Screwing The Pooch, Linux-Style

My dear wife, Pinky Dink, has been running Ubuntu 6.04 LTS (LTS="Long Term Support") for close to three years now. She has been quite pleased with it but I've been bugging her about upgrading to 8.04 LTS for months.

But she's seen how my "upgrades" go (the long saga of EXP IV being the most recent) and wanted nothing to do with it. So we compromised for a while. 6.04 came stock with FireFox 1.x, which is dreadfully out of date. I found a hack on the Web and upgraded here to 2.x, which is only woefully out of date. The problem there is the upgrade was out-of-band, so she stopped getting updates to FireFox or important plug-ins like Flash (which is full of vulnerabilities and has been hacked to death lately).

Not a good situation.

So I finally talked her into it and she let me do it.

I anticipated the SCSI issue. Maybe you haven't noticed, but IDE hard drives are obsolete. SATA is now king and to simplify things, Linux now treats all drives as SCSI drives. If you upgrade to a new kernel and your root drive is on /dev/hda1 (the old IDE drive designation), the kernel will choke on boot because it thinks it should be /dev/sda1 (SCSI). The way around that is to either use LVM (Logical Volume Manager - which I despise) or to label your drives before you upgrade, which is exactly what I did, having learned that the hard way over several VM Linux upgrades and the EXP III/IV debacle. Use e2label for ext2/3/4 drives and mkswap /dev/whatever -L yourlabel for the swap partition. Then edit /etc/fstab with LABEL=yourlabel where /dev/hdax used to be. Reboot to make sure it works. If it doesn't... call me. Leave a message.

I knew there were going to be other issues. VNC4 is a wash, as I mentioned before. I was prepared for that. The alternative has always been Cygwin/X, which is slower and suffers from a lack of a dependable clipboard, among other things.

What I didn't expect was problems with her wireless drivers. When I first set that box up back in '06, the RaLink drivers had to be built from alpha or beta source and had to be rebuilt every time there was a kernel upgrade.

But over the years, the RaLink drivers were mainlined into the Linux kernel and that problem disappeared.

Turns out, it's back. With a vengeance. And it's apparently due to some "philosophical" differences the developers at Ubuntu have with the driver. For details, see this exasperated posting from some poor schmuck who can't get Ubuntu to admit they have a problem. I followed his lead, downloaded the source code, and blacklisted the stock Ubuntu drivers. Wireless is fine again, but I will be fucked on the next kernel upgrade.

One problem down.

The next was the remoting issue. Pinky's box is in the kitchen, but I always used VNC4 to hook up to it and do patching and housekeeping (which is a really bad idea - if your session gets trashed during an upgrade you can leave the box in an "undefined" state - but I'm prepared to take that risk because I'm too lazy to get up out of my chair).

As I said, I expected to fall back on Cygwin/X. Silly me.

Cygwin, for those who may not know, is a set of Linux utilities that run on top of Windows. Cygwin/X is an X server that allows you to run graphical programs or full graphical desktop sessions on another Unix box across the network while you're logged in to Windows.

This is very nice, considering it's free when most third party X servers (such as Hummingbird Exceed) cost hundreds of dollars.

The problem is, with all due respect to the Cygwin developers, they keep fucking the god damned thing up.

Upgrading Cygwin is a crap shoot. Something is always guaranteed to be broken.

So when I tried to connect to Pinkie's box and the X screen kept bouncing, blinking on and off, I knew I was in for more fun. I crossed my fingers, girded my loins, and upgraded Cygwin.

It worked. Or perhaps I should say I simply haven't found what's broken in it yet.

Now I have the box where I want it to be (almost). In fact I'm posting from it now, wirelessly and over a network Cygwin/X session! I'm 90% pleased with the way things turned out and this is still the best Linux box I ever built.