Linux Neophyte

Wow. This is the first time I’ve actually said wow (in a positive way) when it comes to Linux wireless. Basically, it almost just worked!

Here’s the thing. I have a bcm4306 (rev 03) wireless card in this lappy, I have NEVER been able to maintain a wireless connection to my AP for long periods of time using the bcm43xx kernel driver and firmware (either found or extracted by myself). I’ve always had good luck with ndiswrapper and this card, and that’s just how I’ve gotten things going. Until now.

I wanted to leave my Feisty install as slick as possible which means leaving the NetworkManager (NM) integration as is. I figured I would just install ndiswrapper, get my card recognized and then let NM take over. I was just going to stick with ndiswrapper as it had never kicked me before. Well, ndiswrapper decided to kick me. grrr. I found that I only connected to my AP about half of the time and had weak, weak, weak signal when using ndiswrapper. I knew everything was working properly because when I booted to Edgy, things worked as expected.

I tried bringing the interface up and down, changing driver versions, using modprobe to remove/add the ndiswrapper module, all to no avail. I eventually said, ok.. Let’s try something else. I did a little googling and found that others were singing the praises of NM and the kernel driver. I just wanted it to work, so I reversed everything I did to get ndiswrapper working and installed bcm43xx-fwcutter. During the install I was asked if I wanted to download the firmware for the card (I forget how it was worded), I said yes. Less for me to do, and who knows.. Maybe they (the bcm43xx-fwcutter ppl I presume) know better than I about what firmware versions work “best”.

Initially I was unable to associate with my AP (modprobing, wishing, hoping… nothing worked) so I restarted the machine (the tried and true not-fix for everything) and found myself being prompted for my AP’s password (actually it was the password for my Gnome Keyring which feeds NM the pass for my AP). Lordy, lordy!! If I wasn’t connected right up to my AP with proper signal strength, I’ll eat this lappy!

Right now, I’m LOVING Feisty Fawn. She is one helluva sexy young deer who is doing wonders with this notebook.

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, Feisty, Hardware, Ubuntu

I’ve just spent a few hours chilling out with Feisty on my notebook. I’m using a Dell Latitude D600 machine. So far I’m really digging some of the nicer touches in Gnome and I think I’m enjoying the NetworkManager integration (we’ll see, it’s been a problem for me before).

Firstly, as looks go, Feisty isn’t that different from Edgy. Similar bootsplash and Gnome theme. I’ve been a fan of the bootsplash since I first saw it on Edgy, the text is a little thicker now and has a more pronounced light outline. It looks a little softer too, I’m liking it. I have no real opinion on the Human theme, I never use it long enough to notice when it changes. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just like blues better,

I found that both the Universe and Multiverse repos are enabled by default. They should be, since (IMO) you need them to really get the full range of applications and use of your machine. Still, there are some things worth having that aren’t available in the standard repos and you need to go a little further. I found out about Medibuntu whilst doing a little research and added it. You can find out how on this page https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu. This allowed me to install the w32codecs and a few other non-free/proprietary apps/whatevers.

I checked out the new Restricted Drivers Manager. It was exactly what I expected, useless for me! I don’t have any hardware in this machine that would require any restricted drivers. Hopefully I’ll finally get the Nvidia card I’ve been talking myself into and out of for months and I’ll be able to test the utility out on my desktop.

I was able to test the new Codec manager. This is a gem! It really simplifies getting mp3 and other proprietary codecs on your machine. All you have to do is try to play a file (mp3 for instance). It will just prompt you download/install the codec and you’ll be ready to roll. NICE.

One of the nicer, user friendly features is hidden, I don’t know what the logic behind this is, but I have to assume there is some. If you want to check out the gnome-control-center (without typing that whenever you want to use it), you’ll have to use the menu editor (System > Preferences > Main Menu) and enable it. You’ll find it under the Preferences heading, just check the box next to Control Center. The control center isn’t new, but it certainly looks a lot nicer than the version that shipped with Edgy. Just another enhancement.

If you’ve ever used session management in Gnome, check out the updated session manager. You should be pleased. Nuff said.

I can’t say much about the desktop effects on this machine, I’ve always had problems with Compiz and Beryl on it. It just has older hardware and compositing desktop window managers just don’t run well. I look forward to playing with it on my desktop machine later.

All in all, the beta release is working VERY well on my lappy. I’m monitoring a few things for problems and will address them in another post later on this week. I’ve posted “too soon” in the past and I want to be sure things are working properly for me before I say they are.

