Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category
Oneric right around the corner, vpn woes
So according to the countdown timer, we have about a day left until Oneric (Ubuntu 11.10) goes gold and there is a mad rush to download it and complain about Unity. The problem for me is that I have a feeling I will never get to enjoy the new release. At work they recently moved to a new two-factor authentication system where first a certificate is traded then you auth with the usual u/p creds. Great..
First problem, vpnc has been working fine for me, but won’t work with the new scheme. I recompiled vpnc to support ssl certs, but after running it I found it only supports a hybrid client-only cert mode. Not compatible with the new vpn.
Second problem, I can’t get a 64-bit version of the official Cisco vpn client. The Cisco client does support certificate exchange, but I can’t find a 64-bit version that works. I was using this site, but it hasn’t been updated in a while. Then once I get the ipsec module compiled and installed, when I try to connect to it with the vpnclient, it dies a nasty death that takes the whole networking subsystem with it. Only a reboot can get my networking running again.
So what are my options? I am going to request a MacBook, but they take the better part of a year to get. So that means I will have to boot into Windows to use any company resources that require a vpn to access. I can still run Linux when I am at the office, but I end up needing a vpn much, it might become a major pita if I have to keep switching back and forth.
The Windows 95 paradox
Unknown to most (sarcasm), I am an avid Linux user. I know a great many other Linux users. As Linux users I feel we have a certain free spirit that comes with using our free OS. But I am finding a disturbing paradigm in regard to the response to the Gnome 3/Unity desktop environments that have surfaced recently. The number one rant I have read about online has been about how hard the new interfaces are to use. People want their program button with its flyout menus back.
Now I realize that many of the reviews were knee jerk reactions to the new interfaces. I had much the same reaction, when I upgraded to Natty. I couldn’t figure out how to use it, and I just wanted my familiar interface back. But wait, at some point inmy life, the familiar had to have been unfamiliar. When was that.. lets see, when was a little button in the bottom left corner of the screen for accessing programs and settings introduced… oh yes, Windows 95!! People want their Windows 95 like desktops back! For gods sake, that OS has been setting the desktop top standard for the past 16 years. This is almost the EXACT same reaction I get from people when I try to introduce LibreOffice to people that are used to MS Office.
Them: “This sucks, I can’t find anything.”
Me: “But what about the functionality, how does it compare to Office?”
Them: “Oh that, its fine, I just can’t find anything”
Me: “What options are you having trouble finding precisely?”
Them: “I have found everything I was looking for, it just sucks that I had to look for them.”
The problem isn’t the interface, you can teach old dogs new tricks. Its the fact that people don’t like new things. But wait, what about when MS changed the Office menu bar to the ribbon? Well, people were forced to use it, so they bitched, then got over it. And started to realize, maybe it isn’t so bad after all, they just needed to retrain their brains a little. You never know, you might find that your better with the new interface.
I for one love the Unity interface. There are quirks that annoy me, but what doesn’t have annoying quirks? Usage note with Unity; people love to complain about how hard it is to launch programs. If you have ever used Launchy, or Gnome Do, then this will be easy. Hit the super key, type in the first couple letters of the program you want, hit tab when it shows up, then hit enter, your done. I can launch a program in under a second, try that with a fly out menu and a mouse. Learn the keyboard short cuts, or stop complaining about using your mouse so much.
UbuntuOne now with more of the GB
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Technology on July 29th, 2011
UbuntuOne, the service that integrates seamlessly with your Ubuntu desktop to store your files online, now offers 5GB of storage with their free account. The question is, how long will it take the likes of Sugarsync and Dropbox to follow suit? I have been syncing with Dropbox at work and home for so long now, I probably won’t be in a huge hurry to move. But it will most likely happen, probably on my servers first.
One of the things that prevented me from using UbuntuOne was the fact that they didn’t offer the simplicity of Dropbox’s public download URL’s. I use this so much I can’t even count. No work if UbuntuOne has pushed this out, or is still working on it (most likely).
Online man pages
Yes, online man pages is nothing new, but Dustin Kirkland has taken them a step simpler, by shortening the url and making it more like the actual command. So now you can enter ‘man grep‘ on the command line, or you can enter ‘manpg.es/grep‘ in your browser. I likee.. 
Ubunutu 11.04 initial impressions
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, Technology on May 2nd, 2011
So I intstalled Natty over the weekend, I am usually able to hold off for a total of 24 hours after a new release comes out before I really want to upgrade something.
Well I have been using Natty for 24 hours with the new Unity desktop and all. Well I can officially weigh in on Unity now. and the word is…meh.. Yeah, talk about anti-climactic. I switched back to Gnome classic after about 4 hours with Unity because it was just taking too long to do things in my mind. It was driving me crazy. Its not a bad design, not at all, but its such a divergence from what I am used to using that there was A LOT of overhead where I was just staring at the screen trying to figure out how to do something. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of things I wasn’t able to do let me just point out a couple.
