Another Opinion Among Many

RT Cunningham recently wrote about his woes with Windows and his desire to kick Microsoft and its encumbered software to the curb. He is going to try and replace Windows with Ubuntu Linux.

I think that this is great, sort of.

You see, I’ve been using some form of GNU and Linux (or *Bsd) on my desktop compute since I first tried that Storm Linux 2000 disk that a neighbor gave me to play with. I had a hard time with it, as I couldn’t get my Wintel modem to connect to the internet.

Lately, although I am still a true distro-hopper, I have been using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice. The computer I currently have has not had Windows installed on it since I put the parts together. My hard drive was not new when I acquired it and has developed a few bad sectors, so I replaced it. I was running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, the long term support stable release, on my computer, which had bee upgraded from 6.10 or 7.04, as the releases arrived.

On the new hard drive, I put on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), which was sometime around September or October. This was just before the release of 9.10 in November. All of the bugs that had presented themselves in the early months seemed to have been ironed out, except for a sound/video issue in which the sound would totally crap out on me for no apparent reason, freezing up .avi videos. I resolved that by changing a configuration file to not choose the frequency (44,100 or 48,000) and set it at one. Taking the auto off seemed to fix the problem.

9.04 had Firefox 3.0, though, and I really prefer Firefox 3.5, so for that reason alone, I “upgraded” to 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I don’t know why I did this, as I had already tried to install Karmic on its own partition to test it, along about beta 1 or so. It began with sound, but now it has no sound. The desktop is stunning and the themes are improving. Everything seems to work with a nice, fluid flow, but it has no sound. This time I can’t fix it.

The “upgrade” had preserved the sound, but I’ve found a few little glitches that I don’t like at all and, even with diligent googling for the cure, I cannot solve these issues.

• sound and video skip, hiccup, and race or freeze at random times
• flash is unplayable on it
• logging out so another user can log in can cause X to produce a black screen that requires a REISUB or reset to get out of.

This is unacceptable, so my 9.10 spare test distro is now being upgraded to the alpha of 10.4 Lucid Lynx so that I can see if it can be repaired by “progress”. Its happening underneath this browser, as I type. I hope nothing breaks too badly before I submit the article. So far, its down to “about 4 minutes remaining”. I began this about 1/2 hour ago. That is amazing. The time that I upgraded to 8.04, it took all night (as in many hours). Of course, the new policy on upgrades is to disable 3rd party repositories during the upgrade, which likely makes it a lot tidier.

We’ll see. Hopefully, this experiment bears the fruit that I am looking for. Then I might be able to watch a video from beginning to end again.

Update: This didn’t work at all. Lucid Lynx totally broke and now kernel panics when booting into multi user mode. I’ve been updating, hoping that there will be some fix that will miraculously fix it, but I don’t have much hope.

What I did to work around it

After coming up against a stumbling block, such as it was, I looked elsewhere as a temporary fix. I must say that the newest Mepis is well-appointed, sporting a KDE4 desktop that is beginning to show the shine that we once saw in the older versions. I can view and hear video well and outputting the video to my TV set is resolve in a slightly nicer way, with a “widened” desktop, like Twinview did, but without fullscreen windows stretching across both screens.

Ubuntu did do a kernel update with 9.10 and it didn’t seem to have made any difference.  Video seemed to play a bit longer before the sound got lost, but that is all.  What did make a difference, though, was removing pulse audio from my system. Now, without that buggy piece of crap on my machine, video plays from beginning to end without problem.  There’s still an issue with Flash freezing up the browser, but Flash is buggy and a resource hog anyways.

I was reading a post on Geeks are Sexy and came across this subject.

So, according to Keith Bakker, founder of the Smith and Jones center, a treatment center for gaming addiction, our son is not likely an addict. He’s just into Runescape and Battle for Wesnoth because we’re bad parents. I resemble that comment!

NOTE: this tip may be specific to Ubuntu, as far as the command goes…

*It turns out that this might be an Ubuntu-specific command. Its changed over time, as its now:

blkid

One thing that I’ve noticed is that many distros are starting to change their partition references in /etc/fstab to a UUID from the more familiar (but no friendlier) reference to the volume in /dev (such as /dev/hdc3, for example).  This might be a sign of things to come, since any distro based on the 2.6 Linux kernel has pretty much dropped the /dev for udev (hot plugging for cold plugging, etc).  After looking into things, its good for situations where drives are being moved or removed now and then (as in when you plug in your USB hard drive).

