Ubuntu 13.10

So I finally updated, (again), my home system. this time around none of my games broke to the point of despair. My installer was even interrupted by a connection issue part way through and it still was able to succeed without my needing to go get a DVD installer. I did wait at least a month prior to attempting the update, just in case there were critical patches needed, or the main servers were flooded with everyone else trying to install. But, I'm current again.

At present I am able to run Guild Wars 2, Secondlife, Gpodder, Chrome, Wally, and Blender without any additional tweaking. The last round through this update maze had me losing sound and video from the GW2 install until I went and pulled a beta release of Wine. Almost fearful I was going to have to dig out the compiler and do some make make-install steps, but I didnt have to the beta repo set itself up nicely. But, this time I didn't have to go there. It just ran. Sound was active without glitchy stuttering and everything.

Sound, in Secondlife is always a challenge. This time I thought it was that way again. Since its my main reason for running the application if the sound doesnt work then there isn't much else. But, that worked well too. Seems like something wrong when it all just "works".

The biggest failure was on the part of my local network, I think I over loaded the wireless links with all the downloads, and it gave up. This could have been disaster, but I must have had most of the install already there as the only portion that really had to redownload was the wine installer.

Gpodder did lose its mind. Every one of my podcast URL links was gone. So I had to go through my download directory and decide if the show I had previously downloaded worth going and looking up again. Bit of a forced purge, but considering that I havnt had the long drive to work lately I really wasn't missing out on most shows. Getting a clean slate there is actually a help.

Chrome has been a problem child in the past, mostly due to the 64-bit Ubuntu I think, as the links to the updates aren't always ready for prime time with the Chrome builds on 64-bit. This time around, either there wasn't a corresponding update with 13.10 or it just worked as well. All my tabs were still there, all my main logins were still functional after the update.

Wally and Blender both worked, with Wally dutifully grabbing up random wallpapers for me again, and Blender with its new UI continues to befuddle me. I suppose if I actually took the time to step through the tutorials again I'd get back up to speed quickly. But, when I go and try to run my test blend through and it comes out black and white instead of looking like glass. I'm a bit stumped. Apparently they pulled a lot of the ray tracing algorithms back into the package, and the external rendering engines I had once, are no longer available. So even there I need to re-learn. Maybe when I make some free time to look there again it will all make sense.

Evolution Email and AT&T

I'll be quick on this one, since I don't have all the pertinent version information in front of me right now.

Synopsis of the problem is that my Evolution email reader quit downloading new content after an update of my Ubuntu workstation.  Shows how much I notice things, in that I had not gotten any email inbound for about 10 days.  Then I look and see I'm getting a communication error from the POP server.

Searching for this error resulted in either "nothing" or posts over three years old (which are typically worse than nothing).

Final fix was a simple change from "SSL Authentication", to just "Login" on my Evolution account configuration.

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!

Camera Woe

Ok, the Kodak Easy Share digital camera still won't connect to Ubuntu.  The front end photo management software (such as F-Spot) will not pull images from the camera, and I typically get an error " Error initializing camera: -60: Could not lock the device" even when trying to open.

I've seen some references to applying camera.app via synaptic (done that) and also about elevating user rights for the device (have not tested that).

But, the most promising so far is this, which I will try this evening and see if it provides any solutions.

Apply to U9.04 and Kodak DX7590 = OK ********************************

sudo gedit /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-libgphoto2.fdi
Search for "Kodak DX7590" (or your camera model)
Put in XML comment of this paragraph =

Reconnect your Kodak DX7590