Ubuntu 11.10 Slow? Here's a possible cure!

Are you sick and tired of Ubuntu 11.10 running very slowly? In fact, I wouldn't call it running - I would call it crawling - at best! Out of my few machines, I've only upgraded (if you can call it that!) one machine to Ubuntu 11.10.

The reason I didn't upgrade the rest of my boxes is because it became plainly obvious that this was the worst Ubuntu upgrade ever. Not only was it slow, sound was a complete failure... and a few other things too, but not as generally as important as user interface speed and video and sound.

I had a problem that sound wasn't quite behaving as it should. I couldn't find any mixers to change the input and output levels for the headphone output and the line-level output. I use the headphone output to a small pair of USB speakers and the line level outputs to a larger entertainment system.

Searching around, I found that there are issues with pulseaudio and alsa-base which not only mess with the sound, but also mess with the system's overall performance.


Here's the solution I found (cut'n'paste each line individually and execute it):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get remove --purge alsa-base
sudo apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get install alsa-base
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio


Then, do this to fix up some stuff that gets broken by the above:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop


Now, reboot... even into the new default UI. If you're as lucky as I was, you might be surprised and the machine might perform quite a lot closer to how it behaved under 11.04 and earlier, albeit with the new 'slick' interface.


Here's the original source for the solution:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1863271&page=2 - Check post #16.

Note that my machine is very old - an AMD Opteron 144 overclocked to 2.1 GHz with 2 Gb RAM and a newer nVidia card. I'm sure there are other optimisations that can be performed and I'll make sure to post those as soon as I know more.

Happy computing!!

Ubuntu 11.10 Makes Baby Jesus Cry...

... wel he would if he could, but it makes me want to slit my wrists in sheer frustration!

In the past, Linux distros have been able to make sure that old computers can stay out of landfill and perform useful functions for far longer. Microsoft's operating system, comparatively, required faster and stronger machines almost every year so that they could remain reasonably functional.  That's why I dumped MS for both commercial and personal endeavours.

I've done my best to restore pre-11.10 performance. I've searched blogs all over the internet. I've searched Ubuntu forums. I've even looked at h4xor (choke, splutter) places to see what can be done to make this abomination called "Ubuntu 11.10" walk, let alone run.

In my opinion, it's worse than Windows 3.0 compared to GEM - if you can remember back that far.

11.04 was OK. No complaints. Stable. Performance was OK.

11.10? An abomination!

Using Unity, I find it totally useless. Gnome 2.x? Not much better. Gnome 3.x? FFS... no real difference compared to Unity. Why, in fifteen different kinds of buggery did Canonical want to mess up something that worked so well?

Henceforth, the word 'ubuntu' will no longer translate to a beneficial grand and good ideology. It will now be comprehended as  "how to fuck up something that used to work well, in a manner that causes it to barely function any more".

I hear words, possibly a rumour, that Ubuntu (aka Canonical) wanted to take on the big boys (i.e iOS and Android) and at last gain a significant commercial return, somehow. What they have done instead is shot themselves in the foot, multiple times with a very large field gun at point-blank range.

Right now, I wouldn't trust Canonical to organise [an event] in [a place where that event is usual and expected, and expected to be paid in cash] with a fist full of cash. I'm sure you can extrapolate that one, dear reader.


Canonical? You suck. Please - fix this mess and suck less. I implore you.


Peace Out? No... not this time.

Ubuntu 11.10 Running Dog Slow? Solved!

I took the leap of faith to install Ubuntu 11.10 - and a bad step it was! This has to be the most broken distro I've ever played with.

If you've done it, you probably had networking, NFS mount and video issues. Or if you were very lucky only one or less of these problems.

The biggest problem of all is that it runs ultra slow. Horribly, agonisingly slow.

So - here's a fix:
Open a terminal.
Type "top" and you can see what processes are sponging your CPU.
You may see one called "tracker-extract"... and look how much CPU the little sucker is chewing!

Uninstall it, reboot and peace be with you... and a more usable machine using less power.

Have fun.

Bugger me. It's back up.

Twitter, that is.

Twitter is Down

After surviving an onslaught of 10000 messages per second when Steve Jobs iDied, Twitter is now down.

