Mindstab.net

So Ubuntu has done it again, they’re released an update to xorg-server that breaks Xorg for most people leaving them stranded in the console. If you have xorg-server sitting in your update manager but can’t update because of a “403 Forbidden” error, this is why, they caught it fairly quickly and pulled it. But this should have never been released. Especially because they already did this last year. I think they at least caught it faster, but they still fail because there is no public mention of this any where. There’s some chatter amongst the users on the forums, but no official news from Canonical, which I think is in pretty bad taste because this came out and started breaking people’s systems this morning and it’s now evening. They should be getting some public word out to the people with busted systems, and letting everyone else know whats up instead of leaving everyone guessing. There’s not even any talk of it on Planet Ubuntu. You made a mistake so at least own up to it.

And then go back and try and figure out how this exact same thing can happen 2 years in a row…

So with a laptop again I’m really keen to find ways of not duplicating data entry and getting weirdness between my computers, so all kinds of synchronization catch my attention. Here’s two I’ve jsut gotten working and love and make my life better:

Google Browser Sync: It lets you sync data from your browser (Firefox) to Google’s server and the to other copies of Firefox you’re using. I’m only using it to manage my bookmarks but it’s wonderful to now have one set of bookmarks across my desktop and laptop.

Tomboy note syncing: Tomboy is awesome. It is my brain dump. I store tons of stuff in there but till now it has been a bit limited because the information in it doesn’t follow me around so I can’t count on it to be with me when I’m out or at home. Now I can. Since I have a nice reliable server, I just set it up to use sshfs (thanks to fuse) and both my copies of Tomboy (laptop and desktop) sync to a shared dump on my server. On Ubuntu it was super easy and everything was configured to work already, I just had to enable the sshfs sync plugin. On Gentoo, I had to add FUSE support to my kernel, install sshfs-fuse, and then add a fuse group and modify /etc/udev/rules.d/99-fuse.rules to look like

KERNEL=="fuse", NAME="%k", MODE="0666", OWNER="root", GROUP="fuse"

and then add myself to the fuse group. Once that was all done, Tomboy on Gentoo was syncing too and now my notes will follow me around where ever I am. This is truly amazing and takes Tomboy from a neat app, to an incredibly useful app.

I’m feeling the synchronizational love tonight!

So in September, my laptop Nika died of an electrical system failure. Going through a semester of university without a laptop was a hassle, but I waited and on Boxing Day I picked up a new laptop for $600 CDN ($300 off!). So what does one get for about the cheapest laptop in the store? Well, I got an Acer Extensa 5620 equipped with a Core2 Due 1.6GHz cpu, a pleasing 2 GB ram and a 250GB harddrive. It also had a Intel X3100 video card. So really, I couldn’t have asked for any more in laptop. I’m pretty pleased. I named it Umbriel.
Then I threw Ubuntu 7.10 on it.

First, a few install details. I decided to save Vista since a) I paid for it and more importantly b) I might need it for Starcraft 2. Vista did at least come with a nice partition+filesystem resize tool that shrank it right down. So that was nice. And then Ubuntu installed smoothly onto the rest of the disk and setup Grub to dual boot them flawlessly. So that was all nice.

So what are the good and bads?

The goods: All the open source Intel hardware I could want, including a surprisingly good built in web cam. The Ubuntu install went without a hitch and everything worked. Popped in media and it went out in search of codecs and installed them. Cool.

The medium: I did have to manually install DVD support. But it took like 1 minute so whatever. Same for enabling CPU scaling control from the Gnome panel applet (and I understand the rational for that).

The bad: Even though the graphics drivers for the newest Intel video card are open source and Intel backed no less, I can’t have desktop bling AND video playback. One or the other. That’s kind of lame. But will probably be fixed, and I’m really hoping by the time Ubuntu 8.04 comes out.

