In a morning press call on December 17th, 2009 Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was stepping down as head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. In his place, Jane Silber, the current Chief Operating Officer who has been with Canonical since 2004 will take over as CEO………….
Read the rest here…
What will this really mean for Ubuntu? What do you think?
Yes, another post about Ubuntu 9.10. I know I tried it out before, but I put it on this new (old) laptop and am giving it a little better run this time. I still believe 9.10 (Karmic) to be a fine running distribution and this time I got to test out my method of installing all the codecs I want on there, along with messing with Grub 2 a little bit.
When you are travelling abroad where it’s legal to do so, as i was just the other day, you might want to have access to all those codecs that make life worth living on a linux box. Things like listening to your mp3s and watching your dvds and miscellaneous media files are very dificult without them.
I realise that Ubuntu has, for some time now, been able to detect that you need so and so codec to play so and so media and ask you if you really want it installed, but I find that particularly irritating. I like to already have that functionality there when I want to use it. To do that, I have a little script that I use that generally takes care of that for me, along with installing most of the programs I need to make my day to day use hassle free.
#!/bin/bash
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/karmic.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird php5-common php5-cli php-pear subversion openssh-server clusterssh imagemagick vim synergy smbfs curl vlc libdvdcss2 ubuntu-restricted-extras w32codecs mplayer mencoder build-essential sqlite dia expect mysql-client
Feel free to modify and use this, but basically I derived this from paying attention to the programs I need and use and making a list. It really does save a lot of time to do this.
The other thing I wanted to mention is Grub 2. For some reason, someone decided it was time to move from the original Grub to Grub 2. Time alone will tell whether that was a smart move or not. I know I certainly had a tough time of it for a day or two. Everything has moved and the methodology has changed as well. The short of it is you have some config files in /etc/grub.d that you can now manipulate, along with issuing a “update-grub”, that will build your /boot/grub/grub.cfg, which is pretty much the equivalent of the old /boot/grub/menu.lst file. The fun part is figuring out how all this works because, as it happens with open source many times, the documentation sucks.
What I needed to do was to add another linux distribution to grub so I could dual (or multi) boot it. This is accomplished in that /etc/grub.d directory. Now it’s worth mentioning here that if you do multiple OS installs on your machine and just issue a “update-grub” on your base Grub 2 enabled OS, it will (or at least mine did) auto detect this installation by default and add a boot option for it into the grub boot menu. The problem is, like mine, it probaly won’t boot your other OS.
The way to fix this is to go into /etc/grub.d and “chmod -x 30_os-prober”. After that you won’t be auto-genning entries. Next you can make a copy of the 40_custom file (I named mine 41_centos) and edit that file to have the correct boot parameters to boot your other OS. This is especially fun without having a good grasp of the correct syntax. For instance it took me hours to figure out that the “kernel” line that the old Grub used has been replaced with a “linux” line now. Other than that, though, just make sure that if you are booting another linux to use the correct root label and kernel and initrd image names and locations. My correct and working CentOS entry looks like this for reference:
#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change
# the ‘exec tail’ line above.
menuentry “CentOS 5.4″ {
set root=(hd0,3)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.el5 ro root=LABEL=/ rhgb quiet
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-164.el5.img
}
Have fun!
I have to keep a windows xp vm kicking around that I use almost never for those nagging few windows apps that the smart developers didn’t make at least a web version for. Well, I needed to to some modifications to a project on MS Project server (Firefox/Linux compatibility in next release BTW) so I fired up the xp vm to find that it was effectively out of disk space. Back when I built it 2+ yrs ago I only made it an 8gb vm and with all the little proprietary apps over the years is has just gotten full.
A quick google search on the subject showed that I could, indeed, increase the drive space in the vmdk with the “vmware-vdiskmanager” command (vmware serer 1 – I told you this vm was old). I simply went to my virtual machines directory (where the vmdk files are stored) and issued “vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12gb -t 1 winxp.vmdk”. This says (-x) extend the volume to 12gb and that the volume type (-t 1) is split into the 2gb files. The command did it’s job in just a few seconds and presented me with a warning that I would need a third party program in the virtual machine to expand the partition there to get use of the new volume free space.
