Looking At Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

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Nov 022009
 

So I quickly install the CD in a virtual machine, login, get delayed by doing something with a passphrase, install the “guest additions”, and reboot. But why doesn’t Ubuntu include the drivers for various different virtual machine environments ? It would certainly make it easier to quickly setup a machine to test the feasibility of switching or upgrading.

One tiny little niggle with the first boot – the passphrase request to “unlock” the encrypted drive (I wanted to say “unencrypt” there but of course it doesn’t actually do that) is a little less than obvious. It should perhaps be a little more “in your face” – a popup. And of course the new Ubuntu boot straight into X might look a little prettier than the previous mechanism, but it isn’t quite “geeky” enough for me (my OSX machines are set to boot in verbose mode to scare those who think the command line is scary). This new startup is supposedly significantly quicker than previous releases; I’m afraid I didn’t notice. Perhaps it is of concern more to others than to me, but I rarely restart my machines – my somewhat less than totally reliable main machine has been up for 7 days, so a faster boot time is not of great significance to me.

I couldn’t seem to find anything to tweak the desktop effects settings. Perhaps not that important, but sort of peculiar. I dare say there’s an addon to do that.

I next dove into “Software Centre” to find a couple of applications that I use, but couldn’t. Admittedly they are somewhat towards the geeky side of things, but they are not that unpopular (zsh and enlightenment). Dropping to a terminal window and they were quickly found using apt-cache. Perhaps the Software Centre intentionally hides things to make the default list of new application choices a little less scary ? Maybe, but it needs an easily found button to say “show more”. Of course the Synaptic package manager can still be found, so this isn’t a real problem although having two ways of installing/removing software could be.

After I installed my favourite window manager (Enlightenment for now), I went on to try setting it up in my usual way with a .xsession file. No luck! It seems that Ubuntu’s version of gdm has accidentally (?) removed this functionality. This is quite a serious problem for those who like to run seriously customised environments. Perhaps not Ubuntu’s major audience, but it seems rather unfortunate to remove this functionality as it will seriously annoy those like me who prefer their own environment.

Going back to the default environment, I take a quick look at Firefox to realise that there is no Flash plugin. A dive into the Software Centre fixes that, although it would have been nice to be taken through a “wizard” when starting Firefox for the first time to suggest installing a number of proprietary extensions (and explain why they are not installed by default). Not that it does not install with a good selection already, but a browser without flash is perhaps not what people are expecting (although there are advantages in not having flash or turning it on only for those pages you want it turned on for).

Browsing through the settings, and I find the theme browser which does not really offer much choice by default – you have to install some additional themes. The choice of backgrounds is fine, although I’m not too sure why the frog was included (I chose the falling coffee). The most obvious improvement here, would be to include a hint on how to include your own photos as a background – quite possibly the first thing that many want to do! At least the Font tab defaults to using a method of rendering suitable for LCD panels (I’m not sure if this is new with the Koala).

In the keyboard preferences, the Layout options are somewhat confusing. Admittedly the number of options here is bound to make it more confusing, and those who choose “Layout Options” are likely to be self-educated to some degree. However it may be worth looking again at how the options are described. Oddly enough the Mouse preferences shows an option to “Show mouse pointer position when Control is pressed” but does not allow you to enable it!

Going through the applications, most (without extensive testing) seem fine. However Empathy (the replacement for the Pidgin instant messaging client) does seem a little on the flaky side with a few “misfeatures” – for instance the “Room” dialog box is a little immature and it is not obvious what you should do with it. Are you supposed to know some sort of “server name” ? Seems a little odd.

This may get added to when I find the time and patience to do more, but I am sure there are plenty of other far more complete looks at Ubuntu 9.10 out there!

Ubuntu – Installing MS Office 2007 with WINE

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Apr 162009
 

Unfortunately I have to run Microsoft Office 2007 for work purposes. No criticisms please! I have tried OpenOffice 3.x and it is just a little too disruptive to the documents in question (although part of the fault may be sub-optimal document templates). Personally I would much rather use LyX which is little feature light, but absolutely brilliant for pure writing.

