Results tagged “Ubuntu” from CLICK

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.

Read the well-wrought entry linked above for the drawn-out reasoning behind moving the "professional"-quality Photoshop killer GIMP from the Ubuntu base (it'll be available in the Ubuntu Software Center, or your other favorite package-management tool).

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. I still haven't made my decision on whether I'm for Mono (using the Microsoft-compatible open-source tools) apps or against them (and F-Spot, along with Tomboy notes and, if you've added it, the Banshee music player seem in my mind anyway to be the highest-profile Mono apps in the GNOME world).

All I can say is that with the geek-political climate these days, more Mono rather than the same or less will just give more users a reason to jump off of GNOME (and Ubuntu) in order to keep one's collective hands, if not clean, than at least Microsoft-free.

Again, I haven't made a personal decision about Mono as yet, but I'm far from happy with F-Spot.

And yes, I've been using it somewhat regularly. For my purposes, I'm not crazy about having to import images into F-Spot. digiKam can deal with images in any directory structure, and I'd like my photo-organizing program to do the same. I understand that F-Spot is more iPhoto-like in this aspect. I still don't like it. It's OK for my personal images, but I can't keep my businessy images separate. Everything's in one big pile in F-Spot, except when you dig into the actual directory structure the app creates. Yep, just like iPhoto.

In F-Spot I can add a caption in the "comments" area. Unfortunately that data does not come up in any other applications I use to edit or view photos. I can't edit the IPTC data that 100 percent of professional photojournalists use (and those are the guys whose images I handle day in and out).

F-Spot will sharpen and adjust the color of images. It will crop them. But it won't resize them. Huge, huge deal-breaker for my "professional" use of this application. (And why would I use something for my "home" images that won't do the job with my real work if I don't have to?)

Truth be told, I don't require all that Photoshop offers. On the PC I use IrfanView. And basically my "quest" for a Linux/Unix image viewing/editing program runs along the lines of "give me something that does what IrfanView can do."

Even the GIMP (and Krita, too, O fans of KDE) can't deal with the IPTC data in JPEG images, which I absolutely need.

The digiKam image manager in KDE, through the great Kipi Plugins, CAN deal with this data, and pretty well, too (although the limit on the length of the IPTC credit line is a bit grating and seemingly unnecessary).

So I've been using digiKam for the past few weeks somewhat regularly. (Truth be told, I tend to work in IrfanView on my Windows box at the office about 80 percent of the time when editing photos; it's the environment I know, and that does what I want it to do.)

digiKam is a bit unwieldly. Like many KDE apps, there are menus for days, along with choices to match. It resizes. Good. It sharpens (although the results aren't as good, seemingly, as in every other app that sharpens images; there are, again, lots of choices, and I barely understand — and can't get a great result — from them. digiKam can crop, but you can't enter the exact dimensions of your crop in pixels and then drag the box around to make the perfect crop like I do in IrfanView. Not a deal-breaker, but not good either.

And did I say digiKam is unwieldy. Why are there separate "edit" modes for the metadata and the image data?

I've had little ol' gThumb on this Ubuntu machine for awhile. And hearing that the UDS suggested and then rejected it as a "replacement" for either GIMP and/or F-Spot prompted me to try it out. Sure I had opened a few images, but I hadn't yet done any heavy lifting with gThumb.

It was time.

Gthumb, little ol' gThumb (that's what I'll call it for the purposes of this entry), does almost everything I need:

-- Deals with images in their current directory structure
-- Resizes images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Crops images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Can edit/add IPTC caption info (to the main caption area only) with the "comments" feature
-- Allows for easy save-as of images

The only thing gThumb doesn't seem to do (and I could be missing it, though I don't think I am) is sharpen images. I can live without that, especially if gThumb can create and won't destroy existing IPTC data in JPEGs.

(Note: Besides Krita and GIMP, my previous favorite light image editor for Linux, MtPaint, is also an IPTC-data-destroyer and therefore can't be used for my "real" work.)

So thanks UDS people, for mentioning gThumb. And if you're asking my advice, and I know for damn sure that you're not, keep the GIMP or don't. I'll install it anyway.

But look deep into your geeky, geeky hearts and find it within them to replace F-Spot with gThumb. Or at very least make gThumb part of the Ubuntu base, make it the default image-organizing app, and let the rest of the free, open-source software-using world discover this most worthy of applications that for the most part can free me from the purgatory of Windows-based photo editing applications for good.

(And while I'm on the well-trod soapbox, let me mention that I wrote this entire entry using the newish Webkit-based Epiphany Web browser, another lovely bit of GNOME that I liked in its Gecko days but like even more now.)

(And sorry [really] about all those parentheses, within which I'm thinking all too often these days.)

Johannes Eva offers a very extensive post-installation guide on what to do after you install/upgrade Ubuntu 9.10 on your computer.

While I didn't want to personally do most of what was in this guide, I did pick up a few things that I either have done or will do in the near future.

On the first day of Karmic, my true love gave to me ... LET'S STOP THIS RIGHT NOW ...

I'll just present the link:

Christopher Tozzi of WorksWithU describes his first 10 days running Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala," along with pros and cons.

Brief gratuitous quote I pulled from the entry:

"In my experience, Karmic is far from an unmitigated failure. But it's not perfect, either."

According to WorksWithU (where I'm checking daily for Ubuntu developments, by the way), a Ubuntu One Music Store is in the works for the 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" release. Though nothing is confirmed in the slightest, speculation is that Ubuntu parent Canonical is working with Amazon to meld its own Apple-fighting music service into Ubuntu proper in order to fill one of the more cavernous gaps in the Linux app stack.

WorksWithU's Joe Panettieri writes:

I am reaching out to Canonical for a briefing on the Ubuntu One Music Store. But in the meantime I can tell you this: When my kids run Ubuntu on a range of netbooks and desktops at home there's only one "consumer" application they miss: Apple's iTunes. If the Ubuntu One Music Store fills that void, Canonical could successfully push Ubuntu deeper into the consumer market.

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 woujld be at /media/disk/ in the filesystem. That was 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.

Not that I can't code around this, because I can (and I could probably put any name I wish in /etc/fstab ...) but should I have to?

Update: I've modified my shell scripts to rsync to the USB drives by their UUID-generated names instead of the previously given name "disk." The scripts work, and everything is back to normal.

It's another in the now-half-dozen things that have broken in the transition from Jaunty to Karmic. All were fairly easy to fix, but my idea of a successful upgrade isn't having to devote time to restoring basic functionality after an upgrade.

So where is the "wisdom" in this Karmic fail?

Well, now that each drive is being automounted and automatically given a unique name that happens to be the same as its UUID, that means I can further automate the backup process without much additional coding.

Previously I could've modified /etc/fstab to give each of these drives a unique name when they were automounted. Truthfully I never thought about it until now.

