I’m finally actually “using” Gmail…

One of the happiest “geek-days” I remember was the day Gmail announced IMAP access for Gmail - Finally, I could interact directly with GMail from an e-mail client and not let my web-interface got to heck from neglect while using POP3.

Also, IMAP allowed me to use Alpine as my mail client - I’ve liked Pine since I first used it in college (yes we had webmail access, but I prefered to telnet into the system and use pine). Pine is fast, simple, I can move through mail quickly and it protects me from unsightly HTML email (I firmly believe all email should be plain text).

However, for some reason over the last few weeks I’ve been having a heck of a time with my GMail/IMAP combination - I tend to leave Alpine open in a terminal, and my system beep (over my PC speaker) alerts me when there is new mail, however recently Alpine was timing out, and giving a mailbox closed error. Usually I’ve been able to restart Alpine and be back in business, however lately, It’s timed out, wouldn’t let me log in, and on a couple of occasions would report that IMAP wasn’t enabled for my account.

I thought maybe that it was Alpine and not Gmail’s IMAP interface, but I’ve been able to reproduce the errors with Evolution and Thunderbird, so I’ve resorted to what I thought I would never do - I’m using GMails web-based interface. You know what though? It isn’t that bad. I’ve gone through and set up Labels and Filters, and it’s actually quite efficient.

Now if Gmail would only implement the ability to change to a bottom reply by default. I’m sure many people are used to top-reply, however if you spend any time in a mailing list you will quickly be scolded if you top-post.

Reset Compiz effects back to Ubuntu Defaults…

The other day I installed compizconfig-settings-manager and started playing around with some of the advanced settings in compiz, and everything was working OK, I’d just had enough of all the “Extras” and I wanted to go back to Ubuntu’s “Normal” effects as selectable in Appearance Preferences, but apparently, even by doing that some of the extras settings I’d set up in the advanced settings manager wouldn’t go away. I did a quick bit of “googling” and I came by this command that will reset Compiz to the defaults:

Simply hit Alt+F2 and run:

gconftool-2 –recursive-unset /apps/compiz

Hope this helps some other poor soul that got carried away like I did.

Ubuntu for “Humans”

One of the common things I see around the net is people complaining about Ubuntu’s Brown/Orange Human theme. Now I know there is going to be a “new” theme for Intrepid but I just hope as much thought goes into it that apparently went into Human.

I recently tried the new Unity theme in ‘gnome-themes-extras’ and I made a post to show it off. Now I do like the theme, very much, but I ended up switching back to Human. Why? I don’t know - it just feels right I guess. It’s always been the same in the past for me - I’ll try other themes and always without exception, I go back to the default Ubuntu Human.

Perhaps, subconciously I just feel that human is “right” somehow - it’s the first visual cue that says - hey this is an Ubuntu machine I’m on - I just hope whatever theme is created/decided upon for 8.10 is as recognizable as only Ubuntu and has that “just right” feel to it that Human has.

I don’t normally get “excited” about desktop themes and such…

But I think the new Unity theme for GNOME is really hot.

Available in Ubuntu “sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-extras”.

EDIT: updated to include wallpaper which suited the theme better (I think, anyway).

Ubuntu 8.04 Active Directory Integration w/ Likewise Open

Last month I had written a post breifly talking about Ubuntu Hardy Hearon including Likewise Open allowing an Ubuntu desktop seamless integration into Active Directory. I decided to try it out today at work with a virtual machine just to see how seamless it was, and compare it to my previous test with openSUSE. Overall, the openSUSE experiement was “easier” to set up, as it was part of the installation process. With Ubuntu, I had to finish the install (having created a local user in the setup process), log in as that local user and install Likewise Open.

After getting the package installed, it was a matter of doing a simple command:

sudo domainjoin-cli join your.domain username

Followed by:

1. sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults
2. sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start

The whole process was very painless, and I was pleased with the results. While the openSUSE process seemed more integrated into the install process, Ubuntu w/ Likewise seemed to be more integrated into the domain. For example, in openSUSE, I could access SMB shares w/o authenticating, but Ubuntu actually recognized the DFS shares rather than the individual shares, so it was more like what I’d see on a Windows box.

I was also able to set up printing to one of the network printers via SMB, and I was able to get Evolution accessing my Exchange mailbox.

All in all, I was pretty impressed!

Hello Planet Ubuntu Users!

Since my blog is now being aggregated over at Planet Ubuntu Users I thought since I would probably have a new set of readers that I would introduce myself a little bit.

