So I stupidly upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gusty). Now I can't hibernate or suspend my laptop, so I have to power it off each time I want to go somewhere else. My Beryl effects I love have gone and been replaced with something. Thunderbird seems to fall over when starting up and RSSOWL beta 6 has stopped working now. Can I fix all of these soon? Maybe not, does anyone know how to downgrade back to 7.04?
Tag: ubuntu
What do you do when Gnome Display Manager dies? Fixed!
My Ubuntu install is working again thanks to Jon Callas from PGP. So I can finally bring you this entry from the Airplane trip 2 days ago. The mount command using the remount flag really made a huge difference. Otherwise I would still be running Windows!
Right so I'm in Boston after a nice but late flight. Get through customs, jump in the first cab which takes me to my Hotel (Westin Seaport) where I open my laptop to find that Gnome Display Bloody Manager fails. Now I can't get into my gnu/linux setup. Luckly I still have Windows on dual boot, so I can use the laptop and get on with stuff. But it seems a little setting in /etc/fstab which was recommended by Linux Format magazine which I bought for the portions of the flight when your not allowed to use electorinic equipment, has caused the root drive to be read only and hence why Gnome won't start. The problem is that I have no way to change this without (in my mind) booting into Linux with a live CD and then making the changes? If someone else knows a way to change /etc/fstab from windows or the recovery command line, drop me a email or comment. Damm you linux format and your No more disk thrashing which recommended adding this to /etc/fstab – defaults,noatime,data=writeback.
Right its 6:45am and I want to upload some pictures of Boston from yesterday and then head out for a day packed solid for the conference I'm at. Oh can I say I download the live Ubuntu CD already, I just need to find somewhere to buy blank CD-Rs, came down at 724.3kB/s from MIT over the hotels non-free (10 dollars per day) ethernet connection. So yes any tips on where I can quickly nip out and get a blank CD would be useful too. I'll quickly blog my post from the airplane too. Oh but I can't because its in my /home/ian directory! Damm it
Current state of my GNU/Linux switch over
So its been about 2 months since I switched over to Ubuntu GNU/Linux on my Dell Laptop. Things have been a lot better over time and generally day to day I'm having no problems. Its only when I go to do something different is when I get the problems.
First problem, external display from the VGA port. During BarCampBrighton some of the projectors didn't like my laptop's native rez of 1280×800 and would fail to display anything at all. What made things frustrating was the fact I couldn't switch down to 1024×768 because my laptop driver seems to give me only one option.
I stilll have yet to find a decent RSS reader except the preview version of RSS OWL which actually works better that previous versions. I usually keep an eye on the heap memory and it tends to stay within the 40meg allocated memory. So for now its my choice for RSS reading
Blogging from a clinet under Ubuntu is working due to BloGTK but the general expeience is very basic and I closer to W.Blogger that Ecto. If there is a more rich feature blgging application/client do drop me a comment. I miss stuff like being able to update posts and read posts offline.
Battery life has imporved over the months. When I first switched over, it would run for about 4hours on batteries but now its up to 5hours (about the same as I would get out of Windows on the same machine). Hibernate support still fails but suspend now works correctly all the time. Networking still needs to be restarted when I switch on each time but it seems more consistent.
I've still not found something to totally replace outlook. Currently I'm using Plaxo online for most of my PIM type stuff. This is ok but sometimes when I'm offline its frustrating to look at Plaxo and hope I left the page on the calendar section.
I'm still looking to sync my phone with my laptop but I'm having very little sucess with this. I've seen mentions of Opensync but it doesn't work for myself. On the mobile phone front, I've tried to connect my nokia N80 to the laptop using this script but its not worked out so far. I've not even attempted this on my Windows Mobile phone.
Backup and Syncing is totally broken for me. I want to do simple things like backup my laptop to my storage server over samba but unison and rsync don't like samba! This is insane and I've tried many ways to trick it into thinking a samba share is actually a mounted drive but it doesn't work. There seems to be a solution here.I've yet to play with Baclua and Amanda (yes that guy from Amanda I will be contacting you very soon. I'm also looking for some way to generic.
Ok last few things, I've dumped Madma and Xmms in favour of Amarok which works so well now it supports Mpeg3! For ages I wondered why I got no sounds and only in later versions does it tell you your missing the codec in question, before that you were left to work it out alone. Lastly Bluetooth is working but I've not got the Wiimote talking correctly and I'm really missing GlovePIE. And finally to finish off for now. My logtech Camera still doesn't work and I can't find drivers for it anywhere.
I told you I would never upgrade to Windows Vista
It took quite a long time but I finally got fed up with Windows XP when weird services started showing up plus it would take 1min to suspend. I could have reinstalled XP, upgraded to Vista or moved to Ubuntu 7.04. Although its not exactly the best time to do so, I moved to Ubuntu GNU/Linux and I'm slowly porting my settings and data over from the Windows drive. So far, Firefox, Thunderbird, Keepass, Hamachi are all up and running. I'll get the tricker stuff going tomorrow.
I'm finding ubuntuguide.org and TuxMobil useful by the way.
Switching to Linux again…
Tim O'Reilly is on the money, there's trouble in Apple land. Jason Kottke and Cory Doctorow have made the switch to the Linux flavor Ubuntu for there operating system. This follows Mark Pilgrim and there seems to be more leading lights switching too.
Sarah really hates it when I say about switching to Linux, because she knows how outraged I get about some of the most simple things. But this really makes me want to switch even quicker. I've almost pledged never to run Windows Vista on my desktop or laptop machine. I'm not going to switch to OSX because I simply love the PC architecture and freedom it brings (Although I was tempted with the dodgy copies of running OSX on a AMD PC). So I'm going to move to Linux again. This time, I'm going to take it seriously and give it time. I already had OpenSuse 10.1 with XGL running on a spare machine. But now I'm talking about slowly switching everything including my Laptop.
I have already got a small list of some problems I'll have, such as my mobile phone which runnings on Windows Mobile 2005. My PIM syncing using Plaxo, and Hardware support such as my new Camcorder and weird motherboard. But with a year to get it all going, I'm sure to come up with the answers or another way to the same thing.
Ubuntu looks the way to go, specially if I can get xgl running too.