Wine on Ubuntu

We had installed Wine - software that will run Windows applications and wanted to give it a spin. Since we had to do a comparison of the GIMP with Photoshop we decided to see if we could install Photoshop using wine.

We looked at the instructions on:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine

which basically said to use the terminal to run the install program. So let's give it a go. We decide to do the test on an old version of Photoshop - the 'lite' one they no longer sell. We copy the installer and its associated files to a new folder and open a terminal session to the shell and issue the command:

sudo wine setup.exe

Cool, the photoshop installer splash screen comes up and the installer starts. The installer will place the applicaton ins c:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop 5, we prefer to put in in c:\bin but what the heck. Lets do a custom install tho so we can see what it would install. Ok we don't need icc profiles or Adobe online or some of the other crap. First problem - trying to select a component has locked up the installer. The cpu graph is stuck at about 50% usage. We run the system monitor but find no wine process to kill. So we log out and log back in. This time we select compact and it all seems to go well. We even get to enter the lengthy serial number - one task i certainly do not miss!

But then the install aborts when it tried to decompress the files. We abort the process. Must be some old windows software around here. We look in the boxes of CD's...and how about visio 2000?

We enter the terminal and cd /media/cdrom0 and sudo wine setup.exe and it says it has to install IE 5.0 - no thanks. We cancel. How about an editor? That should not require any weird software - so we try hotmetal pro 6. Hilarious - it wants you to install IE, at least it is an option at the end of the install, so maybe there is a way to cancel out of it so we choose the minimum install. It's now search for Data Access Components....ok no joy here either.

We try a couple of other programs without success. We probably should have consulted the Wine application database at:

http://appdb.winehq.org/

Of course there is really no windows program that we need to run. Actually, not true - i still run an old turn based strategy game called Fields of Battle. Let's copy it over from the games machine. Ooops - not there. It's backed up somewhere. Maybe we could try Axis and Allies which did not work anymore on XP. Not unexpected it crashes but then Hasbro software is notoriously buggy. Ah we find the fields of battle cd and a Visual Basic 4 cd and Visio on 12 floppies and Office 95 on lots and lots of floppies and a program called Smsketch which i recall using.

We try fob but get a memory error and a registry dump. We try VB 4 and get a major opcode failed request. Same with smsketch. Time to try virtualbox again this time using XP and then to run fields of battle tomorrow.

VMWARE on Ubuntu

I decided to try VMware on Ubuntu, i've used VMware workstation on windows and for quite a while and found it an excellent product.

First i tried Automatix to install VMware server but the serial number i got from Vmware was rejected during the install which caused the script to freeze up and i had to abort the install.

So next we download the files directly from the Vmware web site. Trying to drag the folder in the gzipped tarball caused the extraction utility to seize up. So next we tried to extract the files from the archive which seemed to lock it up again but it was working - it just gave no indication or feedback that is was functioning and not frozen. After a minute or so it created a folder called vmware-server-distrib which as a script called vmware.install.pl

We want to see what happens if we double click the script file. A dialog box appears asking if we want to view the contents or run in the terminal. We choose run in terminal and nothing seems to happen which makes sense as we are not logged in as root. We recall from long ago that we have to run the file in terminal but the exact syntax escapes me at the moment.

You would think a readme.txt file could be included in the package. We find a readme in the doc folder. It says:

For complete VMware Server product documentation please use the
product Help menu or refer to "http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs".

Screw that - it's off to google to see who has done this before - nothing like an example to see what to do. We find an article at Ubuntu Geek:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-vmware-server-in-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon.html

Which contains the information that after unpacking the archive to start the installation using the following comamnd:

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

So we open up the shell and issue the command.

A previous installation of VMware software has been detected.
The previous installation was made by the tar installer (version 3).
Keeping the tar3 installer database format.
Error: Unable to execute "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl.
Failure
Execution aborted.

So the previous install froze but is still there. We take a look for the uninstall script. It is not in /usr/bin but we see all the vmware files from the previous install. We could rm them but what if that does not solve the problem? Best to use the uninstall script. We find it in the new vmware download in the /bin directory.

We evoke sudo ./vmware-uninstall.pl

Uninstalling the tar installation of VMware Server.
xinetd: no process killed
inetd: no process killed
The removal of VMware Server 1.0.5 build-80187 for Linux completed
successfully. Thank you for having tried this software.

Best to check /usr/bin to confirm. Success they are gone! Ok let's try the install again.

Damn - same error message as before - it says vmware is installed. Check /usr/bin again and yes, farther down there are some vmware files. Let's see if deleting them helps. Ok so we removed the vmware files with:

gnickers@godzilla:/usr/bin$ sudo rm vmnet*
gnickers@godzilla:/usr/bin$ sudo rm vmstat
gnickers@godzilla:/usr/bin$ sudo rm vm-support
gnickers@godzilla:/usr/bin$ sudo rm vmrun
gnickers@godzilla:/usr/bin$

Now we try the install again. Same error as before. We are going at this the wrong way. Maybe there is a record of installs done by tar and we need to remove that data. So we take a look at the package database and lo there is vmware listed. So the automatix install did 'take' as far as the package manager is concerned. So we completely remove the vmware server package. There are some other vmware packages such as x.org and kernel stuff but we leave them alone for now.

