The system naturally required a reboot. Upon doing so, I got to my grub menu where it took me a minute to think of why it was still called “Ubuntu 7.10″: I had installed the grub menu long ago in ages past when I was using OpenSUSE and hadn’t updated the menu.lst file yet on that partition. Oh well, it was a simple naming change – - I could just do that later, right?

Anyway, upon finally booting up into Ubuntu, I was greeted with a dumping out to a full-screen console, then flickering black, then dumping back to full-screen console, then black a couple times more. Next, a warning that the display was not configured properly and would be operating in low resolution mode, then finally into a 800×600 Gnome desktop.

Once things settled down, attempting to change the screen resolution presented me with an error dialog stating: “The X Server does not support the XRandR extension…”. I was not alone.

Doing a bit of web research, I thought I’d attempt to install the nVidia driver from nVidia themselves:

Woops – nVidia warns me that the X-Server can’t be running. Ok: sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop. Bye-bye nice warm and fuzzy windows and try it again…

Woops – nVidia says that the compiler used to compile my kernel (gcc 4.1) does not match the current compiler (gcc 4.2). Hm, that’s odd but ok, temporarily remap the “gcc” symlink to /usr/bin/gcc-4.1. Try again…

Woops – nVidia says that I don’t have the Linux kernel source. Ok: sudo apt-get install linux-source and the 2.6.24 kernel source is downloaded and installed. Try again…

Woops – nVidia warns me that the kernel source is still not installed for my kernel. Hmm: uname -r and it tells me the kernel version is 2.6.22. Whah? I confirm from sources on the web that Ubuntu 7.10=2.6.22 and that Ubuntu 8.04=2.6.24… so why is it booting up attempting to use the 2.6.22 kernel?

Yep, you guessed it: The grub menu that I installed years ago in my OpenSUSE partition of course had no idea that I have upgraded my Ubuntu system. It was still invoking the operating system using the 7.10 kernel and bad things were happening (my guess: the nVidia driver had been upgraded to support “recent Linux 2.6 kernels” and my old kernel just didn’t cut the mustard).

So… spend 15 mins re-learning how grub works and finding the menu file, then change the …/boot/grub/menu.lst file on that OpenSUSE partition from:

to:

Reboot and now I’m back in business (the display is fine).

So now I have to decide if installing grub on Ubuntu and copying over the menu and overwriting the old OpenSUSE grub install on the master boot record is worth the risk/pain or what…

Well, I thought it was a funny story anyway.

Of course one easy way to free yourself is to use the Control Panel to remove programs you no longer use. For instance, Adobe Acrobat 8.0 takes up 1.1GB on my hard drive thanks to my employer, and I’ve never even used it.

Another way is to figure out where all your disk space is being eaten up at the file-level. Using cygwin, the following command is what I’ve used – feel free to share your more sophisticated versions below.

Let it run for minutes/hours then check out c:\diskalloc.txt. It will show you the worst offenders first. I was surprised to find out that I had 1GB in my “Local Settings/Temp”. Also I had forgotten that I had built Inkscape months ago and just left the object files lying around. That’s another 1GB of wasted disk space.

Just be careful not to delete anything you think Windows might need to function!

Apparently this crash has been fixed on Ubuntu 8.10 because Daniel himself hasn’t witnessed this crash?

One big change was the adjustment from KDE to Gnome. I realize I could have installed Kubuntu, but I figured I’d give Gnome another chance. I may end up compiling KDE 4.x at some point just for the experience and the eye candy – and to see where that project is headed. At least for now I can install some key KDE apps straight from the GUI (Amarok, K3B, KDevelop).

I am increasingly impressed with Ubuntu. Their level of documentation, usability and support seems to surpass Novell’s with SUSE. I could recommend this to my relatives without feeling the least bit guilty or religious.

Printing worked right out of the box – it never worked for me in the 2 years I used OpenSUSE. That was a very pleasant surprise, since that was my wife’s biggest complaint about our Linux install (being able to print something is a pretty low requirement for an operating system).

MythTV was actually a little bit more painful to set up than on OpenSUSE. I had to dpkg-reconfigure and reset the password for MySQL before MythTV would work. See these instructions if you’re also having problems.

I had to build the LIRC modules, though the instructions were laid out in such a simple way that I sadly have no idea what I did, just that my Snapstream Firefly RF remote now works with my existing lircrc files brought over from the OpenSUSE install. Dangerous? Apparently not.

I particularly liked that installing most applications was as simple as the Applications > Add/Remove menu option – works much faster than YAST. What did confuse me a little was why some of the available applications were not listed in the GUI app. For instance, MythTV was available in the GUI, but I had to install MythVideo via the command-line (sudo apt-get install mythvideo). Another one: ChildsPlay was listed in the GUI, but that only gives you two games – you really need the plugins if you want to keep your kids happy (sudo apt-get install childsplay-plugins).

