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[Thad]

Welp, accidentally bumped the power button on my surge protector and the FS keeps going RO shortly after I log in.  Can't do an fsck on a mounted filesystem, and even booting to failsafe mounts the FS.  It has an option to reboot to fsck, which doesn't seem to do anything; neither does creating a /forcefsck file.  Eventually had to boot to a damn CD; fsck's running now and I hope it works.  (EDIT: Oh, haha, I forgot the --fix-fixable flag!  Well, guess I'll run ANOTHER 15-minute disk check...)  (EDIT 2: Oh good, it coredumped.)

In fairness, this may not be an Ubuntu problem so much as a Hans-Reiser-Murdered-His-Wife-and-Now-Nobody-Uses-His-Filesystem-Anymore problem.

[sei]

Saw this coming a mile away.

MATE

MATE is at a really early stage of its development and isn't stable yet. It was included in this release to gather more feedback and help it get the maturity it deserves. In this release it comes with stability issues with all Murine based themes, the file manager and on certain systems the session itself. You cannot run MATE from the live session. Once the system is installed you can try to run it by selecting "MATE" as your session at the login screen.

[Thad]

Soo...a GNOME 2 fork?

Trinity tried that with KDE3.  I guess it's still under active development, but I don't actually know anybody who gives a fuck.  Mainly because KDE4 eventually got its shit together.

Of course, if we're to be precise, the problem isn't GNOME 3, it's GNOME Shell.  If MATE's endgame is actually a GNOME 2-style shell that runs on top of GNOME 3, that's going to be a fuck of a lot of work but will have a much broader appeal and staying power than just forking an obsolescent DE.

I guess that's what MGSE is?

[sei]

Guess the iron's pretty hot for it.

As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market.

[Angryoptimist]

It seems like a lot of hardware still eats shit on Gnome 3  RE: Graphics drivers.  Pretty much everything fglrx works on it now, right?  But I seem to recall a friend of mine having trouble with an Intel chipset and my mother's Linux desktop with an old low-end 9xxx series card and the Free drivers isn't stable under it (I'm not sure she'd like it, though--too unfamiliar).  That might just be because there's something wrong with her card--quite possible, it's always acted a bit weird--but it runs Minecraft just fine.

I was going to suggest that problems with Gnome 3 were making people not want to use it, but everything I've got to say about it are anecdotal and, besides, Ubuntu used Unity.  Unity which, as far as I know, never really had those issues (or didn't have them as long?).

Nothing to do with me, anyhow; I compile my own dwm with 0 pixel borders, for fuck's sake.

Finally tried Unity, though, when I threw Ubuntu on an old, semi-busted laptop to try this.  Felt... basic, but essentially usable.

In fairness, this may not be an Ubuntu problem so much as a Hans-Reiser-Murdered-His-Wife-and-Now-Nobody-Uses-His-Filesystem-Anymore problem.

Reiser4?  ...mounted root?  (IIRC, it had some serious performance issues with some workloads outside of its focus.)  What did you need it for?  Hoping nothing got eaten.  I've heard nice things about BtrFS, but there *are* bugs... and no proper fsck (its fsck can't fix errors yet).  What'll you be moving to?

[Thad]

No, Reiser3.  Eventually got everything straightened out.  (fsck from CD kept segfaulting so I'm not sure it actually did anything, but on my next boot the forcefsck finally worked.)

Considering btrfs the next time I do a clean install, but no time or inclination right now.

[Thad]

Anyway.  Still haven't upgraded to Oneiric on the desktop.  The bug page blames it on cups and says it's been fixed in a proposed package, but I've decided not to fuck around with enabling proposed packages.  I'll upgrade when it's a smooth process and not before.

Finally decided it's been long enough that it's not going to get fixed upstream.  Fucked around a good bit with the proposed packages; no change.  Ultimately determined that it wasn't cups at all, it was (as another poster in the bug thread suggested) nspluginwrapper.  Which, fortunately, unlike CUPS is not a dependency for like every damn package.

