Notes to self

Mar 29, 2013 12:25

Never ever bloody anything Ubuntu ever.

clue by four, hopeless shower of bastards, fail

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badnewswade March 29 2013, 12:45:38 UTC
Wha' appen?

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hirez March 29 2013, 13:09:40 UTC
Getting recent versions of Puppet to even install on aged versions of Umbongleton is rather more hassle than it's worth.

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quercus March 29 2013, 13:25:01 UTC
What's "aged"?

I have a perfectly functional server that kicks me every morning with an "I'm an October version and my lifegem is flashing" warning. Yet the newer versions have the shafted desktop, so it ain't going forwards. I might yet _downgrade_ this to the previous LTS, just to get rid of the dialogs.

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maluse March 29 2013, 18:34:34 UTC
Linux Mint with xfce (based on Ubuntu) seems to be the best choice for an "It Just Works" system without broken desktop environments.

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badnewswade March 30 2013, 09:52:09 UTC
I use vanilla Ubuntu with LXDE and it's fine. MY problem is that when I upgraded to 12.04 LTS, it blew up one of my fave game programs. They just plain stopped allowing me to use the fantastic GUI frontend that MAME used to have (GXMAME), and replaced it with a really shitty text-based one... apparently simply because GXMAME is "old". Oh and also a lot of games no longer work on it. And I'm convinced the computer's slower.

Most OS programmers should be taken out and shot. I mean that's a foul worthy of Apple at their worst. If I want to run a certain program, I should bloody well be allowed to do it. What the hell kind of nightmare Big Brother OS goes around uninstalling random programs it doesn't like - without even asking first?

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steer March 30 2013, 15:54:45 UTC
I just use the fallback gnome because I can't stick Unity -- so I run 12.10 without Unity. However, gnome 3.8 is introducing "Classic mode" as an alternative to all that Unity crap. Hopefully 3.8 will make it into Ubuntu 13.10.

(Presume by "shafted desktop" you mean Unity.)

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valkyriekaren March 29 2013, 14:54:00 UTC
I thought Umbongleton was what they drank in Congleton. Shows what I know.

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hirez March 29 2013, 14:56:41 UTC
They do indeed drink it in Congleton.

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d_floorlandmine April 1 2013, 22:08:07 UTC
[snork]

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steer March 29 2013, 16:40:28 UTC
Heh.... not a fair test. I mean how *old* is puppet? Rather newer than the OS you're installing on.

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steer March 29 2013, 19:31:22 UTC
Urm... I kind of see what you mean in a twisted way. Puppet is supposed to be flexible -- but it makes a lot of demands for relatively modern libraries to install (unless you're willing to settle for a super old version -- which, let's face it, waht's the point?). Flexibility isn't much to do with it. It's always going to be a pain to install software that requires versions 5.7 and 3.2 on an OS which by default provides 4.3 and 0.9 because it's from a few years previously.

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steer March 30 2013, 15:45:28 UTC
Ah... you're right. I think of it only in terms of cloud because that's the only reason I'm interested in it -- if it's doing stuff with actual metal that would be a huge pain. Sorry, my understanding of these things is actually pretty limited and context specific.

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hirez March 30 2013, 16:24:18 UTC
Hm... well, yes. And indeed no. If there's a set of terrible old boxes lying about it mostly seems to be because getting them into a state where they'd keep working was such a huge effort that it was easiest to leave them very alone. Which is, I think, more or less what's wrong with hand-tended servers. "Oh you can't touch that it's the [mumble] box and $business-unit throw a massive strop if they think someone's been playing." (Which actually means "$business-unit don't know anything about the H/W or OS, and if their favourite software in all the world goes funny then SOMEONE'S BROKEN SOMETHING.")

This is a shit way of managing kit.

Uptime-manship is also a sign of hand-tended servers. And unpatched ones.

Meanwhile, when the box falls off the end of any sort of maintenance, $business-unit won't have any of it and demand that everything still works like it did in the nineties.

When your maintenance partner is eBay, this is probably a Bad Thing.

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