Update to Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

These days, Ubuntu's new release hit the repositories, so I upgraded my three systems as soon as possible to see if some annoying Unity bugs have been solved finally. Here is the resume and the reasons why I'll evaluate to switch to KDE finally: Upgrade
During the upgrades I had two issues:

1. Emacs got somehow broken on one system y prevented the upgrade process to finish completely. It even said, the process had been aborted, but the only thing missing was the last Cleanup step.
   I removed emacs packages and reinstalled them, then everything went fine.
2. Screenblanker got stuck on one of my machines during upgrade, so I could hit on any button to enter the last Cleanup step.
   I connected via Remote Desktop to that machine and could finish the process correctly.
   

Updating custom repositories
As usual, the upgrade process disables all your custom repositories to prevent problems. You'll have to adapt and enabled them by hand, or you might use these instructions to do this with a few commands.

# Become super-user
sudo -i

# Set some variables (these can be changed to adapt to other Ubuntu versions)
export old=natty
export new=oneiric

# Enter repository list folder
cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

# Change old distribution list files and store them as newer ones
for sl in *-${old}.list ; do echo "Creating ${sl/${old}/${new}}" ; sed 's/\(.*\) '${old}'\(.*\)/\1 '${new}'\2/' $sl > ${sl/${old}/${new}} ; done

# Enable and remove the "disabled ..." comment
for sl in *-${new}.list ; do echo "Enabling ${sl}..." ; sed -i.bak 's/^# \(.*\) disabled on upgrade to '${new}'$/\1/' $sl ; done

# Check they are all fine
for sl in *-${new}.list ; do echo "Content of ${sl/${old}/${new}}:" ; cat $sl ; done

# Cleanup backup files and old distribution list files (not needed any longer)
rm *-${old}* *${new}.list.bak

Severe design flaw in Natty's Upgrade Process

Ubuntu's latest version 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) arrived a few days ago, some people hate it already before launched, high expectations by others.
Personally, I waited for that version several months already, hoping that it will resolve the slow problems I had on my personal laptop, as described on my previous post. Even changing the Kernel version, never solved the problem completely.
Here my update experience on three systems (all were 10.10).

Desktop PC

Machine gots stuck and hang during the upgrade process.
After rebooting, when trying the use the new Grub entry, it claims that my hardware doesn't support Unity.
After a second boot, entering the Previous Linux entry, my old 10.10 system started up perfectly and advised about a partial upgrade.
The upgrade continued smooth and left my system at the end with a running Natty.
Only my Chromium isn't usable any longer, but that's another story.

Dell home laptop

The 2nd, a smooth upgrade, without any problem.
First I downloaded the ISO image, and mounted the burned CD as software source, so most of the packages hadn't to be downloaded from the net.
After upgrade, the slow problem was gone, finally I have a fast system again, even compiz effects are usable again.
Great, all my expectations have been reached.

Lenovo office laptop

My last system hang too during the update process, it blocked with the screen-saver and I wasn't able to enter the desktop, so I couldn't see where exactly it got stuck.
Rebooting the system, first showed that Grub hadn't been updated yet, and even worse, my old system didn't booted up.
My root partition didn't mount correctly.
Inspecting with the SystemRescueCD (I have an entry to it's ISO in my Grub boot menu as explained in this post) revealed that the filesystem hadn't been damaged, all files where there.
After some investigation, I found this discussion about a serious design flaw in the Upgrade Process which could lead to that situation.
I could recover with the mentioned commands as seen below.

Recovering from not ready yet or not present root partition

mount -w -o remount /dev/sda1 /
dpkg --configure -a

Only one package made trouble, winbind, so I removed it with aptitude purge winbind, then run the dpkg command again and finally rebooted into a running Natty system.

Pin down the oficial Firefox version in Ubuntu

Today, I'll write an article about a more complicated administration tool: APTs pinning.

What is pinning?

Pinning is used to prevent your Ubuntu system to upgrade a package to a higher version through its automatic update system.

Why do you want to prevent an update?

Well, maybe the newer version of an application isn't working the way you want to or is buggy and you prefer to use the older version.

In my example, this happened to me with Firefox. The version 3.5 that ships with the official Ubuntu repositories works perfect.
But as I enabled the Mozilla-Daily repository from Launchpad to install the better Thunderbird 3.0 (see my article about installing it), that same repository also holds a newer version from Firefox. So my system all the time tries to upgrade to the version from Launchpad, which works worse for me.

How could I prevent upgrading Firefox from that repository, but still be able to use and update my Thunderbird 3.0 package from that one?

Obtain list of priorities

After searching through several articles and forum post, finally I found the tool I needed to setup the pinning.

apt-cache policy
apt-cache policy firefox-3.5

Whereas the first command shows a list of all your enabled repositories and their priorities, the second one gives you information about a concrete package.

In my case it shows:

firefox-3.5:
  Installed: 3.5.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1
  Candidate: 3.5.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1
  Version table:
     3.5.6~hg20091129r26611+nobinonly-0ubuntu1~umd1~karmic 0
         50 http://ppa.launchpad.net karmic/main Packages
     3.5.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic-updates/main Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic-security/main Packages
 *** 3.5.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3.5.3+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu6 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages

You can see the installed version is 3.5.4, there is a newer version 3.5.5 from the official Ubuntu repositories, and a newer version 3.5.6 from the Luanchpad repository.
Interesting to look at is the Candidate: line, which shows the version that will be installed next by the update mechanism. Normally, this would be 3.5.6, but in my case, I lowered the priority of the Launchpad repository to 50, which is lower than the default, so it is not selected any more.

