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Linux

Technology Woes

Spent the weekend on and off attacking my to-do list.

Got the den cleaned up, a bit. Most everything off the floor.

Spent a good chunk of the weekend trying to stop the lockups on my Ubuntu desktop. It’s definitely a Nvidia bug. Started with X freezing, but the mouse pointer works. Found the bug on nvnews.net, but no solution. Asked for help on the Ubuntu forums, but no luck there. Asked for help on the TCLUG, but can’t even get to my mail now with the frequent lock ups.

I’ve installed and un-installed the Nvidia packages from Ubuntu, messed with my XFree86-4 configuration file, including making sure the modules are right, and even trying with and without the DRI module as some posts indicate. It definitely has something to do with the GL functions – the screensavers and GLXgears lock it up instantly.

The next two things to try are swapping 4200 cards, and maybe trying to build the Nvidia drivers from source (ugh).

I did get Vino working on the laptop – that’s pretty cool as I can just use the remote desktop functionality to read my email on my box from my laptop in the living room over the wireless connection. I’ll need to play with the screen resolutions a bit, as my desktop has 1600×1200 and my laptop is 1024×768, which makes it a bit hard to read at times.

All of this makes the case for getting my Athlon64 up and running – it might be my solution to dedicate that box as my primary linux box.

I disconnected my Linksys router I use as an access point. For some reason, unlike my D-Link A/G router, the Linksys won’t serve as a passthrough to my server, so any device connected to the Linksys won’t have internet access. I attempted to hook up a second D-Link, a vanilla 802.11g, but couldn’t get it to work like my A/G. It’s a pain in the ass to do it too, as I have to dedicate one machine to it, turn DHCP and all that fun stuff off, but I’ve learned I’ll have to have a second box hooked up to the A/G so I can figure out what settings I’m missing to get it to work.

To top it all off, I’m in the living room watching football, and my UPS freaks out. It’s probably my own fault as I don’t drain it periodically like I should, but it starts beeping and won’t stop. I’ll have to re-evaluate my power needs for my den. It’s just more to add to my to-do list. One step forward and two steps backwards.

Ubuntu – Holy Cow

So I knew Ubuntu was good, just see my last two posts. But I had no idea it was this good.

I took the liberty of installing it on my HP ze4600 laptop tonight. Popped in the CD, booted it up, clicked enter, and it hung. Repeat, hangs again. Guessing it’s an APCI problem, add a noirq to the boot command line, no go. Google around, see the F1 key is options before boot, and there it says add “noapic nolapic” to the boot command. Voila.

Normal install, quick and dirty. Boot up for the first time after installation is complete.

What’s this? My Synaptic touchpad is working? Double-clicking the pad is just like double tapping the mouse button. Awesome! I never did get this to work on FC2.

Looking up at the panel I see the wireless networking strength meter. Interesting, mouse over shows it sees device ath0, my D-Link AG660 PC Card that’s in there! (I don’t use the Broadcom builtin 54G, bad Broadcom for not supporting linux!) Fire up the networking settings, add the ath0 and WEP key, disable the ethernet, and wham! bang! Full wireless network support!

I spent days hacking at madwifi getting that to run on FC2. The first FC2 install I had it worked fairly easily, but after a reinstall I couldn’t get madwifi / atheros support to work to save my life. And here’s a distribution that installs this stuff by default.

I am going to make it a priority to get my music re-tagged, organized, backed up, and migrate my server over to Ubuntu in the next month or two. I’m in love, swept off my feet, by a polished, linux distribution run by Canonical, powered by Debian. I’m in awe of the work they’ve done, and am going to support them as much as I can.

Taking the plunge

I took the plunge last night, inspired by my post yesterday, and installed Ubuntu on my linux box I use for chat, email, surfing, and listening to music.

I backed up my Evolution and media files, but I forgot to export my GPG private key. Oops, I’ll have to create a new one and get my new public key posted.

I have to say I was absolutely blown away. First, as a text based installer, so what – everyone wants a GUI installer but there were only a few basic questions asked during installation, and then a few more after that to get it set up. It was, by far, the fastest installation of any linux distribution I’ve ever seen, including Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake that I’ve done in the last 5 years. A part of that is that package selection is pre-determined, and looking through the final package list of what’s on the system, I can’t say I disagree with any of them.

I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again – Gnome 2.8 is sexy. I changed Gnome to the Industrial theme right away, I didn’t care for the earth tones of the Ubuntu default theme, nor the fonts, but that’s just personal. Evolution 2.2 wouldn’t import my old Evolution files from my Fedora box. I have ’em backed up, but I hope there wasn’t anything really important there I really need. I did Google for importing, and found a page about importing Evolution email into Thunderbird. Fired up Synaptic, installed Thunderbird, started it, and my box locked up. Hmmm. Restarted, seems to work fine. Still using Evolution at the moment, just from a starting over point, want to try the Junk filters built in now.

Went to change my desktop background, and tried to download a blue Ubuntu background. Firefox locked up. Restarted. Hmm. Wonder if it’s a hardware thing or just me? Seems to be working fine though.

