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Ubnutu 7.10 Official Documentation Released (finally)
The official documentation developed and maintained by the Ubuntu Documentation Project has finally been released. I wonder what took so long, and why the decision was made to release a new version without having finished documentation. I really think that documentation is an area where Ubuntu has a lot of room for improvement, not just in the timeliness of release, but in the quantity/quality department as well. Compared to other distros, Ubuntu's documentation is anemic.

posted 07:17 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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WOOOO HOOOO!!!!!
Debian etch is hotness. I finally got all the gotchas worked out and I am running Debian etch, kernel-2.6.18-4 and apache2.2 on my sparc ultra2 server:-) YEA ME! Only thing that I haven't got figured out is how to make the switch to udev from hotplug on the sparc. I got around the whole udev/hotplug/2.6.18-4 thing by installing Yaird,(Yet Another Mkinitrd). I had to specifically load some modules in /etc/yaird/Default.cfg to get it working; I am happy now.

posted 19:03 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link

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On debian and downtime
Yesterday, after 21 months of work, the debian developers released debian etch. Debian is a wonderful thing. I have played with etch 3 or 4 times since last fall, and debain stable has been on my web server for a long, long, long time. When woody passed the torch to sarge, I held off upgrading my server for about 6 months. When I finally did upgrade to sarge, I was amazed; debain upgrades are modern day miracles. With debain you really can just install the OS one time, and apt-get dist upgrade all future releases. As long as you don't go skipping releases, or going straight from stable to unstable, upgrading a debian system is a very very pleasant experience. So, when I read that etch had been deemed stable, I jumped all over it. Literally within hours (less than 4) of the upgrade announcement I was upgrading my old sparc ultra2 production web server.

There was a voice inside my head though, speaking softly to me, as I went about upgrading my trusty sarge box to debain etch. The voice was warning me to go slow, to be sure to read the release notes, to make sure i had all the bases covered, the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I mostly ignored the voice. I was aware of the pitfalls (or at least I was aware that there could be pitfalls), but another louder voice in my head said, "just do it, woody to sarge went so smoothly, what could go wrong?" I knew better, but I did it anyway.

First a little background info: this box used to be a desktop, and later became a server. It used to have a monitor and keyboard. Now it's a headless sun box in a corner of my youngest daughter's room. The reat of my computers are in other parts of the house. I do all my administration on this box via ssh. Beofre i stared the installation I did a trial run; i changed my sources.list file to call for etch repos instead of sarge and did the whole update upgrade thing-but stopping short of selecting yes and letting dpkg make the changes. I saw that a great many packages, that I have long since stopped using were going to be upgraded. So I changed my sources.list file back to sarge repos, and went about uninstalling any and everything X-windows related. As I mentioned before this box is a true headless server now, I don't need all that GUI stuff anyway.

After cleaning up the GUI packeges that I didn't need anymore, I stared the upgrade proper this time, and was pleased to see the number of files to be upgraded was significantly less than before. The upgrade itself went as I expected--perfect. Maybe too perfect. There were some tense moments though. The one foremost on my mind, was will the upgrade finish, before my wife wakes up and comes in and tells me that I have to be at work in 5 hours and need to get my butt in bed. The other thing I was concerned about was apache 1.3 vs 2. My server is still running apache 1.3 and I don't want to move to apache 2 yet. I sat there watching the text scroll by occasionally checking the time, and listening for my wife to wake up. I noticed that apache 2 was installed along side apache 1.3 and apache 2 took over web server and replaced my web page with a page that said "It works!". That was easily fixed though, by uninstalling apache 2. My box was upgraded, my site was only down 10 minutes (due to apache 2 taking over momentarily), and the wife didn't wake up and fuss at me, and I was in bed before 12:30 am. Life was good!

I woke up the next morning feeling great! My very old Ultra Sparc 2 box had new life. This is what is good about linux and debian. I got to work and ssh'd into my box and poked around some; it was then I noticed that the upgrade didn't upgrade my kernel from 2.6.8-3 to 2.6.18-4. "That won't do", the voice in my head said. What i did next was stupid. I have been using linux for 13 years, what I did was dumber than dumb. I upgraded the kernel, and removed the working kernel after I was done. I did this 40 miles from home, and then I rebooted my machine! Did I say that what i did was dumb?