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, Feisty, Gnome, Hardware, Ubuntu, Uncategorized

Here come the Dell Linux desktops, laptops http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8436091466.html

To me this is a HUGE step for getting Linux onto family computers. I’m fully aware that Linux is not for everyone, and many shoppers will stick with Windows (cool with me). The beauty of this is not only that people will have the option of purchasing a computer with Linux on it, but if sales are up, more OEMs will want/need to develop Linux drivers (or make hardware specs available to kernel hackers). How sexy is that?? If this is something that’s important to you, take a look at this article. We don’t have all of the details yet, but it’s certainly something to think about and look forward to.

Note: There are already vendors shipping computers with Linux pre-installed, take a look at http://www.system76.com/ (among others). I’ve heard nothing but good about System 76 and when I’m in the market for a new personal laptop, they are on my list of vendors to evaluate. I mention this because Dell won’t be the first vendor to make Linux available, but they will be the most well known.

I just wonder, how MS will attempt to punish Dell for this bold move. I personally believe that it’ll happen, I just wonder how public it will be. Time will tell, this is a great time to add some tech news sites to your RSS aggregator if they aren’t already there

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, News

I screwed up. In the history of screw ups it’s minor, but I did screw up.

A long time ago I settled on a Windows only password manager (PM). I have hundreds of passwords and I keep them in an encrypted Password Corral database. The program & db live on my Windows box and I keep a copy on my flash drive that goes everywhere with me. I assumed that I would never use another OS and this program would last me a good long time. <– That’s where I screwed the pooch. I find myself using Linux almost exclusively now and I want a PM that will not only work on Linux, but on Windows as well (and I’m keeping my options open, I might have a MAC some day too).

I did some searching last night and found a nifty looking cross platform replacement PM named KeePass. It’s open source (I like that very much), uses strong encryption, and it’s portable. I can keep a copy of the Windows exe on my flash drive as well as a shell script that will allow me to run it on a Linux box (it seems to have all of the libraries in the tarball so it should run on any distro with a GUI).

Both programs have a similar set of features and both satisfy my needs. So I have some options here, and now I need to decide what I want to do.

Option 1: Do nothing

I’ve found that Password Corral works well enough in Wine, but I prefer using Linux native apps when I’m using Linux (who wouldn’t?). If I do nothing, I will always need to have Wine installed on any machine I want to run the app on. I must admit that this option does NOT appeal to me.

Option 2: Migrate to KeePass

KeePass has a nifty import feature, and Password Corral has a nifty export feature. Sadly, they don’t read/write common formats. That means I’m going to have to manually move everything over to KeePass. That sucks (to put it mildly). I REALLY don’t want to spend my time using copy/paste to get the data from one app to the other. This option doesn’t appeal to me either.

So, I have 2 options, both rot. Not sure what I’m going to do at this point.

If you’re looking for a portable app, something that you’re going to rely on, put some thought into it. Consider open source and whether or not the program is cross platform. You may not always be in front of a Windows machine!

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, Desktop, Musings

I’ve been terribly busy over the last few days, I started playing with Mutt and XFCE 4.4 on Fedora. Who knew it (”it” being mutt) would take over my life?? Mutt is going to take some time to explain, and since I haven’t got it doing exactly what I want yet, I’ll hold off on talking about it. I can tell you this, I’ll be damned if I’ll let it beat me. I will own (or should I be cool and use “pwn”?) mutt, and once I do, I’ll try to tell you how I did it.

Since XFCE is easier to get into, I’ll explain that. My work machine is a bit of a dog. At least it’s feeling that way. To improve the feel of it, I decided to give a lighter weight desktop a shot and I installed the latest XFCE. To put it simply, wow! What a difference.

Now this isn’t my first experience with XFCE. Back when I had only been using Linux for a month or two, I installed it to take a peek. I was completely dependent on my desktop environment at that time. If it didn’t take care of mounting devices and network resources, I couldn’t use it. Back to Gnome or KDE I went.

I’m more comfortable with Linux now and can either mount devices on my own or edit /etc/fstab to make mounting automatic. That being the case, I can move on to some of the more “manual” desktops (yayy me!).

Installing XFCE was a breeze, su -c 'yum groupinstall XFCE' and a little coffee to pass the time was all it took. After that, log in and start customizing.

One of the first things I had to do after setting up my desktop was to find out how to lock the workstation. XFCE allows you to trigger a lock by hitting CTRL+ALT+DEL; that sequence executes /usr/bin/xflock4 which in turn, starts the screen saver (I found/figured this info under Keyboard Settings) .

