Cobra's bits (Posts about ubuntu)

Ubuntu VSTS

Cobra — Fri, 06 May 2016 21:10:00 GMT

I've used Ubuntu from 2008 to 2012 on actual hardware. I stopped using it mainly because it degraded from a usable Linux distribution to a bugriddled bundle of outdated packages that evolved in the wrong direction. Still, I kept a minimal LTS server as virtual machine which I believed to be potentially helpful to diagnose issues we might have with our Ubuntu server installation at work.

LTS? Stands for "long term support", is released every two years, and is advertised as being supported for five years.

I have known this promise to be false since 2010, and this knowledge has accelerated my departure from Ubuntu. The German computer magazine ~~Hail Ubuntu~~ c't has recently published an online article on Canonical's deception, but they otherwise consequently ignore other Linux distributions and treat Ubuntu as being the most (only?) suitable distribution for newbies. As if newbies wouldn't need security support.

To check the support status of the current version, I've upgraded my existing 14.04 installation to 16.04, which was released just two weeks ago. Canonical does not encourage this update, but recommends to wait until the first point release (16.04.1). To still be able to upgrade, the 'do-release-upgrade' tool needs the command line parameter 'd', directing it to also consider development versions. That's very interesting: the 16.04 LTS release, which is by viewed by many as the prototype of stability and reliability, is officially considered to be a development release.

And to give credit where credit is due: Canonical is right. While the upgrade itself was fast (10 min) and free of errors, and 16.04 boots up to the login prompt faster than ever, the X server exits with a segmentation fault. Just like the old times, and so Ubuntuish!

Fortunately, I do not need an X server to run 'ubuntu-support-status':

Percentage      Time
4.3             3y
2.9             9m
6.4             unsupported

Almost 14% of all packages are not covered by the 5y support (and almost half of those are unsupported at the day of installation). Note that I'm talking about a server installation with a total size of 2 GB and not a single package from multiverse. I don't even want to imagine the situation with a full-blown desktop installation.

Economics

Cobra — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 19:30:54 GMT

I don't know about you, but I'm lazy. I always seek a shortcut.

And if there's a shortcut, I won't follow the generic way.

O tempora, o mores

Cobra — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 18:21:13 GMT

Q: Isn't it great that an increasing fraction of young people use Linux on their desktops or notebooks?
A: No.

First of all, they don't use Linux: they use Ubuntu. Exclusively. Not Ku-, not Lu-, not Xubuntu. Uhhhhbuntu.

And why? Well, according to my research, because it's different and has a certain coolness factor. It's poor man's Apple, and even the cage looks golden at the first glance.

So, second, they use it for all the wrong reasons.

Consequently, and thus third, they have no clue of what they are doing, and if an issue cannot be solved by clicking, they are lost. That's neither cool nor great.

A most amusing example of this particular species of users is Bastian, a 26 years old electrical engineer, member of the Pirate party, owner and avid user of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts and a high-end Sony Vaio with Ubuntu 12.10 (which, I have to admit, was installed by my own stupid self).

Bastian wanted to install an 'app' (he calls all programs 'apps') which he couldn't find in the software store of Ubuntu. He wasn't able to tell me which 'app', but anyway, he claims to have installed something with the help of the internet. He didn't like what he installed, however, and attempted to uninstall it. Since this attempt, Firefox tends to pause sometimes for several seconds or even freezes indefinitely. Bastian's way to "deal" with this problem is to press the power button. *sigh*

There are several better ways. As a matter of fact, there are only better ways (and I'm not even talking about actually solving such issues, oh no):

Clients of the X server which have locked up are most satisfactorily eliminated with the key combination ctrl-alt-esc, also known as Xkill.Try, it's addictive. 😄
One can also switch to another console with ctrl-alt-F1 (F2, F3...) and kill the misbehaving program from there. Oh, I forgot: to kill the program, use 'htop' to find your program. Press F9. Try SIGTERM first, then SIGKILL. Or, if you don't have htop, type 'pidof misbehavinprog', and then 'kill -9 pid'. Or 'killall misbehavinprog', that'll also work.
And if you can't change to another console, and even your system doesn't seem to respond, there's still the magic sysrequest. Check if it's enabled: 'sysctl -n kernel.sysrq'. If not, issue 'sysctl kernel.sysrq=1'. Don't forget to make this change permanent by editing /etc/sysctl.conf (other distributions may put this switch in /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf). The next time your Ubuntu locks up, hold down alt-print and enter reisub. Yes: REISUB. Raising elephants is so utterly boring. Type it slowly so the system has time to do the job you're asking it to do.

Bastian told me he can't possibly remember that, and asked if there isn't an app for it.

