kontrawize

Moving from openSUSE Linux to Ubuntu

I've been using openSUSE Linux for many years now, and never saw any compelling reason to switch to Ubuntu.  There still isn't a compelling reason for the most part, but I will shortly get my new Nokia N900 phone, which runs Maemo, a derivative of Debian Linux.  The Maemo SDK requires a Debian Linux to run it, and I want to run it, so I decided that was a good enough reason to move to Ubuntu.

I've had a couple of goes at moving to Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala".  Along the way I also tried Debian Linux 5.0.3.  I rejected vanilla Debian because the package management seemed weak.  Linux distributions with the GNOME desktop typically come with the "Evolution" e-mail client.  Since I use Opera for e-mail, I don't want Evolution wasted disk space.  Under openSUSE, it is easy to uninstall the Evolution client (although you have to leave the "Evolution data server", as some packages have dependencies on it).  With Debian, I couldn't remove the client or anything related to Evolution, which suggested bad package management to me.

Moving from openSUSE (using GNOME, not KDE) to Ubuntu was straightforward.  You basically just need to copy your files across from your home directory, plus your files from anywhere you have installed your own applications (e.g. "/opt").  When copying your files

• you can use NFS, or tar to move your files (it's faster to just tar without compressing, if you have the disk space to do so;
• don't use Samba or ZIP files, as they lose important permission information.

After copying your files across, make sure your home directory has "rwxr-xr-x" (755) permissions.  Also, in your home directory you should run the following to delete configuration files that can cause you problems (and which don't appear to lose anything important for your desktop):

rm -rf .config .gnome*

That's all there was to it.  I haven't fully set up all of my applications yet (i.e. need to add some icons to the menu, etc.), but otherwise it's all looking good.  While I've described moving from openSUSE to Ubuntu, I expect it should be similarly straightforward to move from Ubuntu to openSUSE.

The Virtual Laptop ― From Linux to Windows XP, part 2

John Cowan submitted a comment to my post about switching my laptop from Linux to Windows XP. He asks, quite reasonably, why I need to install OpenOffice directly on my laptop if I do my work in VMware virtual machines. Don't I only need OpenOffice in the virtual machines? Shouldn't I keep the laptop itself free of almost everything except VMware Server?

The answer is something of an 80/20 rule. There are compromises that you have to make in running VMware on a laptop (and even on a lot of desktops). The two most obvious ones are

• available memory;
• available disk space.

My laptop has 2G RAM, and that is the maximum it supports (it's 2 years old, what can I say? This Christmas, at a large UK chain called PC World, they had £499 laptops with 4G RAM and 250G disk, both figures about double what I have now. But I don't have one of those). When I'm running both Linux and Windows in VMware virtual machines on my laptop, I'm running 3 operating systems at the same time, 2 x Windows + 1 x Linux. That's quite a squeeze. I can only assign 768M to each virtual machine, which is less that most people are used to having these days when using Windows or Linux. It's just barely enough, really, although it is enough for the most part.

Now, there are certain common services I sometimes want to run that are used by both my virtual machines. The most important is my Subversion repository, but I also sometimes run XML or relational databases. As I'm already so squeezed for memory, there is no way I can run extra virtual machines for these. I also don't want to run them within one of my existing virtual machines, because them I'm forced to run both at once. It's better to be able to run them independently, not the least because I sometimes need to bump the memory up to double (1.5G) in order to run something big, and that means one virtual machine only. The upshot is that I have to run certain common services on the host directly, there isn't really a practical alternative.

There are also some applications that run sufficiently better on the host, enough to make it worth using the host directly. Skype is a key one for me, but also Bibble Pro which I use for processing RAW photographs from my digital SLR. And why OpenOffice? The main reason is because, when I'm giving a presentation at a conference or meeting, there is always that natural tendency for technical things to fail at the worst possible moment. Adding a virtual machine into the equation is just an extra distraction that I don't need. Additionally, sometimes I might want to quickly look at an office file that someone has put on a USB memory stick. I don't want to have to fire up both a host operating system and a virtual machine operating system just to view a word processing document or a spreadsheet quickly.