Hooray. Maybe some folk I've been trying to contact can now go fully retro and use the damned phone.

Peace Out.

Joomla 1.7.1 Broken RSS Feed - How to Fix It!!

OK - probably the two fastest posts to this blog I've ever made.

There is a fix for the broken RSS feed (Syndication) problem in Joomla 1.7.1 and it's not hard. In fact, there are two fixes.

The easiest one is to turn off the system caching plugin (System - Cache). Definitely not ideal at all as it will have detrimental performance characteristics for your install.

The least easy one is to modify a line in libraries/joomla/cache/cache.php - Line 529 to be precise.

Check it. It should be "if ($loptions['nohead'] != 1) {"

Go ahead and change it to "if ($loptions['nohead'] != 1 && method_exists($document, 'getHeadData')) {" and re-test.

Worked for me, should work for you.

Good luck!

Cheers - TheTechnoHippie.

Joomla 1.7.1 Released - and Still Buggy.

It's good to see that Joomla! has progressed far beyond its original scope and has improved so dramatically.

The jump from v1.5.x to v1.7.0 was massive and made so many improvements that make life for users so much easier. It's great.

However, about twelve hours ago, news of the new release of v1.7.1 came up and noted that it fixed a whole heap of interested niggles. My pet niggle is that the syndication feed feature wasn't working properly, even though there was a patch to fix it released a month or so ago.

The patch didn't work. The upgrade still doesn't work. And I'm still in RSS hell.

If anyone has any clues how to fix it, please make contact with me!

Here's what happens:
- Create a Syndicated Feed through the usual Module method, selecting the category/categories you want
- All looks like it works, until you try to test it in Feedburner, or just plain old fashioned click on it.
- The error message is "Fatal error: Call to undefined method JDocumentFeed::getHeadData() in /var/www/web1/web/libraries/joomla/cache/cache.php on line 530"

I've exhausted my Google-fu on this and can't seem to find a known fix.

So, if there is anyone out there who has had this problem and knows how to solve it, please reply here.

Best Regards - TheTechnoHippie.

A bit pissed at Google Places.

Many moons ago, my business applied to Google Places. We used our company PO BOX as the address.

It was accepted and was successful for us.

Somehow, they changed their rules and suspended the account, without actually telling anyone about the change in rules.

Google, you suck.

That's very poor customer service and is rather akin to a dictatorship. You could at least tell someone that there is a change in rules and ask that the information is updated rather than summarily cutting a business off.

The importance of the "sales@domainname.com" address

When you're in business for yourself, you're ever so busy and quite often don't find out about the latest trends. Things that could be ever so important to you.


Likewise, without an e-mail address that anyone can guess, it can be hard to find you. It's even worse if your web designer is one of those arty types who obfuscates e-mail addresses!


By using "sales@yourdomainname.com" you can be very sure that you can know everything you've ever wanted to know and more. Truly!


The "sales@..." address at some of the business domain names I own are such busy addresses it's not funny. If I had erectile dysfunction, wanted a huge vibrator (that looks more like a Thermos than anything else, actually) or fake luxury goods - well - so many kind purveyors have already told me where to find those! All kinds of amazing offers! I can get an extra ten thousand Facebook friends for only a hundred bucks! Same goes for Twitter. One cent per friend? Who knew bots were that cheap!


And they even prefer Western Union as their payment method. So generous!


Amazingly, so many of my relatives are dead and there are unclaimed funds. It's amazing because in total, my relatives have made close to one billion dollars. Even more amazing? My surname is really rare. I didn't know that there were so many people in my extended family who kicked the bucket... let alone who were born!


The best part - and I love this - is that I won the lottery! And I didn't even pay to be in it. Isn't that amazing? Talk about the providence of faith! The funds processor only wants a few hundred bucks and then I can have millions remitted to my personal account.


419'ers come along too. They're so nice. Lost funds which they want to give to Christian charities but they want my staff to be the intermediaries. So very generous, despite being thieves... and wanting pre-payment for their efforts.


Yup. We get our tits spammed off.


We even occasionally hear from genuine customers too.


Use some form of obfuscation for real e-mail addresses.

