Big Fat Ostrich

Speaking of being on the bleeding edge of technology, a recent update/upgrade of my Debian server revealed a bug with man-db. Yes. man-db. Out of all places it could have happened, it happened here. It’s shameful!

After upgrading, you might see mandb taking up 100% of your cpu. And not only that, the upgrade is likely to hang on it.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

2653 811 man 20 0 21500 1256 488 R 100 0.1 154:39.62 mandb

This was found in man-db version 2.5.6-4 but it’s already been fixed. You’ll just have to do an apt-get update followed by an apt-get upgrade. After that you should have man-db version 2.5.6-5

You can also look at the bug report here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=562503

Exciting times.

Well it’s time to upgrade and say goodbye to Jaunty Jackalope. With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic Koala, it had to be done.

Karmic Koala was released on 29 October 2009, and while I am a little late on my review, I will say that I wanted to wait it out. After the initial release, I was hearing a lot of grumbling about slowness and issues with upgrading as opposed to a fresh install.

The last time I wrote a review of the Ubuntu upgrade process was way back in April of 2009.There were some issues with that tracker bug, but that was finally resolved. This time however, the upgrade went really smooth. Actually, let me back up a bit: The first time I tried to upgrade (2 months ago) to Karmic Koala, I used my old PIII 500Mhz laptop as a guinea pig. The exercise went horribly wrong, and to no fault of Ubuntu. Yes, my old Dell Latitude PIII finally bought the farm. That 20Gig hard drive has done it’s final spin.

So I had no choice but to bite the bullet and try the upgrade on my main machine.

I’m happy to say that the upgrade went perfectly smooth. I was a little worried that some packages might break considering the history of package installation that my machine has, but that didn’t happen.

The only issue I had was upgrading Virtual Box once Karmic was installed. If you use Virtual Box 2.0, you’ll need to first remove it (as root) with apt-get remove virtualbox-2.2.6.31-160, then download Virtual Box 3.12 from here and install it like so: dpkg -i virtualbox-3.0_3.0.12-54655_Ubuntu_jaunty_i386.deb

There was some initial slowness during the first boot, which is normal. Thunderbird and Firefox took forever to load. After the second boot, everything seems fine using the 2.6.31-16 kernel. Other than that, I have nothing bad to say about the Karmic Koala upgrade, so far. Time will tell.

I will say that the new splash screen is pretty slick. Click to enlarge:

Addendum I: After using Karmic Koala for about three hours, a nasty little bug was revealed. It turns out that a ton of useless messages will get logged to /var/log/messages, kern.log, and syslog. The logs fill up to the point where / or /var/log fills up. I’m really surprised that this made it out into the field, and it’s extremely annoying. The messages in question look like this:

Dec 1 08:02:42 compname kernel: [35031.545468] CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 13710)
Dec 1 08:02:42 compname kernel: [35031.545470] CPU0: Temperature/speed normal

Good thing though, is that there’s a simple temporary fix that you can use from the Ubuntu forums. Check out post #57 here. Once you apply the fix, backup or delete the huge log files and restart rsyslog.

Aside from that (I know, it’s a pretty major bug), Karmic Koala is running very fast and snappy. I’m inclined to say that the slowness I experienced with Jaunty was the fault of Firefox. Now, with Firefox 3.5.6 on Karmic, browsing is extremely fast. I’ve been testing browsing in Karmic using Chrome 4 as well, and page loading is very fast there too.

Addendum II: After a good 4 days of using Karmic, I’m really satisfied with performance.  Chrome 4 is good, but not there 100% yet. All apps seem to be loading fast, and my Windows XP Virtual Machine is smoother than before. Plus, Firefox is still surprising me with page loading,  especially when clicking through Adgitize blogs and ads.

m.

Well, it’s upgrade time once again! April 23 marked the release of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), so I’m going to run through a little review while I upgrade my laptop which is currently running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Both my laptop and my desktop are running 8.10, but I use my laptop as my sandbox in case anything goes wrong. Honestly, I’ve been running Ubuntu since Edgy Eft (6.10) and have never run into any major issues. The last few upgrades have been ridiculously simple and headache-free.

