This Old Blog

Ubuntu Gnome (Gnome 3 + Ubuntu 13.10) Last night my copy of VMware Player 6 automatically updated itself to version 6.0.1. In the process the VMware Tools that are installed on the various virtual machines were also updated, in particular those for the latest Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 13.10. Under VMware Player 6 the shared directory kernel module failed to compile . Under 6.0.1 the module successfully compiled, installed, and executed, allowing my Share directory on the Windows 8.1 host side to be seen. And of course, as I reported earlier after repairing the version 6 installation , networking out of the VM into the outside world is working just fine. Gnome 3 showing some of its hidden capabilities As the picture captions note, this is Ubuntu Gnome , a distribution built up from Gnome 3.8 and Ubuntu 13.10 . This combination has resulted in a stable and pleasant distribution. I find it somewhat amusing that two of the more controversial desktops (Gnome 3 and Unity...

Over the weekend I upgraded to Windows 8.1, then discovered that networking for the virtual machines wouldn't work. Then I tried something incredibly simple and fixed the problem. Checking the system I noticed that three VMware Windows services weren't running; VMnetDHCP, VMUSBArbService, and VMwareNatService. VMware Player allows you to install, remove, or fix an existing installation. I chose to try fixing the installation, and that fixed the problem. The services were re-installed/restarted, and the virtual machines had networking again. Once network connectivity was established there was exactly one updated file for Ubuntu 13.10, a data file. This underscores how solid and finished the release was this time. Every other version of every other Linux installation I've ever dealt with has always been succeeded by boatloads of updates after the initial installation. But not this time. Everything is working properly on my notebook. All's right with the world.

Update 26 October 2013 All of this has been overcome by events (OBE) as noted in this post:  http://blogbeebe.blogspot.com/2013/10/ubuntu-1310-windows-81-vmware-player.html tl;dr - It's all fixed now. Original It hardly took any time at all for me to download the Ubuntu 13.10 ISO file and install the latest Ubuntu as a virtual machine on VMware Player 6 running on my shiny new Windows 8.1 system. For the most part it's been error and trouble free. Except for one issue, which I'll get to shortly. But first, all the good news. I've read the various "reviews" [sic] from the various online tech pubs, most notably Ars Technica, and the general consensus is "meh." There are times where meh is a Good Thing. The one feature (if you want to call it that) about Ubuntu 13.10 is the polish applied to 13.04. Just as Windows 8.1 can be considered a polished Windows 8, instead of a major new upgrade. In the pell-mell rush to release software to stay ahe...

Fedora 17 base install with Gnome 3 before a massive update I spent the majority of last week at an integration event. Part of the toolkit I took with me was a Dell Latitude E6510 with RHEL 6.3 installed. Running on top of that was VMware Player to host several VMs that ran additional systems as part of the event. I'd also installed Google's exfat driver to support a 64GB SDXC card and additional drivers from EPEL to support a 500GB LaCie external drive formated as NTFS. It was a decent enough system, and certainly supported the integration event to a very successful conclusion. When I got back home, however, I wanted a more advanced kernel on the notebook, one that had a chance of supporting the E6510's wifi wireless chipset. The older driver under RHEL couldn't see it (or I never saw it with the tools), so I installed Fedora 17 to get at least the drivers installed. Sure enough, dmesg logs that the Intel wifi chipset was found and enabled on boot: [ 5.40642...

There's an place at the intersection of East Colonial and North Ferncreek called Ice Cold Auto Air . They've been there so long (since 1964) they've become something of a landmark. Right under their sign they have this heavily customized VW minibus which has been painted up in various color schemes for years. Recently it was given yet another paint job and given something of a name. It's now called "Penguin Power." It looks all cute and interesting from the outside, but a quick peek into the interior tells a slightly different tale. The panels are missing from inside the doors. The dash had been reconstructed from "home brew" materials, and spray painted interesting shades. Wires dangle from beneath the dash and some feed directly through the front sheet metal to the lights outside. Some of the interior material is torn, exposing yellow filler foam. The interior looks like it's usable, but it's definitely not the kind of vehicle you...

I stumbled across this behavior of the Unity desktop quite by accident (like so much else). Look in the lower left corner of the screen at the bottom of the launcher. Note how the lowest icons, starting with the Workspace Switcher, are stacked on top of one another, instead of lying flat as it they do from the Synaptic Package Manager up to Dash. I discovered this behavior when re-starting the 12.04 VM. The VM screen tends to remain at the small default launch size, which is how I stumbled upon this behavior. It's an interesting solution to the problem that exists with 11.10. If the screen of Ubuntu 11.10 is small like this, then the lowest icons are simply covered with a shadow cast by the Trash Can. If you hover the mouse over the launcher then the icons will automatically scroll up, uncovering the covered icons. The same behavior is observed with 12.04, except a little more convoluted. Hovering the mouse over the stacked icons unstacks them, and then as the mouse if held ov...

