brian habbe | window to my world

July 12, 2010

The HTC G1 still rocks

Phones have almost become disposable as technology advances at a speed where what you have is replaced in a month or two by “the new thing”. I like new gadgets but these days at $300 to $600 dollars a pop it’s just not economical. So when I opted for a G1 Dev Phone last year I was hoping for something that might be upgradeable and still have that new feel as the software evolves.

I have not been disappointed.

After the upgrade to 1.6 I was satisfied for a while but then came the next version of Android and that changed things. Better navigation and snappier user interface with screen auto rotation and more. When it didn’t look like there’d be any official version after 1.6 I went looking for a custom ROM, enter cyanogen. I loaded 1.6 just after the first of the year and 2.1 (Eclair) about a month ago, it has been excellent. Checking the site today they have 2.2 (Froyo) available for both the Dream (G1) and the Magic (G2).

It’s been two years since the G1 was released and thanks to folks at cyanogen and other communities like xda developers it has the same software as a Nexus One, HTC Incredible or EVO. Open Source, you gotta love it !!!

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December 31, 2009

Ubuntu Karmic notification icons with messed up video

For the last month or so I’ve been using Fedora as it seemed to fit my T42 better than Ubuntu did. But wanting to get back to it I plopped in the drive and fired it up. A decent amount of updates were needed and after getting through those things seemed fine. But then after resuming from suspend I noticed the pop up icon in the notification area was blank. It was almost like the something was up with the resolution or video display of the icon itself.

Bad Video Notification

I’m not sure if this was one of those things I thought was a problem when Karmic first came out or not. I did load it pre-release but moved to Fedora shortly thereafter. Finding this to be odd I tried to do a little googling and research, found a few threads that pointed to some of the work the Ubuntu Desktop Experience Team was doing but not much that suggested a solution. The only thing I did come across was talk about video drivers and excelleration. This didn’t really make much sense to me, it has been years since I’ve had to care about the X config file and adjusting it manually. That takes me back to the RedHat 6 days and my Tecra 600. But it did give me a thought.

Video in general was not a problem, just the notificaiton icons. So as a guess I checked what was set for Visual Effects.

System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects (tab)



The current setting was None so I changed it to Normal. To test I watched Rhythmbox move to the next song and the icon was normal.

Correct Notification

Good to know that fixed the problem but interesting it needed to be done. Regardless the polish with Gnome in Karmic is really good. Ubuntu has taken Linux on the desktop where no one else has and with that there will always be little challenges. Wonder where they’ll go from here.

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December 1, 2009

G1 Contact Sync

Just after updating my G1 to 1.6 I was struck again with problems syncing contacts. Mind you it’s not a huge deal, I don’t meet 20 people a day and need there digits. It has been a common problem and was well documented based on the posts I found. The consistent fix from the Google Mobile Help forum was clearing contact data on the G1 and then sync. That worked and syncing is back.

This might be a good argument for turning on synchronization but that tends to limit battery life. If all else fails I can fall back to this but I’m hoping if I sync more often, and not make changes in both places then sync, the problem will go away. We’ll see.

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November 2, 2009

SSH Public Key Authenication

Last week I had an occasion to test public key authentication from OpenVMS to Linux. With the dayjob we have an implementation where data will be sent in batch via sftp to a Linux box. To get a better idea of “the entire process” thought I should take my Debian box and test authenticating to it. Once I got through all the quirks it wasn’t that difficult.

The biggest challenge has been getting past access violations when executing ssh commands on some OpenVMS servers. What I found on HP’s ITRC forum referenced UIC in RIGHTSLIST needing to match what’s in SYSUAF, for a user executing SSH commands. Even though OpenVMS TCPIP version 5.6 ECO 1 release notes comment about this as being fixed we have experienced it with ECO 2. None the less updating the RIGHTSLIST resolves the problem.

As for set up it wasn’t to bad. Here’s the steps (summary) I used.

OpenVMS

  1. Enable the SSH Client in TCPIP$CONFIG.
  2. Create a sub folder for the user of [.SSH2], making sure your logged in as the account in question.
  3. Set default to that directory and create a key using ssh_keygen. (In order to use ssh_keygen you must first execute sys$manager:tcpip$define_commands.com.)
  4. Create an IDENTIFICATION. file with a line of. 
    KeyID <private key name>
  5. Push the public key (.PUB) to the Linux box.

Linux

  1. Log in as the user you’ll be connecting with, create a .ssh subfolder if it does not already exist.
  2. Take the public key (.PUB) from the OpenVMS box and put it in the authorized_keys file.
    $ ssh-keygen -i -f openvms.pub >> authorized_keys

note:  keep in mind where default is in relation to .ssh/authorized_keys the above would assume
your in ~/.ssh when executing ssh-keygen.

