A follow-up on my upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04

As I said back on the 6th of this month I made the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”. While most of it’s been pretty good (other than the three plus hour upgrade time and no visible improvement in the boot time on my system) there is one thing that’s bugged the living daylights out of me. Something happened while I was installing the upgrade that essentially killed my MPD/Sonata install. I’ve spent a number of hours trying to get it resolved, including completely uninstalling it and blowing away my existing configuration files to start from scratch, and what I ended up with yesterday is a complete inability to even update my MPD database. Since I use MPD/Sonata on a daily basis when I’m at my Ubuntu box the inability to use it is a deal breaker. Plus it seems that the .deb package for Google Gadgets has been edited to remove the Gmail Notifier applet, which is something I rely on several times a day to use my multiple Gmail accounts. The fact that I don’t use Firefox as my default browser anymore has added even more insult to the “injury”, and I haven’t seen a reliable way to have an applet or gadget check my multiple accounts outside of the Gmail Notifier addon for Firefox.

All of these issues may come from something I discovered over a year ago, and that’s the fact that something in my user profile has been borked. It first showed up when I was unable to do something no matter what I tried (I don’t even recall what it is at this point) but I suspect it’s gotten worse in the last year with my installing apps to try them out and getting rid of them when I decided I didn’t like them enough. I’ve decided that I’m simply going to clear out some of the config files on my primary profile, get rid of things that I don’t have in other forms (like .tar.gz’s), and back up some of my most critical data (such as bookmarks for Epiphany and my Evolution email/rss settings). Once that’s done I’m going to dig out my old Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” Live CD and do a fairly clean install, blowing away my current root partition and creating a new user profile. My /home directory resides on it’s own partition so once I make room for a new partition I’ll be able to create a new user account and simply move my documents, etc., into the new user space (and updating permissions as needed). I don’t think it will be a completely easy task, and I’m preparing myself for the very real probability that it’s going to end up being a ton of work. I know just starting that far back and upgrading the system one version at a time is going to take many hours, and I’m hoping 7.04 is the proper version to go back to. I remember starting with Ubuntu in November of 2007, and 7.04 came out in April of that year so I’m not sure why I started with that rather than Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, but I distinctly remember using Feisty so that’s where I’ll start. Nanci and I were able to set up our LCD monitors back in December 2007 so that SecondLife would let us use the 1280×1024 resolution, and I haven’t been able to do that properly in recent reinstalls so I know I need to go that far back.

The process will begin this weekend, so if I don’t get much posting done between now and when it’s done you will know why. I do have my RSS feeds available to me in the Google Reader, which will allow me to find things I want to post about, but I still have limited access to my Ubuntu box so I’ll have to watch how much I mark for  posting for a bit.

TTFN!

I dood it

As promised I managed to snag the update to Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Beta yesterday. The first thing I noticed, even as I was taking the update, is that the estimated time for the update was 3 and a quarter hours. Holy crap! I’ve never seen an Ubuntu update take that bloody long. EVAH. Of course one of the possible causes could be that I have so many damned apps installed, but somehow I’m not sure that’s the issue. (Although yes, I did go through and clean out some of the crap.)

Once I finally got to the reboot stage I noticed an error message about something crashing during the update. I didn’t notice what it was, but I get the feeling it’s in relation to Bug #356157 in hotkey-setup (Ubuntu): “package hotkey-setup 0.1-23ubuntu10 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2”. It seems everyone is getting bitten by this bug, and even though an update came down the pipeline to fix it, I couldn’t apply the update yet. Sergios was kind enough to post very specific instructions that fixed the issue for me. In short, get to a terminal window and run this command

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup

When the file opens go down to around line 46. You should see

# This entire block does nothing on desktops right now
if laptop-detect; then
do_video
;;
restart|force-reload)
$0 stop || true
$0 start
;;
esac

exit 0

What you want to do is to add a line below where it says do_video so it will now read like this:

# This entire block does nothing on desktops right now
if laptop-detect; then

do_video
fi

;;
restart|force-reload)
$0 stop || true
$0 start
;;
esac

Save the file, and then apply the update with sudo apt-get upgrade. Your problem will be solved.

