Simon Scullion

Since I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04, I had noticed that Update Manager was hanging, but not bothered to look into fixing it.

Tonight I did, and a quick search on google lead me to this post on Joe Wein’s blog with a clear explanation on how to solve the issue:

Last month I upgraded my notebook from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”). Since then, whenever I tried tried to install the up to 133 updates that had become available, the Update Manager would hang indefinitely instead of prompting me for the user password.

If you’re in the same situation, the following tips might help you. Edit /etc/hosts with an editor of your choice (e.g. sudo vi /etc/hosts). There should be two entries with IPv4 addresses starting with 127.0.x.x, like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 mycomputername.mydomain

Remove the domain name from the entry starting with 127.0.1.1, leaving only the computer name and save the file. Now try again.

When I made this change I got the password prompt as expected and all the updates where downloaded and applied.

Thanks Joe!

Tell me its true!

Glen on his blog lets on:

So it was a big (and welcome) surprise to find not one but two groups within the company putting together distributions of the IBM desktop products for Ubuntu.

This was also picked up by Julian over at nsftools:

Ooo, that sounds tasty. A package of IBM products specifically for Ubuntu. I know it’s internal to IBM and not-for-the-public and unofficial and all that, but very interesting to hear. Maybe that’ll get us one step closer to official Debian support.

Lets hope so. I know it would make a lot of people happy, and would get IBM products in front of a lot of linux users. Imagine Dell flogging laptops preloaded with Ubuntu + Notes + Sametime + Symphony! That’d be nice!

This also gives us a glimpse of the power of social software tools behind the firewall. Without them, Glen would have found it extremely hard, if not impossible, to locate this kind of virtual community within such a large organisation. The truth is though that all organisations have these kind of dispersed groups with common interests, and tools like Sametime and Lotus Connections can allow them to unite and achieve results.

It would not surprise me to see this made available in some form at some point in the future. Please IBM!

As we close in on the release of Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon during the development cycle, we thought we would tell you a little bit about some of the new features and improvements that make the release exciting. So over the next ten days, we will talk about one rocking feature each day until the 18th of October, when Ubuntu 7.10 goes live.So what is in store for you with 7.10? We’ll be looking at the following features:

• Starting today, desktop search via Tracker and Deskbar
• Improved usability for configuring the graphic environment, with features such as Bulletproof-X and Graphical X configuration
• Spectacular desktop visual effects by default, brought to you by Compiz-Fusion
• Improvements in Firefox plugins, including Gnash installed by default
• Fast User Switching for those with shared machines
• Printer auto-detection
• Better handling of non-free drivers (including firmware installation)
• Improved security with AppArmor
• Easier access to your files on Windows with NTFS writing

Exciting times for an Ubuntu user! This series of articles is one to check out over the next week-and-a-bit.

Here’s the first, explaining what we’re getting related to desktop search.

James posted on this yesterday.

Today I found this:

Cool huh! Added to the sidebar!

Can’t wait for the release, will be upgrading and looking forward to the Compiz Fusion magic!

In terms of elegance and aesthetics, Microsoft and Apple are many years ahead of Linux.

451 Group analyst Raven Zachary

Ignoring Mac OSX for now, I’m not sure what this is being based upon. I’ve been using Ubuntu since 5.04, and in its current form I’d say it is every bit as elegant and aesthetic as Windows XP.

I’m not sure Mr Zachary is being fair calling the Linux OS “scrappy”. Is he talking about the OS, the UI, the applications, or all three? Comparing just the Linux OS with Windows, which one would likely justify the description given proper investigation? The UI, if comparing Gnome and KDE with Windows Vista, he has a point, but if we don’t need or want the effects, its a much closer call. And as for the applications, I think we’ve all had to use some pretty poorly designed UIs for applications running on Windows, right? (Mentioning no names! ;-))

RED HERRING | Lenovo or No, Linux Not There Yet

James Governor of RedMonk raised a question that has come up a few times in the Lotus blogsphere, on the subject of Ubuntu as an IBM supported OS.

I mentioned the fact that DB2 is supported on Ubuntu, a fact which doesn’t really fit with some of the justification for not supporting Lotus Notes and Domino, that Ubuntu is not an “enterprise” operating system.

