Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) came out this week, and I downloaded it right away via torrent. I decided to go this time with Xubuntu, which uses XFCE as the desktop environment instead of the regular Gnome or KDE based editions.

I had already fooled around with XFCE before and found it to be an excellent desktop environment overall, and much more lightweight than both Gnome and KDE. I was also using Xubuntu 7.10 already on a virtual machine on my Vista box using Virtual Box [1] and it worked very well for my needs (which I admit are fairly basic).

As expected, installation went very well. The only problem I had during installation was that my data drive (a partition I mount my /home in) ended up getting formatted accidentally. I should've paid more attention during partitioning! Fortunately, there was nothing there that was irreplaceable.

After installation, I proceeded to do some tweaking and customization, and enabled the ATI restricted X11 driver using Driver Manager. This time, it worked flawlessly right out of the box, and suspend seems to be working correctly without having to fool around with it at all.

I then went ahead and installed some of the tools I use more often on Linux, like Vim, gnome-terminal, tofromdos and all the samba tools. I now have to install ruby, mono, Open Office (probably), Virtual Box and a few others, but those can wait a bit, as the Canonical servers were still getting hammered pretty hard yesterday. They seem a lot better today, so maybe I'll get some of that installed later on.

Overall, I am very pleased with the experience so far!

[1] I turned to Virtual Box for a couple of reasons: It runs Linux very nicely, unlike Virtual PC, which just sucks at that. I had also been using Virtual Box on a Linux host, and worked very nicely there as well (and seamless mode for Windows-based guests is very nice!).

Yesterday I decided to go a bit on the bleeding edge and went ahead and installed KDE 4.0 on my machine running Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I started installing kde4-core first, then went for the whole kde4 package.

For the most part, the installation went OK. There are many UI changes, and I'm not sure I like all of them, but it's nice enough for the most part. I did run into some issues, so maybe this might help others solve them.

Graphics Corruption

KDE 4.0 tends to use a bit more resources of your graphics card. Because of the sleep/hibernate issue I was running the open source Radeon driver (which doesn't do much acceleration), so it was very slow at first and I was experiencing some nasty graphics corruptions at times that forced me to restart the machine.

I then tried enabling again the restricted fxglr driver that Ubuntu can install automatically, and that felt a bit faster, but I was still suffering some heavy video corruption.

Finally, I tried ATI's (AMD's, really) latest linux driver, which I downloaded from here. This is actually working much better: I'm seeing no video corruption at all (as long as XComposite is disabled) and seems a bit snappier, though a few things in KDE4 (most notably, the shutdown screen) are just very sluggish overall regardless of which driver I was using.

Of course, now sleep/hibernate don't work again, so I need to try to find a workaround for that.

Update: I noticed that the fglrx driver wasn't loading properly, so I went in and removed all traces of the older ubuntu driver versions and reinstalled the ATI driver again, and now I've got both 2D and 3D acceleration (i.e. with DRI) working. Plus, it seems that sleep, at least is now working correctly again. Whoot!

Can't run with Elevated Privileges

The second problem I started to notice was that I couldn't run applications that required elevated privileges from the KDE menu. I could still run them using 'sudo' from the command line, but if I tried running them from the KDE menu, it would keep rejecting the password I was specifying. Sounds very like what other people reported here.

I was able to fix this by editing my ~/.kde4/share/config/kdeglobals file, and adding this at the bottom:

Wireless Networking

Whenever I boot directly into KDE4, I have no network right at the start, because the Wireless connection isn't configured.

Under KDE3, it still works right away because I have setup knetworkmanager already setup with my network details and it auto starts when I login. For now, I've added a script in ~./kde4/env/ that starts knetworkmanager when I login.

Unfortunately, it seems the KDE4 updates don't include a native KDE4 version of knetworkmanager so it seems it still runs as a KDE3 app.

The Shutdown Screen

The shutdown dialog in KDE4 just nags me, for two reasons:

1. The dimming on the screen while it is displayed takes forever in my machine; it's very slow, and the dialog itself takes quite a bit of time to paint correctly. I'm sure this has something to do with my video card settings, but I wish it wasn't quite so.
2. KDE4 asks you twice for the same information: Once you select the "leave"  option in the KDE menu, it asks you whether to logout/restart/shutdown, but all three options take you to the same dialog with the same choices again! Just dumb from an usability standpoint.

Other Problems

One issue I have not yet researched too much, but that is causing some issues is that kwalletmanager seems to crash right after I log in every other time, forcing a full reboot to get it to work again, which obviously breaks havoc with other things, including, for example, the wallpaper not getting painted on the desktop [1]. Hopefully this stuff will be fixed by the time Hardy Heron ships.

[1] Update: Looks like this isn't related to the other issue at all. KDE simply refuses to paint the wallpaper on many ocassions (but opening the dialog settings and clicking apply fixes it). No idea yet what the issue is.

KDE4, Ubuntu

As I mentioned in a previous post, I did a successful upgrade of my Inspiron 6000 laptop over to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) from 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), though sleep/hibernate wasn't working. I spent a some time yesterday trying to fix it, with some partial success.