More annoyingly, the sound situtation. The speakers are way to quiet in some situations, like playing a DVD and only acceptably loud other times. Ditto for the headphones. The only minor saving grace is that this is also the case in Windows Vista which the laptop came with. That the computer industry as a whole is shipping laptops with crippled gimpy sound like this is a little discouraging and amazing. Does no one test the hardware and software they ship? Max sound on both headphones and speakers should be better than a whisper. Also, some weird regression in Ubuntu in that when I plug headphones in the speakers don’t turn off. Awesome. I though we had that licked like YEARS ago. It worked on my old laptop :p

Still, as a work and school machine the laptop is wonderful and more than sufficient. Additionally it can smoothly play UT2004 with all the features turned to low (which is really a a nice bonus) and I’m hopeful that with in a year it’ll handle video and audio just fine. And lets face it, $600 is pretty damn cheap :)

So you might be noticing a theme emerge between this and my last post. Yes, after watching terrible movies and reading some books, some of which are sub optimal, and then generally immersing myself in the internet, I decided I needed to be more connected. So I have several projects on the go to fix that. The earlier post of getting GPRS internet on my laptop from my cell via bluetooth was one such project. But it’s also financially impractical. However, my Telus ADSL package comes with 40 hours a month of dialup included. So I thought it was time to turn my attention to that. I’d ignored the old technology of modems forever, not thinking that they can still come in handy in pinch until the city is covered in municipal WiFi. Phone lines are often more prevalent then unsecured wifi in the city, especially in buildings or houses.

So, first, I hopped over to the Telus website and found that the Vancouver dial in number is 604-280-9000. Next, I had to determine the modem that my Toshiba Satellite m40x has. As it turns out there are tools for that: scanModem, a little shell script that does the trick. Downloaded it, unzipped it and ran it. It told me I had an Intel/Alsa modem. So I loaded up the snd-intel8x0m kernel module. Then I installed the sl-modem-daemon package that uses the module and provides the rest of the softmodem. It neede to be setup:

 # dpkg-reconfigure sl-modem-daemon -plow

And it just asked the county I was in, and the set things up. The modem was then controllable from ‘/etc/init.d/sl-modem-daemon‘ and could be started and stoped accordingly. The device that was created was /dev/ttySL0 but /dev/modem was also turned into a symlink that pointed to it so either was usable. With the modem setup and on, I then needed a dialer to connect me to my ISP.

First, a simple but verbose and command line dialer: wvdial. To set it up I ran

# wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf

It worked and the config file was created. But it needed editing. So I loaded it up in a text editor and uncommented the phone number (one number, no dashes or spaces), username, and password fields and filled them out accordingly. Lastly, for this modem, I needed to add the ‘Carrier Check = no‘ line at the end of the file for it to connect properly. Then everything was in order and connecting was as simple as

# wvdial

Success. I had dailup internet. Ctrl-C in the terminal to disconnect.

The softmodem is flaky though and its often a good idea to restart it between dials

# invoke-rc.d sl-modem-daemon restart

Still, command line isn’t as sexy as GUI, or at least not as convenient. So I then installed gnome-ppp and found it in the Applications->Internet menu. I put in the pertinent information again (phone number, username, password) and then tweaked a few options in it’s setup window like device in the Modem section, and turning on ‘Dock in notification area‘, and turning off ‘Check carrier line‘ in the Options section. Then I hit the connect button and it connected and minimized to the notification area. Beautiful slow internet was mine!

Reference

• DialupModemHowto – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• As always, Google for analyzing various errors and pointing me in the right direction.

Well, I taught my laptop a new trick.

I went out and bought a DLink DBT-122 Bluetooth adapter (USB). Cheapest one they had, plugged it into my laptop (Ubuntu Feisty) and it was recognized right away. Installed bluez and bluetooth related packages and started to play.

First thing I did was enable the bluetooth applet that runs in the notification area. It can also be accessed from System->Preferences->Bluetooth Preferences. Once that was on and my cell phone’s (Sony Ericsson k510a) bluetooth was on I was able to use nautilus’ sendto to send files via bluetooth to my cell phone. Then after turning on Applications->Accessories->Bluetooth File Sharing, which starts an applet in the notification area, I was able to send files to my laptop from my cell phone via bluetooth. So that was all cool, but it was also just warm up.

