Laney's blog

Last week I installed the Karmic RC on my Macbook (5.1, late 2008), which I have now upgraded to final. I had previously installed Jaunty, but it wasn't usable enough out of the box to prise me away from OSX for good. The niggle:quality ratio seems to have slid to an acceptable level for this release to make the system good enough for daily use. However, there are still issues that persist. Being in the fortunate position of having a system dual booting with an OSX install that mostly does what I'd expect, I'm going to give a list of the ways in which my experience has been a little bit lacking thus far.

This is all about my personal use case. I am probably overlooking areas that you care about, and concentrating on those that you don't. This might read as me bashing Ubuntu a bit, but it's really not supposed to. By being honest about these issues, we can hopefully work towards fixing them.

• Proxy support. At Uni/work I am behind a web proxy – the firewall has a default deny policy which means that users are required to go through the web proxy in order to use the web. The problem is that not all applications notice that I have changed the proxy, even when I use the "Apply systemwide" option. I noticed this just now when trying to file a bug report using Apport – the collecting process just hung until I got bored and cancelled it. Launching from a terminal with http_proxy exported worked just fine (actually, automatically exporting http_proxy in terminals if one is set in Gnome would be cool – OSX doesn't do this). I'm not sure where the bug lies here, in applications or somewhere in the Gnome stack, so I don't feel comfortable filing a bug report.
• The speaker output is not muted when I plug my headphones in. I have to go to alsamixer and adjust the headphone volume separately. There's a workaround for this on the Macbook pages of the Ubuntu help wiki but I'm yet to try it. Bug 437150.
• Brightness adjustment doesn't work out of the box. There's apparently a fixed driver on the wiki page that I've just installed. We'll see after the next boot whether it works or not.
• External monitor support is a bit suboptimal. To be fair, I've probably been spoiled by the fact that OSX handles this so well. I have to manually enable/disable the monitor when I remove or add it. OSX detects this automatically and adjusts the windows as required so I can just yank the connector out and go on my merry way. See this Ubuntu QA blog post from Bryce for more on this.
• Battery life leaves a lot to be desired. Sometimes the machine gets really quite hot.

I think that's it. Really these are minor niggles that I can overlook in order to use my OS of choice. I've concentrated on laptop/Macbook specific problems here. We can see that most of the problems I mentioned are hardware/driver specific, and really these are some of the most difficult problems to fix due to hardware manufacturers in the main being difficult to work with, so it's not hard to let issues like this go.

On the plus side, suspend finally works! I can just shut the lid to suspend and open it to resume, just like I can in OSX. This is really great. Also, using my phone as a 3G modem is faster, easier and more solid under Karmic. And of course all applications (barring the proxy issue), work just as they do on any other Ubuntu machine, meaning really well. There's also the benefit that I no longer feel like a hypocrite .

We've a little way to go to overtake the major proprietary players, but with incremental improvements like these, it's just going to be a matter of time.

. 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…)

I've had a lot on recently. Mainly a never-ending stream of coursework followed by the inevitable dissertation panic. This is all over now, however: all that remains to be done are 3 exams starting in 8 days (better get revising!). The last lecture of my degree has been and gone in the biggest anticlimax ever. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang! I don't know how I feel about finishing my course. To some extent it's not so bad as I'm staying on to do a PhD here (that was another thing which occupied my time and I neglected to post about) starting in October, but this will still be a very different experience. The last three years seem to have flown by, but then when I think back to the sheer amount of things I've done, and the stuff I've learned then perhaps it wasn't so quick after all.

I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.

Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?

The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.

Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.

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!

A little while ago I blogged about problems that I was experiencing in Ubuntu, one of which was that the display would blank regardless of what was set in gnome-power-manager (System -> Preferences -> Power Management). I'm happy to report that I found a workaround for this, thanks to Michael Holloway on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. If you find that your display is blanking inexplicably, try appending this to your xorg.conf (hit alt-f2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

Save and restart your computer (or log out and restart X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace), and everything should be fixed. Play a video and leave it and marvel at how you don't have to move the mouse once every 10 minutes to keep it displaying! Also, I noted that on Xubuntu gnome-screensaver wasn't started by default, meaning that no power management settings would work any more. This is easily solved by going to Settings -> Autostarted Applications and adding an item to start /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver when you login.

Here's the launchpad bug for anyone interested in tracking the issue.

