A Linux Newbie Documents the Transition

Keep pants out of bike chain with strap of old inner tube

2011-02-06T07:33:00.000-08:00

I've come up with a very simple pants strap made of old innertube.

From Inner Tube Pants Strap

Cut tube about an inch away from valve. Measure length around leg, cut a few inches too long just in case.

From Inner Tube Pants Strap

Cut a couple of holes in the right places.

From Inner Tube Pants Strap

Wrap around pants and secure by poking valve through a hole.

From Inner Tube Pants Strap

My Favorite Affordable Tech Purchases of 2010

2010-12-21T11:03:00.000-08:00

1. Spare laptop hard drive, same size as the one in my laptop. In my case, 320 GB, about $45.

2. Spare laptop hard drive caddy (that thing screwed onto the drive to hold it in place) $8.00 on eBay

With these two things I can keep a cloned image of hard drive and swap them out in about 30 seconds if I hose my system. I also have a spare 160 GB laptop drive, which I use for distro testing.

3. Cables to Go IDE/SATA to USB adapter. This thing lets me hook a bare hard drive up to my laptop via USB to make backups, clones, etc. Awesome. $28.

I use Clonezilla Live to clone system about once a week, using this adapter hooked up to bare spare hard drive.

4. Stanley 4-in-1 magnetic tip precision screwdriver. Not really tech per-se, but awesome for removing tiny screws on laptop. Magnetic tips help putting screws back too.

Fluendo DVD player setup on Debian

2010-04-18T10:41:00.001-07:00

The fluendo dvd player has a .deb package for easy install on Debian, but it wouldn't launch when I tried to launch either from the menu or the command line. After digging around a bit I discovered that the right binary to launch the program is not in /usr/bin/ the way it's supposed to be, but rather in

/usr/share/fluendo-dvd/bin/fluendo-dvd

To make it work right, remove the binary from /usr/bin/ and make a symbolic link to the right binary (you need to be root for this):

# cd /usr/bin
# rm fluendo-dvd
# ln -s /usr/share/fluendo-dvd/bin/fluendo-dvd fluendo-dvd

Now you should be able to launch it from the menu or from the Alt+F2 launcher thingy.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE

Following advice of fluendo dev who commented, I solved this problem by editing the startup script rather than making a symbolic link like above. Turns out all I had to do was change Linuxmint8 to Linuxmint9 in script and it works. Probably could have done something similar for Debian before. Just have to check value of DISTRO_RELEASE and make sure that appears somewhere in line 68.

mutt: automatic smtp server selection at startup

2009-07-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

Something that's bugged me for a while is the fact that I have different outgoing mail servers at home and and work, and as yet there's been no really elegant way to handle it. The best solution until now was a plugin for Thunderbird that put a button on the toolbar to select outgoing mail server. Well, yesterday I hit upon the perfect solution, at least when using mutt as the email client. I found a tips page for configuring mutt, and it showed how you can source a shell script to have a dynamically loaded mutt configuration, so I came up with a way to have my system assign the smtp server automatically based upon my location. It checks my IP address using the ifconfig command, and if it finds a string associated with my home IP address, it selects one smtp server, if it doesn't find that string, it selects my work server. Here's the script, with particulars changed to general info:

#!/bin/sh

where_am_i=$(ifconfig | grep 192 >& /dev/null ; echo $?)

if [ "$where_am_i" == "0" ] ; then

   # found it! I'm at home

   echo 'set smtp_url="smtp://smtp.server.net"'

else

   # not there, must be at work

   echo 'set smtp_url="smtp://mailer.work.edu"'

fi

I save this script in my .mutt/ directory, make it executable, then in my .muttrc file, source the script as follows:

source '~/.mutt/set-smtp.sh|'

Woohoo! Automagic outgoing mailserver setting!

Makefiles and Finale (again)

2009-06-03T19:25:00.000-07:00

Man it's been a really long time since the last post. I guess the title of the blog is no longer apt, now that I've been on Linux for 18+ months. Always learning new stuff, though, and the latest is one of the coolest things so far--Makefiles! I've just recently learned to write Makefiles for my Lilypond and LaTeX projects, greatly easing the process of compiling, managing, and archiving the files. If you've never heard of a Makefile, it's a file that a program called "GNU make" uses to run the proper commands to build something from source code. Most often it's building software but it's also for building documentation and now for me, Lilypond scores and my Counterpoint Workbook, which is a lilypond-book project based on LaTeX. With a makefile, you can type the command "make score" instead of "lilypond -dno-point-and-click -ddelete-intermediate-files --include=$HOME filename.ly && mv filename.pdf PDF/". I already had shell scripts to take care of the most complex commands, but with a Makefile I can easily share my source code with someone else and they'll have simple make commands to run instead of trying to figure out what commands to run to build it. Love the makefiles. I even wrote a new section of the Lilypond Learning Manual discussing makefiles and giving a few examples.

Oh yeah, that brings me to another recent discovery. It's not going to be new to most people, but I just discovered the beauty of virtual machines. While working on the Makefiles for the Lilypond docs, I found myself using virtual machines constantly to test the makefiles on Windows. I no longer have a Windows partition on my laptop, so it was great to have XP as a virtual machine on which to test the makefiles, without having to reboot or try to sneak time on my son's laptop. I use VirtualBox OSE by Sun, and it does the job. I'd like it better if I could resize the window or hide the toolbar so the whole screen fits on my screen, but otherwise I have no complaints. The VM has access to my wireless device, so I can download and install stuff inside the VM just fine. It's great.

Last thing: I finally got Finale to run perfectly on Linux. Well, the Finale 2009 demo anyway. In one of my earliest blog posts I reported that while I got it to run, it didn't look quite right--piano braces were jacked up and slurs looked funny. Well I tried it again on Xubuntu 9.04 and everything displays perfectly now. There was something funny I had to do to get the MIDI playback to work. Let me see...Ok yeah. After it's installed, choose the oss sound driver in the wine configuration, then inside Finale choose choose menu item: MIDI/Audio > Device Setup > Midi Thru, and set Midi Thru to "Off". MIDI playback should work now. :)

HDTV and Home-Made Antennas

2009-01-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since my last post and this new one has nothing to do with Linux. I got an HDTV for Xmas, a 26" Vizio LCD. I have to say that I'm completely blown away by the quality of digital broadcast, especially the HD broadcasts. It's amazing to me that I can get such high-quality content for free, over the airwaves. Since I got the TV, though, I've been experimenting a lot with antennas trying to get the best, most consistent signal.

The Commercial Antenna

The first thing I used, of course, was the powered antenna I already had, a Philips/Magnavox antenna originally meant for FM/UHF/VHF reception. It didn't pick up any of the PBS stations, and it also had trouble with the Fox affiliate. I went to Amazon and searched for other antennas that had good customer reviews, and it seemed like every commercial antenna had mixed reviews. Each one worked wonders for some people and didn't pick up anything for others.

The Home-made Antennas

One of the customer reviews on Amazon mentioned how the antenna he made out of coat hangers following instructions on YouTube worked better than any of the commercial ones he'd tried, so I did a search and quickly found the video he was talking about. It looked easy enough, so I rounded up the materials and built it. It didn't work any better than the Philips antenna until I put it in the attic, after which it picked up all of the channels in the area! Here's a picture of it in my attic.

It worked pretty well up there but I still had trouble with the PBS channels and NBC affiliate (50 miles away in Baton Rouge). NBC came in fine sometimes and broke up at others. The PBS channels did well for the most part but broke up at inopportune moments. I read some more and found that some people had better luck with solid copper wires instead of metal coat hangers, so I built one out of copper wires. It definitely worked better but I still had some cutting out of the same channels.

The Gray-Hoverman Design

After some more searching I found a website where there was a dedicated bunch of guys working and experimenting like crazy on an old antenna design called the "Gray-Hoverman," patented in the late 50s and newly released under a GPL license (there's the Linux connection! Haha!). The forums for this antenna had thousands of posts and lots of graphics illustrating the performance of different modifications of the design. It looked like a lot of work to make one exactly as shown in the original design, but I was curious so I decided to make one without the metal mesh backdrop that seemed critical for folks far away from towers. I bought 10 feet of 6 gauge bare copper wire, some wood screws and washers, and got to work. The first thing I did was plot the design at full size on a big piece of paper, going by the dimensions given in the designer's patent application. Then I cut the wire in half and started shaping it to what I had plotted on paper. It was pretty hard. That #6 copper wire is difficult to bend precisely. I got it to conform to the design the best I could, then attached the two elements to a board just like the one I had used to make the coat-hanger antenna. I attached the balun to the middle part of the elements, took it up to the attic, and hooked it up. Here's a picture:

This is a truly amazing antenna! It gets all the channels perfectly and I haven't had any more problems with signals dropping out, even with the NBC affiliate in Baton Rouge. It worked so well that I built another one to feed signals into my VCR. This time I decided to try 12-gauge copper wire since I happened to have some on hand already, and I can't tell any difference in the performance. I even made a mistake on one of the elements and it ended up about 2 inches short, but it appears to work perfectly nonetheless.

VHF Addition?

Now, so far so good, but I know that the CBS affiliate, which currently broadcasts on real channel 56 (virtual channel 10.1) is going to change to real channel 10 after Feb. 17. This is a problem because channel 10 is outside the spectrum that this antenna is meant to pick up. Today I made a VHF dipole that is tuned specifically to channel 10 according to the instructions given here. I attached it to the same balun as the two gray-hoverman elements and stuck it on the bottom of the board. Unfortunately I can't really test it until the transition occurs, but at the very least it didn't mess up the reception I currently enjoy. I'll test it after the transition and if it works I'll put more details and a picture or two.

Scripting and Lilypond

2008-10-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

Lately I haven't posted anything because by now, after nearly a year living with Linux, I'm very comfortable in it and there's not really much that I want to do that I can't. What's occupying me now is learning how to make Linux work for me better. To this end I've been learning how to write shell scripts. I had done some attempts at this a while back but have lately learned how to make them work better. For example, I came up with a script one day to use Lilypond source files to make musical examples suitable for insertion in documents or web pages by making use of the excellent "netpbm" package of image tools. By default, when you choose .png image format for Lilypond output, it uses full pages. I wanted images that were cropped properly. So I wrote a script that let you call lilypond and specify the image format and the resolution. One of the users on the Lilypond mailing list, Patrick Horgan, took an interest in it and made some great suggestions and tons of additions of code. He made it so that I could use command-line flags to specify the res and format, and I used his code as an example and added a flag for quiet mode and to have the image opened in a preview application if desired. The original script had only about 45 lines, and by the time we were finished with it, it had more than 600 lines and I had written a manpage for it. It was a great learning experience and now I have a tool I can use to make beautiful musical examples. Composer Josh Parmenter also helped out on this by testing every version of the script and making some good suggestions about how it should behave. The final product is called "lily2image."

I've also been getting much better at Lilypond engraving. I'm about halfway through a new engraving of my Merengue for Orchestra, which is a very big project for me. It has about 20 source files and it's so big that it takes a long time to compile. This is something that prompted me to take on another coding project, which was to figure out a way to specify at the command line the exact number of measures to compile on a given Lilypond source file. Lilypond has a built-in ability to compile only the last x number of bars, but you have to specify it inside one of the source files. I wanted to be able to do it when I typed the command, and I didn't know enough about programming to fiddle with the actual source code, but I figured out a way to do it with the usual script I use for calling Lilypond. What I did was created a flag with which I could capture a value and pass it into a temporary file that would be included in the source file using the \include "filename.ly" command. The included file has only the command "showLastLength=R1*12" (or whatever value is given at the command line), and it's created just before lilypond is called, then deleted as soon as it's done compiling. It works like a charm!

Last night I engraved a passage of the Ravel quartet for use as an inspirational headword in the Lilypond documentation, but it turns out we can't use it b/c of copyright law in France. I liked it so much, though, that I thought I'd post the image here. My skills at Lilypond have gotten enough better that this only took me a couple of hours, even with all the tweaks and stuff. I made this nicely cropped image with my lily2image script :)

So after we decided we couldn't use the Ravel, I engraved a bit of a Beethoven quartet, and it looks pretty good but we eventually decided to use a modern piece by a Lilypond user, one that shows off many more of Lilypond's capabilities. Here's the image of the Beethoven quartet, though. I think it looks nice, too.

Using a Script to Install Packages

2008-08-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post and the only really cool thing I've learned to do since then is use to use shell scripts in more and more contexts.

One of the nicest ways to use one is to install bunches of packages in one fell swoop. The deeper I get into Linux, the more packages I need to do the stuff I want to, especially since lately I've started to compile programs from source.

In order to make sure I'll be able to get set up with a minimum of trouble, I've created an install script for all of the packages I want to have. Every time I add a new package with apt-get, I add it to my script. So basically it's a series of "sudo apt-get install -y package-name" commands all in a row. The -y flag is especially useful because many packages require you to respond to a "Do you want to continue?" prompt. If you use the -y flag, it automatically assumes "yes" to this question.

