Fedora 19 … New things learned

As indicated in my previous blog post “My first peek at Fedora 19” here’s the continuation of my experience with Fedora 19 Alpha and Gnome 3.8.

Since my last blog post I have done a clean install. Not because I had issues, but simply because my (virtual) disk ran out of space. With the initial installation I had opted for an 8 Gb virtual disk, with the new installation I opted for a 10 Gb virtual disk giving me some more room to move. One thing I did different opposed to the previous time is that this time I opted for the default LVM partitioning. However, much to my surprise, I had less space than the first time. Turned out that an over 4 Gb swap partition was created?!

F19 LVM Original DiskSize

Since these are logical volumes it seemed to me that this must be (relatively) easy to change, After some reading up and google-ing I indeed found the way to do this. First thing I did was reduce the size of the swap volume back to 500 Mb with the following command
lvreduce -L500M /dev/mapper/fedora_10-swap

Next I expanded the root volume to increase size so that all (now) available free space was used
lvexpand -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/fedora_10-root

Finally instruct the logical volume to increase to the same size as the physical size
resize2fs /dev/mapper/fedora_10-root

This worked like a charm and now I have more space in the root partition than I had with the original installation.

F19 LVM Altered DiskSize

On a side note: Please be careful when using the commands that I used on a production environment! Having learned the above commands I figured I could use them on my “production” laptop to reduce the root volume and increase my home volume. Although a warning is giving when reducing a volume’s size I decided to neglect it and reduced it anyway. This left me with a non working Fedora installation.
Since I have a LUKS encrypted disk I had to go through quite some hazzle to retrieve my data, move this to an external disk and then do a clean install and set everything back up the way it was. So do be careful!

With the clean install I came across a Gnome Shell Extension that I had not noticed before: gnome-shell-extension-apps-menu
This extension gives you the possibility to use a new version of the “old” applications menu

F19 Applications Shell Extension

I think it looks pretty good and that it may help those who can not part from the “old menu” style. This extension is now also available (Fedora 18) but in the current version it does not replace the Activities menu while in Fedora 19 it does.

A final new thing I came across is Gnome Photos. From what I understand this may replace Shotwell, the current photo application.

F19 Gnome Photos

Concluding: Still coming across (minor) new things and changes but all to me seem as improvements. Furthermore I also learned something about resizing logical volumes both with Fedora 19 and my “production” installation. 

 

 

My first peek at Fedora 19

Hearing about Fedora 19 Alpha and Gnome 3.8 I just could not resist to create a VM in VBox, download the netinst.iso and having a first peek. Being well aware that it is “just” Alpha and that, as they indicate in the installer, I have to accept my fate.

The VM I created is pretty basic for what I generally use when “playing” around with a new or different distro. Memory set to 2048Mb, video memory at 64Mb, 2 processors and an 8Gb “hard disk”. For the rest I just accept the defaults. As with regard to “Installation Destionation” I have opted for a custom partitioning, using 500Mb for /boot, 7Gb for / (root) and the remaining space for swap.

Fedora 19 – Installer

After the initial screen, as shown above, a second screen shows the installation progress plus the possibility to set the root password and the creation of a user with an option to add this user to the administration group. Installation took quite some time, about an hour and a half in my case, but hat may as well also being caused by my network speed (or lack thereof).

Once installed and after reboot a “First login” sequence is started to set language and such. What was new to me, and hopefully also for others, was that I was prompted to create a “Local User” account.

Fedora 19 – Local Account

I haven’t yet figured out the reason why, particularly since I had already indicated to create an account for me during installation. This is something I still have to look into. When having gone through the “First Login” cycle I was logged in as the “Local Account” and a (Gnome) help window appeared. Not sure if this will be expanded but to me it seemed not very useful at the moment since, AFAIK, it did not provide any new information related to version 3.8.

On the “outside” not much seems to have changed but Gnome 3.8, as far as I can tell at the moment, did make some improvement for convenience. For example, when looking for an application it provides the option to switch  between frequently used and all applications.

