I had a request to run qdrant database, and I didn't want to do it under docker, due to all the extra nonsense that entails. So having installed it, basically just dropping a binary on the filesystem, I wanted to run it as a systemd service, under a specific user, qdrant.

On the qdrant site, they don't give an example, so I thought it would be quickest to ask Google Gemini, which quickly squirted out a reply. So I activated it and was confused when it wouldn't start. About an hour later, I figured out that the inline comments which Gemini had put in the systemd service files are not allowed. And when telling Gemini about this it cheerfully admitted that it knew about this all along:

Even though I 'shared' the finding, I'm skeptical that Gemini will learn from it, so here is the working qdrant systemd file for anyone interested.

[Unit]
Description=Qdrant Vector Database
After=network.target

[Service]
# sudo adduser --system --no-create-home --group qdrant
User=qdrant
Group=qdrant

ExecStart=/usr/bin/qdrant --config-path /etc/qdrant/config.yaml

# Put all data in here, please
WorkingDirectory=/qdrant

# Increase open file limit for better performance
LimitNOFILE=65536

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

CherryTree claims to be able to import from Notecase. However I tried various experiments, exporting to HTML, to Notecase HTML, plain text, MD, etc, but I couldn't get it to import any of the notes nested as originally intended. I could have sat there and dragged them around with the mouse until they were in the right place, and that would have been do-able, but a boring couple of hours. So I looked further.

I found mention in the Github Issues page of CherryTree that the previous version of CherryTree was able to correctly import the notes structure from NoteCase. But that since the developer is in the process of migrating the code from python to c++ (I think), then that functionality had been abandoned until he can re-implement it. I tried to find old versions of the app as flatpak, snap, and AppImage, but there weren't any. So here's the convoluted story of how I got it to work.

• Download Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop and install it as a virtual machine in VirtualBox
• Install the relevant CherryTree 0.34 version from here.
• Export from the current NoteCase file as a notecase ncd. (ncdb and ncz formats don't work). In order to get Notecase to start in 30 day trial mode I needed to first remove the ~/.notecase/ directory contents.
• Open the ncd file in CherryTree 0.34 on Ubuntu 16. Save as CherryTree .ctb format.
• Copy files back to main machine where they could be opened with a recent version of CherryTree.

OK, so now that's looking good, except all the notes are imported as rtf instead of plain text. Probably not a problem, but in my case it was, as I relied on monospace font for formatting in the originals, so I needed text format. The .ctb file format is in sqlite3, so I used dbeaver to examine it, and came up with the following SQL code to change all the rtf notes into txt notes.

# Strip rtf header and footer from note
UPDATE node SET txt = REPLACE(txt,'<?xml version="1.0" ?><node><rich_text>','') WHERE is_richtxt = "1";
UPDATE node SET txt = REPLACE(txt,'</rich_text></node>','') WHERE is_richtxt = "1";
# Set flags
UPDATE node SET syntax = "plain-text" WHERE is_richtxt = "1";
UPDATE node SET is_richtxt = "0" WHERE is_richtxt = "1";

And that was that. Probably more work than I initially intended, but the journey is part of the fun.

After that, on running apt-get update, you get a message like this:

W: GPG error: http://volatile.debian.org etch/volatile Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY DFD993306D849617

So, take the pubkey number off the end and do this with it.

sudo gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys DFD993306D849617

sudo gpg --armor --export DFD993306D849617 > new.key

sudo apt-key add new.key

I then got a message saying "The following packages have been kept back: clamav clamav-daemon clamav-freshclam"

By using

 sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

(NB aptitude rather than apt-get) the new packages are downloaded. However they're still not up to the level that ClamAV is telling me to upgrade to.

So, more searching. It turns out the most up to date Ubuntu Repositories are from this page … https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-clamav/+archive/ppa. In my case the solution was to add these lines to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-clamav/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-clamav/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

And then run through the pubkey process above, with the different pubkey id number. Later distros might get away with the add-apt-key command, but I was running hardy (8.04) on this particular server.

Anyway, for example, last time I upgraded my two laptops from 8.10 to 9.04, a lot of things broke, and I was hurting for a long time. In fact one of the laptops never really got straight. This was irritating for me, but as I had another laptop to use for my main work, it wasn't a major annoyance. But I can imagine if you only have one machine and the sound doesn't work on it, for example, it would leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

So this time, I started with the Thinkpad R51e, which is my spare laptop. I have the /home directory mounted on a separate partition, which makes things really easy. Basically you just blow away the main OS partition, and then remount the your data partition at /home, preserving all your data. (OK its a little more complicated than that, but I'm not blogging about that right now).

