Keith's Web Blog RSS Feed

Networking Problems In Fedora Core 2

Sun, 09 May 2004 10:17:51 -0600

I noticed for my system under Fedora Core 2 Test 3 my internet was slow. In particular, the lookup. Once you were able to connect though, the actual connection is okay. However, I had to solve the lookup problems which might be IPv6 related according to this forum's article. Basically, to handle this, do: 1) edit /etc/modprobe.conf 2) add to the bottom of this file: alias net-pf-10 off 3) reboot the machine for this to take effect. you should notice that it fixes this problem instantly.

apt-get and synaptic

Mon, 10 May 2004 01:13:35 -0600

I use a combination of apt-get and synaptic for upgrading my system's rpms. for those of you not familiar with these tools, apt-get is like Debian's apt command line tool which manages deb files and installs it on the system as well as managing their dependencies. Dependencies for RPMs are real nightmares. The big problem is with the base RPM system, which for whatever reason, detects the depends it needs, but never attempts to resolve them. However, for those who choose a distribution like Redhat or Fedora, you can get a fairly decent system like apt-get which does manage dependencies. Synaptic is basically a GUI front end you can use in Gnome or KDE that hooks into apt-get. It's not a real elegant piece of software, but for newbies and lazy people (like me), it does provide a quick and dirty means of managing rpms from a point-and-click style interface. However, both suffer in one major area: multiple versions. I've been getting this at times when I do upgrades. Synaptic at the moment just chokes; at a certain point it just freezes and you have to kill the process and start from scratch. However, apt-get can solve this problem through running: apt-get update do this twice, and the major update problems should be resolved. If you're wondering where you can pick up this software, try: http://freshrpms.net

Easy Rsync Over SSH

Tue, 11 May 2004 21:26:22 -0600

I've always had problems remembering the commands to do an rsync over ssh. Here's the quickie: rsync -a -e "ssh -i $SSHKEY" $FILE $DEST $SSHKEY: the pay to your private sshkey $FILE: the files you want to send $DEST: your destination. example: rsync -a -e "/usr/bin/ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/id_dsa" /home/mydir/datafile.txt me@remoteserver:. This will copy the file datafile.txt to your remote server. Make sure you have the sshkey generated (will put up another FAQ for that).

Tar/Gziping in a single line

Tue, 11 May 2004 21:30:50 -0600

tar -cvf - $DIR | gzip -c > $compressedfile.tar.gz if you're doing this from a script rather than command line, you have to note that you'll need to change directories into parent directory of the directory you want to tar up. For instance: cd /home/mydir; /usr/bin/tar -cvf - important_dir | gzip -c > important_dir.tar.gz In this case, you can put something like this into crontab if you need to do a nightly backup.

Installing Flash plugin for Fedora 1

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 23:30:57 -0600

Add "macromedia" repository into /etc/yum.conf [macromedia] name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - macromedia baseurl=http://sluglug.ucsc.edu/macromedia/apt/fedora/$releasever yum check-update yum install flash-plugin then agree to the licensing and test it out.

Configuring Postgres Over the Network

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:03:34 -0600

Had a bitch of a problem trying to get my remote system to connect to my postgres server. Turned out there were at least two places to look. One (the hardest to determine) was the firewall (iptables) and the other which was slightly easier was pg_hba.conf. Although I'm not 100% certain that I did this correctly, I basically hacked /etc/sysconfig/iptables and added a line: -A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 5432 -j ACCEPT before one of the reject rules. then i restarted the iptables service. Still when you run postgres to allow TCP connections to come in, you still have another layer of security: pg_hba.conf. Here, you can fine tune the settings so that only certain users can get access to a database, etc. For instance, you might have a line like: host foo bar 192.168.2.24 255.255.255.255 trust this line indicates that database foo can let user bar in through the ip/host 192.168.2.24. very useful!

neat little trick for home directories

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 16:10:01 -0600

i have an external hard drive that i was using to back up my data. however, i think it's actually not a bad place to use for my home directories (i.e. data directories). so there's two things you can do here: 1) mount them; or 2) symlink them. i've decided to symlink them (actually one) for now. the positive point here is that you become somewhat OS independent. for instance, if you want to switch your external drive to a laptop, you just need to swap them. it might be a bit of a pain initially because you end up mounting/umounting/re-symlinking them each time or pull off some silly trick. however, the long term benefits are pretty clear. the other option you can do is have a central server that's used as an NFS server for these purposes. as long as your connection is good and you have tons of space with a reliable disk or two, you should be fine.

fuser and (u)mount

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 01:40:25 -0700

had a nasty issue today with my system. seems like fedora core 4/xine has been choking on the DVD player. really bites. so the thing is that i was trying to get my dvd player to mount (automount is fucked up) and ended up using a forced mount. that, for some reason, only made the situation worse and froze the command! and this was root! i couldn't kill it either. obviously, the only thing to do was reboot. however, since my home directory is mounted, i'm pretty cautious about just rebooting it. umount wouldn't work though because some processes were accessing the mount and i kept getting "device is busy" messages. so unless i shut it down the hardway, i could've had issues with my external drive. what to do? fuser and umount -l to the rescue! fuser can show which users access a particular device or filesystem. you can do a fuser -v to get a listing of users. but the handy dandy piece is fuser -k. that'll send a SIGKILL signal to those processes. unfortunately, that still didn't resolve my issue. those processes (namely automount and xine) still persisted. so the next thing to try was umount -l on the external drive. that's a lazy umount that somehow allows you to unmount a device and let the processes, etc. accessing that device get cleaned up later. so in the end, that saved my ass. on the side, xine has really pissed me off. on core 1, it worked beautifully. somehow the upgrades caused some issues that cause problems with the process. i suggest not using xine for playing dvds. other formats don't show this issue though.

dual head under fedora core 5

Sun, 28 May 2006 05:31:38 -0600

there's a problem with the installed ATI driver under Fedora Core 5 when you want to run dual head. so you need to update the driver and restart your session with the new dual head configuration to get it working. you can download the driver at: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/testing/5/i386/xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.5.8.0-1.i386.rpm

SCO's FUD is their Demise

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:35:16 -0600

Although it was inevitable, SCO's plan of using FUDs seem to have backfired. Against IBM and Novell, it wasn't a case of David vs Goliath(s). This was more like a glorified, elongated squash match during the 80's WWF. The sad part is that some people did make money out of this wasteful battle (CEO, lawyers), but it really was a fruitless endeavor that tried to take a stab against Open Source, the GPL, Linux, and companeis that really wanted to participate in a Linux strategy but were afraid due to long term obligations.