We return to the terminal to execute the script in the shell again. Success!

gnickers@godzilla:~/vmware-server-distrib$ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
Creating a new installer database using the tar3 format.
Installing the content of the package.

In which directory do you want to install the binary files?
[/usr/bin]

What is the directory that contains the init directories (rc0.d/ to rc6.d/)?
[/etc]

What is the directory that contains the init scripts?
[/etc/init.d]

In which directory do you want to install the daemon files?
[/usr/sbin]

In which directory do you want to install the library files?
[/usr/lib/vmware]

The path "/usr/lib/vmware" does not exist currently. This program is going to
create it, including needed parent directories. Is this what you want?
[yes]

In which directory do you want to install the manual files?
[/usr/share/man]

In which directory do you want to install the documentation files?
[/usr/share/doc/vmware]

The path "/usr/share/doc/vmware" does not exist currently. This program is going to create it, including needed parent directories. Is this what you want?
[yes]

The installation of VMware Server 1.0.5 build-80187 for Linux completed successfully. You can decide to remove this software from your system at any time by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall.pl".

Before running VMware Server for the first time, you need to configure it by invoking the following command: "/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl". Do you want this
program to invoke the command for you now? [yes]

Making sure services for VMware Server are stopped.

Stopping VMware services:
Virtual machine monitor done
Configuring fallback GTK+ 2.4 libraries.

In which directory do you want to install the mime type icons?
[/usr/share/icons]

What directory contains your desktop menu entry files? These files have a .desktop file extension. [/usr/share/applications]

In which directory do you want to install the application's icon?
[/usr/share/pixmaps]

Trying to find a suitable vmmon module for your running kernel.

None of the pre-built vmmon modules for VMware Server is suitable for your running kernel. Do you want this program to try to build the vmmon module for your system (you need to have a C compiler installed on your system)? [yes]

This is a good question - best check the package manager before we continue. We see that the GNU C compiler is installed. So we continue.

Using compiler "/usr/bin/gcc". Use environment variable CC to override.

What is the location of the directory of C header files that match your running
kernel? [/lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/build/include]

Extracting the sources of the vmmon module.

Building the vmmon module.

Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-generic/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-14-generic'
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/hostif.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/common/cpuid.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/common/hash.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/common/memtrack.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/common/phystrack.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/common/task.o
CC [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/common/vmx86.o

LD [M] /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/vmmon.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.22-14-generic'
cp -f vmmon.ko ./../vmmon.o
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
The module loads perfectly in the running kernel.

Do you want networking for your virtual machines? (yes/no/help)

Damn - pressed the wrong keys when copying the install text from the terminal and aborted the install! So we restart the install - this time it knows how to uninstall the aborted install.

We have been accepting the defaults - when asked if we want NAT on the virtual machine we reject the default and answer NO. We are assuming we can bridge to the real network from the vm and thus get to the outside world.

We not get an error message warning that the default port of 902 is not free - it has selected port 903 to communicate with the vmware server for remote console connections to use.

inetd: no process killed
Unable to make the Internet super-server (inetd) re-read its configuration
file. Please restart inetd by hand:
killall -v -HUP inetd

We are now asked to enter the serial number we got from vmware.

The answer "9154n-y0pau-2a0ap-4h12t" is invalid. It must be of the form XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX where X is a digit 0-9 or a capital letter A-Z

Ahh - we had to enter it all in upper case - that is why the first install failed. Stupid - all these things do is to annoy users - no wonder many people prefer oss. Ok now it is accepted.

Starting VMware services:
Virtual machine monitor done
Virtual ethernet done
Bridged networking on /dev/vmnet0 done

The configuration of VMware Server 1.0.5 build-80187 for Linux for this running
kernel completed successfully. A menu item is added to the applications, system menu called vmware server console.

We decide to look at this tomorrow after we search the pile of dvd's for the one with the downloaded VM's...

Well, we could not find it without more searching than it is worth so we decide to get new images anyway. This required installing a bittorrent client as many images can only be downloaded in that way.

Once done we had a folder of the nostalgia virtual appliance which creates a DOS box. We select Applications, System tools, Vmware server console from the menu.

Next it asks if we want to connect to localhost or to a remote host. This is interesting - it will run vmware images stored on a server. Sweet - we could set up a NAS arrangement with all the images stored centrally. This would be neat to use with a network device where you could choose your OS at boot time, wonder if there is a 'dumb pc' that boots vmware images. I used to have some HP thin client boxes that booted from unix and a citrix thin client box.

Anyway we choose local host and click CONNECT.

The menu appears and we select CREATE A NEW Virtual Machine to see what would happen. A wizard appears to guide us through the process.

We choose Typical setting, and then select an operating system. It support all versions of Microsoft Windows from 3.1 to Vista, a large list of Linuxes including the most popular ones, plus Solaris, Novell, the various BSD forks and ms-dos.