This was with the default config for sshd on Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (lenny). Something to also keep in mind is from a security perspective ensuring access to the key files is limited to the user would be a good practice on both systems.

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October 1, 2009

Flash not working in Ubuntu

There seems to be a lot of discussion about Flash not working from time to time in Ubuntu and I to have had that problem in the past. I was late upgrading to Jaunty and after doing so it came up again. Mind you most times I don’t do a dist-upgrade but a fresh install, with $HOME on it’s own partition. This time I tried gnash and swfdec but for some sites it didn’t do the trick. So this evening I thought I’d sit down do some research and fix it.

After a bit of googling I found my way to this forum thread. It is dated but gave me a direction, so I followed the advice and did the following. 

$ sudo apt-get clean
$ sudo apt-get autoclean
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get remove -y --purge flashplugin-nonfree
$ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

Unfortunately the result was the same, but all was not lost the plugin was installed I just needed to point it to firefox. That wasn’t quite it. See I had installed gnash and swfdec and removed them so I thought but there was still something overriding firefox from using the flashplugin-nonfree package. So when trying to play a flash movie from the browser I right clicked on the embeded player in the page and selected “About”. What came up was SWFDEC, and there in lies the problem.

I’m not positive at this point if the package was something I installed or loaded by default but removing swfdec-mozilla fixed my problem. 

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge swfdec-mozilla
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Reload the page and we are up and running… YMMV.

Cheers.

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September 29, 2009

Android 1.6 on the G1 Dev Phone

Tonight I had some time and wanted to load the latest version of Android on my g1. This was one reason why I got it, even though I skipped over the 1.5 update and was still running 1.1. I haven’t been bold enough to load any custom ROM images yet so I go to the Android Dev Phone 1 site at HTC and grab an updated radio and recovery image. As time goes by I might go another route but for now those versions do the trick.

It has been a while since I blogged about the g1 and some things have changed. The T42 I was using fell victum to the well documented ThinkPad GPU reflow problem, probably the result of a fumble while at the Avis rental counter in the Denver airport back in April. I replaced it with another T42 from ThinkPad Depot a couple months ago and have been happy with it so far.

    Interesting those sound like topics worthy of a blog post but there are none !!! Will try to rectify that in the future.

So needing to start over I first grabbed the Eclipse for RCP and then the Android sdk. I followed the upgrade instructions and managed to have a problem with the adb tool that I think I ran into when I first got the phone and flashed it with 1.1. None the less I did some googling and found where the SD card should not be mounted and adb needs to run as root.

    The “needs to run as root” can be resolved with the right tweeking I believe but I haven’t spent enough time one it yet.

That said the flash went without a hitch for both the radio and recovery image. I’m looking forward to some of the new features, although I’m not sure about the virtual keyboard since it eats up half the screen. The nice part is if it’s a bust I can always try something different or go back.

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June 23, 2009

Windows 7

A few weeks ago I downloaded a trial version of Windows 7 Ultimate to give it a whirl. At the time I thought it might be a way to get away from XP for work yet still run inside of VirtualBox. If it worked I could always load it to the hard drive and not worry about the SATA driver issue I had with XP. Loading was initially a problem as I don’t have a DVD burner but thanks to VirtualBoxes ability to create a virtual machine from an ISO I was in luck.

The UI is better, visually kinder to the eye but functionally similar. Some changes in the control panel area have me wandering a bit, but what’s already on the web has helped. I get the impression Microsoft is moving to helping the average or not so informed user with some of what it’s doing. I don’t blame them there’s more numbers in users that need education than those that already have it. Personally though I could do without the wizards, that’s probably “old school” mentality.

The only problem I have at the moment is after starting the VM I can’t join the domain at work. The version of Cisco’s VPN Client (5.0.4) I’m using doesn’t offer an option to start before the windows login. So far the searching I’ve done hasn’t yielded any solutions. I’m thinking I should be able to VPN into the network at work in Ubuntu, which gets me on the network but not on the domain, then login to the VM with my domain credentials… that should do it. But it hasn’t worked. I’m sure Cisco will come out with an update, just need to be patient.

For a preview you can look at some screens on crunch gear.

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April 8, 2009

Virtualbox rules

The beginning of 2009 I decided to move back to windows for work and with the laptop dead again it seemed like the right time. Yes I forgot, after getting a new power supply it again has decided to shutdown randomly. At times receeding the hard drive, or the memory, or the battery seemed to bring it back but nothing consistent. So I picked up a used IBM T42, added a extended life battery and maxed the memory at 2GB (from the old laptop) and it has been great. Hopefully I’ll get a year or so out of it.

