Ubuntu

Like many people, I need to upgrade from the used laptop that I am using, to a newer (still used) laptop. This is usually every 3 years or so.

Because I don't want to install the operating system that I use (Xubuntu Linux) from scratch when doing so, I used to remove the disk in the old computer, and install it in the new one, and things would work right away, with all my applications still there, and my desktop the way it is when I shutdown the older computer.

In recent long term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu, Canonical has been adding more and more packages that are installed using snapd.

Snapd is a package manager that relies on static linking of dependencies, contrary to over two decades of Linux managing dependencies via dynamic linking, with Debian being the pioneer of this approach.

A few months ago, Ubuntu started pushing ads for their Ubuntu Pro service to the command line interface apt command. When you run the apt command from the terminal, you see this message:

Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Then about a week ago, more messages were pushed about the ESM service saying that more packages that can be upgraded if you subscribe to that service.

When I was running Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS on my home server, I had installed minidlna as a media server that is accessible to DLNA capable clients, including a Smart TV where one can view photos on a large screen.

However, when the server was upgraded to 14.04 LTS, minidlna stopped working. Searching Google turned up forum posts from 2014 with instructions that no longer work.

In mid June, my laptop hard disk died. Suddenly, there was a flurry of disk I/O wait, then applications started to report errors trying to write anything.

With a 500GB 2.5" laptop disk lying around that was used for backup, I replaced the dead disk with this one.

I had an Ubuntu Server 14.04 CD lying around, and therefore did not bother to download Kubuntu 14.04.

My laptop's home directory is backed up daily via ssh to the server. So my data was safe.

Since I moved from cable TV to free HDTV over-the-air (OTA) ATSC TV, I have been using the Homeworx HW-150PVR as a PVR (personal video recorder) for HD TV.

If you are, like me, an Ubuntu user who is annoyed when doing aptitude full-upgrade because it stops and displays the changelog until you press "q", then here is why this happens, and how to change the behavior.

The reason this happens is that the package apt-listchanges is installed on your system. This package lists the changes before applying them.

However, by default, it stops the upgrade process until the user has provided input. The silly part is that there are no choices at this point, the user must dismiss the output and nothing else can be done.

After upgrading my laptop from Kubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS, I noticed that the laptop runs hotter than usual.

Upon investigating further, I found that PackageKit was the process that was consuming lots of CPU and memory.

For example, here is a sample output from htop, showing packagekitd maxing out one core, and eating up almost a quarter of the laptop's RAM:

Update: 2017-Nov-19: See the last section for automated installation and upgrading, which is now possible.

To read my RSS feeds, I use Tiny Tiny RSS, which worked fine until 21 Feb 2014.

On 22 Feb 2014, Ubuntu pushed Firefox 27, Tiny Tiny RSS stopped working, with a Javascript error. After logging in, there would be a pop up error referring to getCookie and tracing to prototype.js.

To solve this, I went back to the ESR (Extended Support Release). This was quite a few steps, so I am documenting them here.

Ubuntu decided several months ago to forgo its policy of sticking with Firefox 3.6, and go with the latest versions from Mozilla.

With Firefox 13 running on Ubuntu 10.04, I had good performance, and did not suffer from this problem that I am about to describe. The only issue I faced was excessive disk activity and that was fixed by disabling the FireBug extension. Other than that, Firefox was speedy and responsive.