Unfortunately, that wasn’t working for me. There was no error message or any indication that the key sequence was doing anything. I opened a terminal, found the script and checked it out. The script attempts to run xscreensaver-command -lock or xlock. I didn’t have any executables matching those filenames on my box, so off to google I went. The Gentoo wiki offered me this page. With that info, I created /usr/bin/xlock and added the lines below:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command -l

All that was left to do was to set the proper mode on the file; chmod 755 /usr/bin/xlock (as root). With that done, the magic key sequence locked my box and allowed me to walk away.

***Edit*** I also had to add gnome-screensaver to autostarted applications

Notes:

• I rely too much on Google. If I had taken a minute to think, I wouldn’t have needed the Gentoo wiki to tell me to create the xlock script. This annoys me about myself, I too often look for the easy answer.
• I decided to use the Gnome screen saver because it was already installed and I knew it could do the job.
• I could have just installed the xscreensaver package but that just would have added software I don’t need.

I’ll keep playing and tweaking, so far this is great. I can only complain about the screen lock issue and the fact that adding items to the panel is a little clunky. Other than that, I’m flying around my machine with breakneck speed and it ROCKS. Got some time on your hands? Install it, play with it, see if you like it.

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, FC6, Fedora, XFCE

I mentioned in a recent post that I had installed KDE on my lappy, when I did it, I used the recommended Ubuntu method; sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop. If you don’t know, that installs all of the apps and settings that you’d have if you installed from the Kubuntu CD. That’s all fine and good with me save for one thing; I don’t want the Kubuntu boot/shutdown splash screens. I really like the sexy black/orange splash that comes with stock Ubuntu (which is what I installed back in the day). I used the following method to restore the default usplash.

Get to a shell prompt, and execute the following commands:

sudo update-alternatives --config usplash-artwork.so

You’ll be prompted with the following:

There are 2 alternatives which provide `usplash-artwork.so’.
Selection Alternative
———————————————–
1 /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-theme-ubuntu.so
*2 /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-theme-kubuntu.so
Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number:

I entered 1 to select usplash-theme-ubuntu.so and hit Enter.

Now enter the command below:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)

You’ll receive a few status messages, and then a few moments later you’ll have your prompt back. Now go about your business, you’re done! The next time you boot, you’ll have the default Ubuntu boot splash staring back at you.

written by M@ \\ tags: CLI, Console, Desktop, Edgy, Ubuntu

A student here at work has a notebook which just up and died. The story was that the fan died about a week before, she ignored it and just kept running the machine. As many of us have learned, lappies can run hot. This wasn’t a very good idea (to say the least). As computers will do when too much heat is applied, it choked and took everything with it. My hope was to save the data she’s been collecting throughout her college career so I started poking around.

The notebook itself seems thrashed, holding the power button down will flash the power LED, then it just blinks out (kinda sad). Obviously I’m not getting at the data on the disk if I have to use this machine. I yank the disk, toss it into another lappy (same model) and insert a Knoppix 3.9 boot CD. To my chagrin, the poor little disk is hurting too. I got a horrid click/crunch noise during POST and the system couldn’t find the disk. Dismayed, I pulled the drive, tapped it ever so slightly and tried again. No joy. OK, I have another idea, I grab a ziplock bag (thanks to the ladies in AP, they ALWAYS have “stuff” around, I always find the strangest things in their area), pop the drive into it and stick the whole thing into the freezer for an hour and a half (passing the time by drinking coffee and hoping this works).

Now that it’s frozen, I take the disk, slide it back into the lappy and start it up. No hard disk noises at all, it’s just not spinning up. Well, we’re getting to the point where I won’t have the tools to save the data. So, I says to myself, “screw it” and whacked the disk off of the top of my desk a couple of times and try again. JOY! The drive spins up!

Note to self: violence is better than cold…

I boot from the CD into the Knoppix KDE desktop, mount /dev/hda2 (which is where XP lives on this machine) and use scp to transfer the contents of her “My Documents” folder to my Fedora machine here at work. The command looked like scp -r /mnt/hda2/Documents\ and\ Settings/[username]/My\ Documents/ xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx: (I removed her username and my IP from the example).

Dell will be in to replace the ever so toasted motherboard (and anything else that’s been trashed) and I can hand it all back to her with her data in place.

Just another illustration of the power of Linux, there was no way I could have added this drive to a desktop machine here at work without buying a laptop drive conversion kit. Knoppix was the PERFECT solution.

