June 2010 Archives

I've been using Ubuntu for a few years now and quite like it. And when I saw they had released 10.04 I was excited to upgrade. The last two releases I did an upgrade-in-place with their upgrade tool and I didn't run into any major problems. So I did the same thing for this release. But that's where this story begins.

First I noticed that I was getting warnings and errors related to my X.org config. This was very alarming since I've never seen that before and I don't run any thing unusual in my x.org config. I tried a few different things to address it but could never really solve the problem. Then I noticed that rhythmbox was always crashing on me. Like all the time. Oh and my startup applications would never start up as they were supposed to. And compiz wouldn't work due to complaints about in correct driver even though I did install the correct one.

So after complaining about it for a week to my coworkers they suggested that I back up all my important stuff and then do a fresh install. Complety wipe it and install from scratch with 10.04. So I bought an external hard drive (500G) and did that. The fresh install was soooo easy and quick. I then carefully restored data back to my home folder. If you are doing this be careful not to copy back .gnome2 or .gvfs or anything .g* or at least be very cautious in doing so. Those could break things on an upgrade like this.

Conclusion- the fresh install worked beatifully. Ubuntu 10.04 works great and i'm not seeing any of the problems I had earlier. In fact it also fixed a completely separate issue I was having with my wireless card. So I'm definately still an Ubuntu fan.

I haven't written for a while, but I have gathered several ideas to write about.  Here are a few of them:

• My SageTV setup, and why I chose to go with SageTV versus MythTV, or TiVo or others.
• Controltier.  This is an automation framework for deploying and managing software.  It is a bit complex but can be very powerful.  I use this at work.
• My presentation at Postgresql Conference East, entitled "Postgres Administration for Sysadmins".  This presentation covers basics of configuration and running Postgres and monitoring your database.
• An updated how-to for Virtual Box- setting up several servers and getting them to talk to each other.
• How-to on getting CUPC (cisco's chat/video thingy app) working in Virtual box vm.
• Snippets of some of my screenplays (works in progress).

As you can see, I actually do have things to write about, now if I could only make the time.....