Recently in 10.04 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.

Now that the Ubuntu One cloud-storage service can sync any directory in the system instead of just things in a Ubuntu One folder, I have been anxious to start using it to sync my files to the cloud for availability not just on any other Ubuntu machines I might set up but also via the Web interface (and hopefully in other OSes, Linux and not, in the future).

So I tried to get Ubuntu One going in this newish 10.04 installation. No go. I logged in, but nothing would sync.

Perhaps my "situation" is unusual (but there are enough Ubuntu users that it could be more common than I think). Here it is:

I briefly had Ubuntu 9.10 installed on a different computer, with which I created an account and used Ubuntu One. That computer has since been parted out to make this current laptop work.

Now I have this "new" computer with Ubuntu 10.04. Logging into Ubuntu One, the system listed my "old" computer as a synced device. There was nowhere to add a new computer on the Web page, as detailed in the Ubuntu One how-to. Yep, no "add this computer" button.

I did a bit of searching and found this Ubuntu forum post in which Ubuntu One developer Joshua Hoover gives these instructions:

I'm sorry this process isn't as streamlined as it could be. We're working on fixing that, but in the time being, you should be able to open System->Preferences->Ubuntu One and then get prompted in a web browser window to add your computer to your Ubuntu One account. If this never happens, can you do the following?

1. Open Applications->Accessories->Passwords and Encryption Keys

2. If you have an UbuntuOne token (under Passwords: default), right-click and select delete

3. Open a terminal session (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and run:
killall ubuntuone-login ubuntuone-syncdaemon

4. Open System->Preferences->Ubuntu One

5. A browser window should open and you should be prompted to add your computer

In my case, doing steps 1 and 2, there were no UbuntuOne tokens in the Passwords and encryption keys.

So I went to step 3, and ran this line in the terminal:

$ killall ubuntuone-login ubuntuone-syncdaemon

Then I went to the Ubuntu One application (System-Preferences-Ubuntu One), and I was then prompted to add my current computer.

Now all looks good in the Ubuntu One window. But none of my files are yet visible at https://one.ubuntu.com/files/.

I'll wait a bit. More later.

Later: I rebooted, and when I logged in, Ubuntu One was active, but none of my files were syncing.

Before I was able to actually add this computer to the Ubuntu One account, I had only chosen one folder to sync - which I did in the file browser by right-clicking on it and then left-clicking on "Synchronize to Ubuntu One" in the resulting menu.

Now that the machine was hooked up to Ubuntu One, I did this again - right-clicked on the folder and then syncronized it. The sync began immediately, and a minute or so later the folder was accessible in my Web interface at https://one.ubuntu.com/files/.

Hopefully this process is super-intuitive for new users who don't have Ubuntu One accounts left over from previous machines.

So now it's working. I'm not treating this as a backup. I've heard stories about people who accidentally deleted files on their Ubuntu machine and hoped to pull them from their Ubuntu One backup. But since their Ubuntu One account had already synced, the files were gone from the cloud, too. So my existing backup routines will continue.

Like most users I expect, I'm sticking with the free 2 GB plan. Sure I have more than 2 GB of files, and the 50 GB plan would take care of that, but $10/month is a bit pricey for my current needs, which are probably somewhere in the 5-10 GB range. I'd rather pay for a backup service like rsync.net that doesn't automatically sync, or something Time Machinish that does snapshots that will allow me to go back and grab old files.

And I'm ramping up my use of Google Docs - my complaint about syntax highlighting seems to be solved, as I wrote some HTML in Docs — and it was pleasantly colored. I'll probably be taking advantage of the bulk upload to Docs once I separate my image files from my text files, a separation I used to adhere to but abandoned due to laziness. (I don't need a bunch of JPEGs mucking up my Google Docs files ...).

What Google Docs and Gmail are allowing me to do is work not just across Ubuntu machines but with any computer I happen to be using, whether it's one of mine or not. At the moment anyway, that flexibility is worth letting Google spy on me and market to me based on that spying.

However, Google One and technologies like it — with files in the cloud (either synced or cloud-only) and local applications accessing them — seems to allow for a more full-featured computing experience than the current crop of Web-based applications such as Google Docs. However, I am enjoying all the features of Gmail that traditional mail clients such as Thunderbird and Evolution don't have.

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've probably written a dozen entries in which I wondered aloud about how anybody could use the Google Chrome Web browser when, on my 512 MB Windows XP system, it literally ran aground after maybe a half-hour of use, with screens taking forever to render and sending me scurrying back to the relative comfort of Firefox.

Well since that time I've been running both Firefox and Google Chrome on a Windows box with 1 GB of RAM, and my opinion of Chrome has turned around: It's fast and stays fast.

I guess Chrome is one of those applications that just doesn't do well with 512 MB of RAM.

And now that I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my laptop that also has 1 GB of RAM — and I'm having "issues" with Firefox eating tons of CPU — I've installed a couple of other browsers, including the Webkit-powered GNOME browser-of-choice Epiphany and its close cousin (and Chrome twin) Chromium, both of which are easily added from the refreshingly simple Ubuntu Software Center.

(About the only thing I don't like about the Ubuntu Software Center is its method of installing an application as soon as you select it; I'd rather make a number of software selections and then have the system install them all together. I guess that's what the Synaptic Package Manager is for.)

So how is Chromium in Linux, specifically Ubuntu 10.04?

So far, it's excellent. Everything happens fast. There is absolutely no slowdown when I type into a Web form. I can see in top that when not in active use, Chromium (just like Epiphany) gives back almost all the CPU it uses when rendering a Web page (most unlike Firefox, which holds onto CPU even when you're not in a FF window).

Windows XP runs great in 512 MB. But if you're running a modern Web browser, you really need 1 GB for things to run smoothly. This doesn't mean a modern Web browser — especially Firefox — will run great on a Linux machine with only 512 MB of RAM. But I've never seen it choke so badly with 1 GB of RAM as I have in my current Ubuntu 10.04 installation.

The fact that Chromium is flawless on this configuration and with this CPU (1.2 GHz Celeron) says a whole lot.

My only problem is that the "core" of my Web-based work requires me to use Firefox. ... and if Chromium runs great in Ubuntu, it could only do better in a "lighter" environment, right?

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.

Ubuntu can't make up its mind on how to arrange the buttons on application windows. In today's patches, the buttons moved yet again.

Here's what they look like today:

And here's what they looked like yesterday (or, in my case, mere minutes ago):

And a few days before that, they look like they do now. I prefer the Red X to be the "outside" button, whether the buttons as a group are on the left (as they are now) or the right (as they were before this controversial change in Ubuntu).