K/L/Ubuntu

In my building, we asked our "IT vendor" to fix up our slow, creaky public internet kiosks. They told us the boxes were too old (they're from about 2002), one was running Windoze Professional 2000, and one was running Windows 97 (ack!) And both were running an unregistered free trial copy of the payware SiteKiosk (which is craptastic at best.)

So they say they "can't" fix the current boxes, and we should just throw them out. And their quote for selling us two refurbished windows boxes with SiteKiosk (no doubt again the free trial version)? $1200. Our answer, in two words: Fuck. That.

So I tell our building manager to get the boxes back. I'll try stripping them, install a very light distribution of Ubuntu, create a very limited privilege user account, throw Firefox or Chromium on, and be done with it. A supports this approach and sends a handy instructable.

Great idea, right? Except that the stupid motherfuckers THREW ONE OF THE COMPUTERS AWAY. Say WHAAAAAAT? You threw it in the garbage? Without asking us?

That's kinda like you take your car to the mechanic, and they tell you that it's not worth fixing, so they donate it to public radio for you. Or run it into a river.

So we yell a little, and they agree to provide us a refurbished box (not yet arrived.)

This morning at half of the asscrack of dawn I took the one remaining computer out (which required some power tools to liberate it) and then spent much of the morning downloading torrents of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) (very new, but I really wanted a Long Term Support version), creating a bootable USB drive with it, only to find out the computer doesn't support PAE (meaning you can't boot from an external hard drive with it.) So I go back and torrent Lubuntu 12.04, remake the bootable USB drive, and try that. No kinda dice whatsoever: just a massive pain in the ass. It takes FOREVER to install, won't properly set the time zone (which even though you used to be able to tell it manually what time zone you're in, it now insists on hanging while waiting indefinitely for a network time server for), won't complete the console configuration properly. And then even though it pretends that the install mostly finished, it just totally freezes, and freezes completely upon startup.

Back to the drawing board. I go through the same miserable process with Kubuntu 12.04.

By now I've learned by lesson about 12.04, and ditch it. I try Kubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) with the same damn result.

So I go get Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal , the alternate (stripped down) version, and it installs like a charm. Well, it takes a while, but with no hiccups.

The moral of the story? Be very wary about early adoption. 

Now time to go configure the machine and make it a public kiosk, and await the arrival of our newly refurbished machine.

Intense

It's been, on several fronts, a pretty intense couple of days for e-mail. Almost all of it good, but just: intense. I won't go into a lot of details because (a) it could involve confidences, and I keep secrets better than almost anyone I have ever known, and (b) the subjects wouldn't make sense, or have a whole lot of resonance for most readers, without extensive backstory and explanation. Suffice it to say it has been a busy email time. (Phone as well.)

One friend told me that reading this blog is like talking to me, which I am tickled by. (Though I suppose some might not think it a good thing. But then, they're probably not voracious readers of my blog...)

It's beautiful here: one of those slightly hazy but bright days, with alternating sharp and soft definition in the clouds. Stone Mountain is clearly visible to the east. But I ain't got no bike to ride. Boo! It's strange, even to me, that I'm feeling withdrawal symptoms from not having a bike to ride. Yes, as I said to the friend mentioned above, I am that dork that got a bicycle part tattooed on his body (which most of you have seen; it's a shark-toothed chaingring on my right deltoid), and has the next tattoo planned, also a bicycle part (a mobius strip made out of bicycle chain, going around the deltoid and tricep on my left arm.)

In boring computer news, the score is now Ubuntu 2, Me 2.5! For no apparent reason, when I shut down the laptop yesterday and then later started it back it, it did the screen resolution properly, taking away the blank strips. It must've been scared by my putting on BDUs. (To paraphrase my best friend the computer genius, when all else fails, fix it with a hammer!)

Okay: I'm going to finish this up, take a shower, make a smoothie, and start cleaning up the multiple piles of bicycle parts which are literally strewn all over the condo. And consider which of them I want to get tattooed with. The smoothie is the odds-on favorite.

Score: Ubuntu 2, Me 2

The three faithful readers of my boring blog (love you guys!) might remember a post a while ago about the battle I'm fighting with my Ubuntu install on this very (Dell 700m) laptop, where the score was Ubuntu 1, Me 1. If not, you should go back and briefly review that post, so that this will make a little more sense.

In the intervening time since that last post, the Karmic install was getting more and more buggy: crashing, freezing, and the power management was just a complete fuckup. I had my best friend the computer genius try to fix it, and finally he asked if I really even need the power management function (e.g., to sleep or hibernate the computer after long periods of disuse.) I didn't, since when I'm using this laptop, I'm always using it, and then I pretty much always manually sleep it or shut it down. So he just turned off power management, which worked like a charm. For about an hour.

Fast forward to yesterday: I'm finally sufficiently unhappy with the bugginess and instability of Karmic that I decide to go the big ol' pain in the ass route, and regress to Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope. It's a big ol' pain in the ass because reverse-updating essentially means a full wipe of your hard drive and completely new install of the new version as if it's a new OS. Yeah, there are various ways of tricking your system into the downgrade, but many advise against them.

So I got out the external hard drive, and backed up all the data. (Well, I actually forgot the pictures, but that's okay, because I had minimal images on this machine.) Then I generated a bootable installation of Jaunty on a flash drive. Then installed it. Then installed the hundreds of updates that Ubuntu developers have released since Jaunty came out. Then installed all of the software I like.

So the score as of yesterday evening was Ubuntu 1, Me 2. HAH!

I just started up the computer this morning, and had to laugh out loud: I'm back to the bug that existed in my last go-round with Jaunty, which is particular to some models of laptops: the computer thinks I have a smaller screen or lower refresh rate than I do, and cannot be made to believe otherwise. So I have two black bands of empty screen running vertically on both sides of my display, wasting about two inches of screen real estate.

Ubuntu 2, Me 2. The battle rages on!

Score: Ubuntu 1, me 1

I recently updated the version of Ubuntu i run on one of my laptops. (Don't ask me why i have two laptops. Okay, here's a hint: I suck.) But I digress: I moved from version 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

First impressions were very solid: it's a slightly cleaner interface, it's considerably faster (though not in bootup the way many others seem to have experienced, and seemed relatively stable.

That is, until I took the bold step of unplugging my laptop while it was turned on. Which caused it to suspend automatically, and need to be awoken.

Well, I endured this irritation for a week or so while I poked around on the InformationSuperInfoBahn for fixes, and basically just read and re-read that the new power management package in Karmic, well, sucks.

Finally today I found a post deep in a bug reporting forum (see post #47.)

So while I can now happily unplug the laptop while using it to move it around the condo (this laptop serves as a primary podcast playing device while I'm cooking and brewing) I'm still enduring the semi-regular freezeups, where everything stops working except that you can move the mouse around in a futile, sad attempt to make it work, and which require a hard-restart.

On balance, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have updated, but reverting to an older version is a big pain in the ass, so here I am. Fortunately, the ubuntu community is very, very good about patches and fixing things, so it shouldn't take long.