Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

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Ubuntu (Gutsy) Linux on Latitude D630. Ugly.

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

Until the other day I was running just Vista Enterprise on my work lappy. I was freaking annoyed with its lack of speed on this dual core machine and opted to install Ubuntu 7.10/Gutsy. I fully expected to have to work to get the wireless going and was ready for the headache. I wasn’t worried too much about anything else… whoops!!

The good news, the wireless card was working as soon as the installer completed and booted me into Gnome (so all of my preconceptions have already been blasted out of the water). The restricted drivers manager let me know that I was using an unsupported driver (ipw3945), I smiled, thought “who cares”, and started installing all my stuff. That’s where the good news ends.

It wasn’t long before I noticed that I had no sound (took a little time as I usually keep the machine muted). It turns out that I had to install linux-backports-modules-generic and tweak a few files. I simply had to follow the steps listed in method G over on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gutsy_Intel_HD_Audio_Controller. This didn’t bother me too much. Of course I would have liked it to work out of the box, but the effort involved was minimal. Sound working, moving on to the fun stuff.

So I’m theming the desktop, Glass icons, a new Metacity theme and wait, what’s this? Let’s turn on some of those funky Compiz Fusion effects! Nope, not in the cards, when I try to enable it I get the error “Desktop effects could not be enabled”. Rather useless error, but whatever, I Google it and find out what’s up. Just to be clear, this is not the fault of Ubuntu, it’s an issue with the driver for my card (GM965/GL960) and Compiz Fusion (see http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Hardware/Blacklist). They list a simple enough way around the blacklist, but after the next prob, there really was no point…

Saddened but not yet dismayed, I close the lid and grab a brew. When I return and wake the machine from suspend, the wifi adapter won’t connect to my AP. I could force it by restarting services (dbus) but really, my wife needs to use this machine too. I can’t ask her to issue a /etc/init.d/dbus restart and to check if NetworkManager is running away in the background should the restart of dbus fail. Oh and then expect her to know how to kill the cracked out process. It’s all just too ugly.

I shortened this a bit for the post, I did have the suspend problem more than once, it’s intermittent which makes it all the more annoying to me.

All of those issues (but mostly suspend) combined to tell me that I won’t be running Linux on this laptop. This is the first time I haven’t been able to get Linux up and usable on a machine. Sucks for me, I’m really finding myself more at home in Linux than Windows these days. Hopefully in time, support for my hardware will improve. Until then I’m stuck with Windows on the lappy.

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Migration Project: Part III – Building My VMs

Monday, October 15th, 2007

Now that I’ve got my physical machine up and running, I can get started with my virtuals. I’m going to go into some detail on the Linux one and not so much on the Windows one.

The Linux VM (referred to from here out as Ka) is going to be running my fully configured postfix server (acting as a relay for other machines on my lan), my wiki, my email (I use mutt) and the config files that go along with it, my IRC client and my IM client. This is where I want to keep my always on services. My Windows VM is named Peeves. It’ll be managing my online address book and my FTP server, not much else.

  • You may be wondering why my Samba server is running on the physical machine and not this one. It comes down to this; if I store all my media on the VM it becomes much harder to move it to a new machine and get it running if something ugly happens to the physical server. So, if something goes awry, I’ll be without my media for a while but I won’t be without mail and communications.

I performed the same installation/configuration I covered on the physical host with some changes when it came to installing my packages.

apt-get install ssh vim build-essential linux-headers-2.6-686 bzip2 p7zip-full less lsof lshw psmisc w3m lynx nload telnet host dnsutils ftp lftp vnstat file screen irssi unrar cksfv rsync smbfs samba postfix wakeonlan apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5 rcs libcgi-session-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libarchive-tar-perl libsasl2-modules mailx mutt procmail fetchmail urlview abook libgpgme11-dev libgpgme11 automake libgnutls-dev libgnutls13 autoconf libncurses5 libncurses5-dev gettext cogito liblzo1 liblzo-dev libcurl3-openssl-dev

  • Some of the applications (samba and postfix for example) will require that you provide some setup information. You’ll want to configure them for yourself.
  • If you don’t know what these packages are, you can do an apt-cache show <package> on Debian or Ubuntu.
  • It’s not obvious why I need all of these packages, many of them are required by Twiki and other applications I plan on compiling/running.

I also installed VMWare tools, I want the host to be able to start and stop the VMs in an orderly fashion and the tools allow that.

