StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Released today.

I plan on trying it out on my laptop this weekend. If all goes well, I'll be dual-booting my Windows box with 8.04, and turning my 7.04 box into a file/whatever server.

Here we go again. I wonder what'll break this time?

Not very much so far... *crosses fingers*

There's a kernel regression (apparently fixed with updates being pushed out) and PulseAudio is still problematic.

rt2500 drivers! Oh, maybe I should look into this after all

I can't find it in the release notes, has anything been done about the broken Radeon drivers? 7.10 is a pain when you've got an old Mobility card.

And I hear it's got a new default torrent app?

I'm really happy with Gutsy. My only serious complaint is Firefox dying 1/7 times on flash video sites. I probably won't upgrade for a few months.

Bounty wrote:And I hear it's got a new default torrent app?

Yeah, my favourite one. Transmission is great.

The only gripe I'll probably have is that Automatix is no more, so I have to get all the good stuff the hard way. Well, the not-so-easy way, at any rate. Envy has been included in the 8.04 universe repositories, which should make installing the nVidia driver relatively painless. I dunno if compiz fusion is included in the same repositories, but here's hoping.

Compiz Fusion became default in Gutsy.

PulseAudio is still problematic.

How bad? Still just cutting all sound till the soundserver is restarted? I love PulseAudio, it's an awesome soundserver, just wish it wasn't so buggy.

Thank you inter-university network. I was getting 10 megs a second. For both the 32 and 64 bit versions. At the same time!

I may try it out tomorrow, but I am happy with Gutsy and the way my system is set up. I could try the update route, but that caused me more trouble than it was worth the last time.

Did the upgrade overnight. So far, looks good. However,

1. They included Firefox 3, and now half of my extensions don't work.
2. For some reason, they removed kOctave

Of course, none of this has to do with the system itself. I'll see whether the 3d effects work later (they screwed up my desktop on Gutsy).

I begrudgingly installed 8.04 last night. I was sort of forced into it by the fact that I needed certain network boot facilities that are only availible in it, and, puke, Debian. Since I certainly did not want to screw around with Debian, which has been, and will continue to be, one of my least favorite distributions, I reluctantly installed 8.04 of Ubuntu, and I was immediately greeted by typical amounts of crap.

The artwork was an improvement, and the Ubiquity installer no longer failed in the first few minutes when attempting to install to the highly complicated drive layout on this particular box. No, it waited until the end of the install to fail, when it mysteriously crashed just prior to installing a bootloader, without giving so much as an error message.

This forced me to waste a whole hour screwing around with GRUB to latch onto the Ubuntu kernel and boot it. Ubuntu, unlike most other distros I've used, requires certain exact kernel parameters, and there are two files masquerading in the rootfs that appear to be the kernel and initrd, but in fact aren't (the real kernel and initrd are in boot, as is normal). Finally, I got the system to boot. An obonxious Ubuntu fanboi (Ubuntu fanbois are, IMO, sometimes worse than their dreaded Mac counterparts, and worse, some of them are both Mac and Ubuntu fanbois, and Firefox ones also, oh the horrors) in #ubuntu who refused to help grated my nerves to the point where I could not resist saying in channel "I'd file a bug report against ubiquity, except that would be too nice."

The horrors did not end there. I spent the next three hours dealing with stupid and unneccessary breakage, as a result of creating a root password mysteriously crippling Ubuntu's privilege elevation system, and as the result of TFTP being installed in an absolutely retarded manner: scripts were created to launch it, both from /etc/init.d and from inetd. Thus, naturally, my attempts to boot a system using PXE mysteriously failed due to TFTP being confused about what config file it was supposed to read. Commenting out the errant section in the inetd conf file corrected that, but a reboot was still required, as inetd is located outside of /etc/init.d for added inconvenience. Finally, by 6 AM, the network booting facility was working somewhat, so I called it a night. What should've been a simple two hour procedure turned into a miserable 8 hour nightmare of epic proportions, thanks to absolute crappiness in the Ubuntu distribution.

Alas.

Oh, and btw, Durandal, if you read this, I hope you're happy, I've just flamed a Linux distro with more passion than I've ever flamed OS X with. As much as OS X slowly grates on my nerves with its sluggish I/O response, Ubuntu infuriates me by being outright *broken* (and its been nasty, in this manner, since at least the Feisty release, IMO...the last Ubuntu release I did not passionately hate was Edgy Eft).

