TR Forums

Wed Apr 23, 2014 8:13 pm

irvinenomore wrote:
It's the lens that hacks me off rather than the sidebar. I run my Windoze menus on the left hand side of the screen so from my perspective they got that bit of Unity right!

Easy enough to dock an extra panel on the left side of the screen with KDE, if that's how you prefer to work. I put extra panels left and top; the left panel has launchers for most of my commonly used applications; the top one has more launchers, and a pager for switching between virtual desktops. Bottom panel is for taskbar and notifications. YMMV, but this setup works for me!

MarkG509 · Thu Apr 24, 2014 1:10 am

Captain Ned wrote:
EDIT: If there's a way to directly image my current XPSP3 install into something I can shove into a VM under K 14.04, I'm all ears, and I have the spare space.

Although I've never tried doing this myself, VMware's vCenter Converter and MSFT's Virtual Machine Manager both claim to be able to do this. I do not see any free tools out there.

I installed 14.04 Server in a VirtualBox VM, and setup Mate 1.8. The whole process took less than an hour, and worked fairly well. But, overall, I think I'm going to hold off a while to let things mature before attempting to put this into production use. I'm seeing too many issues/warnings, including complaints from FireFox, Samba's PAM module, and other random mostly innocuous places. I also couldn't get sound to work in the VM, but I don't care much about that.

Thu Apr 24, 2014 6:13 am

MarkG509 wrote:
Captain Ned wrote:
EDIT: If there's a way to directly image my current XPSP3 install into something I can shove into a VM under K 14.04, I'm all ears, and I have the spare space.

Although I've never tried doing this myself, VMware's vCenter Converter and MSFT's Virtual Machine Manager both claim to be able to do this. I do not see any free tools out there.

Well, you could image the drive into a VirtualBox virtual disk, attach it to a VM, and see what happens. Costs you nothing to try. The most likely stumbling block is reactivation.

As far as getting the image onto the Linux system goes, there are a couple of ways to deal with that. You can either attach the disk directly to the Linux system and use dd to copy the raw blocks to a file, or boot the XP system from a Linux live CD and use a combination of dd and ssh to push the image over the network. I can provide further guidance on this if you decide to give it a go.

Flatland_Spider · Thu Apr 24, 2014 8:16 am

just brew it! wrote:
Flatland_Spider wrote:
Linux handles 2GB of RAM much better then Vista/7.

I would probably qualify that with "...provided you don't try to run KDE as your DE".

I mentioned I used Xfce or Gnome 2 in low mem systems. I haven't actually used KDE in a while as I'm a happy Xfce user.

Captain Ned wrote:
If there's a way to directly image my current XPSP3 install into something I can shove into a VM under K 14.04, I'm all ears, and I have the spare space.

Probably the best way is to use Clonezilla and clone the XP install into a new VM. Here's an old link to a post describing how one person did it. (http://blog.khax.net/2009/02/08/windows ... -with-kvm/)

Virtualbox can read the most common virtual HD formats, so you could use existing p2v tools. Then there is KVM which can read raw images created by dd. With either of those, I would be wary of mixing and matching VM software and VM disk images.

Virtualbox has the better console experience, and KVM is better if you're going to use remote desktop to access the VM

bthylafh · Thu Apr 24, 2014 8:33 am

I'm a fan of the new Xubuntu "start menu". They've improved the layout quite a bit, makes discoverability easier.

The weather app's got a bunch of new buttons and knobs to play with too.

Thu May 01, 2014 9:43 pm

Made the jump on my laptop and desktop today -- Kubuntu. Laptop was an upgrade from 13.10. Desktop was a fresh install. I wasn't going to try and go from 12.04 to 14.04 on my desktop. So far I have run in to the normal issues I have with Ubuntu based distros. They assume a stand alone system. Trying to install them into an environment managed with NIS, NFS, and automount requires some "tweaking".

So far I haven't found much terribly broken with it. It appears the chromium is busted but I haven't tried it on my desktop yet. My biggest annoyance, really, is that the desktop, graphical installer won't let you do a software RAID install.