I decided to warmly congratulate him on this idea. 😄

No more buntu

Cobra — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 20:30:41 GMT

A few days ago, the Kubuntu 12.10 on my wife's notebook received a regular update but did not, upon the obligatory reboot, return to its regular operation: the display resolution was changed to 1024x768 and neither WiFi nor Bluetooth were avaliable.

I didn't even think twice (my wife said I was just waiting for such an opportunity, and she may be right) : let's replace this sad imitation of GNU/Linux with something I can rely on!

And what would that be? My wife asked for something really established, with an easy, graphical install routine, up-to-date packages and preferably offering a rolling release scheme. And it should not be related in any way to any kind of *buntu *shudder*.

What does that leave?

OpenSUSE, a descendant of Slackware. 😉 Of course, installation (12.3) is a breeze, and activating the Tumbleweed repository (and thus the rolling release scheme) too. Equally expected is the fact that all the hardware of this Fujitsu Lifebook AH 530 is recognized and supported out of the box. The lifebook falls asleep and gracefully wakes up, as desired, and the frequent hiccups and lockups due to the power management under *buntu are a thing of the past.

That leaves me with Archlinux on my main system, Crunchbang on the Mini, openSUSE on the lifebook, Fedora for my office desktop, and Debian Wheezy for the workstations. Pity I can't fit a Gentoo in between. 😉

Turbo

Cobra — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:13:39 GMT

My Mini is now in its fourth year, but so far, I don't see any reason for its retirement. The combination of a small footprint (9") and a system free of any moving parts (aka noise) has remained unique. Contemporary netbooks are invariably equipped with magnetic hard drives and fans, and tend to be a good deal larger and heavier without offering any significant advances in terms of processing power.

There's a catch, of course: the Mini's SSD is only 8 GB in size, 5 of which I'd devoted to the operating system. Originally, the Mini came with a customized version of Ubuntu 8.04, and I've updated it step by step from Ubuntu 8.10 to the current 12.04. The updates became increasingly voluminous, and eventually the system partition was filled to 90% despite the removal of the entire TeX documentation and LibreOffice.

And what's more: I've really grown tired of Ubuntu. I never understood the hype, but I thought that using Ubuntu on at least one machine would be useful for supporting other Linux users (95% of which seem to use Ubuntu). Man, was I right: Ubuntu developed into the buggiest distribution I've ever used. I still continued to use it because I had myself arranged with it quite comfortably, but also out of sheer laziness. Still, I've never trusted the good intentions of Mr. Shuttleworth, and after the latest developments it became painfully clear even to many casual users what Ubuntu really aims at. So, the support is over, and you are on your own.

It is time to act! I've decided to do the following:

Buy a larger SSD.
Throw Ubuntu to the dogs.
Install a lightweight, community-driven distribution.

ad 1.: Bought a RunCore Pro IV SSD with 32 GB.

ad 2.: Well, I just opened the Mini, as you see below:

The SSD is right below the 2 EUR coin. I unscrewed it (that requires a Phillips #0 driver and quite some determination) and put the new one inside:

I'll keep the old SSD in a box until a museum will ask for it. 😉

What you also see in the above photograph are the latches for the battery, which may be replaced within seconds (which I have just done). The Mini may not look as sexy as certain Air- and Zenbooks, but it is infinitely more practical and durable.

ad 3.: I've opted for Crunchbang (#!) "Waldorf", a lightweight distribution based on Debian Wheezy:

Installation was a breeze (including the encryption of /home) and took 15 min, and all hardware (particularly the Wifi card) was detected and configured correctly at install time. Everything worked right out of the box (even my LUKS encrypted SD card containing a btrfs filesystem). And in contrast to Archbang, to which I'm much attracted, I'll never need to compile important packages, which would be a nuisance on the Mini.

#! uses Openbox as the default window manager, tint2 as panel (visible on the top of the screenshot above), and dmenu as application launcher. A good choice, since all are slim and functional.

For the Mini, it's essential that I don't need a mouse to use the system. #! is perfect in this regard:

Ctrl-Alt-Left/Right:            switch desktop

Super+T:                Terminal        (Gnome Terminator)
Super+E:                Editor          (Geany)
Super+F:                File Manager        (Thunar)
Super+M:                Media Player        (Gnome Mplayer)
Super+W:                Browser         (Iceweasel)
etc.

Alt-F3:                 Run command     (Dmenu)

In Terminator, Alt-Left/Right switches between different windows. In Geany, F9 compiles a LaTeX document and F5 will display the pdf. In Iceweasel, Ctrl-Pageup/down will switch tabs, and all the rest is handled by Pentadactyl.

Apropos LaTeX: the persistence of TL 2009 was the main reason for me to shy away from Debian-related distris. Fortunately, TexLive 2012 has finally arrived also in the Debian (testing) repositories!

