stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley

Upgrading Ubuntu Feisty now that its end of lifed

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 20:28:00 PST

I have a machine I neglected to upgrade before Feisty was EOLed. This was a problem, because as part of the EOL process they removed the main, universe and multiverse directories from the archive, which means mirrors don't carry them any more either. This made the upgrade tool fail, because it couldn't download all of the meta data.

Resolution? Comment the out of /etc/apt/sources.list.

Tags for this post: linux() ubuntu()
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What packages are taking all my disk?

Thu, 01 May 2008 16:42:00 PST

I'm using Ubuntu here, but this would work on any Debian based distribution... I want to find out what packages are sucking up all the disk on my new laptop. So, I run:

mikal@mikal-eee:~$ dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package}\n' | sort -n

Which will give you a list of packages sorted by size when installed. In my case, removing evolution and open office ill make a big difference to my free disk space.

Tags for this post: linux() ubuntu()
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Nice touch

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 15:07:00 PST

Ok, so I don't know about you, but pretty much the only time I have a copy of Windows these days is when I take delivery of a new laptop like I did this morning, before I get around to installing Linux on it. To verify that my download and cdrecord had produced something valid, I just stuck the Ubuntu Dapper CD I just made into the CD ROM drive on this Windows laptop.

It's really cool. It launches an application with the autorun stuff on Windows, and then offers to let me install open source on the Windows partition. It's like a small version of the OpenCD (and was in fact done with their help). Applications it offers to install:

Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
Abiword
Gaim
The Gimp

It's a nice touch that the CD can be used for this sort of thing as well. Like all ideas, it's so obvious now that I've seen it done, and it makes me wonder why other distros haven't been doing this for a while.

Another on Mikal's rocks list for the day -- Ubuntu.

Tags for this post: linux() ubuntu()
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Debian / Ubuntu packaging

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 08:13:00 PST

Jon kindly dropped in on Google on the way to Oscon, and presented a talk on Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) packaging. Here it is:

And a direct link to the video

Tags for this post: linux() ubuntu()
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Adventures in Ubuntu Breezy Dovecot

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 20:40:00 PST

I mentioned the other day that I am having problems with Dovecot on Ubuntu Breezy. Now's the time to debug it, and here are my notes...

No inetd.conf

sed: can't read /etc/inetd.conf: No such file or directory

This first error is because of this poorly implemented test:

# The init script should do nothing if dovecot is being run from inetd
for p in `sed -r "s/^ *(([^:]+|\[[^]]+]|\*):)?(pop3s?|imaps?)[ \t].*/\3/;t;d" \
  /etc/inetd.conf`
do
  for q in `sed -r "s/^ *protocols[ \t]*=[ \t]*(([^\"]*)|\"(.*)\")/\2\3/;t;d" \
    /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf`
  do
    if [ $p = $q ]; then
      exit 0
    fi
  done
done

You can see from the comment that the intention is that the init script doesn't do anything if dovecot is running from inetd. The error message is kinda bogus though, in that the code keeps executing after that failed line with the sed call in it. If you find the error annoying, then make it go away:

touch /etc/inetd.conf

In a perfect world, you'd hope that the packager would change the script to do something more like this:

for p in `sed -r "s/^ *(([^:]+|\[[^]]+]|\*):)?(pop3s?|imaps?)[ \t].*/\3/;t;d" \
  /etc/inetd.conf 2> /dev/null`

Moving right along...

It doesn't start the service

I had enabled the imap_listen variable in the dovecot.conf file, but not put it in the protocols variable. The init script checks this, and bugged out without an error message. I would think an error message would be nicer.

And now it works.

Tags for this post: linux() ubuntu()
Related posts: Ubuntu Breezy and Dovecot hate me; Dovecot index cache problems Comment

Ubuntu Breezy and Dovecot hate me

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 14:54:00 PST

I've got a new laptop, and have installed dovecot. Now it wont start, with an error about not being able to find the inetd.conf config file. That's because inetd isn't installed.

Is the dovecot package just broken? Is there something obvious that I am doing wrong?

Tags for this post: linux() ubuntu()
Related posts: Normalising mail server package names; Samba and MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger); Adventures in Ubuntu Breezy Dovecot; Dovecot index cache problems Comment

A first taste of Ubuntu

Sun, 05 Jun 2005 02:57:00 PST

For the skunk works project I had a need for a Ubuntu box, so I did an install on an old piece of c**p Pentium two box I had lying around. It's my first time installing Ubuntu, and I must say I'm impressed:

The installer didn't ask me for partition sizes, it just went with reasonable defaults once I had told it to blow away all of my whopping 4gb disc
It automatically checked the checksum of each package on the CD, although I imagine that doesn't help much if the entire CD can't be trusted
It then went off an did it's thing with no more prompting except for host name and a user account
I wonder id the installer changes the list of packages it installs based on the size of the target filesystem. That would be cool...
Anyways, after a bit you reboot and apt magic happens without prompting
They even overwrite /etc/apt/sources.list with Internet sources and do an apt-get update so it's ready to fly
I was impressed over all

No, if only they had ImageMagick in the base install...

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