High Tech Sorcery

• Bug #992469 “apparmor chromium-browser abstraction missing in Ub…” : Bugs : “apparmor” package : Ubuntu
• Bug #990740 “upgrading from lucid to precise fails” : Bugs : “python-defaults” package : Ubuntu
• Bug #992449 “Ubuntu 12.04 downloads i386 sources on amd64 system…” : Bugs : “apt” package : Ubuntu

I run Ubuntu on my desktop and have since Ubuntu’s first release (4.10) and the current release, 11.10, is the first that I am going to skip over entirely.  The reason is that the choice of desktop environments is poor.  I upgraded my HTPC to 11.10 and tried every desktop environment available: Gnome Shell, Unity, KDE 4, XFCE, LXDE.  Not 1 of them seemed like it would fit my desktop needs.  I have a nice Gnome 2 desktop with plenty of customizations to fit how I work but upgrading to from 11.04 to 11.10 would cause me to lose all of that and force me to learn how to be as productive in a new desktop environment.  I really cannot afford to take that time when I have so many projects going.

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Ony my desktop I’ve removed pulseaudio because I found it to be more trouble than it was worth.  So I use ALSA, which works pretty well.  However, sometimes my audio dies and produces chirps and squeaks only.  I found the easiest way to fix this is the following command:

• sudo alsa force-reload

• Bug #785681 in xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu): “Unable to unblank screen, cursor still present”
• Bug #616131 in netbeans (Ubuntu): “JavaScript support in NetBeans”
• Bug #632984 in wxwidgets2.8 (Debian): “libwx_gtk2u_media-2.8.so.0 missing from libwxgtk2.8-0”
• Bug #790538 in pam (Ubuntu): “pam update causes cron to stop working with “Module is unknown” error”
• Bug #659738 in sysvinit (Ubuntu): “Duplicate welcome message in motd”
• Bug #509180 in eCryptfs: “ecryptfs sometimes seems to add trailing garbage to encrypted files”
• rails + git source in Gemfile = webserver (webrick or mongrel) cannot be shutdown by Ctrl+C or kill
  • Using Ubuntu 11.04, I can’t shut down rails server using CTRL-C – Stack Overflow
  • ruby on rails – Can’t stop WEBrick 1.3.1 with ctrl-c on Ubuntu 11.04 – Stack Overflow
  • ruby on rails – CTRL+C to Webbrick server ignored – Stack Overflow

I’ve been doing more work with linux traffic control.  I’m finding my earlier efforts are too complicated and end up introducing latency.  My latest shaper is very simple.  I decided I wanted to check in on the status of a couple of projects that can be used to classify p2p traffic.

• ipp2p – discontinued, recommends checking out opendpi: OpenDPI.org
• l7-filter – moved here: l7-filter | ClearFoundation

Though I’ve played with both of these in the past I’m not using either in production currently.  Most p2p programs are well behaved enough to mark data transfers as bulk which makes shaping easy.

I am not at all happy with the state of GNU/Linux twitter clients.  It seems this is all too common in the open source world, too many people working on different products, none of which end up being very good.  I’ve counted 10 native GNU/Linux clients (not counting Adobe Air) and not one of them suits my needs (Gnome, multiple account support, decent interface, works).  Here are some thoughts on each of them:

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