Hardy Heron: Day 1

Well, I’m back in ubuntu world for today.  It’s been quite the long way around back.  After finishing up my tshirts using Vista and photoshop, I had to prepare for a vacation to Ireland and England (went very well, thanks).  Over the weeks up until the vacation, we were scrambling to plan things and just keep our daily life in order.  It was quite the struggle…so much so that I barely touched my ubuntu.  You see, my wife started a site to help her study for the GRE, but it has broadened in scope to include a forum that we spend most of our time in.  Guess who’s the webmaster?

Anyway, it’s about a week and a half since we’ve returned from our vacation and I’m back in Ubuntu land running Hardy Heron on my XPS m1330.  The good news (of stuff I tried):

1.  Compiz-fusion works!  Finally!

2.  X-Sane works!

3.  cups-pdf works!

4.  kdeprint works!

5.  awn works (cause compiz is working)

and that’s about all I’ve tried thus far.  Now here’s what doesn’t work:

1.  cups-pdf is wonky with scan area.  Had to set some funky offsets to get it right.  Also no multipage PDF creation from what I can tell.

2.  rdp busted

3.  f-spot couldn’t import photos from network share (neither could picasa running in wine).

Anyway, enough head scratching for the night…I’m switching to Vista to sort through my UK photos and upload them to flickr.  We’ll give Ubuntu another try this weekend.

Installing VMWare Player in Ubuntu

I’m in the midst of trying to get VMWare Player installed and pointing at the Vista side of things so I never have to boot into Vista natively again…I can (hopefully) just run it in VMWare’s Player from now on. The problem is that it is taking forever to get things installed. Here’s one crucial step that I needed…took me forever that I had to use sudo to get the installer to work:

My Ubuntu Installation
9. Installing VMware Player

VMware Player is a free software which enables you to run Windows on your Linux PC. This needs an existing virtual machine which can be created with the non-free VMware Workstation, with the free QEMU and with the free VM Builder.

Note: VMware Workstation installs also the VMware Player so these steps are only needed if you don’t have a VMware Workstation installed.

VMware Player 2.x is not yet available for Ubuntu as a .deb package so you need to install it manually. Start by fetching the required .tar.gz file from the VMware Player download page.

# tar xzf VMware-player-2.0.1-55017.i386.tar.gz -C /tmp
# cd /tmp/vmware-player-distrib
# sudo ./vmware-install.pl

UPDATE: Abort! Abort! Abort! I tried all manner of drivers on the Vista side, but I could never get VMWare or VirtualBox to boot my Vista partition as a virtual hard drive. I did, however, succeed in borking my Vista partition twice such that it would blue screen upon start up and then retry. Luckily, I was able to get into the Vista partition via Ubuntu and get things back to normal again.

Anyway, if you want to see what I tried, go here. If you’re running Vista, you’ll need this too. Well, maybe not, as it didn’t really work for me.

Man, I feel downtrodden…no AWN curvy dock and now no raw disk action on the Vista partition. Sigh…maybe one day I’ll have my dock and my partition virtualization goodness.

That’s Yellowtail to You

So I decided to give Hamachi a whirl on good ol’ gutsy–I think I’ll abbreviate that GOG–and it took some doing.  Hamachi is a neat app that creates a virtual private network–that’s VPN to you acronymoholics–with other computers on your network.  What can you do with said VPN?  Well, for one thing, you can access the files you have at home when you’re out and about.  You can also do a VNC or remote desktop session.  While I found this to work, it was less than ideal since my upstream speed at home is very slow and is probably being hammered by Mozy trying to suck 50GBs or so of data through a coffee-stirrer-sized data pipe.  Man, I wish I was in Korea or Japan…anyway.

To get Hamachi working, I had to use the following tip:

[SOLVED] Can’t log in to Hamachi – Ubuntu Forums

While I found the whole thing very helpful, I wish that the folks who give help would explain how they tracked these issues down in the first place.  What the heck is “upx” and why did I have to use it on the hamachi executable?  Also, I found that putting hamachi and ghamachi into the  /usr/bin folder made them behave proper.  Why?  I’m not 100% sure but I figure that’s where executables should go.  Anyway, I’m off to google upx and /usr/bin to see what’s up there.