This looks promising, later we will try the windows98 vm as that defeated virtualbox. For now we cancel out of the wizard.

We now select Open a Virtual Machine. The list is empty so we click Browse, navigate to our home folder, choose nostaglia and select dos.vmx and click OPEN and the details are displayed.

We click Start up to start the guest os. That didn't go well - a black window. And when we exited it our desktop is screwed up. We shut down the dos vm but all we get is a beige screen. We use alt-tab to get to the dock and close the VMware server console which restores our desktop from the beige 'fog' which obscured everything.

Tomorrow - we try again with some other VM's we have downloaded from VMware.

We tried the ubuntu-server-6.06.1 which has a copy of the Koha library system. We got the VM to run but the beige screen is back - it is hard to switch between the guest OS and the host OS. Doesn't seem as polished as virtualbox but there are so many community contributed VM's that it is a shame. The answer seems to be to run VMworkstation which works great - on windows XP to use VM appliances but to use Virtualbox on Linux to run other OS like windows 98 or DOS.

Gaming on Ubuntu

There are only a few games i play regularly, Fields of Battle, a WWI turn based strategy game from Denmark (company is out of business) and Civilization II Gold for the Mac. I don't like the windows versions or the osx version.

I was interested in the Linux version of Call to Power. Years ago we had played with the FreeCiv version but found it too much like the windows one. I managed to install the game manually as the graphical installer choked but when it started it crashed causing Ubuntu to log me out.

Anyway, this got me interested in gaming and the possibilities of gaming using either ports, wine or emulation. I used to play the mac version of civ on windows xp using a mac emulator.

So we fire up the package manager to see what's available. First let's try freeciv to see how it's come along since way back then. It has added a freeciv menu item to the games menu. We give it a go. Well the graphics are a lot nicer and there is sound and the gui interface is good but the gameplay is still bad.

There is a section in the package manager called Games and Amusements and we look there. The regular games are the usual lot so we check out the multiverse and universe sections which have the restricted packages that may not have source code or are proprietary. We find some interesting things here like:

Alien Arena - a standalone 3D first person online deathmatch shooter
crafted from the original source code of Quake II and Quake III. We decide to install this. It adds an alien arena menu item to the games menu. We give it a go.

Well that was good fun - excellent graphics, sound effects and a real quake experience. Of course it is best played in deathmatch mode with other people. Fragging computer ai is not the same.

The other option is to look at emulators or virtualization. We have virtualbox installed but were not too successful at installing other operating systems such as windows 98, 2000 and DOS. There is a free VMware server you can get from VMware and lots of community contributed virtual machines on their web site. We should try that too.

The Cross Platform (multiverse) section has some neat things. I notice it has the mac emulator i used to use:

Basilisk II is an Open Source 68k Macintosh emulator. That is, it enables
you to run 68k MacOS software on you computer, even if you are using a
different operating system.

I will have to sort through the boxes of old mac CD's tomorrow to find the ROM images i made.

Image Scanning and OCR with Ubuntu

I was going to install a scsi card and hook up the spare HP Scanjet 3C to test out scanning. I have two of these beasts, one is installed on the old windows server and the other is the backup. Used to have 3 but that seemed excessive so i gave it away.

Anyway, i wanted to add a second gig of ram to the Comap EVO W6000 that is running Ubuntu so grabbed an Adaptec scsi card from the pile but then a Canon Canoscan FB636U usb scanner came my way (courtesy of the dumpster). This is a neat little compact scanner, small and light that gets it's power from a USB connection - so no power supply.

I used to have a couple of early Afga USB scanners for mac but OSX had poor scanner support so i got rid of them. So was curious to see how Ubuntu would work with this discard.

From the menu i selected Applications, Graphics, Xsane image Scanner. Really cool - it 'scanned' for devices and found the Canon and allowed me to calibrate it and so i scanned an image and here is the result.

Not bad, eh? Looks like it supports scanning negatives and slides. We choose to save the scan to the desktop as a jpg file and click the SCAN button. Pretty easy to do and just as good as the Document Image Scanning function in Microsoft Office.

This is just a way to acquire an image, we also want to try some Optical Character Recognition. Doing OCR requires some specialized software to 'scan' the image scanned by the scanner and to convert it into text. I has used textbridge and omniscan on windows before. So we head off to the package manager to search for OCR. We decide to install Clara and also another OCR package.

We find:

Clara OCR is intended for large scale digitalization projects. It features a
powerful GUI and a web interface for cooperative digitalization of books.

gocr is a multi-platform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. While command line, there is a GTK GUI to gocr.

GNU Ocrad is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program based on a
feature extraction method.

Tesseract - A commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985
and 1995. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by UNLV. It
was open-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr

Not listed in the package manager but available at http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/ is OCRopus, a state-of-the-art document analysis and OCR system, featuring pluggable layout analysis, pluggable character recognition, statistical natural language modeling, and multi-lingual capabilities. This seems to use the Tesseract engine and is tested to run under Ubuntu. So we download tesseract-2.03 and extract the folder. Just looking at the notes quickly - this looks like pretty rough software - alpha.

