Hello again!  I'm so very bad at actually keeping notes on my Linuxing adventures.  I hang my head in shame.  But not for long, 'cos I do want to actually post an update in here.

In August or thereabouts, Indigo started giving me problems of the 'no GUI for you!' variety.  Seems he thought his root partition was full, except it wasn't.  Two different diagnostics commands gave two contradictory results.  In fact, one said that the root partition was 100% full, but also indicated that there was at least some free space.  Long story short, I asked the Ubuntu Forum people for advice but ultimately wound up reinstalling.  Indigo now sports Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, and I like it just fine.  Indigo had the first real Ubuntu install I'd ever done, and with all my installing and uninstalling of programs and window managers and the like, maybe I made a mess of the Ubuntu partition just a wee bit.  Not sure on that one.  But all's well now, and Indigo is going strong.

Cairns has been changed from KDE to Xfce.  I'm strongly considering wiping the Windows partition, since I'm now nearly 100% Windows free (hurray!).  I found that SimpleScan detects and operates the scanner part of my Epson multi-function printer just fine.  That was the last thing that was keeping me from going Linux only on the main study computer.  I'm planning to move Cairns into the bedroom and bring Adelaide back out into the study, a procedure which will involve either a reinstall of Cairns or a monitor swap, because the text on Cairns is so very small when the machine is connected to the monitor in the bedroom.  Mepis, on Adelaide, has some kind of issues with that monitor as well, so I suspect it's at least partly the monitor's fault.

Adelaide has been running Mepis 8.0 very well.  My initial choice for that box was Linux Mint, but my Mint install disc hung mid-install three times, so I grabbed the Mepis one.  I love me some KDE, I do.  I'm thinking of installing Adelaide with something lighter, though I'm pretty sure the minor performance issues (due to low RAM) are mostly because of the heavier footprint of KDE 3.5.  The only machine I have that will run KDE 4.6+ with any real performance is the laptop, I've discovered.

Unity is now the default window manager for Ubuntu, it would seem.  I haven't played with it very much, but I have to bristle at the graphics requirements for it.  Yes, there's a fallback 2D version.  I tried Unity on a LiveCD a month or more ago and was not impressed.  It takes a lot of getting used to, does Unity.  I did a fair bit of 'what the -- where're the settings? Where's the freaking -- why did you hide this at the top of the screen?  Why would I mouse up to the top of the screen to get at these settings, you buncha dorks?' before declaring Unity was, at least for the moment, too frustrating to bother with for now, especially as it'll only run in its full 'glory' on my most advanced machine.  Apparently Virtualbox does in fact support 3D emulation now so Unity might be runnable on that.  I'll give it another shot at some point.

I'm also intrigued by Gnome 3/Gnome Shell.  Looks nifty, but again, you MUST have 3D acceleration to run it.  No fallback there.  Never liked Gnome, honestly.  But if I can get that running in Virtualbox, I'll see what I think of it too.

Yikes, that was a lot of stuff!  See you next time.  Happy Linuxing!

Once I started trying to actually work with Cairns, I discovered a problem: it runs really, really slowly. I had Amarok open, streaming music, a terminal window, and Rekonq open. No problem there. I opened a couple tabs in Rekonq, checked email, etc. At some point it began to bog down. I added a 'tech' activity and tossed a bunch of monitors onto it and discovered 100% of the swap space was being used. This machine, with 640M of RAM, got installed with a swap of 400M or so. Aren't you supposed to make your swap double your RAM? I had let the installer define the terms and hadn't checked the swap size.

At any rate, once I got everything except Konsole and Rekonq shut down, a process that involved me clicking a control, leaving the room for five minutes to do something else, and coming back to see if it had responded to my click yet, then clicking something else if it had, I searched for help on managing my swap space. A few sites talked about 'swappiness', a value that can be modified to tell Kubuntu how often and how aggressively to use the swap space. This value was set to 60 as a default, meaning it was going to swap space fairly often. I reduced it to 10, just to see what it would do.

Sadness. (on Indigo)

The next morning I opened Amarok, Chrome, which I installed after fearing memory issues with Rekonq, and Dolphin. A few minor blips in the music stream were all the difficulties I had, but, then, I opted not to use that machine to get my work done. I'd gotten fantastically little done the day before. (In the grand scheme of 'computers hate me today', my laptop's install of KDE decided it wasn't going to load the plasma desktop, nope, and presented me with a naked gray grid and no little commas to do all the plasma things I usually like to do. *sigh* That machine so needs an upgrade/repair/reinstall/miracle. In reference to the screenshot, my lower panel was working, but was hidden at the time of the shot.)