James followed up this morning, and wonders whether

Ubuntu really just isn’t seeing much in the way of enterprise adoption as yet

Sounds like a chicken and egg situation to me!

Ubuntu is an extremely popular desktop distribution, so in my opinion, chances are support for software like Lotus Notes on Ubuntu would go a long way to opening the door to further enterprise adoption. I realise this is not an adequate cost justification, but if we’ve managed to get the Notes 8 Beta running on Ubuntu by ourselves, my guess is there isn’t a hell of a lot that IBM would need to do to get this sorted.

One other point I have mentioned before (can’t remember where!) is that with Ubuntu support, could IBM Lotus not look to provide more of an “appliance” (along the lines of Nitix), if not for production, at least for testing or demonstration purposes?

With a consistent support for Ubuntu across the IBM portfolio, they could potentially provide a serious offering to the SMB market. Taking the appliance approach and therefore “hiding” the underlying technologies somewhat, certain barriers to entry could be eliminated, at least from an install / admin standpoint.

Good luck trying to get more on this one James, there are lots of us very interested in where it could lead!

This rather (in my opinion) poor piece of journalism from the BBC quoting Gates on Vista sales figures caught my interest, particularly following the news this week regarding Microsoft’s threat to persue patent royalties from open source initiatives such as Linux and OpenOffice.org. (Link via Bub Sutor).

Mr Gates said sales had been quicker than Microsoft expected, and made Vista the firm’s quickest selling software.

What!? Does anyone believe this stuff? What upset me about the article from the beeb was the lack of comment or verification of Gates’ statement. There is plenty on this out there, so you can do your own searches on google, but with Vista sales being reported as slow, Dell offering linux and bringing back Windows XP, how can it be Microsoft’s quickest selling software?

Oh, and to say sales were quicker than they had expected, that just makes me wonder just how low their expectations really were!

Just where are MS going? They are appearing increasingly deperate and looking to create confusion. Smells like fear to me.

My take on all this, forget Vista and move to Ubuntu.

Over the last few days, I have noticed a few other bloggers from the Lotus blogging community mentioning Ubuntu.

Ferdy Christant has published a good article on his recent move to ubuntu on his new laptop.

Stuart McIntyre has a post on his attempt at getting the Notes 8 Beta running on ubuntu.

I look forward to following them both, I hope they are having as much fun as I am!

Are there any others out there?

As it turns out, my Ubuntu bug turns out not to be, following a response with some instrustions.

It looks like the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-1.0.9629 was installed from a 3rd party source that is not compatible with the ubuntu version numbering schema.

You can try to remove the nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel-1.0.9629 packages and install the ones from ubuntu instead. But be careful you may end up on a shell without X.

Unfortunately I wasn’t careful enough, and I ended up with no UI having broken my video driver install! Help!

Not being too experienced with all this, a late night ensued. Having googled various error messages, tonight I managed to recover, reinstall the correct nvidia-glx package, and also clean out a few unnecessary ones.

So, back to business, and to be honest, I’m happy it wasn’t really a bug, Ubuntu rules!

So, tonight I managed to have another go at getting the Lotus Notes 8 client running under Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I do realise this is not supported, and I agree with John and his rules of engagement, curiosity has just got the better of me!

Thanks to Nathan’s tip on the Beta forum, I manually created a notes.ini file which was missing from the install, and managed to launch the client!

Unfortunately it didn’t take me long to encounter NSD running but I realise I’m on my own with this, though my guess is there’ll be a few others than just Stuart and I!

I’ve been taking a load of screenshots throughout the process, and will try to get full write-up of my adventures so far. Stay tuned!

Back in Windows-land, I have had a quick play with the client too, and to answer Bruce’s question, I like, a lot! On first impressions, I think I’d go as far as to say that having to go back to the Notes 7 client now is going to be as enjoyable as working in Notes 4.6 was, prior to Saturday! Again, more detail to come.

On another note, Christopher Byrne made a good point in a comment over on Ed’s blog regarding a common tag for all this. I’m with him on using “Notes8Beta” for technorati.