This weekend, after finding out just how easily one can accidentally invoke the option to “recover” a Windows partition on an Asus eeePC (hint: “too easily”), I decided to take the opportunity to try out a couple of different Ubuntu distros for the eeePC.
I started with Crunchbang, because I was attracted to the idea of using a really lightweight environment like OpenBox, as opposed to GNOME. I grabbed the torrent for the eee ISO from the downloads page, and about half an hour later, did the install. It went fairly smoothly, but I had to retry a couple of times because the partitioner did not show me any disks on its first launch. After rebooting, it worked. Very odd, and displeasing. Inconsistencies like this really drive me batty, especially on Linux. I don’t understand why one should get different results simply because of a reboot, but this happens frequently to me with respect to partitioners and video configurations.
After failing to be able to mount SMB/CIFS shares, even from the command line after installing the needed packages, I gave up on Crunchbang and, at CafeNinja’s suggestion, decided to try out Eeebuntu instead. Oddly enough, I had the exact same difficulty getting the partitioner to show any partitions/drives, but it worked after a reboot.
Anyway, I’ve been running Eeebuntu’s netbook remix for a day or so, and so far, I like it. It lets you use the netbook interface as well as the traditional GNOME menu, and auto-hides the bottom GNOME panel, which I like. It’s like the best of both GNOME worlds! So far, so good with respect to Eeebuntu.
Finally, this morning, I decided to upgrade the host operating system of my ticketing system (RT 3.8) from Debian 4 to 5. It went very smoothly and took under an hour. A slight change to my /etc/apt/sources.lst (s/etch/lenny/g), apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade, reinstallation of the build-essential package, and reinstallation of a few PERL modules, and we were back in business. One curious oddity was that the rt-mailgate command which worked under the previous configuration no longer worked after the upgrade. My mail.log showed a lot of these:
Mar 31 11:36:24 rt postfix/local[4131]: 95C87AEF81: to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=7.3, delays=2.7/2.5/0/2.1, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: An Error Occurred =================? 404 Not Found )
I simply changed the line in /etc/aliases that read
blah: "|/usr/local/bin/rt-mailgate --queue support --action correspond --url http://localhost"
to read
blah: "|/usr/local/bin/rt-mailgate --queue support --action correspond --url http://rt"
instead. I haven’t yet looked to see if this was a change on the Apache2 end or the Debian end, but there is still a “localhost” entry in /etc/hosts, so I’m thinking Apache2.
The personal blog of Peter Nikolaidis