But now that each drive is getting a unique yet predictable name, I can plug both into the computer at once and do my two separate backups (first is everything but Thunderbird mail, second is only Thunderbird mail, and yes, I have too much Thunderbird mail) with a single script if I wish.

So from the jaws of fail comes the thrill of geekish victory.

This is the kind of thing I'd normally just tweet about, but the problem with Twitter is that if it's not doing anything for you, i.e. bringing you (or me) traffic, you're just giving away your time.

Hence I pretty much have relegated Twitter to promoting my other writing. It's gotta pay the freight. After 600+ tweets, I'm stalled at about 130 followers. If I had 1,000 or more followers, I might feel differently. But I don't. And I don't.

That's a long preamble to this:

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.

One thing they called for, and I agree, is that the Ubuntu LTS release could benefit every once in a while from some new drivers in the kernel in the same way that Red Hat adds hardware drivers to the RHEL kernel in point releases.

I'm not sure whether or not it was mentioned in the post referenced above, but I've been reading about a change in policy for the next Ubuntu LTS, 10.04 (if you haven't cracked the Ubuntu release-number code, 10.04 stands for the fourth month of 2010, i.e. April, when the release is due).

Usually Ubuntu is built with packages pulled from the Debian Unstable branch, but for the 10.04 LTS, the Ubuntu developers are supposedly pulling from Debian Testing, which is more stable (and slightly older) than Unstable (or Volatile, for that matter) but less stable (and potentially a great deal newer) than Debian Stable (currently Lenny).

Whew!

All that means is that the packages in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS should be a bit more mature out of the box when the release is finalized in April 2010, and we should have a better-working LTS out of the box.

Or it could mean nothing. I'm no expert in how long it takes a package to move from Unstable to Testing, and I suspect that pulling from Testing = pulling from Unstable + 15-30 days, meaning that the potential is there for the Ubuntu LTS release to be more "stable" for the first month of release but just about the same after that, since patches from upstream tend to make their way from Debian to Ubuntu anyway.

I'll be upgrading at least one machine from the current LTS (8.04) to the new one when the time comes, and I always plan to bring the rest of my Ubuntu machines up to that LTS some time in the first six months after its release with a plan to use it for about a year before re-evaluating whether or not to stick with the LTS, move up to the next six-month release (as I've done now with 9.04 and 9.10), or go in a different direction entirely (generally to Debian Stable or Testing).

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?

Allow me to digress briefly: I first tried the Orage calendar app from Xfce, which I already have on this Ubuntu box because I have Xfce (but not the full Xubuntu) on it. But Orage, while working generally well for what I need it to do, for some reason is incapable of playing sounds to alert me to ... my alerts.

I did a bunch of Googling, checked bug reports. Nothing about Orage and a lack of sound in Ubuntu.

So I moved on.

I learned about Mozilla's Sunbird project, which is a full-fledged calendering app, and I also learned that there is a Thunderbird add-on called Lightning (Thunderbird and Lightning ... get it?) that brings Sunbird's calendar features to the Mozilla mail client.

Well, I downloaded the add-on, added it to Thunderbird ... and I was unable to create an event. Full stop.

So I backtracked. I removed the add-on and did what I should have done in the first place: I went through the Synaptic Package Manager and added the lightning-extension package, which brings along with it the calendar-timezones and calender-google-provider packages. (Presumably this means Google's calendar can somehow feed off of this ... I'll explore that later.)

I'll repeat for the West Coast audience: If you're running Thunderbird in Ubuntu, downloading and installing the Lightning calendar add-on from Mozilla won't work. Instead use the version in Ubuntu's repository.

Since I generally run Thunderbird all the time for my mail, having my calendar/alerts in there is the perfect solution.

Once I installed the three packages, I started Thunderbird. Right away the app asked whether or not I wanted to import my calendar settings from Evolution. Since I have nothing there, I declined.

Once in Thunderbird, I had Lightning. It works. I did a test event, sound worked, and I'm ready to start creating recurring events and alerting myself to their imminence (and/or eminence).

All this makes me think about the huge value we as users get from Mozilla. I'm waiting for music-manager/iTunes-killer Songbird to get better, and I'm already benefiting from Sunbird in the form of Lightning. ... and that's all on top of Thunderbird and Firefox. Very nice, indeed.

The quick version: To add calendar functionality to Thunderbird in Ubuntu, don't add Mozilla's Lightning add-on directly. Instead, add it through Ubuntu's own repositories, in my case using Synaptic to add the lightning-extension package and its dependencies. Then you'll be calendar-ready in Thunderbird.

The take-away: Don't want to use Evolution (I prefer a true cross-platform application for e-mail, and Thunderbird fits that bill very well) but want calendar functionality in your mail client? Thunderbird and Lightning seem to play well together.

Follow along: Developers of Sunbird and Lightning update things at the Calendar Weblog.

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.

It turns out you can't pick and choose directories on your Ubuntu box to backup/mirror across your various Ubuntu desktops (and right now I have only one system — this one — capable of using Ubuntu One).

Instead, to have files saved/mirrored, you need to drop them in the Ubuntu One folder/directory that is created in your Home directory. You drop stuff into that folder and the app mirrors it, where you can see the results at https://one.ubuntu.com

What I'd like to use Ubuntu One (or any other cloud-storage system) for is to back up the directories I select. I don't want to have to dump everything into a single folder. That would seriously mess with my file-management mojo.

And I don't use Tomboy or Evolution, so syncing those notes and contacts holds little appeal for me ...

And ... (you knew there was another and) I'd like to access these documents on other desktops that aren't running Ubuntu, or even running Linux.

The good news (and the biggest reason why I probably WILL use Ubuntu One at least a little bit) is that any client computer with a Web browser can access the shared Ubuntu One files at https://one.ubuntu.com ... this thing could be useful after all. I just uploaded a file into Ubuntu One from my Windows machine and did see that file in the Web interface on my Ubuntu computer. Once I remembered to "turn on" Ubuntu One by clicking on the little cloud icon in the upper GNOME panel, I received a notification that files were syncing. And sure enough, a few seconds later I saw the file in question in my Ubuntu One directory.

So for my purposes anyway, Ubuntu One is a somewhat useful FTP/sandbox area in which to share files across the many computers I use in a given week.

I suppose something like JungleDisk at this point is much better suited to the specific task of backing up to the cloud, but a free 2 GB is something that can come in handy.

Given the need to place items in the Ubuntu One directory in order to get them into the cloud, I really can't use the service as a true backup system. And if I exceeded 2 GB and had to pay the $10/month but didn't use the full 50 GB, I'd be paying more for Ubuntu One than I would for Amazon S3 storage in JungleDisk (although that doesn't factor in download/upload charges, just the monthly per-GB storage costs of about 15 cents/GB plus JungleDisk's $2/month fee).

