Every time I logged into the system – and several times throughout a day’s usage – the following dialog would pop up:

At first, I tried reporting the problem – which seemed to be something to do with apport – but the dialog kept popping up. A minor frustration, but it always managed to appear when I was in the middle of typing something important.

The solution was very simple. I remember that Ubuntu crashed one day, while trying to resume from hibernate. It hasn’t had the problem since, and I dutifully reported the problem. It was after that incident that the dialog began to appear. I was thinking that maybe some system module was corrupted, or perhaps was incompatible with Ubuntu 12.10.

As usual, my imagination had run riot and concocted a far worse situation than actually existed. The perfectly reasonable explanation was that the old crash report hadn’t been cleared out after I reported it. Solving it was a simple case of opening a terminal window and typing:

sudo rm /var/crash/*

No more problematic dialog! I love little tweaks like this, although I can’t guarantee that my imagination won’t go into overdrive next time I have a problem like this!

Anyway, that’s just a moan, and nothing to do with the title of this blog post. Synchronicity is wonderful – I was just actually looking at how to change the tty resolution on a console-only Ubuntu Server, when the same question popped up on the Ubuntu Forums.

Ubuntu helpfully sets the console resolution for you – depending on what graphics card and monitor you have. Sometimes, though, the font can appear almost nanoscopic! Also – as was the case for me – you may be putting an older monitor onto the server, which won’t support such a high resolution.

Many of the answers focus on editing /etc/default/grub, but many of them don’t work – or only work for the GRUB selection screen. Here’s how to change the tty console resolution on Ubuntu 12.04 Server (this method works for everything from 9.10 as far as I know).

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Add the following lines – or uncomment and modify them if they already exist:

GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="915.modeset=0 nomodeset"

Save and close the /etc/default/grub file. And finally:

sudo update-grub
reboot

When your server reboots, the console resolution will now be 800×600, which is good enough for most old monitors – and myopic, old sysadmins!

Proving the old adage (which I just made up) of “where there’s a geek, there’s a way”, I had the idea of installing her Wine applications to our Mythbuntu-based home media centre, and letting her access them via an SSH tunnel.

On our Mythbuntu 11.10 media centre, this proved to be almost insanely easy! I already had SSH server installed, but if you don’t then open a terminal window and type:

sudo apt-get install ssh

I didn’t have Wine installed, but this is a simple case of just typing:

sudo apt-get install wine

Next, I installed the Windows applications and tested them on the media centre itself.

From my laptop, running Ubuntu 12.04, I tested to see if I could get a Wine application opening through SSH:

ssh -X user@192.168.0.100 'wine notepad'

The IP address of my media centre is 192.168.0.100. The “-X” switch enables X11 (the graphical user interface) to be forwarded, and the final part ‘wine notepad’ is the command I want to run.

After typing in my password, the Wine notepad application popped up on my screen. So far so good!

I knew that the application I wanted to launch had more complex requirements – including an “ENV” command – so I put all of this into a little shell script called wtlib in the home directory of my media centre (guess what I was wanting to run!!) and made it executable. I now ran:

ssh -X user@192.168.0.100 ~/wtlib

Happily, after a little churning, Watchtower Library 2011 appeared and, over my home wireless network, was perfectly usable.

This works very well for Linux-based machines, since they’re already running an X Server. Most other devices (Windows PCs, Macs, iStuff) don’t have built-in X Servers, so we need to get one. There are some available for iOS, and the best of these – in my humble opinion – is iSSH.

We don’t have Kim’s new iToy yet, but I do have iSSH on my iPhone (there were an awful lot of “i”s in that sentence). For €7 from the App Store it isn’t the cheapest app in the world, but it does have a built-in X Server and DWM (dynamic window manager), so it allows X-based applications to be tunnelled over SSH.

A trivial bit of configuration later, and I had my Wine application running in an SSH tunnel to my iPhone. The iPhone’s screen size renders it almost unusable, but the speed was good. You just have to keep scrolling backwards and forwards to see anything. In a future version of iSSH they’re planning on bringing out a window resizing feature, which will be much more helpful.

