Trey’s Blog

After hours of backing up data to DVD, I finally had the opportunity to install SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop on my 64-bit machine. This install went very easy. I spent the most time dealing with the partitions because I haven’t had to deal with that in a while thanks to Ubuntu. The problem wasn’t that it was all that difficult, but that it detected a Windows install on the hard drive and wanted to work around it by default. I just went, in removed the Windows partition and realigned the other partitions. Once that was under way, I confirmed the default packages, set my time zone and left it alone for 30 minutes. At this point, I needed to confirm or modify the Hardware that was detected. It did a great job of finding everything, but it used a default driver for my ATI Radeon 7500 video card. This doesn’t affect regular use, but the default driver is not capable of 3D rendering. Essentially, Novell takes much pride in their support and the fact that they have an awesome desktop solution with this product, and they want you to subscribe to their support. I believe it is usually around $50 per year, which is not bad considering you may actually need it at some point. Upon registration of this support, the system is setup to retrieve the necessary drivers for your video card, whether it be ATI, nVidia, or Intel and your desktop with XGL is only minutes away. If you haven’t seen what this can do, you should really check it out. This is a fantastic alternative to Vista, which is still not yet released, but doesn’t have the steep hardware requirements.

Things to note about the SuSE Desktop install:

• The default install has just about everything the average user would want as far as software
• Mono, the .NET framework for linux, comes installed and already configured
• .NET apps such as Beagle, Banshee, and F-Spot are installed and ready to go.
• Firefox flash plug-ins are already installed. (this can be a bit of a hassle* with other distros)
• The ’start’/computer menu is very user friendly and a little Vista-ish.
• Desktop search via Beagle is very very impressive

*hassle: this is usually a hassle with other distributions because Firefox has a way of telling you you need the plugin, it greets you with a way to do it quickly through their interface, but with linux, this never seems to work. I’ve always had to go to adobe.com, get the installer scripts and run them manually. Granted this only take a couple of minutes, but I’m really bothered by the failed attempt on the Firefox end.

My next task is to attempt some DVD+DL burning, which always seem to fail in Windows on this particular box. I’ll also test Banshee with my iPod, although I’ve heard that it will not play non-DRM media. I find this very hard to believe, but time will tell.

About every six months or so I like to post my current computer lineup which is very basic information about the computers and most importantly, what operating systems I’m running on each.

Mac Mini Core Duo (2GB RAM) - Mac OS X 10.4

AMD64 3500+ (1GB RAM) - Windows XP –> soon to be SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10

HP 1.4GHz (1GB RAM) - Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)

Sony VAIO Notebook (256MB RAM) - Ubuntu Linux (Dapper)

AMD 2600+ (1GB RAM) - Windows XP

This is not looking good for Microsoft. The only remaining machine with Windows on it is the one my daughters use for gaming. However, I did purchase Cedega last year, but never got past the install stage. Cedega should allow me to run all/most of their Windows games under Linux. I may try that in a couple of months. They’ll be due for a reformat of Windows by then anyway.

When my new hard drive arrived, I had just attended the SuSE Linux Enterprise Roadshow and thought the latest release of SuSE looked amazing.  I decided to give installing SuSE a try and to my surprise, I got caught up on something simple.  I made it all the way through the install to the point of video configuration and SuSE couldn’t identify the LCD model being used by my Sony PCG-R505DL.  I tried the basic LCD and Sony, but no joy with either.  Why SuSE can’t choose a basic driver to use when Ubuntu has no issue with this, is beyond me.  Anyway, I gave up after an hour of trial and error with different configuration tests.

In the next few months, I’ll be trying this distro out on what is my Windows XP box being decommissioned.  I think the hardware on that machine should be easy to identify and should perform very very well with SLED (SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop).