--SS

MarkG509 · Thu May 01, 2014 10:58 pm

I did the install on a SuperMicro X9SCV-Q with an i5-2520M and 8GB DDR3, Crucial 256GB SSD and an Intel 2-port NIC, all powered by a Pico PSU 160 with a 60W AC-DC brick.
Added Mate 1.8, Firefox 29.0, VirtualBox, and as little else as possible. It's now hosting 2 pfSense VMs for my firewall.
When I get time I expect to add another VM to host some stuff like a Web server, Git server, Firefox Sync server, and perhaps an ownCloud setup.

At the Mate Desktop via the IGP's HDMI, it idles at 14 to 15 Watts with 2 pfSense VMs running. Under heavy load (e.g., running 4x cpuburn), it stays below 50Watts.
Firefox still complains on startup from a bug that seems to reappear and get refixed every few releases, but otherwise seems to work fine. I didn't install Samba this time so the issue with PAM doesn't affect me. The only other problem I have with this version of Ubuntu is that neither LM Sensors nor FanControl can talk to the board's NCT6776F controller chip, so I may have to hunt down the right module. With the motherboard's non-standard HSF layout, I'm stuck with more noise than I would like.

Rather than wait for Mint 17 (based on 14.04), I think I'll roll-my-own Ubuntu/Mate on my other machine whose Mint 14 is now obsolete. (Actually, just checked and they extended Mint 14 support till May.)

Fri May 02, 2014 8:48 am

SecretSquirrel wrote:
My biggest annoyance, really, is that the desktop, graphical installer won't let you do a software RAID install.

Yeah, I noticed they ditched the "alternate" flavor installers a couple of releases back. I guess not enough desktop users try to RAID their boot/root volumes for it to be a priority. Doing a software RAID server install plus the KDE meta-package shouldn't be too bad though; that's probably what I will do (I figure it'll be easier than doing a non-RAID install then upgrading the filesystem to RAID after the fact).

12.04 also had some issues with setting up software RAID on UEFI systems. I guess I will find out whether these have been resolved in 14.04...

Fri May 02, 2014 9:17 am

just brew it! wrote:
SecretSquirrel wrote:
My biggest annoyance, really, is that the desktop, graphical installer won't let you do a software RAID install.

Yeah, I noticed they ditched the "alternate" flavor installers a couple of releases back. I guess not enough desktop users try to RAID their boot/root volumes for it to be a priority. Doing a software RAID server install plus the KDE meta-package shouldn't be too bad though; that's probably what I will do (I figure it'll be easier than doing a non-RAID install then upgrading the filesystem to RAID after the fact).

12.04 also had some issues with setting up software RAID on UEFI systems. I guess I will find out whether these have been resolved in 14.04...

I opted to do the post install transition to RAID, for a couple reasons. 1) I have it well documented from my day job. It just takes time. 2) I wasn't sure whether I was going to stay with Kubuntu 14.04 so I wanted to do a minimum amount of work to test it out. That was the other reason I went with a fresh install on a fresh disk.

Now I just need to take the time to clean up my home directory. I have stuff sitting around from 2001.... :oops:

--SS

SuperSpy · Fri May 02, 2014 11:22 am

SecretSquirrel wrote:
Now I just need to take the time to clean up my home directory. I have stuff sitting around from 2001....

http://xkcd.com/1360/

Fri May 02, 2014 7:14 pm

SuperSpy wrote:
SecretSquirrel wrote:
Now I just need to take the time to clean up my home directory. I have stuff sitting around from 2001....

http://xkcd.com/1360/

Yes. I understand that comic well. I have a piece of code from 1993 still, though only in hard copy. Unfortunately, I think everything before that has been lost to the cosmic bit-bucket. There is some code I wrote in 91-92 that I wish I still had -- old DOS/VGA C code. Might even run in a VM that properly emulated a VGA card.

Back on topic, I found the Chrome works just fine even though Chromium is broken so that addresses that issue to some degree. Had to copmpile K9copy last night. It fell victim to the ffmpeg/libav rift around the 12.10 timeframe.

--SS

Sun May 04, 2014 8:58 am

Well, I have now updated six difference system to 14.04. They pretty much covered the releases since 12.04. One has an encrypted root drive. One is a VM. One is a MacBook Pro. Something went awry in the MacBook upgrade and I had to run it twice. Not sure what happened, but the upgrade process recovered without problem. So far, the only problem I have run into is the insistance that NetworkManager be installed.