We don't see a menu item added for clara which we installed. Will have to take a stab at OCR tomorrow.

We now see that in the xsane preferences menu under the OCR tab that the ocr command box has gocr listed. What we can't see is how to run the ocr. There seems to be no control on the interface to do ocr.

Update: hah - this scanner worked perfectly in Ubuntu when i plugged it in. So today i plugged it into Windows XP. The os chugged a bit and eventually declared it could not install the device - a simple USB scanner. Chalk one up for Ubuntu!

iPod from Ubuntu

The mac hard disk died taking iTunes along with it and i wanted to copy some songs off the ipod. Connecting the ipod to a different computer running itunes was no help as only 1 computer can manage the ipod. This is the 30 gig 5th generation model. (x9585)

So i installed gtkpod on ubuntu along with Gpixpod (for download pictures to it) and Hipo
Ran the Gtkpod and it found the plugged in ipod and took a minute to retrieve the 1500 songs on it. It did display an error message about being unable to open 'itunesDB.ext' for reading extended info. I think that is because apple changes the ipod database. I don't store album covers or any of that stuff anyway.

Copying a track off the ipod was as easy as highlighting the track and right clicking and selecting Copy selected track to local.

However, trying to play a track gave an error message about xmms. Apparently it is not installed, which is odd - a package should know it dependencies and install them when it is installed. Anyway we install XMMS from the package manager and Audacious while we are at it. We exit and restart.

The play function now works - it load the X window music player which looks a lot like winamp, which i use on windows in preference to the media player.

I find the UI a bit confusing. The bottom pane displays the tracks but there are two side by side windows on above it whose purpose it not clear. They have tabs to sort by artist, album, genre on both panes. I see it is a browsing resource discovery function that uses filtering. For example, if you select Rock as a genre in the first window you can narrow it down by filtering by artist or album in the second.

Clicking on the special tab brings up an advanced search function. You can use Boolean logic but the fields you can search on are limited such as rating and played. You can't seem to do a search for country songs

Update - the macbook hard disk died so i needed to get the songs off the ipod but i didn't want to copy them song by song - a straight dump of everything into Ubuntu was needed. The worry was the ipod hard disk would die, which happened to the first ipod. I didn't want to have to import all the songs from the backups and re-enter all the metadata.

I installed Banshee and it picked up the ipod immediately. However, the ipod had been upgraded to the latest version of itunes which prevented banshee from reading its database. Banshee helpfully allowed me to rebuild the ipod database to make it accessible. I was able to now copy the entire music collection from the ipod to the Ubuntu laptop. The next test is to take the ipod to the Ubuntu desktop and plug it in and see if Banshee on that machine can manage it too - itunes has a very annoying restriction that only 1 computer can manage the ipod.

Video

I had copied some Ubuntu tutorial movies in mpeg format to the ipod using iTunes to show in class using the AV cable. The movies worked well when viewed on the ipod but when plugged in to an external monitor only the audio was available - no video could be seen. I suspected the cable but....

Today i discovered that the ipod considered the files to be audio files not video files. This provided the opportunity to test out putting some downloaded cartoons on the ipod. The clips were in .AVI format and dragging them to the ipod doesn't work as it says it can't play them.

Ok so we have to convert them. As it turns out the excellent open source player we use, called VLC can also convert video - who knew?

Our first attempt was in fiddling with some of the included video programs in Ubuntu but the conversion to the ipod format did not seem to work. We had success in using DeeVeeDee to convert some divx movies and burn them to standard DVD discs for regular players. The only issues seems to be that some discs work with both upstairs DVD players but some only work on the one universal player. Anyway we went back to VLC.

Following the detailed guide written by loqu (AKA Rob) at http://wiki.videolan.org/IPod i opened some files and let VLC convert them. It was quite quick although getting the settings right is a bit tricky.

You basically open the file you want to convert, check the Stream/Save box and click Settings.
Save the streaming output to a file with an .mp4 extension with the following settings:

Video codec = h264 at 768 kb/s
Audio codex = =mp4a at 128 kb/s
The code in the Stream output MRL Target box has to be edited to add width and height values with the added text inside the {} brackets being width=320,canvas-height=240

One problem is if you are converting a number of files you have to add this each time. However, i am sure i left it out but it did not seem to matter as i had to do a second step anyway. You can always do this in batch mode with a script.

Once the file was converted i imported the mp4 video files into iTunes Movies. Then i selected a file and right clicked to bring up the itunes menu. Select Convert Selection for iPod/iPhone and the file is processed. Once it is done you have 2 files - delete the original and copy the converted file to the iPod icon in iTunes. (I sync manually - if you have automatic syncing on then it should copy the files when you plug in your ipod).

I can now play the video files in the iPod and they are the correct resolution and look pretty good. Of course they are cartoons, i have not tried this yet with regular movies. As a test i should convert a old black and white movie like Gunga Din or Lives of a Bengal Lancer or Charge of the Light Brigade to the older non-color ipod. You would think that as portable video players fall in price and increase in capacity that there would be a market for ipod-ready movie downloads. It seems ready-made for tutorials or TV shows like Dotto Tech or Coronation Street.

