Occasional Thoughts

For quite a while the Ubuntu subversion package suffer from bad user certificates that do not follow the standards strictly. In case you have to authenticate with such a certificate subversion will return such an error message:

The root of this problem is that the Ubuntu packages link against libneon-gnutls, which handles certificates in a stricter way than libneon. A easy workaround in the past was to simply replace a replace the library link of libneon-gnutls to point to libneon:

sudo mv /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27.old
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libneon.so.27 /usr/lib/libneon-gnutls.so.27

However once you do this in Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin you will get a another error message instead:

OPTIONS of <url>': SSL handshake failed: SSL disabled due to library version mismatch (<url>)

After a long painful time I finally got my Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 running for streaming on my Ubuntu Intrepid server. As streaming software I used Motion, an intelligent streaming server that is able to detect motion and only stores images if something happens that is worth imaging.

I myself had a hard time to get it running. I first tried to run it on SuSE Linux 10. But failed because of a series of problems. Then I tried running it on Ubuntu Linux 8.10. Ubuntu has a precompiled package for Motion. The tool is V4L2 aware and is known to work with the uvc-video driver, which is needed for the Quickcam.

As last time I wanted to perform a hot upgrade, so I launched adept_manager --dist-upgrade just like described on the Kubuntu pages and let my computer downloading and installing the updated packages during night (I just have a DSL 768k connection). This morning I wanted to see who far it got and as expected KDE 4 had locked the computer so I tried to logon. However the login screen hung up, when hitting enter.

My assumption is that the upgrade has replaced several KDE 4 files, which is the cause for being unable to unlock the screen.

I did a comparison of favourite distributions and the result shows a clear trend towards Ubuntu, while the interest in all other distributions declines. However please also note that this might also indicate that a lot of people use Ubuntu and have problems with Ubuntu and are looking for help. Personally I believe its a combination of both. First there is a high interest. On the other hand there are excellent resources for Ubuntu and people know that Google is of great help for Ubuntu problems, while I wasn't able to get so much help from Google for SuSE problems in the past.

Google Trends comparison for various distributions.

A big surprise was the regional results. Italy is the clear leader in searches for Ubuntu.

Call me crazy to try a hot update while I really required to work on my system. Would you dare to do this with SuSE Linux? Or with any Microsoft Windows version? Or with Mac OS? Well, even if you would dare, these operating systems do not allow you to do that.

As already mentioned in my first impressions about Kubuntu, I expected Kubuntu as a Debian based distribution to provide a smooth upgrade. I was so sure that this can be done that I even tried it, while having a workshop that required my laptop. I wasn't dissapointed. Even more... I was astonished how smooth the upgrade was performed actually. This is something most operating system users just can dream of: Doing an online upgrade in the background, while working on the machines in less than 2 hours just one day after the official release of the distribution.