What's wrong w/ Debian? At least it and derivatives has a decent CLI package manager (Aptitude) installed by default, and isn't bloated like Fedora.

Also, the GUI install has always sucked. I always use the alternate installer (because I need LVM support). The alternate installer was always meant for a "highly complicated drive layout"

For future reference, the normal grub-fixing procedure for me is boot off a recovery cd, chroot into the installation, mount /boot, and run grub-install. It shouldn't take a whole hour (unless you don't have a CD available.

Also, I have always had a root password, and I haven't had any breakage.

Why would you have to reboot the entire machine just to restart a few daemons? Shouldn't /etc/init.d/daemonname restart do it?

And what's so special about Debian derivatives for network booting anyway? Couldn't it be done on any distro as long as you have the right daemons?

You do sound rather whiny in the above post. I do wonder about that conversation in #ubuntu


Granted, I might just not experience any problems since I've exclusively used Debian-derived distros for the past 5 years, and use the CLI for nearly all system tasks anyway.

General Soontir Fel wrote:Did the upgrade overnight. So far, looks good. However,

1. They included Firefox 3, and now half of my extensions don't work.
2. For some reason, they removed kOctave

Of course, none of this has to do with the system itself. I'll see whether the 3d effects work later (they screwed up my desktop on Gutsy).

Firefox-2 is available on Hardy. You can just unzip most extensions and edit the versions in install.rdf to force them to work anyway- frankly, losing a few extensions is worth having the better URL completion and more importantly, speed increase and memory use reduction.

Oh, and rthurmont, by stating there are Firefox "fanbois" (your use of deliberate misspellings such as pwn is also getting annoying), you're implying Firefox sucks- they have improved significantly w/ FF3 w/ regards to performance/bloat.

Haven't had severe problems w/ Pulseaudio other than a broken Audacity. A few programs need padsp emulation to work right (eg skype, wine, java (although that was always broken, and padsp makes it possible to have java sound w/ other apps also using sound)).

On the positive side though, since everything is routed through pulseaudio, it's now easy to use snd-aloop to record what comes out of the speakers if one has a shitty sound card.

What's wrong w/ Debian? At least it and derivatives has a decent CLI package manager (Aptitude) installed by default, and isn't bloated like Fedora.

I find aptitude to be a bloated and annoying nightmare of a CLI app. Much as I disagree with Rob Pike's well documented disdain for cursor-addressing applications, Aptitude offers a fairly compelling insight into his perspective (and, along with NAIM, is one of several apps that could be used as compelling case studies against the use of curses and ANSI coloring).

I'd much rather use Fedora than Debian, frankly, although both distros irritate me in that the software in their default repos is determined by ideology rather than a respect for end user convenience. At least Fedora has better artwork (and a nice GUI installer).

For future reference, the normal grub-fixing procedure for me is boot off a recovery cd, chroot into the installation, mount /boot, and run grub-install. It shouldn't take a whole hour (unless you don't have a CD available.

I'll follow that procedure next time. With OpenSUSE, I just enter "recovery mode" via YaST, or use YaST to boot into the distro directly (it probably follows the same procedure you're describing).

Why would you have to reboot the entire machine just to restart a few daemons? Shouldn't /etc/init.d/daemonname restart do it?

It should, yes, but inetd was not included in /etc/init.d for some bizarre reason. Restarting netd via a kill -1 (and alternately killing it via kill -9) and then restarting TFTPd via the init.d script did not work for whatever reason. It irritated me to no end that I had to reboot; it doesn't seem very UNIXy to me that you should have to go through that (for anything other than some complex kernel patches, where it can be preferrable to reboot rather than mess around with modprobe commands for a while...I went that route once with a FreeBSD system).

And what's so special about Debian derivatives for network booting anyway? Couldn't it be done on any distro as long as you have the right daemons?

Only Debian and Ubuntu have the latest release of LTSP, which I needed. For regular fat client network booting, I would use something else (and I'm planning on rolling my own rPath-based distro to make that somewhat easier).

Oh, and rthurmont, by stating there are Firefox "fanbois" (your use of deliberate misspellings such as pwn is also getting annoying), you're implying Firefox sucks- they have improved significantly w/ FF3 w/ regards to performance/bloat.

I think Firefox 3 is probably the best browser out there.