Some of the things that absolutely kick ass. Clean theme, no icons on the desktop. I like splitting the Applications and Computer on the Gnome panel bar thing. Samba functionality worked out of the box. Can completely see my server in the basement and can browse SMB shares. Linked to the shares on my desktop. I never could get that working in Gnome 2.6 / Nautilus on my Fedora Core 2 box.

Synaptic runs like a champ. Being a long time user of Apt from Freshrpms on Fedora & Red Hat, on a Debian based system it even feels better.

Next steps are getting full multimedia functionality, including DVD & MP3; Bluefish and some editor type stuff, and seeing if Rhythmbox can connect over a Samba share. And maybe importing my Evolution stuff.

Then I’ll be on to installing Ubuntu on the laptop and the Athlon 64! And if I’m really daring, wiping my Gaming box. Getting closer everyday.

Progress

Finally figured out what’s hanging my linux box – GAIM, my IM client. Can’t say I’m shocked, there have been a ton of updates lately.

It’s driving me pretty close to using Ubuntu Linux though. I’ve tried Debian, Gentoo, and have been (and still am) a long time user of Red Hat & Fedora. The box currently has Fedora Core 2 on it, and Fedora Core 3 hasn’t come out fast enough for me.

Gnome 2.8 is sexy.

Ubuntu, as a Debian derivative is very interesting me. 6 month release cycles (similar to Fedora), tied to Gnome releases, which are 6 months as well (close, but not quite similar to Fedora).

I am very excited about the community aspect of Ubuntu – Debian with all the updates, contributed back to the Debian core teams, funded by a .com millionaire to make a great Linux distro. As a huge Gnome fan, their Gnome integration looks (from the outside) fabulous. All the power of apt-get, with the power of Debian.

I always hated the Debian installer – I had to actually get help at a TCLUG installfest to get installed (damn network). Ubuntu looks to take some of that complexity away. In addition, their interesting choice of using sudo instead of a root account is intriguing.

I tried their pre-release on my laptop, but it wouldn’t boot, but I’m sure it was ACPI related. I just didn’t spend the 15 minutes needed to find the boot command. I burned the final version last week – I’m going to get on my linux box as I backed up my music and email a day or two ago, and then my laptop and AMD64 box right after that.

More to come.

My Music

So I have a lot of music. With over 700 CDs ripped, and some other misc. music, it’s quite a bear to manage it all.

For the last few years, I’ve used Netjuke on my Linux server. During the upgrade process this past spring, I put my music on two seperate hard drives, seperate from the third which holds the OS. What I love about Netjuke is that it’s database driven, making it very easy to search, and a nice web interface, that is semi-skinnable. It’s also GPL.

The downside is that Netjuke 2.0 has been in development for almost (or just over?) a year. Netjuke 1 was released in Aug. ’03, and no updates since. Netjuke 2.0 development has been quiet for almost 6 months, with no updates, and the CVS is unusable. And there is talk that it will be propietary, not GPL, which doesn’t make me happy.

I’ve been looking at other projects, first Andromeda, which is a PHP script that is not database driven. I had used Andromeda before Netjuke, and purchased it again this past spring when I had some installation problems with Netjuke 1.0, but still wasn’t happy with it.

On the Netjuke forums, I came across Jinzora, which looks similar to Andromeda, but has more functionality through PHP scripting. Features include ID3 tagging, server side playback (which Netjuke can do kind of), file downloading, RSS feeds, and a slim version for adding via an iframe.

I still have some questions that the FAQ, Wiki and forums didn’t answer around multiple directories (I have my Ogg and MP3 files in seperate directories, but those directories have identical artists, but different albums).

I still have some work to do to finish cleaning up some ID3 tags, and getting some newer music on the site and syncing it all up, but this is another project to add to my list. I still have to figure out why the ID3 tags for some live Dave Mathews stuff isn’t working in Netjuke too.

In addition, I need to get a linux box up with a sufficiently big enough hard drive so I can rsync nightly or weekly to back it all up. My Mirra won’t back up a network drive, and I had mapped my music directories on my linux box over Samba to my extra Windows box hoping it would. Dammit.

Speaking of music, I need to find out how Windows serving works. A while back I received Omnifi for the car and my home receiver. While pretty cool to transfer my music to my car’s hard drive, the car version was way to sensitive and doesn’t work. I still have the set top box hooked up to my home theater, and that works streaming from my extra Windows box where I have some of my music duplicated from my server. The downside is that Omnifi uses software to manage your music collection called SimpleCenter. This is one of the worst designed music interfaces ever created. The one neat feature it has is “Watch Folders” where you point it towards your music folder, and it automatically notices when you add music to that folder and adds it to your collection. It does not support Ogg, but does support Rhapsody and some internet music stations.

I had purchased The Killers new CD, ripped it to MP3 (bleh) and put it on my Windows box. Firing up the Omnifi, lo and behold I see a Musicmatch server on it – sure enough, from my Linksys boombox installation, Musicmatch has the identical ability that SimpleCenter, including watch folders, and what not. So I import all the music on that Windows box into MusicMatch, and can use that on my Omnifi. From managing my music on my PC, I prefer the MusicMatch interface – it’s not my favorite either, but it has some better features built-in including ID3 tagging, and the interface is cleaner to use, but it has too many advanced features to get you to buy crap.

