Tag: Linux (page 3 of 3)

April 1, 2007

Ubuntu 6.10 on a IBM T40 laptop

Update: Well the keyconfig extension no longer works despite hacking the install.rdf in the file. I had to follow the instructions located at this website.

On my Ubuntu laptop I did the following at a bash shell prompt:

cd /usr/share/firefox/chrome/browser/content/browser
sudo vi browser.xul

Did a search for “mainKeyset” and right after the line

<keyset id=”mainKeyset”>

I added the following two lines:

I then saved the file and the two IBM keys worked fine. This requires the lines in ~/.Xmodmap below. I’m not pleased with this solution because I have to update the main firefox package files. I will have to figure out how to do this in my home directory.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

That was way too easy.

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 from the Live/Install CD I had and ran the updater to get all the patches. I played with it for an hour or two and then ran

sudo “update-manager -c -d”

in a terminal window. This permitted me to upgrade the laptop to Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy. I added some more software using Synaptic and was good to go.

Everything worked except in Firefox the keyboard navigation keys for previous/next page did not get recognized. So I added ~/.Xmodmap and put in the following two lines

keycode 234 = F19
keycode 233 = F20

I was all set to do the keyboard macro dance of death when I located and downloaded the keyconfig firefox extension. This extension lets you remap or assign functions to keys in Firefox. That’s very cool since I only was interested in making the keys work in Firefox.

I ran “xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap” and used the extension to map Back as F19 and Forward as F20.

If you download animation or watch video clips, get and install Automatix2. All my vids work due to getting the correct codecs. I’m finding Totem to be a good player.

The real test of if this will work is Lily. She has used the laptop once or twice for browsing and I have even used this laptop to connect to my work’s remote desktop in a browser solution. It’s all working fine.

If she has no issues I’m leaving Ubuntu on this laptop.

March 31, 2007

Laptop committed XP suicide

Cool Ubuntu logo from www.linuxextremist.com For 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 21, 2007

Easy server upgrade

I gave up on running my blog on a VPS. It was just too problematic and I got tired of trying to get it working well. So I opted to put the blog on my old basement server.

My old basement server was a Dell PII 450 MHz machine with 256 MB of RAM. It was a good example of how Linux can extend the life of your hardware. It works well as a Internet gateway and mail relay but for serving dynamic web page pages it was a little slow.

When I purchased my XPS 700 monster I shelved the old PC. That one was a P4 3.2 GHz with 1 GB of RAM. For running Linux it’s great.

At first I was bent on getting a fresh install but I ended removing the old hard drive and putting it into the new server. The worst that I had to deal with is the network interfaces were named wrong (one was coming up eth2).

After a little searching I found the file

/etc/udev/rules.d/30-net_persistent_names.rules

and fixed the names from

SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, SYSFS{address}==”00:0c:5a:b4:b2:d2″, IMPORT=”/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth2″

SUBSYSTEM==”net”, ACTION==”add”, SYSFS{address}==”00:0c:5a:b4:b2:d2″, IMPORT=”/lib/udev/rename_netiface %k eth0”

The udevd daemon is great but I hardly ever looked at it.

Page generation on WordPress went from 1.7 seconds on the old server to 0.234 seconds on the new one. That’s not too bad an improvement and all it cost me was a server that I was using as a door stop.

January 24, 2007

Very Bad Upgrade

Sunday I went to Stefan’s to upgrade my main server. It was running Fedora Core 1 and was well past an upgrade.

I wanted to get away from Fedora because it was not supported in a way that I liked. But I did not want to waste too much time so I took with me the latest Fedora and tried to upgrade.

The new Fedora did not like my hard disk setup and refused to see the existing system. So I figured I’d put on Opensuse 10.1, move files on the file system and do an install over the old Fedora Core 1.

Everything that could go wrong did. Massively. Non-stop. The DVD drives did not work. The boot sector was not installing. It installed but refused to boot.

I finally moved the mail and web pages over to another server (more that 3 GB of data) and did a clean install of Opensuse. I’m still recovering. Last night I finally got postfix with TLS and SMTP AUTH working. The web pages are working (sorta).

December 4, 2006

XPS 700 BIOS update

Version 1.1.6 of the Flash BIOS is out and can be downloaded here. This version supports 64 bit operating systems.

The prior 1.1.3 release would not boot up an x64 Ubuntu live disk. Nice to have a 64 bit Core 2 Duo (what a lousy marketing name) and not be able to play with a 64 bit operating system. After I applied the update I loaded up my Ubuntu 6.06 x64 CD and booted into the live desktop. Cool, previously it would hang on just after unpacking the kernel.

This is probably done to support 64 bit Vista, but now I have the possibility of running a 64 bit Linux on my box just for fun.

October 4, 2006

OpenSuSE 10.1 quirks and postgrey RPM

Update November 13, 2006:

Fixed the rpm’s. I was putting the –daemonize in with the other options. That does not work, putting it in first works.

So now I read the /etc/sysconfig/postgrey with

test -s /etc/sysconfig/postgrey && . /etc/sysconfig/postgrey

And execute

$POSTGREY_BIN –daemonize $OPTIONS

And all is right in the world.

Here are the links for the rpm and source rpm that I use on my SuSE 10.1 server.

Original October 4th post starts here.

————

I run OpenSuSE 10.1 on my server. For a few weeks yast’s online update was acting up. It would list things for update and not seem to fully get that the update was already.

Saturday I checked and got a boat load of new updates. One reboot later and yast online update is working perfectly each time.