In the past, I’ve always run into trouble running Linux Live CDs or install CDs because my Sony PCG-R505DL Notebook’s optical drive is in a docking station, which connects internally via IEEE1394. When these CDs would load Linux, they would boot, but as soon as the kernel was loading, the necessary IEEE1394 drivers were disabled, which killed the installs. The newest version of Ubuntu had no issues with this, so they must have addressed the issue. However, the Live CD was very slow to load and when I finally got it loaded, I chose the Install option, which took 4 minutes to even acknowledge the command. Once it started, I was greeted with a screen that told me to select the language to be used on the system, but the list hadn’t been completely rendered. Another 3 minutes passed before the list appeared. English was selected as the default, so I clicked on Forward, but it is taking a long time for this ‘click’ to execute. Very very slow so far. Oddly enough, I can hear the CD cranking, but the screen hasn’t changed yet. In fact, the screen ironically says I will need to answer a few questions and the install will begin from the HDD rather than the CD to speed things along. Here I am waiting for the first question to go away, so I can answer the others and get started. Also, the screen says, ‘Answering the questions should only take a few minutes,’ but I think in reality the questions only take a few seconds to answer while the loading of the answers is going on 45 minutes now. Why is the process so slow? Installing on a desktop machine only takes about 40 minutes from start to finish, so this is beyond me.

For the past week, I thought my Mac was starting to crap out because I couldn’t connect to the MSN network using CyberDuck Adium, which worked fine weeks prior. Everytime I launched it, I got the ‘just crashed’ screen. Well today I setup Gaim on my Ubuntu box and tried to connect to the MSN network only to have Gaim autoclose itself.

Is this a case of being blocked by Microsoft since I’m not using a supported version of Windows Messenger? At the moment, I don’t know, but it really is bothersome.

Anyone has ideas for me to try to test this?

UPDATE:

I ran gaim on my Ubuntu box with debug turned on and noticed that everything was fine until it loaded the Encarta Answers contact.  I removed Encarta Answers from my Contact List and it launched without problems.  Seeing as this is a Windows Messenger only feature, I don’t think removing that contact will ever be a problem.

Now that I’m back to the install, to summarize what has happened up to this point. I installed Ubuntu 6.06 from the install CD and setup my second harddrive. I setup my shared directories using samba and setup my shared printer for my network. The following are the next steps I’ve taken (most pulled from UbuntuGuide.org):

1. Install the OpenSSH server to enable SSH from remote machines
2. Get and run EasyUbuntu to configure Multimedia Codecs, Browser Plugins and other miscellaneous applications that are typically used, but not included in the default installation of Ubuntu
3. Install PDF Reader and PDF browser plugins
4. Install gFTP (FTP Client)
5. Install Azureus BitTorrent Client
6. Install Frostwire Gnutella Client
7. Install DVD::Rip
8. Install GnomeBaker
9. Setup extra repositories
10. Install K3B
11. Install Bum Boot-Up Manager
12. Install GParted Partition Manager
13. Setup NVidia configuration
14. {System Updates via notification here}

Now the big question is, should I try to install XGL?  It seems pretty cool and definitely outshines the Aero Interface still in the works, but XGML requires a lot less hardware.  I dunno, but my box is running now, so I’m happy.

I try to get my hands into everything computer related so I have a good range of machines. I’m not really into gaming, so I don’t have any suped up rigs. The good news is that all of my OSes are legal versions. The bad news is that I need to get rid of some of these machines. My electric bill is probably impacted greatly by this computer lab I have set up in my office.

• Mac Mini 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo with 2GB RAM (Mac OS X 10.4)

• Custom AMD64 3500+ with 1GB RAM (Windows XP Pro)

• HP Pavilion 7965 1.6GHz P4 with 1GB RAM (Ubuntu Linux 6.06)

• Custom AMD 2600+ with 1GB RAM (Windows XP Pro)

• Sony VAIO 1GHz Pentium-M Notebook with 256MB RAM (Windows XP Home)

• eMachines W1640 AMD 1600+ with 768MB RAM (SuSE Linux 10.1) - For sale $100 plus any applicable shipping costs. Photos and specs available upon request.

