Upgrading Shotwell to 0.18.1 in Ubuntu 12.04

Officially, Shotwell 0.18 is not supported on Ubuntu 12.04 and at first I was a little disappointed that the folks over at Yorba would drop support of an LTS that still has about three years of support to go before being end of life. But, looking at how the newer versions are built, I understand the reason: the newest version of Shotwell depends on packages that the Ubuntu team will not be making available for 12.04, meaning for those of us who aren't ready to jump into the next release (LTS or otherwise) are effectively "stuck" on older versions of many software packages.

With many applications, this is really not that big of a deal. In the case of Shotwell though, Flickr made a change that broke uploading with older versions of Shotwell. This was fixed in 0.18.1, meaning officially its either upgrade your 12.04 LTS release or deal with no Flickr uploading. Alternatively, you can install from source with my instructions below to get the current version of Shotwell running on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

For this to work, we will need four PPA's setup in order to install all the prerequisite packages that Shotwell will need when we compile it from source. All of the steps below (save downloading the source archive and uncompressing it) will be run from a terminal session (CTRL + ALT + T will bring up a terminal). First we will need to add the following four PPA's to your system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ricotz/testing
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vala-team/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yorba/ppa

After the four PPAs have been added, run sudo apt-get update and then install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install valac gee-0.8 webkitgtk-3.0 desktop-file-utils libgconf2-dev libgexiv2-dev libglib2.0-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev libgudev-1.0-dev libexif-dev libgphoto2-2-dev libraw-dev librest-dev libsoup2.4-dev libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev m4 libjson-glib-dev gnome-doc-utils

Many other packages will get upgraded at the same time from the PPAs we installed, let them update as well (we'll need them to compile Shotwell). The webkitgtk-3.0 package is quite large (close to 500MB) so this part will take a bit to download and install.

At his point, if you haven't done so already - download the source tarball and extract it. For me, I simply saved it in Downloads to make it easy. From our terminal change into the recently extracted folder: cd Downloads/shotwell-0.18.1

Next we will run the following commands in sequence, letting each previous command finish before entering the next one:

sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

Once this is done you will have Shotwell 0.18.1 on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. I have noticed this may cause some issues with the Ambiance Theme (it did for me), this was solved by upgrading the light-themes package. I used the Synaptic Package Manager to do the update (which showed that the light-themes package had an upgrade available) and after a reboot, things were back in place looking they way I would expect.


 Keep in mind, that this is an unsupported (by either the Shotwell developers or the Ubuntu developers) way to upgrade and may cause system instability.

Blessings,

Jesse

Customizing Xubuntu with Remastersys

As I did with the base Ubuntu 12.04, I wanted to create a customized version of Xubuntu 12.04. The first step was similar to my Ubuntu customization with a removal of unwanted default software and installation of my custom set.

While Xubuntu by default comes with some lighter weight programs such as Abiword and Gnumeric, I am more interested in the more feature rich LibreOffice Suite. Along with Abiword and Gnumeric: Pidgin, Transmission, Xchat, Gmusicbrowser and Parole get the ax for my application set.

The new applications include the aforementioned LibreOffice as well as Quadrapassel,  GIMP 2.8 (From PPA), Hugin, Darktable (From PPA), Openshot Video Editor (From PPA), Banshee, RipperX, DVD Styler, gLabels, Audacity, Lucky Backup, WinFF and Shotwell. This rounds out the same software set installed on the Ubuntu Photo customization.

After customizing the XFCE environment, I had run the Remastersys program (as detailed in previous posts on Customizing Ubuntu) and when I went to test the ISO none of my customizations stuck - the default Xubuntu desktop and panel structure was back. After some research and trial and error I did the following to get my configurations to stick:

I copied my user configuration files located at ~./config/xfce4/ to /etc/xdg/xfce4/ & /etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu/xfce4.  After a reboot of the VM I created everything, I lost some the color theme and icon set settings. Changed those back and all was good. Next I copied  ~./config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce4-panel.xml to /etc/xdg/xdg-xubuntu/xfce4/panel/default.xml (overwriting the existing default.xml file). Lastly I copied the contents of ~./config/ to /etc/skel and the final ISO tested and booted as expected with all customizations in place. Below is a screen shot of my customized setup.

Customized Xubuntu 12.04 LTS

I have uploaded my custom Xubuntu ISO to my Sourceforge project page (link)  to go with my Ubuntu customizations. This version includes all Ubuntu system updates as of 11/22/13 and is 64Bit only.

