This Old Blog

I finally pulled the trigger and replaced Suse 10.2 on europa with Ubuntu 7.04. How I got to this point was long and involved. The results of the change were less than I anticipated. If you're curious about the long strange trip it's been then read on. Otherwise you can bail at this point. It's your choice. In The Beginning Europa is my workhorse home system. It's a DIY system I built in January 2003 from components ordered from Newegg. Every component, with the notable exception of one hard disk, continues to function on the machine (and I attribute that to the fact that nothing has ever been overclocked). The motherboard is a Chaintech 7NJS Zenith (Socket A, nVidia nForce 2 400 ATX). It should be noted that Chaintech is now Walton Chaintech and they don't make motherboards any more. When it was released the 7NJS was considered a high-end motherboard, and it came stocked with just about every feature you'd ever want or need on a Socket A system board. One item ...

Let me start this entry by showing a simple screen capture of Ubuntu 7.04 running on my Gateway M685. All I had to do this time was drop the Ubuntu CDROM in the DVD drive, reboot the notebook, and wait for Ubuntu to start up. It was as smooth as proverbial silk. Here's a quick rundown of what I was able to initially check out about 7.04 running on the Gateway. Screen: The good news is that it booted and used the screen. Every pre-release version of 7.04 before this final release had screen issues; the screen booted up black and disabled. But this time It Just Worked. The bad news is that its resolution is limited to 1024 by 768. This is No Big Deal. All I have to do to fix this is install 7.04 and then install the nVidia drivers to enable the built-in Go 7800's hardware capabilities (including 1680 x 1050 resolution). I've had to do this with every release of Suse. It's No Big Deal. Network: 7.04 detected and allowed me to connect to my home wireless network without a...

Well, today is the day that Ubuntu 7.04 is officially released. I got two more updates this morning for K3B; it can now rip DVDs to MPEG-4 movies, suitable for playing on my computer or on the latest generation of portable devices. So far I've ripped about 30 of my DVD collection on my Suse 10.2 system. Right now I'm performing a test rip on "Batman Begins". I'm still debating whether I want to download and re-install from scratch, just to see if any little quirks I ran during the testing phases clear up. But considering that everything Just Works the way I expected is a strong incentive not to screw around with it. Regardless of the OS, it takes time to install, update, and configure it to my liking. This occurs with any Linux distribution or Windows. Micheal Dell Uses Ubuntu Yep. Found this item via /. Looks like Micheal Dell uses Ubuntu 7.04 on his Dell Precision M90 , a souped up laptop with a 2.33 GHz Intel T7600, 4GB of DRAM, 17" screen, and nVidia Quad...

There was an entry on Shuttleworth's blog about Beryl in universe. So I followed his advice and installed it, then fired it up. Boy, has Beryl come a long way since I installed it on my notebook under Suse 10.1. You can see a screen shot of the whole setup running below. I've got the Beryl defaults for Ubuntu installed and enabled. And with all the effects running it looks and runs sweet. The screen shot above shows one of the new Beryl effects (new to me, anyway); a preview of any of the applications on the panel if the mouse pointer hovers over any given application. The screen shot shows the movie running in the middle of the desktop, and a thumbnail is also running in the lower right corner. And I mean running in the lower right corner. This is the exact same effect as what you'd find running Vista. That AVI movie was ripped (transcoded) from a DVD to a 1GB MPEG-4 file. I performed the transcoding using K3B under Suse 10.2. I tried K3B under Ubuntu, but K3B's trans...

Linux continues to show strong growth across the entire industry from small devices up to the enterprise level. The following are just a few examples of this from the week of April 9th. Sumitomo Electric buys into Novell - This was a major deal with a very conservative, established business that didn't rely on the Microsoft/Novell deal that so many hold in disdain. Novell knows how to sell solutions, and Novell knows how to create excellent software, open or closed. Here's to Novell's continuing success. Red Hat Signs Master Marketing Agreement with SAIC - I'm no fan of SAIC, but I have to appreciate what this deal means for Red Hat. Basically, SAIC will use Red Hat system software solutions (OS, JBoss, etc) as part of their overall engineering solutions that they pitch to the federal government. From personal experience the military side of the government is truly split about the use of closed (Windows, etc) vs. open (Linux, etc) software underpinning their systems. ...

The updates keep coming in at a steady rate every day. They range anywhere from 20 to 40 packages/update on a given day. It will be interesting to see what is finally touched up and cleaned up for the April 19th official release of 7.04. Some good news: The display problem with the NetworkManager was fixed with today's updates. It now displays the state of the underlying networking system. Some peculiar news: I ran into an interesting problem during yesterday's batch of updates that included an attempted update to the kernel. Two items to point out in the screen capture above. First, the update manager has failed to download kernel 2.6.20-14-generic with a 403 HTTP error . Second, kernel 2.6.20-14-generic was already installed and running on rhea. The 403 error is usually the 'forbidden' error. If somebody realized that it was a mistake to leave this package on the update server, why not remove it? They I'd have seen the ubiquitous 404 (not found) error. My greater ...

I commented yesterday that after the marathon upgrade networking wasn't enabled after a re-boot. Turns out I was wrong about that. It's actually working, it's that the network applet icon incorrectly shows state and when you hover the mouse over the icon it says "No network connection". But if you right click on the icon and then select connection information from the menu you discover that it is fully connected. I tested that connection out by firing up NetBeans and seeing that the welcome screen goes out and gathers articles and news to display. And of course it did. I then fired up Firefox and wrote up this entry. And of course the network applet still shows my network connection disabled. When 7.04 is finally and officially released I'll do a complete re-install and see if any of these issues (network and Compiz) clear up. We are, after all, still in development mode. And part of the final testing should be a new installation just to make sure the old bad ...