RFC: Babbage dist-upgrade

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Mark Steward

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May 26, 2011, 6:27:49 PM5/26/11
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Hi all,

Babbage is currently on Umbongo 9.10, and it's been mentioned a couple of times recently that we should be on something newer, possibly just 10.04 LTS.

To save time, does anyone know of any particular issues this will cause?  I'll take care of ensuring all the services[1] stay working (and if anyone wants to help, feel free).

Would it be reasonable to do this on Saturday during the gaming day?  There should be a decent range of people on hand if something goes horribly wrong.


Cheers,
Mark

Billy

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May 26, 2011, 7:13:26 PM5/26/11
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Piece of practical advice. I've had no end of problems with upgrading
customer's computers from 9.10 to 10.04. There's a large difference in
the graphics card requirements. A lot of mainboard machines had
trouble keeping up with it.

Please check that it will work first!

It might be better to go over to Debian rather than Ububble, as
there's a lot less bloat in the overall system, and definitely a lot
less bloat in the X-Server.

Charles Yarnold

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May 26, 2011, 7:42:55 PM5/26/11
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As babbage is a headless server I don't think graphics requirements will affect it too much.

Billy

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May 26, 2011, 9:14:55 PM5/26/11
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On May 27, 12:42 am, Charles Yarnold <charlesyarn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As babbage is a headless server I don't think graphics requirements will
> affect it too much.
>

True, but it'll definitely be worth trimming the bloat out before we
start adding in our own tangents.

I liked earlier Ububble versions, but 10+ has been annoying. If i
wanted the hardware-upgrade treadmill, I'd ave stayed with Windows...

Sure the eye-candy is nice for a demo, but then i end up turning it
off as it gets in the way.


6tricky9

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May 27, 2011, 6:13:53 AM5/27/11
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On May 27, 2:14 am, Billy <bi...@billycomputersmith.com> wrote:

> True, but it'll definitely be worth trimming the bloat out before we
> start adding in our own tangents.
>
> I liked earlier Ububble versions, but 10+ has been annoying. If i
> wanted the hardware-upgrade treadmill, I'd ave stayed with Windows...
>
> Sure the eye-candy is nice for a demo, but then i end up turning it
> off as it gets in the way.

I agree; I'm not an Ubuntu fan either. It is becoming far too much
like Windows, but with a Mac look. This, I'm sure, is Shuttleworth's
vision for its future. I don't know if that ureadahead crap is
installed on the server edition, but it certainly gets in the way on
the desktop versions if you want to do anything slightly different
with partitions at a later date. It is full of bloat so maybe Debian
is the way forward.

I ended up building my own server OS from scratch and I haven't
regretted it. It's incredibly stable, it's small and light, it's
built to support just my hardware, and the only time I update any of
the packages is when there's a possible exploit found. It's seven
years old, running gcc-3.4.3, but still compiles and runs the latest
Erlang code, for example.

Mark Steward

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May 27, 2011, 6:43:28 AM5/27/11
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On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:13 AM, 6tricky9 <6tri...@gmail.com> wrote:


On May 27, 2:14 am, Billy <bi...@billycomputersmith.com> wrote:

> True, but it'll definitely be worth trimming the bloat out before we
> start adding in our own tangents.
>
> I liked earlier Ububble versions, but 10+ has been annoying. If i
> wanted the hardware-upgrade treadmill, I'd ave stayed with Windows...
>
> Sure the eye-candy is nice for a demo, but then i end up turning it
> off as it gets in the way.

I agree; I'm not an Ubuntu fan either.  It is becoming far too much
like Windows, but with a Mac look.  This, I'm sure, is Shuttleworth's
vision for its future.  I don't know if that ureadahead crap is
installed on the server edition, but it certainly gets in the way on
the desktop versions if you want to do anything slightly different
with partitions at a later date.  It is full of bloat so maybe Debian
is the way forward.


I'm not sure what you mean by bloat.  This is a complaint people used to level at Windows 95 because it included Unicode support.  As I see it, Babbage fills a need for a well-supported environment for playing with reasonably up-to-date tools, which Ubuntu provides well.  In fact, I'd like to upgrade to 11.04, but think it's better done incrementally for ease of troubleshooting.

Do you have any information on why ureadahead's "crap", or do you just like caching files from disk manually?

 
I ended up building my own server OS from scratch and I haven't
regretted it.  It's incredibly stable, it's small and light, it's
built to support just my hardware, and the only time I update any of
the packages is when there's a possible exploit found.  It's seven
years old, running gcc-3.4.3, but still compiles and runs the latest
Erlang code, for example.

Awesome, what's your IP address?

Mark

6tricky9

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May 27, 2011, 7:35:57 AM5/27/11
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On May 27, 11:43 am, Mark Steward <markstew...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by bloat.  This is a complaint people used to
> level at Windows 95 because it included Unicode support.  As I see it,
> Babbage fills a need for a well-supported environment for playing with
> reasonably up-to-date tools, which Ubuntu provides well.  In fact, I'd like
> to upgrade to 11.04, but think it's better done incrementally for ease of
> troubleshooting.

Stuff that I don't need and which I feel doesn't contribute much to
the overall performance, such as ureadahead.
>
> Do you have any information on why ureadahead's "crap", or do you just like
> caching files from disk manually?

I'm not an Ubuntu expert, in fact I only have Kubuntu running on my
netbook, however, I believe that ureadahead was added in order to
improve boot time. The problem that I've had with it was when I
decided to create another partition and move /var onto it because /var/
cache was filling up so fast on limited disk space. It refused to
boot, spewing out ureadahead errors. I had partial success fiddling
about with it but in the end gave up and did a fresh install.
Ureadahead is, I believe, fairly new and, it seems to me, quite
buggy. It appears to be supported by one person. I'm not even sure
how much it improves boot time, which, anyway, is irrelevant for a
server which is going to be up for most of the time.
>
> > I ended up building my own server OS from scratch and I haven't
> > regretted it.  It's incredibly stable, it's small and light, it's
> > built to support just my hardware, and the only time I update any of
> > the packages is when there's a possible exploit found.  It's seven
> > years old, running gcc-3.4.3, but still compiles and runs the latest
> > Erlang code, for example.
>
> Awesome, what's your IP address?
>
I'm afraid that it's a server I use on my internal network, partly for
Drupal development. It's tiny, and solid state, not particularly
fast, but works well enough. I'm planning on rebuilding it with newer
and faster hardware when I have the time, and then making it publicly
available.

Richard

Mark Steward

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Jun 2, 2011, 3:00:35 PM6/2/11
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So I was a bit busy at the weekend. As I still haven't seen any
serious concerns, I'll upgrade to 10.04 _this_ Saturday.


Cheers,
Mark
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