So the questions becomes what is the SDK that they’re using – terminology is identical (Watch Folders, etc) and what would it take to get it ported to Linux. If I could have my whole collection on my server serving my house (with the exception of Ogg dammit, and I’m not re-encoding that stuff), I would be golden.

So much work, so little time.

Take back the web!

I’ve been meaning for a while to blog about Mozilla’s Firefox . A week or two back they released 1.0 Preview Release 1, and it blew away their previous version. The built-in RSS reader is worth it alone.

Tabbed browsing, built-in Google search bar, built-in pop-up blocking, and most of all, speed. This is true innovation in software development.

They had a goal of 1 million downloads in 10 days, and almost doubled that. Even a few friends of mine who aren’t aware or believe in the open source movement use Firefox. This is the kind of application that will educate people to the beauty of open source.

Get Firefox today!

Get Firefox!

Linux Gaming

This article sums up most of my views of gaming on Linux.

I have 2 machines that still run XP – one for gaming, the other I used to 2box my other Everquest account back in the day. It still has a bunch of music I need to transfer to my server, but other than that, I keep telling myself it will be for video editing as that’s the only other thing Linux isn’t as good as Windows still.

But back to Linux gaming: As I game less and less now, I realize I have to get my basement done, as my using my high end computer for non-gaming tasks drives me nuts in Windows. For the last two weeks I’ve seriously considered wiping my XP partition, or at the least making it dual boot. But I’m lazy, though I’m getting closer every day. As I look at what games I play, only Doom 3 has the potential to be played on Linux. If I only ran Linux, I’d have UT2k4 there as well. I had great success with NeverWinter Nights on Linux, but other than that, there are no RPG choices. As I debate EQ2 and World of Warcraft, neither will play on Linux.

Is playing games on the X-box my only choice? (If I were to only run Linux).

I absolutely agree with the article regarding WINE. WINE is not an option for Linux gaming, and for developers it’s a cop-out. Yes, I understand DirectX has matured better and faster than OpenGL. But if major games can work natively on Mac OSX, is Linux that far out of reach?

Yahoo Radio & MNF

Speaking of Yahoo Radio yesterday, what a disappointing service.

From a broadcast perspective, it’s gotten better. It used to be when they cut to commercial, it was dead air with no sound. Now you get local commercials.

But I’m a geek – I use Red Hat 9 on the box I listen to the game on. Well, doesn’t work with Linux. Fine. Use the KVM and pull up the other Windows box. Fire up Mozilla Firebird and go back and try and load it and Yahoo tells me I’m not running the right OS again. Takes me a few minutes to realize that I’m running the right OS, just not the right browser. Fire up IE, and bam, get the popup to choose RealOne or WMP as my player. Their OS / player detection page needs to define better the problem. And they should at least be Mozilla compliant. (Hmm, just thought of putting the plugin information in for WMP, but I don’t think that would fix it anyway).

And how about those Colts last night? By the definition of the Leaping rule as Al Michaels read on TV, Simeon Rice did break the rule – even if he landed late. But even to that point, for the Colts to score 3 TDs in 3:44, on the Bucs Defense, is amazing.

Sitting around watching the game last night, we all looked at each other and said this was a defining moment for Peyton Manning – and it was. Good for Dungy, especially after how the Glazers screwed him.

Red Hat 9

I just installed Red Hat 9 on my old gaming rig, and I just can’t believe how great it is.

I thought Red Hat 8 was good, worthy of up a full number upgrade over 7.3, Bluecurve was a step in the right direction, but 9 is really that good. The fonts are the best I’ve seen – and that’s something I had always wanted to update previously on my RH and Debian boxes, but 9 is fantastic. The software is good and up to date without being scary new, apt-get works like a charm (thanks Freshrpms!), the menu issues were fixed, and the network browser works great.

Just having installed it again, it’s slick, installs easily, and just runs. I replaced my Debian box with it — running a version called “unstable” just never seemed right, though I love Debian, both from a technology standpoint and a belief standpoint. I think Red Hat is doing the right thing in taking a stance on copyright issues similar to Debian with MP3, NTFS, etc. And Red Hat is doing it without falling behind on the applications front.

I can’t recommend Red Hat enough – it was more than worth it to buy a Red Hat Network subscription.

Criticism

I’m sometimes criticized for my liberal beliefs. That doesn’t bug me, especially in these times. Without getting into politics, one of the favorite ways to poke fun at me is for my technology views, especially when they’re viewed as paranoia. (See the links on right hand side of Silwenae.com.)

However, there is a story up at Kuro5hin discussing spyware, adware, and digital rights management. The article starts out with good definitions of each and then some editorial content. While the article tries to delicately avoid all-out Microsoft bashing, there is some, but the article describes very well the state of digital rights today, and some of the things being done to curtail our fair use rights.

So go ahead and make fun of me for using Linux. But at least read the article and understand some of the concerns. While parts of the article might be on the edge, some parts are right on, and these things paint a picture of what could come – if we don’t speak up.