Posts Tagged ‘ubuntu’

A Rant about Ubuntu 11.10

Every 6 months when Ubuntu releases I throw caution to the wind, click the upgrade button on my desktop, and leave, expecting to come back shortly to an awesome new operating system. And every 6 months it seems I don’t come back to something awesome, but to a whole collection of new problems. Usually it’s a whole collection of conflicts or broken packages. Sometimes the system won’t boot. Sometimes X won’t start or some weird new graphics problem pops up. It pretty much always leads to a fresh install. This time, however, things were different. With 11.10, things went smoothly and everything came back up nicely. That is until I logged in and realized all my GNOME settings were non-existent afte the upgrade to GNOME 3.

I don’t really have any particular loyalties or love of GNOME, I just used it because that was the default and tends to be the one that’s been polished the most by Ubuntu. While the new desktop looks great, it seems to have gone backwards quite a bit in usability. The integrations with Banshee/volume controls seem to be gone (or at least not working after my upgrade), menus are confusing and way too click-heavy, and there seems to be almost not configurability to the desktop. Even the new gnome-tweak-tool seems to have very little customizability. It seems over half of the customizations have to do with fonts and really small things that don’t matter to me at all. There are those who are passionate about fonts, but I am not one of those people.

Perhaps worse, there’s a new menu item under your username on the menu bar for “Online Accounts”. When I clicked on it, it brought me to a screen asking to give access to my Google account.. I thought maybe this could have some promise, so I granted it access to my Goolge account and it said that it had access to, among other things, docs (which I thought was going to be really awesome). However, nothing really indicated any next steps for accessing things. After poking around a bit and not finding anything, I did a quick search online to see if anyone could give any indication for what this thing was supposed to do. And, as it seems.. It does nothing. While I do enjoy a good technology preview.. I had to remind myself that this was an actual release. Ugh. I just granted access to my Google account for.. what?

One pleasant detail that I did thoroughly enjoy about the new GNOME is the OSX-style alt-tab/alt-~ app/window switching. Grouping applications and switching windows within the apps that way has been something that I’ve desired for a long time when switching back and forth. I know that most will probably hate it, but I’m a fan :)

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Filed under Rants : Comments (0) : Oct 26th, 2011

Launching Ubuntu 11.04 Instances on KVM

This post is mostly for my own record as I keep having to look at my shell history every time I want to spin up a new virtual machine on my KVM server at home (so for those looking for something earth shattering, move along). For anyone looking for a how-to to get started, I followed an entry over a howtoforge. It’s pretty good, so no need to replicate.

Now, the goods.

If this is your first image, I recommend looking for the section in the page referenced titled “3 Creating An Image-Based VM” (seems no way to link to specific sections..). For me, I just copy one of the dirs from an existing one and clear out the ubuntu-kvm dir and edit vmbuilder.partition as necessary.

Then, from that dir, run:
sudo vmbuilder kvm ubuntu --suite=natty --flavour=virtual --arch=amd64 -o --libvirt=qemu:///system --ip=172.16.0.10 --templates=mytemplates --user=wyatt --name=Wyatt --pass=supersecret --addpkg=vim-nox --addpkg=unattended-upgrades --addpkg=acpid --addpkg=openssh-server --firstboot=/home/user/host.whatan00b.com/boot.sh --mem=1024 --hostname=host.whatan00b.com --bridge=br0 --part=vmbuilder.partition

Then, start the vm:
sudo virsh start host.whatan00b.com

It should boot shortly and you can ssh to the shiny new vm with the IP and username/password specified. Hopefully soon I can find some fancy way to integrate Puppet into the mix. :)

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Oct 23rd, 2011

Zimbra Upgrade to 7.0

Upgraded my Zimbra system from 6.0.9 (haven’t kept up-to-date with the 6.0.x series) to 7.0 tonight. The upgrade was pretty straightforward (though a couple of weird things happened). Just have to install sqlite3 as an added prerequisite on my platform (Ubuntu 10.04 x64):
apt-get install sqlite3

At the end of the upgrade, it the upgrader complained a bit about finding my license file. I have a valid license, and I just hit enter to go past the message and it wasn’t an issue after that…
Looking for valid license to install...failed to install license.
*******ERROR
Failed to install a license - this will prevent your server from functioning properly
Please contact Zimbra to obtain a license
Press RETURN to continue Activating license...license activated.