This morning, after confirming my backup of important files was complete, I dropped in the Ubuntu 6.06 install CD and was surprised to see how easy they made the process. The install CD is now the Live CD with an install launcher on the desktop. So for anyone wanting to try this OS, they can play around before they decide. If they want to go with it, they simply double click the Install icon on the desktop and they begin the install. When the install is complete (only took me about 8 minutes), the user is prompted to remove the CD and reboot. I do so and was up and running without a hitch and the configuration error I was getting for the past two versions was now gone. There was nothing wrong with the previous versions, but somewhere along the line, I messed something up. Within two minutes, I had my second harddrive enabled (for my music), shared directories setup (which included installing samba), and my shared Printer configured. I had to leave for work, so the rest will have to wait. Good, clean, quick install… couldn’t ask for anything more.

I was thinking this morning that of the people I know, and surround myself with, only one person (podious) shares the same interests when it comes to the Internet. Percentage wise, this is very low. Here are some things I use often that would qualify anyone as a web geek (IMHO):

• Bloglines
• digg
• BackPackIt
• RememberTheMilk
• del.icio.us

Can anyone think of other things that qualify someone as a web geek?

Though I plan on doing a clean install of the latest version of Ubuntu (6.06), I ran across this nice upgrade feature found in the System Updates Manager. Apparently, with this new release, you no longer have to fuss with changing your repositories over and doing a Dist Upgrade. You simply click on Upgrade and follow any prompts that might come up. For an operating system to not only be fully upgradeable, but to then add a extremely simple method to do it, is amazing. The screenshots below show most of the steps involved. I tried to do this overnight and during a busy day so the whole process took me about 24 hours, but that is because there were quite a bit of prompts throughout the process asking if I wanted to overwrite the existing config files. In my case, I probably fubbed something up and now my computer won’t boot into the latest kernel and when I select the kernel one version back is half loads and gives my partial access to the system. Since I planned on doing the clean install I was just going to try this to see where it lead me, but I don’t think I have it in me to try to fix this install which I already knew was a mess prior to this version. I’ll post more about that experience when I find the time to do the install.

Apparently I’m in the minority when it comes to migrating my Thunderbird Profile from Linux to OS X. I couldn’t find information for it anywhere. Most of the information I found was how to move from another client to Thunderbird or how to migrate from XP to Linux.

What I’ve tried

1. I copied over the entire profile, and added it to the Profiles directory under /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles. After that, I modified the pref.js for this profile changing all references to /home/[username]/.mozilla-thunderbird/ to /Users/[username]/Library/Thunderbird/. With all of this done, the only thing that appears in Thunderbird when I launch it is Local Folders. There is no sign of my emails. When I look under the mail settings, the mailbox appears to be setup, but nothing shows up in the Inbox.

2. Another thing I tried was using default profile as created by Thunderbird, then overwriting the Profile Mail files over the existing and still nothing shows. This method doesn’t require any change to the prefs.js file as it should already be correct and more environmentally accurate.

GOOD NEWS!! The second method is what proved to be the answer, although, one key thing for my situation was the speedbump pothole in the road. I keep my Inbox as a global Inbox, meaning all of my mail for my email account gets stored in Local Folders’ Inbox rather than the mail.whatever.com Inbox. This means I was copying the wrong Mail folder into the Mac profile. What I did to find this was a simple du -sh on the Mail directory to find that my Local Folders directory was 1.4GB while my mail.whatever.com was only 100MB (which is still a lot for no use, but no worries… I don’t need it). Once the correct Mail dir was put in place, Thunderbird was launched and had all of my email and folder structure was intact.

Note: I spent about an hour looking for the answer and submitted a post to the mozillazine forums. I must commend the Moderators over there because they are on top of their game. They replied to my post in about 5 minutes and provided another workaround that would’ve worked (I tested it) had I not found out my own goof up during the process.