Usually, I root for the smaller guys, but in this case the right people won (for now).

There was a follow up article on the explosion of Linux/GPL, but I think it's just the voices of hopefuls on this silly case. I think for the most part, you could ignore this situation. Towards the end, there really wasn't much being said and I'm certain most people already started to forget.

I personally would love to see a greater explosion of Linux, Open Source and GPL, but I have my doubts that it would come just as a result of this court case.

Using (K)Ubuntu at Work

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:13:50 -0600

I've been a long time fan of KDE and decided to try Kubuntu on one of my home systems after being a 3 years user of Fedora. I still use Fedora on my laptop but don't intend to upgrade considering all the difficulties and problems I've heard about in recent years. Unfortunately, despite installing Kubuntu, I almost never use it at home (mostly due to space and resource issues; I need a new desk and monitor but my place is just so small!). Despite this setback, I decided to give Kubuntu a go at work. I must say that it's really nice!

I've never been a huge fan of Debian because of the myth of the whole unstable vs stable thing. Not to mention I had a bad experience initially with Debian a long time back that made me slightly prejudice against the system. Going into Kubuntu, I was a bit apprehensive. However, I had been using apt-get and Synaptic on Fedora for a while (and now Yum), so I got used to the idea of dealing with all of RedHat's dependency problems. Making the switch wasn't any problem at all. Probably the biggest issue was how Debian arranges some directories, configurations and binaries compared to Fedora. That said, it's not unusable.

Quite the contrary.

I found dual booting with Windows to be dead easy. One of Fedora's weaknesses is that there is no partition tool to easily help a person handle a dual boot system with Windows. You still need a shitty tool like Partition Magic (which royally screwed up my system at one point!). It's one reason, imo, Fedora hasn't made much progress on the desktop.

You still are left with a lot of configuration to do after you get the base installed. Unlike Fedora though which practically needs a DVD to hold the entire disc image, Ubuntu still just needs a single CD. They're practical in having people install from Synaptic, which is better anyway. I mean, after you get a new system, you're probably a few upgrades away still from being up to date. The nice thing about Synaptic is that it's pre-installed, unlike Fedora which requires you to get either that, apt-get and even the Yum GUI tool.

Getting a simple server with subversion, apache, mysql, etc. is quite easy. Just use synaptic, grab your modules and just configure the rest. In about two hours, I had a subversion server running with WebDav and websvn all together!

My only pet peeve at the moment is that I think the GUI could use some improvement. It looks like an old version of Windows 95. Not too handsome. If Fedora has one good thing going, it's that their BlueCurve theme is quite nice to look at.

Unfortunately, I think the people at Fedora probably spent too much time on that and adding as many modules to the base that they forgot about compatibility and stability. Those two areas are definite strengths for Ubuntu. My Dell system at work had no problem at all. First try and I had Kubuntu going in no time. My Dell laptop's DVD/CD Writer locks up depending on the DVD i insert! It was so bad that I was forced to use (yick!) Windows for watching DVDs since Xine would just die.

Anyway, I'll probably migrate my laptop some day to Kubuntu if they continue to produce such a tremendous OS base.

Ubuntu 7.10

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:25:46 -0600

Eager to try the newest Ubuntu distro, I almost had upgraded my desktop PC at work from 7.03 to 7.10. Fortunately, I avoided a disasterous situation. At home, I tried using the alternate disc CD as well as the network upgrade AND a raw installation. Nada. Ubuntu actually screwed up my home system pretty badly. The alternate disc CD didn't make it through the installation, the network installation froze my computer and destroyed whatever work I had going and the raw install Desktop disc didn't even make it through despite saying that the disc was fine after a checksum.
This is highly disappointing and so I might just wait off a few months before reattempting to upgrade my OS. Unfortunately, this also means I have to re-install 7.03 on my home system since the upgrade totally whacked my system.

I don't know what happened, but I think it's best to hold off until they can get this resolved. Then again, knowing how Linux distributions go, it's really best to wait two or three months before grabbing the current distribution. They really need to stabilize this.

ffmpeg and avimerge

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:11:36 -0700

Recently, I started messing with this tool. It's quite nice actually. Combine this with avimerge, you can convert vob files to a massive avi file. I found some good settings with ffmpeg:

$ffmpeg -i $input -f avi -vcodec xvid -b 8300 -g 300 -bf 2 -acodec mp3 -ab 128k $output

where:

$ffmpeg = /usr/bin/ffmpeg
$input = (your vob file)
$output = (your avi filename)

You probably have to tweak the bitrate and your encoding type. Also, you might have to tweak the screen size. For that you'll have to use the -s switch and enter your size like 800x600. Main thing is to check what the original format is so you can try to match your output. In general, these settings seem to be the most useful for most purposes.

If your avi files are split up, you can merge them together by using avimerge like:

avimerge -o (output file) -i input1 input2 input3 input4...

for example:

avimerge -o myfile.avi -i f1.avi f2.avi f3.avi f4.avi

Hope this helps people out there

Good NFS Article

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 13:50:49 -0700

I'm almost done migrating my ancient laptop system over to my new (K)ubuntu 7.04 system. In the past, I did these migrations in the most tedious manners possible. However, this time one thing I decided to facilitate was using NFS for copying files over as opposed to scp or rsync. I've done a little bit of work with NFS in the past, but this is the first time I implemented it successfully at home. And this article does a good job of showing just how easy it's handled.

