Recently in Ubuntu Category

Things in my personal world of Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 are starting to work themselves out, but it hasn't exactly been a smooth ride on my main laptop.

If you read to the bottom, you'll find that the hacky-as-hell solution to a bug that has plagued my own desktop is followed by my thoughts (not all good) on what exactly Canonical was thinking about when deciding what goes into a long-term-support release.

Let's start with my latest amateur bug fix:

I think I've solved the social-bar-doesn't-appear-in-the-me-menu situation. First of all it's only in my main user account. New accounts work fine with the social bar once Gwibber is set up.

So it's something I did in the early days of this Ubuntu installation, which occurred during the beta phase.

The fix I tried today appears to be working:

First I went into Applications - Accessories - Passwords and Encryption Keys and deleted all password that had to do with Gwibber. I'm not sure whether or not this step is actually necessary, but it couldn't hurt — and that's why I did it.

Then I followed this advice from a Gwibber bug report in Launchpad:

If you are facing this please Quit(not close) gwibber and delete ~/.cache/desktop-couch ~/.config/desktop-couch and ~/.local/desktop-couch and start gwibber and try to add twitter account

In case you're not quite hard-core enough, ~ means your home directory, which in my case is /home/steven ...

I deleted all three desktop-couch folders and then restarted the system, added my Twitter and Identi.ca accounts and then rebooted again. I still didn't have the social bar, so I did one other thing:

In my earlier testing, under System - Preferences - Startup Applications, I added one for gwibber-service. It previously only worked intermittently so I had it turned off.

I turned back on the gwibber-service startup application that I had previously created, then rebooted.

Once again I have the social bar in the Me Menu.

I'll keep an eye on this over the next few days.

I had hoped that the "simple" act of removing the desktop-couch folders and re-entering my Twitter and Identi.ca account information in Gwibber was itself enough to make everything work like it's supposed to.

Creating the gwibber-service startup application is more hacky than I'd like, but for now it appears to be working. And remember, subsequent accounts I've created in this particular installation have no trouble with the social bar in the Me Menu, so it appears that something somewhere in my main account's startup scripts is not properly starting gwibber-service.

Analysis: Things started to go wrong with the social bar when I decided to change my main user account's password. Once I did that the GNOME keyring kept asking me for the old password every time I did something that required that keyring.

Following the not-always-reliable advice I found in the Ubuntu Forums, I deleted the keyring in my user account. After that the keyring worked fine (with the same password as my user account) but the social bar didn't appear except during the same session in which I actively added a social-networking account to Gwibber.

Whether or not these two things are related (deleting GNOME keyring and losing social bar) is still an open question.

What it points to is the alpha nature of the social desktop in Ubuntu Lucid. Not the greatest thing for what is supposed to be a long-term support release. Will they finally figure this thing out in 10.10 or 11.04? I hope so.

Just this kind of problem, in my opinion, is a very good reason why the 10.04 LTS should have been more like a refined, bug-fixed Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) rather than an alpha for what might get fixed in Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04.

My sense of the whole release philosophy is that Canonical/Ubuntu wanted to make a whole lot of noise with a release packed with a mix of real and imagined innovation (Ubuntu One everywhere! MP3s for sale! Social all over! Mac-like buttons! Purple!) and really forgot what an LTS release is all about: stability out of the box.

My worry (which I hope does not come to pass) is that due to the nature of Linux releases there will be no major bug-fixing in Ubuntu 10.04, and any refinement/stability for the new features will not reach the end user until subsequent releases, making this LTS more of a "lame duck" than it deserved to be.

Here's something that puzzles me: In the final days, Ubuntu decided to pull gThumb 2.11 and replace it with 2.10 because they were worried that the newer version (a major upgrade despite the incremental version number) was too unstable — either potentially or in reality.

But things like this social desktop with tight Gwibber, Empathy and Evolution integration (and between less and no integration with other client software such as Pidgin and Thunderbird), the merits and speed of Ubuntu One and the constantly moving window buttons, seem way more dodgy and unstable.

But I guess that gThumb is GNOME's project, and the social desktop and Ubuntu One are Canonicals, so there are different sets of rules depending on where the code comes from.

Fedora doesn't always make its release date. Neither does FreeBSD (though OpenBSD seems to hit it pretty well regardless). Debian won't even set one. Slackware releases only when ready. Maybe Ubuntu can take a hint here and apply the brakes once in awhile — or at least not get so ambitious and run the risk of severely hobbling a very important long-term-support release.

