List of Linux Distros Tested on CF-28 Toughbook

Test Results Installing Different Linux/BSD Distributions on a Panasonic CF-28 ToughBook

Below is my list of Linux and BSD distributions that I have tried installing on a CF-28 Toughbook. A lot of distributions will not even boot up correctly on this notebook with the install CD so I have decided to keep track of which distributions could be successfully installed and document my results in the table below:

Linux Distro	Default Install Works	Date Install Attempted	Notes
Linux Mint Elyssa FluxBox	Yes	November 2008
LighthousePup	Yes	November 2008	Puppy Derivative
Puppy Linux	Yes	November 2008	Live CD and Installer works OK
PC-BSD 7.01	Yes	November 2008	Install time: 45 minutes  Installed but buggy when booting
Vector Linux 6.0 RC1	No	November 2008	Just boots to a distorted mostly blank screen
Linux Mint 6 RC1	No	November 2008	Just boots to a blank screen
Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 Alternative ISO Install	No	November 2008	Install takes about 45 minutes, seems to stall out for about 15-20 minutes at 6% on the “Select and install Software” part of the install (known bug) but install will continue.  After reboot, login screen comes up but desktop screen never comes up properly after login
Opensuse 11.1 RC1	No	December 2008	Install CD just boots to distorted desktop
Fedora 10	No	November 2008	Just boots to a black screen with mouse cursor

Playing CBC Radio Streams with VLC Media Player on Linux

I have found you can get CBC radio streams from:

http://www.cbc.ca/listen/streams.html

to play with latest Linux VLC 0.9.X version by clicking on the link and letting VLC error out and then copying the link and changing three characters in it and pasting it back into VLC using the pull down menu item Media, Open Network, and pasting it into the address box and change the uppercase REF to ref then clicking play.

—- quote of error that will popup in VLC ———————

Your input can’t be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘mms://a808.l961736807.c9617.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/808/9617/v0001/REFlector:36807′. Check the log for details.
Your input can’t be opened:
VLC is unable to open the MRL ‘mms://a809.l961736808.c9617.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/809/9617/v0001/REFlector:36808′. Check the log for details.
—- end of quote ——————————————————–

For example to play the above you would copy and paste the following link from the error above into VLC and change the REF to ref as shown to get it to play:

mms://a809.l961736808.c9617.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/809/9617/v0001/reflector:36808

I have sent a message to CBC about this – hopefully they will fix this so you don’t have to do this to listen to their live streams but in the meantime this will work if you want to listen to any of the links from this page.

Update: December 15 2008 – still no reply from CBC or change at the CBC site but I think the same limitation applies to Mplayer and Kmplayer – these players also will not start the links when you click on them from the CBC pages but if you paste in the link I mention above with the lower case ref then the player will play the stream.  The problem is they don’t go as far as VLC and actually give you the final link that plays the stream so you cannot copy and paste the link as described above.

New Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Solves Some Issues

I just tried installing the Xubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex version and it looks like things are improving – many of the problems I had with earlier install attempts that I had documented on this site have been solved.  The standard iso GUI install booted up and worked OK, although I had to manually setup the partitioning to get past an error about mounting the swap partition.  Other than that the install takes a little time (likely about a couple hours) on the old Panasonic Toughbook CF-28.  I went to the CBC radio site and tried playing one of the “Listen Live” links and it automatically realized it needed some extra codecs and started the process the download them which took another 1/2 hour or so – after it finally got all the codecs and plugins required the CBC radio stream started playing.   The codecs it downloaded are the freely available ones but also the ones that are questionable from a legal perspective in certain countries due to the patent issues – there is a different solution if you want to go the legal route – more on that below.

