Disunity

Ubuntu's "Natty Narwhale" release (11.04) foisted a new look-and-feel called, laughingly, "Unity" on users last April 28th. Ubuntu users are writhing and fainting in coils.

To be sure, the screwball Ubuntu nerds profess to like it ginormously, but those of us who need to explain to our families why they need to spend a couple of hours retraining... Ah, yes. You see the problem.

No, I will NOT sideslide to Natty Narwhal, or any other whale carried on a gnome's back. I'm turning off my Abbie Normal update setting, and sticking with Ubuntu 10.10 for the nonce. To infinity. And beyond.

My next "update" will probably be a Macintosh, if Oneiric Ocelot fails as obliviously as 11.04.

First impressions, Maverick Meerkat

I run Ubuntu on this Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, which, in the past, has been no easy task. This morning, I backed up our data and installed Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat.

First impressions? Hate the font, but it's legible. On the plus side, the Meerkat seems to have a ton of minor fixes and improvements, including relatively new versions of many applications you would normally update through the Synaptic Package Manager. On the down side...? Doesn't seem to be a lot of down side.  The Software Sources dialog is hidden (probably "a feature, not a bug"); but the Sysinfo menu option doesn't work (the window closes when you select the top item), a silly glitch (belongs to Gnome?) I've also seen in Firefox, but nothing major seems to be broken — WiFi works fine, especially.

So far, so... well, uhh...

SECOND IMPRESSIONS

Stupid Maverick Meercat!  What have you done with my Wallpaper collection!

Lucid Lynx

Hmmm... Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) was a decent Ubuntu release. It gave me back my wireless connection (missing since 8.10 broke it — although Dell's proprietary Broadcom STA wireless driver had somethin' to do with it being missing in the first place...!)

Karmic Koala (9.10) only lasted overnight. It broke my wireless again, and a few other minor things.

Lucid Lynx (10.04) is Ubuntu's latest and greatest (for now). Wireless is back. Not many issues that I didn't already have. Wine 1.2^† is no better than it was, despite the hype. Some Firefox 3.6.7 plugins do not play well with others.

Mostly satisfied. The basic Linux part of my Dell Inspiron 1525 is now very nice.

Some gotchas...

Firefox 3.6.7, not actually part of Lucid, is almost unusable without AdBlock Plus and NoScript; both of these have a learning curve.

Also, the screensaver comes in Lock mode by default — you have to go to System → Preferences → Screensaver and turn it off. You can still Lock your screen manually using the User item on the menubar.

^†Neither SmartGo for Windows nor Many Faces of Go v12 can draw a drop shadow properly using Wine 1.2.

Sumthin' fer Nuthin'

Send a self addressed stamped envelope to:

System76, Inc. (Free Stickers)
1582 S. Parker Rd. Ste. 310
Denver, Colorado 80231

You get back four stickers. Mine showed up right after I'd forgotten I sent in the S.A.S.E. I put one on my Dell laptop in the place of that Microsoft Vista sticker^‡ I peeled off and threw away months ago. The stickers are hard and shiny, like the originals.

That leaves three stickers on a waxed paper strip. I'm using mine as a bookmark in a re-read of Isaac Asimov's preposterously outdated Pebble in the Sky (1950), which almost incidentally predates the U.S. civil rights movement by a dozen years. But Asimov almost certainly took his model for unreasoning riot and hatred from Russian pogroms, if not the Nazi Holocaust itself. American biracial history is full of miscegenation, and even happy marriages, but Pola Shekt, the "Earthie-girl" lab tech, never gets phone calls from goyim ... err ... Outsiders.

Pebble also mentions advanced worlds which have replaced human with robot labor, predating The Good Doctor's own book, Caves of Steel (1954), and gives Mule-like mental powers to Schwarz (of Spaceballs fame — "May the Schwarz be with you!"); although The Mule from his Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953) really backdates to a 1948 story in Astounding Science Fiction.

I also play a little mind game, like Grew's and Schwarz's chess games in the dark, called "Too Much Science." The rules are simple. Take a black magic marker and blot out all references to science, real or imagined, in an Asimov story like Pebble in the Sky. Is it possible to blot out an entire page? Does the story line suffer one iota? Can you make the book resemble a redacted Freedom of Information Act release from the CIA? That's fun. As a kid, though, I was rather taken by Asimov's description of that glow-in-the-dark chess set. I still want one. Can you imagine Dr. Asimov's 3-Mile Island Chess from Parker Brothers?^†

There's another magic marker game you can play called "That's Good, Doctor!" Using two markers with contrasting colors — I'd recommend fluorescent pink and fluorescent yellowgreen — highlight all conversations involving two people, pink for A, yellowgreen for B. Whenever you realize you've just highlighted an entire page in yellowgreen, but pink is obviously speaking, ding yourself a point and snarl, "Good one, Doctor Asimov!" This game is played like golf, low score wins.

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^‡I have a Dell Inspiron 1525, which was not a native Linux laptop at inception. It started life as Vista, but problems arose (to put it nicely), so now it's been through Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04, plus a couple of restore-from-backups. My next laptop (probably my daughter's) will be a Pangolin Performance from System76.

^†Well, yes, actually. There's an updated glowing version of shogi — albeit electronic and not radioactive — in Cowboy Bebop.

Security Tools for Ubuntu

Whaddaya know? There's a TrueCrypt for Linux! And the secure-delete package available in Synaptic has srm, secure remove with Peter Gutmann's algorithm (not to mention steghide and mcrypt...). Whee! All the stuff you need to get your Linux laptop impounded by TSA airport paranoia steam!

