Switching from Ubuntu to debian

Having run Ubuntu for quite a while now I decided to upgrade to 11.04 with full knowledge of unity being the new desktop. I can see a lot of potential in unity especially for novice users and as such I do not denounce unity.

But for now I cannot get used to it myself. And so I decided to try debian yet again.

I started using Linux a long time ago installing Red Hat 4.2 on a Pentium Classic PC. Since then I have tried the newer Red Hat versions but I never went with the Fedora crew. I have also tried SuSE and arch for brief periods of time. And then I've been running Ubuntu since 8.04 up to and including 11.04. Oh and then I have a couple of firewalls runninf *bsd based pfSense.

But now it is back to debian 6.

The computer I am installing this on is an Intel Pentium T4500 based Acer Aspire 5738zg laptop.

As I had Ubuntu running on it and Acer uses 3 of the maximum 4 primary partition possible I had to erase the Ubuntu partitions before being able to create the necessary debian partitions. I would have liked to resize the Windows 7 partition to allow a little more than the about 100 GBs that Ubuntu had but because the NTFS partition was not 'clean' it was not possible. And as I had removed the Ubuntu partitions, grub complained that partition(s) were missing so it wouldn't even allow me to boot into Windows. So for now I will settle for this space.

Usually I have been shying away from the single partition scheme keeping /home on its on partition, but last time I partitioned I kept with just one giant partition plus the swap partition. This time I am going back to having seperate root and /home partitions.

I opted to let debian select the partition sizes, giving 3.6 GB to swap, 10 GB to root and about 86 GB to /home.

Unfortunately it seems that the debian installation is not able to initialize my Atheros based WLAN card properly, so it would not connect to my WPA secured wireless network.

Ultra-portible Linux - i.e. Linux on a stick

Updated Dec 9th 2010 - see below...

I was recently in the market for a new laptop as the old one was slow and the battery was almost done for. That laptop now services mainly as a portable DVD & netplayer for my 4 year old son, Isaac. The battery is almost gone (5.5 % is reported by Ubuntu) but it is still enough to move the laptop from one wall socket to the other.

As my budget was quite limited I had to choose between power and portability - I could not get both, so I opted for power. You can see the specs of the computer in an earlier post on this blog. So what do I do for a portable - away from home - solution for minimal funds and minimal size?

Why not make a USB stick bootable?

I happen to have a Kingston 8GB Class 10 USB stick that I can use for this purpose. This is a reasonably big drive with plenty of speed.

So my plans are the following:


Partition the space into 2 partitions:

• 2 GB FAT - for windows use
• 6 GB ext4 - for Ubuntu

As you might notice I have opted not to put in a swap drive. This is partly due to the fact, that I do not know how Linux will cope with a flash drive with regard to wear/limited write cycles. What happens when cells become read only on a swap partition? Secondly most computer will have ample memory for my primary use; Programming.

I need the FAT partition for windows use - moving files etc.

The plan is to install Ubuntu 10.10 on the 6 GB partition. I am using one big partition as it is hard to know right now how much /root and how much /home space I need so I am diverting from my usual /root /home partition scheme.

To keep data and projects uptodate I will be using UbuntuOne. But as my primary Ubuntu One account holds more than 20 GBs of data currently, which will not fit on the stick and as Ubuntu One configuration currently does not support selective sync'ing I am going to use a secondary UbuntuOne account to which I will share the necessary folders.

Please feel free to share your views and thoughts in the comments. I will update this post with new info as I go along.

Update 09-12-2010:

I made my first go at this yesterday and worked on it a bit this morning. (This update is being written on the Ubuntu-on-USB ;-) I will make a new post with a how I did it approach. A few thoughts from my first go:

I decided to lower the FAT partition to 1800 MB to allow for a little more space. But with the things I need to install: git, eclipse, Android SDK and with opening my primary email in Evolution (IMAP based) I now have around 600 MB to spare on the /root partition. And that was after doing an apt-get clean. Before that I had about 70 MB to spare. So I will redo the setup with a 1 GB FAT partition instead.

Also it seems quite slow when doing a lot of I/O e.g. when doing apt-get update/upgrade and installing packages. I am not sure why this is the case but I suspect that it might be because the fs manager has set the write-cache to a minimum because it is running on a USB device in order to preserve high-reliability. I will try to google a bit to see if this is the case and how to set a more harddisk like write-cache to speed things up a bit.

I have only tried the stick on 2 Acer laptops, my wn Aspire 5738ZG and an eMachines 17". But so far it works on those two. I will try to boot on a few other at work today.

Problem with Touchpad under Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Recently my Synaptics TouchPad stopped working in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. It works fine in Windows 7 and the TouchPad works even in Ubuntu on login screen prior to logging in.

If I use the "disable TouchPad" button Ubuntu shows that the Touchpad is now on, if I press it again, it shows the TouchPad is off. So when the hardware believes the TouchPad is live, Ubuntu/X "closes its ears" as the TouchPad is supposed to be off, and when the hardware believes the TouchPad is off, Ubuntu is listening, but the TouchPad is silent. Catch 22!

I have been googling a bit, but nothing interesting comes up. Checking Launchpad, nothing 10.10 specific comes up and by skimming the rest I have found nothing. I will dive deeper into Launchpad though.

Does anybody have any solutions?

git

So I finally started looking into git as a version control system. I have yet to do any serious use of it, but I have run into a few snags.

I want to use git for version control of several private projects. Currently I have both website and Android development projects running and I would also like to start a few C projects (for Linux). And I would like the repositories to be placed in a central location (within my filetree) so that it can be Sync'ed via Ubuntu One.

So what is the road ahead? Does anybody have any pointers about multiple projects/repositories for an absolute newbie in git? Please share in the comments!