I'd rather have a Ubuntu One that could pick/choose among my system's many directories what gets backed up/mirrored, just like I do with the rsync scripts I use to back up my system to USB drives.

I have a pretty good feeling that Ubuntu One is under heavy development (the Web site labels it as "beta"), and perhaps a more sophisticated way of both choosing what will be mirrored and even perhaps making the service function more as a backup application (i.e. allowing a user to archive files that aren't necessarily on the hard drive at all and keeping them in case of hardware/software disaster on the local machine) ... and syncing Firefox bookmarks, Thunderbird contacts and more just might be in the offing.

Again, there are a few services that compete quite well with Ubuntu One — including the Linux-compatible, very-much-cross-platform single-folder-syncs-all (and identically priced up to 50 GB) Dropbox, which looks a lot more built out than Ubuntu One at this point.

Still, a free 2 GB is a nice enticement for any given cloud-backup service. And watching what Ubuntu One eventually becomes looks to be a popular sport among FOSS proponents. I'll be one of them.

But right here, right now, the cross-platform nature of Dropbox makes it the better service for anybody who wants easier access to files from non-Ubuntu (and non-Linux) machines.

Later: I just took a look at the Dropbox blog, and that very blog subtly tells Ubuntu users that Dropbox is ready for them and has its own Karmic-specific repository that they can add to their /etc/apt/sources.list for automatic installation and updates of the Dropbox client software.

This still isn't quite what I want. Complicating matters is the fact that a) I don't exactly know what I want, and b) I don't know what's possible on the currently offered cloud-backup services.

I do know that for the most part I want a certain subset of my overall files synced across all of my desktops, but I also want another subset of files archived and accessible from all desktops yet not synced to them. And then there's the problem of stored e-mail. I have about 2 GB of mail in Thunderbird right now, all POPped down to my main PC. I'm not anxious to go back to IMAP, but the overly large files that Thunderbird's mbox format creates are laborious to back up and potentially hard to sync (OK ... I really don't know how easy or hard it would be).

At one level, I think all of this would be much easier if I finally pulled the trigger and piped my mail through Gmail, using POP through Thunderbird as a secondary way of dealing with that mail. That's another overly boring geeky tale for another overly boring geeky blog post.

I'm not all that upset about the way Ubuntu 9.10 has been notifying users about upgrades to the system with the Update Manager popping up on the screen whenever it seemingly feels like (as opposed to showing an icon on the upper panel in versions before 9.04), but I have been semi-regularly using Aptitude in the terminal to check for updates on my own.

I just did one now:

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude upgrade

and got the following output:

The following packages will be upgraded:
apparmor apparmor-utils apport apport-gtk checkbox checkbox-gtk evince
evince-dbg evolution evolution-common evolution-dbg
evolution-documentation-en evolution-plugins gnome-about
gnome-desktop-data gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-murrine hwtest hwtest-gtk
libapparmor-perl libapparmor1 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0 libenchant1c2a
libevdocument1 libevview1 libgnome-desktop-2-11 libgudev-1.0-0
libnautilus-extension1 libpython2.6 libudev0 nautilus nautilus-data
nautilus-dbg python-apport python-problem-report python2.6
python2.6-minimal rhythmbox udev update-manager update-manager-core
41 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 30.4MB of archives. After unpacking 123kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

That's a whole lot of updates. I'm too lazy to check exactly why each individual package is being updated, but the fix for Rhythmbox doesn't appear to resolve the issue for which I've already found the solution (removing and reinstalling the app).

Here's what changed for Rhythmbox:

* debian/patches/05_brasero_burn_xml.patch:
- Fix Brasero project

Other than this, there are a whole lot of GNOME packages being updated. Even the Update Manager itself is being updated in this flurry of patches. I'll confess that the changelog for this package didn't mean a whole lot to me.

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.

Apple has it easy because it controls the hardware and the software and hence has an easier time making all the bits work together.

In my experience, Ubuntu generally performs well, and its developers seem genuinely worried about whether or not hardware will work with the distribution's constant stream of releases.

In both Linux and OpenBSD, for instance, wireless support has only gotten better over time.

I wish I could say the same for sound and video. PulseAudio has been somewhat of a disaster over the past year or more. It just wasn't ready for the average user, and the above-average user is demanding Jack and real-time kernels to do sophisticated audio work.

Now PulseAudio seems to be getting better.

For me, my Intel video hardware on a couple of laptops (Gateway Solo 1450 and Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) has been causing problems beginning with Debian Lenny's time in testing. Whenever you need xorg.conf hacks just to make video work, and those hacks aren't crystal clear and easy to find, there will be problems. People will try Linux and run away from it as fast as they can if they can't get the basics (sound and video) to work.

And for my particular Toshiba laptop, the use of Kernel Mode Setting killed X in my Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. Once I figured out how to turn KMS off (with a new line in GRUB), I could run X without an xorg.conf for the first time since Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. That's a nice change.

But to get there — to get basic functionality — I had to bring my 2 years of FOSS knowledge to bear in order to solve the problem.

Then just about every ancillary GNOME app (Brasero, Rhythmbox, Empathy and the non-GNOME Pidgin) stopped working after the upgrade. A quick search determined that my previous installation (in 9.04) of KDEnlive brought in a plugin that kept the other four apps from working. I saw lots of chatter on the problem, but none of the solutions worked for me. I had to remove the offending plugin and then reinstall three opencv libraries to clear things up (you can see all the details in the previous entries on this blog).

Many will say that I should've stuck with the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (with the initials standing for "long-term support"), which performed well for me but wasn't as stable on my particular hardware as 9.10 (for which I had to do some hackery to get NetworkManager to manage my network).

And both Ubuntu 8.04 (I'm still using it on the Gateway laptop, where it's very solid) and Debian Lenny (now stable and running very well for me on two other machines) are viable options, but for my main laptop I want newer packages, especially Firefox 3.5, and I've been more inclined to upgrade the distro itself rather than use backports or PPAs to bring newer apps to older distributions.

Maybe I've got that wrong (or maybe not).

I've been meaning to move all of my user files to a Debian Lenny machine and see how well that performs with my regular abuse of the hardware and software. And there's always Fedora (and Mandriva ... and PCLinuxOS ... Mepis ... and dozens of others).

But despite all my grumbling, I do have a functioning Ubuntu 9.10 system. I even ditched my own "blue" theme and wallpaper and brought in the "human" theme and wallpaper that shipped with the upgrade. I'm back to Ubuntu s**t brown and orange, and I'm liking it. The new GNOME icons are cool. And we all have the next Ubuntu release — and 10.04 will be the next LTS — to look forward to with hope that many bugs will be squashed in the service of a stable desktop that will have the customary 3 years of desktop support.

In a nutshell: Ubuntu's under the hot lights. People expect more from it than they do from any other FOSS operating system. And it generally delivers more than any other, if not as much as people are counting on in their lofty expectations.

