Tags: gnupg, gpg2, openpgp, openpgpv2, smartcard, ubuntu, unknown IPC command
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OpenPGP V2 card and Ubuntu Karmic Koala
If you’re trying to get it to work on Jaunty or Debian, I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, but I’ve not been able to get that to work properly. If you have, please let us know in the comments below.
The key is using gnupg 2.0.12 (with the Ubuntu patches) and installing libccid, which seems not to be pulled in by default. After that, it’ll work as expected. We’ve been using a SCM SCR335 to attach it to the computer, but any other supported smartcard reader should work.
We spent a whole day on this, trying to get it to work. I don’t get why kernelconcepts already sells these exclusively if the support in GnuPG is still so fresh. Bit of a shame.
Error we got were things like:
scdaemon[85270]: updating slot 0 status: 0x0000->0x0000 (0->1)
scdaemon[85270]: sending signal 31 to client 85269
and:
gpg: key operation not possible: Unknown IPC command
Hope this helps someone!
Skype on Ubuntu: Feisty package seems to work for Intrepid
No idea why the nice folk at Skype haven’t updated their package yet to Hardy at the very least, but I can inform you all that the Feisty package seems to install en run just fine on Intrepid at least. Haven’t tried it on Hardy, but I have no reason to assume it won’t work there too.
Find the Ubuntu package here.
Tags: 700ae, aironet, cisco, compaq, edgy, feisty, gutsy, hardy, intrepid, linux, network manager, presario, ubuntu, upgrade
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Ubuntu: Upgrade Edgy to Intrepid
I’m in the process of reviving my old Compaq Presario 700AE laptop. Yes, it’s very old, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a modern Linux distribution like Ubuntu Linux. However, I only had an Edgy CD at hand, no empty CD-R’s and a hell of a lot of time. So I decided to upgrade Edgy all the way to Intrepid, passing Feisty, Gutsy and Hardy in between.
First problem I encountered was the fact that neither Edgy nor Feisty are part of the common mirrors. It took me some time, but eventually I found the old-releases.ubuntu.com mirror from Ubuntu, which, as the name kind of suggests, contained all the old releases. So I needed to edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change all the references to “us.archive.ubuntu.com” to “old-releases.ubuntu.com”. Thank god for vim’s regex replace:
:%s/us\.archive/old-releases/g
Then an apt-get update and a apt-get dist-upgrade. Now I had the most recent Edgy release. Next change in the sources.list:
:%s/edgy/feisty/g
Again, apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. Prepare to wait a while, after downloading about 600M of packages, it took the machine almost 2 hours to install them all. Besides some errors about the Network Manager and a cross in the menu instead of a link to Evolution, everything seemed to have gone correct. I didn’t try to actually use anything else on the laptop, though. I assumed that during the updates, things would get broken and fixed again. We’ll see how everything works at the end of it all.
With Feisty installed, I rebooted and everything seemed to go well. On to Gutsy. Again, editing the sources.list:
:%s/feisty/gutsy/g
But als the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/prerequists-sources.list. Not sure if every Feisty has this one, I tried upgrading from the Ubuntu tools first, but that failed. That process might have created this file. Anyway, if you have it, you need to change feisty into gutsy in there too. Next, the upgrade again: apt-get update followed by and apt-get dist-upgrade. Again it needs to download about 600M, but installation seems to take a lot longer. I have no idea why that’s the case.
There were some issues during the installation. For example, scrollkeeper seemed to be rebuilding the docs for over 20 minutes, after which I ctrl+c’ed it. I have no idea what caused this, though. The app f-spot seemed to have the same trouble. A little later, I got a scary glibc error telling me about how the app scrollkeeper-update seemed to have a corrupted double-linked list. The setting up of sound-juicer and tomboy also took longer than I was willing to wait for.
After this first apt-get dist-upgrade was done, I got a list of 38 apps that weren’t completely installed. When I looked through the list, it looked mainly to be desktop apps. I tried to do an apt-get dist-upgrade again, to see if it would be fixed this time around. I got some parsing errors this time, about parsing /var/lib/scrollkeeper/es/scrollkeeper_extended_cl.xml, but it continued after that like normal. So I guess I was too impatient on the first try. It took about 30 minutes in total, which is okay, I guess.
Another reboot later and I had a working Gutsy. Yay! No strange errors while loading the desktop this time and all links seemed to be working. Again I tried the Ubuntu supplied tool for upgrading to Hardy, but it seemed to stall while downloading the first to components (the ones that are supposed to guide me through the upgrade process). For some reason, once I clicked cancel, it did continue, however. This is a way nicer way of upgrading, though, so I decided to stick with it. It seemed to work for the time being and I got nice progress indicators. Another 600M to download, of course.
A little over two hours later, the laptop reboots into Hardy Heron, which gave me some headaches. First boot didn’t even get very far. There were no obvious messages why it didn’t want to boot, so I pressed a few buttons and it did continue. However, the result was an unusable system with / mounted in ro mode. I thought, “Shit, there goes all my work”, but tried a reboot anyway. This time without the Cisco Aironet 350 card inserted into the PCMCIA slot and that worked. Not sure if that’s because of the PCMCIA card, though.