I am nonetheless fairly strict about what things I do on the host operating system, and what data or files I keep on it. Any data or files on the host have to be backed up separately to my virtual machines, which is important. I don't do e-mail on my host operating system (maybe the occasional bit of webmail, nothing more than that), nor anything much else that is part of my daily work tasks. So, it's 80 for the virtual machines and 20 for the host operating system. I think that's a reasonable compromise.

The Virtual Laptop ― From Linux to Windows XP

For over 2 years now, since I bought it, I have been running openSUSE Linux on my laptop. Although I spent a lot of time making it work, more or less, I have also lost a lot of time in trying to get simple things to work well. For example, with a laptop, it's useful if you can hibernate it, and do so quickly and safely. Also, when travelling, you want things like Skype to work well. I never managed to get these kinds of "mobile" aspects working well enough. So, when I recently had a couple of hard disk crashes on my laptop in the space of a couple of months, I decided to bite the bullet and switch my laptop back to Windows XP. That's what I've done, my laptop is running Windows XP now.

The reason I could switch so quickly, in less than half a week of spare time, is because most things that I do are done in VMware Server virtual machines. So, as long as I can run VMware Server on a PC of any sort, I can quickly be up and running with my working environments.

Is Windows better than Linux? No, not really. I'm trading one set of issues for another. However, my new principle is that you should stick the the operating system that comes with your laptop. Not because that operating system is better than any other, but because it should work with the hardware in your laptop; manufacturer testing of the operating system with the hardware is worth a lot in practice. So, while hibernating is now much better (I can hibernate even with VMware virtual machines running, something that was out of the question with Linux), I've already had problems with software not running properly when installed, or new installations seeming to stop previously installed software from running. Linux has a sophisticated system for managing dependencies between versions of software, and Windows doesn't seem to have anything to match, so Windows is a generation or more behind in terms of making different software applications co-exist. I'm losing that, compromising instead to get better hardware support.

By the way, where does all of the disk space go in Windows? I don't like the idea of having just a single huge disk partition as is the default for Windows, so I split my partition (using "Parted Magic" - free and recommended by me) so that I have a C drive for Windows and application files, and a D drive for data. I thought 25G should be plenty, even for something as profligate as Windows XP (which itself is still leaner than Vista). However, with XP and selection of applications (including VMware Server and the Novell edition of OpenOffice 3, which are big installs), I now find I only have 4G free out of 25G! Where did my disk space go? I've examined the C drive once, but the numbers don't add up, something is missing. I may have some large "system restore point" file backups, perhaps. I'll be checking into that as I go along.

Windows XP needs more protection than openSUSE Linux, which comes with built-in support for disk encryption and also comes with Novell's AppArmor, which is a better way for Linux to protect against viruses/etc., than the virus-signature-based approach that is most common for Windows. That meant software to buy. I like to use Norman software (not Norton) for virus checking and firewall, because the firewall allows very fine-grained control over incoming and outgoing network connections. To encrypt my hard disk, I decided to follow Bruce Schneier and use PGP Whole Disk Encryption, which is straightforward to use and also provides support for signing and encrypting your files using PGP.

By the way, my laptop may be running Windows XP, but remember, I do most of my work in VMware virtual machines, so I'll still be doing most of my work in Linux. I'm just trying to get the best of both worlds.

Laptop Crash

My laptop, an HP Pavilion 2058ea running openSUSE 11.0 Linux, crashed during the week. I don't remember anything particular happening, I just went to start it and it wouldn't boot up. The disk partitions were only being mounted in read-only mode, not read/write mode, so the boot-up process was failing. I tried the openSUSE automatic repair function, but that didn't help. I decided not to try "expert mode"; I use Linux a lot, but I don't know about all of the internal workings, nor how best to use low-level expert tools to fix this kind of problem.