I use Ubuntu for many reasons: It seems to have the right balance between total "freedom" and the ability to play most multimedia, its developers are focused more on the desktop and less on the server (although Ubuntu is making a big play there), and its vast user base means that when there are problems, the community (including me in this blog) can often solve problems that benefit all users.

We're all looking for the time when Ubuntu (or some other distro, or some other OS entirely) can be easily handled by the average computer owner. That time really isn't here yet. With a Windows preload, the manufacture of the hardware generally makes sure there are drivers for all the hardware. Linux preloads — a few of which do exist — generally do the same. But in the wild and wooly world of geeks burning ISOs and installing Unix-like operating systems on all manner of hardware, a foolproof experience just isn't in the cards. Yet.

Will we ever get there? I hope so. I also have at least a little bit of hope for more preloads of Ubuntu and other Linux distros and maybe even a BSD.

There has been a whole lot of progress over the past few years on the Linux desktop. It's hard to predict where the state of FOSS will be five years from now.

In the near future I'll settle for Xorg and Intel playing well together, mass adoption of a free and open video standard and a move away from proprietary document formats since we barely need to print anything anyway.

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 happen to have a Launchpad account (which I created when I bought a shirt and hat from the Ubuntu online store), and I was able to add my solution to this 9.10 (Karmic) bug. I remember seeing this solution (albeit with one critical detail missing) somewhere on the Web but can't remember where.

Here it is:

If you upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10, can't play audio files in Rhythmbox and get the following message in a dialog box — "unable to start playback pipeline," you can fix the problem by removing Rhythmbox and then reinstalling it. I used the Synaptic Package Manager but apt or Aptitude will work just as well.

I first just reinstalled Rhythmbox without removing it beforehand. That didn't work.

Once I removed Rhythmbox and then reinstalled it, the app was and is able to play audio files.

Point of order: Other audio applications in Ubuntu 9.10 worked the whole time; only Rhythmbox was affected. Mousing over audio files in Nautilus produced audio. Before I fixed the Rhythmbox problem, I installed Exaile, which played audio with no problem.

Parting shot: I've had more issues with the 9.04-9.10 upgrade than with any other in the recent past (not counting my two attempts to do an in-place upgrade of OpenBSD that broke the installation completely). The fixes have been relatively easy, but there has been too many of them.

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:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ pidgin
ERROR: Could not load classifier cascade /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
Illegal instruction
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ empathy
ERROR: Could not load classifier cascade /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
Run 'empathy --help' to see a full list of available command line options.

(empathy:2527): empathy-WARNING **: Error in empathy init: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal
steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$

At least both apps seem to be suffering from the same problem, and luckily there is already a bug (#459940) on it in Launchpad. The bug is for the package opencv, and

According to notes on the bug, other GNOME applications affected by the problem include the Totem video player, the Brasero disc burner and Rhythmbox music player.

I can confirm that on my system, every one of those apps will not run.

I also confirmed that the XML file in question is NOT on my box:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ cat /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml
cat: /usr/share/opencv/haarcascades/haarcascade_frontalface_alt2.xml: No such file or directory

One of the comments in the bug report says:

Thomas DEBESSE wrote on 2009-10-29: #6

seems to appear when installing frei0r-plugins (example: for kdenlive). When removing frei0r-plugins from my karmic I've no error messages at all, and totem (and other apps) runs fine.

Hey, I do have KDEnlive on this laptop. I would've removed the offending plugins package, but I decided first to do a software update to see if Ubuntu's package maintainers took care of the problem.

I opened a terminal and used aptitude to do it:

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude update
[sudo] password for steven:

Reading package lists... Done

(listing of mirrors hit has been removed for brevity)

steven@toshiba-ubuntu:~$ sudo aptitude upgrade
W: The "upgrade" command is deprecated; use "safe-upgrade" instead.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
binutils brasero empathy empathy-doc f-spot libbrasero-media0
libempathy-common libempathy-gtk-common libempathy-gtk28 libempathy30
nvidia-common python python-minimal ubuntu-xsplash-artwork xsplash
15 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 5,715kB of archives. After unpacking 160kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

That seems like it would take care of the problem, but the missing file still hadn't shown up. Would a reboot fix things?

After the software update didn't solve the problem, I decided to go into the Synaptic Package Manager and reinstall the opencv packages, which I guessed were libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1.

That didn't work either.

The next step would be either removing KDEnlive or the offending package, frei0r-plugins.

I went into Synaptic and removed frei0r-plugins.

Nothing changed.

I reinstalled the three opencv libraries (libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1).

That worked. I was able to run Pidgin, Empathy (which has a nice dialog that offered to import my Pidgin settings, an offer I accepted), Rhythmbox, Brasero and Totem once again.

And KDEnlive seemed to be working, too. It at least loaded.

Let's review: If Pidgin, Empathy, Rhythmbox, Brasero and Totem are not running on your Ubuntu 9.10 system, first update the box, then use the Synaptic Package Manager to remove frei0r-plugins and reinstall libcv1, libhihgui1 and libcvaux1.

I'm a bit surprised that the software update alone didn't fix the problem. While the fix is easy, it's a little bit of "dependency hell" for a package-management system (apt) that is not supposed to suffer from that particular malady.

While I've solved my X issue and now this in 9.10, I probably should have waited an extra month or so before upgrading so these bugs could be shaken out.

Bug #459940 should be closed eventually, but at present it appears that the removal of the offending package and the replacement of those the offender affected is the way out of this problem.

I do have a Launchpad account (I had to create it in order to buy stuff at the Canonical U.S. shop), and I subscribed to this bug so I can keep an eye on it.

I've seen a lot of comments directed at me and others in regard to reporting bugs, and following this bug is hopefully a step in that direction for me personally as a Ubuntu user.

My three-part series on how my Intel-graphics-equipped laptop lost X in the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 is a bit long.

If you just want to fix your computer, and by chance you are having the same problem as I, try this quick fix. It worked for me:

The problem is with kernel mode setting, which is causing X to die.

To test whether or not the fix works, when you get to the GRUB screen, hit esc to stop the boot, then go arrow down to the kernel boot line, type e to edit it and add the following to the end (or after the ro ... both work for me):

i915.modeset=0

Then type b to boot.

If your computer boots into Ubuntu 9.10 and you now have a working display, make this change permanent by adding that same line to the GRUB entries for Ubuntu permanently by using your sudo privileges to edit the GRUB configuration file, /boot/grub/menu.lst

Open the terminal and do the following:

$ sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

That will open GRUB's menu.lst file in the Gedit text editor.

Add this, again, either to the end of the kernel boot line for both the "regular" and "recovery" boot stanzas for the current Ubuntu kernel.

