Updating Ubuntu

Earlier in the week I got around to updating the desktop to the new release of (K)Ubuntu 14.04 - I run the version using the KDE desktop - though I have lots of the ordinary Ubuntu packages installed too. Around 50 mins from the projected end of update the machine locked up - I was doing various other things at the time on it which may have contributed to this. No response to anything from mouse/keyboard - the sysrq magic keys had no effect either, but I was running an ssh server on the dekstop so I logged in remotely and rebooted.
When it came up again the boot screen appeared to think it was running 14.04 (rather than the previous 13.10) however at the login screen neither keyboard nor mouse got any reaction (and the ssh server wasn't running the machine hadn't registered with the router). I tried re-booting a couple of times with no effect.
I then broke into GRUB (at boot - press down the shift key) and booted the minimal 13.10 install (still there!) and ran the dkpg fix option (I previously tried minimal with 14.04 which again failed) which ran to completion. A reboot then gave me a working system!
Looking at the upgrade log file the last lines of /var/log/dist-upgrade/term.log read as follows:

Setting up openssh-server (1:6.6p1-2ubuntu2) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/init/ssh.conf ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/pam.d/sshd ...
ssh stop/waiting
ssh start/running, proce

Yes it stops there! I had it down as a problem with the NVIDIA graphics driver, this might suggest something else - I wasn't connected via ssh when I was running the upgrade so it wasn't a a case of the connection dying. Still puzzled but putting this here in case it helps anyone else.
The other problem I found (so far!) is that Ctrl-Space doesn't appear to do anything - I use this key combo a lot - in Emacs. So it was a bit painful, a websearch reveled that ibus was the problem so I ran ibus-setup and stopped that grabbing Ctrl-Space for 'next input method' and assigned it to a different key.
So far everything else appears to work...

You need to recompile the kernel

I was searching through some old papers this morning and came across a document describing how to set a Linux machine up to retrieve email from freeserve. In amongst the 10 pages (or so) was this gem:

So if you didn't have the dummy interface and didn't have ethernet (fairly common in those modem based days) you needed to recompile the linux kernel to enable it. I sign of how far things have moved since then! It then goes into the gory details of sendmail....

The Oneiric Ocelot upgrade

The latest version of ubuntu was released last week and over the weekend I decided to try upgrading - this desktop was running the ealier version which had already been installed a few weeks, so I thought it would be pretty smooth as I hadn't had too much excuse for tweaking this machine! I think things are now running ok so let me highlight the issues I had:

• The upgrade of samba crashed - it gave a few error messages but didn't stop the overall upgrade - and I've reported bug 875172
• On completion of the upgrade I rebooted all went smoothly but I found that there was no sound - I deleted my .pulse directory adn logged in again and sound was now fixed.
• I use vm from within emacs for my email but occasionally use kmail in the case of graphic/link heavy emails - on Sunday I read a review of email clients in Linux Format magazine which gave kmail a resounding last place so I was thinking about migrating..but to that point I hadn't yet run kmail in the upgraded ubuntu. I tried running kmail and was confronted with a migration dialog - the new kmail uses a different email backend for storing data. Alas the migration failed... so I then started web searching! The problem was that akonadi was failing to start so I couldn't even view kmail with no unmigrated emails! To start akonadi I tried a manual

  akonadictl start

  but that still failed, I did a lot of searching, thought about moving to thunderbird - but there's no easy migration of data there.. and eventually I spotted this bug report which gave this recipe:

  sudo aa-complain mysqld
  sudo aa-complain mysqld-akonadi
  sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor reload
  akonadictl start

  I've not messed around with apparmor before so I wasn't clear as to what it did but I went on trust and the last command started akonadi ok. I started kmail and it ran! but with no data, I shut it down and tried the advertised command

  kmail-migrator --interactive

  But that complains the migration has already been done! You need to read the instructions here:

  If you have already attempted to run the migrator and it failed, you can re-run it manually by first deleting your
  ~/.kde/share/config/kmail-migratorrc file and your
  ~/.kde/share/config/kmail2rc file.
  Then you will need to run the migrator manually by hitting Alt-F2, and entering the following:
  kmail-migrator --interactive
  The program will run, and all your accounts and mails will be moved over to the Akonadi system.

  And following that kmail now runs ok. I hope the collection of the above instructions in one place helps anyone else struggling with the same problem - I don't know whether it's a general problem or just due to the previous configuration of the machine. For comparison,here are my experiences with the upgrade of the previous ubuntu release. One machine upgraded, 2 more to go!