OSX Server on a Macbook

I was interested in doing this for 2 reasons - osx server is a great product - far superior to windows server:

- it uses open source software like apache, php, ruby instead of proprietary products

- has a nice integrated gui that is familiar

- is much cheaper that windows server with a reasonable pricing model

- is quite light - i ran 10.4 on an ancient mdd dual 550 cpu mode  with 1.5 gig ram 

I've been using it at home for a while - it replaced the red hat server that did good duty for many years. I still have a ppc 8550 around here somewhere running Appleshare IP the server version for the pre-osx machines. 

The macbook provides decent performance in a small package. This is the black 13.3" model the intel duo core @ 2Ghz, an 80gig SATA hd and 2 gig of ram. The only problem with the machine is the airport card died - killed by windows running in boot camp. Possibly due to overheating?

First we removed the existing hard drive in the macbook. You just remove the battery and unplug the power and then remove the ram door rail and slide out the hard disk. We replaced it with a larger sata western digital drive. This does not have an apple rom. 

When we booted the 10.5 server dvd it did not find the hard disk even when we ran the disk utility. This is a long-standing problem with using non-apple hard disks. One solution has been to use the same make of drives, ie fujitisu in the old macs and toshiba in laptops. Another solution is to use a 3rd party hard drive partitioner.

We decide to create a gparted boot disk that will enable us to use the open source hd partitioning utility. The idea is to format the disk as a mac volume.

Only problem is we can't get the osx install DVD to eject. All the usual tricks do not work. We may need to replace the original hd to boot from an then eject the dvd or install to an external drive that osx can recognize.  We pull the external 250gig hd from \\godzilla a ubuntu machine and plug it it and boot from the dvd. The installer picks up the drive so we run disk utility and reformat it as mac os extended with a GUID partition table and begin the install.

We choose the standard server configuration and answer the standard questions. We choose dhcp as the network setup as this is a mobile server and gave it the name of gnickers with outgoing email to our mail gateway. We also enabled VPN and created an class user called 9762. Users can login to the macbook by doing ssh, they can also do screen sharing with VNC.

oops - forgot the existing 10.4 server is called gnickers so the install has renamed this to gnickers(2) which we will have to fix using server preferences once the install is finished.

Ok now that it is working we reboot using the gparted liveCD. Grub 0.97 menu appears and we choose the gparted-liveCD macbook option. The GUI boots up and we see /dev/sda2 being displayed. This is the 250 gig external. Trackpad is not working so we plug in a usb mouse. 

We find no internal drive so it looks like it is not functioning. Click Exit. We will have to put this drive in an external case to work and put the original drive back in. The exit icon does not seem to work so we do CREL ALT Backspace to shutdown the X server and issue a reboot  command to get back to osx. Eject the gparted CD and shut down the machine.

Off  to the local computer store to get an external 2.5" sata case.

Virtualbox on Ubuntu

We've been playing with virtualbox on windows as a way of letting students boot LiveCD's without compromising the security of the network.

Virtualbox is a virtualization program that allows you to install and run other operating systems such as Windows from within Linux.

I've used VMware on windows for a long time and it is quite good. Tried parallels on my macbook but really didn't like it and it was a pain to remove.

Virtualbox is available in the ubuntu repositories so we fire up the package manager and install.

It adds a Virtualbox menu item to the Applications, System Tools menu. Now to download the manual in .pdf format and do some reading. We might want to install windows XP or to test out other linux distributions.

As a test let's create a virtual machine to run MS-DOS. So we click on New and enter DOS622 as the name with an OS type of DOS. Virtualbox supports all versions of windows from 3.1 to Vista along with linuxes and others like BSD and Solaris. Will have to try my BeOS cd later.

We reserve a whopping 32mb of memory for the dos VM and create a fixed size disk image of 40mb which was the size in my old exceltronix AT (upgraded from the 20mb seagate ST drive in the XT). VB disk images have the extension .VDI and are created in the user's home directory.

Once the vm is created you have to configure your devices.

We clicked on cd/dvd drive and put a checkmark in mount. Do not enable passthrouigh.
We also mounted the floppy drive. We have dos on CD somewhere in the MS developers cd's but we also have the floppies. We decide not to enable audio for now but the network is enabled by default. Maybe we can load the packet drivers and run gopher or something.


The cd is /dev/cdrom and the floppy is /dev/fd0

We start the machine and the auto capture message is displayed. This means you have to click in the VM window to use the keyboard/mouse with the VM and then use a 'host' key to return to the host operating system. In the windows version the host key was the right CTRL key (the left key does nothing).

We get an error message 'failed to start Dos622 vm'

VirtualBox kernel driver not installed. The vboxdrv kernel module was either not loaded or /dev/vboxdrv was not created for some reason. Please install the virtualbox-ose-modules package for your kernel and execute '/etc/init.d/vboxdrv start' as root.
VBox status code: -1908 (VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_INSTALLED).

This may be because we installed the software but did not reboot the machine. So let's do it.