Here is what my "stanzas" now look like (excuse the skipped lines ... that's a CSS issue with this blog; keep the current line spacing in your menu.lst), with the additions in red type:

title      Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-14-generic
root      (hd0,2)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=dc3cf399-6b13-4704-80c5-0e02fe6cd364 ro quiet splash i915.modeset=0
initrd       /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
quiet

title      Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-14-generic (recovery mode)
root      (hd0,2)
kernel      /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=UUID=dc3cf399-6b13-4704-80c5-0e02fe6cd364 ro single i915.modeset=0
initrd      /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic

Save the file in Gedit and close it. If this hack worked for you when you added it to GRUB during boot time, it should work for you automatically when you boot the machine again. It's a good hack because you can test it before you commit to it in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Note: DON'T directly copy my menu.lst stanzas into your /boot/grub/menu.lst. Your UUID information will be different than mine, and wrong UUID numbers will render your system unusable. IF THE HACK WORKS WHEN YOU EDIT THE GRUB LINE DURING BOOT TIME, JUST ADD THE PORTIONS IN RED TO YOUR EXISTING BOOT STANZAS IN /BOOT/GRUB/MENU.LST.

Additional note: My graphics chip is the Intel 82830 CGC (aka Intel 830M)

I had to do this in 9.04 and now again in 9.10. It's not a big deal, but it's a bit quirky.

I just upgraded to 9.10 (see the posts below this one for my particularly woeish tale), and in the Update Manager there's a "Distribution Upgrade" that can't be check-marked and installed.

The way to take care of this is to do a dist-upgrade in the terminal. I use Aptitude to accomplish this:

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

Then answer "y" for yes for the "solution," then "y" again to do the upgrade.

What this dist-upgrade did was dump a few files and bring in the latest Adobe Flash Player for Linux.

I don't know why this can't be taken care of in the Update Manager GUI, and for all I know it can, but it's easy enough to deal with in the terminal, and learning how to use Aptitude even a little isn't a bad idea, especially with the screwy way Ubuntu notifies users of updates in said GUI.

Our story thus far: Xorg has been a pain in the you-know-where for my Intel-video-running laptops ever since Debian Lenny was still in Testing, and those problems have made everything from OpenBSD (and the rest of the BSDs, for that matter) to Ubuntu render video everywhere from unreliably to ... not at all.

Over the past many, many months, I've discovered fixes that worked for various releases of Debian (Lenny is good now), Slackware (I've tamed the 12.x series) and Ubuntu (I debugged xorg.conf for Jaunty with the live CD BEFORE installing it ...).

But things broke anew in the Ubuntu 9.04-9.10 upgrade. I thought I had the hack ready to roll for my Intel 82830 graphics chip. But said hack did not work.

I found a new hack with a quick bit of Googling. Now I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 with no xorg.conf file, and X is back. I won't yet say it's "better than ever," but it does work, and after a day or so of evaluation, I'll come back and see how things sit.

Here's how I did it:

I found the hack here. Testing the hack involved adding a boot parameter in GRUB, something which I'm a bit familiar with. But nonetheless, I did find this Ubuntu Wiki page helpful, even though in this case I want to turn this parameter off instead of on.

It all has to do with kernel mode setting.

To make X work, I escaped out of the boot process in GRUB, edited the boot line and added this to the end of that line:

i915.modeset=0

Once I booted with that i915.modeset=0 in my boot parameters, X worked and I was able to log in. I still had my "test" xorg.conf file active. But since it didn't do anything for me without this kernel mode setting, I decided to disable the configuration file by renaming it:

$ cd /etc/X11
$ sudo mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.910

Then I rebooted, and X worked just fine with this boot parameter and no xorg.conf file at all.

Now ... to make the kernel mode setting permanent, I went back to the Ubuntu Wiki.

I copied the following from that Wiki, modifying the setting, since we're turning this off rather than on:

Turn onoff kms in your kernel modules

1. To turn it onoff for one boot, in grub add the kernel parameter, i915.modeset=0, and boot.

2. Or, to turn it onoff permanently, create (if necessary) /etc/modprobe.d/i915-kms.conf with this line:

options i915 modeset=0

and then reboot. If there are problems, you can turn it off via the kernel option nomodeset.

"If there are problems." There won't be any stinkin' problems, I thought. This is going to work.

It did not work. Just like the user in the Ubuntu Forums post, I instead needed to permanently add i915.modeset=0 to my boot parameters in GRUB.

So I did just that.

$ sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Then I added i915.modeset=0 to the end of the "kernel" line in both the "regular" and "recovery mode" portions of the kernel 2.6.31-14-generic areas of /boot/grub/menu.lst.

Now I have a working Ubuntu system once again. Thankfully I did this all in a single day (the helpful Ubuntu Forums post was only 12 hours old when I discovered it).

I'm used to mucking around in xorg.conf (and am damn glad I don't need one with this version of Ubuntu), just as I'm used to screwing with /boot/grub/menu.lst to make things work.

But in Ubuntu Linux, of all the operating systems out there, and with an in-place upgrade to the current distribution, and with a subset of video chips (Intel) that is problematic yet widely used, this is a total and complete deal-breaker for all but the most "Hardy" (pun intended) users.

The Linux geek who has encountered X issues before can muddle through this.

But a new user, a recent user, a "non-technical" user will most likely conclude that Ubuntu in particular, Linux in general (but perhaps not Xorg, which seems to be the real culprit here, or is it the Intel drivers?) and the whole not-Windows-or-Mac world is just not ready for them.

I don't mean to be reactionary here. Yeah, I thought I had the problem solved with a couple of hacks, but I had to find a third and fourth hack, adopting one and rejecting the other, in order to make what was a working system work once again. And yes, I made relatively quick work of it. But I consider that quickness a bit of luck. Nothing more.

If I had a 9.10 CD, which I don't (my CD drive is very flaky when it comes to CD-Rs, and I haven't yet sprung for the 5-for-$10 offer for Ubuntu CDs that is replacing the free ShipIt program), with which I could have tested this in a live CD environment as I did for 9.04. But I didn't have that CD (burning my own would've probably resulted in a coaster, at least for the laptop it was intended to test).

Whether or not the seeming end of the free-CD distribution from Canonical via ShipIt is an acknowledgment that Ubuntu is focusing on the already converted and abandoning the true newbie is the subject of another entry. Fresh from this X disaster, whether it's Ubuntu's fault, Xorg's or Intel's, I do have a working system, but the level of geekery involved is not in keeping with Ubuntu's "Linux for Human Beings" tag line.