What I am blogging about is the complete success of the upgrade. The Thinkpad R51e works flawlessly. The sound, which never worked previously is now fine. The random freezes which I put down to some sort of ACPI weirdness, now don't occur. The wireless, which was working OK, failed to break. Marvellous. So if you've got a Thinkpad R51e out there, do yourself a favour and upgrade it. I'd recommend the re-install rather than the in-place upgrade.

Emboldened, I also tried it on my Dell Mini 10v. As this was a new install, and I hadn't had any problems with 9.04, I did an in-place upgrade. Also running fine. Now … should I do it on my main work machine ….?

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

Well what you're effectively doing is giving Google a lot of information for free. Which irritates me. All I really need is this,

http://www.google.com.ph/search?q=banana

and if they really want to know more about me, then they're welcome to go digging through their logs.

OK its a minor irritation, but one that we can fix! I understand that Ubuntu does it as part of a deal with Google, but there's no reason why we can't take matters into our own hands and change the defaults.

So, the file you need to find is this one: /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml, and you'll need to open it in an editor as root.  So:

sudo gedit /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/google.xml

If you use another search engine as your default, then choose a different file, of course. With this file open in an editor,  remove the offending lines. In the case above, its

  <Param name="ie" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="oe" value="utf-8"/>
  <Param name="aq" value="t"/>
  <!-- Dynamic parameters -->
  <Param name="rls" value="{moz:distributionID}:{moz:locale}:{moz:official}"/>
  <MozParam name="client" condition="defaultEngine" trueValue="firefox-a" falseValue="firefox"/>

Save the file, restart Firefox, and we're good to go.  Now the problem is that whenever you upgrade Firefox, the problem reappears, so you might want to make a copy of the correct file, and write a script to replace it every time you upgrade.  I always manage to forget where the file is, so I'm blogging this for my own benefit as much as anyone elses …

Also, Ubuntu has an aggressive schedule, which means release are made every 6 months. I believe the purpose of the April (.04) releases is to introduce new features, and the October (.10) release is to refine them and fix any breaks. Compare this approach to Windows or Macintosh, where releases are made around every three years, and you can appreciate that releasing little and often means that changes are more diffuse and less apparent.

I performed the Upgrade option from 8.04 to 8.10, as I'd only just installed 8.04 on this machine. If I'd been running it for a year or more, I probably would have done a clean install, just to blow away the crud, but this time I just clicked the button and left it to go. Its a good idea to leave yourself plenty of time for this, not only because downloading the packages can take a while, but also because the chances are that something will break in the upgrade. Its also worth waiting a week or two before upgrading, as that gives people a chance to discover problems and post solutions to them online.

Downloading all the packages took around 12 hours on my crappy connection, so I left it to go overnight. If you do this, make sure you get to the part where it actually says its downloading the package files, otherwise you'll wake up in the morning with a dialog box on your screen, and zero packages downloaded. Luckily it will still roll back to 8.04 at this point, so its not the end of the world.

OK, so having run the upgrade, the first thing to do is Reboot, and then put all your third party repositories back in place. I did this by opening System > Administration > Software Sources and physically visiting the URIs listed in each place. If there was an 'intrepid' directory on the site, I'd change hardy to intrepid in the Edit box. If not, then I'd leave it on hardy. After this, a big global Re-check and Install Updates is in order, just to check you have the latest and greatest of everything. One more reboot and its time to look around. A few things had broken, but first, lets look at the great successes.

First of all I was enormously pleased to see that my Dell Vostro 1400 wireless was working. Properly! I checked in Hardware Drivers, and Windows Wireless Drivers and neither of those were active, so the new kernel was properly supporting my wireless. This, I feel is one of the most important enhancements for the 8.10 release: the more wireless chipsets that 'just work' the better the chances Ubuntu will get adopted.

Dual Head also worked. Ironically the previous day I'd just spent a couple of hours trying to get this to work on 8.04, and on 8.10 it worked without any fiddling: just fire up the System > Preferences > Screen Resolution applet and it detects the two monitors and lets you configure them how you wish. They've achieved that by doing away with the settings from /etc/X11/xorg.conf. However that meant I had to look elsewhere to get my TouchPad Toggling Script to work.