Next I wanted to get internet on my laptop through my cell phone. While impractical in the areas on cost and speed, it does have far greater coverage than random unsecured wifi access points around the city (especially as of late as people are finally starting to use WEP and WPA) and it’s coverage out of city is of course no contest either.

So I installed a few more tools, ppp (Point to Point Protocol) related, like ppp and pppconfig.

The first tool I used was ‘hcitool‘ which is used for establishing bluetooth connections and other bluetooth related issues.

# hcitool scan
Scanning ...
         00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2       phone.mindstab.net

This will scan for all bluetooth devices in range and return their name and MAC address. Next I had to connect to the phone and laptop or ‘pair’ the devices. For my phone, the Sony Ericsson k510a, I had to do this on the phone’s side. I went to Settings->Connectivity->Bluetooth->My Devices. Then I selected New Device and after it scanned, I selected my laptop. It then bid me enter a ‘password’ so I choose a few numbers, and then the bluetooth manager on my laptop notified me a device was trying to ‘pair’ and asked me to enter the number there. That done my cell phone accepted my laptop. I selected my laptop/device on my cell phone and told it to always accept connections from that device. Also, to be safe, I put the password/number in ‘/etc/bluetooth/pin‘ although I’m not really certain if that was necessary.

Now the devices were set to connect to each other on a regular basis so back to hcitool to handle that. The ‘cc‘ argument establishes or breaks a connection and the ‘auth‘ argument authenticates the connection.

# hcitool cc 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2
# hcitool auth 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2

Now a bluetooth connection with the phone was established. Next up it was time to configure the ppp connection that would run from my laptop, over bluetooth to the cell, and from there over GPRS (or possibly EDGE?) to the internet.

First, I needed to further setup Bluez (Bluetooth handler on Linux) to facilitate this by creating a /dev/ entry for the connection. And I needed a bit more info. The command ‘sdptool‘ delivered this to me. It can be used to list all the supported features of a device and their details. I was specifically interested in the ‘Dial-up Networking’ section.

# sdptool browse 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2
...
Service Name: Dial-up Networking
Service RecHandle: 0x10002
Service Class ID List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
  "Generic Networking" (0x1201)
Protocol Descriptor List:
  "L2CAP" (0x0100)
  "RFCOMM" (0x0003)
    Channel: 2
Profile Descriptor List:
  "Dialup Networking" (0x1103)
    Version: 0x0100
...

In there I found the ‘Channel’ that the protocol was operating on, in this case ‘2‘. Now I opened up ‘/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf‘ and setup the device.

/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf

rfcomm0 {
        bind yes;
        device 00:17:B9:DA:E4:F2;
        channel 2;
        comment "Bluetooth PPP Connection";
}

Then I restart bluetooth. On newer Ubuntu versions the service is just called ‘bluetooth’ but on older versions it’s apparently called ‘bluez’.

# invoke-rd.d bluetooth restart

Now I had setup a connection to my cell phone and created ‘/dev/rfcomm0‘ for it. I was now ready to setup a ppp connection over bluetooth.

pppconfig thankfully does most of the hard work here. It configures the ppp/peer files and the even more convoluted chatscript (some kind of text file that contains the initial connection protocol text that is used to establish the connection).

# pppconfig

pppconfig gives you a menu. I chose ‘Create Connection’. Called it whatever, I chose ‘gprs’. Next I selected ‘Dynamic’ (for DNS). Then I selected ‘Chat’ for the Authentication Method. I entered no password or login, and then deleted the text when it asked for a User name and another password. The default speed of ’115200′ baud was fine. ‘Tone’ is the choice for the ‘Pulse or Tone’ section. The number to dial was a bit tricky. It’s in the form of something like ‘*99***slot-of-internet-on-cell#’ so for me ‘*99***2#‘ was what I entered but others might try ‘*99***1#‘ or possibly ‘*99#‘. I entered the port to use manually and entered ‘/dev/rfcomm0‘. Then it gave me a chance to review and then write the file. I did so.

