Technology Tales

Consolidation

For a while, the Windows computing side of my life has been spread across far too many versions of the pervasive operating systems with the list including 2000 (desktop and server), XP, 2003 Server, Vista and 7; 9x hasn't been part of my life for what feels like an age. At home, XP has been the mainstay for my Windows computing needs, with Vista Home Premium loaded on my Toshiba laptop. The latter variant came in for more use during that period of home computing "homelessness" and, despite a cacophony of complaints from some, it seemed to work well enough. Since the start of the year, 7 has also been in my sights with beta and release candidate instances in virtual machines, leaving me impressed enough to go popping the final version onto both the laptop and in a VM on my main PC. Microsoft finally has got around to checking product keys over the net, so that meant a licence purchase for each installation using the same downloaded 32-bit ISO image. 7 is still doing well for me, so I am beginning to wonder whether having an XP VM is becoming pointless. The reason for that train of thought is that 7 is becoming the only version that I really need for anything that takes me into the world of Windows.

Work is a different matter, with a recent move away from Windows 2000 to Vista heavily reducing my exposure to the venerable old stager (businesses usually take longer to migrate, and any good IT manager usually delays any migration by a year anyway). 2000 is sufficiently outmoded by now that even my brother was considering a move to 7 for his work because of all the Office 2007 files that have been coming his way. While he may be no technical user, the bad press gained by Vista hasn't passed him by, so a certain wariness is understandable. Saying that, my experiences with Vista haven't been unpleasant, and it always worked well on the laptop, while the same also can be said for its corporate desktop counterpart. Much of the noise centred around issues of hardware and software compatibility, and that certainly is apparent at work with my having some creases left to straighten.

With all of this general forward heaving, you might think that IE6 would be shuffling its mortal coil by now, but a recent check on visitor statistics for this website places it at about 13% share, tantalisingly close to oblivion but still too large to ignore it completely. All in all, it is lingering like that earlier blight of web design, Netscape 4.x. If I was planning a big change to the site design, setting up a Win2K VM would be in order, not to completely put off those labouring with the old curmudgeon. For smaller changes, the temptation is not to bother checking, but that is questionable when XP is set to live on for a while yet. That came with IE6 and there must be users labouring with the old curmudgeon, and that's ironic with IE8 being available for SP2 since its original launch a while back. Where all this is leading me is towards the idea of waiting for IE6 share to decrease further before tackling any major site changes. After all, I can wait with the general downward trend in market share; there has to be a point when its awkwardness makes it no longer viable to support the thing. That would be a happy day.

When buttons stop working...

One of the things that stopped working as it should after my recent Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade was the Eclipse PDT installation that I had in place. Editing files went a bit haywire and creating projects had me pushing buttons with nothing happening. Whether this was a Java or GNOME issue, I don't know, but I found it happening too on openSUSE 11.2 (there should be more on that distro in a later entry). That was enough to get me looking again at NetBeans.

In both openSUSE (NB version 6.5) and Ubuntu (NB version 6.7.1), I plucked the default offering of NetBeans from the respective software repositories and added the PHP plugin in both cases. Unlike when I last gave the platform a go, things seemed to go smoothly, and it looks to have replaced Eclipse for PHP development duties. While project scanning may take a little while, it's far from annoying, a departure from my earlier dalliance with using NetBeans as a PHP editor was stymied by performance that was so sluggish as to make the thing a pain to use. Up to now, NetBeans' footprint when it comes to its use of PC power never was light, so I am wondering if dual-core and quad-core CPU's help along with a copious supply of RAM. Only time will tell if these initial positive impressions stay the course; for now, I'll be keeping an open mind.

Rough?

Was it because Canonical and friends kept Ubuntu in such a decent state from 8.04 through to 9.04 that things went a little quiet in the blogosphere on the subject of the well-known Linux distribution? If so, 9.10 might be proving more of a talking point, and you have to wonder if this is such a good thing with the appearance of Windows 7 on the scene. Looking on the bright side, 10.04 will be an LTS release, so there is some chance that any rough edges that are on display now could be resolved by next April. Even so, it might have been better not to see anything so obvious at all.

In truth, Ubuntu always has had its gaps, and I have seen a few of their ilk over the last two years. Of these, a few have triggered postings on here. In fact, issues with accessing the BBC iPlayer still bring a goodly number of folk to this website. That may just be a matter of grabbing RealPlayer, now helpfully available as a DEB package, from the requisite place on the web and ensuring that Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras is in place too, but you have to know that in the first place.

Even so, unexpected behaviours like Palimpsest seeing every partition on a disk as a different drive and SIL Raid mappings being seen for hard drives that used to live on the main home PC that bit the dust earlier this year; it only happens on one of the machines that I have running Ubuntu so it may be hardware thing and newly added hard drive uses none of the SIL mapping either.

