Ubuntu 22.04

 Triviality  Comments Off on Ubuntu 22.04
Apr 262022
 

Ubuntu 22.04 was just released, I managed to upgrade my WordPress site (running on VM and only publish static site), it was not as smooth as I thought, there were quite some small problems here and there, but eventually it worked after like 4 hours of troubleshooting, and so on.

As a side note, I no longer running Parallels since I found it tricked me to subscription which involves $79.99 per year, luckily I noticed the weird charge on my credit card so was able to cancel it the same day. I’m running my VM on UTM now, I didn’t notice performance difference between UTM and Parallels, though Parallels does provide more convenient features like desktop integration, snapshot, etc.

I think I’ve been running Ubuntu since 10.04, but I’m seriously thinking of moving away from it now due to snap, there are more and more applications over Ubuntu dropped deb support and are solely on snap only, I don’t mind a distro changes its package management tool like yum to dnf, but I just don’t want to have 2 package management mechanism at the same time.

I may not run Fedora as I need LTS, I cannot choose Rocky as it (actually RHEL) lacks of aarch64 support. Most likely I’m going to play with Debian or Arch.

Jan 132010
 

Since I’m getting myself messed up with all sort of distros, here are something I have to write down to keep track.

To make Linux/FreeBSD distro up-to-date:

  • Debian & Ubuntu:
    alias update=’sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade’
  • CentOS & Fedora:
    alias update=’sudo yum -y update’
  • openSUSE:
    alias update=’sudo zypper refresh && sudo zypper –no-gpg-checks -n update’
  • Gentoo:
    alias update=’sudo emerge –sync && sudo emerge –update –deep –newuse world’
  • FreeBSD (need to have portmanager installed):
    alias update=’sudo portmanager -u’
Dec 282009
 

I was running everything on Fedora (7 VMs), but steadily, I changed some of them to different distros … just for fun.

Now I have two Fedora 12,ย  one CentOS 5.4, one openSuSE 11.2, one Debian 5.03, and two Ubuntu 9.10. I will think about converting one of the Fedora machine and one of the Ubuntu machine to something else, but haven’t decided yet.

Aug 262009
 

I’m trying to test mysql replication and mysql proxy, and later on will try some grid thing to see how current web sites setup their environment. This is a great chance to me to try out different Linux distro, running in VirtualBox on my home Vista machine (4 core 6G mem ๐Ÿ˜‰ ).

I did some research around and tried to figure out what are the most popular distro, after trying wikipedia, distrowatch, and some other sites, I listed candidates here (by priority):

  • Ubuntu and Debian
  • Fedora and CentOS
  • openSUSE
  • Gentoo
  • Slackware
  • Mandriva

Soon I gave up Gentoo as it may take too long to build up the system, though I’m not quite sure, and I believe small start-up cannot afford the time. I tried Slackware which … I cannot figure out how to proceed installation, I believe I’m just to stupid to dig things out but obviously it is not what I want. Mandriva finally became one (I can install 6 distro in total), though it is not that easy to find its 64-bit free edition.

Alright, time to install – all these distro are really friendly on installation. Put a disc in, boot machines up, and instruction after that were all clear enough. All these distro have both graphical and text mode, and I used to choose text mode. Mandriva and openSUSE don’t have SSH server installed by default, which is not that good, and their firewall setup by default does not open for SSH (sure thing as SSH server is not installed). Ubuntu/Debian and Fedora/CentOS by default installed quite a lot packages that I don’t want them at all, but anyway it’s better than missing packages ๐Ÿ™‚ . All distro asked for my own account but at least Mandriva didn’t install sudo for me, which is tricky. I have to say, Ubuntu is doing great job on these stuffs, almost made everything I want on the default installation.

Now, after installation, I want to do couple of things:

  1. Remove unrelated packages
  2. Update the system to latest packages
  3. Install mysql server/mysql proxy, etc

Now, CentOS becomes the worst distro, while I was trying to do “yum remove <some packages>”, it can correctly (?) determine the dependencies. However, it seems it was not doing the right order to uninstall packages, things like gconf and gtk gave me great headache to make things clean, and finally I have to get all (non-necessary) packages back to the system as I don’t want to break anything.

openSUSE is another tricky one – it is not bad but I don’t quite understand the design goal. For example, I was trying to remove some x86_64 packages, it would do that for me, but also try to install 32bit x86_64 packages, or downgrade the version, or install something else (such as for the missing lib). This is ridiculous, if the package is providing some necessary libraries, just tell me there are dependency there and I can decide if I want to remove the dependencies or not, and whenever I want to remove a specific package, I don’t mind if it is 32bit.i386 or 32bit.x86_64, ot 64bit.x86_64 – just remove it for me.

openSUSE got another problem is that CD/DVD is by default in the distro repository (guess it is because I installed from DVD), so without removing the repo, every time it would ask me put the installation disc in, which is too bad. Luckily, zypper clearly told me how to remove a repo entry and things worked perfectly after that.

Mandriva has the same problem as openSUSE and removing CD/DVD from repository is not supported by urpmi, but find out the configuration file is not that hard, and “#” is the standard way to comment entries out, which is fair enough.

I haven’t tested more yet, but based on my experience playing with couple of distros, I would like to rate Ubuntu and Debian as the best, Fedora is really close to these two, Mandriva and openSUSE is a little bit behind, and CentOS is something better to avoid.

All about installation, nothing else. ๐Ÿ™‚