Ubuntu archive
Note to self about mounting problems
2008-06-27 22:20
This is just a small note to my future self, for the next time I encounter seemingly random invalid mount operations, or other mount failures in Ubuntu (Hardy Heron, in this case), for phone cards, usb drives et al. Remove the following line from /etc/fstab:
/dev/sdb1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0For what it’s worth, I have to do this because I have no optical drive in my laptop, and this line seems to be added, regardless of the presence of such a drive.
My experience with Windows Vista, in n simple steps
2007-09-18 19:31
At work, I just got a Lenovo X61s — a really nice piece of hardware, and way more suited to my everyday needs than the desktop computer it replaced.
It came preinstalled with Windows Vista Business edition. Here is my (highly biased) review:
Booting up
- The computer boots.
- It shows me a microsoft progress bar
- After a couple of minutes, it still shows me a progress bar
- Finally, a few minutes later, I have a spinning disc of death mouse cursor.
- Crash/Reboot
- Repeat steps 1-4
- Be greeted by a welcoming dialog
- Answer lots of questions, like where I am from, what my name is.
- Notice that it doesn’t pick up my time zone or keyboard setup based on my other location
- Notice that the dialogs are inconsistent. Some use immediate apply+progress, while others require me to click “Next”. Wonder why.
- Get asked if I want Lenovo promotional material
- Get asked if I want to register
- Get asked about more crapware. No, Norton Internet security is not an acceptable piece of software. Anywhere in the known universe
- When everything is answered, notice that the system claims to be measuring my performance, and thus needs to reboot afterwards. Believe that this is a blatant lie.
- Reboot
- Wait
- Wait more
- Be greeted by a friendly login dialog revealing the username of the only user on this computer. Friendly, but I’m actually old school enough to prefer typing in my username.
- Wait
- Watch the spinning disc of death flash in my mouse cursor. Another few minutes.
- Bitch on IRC about this shiny operating system being slow.
- Notice Microsoft’s familiar Window telling me it’s configuring MSIE and other applications for me.
- Questioning why they couldn’t just have done that at the same time I created my user account.
- Try dragging the window around in total boredom.
- Notice how, even after Microsoft told me they would configure Window effects to work optimally, have set up a system that has problems dragging a 200×50-sized window without getting jumping, lag, jerking, and unresponsiveness
- Notice that Lenovo, beside my insistence on not installing anything from them, runs the batch script from hell
- Notice that said scripts throws error after error after error.
- Thinking that this is a bad sign
- Try to open up an application
- Wait
- Notice that it takes MSIE ten seconds or so to open
- Wonder where all of the rest of the windows came from. Including warning this, warning that.
- Notice that an icon in the systray telling me my system is misconfigured, insecure and not working optimally
- Ignore said icon
- Bitch more on IRC
- Leave the computer alone
- Notice that the task bar goes AWOL.
- Try to bring it back the way the task bar was brought back in XP and 2000, by simply moving the mouse to the bottom of the screen.
- Notice that nothing happens.
- Curse.
- Try the Windows key.
- Notice that it works.
- Figure out that since Vista is intent on being the antithesis of Fitts’ Law, you need a higher precision pointer device than the nipple. Install a mouse.
- Locate and plug in said mouse.
- Try to move cursor with mouse.
- Notice how exactly NOTHING happens.
- Wait
- Curse
- Bitch on IRC
- Curse
- Notice how Vista, after 30 seconds or so, says it has located a pointing device. In dialog popup in a systray icon. Which is partially obscured. By the second popup telling me my computer is unsafe, misconfigured and whatnot.
- Curse.
- Wait another 30 seconds.
- Try to reboot the thing. Only to find out that the power button just puts the computer to sleep.
- Try to locate a proper shutdown option in the start menu, like the “Power” symbol. Click it. Which puts the computer to sleep.
- Power up the computer
- Curse
- Type password
- Curse again, because the bog standard mouse is still not working. Fully expecting that there is some non-modal dialog that wants my password.
- Try to figure out what the two odd-looking symbols next to the power button are. One most certainly locks the screen, but the tiny arrow-like thing looks promising.
- Curse, because the nipple is not a good control device for actually clicking on real tiny onscreen buttons like that.
- Choose reboot
- Plug in external DVD drive
- Boot Ubuntu
- Select “Install”. Answer various questions. Including “Guided partitioning, use entire disk”
- Notice how Ubuntu actually makes one of the same usability mistakes Vista makes. If I am in Norway, and say so on the shiny map, I would expect to get a Norwegian keyboard (Sidenote: and a 24-hour clock after reboot. Yes, I really want this even if I want English as my UI language)
- Start installation
- Go talk to some people.
- Get back to a system that is ready to reboot.
- Reboot.
- Notice how all of the hardware works. Including the ability to plug in a frakking mouse and have it work five seconds later.
- Enjoy using Gnome, which is actually usable with the nipple
- Curse Vista, but be relieved to know that you will never, ever have to deal with it again.
- Be extremely satisfied that your employer has a really nice policy: Run whichever OS that suits you.
- Upgrade Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10, knowing that the upgrade will still Just Work. Even if it is to a prerelease version.
- Go have food and beer with co-workers that don’t use Windows Vista.
Search-based interfaces
2007-08-10 12:34
In the up-and coming version of Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon, there are new and better document search facilities. This is not without problems: Upon upgrading one of my computers to Gutsy, I noticed that random applications would slow down, and even stall totally on my system.
My question is: Are such features really needed? In my 26+ years of owning and using a computer, I have never searched my filesystem for random content in any of my files, save grepping through known sets of files.
