Category: technology

Ubuntu switch: If you ever want to sleep at night…

…don't try and create samba shares on top of NTFS formatted partitions.

Honestly it's been a ongoing problem for the last few months. My first lot of shares just worked on NTFS so I tried to duplicate the setup over other machines including my laptop and my ubuntu home server. Did it ever work? No. So I've finally juggled the data around and formatted all the drives in my ubuntu home server Ext3 (i was tempted with reiser3 but couldn't see the point) and now finally setup the shares. As expected, with some tweaking of my /etc/fstab file its all working correctly.

So hows the rest of my switch going? Well actually pretty well. I've not switched back into Windows for ages now. I actually deleted the virtualised image I had of Windows XP and although Wine is still installed, I have never really used it beyond seeing if particls will launch. Of course it didnt…

I'm now blogging using QTM and found a couple useful applications including Specto and Timevault. Timevault is like Timemachine on Mac OS 10.5 but without all the fancy crap and it can sync to a network drive. Yes this is very important and I realised after talking to Miles that Timemachine doesn't have this feature. Plus realisticlly Timemachine is actually just a app which allows unlimited undos, not really backup. Timevault on the other hand can back up to a local HD, Firewire drive or Network drive making it useful for real backup and with a VPN coonection very powerful.

My standby problems on my laptop are under control. I have a script which I can active via Natuitus Scripts to shutdown Gnome's Power manager control. Once the Gnome power manager is shutdown, the lid will put the machine to standby no problem. Sometimes I have to watch out because gnome will start the power manager again after a update. I had a problem a while back with my wireless card waking up afterwards but its all sorted now. I've also noticed my battery times have gone up again. Now I'm getting about 3.5 hours out of my 1 year old battery, so I'm not doing too bad. Maybe I'll get another battery later next year as a spare.

Another thing which got fixed recently was my calendaring solution. Now I'm using Google Calendar as a syncing tool between Mozilla lightning and Plaxo. My phone now talks directly to Plaxo and my work outlook calendar.

I'm glad I switched over and my next project is to get rsyncing working well with a couple of cron jobs. So for example my laptop will have the latest podcasts when I pick it up in the mornings. I'll also use it for backups in liu of amanda or bacula. I'm also still using Hamachi for my VPN solution and I'm finding it a pain on Linux, the gui version does crash a bit and the command line gives very little feedback. So I'm thinking about switching to OpenVPN as its got real Linux support and its highly recommended. Lastly I want to switch to Evolution and I need to upgrade my smoothwall server to version 3.0. Who knows a couple more late nights before Christmas and it might happen.

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Finally an half decent blogging app for Linux

So after much searching a decent native blogging application graces the Linux platform. Finally I can get rid of BloGTK and I've now switched to QTM. Its at least has technorati tag support and basic things like undo and redo. QTM is open source and can be made to run on every single platform including even Windows. If your serious about your blogging and don't want to blog in a browser window everyday, give QTM a try. Right time to start some serious blogging…

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Windows Mobile Plaxo client now does full sync

Plaxo and Windows mobile

So after a long time beta, Plaxo has finally released a version of mobile plaxo which syncs not only contact information but calendars and tasks. You have to be Premium user which requires a yearly fee but to be honest, its not that expensive for a backup and sync solution, also its new features like pulse are interesting. Now if I can just make the change to Evolution over using Thunderbird/Lightning all would be well.

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A solution to my Dell Laptop Suspend problem? Solved!

Dell M1210 Ubuntu power configs

Ok yes its partly my fault but I seem to have power control panel for KDE and Gnome working on the same machine. If I use just the Gnome settings and close the lid of my laptop, it will lock up and the only way to get back to normal is to power the laptop off again (aka hold the power button in). If I use the KDE power setting and close the lid of my laptop, it powers down correctly and when I open it up again, I get Ubuntu exactly where I left it after entering the user password again. Why?

Actually I'm almost not interested in the why but the how do I use KDE's Power settings instead of Gnome but still use Gnome? Right now I have to remember to start the KDE setting otherwise its back to powering off the laptop again. Oh just for bug reports and the record, I'm running Ubuntu 7.10 with Compiz Fusion (this only became a problem in 7.10). on a Dell XPS M1210 with an Intel Graphics card and restricted driver a/b/g wireless card. Everything else is fine except suspend and hibernate (which never works)

So anyone with a solution?

