In my inestimably valuable opinion, we need programmers (and related disciplines like QA, advanced math, and design) more than almost anything else. We’re in the very infancy of the computer age, and already we are intensively computerized, from toasters and refrigerators to inventory tags to vehicles to big ole factories.

Yesterday I decided to give up wrestling with a recalcitrant Solaris 9 box (specifically, an Enterprise 250), and install Linux on it instead. My first stop was Debian, but unfortunately while the installer started up fine for both stable and testing, in neither case did I get output which included a cursor, so wasn’t able to navigate the screens (the keyboard seemed to work, but I couldn’t reliably tell what it was doing). Thus, onto Ubuntu 6.06. Which worked beautifully, cursor and all, and is now running happily.

Although I did discover New Things about the Sun boot process; viz that it will automatically pick up whatever’s on the first partition and has no MBR. In my case, this was still Solaris 9. I messed around with boot magic & nvalias a bit but couldn’t locate the Linux partition correctly (or couldn’t boot it, one or the other), so in the end decided it was quicker to reinstall over the old Solaris 9 partition as well as the previous free space - keeping it would have been something of a waste of disk space, really, since it’s not working anyway.

A further note, however, about the Ubuntu installer: it will only boot from the CD (on this architecture) if you are booting the machine from cold - i.e. turn it all the way off & all the way back on again, hit Stop+A as soon as the smonitor comes up, & type ‘boot cdrom’ at the ok> prompt. If you stop the boot (of whatever) halfway through, get back to the ok> prompt, & type ‘boot cdrom’ from there, it dies with “Illegal instruction”. (details here & other suggestions for fixing this - looks like a fix is on its way).

Sadly no joy with Ubuntu on my SunBlade 100. I’ve tried Debian stable (died with ‘cramfs wrong magic’ error - bug report although apparently fiddling with the memory might work), testing (died with ‘Illegal Instruction’ - lots of bug reports, although there is active work going on on this if you check the debian-sparc mailing list); and now Ubuntu 6.06, but still the “Illegal Instruction” error (& booting from cold doesn’t make a difference). I haven’t yet tried the firmware upgrade suggestion, or tried *much* with netboot, mind; some day when I have some spare time!

Edited to add: After sibre commented below that they’d got Ubuntu booting on their Blade 100, I had another go, in case I hadn’t booted cold enough. First go no joy: got further than previously, but hung at “rtc_init: no PC rtc found”. Second and third tries, got significantly further than that, but install hung during/just after the “Detecting hardware” stage. I may give auroralinux, linked below, a go at some point.

Further edit: Many thanks to Shane (see comment below)! Cold boot + typing install ide=nodma at the SILO prompt got Ubuntu 6.06 successfully installed on the Blade 100. For the record: Debian etch installer beta-3 version gets further than before (again, requires cold boot) but for me hung just after “Detecting network hardware”.

On 1 June Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) was released. New versions of Kubuntu (Ubuntu with a KDE desktop) and Edubuntu (a version for young people) were also unveiled. Perhaps the most interesting release was the newest member of the Ubuntu family, Xubuntu, a derivative distro based on the forthcoming XFCE 4.4 desktop. In this review I am going to focus heavily on the desktop since that is really the only thing that sets Xubuntu apart from Ubuntu.

In the article where I renewed my complaints about Gnome I touted XFCE 4.4 as an up and coming challenger to both KDE and Gnome on the desktop. The 4.4 version includes a new file manager, Thunar, added panel functionality to rival what KDE and Gnome users are accustomed to, new applets, and greater configurability. The release of Xubuntu is actually built on a beta of the new XFCE, version 4.3.90.1. While I was originally a bit concerned about this it turns out that Xubuntu has relatively few bugs and a very polished look and feel.

One of the claims made on the Xubuntu web page is:

It’s lighter, and more efficient than Ubuntu with GNOME or KDE, since it uses the Xfce Desktop environment, which makes it ideal for old or low-end machines, as well as thin-client networks.

I decided to put this to the test, installing Xubunu onto a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204, a laptop with a 1 GHz Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM. This was one of the systems I used to evaluate and review Fedora Core 5. At the time I found FC5 to be substantially faster on this somewhat dated laptop that Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger). Over a roughly two month period I used this laptop running Fedora with an XFCE 4.2.3.2 desktop and my usual favorite applications so my comparison of Xubuntu 6.06 to Fedora 5 is apples-to-apples.

On upgrading my webserver recently (from RHEL3 to Debian stable, fwiw), I discovered an issue with renamed/old versions of index.html in the new version of Apache (2.0.54).

A user had two files in his public_html directory - home.html, which was what he wanted as his homepage (i.e. to be served up for http://server.net/~user/); and index.html.old, an old version of that page. Under our previous setup, this had worked fine. Under the new one, index.html.old took priority over home.html, and was therefore served; despite the fact that home.html was listed under DirectoryIndex in the config (and index.html.old wasn’t, although of course index.html was). Changing the name of the old page to index_old.html worked to fix it.