Ok we try again and get a different error - looks like a permissions problem

The VirtualBox kernel driver is not accessible to the current user. Make sure that the user has write permissions for /dev/vboxdrv by adding them to the vboxusers groups. You will need to logout for the change to take effect..
VBox status code: -1909 (VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_ACCESSIBLE).

So we goto System, Administration, Users and Groups and click on Manage Groups. We select the vboxusers group and click on Properties. Our account is listed in the group members list so we place a checkmark in the user box and click OK. We have to logout for this to take effect.

Ok a reboot fixes this and now we can run vb. We put in the boot floppy for dos but vb cannot seem to find a bootable medium. We press F12 at the splash screen and get a menu of boot devices:

1) Floppy
2) Hard disk
3) CD-rom
4) Lan

the floppy light goes green but nothing happens. We try unmounting and mounting the floppy.

So we decide to go for a CD based VM using Windows 2000 using 198mb of ram and a 2 gig hard disk. We put in the CD and start the machine. Same error message:

FATAL: no bootable medium found! system halted.

We try and mount the CD. no go. We see that the cdrom has been assigned to /dev/fd0 so we change it to /dev/cdrom and restart the machine.

We get this error message:

FATAL: could not read from the boot medium! system halted.

So let's change cd's to another one. The old cd backup copy could not be read but the original CD worked fine. This time success - we get the windows 2000 blue setup screen.

It finds the 2gig virtual hard disk and formats it with NTFS and then copies the setup files and 'reboots' into the windows 2000 gui and begins the setup.

We answer the usual questions and the system then starts up again and installs devices.

This takes a few minutes and the screen flickers a few time but that is normal. It seems to have restarted the setup as we have to re-enter the product key again.

Ok - now it is booting but has gone into the setup devices routine once more. Enough - let's try 98 next. The same result - can no read from boot medium when you put a cd in and start the VM.

We go into the settings pane and under the General, Advanced tab set the boot order to make the CD/DVD first. The default is floppy first so maybe it tries to read that and never gets to the cd. All versions of windows up to XP can be installed from a floppy. Windows 98 was 1 floppy, windows 2000 was 4 floppies and windows XP is 6 floppies.

Now we have it booting from the win98 cd rom. It had to reboot to format the hard drive VM and now is running the install program. Looks like it will take about 50 minutes - longer than 2000.

Would be interesting to bundle virtualbox with a bunch of emulators such as MAME. I used to the the Basilisk 68k macintosh emulator on windows and it worked very well. Would be neat to have a bunch of virtual machines with non-windows operating systems.

Ok the install program is pretty much done, but now we have a bunch of vertical green and red lines on the screen. This happened as it was going into the detect devices bit - 98 is probably not as good at that as is 2000 or XP. The cd is still spinning and the green line goes on as it reads from the disc so we assume it is still working.

Whatever it is doing is requiring a lot of juice - the system fans have just come on, this is the first time that has happened. we decide to power off the vm and to restart it.

The windows 98 splash screen comes up and we login to windows and complete the install by answering some questions. It's now updating the system settings which is taking a long time. First impressions are that this is slow. The host machine has dual xeon cpus running at 2ghz and a 73gig u160 scsi drive but only 1 gig of ram. Maybe we pop in another gig this week. It's a fairly zippy machine running Ubuntu. We will have to try an install of XP to see if that is a faster process.

Well the performance of windows98 under VB is pretty slow. This may be due to the fact it is running in 640x480 16 color vga resolution. We shut down the machine. Maybe XP will be better.

Tomorrow we now try XP using the Dell 1420 laptop instead of the Compaq Evo desktop. First we create an XP machine with 10gig hd and 512mb of ram. We insert the XP cd and click START.

The cd spins and the xp setup screen appears. The blue screen of death follow 'session3_initialization_failed' STOP: 0x0000006F....etc

We try again. Setup crashes with the same message. We decide to read the article at:

http://www.blog.arun-prabha.com/2007/05/07/installing-virtualbox-and-windows-using-virtualbox-in-ubuntu/

to see how it was done.

We decide to click on the Audio setting and enable audio and set it to ALSA audio driver.

One thing was missing - the USB device option. This version is 1.5.0 OSE, the version for windows i used had settings for the usb devices. The article has information on fixing this.

Open a terminal and enter

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Go to the lines as shown below:

#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs «» /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Uncomment the last 4 lines and make it look like below:

#
# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs «» /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount --rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Close and restart virtualbox. You should see the USB options in the settings. You can add the devices you want.

Arun also has some more information about USB devices on his blog:

Once you attach the Vboxusers group to the users, change permission to access USB devices. Open a terminal and enter

gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/40-permissions.rules

Change the line that says

SUBSYSTEM==»usb_device», MODE=»0664»

to

SUBSYSTEM==»usb_device», MODE=»0666»

Save and reboot your system

We did not do this as until the install works - why bother?

We decide to try one more time. Setup runs and now we get the Welcome to Setup menu, we select the 10gig 'partition' and format it with NTFS. Was it the lack of audio that caused the previous attempts to fail? Audio should not be a requirement for an operating system.

