Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Category: Software (page 19 of 22)

May 2, 2007

Pidgin IM client

Pidgin 2.0.0 beta 7I’ve been using Trillian 3 Pro since it came out. It’s okay but I have problems with it’s stability and I suspect that AOL updated their protocol and Trillian has not kept up. Upgrading to Vista did not help, Trillian routinely crashes and I can’t get any spell check plug-in to work.

The appeal of Trillian is that instead of running multiple clients which are loaded with advertisements (I am a huge user of AdBlock Plus) I get to run an IM client that supports all those protocols and it has no ads.

The free IM client GAIM Pidgin is that way too except it really has kept up with the protocols. The current version 2.0.0 beta 7 runs well in Vista and looks good. I’m using it now for AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk. AFAIK it does not support the whiz bang features of video and voice. Since I don’t use those features anyway I’m not missing out.

The first thing the beta does is update my GTK+ installation. Good thing since the existing installation worked badly in Vista. I ran the defaults and installed Aspell also. The spell checker does the red squiggly line underneath words I misspell; important to me since I hate when people use “r u there” or “c u l8r”.

I know it’s instant messaging but do people have to kill the language that way…?

Pidgin comes with sounds for events such as when contacts log on or off, when a message is recieved or sent, etc. It supports plug-ins for things like setting window transparency, conversation color, iconify on away, and so on.

It’s all well thought out from a development that has been going on for months (not counting the issue with AOL and re-branding the product) and is a really good replacement for Yahoo, AOL, and Micosoft’s IM clients. When 2.0.0 is released in a week or two I’ll dump Trillian 3 Pro and just use Pidgin.

April 30, 2007

I bricked my WRT54G

Right after I put a post up about how dd-wrt rocks, I bricked my WRT54G v5 by playing around with the nvram settings. “It’s dead, it’s a late WRT54g, it’s passed on.”

Sigh.

Right now I have my buggy WET54GS5 back and running on the second floor. I’ll either shell out $60 for a WRT54GL or I’ll wait for draft-n to settle down and put dd-wrt on that. I’ll need a pair of them, one for the basement and one for the second floor… that could get expensive…

April 24, 2007

dd-wrt rocks

If you have a supported wireless AP or gateway and want to have fun extending it without getting too deep into building software, give dd-wrt a try.

I have a collection of Linksys wireless junk, enough that I should consider becoming a stock holder. When we moved into this house I was thinking of running cables from the basement up to the 2nd floor. But this house does not have a simple means to run cable from the basement to the attic and I really don’t want to punch holes in the walls.

So I setup a Linksys WAP54G in the basement, another WAP54G in the guest room, and a WET54GS5 on my second floor where Lily and my computers are. Eventually I purchased a WRT54G v5 and replaced the WAP54G in the basement. I think I wanted to play with the idea of using the WRT54G as a replacement for my Linux gateway. The old WAP55G got put away on the shelf.

The second floor WET54GS5 was a 5 port switch bridge; it seemed like a good idea at the time. The thing is simple to setup but it spontaneously reboots often and support for it is really non-existent. It’s a dead end product.

The shelved WAP54G only has 8MB of RAM and 2MB FLASH which in the past excluded it from hacking. Now the website www.dd-wrt.com has a replacement firmware v2.3 SP2 micro image which fits and is a stripped down. Using these instructions, I installed the image on the WRT54G v5. It works really well and I’ve replaced the 5 port switch bridge with the WRT54G.

On the WRT54G the WAN connection is now configured as just another LAN port. I configured the device as a “Client Bridge” and connect it to the AP in the basement. At the WRT Wiki is a pretty good description of how to set it up. It’s been running without a hiccup for over two weeks now. My game consoles, the laptops, etc. all work fine.

April 15, 2007

Harmony 720 and Vista

Logitech Harmony 720Costco has the Logitech Harmony 720 on sale and I picked one up Saturday. Don’t bother looking for it on Logitech’s web site, it apparently does not exist there.

It’s a programmable IR universal remote with a color LCD display and is programmed via a USB cable to your PC. You create an account on Logitech’s web site, download the 7.2.1 version of the software and program the remote.

The downloaded software is not 100% Vista compatible. When you run it, it causes the window system to go from Aero Glass to the Vista Home Basic look and feel. Everything still works but the eye candy is one of the few appeals of Vista.

Easy to fix. The software is written in Java and includes a copy of the 1.5 JRE which is not Vista friendly. Azureus had the same problem.

