I’m starting to hate again (K)Ubuntu!
I do use Kubuntu on many of my desktop systems, and yesterday I have to fresh install a new system. Easy pal, or at least this what I was thinking. I burned a fresh Kubuntu 18.10 USB stick just to get stucked around the end of the installation with a generic installer error. Trying several times, burning the stick from scratch and trying again lead me to the conclusion that only the minimal install could finish. Ok, assuming it was a problem with my USB stick, I decided to proceed anyway; after all I can install software as soon as I can login!Networking is Horrible!
Having to configure a static IPv4 networking, I opened a shell and tried well know commands…just to discover thatip
is now the only one command available! Now, I don’t know such command a lot, but luckily I get online with the followings:
$ sudo ip addr add 192.168.1.200/24 dev eno1
$ sudo ip route add default via 192.168.1.7
$ sudo echo "nameserver 192.168.1.254" > /etc/resolv.conf
NetworkManager
decided to try again to configure the networking overriding my settings. Ok, calm down, wait a little longer and repeat.
Then let’s edit /etc/network.d/interfaces
to set the old well known content:
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eno1
iface eno1 inet static
address 192.168.1.201
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.7
dns-nameservers 192.168.1.254
/etc/netplan/01-network-manager-all.yaml
to something that looks like:
network:
version: 2
renderer: networkd
ethernets:
eno1:
dhcp4: no
addresses: [192.168.1.201/24]
gateway4: 192.168.1.7
nameservers:
search: [mydomain.com]
addresses:
- 192.168.1.254
``**
**Is it more readable than the old Unix-style text files? I really don't think so!**
Anyway, after having created such file, let's apply it:
```shell
$ netplan apply
/etc/resolv.conf
just to see that, for some reason I totally don’t understand, the search
entry is updated while the nameserver
is not. Then spend a couple of hours trying to figure out why nameserver resolution is working while netplan
is not updating such file, and finally give up!
As a final amusement: I really don’t see the point in having another file format (YAML) to configure networking, having then to rely on another application to instruments all other components around the system. It reminds me when OpenSolaris was using XML (!) to configure services.
Home Encryption is now an optional?
During the installation process I was not asked to encrypt my home folder, even if I disabled auto-login. I had therefore to do it by myself: 1) I created another user in thesudo
group just to quickly provide root capabilities;
2) I logged in as the new user, and then run
$ sudo ecryptfs-migrate-home -u luca
Get Back Encrypted Data
Even if I do regular backups (well, not so regular, but at least I do before such a major upgrade!), I would like to diff my new home with the previous one in order to check against missing bits. The problem was that the previous home folder was encrypted on another hard drive. I then did the following: 1) mounted all the partitions of the previous hard drive in a single mount point; 2)chroot
to such directory;
3) use ecrypts-recover-private
to do the trick:
# ecryptfs-recover-private /home/.ecryptfs/luca/.Private
INFO: Found [/home/.ecryptfs/luca/.Private].
Try to recover this directory? [Y/n]:
INFO: Found your wrapped-passphrase
Do you know your LOGIN passphrase? [Y/n]
INFO: Enter your LOGIN passphrase...
Passphrase:
Inserted auth tok with sig [20f1131ab0f295db] into the user session keyring
INFO: Success! Private data mounted at [/tmp/ecryptfs.yGKKVIMa].
Java is … I don’t name it!
Java seems broken, or at least, aJDK 8
from Oracle is not working anymore. I had to install the official Java package via apt
, that is Java 11, and then configure the alternatives to run as Java 8. After that, I was able to run Eclipse 2018.12.
Cups and the Hell of SMB printers
Another hard problem, or at least a problem that required me a lot of time to fix, was related to printing to remote SMB printers. I had to send prints to a Windows Serversmbspool
, receiving always a NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED
, without any regard of including username/password/domain into the DEVICE_URI
. What was nice, is that the very same URI was working before.
After almost one day of digging, I found that invoking smbclient
with --max-connection NT1
and issuing a print
command worked, so I searched for a way to force smbspool
to behave the same. No way at all!
ipp
to the rescue: I decided then to try to print directly via ipp
and it worked in a couple of minutes!
Fuck off!