Now that everything is installed, I download and install Twiki (this will be the subject of another post). I use it for everything I need to document. That includes records of upgrades/changes to the house, complete and incomplete projects, info on TV shows we watch, side work I’ve done, fishing stuff (knots, laws, etc), gardening tips and schedules, and just about everything else I ever write down. Now that I have a wiki, I can’t imagine NOT having one… End rant on wiki, moving on.

Next I download and compile centerim. They have a list of dependencies and fixes for gotchas on the site. It was simple to do. It was between this and Pidgin, when it comes to console IM, I just prefer the look and feel of centerim.

Now I take a few minutes to configure Samba, I’m only sharing home directories. This makes it easy for me to save attachments from my email and have them quickly available to GUI desktops and Windows machines.

The next step was to configure postfix. I’ll be honest. I’m NOT a pro at ALL. I’ve been able to get postfix to act as a relay server for my LAN (and only my LAN) and to use SSL to authenticate with my ISP’s SMTP server for mail relay. I hand outgoing mail off to my ISP’s server to help prevent mail from me being marked as spam by pretty much every mail server in the world. It works and now that I have it that way, I’m just not touching it. I have a book on postfix that I hope to read (eventually). Maybe I’ll be a little more confident following the read and I can elaborate on this.

With that complete, I move on to building the Windows VM and shutting down my older hardware. This is the best part. I’ve shut down the two machines in the basement (albus & voldemort) and moved cerberus (formerly nix) to the dungeon. I can now keep darktower in standby as it’s no longer acting as a server and all of my documents and pictures live on the Samba server. Come the end of this month I’m going to (attempt to) use the Gparted Live CD to re-partition darktower and install Gutsy Gibbon, converting the machine to a dual boot.

My next step is to develop a backup routine and some scripts to automate it. I’ll be keeping my data on a remote Debian machine that I manage and I’ll be using SSH to transfer my data to it.

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Migration Project: Part I – Hardware (physical and virtual)

Sunday, September 23rd, 2007

Last time I wrote, I gave the overview of a project I’ve begun at the house. Here’s the hardware I’m working with and the roles the machines will be performing (or not, as the case may be).

These first 2 guys are the older noisy machines that I need to replace. They have loud fans and louder hard disks. I don’t notice the noise so much since I moved them to the basement, but I *know* they’re down there making noise…

Voldemort:

A Pentium III (Coppermine) 1GHz running on a SuperMicro P3TSSA motherboard. This baby is maxed out with 512MB PC133 SDRAM. This was a great machine 7+ years ago. I had a lot of fun on it. I built it to learn/play with Windows 2000, it had a whopping 256MB of RAM back then and was moderate to high tech when I built it. This isn’t the original mobo, it had an Intel branded board that went kaput some time after I installed XP on it. I’ve loved this machine for MANY years and while it won’t be running 24/7 anymore, it’ll still be there for me to play with. It’s currently running Debian 4.0 and hasn’t had a real role other than for testing for a while. Most recently, it’s been host to a VM or two that I’ve been playing with.

Albus:

A Pentium III (Coppermine) 1GHz running on a Dell GX150 motherboard. This one is maxed with 512 MB as well and used to be my work desktop many years ago. We were able to pick up our machines before they were refreshed for a modest price so I opted to. I don’t have any really fond memories with this machine. It’s always been on and I’ve never once had a problem with it. Not a bad little box. Currently it’s running Debian 4.0 (upgraded from Debian 3.1) and its primary role is a backup server (I’m using an offsite backup server after this whole project is complete) and shell server. it’s the single door into my home network.

This next machine is the physical box replacing both Albus and Voldemort.

Nix/Cerberus:

Credit: Cerberus was given his name by none other than Sarah Conti. Rock on with your mythology Miss Conti!

A Pentium 4, 3.00GHz (Hyperthreading) running on an Intel D945GTP motherboard. It’s currently rocking 2GB of DDR2/667MHz memory. This is a great machine for running a standard desktop. I built it in March 2006 to be my Ubuntu desktop, and I’ve never had a problem with it. Currently it’s name is Nix but will soon become Cerberus. It will be running Debian 4.0, VMware server and will be providing shell access (replacing albus) and will act as a Samba server for my music and whatever else I need to share.

…and without further delay, the virtual machines!