I learned from my favorite windows admin that there is a diskmanager utility in xp that *can* do this, however, not on the system partition, which is what I needed. I just happened to have an Ubuntu 9.10 iso handy and told the xp vm to boot that up instead. From there I started up GParted and quickly told it to extend the size of the partition to fill all the remaining free space on the volume. I clicked on the green checkmark to tell GParted to “Go” and off it went. The entire resize for GParted took only maybe 10 seconds. It’s just amazing to me. I remember when Linux couldn’t even figure out what an NTFS partition and here I was fixing one in mere seconds.
Needless to say, only a minute later I had my windows xp vm booting up and working in it’s newly extended NTFS partition. Once again, Linux saved the day!
The Official Ubuntu Server Book
Ahh, these are the kinds of books I really dig. As a systems administrator, I love to get books that detail setting up servers and services and this is exactly what this covers for Ubuntu. Here you can learn about things from what bind is and how to get it working to kickstarting, raid and a plethora of other server topics. Great reference material here, especially for those people who are thinking they want to get a server set up at home. You just can’t go wrong with this one.
Pro Ubuntu Server Administration
If you were going to really really get into Ubuntu server administration you would want this book, probably to go along with the Official Ubuntu Server book. Like the title suggests, this book is intended for those people who are in up to their neck in serious admin tasks. This book covers things like getting Nagios running so you can monitor things better, server performance analysis, iSCSI, LDAP and even a smattering of VPN. It’s the stuff the big boys play with, and it’s a great reference and tool for those kind of tasks on Ubuntu servers. I try and make it a policy to pass a lot of my books along so they can also benefit other people, but this one stays put on my bookshelf. I am keeping it 
The Official Ubuntu Book
For Ubuntu users, this one is a real gem. This is your “soup to nuts” type good starter book for Ubuntu users. It is great reference material for everything from the history and idea behind the Ubuntu distribution to more advanced topics like using Ubuntu as a server and even touches on different offshoots of Ubuntu like Kubuntu and Edubuntu. What will really make a difference to a newer Ubuntu user (or just a new Linux user) is the sections of this book which give detailed instructions on how to use different available pieces of software to accomplish tasks like getting your email going, drawing pictures with Gimp, finding your files and so fourth. There is also a great section of the book dealing with common issues and troubleshooting problems like fixing an incorrect screen resolution.
A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux
As great an Ubuntu book as the last one is for the desktop Ubuntu user, this one is that and more of it! Even though this book is for a little older version of Ubuntu, the information in it is absolutely expansive. If you cannot find a reference in here on how to get a certain task accomplished, I would really be surprised This book goes through the general information like setup and install like most books do, and then gives you HUNDREDS of examples of how to get things done with your Ubuntu install. It’s really a pretty great book, and the one that I am going to pass on to a new Ubuntu user friend of mine.
Yes, another in the junker series on my T23. I *finally* got around to playing a bit with the new Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. I know, based on the date of the posts, that it’ll look like I am doing a distribution a day (magic of dated publishing), but I have had this running a few days now and I really dig it.
The installer is very fancy looking now and I really like the new loading logo graphics. They have this cool little cylon slider that goes across the screen – much slicker than the big blocky one on previous versions. All my equipment was detected correctly and, I should add, this is the norm for any recent version of Ubuntu, and they should be praised for that. I have come to expect nothing less from them.
The default background is *still* brown. Ick. They *do* have a much better selection of other wallpapers to choose from though. Honestly, if the most you have to complain about is the default brown background, things are pretty good. And things here really are pretty good!
Ubuntu still comes with all the software it always has – the things you need to get the job done. And what is not there by default is only a click or two away. Ubuntu has come to be the go-to distribution for a nice workable desktop Linux. It’s clean, up to date, and perky too. What more would you expect? Well, maybe a different color wallpaper (I like the stones one).
I had a little trouble on the last TechShow with my audio. You see, I use a CyberAudio USB headset on the show, and I recently upgraded my Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 9.04 and pulse audio makes a nice hum the entire time now with my headset. Obviously this irritates me and I decided to fix it by swapping distributions until this problem gets straightened out.
I decided I would try Fedora 11. It sure looked sweet at the South East Linux Fest I was recently at. I had heard that there was some issue with the installer and it’s handling of ext4 in the partitioner and I *thought* I heard it was better to install from dvd as opposed to the live cd. I grabbed them both to be sure. Well, neither of them worked and bombed during the install. I have heard many people going through the fixes for this and a host of apologetics, however, let me just say that this is really bad form for Fedora to issue media that you cannot install from. I can tell you for certain that I was not going to try and beat this on my laptop especially with so many other options out there. I suspect the same can be said for many many other people. Fedora folks, you’ll really have to get it together for your next release!