Hardware-wise, an "hdparm -t /dev/sda" returns 75 MB/s, more than twice of the original disk and on par with the magnetic hard drives on my notebook and desktop. And indeed, the Mini now seems to fly: a cold boot brings you in 20 s to the login screen, and then in 5 s to the desktop seen in the screenshot above. It's actually real fun to use the little guy, and I currently prefer it over my two bigger alternatives. 😉

Plotting challenge

Cobra — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:01:22 GMT

All scientists produce data of one kind or another. In most cases, the optimum way to survey these data is to plot them. Since the data often evolve in a systematic fashion as a function of an external parameter (temperature, voltage, polarization, magnetic field, ...), it is often advantageous to display all of them in a single plot. And because the examination of data is the core business of any sciencist, this plot should be obtained in the easiest and quickest way possible.

The challenge: find the fastest method to plot all data in the current directory in a single plot window with a custom range for the x axis.

The winner:

graph -T X -x xmin xmax *.dat

Naturally, the conditions of this competition ruled out the usual suspects such as gnuplot, octave, R, matplotlib, etc. as well as GUI driven solutions such as qtiplot, labplot, grace, etc. If you don't believe that, try gnuplot for the task defined in the challenge and be surprised.

I've indeed explored a few of these dead ends until I suddenly remembered that there once was a direct command for plotting … a command with a very intuitive name …

Graph is part of the plotutils which were already mature when I've first used them 20 years ago. And then I forgot all about them! What a shame!

Obviously, none of the young wanna-be-nerds participating in this competition ever heard of graph. 😄 But Anan came dangerously close with

ctioga -X --xrange xmin:xmax *.dat

That the above comand didn't work at all since xpdf crashed with a seg fault did not, however, impress the jury favorably. 😄 In any case, graph's syntax is more concise. 😉

After some search we quickly found that 'ctioga2 --viewer okular --xrange xmin:xmax *.dat' works even under Bugbuntu and produces a visually much better result than my graph command above. But don't let that mislead you: that's just because of the rather outdated X backend of graph (which does not support anti-aliasing). You can create publication quality figures using the ps and svg backends of graph. Look at the following plots, for example: I have fabricated the one on top using Origin six years ago, and the bottom one using graph and the oneliner below yesterday (the top axis, arrows and labels were added by inkscape; differences are intentional).

graph -T svg -C -h 0.55 -w 0.7 -g 1 -x 347.5 362.5 -y -1 1 --pen-colors 1=gray:2=black   \
 -F AvantGarde-Book -X "WAVELENGTH (nm)" -Y "LINEAR POLARIZATION" -m -1 -S 17 rhoexp.dat \
 -m 2 -S -W 0.003 rhofit.dat --reposition 0 0 1 --blankout 0 -N y -y 0 11000 -E y        \
 -Y "INTENSITY (arb. units)" -m -1 -S 17 uw1031exp.dat -m 2 -S uw1031fit.dat -m -1 -S 17 \
 uw1040exp.dat -m 2 -S uw1040fit.dat > plot.svg

Let's dissect that command step-by-step:

-T:     type of backend, here svg for easy editing in inkscape
-C:     colors
-h, -w:     height and width
-g:     grid style
-x, -y:     x and y range
--pen-colors:   custom colors for symbols and lines
-F:     font for axes and labels
-X, -Y:     x and y axes labels
-m:     linestyle and color (-n means no line and color style n)
-S:         symbol type (-S without number means no symbol)
-W:     line width
--reposition:   creates a second graph here with coordinates 0,0 and size 1 (same as first one)
--blankout: white-out around second graph, 0: no white-outdated
-N:     no ticks and labels, here for y axis
-E:     use top x or right y axis.

It's really quite intuitive, I think. 😊

Psychological factors

Cobra — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:01:08 GMT

I'm now using Arch Linux as my primary operating system on my desktop computer at home since 5 month. Time for a little review and comparison.

Were my initial expectations fulfilled?

More than that, they were exceeded. Arch proved to be a truly up-to-date distribution which simultaneously manages to be stable as the proverbial rock. My problems at the beginning were easily corrected by adding a script to /home/cobra/.kde4/Autostart, as actually described in the ArchWiki. Since then, I didn't experience any problem. Everything just works the way I intend it to do.

What are my future expectations/hopes?

A month ago I would have voted for package signing. That, however, has been implemented in pacman 4, and I'm currently entirely satisfied.

How does it compare to other distributions?

Oh my. That's really where I went wrong. See, Arch is great, but it does require some time to set it up properly. So I argued that I'd need an easier-to-set-up distribution for the office, where I manage time in slots of minutes. A mandatory requirement was that the distribution offers TeXLive 2011, and this excluded most distributions (foremost Debian, which I would have much preferred). So I've chosen Fedora Scientific, which comes prepackaged with most I need. Indeed, installation was a breeze and finished in 30 min. But after that...well, let's just say that I'm not enthusiastic about the Fedora way. The distribution is outdated (compared to Arch), offers a quite limited set of packages (compared to Arch), and its package manager is the slowest I've ever seen. Well, perhaps zypper is even slower, but not much.