After I got the desktop, the default Software Update app didn’t show me the latest new version, Intrepid Ibex. I had to enable “Normal releases” in the Software Sources tool. After that, however, everything went back to normal. I noticed a button that told me I could upgrade to the newest version of Ubuntu, 8.10, I pressed it and it continued on, downloading again.
While waiting, I installed Intrepid from and ISO on my Parallels Desktop VM. So that at least I can compare dpkg -l output’s from a fresh install to this upgraded install.
The upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid was another 2 hours, about. But then the trouble started. First of all, the Network Manager didn’t do what I expected. Now, I might be a retard, but I wanted it to simply keep my previous settings. It was not meant to be. I had to reset all the settings, apparantly, because it kept showing me the icon for the network with a warning triangle in it.
Adding a new wired network setting didn’t seem to change much, I was unable to active it and there’s no obvious method of activating it anyway. So I tried the Cisco Aironet 350…
Well, that’s when I learned that this card, which I once bought for it’s outstanding Linux support, needs a firmware upgrade to enable WPA connection encryption. And the firmware upgrade tools only works on Windows. Darn it.
Tomorrow I’m going to try to install Windows XP in the VirtualBox VM and see if I can upgrade the PCMCIA card from there. Hoping for the best…
Installing Breezy – Don’t download from the Internet!
My dad’s disc crashed. I warned him about that possibility before, since he’s using Maxtor and we’ve very bad experiences with those discs. So since yesterday, I’ve been installing Ubuntu anew on his brand new (Maxtor 
) harddisc.
Since I recently recieved my shipment of Ubuntu CD’s (made available through ShipIt), I decided to start with those. They were no fun. During the install process, I told the system to download the latest packages from the Internet. In second stage installation (after the reboot), the stuff failed miserably. Apparantly, upstream has an update-incompatible version of libesd0, which crashes the installation and leaves you at a prompt. I tried to fix it, but I couldn’t, the package just wasn’t proper for the installation.
Desperate as I was to have the stuff working asap, I decided to download Dapper Drake, the alpha for the next version of Ubuntu, to be released in April. That looked really, really nice. Much of the stuff I wanted changed in Breezy was changed for the better. I actually really liked that desktop… apart from the fact that I couldn’t get my printer working.
Now, we’ve got a Canon S600 here, for which the driver from Ubuntu simply doesn’t work. I don’t know why they ship it with that driver, since the printer doesn’t print with it. Feels like someone didn’t do their job correctly. But, several years ago, we bought the driver from TurboPrint.de. This driver works perfectly… except on Dapper. I was able to print the testpage once and then it simply stopped printing or even responding to printing commands (you know, starting and warming up). Since I really need to print some stuff today, I decided to try Breezy again.
Which is what I’m doing now. The first time I again got caught by that strange upstream package which doesn’t want to install. Now I’m in second stage, by telling the system to not download packages from the Internet. I’ll do that after second stage, since there seems no adequate way to do second stage properly.
Btw, if you’re caught in second stage and want to start it again, start base-config new. It’ll start the second stage install anew, with a question about language up front. The thing is, if you by mistake entered “download packages from the internet” during your first stage, you’re screwed. Somehow you can’t just quit second stage, edit sources.list and start second stage anew. It will change the sources.list back to the one it generated during first stage. It must be saved somewhere on disc, but I’ve been unable to find it and honestly, I’m tired of searching for the stuff.
There must be some great documentation about how the installation works and how you can manipulate it. But I’ve been unable to find it. I hope this install just works.
Can’t we all just get along?
There is an interesting read on Ian Murdock’s Weblog: Can’t we all just get along? It talks about the differences between Debian and Ubuntu, the latter being a derivative of the first. Although I can understand Ian’s problem, I do not share his views.
He’s correct in some respects, for example that Ubuntu’s packages often don’t work on Debian Sarge. But the question is, do we want them to? Debian Sarge is a very stable and secure platform, one we (as a company) prefer to use in a corporate environment. In fact, 45% of our deployments are Debian Woody and another 45% are Debian Sarge. (The rest are mostly different hardware routers and Cisco stuff.) I wouldn’t want those Ubuntu packages working on Sarge! As much as I love Debian, I never thought of it as a desktop distribution. It’s ideal for servers, because it’s stable and has slow update cycles. You know, when people say they choose for Red Hat because they can upgrade often, that’s just not logical. Servers we have are deployed and work without a glitch. They don’t need to be upgraded regularly, just patched for security holes! Why in the world would we want to upgrade a firewall/router? Patch the holes and give me those updates, that’s all I want. And that’s what Debian gives me. Sarge is due to be released very soon and the next version of Debian, Sid, will probably not be released for at least two years. And that’s the way I want it to be. Server protocols don’t change all that often.
On the other hand, a desktop is a machine that needs to be upgraded often. And when I take the time to upgrade, I want it to show. Not just some new buttons, but a nicer interface, new programmes, more features, better spam-detection, et cetera, et cetera. That’s what Ubuntu gives us. Fast release cycles that matter. Each six months we get improvements. Do we want those improvements on a server? Usually not. But when we do want them, it’s easier to backport an Ubuntu package than to build one from scratch.
Just my two cents.