I ended up with problems trying to get Avant Window Navigator (AWN) reinstalled, but that’s because I’m running the trunk packages and one of the first thing the update process does is to disable any and all third-party repositories like the Launchpad PPA’s. I went through and verified which of my PPA’s have Jaunty packages available (I have about 40 PPA’s that I’ve used from time to time and had to see if they could be enabled for 9.04 Beta) and was finally able to get my AWN back working (for the most part).

I’ve seen some really short boot times, but I just did fired up my comp (from being completely off) and from selecting the specific GRUB entry to being able to do anything on my system (with autologon) took me about two minutes. That may not be the start/end events that others are using but I’m not seeing a noticeable change in the startup time on my system. I’m also seeing that I’m still getting issues of Compiz not getting started properly so I get a nice message from AWN that it can’t see any compositing. I’m definitely going to have to try to sit down one day and spend some time in an exhaustive search for what could be causing the problem because it really bugs the living daylights out of me. What I end up having to do for now is to go to my Compiz Fusion Icon and make either reloading the window manager or manually selecting Compiz as the Window Manager, which seems to “hang” my system while Compiz does it’s thing. In the process of doing all that I have to kill my Google Gadgets Sidebar and restart it once I get Compiz running properly, which is just one more pain in the rear that I have to get resolved. I know I probably have a faulty profile and I need to create a new profile to try to get things cleaned up but I really don’t feel like going through that hassle, plus I seem to have filled up most of my partitions so I’ll need to see what I can do to clear out some space to make a new profile.

There’s a new icon on my panel for the Indicator Applet, and I’m honestly not sure if it’s useful or not. At the moment it’s showing an envelope to let me know that Evolution has a new message, and I have a feeling it’s going to stay there until I mark all of my email read, which I don’t do that often since I tend to use the unread flag to help me see the messages and articles I want to blog about or use in some other way at a later date.

One of the nice things I’m seeing is that there’s now a fade transition when Wallpaper Tray changes my desktop wallpaper. I’m not sure what’s generating the transition effect but it’s pretty nice.

During my first reboot after the update (while I was still making sure I had all my apps updated properly) I didn’t have any sound, not even the Test sound from the Sound Preferences window, but once I got all of my Gstreamer  codecs updated properly and logged out I was able to hear sounds from my comp again.

If you’re like me you use the Sessions window pretty often. It’s been renamed so typing “Sess” into Gnome Do won’t do any good anymore. It’s now called System > Preferences > Startup Applications.

Speaking of Gnome Do, I’m finding that when I use the hotkeys to call up GNOME Do 0.8.1.3 it wants to come up behind whatever window I have active unless I make the desktop the active “application”. Of course now when I try to use the hotkeys it doesn’t do that, even with calling up Do when I’ve got the cursor in Epiphany, so I’m not sure if I just needed to to do a reboot or what. I’m also noticing that I’m not seeing the Nouveau theme, even though it’s my selected theme in the Do Preferences dialog.

There’s also a very nice new feature in Synaptic. Now when you select a package you’ll see a button labeled “Get Screenshot”. When you click the button it will grab a screenshot for the application (if one’s available). They’re rather on the small side, and I haven’t seen a way to enlarge them, but it’s nice to be able to see a screenie of an app.

I seem to be having an issue with Sonata and the Music Player Daemon itself. For some reason MPD isn’t seeing any music it can play. It’s probably a change in the configuration but I didn’t keep my old config settings when the update came in. I’ll play around with it some more later on but I already miss my Sonata.

I honestly haven’t had much chance to play with the update yet, mostly because the update itself took so bloody long plus I wasted a lot of time trying to chase down the sound issue before I relogged. I strongly recommend that you snag the Ubuntu 9.04 beta iso and either burn yourself a LiveCD or put it on a flash drive and check it with that before you take it, especially while it’s still in beta. Plus make sure you backup your important files before doing any major upgrades like this. The Ubuntu 9.04 beta is for testing purposes only and shouldn’t be used on a production system (the computer you use on a daily basis). There are still some things being fixed and the members of the Ubuntu community can not be held responsible for any data loss that arises from upgrading your daily system to this beta.

