Cyclopedia Square

We have a local mirror of the Ubuntu repos here at work and they are pretty fast. I couldn't figure out how to get update-manager to use them, so I upgraded my desktop machine to Hardy Heron by changing everything in /etc/apt/sources.list from gutsy to hardy and typed sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude full-upgrade and let it run. It asked a couple questions about modified config files and such which I answered, and then it was done. I rebooted and it put up the pretty "UBUNTU" with the new pulsating KITT -esque progress bar...and it never went beyond that. I finally hit alt-f1 and saw that it was waiting for my input with the prompt: resume: could not stat resume device file /dev/sda10. Please type in the name to try again or press ENTER to boot the system I hit enter and it seemed to boot just fine. This is a pretty annoying thing to have to do every time you boot, so I searched until I found the solution for me: reinstall initramfs-tools , like so...

Apparently there are some new gui apps for running and interacting with KVM on Ubuntu 8.04. After reading those two blog entries, I fired up virt-manager and virt-install, and wasn't very impressed. I didn't like the idea of piping the graphics through VNC when all I want is to run a virtual machine on my local desktop. And why do you need a confusing GUI when the command-line utilities for kvm/qemu are so straightforward? Now that I've said that, I'll point you at this overly complex KVM guide just so you can follow the first part to check if your CPU supports hardware virtualization . I would pretty much ignore the rest of that guide. Oh, and if your CPU doesn't support hardware virtualization, you can pretty much replace kvm with qemu in all the below steps and this will still work, just slower. Allright, here's how I set up a new KVM instance on my Ubuntu Hardy Heron box. I installed Hardy on the virtual machine in this example, but you could ju...

This is kind of funny. At least I thought so. I fired up my windoze kvm instance for the first time since upgrading to Hardy Heron, and I got a pop-up dialog from XP telling me that hardware has changed significantly (click to see the full-sized image): Weird.

I noticed today that my upgrade to Hardy broke my Apache logs for my little family website that I'm hosting. It turns out that I had a LogFormat definition in apache2.conf called comonvhost. All my sites in sites-available used this with a line like this: CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log comonvhost Well, in the upgrade, the commonvhost LogFormat was removed from my apache2.conf and replaced with three other LogFormats named, "combined," "common," and "referer (sic)." My log file became filled with lines that simply said, "commonvhost." Here I'd like pause and say that having /etc under revision control made this very easy to debug. All I had to do was run git diff -r <some commit before the upgrade> on the various files in /etc/apache2 and it became obvious very quick what had happened. I'm so glad I set that up. Anyway, after changing my sites-available files to all use the new combined LogFormat instead of...

I have a question about Subversion that I can't quite coax Google into answering. Is there any problem with copying an existing working copy and using that instead of running svn checkout to create a new working copy? You might want to do this if checkouts from your Subversion repository are very slow, see. I tried it out and it seems to work, but I wonder if there are any hidden pitfalls to this method. If you have any ideas please comment.

WARNING I needed a place to take notes while debugging sound issues after upgrading my desktop from Gutsy to Hardy, so here they are. This is probably a pretty boring read, so continue at your own risk. Upgraded to Hardy today. Got some indistinct error message at the end, so I made sure and ran aptitude update && aptitude -y full-upgrade && dpkg --configure -a a few times before and after rebooting. Then, when I fired up Firefox (fired up... Firefox... get it...?) and went to youtube I realized I didn't have flash anymore. I aptitude installed flashplugin-nonfree, restarted Firefox, and videos worked. Yay! Then I went away for a while. When I came back youtube videos had no sound. This is actually a problem that I was having before the upgrade. Not even a reboot helped. I fired up Amarok to see if mp3s still played. Nope, it froze. I googled a bit and found some pulse audio help which led me to believe that maybe I needed to add myself to the puls...

If you use gnome-terminal with a dark background, the default colors that you get when you type, say, ls --color are hard on the eyes, especially the dark blue. To fix it, right-click, edit current profile, click on the colors tab, and under Palette choose XTerm from the Built-in schemes. Much much better.