I'm thinking that once I finish migrating the rest of my system over (which is just some files, directories, and my application configuration) I will upgrade my laptop to the latest edition of Fedora Core or PCLinuxOS. I like (K)ubuntu a lot but I think it's good to have a wide variety of Linux flavors to test drive each one. On top of that, I'm also considering making my laptop a kind of "dumb" client terminal, where my desktop Linux box will serve as a permanent NFS system and that I'll mount my main home directory from this system. The idea here is that I'm becoming super lazy in the way I work and that I really want to just work from my couch (couch potato programming anyone?). My laptop has been doing some serious damage to my wrist so I want to move it around a bit. The only issue will be the touchpad, which I really dislike. But I'll figure out something there too eventually.

Either way, I was pleasantly surprised at how this tutorial helped make my NFS work with just one try. Give it a shot.

ATI and Linux

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:47:38 -0700

A few days ago I purchased an ATI Radeon video card. Little did I know that ATI's have a lot of difficulties with Linux. The funny part was that I recalled that it was NVidia that had issues, but I guess I was wrong. My laptop had been running an ATI card and my old machine was using ATI as well. Now, it seems that NVidia is the one that installs smoothly whereas ATI requires a lot of fudging.

Funny thing was that my intention of getting a new video card was to upgrade my linux system. I had some trouble as mentioned before with upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10 ubuntu. In the end, I figured part of the problem was the video card/driver since rebooting the system caused some havoc after various upgrade methods. Well, it looks like I'll be stuck with 7.04 until they figure this ATI problem out. Or perhaps, I'll just suck it up and get myself a new NVidia card.

(k)ubuntu Thoughts

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:13:09 -0700

Okay, unfortunately this quick review is only for 7.04 and specifically for Kubuntu. Since my last upgrade process was a disaster, I decided to hold off on 7.10 and in fact upgrading in general until the next full release. I mean, outside of merely having the latest/greatest packages, there really wasn't much incentive to upgrade at this point.

I think I mentioned that I held off on debian based systems for a while since my disaster a few years ago of having to deal with debian. However, this time I gave it another try on the basis that the ubuntu distribution looked quite handsomely put together and having a nice community. Tired of Fedora and the bloat, I wanted to try something new with a bit of hype.

As a desktop, it's not based. I always liked the synaptic package manager, especially over yum/yumex. This helped simplify adding some of my favorite software quickly. I mostly prefer KDE over Gnome, but there are a few Gnome packages that I enjoy such as multi-gnome-terminal (although it hasn't been upgraded in ages). Also, gthumb is a very nice picture viewer.

Since I've been using this cruddy, old Fedora Core 5 system, I didn't have a chance to see some of the newer packages or hood ornaments from some of my favorite pieces of software like xmms. Man, xmms has come quite a way! I use ubuntu 7.04 also at work, but I don't use the multimedia stuff as much on the basis that I prefer utilizing my ipod.

One of the biggest things I decided to move towards ubuntu was that my little laptop exhibited issues trying to handle DVDs. It simply would lock up. I noticed this for Fedora since 3. And it wasn't just on my laptop but my old desktop. Naturally, one of the big test was to try playing a DVD. So far it read one of my burned DVDs. I haven't tried putting in a regular DVD in yet, but that's coming up!

Right now, things seem to be moving smoothly. I was able to quickly find some packages like ffmpeg, mencoder through the synaptic interface. I think with Fedora you have to add the non-standard distribution repositories manually. At least, you did the last time I checked. I did a simple search and grabbed those packages without blinking. Also, I didn't have to jump through too many hoops when getting mp3s to work on my system. I'm certain there are a few media formats that'll have issues, but I'll get to those eventually.

Overall, my home Kubuntu system has more functionality than my work's system and I'm starting to taste the delight of working with a better performing system. Now, if I can just add a better video card and another 1gb of ram, I think this thing will seriously kick rear!

If I do have a few disappointments, it's that the upgrade process doesn't seem as smooth as I'd like. I'm a bit timid now of moving off 7.04 since my last disaster. Also, I dislike the fact that despite coming on only one CD, you pretty much have to download all the updates almost immediately after installation. My router is really flaky so I get nervous whenever I have to run upgrades or massive installs via a network. Although Fedora's size has become disputably huge in the last few releases with many unnecessary packages, one thing I do like is that once you have the system, you just need to grab updates through the network; in other words, you're not necessarily forced to grab updates immediately because you'll have most of the packages on disk. Another complaint is that I really want these distributions to have base installations contain all the most recent updates. I don't know if this is necessarily the case, but I'm certain that once a release gets made, there's bound to be large bugs. Instead of having workarounds, just post another bug fix type of release. For me, I just want a fresh install to be 100% reliable. I heavily dislike wasting valuable time re-installing a system.

Anyway, at least with 7.04, I heavily recommend giving this a try. Maybe I might try to switch my laptop to 7.10 and see how that goes.

2008 Linux's Year As A Desktop? Nope!

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:53:11 -0700

Every year you'll see a discussion from the OSS community regarding whether or not Linux as a Desktop is ready for prime time. Certainly, rumblings for 2008 will become apparent with each new release from distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, and PCLinuxOS. While tons of improvements have been made to the Linux OS and the various tools involved, my primary complaint is that it's still too developer oriented.

Let's face it. Most of us who use Linux as a tool are developers. Good development environments often implement Linux on the desktop and virtually most of the tech groups employ Linux as their main OS of choice (Mac OS comes in a close second). It's funny to think then that those same environments where the techies understand what a great OS Linux is fail to convince management to standardize it across the company. So strike one. Not business friendly apparently.