Setup copies its files and reboots to the xp hd and runs the windows xp gui to complete the install. We answer the usual questions and it begins to install xp. It finishes and reboots into the XP splash screen and the welcome musak. We turn OFF the automatic updates, decided not to resister, create a user etc and boot in xp. Cool - IE takes us to MSN home page - fat chance, we change the default home to google.

You have to press the right CTRL key to switch between virtualbox and Linux. We do this and take a screenshot of xp in action. To get back to xp just click on the screen and the mouse is acquired.

We turn off XP and exit virtualbox. Guess we will have to try Arun's USB tip tomorrow.

Windows Networking Broken

Today on \\godzilla the windows shares on other machines had disappeared. We had installed GSAMBAD which is a GUI tool to manage samba, the windows networking. We had done these tasks before by editing /etc/samba/smb.conf using the PICO text editor.

When we went to the gsambad control panel and deactivated samba and then activated it in returned an error message that 'wininbdd was not found'. This is a linux version of winbind. The master browser on the network is \\rodan, an old windows 2000 server that used to run the printers and still runs the big HP ScanJet 3c.

So we install winbindd, deactivate and active samba. We now note that it lists nmdb as being inactive. That program is a server that responds to netbios name service requests from other machines. This is probably why \\godzilla does not display as a share on the other machines. There were security issues with nmdb which may explain why it is not listed in the package manager. We had problems with gsambad on the dell laptop and fixed it by removing the package and deleting the smb.conf file it created and restoring the old file.

The gsambad security log notes it denied connections from 192.168.1.117 which is the dell laptop and 107 and 106 and every machine on the network. It is most likely possible to get this to work but doesn't seem worth the trouble so let's remove it and restore the old configuration. We need samba to work - else we can't get to the file server.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root dhcp 0 2008-04-16 20:16 dhcp.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8 2007-10-04 02:39 gdbcommands
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3412 2008-05-14 21:06 smb.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10911 2008-04-29 20:25 smb.conf.gsambad.old
-rw------- 1 root root 314 2008-05-14 20:46 smbpasswd
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 91 2008-05-14 20:46 smbusers
gnickers@godzilla:/etc/samba$ sudo rm smb.conf

Next i decided to stop samba - this takes me back to old red hat:

gnickers@godzilla:/etc/samba$ sudo /etc/init.d/samba stop

I tried rename the file to smb.conf but got error message about bareword 'not allowed while strict subs in use at line 1'.

We could grab a smb.conf file from one of the other machines and edit it but it may be simplier to uninstall and re-install samba. That worked for the dell laptop. So we mark the packages for removal and then re-install. We shut down samba make changes to the configuration file and start it up again

gnickers@godzilla:/etc/samba$ sudo pico smb.conf
gnickers@godzilla:/etc/samba$ sudo /etc/init.d/samba start

No windows shares are displayed. The link to \\mothra and \\gamera are broken. Doing a reboot was the only thing that solved the problem. The windows machines are now displayed along with the shares on the server.

Ubuntu on the Dell D400

Continued the next day with plugging in the usb drive and booting the DELL re-install 7.10 iso image downloaded from the dell ubuntu wiki.

boots fine. No wireless network seen. There may be no linux driver for that so we may have to look at ndiswrapper.

For now lets do an install. We click the install icon. It starts up the hard disk partitioner. Since this is a dual boot system we do not want to use the entire disk. We have /dev/sda1 which is the NTFS partition and /dev/sda5 which is the previous installation linux partition. So we choose manual installer and create a swap partition and a / partition. We choose not to migrate any data from the windows partition.

OS installs and we reboot. Same reboot problem - have to remove the battery and then power up. We log in. Sound works and there are 212 updates available.

It tells us that restricted drivers are available.  We click to install and enable the Broadcom 43xx chipset family. It downloads the driver and asks us to specify the firmware location and supplies the url. We enable the driver. Going to the system, administration, network control panel we pull down on the network name box and viola it finds and lists the 2 WAP's. We choose the open one and set the password type to WEP key (ascii) and the configuration to DHCP and click OK. The network box seems frozen for a minute and then disappears. We try to run the applet again but it will not appear. We can't seem to log off or run any programs. Even pushing to power button does nothing. So it is remove the battery once again.

We run Firefox and download and install automatix. Ooops forgot to keep the external optical plugged in as the automatix install requires the CD. We plug it in and /dev/cdrom is found and mounted ok. 

Now we run automatix and go get the missing stuff. However, we get some errors - unmet dependencies, it says apt-based error occured and installation was unsuccessful.

It suggests apt-get -f install so we open a terminal window and do sudo apt-get -f install and it installs some packages to fix the dependencies.

We rerun automatix.  Looks like it has trouble connecting to archive.ubuntu.com ....very slow.

Ok now it is running. We'll let it run for a while and then install the updates overnight.

Updates are finished and everything is working fine. I can browse the network can copy files to the laptop. I played a quicktime movie but the color was off. Downloaded VLC and played the movie and now it is fine. We see the wireless networks but cannot connect. Pings to the router do not do anything. 

