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Saturday 18 July 2009, 10:31 PM
Ubuntu 9.04 Snaps Desktop Visaster
I got permission from the IT department to go back to doing my own IT admin work. I went into Visaster's Disk Manager and shrunk the third partition (D:) on the 640 GB drive. That gave me about 300 GB of open drive space. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and set all 3 of the Linux partitions manually. 80GB for /, an 8GB swap space (overkill) and the rest for /Home. I set them up for ext3. So now I have a dual boot system. Visaster and Ubuntu, with Ubuntu as default. As I manage to copy project and doc files from the NTFS D drive to /Home, I'll shrink it further.
A definite upgrade for Visaster is Ubuntu 9.04 on the same hardware. Eventually I'll be Visaster-free at work like I am at home.
Open Office 3.0 works fine for what I have to do. FireFox of any version is far superior to Internet Exploder 6, 7 and especially version 8 for access to the crappy commercial wiki I've described before.
While working on the Visaster I discovered something interesting and unexpected. This being a DELL system, there are 3 partitions setup for Visaster, a hidden DELL repair partition of 60 odd megabytes, the C and D NTFS drives. All three of them are primary partitions. The three Linux partitions are primary partitions as well. MS DOS, 16 & 32 bit Windows all have a limit of 4 primary partitions on a drive. But this one has a total of 6 primary partitions and Grub seems to run all of it just fine. Nice.
This particular system has an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz with 4GB of DDR2 RAM so its no slouch. Ubuntu 9.04 on it has done some pretty things I hadn't seen before. Application windows open and close with fades in and out with the panel moving towards and away from the user. Transparency of the task bar and application bars are independently controllable.
Another desktop feature I have not seen before is related to the mouse. If you push the mouse hard over to the right, it shoves the desktop to the left so suddenly it appears as if your desktop is twice as wide as the display (1600 x 1200 turns into 3200 x 1200). The desktop space actually is twice as wide, the setting for the video controller becomes a sliding "window" on the desktop. I suppose its just a variation of the virtual desktop feature but it was totally unexpected and a cool effect! You could park an application window off the right hand side of the screen totally out of sight. It also allows for a mid-range setting so that the "display" window is centered on the desktop range.
Ubuntu 9.04 definitely picks up some significant “snap” with a high power processor. I was impressed, as far as I'm concerned it beats Visaster SP2.
PreviousComments on this post
I found a similar thing going on with Linux mint. If I brush my hand down the right side of the touch pad then the desktop performs a cool flip type effect and switches to an alternative desktop.
The open and shut window effects can be set to wave, wobble, explode, transform into light beams, quietly shatter, flip in towards and out away from you and more. The windows can wobble like jelly when you move them around.
And the screen savers are breathtaking. I don't normally bother with them because they aren't needed anymore, but when they're as good as this....well I've set them to random and I'm happy to gawp at them.
XWJ - Could you please check again to be sure that all six of your partitions are Primaries? I was under the impression that the four-primary partition limit was universal and inviolable, if that is really not the case I'm going to be doing a lot more investigation. I was helping a friend load Linux on a Samsung netbook over the weekend, and the disk partitioning was exactly as you had - Recovery, Windows (C:) and Data (D:). We reduced the size of the Windows partition to make room for Mandriva, but the whole process would have been a lot easier and cleaner if we could have just made two more primary partitions for root and swap.
If you really have more than four Primaries, the next question would be what did you use to create them - the standard partition managers that I use for Linux all seem to have the four-primary limit built in, so they won't even attempt to make a fifth.
Thanks,
jw
Jamie:
I just used the manual partition application in the Ubuntu installer. I did a manual partition action, and just stacked them up after the D partition for Visaster.
I'll be headed into the office in about an hour (Tuesday AM here) and I'll double check it under both Visaster (Drive Manager) and Ubuntu (gparted).
I was sort of boggled by it too. but it could have been reported wrong by Visaster. I didn't even think to look at it under gparted and just accepted what Disk Manager reported. Although Windows OS won't mount an ext partition it seems to know what they are now compared to what was reported with Windows XP Pro.
I know that the primary partition limitations have been somewhat artificial for awhile simply because Windows using dynamic disks has to be able to keep track of a lot more than just 4 primary partitions.
I'll report back here in a few hours.
How interesting!
Turns out that when the system is booted up in Visaster and you use Disk Manager it reports that there are 6 primary partitions, 3 for Visaster (hidden FAT, C drive and D drive both NTFS) and 3 for Ubuntu (/root, swap and /home).
