glasgow’s finnieston crane next to the river clyde. not used for ship building these days. sometimes maniacs bungee off it…occasionally others leap without using a rope. tenements at the front there…the whitelee windfarm on the hills behind (click to view the image in a larger format).
i like a glass of guinness. i don’t drink a huge amount of it and i’m not terribly fond of the extra cold stuff (ruins the consistency i feel) but i do like it. also the export variety that’s sold in the bottles is worth a try. put hairs on your chest it will…or make them fall out…one or the other.
i’m upgrading my home server. a faithful 1GHz PIII with 512MB has served(!) me well for 4 years but i though it was time to expand. got a rather nice box with a 1.6GHz processor (quad core atom d510), 4GB of RAM and a 500GB SATA disk (room for another 2 disks also).
the old machine runs debian 6.0.3 and deals with a few chores…apache, postfix, remote ssh tunnelling, subsonic and a couple of samba shares. the old install is obviously 32 bit…the new one will be 64 bit (also running debian 6.0.3…i haven’t found a more stable server os) so that prevents a straight rsync as many of the packages will be incompatible with the different architecture. a chum got me thinking…a simple way to get a new box running the same apps as the old one is to replicate the packages that are installed. this can be done simply with the following…on the old box issue the following in a terminal…doesn’t need to be as root…
dpkg –get-selections > installedpackages
this creates a file called ‘installedpackages’ that contains all the applications that have been installed on the old system. if you have the new server up and running and accessible via ssh you can then copy the file over with scp…if not use USB
scp installedpackages username@newserver:/home/username
this will plonk it into your home folder on the new machine. so now log into your new machine and as root issue the command
dpkg –set-selections < installedpackages
and then
apt-get dselect-upgrade
this will install all the packages that ran on the old box…to the new one.
NB that this, obviously, doesn’t move your /home directories, email, web sites or any configuration files. you can do this via USB or using the scp method detailed above. lots of the configuration files are stored in /etc, web sites are generally in /var/www. i’m not dealing with things like mysql now but here’s some info on that.
as usual i like to have a mess about with ubuntu alpha versions. this time it’s a look at ubuntu 12.04 (precise pangolin…again…fine work there people) an LTS release which means it’ll get support until april of 2017…that’s a while. get the daily iso from here and burn it to a dvd or whap it onto a usb stick using dd or unetbootin. the install process still features a lot of the artwork from 11.10…unity is still in use…and looks much the same as it did previously…and that’s not, in this users opinion, a good thing. in fact if you follow this post down you’ll see that i quickly tire of ubuntu 12.04 and turned it into xubuntu 12.04…
doing the initial update using apt-get update and then apt-get dist-upgrade (as root). a couple of the ‘extra. repositories were unavailable. also neither ai32-libs or ia32-libs-multiarch would install due to dependency problems.
this build of ubuntu is shipping with firefox 9 and thunderbird 9 but by the time april 2012 rolls around both of these will probably have morphed to version 11 with no noticeable improvements.
as i said…they’re sticking with unity. just as feature-rich as always…
not too light on resources either but then i’ve got a bit of ram to spare.
now as i mentioned before…unity isn’t for me. i could have installed gnome 3 but prefer things to be slightly more configurable so here’s how to add xfce as a desktop environment…in other words change ubuntu 12.04 into xubuntu 12.04…
as root issue the command apt-get install xubuntu-desktop this will grab 120MB or so from the repositories…after it has finished log out. when you’re greeted with the log in screen click the wee gear icon next to your username and choose ‘xfce session’ or whatever. this’ll give you something slightly more usable. i’ve used xfce a fair bit in the past…still not 100% sure of it but it kicks unity’s arse…see below for a quick look.
too many icons…not sure why all my drives have to be shown by default. right-click the bottom menu and go into panel options to make it auto-hide.
ah…proper menus…bliss…
and there’s my daily look at el reg…with some thumbnails…
to sum up. ubuntu’s going in the wrong direction for me interface-wise. they won’t change and i don’t think i’ll ever like it. for an alpha version it seems stable though…adding xfce makes it a lot nicer to use. how long will i stick with it? probably until this afternoon.