Linux Neophyte

Well, they’ve finally done it! Fedora fixed the kernel problem that was simply driving me mad. Back in November, I posted about Fedora Core 6 - SATA & CIFS Problems which led to painfully slow boot times on my office OptiPlex system.

If you’re suffering from this garbage at startup:

ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient
ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata1: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata1: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata1: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs

Then all you need to do is perform a standard update (su -c 'yum update') and restart the machine. The 2.6.19-1.2895.fc6 kernel will fix it.

Now that the issue is resolved, Fedora doesn’t feel broken to me anymore. JOY!

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, FC6, Fedora, Hardware, RPM

The first non-beta version of Flash 9 for Linux is out, you can download the installer from Adobe’s site. I downloaded the tar.gz installer and had no problem whatsoever installing it. The instructions are on the download page, and all you’ll need to know before hand is where your browsers are installed to. To find out, you can use the package management tools included in your distro.

Fedora:

rpm -ql firefox

This query will give you a lot of information (you might want to pipe it to less). What you want to zero in on is the directory that is referenced most, on my system it’s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.9/. You’ll notice a lot of references to /usr/share/ and can pretty much ignore them. That directory holds icons, .desktop files and other shared objects.

I did the same for SeaMonkey (rpm -ql seamonkey), the install location for the current version of the monkey is /usr/lib/seamonkey-1.0.7/.

Ubuntu:

dpkg -L firefox

That’s another command that will hand you TONS of information. Again, I only care about the installation directory, I know from using Ubuntu that the standard application install location is /usr/lib/[installdir]. So to clean up the output, I used grep to filter out the data I don’t need (you could do the same on the Fedora example above).

dpkg -L firefox |grep /usr/lib

That gave me something that looked like:

/usr/lib
/usr/lib/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/libgfxpsshar.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgkgfx.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkembedmoz.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkxtbin.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libjsj.so
[snip]

From that I can see that Ubuntu installs Firefox to /usr/lib/firefox.

I also use SeaMonkey on Ubuntu, but I had to manually install it. For that reason, dpkg has no clue as to where the software is. I chose to install it to /usr/local/seamonkey, which is the location that the SeaMonkey installer suggests. I just keep that in the back of my mind or I could enter a locate seamonkey. That will return a lot of hits as well and will look something like:

/usr/bin/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey/install.log
/usr/local/seamonkey/registry
/usr/local/seamonkey/libplds4.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libxpcom.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libmozz.so
[snip]

Now that I know where my browsers are installed to, I can run the Flash installer and give it the correct path to each browser when asked.

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, CLI, Console, DPKG, Fedora, Firefox, Flash, Mozilla, RPM, Ubuntu

I’m still following the course over at LinuxBasics.org (and I’m waaaay behind at the moment). Chapter 6 is all about editors, and specifically the Vim editor. So for a least the next few posts, I’ll be composing in Vim and then pasting into Wordpress.

Vim is the editor I’ve been forcing myself to use since jumping into the Linux ring. I chose it because I had heard of it before, I had actually used a GUI version of it in Windows for a while to maintain a Windrop IRC bot, and because everything I had read online made it clear that Vim was a very common and powerful UNIX editor.

There are tons of sweet commands in Vim that allow you to keep your fingers on the keyboard at all times. IMO, much preferable to mousing around an editor (even when I couldn’t type, I still found the keyboard faster). The commands do (of course) require a little practice to really nail down. The good news is that there’s an extremely simple to follow tutor built into the program. To run it, simply enter vimtutor at the command line and follow the on-screen instructions. I did find this tutor back when I started using Vim, I went through it once to collect enough information to make using the editor bearable, now I’m actually taking some time to get this down. Unless you’re an elephant, you’ll probably need to run the tutor a few times.

I’ve re-read the last two paragraphs, it almost sounds like I dislike using Vim. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s got a learning curve to it, it requires some thought in the beginning and (fortunately) that eventually leads to muscle memory. It was a moderately tough road at the start. So indeed, in the beginning I had to force myself to use it and at times it was as frustrating as hell. That ends, and I’m very comfortable using it on a daily basis now (I admit that I’m still looking up commands from time to time). The more you use it the better it gets.