Fedora 19 – Frequently used

Furthermore the search is extended to files, documents and others and you have the possibility to set the priority in which area the search has to be done.

Fedora 19 – Search priority

What sort of surprised me is that I noticed during a “yum update” that deltarpm was not installed, which is something I have always liked. I do have it now installed and will see if it (already) works. Another thing I experience at the moment is that it all seems sluggish and that CPU use is quite high, but hey .. we are still at Alpha stage. 

The final screenshot shows the new Gnome weather application and conky running. With regard to the weather application, haven’t figured out yet how to have it show “proper” metrics. 

Fedora 19 – Weather and Conky

I think I will keep this VM around and regularly update to see if there are changes and what these changes are.
So I’ll conclude with: to be continued….

 

 

Upgrade from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 using FedUp

As could be read in my previous blog post I have made the change over from Ubuntu to Fedora. Just as with Ubuntu also with Fedora I was following the coming of the new release, Fedora 18 (Spherical Cow). From the beta release onward I was running this release in VirtualBox.

January 15 last Fedora officially released Fedora 18 and, although maybe not always wise, I just had to upgrade. As of Fedora 18 a changeover has been made from PreUpgrade to FedUp (FEDora UPgrader), meaning that if you want to upgrade to Fedora 18 or a later release now FedUp is to be used.

The wiki basically explains very clearly how to upgrade. It is very simple. The first thing to do is to install FedUp.
yum install fedup

NOTE: When performing administrative tasks I always change over to root, but those comfortable with ‘sudo’ can follow the commands keeping in mind that I ran them as root.

Once installed I have executed the following command:
fedup-cli --network 18 --debuglog fedupdebug.log --instrepo http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/qa/fedup/f18-RC4/x86_64

Currently the wiki shows the command without the –instrepo option since this option is no longer required after Fedora 18 was officially released. I have added just in case, but it seems that currently you can run it without.

Once executed FedUp will alter the repositories and pull in all the packages that are to be installed and/or upgraded. When this is completed without errors it is safe to reboot, if not it is best to examine the log to see what went wrong. In my case there were no errors so I rebooted.

After the reboot the GRUB menu will show the option “System Upgrade”. Choose this option and the upgrade will start automagically. Now simply wait until it is completed and the system is rebooted.

After the reboot the GRUB menu showed to options “Fedora” and “Advanced options for Fedora”. I opted for the regular item but that started a “simple” Fedora with no access to the wireless and more items that seemed to be missing. It turned out that I was faced with bug 893175, which caused the fedup entry to be started instead of the latest kernel version. Removing the fedup files, as indicated in comment #4, and rebuilding the GRUB menu resolved the issue.

With the upgrade also a new version of VirtualBox was installed. That I had to reinstall the VirtualBox extensions did not seem to strange to me. The fact that I had to run “/etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup” did seem somewhat strange to me. Since I have DKMS installed I normally do not have to run this when the kernel is upgraded. For some reason this was not done after the upgrade.

Bottomline: Upgrading with FedUp turned out to be an easy task and did not cause any major issues.

Fedora 18 – Desktop

Change over to Fedora 17

I have been thinking about this already for a while and yesterday I finally took the decision and the related actions. I have replaced my main OS and have removed Ubuntu 12.04 and have replaced it with Fedora 17. To answer the obvious question first: was I unhappy with Ubuntu? No, not really although …

As can be read in my latest blog posts about my first steps in “64-country” and getting the touchpad working you may have noticed that I had been struggling to get things properly installed and/or working. Was this purely to blame on Ubuntu? No, certainly not. Some of the hardware that came with my latest laptop just is not compatible with Linux, regardless of distribution.

I must say what did bother me is the fact that I, besides the hardware issues, also encountered (too frequently) complete system freezes. Mouse and keyboard just would stop working and the only way out was pressing the power button for several seconds and perform a full power down. I wondered whether it had to do with my “experiments” with getting the touchpad working and the installation of bumblebee, but a colleague of me went back to Win7 as main OS since he also encountered the freezes and that was with a clean install. Is this to blame on Ubuntu? I really can not tell at this moment.