  1. Download the Java 6 JRE and install. Just the JRE not the whole kit.
  2. Using Explorer go to the Directory “C:Program FilesJavajre1.6.0_01” (Java 6 updates might have a different directory) and copy all the contents.
  3. Now go to the “C:Program FilesLogitechLogitech Harmony Remote Software 7” directory and rename the jre folder to jre-old (just in case).
  4. Create a new folder “jre” and paste the contents from jre1.6.0_01 (step 2) there. The folder should look like this.

Harmony 720 with jre 1.6

That’s it. The software runs fine now and I’ve used it to re-program my Harmony 720 already. Eventually Logitech will update the software (the web site says April 2007) but until then this works.

Now if I could figure out how to do this trick in Ubuntu, then I’d be satisfied.

April 7, 2007

Ubuntu and Steam

So far so good. I have tried the following with my Ubuntu installation:

  1. Tried to get Compiz running on my laptop
  2. Updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
  3. Get Steam working on my laptop running Ubuntu

Compiz works badly. I think it’s the xserver I am using. I’ve un-installed it already; my laptop probably just lacks the horse power to drive the effects.

Ubuntu 7.04 will likely be better. But I fat fingered something and ended up putting back on 6.10 Edgy.

Steam works so far. In the past I purchased Transgaming’s Cedega cause I really like what they’re doing. But this time I’ve installed wine using

sudo apt-get install wine

Steam now installs via a .msi file. So to get it installed I downloaded SteamInstall.msi from http://www.steampowered.com/ and Googled to locate tahoma.ttf font file.

I moved the tahoma.ttf file to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ and ran

msiexec /a SteamInstall.msi

The mouse worked but I could not get the keyboard focused on the installer. Everything I typed ended up in the terminal I used to run wine. I ended up running winecfg and unchecking the “Allow window manager to control the windows” which was enough to get it installed.

Later on I put that option back and ran wine again with this on the command line:

WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine "C:Program FilesSteamsteam.exe"

This was lifted from a Ubuntuforums.org page. BTW I just pasted the snippet from the web page into the WordPress TinyMCE window. All formatting was taken care of, very cool. All I did was use the Code tab to adjust the width of the box.

The installation of a Steam game created a link on my desktop complete with icon. Later on I just double-clicked that link and the Steam app is installing my copy of Condition Zero.

The only problem I have is that the Steam window stays on top all the time. I will see if I can get that fixed.

March 31, 2007

Laptop committed XP suicide

Cool Ubuntu logo from www.linuxextremist.comFor about a week my IBM T40 laptop has been acting bizarre.

It boots, complains about different problems, and none of the network connections work at all. Using the few tools I have for XP, I can’t get the thing to work.

It’s gotten to the point where I have to dig out the IBM CD’s and re-install XP and the utilities from the CD. I don’t think it’s a virus but the laptop has ticked me off to the point where I’m “Let’s just buy a new one!”

Without slip-streaming an updated copy of XP, that means I have to do the factory re-install and download a few hundred megabytes of patches. It’ll take hours to do.

X-<

As a rule I don’t keep anything important on my laptop. I have a USB key fob and keep copies of the important docs on my servers. Since all I plan to do is use the laptop for browsing and ssh’ing to my boxes, I am installing Ubuntu.

As I am typing this on another virtual desktop, I’m currently installing Ubuntu 6.06 from a live CD. That’s just not an option when installing XP.

This should be good, I will see how long I keep it.

Cool logo found on www.linuxextremist.com.

March 17, 2007

XPS 700 Vista re-install

I upgraded from XP to Vista. Since I purchased my XPS 700 as soon as it came out I did not qualify for Dell’s free Vista upgrade.

My XP install had a ton of junk left on from installing apps, removing them, games I did not play etc. So I figured that I’d just boot off of the Vista upgrade DVD and do a clean install.

The idea was to

  1. Backup the data to an external USB HD
  2. Wipe out the hardrive
  3. Clean install without putting in a product key (Vista lets you run unactivated for 30 days)
  4. Boot, and install the upgrade using the upgrade activation key

Sigh. Well I did backup my data and using the Vista clean install to wipe the hard drive worked perfectly.

Vista would not accept that my hard drive as a valid place to install on. Even putting the drivers from Dell and nvidia on a CD would not work.

I ended up having my two drives separated, installing an unactivated Vista, and downloading and installing vLite.

The vLite application lets you create an install DVD image with the update drivers. It even lets you burn the DVD directly from the application. Until I got the image booted I was in a pretty foul mood since the update XPS BIOS on my machine would no longer install XP Media Center 2005 that came with my XPS 700.

Once that was done I went into the BIOS and re-established the joined drives and started from scratch.

Now steps 3 and 4 worked and I’m keeping the DVD I burned. Using vLite saved me from making a Dell support call that would have ended really badly.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 16 other subscribers
Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

View Full Profile →