As I’ve written, moving the application-folders into the cloud seems to be working pretty good on one client. Now I’ve tested, how it is when using two clients and pulled the information contained in the cloud (from client A) down to client B. Each of the three applications worked in general, Pidgin started with the account configured on client A, Evolution started with the Inbox configure in client A but asked me for the password to access the mail-server (what’s clear, because I did not synchronize the key-rings) and Firefox displayed with the preferences configured, but prepended a message box that said:

Could not initialize the application’s security component. The most likely cause is problems with files in your application’s profile directory. Please check that this directory has no read/write restrictions and your hard disk is not full or close to full. It is recommended that you exit the application and fix the problem. If you continue to use this session, you might see incorrect application behaviour when accessing security features.

This confused me a bit, especially since the actual browser ran without any more problems. However, I’ve been to lazy to track down this permission problem.

After I’ve checked, if “one-after-another” synchronization worked, I tried out the simultaneous usage of both machines, while being connected and synced with the cloud on each of them. As I’ve expected, I ran into some problems: Suddenly, some more folder (thumbnail) appeared within the client B’s Ubuntu One folder, that contained his app-information. The folders remained until the actual Home folder finished receiving the data from within the cloud, then they just disappeared. I don’t know, if those have been merged or just deleted – it just worked afterwards.

Ubuntu One seems to be using “semaphores”, in a similar way token-ring was using: At first, client A is allowed to sync his data with the cloud. When this is finished, client B is allowed to sync. Then, it’s client A’s turn again – and so on. Theoretically, this is good. But in practice, Ubuntu One unfortunately seems to overwrite locale changes when pulling data down from the cloud. In comparison: MobileMe asks the user and merges the data, as good as possible.

In the end, simultaneous usage was unable to sync both machines in a way, so that data was kept consistent. Either one machine lost information, or the other. Especially when adding a new Pidgin account on client B, waiting for the sync, closing Pidgin on client A (which then seems to save a final account-info) and waiting for the sync there, you will be surprised your account not to be available when re-launching Pidgin on client A.

Of course, synchronization always is a tricky feature, but I guess, Ubuntu One lacks of an SVN-like back-end, that keeps track of all changes and makes merging possible. I’m really interested in how Ubuntu One will continue to evolve and I’ll try to keep tack of its development status. This could really kick ass someday, as soon as everything works seamless and simultaneous.

For my tests, I was using a vanilla Ubuntu 9.04 with latest package versions/updates installed. The installation of the PPA was pretty simple, thanks to the DEB provided on the Ubuntu One site, although I could not install the Ubuntu One GNOME-Client using the one-click feature implemented on the official Install-site. This probably could be the first thing a regular user could trap on.

So, after installing the packages manually by using a terminal and aptitude, the client appeared in Ubuntu’s “Internet”-submenu of the panel-main-menu. When a user installs Ubuntu One on a new computer and clicks the client’s icon within the menu to start the service, he will get a browser-window containing an Ubuntu One authorization-page. There, the user needs to click the “Authorize this Computer” button, so the computer will be able to sync with the Ubuntu One cloud. I took a quick look behind the scenes and as far as I’ve seen, Ubuntu One uses regular OAuth to authenticate computers to the cloud. The OAuth-token therefor will be saved within the “Passwords & Keys” thingy, that’s found somewhere in the main-menu.

However, the sync service itself creates a “Ubuntu One” folder within your home-directory, which syncs up into the cloud. Within this folder, there’s also a sym-linked-folder for Public content. The client-daemon doesn’t seem to be using some mechanism like iNotify to sync the folder contents up to the cloud, or if it does, it’s simply broken. At least on my test-machine, the client synchronized periodically – and by periodically I mean cycles with noticeable pauses in between. On one way that’s good, because not every tiny-whiny change that will be made to the folder’s contents will be pushed up to the cloud, what would literally kill your bandwidth, but on the other hand, the actual duration from one sync to another is just too big to be used with multiple devices simultaneously (e.g. an Android implementation or even another client-computer).

