Had I done a little research beforehand, I’d have discovered this in advance. The release notes mention two separate issues: one with USB, and the other with the screen flickering. Indeed, I experienced the screen flickering, which was enough (in my opinion) to render this version unusable. Hopefully that’ll be fixed soon.

I was impressed with the ease of installing Karmic Koala, though.The installer’s user interface gets easier to navigate with each release of Ubuntu. I was pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of specifying how to modify existing partitions in order to make space for Ubuntu. By default, that screen offered to shrink my single existing partition to half its size in order to make space for a partition for Ubuntu. I simply manipulated a slider bar to change the sizes allocated to each of the partitions, and the installer took care of the rest. The installer happily shrunk the size of the Windows partition, created a new partition for Karmic and installed it there, and then set up the netbook so that it would dual-boot to either Karmic (the default) or Windows. It did take me a while to change the default OS–Ubuntu now uses Grub 2, which does things a bit differently than Grub–but I managed to figure it out.

If not for the two issues mentioned above, I think my initial user experience would have been mostly positive. The Netbook Remix has a different user interface than the normal Ubuntu desktop, and that might take some getting used to, but it was easy to navigate. In the Remix, the entire desktop is a menu. Categories are listed on the left side of the screen, and the right side shows large icons for each item in the category. Given that most netbook users will do little more than surf the web and check email, this is probably okay. It didn’t appear that there was any easy way to switch back to a classic Ubuntu desktop (but I could be wrong on this).

When you select an application from the menu, it opens in full-screen mode. Icons for each open application are shown in the launcher bar at the top of the screen so you can quickly switch from one to the next. Given the size of most netbook displays, this isn’t a bad approach. I didn’t see any evidence of the ability to have multiple desktops, but I could have missed something somewhere.

I didn’t really explore the choice of applications included with the netbook remix, but there probably aren’t any surprises there if you’re a seasoned Ubuntu user. Firefox is the web browser of choice, of course, and Evolution is the choice for email (though I’d probably replace it with Thunderbird, but that’s just me). Rhythmbox is the media player, and Empathy is used for IM. Open Office is included, t0o, of course. Supposedly, the netbook remix includes the necessary (free and legal) codecs for various media formats, so you don’t have to chase those down for yourself.

The user interface looks pretty polished–more so than previous releases. In some ways it looks almost a little cartoonish, but in a good way. Canonical definitely applied some resources to making the icons and graphics look good. I’ve always felt that user interface elements in Ubuntu were a little on the large side (compared to Windows XP, anyway), but you get used to it. It’s probably even an advantage on a netbook.

Getting connected to my wireless network was a no-brainer, although using the function key to enable and disable the wireless did not work consistently–Karmic seemed to think that wireless should be enabled when I’d tried to disable it, and vice versa. However, the function keys for changing volume and enabling/disabling the touchpad (the touchpad worked flawlessly, too) seemed okay. I couldn’t find any way of turning on the built-in webcam (its function key was ignored), and the function key for sleep also had no effect. Neither did the “suspend” and “hibernate” selections from the shutdown menu, or closing the lid of the netbook. The function key for changing power settings (F10) was also ignored (but Karmic did recognize when I unplugged the netbook). Finally, Karmic didn’t seem to recognize the existence of the built-in microphone.

I suspect that many of these issues can be fixed by tracking down the right drivers and changing some settings, but I haven’t investigated any of this. One place to start would be the forum at InsanelyWind. I’m sure there’s some info in the Ubuntu forums, as well. If I find some fixes, I’ll post them on my blog. In the mean time, I’ll have to consider Karmic on my netbook as an unfinished work.

Now, this was by no means an exhaustive test drive. All I really did was to boot into Ubuntu and delete the files that Windows had troubles with. But this version had a lot of polish to it. Graphically, it was very appealing, reminding me of the jump from Windows ME to Windows XP. It booted much more quickly from the CD than I’d ever experienced before–it was ready to rock much more quickly than I expected. It even recognized my Linksys WUSB54G (v1) wireless adapter, and I was able to easily connect to my WPA-protected wireless network–a big issue in previous versions, let me tell you.

I just might have to slap this on my netbook to give it a whirl, now that I’ve used Clonezilla to clone its hard drive so I can easily restore it to Windows. There’s even a Netbook Remix offered for Ubuntu 9.10–I’ll probably try that out first on my MSI Wind U100 netbook. Stay tuned for a report.

