Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) from 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) on my home desktop (in pictures)

Despite Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) being out for over a month now, I just got around to upgrading today. I use my Linux box for web browsing, watching videos, general web development and other day to day tasks so I couldn't afford for it to be down long if the upgrade went badly. Fortunately, the upgrade worked like a charm. So here is the upgrade process that took a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes in pictures:











At this point something was upgraded that caused the border to not show up in the screen shots. Oh well.










After the upgrade the theme was a little funky. I went into the theme editor and changed the theme a few times and it was back to normal. I did see the new dark theme and I am going to give it a try for a little bit. I don't think it will last long but it does look pretty good at first. I also switched to the default background for a bit too.

Wine development release 1.1.9 is now available

The Wine development release 1.1.9 is now available.

What's new in this release:
- A large number of regression test fixes.
- Performance improvements in memory management.
- Improved POP3 support in inetcomm.
- Initial implementation of the XInput DLL.
- Various bug fixes.

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

http://www.winehq.org/site/download

One step closer to ignoring experts-exchange.com thanks to Google

The one site on the Internet that annoys me the most is experts-exchange.com. This seemingly useful site comes up in my search results frequently. The more obscure my query, the more likely an Experts Exchange page will appear in the top results. The problem with this though is they don't answer your question unless you register. This isn't just an annoying New York Times registration either. This is a full blown 7 day trial registration that leads to a $12.95 per month account. Blah!

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with them trying to make money by bringing information together. It is not for me though. I have no desire to pay a monthly fee or to take the time to sign up for a free 7 day trial account to answer some simple question that is likely answered somewhere else on page 1 of my search results. Because I will never use their service I'd like to never be bothered with search results to their pages.

Fortunately, Google is helping us get a little closer to the dream of completely blocking results on expert-exchange.com. The just released a feature called SearchWiki which lets you annotate, promote and remove search results. Granted this is only for when you are logged in and on a per search basis so it is far from the optimal "block everything from this domain" option but it is a step in the right direction. At least I can take my loathing out on the result by removing it. It is as easy as 1.. 2.. 3.. You even get a fun explosion dust cloud while the result is removed.




And while doing a little more research, it looks like there is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox users to block Expert Exchange results for us already.

Also, if you are looking for answers, try Stack Overflow instead. It is actually useful.

Free CrossOver for Linux and Mac TODAY ONLY!

CodeWeavers is offering free copies of CrossOver for Linux and Mac users for today, October 28th only! They are doing this as part of a Lame Duck Challenge Free Offer. CrossOver is based on Wine which allows you to run Windows applications on Linux and Mac platforms by implementing the Windows API on those platforms.

As of writing this, their website is in slim mode because of all the traffic but they are still accepting email address submissions and providing downloads for their Pro and Games versions of CrossOver. Go download it now if you are a Linux or Mac user. What do you have to lose?

Ubuntu 8.10 is coming soon...

Ubuntu 8.10 is set to be released on October 30th. Only 13 more days to go.

Flash 10 is out for Linux and Ubuntu users even get deb packages!

Flash 10 was released just a few days ago (October 15th) and I am excited! Whats new? On Linux, Flash has been a second rate citizen for some time. The Linux version has been buggy, causes browser crashes and leads to excessive CPU usage. The last release for Linux was also over 6 months behind the Windows and OS X releases.

Flash 10 for Linux has been released at the same time as other platforms this time around. The Linux release now also comes with easy to install packages for Debian based distributions like Ubuntu and RPM based distributions like Fedora. Adobe is really starting to pay more attention to Linux users and I really appreciate it.

I had hoped that I could get the latest Flash from the ubuntu-backports repository but it looks like they are still working on that as the version listed now is "10.0.1.218+10.0.0.525ubuntu1~hardy1+really9.0.124.0ubuntu2" which really is still version 9. To easily install version 10 though, I just went to the Adobe Flash download page, downloaded the deb file and installed it. The installation also removes the old version for you keeping your upgrade hassle free. A simple browser restart later and I was running the latest Flash 10.



I haven't been running Flash 10 long enough to know if it has fixed all my problems yet but I do know it has fixed the annoying Flash z-index bug that caused content like menus to be drawn behind Flash content. This was most annoying to me on the Verizon Wireless website.

Flash 9 on Linux


Flash 10 on Linux

I really hope Adobe keeps Flash on Linux at the same level moving forward. Flash has been one of the chicken or the egg problems for Linux for a while and I think Adobe now realizes they should do something about that. I also think competition from Sliverlight may be a factor here as Microsoft has only partially endorsed an implementation of it as Moonlight for Linux. I see the benefits of having more popular/standardized distributions coming into play also. With Ubuntu and Red Hat/Fedora as two of the major players, Adobe can confidently create tested and easy to install packages for those platforms.

As further reading, I would suggest the Ars Technica review as it covers all platforms and goes into some performance benchmarks.

What is your uptime?

My system has been up for:

$ uptime
01:01:48 up 44 days,  7:47,  2 users,  load average: 1.06, 1.03, 0.86

... but now it is time to restart. Some updates I installed over the past few days require a restart (though I don't believe it is a new kernel which is usually the only thing that requires one).

Of course this is nothing like the current uptime of the Linux server I manage (which I had to restart recently to install some more memory). I think it has been up for about a year before.

$ uptime
01:06:46  up 86 days,  2:43,  1 user,  load average: 0.04, 0.02, 0.00

And this is far from any sort of uptime record too. Just an interesting tidbit. Oh, this would also not be possible if it weren't thanks to my friend the UPS. My electric power lately has been less than ideal.

Either way, it doesn't matter for anything... just interesting.