Yet again I’m happy about how easy it is with Linux to implement a solution like this. The only cost was the app for the iDevice, but all of the other stuff was freely available and easy to configure.

Anyway, this isn’t a technical problem, nor is it specifically Ubuntu-related, but I think it comes under the category of ubuntu with a small “u”; the philosophy of community, mutual support, and giving back when you can. That’s what I thought when I read the June 21st 2012 news release on www.pool.ntp.org. The full release can be read here. The chances are that you’re already using servers of the NTP project – even if you don’t realise it. So I decided to give a bit back and join the pool with my Ubuntu server and static IP. If you want to help out too, then it’s fairly easy to set up.

The two main requirements for joining the pool would be 1) an Internet connection with a static IP address, and 2) a machine running ntpd. If you’re running Ubuntu server (as I am), then ntpd is already installed. For everyone else, open a terminal window and type:

sudo apt-get install ntp

When ntpd is installed, edit the /etc/ntp.conf file to adjust the servers.

sudo nano /etc/ntp.conf

The file is pre-populated with ubuntu.pool.ntp.org servers. To join the NTP pool, we need to use stratum 1 or 2 servers with fixed IP addresses. You need about five servers in the list. Locate the servers nearest to you by using this list, and then put them in your ntp.conf file using the following syntax:

server hostname

So, for example, my ntp.conf file looks like this:

server ntp.maths.tcd.ie iburst
server ntp.amber.org.uk
server ntp2c.mcc.ac.uk
server ntp.cis.strath.ac.uk
server ntp2.sandvika.net

The “iburst” parameter after the first server tells it to synchronise quickly after startup.

I left the default restrictions in place. These allow anyone to synchronise, but they don’t allow non-local clients to see the operating system type, or ntpd version number. The default restrictions are:

restrict -4 default kod notrap nomodify nopeer noquery
restrict -6 default kod notrap nomodify nopeer noquery

Finally, I retrieved the “leap seconds” file from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and applied this to my ntpd installation. In case you’re confused about what a leap second is, then the ntp.org support pages offer the following helpful information:

Graceful handling of leap seconds implies applying the leap second locally at the appropriate time, rather than having the clock off by one second until the discrepancy witih sources is noticed and corrected at a later time. ntpd will gracefully handle leap seconds which it knows about in advance, via one of two means. If a leap second file is configured in ntp.conf or acquired via autokey, ntpd will inform clients of the pending leap for one day in advance via the leap field of the NTP packet, and it will be applied locally. Lacking a leapfile, ntpd is at the mercy of its sources to inform it of the pending leap second.

So now you know! To apply the file, download it from time.nist.gov using your favourite ftp client. It’s in the /pub directory and is called “leap-seconds.nnnnnnnnnn” where nnnnnnnnnn is a numeric time stamp. At time of writing, the file was called “leap-seconds.3535228800″. Once you have retrieved the file, store it in a public path on your server. Then add the following line to your ntp.conf file:

leapfile "/path/to/leap-file"

So my ntp.conf file reads:

leapfile "/pub/leap-seconds.3535228800"

Now make sure that TCP and UDP port numbers 123 are open on your firewall and forwarded to your Ubuntu server. Lastly, restart ntpd:

sudo service ntp restart

You can check to make sure that ntp has synchronised with a peer by typing:

ntpq -c lpeers

If a peer name appears with an asterisk in the list, then your ntpd service has synchronised with it.

Now all you need to do is add your server to the pool. I created a DNS entry, so that ntp.mattrudge.net points to my static IP address, but this isn’t strictly necessary.

Once your server is added, it will start with an “availability score” of -5.0. This will gradually increase as your server is checked over a number of hours for uptime and reliability. When the score reaches 10, then the server will be published in the pool.

So, if you have a few spare CPU cycles and a bit of bandwidth hanging around, then why not get into the spirit of Ubuntu and join the NTP server pool.

…and waited, and waited, and waited a bit more. The installer told me that it was “Preparing libc6″, but it seemed to be doing an awful lot of preparing. I’ve prepared entire meals in less time than it was taking to prepare libc6. So eventually, I clicked on the Terminal dropdown to see what was going on.