I hear the Network Manager is a lot better now as it can configure GPRS connections as well as wireless and wired connections. However I'm using wicd for now, so I'll look at that later. Also of note in this area is that networks configured via NetworkManager are brought up during boot, which is handy if you need to do things from the command line before logging into your desktop.

The Guest Session is interesting, allowing you to lend your computer to someone in a secure manner — all settings are temporary and disappear after logging out, and there is no access to the file system, so theoretically no damage can be done. This didn't work at first for me, perhaps as a consequence of upgrading rather than installing fresh. Initially I was just presented with a login screen (which clearly a Guest Account shouldn't need). However, by running the script from the command line

/usr/share/gdm/guest-session/guest-session-launch

I was able to make it work, and subsequently its worked from the button as well.

Another security feature is having an encrypted Private folder set up in a ~/Private directory. This is automatically locked and unlocked as you log in and out. As a sidenote its not entirely secret as the encrypted files can be accessed in your ~/.Private directory (ie with a dot). These can't be read, but the file names are the same as the unencrypted versions, so best not to call them anything too explicit: secret_plan_to_take_over_the_world.doc for example.

To set this up you have to do some work. Type:

sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils

ecryptfs-setup-private

In terms of actual software updates there hasn't been much as previously noted. GIMP has been upgraded to the 2.6 release which has a much nicer interface. VLC has a facelift, but it seems that some of the video encoding capability has been stripped out. Still trying to fix this. Virtual Box upgraded fine, and even compiled its own modules for the new kernel, so that was pretty seamless. Open Office 3, as noted elsewhere, was skipped in this version, but I'm sure it will be along soon.

Other tweaks: Totem can now play content from the BBC, although most of it seems to only be available in the UK. What's the point of that? Clam AV is now available, and hopefully they'll make a decent interface for it soon. And if you could turn on real time on-access scanning at will, that would be cool. Maybe next time.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the way things are going. The whole point for me is to make this easy to use rather than following Vista's lead into confusing user interfaces and bloat, and the Ubuntu developers seem to remain focused on the things which will help them gain user share.

The internal "Screen Resolution" application seems to consistently get all the settings wrong, and has never managed to guess the correct resolutions for monitors. Sometimes it doesn't detect them at all. Other times when I try to manually set the resolutions, it refuses as my instruction doesn't match its guess. The real magic seems to depend on a combination of xrandr, xorg.conf, grandr and a lot of poking and fiddling. In this case it seems relatively straightforward.

The first thing you have to do is tell your xorg.conf the size of the virtual screen. This is the size of the maximum resolution of the screen when you've added both displays together. In my example, I have a laptop screen of 1280×800 on the left and an external screen of 1024×768 on the right. This makes the Virtual screen (1280+1024)x(800), so the virtual directive reads.

 SubSection "Display"

  Virtual         2304 800

 EndSubsection

In my case the SubSection wasn't already within the Screen section of my xorg.conf, so I created it by adding the three lines above. Time to restart X by logging out and in again.

Now when you use the Screen Resolution app, it should actually work: you can place the two screens side by side, uncheck the Clone Screens box and set the correct resolution and refresh rate for the monitors. The settings for the Vostro laptop screen are 1280×800 @ 60Hz. Great. No need for tinkering with xrandr or grandr.

Ubuntu Hardy 8.04

First of all, you need to edit your /etc/xorg.conf file, for which you'll need root privileges – use sudo.You just need to add one line in the input device section, which is the one in bold below. (Intrepid 8.10, see below)

Section "InputDevice"

        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"

        Driver          "synaptics"

        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"

        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"

        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"

        Option          "HorizEdgeScroll"       "0"

        Option          "SHMConfig"

EndSection

OK, now after you restart X, by logging out and in again, you can turn off the touchpad with

    synclient TouchpadOff=0

And on with

    synclient TouchpadOff=0

I put this together in a script which will look to see if it is on or off, and toggle it to the opposite.

if synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff | grep 1

then

    synclient TouchpadOff=0

else

    synclient TouchpadOff=1

fi

I attached the script to an icon in my toolbar using the Add to Panel > Launcher route. Now I just have to click to toggle it off and on.

Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Whatsit

While the script above still works, editing xorg.conf doesn't work any more, as Ubuntu is moving functionality out of that file. So, instead of that we create a file here.

sudo nano /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

and cut and paste the following into it, saving afterwards.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.HorizEdgeScroll" type="string">1</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

This file only works with Synaptics Touchpad driver. If you have another touchpad, the filename may be different. There are hundreds of other options which you can activate in this file, but the SHMConfig line is the one you need to allow the script to work.