I live in Darlington, SC and I work by day as a Network Administrator for a software company. At work, I mostly deal with Windows servers, but we are in the process to moving vmware based virtual servers, as well as some physical servers over to XenServer, so I get a little “taste” of Linux at work now

On the home front, I started dual booting Linux with Red Hat 6.1 back in 1999 and with the exception of a few attempts to run Windows Vista since I received a gratis copy on release in Jan ‘06 (none of which lasted more than a few weeks) my home system has been running exclusively some flavor of Linux since 2003. After staying with Red Hat until using Fedora Core 1 for a couple of weeks, I moved on to Slackware and I stayed there until getting my first AMD64 system back in 2005. I started looking for an AMD64 distro and I’d been hearing about this “Ubuntu Thing” so I checked out Ubuntu 5.10. I stuck with Ubuntu exclusively until shortly after 7.04 was released and I started getting restless and wanted to try some other distros out - I hopped around a bit and tried out Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE, slamd64 (an AMD64 port of Slackware), Mandriva, Debian and most recently took Foresight for a spin. I have in the end wound up coming back to Ubuntu becuase it simply works for me. Having used Ubuntu for so long, I know it (and Debian itself) much better than any other distro out there, and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that none of the other distros are any better (or for the most part worse) than Ubuntu - just different.

Ubuntu is quickly becoming the defacto standard for Desktop Linux Distributions, and is really starting to become more popular on the server side of things - I don’t think it’ll be long before we see Ubuntu pushing Red Hat and Novell out of the datacenters. The admins that run those system are going to be running Ubuntu on their workstations (or at home), and they are going to want uniformity within the organization…It’s just a matter of time (that’s my fortune telling deed for the year!).

Anyway - thanks for adding me to Planet Ubuntu Users - I’ve been getting more deeply etched into the Ubuntu community - I just discovered Ubuntu Answers on Launchpad so I’ve been digging through some of those questions over the weekend, and you can usually find me on various Ubuntu mailing lists as well as various Ubuntu channels on Freenode (I’m jayson_r on Freenode) in the evenings and on weekends.

Link for the day…

Here’s an informative article I just came across about KVM and Xen.

Interview: Avi Kivity

To compare KVM to other solutions:

• In many ways, VMware is a groundbreaking technology. VMware manages to fully virtualize the notoriously complex x86 architecture using software techniques only, and to achieve very good performance and stability. As a result, VMware is a very large and complex piece of software.
• KVM, on the other hand, relies on the new hardware virtualization technologies that have appeared recently. As such, it is very small (about 10,000 lines) and relatively simple. Another big difference is that VMware is proprietary while kvm is open source.
• Xen is a fairly large project, providing both paravirtualization and full virtualization. It is designed as a standalone kernel, which only requires Linux to perform I/O. This makes it rather large, as it has its own scheduler, memory manager, timer handling, and machine initialization.
• KVM, in contrast, uses the standard Linux scheduler, memory management, and other services. This allows the kvm developers to concentrate on virtualization, building on the core kernel instead of replacing it.
• Qemu is a userspace emulator. It is a fairly amazing project, emulating a variety of guest processors on several host processors, with fairly decent performance. However, the userspace architecture does not allow it to approach native speeds without a kernel accelerator. kvm recognizes the utility of qemu by using it for I/O hardware emulation. Although kvm is not tied to any particular userspace, the qemu code was too good not to use — so we used it.

RE: Ubuntu Bug 99508

I just got the most awesome email!

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:28:13 -0000
From: Launchpad Bug Tracker <99508@bugs.launchpad.net>
To: <email address>
Subject: [Bug 99508] Re: Window titlebar displayed not right with compiz enabled

This bug was fixed in the package human-theme - 0.18

—————
human-theme (0.1 hardy; urgency=low

* Changing left_width value from 0 to 1 to fix bug (LP: #9950

– Kenneth Wimer <kwwii@ubuntu.com>   Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:56:43 +0200

** Changed in: human-theme (Ubuntu Hardy)
Status: Fix Committed => Fix Released

–
Window titlebar displayed not right with compiz enabled
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/99508

I can turn Compiz back on now!

w00t!

UPDATE: I came back up to my PC after watching TV most of the evening and there were some updates available - one of which was the human theme, and I can confirm that the bug is now dead! This was my biggest annoyance with Ubuntu all the way through the 7.10 release, and I was sooo dissapointed to see it still in Hardy when I tried out the Alphas and Betas - Thanks to those who persisted in getting this bug fixed! Thank You!

The Terminator!

Here’s another one of those little things, that could only make a true Geek jump for joy!

Terminator that allows you to split your GNOME terminal window into multiple panes - this allows you to fill your screen with multiple terminals for different tasks efficiently.

On Ubuntu - just “sudo apt-get install terminator”.

There are a couple of switches that I found handy - I have my launcher set to “terminator -m -b” which launches it maximized with no window border.

Ubuntu 8.04 RC available!

See here for more info!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardyHeron/RC