The two main files it creates are ‘/etc/ppp/peers/gprs‘ and ‘/etc/chatscripts/gprs‘. If you are lucky you should just be able to connect now, but I had problems, so I had to tweak the files a bit. In ‘/etc/ppp/peers/gprs‘ I had to comment out the ‘remotename‘ and ‘ipparam‘ lines with hashs [#].

/etc/ppp/peers/gprs

...
user ""
#remotename gprs2
#ipparam gprs2

and in ‘/etc/chatscripts/gprs‘ I had to comment out the ‘ogin:‘ and ‘ssword:‘ lines again with hashes.

/etc/chatscripts/gprs

...
# ispname
#ogin: ""
# isppassword
#ssword: ""
# postlogin

Now all the ppp config files were properly configured to work with my phone, so it was time to try the connection out. Before that though, I turned other networking off, which is easy enough with NetworkManager, I just right clicked on it and unchecked ‘Networking‘. Then to turn on the connection over bluetooth, ppp, and gprs, I just used the ‘pon‘ command.

# pon gprs

and gave it a few seconds. My cell lit up and told me it was connecting and then it connected. Then I was good to go. Sadly gprs internet rates are expensive here at $0.05 / kB. Also, it’s a bit firewalled so the standard ping google.com test to see if the connection is working fails. I just loaded a small web page in my browser. It worked! Then tried to ‘ssh’ to my server, and that also worked! When I was done, I just

# poff gprs

to turn the connection off.

And that’s it. Now I can get files to and from my cell phone and get internet from it for my laptop as well.

When I was having trouble, I looked in ‘/var/log/syslog‘ to see where the trouble was coming from.

Also, for some reason, the next day, ‘sdptool‘ was reporting that the ‘Dailup Networking’ service had moved to channel 2 so I had to change ‘/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf‘ file to represent that and restart bluetooth with ‘invoke-rc.d bluetooth restart‘, so keep an eye out for that if your connection starts failing later for no reason.

References

• CLUG Wiki: GPRS Internet over Bluetooth
• Bluetooth Setup – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• BluetoothDailup – Community Ubuntu Documentation
• HOW-To: GPRS Connection Via Bluetooth – Ubuntu Forums
• UbuntuHelp:BluetoothDailup – Ubuntu中文
• A few more pages turned up on Google under various bluetooth + ppp + gprs + error searches

I have some old computers I haven’t been using in ages and I also have some friends without computers. So I decided to donate two of my old computers to my friends without computers. A good match, and I’m not using them so they won’t be missed and it’ll be nice to see the hardware getting used again (wasted otherwise) in a second or third life.

The two computers are 8 years old with ~600MHz Pentium 3s and 256MB to 512MB of RAM. Not exactly cutting edge anymore. Still, I wanted them to have lots of the nice new stuff, but not run at the speed of slow. So I looked at my options and decided to try Xubuntu, an Ubuntu derivative using the lightweight XFCE desktop environment instead of Gnome and tailored to light weight and/or older machines.

I proceeded to install Xubuntu on the first machine.

The installer is nice, it’s an Xubuntu liveCD. It didn’t launch properly on the ancient ATi video card in the machine the first time, but worked fine in ‘graphics safe mode’ (VESA). The install bugged out a few times being ‘unable to partition the drive because it didn’t have the rights’, but eventually it figured itself out and moved on. Then it was smooth sailing.

The system booted fine and was very pretty, and yet still felt fast and responsive. When fully logged into the desktop, a mere 80MB of RAM was being used. Not bad at all. Plenty of space left for apps. The whole time using it it made the old hardware feel fast and responsive. I was quite impressed. Playing movies initially didn’t work, and gxine pointed this might be because the Xv extension wasn’t supported. I swapped the old ATi card for an old Nvidia card and told X to use the ‘nv’ driver and video playback worked just fine. Music playback worked fine and web browsing was also no problem.

Probably the most noticeable nice feature was that they are using some kind of volume manager and so USB sticks and such are auto mounted and have icons show up on the desktop that you can unmount them from. Very smooth.

So we packaged the box up and bused with it to my friends house. That was a trip.

