Spoke too soon…
After much ado about FINALLY having a stable 11.04, today we cannot boot again into anything other than low graphics mode…
I give up. 10.04, here we come
Inspiration
Because I know I can do almost anything I put my mind to, I just lack the inspiration to want to…
Do it for her:
She is worth anything and everything
A little off topic…
Tonight, I am at a cooking class. There may or may not be free flowing wine. Fun had by all!!
We cooked:
Orgasm on a plate (salt and pepper roasted beef with red wine and lemon thyme jus);
Chicken filled with cheese and herbs, wrapped in prosciutto;
Smashed potato thingy;
Salt and pepper squid;
Stuffed squid and salsa on pasta;
Salads;
Banana fritter with chocolate sauce and palm sugar cream
ZOMFG!!!
Highly recommended. Book in now at Sam’s Bit On The Side
Before we begin…
If anyone is reading this blog from an “interested in starting working with Samba development” perspective, I should probably list what I’m running on.
If you want to know what Samba is, http://samba.org is an amazing resource for all sorts of information.
I am currently running three machines. I have an old desktop due for replacement (at which time it shall be repurposed as a mythtv server), an eeePC running easypeasy (eeebuntu) and a Lenovo W500 laptop (which is my work laptop, supplied by my employer).
I run Ubuntu on all of my machines, although have a partition on the desktop running ‘doze as a gaming platform (something I have very little time for of late).
My work laptop is the machine of most interest, as this is predominantly where I will be doing my Samba development tasks from until such a time as I manage to find the finances to replace the desktop machine. It has 4Gb RAM, not nearly enough disk space, and a 512Mb video card that frequently overheats and puts my system into a complete crash – so if I’m going a bit slow for other people’s liking it’s probably because I’ve tied myself up to avoid throwing the laptop through the window. 
I am running Ubuntu 11.04 on this laptop. This was a BIG mistake. A few weeks ago I decided to completely rebuild my machine, get rid of an old SLES64 partition that I was using for an old project, and reclaim some disk space to enable more space for virtual machines. I installed 10.04 and had everything running quite smoothly and happily, including any work requirements such as Lotus Notes. I then decided to upgrade my OS to 11.04 and have spent two weeks attempting to stabilise it since.
11.04 does not get along so well with my ATI Radeon video card. I should have just reinstalled 10.04, but had just spent so much time on the new install that it felt like a waste to start over. As such, I kept at it until I stabilised my system. Stupidly, I did not document this process. My recommendations would definitely be to stick with 10.04, or not spend days getting your system configured and working with all required software before trying 11.04. Make sure that 11.04 works satisfactorily before you spend too much time getting everything else on to your machine so that you don’t feel as though you have completely wasted all of that time when you have to blow it all away and start again in order to get back to the stable 10.04 environment. FWIW, I installed 10.04 first due to a glitch with U3 based USB memory sticks that will not run the 11.04 install.
I am NOT running “Unity” desktop in Ubuntu. Why, oh why they ever decided to put that in there as the default is beyond me, and has me more than disgusted. Unity is the devil. And worse. To avoid Unity, you need to select the desktop manager at the login screen. I have gone with “classic”.
I currently have my machine in a state where it will run for approximately 6-8 hours before crashing, so it’s not *so* bad. For a while it wouldn’t start at all, or would only start in low graphics mode, and would crash within 5 minutes of boot. That’s 5 minutes to trawl through dmesg or remove and purge video drivers and find something else, with a required 10 mins cool down in between each attempt. Slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow going.
My next post will go over what software I have installed that is actually pertinent to my work with Samba. Our team does a lot of work with paired programming, and I will also be documenting a lot of the how to in getting this working.
I’m assuming that you have been a linux user for some time, and therefore are able to suitably modify my version of “what I did” to your own preferred flavour of linux, but if you need help please post in the comments and I’m sure I (or someone!) can get you a reasonably suitable answer 
Repurposed
Finally, there is something useful to do with this web site, so it is being repurposed from something wholly uninformative and useless to being something that will hopefully be educational and useful!!
The main plan is to document my work with the Samba development team, most particularly the “getting to know you” phase of joining a new project, what helps, what doesn’t, what set up is required (or useful), etc. It may, or may not, also contain snippets of other stuff I’m up to – depends how inspired I’m feeling at the time!
I hope you find this useful
Cheers,
K
