News archive 2009

I just upgraded my wife's laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Very smooth upgrade experience; the update detected the few modifications I did to some system files, and asked me how to proceed. I could even get a diff of the changes, so it was very easy for me to remember what the change was for (an AppArmor hack (see previous entry) that isn't necessary any more, a tweak to enable the built-in laptop speakers; testing showed this now works out-of-the-box, too, and automatic installation of non-critical fixes, which I've re-applied for the Karmic repository). A non-technical user probably would have been overwhelmed by that, and just chosen overwrite, which would have been okay, too.
Unfortunately, the update also quickly showed up an annoying but harmless regression.
There are very few visible changes (which I appreciate); the default color scheme contains a slightly darker window title color. The new startup splash screen is supposed to be cool; I don't like it, and on my wife's laptop, there's now a brief return into text mode, which kind of ruins the visual smoothness of the boot animation.

Finally, the Ubuntu freezes have been fixed. Well, unfortunately, not in Jaunty, but in the upcoming Karmic. I've manually installed the updated xserver-org-core package. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of preventing cupds from starting, and thus a complaint from my wife: I cannot print any more!.
A quick research showed that AppArmor's security settings caused the daemon to abort, and I found a workaround that made it start up again. I reported this in the bug's comments, and no 25 minutes passed (on a Sunday!) until someone added a link to an existing bug in AppArmor (also fixed in Karmic). This level of community and support is really awesome! Thanks, Ubuntu!

Another Ubuntu freeze. This time, I could ssh into the system and start htop; the X server was consuming 100% of CPU. I was able to dig around a bit, but after ten minutes, the connection died again, and the system stopped pinging. After five more minutes, I took down the system via Alt-Gr SysRq + REISUB.
I turned off Compiz effects (System > Preferences > Appearance > /Visual Effects\ > None) to see whether that'll make any difference.

The Ubuntu laptop is still locking up while VoIPing with Skype. Just had one such incident; after a few minutes, the system starts reacting again and is back to normal. I found entry in Ubuntu Forums and a bug report on lockups, but no solution yet (other than to avoid using Skype).

In the meantime, I've also installed Ubuntu on my wife's former notebook, a HP Pavillon zv6000. On this machine, I had to manually install a Broadcom b43 driver for WLAN; once I found the excellent howto, the installation was smooth; it even automatically downloaded and then extracted the necessary proprietary firmware. On the other hand, the proprietary ATI driver didn't work (just a garbled mess on the screen), but Compiz effects are still available.
I sync'ed the package inventory from the new system (via dpkg --get-selections) to the old; with this, I got a nearly identical system without much effort. This old system will now be shelved for emergencies or to try out something.

Ubuntu — recap after one month: My wife is working daily with her Ubuntu 9.04 notebook. Standby-resume is working flawlessly now, and we didn't have any system crashes yet. Only Skype continues to be fickle and destabilizing: During calls, it totally (no mouse movement, no caps lock-indicator change) froze the system for a few minutes, then suddenly unblock the system with everything back to normal except for the sound. Reconfiguring the sound output to pulse (as one post recommended) didn't help, but I found a workaround via a special .asoundrc for Skype. Long VoIP calls still abort occasionally, but do not freeze the system. I attribute this to Skype version 2 (vs. version 4 on Windows). Too bad we cannot switch VoIP apps due to our counterparts.

For downloading photos from the digital camera, one could use either F-Spot or gthumb-importer. We would like to have photos downloaded into a YYYYmmdd subfolder. The former sorts photos into a YYYY/mm/dd directory structure (and has a fixed, but not yet released bug that ignores the configured photo base directory), whereas the latter uses a quite-close (but also not configurable) YYYY-mm-dd - hh:mm subdirectory (which can be manually overridden), but creates this only based on the download date, not the photo creation date. After much experimentation, we stuck with F-Spot.

Finally, I have a rsync-based backup script in place, which syncs my wife's home directory with a backup directory on our NAS server.

boot time: Ubuntu vs. Vista: After reading that Ubuntu 9.04 implemented some enhancements that should result in ~30% reduced boot times, I did some simple measurements. As both Windows Vista and Ubuntu 9.04 have only recently been installed, and can boot side-by-side on the same hardware, this should be a fair comparison:

1. Counting starts from selection of the boot partition in Grub. Both contenders are configured to automatically login the user, and have recently been booted and shutdown, so that no fsck / virus definition downloads distort the startup.
2. Vista: Internet Explorer 7, Ubuntu: Firefox 3.0; both started from the quick launch bar.
3. This use case was chosen as a simple, practical means to determine when the system is actually available to the user; just showing the desktop while still ferociously working in the background doesn't count.

