Rebel Zero (dot com)

Least I Could Do made me laugh. It reminded me about how much of a cult-following Steve Jobs has been able to create through Apple and its line of gotta-have-devices. People will be clamoring for the iPad when it officially releases on April 3, much like the past iPhones.
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It’s been about three weeks since the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx Alpha 3 isos were released. Since then I’ve been seeding the desktop CDs, along with the Alternate i386 shortly afterwards, and have uploaded over 30GB worth of bandwidth racking up about 46 copies.

lucid-desktop-i386.iso
done 685.9 MB Rate: 36.8 / 0.0 KB Uploaded: 15212.3 MB [ I R: 22.18]

lucid-alternate-i386.iso
done 651.7 MB Rate: 0.4 / 0.0 KB Uploaded: 3580.3 MB [ I R: 5.49]

lucid-desktop-amd64.iso
done 689.0 MB Rate: 5.3 / 0.0 KB Uploaded: 12409.9 MB [ I R: 18.01]

Those numbers should be much more impressive with Beta 1 due out tomorrow.

There’s been a lot of debate between users over the relocation of the title bar buttons with the new theme for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS due out in April.

During the alpha stages of Lucid’s development, a major update to Ubuntu’s theme was introduced which went far and away from the familiar brown. With that, the designers decided to also incorporate a new title bar button layout that flopped the minimize, maximize, and close buttons from the right corner to the left corner. Understandably, chaos ensued as many users offered lots of reasons why this was a horrible design change. But the term “many” should not be confused with “most” as there are plenty more users who aren’t that affected by it, myself included.

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With the last batch of updates, plymouth broke with the following error during start-up:

mountall: error while loading shared libraries: libplybootclient.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
init: mountall main process (265) terminated with status 127

It’s getting some attention at Ubuntu Forums here and here. There’s also a bug report already filed with a fix on the way.

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So it’s been about a week since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx reached the Alpha 3 stage. With it comes what I can only describe as the most stable pre-release of Ubuntu throughout its entire schedule that I’ve ever had the pleasure to use. I don’t have it on a physical machine, yet, but in a VirtualBox environment where, contrary to its limited resources, it seems much faster, especially in terms of boot times, than the host’s 9.10 Karmic installation.

I’ve dedicated some home bandwidth to the desktop torrents. As you can see from my rtorrent’s current stats below, there’s been plenty of demand for them throughout these past seven days since Alpha 3 was released.

lucid-desktop-amd64.iso
done 689.0 MB Rate: 1.4 / 0.0 KB Uploaded: 6185.9 MB [ I R: 8.98]

lucid-desktop-i386.iso
done 685.9 MB Rate: 6.6 / 0.0 KB Uploaded: 6937.8 MB [ I R: 10.11]

According to Lucid’s release schedule, we can expect another two weeks of testing before the first of two Beta releases come out on March 18. Three weeks later will be the Beta 2, followed by a Release Candidate two weeks after that, and finally the official release on April 29.

With the release of Lucid, we should also be seeing the death of 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. User will be urged to upgrade to at least 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope by then to continue receiving package updates and security fixes.

So, I wanted to watch some video on an external monitor connected to my Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala laptop, but everytime I closed the laptop’s lid, the external monitor would turn off. This is when I noticed the option of Do nothing in Power Management was noticeably absent.
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Ever since the Beta days of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, I had been wondering why certain icons were no longer visible. Most notably were the search engine icon’s from Firefox’s search toolbar and the System menu icons.
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MatBoy: mhh, 9.10 upgrade on a eeepc 901 is not that easy with ssd
MatBoy: where does the 9.10 upgrade needs 1,5GB space ?
MatBoy: in /tmp ?
MatBoy: someone running 9.10 on a eeepc 901 with ssd ?
MatBoy: mhh, I can’t upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10… space issue of 1,5GB it says
MatBoy: LOL I removed my /home because I wanted to gpart the drives… which is ofcourse seperated :)
MatBoy: my install is on the 4GB part, so that might be too small by default…. I’m wondering if I move /tmp to the second drive if it works
MatBoy: I think I need a new install :(

Upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic through the Update Manager presented an interesting challenge on my Asus Eee PC 701. Since my / partition was only 4GB in size, there wasn’t enough room to download all of the necessary packages. Since there was no reason, or space, to put /var onto its own partition, the upgrade process was reliant on what the / partition contained. Fortunately, the Linux file system is very versatile making this more of an annoyance than a show-stopper.
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Gnome used to allow the user to change system sounds to their own liking. The System > Preferences > Sound menu option used to show a breakdown of the specific events with the option to choose whichever supported file the user wanted. Personally, I always opted to replace the login sound with MGM’s roaring lion.

With the new functionality introduced with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, there’s no simple way to do this without a bit of hacking at the command line, or through a root nautilus window if one feels inclined.
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