OK, now you've done that, the commands and script above should work.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackass

…. it should work unless you upgrade to 9.04 that is. Now neither of those methods work for disabling the touchpad, which is causing me no end of irritation. So now there's a third solution which I discovered after finding the new touchpad control panel under System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad. In there there is a switch to turn off the touchpad, so I figured there must be a way to change this setting with gconftool. Here's what  came up with:

gconftool-2 –toggle /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/touchpad_enabled

This works from the commandline, in a script and even typed directly into a launcher button on your menubar for lightning fast toggling. Which is the only way to toggle.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Why do they have to change this every frigging version. OK, so back to a script into which the following is inserted.

if xinput list-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" | grep "Device Enabled" | grep 1

then

    xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 8 0

else

     xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 8 1

fi

Then assign this to a key (in my case F6) using System > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts. All seems to work again … until the next upgrade.

I've occasionally looked around the internet for such a tool and uncovered a couple of scripts and tools which don't quite work. I've even thought of writing my own script, but never quite got around to it.

But now the search is over. As part of  Ubuntu/Gnome Desktop there is a hidden feature. You might have come across it before and missed it. A casual glance in System > Admin > Network Tools and you'll find all your favourite network diagnostic tools. Ping, netstat, nslookup, dig, finger, whois, etc. Well nearly all of them: it doesn't have the excellent mtr, but that's another story. So … as someone who's normally got a command prompt open somewhere, and who's used to the command line, I took an initial look at Network Tools, filed it as "Potentially useful", and went back to my old command line ways.

But look a little closer:flip to the Ping tab, and under Tools, there is an option to "Beep on Ping". Simple but Glorious.

So, a few quick notes. The re-installation process was painless. I have my data on a separate /home partion, so I just backed that up to a separate USB hard disk (using partimage on a Gparted boot CD), and installed Ubuntu over the top of my Mandriva partition.I have to say the Ubuntu installer is a bit simpler than the Mandriva one when it comes to the business of disk partitioning.

It took a few minutes of jiggling to re-arrange the partitions once the install had finished, but then I was good to go. I took out some bits of software I didn't need, installed a few must-have applications so I could get on with my work, and finshed the rest of the day happy. In this case the fact that truecrypt had suddenly broken in Mandriva was the deciding factor, as I needed data on that partition to work: once I had that working on Ubuntu, which I have to say was seamless, then I was good to go.

Overnight I installed some more software and did an update to get the software up to date. I have a very slow connection so this kind of thing takes a few hours. I rebooted and everything was fine. For a few days.

But then last night after having worked all day, I switched my computer on again to play a DVD which was skipping on my standard DVD player. It took an age to boot up and wireless didn't work. Also everything was sluggish, taking sometimes two or three seconds to respond to a keypress. I played the DVD and went to bed, sulking.

I really couldn't understand why it was behaving like this all of a sudden. I hadn't done any kernel updates (RKUH!) in the last few days, which is my normal source of instability, and consequent insanity. I checked dmesg, and tracked it down to this section:

[ 33.957128] Probing IDE interface ide0...
[ 34.915447] hda: FUJITSU MHV2060AH, ATA DISK drive
[ 34.915591] hda: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4
[ 34.919261] hda: UDMA/100 mode selected
[ 34.922862] ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
[ 34.992563] Probing IDE interface ide1...
[ 35.302438] Clocksource tsc unstable (delta = 136417566 ns)
[ 35.306438] Time: acpi_pm clocksource has been installed.
[ 35.319400] hdc: UJDA750 DVD/CDRW, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
[ 35.319603] hdc: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4
[ 35.319706] hdc: UDMA/33 mode selected

After searching for a bit, I thought the "Clocksource tsc unstable" looked likely and it seemed that a few other people had been experiencing long boot times due to it. I added clocksource=hpet to my boot stanza, and bingo, boot is once again fast and wireless works like a dream.

So, although the fix was fast, once again I'm forced to ponder the question "Why did this suddenly happen?" My Thinkpad R51e has always caused me problems with Linux due to its 'special' hardware, but really, if I didn't change anything on the system, why should it suddenly start doing this to me? And if I was a normal guy-in-the-street user, how long do you think it might take me to fix this? Or indeed, to run scuttling back to Windows?