If you’re in the US - or your servers are - you need to make sure that you are ready for the new Daylight Savings Time (DST) changes. It turns out this was already handled by an update to Ubuntu.
You can easily confirm it just by running the following command:
sudo zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2007
Assuming you see March 11th and Nov 4th you should be good to go.
I’ve been enjoying my new Lenovo - once in a while the sound acts a bit flaky after repeated hibernates. Then what seemed like all of a sudden - the sound stopped working completely. I didn’t know what happened but it sucked not having sound….
After a lot of searching I found the likely culprit - my modem is switched off in BIOS. I turned it off when I turned on IrDA for my palm.
I should have known to just go to ThinkWiki
Problem with no sound on ThinkPad R60e - ThinkWiki
The ThinkPad BIOS has an option to disable the Modem. If you are tempted to do this (seems like a good idea if you never use the modem) don’t. If the modem is disabled sound does not work. [Applies to Ubuntu 6.06.1 and Edgy-Eft Knot2 on ThinkPad R60e] [sound does work in WinXP with modem disabled]
Live and learn…
I’m a little bummed - I not sure what all other Linux people have switched to - but the palm support seems to have dropped off over time.
Lately I’ve been getting in trouble because now that I use Evolution as my main mail client - I actually get those Exchange meeting invitations. I end up accepting them. Only problem is that Palm sync hasn’t been working on my laptop. So I forget to put it in the Palm immediately and then I end up missing the meeting - not good!
I tried for a while to get my USB cable to sync my Palm TX under Edgy without any luck. (If you know how to do this - share the secret). At home I just sync via wireless. That works fine because my pc at home has a static ip. At work, I don’t. So tonight I ended up playing around with the third syncing option - IrDA.
I’ll be honest - this seemed like it was going to be impossible - that was until I found this blog post. It ended up giving me the details I needed to get everything running.
Now I just have to remember to sync and maybe you’ll actually see me in the next meeting you schedule with me.
Update: Not so fast. At some point I missed a step because I rebooted - I ended up terminated whatever process was really listening to my IrDA port….This is going to take some time after all.
I use a DD-WRT router at home. For a while I had a transparent proxy setup inside my home network. (Instructions Here)
I’ve upgraded the DD-WRT and my main file server/proxy server in the last month or so. In the process, I removed the proxy. I didn’t realize it until this morning.
I turned it back on and I started getting “INVALID REQUEST” errors. Seriously annoying.
Turns out you have to make some changes to your Squid config if you are using 2.6 (instead of 2.5 which was the standard on Dapper).
There is apparently a patch to handle this but it doesn’t seem to have made in to Edgy.
First change is that you now have to tell Squid you are doing a transparent proxy - so
http_port 3128
becomes
http_port 3128 transparent
And thanks to this post :
RE: [squid-users] Squid 2.6.STABLE1 invalid request
always_direct allow all
I realized I had to add another tag. Now the proxy is back up and the web is a little bit zippier.
I booted up my laptop after using suspend. It completely hosed by swap partition. This is apparently a side effect of the upgrade from Dapper directly to Edgy.
The bug submission below describes both the problem and a simple solution.
Bug #66637 in Ubuntu: “mkswap should re-use existing UUID or warn about changing it”
1, determine your swap with ‘fdisk -l’
2, do mkswap on your swap partition - RECORD THE UUID WHICH THIS COMMAND
OUTPUTS
3, now use this UUID to put into fstab and resume
files…(RESUME=UUID=should go in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
4, update-initramfs -u
5, reboot normally after this finishes
So far I’ve found the UUID thing a little annoying - mostly because you really need to be able to cut and paste when dealing with things like UUID=a7a34873-20db-4de8-b605-9d47e418ed6c
In the long run, I’m hoping this helps them move forward. This is one of the many things I didn’t really expect as part of “Edgy”. I assumed they just meant that they were going to use really cutting edge packages. They’ve also made changes at a lower level (UUIDs for drive identification, the switch to dash from bash for /bin/sh, and the new startup system for example)
It is probably going to be a little bumpy since these things change behavior in an area where you don’t expect it - and if you are just a normal user probably won’t even notice. The question will be - do those bumps add up to a better experience - or just push Ubuntu farther from its Debian roots?
Ok I decided to start the process of moving over to Edgy.
For a change instead of doing it the Debian command line way I used the Ubuntu upgrade manager
gksudo "update-manager -c -d"
That triggered the update manager with the option to upgrade to the new release.
It took a while to download the 1200 packages that had been updated since Dapper. The process was pretty straight forward. At the end, it handled prompting me about config files that I had changed. This would probably confuse normal users but then I don’t they end up editing the config files as much as I did.
