linux and freedom

In this very short tutorial I will install a subversion in ubuntu (or Debian based linux for that matter) and create local repository of it.


I like version control, although I don't understand a large part of it perhaps because I am not experienced enough but if you want a case study just have a look at our very own WWW , there's story of people who claim it save their ass, inspired by these stuff and a small book entitled Head First Software Development , I decided to have my local repo to do this , before going forward consider these points,

• I have a special case , I am preparing for SCJD certification and require version control software to have a more organized and less error prone development environment.
• because this project is super-confidential(as per Sun  Microsystem I am not allowed to share it) I cannot use my wonderful IDE(Netbeans 6.7 ) and it's integrated Kenai plugin to host it in Kenai.com, since the project there, are open(but read-only)
• keeping above point in mind I decided to have local repo for the same and with help of this wonderful book and worldwideweb I got it running in jsut under 10 minutes

Looks like lot have changed in the linux world , since my recent installation, I had lot's of problem , this is Jaunty I know, it is blazingly fast , sure though but everything is caused due to my fault, first I selected ext4 as my filesystem during installation , that said , it is fast, they say that but I dont know from my experience, I intend to use it though because notification system really looks cool , and boot time is mind-blowing , oddly enough , these number of problem whenever occured on my Windows Box , I will definitely re-install it, because I hate to hunt down Vista-forum for a fix, but I like fixing problem here, they give you some kind of control, but that is relly BS , I use it because I like it and because it is not windows, coming to my problem here is what happened,

• First since I installed Jaunty with ext4 as my file system, there are occasional system freezes , I experienced it 3 times in a day, it has something to do with movement of files , deleting etc., which triggers the freeze , the freeze is like nothing seem to work no Alt+Ctrl+Backspace just do a hard reboot, ubuntu is currently with kernel 2.6.29.x which have this bug associated with bug#330824 , and a workaround is listed there, install a latest kernel 2.6.29 or above which leads to next problem
• I never had a chance to compile kernel manually, I really never needed it, but this time I need it , it is easy though but there is utility out there kernelcheck which can automate this for you , I thought this can work for me, but few surprises were waiting , I downloaded it from it's website and installed it using standard setup.py command, it installed graciuosly, here is a link on how to do this, I did that which lead to another problem
• when I ran command sudo kernelcheck it listed an error , something about glade, xml , all in all it simply won't run , a little more digging and some help from nice folks of ubuntuforums.org I came to know that the latest version of kernelcheck had some problem with jaunty (latest version being 1.1.14) so I now I had to remove it and install it's development version, but it leads to another problem
• I am not a python programmer and google tells me that there is not a way to automatically uninstall this type of install, so I have to remove kernelcheck , but don't know since it is not installed from apt-get,
  
• ubuntuforums guys again came to rescue this post entails how to for uninstalling
  
• after uninstalling I installed latest kernelcheck which works fine, installed new kernel(2.6.30, this will take a while , maybe 2-4 hours ) everything seems good except after the reboot
• the next time I booted my system , sorry no wire-less , I have broadcom wireless integrated which come with my dell inspiron which works fine with dell inspiron but looks like new kernel messed things up , and I am stuck here, perhaps upgrading to 9.10 alpha will do some good.

With my recent ramblings with Ubuntu , I just got something strange, I am a big Ubuntu fan because I really like there hardware support , and my findings are not baseless, in the times of edgy , Ubuntu was the only system which work perfectly on my P4 Intel machine , the bigwigs like Suse(no sound) and Fedora(No network ) failed me back then , I was lone Ubuntu user at that time in my batch and now more than 80% use it, so I may say that I am an early adopter in terms of demographics, that said , I never had any problems with either compiz or beryl , I heard several fables but they seem like myth to all of us, until an hour ago , On my freshly installed jaunty I just tried to enable Effects since UX was slightly breaking in none mode for some reason, I never use Extra setting because really they're just extra, not of any use for me, but when I enabled Normal effect what I got si some flashes, and a dialog box , saying effects cannot be enabled on my system , for heaven's sake this is my most advanced graphics machine up-to date(I never had any chance of using any graphics card because I am not much of a gamer or designer of any sort for that matter) , that said I turned my fate to the hands ubuntuforums and they did not disappoint me , this thread solved my problem, basically we override a blacklisted entry , for some reason my laptop's driver for graphics is blacklisted in jaunty , it may cause some potential problem but we can always refer to forum, and for that matter here's a cool tool to check your system compatibility with compiz, here's my system's output

For a fairly long time (3 months to be precise) i was hooked to Windows Vista not by choice , but due to lack official JavaFX support available on linux , since last week before JavaONE, that problem phased out, We have official supported SDK's available for linux, so it's time for me to get my Jaunty installation back(yes I was on Jaunty during the shift , although that was Alpha version), so I grabbed Ubuntu ISO from their site, created a bootable pen drive using unetbootin(I have a previous post on how to do this) , and after my several failed attempts to get my net working on live CD(I still can't figure why this happen , perhaps my ISP have a problem with this mode , or my modem which is a 2 years old defunct model, had lost it's glory), I figured, what the hell , lets have a fresh install, I did it , next came the herculean task getting my net working , pppoeconfig did not worked, my ISP is BSNL , a public- sector ISP which entails them to defy us of any help in terms of support , documentation or anything to be found at hte right place, that sat aside little bit of search helped, few site offered nothing but suddently I got my LAN connection working , that said , I cannot sa how it worked , the auto cannection did not worked for me so I created a new connection abruptly named 'Wired Connection 1' by Ubuntu with all the following settings,


and I suddenly it flashed with a notification , saying I am connected, good , now I have net connected to figure out wireless woes, but for my luck I had configured my modem for wireless when using windows and it worked nice enough there, I had WAP encrypted connection(I am a bit skeptic to share my limited bandwidth since it is very limited(30 kBps as of now)) , I roamed a little on WWW, no luck still , then I configured my auto Wireless connection as per connection settings as of lan and setting Wireless security to WPA and WPA2 personal (that is what I used in Wireless) , entering my keyphrase , and plugging out my ethernet cable , and voila! I got wireless access, now I can lay anywhere in my house and work silently on my jaunty box, I downloaded and.or installed few softwares , Netbeans JavaFX bundle, Java SUN Development kit , a few of firefox addons (addblock plus etc., ) installed and thought now I am good to settle, suddenly update-manager popped-up suggesting a 56 Mb update , this was low as compared to fact that 2 months have passed since the release of jaunty , I only do important updates,(the default one now) and closed my laptop lid and go to sleep, in morning I woke-up good to see my laptop shut down due to expiration of battery, opened my laptop and got no wireless , but a message -- device is unmanaged , connected my ethernet cable and stumpled upon this post from the source which rescue me more than I can count -- the ubuntu forums , This is the link , the experience was good, this might be a surprise but I had more trouble working my wireless for Vista then here, but that was because I had to also configured my modem for wireless access, but screw all of this I have a working net an fully configured and working ubuntu.

recently, I got troubled in my intrepid install twice, making my system unbootable

case 1:

• graphical problem in intrepid, making blurry graphics, and always resetting monitor and card settings to generic mode.

• solution : reconfigure xorg through dpkg adn then perform a flea power reboot  
• courtesy: bsnider from #ubuntu+1 channel at irc.freenode.org

• edited /etc/environment which made intrepid unstable with following message " your session lasted less then 10 seconds...." during logon . messing up $PATH variable.
  
• I am not sure but I rather modified he path variable completely rather than appending it.
• solution: wipe out all the lines from /etc/environment file except first line and set permission of /tmp directory, and free osme space in file system(anything could solve the problem.