OK, I just want to get this out there, since I just had this annoying problem. I installed Kubuntu using Synaptic to see if I'd like it any better than the default Gnome desktop. I quickly found out, however, that it didn't want to run nicely on my system – the mouse seemed to lag to hell – and since I can't be arsed with spending hours faffing around trying to get it to work properly I just went back to Ubuntu (I'll probably give it another try when KDE4 is released, with the benefit of knowing how to get rid of it later).

Uninstalling Kubuntu and all of the stuff that it brought in wasn't so straightforward, however. Simply removing the metapackage kubuntu-desktop with Synaptic or aptitude left all of the extra stuff that I didn't want hanging around. This thread gave a massive apt-get line to remove all of the packages, which seemed more than a little suspect to me (enumerating all packages is bound to be a bad idea; some will get missed and some that I could have potentially installed myself previously could be removed), but upon scrolling down I came upon a nice program called debfoster which purged everything nicely. Note: This has been deprecated in favour of using aptitude. I only had to use deborphan because I didn't install kubuntu-desktop with aptitude in the first place. Use aptitude to save yourself a load of hassle. If, like me, you didn't know to use aptitude and just used apt-get or synaptic, deborphan will save your bacon and even keep any KDE packages you've explicitly installed (Kile and KBib for me). Paraphrasing from the thread, these are the commands you need to run:

sudo aptitude install debfoster
sudo debfoster -q
sudo sed -ni '1h;2,$H;${g;s/kubuntu-desktop\n//g;p}' /var/lib/debfoster/keepers
sudo debfoster

(Note that there are four lines here – the "sudo sed" line ends with "keepers".)

Review the output to see if it looks like it's removing all of the unnecessary kubuntu packages, then press P to purge them all and Y to confirm.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to try out Ubuntu for kicks, and to turn my PC back into something I can fiddle around with. Well, it seems that I got my wish.

First of all, I couldn't get it to boot after installation. The installation itself appeared to go smoothly, but then upon rebooting I got the dreaded GRUB Error 17, which means "Invalid device requested". After hours days of messing around with BIOS settings, grub-install witchcraft and the like, I had pretty much decided that I just wasn't going to get it to work on my IDE drive, and decided to try it on a SATA. This almost went smoothly; on the first boot, I got sent straight to Vista, but Super GRUB Disk, with its charming broken English fixed me right up. Almost. I had to edit one of the lines in the GRUB config file that it had created to point to the right HDD, but I had finally gotten into Linux!

On first impressions, everything was great: sound worked out of the box, MSN support was there and very nice, and Synaptic made installing new software a breeze. Since then, things have been mostly good; for someone like myself who doesn't mind the occasional trip down CLI-lane, it's definitely usable for day-to-day work. I'll quickly list my remaining niggles, just to get them out there.

• Compiz Fusion is a bit buggy, and seems to take up a lot of CPU time. Sometimes when I maximise windows, they jiggle around constantly until I unmaximise them.
• The media players aren't quite there yet. Rhythmbox is a bit flaky and most of the time won't let me navigate the playlist with my arrow keys after being alt-tabbed to. Banshee seems a bit thin feature-wise. Amarok loves to peg the CPU and crash, and has weird keyboard-navigation too (although it is the one I'm currently using for its wealth of features, decent iPod support and nice global hotkeys).
• It took me a little while to realise this, but only the front speaker of my 5.1 was enabled by default. I had to drop into alsamixer to unmute and enable all the others, after which they worked just fine. Also, somewhat confusingly, the volume control button on the taskbar comes set up to only control this one speaker. Changing it to control "PCM" seems to act more like the master volume switch that I expect it to.
• Even though I have turned off all options which I could find, my display still insists on suspending after 10 minutes of the computer being idle. This I have only just "solved" (in reality a hack) by commenting out Option "DPMS" in my xorg.conf file. Edit: Ok, this didn't actually solve anything. I'm stumped and Really Pissed Off.
• Related to the above, VLC (my media player of choice), doesn't seem to stop the display from suspending while playing media. Very annoying when trying to watch (say) a film.
• I still cannot get BBC radio streaming to work in Firefox. I'll probably have to install the official Realplayer, which I really don't want to do.
• The Java situation is very odd. I understand this is due to license issues. And no amd64 firefox plugin from Sun makes me sad, as the free Icedtea one doesn't want to work.

So there we have it. I'm enjoying it overall, but there are some annoying niggles. (I really don't like being told off on IRC for daring to express frustration) Given a few more releases, Ubuntu should have gotten rid of most of these things, making for a genuinely useful OS.