Twitter... more than just crappy chatter.

For a long time, I considered Twitter to be nothing more than crappy chatter which was best suited to celebrities keen on telling people when they were, well, taking a crap or some other similar TMI inanity.


A while back, I started some experiments for business and personal reasons to see what happens and why. The experiments gave some results that, to me, were rather remarkable. And of course, they launched a whole new range of experiments that I will tell you about some other time.


The first experiment was "Mr Clean" vs "Mr Asshole".


The "Mr Clean" account was nice, positive and upbeat: engaging all manner of people and talking about nice things, or at least putting a good spin on bad things. It felt nice to be Mr Clean.


The "Mr Asshole" account was downbeat, snarky and pretty much antisocial without being a complete pig: made friends with comedians whose act is mostly foul language, engaged in explicit dialogue with adult actresses, snarky political commentary just to the right of Genghis Khan and worse, while still remaining vaguely politically correct.


At the end of the experiment, the account with the most followers? Mr Asshole. That same account also had the highest count of so-called "influential" Tweeters.


From a marketing perspective, Mr Clean was good quality. From a sheer traffic volume and 'quality' tweeter point of view, Mr Asshole won by a margin of four to one for followers, more than triple the retweets and more.


Want traffic on Twitter? Want interaction? Be an asshole.


While the statistics in this article are 100% accurate, please, don't be an asshole. There are far too many on the internet already, let alone the ones in normal meatspace life.


Technically, Mr Clean's influence on a refined analysis of Klout was better per capita of follower than the other account. Being nice gets less of the 'vital' stats, but ends up with far greater total influence per follower and follow.


You? Make up your own mind, but remember, once you choose to be seen to be an asshole people will treat you like sh*t.

Printing on Linux

It has been a long while since I posted anything of much interest to this blog because everything Linux (and Ubuntu in particular) has been so predictable and well behaved.


However, I've recently been tooling around with printing. Printing photos on photo paper and CD/DVD. In the Windows world, there's nothing special about that and, for the most part, in the Linux world too.


For many years, I've been an Epson devotee. Maybe even a fanboi. Epson gear just works. It does what it says on the box with a minimum of fuss, especially on Windows and Mac platforms. On Linux, it's a bit hit and miss if you choose a model that has some discernible difference which hasn't been catered for in the Linux drivers.


I run an Epson Aculaser CX11NF as my main office printer and for some graphic production when our big guns are already committed. It's a great office printer, but the colour rendition under the drivers provided by Epson is a bit odd. The density of photographic images is, well, washed out.


For a long time, I also ran an Epson Stylus Phot R210 for personal use. It printed excellent photographic prints on all sorts of decent paper, including Epson original and some of the higher grade Euro import stocks.  It also gave superb results on all sorts of CD and DVD, from Taiyo Yuden down to some really budget stuff. The downside was that the print cartridges cost more than the printer! After many years of service it has finally been consigned to FreeCycle so that it has a second chance at life with someone else.


I did a bad thing. Well, three, but let's go one step at a time.


Bad Thing Number One:

There are not many inkjet printers on the market in Australia at the moment which can print CD/DVD. For me, that's a critical feature because we often prototype client art as a "what if" as part of their business proposal. Sadly, Epson isn't stocked by the mass market shops or is otherwise scarce. One weekend, I had work to do and the trusty Epson was out of ink. The choice was pretty clear: a new set of ink at retail at the big office supplier nearby cost as much as a whole new printer and cartridges... but it wouldn't be an Epson.


After so many years of loyalty, and needing to maintain a sensible budget for the machine, we bought a Canon iP4850. A few quick test prints of some photos and it seemed to be the cat's pyjamas. In truth, it was the cat's ass.


The Linux drivers from Canon's site don't support the CD tray. It's a nice printer and does good work - don't get me wrong - but not supporting what is essentially that one differentiating feature at the price point is pretty much criminal in my opinion.


The only choice was to use my illustrious Google-fu and find alternate drivers to make the CD/DVD print function work under Ubuntu. And find it I did. The choice? TurboPrint (www.turboprint.info - NOT affiliated, not schilling for them, just telling the good news).