Glyn solved my problem. The problem is to do with the Gnome Power manager, so we disabled it from starting up in the boot manager and wrote at the end of the file /etc/acpi/lid.sh.

grep -q closed /proc/acpi/button/lid/*/state
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
/etc/acpi/sleep.sh
fi

This forces the Laptop to sleep when the lid is closed. Oh you should try running "sudo /etc/acpi/sleep.sh" from a command line to double check your machine will sleep ok. I'm planning to put up a bug report for this pretty soon.

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No Gphone, so I upgraded to the HTC TyTN II

HTC Kaiser

So after Google confirmed that the Gphone is not an actual phone but a open operating system for the next generation of mobile phones.

I decided to use my long awaited Orange upgrade. This time I went for pretty much the same phone as I already own but with better specs and a physical keyboard. I love my Orange SPV M700 but I started to find the internal memory a little small (64meg) the TyTN II has 160meg which is very roomy but not quite the 256meg which is starting to appear. Also now I have the 5 pound for unlimited (1gig) evening and weekend data, I'm finding myself using im, rss, email a lot more that before. A onscreen keyboard is only so good and my bluetooth keyboard sits in my bag alongside my laptop. So the other day when I was waiting to pick up my friend Claire from the Airport in Berlin, her flight was delayed by 2hours. I could have wrote a blog entry but found it slightly painful on my stylus and onscreen keyboard. If I had my bag with me, I could have used my bluetooth keyboard but to tell the truth if I had my bag with me, I would have had my laptop too.

I was going to do some unboxing video but these guys have already done such a good job. I also did some reading into HSDPA also known as 3.5G. It seems capable of up to 4meg a second transfer, wow! Theres a instant downside, however. Orange stuck there nasty today screen as default on the device and I don't seem to be able to get the full TouchFLO interface. The device is also feels almost twice as heavy as my M700 and wheres the VGA display? I would have waited for the GloFiish devices but there was no way I could afford to buy off contact.

So anyway I look forward to the next 12 months with my new non-iphone or Gphone. I also look forward to much better written software for the Windows mobile 6 platform as it seems to have APIs into everything now including GPS, HSDPA, etc.

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Tracking fingers with the Wiimote

One of the guys at BBC R&I sent this around today. I only just watched this today but I'm really amazed. This is awesome stuff and reminds me I need to get my Wiimote working with my Ubuntu boxes.

I've also been thinking, everyones using that pinch movement/behaviour to indicate scale but what other interactions/behaviours? Is there more which have yet to become standard? Maybe a cycle of the fingers in tandum could indicate master volume or something more? Maybe 3 fingers down the screen could indicate something which should be deleted and 3 up something to be uploaded. The beauty of this low cost setup is that anyone can play and make up there own commands, its no longer just in the research labs. This is great and I'm always in favor of that.

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Current state of Ubuntu switch over

Well to be honest it was going so well till I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10. Now I can't put my laptop into standby/suspend or hibernate. This means I need to switch it off everytime I make a trip anywhere longer that a short walk. If I shut the lid, it locks up and I end up having to force the shutdown with the power button. I'm not the only one and there is an official bug been raised. George reckons I have 3 options… Live with it, downgrade or change kernal version. I prefer to keep 7.10 because I actually like some of the new features but hate not being able to suspend.

Another thing broke recently, Hamachi. It was working fine for ages then it broke. Problem is that it will launch as usual but hit the power button and I get a error saying could not log into Hamachi. Yes I have tried different Gui's and from the shell. Whats extra weird is my two other Ubuntu machines are running Hamachi without a problem now.

On the upside, Compiz graphics is seriously tuned now and you can really tweak the settings to your perfect taste now. Tomboy notes has webdav syncing now. I'm already thinking about syncing it with Exist DB (xmldb) which I'm going to run on my workstation in the near future. I have switched my windows home server over to Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS because I wanted something rock solid. And to be honest its a dual Pentium 3 with tons of hard drive space and memory, it doesn't need 7.x.I Put Webmin on it and everythings working including Hamachi, SSH, Cups (printer server) and Samba. I'm trying out Amanda for backup again, so if anyone from Amanda wouldl like to help out, just comment.