So why Fedora? In my work I work with SAS Software and the “server part” of this software is installed on a VM that has CentOS (currently 6.3) as a distribution since this is one of the distributions that is being supported. Opposed to Ubuntu CentOS is an “rpm based” distribution and in the beginning I did have to get used to this. But over the years I have learned to work with it as also can be read in several of my (older) blog posts. So since I already had an “rpm based” distro running, very stable I must admit, I went looking for an “rpm based” distribution as well for my main OS.
One of the things I, sort of, disliked about CentOS that they are not so “state of the art”, their applications, kernel and so on is – how to say this -  somewhat “old fashioned”. Therefore I went for the more upstream RedHat-ish distribution: Fedora. Does make sense, no?

Installation

In order to install Fedora I simply downloaded the Fedora 17 Desktop Edition, installed it to a USB stick using unetbootin. Next I moved the files I wanted to keep to an external disk, inserted the USB stick and rebooted. I started by using the Live Edition just to see if (most) things worked out of the box and they did. So once I had this confirmed I started the installer and went for all the default options (full disk installation with LVM and an encrypted disk). The installation completed without any issues and after the reboot and answering the first boot questions Fedora 17 was up and running. Next I moved the files back from the external hard disk and then I came to the part where I had to start adding the applications I need for work.

VirtualBox

Initially I tried to install VirtualBox by adding the repository and install it from there. However I ran into an error and did not really feel like searching for the actual cause. So I took the “easy road”, I simply downloaded the rpm from the VirtualBox download site and have that installed by using the software installer. That ran without issues and after adding the VirtualBox extensions I could re-register my Virtual Machines and all worked (almost immediately) again.

Citrix Receiver

For my work I also need the Citrix Receiver. Also for this I opted for the “easy road”. Download the correct version and have the installer perform the check for dependencies and install the product. Also this seemed to have gone okay until … I actually tried it. At that point the Citrix Receiver simply did not want to start. Turned out I wasn’t the only one that had some issues. After following the instructions in the blog post “Installing Citrix on Fedora 16/17” the receiver worked as expected. So another hurdle taken to a fully operational environment.

LibreOffice

For the installation I used this blog post as a guideline. However, it did not go entirely flawless. When I tried to install LibreOffice I got the error message that the package libgnomevfs-2.so.0 was missing and with some checking (amongst others by using yum list) I found out that the package that was needed was gnome-vfs2.x86_64. So prior to installing LibreOffice you may need to install this package (as root)
# yum install gnome-vfs2.x86_64

Once the installation was completed I tried to start LibreOffice but it did not start.
$ libreoffice3.6
/opt/libreoffice3.6/program/soffice.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpng12.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A quick search showed that this has happened before, plus also the answer was provided. So I installed the indicated package
# yum install libpng-compat.x86_64

Now LibreOffice started as expected and everything, as far as I can see now, seems to be working.

Hardware

So, from a hardware perspective, does Fedora offer more than Ubuntu? No, it doesn’t. As with Ubuntu neither my touchpad, my fingerprint reader nor Optimus is working.With regard to the touchpad, an official bug is registered and the solution proposed is basically the same as I have used for Ubuntu. With regard to the Optimus technology a very similar solution to Ubuntu is suggested, use BumbleBee. More on this solution can be found in this blog post. For now I will leave things as they are and simply (only) use the Intel graphics card, but who knows ….

Do I mind that all hardware is support? Not really. Although it seems somewhat odd to me that a laptop producer that does sell Linux pre-installed laptops makes use of hardware that is not recognized by any Linux distribution.

Conclusion

Although Ubuntu has the name of having a simple installer, the Fedora installer was not any harder. At least not IMHO.
Fedora 17 does not come with as much pre-installed as Ubuntu (for example no office products are installed in Fedora), it is quite complete and thus providing you with the option what to install.