I tried the script out for the first time the other day on my old Dell laptop, and was amazed at how easy it was to get the whole system installed and customized when using a script like this. I had also backed up my home directory, so that after copying all of that stuff into the new home directory, I had all of my scripts, documents, media, email, browser settings, etc. In under an hour I went from a blank hard drive to a perfectly set-up machine :)

REALLY fixing the laptop/projector problem: XRandR

2008-06-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

Well, after figuring out a very sketchy way to make my laptop work with the projectors in our classrooms, I stumbled upon a *real* way to fix the problem, one that was already built into the operating system but I had never heard of and hadn't seen anyone write about until today.

Buddhika Siddhisena writes on his blog about how to hot-plug an external monitor under Linux, and this really is a solution, not just a series of hopeful steps that might or might not end up with my computer displaying on the screen. It's a utility that is now built into Xorg 7.3 called xrandr, which allows you to command the machine to discover monitors attached to it and configure them appropriately. I read his post this afternoon and couldn't wait to try it out but had to wait until the kids were in bed, then I ran over to the office just now to try it.

So I turned on the laptop, turned on the projector, and when they were both up and running, I connected the projector to the VGA port. Then I ran the command

xrandr --output VGA --auto

To my amazement, it immediately showed my laptop's output on the projector! Woohooo!!! The resolution was kind of jacked up, so I tried another thing Buddhika Siddhisena mentioned, which was specifying the resolution as part of the commmand:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768

Wow!!! It showed up on the projector at the right resolution!!! Oh man! Unbelievable!!! It did leave my laptop's LCD looking a little funny (basically cut off part of the right-hand side of the display resulting in a 1024x768 resolution on the laptop's screen), but it was perfect on the big screen.

The problem with using the xrandr at 1024x768 command was that even after I disconnected the projector and told it to go back to the normal resolution on the LCD, it wouldn't do it. I'll have to fiddle with this a bit. I've already created bash aliases for the xrandr commands to output to VGA and to turn it off, and for now this is more than adequate. I'll be able to use Linux in the classroom and be an example for my students. Yea!

Another Update: Toshiba Satellite with Projector part II

2008-06-25T11:00:00.001-07:00

Well, I've been experimenting some more and I think I've figured out how to make my Toshiba Satellite laptop running Ubuntu work with external projector every time. In yesterday's post I speculated that it didn't work with the Panasonic projector in one of our classrooms but it would work with the Liesagang projectors. Today I went back to the classroom with the Panasonic projector to give it one more try and I think I've finally discovered the key to success. I got it to work with all projectors by going through the following steps precisely:

1. Make sure laptop is shut down
2. Make sure projector is turned OFF
3. plug in the VGA connector from projector to VGA port in laptop
4. press power button on laptop
5. wait until you hear laptop starting to boot (you hear the fan start up, the machine start to hum, etc) and *then* press the projector's power button.

As far as I can tell, step 5 is the critical stage in the process that determines whether your laptop is going to show on the projector's screen or not. Turn on the projector too early or too late, and it won't work.

This laptop is a dual-boot machine, with Vista or Ubuntu. By default the machine will boot into Ubuntu after a certain amount of time if no other system is selected. When the projector is plugged in, the whole boot process displays on the external projector, but since you have to start with the projector turned *off*, you can't actually see the grub menu and you don't know when to press *enter* to select it. My solution is simply to wait until it selects Ubuntu by default. Once it has done this, I can hear the laptop kick into gear and that's when I hit the power button for the projector.

I have no idea why this works, but I'm glad to have discovered it and hopefully this will help some other people, too.

Update: Toshiba Laptop with Projector

2008-06-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

Ok I have a few additional comments about running the Toshiba Satellite laptop in Ubuntu with an external projector. It worked when I did it this morning in one of our classrooms, but when I tried it in a different classroom, it didn't work. I thought I might have done something different, so I went back to the first classroom and tried there again. Didn't work. Weird. I thought I remembered turning the projector on slightly *after* turning on the computer the first time that it worked, so I turned everything off and tried turning on the laptop first, then about 10 seconds later the projector (already connected via the VGA port before turning anything on). It worked this way. So apparently the order in which you turn things on matters. I went back to the second classroom to try that one again, and it didn't work. Best I can tell, it works with the newer Liesegang projectors but not with the older Panasonic projector. Oy. Maybe if you hold your mouth just right, it all works ;-)

New Laptop!

2008-06-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

Ok I have a new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite U305 28-something. 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, Intel Core duo processor, 13.3" widescreen. It's pretty nice for the money ($549 at Office Depot, marked down b/c it was the last one in the store).

First thing I did was install Ubuntu for a dual-boot setup (it came with Vista, of course), but I messed something up and Windows wouldn't boot so I did a restore of the Windows side using the disk that came with it. Vista is a serious pain. It took FOREVER to install and kept rebooting over and over. I think it took nearly three hours in all. When I did it, though, I specified to install it on its own partition of 45GB, so that way I was pretty sure I'd be able to get my Ubuntu installation on there without causing trouble, and I was right. This time it went perfectly. Of course Ubuntu only took about 20 minutes before it was ready to use :).

One of the nice things about having a brand new laptop with Linux is that I can now run COMPIZ!! Not something that's really very important but it's a lot of fun. At first I thought the graphics card wasn't good enough and I was resigned to it, but then I was trying the new OpenSuse 11 on a live CD and they had the compiz config tool on their menu so I tried it out. Rotating cube, all that stuff worked perfectly from the live CD, so I went back to Ubuntu and dug around to find that I needed to install the compizconfig-settings-manager. Got it and suddenly I had compiz running great. I wish Ubuntu would include this compiz configuration tool by default, man. I don't understand why they'd make it hard to get compiz running when that's one of the things that attracts many new users to Linux in the first place.

##Toshiba Satellite with an External Projector

Ok so the only thing that didn't work just right on the Linux side that I really wanted to work was the external monitor thing. I want to use this laptop in the classroom with a projector, but it doesn't behave exactly as expected. The Fn+F5 toggle doesn't work on the Linux side, although it works fine under Vista. Here's how I got the machine to display satisfactorily on a projector under Ubuntu:

1. Start it up while connected to the projector through the VGA port (as far as I can tell this is the only way to get it to recognize the external monitor)
2. Once it's booted up and you see your whole desktop, change the screen resolution to 1024x768. This will make it look stretched out on the laptop's widescreen but it looks perfect on the projector. If you leave it at the default resolution (mine's 1280x800) and try to show a presentation, the presentation gets squeezed on the projector. You have to set the resolution to a 4:3 aspect ratio for it to look right on the projector.

That's it, I guess. I think it'll work for me. I wish the Fn+F5 toggle would work, and I wish I could just plug the projector in while the laptop was already running, but this method will suffice.

##My one use for Windows

So far the only thing I need to do on the Windows side is create DVDs of my home movies. The Windows DVD creation application is actually pretty good and easy to use. I can't figure out how to do this on the Linux side b/c no matter what file format I use for my videos, Linux can't deal with it. I have to convert the m2v files to mpeg1 for the Windows side and that works well. Otherwise I have no use for Windows. It looks pretty nice but runs very slow and even when I have most of the special desktop effects disabled it feels like I'm running a 5-year-old machine instead of a brand new one. In Ubuntu I can have all of the compiz stuff enabled and it still runs very fast. It's no contest.

In all I'm very happy with this new machine. It's fast and looks nice, and it's much lighter than the laptop I had before so it's easier to lug around. Many thanks to the sales guy at Office Depot who let me try the computer out with an Ubuntu live CD before purchasing! The wireless worked perfectly from the live CD, and this was pretty important. Wireless compatibility is an issue with Linux and this Intel 3945 card worked great. I suspected that it would, since it's the one Dell uses on their preinstalled Ubuntu systems, but it was important for me to find out for sure before purchasing.

Rockbox: Hacking your iPod

2008-05-30T19:38:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I installed *Rockbox* on my 4th generation iPod Photo. This was the last iPod before the iPod Video. I remember being very irritated that I bought this iPod about 2 weeks before the iPod Video came out. Of course there was no heads-up from Apple that this was on the horizon, so I bought it and watched with dismay as they unveiled the new device that played videos and had a bigger hard drive for the same price as the old one.

Anyway the device is now almost three years old and still works fine but I decided to try installing Rockbox on it to extend its capabilities and also just because I thought it'd be fun to hack it, and it's really cool to be able to dual-boot an iPod.

Customization

Rockbox is an open-source alternative firmware for portable audio devices (not just iPods--lots of devices). It's attractive for a couple of reasons. First of all it allows for much greater customization than Apple's firmware. You can download lots of different themes to customize the user interface and you can tweak the audio settings in much greater detail, for example. Some of the themes even have dB meters that jump with the music. Secondly, it supports the open formats .ogg and flac. Some of the podcasts I listen to are offered in .ogg format so it's nice to be able to use that and support the open format. Most of the themes also display much more information about the tracks that are playing: battery time remaining, file format, compression rate, and all the usual artist, album, and so forth.

Video Playback on an iPod Photo

The most impressive part of Rockbox, though, is that it has turned my iPod Photo into a VIDEO PLAYER! It's amazing! When I realized that I could now play videos on my iPod, I was filled with admiration for the Rockbox developers, and at the same time even more irritated with Apple, because they *could* have done this and offered updated firmware for this generation of iPod, making it capable of video playback. I always thought it was simply incapable of playing videos because of hardware limitations, but that's clearly not the case. It was just Apple trying to get consumers to buy the Video iPod instead of offering that playback on the older device. Props to the Rockbox people for making it happen. If you have an older iPod like this, you should definitely put Rockbox on it. The install is very quick and easy and it's really fun to put some new life in an old device.

Shell Scripts, Aliases, and Command-Line FTP

2008-05-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I wrote an entry for this and I've learned some really cool stuff since then. Probably the coolest thing I've learned to do is to write shell scripts, which are simple text files that contain shell commands that are run one after the other.

I have to thank Chess Griffin of the Linux Reality Podcast for this, since he did an episode on writing basic scripts and it sounded so easy that I decided to try it. I've since written scripts to automate some of the tiresome command-line stuff I do on a regular basis to streamline my workflow considerably.

For example, I like to use the Markdown and MultiMarkdown perl scripts to convert plain text files to html, and since I don't have a text editor that does this automatically (like TextMate does, for example), I have to run the files through the perl scripts at the command line, save the resulting html file, then open it in a browser to view it. I've written a shell script that does all of this automatically. I also added a line to the script that will close the last preview before opening the new one so that I don't end up with umpteen tabs open. Thanks to the guy named Vor in Buenos Aires who posted a response to my query on the Ubuntu forum about how to close an application window from the command line. He gave me the excellent tip to use the program "wmctrl" for this. Works great!

Another script I wrote performs a similar series of tasks for Lilypond. It closes the most recent .pdf preview, runs the file through the lilypond engine, opens the new .pdf file in Acrobat Reader, and deletes the .ps file that is created along the way.

Bash Aliases!

My friend John Laudun gave me the heads up that I can also create aliases for my scripts, so that, for example, my script called "run-multimarkdown.sh" could be called at the command by a brief command like "mmd" if that were defined in my .bashrc file as "alias mmd='sh run-multimarkdown.sh'" This is a genius tool, and you can make aliases for all kinds of things, like opening applications or making ftp or ssh connections. So, I now have the alias "ff" that opens firefox, or "tb" that opens thunderbird, or "imac" that opens an ssh connection with my office imac. I've added a .bashrc file to my Macs as well. Now I keep a terminal open on my macs so I can open stuff faster without having to use the mouse. The commands are a bit different on the mac (it's not Linux, after all, but some brand of Unix--FreeBSD, maybe? I'm ignorant on this), but once you have them defined in the .bashrc file, it all works the same. So, for example my firefox launcher on the Mac is defined this way: alias ff='open -a firefox' (on Linux it would just be "alias ff='firefox'").

Command-Line FTP

The other thing I learned to do is use the Unix/Linux ftp program from the command line. It's actually very easy and now I do almost all of my website updates this way, as well as grab files from my remote computers or put files on my office machine from home, stuff like that. If you can use the cd, ls, get, and put commands (or mput and mget for multiple files at once), you're in good shape.

The upshot of all of this is that I feel much more comfortable at the command line for doing lots of different things, and I find myself being annoyed when I realize I don't have a terminal open. If my system hangs now, I'm not the least bit scared to hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a command prompt and deal with the problem. It's kind of empowering!

