I think I’ve about had it with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It’s a sad day when my windows box is more stable than my linux laptop. I also made the mistake of upgrading my work machine from Gutsy Gibbon to HH last week and I’ve been regretting it ever since. Three times today alone I had Nautilus crash on me without the ability to restart it. When I’d kill the existing Nautilus process a new one would start automatically and crash until I rebooted the box. Reboots like that are unacceptable to me on a linux machine.

I’ve been playing with Ubuntu since the Warty Warthog days and this is the first upgrade that has not been a significant improvement. That makes me want to not give up on Ubuntu completely and instead downgrade back to Gutsy until the issues get worked out. Then there’s the bandwagon part of me that wants to jump on the the PCLINUXOS bandwagon.

Tomorrow after work I’m going to install PCLINUXOS on my home laptop and if things go well I’ll consider putting it on my work machine too. PCLOS has it’s .roots in Mandrake… aka Redhat, but it’s a full fledge distro in its own right now and it uses APT. I can work with anything so long as I have APT.

Thanks to Hayden Simons for the photo

I had a little time to kill this morning while waiting for scripts to execute so I decided to undertake what I thought would be an arduous task of getting Photoshop CS2 running on my work machine’s install of Ubuntu 7.10. Turns out that with the latest version of wine it’s no problem at all. What got me thinking about this was the recent news that Google had funded some wine improvements for the specific purpose of getting Photoshop to run in Linux. All the instructions I’m about to lay out are available on the WineHQ site, but I’ve consolidated them here for ease.

First I recommend that you uninstall any existing installations of wine you might have. This may be problematic if you have existing applications running through wine, but I was working on a clean system. Once you’re wine free install the latest version of wine by adding the their repositories thusly:
wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine

As of the time of this writing that will install wine version 0.9.57

Next you’ll need to make sure that the times32 font is installed in wine for Photoshop to be able to run properly:
wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/corefonts/times32.exe
wine times32.exe

Now you’ll need your Photoshop CS2 CD. Locate the Setup.exe file on the CD and run it using:
wine Setup.exe

That’s it. Once setup has run through you should have a working copy of CS on your system. You can now run photoshop using the command:
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS2/Photoshop.exe

In order for the clone tool to work properly you’ll need to set the Movement Key in Ubuntu to “Super” aka the windows key. To do this open the systems window preferences by going to System->Preferences->Window

You also may want to increase Photoshops UI font size by going to (in CS2) Edit->Preferences->General, and change UI Font Size from Small to Medium.

When I first attempted to use Linux as a desktop operating system back in `96 or early `97  I remember it being a giant hassle to even get X-Windows to recognize my serial mouse. Flash forward a few years and everything is getting so easy that I almost miss the old days. At least back then you had to be a proper geek to run MS-Free.

If you have a long running EC2 instance running you’ve noticed the daily logwatch emails. These emails can be quite useful for tracking usage and activity. It’s best to get those sent to your primary email address so you can see them as soon as they’re sent. Here’s how to make that happen.

When logged in as root:
cp /etc/aliases /etc/~aliases
vi /etc/aliases
The first command just makes a backup copy of the aliases file which is always wise. The second command opens the aliases file for editing using the vi editor (you can use whichever editor you feel most comfortable with as long as it’s installed on your EC2 system).

The last 2 line in the aliases file should look like this:
# Person who should get root's mail
#root: marc
Uncomment the last line and replace “marc” with your email address:
# Person who should get root's mail
root: you@yourdomain.com

Then you just need to tell the system that aliases have been updated by running:
newaliases

That should be it. You can test it if you like, but it worked immediately for me.

Also commas are important

This was supposed to be my triumphant trillion dollar post but I’m delaying it for this “Why I shouldn’t have gone to work yesterday” post. Things started with my discovery that an errant comma had cause all 140 active MLS in our system to not run over night. So instead for migrating Palm Beach Regional over to using S3 I spent the day baby sitting MLS data. The sever tends to freak out when all 140 MLSs need to be processed all at once.

All that wasn’t so bad. It ruined my day day work wise, but I could deal with it.That afternoon I was cleaning up my Kubuntu install trying to figure out my flash had started crashing firefox a week before. I was sorting the my dpkg -l kist and decided to sudo apt-get remove fontconfig and then just defaulted through the confirmation messages. I can only blame this on bad mood and lack of sleep, because I really know better. The message that I didn’t read that I should have said something along the lines of:

This package is required to run x-windows. As long as I’m removing it to you want be to remove every piece of software associated with graphical user interfaces?

What I really wanted to remove was fontconfig-config which I would have known if I had read the descriptions or the confirmation messages. KDE and Pidgin stayed active because they were in RAM but that was about all my system was able to do. Then there was the mad rush to backup my home directory and try to recover. I decided that since Linux installs so quickly I’d just reinstall and on top of that I decided to install Ubuntu. I went to a machine that still had software on it and downloaded Ubuntu 7.10 and burned it to a disk. Within half an hour I was back up and running again, but I still have a lot of software to install and configure to get back to where I was.

I made the decision to go with Ubuntu over Kubuntu this time for a number of reasons, but what it really comes down to is that I don’t think KDE is quite as solid an environment as GNOME. As much as I like how super customizable KDE is it just always seemed a little wobbly under the hood. Plus the majority of the linux desktop support on the internet seems geared specifically toward Ubuntu and GNOME. I do plan to at least try to bring over some of the superior KDE apps though. I’m not sure I can go back to a life without Konsole. I know it sounds dumb to be so devoted to a terminal emulator, but Konsole is simple where it should be simple and feature full where it counts.