Otherwise, what I’ve seen so far looks pretty good. I can’t wait to play with it more and see all of the changes and improvements the dev teams have made. :p Now if we could only get a useful spell checker in Epiphany I’d be even happier.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 29 Mar

The hell??? A Sunday links post on top of the other posts from today? You betcha.

I’m going to have to hold off on the promised post about Ubuntu 9.04. I’ve got it downloaded and burned (I’m not sure why my flash drive with it just sits there like a log’s bump) but I haven’t had a chance to do more than a quick look at it, plus I want to take the upgrade before I report on it. Yes, it looks solid enough that I’m going to snag the upgrade but before you do I strongly recommend that you check your computer with the iso on either a burned CD-ROM or a flash drive. That way you will get a better idea of how well your system will play with the Jackalope.

• Ronnie Tucker: Come grab Issue #23, hot from the digital presses! You need to read the latest issue, I’m just going to give you the link and leave it at that.
  
• Jonathan Jesse: Successful upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty. It’s a short post, but Jonathan had an easy time going from Kubuntu 8.10 to Kubuntu 9.04 (both 64-bit versions). He also finds something he really likes, which is why you should read it regardless of which flavor of *Ubuntu you prefer.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Kill X session in Jaunty Jackalope. The devs have decided that users don’t want to be able to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace as an emergency way to get out of a frozen session. (Silly devs, we really do need that every now and then.) Luckily Isabelle shows us how to get it back.
• Jun Auza: Easy Way To Save Flash/YouTube Videos on Linux. Yes, Linux users like to not only watch Flash movies, we like to snag them every now and then to our hard drive so we can enjoy it without having to go back to the server to get the vid again. You know what? It’s eeeeeasy to do if you’re a GNU/Linux user.

That’s it for today. Enjoy the end of March, because April is looking pretty nice for the GNU/Linux community. Plus Opening Day is just 8 days away!

Peng’s links for Sunday, 22 Mar

As much as I tried to stay on top of my feeds this week I still end up with 25 items in my ToBlog folder. Luckily I’m going to cull out some of the older ones as well as a few things that aren’t so post-worthy at this point. But I have a great (OT) vid to share with y’all at the end.

• ArsTechnica: Get it done with GNOME Do 0.8. A very nice story on how much easier Gnome Do makes using GNOME-based GNU/Linux distros. Thanks to Peter Stuifzand over on the Do Google Group for letting me know about it.
• Jonathan Ernst: HP refunds 520$ for unused software. There was just now way I wasn’t going to share this story.
• Jon Beebe: Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu. Yes, it’s from a Linux guy, but it’s a great tongue-in-cheek list.
• Srinivasa Ragavan: Announcing ‘Anjal’- the new mail for netbooks. If you use a netbook you should definitely check out Anjal for your email client.
• Stefano Forenza: Chinese MID deploying Ubuntu by default. Speaking of netbooks, I may have to find a way to get one of these. Not only do they run my fav OS, but they’re pretty darned inexpensive as well.
• Stefano Forenze: New wallpapers for Jaunty. Don’t hold your breath. I’m liking how some of them look, although I know they won’t be everyone’s cup of espresso.
• Wouter Verhelst: Dealing with apt’s GPG signing stuff — the right way. If you use third party sources for installing and updating your GNU/Linux you know about adding GPG signing keys. Wouter has instructions for adding them in a way that doesn’t inject a security flaw, and that defeats the purpose of importing a GPG key in the first place.
• Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Is ext4 unsafe? The next update to Ubuntu will add support for ext4 partitions, and lately people have been talking about security concerns with ext4. Luckily Jose has info to set your mind at ease.
• Josselin Mouette: Which logo for the main GNOME menu in Debian? I could have skipped this post from Friday, but the “swirl foot” icons are so cute I may have to grab them for my own system.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Ubuntuforums nuts and bolts. Isabelle has some very handy Ubuntu Forums links you may want to bookmark, as well as some rather nice numbers for what’s going on at UF)
• Tom Dryer: How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu. The latest update for GE brings some really nice new features. Tom gives us a very quick and easy way to install this new version, as well as some troubleshooting info.
• Joe Barker: Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – My Thoughts So far. Joe’s been playing with late alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 and is kind enough to let us know how it’s behaving on his system. Remember, no matter how well (or unwell) any software runs on a person’s system, Your Milage May Vary, simply because their hardware, software and particular configuration is bound to be different from yours. But so far Joe’s pretty happy with it, although I’m hearing that those of us on the Mac4Lin dev team are unhappy about yet more bloody changes to things that are affecting our software. Yet again. Grrr.
• Guillaume Desmottes: Good GNOME news. We’re just about to see a beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 and that means there is an update coming down the pike for GNOME. And as a matter of fact it came out on Wednesday. Guillaume has the best post that I’ve seen with info on what’s new in this update, next to the release notes, that is. Hell, just looking at the improvements for users makes me want to snag the beta for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” just so I can play with it sooner!
  