You want to know how this is possible? Read on.

Use pinning to lower upgrade priorities

The trick lays inside the /etc/apt/preferences, use man apt_preferences to read more about it.
Just execute the following instruction:

sudo echo "Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily
Pin-Priority: 50" > /etc/apt/preferences.d/Mozilla-Daily

## or if that doesn't work for you (tried it only on Karmic):
sudo echo "Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily
Pin-Priority: 50" > /etc/apt/preferences

sudo apt-get update

How to obtain the correct values

Remember the apt-cache policy command? Searching its output, you find the information:

 500 http://ppa.launchpad.net karmic/main Packages
     release v=9.10,o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily,a=karmic,n=karmic,l=Ubuntu,c=main
     origin ppa.launchpad.net

From the release line I just selected the o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily, enough to clearly select which packages will be pinned.

After the apt-get update, you will not be troubled any longer by the firefox updates from that repository, but the thunderbird-3.0 updates will still show up, because it doesn't exist in the official repositories.

Troubleshooting

I run into some trouble and will share the solutions here as well.

Can't find the o=LP-PPA-ubuntu-mozilla-daily entry

This happened in one of my machines, so at the end I had to pin down the whole Launchpad repositories, not only the Mozilla-Daily one.

sudo echo "Package: *
Pin: origin ppa.launchpad.net
Pin-Priority: 50" > /etc/apt/preferences.d/Mozilla-Daily
sudo apt-get update

Firefox and/or xulrunner still update from Mozilla-Daily

That happens when some packages have been updated from the Mozilla-Daily repository before. You'll need to downgrade them to a version from the official repositories.
Here an example (find the correct version with the apt-cache policy command):

sudo aptitude install firefox-gnome-support=3.5.5+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1

Firefox 3.5 is out

They released the latest version of this magnificent web browser.

Go here to see real-time download statistics and a world map where Firefox 3.5 is downloaded.

Install instructions

sudo -v

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main" > /tmp/MozillaDaily.list
sudo mv /tmp/MozillaDaily.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 247510BE
sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install firefox-3.5 firefox-3.5-gnome-support latex-xft-fonts

# Create a new entry in gnomes alternatives system and set Firefox 3.5 to be the preferred choice.
sudo update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/firefox firefox /usr/bin/$(readlink /usr/bin/firefox) 60
sudo update-alternatives --verbose --install /usr/bin/firefox firefox /usr/bin/firefox-3.5 70
sudo update-alternatives --verbose --auto firefox
# If you get into any trouble and want to use your previous Firefox again, just change the selection with
# sudo update-alternatives --config firefox

Note

Some instructions come from this post.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty - Feedback

As always, when you upgrade your system to the latest version, some things work better, others worse.

Here's a list of things that I found (in general, I recommend installing Jaunty):

• wallpaper-tray disappeared
  Hm, well, not exactly, it just changed to be an integrated panel applet, so just add it with Add to panel... on your top-panel.
• OpenOffice 3.x is so much faster now!
  But, all my installed extensions disappeared and I have to reinstall all of them.
  Moreover I got the error "Could not create Java implementation loader" when installing some extensions. To solve this problem just install the "openoffice.org-java-common" package.
• At the moment there are no hardware drivers for your video card, so 3D animations will likely not work at the beginning.
  Update on 12/5/2009: compiz still is unstable, on two of my laptops, moreover, I can't create a dual-monitor setup with more than 2048x2048 like before.
  
• mail-notification suddenly opens sticky message boxes for each e-mail arrived. It doesn't use Ubuntu's new notification mechanism.
  You can enable avant-window-managers notification area, so that problem is gone, but also the mentioned notification mechanism which is more beautiful.
• Synaptic now offers to show you a screenshot of an application before you install it, but there aren't so much available yet.
• Video playback of totem got a big boost! Now I can play HDTV movies on my laptop which wasn't possible before without stuttering.
  

Install Ubuntu from Alternate CD

Just figured out a quicker way to update our Ubuntu sytem, instead of using the automatic update system (which can take hours to download almost a Giga of packets, caused by saturation of update servers, especially the first days after a new Ubuntu version has been launched).

It is also very interesting when you have to update several systems, in my case three.

You don't have to burn any CD!

Install instructions

1. Download the alternate CD ISO image (assume you store it in your home directory).
   You could use the Torrent, which downloads so much quicker.
2. Next we'll mount that ISO image, and launch the upgrade process so that it uses almost all packages from the CD.

sudo -s
mount -o loop -t iso9660 ~/ubuntu-9.04-alternate-i386.iso /media/cdrom0
sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade

Maybe, you'll still have to download some packages, depending on how much additional software you installed on your system, but at least the most of them you just downloaded with more speed (a big file, instead of hundreds of small packages).

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

The latest version of this magnificent operating system just arrived today.

You can download CD images from their Ubuntu Releases site.

Upgrading through the integrated updater, will come soon.

KeePassX crash when auto-typing special characters

KeePassX 0.3.4 has been released which fixes a crash when auto-typing special characters.
Very frequent with the '@' when your user name is your email address.

Just download the corresponding package from the download section install it with GDebi or whatever and the problem is gone.

Read more about KeePass in a previous post about it.

Ubuntu 8.10

Yesterday the latest Ubuntu version was released.

Just upgrade your existing Ubuntu system or see the download and upgrade instructions in one of these sites:

• http://www.ubuntulinux.org
• http://www.ubuntu.com