Speaking of kids, get TuxPaint. My kids also loved each of the three Asteroids clones… for about 5 minutes each.

What’s nice though is that getting these ‘extra’ apps is only a google search and a one-liner in a terminal.

Anyway, there’s only about one more thing that I have to set up in Ubuntu and then I can probably let the OpenSUSE one bitrot as I migrate data over from those partitions. If I’m able to stay running successfully for a month or two, then I can blow away those SUSE partitions and make room for something more modern (SUSE 11?).

• There appears to be a formal agreement established between Microsoft and Novell to develop and support the Linux-based version of Microsoft’s Silverlight, called Moonlight.
• Speaking of Microsoft, Alex Russell of Dojo speaks of how poorly the Microsoft IE team has communicated future plans. I agree. It’s not a way to build trust among web developers who you’ve pissed off for so long. Where’s the news on the next version of IE after 7?
• Speaking of web browsers, Apple announced the iPodTouch, which will soon put WiFi web browsing capabilities (via Safari) into the hands of many a music geek. Couple that with the iPhone now selling for $200 less and I believe that Safari is soon going to be one of the most widely used browsers out there in the Mobile Web, competing head-to-head with the Opera Mini. When Safari 3 gets out of Beta and is distributed to its millions of users, we’ll suddenly see a huge increase in the number of users that can view SVG.
• Speaking of Opera, I mentioned yesterday that Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 was out. Here are some interesting performance results, though Mozilla evangelist Asa Dotzler is quick to point out that Opera still lacks an auto-update feature.

That’s it for now.

Here are some things to expect:

• Linux build built on QT4 – ooo, shiny, I wonder which version of QT4 – QT 4.3 I hope…
• Superior SVG support – including SVG as CSS background-image finally – that is the last item on my list they have to implement. Time to write a new list!
• Usability – “more consistent with other browsers”. Hopefully Alt-D will focus the darn Location bar finally!
• Performance – cuz everyone could use a faster, more memory-efficient browser

First, to clarify – what I wanted to do was take a snapshot of all files in my working directories (even the non-versioned ones). In some cases, the SVN server was no longer around (for one reason or another) so this was really about taking the files on my hard drive and archiving them somewhere (but removing the .svn hidden files and directories).

I use cygwin on my Windows box because I love the power that Unix command line gives me. Unfortunately, I hadn’t installed the man package in cygwin, so I used Google to find a tar man page. It told me there is an exclude-file option (-X) so I did the following:

This creates a text file, called exclude.txt that has one line for every hidden .svn directory. The reason I cut the first two characters out of the grep is because tar (for whatever reason) wouldn’t exclude a directory named “./blah/.svn” but it would exclude a directory named “blah/.svn”.

Once I had the exclude file, then I ran the tar command:

Hope it helps someone else…

Dev Opera Article #3 up

Go read my latest article about SVG on Dev.Opera. It deals with SVG filters so I recommend using the Opera Web Browser (or recent Firefox 3 Trunk builds). You can comment here.

Slacker vs. Geek vs. Cool Chick

The PC vs. Mac commercials are probably the most parodied series of commercials ever, now here are some from Novell that add a twist. Many may have already caught these videos on the Novell site, but I thought I’d post the YouTube links because they’re a little easier to get at (and the audio has less of a hiss to it):

• Clip 1
• Clip 2
• Clip 3

Putting the hardware vs. software comparisons aside for a minute, my wife and I both liked these commercials (especially since I was watching them on a OpenSUSE 10.2 box). It figures that Linux would be friendly, savvy and somewhat hot chick.

Character Map on OpenSuse

Speaking of Linux, I was typing up some genealogy information on my OpenSUSE 10.2 box and could not find the equivalent “Character Map” application that Windows has at Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map to copy some characters like é and ï and to my clipboard. Can someone put me on the clue train? If there is no such application – how do people type those characters on a standard US-English keyboard?

[Update: Rob let me know below about the Gnome Character Map (Suse package in YaST is "gucharmap") and I've now installed it]

Snowstorm in April

It’s snowing today in the north-west Chicago suburbs. On April 11th, 2007. And not just a little flurry, more like the everything is covered in snow and it’s still coming down kind. What is up with the weather?

Winer on Graham on Microsoft

For the most part, I agree with what Dave Winer says about Microsoft here. Maybe not “dead” but largely “irrelevant” for a lot of people. On the other hand, I think Paul Graham is living in a little too insular a bubble if he rarely comes across a Windows box. And if you’re a web developer you still have to deal with the fact that most of the deployed browsers out there are Microsoft browsers, despite all the other great, standards-comforming, free browsers available.