Turns out that Ubuntu is slightly ahead of Vista on startup. Much more impressive is the super-fast shutdown time. I hope these times will not deteriorate as the systems accumulates cruft over time. (I hate it when my 4-year-old Windows XP notebook won't shutdown at all, due to some hanging zombie process that even hardcore tools are not able to kill.)

Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" on my wife's new HP Compaq 6735s laptop: The timing couldn't have been better; the Linux Laptop Wiki already reported good support of the previous Ubuntu version for this laptop, and I assumed that the new Ubuntu version would be at least up to par for this brand new laptop model.

I downloaded the x86 Desktop Edition CD image (nice that it still doesn't require a DVD, even though all important apps (Firefox, OpenOffice) are already included), and installed on the free 76 GB that I was able to wrestle from Vista. (32 GB root partition, 60 GB /home, both ext3, remainder 7 GB swap.) After a gratifyingly quick install, the system showed a bland Grub welcome screen (the one from OpenSUSE 10 looks a lot fancier), and booted Ubuntu without problems. After manually configuring the WLAN, the system was alive and kickin', and the fine-tuning could begin. It took me about 20 man-hours (spread over four days) to shape the system into something that I could deliver to my Linux-neophyte wife.
I'm glad that many things "just worked" out of the box; however, there were some issues that required research and tinkering:

• I installed the proprietary fglrx ATI driver to get Compiz effects (and hopefully better video acceleration). However, video fullscreen crashed / hung the system (on multiple players!). It worked when I set VLC's output method to X11 output.
• Hibernate didn't work correctly; the system awakes, presents the locked screen just fine, but after unlocking just shows an empty desktop background; however, the mouse cursor changes its shape when it hovers over e.g. the "invisible" console or browser links. I reverted back to the open source ATI driver, but then standby wouldn't work. Since hibernate is becoming virtually useless with gigs of memory (and the Ubuntu boot time is exceptionally fast), I opted for the proprietary driver. (How can I hate Vista and Aero so much, yet be so giddy about Compiz' wobbly windows et al, even when they're so hard to configure?)
  Some googling taught me how to remove the hibernation option from the menu and login screen, so that my wife doesn't accidentally the whole thing…
• Standby had one nuisance: The fan kept rotating after resume. I found a defect against Ubuntu which contained a workaround; as a good citizen, I also appended requested debugging info and re-opened the defect.
  Update 05-May-2009: Found another defect for the exact same notebook model. Someone also reported the problem (with Windows) to the HP Business support forum more than four months ago, without receiving any response. That sheds a really bad light on HP support.
• Surprisingly, both printing to our HP Deskjet 2360 and scanning with a Canon LiDE 25 (through xsane) were beautiful plug-and-play experiences. Check.
• I saw myself on a lucky streak when even the built-in web cam worked flawlessly in VLC. I quickly installed Skype, which also accepted the /dev/video0 stream. Unfortunately, Skype only captures an area barely consisting of mouth and nose when sitting in front of the laptop, and somehow cuts off most of the covered area. Skype doesn't expose any web cam controls, and I only found undocumented config settings to force the video width and height, but that didn't help, neither.
  I learned that the Skype version for Linux is still stuck at 2.0, while the latest Windows version is 4.0. Such is the sad state of corporate Linux support. Unfortunately, my wife's acquaintances all use Skype, so we cannot simply move to another VoIP app. Since the fault definitely lies with Skype (the Ubuntu Ekiga VoIP app works just fine in any selected video size, and does offer web cam controls, too), I declared defeat, and moved on.
• I used the Places > Network Connection menu item to connect to the Samba shares on our NAS device, only to be dumbfounded that I was able to play mp3 files with Rhythmbox, but could not import a single one into its media library. Similarly, mp3 playback failed completely with the Audacious Winamp-clone.
  I learned that the Samba access was done on-the-fly through the Gnome Virtual File System, and that depending on the app, either the logical smb://... or the physical ~/.gvfs/... had to be passed to the app, and (insert hand-waving here) if Gnome gets it wrong, the app receives the wrong one and cannot understand it.
  As I wanted fixed, full access, I redid the Samba access through a classic CIFS mount. Because our NAS isn't turned on all the time, I didn't want the mount done at startup, and so I wrote a short mount script and put that into the menu. (Unfortunately, one cannot insert such shortcuts into the Places menu, where it logically belongs, so I put it into the System menu.)
• For a final cosmetic change (and to entice my wife into the multiple desktops), I wanted to set a different wallpaper (or at least background color) for each desktop; something that the CDE desktop environment on creaky HP-UX 10 workstations was able to do even back in 1996. Turns out that this isn't possible with Gnome. (Nautilus is responsible for the desktop, including icons, and it doesn't yet support transparency so that Compiz would be able to draw different backgrounds below it.)

