I am told that Ubuntu Netbook Remix works well on the A110 and that it has a fairly decent user interface. With this in mind, I set myself to obtaining a copy. Just under 1GB later, I had the USB image and wanted to try it out. Problem is, VMware Workstation can’t boot from USB devices and I was too lazy to make a USB device anyway. With a little help from Google, and http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/2009/08/ubuntu-netbook-remix-in-vmware.html, I set about turning the USB image into an ISO. This is fairly easy and is detailed below.

Firstly, the USB .img file is just a file system dump, so it can be mounted fairly easily:

# mount -o loop -t vfat ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
/some/mount/point/

Then, it was a simple case of copying and editing the files. The image is almost suitable for CD, except that it needs isolinux rather than syslinux. This I knew from installing Ubuntu server on a machine without a CD drive last year, then I was going the other way. So:

$ mv syslinux isolinux
$ mv isolinux/syslinux.cfg isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Simple as can be. The final stage is just bundling it all up into a CD image:

$ mkisofs -o ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.iso -r -J -l \
-V "Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.04 i386" -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table /path/to/unr/files/

And we are done. UNR itself worked fairly well under Workstation and has a good user interface. I am definitely planning on installing it onto my netbook when it arrives!

However, despite the fact that Xubuntu had numerous new features – most of which can be found in other versions of Ubuntu, I have really grown tired of the minimalist look. Having seen KDE 4 in action on another Kubuntu 8.10 installation, I thought that I would migrate. Now they say that this should be as simple as installing the kubuntu-desktop package, but I disagree. What follows is a guide to switching between the ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop and xubuntu-desktop packages (and any others such as Gobuntu).

Many sources on the Internet will suggest that to get Kubuntu from Xubuntu, you just need to install the kubuntu-desktop package – but I will contest that this is simply not enough. To do this properly, I feel that you must use Aptitude, as apt-get (and graphical based managers such as Synaptic and Adept) are just not good enough.

This article assumes that you can use Aptitude already, and will just fly though the requirements for removing (x|k)ubuntu-desktop and installing (x|k)ubuntu-desktop. First navigate to the meta-package you are migrating from – in my case xubuntu-desktop and remove it (press ‘-’).  This will not, however, remove any of the packages on which it depends. As many of these are Xubuntu specific we wish to remove them as well. So next navigate down the list of Depends on and Recommends packages and remove those too. (It suffices to press ‘-’ on the line which says “Depends”.) This will break a lot of packages, this is expected.

Then navigate to the meta-package you wish to install (in my case kubuntu-desktop) and install it (’+'). You will find that this will fix many of the the broken packages, but not all. Pressing ‘e’ will bring up the Resolver and you will need to work through these one at a time. In many cases this equates to removing the associated -data package, or not removing the package at all. I found that the built in resolver was not helpful with this many broken packages. This process took roughly 20 mins. Thereafter, pressing ‘g’ twice removes the old and installs the new. As an aside, however, I recommend running Aptitude again to remove other unnecessary packages. You may also wish to purge the config files of those packages you are not using. A reboot later and I had Kubuntu 8.10 working perfectly, and what a delight it seems to be…

Well, its been six months since the Release of Ubuntu 8.04 and its almost time for us to say goodbye to the Heron which has been with us for such a smattering of time. It will continue to live on in the Ubuntu servers…

Get ready to welcome the Intrepid Ibex, as it makes its appearance on October 30th.

So, with the countdown edging ever closer, what can we expect from 8.10? The official Technical Overview of the Beta release indicates that we can expect GNOME 2.24 (which is unsurprising as Ubuntu’s releases track the GNOME releases) which includes a few new features. We can also expect the 2.6.27 release of the Linux kernel, and X.Org 7.4. On the feature side we now get support for an encrypted private directory, and guest sessions (don’t those go hand in hand, so well).

That’s just some of the new features, but I cant help thinking that another new X.Org and the new Network Manager will make Ubuntu even easier and more likely to break.

Conceptually, and practically, it works pretty well, but its layout engine does not always produce something visually appealing, or simple. It tool a wile to discover how to force it to draw nodes in a specific order. It turns out that you connect them with an edge. Sounds silly to add unwanted edges, but you can tell Grahviz that these nodes are invisible. This allows the problem to be solved.

In practice, it still takes forever to do, as it really is a trial and error process. Despite this, it still produces very nice graphics. Unfortunately it cant produce EPS out of the box, but it will create PostScript. If you use the “ps” type (rather than the “ps2″ type) it is a simple matter of running ps2epsi on it.

By reading the manual, it was clear that CVS can run in server mode – also known as pserver, but it is a single binary. After spending some time browsing the Internet, I understood that cvsd is simply a chroot wrapper to cvs which attempts to overcome the security flaws in CVS.

This is the process I took to installing a working pserver:

$ sudo apt-get install cvs cvsd

This eventually prompts you to choose which repositories you want to configure cvsd for. This wasn’t really helpful as dpkg configuration explained that this was far from all the config required to set up a repository. Because of this, I didn’t change the defaults at this stage.

By default, cvsd is configured to store its repositories in /var/lib/cvsd/ which is a default I stuck with. You can change this in the cvsd config file (more later) but then you have to rebuild the cvsd root as it stores a full, yet minimal, environment in that folder for use as a chroot. The default method of creating a repository is to:

$ sudo mkdir /var/lib/cvsd/reponame

$ sudo chown cvsd:cvsd /var/lib/cvsd/reponame

$ sudo -u cvsd cvs -d /var/lib/cvsd/reponame init

This will setup a functioning CVSROOT in /var/lib/cvsd/reponame/ but the pserver is not yet configured to make use of it. You could have configured cvsd to permit access to the repository when dpkg prompted you on install, but if you didn’t or need to add more at a later stage, you can edit the cvsd config file at /etc/cvsd/cvsd.conf and add the following to it:

Repos /reponame

This is relative to the RootJail path (default is /var/lib/cvsd, as I said before). The RootJail property can also be edited in this config file. You can have as many Repos lines as needed for your sever.

This is all that is required to get a basic pserver going, but for security considerations, I would suggest you at least password protect any write access to it. This can be done by following the classical methods for configuring a pserver, but cvsd also provides a utility to perform this.

$ sudo -u cvsd cvsd-passwd +username

This command will prompt you for a password. Similarly, you can use -username to remove a username. If a username already exists, this utility will change the password of the existing user.

For easy backup purposes, I decided to install all my repositories in a single folder inside the /var/lib/cvsd/ folder, soas to easily differentiate them from the chroot environment which is setup.

If you decided to move the RootJail, or if you upgrade cvs, you need to rebuild the cvsd root. This is done by performing the following command:

$ sudo cvsd-buildroot /path/to/root

This has to be performed every time cvs is updated as it copies the cvs binary into the fake root.

Remember that to give your pserver access to the outside world, you will need to permit TCP port 2401 to be accessible – unless you change it in the config. Be warned of the security implications of doing so.

There may be a better method doing this, but it works for me .