After following most of the steps in the tutorial, and improvising a little, I came up with something I was pretty happy with. I decided to take a slightly more clean cut and artificial look that Vlad did. That clean look basically means no stitches for now.

Obviously these wallpapers are a lot more simplistic that the Vlads, but I actually like the simplistic look and just enjoy the texture of the denim on screen.

Anyway, hope some of you enjoy it. (Note: Read the entire post to see the attachments).

I especially like the new ability to group windows together, and flip them around like each window is on the back the other. The Linux desktop is really coming into it’s own right now, if only it could get better application support!

Now that I have a bunch of Adobe products installed on my main system Linux has pretty much dropped out as an option for me. When you do not rely on a specific set of applications to do your everyday work it’s a lot easier to pick and choose OS’s.

That being said I still love to use Linux and I am planning on buying a laptop very soon mainly so that I can have a Linux system again. Then I can use my desktop for work related stuff, and use my laptop for everything else.

Here is a new update on the continuing struggle to get Linux running on an Intel P965 motherboard with the JMicron PATA controller.

There have been two more patches commited to fix the problem. The main patch has been added to Edgy Eft which should allow the user to access their PATA drives connected to the JMicron chip. A similar patch has also been applied to the Dapper Kernel so it should now be possible to create a custom Ubuntu install cd with the new updated Dapper cd and install from there.

Hopefully this also means that Ubuntu will have support out of the box with the next release.

Also if this Kernel gets backported to the Dapper branch then we maybe able to create a custom install cd with the new kernel, and any other custom packages you may want. Then get dapper running on the new system.

If you are one of the few people who went to all the trouble of using one of the work arounds to get Ubuntu Dapper running on your P965 motherboard, then you should be able to use a backported kernel to support it.

Ever since the Core 2 Duo was announced I have been planning on building a new system around it and then using Linux as my main system on it. That however is proving to be a bit harder to do that I would have liked.

I was starting to think that Linux was over the hump when it came to basic hardware compatibility. Even it the main distros did not support all your obscure hardware like USB webcams, or TV tuner cards, you could pretty much install Linux on any system you got. However with the new Core 2 Duo systems that has changed.

My System

After reading a bunch of hardware reviews, and opinions my personal motherboard chipset of choice is Intel’s P965. The P975 chipset is very expensive for a motherboard that is now a generation behind, and the P945 chipset is designed for lower end systems and does not pair well with a Core 2 Duo. The P965 has a nice compromise of the latest technologies and price.

I am still holding out hope for the NVidia NForce 570 or 590 chipsets, but initial reviews of the ASUS motherboard build around the 570 chipset are not looking good.

So I would like a P965 motherboard to be paired with my Core 2 Duo and run Linux on it. Nothing else fancy, just gigabit ethernet, a decent graphics card, maybe raid, and a sound card. Basically I want a fast processor for music encoding, video playback/encoding, and source code compiling.

The Problem

However, somewhere along the line the decision was made by the Linux kernel development community to not add support for the JMicron JMB368 chip that pretty much every P965 motherboard is using to provide PATA drive support. Because there is currently no Kernel support for this chip you can not easily install Linux on any system if you have a PATA DVD-Rom drive or Hard-drive. With no DVD you can not install Linux unless you try doing a network boot, or use USB drives etc. But that is not practical for most people.

The Solution

At the moment there is no solution…it seems that some patches are being added to the very latest bleeding edge Kernels, which are not ready for prime time yet. Edgy Eft Knot 2 does not seem to support the JMicron chip yet either. So right now I am stuck in limbo. I can either go for another motherboard based on a chipset that is either more expensive or not as powerful as my first choice, stick with AMD, or wait and see.

Right now I am in a holding pattern until Edgy Eft is released. If it still does not support one of the most popular Core 2 Duo motherboards then I will probably just go with a AMD Athlon64 X2 and get great Linux support.

Hopefully the ASUS Nforce 570 board is just a fluke and other boards with be screamers, that support high voltage DDR2 RAM and overclock as well as the P965 boards do. That will be a nice solution.