Perhaps more seriously (is it something that a new user should be encountering?), a misfiring variant of Brasero had me moving to K3b. Then, UFRaw was sluggish in batch mode, yet that's nothing that having a Debian VM won't overcome. Rough edges like these do get you asking if 9.10 was ready for the big time, while making you reluctant to recommend it to mainstream users like my brother.

The counterpoint to the above is that 9.10 includes a host of under the bonnet changes like the introduction of Ext4 hard drive formatting, Xsplash to allow the faster system loading to occur unseen and GNOME 2.28. To someone looking in from outside like me, that looks like a lot of work and might explain the ingress of the annoyances that I have seen. Add to that the fact that we are between Debian releases, so things like the optimised packaging of ImageMagick or UFRaw may not be so high up the list of the things to do, especially with the more general speed optimisations that were put in place for 9.10.

With 10.04 set to be an LTS release, I'd be hoping that consolidation is the order of the day over the next five or six months, but it seems to be the inclusion of new features and other such progress that get magazine reviewers giving higher ratings (Linux Format has given it a mark of 9 out of 10). With the mooted inclusion of GNOME 3 and its dramatically different interface in 10.10, they should get their fill of that. However, I'd like to see some restraint for the take of a smooth transition from the familiar GNOME 2.x to the new. If GNOME 3 stays very like its alpha builds, then the question of how users will take to it arises. Of course, there's still some time before we see GNOME 3 and, having seen how the Ubuntu developers transformed GNOME 2.28, I wouldn't be surprised if the impact of any change could be dulled.

In summary, my few weeks with Ubuntu 9.10 as my main OS have thrown up no major roadblocks that would cause me to look at moving elsewhere; Fedora would be tempting if that situation were to arise. The irritations that I have seen are more like signs of a lack of polish and remain peripheral to day-to-day working if you discount CD/DVD burning. To be honest, there always have been some element of roughness on Ubuntu, but has the lack of sizeable change spoilt us? Whatever about how things feel afterwards, significant changes can mean new problems to resolve and inspire blog posts describing any solutions, so it's not all bad. If that's what Canonical wants to see, they might get it, and the year ahead looks as if it will be an interesting one after a recent quieter period.

A use for choice

After moving to Ubuntu 9.10, Brasero stopped behaving as well as it did in Ubuntu 9.04. Any bootable disks that I have created with it weren't without glitches. After a recent update, things got better with a live CD actually booting up a PC rather than failing to find a file system like those created with its forbear. While unsure if the observed imperfections stemmed from my using the RC for the upgrades and installations, I got to looking for a solution and gave K3b a go. It certainly behaves like I'd expect it, and a live CD created with it worked without fault. The end result is that Brasero has been booted off my main home system for now. That may mean that all the in-built GNOME convenience is lost to me, but I can live without the extras; after all, it's the quality of the created disks that matters.

DePo Masthead

There is a place on WordPress.com where I share various odds and ends about public transport in the U.K. It's called On Trains and Buses, and I try not to go tinkering with the design side of things too much. You only can change the CSS and my previous experience of doing that with this edifice while it lived on there taught me not to expect too much even if there are sandbox themes for anyone to turn into something presentable, not that I really would want to go doing that in full view of everyone (doing if offline first and copying the CSS afterwards when it's done is my preferred way of going about it). Besides, I wanted to see how WordPress.com fares these days anyway.

While my public transport blog just been around for a little over a year, it's worn a few themes over that time, ranging from the minimalist The Journalist v1.9 and Vigilance through to Spring Reloaded. After the last of these, I am back to minimalist again with DePo Masthead, albeit with a spot of my own colouring to soften its feel a little. Though I must admit growing to like it, it came to my attention that it was a bespoke design from Derek Powazek that Automattic's Noel Jackson turned into reality. The result would appear that you cannot get it anywhere but from the WordPress.com Subversion theme repository. For those not versed in the little bit of Subversion action that is needed to get it, I did it for you and put it all into a zip file without making any changes to the original, hoping that it might make life easier for someone.

Download DePo Masthead

A case of double vision?

One of the early signs that I noticed after upgrading my main PC to Ubuntu 9.10 was a warning regarding the health of one of my hard disks. While others have reported that this can be triggered by the least bit of roughness in a SMART profile, that's not how it was for me. The PATA disk that has hosted my Ubuntu installation since the move away from Windows had a few bad sectors but no adverse warning. It was a 320 GB Western Digital SATA drive that was raising alarm bells with its 200 bad sectors.

The conveyor of this news was Palimpsest (not sure how it got that name even when I read the Wikipedia entry) and that is part of the subject of this post. Some have been irritated by its disk health warnings, yet it's easy to make them go away by turning off Disk Notifications in the dialogue that going to System > Preferences > Startup Applications will bring up for you. To fire up Palimpsest itself, there's always the command line, but you'll find it at System > Administration > Disk Utility too.