Ka:

Ka is a Debian 4.0 Virtual Machine. His role is to be an always on machine for my wiki, email, IRC & IM clients. He’s already alive and well and I’ve moved those services over to him. For the moment he’s hosted on Voldemort and will be moved to Cerberus once he lives.

Peeves:

Peeves is Windows Server 2003 Enterprise. Yep, I need to be able to virtualize Windows because I have a few apps that I need/want to have on at all times. This includes my FTP server, Handy Address Book server and WhereIsIt which is a cataloging program that just rocks. I decided to go with Windows 2k3 because I had a license for it and didn’t have one for another copy of XP. It’s currently being hosted by Darktower (you’ll meet him below)

Finally, the desktop machine/VM to get me through this whole mess.

Nix2/Darktower:

Nix2 is just an Ubuntu VM so that I can continue to use my Linux apps while converting Nix to Cerberus. Nix2 will be hosted on Darktower. This is a physical machine similar in make-up to Nix (only diff is that it’s a full ATX board, not a Micro and it’s in a taller case). Darktower runs XP at the moment but will eventually be a dual boot with Ubuntu and XP or Vista. I plan on keeping all data off of this machine, it will be nothing but a client as all of my data will be accessible via the servers. It’s final name will remain Darktower. Once I’ve got my data off of Nix2 and onto the new Darktower, Nix2 will get the boot and all will be good in the world.

So to summarize, both Albus and Voldemort die (seems fitting), Cerberus, Ka and Peeves rule the roost and Darktower just hangs out getting poked and prodded when needed. Since I won’t need it to be on at all times anymore (for IRC and what not) it’ll be spending the majority of it’s time in sleep mode.It’ll be nice to eliminate the 2 older machines and keep a third sleeping most of the time. That will leave only 2 always on machines in the house, that’s Cerberus and HTPC (which is a Windows machine running some home theater software).

Once complete, I’ll not only have infrastructure that’s really easy to backup/re-create but I’ll have stopped wasting so much energy.

Next, I’ll start going over what’s involved in setting up the VMs, things from Debian installation options to installed applications.

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Migration Project: Overview

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Well, it’s been a while. I’m still rocking the Linux and loving it. I’m over the “shiney new OS” phase and onto the practical reality of Linux and its use (whatever that means). I still prefer it over Windows, but I do have my moments where I go back to Windows for certain things. I hate it, but I like the look of plain ole’ Windows Explorer for simple file management. This is only because it sorts everything in a predictable way (there is no case precedence). It comes down to me looking at something familiar and I’m sure (hope?) I’ll outgrow it :) .

I’m still using Ubuntu as my primary desktop OS, Debian as my primary server OS and Windows XP as my wubi. I’ve also injected Vista Enterprise into the mix. I got a new laptop from work and since it has the juice to run it, and work provided the license, I thought it would be nice to get familiar with the OS. So far, it’s just “OK”. Aero looks nice, it has a lot of entries in control panel (sexy looking), but I haven’t seen anything that makes me go “wow” (I’ll be honest and admit that I haven’t searched for any wow stuffs). I will say that it can be slow at times and just feels heavy. I’ll be keeping it on the lappy for the experience and testing. It also allows Mrs. Neophyte to play the Yahoo games (I think she’s addicted to Ocean Express atm).

I want to outline a project I’ve started. It’s something I’ve been considering for a while and just put off as I was enjoying the summer. I have too many physical computers. OK, let me qualify that, I feel guilty running extra underutilized machines. They are old, less than stellar when it comes to power consumption/management and they’re damn noisy.

Since I almost never use the machine I have dedicated to Windows, I thought that now would be a good time to take my current Ubuntu machine, convert it to a server, virtualize some of the physical machines I have and shut them down. I’ve explored a few options and with my current hardware, VMware Server is the best option for me. I was hoping to use Xen, but since Intel’s VT extensions aren’t built into my processor, I can’t virtualize Windows with it. This is a problem as my web based address book runs on Windows (and I’ve never been able to get it running on a LAMP server), so I need to have a Windows VM. I also prefer Gene6 FTP server to anything available for Linux so I’ll be running that on the Windows VM as well.

This will allow me to eliminate 2 physical machines, move one to the basement to act as a VMware Server (among other things) and convert one to a dual boot with Ubuntu/XP. Then I can cram 2 machines (both PIII class units) into my closet for play time whenever I have the need (those are the old noisy ones).

