Piotr Woloszyn

I was looking forward to the release of Hardy as I upgraded my main computer much before the official release which meant couple of problems which I described in one of my previous posts. Most of the issues were resolved in couple of days but about two weeks ago I started having a problem with starting graphical interface due to the Nautilus not being able to register to the bonobo activation server, the same for panel. The environment was still usable but I had to start each time in the Gnome Failsafe mode. I assumed it must to be a pre-release bug or something. I know, I was passive and should have investigated that straight away. But using beta versions of software very often means that there are small issuettes here and there, which is natural, I think, and we agree for that the minute we start that version. I waited patiently for the fix checking everyday, pulling updated packages. It didn’t come. Finally the official release came as well but didn’t solve my problem neither.

As it turned out the problem laid somewhere else. I installed recently Mono 1.9 to try if the Web21c SDK can be executed on that. After uninstalling the software by running the ./uninstall script from the Mono home folder everything works smooooothly again!

Lesson: don’t assume.

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After being abnormally active last two weekends because of my well deserved ski holidays I had a chance to return this weekend to more usual couch potato life style. This allowed me to see Welsh proving over French who deserves to win Six Nations and Kubica blowing up his chance to be on the podium of the Formula One race in Melbourne. All that super exciting activities left me some time to play with latest alpha release of the Ubuntu - Hardy Heron Alpha 6. I used HP Compaq Mobile Workstation nw9440 for the trial. So, here are couple of my observations.

Most of the things worked without any problems (graphic card, sound, touchpad, wired network). Great stuff for alpha! However I had couple of problems:

• Hardy will upgrade your Firefox to 3.0 Beta
  • probably you will lose most of your plugins
  • if you want you can downgrade the version to 2.x, it is still available through Synaptics or apt-get install firefox-2
• Wireless connection does not work
  • I have the Intel 3945ABG chip on board.
  • The Network Manager doesn’t recognise and show any wireless connection.
  • The module iwl3945 is not loaded: lsmod | grep iw
  • Other users report the same or similar problems
  • There are solutions for the issue but you can expect that if you have the same chip you will encounter the same problem with out of the box configuration.

• VmWare Player
  • reconfiguration of the software is needed. Run: vmware-config.pl
  • the process will try to build modules for current kernel but unfortunately the compilation can fail
    • I had to install missing linux headers: sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.24-12-386
    • make sure you have installed build essential packages: sudo apt-get install build-essential
    • if the build still doesn’t compile try the vmware-any-any-116. More information on this blog.

I don’t want to discourage you from trying the Hardy release. I am pointing only on issues not telling about good things. It looks like another good release of Ubuntu is on the way. If you are ready for couple of minor issues then try the new version now. If not wait couple of weeks. The final release of Hardy Heron should happen in April 2008.

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Do you use VMware Player on Ubuntu host to use Windows XP as guest? If you are not happy with performance and you are annoyed with the Ctrl-Alt shortcut to leave the guest (that one for you Uros!) then consider installing VMware Tools package on your guest OS. This package is available only for the VMware Workstation but it is possible to install that on the Player as well. From your guest:

1. Download VMware Workstation: http://download3.vmware.com/software/wkst/VMware-workstation-5.5.0-18463.tar.gz
2. Extract windows.iso from the archive which is located in vmware-distrib/lib/isoimages/windows.iso
3. Mount the image. You can use free and nicely simple Virtual CDROM Control Panel to do it.
4. Run the setup.exe from the virtual drive

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I used Google Trends to check which Linux distribution is the most popular among Google search users. As you could probably easily guess and what is visible on the diagram Ubuntu is clearly the winner at the moment with the biggest number of search requests. What is interesting is that at the beginning of 2003 there were at least three equally popular distributions: Debian, Suse (now OpenSuse) and Mandrake (now Mandriva) with Red Hat slightly behind. Situation changed since then though. Debian sort of maintains its share. But other distributions became less and less popular with Mandrake loosing the most but partially probably due to changed name. Ubuntu with its excellent online community gains attention with linear search volume increase. I hope it will remain like that and then it is a matter of time when Windows with its ridiculous Vista release will go to hell.

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