Update: Even though TrueCrypt uses Sarah Dean's OTFE library, it has implemented a few non-essential gotchas for careless or casual users. For one, the TrueCrypt GUI violates "plausible deniability" by providing three over-the-shoulder mounted volume types (Normal, Outer and Hidden). For another, ~/.TrueCrypt/Default Keyfiles.xml and ~/.TrueCrypt/Favorite Volumes.xml contain unencrypted, readable text which helpfully records the pathnames of your "secret" files. And again, only one fs type (FAT) is supported. The implications for "plausible deniability" are left as an exercise for the reader. LUKS, anyone?

How to run Windows XP inside Ubuntu

Beats me.

I found the Windows XP Pro and Home full install .iso's here, but nothing seems really ready to cook that stuff in an emulation layer; for one thing, vague assurances to the contrary, those Microsoft images (with valid Microsoft SHA1's and MD5's) still enforce mandatory activation after 30 days.

So far I've tried Wine (a.k.a. "Grape Juice" or more likely "Vinegar" by would-be users familiar with it), CrossOver, VMWare and VirtualBox. No soap, each for its own maddeningly idiosyncratic reasons, at least not on a Dell Inspiron 1525. [UPDATE: Curiously enough, Fallout 1 & 2 both seem to play nice with CrossOver 7 for Linux. Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel also ran, but does not install seamlessly — it leaves a few toolmarks. (Of course, no one plays that one anyway.)]

QEmu does work pretty well, if you can overlook the lethargy not to mention the missing CD drive, sound and internet in the installed OS. That, and the fact that qemu-launcher is plain and undocumented, so you will have to generalize from experience in order to use it.

Because of the Windows activation problem, still unresolved, there's no point wasting my time explaining how "plain and undocumented" really works, but give yourself all morning to install and all afternoon for disappointment, regrets, fury and weeping in your beer.

On the bright side, QEmu implements some simple tricks, like mouse grab, that are supposed to work in VirtualBox, but don't, so the feature is not impossible to implement. Of course, there's always the dual boot, separate partitions option... not my first choice.

There are good and valid reasons to run Windows, of course, no matter what one might think of it privately, the main one being that a lot of truly excellent software was written for that and not for Linux.

An excellent DVD player for Ubuntu

VLC seems to work about as well as Dell's MediaDirect player for Vista ever did, if not better. (A severe, showstopping MediaDirect crash is the thing that nuked Vista SP1 and forced me to migrate to Ubuntu 8.04 on this Inspiron 1525 notebook in the first place!) VLC's menu interface is absurdly complex-looking when you first approach it, but when you choose to Open Disk..., it defaults to a common sense subset of options. Do the simple thing: Click the OK button on the window that opens up. Then right-click in the movie window and click on full screen. Easy. The movie's own Setup can be accessed onscreen with mouse clicks! [Update: Actually, this depends whether the manufacturer of the DVD has produced a "best practices" Setup menu. Disney stuff always seems to work. The old Cowboy Bebop tv episode DVDs are a bit flaky, but work if you click Navigation → DVD Menu → Audio first, while the Cowboy Bebop movie works fine with keyboard controls.]

Notes — VLC does not enforce region encoding, so you can watch Region 2 (Japanese) anime on your Region 1 (American) boxen. VLC can also use a non-essential decryption plugin, not supported by Ubuntu. Available for Windows, Mac OS X, and all the big Linux distros. Other systems compile from source.

How to fix verbose Ubuntu boot (Hardy Heron)

The symptoms were these: When I turned on my laptop, which runs Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, the orange and black splash screen comes up, the bar runs over to the right and stops, then the screen switches to text and reports:

* Reading files necessary for boot

Then a lot of text, and finally we're ready to go at the login screen! It only seems simple!

I didn't like the verbose boot. It was not aesthetically pleasing. It was new behavior. It shouldn't be happening. What was wrong?

Here it is:

1) I changed the size of my swap partition when I realized I'd set it up too small on Day One. That caused some of the trouble!

2) But wait, there's more! In System → Administration → Software Sources → Updates, I'd gone in some days ago and checked the "hardy proposed" and "hardy-backports" options, not because I knew what I was doing, but because it seemed like a good idea at the time. This. Had. Consequences.

3) Upon further checking using sysinfo, I realized the swap partition wasn't even active, and I couldn't MAKE it active using swapon !

4) vol_id /dev/sda2 showed a different UUID than the one in (how esoteric can you get?) /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume ! What the blazes is that, you ask? I dunno, I didn't figure this out on my own.

Ok, so how did I fix it? With the help of the übergeeks at Ubuntu Forums, of course! In a nutshell, the help I got covered the essentials and left some details about my specific situation to the imagination, so this is it:

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! Getting this wrong ABSOLUTELY WILL screw up your system! ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE *except in California, where by law you may still hope but proceed at your own risk anyway!

A) Using System → Administration → Partition Editor, DELETE the swap partition, and recreate it in the exact same place and exact same size! This will reassign a brand new UUID to the swap partition, which you may discover using vol_id /dev/sda2 .

B) Using gedit, MANUALLY edit /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume so that the UUID is up-to-date. Do the same for the file /etc/fstab, i.e., find the swap partition (identified by type swap rather than ext3 and change the UUID to the new number.

C) Because I had been MUNG-ing around in Software Sources and told the system to feed me Ubuntu's experimental proposed updates and and the totally unsupported "hardy-backports", my kernel version was set to 21, but at the moment, the last stable kernel is 19. These are listed by filename in /lib/modules, and will be used in the next step.

D) You need to regenerate some boot information for your linux kernel version using sudo update-initramfs -k 2.6.24-19-generic -u — note that in my case, my kernel was set to version 21, not 19, so I had to use the -k 2.6.24-19-generic switch. If your kernel is right and proper as shown by sysinfo, you can leave that switch out, but be sure to include -u !

E) sudo reboot , and that's all!