ubuntu

This weekend was the day to upgrade my internal mail server from Feisty to Hardy. I've already done this on several servers and didn't expect any major problems.

Step 1: Upgrade Feisty with all latest packages:

apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade

Followed by a reboot. Went perfectly!

Step 2: Upgrade Fesity to Gutsy. If you're more than one version behind, you really have to take it in stages. Replace all occurrences in /etc/apt/sources.list of "feisty" with "gutsy", then:

apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade

followed by a reboot. Went mostly perfectly - it overwrote the newer version of eGroupware I'd installed with something that wouldn't run, so I restored my version of eGroupware and made sure everything worked.

Step 3: Upgrade Gutsy to Hardy LTS. Replace all occurrences in /etc/apt/sources.list of "gutsy" with "hardy" then:

apt-get update;apt-get dist-upgrade

Then things went downhill. During installation, I ran into the locales bug. The system froze on the upgrade completely. The fix? You need physical access to the machine so thankfully this wasn't one of my colocated servers.

First, do a hard reboot of the box, because CTRL-C isn't going to unhang it any time soon. During boot, at Grub select the previous kernel version from the boot menu. After it boots, log in as root (I hope you have a root password set!) then continue the upgrade process using:

dpkg --configure -a

I decided to configure a new Linux machine just for photography. I just bought LightZone for Linux, and plan to move all my images over to this new machine and set it up just for photo editing.

I did a fresh install of 64-bit desktop Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), followed by an install of the nVidia restricted drivers. Everything went flawlessly.

Attempting to run LightZone resulted in:

$ ./LightZone
Preparing JRE ...
./LightZone: 148: bin/unpack200: not found
Error unpacking jar files. Aborting.
You might need administrative priviledges for this operation.

Turns out if you're running the 64 bit version of Linux, you also need one additional package which can be installed with Synaptic, the default package manager:

ia32-libs

Those are the 32 bit compatibility libraries for the 64 bit Linux. After installing them, everything went swimmingly.

ZDNet is reporting that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has challenged his crew and the open source community to make Linux as pretty and ultimately better looking than a Mac.

I think this is great! It shows that Canonical is committed to expanding it's desktop market share. Really, though, he might do better to attack gaming as a challenge. Ubuntu is already some nice eye candy, and with the 3D desktop enhancements it's had for some time (that Vista tried to copy of course) in my opinion it's about as good as a Mac already. Being the "best" at any one thing is not necessarily a market winner. Ask Apple - they were the best at desktop publishing for years and still struggled.

Still though, I'm no marketing genius and even I can see that gaining market share against Microsoft and Apple is no easy task. What Canonical has done to date is nothing short of wonderful, and it sounds like he's already set his eyes on astounding.

I use Ubuntu servers in various places. I've built a terabyte backup server that reaches out and grabs various files from other servers for a longer term storage using rsync over ssh.

Works like a charm!

Unfortunately I neglected to check it's SSH key's after I installed the security upgrades for Ubuntu after the SSH vulnerability was announced, and the key it was using was invalidated so all the rsync connections were failing.

I really should implement some sort of real network backup system one day so I'd be notified if something failed. In the meantime I've replaced the key pair and everything's working fine again.

Setting up KVM for virtual machines in Ubuntu 8.04 is easy!

A few simple steps will get you up and running. First, install the packages with your favorite package manager, or at a console type:

sudo apt-get install kvm libvirt-bin virt-manager virt-viewer qemu

I also found I needed to add myself to the kvm group:

sudo adduser `id -un` kvm
sudo adduser `id -un` libvirtd

You must add yourself to libvirtd for networking to function :-)

Here's one of the few situations where rebooting linux is probably easier for most people than trying to manually start everything, so give her a boot and log back in.

Under your Applications menu in "System Tools" you'll find "Virtual Machine Manager". Connect to the qemu "localhost" setup that is already there by right clicking on it. After it says you are connected, click New at the bottom of the window to create a new virtual machine instance. Follow the wizard to configure your install.

I found that after installing XP, when it rebooted to complete the install that kvm didn't remount the cd-rom image I was installing from, so I had to manually edit the virtual machine setup and add a storage device pointed at the Windows XP cd-rom. Then installation finished normally.

The first thing I noticed was that install took about 45 minutes total, which seemed a bit long to me. It could be the setup I chose. I'm running a dual-core AMD 64 on a 64 bit Ubuntu install, and chose to run a 2 processor 32 bit virtual machine for the install.

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 on my machine that refused to install Ubuntu 8.04, I then updated it to 8.04.

Things seem to be working... we'll see.

Well, I gave up on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". It refused to format the drive whatever I did. I did format the drive once with a 7.04 disc I had lying around and then tried to install 8.04 on it, and it still failed.

So, obviously it didn't like my motherboard chipset. Basically if you have a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard (AMD 690G Northbridge) then don't try Ubuntu 8.04.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the system and it went on perfectly first try!

For the record, here's what I have:

Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H Motherboard
AMD AM2 X2 64 bit 5600 Brisbane CPU (fastest 65 watt CPU they have)
8 GB of RAM
160 GB SATA Barracuda
160 GB SATA Raptor
Asus GeForce 8600GTS with Dual 20" widescreen monitors

I'm still not sure what the problem is. I'm attempting to install Ubuntu 8.04 on a new machine and it keeps freezing up during the install. So far I've tried disabling virtualization in the BIOS, a different hard drive and now I'm trying the built-in video instead of the GeForce card I'm going to use.

Update:
Things I've tried:

boot params: noapic, nolapic acpi=off
Multiple hard drives
Removed PCIx video card and used onboard video
Setting BIOS SATA controller to "Legacy IDE"
Native SATA Mode
Standard IDE hard drive
Another DVD reader in case it was a bad source drive
Memtest, just to make sure it wasn't bad memory
Booted into 8.04 live CD and tried to partition the drive - still froze
Tried different SATA cable and port (even though the IDE drive failed too)
I finally booted a 7.10 32 bit Live CD and was able to partition and format the drive
Still no luck installing 8.04 on top of that formatted drive, however...
Tried setting SATA mode to RAID

This is somewhat old news but I just got around to reading my April 21st copy of Information Week.

Something I hadn't noticed previously in all the news is that Sun Microsystems pre-tested and certified Ubuntu 8.04 to run on Sun's x86 servers. That's the first time that a hardware vendor has bothered to test and certify Ubuntu Linux to run on their equipment.

That's an impressive milestone if you think about it. Ubuntu has taken a lead as the Linux desktop of choice in a very short period of time, something I think a lot of people hoped would happen to Mandriva (Mandrake) or Redhat a long time ago. This event not only validates Canonical as a company, but validates their official entry into the server market.

I've been running Ubuntu on servers for a few years already. I've never waited for someone to certify Linux, I'd just test and go. Lately I find that Tyan AMD based servers work exceptionally well with Ubuntu 64 bit server edition.