Ubuntu - natty narwhal and plasma

Back in this post, I wrote:

kde/plasma did look very nice before the upgrade but at the moment whenever I run it from login the system locks up and I have to reboot - this is before I can interact with the GUI - I've looked through the system logs and as yet have not spotted the problem. When I find a resolution - I'll update this post.

I've eventually got around to researching this, hand editing the startup file ~/.kde/share/config/ksmserverrc and gradually removing startup applications - that previous blog entry led me to suspect some of the terms I was launching - I removed those and it still locked, eventually I removed emacs and I could get in, if I ran emacs with no startup file (-Q) it locked up, having also spotted a

NVRM: Xid (0000:07:00): 13, 0001 00000000 00005097 000015e0 00000000 00000100

message in the logs just before the crash, I googled the NVRM: Xid bit and found this bug, which gives the solution to update the nvidia drivers, rather than the ones mentioned there, I went for not being quite so bleeding edge and installed the ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates ppa, restarted the system and I'm now happily running in the kde/plasma desktop environment!

Ubuntu - natty narwhal

Around a week ago the latest release of Ubuntu - Natty Narwhal was released, the upgrade of Beth's desktop went pretty smoothly and so I decided to upgrade this laptop. Laptops are often a little more problematic and I had lots of extra stuff installed so I knew it wasn't going to go as smoothly!
But here I am now running the new release with the new Unity desktop:

This is a work in progress I've found a number of issues and as I resolve them I'll put the solutions (which worked for me!) here:

• Initially I had problems with being unable to start the upgrade with an error message about held packages - I'd been running beta versions of some applications so I needed to remove the ppa's for dontzap and kubuntu-ppa/beta before it would start. The upgrade then ran smoothly - probably around 4 hours - though I was out for some of that time so it was sitting there waiting for me to reply when I returned!
  
• On reboot I spotted the first issue - the boot menu appears to think I'm running a Xen(virtual) kernel which is selected as the default boot - if I run this the kernel soon panics! Looks similar to this bug report but that claims to have been fixed well before release. (Later: I've reported this as bug 779029)
  
• When I tried the proper non-Xen kernel it booted fine, I use the kubuntu version of the distribution but first tried logging in using the new Unity desktop. Unfortunately I was then told that the hardware was unsuitable for running Unity and it would run the Gnome interface. Puzzling as this is a fairly good spec laptop. On checking I found that the machine claims that the closed-source nvidia drivers were installed but not in use! I tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling which didn't help. Just by chance I looked at the package manager for the unity desktop - I was looking for a diagnostic tool and found that unity wasn't installed! I don't know if it was quietly uninstalled when it thought the hardware wasn't good enough or if it is an upgrade issue. I installed some unity packages and as you see from the screenshot Unity runs fine. I started my Linux experience with WindowMaker and so the dock looked pretty familiar to me! I recommend the help menu to navigate around the new experience there looks to lots of good information on setting up things to your choice - a sample. You'll see from my screenshot that the background repeats - I'm using twin view with the screen split across two monitors and unity can't (or I've not found out how) to persuade it to stretch the background - but then gnome had the same issue before the upgrade. (Later: the system still claims the nvidia driver is installed but not in use - however it clearly is in use!)
  
• fluxbox - my usual minimalist interface was having problems before the upgrade - I assume with the nvidia driver and this is still an issue - I get shadows on the screen and windows occasionally need a forced refresh.
  
• kde/plasma did look very nice before the upgrade but at the moment whenever I run it from login the system locks up and I have to reboot - this is before I can interact with the GUI - I've looked through the system logs and as yet have not spotted the problem. When I find a resolution - I'll update this post. Some websearching reveals this bug I don't get as far as interacting with a terminal but I have graphics effects enabled and various terms start automatically when I login - maybe some hand editing of the config files is called for?

There's some fairly hard-core geekery in the above - thanks for sticking with the description to the end!

Later - Aug 2011 two comments on the above:

• I've now solved the kde/plasma locking the system up problem, see this blog update.
• I've also discovered which of the unity background image options allows you to stretch the background across two monitors - and hugin makes the production of panoramas easy - with another blog update!

reboot? - this is linux!

