

But Its My First Time

I have been saying for a long while now that Linux is ready to take on the personal and corporate desktop. I base that on personal experience, not only of being a user personally and professionally, but in helping others to do the same thing. I watched my brother (who is not a computer person) look at an Ubuntu PC for the first time and say in some wonder "This is Linux?", clearly thinking it was going to be something much more mysterious than what it was.

If you are Open Source / Computer savvy, I'll wager someone someplace has asked you at least once: "What is the best version of Linux for me to run?". As technical people, we as a group like to answer such questions correctly, even if two minutes later their eyes are glazing over, and, like one of my blog posts, we are just warming up.

These days I just answer that question with "Mint" or "Ubuntu". If they asked me that question, they are not ready to hack device support in Fedora just yet. They may never want to. As good as Fedoras reasons are for being Open, and only Open, this rules them out for a beginner at least in my estimation.

As I was lamenting in "Agenda", that is too bad. Fedora has a ton of great stuff in it. By ceding the entry level Linux to Ubuntu, they are also ceding mind and market share. Since under the covers, Linux is Linux, Ubuntu can grow with the user. When it comes time to install their first Linux server, Ubuntu has one of those now too.

At the end of the day, it looks like to me that the way one goes about being open (or Open) is to be inclusive.