What happened next was 10 hours of downtime for my website, for my blog, for my forums, and my podcast rss feeds. That, and a lot of fussing at myself. Was i really so stupid, or was it because I was feeling good (read smug) about myself and the upgrade the night before? Or was it because I was at work, and in a hurry? I have to think it was a little of all of those things. One thing i do know though, thus was my fault NOT debian's. I knew better, and did it anyway.

On the drive home, I hoped against hope that I hadn't done what I knew hat I had. I kept telling myself, maybe just maybe, you did a shutdown -h instead of a -r. When I got home my fears were realized. The sparc was running, but linux wasn't. Luckily, I did still have a 2.4 kernel on the system and was able to boot into that, and determine that the reason the box didn't boot was that the new 2.6.18-4 kernel and/or udev didn't recognize my hard drive or my cd. Uninstalling the 2.6.18-4 kernel and reinstalling the 2.6.8-3 kernel fixed the problem. The server is up and running etch. Life is good again.

I said earlier that this was my fault, not debian's. Either the new kernel or udev is buggy, at least on my hardware., but I have no one to blame but myself for rebooting a new kernel on a production machine from 40 miles away. Live and re-learn.

posted 22:05 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link

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No more fedora core
Good move here by fedora team. Consolidation of the fedora core repos with the fedora extras repos, will make fedora a more usable distro.see story here.

posted 22:25 [/computers/linux/distros/redhat] permanent link

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ATI Radeon Mobility Xpress 200M 3D accleration--finally!
YEEHAW! For the first time since upgrading to edgy, I now have 3D acceleration on my laptop with my ATI Radeon Mobility Xpress 200M! And the best part is, I am using the most up to date driver, 8.32.5! As an added bonus, I am able to use the 128 mbs of memory on the card as well as an additional 128 mbs of shared memory! This is the first driver from ATI since 8.24.8 to work with this card. Maybe AMD is gonna do good work with ATI. I hope so. Progress, even after a year, is always nice.

Yea me!

posted 21:37 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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dang that looks better!
I saw this post about how to enable smooth fonts on ubuntu linux, and tried it out. WOW! This made a major improvement. I am sure that this works on on distros other than ubuntu. I had a little trouble at first as I copied and pasted from the instructions on the page mentioned above; the quotation marks were wrong. After fixing that, there was a very noticable improvement.

posted 23:53 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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Is dapper to to much like debian sid?
It's almost a silly question I guess, since dapper is based on sid, but I am begginning to think that maybe a sarge install will suit my needs better. Dapper has been one headache after another. The latest xserver-xorg-core upgrade may be the straw that broke the camel's back. Honestly, the previous 3 versions were better than this one. I need something more stable on this laptop. It's fine for the computers I don't use as much as this one though. Maybe I am being a little harsh, it' not been that bad, mainly the synaptics touchpad, and now this. For the most part it's been alright--but not great. Now that I am doing this podcast though, I need something that just works all the time. I don't have the time to be playing around with trhying to fix things. I may end up changing my mind, but it looks like I am going to have to find the time to backup some stuff and do a debain stable install on this laptop.

posted 23:26 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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WORD OF CAUTION
Dapper upgrade issued tonight xserver-xorg-core 1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10.3 will break your xserver. Downgrade with sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10 if you were unfortunate enought to have upgraded to this latest version.

posted 22:54 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEBIAN!
Debian is 13 years old today!. Now I feel old. Debian was less than a year old when I first started using linux.

posted 00:05 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link

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Touchpad under ubuntu revisited
After weeks of using a wireless usb mouse, and nearly forgetting about the existance of the touchpad with a mind of it's own, I had an opportunuty to use the laptop without the wireless mouse. I had all but forgotten the list of tweaks, and options that I had applied in trying to resolve this problem, but the last thing I tried seems to have worked.

I put the follwoing in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file under the Input Device section, in the touchpad section:

Option "TapButton0" "0"

Option "TapButton1" "0"

Option "TapButton2" "0"

I stumbled apon this tip after listening to an episode of Tht Jak Attack Podcast, where Kelly Penguin Girl found reslotion to her touchpad problem in ubuntu.

Like I said, I had almost forgotten that I had even made these changes to my xorg.conf file, until just now, when I was forced to use the touchpad for the first time in weeks. It's still a little early to tell, but it seems to work a whole lot better!

posted 22:26 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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KDE 3.5.4 for ubuntu
add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

#latest kde

deb http://kubuntu.org/packages/kde-354 dapper main

posted 01:54 [/computers/linux/distros/ubuntu] permanent link

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