More musings on Xubuntu

I'd been getting more and more annoyed with some bugs in Xubuntu 8.04 ( Hardy Heron ), particularly with USB drives being detected twice and my DVD+RW drive not working correctly. I also had occasional problems with wireless not detecting the access point, or if it did, it didn't connect properly using WPA (although, WEP was usually fine).

They weren't major bugs, but they were annoying. I'd also realised that I hadn't used my Ubuntu 8.04 partition since I installed it. So, a week ago, I made the jump to Xubuntu 8.10 ( Intrepid Ibex ), completely repartitioning the drive and having solely 8.10.

To say I'm impressed would be an understatement. I'm also glad that I upgraded my Nvidia card a while ago, since previous nvidia cards aren't supported under the 8.10 kernel (2.7.1.27), so they regress to the "nv" driver which doesn't support 3D acceleration. Fortunately, I don't have any of those problems.

So, let's run through the checklist :

1. USB drive(s) detected correctly? check.
2. DVD drive(s) detected correctly? check.
3. Wireless functionality working? check.
3. Anything else that was annoying me with 8.04 fixed? check.

Astonishing. The speed increase of 8.10 is also breathtaking. It won't be long, and more and more people will be on Linux, and at that point, the world will be a better place.

Not much to say...

Wow... how long has it been since I posted anything? Frankly, this post hasn't got much to say either. However, I just wanted to post a link to possibly the most beautiful landscape picture I have ever seen...
http://flickr.com/photos/dotdoubledot/1281864495/sizes/l/
Astonishing.

Hardy Heron and NVidia

Well... I've finally taken the leap from Feisty to Hardy, and wow... I'm glad I did. The performance difference alone is worth the money. I've currently got Xubuntu and Ubuntu dual booting (lovely tool GRUB!).

Most stuff worked straight out of the box, apart from one thing. The nvidia drivers had a problem initialising, the "nv" drivers worked ok, but not the nvidia ones, and, unfortunately, you need the nvidia ones for 3D acceleration to work, and, of course, you need 3D acceleration to do Second Life etc. etc.

The problem I was having was that every time I installed the nvidia 96.43 drivers (I have a GeForce4 440MX), the display looked rubbish (to the point where I couldn't even read the text). So, a quick look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log showed the following error :

Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA X driver not found)

It all basically (after about two days of investigation) found that there's a bug in Hardy which doesn't detect the monitor correctly, so you basically have some kind of basic monitor which doesn't have the correct resolutions, and this throws the driver completely. Anyway, a quick addition of :

SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection

to the xorg.conf file and it sorted it.

Other than that, no problems, and more than happy.

Data breaches

I blog quite a bit about the amazing ineptitude of various government departments with regards to data security. On the subject, FlowingData has published a picture of the 10 largest data breaches since 2000. It's fascinating reading.

Virtualisation (take 3)

Okay, one minor hiccup overcome. I attempted to RDP into one of my VirtualBox VMs yesterday, and found that I couldn't, for one reason and one reason only. By default, VirtualBox (on Linux, anyway) sets up the VM running via a NAT connection, and for those in the know, this basically piggybacks on the current IP address, rather than getting it's own MAC / IP address. This is fine for VMs where you only ever want to communicate "out", i.e. surf the web from the VM etc., but when you want to use them as "servers", i.e. to communicate "to" them, it's no good. And this is precisely what I pretty much exclusively use them for.

Well, it's a bit bizarre to set up a bridging network in Ubuntu, but it is possible, and actually works really well, it's just a little bit more fiddly than VMware, which does it by default.

I'm not going to go into too much detail (if anybody wants the detail, then by all means email me), but you basically have to set up some custom bridging network adapters, (via the bridge-utils package), assign the bridged adapter an IP address, and then associate the VM with the adapter. Now, I've currently only got it working via DHCP, and, unfortunately, my router's not fantastic at this, so, in the past, I've tended to manually assign the IP addresses to my network nodes, but it seems to be working at the moment, fingers crossed.

I suppose a downside, and it's whether you consider it a downside or not, is that, using this approach, you have to have a seperate bridge adapter for each VM, since VirtualBox can't even start a VM which is sharing an adapter, but I can live with this at the moment, even though I have 5 adapters defined. Fortunately, a quick

$ ifconfig  down

disables the currently unused adapter.

So, what's the state of play?

Well, I currently have the following VMware VMs :

1. MediaWiki running via a JumpBox
2. Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
3. Minix

And the following VirtualBox VMs :

1. Ubuntu 7.10
2. Ubuntu 7.10 JeOS
3. Google gOS
4. Damn Small Linux 4.2.2

Sad, moi? ;-)