Settling in a new system

Changing OS is like moving to a new home – it is empty and clean and looks not so fond and comfortable as your old flat. But, bit by bit, it looks inhabited more and more – you’re placing a furniture, sticking a wallpaper by your own taste and making the home full of your belongings, gadgets and knick-knacks.

The difference between good and not-so-good Linux distribution is how often you have to keep a hammer and file in your hands while making the system good for living. In this sense, Ubuntu is a good system.

The last week I’ve almost upgraded my fresh Kubuntu 7.04 installation to an environment where I could grow roots, work and live in peace. There are the things that I needed to install absolutely:

• Sun Java 5. I kindly appreciate efforts of the GNU Java projects (default in Ubuntu) but sorry, they cannot replace Sun’s implementation so far.
• Eclipse. I cannot program without it.
• Firefox. Konqueror is good, but many modern ajaxian web interfaces have problems with it. So, Fox rocks.
• Extra multimedia codecs. How could I live without my old huge MP3 collection?
• Apache, PHP and MySQL. I am a web-developer, huh.
• GIMP and Inkscape for graphics.
• And lots of other thingies.

First problems

Bug #91368. I was unable to fetch ‘universe’ packages list when ‘apt-get update’, because the downloaded gzip file was broken and stuck in the ‘/var/lib/apt/lists/partial’ dir. I removed it and tried to update again but it had no help – I got the same broken file. And it was happening only with the ‘universe’ list (maybe, ‘coz it was a largest one). Finally, I downloaded it with wget, gunzipped, renamed an moved into ‘list’ manually and it worked! Later I found on Ubuntu Forums that replacing ‘http:’ protocol to ‘ftp:’ everywhere in ‘sources.list’ fixes the problem. Sort of apt and proxy issue, I think.

Bug #102742. Not so critical but sad also – KNemo network monitor (a very useful thing that shows nice connection icons in the system tray, connection speed graphs and keeps network usage statistics) strangely eats up to 100% CPU time and makes the rest of the system crowling slowly. I didn’t see this behavior in my previous installations. I have no idea how to fix it, so, I simply turned it off waiting for update.

So far, it’s all.