Many things to do

Crazy time of year. Tried doing nanowrimo last month, on top of all the family activities.  Needless to say I didn't make my word goal.  I barely made 4% of the word goal. Oh well, try again next year, and maybe in the interim I can punch up this one I started.

Work is busy busy with more projects and facilities to integrate than I had expected for end of the year. that's good, but leaves little time for other things.

My home system keeps prompting me every few days to upgrade to newest Ubuntu. I don't think I want to. I finally have everything working, camera functions, all the websites I go to work, the windows games like Rift, GuildWars, Lord of the Rings, Eve, etc. they all work quite well under wine. That and the fact I really don't like the look of the Unity desktop is making me re-evaluate my choice in system.

I am now planning to use part of my holiday break time to check out the various distributions and see what one fits for me the best. Anecdotally Mint is leading the way right now, since they are the best of the multimedia options essentially on an Ubuntu platform. But, the newer release of OpenSuSE is very intriguing.

Maybe its time for me to go back to an RPM based system and learn its foibles.  But, its so so hard to go away from something that works well.

New computer maybe, so I can leave this one intact while I evaluate?

Ubuntu 10.10 updates

Ok, for a while now (since the summer and it was dearly hot) I have been running the Hardware Sensor Monitor applet so I can glance up and see what the mean temperatures are of my system components. I didn't want to have a literal meltdown.

So, I think this applet isn't playing nice with other items, specifically my Wally wallpaper changer.  On the last Ubuntu update (circa mid Oct 2011) something changed where the Sensor monitor and Wally collided. Rebooting didn't help. Deleting the applets and re-adding them to the panel seemed like the best bet.

Delete worked fine, re-adding gets sticky. Seems there is no Wally applet to readd, it just gets placed there at application startup. Uninstall and reinstall this application.  No good.  Remove the configuration directory ~/.wally and restart application. Still no good.  It is doing its thing, switching wallpapers, but I no longer have a way to adjust the preferences or push it to fetch a new picture.

Here is the solution that seems to be working well for me.

First I removed the hardware monitor sensor applet, since its going into winter I can probably be safe to assume the ambient temperatures will not cause my system too hot.

Second I reset the Gnome panel system. Not as scary as it sounds.

Do the following (on Ubuntu 10.10, not sure what will happen if and when I finally update to 11.x)

1 - open a terminal window.

2 - shutdown and remove the gnome panel system. (Top and bottom panels will disappear)
     gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel


3 - Clear out the old panel configurations
     rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

4 - send a term signal to restart the panel system
     pkill gnome-panel

Both top and bottom panels reappeared and the missing Wally applet was there again. I had to re-add my favorite quick launches for Chrome and Terminal, but that's a small price to pay.

Ubuntu 10.10 Auto Update Fail (and solution YAY!)

So I am letting the Update Manager do its thing the other day, and it kicks an error that looked a bit suspicious.  Was saying something about a partial upgrade had failed and would I like to let it fix that.  Well, I know for a fact I did NOT allow it to upgrade to 11.04 as I don't want to break everything I have working. and I did not think this was a true and valid message.

I didn't want the system to blindly upgrade since I play some games under Wine and have read there are problems with the new Ubuntu which I don't want to deal with just yet.

Instead of letting the updater try and fix something that might force an unwanted upgrade I first went looking and found blog and forum postings similar to this (Ubuntu#root), that talk of several steps to take including verifying each application and selectively allowing the updates to occur.

In a word YUCK!, much too difficult a process. (first letter of the exclaim may be adjust to suit taste)

Instead I went to the Ubuntu IRC channel (#ubuntu) and posted the question "What is this message about a partial upgrade all about anyway?"

Almost immediately I get a simple answer on how to fix my local package archive.

  sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

My understanding is this was a hands free, simple check of all my repository connections with a leaning towards repairing my local package database and upgrade a package only if it does not impact other packages.

Whatever it did, it did it quickly and without any hassle from me.

Camera issue resolved

Ubuntu and digital cameras don't work well together for me, and from what I could find on the various forums, for other people too. Well, this problem only took about a year to puzzle out.  With many failed sessions of mounting and remounting the camera as a hard drive and copying the files over, then using the cool photo categorizing apps to sort through them

Turns out, and not sure what update finally fixed this, or at least got me to a workable solution.  But, if I dismount the camera from the desktop.  since it auto-mounts when you plug it in.  So, dismount the camera and then start the photo application.  It will now link and import photos from within the application.

This works for both of my current favorites. DigiKam and F-Spot.

Yeah!