Damnit. I may be the only person I know that has trouble EVERY SINGLE TIME they update an existing Ubuntu installation. Earlier this week I did a dist-upgrade on the machine that I’ve been using to host my bots, naively believing all of the blogs I’d read gushing about how this new version was the "best evar" and how the update was so painless.
You’d think I would have learned by now. While this update didn’t completely hose my machine like previous updates have, it take a great deal of time and in the end left me with no way to run my bots from that machine. I don’t know at this point if the problem lies in the version of Mono (or if the Mono version was even different) or whether it’s a more fundamental problem, but this version has a SIGABRT from an issue somewhere in the appearance code.
The bots were working before I did the dist-upgrade, and were not working after, but I suppose it’s also remotely possible that the problem is related to Second Life® rather than Ubuntu. If that’s the case, I should be able to get the latest version of libsecondlife and ensure that the bots are using the latest SL™ protocols, but I REALLY hate to do that because the libsl guys have no idea of what it means to have a stable interface; They change the public API of the libsl code on a daily basis, and this makes it incredibly difficult and time-consuming for anyone to maintain a non-trivial project dependant on libsecondlife.
The libsl team have done a pretty fantastic job of putting together a codebase that you can use to build custom viewers, bots, SL™ <-> RL integration, etc, and are to be commended for all of their hard work, but I often get the feeling that the majority of contributors have not spent a lot of time deep in the trenches of a large commercial software project where different teams maintain different subsystems and critical libraries.
Okay, enough ranting for now. I had hoped to have the bots ready for public usage at the same time as the new C:SI update, and have been testing them in secret for the last several weeks on a few of the sims where my wife and I have large chunks of land, but this setback will most likely mean that the bots will be delayed.
Popularity: 28% [?]
Interesting… I just went to the libsecondlife page to get the SVN url (which I didn’t have on this machine) and ran across this post: http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/News:SVN_Reorg
That sounds like good news, and I hope it means that the “stable” api isn’t such a moving target now
Thanks, libsl guys!
Quoted here in case WordPress mangles my url:
This was probably the worst upgrade for me too, with Dapper->Edgy being in close second. This time, it completely broke X, which is ironic since I think Gutsy is supposed to have the new “Bulletproof X”. After the upgrade, I restarted and when it got to the point of starting X, the monitor stopped getting a signal. I was able to ctrl+alt+F# to a command line, so I checked my xorg.conf and saw it was using the nv driver, which worked in the past to at least get me into Gnome, even though 3D rendering isn’t supported by those drivers. I switched it to vesa and restarted gdm, and instead of getting no singal, I got a black screen with a flashing cursor. I ended up having to use Lynx to download the official nvidia drivers and got it working.
Maybe it has something to do with compiz enabled by default? But it seems like then I should have at least been able to get to the gdm login screen.
That happened to me with the Dapper -> Edgy upgrade as well. Unlike you, however, I had no idea how to resolve the issue, being the Linux noob that I am.
On that particular day that was the only machine I had running here at home, so I couldn’t very well get online and research a solution either.
In the end, I just ended up wiping the machine and re-installing Edgy, which worked the second time around. No idea why, but I finally had a working machine, up until Fiesty at least :/
Don’t get me wrong, I really love Ubuntu. I’d probably love it even more if I knew more about Linux, though, because even though Ubuntu is widely regarded as the best entry-level and user-friendly distro, it still has a very long way to go before it’s ready for the average home user.
Oh, I forgot to mention something about my Ubuntu usage that perhaps some people might find interesting.
Probably 95% of the time I’m using Ubuntu, it’s on a machine in my home office either through SSH (whenever possible) or through NXClient when I need to have a windowed interface.
I nearly always run the bots over an SSH terminal since they are console applications that spit out status messages to let me know what’s going on.
SSH works extremely well in this case, and performance is (usually) fantastic. I love that I can have a dedicated machine for the bots running a free operating system that has excellent performance on an old Toshiba laptop that I acquired from a friend for $100 because he spilled soda on the keyboard and 50% of the keys don’t work. It’s old and (comparatively) slow and would NEVER run Windows with the kind of performance I’m seeing with Ubuntu.