Having successfully bricked not one but two Linux/Unix installations in the same month (Debian Lenny-to-Squeeze and FreeBSD 7.3-release), I jumped on the Ubuntu Lucid bandwagon early — starting with one of the alpha releases.

I don't normally do this kind of thing and recommend that current or prospective Ubuntu users wait a month or even two after a given release before installing or upgrading.

But I had an empty laptop, needed an OS and figured that Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) was a long-term-support release and might not cause me too much pain.

Well, over the course of the waning days of the alpha (I tested the alpha image in the live environment but installed from a beta), through the beta and now weeks into the release, I've had a few issues to deal with, needing to tweak grub2, Ubuntu One, Gwibber, Totem and various GNOME settings.

But things have settled in a bit, and I'm productive and generally enjoying using the distribution and all that comes with it.

There have been more than a few bug-fixes since the release date, and most have directly benefited me, so I thank the Ubuntu developers for all of those patches.

I originally committed myself to a month in Ubuntu Lucid, but I can see staying here longer. It looks good (especially with the Radiance theme that I'm using to replace the darker Ambiance default), runs well and at this point isn't throwing any bugs or breakage at me that I can't handle.

Of all the problems I've faced, the Totem fixes have been the most welcome. I couldn't run the player at all in FreeBSD, even though it was perfect in Debian Lenny.

Both my "blank screen" and YouTube plugin problems have been solved in recent updates.

Xorg has been running well. Finally the kernel knows to turn off kernel mode setting for this i830 chipset (even though I had been turning if off in Grub for the past few months). Still no Compiz for this video chip (82830 CGC), a feature I had in Ubuntu 8.04 but don't really miss. It would be nice to have the option, though.

I somehow messed up my Gwibber-Me Menu hookup, and over maybe a dozen posts and many dozen tweets have chronicled the solution I figured out.

Ubuntu was famous for being brown, even though it was probably half-orange for most of its storied existence. Mark Shuttleworth and Co. mostly blew that notion out of the water in Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS), which is purplish and dark.

And if you really, really hate the button placement on the left side of the windows, there is more than one theme in Lucid's default GNOME desktop that automatically moves those buttons back to the right side of the window.

To access all of these desktop designs, go to System - Preferences - Appearance in the menu and start experimenting. There are eight themes in the default along with a link to get more.

I'm pretty simple about these things, so I looked at what came with the Lucid install and ditched the default Ambiance theme in favor of Radiance. I also dumped the purple wallpaper by clicking on the Background tab and selecting the Cosmos slide-show background, which not only presents a nice outer-space view but periodically changes the image (hence the "slide-show" portion of the name).

As you can see above, the panel and window borders are much lighter in color. I realize that the stars/galaxies/planets backgrounds themselves are dark, but everything else is lighter, and I can always find a new background wallpaper if I get tired of globular clusters and the like.

I don't really care about button placement and knowing full well that I can move them to the right side if I wish, I'm just going to leave them where they are.

I've tried many different things in the hope of solving my Gwibber/Me Menu/Social bar problem in Ubuntu Lucid.

That problem, for those not reading along (you're the better for it, I assure you) is that for some reason even after I start Gwibber and send a social-broadcast message (to Twitter in my case), the "social bar" in the upper panel's Me Menu does not appear.

However, if I add a social-broadcasting account (say a secondary Twitter account or Facebook), during that computing session the social bar reappears. However, once the computer is rebooted, the bar disappears and won't reappear until another social-broadcast account is added.

----------------- begin tangent ------------------------

The social bar in Ubuntu Lucid's Me Menu is a great idea. The only problem is that it's powered by Gwibber. It should be a much lighter application in its own right - one that works without the need to start Gwibber. (Maybe it just doesn't work this way on my system.)

---------------- end tangent ---------------------------

Here's how I "fixed" my Gwibber/Me Menu situation:

Step 1: After booting into Ubuntu Lucid, start Gwibber. If you don't have any accounts programmed into the social-updating client, enter one now.

Step 2: In the Gwibber menu, under Edit - Preferences, uncheck the "Start service at login" box.

Step 3: In the desktop's menu, under System - Preferences - Startup Applications, click "Add" and create an entry that runs gwibber-service when you start your computer.