When I install or upgrade Ubuntu, I try to put myself in the shoes of the novice in order to gauge the ease-of-use for the end user. My experience so far has been good, with minimal knowledge required to get your system up and running straight out of the box.

Hardware
Dell Latitude CS
PIII 500 Mhz
Memory 256 MB
HD 20 GB

Part I

The Upgrade
As a “best practice”, I usually like to do a full update of the current system (Intrepid Ibex) before doing the upgrade. The upgrade will install all of the newer packages anyway, even if your system is not up to date. I’m impatient today, so we’re going straight for the upgrade. So much for best practices, eh?

The number of packages required to download varies from machine to machine. Depending on what (and how many) packages you have installed will have an impact on the update process. In my case, I had to download 822 packages.

Alright, so you may have noticed that I’m not exactly running a bleeding edge system, but that is exactly the kind of system you want to try this out on.You get a good idea about an operating system’s performance when you install it on less than state-of-the-art hardware.

The upgrade is slated to take about 3 hours, which is to be expected for my ancient laptop, aka Methuselah. The last time I upgraded my P4 2.8 GHz (2 GB RAM), the upgrade was complete in under an hour.

Now we play the waiting game while the updates install. Once the updates are being installed, there’s really no need to hang around and stare at the screen as there are no prompts to wait for until the end. Of course, there will be a reboot.

Part II – Post Reboot Tracker Bug!

Once the upgrade completed and the reboot was initiated, we’re treated to a smaller, sleeker, sexier splash screen. The logon screen has also been tweaked with a sleeker look.

However…

After logging in, the Tracker Applet appears and asks you if you want to index the files “for faster searching”.  I selected “yes” to indexing, but it failed with this message: “There was an error while performing indexing: Index corrupted”

Hitting OK, simply brings back this message, so I hit “Reindex all contents”, which brings up the following dialog: Reindex your System? Yes/No

Whether you hit yes or no, the initial “Index Corrupted” error message stays on the screen. Hitting Cancel or OK, has no effect, and Re-index all contents isn’t an option right now, since we seem to be in a loop. Time to kill it.

I opened up a shell and ran top. tracker-indexer is running with the PID 3488, so let’s kill it off.  I also noticed that trackerd is also running, which looks like the daemon which is spawning tracker-indexer. Better kill that one off first.

From the shell I typed:

sudo killall trackerd followed by sudo killall tracker-indexer

I ran top again and saw no sign of tracker running. Finally I was able to close the Tracker error dialog.

On reboot, I got the same problem.  A quick Google search confirms that this is indeed a bug. If you want to read about it, you can do so here -> Bug #346912

If you’re running into the same problem, you can disable indexing like so:  System > Preferences > Search and Indexing > General > uncheck Enable Indexing and hit ‘apply’.

Well OK. On reboot, tracker isn’t harassing me to index anymore.

I’m not going to get into how to remove tracker, since this is just about the upgrade. Unfortunately, this is an annoying little bug which I hope the folks over at Canonical will address quickly. Otherwise, the process was similar to previous upgrades (Gutsy Gibbon, Intrepid Ibex).

So that’s it. A “relatively” painless upgrade + 1 annoying and obvious bug. New features? Haven’t discovered them yet. Will I upgrade my primary machine? Not yet. I’m still a fan of Ubuntu, but we’ll test drive the old laptop for a few weeks first.

Update Update!

I’ve now updated my main machine to Jaunty. Prior to doing so, I made sure that Search and Indexing was disabled first, and on reboot the tracker bug didn’t manifest. So, all in all, a very smooth upgrade with an easy to avoid minor bug. I’m using Gnome at the moment, and dialog boxes have clearer and sharper lines. At first glance the upgrade is easier on the eyes and performance feels lighter, with snappier window switching.  So far so good.

Lata

M.

P.S. If any of this was at all helpful, we’d love to hear your comments!