Talking about the simultaneousness, I don’t think that Ubuntu One is (yet) planned to be used on multiple computers simultaneous. On my test-setup I’ve created a sub-folder named “Home”, where I moved some dot-starting-folders from within my actual $HOME to and soft-linked them back to their actual location. My setup then looked something like:


devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$ ls -la | grep ^lrw*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 38 2009-09-12 20:32 .evolution -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/evolution
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 36 2009-09-12 20:31 .mozilla -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/mozilla
lrwxrwxrwx 1 devilx devilx 35 2009-09-12 20:33 .purple -> /home/devilx/Ubuntu One/Home/purple
devilx@vm-ubuntu:~$


By this, I’ve pushed the preferences and information of my Firefox, my Evolution and my Pidgin into the cloud. A quick test showed me, that none of those three applications complained about their new “home” being a symlink to some directory within the cloud – and neither about any insufficient permissions that could have happened, if the cloud was set-up crappy (+1P for Ubuntu One). Still, this setup seems not that perfect for me, at the moment.

The synchronization of a modified .mozilla and especially of a modified .evolution folder seems to take for years. While I’m writing this text, the client-daemon is still synchronizing the files (it started nearly at the same time I’ve started writing this entry) and says “Updating 6 of 270 files…” – this could become a looooong night. Though, I don’t want to complain about Ubuntu One’s performance, since yet, it’s still in Beta (even if I don’t know, if Beta isn’t just an upcoming trend every company has to stick with -> e.g. Google).

I’ll try to clone this Ubuntu-installation and run them both with Ubuntu One being active – first, one after another (to see, if the applications could be synced without them complaining about parameters, that are incorrect for the secondary host they get synced to -> e.g. hostname information) and then I’ll try to run them simultaneously and hope for the best. If it should work out (what I don’t expect, just from what I’ve seen in similar projects), it would be really cool, because then, most applications could be synced this way without much hassle. I’d be really surprised, if this should be working, because then, the cloud seems to implement some kind of “merge” service, which allows you to upload data from two (or more) clients and seamlessly merge it up in the cloud together to one, consistent state.

Eh, I will see. Altogether, Ubuntu One is yet already working pretty cool, though I’m not quite sure, what a regular user should do with it, if he’s already aware of service like Dropbox or Amazon’s S3 – because at the moment, Ubuntu One unfortunately isn’t any better than those services. It just integrates more seamless into the GNOME-desktop. Hm… oh well.

The current service-site describes the services mainly as synchronization option for your Ubuntu workstations, so that everything is kept up to date. My first thought on this was, that they’re using webdav (just like Apple does for their iDisk) for accomplishing this task, but as it seems, there’s no webdav involved. Maybe it’s built-up on Amazon’s S3?

I don’t know yet, since up to now I haven’t received my invitation to join and use this service. I was told that invitations are being sent amongst others depending on the service’s usage, so I really hope (since the ubuntuone.com isn’t that popular, yet) to receive mine soon.

Depending of how good this service works already, it could be a really good competitor to Apple’s MobileMe – especially if it should get an own “Exchange for the Rest of Us”, heh. I don’t know what’s planned to be implemented and as it seems there’s not much talking about that, but I’d really welcome it to see a working solution on that area.

As soon as I’ll receive the invitation, I will take Ubuntu One on a test-drive and try to see whether it would be possible to use this service on other distributions as well. I really can’t wait to get my hands on the service’s software, heh…

I need to create a minimalist base-system for a project and have been given the strategical requirement of using Ubuntu Server for my installation. It’s not actually the distribution me or any other team-member would have preferred, but I thought “it can’t be that worse, it’s based on Debian and it’s hard to break something that good“. But of course, today I’ve been disabused about that.