Ubuntu lets you download the free codecs and plugins but a message comes up saying you can buy them from the Ubuntu store as well if you are in a country that is restricted by the software patents that are the root of this codec issue mess.  If you want to go the legal route, Ubuntu has teamed up with a company called Fluendo that has licensed and packaged all the codecs required – they seem to want enough money for them – if you had to pay for these plus the Power DVD decoder from another company called Cyberlink you would be paying about $90.00 US which is approaching the cost of Windows.  If these upgrades were more reasonably priced people might go for it, but at those costs, I don’t expect they will catch on in a big way – this is not so much the fault of either of one of these companies that are packaging these things, but it might be time for the patent holders they are licensing these from to be a little more reasonable to make the costs more affordable.  This whole software patent thing just does not make sense in today’s global world where software can be downloaded so easily from anywhere and with different rules for different countries it just makes it confusing for the average user who just wants things to work.  It also doesn’t fit well with open source software and updates for everything else being so easily available from the standard package managers in Linux distributions – if open source operating system use increases and enough of the public demand more reasonable solutions perhaps the pressure will be there to change things or the way the content is delivered on the Internet will change to get around these issues – either way the old methodology of using software licensing and software patents and making money from such things is likely to decline.

Things I am Learning While Trying to use Linux for my Desktop OS

As stated in previous posts, I am gradually moving my home desktop from Windows to Linux. I am running two desktops and laptop in parallel right now and have most critical applications on the two desktops. I am also trying out several distributions on a CF-28 Toughbook that I have. Trying to install and use Linux for a desktop OS has been a learning opportunity – here is what I have found so far:

Setting up multimedia support in Linux is a real issue.

Some Linux distributions that want to stay pure to the open source, non-proprietary and free philosophy do not come configured to play audio, video or DVDs – a lot of this really has nothing to do with technical limitations and is not really a weakness in Linux but is due to some distros not wanting to sell out to or get involved in licensing and software patent issues of companies or research organizations. The whole industry is in quite a mess because of all these software patents and proprietary closed source audio, video and codec formats and most of it boils down to corporations or organizations trying to protect content or enhance profits. Unfortunately, because of the current formats that a lot of the web, audio, and video content use, you must have some of these proprietary or licensed items installed to have a “useful” desktop. I realize that there are certain sites, especially those selling online videos that are using some type of DRM that are likely to never work on Linux, but I am just talking about getting normal audio and video formats to operate so that you can access 90% of what is out there. There are ways to get most types of audio, video and DVD content to play but it involves a few extra steps. I have also found other challenges in getting video and audio content to play consistently from various web sites – some web sites seem to encode their audio or video links in such a way that some of the video players and/or browser plugins available in Linux will not work. I have had a real challenge getting the following sites to work:

• CBC radio streaming links at http://www.cbc.ca/radio
• Viewing movie trailers at http://winnipegmovies.com

It seems like I can get one or the other working but very rarely both with the same media player and plugins. One of the most popular Linux media players, Mplayer, will not work with CBC even though they say it should on their site – it appears to start loading the stream but then times out with a “stopped” message and never starts playing the audio. I even tried this with Crossover Office standard and Microsoft’s Media Player 6.0 that it installs with plugins and it seems to have the same issue. Other Linux media players like Xine and VLC seem to work so I finally manged to find a couple combinations that would work but some of the plugins that do work lack the nice embedded control features (for volume, etc.). I also found that all browsers you have installed want to use the same set of plugins so you cannot install different browsers as a workaround to get different multimedia content to play properly. Again, this is not totally a fault of Linux but sometimes is the result of whoever is putting up the content taking the easy way out by only wanting to have a single format or not checking to make sure what they are streaming is encoded in the best way. Some of the better audio or video streaming sites give you a choice so you can choose the type of audio or video format to play and I hope as Mac and Linux become more popular this becomes more common.

Keep checking back – I will try and describe other issues I am running into as I continue to experiment with Linux on the desktop.

Gradually Moving My Desktop to Linux

I have been gradually trying to move my main desktop to Linux. I’ve had a second desktop PC running Linux Mint for a few months now and have been gradually moving things over to it. A few years ago when I had to rebuild my Windows XP desktop I decided I would NOT put MS Office on it even though I could have because of the three educational licenses they give you with a student version. Instead I installed Mozilla Thunderbird and OpenOffice to handle the tasks I would have used MS Office for. This has actually worked fairly well and I haven’t run into too many issues with using email and opening email attachments which is mainly what I used MS Office for anyway. This also gave me a chance to see how free and open source programs work and when I found I could live without MS Office it made me want to go further and try alternative free and open source operating systems as well.