That's all for now...

gsynaptics and Hardy issues

2008-05-05T19:55:00.001-07:00

What to do if you can't run gsynaptics

Ok this posting is mainly for my own future reference. I did a nice fresh install of Hardy Heron last week and in general the laptop is running better than before, but there were a couple of problems. One was that my touchpad's vertical scroll wasn't working. I googled and found a number of people who had the same problem and was able to fix it by adding a couple of lines to my xorg.conf file. I also found that there's a GUI for adjusting the sensitivity of the touchpad called "gsynaptics," so I downloaded and installed that. When I tried to run it, though, I got a message saying I had to set "SHMConfig" to "true" in my xorg.conf file. So I did. It still wouldn't run. I forgot about it for a few days because the scrolling was working, but then tonight it didn't work when I first logged in so I started poking again. I found the answer on a Fedora forum, where someone posted his xorg.conf file and I saw that where mine said "true" his said "on". I changed mine to "on" and restarted X, and now gsynaptics starts right up. Now, it's beyond me how anyone is supposed to know that when their own error message says to set the value to "true" it really means "on". Anyway here's that section of my xorg.conf, for my own future reference and for anyone else out there having the same annoying problem:

Code:

Section "InputDevice" 
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver  "synaptics" 
Option  "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option  "Device"  "/dev/psaux"
Option  "Protocol"  "auto-dev"
Option  "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option  "SHMConfig"       "on"
EndSection

No audio on YouTube videos

The other thing that's not working for me so far on Hardy is audio on YouTube. The video plays just fine but I can't hear audio. But here's the weird thing. I have some of my own YouTube videos embedded in my website, and when I watch them from my site, where they are presumably streaming from YouTube, everything works fine! I can see/hear exactly what I'm supposed to. But when I try to watch the same videos on the YouTube site, the audio doesn't work. The other Flash sites I visit seem to work just fine, though--ESPN, PBSKids, etc. No idea why it doesn't work at YouTube. Maybe it's for the best...

GNU Lilypond revisited...

2008-04-07T19:54:00.001-07:00

In a previous post I talked about my experiments with the open-source music typesetting program "Lilypond," concluding that it was probably not something I'd use very much. I've been working with it again lately, and I think I'm starting to change my mind about it.

First of all, I've gotten much better at looking at the code and understanding how the program will interpret things. I've figured out how to insert text expressions, how to change their fonts, to reposition them with respect to the staff or the notes to which they're attached, and so forth. I've also figured out how to put in courtesy accidentals, which was one of the things I couldn't do before. It's actually very easy, I just didn't find the right part of the manual.

So I've been engraving a few more of my pieces and I find that the process goes very quickly now, especially since realizing how the "relative c" thing works. This is saving me a lot of time and making my code look a lot more tidy. My scores are looking better, too, now that I know how to tweak them a bit more. It's a fun learning process. I've shown it to my students but I don't think they're very interested. They like the idea of free software, but they don't like the idea of writing code instead of having a nice Finale-like GUI for their music engraving.

I'm thinking that very soon I'll offer some of my music scores online for free, under the Creative Commons "share alike" license, making both the .pdf and the Lilypond source code files available. I also have a project in mind whereby I'll write enough counterpoint exercises for a whole semester-long class (18th-century style counterpoint) that I'll share online via .pdf and lilypond files so that counterpoint teachers will have an alternative to making students pay $40+ for workbooks.

I'll update further on Lilypond in the future, I expect. It's a good program and one well worth the investment of time.

Linux on Ancient Hardware

2008-03-25T20:30:00.000-07:00

Vi

I'm writing this post using the Vi editor. Normally I use Emacs but I'm trying Vi because it's the other major text editor in the free software world, and because it's the editor that's included on a new Linux distro (well, new to me anyway) that I've gotten to use on my mother-in-law's old, old Winbook.

Hal91 Linux

The distro I speak of is called Hal91, and it's so tiny that it fits on a single 1.44MB floppy disk! This is really incredible. It's an entire functioning command-line operating system that boots into RAM so you can remove the disk once bootup is finished, then put in another disk to open and save files and such. Anyway the editor that's included with Hal91 is Vi, not Emacs, so I'm trying out Vi. I think I might like it better than Emacs. Not sure. They're both very powerful. What I like better about Vi is that I don't have to use the Ctrl and Alt keys so much. In Emacs, nearly everything you do involves one of these keys. In Vi, you can do many of the same things without using those keys. The functions are assigned to various letters instead, and are used while in the "command mode." Anyway I'm not sure whether I'll end up using one editor over the other (especially since I'm expecting my Learning GNU Emacs book in the mail any day now), but I'm thinking Vi might be the easier editor to use. We'll see. Anyway it's pretty cool to be able to run a whole OS from a single floppy. Incredible, really. BTW, that machine has Windows 98 installed and it just barely runs on it (inCREDibly slow and painful...), but it's lightning fast and agile in command-line mode running completely from RAM.

Command-Line Linux

2008-03-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

Command-Line Linux

I have an ancient Gateway laptop, one that my dad bought me in 1997, and a couple of years ago I had my tech buddy Mark install Linux on it, thinking it would breathe some new life into it. It had been running Windows 98 and whenever I started it up, it didn't take long for the thing to come to a grinding halt. Well, it didn't handle the Red Hat Linux very well in a graphical environment, and I sort of forgot about it until recently, when I decided to try it out again to see if there was any use to which I could put it. At first I couldn't even log in because I had completely forgotten the username and password that Mark set up for me when he installed it. I looked on the forums, though, and found a not-too-hard way to change the root password from the command line, so at least I was able to log in as root. This is kind of a scary proposition in Linux, though. In looking through some files on it I found my old username referenced, and after that it didn't take long to remember the password that went with it, so I was back "in."

So, I tried to run Feather Linux, since it's a super-ultra-light distro that only takes up like 50MB, but the desktop didn't render correctly and it was unusable. The only way I could figure out to use it was to run it as a strictly command-line machine. What can you do with a command-line machine, though, when it only has a 1 GB hard drive and probably can't connect to the internet?

First thought was to use it simply to get comfortable in the command-line environment. Navigating around the various directories, creating directories, copying files, renaming things, viewing config files, and so forth. One day when I was poking around I saw a file called "Emacs," and of course recognized that as the super-powerful text editor created by Richard Stallman. I typed "emacs" at the prompt and it opened up with a nice tutorial on how to use it. So then I realized that if I learned to use emacs I could at least use this old machine for text editing, and to learn the emacs text editor.

I say "this machine," because I'm actually using it now to write this blog entry. It feels nice to be doing something useful with this machine when I had given it up for dead ages ago. It's not without pitfalls, though. A few minutes ago some crazy disk error happened while I was typing, and it suddenly turned my floppy disk into a read-only file system. I had to remove the disk and put it in my other laptop, change the permissions of the file (somehow I couldn't make that work at the command line on this machine), then put the floppy back in the Gateway and open the file back up. Now I can edit the file again.

The floppy drive is pretty much the only reason I can use this machine for actual work. Once I figured out how to mount the floppy from the command line, I had a way to get a file off of the Gateway and onto another computer where I could print or email it or post it online or whatever.

Using Plain Text

Something I've come around to lately is the realization that plain text is good. I've used fancy word processors for ages, but lately I've started using text editors almost exlusively for what used to be word-processing tasks. What I like about plain text is the super-fast opening of the text editor, the tiny file sizes, the almost universal compatibility. And a friend of mine who has come around to this way of thinking independently of me showed me something I hadn't seen before, but which is apparently pretty common, a formatting method called Markdown. It's a really easy way to use plain text but create formatted output. I've already changed a couple of my course syllabi to markdown format and they look nice. They're also really easy to post on Moodle (that's our web-based course management system--open source!) b/c Moodle has markdown support built in. I just copy-and-paste the text into the little text editing window, choose "markdown" format, then click save, and it appears correctly when viewed on the Moodle site.

Ok that's probably about enough for now. I'm pressing my luck by continuing to use this dinosaur for productive purposes. I don't trust it yet...

SWEET Nautilus Extensions!!

2008-03-04T20:31:00.000-08:00

When I was checking the new Ubuntu Brainstorm site yesterday to see if anyone else had proposed the same features I want in future releases of Ubuntu, I read about a couple of extensions you can install to add really nice features to Nautilus, the default GNOME file manager. Both of these are available in the Synaptic Package Manager.

The best one is the "nautilus-gksu" extension, which adds a critical option to the menu when you right-click something in Nautilus: "open as administrator." One of the sort of annoying things about Ubuntu (and maybe other versions of Linux, too, I don't know) is that you often run up against a wall when trying to save changes to a file or delete a file. You'll try to delete a file and get a message saying you don't have permission. This happened to me just a few minutes ago when I tried to delete a dictionary that I had just installed and decided I didn't want after all. I went to the command line to try to delete it using the sudo command, which grants you temporary administrator privileges, but I must have gotten the file name wrong b/c it kept telling me the file didn't exist. Even when I dragged the file into the terminal (to be sure I didn't have a typo) I got the same "file doesn't exist" message. Well, I realized that if I went back to Nautilus and opened the "Dic" directory, where the unwanted dictionary was, as an administrator, then I could probably delete the file in Nautilus. I right-clicked the "Dic" directory, chose to open as administrator, and it prompted me for my password. Once I was in the directory, I deleted the dictionary without any objections from the computer! Yea!! Oh man, what a relief to have this capability.

The other nice extension is called "nautilus-open-terminal," which gives you the option to open a directory in the terminal. This is probably not as critical as the gksu extension, but it does save a couple of clicks and mouse movements when trying to display something in the terminal.

If you use the Nautilus file manager, I HIGHLY recommend installing these extensions right away...

Search Fields in Linux File Managers

2008-02-29T19:08:00.000-08:00

I discovered something really nice about my file managers today--you can search a file manager window by simply typing. This isn't immediately obvious. There's no search field, like the Mac OSX Tiger Finder windows have. I just discovered it by accident. I've been busy transferring music files over from my iMac to this new Linux machine in my office (see previous post), and dealing with hundreds of directories was starting to get frustrating, all the clicking and scrolling to navigate my way to the folder I wanted. So one time when I went looking for a directory I decided to try typing the first couple of letters to see if it would take me there quicker. Not only did it immediately take me where I wanted to go, but a little search field materialized out of nowhere as soon as I started typing! I think I might like this even better than the OSX Finder spotlight search fields. It's really very elegant. It only appears when you start typing, and like lightning fast it takes you to the right directory or file. Now I think this only works if the subdirectory or file you're looking for is in the current working directory. It won't automatically go looking through your whole computer like the Mac spotlight search. This is one reason it's so much faster. If you want to search your whole computer in gnome's Nautilus file manager, you can do it, but you have to press Ctrl+F to get the search field.

One thing I find really frustrating about the Linux file managers is that they won't allow me to change the permissions on anything. On the Mac, if you try to change permissions and you're not logged in as the owner of the files, it'll prompt you for an administrator username and password. If you can supply the right info, then it lets you change the permissions. Man, if I could find a Linux file manager that would prompt me for admin login info I'd be so stoked. Right now, I just get stiff-armed with no recourse at all. It just tells me I don't have privileges to change the permissions. It really should prompt for a password. Today I tried changing permissions at the command line, but with only marginal success. I couldn't change the group designation on a certain directory when I tried. It kept saying unable to perform operation. I'd rather be able to do it in Nautilus or Thunar. Maybe there's another file manager out there that does this, but I haven't found it yet. I think I'll go looking right now...

Using Ubuntu desktop to share music

2008-02-28T19:37:00.000-08:00

In advance of the re-accreditation visit for our department, there was a lot of cleaning going on, including rounding up old equipment and piling it up to be taken off of inventory and sent away for state auction. One of the things I saw on the pile was an old Gateway box, and when I asked about it, I was told that they mainly wanted to get rid of it b/c it had student information on it. I said I could use it and would be glad to wipe the drive clean for them. I had been wanting an old PC to use as a sort of streaming music server for our students to have instant access to the listening lists for their music classes, and this seemed like the perfect machine for it. I was already sharing music with my students from my iMac via iTunes, but iTunes has a rather onerous restriction of only 5 users per day logging into a given computer to listen to the shared playlists. I have lots of students and this is too restrictive to be useful. I knew that the GNU/Linux media player Rhythmbox was able to share easily with machines running iTunes and that it had no restrictions at all on the number of users who could listen, so I took this old Gateway tower to my office, hooked up an old external monitor (wish I had a flat-panel...), and installed Ubuntu Linux on it, wiping XP and all the student data off of the drive. I loaded some music onto the drive, but realized that I would probably need some more space b/c the machine had only a 20 GB hard drive. About a year ago, we had a sudden power failure in the music building, and my 160 GB external USB hard drive got fried--couldn't mount the drive anymore after the power failure. It had been sitting in my office being a $100 paperweight for the last year, and I decided there was nothing to lose by cracking open the case and removing the drive to see if it would work inside this desktop machine. It wasn't pretty, but I managed to get it open. After I had nearly gotten it open by prying and bending, I noticed that there was a hidden screw holding it together. They covered the screw head with a thin layer of rubber, so you couldn't see it. Once I unscrewed this, it came apart pretty easily (duh!). So I got the drive out and installed it in the Gateway machine, then started the computer. Ta-da!! The hard drive was fine! It was just the circuit boards inside the case that had been damaged. So after deleting a good bit of the data that I had stored on there before it had been fried, I had an extra hard drive in the Gateway with about 114 GB free to load music for sharing with my students.

