Laney's blog

. o O (WordPress 2.7.1 is pretty sexy)

Congratulations on mankind for reaching the splendid milestone that is 1234567890 seconds since 1970 began. Who'd have thought we'd make it this far?

But really, congratulations on the Debian team for releasing Lenny (I even have one package uploaded there)! The point of this post is mainly to point people upgrading their Xen DomUs of a bug that I encountered and how to fix it (thanks to Andy Smith).

When doing the upgrade I got this message:

laney@cripps:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Setting up linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (2.6.26-13) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-1-xen-686
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
warning: grub-probe can't find drive for /dev/sda1.
grub-probe: error: Cannot find a GRUB drive for /dev/sda1. Check your
device.map.

dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-2.6-xen-686:
linux-image-2.6-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-2.6-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of linux-image-xen-686:
linux-image-xen-686 depends on linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686; however:
Package linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing linux-image-xen-686 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
linux-image-2.6.26-1-xen-686
linux-image-2.6-xen-686
linux-image-xen-686

This is apparently a bug in grub-probe when dealing with Xen virtual machines. A post by Andy here gives the magic incantation to fix it:

sudo sh -c "echo '(hd0) /dev/sda' > /boot/grub/device.map && cd /dev && mknod sda b 202 0"

(you might need to change sda to xvda depending on what your error says).

A quick dpkg --configure -a later and everything is hunky-dory. Now in a sexy Lenny system in which everything seems to just work, just like the marketing says. Some Apache and MySQL warnings to fix up, but nothing too major. Yet.

(on a side-note – I got MOTU recently. Breakage coming to an Ubuntu near you. Yay!)

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Well, hello Planet! Since I've been approved as an Ubuntu member, I figured this is as good a time as any to post some drivel. I'm Laney, and I am very pleased to have your attention. I am 22 years young and in a small number of weeks will be a PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham.

I might as well use this platform to ask for your help. No, not for myself, for the Intrepid Ibex. Look at the picture up there, he needs you to help him. You couldn't say no to that, could you?

James Westby has made a much more comprehensive post on this, but I'd just like to retierate the testing part. If you feel you're able to recover from any problems that might occur (should not be too severe now we're in feature freeze) and your system is not mission critical then please do consider helping out. It was with some hesitation that I made the switch a week or so ago, and I've certainly found my fair share of bugs and have to live with a slightly more unstable system (particularly audio-wise), but it'll be worth it in the end when we ship an excellent Ubuntu 8.10. If you do test, I urge you to get involved in bug reporting, otherwise you're just putting yourself through pain for no gain. When you come across a problem, search Launchpad and the affected program's upstream bug tracker for the issue and see if you can add any more information. If there is no bug, or if you just don't have the time to be searching bug trackers then please do still file the bug on Launchpad and a triager will deal with it for you (maybe asking you for more information). As the ever wise Tesco say, "Every little helps". I've definitely come across a few bugs (probably some I've forgotten here):

• Banshee crashes on Last.FM login
• terminator crashed with AttributeError in get_first_notebook_page()
• seahorse crashed with SIGSEGV in IA__g_object_set_valist()
• file-roller crashed with SIGSEGV in find_image_offset()
• tracker-applet crashed with SIGSEGV in signal_emit_unlocked_R()
• Can no longer configure keyboard shortcuts for switching tabs

A lot of the bugs have a similar format: "x crashed with y in z". This is apport at work, an excellent tool which takes a lot of the work out of reporting crash bugs. Even just reporting these bugs helps to stabilise the system.

So, I urge you, please do run update-manager -d (Ubuntu users) or adept_manager --version-upgrade (Kubuntu), and get involved!

I'm going to start a series of posts where I walk through various things that I do as part of my Ubuntu development work with the MOTU team. I'm currently trying to get myself up to a level where I can apply to the Ubuntu Universe Contributors team, and then at some point in the future for MOTUship.

This article describes the process for merging a package from Debian to the development version of Ubuntu, currently the Intrepid Ibex. If you want to see how I generally go about doing this, follow the jump.

(more…)

A little while ago I uploaded my first patch to Launchpad, closing bug 159727. This is one of the easiest bugs there is – someone even provided the icon file needed to fix it! Nevertheless, I'm still pleased to have taken my first small step in Ubuntu development.

<crimsun> Laney: thanks, uploaded.

ROCK ON!