Niels Olson was kind enough to comment on my post and mentioned some directions that worked for him on his Latidude laptop. I tried some of those, but they didn't work for me, as my laptop has an ATI X300 card instead of an NVidia. However, it gave me some good ideas to play with.

In the end, I wasn't able to get sleep working with the restricted/proprietary ATI drivers (fxglr) so I reverted back to the initial open source Radeon driver. That way I was able to get sleep working back, though the machine still wouldn't come out of sleep successfully (it just locked up).

Finally, I was able to work around this by tweaking a few parameters in /etc/default/acpi-support:

SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=false
USE_DPMS=true

This works, though the video takes a bit of a long time to reestablish once the machine comes up from sleep, but at least it works .

Ubuntu

Yesterday was the release of Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10). For fun, I decided to try and see what it would mean to update my other laptop, which was running Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) over to the new release. I first started looking around the ubuntu forums, where I read that the "proper" way to do an upgrade was to run the following command:

gksu "update-manager -c"

Well, turns out neither gksu nor update-manager were installed on my machine, so I got those first (sudo apt-get install....), and then ran the command. It asked a couple of questions and then proceeded to download all 950+ packages that needed updating.

The entire update process was surprisingly problem-free. It took a long time, though - about 12 hours in total - but only because my Internet connection sucks and the ubuntu servers seemed to be a bit hammered. The download stalled several times, but it always restarted on it's own a while later without problems.

After the download was complete, actually installing the packages probably took less than an hour, just had to answer a couple of questions in between, and finally restart, and the machine came back up without any issues. Then I installed the ATI restricted driver again and restarted once more and it was done.

All in all, a much better experience than the last time I had tried to do an in-place upgrade of a linux distro (years and years ago!).

The only problem I've noted so far is that putting the machine to sleep doesn't seem to be working. The machine tries to go into sleep mode but doesn't quite manage it and stays on, but non-responsive. Annoying, but not that much big of a deal, seeing how sleep didn't really work well on Feisty either (about 50% of the times it went on standby it wouldn't be able to wake up).

Ubuntu, Gutsy Gibbon, Upgrade

A few weeks ago, just before the MVP summit, I got a new Dell Latitude D820 laptop, which is now my main development machine. It runs far, far better than my previous laptop and overall I'm very happy with it. After waiting for a while and making sure I had transfered all my settings to the new machine, I repaved my Inspiron 6000.

This time I put the just released Kubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on it. I was already familiar with Ubuntu previously (used 6.04 before) and definitely like it quite a bit. Many years ago I used to be a Slackware user, then switched to Red Hat and the Fedora Core, but I definitely got a bit tired of fighting Fedora every now and then. Ubuntu has worked very nicely for me, so that's what I'm sticking with for now. The only change I did was moving to Kubuntu, which defaults to a KDE desktop instead of the Gnome desktop found in the regular distribution. To be honest, I could live with either Gnome or KDE (and I used Gnome for years on most of my previous), but just thought about trying KDE this time.

I will say that Linux on the desktop has improved significantly over the years, and let's face it, it is pretty usable right now for someone like me. I was able to download the CD image, install and then use Adept Manager to get most of the packages I needed and configure it how I wanted. I had to fight a bit to get my wireless connection going (mostly because I was an idiot and missed the connection icon on the desktop panel) and again when configuring Samba, but overall things were pretty smooth. Even my no-name USB bluetooth adapter which was completely useless in Vista worked right away.

Ohh, it also turned out that X and KDE were pretty aggressive in correclty detecting the "ideal" DPI settings for my 1920x1200 screen: somewhere around 146 DPI. Ended up bringing it to a more manageable 120 DPI, as I got tired of feeling as if I was working on a 640x480 VGA screen

Now, you may be wondering why someone like me, who does .NET and BizTalk development for a living might be installing Linux. Well, there are several good reasons, and one of them is not that I'm walking away from the Windows/.NET world (and I couldn't do it even if I wanted).

Reason #1: I was pretty sick of running Vista on this machine. All the hardware was supported and worked fine, but the machine felt overall pretty slugish, even though it's only 1 year old and is a good machine (2GHz centrino, 2GB RAM). I could've just go back to WinXP, but...

Reason #2: I'm currently working on a project that involves network connections. As part of that, I needed to have a Linux machine to test from. I've been using an Ubuntu Live CD on the Inspiron laptop for that (I could've used a Virtual Machine instead, but didn't have enough RAM on my main laptop for that), and while that works very well for my needs, it was getting a bit tiresome.

Reason #3: I'm currently involved in some projects were, again, interoperability is key. While I don't have to do any development myself on non-windows platforms directly, I do have to test that everything runs and interops. Having a Unix machine to test with is pretty handy.

Reason #4: Again, on this project, Mono is a potential platform we might be interested in. While I do have the mono tools installed on my main development VPC image, I do want to try this on other environments, and this seemed like a good oportunity to do so.

Reason #5: It always pays off to keep your skills up to date and being able to work with different environments and operating systems, and this is a good way to ensure that. Despite being a long time mostly-windows user, there are a lot of things I appreciate it about The Unix Way, including the many very useful tools around (there's a good reason I keep a lot of Win32 ports of common Unix tools on my windows machines).

Now, if only I could afford the money to add an Apple machine running OS-X to my collection...

Ubuntu, Linux