Custom launchers. Yeah, in web development, the browser version matters. So I had to manually install FF3 in /opt and point to a special profile that I have all tuned for testing websites. Natty uses FF4, which not a lot of people are using yet. So I am flummoxed trying to figure out how to create a custom launcher for FF3 that is installed in a non-standard place.
Notification applets. They just don’t work in Unity. There are some that they custom build to work in Unity, but the standard Gnome applets and icons in the notification area don’t work, at all. You can’t click them and they are replicated when you have two screens. They just don’t seem very well thought out. There seems to be a lot of ‘not invented here’ syndrome going on.
I thought about trying Gnome 3 but I hear it totally breaks Unity. So I will probably hold off until a bit later, I will probably try Unity again at a later time. I needed to actually get some work done. 
Happy Ubuntu 11.04 release day
Ubuntu 11.04 was released today and, as OMG! Ubuntu put it, “every man, wife, dog, child, elf, dwarf, sister, neighbour and cousin are downloading it right now”. OMG! Ubuntu has set up a cutomized landing page for people looking for Natty info. Head on over to http://omgubuntu.co.uk/hub/natty to see it
Robbinsweb lives…again
Posted by: jeffro in Linux, My Life, Technology on April 25th, 2011
Yeah, ok, so I know I already wrote about this, but the ole’ boy died again. This time I lost a drive. For once in my life i was glad I had mirrored drives on a home server. The down time was rather epic considering my complete lack of motivation to rebuild it, and its difficult to find an 80 GB drive any more. For the interested here are the steps I followed to restore the array:
1) Install the drive in place of the dead drive (like I needed to tell you that)
2) Boot the degraded array and go start up fdisk indicating the new drive (something to the effect of ‘fdisk /dev/sdb’) The reason I used fdisk rather than the far sexier cfdisk, is that cfdisk was having fits about the drive having an incorrect block count or something that made no sense on a new drive. Fdisk handled it perfectly.
3) Partition the drive EXACTLY like the current drive (size, order on disk, etc.)
4) Add the partitions back into the array one by one. So if you have three partitions in the array, say root, swap and home as sdb1, sdb2, and sdb3 respectively, add them into the array like this:
mdadm –add /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1
mdadm –add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb2
mdadm –add /dev/md2 /dev/sdb3
That is assuming your array partitions line up to your disk partitions that way.. Then you can watch the rsync updating the partitions by doing a ‘cat /proc/mdstat’
Ubuntu 11.04 is almost here
In light of the fact that Natty is almost ready for release, I have added the countdown timer to the side panel. I will, as tradition demands, forget about it until many months after the release has happened and the image become some odd amalgamation of Ubuntu advertising and proselytization, either that or a broken image. Either way, I usually remember to take the image down before the next scheduled Ubuntu release. Usually..
With 11.04 moving to use both Wayland AND Unity this is setting up to be one of the biggest releases Ubuntu has ever seen. The move away from X.org is a monumental thing in itself, but then also replacing one of the mainstay Linux (Gnome,KDE,etc.) desktop environments with Unity is nothing less than playing software chicken. Either Ubuntu is going stay the course and the community will flinch and Unity/Weyland will become a standard, or Ubuntu will flinch and will have to backtrack with X.org and Gnome, or a worst-case scenario, neither flinch and we end up with a smoldering pile of rubbish on both ends.
(note: yes, I know Unity is built on Gnome, and works similar to Gnome3, but it isn’t Gnome3, so my statement stands)
A solution of sorts
A reoccurring issue with web development has always been cross-browser checking. Does the site work and layout correctly in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera, blah blah. A huge problem with doing all my development on Linux is that I can’t easily check Internet Explorer on Windows. Most of the rest of my team also decline to use Windows and most of them use Apple (a whole other debate, but I will skip that for now). Our clients are totally Window’s shops so this presents a problem. We have tried running VM’s locally, but this has its own issues such as resource usage on your local machine. You start up a VM and watch all your RAM go bye bye.
The solution I have for this now, which seems to work alright, is to run another box with a decent amount of RAM and let everyone RDP into it for testing. This coupled with the virtual machines that Microsoft provides for testing has been working very well.
Cairo dock
I just found this little nugget of desktop customization goodness. Its called Cairo-dock, or GLX-Dock, not sure where the name discrepancy came from. Its basically Apple’s dock on all sorts of funky pepsi. You can customize the heck out of it and it just does its thing. I used to use Docky and AWN but after messing with Cairo-dock for a while, I was hooked. It might not be for everyone since it has quite a breadth of features, if thats not your cup of tea, you might try AWN or even Docky for the ultimate in dock usage-ease.
Not only can it serve as a app launcher, it can completely replace the default OS menu bars. Check out the video on the main page of their site for a good example of what it can do. I will post some screen shots of my desktop once I have mine more customized.