Upgrade still not smooth.  Hangs on splash screen at boot; KDM never loads and I don't get a login shell (though I can ssh in).  Current stab in the dark is that it's an nvidia driver problem, as I saw a reference to "nouveau" when I booted to failsafe.

EDIT: Eeyup, reinstalling nvidia-current got me into X.  More tribulations to come, I'm sure...

[Thad]

Okay, so so far:

Thing blocking upgrade: turned out to be nspluginwrapper.
Removed; upgrade worked.
Problem: Some more arcane Flash programs don't work now.  But videos work fine so far, and that is of course the main reason to use Flash.

Problem at boot: nvidia drivers not updated with kernel.
Removed, readded; worked.
Problem: Compiz doesn't seem to work.  Not like I use the damn thing anyway.  (glxinfo doesn't show anything wrong.)

Additional problem: Had that fucking thing where FS went to RO a few minutes after boot again.
Didn't recur on reboot; looks fine now.

New problem: no audio.
Googled; someone said to wipe out my ~/.pulse directory.  Audio works now.
And the volume controls on my keyboard work again too!

On the whole, compared to what I've been dealing with in Natty, this actually WAS a smooth upgrade.  But a pretty fucking far cry from something a typical end user would be capable of troubleshooting.


Additional issue: Banshee window is completely blank and unresponsive.  Plays music okay, but no controls.
Probably not a big deal; I'm using Banshee mainly because it's the thing that opened when I clicked on an audio track.  Can switch back to Amarok and not feel too bad about it.

[Angryoptimist]

Sounds like some nasty business.  Do you usually experience that in Ubuntu release upgrades?  Better than in Natty, yes, but I'm asking more about an impression of Ubuntu upgrades in general.

Considering btrfs the next time I do a clean install, but no time or inclination right now.

I'd stay away from it for data that isn't replicated elsewhere until they've got a fsck for it that actually fixes errors it finds (I believe they're still working on it).

Can switch back to Amarok and not feel too bad about it.

There was a period in which I used KDE (pre-4) and during this period I used Amarok, where previously I had used XMMS (out of inertia more than anything, having preferred to use Winamp when I'd been on windows).  I liked it quite a bit--it felt very polished--but when I went back to Gnome, I started using Rhythmbox (despite its iTunes-clone aspirations and not really being better than Amarok) and have continued to use it to this day.  I should probably take another look at Amarok--been a long time since I've looked at it.

[Thad]

Sounds like some nasty business.  Do you usually experience that in Ubuntu release upgrades?  Better than in Natty, yes, but I'm asking more about an impression of Ubuntu upgrades in general.

Generally they've gone pretty smoothly; last couple have been a bit spottier.  Assume that's mostly due to general Ubuntu problems and partially due to my not having done a clean install since 2007 and piling dist-upgrade on top of dist-upgrade.  (In fairness, I've never had a major Windows release upgrade cleanly.  Compared to that, Kubuntu's been rock solid.)

Considering btrfs the next time I do a clean install, but no time or inclination right now.

I'd stay away from it for data that isn't replicated elsewhere until they've got a fsck for it that actually fixes errors it finds (I believe they're still working on it).

Yeah, like I say, not in a hurry.

I started using Rhythmbox (despite its iTunes-clone aspirations and not really being better than Amarok) and have continued to use it to this day.  I should probably take another look at Amarok--been a long time since I've looked at it.

Haven't tried Rhythmbox since the upgrade.  It's not bad, but yeah I bristle a bit at the iTunes-like too.  Especially since it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as iTunes.

[sei]

Especially since it doesn't seem to work as smoothly as iTunes.

Uninstall it if it runs like iTunes for Windows.

[Thad]

You know, I've never actually used iTunes for Windows.


(Actually come to think of it I had it installed on my old work computer, but I rarely fired it up.)