Grub getting grubby

Apparently, I’m on my third release of Gutsy.  How do I know?  Well, when I boot up, Grub has 6 entries for Ubuntu.  There’s a regular entry and a recovery entry for each version of Ubuntu that’s installed.  This is yet another difference between Linux and Windows.  Apparently, you can have different versions of the OS installed at the same time and switch between them.

Anyway, I have no desire to do such so, I found a little help to clean all that grubbiness out of Grub (not to mention saving some space on my hard drive!).

So all you need to do according to a comment on this howtogeek post, you just need to run Synaptic package manager and search for everything called “linux-image” and see what’s installed.  You’ll notice your good friends, the old versions of Ubuntu happily installed.  Anyway, select them for complete removal and you’ll save a couple hundred megs of hard drive space.

While you’re at it, according to arsgeek all you need to do is run sudo apt-get autoclean to get rid of other cruft that’s old and no longer needed.  I tried the deborphan stuff on that page and it did not seem to do anything.  The autoclean worked like a charm though.

Installing stuff in Ubuntu

Last night, I did a little bit of updating and filed my first Ubuntu bug (Bugbuntu?). After doing an upgrade, my terminal window went to heck and I couldn’t really use it. My bug was found to be a duplicate of another bug and the original had a little tidbit on how to fix it (which worked). What’s odd is that their bug filing process which tried to be nice and suggest other bugs that may be similar did not seem to find the one of the many that mine was duped against.

Last night, I only had one wireless drop out. When I got home, I did not want to usurp my network capacity with frivolous streaming so I decided to just give the latest update a whirl sans pandora. The wireless held up for an hour or so before if finally gave out again. It may just be me, but it looks like things are improving on this front.

While I was surfing around, I hit upon a PDF file and found that I have something called document viewer which is a little primitive compared to Adobe’s reader. I headed over to Adobe and grabbed the rpm, ran alien to convert and install it, and now I seem to have lost it. There does not seem to be any trace of Acrobat Reader any where on my machine. Which brings me to this useful guide on installing stuff in Ubuntu

Up and Running

With the help of a buddy at work who is much more versed in the world of Linux than I am, I have gotten Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 to install on a separate partition and dual boot it with Vista Business.

My Dell XPS m1330 laptop shipped with Vista Biz edition on there and I wanted to keep it since there wasn’t much crapware preinstalled (thankfully). I uninstalled McAfffee Antivirus as that service has gone downhill as of late. I now use Antivir which nags every now and then, but at least is free and self-updates.

I went over to APC mag’s step by step walk through of this process and it went off without a hitch. Well, that’s not quite true. I was a dork and first tried to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and that didn’t seem to like the m1330 too much. I figured it’d be more stable, but that did not turn out to be the case. I couldn’t get X11 to start and ended up at the command line trying to fiddle with a configuration files for X11 (xorg.conf) to see if I could get it going. A fellow dual-booter at work told me that I’d have to move up to the Gutsy Gibbon tribe 5 version of Ubuntu and then it would work. Lo and behold he was right.

After the install, I was told to add a few lines to xorg.conf as found in this bug report. Adding those lines made the upper and lower menu bar hang out in their proper places instead of taking up what looked like 1024×768 territory.

As soon as I started up with the screen looking the way it should, I proceeded to run the update manager which seemed to find a bunch of things to update and proceeded to download and install them. I messed around with some of the settings to change font size since they were way too big and turned on more effects that I believe are powered by compiz. The effects while completely unnecessary add to my enjoyment of using Ubuntu immensely. I’m not sure what it is about having the nice effects and just the right setup, but it helps me enjoy my computing much more. For example, on Vista, I installed rocket dock, icon packager with their Local Flavor icon pack, along with a nice vintage looking desktop wallpaper from interfacelift. I also got rid of the Vista and Google Desktop sidebars in favor of Yahoo’s Konfabulator…er Widgets.

Anyway, Ubuntu has been a pretty nice system thus far and seems like it can be my primary OS except for the fact that I haven’t found drivers for my printer yet. This seems to be the achilles heel of Linux. Darned hardcopies!