Sean's blog

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

I broke the cardinal rule and updated to software that was only 1 day old. It seems I’ve been reasonably lucky and very little went wrong. I thought I’d better write some notes on what did go wrong just in case it happens to someone else and they lose a day trying to work out how to put them right.

ATI Big Desktop reversed

This would have been quite amusing if it had been the only problem. There isn’t much space on my workbench, so I put a 1280×1024 LCD panel behind and above my laptop’s 1280×800 panel, and extend my desktop up from the laptop. When the Ubuntu distribution upgrade had finished, the desktop was the wrong way round. I had to mouse up from the big panel to get to the bottom of the laptop panel. I tried editing xorg.conf and running aticonfig, and reverting to the pre-upgrade xorg.conf, but nothing seemed to fix the problem. In the end, I installed the ATI control panel with:

apt-get install fglrx-control

and that allowed me to set the correct desktop layout.

Distribution Upgrade didn’t use proxy

I’m not complaining about this one. We’ve just terminated our ADSL contract because it’s so unreliable, so we’ve only got ADSL until the notice period expires. If you’re a Streamyx user, I will soon no longer be sharing your pain.

On our home network we’ve got Streamyx ADSL on an ADSL router and a DiGi EDGE adapter on a server connected by ethernet to the same router. The server runs a squid web proxy to try to reduce the load on the nominally much slower EDGE adapter. We configure synaptic to use the web proxy for updates. It works a treat for updating Ubuntu on our PCs in the house, but the dist-upgrade didn’t seem to use the proxy settings in synaptic / update-manager at all. I’ll have to think of some other way of updating the other PCs in the house, I don’t want to repeat the 1GB+ download over EDGE!

File reporting .jar files (Java archive) as application/zip

Now this one really was annoying. I have a few Java projects that are bundled up as Java archives. I can just double-click on the .jar file in my file browser (ROX), and they would usually be launched with java -jar. After the 8.10 upgrade, the ‘file’ utility was reporting them as application/zip, so double-click was launching file-roller! I tried all sorts, even renaming all associated files and copying older versions from a PC at home running Hardy which reported the files’ type correctly. Nothing.

I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know which of the last two solutions I tried actually solved the problem. After trying to destroy any chached mime types by removing ~/.local and running the ‘update-mime’ utility, the problem went away. My Java archives are now correctly identified by file. If you have the same (or similar) problem, I’d appreciate a comment to say which one solved the problem for you.

General impressions of Intrepid Ibex

Apart from the problems above, things seem to be running very smoothly. I’m interested to see how Network Manager has changed – it has never really given me the impression of being ‘finished’ in the past. As I look at it now, I see it says my laptop is disconnected from any network. The wireless kill switch seems to be working as I’d expect: too bad I rarely move my laptop away from the wired network on my desk!