30 days with Ubuntu 7.04 - Part V

By Niall C. Brady, May/June 2007.
If you wish to re-publish this article (or parts of), then you are free to do so as long as it links back to here.

<< Part I (Days 1-5)

<< Part II (Days 6-10)

<< Part III (Days 11-15)

<< Part IV (Days 16-20)

Part V (Days 21-25)

* google for linux distro
* linuXXX
* more updates
* Installing and using wine
* Migrate Documents and Settings
* grub triple boot
* fsck error
* desktop effects and nvidia driver installation
* audio

>> Part VI (Days 26-30)

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Ubuntu is a popular linux distro

At this point, I've realised that pretty much all I need configured is already done, I've got multimedia, cd burning with mp3 capability, remote desktop, ssh, cool gui effects (beryl/avant-dock/gdesklets), so my laptop is performing nicely. I've not had any fatal errors (kernel panics) and all in all the laptop is now setup really nicely.

When I have installed other linux distros such as Fedora or Suse, the first few days (or weeks) are usually the most intense, setting up the system the way that I want it (I guess the same is true for windows users too, more or less). But once the dust settles (and it does) you end up with a system that's working the way you want, which leads me to think about the marketing hype mentioned in Part I. Ubuntu, is (as far as I'm concerned) perceived by many people to be the answer to their dreams if they are entering the linux world for the first time (eg: windows switchers). Why is that ?

Try typing in 'linux distro' into google and see what it returns, (first hit is distrowatch.com and the most popular distro there is..... Ubuntu. Infact, the first distro listed on google's result page is Ubuntu. We can say Ubuntu is pretty popular, but why? Is the success of Ubuntu down to marketing, or something else ? meanwhile, here's my desktop as it looks today

LinuXXX

Meanwhile, I'd like to share the following with you, perhaps it (indirectly) is part of Ubuntu's popularity at least in the beginning ?

Ubuntu & You, Part 1: Trying Today's Most Popular Linux Distribution

and I quote:-

"The more cynical among us might point to another reason for Ubuntu's overnight success: sheer sex appeal. Either as a consequence of its "humanity toward others" philosophy (as I believe) or as a calculated marketing ploy (as the cynics say), Ubuntu debuted with some backgrounds and wallpapers featuring attractive young people in various states of togetherness and undress. There was even a feature called Ubuntu-calendar, still available but apparently no longer functional, which would update your desktop with a new art photograph each month. That's art photography as in nudity, folks. Needless to say, this penchant set Ubuntu apart and had people talking about it as "LinuXXX" or "the porn distribution."

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9 more updates

9 updates available today ! some vim and smb stuff (see screenshot).

Installing and using wine

I need to ftp some files locally, so I use synaptic to install gftp as it's not present in the default Ubuntu install. It installed quickly and painlessly. However gftp crashes when I try to connect to my ftp server (implicit ssl enabled). I quickly realise that gftp doesn't do implicit ssl. No problem, I'll try flashfxp (a windows application) via wine.

I install wine via Synaptic, and once done I install an old version of flashfxp (FlashFXP_21_Setup-nohelp.exe to be precise) as I know that from version 3.x and up, there were issues with wine. I then install the app in wine via cli:-

anyweb@anyweb-laptop:~$ wine FlashFXP_21_Setup-nohelp.exe
wine: creating configuration directory '/home/anyweb/.wine'...

That starts the installation, and finally after lots' of next/next/next, it completes. Now to test it. I then launched Flashfxp via cli by doing this:-

anyweb@anyweb-laptop:~$ cd .wine/drive_c/Program Files$ cd FlashFXP/
anyweb@anyweb-laptop:~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/FlashFXP$ wine FlashFXP.exe

The important bit above is that I first cd (change directory) into the hidden wine directory where the FlashFxp executable was stored, and then I executed Flashfxp using wine by:-

wine FlashFXP.exe

It worked ! I then configured Flashfxp, and connected to the site, and it worked, implicit SSL no problem at all using Flasfxp in Ubuntu.

Migrate documents and settings

As part of my 30 days with Ubuntu, I wanted to test it on my sons' gaming computer (p4, 3ghz, 120hdd, 512mb ram, geforce 6800 video card, turtle beach audio card.) During the install, it prompted me for where to install, I chose a forgotten blank 10gb partition as it was unused,. and Ubuntu brought up a migrate documents and settings wizard of sorts, allowing me to copy the data from detected users on the Windows XP partition, cool.

This wizard was quite cool, but suffers from some lack of thought, because when you select more than one user you see the following:-

'Create a user to import the selected account into'

If you had selected 5 users like me, it wasn't clear whether all this info is going into ONE user account or each account separately (that you create). So in the end I highlighted each selected account, and created a new one underneath for copying the info across. One of those accounts was for me and I had to type username, login name, password. I did that and after the wizard was complete, you are brought to the 'who is going to use this computer' page, where I once again had to enter my own account info+password. It seemed a bit odd to me, but at least this is a step in the right direction for helping Windows users move to linux. Thumbs up to Ubuntu.

After the installation on my sons (shared) computer however, Firefox didn't have any of the Firefox bookmarks from Windows XP and it seems the Ubuntu migration wizard only copies bookmarks from Internet Explorer. Well that's a shame, nice tool otherwise. (note to Ubuntu developers:- how about giving the user a choice of which browser to copy the bookmarks from ?).

Grub triple boot

In addition to setting his box up, I noted that after the installation was complete and I saw the grub bootloader, it now listed Ubuntu, SLED10 and Winxp, nice, very nice. I tested booting into XP after all was done and it worked fine, I've yet to test SLED10 but I'm hopeful that it too is fine.

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fsck error

However, it wasn't all plain sailing, on the first boot after installation, I got an fsck error saying device /dev/sdb1 (not sure if that was it) hadn't been scanned for errors in 49710 days ! and it scanned and fixed..... then forced a reboot. I've no idea why this happened and i'm pretty sure that whatever it was referring to was definetly not around 49710 days ago... (136.5 years ago ?)

I logged in as me, then ran apt-get update, and apt-get upgrade from cli as root (sudo -i if you forget). One other suggestion for Ubuntu developers, if the installation has brought up the 'migrate documents and settings tool' and if there are more than one users created in that tool, wouldn't it be nice to have the XP like gui login where you can choose which user to login rather than having to type username and password ? Yes, I know this is easily configurable within Ubuntu, but my point was to ease the transition from XP to linux.

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Desktop Effects and Nvidia video drivers

Next I attempted to enable desktop effects and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ubuntu would install the nvidia 'proprietory' driver for me, if I chose to do so. Nice. Ok after installing the nvidia driver, Ubuntu wanted a reboot so I rebooted and then enabled desktop effects. XGL/compiz worked fine, however I note that I cannot set the resolution above 1024x768 which sucks as this is a 21inch monitor capable of 1600x1200@85hz.

No audio ?

In addition, I'll need to find out where the sound is, as it's totally missing (I believe it was working fine in SLED 10, but will need to boot into Suse to find out.) I'm including a screenshot of my sons Ubuntu desktop, with beryl, gdesklets, avant dock installed (gdesklets not in the screenshot) and to do all this took about 70 minutes from start (inserting Ubuntu cd) to where I am now.

>> Part VI (Days 26-30)

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(c) http://www.linux-noob.com 2007.
Please send corrections/suggestions/spelling mistakes to anyweb First draft: June 04, 2007.