The installer was actually waiting for input from me in the terminal window. It had an ncurses window open, and was asking about stopping and restarting certain services. I clicked OK, and OK again on the window that followed. After that the installation was quick and painless. So just a tip if you’re doing an upgrade through Update Manager – click on the Terminal dropdown first and save yourselves a long wait!

That little niggle aside, I’m really liking this new release. Most – if not all – of Unity’s rough edges seem to have been smoothed out. Being a “terminal fiend” as I was recently called (thank you +Sean Campbell, I like that ), I love the new Super key feature (the Windows key on most PCs) – hold it down and an overlay pops up showing keyboard shortcuts.

The HUD is a really interesting addition too. I know this has had a mixed response from some testers, but it works like this: if you press and hold the Alt key in an application, then that application’s menus appear at the top of the screen as expected. If you press and quickly release the Alt key, however, then the HUD is activated. This neat little text box allows you to start typing the command you want to carry out from the menus. For example, stab the Alt key and type p – the HUD will show you the menu commands that match your input (likely File > Print in this example). Just press Enter to select the option – often it’s the default.

The HUD uses fuzzy searching and remembers past searches to try and learn from your input. It’s a really quick way of navigating around applications, and you don’t even have to remove your hands from the keyboard – or navigate a series of nested menus to find what you want. Personally, I love it.

I’m also really liking the new Video lens for the Dash. It searches your local videos, and online sources, which I think is a great way of integrating video searching to the desktop.

Additionally, I’m happy to say that my Wine applications seem to be behaving better than they did on 11.10. The tooltips in Windows applications would often leave an ugly grey box when they deactivated. It was almost as if the drop shadow remained after the tooltip vanished. Anyway, that has now been fixed, so my Wine applications are a lot more visually pleasing.

Did I mention that my Samsung RF511 now starts up in record time? I thought Oneiric was quick, but Precise is like lightning. And there you have it, folks, conclusive proof than a Pangolin is faster than an Ocelot.

I was quite excited about this Ubuntu release. This was the first time I’d been involved with the release as part of the server documentation team, so it’s great to see everything come together. Congratulations to all the developers and teams that put in so much time and effort to make 12.04 LTS such a polished release.

Perhaps more importantly, the Spectrum introduced me to programming and, I think, laid the basis for  my current involvement with Linux. I started with Sinclair BASIC, an interpreted language built in to the machine, and quickly grasped the fundamentals. Fast forward two years to 1984. Margaret Thatcher and the National Union of Mineworkers were engaged in a vicious power struggle, and my father was on strike with the other miners in Britain. No longer able to afford to buy any games for the Spectrum, I saved up every penny and bought the book “Mastering Machine Code on your ZX Spectrum” by Toni Baker. Amazingly by today’s standards – where all programming is done from the boxed-in safety of an IDE – you had to write your own assembler in Sinclair BASIC. Opcodes were firstly written on A4 ruled sheets, and graphics were designed on graph paper from school.

With only 48Kb of RAM (41.5Kb usable) space was at a premium. Programs had to be tight, and no instruction could be wasted in order to get the most out of the 3.5Mhz Zilog Z80 processor. This taught me programming discipline that I still try to use on projects today and, just to put a Linux spin on this post as well, Linus Torvalds (I really don’t need to tell you who he is, do I?) cut his programming teeth on the successor to the ZX Spectrum, the Sinclair QL.

It’s not just misty-eyed nostalgic exaggeration when I say that this humble machine, with less computing power than the weakest smartphone, affected my life more than anything else I’ve ever owned. It taught me fundamentals of computer architecture that are still the same today, and started me on a 30-year journey with computers that I’m still enjoying today. I hope that projects like Raspberry Pi can create a whole new generation of people who get into programming and computer science for the sheer fun of it, just like my generation did back in the 1980′s.

Even today, I still own the 48K, rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum (well, two now actually, along with a 128K Spectrum+2 and a 48K Spectrum+), such is the affection that I have for the little machine. So before I do descend into misty-eyed nostalgia, I’ll finish by saying a huge thank you to Sir Clive Sinclair and the world-changing ZX Spectrum. Happy 30th anniversary.

