*Happy New Year everyone! *

Some relatives saved up half a dozen problems with their Windows PC and hoped I would fix them.

Did I?

Regular readers will know the answer is...

...did I heck!

Instead I finally got to try out Ubuntu properly! Regular readers will also know that I am a ardent Gentoo Linux user, but actually I had a great time. Lets start the year with something a little different. This is no how to or guide, just a rough diary of my little Ubuntu festival.

The Install

I downloaded the Desktop install CD via bittorrent to my Gentoo macbook and burnt it to CD-R. I then used your friendly neighbourhood gparted to reduce the Windows partition to give some blank space.

Next I ran the Ubuntu installer, in Finnish no less, and I was quite shocked at how little I had to do. I cannot remember being asked any technical questions at all, I just provided the person's username, password and timezone. Unlike a Redhat install, there were no questions about window managers or web servers. It was quite smart of Ubuntu to separate out the Desktop from its other CDs.

The one thing that still requires a tiny of bit of common sense and/or documentation is the disk partitioning step, where you have to choose between two or three checkboxes. This is an observation rather than a criticism, I have no idea how this can be improved further.

The LiveCD environment meant that I could surf the web with a full copy of Firefox while I waited for the packages to be copied. Once they had then I rebooted and had a working computer with a decent set of default applications.

Peripherals

Next step was to sort out the large pile of legacy peripherals that lay on and around the desk. The wireless rat (including scroll wheel), headset and speakers worked out of the box. The wireless keyboard was a Logitech affair with all the extra buttons so I just called up the "Keyboard shortcuts" tool and 20 seconds later I had a fully working set of eight buttons to help with volume, media, email, web and so on.

Next was the Webcam - a Logitech Quickcam Messenger, which to be honest, I had already written off as 'never going to work'. Unfairly as it turned out, one download and one script later I could see myself in full post-sauna glory.

.. image:: http://commandline.org.uk/images/posts/webcam/midnight-ish.png
    :alt: Me about midnight, just after a late sauna, had not yet figured
    out how to take shot at a good resolution

A Digital Camera was next, HP Photosmart R818 with a rather attractive "R-series dock". There was a small bug but once I had overcome that, it worked out fantastically, far better than Windows. You just throw the camera into the dock, press the button and voila, your pictures are displayed in an application called "gthumb".

Lastly and definitely least was the all in one Printer/Scanner combo, the Canon Pixma MP110. I think the printer is the same as the LP1000, however not that it helped me much. I managed to get the printer to accept jobs but it cannot be bothered to push the paper through. So a rather large doorstep so far. Moral of the story, do not buy cheap printers that do not have proper ghostscript support. I have not had the heart to look into the scanner yet.

Fixing Camera support on Ubuntu Edgy Eft

The slight bug was an Ubuntu Edgy Eft problem, easily fixed. When gthumb or whatever launched itself, it spat out this error:

> An error occurred in the io-library ('Could not claim the USB device'): Could not claim interface 0 (Operation not permitted). Make sure no other program or kernel module (such as sdc2xx, stv680, spca50x) is using the device and you have read/write access to the device.

Not very jovial, but the part about read/write reinforced my idea that a permissions problem was by far the most likely culprit. To the rescue came the lsusb command, this gave me the following line:

> Bus 001 Device 010: ID 03f0:7e02 Hewlett-Packard

The code in the middle is the key, the first half refers to the vendor, the second to the product, I added those numbers into the following line:

SYSFS{idVendor}=="03f0", SYSFS{idProduct}=="7e02", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"

Which I then posted into /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules . Now it all works perfectly, far better than HP's own Windows application.

Software

First thing was to install all the usual crap: Java, Flash, MP3 support and so on. I then set up Ekiga and Skype.

I was surprised to find that instead of one GUI package manager, there were four. The main one called "Add/Remove" had pride of place at the bottom of the Applications Menu. There was also Synaptic of Debian fame, as well as one called gdebi-gtk and another that had something to do with dpkg.

If they just added a preferences button to the Add/Remove tool that could replace Synaptic, i.e. so you could select your repositories and so on. If they added an "open downloaded package" button then it could replace the other two.

Under "System" in the top menu, the first two choices are "Preferences" and "Administration". Under these two options are a combined 41 tools! I know my program choices added a couple but cripes that is one big mess.

On the other hand each tool is very well labelled and easy to use, so it is not quite as bad as the "Windows Control Panel", where all the options are hidden inside a tab inside a completely differently labelled icon, or the Apple 'Finder' which does the exact opposite of its name.

Conclusion

I think Ubuntu is my favourite binary Linux Distribution so far. The package manager, despite multiple GUIs, is rather less painful than the RPM world (yum notwithstanding). It also has very sensible defaults and a nice set of default applications, remarkable considering the applications have to share the one CD with an operating system and a graphical LiveCD environment. (I remember using Redhat where you had to burn 4 CDs but only ever used the first one).

I will certainly be recommending it to others. It is very easy to get a good desktop setup out of this. Now I am off to emerge sync before I come down with something...