Step 4: Reboot. Now you should have the "social bar" in the Me Menu without having to do anything.

Note: I'm pretty sure that most users do not have this problem and as a result do not need this fix. But if you do have this problem, going through these steps will fix it.

Opinion: Is this how it's supposed to work? It's better than no social bar at all, even though it would be better for the social bar to be available for updating even without Gwibber running.

I'll take what I can get. At least I have the social bar.

Thus far the "social from the start" desktop in Ubuntu is working but needs refinement - not bad for its first release, I suppose.

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects).

But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager.

What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.

I have a few Web-delivered apps that absolutely require Firefox, but for as much else as possible, Epiphany does an excellent job and doesn't stress my less-than-new hardware as much as Firefox.

If you run top in a terminal and keep an eye on the running processes, you'll see that Firefox hogs a lot of CPU and tends to keep hogging it even if you're not "actively" browsing. Other browsers, including (in my experience) Epiphany, Opera, Chrome/Chromium, Konqueror, Midori, Kazehakaze (and really just about anything that isn't Firefox) is much more forgiving of system resources than Firefox.

So it pays to shop around for browsers that do what you want yet don't stress your system so much.

Though it's not open-source, I do use Opera on my super-old systems, where it's light footprint makes even my 233 MHz system usable.

I've been pretty happy with Chromium in Ubuntu, and Chrome in Windows runs better now that I have 1 GB of RAM on the XP box (it didn't do so well with 512 MB).

But in GNOME, I've relied on Epiphany as my browser of choice for some time. I didn't find it slow when it was based on the Gecko engine, and now on Webkit it remains fast and functional.

The more I use GNOME, the more I gravitate toward the "GNOME apps," incluiding Epiphany, Evolution (which I've just started using with a couple IMAP mail accounts), the Empathy IM client, Rhythmbox, etc.

While I think the even-tighter integration of GNOME apps in the Ubuntu panel is theoretically a step in the right direction, I find that things are broken enough that the benefits of that integration aren't terrible available at present (but I hope they will be in future).

Note: In the past month or so, I've run GNOME in Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7.3 and Ubuntus 8.04 and 10.04.

First things first: My particular Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation is not suffering from the Xorg memory leak.

I added mesa-utils so I could run:

glxinfo | grep "GLX version"

My output is:

GLX version: 1.2

If it was version 1.4, I'd have the newer, leaky Xorg, but the machine is properly reverted back to 1.2.

So what's my increased use of swap all about? I don't know if it's beneficial or not to have so much swapping going on, but a couple of readers have told me that Ubuntu's "swappiness" is set to a level of 60, which is optimal for servers. Desktops run better with lower "swappiness," and 10 is the suggested level.

All of this "swappiness" information is available in the Ubuntu community's Swap FAQ, which offers the following:

--------------- begin quoted material ----------------

What is swappiness and how do I change it?

The swappiness parameter controls the tendency of the kernel to move processes out of physical memory and onto the swap disk. Because disks are much slower than RAM, this can lead to slower response times for system and applications if processes are too aggressively moved out of memory.

* swappiness can have a value of between 0 and 100
* swappiness=0 tells the kernel to avoid swapping processes out of physical memory for as long as possible
* swappiness=100 tells the kernel to aggressively swap processes out of physical memory and move them to swap cache

The default setting in Ubuntu is swappiness=60. Reducing the default value of swappiness will probably improve overall performance for a typical Ubuntu desktop installation. A value of swappiness=10 is recommended, but feel free to experiment. Note: Ubuntu server installations have different performance requirements to desktop systems, and the default value of 60 is likely more suitable.

To check the swappiness value

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To change the swappiness value A temporary change (lost on reboot) with a swappiness value of 10 can be made with

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

To make a change permanent, edit the configuration file with your favorite editor:

gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Search for vm.swappiness and change its value as desired. If vm.swappiness does not exist, add it to the end of the file like so:

vm.swappiness=10

Save the file and reboot.

--------------- end quoted material ----------------

At first I changed my swappiness temporarily. But now I'm ready make the fix permanent. Thanks for the tip, readers ctk and Mike. And thanks to the Ubuntu community for this nice little bit of how-to documentation on swap, plus the rest of the community documentation, all searchable, too.