Whatever you do, don’t go starting up Vim without (at the very least) going through the tutor or checking out some online tutorials. One of the things that make it such a powerful editor is that it has two modes, command and input. When you first launch it, you’re in command mode. Unless you happen to enter an i, a or o as the first character, you’re going to find yourself a little confused and probably annoyed.

Vim is certainly worth snuggling up to if you want to hone some of your skills. If you’ve been exploring your system, you know that almost every configuration file is comprised of plain text and you need an editor to make changes to them. Since you’ll find Vim on just about any distro, you’ll want this weapon in your arsenal.

Note: If you’re using Edgy, perform a sudo apt-get install vim before getting started, it seems that Ubuntu defaulted to Vi (the inspiration for Vim) and IMO, it’s just a bit more difficult get used to.

For more help with Vim check out the links below:

*http://www.apmaths.uwo.ca/~xli/vim/vim_tutorial.html

*http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial.html (neat cheat sheet)

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, CLI, Console, Edgy, Getting Help, Ubuntu, VIM

At home I have two machines on my desk, my main desktop is running Ubuntu and I have a machine off to the right running XP. I have a craptacular KVM connected to them and when I use it to share the monitor I spend 87% of my computing time staring at and cursing the blur. I end up annoyed and cranky (and in turn, I end up annoying the Mrs.). I decided to drop an old Dell CRT onto my desk and use two monitors, aside from having an ugly old CRT on my desktop this has worked out well.

Instead of using the KVM’s toggle keystroke (scroll lock twice) to switch between machines I figured I should be able to slide my mouse off of one screen and onto the other. There are a few solutions that allow you to do this; while its not perfect, I’ve settled on Synergy.

For Synergy to work you need to install the software on all of the machines that you want to be able to share screens with. One machine will be the Synergy server, the remaining machines will be clients. Basically you have one ring machine to rule them all. The server listens for the clients and once they connect, you can easily change from screen to screen.

Before moving on, let me tell you about the only issue I have with Synergy. The client machine’s monitor won’t sleep and about half of the time the screen blanking won’t kick in. While I could gripe about it, I won’t, the client machine in my setup is the XP box and really only gets used occasionally. It’s easy enough for me to just keep the monitor off most of the time. If thats unacceptable to you then I would wait until the issue is resolved or try x2x or x2vnc (see my notes at the end for a potential solution).

Installation:

Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install synergy
You must have the Universe repo enabled

Fedora: su -c ‘yum install synergy’
You must have the Extras repo enabled

If you’re planning on sharing screens with a Windows or MAC machine you’ll have to download and install the Synergy software on that machine as well.

Configuration:

My configuration is pretty simple, the Linux machine is the Synergy server and the XP machine is the synergy client. My server configuration is below, “ubuntu” is the server host name and “xp” is the client host name. This configuration is stored in ~/.synergy.conf.

section: screens
ubuntu:
xp:
end

section: links
ubuntu:
right = xp
xp:
left = ubuntu
end

The “screens” section defines the names of the screens you’ll be moving between, the docs recommend using the host names of your machines (you should be able to enter the IP addresses of your machines instead of the host name). The “links” section indicates which screen is adjacent in the given direction. If I drag my mouse off screen to the right I’ll be controlling “xp”, back to the left and I’m controlling “ubuntu”. You MUST configure both machines in the links section! If I had only configured the screen “ubuntu” to switch to “xp” I would be able to move my mouse over to “xp” but I wouldn’t be able to move back.

The Windows XP client is set to automatically connect to “ubuntu” when the computer starts. Installing the Synergy software is simple in Windows, just download it from http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ and install. I chose to have it automatically connect to the server when the machine starts so that it runs as a service and connects whether I’m logged in to Windows or not. These are all options within the program and are pretty self explanatory.

