Trey’s Blog

These are items I need to get worked out before I can move to my Mac Mini fulltime.

• get Mozilla Thunderbird configured and showing all mail from previous Profile (Thunderbird on Ubuntu Linux)
• find a good DVD Copy program that works without a hitch
• get my music stored off on a larger hard drive. I’m currently approaching the limit on my 40GB hard drive. I was thinking of getting a MiniStack v2 and putting the spare 120GB I have in it.
• get my iTunes setup as it is on XP with my music and podcast subscriptions.
• get my photo collection moved over from XP
• get my DiVX movie collection moved over from XP (BTW Handbrake is an awesome app that is very easy to use and can even crop out letterboxes!)
• get all of my FTP Sites setup in CyberDuck.

I believe that is it. Some of you might be wondering why I even posted this. The answer is because I needed to checklist for myself and this just happen to pop into my head when I was looking at my blog.

Ubuntu’s latest release will be available for download this evening at or around 12:00 AM. Normally, I would go through the upgrade process, but this time, I would feel better installing it fresh to ensure I’ve done everything correctly. In the past, the upgrades have been a simple 3-4 step process that takes all of an hour (including download time), but I’ve always been left wondering, are some of the issues I have had due to me screwing an upgrade up? Perhaps even an old screw up has now made its presence known. Either way, I’ll be doing a fresh install. The machine, I’m currently using for Ubuntu is an old Pentium 4 1.8GHz HP Pavilion with 1GB RAM and two 40GB hard drives.

I did some updates using the auto update feature in Ubuntu a couple of days ago and noticed some xorg updates going through the pipe. At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but when I rebooted yesterday, my X Server failed to start. I searched around the Internet (I mean Google) and only found things related to this issue that took place over a year ago. One thing I did notice on a couple of the posts was a thing called vesa. I’m not sure what it really is and cannot find any quick answers, but it appears to be some sort of fallback driver or something. Some ATI users have used it and some NVidia users have implemented it, so it is definitely not card specific. To use it, just replace the Driver value in the Device section of xorg.conf with “vesa” and restart X. This is working for me now, but I don’t like not know what it is or the feeling that I’ve somehow disabled the proper NVidia driver. In June, I’ll be rebuilding my machine using Ubuntu new Dapper release from scratch, so for the time being, I’ll deal with the driver issue and begin backing up my profile data.

UPDATE: vesa is an Xorg driver for generic VESA video cards. It can drive most VESA-compatible video cards, but only makes use of the basic standard VESA core that is common to these cards. The driver supports depths 8, 15, 16, and 24. http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man4/vesa.4.html

I’ve had a horrible time of trial and error getting my NVidia drivers running under Ubuntu. I’ll start by explaining the original setup, the problem, then get to what I did to fix.

Original Setup: Pentium 4 with the Riva TNT Pro64 32MB

The default install of Ubuntu detected my card and installed the nvidia-glx drivers which appeared to run as a legacy driver and didn’t perform well with the Compositing enabled. I decided to purchase a GeForce FX 5200 with 128MB assuming the extra horsepower would handle the Compositing without any issues.

The Problem: Upon install, I noticed the card performed even worse than the old card with each window redrawing itself very slowly when minimizing and maximizing. I downloaded the NVidia drivers from their website and installed them. The only true indication I could get that I did something right here was the NVidia splash screen that displayed just before starting X Windows. The NVidia Settings tool I found doesn’t seem to have any helpful tools for setting up the card, rather is more for fine tuning little features like Cursor Shadow.

What I Did: I searched the Internet (Google really) and found ways to check which driver was running and it showed AGPGART was running instead of the NVidia driver I had installed. I then added nvidia to the /etc/modules and blacklisted agpgart. I added modified my xorg.conf to have the following:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "NV34 [GeForce FX 5200]"
    Driver         "nvidia"
        Option "NoLogo" "true"  # Disables nVidia's logo on start-up
        Option "NvAGP" "0"  # Tries internal nVidia AGP drivers first
        Option "RenderAccel" "true"  # Duh  
        Option "CursorShadow" "true"  # Adds an alpha-shadow to your cursor
        Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"  # Mostly used for cool effects
EndSection

When I had NvAGP set to 1, the gnome-panel (top and bottom bars) wouldn’t load, but setting it to 0 allowed them to load. I’m not completely sure the NVidia drivers loaded because the status I ran earlier only output AGP Disabled, but the screen rendering seems to be much better. I may post an update in the future once I have time to figure out what is happening here.

