johnbarrytech.com

Upgraded to Jaunty Jackalope this week.
Had a minor issue with my rig. See, my PC currently does not return from sleep ever ever ever with an internet connection. This is, I suspect, a hardware issue. It happens both in Vista and in Linux.

The last time I was logged into the Ubuntu side of the world I’d been troubleshooting it in a variety of ways. Shutting off IPV6 (some known issues w/Firefox in Ubuntu), looking through the init.d files for any clues, scouring logfiles and the internet trying to get a direct hit, googling my hardware setup to see if anyone else has run into it. . . nothing.
One of the things I was doing was attempting to create a reproduction at will for the bug, which involved tweaking some power settings to test for it. I promptly forgot about tweaking these settings until . . .

11 minutes into my upgrade to Jaunty Jackelope, my power management kicks in and sleeps.
Which causes the internet connection to die inexplicably.
Which means when I log into Ubuntu again the next morning, I see a failed install and 982 packages to update.

Ubuntu is only nominally Linux at this point, however, and rather than forcing me to research and fix hundreds of potential errors, it just gracefully recovered by telling it to Upgrade again.

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One of the more interesting things Ubuntu does is allow a lot of alternatives to live in the same space without a significant amount of effort.
E.g. Java – in most linux installs, living with multiple java homes (say for Java 5 and Java 6) will cause you a few headaches scripting opportunities to switch these up.
With Ubuntu, however, there’s some handy dandy commands that do this for you:

sudo update-java-alternatives -l

and

sudo update-alternatives --config java

This takes out most of the pain and suffering of swapping between java and javac.
More info is here but it seems to need an update, as it’s a few versions behind. (we’re in java 6 with Jaunty, for example)
I still can’t get stupid Maven + Hibernate to work on this godforsaken development environment.
Currently hunting down what the heck po2xml is and why I don’t have it. The Good Times Are Killing Me. . .