Just had a scary few minutes, this morning I was unable to logon the home mailserver (running mandriva 2010.1) across the local network - the process connected, opened up a terminal window and just hung, never getting to a prompt! Sunday lunch over, I tried opening up a term when sitting at the machine with the problems and there too, no xterm! Fortunately I was already logged in and had root (admin) access. Looking back in the logs I saw a crash in ssh (which I use to get onto the mailserver from other machines) - in ssh-block-Allow. I could understand ssh problems causing a problem with remote access - but why was local access a problem? Even a Control - C failed to interrupt whatever was running - and I could check that nothing was hogging the CPU.
I looked through any recent updates to the machine and saw nothing likely, googling only gave me my tweet for help(!) so I hurriedly connected the backup drive, did a machine backup - I was glad I already had root access and then tried a reboot. This failed to work - wouldn't shutdown with a message:

could not log bootup - already in use

so a magic key shutdown (using the sysRq key) was resorted to.
A few deep breaths later and the system rebooted and I logged in - then I realised the consequence of the ssh crash - one of the system scripts which run when you open up a terminal checks whether the machine is running ssh and, if so, asks you to unlock the key - for passwordless logins - if ssh is confused - as it evidently was - maybe that script was hanging there.
So I guess killing and restarting sshd would have avoided the reboot as to why ssh was broken that's another issue!
At least the server had been up for a month so it wasn't too unstable!

Screenshot

I've not had a screenshot up here since November 2009 so here's a current one!

This is my laptop running ubuntu's version of fluxbox with a cairo dock at the middle bottom. Applications running are (from left) gkrellm - giving machine status, amarok - for listening to music, and a wterm - for commandy stuff.

Stranded and Indolent?

This extract from my latest incoming spam (which just escaped the filter) seems too good not to quote:

Please, let me know if this email is valid. My valid Email is: debt.settlementboard@*******.th
FUND FINAL PAYMENT BOARD/PAYMENT SETTLEMENT VALUE AMOUNT: $850,000.00USD:
We Apologize for the delay of your payment and all the Inconveniences and hiccups that we might have caused you. However, we were having some minor problem with our payment systems, which is Inexplicable, and have held us stranded and Indolent, not having the Prerequisite to devote our 100% endowment in accrediting foreign payments.

Wish I could be left stranded and indolent in some scenic clime!

Steps to Lucidity

Some of you might venture to disagree with the title of this posting as it is an account of the various issues I've had (so far) with the upgrading of the laptop to the beta version of Lucid Lynx the next release of the Ubuntu version of the Linux/FSF operating system. I did this as part of the global bug jam at Madlab in Manchester.
I started off with

sudo update-manager -d

which told me there was a new release (in Beta) I proceeded and almost immediately got a python crash:

ImportError: No module named deprecation

a bit of web searching gave me the solution and I downloaded and installed python-apt_0.7.94.2ubuntu3_amd64.deb. This took me once I restarted the upgrade, a little further until it stopped with the cryptic error:

E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

and told me that I might be trying to install a beta version (gosh!). This took me a little time to resolve, did a lot of searching around broken packages and removed a few which really ought to have long gone but a look at /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log and the apt.log should have told me that the problem was the empathy package (an instant messenger) which claimed that there was a broken depends upon empathy-common (which I didn't have!) I removed empathy and it started downloading the new version of the operating system (all 2000+ packages!) this took some time but eventually prompted me to reboot. I rebooted and got to the screen where I select which operating system to run and the new version wasn't there! I tried the old version(which was still there and inevitably that crashed nastily as the only thing left of that was the Linux kernel! Fortunately I had installed other versions of Linux on the hard drive - if not I could have used a rescue disk - and from one of those edited the grub menu - which allows selection between them - to include the new version.
Reboot, select the Ubuntu Lucid and I got a black screen with a scary message about ureadahead having crashed and mountall being unable to connect to Plymouth (that's the graphical boot screen not a port in the south!). Booted back to a alternative working system to web search and after quite a few false trails looked at the /etc/fstab and spotted a line which I'd included to mount /proc/bus/usb which got Aladdin dongles working with the previous version of Ubuntu (as I no longer have the Aladdin dongle - used by my ex-work - I didn't need it). Then having edited that file (mounted the Ubuntu partition from the working OS) I rebooted, I still see that message about ureadahead but it quickly vanishes - so it was a red herring apart from telling me where in the boot process it was bombing out - and I could login to the upgraded Lucid Lynx system. Thanks to all at the bugjam for assistance. Now for testing of the running system!

There you are, wasn't that Lucid!
I meant to take some pictures of the day but, alas forgot!
Later Looks like the issue with grub was due to my having installed another version of Linux which, without asking, moved the MBR (master boot record) somewhere else where the Ubuntu system wasn't expecting it!

Whoops!