So overall, I didn't have to compile my own kernel, patch any executable, or resort to any other dirty hack that I might regret later on. Basic Linux knowledge is still required, and one mustn't be afraid of the shell and command-line tools. Because Ubuntu is such a popular distribution, practically each problem is already covered by some Linux forum, often directly in an Ubuntu or Ubuntu-users forum. (However, this doesn't mean that each issue has been resolved; sometimes, the post just ends with I've already reported this for Hardy; I wonder why nobody else has complained about this…)
I would say that one needs a similar proficiency for Windows Vista and Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, as both operating systems offer a similar level of functionality and complexity. Windows users still have the big advantage that every hardware and software vendor ensures that this platform is fully tested and supported, while Linux hasn't reached the critical mass yet to be accepted into that club. It is a shame (but understandable from a purely financial point-of-view) that some vendors (Skype, Flash player) still treat Linux as a second-class citizen.
Despite the fact that most Linux apps are open source and free-of-charge, the quality is surprisingly good; a testament to the many volunteers and open development communities. For a software developer, it is very reassuring that when push comes to shove, there is always the option of delving into the sources, and fixing that annoying thing by yourself. (Even though most of the time, you have better things to do; but filing a bug or enhancement request just takes a few minutes.) In the Windows ecosystem, one is much more reliant on a bunch of vendors, professionals and shareware authors.

Windows Vista - yuck! I've tried to avoid this as long as I could, and I've prepared for the day that I'll part ways with Windows XP for good by exploring Knoppix, OpenSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu (the latter being my favorite!). Nonetheless, my wife's new HP Compaq 6735s low-end laptop comes with Windows Vista SP1 Home, without a downgrade option to XP. I'll try to install Ubuntu 9.04 (which will be released in two days) onto it. If my wife has to accustom herself to a new OS anyway, why not wean her off the Microsoft monoculture? In the meantime, I'm spending my time looking around and configuring Windows Vista, to have a fallback if the Ubuntu install won't work. (My must requirements: WLAN support, functional standby or hibernate, Skype; high want: Skype with the built-in web cam.)

Here's my list of Vista disappointments:

• Let's start with a nit: On her XP system, my wife chose the frog icon to represent her user name. (There's a story behind this that I'm not gonna tell here.) At the Vista user creation wizard, the frog is gone, though other characteristic icons (I remember the bright yellow flower, and the chess theme) are still there. First disappointment.
  Even stranger: In the user configuration, the icon can be changed; the selection there offers a few more icons (but the frog is still missing). Why is the set of icons more limited in the initial setup?
• Dang! Is it really that bloated? The factory-install (with all the bloatware that HP packaged into it, see below) swallows nearly an entire gig from the 2 GB main memory. After deinstalling all the crap and removing stuff with autoruns from sysinternals, I've got it down to less that 600 MB used RAM after boot (including a virus scanner).
• Disk Management is finally able to shrink the system partition. (Manufacturers, it is really sensible to install Vista into one large 130 GB partition? Ever heard about imaging and backups? And don't get me started on the 8 GB recovery partition plus 1 GB protect tools partition; all primary partitions, of course, so Linux will have to make do with an extended one.) But it only allows to shrink to 77 GB, no less. Moved pagefile, turned off hibernation, cleaned up restore points, to no avail.
  With gparted from a Knoppix 6.1 DVD, the partition resized just fine to my desired 40 GB. After that foreign resize, Windows suddenly allows to shrink by an additional 16 GB. WTF?
• Side note: As a good citizen, I ask Windows to do a chkdsk after the resize, but nothing happens during the next reboot. Where's the blue scandisk output? (I actually tried this twice, but never noticed anything.)
• I also tried the built-in defragmenter to persuade Vista to shrink more. I had to search the Internet to confirm that the nice defragmenter GUI is gone. No progress report, no estimated time, nothing. I let the maiden system (~ 20 GB allocated out of 130 GB; there shouldn't be much fragmentation yet) defragment for an hour, it still wasn't finished. Microsoft, nice to hear that defragging now automatically runs with low prio in the background, but you already had this nice functional UI, why take it away? You're normally not shy about an Advanced… button?!
• UAC: During configuration, this constantly pops up. After the third time, you're so accustomed to it and already anticipate it; I'm so trained on it that from now on, my motor memory will probably also acknowledge any malware request automatically. On Linux, I think first about the next command, then prepend sudo or use a single root shell for system administration, so I control the access rights, instead of reacting to elevation requests all the time.
• I finally had removed the bloat and shaped the system. Time for some fine-tuning with TweakUI. I already have the future dual-boot with Linux in mind, so just verify that I can later point My Documents et al. to another partition, and check out what new nifty options are available under Vista. downloads.microsoft.com… NO f*%#ing TWEAKUI for Vista?! You must be kidding.
  Sad but true; there are only some third-party alternatives that purport to offer the same functionality; but I'm skeptical about any Windows Optimizer shareware.

