Thursday, December 13, 2007

Backup

I used to use Dar/KDar for backup purposes back when I was using SuSE 10.2. I've switched to Ubuntu, and it seems KDar is no longer packaged for Ubuntu. It got me thinking: what are the features that I want in a simple desktop backup application? Here are some in no particular order:

  1. Network awareness. This is something I missed in Dar, which could only write to a directory on the system, which meant I had to ssh-mount a remote filesystem before I could back up to it.
  2. Incremental and Full Backups.
  3. A good scheduler. That is, it should be possible to specify the frequency and type of incremental and full backups, and a purge schedule for old backups.
  4. Software independence. Dar used its own proprietary format, which forces me to use Dar to look at any of my backups. With KDar no longer available, it is quite painful to try to look at the contents of any of the older backup files. I have to get Dar to extract them somewhere, browse them and then delete them later. Something uses simple tar or tar.gz is much better; I can use Konqueror etc. to browse inside them directly.
  5. Encryption is good if I'll be using NAS, otherwise it's not as important to me.
Maybe I'll add more requirements later.

Ubuntu 7.10, the T61 and External Monitors

I had a spot of bother trying to use an external monitor with Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on a Lenovo T61. My T61 has an Nvidia Quadro 140M card and I'm using the proprietary (restricted) drivers.

I got a Lenovo Mini-dock and a Lenovo D221 monitor with my T61. When I connected everything up and put my T61 on the mini-dock and started it, everything appeared on the external monitor up to the Ubuntu splash screen with the progress bar. Right after that, the external monitor went blank and the T61's screen took over. (I think that happened when the X server was started, but not sure.) The same thing happened when I connected the external monitor to the T61 directly (not through the mini-dock).

To resolve this:
  1. Connect the external monitor to the laptop directly
  2. Open up a terminal, get root access using "su", and type "nvidia-settings &" at the prompt. This is a configuration program from the package "nvidia-glx-new" (I think it gets installed when you install the restricted nvidia drivers, but not sure).
  3. Within nvidia-settings, select "X Server Display Information". It should show two monitors in a little box called "Layout". The external monitor may be disabled.
  4. Click on the external monitor's icon, then click "Configure", then select "Separate X Screen".
  5. Click on the laptop screen's icon (which is probably enabled), then click "Configure", then select "Disabled".
  6. Note: This step will overwrite the X Confuration File (usually /etc/X11/xorg.conf). You may first want to backup that file to something like xorg.conf.bak.01. When you've backed it up, click "Save to X Configuration File".
When I restarted my X Server (or restarted the computer) after this, all output came out only on the external monitor, which is what I wanted.

However, this didn't solve the problem when I put the T61 on the mini-dock. I also had to connect the T61 and the external monitor to the mini-dock, and then repeat steps 2-6 with the T61 on the mini-dock.

Finally, when the T61 is not connected to the external monitor in any way, it should continue to work as usual. The above configurations don't affect this.

Caveats:
  1. After doing this, there is an Nvidia splash screen every time the X Server is started up. This can be removed by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I don't detail that here.
  2. After this reconfiguration, I began noticing that my GL Desktop window manager crashes very frequently. When that happens, I can resolve it by running System > Preferences > GL Desktop. But it is a bother.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Gnome Frustrations