Yes, I lied. I kept Ubuntu 12.04 around (and 11.10 for that matter) while I went off to do other tasks. Today, after reading a comment from an unknown about enabling 3D acceleration on the VMware Player to correct the Ubuntu 12.04 window resizing problem, I decided to fire up the instances of 11.10 and 12.04 for further examination. First, I upgraded the patches and packages of both versions. Then I enabled 3D acceleration for both. In the case of 11.10, enabling 3D acceleration accomplished nothing. But sure enough, just like unknown wrote, enabling 3D acceleration for 12.04 cleaned up the window resizing, as well as fixing the text artifacts and giving the whole desktop a subtle but significant makeover. What is interesting in 12.04 with 3D acceleration is that the Dash Home panel now covers the entire desktop when selected. I know it didn't do this for Ubuntu 11.10, and I'm not so sure it did this for the non-3D-accelerated 12.04 desktop. I'm neutral as to wheth...

Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 desktop, Firefox 12 Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 desktop. Terminal has "fake transparency" enabled. A few days ago I wrote about my experiences with Ubuntu 12.04 vs Ubuntu 11.10. After giving 24 hours to think it over, I've decided to drop all Ubuntu support in the lab. We're pretty much a Redhat shop,using RHEL 6.2, filling in with Fedora and CentOS as needed. The key to this is what do my sponsors use, and it turns out that for official deployment when they use Linux they use RHEL or CentOS, while the developers pretty much use Fedora (I use Fedora). I wish Ubuntu the best of luck, but I doubt it will show back up, either on regular computing platforms or portable devices such as tablets. If anything we've adapted Android as our small device OS, as have all sponsors who use Android. The other portable device OS they use is iOS and certain Apple devices, but only in very narrow niches. My favorite Fedora release by far has been Fedora 14...

Ubuntu 11.10 with default Ambiance theme. Ubuntu 11.10 with Radiance theme. Note easily readable dark text on light background. I've got four new screen captures, two from Ubuntu 11.10 (top) and two from 12.04 LTS. I wanted to illustrate some of the differences, some of the annoying differences, between the two. As I stated earlier, and as I've said in the past with Ubuntu versions 7 and 8 (search the blog if you want) upgrading from one Ubuntu release to the next is fraught with some peril. An installation that works fine will wind up with broken, arbitrarily changed, and/or missing features in the next. It's been so in the past, and it appears to be so between 11.10 and 12.04. What makes this unacceptable this time is 12.04 is a Long Term Support release. Canonical repeatedly stated how important it was to produce a polished release this time. Based on my initial experiences 12.04 isn't polished. I'm better off sticking to 11.10 until such time as 12.04 ...

Nothing out of the ordinary to report. Rather than upgrade my Ubnuntu 11.10 virtual machine, I created a new VMware VM from the Ubuntu 12.04 DVD ISO. Installation went flawlessly if a bit boring (boring is good). Just to mention this One More Time, in order to setup a non DHCP network connection before you install, go into the Network panel (bring up Dash, type "net" into the search bar and click on the Network icon that appears) and from there set the 'Wired' and 'Network proxy' settings to connect to your network. This will allow you to both install from the DVD (disk or attached ISO) as well as pick up any network updates during the initial install. Or you can wait until after installing to do the work. The first application I installed after initial system installation was Synaptic. I used Synaptic to further tune the system. I don't know what I'll do the day Synaptic finally disappears from Ubuntu. I hate Ubuntu Software Center. I tried once ag...

Three instances of Google's Chrome on the Unity desktop Those three instances in tile layout after clicking the Chrome icon in the Unity launcher In digging a little further into how Ubuntu 11.10 works, I installed Real Google Chrome. I then used Chrome to create a shortcut to Oracle Java on the desktop (via Wrench | Tools | Create Application Shortcuts), then experimented a bit with the results. If you're not familiar with Google's browser "applications", know that when Google's Chrome creates a shortcut to a web page, on execution (double click the shortcut on the desktop) the shortcut launches Chrome as an application without any of the tabs or other decorations present on the regular Google Chrome browser. For those who are used to multiple tabs in one browser instead of multiple browser instances on the desktop this behavior can be somewhat surprising. Unit's left-side launcher provides nominal visual feedback as to what is going on. In t...