Final Thoughts

It was very sad when I started seeing these problems crop up. I was days away from building my new system when the first problems with the P965 motherboards first started. Linux has prided itself on running on everything, and that is one of the best things about it. I was really hoping that the time had past where I had to spend hours researching each component on my new system to see if it will work well with Linux, but it seems that we are still not quite there.

What really pisses me off though is that the standard WindowsXP installer can see the chip by default!!! I mean come on if WindowsXP installer from several years ago has support for a PATA chip there is no reason Linux should not have it.

It now seems that they have all the basic functionality in place to make a full replacement of sysvinit. With my initial review I was a little concerned when I realized you could not easily shut down or restart your system using Upstart. Now that have that functionality the system really does look like it will be ready for the release of 6.10.

Personally I can not wait, I like change it gives you something to look forward too. Far too many Linux distros are stagnating recently, just release updates to programs that have been around for many years. That stability is great for servers, but for desktop systems they thrive on change. Sometimes it is good to shake things up a little.

*Update 9/12/2006: Fixed a silly typo where I said upstart “is not ready” when I meant to say upstart “is now ready.” Big difference.

Upstart is a new boot loader that is in development that could be a potential replacement for sysvinit. The program is basically in charge of starting up all the programs you need when you start your machine to make it do anything useful. This program is quite important because it is a major factor in determining how long your computer takes to boot.

I first heard about Upstart a few days ago. It is being developed by some of the developers at Canonical Limited, the company behind Ubuntu, and is looking like a good system. You can read in more detail about how Upstart works when compared to other systems, but basically it differs from the others in that it uses an Event Driven model to boot the system rather than a liner system.

For example, the current sysvinit program runs boot scripts one after another, in a liner fashion, until the system is up. Each step in the boot sequence relies on the fact that all the previous steps are complete before it starts it work.

Upstart on the other hand is driven by events. So an example event could be “the root file system is writable”, boot processes that require writing to the root file system do not have to wait for that step to finish before they can be started. The processes could be started before then when the file system becomes writable all the waiting processes are notified and continue loading.

This system allows for a more flexible and robust boot processes that should also lead to faster boot times by allowing the system to do more work concurrently rather than forcing some steps to wait for a whole host of other steps to be completed, which they may not even require to continue themselves.

Installation

Before we start remember that Upstart is still in heavy development, it is far from ready for a main Ubuntu system. That is why I am doing all of this in Parallels so I can test it out, and see what it does without compromising my main system.

In the blog posting that first peeked my interest in Upstart stated that the package is in the “Ubuntu Universe” repository. So the first thing I did was install Dapper in Parallels and try to download the Upstart package from the Universe repository, but alas it was not there! After some more thought it seemed obvious that the author meant the Edgy Eft Universe repository, after all who would want to install a incomplete, experimental boot system on their Stable Ubuntu system? So I took some Dapper boot up times in Parallels then moved on to installing Edgy Eft.

After Install Edgy Eft Knot 1, and adding the Edgy Eft Universe repositories I then saw the Upstart Package. After installing the package and reading the README (/usr/share/doc/upstart/README) grub menu option that allowed me to boot Ubuntu using Upstart. One reboot later and I was again disappointed, because Upstart complained about missing files, and would not boot anything.

So my next conclusion was that Upstart really required the cutting edge version of Edgy Eft. So using Synaptic I did a system update moving my system from Edgy Eft Knot 1 to the latest current release. After that Upstart booted just fine, shutting down, and restarting are another story.

Obviously Upstart is still in heavy testing, and is in no way intended to be used on a production system. That is why I was pleased that the Upstart developers made Upstart an option at boot, so if it does not work you can just ignore it and boot normally.

Impressions and Speed

The system booted just fine, shutdown, and restart have not been implemented yet. You can shutdown the system by sending a event directly to the program, but it is not very friendly yet. To be honest I was a little surprised that the system booted at all. Normally when you try to change something this fundamental in a Linux system something normally breaks horribly. This time however I was greeted with the familiar Ubuntu log in and went straight to Gnome.

