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Linux

OS Installation Master

I am the OS Installation Master. I must have installed or booted LiveCDs of Ubuntu at least 10 times today.

When I re-installed 5.10 last week, I got a weird error on my first bootup that no OS wasn’t found. I re-installed, and deleted all the partitions on both hard drives, and no problems.

Well, similar situation after installing Edubuntu and Dapper Drake Flight 3. Same error. After installing and reinstalling OS’s to no avail, including wiping the main hard drive, and spending a couple hours tweaking GRUB by hand, it turns out that the boot order in my BIOS was out of order, looking at the 2nd hard drive first, instead of the 1st hard drive. I have no idea how the BIOS was changed (sure wasn’t by me!), as the MBR is on the first hard drive. Changed the BIOS option, and booting in to (a fresh version) of Ubuntu. Now the test will be installing Edubuntu again on the 2nd hard drive.

But I can say I have installing Ubuntu down cold. The bad news is, was that I installed Quake IV and Doom 3 this morning, patched ’em, and downloaded a few mods. It was time consuming, but not that big a loss. The good news is was that re-installing wasn’t that big of a deal, as I had everything backed up from my fresh install last week.

Reformat Complete

I’m up and running on a clean install of Ubuntu 5.10. Everything went smooth, swapped the hard drives out, re-installed from scratch, wiping my hard drives clean.

One of the cooler things I found during the re-install, was Automatix and Easy Ubuntu. Both are illegal in the United States, specifically for the codec support they install (DVD, MP3, etc).

Basically, they do the same thing, though Automatix is more complete. They provide a script to install everything a default Ubuntu installation didn’t – support for MP3, DVD, plugins like Flash and Java for Firefox, missing applications like dvd::rip, windows codecs, multimedia players such as mplayer, etc. All automagically by updating your sources.list file for you and just runnign the script. Automatix lets you pick and choose, and then just installs the stuff. Very cool that the user community have started these projects.

I’m going to wait on installing Dapper Drake Flight 3 on the second hard drive. Instead, I downloaded Edubuntu, and am going to install that first. With three kids under the age of 10, I’ve always wanted to start them on Linux. My 10 year old son no longer really plays games – he plays a ton of flash games on the net from Lego, Yahooligans, etc. Edubuntu may be a great alternative, but I will need to find a new wireless card. So we’ll install that and take a look-see.

Filezilla 3

My favorite FTP client for Windows, Filezilla, is being ported to Linux for the release of Filezilla 3. Linuxedge has a preview of Filezilla 3 on Linux built from CVS.

Pretty cool, I’ve been a big fan of Filezilla for years, though gFTP seems to work fine for me on my Linux desktop. It looks GNOME-HIG compliant, and will be interesting to test out.

Ubuntu Fun

As I mentioned in my last post, screwing around with my Ubuntu repositories has messed some stuff up on my system. Most of my Mono apps no longer work, with the exception of Tomboy.

This past Sunday, I was modding another Xbox, and unzipping ROM files like a madman, when I ran out of disk space. 60 gigs goes fast, especially with all the music and photos on this machine, as well as a few games.

I have a 20 gig installed as a secondary drive, where I keep a development version of Ubuntu running. I haven’t booted in to that drive a while.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to contribute something to Ubuntu this year. Whether it’s writing documentation, bug hunting, or on the wiki, I need to do something. (God knows I can’t right code). More on that in another post.

How do these all tie together? Today I began the process of backing up my stuff on this machine, and I’m going to swap out hard drives and reinstall. I debated about just throwing in an extra hard drive replacing the 20 gig to fix my space problem and mounting that, but I discarded that option. I’m going to get a 120 gig drive as my main hard drive to run Ubuntu 5.10 as my stable operating system, and make the 60 gig drive run the latest development version of Ubuntu, Dapper Drake.

So tonight I’ll swap out my CDRW for a DVDRW, remove and add a hard drive, and re-install Ubuntu a couple of times.

Fun!

Upgrading Mono – whoops!

I wanted to upgrade the to the latest Banshee music player something fierce. I’ve been meaning to blog about Banshee for forever and a day, but with the latest tarball out, that includes plugin support, especially Audioscrobbler, I tried to upgrade.

Well, Banshee wants the latest and greatest Mono. I checked the Ubuntu Backports, but they didn’t have the latest Banshee nor Mono.

So I tried something that worked when I was running Ubuntu 5.04 and wanted the latest VLC to stream 89.3 The Current – I changed my sources.list to the latest Ubuntu (Dapper Drake), upgraded the Mono and Banshee packages, and then downgraded my sources.list back to Ubuntu 5.10.

Mono seems to be working fine, and the Mono apps I have loaded (Tomboy, F-Spot) with one exception – Banshee. Banshee segfaults if you just look at it funny. I can’t listen to music, import my library, or restart it after a crash.

Ah well, back to XMMS for listening to music.

Merry Christmas for Linux

The Gstreamer team at Fluendohas licensed the MP3 codec for use on Linux! From the article:

Why are we doing this ? Quite simple. mp3 is a very widespread format, and the fact that Linux could not legally play it out of the box in countries where patents apply is posing a lot of problems for adoption. It is one of the most commonly heard complaints about distros these days. Fluendo still fully supports open formats, and we hope people move to using them. Part of that move is being able to play your legacy formats, where you have no choice over the format. Remember, we are not giving away a free encoder.

What does this mean? That one of the biggest oversights in all Linux distributions has been fixed – Distro’s can bundle in MP3 decoding support out of the box, and not have to worry about patent issues.

Thanks Fluendo!

Ubuntu Desktop News

The first Ubuntu Desktop News has been published.

It contains an overview of all the work being done on the upcoming 6.04 Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu, specifically around desktop improvements.

With lots of topics, including speed improvements, being able to install packages by just double-clicking on a .deb file (!), Rhythmbox mention, and an interview with Sebastian Bacher, if you’re an Ubuntu user, this is worth a read!

Second Life Linux Port Update

Back in July, I blogged about Icculus starting a port of Second Life.

About a month ago, I signed up for a Second Life account as it was: a) free and b) you need an account to get on the Second Life forums. I was looking for an answer or update on the Linux port. I didn’t find anything, but I headed back today, and found this post by Andrew Linden on the Linden staff:

_Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Zaius

I think LL’s contractor has gone walkabout. We saw some initial screenshots, then nothing._

Actually, he [ed: Icculus] did go missing. As far as I know the project was started on his own initiative. He wanted to work on it in his copius spare time and LL’s stance was, “If you can do it, great!”. He made some rapid progress, then got sidetracked and never got back to it. I prodded him twice but he didn’t reply.

Which is very unfortunate. I don’t even have access to SL at home anymore since our Windows computer finally succumbed to a virus. I transferred all of the important data over to a Knoppix/debian machine and haven’t had time to rebuild a fresh Windows installation.

I would love to work on a GNU/Linux port of SL but I already have a full plate of stuff to do that I can’t get done fast enough. 🙁

Very interesting. Nice to have an update, and I’m intrigued that Icculus started the port on his own. I’m curious if he had the source from Linden Labs, or used the Mac client to port it to Linux. I’m disappointed that it never got finished, but I more than understand getting sidetracked when you were working on it for free.

Icculus.org is down (just today) switching ISPs, and I think Icculus has a FAQ up about contacting him – and this is one of those topics that are probably taboo. Bummer.