One more note. Once again, I lost my MTA and zimbraMailMode settings. :(

I haven’t had time yet to play with the new fanciness, but the geek inside me didn’t allow me to let a major upgrade sit for too long. So far I’m at least digging the new UI.

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (2) : Feb 10th, 2011

Chef on Ubuntu 10.04

I’m starting to play around a bit with Chef and tonight ran into some issues with setting up a Ubuntu 10.04 machine. The machine was configured as a JEOS box from the beginning, so that may have been messing with me a bit, but the getting started guide from Opscode didn’t quite get me up and running, so I thought I’d share what got me up and running.

To start out, the getting started guide recommended installing a copy of RubyGems from source. Since it was the same version, I tried it without doing that and just using the package manager. This was a mistake – don’t try it! As a side note, it’s frustrating the way Debian-based distro’s (and more so Ubuntu) tend to be the red-headed step-child when it comes to tools like this. Not sure what Ubuntu was doing wrong different, but it didn’t work. Anyway, be sure to install RubyGems from source as recommended.

After getting RubyGems installed “the right way” for Chef, I had some troubles installing chef via gem:
$ sudo gem install chef
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing chef:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/json-1.4.2 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/json-1.4.2/ext/json/ext/generator/gem_make.out

After doing a quick Google search, turns out I didn’t have ruby-dev installed:
sudo apt-get install ruby-dev

After that, chef installed correctly.

Once I got past that, the knife utility still wouldn’t run, but instead threw:
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- net/https (LoadError)
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.9.8/lib/chef/rest.rb:23
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.9.8/lib/chef/client.rb:24
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.9.8/lib/chef/application/knife.rb:20
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.9.8/bin/knife:23
from /usr/bin/knife:19:in `load'
from /usr/bin/knife:19

Again, after a bit of searching, turns out I was missing the Ruby OpenSSL packages:
sudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby

All seems well now after a few snags. If you’re hitting my same issues, I hope this helps!

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (0) : Sep 22nd, 2010

Upgrading Zimbra Server from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04

This last week Zimbra released its new version 6.0.8 which is the first version that supports Ubuntu 10.04 (still in beta, but package was released). Being a sucker for upgrades, I decided to give it a try tonight and upgrade my Zimbra server. The upgrade actually went pretty smooth, despite the fact that I’ve had bad luck with Ubuntu distro upgrades in the past.

To start, I had a server at Zimbra 6.0.7 on Ubuntu 8.04 (64-bit). I upgraded Ubuntu to 10.04 first and then Zimbra to 6.0.8.

The upgrade for Ubuntu is pretty straightforward and is outlined in their docs. Basically, make sure the install manager is up-to-date:
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Then, make sure Prompt is set to “lts” in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades. (These two steps weren’t necessary for me and I didn’t do that on purpose, so it’s likely they are ok ‘out of the box’)

Then, perform the upgrade:
sudo do-release-upgrade

I did mine from an SSH session (gives a warning and starts another SSH server on an alternate port, but I didn’t have to worry about that). When the upgrader prompted, I took the defaults except for /etc/pam.d/common-*.

Once your new Ubuntu 10.04 server is up and running, we have to grab an additional dependency:
sudo apt-get install libperl5.10

I then just ran the install like normal, but skipped the integrity checks. The first time I let them run and hit this error:

perl: symbol lookup error: /opt/zimbra/zimbramon/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi/auto/Data/UUID/UUID.so: undefined symbol: Perl_Tstack_sp_ptr

The second time I just skipped the integrity check and everything went as normal.

I lost a few settings, the same as the 6.0.7 upgrade :( . I wrote about them last time here. I also lost my zimbraMailMode setting again, same thing as the upgrade to 6.0.7.

After the settings were back, I noticed mail wouldn’t send out properly. /var/log/zimbra.log complained of the antivirus scanner being unavailable. A run of ‘zmcontrol status’ showed that clamd wasn’t running. When I tried to start the antivirus, it failed on starting clamd, showing this in /opt/zimbra/log/clamd.log:

/opt/zimbra/clamav/sbin/clamd: error while loading shared libraries: libltdl.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Turns out it’s easy enough to fix:
apt-get install libltdl7

A restart of zmantivirusctl and all was good. (update: submitted bug for this)

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Filed under How-Tos / Tips : Comments (1) : Aug 28th, 2010

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