I took a few boot up time readings using my trusty stopwatch and here are the results:

The first thing that shocked me was how much faster Edgy Eft was booting than Dapper Drake. I am not sure if developers start with a stripped down version of Ubuntu then add things back before release, or if they have done something dramatic to the boot up processes, but Edgy seemed a lot faster. Hopefully this will stick with the final release of Edgy because if the boot up time can be reduced by anywhere near 40% that will be a great thing for Ubuntu. Upstart was also much faster than Dappers standard boot up , but that’s probably due more to overall reduced boot time of Edgy.

Upstart was a couple of seconds faster booting than the standard Edgy sysinitv. While this is not as dramatic as the difference between Edgy and Dapper, it is still impressive. Upstart is still in development, where sysinitv has been hammered on and optimized for years. Also Upstart still has all the debugging messages turned on. So just that fact that it is currently just a little faster than sysvinit is nice.

Final Thoughts

I am quite excited to see what Upstart can do in the future. These tests are not very scientific or anything, but some of the huge time differences also bode well for the future of Ubuntu. If Edgy Eft can keep their boot times this much lower than Dapper, and my readings were not just a fluke, then we might start seeing some much faster booting Linux systems soon.

There is still a ways to go in both Edgy Eft and Upstart development, so I will have to take a wait and see approach to both projects, but I really hope my findings here hold out until release.

So the first thing I wanted to do was download one of the popular virtualization packages and give it a spin. There appear to be two main products out there at the moment, VMWare and Parallels. VMWare is the grand-daddy of them all, and has been around forever, and Parallels is the relatively new kid on the block. Parallels has been getting a lot of press recently with it’s Mac line of products so I thought I would start with that and see how it performs in Linux.

Installation

To start with I just went to the parallels website, where I registered for a trial activation key, and downloaded deb package the beta version of Parallels workstation 2.2. They also have RPM, TGZ, and Gentoo ebuilds as well as a Windows EXE just in case.

The deb install package worked with Ubuntu Dapper just fine. After getting the package installed I ran the parallels-config program. At first I had a little problem running Parallels configuration because I did not have the current source headers for the version of the Linux kernel I was running. That was quickly fixed with “sudo apt-get install linux-headers” and I was off again.

After fixing the missing headers problem the parallels-config command ran without a hitch and said that I could now run parallels. The first time starting up Parallels I got a couple of X Windows warning messages in the console, but the program still started up.

With everything else installed the rest of the setup is pretty stright forward. This is my first experience with any VM software, and I had no trouble figuring out what I had to do to get it working. This is a good sign that Parallels has a pretty decent and easy to use UI.

Setting up a new Virtual Machine

With parallels up and running I got started creating a new Virtual Machine (VM). For testing this for the first time I decided to go with Parallels default settings and see how it turns out. It created a system with 256MB of ram, a floppy drive, 8GB hard disk, DVD-Rom, Network Adapter, Sound, and a USB controller. Everything a system needs, well maybe except for the RAM which is a little stingy for a modern GUI based operating system.

After entering my trial activation key I started up the new VM, popped in my Ubuntu DVD and set it off. I know it seems a little odd installing Ubuntu on Ubuntu, but the main reason I wanted to try virtualization was to have a test bed for my main system where I could test new software before applying it to my main OS.

For example, the Ubuntu developers just released a beta version of Upstart, a new system boot loader. I do not want to hose my main system by installing a untested low level application on it. So I will try it out on an identical setup in a virtual machine. If anything goes badly I can just delete the VM.

So far Parallels has been impressive, everything from the installation and configuration of Parallels itself to the creation of a new virtual machine has been simple. As I write this Ubuntu is installing in a window on my other workspace just as it would on any system.

Final Words

With the system installed I am now going to spend a little time messing around with the program, and see how it works out. I am hoping to give VMWare a try at a later time, and maybe compare how well Parallels and VMWare run on my new Core 2 Duo system (when I actually get the thing) compared to my current AthlonXP system.