I did manage to get the desktop installer to install on a software RAID. The trick was to boot the live CD into "try Ubuntu" mode and setup the mirror first, then click the install icon. Do a manual setup of the disks and it will let you pick the the md partitions. There is one catch though. The install will fail at the very end when it tries to install grub. Apparently the installer doesn't install the mdadm pacakge and grub requires mdadm to configure itself. Open a shell, chroot into the new install and install the mdadm package, then run the grub setup command (the exact command is in the live CD syslog). There is a patch to one of the grub scripts to get rid of the "disk filter writes not supported" message you get on reboot.

I have one more machine to upgrade, but that one is going to be a bit more dicey. It is the house file server and is running 10.04. Yes, it has been running four years without being touched. I'm thinking it will be a two step -- upgrade to 12.04 first, then go to 14.04.

--SS

Sun May 04, 2014 10:20 am

SecretSquirrel wrote:
So far, the only problem I have run into is the insistance that NetworkManager be installed.

Insistence as in removing it causes bad things to happen? Prior to 12.04 I always removed it for desktops because it was more trouble than it was worth; starting with 12.04 I've tended to leave it enabled.

SecretSquirrel wrote:
I did manage to get the desktop installer to install on a software RAID. The trick was to boot the live CD into "try Ubuntu" mode and setup the mirror first, then click the install icon. Do a manual setup of the disks and it will let you pick the the md partitions. There is one catch though. The install will fail at the very end when it tries to install grub. Apparently the installer doesn't install the mdadm pacakge and grub requires mdadm to configure itself. Open a shell, chroot into the new install and install the mdadm package, then run the grub setup command (the exact command is in the live CD syslog). There is a patch to one of the grub scripts to get rid of the "disk filter writes not supported" message you get on reboot.

Ahh, that's good to know.

Did any of these systems have a UEFI BIOS, by any chance? UEFI caused me a lot of grief with 12.04, it would be nice if they've cleaned that up.

SecretSquirrel wrote:
I have one more machine to upgrade, but that one is going to be a bit more dicey. It is the house file server and is running 10.04. Yes, it has been running four years without being touched. I'm thinking it will be a two step -- upgrade to 12.04 first, then go to 14.04.

In your shoes I'd probably just do a fresh install to another partition and copy the server configuration over.

My home server is still on 9.04, so I probably don't have a choice. The hardware is old enough anyway that I'm planning to build a complete new one and swap the whole server out.

UberGerbil · Sun May 04, 2014 1:56 pm

captaintrav wrote:
Windows is an insane mismash of 32 bit and 64 now, and many whole subsystems need to be duplicated either in whole or in part. It's no small feat Microsoft accomplished 64 bit without breaking backward compatibility with %90+ of everything besides device drivers and 16-bit apps, which is a hardware thing anyhow. I would love to see a version of Windows 9 or maybe 10 remove 32 bit subsystems by default, or at least make them optional. I believe that the basic Windows install for x64 takes up something like 2-4Gb more right out of the box, which should be trivial, but not on SSDs or even moreso on tablets with fixed storage limits.

Actually a lot of those 32bit subsystems are just thunk layers that marshal the inputs and then call into the equivalent 64bit routines, and then marshal the return. Which isn't as much overhead as you'd initially think (particularly in cases where the underlying 64bit routines are faster/better at exploiting the ISA and other kernel improvements). It isn't ideal, but if you're running 32bit executable then 32bit compatibility is the feature that you're demanding first (and it may still run faster than it would on 32bit Windows, and moreso if it's large address aware).

Glorious wrote:
captaintrav wrote:
Oh, and I'm pretty sure most distros ship with a PAE enabled kernel, so you're not really gaining much by going 64bit in some cases, unless you have individual apps that gobble up large amounts of ram in a single instance. I had a box with 32 bit Ubuntu, 8GB of ram happily running a few VMs, some of which were 64 bit just fine.
Yeah, the reason that was never really an option for windows was because of all those third party drivers that played games with pointers. PAE is actually enabled in all those 32-bit versions of windows (that's how DEP works); but actually addressing memory above 4GB is dangerous, so they don't.

That's why 32-bit versions of windows server allow >4GB: they just didn't allow those drivers (apparently sound cards were a big culprit)!