1) I got my iPod Nano, and

2) Ubuntu 9.04 was released.

My Nano (the 4th generation, not the 5th that was just announced) really requires the iTunes software in order to get the full experience, and iTunes doesn’t run in Linux (that I’m aware of, anyway). And my Nano has really grown on me, and I use it quite a bit (I even listen to podcasts downloaded from the iTunes store), so I always needed to boot to Windows when I wanted to update its contents.

About the same time that I bought my iPod, Ubuntu released version 9.04. So, I dutifully allowed my installation of Ubuntu to upgrade itself to 9.04. And my installation of Ubuntu dutifully became inoperative. No big deal, I figured–I’d installed Ubuntu many times, so I just downloaded the ISO for 9.04 and tried to do a clean installation.

The install CD would not even boot.

Perhaps it’s not surprising to you that this experience left me less than pleased. I reverted to Ubuntu 8.10, but that was pretty-much the last time I booted to Ubuntu.

Yesterday, realizing that I hadn’t run Ubuntu in ages, I removed it from my PC and reclaimed the disk space for Windows. After all, my iTunes library is gonna need it!

I did learn one interesting thing. In the process of removing Ubuntu, you need to restore the master boot record (MBR) to how it was before Ubuntu installed GRUB and the whole dual-boot thing. This is fairly easy to do–you just boot using your Windows XP CD, launch the Recovery Console, and run the “fixmbr” command. Unfortunately, for some reason my Windows XP install CD would simply hang when I tried to boot from it (perhaps for the same reason that I couldn’t boot from the Ubuntu 9.04 CD? I don’t think so–I was able to boot just fine from the Ubuntu 8.10 CD).

The interesting thing is that you can install the Recovery Console to your hard disk. This allows you to boot to the Recovery Console without using the Windows XP instal CD, and you can then run fixmbr, chkdsk, and a bunch of other useful things you can’t run normally in Windows. (If your XP setup disk is too far out of date service-pack-wise, Windows may tell you so and refuse to install the recovery console. If that happens to you, go here to see how to create an updated setup disk by slipstreaming the service packs onto your old setup disk.)

One other thought–I’ve found the GPartEd Live CD to be invaluable for manipulating partitions on my hard disks. Stick it in your hard drive and boot from it, and it loads a version of Linux and the GPartEd partition editor and allows you to manipulate your disk partitions (just like the commercial Partition Magic product). It handles NTFS partitions as well as the various Linux file systems, so you can use it to do all the things to your Windows installation that you can’t do directly in Windows (like resize and move partitions).

I previously mentioned that I had my WUSB54G v4 adapter connected to my computer while I was installing Intrepid, and that it came right up and connected me to my wireless network (after prompting for the WPA password) on first boot. So, I figured I’d try the same test using my WUSB54G v1 adapter as I installed Intrepid on my old IBM T23 notebook (a clean install, not an upgrade). No dice, though. Intrepid didn’t recognize the adapter after installation. I plugged in my WUSB54G v4 and rebooted, and that one worked fine, however.

I also tried rebooting with my WPC54G v2 adapter plugged in, but that didn’t work either. So, I reverted to my instructions for installing it using ndiswrapper, and now it works fine. Same for the WUSB54G v1–installing it using ndiswrapper makes it work just fine.

One hitch I ran into–I couldn’t find ndiswrapper in the repositories to install it! So I downloaded the .deb packages from the ubuntu website and installed them manually (you just double-click on the .deb file and the package installer takes care of the rest).

You may have noticed that my posts on how to make Linksys wireless adapters work in Ubuntu are by far the most popular in my blog. That’s probably because (1) Linksys wireless adapters are pretty popular, and (2) it’s non-intuitive (at least for non-linux geeks) to get them working.

Well, no more. Yesterday I added Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex to my stable of OS installations on my computer, and I’m happy to report that my WUSB54G (v4) adapter worked out-of-the-box (even using WPA encryption)! I had simply left the wireless adapter connected during the installation process (I did a clean install, not an upgrade). Upon first logging in after installing Intrepid, it notified me that there were wireless networks to connect to, and I selected my own. Then it prompted me for my WPA password, and I was connected. Nice!

