Recently, I made a post about how Linux on the Desktop (LotD) has been getting closer. I’m starting to think that I was wrong, and that LotD has already appeared in the form of Ubuntu.

Now, I’m not the only one that thinks this way. My friend Matthias recently posted on how Ubuntu told him he needed to charge his wireless mouse.

Jorge Castro has been talking about this for quite a while now. I’ve always considered him to be a bit of a Gnome and Ubuntu fanatic, so until recently, I’ve always taken the things he says with a grain of salt (well, I still do, but it’s a smaller grain).

So, what brought this change about? Ubuntu’s Edgy Eft release. Yeah, Dapper was polished, but it just felt like some things were either missing or just didn’t work the way I thought they should. Well, those complaints have mostly disappeared.

So, starting tomorrow, as a semi-regular feature (at least for now), I’m going to be posting some of the things that make Ubuntu a Linux desktop for me.

Yesterday I did a fresh install of Ubuntu’s newest release, Edgy Eft on my desktop. Getting a fresh install back to the way I like it generally a long process of remembering what I actually had installed. Firing up my music player of choice, Amarok, made things a bit easier though.

I tried to play one of the songs in a playlist, only to have Amarok tell me I didn’t have the codec to play .mp3s. However, what was nice to see was an option to install it.

Much to my delight, Synaptic opened up, and proceeded to install the two packages I needed to listen to my music.

Ubuntu’s 6.10 release, Edgy Eft dropped today. The official mirrors are running pretty slowly, so check out MTU LUG’s mirror for the ISOs.

One of my goals this weekend was to get Linux installed on one of my Ultra 10s, for use as a dedicated web server since I’ve been having a number of problems with the x86 this site is currently hosted on. After running into a problem (the installer would hang at “Booting Linux”) with an Ubuntu Dapper Drake install CD and running into the same problem trying to net-boot the machine, I decided to just go with vanilla Debian.

I grabbed a Sarge net-install CD, dropped it in and found myself confronting the following error:

Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on 00:00
Press L1-A to return to the boot prom

Having found out that other people had solved this problem by putting the disks into another machine and deleting pre-existing Solaris installs, I vowed to find another way (any of you who have taken apart a U10 will understand).

I rebooted, deciding to try with a 2.4 kernel, hoping that would solve my problem. Entering linux 24 at the install prompt, I was soon greeted with the Debian Installer in all of it’s (un)glory. As much as I wanted to use Ubuntu, oh well… I’ve still got apt at least.

Over the course of this week, I’ll attempt to get everything set up to transfer my web server to the U10. Hopefully the load doesn’t eat the machine alive.

A few things still aren’t working, so I’m popping up a post more as a reminder to myself on what’s left and how I fixed things more than anything.

SWAT

The Samba Web Administration Tool isn’t working for some reason. Whenever I attempt to connect to localhost:901 I get an error message that says:

The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost:901

I’ve added the necessary lines to /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/services so I’m a bit confused on this one.

/etc/inetd.conf:

swat stream tcp nowait.400 root /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/sbin/swat

/etc/services:

swat 901/tcp #swat

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