Google Gears for Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu Karmic 9.10

Built my own - seems to work fine so far.

jabley@miq-jabley:~/work/gears-read-only$ svn info
Path: .
URL: http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk
Repository Root: http://gears.googlecode.com/svn
Repository UUID: fe895e04-df30-0410-9975-d76d301b4276
Revision: 3410
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: gears.daemon
Last Changed Rev: 3410
Last Changed Date: 2009-11-10 01:49:08 +0000 (Tue, 10 Nov 2009)

Made some changes:



make mode=OPT

and then install the resulting xpi.

Enforced SVN upgrade

I migrated from Eclipse Europa (3.3) to Eclipse Ganymede (3.4), re-installed the necessary plugins and noticed an issue with using svn on the CLI.


$ svn up
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'; please get a newer Subversion client

$ svn --version
svn, version 1.4.6 (r28521)
compiled Mar 11 2008, 08:26:35

Copyright (C) 2000-2007 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles 'http' scheme
- handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles 'file' scheme


Apparently, Subclipse had upgraded my working copies and my CLI client was too old to cope with this. The options appeared to be either upgrade to Ibex, build svn locally or use hardy-backports. Backports seemed like the best option and has a nice option to restrict what I want to install.

$ cat /etc/apt/preference
Package: *
Pin: release a=hardy-backports
Pin-Priority: 400

$ sudo aptitude install subversion=1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initialising package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
subversion
1 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1274kB of archives. After unpacking 713kB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
subversion: Depends: libsvn1 (= 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2) but 1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 is installed.
Resolving dependencies...
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Upgrade the following packages:
libsvn1 [1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 (hardy, now) -> 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2 (hardy-backports)]

Score is 20

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] Y
The following packages will be upgraded:
libsvn1 subversion
2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 1995kB of archives. After unpacking 971kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Y
Writing extended state information... Done
Get:1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-backports/main subversion 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2 [1274kB]
Get:2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com hardy-backports/main libsvn1 1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2 [721kB]
Fetched 1995kB in 27s (72.2kB/s)
(Reading database ... 169200 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace subversion 1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 (using .../subversion_1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement subversion ...
Preparing to replace libsvn1 1.4.6dfsg1-2ubuntu1 (using .../libsvn1_1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libsvn1 ...
Setting up libsvn1 (1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2) ...

Setting up subversion (1.5.1dfsg1-1ubuntu2~hardy2) ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/bash_completion.d/subversion ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/subversion/config ...
Installing new version of config file /etc/subversion/servers ...
Processing triggers for libc6 ...
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initialising package states... Done
Building tag database... Done


Subversion upgrade - DONE!

Ubuntu Hardy issues

Just a place holder for stuff as I hit it.

1. Hibernate / Resume has stopped working. Damn, now it takes me 10 minutes to start up and shutdown at the end of the day. That's time my employer is losing. With Gutsy, Sleep was great. Just shut the lid and leg it out at the end of the day to beat the traffic and pick up the kids. Now I have to stop writing code early. Tracking this, but I'm don't have an idea of when I might get the old functionality back.
2. Thunderbird with Lightning 0.8 stopped understanding iCal, VCALENDAR and all remote and local Calendar data disappeared. I eventually narrowed it down to this. With libstdc++5 installed locally, a reinstall of the lightning 0.8 plugin brought all my calendars back. Might be moving more of them into the cloud from now on though.
3. IO seems a slower, or the disk is getting spun quite a lot more. That's just a subjective impression though, and I don't have any Bonnie(++) numbers for my laptop before the upgrade.
4. Network Manager seems to have a hard time with roaming now. At work, I'm on a LAN all the time. At home, I'm on my LAN or WiFi. Switching at home seems a lot more troublesome that it used to be, and /etc/init.d/dbus restart as my usual brute force approach seems to stop the NM applet from getting put back into the System Tray. No bug report for that yet, since that sounds a little woolly!

FogCreek Copilot - impressed

I was hoping that now I don't have a Windows machine any more that I could wriggle out of IT support duties for the family. Well, Copilot works under Wine on Ubuntu 7.10. Arse. I was wondering about talking my folks through installing a VNC server on their machine, but just tried the Copilot quick free demo, and it all worked. And it's free on the weekend. So I guess that's my IT support position.

How to dismantle an Atomic Bomb (otherwise known as de-stressing by migrating from Vista to Ubuntu)

Finally it's happened! I've been able to get off Windows Vista and install Gutsy Gibbon on my work laptop. Herein follows a few notes on things that I noticed, which may help others take the leap. This will probably get updated as I notice things that I've missed, or that went well.

1. Cygwin. I can't say enough good things about that project. It's been great to have on Windows and ultimately played a very important part in getting stuff off my laptop before wiping the hard-drive. I've found the people involved very helpful and responsive. My initial attempts to rsync data to a safe location failed. If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself, jwz, 2007. Contacting the mailing list led me to try the snapshot versions, report issues and see them fixed very quickly. Thanks Corinna and others.


2. Firefox. My profile was split over ${HOME}/AppData/Local/Mozilla/Firefox and ${HOME}/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox. I consolidated the two by copying to ~/.mozilla/firefox. The profiles.ini file needed editing, since it has an incorrect relative path to the profile folder. I also needed to rename extensions.rdf, so that a new one is built on startup. This preserved all of my extensions (apart from Google Toolbar; there is a Linux-specific version?) and associated data such as ModifyHeaders values, UserAgentSwitcher values, etc. I have needed to manually edit some preferences, such as Download location, and then restart Firefox for it to take effect, but otherwise it all seems to be working fine. Similarly for Thunderbird, although I should have exported my Lightning Calendars first - I seem to have lost them, but that's no biggie. I still have all of the emails (MBOX!) (although my tags seem to have disappeared. That's a bit of a pisser). Maybe I should have migrated that to GMail, rather than copying mboxes around, but it's worked.


3. SSH. I made sure that I copied my keys over and that they all worked. I seem to have missed the full known_hosts file; I have a copy, but some entries are missing, which is slightly annoying. Also, I forgot my System32/drives/etc/hosts changes, so I'll need to recreate the local aliases that I have for some servers. Sure I can remember that, so not too painful an omission.


4. sudo aptitude install tofrodos

Ubuntu just flies, versus the same hardware running Vista. That's a shocker, obviously ;-).

Update:

Eclipse was using a lot of file handles (I just install the world in terms of the number of plugins I have), which required an addition to /etc/security/limits.conf.

# raise limits due to Eclipse complaining about too many open files
* soft nofile 5120
* hard nofile 5120


Shell Meme for migrating off Vista

Backing up required files to my home machine first, prior to wiping Vista off the laptop this evening...


jabley@python:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
89 ll
70 sudo
61 cd
41 exit
38 aptitude
18 svn
15 rsync
10 mkdir
10 cp
6 which


Apple envy

Does Apple have some quality issues? I'm in the market for a new laptop, and was considering a Mac, having heard good things from some. But recently, there seems to be a spate of problems. Think I'll be staying with Ubuntu on something for now, thanks all the same.

Linux goodness

I'm posting this using the Ubuntu Feisty Live Disk running on my work laptop. I was able to connect to my wireless connection and it Just Worked, WEP using a passphrase as well, rather than requiring the large hexadecimal keys. So colour me happy with that (for anyone that's interested, this is on a Dell Latitude D820, more details available on request) Think I'll be grabbing an XP install disk from our MSDN Universal subscription or whatever it's called these days and taking a serious look at Xen, along with possibly trying to pick Steve Loughran's brain about virtualisation on Linux.