I don’t have any data yet on v1 of the adapter. I tried booting with the v1 adapter connected, but Intrepid never appeared to recognize it. I was immediately in business when I hot-swapped it for my v4 adapter, though. It may be that the v1 adapter will work fine if it’s connected to the computer when Intrepid is installed. I’ll have to test that on my notebook. (In case you didn’t know, the v1 adapter uses a different chipset and driver that the v4 adapter.)

My initial impressions of Intrepid are very favorable. Whereas I noticed some wonkiness with Hardy (like Firefox closing for no reason, and my SD card reader not working), Intrepid is very well-behaved so far. Compiz is enabled by default, at least for me, and provides some interesting visual effects. I’ll need to explore Compiz further to see what really useful stuff it can do.

In case you’re interested, my computer currently can boot XP, Gutsy, Hardy, or Intrepid. I installed GRUB to a separate partition and use it to boot each operating system. I have an NTFS partition that I share between all OS’s (it’s “My Documents” in XP and “/home/dave/Documents” in Ubuntu), and I share my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles among all the OS’s, too. Thus, no matter which OS I’m using, I have access to all my documents as well as my email and my browser settings. Firefox tends to pop up a little extra information the first time I run it after switching to a different OS (like the “Welcome to Firefox” page you usually see when you run it for the first time, and also a window showing me the add-ons that have been installed), and that’s a mite annoying, but everything else works just fine.

Well, now I’m pleased to report that I have my Linksys adapter working with Hardy Heron using the same procedure that I followed for getting it to work with Gutsy Gibbon.

I followed these instructions once again (note that I have only tested these for v4 of the adapter in Hardy). Note that when I executed step 9 of the instructions (“sudo ndiswrapper -m”), I got the following output:

adding “alias wlan0 ndiswrapper” to /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper …

****************************************************
*
* The update-modules command is deprecated and should not be used!
*
****************************************************

So, I ran “sudo depmod -a” after that, and then everything worked fine after I rebooted (in step 11). Note that I skipped step 10 and everything still seemed to work fine (either in roaming mode or with roaming mode disabled and a static IP specified). I have WPA Personal encryption enabled and it works fine.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why this didn’t work when I tried it using Hardy Heron beta. Maybe I screwed it up the first time.

In the mean time, my experiment with the Hardy Heron beta has ended. I’ll pick it up again at a later time, perhaps when it’s released in final form.

• What’s the best way to partition the system?
• Can I use a single /home partition and just share it with every Linux distro I install?
• How can I easily share files between WinXP and Linux?

There’s about a billion different ways to set up a system like that, and about a billion web sites that give snippets of information on what’s best and how to do it. After doing some reading for the past few days, I attempted to simulate a setup like this using my old notebook (that already dual-boots WinXP Home and Ubuntu 7.10).

Initially, my notebook had two primary partitions (one for WinXP and one for Ubuntu) and an extended partition containing a single logical partition (the swap partition). I wanted to change this to create two additional partitions. First, I wanted a separate NTFS partition that I could use for storing all my user-generated files (like the stuff that you’d store in My Documents in Windows, or in ~/Documents in Ubuntu). This was not a separate /home partition–just a separate partition for documents.

(Aside: Ubuntu 7.10 can read and write to NTFS partitions out-of-the-box. Earlier versions of Ubuntu cannot. If you’re running an earlier version, you’ll want to use FAT32 for your shared partition instead of NTFS.)

The other additional partition that I wanted to create was a small partition dedicated to GRUB, the boot loader used by Ubuntu (and many other flavors of Linux). It turns out that putting GRUB in its own partition makes it much easier to add and remove Linux distros on your system, if you’re in to that kind of thing.

There’s a nice overview of disk partitioning on the Illustrated Dual Boot HomePage, and there’s also a nice section on the hows and whys of creating and using a separate GRUB partition. In fact, I followed those instructions pretty-much verbatim to create my own GRUB partition.

WARNING: when you start dorking around with existing partitions, you run the risk of screwing things up and losing data. Do a backup before you embark on an experiment like this one.

