So I have been noticing horrible transfer speed problems on my laptop. I ran hdparm in BackTrack and got 34mb/sec in Ubuntu 2.53mb/sec. I am unable to set dma on the drive which is the real performance killer in this case. I have thus far found not solution other than compiling my own kernel, which I’m kinda annoyed about. If I wanted to be compiling kernels to get the latest features I would be using a distro that I would expect to have to do so. If I cannot find a solution I may have to move away from Ubuntu.

I install Kubuntu on my laptop today so now I am penta-booting BackTrack, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Windows XP. I would really like to get a few more on there, but this laptop only has a 60gb hard drive and I am not in the mood to deal with the possible horror resizing partitions can cause if an error occurs. I might clean off the laptop next month and put on Solaris, and try to get Fedora working again.

As a follow up to my Ubuntu post, I spent a good number of hours playing with Ubuntu in Gnome and I have enjoyed Gnome more than I used to. I feel a big part of that is the new “shiny” features Ubuntu added. I did have a lot of trouble installing Rails though, took me about 8 times before the error telling me rails did not exist went away and when I installed mongrel fastthread blew up so I had to install the deb package to avoid a headache. I cannot say that the problem occurred because I was using Ubuntu, but since I did not compile my Ruby install I cannot say if something done during that install contributed to my problems.

Another interesting problem I had was that when I updated about 200mb in packages today my machine suddenly started taking a crap on me. I do not get the shiny boot screen for Ubuntu and I am not entirely sure why, but I also don’t even get text on my screen. This means if something goes wrong I cannot know what caused it. Basically it went like this, the machine was booting (known by looking at the HD light) and then stopped, I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and then it took a few seconds and booted into X. Once I have logged in I am missing my nice shortcuts to other partitions and I even had trouble mounting them. After one attempt mounting them I said screw it and reinstalled Ubuntu.

With all of that said I am at somewhat of a fork in the road. I would really like to install 7 or 8 distros on this laptop so that I can try some of the things I learn at conferences, but at the same time, I would really like to use just one operating system on the machine. I love my Slackware, and I would like to keep Backtrack on incase I ever need it, but I feel as my main laptop distro I will be using Ubuntu for the simple fact that it works right out of the box for me, if I ever need to reinstall on the road I can and know that I don’t have to download anything to get wireless working or hassle with anything to get standby working.

I can buy a 1gb memory stick for this laptop for $129 from the Dell website, which isn’t horrible, but at the same time it is $129 for 1gb of RAM. If I install another stick, I have to remove one 256 stick giving me roughly 1.2gb of RAM. That memory could then be used for VMWare server, which would allow me to run as many distros as I wanted. The one downside is that I have received information from very good sources BackTrack should always be run from a LiveCD or direct boot, and should not be used from a VM.

I’ll end this post now that I feel I am jumping into too many things, but before I do I have decided to backup the things that I need to backup and I setup my laptop right. I will be removing Kubuntu and Slackware, installing Ubuntu on the Slackware partition, deleting the old Ubuntu and Kubuntu partitions and joining them to make one ext3 shared partition. I have to have Windows XP and I have to have BackTrack to complete my labs and my exam for OSCP.

Funny I went from Penta-booting to Triple-Booting in one day and for no good reason.

So I tried the new Ubuntu 7.10 today and for a long time I have hated Ubuntu for 3 reasons….1. I think that it prevents people from learning essential linux skills, they do not have to know how to add a user to sudoers or configure hardware via config files. 2. it uses Gnome, now I think Gnome is ok, but I feel very locked in a box compared to KDE. 3. You have to download almost all the apps you want to install, and being on dialup as many of you know, makes it very very hard to do. So really I do not hate Ubuntu in the sense that it is a bad distro, I think it is a good distro, but for me to make a system that I can enjoy to the fullest it would take forever with my current connection.

Kubuntu fixes the Gnome problem, and well #1, I don’t really think I can piss on a distro for helping people use something that can get difficult. In slackware I have had problems with suspending not working as it does in Windows, but I have not bothered to work on that problem. In Ubuntu it works out of the box, as does all my hardware… with the exception of my modem. The first linux distro I ever used was Slackware, I love the name and I like how it works. A user has to really learn to use the system because it makes you learn. I once heard someone say “If you want to learn linux, use Slackware” and I feel it is a very true statement. You can of course learn Linux on any distro because it is linux, but GUIs and web interfaces don’t teach you the skills that in many cases are needed. If you have packages you are less likely to compile software. I cannot remember the exact details of the situation, but I remember sometime last year I had a horrible problem with a system, and I ended up having to mount multiple partitions and do a lot of tricky stuff in config files to fix the problem. Had I been a sole Ubuntu user, I might not have had those skills when I needed them.

Every distro has its place, and many are not for every user. I have been told, “slackware isn’t linux” or “slackware doesn’t have packages”, “slackware gives you nothing to get started with” and all of those comments came from people who havn’t really used Slackware. If you do a full install of Slackware you get a ton of packages. Linux Packages has a few thousand packages and they are all for Slackware. Sure, it isn’t the 23,000 available for Ubuntu and they don’t do dependancy checking, but dependancy checking it’s always a good thing. I have rarely ever installed a package on Slackware, I usually compile the software and very very rarely do I ever have any problems with a compile. As far as it not being linux, Slackware is the oldest existing linux distro and I seriously doubt that will be changing and it has stayed that way for a reason.

I plan to use Ubuntu, and I am going to install the new Kubuntu to see if I like KDE on Ubuntu or not. Gnome has improved since the last time I used it for more than 5 minutes, so I can probably deal with Gnome. Right now my laptop is quad booting Slackware, BackTrack, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. I have one free partition left that I will put Kubuntu on probably. So far the only OS I havn’t been able to multi-boot off the BackTrack LILO config is Fedora 7, which is a shame. What is also a shame is that my hard drive on the laptop isn’t larger, I would love to have 10 distros to boot to, just for fun….

I suggest you read this very well written article that was recently released about Slackware and Ubuntu, more slack though.

I am looking for a reliable managed subversion hosting environment that includes Trac. The service must be reliable and secure and I would prefer to be able to point a subdomain of my choice to the trac instance. I am looking at the following:

http://svnrepository.com/
http://www.hosted-projects.com/
http://www.devguard.com/

Any recommendations or good/bad words on any of these would be appreciated.

I have been noticing for a little over a week my email account on digital39.com was increasing in total storage space. I have a few more accounts under Google Apps, but none of my other domains were increasing. This morning my primary email address had 3100mb of total space, right now it says “You are currently using 480 MB (14%) of your 3216 MB.”. Might be time to switch. If you need more storage than that you can pay $50 per year, per user and get 25gb of email storage.

P.S. While writing this my email account increased another 2mb to 3218mb

[EDIT]

When I first wrote this I had not checked my Gmail account, which has also increased. Originally it was only the one domain that had increased and not Gmail or my other domains. It looks like storage on Gmail is up to 3220mb.