My complaint about it is that I see the same hard drive listed in there more than once, and it takes some finding to separate the real entries from the "bogus" ones. Whether this is because Ubuntu has seen my SATA drives with SIL RAID mappings (for the record, I have no array set up) or not is an open question, but it's one that needs continued investigation and I already have had a go with the dmraid command.

Even GParted shows both the original /dev/sd* type addressing and the /dev/mapper/sil_* equivalent, with the latter being the one with which you need to work (Ubuntu now lives on a partition on one of the SATA drives, which is how I noticed this). All in all, it looks less than tidy, so additional interrogation is in order, especially when I have no recollection of 9.04 doing anything of the sort.

A certain lack of speed

A little while, I encountered a problem with ImageMagick processing DNG files in Ubuntu 9.04. Not realising that I could solve me own problem by editing a file named delegates.xml, I took to getting a Debian VM to do the legwork for me. That's where you'll find all the commands used when helper software is used by ImageMagick to help it on its way. On its own, ImageMagick cannot deal with DNG files, so the command line variant of UFRaw (itself a front end for DCRaw) is used to create a PNM file that ImageMagick can handle. The problem a few months back was that the command in delegates.xml wasn't appropriate for a newer version of UFRaw and I got it into my head that things like this were hard-wired into ImageMagick. Now, I know better and admit my error.

With 9.10, it appears that the command in delegates.xml has been corrected, only for another issue to raise its head. UFRaw 0.15, it seems, isn't the speediest when it comes to creating PNM files and, while my raw file processing script works after a spot of modification to deal with changes in output from the identify command used, it takes far too long to run. Since GIMP also uses UFRaw, I wonder if the same problem has surfaced there too. However, it has been noticed by the Debian team, with the outcome being that they have a package for version 0.16 of the software in their unstable branch that looks as if it has sorted the speed issue. However, I am seeing that 0.15 is in the testing branch, which tempts me to stick with Lenny (5.x) if any successor turns out to have slower DNG file handling with ImageMagick and UFRaw. In my estimation, 0.13 does what I need, so why go for a newer release if it turns out to be slower?

Evoluent Vertical Mouse 3 Configuration in Ubuntu 9.10

On popping Ubuntu 9.10 onto a newly built PC, I noticed that the button mappings weren't as I had expected them to be. The button just below the wheel no longer acted like a right mouse button on a conventional mouse, and it really was throwing me. The cause was found to be in a file name evoluent-verticalmouse3.fdi that is found either in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/ or /etc/hal/fdi/policy/.

So, to get things back as I wanted, I changed the following line:

<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 2 4 5 6 7 3 8</merge>

to:

<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 3 4 5 6 7 3 8</merge>

If there is no sign of the file on your system, then create one named evoluent-verticalmouse3.fdi in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ with the following content and you should be away. All that's needed to set things to rights is to disconnect the mouse and reconnect it again in both cases.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.mouse">
<match key="input.product" string="Kingsis Peripherals  Evoluent VerticalMouse 3">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">no</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 3 4 5 6 7 3 8</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

While I may not have appreciated the sudden change, it does show how you remap buttons on these mice, and that can be no bad thing. Saying that, hardware settings can be personal things, so it's best not to go changing defaults based on one person's preferences. It just goes to show how valuable discussions like that on Launchpad about this matter can be. For one, I am glad to know what happened and how to make things the way that I want them to be, though I realise that it may not suit everyone; that makes me reticent about asking for such things to be made the standard settings.

Service management in Ubuntu 9.10

The final release of Ubuntu 9.10 is due out today, but there is a minor item that seems to have disappeared from the System > Administration menu, in the release candidate at least: Services. While some readers may put me right, I can't seem to find it anywhere else. Luckily, there is a solution in the form of the GNOME Boot-Up Manager or BUM as it is known sometimes. It is always handy to have a graphical means of restarting services, and BUM suffices for the purpose. While restarting Apache from the command line is all well and good, but the GUI approach has its place too.

A multitude of operating systems

Like buses, it appears that a whole hoard of operating systems is descending upon us at once. OS X 10.6 came first before it was the turn of Windows 7 last week with all the excitement that it generated in the computing and technology media. Next up will be Ubuntu, already a source of some embarrassment for the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones when he got his facts muddled; to his credit he later corrected himself, though I do wonder how up to speed is his appreciated that Ubuntu has its distinct flavours with a netbook variant being different to the main offering that I use. Along with Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12 and openSUSE 11.2 are also in the wings. As if all these weren't enough, the latest issue of PC Plus gives an airing to less well-known operating systems like Haiku (the project that carries on BeOS). The inescapable conclusion is that, far from the impressions of mainstream computer users who know only Windows, we are swimming in a sea of operating system options in which you may drown if you decide to try sampling them all. That may explain why I stick with Ubuntu for home use due to reasons of familiarity and reliability and leave much of the distro hopping to others. Of course, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Windows is the choice of where I work, with 2000 being usurped by Vista in the next few weeks (IT managers always like to be behind the curve for the sake of safety).