Bye bye, Ubuntu, Hello Debian

Sadly, the new version of Ubuntu, 8.04, didn't accept my laptop (an a few years old Acer TravelMate 290, without any strange hardware). I couldn't find any information on how to resolve the problems I ran into, so I had to ditch Ubuntu, and replace it with Debian 4.0.

This was a pity, since the new Ubuntu looked quite promising. The install is incredible easy and rather quick. Apart from the desktop background image, the new system looks and feels good. They appear to have made good choices when it comes to the pre-installed software. But this doesn't help when Ubuntu fails to shutdown the computer properly.

Installing Debian is not as straightforward, but still not very hard. It took a little longer, mostly because I used the net installer that grabs the software packages from the internet and not from the installation CD-ROM.

However, compared to Ubuntu, it takes some more fixing after the installation to get a system that your are comfortable with. For instance, the Debian people appear to think that you should prefer a web browser called Epiphany to Firefox... They don't even offer you the standard Firefox browser, but their own version, "Iceweasel". (There seems to be a totally silly reason as to why Firefox is not called Firefox.)

Worse, the default fonts did not look good on my laptop, so I had to install new fonts (by running apt-get install msttcorefonts, I think?).

A bit surprisingly, Debian supports playing mp3 files without installing additional libraries.

After a bit of tweaking, Debian feels nice. Still, I would prefer a working version of Ubuntu. It would be interesting to know what went wrong in the relationship between Ubuntu 8.04 and my laptop.

Ubuntu 8.04 revitalised my laptop, but I'm still not happy...

Ah, I just did a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04 (aka "Gniffly Gnaffly") on my Acer laptop. The net update failed, so I had to burn an install CD. I didn't mind, however, since last time I did an upgrade of the laptop, something strange happened, and it became incredibly slow.

With Ubuntu 8.04 installed, the laptop is back on track. It starts fast, and everything (that I care about) seems to work.

The first things to do after install, are to change the desktop background image (the default depicts an oil-drenched dead bird?), turn off the system sounds including the beep and turn off all visual effects.

Update: No! Ubuntu still doesn't behave well. It turns out, that sometimes when I turn off the laptop, it isn't turned off correctly! Ubuntu goes down, the screen gets black, but still, the laptop is not properly turned off (both the indicator that the computer is on, and the indicator that the hard drive is working keep glowing...). Gah.

Furthermore, I've noticed some instances of ill-boding flickering of the screen.

Maybe it is time to go back to Debian.

Automatic Simple backups: SBackup

A colleague told me about a simple backup utility called... Simple Backup (or SBackup). With the help of Simple Backup, you can very easily do hard-drive backups (and restore the backups if needed). If you're using Ubuntu, you will find it with the help of apt-get, Synaptic or under Applications>Add/remove....

At a small office, SBackup may be suitable for doing daily, automatic PC-backups. You configure it to do incremental backups with a frequency of your own choice. You can tell SBackup to put the backups on a remote server through ssh. Notice that the connection settings are in clear text, i.e., your password for ssh-ing will be readable for anyone with access to your computer! (Thus, you should be a bit careful with how you use SBackup.)

A nice feature is that the backups are in tar.gz format, i.e., you can use standard tools to read the backed up files. You can also tell SBackup what local directories to include or exclude from the backups. Once configured, the only thing you may need to care about is that you have enough disk space on the machine that holds the backups. If you do incremental backups of a number of computers, the backups may grow quite large. (However, they will not grow infinitely large, since SBackup can take care of removing old/redundant backups.)

More info here.

Update: Due to a reboot of the target server, SBackup silently stopped doing its backups. It had to do with obsolete ssh keys, most likely. On the Ubuntu clients, the problem can fixed by removing the known_hosts file from the root home directory

sudo rm /root/.ssh/known_hosts

or by removing the same file from the user home

rm ${HOME}/.ssh/known_hosts

(It appears to work differently on different versions of Ubuntu.)

After this, we started the SBackup configuration GUI and tested the destination (you need to answer a question before it works again).

The same goes for moving the backup destination to a different server. SBackup silently stops working. You have to delete the known_hosts file, as above.

No Web Start for 64-bit Sun Java

Sun does not include Java Web Start in its 64-bit version of Java. It appears that Sun thinks that you are not supposed to run Web Start on 64-bit machines, since these mostly are servers (?), and... eh... sorry, I cannot follow their reasoning. Let's hope they change their minds.

I haven't tried it myself, but here is a description of how to run 32-bit Java Web Start on 64-bit Ubuntu.

Update: At the time of writing this, an AMD64 version of Java Web Start is at the top of Sun's Request for Enhancements list.

Update: There will be support for 64-bit Java Web Start in an upcoming release, 1.6.0_12 (I think). Ismael Juma points out that an early access release is available. See his comment below.