Tolero’s tech notes

Due to lack of the native Ubuntu edgy and dapper packages of xfce 4.4.0, I manually rebuilded them from Ubuntu feisty reposiory. I also rebuilded (only for edgy) from feisty xubuntu-desktop package and relatives, cos it handles additional dependencys, not mentioned in current xubuntu in edgy. Thus these packages works good for me, I can not give any guaranties, and I’am not responsible for any possible harm. If you still interested in xfce upgrade, you can use my repository. Just add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list for edgy:

deb http://ubuntu.tolero.org/ edgy xfce-4-4-0
deb-src http://ubuntu.tolero.org/ edgy xfce-4-4-0

Or that lines if you’re running dapper (simply mepis 6.0):

deb http://ubuntu.tolero.org/ dapper xfce-4-4-0
deb-src http://ubuntu.tolero.org/ dapper xfce-4-4-0

And then at your favorite package manager do update and upgrade if you are already using xfce4, or update and install xubuntu-desktop if you’re setting it at first. I truely hope that everything will pass well, as in my case, but if shit happens, I’am always open for help.

I’am also recommend to install a thunar-volman package, plugin which automaticaly mounts a removable media devices, which makes a use of xubuntu desktop powered by xfce4 more comfortable.

PS: If you found this info useful don’t mind to place link to this post from your resource (blog, forum, e t. c.) with title like “xfce 4.4.0 for ubuntu edgy and dapper packages”. Let’s help others to find a solution.

Update 02-feb-2007: repository moved from the Russian servet at http://tech.tolero.org/ubuntu/ to the US server at http://ubuntu.tolero.org/. Please update your /etc/apt/sources.list if you are already subscribed.

I have just read a BBC “users OS review”. BBC have selected two users to explain theirs opinion about Windows Vista, and by one user for Linux and OS X.

After reading that article, my final thought is that vista bloated too much. That was mentioned by both writers. No one of Linux distros requires a minimum of 512 megabytes of memory just to start an empty OS. The exact vista fan’s phrase was:

Whilst 512Mb is quoted as the minimum I would say that 1Gb is needed for a wait-free session.

How is it, to have 1Gb just “for a wait-free session”? Microsoft also did, in my opinion, a funny solution for those who have a not enough (I suppose less than 1Gb) memory. As the other writer sayed:

When you’re having performance issues due to insufficient memory, you can use a USB flash drive as an additional cache of memory to boost performance.

No one of users mentioned notning interesting besides the new Windows 3D Aero interface. To be clear, both articles are telling to buy more memory and new video card, just for a new Microsoft fetish interface. The completely different articles about the Linux and the Apple OS. The basic ideas from the article about Linux, as always, is about freedom:

1. … it also gives more experienced users radical powers over their computer which are not available in other operating systems.
2. Also there is a huge variety of high quality, free software available for Linux…
3. Also it encourages programmers to be better people, working in the open…
   

I’am absolutely agree with this opinion. The same as the author of the first Vista article, I did all steeps following the Misrosift. I was faithful to it, and went through all popular OS versions: 3.11, 95, 95 osr2, 98, 2000, XP. But the real comfort came to me in 2004 only with Linux.

What is for the Mac OS X? It is a truely polished OS. It is much more stable than any Windows, and it is straight forward developed than GNU/Linux distributins with theirs tons of variants how to do the same task. But I think, it is not fearful Microsoft competitor, because it supports mostly own expensive Apple computers, and no possibility to set it up on any other cheap variant.

Вчера я окончательно решил завести блог. Последняя капля терпения упала в тот момент, когда я уменяшал время загрузки моего Ubuntu Edgy, отключая бесполезные скрипты из /etc/init.d/. Изучая поведение, я проверял скрипты один за одним. Так я обнаружил скрипт /etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam который содержит некоторое количество грубого текста (некоторые символы заменены на *):

# This only does something if I’ve f**ked up before
# Not entirely impossible

Это любопытно, для завершённого дистрибутива. Чуть позже я сделал grep по всей системе на предмет вхождения слова f**k. И опа! Результат – 966 вхождения. Подробная проверка показала, что примерно две трети из них находятся в словарях (/etc/dictionaries-common/words, /usr/lib/firefox/dictionaries/, /usr/lib/openoffice/share/dict/), но оставшаяся треть полностью на совести скриптов дистрибутива (менее всего), заголовочных файлов и заголовков ядва (более всго). Я даже не хочу знать кокой получится результат если провести grep по исходникам всех программ дистрибутива и исходникам ядра. Но я думаю что для кого-то это может оказаться интересным “домашним заданием” поискать в исходниках такие слова как: shit, damn, hack, how it works, and so on.

Why do I personally hate proprietary drivers? I have a well featured laptop Asus W3V which is equiped with ATI mobility radeon X600 video card, and Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG network card. Both require a closed source proprietary drivers to work (fglrx, ipw2200). Both brings a headache in use. The whole pain for both is bugs.

My Asus supports ACPI as well, but I’am unable to use it freely with the proprietary drivers. The problem is with suspend function. It doesn’t work perfectly: neither ram nor hdd. The suspend to ram and suspend to disk goes well only in one way – to sleep. The way back is not well. I’am using ubuntu edgy (previously used dapper) which comes with pre-builded, easy installable, proprietary drivers packages. To be fair, I also tryed patched suspend 2 kernel, which gaved the same picture.

Resume from suspend to ram leaves the screen black, and the computer doesn’t respond to any actions (even Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace). If the machine was suspended in a text mode, it will resume, but switch to X server will halt it. This problem came with the fglrx drivers since spring of 2006. Everything works well on the debian sarge with the old drivers. But the old drivers are not possible to setup onto the new ubuntu kernel, it is unable to compile the kernel module.

The resume from hard disk sleep causes ipw drivers failure, and the wireless network doesn’t work until reboot.

Update 29-jan-2007: there is a solution to restore a suspend to ram! It is working with suspend 2 patches and hibernate-ram script. Just tweak a /etc/hibernate/ram.conf file, and comment all lines containing a vbetool occurence. Also uncomment, or add RadeonTool yes to the end of the script. Mine script now look like this:

TryMethod ususpend-ram.conf
TryMethod sysfs-ram.conf
#EnableVbetool yes
#VbetoolPost yes
RadeonTool yes

Yesterday I finally decided to start blogging. The final grain of sense were dropped while my optimization of the Ubuntu Edgy boot up speed by switching off some unnecessary scripts from /etc/init.d/. I were inspecting each script one by one for theirs behavior. And I discovered that the script /etc/init.d/clamav-freshclam contains a brutal text (some symbols replaced with *):

# This only does something if I’ve f**ked up before
# Not entirely impossible

Really interesting for production distro. Later a did a global grep on a whole system for inclusion of the word f**k. And wow! The reasult is 966 inclusions. Detailed inspection showed that around two/third of them are in dictionarys (/etc/dictionaries-common/words, /usr/lib/firefox/dictionaries/, /usr/lib/openoffice/share/dict/), but the rest one/third is on conscience of the distro scripts (less polluted), development headers and the kernel headers (most polluted). I don’t want to know what results can be if to grep all disrto software sources and kernel sources. But I think it can be interesting “homework” for someone to grep full sources for keywords like: shit, damn, hack, how it works, and so on.