Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" (Shallow Thoughts)

Ubuntu "Hardy Heron"

On a lunchtime bird walk on Monday I saw one blue heron and at least five green herons (very unusuual to see so many of those). Maybe that helped prepare me for installing the latest Ubuntu beta, "Hardy Heron", Monday afternoon.

I was trying the beta primarily in the hope that it would fix a serious video out regression that appeared in Gutsy (the current Ubuntu) in January. My beloved old Vaio SR17 laptop can't switch video signals on the fly like some laptops can; I've always needed to boot it with an external monitor or projector connected. But as long as it saw a monitor at boot time, it would remember that state through many suspend cycles, so I could come out of suspend, plug in to a projector and be ready to go. But beginning some time in late January, somehow Gutsy started doing something that turned off the video signal when suspending. To talk to a projector, I could reboot with the projector connected (I hate making an audience watch that! and besides, it takes away the magic). I also discovered that switching to one of the alternate consoles, then back (ctl-alt-F2 ctl-alt-F7) got a signal going out on the video port -- but I found out the hard way, in front of an audience, that it was only a 640x480 signal, not the 1024x768 signal I expected. Not pretty! I could either go back to Feisty ... or try upgrading to Hardy.

I've already written about the handy debootstrap lightweight install process I used. (I did try the official Hardy "alternate installer" disk first, but after finishing package installation it got into a spin lock trying to configure kernel modules, so I had to pull the plug and try another approach.)

This left me with a system that was very minimal indeed, so I spent the next few hours installing packages, starting with tcsh, vim (Ubuntu's minimal install has something called vim, but it's not actually vim so you tend to get lots of errors about parsing your .vimrc until you install the real vim), acpi and acpi-support (for suspending), and the window system: xorg and friends. To get xorg, I started with:

apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-savage xbase-clients openbox xloadimage xterm

Then there was the usual exercise of aptitude search font and installing everything on that list that seemed relevant to European languages (I don't really need to scroll through dozens of Tamil, Thai, Devanagari and Bangla fonts every time I'm looking for a fancy cursive in GIMP).

But I hit a problem with that pretty early on: turns out most of the fonts I installed weren't actually showing up in xlsfonts, xfontsel, gtkfontsel, or, most important, the little xlib program I'm using for a talk I need to give in a couple weeks. I filed it as bug 212669, but kept working on it, and when a clever person on #ubuntu+1 ("redwhitewaldo") suggested I take a look at the x-ttcidfont-conf README, that gave me enough clue to get me the rest of the way. Turns out there's a Debian bug with the solution, and the workaround is easy until the Ubuntu folks pick up the update.

I hit a few other problems, like the PCMCIA/udev problem I've described elsewhere ... but mostly, my debootstrapped Hardy Heron is working quite well.

And in case you're wondering whether Hardy fixed the video signal problem, I'm happy to say it does. Video out is working just fine.

Tags: linux, ubuntu, install, fonts, vaio
[ 19:31 Apr 07, 2008    More linux/install | permalink to this entry | ]