A new way to sudo: I've never heard of gksudo before, but this FAQ recommend using it, and it worked perfectly. From the man page for gksudo:

gksu is a frontend to su and gksudo is a frontend to sudo. Their primary purpose is to run graphical commands that need root without the need to run an X terminal emulator and using su directly.

Works for me.

How other distros set their "swappiness": I've done a bit of checking, and it seems that most Linux distros, including Fedora, Debian, PCLinuxOS and Suse, also set their default swappiness at 60. Most of what I found about swappiness is in agreement with the Ubuntu FAQ, with desktop users setting swappiness to 10. I saw a few posts about MySQL servers that recommended setting swappiness to 0; I couldn't tell you anything about that.

What I will be doing is running with swappiness at 10. Whether or not I see or feel any change, I'll write again with an update.

Think about this: Sure, changing the swappiness from 60 to 10 is going to reduce what I saw as excessive swapping in Ubuntu. Will performance on the desktop really improve? And if swappiness has been at 60 in most distros for a long while, why am I suddenly seeing a problem in Ubuntu 10.04 that I never saw previously.

More to think about: The Linux kernel tends to take memory and hold onto it for what is presumably the greater good. As I understand it, the system isn't so much using all the memory you see it taking while monitoring a utility such at top. That memory will be used when the system needs it.

I don't begin to understand the gritty details of all this, nor of swap and swappiness, and I'm just comparing my experience now with that of running Linux distributions and BSD projects in the recent past.

Update, 3 p.m.: It's been a few hours since I made this change, and so far the system is using no swap and is running as well as or better than it did before.

I'm no kernel hacker. Hell, I'm no regular hacker. The most I can code that isn't a Web page is a three-line shell script so I don't rsync into the wrong directory. I'm just a user with a big mouth.

I don't know exactly (or even slightly) how they do it, but after a crash while testing suspend/resume in the 2.6.32.21 kernel while running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid — still in beta as of this writing — I rebooted and got that little "something crashed" icon in my upper panel.

It asked me if I wanted to file a bug report, and I did, so after clicking a few boxes, a Firefox window opens in Launchpad (I have a Launchpad account, and if you're a habitual Ubuntu user, you should, too) with the shell of a bug report, first asking me if my bug is similar to about a dozen others.

What? My problems be shared by others? Not in this case — to the best of my feeble knowledge, at any rate.

Anyhow, the short version is that suspend/resume works on my hardware (Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 with Intel Celeron 1.2 GHz, Intel 830m chipset) in the 2.6.32.20 kernel but not in 2.6.32.21.

So it's a regression. The mere fact that suspend/resume worked at all on any gear I have is monumental, and I was sad to see it go away as quickly as it arrived.

As if anybody anywhere with the word "developer" adjacent to their name cares about my petty problems on my 8-year-old dying hardware.

(I'm looking into the best $400-$500 laptop I can buy, but first I need to do a great deal of research and find $400-$500 ... but that's another story for another blog entry.)

Meanwhile, whatever the Ubuntu developers have going that enabled me to file this bug automatically with a whole mess of attachments that detail the here and now of my system, I am pretty much in awe.

Allowing a regular user to file a bug - especially one that might even have enough data in it to be useful, that's huge. (And I hope it's working in terms of letting developers know about what's broken in the upcoming release (and those in the future).

Are there other projects, be they distributions, applications or other, that have a setup like this for bug reporting? I sure haven't seen any.

All I can say is that this is something that separates Ubuntu from the pack (in a good way).

I had heard that gthumb was being downgraded in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid because the 2.11 build was supposedly not stable enough for an LTS release.

Well, it did happen today. The differences between gthumb 2.11 and 2.10 are startling. The enhancements to the IPTC metadata framework are gone, but the ability to do a slideshow (which I don't care about) and perhaps the ability to open images in other editors (which I do care about but couldn't figure out in 2.11 whether that feature was removed or just "moved") are back where I can see and use them.

Webupd8 is all over this change and also plans to offer a PPA for gthumb 2.11.3, which I'll either be using soon unless I decide to compile my own package.

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists.

But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware.

Pretty darn well Slowly. And with all the things that Lucid brings to the desktop in terms of the back end of the social media and cloud integration features, a commensurate bite is taken out of RAM.

