There were some big problems.

Ubuntu 11.04

The new Unity interface, whilst it’s very pretty, is totally unfamiliar and feels rather like a toy. The menus I used to start applications from are gone, the taskbar I used to see what was running and place shortcuts on is gone. Now to start a program there’s a glossy, full screen… thing… it’s a bit like a menu… but takes up the whole screen with big Fisher-Price icons. To see what’s running at a glance… I can’t. The idea where the title bar of a window with the window buttons and menus isn’t attached to the window and appears at the top of the screen… seriously? I hear that this idea is nicked from Apple – but it really doesn’t work for me.

I guess the idea is that you type the name of the application instead of finding it in the menus. Nicked from Windows 7, I think. If I want to find and launch applications by typing their names, I use the command line – I’m not sure I get how search instead of menus is a step forward.

Then there was the speed, or rather, the total lack thereof. Using my computer went from effortless to wading through treacle. In snowshoes. I notice performance tips and tweaks guides for 11.04 starting to appear out there, so it’s not just me. The poor performance was the dealbreaker.

Fedora 15

I downloaded Fedora 15, having previously been a user of that distro. I know that 15 ships with Gnome 3, but I didn’t realise it would be so similar to Unity, with all the same bizarre UI quirks. On the bright side, it was a lot snappier… but all in, still not really usable.

Mint

So yesterday, I pulled Linux Mint 11 off the shelf and I’m happy to say that it is a joy to use. Menus, task bars, windows that work properly, fast, easy to set up. Back to business as usual. If you’re not loving the Gnome 3/Unity thing, I can recommend Mint (so far, based on 24h usage… mileage may vary!)

Serious or Casual?

With my immediate problems addressed, the direction that Gnome and Unity are taking for Linux is interesting. Are we seeing the Linux windowing systems fragment into serious and casual usecases? I can see how the new UI might be familiar and easy for someone who is used to their tablet or their smartphone. Maybe it’s also good angle for relatively small screen devices like netbooks and tablets – certainly the apparent ‘every pixel is precious’ mindset doesn’t make much sense on a big widescreen monitor.

I expect that broadening the appeal of an operating system is a good thing, and perhaps Ubuntu and Fedora are setting their stalls out as ‘for the casual user’. If that’s so, then thank goodness for distros like Mint that give folks who use their computers to do work the power of old(er) school Linux without the pain.

On first boot, the most noticeable thing was the updated loading screens and reduced boot time. It wasn’t a slouch before, maybe taking 45ish seconds, but now taking 25 seconds between finishing the POST and giving me a login screen (I’ll time the laptop before and after when I upgrade that and produce a better comparison). It feels nice and fast.

Next, the wireless – works a treat, as usual. Then the proprietary graphics drivers, and the only essential reboot (having only today had a VPN client upgrade on a Windows system I have the misfortune of using with a total of five reboots necessary in the process).

Next, upgrade everything when prompted – only took a couple or minutes. Then, added in most of the packages I use that I can get out of the standard repo – that took a while, but it is 180 packages (incl. dependencies).

Finally, the other standout feature is the social network integration. The usual user identity graphic in the menu bar is replaced with a widget that looks identical but connects to my Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger accounts. So far, I’ve posted up a couple of updates from there, but I’m not sure what else it can do just yet. The other option under this widget, ‘Ubuntu One’, provides the ability to synchronise some of your user settings to the cloud. Nice idea – but as an Android user, I wonder whether I can sync my phone info with my desktops?

A bum note though – the default theme is a little dark, and moves the window maximise/minimise/close buttons to the left hand side of the window, also known as the wrong side! Quick fix – System > Preferences > Appearance: Choose the New Wave theme to brighten things up slightly and put the controls back where they belong.

Anyway, all done in no time at all – it’s hard to see how they could make it any easier!

Better for the environment, right? More importantly, I never seem to have a blank CD knocking about when I decide to do an install.