The first thing is, that it’s very hard to strip down the default Ubuntu Server installation, to make it as minimal as possible. You have to fuck around with many dependencies that seemed to be there only because some maintainers thought how cool it would be to compile every bleeding-edge feature into that application, regardless if it’s really useful on a Server-Distribution (as they call it) or not. But let me clarify a bit what I mean with “fuck around with dependencies”…

On a standard, “minimal” installation with no extras selected in tasksel, this is what has to be removed additionally after the setup:


aptitude --purge-unused purge apparmor apparmor-utils bash-completion bind9-host dnsutils ubuntu-standard ubuntu-minimal bzip2 command-not-found command-not-found-data console-setup console-terminus dmidecode laptop-detect tasksel tasksel-data dosfstools eject ethtool fdutils file friendly-recovery ftp fuse-utils ntfs-3g gnupg python-gnupginterface ubuntu-keyring update-manager-core hdparm info inputattach installation-report iputils-arping iputils-tracepath libbind9-30 libbz2-1.0 lsb-release python python-apt python-central python-gdbm python-support python2.5 ufw libcurl3-gnutls libexpat1 librpc-xml-perl libxml-parser-perl libfribidi0 libfuse2 libgc1c2 w3m libgc1c2 libgcrypt11 libgnutls13 libldap-2.4-2 libopencdk10 libgpg-error0 libgpmg1 libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tree-perl libwww-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libidn11 libisc32 libdns32 libisccfg30 libisccc30 libiw29 wireless-tools libldap-2.4-2 liblwres30 liblzo2-2 libmagic1 libntfs-3g23 libopencdk10 libparted1.7-1 parted libreadline5 wpasupplicant librpc-xml-perl libsasl2-2 libsasl2-modules libsqlite3-0 libsysfs2 pcmciautils libtasn1-3 libterm-readkey-perl liburi-perl libusb-0.1-4 lshw usbutils libwww-perl libx11-6 xauth libxmuu1 libxext6 libx11-data libxau6 libxcb-xlib0 libxcb1 libxdmcp6 libxext6 libxml-parser-perl libxmuu1 lsof memtest86+ mii-diag mime-support mlocate mtr-tiny nano netcat netcat-traditional ntpdate pcmciautils perl perl-modules popularity-contest ppp pppconfig pppoeconf python python-apt python-gnupginterface python-minimal
python-support python2.5-minimal readline-common reiserfsprogs rsync startup-tasks sudo system-services tasksel tasksel-data time ubuntu-keyring ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard upstart upstart-compat-sysv upstart-logd usbutils util-linux-locales vim-common vim-tiny wget wireless-tools wpasupplicant x11-common xkb-data at ed iptables linux-server pciutils


After that, the system is still something around four-hundred Megabytes large and contains over one-hundred-thirty packages. You removed “gnupg”, because it has an extreme amount of additional features/dependencies which seem just useless for 99% of the cases on a server-system (e.g. ldap), but of course this will also automatically remove the ubuntu-keyring – what is kinda not fun. However, after searching for an stripped down package of gnupg, you will notice that there is none but gpgv. Unfortunately this tool can’t be used in combination with apt-key, what makes the whole GPG/Keyring stuff unusable. The only compromise you have, is to stick with gpgv and manually update the keyring, since gpgv can only verify but not update the GPG stuff.

Now, after executing the purge-command, you will be prompted to type in “I am aware that this is a very bad idea“. Not because you are removing an essential package which causes your system not to reboot anymore (upstart), just because you remove python-minimal. When I saw, that neither the upstart- nor sysvinit-packages had the “Essential: yes”-flag set, I was really shocked. That should be Linux for Human Beings? A Linux which lets you delete /sbin/runlevel and /sbin/init without even complaining about it? Holy crap.

So, after manually installing sysvinit, we need some editor (no, not nano, that’s not an editor!) to modify our sources list. Since Emacs is quite big and bloated, vi (no, not vim, n v i) is probably a good choice. After installing it and opening APT’s sources list, we will see many entries we do not want (multiverse, universe, whateververse), since they are barely supported and provide no security-updates. After removing everything but “main”, we execute aptitude update and continue installing the software we actually need.

Next, we would like to have the versioning-tool rcs, for handling the configuration files we will need to change. Also, we might want an mc (midnight commander) for performing filesystem operations and navigation. Unfortunately now, we just found the next problem: We can’t install them. There is no installation candidate for these package-names. Why? Simply because they are not in “main”. I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell anyone who could, but these packages are contained in “universe”.

