CoffeeBear.net » linux

Watch & Win with Linux Journal

Mark — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:25:33 +0000

Like Linux Journal but are too cheap to buy your own subscription? Or just like freebies? Then now’s your chance to get a free subscription. Linux Journal is holding a contest this week. You simply have to watch their Tech Tip Videos, collect the secret letters. You can find full details on their site. I’ve embedded the first video below or you can head over to Linux Journal to watch it there.

Additional videos to watch for the secret letters include:

Watch & Win with Linux Journal © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10

Mark — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:11:03 +0000

Last night I upgraded my home PC from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. On the one hand, the upgrade went better than any other upgrade ever has. On the other, I ran into some major problems.

Good

The actual upgrade process completed without errors.
The computer was successfully upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 without any manual intervention on my part.
Desktop effects (aka compiz) are very fun. I’d tried them in the past with less than stellar results (too buggy) but they seem much more stable now.
The extra buttons on my trackball finally work righ with Firefox under Ubuntu (back/forward).

Bad

The upgrader removed and did not reinstall the restricted kernel modules.
- For my less technical readers, basically the upgrade broke both my wireless connection and 3D acceleration. I could live without the 3D, but this computer relies on wireless to connect to my home network. Fixing that took a couple of hours of digging around in the log files and using another computer to get the files I needed. Major headache.
- I understand why the modules were removed and not installed after the upgrade, but I wish the upgrader had been smart enough to realize I needed them and would have at least downloaded them to be available after I rebooted to complete the install.
KDE 4.x is the new default desktop environment for Kubuntu. KDE 4.x does not play nicely with Nvidia graphics cards. Like the one in my computer. Meaning the lag between clicking on a the K menu and the menu popping up was about 2 minutes. *ugh* I could disable the Nvidia drivers to get normal performance back but then I’d lose my 3D acceleration. *sigh* So I’ve switched over to using Gnome, which will probably make at least one person I know very smug.
The network shared drives I had setup to be automatically mounted on every boot are no longer mounting. Gnome has an easy way to connect to those shares, but I really don’t want to have to mount them manually every time.

Update: For those of you stopping by looking for instructions on how to do this upgrade, you can fine the complete instructions (with screenshots!) over at Ubuntu’s Community Documentation page for IntrepidUpgrades/Kubuntu.

Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Dapper to Hardy in 23 painful hours

Mark — Thu, 01 May 2008 03:00:16 +0000

I I finally set about upgrading my home server¹ from Dapper to Hardy yesterday. I had been hoping for a less traumatic experience then upgrading my desktop computer from Dapper to Gusty². Unfortunately I once again ran into problems. First off, it’s been nearly a week since Hardy was officially released but when I tried to run the official upgrade tools they all initially told me I was running the latest version. According to the documentation, I should have been able to run either sudo do-release-upgrade or sudo update-manager but neither worked. I was only able to start the upgrade process by running sudo update-manager -d and my understanding is that “-d” tells the program to grab the latest development version. Weird, but oh well. Then the process just dragged on and on and on and on and on.… I eventually went to bed leaving it running. The only reason I stayed up as late as I did with it was the excellent book I was reading.

When I got up this morning, it was still running but was hung up on a question I needed to answer. I clicked through the question and a few more before heading off to work. When I got home, again the upgrade was hung up on a question. I worked my way through answering all the questions and let the upgrader do its job. Unfortunately the upgrader eventually failed on these packages: gnome-applets-data, gnome-applets, ubuntu-desktop and update-manager. I clicked through the errors and then the upgrader said:

Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade aborts now. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg –configure –a).

I clicked ok to the error, something flashed up and then the upgrader died/vanished/went away. I tried running:

sudo aptitude update but it sat there for far too long for my sleep deprived and impatient self.
sudo aptitude upgrade, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.
sudo aptitude autoclean, *shrug* it's part of my standard script for updating my systems.
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.
sudo dpkg --configure -a, it said there were unconfigured packages but it couldn’t fix them automagically. It mostly complained about gnome-applets-data.