EDIT: and a tip of the hat to Google for the doodle at www.google.co.uk today screenshot is here in case it’s gone by the time you read this.

Some Spectrum links:

comp.sys.sinclair
World of Spectrum
ZX Spectrum on Wikipedia
My CSSCGC 2006 pages
My Spectrum Firefox Personas here and here

This blog normally trundles along, receiving between 500 to 1,000 views per day, but the “Linux is alive” article spiked at twenty times that on the first day! I don’t want to thrash this subject to death, and I’m neither apologising nor backtracking on my views, but I want to address just a few of the points that were raised.

1. “He is a typical Linux apologist, who treats problems with the operating system as if they don’t exist”

Well, since an apologist is someone who argues in defense or justification of something, then I don’t mind being that! Yes, I use Ubuntu out of choice on my laptop, my media centre, my servers, and my wife’s netbook; however in my work, I also support Windows, and Mac environments. I am not saying Microsoft/Apple/Google/You (delete as applicable) are evil, but after frustrating times with every version of Windows up to 7, I’m very happy using Linux.

I don’t deny that there are issues with the operating system. I just find the attitude that people have towards Linux quite surprising and, I suppose, a little hypocritical. If your new iThing doesn’t work with Windows, then that’s Apple’s fault. If it doesn’t work with Linux, then that’s because Linux is not geared for the desktop. Huh? Feel free to point out Microsoft’s dominant market share here (more on that later), but I think that user outrage needs to be pointed in the right direction. In other words, if some vendors were more supportive, this would lead to a smoother Linux experience with their products. A few years ago, however, while my company was negotiating the Irish distributorship of the now-defunct HP OpenMail-based Samsung Contact, I saw how the large, established software companies viewed enterprise Linux – and experienced some of their strong arm tactics myself.

Every time I read something about “Linux must do this because Windows does”, I get this image of Linux as a cringing, doe-eyed puppy, nipping the heels of Windows users and promising to leap backwards through flaming hoops for them if they’ll just please stop kicking me. We don’t need to have this “forgotten child” syndrome. Linux is a mature platform, with great support. We don’t need to apologise for that.

2. My personal favourite – “The article was just for page-views – he probably made a fortune from the advertising.”

The advertising on this site makes just about enough to cover the cost of hosting (about €40 per year). The “Donate” button has been clicked three times since its inception. Over the period of time in question, I made €2.63 from the Google Ads, €0.10 from the Project Wonderful ad, and zero from the Amazon ad or “Donate” button.

At exactly 1,200 words, I reckon I made the princely sum of €0.002 per word from the article. You’re all too smart to click on adverts, you see!

3. Various ad hominem arguments.

After mentioning the “calm and elegance” of my Ubuntu installation, there was an animated little discussion saying that I probably use the ugliest theme. Yes- fine, but it doesn’t matter if I use a lurid, pink, 1970′s Barbie-in-spandex theme, because I’m not talking about appearance. I’m talking about the continual pop-up nags that still appear on Windows – even though they’re now aggregated behind an equally irritating speech bubble. I was talking about the ease with which my software is updated through the repositories, and the general speed and lack of fuss with which Linux does its job.

I maintain that if an operating system does its job properly, then you don’t notice it. My wife never gives thought to what operating system she’s using…she just trusts it to do what she wants.

I was also accused of hypocrisy because my comment about the success of Linux not being about the size of its market segment, was twisted together with a sentence in the post that said that Linux on the desktop has millions of users.

I don’t think the two are mutually incompatible, and the comments were taken out of context. Linux on the desktop will live as long as millions of people use it. It doesn’t depend on a large market segment, because it’s not a commercial project. Equally the fact that the majority can be sincerely and deeply wrong is a lesson we still don’t appear to have learned from history.

The only reason I address these is that I think it’s easy to miss the point – and ad hominem attacks just add to the FUD that’s out there. Like ants crawling on the surface of the Mona Lisa, they can see every tiny imperfection, but miss the beautiful big picture.