I expected some hassle, but it turns out to be trivial if you’re already on a Ubuntu machine, so long as your BIOS supports booting from USB devices. So…

• Check the computer you want to install into supports booting from USB; if it doesn’t I guess you’re stuck with the CD option
• Slap a USB stick with 2GB space or more in a slot on another Ubuntu machine (make sure there’s nothing on the stick you’ll miss if it gets lost!)
• Start up usb-creator from the command line (just type usb-creator, or sudo apt-get it if it’s not installed)
• Choose the .iso in the usb-creator utility
• Choose the target USB device
• Wait while files are copied and stuff
• Pull out the USB stick when it’s ready, plug it into your target machine and reboot.

The familiar installer screens should start up.

More details here.

First up, I installed the Student Edition of Matlab (currently R2009a and a steal at the student price), taking into account the fact that I’m running a 64-bit OS and the student edition doesn’t come with the 64-bit architecture libraries. Pretty confusing on first install as the installer detects the architecture but then can’t find the libs, but corrected using this guidance on the Mathworks website.

Once you’ve done that, you need to pass the argument ‘-glnx86′ to Matlab every time you start it up.

That’s a pain, plus the other boilerplate to run it in the background – so I tried to set up a menu option using ‘Main Menu’, which is the relevant administrative tool that comes with Ubuntu. It’s in System – Preferences – Main Menu if you’ve not used it before. Here’s a screenshot of it, set up with a Matlab launcher.

The obvious thing is to give Main Menu the command that works from the command prompt, but no. Doing this results is strange behaviour where the splash screen fires up, disappears, and nothing. Checking the .xsession-errors log file in my home directory shows what’s happening. The application is launching in command line mode, writing its prompt to stdout, and then being shut down.

Kinda weird, maybe, as launching the app from the command line launches the Matlab GUI. Anyway, you also need to also add a ‘-desktop’ argument to the launcher command. My Matlab is installed in /opt/matlab, remember to change the path as appropriate for you.

You can also add the icon if you want by clicking where the Matlab icon is shown above, browsing to wherever you installed Matlab then into the ‘X11/icons’ directory, where you’ll find a number of icons.

Now you can launch the program from Main Menu, or drag-dropping it onto a panel, onto your desktop – wherever you like.

As the course involved writing code and documents, I would work during the day when I was onsite on my laptop, then switch to my desktop to continue working for the week.

Naturally, I would forget to copy something to my laptop ready for the following week, so I tried Google Docs and blogged about it here. Pretty good – just a little clunky and not quite up to the job with the maths symbolic stuff I needed to use.

In a comment to that post, Luke Maciak suggested Dropbox. (Incidentally, I can recommend his blog for entertaining reading too)

Using it, I get an online repository where I can put files, and I can download client software for my (Windows when I was running Windows) and Linux machines.

The client software gives me a ‘Dropbox’ folder. Placing any files in there synchronizes them with the online repository. Any files I’ve added or updated on other machines are synchronized down from the repository, and I can get to and share my files via the Dropbox website as well.

The main difference for me is that Dropbox is completely transparent. It’s just files in that folder. No messing.

So far*, it just works – in fact, I’ve started using to to share some of my Ubuntu desktop configuration. Everything behaves exactly as I expect it to, and there’s been no nasty surprises, so I’d tentatively recommend it if you have multiple computers that you want to keep files in sync across.

You get the first 2GB of space free. If you’re interested in giving it a go, you can get Dropbox here.

*of course, tomorrow it will probably break. That’s computers for you. I’d suggest taking your own, separate backups of that ol’ Dropbox folder now and again, just in case.

This seems to be a fairly Dell-specific problem, but there just might be a fix, as detailed in this ubuntuforums thread.

Long story short: you need to update your menu.lst file (mine’s in /boot/grub/menu.lst), and append the entries

i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop

to the line beginning with the word kernel for your current kernel version. So far, it seems to be working… but that’s only a couple of boots later.

There’s more detail in the thread I mentioned, and if anyone wants any more detailed instructions feel free leave me a comment with your question and I’ll try and help.