But it's not just Microsoft, the notebook vendor (HP) contributes to the bad user experience, too:

• We're doing it all for the money — or: corporate endorsements.
  • After system setup, McAfee offers its virus-squashing services: for 60 days, then pay up. Three years ago, on my wife's previous notebook, HP was still paired off with competitor Symantec. (Back then, my wife signed up for Norton Internet Security; if HP had kept faith with its recommended anti-virus vendor, it would have been a matter of re-entering the license key (which covers 3 separate installations).)
  • Microsoft Office pre-installed; well, you just need to acquire the license to be able to use it after the trial period is over. What do you think, how many cost-saving customers that go for the < € 400 low-end notebook will fork over the serious money that MS Office costs? Wouldn't it be wiser to preinstall (free as in beer) OpenOffice?
    Finally: I don't know how long it takes to install MS Office, but the deinstallation (hey, just a fancy del "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\") took more than 40 minutes on this brand-new machine?!
  • IE search is powered by AOL (beta) toolbar. AOL? They still exist? They must pay serious money to have Microsoft forgo pushing their Windows Live service. And beta? I can accept beta web applications; it'll be just their servers that crash and burn. But I don't want no stinkin' beta software in the most important app today, i.e. my web browser. (Well, I wouldn't use IE 7, anyway.)
• When looking at the list of processes, I noticed the funny CoreShredder.exe executable, part of the HP Protect Tools suite. With that, one can "safely" delete pornography confidential files. I dig deeper and find out that the Credential Manager that is listed in the Vista login screen isn't a Vista feature, it's courtesy of the Protect Tools, too. Why doesn't HP advertise these extra features (e.g. during the initial system setup), or better just install them on-demand? After digging around the tool, I read about drive encryption (how does that contrast with Vista's Bitlocker?), single sign-on (trusting some HP tool with all my passwords? nah!), and login via fingerprint reader (this notebook has none). Deinstall.
• I already know the Quick Launch Buttons daemon from other HP notebooks. Problem is, this notebook doesn't have any additional buttons. (Heck, even the normal keyboard is as bare-bones as it can get; the fn virtual key labels are even in the same color as the normal key labels; talk about cheap!) Deinstall.

Enough ranting. Overall, I'm happy that the hardware didn't malfunction (should have stressed it enough by now), and that I was able to somewhat tame the Vista monster. I am pleasantly surprised that (though with hurdles), I was able to shrink the partition to the desired size without harming Vista. If the Ubuntu install works out fine, I will only leave Vista on the hard disk in case my wife ever needs some Windows-only software.

Warning: Visiting my web site may harm your computer ;-)

What sounds like a bad joke was actually a Google slip-up that lasted from 15:30 to 16:15 - globally, for each and every web site.

At home, my wife noticed first, and anxiously asked me why she suddenly could not click on any search result.

This shows what happens to our daily lives when such a crucial piece of infrastructure fails to work properly. Fortunately, there was no real damage on all those sites, so keep reading. (This web site may only harm your brain, but you should have known that already ;-)

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