Rhythmbox shares perfectly with iTunes. I set up several playlists, one for each of the classes I teach. When you open iTunes, you see the Gateway machine's shared library and click on it to reveal the individual lists. I was able to access the shared listening lists from any computer in the music building, and from laptops connected to our wireless network. I could even access the lists from my wife's building and the art building across campus. This is an excellent solution for us as a department, to be able to allow our students to listen to assigned examples via music sharing. It keeps them from having to purchase so much music, and it also keeps them from making illegal copies of it like they would do if we simply put CDs on reserve for them. Besides that, I'm really happy to be able to take a computer from the scrap heap and put it to good use. The students are stoked at having easy access to everything they need.

There are still two things I'd like to be able to do, though. One is to allow students to log in and listen to the music from home. I don't know if this is possible or not. I think they have to be connected to the campus network for it to work. The other has to do with Rhythmbox. It's a pretty nice media player, but it doesn't have one of the features that's sort of important for classical music, which is recognition of the "composer" tag on audio files. All of my music files have the composer tag, but Rhythmbox doesn't recognize it. It only has title, artist, album, year, genre, and a couple of others. I checked on the forums to see if anyone else had reported on this, and found that users have wished for this feature since 2005. It's on the development team's "wishlist," but apparently has a pretty low priority. (incidentally, I don't think the Amarok player--the other most popular GNU/Linux media player--recognizes the composer tag either.) Other than that, I couldn't be happier with this solution to our listening needs. I now have a machine that can hold a ton of music, and it allows any number of users to access the music as many times as they want. Thank you GNU/Linux!

Baby steps with the display issues

2008-02-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

Today I made another tiny step toward getting my laptop to do everything I want it to. I've been having problems getting it to display on a projector. Can't remember if I've mentioned that in any previous posts, but whenever I've tried to show it on a projector, I've just gotten a garbled mess on the projector. I thought for a while it was just a graphics driver problem, but I was loathe to experiment with the driver after the problems I had before (see previous post on lessons learned). There's a guy in Italy (I think) who made a program called Envy that finds, installs, and configures the correct proprietary driver for Nvidia graphics cards, though, so I decided to give it a try. This was probably a week ago. I installed Envy and ran it to do everything automatically. When it finished and I rebooted, everything still looked the same, which I counted as a major victory. I was braced for a total graphics meltdown, but everything looked like it was supposed to, plus it also gave me a couple of resolution options that I didn't have before, so not only did nothing get destroyed, it actually made some progress for me. When I hooked it up to a projector, though, it still displayed the garbled mess. Sigh.

Someone mentioned that it might be a refresh-rate problem, but I couldn't change the refresh rates using the system tools or Envy. When I clicked on the menu showing the refresh rate, it gave me only one option, 50Hz--there was nothing to change it to. I found a post on the Ubuntu forums showing how to edit the xorg.conf file manually to change the refresh rate, and it looked simple enough that I could probably handle it. The xorg.conf file is a very sensitive file, as you'll remember from my "lessons learned" post, so it was with a pounding heart that I did the "sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf" command to open it as root user. In the place where it said my display resolution was "1024x768" I changed it to read "1024x768_60" (specifying a refresh rate of 60Hz). It would probably have been comical to watch as I typed these three characters very slowly and carefully, my mouth going dry and my hands trembling. As I decided whether or not to press Ctrl+S to save the changes, I had the odd sensation that I was the guy sitting there with a ticking bomb trying to decide whether to cut the wire or not, knowing that cutting the wrong one would be disastrous. This is how much respect I have for the xorg.conf file. After deliberating for a minute or so, I decided that the worst that was likely to happen was that I would have to use my backup copy of the file to restore it to its previous state, and I saved the changes and wiped the sweat from my forehead. When I logged out and back in (this is how you test changes to the X11 configuration), everything still had the correct resolution, but I could tell a slight difference in the crispness of the display. It was a visible improvement. Everything looked nicer, a bit easier on the eyes. Already feeling like a hero for editing the xorg.conf file without destroying it, I shut it down and took the machine down to my classroom and hooked it up to the projector's VGA cable and turned the projector on. I started the laptop back up. You wouldn't believe my feeling of exhilaration as I saw my login screen, clear as could be, displayed on the big projector screen in the front of the room!! Yes!! Changing the refresh rate from 50Hz to 60Hz was the difference between a garbled mess and a nice clear image. Like I said, this is a baby step. It's pretty big for me, because it means I can use my laptop in the classroom, but it's not perfect yet. I still can't use the VGA output and the laptop LCD at the same time. I've changed the BIOS settings to LCD only, which means that it'll either show the LCD, or it'll show an external monitor (or projector) if that monitor is attached and turned on during bootup. It won't show both. When I changed the BIOS settings back to "simul" mode, where you can toggle between one display and the other or both at once, I got my old nemesis, the split screen with one half completely black and the other showing my login screen all squished into the other half. Sigh. There must be a way to fix this but at the moment I'll just revel in my successful xorg.conf adjustment. The dual display is a battle for another day.

GNU Lilypond: open-source music engraving

2008-02-18T19:52:00.000-08:00

I've been poking around with an open-source music engraving application called Lilypond for the last few days. It looks like a very powerful program, but it's not without difficulties. I mean, Finale was kind of a difficult program to learn, too, but this is a whole different sort of hard. Lilypond is an app that doesn't have a built-in graphical interface. You have to write code in plain text, and the code is converted to a musical score in the form of .pdf output. There's at least one GUI available for Lilypond, but I didn't find it very helpful.

For purposes of learning how to use it, I just took a fairly simple piano piece I had already done in Finale and re-engraved it in Lilypond. I've never written any kind of code before and don't really understand the syntax of it, but I started with a template for a piano score and began entering notes using what is really a fairly intuitive sort of code. You just use the pitch class followed by a number that indicates the duration of the pitch. You also have to tell Lilypond which register it should occupy by using a ' or , with the pitch name. For example, this code: c''4 would be a quarter-note C (the one in the 2nd space from the top of the treble clef). The 4 indicates quarter note. There's also an easy way to assign articulations and slurs. To make the same note staccato, the code is changed to c"4-. (where the period indicates staccato). So, note entry isn't very hard, and once you get the hang of it, it goes pretty quickly. I also like the very easy insertion of slurs by using open parenthesis where you want it to start, then closed parenthesis where it should end. After entering all of the notes and slurs and articulation markings and dynamics, I had a score that looked pretty nice (although my code was a mess! A programmer would have been horrified by my sloppy code...)

The main problem with Lilypond, for me, was trying to insert text expressions and trying to make fine adjustments on the placement of expressions. I just don't understand how to insert the code for these actions. No matter what I did, I kept getting errors. I tried to tell it to use courtesy accidentals, got errors. Tried to create a text insertion for my tempo marking--errors. It starts to get frustrating. I think I've come to the conclusion that Finale is simply a program I'm willing to purchase, as expensive as it is. I don't have the time or patience to keep messing up in Lilypond until I figure out how to do it right. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future, but for now I probably won't use Lilypond except for simple engraving tasks that don't require text expressions. I do like knowing that there's a powerful, GNU/Linux-native app for engraving music, though.

Got an Eee PC for the wife!

2008-02-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

For Valentine's Day I got my wife one of the new Asus Eee PCs. She's STOKED!! This is a really cool machine. It's tiny, y'all. This is a really tiny computer, and that's one of the thing she likes best about it. She can slip it into her purse and it fits just fine without weighing it down. I think this is the first time she's ever had her own "new" computer, too, so I got major points for surprising her with this.

It runs a version of Xandros Linux and so far it seems good but it's not without weirdness. I'm not crazy about the simple default interface, but it's o.k. It would only take a couple of steps to get a standard KDE desktop, but for my wife this default interface will probably be fine. It has Thunderbird for email (what I'm already using, so it was easy to set up for her), Firefox, OpenOffice, Pidgin, and something that really surprised me, the Adobe Acrobat Reader (!! Xandros includes the genuine Acrobat Reader!! Incredible! I still can't get this installed on my Dell Ubuntu box properly...).

One kind of funny issue came up a couple of times so far, having to do with the tiny screen size: there are some dialog boxes that don't fit on the screen! They don't fit, and there's no scroll bar to scroll down and see what's at the bottom! This is kind of a problem. When I printed a doc from Acrobat Reader, I couldn't see the "OK" button down at the bottom. you know, the one that allows you to print! There was no way to click "OK"! I thought I remembered that the hot key was "o", so I pressed alt+o and that did it, the doc printed. In Thunderbird I was trying to configure it so that it would leave her work emails on the server but in the account settings I couldn't see the checkbox for "leave messages on server." It was off the screen. I got around this by looking on my laptop to see what the hot key was for that (it's "g") and doing alt+g on her computer. I wasn't sure whether it worked or not until I looked at the preferences file in the terminal. (I couldn't find any system files in the file manager, and I think it's because they don't want most people to know where they are.) I found the preferences file and viewed it with the "cat" command, then scrolled down through it until I found where it said "leave messages on server=true" (yeah!!). I guess I could have edited the preferences file itself, but I'm hesitant to mess around with these kinds of files. I'd rather use the GUI and let the system write the changes to config files.

Oh. One other thing that took a little time for me was getting the wireless working properly. This was no fault of the Eee PC, though. My network's security is based on MAC addresses, not on a password. I supply a list of accepted MAC addresses to the router. I couldn't get her Eee PC to connect at first b/c I had put the wrong MAC address in there. I read somebody's post on a forum that you could find the MAC address for the Eee PC in a certain place in the System settings, but that address turned out to be for the ethernet port, not for the wireless hardware. I found the wireless MAC address sometime later, almost by accident, and noticed that it wasn't the same as what I had listed on my router admin utility. I plugged in the new MAC address, and it instantly gave the Eee PC access to the network. So, if you're using MAC addresses for network access, be sure to find the one for the wireless card, not for the ethernet port.

Anyway this little computer is pretty cool and I might even get one for myself sometime later, although I'm also intrigued by the news that Asus is coming out with a knockoff of the iMac, a flatscreen all-in-one desktop computer that will go for about $500. That's supposed to come out in the fall, I think. Might be worth a look. BTW, for a detailed and entertaining review of the Eee PC, listen to the most recent episode of "The Linux Action Show." Those guys are hilarious and their review was a lot of fun.

The cool thing about Linux Live CDs...

2008-02-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

Is that you can try out all these different Linux distros without having to install them. Now that I have a Linux-compatible wireless card, I can even have internet access while running the Live CDs. Right now, for example, I'm trying out a distro called "Damn Small Linux," which is really cool. The download is only 48 MB, and it runs very easily from the CD. They advertise it as a distro that can be run from a flash drive but I don't really know how to make my computer boot from a flash drive so I'm using the CD, which works great. I've also run Fedora 6 and Mandriva from the Live CDs. Mandriva was really beautiful. Live CDs are cool!

More Lessons Learned--Hardware

2008-01-31T13:32:00.000-08:00

Wow. Ok it's been a while again since my last post, mainly because my laptop has been all jacked up and I've been trying to get it going right again. I've reinstalled the OS like four times, trying Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and back to Xubuntu, where it currently remains. I would have stayed with one of them but I couldn't get the wireless working, not even on regular old Ubuntu where I've normally been able to make it work.

I thought everything was grand about four or five days ago when I had it set up where I could log in either in Ubuntu (GNOME desktop environment) or Kubuntu (KDE desktop environment). I was very stoked to be able to switch between the two DEs because they're different and both have cool features. KDE is beautiful, although I don't think it was possible to add panels besides the one given at the bottom of the screen by default. I liked the bouncing icons when programs or files were opening up. Xubuntu was pretty snappy but had some issues that I believe I've covered in a previous posting. I'm still using it right now but will probably switch back to regular Ubuntu in a few days. I want to give Xubuntu a fair try, and I feel like I can now that I HAVE WIRELESS AGAIN!!

Here's the lesson I learned: There's no substitute for COMPATIBLE HARDWARE. The wireless card my dad gave me with the laptop was just not compatible. It was like swimming upstream trying to make it work with a windows driver and the ndiswrapper and all that stuff. Well, today a good friend gave me a different wireless card, saying it was Linux compatible, so I plugged it in and when I started up the machine, it INSTANTLY WORKED!!! Oh man did my heart leap when I saw it connect upon startup without installing any drivers or configuring anything at all. The only thing I had to do was plug it in. This solves the biggest headache of all so far with Linux, and I could not be more grateful. In case you're wondering, the wireless card is a Lucent Technologies PC24E-H-FC Orinoco WiFi PCMCIA card. I think it's kind of old (Mark said it was in the junk closet in his department) but it WORKS GREAT, right upon plugin. Man, what a relief. There's nothing like hardware that's compatible...

