Ubuntu – TestBlog

The drudgery

Not sure how many times I’ve been through the steps in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhMQIpCP1A. Most irritating to me is the way in which the bug in GRUB that doesn’t kill a boot process but throws a bunch of misleading errors was skipped over. Went down a bit rabbit hole on that when it turns out my biggest issue has to do with the X/Nouveau video driver. It has only the slightest degree of support for the GeForce 750 TI video card I installed. So the boot would appear to puke up front but allow you to continue only to puke for real after logging that it was adding swap space. What was really happening though, is that the filesystem was successfully mounted and it was switching to graphical mode. Only it couldn’t because of the suck.

Thankfully the NVIDIA driver installs correctly and disables nouveau for me at the same time. The only problem there was getting to a terminal while xserv wasn’t running so that it could perform the install. So, after many attempts, tonight I will finally, successfully, build out my new server with a permanent installation. While doing laundry. Because I’m hyper-threaded like my CPU.

Install Ubuntu Server so as to set up a RAID5 device with partitions for swap, /, and /home
Reboot into repair mode
Mount the root RAID partition
Drop into a shell
Set the GRUB quick boot option to false in the grub config
wget/run the NVIDIA driver
Reboot into server mode
apt-get install ubuntu-desktop cinnamon (because Unity is still the suck)
and then restore /home from backup (again) and install all of the software that makes the machine go (again)
Set up my Windows 7 VM for seamless mode and install all my Windows-only apps like Evernote, VisualStudio 2013, etc.

All-in-all, though, the new workstation is a beast. I don’t think I’ve seen CPU usage over 60%, RAM usage above 40%, and the CPU temp higher than 80°F. I haven’t done any serious benchmarking but I’ve put it under some load multitasking installs, compilation, and running VMs. It should be a great testbed for evaluating Vagrant, Docker, Jenkins, and Gradle.

Fail-state = FAIL

Using Ubuntu 14.04 which is the current LTS release I was able to install Gnome-Do [1] and basically rock it. Gnome-Do is a port/clone of the Quicksilver app for Macs. It’s a launcher but so much more. It follows a subject/predicate/[object] syntax activated by a key combination. It’s also scriptable. Suddenly the mouse/touchpad becomes an optional device on the Mac. Which is a good thing, by the way.

Executive summary: If you’re on MacOSX[foo] and you’re not using Quicksilver [2], then you’re wrong and you probably won’t have any viable progeny.

With that out of the way, you can see how one would find a port/clone of this app on a *nix box to be a good thing too. I mean, there is always a terminal window open and any .bashrc file worth its salt will have shortcuts galore which mirrors the launching half of what Quicksilver provides. But the scripting? Again, you can predict much of that and stuff that into your .bashrc (you are using bash, right?) but when it comes to on-the-fly scriptability, Gnome-Do was tops.

Until I upgraded anyway. The move from 14.04 to 14.10 may not have been wholly advisable–after all there isn’t much new in 14.10 and certainly nothing I needed. But the upshot being, I did the in-place upgrade and that absolutely killed Gnome-Do. In fact, it killed Gnome. It killed everything Gnome related. No Unity, no Gnome-shell, no Cinnamon, no MATE. Nothing.

Luckily I’d installed Fluxbox because it’s never lost its old-school charm. Sometimes you want a windowing system that is lightweight and not loaded with geegaws. At any rate, Fluxbox –> Terminal –> apt-get purge and everything was cleaned up in regards to that.

Of course, I ended up re-partioning and pulling my /home/nhansen across on an untouched partition anyway because the upgrade also blew up all of the gnome-related sound processing during video playback…and that problem wasn’t so easily solved.

So how did you spend your vacation days in November, Nick? Troubleshooting an in-place upgrade and ultimately Un/re-installing a base operating system on my primary workstation. Hooray for fun times!

At any rate, in the process I have a more robust partitioning scheme, a fresh 14.10 install, and a newfound respect for the Mint distro’s [3] folks fear of in-place upgrade installs.

Oh, and so the funny thing? I got everything fixed and then tonight apt-get installed gnome-do again. Before reinstalling Fluxbox. Why? I wish I had a good answer to that. Anyway, thank the higher power that Ctrl-Alt-F[2 -6] brings up a terminal windows from which I could apt-get purge that little fucker.

Never again, Gnome-Do! Do you hear me? Never fucking again! Bastard.

[1] http://do.cooperteam.net/
[2] http://qsapp.com/
[3] http://linuxmint.com/

Com

I don’t know how they did it, but Canonical turned the normally frustrating and inane Eclipse environment set up into a god damn dog’s breakfast rotting on the steps to the portal of hell.

I used to want to do a little brushing up on my Eclipse/Struts/Ajax skills but now I mostly just want to punch holes in walls.

Simple Home File Server Based On Ubuntu

Simple Home File Server Based On Ubuntu | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials is a nice little howto article that netted me a file server to use for daily backups. Elz’s hard drive melting down last weekend finally got my ass in gear to put this together. Of course, not before she lost all of her email and address book. I was able to save the photos and music collection though. Hooray for partitions!

At any rate, if’n you’re looking for a quick and dirty network file server, you could do a lot worse than this. OTOH, if’n you’re looking for a micro-powered, highly tailored file server, you can probably do a lot better. All I know is that I now have all of our machines dumping nightly backups to a file server, and have the foundation for a home media center once I get myself together for that project.

Ubuntu Oddity

I’ve been using Ubuntu server edition for my end-of-lifecycle PC turned headless web/file server for the past year and change. For the most part I like it. What you lose in hardware-specific tuning in Gentoo you generally more than make up for in easy of install and use. I rather like Gentoo’s portage and have since come to appreciate the utility of apt-get. What I don’t like, however, is Unbuntu / Debian’s insistence on renaming popular modules in what I would assume is some misguided attempt at making the whole OS human readable.

For example, I spent an unreasonable amount of time yesterday hunting for PyXML, a bog-standard and widely used 3rd party Python module. It wasn’t until I finally decided to step outside the apt-get process and install myself from source that I found a reference indicating that PyXML is actually referred to as python-xml in Ubuntu.

In the grand scheme of things, it rates a meh. Still, there is always a small window of opportunity for programming projects on the weekend and the more time I have to spend configging my environment, the less time and energy I have for doing what it is I want. If you’re going to fudge with the package names, please include a thesaurus.

That is all.