Oh and I forgot to mention, you can copy the paste buffer from machine to machine. That has been VERY handy. I got a link to a Flash 9 video via IM and just copied it from the Ubuntu machine to the XP machine and watched.

As I’ve said, my set up is simple, you can get very complex with this software and there’s a lot of great documentation over on the Synergy site.

Some notes:

Autostarting Synergy on Linux is explained on the Synergy site. Since my home machine automatically logs my account in at startup, I just have a small startup script launch the server (/usr/bin/synergys —config ~/.synergy.conf)

Synergy supports screensaver syncing, so that might be an option for screen blanking. I haven’t tested it as I don’t use a screensaver on my Ubuntu machine.

Synergy can be configured to work through an SSH session. I have no need for that at home. I did attempt it here at work and found the lag to be unacceptable. You may have better luck on your personal network.

You could try similar applications like x2vnc. I had played with this one before and found the lag on the “remote” machine to be frequent and made the software unusable. YMMV.

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, Synergy

When I got to work this morning I was captain apathetic. I had no desire to do anything at all computer related. I decided that I needed to jump start my day so I dug up a copy of a how-to that covered running Dreamweaver 8 on Ubuntu that I had read a while back but never attempted. I’m running Fedora 5 on this machine at work and I figured since I keep wine up to date on this machine (version 0.9.21 at the time of this writing) that I could get it done here too. Well, it worked! I made a few changes, they’re noted below.

The how-to is located at http://blog.publicidadpixelada.com/2006/07/30/how-to-dreamweaver-running-on-ubuntu-in-10-easy-steps/.

My changes:

In step 6: I copied the files to “/home/YOURNAME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profile/all users/Application Data/”

In step 9: I tried the “$ recode ucs-2..ascii macromedia.reg”, but it failed (recode: macromedia.reg failed: Untranslatable input in step `ISO-10646-UCS-2..ANSI_X3.4-1968‘). I just ignored it and imported the registry entries without the conversion.

After that, I created a launcher pointing to wine ‘/home/[user name]/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Dreamweaver 8/Dreamweaver.exe’ and defined my site. I made a quick change to an html file, uploaded it to the webserver and did a little victory dance. This is the first time I’ve run an application in wine that worked as I hoped that it would. I haven’t done anything taxing in the application yet, if I find problems later I’ll post about them.

I think I’m going to try installing Dreamweaver from the install CD next. If that works out for me I’ll post a detailed how-to.

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, FC5, Fedora, Wine

I know, the post title is ridiculous. However goofy it sounds, it’s accurate (and just to hammer it home) Ninan IS Nifty.

Ninan is a Java application (Java 1.5 is required) for downloading files from Usenet (commonly referred to as news groups). It runs a small web server on your machine that you can connect to from your local computer or another computer on your network using your web browser (I’ve only tested it with Firefox).

Ninan allows you to feed it NZB files via a convenient upload feature (there are several sites out there offering NZBs for download), or you can add downloads to queue by entering the post ID from a particular NZB provider (see the Ninan site for more details). It does NOT allow you to browse/read postings on Usenet, currently all it does is manage downloads.

What makes it so special is that it has smartpar download, only the first PAR is downloaded which saves bandwidth and at the same time still allows you to verify your files. There’s auto PAR verification and repair, and once a RAR compressed download is verified Ninan will extract the file(s) for you. After all of that, it does cleanup too. Once your download is verified complete, the PAR files are removed. After extracting your download, the left over (and space thieving) RARs are removed. You just can’t beat a program that makes checking downloads and extracting them it’s job instead of yours.

If you already have Java installed, getting Ninan up and running is a breeze. There is a walk-through over on the Ninan Wiki that should have you leeching in but a few minutes. If you need to install Java, check your distro’s forums (Ubuntu tells you how on the Wiki, and you can find Fedora help here).

All of the configuration is done via a control panel you can access once you have Ninan running, it couldn’t be easier to configure and use.

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, Java, Ninan, Usenet