However, if you’re a constant alpha/beta tester at heart, like I am, you are probably using a main Linux partition or drive to work from and have either a spare drive or partition that you frequently blow away and replace what’s on it with the latest fun toy, as I do.  I don’t know how many distros are doing this with the UUID so far, but I suspect that Fedora does and I know that Ubuntu and Mandriva are now doing it.  So, what happens if you are tired of what you’ve been testing and you want to install something new? As soon as you format the drive, the UUID will change.  How do you reference the drive in your /etc/fstab, so that you can either find it when you want to mount it, or when you want to boot from the new distro? The first “U” is for “unique”, and they are! Here’s what’s currently in my /boot/grub/menu.lst for the Mandrake alpha 2 that I’m playing with: root=UUID=b414e306-0582-4572-926d-a8c113bf34bb.

That’s not exactly the stuff of memorization, and, in a few hours, it’ll be different, as I’m going to hose it and reinstall it with a totally different configuration (I wanna try KDE 4!!!).  So, how do I get the new volume ID to put in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst? With Ubuntu, you have a command called vol_id that you can run as root to determine various things about the volumes that are accessible to your computer.

The command is vol_id. So, the command to find a volume ID is:

sudo vol_id -u device

where device is the /dev entry for the partition you want to know about.  for example,

sudo vol_id -u /dev/hdc3

would yield the long scary output that you need to enter into your files.

I hope that this helps all you distro hoppers out there as much as it has me.

In addition to the list of podcasts that I’ve gotten used to listening to, I have discovered The Jak Attack, with “Jon Watson and Kelly Penguin Girl coming atcha!”  Its got a bit of tech, linux, and Nova Scotia all mixed in a serious but goofy-enough package.  I like it!

Here I go reinstalling Windows XP on my other computer for the second time in as many months. I don’t think that this “upgrade” is going to work, but I have to try to get it to pull out of super slug mode and accept the drivers for my printer that had been working fine up until last week. What a pain!

And, its not like an install of Mepis or Linspire, where you have about a 10-15 minute install and your hard drive’s full of goodies. My well-known components will require drivers installed to work properly because the support won’t be there “out of the box”. Oh well. At least its not ‘98 or BeOS.

Update

I’ve not been successful in doing an “upgrade” so a chkdsk and a few corrupted file later, I think that I might have something that’s workable. We’ll see. At least I got the printer/scanner working. That’s a start.

Update

Rebooting causes changes to the video driver to be lost.  Since there’s no easy configuration file to edit, it sure looks like a reinstall of the OS.  Lovely.

Actually, I’m referring to this site. I see with Internet Explorer, here at work (the browser that Macbros blatantly insists that I upgrade from on every visit to his site from work), that the header and body of the page seem to be squished together a bit, showing only the top half of the links between. Is this happening for anyone else? This only happened since we upgraded the center’s computers with the latest patched version of Windows.

At home, the page renders as intended (except that my monitor is getting old and everything is getting darker and darker) on IE6, Firefox2.2, and Opera10 on Windows and also fine in Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera on PCLinuxOS, Gentoo (no Opera), Debian, and Kubuntu.

If you see this behavior and you know how to fix it, I’d like to know. I know its gotta be an IE hack, but I’m not to well versed on them (I barely can code to standard, let alone to non-standard, oppressive, restricted proprietary code).

fixed.  see comments for details. kludgy.  blech

From My Inbox

To my friends with Children: Why parents drink

A boss wondered why one of his most valued employees had not phoned in sick one day. Having an urgent problem with one of the main computers, he dialed the employee’s home phone number and was greeted with a child’s whisper. ” Hello ? “

“Is your daddy home?” he asked.

” Yes ,” whispered the small voice. May I talk with him?” The child whispered, ” No .” Surprised and wanting to talk with an adult, the boss asked, “Is your Mommy there?” ” Yes .”

“May I talk with her?” Again the small voice whispered, ” No .”

Hoping there was somebody with whom he could leave a message, the boss asked, “Is anybody else there?”

” Yes ,” whispered the child, ” a policeman “.

Wondering what a cop would be doing at his employee’s home, the boss asked, “May I speak with the policeman?”

” No, he’s busy “, whispered the child.

“Busy doing what?”

” Talking to Daddy and Mommy and the Fireman ,” came the whispered answer.

Growing more worried as he heard a loud noise in the background through t he earpiece on the phone, the boss asked, “What is that noise?”

” A helicopter ” answered the whispering voice.

“What is going on there?” demanded the boss, now truly apprehensive. Again, whispering, the child answered, ” The search team just landed a helicopter .”

Alarmed, concerned and a little frustrated the boss asked, “What are they searching for?”

Still whispering, the young voice replied with a muffled giggle… ” ME .”