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, Hardware, KDE, Knoppix

I spent some time tweaking out my (and by “my” I mean on loan from work) Dell D600 laptop tonight. I’m using KDE on this machine as I haven’t used it since giving Gnome a shot and I’m trying to diagnose a strange problem I’m having by ruling Gnome out as the cause. I’ve got this thing looking pretty sweet and I’m pretty happy with the feel of it. Thanks to my play time, I finally figured out just what the hell was annoying me so much about KDE and fixed it!

Waiting for the big revelation???

Bah, nothing major. It comes down to the fact that I detest the look of the Plastik window decorations and the useful area of the screen always felt small to me. These aren’t show stoppers, I was just lazy and didn’t get around to tweaking. Now that I have, I’m really digging on KDE. I LOVE the look and feel of Gnome, however continued KDE use might, just might, convert me.

I think on Monday I’ll switch to KDE on my work Fedora system and put it through its paces. I’ll just boot Plastik and set both my kicker and external task bar to allow other windows to cover them.

So check it out if ya like, it seems I was feeling like many shades of gray this evening…

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, KDE

Ever wish that you could right-click the Gnome desktop or a folder and open a terminal window? It’s a simple installation away in both Ubuntu and Fedora. I do sorta wonder why this isn’t included in Gnome by default.

Ubuntu:

Open your package manager and locate/install nautilus-open-terminal or alternatively open a terminal prompt and enter the command sudo apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal

Now restart Gnome (log out and back in) or open a terminal and enter ps aux |grep nautilus then locate the PID for nautilus and issue a kill -HUP [pid]

Fedora:

Open a terminal prompt and enter the command su -c ‘yum install nautilus-open-terminal’

Now restart Gnome (log out and back in) or open a terminal and enter ps aux |grep nautilus then locate the PID for nautilus and issue a kill -HUP [pid]

Happy Thanksgiving! Food, football and naps. Who doesn’t love this holiday????

written by M@ \\ tags: Desktop, Edgy, FC6, Fedora, Gnome, Ubuntu

I’m having two problems with my FC6 install at work (I’m running a Dell OptiPlex GX270, ya know, a basic office machine). One of the issues is more of an annoyance, the other limits my capabilities and I’m bothered that it’s still a problem on this machine.

The lesser of the issues causes slow boot times. While the kernel is loading and before the GUI boot screen, Linux is probing my SATA ports and not finding any drives. That makes sense since there aren’t any SATA drives in this box. I found 2 posts about this issue on Red Hat’s bugzilla, ID 212581 & ID 212737, I see no confirmation of the problem, so who knows when there will be a fix. Its not really a show stopper as the scan times out, gives up, and eventually boots normally.

This issue is the bugger! CIFS mounts with roughly 100 or more files cannot be read. If you’re unfamiliar with CIFS, its the filesystem type used when mounting Samba/Windows shares. As I’m using this machine at work, this one makes me growl. I have up to 15 shares I need to mount from time to time in order to get my work done. Most of them have well over 100 files just in the root of the share. When attempting to navigate offending mounts with Nautilus, I receive an error that reads “The folder contents could not be displayed“. The error I receive when trying to list the contents of the folder via the command line reads “ls: reading directory .: Invalid argument”. This is a real problem for me as I’m responsible for a lot of documentation, I sort them by directory, I have thousands of folders/files (I’m anal about it and document everything) and I can’t access them through file system mounts.

There is a workaround, I can mount using Gnome VFS (Places > Connect to Server), and I can browse using Nautilus (smb://server/share). This isn’t ideal, I would prefer to have a genuine mount. Not all programs are Gnome VFS aware and I don’t see a way to direct Gnome to mount to an actual file system location. That means that if I create a file with an app that can’t utilize Gnome VFS, I need to save the file to my home dir and then copy it off to the VFS mount. If you know of a way to force VFS mounts use a genuine mount point, PLEASE let me know.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=212123 says that this problem has been fixed in CVS and an update will be released shortly. That was posted on October 28th and I still haven’t seen an update addressing the issue.

When Looking at this from a Linux newbie point of view (and I do know that Fedora isn’t a newbie focused distro) this is a real problem. There is no fix for the CIFS problem, well, not unless you want to compile your own kernel from CVS (and that’s nothing more than a drug store chain to many people new to Linux) and the potential fix listed for the SATA problem (mentioned in bug 212581) isn’t something a newb would/should be comfortable doing. If I was just giving Linux a shot and started out with Fedora I might be tempted to just say that Linux is broken and go back to Windows.

written by M@ \\ tags: CIFS, Desktop, FC6, Fedora, Gnome, Gnome VFS, Hardware