From an at-home viewpoint, things aren't much better. It reminds me of Apple's commercial bashing Windows 95 or 98 back when Steve Jobs/Apple were making their comeback. It was funny actually because you had this regular guy at home going, "What is this io.sys file?" Hey people, why give something such a mysterious name like "grub?" You think these names make it any easier for someone coming from a "it just works" background to a "I know how to fix my own plumbing!" background? Transparency, transparency, transparency. Developers need flexibility but home users need transparency.

Next the number of tools are enormous. It's great to have choices and avoid M$-like monopolies. But in all honesty, most people just need a few tools to get their work done. It seems whenever someone gets pissed off that a certain tool doesn't have a feature they want, they scurry into their dank hovel and build another one just for the sake of the feature. That doesn't seem that efficient. And to try and figure out which tools to employ is pretty brutal because the number of tools in something like synaptec is downright mind boggling! How can one attempt to figure out what the best media player is? Totem? Mplayer? XMMS? Xine? In Windows, you just use Media Player and it handles most of your tasks. While I'm somewhat familiar with a number of the programs available from synaptec, imagine how a newbie might be intimidated by the availability of programs there.

Next where are all the games? Yes, there are games for Linux but they suck! Well, I don't think the PC game market is thriving that much anyway since you have the DS, PS and XBoxes roaming out there. But believe it or not, there are some people like myself who will actually PAY for games developed on a Linux box just to avoid having to start up my Windows piece of garbage.

Just simple compatibility problems from browsers. This seems like a small one, but it's really frustrating going to a site that's IE only or that renders funny on Linux. The thing is that people just don't test for compatibility on Linux or really don't care to when it comes to websites. Fortunately, many sites render fine but as we move towards richer web applications, I'm afraid that this issue will get worse.

Better hardware support. It's come a LONG, LONG WAY since the days where even a modem would be difficult to get working. But they really need to resolve compatibility problems. ATI video cards? This isn't as much fault with the Linux community as it is with the hardware manufacturers. But it's a two way street since the hardware manufacturers probably still see Linux as a server side component with spots of life on the desktop side. Therefore to them there's not really a huge business case (at the moment) to invest more money into testing and the extra coders. So you could say that this is a chicken-or-the-egg type of problem.

Even if all the most useful applications move to the web, I seriously doubt that Linux will become a force on the desktop, at least in the vision that most people probably want. Maybe someone might invent a "dumb client" where you just have a browser with flash. But by that point, Linux won't have any real use as a desktop. Think about that point long and hard.

I'm certain that most people in the Linux community recognize these points as the chief ones in helping Linux penetrate the desktop market (except the one about it being too developer oriented). However, it never can be understated that these have to be addressed over and over again.

I think one inroad that Linux can make against M$ and Mac OS is determining what a person needs before they need it. This is sort of B. Gates' philosophy for M$, except his aim was generally for businesses. Whenever you get a newly installed Linux system (or as you're installing Linux), you either get some minimal working environment where you're forced to grab a ton of packages, taking a few more hours, or you're force to grab a ton of packages from a menu and that most of the packages aren't really the ones you're looking for (because of legal reasons). I see this methodology as being ass backwards.

I kinda like the minimal install idea because you really don't want a lot of garbage floating around your system. But you shouldn't have to choose between a million packages, especially if you don't know what you want to do. One major problem I see in Linux and its design is in the assumptions made about the user. Most of the time, there are either no assumptions being made, or that the user is some silly Windows convert, or that the person is a guru. You can't market something without assumptions so this item must be crossed off the list. Probably most of the Linux system is designed for the "average" (read: guru) user. And when Linux tries to do Windows (or should I say a bad Mac impersonation) it's just plain bad.

There should be (simply stated) two modes of operation: idiot and guru. In my world, I'd even assign points/levels as the person makes progress. But you have to design for idiots because the world is composed of them (including myself). That means, you have to go back to fundamental questions in designing your interfaces, since this is what people have to work with. The most fundamental question is, what do you want your users want to do with this thing?

Before trying to re-create Windows, Mac OS or anything, answer that question first. Why should people go to a website and download a specific distribution for servers, desktops, or alternatives? What difference does it really make? The download should NOT determine the user's preference (because people can tend to become confused on this purpose).

I think there should be just two distribution types: guru and idiot. The guru version has no wizards and is just what it is at the moment. The idiot version is the one that the Linux community needs to work on. Ever see Winzip and how they've done their interface? It's great. You have a wizard (idiot) or classic (guru). Or have you used TurboTax? Again, guru (fill out everything by hand) or idiot (tons of questions that you need to answer).

I know Fedora tried something like this, but even I'm skeptical. To me, there were too many questions and choices. Worse yet, some were plain obvious. I mean, why not install OpenOffice? You don't see the ipod or iPhone asking questions on what applications need to available when you receive one.

I think the killer application for Linux would be to automatically figure out and get something to run, load, view, etc. a file based on the extension type and headers. Imagine encountering an mp3 for the first time. Certainly, most distributions for legal reasons will not ship an out-of-the-box codec. But why should a home user be forced to go through hoops just to listen to music? If a home user was browsing his file system via Konquer and double clicked on the file, if the application did not already exist on the system, a little popup should appear saying, "Installing XXX...." making some specific assumptions about what the user wants based on the most popular viewer or whatever for that application. In the case of the mp3 file, a legal disclaimer could popup and get the user to check it off before going out and grabbing the correct codec.

Next, forget the whole menu system. There should be a question based system based on the most commonly used applications on the system. You could have it say things like, "I want to listen to music," or "I want to watch a movie," or "I want to read my email". As people use more applications, these questions might disappear and form shortcuts, learning about the user, rather than the user being forced to learn about the system.

This is a big thing because really menu systems in general have sucked for the longest time. In the case of linux, even with synaptec, you still can get a boatload of confusion. For instance, after installing something like multi-gnome-terminal, where the hell in the menu is it supposed to be located? Should the application be readily available after I installed it? It's again not transparent.

