Ubuntu Linux

[wnmnkh]

Oh, forget to mention that PulseAudio thingy. Currently this does not make any problem with my machines.

But I expect a lot of people will post problems about their sound outputs after the official release. I think it is pretty premature one and 8.04 should not include this.

[Rasqual Twilight]

Hi,
What are the things to back up before making the great jump ? Is there a thing such as ghosting a drive / partitions so I can restore GRUB/MBR & filesystems easily ?

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by wnmnkh

I am kinda confused to what you said about GRUB problem. You mean that the VM does not allow you to boot via liveCD?

The way the VM works is this: I load the VM program. I have a list of virtual machines. Assuming I'd powered down the virtual machine, starting it loads a brief VM BIOS and then immediately launches the OS. I can pair up USB devices and put in real optical media or use ISOs for the DVD drive, but I don't believe it'll auto-boot from the "optical drive" unless it's during an OS install phase. There may be an option to do that somewhere though - I haven't checked.

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

@Ledgem
I'm guessing that the kernel module for your VM wasn't built for the kernel you're now using. (I've had this problem with VirtualBox when the kernel was automatically upgraded.) You're probably faced with compiling the module yourself (if the source code is available like it is for VirtualBox), reverting to the previous working kernel, or trying to find a new binary module that's compatible with the new kernel.

When installing a Linux distro, VMWare has a few presets but I think I went with the Generic Linux Kernel 2.6 - we haven't jumped beyond 2.6, right? GRUB is fully functional, it's just that GRUB is pulling an error 15 on me when I try to boot the OS. I've googled for the issue (along with the full text of the error, which I've forgotten) and found other people who had the same problem outside of virtual machines, but I never found a solid conclusion for how to fix it. (Not that I searched very hard - didn't go beyond the first five or so results on Google at the time.)

[grey_moon]

Originally Posted by wnmnkh

Oh, forget to mention that PulseAudio thingy. Currently this does not make any problem with my machines.

But I expect a lot of people will post problems about their sound outputs after the official release. I think it is pretty premature one and 8.04 should not include this.

PulseAudio, Alsa and OSS (and the Gnome sound thingy) all are used on demand so unless something actually calls PA then it won't affect you. <- Bit spaghetti like right now

[IRJustman]

I upgraded my desktop Kubuntu install from Gutsy to Hardy and noticed something very disturbing. Tomboy ended up getting installed. Tomboy alone isn't the problem per se. One of its depenencies, Mono, is a VERY BIG problem.

There are two reasons I ask this:

1. It's a GNOME program and I only have a few selected GNOME programs.
2. It depends on Mono, a depenecy not present in default Kubuntu.

The reason Mono is such a big problem is the fact that .NET has several patents on it.

Before I go too much further, I must give the obligatory IANAL/TINLA disclaimer. If you want a legal opinion, buy one from your lawyer.

*ahem* Now that I've gotten THAT out of the way, onward!

Mono could potentially get whomever uses it in hot water--UNLESS (and this is a VERY big "unless") you use a Novell-sanctioned Linux distribution, e.g. S.u.S.E., due to their agreement not to sue with Microsoft. I say Novell because Mono's creator, Miguel de Icaza, is a Novell employee. Basically, if a technology that Microsoft has any say about (and can actually sue for) is in S.u.S.E., they won't sue Novell customers for the term of that agreement, which doesn't necessarily mean it won't once the agreement is up, assuming the agreement has not been renewed. However, this promise not to sue does NOT extend to anyone else, e.g. us Ubuntu users.

Any Kubuntu users have any ideas?

--Ian.

[SeijiSensei]

You might find this discussion on Mono, Tomboy, and Ubuntu of interest.

[Epyon9283]

I think Mono has no place inside a default Gnome install. Why use something thats obviously patent encumbered? Especially when the company holding the patents is a direct competitor. I also have issues with Mono on technical terms. Its slow. Slow as hell. It takes Tomboy far too long to load. Its a simple notepad app. Why the hell does it take 20+ seconds to load? All the other Mono apps have similar speed issues. When you launch a Mono app you know it because it takes a lot longer to load than it should. People bitch and moan about Java being slow but then they go and use Mono based apps.

[WanderingKnight]

By the way,



Credits to this guy.

Only a couple of hours more... I'm downloading the RC for the KDE 4 release to try it out a little before going to sleep, as the release catches me deep into my nightly hours.

[WanderingKnight]

Oh, I noticed no one answered this post:

What are the things to back up before making the great jump ? Is there a thing such as ghosting a drive / partitions so I can restore GRUB/MBR & filesystems easily ?

Normally the things you want to back up are all in your home directory, and if you've customized your system's inner settings a lot, backupping /etc is also a good idea.