I had a few other links I was going to share with y’all, but I think that’s enough for a weekend. If you’re in need of a good laugh (and some of your NCAA brackets may be in the toilet by now from what I’m hearing), check out this vid. As much as I try not to laugh at what happens to the poor feline I just can’t help myself.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 7 February

I’m baaack! It was nice to get emails from readers asking when I’ll have a new post, but it took me longer to get caught up on two weeks worth of newsfeeds than I expected. A big part of that is thanks in part to the way some of the planets I’ve subscribed to are set up. Most newsfeeds are set up so that when someone’s feed reader hits the server it presents the 10-20 newest posts, with a few sites offering as many as 50 posts. Some of the planets I read went so far back that I’m not certain but I think I may have gotten all of the posts I hadn’t seen yet.

Anyway, I had over 100 posts waiting to be read from enough sources that when I finally got Evolution fired up earlier this week I ended up with over a thousand posts and messages to deal with. I’ve decided to not share many of the older links I had found before my power supply died (yoooouge thanks to the friend who bought me a new PSU!) but I do have some posts I want to make sure you guys and gals know about.

• Jun Auza: Linux Keyboard Shortcuts: Safe Way to Exit During System Freezes. We’ve all had times where our computer seems to lock up in the middle of doing something. Windows users run some serious risks of borking their system if they simply shut the computer off and turns it back on (also known as a hard reset), but Linux users can do that with the risk of little more than losing any new data they were working on. Jun knows ways to get the system responding to you without the data loss that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace can cause when you force the end to your current session. I need to add these to my PDA so I have them handy the next time I need them.
• Jon Beebe: Installing Fonts in Ubuntu 8.10. It’s the rare user that never adds any additional fonts to their computer, and as the Mac4Lin dev team discovered the process changed when Gnome 2.22.2 was included with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). Jon gives us the skinny on how to add fonts in Ubuntu Intrepid, and you’ll probably want to bookmark his post for future reference.
• Thomas Thurman: So why is Human so slow? It turns out that Human, the default theme on Ubuntu, takes longer then any other common theme to finish drawing the screen. (Thomas has numbers to back that statement up.) How do we fix that? (@infra: We may want to look at the Mac4Lin themes in the light of this article.)
• Michael Rooney: Gnome Do 0.8 released, awesomeness ensues! The latest version of GNOME Do has been officially released, and while I covered it when it was in alpha stage Michael gives some additional coverage to the one thing I dislike in it: the Docky theme. Some folks love it, but I’m in the camp that will stick to AWN for my dock.
• Ken Kovash: Some Firefox Users Still on Fx2. The metrics team over at Mozilla is wondering why some users haven’t upgraded to Firefox 3 yet. Ken looks at the issue, but probably doesn’t realize that some users hate the UI decisions that the Fx3 dev team made and may even hate Fx3 with the heat of a thousand nuns. I have Fx3 installed but I use it only as a backup to Epiphany and I’m considering rolling back to Fx2 as my backup browser. I sure as hell don’t want to touch Fx 3.1 with a 50-foot pole thanks to some of what I’m seeing in terms of UI decisions. (Granted, I haven’t even looked at the daily build threads over at Mozillazine in a while because I honestly don’t care that much about what the Fx devs are doing. That’s how much I hate what I’ve seen.)
• Michael Rooney: How Windows Vista, Digg, and Ubuntu landed me a Sweet Job. And you thought Vista wasn’t good for anything. Monkeys aside, Michael has a great story to tell, and anyone who has any interest in open source software should read it.

