I’ve been using some version of Suse as my desktop distro ever since I switched to Linux.  Suse is okay, and not bad, but I had had enough.  Suse had become slow, bloated, and difficult.  I could have just fixed Suse, but where is the fun in that?

I decided to try something new. I installed Ubuntu (the KDE version).

While (K)Ubuntu is Linux and will do whatever I need it to, any major change isn’t without issues and I have had plenty. Some are just nuisances, some have been minor problems, and I still have some major ones. So, for the sake of sharing my experience to help others, here is a list of what I’ve gone through so far:

Little Things:

• Firefox, Kwrite, VLC, and many common programs are not installed by default in Kubuntu.
• LVM isn’t installed on the livecd and there was not easy way to enable it. I was forced to use the Alternate install instead.
• .bashrc had autocomplete disabled. Uncommenting the lines about bash-completion in /etc/bash.bashrc fixed this.
• .bashrc also didn’t colorize anything. echo "alias ls='ls --color=auto'" >> ~/.bashrc made bash a little more pretty.
• GFX Grub is not used by Ubuntu. Tux Enclave has a writeup on making that happen: How to : Install GFX Grub In Ubuntu.
• Bluetooth started on boot, but my computer doesn’t have Bluetooth. update-rc.d del bluetooth makes that go away.
• Restarting X by Ctrl-Alt-Bksp is disabled by default. dontzap --disable is a quick way to restore that.
• Firefox looks ugly when first installed in Kubuntu. Installing gtk-qt-engines and qt-curve fixes that.

Problems:

• Nvidia drivers were not detected automatically, and once installed were not configured by Ubuntu. I’ve dealt with my xorg.conf file many times in the past, but I thought Ubuntu was supposed to do this.
• AIGLX must be enabled for KWin/Compiz desktop effects. I couldn’t find how to do this in the Ubuntu community. Luckly, I did in the openSUSE wiki.

Major and Un-Fixed Issues:

• GRUB. Two out of three installs I did, GRUB did not install correctly. While I know how to install and edit GRUB manually, this one would be a showstopper for a new user.
• Pulse Audio just didn’t work correctly out of the box. I installed a lot of things, but what it comes down to is installing padevchooser. A detailed writeup on configuring pulse can be found in the Ubuntu forums.
• NetBeans does not use Sun’s JDK by default, and my install does not work properly (will not import many of the Java libraries). I’m using Eclipse for the time being.
• The Omnibook kernel module is not included in Ubuntu, and I have to compile this one myself. Worse yet, Ubuntu does not make compiling modules easy (and I have yet to successfully do so).

Kubuntu definitely doesn’t have the polish of its GNOME sibling. Most of KDE’s settings were at their default, while GNOME seems to get a variety of little tweaks and extras. While tweaking Kubuntu was not difficult for me, I must admit I’m a little disappointed by Kubuntu’s default offering and feel it could be better, faster, and easier.

One little extra tweak:

For those of us who like KDE but find 4.2 a bit too heavy, I have an interesting solution. Install Openbox. It is just a window manager–not a full desktop–and can be used in place of KWin.

Once installed, go to System Settings → Default Programs → Window Manager, and change KWin to Openbox. Once applied, you’ll notice some things are a little different, but Openbox should be easier on your memory than KWin.

For the third time this month I got a computer that randomly reboots with Stop Error 0xC000021A, otherwise known as a WinLogon error. Following Microsoft’s guide didn’t fix the issue, so I took a shot in the dark and uninstalled IE toolbars while in Safe Mode.

It worked.

For the record, these systems are WinXP (so I don’t know if Vista shares the issue) running IE6 (so IE7 may have no problems).

Usually, I just take the shotgun approach and uninstall everything that calls itself a toolbar. This time there were only two: the AOL toolbar and the AIM toolbar. “Surely,” I thought to myself, “a toolbar from a reputable company such as AOL can’t be the problem.” Well, I was wrong.

So, IE6 users, avoid installing toolbars on your computer. Even AIM could be the cause of a system crash.

This one comes from a computer that used to have Zone Alarm. I don’t know why Zone Alarm was removed, but it wasn’t removed properly. The end result was Windows Firewall was forced off by a “group policy.”

The fun part was that this computer had XP Home, which isn’t supposed to have group policies. More importantly, it didn’t have gpedit.msc for fixing the policy. So what do I do?

I found the fix on windowsxp.mvps.org. Basically you need to open regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Policies \ Microsoft \ WindowsFirewall and delete the entire WindowsFirewall key (backing it up of course).

