May 5
My first library written in the Go programming language, GoMySQL, is now complete and available to download from my projects pages.
The library fully implements the MySQL protocol and supports the majority of the common features found in other libraries, including:
There are a number of other libraries available for Go, but none of them (as yet) implement the full protocol.
To download visit the GoMySQL project page.
Whereas I have been running Lucid since beta1 on my laptop without too many issues, my desktop PC doesn’t get upgraded until release day.
After eventually managing to download the ISO, loading 5 different email backups to find my Nero key and waiting half an hour for the Lightscribe to burn onto the CD I finally got to boot the live CD….
Flashing cursor…
Power saver mode…
[2 minutes go by]
Screen powers on…
Strange Windows 7 blockiness (presumably something left in the video memory)…
[Another minute goes by]
Desktop, finally.
Install goes smoothly, nice to see the migration wizard is disabled by default and has clear options, should you choose to use it.
Try to reboot and machine hangs with just the desktop background.
Reset, restart…
The infamous flashing cursor…
Login screen…
I attempt to login and get a popup about power saving not working do I still want to logout? Odd… No I want to login really 
Click continue, it goes away, finally get to the desktop.
One thing is immediately clear, Plymouth = EPIC FAIL.
So far it doesn’t work on Intel or Nvidia hardware, 2 of the 3 post popular video chip manufacturers!
I guess this is what happens when you name something after a scummy little city hidden away in the south west of England…
Testing continues…
I’ve just noticed that the FTTC rollout is coming to Sittingbourne, expected to be available by the end of the summer.
This is great news as we struggle to get 2Mbit where we live currently!
It’s a nice surprise that they have chosen Sittingbourne so early in the rollout as we were one of the last places to even get the 21CN. They’ve obviously realised how many of us live in new houses almost on the distance limit for ADSL, well done BT
A list of the exchanges that will get FTTC in the current rollout phase can be found here:
I upgraded one of my Karmic servers to Ubuntu 10.04 RC the other day.
The last upgrade from Jaunty to Karmic was a rather traumatic process, but thankfully this time round all went smoothly. Not really any overly noticeable changes this time round other than a few more things have moved into upstart (MySQL for example) and when I boot via KVM the new Plymouth boot screen is present, although not sure why this is even included in a server release.
It’s about as updated a LAMP setup as is possible including Apache 2.2.14, MySQL 5.1.41 and especially pleased they put in PHP 5.3.2 after the code freeze. On this server I’m actually running Zend Server CE (which already had PHP 5.3.2) as Zend are quicker to push out the updates, but on others I will stick with the default Ubuntu release.
What else can be said about a server OS? Well, it just works
Here is a quick fix for the missing boot screen:
Note that this fix does marginally slow down boot, but only by a few seconds.
Apr 15
Here is a quick way to copy your Windows fonts over to an Ubuntu Wubi installation:
Applications should then pick up all your Windows fonts
Mar 25
Tried to visit YouTube this morning?
For about an hour now it’s been down, initially there was a “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” message, which has now turned into a standard Apache “Internal Server Error”.
Update:
Now there is a Google error page:
Update (12.30pm):
Normal service is resumed!
Setup
Setting up the desktop edition of Lucid with Virtualbox was a little problematic at first. Install went fine and I rebooted to find myself in a very small desktop which was rather sluggish.
I opened up a terminal and installed the guest additions software:
(or use the x86 version for 32 bit).
After a reboot there is a lot of screen flashing and eventually a message comes up about low graphics mode.
To fix this login and perform the following:
Go to line 90:
Replace it with:
Then run:
This solution came from this blog:
After rebooting following this fix the mouse pointer is invisible, so another fix is needed:
Edit:
Add:
Reboot and everything should run nicely, including Compiz.
This solution came from here:
Checking for updates, there are 245 updates just a few days after the release of the beta, the dev team have obviously been busy! Unfortunately the updates broke the VBox addons again so I had to run the setup command above again to fix this and reboot.
I had a minor issue with resizing the VBox window to fit my screen, it messed up the panels and I had to unlock/reorganise them to fix this.
What’s new?
The most obvious change is the new UI, it’s almost exactly like I have Karmic skinned now so a nice change. It’s much more like OSX than the previous Human skin. The only thing I’m not a fan of is the decision to move the minimise/maximise/close buttons to the left hand side of the window.
It’s also quite noticeable that Google has disappeared and been replaced by Yahoo. I can’t help wonder how many people won’t change their default search provider right back to Google as the first thing they do with Firefox!
The next thing I noticed was that the ‘status’ button on the top panel had been given a bit of a rework, it now includes the ability to add ‘broadcast channels’ which are simply social network integration for Facebook, Twitter etc.
This pretty much sums up the noticeable changes, under the scenes there are obviously numerous package updates, what difference this makes to the OS will yet to be determined.
First Impressions
Overall the new design looks nice albeit a little too OSX-ish for my liking, the new colour screme is great though. The social networking integration is nice, the replacement of Google with Yahoo, not so much.
I had a few issues with slowness, crashes of plymouthd and occasional other errors but while this is a beta version these are to be expected.