Overall, I seriously doubt that Linux will adjust itself based on my recommendations. They are very much valid and should be considered heavily. Instead of imitating, the Linux desktop needs to innovate. People who work on things like installation or KDE need to focus more on how the average person can arrive to the answers of their problem, rather than just writing a million applications that most people won't ever use. Copy the core philosophy that Apple has, not just the appearance of it.

A Key Phrase for Linux

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:19:54 -0700

I wasn't the only one who noticed that Microsoft's loss in shares of the desktop market has gone not towards Linux but towards Mac. But if people in the linux world want to have any hope of achieving greater acceptance rates in the desktop arena, they need a strategy, a focus and a good key phrase to bring these elements together. That phrase should be:

Just make it work.

A recurring theme for people who switch to Mac, or those who might employ an X-Box for games and those who go through any reasonable amount of trouble with a PC want that one thing of having things work. Again, transparency.

One frustrating aspect of the Linux world is that it reminds me of the video card world: just too many choices. Having choice is a great thing. It's democratic and allows people to pick something based on their personality. However, if you go to a site like DistroWatch.com, you'll see a huge number of distributions, each more or less doing the same job as the other. It's kinda like when python and ruby came out. You could still do the same thing in perl, but just with different syntax.

Just as I started warming up to (K)ubuntu, a new more friendly distribution comes out called PCLinuxOS. What? Another one?

I think it's wasted effort from the Linux community in having so many distributions. Why not simply focus on hardware compatibility and improving the interface for what's available? Focus on certain core packages that people seem to be interested that have traditionally been well supported like OpenOffice, mplayer, gaim, gimp, xmms, etc. and allow people to check out similar ones on their own.

The main thing is that people don't need so many different software packages; they just need ones that work for certain purposes. Until those ones are done well enough and marketed well enough, people will continue flocking towards the Windows and Mac OS of the world.

Almost Done With the Ubuntu Upgrades/Migration

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 10:17:30 -0700

I added an NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT card to my system. I missed having the dual head action (huh huh, head) since I'm slowly retiring my current Dell laptop (well, retiring in the sense of converting my main current desktop over and then eventually re-installing some version of Linux on my laptop). The NVIDIA addition wasn't as transparent as I had hoped (and as the support piece of ubuntu's documentation had said). Upon starting up my desktop with the new card, I received a message in how the xorg.conf was misconfigured. Fortunately, the system had OpenSSH server loaded, so I could login through my Windows desktop (while reading the proper upgrade procedure), used apt-get to install the correct drivers, then finally ran a command to reconfigure the nvidia driver. Upon rebooting the system, I had a working display. But I still wasn't out of the fryer.

The system had left the resolution in a 1024x768. Not so great considering that my monitor can easily handle a good step above that. I ran another utility (after some searching) to configure the resolution. Now, it's much nicer at 1280x1024. I almost got into a trap of running a slightly lower level (and much more confusing!) utility to configure the card. But I managed to sneak out and find the proper utility to configure my card. Now, it looks quite decent!

The last step is to attempt to get the dual head part working. I can try with my old emachine 14". It's not a bad monitor, just SMALL. I really like working at 1280x1024, so I plan to examine a few more 19"+ type of monitors when I hit Akihabara again sometime.

As an added bonus, I moved things around in my apartment. Funny how switching two tables and moving my laptop somehow has increased my workspace.

Ultimately, after I finish the last few migrations and install a new OS on my laptop, I hope to completely turn my (k)ubuntu desktop into an NFS server. I have a "smaller" 250 GB external drive that I plan to externalize all my main data. Then I'll mount my home directory to either my local home directory, or to a mirrored directory. Sadly, my main goal in all of this is to work under the covers on my couch on my laptop. But also, if I get this type of "home architecture" going, I'd like to take one of my home systems in America and install ubuntu or some other form of linux on it as well. Then every time I cross the Pacific, all I have to do is bring my external hard drive home. The beauty of that situation is that I'd avoid having to lug around a heavy laptop (unless I go overseas for business trips) and would need to simply mount the mirrored external drive up.

What A Pain!!!!

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 16:44:56 -0700

I did something somewhat boneheaded on my (k)ubuntu box. Last night I tried playing a movie through mplayer as root off my external USB hard drive. I did this because one of the directories didn't have executable permissions for anything but root, so I couldn't casually go to the contents in the other directories there. But the problem was that out of laziness, I just decided to use my root account to view a movie. Root not only couldn't open up the file, but it went into an infinite loop that i couldn't kill.

I totally forgot about that situation, tried going to sleep (failed), and woke up intending to watch youtube. Then youtube started freezing as did other video sites. And then I tried playing other video files. Originally, I was going to blog that the problem was the nvidia driver, but I realized/remembered (faintly) that mplayer had bogged down and probably was still running. I rebooted my machine to clear the problem and now everything is working again.

The worst part was that I spent several sleepy/waking hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on. What a waste of time!!!!

Subversion and Patch

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:55:36 -0700

The next point of advancement in my skill elevation has been learning the patch utility. Actually, I got to work with a combination of the unix utilities diff and patch. I've found various good tutorials on the subject to get me started. Right now, I'm doing some simple patch creation. In the easiest form, you can create a patch from two files using diff like this:

diff -c original_file new_file > patch.diff

Apparently, the "-c" options allows for some context based mode that will allow the patch program to have an easier time patching your code. Also, the order of running the diff is critical. If you do this in the wrong order, patch will just give you a warning message and create a kind of backup file with the .orig extension.

Using the patch file, you would do something like this:

patch original_file -i patch.diff

The "-i" option tells patch the input file (i.e. the patch file).

You can also diff directories in creating a patch. I didn't succeed very well at that, but I'll put up my results once I become an expert in that area.

