Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was finally released last week, and I just managed to upgrade it today. Unlike Mandriva, to upgrade Ubuntu, I needed to use the alternate CD image instead of the normal one.
The upgrade took about an hour, which was actually quite long for such a newly installed system. However, on the bright side, it could be done while the system was running.

The Ubuntu guys boasted about the 10 second startup time. And in fact, my new system booted really fast. I doubt if it's as fast as 10 seconds though :P

There's a very annoying problem with the new Gnome button layout: the minimize, maximize, and close button are moved to the top left of the windows, whichever theme you use. A guide to fixing that problem is available here: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-back-to-the-right-in-ubuntu-10.04/

Ubuntu

So I got a new laptop, and of course I installed another Linux distro on it. Ubuntu seems to be a very popular one now, so I decided to give it a try.

Gnome seems to have improved a lot since the last time I tried it on Fedora. After some modding it looks quite awesome now ;)

Another thing I like about Ubuntu is the free 2GB Ubuntu One space I can use to synchronize and share my data.

Is cloud computing really the way to go?

Some updates

So I updated my kernel to 2.6.29.1, however the computer failed to boot. Probably there were some changes in the system structure. I guess I'll stick with 2.6.27 for a little more.

On the bright side, I have finally managed to find a way to connect to vpn from my Linux box. At first I went through the trouble of installing the Cisco VPN client for Linux, but no matter how hard I tried it couldn't connect to the gateway. Next I tried OpenVPN, but it didn't seem to be compatible either. In the end I tried vpnc. It was impossible to get it to work using certificate authentication, however group authentication worked fine ;)

Now probably there'll be no big changes until Mandriva Linux 2010 comes out!

2009.1

So Mandriva 2009 Spring Edition (2009.1) has been out for a few months, but I'm too lazy to update it. To be honest, I was quite satisfied with 2009, until recently when Yahoo changed their protocol and my old version Pidgin couldn't connect to their server anymore. A lame reason I know but that was the thing that helped me defeat my laziness and download the new image.

This time, instead of burning the image to dvd, I have decided to mount it locally and use it as an update media. Here's the command to add it to urpmi database:

$ urpmi.addmedia --distrib cdrom /mnt/2009.1/i586/
adding medium ""Mandriva Linux - 2009 Spring (Free) - main" (cdrom1)" before remote medium "Mandriva Linux - 2009.0 (Free) - Installer"
adding medium ""Mandriva Linux - 2009 Spring (Free) - contrib" (cdrom2)" beforeremote medium "Mandriva Linux - 2009.0 (Free) - Installer"

Then the pidgin update:

$ urpmi pidgin
To satisfy dependencies, the following packages are going to be installed:
 Package                        Version      Release       Arch
(medium ""Mandriva Linux - 2009 Spring (Free) - main" (cdrom1)")
libpurple0                     2.5.5        5mdv2009.1    i586
pidgin                         2.5.5        5mdv2009.1    i586
pidgin-i18n                    2.5.5        5mdv2009.1    i586
pidgin-plugins                 2.5.5        5mdv2009.1    i586
1.2MB of additional disk space will be used.
4.9MB of packages will be retrieved.
Proceed with the installation of the 4 packages? (Y/n) y

installing pidgin-i18n-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpm pidgin-plugins-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpm libpurple0-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpm pidgin-2.5.5-5mdv2009.1.i586.rpmfrom /mnt/2009.1/i586/media/main
Preparing...                     #############################################
    1/4: libpurple0            #############################################
    2/4: pidgin-plugins        #############################################
    3/4: pidgin-i18n           #############################################
    4/4: pidgin                #############################################

Unfortunately, the problem with pidgin was only fixed in version 2.5.7. So in the end I had to grab the latest version 2.5.8 off the Internet to get it done.

Maybe tomorrow I'll try updating the kernel next.

Yay for 2009.0

Hey guys, I'm back with a brand new operating system :)

After installing I encountered some bug with the display manager that made the keyboard stop working after a while so I needed to use KDM 3.

KDE 4 is awesome! Here's a screenshot:

I'm still a bit unfamiliar with the changes though :( I can't find the new hotkey for "Show desktop", which used to be Ctrl-Alt-D in KDE 3. The PrintScreen key doesn't seem to work, and I need to run the ksnapshot command to take a screnshot. The desktop setting to change the monitor gamma is gone, and I need to use the xgamma command. And more...

Let's try to tame this new penguin :)

Mandriva Linux 2009.0

Mandriva announced the official public release of Mandriva Linux 2009.0 yesterday. It's the first time in many years they've met their scheduled date! I am downloading it now. Wish me good luck!

2008.1 finally

Didn't want to reinstall the whole system from scratch, I have been trying to upgrade the old packages manually.

Things went fine until yesterday.

After a massive upgrade of more than 100 packages, I rebooted the system and found myself logging into the text mode. X server failed to start. Looking at the logs I found that a video driver module failed to load. Well, that's the worst situation you could get yourself involved in.

So I decided to take the risk and try updating my system using the installation CDs. The estimated time was more than 3 hours, but actually the packages were all upgraded in just an hour. In the end, I got an error claiming that some media.cfg file could not be found, but after rebooting everything went fine.

Finally I got my system up-to-date (hopefully) with minimal efforts. Now it's time to try out all the new features!