Pioneer Inno compatible with Linux

2008-01-27T18:03:00.000-08:00

Just a quickie post tonight. Probably the electronic device that I use more than any other is my iPod. It's sort of an old one, but I use it every day for podcasts and music, I carry all of my kids' favorite songs on it, back up computer data on it, etc. So far the only thing I haven't tried on the Linux laptop that I routinely do on my Macs is hook it up to a portable audio device. I can't try my iPod on it without reformatting it first on a Windows machine, because when I set it up I used Mac format. I might still try that sometime but not right now. Tonight, though, I tried hooking up my Pioneer Inno XM Satellite Radio receiver to the laptop to transfer some music to it, and it WORKED!! Worked just fine. Well, it doesn't work in the same way that iTunes and iPod work together in a seamless fashion, but you can drag audio files onto the Inno after you plug it into the USB port. You just put files in there using the nautilus file manager, the way you would a USB flash drive or something, and then "unmount" the drive before pulling the plug out.

In case you've never heard of the Inno, it's a portable XM radio receiver with a hard drive in it. It's a great device. I got it about six months ago as a refurbished unit, for only like 70 bucks (new ones retail for nearly 200), and it's been terrific. The hard drive is for recording XM radio content to listen back to it later. The Inno also came with a CD with Napster software on it, but that's only for Windows machines so I've never used the Inno with a computer until just now. I probably won't do it very much, but I really like knowing that I "can" do it.

Linux Lessons Learned / Xubuntu / Re-Installing Ubuntu

2008-01-26T19:10:00.000-08:00

I learned a few lessons about Linux recently. I haven't posted in a while, partly b/c my Linux machine was out of commission for a few days. What I learned was that you shouldn't mess around with the graphics driver settings in Linux unless you really know what you're doing. Well. What I really learned was that if you DO decide to mess around with them, be sure to BACK UP YOUR XORG.CONF FILE BEFORE DOING ANYTHING!!!

I was having a problem (couldn't get my VGA output to show the laptop screen on a projector) so I thought it must be that I had the wrong graphics card driver installed. No problem, right? Just go in and change the driver. Well, pretty soon I had everything so jacked up that the screen was either displaying only halfway or it had to go into safe graphics mode and displayed at like 640x400 resolution. Horrible. Couldn't find the right driver, couldn't get it to accept what I thought was the right driver, couldn't convince the computer that it had wrongly identified my graphics card, etc. Actually, I'm the one who told it the wrong graphics card, but it was an accident and I tried to take it back and I couldn't! Sigh. I did some searching on the Ubuntu forums and found that I was hardly alone. Tons of people had hopelessly demolished their graphics configurations and were desperately begging for help. I figured out that I needed to restore the xorg.conf file to its original state, so I ran the reconfigure command in the terminal and went through the process, but I must have made a wrong choice along the way b/c it didn't solve the problems. I went into the X11 folder and found the xorg.conf files and discovered that there were like 8 of them, including one with a date from a week earlier. Aha! I decided to try and rename that one from xorg.conf.2 to xorg.conf, so that it would become the default configuration file when the system booted up, and then all my troubles would be over! I did it, then rebooted, and at first it looked like my plan had worked. The resolution was back to 1024x768, and I started doing a little victory dance, but then it froze up and never rendered the desktop. I shut it down and started it again--same thing. At this point I decided to wipe the whole thing clean and start from scratch.

Well, I thought (as my mother-in-law has been known to say when something goes horribly wrong) "what an opportunity!" I'd been wanting to try a couple of other Linux distros for a while and this was a golden opportunity to do so. I got the live CDs for Xubuntu and Kubuntu from the web, as well as openSUSE with KDE 4, and decided to start with Xubuntu. Xubuntu is a branch of the Ubuntu project with a different desktop environment, one that's lighter and leaner so that it's ideal for older hardware that doesn't have as much firepower. It seemed perfect for this slightly old laptop of mine, so I installed it and then started fiddling to get it set up, but soon ran into problems.

I should probably preface my list of problems with Xubuntu by saying that some of them would have been pretty easy to solve if the wireless had been working or if I'd taken the laptop to an ethernet connection. That said, here were the things that bugged me.

First off, I couldn't get the wireless to work. I was following an ndiswrapper installation guide that someone had posted on the forums, and I think I did everything correctly but I never could get it to recognize the wireless card and it kept saying "invalid driver!" (probably b/c it still didn't see which wireless card I had). This was the biggest problem. When I reinstalled regular Ubuntu I abandoned that guy's instructions b/c I had discovered that there was a way to get ndiswrapper with the synaptic package manager and I thought it would be more reliable to do it this way, b/c the machine would install it wherever it thought appropriate and not leave it up to me, who could put something in the wrong directory. When I was following the ndiswrapper install guide from the forums, I downloaded a package from some site manually, then followed a series of instructions at the command line to get it installed. I probably should have used synaptic instead but I didn't realize I could at the time. I discovered that by accident later.

Back to Xubuntu. A sort of minor but still annoying thing--I had trouble adding application launchers to the panel. It doesn't work the same way as Ubuntu, where you right-click something in the menu and choose to add it to the panel. In Xubuntu, when you right-click on something in the menu, it just launches the application instead of giving you a menu of different things to do with it. I tried right-clicking on the panel itself and choosing "add to panel," but there was no way I could see to get applications onto the panel, just other stuff I didn't want. There's probably a not-too-hard way to put app launchers on the panel, but I didn't want to figure it out at the time.

Next: Xubuntu only comes with Abiword and Gnumeric as the office-type applications, and I needed something that would deal with Powerpoint-type files, so I wanted to install OpenOffice. OpenOffice is not on the Xubuntu install disc, so I tried to use the regular Ubuntu install disc as my repository and I couldn't make it work. Kept getting a message saying my computer couldn't handle that application. I bet, though, that if I'd had an ethernet connection I could have chosen it in "Add/Remove" or Synaptic and gotten it onto the machine. I tried Gnumeric out with one of my xls gradebooks, though, and liked it a lot. It opens way faster than either MS Excel or the OpenOffice spreadsheet. I might keep using Gnumeric as my default spreadsheet application. This was something positive that came out of it. I wouldn't have minded using Abiword except that it didn't open my .odt files and I didn't want to have to convert everything to .rtf or some other format.

There was no music player installed, but if I'd had an internet connection I could have gotten one easily enough. It annoyed me that there wasn't one installed by default, though.

Here's the problem that pushed me over the edge, though. When I plugged the VGA cable into the back to hook up to a projector, I got a garbled mess, which was what started my downward spiral in the first place. Might have been able to fix that by adjusting the refresh rate or some other adjustment, but then when I tried flipping the display back to my laptop screen with fn+F5, the laptop's screen was all jacked up, too! Oy! Couldn't see anything properly on the laptop anymore after plugging in the VGA cable. I remembered that before I ever started screwing around with graphics drivers, Ubuntu worked with the projector, so I decided right then to revert to regular Ubuntu, without even bothering with Kubuntu or openSUSE. You know, I only recently got this laptop, so I should probably be used to living without one, but I've REALLY LOVED having a laptop and my desire to have one WORKING was greater than my desire to explore other distros. So, back to Ubuntu I went. I haven't had a chance to try the projector since reinstalling Ubuntu. I'll try it on Monday when I teach my first class.

Things I liked about Xubuntu: LOVED the shell! It had a black background with green text. I thought that looked really cool. Wish I could remember what that shell was called so I could install it on regular Ubuntu. I also liked the quick operation of the environment. Not fancy, but nice and clean-looking with a few decent themes to choose from. I found at least one theme I could have lived with "as is," without customizing at all. I also liked that it had Thunderbird as pre-installed email client instead of Evolution. And as I mentioned before, Gnumeric was a great revelation. I liked it enough that I'll probably start using that instead of the OpenOffice spreadsheet.

All in all, Xubuntu probably would have been an acceptable distro if it hadn't been for the trouble in getting the wireless working. I might try it again one day. I do wish they'd offer OpenOffice from the CD, too, even if it's not installed by default.

Now, regarding the re-installation of Ubuntu, I'm pleased to say that it went REALLY well. I was a bit worried about it, because my dad was the one who did the installation and most of the work getting the wireless going the first time. I had saved the various packages that we downloaded, and also had printed out the Ubuntu forum posting that seemed most critical to our success the first time, the one that showed how to add ndiswrapper to the list of modules that would be loaded during the boot process. Having discovered that I could install ndiswrapper from the synaptic package manager, I abandoned the more complicated method outlined in that guy's installation guide, and sort of followed my nose with it. After I got it running successfully, I wrote up a list of instructions for myself so it'd be easier the next time. I'll share!

WIRELESS SETUP INSTRUCTIONS

1. Install ndiswrapper from Ubuntu installation disc's repository

2. Install ndisgtk_0.7.2-1ubuntu1_i386.deb from package (this is the little app used to manage Windows wireless drivers). I can't remember if we got this from the repository or had to download it somewhere.

3. Go to "System>Administration>Windows Wireless Drivers" and install the driver named *.inf (mine was net5416.inf for a D-Link wireless card--I got the driver from the CD that came with the card)

4. Open the file /etc/modules in gedit and add the line "ndiswrapper" below the last item, then save file.

5. To open the file, you probably have to open a terminal and run this command:

sudo gedit '/etc/modules'

It should look like this:

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

fuse
lp
sbp2
ndiswrapper

6. Be sure you've saved the file after adding "ndiswrapper" and then reboot computer. It "should" work now.

In all I'm pretty happy with the experience of doing a fresh installation of the operating system and configuring it myself. I have much more confidence now that I can do it again if necessary. One of the things I've really come to appreciate about Linux, and this only struck me after having lived with Linux for the last 6 weeks or so, is the fact that you NEVER HAVE TO ENTER A LICENSE CODE when installing the OS or any software! This was one of the things that always irked me about installing Microsoft software or certain Apple products or Finale (definitely Finale). Those 67-digit license keys that you had to enter before you could use the applications. Man, what a pain. There hasn't been a single license code to enter and it's SOOO nice. I can install and reinstall whenever, however many times I want and never have to enter one of those stupid codes. Love it.

Sunbird Calendar Application

2008-01-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

I installed Mozilla's Sunbird calendar application and it's pretty nice. Seems to have the calendar features I want and it syncs well with iCal so I can share the calendar with my Macs at home and work. I'm happy about this!

Follow-Up to Previous Post

2008-01-13T09:51:00.000-08:00

Ok, I have to make an addendum and a partial retraction to my previous rant on lack of audio with a new user account. You see, when I added the new user account for my son, I did it from the command line, which is what Linux long-timers always rave about, isn't it? Everybody loves the power of the command line! Ok, so I added a user from the command line, in part because it was cool and in part b/c I didn't know how to do it with a GUI (graphical user interface). Well today I found the GUI for managing/adding user accounts [System>Administration>Users and Groups], and of course there's a dialog tab of "preferences," on which you can choose to enable access to all of the stuff a normal person would want. By default, the only box that is unchecked is "administer the system," which is normal. So if I had gone the newbie route and used a GUI to begin with, I would never have had this problem. Sigh...

Getting Sound for Additional User Accounts in Ubuntu 7.10

2008-01-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

A REALLY annoying problem came up today. A few nights ago I created an extra user account on my laptop for my son, and today he logged into it for the first time. He was totally stoked to have his own login but quickly got bummed out because there was NO SOUND! On his side, it looked as if the machine couldn't even find the sound card. I searched the forums and found that this was a common problem but I couldn't find a solution that worked on the most recent Ubuntu release until just now. In older releases there used to be some kind of asound.conf file or something, but it doesn't exist in 7.10. Searching all around I realized that it had to do with a permissions setting, that the second user account didn't have permission to access the sound card (what? what?!! Should access to sound not be a DEFAULT SETTING when adding a new user??? Geez!! No wonder people get frustrated with Linux. How can "no sound permission" even be possible? For heaven's sake...).

Finally I used the right keyword search and found a posting on the Ubuntu forum that gave the incredibly simple solution to the problem. Gather round: if you have added a second user account to your system using Ubuntu 7.10 and that user does not have sound, go to the terminal and type the following command, substituting the appropriate username where I've put username in italics:

sudo adduser username audio

Type in your password when prompted, and it'll finish up the process. I did this and my son's user account immediately had sound.

Now, I'm glad it was such an easy solution, but FINDING that solution was a freaking pain! Neither of my Ubuntu books made any mention of the existence of an "audio group" or any need for audio permissions, and it took me more than two hours to find the right forum posting. Not having sound enabled by default is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of, really.

Running Finale on Linux!!

2008-01-07T20:20:00.000-08:00

As a composer one of the most important applications I use is Finale music notation software, which is a very expensive proprietary application and of course does not have a version for Linux. In order to make a complete transition to Linux I'll have to be able to run Finale, and thankfully a grad student at Kansas named Brian Bondari wrote an online article not too long ago on how to get it running on WINE, a Windows emulator application that can make lots of Windows apps work on Linux. I followed the steps in his article and was able to go through the installation process without any apparent mishaps. When I opened a document there were two problems, though. First was that I seemed to be missing a font because the bracket on the piano grand staff looks kind of messed up. The second was that I couldn't get any sound on playback.