Another tool called diskpart.exe, a command line tool in Visaster and most Windows versions can't even see the Linux partitions.
When you boot up into Ubuntu, it reports under gparted that the three Visaster partitions are all primary. The three partitions for Ubuntu are in an extended partition.
Why the difference? I haven't a clue.
The boot manager is Grub. Maybe it hands off to Visaster a different disk map than it does to Ubuntu 9.04.
So I guess I'm mistaken, the primary partition count at least under Ubuntu is still 4. I need to figure out the reason for the difference in drive mapping though. That could cause some issues if a user tried to manage an inter-OS type of operation manipulating the disk itself.
Interesting indeed! That was what I suspected you had ended up with; in my experience the Ubuntu installer is quite good at doing that - creating an extended partition and putting everything into it, when necessary. However, I would have been a lot happier if you had been right, and there had been six primary partitions.
Thanks again, both for the excellent original post, and the followup.
jw
Well I copied over all the folders I had on the D drive to the /Home partition on Ubuntu and then deleted the D partition. I have a "temporary" ext3 partition sitting there in case I can't get anything to move the extended partition. That freed up a bunch of space. I ran gparted and discovered that it couldn't or wouldn't expand the extended partition into the empty space. Hmmm. I know there is something FOSS out there that will work, gotta be.
I'm close to being Visaster-free, I'm now down to one partition, the C Drive is the last one left.
Did gparted tell you why it wouldn't expand the partition? Or did was the Resize option simply not available? In my experience, gparted won't make any changes to a partition that is currently in use, and for Extended Partitions that includes having any of the Logical Partitions within them in use. If either the root partition you are booted from or the swap partition is within the extended partition (or both, as is likely in your case), it won't let you change it. What I have done in this case is just boot from an Ubuntu LiveCD or USB stick and use gparted from there. You still get a bit stuck sometimes, because the Live boot notices the swap partition and automatically uses it, which locks the extended partition again. But you can "sudo swapoff -a", and that should release it.
Good luck.
jw
Thanks. I hadn't thought of that as an issue, duh. Sometimes you just get wrapped up in too many things at once. Most of my work in the office with Linux is crammed in-between Windows XP Pro or Embedded related tasks. You're right that I should have been booted up on another partition.
I booted up off the Live CD for Ubuntu 9.04 and exactly as you predicted, the swap partition got grabbed by the Live install. Gparted works exactly as advertised. Thank you guys! (a shout-out to the gparted programmers) Its nice to have such stable software you don't have to worry about it.
So I'm down to one partition of Visaster left on the DELL I use at the office. Discovered that MS Sharepoint works fine with Ubuntu 9.04 and FireFox 3.01. I'm fairly certain that not ALL the Sharepoint services are available through the FireFox browser but since it seems as if I'm the only user for Sharepoint in the entire company right now, who cares? Collaboration with a user group of one is easy even if its boring!
Good stuff, glad it is working for you, and happy to help - although I have no doubt that you would have figured it out for yourself. I too am a major fan of gparted - I'm a bit bemused that it is included on the Ubuntu LiveCD, but is not in the standard installation produced from that CD. It is always the first thing I add after booting a newly installed system.
Hmmm. "Collaborating with a group of one", is that a fancy way of saying "talking to yourself"?
jw
Sometimes that's the only way to have an intelligent conversation in my business!
SharePoint as a product is one of those things that positively requires somebody on staff to program it. Its basically a webserver with lots of scripting to enable active content like documents with version-ing (not a word, I know), Trouble ticket sorts of things, managed/topic chat, group blogs etc. In other words all the stuff you see on Internet websites but pulled inside the corporate firewall. The problem is that small businesses can't afford that right now. My supervisor is big on it and I can see that it has high potential, but its just not going to happen unless somebody on-staff starts working directly with it.
There are a few products that Microsoft created that actually work well. FrontPage 2000 was one of those products even though it was saddled with MS Office 2000. SharePoint could likely be another. People I've talked to that have experienced Sharepoint at large companies all say they had at least one guy on staff that did nothing but work on writing programs and building pages for the server. The over-all trend seems to be good. So the collaboration potential is there, it just requires at least one other person to write the stuff.
BTW it also seems to work with FireFox 3.5 running on Ubuntu 9.04 just fine. I've even written a few docs that I created with OpenOffice and exported as DOC files to the Sharepoint server, don't tell anybody, OK? ha!
