Upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10
We decided to upgrade the HP compaq 8510p laptop to the latest desktop and then to add the server stuff we need (LAMP, various lamp apps, etc). The old 80gig hard drives were too small and we were running ver 9.x which did not support the wireless. So we replaced the hard drive with a new 500gig Seagate hybrid hard drive (SSD/SATA) that should be a lot faster.
Installing was quick and it did fix the wireless problem. However, there are a number of issues with the new release (some minor, some major)
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
and then restarting and logging in again. This provides some login option. First time around we choose Gnome but the screen menus were scrambled and the unity right side dock would appear! Logging out and choose Gnome Classic at login solved that problem. I can't figure out to how to get windows to roll up, a feature i've been using since mac os 7 and one that is much more usable than having to minimize windows in the way and then go all the way down to the bottom bar to retrieve them. I also seem to recall Unity had that annoying Windows 7 behavior that when you move a window to the side of the screen it maximizes the window. What dumb idea, you move windows to the side to get them out of the way because you can't roll them up. It is fast to just throw a window to the side, doing that does NOT mean i now want it to take up the whole screen. Dumb usability ideas - don't they test these things with real users?
The next step is to download and install all my regular apps and then install LAMP. I did this many versions ago using TASKSEL and the results were awful - lots of problems. So i have to decide between 3 install methods:
Method 1 - TASKSEL(easy but does it work better now?)
sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel
select LAMP Server
Method 2 - Manually (more work to install but possibly most stable?)
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
Method 3 - 'Bundle' method (newer so maybe give it a whirl?)
sudo apt-get install lamp-server
Of course I have yet to find an informed article that can discuss the pros/cons of the 3 approaches. So it is trial and error.
On the plus side, the laptop is very snappy. Next to get back my apps... Ah good, the Ubuntu software center has synaptic so let's start with that...
PS - one new app that is interesting is under Internet, Desktop Sharing. We will be trying this out as we need to find a good way to showing distance ed students how to do particular tasks. We having been taking screen shots and turning them into movies using Camtasia Studio but that is proprietary and you have to update them when things change. I'd like to be able to stream my desktop to 1 or more students so they can see a process and ask questions.
We decided to upgrade the HP compaq 8510p laptop to the latest desktop and then to add the server stuff we need (LAMP, various lamp apps, etc). The old 80gig hard drives were too small and we were running ver 9.x which did not support the wireless. So we replaced the hard drive with a new 500gig Seagate hybrid hard drive (SSD/SATA) that should be a lot faster.
Installing was quick and it did fix the wireless problem. However, there are a number of issues with the new release (some minor, some major)
- The Unity interface is annoying (slower to find what you want)
- Windowshade is not longer an option for windows
- Synaptic package manager is not longer included
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell
and then restarting and logging in again. This provides some login option. First time around we choose Gnome but the screen menus were scrambled and the unity right side dock would appear! Logging out and choose Gnome Classic at login solved that problem. I can't figure out to how to get windows to roll up, a feature i've been using since mac os 7 and one that is much more usable than having to minimize windows in the way and then go all the way down to the bottom bar to retrieve them. I also seem to recall Unity had that annoying Windows 7 behavior that when you move a window to the side of the screen it maximizes the window. What dumb idea, you move windows to the side to get them out of the way because you can't roll them up. It is fast to just throw a window to the side, doing that does NOT mean i now want it to take up the whole screen. Dumb usability ideas - don't they test these things with real users?
The next step is to download and install all my regular apps and then install LAMP. I did this many versions ago using TASKSEL and the results were awful - lots of problems. So i have to decide between 3 install methods:
Method 1 - TASKSEL(easy but does it work better now?)
sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel
select LAMP Server
Method 2 - Manually (more work to install but possibly most stable?)
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin
Method 3 - 'Bundle' method (newer so maybe give it a whirl?)
sudo apt-get install lamp-server
Of course I have yet to find an informed article that can discuss the pros/cons of the 3 approaches. So it is trial and error.
On the plus side, the laptop is very snappy. Next to get back my apps... Ah good, the Ubuntu software center has synaptic so let's start with that...
PS - one new app that is interesting is under Internet, Desktop Sharing. We will be trying this out as we need to find a good way to showing distance ed students how to do particular tasks. We having been taking screen shots and turning them into movies using Camtasia Studio but that is proprietary and you have to update them when things change. I'd like to be able to stream my desktop to 1 or more students so they can see a process and ask questions.
9 comments:
Under themes & tweaks install the Window Manager
New problem - the 11.10 machine can see my windows shares (win 7, ubuntu 10) but it cannot browse them. Dumb. It should work out of the box. The windows and linux boxes have no problem accessing the shared folder on the 11.10 machine. Samba used to break with each release but i thought those days were done. I did a sudo net domain and workgroup and //megatron are listed. So i do an apt-get install system-config-samba but the control is no use. The problem is not the samba server but the client.
The error message is 'failed to retrieve share list from server' so it cannot browse a windows 7 pc or a unbuntu 10 pc or a mac desktop pc.
smbtree lists all the shares from machines on the network
so off to /etc/samba and we sudo pico smb.conf
The name resolve order uses hosts files first and broadcasts last and it is commented out! Maybe we change that to:
name resolve order = bcast host
and then restart the servers with service smbd restart and service nmbd restart
Works! This is an awful mistake to make in an upgrade. Upgrade should not break what is working, particularly something as important as networking. Good thing i recall the manual work you had to do to get samba working back in redhat 5 and 6.
Spoke too soon, no windowshade yet so i did:
sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
Select Other, Advanced Settings
Click Windows
Select Toggle Shade on double-click
and it works!
You can also put the trash can and the computer icon back on the desktop
One nice feature - when you download a .deb package it can open automatically in the Ubuntu Software Center for installing. This is much nicer than fiddling around with manual installs.
So in the end i opted for:
sudo apt-get install lamp-server
result 'unable to locate lamp-server'
so we ran apt-get update and we see ppa.launchpad.net is not available and neither is getdeb.net so we should remove them from the software sources file. No package lamp-server.
We try the tasksel approach with:
sudo apt-get install tasksel and this works. Next we run the app with sudo tasksel. The menu runs and we select the lamp server and tab to OK. The install asks for a password for root for the mysql server and we oblige. We exit tasksel and restart (easier than restarting services...)
apache and mysql installed ok but phpmyadmin not included. so we do:
sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin and it installs but http://localhost/phpmyadmin is not found
so we edit http.conf in /etc/apache2 to add the line:
include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf and restart
- still not found.
the root seems to be /var/www which only has index.html and no folder and has permissions set so you can't do anything. But the same file is found at /usr/share/apache2/default-site which seems more likely as the root level. But i am not the owner of the file and so can do nothing. There are no folders here either.
Ok tomorrow remove lamp-serve and try option #3 - the manual method...
Another nice feature, the HDMI output works like a charm. It picks up the video and then clicking the sound control lets you decide to redirect the sound thru the hdmi or to sent it thru the laptop (default). Very slick. This means a meeting room with a lcd panel would get rid of the need for cumbersome data projectors...
If Unity is upsetting you (as it very well may) you could try Mate, which is the gnome 2 fork, or just keep using the gnome classic. If you want a lighter desktop environment, you could try Xfce (xubuntu) or go with Linux Mint which uses a modified gnome shell.
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