[via Ubuntu ]:

Last week the Ubuntu folks released their latest version, which had the code name "Breezy Badger". A few weeks before I switched my Hoary box over to Breezy, just by changing the sources in my apt sources list, and letting apt-get do its thing. I expected the upgrade to be painless since that's been my experience on the various Debian boxes that I am running. One thing that I didn't expect was the the sound on my Shuttle box started working after I did the upgrade. I didn't even have to re-run the installer.

For work I got a new Intel based PC, a Shuttle G5 9500 XPC. This is an AMD64 nForce3 based machine. Mine has an AMD64 3500, 1Gig of RAM and 74G 10000RPM Raptor. It's not the top of the line, but it's pretty close. The form factor is great (goes right under one of the shelves of my desk), the heat is nice in the winter, and the noise is tolerable (but could be better)

I've spent the last few days wrestling with the machine. To do the job, the machine needs to run Windows XP, Fedora Core n (which is our supported Linux) and Ubuntu (because I'm willing to do the work to get things going on Ubuntu).

I started by grabbing the latest Hoary AMD64 Live CD, in order to make sure that Ubuntu could detect all the hardware. I had some concerns about the SATA disks and the Ethernet controller on the nForce. The LiveCD's found everything, put up a beautiful GNOME desktop, and seemed to run just fine. Next stop Hoary Install CD for AMD64. This installed like a champ, but wouldn't boot. I got dropped into the Intel PXE netboot. Something was messed up with the boot records. A frenzy of wiping, repartitioning, reinstalling ensued punctuated by reboot after reboot (I ended up blasting Windows too). I learned about Debian From Scratch, which is a handy way of using Debian as a rescue CD.

In the end I put Ubuntu on a primary partition (it had been on an extended paritition), installed GRUB's master boot record on that partition, and then copied that boot record to Windows, where I could put it into boot.ini and use the Windows boot loader to load GRUB which would then boot Ubuntu. I had never done anything with GRUB before Ubuntu, and I now know more about it that I wanted to. But at least I have a working dual boot system.

Next problem, building Chandler on AMD64. This turned out to be too big of a hurdle for a one night project. Installing the ia32-libs package helped some, but not enough. The big remaining problem seems to be weirdness with Hoary's current packageing of gcj-3.4, which is needed for PyLucene. I was tempted to go do the chrooted 32bit library thing, but I think I need to learn a little more about 64 vs 32 bit environments before I do that. I ended up grabbing a 32bit i386 Hoary CD and installing that into the partition intended for Fedora Core 3. After I did that I was able to successfully get the prebuilt Chandler to run (I have no doubt I'll be able to get it to compile if I need to). The last snag is that Chandler/wxWidgets runs great on the Xorg X xserver in Ubuntu, but when I try to run it using XQuartz on the Mac, Chandler crashes. So, for native Linux, we're AOK, for the case which would be more convenient for my working, there's a bit more to go.

On the whole, I'm happy with how the Ubuntu install went -- much better than my previous Debian installs (and most of my Debian knowledge carried right over), and without many cuts. In fact, when I just made one huge Ubuntu partition, things went really easily. The problem came in with me wanting a triple (perhaps now I'll need quadruple) boot setup, being inexperienced with GRUB, and trying to build a 64 bit Chandler, which I'll eventually figure out how to do.