However I noticed that for some reason it was marking the package called “texlive-fonts-recommended” for removal (apart from other packages). I went along with the suggested removal, but made a mental note of this.

I am using LaTeX quite heavily these days (I am supposedly writing a paper and my thesis). Hence I noticed immediately after the upgrade that simple LaTeX documents would not compile anymore and throw up the following error:

$ latex thesis.tex
[snip]
(/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex/psnfss/ot1ptm.fd)
kpathsea: Running mktextfm ptmr7t
mktextfm: Running mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t
This is METAFONT, Version 2.71828 (Web2C 7.5.6)

kpathsea: Running mktexmf ptmr7t
! I can't find file `ptmr7t'.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t

Please type another input file name
! Emergency stop.
<*> ...:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t

Transcript written on mfput.log.
grep: ptmr7t.log: No such file or directory
mktextfm: `mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ptmr7t' failed to make ptmr7t.tfm.
kpathsea: Appending font creation commands to missfont.log.

! Font OT1/ptm/m/n/12=ptmr7t at 12.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not foun
d.
<to be read again>
relax
l.56 \begin{document}

? x
No pages of output.
Transcript written on thesis.log.

Clearly there was something wrong with the fonts subsystem of TeX/LaTeX. I tried to correct this by (recalling my mental note) installing the “texlive-fonts-recommended” package:

$ sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended

This fixed the problem and I am back to my thesis. Just to check, I tried removing (purging) the package, and the errors returned. Installing the package again fixed it again, as expected. This sure sounds like a bug (removal of a required package during upgrade). If more people have faced this problem, then leave a comment/ trackback here and we should file this as a bug. I don’t have the (mental) bandwidth for doing the bug-filing now, hence this informal report.

What was surprising was that even though the disk was being written to almost continuously, the disk space was not filling up! This is when we have chosen not to have disk quotas on the nfs server. If the disk was getting filled-up, it would have choked that RAIDed home partition in little time.

Strange.

I tried it out on Ubuntu Edgy. Installation was as simple as a dpkg -i picasa.deb. Upon starting it however, I saw the following issues:

• It follows symbolic links while scanning for photographs. This meant that I got multiple copies of entire trees! Bad. Fixed this by (yuk!) temporarily deleting the symbolic links (I could afford to do this).
• A process called “explorer.exe” takes up almost 100% CPU for as long as Picasa runs, even when it is idle! A little bit of googling revealed that this is a known problem [2]. Fixed it by forcing Picasa to use a particular version of the dbus libraries as advised in the thread on GoogleGroups [2].

[1] http://picasa.google.com/linux
[2] http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux/browse_thread/thread/d06c8f862c07aa57

oldserver:~# mysqldump -p --add-drop-database --complete-insert --create-options --extended-insert --lock-all-tables --all-databases > old-server.sql
oldserver:~# scp old-server.sql root@newserver:

newserver:~# mysql -u root -p < old-server.sql

Got the following error on starting mysqld:

Starting MySQL database server: mysqld.
/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES)'

Of course! Migrating the “mysql” database caused the credentials for the debian-sys-maint user (according to mysql) on the new server to be overwritten. The password for this system user is stored as plain-text in the file /etc/mysql/debian.cnf.

So I used the value given in that file (current password for the system user) and updated the password for the mysql user of the same name. That fixed it.

"Warning: locale not supported by Xlib, locale set to C"

So I did some digging and concluded that (surprize surprize!) Xlib does not yet support the en_IN locale The problem can be solved by editing /etc/environment and changing en_IN.UTF-8 etc. to en_US.UTF-8.

PID PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
28711 25 0 895M 800M 7644 R 99.0 79.4 30634m 1 emacs

Emacs hogging 800MB resident memory and 99% of the CPU! I wonder what it is up to

The results turned out to be pretty accurate for me!

	Ubuntu	( http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ )
	Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. Ubuntu includes more than 1,000 pieces of software, starting with the Linux kernel version 2.6 and Gnome 2.10, and covering every standard desktop application from word processing and spreadsheet applications to internet access applications, web server software, email software, programming languages and tools and of course several games.

	Debian	( http://www.debian.org/ )
	Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian GNU/Linux provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 15490 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

There is still the matter of files (and temporary backups!) from an old installation cluttering the installation tree, but it is bearable given the smooth untar-and-visit-setup-directory-from-browser upgrade process.

Apparently, it took more effort to put in a we-are-down-for-maintenance page than to do the meat of the upgrade work.

There were some loose ends to be tied up, but those were mainly due to the need to migrate customizations that we have done to the phpWebSite code itself.