I like packaging the software I use. It’s one way to keep my technical skills fresh and make my server more manageable. I use Postgrey with my postfix installation and have had problems wrapping the software. The software and RPM build fine, and I can run it by hand but when I try to read the /etc/sysconfig/postgrey in the init script, junk gets added to the command line.

I hacked the postfix init script and created a new script for postgrey.

I run postgrey like so:

/usr/sbin/postgrey
–unix=/var/spool/postfix/postgrey/socket
–daemonize –user=postgrey –pidfile=/var/run/postgrey.pid

In /etc/sysconfig/postgrey I have

OPTIONS=”–unix=/var/spool/postfix/postgrey/socket –daemonize –user=postgrey –pidfile=/var/run/postgrey.pid”

So in my init script I should be able to just do

. /etc/sysconfig/postgrey

And set OPTIONS that way. Once that’s done I should be able to just run

POSTGREY_BIN=/usr/sbin/postgrey
$POSTGREY_BIN $OPTIONS

The options piece seems to be adding on junk. The OPTIONS variable is set correctly but when I execute the perl script junk gets added and the postgrey script exits.

I’ve replaced $OPTIONS with explicit command line arguments for now but it’ll bug me till I figure it out.

June 10, 2006

openSUSE upgrade

I moved my wordpress blog onto the server in my basement. The old server was a dual CPU PIII running at 993 Mhz with a gig of RAM.

The server in the basement is PII 450Mhz box with 256MB ram so it was chugging. I wanted to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) for performance reasons but when I ran the command to install it I got back that my version of php was not supported.

openSUSE 10.1 comes with php 5.1.2 so I ran the upgrade via yast (System Update). This had the fun effect of rendering my server un-bootable. The kernel package did not really install so last night I did some quick surgery and got the system booted. This afternoon I installed the DVD drive from my workstation and got the system properly updated.

APC still did not install. Suse and the phpize command (php5-devel package) is apparently broken. Fortunately this webpage has a list of additional repositories. I added LAB-Project since they maintain updated php5 packages including one for APC.

After I added the apc extension to the php5.ini file, the wordpress pages load almost twice as fast before. Mysql was updated to version 5 so that may have also been a factor.

June 3, 2006

Half-Life Blues

Half-Life 2: Episode One keeps crashing.

I figured it would be related to my Audigy sound card so I removed it and turned on the built in RealTek AC97. While I was at it I removed the wintel PCI modem. I never used it and wanted to make my PC as friendly to steam as possible.

I optimized my hard drive, ran the whole Symantec Norton tools, etc. I was able to play further but still eventually keeps crashing.

Sigh. Need to get a new PC, this one is becoming a pain to support.

Update: Last night I booted up into Ubuntu Linux, ran the latest Transgaming Cedega application and installed Episode One on it.

Amazingly it installed and ran. Still locked up though. The only difference was that it locked up the application and not the whole desktop. I was able to kill Cedega and not have the whole computer sieze up.

Transgaming rocks. Up until the game locked up Half-Life 2 ran at full speed.

I so need a new PC. The only thing I have not tried is swapping out the video card.

May 13, 2006

Ubuntu upgrade to 6.06 Flight 7

easy On my workstation I had been running Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I primarily run Windows XP Pro because that is the environment that my games run in.

I had read that 6.06 beta was coming along very nicely so I booted up on Linux and used the updater to get the latest 5.10 updates.

The Ubuntu web page at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperFlight7 has very easy upgrade instructions. I opened up a terminal window and just ran

gksudo “update-manager -d”

This downloaded and installed over 1400 software packages. It was so easy. All I had to do was modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf so that the device driver became nv instead of nvidia. I probably could have kept the nvidia driver since the old kernel was preserved but as I said I am not running games and don’t need the accelerated 3D drivers yet.

The experience was so simple and easy to do. This confirms my idea of running SuSE on the server and Ubuntu on the workstation.

December 5, 2005

Ubuntu Linux

I had been thinking about playing with Ubuntu Linux for some time now and at the end of October I went to the web site https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ and ordered a set of Ubuntu 5.10 CDs. You fill out the form, and they ship you CDs for free. Minimum order is 5.

Friday the CDs (5 sets, cool) arrived and in each CD folder is an install CD and a Live CD. I ran the live CD on my desktop and also on my laptop. The Live CD is very functional and I could not break it. Even when I made my laptop sleep, the session “woke up” without a hitch. My graphic and sound cards were supported. Applications like e-mail clients, web browser, I even ran Synaptic and updated the running live session. Worked flawlessly.

I am typically a RedHat Linux user from version 4.2 and on. This server runs the free RedHat derivative Fedora. But the desktop experience for both RedHat and Fedora has always been very lacking. Applications break (I could kill the e-mail client Evolution in 5 minutes, I don’t know why) and the desktop felt less than user friendly. It was just all part of the Geek Appeal. You expected Linux to be clumsy and require editing of files using vi.

Ubuntu Linux installed on my desktop with no problem. I have a nvidia 6800GT graphics card. In the past I would install a Linux distribution, get it working, install nvidia’s drivers, edit configuration files by hand, experience some pain till I got all the options right. Eventually I would be able to run my 3D accelerated video game (which BTW runs perfectly on the same dual booting Windows XP system) and enjoy.

On Ubuntu it is just a matter of running Synaptic (GUI for package management) installing some packages, and run a simple command. The whole process is well documented here.

Everything works really well. For a desktop solution this is the most easy going distribution I have seen so far.