I used the GParted Live CD in order to do all the partitioning work. You simply boot your system from that CD, and the GParted application is started for you. GParted allows you to create, delete, move, resize, and format partitions to your heart’s content. Rather than try to create a GParted tutorial here, I’ll let you discover one of the many sites that’ll walk you through using GParted. I’ll just say here that I used GParted to shrink the primary WinXP NTFS partition and the primary Ubuntu ext3 partition, to create a separate ext2 primary partition (only a few megabytes in size) for GRUB, and to expand the extended partition to fill the remaining space. I also created a new logical NTFS partition within the extended partition for holding my files to be shared between WinXP and Ubuntu.

Once I was finished with all the partitioning gymnastics, I rebooted. You really won’t notice many changes when you reboot, at least initially. In WinXP, you’ll see that there’s a new drive available (the logical NTFS partition I created for holding my documents), but that’s about it. The next step for me was to install GRUB to its newly-created partition, and I simply followed the instructions for doing so that I mentioned above.

A couple of test reboots later and I had convinced myself that the machine was indeed booting using the contents of the GRUB partition. Interestingly, you can set up the boot menu (menu.lst) a number of different ways. The coolest way, at least in my book, is to have the main GRUB menu.lst refer to the menu.lst files on the individual linux partitions. It’s all covered in the links I mentioned above.

The final step for me was to see if I could get WinXP and Ubuntu to both look at (and share) the same documents folder. The first thing to do was to boot WinXP and tell it to change the location of the My Documents special folder. You may know that the My Documents folder in Windows is actually a link to a folder under /Documents and Settings/username/My Documents. But you can tell Windows to change where the folder is physically located, simply by right-clicking on the My Documents folder that appears at the top of the Windows Explorer window and then clicking the Move button. I moved mine to the root of the second NTFS partition that I created (which Windows recognizes as the E: drive, in my case). In case my explanation isn’t clear, here’s the straight poop from Microsoft. My goal was simply to use the root of E: as the My Documents folder, so that (a) that’s where Windows would want to store things by default, and (b) I could then mount that partition in Linux as a folder under /home/dave named /home/dave/Documents.

Once I got the My Documents folder moved in Windows, it was back to Ubuntu and some learning about the mount command. It’s fairly simple to do. The partition that Windows calls E: is known on the Ubuntu side as /dev/sda6 (this, of course, will vary from system to system depending on how many partitions are present, what order they were created in, and what type of devices they are). I wanted /dev/sda6 to be mounted such that the contents would appear to be located in folder /home/dave/Documents (or simply ~/Documents, for short). So here’s the basic mount command (in Ubuntu 7.10) to do that:

sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sda6 /home/dave/Documents/

After I typed that, I was able to access files on that partition. Cool.

But I noticed a couple of things. First, I wasn’t the owner of the files. Second, files that shouldn’t have been executable were being considered by Linux as executable. Both of these issues can be solved by specifying additional parameters for the mount command. I’ll get to that in a second.

The other issue to deal with was to figure out how to get the partition to be mounted automatically when I booted. That turned out to be reasonably easy–you simply edit the /etc/fstab file and add an entry that causes the partition to be mounted where you want it. In my case, I ended up adding a line to the end of that file that looks like this:

/dev/sda6 /home/dave/Documents/ ntfs users, auto,rw,uid=1000,gid=0,dmask=000,fmask=111

You can see exactly what all this means by looking at the man page for mount, but here are some highlights.

/dev/sda6 is the device we’re mounting, of course. The location that it’s being mounted to is /home/dave/Documents. It’s an ntfs volume and we want it to be mountable by all users, and auto mounted at boot time. The rw option means that we want the partition to be readable and writeable. The uid and gid options set the user and group who own the partition. In this case, the ID for my username (dave) is 1000 (I saw this by opening the Users and Groups manager in Ubuntu–the ID is shown for each user and group). Finally, dmask and fmask set the permissions for directories and files, respectively. They do it with a mask that’s the inverse of what you’d type for chmod, though. A dmask of 000 is the same as chmod 777, and an fmask of 111 is the same as a chmod of 666, if that makes any sense. The final result is that the partition gets mounted automatically at boot time to /home/dave/Documents as an ntfs volume with me as the owner and permissions that allow me to read and write the files but not execute them.

The upshot is that everything that appears in My Documents in WinXP also appears in ~/Documents in Ubuntu.

So there you have it (albeit in a nutshell). This was simply a proof-of-principle exercise for me, as I’ll be doing this again once my new hard drive arrives for the system my son gave me as a hand-me-d0wn. I’ll try to provide a more detailed blow-by-blow when I do this for keeps.