Bluetooth support in 7.10 has come along a lot but the Bluetooth support in KDE seems a lot stronger again. George showed me the lock and unlock feature I've always wanted for my laptop. Unfortually it doesn't seem to see my windows mobile phone, I think maybe because its looking just for phones while my spv comes up as a computer on other scans. Also explains why it can see my work Nokia N80 all the time. Virtual Box is setup and running Windows XP SP3. I tried to run Virtual Dj and it does work but if you put it under any pressure it gets very slow and syncronisation of music becomes a joke. So for my digital djing, I'm going to have to switch back to Windows with a reboot. I've not attempted to put Particls on it but it might work virtualised.

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Beware don’t upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 yet

So I stupidly upgraded from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) to 7.10 (Gusty). Now I can't hibernate or suspend my laptop, so I have to power it off each time I want to go somewhere else. My Beryl effects I love have gone and been replaced with something. Thunderbird seems to fall over when starting up and RSSOWL beta 6 has stopped working now. Can I fix all of these soon? Maybe not, does anyone know how to downgrade back to 7.04?

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Months into the Ubuntu Switchover, rants and raves

Desktop Screenshot

So its been a while but I'm finally getting my head around the gnu/linux system and environment. There are some great things about the switch which makes me cringe everytime I go back into windows (on my work pc and when I want to read my busted sd card – more on this soon). But there are some bad things too.

First, pieces of pure joy. Since I've lost Outlook I've not really had a way to capture notes quickly. Dave showed me Tomboynotes which is build into Gnome. Tomboynotes is a local wiki but saves everything into a simple set of XML files. So now I have XMLstartlet and CWM installed, so I can apply XML processing and more to the raw xml. Combine this with Cron and Unix Pipes and I'm not even sure where to start because theres so many opptunities. I'm also looking at using one editor for unix because I've tried a couple but I need something serious before I start writing XSL again. Currently I'm using Nano for command line operations and Quanta plus for writing XML. I've downloaded Eclipse now and will try out both eclipse and emacs soon. Dave also alerted me to Conduit which is synchronsation solution for Gnome but looking a little deeper seems to be part of the solution for my pipelines application (which yes I've not talked enough about recently let alone updated for a while). So I'm super excited by this and the ability to pipe and process stuff with XML, including a KDE application called Tellico which also stores it records in XML. So I'm adding my music collection (from Amarok) and movie collection (from Myfilmz). I think Conduit is going to be one of those applications which I use a lot.

Other good stuff which is good is Stereo Bluetooth can be made to work in Linux, I just wish it was simplier. I get Cron now thanks to Kcron and Dave also showed me Anacron which works like Cron but will run tasks if your computer is off when you boot it back up. Glyn also showed me some battery saving technology () which looks like it will make its way into Ubuntu 7.11? On Windows I use to get about 4.5 hours of battery life out of my Dell laptop. I'm getting close to that on Ubuntu now but I reckon there is room for improvement, so this little app could help a lot. Samba is coming along, and I've now setup Hamachi ip addresses to shares in /etc/fstab. This means if I'm on my own network or on a internet connection I can still mount shares and its all secure. On the moan side, I still can't do real authentication with Samba for some weird reason. I still don't have a decent blogging application and if I switch my wireless card off, I have to reboot the whole machine to switch it back on again! Oh and Wireless and Bluetooth are lumped together it would seem and I can't find where to just turn off Bluetooth in Ubuntu. Not great for saving power. RSSowl is good but I'm still missing lots of features which could make it great. For example I now have a cron to grab my OPML (hopefully soon my APML too) from Bloglines. I was hoping that I could automaticlly update RSSowl with new subscriptions by over writing a bookmarks file but I can't find such a thing and the feature from RSSowl 1.x of automatic subscribing folders isn't in the new version. Last but not so important is, I still can't get the Wiimote to connect to the computer. Oh and I still need a decent piece of DJ software for Linux, I have to reboot into Windows to use Virtual DJ right now.

So generally things are better and I'm glad I switched to Linux over Vista or bought a Mac. Maybe you could be better off too?

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