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Well, it’s been a few days of playing around with my AMD Athlon64 3800+ X2, all of which has been under Ubuntu. I’ve found the whole thing pretty painless, with a lack of 64-bit specific apps not much of a problem as detailed earlier.

The dual-core kernel hasn’t spat it’s dummy out, although trying to run Dapper Drake 6.06 didn’t work out too well - ended up running around in serious dependency hell when it realised it had completely the wrong libraries. As it was just on a test hard drive, wasn’t bothered, but I did find it very, very slick before I balls-ed it up. KDE 3.5 was looking smart, the new version of Adept was looking good, simplying things even further for new users. Not convinced more experienced users will appreciate it as much, though it’s certainly looking like another cracking effort from the Ubuntu team to allow more new users to take on Linux.

The only problem I have been experiencing has been with Amarok. On my 32-bit system, I’d painlessly updated to Amarok 1.4-beta2, but it just won’t have any of it with the 64-bit libraries. That’s actually how I ended up giving Dapper Drake a go, which worked fine at the time before bailing out. It’s still got a few problems, even with all the media libraries and codecs installed, so will fire off a script tonight to convert any renaming .wma (evil, evil!) or .m4a files back to 192Kbps MP3 files so everything plays nice.

Even in it’s current case which has appalling airflow it’s running at 29C, moving up to 35C or so under load with a max lm-sensors has reported being 38C which is very nice. The Cool’n'Quiet technology really makes a massive difference - when I first turned it on, it really is barely noticable alongside the PSU fan, and only when the the load picks up and the fan rotates faster does the nice increase. Seems to nicely roll itself back down too, which I think is a credit to the ASRock system board since I know a couple of people running into problems with 64-bit systems because simply because of lack of support for Cool’n'Quiet.

No playing with Gregarius and Thunderbird tonight - I got my spiffy new AMD Athlon64 3800+ X2 processor, so that’s been the order of tonight’s play! Sitting on an ASRock system board, with 2GB PC3200 DDR RAM makes it a pretty decent system I suppose!

Since my main desktop is Ubuntu, thought I may as well stick with it, and the 64-bit version of Kubuntu has gone on very smoothly indeed. Picked up the on-board network without a problem, and worked fine with the Audigy2 sound card. The ATI drivers have installed quickly once the system was up and running, as did ndiswrapper for my wireless card.

Running Firefox in 32-bit mode isn’t a big problem and performance probably won’t really be noticeable anyways, and the same method of wrapping it within a script for 32-bit compatibility works for Thunderbird. Both of these have been upgraded to 1.5 - details for upgrading Firefox and Thunderbird for those running older versions.

I’m also running the amd64-k8-smp kernel to take advantage of the dual-core processor which wasn’t installed by default (just the generic amd64 kernel), and that’s worked without any major problems that other people seem to have ran into such as incorrect time-keeping, bizarre behaviour under X11 and driver incompatibility. The only thing I’ve so been unable to get running is Amarok 1.4-beta2 which I had working before, though I suspect the dependency problems I’m running into may be caused by running the 64-bit binaries. Will do some digging tomorrow.

Too early to really tell how well the system is performing, as it hasn’t even come close to being pushed, but is definately a lot, lot faster than my previous XP2800+. Installing new packages and compiling from source is frighteningly fast though I did have a chuckle the first time the system loaded and an error message was thrown from the sound server - “CPU overload”

Quite a puzzling one here. Something I’ve been looking into quite a bit recently is server virtualisation, to the point of planning to upgrade my current desktop in order to free a nice XP2800+ to form the basis of a new test server. So Microsoft’s decision to release their Virtual Server 2005 R2 for free is quite interesting.

It’s clearly laid out to be a move to put the halt on people’s uptake with VMWare, and even the usually arrogant Microsoft probably realise they just don’t carry much weight in the virtualisation market. Xen is what I’ve been looking at running (no prizes for guessing why) in order to power various virtual Linux servers, but to make things even more interesting, Microsoft is actually going to officially support various Linux distros. Admitedly, it’s limiting itself to Red Hat and Novell SuSE, but still a fairly bold move - though I can’t quite my head around supporting Red Hat 7.3! Wonder where they’re getting the techies from too!

Am not convinced it will tempt potential customers away though. Those looking for serious stability + support will still pull out the money and plump for VMWare. For those looking at the possibilities of virtualisation, I think they’d go for Xen (although it’s steep learning curve for those coming from Windows-based environments might be off-putting). In the middle are folks like me who will probably give it a go (hey, it’s free, so why not!) in order to dabble with it before deciding on either VMWare of Xen.

It’s still nice to see Microsoft opening up to new ideas and realising it may not all be about money-down to gain a following, and also giving something back to all those customers with no new toys to play with this year due to a couple of little launch dates being put back

Am surprised I hadn’t thought of this, or at least read about it before. Maybe I had and just completely forgot about it, which sounds more like the kind of thing I would do! There’s quite a lot of times I fall back onto a Knoppix Live CD for carrying out system admin tasks, though have found a lighter friend in Gparted for re-sizing hard drives.