Disclaimer: I'm not exactly sure about what is going on with the free shipping of Ubuntu discs to those who request it via ShipIt. The change in policy, which I can't quite figure out, was announced in this Jono Bacon blog post. Personally, I'd use OSdisc.com to get a single CDDVD for $5.95 (or CD for $1.95 &ndash go OSDisc.com!) if I couldn't burn my own, but I think the policy of limiting free Ubuntu CDs to LoCos and other "members of the tribe," as it were is a dangerous thing for Canonical to be doing at this point in time. I personally don't mind purchasing CDs directly from Canonical and probably will do so in the near future. But the ShipIt program, to me, is what makes Ubuntu different than the other 300 or so distros out there (although I'm sure Fedora will send out free CDs to those who ask for them; but Fedora — in my opinion anyway — doesn't have the commitments both to newbies and to the desktop that Ubuntu at least appears to have.

Maybe the overall wonderfulness of Ubuntu 9.10 will bring a restored sense of hope. I worried about breakage in the 9.04-9.10 transition, and breakage I got. All is well for the moment, but I can see 49 out of 50 users with my problem giving up before solving it.

Bottom line: This should be taken care of in the install/upgrade process. And whether it's Xorg or Intel that is screwing up the graphics for these "older" chips, I'd just like to let each and every one of you know that it's been a time-sucking pain in the ass.

I'll leave on an up-note: If this hack helped you, please leave a comment on this post (or if you really, really don't want to sign in with one of the many, many kinds of accounts we use on this Movable Type blog, send me an e-mail). You can even gloat over having an Nvidia or ATI graphics chip and thus skirting this multi-year nightmare entirely. Also, feel free to school me on any "better" ways to fix this issue (and I am very much open to anything "better" than this bit of hackery). None of you have been shy about correcting me before; don't stop now.

The day after – analysis: I've had the night to think about just what is going on with this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, its Intel 82830 graphics chip, Xorg, the Intel drivers and kernel mode setting.

Years of trouble with this graphics chip initially led me to believe that the issue I'm having with Ubuntu 9.10, Xorg 7.4 and Xserver 1.6.4 is caused by catastrophic regressions in support for a chip that worked fine back in the days of Debian Etch, Ubuntu Dapper and Slackware 11.

For a brief time I was able to run two systems — OpenBSD 4.4 and Ubuntu 8.04 — without an xorg.conf file.

Now I'm again running this Intel chip with no xorg.conf — not that the presence or absence of such a file is the sole determiner of "good" graphics. Good graphics are their own measure.

No, it seems to be the kernel mode setting in Karmic that is messing with my Intel 82830 video, and turning off this "feature" leaves me with as good an experience with X as I've ever had.

I just wish that somehow Xorg, the Linux kernel, the Ubuntu installer, or some other utility could recognize whether or not kernel mode setting will speed my boot or render the system totally unusable and configure accordingly. I haven't had to modify a boot parameter in GRUB in quite some time, and while it was easy for me, once again I don't think the new user of a very common graphics system should have to contend with this.

Whether it's the kernel developers, Xorg or Intel, I hope somebody can address this situation in future releases and at least give Linux a fighting chance on the desktops of those who aren't accustomed to the general level of hackery required to see something on their computer screen in the GUI.

Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10: An opera in three acts:

• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 3: Bringing X back from the dead (and why, oh why didn't the installer just do this for me?)

When upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 this morning, I purposefully did not make any changes to my "custom" xorg.conf. You know, the one that made my Intel video chip (82830, for those keeping score) work in Ubuntu 9.04.

Yes it used EXA acceleration and not UXA. But it worked in 9.04, and I was curious as to what the Ubuntu upgrade process would do about it.

Turns out, nothing.

Yes, post-upgrade, my Intel-video-equipped Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop has NO video in X. I can't even bring up a terminal outside of X, it's that messed up.

I knew this could happen. I pretty much think I know how to fix it. I haven't done that yet.

I used one of my Puppy Linux CDs that happens to work in the Toshiba's very touchy CD drive — version 2.16 (again submitted for those keeping score) — and at first I renamed my xorg.conf to xorg.conf.old and rebooted Ubuntu 9.10.

I wanted to see how Ubuntu 9.10 would deal with the Intel 82830 graphics chip with no xorg.conf file.

No change. No X. Time to pull out the UXA acceleration hack.

I got most of the code from this blog post by Ivan Kristianto, which I previously mentioned here.

I didn't do everything he suggested, but I did use this code for the "Device" section of xorg.conf (ignore the skipped lines ... it's a CSS issue in Movable Type):

Section "Device"
Identifier    "Configured Video Device"
Option        "AccelMethod"            "uxa"
Option        "EXAOptimizeMigration"        "true"
Option        "MigrationHeuristic"        "greedy"
# Option        "Tiling"            "true" # i8xx users: set to false
EndSection

As you can see, I didn't use the "Tiling" option, either true or false.

Well, X still didn't work. I thought I had this one in the proverbial bag.

And remember. I've been doing this for a couple of years. I've suffered through a lot of sub-par Intel video and numerous xorg.conf hacks. And I still couldn't get it to work.

So I turned to the world's oracle (not Oracle, capital O, but oracle, small o) — Google.

Would the vast Ubuntu user community have solved this issue already? Stay tuned for my next post to find out.

Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10: An opera in three acts:

• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 3: Bringing X back from the dead (and why, oh why didn't the installer just do this for me?)

Even though I said I'd wait a month, or two or more, before upgrading my main laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, I got in early enough today and had a fast enough connection to my chosen mirror that I decided to do the upgrade to Karmic today. Now. The download was quick, and I've as of now got about 45 minutes left for the installation to complete.

This is an upgrade, not a clean install, so I won't be getting (and don't really want) the new GRUB 2 bootloader. I won't get the ext4 filesystem, either (although I would like to try it, I'm not sufficiently motivated at present to do a full reinstall).

I'm fairly confident that all of my hardware — a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 and any one of three WiFi adapters — will work.

I'm less confident about the laptop's Intel video. Intel video hasn't just been problematic in Linux for the past couple of years. It's been a problem in the BSDs, too.

It all comes down to Xorg. Or Intel. Depends on who you ask. Or whom you ask.

However you slice it up, upgrades have been hell for anybody with Intel video chips in their computers. And that's a whole lot of people. I can think of bigger "negatives" when it comes to open-source-OS adoption over the past two years ... oh, wait ... I can't.

My basic contention is that video needs to just work. Messing about with xorg.conf should be a last, last, last resort, and if such messing is required, there should be extremely clear and easy-to-find guides on exactly what to put in said xorg.conf file to make the system work.

Then there's the whole switch from EXA to UXA acceleration (like I have even the smallest clue as to what that really means).

But I'm ready enough for X problems. I've posted a few entries of my own on how to clean up Intel video first with EXA and now with UXA acceleration. I applauded the whole idea of running perfect video with absolutely no xorg.conf file for the few months I was able to do it. I hope we get back there.

Anyhow, while you can see that Intel video has dominated my thoughts about the move from 9.04 (Jaunty) to 9.10 (Hardy), but there's more.

I ran the current long-term-support release of Ubuntu, 8.04 (Hardy) for a whole lot longer than I had planned. It ran very well.