Original Post:

I made the classic mistake of changing more than one variable at a time – installed Ubuntu 9.04 over my 8.10 installation, and went 64-bit – and now my laptop doesn’t recognise its keyboard and trackpad on some boots.

On top of that, I had that thing happen when you quickly log off, shut the laptop lid, and put it away… but some darned dialog popped up as it shut down, keeping my laptop powered up all night. Unfortunately I left it with the exhaust kinda blocked, so it was toasty by the time I picked it up the following morning. Probably didn’t help.

Maybe there’s a setting or something I can use to override this behaviour, but as an aside…

Dear Mr. Ubuntu (/Windows/whatever), if I’ve hit shutdown and then shut the laptop lid or done nothing else for an hour, it’d be great if the thing would just shut down by default, regardless of how many things want to pop up and clamour for my attention.

As opposed to toasting my laptop and potentially burning my house down. Thanks.

Anyway now on boot, my keyboard works just fine through the POST and the GRUB menu. By the time I’ve got to a login prompt though, I can’t type or do pointery things anymore.

Sometimes.

I’ve seen a couple of other folks referring to the same problem with 9.04 on forums, so for now it looks like it’s a bug. My money’s on a timing issue during boot.

If anyone else is having the same problem, I have a couple of things to try that have made my system just about usable for now.

• Stick a CD in your drive – I put the 9.04 32-bit CD in and switched from 90% bad boots to maybe 70% good boots. Maybe it changes the timing of events during boot or something.
• Hit ESC just after the POST – this gives you the option of selecting recovery mode from the GRUB menu. If your input devices work in the recovery menu, select normal boot. This shortened the boot time to find out if it was going to boot OK.

Roll on a fix!

I was also getting flickering when using Compiz desktop effects.

Finally, after a couple of headaches, I researched the problem. Turns out it looks like an incompatibility between my ATI X1900GT card’s drivers and the way Compiz tries to use it. Something to do with an unsupported call making the application use unaccelerated rendering (and all your CPU resources), but at least I now have a fix – turn off desktop effects.

System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects Tab

Select ‘None’, then ‘Close’.

Et voila – no more flickering.

It’s a shame you can’t have the simply beautiful effects AND flicker-free video playback. If anyone’s got a better answer, please leave me a comment, but for now, my advice? If you have the choice and you want an easy Linux life, buy nvidia. My nvidia mobile-based laptop works a treat.

(I did try an alternative solution, adding Option “TexturedVideo” “off” to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but it didn’t really work for me – less flickering, but still there.)

Now, back to that skateboarding dog. I mean educational material…

Getting Hold of 8.10

I downloaded the 698.8Mb Desktop distribution for i386 in about 35 mins using the Bittorrent download, available straight off the download page. You’ll need a writable CD to burn the downloaded ISO image to and then install from.

Ubuntu 8.04 will take good care of you with Transmission for Bittorrent and Brasero for CD burning out of the box.

Saving your Life (Backing Up)

The advent of online services like del.icio.us (I know it’s delicious.com now, but I like the old name!) makes some of the tedium of backing up obsolete, but there’s still a few bits and pieces to take care of. A bit of discipline in filing stuff away as you create it really helps – and it’s about now when I really wish I had that kind of discipline! Anyway, you might want to think about:

• Documents – do you keep your CV, finances and letters on your computer?
• Web Site Usernames and Passwords, if your browser remembers them for you.
• RSS Feeds – Firefox has Import and Backup options in Bookmarks > Organise Bookmarks.
• Bookmarks – I use del.icio.us! Again, Firefox has you covered if you don’t.
• Add-Ons – do you use browser plugins and add-ons? I do (Delicious, Firebug, FireFTP, ChatZilla and Elasticfox), and if I don’t note down the ones I use I’ll be wondering why my browsing experience sucks for weeks. Same goes for anything else you use that supports plugins.
• Email – do you use an email client? You’ll probably need to back up contacts, messages, calender entries, etc. Google and Yahoo tools store all this stuff up on t’internet for me.
• Wireless Network Keys – yep, I always forget this too. If you’re connecting into a secured wireless network you’ll need a copy of your keys to get back on again.

