Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

I've been running Debian Lenny exclusively for more than a week now, and I can tell you that in an apples-to-apples comparison with Ubuntus 8.04 through 9.10, my immediate impression is that you do get a recognizable speed boost in just about all operations between the generic Lenny and generic Ubuntu on my 9-ish-year-old hardware, a Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with 1.3 GHz Celeron processor and 1 GB of PC133 RAM.

When trying to add the iceowl-extension package — Debian's renamed version of Mozilla's Lightning/Sunbird calendar app — to an existing Icedove installation in Lenny, I quickly learned from Mozilla's Calendar Weblog that a certain library package must be installed before you install Lightning/Iceowl.

Some might say that the mission of Ubuntu is to cleanse the upstream projects of the "sins" that make them hard to deal with from the vantage point of the average user. Put more plainly: Whether it's true or not, I think many users out there (myself included) somehow expect Ubuntu to fix every d@mn thing that's broken in the Linux user experience. The problem is that Ubuntu is not Linux.

I bet many of us have been trying to pound square pegs into round holes at one time or another. It's the same for me with operating systems. I made the semi-conscious decision to run Ubuntu at least in part because so many others run it, the articles I wrote about it would theoretically have a larger audience, and didn't Ubuntu's commitment to the desktop mean that things would work better than in (fill in the blank)?

I'm reading one of my very favorite FOSS writers, Ars Technica's Ryan Paul, on the changes afoot for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (codename Lucid ... and I hope so), and this comment leapt right out at me: "I'm looking forward to this release. 9.10 is mostly stable, I could use a good update that breaks my intel video and wireless chips even though they were fine, plus overhauls the USB method so not much works anymore."

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about Ubuntu to like — a lot I like — but I tend to write fairly critically about what seems to be the world's most popular free, open-source desktop operating system because not just I — but the rest of the user and developer communities — hold it up to a higher standard. And Ubuntu doesn't always measure up.

It's not like I actually did anything, but my issues regarding my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop from the long-ago year 2001 and its Intel 82830 (aka 830m) video not working all that well in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) have mostly disappeared.

Have you read the past 25 or so entries in this blog? Once I finally solved all my issues with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, I decided to start the upgrade path to version 9.10. I wanted newer applications. I needed better hardware drivers. But especially with 9.10, nicknamed Karmic Koala, I've had to deal with too many issues. I'm tired.

I don't know whether or not it's just me that Ubuntu and/or Xorg is trying to kill, but my latest Intel-graphics honeymoon is most definitely over.

Somewhere between the debut of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala for those into animal names) and today, the developers/maintainers/overlords of what many consider the leading Linux distribution have fixed the dreaded "kernel mode setting bug" that rendered the X Window system on many computers using Intel video hardware unusable until kernel mode setting was turned off.

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution. Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user. Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one.

In its latest entry, WorksWithU reports on Dell's plans for the next Ubuntu LTS, 10.04, due (as its numerical designator hints) in the fourth month of 2010 (aka April). What interests me more than the entry itself are the comments that follow.

Normally a change in the automounting of USB drives in Ubuntu wouldn't be a big deal. But in my case I've been using shell scripts to back up my Ubuntu box to USB drives via rsync. And before Karmic, those USB drives automounted with the name "disk," and they'd be at /media/disk/ in the filesystem. Perfect for my shell script to target for the backup. Now for some reason those drives are automounting not with the name "disk" but with the unique UUID number for the given device. At first this was bad, but after I modified my scripts, I actually see some wisdom in what started out as just another Karmic fail.

The Tech-no-media blog asks, "Is Ubuntu Broken?" and basically calls for Ubuntu to call the proverbial spade a spade and own up to the fact that the six-month releases aren't exactly stable.

Here's my problem. I need a calendar app that rudely beeps to tell me when to go to meetings and such. In Ubuntu, that means the Evolution mail client, which has an extensive calendar function, or so I'm told. But I don't run Evolution. I use Thunderbird to manage my mail, and Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar function ... or does it?

[My apologies for the "Bohemian Rhapsody" pun in the headline - Steve]

Jono Bacon goes on at length at his blog on the contrast between the euphoria over the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the reports of problems by users. Read the 10 or so entries below this one and you can see the problems I've had. It's time to put this in perspective. I've had plenty of problems with all manner of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems over the past few years. Given all the hardware that a modern OS must contend with (and I'll include Windows in that number since it runs – or is supposed to, anyway – on a wide variety of hardware), there's bound to be breakage.

Canonical has been touting its Ubuntu One cloud-storage solution, which allows you to mirror up to 2 GB of files for free and up to 50 GB for $10/month. The service also allows you to sync Tomboy Notes and Evolution contacts across multiple Ubuntu installations. I gave Ubuntu One a try on my recently upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 system, and it appears that Ubuntu One just doesn't do very much that I need. And whether it's the service's simplicity or lack of decent documentation, it took me awhile to figure out just how you get stuff synced with Ubuntu One.

I've had more than a little trouble with all things GNOMEish in Ubuntu 9.10 since upgrading from 9.04. I've solved all of the issues thus far but discovered another last night. Rhythmbox, which wouldn't even start until I fixed the opencv bug, started but wouldn't play anything. When trying to play an audio file, I kept getting an error message that included this line: "unable to start playback pipeline." That was enough to send me to Google, where I found the bug (#468577) in Launchpad.

I haven't loaded up an IM client since I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). But I did today, and neither Pidgin nor the new GNOMEish Empathy would run. (Whether this matters or not, I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, as opposed to doing a reinstall.) I started both IM clients in the terminal to see if I could determine what the problem might be.

When you're running a machine with Intel video, a Linux upgrade can be fraught with peril. Follow along on my roller-coaster ride from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 in parts 1, 2 and 3 of my little opera titled "Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10."