Ubuntu 11.04 - disaster, fear, loathing, all wrapped up in one!

I'm a huge fan of Linux (the kernel) and the many incarnations of operating systems that use from, from humble devices and cool smart-phones (using Android), to servers and desktop systems. It is today probably the most used operating system for computers today, and it all started in humble beginnings and embrace complete freedom and collaboration. It is nothing short of an amazing feat of humanity, thanks to an open and sharing geeky Finn.

I am myself an Ubuntu user of about two years or so. I've had various incarnations in the past (Red Hat and Slackware, specifically), but more or less found that Ubuntu was the distribution for me; easy to use, easy to maintain, stable, effective, well supported and well packaged.

And now, all of that might change. Well, all of the things about Ubuntu, that is. I started with Ubuntu 9.04, then I had version 9.10 for a while, and then upgraded to 10.04 (not without a hitch or two), and then a couple of months ago I upgraded to version 10.10 (which was a roaring success). If you look at the calendar you'd notice that my 10.10 upgrade is fashionably late, and that's because I have one principle in regards to upgrading my OS;

• Wait at least 3 months until the forums are filled up with actual solutions to all the problems you might bump into.

And then on Saturday I broke my principle, partly because I felt brave and confident that Canonical (the people behind the Ubuntu distribution) had it all under control, and partly because of the success of the last upgrade. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the first problem was that I hadn't been paying attention to the gossip of the Ubuntusphere, and didn't know that they had replaced the Gnome2 window manager with Unity, a window manager spawned from a more successful netbook line of software. I'm sure it might have been a good choice for netbooks and lighter machines, or even lighter users, but for us heavy-weight developers it turned out to be a disaster, bordering on unusable.

Just like the disastrous change in Ubuntu 10.04 of moving the window control icons from the right-hand side (where we all know them, from Windows and Mac to most Linux) to the left (back to some distant past x-windows time-travelling exercise gone wrong) against all cries, and simply ignoring all usability issues that came from it, Unity brings with it a whole bucketload of additional confusing and counter-intuitive concepts. And, against the nature of Linux itself of complete freedom and a multitude of choices, Unity is pretty much non-tweakable. A lot of the time as I was trying to get to grips with the new user-interface I thought to myself, "surely there's a config option where I can tweak this to be usable?" but no such thing exists. Want the taskbar at the bottom instead of the left-hand side of the screen? Tough. The menus were confusing enough, but the plain stupidity of Unity as a screen real-estate saver then filled up with advertisement for programs I might want to download and install? Unbelievable. And moving the menus from the top-left panel where you could rely on a consistent and static place for all your programs and settings you now get a mish-mash of scattered options by right-clicking and clicking on "more" options! I'm sure a lot of it sounded cool on paper, but in practice this is just terrible.

Anyway, the biggest gripe I have (apart from shifting the window bar icons and titles into the top-panel when maximized!) is the new taskbar concept, which is a taskbar and quick-start menu, wrapped into one. It's similar to the Max OSX bar where you fly over your programs, and if it's running you get some little indicator that it is indeed already running, meaning instead of starting it when you click on it, you switch to it. Fine enough unless you're like me and have many windows of the same program open at the same time. At all times I have at least 7-9 Chrome windows open, each sporting an assortment of tabs. Want to switch between these windows? Why, simply flick your mouse to the left-side of the screen to open the taskbar (with the added delay until it comes up), scroll till you get to the Chrome icon, click it. It has a tiny indicator on it saying there's more than one window open, so you click it again where minimized versions of those windows zoom out and gets placed on the screen with a cool animation, and now you click the window you wish to switch to (and note the small windows have no titles just graphics, and if you squint really well you might pick out what the window might contain, but most of the time it's a random click'n'try process). So when I'm in multiple windows that rely on eachother (one window is the program I'm developing, another a test window, then there's the debug window, a JS debug window, documentation, and on and on) I have to go through this whole ordeal to switch between them if I was arrogant enough to want them maximized (and when you develop complex programs that is a guarantee). The only solution is to have them not maximized and placed around in some fashion where I can click on them, if I can read the window bar text. Horrible.

I'm almost lost for words as to why Ubuntu has chosen to now use Unity as the default window manager, given that a majority of users would still be geeks and more or less tech-savvy people. As a supplement, fine, but the default thing for all Linux geeks and users? Shocking.