Real honest-to-goodness Google Chrome Finally found decent directions for installing Google Chrome here:  http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=381d28fd49d3fc52&hl=en I'll repeat the pertenant parts. Perform the following four steps in order: Download the Chrome Debian package to your 'Downloads' directory (or whatever directory Firefox uses for downloads) from http://www.google.com/chrome Open a terminal from Dash or press [Ctrl][Shift][T] Run command: sudo apt-get install libnspr4-0d libnss3-1d libxss1 libcurl3 Run command: sudo dpkg -i './Downloads/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb' Once installed you'll find it via Dash. You can drag-and-drop the Chrome icon to the launcher. Why use Google's Chrome rather than what you'll find via Ubuntu Software Center? Because the version in Ubuntu Software Center is at major revision 14, while Google Chrome's major version (at this point in time) is 15. After installin...

Running synaptic from Dash. Note that I've also dropped the synaptic icon on the left vertical launcher. I received a couple of questions from Rick Reumann via a comment on the post " At Work With Linux - Ubuntu 11.10, Day 2 ". His questions are at the bottom of the page and boiled down to how to setup synaptic as the default installer such that double clicking on a .deb file starts it up, and how to start synaptic from Dash and hopefully from the launcher. Starting with the second question I was able to start synaptic from Dash, and I was able to drag and drop the icon to the launcher such that clicking on the synaptic icon launched it. So that part did work for me. Unfortunately, I have no answers for the rest of his questions. You can't create individual application launchers on the desktop, and you can't create them on the fly on the launcher bar. I did discover while installing the NetBeans IDE 7.1 RC2 downloaded from Oracle that you could programmati...

Executive Summary It's come a long way and it's quite good, even when booted from a USB drive. Long Version I wrote yesterday about the pleasures of using Ubuntu on one of the Dell workstations. Late last night I decided to boot the old Dell Latititude D630 with Ubuntu installed on a thumb drive. The Latitude already runs 64-bit Fedora 14 with excellent effect. Every feature works, including Broadcom 802.11 wireless hardware in the notebook. I've written already how happy I am that everything Just Works with Fedora on the Latitude. But Fedora 14 (Laughlin) was released over a year ago on November of 2010. Fedora 16 (Verne) was released a month ago on 6 November. While it's easy to upgrade and install the latest and greatest on virtual machines in the lab, I have learned to slow down and upgrade with considerable caution when it's a machine I depend on quite a lot, or that already does everything I want. I jumped off the upgrade treadmill a while back, havin...

Criticizing Ubuntu and Unity has become something of a blood sport, especially at that solipsistic cesspool of lopsided criticism known as TM Repository. To read any number of recent forum comments you'd think Canonical had been hit with mass stupidity to even consider replacing Gnome (2) with Unity, especially a desktop environment that hews more towards tablets than the classic desktop. Well, I'm here to tell you, that after installing Ubuntu 11.10 on a Dell 690 workstation in our lab, that Ubuntu and Unity are a pretty slick combination. It took two attempts for a completely successful installation of Ubuntu 11.10 on the Dell 690. The first time I failed to configure the proxy server on the live desktop. I went on ahead and installed Ubuntu, and then assumed that if I missed any updates they'd come through after first boot. Unfortunately that first install left certain parts of Ubuntu in an "unknown" state that impacted some functionality. Rather than hack ...

You're looking at the Software Center, working again. I complained about its not working and spewing out an error message. I blamed it on Ubuntu, and I was probably wrong to do that. It turns out it's not a problem with Ubuntu but in this particular case the environment in which it's run. My instanced of Ubuntu 11.10 is running as a VMware virtual machine. This particular screenshot of Software Center running is after cold starting the instance. You can either shut down a VM or you can just put it to sleep, then restart the VM where you left off. And that's the key to the malfunction. I was hoping that another upgrade might have restored Software Center. To complete the installation I restarted Ubuntu and after the reboot found Software Center was indeed working again. I put the VM to sleep, then came back to it later in the day and discovered that Software Center was back to it's original failure mode. And then the lightbulb came on. I shut down the VM, the...

As I first mentioned last Friday I've installed Ubuntu 11.10 in a VMware virtual machine. Today I spent a few more minutes checking out how it worked. One of the first things the installation did after I started it back up was to download about 60 updates. Considering it was just released, I find that a bit peculiar. But then I always find it peculiar when a newly released distribution version such as Ubuntu downloads a slew of patches right after it's release. Not to worry, though; Fedora does the same thing, as does OpenSUSE. What I wanted to note was the use of Unity 2D on the desktop. Even thought it's not using hardware acceleration, it can still support credible transparency as shown by the terminals. One aspect of the launcher I find somewhat annoying is the inability to launch more than one instance. I can understand this on an Android tablet. But this is a genuine Linux desktop. You should be able to launch additional copies just by clicking on the icon. I di...