Next I decided to go for Slackware. 2 opposite ends of the same coin. I have run Slackware for a long long time, but mostly use it as a server. I haven’t used it in a desktop setting for quite a while and the thought of it sounded like fun. I even recently did a vm install and was thrilled with the results, giving sbopkg a whirl and really enjoying it! Well, as expected, the install went flawlessly. You just can’t beat Slackware’s text installer. The problems I had were after the install, but I’ll get to those later.
Since I actually had some work I needed to do that day, I decided to reach for a quick install that I knew would just do the right thing right away. That was Linux Mint 7. I popped in the cd (yes, you can still get a great linux OS on a CD – not DVD) and in a minute I was using the live cd. About 20 minutes later I was completely installed and working. There is definitely something to be said for that! I am still using it now, in fact, that’s what I am writing this post from, and I will probably continue to do so until something better seems to come along. As I have said before, if you haven’t tried Mint yet, you probably should.
All that being said, this post is really about Slackware. I said I had some problems with Slackware on my laptop, and probably, some of them are just related to using Slackware on a laptop. Things like wireless and widescreen displays are issues that I would expect to see, mostly… By this time, I figured Slackware could do a decent job of autodetecting your X configuration and making my laptop display work. Nope. I just put that on the mental “I need to address this” list and plod on. I add my user and startx, and find that I have no wireless. Now, it’s been a while since I have used KDE, but I was sure there was some program like networkmanager to get my wireless going. What I find out is that my Atheros is not even detected. Strike two for the laptop install. It was after that that I remembered the biggest barrier to using Slackware as a Desktop solution. There is no useful codec support in there. Can’t play any of my media files, watch flash video, etc., etc., etc..
Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Slackware. It’s a fantastic distribution and I have long held that if you want to learn RedHat, you install RedHat, if you want to learn Ubuntu, you install Ubuntu and if you want to learn Linux, you install Slackware. Some of my problems, as I said before, I will just chalk up to the oddities of laptop installs, even though I think, at this point, that’s making excuses. I would, however, still like to get my main workstation at home running the Slack again. That being the case, I am going to want some things on there to make my life easier. After all, that’s the name of the game right? You have a computer to help make things easier for you and not more complicated.
I WANT MY CODECS/FONTS/DVDs/FLASH/ETC.
Now, years ago there used to be a program called Automatix that did just this sort of thing for Ubuntu. Later it was replaced by Ultamatix, and recently, you can just pretty much install VLC and be done with it. What I would like to see is something similar for Slackware. I see that you can, fairly easily, get some of this done by using sbopkg and weeding through the menus and selecting the appropriate things, if you can find them, from the menus. I, personally, think this is still too cumbersome, How about an sbopkg like system, or even a simple script that does what automatix used to do, but does it for a modern Slackware? Anyone willing to bite? How about it Chess?Dann?Anyone?
(sung to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song)
Oh, this is a story ’bout a man named Joe.
He sent me an OSD a couple years ago.
An’ just the other day he said “You really should review…”
Then he boxed up and sent me a Neuros Link too…
OK, OK I know, but it was playing on continuous loop in my brain all last night. Don’t judge me!
Seriously though, Joe from http://www.neurostechnology.com sent me out a Neuros Link (snappy name a?) and I thought it only fair I talk about how great it is.
For some reason I don’t quite understand, most companies are not like Neuros. Neuros “just gets it”. They have this mystical power which clues them in on what kinds of stuff we really want. They understand that we want “our media, our way” and they set out to make that possible with their fantastic line of products.
The Neuros Link (still love that name) is just such a gizmo. This is MORE than just a set-top pc, it’s the convergence of tv, computer and internet. What they have done is to take a very decently spec’d computer, remove most of the breakables (moving/spinning media), add the ability to display to your tv set, and throw in a robust OS, with some customizations that let you easily find video content you can play/watch for free, all for $300. Yes, really, I am serious.
I got this Link delivered yesterday and pulling it out of the box I noticed, first of all, how good looking it was. It’s smaller than I had pictured and has a sleek looking black pc case which would go well in any entertainment-center equipment stack. Included with this is the Neuros KeyMote, which is the wireless keyboard/tackball combo. I have to say I really like it. Nice tactile feel and it works quite well (apart from that nagging windows key).
