The problem might have some thing to do with the fact that when we create partitions in Linux, they dont share boundries, but when Windows makes partitions, they do share some sort of boundaries. I am not entirely sure if it does cause some error, but it surely is not the same. Here is a dump from my fsdisk

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1          13      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2              13       21401   171798528    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3           21401       38913   140666720+   5  Extended
/dev/sda5           21401       22185     6291456   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6   *       22185       35239   104857600   83  Linux

If you notice, you will see that there are overlaps between Start and End cylinder, this is what Windows does to the drive, This is not the same in Linux.

Any who, after failing to recover windows from the already installed partition, I recovered my Windows installation and was able to get windows working back again (thanks to recovering the complete disk) and then I only recovered partitions for my linux machine. Infact this failed too first time as I didn’t pay attention and let it rewrite the MBR, so third time was the charm with recovering the whole disk of windows (from before i started installing Linux) and recovering the Linux partition from my recent install. Overall it took me a good part of a weekend to get every thing working. Now I just hope that they can resolve this bug soon. I am convinced that it is caused by Windows 7 (I have not had problems like this in a decade since I have used Linux/Windows)

As for Ubuntu 10.04, like usual there are so many new things and it’s gotten slicker. I did have one problem with the system. It seemed to install the Nvidia driver during the install process but could not activate them (even though it said they were active and not in use). A quick look in the forums suggested purging and re-installing the Nvidia drivers. Other than that, I am getting used to the windows controls on the top left instead of the top right, but thats a minor adjustment

I hope I wont get the urge to tinker more in the next 6 months till next Ubuntu release.

I decided to go with Nginx and PHP-FPM solution for running Wordpress (and then later I can also put in Passenger for my RoR applications). Nginx is very lean Webserver which is changing the whole landscape of LAMP to LEMP (it’s pronounced as engine-x). I had been using it previously as well but it’s a moving target and has progressed a lot since I last dove into configuration files. There are various resources on the internet addressing this kind of migration but none of them complete. In order to handle redirects as 301 and not as 302 I used this plugin, and this post was extremely helpful in getting the permalinks working properly.

I also got to optimize my MySQL for memory use but I think there is still room for improvement.

Initial tests with a blank TC server and a running blog on stock Apache and Mysql would reat away all the available RAM. Now I have been able to shave off about 100 MB (which is not bad). I will see if running standard Tomcat works as it uses less memory than TCServer (from the looks of it)

Since Google decided to put Chrome for linux in beta and it has some mixed reviews (compared to Windows version) I decided to go over back to linux (that was actually in December, but writing about it now) but this time on 64 bit. Working with 64 bit has been problematic for me in the past as one would need to figure out lots of things. Fortunately lots of the issues from my previous experience with 64 bit ubuntu have been now resolved.

The first problem I ran into was bad performance of Spotify sound under Wine. This was easily solved by moving to wine-1.2 instead of wine. Another problem that I encountered was crashes of browser  when I started an Adobe Air application after I started the browser. This is also solved by first starting the Adobe Air app and then starting the browser.

I also used Adobe’s 64 bit pre-release version of flash which solves alot of issues of dancing around 32 bit libraries on 64 bit system. I have actually forgotten about lot’s of issues I fixed during the move, for which I need to put a note to sel: blog when its happening, not weeks later.

My base line would be some thing which would cost me less than 0.027 US$ per hour. Amazons elastic cloud services might be the way to go as I would like to play around with those services. Renting a dedicated server is probably out of my reach at the moment and will not be needed for my minimal footprint activities. However there are certain benifits of using a mid size provider such as linode (a hint would be that big provider’s IP segments are some times blocked by digital TV aggragators….enough said).

The reasons for moving away from linode would be mere change. I have not been keeping up with server technology for some time now and I don’t necessarily get a chance to play with new things at work. I might as well just try out Amazon AWS for a month and just check it out if its even viable and if it’s not, I always have a realiable VPS to come back to. In any case I would stroing recommend Linode to any one looking for a VPS.

Edit: I have looked up the cost of using Amazon AWS cloud, it costs almost double for the smallest instances, but at the same time offers double the power in terms of memory. After looking into my schedule I have decided to not tinker with my current setup till the next LTS of ubuntu comes out, after which I plan to stick with a production server for the whole lenght of LTS and it also turns out that by the time next LTS comes out I would need to update my system any way.

(30th Dec)Edit: I have piad one more month of dues to Linode. I am on the lookout for a better VPS. If my finances permit I would prefer to go for cloud system (or atleast a bigger VPS for my Java needs).

Personally I don’t mind MS Exchange based email servers as long as they are configured to run in some what standard mode. To my surprise I could actually get email out of the system, thanks to a French blogger.

I wonder if I can do the same for hotmail (well it’s already being forwarded to my gmail account

But the last distribution was not so much fun for me and I now know the primary reason for it. I have had a 64 bit machine since April 2008 and I was using 64 bit Ubuntu (with work around for 32 bit apps and plug ins). The performance of firefox was unbearable. As soon as the current release of Ubuntu became available (which was around April 23, 2009) I downloaded an ISO image so I could do a plain install (primarily to resize the partition size and to get a new partition on the newly shipped ext4 filesystem). I didn’t realize at first but I installed the 32 bit distribution by chance (which was a blessing in disguise). The first I realized that it was a 32 bit system was when I tried to install VirtualBox from a deb file (I could have sworn that I had burnt the 64 bit CD, but it was installed).

The first thing which I did was to update drivers for Nvidia GPU (which was painless, since a popup automatically gives you that option). Then I went on to install RubyOnRails following my own blog entry. After that I tinkered a bit with Firefox to check for performance. In my experience firefox with it’s stack of plug-ins performs much better in native 32 bit than in 64 bit wrapping mode. I could not only run BBC.com/urdu radio, but also had better  performance of flash and other plug-ins.

There are various incremental improvements in latest Ubuntu. Faster booting time bing one and seemingly cleaner/faster UI is another. There are many nice new UI themes to choose from. One small new feature which I found was the automatic logout (once you press logout, you don’t have to confirm it, it  can logout automatically in 60 seconds if you choose to not confirm).

Another nice feature is the Ubuntu Janitor (which keeps track of packages and files installed from outside of repository, ie possible junk). In my case Janitor was able to detect that I had installed VirtualBox. (Later it also found Adobe Air run time and some AdobeAir applications which I had installed)

Installing fonts is super easy. Just make a new folder .fonts and put your TTF files there. Following are some screen shots of urdu websites utilizing some of the installed fonts on my system.

I followed the guide of medibuntu to install repositories and enable win32 codecs for streaming content as well to easily install other non-free software (you can’t live with them if you have non geek family and friends). I also installed sun-java6 plugin to make JavaFX work nice and VLC with mozilla plugin as my primary media player and Adobe Air run time.

Last but not least I installed screnlets, compiz config manager and GnomeDo to make my desktop work like a charm (I didn’t find any of the other software from Lifehackers’s top 10 Jaunty download list to be of much use)

As for hickups I did experience a bit of sound starvation (clicking in sound) when using plain Alsa drivers. After looking around and trying around some configurations I used this tip and now I am running the Pulse sound server without any problem.

Call it a charm of a clean install, magic of ext4, or simplicity of coming back to 32 bit system, for me this is Ubuntu’s best release to date.