It transpires that this is related to the Apache MultiViews functionality. MultiViews is an option which means that Apache will translate a request for ‘index‘ to ‘index.*‘, with the value of * depending on what it can find in the relevant directory. So, if some of your site has index.php and some has index.html, you don’t need to set both of these under DirectoryIndex in the config, because all requests for ‘index’ will automatically be translated. (Myself, I’m not sure that this is worth it, particularly, but it does appear to be on by default.) So, in the absence of an actual index.html file, index.html.old fitted the bill for http://server.net/~user/ better than home.html, despite the fact that the latter was explicitly listed in DirectoryIndex.

(It’s possible that listing home.html earlier in the DirectoryIndex list would also have fixed this problem; order does matter in at least some Apache directives.)

So: Feature Not Bug.

I also ran into another minor problem today, after an issue elsewhere broke my LDAP automount maps and forced me to manually mount the NFS /home directory on the webserver. Specifically, the UserDir public_html directive in mod_userdir config stopped working (requests for http://server.com/~user/ returned 404). The Apache docs noted that you can have more than one value for this directive; using UserDir public_html /home/*/public_html did the trick (always remember to reload the config afterwards!).

On the 12th of this month Google released version 4 of the Google Earth software with support for Linux. It can now be downloaded from here:

http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

The minimum requirements to get it running are pretty reasonable:

* Kernel: 2.4 or later
* glibc: 2.3.2 w/ NPTL or later
* XFree86-4.0 or x.org R6.7 or later
* CPU: Pentium 3, 500Mhz
* System Memory (RAM): 128MB
* Hard Disk: 400MB free space
* Network Speed: 128 Kbits/sec
* Screen: 1024×768, 16 bit color

But you might want to get closer to the recommended specs if you want to run it well:

* Kernel 2.6 or later
* glibc 2.3.5 w/ NPTL or later
* x.org R6.7 or later
* System Memory (RAM): 512MB
* Hard Disk: 2GB free space
* Network Speed: 768 Kbits/sec
* Graphics Card: 3D-capable with 32MB of VRAM
* Screen: 1280×1024, 32 bit color

And they’ve tested it with Ubuntu 5.10, Suse 10.1, Fedora Core 5, Linspire 5.1, Gentoo 2006.0, Debian 3.1 and Red Hat 9.

Install was a breeze, just download the GoogleEarthLinux.bin, chmod +x it to make it executable and run it. By default it installs to ~/google-earth/ but you have the option to change this during the install.

On my Debian Etch system (2 ghz Pentium 4, 2 gigs RDRAM, 64meg GeForce3 (w/ 3d acceleration), 384/1.5 DSL) it runs flawlessly. Kudos to Google for finally making a Google Earth that I can use.

Since I reviewed Fedora Core 5 back in April I’ve become increasingly frustrated with one aspect of what is otherwise a very well done distribution: package management and keeping my system secure and up to date. I’ve run into repeated instances of yum deciding I needed a lot of new packages and promptly failing over just one. pup, which is really just a pretty but somewhat crippled front end to yum, also fails in the same way. What I’ve discovered is that pup and yum aren’t broken at all. The code is doing precisely what it was designed to do.

Let’s look at today’s failure as an example. I had been on vacation and my system was probably 10 days behind on updates. yum decided I needed to upgrade some 166 packages and add 2 more for dependencies. Fine, go do it. No chance. Here is the error message:

Error: Missing Dependency: libecal-1.2.so.3 is needed by package gnome-panel

That seems clear enough but it really isn’t. gnome-panel wasn’t being upgraded. Rather the package that contained libecal-1.2.so.3 was and doing the upgrade would break gnome-panel. Typing in:

yum whatprovides libecal-1.2.so.3

reveals that it is part of the evolution-data-server package. A new version of that package was rolled out without checking to see if any other package had a dependency on the old version. That is just plain sloppy package and repository management on the part of the Fedora Project people at Red Hat. If this happened just once it would be forgivable but this sort of failure has happened repeatedly over the past two months. To their credit the Fedora Project has, in each case, rolled out a new package for whatever they’ve broken in a day or two. Still, it shouldn’t happen in the first place.

I upgraded two of my home systems from Breezy to Dapper Kubuntu. One is AMD-64, one is i386. I write about this stuff for a living, and would rather tinker than work anyday, so it here we are. The upgrade went OK, but not nearly as well as a plain-vanilla Debian installation. And the K/Ubuntu devs seem determined to make printing painful.

TurboPrint users be warned- you need to upgrade.

I think this video sums up the launch of Google Spreadsheet:

Which is Microsoft and which is Google?