Released

Happy Gutsy Gibbon Day.   Today Ubuntu 7.10 went out the door.  I went to check my Update Manager and boom!  I found nothing.  What?!?  Surprise!

Apparently, I’ve been running the final build and have just been baking on it for a few days.  Anyway, my day to day home computing has finally gone Microsoft-free.  I still have good old Vista there for a few things like using MTP to transfer stuff to/from my array of portable devices and installing stuff on my WM6 phone.   I’ve tried to get Rhythmbox to see my Sansa Connect, but it refuses to give me the love.  Oh well…I suppose there will have to be more debugging.  Also, my built-in webcam doesn’t seem to work either.  Another “oh well” since I don’t ever use this feature figuring that I’m not much to look at to begin with

I hope everyone has had a nice ride thus far…I hope to be along for the Linux for the long term.

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.

Wireless workaround?

Well, streaming Pandora (and anything else for that matter) seems to keep the wireless connection alive. I think things go bad when we leave the wireless adapter idle. After reading more of the oreilly post mentioned in my previous post, I found that I have the exact same issue with the ndiswrapper (not exactly sure what that is, but sounds like something important). I’ve therefore initiated one of the few commands I know

sudo apt-get update

then I’ve run

sudo apt-get upgrade

and now I’m here…about an hour later, still online, still listening to Pandora (Nelly Furtado: Say It Right…man Timbaland knows how to get booties shaking), watching the sunset over the Free Speech Cafe at UC Berkeley, and waiting for the upgrade bits to arrive.

Wireless Update

So far so good. Congratulations, you’re reading my first official post from a linux machine. Underwhelming, I know. Anyway, I was digging around the whole wireless issue and decided to try a fun way to figure out when my wifi connection drops. I am streaming Pandora in the background whilst I compose this post. I’m through my third song and it’s still going strong.

Anyway, a bit more digging and I found a post over at the linux dev center over at oreilly that sort of talks about this issue. You can see it here

In the mean time, I’m going to try to figure out what the heck the post is saying and see if I can get the wifi to drop out on while I’m streaming some tunes.

Wireless not so Gutsy

Holy cow have I had a rough morning with Ubuntu. The wireless connection seems to fail if I leave it idle for a minute or two on my Dell XPS m1330. I wanted to make my first official post FROM Ubuntu this morning (I’m camped out with my work and personal laptop right now in the Anthropology library at UC Berkeley), but have been unable to keep a connection long enough to get it completed. Oh well, I’ve booted back into Vista to post this. I was trying to debug this, but don’t have much more time to dedicate to figuring it out at the moment. Here’s what I’ve found thus far:

a bug has been filed on this issue (#139832), there seems to be a dedicated laptop testing team that I may sacrifice my XPS m1330 to officially since I want Gutsy to “just work” on this really well designed machine. Plus it will give me a chance to learn how to debug things in Linux and really, isn’t that what it’s all about? I kid, I kid. Anyway, back to work (the real kind that pays me, not “WorkBuntu”)