That’s almost it for now. I have two free PDF downloads that you’ll want to get onto your hard drive, but I’ll put them in a separate post.

Hardware Upgrade: Complete

This year Santa Claws was very good to me. Not only did I get a couple of gigs of memory almost tripling my available 749MB of RAM for Chrismukkuh, we had a network issue last week that prompted us all to upgrade to wireless networking. Granted I had to pay for it myself, but it’s still a holiday season upgrade.

My mom sent me a check for Chrismukkuh and I quickly decided that since we were already heading off to MicroCenter I would get a new video card. You may remember that I used to use an Nvidia MX100-200, which is practically a dinosaur. Since my motherboard only supports PCI cards I didn’t have many options. I looked at a PNY card but they were out of stock, so I went with an EVGA e-GeForce 6200 (MicroCenter’s info), a PCI video card with 256 MB of RAM. Alas, I got it home and put it in my comp and it sat there like a log’s bump. With everything going on this week, including a decision to reinstall Ubuntu to clean up behind a lot of installations and uninstalls of various software packages, so I didn’t get to head back to MicroCenter until today.

Today I went back to Cambridge and talked with Ryan, who works in the peripherals department. We was surprised it didn’t work but said I could exchange it with no problem. He also said they should get some other cards in this week so if my EVGA card didn’t work I could check the site for when they get their shipment in, then call him and he’d hold the card I want on the side so it wouldn’t get sold out before I could get back there.

I got back home and got my computer ready (switching the window manager to Metacity, disabling the legacy 96 driver for my old video card), and restarted my system just to confirm everything was ready for a new video card. I pulled the old card, installed the new one and reconnected everything, then turned the IceBox back on and hoped for the best.

It looked good when I saw the Intel BIOS splash, which I didn’t see with the first card I got, and when Ubuntu loaded up I was pleasantly surprised to see a notification that the OS had seen that I had installed a new piece of hardware and that it wanted to get the proprietary drivers for me. A few minutes later (the first try at getting the driver didn’t work right for some reason) I was restarting my comp and tracking down a piece of eye candy that I had looked at some time back but I needed a better video card to use it. And now, in honor of the storm coming in this evening …

IT’S SNOWING!!!

Now that I have a better video card, as well as more memory, I may have to see about firing up SecondLife and checking out all the goodies in Windlight that my older video card couldn’t support.

And yes, Nanci, now that I’ve confirmed that this card will work on a system like ours I’ll help you get one and get it set up for you.

Peng’s links for Christmas Eve

Ho ho ho. Merry Chrismukkuh!

I meant to post some links yesterday but there were a few too many things that had to get done before the jolly old fat man started coming down chimneys. I’ve got some special links down at the bottom, but I do have some (hopefully) great links to share with y’all. I know some of them are a little old, but I didn’t want to make some of you miss out on them.