The Gnome desktop environment, as packaged with Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon", is a queer mix of liberating and frustrating. While it's got some great features and applets, and Compiz is pretty cool, it really falls flat on its face in some areas. While I understand that the Gnome people want to be minimalist, the extremes to which they go are counter-productive. Here are some of my gripes:
  1. Their File Open dialogs don't have a place where you can type in a file location; you are forced to navigate to it using mouse clicks. This becomes really frustrating if you want to hide folders starting with a period ("."). I like to hide them because there are way too many and I access them only rarely. But when I do want to access them, Gnome makes it so difficult.
  2. Having the option to see more information about what's going on during various operations can save a lot of frustration. I guess giving people access to information doesn't necessarily go against Gnome's philosophy; there could be an option to turn on extra information. One applet which frustrates me in this regard is the nm-applet which provides wireless access. The applet sometimes cannot connect to wireless networks, for example if I had to restart a wireless router. The problem is it keeps working away without allowing any kind of interaction. There is no option to cancel, no output indicating what it's doing; just the animation showing that it's working.
  3. Gnome workspaces simply don't implement the best aspects of workspaces. The only thing you can do with Gnome workspaces is have different applications on different workspaces. What would be vastly more useful is to allow a different set of icons on each workspace. This is more important now that Gnome shows large thumbnail views of PDF files; there simply isn't enough space on a single workspace, and Gnome prevents users from effectively using the additional space that multiple workspaces provide. Allowing a different desktop background would nice too, but this is just eye candy.
  4. Gnome has drawers, but these are too limited. You can't look at its contents and see what each element is. (The drawers just show identical icons for all PDF documents, for example.)
  5. You can't select multiple applications on the taskbar (using Ctrl-click, for example) to close or minimize several windows at once! This is the worst regression I've seen. I once tried to open a large number of audio files with Audacity (thinking they would be queued in a playlist) and it opened up about 50 windows. I had to close them one by one.
So if you have a large number of documents that you want to organize on your desktop for quick access, there is no way to do it: you can't use workspaces because all workspaces have the same desktop icons, and you can't use drawers because you have no way to label a drawer or its contents.

And, this isn't Gnome's fault, but lack of good out-of-the-box hibernate negates all the benefits of having multiple desktops.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Ubuntu: sudo woes

Ubuntu's philosophy is to have a privileged "first user" account, created during system setup, which has sudo privileges. There is also a separate user account with username "root", but the password is unknown right after installation. The system administrator is expected to administer the system through the privileged first user account.

To get access to the root account, you can use the command "sudo passwd root" as the privileged user to reset the root password.

Suppose you want to run a package manager as the privileged first user, while logged in as a regular (non-privileged) user in Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10). You cannot use sudo unless the non-privileged user is in the sudoers group. Attempting something like the command "gksudo -u privileged-username package-manager" brings up a root password prompt, but you always get an "incorrect password" error. Using gksu also results in the same problem. However, using su in a terminal rather than gksudo or gksu works.

Fix:

The reason this doesn't work is that gksu's behaviour defaults to gksudo (see gksu man page). A solution:

1. Reset root password using "sudo passwd root" as the privileged user
2. Then "gksu --su-mode package-manager" to run it as root.

I still don't know how to make this work running the package manager as the privileged user rather than root.




Monday, October 22, 2007

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on the T61

Having installed KUbuntu, I was interested in trying out Ubuntu on my T61. I installed it on a separate partition, and I am thrilled with the results. Kubuntu and Ubuntu have their strengths and weaknesses, but Ubuntu seems better on the whole.

I did have a couple of problems during the installation. The Ubuntu GRUB installer got confused and thought the Windows XP Pro partition was another Ubuntu partition... rendering it unbootable. This was fixed easily enough, though, by simply editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file a bit.

A peculiar problem with both KUbuntu and Ubuntu on the T61 is that the keyboard volume controls don't work the way you'd expect them to. On Kubuntu, there are only two volume levels you can select with the keyboard controls. On Ubuntu, the controls do work... the problem is that they are not integrated with the system software controls. For example, if I press the mute button, the system doesn't seem to realize that it's been muted. Using the volume up and down does change the volume appropriately, and Ubuntu recognizes this and even shows an overlay displaying the volume changing, but this is not reflected in the system volume levels. This confused me a couple of times.

The screen brightness controls on the keyboard (Fn+Home and Fn+End) are recognized. Ubuntu shows an overlay with increasing or decreasing brightness. However, Ubuntu ignores them: it does not respond by changing screen brightness.