I searched for a forum posting on the playback problem and found that a few people have had this trouble but didn't see any solution, so tonight I fiddled with it myself until I got it to work. I think the main trouble was that I hadn't chosen an audio driver in the WINE configuration. You have to go into the WINE configuration dialog box and click on the "audio" tab, then select a sound driver. I chose the OSS driver. Next, I tried the various MIDI output options in Finale (in the MIDI/Audio>MIDI Setup menu) until finding that "Timidity port 0" made playback work perfectly (!).

I tried printing a page and it worked just fine (apart from the funny bracket already mentioned), and I also tried some basic editing in speedy edit mode, which worked exactly as I expected it to. So, apparently Finale will work acceptably in Linux as long as the audio settings are done correctly. I'll have to fiddle some more to figure out why the bracket doesn't display correctly.

On the whole, this install/setup was actually no more troublesome than any other installation I've done of Finale on either Windows or Mac. I don't think I've ever done a Finale installation where everything worked right without some fiddling with MIDI setup and system settings. I count this as a major victory!

Sound Recording Issues Resolved

2008-01-01T19:07:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged on this yet but the other day I tried to make a sound recording with Audacity and had serious trouble. The incoming signal was so weak as to be almost inaudible, even though my source had plenty of gain and I had the mic level slider all the way to the right on Audacity. I checked the Ubuntu forums tonight and found that tons of people have had this problem. The solution for me lay in adjusting the mixer settings of ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). You have to open the mixer from the command line by typing "alsamixer" at the prompt, and while it's all done in a terminal, it does have a pretty intuitive graphical interface to make the various level adjustments. I found a very helpful blog on this topic that immediately produced results here.

The only step of his that I had to undo was the second one, about unmuting all outputs. Mine were already unmuted, so when I pressed "m" I actually muted everything. After following all his recommendations for enabling the mic and capture, I also adjusted the level of the "line" a couple of times until I found a level that seemed to work right. This is a very powerful adjustment. The first time I did it, it was so hot that everything was clipping badly. I brought it back down a bit and got acceptable incoming levels for recording in Audacity. (This guy's blog didn't say how to adjust the levels, but I figured it out without too much trouble. After you use the arrow keys to highlight what you want to adjust--"Line" "Mic" or whatever--you press "return," and then the up/down arrow keys will adjust the levels.) After making these adjustments to the ALSA mixer, my recording levels in Audacity were plenty hot and the mic slider in the Audicity interface still had plenty of room to go higher. Hray!!

Fixing this problem wasn't that important for this laptop, since I don't really plan to use it for much recording, but it was sort of a big issue for future Linux machines I might have. For example if I ever decide to make my main home desktop computer a Linux machine, I "had" to resolve this problem. It's nice to have it fixed. Once again, major props to the Ubuntu users around the world who provide help on blogs and forums. I had never even heard of the ALSA mixer and had no idea how to find it until I found the aforementioned blog.

I CAN PRINT!!

2007-12-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

If you could see me tonight you'd probably notice that I have a bit more of a bounce to my step than usual. This is because I SOLVED MY PRINTING PROBLEM!! Just a couple of posts ago I said it was the most frustrating problem I'd had since starting to use Ubuntu, and now as I type this post, the problem is but a distant memory. What happened is that I built upon last night's file-sharing success and applied what I learned to the printing problem. The critical bit of information that made file-sharing possible also made it possible to access the network printer, which is hooked up to my Apple Airport base station via USB cable. What I learned last night is that the IP address of my eMac is a much different-looking number than I had thought it was. It's 10.0.1.2. That's it. I was always used to seeing much longer numbers for IP addresses. I discovered this when I was enabling the various types of file sharing on the eMac end of things. It told me to type that number as the "host." Well, today I was reading more about the network printing problems with Ubuntu and someone said to check your router's IP address. I had thought it was something very complicated and long like the IP address of our network printer at work (which has 11 digits plus assorted periods), but it occurred to me that the airport might have a number very much like the eMac. I opened up the Airport Administration Utility and...there it was! Before you even click "configure" or anything, it shows you a list of the airports attached to your network AND it shows each airport's IP address! The IP address it showed for my airport was almost idential to that for the eMac. It was 10.0.1.1. AHA!! I ran and started up the laptop, then opened the CUPS printer administration thing in Firefox (http://localhost:631/admin) but I think I could probably have accomplished the same thing by going to System>Administration>Printing. I still had my home printer showing there from my last, failed attempt to get it working, so I chose to "modify" it, and where it said Device URI, I replaced what I had before (some long gobbledygook IP address from who knows where) with the following: Device URI: socket://10.0.1.1

I went through the rest of the setup, which didn't change from the failed attempts, and clicked "modify" to finish it up. Then I opened up a file and, with a mounting sense of excitement and my heart racing, chose "print." WHOA!! I immediately heard the printer start fussing in the other room, making all its usual noises and then PRINTING MY DOCUMENT!!! Ooh!! Aah!!! The crowd goes wild!!! Yeah!!!!

So, I can now print from my Ubuntu laptop to the network printer, wirelessly, and at the moment this is about the last major hurdle I can think of in making the transition to Linux. This is big, because down the road I can anticipate having three or four computers in the house, all needing to be able to print to the network printer. It still bugs me that you can't just "see" the network printer in printer-setup dialog box the way you can on Macs (and probably on Windows machines, too, but I don't use these), but at least now I know how to get around this minor annoyance. It looks like you "should" be able to see available network printers in Ubuntu, because there's a checkbox that says "detect LAN printers," but even after checking the box it doesn't detect squat. Can't WAIT to get my new HP Laserjet printer! Our current printer is a lame Canon inkjet but the HP should come in the next week or so. It would be here sooner if not for all these annoying holidays (Happy New Year!), which seem to exist mainly to delay the arrival of my sweet new printer...

Successful File Sharing between Linux lapper and eMac!

2007-12-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

A major triumph tonight, as I was able to connect to my eMac and share files with it. I couldn't make it work the way most people seem to do it (at least how the people who post on the Ubuntu forums do it), but I did get it to work in two different ways. I even posted my solution to the Ubuntu forums, thinking perhaps someone else could use the tips. I felt pretty cool to be able offer a tip like that, but I suppose I shouldn't get too cocky b/c it might not help the next guy at all. Here's my forum posting:

jonkulp

First Cup of Ubuntu

Join Date: Dec 2007

Beans: 2

Thanks: 0
Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts

Re: Ubuntu, Mac OS X file sharing

I'm pretty new to Linux also, having about a month with it so far. I'm running 7.10 on a laptop using a wireless network connection, trying to connect to my eMac, which is wired with an ethernet cable. I managed to connect and share files (from laptop to eMac, but not the other way around so far) in two different ways.

First, on the eMac I enabled the "Windows Sharing," "Remote Login - SSH," and "FTP access" sharing options. When you highlight each type of sharing by clicking on it, it tells you how to connect to the computer using that service. For example, when I clicked on "Remote Login - SSH," it told me to type "ssh Jon@10.0.1.2" at a command line. I tried this on the laptop and it prompted me for my password (my eMac password), which I typed and got a nice welcome to Darwin message. I was able to view my eMac's files using the few basic shell commands I know like ls and cd and so forth. I tried copying a file from the eMac to the laptop but I must have typed something wrong. I'm pretty new at this and I really need a GUI to do any file transfers from one machine to another.

I couldn't figure out how to make a network connection with Nautilus at all. The eMac didn't show up and Nautilus didn't find it when I tried typing in the 10.0.1.2 location either. I thought I'd try the FTP method, even though I haven't seen any forum postings on it to see whether it works, and it worked great for me! I opened up FileZilla, which I have used a few times for updating my website, and typed "10.0.1.2" in the "host" field, then "Jon" as username, then put my eMac password in the password field and hit return. It connected immediately and showed my eMac's files in a frame on the right side of the window. From there it was easy to drag-and-drop whatever files I wanted onto the laptop and vice-versa. Hope that helps somebody else too.

Tarball gets me video capability!

2007-12-27T20:33:00.002-08:00

One thing I forgot to post on earlier was a minor triumph having to do with streaming video. In the first week or so that I had this laptop, I wasn't able to view any video on the internet, and some websites that used Flash animation didn't show up properly. I went through the process of installing Flash plugins with either the Synaptic manager or Add/Remove programs (can't remember which now), but it didn't solve the problem and I just thought that my video card was insufficient for streaming video or something. Then I went to a website that had embedded Flash and it said I needed the Flash plugin. Hmm. Weird that I would get that message even though I'd installed it already. So I clicked on the link it gave me and it took me to a download page for Flash plugins. One of the options was the Linux "tarball," and since it had detailed instructions for installing from the command line, I went for it. Got the tarball (btw, tarball is one of my favorite terms in Linux!), and once in a terminal I followed all the instructions for unpacking the tarball and installing it. Everything seemed to go fine, so as a trial I went to PBSKids.org (one of the sites that didn't work right--a big problem b/c it's the favorite of my kids), and where once it hung and didn't show me anything, I now saw beautiful Flash animation! Whoa!! Flush with this success I went to espn.com's main page, and my spine tingled as the little video update automatically loaded and began to play! Woohoo!! It had previously shown up as a blank rectangle. I went to YouTube and enjoyed a few streaming videos, then patted myself on the back for getting a tarball installation to work. (I had a dismal failure when trying to install the Acrobat Reader this way.)

Can't print on home network!

2007-12-27T20:20:00.000-08:00

Man, this is probably the most frustrating problem since I've started using this Linux lapper. I can't get it to print to my home printer via wireless. I have a printer hooked up to my Apple Airport base station via USB cable, which is supposed to make it easily available to anyone on the network, but this laptop just can't see it. I was able to print successfully to the network printer at work, I "think," because it has a fixed IP address--just type that address into the proper slot in the printer setup process and you're good to go. I don't have a fixed IP address for my airport. Even when I put in the current session's IP address, though, I couldn't get it to print. Weird. I'd really like for this to work since I'm about to get a new printer that will be a major upgrade: HP 2200d laser printer with duplex printing! Right now we have a little Canon inkjet that's terrible. Runs through ink really fast and the color ink costs a FORTUNE. Can't wait to get the new printer. I found it on eBay for $40 plus S&H. I guess it's sort of a leap of faith to buy something like this on eBay, but from what I've seen HP laser printers are workhorses and it's unlikely that this will have problems after only 44,000 pages, which is the current page count. That's only like one month's worth of its rated printing capacity.
Anyway there were a bunch of people who had this problem on the Ubuntu forums but only a few were able to solve it. I tried the solutions that worked for them without success. This printing problem--something that seems pretty basic in other operating systems--is a major flaw in the Linux OS, it seems to me. I suppose it could be me, but when I look for a printer on my Macs, it just shows up on my screen and I select it. It "just works." Wish I could say the same for my Linux laptop...

Digital Camera works great with Ubuntu

2007-12-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

We do lots of digital photos in our house, so I wanted to see how Ubuntu would handle a digital camera. I took a picture, then hooked the camera up to the laptop via the USB port. I LOVED the response. A little window popped up saying that a camera with pictures on it had just been plugged into my computer, and asked if I wanted to transfer the pictures to the computer? I said yes, and it grabbed the photo and displayed it in gThumb image viewer, if I remember right. It saved the photo in my "pictures" folder. I opened up the F-spot photo manager and tried a few basic maneuvers like rotating, cropping, adjusting colors, etc. Everything worked perfectly. All this stuff was already installed on the machine so this was all a very easy process. Reminds me of how easy Apple has made digital photos with iPhoto. It was always a real pain dealing with photos when we had a Windows 2000 machine. We had to use the software that came with camera, and not only was the software not very good, but it kept crashing all the time and wasting a lot of work. Photos are very easy right out of the box with Ubuntu.

KompoZer Web Authoring and FileZilla ftp

2007-12-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

Ok I don't know if I'd do all of my website maintenance on the laptop, but I wanted to try and see if I could do it anyway. A couple of months ago I found the open-source web-authoring application Nvu and installed it on my Macs--it's been fantastic. Great program. I was using Netscape Composer before, but Nvu is about a thousand times better. It opens faster, doesn't hog memory, and it has a very logical interface. I had also started using the open-source ftp program Cyberduck to upload my website files, so I wanted to get this stuff going on the new laptop as well. I figured it would be a snap since they were both open-source programs, but I couldn't find Nvu or Cyberduck with the Add/Remove programs or with the Synaptic Package Manager. I don't know if they have Linux versions or not, but if they do, they're not part of the Ubuntu repositories. Anyway I found another web-authoring app called KompoZer, which shares a website with Nvu and looks almost exactly the same, so I installed that. I grabbed one of my web pages and updated a few things, then started looking for an ftp program. The most promising one I found on either Synaptic or Add/Remove was FileZilla, an ftp program from Mozilla. It looks different from Cyberduck, a bit more complicated, but it was intuitive enough that I was able to connect to the server and upload the updated web page within one or two minutes. These two apps will be more than sufficient to do website updates from the laptop. Yet another hurdle cleared with ease!! Yeah!

Hooked up to Network Printer!