4. “You shouldn’t criticise a new user’s opinion”

I agree with this…to a point. I wasn’t trying to criticise Mr Bradley’s experience with Ubuntu. In fact, his 30 Days with Ubuntu Linux article finished quite positively. I like to think I’m sympathetic to any problems that a new user has, but I took issue with his follow-up article. In this, his stance seemed to have hardened against Linux on the desktop, and he quoted his 9-month old data as proof.

Things move fast in the Linux world – and IT in general. Unity has also matured a lot – my 12.04 beta install has proved very robust so far. Additionally, my iPhone syncs with Rhythmbox and updates over the air, so some of the issues he raised 9 months ago are no longer valid. Ubuntu 11.10 was released since his original test, and 12.04 is about to be. Just because Windows Vista might have been woeful, it doesn’t mean that Windows 7 isn’t desktop-ready.

Having said that, I’ve also learned that it’s easy to get your fingers burned when handling a subject as hot as Linux on the desktop vs Windows! So, in summary:

• Use whatever operating system makes you happy, and don’t stress about it; however the “my distro is better than yours” arguments don’t help. Instead they fragment the community and alienate potential new users.
• If you’re going to say that Linux/Windows/Mac OS/Whatever (delete as appropriate) isn’t ready for the desktop, then at least base your comments on the most recent version.
• I welcome discussion about this, but please try to leave emotion at the door. It just adds to the FUD that’s already out there.

I don’t often use this blog to take exception to things I read (otherwise it’s probably all I’d ever do), but in this case, I felt that I had to respond.

Firstly my own experience of Linux on the desktop has been overwhelmingly positive. All of my hardware works out of the box, and within a few short weeks of having Ubuntu installed, I happily deleted my Windows partition and I’ve never looked back. That’s over 5 years ago. Now, it could be argued that as an IT professional, Linux would be more accessible to me; however I’ve also installed Ubuntu on my wife’s netbook. She downloads music, browses the web, sends emails, uses productivity packages, prints documents, watches videos, and makes video calls – and has absolutely no problem with the operating system whatsoever.

So, what were Mr Bradley’s main issues? I read through the entire 30-days article, and the five things he hated most about his Ubuntu trial were:

1. Inability to sync and update his iPhone

To me this is a weak dislike. This is not Ubuntu’s or Linux’s fault. Plus the ability to update iOS over the air has now all but removed the need for me to connect my iPhone to my computer.

2. A dislike of the Banshee music player

There are many more music players in the sea, and writing off an operating system as “dead on the desktop” because you don’t like one application is really grasping at straws. If my reasons for giving up Windows were that I didn’t like Windows Media Player, then that would be a really petty argument.

3. Difficulties with Wine

Wine can be tricky, I admit; however installing any compatibility layer to run code that’s native to another operating system is going to be error-prone. Wine does a very good job at providing access to some Windows-only applications, but in my opinion it’s better to find a Linux alternative, and only go down the Wine route if you absolutely can’t live without a certain Windows program.

4. The feeling of “swimming upstream”.

I really did take issue with this one. As someone who has struggled with (and blogged about) certain vagaries of Microsoft programs and operating systems, this rankled. Ubuntu’s job is not to be a Linux-based Windows look-alike. Many things are, in fact, easier with Ubuntu – setting up and publishing websites for one. If there’s a problem, then a huge community is instantly accessible to provide help.

When you are using a different operating system it is only to be expected that certain things don’t operate the way you would immediately expect. “I really hate my new Ford because it doesn’t look like my old Toyota” would be a foolish comment, but not when it comes to computer operating systems it seems.

Mr Bradley’s comment that “if Ubuntu Linux was a microwave–I would have to first research obscure types of food uniquely crafted to work with the Ubuntu Linux microwave, then press the magic button enabling the food to be cooked, and search through forums and online help to find the specific way to rewire my microwave to work with that particular food” is just plain wrong. This is based on his attempts to get his VPN connection working. I don’t think that it’s counter-intuitive to type “VPN” in to the Ubuntu Software Center if you’re looking for…ummm…a VPN client!