It wasn't just the drivers. Because 64bit addresses were optional in the PCI specification, there were a bunch of PCI and (less so) early PCIe cards where the hardware simply ignored the second address cycle and so only "saw" the lower 32bits of any physical memory address -- and these cards didn't necessarily announce themselves as being limited in this way (though they were supposed to). Of course MS could (and did) build up a list through configuration testing -- which constituted the approved/supported devices for the server versions of Windows -- but there was always the chance of unknown rogue hardware out there and, at a time when 4GB was still a huge and enormously expensive quantity of memory, not to mention consumer motherboards even supporting it -- they just decided to punt on dealing with the problem in consumer Windows. Which wasn't unreasonable; if we hadn't been stuck on XP for so long we probably wouldn't even have noticed.

Sun May 04, 2014 6:30 pm

just brew it! wrote:
SecretSquirrel wrote:
So far, the only problem I have run into is the insistance that NetworkManager be installed.

Insistence as in removing it causes bad things to happen? Prior to 12.04 I always removed it for desktops because it was more trouble than it was worth; starting with 12.04 I've tended to leave it enabled.

No, removing it doesn't cause bad things to happen so long as you know what to put in /etc/network/interfaces. I leave network manager on desktop/laptop machines, but for the three severs it causes problems as it won't bring up the network until you log in.

just brew it! wrote:
SecretSquirrel wrote:
I did manage to get the desktop installer to install on a software RAID. The trick was to boot the live CD into "try Ubuntu" mode and setup the mirror first, then click the install icon. Do a manual setup of the disks and it will let you pick the the md partitions. There is one catch though. The install will fail at the very end when it tries to install grub. Apparently the installer doesn't install the mdadm pacakge and grub requires mdadm to configure itself. Open a shell, chroot into the new install and install the mdadm package, then run the grub setup command (the exact command is in the live CD syslog). There is a patch to one of the grub scripts to get rid of the "disk filter writes not supported" message you get on reboot.

Ahh, that's good to know.

Did any of these systems have a UEFI BIOS, by any chance? UEFI caused me a lot of grief with 12.04, it would be nice if they've cleaned that up.

My laptop has a UEFI BIOS. Upgrade on it went without a hitch.

just brew it! wrote:
SecretSquirrel wrote:
I have one more machine to upgrade, but that one is going to be a bit more dicey. It is the house file server and is running 10.04. Yes, it has been running four years without being touched. I'm thinking it will be a two step -- upgrade to 12.04 first, then go to 14.04.

In your shoes I'd probably just do a fresh install to another partition and copy the server configuration over.

My home server is still on 9.04, so I probably don't have a choice. The hardware is old enough anyway that I'm planning to build a complete new one and swap the whole server out.

I'm going to keep a backup of /etc for just that reason. I figure if I have to re-install, no big deal, but I'm curious to see if I can upgrade it. Since failure just means a clean install, I though it would be an interesting experiment.

--SS

Sun May 04, 2014 6:34 pm

UberGerbil wrote:
It wasn't just the drivers. Because 64bit addresses were optional in the PCI specification, there were a bunch of PCI and (less so) early PCIe cards where the hardware simply ignored the second address cycle and so only "saw" the lower 32bits of any physical memory address -- and these cards didn't necessarily announce themselves as being limited in this way (though they were supposed to). Of course MS could (and did) build up a list through configuration testing -- which constituted the approved/supported devices for the server versions of Windows -- but there was always the chance of unknown rogue hardware out there and, at a time when 4GB was still a huge and enormously expensive quantity of memory, not to mention consumer motherboards even supporting it -- they just decided to punt on dealing with the problem in consumer Windows. Which wasn't unreasonable; if we hadn't been stuck on XP for so long we probably wouldn't even have noticed.

It goes further than that even. Almost all consumer motherboards currently in use cannot support PCIe MMIOH addressing above 4GB. If I remember correctly, there are maybe a couple of boards from Asus that do. Even server motherboards are just now starting to support it. Without 64 bit PCIe MMIOH addressing support by the chipset/BIOS, card support doesn't matter. We have to deal with this for a card we develop at work and it is also why you have to have specific motherboards for an Intel Phi card.