So about Virtual Box. Since the T42 came with a copy of XP I had a license to work with. Installing was simple using aptitude, but I did grab a more current version by updating /etc/apt/sources.list with.

deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian lenny non-free

This was mainly since the T42 runs Debian and the desktop runs Ubuntu. From there it was.

aptitude update
aptitued install virtualbox-2.1

.. and I was ready to create a virtual machine.

With the virtual machine created I loaded XP, updated and added the software I needed from our servers at work. When it came time to move it to the other machine I did run into a problem. But after checking the forums I was able to clone from one machine to the other and things are working in both places.

Sweet !!

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December 20, 2008

Fetchmail, Dovecot and OpenLDAP

The last few weeks I’ve been working on a server that I can access mail from regardless of which machine I’m on, what OS I load or where I’m at. Now yes the thoughts running through ones head is you can also do it with about any of the major email hosts google, yahoo, hotmail, not to mention a number of ISP’s. The difference is I wanted to have the data in a place that I could physically touch on my own equipment to modify as I see fit. Not to mention it sounded like a decent challenge too. Applications already exist to do this and since I’m not going with an all in one solution I’ll need a few separate programs to do the job. That’s where Fetchmail, Dovecot and LDAP will do all the work.

I’ve read about Fetchmail for years but never took the time to put it to work. The same would go for Dovecot (IMAP) and LDAP.

How they all work is Fetchmail will “fetch” mail from the various addresses I have and store all the messages in one place. To read the mail with a standard client I needed IMAP, this what Dovecot will do. Lastly, which is a bonus, is LDAP for contacts and for this we can use slapd to implement OpenLDAP.

Fetchmail

Their is plenty of resources on the net for this already one that helped me was this post, simple and straight forward. My setup barley scratches the surface of what this app can do, but for now simple does the trick.

Dovecot

Dovecot is an IMAP and POP3 package it will take care of the access, it can be configured for unsecure, secure or both. This setup was a little more tricky for me. After installing I was able to get access but no mail or folders would show up. It took me a little time, in the end it was this that solved the problem. I enabled the following line in dovecot.conf

default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

.. and I had access. What’s nice here is all I have to do is create a folder on the IMAP side and copy / paste the messages from the folder on my machine. Now they are all on the server and I can access them from any machine / device on my network or if I’m travelling.

OpenLDAP

The most challenging of these has been LDAP. This is another protocol I haven’t had an opportunity to do much with. For this I installed slapd and immediately began fighting with the setup. LDAP is one of those apps that is very robust and with so many options and ways to do things it’s difficult to weed your way through. This article was very helpful. When I got to the section that talks about ldapadd I could not execute it, that app was not part of the slapd package. It took me a little time to figure that out and once I added it, and loaded the ldif file things were better.

But then the problems started with Evolution and accessing the LDAP directory. Response was slow and would only work a few times until I restarted. I was hoping this was a configuration issue but then I found this bug and was immediately disappointed.

However I figured their had to be a resolution and since I was using version 2.22 I thought maybe 2.24 had a fix. Both Ubuntu Intrepid and Fedora 10 come with 2.24 and I have a drive that I just loaded F10 on. Before swapping I did some more googling I found reference to a patch that recently had been applied so I was hopeful 2.24 was ok. Unfortunately I can’t find the reference and didn’t make note of it at the time. But I believe it was a thread on the Gnome Evolution Hackers list and the fix is included in this release. So after putting in my drive with F10 and adding the LDAP address book response was much better and no time outs. So far it’s looking good.

That leaves me with a question, move to 2.24 or live with 2.22. I’d like to keep all contacts in a central location so I’ll have to look into upgrading Evolution to 2.24 on Lenny. Regardless I’m pleased and it was an excellent learning experience.

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December 9, 2008

Comcast using Zimbra

A hockey buddy sent me a email recently where the mailer was reported as.

Mailer: Zimbra 5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64 (zclient/5.0.9_GA_2533.RHEL5_64)

I’ve always found it interesting what others use to manage their mail but I didn’t think he used open source, not to mention Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Zimbra. So that got me thinking he is a Comcast user and so am I, does Comcast use Zimbra ? I sent a message from my Comcast account then checked the mailer, nope it was AT&T Message Center. So I did some googling and sure enough I missed this one late last year.

The reason he has it and I don’t is it’s a feature of their Triple Play package, we only use TV and Internet. Regardless it’s pretty cool for open source software. I’ve been reading good things about Zimbra and was thinking about installing it on a test server about a month ago but never got to it. Five or six years ago when I was hosting my own mail server a product like this would have been sweet. Guess if I get crazy and want to go back I know now there’s a good option that’s free.

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