Next post, hardware specs and hopefully the roles that the host and guests will be filling. I hope to go through everything here so that somebody else with too many machines (ugh, I just don’t think you can have too many machines…) can do something similar.

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Compile Pidgin on Feisty

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Just a quickie (it’s all I’ve had time for lately). I wanted to play with Pidgin on my work machine (I use Gaim to provide support to users around campus) and figured I’d see what the program looks like. Since there isn’t a package available from the Ubuntu repos, I set about compiling and installing it myself.

Firstly, I installed the dependencies that are required for Gaim (got this tip by googling, can’t remember where)

sudo apt-get build-dep gaim

Then I installed build-essential and libglib2.0-dev (I already had these installed, just put that here for completeness)

sudo apt-get install build-essential libglib2.0-dev

I downloaded the program source from http://pidgin.im/pidgin/download/ and put it into ~/src/. After the download, I extracted everything from the archive (tar -xjvf pidgin-2.0.0.tar.bz2), changed into the ~/src/pidgin-2.0.0 directory and ran the configure script (which seemed to complete normally)

./configure

Then I ran make

make

Then I installed

sudo make install

This method about above will install Pidgin and its dependencies to /usr/local/lib and will automagically install a menu item for the application in your Gnome menu under Internet.

If you do the same, just remember that whenever there’s a new Pidgin release you’ll need to download, compile and install, your package manager has no idea what-so-ever that you’ve done this.

Check out the release notes and enjoy :)

Edit: fixed some silly spelling errors

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Feisty rdesktop Problem/Fix

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

Since migrating to Feisty at work I’ve found two fairly important problems. I guess the matter of importance depends on what you need to get done. I regularly need to mount/un-mount CIFS shares and I regularly need to use rdesktop to connect to other Windows machines. So, for me, these problems are big. I haven’t done a lot of research on the CIFS problem just yet, that’s for another post. If you’re having a Remote Desktop problem, read on for the fix.

There should be a fix for the rdesktop problem shortly, it’s in the testing phase now. Basically rdesktop is crashing and making it impossible to maintain a connection to a remote server. You’ll find details at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rdesktop/+bug/104332. I downloaded the proposed fix from http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/r/rdesktop/rdesktop_1.5.0-1ubuntu1~prop1_i386.deb, installed it and promptly let go a sigh of relief. I am now able to connect and remain connected to my 2003 server. If you’re using rdesktop directly or TS Client and find that the program is crashing constantly, give the fix a shot.

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Feisty, Faster than Fedora. Fantastic!

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

OK, so recently I decided to drop Fedora on my work machine and just move over to Ubuntu. The day I posted about that, I began the install. That afternoon, I had a working system and was MORE than happy!

What a difference! Not only do I now have apt-<whatever> and all of Debian’s wonderful tools for package management, I have a faster, more fun to use computer! I had no idea that changing to Ubuntu would yield such an increase in performance, but everything is faster. Opening OpenOffice programs to Desktop Effects is just running extremely well!

I was initially disappointed that I would only be running Debian based distros. This side-effect has certainly changed my mind for now. I don’t even miss Fedora (no hate for it, but no love either).

I may not know what Ubuntu does differently, but I know I like it :D – So there you have it folks. My quick opinion on Ubuntu Vs. Fedora.

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The end of my Fedora journey

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

I’ve decided, after going back and forth over this for a while, that I’m dropping Fedora on my work machine. I’ve gotten to where I just can’t be bothered with yum and the limited (in comparison to Debian based distros) package selection anymore. Those are my main reasons, but there are others, the amount of time it took for the Fedora team to fix the ATA kernel problems following the release of Core 6 for instance.

I’m not happy about forsaking Fedora, I would prefer to have some level of experience with an RPM based distro. I just can’t justify the time it’s taking to become a knowledgeable user with Fedora. Maybe some day, when I’m more familiar with the internals of more Linux applications and more experienced with compiling what I need from source I can go back.

I’ll be installing Feisty on the machine some time this week or next and will be strictly a Debian (or its derivatives) user for a while. I’ve had almost no problem installing whatever applications I want on a Debian machine. There have been a few times when I needed to compile from source and on Debian I’ve been able to get the job done (my success rate on Fedora is abysmal).

So to me, this feels like a failure. Disappointing but necessary. :(

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Feisty Wireless, It’s Good!

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

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.

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Feisty Beta Laptop Fun

Sunday, April 8th, 2007

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.

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