[Thad]

Oh good, clicking one of the extra buttons on my mouse disables it now.  Replugging it doesn't fix it, and neither does restarting X.

Also I get a popping sound when I get new mail now.  Doesn't appear to be a way to disable it from KDE's settings, and it doesn't look like you can access the GTK settings from KDE.

[Niku]

POP POP

i don't see the problem

[Thad]

Of course, if we're to be precise, the problem isn't GNOME 3, it's GNOME Shell.  If MATE's endgame is actually a GNOME 2-style shell that runs on top of GNOME 3, that's going to be a fuck of a lot of work but will have a much broader appeal and staying power than just forking an obsolescent DE.

I guess that's what MGSE is?

Ah, THAT'S more like it.

Still a fuckload of needlessly wasted space in the top bar, but they're moving in the right direction.

I predict MGSE will catch on in a big way and ultimately the GNOME devs will do the same thing they did with the 2.x series: back off their stupid no-guys-I-read-a-paper-about-this crap and acknowledge how people actually interact with their computers in real life.

[Thad]

Fortunately, 12.04 is an LTS release, so "getting their shit together" is going to be priority one next time around.

Alpha's out; Shuttleworth DOES apparently still know what "LTS" means and is talking about tweaks to make sure everything works and that the whole thing is suitable for business users.

Don't expect I'll jump right on this one, but I've got a laptop that's not mission-critical and which has worked well with alphas in the past.  Maybe once I get some free time.

[Thad]

The good news is that HP isn't taking WebOS out behind the barn and shooting it, it's setting it free.

The last batch of their tablets is going on sale on Sunday, $99 a pop; I expect them to be gone faster than anyone can reasonably expect to get one.  With any luck this will mean extended longevity not just for their (apparently pretty good) tablet, but for WebOS itself.

No word on what license yet but I'm betting something like Apache.

[Thad]

Mint's GNOME3 implementation becomes a full-on fork.

I continue to expect that there will be an overwhelming demand for this, and eventually it'll all get merged back into mainline GNOME.

[Thad]

Something I've been keeping an eye on for awhile: ZFS for Mac.  It was supposed to be included in Leopard (IIRC) but was cancelled; rights issues, if I'm not mistaken.

Well, the guy who was in charge of that project has struck out on his own and just recently released it as Zevo.

Why I'm interested: my grandmother has a MacBook Pro, and uses it to put together family movies.  The source files are spread across a half-dozen or so external hard drives.  There's some redundancy across drives, but not really any kind of reliable backup.  The drives themselves are probably a decade old and mostly full.

A few years back she bought my old roomie's rack of external LaCie drives, but I realized in short order that they weren't going to be a vastly superior solution as-is (3 500GB drives and 1 1TB drive, arranged in a software RAID -- simple concatenation IIRC, not striped or mirrored) -- they didn't have enough space to replace her existing bunch of drives, and there was no redundancy so they weren't reliable.

So I replaced the 4 drives with new 2TB ones.  I thought of doing a RAID10 thing, but saw Zevo was under development and decided we could wait.

Well, looks like the sucker's finally been released -- partially.  They're releasing it in Silver, Gold, and Platinum Editions (in pizza-franchise-style they-think-we're-stupid inflation -- if you have three sizes, the smallest one is not a MEDIUM, asshole) and so far only the Silver is available.  The good news is they're offering to let you upgrade to each successive version as it comes out, for just the price difference; the bad news is that it still doesn't look like Silver (or even Gold) has the full feature set I want (RAID-Z), so I'll have to wait anyway.

Still, neat.

[Dooly]

They're releasing it in Silver, Gold, and Platinum Editions (in pizza-franchise-style they-think-we're-stupid inflation -- if you have three sizes, the smallest one is not a MEDIUM, asshole)

I'm sorry if this is diverging from the main topic, but I think you're being overly nit-picky here.  Silver does not exclusively mean "second place" or "middle tier," and in this case is meant to be interpreted as "the least valuable of the three options."