But once I made the less-than-painless upgrade through Intrepid (8.10) to Jaunty (9.04) in a single, longish day (and after I finally got the new-to-8.10 NetworkManager to behave — and behave well, I might add), I suddenly had a Ubuntu Linux system with a whole lot more stability than before.

Here's the short version: 9.04 is better than 8.04 on my hardware.

So with all the talk of faster booting and better performance under Karmic (9.10), coupled with more than a couple of clues on how to fix Xorg video if and when it breaks), I was a bit anxious about the upgrade.

And after using the utility in System -- Administration -- Software Sources to find a faster mirror, I was ready for the big download and installation.

I've been doing Linux and BSD installs somewhat regularly since the beginning of 2007, and I'm still a bit worried about some of the things that come up in a Ubuntu upgrade. "Some packages are deprecated and will be removed" (I'm paraphrasing here) ... um ... OK. I can handle that. "Some extra software repositories are being disabled ... re-enable them after the upgrade" ... I dealt with this in the Hardy-Intrepid-Jaunty upgrade, so I remember it. I don't like it, but I remember it.

Then I got the dialog box about replacing the NetworkManager config file. That's the one I had to modify to get Intrepid/Jaunty working after the Hardy upgrade, which I did over wireless, leaving me with a non-managed wired Ethernet port until I figured out how to re-manage it.

Knowing that some or all of my NetworkManager configuration either might or definitely will be blown away by an upgrade? Not the best feeling.

Anyhow, with Karmic, I'll be getting Firefox 3.5 — yes, Ubuntu stuck with 3.0.x for the duration of the Jaunty release. I know I could've gotten 3.5 with a PPA, but I'm not in the habit of grabbing newer versions of things that are already in the distribution, so I kept Firefox 3.0.x around for the duration. There'll be updates on just about everything else, from OpenOffice to digiKam (my current "focus," so to speak) as well as the entire GNOME desktop.

As always, I hope for minimal regression and maximal improvement. I got that going from Hardy to Jaunty. I hope for more of the same as I go from Jaunty to Karmic.

Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10: An opera in three acts:

• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 1: Eyes wide open/shut
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 2: Worst-case X scenario (no video)
  
• Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade, Part 3: Bringing X back from the dead (and why, oh why didn't the installer just do this for me?)

There have been a few upgrades a day popping into the Update Manager on my Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, for those keeping score on the animal names) installation, and have you noticed what I've noticed?

Those updates are downloading very, very slowly.

I'd say my speed from the Ubuntu mirror is roughly a tenth of what it normally is.

It must mean that a lot of users are already installing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which won't be "officially" released until Thursday, Oct. 29, but which is in beta right now. That means you, in fact, can upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic, or download the full ISO to burn a live CD and either test Karmic that way, or do a full install — and all the "final" tweaks to the release will just flow into your installation as they are released.

At least that's what I think is happening — and why even the smallest software updates or application installs are becoming extremely slow and therefore painful.

You won't see me clicking the "Update to Ubuntu 9.10" box in my Update Manager during the first week that Karmic is officially out. Probably not during the first month, either.

You see, even though Ubuntu releases every six months, each release receives a full 18 months of support in the form of bug fixes and security patches (with the LTS, of which 8.04 is the current release and 10.04 the next, getting three years of patches on the desktop and five years on the server).

So even though 9.04 (Jaunty) has been out six months and will not be the "current" Ubuntu release after 9.10 (Karmic) makes its official debut on Thursday, but Jaunty still has a full year of patches before it's end of life in October 2010.

I waited well over a year after Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was first released to upgrade it on my main laptop (where I've only been using it since May anyway), but my daughter's laptop is still running 8.04 (aka Hardy Heron) and probably will be for awhile — possibly until I can directly upgrade to the next LTS (long-term support) release in April 2010.

As it stands, I'll hold off on 9.10 on the main 9.04-running laptop until the download speeds from the Ubuntu mirrors creep back up to "normal" non-release-month levels and I can do the upgrade without it taking all the live-long day. Until then I'm covered security-wise, and the choice of when to upgrade is mine.

And either way, it won't cost a thing, since Ubuntu Linux is distributed free of charge. It can be downloaded as a CD-R-filling ISO file and burned as a bootable disc. While things are changing, Ubuntu has always offered to ship a free CD to potential users, though for the first time parent company Canonical is pulling back from shipping free discs to everybody and is ending its practice selling install CDs in quantities of less than 20 or 100 (yep, that's how they do it ... or at least did it up until now.

I've actually wanted to purchase a CD, since my old Toshiba laptop is quite finicky when it comes to reading CD-R discs and much prefers CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or even DVD-R discs. So for 9.04, I actually requested a free CD and received one.

This time, I'll be doing an in-place upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 — meaning I'll let the Update Manager utility handle the whole thing and automatically download and install all the packages I need to make the move.

But I'd still like to have a CD handy, and I'm more than happy to go to the Ubuntushop / U.S. and pay $10 for a pack of 5 Ubuntu 9.10 CDs.

That way I'll have a few discs to give to anybody I happen to run into who is interested in giving Linux in general — and Ubuntu 9.10 in particular — a try.

Not that downloading the usually 600-700-MB ISO file and making a bootable disc out of it is all that hard. Macintosh computers can make a bootable disc out of an ISO in the Disk Utility program, and such discs are easy to make if you're already running Linux.

Windows didn't have an ISO-burning program included, but something like Nero, or my personal favorite, the free ISO Recorder, can do the job easily.

If you do have — or will have — Windows 7, I've heard that Microsoft's new OS finally includes ISO-burning capability in the base system. It must have something to do with baking your own Windows update or restore discs, but whatever the reason for its inclusion, it will make burning bootable Linux and other Unix-like OS discs easier for many millions of users.

And I probably mentioned but didn't fully mention that the Ubuntu discs is a live CD which you can use to try out Ubuntu. You put the CD in the drive, figure out how your PC boots from its optical drive by fiddling with your BIOS settings (it's not all that hard), and you can boot into a Ubuntu Linux environment without changing anything on your existing hard disk drive.

Ubuntu doesn't run anywhere near as well in live CD mode as it does when you do the full installation, but you can see how your hardware is recognized (or not) by the system. If your display, keyboard, mouse, network interfaces and other hardware bits seem to work, then your machine is a good candidate for a full Ubuntu install. And that live CD doubles as an install CD with menus guiding you along the way.

I realize that exorting readers of this blog to install Ubuntu (or any other Linux or BSD operating system) falls under "preaching to the choir," since most readers come to this blog via searches for these same topics, but I'd like to believe that at least a few of you are kicking the tires on running Linux on at least one of your computers.

Over the next week or so, I plan to write more about why I use free, open-source software such as the Ubuntu, Debian and Puppy distributions of Linux and how they differ from Windows and OS X.

