Linux Mint 13 (Maya)

So Linux Mint have released their latest version. 13. Maya with the Gnome offspring 'Mate' desktop or if you want to be on the edge of all things linux the 'cinnamon' offering. For me, I decided to upgrade from 11 (Katya) to 13 with Mate and at the same time upgrade to the latest Freenas version '8.0.4'. Here is my experience...

Firstly, I did not do this without a care in the world. My Linux box has been performing admirably over the last year or so, as has Freenas inside the virtual machine that launches on startup. Since moving to Freenas 8 with the ZFS pools I have never had an issue with the server or disk read/writes etc. I usually only reboot if an application install requires it or after weeks of continuous running the PC takes a bit of a wobbler. Basically, it was robust, more so than the PC at work that runs a much more common commercial OS. Say no more.

So, off I went. Step one was to ensure Freenas 8..0.4 would work off the bat with my configs from Mint 11. It did. Wahey!

Next, download and install Maya. Alongside Katya with dual boot to make transferring files between the OS's easily. Downloaded, .iso burned to DVD, reboot, install, grub bootloader install fails..bollox! Not to worry though, machine reboots to Katya and I go to the startup/bootloader app to change the settings such that I get time to select Maya at boot. I think I had made the boot menu time be short many months ago and this is why I didn't get the option to select OS on startup.

Note, in Maya the grub bootloader config wasn't available, but through package manager you can install 'startupmanager' and get back the app to play around with grub bootloader options.

Next step was the freenas install. First download the VirtualBox app using the software manager. Copy the machine from the old Katya partiion over to the new OS partition. Now the ZFS disks are not mounted by the native filesystem of Linux Mint, or at least they don't seem to be for me. So, the virtual machine needs to have the rawdisks created. For myself copying the raw disks over from the Katya install never worked. So for reference here is how I created my rawdisks again:

1. Using VBoxManage create the raw vmdk

> sudo VboxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename

                                          -rawdisk /dev/mydisk

Where target is a full path to the filename you want to use. The disk /dev/ location can be located by running the following command

> fdisk -l

2. I have had to change permissions on the rawdisk files such that VirtualBox can access them. This took 3 steps, firstly 'chmod' each file to 777. Secondly 'chown' to 666. Then, finally make sure that the local user is in the 'disk' group by navigating to 'Administration/Users & Groups' and adding the username. VirtualBox will now be able to access those vmdk files and read/write quite happily. A word of caution here though, adding the local user into the disk group gives all power in the world over those disks at a most fundamental level. As this is my computer sitting behind the firewall I think i'll be fine. But I will be looking for a more robust approach, like perhaps having the virtualBox machine be in the group as a user or something. We shall scour the web for answers....onwards to the next step.
3. Reconfigure the VM to use those newly created disks as shown below on SATA port 0/1.

3. Start the machine and hey presto everything is up and running! Note that this was much easier than when I tried to get it running under Katya, probably because I knew about step 2 which is critical!! The new devil animation is pretty sweet!

Now things since then have not been without problem. Well one problem to be precise which manifested itself in a couple of ways. The Katya release worked out the box for me with regard to sound and video. However Maya was running video (YouTube etc) at a superfast frame rate with no sound, and audio files could not be played at all. Add to this, Skype audio did not work. Some websearching indicated that the pulseAudio driver/mixer is, well. crap. I never had problems on Katya but without argument I uninstalled PulseAudio and installed ALSA instead:

>sudo apt-get autoremove pulseaudio

>sudo apt-get install gnome-alsamixer

>reboot

Following the reboot everything worked fine. So lesson learned, PulseAudio is crap! I should join the online campaigns to have the linux Mint team ditch it.

Next steps...to configure CIFS on Freenas again, with the correct user priveleges. Also need to sort out skype to load with the lib4vl drivers that are necessary to get webcams working and then perhaps i'll dabble with installing ownCloud which I was reading about today.