Ubuntu has a host of usability hacks that KUbuntu lacks. For example, it automagically recognized the .Xmodmap file I had placed in my home directory (to switch Caps Lock and Ctrl). Compiz works well out of the box on Ubuntu; I couldn't figure out how to enable it on KUbuntu.

One thing I did miss on Ubuntu is Konqueror's multi-functionality. I installed Konqueror, but it was a different version and didn't have the handy "File Size View".

Both Ubuntu and KUbuntu seem to have problems with their "Switch User" functionality. It's a little slow, and one of the sessions crashes a little too often. On Ubuntu, there's a peculiar effect when switching: one of the sessions will slow down a hundredfold, taking several seconds to respond to mouse clicks or draw/move windows etc. Switching back and forth a couple of times solves the problem, but it is an annoyance.


Wednesday, October 17, 2007

KUbuntu Gutsy Gibbon + Lenovo T61 = Freedom!

I just got a new Lenovo T61, with 2.2 GHz core 2 duo, NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M, 3 gigs of RAM, and a 160 Gig hard drive. As soon as I could, I installed KUbuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on it, and am impressed with the results. Installation was (almost) a breeze, and (almost) everything works right out of the box. After using SuSE 10.2 for over a year, I can finally breathe! Read on for a review.

Partitioning

The laptop came with the 160 gigs partitioned into two parts: a small recovery partition by Lenovo (about 6 gigs), and a large (~150 gigs) partition with Windows XP Pro (more expensive than Vista Home). I wanted to keep XP along with one "production" Linux system and a "trial" Linux system to play around with. I used the gparted LiveCD (from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/), which made re-partitioning a breeze. I left the recovery partition strictly alone. My final partitioning scheme:


Device Gigs System
/dev/sda1 30.7 HPFS/NTFS (Win XP)
/dev/sda3 79.5 W95 FAT32 (Data)
/dev/sda4 40.2 Extended
/dev/sda5 12.6 Linux (Trial)
/dev/sda6 3.2 Linux (Trial home)
/dev/sda7 15.9 Linux (Production)
/dev/sda8 5.2 Linux (Production home)
/dev/sda9 3.3 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2 5.8 Compaq diagnostics (Lenovo Recovery)


Initial Hiccups

I initially tried to install KUbuntu 7.04 ("Feisty Fawn") because Gutsy was still in the RC (Release Candidate) stage. When using the standard Live CD, Feisty would boot up and ask for mode of operation, but wouldn't be able to initialize its X Window System (from which you can install). There is some discussion online about setting the SATA setting to "Compatibility" instead of "HCPI" in the T61's BIOS, but that didn't work for me, so I went ahead with the Gutsy Gibbon RC. Gutsy couldn't initialize its usual X Window System, either, but I followed the advice at:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Ubuntu_7.10_%28Gutsy_Gibbon%29_Release_Candidate_on_a_ThinkPad_T61

and simply selected the "Safe Graphics" option and the rest of the installation was a breeze.

Installation

During installation KUbuntu asks for the name of a user and an admin password. This refers to a special user with sudo privileges, so I avoided my usual username and put in something like "sysadmin". I didn't have any other installation issues.

Startup, Logon and Shutdown

Gutsy is the fastest Linux I've ever seen, even giving Win XP a run for its money. Here are the startup (time to display logon screen), logon (time from display of logon screen to delivering a usable cursor and clickable icons after logon) and shutdown (from a session with no windows open) times of XP and Gutsy on this machine:

Win XP: Startup = 40s, Logon = 30s, Shutdown = 28s.
Gutsy: Startup = 49s, Logon = 19s, Shutdown = 20s.

Adding Packages

The installer installs a basic functional system. I wanted to add more packages. I like the package manager synaptic better than the default, adept. So I installed it using the command "apt-get install synaptic" in a terminal window.

Wi-Fi

Worked out of the box. Knetworkmanager stores the authentication information in the KDE wallet.

