Oblomovka

2008-07-17»

Deciding to upgrade to Ubuntu’s alpha-state Intrepid Ibex because of a hope that tiny bug might be fixed: not such a good idea. Deciding that, because your beautiful composite set-up was broken by the Ibex kernel upgrade that you should maybe try out the even-more-alpha intrepid-proposed repository: frankly ill-advised. Struggling with the consequential collapse of all your wireless networking by attempting to remove and re-install dbus from the old Ubuntu: not so much asking for trouble, as drawing a pentagram in your own mother’s blood and hollering in Aramaic for same. So I was without a working laptop for much of today.

Well, as I’ve heard people say in the same circumstances, at least it was a good test of my backup policy. In the end I just threw up my arms, re-installed from an old Ubuntu Huffin’ Heron, and pulled my home directory off the backup drive.

Of course, the painful bit with re-animating an old and familiar set-up is trying to recall all the tiny mods and tweaks that one gave one’s system back in the ice age, then re-implementing them individually on the new system — all without saddling it all with your later, senile wanderings.

I actually do backup my /etc folder, so it wasn’t that bad — Debian is pretty good at keeping most of the configuration files in etc, on pain of maintainer death. But I hadn’t kept a list of the many extra packages I’d installed. Fortunately, Debian/Ubuntu machines, positively trembling with racial knowledge of how badly its users screw up in the past, keep their own backup copies of this list, in /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 .

If you’re ever in the position of checking this list with your current system to try and work out what packages you should install to get to your old state, try package_list. You feed it the dpkg.status backup file as a command line argument, and it spits out the packages you need to install.

Here’s some of what it spat at me. I’m off to see Eddie Izzard now — when I get back, I’ll highlight some of my favourite Ubuntu packages here:

Hello, I am back. I don’t know whether your RSS reader will notice this, but here are my all new summaries of my dpkg list.

These are ones that I snuffled from other, non-official Ubuntu repositories. The SHAME!

amazonmp3

Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor. They have a Debian friendly MP3 downloader.

avant-window-navigator-bzr

Avant is in no way a fake MacOS dock applet.

chandler

I tried Chandler for a bit, but now I am all about the Kontact

ec2-ami-tools

Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor and virtual machine rental site

isight-firmware-tools

Yes, I run Ubuntu on a Macbook. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is screaming

skype

And I use proprietary software, so that’s Stallman screaming back.

Here are the official Ubuntu packages.

adblock-plus

Who knew you could install Firefox plugins using the Ubuntu package system? Me, clearly, at some point.

alien

Alien lets you convert Redhat RPMs into Debian Ubuntu deb packages. Useful!

apache2

If MacOS laptop owners can run apache locally, then so can I.

apg

More useful! APG is an obscurely named password-generating utility.

avahi-utils

Avahi is the Linux name for Apple’s Bonjour which was the name for Apple’s Rendezvous which was the name for the Internet’s Zeroconf.

blogtk

When somebody says “What can I use instead of Ecto on Linux”, tell them about BloGTK. Then hope they don’t ask any more questions, because it’s not really that polished.

cheese

This is like Photobooth. Not quite as polished, but quite as useless.

compizconfig-settings-manager

This is, by contrast, awesome and lets you turn your poor user-interface into the most tweaked, weird, and customized cube-spinning zoomey wibble-wibble monster imaginable. Makes everyone sick with jealousy. Or vertigo, hard to say.

dillo

Dillo is the rude-sounding super-minimal super-fast browser. Good for checking what your site looks like to Victorians.

discover1

This is discover1, of course.

dovecot-imapd

Dovecot is about as sane an IMAP server as you can muster.

gammu

gnokii

gnome-phone-manager

gnome-vfs-obexftp

These are all for talking to my Nokia phone, and pulling addresses off it, and sending it SMSs and kissing it and hugging it.

gnumeric

I have a soft spot for Gnumeric, which was Gnome’s competitor to Excel, and yet has somehow managed to not become as crazy-ass as Evolution (or OpenOffice, for that matter).

gsynaptics

If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, this lets you set up your trackpad just the way you like it. Sixty hours later.

hfsplus

If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, and secretly keep MacOS on it because you’re not entirely crazy, this gives you some utilities to look at them.

idle

Idle is the standard Python editor. It’s sort of funky.

imagemagick

Imagemagick is actually what you need to do all that graphical image conversion.

iodine

This is that program that lets you tunnel IP over DNS, like in Little Brother. The technique was popularised by Dan Kaminsky, who later went on to save the world.

kontact

Even though I use Gnome, Kontact rules my world. I live with the pain of all the background KDE libraries coming in and spilling their strong German beer everywhere.

lynx

Lynx is the text web browser. It’s useful for “lynx -dump http://thiswebpageinasemblenceofatextfile.com/”

midori

Midori is another lightweight browser. It’s useful for when you are tired of only having seven other browsers.

miredo

Miredo gives you IPv6 when other people only give you IPv4. Useful for … well, it’ll be useful one day.

miro

Miro is the new name for Democracy, which has been less popular ever since Iraq.

mnemosyne

I forget. Oh wait, it’s a flashcard memory aid!

mozilla-firefox-locale-en-gb

What can I say? I miss the old country.

mysql-admin

mysql-client

mysql-navigator

mysql-server

ndisgtk

Do you know how long I’ve been scared of relational databases?

nmap

For portscanning the hell out of strange networks and broken machines.

ntop

For working out who the hell is using all the bandwidth on your network.

oolite

GPL’d Elite! For Linux! And MacOS! And SGI Irix!

pandoc

Incredibly useful for converting to and from various markup languages, like HTML, Markdown, RTF, etc. Written in Haskell for extra cred points.

pdftk

For doing hideous things to PDF files.

pidgin-libnotify

For actually telling me when someone is trying to get my attention on IM.

pommed

Handles Macbook hotkeys. From the really useful, somewhat obscure Mac support Ubuntu repository.

powertop

Use fewer watts!

privoxy

Part of my tor setup, natch.

pylint

Horrifically pedantic code style checker.

python-beautifulsoup

Leonard’s damn fine, damn tolerant HTML parser.

python-feedparser

Mark’s damn fine, damn tolerant RSS/Atom parser.

python-mechanize

When you want to webscrape like a pro.

python-nose

Python unit tests handled gently and kindly.

rtorrent

The best of the background, text-based torrent handlers.

sc

The ‘vi’ of spreadsheets. Really.

sox

The ImageMagick of sound files.

squeak

For wasting TOO MUCH TIME in happy Smalltalk land.

squeak-plugin

sshfs

Mount remote systems using just ssh.

swftools

For messing around with Flash files (like extracting images, etc).

terminator

Multiple terminal windows in the same (Python-coded) window.

tidy

Cleans up your (or someone else’s) HTML.

tor

For anonymity and censorship circumvention.

torbutton-extension

trickle

A command line program that will throttle and bandwidth limit almost any other command line program

vlc

For when mplayer won’t cut it.

vrms

Virtual RMS — for nagging you about those non-free programs (see above).

wammu

The graphical bit of gammu, the cellphone software.

wine

For running Windows programs.

wireshark

For monitoring your Net traffic (and pointing out to others how easy it is to monitor theirs).

Phew!

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