I’ve got a list of niggling things that have been bothering me about the current Hardy Heron release. Since the biggest of these issues are related to hooking up a projector or external monitor, and I’m giving a guest lecture Wednesday evening, I decided to test-drive the Intrepid release candidate to see if they’ve resolved these issues.

It turns out, the answer is yes.

I’ve been running it for a few hours now, and I have to say, I’m finding a lot of nice little improvements. If you’re new to Linux, please forgive the technical nature of a few of these notes… just some random unedited thoughts. Here are some things I’m really liking right now:

• External monitors. Finally, after being promised for the past three releases, I can add an external monitor and configure it through a GUI, without needing to edit a configuration file. I can extend the desktop across both monitors, or clone the screen. For the past year, I haven’t been able to do this at all without the video display locking up. Now it’s working great. Fantastic!
• Broadband card support. My USB Verizon broadband card works in Network Manager. All I have to do is tell it to connect, and it does–no configuration necessary. Previously I was using gnome-ppp, which took a lot longer to make the connection, and took some configuration.
• Appointments show up in the panel with the right colors. I’ve used Evolution for appointments for years. I have a bunch of different calendars loaded–different ones for work and social events, and the calendars of my employees. In Evolution, I set each calendar to a color so I can easily see which calendar an event is on. However, until Intrepid, these colors did not get used in the Gnome display–that used some random set of colors. Now they match. Small, but much appreciated improvement.
• Suspend/Resume is much quicker. While suspending the machine has worked pretty well for quite a while, under Hardy there was a lot of load that kept you from getting to work right away. If you had a few applications running, it could take 10 minutes before it was usable again! Under Intrepid, you can start using the applications immediately after starting up. I see that the system is under high load for a similar period of time, but the user interface is no longer sluggish at all, and the load seems to drop much quicker.
• Avant Window Navigator plugins work. I’m hooked on this little launcher utility, but the one available in the Hardy repositories didn’t work with any plugins. With Intrepid, they’re all there and work great.
• Firefox with Flash doesn’t crash so much. Okay, this isn’t anything to do with Intrepid, so much as tracking down the nspluginwrapper package, which allows Flash to crash without taking the browser down with it. I found this based on a how-to on getting Flash sound to work.

Which brings me to the problems. I’ve hit two pretty substantial problems. Both of them are more of a nuisance than any sort of show-stopper, but they are the kind of nuisance problems that might keep some people in Windows:

1. Sound did not work correctly out of the gate. I first noticed this in a flash video. Here it is the second release with Pulse Audio, and it still doesn’t work correctly without some manual configuration. To get it working, I followed a how-to on the Ubuntu forums, basically installing libao, padevchooser, and some other libraries, removing previous config files for alsa and pulse from my profile, and making libao use pulse by default. This only took a couple minutes, but for somebody unfamiliar with Linux, this might be a big barrier.
2. Bluetooth. I have a bluetooth mouse, and hooking it up was a piece of cake. However, it doesn’t remember the connection. I have to delete the bluetooth profile, and re-pair it every time I shut off the mouse or suspend the computer. I’m sure there’s a pretty simple fix by editing a couple configs, but the point is, it should just remember that I’ve paired this device and not bother me again.

Those are the only two new issues I’ve seen appear in this release, so far. And I really only see one other major issue: I’m still seeing memory usage of Xorg creeping up as I use the system, especially after a suspend/resume cycle. It’s currently up to 835M, which seems like an obscene amount of RAM for the graphical environment. I saw this same type of memory leak under Hardy, under similar conditions, but to Intrepid’s credit, the system seems completely responsive and speedy. So it looks like I’m going to continue needing to log out and back in every couple days to free up the memory consumed by X.

Overall, I’m quite impressed, and not seeing any downsides to this release compared to Hardy, which was already pretty great.

Why not OpenSuSE, instead of Ubuntu?

At Freelock, we provide a maintenance service contract to manage Linux servers. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide monitoring, system updates, application updates, and our help recovering anything that goes wrong with an upgrade. We’re looking at adding disaster recovery to the mix, raising the price to cover the cost of backing up all of the data and providing varying service level agreements on how soon we will recover your machine from a total loss. But for our base price, we only support Ubuntu and CentOS, with a preference for Ubuntu. So Patrick asks, why not OpenSuSE? Here’s my reply:

Hi, Patrick,

There are literally hundreds of different distributions of Linux, and 7 or 8 that are very widely deployed in server environments. The reasons Ubuntu is our preferred distribution include:

• No separate version of operating system–Red Hat and Novell/SuSE keep some of their stuff for their commercial version
• Commercial company backing it (Canonical, LTD), support contracts available
• Strong community support, lots of friendly help available
• “Long Term Support” releases, with a commitment by Canonical to maintain security releases for 5 years on designated versions
• Superior upgrade path when a version reaches end-of-life
• Nice balance between cutting-edge versions of new software, while making sure they’re stable
• Easy package management, well-built packages

OpenSuse has no commercial support available, and no commitment on the part of Novell to provide long term support to their free versions–you have to buy SuSE Enterprise Linux to get that level of stability/support, and that’s not the same software–they bundle older versions in their enterprise distributions that often don’t have features we’re coding on top of…

The upgrade path is another nice feature–we’ve had very good success upgrading Ubuntu boxes in place, without having to install an entirely new system and migrate the data over.

We support CentOS as well, which is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because some of the software our clients run are only available for Red Hat, so we have to… CentOS doesn’t have as good an upgrade path as Ubuntu, so we don’t include system upgrades at software end-of-life with that. We have supported SuSE boxes in the past, but I think we’re down to a single one running some legacy software. The main reason we discourage it is to streamline our processes–it’s much easier to administer a bunch of the same operating system, than having every box be a one-off system.