There are still some minor items to “tweak” but overall I am pleased with the way Fedora 17 installed and how it is working at the moment.
Whether it is more stable than Ubuntu is something that time will tell.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64: The next step … getting touchpad working

UPDATE February 2, 2013: In one of the comments, see here, applying the patch described below resulted in a disabled mouse/touchpad. Although the solution may work for you, please note that this can happen.
Furthermore I would suggest to keep an eye on the bug I mention in this blog since a fix seems to be on the way.

---

In my previous blog post I wrote about my first steps with a 64-bit distro, in my case Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Initially my thoughts were that the issues I encountered were merely to blame on the fact that I was new to the “64-bit world”. Since then I have somewhat changed my thoughts about this. As I see it now some issues are simply caused by the fact that my hardware – a Dell Latitude E6430 – consists of bits and pieces that are not (yet) included within the OS software. My understanding btw is that this is not limited to Linux only.

Comment before reading on: In this post you will find several commands issued. In front of the command you will find either a $ or a #, this is done on purpose. The commands with a $ in front were issued as a “regular user”, the commands with a # in front were issued as root.

Touchpad

One of the things I noticed while working (although I have to admit I rarely use the touchpad) is that amongst others scrolling did not work. As with previous issues I had Google helped me find that it was not new that the touchpad was not being detected on a Dell laptop as can be read in Ubuntu bug #606238. To check whether or not your touchpad is detected run the following command “xinput list”. In my case the intial outcome was as follows (partial output):

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ PS/2 Generic Mouse                          id=14    [slave  pointer  (2)]

As can be seen above the touchpad is seen as a PS/2 Generic Mouse. Another “hint” is the fact that in the “Mouse  and touchpad” settings in “System Settings” the touchpad tab is missing.

Reading through the earlier indicated bug I came across the comment #139 plus comment #141 indicating the suggested solution worked for a Dell E6530. Searching the web I came across more positive comments for the indicated solution so I decided to also give it a go. Unfortunately I have very little (t0 no) knowledge of git so I needed some help. Decided to ask for it (comment #154) and got it (comment #155).

In this post I will try to describe as clearly as possible what steps I have taken. First: I have a sub-directory called “git” in my home directory (~) in which I clone git repositories. So after opening a terminal I went into this directory:

$ cd ~/git

Next I cloned the linux repository of bgamari, went into the created subdirectory and checked out the alps (touchpad) section. Below are the commands and their feedback (please note that the cloning can take some time)

$ git clone git://github.com/bgamari/linux.git
Cloning into 'linux'...
remote: Counting objects: 2536596, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (762977/762977), done.
remote: Total 2536596 (delta 2086838), reused 2186798 (delta 1748516)
Receiving objects: 100% (2536596/2536596), 836.31 MiB | 540 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (2086838/2086838), done.

$ cd linux
Note: This takes me in my case into the ~/git/linux directory

$ git checkout origin/alps
Note: checking out 'origin/alps'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.

If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:

git checkout -b new_branch_name

HEAD is now at 1527416... alps: Add support for Dell Latitude E6430 touchpad

Now I had to get a “base” configuration file and run make

$ cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) .
Note: the “variable” uname -r will resolve into your currently running kernel

$ make oldconfig

The latter command will “ask” a lot of questions, I just accepted all the default settings. Not sure if that is the correct or best way to do it, but it did the trick for me.

Once this was completed I had to go into the “mouse” subdirectory and “build” the touchpad part

$ cd drivers/input/mouse/
Note: This takes me in my case into the ~/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse directory

$ make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` psmouse.ko
make: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-30-generic'
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse-base.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/alps.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/elantech.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/logips2pp.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/lifebook.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/sentelic.o
CC [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/trackpoint.o
LD [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.o
MODPOST 1 modules
CC      /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.mod.o
LD [M]  /home/rdrijsen/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.ko
make: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-30-generic'

Next change to root and issue the following commands

# rmmod psmouse

# insmod ./psmouse.ko

Now change back to a “regular user” and see if the touchpad is now detected. In my case it resulted in (partial output displayed):

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse             id=11    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ DualPoint Stick                             id=14    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad            id=16    [slave  pointer  (2)]

As can be seen my touchpad is now detected and no longer seen as a generic mouse. Scrolling now worked plus I can set the settings for a touchpad in the System Settings.

