Solid Blog of Ise I think my toes are jealous of my fingers because they get to point at things

The other day I upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop to the latest 10.04-release. It went without a hitch, and because my laptop is unaffected by the I/O bug it went fairly quickly. A little over an hour, most of which I spent watching “Damnation Alley” and occasionally checking up on the laptop.

After it was done I rebooted, and everything was peachy. Nothing major to report, except that I now can use Compiz/Desktop effects on it without X freezing after two-three minutes. That’s a major improvement in my book, since I now can play (an admittedly quite jerky) Xmoto on it. Previously X would freeze up whenever any accelerated graphics were in use.

Quite nice.

Yesterday I took the plunge and upgraded my installation of Ubuntu to the freshly squeezed 10.04 aka “Lucid Lynx”. Yeah, the codenames are silly, but I find that they help identify the generation you’re using. Whatever.

These are some random assorted impressions after the first 24 hours of use.

First off, the frickin’ disk I/O whatever bug is still there. It seems a bit mitigated, but heavy disk I/O will still make my computer take long and completely unwarranted pauses. THIS IS INCREDIBLY ANNOYING, and even more annoying is the fact that more than two years down the road and no one still knows why this is happening or how we fix it. Sure, we’re relatively a minority of users who are affected by this, but we’re still lots of people. This is a big, big blight on the otherwise quite good Ubuntu-stamp of approval.

The upgrade went fine, even if it took ungodly long. I think the upgrade took a total of six (!) hours for me, and I heavily suspect the above mentioned disk I/O regression whatever bullshit is to blame for it. I could theoretically still use my computer while upgrading, but it was essentially like trying to pass a kidney stone so I simply let the machine putter for all that time and resorted to my laptop. Which is blissfully unaffected by that bug, even though the funky onboard ATI x300 has some quirks. I’ll be upgrading the laptop to Lucid in a few days, and maybe those quirks will disappear by then – although I don’t have very high hopes that they will.

After the upgrade finished I rebooted. There were a few tense moments when all I stared at was a black screen with a blinking cursors, but then my harddrive started ticking and vrooom, I was greeted by the new GDM login-screen. It’s quite purple, and while it’s pretty I think the dark chocolate of Karmic was a bit prettier. But booting went fine and it went quick, so it seems the priority to pull down the long boot-times has been a wise choice. HAL is completely gone now, and this is (as far as I can understand) one of the major contributions to the increased boot-speed.

I can’t say anything about the new UI changes, since my desktop looks and functions almost identical to before the upgrade. Same theme, same settings, same everything. Some minor keybindings had inexplicably changed, and some minor settings in window management, but a few clicks in the settings and it was back to normal.

Some minor griping is about this new idea that applications don’t appear in the notification area, but rather create their own icon/applet in the panel. Transmission for example would previously appear in the notification area, and required one click to open it and one click to tuck it back in. Now, with the new behaviour you require twice the amount of clicking to perform the same action since clicking will open a drop-down menu, THEN you click “Show transmission” and then the same to hide it again. Sure, you can hide it by clicking the close-button but it’s still inefficient and a bit obtuse in my opinion.

The volume control and Rhythmbox act the same way, imitating panel-applets rather than notification icons.

Thunderbird has been upgraded from the 2.x tree to the fairly new and shiny 3.0. That’s nice, even though I find a lot of the new Thunderbird a bit confusing. I do however like the non-existing toolbar, and just like Firefox it now sports an “awesomebar” instead. Quite nice. Thunderbird is definitely moving in the right direction and I feel zero incentive to change my mail-client.

Today is the 29th of April, 2010. To most people it’s just another day, but to us nerds it’s the day of release for the latest Ubuntu-version. In this case it’s 10.04 aka Lucid Lynx.

So far the official Ubuntu-site hasn’t been updated, and my update-manager hasn’t started squealing about this yet, but I’m guessing it’ll happen in a few hours. I’m going to hold off on upgrading until the weekend (or possibly later even) to make sure that the load on Ubuntus servers lighten.

Lucid seems promising. I’m not completely excited about it, but it takes more steps in the right direction. I’m a little ambiguous about the new default theme – it’s pretty and it’s nice to see Ubuntu move away from the dominant brown colors, but at the same time it might be confusing to newbies. None the less, I don’t really care about it in the long run, since I’ve been running the same theme for almost two years now and won’t change it just because Lucid rolls around.