Restart the computer and the firewall comes back.

This all actually starts with my ACPI. Apparently, the DSDT that came with my BIOS wasn’t made very well. The table had been compiled against the Microsoft compiler, which allows some errors to get through. So, in order to get Suspend to RAM to work for Linux in the first place, I had to fix and recompile my DSDT. More information about figuring out if you have a broken DSDT and how to fix it can be found here: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Fix_Common_ACPI_Problems.

My new DSDT worked very well, until I added the new RAM. Unbeknownst to me, a computer’s BIOS usually updates the DSDT whenever you change the RAM. This has no impact if your OS is using the DSDT from the BIOS, but it becomes a big problem if you have replaced it with your own–like I did.

So my ACPI suddenly became really buggy, and having Suspend not working right was annoying, but that didn’t crash my system. What brought my Linux to its knees were all the errors being generated. After just one day, just my /var/log/messages had grown to over four gigabytes! So my logs filled my hard drive, and my computer stopped working–almost.

You know how in part one I struggled with fixing my LVM? Well, the power and beauty of LVM saved the day. I was able to repartition my LVM and transfer free space to my root partition while the system was online (the most I had to do was unmount /home). No rebooting, no rescue cd, not even logging into /bin/bash. Awesome.

As I’m going back and fixing my ACPI tables (again), I’d like to point out how much of a problem motherboard manufacturers not following standards can be. I ran across the tale about a badly written DSDT [ubuntuforums.org] on a Foxconn motherboard. Long story short: never buy from them. I had a big enough problem when my /var/log filled up from my little mistake, I can imagine the strife this guy has been going through.

Windows and OSX have a file on the root partition that does this, however the standard on Linux is a swap partition. The benefit is that you can write to a swap partition much faster than you can to a swap file, which makes performance a little bit better. The big downside is that to change your swap space involves repartitioning your hard drive. Yeah, its complicated.

Just to make my life more complicated, about a year ago I switched to LVM in order to avoid this (since repartitioning a LVM is much easier than regular partitions). The problem with that idea was Suse 10.2 really didn’t like that idea, and kinda forced me to use a regular swap partition. The result was I had my LVM cut up, and the a swap partition and a separate partition for Windows on my computer.

I really should have sorted that out beforehand.

So the night was spent actually repartitioning my drive, moving my swap over to LVM, shrinking and resizing my home partition to make room, and finally adding unused space my LVM. Also I had to remember that to shrink an LVM from the command line one has to:

1. Shrink the filesystem
2. Shrink the Logical Volume
3. Move/shrink the physical volume

And you have to do so in that order, or if you’re adding space you would grow the volumes in reverse order. Otherwise bad stuff will happen (usually nothing will happen though).

Yes, I would love Knoppix/Gparted/not-Suse to have an LVM manager that could do this for me (Suse’s isn’t bad at all, but the live disk doesn’t boot on my laptop). The reality is I should have gone through changing out LVM by hand before I dove in, and I should have remembered there are 3 steps to shrinking a partition on LVM (with regular partitions you only have 2: shrink the filesystem, then the partition).

SuSE:

• 9.1: My first ever encounter with Linux. It all started with a livecd for 9.1 (that I still have). I tried it out because Windows refused to work with a USB keyboard I just bought. Sure enough, it worked with SuSE, and I was hooked from then on.
• 9.2: SuSE became blue for some reason. KDE looked a little better, and wireless networking (via ndiswrapper) didn’t crash my whole system.
• 9.3: Everything worked just a little bit better, and suspend to disk almost worked.
• 10.0: Pretty much felt exactly like 9.3 with a different name, however this was when Novell decided to kick YaST in the nads and replace it’s backend with zypper, which didn’t work.
• 10.1: Which was blue (I thought the odd ones were green), and now I had a network manager! No more fumbling around with scripts and iwconfig to go wireless, I can connect easily and save my connection! Zypper still doesn’t work, and I hear about this thing called smart.
• 10.2: Once again, everything is just a little bit better, except suspend which never worked in this version.
• 10.3: I upgraded to this using # smart upgrade. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds (the install disk was used to finish the job). Strange thing though: everything works! Finally I can say I envy no Windows.

As for Ubuntu:

• 5.04: I downloaded and burned a livecd (back then it was separate from the install). I tried it, but it just seemed like Debian by another name.
• 6.10: I mainly used this one to build a server in the beginning of ’07. I was impressed by the ‘Add/Remove’ applet, but only a little.
• 7.10: I used this one only as Xubuntu. I still liked it a lot, and used it instead of DSL when applicable. Everything I liked in 6.10 had gotten better (sudo was interesting though).
• 8.04: I really like this one. Everything is sleek and stylish, and my first glimpse of it reminded me of OSX. If Suse 11 doesn’t impress, this will probably be my new distro.