Needless to say I was less than impressed, and pondered what to do. And then a stupid thought came to me; I just read about the sexiness of Gnome3, so why not try that? Yeah, a bit premature at this point, but I was seriously that disappointed with the whole Unity ordeal, willing to try desperate measures to get away from it (also, not realizing that Gnome3 and Unity are actually terribly similar, and if the story had a successful ending at this point, I'd actually probably been very, very unhappy at this point, so it's kind good that it didn't happen as planned).

Ok, so I found a page or two that showed how to add a ppa to do the trick, and a apt-get dist-upgrade later I rebooted. However I rebooted into a black screen where nothing except a solitary mouse happened. Oops.

Fast forward a number of reboots and apt-get install/upgrade gnome* later, I just thought, hmm, this isn't going to work. Could be graphics drivers, but I had a mouse so I had no idea. And reverting back to Unity was not really an option (as the big warnings had told me), however someone had made a ppa for purging the Gnome3 from the system. I ran that, and it make things even worse (but in a good way I learned later) where I couldn't even open a session of any kind. Ok, back to the terminal and Lynx trying to work things out, and then I stumbled upon a tool which I can't for the life of me remember (menustat, statmenu, something like that?), but is a console tool for tagging what your distribution should contain. So I tagged out ubuntu and in kubuntu (because I thought might as well give that a try), let the program churn away, and rebooted ...

... into a Ubuntu 11.04 with Gnome 2.* classic user-interface. And yes, in hindsight I should have known that the way to do it is to log out of Unity, click my username again for login, but before putting in the password select 'ubuntu-classic' from a drop-down menu at the bottom, and then log in, and I would have gotten something almost like what I've got now, but doing it correctly is for wimps.

However, what I've got right now is somewhat better; it's a mutated mix of Ubuntu gnome 2.* and KDE (and I'll see what I want to remove, little by little), but in the purging effort it cleaned up a few snags I had been struggling with, like the graphics card (graphics now much smoother and faster), now unstuck options, some sound problems in some packages, and a cleaner theme throughout.

All in all, over the weekend I thought I'd screwed up my system seriously (although I did use the great Ubuntu One service to back up my essentials). But after a purge or two, everything snapped back to normal, all programs working, all personal settings intact. Now that stands as a testament to the greatness of Linux if nothing else, and I'm back to being a somewhat happy camper.

But I'm not happy in that I think Ubuntu is not going to be for me anymore. Both Unity and Gnome3 seems like a step in the wrong direction, so perhaps KDE is my next try, we'll see as the next version of the Ubuntu saga unveils. Or, failing that, this might be a good time to go shopping for another great distribution. The options are, unlike Unity, endless.

Ubuntu 10.10

I had held off upgrading my computer to the latest version of Ubuntu, because every time I do, something screws up. Maybe the sound disappears, or the mouse accelerates, or Java goes missing, or the graphics gets botched. Always something.

But I shouldn't have worried. I went to update manager, hit that 'distribution upgrade', waited an hour or so (lots of downloads on a slow line), one reboot, and everything worked perfectly on the first go. Not a single hitch. Not even a small one. In fact, something's even improved, such as my internal microphone started working. It looks better, feels better, responds better, and the fonts are vastly improved. Everything is just, well, perfect. Color me impressed, and thanks to the Linux community, Canonical and the Ubuntu team for making this awesome operating system that frankly, for me, couldn't be improved upon.

Linux Ubuntu 10.04 upgrade, ATI MobileRadeon 3650 woes

(Note: If you're after my ATI MobileRadeon 3650 graphics card saga, scroll further down)

As mentioned in my more eclectic piece of yesterday, I stuffed up my computer over the weekend, and now I'm here to tell you all about it as well as tell you about the latest Ubuntu release.

I upgraded through the update manager as I've always done. I know a lot of people prefer to take backup, clean the machine, install a fresh Ubuntu version, and then copy back the personal stuff, install the stuff that went missing, as a means of a more secure and painless way. I sneer at such disdain for life and adventure!

I've never had trouble with just clicking the update button that extends beyond what minor snafus you might expect, like drivers to old stuff not working perfect with new stuff, but that's in the nature of going from old to new systems, and doesn't say anything bad on the upgrade process as such. For me, it worked pretty good.

But let's go through snags, one serious annoyance, an irritated state of affairs, and a few tips in dealing with your ATI Radeon issues ;

Snags

I had mostly no trouble at all, really, except after the install the following snags are noted ;

• The brightness control no longer controls the brightness (and I now must use my special function keys to adjust it). No biggie, just annoying.
• My Vodafone 3G mobile network adapter software got uninstalled. Why? It was an independent third-party program. Puzzle.
• The applets (minimize and desktop switcher) on my bottom panel (Gnome) has crashed a couple of times. Odd.
• The system seems slower, but I need to investigate a bit further before pointing fingers.

