Ubuntu 8.10 Cruft Remover

Updated my Ubuntu to 8.10 this week and have been poking around the new features.

Yesterday I found “Cruft Remover” under the System > Administration menu.  I assumed it was something similar to CCleaner on Windows. CCleaner scans your system and finds UNused items which are safe to remove.   Unfortunately the Cruft Remover tool itself provides no information or help only a “Cleanup” button which I gleefully pressed.

Unfortunately it appears to have deleted several apps I use regularly. Oops.

VirtualBox? Gone.
Air/Twhirl? Gone.

Not sure what else is missing.  But they definately need to improve the usability of this tool.  So if you have upgraded – beware of Cruft Remover!

A co-worker told me about this one… SQuirrel SQL bills itself as a “universal SQL client”.  At work we use Oracle and I’ve been happy using Oracle’s SQL Developer.  At home on Linux I’ve been searching for something to interact with MySQL.  The MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser tools provided by MySQL work but are lacking in features…

After using SQuirrel SQL for a few days I’m happy to report my search may be over!  SQuirrel SQL is like Eclipse – it’s based on Java, uses JDBC drivers to connect to your database, and it can be extended via plugins.

SQuirrel SQL

All the basics are here – code completion, SQL editor, auto correction, editing results, etc.  Through plugins you can get table relation graphs, data import, database copy, SQL validation, syntax highlighting and more.

Since SQuirrel SQL is based on Java it’s cross platform, it supports any database with a JDBC driver and is free!

Last night I decided on a whim to upgrade to the latest RC (release candidate) of Ubuntu called Hardy Heron (8.x).  It’s due to officially be released in a few days so I figured it should be fairly stable and I thought I’d beat the rush and upgrade now.   Usually I do these sort of things with little planning and last night was no exception!

• No backup (rsync is sooo easy but really, what could go wrong?)
• Started the upgrade right about the time a huge thunderstorm was overhead (computers love lightening!)
• Forgot once again to backup my xorg.conf file (just in case)

The upgrade took about an hour.  Soon it rebooted my system and of course my monitors were all a mess.  Seems the NVidia drivers either didn’t get upgrade or got hosed.  Sigh.   Then I go to hit the Ubuntu forums (a great resource) and they are down for maintenance or something.  Ooops.

But I did find one post on the web that suggested trying Envy to load the latest NVidia drivers. I did that and things still weren’t right so I loaded up the package manager, uninstalled EVERYTHING NVidia related and tried Envy again.  This time I got nvidia-settings to run and from there it was just a simple matter of setting things up again and tweaking my xorg.conf file.   The only other thing that didn’t work was my sound for some reason but a quick search on the web and I found a few suggestions and after fiddling a bit I got it working as well.

I didn’t really have time afterwards to dig around and find out what’s new with the latest release but will hopefully have time to do that tonight after the TACFUG meeting!   Overall I’ve been very happy with Ubuntu but I do wish they could spend some time fixing the monitor setup issues.  That has been an issue during the last 2-3 upgrades.

Alan has a list of the OpenBD (Open BlueDragon) Steering Committee on his blog:

Andy Allan, Peter Amiri, Mike Brunt, Sean Corfield, Mark Drew, Adam Haskell, Jordan Michaels, Alan Williamson, Matt Woodward and Andy Wu

LOTS of good names on there and some really nice quotes but obviously I’m going to have to step up and volunteer for the committee myself.

“formalised language”… “masterful clustering-replication mechanism”…

Huh?

Not one of them mentioned the dreaded ‘f-word‘…. Can’t anyone say it??! Me of shallow pockets (have you priced kid sneakers lately?) will…

OpenBD is Free!! (it even rhymes – marketing will love that)

OK. Now I feel better.

On a serious note – I am happy to see such prominent names on the committee and I’m really looking forward to seeing where all this goes. Exciting times!

This weekend I downloaded the Flex Builder Linux alpha, but ran into some issues and after digging around in the forums it was hinted that a new release would be out ’soon’. Soon turns out to be this morning. Alpha 3 was released today! I’m looking forward to getting home and trying that out!

I also saw on Sean Corfield’s blog that an alpha release of Air for Linux is out too! Sean’s post also pointed to this nice article on Read Write Web discussing Flex and Air on Linux. The article had this nice tidbit:

In addition to AIR and Flex releases for Linux, Adobe announced that it had joined the Linux Foundation in an effort to help “accelerate the growth of RIA technologies on the Linux platform.”