No, my biggest hope is that they’ve finally fixed the disk I/O bug. Or whatever it is. It’s been a problem for me since the days of 8.04 (aka Hardy Heron) and it’s become progressively worse. According to most sources it’s a problem with some kind of driver-regression in the kernel, but I have yet to get a straight answer, much less get a fix for it. In fact, whenever I’ve submitted a bug-report it’s been quashed and deleted. Often times I felt as if I was taking crazy-pills – it’s here and I’m not the only one affected by it, but the people in charge seemingly choose to ignore it.

So, that’s my biggest hope. Other than that, I see 10.04 as more simply more Free goodness.

It seems like eons ago that I started this thing. Back in 2003 I installed what would become this server, and after a while this started to grow. The name (darklands) was inherited from that machines previous owner, and it still felt right. Admittedly I have none of the original hardware left, having replaced everything including the chassis, but the name still sticks.

Debian was the operating system of choice, made as far as I can remember on an impulse and a mild suggestion from a friend. Debian Woody to be precise, since back then I didn’t really know much about Debian and went for the “stable” release.

This installation served well for the next seven or so years. It got upgraded twice (from Woody to Sarge, then from Sarge to Etch) and survived my occasionally wild exploits. It hosted websites, and helped teach me a lot about the finer qualities of maintaining a 24/7 server.

But as time went by it became more and more unstable. Or rather, not unstable as such (uptime when I pulled it offline was 270+ days) but it had developed a lot of personality. Since I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the beginning, back in 2003, I took a lot of -in hindsight- very poor decisions. Decisions which I later regretted and had to endure working around for the next seven years, always being a nagging irritation at the back of my mind.

No more of this now.

I spent a week reinstalling the machine from scratch. After giving a lot of thought to it all I decided to go with Ubuntu Server instead of the previous choice, Debian. Admittedly, since Ubuntu is based on Debian the differences are very subtle, and all in all I’m quite happy with Ubuntu even as a server OS. It’s got the good things about Debian, and very few of the annoying ones.

The reinstallation was surprisingly smooth. I transferred the original machine into a virtualized environment running on my workstation to minimize the downtime while working on the actual machine. This proved to be a good idea, and I’m happy I took the time to do it. It also cemented that VirtualBox is a perfectly decent environment for virtualized computing.

Reinstallation went smooth. Minor hiccups always occur, but with seven years of experience I sorted them fairly quickly. Getting the external services running proved a challenge, but after some tweaking I managed it just fine. Apache, MySQL, all that stuff went up fairly quickly, and with minor modifications and tweaks the original content and configurations could be transferred to the new environment.

Internal services also went up smoothly. In about two days I had gotten approximately 90% of the external and internal services up and running. Quite nice. It’s been running for about a week now, basically just a shakedown to make sure things don’t go haywire for no reason.

Work remains, but now I can do it in the background or at night while the machine hums along and provides the same services it has always done. I’m happy, and proud of myself.

I’ve been avoiding upgrading Firefox from 3.5 since up until just recently I hadn’t found a good way to do it under Ubuntu. The only real option I’d found (apart from installing it manually) was using the mozilla-daily PPA, and that has some negative effects since you’re essentially installing a nightly developer-build of the browser that isn’t adapted to Ubuntu. It’s just a little too bleeding-edge for my taste; having your browsers behavior change on a virtually daily basis because you’re running nightlies of developer-versions is not something I recommend. Additionally it doesn’t install the Firefox-branded version but rather the generic Iceweasel-version instead, which is a minor annoyance.

Until I found this little article detailing a different PPA to use, and it worked flawlessly. A quick tour in aptitude and presto, new version of Firefox.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I see almost no incentive to change that habit. I’ve used it since back before it was Firefox, back when it was Firebird, and it’s still the best browser in most ways. 3.6 has made it better by removing some of the annoyances I had with 3.5, most notably how the browser would often simply “pause” for a second or two. Admittedly a lot of these annoyances could stem from me using about 56954 different extensions but whatever.

It’s a nice improvement, and if you’re using Ubuntu then the abovementioned PPA will be a nice and easy way to upgrade. It won’t blow your socks off, but it’s a nice improvement. Slightly faster and more of the same Firefox-goodness we’ve all come to love over the years.