Linking to a PDF on a web page is easy enough:

<a href="mypdf.pdf">This is my PDF</a>

Not until Acrobat 7.0 came out could you link directly to a page within a pdf, such as sending someone to page 4 of the PDF to skip straight to the pertinent content.

<a href="mypdf.pdf#page=4">This is my PDF</a>

Note: This feature only exists in Adobe’s Acrobat product, but I don’t see it being much longer before an Open Source PDF Viewer will implement this feature.

Recently, I’ve discovered that all email being sent via script through my mail server, a Qmail server, was arriving with anonymous@servername and root@servername as the from address rather than the specified From in the message headers. After several hours of Internet research, I happened upon a message that solved another issue, but included a bit of information helpful to my situation. Due to the huge SPAM problem the world is having, mail servers are now displaying the Return-Path for the message, which basically is the actual system user responsible for sending the email. This helps mail servers determine which servers are responsible for SPAM via open relay and the like. When you send mail via email client, the Return-Path is already set to your email address, so this problem won’t affect you there.

To get your From address workign again for your formmail scripts, you need to add the following code to your script before sending the mail. (Note: the @ will be applied by the server, so the alias is the only thing necessary for the MAILUSER)

Perl: $ENV{'MAILUSER'} = 'myusername'; $ENV{'MAILHOST'} = 'mydomain.com';

PHP: putenv("MAILUSER=myusername"); putenv("MAILHOST=mydomain.com");

Another easy to fix this is to add the Return-Path to the header portion of your mail function:

Return-Path: Alias <alias@yourdomain.com>

I just ran across this site (open source versus) and though they did an awesome job of comparing Open Source software with the closed-sourced alternative. They’ve compared Outlook Express with Mozilla’s Thunderbird, Windows with SuSE and Ubuntu. Check them out here.

I just read this on Newsforge and thought it was cool. An OpenDocument Fellowship. Very nice.

Read the article.

Read more about OpenDocument and OpenOffice here.

See the OpenDocument Fellowship Homepage.

In Ubuntu and many of the latest distros, syntax highlighting in Vim (Vi improved) is off by default. To enable syntax highlighting, edit /etc/vim/vimrc. In here you’ll find this line: " syntax on. Just remove the quote at the beginning of this line and save. That’s it!!

Because this was off by default, I thought I was running plain Vi, but I was wrong. Vim is pretty much the standard these days. Anyway… happy highlighting.

When I read this article, I wanted to leap into the air cheering. I think this is big news on a topic I’ve been supporting since I first heard of it. Essentially, Google sees the potential of OpenOffice in the productivity suite war against Microsoft, and decided to bring in some help for the OOo Team. Read the article.

See my previous entries about OpenOffice and OpenDocument:

OpenOffice version 2 OpenDocument (Part 1) OpenDocument Part 2

For any Ubuntu lovers out there, I found this to be very cool. I friend of mine has got Ubuntu loaded and working on his Tablet PC (Compaq TC1000) including the ‘magic’ pen. Check it out over here with photos.

For those looking for a way to sync your music files with your Philips GoGear media player, you’ll likely find that MusicMatch is the officially supported tool. However, for those who wish to use this with Linux, MusicMatch is not an option. It only took me two minutes to find this set of tools available for the Linux community provided by the Linux community.

Linux Digital Media Manager (LDMM) has the ability to add and delete MP3s from the device, and manage the album and artist databases. It has a GUI front-end and a straightforward interface. It was written in Python specifically for the HDD060, but should work fine with the HDD070 as well.

openGogear is a suite of tools for working with Philips GoGear HDD0xx MP3 players. Though these devices can be mounted with the standard usb-storage module, these tools implement the file indexing required to hear MP3s. openGogear has a debian package available. JGoGear is the Java-based GUI front-end for openGogear.

PyGogear is obviously written in Python exchanges information about the tracks from a Sqlite database file, usually named MyDb. This program reads the ID3v1 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts the most important ones in the database. There is no GUI available yet, but it is in the works.

pymaj was rewritten from pyGogear 5.8.4 with some changes and folders support added. Program can read the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags from the MP3 files placed on the player and inserts them in the database. M3U playlists are supported as well.

See my previous post regarding Philips GoGear here.

Update: Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) mounted the HDD070 as ‘Philips MassStorage-Disc: 1.9GB Removable Volume’ available under ‘Computer’. Its actual location is /media/usbdisk/. Under this device, you’ll find the following structure:

/_system/
    /firmware/
        /FWimage.bak
        /FWimage.oke
    /media/
        /audio/
            all mp3 files here...
            MyDb (the file that contains the ID3 index information)
/drmv1pm.tmp