With Subversion, you can perform even more powerful patches by using Subversion's diff utility and comparing the repository items against a file or even directories. I had some issues getting this to work, but I think my biggest issue was the ordering of the diff. I kept getting the .orig extensions, signifying that patch did not work as expected. Well, I'll try again another day as I really want to become an expert at these subject matters.

On a side note, it's a real bitch mastering so many different technologies. You learn one tool, then you find out that you have to learn around 10 more related ones. On a positive note, I'm getting to the point where I feel very comfortable with a large number of tools. These are just another feather in my cap.

Cool Linux Command For Learning about Your System

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:16:52 -0700

sudo dmidecode | more

This will print out useful information about your system. I use this for remembering what kind of memory my system uses. Useful when you want to go for upgrades and don't want to open your box up more than once.

Judging A Company By Its Desktop OS

Tue, 06 May 2008 18:00:36 -0600

As a developer/engineer, when you're looking for a tech position with a company, one interesting way of assessing the work environment is seeing how many desktops run some form of Linux. While in some companies you may see Macs running, seeing Linux as a choice for engineers is even more impressive, considering how it's not really considered a standard for desktop environments. But if you're able to run Linux as your desktop of choice, then it means that the company gives you a fair amount of freedom as an engineer (meaning you'll get the root/admin access rights to your system).

Not all companies do this, but I find companies who entrust their employees with their desktop make a heavy statement about their working environment.

Upgraded Laptop to Ubuntu 8.04

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:29:01 -0600

My little laptop now is becoming my experimental zone for Linux. This past week I managed to upgrade it to 8.04. Had some initial issues, a few repository problems where I switched my location to the US. That obviously made my downloads a little slower, but I was getting some issues with the JP repositories. When doing version upgrades, I tend to use the Gnome Package Manager as opposed to KDE's Adept. I've had some issues with upgrades in the past with Adept. However, Gnome's Package Manager seems to handle my upgrades without any issues.

Outside of some initial slowness, the upgrade went SMOOTH. In the past, I painfully would burn a completely new installation CD for my Fedora upgrades because I just didn't trust the package managers bundled with Fedora, leaving my system to out-of-date for significant periods of time. However, between 7.04 until the current version, I've had no major issues (at least with my laptop) with regards to the upgrades. Usually, you should wait about 2-3 months for the bugs to be ironed out before doing a full upgrade. But my laptop posed no risk and I made a go.

At least for now, I don't see much difference visually. The biggest three areas of immediate impact to me are:

Lack of Multi-Gnome-Terminal support (we'll get to this one).
A Beta version of the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release.
XMMS moving a full version up to 2.

The lack of multi-gnome-terminal was a bummer for me. You have to do a fair amount of tweaking because the packages are old. It's not hard to get working, just grab the deb files and some of the unsupported repositories, and you should be fine. There was one part of the upgrade process where the upgrade program mentions, "Remove These Packages?" I hit "Yes" intuitively not bothering to read the details and then realizing what it was doing. Should've left them but I don't know if things like MGT would be disabled (btw, multi-gnome-terminal is great, but the package is practically unsupported and hasn't had an update for a good period; sad).

Firefox 3.0 as a beta is something rather debatable as something to be included in such a major distribution release. Some of my best plugins are currently disabled as a result (Del.icio.us, colorzilla, Tabs Mix Plus, Restart Firefox). They aren't complete killers and I can always install a local version, but it defeats the purpose of moving up a full version. Still, the fact that Firefox 3.0 still is in beta makes me wonder about the decision to move forward.

Next, apparently XMMS is now XMMS 2. XMMS is similar to the Winamp, except that it feels lighter and isn't run by a visionless company who decided to kill it off. I'm still waiting to give it a try, so we'll see about that soon.

There were a few other upgrades in the package that I haven't looked at, most notably Open Office. The other major packages that affect me seem like only minor security patches (e.g. Apache, PHP, Perl, etc.). Cosmetically, there's not a lot of difference that I can say would make a huge impact upon my work with this version upgrade. I use the Kubuntu version and there really isn't anything to write home about with the latest 3.5.4 packages. Once KDE manages to move towards 4 and (K)ubuntu does the full upgrade, I think it'll be worth upgrading. If you're just looking for some simple eye candy though, don't do the upgrade just for that.

Overall, I think using my laptop as a testbed for the upgrade was a great idea. There's no critical dependencies upon it for me at the moment since my desktop has become my chief work station. My desktop, on the other hand, is something I'm holding off on for a little while. I had some issues with the nvidia driver when I first tried to install it. Not sure if it'll happen again, but I want to make sure my secondary (laptop) system is okay so I can use it as a backup when I go for the major upgrade to my desktop. Also, some of those elements that I'm missing were a bit painful. Luckily, I managed to get a few working, but it looks like I'll have to bite my tongue while waiting for those Firefox plugin authors to finish up.

At work, I'm currently trying to upgrade my system to 7.10. It was taking far too long so I'm praying by the time I get in tomorrow, the packages should be downloaded and ready to rock.

I've still got a bit of customization to do with my laptop in getting it to mimic my usual desktop environment. Shouldn't take much work now though. After that, I need to start importing my application data over. I'm using a Dell Inspiron 600M with a smaller-than-usual hard disk (only 40 gb as opposed to my original 80 gb which crashed), so I'm a little constrained. Maybe I'll upgrade that too when I go back to LA this coming weekend :)

(K)ubuntu 8.04 is NOT Stable

Sun, 18 May 2008 22:32:27 -0600

I'm utterly convinced that Ubuntu's premature release of 8.04 was a terrible decision. The 6 month release cycle has produced a distribution that gets untested results. Sadly enough, people are buying this distribution as the best desktop distribution out there. I'm not inclined to disagree, but I'm quite disappointed with the current release.

My laptop is an old Dell Inspiron 600M with the ATI graphics card option.