Sound

Works out of the box, but the volume up/down buttons don't work properly. Mute works.

Brightness

The brightness controls don't work. The night light works.

3D

The restricted NVIDIA driver is required to enable harware 3D acceleration. Enabling it is a breeze.

Fonts & Appearance

This was the biggest surprise. After getting accustomed to fuzzy, ugly fonts, blunt mouse pointers, and a generally shoddy appearance on Linux for ages, I am now happy to state that Gutsy surpasses Win XP in terms of appearance. Everything is crisp and beautiful. Caveat: Enabling the restricted NVIDIA driver actually diminished the appearance somewhat, with some fonts looking too thin.

Hibernate

This doesn't work very well out of the box. When only one session was active, I recovered from a hibernate once and couldn't another time. When I did recover, Gutsy showed some corrupted screens etc. and then a blank screen; it took me a few seconds to realize I had to move the mouse to get a login dialog. When two sessions were active, Gutsy wouldn't hibernate at all. With Gutsy's amazing boot-up speed, this is less of an issue than on SuSE 10.2, but is still a problem when I'm in the middle of several applications and have to move.

The Mini-Dock

I got a mini-dock with the T61. Gutsy works fine on the mini-dock as long as the T61 is turned off when putting it on or taking it off. If I eject it from the dock while Gutsy is running, the T61 screen stays blank, and I have to do a hard reboot.

Overall Experience

The overall experience is great. The most bothersome Linux issues seem to have disappeared in this distribution. And this is just the release candidate!

There are still some bugs, however. Konqueror doesn't remember its settings properly. Integration between the KDE clipboard and applications like kterm and emacs is quite problematic. Some applications and KDE components crash, especially when switching between multiple X sessions. And a few others.


Friday, August 31, 2007

Why Not Microsoft?

  1. Microsoft competes using business and personal tactics, not on technical merit. (Using SCO to run an anti-Linux malicious legal witchhunt designed to spread FUD about the legality of Linux, scaring away corporate customers of Linux; threatening PC manufacturers who offer Linux; using lobbying money instead of technical arguments to push OpenXML through)
  2. Microsoft doesn't try to create better products than competitors; it tries to make competitor's products worse. (Java is an example where Microsoft was foiled.) As a result, thousands of innovations never see the light of day unless Microsoft can make more money out of them.
  3. Microsoft has a culture of reliance on deception rather than openness. (In its earlier days, it tried to cover up security flaws rather than fix them numerous times. Currently, its claims about OpenXML being an open standard are disingenuous: Microsoft uses various techniques to make it almost impossible for 3rd parties to write software compatible with Microsoft Office even if OpenXML is followed.)
  4. Microsoft decisions are technically flawed. Microsoft sets off to make radical changes in the way things are done, relative to Unix. Several years later, it then begins a costly process of converting its legacy of bad code into practices similar to those of Unix. (Example: DOS's lack of memory protection, user accounts, application settings instead of the registry, home directories, making security a priority, remote access)
  5. Microsoft's "copy, don't innovate" strategy has a significant opportunity cost for customers who don't get useful features for years after they are available elsewhere. The problem is compounded by Microsoft's monopoly. (Example: tabbed browsing, available for 4 years on Opera and 2 years on Firefox before Microsoft could make it available on IE.)
  6. With Microsoft, customers have no chance at code ownership. So features Microsoft wants to add are added when Microsoft wants them. A customer can pay to have features added to an open source app. Not so with Microsoft products; customers are entirely at Microsoft's mercy. The problem is exacerbated if this refers to a feature that is useful to a small minority of customers, or just to one customer.
  7. Developers with smart ideas can add features to open source software. Not so with Microsoft software. Such ideas cannot be widely distributed without the entire piece of software being rewritten as an alternative, or Microsoft deciding to support the modification. No such ideas are ever part of Microsoft software. Thus, Microsoft stifles creativity (unintentionally, in this case).