Not another Ubuntu 7.10 review

Well, this certainly won’t be your usual Ubuntu review. Rant is probably the more appropriate word. If you don’t want to hear a rant, stop reading.

I received the ShipIt live CDs for the latest 7.10 release in the mail today, and decided to test drive it immediately. Started the live CD, and everything works just great. Wi-fi, sound, resolution, everything’s just dandy on my Advent 7093 laptop.

So I decided to proceed to the installation. I decided on a clean install, overwriting my existing 6.06 setup. Chose the locale etc., partition got formatted, files got copied and then… nothing. The installer just quit at around 45%. I tried starting it again. Same thing. So I thought maybe it’s done, a bit weird that there’s not confirmation message, but let’s restart.

Not only had ubuntu not installed, but grub was messed up too – I couldn’t even boot WinXP. Here are the steps I took to get XP back:

load live cd

sudo -i

sudo mkdir /mnt/try

mount -t ext3 -o rw /dev/sda4 /mnt/try

grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/try /dev/sda

This gets grub back on restart. Unfortunately, that’s just your garden variety grub, without any boot options populated, and just a grub> prompt. Load XP using

rootnoverify (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1 boot

Once XP is loaded, I decided to get rid of grub altogether using this method : http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p18.htm#MbrFix.exe

So yes, I’ve decided to get rid of linux altogether. For the first time in many years, I’m going to not use linux at all. The reasons for this are:

• XP, really, works perfectly well for the light, non-work use I need.  It’s got all the programs I need, and is still blazing fast with a core duo processor
• I am sick and tired of bugs with linux. This laptop is 3 years old, and the version of ubuntu out back then installed perfectly fine. So it isn’t about driver support. Just some change that happens to mess my system up
• I’m not a student anymore. My time is too valuable to spend, as I just did, 3 hours fixing a buggy install. This is not a dig at the people willing to ride out linux’s bugs, and I’m not suggesting my time is more valuable than yours. But personally, I can’t afford this kind of tinkering around anymore. This laptop worked fine with ubuntu several releases ago. The following release, wireless support went buggy. I did the bug reports etc. This release won’t even install. I’m sick of this shit
• For the fanboys out there: I’m not goddamn anti-linux! I’ve been using ubuntu since warty, and before that I had redhat, suse and gentoo on my box. I know how to use the forums, I know how to submit bug reports, I know how to fix a lot of newbie and not-so newbie mistakes. I ran betas for several ubuntu releases because I wanted to help out. I’ve contributed to the forums. I just don’t want to anymore.
• I also know that the installation probably went just fine for you. Sure, I’ve been there too. I’ve just had one bug too many.

Latest updates to xorg-core break xserver

The forums are alive with the sound of people hitting their computers. Both of those threads contain ways of fixing the problem, thankfully.

Solution 1 :

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10
sudo reboot

Solution 2 :

wget -c http://people.ubuntu.com/~rodarvus/packages/dapper/xorg-server/xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb
wget -c http://people.ubuntu.com/~rodarvus/packages/dapper/xorg-server/xserver-xorg-dev_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i xserver-xorg-core*.deb

NOTE: 64bit users should do this:
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10
sudo reboot

Ubuntu 6.06 Is Current Desktop Linux Champ

Yes, the title reeks of fanboyism. It is, however, really how the linux desktop landscape looks at the moment. And eweek isn’t afraid of getting all excited about it. The real issue here, however, is that this gives me an opportunity to use an image of ubuntu-tan.

Ubuntu Women

This has been around for a while now, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Ubuntu Women is aimed at increasing the female/male ratio in the ubuntu world. It’s not a women-only forum, but simply a place to organize and talk about projects and ways to get women more involved in ubuntu, or more comfortable in the forums and linux world in general.

I think this is a very good idea, and if you agree, swing by the forums to get involved, or just to voice your opinion. There are a lot of guys who seem to get upset, thinking that women get to have a special forum, bla bla bla, so every vote of approval from women counts.

What happens when you combine Ubuntu and Gentoo ? Gen-bun-too, apparently

So a couple of folks down at the ubuntuforums have started trying to put together that holy grail/panacea/anti-christ, ubuntu+gentoo. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, or better yet, peanut and butter.
The idea is to use ubuntu sources, for the ease of use, but allow for recompiling using optimizations, in a limited gentoo-ish way. It’s very early stages, but it looks like they’re honestly scratching their heads over it and trying to make things work, instead of just bullshitting about how awesome and l33t things are going to be and why ubuntu/gentoo sucks and the other rocks.

If this sounds like a good idea to you, and would like to contribute or encourage, or just see whether it ever pans out, keep an eye on this thread.

Step by step instructions to install VMWare Server 1.0 on Ubuntu Dapper

Follow these detailed, easy steps to get VMWare Server up and running. You never know when you’re going to need to deal with some pesky file format, or sort out a problem for a friend who uses windows.

QComicBook. A, umm, comic book reader.

If you’re a fan of comic books, you’re going to come across cbr files at some point. This is a compressed format for packaging jpegs. Going through each jpeg in a comic book would be annoying, but thankfully QComicBook transforms it from a chore to a joy – well, at least for good comics.

To install it in Dapper, simply add this to your sources.list :

deb http://qcomicbook.horisone.com/ dapper main

And then execute :

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install qcomicbook

Enjoy !

Usability improved SLED menu available in Ubuntu

SLAB, which will be the menu used in the upcoming SLED release, is the result of extensive usability testing by the Novell people. And now it’s available all packaged up in a nice repo ! See here and here for previous methods/discussions.

How to get the word count of a latex document

Open the command line, then do

sudo apt-get install untex

untex foo.tex | wc -w

Nice and quick.

NTFS woes over ?

Enter ntfs-3g, “a read-write ntfs driver, capable of unlimited file creation and deletion”.

If this works as advertised, there’s gonna be a lot less reboots to windows happening around the world. Sweet, sweet music to my ears !