However, the above fix works for the current session. Once you reboot the touchpad is no longer detected. I have used the steps below to make the change persistent over reboots.

First create a backup of the original psmouse.ko file in a backup directory (mine is named Ubuntu_64)

$ sudo cp /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.ko ~/Ubuntu_64/psmouse.ko.backup

Next place the psmouse.ko file that we have build into the original location

$ sudo cp ~/git/linux/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.ko

Remove the original “settings” and replace them with the new ones

$ sudo modprobe -r psmouse

$ sudo modprobe psmouse

Now also after reboots the touchpad is still detected and the scrolling works as it is supposed to.

I am not a real expert in this area of compiling modules but AFAIK you will have to replace the psmouse.ko with each kernel change (provided it is not fixed by then). Furthermore, the solution is experimental and thus YMMV. In other words: “use at own risk”

Fingerprint reader

Another nifty item on my laptop is the “fingerprint reader”. IMHO a nice gadget, fun to have. However, unfortunately, the one that is installed in my laptop is the one for which a driver is not (yet) available. The one I have is:

$ lsusb | grep -i fingerprint
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 0a5c:5801 Broadcom Corp. BCM5880 Secure Applications Processor with fingerprint swipe sensor

As can be read in Ubuntu bug #602071 there is no way (yet) to get this gadget working.  :’(

Conclusion

As indicated in the start of this post, my initial perception was that I still had to find my way around “64-bit country”.  Currently I believe that the issues that I have are also to blame by some of the hardware I have and/or the lack of (open source) drivers for these bits of hardware. The challenges I blame to hardware currently are:

• the nVidia Optimus technology (workaround found by using Bumblebee)
• the ALPS Touchpad (workaround decribed in this post)
• the Broadcom fingerprint reader (no solution so far)

I do hope that my post can help others as well to workaround this issue.

My first steps with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64 …. trial, error and Google

A few weeks ago I received a new (work) laptop, a Dell Latitude E6430. Great specs and I was really looking forward to getting my hands on it.It came with 8Gb of memory and based on the “advice” I found on various blogs and forum threads I decided to replace Windows 7 (which was installed by default) with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64 since the 64-bit release would handle the 8Gb of memory better than the 32-bit version with the PAE kernel.

I figured that the installation and configuration would not be too different from the 32-bit release, however that turned out to be a not entirely right. Although I do have it all running now smoothly and think that I have overcome most (if not all) issues I decided to write down what I have encountered in this blog post.

Installation

Basically the Ubuntu installer is the same as for the 32-bit version, so if you have ever installed the 32-bit version the 64-bit version brings no surprises. There was one difference though. Only the third installation (guess indeed the third is a charm) completed successfully and until today I still have no clue on why the first two failed. So if you encounter the same issue, all I can say … try, try again.

Once installed and running I opened the “Details” in the “System Settings” and started the “System Monitor”.

The first thing that surprised me were the 8 CPU’s …. on a quad-core? Huh. Fortunately it turned out that I was not the only one wondering as can be read (for example) here on askUbuntu. The processor I have, the Intel i7-3720QM is equiped with so-called Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology which delivers two processing threads per physical core. Thus 2 times 4 resulted in the 8 as seen in the System Monitor. Other than this, things showed mostly as I expected.

Cinnamon

As described in several of my blog posts, I am still no great fan of Unity. In my previous post I wrote about cinnamon and once of the things I did after installation was to install cinnamon. For installation I could use “my own” instructions and encountered no issues at all. Of course I also installed the Reality theme and both the weather and the VirtualBox applets.

