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Ubuntu 9.10

Fri, 10/30/2009 - 12:03 — will.ballantyne

Ubuntu 9.10 has come out and is getting installed on one of my systems.   So far the installation has gone well.  The new home encryption stuff is very nicely automated, at least when using the alternate CD.

Custom Steps

Install using Synaptic package manager

Make sure to use the "Mark packages by task" option in the Edit menu when applicable (e.g. if installing MythTV etc).  It will save a lot of time.

  • thunderbird - preferred email client
  • nfs-common - for the nfs client
  • emerald - window decorations
  • cairo-dock - provides the nice zooming app selection dock
  • inkscape - scalable vector graphics
  • compiz - for the desktop effects
  • wings3d - a simple yet powerful 3d modelling and rendering package
  • mplayer - for video playback
  • googleearth package - makes a package for google-earth.  Google Earth is good for maps, satellite images, etc.  To make the package run the script after installation: make-googleearth-package
  • xvnc4viewer - for remote desktops.  Note communication is not encrypted so only use in isolated networks or through tunnels.
  • wireshark - for network analyzing
  • eclipse - for development

Other things to install

  • Skype - for phone
  • VMware - for virtual machines
  • netbeans - for more development.  Found some issues with the install through aptitude, so installing directly from netbeans.org

Issues

  • Doing an rsync with some files that have quite long names has resulted in 'File name too long' errors.  Some of those are very long, but they worked with previous versions of Ubuntu. Need to dig deeper to determine what is causing the problem.... ah, it seems to be a known limitation of file system encryption: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ecryptfs/+bug/344878... quite an irritating bug when dealing with a lot of files that had long file names.
  • Changing ownership of a large number of files seems to take a very long time on the encrypted home file systems.
  • Backing up of the home folder now looks slightly trickier.  The encrypted content seems to be stored in the /home/.ecryptfs ... so would need to back up this...how would the content be decrypted when loaded on another system for partial restores?
  • Trying to use an old .mozilla folder (from the LTS distro) results in firefox being inoperable, it silently fails.  Looks like bookmarks et all will need to be imported manually.
  • The nvidia display configuration tool can no longer parse the xorg.conf file, so changing to twinview no longer works.  Luckily using my old xorg.conf (from LTS) works.
  • The option to remove the names from the login screen has been removed.  Use the following command instead:  sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true
  • Sometimes a command will not get recorded into the history.  This issue seems a little random - on rare occasion a command will not get recorded and is not available using the up-arrow or history command, but the same command in the same session will get recorded if tried again.
  • du -s * sometimes does not show the correct space utilization. Sometimes the command shows all the space appropriately and sometimes not.  It may be related to encrypted home partitions.

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