xUbuntu 9.10, Adobe AIR, Random Rants 2

Posted by JD 02/19/2010 at 08:01

Last week, my main laptop died taking my main xUbuntu installation with it. Ok, it really didn’t take it, since I have backups and the hard disk was fine. Further, because I run it in a VirtualBox VM, picking it up and moving it to a different physical machine was fairly simple, once I had a machine ready for VirtualBox.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last week building a new machine, migrating Linux servers around, rebuilding a Windows7 Media Center machine, fighting with a bad power supply, poor connections in DVDs and network cables. Finally, everything is starting to work as expected. I was feeling lucky, so I decided to update the main xUbuntu desktop VM from 8.04 LTS to 9.10. Yes, I said update, not do a fresh install. BTW the 8.04 install was an upgrade from 6.06 originally.

xubuntu 8.04 —> 9.10

As the 8.04 —> 8.10 —> 9.04 —> 9.10 upgrades happened, I watched which packages were added and which were removed. Sometimes I had to retain config files to keep my development stuff working, like /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/default – seems they’d figure out how to merge non-trivial changes by now. Anyway, 9.10 removed something like 34 packages and added 194. Yes, 194! This is an xubuntu install, so I was surprised to see lots of KDE and GNOME things included. Oh well, perhaps I’ve loaded programs manually that required those. Fine. Then I saw Adobe AIR. I was pissed. I tried AIR last fall. I don’t see the point. It is big, slow, you know, just like Java which has been time tested since 1993. I didn’t ask for AIR, so why was it installed? I didn’t ask for The GIMP either, yet it was installed too. Ok, so

sudo apt-get remove adobeair1.0 gimp gimp-data libgimp2.0

will remove those packages. Done. I wonder what else was actually installed that I’m not interested in. I decide to look around a little. Under the Applications menu, there’s Add/Remove Applications now. I guess this is to make MS-Windows noobs to Linux happy? I open the A/R App tool and start selecting things to remove. None of them can be removed by this tool. It complains there are dependency issues and reports that I should use Synaptic to resolve those instead. The interface for this tool is very much like Synaptic – why does it exist at all?

Synaptic is opened, packages are sorted by whether they are installed or not and I start selecting which packages to remove. I use OpenOffice, so why would I want AbiWord or Gnumeric? What’s with all the games and Amarok? Deselected. I did see something called Computer Janitor which claims to clean up installations. I’ll run that later.

Disk Storage

Originally my VM / directory used about 6.1GB, which includes my HOME and all the files stuffed in there. The VM only has a 10GB virtual disk after all. After all the upgrades, it used 8.2GB. Yes, I ran autoremove and autoclean. Further, I removed all old kernels.

Computer Janitor

I run the program and it provides a list of Unused things as well as a few things to Optimize. Most of the Unused things listed are unsupported packages – that often means things that I installed outside the Ubuntu-loved depots. One of my main packages is listed as unsupported – heck, I used it 4 times yesterday and it worked fine, override. I make my way the the page after page of unsupported packages and override a few (slocate, hulu, xdialog), but leave most to be removed. I wonder, what will removing ALL THOSE LIBRARIES break?

Do selected tasks is pressed and a not-so-nice warning is displayed. I continue and wait. It comes back with 30 packages still remaining to be cleaned up and no explanation why these selected packages didn’t get cleaned the first time. Do selected tasks is pressed again. 10 remaining packages. Do selected tasks is pressed again. 2 remaining packages. Do selected tasks is pressed again. Finally, only the packages that I overrode are left. I’m a little nervous about this.

7.4GB used. Nicer.

Future

Why bother with this upgrade when 10.04 is just around the corner? Well, there are some interesting virtualization tools and some other enterprise tools that we use which have been added to the latest release, but not back ported. Alfresco is an apt-get install for example. KVM is replacing Xen for the main virtualization under Ubuntu Server. I know I can’t run KVM inside a VirtualBox VM, but I can run the KVM VM manager there. At least I hope I can.

Time to reboot and see what really broke. Check the comments for more.

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  1. JD 02/20/2010 at 12:22

    So it is a few days after the 9.10 upgrade. Only 2 surprises so far:

    1. my mplayer alias to force -vo sdl and —monitoraspect 16:10 were causing issues. It appears that my use of ALSA instead of Pulse audio may be part of it, then again, perhaps not. Removing the -vo sdl from the alias solved it.
    2. rdiff-backup versions are incompatible between 9.10 and my backup server running 8.04. The versions are 1.2.8 and 1.1.15, respectively. I’ve got to do something about this since living without a nighly backup on my main desktop VM is completely unacceptable.
  2. JD 03/10/2010 at 13:35

    I guess a few people come here looking for the ubuntu way to install Adobe Air.

    sudo apt-get install adobeair1.0

    Ought to cover it, but since it has a specific version listed, this may change in the future or for different Ubuntu releases.