Hating (and Fixing) Natty's Unity

As a Ubuntu user on my primary home computer, i wanted the updated OS (Natty Narwhal 11.04) with newer 2.6.38 kernel for various updates, fixes, and Wacom compatibility. Sure some of these updates I had "patched" but that wasn't good enough.

I rebooted into Unity... It didn't seem so bad at first -- I'm also a Mac OSX user at work and it was very similar, albeit a poor, implementation of that. (I even have my dock on the left.)

After about 20 minutes I was no longer liking unity. But i wanted to enable my rotating desktop and continue to review unity. I ran the compizconfig-settings-manager from the menu, turned on the rotating cube effect, and thus began to completely bork unity. I lost the frames first and eventually lost the dock and title bar also.

Alt-tab and desktop switching was lost too and I was soon out of usability of my system. The only thing that really saved me was i already had "nautilus-open-terminal" installed so i was able to right-click the desktop for the terminal window.

It took awhile to search for the fixes, so I'll list them. You'll need to have the compiz settings manager installed:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

It took quite awhile to find the command to launch it. In the terminal, run:

ccsm

Go to "preferences" toward the bottom left, and either select "default" or re-select "unity" this should re-load the frames, but i was forced to "sudo reboot" to get everything in order.

At this point, I non-verbally begged for gnome again. Again, it took awhile, but I found i could select the default interface by running

gdmsetup

from the terminal and selecting "Ubuntu Classic". This is already available for you if you have to login, but I had setup auto-login so it was not selectable for me.

Once I was rebooted again I followed the suggestions from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1742581 to remove Unity completely and will unlikely attempt it again.

Also, I like the new overlay scrollbar, but often enough it slows effeciency down due to having to locate the scroll area; therefore, I zapped it from existence too:

sudo apt-get purge liboverlay-scrollbar-*

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The inevitable happened - total data loss

You've heard it a thousand times. "Backup your data!" Well when you have a 400Gb harddrive filled and nowhere to backup to, you're screwed.

One fine day I figured I'd play with my BIOS settings for no apparent good reason. I'm searching around and see this nifty drive chipset setting that was disabled. The options were Disabled, RAID, and SATA. Well I had 3 SATA drives plugged in, so why is this thing on "disabled"... hmmm let me change that. I rebooted and my machine hung. I reset, my machine went a little further but kept complaining that a device was not ready "(Ready=0)". Well let me disable, I figured. I rebooted and again it hung. What I had done was mistakenly enabled SATA power to my drives when they already had MOLEX power supplied. It turned out that this can be (and definitely was) a very bad thing.

Luckily my 320GB drive that stored "My Documents" among other things was safe, but my drive containing 4 years of collecting Martial Arts videos was dead. I also had quiet a few CD backups (ISO) -- about 360GB of data is lost. I tried several software recovery options intermittently over a few days; however, it was a complete fail.  I checked into data recovery options and the rates are phenomenally and outrageously expensive. It's a "no go" -- I'm not paying a grand to restore what is 80% re-downloadable and truth be told, i'd never have the time to review all those martial videos anyhow. I'll just find the important ones again. Yes, some of the data is irreplaceable. I had a backup ISO containing files my father created. His "My Documents" and CadKey drawings. My father passed away in 2004. I backed up the data and wiped the computer. It was irreplaceable data that I'd preferred to keep.

So this post was written for two reasons: One, to frighten you into backing up your data! Two, offer some backup solutions.

I had, in the past, wanted to get a "real" NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. I had a FreeNAS running, which is very nice, but it required me to keep an old Pentium 4 1.2Ghz PC powered on 24/7 with only 80GB+30GB storage -- not nearly enough. I could have gotten a replacement drive, whether internal or external, but what happens when that fails? Total loss again -- and drives do fail. There is also services like carbonite.com offering unlimited backup for $55 a year, but how many continuous days do you think it would take to upload hundreds of gigs of data?

I was aching to get a NAS. There are many brands.  Some too cheap, some too expensive. I kept researching newegg.com. I had some limited experience with iOmega's ix stores.  Very nice devices, but they were a bit overpriced and I understood the drive replacements can only be bought from iOmega. I ultimately decided on a Synology product that had good feedback on newegg.com and has some good features. The product I wanted had to have a high capacity and fault tolerance. I did not want a single drive solution. I wanted to mirror or RAID. I could have chosen a two drive solution for mirroring, but I felt that expandability was necessary. My final choice, although still very pricey, had room for growth and steered clear of the truly over-priced vendors.

