LinLog

In a fit of optimism, I decided to upgrade my laptop to Kubuntu Dapper last night.  As usual, the upgrade process really sucked.  This time I knew what to look for, so it didn't suck as hard as the last time, but it still sucked.  Ubuntu may be a really great distribution, but they really need to work on the upgrade procedure.  I don't want to waste my time rebuilding a working system every six months.

After playing around with possible dependencies for way, way too long, I was finally able to get around that "upgrading uninstalls KDE" problem I had last time.  I ended up removing KOffice (which I wasn't using anyway), Amarok, and k3b-mp3.  I'm not sure exactly which package caused the problem, but after that I was able to mark all upgrades and then kubuntu-desktop, which gave me a proper upgrade.  Of course, I still had to go through a few dozen packages that Adept wanted to remove rather than upgrade (like kdegames and kile), but I eventually got everything I wanted marked for upgrade and the package installs went smoothly.

The main problem I had was that my WiFi card stopped working after I rebooted.  It took a disturbingly long time to figure out the problem, but I've got it sorted now.  It seems that Dapper includes a driver it thinks works with my integrated Broadcom BCM4318 card, but really doesn't. Naturally, this conflicted with the working NDISwrapper installation. All I had to do to fix it was add the bcm43xx driver to my /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file. After that, ndiswrapper was free and clear and my WiFi connection was fixed.

Imagine my surprise. As per my usual Saturday routine, I dropped Sarah off at work, stopped in to Barnes & Noble, grabbed some magazines, and sat down in the café to have some breakfast. Little did I know, as I browsed a copy of Linux Format, that I'd actually find a column on myself.

Well, OK, it wasn't actually about me, but rather about my work. You see, the June 2006 issue of Linux Format included a column on LnBlog 0.6.4, my weblog system. It wasn't a feature article or anything, but it was on the first page of the "Hot Picks" section, which I thought was pretty cool.

This is kind of nice timing, since I've been trying to start building up a bit of a community around LnBlog. It started out as a personal learning project, but it's grown into a very capable blogging system. It's got the basics, like comments and trackbacks, multiple users and blogs, anti-spam plugins, and, in the newest release, blogging API support and optional rich-text editor plugins. It has a theme system and a plugin system with API documentation. In other words, all the technical makings for community development.

So, if you're a PHP programmer, a web designer, or just an average user looking for a blogging system for your web site, give LnBlog a look. It's light-weight, featureful, configurable, and has plenty to keep users and developers interested. I'll be making a few more posts about the technical aspects of LnBlog in the near future, so you'll get a more in-depth look later. If you're looking to get involved in an open-source project, please give it a look.

I mentioned earlier that the scrolling buttons on my Logitech Marble Mouse weren't working since the upgrade to Dapper. Well, now they are. Apparently, all I had to do in my old configuration was change the "EmulateWheelButton" variable from 5 to 9, which is the new number for the same button I was using before. Not sure why the change happened, but to be honest, at this point I really don't much care.

At least one of my Dapper problems is fixed now. I got Opera 9.0 beta 2 installed last night.

It turns out the problem was with the dependencies in the Opera .deb package. Apparently, the Breezy Opera .deb lists xlibs as a dependency, but Dapper has changed naming conventions, so there no longer is a package named xlibs. The program still works perfectly if you force the installation, but then APT sees the package as "broken" and won't let you install anything else without removing it.

Well, there were two possibilities to fix this. The first was to make a dumby xlibs package to satisfy APT. However, I didn't know how to do that, so I took the brute-force approach: explode the package, remove the dependency, and rebuild it. It wasn't pretty, but it worked like a charm. I figure the next stable release will have a Dapper .deb, so I don't imagine I'll have to be repeating this latter.

Well, I installed Kubuntu 6.06 "Dapper Drake" from scratch the other night. I didn't actually intend to, though. I actually wanted to upgrade, but that didn't go so well. In fact, the upgrade completely hosed my system. Either I made a really bad mistake following the directions on the Kubuntu web site, or the directions were just plain bad. (To be fair, they were at least incomplete.) At any rate, Adept stopped responding in the middle of configuring autofs and I had to kill it. I tried to recover by running apt-get, which told me to run dpkg, which seemed to complete the upgrade. However, after rebooting, I found that I was without KDE (as in the upgrade removed it and never installed the new version) and without a network connection. So, since I had wanted to fix my brain-damaged legacy partition scheme anyway, I just reinstalled.

I must say, I'm extremely impressed with the new installer. Instead of booting into a crumby command-line installer, the install CD is now a live CD. You boot into a working graphical environment and then run a graphical installer program to put Kubuntu on your hard drive. You answer a few questions, configure your hard drive with QtParted, wait a while, and reboot. The mount point selection screen could have used a few more visual cues, but other than that it was the easiest install I've ever done. Bravo!

However, it wasn't all wine and roses. After booting into my new installation, I found that I no longer had sound, despite the fact that I'd gotten the system sounds when I booted from the live CD. There didn't seem to be After flailing around in vain for a while, I found the answer in this Kubuntu Forums thread, which basically said to turn off a few switches in KMix. I certainly never would have thought of that, since I never actually set any of those switches. In fact, I don't even know what they do. But, at any rate, it worked.

It also took me a few minutes to remember that Ubuntu doesn't come with MP3 support out of the box. It would have been a lot faster if Kaffeine or Amarok had just told me that they couldn't play MP3s. But nooooo, that would be too easy. Instead, I sat there for fifteen minutes wondering why Amarok was zooming through a two hour recording in three seconds without making a sound. I probably would have figured it out sooner if I wasn't so flustered from the previous failure of sound to work at all. At any rate, I eventually remembered and followed the new instructions to enable the multiverse repository and install libxine-extracodecs.

In other bad news, I still haven't gotten the extra buttons on my Marble Mouse to work yet. Just copying the mouse setup from my old xorg.conf file didn't work. The really weird thing about that is that when I try to remap the buttons with xmodmap, I get errors saying that I need to define 11 buttons instead of 7. But the trackball only has four physical buttons and I've only set the buttons option to 7 in my xorg.conf file. So where is it getting 11 from?

We'll see how the rest goes. I've still got a bunch of other things to install and configure, so I'm sure there will be some rough spots. Hopefully I'll get them all worked out and be able to post the solutions for posterity.