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.