jgchristopher blog

My only gripes with KUbuntu Linux

I recently changed my GNU/Linux distribution from Mandriva to KUbuntu. I am a KDE fan and was growing increasingly annoyed with how slowly Mandriva(Mandrake) has been updating its versions.

I have been completely over joyed with KUbuntu since installation. It works flawlessly, and it even picks up on my thumb drive, something Mandrake has had a problem of doing in the last couple of releases.

Just this last week, I have found my first couple of complaints about KUbuntu. These are minor points and were some what easily rectified on my end.

I began to play with Ruby on Rails and, with the latest version of Rails they require the final release of Ruby 1.8.2 or higher. KUbuntu ships with the a version that was released just before the final so, (the latest version of) Rails didn't work out of the box. After rebuilding Ruby, and gems from scratch, I was on my way. The upcoming Breezy release will take care of this little problem.

The more annoying problem, and I say annoying because I wasted a lot of time on a new project that I have become a part of, is that the MySql version 4.0.23 with KUbuntu is configured to skip-innodb by default. I didn't catch this and spent some time going over unit tests that were changing values in a database, testing the values, and then rolling back all changes in the tearDown() method. Of course, since my MySQL configuration wasn't allowing innoDB tables, the rollbacks were not occurring and subsequent tests would fail.

I finally wised up and looked at the test db creation script and noticed that data was persisting when it shouldn't have. After commenting out the offending
skip-innodb line in my.cnf file. The unit tests magically began to work again.

Not sure why Ubuntu/KUbuntu ship with innodb support turned off?

*Update, the mysql 4.1 packages for Ubuntu/KUbuntu have innodb on by default.

posted by jgchristopher @ 8:32 AM