However… let’s move on. So, we fight ourselves through the configuration and stuff and in the end there are only some peanuts left to be set-up. An example could be, the locale and keymap settings. So, let’s begin with the keymap. We would like to have the keymap #150 (German, Latin1, Qwertz). We check the installed packages and see that console-tools are installed on our system. We browse the net and find out, that (for changing the keymap), we only need to execute dpkg-reconfigure console-data. Before we can do that, we need to install it. And I think you know what comes next…. right. It’s not possible. This is another (elementary) package, which is not contained in “main”, but instead it can be found in “universe”. For no reason, in my opinion. But okay, since we really need it, we manually download it from the “universe”-repository and install it. Now, we try executing the dpkg-reconfigure command: The command runs, finishes, and doesn’t display any errors or warnings. “Great!“, we think. Unfortunately, after rebooting the machine, our thought became more like an “Wtf?!“, since the keymap didn’t change at all. After some more trying, searching and debugging, we find out, that there’s some script which calls some install-keymap command, which of course we can’t find on our system. Unfortunately, the calling script doesn’t show any error, if the command can’t be executed/found, what let’s us think, that everything went just fine. After searching on packages.ubuntu.com for the binary, we find out that it’s contained in a package named console-common. Which, again, is only available in universal. So, up to now, we got already five packages which we will have to maintain manually, since they’re not in “main” for no frikkin’ reason. That’s Linux for Human Beings.

After finally installing the last required package and successfully changing the keymap, we can now focus on the locale. On a regular Debian, the only command needed for selecting which locales to be built and which to be used is dpkg-reconfigure locales. Let’s take a look at what has to be done on the Ubuntu Server:

First, we need to manually insert the locales we would like to be built into the file /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local. One on each line. After that, we execute the command mentioned for the Debian system, which only builds us the locales. After that, we edit the /etc/default/locale and insert the LANG we would like to be used. And then we might execute update-locale and reboot the system. This is how locales are being handled on the Linux for Human Beings. Again, for comparison, on a Debian the only command you need to know is dpkg-reconfigure locales. And reboot. But that’s all.

Personally, the installation today taught me, that Ubuntu might be a nice (and very bloated) operating system for Desktop computing, but in the Server area it still lacks the knowledge of seeing the point and really simplifying the administration of a machine, instead of complicating everything by using obscure dependencies, odd tools and a package management which keeps out rock-solid and widely spread software of its “stable” package-branch.

At the moment, it would call it “EPIC FAIL“, to cite my buddy M. Pain.

I can recognize some similarities there.

(and yes, installed Ubuntu 8.10 on VMware Fusion. Now I’m just building the VMware Tools for the Guest.)

Gwibber on my GNOME Desktop

Just tried out Gwibber and I gotta say that it’s a pretty nice and smooth-looking Twitter client for the GNOME Desktop. It’s written in Python and uses GTK2 in combination with Webkit to display the eye-candy-tweets. It was pretty much a pain to get the Ubuntu-Packages working on Debian, but now it’s running pretty good and yet it seems stable. I’m wondering where to configure the appearance, hm… well, however.

Just try it out yourself!

So, now I am REALLY pissed. And the actual reason why I’m sitting here is because I’m waiting for the openSuSE 11.0 Netinstaller to finish, because I need a running system for work tomorrow and I’m hoping that Novell can finally provide that more or less with version 11.0 of their distro.

I’m really thinking of buying an iMac for personal use…. *grml*

However, the MCS intself is pretty cool and tidy built-up. At first I was wondering whether it might be some Elisa fork, but since I’ve seen it consuming less than 90% of the CPU I don’t think so anymore. The eAR OS media center software combines many features, such as TV, DVD, Music, Radio, etc. but most of the stuff isn’t implemented directly into the media center. Instead, the software just forks a XINE (or whatever) command to play the selected movie. The thing that is really nicely implemented is the music playing. Whereever you navigate, you can always see the current track playing on the bottom of the screen, what I pretty much missed on Elisa. Unfortunatelly eAR can’t display me visual effects according to the actual playing music.

For the moment I would call eAR OS a very nice startup with lot of potential but also still a lot to do. There are many things which aren’t solved that clean now and I personally do not like the fact of having a complete GNOME Desktop running under my media center. I will keep monitoring it and meanwhile I’ll try to take a look at the latest XBMC.