Serious annoyance

Before we get to the good parts, I need to point out this one thing that just stands out as the dumbest thing with this release, and it is just so stupid that no amount of trying to back-pedal out of it with the lamest excuses ever is good enough;

They switched the minimize, maximize and close window icons from the right side (like the rest of the world does it) to the left (like what retarded systems used to do in the 80's and 90's)! Luckily there's a couple of easy fixes, but none which are embedded in the system to make it easy. Friggin' idiots, what were they thinking? I could write a whole book on just how stupid this was, but suffice to say, my over 10 years of UX and GUI design experience - and my personal experience in using these here new (but terribly old) ideas - screams how much it sucks big time! Icons of window control now sit on top of menus that you use all the time, and the cognitive distance between doing what you want and what will piss you off has now been reduced to a swearword's distance on a regular basis. I seriously hope this is not a hint of things to come, or I'll jump ship. I can deal with the odd snafu, but I don't want to deal with continued stupidity.

Irritating state of affairs

I have a Toshiba Satellite P300 (05Y01Y, which now is discontinued ... a true mark of comfort for me) that came with pre-installed Windows Vista which I killed by accident, and I popped Ubuntu 8.10 on there and have been reasonably happy with all this time. However, all this time there's a few things that still is terribly annoying, although I know this is the fault of vendors and not Linux (so I live with these blemishes rather than whinge about them). Over the updates things have improved (like Skype and Choqok), but there's still more hardware related issues that should have easy fixes ;

• BlueTooth does not work, and probably never will. Toshiba sucks when it comes to supporting Linux, and their BlueTooth stack obviously is not supported here, nor are the default Linux stacks compatible with whatever my machine's got. However, I'm not in need of BlueTooth so I haven't spent the appropriate crazy time needed for proper investigation.
• There's an insanely annoying delay (between 0.5 to 2 seconds long!) whenever a window is minimized or maximized (which also means when the application starts up, hides, reappears or closes down, you know, the sort of stuff you do all freakin' time) when I've got graphics acceleration switched on. This is apparently a bug, and it's been around and come back in various forms. There's a few suggested fixes, but mostly it just doesn't seem to want to go away. This one is seriously bad, and it amazes me that something like this could still be hanging around in an otherwise polished distribution like Ubuntu. There might be a link to the ATI drivers below as well, but the sad part is that to temporary no go insane over this, I sadly have to switch graphics acceleration off.
  Update! It seems that after trying the suggested fixes for enabling 2D that didn't at first do anything, now all of a sudden the problem disappeared! Oh, joy! Come to think of it, I did do a reboot not that long ago, and re-installed the desktop switcher applet. Maybe there were some correlation between the switcher and the graphics driver? Who knows. I'm happily running Compiz and Emerald (although the latter is only an experiment I suspect will be uninstalled).
• The two internal microphones on the machine has never worked, probably never will again due to Toshibas poor Linux support. Crikey, can't they just hire one or two Linux guys to at least tweak existing software with configuration options that might be compatible with some of their more popular models? I could spend a weekend to do this myself, but I've got an USB DSP that does these things which works just fantastic, so again I won't spend the time chasing it.
• My external Logitech Optical Radio mouse does not work properly. It works in the sense that the accelerator insist that my whole world is either top-left or bottom-right, and there's no easy ways in Ubuntu to modify crazy acceleration, so I've just given up on it and use it on my Windows machine.
• The internal ATI MobileRadeon 3650 graphics card saga; this one gets its own section below.

Generics

To me, this upgrade was a bit meh. Nothing stands out as impressive, just small fixes here and there. There's the new menu's at the top so many people rave about, but I don't like nor use them, so meh. The new colors are, well, meh. I didn't mind brown. Not sure I mind purple. Meh. I like that more icons are getting the same style and form, but no biggie. The Software Center has been prettied up a bit, but still lacks what's really important, like testimonials, ratings, awards, versioning, people's comments, recomendations, field groupings, and so on. Meh. I'm sure there's more stuff around, and I'll find them eventually. The only real thing that stands out is that some old problems still aren't fixed, and my system is less responsive. Oh, and they switched from Sun to the OpenJDK Java which threw me off for a few minutes as well. Meh.