Which brings me to the real question: is this a feature that users actually want or need? Input from Mac and Windows users especially welcome: Do you use these features, or would you prefer for your system to instead speed up?
Three and a half years ago, I was as wrong as it's humanly possible to be
2007-06-05 23:15
Roughly three and a half years ago, I wrote a blog entry titled Why Linux has failed, and why Linux will fail again. Roughly two years ago, I switched — to the operating system I claimed had failed, and would fail again. Linux. Ubuntu to be precise.
Recently, Mark Pilgrim blogged about his first year with Linux and Sam Ruby followed up with his May 2005 switch.
So, what has my experience with Linux been, and how does it relate to my previous issues. Let’s reexamine what I wrote about Joe Phobic:
Joe has:
- Never customized windows. Not even changed the default resolution.
- Never touched the control panel.
- Never used the command line.
During my 2005 switch, I:
- Never had to customize Gnome itself. I made one customization to Nautilus, to prevent it from opening a new window for every folder I selected
- Never touched the control panel, save perhaps from setting the screen saver, and resetting the resolution when I replaced a monitor
- I did use the command line. But I was in no way forced to. I did so out of choice, and I did so to reconfigure X after I had rather royally hosed my own xorg.conf (but I’m not Joe Phobic, either).
… so it’s pretty safe to assume that my assumptions about whether Joe Phobic could handle this was wrong. Elaborating, saying something about what I didn’t write back then:
- Ubuntu came preinstalled with all of the applications Joe would need. He could be as phobic as he wanted, because he had replacements for all of his applications
- The cost of switching window manager to Gnome from Windows is for all practical purposes zero. He doesn’t have to relearn much, save for icon positions.
- There’s more, I’ll get to that later.
Further, I wrote, while having spent some time on a system, trying to locate a simple calculator:
This is where Linux fails. Miserably. Linux is about freedom. A different kind of freedom. It’s freedom to choose to use any one of seven text editors to perform the same task. It’s the freedom to choose any one of several ridiculously complicated Window Managers. It’s the freedom to choose any one of two or three IDEs. It’s the freedom to install lots of perpetually unused servers.
… and, the money quote …
Windows is all about freedom. Windows is freedom from complicated choices, it’s freedom from having to learn something new, something not really relevant to the task you want to do.
I will spare you the pain (or amusement) of giving me an embarrasing reward for being silly: The undersigned is hereby awarded the price for “Most embararssing remark about operating systems, freedoms and choices”.
In July 2005, when I switched, I spent a full four to five hours getting a Windows 2000 system that hadn’t been booted for three months back into a usable state. I spent lots of time trying to kill update managers that caused nothing but network congestion and high CPU use. I spent time dismissing dialogs. I didn’t feel free then. Nor did I feel free the time before that, when I hosed my Windows registry, because I yanked an IDE cable from a running system. I learnt a lot about restoring, no make that finding various ways of failing to restore a system whose every copy of the shackles called the “Windows Registry” had gone missing in action.
Neither did I feel free when I, a year after switching my work machine over to Linux, tried booting it, because I needed a firmware update for my mobile phone. Updating this phone’s firmware required Flash to be installed, and it required MSIE to be the default browser. So, after having gone through roughly the same update dance as I went through with the Windows 2000 system, I thought resetting the browser to MSIE would be trivial. Not so. It took manually editing the registry. It took uninstalling every single third-party browser on the system. It involved downloading a shoddy third-party application. It took a lot of cursing. And I presume it also took luck to get this working. And some more cursing. And boy, did I feel free.
And I am free. Like Mark, I love apt, update-manager and its siblings to death. I don’t compile software (Ok, I’ve done it once, to get a CVS version of some spec-related tools working). I have exactly two applications that aren’t updated with the rest, Komodo Edit and Opera. And the latter one is by choice, because I run internal versions, and as such there is no point in me using the repository versions. That leaves it down to one application not automatically managed, updated, and taken care of. Across operating system upgrades. With all of the user data kept. I also (apart from a few text editor) have only one of each application, but they fill distinctly different needs, and I have all the software I need out of the box.
Linux has given me both freedom of choice, and freedom from choice. Windows never offered me “of”, and it only ever pretended to offer me “from”. On my personal computers, I only have Linux installed. I keep the XP partition on the work computer around, just in case. I don’t expect to boot it often, I hope I don’t have to boot it often.
Command-line usability
2007-03-06 15:18
On doing a quick check of what update-manager can actually do, I did what I should and checked which command line options are available, and found a little usability gem (highlighted):
arve@carnage:~$ update-manager -help
Usage: update-manager [options]
Options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-c, --check-dist-upgrades
Check if a new distribution release is available
-d, --devel-release Check if upgrading to the latest devel release is
possible
-p, --proposed Try to run a dist-upgrade
--dist-upgrade, --dist-ugprade
Try to run a dist-upgrade
I like that. Another typo-helper is to locate the nearest shell and do sudo apt-get install sl. You’ll quickly learn to type ls correctly.
Just gimme a good editor, dammit
2007-03-05 16:32 – 15 comments
I'm on the lookout for a new (Linux/Gnome) editor, for mainly working with editing angle brackets, JavaScript and Python. Can you help me?
Using Quod Libet with Rockboxed iPods
2007-02-04 20:14 – Leave a comment
You may have taught your five-year old too well ...
2006-11-05 11:05 – One comment
... when you see what I saw in my console this morning.
HOWTO: Painless markup validation with Opera and Ubuntu
2006-10-03 15:18 – 11 comments
How to install the markup validator locally in Ubuntu Linux and configuring Opera to use the locally installed validator in place of the w3c hosted one.