Linux

I have (temporarilly) switched to AMD64 Kubuntu Linux from my normal Gentoo Linux. This switch might become permanent if I ultimately find that Kubuntu is better than Gentoo. That’s a really tough act as I love Gentoo ;-)

I want to really test Kubuntu (and, hence, Ubuntu) before installating it on Christina’s computer at work. I have decided to stick to the official packages. I want to be sure that Kubuntu is perfectly usable without having to download packages from unofficial (and difficult to find) repositories because this is the way I want Christina’s computer to be configured…

I have to tell you that I am very satisfied with the progress I’ve made:

1. Installation was a breeze. Everything except my ADSL modem was recognised right away.
2. Configuring the ADSL modem was easy thanks to detailed instructions written by some nice guy.
3. Firefox and Thunderbird were preinstalled and I had no difficulty importing my setting and files from Gentoo (as I am very knowledgeable :-))
4. I installed LyX, the rather wonderful document processor that I recommend to all of you, using apt-get which also installed the whole LaTeX infrastructure.
5. I finished by installing some programming tools for Haskell, Python and Ruby which are, IMHO, great languages. Forget about C, C++ and Java!

Everything is working really well. Might this switch become permanent? Only time will tell :-)

As read on Kubuntu’s website,

“Kubuntu is a user friendly operating system based on KDE, the K Desktop Environment. With a predictable 6 month release cycle and part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu is the GNU/Linux distribution for everyone.”

As you all know, I run Gentoo Linux at home on my AMD64 box and, after some months of tweaking, I can say I’m very very satisfied.

For some weeks now, Christina has been telling me to replace the Windoze 2000 she use at work with Linux. I decided to download the x86 ISO of Ubuntu as I didn’t want to install Gentoo on Christina’s computer as that took too much time. As I was using Jigdo, the Jigsaw Download[er], I had no trouble incrementally downloading the AMD64 ISO image of Kubuntu which I quickly installed on my home computer just to have a look.

To summarise, I’m impressed even though there are 1-2 small niggles I don’t like:

Positives:

1. Very quick to install compared to Gentoo.
2. Only one ISO image (1 CD) to download – the rest, if needed, is downloaded from the Internet.
3. Kubuntu feature KDE which is very nice looking and more functional than Gnome IMHO
4. Kubuntu is based on Debian and, therefore, features a fantastic package management tool called apt-get.

Negatives:

1. I don’t like the fact that there are multiple official package repositories (main, restricted, universe and multiverse) and countless unofficial ones. Sure, any software, however obscure, surely exists in one of those repositories. But which one??? This is impossible to tell without a lot of Googling.
2. In Gentoo, everything is compiled from source and, therefore, all libraries, development tools and headers files are always installed. In contrast, the installation program for Kubuntu does not install those essential components (they can be manually installed afterwards using apt-get though). As a lecturer and programmer, I find this very painful to do. For me, Gentoo Linux is out-of-the-box (if I can use that term) a fantastic programming (and experimentation) environment and this is clearly not the case with Kubuntu.

Nevertheless, Kubuntu and Ubuntu have a lot of potential. Worth a nice 8/10 I would say…

Yesterday, I decided to update my Gentoo Linux computer I use at work by doing a nice:


emerge --sync
emerge -avuDN world


I then switched off the computer monitor (thanks Ajay :-)) and went home. Imagine my surprise when I switched it on this morning to see this very frightening error message:


* Configuring system to use udev ...
/sbin/rc: line 93: 1076 Segmentation fault /sbin/udevstart


followed by something which looked like:


fsck.ext3 No such file or directory while trying to openb /dev/hda2
/dev/hda2 : The superblock could not be read or does ot describe a correct ext3 filesystem. Filesystem could not be fixed. Give root password for maintenance or Ctrl-D to continue


What happened is that, during the upgrade process, udev-068 was replaced by a flawed udev-70 which basically segfaults when used. As a result, no devices (i.e. no disks partitions) were created in /dev hence the kernel panic.

The solution is, obviously, to downgrade to udev-68.

I did it using a Fedora Core 4 bootable CD-ROM in Linux rescue mode (as I did not have a Gentoo Linux CD-ROM handy) :


# Display the list of partitions
fdisk -l

# Mount the partitions
mkdir /mnt/gentoo
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdaX /mnt/gentoo
mount -t ext3 /dev/hdaY /mnt/gentoo/boot
...

# and proc
mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

# get in Gentoo
chroot /mnt/gentoo
source /etc/profile

# downgrade udev
echo "=sys-fs/udev-070" >> /etc/portage/package.mask
emerge -av udev


and rebooted my PC :-)

This procedure is also explained/described here, here,
here and also here.

Important : udev-070-r1 has since been released which corrects the bug.

An update : It is possible to boot without using udev by passing “gentoo=noudev” to the kernel (via grub). You just have to downgrade to 068 or upgrade to 070-r1 for everything to work. It’s much easier than using a bootable CD-ROM.