I recently purchased a GPS (Garmin 2610) to tote around on motorcycle trips. If you have never tinkered with one – it is VERY cool. Unfortunately the MapSource software that comes with it requires Windows… Ugh.

I’ve run VMWare and QEMU on my Ubuntu box before. VMWare was very nice but a pain to install (granted it’s been awhile so that may have improved). QEMU was very fast but recently it’s been a bit flaky and this time when I tried to run Windows it wouldn’t find my USB mouse. I dug around online but was unable to fix it. I’ve heard about VirtualBox for awhile now and decided to give it a try.

While VirtualBox is free – I did notice they were recently acquired by Sun and now it appears they have two versions: one closed and one open-source. So far I’m very impressed. I ran into some issues installing the OSE version from the Ubuntu repositories. Downloading the .deb file from the VirtualBox site worked much better. Installation went well and I installed Windows XP without a hitch. And most importantly everything works – mouse, keyboard, internet, etc.

So if you are looking for a VM – check it out – they have an extensive list of supported platforms and Linux, Windows and Mac are all supported in one flavor or another. Lifehacker did a recent article covering installation and running Windows apps seamlessly on the Ubuntu desktop.

I always set ColdFusion to NOT run at startup - why have it eating resources when you aren't using it? On Windows I had a few batch scripts to easily kick off ColdFusion. I dug around looking for something similar for Linux... I found a few things which I've added to my wiki in the ColdFusion section.

I basically came up with a very simple bash script:

Save this to a cfstart.sh file or something. Give it executable rights. Then it's just 'sudo ./cfstart.sh'. And of course you can make the same thing to stop the services. I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 so if you are on something different (RedHat) you'll have to change your paths, etc...

Ever since I've been using two monitors at work I've wanted to setup two monitors at home but finances are tight and I just can't afford another flat screen. But this weekend I did dust off my daughters old 17" CRT and tried to get it working with my Dell widescreen. I knew the latest Ubuntu had made advances in setting up monitors but I was also familiar with hacking on xorg.conf so I wasn't too concerned with screwing anything up. I backed up my xorg.conf and started tinkering.

I originally messed with Ubuntu's native screen controls but they were having no effect. After a bit of digging I discovered if you are using the 'restricted' NVIDIA drivers (which I was) there is another application for tweaking settings - nvidia-settings. This was a bit confusing. Which one to use? (Ubuntu should check to see if the NVIDIA drivers are installed and if so disable the native screen tools.) The NVIDIA application provided a nice dialog - both screens were showing - but at incorrect resolutions. I tweaked a few things - saved, restarted my session. Nothing happened. The CRT was working but my Dell widescreen was doing nothing. I tried a few more things and got frustrated so I hit the Ubuntu forums. Lots of threads on there about running dual head but no real silver bullet solutions. One suggestion did mention running the settings application as sudo. I tried that and things started to work. After a bit more experimentation I got the following modes to work.

Twinview - this is a NVIDIA setting. It basically takes your current desktop and 'stretches' it across both monitors. This would probably work OK if both monitors were the same size and resolution but since mine were different - it was a bit odd to work with. I could also not 'contain' my applications to one screen. If I maximized a window - it would stretch across both monitors. Not ideal.

Next I turned off Twinview and enabled Xinerama.

Xinerama is an extension to the X Window System which enables multi-headed X: applications and window managers which use two (or more) physical displays as one large virtual display.

This worked but oddly enough some applications (like terminal and Gnome Do) would not start. After tinkering a bit I discovered the fancy new compositing window manager Compiz wasn't running. Why? I have no idea. But overall this was the most "Windows" like setup. I could drag running applications between screens but if I maximized an application it would contain itself to one monitor. But without Compiz running the system was unusable. If I can get Compiz running in this mode I'll be happy.

Finally I removed the Xinerama setting and just set configured two X sessions. This gave me two independent desktops. I had two taskbars, two desktops and while I could drag and drop icons and files between the two screens I could not open an application on one desktop and move it to the other. This works and is what I'm using now but obviously it is not ideal.

I'm going to tinker with the 'restricted' NVIDIA drivers a bit more. If I can't make any progress I may try the drivers from the NVIDIA site itself and see if anything improves. The other alternative is to figure out why Compiz isn't running and fix that.

I've been so happy running Ubuntu it is a shame that getting this setup is so difficult. While I'm happy tweaking things I could easily see others hitting this roadblock and giving up. Hopefully the Ubuntu team will make some progress on tightening up the integration between native Ubuntu apps, restricted drivers and Compiz.