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Ubuntu Breezy Badger Update

I had mentioned in my Colony 4 upgrade post some of the problems I was having. It turns out the icons weren’t appearing because I had a custom theme chosen. Choosing Clearlooks set everything right again, though Ubuntu seems to have changed the Tomboy icons in the panel and in the Applications menu.

Doing an apt-get upgrade after getting home from traveling resulted in 24 hours of panic. Upon upgrading, my networking stopped working. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this problem, but thankfully one of the posters in that thread mentioned how the upgrade seemed to have stopped half way through. Going to a terminal and doing another apt-get upgrade and a reboot fixed the problem, thank god.

Overall, I’m still very happy with Breezy Badger. I’m waiting for the X.org packages to get a bit more stable as it seems I upgrade them almost daily and then I’ll get my monitor and ATI drivers working properly.

Just a few weeks from Breezy Badger going final!

  • in General
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Back again

And… I’m back. Spent most of last week traveling in Houston for work. This was my first significant time spent in the big ole state of Texas, and in some ways it’s a different world down there.

First, housing is much cheaper. Like 50% cheaper than here – and with no state income tax, cost of living must be much lower. It was 90 and humid all week – I loved it. I had the opportunity to go to Minute Maid Park and watch the Astro’s play. It feels like they just tried to cram a MLB stadium into a few spare blocks they had open in downtown – the place is tiny. All the modern amenities, but looking into the outfield and just seeing walls and no bleachers wasn’t right.

Demographics were very different. Texas state flags were everywhere – they don’t call it the Lonestar State for nothing.

Now, back to blogging.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger Colony 4 Upgrade

I upgraded my main computer with Ubuntu’s Hoary Hedgehog release from May ’04 to the latest version of testing (Colony 4) Tuesday night. I wanted to perform the upgrade with the release of GNOME 2.12 Wed., and Breezy Badger about a month out.

I used apt-get to perform the install, and considering it’s not even to preview version, some things went right and some things went wrong.

The Good:

  • Updated my /etc/apt/sources.list and replaced all instances of “Hoary” with “Breezy”

  • It took about 20 minutes to install and upgrade, had a few instances where I had to force (-f) the packages

The Bad:

  • ATI binary drivers aren’t in Breezy yet

  • My xorg.conf file is pretty messed up. My original Hoary xorg.conf included the actual scan lines for my Dell 2405 monitor. I ran through the manual setup script and removed one bad resolution (1920 x 1440) and am using DRI to draw the desktop. At least I get to the desktop to that way, though I currently have no 3d acceleration.

The Ugly:

  • My icons are pretty messed up – I’ll post a screenshot tonight. Including icons on the panel (Tomboy specifically) and on the desktop.

  • I keep my desktop clean of icons, with the exception of my Samba and SSH links to my remote servers. Those icons are messed up, as is Nautilus, including the new spatial tree view.

Overall, GNOME still feels snappy, even in DRI mode, and I’m fairly excited about some of the new features, especially the spatial tree view in Nautilus.

Bandwidth Oops

After all the problems I’ve had getting my Vonage up and running to interact properly with my TiVo, I thought I had it totally fixed.

Yet all last week, I had horrible latency on my network, that was resulting in long pauses when on the phone, and then my web browsing became very, very slow. Not quite dial-up quality, but definitely not broadband. It was very frustrating, especially as I needed to get some stuff fixed on Apatheia.org.

Friday I brought home a different router to see if that would work. First I upgraded the firmware on my current router, and then went to check a website on my 2nd machine that does all my email and IM that I don’t use a lot for web browsing.

Wait – what’s that in the bottom corner of the screen below Firefox? Sure enough, it was a Bittorrent client I had open from the previous Saturday downloading OpenSuse. It had started really, really slow – 1 – 2k download. But it had definitely finished strong as it was now uploading at 40k / second – using all of my available 384k upload speed. Turn that off, and voila – all my latency problems fixed.

Whoops.

Reamspire

I’ll have to agree whole-heartedly with Jeff Waugh on this one: Reampsire!

Here’s a Linux company who went after Microsoft with their first name (Lindows), then took Microsoft’s money to the tune of $20 million to change it, going after a project that was more dissimilar than they were when they were called Linspire.

