So I guess I join the ranks of those who've had to send their consoles in for repair. And just days before Left4Dead releases, of course.

The hardware detection step went fine, it detected my disks, and even saw that there were RAID partitions on them, but didn't offer me the option to use them as RAID devices.

After a bit of googling (glad I had a second machine), I discovered that selecting "Configure RAID" would load the appropriate kernel modules and re-scan the device. Sure enough, it then noticed that there were volume managed volumes on said devices, but didn't offer to start them. One more iteration (choosing "Configure LVM") noticed the three volume groups, started them, and returned me to the partitioning screen where I could indicate which groups I wanted used for which file systems.

The interface wasn't exactly intuitive, but it does seem to have done the right thing - allowing me to preserve my /home and /scratch filesystems, while formatting the root and /boot portions of the drive.

The one very disconcerting message was the installer insisting that the partition table, and subsequently the RAID configuration, had changed between steps and requiring me to allow it to write these (non)changes to disk before continuing.

Since I hadn't changed anything, I had to take it on faith that the write would either not happen, or be non-destructive. We'll find out if my faith was misplaced when the install completes.

Seems the Ubuntu guys could take a few lessons from the Fedora/RedHat graphical installer with respect to keeping the common case simple while enabling more advanced operations. It seems unnecessary to throw the friendly install experience out with the bath water just to gain the benefits of some data redundancy.

19:45PM a steady stream of packages being prepared and configured... The install shows at 65%.

19:55 The install detected my WinXP install and advised me about where to install the bootloader. That's sorta nice. Package installation is complete, rebooting.

19:55 Well that's not awesome - No graphics, and selecting any of the offered boot configs (which don't include the Windows install it detected) produces "Error 15: File Not Found"... Let's see what that "Rescue a Broken System" option does.

20:00 Well, problem #1 is that the /boot file system is empty. As in, has no files on it. As in, what the hell? Ah, no, not empty, just not mounted, as the output of mount(1) indicates.

20:13 First guess, after inspecting the system a bit, is that grub was misconfigured - it was pointing at the first partition on the first disk, which actually holds the WindowsXP install that I mentioned was detected by the installer (but wasn't added to the GRUB menu). Runing grub-update, and rebooting to see what happens.

20:14 Still get the ugly menu (would a little color kill you guys?) but selecting the first Ubuntu kernel option produced a boot screen, so that's a step in the right direction. It's now checking my file systems, which isn't really necessary, but certainly doesn't hurt anything.

20:15 Uh-oh, blank screen. I'm guessing something about my dual monitor setup is confusing the X server. Let's see if the old three-finger salute will get me back to a GRUB prompt, so I can boot single user... The score so far, Fedora 2 - Ubuntu 0.

20:20 Next problem. Booting single user presented me with a nice menu of options, one of which was "root - drop to a root shell" - unfortunately, the arrow keys didn't move around the menu, so after filling the screen with control characters, trying to type "root", I gave up and hit return, and I'm back at a blank screen again. Lovely.

20:22 rebooting without the "quiet" and "splash" options (but still with "single") got me to a menu that worked, and I'm at a root shell. Attempting to start networking ($ cd /etc/init.d ; ./networking start ) complains "Ignoring unknown interface eth1=eth1". This is just all kinds of awesome.

20:26 the /etc/network/interfaces file had auto eth1, but the line "iface eth1 inet dhcp" was commented out. So now I have networking. Going to try an aptitude upgrade and then see if I can figure out how to enable the proprietary nvidia driver from the command line. In the mean time, I'll take a peak at the X log and see if I can tell what went sideways.

20:36 updates are applied, rebooting to see if any of said updates made things "just work."

20:37 Nope - same blank screen. I'm pretty sure the problem is my relatively new card (a GeForce 9600GT) arguing with the opensource nvidia driver. Starting to consider a stop-loss plan that involves installing Fedora 9 if I don't get this sorted out in the next couple attempts.

20:40 Installed the nvidia drivers, which claims to have succeeded. Let's see if that lets the X server start. ... survey says ... nope. Reboot again.

20:50 Ok, I have display (on one monitor). The magic seems to have been to reconfigure the xserver package, and then run the nvidia-xconfig to configure the driver. I'm guessing that the gui tool does all this, but sorta requires you to be able to get to the gui.

20:52 Next problem - the uid on my homedir doesn't match the uid of the account created for me during the install. No problem. Change to a a different terminal, login, and move my old homedir out of the way. Probably not a bad idea anyway, since god knows how the various things that have put settings in there will get along with the transition from Fedora to Ubuntu.

21:00 Got dual screens configured, rebooted and ended up in X without any hand-holding.

I'm going to call the system "working" at this point, but damn was that an unpleasant process. I haven't had that many things go wrong in years.

This morning, the random album shuffle that is my music at work decided on the bonus disc that accompanied Little Voice, and I was treated to a quite enjoyable cover of In Your Eyes. While not as awesome as the live version that appeared on the Secret World Live disc, it was a good rendition of a great song.

I often like covers, both because I enjoy hearing artists re-interpret each-others work, but also because it provides a glimpse into the sorts of music that the covering artist enjoys, and is influenced by.

Followed by a bit of

$ sudo find /opt -depth -type d -empty -exec /bin/rmdir {}\;

GACK!

A short while later, I had a mostly working machine - made more difficult only by the lack of in-built support for the Intel on-board NIC, which required me to grab drivers from sourceforge, and use a USB stick to get the machine on-line. (I say only knowing full well that such a situation would be a "dead end" for a normal user, even if they had a second machine from which they could google and download said drivers.)

