Notes from the Mousepad

Hot off of the presses comes a release announcement marking the final release of Xfce 4.6!

from          Stephan Arts <stephan@xfce.org>
date    Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 6:30 PM
subject    Xfce 4.6.0 Released!!!

After more than two years of development, Xfce 4.6.0 has just been released.

Xfce 4.6 features a new configuration backend, a new settings manager,
a brand new session manager and sound mixer as well as several huge
improvements of its core components. A list of all the changes since
the last release candidate can be found on this page.

A visual overview of Xfce 4.6 is available here:
http://www.xfce.org/about/tour

Download Xfce 4.6 from the Downloads section of the Xfce website:
http://www.xfce.org/download

Regards,
The Xfce development team.

All interested parties should take a quick peek at the desktop tour that is linked-to above, but Xubuntu users won’t need to download anything from the Xfce website – Xfce 4.6 will be included by default in Xubuntu 9.04. 

CONGRATULATIONS to the entire Xfce development team!

I volunteered at Free Geek Chicago again on Sunday, and spent much of my day trying to get Xubuntu Feisty Fawn to install on some rather unique hardware. It didn’t go so well.

The machine in question was a PII with 256mb of RAM, and two SCSI hard drives – one 8gb and one 4gb in size. I tried to set up an LVM installation, but the installer hung after it had completed 85% of the software installation. So I also tried manual partitioning, setting up the root partition on the 4gb drive, and boot, home, and swap partitions on the 8gb drive. It hung at 85%, too. Even trying to do a command-line installation hung at 85%.

With frustration mounting, we just switched over to a new computer. I knew there had to be a way to view what was causing the install to hang, so I asked the folks in #ubuntu-iso what I could do to see these error messages. I talked the issue over with Stephane Graber, and he suggested that I check out some of the install messages in /var/log by pressing ctrl-alt-f2 and getting to run level 2 once the installation had hung.

I’m going to do that the next time I’m at Free Geek Chicago. If anything, I’d like to at least get a good bug report out of this. I haven’t done too much testing of SCSI drives, and also haven’t done to much LVM testing, so I think I might try and add that to my testing repertoire on this release cycle. I’m even going to trade in my standard PII testing box (which runs just fine, thank you) for this SCSI beast (assuming it has no hardware issues).

How about replicating an installed package list this way:

dpkg --get-selections | grep '[[:space:]]install$' | awk '{print $1}' > packagelist.txt on the old machine,

then:
sudo apt-get -u install `cat packagelist.txt` on new machine,

That should work. Only disadvantage is that you’d have to download the installed packages from the ‘net onto the new machine, rather than having them available via a CD. The advantage, of course, is that you have burnt one less CD, and will automatically download the most recent version of your packages.

Apt on CD looks pretty awesome for For x/k/ed/ubuntu and debian users . . . There’s got to be a way to back up all of your installed .debs without the gui, but this will be useful for most desktop users. And I like how it allows you to share the packages that you already have installed with other folks. Something like this would come in handy for Xubuntu, which isn’t installed with a very rich set of multimedia apps, for example.