2007-12-22T11:10:00.000-08:00

I got the laptop set up to print to the network printer at school. This isn't as easy on Ubuntu Linux as it is on a Mac. There's supposed to be a way to do it using the little printer setup thing in the system administration menu, but I couldn't make it go out and find the network printer. My Ubuntu books were disappointingly vague about using network printers, so I checked the Ubuntu forums and found one where a guy showed how to open up CUPS in a web browser and use it to configure network printing. Here's the address to type into the browser's address line: http://localhost:631/admin

The most crucial bit of info for setup, as far as I could tell, was the IP address of our printer (an HP 5200), so I used the buttons on the printer to print out a sheet that had all of its setup info, including the IP address. I went through a series of setup screens on CUPS, putting in the info as prompted, and then when it said everything was set up, I opened a document, chose the "manual feed" tray from the print dialog box, crossed my fingers, and pressed "print." I went across the hall to the room where the printer lives, feeling a strange combination of apprehension and anticipation. Oh, the elation when I saw the blinking red light and the message asking me to "insert paper in manual feed tray"! It sent chills down my spine! (Really!!) I put a sheet of paper in the tray, and seconds later I was holding a printout of my document! Oh the ecstasy! The triumph!! The next thing to try was duplex printing, since the 5200 has a duplex tray and I like to do double-sided prints whenever possible. During setup I had made sure to install the duplex option, so once I found the box to check for double-sided printing in the print dialog box (it looks a good bit different than the print dialog boxes in OSX), I clicked "print" again, and went across the hall to find the printer busily printing my document on both sides of the paper. Yeah!! One more step toward complete functionality in Linux...

Kids Commandeering my Linux Machine!

2007-12-21T21:06:00.000-08:00

I have two kids, ages 6 and 3, and they're trying to commandeer my new laptop. I showed them one of the nice little Linux education applications called TuxPaint, a simple graphics program for drawing/painting, and they both really liked it. My three-year-old especially likes it, probably because it's finally a program where she can do it all by herself. I mean, she figured out how to do a couple of things on it before I did. I showed her how to select a tool and a color and then draw with them, how to choose a stamp and make it appear on the canvas, etc. and then I left her with it for a few minutes while I went to the kitchen. When I came back to check on her, she was doing stuff I didn't know how to do. I said, "how did you make that frog smaller?" She said, "just click on this thing down here," and she pointed to a little sliding scale that I hadn't even noticed. It's an intuitive program, and my 3-year-old is thriving on it. On the one hand, it's thrilling to see her do this and learn and have fun with it. On the other, it's a pain because now every time I get the machine out, she sidles up to me and puts on the charm to get me to surrender the computer for her to use. I end up having to use it only at night or when they're at school. My six-year-old likes a program called Kanogram, which generates word scrambles. You have to figure out what a word is by looking at its mixed-up letters. One of the nice features of the program is that you can put your own libraries of words in it, so I made a big bank of words having to do with Harry Potter for my son and he's had a great time deciphering them.

Ubuntu is available in a version specifically tailored for educational settings (Edubuntu), but I haven't tried it yet. I've only tried a few of the applications. It seems like it would work very well in an educational environment, though. I don't know that it's necessarily any better than Windows or Mac for school settings (they use Macs at my son's school), but it would work well and is probably a lot cheaper than either Mac or Windows. Linux would be better at least in settings where students are learning programming, I guess, because of the open-source code. They could get in there and poke around in the code and see what happens. Anyway now I'll probably be on the lookout for another old PC on which to install Linux for my kids to use. Either that or I'll get a new one for myself and let them have this one...

Scanning with XSane

2007-12-20T06:59:00.000-08:00

I just tried scanning a document for the first time in Linux, using XSane. I had mixed success. On the positive side, the software immediately recognized the scanner and had no trouble grabbing an image from the document on the scanner bed. The image was of very high quality and there were lots of options as to what I could do with it. I tried two things. First I saved it as a .pdf file. Worked fine. Next I printed it to the network printer. That also worked fine. What I couldn't do, and what I really wanted to do, was to scan the document in black & white instead of color. I found what looked like the place where you tell the scanner what output type you want, what resolution to use, and so forth, but it wouldn't allow me to choose B&W. The ONLY choice was "color." I think it sensed that my document had some color on it and it thought I must be a nut if I wanted to scan it as B&W instead. I'm used to having more control over scanning. Of course I might be unaware of some critical checkbox or preference that would allow me to do what I want, but for now I'm not completely happy with my scanning experience. I might try a different scanning software package.

Email, Music, and Money software

2007-12-19T20:33:00.000-08:00

One of the first things I wanted to set up on the Linux lapper was of course email. I like to use an email client instead of webmail, and in anticipation of getting this machine I had started using Mozilla's Thunderbird email client on my Macs at home and at work. I was able to transfer all of my email messages and address book contacts into Thunderbird from the Mac Mail program without too much difficulty. I remember that with the address book I had to export it from the Address Book application, then use some online file conversion thing to change it to the .ldif format, and then it imported perfectly into Thunderbird. Inexplicably, Thunderbird has only one (maybe two?) choices when importing mail from other mail clients. I think it was Netscape mail or some other app nobody uses anymore. Anyway, from the online documentation I found that you can work around this problem by copying your mail files from Apple's Mail application into the appropriate Thunderbird folder (local folders, I think), and voilà, all your mail is there next time you start up Thunderbird. One of the things I liked about Thunderbird right away was the spam detection. From the first time I started it up, it was about 100 times better at detecting spam than Apple's Mail program. I've tried for a long time to train Mac Mail to know what's spam and what's not, but no matter what I do, it rolls out the red carpet for Viagra and male enhancement messages while banishing important mail from colleagues and friends to the spam folder. Thunderbird is WAY better with spam. I'm very grateful for this. Otherwise it's just an email client and does all the things you want it to do. The default email client for Ubuntu is something else, though, Evolution. I tried Evolution on one of my email addresses for a few days and it works very well, too. It has a calendar function, which is pretty nice and integrates well with the Ubuntu desktop b/c when you click on the date/time stamp at the top right corner of the screen, it displays your Evolution calendar for the day. I decided to abandon Evolution in favor of Thunderbird, though, because as far as I could tell there was no way to set up multiple outgoing mail servers. Since this is a laptop, I'm not always hooked up to the same ISP and I have to use a different outgoing mail server when I'm at work than when I'm at home. Thunderbird makes it easy to have both servers set up and just choose which one you want to use. In Evolution the only solution I could find was to delete one server in order to activate the other one. Thunderbird wins. Incidentally, there are also "portable" versions of Thunderbird and Firefox that you can take with you on a flash drive. You intall it on your flash drive and take it with you to whatever computer you want. There are versions for Mac, Windows, and Linux. I've also tried the "portable OpenOffice" on my flash drive and it works beautifully. I used it one day on a Windows PC in one of our classrooms at school. Takes a moment to load up, but it works perfectly once it's running. The portable applications are genius!

Music. I'm a music professor, so music is really important to me and I was curious to see how I liked the various media players in Linux. There are tons. I had read about RhythmBox and XMMS and Amarok, so I gave all of them a try, plus a couple more like Beep and Audacious. BTW, a short digression: one of the really great features of Linux is the process for installing new applications. There are two easy ways to do it with graphical interfaces. One is the Add/Remove Applications interface, and the other is the Synaptic Package Manager. Both of these are great. What's so nice about them is that they go out to the web for you and grab the files, then intall them on your computer. You don't have to surf the web and find sites to download packages and install them yourself. It's a very slick way of dealing with adding/removing programs. They sync up with repositories of hundreds of known open-source applications and it's super easy to find and install them with either of these methods. You can also install stuff from the command line but I haven't done that as much. So, Rhythmbox was already installed as the default media player, if I remember right, and to get the other players I just chose them from the lists available via Add/Remove programs or Synaptic. I've been an iTunes user for as long as I've used a computer for listening to music, so I'm used to an interface that shows me what's playing and what playlists, artists, and albums I have. Amarok and Rhythmbox were the ones that most closely resembled iTunes in this respect. After using both for a few days I settled on Rhythmbox. It played my .ogg files just fine right away but it had to go find codecs to play MP3s. It only took about half a minute to get this installed, though, so now I can listen to MP3s just fine. The music software is more than sufficient on Ubuntu. Now, what I haven't tried yet is to hook up an MP3 player and manage the songs on it, but I probably won't do that for a while b/c my iPod is formatted for Mac and I'd have to reformat it to make it work with Linux. I'll do that if I ever get a new iPod. For now I'll just manage the iPod on my Macs.

One minor consideration for me in deciding whether a Linux machine could serve as my main home computer someday was whether it could deal with my Quicken files. I've used Quicken for keeping up with the checkbook for a few years, although recently I've about decided just to rely on the bank's website instead of keeping the data on my own machine. Anyway I thought I'd try out the Linux open-source alternatives to Quicken and see how they did. I installed GnuCash with the Add/Remove function, then exported data from my bank's website into a Quicken data file. I opened up GnuCash and went through a few setup menus and chose to import the data from the Quicken file. Once I figured out how to view the account, I was thrilled to see that all the data imported perfectly! I haven't spent a lot of time with it, but it seems like GnuCash would be a perfectly acceptable alternative to Quicken. Certainly if all you need to do is keep track of your checkbook and debit-card purchases, it'll do great, and it's probably good for keeping track of investments and retirement accounts and stuff like that, too. I don't know about tax-preparation software, though. I'll have to investigate further on that. I've used TurboTax for the last several years. From what I've read about tax software for Linux, it has a ways to go. We'll see. There's probably a web-based way to do that. That's all for now.

Observations on the Ubuntu Interface / Keystrokes

2007-12-19T19:26:00.000-08:00

When you first log in to Ubuntu you see the default Ubuntu "Human" theme, which has a "chocolate" wallpaper and orangish window bars with a modern-looking font. The nice thing about Ubuntu (and probably most other Linux distros) is that you can customize just about everything about the interface. If you go into System>Preferences>Appearance, you get options for customizing the look of the windows, the background, the level of graphical sophistication, and so forth. I tinkered with it for about fifteen minutes and came up with a look that was completely different from the default theme and really changed how the whole OS looked. I started by going with a different theme and then customized it further by changing fonts, colors, the style of icons, and so forth. It's amazing the difference it makes to be able to suit yourself in all these respects. I really like this about Linux.

KEYSTROKES! Something I REALLY, really, really like about Linux is that you can navigate so easily with keystrokes. This is something that I learned to do long ago when I was a DOS user and had no choice but to use keystrokes because I didn't have a mouse. When I got my first Windows machine (Win95) I still used keystrokes whenever I could b/c I was used to it and found it less cumbersome than using the mouse. Now, it's not like you can't do tons of stuff in OSX Tiger with keystrokes--you can, and I've learned a lot of these things because I still prefer to do whatever navigation and commands I can via keystrokes, but both Windows and Linux make it easier to use keystrokes than Mac does, because you can instantly access MENUS via keystrokes. It's "possible" to get to menus by keystrokes in OSX Tiger, but you can't immediately go to the menu you want with one keystroke. You have to do a keystroke (I think it's CTRL+F2) to "move focus to the menu bar," after which you can hit letter keys or arrow keys to make your way over to the right menu, then a down arrow key to see the contents of the menu, and finally more down arrow keys or letter keys to get to the item you want in the menu. It's MUCH easier to do all this stuff in both Ubuntu Linux and in any generation of Windows (although I haven't seen Vista yet--I assume this hasn't changed?). You can always see which key is crucial because it's underlined. A simple alt+e gets me into the "edit" menu, where I can see all the options and select another underlined letter to do what I want it to do. I can't tell you how happy I am to have this power again, after like five years of not being able to do this on a Mac. Like I said, I have learned many keystrokes on the Mac OS, and I can do a lot more stuff without the mouse than most people I know, but the nice thing about this Linux menu access is that you don't have to memorize as many keystrokes b/c with one keystroke you can see all your options in the menu. It's tremendous. It's not just the menus, either. All of the buttons on every dialog box have underlined letters showing which key you need to use to depress that button. Every button can be activated by a keystroke. On the Mac, some of the buttons can be activated by pressing the first letter of the word on that button (like when you press the letter "D" and it activates the "discard changes" button when you exit a program), but it's frustrating because this doesn't work with every application. It'll work with one application and not another, even though it's the same button, so you still end up having to use the mouse. Really annoying. So all of this is to say that one of my favorite things about Ubuntu Linux so far is that I have the power of keystrokes back in my grasp! Hray for keystrokes!!

Getting Started on the Desktop

2007-12-18T09:54:00.000-08:00

Ok with the last couple of posts I've jumped ahead of where I meant to be but wanted to jot down the stuff that was on my mind. Now I'll go back to the early stages of using Ubuntu after getting the wireless card problems straightened out.

I think the first thing I did was pop a flash drive into the USB port to transfer a couple of files. I liked what happened. The Nautilus file manager opened a window showing me the contents of my drive. I dragged a few different kinds of files over to my documents folder, then opened up a couple of .odt files in OpenOffice.org. They looked great. I expected this since I had created the files using NeoOffice. I also opened a .doc file my boss had sent me and it looked great, too. I was already used to NeoOffice, and everything in OpenOffice looked pretty much the same, but I'm pleased to say that OpenOffice seemed to run much faster. It took less time to load up, less time to save files, and generally seemed snappier in its operation. I was kind of surprised by this because my computer at work, where I use NeoOffice, is a much more powerful machine, an iMac that's only about a year old with 2GB of RAM (as opposed to the 384MB on this laptop) and a much faster processor.