And my brief stint with Gentoo:

• It’s still compiling.

When I first switched, everything was new and exciting. Any time I was doing something I felt like I was somehow hacking my computer, doing something I could never have done before. Now when I look at Linux I don’t see shiny new car, I see all the parts that make it go together (even though Hardy Heron is very shiny).

I must admit I miss the days when Linux was a mystery machine with magic powers and every click of the mouse was a new discovery. But getting new software by doing smart install whatever is still freaking awesome.

SWEET. My favorite browser gets the bump. So if you haven’t already, go to firefox.com (or your mirror of choice) and grab yourself a fresh copy of Firefox 3. I told you IE was no good.

P.S.

If you’re holding off from switching from FF2 to FF3 because one of your extensions isn’t yet supported, you don’t have to miss out on the new features because of one or two old addons. Usually an addon won’t work just because the developer didn’t test it against the new version of Firefox. There are many ways around this, but the simplest is to install the Nightly Tester Tools extension.

Nightly Test Tools will let you override compatibility checking on any and all addons you have installed. It can even disable checking altogether (not recommended). I find using NTT easier than remembering how to edit about:config or the header file on .xpi files

I’ve long lamented the fact that Windows XP lacks any form of network places: storing different network configurations for different locations. Such a thing is useful on a laptop, where your office might require you to use a specific IP or you need to use a certain proxy in public locations.

So imagine my surprise when, while switching the static IP address of this office, I come across a laptop that is still set to DHCP! Yes, it was using the correct static IP, but instead of telling the TCP/IP protocol to just use that static address, the former IT person had put in the static IP as the Alternate IP Configuration. And sure enough, if the computer didn’t get a response from DHCP, it would revert to the address for the office.

It’s a clever idea, but it also flies in the face of common network troubleshooting. As soon as I hear the computer’s IP address starts with 169.254.x.x I know the DHCP server for the network isn’t running. If I found a regular address I wouldn’t immediately know what is wrong with the client’s network, and I’d have to do more troubleshooting to figure out the network’s topology.

Still, I might use this trick. I’ll just have to remember to ask my clients how their computer gets an IP address from now on.

During my downtime I got some Spring cleaning done. Not in my house–I gave up on that years ago–but on my computer. On Windows this process usually involves running disk cleaning software. For that I prefer CCleaner, but most of the tools out there pretty much do the same thing.

Linux is a different story. Many things, like the /tmp directory, clean themselves automatically, so there is no need for a program like CCleaner to clear temporary folders. To reclaim my hard drive in Linux, a little investigation was required.

The first step was figuring out what was taking up the most space, and Filelight was a big help. It has a pie-chart-like representation of disk usage that made figuring out the amount of data in each folder quick and easy. From Filelight I found a cache of files downloaded by smart and a bunch of extra OpenOffice files taking up a large part of my disk. So I ran:

# smart remove ooo-devel
# smart clean

The next big waste of space was from all the files left over from my various attempts at compiling my kernel. Thanks to the guide on the SUSE forms I was able to free up about one gigabyte of my hard drive from removing the build files and doing # make clean

That’s pretty much it. Filelight showed me where of my free space went to and how I could get it back. Now I’m going to go enjoy my newly uncovered gigabytes.

If you ever have to move an office from a workgroup to a Windows domain, as I do frequently, the process can be an extreme pain in the rear even when using FAST Wizard. Frequently I have thought there had to be a better way, and now I have found it.

The answer is here. Basically you’re either copying the user’s folder (safely) to the domain user, or redirecting the domain user’s folder path to that of the old one.

To copy,

1. Log in and out as the domain user (this creates the user on the computer)
2. Log in as a different user who has admin rights (such as administrator)
3. Go to Control Panel → System → Advanced (tab), and click the Settings button under User Profiles
4. Select the old (workgroup) user and click Copy To, then browse to \Documents and Settings\<domain user>
5. Make sure the domain user has proper rights (is a local user and such) to their folder and that’s it!

To use the same folder (which is more dangerous):

1. Log in and out as the domain user, then go back in as some other admin just as before
2. Go to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\<domain user id>
3. Change the ProfilePath value to that of the old workgroup user
4. Browse to the folder and give the domain user full control over everything and you’re done!

Aside from being a little faster, this method will give the domain user the exact same everything as their old account.