OK, I'm a bit embarrassed about this, but it's just a bit of fun and community building. About a week ago, Melissa Draper posted a request to Planet Ubuntu via her blog for people to participate in a community experiment. She wanted the Ubuntu community to produce a version of Auld Lang Syne.

Now I don't normally allow myself to be heard singing, but I thought "What the hell, it'll be drowned out by all the other voices anyway," and submitted my recording. A massive FIVE people did likewise. The result can be found here. You can pick my voice out near the beginning, but I'm drowned out by the others towards the end, thankfully.

In a geeky way, I find it interesting that five people, separated by (in my case) several thousand miles, all online at different times, were able to produce a piece of music that actually rivals that of many of the carol singers you get knocking on your door.

IPSec gateway 1.2.3.4
IPSec ID me
#IPSec secret mypass
Xauth username me
#Xauth password mypass
UDP Encapsulate

# OPTIONAL
# ========

#
#
# Varios options not undestood by vpnc itself but by some other scripts
#
# Target networks 123.234.210.0/24 10.1.0.0/16
# If Target networks is defined here, the default route is not replaced!

# Don't update resolv.conf though resolvconf is installed
# DNSUpdate no

Enter my passwords as usual and it magically works. The other thing I couldn't do before was use the copy of Windows XP Pro X64 that came pre-installed on my laptop from within Ubuntu using Qemu. It complained that it couldn't find the APIC. Now, however, I'm making some progress:

I thought I'd follow on from my last entry with an update on how things are going. The first thing I need to rectify is the NetworkManager problem I thought I was having. It turns out that what I'm seeing is expected behaviour (at least when there are no wireless networks in the vicinity). I read the README.Debian that comes with the package, which says:

Configuration
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Only devices that are *not* listed in /etc/network/interfaces or which have 
been configured "auto" and "dhcp" (with no other options) are managed by NM.

This way you can setup a custom (static) configuration for a device and NM 
will not try to override this setting.

It then goes on to list some examples, but the above made sense to me since my wired LAN interface is configured with a static IP address. I'm not sure if I like this behaviour or not... I can't help thinking there should be some kind of network profile management, such that I can say "I'm at home, so I'll have my wireless disabled and my wired interface statically configured please", and then later "I'm in the office, so I'll have wireless and wired interfaces enabled and configured via DHCP and let NetworkManager decide which network is available at any given moment" or "I'm travelling and I'm at a train station which has a free wireless hotspot, so I'll disable my wired interface and have my wireless pick up a connection and configure it via DHCP." I think this is what laptop-net was supposed to do, but I'm not sure. It would also be useful to have my network-mounted shares synced and made available for me when I go offline, then any changes synced again when I reconnect to the network. Maybe I'm asking a bit much, but I think it should be possible.

I did come across what I consider to be a regression yesterday. I forgot to mention that we do occasionally get Microsoft Office documents from customers, detailing change requests and support tickets usually. This is partly our own fault, as we created the support form and saved it as a Word document, so we currently have to live with it, at least until we can concoct an online support form. I use OpenOffice to view these files and yesterday I tried to open a Word Document with an embedded Excel spreadsheet. I'd opened it fine before the upgrade, although the spreadsheet was barely readable within the context of the Word document so I had to open it separately, but yesterday I got an error saying that the Excel file format was invalid. I got a colleague to send me a copy of the Excel file and that opened fine, it was just when it was embedded that it failed to open.

Otherwise, everything's been fine so far. So I'm off to see if this bug has been filed already and if not, I'll file it myself.

As anyone who's worked with me will know, I'm a bit of a Linux fanboy. Actually, I'm a free software fanboy, but Linux is where most people will have actually experienced my enthusiasm.  I've used various Linux distributions, starting with Slackware in 1996, which I patched and hacked about myself for a long time, before installing Red Hat 7.1 on my wife's machine and maintaining a couple of Red Hat boxes at work. Then I moved onto Debian on my server, after talking in the South Derbyshire LUG IRC channel and being convinced that with my level of knowledge, Debian was going to save me a lot of time.

Eventually, impressed with Debian's package management and overall quality, and with Canonical's work towards making a user-centric distribution, I tried out an Ubuntu live CD on my wife's machine. Her main complaint was that it was way too slow to be useful, and when I watched her I saw what she meant – running from the live CD was fine as a trial, to make sure things worked, but it wasn't usable for day-to-day stuff. Nor was it meant to be. So I installed it properly for her and she hasn't looked back. Admittedly, I hadn't pared things down very much, so it was sluggish on an AMD K6-2/450 with 256MB RAM. I still haven't pared things down, but I did upgrade her machine to a Celeron 966. I think she still has 256MB RAM and the machine ticks along quite nicely.