I ended up running sudo aptitude install gnome-applets-data gnome-applets ubuntu-desktop update-manager and that fixed up those errors no problem. For giggles of insanity I tried running sudo aptitude -s -f install to see what else might be left to update³. It found another 111 packages it wanted to remove but some of them I want to keep, so I’ll have to look into that more closely. Most likely all these errors were caused by my own foolishness, as at one point I was testing some stuff out on the machine and enabled some 3rd party repositories to install unsupported apps. *blech* I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. I was able to reboot the machine and connect to it via SSH and SMB, but HTTP seems to be broken at the moment. *bugger* Apache is one of the packages sudo aptitude -s -f install wanted to remove. I guess looking into that just got bumped up my priority list.

¹ An old Dell Dimension desktop with a PII-400 CPU and 256 MB of RAM.
² Never fear, Fritz (my desktop PC) is next on my list of machines to upgrade.
³ More accurately, I found some instructions when upgrading my desktop from Dapper to Gusty that recommended doing that to ensure all apps got updated.

Dapper to Hardy in 23 painful hours © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Linux CLI Tip

Mark — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:54:20 +0000

Sometimes when you’re staring the bash prompt, you want to be able to see if a specific program is currently running. There are a couple of ways to do this; generally I run:
ps -ef | grep ProgramName

However I once saw a tip for doing something similar with top but I lost the link and for a long time couldn’t find it again. Truth be told, I still haven’t found that specific link but I did some googling and found the right cli switches to do it. Since I want to make sure I remember in the future, I’m posting it here:
top -b -n 1 | grep ProgramName

Linux CLI Tip © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Too Much Command Line

Mark — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 17:04:27 +0000

You know you’ve been spending too much time on the cli when you keep hitting tab in Notepad and wonder why the autocompletion isn’t kicking in.

Too Much Command Line © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Installing new, quirky apps under Linux

Mark — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:48:53 +0000

First off, you need to go through a bit of a cultural shift. When you’re looking for/at quirky, little apps; you should be for the Linux version.Secondly, installing and maintaining all your apps under Linux tends to be easier than under Windows. Yes, I said easier. In Windows, you find application “XYZ” on a website. You download a ZIP file and extract it to find an EXE. You run the EXE and it installs, but the program doesn’t run. Why? You’re missing something. It might be Microsoft’s .NET, Java, DirectX, etc.… Only it’s highly unlikely XYZ will tell you in plain English what went wrong. More likely, the app will just die without reporting an error. Then you’re off to Google to figure out what went wrong. Or if XYZ will run, it has no way of knowing when a new version is available or at best it can check their website for updates and when one comes out; you have to download, unzip and install the new version of XYZ (possibly uninstalling the old version first). Since you’re used to this, it doesn’t seem like much but it’s actually a complex operation.

Now let’s compare that to installing/maintaining apps under Linux (specifically Ubuntu). First off, you should enable the extra repositories and after doing so you suddenly have thousands of apps you can install with a few clicks in Synaptic. With the added bonus of Ubuntu automatically checking for updates to every single one you install and then enabling you to update all of them with a couple of clicks. And if some app you want to install requires other packages, then Synaptic will download and install those for you automatically. For the occassional app that is not include in the extra repositories, many 3rd party developers who work on Linux will provide their own repositories which you can add to your sources.list in Synaptic, which gives you all the same benefits as apps in the official repositories. True, there are still other 3rd party developers who don’t provide repositories but for some of these there are sites like Get Deb which offer pre-compiled DEB files for you to use in installing a given app. DEB files serve the same purpose as the installation EXE you download for Windows apps. Lastly, there are those developers where all they provide is the source code. For these, you can generally find detailed instructions on how to compile the app to use it. Though, I’ve been using Linux full-time for about 5 years now and I’ve yet to find a must-have app which was only provided in source code form that I had to compile.