Anyway, when I first tried running Microsoft Office with WINE, I couldn’t get past the installer and I had to come up with the following recipe for getting it installed.

First of all, remove all traces of wine from your system (I’ll be assuming Ubuntu 8.10 which is what I’m running) :-

sudo apt-get --purge remove wine wine-dev
rm -rf ~/.wine

Note that I am removing the old ~/.wine directory which you may choose to keep if you wish (you may have installed something else after all!). However this document assumes that you are only installing Office and may not work if other software is also installed.

The next step is to download the right version of wine from WineHQ. Unfortunately the latest version of wine isn’t compatible with the installer. The version I tried (after reading numerous problem reports) was 1.1.16. The archive page can be found here.

After downloading, install manually with :-

sudo dpkg -i wine_1.1.16\~winehq0\~ubuntu\~8.10-0ubuntu1_amd64.deb

After this has been installed, you can mount the Office 2007 CD and start the installer. Incidentally it is well worth creating an image file from the real CD if you are going to be spending any time tinkering with this – which is why I’m using a CD image!

sudo mount -oloop,unhide /cdimages/office2007.iso /mnt
wine /mnt/setup.exe

The installation process should be fairly straight forward although you will need to ignore a few warnings about being unable to obtain some updates.

Once this has finished you can run Word with :-

wine ~/.wine/drive_c//Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Office/Office12/WINWORD.EXE

Enjoy!?!

No guarantees that everything works properly of course, but it is a start.

At this point it may well be worth taking a backup copy of the wine directory with the installation of Office 2007. This can be done quite easily with :-

cd
tar cvf ~/wine-drive-c-with-office.tar .wine
bzip2 ~/wine-drive-c-with-office.tar

If you no longer need to run the installer, it may well be worth removing wine again to install a later version of Wine. This can be done by repeating the first step (but not removing the .wine directory) and downloading a different version of wine from the archive page as given.

Ubuntu on Intel iMac Review

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Feb 262009
 

Yes I know everyone and their dog has already written a review of the Intel iMac, but I have not done so yet. This is a review of the 24″ iMac (and I’m already hating that incorrect capitalisation) with the specific intent of putting Ubuntu on. This is not some kind of weird anti-OSX statement; I already have a laptop with OSX installed on it and it does seem like a fun operating system.

But this is a replacement for my main desktop, and I really want a “proper” Unix on it, and Linux will do in the meantime.

First Thoughts

First of all, the screen stand should allow adjustment in the vertical direction; already I can see myself getting out an extremely old and manky tape drive to sit underneath to raise the screen to an appropriate height. Apple ? Your lack of foresight in not including height adjustment is ruining the look of the system!

Nice keyboard! If you do not type much. I am aware that some people really like the skinny Apple keyboards, but it is not for me even though they got off to a good start by not including Windows keys. Back to the Das Keyboard for me I think. The mouse is similar – there’s this nice funky ball on top which is an improvement over the usual scroll wheel (although I am not too sure how well it would work at speed), but just not enough buttons.  Or at least it does not feel like enough buttons. The “one button” with two effects method as appears to be the case here is a little odd and off-putting.

Perhaps Apple needs a special country kit – “Special Clicky Keyboard And Mouse With Too Many Buttons For The Unix Geeks”. How many people end up using a non-Apple keyboard and mouse ? Perhaps not many, but why not cater to them with alternative keyboards and mice ? My Apple keyboard and mouse will be mostly unused.

Where are the memory card slots though ?  It would make things a bit more complete (and the iMac is about one box doing everything) if there were a sensible selection of memory card slots.

In terms of software (and not OSX itself), one thing becomes immediately apparent when booting (and on previous occasions when trying to boot from CD, diagnosing booting problems, etc.). The Apple firmware breaks the first rule of user interface design! Not something you expect Apple to do.

The firmware needs to be just a little bit more expressive about what is going on. You may well be thinking that as a hardcore Unix geek I want to see inscrutable messages from the firmware about initialising that chipset, addresses of where adapter cards are, cpu values, etc. And of course you are right.

But basic messages about starting the hardware would still be helpful.