The changed swappiness setting has helped, I think. I've still not used Cairns for any real work, but the draw on the swap space has reduced. The music streaming in Amarok still hitches from time to time, especially when the hard drive is running for any reason. I'm tempted to install another window manager so I can use the machine for my work, but I'm reluctant to toss Gnome on there because of all the associated apps that will get installed. Fluxbox might be an option. It seems that the machine runs well enough once its programs are started and running, much like my ailing WinXP install on BotanyBay. I'm hesitant to use this machine as a test box, since it's supposed to be a backup for my laptop should the upgrade go blooey, but I do want a real idea of whether or not Cairns can handle KDE 4. Ironically, the real 'test machine', Adelaide, now residing in BotanyBay's spot on the bedroom desk, exhibited only minor glitches when installing Mepis 8 and runs it very well indeed. Computers, if you guys could figure out which of you is gonna hork OS hairballs and which ones are going to behave, I'd appreciate a report. Thanks ever so.

Meet Cairns

Dell Optiplex GX260 small form factor

One of the computers I received from the local library, a small form factor edition of a Dell Optiplex GX260 tentatively named Cairns, is slated to receive a Kubuntu Maverick install soon. Cairns has 640 MB of memory and ran the Kubuntu Maverick disc without any hitches (aside from the 'cannot boot from this disk' error it threw when I first tried to boot it. A reboot convinced it of the error of its ways). It stayed idle for a day and a half while I forgot I'd left it on (it runs a lot more quietly than Kurdnatta ever did, but he had some hard disk issues), and when I returned, it was as good as it had been when I left it. That was a few weeks ago.

I didn't have the same kind of luck with the disc when I tried installing it a few days ago. The LiveCD hung twice: once before it got to the live desktop and the other after I told it I wanted to install. It worries me that this version kicks out the same getpwuid_r() error that made me rip Lucid off my other test box. Black Screen of Death, they call it. I'm sincerely hoping this edition has fixed that glaring and unforgivable error. The end user, even on a Linux system, should not be forced to hack her own GRUB in order to have a usable system. Even the LiveCD threw that error.

I checked the LiveCD for errors and it came back clean. It doesn't help that the CD drives on these library computers are the slowest ever produced by mankind. The small form factor machine has what amounts to a laptop CD drive. It has no motor to open and shut the door and is therefore a lot smaller, but it sure does make a lot of racket while it takes ten minutes or more to go from the splash screen to the Live desktop. *whirrrr-grindgrindgrindgrind-snick-whirrrrr*

I seem to have a problem with Kubuntu LiveCDs locking up on various machines. BotanyBay wouldn't run an earlier version (Karmic or Lucid, I forget which) for more than half an hour (during which I fiddled and poked at everything I could, 'cos I'm like that) before locking mouse and keyboard and requiring a reset.

My laptop, currently running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackelope with about five window managers available (KDE is my favourite), is in need of an upgrade. Things have started failing or behaving oddly, and Jaunty is out of support. Having used Windows for so very long and having had odd behaviour from Linuxes in the past, I'm leery. I need to remember to back up the system, or at least my important documents, to my terabyte drive before I do the upgrade. I would burn them to a CD, but K3B is one of the things that's not working properly anymore. *facepalm*

The install

I've managed to get Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat installed successfully on Cairns. No real problems: the install was very smooth. It booted up fine and I'm streaming ambient downtempo electronica from Soma.fm from it right now. I haven't had a chance to really work with the system yet. It should ultimately become my new print server (with Windows XP as the only OS choice for the scanner, unfortunately), but before I set it to its new job I may take it into the bedroom to have a machine in there that runs Kubuntu. Once I'm settled in with the new install, I'll make sure everything's backed up here on the laptop and *gulp* set about doing my upgrade to 9.10. I'm hoping that won't be too much of an adventure. More on how Maverick and Cairns get along to come.

Parnaparnti's Win98 install went well, but the 98 had great difficulty with every piece of hardware on the system except the keyboard and mouse. I decided to try Win XP, knowing that the machine was just within the requirements for it. That install went smoothly, and XP properly detected every device without problem. It runs a bit slowly, but the friend I gave it too seems satisfied with it, and that's what counts.

So Parnaparnti has left my home for a new life. In his place have arrived three new-to-me machines, generously donated by the local library, who now don't have to pay to have someone take them away and recycle them.

The first of these machines has been dubbed 'Adelaide' and has been installed with Win XP and Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. The XP did a 98 on me - failing to properly detect the video/display settings. I have a driver disc for that problem, which I'll get to later. Adelaide's primary function is to be my Linux print server; the Windows is there for scanning purposes, as the scanning function of my Epson Stylus combo printer/scanner/copier is reportedly not supported in Ubuntu (and I haven't tried to wrangle with XSane yet, though I plan on it).

I had originally tried to install Lucid Lynx on Adelaide, but the install disc gave me some unusual problems, not the least of which was the fact it would blank the screen halfway through the install process, leaving me unable to interact with the machine at all. So I installed Karmic, which seems to work well. The -14 kernel runs smoothly; the -22 which came with the initial updating does not. Molasses flowing down a glacier would run faster, I think. There are possible solutions to that issue as well, which I've bookmarked and are on my to-do list. For now I'm running -14, which is just fine for my purposes.