As a 100% Linux user, who occasionally has to use Windows on another PC, I now find the Windows way of doing things to be counter-intuitive, unhelpful, nagging, and awkward. When fixing a friend’s Windows 7 installation recently, I couldn’t wait to get away from the busy, irritating, pop-up dialog boxes and back to the calm and elegance of my Linux installation.

5. Linux flamers

True, there are some. Mr Bradley describes them as “arrogant, self-righteous jerks”, and there certainly are many of them out there – in support of whatever operating system or gadget you want to choose. Critically, though, I think many were taking exception to his desire for Ubuntu to be an identical-looking slot-in replacement for Windows. This is never going to be the case – and shouldn’t be, either.

A further factual inaccuracy in the 30-days article had to do with the comparative file-sizes of ODT vs DOCX files. Mr Bradley states that his ODT file was 500% larger than the DOCX. That may be true for small files, but as the file size increases, the ODT format becomes much more economical. A 764k DOCX file would be only 438k as an ODT, for example. The article states that for an organization with thousands upon thousands of files, those KBs will add up, and no organization wants to have to purchase or maintain five times more storage capacity for the exact same data”. True, but not true – since the overhead only seems to be an issue with small files.

I suppose I’m really wondering why the follow-up article was written. The original 30-day test was performed with Ubuntu 11.04 in June of last year. This article was written on March 24th of this year, and didn’t really seem to add anything to the debate. The headline, though, is certainly attention-grabbing enough and guarantees a few page-views.

While he acknowledges Ubuntu’s wonderful and knowledgeable users, he also says that “it’s often difficult to find them through the sea of self-righteous flamers who berate you for not knowing what you’re doing”. That’s not true or fair at all – the Ubuntu Forums are a treasure trove of genuinely helpful folks. These people give their time and expertise for free to help out other users, so occasionally an element of frustration can creep in when a user wants a Windows clone, and acts like you owe them something because they decided to try Linux.

For those of us who get on perfectly happily with Ubuntu “it doesn’t change the fact that you’re part of a negligible market segment”. I don’t recall making any decision in life based on belonging to the biggest market segment. History has proved time and again that the majority can be very sincerely wrong. Also, since Linux is not a commercial project, it doesn’t actually need a large market share to succeed.

In the end, I just feel frustrated, because I don’t consider these type of articles to be helpful at all. It seems to be Linux-bashing for the sake of readership figures. I’m not saying that Ubuntu is better than Windows, but I do feel that, after giving Ubuntu a 30 day trial and only being able to come up with five fairly weak reasons for disliking it, Mr Bradley is drastically exaggerating when he proclaim’s Ubuntu’s desktop death. The death or life of an operating system depends on those who use it – and with tens (possibly hundreds) of millions of desktop users, I think that indicates that Linux on the desktop is very much alive.

I got myself set up again with a nice, Ubuntu-happy laptop, which I’ll tell you about in another post. I removed the hard drive from the old Dell and put it in a 2.5″ external USB enclosure to try to try and mount my /home partition for data recovery, which is when I got the dreaded “Bad superblock on /dev/sdb3″ error.

Interestingly fsck is happy to tell you that you have a bad superblock, but it doesn’t tell you either what a superblock is, or how to fix the problem. So, first things first, the superblock is a record of the filesystem details, such as its size, block size, the used and unused blocks, the size and location of the inode tables, and so on. Any time you access a file, the superblock is read.

So, how can you recover a bad superblock? Fortunately for us, backup copies of the superblock are kept at certain offsets on the disk. To find out where the superblock backups are, open a terminal window and type:

sudo mke2fs -n /dev/????

Where ???? is the partition you want to check, which in my case was sdb3. This produces output, like the following:

Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872


These are block numbers, signifying the location of the superblock backups.

To replace the superblock with one from a backup, type the following:

sudo e2fsck -y -b block_location /dev/????

Replace block_location with one of the above numbers and, again, ???? is the partition, so in my case it was sdb3.

There was significant corruption on my hard drive, but supplying the -y switch stopped fsck asking for confirmation every time it encountered a bad block.

After running this, I was able to mount the partition and recover my data.