Category Archives: Technology

Ubuntu is impressive

Technology,

About a month ago I switched from Fedora to Ubuntu and needless to say I am impressed. Back in 1998 when I first found Linux and started playing around it was a RedHat boxen version (6.0) that I spent $40.00 on. I have pretty much been a RedHat man till they changed there business model and released there last free version, 9. Then I started looking to other distros and used SuSe for a while. It was not but a few months later that I was back to RedHat, this time with Fedora Core 2.

I was pleased with Fedora but after getting a new laptop this year and loaded Core 3 I had some difficulties with the display and wireless. Now I got those worked out but it was not without some googling and trial and error. The last straw was when attempting to customize the desktop I pretty much broke my login. Now that could have nothing to do with Fedora and everything to do with me, I’m not sure but after fixing it again started me wondering about what else was out there.

I thought maybe it was time to go a little more hard core and took a stab at Gentoo but quickly found that installing was a little more than I wanted to deal with. That led me to Ubuntu. Now the “hard core” comment can get thrown out the window here but this distro is impressive.

The installation is not GUI but that doesn’t matter, IMHO. What does matter is that hardward is recognized and setup correctly, Ubuntu did so without a problem. Video, sound, mouse, NIC’s, USB, CD/DVD .. all were recognized on installation. What was not found was an appropriate driver for the built in SD card reader and on board modem. These I don’t mind since I don’t use them. I’m sure with some googling I could find the correct ndiswrapper for the modem but not for the built in SD card.

To date it has been a little over a month with Ubuntu and I’m loving every minute of it. I still have Fedora Core 3 on a spare drive, the original 80GB. So this 10GB spare I’m using at the moment will become the backup soon and I put the original back and load Ubuntu. For now since I’m not doing anything with a CMS product I don’t really need the space. But that will change.

Wireless wakeup

Technology

Well I got a great laugh at myself this morning as I booted up and had no wireless connection. Sometimes the obvious is to close and you loose all perspective. You see I spent about an hour checking settings, viewing logs, starting and stopping networking, rebooting … just about anything I could think of. Of course nothing made sense so I started googling to see what I could be missing.

Keep in mind I did say “obvious” at the beginning.

Googling pointed me to a number of resources and they all commented about loading the current firmware and drivers. The wireless NIC is an Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915.

In an earlier post I noted getting a new laptop at the beginning of the year and since then have switched from Fedora to Ubuntu.

But then I got to thinking after loading Ubuntu wireless worked, in fact it worked out of the box and without a problem. So then I changed my tune as far as what I was searching for. Things had to of stopped working for a reason. So after a little more googling I “paid attention” to what was in dmesg.

$ dmesg | grep ipw2200
ipw2200: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200/2915 Network Driver, 0.19
ipw2200: Copyright(c) 2003-2004 Intel Corporation
ipw2200: Detected Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection
ipw2200: Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On:

Radio Frequency Kill Switch is On … right there in front of me and I didn’t even pay attention. Now mind you I’m not using the windows driver and the LED does not come on. So I checked what was set for the driver and sure enough “we are not searching for an wireless networks”.

$ cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/ipw2200/0000:02:06.0/rf_kill
2

With Ubuntu, or at least Horay and the package kernel, there is no software setting.. the driver does not support it. But if you push the wireless NIC button on the laptop rf_kill changes to 0. Wireless is up … end of story.

So don’t forget to check the obvious and save yourself some head scratching otherwise you might drift off into DEU (Delinquent End User) land.

Evolution contacts backup problem

Technology,

I have used Novell Evolution for a few years now and it is an excellent PIM (Personal Information Manager). Other than a bone head move a few weeks ago, which killed all my email and contacts, I have not had any problems.

It had nothing to do with Evolution and I was able to restore from a backup. It was just frustrating more than anything. I guess that is a good argument for backing data up… ;)

Today however I loaded Ubuntu on a spare drive and when restoring .evolution one address book was gone. I thought that was very strange since /$HOME/.evolution/addressbook/local/ contained a folder other than system and it had addressbook.db and addressbook.db.summary. I tried creating the address book in Evolution and then manually copying the .db and .db.summary files into it, but no luck.

I did a little googling and came across a few posts that commented about shutting down the Evolution database server and restarting. This seemed like a logical thing to do, however I would have thought a reboot would have done the same but none the less I was game.
Find the PID of the server. Kill it and restart Evolution.

$ ps -ef | grep Evolution_DataServer
nobody     9657     1  0 20:02 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/evolution

/evolution-data-server-1.2
--oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_DataServer_InterfaceCheck
 --oaf-ior-fd=50

$ kill -9 9657

Initially that did not do the trick so I decided to create the address book empty and then move addressbook.db and addressbook.db.summary into the new folder. After adding the address book I had to kill the DataServer again to get new folder to appear in .evolution/addressbook/local. Once I moved the new files to the new folder and restarted Evolution, both address books were there.

Knoppix and Qparted

Technology

Open source came the the rescue again this weekend when I needed to reformat a hard drive. I use to keep handy a Windows boot floppy to get the job done but I have not used a diskett in years. Not to metion of the three machines I currently have none of them have a floppy. Now of course I could have burned a CD or used a Windows rescue CD but none of those was available.

Enter Knoppix.

A few months back I burned a copy of Knoppix 3.6 just in case I ran into a scenario of needing a quick format. This weekend it did the trick. There are certainly other tools available to format a hard drive but QParted was the quickest access.

A spare 20GB laptop drive that was Fedora Core 2 needed to load XP Home. The reason for using Knoppix is the XP install CD was not getting anywhere with no NTSF partition. A quick boot to Knoppix and a couple clicks later, where done.

Creating Web Pages in Linux

Technology

Being a jack of all trades and a master of none I’m always looking for some help here or there when it comes to getting the job done. Now if I was a web developer I could write about web pages from a completely different angle, but I’m not. Recently I found a product called Bluefish that is very cool.

For what I’ve needed to do over the last few years didn’t need much imagination. I’d use the stock templates that came with the product and because of the implementation I didn’t really need to alter the html… and if I did I’m not a web developer so even if I wanted to there was only so much I could do. But of course the more you know the more you want to know so digging into html is something I’ve been toying with.

For the most part I’ve been using gedit or the vi editor but it always seems like I’d get lost matching up a table or column. That’s when I came across Bluefish. I have not had a chance to work with it very much lately but I can say I like what I see so far. The reviews from the site are from a few years back but the Sourceforge Project site is active. Looks like it could be the ticket for now.

I’ll post more after I get a chance to dig in.

Update April 29, 2005

Well I’m not sure how deep I’ll get into Bluefish I’m just not at that knowledge level yet. It has been a great asset though. See the Bluefish Features List for more details.