My Mobile Radeon 3650 woes

The ATI / AMD chipset has a shaky support history under Linux, but the good news is that there is some degree of support. And indeed, my screen right now is utilizing both OpenGL and higher screens and lots of colors, so all should be well. But it is not, at least not "all" well.

It's not that my latest upgrade killed my graphics setup. No, in fact after upgrade things worked quite well, except I had four ATI Control Center Catalyst icons under System -> Preferences, so I was trying to fix that, and see if there was a fix for the annoying "minimize,maximize delay" bug mentioned further up. But all of a sudden I must have fiddled with the wrong setting (actually, I was uninstalling some unrelated package that wasn't so unrelated after all).

Here's my receipt for fixing a seriously broken and mangled FGLRX install ;

1. Purge your filthy system of sin ;
   
   
   

   sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx* 
   sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati 
   sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-radeon

2. If you get an error like so ;
      dpkg-divert: mismatch on package
      when removing `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa by fglrx'
      found `diversion of /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 to /usr/lib/fglrx/libGL.so.1.2.xlibmesa by xorg-driver-fglrx'
   Go to this page over here for general instructions on fixing diversions.
3. Go to System -> Admin -> Hardware drivers, and wait for it to collect its thoughts.
4. Click on "Install" or "Activate" near the bottom, and wait for it to do its magic.
5. Reboot.

That worked for me; your mileage will vary. Downloading the (massive; 96Mb!!) driver from ATI's homepage, purging and running the downloaded installer did nothing for me. The whole ATI graphics driver brahooha is amazingly bad and should get some cleaning up. Even the Control Center that ATI delivers looks amateurish, and it seems their software lacks any good cleaning up strategies. Or even nice GUI ways of setting up important settings (!!).

The next time I'm buying a computer for my Linux Ubuntu adventures, I'll do some pretty hefty research first to make sure I avoid at least some of the biggest pitfalls. Bloody stupid vendors. Meh.

Nightmare

Update: See bottom.

You know that sinking feeling you get when you're sitting in the root directory of your Linux box, trying to recover the system from a configuration mishap and slightly unaligned update, when you press Enter after typing in "rm -r *"?

Yeah, well, I kinda had a stressing day today. Well, it started yesterday with PulseAudio (the default sound server in the latest Ubuntu) not giving me the desired effect (which is, you know, sound), so in my infinite wisdom I chose to prod a little, configure a little and run various tools in order to fix things. Because I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to all things Linux and Ubuntu these days, little by little I chipped away the things that were working, ending up with a system completely broken.

My computer is a Toshiba Satellite P300. So, I upgraded Ubuntu 8.10 (which I have been very, very happy with) to the new and tasty 9.04. I tried to upgrade through the update-manager a number of times, but my internet connection is a bit flakey, so it panicked on me a few times. In the end, it kinda worked, and the upgrade happened and most things seemed to have worked, except that sound was gone.

So, I tried to make sound work again, because my new boss wants to chat with me over Skype, and it would be a bit pointless without, you know, sound. Somewhere in that process I killed sound completely, and it went from just noise to no noise at all. SO I thought that something was amiss in the upgrade, and so I played around in Synaptic (the package manager) for a while, installing and uninstalling sound stuff. No good results.

Then things got blurry. I got a hint online somewhere to boot into recovery mode and use apt-get from the command line, and run things like dpkg-reconfigure stuff. Well, at some point, and I can't think of where, someone pointed to a major reconfigure of the environment might work, so dpkg-reconfigure * went into action. Ouch, bad move, because when I returned to normal booting, the mouse and keyboard had stopped working. A reboot (well, a crash boot) later and a well-meant dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg further killed my graphics card, so now I was at the point of no mouse, no keyboard and no graphics.

I noticed while doing apt-get that it claimed some packages were installed automatically and no longer needed, and told me to uninstall them. Which I did, and before my eyes I saw things like "uninstalling dkpg-*" which is the whole packaging system, which would leave me stranded with a useless system without the tools needed to fix them. A very, very sinking feeling came over me.

However, the brilliant Ubuntu folks have a menu option for just this kind of stupid user actions, called "fixing broken packages" (or something like that). A run of that, and my system got apt-get again. I uninstalled xserver-xorg completely, and reinstalled it, ran the "xserver fix it!" option from the boot menu, and rebooted.