So, in the end, Xubuntu has a nice blanace of modern features mixed with lightweight that has very much impressed me. It breaths life into old hardware making it look pretty and feel fast while still giving you everything you’d expect from any other modern OS. It hearkens back to the days when Linux desktops always were lighter weight than other OSs and good for invigorating older hardware. I’m quite impressed.

Xubuntu is clearly my love affair of the week.

I’ve been meaning to put Ubuntu on my laptop (Nika) for a bit. The main reason being that since my laptop’s fan doesn’t work so well, compiling software to install it causes heating problems and is rapidly become not so practical. Today I needed something to do so the timing was right.

I couldn’t be more impressed. I popped the Ubuntu 7.04 CD into my laptop and it booted into a Gnome desktop. Network manager loaded and connected to the wireless. Amazing. I launched the installer and it asked a few questions, and I did a manual partition job so as to keep my /home partition with all my data. And the presto. It started installing. I showered and when I got back it was done. I rebooted and volia. The install was done.

And I have to say, I’m very impressed with the hardware support. My wireless (atheros) and graphics (intel) work out of the box. I turned on desktop bling and I had wobbly windows and the desktop cube. Everything worked.

Well, just about. A few tiny more advanced things took me a few more minutes, but really, were still shockingly easy.

CPU frequency scaling wasn’t working. But that’s just Ubuntu’s hardware auto detector cocking up. The p4_clockmod modules is installed so I just had to load it (modprobe p4_clockmod) and add it to /etc/modules to get it to autoload.

Also, hardware tempurature detection wasn’t working once I installed the hardware sensors applet. This is because certain Toshiba Satellite laptops like mine use the Phoenix BIOS and are funky. All that was needed was the omnibook kernel module. Sadly, that wasn’t in the Ubuntu repository, but there was a thread on the forums about it.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=316358&highlight=omnibook

The instructions were really quite simple. I don’t know if I just didn’t know this before, or if they really have worked to make it simpler, but now to get everything you need to build kernel modules, you only need two packages: ‘build-essential’ and ‘linux-sources’. Build-essential is a meta package pulling in the whole compiler and auto tools chain. Then I got subversion, checked out the source for the omnibook module, compiled, installed it, and added it to /etc/modules for autoloading and now the hardware sensors applet is working and I can see my laptop’s temperature.

So with really a trivial amount of work, I have absolutely everything on my laptop working at it’s fullest. In a really short period of time. I’m very impressed. Also, now this will make it easier to keep my laptops software up to date without burning it out. Smooth work guys. Thanks for the smoothest Ubuntu install I’ve yet seen.

So it’s reinstall time for my laptop. I’ve been sitting on the fence on weather to try Ubuntu Edgy or stick with Gentoo. I think there will be a post about that soon, but not here. Today I downloaded Ubuntu Edgy and thought I’d give it a try. I pop the livecd in and it comes up with a nice boot screen and then a nice Gnome desktop. I start the installer and it’s graphical. I’m quite impressed so far. Right until I get to the disk set up part. I don’t want to toast off my /home partition (obviously) so I choose manually partition. It brings up gpartd, I just skip through that because I don’t want to change anything. Then I go to a screen about assigning mount points to partitions. Easy. Except it will not let me pass because it keeps insisting there is no root mount point even though I’ve very clearly assigned what should be root partition to the root mount point.

So here I am, stuck already. I boot up firefox on the livecd just long enough to find out this is a known problem, and I could maybe get around it by jumping on to the command line and trying my hand at manually reformatting certain partitions and maybe the installer would accept it. But if it doesn’t then I have a dead laptop and I can’t go download and burn the latest Gentoo livecd. And besides, I swayed to Ubuntu on the promise it would be easy to use and manage. Making me drop to the command line (where I cannot get root by the way, everything has to be prefaced with sudo) in the very begging of the install because you already can’t handle my system does not instill confidence in me that you are the distro for me for ease of use. Yes Gentoo makes me use the command line for the install, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. It’s supported and not a kludge/hack around for a ridiculous bug.