--SS

Sun May 04, 2014 9:29 pm

SecretSquirrel wrote:
No, removing it doesn't cause bad things to happen so long as you know what to put in /etc/network/interfaces. I leave network manager on desktop/laptop machines, but for the three severs it causes problems as it won't bring up the network until you log in.

OK, so no real change here. My SOP these days is the same as yours -- use it on laptops/desktops but not servers.

SecretSquirrel wrote:
My laptop has a UEFI BIOS. Upgrade on it went without a hitch.

Cool. I figured it was just a matter of time for them to get the UEFI issues sorted. UEFI + software RAID was a total clusterfun on 12.04... I imagine that combination may still be at least moderately challenging. Guess I'll find out.

SecretSquirrel wrote:
I'm going to keep a backup of /etc for just that reason. I figure if I have to re-install, no big deal, but I'm curious to see if I can upgrade it. Since failure just means a clean install, I though it would be an interesting experiment.

Make sure you keep a backup of /var too; some services (e.g. Apache, MySQL...) store content there...

Glorious · Mon May 05, 2014 4:59 am

JBI wrote:
Make sure you keep a backup of /var too; some services (e.g. Apache, MySQL...) store content there...

Yeah, a lot of people miss that one.

I remember back when people were scared of actually using their SSD too much and would put things like /var/ into a ramdisk, and then wonder why their cron jobs didn't survive reboots... :wink:

Flatland_Spider · Mon May 05, 2014 10:01 am

SecretSquirrel wrote:
I leave network manager on desktop/laptop machines, but for the three severs it causes problems as it won't bring up the network until you log in.

Something is misconfigured since that shouldn't happen.

captaintrav · Mon May 05, 2014 10:09 am

Glorious wrote:
JBI wrote:
Make sure you keep a backup of /var too; some services (e.g. Apache, MySQL...) store content there...

Yeah, a lot of people miss that one.

I remember back when people were scared of actually using their SSD too much and would put things like /var/ into a ramdisk, and then wonder why their cron jobs didn't survive reboots...

I would assume the biggest worry would be the swap partition... but it seems Linux is far less swap happy than Windows, I would think that that would help SSD longevity quite a bit.

confusedpenguin · Sun Jun 01, 2014 9:14 pm

I tried Ubuntu 14.04. Not much different from the former. I do remember hating on Ubuntu for forcing pulseaudio on us. Now I LOVE pulseaudio. Very easy to configure via daemon.conf. Superb sound quality compared to Windows if you configure it right. My only complaint is Linux in general still doesn't have video acceleration on par with windows. Even on my GeForce GTX 460, youtube videos at 1080p still stutter horribly. Yes, I've tried both the open source drivers as well as the proprietary ones. Until they get that fixed, I still need to resort to Windows for my youtube enjoyment.

Deanjo · Sun Jun 01, 2014 10:28 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Flatland_Spider wrote:
Linux handles 2GB of RAM much better then Vista/7.

I would probably qualify that with "...provided you don't try to run KDE as your DE".

I run opensuse x64 and KDE quite nicely on 2 GB systems. KDE itself is only using about 300 MB, firefox itself almost consumes as much when opened.

cheesyking · Mon Jun 02, 2014 5:52 am

confusedpenguin wrote:
Even on my GeForce GTX 460, youtube videos at 1080p still stutter horribly. Yes, I've tried both the open source drivers as well as the proprietary ones. Until they get that fixed, I still need to resort to Windows for my youtube enjoyment.

Don't have problems with youtube on any of my linux systems. Have you tried switching to html5 from flashplayer? Flash support on linux really is poo.

Pholostan · Mon Jun 02, 2014 8:03 am

Mint 17 was released a couple of days ago, I upgraded my machine today without a hitch. Not much new compared to 16, but if you're coming from the last LTS that is 13, there is quite a bit of nifty things. They seem to have finally got the update manager to show changelogs properly, at least it looks like it. I'm more a command line guy, force of habit, but it is nice that the graphical tools seems to have gotten some basic functionality like a proper history and such. Cinnamon is still my preferred window manager, this machine doubles as a server and secondary desktop.

I usually run XBMC in linux to get around the stupid issues with flash etc. The youtube plugin in XBMC usually performs really well compared to the browser based one.

TR Forums

Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Re: Ubuntu 14.04

Who is online