October 14th, 2008 admin
Having spent hours tinkering with getting Ubuntu’s wireless to work on at least three previous Thinkpads, before I bought this Vostro I did some research around the internet. I found a bunch of happy Vostro 1400 Ubuntu 8.04 users, and the fact that Dell was releasing Ubuntu on some of its other machines. Good signs. However it seems that the hardware specs between Vostro 1400s vary depending on where and when they’re manufactured, so I think that research might have been misleading.
Anyway, I’ve been trying to get wireless working on and off for the last 3 or 4 weeks, and I’m almost there, so I thought I’d share my experiences.
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October 9th, 2008 admin
Step back a few years … I’ve often thought when I’m under a desk somewhere jiggling wires, is that some kind of audio feedback on ping would be useful: your server isn’t responding, but when you re-seat the ethernet connector it comes back online; you have a messy, unlabeled switch to work through, so you unplug wires until the audio feedback stops, and you’ve located your machine. That kind of thing.
I’ve occasionally looked around the internet for such a tool and uncovered a couple of scripts and tools which don’t quite work. I’ve even thought of writing my own script, but never quite got around to it. Read the rest of this entry »
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August 19th, 2008 admin
As I noted in a previous post I was recently the victim of a Random Kernel Upgrade Hell (RKUH). Maybe I should trademark that acronym, although its not particularly prounounceable like SNAFU, or PEBCAK. Anyway … the fact was that I was spending several hours trying to fix various problems with wifi drivers, VMware server, truecrypt and the sound in Skype, when it suddenly occured to me that a re-install was probably quicker. The double edged sword of Linux: quick to reinstall, but then again why should you need to do it so often? Well I guess in my case I push the OS pretty hard with some esoteric applications, but even so …
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August 19th, 2008 admin
I always forget this one when I’m setting up a new Ubuntu machine, so this is as much for my benefit as anyone else’s …
I’ve used a lot of OSes and have always found the chkconfig command on Redhat / Centos very useful for changing runlevels of services. The equivalent on Ubuntu is the fabulously unmemorably named sysv-rc-conf. (UPDATE – Ignore most of this post and read Ernest’s comment below) … Here’s how to get it on your system.
sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf
and to run it requires
sudo ..uh what was its name again sysrc something? Dammit.
So what I normally do is a quick symlink:
sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/sysv-rc-conf /usr/sbin/chkconfig
and then I can use chkconfig as if it was really available for Ubuntu. Don’t know why they couldn’t just stick to the same name. Bah.
Posted in Linux | 4 Comments »
August 7th, 2008 admin
Anyone remember Groove? I first saw it about 6 years ago (can it really be that long?) and I got quite excited. Our peripatetic CEO at the time got enthused because it would let him share files with all of us while he was on the road, which he was for most of the year. But then Microsoft bought the company, and our plan to use it foundered. Recently it popped its head up again in the context of Sharepoint, but I get the feeling that Microsoft has never really pushed it.
So I was quite interested when I found out about Collanos (http://www.collanos.com/), which does the same thing. Even better, it is a cross platform application, running on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I made a note of it and waited for an excuse to try it out. Finally that excuse arrived. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | 4 Comments »
August 5th, 2008 admin
I’ve been thinking of setting up a company to set people up with Open Source workplaces, and every year that goes past makes me think that the time is almost here.
There are a number of factors which are conspiring to make Linux a viable alternative:
- The fact that Linux, via distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Suse et al, are now easy enough to install and intuitive enough for the Everyday User. I set my girlfriend up with an account on a spare laptop and just let her play. Soon enough she was asking for it on her laptop as well.
- OpenOffice. Enough said. Hardly anyone uses the full feature set of Word, so why do we slavishly upgrade every time a new version comes out? Well actually we don’t … Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Life, Linux | 1 Comment »
July 18th, 2008 admin
I posted an entry here a month or so ago about my switch from Linux Mint to PCLinuxOS. There was good, bad, and definitely very ugly, which, to be fair, was probably due to the non-standard hardware of my Thinkpad r51e. In the many comments on that article, someone suggested that I should try Mandriva, which uses KDE and on which PCLinuxOS is based. So I did. Another new distro, another day …
I can’t remember what prompted the switch. I think I was having some minor problem with printing, which if you mess with your system as much as I do, is only to be expected. Anyway, I had a CD of Mandriva 2008, so instead of fixing the printing problem, I decided to change operating system. In the topsy-turvy world of Linux, these can both take around the same time. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General IT, Linux | 8 Comments »
June 13th, 2008 admin
My girlfriend turned up this morning with her scanner, a Trust Flat Scan USB 19200. Its an old model from around 5-6 years ago, and she’d lost the driver disk. This was clearly a challenge for Linux …
I plugged the thing in (its a USB scanner, which pulls all its power from the USB bus) and the light went on. However the scanner application which comes with both PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu wouldn’t start up. Time for some investigation. I got a root terminal shell and tried poking around
lsusb showed that the scanner was recognised. Read the rest of this entry »
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June 2nd, 2008 admin
I started a new project at a client’s office a month or so ago. On the first day I turned up, and managed to work for about an hour, before my laptop died. Somewhat embarassing. I tried for about an hour to resuscitate it, but couldn’t get it to boot at all: it just died and froze before the KDE login screen. It seemed to be some sort of graphical mishap, and no amount of fiddling with xorg.conf from rescue mode would fix it.
I excused myself, went back home and after some more fiddling, decided to backup and re-install. Having made this decision I was looking through my pile of install CDs, and I came across PCLinuxOS 2008, which I’d downloaded a few weeks previously, and I’d been meaning to try out. “So why not try it out on this laptop?” said the evil part of my brain — the same part which forces me to spend time on Facebook instead of working.
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Posted in General IT, Linux | 24 Comments »
April 9th, 2008 admin
We’re getting into summer in the Philippines, and I was just worrying how hot my Thinkpad R51e was running. Its 32 degrees in the room, and my CPU is running at a consistent 73 degrees, according to
cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature
which seems a bit unhealthy. My motherboard fried itself twice last year, and I figure that might have had something to do with it.
Anyway, I started casting around for things to reduce the power consumption, and found this powertop utility, apparently developed by Intel. (http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/) You can download it and install it from the site, but I just did a quick
sudo apt-get install powertop
and that seemed to work pretty well. When you run it (with sudo powertop), it reports all the things that are keeping your CPU awake and suggests a few things you can do to consume less power. Even better it will make these changes for you, if you press the appropriate letter on the keyboard.
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