Next steps for my photography geared Ubuntu/Xubuntu customizations include custom wallpapers, splash screens and maybe even a few icons. Don't know when that will be a reality at this point though, but that is what I would like to do next.

Blessings,

Jesse

Transferring a Virtual Machine From Xenserver to Hyper-V

Exporting a Virtual Machine from Xenserver and then importing it into Hyper-V is not officially supported from any documentation I can find on-line. If you have need for this conversion, and your Virtual Disks are in VHD format, this is really quite simple. The below tutorial will walk you through the steps I took to move a VM from Xenserver to Hyper-V. I have not tested this with virtual disk formats other than the VHD format, so other scenarios are untested and unknown to work or not.

First step: In XenCenter, export the target VM (VM must be shutdown to export) with the OVF/OVA option and be sure to not choose the option to create a single OVA file. Importing to Hyper-V will not work with the single OVA file export. All the remaining default options are fine, choose to verify the export if you desire.

Second step: On the Hyper-V host, create a folder on the hard drive where you will want your VM's files to live. Once the folder is created, copy the VHD and OVF file from the first step to this folder (The VHD file will be named with a large string of letters and numbers).

Third step: In your Hyper-V manager, create a new Virtual Machine and name it as desired. For the VM destination, select the folder created in the second step that contains the VHD and OVF files. Assign the memory and network options and for the virtual disk, select the exported VHD from the above step.

Fourth step: Adjust and fine tune the remaining settings (virtual processors etc...) and then power it up, your all done!

I have tested this by exporting VM's from Xenserver 6.0.2 and 6.1 and importing them to Hyper-V 2012 running in full Server 2012 hosts.

Blessings,

Jesse

Customizing Ubuntu Part 3: Testing the ISO

Now that we have created the ISO with Remastersys, it is time to test it out to see how it worked. But before we can test the ISO, we will have to get it off of the VirtualBox VM and onto the main host computer (which will then be installed in VirtualBox for testing). First, we will install the VirtualBox guest additions on our host machine. I installed the virtualbox-guest-utils from Synaptic (and the associated ones it will install with it). After that, we will created a share in the VirtualBox VM settings, which for this exercise I named public (and also use the public folder location as the shared folder).

Now in the guest, we will have to install the virtualbox-guest-utils package before we will be able to mount the vboxsf share that points to our host system. Once installed we will then create a directory to be the mount point of our share. From the terminal run "sudo mkdir /mnt/share" to create the share folder. This directory is where we will be copying the ISO file to from our guest VM. From with in the guest I ran the following command from the terminal to mount the vbox share: "sudo mount -t vboxsf public /mnt/share" where public is the name I gave the share created in the VM settings on the host system and /mnt/share is the mount location we created on the guest. From inside the /home/remastersys/remastersys directory I copied the ISO and MD5 file via the command line with the command "sudo cp custom-dist.iso /mnt/share" (again with .md5 custom-dist.iso.md5) and now the customized ISO is on the host machine and ready to test.You can use your graphical file manager to do this, but will need to load the file manager with root permissions to be able to copy the file over - I found it easier to just type in the commands on the terminal.

Now for the moment of truth - testing the Live CD in VirtualBox. First thing I noticed upon boot is that you are not greeted with the pretty graphics you see in the regular Ubuntu CD, just a text menu. No worries though, booting into the Live environment worked great even though it didn't auto login but all you had to do was type "liveuser" (the user name I had used for this experiment) at the LightDM screen and hit enter on the password field (for no password). The user name is also shown in the upper left of the login screen for reference. Default session was GNOME Classic and logging in I was greeted with the different wallpaper I had chosen and an install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS icon on the desktop.

Live session works great, now its time to reboot and run the installer directly and see how everything installs. The installer runs just like you would expect from Ubuntu and worked with out a hitch, I created my new test user and set auto login to yes and away it went. Once completed, reboot and we are in business. Everything worked the way I had hoped and I even created a test user in the VM environment, logged out and logged in with the new test user. As expected and hoped, new users are set to GNOME Classic by default.

A very successful experiment that leads to an up to date customized Ubuntu install - one that I think represents a more sane desktop and one that would be easier for the average user to learn. This setup is one I would be more than happy to distribute to friends or family wanting to see what a Linux experience would be like. After a little more fine tuning of the ISO, I will be uploading my customized version on-line for download if anyone is interested. Any changes should be pretty easy from here on out as I can install the original base customization in a Virtual Machine and then update from there and recreate the ISO.