So impressed was I with her experience, that when I got my laptop I deleted the D: partition and installed Ubuntu Dapper beta on it. I actually ran from a live CD for a while, as I wasn't using the machine daily, but when Dapper was finally released I decided to do things The Right Way. I don't think I've used Windows on the machine since then.

If you're a regular (both of you, you know who you are) you'll probably remember that my work laptop got replaced earlier this year. You might also remember the problems I had with it. Well recently I decided to get the thing sent back as it was clearly faulty. This left me with a minor dilemma – we didn't know how long the machine would be in for repair, or even if we would get it back at all, and we only had a replacement laptop available for a short time. So I decided to take the plunge and start using my own laptop for work. It's more than capable and very stable, so everything should be fine. The only question was could I use Ubuntu for my daily work?

The first thing I needed to do was figure out what my daily work entailed. That was fairly easy to do, in fact:

• Read and respond to e-mail via IMAP4/SMTP. I used Mozilla Thunderbird for that on my Windows laptop, so I would continue to do so.

• Services management via the web-based administration interface. I used Mozilla Firefox for that under Windows, so I would continue to do so. The same applies for viewing and updating the wiki and eGroupware.

• Problem investigation via SSH. This actually involved an intermediate step, namely VPN connectivity. Both Cisco and CheckPoint make Linux versions of their VPN clients available. Unfortunately they're closed source and targeted at the 2.4 kernel, while I run 2.6. Instead, I found vpnc for the Cisco VPN. I haven't yet figured out the CheckPoint, but that's just for the Staging environment which I won't need for a while yet.

• Java development. I used WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.1 on Windows, and have the Linux installation media too, so I could install that. I also had a local Oracle 9.2.0.1 installation. I've previously blogged about my problems getting this to work, but have resorted to a 10g installation instead.

• Read and update documents on the intranet. Our intranet is available via Citrix, for which a Linux client is available.

• IM colleagues using Skype. Skype have a Linux version available, although I have had minor issues with it – the animated emticons consume 100% CPU for some reason, and the sound occasionally triggers an obscure, possibly timing-related, kernel bug.

• Occasionally, connect to Windows boxes via Terminal Server to maintain some service or other.

So under Dapper Drake, what didn't I get working? As far as I know, only the CheckPoint VPN client. Everything else I've had to do in my job has been possible. A few things have been made easier because of the tools available on a Linux machine – Perl, bash, grep, sed, awk – all of which are also available via cygwin or msys, but just run better in their native environment. A few things are a bit awkward – WSAD, Oracle, Citrix ICA Client and Skype are all installed in a 32-bit chroot, which is beyond the casual user. I'm not sure if they had to be installed chroot, but I like the clean separation of native 64-bit apps and legacy (closed source, you'll notice) 32-bit stuff. Also in the 32-bit chroot is a 32-bit version of Firefox with the (once again closed source) Flash plugin installed. Again, Adobe don't have a 64-bit version available and quite frankly the open source Flash plugins I've tried have been pretty poor. The only other things of note are that in the old 2.6.15 kernel, my SD/XD/MMC/MemoryStick Pro card reader wasn't supported, but I don't need that for work and generally transfer files from either my Zaurus, via SCP over the data cable, or from my mobile, via Bluetooth; and the CPU scaling support didn't seem that impressive – I had the BOINC client running and the CPU was still throttled at 800MHz, but if I did something like video editing then it would ramp up to full throttle.

I was quite keen to upgrade to the new 6.10 release of Ubuntu, formerly known as Edgy Eft. I like to have the most recent version, for a start, but I was also keen to see what improvements, if any, could be made to my development environment.

Contrary to some people's experiences, the upgrade went very smoothly. I left it downloading overnight (1.5GB of data took several hours and I wasn't keen to have that going on, killing my bandwidth while I was trying to do other stuff). When I came back the following morning, it had started setting up and stopped to ask me a few questions, which were simple enough. There were a couple of changes to some config files, but I was able to pop up a terminal and edit those in the background to get the benefit of any new options while not losing my own changes. After that, it took about an hour and a half to upgrade and configure everything and purge obsolete packages, before prompting me to reboot.

One of the major new features of Ubuntu 6.10 is upstart, a new boot manager to replace the (now apparently) old-style SystemV startup scripts to improve boot times. I have to say I didn't notice much of a difference, except that after that first reboot, it took a while for my Bluetooth mouse to be seen and start working, and the first login seemed to take an age. I assume this was some kind of post-upgrade activity going on in the background, because subsequent reboots have been fairly quick.