Graphics Card

This has kept me searching, trying and wondering for quite a while and I have only until recently solved this issue. The laptop I have comes with 2 graphics cards, namely an Intel one and an nVidia one.

$ lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 0dfc (rev ff)

Additionally it comes with the so-called Optimus technology, an optimization technology created by nVidia to save computer energy by switching between two graphics adapters. A typical platform includes a lower-performance integrated unit by Intel and a high-performance one by Nvidia. Optimus saves battery life by automatically switching the power of the discrete GPU off when it is not needed and switching it on when needed again. More about this can be found on wikipedia and the nVidia site.

Since I – have to admit here, initially – wanted to make use of the nVidia card I decided to install the nVidia drivers (295.40) from the repository. This turned out to be not the solution, in order to get the nVidia card working I also had to disable the Optimus technology in the BIOS. Once this card was running I was disappointed. The screen kept flashing and all sorts of all colored vertical lines flashed across the screen. Then I read on Ubuntu Geek about the possibility to install 295.59 version of the nVidia driver using the upubuntu PPA repository, see here. The first thing the blog post indicates is:

What is new in version 295.59
Added support for the following GPUs:
NVS 5400M

Since this is the nVidia card that is installed in my laptop I figured that this would solve my issues. So installed the repository, replaced (amongst others) the nvidia-current package and rebooted. Unfortunately no difference … still flashing screen and flashing lines. And I am certain it are not my eyes since when disabling nVidia (by enabling Optimus) and thus enabling the Intel driver it all looks perfect. But that simply does not do it for me, I wanted to see if I can get that nVidia card up and running.

Looking further I came across the Ubuntu-x-swat PPA repository where even a newer nVidia driver (304.43) was available. Would this be the answer? So I removed the upubuntu repository, installed the x-swat repository and once again replaced nvidia-current. However, same results, same effects. This was when I decided to give it a rest for a while and stick with the Intel version for a while.

Then a colleague and fellow Ubuntu user (thanks, Bart) informed me about the Bumblebee project. The Bumblebee Project is a set of tools developed by people aiming to provide Optimus support under Linux (legacy nVidia hybrid graphics is supported too) while waiting for kernel and drivers to support these notebooks. Install and usage is very straight forward and very well described in the wiki. Once installed you can make use of the nVidia card by adding “optirun” before the command that starts an application. Below the outcome of running glxspheres with and without optirun.

$ glxspheres
Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0x96
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ivybridge Mobile
59.851125 frames/sec - 62.786224 Mpixels/sec
59.881317 frames/sec - 62.817897 Mpixels/sec
59.772826 frames/sec - 62.704085 Mpixels/sec

$ optirun glxspheres
Polygons in scene: 62464
Visual ID of window: 0x21
Context is Direct
OpenGL Renderer: NVS 5200M/PCIe/SSE2
155.156011 frames/sec - 162.764861 Mpixels/sec
160.751876 frames/sec - 168.635148 Mpixels/sec
159.755794 frames/sec - 167.590218 Mpixels/sec

The difference is clear, at least IMHO. One thing I do suggest is to also install the Bumblebee indicator. How to install it is very clearly described in the third answer to this question on askUbuntu. Once installed the indicator will notify you when you run with the nVidia card.

Furthermore the indicator also integrates nicely with Unity …

… and cinnamon.

Although I have not yet fully tested Bumblebee, it surely feels like my graphic card woes are over!

Citrix Receiver

The final subject I like to touch upon may not apply for everyone. For my work I have to make use of the Citrix Receiver in order to enable working from home. In order to install this I simply downloaded the deb file for both the receiver and the USB support and installed it using gDebi (so I didn’t have to fix the dependencies myself). However …. an error occurred! So switched to the terminal to see whether I could more clearly determine what went wrong, but just the same error message.

Google helped my solve this issue. It turns out that there is an error in the postinst script. In the third (and fourth) reply in this thread on the Citrix forums the solution is provided. At least this solution solved my installation error and the installation completed now without anymore issues.