To add insult to injury, their 32bit libs package doesn't create the appropriate symlinks in /lib32, so even setting the linker path correctly wouldn't let me link the binaries I was trying to build.

Once I figured out the problem, I created the missing symlinks and was good to go, but Ubuntu's semi-official answer of "use a 32bit chroot" left me shaking my head. I agree that it's more "correct," but it's also a pain in the arse, and very much not the "make things just work" philosophy that Ubuntu is known for.

I was also sorta disappointed that, unlike Fedora, Ubuntu doesn't make it easy to setup winbind authentication and join the machine to a Windows domain. I totally see how it's not a core use case for them, but it also means that I'm not likely to lobby to switch any of the in-house linux servers to Ubuntu in the near future.

As counter-point, I really liked the app that noticed that I had an nvidia card and offered to install non-free drivers - it did the right thing, and one reboot later I had accelerated 2d and 3d graphics, and snazzy GL desktop effects.

After the initial switching pains, I was happy enough that I started thinking about replacing Fedora on my home machine, since I'm due for a (probably painful) Fedora upgrade soon. Since 8.10 was coming out "any day now" I decided to hold off. No sense, I thought, in installing 8.04 just so I can upgrade in a few days.

When 8.10 was released, I did the live upgrade on the machine in my office. I've done a fair number of live (but totally "unsupported") Fedora upgrades via Yum, and they're nail-biting affairs, often involving package tweaking and general jiggery-pokery (even when you haven't deviated from the official package repositories). The graphical upgrade was seemingly idiot-proof and after downloading a shite-ton of stuff, I rebooted into Ubuntu 8.10.

One thing I hadn't messed with at work, but do use at home, was a software raid boot partition, and LVM. Fedora makes the former very easy to setup, and uses the latter by default. I've been saved twice in the past several years when one of my two drives failed - what would have been a tooth-gnashing, breast beating sort of event was relegated to a "ooh, better get that drive RMAd."

I was mildly disappointed that Ubuntu didn't offer any support for either one in their graphical installer, but downloaded the "alternate install" CD and ran through the process on Dawnise's former Windows box with a spare drive this evening.

The text-based installer is functional, albeit less intuitive than the graphical one, but as far as I could tell, while there's a guided partitioning scheme using LVM, if you want software RAID you have to partition your drives manually.

The installer is chugging away on my secondary screen as I type, and assuming it goes well, I'll probably do it over (without the raid and LVM) and use this hardware to replace the certifiably ancient machine in my MAME cabinet downstairs. That'll be an interesting test, as there's no wired network connection in the game room, so I'll find out quickly if Ubuntu groks the PCI 802.11g wireless card I've got sitting in the closet, too.

I'd say that the biggest thing Ubuntu has going for it over Fedora from my perspective is the longer upgrade cycle, and better support for live upgrades. It does feel like a step backwards to run the 32bit distro on my Core Duo machine, but since I've only got 4GB of RAM, I'm not really losing much - it just smells funny.

The real test will be when I boot the installer and try to be selective about which file systems I newfs. If It wipes my /home partition, I'm going to be rather put out (it'll take me several hours to restore from my rdiff-backup...)

$ man pkgutil
...
BUGS
Package dependency analysis and reference counting are not yet available,
hence there is no --uninstall command yet.

Come on... I mean really.

FAIL.

It's an act of cowardice and fear.

And I'm ashamed of it.

One particularly interesting aside was his brief analysis of why prohibition was repealed - he asserts that a global economic crisis (check) made the government unable to continue to spend heaps of money (check) trying to enforce the law, and rather they re-legitimized the hugely profitable illicit drug booze trade so they could realize tax revenue.

Hmmm...

He also explains the rise of Gin, and then Vodka, as the mixer of choice, replacing the more traditionally American Rye and Burbon, and the cyclic history of the martini (and it's transformation from it's Gin based roots to the vodka drink most people think of today).

The last chapter is a recipe set, which is a mix of classics and a couple of "forgotten favorites" selected by the author.

Definitely worth the read.

Turns out that on the Mac, this is what we in the business call a "pain in the ass."

I've spent the morning googling (finding threads like this, and bugs like this) and scanning Apple's pasteboard documentation (note to apple - "think different" shouldn't mean "choose gratuitously different names for things to make them harder to find"), and my conclusion is she's just screwed.

And to add insult to injury - it "just works" from Firefox to OpenOffice on linux (you know, linux, the os that's supposed to be harder to use than OS X or Windows.)

What the hell?!

UPDATE: It seems that Safari to TextEdit does work - at least sometimes.

Just to put a damper on our enthusiasm, though, the latest consumer reports reiterated their conclusion that the so-called "pro-sumer" ranges are only middling in performance and overall poor values. The best any of them ranked was 5th out of around 30 in their comparison, and their prices were all significantly higher than better ranked consumer models.

While they didn't rate the Blue Star in particular, this range is one of the first times I've gone against the advise of Consumer Reports. I'm hoping I don't end up regretting it.

The vent hood and stove are the only major bits left - and the rest is "finish work" - trim, baseboards, and the like.

We might have a working kitchen by weeks end.

I'm all a-quiver with antici-

Then we paint this weekend, and Dan hangs the uppers, installs the dishwasher, and we've got a kitchen again.

I can almost taste it...