Ubuntu

Disgrace ! Why wasn't this mentioned anywhere on the Ubuntu blogs ? As Intrepid Ibex is the current Ubuntu version, today, at 11:04:56 GMT, the Unix time_t value was "IBEX", that being the ASCII representation of the 32bit number of seconds since New Year 1970.

Other interesting upcoming dates :

IBEX  Fri Dec 12 11:04:56 2008 GMT 
ICON  Sat Dec 13 05:59:42 2008 GMT 
IDLE  Sat Dec 13 23:59:01 2008 GMT 
IDOL  Sun Dec 14 00:11:56 2008 GMT 
IEEE  Sun Dec 14 17:41:25 2008 GMT 
INCH  Sun Dec 21 13:23:20 2008 GMT 
INDY  Sun Dec 21 13:27:53 2008 GMT 
INFO  Sun Dec 21 13:36:15 2008 GMT 
IRAN  Wed Dec 24 14:03:58 2008 GMT 
IRAQ  Wed Dec 24 14:04:01 2008 GMT 

Fear not, dear Ubuntu supporters, the ubuntu teams get another chance, as the lowercase numbers still yet have to come :

Ibex  Mon Jan  5 19:54:32 2009 GMT
Ibis  Mon Jan  5 20:11:31 2009 GMT
Idea  Wed Jan  7 08:18:41 2009 GMT
Idle  Wed Jan  7 08:48:37 2009 GMT
Idol  Wed Jan  7 09:01:32 2009 GMT
Iran  Sat Jan 17 22:53:34 2009 GMT
Iraq  Sat Jan 17 22:53:37 2009 GMT

As reported previously, I upgraded my eeePC to Intrepid lately, which introduced quite some space problems. Before I continue, I need to explain the storage contained in this netbook. I acquired the 900 Linux model, which contains 20GB in total. This 20GB is in fact a 4GB SSD drive, combined with a (much) slower internal 16GB SD card. As the SSD drive is really fast, I installed the Ubuntu eee onto it in a single partition (Ubuntu eee doesn't support LVM during install mode), and converted the 16GB drive later to a LVM volume group, on which I installed /home and /opt.

A default Ubuntu install is about 3GB, which means I got 75% used disk space on the SSD drive. Ubuntu needs about 1.5GB temp space in /var/cache/apt/archives during an upgrade, which I didn't had any more on the SSD drive, but I created an extra lvol on the SD card, and mounted this as /var/cache/apt/archives before the install. All went well, but I hit a 97% barrier during the install on the root partition, so I knew I had to resolve this.

Normally, I would enter both disks as physical volumes into the same volume group, but mixing disks with a different speed is a bad idea, and this would require a reinstall also. So I opted for a more ugly approach, where I would move one or more directories to a lvol onto the SD card. /usr was 2.5GB large, so an ideal candidate for migration. This went without any problem, but after a reboot, the /usr partition which resided now on the SD card, was so slow it annoyed the crap out of me.

I decided to move /usr back onto its original place, but to keep /usr/share (still 1.2GB large) onto the slower SD card. Now, moving /usr on a Unix system can be tricky. If everything is designed nicely, you should be able to boot into single user mode without needing anything in /usr. Which wasn't the case for Ubuntu... Booting into single user, starts a program with /usr dependancies, so unmounting /usr is impossible. The easiest solution was to comment /usr in /etc/fstab, which prevented the program to start up, and dumped me into a root shell, after which I could unmount /usr.

I noticed on the web that Ubuntu 8.10 was available, but found it weird that update-manager didn't warned me about this available upgrade. Turns out that the default set-up for Hardy is to subscribe to LTS upgrades only. Weird choice of Canonical... Modifying the sources list through System > Admin > Software Sources > Updates, and selecting the 'Normal Releases' entry enabled the upgrade through update-manager.

On my desktop, the upgrade went without a hiccup, but I got more trouble on my laptop : I copied alot of the files in /var/cache/apt/archives to my laptop, which was a no-no apparently for the upgrade to perform decently. Update-manager decided that the upgrade consisted of 3 packages, which I only noticed after I pressed the 'Continue' button. After this 'upgrade', update-manager was completely foobarred, so I had to switch to apt-get dist-upgrade cycles to get things working again. But in the end, everything went fine from there.

I started the upgrade on my eeePC also, but had to create an extra logical volume on the 16GB media in order to give the upgrade the 1.5GB space it required.

Intrepid is booting way slower than its predecessor, but in the general use, is feeling faster than Hardy.

The dvd-slideshow command takes a series of pictures, and transforms it into a mpg stream. You can add subtitles, transitions and music. However, the version in Ubuntu is quite old, and generates quite some problems :

...
[dvd-slideshow] see [dvd-slideshow] No audio files passed.  Using 0:1:0.000 silence.
[dvd-slideshow] Working on track 1 audio file 0
[dvd-slideshow] silence
[dvd-slideshow] Creating silence audio file for 0:1:0.000
sox soxio: Failed reading '/dev/zero': unknown file type 'raw'
[dvd-slideshow] This audio plays in slideshow from 0:0:0.000 to 0:1:0.000
[dvd-slideshow] ###############
[dvd-slideshow] Concatenating all audio files...
cat: /home/gerben/dvd-slideshow_temp_13985/audio1_????.raw: No such file or directory
sox soxio: Failed reading '-': unknown file type 'raw'
[dvd-slideshow] Creating ac3 audio...
[dvd-slideshow] ERROR during ffmpeg execution!