Tonight I took another step and moved my Thunderbird email profile (which contains all my email messages and settings) from my Windows XP desktop to my Linux Mint desktop – it was surprisingly easy to do once you find out where the Thunderbird email files are stored on each operating system. On my Windows desktop I was used to letting MSN messenger check my Hotmail account but I had to find a different way on Linux since I will not have MSN messenger running as a background task. In looking for a solution for this issue, I also found out that Thunderbird has free webmail addons that can be setup to check various webmail accounts so this will work to keep me connected with my Hotmail.

I will be continuing to move towards having just one desktop – because I think I might still need Windows for some rare things, I am trying to see if I can get Windows XP running in virtual PC on my Linux desktop. I will have to buy a new Windows XP OEM license to do this as I cannot move my existing Windows XP operating system which is also an OEM version (tied to the current hardware it is running on) to a virtual version – it is restrictions like this Microsoft has been limiting us with for years that also make me want to try Linux as a desktop. I like the freedom of moving everything to new hardware without having to re-purchase the operating system each time I make such a move. Once I have a virtual Windows XP desktop setup, I should be able to move it to wherever I want since it will always appear to be running on the same virtual hardware – this just goes to show a lot of these licensing restrictions that Microsoft has placed on its products in the past just don’t translate that well to the new world of “virtualization”.

As I move forward with this migration, I will update this blog with my experiences.

Success with Hardy Heron on Panasonic CF-28

I downloaded the alternate install CD image for both Ubuntu & Xubuntu Hardy Heron and installed from those. I managed to get both Ubuntu and Xubuntu installed successfully using the alternate CDROM. Both supported my wireless card right from the install and I just had to select my WPA network and add in my passphrase – the wireless also seems very stable and stays connected so I am impressed with that. I added in Xine, Real Player, VLC, and Mplayer and had to play around to get the right mix of plugins and codecs so that movies trailers and audio from a couple sites that I frequent would play correctly – setting up a new install for multimedia these days is quite complicated and you never know if you have it right until you use the system for a while. I will take some time over the next couple weeks to try out the new Ubuntu on this notebook and see what happens – it will be a good test to see if this new version can stand the test of time.

I should mention the model and specs of the Panasonic Toughbook that this installation was done on are:

Panasonic CF-28 Toughbook Model CF28STJGZKM-B with:

Integrated Touchscreen (I don’t have this fully working in Ubuntu yet but I have setup it up with other distros before so I am sure I can get it working – I will post the details on exactly how it is done once I do)

Pentium III running at 1GHZ

256MB of RAM

CDROM Drive

D-Link DWL-AG660 Wireless card (in cardbus slot)

I have now successfully installed PCLINUXOS Gnome 2008, PC-BSD, SymphonyOne 2008.1, Xubuntu and Ubuntu on this CF-28. I have several hard drives for this notebook which are easy to remove and swap so it is a great unit for testing differnet Linux distributions. I will continue to try these distros and other new distributions on this particular notebook and report back on my success.

My Experience with Xubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 RC on a CF-28 Toughbook

I thought I would try installing the new Xubuntu 8.04 RC1 on a CF-28 Toughbook I have – I didn’t get too far – both the LiveCD and the install routine boot up to a blank screen. Ubuntu seems to have trouble with the Intel graphics chip but I did find out that if I attached an external screen and rebooted I could start the install routine since things would appear properly on the external monitor. I will have to see if I can get it installed and perhaps figure out what to do to get things straightened out.

Update – see my next post – I finally managed to get Xubuntu and Ubuntu installed on this notebook

Future Directions

I would like this blog to be a place where I can discuss and share information on technical issues and events that interest me.  Over the next couple months I would like to document projects and pursuits that I am spending my time on such as:

• How well Linux installs “out of the box” on various models of laptops
• Interesting open source software
• My comments on IT related news events and the direction I see technology moving that affect the IT industry

I really think we are on the verge of seeing a change in IT that will move open source operating systems and software from the fringes to the mainstream.