Setup was a breeze. They include a little one page setup document and if you follow it you should be going in no time. Just make sure to pay attention to the “configuring your keyboard” section. Once the machine was running and my keyboard was connected, I configured my wireless connection (also in the setup docs). Once that was up and running, I had to make a quick adjustment to X. You see, in the docs, they say that the only “supported” video configuration is hdmi and if you use something else you may have to tweak your config. Well, unfortunately I don’t have anything with hdmi, and my other choices on the back of the machine were dvi and vga, so I pulled out my spare lcd monitor and used that. After booting the X config was stuck in some 16:9 setting which would be wonderful for hdmi, but looks a bit odd on vga, so I moved the xorg.conf file to another name, restarted and I was in business at 1280×1024, perfect for my monitor.
With everything set, you are left in the Link’s customized browser, which is pointing to Neuros TV, a page where the folks at Neuros aggregate and manage (and index) video content across the web for you. This was seriously fun and is where I spent the remainder of my evening. I watched some “A Team” and a bit of “Adam 12″ too. No, I am not that old, just a child of the 70′s and was reliving some great TV moments of the past. I also noted that there is plenty of new content too like Fringe, Eleventh Hour, Heroes and the list goes on forever practically.
The rest of the computer runs a fairly standard, full featured Ubuntu, which means that you can do on there what you need to do. Things like IM, Email, Web surfing, etc., are all right there at your fingertips. In fact, the only thing I think this Neuros Link is missing is an internal Neuros OSD
Go and BUY ONE NOW! You’ll regret it if you don’t. And as I get more time to play on this one I will put more information here for you all to drool over.
Many of you know that I am strangely fascinated by what sorts of things people name their servers after. I, personally, use cryptids. I have machines named things like Sasquatch, Nessie, Yeti, Chupacabras and the like.
Last night I had to do some work. One of the things I needed to take care of was getting some sort of development environment at home for me to be able to work on some work-related projects at home in a less confined atmosphere. A lot of those projects involve needing an rpm based machine, which I didn’t have.
I decided I would set up VMware Server, which I use all the time at work, but this time I would use the Server 2 product. I have been using the Server 1.6 for a long time and love it. It’s fast, easy to use, and reliable. Server 2 came out some time ago, but I haven’t had a need to upgrade, so this seemed to be the perfect time.
I used the tutorial over at HowtoForge which steps you through things really well. The only real problems I encountered were that I couldn’t get to the license page for vmware for some reason (I did happen to have a couple spares from a previous one though) and during the install I was prompted that my gcc version didn’t match my kernel version, but I chose to continue on anyhow and all was well.
My initial impressions were mixed. I kind of like having the interface be web based now, which is pretty convenient. It is, however, slower. The other bothersome thing was that running vmware server on my 3ghz machine with 3gb of ram used *all* of it’s resources and brought the machine to it’s knees. This really frustrated me until I decided to just reboot the machine…. For some reason this cleared up a lot of my problems with the resource utilization and things started behaving better. I am not sure why, but my advice to anyone trying a new install would be to reboot after the install before you actually start trying to use vmware
Once that was all taken care of, I set about to get a vm running. I picked CentOS, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately I only had a CentOS 5.1 dvd image available (usually try to get the greatest and latest) but I decided to use it anyhow rather than spend time downloading the newest one. I started setting up the new vm, which I called Mothman, and got to the installation media section and hit a small speed bump. I specified that I wanted to use an iso image, but the browse function directed me only to some strange volume where there was nothing. I couldn’t pick my home directory for the iso file. As it turns out, the default volume that VMware is looking in is the directory you picked during the install to hold your vm’s. In my case, it was the default /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/. Once I dropped the iso there, I could find and use it.
The install went off without a hitch. The new popout console is pretty slick and works well. All in all, I liked it and would recommend it. I still think I need a way faster machine to host this stuff, but that’s another story altogether. Even so, with my host and vm both running, right now top reports my system usage as ” load average: 0.12, 0.14, 0.09″ and I haven’t used any swap either. Not too shabby!
Just thought I’d stop in to say that I checked the TLLTS Folding at Home Team Stats today and noticed that we are ranked 230th out of almost a million and a half other teams! Congratulations!
If you are not running FAH and on our team, it’s not too late to start!! Well, what are you waiting for?
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