So forgive me if you've been down this road before. I'll sprinkle in some geekier bits along the way; how can I not?

I've stayed fairly quiet on the controversy over Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET protocol and C# programming language that's been grabbing a greater share of the desktop in various Linux distributions in recent years and months.

Reading this article by a Samba developer on the Tux Deluxe blog on why Samba/SMB — itself an iteration of a Microsoft technology — is much easier to justify using than Mono, I know that I have quite a way to go before I completely understand the issue.

Briefly, Jeremy Allison says that an agreement between the Samba project and Microsoft allows all users to implement Samba without threat of legal action over patents.

But with Mono, a similar agreement only covers users of software distributed by Novell, which signed an infamous patent agreement with Microsoft awhile back. That means the rest of us are not so well-protected:

... my basic issue with the Microsoft Community Promise is that Miguel (de Icaza) doesn't have to depend on it like everyone else does. Miguel's employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out. This is not a level playing field, or software freedom for all. This is a preferred supplier trying to pretend there is no problem. Sure there isn't a problem, for them. If it isn't good enough for Miguel, why is it good enough for other developers?

Allison's contention is that while he can understand original Mono creator Miguel de Icaza's reasons for wanting to code GUI apps in C# rather than C or C++, Allison would rather that the open-source community turned to Java instead in its quest to build out the graphical environment. There is some talk about, at the time Mono was started, Java not being available under a free license, but Allison contends that it has more to do with potential or real rivalries among developers wishing to use Java or Mono/C++, as well as control over their respective projects.

Although I'm not a developer, this is a very real issue for me, and it should be for all who use Linux/Unix — and especially GNOME — on the desktop. Two of the biggest Linux distributions — Debian and the Debian-derived Ubuntu — are based on the GNOME desktop environment and seemingly have Mono apps taking a bigger chunk of the system with every release.

Right now, the most common Mono apps, many of which are in the default install in Ubuntu, are:

Tomboy notes
F-Spot photo manager
Banshee music player
Gnome Do "intelligent launcher"

For a longer list, look at this portion of the Wikipedia entry on Mono.

This is no easy issue to resolve. On the one hand, there are always apps that can do the same things that don't use Mono, although in the GNOME environment some such as the Rhythmbox music player aren't very active in terms of development.

There's always KDE, which uses the QT 4 toolkit that is under the GPL license as well as the C++ programming language.

Personally I've avoided KDE as a desktop environment because in the distributions I've tried, it's a great deal slower than GNOME (and Xfce). Despite that, KDE has many extremely compelling apps that include the music player Amarok, CD/DVD-creation program K3b, photo-organizer digiKam and photo/paint app Krita, not to mention the still-seemingly young but very promising Kdenlive video editor.

Still, there is that relative slowness in KDE — and my perceived trouble with the KOffice suite, which seemingly lost its way the past couple of years. Then there's a gaggle of text editors (Kate, KWrite, Kedit, Kile) that previously didn't thrill me but do merit another look. I'm using Gedit in GNOME as my main text editor, and while I'm happy with much of what I see, the lack of any easy way to change the case of letters from the keyboard has my eye wandering.

Do I give abandon GNOME and give KDE another try? Maybe with a multi-core CPU, modern graphics hardware, a few GB of RAM and disk space for days I wouldn't care so much, but now with a 1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB of RAM and an Intel graphics chip that Xorg has been waterboarding for a year or so, I have to pay attention to the potential strain on my system, and thus far GNOME has provided a very nice combination of features and resource load.

On the other hand, seeing Mono as the "Miguel de Icaza-who-works-for-Novell Show," keeping in mind that I know little about him and have never met him, doesn't give me a good feeling about how GNOME is tipping every more closely into becoming a Mono-powered world.

Getting down to the application level. I do have Tomboy notes installed on a couple of boxes. I haven't used it much; I tend to write my notes in regular ol' text files or in Google Docs.

I've been using Rhythmbox a bit and have thought about trying out Banshee (which might become the default Ubuntu music player) ... and I probably should.

F-Spot is the default photo manager in Ubuntu, and I do use it and generally like it. I tried Google's Picasa for a day and thought it more than a little clumsy (and I wasn't a big fan of it scouring my system for images without my "OK" on it). I've used digiKam in the past and found it quite similar to F-Spot, with the added bonus of digiKam being the only Linux application I've ever used that pays even the slightest attention to the IPTC tagging that just about 100 percent of professional photographers add to their JPEG images via Photoshop or other proprietary apps such as PhotoMechanic.

I deal with this embedded metadata in between dozens and hundreds of JPEGs on a daily basis, and this IPTC code, in case you didn't know, is not only uneditable in the GIMP, MtPaint and presumably other Linux/Unix image-editing software but is generally erased by these programs whenever an image is modified within them.

So basically I'm a whore who can be bought by the first FOSS app that allows me to fully edit the IPTC data in JPEGs. I'm showing a whole lot of leg, but it seems nobody either knows or cares. I'll load digiKam again and see how it's doing on IPTC; I don't need a photo archiving program to edit images for Web publication. And if it did the job (and I don't think it will), I'd gladly use Krita — or anything else. I'm thinking of WINE and IrfanView, the latter of which I use heavily in Windows, just to be able to do more work in a FOSS OS and be able to use Windows even less than I already do.

Back to the point. I've totally run off the rails on my investigation of Mono. I still don't know exactly what to think of it. I'll keep looking around at what others are saying. If you wish, leave a comment on this post (you can now sign in with AOL, Wordpress.com and Yahoo accounts in addition to the other ways, including signing up for a Movable Type account on our server; Typekey/Typepad is broken at present, and yes, I'm looking into it).

I resisted upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS — the project's "stable," long-term-support release — because everything worked pretty well, my hardware was fairly well-recognized, there were no showstopping bugs ... and that's a good thing.

After running the LTS for a year (I still have it on another laptop), I decided to undergo the pain of an in-place upgrade through 8.10 and to 9.04. My intention was to be ready for a semi-immediate upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 when it is released later this month.

But now that I'm running 9.10 and everything is working even better than with 8.04, I'm facing the same dilemma — and again, better a dilemma of this sort than the other.

Why is 9.04 so good on my particular hardware? I'm running a 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1 GB PC133 RAM, 20 GB hard drive) and a Cnet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter.

Here's a rundown of Ubuntu 9.04 compared to 8.04 on my rig:

Better in 9.04

Boots faster
NetworkManager (after config-file tweak) MUCH MUCH better
Sound better (PulseAudio has improved)
Flash better (v. 10 way better than v. 9)
CNet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter hasn't killed laptop once (major improvement)

The same in 9.04
Toshiba laptop suspends but won't resume
Intel video (I thought it would be worse, but at this point in the release cycle, it's OK)

Worse in 9.04
New method of notifying users of updates via minimized window instead of update icon is puzzling; not a deal-breaker, just a head-scratcher