As with backupping GRUB, well, the /boot folder holds all its configuration files. With most distributions, however (including Ubuntu), you won't have any problems even if you overwrite the MBR, as almost every distro/OS is detected at installation time. If anything should go wrong, however, having your working /boot/grub/menu.lst backed up is a good idea.

[wnmnkh]

Oh, a nice poster I must say.

[grey_moon]

Hee hee I hate this part of the release, no more counter and only coming soon ....

*EDIT*
Woo hoo its out!!!!
I wuv been on the academic backbone. Installing now

[WanderingKnight]

Umm... I'm not getting my network automatically set up with last night's Hardy RC. I'm scratching my head as to why this happens, neither the Live CD nor the installed OS sets it up automatically. I'm posting from a backup Linux partition I have here, I'll try taking note of my network settings and setting eth1 up manually, but it's a pain in the ass, especially since it's something that always went perfectly fine with Ubuntu.

[WanderingKnight]

Okay, I solved the issue, but I'm a bit annoyed at having to do this... why does it suddenly not work? I mean, autoconfiguration worked every single time...

[wnmnkh]

I hopelessly tried to download the official version of 8.04 for the install CD, but it seems the servers are overwhelmed and I even cannot get torrent file, lol.

Edit : ok, barely got the torrent link, and it seems even torrent server is having hard time.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by WanderingKnight

As with backupping GRUB, well, the /boot folder holds all its configuration files.

I often create a separate partition for /boot, usually no more than 64 or 128MB (yes MB) in size. This has the advantage of preserving /boot during updates, and it also allows multiple distros in separate partitions to work with a single boot partition.

Directories that should always be backed up include:
/boot
/etc
/home
/usr/local
/opt

As WK notes, if you've done a lot of customizations, you'll definitely want to keep a copy of /etc around to apply those customizations to the new installation.

[WanderingKnight]

I hopelessly tried to download the official version of 8.04 for the install CD, but it seems the servers are overwhelmed and I even cannot get torrent file, lol.

That's why I went with the release candidate last night. I simply installed it today and used repositories across the globe (from Taiwan, to be more specific), where the load would be lighter (since it's currently night time there), to upgrade the few packages that were needed before getting the full release version. I still can't connect to any of my local repositories, but I get full speed from Taiwan.

Hooray to the glories of package management.

BTW, here you'll find a copy of the Ubuntu i386 and 64 bit torrents, in case you need them. I don't have the Kubuntu ones since I can't reach the server, I got those from a mail sent to the local mailing list.

[WanderingKnight]

Okay, here's something that's driving me insane in KDE.

The network manager thingie apparently doesn't detect my eth0 and eth1 devices properly. For some strange reason, they keep on randomly switching back and forth without making much sense... though I think I realized that it sets eth0 as the device connected to the net automatically, since I set both devices for automatic dhcp configuration and even when the modem is connected to eth1, the IP is set to eth0. Is this KDE's default behavior? Whenever I try to set up the gateway connection to my mom's PC in eth0 via knetworkmanager, I end up with no internet access. I've tried doing it with ifconfig but apparently knetworkmanager overrides it in some form.

[grey_moon]

Just did an upgrade on my work lappie (not a good idea on Thursday night at 00:30), and omfg it works fine.

Noticed some popping with my pidgin notifications
Happens with Alsa (arrrggghhh)
Not so bad with ESD and perfect with using the aplay command....

[IRJustman]

Originally Posted by SeijiSensei

I often create a separate partition for /boot, usually no more than 64 or 128MB (yes MB) in size. This has the advantage of preserving /boot during updates, and it also allows multiple distros in separate partitions to work with a single boot partition.

Directories that should always be backed up include:
/boot
/etc
/home
/usr/local
/opt

As WK notes, if you've done a lot of customizations, you'll definitely want to keep a copy of /etc around to apply those customizations to the new installation.

I myself do the same thing mainly because I prefer to locate the grub boot sector in a partition boot sector, not to mention I cannot locate a boot sector in an XFS partition. This will destroy the partition. I then put a conventional MBR boot sector in the MBR. I don't like using grub as a multibootloader; I use GAG for this purpose if this machine will be a multiboot system. Otherwise, I use a normal bootloader in the MBR.

Though not a lot out there uses /opt that I've noticed, especially anything that uses an appreciable amount of disk space. About the only thing I've actually seen that uses it is anything KDE uses.

I have two more machines to upgrade, notably my Asterisk/messaging machine and my colocated server. Things have been going very smoothly here, though I did have to unkink my desktop's boot setup.

Will keep everyone updated on my situation.

--Ian.

[wnmnkh]

I guess I found the bug after installed Ubuntu on my primary computer last night.

It seems to have some trouble with windows vista network. It fails to show the shared external hard drive I assigned on 'network'. I manually typed the location of the hard drive to connect, and it said "failed to connect, it was not mounted"

Well I see the drive on the background! Ubuntu is lying to me! Oh well.