Linux and the UUID

Even after more than 15 years of Linux experience, I sometimes learn new stuff. Today, I figured out why my KDE goes haywire sometimes. It turns out, that my swap file was mounted as /dev/sda1. Which is fine, most of the time. Except when an external USB drive is plugged in. Then that one becomes sda, and the internal drives goes to sdb or even sdc, when two external drives are plugged in. So the swap won’t work, and the USB drive cannot be mounted via dBus / HAL, since it is suddenly listed in the /etc/fstab. Also, KDE will have some strange troubles during this time, and will not restore my session. But I am not 100% sure this is related. Time will tell… Anyway, what was strange was, that everything else worked. That was because the root filesystem was mounted using a UUID, which identifies a partition or volume uniquely. So, why did the swap not have this? Seems, this was forgotten by Ubuntu upon the upgrade to Maverick. But the Ubuntu Wiki helps. So what I did was:
  # swapoff /dev/sda1
  # MYUUID=$(uuidgen)
  # mkswap -U $MYUUID
  # sed “s//dev/sda1/UUID=$MYUUID/”
  # swapon /dev/sda1
You can also just edit fstab with the editor of your choice…

Emacs in Ubuntu…

…it’s buggy. I tried the snapshot, but that behaves strange as well. My workaround so far is to go fullscreen. Still, customize is broken: the customization buffer shows up in the wrong buffer. I haven’t found a bug description for that yet. Also, the git interface does not work. I will install magit next, to see if that helps. Anyway: Emacs on (K) Ubuntu is in bad shape…
Update: I fixed the first two problems. Turns out, emacs-snapshot does work, I just forgot to de-install emacs23-gtk and install emacs-snapshot-gtk. Thus I still fired up the old version. Customize works as well now, after uninstalling cedet and ecb, and instead using the latest ecb and cedet from Sourceforge. The versions shipping with Kubuntu are slightly out of date and were causing the buffer problem.