Bad Thing Number Two:

Bluntly, for anyone who is serious about using inkjet printers under a range of Linux distros, this is the best possible choice you can make. There are so many colour profiles, so many controls and adjustments and all simply accessible and useful. If you don't know what you're doing and are just trying to get a better print with less effort, then this does what it says out of the box. No fuss, no muss.


The diverse range of print options is quite amazing. I've been involved in professional pre-press for the best part of twenty years, and was in professional photography and pro-labs before that. The colour profile options for accurate professional purposes, as well as the more visually exciting ones which make most people happy, are all there. The amount of custom tuning you can do easily is amazing.


For me? It supports printing on D/DVD on Canon's iP4850 out of the box. Better control than Canon's own drivers, at higher resolution, for a wider range of media? Yes!


Try before you buy? Yes. 30 day license for free to trial it then a small fee (about 29 Euro off the top of my head) to keep it running. Possible to cheat? Yes, but only if you're an asshole. These guys have done the work and it shows. They deserve to make a little money for what they have done. In fact, I think some of the printer companies should really make a licencing deal with the guys behind TurboPrint. It's that good! More and more people are disillusioned by Windows, can't afford Mac (or don't want to be seen to be "me too" wankers) - and wiser people are breathing new life into old hardware with Linux.



Bad Thing Number Three:

And this is the worst... I bought a CISS. A Continuous Ink Supply System.


Cartridges cost far too much. Yes, it's part of the printer manufacturers' supply and profit methods, but it's too costly. A couple of mls of ink for AUD$23? It's a rip-off. A full set of cartridges costs almost as much, if not more, than the retail price of a new printer with cartridges. It's not only not economical, not realistic and repugnant - it's certainly not very environmentally sensitive!


The reason why I say buying a CISS is the worst offence is because for many years I've spoken out strongly against them. I didn't like them because the inks and the mechanisms were of dubious quality. There is a massive difference in ink qualities available on the market and they all have suitable purposes. Some of them were only suitable for flushing down the toilet. At least that way the fine payable to the EPA would be good for something.


Recently, there are more ink manufacturers around the world and they're making some really excellent inks.


Better yet, the CISS dealers are now dealing in better products. There are still a LOT of false claims out there that Dealer 'X' designed it in Germany and now it's available to the world and those sorts of statements. Frankly? Most of the gear comes from China and is better than earlier efforts which involved punching holes in original cartridges to force feeder tubes in, with or without sealing grommet. Bluntly, if you want to go that cheap, you're either a fool or a rogue. Judge yourself, not for yourself - judge your self.


The inks that are delivered by default are suitable for consumer applications, for the most part. There are better and worse. If you have a special purpose, such as making top quality photo prints, then you need different ink. That's all there is to it.



Printing with Linux? Ubuntu? Debian? Your favourite distro? It's not as easy as being mainstream, but you're sure being greener and kinder to the planet for your little pains. Those little pains? You will be able to deliver a better result and it will certainly be bespoke.

Make your Joomla / ISPConfig Site Go Faster.

Clean up your Joomla install act and see how much more performance you can get for free!

Commonly, sh404sef was used. It was really popular - and then they started asking for money. A lot of people disabled it and didn't uninstall it. The corpse of sh404sef can add up to 20% load time to your site, depending on the hardware and software eployed in your install. Go clean that beastie out now!

While you're at it, go through your install and remove all unused modules, plug-ins and other items. If it's not in use? Remove it!

At the end of giving your Joomla server a high-colonic, performance should measurably improve.

Make sure that you're just as cautious with ensuring the OS is up to date, and operating cleanly.

If you are not already running the latest version of your OS, and backing up daily or weekly, depending on how fast things change, then you're exposing yourself to unreasonable risk.

Clean up the OS. Latest security patches, latest app versions, purge all unused apps.

Back up to a different hard disk - not a different partition! And that's just as a bare minimum. Realistically, you should be backing up to a network managed RAID which is offloading to a remote server and dropping to a permanent optical media or similar.

Your new mean, lean and clean server will give you better Google page ranks, happier customers through improved UX and give you a lovely feeling of happiness for having helped someone else.

Questions? Ask away! We'll help.

Cheers!!