• Jeff Baily: “I’m Linux”. The Linux Foundation is having a contest (or two) for people to create some videos. Some will get rolled out to corporate tech folks (and their suits), and some will answer the “I’m a Mac” and “I’m a PC” ads. Although I really wish we’d see more vids in Novel’s PC Mac Linux series (see under Other Marketing Videos).
• Jun Azua: 5 Known Linux Anti-virus Software for Paranoid Users. While Linux doesn’t have the need for anti-virus software like the users of that big, proprietary operating system do, but if you do much dual booting or run things under WINE, or even if you simply want more to be extra careful, Jun has five apps you may want to get installed on your Linux box. And even if you don’t need the extra protection you should go read Jun’s article and see the very cute Warrior Tux.
• Thomas Wood: New art.gnome.org. The GNOME Art website has gotten an update. I’ll join Andreas for some very good work done on the page design.
• Gerry Ilagan: Linux netbook market share dwindling down. Netbooks started out as a great way go expose people to the joys of our favorite open source operating system but lately more netbooks are getting sold with another OS installed. Gerry did some checking and found out why our market share is trending downward. We definitely need to find a way to correct the bullet points Gerry lays out.
• Uwe Hermann: 256 Creative Commons Christmas Songs. Before you fuss at me and tell me I should have posted this link earlier this week (I saw the article when it hit Planet Debian on Sunday), let me just say that this may the perfect link to finish the preparations for your holiday gatherings. And all of these songs are licensed with Creative Commons licenses so you don’t have to worry about some big multinational conglomerate telling you what you can do with the songs. You can even burn them to CD’s or add them to the pen drives you’re giving those friends and family members.
• Daniel Holbach: No More Holy Cows! No, he’s not referring to a twist on a certain Dogma scene, it’s an honest look at how to try to make a much loved GNU/Linux distro even better.
• Dave Morley: But lo what light through yonder, Windows breaks. Tis the east and Ubuntu is the Sun… A member of Planet Ubuntu looks at his deciding to go 100% GNU/Linux.
• Ryan Troy: Ubuntuforums.org Upgrade. The GNOME Art site isn’t the only one to get an update/upgrade, the user-to-user support forums for Ubuntu Linux has gotten a software update and there are some new goodies waiting to be discovered.

And for your additional holiday cheer…

Jun Azuza has found some great holiday humor that may be just the thing you need after a meal with your family or (deity forbid) assembling all those toys for your little ones. There are Christmas Tech Jokes and Chrismukkuh jokes for Linux/Unix geeks, and Amaya Rodrigo (another Planet Debian blogger) has an adorable post called Self-steem issues? But whether you need a smile or not, be sure to check out Gerry Ilagan’s most excellent Chrismukkuh “card.”

On behalf of Nanci I want to wish everyone a the very bestest possible holiday season. I’ll be back in a day or two (or three?) with some more links, but I’m going to take some time off with some very good friends, my sis, and some of her friends. Our family is back in New Orleans so we won’t be able to make the trip this year, but our friends are the next best thing to family.

Merry Ho Ho!

WordPress.com rolls out version 2.7 and the usability issues begin

I rarely blog about the platform Nanci and I use for our blog, but over the weekend WordPress.com rolled out version 2.7 of their hosted blogging software and almost immediately usability issues were evident.

Nanci called me Saturday and asked if there was any way to fix the stats page so the information in the left hand columns, such as the number of views from each referring site, wasn’t hidden by the most popular posts from the current day. (If that screen looks familiar, it may be due to Nanci’s “borrowing” some of my layout, as well as a custom start page I made for her some time back that I’ve helped her update.) I said she should contact WP.com support and ask them, knowing it was an issue in how their CSS styles were coded. The response she got? Sheri from WP.com told her,

All right, I have contacted our designers and they tell me that the browser window just needs to be wider. Hope that helps!

The hell?!? While I was writing yesterday’s post I found that the stats page isn’t the only victim of poor usability decisions. The right hand side of the text box that we write in was hidden behind the Tags panel, as shown in this screenshot. I contacted WP.com support and Nick told me

The new interface was designed to work best at 1024px wide and higher. It should still work at 800px widths, but your mileage may vary.

Actually? Not so much. My browser window is 820×654 so a width of 800 pixels doesn’t resolve the matter, even with the left side navigation bar collapsed. Nick opted to insist that my browser window be made wider, making me feel like I was talking to a Firefox 3 dev or supporter who had partaken of the Koolaid. I was wrong, and there’s no way around that. My browser window needed to be wider. When I sent him the screenshot (he must have forgotten that I had linked to it on WP.com in my original post) he said,

This screenshot shows a much larger resolution than 820×654 and there is plenty of room for you to make the browser larger. If you expand the size, it will adjust the layout.

Ah, yes, Nick must have previously worked at either Mozilla or Microsoft, because he definitely refused to believe that my browser window is set at the optimum size for how I work. I sent a response that included,

The continued insistence that I make my browser window wider is doing little to make me like this new layout any better. In fact the almost stubborn insistence that it isn’t wide enough reeks of a company who thinks they know how I should be the most productive better than I do.

