A short vacation

Personal,

I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post, that’s horrible. I guess I can’t use the excuse of there hasn’t been much going on, there’s always something. So I’ll get back into the swing here as the wife and I took a little trip to Amelia Island, FL. It’s about 45 minutes from the Jacksonville airport up I95.


We stayed with some friends who have access to a condo on the beach. Even though it rained one day there was still plenty of time to get some sun, take in some history, and play in the water. Fort Clinch was a good afternoon experience taking you back to the days of the confederate. Another afternoon was spent hanging out on a beach where campers were welcome and you could park… on the beach. I forget the name unfortunately but there was plenty of surfers, jet ski’s and family’s with there pets having fun.

All in all it was a great four days away. I even managed to read a book, something that is rare for me. A magazine is no problem but to wade through a novel… that is different story. But then again what is vacation for !!!

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.

Braces arrrrrrg !!!

Personal

Well today I finally had the appointment I’d been dreading for years, literally. I am finally in the position to make right what I should have done 10 years ago. But at the moment I can’t see why. Good things do come to those who wait and in about 24 months it will be good but now …. it sucks !!!

Yes I visited the orthadontist to get some hardware added, what has been a little “out of place” is on it’s way to respecability. At least that is until they start to wander around or fall out, which ever comes first. It started the first week of the month with an extraction from the dentist. Extraction, that is a good word to use. I’ve never had a tooth taken out before, of course the wisdom teeth were pulled but I was not awake for those. So seeing a large pointed chissel type object in the hands of my dentist was a first I’ll say. And in the end when it finally came out it was a first for the dentist, according to them.

They had never seen a tooth with roots so long, I’m not sure if that was good or bad but at an inch long I did ponder how it fit in my lid. Not to mention if all the others in there the same.

Next came the spacers last week. At the time I didn’t really know what they were for just thought they were trying to put some space between my teeth so they’d have some room to move.
Yes I should have asked questions but it was not something that seemed out of the ordinary.
So the spacers were two on each side top and bottom all at the back.
Oh and the extraction was on the top to make room for the movement that would be needed at the front. See that’s where things are a little smooshed.

They were in for a week and today was the “install”.

As for the spacers I’ve learned they were for bands that go around the back teeth and hold the anchors for the wire. Two hours later I was done and on my way with a packet full of info on foods you can’t/shouldn’t eat, wax, perscription toothpaste and a tiny brush for access between the “hardware”. Now I have a mouth full of “extra things” and needless to say it is an expierence. The first day is not even up yet.

I will probably be buying some stock in pain relievers at this rate. It wasn’t that bad when four were moving with the spacers but now there are a lot more. But the bigger challenge will be keeping from getting banged up while playing hockey. Knock on wood after four years of adult league and no cage I’ve been lucky but now I’ll have to pay extra attention.

But that’s ok in 24 months it should all be worth it … at least that is what I keep telling myself…. ;)