Blessings,

Jesse

Customizing Ubuntu Part 2: Remastersys

Now that we have our customized Ubuntu system set up and up to date its time to install and begin the Remastersys setup. Before we tackle that though we are going to take care of the last little bit of house cleaning from the initial setup. First we will run (from terminal) "sudo apt-get autoremove" to clear out any old packages that are no longer needed and then we will disable auto login (as is default on the install) for our originally created user as the instructions on the Remastersys page are very clear to not use auto-login. After that we will remove old kernel files with Synaptic Package manger to free up space. Once we have Remastersys installed we'll clear out the Firefox cache just for good measure.

Installing was simple, I just followed the Synaptic Version of their install instructions on their Ubuntu page. The only difference was the packages didn't show up after just doing a reload in Synaptic, so I opened a terminal and ran "sudo apt-get update" and then found and installed Remastersys and Remastersys-gui from Synaptic.

Now that we have Remastersys installed, its time to open up the GUI version and start our ISO creation. You will find the program under the System Tools - Administration menu and will be asked for you password upon load. Once loaded, we will first choose the configure button to set up some basic options such as live user name and live CD name. After that we will choose the User settings option to copy all settings so as to be default for all users in our new customized ISO.

Next we will go back to the main Remastersys menu and Choose Distribution to start the creation of our ISO. Once you start this process, you will need to be patient and let the system be while Remastersys does its work. All told I think it may have taken about half hour or so to create my ISO that ended up at 1.1GB total.

Next step (and next blog entry) will be getting the ISO off the Virtual Machine and onto my main system for testing. Stay tuned.

Blessings,

Jesse

Customizing Ubuntu Part 1: System Install and Software Configuration

As I mentioned in a previous post, I always wanted to try and make a customized version of Ubuntu with my favorite applications and customized settings. This appears to be made simple using the Remastersys tool and I am setting out to give it a go. The first step in my customized system will be getting the base system in place and getting everything modified to the desired look and feel. For this install I am starting with an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit install in Virtual Box (Virtual Box did not boot the 64bit version). Once the base system is installed we'll go through the software list and start removing what we don't want and/or need and installing the programs we do want. Once we have the updated system with custom settings and software set, it will be time to start creating the new installation media.

Before getting started why Ubuntu? I was first introduced to the Ubuntu Linux distribution while working at a middle school after several years of a bit of a Linux hiatus. I was impressed from day one with how well it was done. The installer was a one CD simplified setup, a breath of fresh air compared to the four CD not so friendly install procedure of the last Linux distributions I had used. And for all the things people may find to criticize Ubuntu's direction, it is still a very well done distribution that has great hardware support and works great.

And now lets get to business, first we are going to install two packages: Synaptic Package Manager & Classic Gnome (gnome-session-fallback). Classic GNOME because I really don't like Unity (wanted to, and tried - but just don't) or GNOME 3 - The classic look and feel is what I want in my system. Synaptic Package Manger because it is a very useful and fast way to manage your software, which will come in handy as we remove default applications we won't be using and add additional applications we do want.

After installing the Classic GNOME session we want it to be the global default, so we will edit the lightdm.conf file located in the /etc/lightdm directory. All we will do is change the line that reads "user-session=ubuntu" to "user-session=gnome-classic" which will hopefully make it the default for all users once we have our customized ISO. We will also log out and log back in with the default user created during install so as to work in the classic mode. We will also disable the overlay scroll bars with the following command entered in the terminal: "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface ubuntu-overlay-scrollbars false" and then we will be off.

With Synaptic in place we can remove a laundry list of applications quickly and in one batch instead of typing up a long list in the terminal or going through the Software Center (which can be a bit slow going). Gone are the following programs: Remmina Desktop Sharing & Vino as a remote desktop application is not really needed for home use. Empathy, Gwibber & Transmission BitTorent are gone as I don't user or care for any of the social networking nonsense and don't need a BitTorent client either. And lastly, RhythmBox which will be replaced by Banshee - this is a personal preference that began when I couldn't get RhythmBox to manage my wife's iPod shuffle and was able to do so just fine with Banshee. It is what I am used to and like now, so Banshee gets the nod.