Got an email from NVIDIA today requesting me to tailor which newsletters I wished to receive from them - so I followed the link did the appropriate configuration and got these rather fetching errors:

Waited a few minutes and got this even more cryptic email:

Getting close to WTF territory I think? I don't think I subscribed from anything, but trust software to make a really spectacular hash of it.

Imlib problems with mandriva 2010?

I'm trying to debug a windowmaker style dockapp under mandriva 2010 - it's called E Notes for putting post-it (am I allowed to use that phrase?) style reminders around the screen. It needed some fixes to get it to build and then I decided I needed to get my head around imlib (which that dockapp uses) to know what I should be looking for to solve a particular problem - the dock app was giving me windows with a black foreground and a black background so it's hard to tell what's going on :-)

So to get a better knowledge of imlib I googled and tried downloading the program I found here:
Imlib programmers guide
The first one - written for Xlib - is meant to produce a window displaying a specified image until the window is closed - I compiled (no warnings even with -Wall) ran it and I get _nothing_ no output at the command line, no window opens, sits there doing nothing until I Control-C it.

Puzzled, I then tried moving it onto a ubuntu system and once I'd built it there (that's another story, imlib1 is carefully hidden in the karmic release) it runs fine absolutely no problem, image displayed ok

So my feeling is that - at least on this system - imlib1 is broken under mandriva 2010, I have installed (at least including all imlib ish rpms)
imlib-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
libimlib1-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
libgdkimlib1-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
kdepimlibs4-core-4.3.2-1mdv2010.0
libimlib2-devel-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0
libimlib2_1-filters-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0
libimlib2_1-loaders-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0
libimlib-devel-1.9.15-8mdv2010.0
libimlib2_1-1.4.2-2mdv2010.0

I'm using the imlib-1 here, anyone else seen this or has the installed
libs able to try that small app? Maybe I should try building imlib from scratch?

Once it's running I can make the buildable version available on the web and then I can start adding various extra features I have in mind..!

Once more..

I was tempted to wait until the fifth anniversary of this early post on my weblog, but time is, I think, of the essence. Redundancy threatens again and so:

Anyone want an exceedingly young looking 58 year old with 19 years of C++ experience, several years Python, lots of CAD ability, numerical analysis skills... cv has been updated, that's in pdf format!

Email address is in the cv or in the weblog personal details.

Type links with care!

Following a colleague's mis-type I've found blogsopt.com - two letters swapped from blogspot! Whois gives the contact as

Investment Ventures, Inc., Global global@myprivacy.ca
Ave Ramon Arias
Panama City, - -
PA

somewhat different from google, but http:// rmstar. blogsopt .com - lot's of space so you can't click on it! - looks very similar to this weblog, apart from various bits of javascript. I've checked a couple of other weblogs and they seem to be mirrored there too - they're not quite up to date so it not linking back to blogspot. What's really scary is that the top frame - if you're logged in to blogspot with your user id etc looks identical. I wouldn't go to any blogsopt site unless you turn off javascript and preferably not using Windows!
Unless I'm being paranoid..

Upgrading to mandriva 2010

I spent a bit of time this weekend upgrading two machines from Mandriva 2009.1 to 2010. Just a few comments and pointers which might be helpful to others.
I started with a machine which is a little lacking in memory (just 256meg), I initially tried an upgrade from DVD but that crashed before getting to the 'do you want to upgrade' question, I assume this was because of the lack of memory. As I wasn't certain whether it was a DVD problem, I mounted the original downloaded ISO image and put the 4gig of rpm files into /var/cache/urpmi/rpms just to avoid having to download them all again. I then attempted to follow the procedure outlined here though I used the command
urpmi --wget --no-verify-rpm --auto-select -v --allow-force that page is a little confusing as to which options to use. This stopped after only upgrading a few packages and I found I had to do a urpmi kernel and then a repeat of the first urpmi --wget --no-verify-rpm --auto-select -v --allow-force to get the upgrade to really start. It went pretty smoothly considering the low power of the machine, I just had to confirm that certain packages really should be upgraded (maybe I should have used the --force option but it's good to know what is being forced!). Upgrade finished, that machine runs kde4 if a little slowly. With fluxbox as a window manager it is very responsive!
Then onto the mailserver (and my main home machine), the upgrade DVD booted without problems and I just set the upgrade going, went to bed, found it had finished next morning and completed the upgrade with a reboot - very, very straightforward. The only two issues so far have been:

• the loss of the nvidia driver - post upgrade it was using the nv driver which is a little slow for 3D/crack-attack/googleearth, I'd forgotten how to re-install this - go to 'configure your computer' view the hardware, select graphic card and 'configure' and the appropriate (non-open) driver will be downloaded and installed.
• The other problem has been with sound and amarok, I also like to use fluxbox on this machine, but sound wouldn't work until I logged in with KDE4 as the environment, amarok now works in fluxbox but the sound is choppy (which it isn't with the KDE4 environment. I've turned off pulseaudio but presumably there's something within the kde environment which I need to start manually in fluxbox, but, so far, I've not found it!

