RANT: Canonical Is NOT Replacing Gnome With Unity In Ubuntu

For people that insist on making distinctions between “operating system” and “window manager,” you’d think there’d be a distinction between “windowing system” and “desktop interface.” However there’s quite a few articles I’ve come across that are suggesting under no uncertain circumstances that Canonical is replacing Gnome with Unity.

Canonical is doing no such thing.

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BUG: Ubuntu 9.04 – OnDemand Doesn’t Scale CPU Speed

Along another one of those long, strung-out searches, I came across a problem I didn’t know I had. Or to be more precise, peculiarities I couldn’t put a finger on. Before Ubuntu 9.04, I had no problem running a bunch of gee-whiz compiz effects on my desktop. Before Ubuntu 9.04, Flash overdoses and crashes caused my CPU fan to spin up instead of slowing down my desktop. Before Ubuntu 9.04, I could see my CPU frequencies bouncing around.

That’s because Ubuntu 8.10 didn’t set the CPU usage threshold to 95% before bumping up the CPU frequency with the ondemand governor.

HOWTO: Compile Midori From Source In Ubuntu

UPDATE: If you want Midori but don’t care for the building, there’s now a Midori PPA for that.

You know you want to do it. You know your friends want to do it. You’ve heard stories of people that have done it. We’ve all wanted to do it — compile a program from source. One of the ultimate goals of any geek to own a computer, compiling a program from source just gives you that geek street cred you’ve always wanted. Now you can have it!

I’m going to show you how to get the Midori browser from source. Midori is a project is headed up by Christian Dywan over at TwoToasts.de. I don’t what has happened, but the version packaged up in the Ubuntu repositories is sorely out-of date at v0.0.18. Midori went 0.1.0 on October 2008.

Ubuntu And The GeForce 200 Series

As of this writing, I’m getting conflicting views on the nVidia GTS 200 series of cards and Jaunty. Canonical says the GTS 250 is supported in 9.04, which uses driver version 180.44. However, nVidia states that driver version 180.51 adds support for the GTS 250. And while nVidia gives you the 180.51 drivers if you specify a GTX 295 card, driver package 181.20 on the Windows side officially states support for that card. Ah, the bleeding edge.

In all probability, you can use 180.44 but your card will come up as an unkown nVidia card. Try the Canonical-approved driver installation first with sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180 (if you don’t already have the driver installed).

If that doesn’t work, use the Canonical Launchpad driver (180.53)

• Add deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main to /etc/apt/sources.list
• Issue the command sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 643dc6bd56580ceb1ab4a9f63b22ab97af1cdfa9
• Use sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade

If that doesn’t work, there’s always manual installation.

INFO: Npviewer.bin Process Can Slow Down Linux

I woke up this morning. The computer was still on. I move the mouse to wake up the screen. I get right to my wife’s desktop. “That’s not very nice of me,” I thought. “I never set the option to lock the screen with a password.” As I got to select a screen saver she might like, I noticed the screen savers took a little long to load and ran kinda jerky. I didn’t get far down the list before I said, “Screw it, this is good enough.” I logged her out of her session and logged back in to mine.

When my desktop came to, everything was jerky. I utilize all the fancy compiz effects a heck of a lot more than my wife does, who is content to stick with Ubuntu’s default, not-all-that-intensive settings. I opened up System Monitor’s Resources tab to find both cores of my CPU being pegged at 100%. I opened up the process viewer, only to find nothing out of line. When I selected View All Processes, I saw about 8 copies of npviewer.bin, all of benign size minus one at 125MB. All were consuming 7%-8% CPU time.

A quick look to the Ubuntu forums revealed that npviewer.bin is the Flash plugin, a known resource hog no matter what platform you’re on. It also told of a pretty simple way to stop the madness in one blow: sudo pkill npviewer.bin. CPU went back to fluctuating between 5% and 25% per core.

EeePC and Ubuntu 8.10

Here we go again. The last time I installed Ubuntu (or rather, Xubuntu) onto Asus’ EeePC was a bit of ordeal. This time around, things are….still an ordeal unfortunately.

First off, it seems people have a got a little fed up with Canonical and made their own kernel. (Behold the beauty of the GPL!) This kernel has all of the hardware modules the EeePC needs compiled in, including the modules for the wireless chipset (which are GPL and could be included for installation in the main distribution, but aren’t). Additionally, there’s an experimental lean version of the kernel that strips out modules that aren’t needed on the EeePC. Boot time is significantly improved, and overall performance also gets a slight boost with this kernel.

Additionally, there’s now an eee-control package available that allows you to easily change settings like WiFi on/off and performance settings from a system tray applet, and there’s been more poking around with SSD performance. The old script that was developed is no longer needed.

HOWTO: Get Rid Of Xubuntu’s Keyring Prompts

If you’re using wireless ethernet and Xubuntu, you might be pondering why the system keeps prompting you for the keyring password, especially if you’re using Ubuntu on other machines (which don’t exhibit this problem) and the keyring password is the same as the password you use to log in.

sudo apt-get install libpam-gnome-keyring

Why it’s installed in Ubuntu by default and not Xubuntu, I don’t know. I do remember earlier versions (Ubuntu 6) having this problem, but I can’t remember exactly what the solution was. But solving it in Ubuntu 7 and up and not bringing it over to Xubuntu just makes the brain hurt.

HOWTO: Run Your Own NTP Server When Your ISP Blocks Ports

This one racked my brain quite a bit, so I hope you enjoy the solution

The Problem

My problem is that I wanted to play nice with other people’s time servers. I have a small local network, and at any time I can have 5 devices (2 routers, up to 3 computers) that will want to synchronize their clocks with a time server. I could sick them all on one time server, but that might verge on me getting an IP ban. (NTP’s minimum of 64 seconds between queries / 5 machines = me hitting a server every 21 seconds on average.) I could pull from a pool, but every computer might “jitter” as they’re pulling their time from all over the country.

The Solution

The solution in this case is to set up your own NTP server that synchronizes with another server over the internet, and then have all the machines on your local network poll that machine. HOWEVER, if you’re using cable broadband, your ISP is most likely blocking anyone from accessing ports below 1024. I’m sure some DSL providers do so as well, but the rule of thumb goes that cable providers block access while DSL providers do not.

Well, that just throws a wrench in our gears, no doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to. There’s another solution if time synchronization isn’t overly critical.

EeePC Headaches With Ubuntu 8.04

UPDATE: Looking to install Ubuntu 8.10 on the EeePC? This article isn’t for you, anymore.

Looks like AppArmor isn’t the only thing causing a few headaches with the new release of Ubuntu. Seems that Ubuntu 8.04 also broke the eee-ubuntu-support script. Have no fear, though. The folks at eeeuser.com have come up with solutions.

The two biggest things I figured I’d post here: Fixing the screen resolution and fixing wifi.

Ubuntu 8.04 “Bug” With MySQL and AppArmor

This one drove me nuts FOR HOURS! I tried setting up my new LAMP server with the newly-released Ubuntu 8.04. When it came time to switch the configuration files so that Apache and MySQL would use /srv instead of /var/lib, Apache worked but MySQL did not.