I noticed something odd when working on one of my files, though. OpenOffice recognized the fonts that were used in the document, but when I selected some text and tried to change the fonts, I found that I didn't have the fonts at my disposal. I'm talking about some of the most common fonts on most computers like Times New Roman and Verdana and Arial and all those. I checked my Ubuntu books on the topic of fonts and found that these fonts are not installed by default. It was easy to get them via the synaptic package manager (I think it was some kind of msttf package), though, and within a few minutes I had all of the fonts to which I was accustomed.

One thing I like to do to a computer when I first start using it is to install a couple of extra keyboard layouts. The ones I use the most are the Latin-American Spanish and the German, both of which were easily installed by going into the system preferences. After installing them, though, I couldn't figure out how to select which layout I wanted to use. Going to the Ubuntu forums I discovered that you can add a keyboard layout button to the panel so I did that and now it's all good. Just right-click the panel and choose "Add to Panel," then choose the "keyboard indicator." Clicking on the keyboard indicator button once it's on the panel switches from one layout to another.

Oh. One other issue with the keyboard. I like to be able to use keystrokes to insert accented letters like á and é but it was apparently impossible in the USA keyboard layout. In Mac OSX I could type alt+e followed by the letter I wanted to have the accent, and ta-da, it appeared. I couldn't figure out the keystrokes in Ubuntu, but again, the forums provided the solution. I had to activate a so-called "compose key," and use that in combination with a couple of keystrokes to create the accented letter. The compose key can be selected by going to System>Preferences>Keyboard, then clicking on the "Layout Options" tab. Click on "compose key position" and choose which key you want to be the compose key. I chose the right "alt" key and so far it seems like a good choice. So, with the compose key activated, I now type "alt" then ' and the letter ("a" in the following case), and it appears as á. Yea! More about keystrokes in a different posting...

Wireless works out of hibernation

2007-12-18T09:39:00.000-08:00

I've figured out that if I choose the "hibernate" option when I'm not going to use the computer for a while, then the wireless works when I wake it up. Choosing "suspend" pretty much guarantees that there'll be no wireless upon waking.

Wireless again

2007-12-18T08:51:00.002-08:00

One annoying thing that happens sometimes is that my wireless internet connection drops and the only way I can get it back is to restart the machine. Sometimes I can still 'see' the network and sometimes I can't, but in either case I can't manage to reestablish a usable internet connection except by restarting. I don't know if this has anything to do with Linux or not. This is the first wireless connection I've ever had, so as far as I know this might happen with Mac or Windows too. Weird. I suspect it's some sort of timeout from lack of interaction with a server but I don't know for sure.

Cool feature: drawers on the panel. I put a drawer on the panel (that's the bar across the top of the screen where you can put application launchers, where the main system menus are, etc.) and I really like this feature. It's not available in OSX Tiger but I think Leopard has something like it. When you click on the drawer icon, a list of things you've put in the drawer is displayed (I put the system monitor and the terminal launcher so far). I like this feature because it helps keep the panel from having too many things all over it.

Speaking of cool features, I saw a video on YouTube that some guy made of his Ubuntu desktop and it was amazing. He's using all of the crazy animation that's available when you have a more powerful machine running Ubuntu, and the animation is truly astounding. He had four workspaces twirling around in 3D, rotating in any direction and showing the back sides of the desktop, as if you were seeing it transparently from the back. He compared it to the animation on Windows Vista and it wasn't even close. Ubuntu's desktop animation ( I think it's made possible by something called Compiz--I haven't really learned about it b/c this machine can't do it) is far superior to anything I've seen. His app launchers were flying off the panel and twirling around, re-arranging themselves and doing little dances. The windows came out of minimization and they were jiggling all over the place. Not sure how useful all this stuff is, but it's really fun to watch. Check it out:

Acrobat frustration

2007-12-18T08:35:00.001-08:00

Man, I spent more than an hour this morning trying to install the Acrobat Reader for Linux with no luck. I downloaded a prm file, then used the Alien to convert it to a .DEB file and ran an install from the command line. Everything went as it was supposed to, but when it was done I still couldn't find the application. Not in the applications menu, nor even in Nautilus (the file manager). It apparently just installed the package or something but didn't really install a usable application. I checked the forums and most people's response to this problem seemed to be, "why do you want to install it anyway, since you can already view .pdf files with open-source apps?" Good question. You "can" view them, but I can tell you that the file I was trying to view looks a lot better in the Acrobat Reader than it does in Ubuntu's default application for this stuff, the Evince document viewer. Evince does pretty well for documents that were created from digital sources using a print-to-file process, but my scanned .pdf pages didn't look so hot. They looked much nicer in Adobe's reader, and not because I created them with Adobe Acrobat--I made them using the Mac OSX create .pdf button on the print dialog box (although I did use Acrobat to assemble all the pages and embed bookmarks). Oh well. At least I figured out how to make Evince show the embedded bookmarks I had in the document. For a while I thought it couldn't do that, but there's a choice in the side pane between thumbnails and index. Choose "index" and you can see the bookmarks for easy navigation. I can live with this.

Becoming a Linux User

2007-12-17T10:33:00.000-08:00

I've recently become a Linux desktop user. This probably isn't such an unusual thing as it used to be, given the recent explosion in popularity of Linux because of Ubuntu and other very user-friendly distributions, but I'm still the only person I know who runs a Linux machine for everyday use. After repeated emails to my techwizard pal Mark LeBlanc detailing various triumphs and adventures in the new OS, he suggested that I write a blog about my experience getting up and running on Linux for the benefit of anyone else who's considering taking the plunge.

At this point I'm about 10 days into it and so far it's excellent. I've been using the Linux machine almost exclusively ever since I got it, putting it through its paces and trying out different applications, procedures, and system tweaks one at a time on an as-needed basis.

Before I go any further I should probably say a few words about my computer background, for the sake of perspective. I'm not a computer programmer or really a computer expert, but would probably be described as a pretty advanced user. I've been using Apple OSX computers for the past four years or so, and before that I used Windows 2000, Win98, Win95, and DOS, in reverse chronological order. I don't do any kind of development for computers, I just use them for all the common office applications, email, web browsing, and also to deal with photos, music, and video. I'm a music professor, so I do a lot of stuff with music--tons of playback but also basic audio recording and editing, and for the creation of musical scores with Finale.

This laptop that's now running Ubuntu 7.10 is a hand-me-down from my Dad, and my intent initially was to use it as an experiment with Linux, to see whether or not it would be a viable operating system for me to use on my primary computer somewhere down the line. Well, there were two events that prompted me to try this. First, I happened to see a guy in one of the tech-support offices over at school running Ubuntu about a month ago. I had never heard of Ubuntu until that moment, but it was a beautiful operating system, and it immediately struck me as a possible way out of my predicament. My predicament was how to get a laptop for my wife and me to use occasionally (at conferences, traveling, etc.) without spending a fortune (Apple) or having to settle for a terrible operating system prone to viruses and assorted other problems (Windows). If I were to go with Ubuntu, I could buy a cheap laptop, or even a used one, and simply replace Windows with Linux.

I ran this idea by my dad not too long after this and he said he'd been thinking about getting a new laptop and that his old one might be perfect to try this out. He offered me his old laptop and I gratefully accepted. I wasn't able to do anything with it for a while, though, because he lives a long way from here and I had to wait for them to come visit and bring it to me (only about two weeks, thankfully!).

In the meantime I started learning as much as I could about Linux in general, about Ubuntu in particular, and about open-source applications that are available for the Linux operating system. Got a couple of decent books and started listening to podcasts (The Linux Action Show is a particular favorite--hilarious show!) and poking around the internet, that sort of thing. I already had some experience with open-source applications, as I had been using NeoOffice (the Mac OSX-native version of OpenOffice.org) for about 18 months as my primary office suite, and I'd been using Audacity for audio editing for a long time, too.

Incidentally, our university had recently made a major decision to go in the direction of open-source software when it switched from the Blackboard course management system to an open-source alternative called Moodle. I was privy to some of the discussions about this decision, and while a big part of the decision had to do with money--upgrading to the newer version of Blackboard and renewing the license was going to cost in the neighborhood of $500,000, while Moodle was FREE (and this was during a year when our budget was obliterated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita)--we discovered soon after installing Moodle that not only was Moodle cheaper and more flexible (by virtue of its open source, our administrators could tweak it as they saw fit), but it was a much BETTER system as well. It was more stable, faster, and more powerful than Blackboard.

So anyway I was into the idea of open-source software and used it all the time, and had even gotten a number of my students to use OpenOffice or NeoOffice instead of purchasing Microsoft Office. One of my students this semester did her entire Masters Thesis on NeoOffice, and not only did the document look great, but we were able to share it flawlessly with Word users. She and I always exchanged .odt files ("open document text" files), but we saved as .doc files when necessary for other people to read it, and even all of the comments I had written in the document using the "track changes" function showed up pefectly in MS Word.

Ok, so the hand-me-down laptop I have now is a few years old, and not overly powerful but not a dinosaur either. It's a Dell Inspiron 2650 with 384 MB of RAM and a 20 GB hard drive. It's got an Intel pentium 4 processor and I think it's 1.7 GHz so that's not too bad. It has a 15-inch display that looks pretty good but it's not glossy like all the new lappers out there. My dad handled the installation of Ubuntu before bringing it down to me, so I can't really comment on that process except to say that it reportedly went just fine. Once he brought it to me we started tinkering with it to get everything working right.

One of the problems with Linux is that things don't necessarily work right out of the box because there aren't native device drivers for whatever it is you're trying to run. For us, it was the wireless card, a D-Link PCMCIA card. There were actually two problems. The first was that I had never set up a wireless network in my house. I borrowed an Apple Airport Extreme from a friend who had upgraded to something else, so I had to figure out how to get that thing working before we could test the wireless card. That accomplished, we set out to fix the wireless card issues. There were a few issues with this and I might forget something, but I think I have the gist of it.

First off, the machine didn't recognize the wireless card. Those little lights on it didn't activate at all. We had the original installation disc for the card, though, and were able to retrieve and install the Windows driver. The Windows driver, though, doesn't work all by itself. At least I don't think it does. Somewhere in the process a mysterious thing called the "ndiswrapper" emerged as most critical. I don't even remember where we read about it but we realized we needed it, and my dad found and installed it (maybe from the command line? I don't remember). Another thing about Linux is that you have to use the command line now and then, and a lot of times it's more efficient to do something that way even if there's a graphical interface with which you can accomplish the same thing. Command lines don't scare me too much since I used DOS for about the first 7 years that I used computers at all, but they're very picky about how you type things, that's for sure.

Having installed a Windows driver and the ndiswrapper, the little LED lights on the wireless card started blinking. Oh wonder! Oh joy of all joys! The machine recognized the card and my wireless network showed up on its radar. We got hooked up to the internet and life was good. The next day when we turned on the computer again, there were no blinking lights, no recognition, no wireless. How could this be? Oh wait! Not only that, but we couldn't even boot up the computer because of something we had done during the previous session having to do with automatic login to the network. My dad found something that you can add to one of the scripts that will log you into the network without having to retype passwords, so he added the line and we thought it was all good. There was one critical, vital problem. The password for the network had to be the same as that for your computer for this little thing to work. My passwords were not the same, so the next day when we turned the thing on, it kept hanging early in the boot process and saying "authentication failed." We guessed that it was the login script and were very fortunate that the machine was in the hands of Mark LeBlanc (the guy mentioned at the top of this blog), who is a Linux expert. He was able to bypass the normal bootup and get to a command line, where he found the problem file, deleted the extra script we had inserted, and rebooted. Incredible. It booted right up after that. He said this is something that would have been impossible to fix on a Windows machine but was a piece of cake in Linux. I thought it was a piece of cake, too, since he was the one doing it...

So the machine is working again but it's still not recognizing the card unless we reinstall the Windows driver every time we boot up. Weird. Thank goodness for the Ubuntu users forums, because my dad scoured them and found a number of people having similar problems and he ultimately was able to solve it by going into a command-line and adding the famous ndiswrapper to a list of stuff that should be started at bootup. Once he added it to this startup script ( I guess it was a startup script?), the wireless card worked perfectly every time the machine booted. All hail the ndiswrapper!!

One final problem with the wireless was that it would only work if I left my wireless network without password protection. I didn't really want to have an unprotected network, but one of the users on the Ubuntu forum mentioned that he worked around this problem by restricting the network only to machines whose MAC addresses were specified in the router's configuration. I figured out how to do this on the airport and it solved the problem beautifully.

Ok I think that's enough for this posting. The wireless card gave us the biggest problems but once solved the computer has been terrific. More on that in the next posting.