Ubuntu first impressions

Success, mainly. I'm now writing a blog entry in emacs (21 instead of 22). The scroll wheel on my mouse doesn't work. Python is 2.5 by default! 4suite failed to install so I can auto generate the blog entry, ... drat. Nor will I be able to process it... we'll see.

Oh. nxml-mode works fine. Colors have changed, but it's working.

I offloaded all my own files to standard ext3 disks, installed Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn sounds silly for an OS version IMHO) 7.4, which installed peacefully. Update only took half an hour. Whilst waiting for that I installed java (I'm going to try and stay with 6, see if I can) and a couple of other oddments. All my firefox plugins (Made me realise how dependent I am on FF!). Mail I haven't tackled yet. I have my old ~ directory on hand in case it's needed. Pulled most of my main working files from my svn repo with no difficulty... just lots of time. Fun and games with the disks though. All SATA. Used to be sda/sdb were the RAIDED lvm'd ones. Both gone. sdc, sdd were the two spares used for backup. Main disk is now sda1 ... and sda 5 (the swap). The other two are sda1 and sdb2! They were partitioned into two 40Gb drives, which seems to have been lost in the OS swap. I do have all my data though, which is the important part to me.

Just the remaining 50 applications to load now!

Minor niggle. All the script files which were +x seem to have lost the property.

Continued: Booted this morning (2007-09-08) and politely received the information that fsck died with exit status 8! Not encouraging. Especially after all this work. To continue.

I found out (thanks to the emacs user list, who are very helpful) that the default Ubuntu desktop doesn't have any of the dev packages. So I couldn't build 4Suite, I couldn't build emacs 22.1. Yikes. Whilst installing the necessary ones

$apt-get install python-dev libc6-dev g++ libncurses5-dev

I found that the Debian based config system needs... configuring? I was asked to run a really old fashioned setup dpgk-reconfigure. When Ubuntu talk about a desktop user I guess they're talking about Aunty Aggy, not an emacs user.

Python now runs with my blog-building code,

from Ft.Xml import MarkupWriter

A really nice way of writing XML. Fine.

Getting emacs 22.1 up and running is proving harder. Emacs (from memory) runs in one of two major forms. A basic text format (which I used happily some time back) and (I think) one of two X based forms. Sort of graphics based, but basically text. For me the only real help is the C-u char which lets me see what the Unicode characters are. I'm so used to using emacs from the keyboard, I really don't use the menu's at all. Ubuntu has 21.4, headed emacs21, but I don't think it's the same as this which is a full Xemacs screen. So I'm looking for some magic that turns a real text emacs into a sort of graphics emacs... if you see what I mean.

Anyway, thanks to Uche and the guys on the emacs list. Im getting there, if the disk stabilizes. A bit worrying that.