I think we should agree to disagree, and I should look into a different platform for my blogging. Evidently WP.com doesn’t think I know what I’m doing, despite the fact that I’ve previously run my own hosted blog of WP software for a number of years. I now regret steering my sister to WP.com for her blog. Thanks.

Yes, I was pretty pissed off at WP.com, and I was seriously considering grabbing a backup of my posts and moving to another hosting platform, but then I saw another paragraph in Nick’s email that I had missed in my anger.

There is also another option where you can figure the interface to one column. See http://support.wordpress.com/screen-configuration/ for an example walkthrough.

As I told Nick in a final email, he should have given me that link in his very first response. I don’t like the single column approach, but I moved everything but the Publish section to below the main text box and I’m able to see enough of the box to make it usable. I’m not sure how useful it will be for the stats page, but it sure is better for the edit posts page.

If you hate the new administration page layouts in WordPress.com 2.7 don’t waste your energy contacting support. Just check out the Screen Configuration page at WP.com Support and see if that helps. It should definitely help your blood pressure. And a note to any WP.com support folks who read this: If someone contacts you about overlapping sections in WP.com 2.7 give them the link in your very first response. Telling us to widen our browser screen is insulting, both to us and to your own intelligence.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 25 October

I know I owe you a follow-up on upgrading to Intrepid but I’m checking a few more things and making some screenshots to share with everyone.

• Ruben Romero: Announcement: SpreadUbuntu alpha0.1. If you like Ubuntu and SpreadFirefox you’ll love SpreadUbuntu! I can’t wait until it’s out of testing.
• Ubuntu Release blog: Ubuntu 8.10 release candidate available. The Intrepid RC did come out on Thursday. They do have a link to some release notes that do have some important information, you may find some additional information Ubuntu wiki, although it’s not as pretty as the link they provide.
• Dustin Kirkland: Announcing ‘musica’ for Ubuntu Intrepid. If you are looking for a way to browse and stream your MP3′s over HTTP musica may be for you. And yes, he has a screenshot and there’s a package in his PPA for Hardy. For Intrepid users it’s simply an apt-get away. In fact I need to check it out for the possibility of sharing my tunage with the roomies a little more easily. ETA: Dang. It doesn’t support Ogg Vorbis files. Yet.
• Jordi Hernàndez: Gloobus-Preview 0.11. Another new version with even more new features.
• Christer Edwards: Upgrading Using the Alternate CD (8.04 -> 8.10). If you’re looking to make the upgrade to Intrepid Christer has a tutorial to help you get it done.
• DesktopLinux.com: You, too, can learn Ubuntu-fu. A brand new book has come out to help users of every experience level, including a “crash course” in doing system administration work in Ubuntu.
• Christer Edwards: Ubuntu Tutorials Search Plugin. One of the very best features of Firefox is the Search bar that you can add any number of the Mycroft Open Search site searching tools. Now the Ubuntu Tutorials site has a site search plugin for both Firefox and IE7. Adding this search tool to your browser should be the very next task on your todo list.

I’ll try to get that Ubuntu Intrepid article posted for you tomorrow morning. Unfortunately one of my roomies has finally come home from his hospitalization (about a week early, actually) and it’s ended up putting a few things on my “gotta do” list several days before I expected to have to get to them. Have a great evening!

Moving to Intrepid

Since I’m making the move to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex in order to try to chase down some issues in the Mac4Lin 1.0 RC under Intrepid I thought I’d go ahead and write a post as I go through the upgrade. My system hardware hasn’t changed since I moved to Hardy, and there’s a picture on the right of what my desktop looks like (with some details in the AWN Terminal) as I get ready to run the update.