The second thing I noticed was that the overall appearance is much sharper and cleaner. It looks spangly. The icons look more polished. Then I noticed the new Firefox icon – the proper, trademarked Firefox icon. Then I realised that I now had Firefox 2.0.  I was very pleased with this, Firefox 2.0 seems to be more responsive than 1.5.  Of my five extensions, three work and two don't, – DOM Inspector and Web Developer Toolbar. I actually quite like having the close button on the browser tabs, although I sometimes go to the top-right where it used to be.

The VPN connection still works, which is obviously good. When I eventually got around to reading my mail, I noticed a problem though. I have logcheck running to send me e-mail notification of system reboots, important system and security events, etc. My reboot mail was filled with error messages, as summarised in this bug entry. I was then slightly disappointed to realise that the old architecture-specific (e.g. amd64-k8) kernels appear to have been replaced with a generic one. But somehow this has enabled correct CPU frequency scaling, so BOINC client is now running full throttle. Unfortunately, I can't see how much of an impact it's had on my progress because I can no longer connect to the client – I keep getting an authentication error that I'm not sure how to fix yet. And yes, when I stop the client or unplug the mains it does drop down to 800MHz, which is correct. NetworkManager seems unable to recognise that there are networks of any description available, which is odd, but again possibly just a glitch that will be sorted out when I read the release notes and package documentation.

Both Oracle and WSAD both start up correctly and pass the very basic post-upgrade tests. I haven't yet tried to install Oracle 9i under the new installation and since I have a working database I might just not bother.

So, all very impressive, but has it enabled me to do anything I couldn't before? So far, no. There are some nifty new applications, apparently, one of which is for photo management. I'll give that a look later. My card reader now prompts a message in the logs when a card is inserted or removed, but I haven't yet discovered how to view the files on the card, or indeed if the driver is yet at the stage that makes this possible. I'll just have to wait and see.

Overall, I've been quite impressed though. My general experience of switching from Windows to Ubuntu has been much less painful than I'd dare imagine. Yes, there are still niggles and issues that, say, my dad wouldn't have been able to resolve on his own. There are a couple of nasties in the new release that could do with being fixed, but then it is only four days old. But I'd be quite happy recommending Ubuntu to someone looking to take the Linux plunge. Linux on the desktop is, in my opinion, getting very close.

For the past week, excluding Tuesday when I was in Harrogate, I've been transferring my development environment over to my own personal laptop. I started off with WebSphere Studio, as I already had the installation media. It's aimed at Red Hat 7.2 or 8.0, or SuSE 7.2 or 8.1 (of course), but it installed perfectly in a 32-bit chroot on my Ubuntu Dapper AMD64 Operating System.

So then I moved onto Oracle. Not just any old version of Oracle. Our production platform is running 9.2.0.1 with patches, so I wanted to get as close to that as I possibly could, which turned out to be 9.2.0.4. It has a 64-bit version available, so I downloaded all 1.5GB of installation media and burned it to DVD. I was sent a script by our support guy who'd installed the same version on our DR kit. It was a bash script that checked your system to make sure it would be happy with Oracle. Apart from a couple of tools (gawk, env) not being where expected (solved with a couple of symlinks) and some kernel parameters that needed to be tuned, the only thing it found wrong was that Ubuntu Dapper wasn't a certified platform for Oracle 9.2.0. Well there's a surprise, considering Oracle 9.2.0.4 pre-dates Ubuntu by a couple of years.

Anyway, satisfied that all would be hunky-dory, I set up the user anf groups and proceeded to run the installer anyway. I entered the required information about what I was installing (Database), what type of installation (Enterprise), what type of database (None) and left it to go. It hung up at 17% saying:

Installing Oracle Required Support Files 32 bit 9.2.0.1.0
Link Pending...


Copying naeet.o

I left it for a while, but no change. I checked the log file, which appeared to be written in some ancient dialect of OracleDeveloperBollocks and wasn't much use. So I cancelled the installation, cleaned up and Googled. And Googled. And Googled. Don't get me wrong, there's a wealth of information out there, just none of it useful. The most hopeful article I managed to find involved installing Oracle 10g Express from the Oracle Debian repository – which would surely be a less troublesome route to take, but it's the wrong version of Oracle. Alas, after a week of gnashing of teeth, symlinks, banging my head against the wall, installing old compatibility libraries, I think I'm just going to have to settle for it.