I keep my laptop regularly backed up these days (since I had a laptop stolen at a drinks event to celebrate my 40th birthday, some years ago), so I could always revert to a backup. However, I'm hesitant about reverting to backups because I've never had to completely restore a laptop from backups. I don't want to wipe my hard disk to test that full backups really work, but because I haven't tested it, I can't be sure whether it will work quickly and neatly, or whether I will find that it has worked 80%, but has left me with a 20% that takes days/weeks/months to resolve.

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I am careful to partition my hard disk so that I can re-install the operating system without affecting "my files". In particular, almost all of the files I need to preserve are in "/home" or in "/opt" (the latter is where I install programs that don't come as part of openSUSE). I have these both on the same partition. All other system files are on other partitions. If I need to re-install the operating system (as I did in this case), I can re-format the partitions for the system files without re-partitioning my own files into oblivion.

I think it's a mistake that so many systems now (both Linux and Windows; how are Macs partitioned?) come with everything (more or less) on a single partition. It's convenient because you never have to worry about moving space between partitions, but it leaves you with few options when something goes wrong and you need to reformat the partition with the system files in order to get your system working again (and that partition contains all of your files as well). I have a Sony VAIO laptop that came with Windows XP with two equal-sized partitions, but Sony's approach seems to be an exception. Most Windows systems come with one C: partition and nothing else. I just don't think that's worth the risk, especially when there are free utilities like gparted (live CD here) that can split partitions and adjust partition sizes when you need it, without losing the contents of the partitions (but do a backup first, just in case).

Sometimes, when you try to make things simpler, you actually makes things harder.

No need for VMware Tools in openSUSE 11.0

Normally, after you have installed your operating system of choice in a VMware virtual machine, you have to install the “VMware Tools” that allow VMware to manage the hardware virtualisation, like interacting with the host system's graphics card. However, there is now an open-source implementation of the VMware Tools (produced by VMware), and it comes with openSUSE 11.0.

Indeed, I thought I had a problem when I couldn't install VMware Tools as I usually would after upgrading my openSUSE virtual machine to from version 10.3 to 11.0. The VMware Tools installer complained that some other package had already installed some of the VMware support files. In the end, the easiest thing is to delete the old VMware tools (if you have it installed from a previous version of openSUSE) and just go with the new “open-vm-tools”. No problems so far.

Opera 9.5

Version 9.5 of the Opera browser (& e-mail client & RSS/Atom feed reader) came out back in June. I mentioned previously that I was waiting on it because of problems I was having with the previous version when running on Linux in a VMware virtual machine. I've been running it for a few months now, with no problems. It was a long time coming; now I have it, I've regained quite a lot of time each day, because I'm not having to restart Opera a hundred times a day (as I genuinely had to some days).

Why do I use Opera, and not a more popular choice like Firefox? I don't want the customisability that people like about Firefox. I want a fast and integrated way to do my on-line communications – read e-mail, browse the Web, and read RSS/Atom feeds. I've tried other software, but nothing I've tried is as fast and convenient as Opera, at least for the things I do and the way I work.

Printing with CUPS in openSUSE 10.3 (Linux)

It's been ages since I've posted. In February I started a new company (Londata), and that has been keeping me very busy. I've not had enough time to read the blogs I like to read,  let alone find the time to write anything.

However, I've finally solved a problem that has been gnawing at me, so that seemed like a good reason to take the time to write.  I installed openSUSE 10.3 back in October, and since that time I haven't been able to print anything from openSUSE! Now, that might seem intolerable to some of you, but I don't print a lot of stuff, so it wasn't enough to put me off openSUSE 10.3, but it has been inconvenient.

I couldn't print from my deskside PC, which is my print server. So no surprise that I couldn't print remotely from my laptop. However, the big surprise was that I could print remotely from Windows XP (using Samba), either from machines running XP directly, or from VMware virtual machines running XP (we don't run any other variety of Windows here at Casa Coates at present).  How galling is that? I had a Linux print server running, but could only print if I printed from Windows. Anyway, that is what I have been doing, copying files across to Windows on those occasions when I actually needed to print something.

Today, I decided to look around for a solution. I was sure I couldn't be the only one with this issue; at least, I  hoped I wasn't the only one. I quick search suggested other people have this problem, but I didn't come across an obvious solution. However,  I solved my problem anyway. Here is what I did.