Another thing I came across that I had some issues with the Citrix Receiver and, most likely, the openjdk packages. As such I have installed the “official” Oracle Java 7 version by using the instructions as found in this blog post on webupd8.

Conclusion

My first steps in the “64-bit world” were quite an adventure. Once up and running it runs smoothly but in order to get there it did, from time to time, feel like my very first step in Linux land. Although most issues can be resolved by searching the web I do hope that these wrinkles will be solved in future versions and that, as end user, it becomes easier. Although I also understand that also my hardware may be part of the issue (referring to the Optimus technology).

All in all, it was an interesting ride. 

Giving Cinnamon a go on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Ever since Ubuntu came out with Unity I have been struggling with it. Not that it is particularly not userfriendly or so, it just somehow does not feel like “home”. As such I have switched back to Gnome 3, added some features but also that did not satisfy me. Maybe I am just getting picky with my increasing age. 
So with the coming of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) I switched back to Unity, somehow believing that even an old dog like me should be able to learn new tricks. It works for me, it does what it is supposed to, but still …

Cinnamon

Recently I learned about Cinnamon, a project of Linux Mint and somehow it appealed to me. This is how Cinnamon is described on Wikipedia:

Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME Shell, initially developed by Linux Mint. It attempts to provide a more traditional user environment based on the desktop metaphor, like GNOME 2. Cinnamon uses Muffin, a fork of the GNOME 3 window manager Mutter, as its window manager from Cinnamon 1.2 onwards.

So today I installed Cinnamon following the instructions as provided in this blog post on LinuxBSDos.com. Installation itself is very simple. Firstly you add the repository for Cinnamon:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
Next you update the repositories
sudo aptitude update
Finally you install Cinnamon
sudo aptitude install cinnamon

Once installed you log out, change the desktop environment to Cinnamon and log back in and there you have it … Cinnamon. Usage is very self explanatory. The menu folds out nicely and going over the “sections” you get a listing of the items available.

One thing I noticed, and liked, is the fact that some of the indicators that I had installed – like the VBox and weather indicator – also worked in this panel. Changing the settings can be done by clicking on the up arrow at the left of the bottom right icons.

Once opened you have the possibility to change several settings through a separate window.

To be honest: I haven’t “played” around with the settings much but was pleasantly surprised by the possibilities provided.

Add-ons

Additionally there are several applets, extensions and themes (already) available. Also these I haven’t tried out yet, but surely will over the coming weeks. Today I have installed two additional themes, an extension and two applets.

Themes

Installation of themes is quite simple. Download the theme of your liking and unzip the file into the ~/.themes directory if you are the only one using it or unzip it into /usr/share/themes for system wide implementation. I installed both ChocoLatte and Reality since I was looking for a theme that would (better) fit with my wallpaper. The Reality theme did the trick for me.

Applets

Since I had the weather and VirtualBox indicators already installed earlier I opted for the weather and VirtualBox Launcher applet. First thing I therefore did was to uninstall the weather and VirtualBox indicators.

Installation of an applet is quite simple. You download the file from the website, unzip and follow the instructions (at least that was the case for the applets I opted for) in the README file. If you are curious, the applets you are using are residing in your ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets directory. If installation requires restarting Cinnamon, hold down Alt+F2 and enter the command “r” when so requested and Cinnamon will restart.

Weather Applet

VirtualBox Launcher Applet

Extensions

Just like applets, extensions can simply be installed by downloading them and move them to the appropriate folder. For extensions this is the ~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions folder. The extension I tried is the CoverflowAltTab extension.

Conclusion

All in all, so far I am pleased with Cinnamon. It felt like “home” from the start. It is, IMHO, very user friendly and very self explanatory in use. If you are not too pleased with Unity, why not give Cinnamon a try?

A final note

Cinnamon is not only available for Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distributions. For a complete listing of distributions for which Cinnamon is available, have a look at their download page.