More importantly however, the Apple firmware should be letting you know what keystrokes are needed to do “unusual” things like boot from a CD, an external hard disk, start the hardware diagnostics, etc. One of the most irritating things about Apple hardware is the need to provide secret incantations to boot from CD  – you hold the “C” key down for “a while” (how long anyway?).

The Install

At this point the “unusual” choices of Apple bite you when it comes to installing a version of Linux intended for use on mainstream PCs. First you have to install rEFIt, then you install Linux off CD (and mess around with the MBR partition table), then have to remember to “resync” the partition tables.

Seems there’s an EFI partition table and an MBR partition table that need keeping in sync. Having two partition tables immediately strikes me as a dumb idea. When Windows is involved, there is probably no fix for this problem, but why is Linux still not doing things properly ? Or at least not doing the sensible thing by default.

It also means there is effectively a two step boot process – first rEFIt starts, then then starts grub which finally starts Linux; this is not a quick system to boot.

Fixing The Niggles

In any install, there are always little niggles that need fixing. The most obvious is a way to control the brightness of the screen which by default is far too bright. There may well be better solutions out there, but a bit of C coming from http://www.felipe-alfaro.org/blog/2006/09/11/basic-backlight-support-for-macbook-pro

A quick compile and install in /opt/bin/bl and root can set the backlight brightness with :-

bl (1-15)

Adding this in an appropriate way to /etc/rc.local ensures that the backlight is set on every boot.

It also appears that we need to do a bit of hacking to support the sound properly. Adding an option to /etc/modprobe.d/options specifies the “model” of soundcard we are using to get sound working :-

options snd-hda-intel model=imac24

A quick reboot and sound is working (microphone not tested!).

For some reason the module that is used to gain access to the iMac temperature probes is not loaded automatically. Adding applesmc to the end of /etc/modules gets this loaded (after a reboot or manually with modprobe applesmc). Unfortunately there does not appear to be an immediately obvious way of using this except from the command line.

The wireless network controller apparently works after the addition of the proprietary driver that shows up after doing an update. Admittedly I cannot say for sure because I use a wired setup.

Lastly the IR receiver. I will admit this has currently defeated me although that is partially because I am not that interested. I will of course update this if I get it to work.

Later: Screen Calibration

I later took a look at setting up the screen properly. Proper controls for the screen would have been nice, but configuring from the system turns out to be relatively easy.

First of all I used the OSX screen calibration tool in “expert” mode to generate in ICC file containing the screen profile. Doing this may well be possible inside Ubuntu; I just happened to know where the tool was in OSX.

I then installed xcalib :-

apt-get install xcalib

This could be used to set the monitor profile from the earlier generated ICC file.

Conclusion

It works. After a week or so using it, I am no longer thinking of the iMac as a system being installed and tested but as my standard desktop.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10; An Alternative Method and Some Rough Edges

 Computing, Working Notes  No Responses »
Nov 082008
 

Well I decided it was time to upgrade my main workstation to Ubuntu 8.10 from 8.04. This was a somewhat nervous upgrade because the SATA disks are connected to a controller that gives me trouble when booting … the last few times I rebooted the machine I have had to re-assemble one of the mirrors at the “miniroot” (the shell you get from the initrd environment).

Given the trouble I wanted the option to revert back to the current install if everything went wrong … something I have described in the past.

Environment

I have four SATA disks in my main workstation that are mirrored and encapsulated into a single volume group with numerous logical volumes. So /dev/md0 is constructed of a mirror of /dev/sda2 and /dev/sdb2 and /dev/md1 is constructed of a mirror of /dev/sdc1 and /dev/sdd1. /dev/sda1 is used as /boot and /dev/sdb1 is “spare”.

The volume group datavg has two “physical disks” in it – /dev/md0 and /dev/md1. In that volume group are (amongst others) two logical volumes of interest – 804root and 804var.

