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.

BTW, for anyone who wants to dual, triple, etc boot from GRUB, and you want it easy, check this out. For as many distros as I’ve been able to, I’ve installed the bootloader on the root partition of the distro (my latest Ubuntu install is on /dev/sda5, for example). Then, I chainload it from the bootloader that I’ve already had installed. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to continually have to have your main bootloader reinstalled each time one of the distros has a kernel update.

Here’s how:

-add a new line in your /etc/menu.list or grub.conf file (and if you’re using LILO, 1.Why? and 2.You’re on your own. Read the man page). You will only need three lines for this to work.
-the first line is the title, so : “title Ubuntu 9.10″ (without the quotes)
-the second line is the “root (hdx,x)” line. I’ll use my Ubuntu install for an example. Use this command on this line (without the quotes, of course): “root (hd,0,5)”
-Then, put a third line: “chainloader +1″
-That’s it.

title Ubuntu 9.10
root (hd0,5)
chainloader +1

is how it would look.

What will happen, then, is that your grub will boot and then, if you select your new distro entry, it will load the grub install from the first partition of your new distro.

Now, its easy to add and remove distros in your bootloader without the risk of it being changed to a mangled state on a multi boot system.

Wow. I missed out on the announcement. World of Goo (the game) is 1 year old as of the 13th of this month. They’ve decided to celebrate with a DRM free version for Mac, Windows, and Linux (gets the newest version,woo!) at a price that you decide. They want to have all of the copies out there actually paid for. Its an addictive, fun game. Go grab it at http://2dboy.com before the 19th. The sale will be over then.

So, I’ve been trying to settle in after my PATA drive decided that its job was finished. I thought that a new drive would be a great place to put a new version of Ubuntu. So, instead of going with Version 8.04 LTS, I loaded up version 9.04. As an aside, the numbering scheme coincides with the date of release (8th year, 4th month=April 2008).

I decided to install with the newer, and to some, buggier, EXT4 filesystem. That proved to be an interesting, and frustrating, mistake. I figured that I’d load up Warzone 2100 for Caleb to play at, which, so far, has locked up the screen on every version that we’ve installed. I figured,that with a new version of everything, perhaps this was the time.

It was not. Caleb could only reset the PC with the button, as he didn’t know the “reisub” trick. I’ve been teaching him a few of the more advanced tricks to using a PC so that he can gracefully shut down his PC, even if locked, though, so he will get this, if need be.

The filesystem pooched. I was able to get back into action with a quick fsck from the recovery prompt, but this is an action that only the root user can do, so Caleb and Abby would be SOL to fix a problem like this.  This went on for a few too many hard resets and some of the data on the hard drive became corrupted. One of them is my podcast downloader, PenguinTv. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it and that didn’t work because the filesystem had decided to drop to “read only”, which screwed everything else.

What resulted was a screwed up system in which I couldn’t upgrade any of my packages and programs, as apt decided that it couldn’t get past the failed/screwed up PenguinTv reinstall.

So, I made the decision to reinstall Ubuntu 9.04 on the drive again, but with the EXT3 filesystem for the root partition. I left the /home partition as it was, with EXT4 (by the way, EXT4 is BLAZINGLY FAST – noticibly to the nth), as I became addicted instantly to the speed. Due to some bad package decisions (Warzone 2100) and a few other screwups that I shouldn’t be doing after all the Linux experience that I have, I ended up trying this again.

Here’s where the fun really began. Although I explicitly told the installer NOT to format the /home partition, /home got reformatted anyways. So, all of the data that I had collected over the last 2 weeks had been erased. My bad.  Thankfully, I had restored most of the data from my failing drive by pluging it in long enough to transfer what I could to the new one. This is the advantage of having your data files on their own partition. The bad blocks on the old drive were on the partition holding the operating system, but not on the /home partition where the user data was, so I could mount just that partition and grab what I needed.

So, I had to restore the old data once again. Before I did that, though, I decided that enough was enough with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope version 9.04 and I upgraded the whole thing to the Alpha 5 of Ubuntu Karmic Koala, version 9.10, due out in October 2009. There were some really cool things that I noticed with Karmic, like the S.M.A.R.T. tool that popped up a nice graphical interface that informed me that the PATA drive had failed an integrity check and needed to be replaced. No other OS that I know of has done that by default. There were some refinements over Jaunty that I liked, as well (the themes are getting richer and more chocolaty, as well (yes, I am one of the few that will publically claim that I LIKE the brown themes).

The problem is, though, that sound doesn’t seem to want to wok as it should. When watching a video file on YouTube is choppy as all get out. Watching a movie file of any kind, such as Big Buck Bunny, would result in choppy, horrible sound that skipped.  Then, this morning, I tried to boot and the GUI did not show. The X-server took over, as usual, but did not go beyond a black screen.

I’ve installed Jaunty over it and am considering my options. I’m becoming quite disgusted with the state of distributions that use Apt as a package manager. When it works, it works great, but when it screws up, it can screw up royally.  Perhaps, if I can wresle the computer away from the kids long enough to fix it, I may ditch Ubuntu for Arch or Slackware.  They seemed to be easier to work with than others. But, Fedora 12 will be out in a few months. Perhaps RPM and Presto will woo me. I’m liking the delta merging idea a lot. Who likes to download 100s of MB of files to do a small update?

Wow. So much for the short rant.

I was going to update once in a while on the state of my garden, wasn’t I? I didn’t. Sorry if you were expecting anything. I will do that very soon. I’m just settling in after a chaotic few weeks. The kids were visiting their grandparents (my parents) and Angela and I decided to use that time wisely. Its been so bloody hot that its been hard to motivate ourselves into getting anything done. So much for partying it up while the kids were gone!

My hard drive went on the computer, so I’ve been hobbling along the net on an old P-III that I put together from parts. Its got an old slow hard drive and 384MB RAM. This machine is not ready for a modern operating system like Windows Vista or Ubuntu 9.04 (which I had installed on it – review later), so I installed Crunchbang Linux on it.

This post is the first one on my new hard drive. I installed Ubuntu on the machine again and I will review my install experience, comparing it to the other machine, when I’ve had some more time with “Jaunty Jackalope”.

TTFN

A relative approached me about helping to repair their computer. They have an old IBM Netvista. It had just stopped booting up, and the way that they described the problem to me over the phone, it sounded like the CPU may have died.

When they brought it over, though, it actually was booting to the BIOS screen, but crapping out after when it tried to start the operating system.  This machine had an originally installed copy of Microsoft Windows XP Home edition. The license key was on a sticker on the computer case, which is completely normal.

After a bit of research, I found that others had this same problem, and it had been something that might go wrong with some versions of this model. The solution was to reinstall Windows and claim your machine back. So, I sourced out a copy of Windows XP Home Edition, as I don’t run Windows on my computer at all. A friend lent me his XP Home CD and I proceeded to install the operating system.

I chose a “repair”, as I wanted to try and save the data on the hard drive, since my relatives are perfectly normal and don’t have backups (I bet they’ll make one this time).

As usual, the installation took over an hour to do, but it went without much of a hitch. I got to the screen where Microsoft wants you to enter the license key for your purchased product and it wouldn’t accept the valid key on the computer sticker. This made me angry. Why would they not accept a paid for license key? Continue reading ‘What good is that license key?’ »

I read this post at go2linux and decided to give it a try.  Here is my attempt:

This is my attempt at trying out the Bokeh effect with the Gimp – click for a larger version