And then, to top it off, the article itslef is belittling and insulting to other Linux distributions. No matter how many flamewars go on at any given time in the Linux community, there is always some respect between distributions and it’s users. Because you’ve made the right choice and that choice is Linux.

Yet Linspire:

The name Freespire, however, did create some confusion in the short time it was used. The name implies a “free” copy of Linspire, which of course it is not. The very things that were taken out of Linspire for Andrew’s project are in fact some of the very things that make Linspire, well…Linspire. One of the main differences between Linspire and other Linux distros (Mandriva, Ubuntu, MEPIS, etc.) is that Linspire does include a lot of legal and paid-for 3rd-party licenses for things like mp3, Java, Flash, Quick Time, Windows Media, Bitstream fonts, Real media, music, etc., and this is all pre-loaded, tested and ready to use. Take all that away and you don’t have Linspire, you have something more like other Linux distros. So you see, the term Freespire (free + Linspire) is actually an oxymoron and would be a term like VanillaChocolateCake, where you take out all the chocolate.

Andrew has decided to change the name of his project to ‘squiggle’ to avoid any confusion.

The only true “Freespire,” would need to be a FREE COPY of the real LINSPIRE.

TerraStation

I recently received a Buffalo 600gig Terrastation to test from work.

I’ve been looking for a NAS / SAN storage solution for a while, but most USB NAS solutions I’ve looked at don’t support Linux. The Terrastation is a work of art. Full support for every OS, including Windows, Mac & Linux, easy setup, multiple RAID options, and a very easy setup.

It has default Samba settings, and in Windows shows up as a network share, unlike SAN’s which will show up as a drive letter. (Mirra only supports backing up from a drive letter, but oh well, wasn’t happy with Mirra as it was a Windows only solution).

It’s pretty slick – a very basic setup from Windows, but like routers on the market today, a full-fledged web page for setting it up on the box itself. It’s basically a Linux box, running off a PPC processor. Full support for users and groups, Raid 0, 1 and 5 (5 default out of the box!), FTP access, drive spanning and user secured shares.

I’ve had it about two weeks, and lo and behold, I see on Planet Gnome this morning, a Gnome developer blogged his experiences with it, including hacking at it. He has the upgrade from mine, the 1 Terrabyte (I have the 600 gig), and points to a nice hacker’s Wiki at terastation.org all about adding customized firmware to the Terrastation, including SSH and NFS support. I’m looking forward to getting SSH up so I can use SCP as well.

Overall, the machine is pretty cool. Pretty quiet, but 4 drives and their vibrations make some noise, and the lights on the front, including 4 seperate places for each drive to show status is very cool.

Burning Man

Someday I’ll get myself to Burning Man.

For those of you going, have fun. For those of you who don’t know what it is, hit the link – it’s the ultimate experience in alternative culture. Located in Black Rock City, Nevada, one week a year the desert is turned in to the playa. Communities form, art is created and much fun is had.

MythTV

I’ve been researching this for years, and waiting for the right moment, and that moment is quickly coming in to focus. That moment will entail buying all of the parts for a Home Theater PC and installing MythTV said HTPC.

What is MythTV, you ask? It’s a software program for Linux distributions, that manages all the media – TV recording, DVD playback, DVD ripping, burn TV to DVD, music, weather and more.

Here is one man’s way to build a $500 MythTV PC. I’m thinking mine will be a bit beefier, with a better processor, home theater looking case, more memory and much more storage.

More to come in the coming months.

Google Talk

Google has launched Google Talk a day early. Turns out Google is running one big Jabber server. Get yourself an IM client that is Jabber compatible such as Gaim and do this:

  1. Open a client supporting Jabber (AdiumX, Gaim, etc.)

  2. Your server name is talk.google.com

  3. Your username is the same as your Google ID. Example: user@gmail.com

  4. Your password is the same as you use to login to Gmail or other Google login locations.


I'm on Google Talk!

Update: And now the talk.google.com website is up offering a Windows Jabber client for download, as well as Jabber-compatible instructions for Mac & Linux users.