After our mass removal of extra and unwanted applications its time to add the ones we do want for this customized Ubuntu System. For games, we are just going to add Quadrapassel (a Tetris clone) to add one more classic to the few already available in the regular install. We will also add LuckyBackup, Hugin Panorama Creator, FileZilla, Skype (Internet download, not in the repositories), gLabels Label Designer, Banshee, DVD Styler, RipperX, WinFF, Ubuntu-restricted-extras & Libdvdcss2 (from the Medibuntu repository for DVD Playback). gLabels is a great little program to create CD Label designs to be printed on CD labels available at most office supply stores. Luckybackup is an rsync front end that I use to backup my hard drive to an external USB drive. Hugin is great software for creating photographic panoramas, FileZilla for FTP access, Skype is self explanitory, DVD Styler for creating custom DVDs, RipperX to copy CDs to your local computer and WinFF in case you may need to convert video files (probably will for DVD Styler).

In addition to the programs above, four will be installed through separate PPAs to ensure we have the most up to date versions. One of the downsides to the LTS model and Ubuntu's rapid release philosophy is that some programs have older versions in the repositories that don't get updated, or don't get updated for a long time. From PPA we will be installing GIMP 2.8, OpenShot, Darktable & Pithos. Gimp 2.8 really improved and made GIMP more palatable for general users and is not available in the 12.04 repositories. Pithos is a native Pandora radio client for Linux that is very handy to have.

In addition to the software included in my custom design, I also have the following installed on my system that many might find worth installing: Pingus (Lemmings style game with Penguins), Blender, Dia, KeePass2, Audacity, ISO Master & PuddleTag.

After our software install binge, its time to run system updates and customize the look of the applications menu. Once that is done, it will be time to install and begin using the Remastersys program to create our distributable installation ISO.

Next step, Remastersys - stay tuned!

Blessings,

Jesse

Using Clonezilla to Clone From a Larger Hard Drive to a Smaller Drive

Officially, Clonezilla does not support cloning from a larger hard drive to a smaller one. While this may seem counter-intuitive there are some situations where you may want or need to do this. Such as with my job when images have been created from systems with 500GB drives and the new systems come with 250GB drives, or when going from a large traditional drive to a smaller SSD.If you are in this situation, I have found a way to get this done. We will have to do some prep work on the image (and re-create it) and then some additional prep on the destination drive before final imaging.

To prep what will be the new image we will be creating a new one (if its an already created image) and we will need to shrink the main partition first. You may need to restore your original image on the larger, original disk first and go from there. I use Parted Magic (which also has Clonezilla built into it) to boot the system and shrink the partition using GParted, making sure to give myself a good amount of flex room - we can always grow the partition on the new disk later. In my test I shrunk the main partition of a two partition Windows 7 drive down to about 100GB (160GB total drive capacity) to be able to fit it on a 120GB SSD. You will also want to note sizes of all partitions on the drive, in this case there was the 100MB system/boot partition and the larger main partition. After the partition has been shrunk and everything is smaller than the new destination drive, reboot the system and let the  operating system boot and run its file system/drive check - if you skip this test CloneZilla will fail when we get to making an image from the newly shrunk drive. Once the checks are finished, reboot the system again and boot into the Clonezilla environment. Once we start up Clonezilla, set the options desired after choosing to work with the device-image option. When asked what mode to use, we will be choosing "saveparts - Save_local_partitions_as_an_image" and then go through the rest of the option sets, making sure to check all the partitions on the disk.

Once the new image is saved and after installing the new, smaller disk we will again boot into Parted Magic (or GParted Live, or a similar tool), load up gParted and edit the partitions on the new drive. First (if it is a new drive) we will need to create a partition table (I did an msdos table for this restoration) and re-create the partition theme from the old drive. To create an aligned partition (critical for an SSD) create a new partition with 2MiB of space preceding it (in my case I created the 100MB system/boot partition for the Windows 7 dive I was moving over to a smaller drive) apply the change then resize/move the partition and change the 2MiB preceding space to 1mb. After that, create the next partition - again starting with 2MiB preceding space and then resizing/moving with 0 preceding space (always choose align to MiB). Repeat these steps for each additional partition. You may have to mark the appropriate partition with a boot flag either in this step or after running Clonezilla.

Now that the new drive is prepared, we will again boot Clonezilla and this time we will be restoring the recently created image. When we are offed the mode option, we will be choosing "restoreparts - Restore_an_image_to_local_partitions." Set our options of source/destination when prompted and away we go. Once finished reboot and you should now be all good to go. Your operating system may run through its file system checks again and you will want to expand the partition to fill any empty space.

There you have it, a tested procedure to clone a larger drive to a smaller drive using Clonezilla.

Blessings,

Jesse