I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y510 from Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy, which I’ve been running since around May 2008, to Linux Mint 8, Helena (which is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10). I used to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu every 6 months, but it got a bit tiring keeping up on the upgrade treadmill, running around fixing things, especially things that worked before. I decided to stick to the Long-Term Support version (LTS), as the intermediate versions tend to have more regressions.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.

First published on Neverness.

So the thing with developing in Linux is that you’re going to use the shell a lot. And the other thing with Linux is that most things are in a deep directory hierarchy. I find myself changing to different directories with long names a lot.

Even with tab-completion, it becomes really tiresome, and slows me down.

I know about pushd and popd which allows you to make a kind of directory “stack”. And it helps, but I don’t necessarily always go back in reverse order.

I’ve found this little utility called autojump. What it does is learn the directories that you use most often, assigning weights to the ones you use more frequently. So after a while of using the normal cd command, it has a pretty good idea of where you usually go.

Now you can jump to the directory you want, by issuing a very short command. For example:

cd ~/projects/MyProject/app/view/users

becomes

j users

And if there are a few directories you jump to with “users”, it will automatically go to the most-frequently used one. Or you can type j users and press Tab, which will give you a numbered list of all “users” directories in it’s list.

And the other kicker is that it’s case-insensitive.

Go, and be productive!

The Fedora developers have been hard at work, and the result is the first alpha release of Fedora 12 which was announced earlier today.

Codenamed “Constantine”, the Fedora 12 Alpha includes a number of new features and improvements over Fedora 11. Among these are:

• Better webcam support which includes out-of-the box support for many new webcams;
• Empathy as the default IM client in place of Pidgin;
• Gnome 2.27.90 beta and KDE 4.3, the latest versions of those desktops;
• Network Manager Mobile Broadband which includes a database of known mobile broadband providers to simplify setting up a mobile broadband connection;
• A better free video codec in the latest version of the Ogg Theora video encoder, codenamed “Thusnelda”;
• PackageKit improvements that include plugins for browser-based or command line installs;
• PulseAudio improvements to include profiles, input switching and easier speaker setup; and
• Better power management.

Also included in Fedora 12 is better IPv6 network management, and automatic bug-reporting tool, Bluetooth on demand, as well as KVM virtualisation improvements that reduce memory consumption, NIC hotplug, better disk I/O, modern PXE booting, support for flexible network configurations, and much more.

A fuller list of features in Fedora 12 can be found on the Fedora Wiki.

For more information including common and known bugs, tips on how to
report bugs, and the official release schedule, please refer to the
release notes:

The beta release of Fedora 12 is planned for 13 October and the final release for 10 November.

Red Hat, IBM and Novell are the three companies that contribute the most to Linux kernel development. A new report from the Linux Foundation says, however, that despite the contributions of these three companies, it is still non-affiliated individual developers that make up the most significant contribution to the ongoing development of a kernel which grows by more than 5 000 lines of code a day.

According to the report, individual developers (18.2%) and those not explicitly identified as working for a company (7.6%) have made 25.8% of the changes to the 2.6.x kernel to date, or a total of 37 808 changes. Red Hat developers contributed 17 981 (12.3%) changes to the same code base. IBM’s team, the second largest corporate contributor, accounted for 11 151 (7.6%) changes to the kernel.

The top ten contributors to the kernel are:

1 – None (18.2%)
2 – Red Hat (12.3%)
3 – Unknown (7.6%)
4 – IBM (7.6%)
5 – Novell (7.6%)
6 – Intel (5.3%)
7 – Consultant (2.5%)
8 – Oracle (2.4%)
9 – Linux Foundation (1.6%)
10 – SGI (1.6%)

According to the report the average kernel development cycle runs for 81 days, just shy of 12 weeks. The 2.6.12 and 2.6.24 kernels had the longest cycles at 108 days each. The shortest cycle was for the 2.6.14 release at just 61 days.

Growing quickly

With all these contributions to the code base it’s unsurprising that the Linux kernel has grown significantly in size. The 2.6.11 version of the kernel had 17 090 files and 6 624 076 lines of code. The 2.6.30 kernel has 27 911 files and 11 560 971 lines of code.

Even more interesting is the rate at which the kernel is developing and changing form. In the 2.6.11 kernel there were an average of 3 224 lines added, 11 360 lines deleted and 1 290 lines altered each and every day of the year.
This pace has stepped up since the 2.6.24 release and now averages 10 923 lines added, 5 547 lines deleted and 2 243 lines changed every day.

The full report can be downloaded from the Linux Foundation website.