Let's do some ranking (from 0 to 10) of the distributions I'm using every day:

	Arch Linux	Fedora Verne	Ubuntu Oneiric	Debian Wheezy	OpenSuse Asparagus
Actuality	9	7	3	5	4
Stability	8	6	4	9	7
Responsiveness	9	3	7	8	2
Trust	8	6	1	9	2

Now, "actuality" describes how close the distribution stays to the current upstream. "Stability" is proportional to the frequency of curses uttered because of segfaults and their cousins during the use of the respective distribution. But WTF are "responsiveness" and "trust"?

Well, if you look deep within yourself, you'll find that there are reasons more important than the two objective criteria above for choosing a particular operating system. If it would only be about actuality and stability, Windows would score pretty high, which would be absurd. The question to ask is how do you feel when you use your computer? Do you feel comfortable? At home? Does it feel right? Do you like it?

"Responsiveness" is a soft criterion intended to reflect the user experience when doing administrative work, such as updating/upgrading, starting and stopping services, change system-wide settings, etc. Simplicity, speed, and transparency is what counts in this discipline. Windows with a value of 0 is used as reference.

"Trust" is an entirely subjective criterion with political dimensions. Do you trust the good intentions of Google? Perhaps not, but do you trust their intentions to create a fast and safe browser? You may not care for the former, but very much for the latter. "Trust" as used here contains both of these elements. As a reference, we use Windows with a value of 0.

These reflections will have a consequence. Particularly for Dell Minis hiding underneath Fujitsu Lifebooks...ArchBang is waiting for you, my little friend.

Bugbuntu

Cobra — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:56:06 GMT

The parade of issues and bugs in recent versions of Ubuntu is becoming a nuisance. The drivers B43 and STA for the Broadcom wifi chipsets popular in notebooks have a particularly irritating and serious bug: when on battery, the wifi chipset toggles between the on and off state on a ms time scale even when a connection exists, resulting in a latency of several 100 ms and low transmission rates. Since my mini also has a Broadcom chipset:

cobra@mini ~> lspci | grep Network
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01),

I've notived this problem when attempting to run applications from my desktop via ssh, such as 'ssh -Y -C mathematica'. It's unbearably slow.

A temporary solution is to simply switch off power management for the chip for the time being:

iwconfig wlan0 power off

A permanent one is established by editing /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/wireless and to ensure that all entries under case $driver concerning operation with battery are equal to the corresponding ones with ac power on (the above link has an explicit listing).

Usable

Cobra — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 21:46:35 GMT

Software tends to get fatter with time. Just look at Firefox, which started as Phoenix with the self-proclaimed aim to fight the bloat of the Mozilla project. Look at it now: a fatter browser was never seen.

Others are not better. When upgrading my Mini to Maverick Meerkat, I've noticed that Chromium now takes 50 MB of my precious SSD space, just as much as Firefox does.

But what can we do? Light-weight alternatives—such as links—are limited in ability and performance, aren't they?

Are they?

uzbl git.20100403-3
    1652.8ms +/- 3.2%
Chromium 8.0.551.0 (62128)
    1834.8ms +/- 2.0%
Firefox 3.6.10
    4163.6ms +/- 1.4%

root@mini:/home/cobra# wajig size | grep chromium
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg                  1,180
chromium-browser-inspector              3,940
chromium-browser                    49,252
root@mini:/home/cobra# wajig size | grep uzbl
uzbl                            656

root@mini:/home/cobra# wajig remove
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg
chromium-browser-inspector
chromium-browser

Adblocker? Privoxy:

vi ~/.config/uzbl/config
set proxy_url = http://127.0.0.1:8118

I also like

@cbind  gc<Scroogle:> = uri https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi?Gw=%s&n=2
@cbind  gx<IxQuick;> = uri https://ixquick.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%s&cat=web&pl=chrome&language=english

in ~/.config/uzbl/config.

I love this browser...its just perfect for the Mini 😊 And vi aficionadas have a new home. 😉

Workaround

Cobra — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:47:26 GMT

Folding@Home is, as so many times before, broken on Linux systems with a reasonably up-to-date version of libc and either segfaults or stops working with bizzare error messages such as 'Couldn't CosmHTTPOpen' or 'Cannot get ID from server'. Since many solutions posted in the interwebs are wrong or deprecated, here's a viable workaround which I know to work on Debian, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Arch (and Fedora, I've heard).

Install nscd, then check your /etc/nscd.conf with your $EDITOR. Find the following line:

enable-cache            hosts           no

Change "no" to "yes", if necessary, then save and exit the editor. Finally, issue a

service nscd restart

and fold away.