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Ubuntu 14.04? Are you plagued by these processes?

doublec+  1912  0.0  0.5 480936 16784 ?        Sl   13:01   0:00          _ /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-source-registry
doublec+  1938  0.0  1.6 1073612 49500 ?       Sl   13:01   0:00          _ /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory

What? evolution-source-registry? evolution-calendar-factory?

Me, I don't use Evolution. I use Thunderbird. And I don't use Gnome Contacts. I use the address book in Thunderbird.

Fortunately, there's a pretty simple way to get rid of these processes.

$ sudo aptitude remove libfolks-eds25 gnome-contacts evolution-data-server

Be sure to kill the processes yourself once the packages have been removed.

I applied a bunch of updates to my installation of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala this morning. Let it be known that I upgraded to Karmic from a clean install of Jaunty, and my root partition was once an ext3 file system turned into ext4. I returned from taking a shower to find the system had completely locked up, so I rebooted. Anyway, I got just past GRUB and received the following error:

24 : Attempt to access block outside partition

As it turns out, the GRUB Manual gives the following as a possible reason.

"This error is returned if a linear block address is outside of the disk partition. This generally happens because of a corrupt filesystem on the disk

So I inserted the Live CD and ran fsck.ext4 -f on the device in question, and no errors were found. Peculiar.

Some Google searching turned up this Launchpad issue, which in turn pointed me to a blog post called "Grub voodoo error no 13/24 and how do i fixed it" for a possible fix.

Allow me to quote from that post (thanks so much, Marius) the correct procedure to fix this beast in case anyone else runs into this little problem. Fill in /dev/sda with the correct device name for your disk containing the root partition.

$ sudo su
$ mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
$ mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
$ mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
$ mount --bind /dev/shm /mnt/dev/shm
$ mount -t proc none /mnt/proc
$ mount -t sysfs none /mnt/sys
$ grub-install /dev/sda --root-directory=/ --recheck

I rebooted and everything was fine; crisis averted.

In recent months, I've taken to spreading the love that is Ubuntu. 

For Christmas, I gifted it to my parents and installed it on their PCs.  My dad uses the Internet and checks his e-mail, my mom does some more power user things, like scanning documents, syncing music to her iPod Nano, and managing her photos (I even got her dated Windows Pocket PC syncing correctly).  They both enjoyed not having to pay to renew their security packages.

When Jaunty Jackalope came out, I made sure my friend Dustin got it installed—who had more malware infections on his Windows XP laptop than I've ever seen.  He was blown away by how simple the software installation process is, and he's now considering marriage with Compiz Fusion.  Alas, I couldn't get Planescape Torment working for him under Wine.

Deidre, one of the players in my tabletop roleplaying group, has requested a Live CD to try it out—soon she too will be one of us.

Not too long ago, I set up my friend Serge with a dual boot of Ubuntu on top of pre-existing Vista.  The only reason he even agreed to keep Vista there was because his Intel graphics chipset did not play well with WoW on Wine.

Serge's wife Cristi has been declaring that she's fed up with her Windows XP laptop and just today mentioned it's now unusable thanks to malware infections.  We have plans to get together soon to get her hooked up as well.  The best part—her direct words were: "I would like to destroy Windows forever with the IRON FIST OF UBUNTU JUSTICE!!"

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron came out yesterday. I meant to upgrade yesterday but, on a whim, I thought I'd install from scratch and live blog it. What follows is the result of that effort.

Did I mention I ordered the limited edition Hardy Heron t-shirt from the Canonical store? Because I did.

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