22 Mar
Firefox 4 will be released today. As with every major version update, this one is still suffering from the same issue: add-on developer haven’t pushed their add-ons forward to work with the most recent version of the web browser.
Although most of them might still work, a few of them, e.g., the inline PDF display add-on on the Mac, will break. Best case, the add-on will be marked as incompatible but the user can still use it (if they disable the compatibility check). Worst case, a feature which the user got used to is suddenly gone (“It used to work! Why is it broken after the update?”). And they’re not going to blame the add-on author, they’ll rant against the Firefox browser or the folks at Mozilla.
I hope Mozilla can come up with a plan to encourage at least the authors of the most downloaded/used add-ons to fix their add-ons as soon as possible — prior to a major release.
Update: The AusweisApp add-on (used for authenticating yourself on a number of websites using your German ID) is just one of the add-ons which broke after the Firefox 4 upgrade…
Update 2: If you’d like to try out Firefox 4 on Ubuntu, install it through the Mozilla Team PPA.
26 Apr
Ich liebe ja humorvolle Fehlermeldungen:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/scd0,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
Manchmal liefert das Syslog wertvolle Informationen – versuchen
Sie dmesg | tail oder so
(Quelle: mount, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS)
Geholfen hat’s leider nichts, scheinbar wird das Dateisystem auf der verwendeten DVD-RAM nicht korrekt erzeugt. mkudffs läuft zwar ohne Fehler durch, aber das Dateisystem kann ich dann trotzdem nicht einhängen. Vermutlich ist dann doch einfach die Scheibe defekt. Da es sich um ein off-site System handelt, kann ich aber leider nicht mal eben nachschauen. Das muss dann wohl bis morgen warten.
04 Jun
As some of you still using Ubuntu 6.10 (“Edgy Eft”) might have noticed, there are no updates for this available anymore. The corresponding package folders are missing on the Ubuntu mirrors and apt/aptitude updates result in a lot of HTTP 404 errors. In case you missed the news, you can still read the End of Life announcement for Edgy.
So, to cut a long story short: you’re still stuck with your legacy Ubuntu version and want to upgrade it. Unfortunately, Update Manager fails because it wants to check the (non-existant) Edgy branch of the Ubuntu apt repository for Edgy updates prior to upgrading to the new version.
The solution (only for the brave ones) is to change the apt sources and perform the update manually.
$ sudo sed -e 's/\sedgy/ feisty/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
Following the Feisty upgrade instructions, run these commands:
$ sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
$ sudo aptitude -f install
$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Fix any upcoming errors, so that eventually invoking the sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade will show no additional updates to be installed and also displays no errors.
After rebooting to let the kernel update become effective, you should have successfully upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04 (“Feisty Fawn”) which life cycle will end in October 2008. It might be a good idea to consider an upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 (“Gutsy Gibbon”) or even upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (“Hardy Heron”) right away.
11 Mar
Just as a reminder for myself…
Of course, the new company laptop came with a Windows installation, but setting up Ubuntu was far more straight forward than when I tried Fedora Core on a Toshiba Satellite M30 years ago. Although the installation instructions linked above cover the T61, most of them also work for the Lenovo Thinkpad R61.
19 Feb
Installing a floppy drive into a computer, booting off a Ubuntu Live CD, formatting an old 3.5″ floppy, copying Promise RAID drivers onto it. In order to be able to install Windows XP.
I wish Microsoft had provided at least one additional way to add drivers to the installation process (USB memory stick, anyone?). At least when I tried with an official SP2 installation CD.
Next step after the Windows installation: add a Ubuntu installation in an LVM partition. So the Ubuntu alternate installation CD was helpful twice with this computer.