Firefox 3b5 should NOT have been packaged in the distribution. You're sacrificing a lot of previous usability with this upgrade in losing the capabilities with many plugins. Worse yet, it's BETA software.
KDE 4 was not packaged as part of the distribution. That's probably a good decision considering that I've read a lot of bugs are springing up left and right.
I can't tell if my ATI driver is working appropriately with this distribution. I'm getting numerous crashes, both with Skype, Flash and Firefox. It's hard to say what the root cause was.
You lose XMMS to XMMS2 and will be missing all the playlist capabilities associated with that system.
For a "mature" release, they still can't get something simple as dual monitors working with a simple checkbox/detection. EXTREMELY disappointing.
Synaptic needs a major overhaul as does all the other visual package management systems. Scrolling through that overloaded list is just insane. There's too many packages that overlap with each other and it can potentially confuse users.

I left Fedora in the dust a while back when it became clear that the Fedora distribution was nothing but bloat ware. Even if the base distribution for Ubuntu is slim at one CD, the number of packages and lack of testing does not produce a better distribution than what Fedora has.

I feel that all the hype that Ubuntu has received is unjustified. It is clearly NOT a distribution that works out of the box, but more like a Mac that works with a limited range of hardware with iffy results at best.

People keep clamoring about the coming of Linux as being ready for the desktop. Truthfully, I doubt that the mentality of the greater Linux community will ever understand what makes a decent desktop: simple usability. The Linux community does not nor probably will ever develop just for the average joe, instead opting for the average geek by providing a confusing number of options that blend together in some meaningless fashion. Choice? Certainly. Making a good decision? That's something left to be desired.

Right now, I'm truly regreting my decision in upgrading my desktop back in Tokyo and even using anything above 7.04 for my laptop. This experience has been excruciating. Right now, my feeling is that until the Linux community (or distributions) like Ubuntu get major support from the hardware manufacturers to provide better QA and just describing flat out the support of their stuff that they have no chance of making any headways at the desktop level. That's the raw truth.

I'm Back (Mentally, Somewhat...)

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:23:54 -0600

Well, I had a nice little vacation in LA for three weeks. This past week I bummed around just playing the new Command and Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath. The weather in Tokyo was quite horrid as we're now experiencing a phenomenon called the "tsuyu" or "rainy season." Literally, translated it means life sucks shit for about a month as the temperatures skyrocket, the air becomes more humid and you go to work in sweaty, dingy crowded trains. Minus points if your company enforces a dress code policy of suits.

Another reason why I was offline, so to speak, was that my internet in LA sucked dick. I use Time-Warner and either my cable modem or router has a problem of constantly rebooting. I'm not sure what other options I have in LA, but if I move back permanently, that's one thing I'll definitely address.

Then my main system had gone down just before I departed for LA. Actually, it didn't go down so much as I attempted to upgrade the damn thing from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10. Something I didn't know much about was that the system requires that you use something called a "restricted driver" because I have an NVIDIA video card. Ubuntu is rather retarded in that the community displaces the driver in a restricted area rather than automatically being integrated when you're building your system. Even less known is that the driver must be re-upgraded each time or re-enabled during kernel upgrades. It's truly retarded ideology that seems counterintuitive in spreading Linux as a mainstream desktop.

I ended up buying a new hard drive (a cool Seagate 500 GB) and simply doing a clean install. After a few unexpected lockups, the system started to experience more smoothness. I had to re-enable the NVIDIA driver, reboot twice (once where I got locked up), upgraded the base software and booted into KDE (KUbuntu) for all this to work. I think the next time I decide to upgrade my system, I'll just purchase a new hard drive, externalize my data and do a clean install (well, I'll at least get another external drive, backup my data and then try an upgrade). Hopefully, the next version of Ubuntu will focus more on system stability with hardware. You really can't call a system "stable" if it keeps crashing and locking up!

Hopefully, all these issues are behind me as I have more things to deal with in the upcoming weeks. Got to renew my passport, two credit cards and get my fat ass back in the gym. At least, things are improving a little here and there....

php5 with ImageMagick Broken in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:52:58 -0600

My faith in the ubuntu name is quickly falling. This time I found an error with php5 and the ImageMagick extension. Running php on the command line, you'll see the following error message:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/imagick.so' - libWand.so.9: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Apparently, there's a quick and dirty workaround:

ln -s /usr/lib/libMagick.so.10 /usr/lib/libMagick.so.9
ln -s /usr/lib/libWand.so.10 /usr/lib/libWand.so.9

A conversation about this problem is shown in the link.

Nonetheless, this is pretty disturbing. The biggest issue here is that the ubuntu community once again had made a political decision to move ImageMagick off and is no longer in the main repository. Reading the discussion, you'd have several options like using the gutsy repository or even recompiling php5/ImageMagick. All of these solutions are unacceptable to me. The two things that could've easily addressed this situation in the first place are:

Keep ImageMagick 9 in the Hardy repository
More testing!!!!!

I vote on the later. Matter of fact, I think the Ubuntu community ought to perform more tests before releasing these distributions. I can see for minor packages how this type of bug might have little impact. However, I've had stability issues and now major libraries with irresponsible bugs attached. You just can't call a distribution "stable" when things are messed up.

I'm all for progress and pushing the envelope, but this things ought to be balanced with stability in a highly reputable distribution. Having made the switch from Windows to Linux years ago, I made a clear decision to use something that I felt had more stability. Now, I'm seeing all types of faults in the delivery of this system in favor of marketing and attempting to be cutting edge through sticking with a deadline of 6 month periodic releases.

The thing is that for most of us, we just want something that works, is virus free, doesn't crash and stops giving us headaches. At this point, I'm starting to get tempted to pick up a Macintosh, despite my long time prejudice against their hardware. It seems like the last system left that truly is stable.

More Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Woes (This Time Flash)

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:34:33 -0600

The hits keep on rolling this time with the Adobe Flash plugin. I read a blog where the new default sound system in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy is something called PulseAudio. Apparently, there's a bug in the Flash plugin when working with PulseAudio so your whole system freezes as a result when you play some media files. In my case, the system would crash and the audio would go into an infinite loop. It's definitely an audio issue as I have narrowed this crash down to Flash sites.

There is a work around that involves some wrapper and utilizing Alsa instead. But I just can't fathom how people can go about making these stupid decisions without testing them. I mean, why employ a new default audio system when you don't bother testing the base system for what might be considered a commonly used feature?

The great thing is that it's not only me who is complaining. I've read numerous other comments where frustrated users say that the latest release has been a complete and utter disaster.

The old slogan where Ubuntu would "just work" no longer can apply if it slowly is becoming a new form of bloatware. I avoided Fedora because I was sick of untested bloatware and wanted a cheap distribution that would "just work." I'm not getting it and am deeply disappointed.

It's obvious that the Ubuntu community seems far more interested in pushing the envelope of technology by trying to push new, untested default software rather than stable releases. I think in attempting to compete against Fedora or other distributions, the Ubuntu community is going to slowly wreck itself in this path.

I keep saying this but if Linux as a whole wants a flagship distribution for the desktop, the main thing it needs to prove is to be stable and "just work" out of the box. Without these basic requirements, there's absolutely zero possibility of Linux becoming a standard desktop distribution. At this point, you're really going to be better off purchasing a low end Mac, since at the very minimum, you're guaranteed that stuff will work.

Note to Adobe: OPEN SOURCE FLASH YOU IDIOTS!!!!

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:37:38 -0600

Okay, I've been going through numerous forums and it seems that my Flash woes can be purely pinpointed on Adobe. The biggest complaints I've been reading are that Flash is not open source so developers have no chance to go in and fix the issue for Linux. PulseAudio people, Firefox people, Ubuntu people, etc. are all pointing the finger at one point. Well, if this is true, then Adobe should at the very least open source the Linux version of their plugin to the community. I'm going to be forced to remove the flash plugin from my browser temporarily in case some stupid site in flash takes down my whole system.

(Updated)

In the meantime, I read that the new Flash Beta 10 plugin solves these problems. I've linked the plugin here so you can get it. Also, I believe you need to add libflashsupport using something like apt-get or synaptic for compatibility since there might still be some issues with PulseAudio and Flash.

Funny how Adobe's Beta software works far better. This isn't something new for me either. But again, if they just open source their stuff I think these frustrations might go away....

Avoid Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy!!!!

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 06:51:19 -0600

This distribution is REALLY bad. I think the problem occurs with my desktop more than anything because my laptop seems to respond fine. My guess at this point is that the NVIDIA card/driver is/are having unresolved issues with Hardy. But thus far, this distribution seems quite hopeless.

My biggest issues seem to come from Firefox usage and media files. This is really bothersome since I use my desktop for internet browsing. Now, I can't even trust it for that purpose.

Anyway, this is really depressing since my Windows system seems more stable than my Linux desktop. Heck, I have to hard reboot my system whenever it freezes. I don't think the guys over at Ubuntu are going to be able to fix these issues anytime soon either.

Ubuntu 8.0.4.1 Stable

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:13:58 -0600

After months of complaining since 8.0.4 Ubuntu came out, I can finally say that my system has returned to normal. It was a rather painful and arduous journey, but one where I learned quite a bit and participated somewhat on the Ubuntu forums. There still are a few kinks in the system such Flash blocking my Pulse Audio and me being slightly hesitant about moving onto Firefox 3. However, the most critical issue has been solved: it no longer locks up.

My system is currently fully upgraded with the latest kernel from the repository installed. Movies no longer jam my system as I simultaneously do some other tasks. I don't have some things turned on though like Compiz. While others have sworn by it, I'm keeping away until it reaches a relatively stable version.

Bottom line for is that what I see isn't bad so far. No more down time. Things work quite well. But definitely when the next version comes out, I'll wait at least 3 months before upgrading.

Increased Laziness: Dumb Clients and NFS

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:01:29 -0600

The link below is a great example of how to increase productivity, cutting cost and making your back a lot more comfortable. I'm talking about getting a laptop with Ubuntu/Linux on it, setting up an NFS server, mounting your data from the server and then sitting back on your couch with your legs propped up and enjoying life.

At home, my little chair has been tortured by my increased physical laziness in that I tend to lay back on it as if it were a recliner. Rather than await the day when the back snaps off and stabbing my spine with remnants of a jagged plastic stump, I decided to move into a pro-active mode through achieving independence of my computer desk and utilizing my recently neglected laptop.

From that, I just configured my desktop and laptop with NFS, mounting my home directory. My LAN lines giving me about 100mbs, I can fluidly utilize my desktop's generous hard drive space while employing my laptop from the comfort of my couch as my legs are indolently propped up against my one seater.

To me this is the future of home computing. Hopefully, more offices start to realize this and implement more relaxing settings for their employees.

upgraded to Firefox 3(.01)

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:27:59 -0600

I finally gave into the need of upgrading my systems' browsers to the latest Firefox. i was able to get all the necessary plugins, which was my primary reason for not upgrading during the Beta and first stable release. However, the need for improved performance was the priority here.

I have to say that it's nice being able to blaze through pages again. 2 was terrible in terms of performance, making IE feel faster. Kinda scary thought considering that the whole point of Firefox was to have a less bloated browser.

Also, my Firefox was a bit flaky on my linux systems. Sometimes I had to load the application a few times. And even the browser wouldn't die properly after a simple shutdown.

I'm still debating whether I like the new interface. There's some plus sides to the look, but it feels a bit blocky. Not as smooth as I would like it.

On the bright side, I was encouraged to try a few new plugins today. Got Clipmarks, StumbleUpon and another. These look quite good. I'll wait on adding more since my browser has a great deal of plugins already loaded.