As you have no doubt committed to memory if you're read the previous 500 or so entries in this blog, my main machine right now is a circa-2002 Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with a 1.2-GHz Intel Celeron CPU, 1 GB of RAM (the maximum the machine will take; you should max out whatever machine you have, too), the original 20 GB hard drive (it's just not easy to swap out a drive on this poorly designed and built laptop, or I'd have done it already) and a USB mouse (touchpad is dead), plus USB Headphone Set $2 sound module (dead internal sound module — yes it does come out and I do have a second "working" internal sound module but am too lazy to do anything about it now that the el-cheapo USB thing is working) ... plus a Linksys powered USB hub because my Toshiba USB backup drive doesn't get enough power from the Satellite's USB ports.

So it's not a power-user machine. But the 1 GB is nice.

However, in Ubuntu 10.04, things are appreciably snappy in the GNOME desktop. What else can I say? Everything runs well. I'm not missing any extra speed from Debian Lenny - this Ubuntu build seems just as good.

Update on April 25, 2010: OK, it's 10 days later than I originally wrote this entry, and after a long night of production at Dailynews.com on the Ubuntu 10.04 laptop, I was a bit surprised (although I'm not sure why I was "surprised") by the overall sluggishness of the machine running Firefox and gthumb.

While moving between windows on the GNOME desktop was extremely quick (perhaps causing me to believe the whole Lucid experience was one of snappiness rather than sluggishness), in Firefox itself things weren't going so well. There were waits between tabs, waits for pages to render, huge CPU spikes in the system as a whole (I had a terminal with top open so I could watch CPU, RAM and swap use).

While using Firefox, the CPU was straining, and much to my dismay, by the time I had been using the system a couple of hours, I was using about 2 MB of swap. Not that using swap is so bad, but with 1 GB of RAM and running basically a Web browser, a light photo viewer/editor and a terminal, I've never used that much swap before. The machine was clearly straining. I could see the various processes having to do with things like gwibber (which I wasn't "actively" running at the time, but which was using quite a bit of CPU in the background) that I sort of understand, as well as those I'm a bit dodgy on, such as desktopcouch.

I added the Chromium browser - basically Google Chrome, and I can say that so far it performs quite well and uses a whole lot less CPU than Firefox. However, my Web-based CMS requires that I use Firefox, which means an environment that runs Firefox well with 1.2 GHz of CPU and 1 GB of RAM is essential. If Ubuntu is "tuned," i.e. is enough of a hog, to run well on "modern" systems, perhaps starting with 3 GHz Pentium 4 or the various and sundry dual-core CPUs out there with a minimum of 2 GB RAM (and I have no reason to either believe or doubt this scenario other than my own experience), then I'll really have to look elsewhere for a usable operating system for my two remaining 2002-era laptops (the Toshiba and the Gateway Solo 1450, the latter which has only 512 MB of RAM with a 1.3 GHz Celeron CPU).

Looks-wise, I guess the purple, the dark windows and the button shenanigans is something you either love, hate or don't care about. For me, it's mostly the latter, although for now I'm enjoying some of the design elements.

One problem I'm having in 10.04 beta 2 is with Totem, which didn't work at all during my recent FreeBSD test.

In Ubuntu 10.04, if I want to watch a video and click on that video to open it in Totem, I get sound but no image. I can see the image if I move the window around or use full-screen mode.

However, if I open Totem first and then navigate to the video through the application, everything looks and works fine.

Video in the Firefox Web browser is fine in all cases.

I need to file a bug on this ... and I will.

Every Linux release, from Ubuntu Dapper and Debian Etch, all the way through the present day and my testing of the Ubuntu Lucid beta, I look to see if suspend/resume will ever work on my old laptops.

It's kind of like the Holy Grail ... of geeky Linux/Unix laptop users like myself.

It always seems like it's going to work but never does.

But things are looking up. Right now I can use the power/logout/other-stuff-like-that button in the upper right corner of the screen to select "Suspend," and the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 (Intel Celeron 1.2 GHz, Intel 830m chipset) will go into suspend. After that I can press the power button, and a few seconds later the machine will resume (meaning awake from suspend and actually work).

I don't know if this wizardry is due to the efforts of the kernel developers, Xorg developers, Debian developers or even Ubuntu developers, but if I can set GNOME to automatically suspend the laptop at a predetermined time after it has been idle and then come back the next day, hit the power button and have the thing actually turn on, I will hardly be able to believe it.