Ubuntu isn’t that much better than Windows XP. My installation of Windows XP was always extremely stable, and I haven’t found Ubuntu to be superior in that regard. I made the switch more for philosophical reasons than anything. I was having a big problem envisioning myself running Windows Vista in the future. Vista contains nothing that I find compels me to want to upgrade, and seems to have been created mainly as a vehicle to generate sales for Microsoft. Not that there’s anything wrong with MS trying to make money, but in my opinion there’s little added value. Was I running an operating system or a marketing tool? So I decided to make the switch to Ubuntu.

First, let me say that I’m the kind of guy who can be entertained by learning a new OS. Ubuntu isn’t completely new to me–I’ve worked with Unix in the past, and the command-line stuff is mainly the same. But let’s not give people the impression that their world will be all beer and skittles after they make the switch. I’ve had to do a fair amount of research and fiddling in order to get things working to my likes. First, network adapters are *still* not a no-brainer. I did a fair amount of work to get my wireless adapters working using WPA encryption and static IP addresses. And I’m not the only one who had troubles with networking–I posted a “how-to” here on my blog, and that post has been by far the most popular. Like to watch DVDs and video on the web? Be prepared to surf the web to figure out how to install the necessary software–it doesn’t come with Ubuntu. Adobe Reader? Yeah, there’s a replacement for it in Ubuntu, but I don’t like it as much. You can install Adobe Reader, but prepare to surf the web to learn which repository to add to your software sources in order to install it. Got some specialized hardware? I was happy that I could use my Rigblaster Plug & Play with my Ubuntu system. In order to make my webcam work, though, I had to download source code and compile it. No big deal, as long as the documentation is complete enough. But if the instructions are crappy, newbies especially will have issues.

There is a ton of software available for linux, and it’s usually pretty easy to install. The good news? It’s practically all free. The bad news? It’s practically all free. It’s nice to get something for nothing, but often you get, well, nothing for nothing. The free software that’s available runs the gamut from excellent and well-supported to excellent and not documented to crappy and not documented. Linux has a reputation for reliability and stability, but much of the software written for linux is written poorly and works poorly. Much of the software has user interfaces that are really bad. And I still haven’t found a general-purpose logger that I like.

I may sound unhappy with Ubuntu, but that’s not true. I like Ubuntu. For the most part, I can get it to do what I want. But I wanted to temper the Ubuntumania with a little dose of reality. As with any operating system, expect a learning curve, and expect a little frustration from time to time. I run only Ubuntu on my desktop system, but on my notebook I can dual-boot to either Ubuntu or Windows XP. In addition, you can install and run VirtualBox in Ubuntu and that will allow you to set up a virtual machine within Ubuntu so you can run Windows (or another linux distro) if you’d like. That’s pretty cool.

For those of you who’d like to give Ubuntu a whirl, you can download a Live CD for Ubuntu from www.ubuntu.com. You can boot from this CD and run Ubuntu without actually installing it (leaving your Windows installation intact and untouched). It’s slower this way, of course, but you can at least get a taste for it. Maybe you’ll be hooked. Maybe you’ll even become Ubuntumanic…

It’s a simple matter to run a setup program under Wine. Assuming you’ve installed Wine, you can simply right-click the executable and select “Open with Wine Windows Emulator” from its context menu. This is what I did with the installer for XMLog. Unfortunately, toward the end of the setup, I got a message from the installer saying that it couldn’t register a DLL named scrrun.dll. So, I tried to register it manually by going to Wine’s /windows/system32 directory (you’ll find it in ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 directory), opening up a terminal window, and typing “wine regsvr32 scrrun.dll”. Regsvr32 reported to me that it couldn’t find mfc42.dll, which scrrun.dll depended upon. So, I found a copy of that dll (it’s a standard dll in almost any Windows installation) and copied it to the same directory, and then retried registering the scrrun.dll file. This time it worked! I reran the XMLog setup program and it installed correctly.

XMLog seems to work fine under Wine–I was able to open old logs, add new entries, export entries, and even use tqsl to sign the exported file for submission to Logbook of the World. The only problem I found was that XMLog seems to only launch successfully every other time you try to launch it. I’d love to fix this problem but so far don’t have any ideas. In the mean time, I guess I can live with that issue.