I thought about installing Intrepid on a virtual machine so I could test it with Mac4Lin without risking any issues to my current set up, but I decided against that. I used to have a virtual machine set up back when I was dual booting with Windows XP, but I uninstalled the virtual machine software when I kicked Windows out and don’t want to take the time to get everything set back up right now. I did run through Caspar Clemens Mierau’s pre-update todo list that I mentioned yesterday and made one final check of the release notes to make sure there was nothing I needed to address before starting the update. I had already seen that the logout applet is changed for Intrepid, although it’s not being changed automatically during the update (yet), but other than that I saw no last-minute gotchas. I had already run the network update check and cleaned out things I didn’t use anymore so with a final morning email check, PDA sync and final system backup I was ready to rock. I also disabled my autologin so I could see the login screen for Intrepid, although I decided to keep my current Mac4Lin settings to see if anything breaks during the upgrade.

I’d already run the Intrepid beta LiveCD (actually a daily build DVD from 2 October, the same day the beta came out) so I knew that while the GRUB splash screen hasn’t changed there are new login sounds that have grown on me since I first mentioned them almost a month ago. I also knew the default desktop wallpaper is much prettier in Intrepid, ditching the animal-centric wallpaper of old for a more stylized one, although I’m now seeing that it’s changed in the last week to an image I’m not thrilled with so I’d better snag it while it’s still in reach. Or perhaps I may simply lock the version of ubuntu-wallpapers to 0.27, which is the one I prefer.

Since I have the LiveDVD from 2 October and even though some of the files have changed since I got the iso I decided to not upgrade via update-manager -d and use my LiveDVD to update. In the past I’ve managed to insert a LiveCD and got a dialog offering to run an upgrade, but it may not work yet with Intrepid DVDs. I did see a script called cdromupgrade so I opened a Terminal window, navigated to the disk with cd /media/cdrom0 and launched the script with http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading. Survey said…

tar: ./dists/stable/main/dist-upgrader/binary-all//intrepid.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
Could not find the upgrade application in the archive, exiting

Okay, so that won’t work. To make sure I wasn’t looking at any problems I didn’t have with the 2 October DVD build I ended up grabbing a new disk image so I could check a LiveCD based on the packages a dist-upgrade would use. The worst part was waiting, for about an hour, for the new iso to download. Son of a gun, when I closed the drive with the disk in the tray in preparation of booting from it to check my system with the updated LiveDVD I was presented with a dialog box.

That’s what I had expected from the older disk. I clicked on the Run upgrade button, entered in my admin password, and started the process. The Distribution Upgrade window popped up, and a dialog came up asking if I wanted to include the latest updates from the ‘net (sorry, I didn’t grab a screenshot of it), and I said yes. It did take a little longer, but my system was up to date by the time the process was done and my system rebooted. I had already disabled the PPAs in my repo list so nothing would get updated using those repos. I got a warning about the fact that drivers for my older Nvidia card were missing, something I suspected would be coming from the release notes (I need to fix links in recent posts to point to this version of the notes, which I really wished I had seen again sooner), but I took the update anyway figuring I’d get some drivers for it through Envy if nothing else worked, not having understood quite what the continuing issue was since the recent links I had seen to Intrepid release notes were a much shorter page. I figured I may end up losing some Desktop Effects until I got working drivers but that’s a small issue. (or so I thought.) I got a listing of apps that would be changed, and I saw that some of AWN looked like it might get removed, but I knew there were packages available for Intrepid so I didn’t worry about it.

After the reboot I did find that my desktop effects were disabled, and the Appearance Preferences gave me some complaints that the GTK+ theme engine isn’t installed, but I had heard that was coming as well. I did get a message about changing the old Quit Applet to the updated Fast User Switch Applet and accepted the change. It now takes up a bit of space with my name, which I intentionally didn’t have on the panel, and now instead of getting a dialog popped up it gives me a dropdown menu asking me what I wanted to do. Plus the startup sounds aren’t the ones I prefer, but I’ll see about rolling back to an older version of the sounds later.

There are a couple of things I’ll need to address, but I’ll put them in another post so this one isn’t quite so Jabba-sized. Plus I see there are some updates that may involve my Nvidia drivers so I’m going to close this post with a shot of my desktop, now about a day and a half after making the upgrade and with a panel at the bottom instead of the AWN dock. I’ll start the next post once I get rebooted after taking these upgrades and seeing if I get my Desktop Effects back. There are a few changes in Intrepid that I want to make sure I tell you about. Most are good, but one or two are issues you need to be aware of.