My printer is a USB printer, set up with CUPS so that it can be accessed remotely. On my print server, you can access the CUPS printer information using the URL

http://localhost:631/printers/

I went into the entry for my printer (which is called “printer”), and vainly tried to print a test page, just to see if any recent openSUSE updates had changed anything. However, I then noticed a “Modify Printer” button that I hadn't tried before. When I tried it, it asked for the same information that YaST asks for when setting up a printer. I went through and set things up this way, then tried to print a test page again.  This time it worked! So, it seems that YaST doesn't quite get the printer setup right in openSUSE 10.3. That's frustrating, but I'm glad there is a solution. It worked for me; if you are having the same problem, I hope it works for you too.

Updated openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 under VMware Server 1.0.4 (a bit of a tale)

I hesitated on upgrading my openSUSE 10.2 VMware virtual machine to 10.3, because it is the system on which I do most of my work, so I can't afford to have any significant down-time with it. However, there weren't a lot of new issues on the openSUSE newsgroups , so I thought it might be safe now.

Initially, the upgrade went OK. As usual for an openSUSE upgrade in a VMware virtual machine, you do it in text mode, and you don't test the internet connection or select any options that require network access. However, openSUSE 10.3 won't install unless your boot partition (if you have a separate "/boot" partition like I do) is at least 64M, so I had to use a bootable "gparted" CD to increase my boot partition's size by taking some of the space from the adjacent swap partition. Also, during the set-up phase of the update, I had to agree to remove some packages (e.g. Firefox and Java 6) to make the package manager happy. I made a note to re-install these later.

After the upgrade finished, I ran "vmware-config-tools.pl" to rebuild the VMware tools (has to be done whenever the kernel version changes). This is needed to get network connectivity in the virtual machine, among other things. After installation, I removed obviously out-of-date software repositories from my list of repositories (using YaST), did an online registration (to get the details for the appropriate online update repository), and then added my favourite repositories. Then I ran the online update. It told me to reboot, so I did.

Unfortunately, after the reboot, my windowing system wouldn't start. Running "yast2" and redoing the display settings didn't help, so I re-ran the openSUSE 10.3 upgrade, this time not adding extra repositories until after the initial online update had been completed. Quite a number of package dependencies couldn't be satisfied, especially packages that were part of the GNOME desktop. For the most part, I set the package manager to ignore those dependency issues, hoping that I would get it all resolved later.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have just disabled the extra repositories and just have re-run the online update, but I didn't think of that at the time. That said, re-running the openSUSE 10.3 updater on a system that already has 10.3 restored is pretty quick. Unfortunately, the re-installation didn't help, I still couldn't get my windowing system running.

So, I went in and disabled all repositories except the installation disk and the main update site, and re-ran the online update using "yast2" in text mode, and then rebooted as instructed. I then re-ran "vmware-config-tools.pl", and rebooted.

No luck. Using "vmware-config-tools.pl" to change the screen resolution (from 1280x800 to 800x600) also didn't help. At this stage I had to give up. The screen had been OK before my original online update, so I restored my openSUSE 10.2 VMware virtual machine from my backup, and started the update all over again.

During this, I noted that VMware Tools was doing something in "/usr/X11R6/bin", where the only file by default is "xauth". VMware tools seemed to expect to find "X" there. After a quick search, I found that some other tools are fooled by this, and the suggestion is to do

ln -s /usr/bin/Xorg /usr/X11R6/bin/X

In addition, I also did

ln -s /usr/bin/Xorg /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg

This certainly fixed the minor issue with "vmware-config-tools.pl", but after rebooting again, the windowing system was still crashing as before.