The only real problem I ran into was with my processor. Part of it was Ubuntu and the other part was my own fault. Edgy ships with linux-image-386. That kernerl doesn’t recognize multi core processors. Since I didn’t spend the money on dual core, to run single core in Linux I had to fix it. It turns out the solution is pretty simple - you must run linux-image-generic. My mistake was taking this opportunity to remove a bunch of old kernel images I had laying around. In the process I manged to mess up grub and my Nvidia drivers. After a little bit of dinking about, I manage to get everything up and running - and I’m now posting this from Firefox 2.0 (I thought it would be IceWeasel).
They have made some changes to the system. I haven’t really explored the new start up mechanism, but I already went through the fstab and noticed that everything now references UUIDs instead of the standard /dev/hd(a-z) labeling. This makes things a little more confusing to read, but apparently it makes the system handle boot order of drives a lot better.
As I spend more time with it, I’ll report more about my experiences - but so far so good!
Salve, Ubuntero’s
With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set
to be spot on schedule October 26th, we’re starting to look beyond
it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.In the next cycle we’ll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has
landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions.
This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer
that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting - seeing the
world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before.In that spirit, the release will be be code named “The Feisty Fawn”.
The main themes for feature development in this release will be
improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end
server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.
Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for
both users and developers. Detailed planning will take place at the
developer summit next month in Mountain View, California. Please join
us there to help shape the Feisty Fawn!https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDeveloperSummitMountainView
This will be our sixth release, marking the third anniversary of the
project’s inception, and will be a return to our standard six-month release
schedule following the shortened catch-up cycle used for 6.10.Edgy has been a wild ride, with some remarkable achievements (nothing
like re-inventing and substantially improving on init!). Feisty will
be a little more focused on features that are very visible to end-users.We welcome new participants in our community - whatever your talent we
look forward to working with you! Jono Bacon, our new community lead,
will find a way to make sure your contribution is well received.Mark
Now I just need to get through updating to Edgy.
I’m about to be without a sys admin on my team. That totally sucks for me :(
That means that I’m stuck doing a lot more sys admin work than I would like. Normally this wouldn’t bother me, but right now I have a lot of development projects in play. They all have different deployments and it means there are a lot of details to manage. In the long run, that translates to making it harder to get someone to take it over when I do get a new sys admin.
So in the interim - I figured I’d take some time and get things a little more ship shape. Enter Cfengine. Basically, this is a tool you can use to audit, manage, and maintain servers under your control. In my case, I’m going to be focused on a set of machines that will operate as a Ruby On Rails cluster.
Although my final deployment will be focused on doing multiple web heads and replicating database servers, this series of posts is going to focus on the simple two server configuration.
web1.ubuntu.com - The web server
db1.ubuntu.com - The MySQL database server.
Please note I don’t own ubuntu.com. But if you following the examples you’ll be setting up a hosts file to make resolution work - so it doesn’t really matter. I have no idea how to do that on Windows or Mac OSX - but I’m sure someone will figure it out.
This is part one. It will deal with the pre-setup. Part two will focus on some of the most basic cfengine stuff. Part three will show it all working together so you can actually “rake deploy” to your little virtual cluster.
Read on for more details…
Read the rest of this entry »
Ok - don’t get me wrong I still like Debian - I just do almost everything in Ubuntu. This statement is so classic I had to blog about it.
Linux.com | New installer gives Debian Etch an edge
I
f it’s true that Ubuntu is a Swahili word meaning “user too dumb to install Debian,” then I have to wonder if I’ll still be running Ubuntu when Etch gets released, because even I can install Debian now. If installing Debian has intimidated you in the past, keep an eye on Etch and its installer as they get nearer to launch time. They won’t intimidate you.
Apparently - the install is what is holding Debian back. That’s it. I mean now that they have a GUI installer - you should throw away Ubuntu and go back to Debian. I thought that wrong headed view of the world went out with a single RedHat distribution.
The reality is that it is not the installer that makes or breaks Linux. Seriously! I spend a half an hour yesterday helping a co-worker get his wifi card (Man I hate broadcom) working under Dapper. He had tried and tried and made no headway.
This is a classic Linux problem for new users.
You have some hardware and it doesn’t work. You don’t know why it doesn’t work. You don’t know how to make it work - just that it doesn’t work. Guess what - that sucks! You add on another couple of problems where you expect it to do something that is easy under Windows and eventually they give up.
So I’m excited that Ubuntu has lit enough of a fire under Debian to make a release in the sub two year release cycle. That’s good for everyone because it means that the foundation that Ubuntu is built on is still healthy and thriving. But - you are missing the entire point of Ubuntu if you think that the installer is the only difference between Debian and Ubuntu.