To get the package working, first upgrade to the latest version. The dvd-slideshow homepage offers a .deb version which installs nicely on Hardy.

Secondly, dvd-slideshow repeatedly calls "sox -t raw" in various ways. My understanding is that this line will fail unless libsox-fmt-sndfile is installed.

And last : change the /usr/bin/dvd-slideshow shellscript as follows :


- ffmpeg -i "$tmpdir/audio1.wav" -y -vn -ab $audio_bitrate -acodec ac3 -ar $audio_sample_rate -ac 6 "$tmpdir/audio1.ac3" >> "$outdir/$logfile" 2>&1
+ ffmpeg -i "$tmpdir/audio1.wav" -y -vn -ab ${audio_bitrate}k -acodec ac3 -ar $audio_sample_rate -ac 6 "$tmpdir/audio1.ac3" >> "$outdir/$logfile" 2>&1


Also, change all occurences of audio_bitrate like this

audio_bitrate=224

to

audio_bitrate=224k

I just upgraded to Hardy, the new Ubuntu version. Not much to say, only that the upgrade went smooth and fast - I feared that the download servers would be overloaded the weekend after the release, but they were very responsive. There are only 2 minor upgrade problems :

First, Ubuntu choose to include Firefox3 beta, which sucks cause many of my add-ons are not compatibe with this version. Especially DeliciousButtons and Tabkit are extensions I already miss. Hopefully they get ported soon.

The second thing is that my fonts are foobarred, especially in Firefox. Which settings do you guys use with LCD screens (I currently use Best Contrast, with Full Hinting and VGBR subpixel ordering), and which fonts do you use in Firefox ?

The Release Candidate of Gutsy was released recently. As I had some free hours, I decided to upgrade to this RC release. After an official release, all Ubuntu servers are overloaded anyway, so this was the right moment. I uninstalled Compiz Fusion first, and then I initiated the upgrade with the

update-manager -d

command, which downloaded and installed the upgrade without a glitch. Compiz Fusion is now the default window manager, so that means eye candy for the masses.

Seems that Ubuntu choose to use the Xgl server as default for use with Compiz Fusion. This runs without any problems on my NVidia card, so I decided to stick with it. In the past, I had my share of troubles with Beryl/Compiz and the buggy NVidia drivers.

Overall, a great upgrade experience ! Gutsy runs in all its glory, without any upgrade problem. Nice work, Canonical !

I purchased a new Acer Aspire laptop. I test-drived Windows Vista for 4 days, during which it bluescreened on me twice. Today, I installed Ubuntu Feisty on it. Surprisingly, almost everything worked out of the box; only the maximum screen resolution obliged me to install 915resolution first, after which the 1280x800 resolution in Gnome came available. Even the built-in webcam worked without a problem ! Only shame that the default installation of Ubuntu doesn't support LVM.
I just have to resolve some problems with the wireless link, but that's probably due to some weird encryption algorithm I configure at my access point. Ubuntu has an excellent Linux on laptop wiki, where the Acer Aspire 5610 is described here.
The laptop is called Esgaroth to the city in the Long Lake, south of the Lonely Mountain and east of Mirkwood, as described in The Hobbit and in Lord of the Rings.

I'm writing this on my newly upgraded Feisty, but boy, did this upgrade took some problems ! First of all, the update-manager crashed after some time during the install of the packages. So I switched to good old 'apt-get dist-upgrade'-'apt-get -f install' combinations which finally got things less or more straight.

After reboot, I got the usplash screen; when my disk kept on rambling, I knew there was big trouble. Getting rid of the usplash logo was easy, and it seemed that udev was causing lots of trouble. The combination with evms and lvm seemed fatal, causing the system only to boot partially into single user. I got even kernel crashes when I disabled evms. Eventually switching to Edgy's kernel version, and getting rid of lvm and evms alltogether finally let me into the realm of runlevel 3. After that, all was easy : switching to linux-2.6.20, re-enabling AIGLX and beryl, and lo and behold, Ubuntu Feisty in all its glory.

Most troublesome dist-upgrade *ever*

The last versions of Beryl contained some problems with my NVidia card, which forced me to start using the cvs versions of Beryl. However, these versions brought another problem to light : Xgl had a huge memory leak. After some hours of work, my memory and swap were filled by Xgl. Up to some point where the kernel started to kill some processes. Not much fun if you know that's mostly Xgl which was killed.

So I decided to switch over to the AIGLX/Beryl combination. Here's an installation HOWTO for Edgy. My first impression : yes, it's more stable, and my memory consumption stays reasonable. Many of the OpenGL programs like xscreensaver-gl and Google Earth work much better now too.

Now that the french parliament has switched to Ubuntu ("Merde," said Bill Gates), this is a good opportunity to point to the Ubuntu 2006 essentials list; this list aims at Ubuntu beginners, and points out some must-have programs to make the Linux switch substantially easier.