The other two machines have not been touched yet. I'll be poking around in those later this month, I hope.

Having received a new Dell Inspiron laptop from one generous friend, I'm working on refitting the IBM Thinkpad another generous friend gave to me a couple of years ago. I have great friends. The Thinkpad will be going to yet another friend who's in need of a laptop, as hers died a while back.

When I used the Thinkpad, I had a 4GB Windows 98 partition and a 7GB Xubuntu Linux partition on it. My friend doesn't want to use Linux, so I'm removing the Linux partition. Easier said than done, for me.

I'm still fairly new to Linux, and partitioning still makes me nervous. I used a Puppy Linux CD to get access to Gparted (my Gparted live disc was a bad burn or something, as it tosses I/O errors everywhere when I try to run it on any of my machines. I got tired of sweeping the I's and O's off the floor, so I switched to Puppy). I saved a session file on Saturday in the hopes of speeding up the boot process the next time I used Puppy. Puppy gave a kernel panic on loading the file, but deleting it solved that issue. Partitioning time. Oh dear.

I couldn't unmount sd6, the swap partition, for some reason, and therefore couldn't delete sd5, the main Linux partition. Gparted said to unmount partitions higher than 5, which was already done - the system was running off the CD, not the Linux on the hard drive. I shrugged and tried the other partitioner that comes with Puppy, pdisk. Choosing the cfdisk option, I didn't see the swap partition at all, and was able to remove the Linux partition. I think my mistake was in maximising the Windows partition with cfdisk. It said that a reboot was necessary, and warned me the partition might be unusuable. Greeeaat. A reboot showed that Gparted didn't know what type of partition remained: the type was black - unknown - instead of the FAT32 that was there before. I rebooted without the disc and confirmed that the Windows partition was unusable. I said a few choice words and went to get the Windows 98 setup disc.

I had originally planned to just reinstall Win98 from the CD anyway, but was worried (and still am) about any proprietary drivers that might have gotten eaten up when the partition exploded. I have a disc with a bunch of files for this machine, given me by the generous friend who gave me the Thinkpad, and I hope that the Windows install will go smoothly and that the machine will not have any hardware issues. It's less of a concern with Windows, of course, but I want to present my friend with a fully working machine, not a machine that she'll have to hand to her husband and say, "Hubby, fix this."

I've utilised fdisk in DOS to delete all the partitions and created one that spans the entire disk. It's formatting in Windows Setup now. Time will tell if this reinstall will go smoothly and my friend will have a nice old Win98 lappy to play with. Personally I think Linux is a better choice for an old machine, but I'm not the person who'll be using it.

I added a gadget that will hopefully help me track the things I want to get done with Ubuntu. I've started saying 'Ubuntu' instead of 'Linux' all the time because I spend 99% of my time using Ubuntu. I periodically tinker with other distros, but mostly I'm settled into Ubuntu and its various options.

My biggest concern is the wireless card. I have a few options on this task which I haven't completely exhausted yet. Mostly I'm consulting what people have already written on Ubuntu Forums and applying that information to my situation. No luck yet though. As it stands I'm mildly disinclined to fuss too much over the network card because my schedule has me in a room with easy access to wired internet when I'm doing my work. And at other times I've been booting into Windows Vista and running Ubuntu via VirtualBox. I'll get that wireless card sorted eventually. Or I'll take the computer to the computer help guys' store in town. Or I'll get a new wireless card.

I'd love to be able to customise Conky to my heart's content, but I don't understand it as well as I'd like to. I've run into problems trying to set up weather forecast information with it, and all I really want is a nice date/time script (which I now have) and a weather script, which is being evil. I'll work that out eventually.

And once I get Kurdnatta's Ubuntu straightened out (probably meaning a reinstall, blah), I'll focus on setting up XSane so I can run the printer's scanning functions from there and converting him to an entirely Ubuntu machine. Maybe. There are some games I still run on the Windows 98 OS, though I have other options for those, I think.

Well, actually it's not much of a saga, because it's over. I fixed the printer tonight. I opened it up to see why that paper was jammed in there and I discovered the problem.

The good news: I removed the blockage.

The bad news: The blockage was three CDs.

Naturally the top CD, the one which now sports a pair of gouges in its surface from having been dragged and dug into by the printer's drive wheels (I don't know if they're called that, but you know what I mean), was the store-bought music disc. The other two were an Xubuntu disc that had started spouting data read errors and an unknown (probably a weirdly-functioning GPartEd) disc. Ninety-nine percent certain I had ripped the music CD.

Why were there CDs in my printer, you ask? I remember having set those discs in the printer tray because I didn't want to forget about them. I don't remember starting a print job with the discs still in the tray, though the last time I tried to print I was in a bit of a hurry and may not have noticed the discs having perhaps slid deeper into the paper tray.

The moral of the story is: don't put CDs in your printer tray. At least the printer still prints.