Over the last two days, in a frenzy of activity, I got some awesome done at work: using git and Vagrant, I finally got Cfengine to install packages in Ubuntu without asking me any goram questions. There were two bits involved:
Telling Apt to use old config files. This prevents it from asking for confirmation when it comes across your already-installed-with-Cfengine config file. Cfengine doesn't do things in a particular order, and in any case I do package installation once an hour -- so I might well have an NTP config file show up before the NTP package itself.
Preseeding, which I've known about for a while but have not had a chance to get right. My summer student came up with a script to do this, and I hope to be able to release it.
Now: Fully automated package installation FTMFW.
And did you know that Emacs can check your laptop battery status? I didn't.
This bit me in the ass today: my workstation's MAC address was suddenly changing to aa:00:04:00:0a:04. The problem turns out to be Decnet, which got added when I installed cmus. RAWR.
In Cfengine3, I had been setting up printers for people using lpadmin commands. Among other things, it used a particular PPD file for the local HP printer. It turns out that in Oneiric, those files are no longer present, or even available; judging by what I found on my laptop, the PPD file is (I think) generated automagically by /usr/share/cups/ppd-updaters/hplip-cups.
It's possible that I could figure this out for my new workstation. But right now, I don't think I can be bothered. I'm going to just set this up by hand, and hope that either I'll get a print server or I'll figure it out.
From deadmemes.net:
So...the best way to fix the pernicious issue of displaying /etc/motd to the end user (read: cat) was 1) to make a PAM module responsible for it, 2) get rid of the "old way" of updating it (cron job), and last but not least, 3) add a completely undocumented behavior (if /etc/motd is a symlink, it is dynamic) that contradicts the man page for said module.
I'm going back to blaming Ubuntu. I also need to step out of the room and have an aneurysm now.
With Grub 2, you can change the default menu entry without changing order by editing /boto/grub/grub.cfg. Edit "set default" line to be of the titles in /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
But in Ubuntu/Debian, you want to edit /etc/default/grub and change the appropriate line there, then run "update-grub".
In Unity, there is no easy, risk-free way of changing Unity settings. You can install Compiz Settings Manager but that will make baby Jesus cry:
I am an experienced Linux user, I've contributed to kernel and work on the Canonical OEM team; I only mention these facts to show my context, which is -- the other day, I did a fresh install of 11.10 on my laptop, and wanted to customize something (turning on focus-follows-mouse). I poked around in gnome-control-center for about 30 minutes before giving up and discovering the only way to do this was using ccsm.
After installing ccsm, I configured ffm, and then -- accidentally! -- my mouse cursor passed over the preferences button and the touchpad on my laptop registered a click.
Boom!
Unity session dead.
Holy crap, what a crock.