Still, suppose when all else fails and you don’t fancy booting into safe-mode to run your Windows virus scanner, or when it won’t even get into safe-mode, this is a good solution. Funny how many times Knoppix, or some other Linux live CD, is being touted as simple fixes for resolving Windows problems…

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A few people have had a snigger or two at my expense on this one, except none of them buggers could offer any useful suggestions. I’ve tried to install Apache on my Ubuntu install, something I’ve done dozens of times on other systems, including a number of servers in the workplace handling thousands of requests a day. I reckon I know a thing or two about Linux having used it for about 6/7 years as well, but this had me stumped.

I was unable to access Apache from my local machine, but other networked machines could. A quick check revealed I was actually unable to ping any of internal devices - loopback, ethernet or wireless from my machine, but other machines could. Figuring it was a simple firewall error, checked my iptables and all fine. Have spent a good few hours flushing rules, adding new ones, reconfiguring devices, etc. Even tried installing firestarted, guardog and shorewall.

It actually looks like quite a common problem with Ubuntu, certainly with 5.10. And the fix?

sudo ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1

I mean, come on, it was purely by chance I tried this one! Everything else on the network has been fine including routing and filtering across my wireless link for the rest of the machines on my network, but Ubuntu doesn’t bring up lo properly which causes local services to fail? Not impressed

I don’t care whether it only does 15-30fps, I still want one

This is some guy’s day job seemingly - building a 24 monitor rack powered by a dozen Linux servers using DMX and Chromium. Imagine a racing game or flight simulator on this bad boy! I’d like to know what clustering setup they have - there’s a few pretty photos which most people are impressed by (including me!), but I’d love to know a bit more about the technicalities of running it

Would be a bit of a bugger if you moved house I suppose…

Since moving to Ubuntu I’ve been running iPodder to manage my podcasts. It’s now called Juice, I think, but there’s no Linux version available yet - however it’s only changed in name after a bit of a fuss with Apple’s lawyers. iPodder is what’s still available via for most distros. Only thing that’s missing is a way to sync to your media device which is something I’ve got roughly scripted including removing old files, but it’s not ideal. Hopefully I can figure out a way to automatically fire off my script when closing iPodder which will request my Archos AV500 to be connected and then copy across the new podcasts.

Respect to Bob Smith for an excellent proof of concept 6 head / 6 user Linux system based around a stock Mandriva install. Click on the image for a bigger picture - it’s not the fact they’ve crammed 6 nVidia graphics cards in there that impresses me, it’s the size of the cooler. They have must have needed planning permission from the local council to install that! Suppose it could be useful for a small Internet cafe type setup if you strung the cables out as they’re going to be left on pretty much all day without users logging in + out which seemed to cause problems, but I think it’s more to prove that it can be done and setup one hell of a system

Upgrading to Thunderbird 1.5 yesterday stopped all my RSS feeds from working - I knew I’d come a cross something Kinda figured something wasn’t quite right yesterday, but then with no feeds updating this morning it definately meant a problem. Simply selecting each feed from ‘Manage Subscriptions’ and re-subscribing to each one brought them back to life, but still a little odd.

I’ve spent most of today moving my desktop machine onto a new hard drive, which gave me an opportunity to start from scratch. I’d become a little frustrated over the last few weeks with niggly little things diverting my attention, when what I really want is to simply turn the desktop on and have it functioning quickly + easily. So, I’ve actually moved away from Debian (a little…) and installed Ubuntu.

As I’ve blogged in the past, although Debian has served me well for 3/4 years now and has been exclusively running my desktop for a year or so, my laptop moved to Gentoo back in November, and although Debian is still my prefered choice for a server OS, after running quite a few Ubuntu installs for others I’ve been drawn to it for my own use. For those running Linux as their sole OS or at least for a large part of the time, you’ll know you usually spend the first year or so with Linux moving between distros trying things out and tweaking your system, but then stick to one that works and have little reason to change. But, as Ubuntu is so closely related to Debian, it’s not such a big adjustment.

One thing that has drawn me to Ubuntu is their support, especially their forums and wiki, matched only by Gentoo in my opinion. More up to date packages are a plus point, which although is easily done with Debian by changing your branch to testing, the support base is their with Ubuntu to guide you. Things such as upgrading to Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5 (two apps I use more than anything else) took about 5 minutes including restoring extensions, themes, mail and personal settings - all easily documented in their wiki.

A couple of new things are pretty cool, the first being Amarok. I previously used Kaffeine, but have grabbed the 1.4 beta version which provides WMA support within libtag to allow scanning of collections containing WMA files, amongst other things. This also ties in with last.fm, so I’ve now got an account on there detailing what crap I’m listening to, though not quite sure how I’ll be utilising it.

I’ve also used Superkaramba rather than gDesklets, and done away with gKrellM at least for the time being. Fluxbox is also being put to one side for the moment. To be honest, I haven’t actually had any performance problems - in fact it seems nippier than the Debian system. I think is partly due to Firefox + Thunderbird 1.5 releases, and having stripped out quite a bit from Ubuntu such as Bluetooth, HP printing, CUPS, ACPI, etc.

Overall, very happy so far! The only slight problem has been various audio + video codecs, easily solved by following through the restricted media formats wiki entry and lack of WMA support from the base Amarok install which is also easily resolved. Am sure I’ll find something to complain about tomorrow though