My latest purchase is a Synology DiskStation DS410j. It is a 4 bay personal NAS unit supporting up to 8TB, yes eight terabytes by using four 2TB drives. Although in the past I've always opted to buy Western Digital drives, Newegg's customer feedback reported many dead-on-arrival WD's, and Seagate's, and just about every other brand. The best feedback for 2TB drives was for Samsung. I don't particularly like Samsung, but the feedback spoke for itself. My new drives are the Spinpoint F4 2-terabyte, eco-green, 5400, 8.9ms drives.  They are not the fastest, but i knew this was a for the NAS unit which was mostly limited by the network speed.  So I am a proud owner of a Synology 410j with two 2TB mirrored drives -- I just couldn't afford four drives. Of course, I can always add a drive or two, and as I understand it, seamlessly upgrade to RAID 5.  The 410j was discounted to $329 and the drives were $119 each.  StorageReview.com has a nice write-up on the DS410j.

For those of you that in no way can afford to drop nearly $600, I'll share some other options with you.  As mentioned prior, Carbonite.com allows unlimited online backup for $55 with the caveat of requiring the time of uploading.  This can be hellish on DSL or cable.

For those wanting a free online solution, I found Adrive.com which allows 50GB of free online storage, with the caveat of uploading via a java interface on a web-page.  There is also Megaupload.com with 50GB free online storage that also allows a browser toolbar or windows application for uploading.  Again, with these services, upload/download speeds are limited by your type of internet service.

The cheapest local storage option would simply be to purchase an external USB drive, but of course there is no fault tolerance.  Although unlikely both your computer's harddrive and your external drive would fail at the same time, it is possible.  But for that matter so is failure of both drives in my NAS.  For me, I am more comfortable with having a dedicated unit for backups.  It also allows me to setup my family's machines to auto-backup -- A great convenience to save invaluable information.


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Speed up your web-browser using a Ram-Disk (XP, OSX, Linux)

Background: Your web-browser be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, or other temporarily saves the viewed pages and images to it's cache. This cache resides on your hard-drive which generally is the slowest part of your computer. By changing this cache location to memory, you can significantly increase your browser speeds. If you are using a modern SSD (Solid State Drive) then this will not have a speed impact, but could reduce the number of writes to the SSD and therefore is also a good option.

I've found this technique while googling and have implemented it on each of my machines as a speedup technique.

I'll briefly cover Windows XP, Mac OSX, and Linux. Although this technique could be used with WinVista or Win7, I have been unable to find a FREE Ram-Disk software.

You can implement the configuration, and if you decide the benefit is nil, then it's easily reversible.

For Windows XP, there are several free Ram-Disk software, but I have had the least (if any) problems with VSuite RamDisk Free Edition. Install this software and create a RamDisk. I chose to assign drive letter Z: and will reference that here. You are welcome to use any available drive, but be sure to use that drive letter with the configurations to follow. A drive size of 64 or 128 MB is plenty sufficient for a web-browser cache. If you heavily use two or more browsers you could easily choose 256MB if your computer has 2GB or more RAM.

I'll explain how to configure Internet Explorer and Firefox. If you use another browser, there is certainly some information online to assist with your browser specific settings.

For Internet Explorer go to Tools>Internet Options>Browsing History>Settings>Move Folder. Make note of the curent folder name in case you wish to revert. For the Move Folder option, choose the RamDrive letter Z: and use a temp folder (i.e. Z:\temp ). While you are at it, change the Disk Space to use option to something more appropriate, i choose 64MB.

For FireFox 3+, enter "about:config" in the address bar. You'll see a warning screen, click the "I'll be careful" button. Right-click anywhere in the list of items and select New>String. Enter "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory" (no quotes), then enter your RamDrive letter and folder as the new value (i.e. Z:\temp). If you are using an older Firefox you may want to search first as i think the key name is different.

I doubt that you will want to revert back, but if so, then you can set Internet Explorer to the original folder that you noted. If you wish to reverse Firefox, simply delete the newly created key.

The same concept will work on Mac OSX. You can use Michaël Parrot's Esperance DV or Peter Hosey's MakeRAMDisk 1.0 to create a RamDrive.

Ubuntu users can use the existing ram-disk mount named "/dev/shm" as your cache folder. I use this one for every Ubuntu or Mint Linux machine I have. For other Linux distributions with kernel 2.4+, use the commands "sudo mkdir /mnt/ramdisk" then "sudo mount none /mnt/ramdisk -t tmpfs" to create a dynamically sizing RamDisk. This can likely be scripted into your startup. There are other resources available so research your preferred method.

On any older machine you should undoubtedly see a significant increase in browser speed. Newest machines may not see as much a boost, but you can be the judge of that.


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