I got my graphics settings back, but still no mouse and keyboard, rebooted into recovery, found one package had been mangled called "udev", uninstalled and reinstalled, run the "xserver fix it!" again plus "apt-reconfigure console ... something", rebooted again with my mouse unplugged (thinking it might be an autodetection problem, and that plugging it in afterwards might reconfigure it properly), got the graphics and the keyboard working, plugged in the mouse which it autodetected and worked, I tapped in username and password, and friggin' VOILA! I was back to where I left off a few days ago.

With no sound.

But hey, at least I got my system back, and if nothing else my Ubuntu / Linux foo has increased, through manual backups and USB mounting and killing processes and linking up dynamic libraries and editing lots and lots of configuration files. Now, if only I can fix that sound, although I'll leave it alone for a few days before I venture down that path. And, I'll burn myself an ISO of my current system right now. Happy, happy.

Update: Got sound working; the rather common pitfall of having your PCM sound set to no sound. Slide it up, and voila! But my microphone is still dead, not sure how to fix that one. Possibly I need to install Windows, boot into it, unclick the mute button there (as it seems the Linux drivers haven't got some access to that), reboot into Linux and kill Windows again. Like, a 2 hour roundtrip because the mute on the microphone might or might not be accessible there. *sigh*

And so a new era begins

Well, yeah, it would be easy to think my headline had anything to do with changing my life, move to the other side of the planet, new job under new circumstances doing new and kick-ass things (more on all this later), but no, this is about how I wanted to "just have a look" at something which buggered my computer up, and how it changed things for the better.

So, many eons ago, I was a Linux hacker. Well, not a true hacker, but I used to adminster a Red Hat box and create some custom programs in C++. Hmm, must have been, like, about 15 years ago, as part of my civil service (military service is mandatory in Norway, which didn't fit well with my non-violent ideals) which was at the same time I ventured into the Internet as well. So, a long, long time ago, in a place I'd rather just forget about, I fiddled and meddled in the dark arts of software computing. I've always stayed in contact with Linux, but my main OS from that time on has always been in various evil Windows incarnations.

Last week I bought a new computer, a slick Toshiba Satellite P300, that came with Windows Vista. Ugh. I had big reservations against Vista, but I was in a hurry, and thought to myself that surely, it can't be that bad, right?

Well, it was. Slow, sluggish, confusing, and I seemed to have little or no control over who went online to download anything they felt like. I thought, in a quiet moment while the internet connection was bogged down by the virus program or the updater or some other bloody download I couldn't figure out, that perhaps I should finally check out my good old friend, Linux, to see what he was up to these days. I went to the distro I know has got a good load of feedback, Ubuntu, downloaded an ISO (Gutsy Gibbon, 7.10) and burned myself a CD. I popped it in, and without thinking too clearly installed it using the automatic partitioning tool.

It's that tool that made a boo-boo of sorts, and managed to wreck my Windows install; I couldn't boot into it anymore, no matter how much I tried to fix it (I've got a bit of partitioning and formatting experience through the years, luckily). So I was more or less forced to have a deep look at it to see if it could do the things I need to do.

First, the whole install took no time at all. Vista felt like an eternity with multiple restarts (over 50 minutes on my laptop), Ubuntu just copied files over, did some juggeling, and one restart (about 20 minutes). Nice.

Secondly, the Gnome desktop environment is great. I installed some extra Compiz stuff as well, and I'm quite blown away with the options, effects and stuff you can do. The standard applications and tools is more than enough for most things, perhaps with the exception of something for all the web developers out there, but that brings me to the next point;

Installing Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL/SQLite was amazingly easy, even with the extensions I need, just "sudo apt-get" a few packages, and the rest is done for you. Locate the config files in /etc/apache2 and /etc/php5, and I was done in 5 minutes, including setting up a few projects that I work on that simply Just Worked (TM) straight out of the box. I was never able to get this right so fast on Windows, and yet here it was almost too easy. I'm very impressed.

Same with NetBeans, Ruby, Python, Firefox and extensions, it all just is find the file for the packager (based on the Debian packager) and the rest is easy. The selection of software is very good, and I've been using my system as a professional for a couple of weeks without a single hitch. It's found all my hardware as well, except perhaps my Lexmark 7600 series Wireless printer (which I haven't really seriously tried to install yet, only poked around) and some glitches with hibernate and suspend (but given the time it takes for this baby to properly close and boot up again, I'm not really saving much time trying to hibernate anyways).

All in all, my first impressions are really positive, and I'm glad I had an install glitch; I love my new Ubuntu, and I can't wait to get more serious about it and Linux again. I think I've made the permanent switch.