Preparation

First I ensured that /dev/sdb1 contained an up to date copy of /boot :-

mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
star -copy /boot /mnt
umount /mnt

The next step was to create two new logical volumes to be used (eventually) for the new release of Ubuntu :-

lvcreate --size 12G -name 810root /dev/datavg
lvcreate --size 3G --name 810var /dev/datavg
mkfs -t xfs /dev/datavg/810root
mkfs -t xfs /dev/datavg/810var

The next step was to copy the filesystems across – at this point no further non-upgrade activity took place :-

mount /dev/datavg/810var /mnt
star -copy -xdev /var /mnt
mount /dev/datavg/810root /mnt
star -copy -xdev / /mnt
(edited /mnt/etc/fstab to change references to 804 to 810)
umount /mnt

At this point the remaining task (or so I thought) was to change the references in /boot/grub/menu.lst so that Grub would boot the kernel with 810root as the root filesystem.

I then rebooted to check the functionality and discovered that for some reason /var/run/network had not been created on the new /var but that seemed to be the only issue. I re-created this directory and rebooted to be sure (and Linux without a loopback device behaves very strangely!).

I then in theory had an environment I could revert to with a bit of fiddling with grub so was happy to attempt the upgrade.

The Upgrade Itself

I then started the upgrade (sudo update-manager -d) only to be told I did not have enough disk space with the suggestion that I run sudo apt-get clean to free up enough space. I tried this and the update started on the next time through. Why doesn’t the upgrade process automatically run apt-get clean ? In fact why doesn’t the upgrade process realise that it is on a system with LVM available (with plenty of free space) and create a new LVM especially for the upgrade files ?

Anyway the second attempt to run update-manager did start downloading files so I settled down for a well earned beer.

After the files had downloaded the actual upgrade process began. At some point the process stopped whilst a certain upgtade (libpam) asked whether it should restart certain services (including gdm which is the graphical login). Unfortunately it did not explain clearly what it was doing, why, or even if restarting gdm would terminate the current X session. Perhaps it is something that would only “worry” someone with a dangerous amount of knowledge, but perhaps the prompt could be improved slightly.

As a later example of how it should be done, the dialog warning about changing the ssl certificate was ideal … basically saying “if this doesn’t mean much to you, don’t worry about it”.

The use of dialogs during the upgrade does raise a couple of issues though :-

  1. Apparently not “stopping the clock” whilst waiting for the user to respond to dialogs caused the estimate of how long the upgrade would take place to increase dramatically. Just after dealing with that libpam prompt I was slightly alarmed by the estimate of 6 further hours to complete (as it was already 21:30) only to be reassured by the rapid drop to 2 hours.
  2. From a users perspective it would be preferable to ask all questions at the beginning or at the end of a long process. Keeping an eye on the upgrade whilst it was churning through the bulk of the upgrade (which took place without user intervention) was somewhat tedious.

The unfortunate thing was that at this point, the upgrade process ran out of space. It also left my machine in an unbootable state … from what little investigation I made it would appear that the initrd file was not created. Perhaps because of the lack of space, but others have also encountered this problem.

Obviously the Ubuntu upgrade process should be a little more careful about estimating the amount of space available. It would also be nice if it would notice that it was installed on an LVMed system with free space available … it could create a new LVM of an appropriate size and use that.

Recovery

Fortunately my preparation left me with a root filesystem that I could revert to by selecting one of the older kernels in the grub menu, editing the command used to boot, and by replacing the root filesystem with “804root”. This resulted in a system almost identical to that before the upgrade process.

I re-tried the “Preparation” stage, ensuring that /var was a little bigger and restarted the upgrade process …

Upgrading (The Second Attempt)

The second upgrade went through pretty much the same process as the first … except that it did not run out of disk space. This let it complete apparently normally with a warning about removing several hundred packages (!).

Finally it suggested rebooting to finish the upgrade.

The First Boot

The first boot was a triffle problematic … firstly I still had to manually assemble /dev/md0 and the process that built /boot/grub/menu.lst hadn’t noticed that an invalid root filesystem was specified. Whilst the later was my fault, it would be nice if it had realised that it was invalid and had warned me. The former is a long standing problem and is not the result of the upgrade.

Apart from that, the standard user interface looked ok, but it had messed around with the Enlightenment window manager. I had to re-install the package, my settings and menus had disappeared. Whilst I am an “unusual” user in not using the standard user interface, this was not something I was happy with!

