Ubuntu

Well, everything is better in 8.04, yet, unfortunately not everything is pure bliss. There are a few stumbling blocks I’ve encountered, some of which I’ve resolved, some of which I am still fighting or waiting for more time to tackle.

So far, I’ve installed Ubuntu 8.04 on three systems:

Generic Intel Desktop Box, using native upgrade feature from Ubuntu 7.10. Uniformly working, smooth upgrade, no real problems. Very slow upgrade, but no real complaints. Bundled Firefox3 beta 5 locked up or crashed unexpectedly so many times that I had to go back to Firefox 2.0.0.14. I actually had to move firefox user files out of the way to get everything to work. New extensions / add-ons would not install until I moved .mozilla to .x_mozilla and allowed firefox to recreate what it needed.

Fortunately, with the CLEO and FEBE extensions, I was able to restore my preferred add-ons very quickly.

Compaq Presario V6420 AMD64. Clean Ubuntu install (32 bit), mostly works. Wireless wasn’t up out of the box, but display was. After some customization and many package installations, I can’t get mp3 or ogg files to work with Rhythmbox. Audacious does work on most of these files. There is still an issue with X locking up as the laptop tries to go into power-saving mode (should be ’standby’ according to the settings). I had the same firefox issues as with the Desktop box. Solution has been the same.

Lenova Thinkpad T60p. Wubi install failed from existing Windows XP OS, but clean install worked. By default, the screensaver came up after a few mintues and frequently locked the system up, apparently from bad display/graphics voodoo. Otherwise pretty smooth and looked good. Not much testing as this was a borrowed system.

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) (though I keep typing “gusty”) was released today. I tried the upgrade directly from my Feisty 7.04 desktop, using update manager. However, though things started well enough, soon enough my download speed had dropped to 20kb/s and my estimated completion time had trailed off to 22 hours. Ack. Not nearly quick enough for me, since I’ve been impatiently waiting for the non-beta release for days.

So, what’s the alternative? As usual, bittorrent provides speedy downloads for popular files, and this one counts. To upgrade a current installation, get the .torrent file for the 7.10 alternate iso image from the Ubuntu 7.10 Releases page, and open it with your favorite torrent application. My speed is about 25 times faster downloading via this method. I will be seeding the file when I can, as well, to make sure this process is as fast for others as it can be.

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If you stay online long enough, you’re bound to find convergences in ideas where you weren’t looking for them.
Here’s where my net trail led me:

From when I first started working with Unix up to the nearly present, I had always used cat /dev/null to empty a file with a minimum of mess, i.e.,:
foozbear% cat /dev/null > big_useless_log

This, of course, made big_useless_log empty, and did so without getting rid of it, in case an a data write was imminent. If memory serves, this was all very consistent with the Unix principle of “First, Do no harm,” or, “Don’t make waves if you don’t have a board,” or whatever it was. (I believe using /dev/null in this way was called data lavage.)

This week I was using a lot of temp files — actually using the same temp file over and over to hold data I’d scraped from Cisco switch output so I could point some ‘awk’ at it for parsing purposes. For some reason, I decided to see what would happen if instead of removing and recreating the file (or more laboriously, typing cat /dev/null > temp), I used a redirection symbol, i.e.,
foozbear% > temp
Well, this worked as well as my previous steps, so I started alternating (using the command line up arrow) between my temp file resetting/editing
foozbear% > temp && vi temp
and my grep/awk line:
foozbear% egrep 'Gig|Fas' temp | awk '{print "interface "$2" "$3"\n description "$1}'

This worked fantastically (note that I was using bash under Ubuntu here), and a good time was had by all (the Cisco switches were particularly pleased, having their cdp output turned into port descriptions so handily — but perhaps I’ll expand on that later).

The redirection symbol also can be used if you are too lazy to create an empty file using ‘touch’. Instead of
foozbear% touch newfile
just type
foozbear% > newfile
and you’re all set.

I think that most of the applications and tools that people expect to be available upon a new install of Ubuntu fall into one of two categories:
1) those included with the latest Ubuntu release
2) those that can are available through automatix.
http://www.getautomatix.com/

This is probably a bit optimistic, but this has held true for me and for most people I’ve seen asking for particular functionality. There is still a list of exceptions, including the lack of a tool to read someone else’s Visio files, but those will either come along in time, or the desperate will come up with a decent work-around and publish it.

So, if you have a new install, what does it take to get automatix and install most of the stuff you probably are looking for?

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I have made almost no manual configuration changes to my Ubuntu Feisty installation since I moved to it as my primary desktop OS. I have, however, installed (and frequently uninstalled) a lot of applications, libraries, and so on (using synaptic, apt, and the Ubuntu add/remove feature). Nevertheless, given my lack of linux-level tweaking, I was surprised when my sound completely disappeared from my system. This was more of a problem for me, than I would have guessed — though I don’t usually listen to music while I’m on the system, occasionally I do want to have something in the background (mid-ground?), and when I wanted that, not having audio output was a disappointment.

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I’m running the beta of Feisty, and wanted to get my wacom tablet working. The general linux instructions direct you to edit XF86Config.conf or xorg.conf. For Feisty, this should be xorg.conf, but I couldn’t find the file, even after re-running updatedb and using locate, as well as

find /etc/X11 | xargs egrep InputDevice.

Fortunately, I found an entry in the ubuntu forums which explicitly addresses the issue. (I still don’t know why, given that I’ve not done anything to directly interact with my X setup, I am missing the file.) The set of entries is here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=2437635 .

This command will generate a working, default xorg.conf for you, which you can then edit to the edge of sanity and back:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg -pcritical.

I recently signed up for an account on box.net so that I’d have another way to store and transfer files between sites. Currently, you can get 1GB of space with the free basic account, but you aren’t allowed to upload files over 10MB. This is fine as long you’re uploading photos, but more problematic if you’ve got larger files.

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Changing my default mail client in Ubuntu turned out to be one of the easiest config changes I’ve ever made in Linux. In Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), the default mail application is Evolution, and I had been putting off changing this to the application I really used — Mozilla’s Thunderbird — because (based on past experience with desktop Linuxes) I was expecting this to be a painful process. Ultimately, I didn’t have to touch Firefox (my default browser, from which I’m launching ‘mailto’ events), I didn’t have to manually edit any configuration files, and I didn’t even have to look very far.

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