Over a year I have been contemplating a shift from Fedora to Ubuntu. At the time of Feisty I took a step in that direction, but then I decided to stick with familiar Fedora little longer. Now I am more comfortable with apt and dpkg, thanks to Maemo. So I was eagerly waiting for Hardy release of Ubuntu.
As you can read everywhere else, Ubuntu 8.04 is impressive. I agree. I will rather write about two specific issues that were relevant to my environment.
For few years I have been managing the storage of my desktops using LVM. It's very handy for me. Unfortunately Ubuntu's Live CD installation method doesn't support logical volumes - something that Redhat/Fedora supported so easily. Probably, ubuntu's target audience would prefer minimum click installs to advanced tweaking of the system. The alternate CD discovers logical volumes, but it's very tricky. I don't remember exactly, but last time I tried it, the installer froze on me until I figured - by jumping to adjascent terminals - that scanning of each volume was taking too long. But this time, I found an easier way of using LVM while still using Live CD. As per the instructions, I installed lvm2 and inserted dm-mod into the Live CD kernel. But the article guides you on how to create logical volumes from raw discs and then install Ubuntu on them. In my case I already had volumes. The instructions given in above link are not sufficient if you want to reuse the volumes that you created with your old linux installation. However it is very simple, if you do it right.
- Make sure you use "sudo" while doing pvscan, vgscan, lvscan. If you don't, these commands will exit silently, giving you the impression that they haven't detected your LVM setup.
- If you create new volumes as mentioned in above instructions, you will be able to see them as device nodes under /dev/mapper or /dev/
/, you can use them as targets of your favorite mkfs. utilities. However your already existing volumes won't show up that easily. If you want to see them, use "vgchange -ay". This will activate all your volume groups.
Now a days, it's common to have dual monitor setups in workplaces. I have one too (I mean two :). I needed to use some nvidia specific utils to get dual monitors working. If you search for terms like "dual monitors ubuntu nvidia twinview" you will get lots of posts. I found and followed all those too. But all of them told me to do Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace to reload X, to test the changes in my x.org file. That just made the display more and more horrible for me. The resolution dropped to 800x640, nvidia's twinview utility was no where in sight. ... until I rebooted the box. Maybe it was little dumb of me to not have rebooted after I installed nvidia's driver. I don't know which of the changes found in all those posts worked for me, but I think the important thing is to reboot the machine after you install nvidia's drivers.
Monday didn't seem so boring because a brand new system was waiting for me at work today. I set things up to suite my needs - nis, automounter, users, firefox sync, mail setup .... Firefox 3 beta 5 is pleasant. Fast as advertised. But I still couldn't find compatible google extenstions that I am so used to (browser sync, notebook, toolbar). There are compatible versions available for Firefox 3, but for some reason they didn't want to get installed on my beta 5 build.
But a major change I did was with my mail client, which wasn't planned. I don't remember if I had used Evolution any time in the past - not seriously for sure. But today I decided to give it a try, as it's the default mail client that comes with ubuntu. And within few minutes, I was a convert. I have stopped using Thunderbird. The biggest turnoff with thunderbird is its lack of calendar utility. Lightning is far behind alpha quality. That had forced me into using Korganizer on my Fedora 7 desktop. But this time I decided to give a shot to Gnome's PIM tools integrated into Evolution. Evolution has almost all the good things that thunderbird has (most importantly fast search), but in addition it has a functioning calendar program. I haven't tried to sync it with MS Exchange, but I doubt if any non M$ client will reliably work with MS Exchange calendars. I am happy with setting up my events and reminders manually, as long as basic functionality is there. Furthermore it was easy to import my mail folders from Thunderbird to Evolution, thankfully both use a standard "mbox" format to store the mails. Filter rules aren't compatible however, I will have to manually write them.
Fedora 9 is coming out in May. If you try it, let me know. I will skip Fedora this time though.
2 comments:
Update:
Evolution works well even with MS Exchange meeting requests. It will automatically add them to the integrated calendar.
Another notable thing I found was the flash player plugin installation for firefox. Ubuntu has shipped a little modified version of firefox, which gives you options to install three different flash plugins (swfdec, Adobe, gnash). When I chose adobe player, it triggered an automatic installer which I believe installed needed .deb file and youtube started working even without restarting of firefox.
A tip if you are Last.fm listener: Don't try to install the .deb file you get from their site (it's for gutsy I believe). Just install "lastfm" package using apt-get.
I have observed certain instabilities though - compiz crashed on me few times and then it froze the GUI several times. So I had to turn it off eventually. I will try it again though, because I am great fan of eye-candy effects.
If you find "Klipper" tool from KDE indispensable like me, you can install it under Ubuntu's Gnome environment as well - just do apt-get install klipper.
Update:
I sadly have to say that I will be uninstalling Ubuntu and give try to Fedora 9.
I am facing an issue that makes half of the things on my Ubuntu desktop unusable. It's not that some rouge process is hogging resources, but most of the windows freeze and I am not left with any means to debug the problem. Half of the usage of my desktop is through multiple terminal windows or shells. For some mysterious reason, they stop responding to input. This happens anywhere between 10 minutes to 1 day after fresh reboot. They just hang. The system monitor applet in the panel freezes. Launching any new application fails as well. However running instances of Firefox and Evolution will respond as usual, until I try to restart them. If any terminal is still responding, I try "top", and confirm that no one is hogging CPU or memory. After all terminals freeze, I switch to console, but it also freezes once I punch in the username.
I have to reboot the system by power cycling, because "Reset" takes too long (waiting on unmounting filesystem) for me to wait.
I checked syslog after reboot. In there, I saw a process trying to mount .Trash folders on my automount points and failing. Some googling told me that "tracker" (the indexing utility) causes this. So I uninstalled it. One by one I removed potential offenders - the system monitor applet, the screen utility. But above problem kept occuring, needing me to reboot in the middle of work. After this happened 4-5 times in one day, I changed grub entries to boot into my old Fedora 7 system.
It very much upsets me that I could not debug the actual root cause, even though it's a linux system. Mostly it's because I can't afford to loose time during the busy work-day.
One thought tells me, this kind of behavior might result from file system not responding. Or some SELinux policies kicking in. I think "App Armour" is what they have on Ubuntu, I noticed in logs that it was off.
I think I am going to try Fedora 9 with Gnome desktop. For a workstation, it's a necessity that it can stay up 24/7 for at least over a month. I hope Fedora 9 satisfies that robustness expectation.
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