Get Up 8
This is my first new post since kfial went down. It's taken me a
while to get going again. (Actually I got mail and other sites up pretty
fast, but it has been a while for the blog.)
Mostly, the delay has been due to my internal struggle between
getting it back up as fast as possible—clearly a failure—and
completely overhauling the look and feel and organization of the site. I
finally came down somewhere in the middle.
As you might guess from the new title, Get Up 8 and the
very raw style, things will be changing. I haven't decided entirely how
yet, but I have some ideas to implement over the next couple of weeks.
At the same time, I'll be getting the older entries online real soon
now.
Trying to solve some network stupid network problems, I upgraded one
of our laptops from dapper to edgy. It came off without a hitch, and
seemed to fix the problem: the machine would forget which /etc/hosts
file it was supposed to be using on reboot.
It went so well, in fact, that I decided to move our other laptop,
the one I use primarily to feisty. This was a little more
troublesome.
The packages downloaded and installed, no problem, but when it came
time to reboot, the boot procedure would hang, complaining that
/dev/hda6, the boot partition, could not be found. I dug around a
little, and discovered that, when booting kernel 2.6.20 (only, not
previous kernels as demonstrated when I picked 2.6.17 at bootup), the
hard disk in the machine was being recognized as scsi, and given a scsi
designation (/dev/sda, instead of /dev/hda). I scratched my head and
grumbled for a while, went off, had a cup of coffee, surfed fruitlessly
for an answer to why it was doing this, and ultimately decided I was
going to have to figure it out on my own.
Coming back to the machine, the first thing I did was look at the
boot parameters. At the appropriate state of the bootstrap procedure, I
pressed ESC to get to the grub prompt, Picked the line for booting
2.6.20-16, and 'e' to edit it.
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-386 root=/dev/hda6 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img-2.6.20-16-386
quiet
savedefault
Well, there's a problem. It's looking on the non-existent /dev/hda6
partition for the root directory. I changed it to sda6 and booted.
Bingo. That was easy
.
To make the change stick, I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to reflect the
change I made at the grub command editor.
I installed Beryl on a
laptop yesterday, and I've been enjoying the experience overall. When I
first heard of it, I turned my nose up at it as a favoring of style over
substance. At PyCon, though, I saw some people using it and had the
opportunity in the meantime to use a Mac and experience things like
Exposé and the dashboard, and my interest was piqued.
Desktop switching becomes freefall.
Things I like:
- Scale/Window Picker may change the way I work.
- Thumbnails during Application/Window Switching make changing tasks
much quicker.
- A few of the provided animations enhance the user experience.
Things I don't like:
- Some keyboard shortcuts I setup for Gnome/Metacity have continued to
work, e.g., ctrl-n for the browser and ctrl-m for mail. Others, like
ctrl-t for a terminal window, don't. I haven't figured out why this is,
though I did add ctrl-t throught the Beryl Settings Manager. I haven't
determined if I can hook the "windows" key (Super_L) back up to the
Gnome panel menu; I particularly miss that setting.
- There's a dearth of documentation. It's hard to know what a
particular setting is even for, unless it's self-explanatory, which many
of them are, fortunately. Of course, this is a great opportunity to
contribute to the project.
- Some features have no discernable effect. I followed the directions from the Beryl FAQ to apply transparency to
menus, just to check it out, and nothing changed. I've seen this on a
few features. For some, it could just be that I don't know what change
I've actually made in some cases.
- Too many configurables!
As Chris and Jeff predicted, the biggest
annoyances stem from moving from a mature desktop environment/window
manager to something newer, with different commands and interactions, as
well as niggling problems that might be bugs or might just be my lack of
experience with the system, though some would say if don't grasp the
workings of the system, that in itself is a bug.
Lest I sound down on it though, these are only initial impressions
after a few hours of use, some of which were spent fiddling with the
configuration and focusing on Beryl rather than just working within its
environment. It's neat, bringing an underused piece of hardware, the 3D
display card, into the workflow.
The first indication I had that anything was wrong was the weather.
The gray question mark icon where a tiny bank of clouds should have
been, and a readout of – ° C
suggested a curious
discontinuity. A quick glance out the window confirmed that there was,
in fact, weather and, I assumed, temperature, so I was going to have to
look somewhere else for the problem.
After several rounds of iwlist, iwconfig, and
ifconfig, I was able to determine that the wireless router, a
Linksys WRT56G rev 6, had freaked out, seriously. It handled wireless
packets, passing them on to the wired link, and it passed the packets
back from his wired link over the wireless. It appeared, healthy and as
expected, on scans of local wifi nodes. It would not, though, allow new
wireless nodes to associate with it, nor would it answer pings.
Basically, if a machine was already associated with the access point
at the time of the out-freaking, that machine continued to work
normally. Machines that needed to associate subsequently, though, got no
love.
Power cycling the router did not fix the problem. I had to reset and
reconfigure it. Whee!
I hope this is not an indicator of things to come.
Since the latest Ubuntu automated update, the newly-installed Firefox
version, 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.9-0ubuntu0.6.06, has been
unstable, crashing on simple pages. It seems to be able to work with
some pages, but crashes on other pages of similar complexity. The most
recent headache has involved a mailman
generated page the code for which is trivial. (It's the adminstrator
authentication page.)
The first thing I tried was creating a fresh firefox user profile.
The page loaded successfully once, but crashed each subsequent
attempt.
Then I downloaded the page using wget, and loaded it from
disk. No crash. If I loaded the page from disk, authenticated, then
clicked the link for "administrative interface", firefox crashes.
On the server machine, I made a static copy of the page, and loaded
it (via the apache server running there), and no crash occurred. I could
authenticate and look at the pending administrative requests. This time
when I clicked "administrative interface", firefox did not crash. I
reloaded the page several times to be sure.
I have a gut feeling the problem is not related to the the markup or
rendering but to the handling of the http request.
Friends using ubuntu (but a different versions of firefox) report the
page loads for them without problem.
So far, no solution has presented it self, short of upgrading firefox
outside the ubuntu package management system, which I would do with
another Linux distro, like fedora. It seems in such conflict with the
ubuntu, linux-for-everyone ideal, though, that my pragmatism is being
overridden by my principle.
After enough of not being able to conveniently administer my lists,
though, I'm sure my pragmatism will throttle my idealism into
submission.
Enough of that pain; now it's time to go to the dentist.