Most definitely annoying. F-spot stopped working again. Not sure why. Did a restart and all. This is exactly the thing why I left Windows for what it is, and switched to Linux. Got to kill Bill (for inventing .NET).
Dec 232008
Dec 132008
Of course, the new ATI driver did not work either. Yes, it installs, yes, it compiles the fglrx module, but trying to insert it still presents an “unable to allocate memory blah-blah” something error.
Naturally the networking did not work after I restarted X with the old config. Network Manager insists on having no active connections, whereas pinging my other systems works like a charm. I took the advice of another frustrated Intrepid user and
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge network-manager
Indeed, the Network Manager Gnome-applet should be classified as “What Was I Thinking?”. I’m starting to wonder if Intrepid shouldn’t be classified the same.
Dec 112008
AMD released ATI Catalyst 8.12, that supposedly supports Ubuntu 8.10. I’ll keep you updated, I’m downloading now.
Dec 072008
For some reason the Network Manager icon showed I had no network connection until at some point yesterday the network really stopped working. So in the Network Manager I created a wired connection and not only did that bring back my network, it also made f-spot work! Can’t see what the network has to do with f-spot, but I’m happy anyway.
For some other vague reason (I did not install or update anything of that kind) the “Unable to load NLS codepage cp437” error messages went away. The cifs-mounts are still mounted the same way. *puzzled*
Dec 062008
I upgraded from 8.04LTS to 8.10 yesterday, and it has been nothing but trouble ever since. I had to manually get X working (since there are some problems with the ATI driver obviously), f-spot stopped working (some strange X-windows error), CIFS mounts now complain about being unable to load NLS codepage cp437 (and therefore filling up the syslog with several entries every second), and I will probably find more when I progress on using the system.
This SUCKS big time. I know 8.10 is not an LTS version, but it should be a stable version. I beg to differ.
Update: Azureus (now Vuze) has an auto-update bug (downloads 4.0.0.4, installs and restarts, but remains 3.1.1.0, so wants to update again)
Nov 182008
…according to this news item. It’s about time.
Update (15:21): You can download the prereleases here. And I have it working in Ubuntu 8.10 (x86_64 version obviously) with FireFox 3.0.4. Browsing to about:plugins shows the Flash plugin as “Shockwave Flash 10.0 d20”.
May 052008
A couple of days ago I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, also known as Hardy Heron. I not sure if I like it all. There is no Firefox 2 anymore, only the beta of Firefox 3, which basically means 90% of the plugins don’t work. No Google toolbar. Can you imagine?
Also, xmms is gone. I don’t want a media-organizer or streaming audio, I want a mediaplayer, and xmms is damn good at that. So I had to compile it from source, something I didn’t want to do anymore since I made the switch to Ubuntu.
My mouse (a Microsoft Trackball Explorer) worked perfectly in Gutsy via xmodmap, but something has changed in the X-server, and now everything must be done via xorg.conf. Not sure why, but it took me some time to figure it out.
But it’s not all bad. Compiz works perfectly now with the standard ATI drivers in the kernel. No more starting the computer, changing the loaded fglrx kernel module to the manually compiled one, and restarting X. It just works now.
And of course, the whole upgrade process was a breeze. Compare that to upgrading your Windows…
Feb 122008
Because I had hangs on Ubuntu with smbfs mounted drivers (the new 1.5TB WorldBook and my USB2 drive from the laptop) I Googled around for some solutions. One thing that I noticed is that most newer forum posts tell you to mount the drives as type “cifs” instead of “smbfs”. Most of the time I can reproduce a “hang” when going to a directory on my WorldBook and clicking on it (in the filebrowser) so that it would start to generate tiny icons of the pictures inside the directory. After having done one icon, the system would freeze until I killed the filebrowser and after a while I unmounted and remounted the drive.
The hang does not occur when mounting the drive as type cifs. The mounting process itself seems (did no accurate testing) faster too. I’ll let you know if this solves the problem completely.
BTW cifs is the successor to smbfs, but it is said that it cannot handle shares from Windows 95 and Windows 98, but that’s not a real problem for most people. Cifs is more actively maintained as well, so bugfixes and security patches are likely to find its way faster to cifs than to smbfs.
Feb 102008
Linux (my Ubuntu) seems to have some problems with SMBFS filesystems. I have the USB2-drive of my laptop mounted in a similar fashion as the WD-MyBook, and that has some hangs occassionally too. So I don’t suspect the MyBook (for now).
Other than that, the MyBook isn’t superfast. It’s only connected at 100Mbit now (it has GLAN interface), I don’t know if that will explain it.
The Mionet software on Windows XP stopped working. For some reason it thinks the MyBook is offline. I’ve resetted the drive and the laptop (poweroff -> poweron), but to no change.
Windows Vista has problems with the x-bit in the fileprotections. On Linux my files are created with rwxr-xr-x fileprotection. Probably because of Windows Vista’s excellent (*ahum*) UAC that does not like the execute-bit on external drives, it chooses not to show ANY file with that bit on. Changing the filemode to rw-r–r– does the trick. It took me a while to discover that. Windows XP has NO problem with the execute-bit.
So my first impression: cheap storage, lousy (Windows only) software. No further comments for now.
Jan 242008
It seems Ubuntu Gutsy does not play flac-files anymore in XMMS. Not sure why, XMMS is great, and flac is installed. Turns out there’s something wrong in the repositories, since the plugin itself does work. So download the flac source, unpack it and do a “./configure;make”. Then go into the src/plugin_xmms/.libs directory and copy the libxmms-flac.so to your xmms plugins directory (cp -p libxmms-flac.so ~/.xmms/Plugins/). Now xmms plays flac again.