1. check available disk space to ensure that you still have some

$ df

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda             33030016  10407780  22622236  32% /
tmpfs                   368748         0    368748   0% /lib/init/rw
varrun                  368748        56    368692   1% /var/run
varlock                 368748         0    368748   0% /var/lock
udev                    368748       108    368640   1% /dev
tmpfs                   368748         0    368748   0% /dev/shm

2. check available Inodes

$ df -i

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/xvda            2080768 2080768       0  100% /
tmpfs                  92187       3   92184    1% /lib/init/rw
varrun                 92187      38   92149    1% /var/run
varlock                92187       4   92183    1% /var/lock
udev                   92187    4404   87783    5% /dev
tmpfs                  92187       1   92186    1% /dev/shm

3. find those little bastards

$ for i in /*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

This command will list directories and number of files in them. Once you see a directory with unusually high number of files (or command just hangs over calculation for a long time), repeat the command for that directory to see where exactly the small files are.

$ for i in /home/*; do echo $i; find $i |wc -l; done

4. once you found the suspect – just delete the files

$ sudo rm -rf /home/bad_user/directory_with_lots_of_empty_files

You’re done. Check the results with df -i command again. You should see something like this:

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on

/dev/xvda            2080768  284431 1796337   14% /
tmpfs                  92187       3   92184    1% /lib/init/rw
varrun                 92187      38   92149    1% /var/run
varlock                92187       4   92183    1% /var/lock
udev                   92187    4404   87783    5% /dev
tmpfs                  92187       1   92186    1% /dev/shm

Both upgrade and installation on both machines went without a single hickup, which was a positive surprise after my last experience with Ubuntu upgrade.

Bluetooth, wireless, display drivers, sound – everything was working from the first start. The only manual configuration I had to make was because of Intel integrated video blacklisted by Compiz. There are two ways to enable Visual Effects on Intel 965.

1.Skipping check for blacklisted cards

• Create ~/.config/compiz/compiz-manager (for local user) or (/etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager)
• Add SKIP_CHECKS=yes
• Go to System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects and select Normal

2. Removing the card from black list

• sudo gedit /usr/bin/compiz
• find a line T=”$T 8086:2982 8086:2992 8086:29a2 8086:2a02 8086:2a12″ # intel 965
• comment it out by placing # in the front
• save the file
• Go to System->Preferences->Appearence->Visual Effects and select Normal

Purely from end-user perspective there are not that many revolutionary changes (you can read the technical details on a number of ubuntu related sites). What I personally liked about 9.04 release is:

• Open Office 3.0
  A number of improvements and new features here. Native tables in Impress, import of DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, Solver component, improved charts. Being an active Open Office user, and having to interact a lot with users of MS Office – these are really great improvements.
• NetBeans 6.5
• New notifications system
  Looks very good – gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling every time you receive a new instant message or connect to network. Mark Shuttleworth blogged about it.
• A really small, but nonetheless important change – Session manager is finally renamed to Startup Applications. At least now I don’t need to think every time I want to add application to autostart list.
• Computer Janitor. A very nice application, helps you to get rid of all unused stuff on your computer, but you have to be careful with it – it offered me to delete skype and xmind amongst all other DEB packages.

Other new things that I read about, but didn’t yet try:

• ext4 filesystem support (thanks to 2.6.28 kernel) – although it reportedly improves booting time, i didn’t yet dare to switch to it, better to wait till potential data loss fixes are verified by long-term use
• New, better Evolution (thanks to Gnome 2.26), that is able to to read Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders or PST files and communicate with existing Microsoft Exchange servers via MAPI – need to try that on my work laptop.

Overall, after going through installation and using it for a couple of days – I am really happy with the new release. Ubuntu continues strong and steady development and becomes a more serious competitor to Windows with every new release.

When Sampo launched the new system this Easter, they took into use Java-based authentication system. Of course it didn’t work in my Ubuntu 7.10, but after removing Open JDK and installing latest Sun JDK it started functioning again – at least log in worked. This Java solution raised a lot of concerns in internet community.

After upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 that has Firefox 3.0b5 as default browser, Sampo web-bank Java login stopped working again. This time installing latest JRE didn’t help. Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) contains JRE 1.6.0_06-b02 and it fails on the second security code request during login process. (Remarkably, Sun itself offers only 1.6.0_05 version for Linux). Solutions proposed in Finnish Ubuntu discussion forum (tweaking plugins) didn’t work for me either.