And if you write software…

• Code – I’m an Eclipse user, so I back up projects I want to keep from the filesystem. I suppose the right way to do this is to use a version control system, and I did recently discover Unfuddle.com which gives me free SVN hosting – so I’ll be trying to use that to resynchronize with my backups as a failsafe.
• IDE Plugins – yep, plugins again. Luckily, the nice folks at eclipse.org provide a bunch of full downloads for different development targets.  I also use Spring IDE  and some PHP plugins at the moment but I’m going to take the opportunity to try out Zend Studio for Eclipse.
• Databases – this is the one I always forget. If you want to carry on as if nothing has happened, you’re going to want to back up your database(s) structure and data. I’ve used mysqldump to back up a database I’m working on right now, so I’ll be trying to recover from that.

Whatever else I’ve forgotten is gone really soon now. The obvious bit – don’t back up your stuff onto the hard disk you’re going to be formatting. I use removable media to put my backups on.

Pre-Install

If I never post again, then the install went horribly wrong…

Post-Install

Still here. The installation was pretty painless as is par for the course with Ubuntu these days. Boot was clean, wireless came straight up, removable media mounted no problem. The wireless light on my Dell Vostro is working too, which it didn’t on 8.04, but it seems to blink when there’s traffic which might get to be pretty annoying. I’ve posted a way to stop it flickering here.

Apply the Latest Updates

I’d say don’t try and activate your video drivers, it didn’t work for me. First job – updates.

System > Administration > Update Manager

Installed the updates and restarted. After the restart, I was able to activate the NVIDIA restricted driver without a problem – after the obligatory restart.

Install the JRE/JDK

Next, the JRE and if you write Java, the JDK, docs, etc. I just grab these out of the repository, so use

System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager

Search for java6 (unless you want a different version) and then install the packages you want. I install them all except the demos and examples. You’ll need to grab the java 6 documentation zipfile and drop it into /tmp owned by root:root to install the docs from the package manager – precise instructions are given during the install.

Up and Running

So now the system is usable and you can carry on with any other app installs you want. You’ll probably want to set up the Medibuntu repository for the non-free (as in speech) software like Flash, Microsoft fonts, etc.

Add the repository:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list \
  --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

And the GPG key:

sudo apt-get update \
  && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring \
  && sudo apt-get update

Finally, here’s my list of essential stuff to install:

• Flash
• MS Fonts
• Acrobat Reader
• A/V Codecs
• Skype

Which can be installed using this command – watch out for w32codecs if you’re not on i386 32 bit architecture:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts acroread acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread \
  flashplugin-nonfree libdvdcss2 w32codecs skype

Now it’s just a case of installing other software and putting those backups back on the system.

If you found your way onto this post, I hope it was helpful. If there’s anything you think I can do to improve this post then please leave a comment.

This solution didn’t work for me – I had to make a slight adjustment to the directories updated. It does give some background on how it works if you’re interested though.
Save the following file as “/etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink” and make it executable for all.

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$IFACE" = "wlan0" ]; then
  for dir in /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy*; do
    echo none > $dir/trigger
  done
fi

Now the wireless light is off when disconnected, blinks when I’m connecting, and is steady on when I’m connected.

Updated, 23th March 09
…but it doesn’t work on resume from suspend. When my Vostro 1310 resumes from suspend, it’s back to the defaults. I fixed this behaviour by adding a script /etc/pm/sleep.d/00wireless, executable for all.

#!/bin/sh
case "$1" in
        resume|thaw)
                /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink
        ;;
        *)
        ;;
esac

Updated, thanks Richard
The easy way to make the script executable for all; you might be prompted for your password.

sudo chmod u+x /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink

Meaning: Modify the file permissions on /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink to add permission to execute for all users.
Then you can check the permissions with:

you@your-computer:~$ ls -lart /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 119 2008-11-02 11:36 /etc/network/if-up.d/iwl-no-blink

The -rwxr-xr-x means that any user can execute the script.