Sys-adminning in the morning...
Written by on in Tuxedo.

I've been thinking in the back of my mind that it's probably time to move to Ubuntu (specifically Kubuntu) on the workstation at home.  While I prefer Gentoo for the control it gives me, I have to admit that I really don't have the time to muck about with keeping everything up to date.  So, today I booted up a Kubuntu Ibex AMD64 LiveCD and took a look.

Seemed to work fine, I can't say the KDE4.1 desktop grabbed my heart, but it seemed serviceable and suitably lick-able.  It detected the nVidia card in the box and offered to download the latest driver for it.  All in all about what I'd expect from an Ubuntu release.  I'll need to confirm that Eric works on it, but other than that it seems likely we could move pretty easily.  The various services (svn, bzr, file-shares, imap, etc) will take some porting, but they shouldn't be all that complex, after all, they're all standard Linux software.

Problems occurred on rebooting, however.  The workstation doesn't get rebooted much and I'd let the nVidia kernel drivers get out of date, no big deal there, simple recompile.  The problem was with the dns resolver.  For some reason the VoIP gateway router wasn't properly resolving :( .  Checking further, it seems that Rogers has started intercepting DNS requests, so when I went to http://hacklab.to I was sent to a Rogers search page instead of the hacker's collective.  Sigh.

Anyway, added OpenDNS to my /etc/resolve.conf.head and manually to /etc/resolve.conf .  That seems to solve the problem and should re-apply the solution the next time I reboot (I hope).

Still playing with the idea of buying a laptop for my work (as opposed to stealing Soni's work laptop, which is where she does all her programming).  It's hard to justify >$3000 (US, mind you, which makes a difference again) on a laptop, but I really do want to have a reasonable machine so I can work on OpenGL stuff away from the apartment.  Annoying thing is there's a new AlienWare that would almost fit the bill, at around $2000, if it weren't a 17" model and 9 pounds.

Comments

  1. godson

    godson on 11/14/2008 1:39 p.m. #

    I've been using kubuntu for a year. Its working amazingly. One of the main reason for its success is it's community forums. I haven't upgraded to 8.10 ,I like KDE3 because of its huge application base. It'll take some time for KDE4 to be as robust as KDE3

  2. Mike Fletcher

    Mike Fletcher on 11/17/2008 12:11 a.m. #

    We've got Kubuntu Hardy on Soni's laptop and had it on the OLPC for a while (currently Gentoo on the OLPC). I don't have a huge preference for KDE 4 vs 3, but I don't spend a lot of time mucking about with the desktop, I spend it in applications, and the ones I care about seem to have been ported already (Amarok, Eric, K3b, KTorrent, Konsole) or aren't KDE to start with. I haven't checked out Digikam yet, but it's about the only other KDE application I use.

    Haven't moved forward much (though I did boot and install Intrepid to a secondary disk) as I can't seem to get the Grub boot-loader to load the Intrepid kernel off the secondary disk.

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