What worked was replacing JRE 1.6 with an older version 1.5:

$sudo apt-get remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jre-headless openjdk-6-jre-lib

$sudo apt-get install sun-java5-bin sun-java5-fonts sun-java5-jre sun-java5-plugin

Then I ran

$sudo update-alternatives --config java

command to make sure correct JRE was selected as default.

While struggling with this issue I tried to check Sampo’s technical support pages. There was a nice “Check your computer page” that kindly informed me that my operating system is Linux and “You may be able to run eBanking, but your operating system is not supported by Customer Support.”

This is really frustrating. 14% of the readers of this blog use Linux. On regular sites that I maintain this figure is from 7% to 10%. Sampo caused a lot of grief to its customers, me including, with this software system upgrade. Even after they promised to waive four months’ worth of service charges I’m still not sure it is going to be enough to keep all their customers.

I’ve experienced quite a lot of problems by far – non-\0-terminated strings in UI, transactions with no explanations that I don’t remember authorising, transactions in our web shop that were reported as failed, although money were withdrawn from customer’s accounts, simple web-bank downtimes with HTTP 503 and the latest one is my credit card – Sampo claims that I don’t owe them anything – probably it is one of the Monopoly’s famous “Bank error in your favour, collect $200″ cases.

Beta culture seems to be spreading from internet startups to bank systems (although in this case I would be more inclined to say that this was a huge screw up on Danske Bank IT department’s part). I’m not sure I like it. Gmail beta, Flickr beta, but Sampo Bank beta? It’s definitely fun to participate in debugging of the new web service, but not when it deals with your real money.

This case bring interesting thoughts on how much we trust online services and what is the pain level when we say “that’s enough, I’m leaving”. Is it the same for data banking as for traditional banking. Would you trust your bank to keep your family photo archive or your computer backups? Is it any safer than Flickr/Google Documents? And the other way around – if you trust your data to Google or Yahoo, would you trust them with your money?

Without installing additional hard drive (which would be impractical for laptop user anyway) the only source for extra space was Vista partition. Vista comes preinstalled with most modern laptops, but there’s no need for it to exist taking up to 40Gb of hard drive space, when Ubuntu is the primary OS.

WARNING: Before executing any of the belowmentioned steps, it is highly recommended to make a full backup of your data.

1. Check how much space you will need

It is good to check how much space you will need for your /home partition. Use “Scan Home” in Disk Usage Analyzer (Applications->Accessories->Disk Usage Analyzer) to check how much space do you use now. This tool will give you excellent perspective on how you use your disk space – and where you can possibly save a few gigabytes. Add some gigabytes on top of the current usage figure for future use and now you now what should be the size of your new /home.

2. Create new partition/filesystem

In Ubuntu there's an excellent tool for manipulating partitions - GParted (System->Administration->Partition Editor).

If the estimated size of your home partition is smaller than the size of Vista partition (or any other partition you’re prepared to re-allocate), then the task is really simple – you just convert Vista’s ntfs partition into ext3. In my case all my data in /home folder didn’t fit into 40Gb, so I had to resize the root / partition. This is not possible while the system is running, so I had to burn Ubuntu Live CD, boot from the CD with “try Ubuntu without affecting you current system” option, and run GParted from there.

Note, that resizing and moving partitions is a time-consuming process – it may take hours, depending on the size of your partitions, so reserve enough time for this operation.

3. Mount the new filesystem

$sudo mkdir /mnt/newhome
$sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/??? /mnt/newhome


4. Copy all files to new home

$cd /home
$sudo cp -ax * /mnt/newhome

That is a copy with “preserve links, preserve mode, ownership, timestamps, copy directories recursively, stay on this file system” parameters.

5. Change homes

Unmount new home partition from temporary mount point

$sudo umount /mnt/newhome

Move old home to a temporary folder oldhome (note that this works only when you are moving /home to own partition from root partition, if you had /home on its own partition already and just moving it to the new place, you’ll need to unmount old /home partition instead of moving it to a temporary folder oldhome)

$sudo mv /home /oldhome

Create a mount point for new home partition

$sudo mkdir /home

Mount new home partition to /home

$sudo mount /dev/??? /home

6. Compare the results

You don’t really have to do that, but if you want to be extra sure that everything is ok and are prepared to wait a bit longer, then type:

$sudo diff -rq /home /oldhome

7. Make changes permanent

Add a line to the “/etc/fstab” file that looks like the following:

/dev/??? /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2

8. Remove old home

Now that everything is ok, you can remove the old home folder (same note as in step 5 – if you had old home on its own partition already – then use GParted to reallocate old partition for new needs)

$sudo rm -r /oldhome

Voila! Now your /home is on its very own partition.