I’ve now got KDE, Gnome, MATE, LXDE, XFCE. IceWM, and OpenBox working on Ubuntu under X2Go.

     There are some caveats you should be aware of, not show stoppers, mere minor annoyances.  First the logout on KDE and LXDE are both painfully slow and on KDE it will start and stop the desktop about three times before finally logging out.

     With Gnome, there is no default logout applet.  In order to logout you first need to add the logout applet to your top panel.  To do this, hover your mouse cursor over the top panel, then simultaneously hold down the Windows button+ALT and right click over the panel.  You will get a short drop down menu, select Add to Panel at top.

     Then scroll down to find the logout applet, it will be a little green guy walking in a box. Select that and hit the “Add” button.  The applet will now appear on your panel.  You only need to do this on your first session, it will remain there after.  When you want to logout, click on this guy.  As with KDE and LXDE it’s a bit slow so be patient.

     Openbox will show as just a black screen.  Right click on your mouse and you will get a drop down menu to add things.

     The following machines are affected by a power supply failure on the physical host which hosts them, zorin, mxlinux, vps1, vps2, and vps4.

      I am in the process of moving these machines to a different host.  This will saturate the network during the copy and cause sluggish performance from some of the other shell servers and web server.

     Presently vps1 and vps4 are completed, the  others are in progress.

     Things didn’t go especially smooth but I now have all the NFS and virtual host servers upgraded.  I’ve been testing on one machine prior to upgrading the rest and this appears to fix the NFS synchronization bugs that have plagued us since 16.04 LTS (the last two years).

     One machine, the upgrade process removed a bunch of necessary packages like the RAID software and the EFI firmware for virtual hosts.  I’m still testing everything but as far as I know it’s all back together now.

     This is an update to an earlier message.  This evening around 8pm I will need to reboot all of the physical hosts.  This is more extensive than my earlier message but only reboots will be done at this time and updates to 18.04 LTS will be done on a later date.

     I discovered that Ubuntu will no allow us to upgrade the release until all existing updates are in place and this includes recent kernel updates.

     I apologize that this is being done outside of our normal early morning maintenance window, unfortunately scheduling conflicts make this necessary.  I will endeavor to make the downtime as brief as possible.

     I am anxious to get these in place because 18.04 LTS provides both improved stability and reboot reliability and ultimately once we get all the necessary tools in place, live kernel patching so that we no longer will need to reboot for kernel upgrades eliminating most future reboots.  In addition, I have not yet had a machine that I’ve already upgraded experience NFS issues which have plagued Ubuntu since 16.04 LTS.

     SquirrelMail has been puking out errors when mail with MIME attachments is read since we updated our web server to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and PHP 7.2.

     The update to PHP7.2 required an upgrade of squirrelmail, the upgrade of squirrelmail brought those messages.  I was able to chase this down to a DEBUG flag the developers left enabled and turn it off.

     If you are being overwhelmed with spam there are some things you can do to adjust spam filter sensitivities or whitelist or blacklist particular addresses:

https://www.eskimo.com/support/mail/spam-control-facilities/

     Our mail lists have been targeted in a major way by fraudulent spammers in the past few days.  I do not know how they determined what lists exist here.  The e-mail typically has “listman” in the headers but we don’t have such a user ID or software by that name.

     Installation of Google Chrome was requested.

     I was unable to install on Centos6 and Scientific because the version of glibc is too old on those machines (and installing a newer version would break the operating system).

     I have installed it on centos7, debian, fedora, mint, mxlinux, opensuse, scientific7, ubuntu, and zorin.  Of these machines mxlinux, ubuntu, and zorin will provide the best performance because they have more memory.

     Locate is now available on Mint, MxLinux, Ubuntu, and Zorin.

     It is not installed on Debian because the version on Debian is slower and very resource intensive.

     It is not installed on all the RedHat based machines because the older kernels are not so efficient when it comes to directory lookup causing it to be resource intensive there.

     VeraCrypt and CherryTree were requested by a customer.

     Veracrypt is installed on: Mint, MxLinux, Ubuntu, and Zorin.  It would not install on Debian owing to library version conflicts and attempting to build from source failed in the link phase.  Not available for RedHat derived platforms.

     CherryTree is installed on ALL shell servers EXCEPT the old SunOS eskimo.com.

     It turns out 10.0.7 of OwnCloud, which is out, is operational under PHP 7.2 but not considered stable, however that was better than 10.0.1 which did not work at all.  I’ve installed 10.0.7 and OwnCloud appears operational again.