So, I ran the online update utility in text mode, and found there were outstanding updates. I decided to keep updating (and re-running "vmware-config-tools.pl" in the case of a kernal update) until there were no more updates left. I should mention that there was (and is) a network issue. My experience of recent openSUSE upgrades is that network device information doesn't get carried over correctly, and needs to be fixed. However, I couldn't get the network to start working by itself on boot-up. Even now, I can only get it to work by running the following script (as root or using "sudo"):

#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/network stop
/sbin/rmmod pcnet32
/sbin/rmmod vmxnet
/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/network start

Anyway, installing all of the online updates didn't fix things. I used YaST's "Software Management" app to select all packages with "xorg" in the name (X-Windows), and tried updating those again. A quick Web search showed that X.org 7.3 is available (7.2 ships with openSUSE 10.3), so I found the openSUSE repository for version 7.3 of X-windows

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/xorg73/openSUSE_10.3/

I added it as a repository, and then did yet another online update of the installed "xorg-*" packages. That worked!

With that major problem over, I added my favourite repositories (Packman, GNOME stable, OpenOffice, etc.) and updated with no problems. The update is done, but that X.org problem almost had me reverting to openSUSE 10.2. It's a pity these things can't run more smoothly, but it's done now, I can just get on with things.

openSUSE 10.3, part 2

Previously:

• openSUSE 10.3 on an HP Pavilion dv2000 (dv2058ea)

I've been happy with openSUSE 10.3 on my laptop, so I decided to install it on my deskside PC. One key difference is that my deskside PC is a twin processor 64-bit machine, whereas my laptop is a dual-core 32-bit machine.

The upgrade went quite smoothly, there were only a few issues worth noting:

• AppArmor – I don't consider virus checkers to be useful for Linux, but Novell's AppArmor is very useful. It allows you to lock down the permissions on particular applications in a very fine-grained way. It's ideal for securing applications like e-mail clients, web browsers, and instant messaging clients. Basically, it stops applications from reading and/or writing files for which they haven't been given permissions, which means it can provide protection against as-yet-unknown future viruses.
  After upgrading, I found that my VMware Server virtual machines wouldn't run, and the VMware log files indicated a permission problem with the configuration files in the user's “ .vmware” directory. This happened even when logged in as root. It turned out that I had to run the AppArmor updater to allow some extra permissions to VMware Server, and then everything was OK.

• Skype 1.4.0 – this is only available as a 32-bit application, there is no 64-bit version for Linux. To install this, I first had to install some 32-bit libqt4 compatibility libraries (core, dbus, x11), and the 32-bit lib compatibility library for libsigc++.

• I was running the "compiz" 3-D desktop under openSUSE 10.2, but the version that comes with openSUSE 10.3 won't run with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 1000 graphics card in my deskside PC.  That's not a big issue, it just means that the windows will no longer has semi-transparent borders, they won't wobble like jelly when I move them, and the desktops won't spin from one to another in a Mac-like style.  I don't really need this visual frippery, but I'm still slightly disappointed to see my graphics card slide of the "supported" list for an application (is that the thing end of the wedge?).

Opera 9.50 beta

Opera 9.50 beta is available for download and testing. I'm a long-time user of Opera as my Web browser, e-mail client, and Atom/RSS feed reader. I've had some problems with earlier versions of Opera 9.x, which can  crash a lot when run inside a VMware virtual machine running Linux, due to an memory issue related to  VNC. I'm hopeful that 9.50 will fix this issue (and I've been testing it since the alpha releases for that reason).

That aside, the most interesting new feature in Opera 9.50 seems to be  shared bookmarks. One of the things I like about Opera is that it applies  fast text search to everything. So, if you are looking for a bookmark, there is no need to have them carefully categorised (although you can if you must). Instead, just start typing in some text from the name or description, or part of the URL, and Opera will refine the bookmark list with every key press. You very quickly get the short list that you need. It's great, but if you run Opera on different machines or in different environments (and I effectively run Opera in 6 different environments), you still have the issue of maintaining bookmarks in multiple places.

Of course, there are Web sites for storing your bookmarks, but it's much slower to bookmark links that way, and the search facilities that those sites provide typically aren't as quick and easy as Opera's search. With shared bookmarks, Opera synchronises your bookmarks directly from Opera to a service via the  Opera Community site. Each copy of Opera that you configure to login to an Opera account will have its bookmarks synchronised there. For me, it is a  genuine improvement over what I have had to do previously.