[ale] Ubuntu recommendations

[Ron Frazier]

Chuck,

Thanks for all the info.  See comments in line below.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 6/24/2011 7:23 PM, Chuck Peters wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Ron Frazier 
> <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com <mailto:atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com>> 
> wrote:
>
>     This thread's a bit old but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.
>      The guys
>     over at the Going Linux podcast http://www.goinglinux.com/ seem to
>     say,
>     from accounts from listeners, to not do upgrades. 
>
>
> Upgrades can break things, and new installs can be broken as well. 
>  Usually a little problem solving will fix either case.   If it is 
> important to you or a production system, upgrades or new installs 
> should be tested prior to making changes.
>
> If a user has problems with an upgrade, it often has something to do 
> with user profile settings.  In that case just move the profile or 
> delete it.  For example firefox settings are in ~/.mozilla, openoffice 
> is in ~.openoffice.org <http://openoffice.org> and libreoffice in 
> .libreoffice etc...  Or you can spend more time and figure out 
> whatever it is in the profile and fix it, and that usually isn't worth 
> the time.
>
> Profile settings, as well as flash cookies and the browser cache and 
> cookies can sometimes get foobarred.  A couple recent problems I 
> helped users with were dolphin, the KDE file manager and gmail. 
>  Deleting the dolphin profile and deleting the browser cookies and 
> cache fixed them.
>
>     Later, I installed Ubuntu 10.04 with a fresh
>     install by wiping out the Linux partition and am still using it.  I've
>     noticed the upgrade to 10.10 prompt but haven't bitten the hook. 
>
>
> That doesn't sound right, if you installed LTS you should not be 
> prompted for an upgrade until the next LTS.
>
> What does your /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades contain?
>
> root at darwin:~# cat /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
> # Default behavior for the release upgrader.
>
> [DEFAULT]
> # Default prompting behavior, valid options:
> #
> #  never  - Never check for a new release.
> #  normal - Check to see if a new release is available.  If more than 
> one new
> #           release is found, the release upgrader will attempt to 
> upgrade to
> #           the release that immediately succeeds the currently-running
> #           release.
> #  lts    - Check to see if a new LTS release is available.  The upgrader
> #           will attempt to upgrade to the first LTS release available 
> after
> #           the currently-running one.  Note that this option should 
> not be
> #           used if the currently-running release is not itself an LTS
> #           release, since in that case the upgrader won't be able to
> #           determine if a newer release is available.
> Prompt=lts

Actually, I changed the setting from LTS to normal in the Synaptic 
preferences screen.  I didn't know you could upgrade from LTS to LTS.

>
>     For me, fresh
>     installs, regardless of being Windows or Linux, are very tedious,
>     because there are many dozens of little settings and tweaks to the
>     system that I do, plus installing user apps, that take about a week to
>     get through.  I don't like doing them. 
>
>
> Did you know about the dpkg --get-selections and --set-selections?
> It may not be the best thing to use directly when an upgrade is 
> involved, but it can help get a system back where it was when 
> reinstalling.

I wasn't familiar with that.  Can you elaborate some, or point me to a 
reference on it?  Sounds interesting.  Many of the tweaks I mention are 
related to configuring security settings and applications.  I'm going to 
elaborate on that in a post I'll enter shortly on securing a computer.  
I don't know how much of this can be automated, but I'm always willing 
to consider new options.

>     So, for now, I'm still with
>     10.04.  There are two other reasons I'm not upgrading.  Firefox 4,
>     which
>     broke almost all my nice status bar apps when I installed it on
>     Windows,
>     so I immediately reverted back to the older version. 
>
>
> Firefox 4 had its last release, now you can try FF5 which has bug 
> fixes and security updates for FF4.  And the Mozilla folks have a 
> meeting next week to try and decide how long they will support the 3.6 
> series.  I think the Mozilla people are doing a great job at confusing 
> users...
>

I guess I'll move to FF5 when they force me to.  I'm still on 3.6.18.  I 
keep saying No Thanks to the Upgrade Now prompt.  It took me days to 
retrograde my Windows machines and get my plugins working again after I 
made the mistake of upgrading to 4.0 on them.  I really did not like the 
changes they made at all.

> One thing I would like to know is, and I haven't found an easy 
> solution, how I can run both  firefox 3.6 with my old profile and the 
> new firefox 5 and not have the profiles step over each other.  From 
> what I have learned thus far it looks like I will have to get into the 
> source, tweak it and build customized packages. And what is 
> most aggravating about that is modifying the Ubuntu packages and 
> redistributing them could be illegal without further modifications due 
> to the Mozilla Trademark and their failure to reply to my inquiry 
> about the trademark licensing.  Debian has good reasons for 
> %s/renaming/calling/ firefox iceweasel...

I'm afraid I have no idea how to do what you describe, other than 
running Firefox in a VM, or another user account.

>      Then, there's also
>     Unity, which I ranted about before.
>
>
> Then use the old Gnome now called "Ubuntu Classic" or KDE.  It was the 
> first production release of Unity, I think it will be a lot better by 
> the next LTS in April 2012.  I use KDE mostly and other than the 
> crashes the one thing I don't like about Unity is how it works when 
> one changes the focus to follow the mouse.

I never got far enough into it to try, or even know about, any of that.  
I was just booting a Live CD to verify that it had burned correctly.  
Unity came up and I immediately hated it on several levels.  I guess 
I'll get around to trying some of that, but for now, I'm just sticking 
with Ubuntu 10.04.

>
> Chuck
>    

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com

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