IT: Upgrading To Ubuntu 8.04

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Apr 272008
 

This entry is about upgrading a machine running Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04 which is only just out. But not in the standard way which would be quite boring.

I have at least two computers running Ubuntu, both configured in a fairly complex way and both fairly important (in the sense I really don’t need to try an upgrade and end up with a broken system). Whilst Ubuntu frequently does upgrade without a hitch, it can occasionally choke; this is seemingly more common with more complex installations.

Why not preserve an old copy of the install around to revert to ? Well with LVM it is perfectly possible. Ignoring what happens underneath, I have an LVM volume group called “internal” (actually I don’t, but I would if I were to re-install) which has :-

  • var – 4Gbytes to be mounted as /var
  • root – 8Gbytes to be mounted as /
  • home – “enough” to be mounted as /home

Note I do not believe in allocating all available disk space with a storage management system like LVM available; I do a great deal of storage management work and the biggest mistake anyone can make is assuming that they know the storage requirements of a system throughout it’s whole lifetime. This applies in spades to a desktop machine. Without some free space, the suggested upgrade mechanism won’t work.

Now with modern hard disks, we are likely to have more than enough storage to allocate. For instance on this machine right away I have 138Gbytes of free storage (mirrored). And that it is on a two year old machine; a newer machine would have larger disks. Easily enough storage to have two or more “copies” of different versions of Ubuntu around.

It would be nice if Ubuntu could do much of the work for us, but for now it’s pretty much a manual process. As an aside, the Ubuntu developers should probably think about using LVM in the default installer to assist in the development of this kind of feature.

The first stage is to create new logical volumes and build filesystems on them. I chose to name the logical volumes after the operating system version they would be running …

lvcreate -n 804root --size=8G /dev/internal
lvcreate -n 804var --size=4G /dev/internal
mkfs -t xfs /dev/internal/804root
mkfs -t xfs /dev/internal/804var

Now the key here is not to look at the current size of your /var filesystem and decide you need a much smaller filesystem … or the upgrade process will refuse to start. You can always reduce it later if you really want to quibble over 1-2Gbytes.

The next stage is to copy the relevant filesystems across. At this point you should avoid running as much as possible and probably do this from a text terminal after shutting down GDM …

/etc/init.d/gdm stop
apt-get install star
     (If you don't have it installed already)
mount /dev/internal/804var /mnt
star -v -xdev -acl -copy /var/* /mnt
umount /mnt
mount /dev/internal/804root /mnt
star -v -xdev -acl -copy / /mnt

This stage will take some time to complete. You will want to do a quick check of the new / and /var to ensure they look roughly like the originals (I always seem to come up with the equivalent of /var/var when I do something like this). Notice that the new root filesystem is still mounted … you need to edit /mnt/etc/fstab to alter what devices are mounted for / and /var.

The next stage is a bit tricky because I didn’t do it “right”, so I will be suggesting something that I didn’t try myself. The task is to modify /boot/grub/menu.lst in such a way as to result in two separate menu entries that will boot either the old operating environment or the new operating environment.

I would suggest that you :-

  1. Create an entry outside of the “DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST” that essentially replicates one of the entries. It should not be modified to boot off the new root filesystem.
  2. Modify all of the entries in the “DEBIAN AUTOMAGIC KERNELS LIST” (it makes sense when you review the menu.lst file) to alter the “root=’ kernel parameter to point to the new root filesystem. This is not the “root (hd0,0)” part, but the kernel parameter “root”. It will specify the old root filesystem logical volume (something like “root=/dev/internal/root”) and you want to change this to “root=/dev/internal/804root”.

At this point you should probably reboot to check that both environments work. Just make sure you have a recent rescue CD knocking around before you do.

After you have done the checking you can boot the new environment and use ‘update-manager’ to upgrade the new environment to Ubuntu 8.04. This will probably work (it worked fine for me).

Undoubtedly the next time I try this, I will figure out how to make it work better, but it is good enough to have a “fallback” option in case an upgrade goes badly. For instance until last week, running Vmware Server under 8.04beta was pretty tricky and if it were still the case I would have to revert back to 7.10.

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