Well I've previously posted about some issues I was having with Lucid whilst still in the Alpha2 stage of development, well now that Alpha3 has been pushed out there has been a number of updates come through.  For a little over a week I've been having an issue where the system will just freeze (hard lockup) I've still not quite pinpointed what is the cause or the events that lead to the system going AWAL on me!

The one thing I have noticed though that has me wondering what is so different between installs, I have two servers the first one is my Web/E-mail/DCHP/DNS this was setup originally with Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) back in late 2008, since that time it has been updated with using the do-release-update to bing it up to current versions as they have been released. When this server is rebooted after POST has completed and Plymouth is doing its thing I'm getting a three tone bar along the bottom of the scree that is dark blue/light blue/white and these continue until the white covers the blue. At this point you still need to ALT+TAB+F2 (tty2) to get a login prompt (bug #506297) but the text on the screen is a bright with colour, not the usual grey! it's not until about 2-3 minutes later the text will change to the grey and all services become available. This behavior is most strange and again I've yet to find a reason to it.

On the second server, this was installed from Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) and this only seems to suffer from bug #506297 that I can notice. However this server is only running a few services and is no where nearly as loaded as my main server!

So I just find that the display difference between these two most bizarre! I've been using Ubuntu now for a few years and this is the first time I seen anything quite like it. However until I can pinpoint the issue/s it makes it very difficult to submit any bug reports!

UPDATE: I've since discovered that there is a theme selection for Plymouth

plymouth-set-default-theme –help
Plymouth theme chooser
usage: plymouth-set-default-theme { –list | –reset | <theme-name> [ –rebuild-initrd ] | –help }

-h, –help             Show this help message
-l, –list             Show available themes
-r. –reset            Reset to default theme
-R, –rebuild-initrd   Rebuild initrd (necessary after changing theme)
<theme-name>           Name of new theme to use (see –list for available themes)

Also it appears that Plymouth must have a minimum specification for themes because one server that has an Intel 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE VGA chip and displays the themes without an issue. However, my main server has a S3 Inc. Savage 4 VGA and doesn't display these themes. So I think my issue be solved as to why I don't get the themes on one server as opposed to the other…  😐

I've run Google Adsense ads on my blog for some time, but recently I noticed a lot of "get rich quick schemes" and "weight loss products" along with questionable "Software Remedies" flowing through. This leads me to believe that there isn't any quality check being done on ad content. For now I've disabled them,and I'll await to see what Googles reply will be (I have sent a query about content) As I certainly wouldn't want anyone to click a link that took them to a phishing site or similar…

I know that some will say why bother with those ads anyway! but I did see it as a remote possibility of funding some server upgrades! I'll be waiting forever as most of us use FireFox with the ad-block plugin so they wouldn't be seen anyway!  😉

Ok after some hair pulling (not that I have much !) I've managed to get Lucid installed on my desktop! 🙂  I struck all the issue that were mentioned in the "Known Issues" but I did manage to circumnavigate a workaround to get me going…

All was going just fine until the Alternative Installer wanted to setup GRUB2, this is where I was getting an warning claiming that had not selected a drive to install GRUB2 onto! I was never prompted to do so…  So if you simply attempt to re-run that section, you just end up in a continuous loop! The solution… install LILO (Yuk I know!) but at least this will give you a way to boot into your fresh install of the Lucid Lynx.

Once I had this shinny new install starring back at me, I promptly went about bringing the Alpa2 base to the current available…  in theory this should have just been a simple task, but no again I was left with a very broken system! So in disgust I simply called it a night.

The following morning, I started the PC and booted into the recovery console, from here I then managed to bring the system up to date from packages that had been updated whilst I slumbered… and yes… yes… WHOHOO!!! it booted as one expected! err… well until I ran the next lot of updates and was left in a broken state (again!) but I simply repeated what I had done the night before and well here I am… now using Lucid Lynx 🙂

Although my efforts where not that difficult to overcome, it did make me realise that I was maybe just a little too keen to get there and maybe I should have just awaited the release of Alpha3 ??? Oh and yes I did manage to get grub2 installed once the system was booted into Lucid  😉