In reply to More Linux at Desperados Under the Eaves.

Installing new, quirky apps under Linux © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

HowTo: Install Windows Vista in 2 Minutes

Mark — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:19:24 +0000

Do you have a new computer that doesn’t run Windows Vista? Do you need step-by-step instructions on how to install it? Then watch this great YouTube video for instructions.

Then go download and install a proper OS, like Ubuntu.

HowTo: Install Windows Vista in 2 Minutes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Dang Computers

Mark — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 06:00:38 +0000

I finished my evening in front of ye olde boob tube¹ at 10 and was thinking about heading to bed early. I decided just before doing so I’d go read some email, maybe run CastPodder and grab some stuff to listen to at work. That was nearly two hours ago and I’m still not continuing on my way to bed. *sigh* I really should learn my lesson and stop thinking I can ~~hit up the crack pipe~~ use my computer for a just a few minutes. On the bright side, my last run of APT-GET updated amaroK which fixed an annoying crash I’d been experiencing for the last week or so. Also, I setup amaroK up to use the MySQL backend and it’s massively faster than using SQLite. The only downside is that somewhere along the way of my manual attempts to fix the crash, updating to the latest/greatest and switching the MySQL backend; amaroK “forgot” which songs I’ve already listened to. This brings my playlist of “new” music to just under 3,000 tracks².

¹ T.V. for you little whipper-snappers.
² This playlist excludes podcasts, audiobooks and the like but does include music that is podsafe or ripped from CDs that I own.

amaroK & Magnatune

Mark — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 01:55:41 +0000

As has been noted on this blog multiple times, I use Linux. Specifically, I use SuSE Linux. For my desktop environment, I use KDE. There are several music players available for KDE but the one that is far & away the best is amaroK. It’s got some great organizational tools, a cover manager and can even copy songs to your iPod. It rocks and if you listen to music under Linux; you’re missing out if you’re still using XMMS.

Another thing I like is Magnatune. This is a website that allows you to listen to MP3s of all the albums they offer for sale as CDs, plus they let you podcast with their music without paying for some ridiculous license. They’ve got a wide selection of music (e.g. blues, ambient, rock, medieval, etc…) and when I’m looking for something new to listen to; they’re the first place I go.

In fact tonight, I started poking around their site for some new music when I ran across this post on their founder’s blog:

A few months ago, the developers of amaroK (the amazingly gorgeous music player for Linux and Unix, that really does give iTunes a run for its money) asked me about Magnatune cooperating on their new release of their version 1.3. Their idea was to make a self-booting linux image, that boots into a linux desktop, with amaroK running and some Magnatune music included.

It’s like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, they’re getting peanut butter (Magnatunes) mixed in with my chocolate (amaroK)! Nice move people! :D

Pukka’s Links of the Week

Mark — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 23:33:39 +0000

The last PLotW never happened because I was too lazy to post it. :p Sorry about that.

From Pukka:

Jack Thompson whimps out and P.A. steps up to the plate.

Not from Pukka:

Pumpkin Apple Bread
Ubuntu No Sound Troubleshooting [Editor] I recently installed Ubuntu 5.10 on my ancient laptop and I plan to get KDE up & running on it. I’ve had problems before getting the sound to work with this laptop. So I’m making a note of this page as the Ubuntu forums link to it for help with sound issues.
Backlink Checker [Editor] You can use this site to see who’s linking to you.
Anti-game activist Jack Thompson under investigation
Transparent aluminum [Editor] Makes you wonder if Scottie stopped by and gave ‘em a tip. :)
Official Site for gDesklet Sensors & Displays [Editor] I recently wiped out my laptop and loaded the Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) on it. One of the things I added to it was gDesklets (KDE users should think SuperKaramba, Windows/Apple users should think Konfabulator).