We’ve been doing this long enough to have to upgrade several servers because the OS has reached end-of-life and there are no more security releases available. Of the free distributions, the only ones we can deploy with confidence knowing we won’t have to upgrade for at least 3 or 4 years are Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian. While there are many other solid distribution choices you could make, none of the others quite stack up to meet our needs as well as Ubuntu and CentOS.

This is a new feature we’re starting: Ask Freelock! Have a question about using open source in business? Drop us a line, ask us a question. We’ll do our best to answer.

It’s a T43, and I got it around a year ago. The first thing I installed was the beta version of Edgy Eft, and then about a month before Feisty Fawn came out, I upgraded.

This time around, the upgrade wasn’t as clean. First off, my root partition was too full, so I had to do some shuffling to make enough room for the upgrade. Once I did that, it took several hours to download all the packages and start installing. At some point, a Latex package was broken, but the installation continued. When the installation progress bar was about 50% done, the installer crashed with a fatal python error, with the last messages indicating failing to configure Lyx, which depends upon Latex.

The installer couldn’t continue, and couldn’t roll back–I was stuck with a half-upgraded machine. Now you might think this is a serious issue, and for someone without much Linux experience, it might be. But my system never crashed, and I was able to finish the upgrade manually.

If you find yourself stuck half way between an upgrade like this, maybe these notes can help you finish. First off, don’t reboot. As long as your system is running, you’ve got all your tools and Internet access. Here are some things I did to get through, all in a shell window:

1. nm-applet & — restart the network applet, because at some point in the upgrade, the panels had crashed and my system had lost its IP address.
2. dpkg-reconfigure -a — Configure every package that needs to be configured. This took a couple hours, and stopped frequently to ask a question about whether to keep my current configuration of a package, or replace with new. This command failed part way through the first time, but when I ran it again, it made it all the way through (repeating many of the same questions it had the first time).
3. apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade — download system updates, and install. This fixed the broken Latex package.
4. apt-get autoremove — Remove the old packages.
5. apt-get -f install — force installation of packages that still need to be installed. This didn’t do anything in my case, since I had already run dpkg-reconfigure -a, which probably did everything this command would do.
6. apt-get install app1 app2 — there were a couple of applications that were “held back” by the other install commands, not even completing with a dist-upgrade. So I named them directly and apt found a couple other missing packages they depended upon, and installed.
7. Crossed my fingers, and rebooted.

When my system came back up, at first I couldn’t log in. But I was expecting that–one of the key features of Gutsy is a new version of X Windows, with a new configuration system. I had a fair amount of customizations of my xorg.conf file to support multiple monitors, and other things. I used Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to a VT console, logged in, and ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, accepting all the defaults. The next time, the X server came up fine, and I could log in.

Now, with Gutsy finally installed, all its new features started to shine. The system immediately asked if I wanted to install the restricted ATI driver for my graphics card. After doing so, and rebooting, it asked if I wanted to enable Xgl, for enhanced desktop effects. I wasn’t expecting this to just work like this–I wasn’t counting on having desktop effects on this laptop at all, due to conflicts with things I need to do with it (multi-monitor, Google Earth, etc).

So I was quite surprised that once I did that, I could enable the Desktop Effects, and soon had all the glitsy stuff working. Well, wobbly windows anyway–the desktop cube didn’t seem to work.

A quick Google search led me to install the ccsm tool — compizconfig-settings-manager, and wow, has this come a long ways. It didn’t seem to work, though–I had wobbly windows but nothing else. Finally, I tried running compiz –replace, and suddenly I have it all. Desktop cubes, Expo, windows that burn up when they close, windows that fold up into a paper airplane and fly off the screen–all the good stuff that can keep you away from productive work for hours!

Gutsy Beta initial impressions/issues

• Even though the update-manager failed, everything seems to work fine right now. About the only issue related to installation that I currently see is a bunch of extra stuff in the “Other” menu, most of which is long gone. Have some menu cleanup to do. Also, Thunderbird disappeared, and I had to reinstall it.
• Thunderbird profile moved from ~/.thunderbird to ~/.mozilla-thunderbird.
• Evolution calendars lost all the color coding. Had to reapply a color to each of my calendar, and these didn’t get saved the first time. Now they save, but no colors in the gnome calendar widget.
• Google Earth doesn’t work with Compiz or XGL. (to be expected, and I haven’t tried turning these off yet)
• Suspend no longer works correctly (again to be expected with Xgl–in Feisty, I had trouble after using any video output).
• Subpixel rendering is SWEET… everything looks fantastic.
• Compiz task bar shows applications across all work spaces–cannot seem to limit it to just the current one. Also, the pager doesn’t turn the cube–it seems to track its own work spaces. It minimizes all the windows, then takes you to a clean desktop and you can’t spin back to the old one…
• Tracker seems to be much better at searching than Beagle. After only a few hours, it had indexed everything, and found more relevant searches than Beagle did until recently…
• In the gnome calendar, tasks can be hidden and appointments shown. This is a great improvement for me…
• Every now and then, it seems like a key or a button press gets stuck. I went to close a few tabs in my development program, and after the first few closed, it then closed every tab I had open–not what I wanted.

These are impressions from less than a day of use. I’m sure I’ll find more to talk about soon–overall it seems quite nice, and I look forward to the new external monitor management, perhaps the key reason I upgraded. I’ll probably turn Compiz/Xgl off in a day or so, to get more of a sense of how well suspend and other OpenGL programs work. For now, it’s quite entertaining…