Up(down)grade to Ubuntu Studio 9.04

I have been running UbuStu 8.10 since may 2009 and with the exception of having some trouble with the initial setup of sound, I have been very happy with it. Recently, after (I believe) a kernel update, the sound stopped working...and I haven't figured out the fix yet. I knew that eventually I would have to update/upgrade my system, and that when I did I would want to repartition my hard drive in a more logical fashion. So I figured now was as good a time as ever.

I decided to upgrade to UbuStu 9.04 and I set up the following partition table:
12 GB: /
2 GB: swap
6 GB: /opt
60 GB: /home

Anyway, I was excited to try out my new UbuStu system but after just a few minutes of uptime the screen went black and the system could not be revived! In fact, I had to kill the power-supply to shutdown as the power switch was even unresponsive. This has happened 3 times in a row now and needless to say, I'm somewhat discouraged. Now I face the choice of reinstalling UbuStu 8.04 or otherwise testing out a different "DAW optimized" linux distro. Giving some consideration to the latter, I started doing a little research and found there are a few serious contenders: 64 Studio being one of the top recommended. Another that I came across is called AVLinux which (like 64 Studio) seems to be fairly stripped down and specialized just for audio work. Either way, this approach may be the best if I want to get serious about a DAW. I can use a different OS (probably a Puppy variant) for my more standard workstation.

Betty Crocker Building Source Code

Since converting to linux (Ubuntu 9.04) at school, I have slowly been reconfiguring my chemical toolbox.  I am using SciFinder Scholar (site licence from the university) through WINE and BKChem and xdrawchem for 2D structure creation.  I still need a 3D molecular viewer and builder that would replace gaussview for windows.  This has been a bit troublsome so far.  The first challenge is simply to "test-drive" different programs available.  After reading about some of the features of a few possible programs, I settled on taking a ride in MacMolPlt 7.1.  However, just to get in the driver seat, I found myself sucked down a "rabbit hole" of dependencies.  MacMolPlt relies on wxWidgets which depends on the GTK+ 2.0 development package which in turn depends on several libraries: ATK, TIFF, glib, pango, and cairo...all of which I apparently did not have installed.  But like Alice, I was too enticed by the prospect before me and down I went.

Building from source so far seems a bit like making a birthday cake.  Since I lack the skills of both a computer scientist and a master chef, in both cases I am having to make due with getting my ingredients "from a box."  What Betty has done for millions of domestics, the Synaptic package manager does for me.  Most times I try to follow the INSTALL instructions and read the README and usually my configure step will fail.  I found all the libraries that I couldn't build from scratch using Synaptic and once installed, my configure step for wxWidgets passed.  Still this took a couple hours with lots of trial and error.  I later found wxWidgets for GTK in Synaptic also.  

In the end, I fulfilled all the dependencies for MacMolPlt but still got a strange error in the 'make' step.

The real surprise came when I went back to work and as applications were being reloaded, all the text displayed in GNOME was turning to empty boxes!!  After panicking a little, I tried to use the 'recovery' boot option and that didn't help.  After rebooting I decided to try to use my web-browser alone to back-up my files.  Fortunately I have GoDaddy server space and I was able to upload my Dissertation folder.  I couldn't back it up any other way as even the terminal window was broken.  I had older backups on a thumb drive and my other partition, but I would have lost a little more than a day of work....too much.  When I reinstalled Ubuntu 9.04 (now more experienced) I made unique partitions for /root, /usr, /opt, and /home so I won't have to worry about losing my files or programs if I "break" my installation.  I am now reinstalling all my software: Opera, BKChem, xdrawchem, Tinker, JabRef, WINE, SciFinder, Filezilla, etc and downloading my Dissertation folder from my server.  Only lost about 3 hours....

As always, lessons learned.

Moe, Larry, Curly and Grub

I have so far stuck with my XP Black/Hardy Studio dual boot and been very pleased. Linux has been a refreshing source of daily learning and many challenges. I suppose I've grown accustomed to challenges and enjoy those that have no deadline or serious consequences.

At school, however, I decided to pursue my 3-boot system...I don't know why I get so enamored with frivality. My desktop (on loan from UNH) has a huge excess of storage that wouldn't be filling anytime soon (around 120 GB free of a 160 GB drive) so I thought it safe to manipulate. However, unlike my home pc, I only have the one hard-drive to work with. I was a little intimidated by the prospect of destroying my 6 years of Ph.D. work sooooo..... I copied my "important" files to a networked computer and then downloaded a .torrent of partition magic.

Partition Magic had lots of scary read-me documentation that is likely to thwart the plans of the timid or ignorant. I narrowly escaped...nearly thwarting myself! I did a disk cleanup and defragmented the drive as suggested. At some point I recall scrambling to find the recommended floppy disk back-up but I couldn't find any working floppy diskettes in the department!! So I ignored the advice and continued anyway. It worked flawlessly. I was very pleased with the results of using Partition Magic and would recommend it to anyone that wants to partition their hard drive. (Just make sure to back up!)

I first installed PCLinuxOS2009 on one of the 30 GB partitions I made and it ran without a hitch. I got my first big scare when I tried to boot back into XP. Instead of booting the OS it went to some utility that ran a full system diagnostic scan. Not really sure what I was looking at, I figured I'd run the scan and then perhaps it would pass on to boot. 30 minutes later and just before I had to go home...no boot. When I closed the dialog box, the whole machine rebooted back to the PCLinuxOS grub boot loader. I had a conference to attend the next day and dwelled on the problem. Then it occured to me that I saw a tiny sliver partition at the front of the drive when I was running Partition Magic. I guessed that the grub boot loader menu item for Windows XP defaulted to hd(0,0) and that this was the location of the DELL Utility that ran. After editing this to hd(0,1) in menu.lst in grub the problem was solved.

I still had a roughly 30 GB partition set aside to load ubuntu studio 8.04 (UbStu) but I wanted to keep the nice graphical boot loader splash page that came with PCLinuxOS. So during the installation I skipped the grub set-up. However, I wasn't quite sure of the hd location of the install. So the lesson learned is to carefully note your partition table as you partition your drive. Where is what partition and what is it called. After I fiddled with the menu.lst file in grub for a while, I finally got ubuntu studio to load. Success!

In summary: I learned a bit about partition tables, installing multiple operating systems on a single drive, and configuring a grub boot loader (Including creating a personalized splash screen).

To Do:

1. Write about my experience thus far with Rosegarden/JACK

2. Figure out how to record MIDI tracks in Rosegarden with only my soundcard

Problems:

1. Cannot record my MIDI sequence in Rosegarden

2. Audacity and Rosegarden freeze my system (complete lock-up) when run together

3. Still not sure how to manage my swap space.

Notes:

The last time I ran UbStu my swap space wasn't even loading and I couldn't get it to load with a >swapon -a. However, I ran a few memory intensive programs and my system memory peaked at about 25-27% so I guess I just have way more memory than my celeron processor can handle. The processor was maxed out.