So I’m going to go and take the installer refusing to install on my laptop as a ‘sign’ (forceful ‘eh?) that Ubuntu isn’t for me and I should stick with Gentoo.

Next up: How easy can a Gentoo install be and how fast?

I’m growing increasingly distressed with Ubuntu. I cannot get video to work with firefox. Even going way out of my way to use super unsupported apt repositories I’m getting dependency errors. And this stuff is super unsupported. Gentoo’s portage had a whole lot of stuff in it, and it was all technically supported. I’ve been seriously thinking about switching back. Except Gnome 2.10 is still hardmasked and things like evince are not in portage at all. So it seems like I want too much. I know so much good stuff is out there and am burning to have it already. And I’m frustrated that I don’t. I have also considered Linux From Scratch, but thats not really the answer. It really bothers me that gstreamer seems unusable in Ubuntu. That xcompmgr has outstanding issues. That integration is just not that great. And Gnome, come on, not being able to edit menus. Disappointing year. I was really expecting 2005 to be the year desktop Linux took off, but now I know it’s totally not. It’ll be just another year it gets better… Hopefully.

I’m starting to feel the way I did about Enlightenment 0.17. There is wicked cool stuff in that, but it’s just not materializing in a usable form. We’ve had composite in X.Org for about a year now, and lately I’ve seen super killer things in dev blogs, like totally GL accelerated x servers with incredible effects. And here I am, one year after composite hit XOrg and I’m still using an xserver that isn’t even double buffered. I’m still seeing tearing. GTK is getting a cario backend. Correction, has a cairo backend. But again, when will we, the users, get to see it? This is all really shitty.

I really hope Gnome shapes up for 2.12 and Ubuntu shapes up for 5.10. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself till then.

The last day of classes was yesterday. It’s nice to have those all done with. Just finals looming in the next two weeks remain. Then a short break and summer school. But it’s a light load, chemistry and psyc.

So last night I installed Ubuntu’s new release (5.04: Hoary) on my desktop. Was not really impressed. Doesn’t really seem to have any benefits over the last release. I was expecting, for instance, XOrg to work well and have composite working, as I did like 9 months ago on Gentoo, but alas it was all disabled by default, and even when I ran xcompmgr from the console, the desktop was initially covered in video garbage, and though it worked decently, it had show stopping issues like the logout dialog would never appear. Not very polished at all. Gstreamer still fails to even be able to handle dvds, so I’m still stuck with good old reliable xine. It also had wierd audio lag and played videos in a rather jerky fashion. Gnome has upgraded to a new menu spec. Fine, so who cares. Well, menu’s have now regressed to a non editable state. It’s 2005 and I can’t even edit my menu. Also, no head way has been made on the pick a default sound card front. I spent an hour online trying to figure out how to make Ubuntu not use the motherboard’s soundcard as default. I finally went with a hack method of putting the soundblaster module in /etc/modules so it was loaded first when the computer starts. Not very smooth or intuitive for anyone who doesn’t know a bunch about Linux already. Not very noob friendly. Had a hassle getting the right kernel source or header package so that I could compile my webcam’s driver. And once that was done, only gqcam seemed to be able to use it. Gnomemeeting seemed unable to get video from my webcam. Evolution has some new “feature” where the toolbar sits at the top of the screen glued to the panel’s bottom. Really annoying and I couldn’t figure out how to place it back in the main window so I had to turn it off entirely.

That’s mostly it for now, but I was kind of hoping for something a little more polished so I could push this on a bunch of my windows using friends, but this was still decently issue-tastic and still not using a lot of the cool features it could be (composite). I might wait and see how the 05.10 release looks. At least will should run better since a bunch of the GNOME dev’s are on a memory reducing quest. Hopefully over the next few months they’ll also make menu’s editable again, and Ubuntu will sort it self out.

I’m kind of disappointed in this release but I guess that’s what I get for getting my hopes up. I know there is a lot of cool tech and code out there and I wish it was more accesible to non developers. In summery, getting media to a usable state (from configureing video card to finding something to play everything) is still a bitch. Everything else could use a little more polish too.