Here's the inevitable screen shot of the desktop

Oh, and another thing, mandriva doesn't appear to have an rpm for MyPasswordSafe which I've used for quite a few years to keep all my passwords including the one for kwallet (kde's password system which some applications insist on using), I have a copy of MyPasswordSafe in /usr/local/bin which runs fine in fluxbox but falls over with kde4 which is a bit of a problem!! The code off the app website won't build on this system claiming that ui file is too old (pre KDE 3.3) - but the latest version of Ubuntu has a working MyPasswordSafe in its repository, maybe I need to find Ubuntu's source for this?
Oops, forgot to add the summary that 2010 is, in my experience, far more responsive than 2009.1 everything just feels faster (and that's even if I'm running with KDE!)

Trip down memory lane

This blog post was recovered from an blog entry I made around 5 years ago and as it is no longer accessible (the blog resided on my home machine) , let me give this boasting a little fresh life by putting it here. I had been looking for my earliest presence on usenet using googlegroups to search google's archive(which then had a far better search facility than now!) I wrote that:

That I can find is this from 1990, but I'm sure I was posting earlier. Complete with double .signature - sigh!

OK, here's a slightly earlier one - again asking about usenet software!

Ah, I needed to search for uk.ac.man.cs rather than the other way around and pushes it back to May 89 though I'm sure I posted to uk.* before that but google groups seems light on those - no posts from uk.followup at all!

I doubt if I would be able to find them starting from scratch now, note in the earliest posting the reversed email addresses as well as the uucp delivery! Over 20 years ago now.
On searching around for my postings I did find this message of a very convoluted approach to system recovery . I still remember that afternoon though as someone affected by the events rather than directly involved. I thought the

rm -rf *

was part of a script which was run from the wrong place but maybe the script was set to echo the commands it ran?

Vista Service Pack 2

The 'delights' of...

On Monday some server somewhere decided that I should be upgraded on my work laptop to Vista Service Pack 2. I installed it went through the reboot it requested and everything seemed ok, I then went back to using my Linux (Ubuntu) installation until the afternoon of the next day when I needed to do some work on Vista.
I was out of luck - I got a dialog suggesting this was the first time I'd logged in. Few of the options in the 'Start' menu worked, couldn't get to the control panel, it claimed I needed to reboot to reenable UAC (which I had never disabled). I rebooted and still the strange setup continued. I had another go today when I thought about rolling back to before the upgrade - but as you see from the screenshot the system is uncertain as to whether I have a C drive(!) and how many of them there are - I do (just one) and neither of them appear to have a saved state. I was working from home, so I decided I needed another pair of eyes and headed into the office whereupon all the problems went away! Googled a lot and it looks as if there's some sort of issue with SP2 and removable hardware - at home I don't connect a keyboard or an external monitor. I tried rebooting without these didn't see the problem and decided that it must have sorted itself out.
Unfortunately at home this evening the problem is back. I'll post here when I find the solution - at the moment all I can guess is some problem with roving profiles one of which is extremely broken but why it thinks I've roving I don't know.

A door in pent

A door in pent
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I'm hoping to twitter from the meeting at Scargill tomorrow - assuming I get a good enough phone signal - here then it will be back to the day job!
If you don't have a service prepared for Speak as a pirate day and don't mind using it tomorrow, here's a sample Eucharist.

So we see!

see more Fail Blog

Never on a Tuesday

Just spotted this interesting bug reported from comp.risks where Openoffice.org application was unable to print files on Tuesdays(!) The application which recognises the file type was spotting the date in the PostScript file header and identifying it as the wrong file type. Go and read the link and see a hard to locate bug!
Full bug discussion is here.

Les Noces

The last two minutes of this piece are, for me, one of the classic moments of 20C music (maybe of any era) I'll have it at my funeral - if they can find space for the 4 pianos!
Awaiting the performance of Les Noces at the Proms in a few minutes..
I've just upgraded to Firefox 3.5 and mostly it is far more responsive, I used to have all kinds of problems with YouTube and it feels a lot better (I do see some very slow scrolling on just one site which has lots of radio buttons. I don't know if that's a contribution?). Otherwise I'm very glad I upgraded.