We decide to install ndiswrapper. Once that is done with  open a terminal and do lspci and examine the output. We see the laptop has a broadcom bcm4309 wireless. So we search google for bcmwl5a.inf and download the file. We will also need BCMWL5.sys  which will need to be extracted on a windows machine. 

We did all this and before setting up the ndiswrapper we unplugged the wired connection and rebooted the machine and lo - the wireless worked.

I find the default touchpad setting way too sensitive - windows pop open and menu items are selected just by having your fingers on the touchpad. So we goto system, preferences, mouse and disable the Tap to Click and Vertical Scrolling options. Now we can control what gets selected.

Everything is now working - just some fine tuning of options (setting windows to windowshade), turning off auto-complete in OO etc but the machine is working well. This will now be my travel machine.

Ubuntu 8.03 on the Dell D400 Laptop

This post details the installation and configuration of Ubuntu 8.03 on a Dell Lattitude D400 compact notebook.

Hardware

Intel Pentium mobile cpu @ 1.8 ghz

BIOS ver A08

512 mb ram (upgrading to 1 gig) 266 mhz DDR

Toshiba MK4026 40gig hard disk

12" screen running at 1024x768

Dell wireless 1350 or 1450

Intel 855 chipset with sigmatel 9750 sound and onboard video and lan

Booted the CD and installed without a problem.

Working

Video - desktop effects are enabled

LAN - wired lan connection

Sound - works

WiFi - the Broadcom B43 wireless driver was installed but not sure if it is working

We goto system, administration, network and select the wireless connection. We enter our SSID and set the password type to WEP key (ascii) as it is an open network but when we click OK the setting reverts to WPA personal and no network seems to be picked up. So back to wired for now.

We go to Places, Network to see what shows up. The windows network is found but no shares are listed. Probably because the windows network client is not running or installed. So we run the synaptic package manager and search for SAMBA.

This seems a bit silly as if windows networks do not exist. Windows networking should be setup 'out of the box' to save the time of the user.

We choose to install gaambad - a gui configuration tool for samba, along with samba, nautilus share, and system-config-samba (another gui tool). Apply the changes.

Now when we browse the network we see the d400 in a workgroup, but not ours. So we need to change the samba settings. This can be done in terminal by cd to /etc/samba and using the command sudo pico smb.conf and editing the settings in the config file.

We decide to give the gui interface (gsambad) a try. We add our settings and apply. Of course to take effect samba has to be stopped and started and we did not install those utilities. Let's logout and see.

Now no machines show up in the windows network. And going into the terminal and trying to edit the smb.conf returns the error "unable to resolve host d400"

Interestingly the OSX 10.4 server shows up in the network list and we are able to login. This is not done using smb but sftp.

Also we notice an odd message in the top dock - "no value has been set" where it usually has the login name. Ok that is the user switcher. By right clicking on it we can choose edit personal information or edit users and groups or even setup the login screen. We choose user settings and select properties for my account. The reason for the message is now clear - when creating my account during the install i didn't bother to put in my real name. So we fix it and now it displays my name.

Let's restart. Ok the machine shuts down but does not power up. We pull the plug and remove the battery and power up once more.

No network joy here - no windows workgroups are displayed. We decide to remove gsamabad and the system-config-samba and reinstall the samba components.

However in the /etc/samba directory the smb.conf file is the one setup with gsambad and the original file is now smb.conf.cold.gsambad-0.1.9

Sudo still not working. So we go to the network settings control panel and change the network name and add in the domain. We logout for the settings to take effect.

Log back in but still sudo is not working, same error "unable to resolve host name". Also got a 'dbus error' when connecting to the osx server.

We decide to do a re-install tomorrow so we shut down for the evening.

Mandriva Linux Diary

This documents the use of other Linux distributions as a comparision to Ubuntu.

Hardware

• Compaq A550
• Dual PIII cpus @ 773ghz
• 1 gig RDRAM
• U160 scsi controller and 36gig drive
• Nividia 2 agp video card
• Intel onboard ethernet and sound
• DVD-ROM
• NEC 15” LCD

Installation

Booted the DVD and choose the language and accept the agreement and choose the erase entire disk and install option. It formatted the drive ok. The next step is a bit silly – it copies the disc to the hard drive and offers you the option – but since this is required why offer it?

Once the copying it done we get to choose the desktop environment so we choose Gnome (never liked KDE) and it says installation will take 30 minutes, just time for an episode of Family Guy.

Done! So now we set the root (administratror) password and create a user and install the boot loader. We choose the proprietary driver for our video card.

It detects the sound card (Intel 8280) and the network (Intel pro 100) and the video (Nvidia TNT Geforce) and the display (NEC LCD 1560V) but the resolution is set to 1024 x 768 which is not the native rez of the display so we change it to 1280x1024.

Ooops – i forgot the native rez of this panel is 1024x768 so will have to reset it after boot. Actually the system was smart enough to ignore my choice and to set the desktop at the right resolution for the panel.

Next we install the updates.

This seems a bit odd – it lists about a 1000 packages and you can select some but not others which have to be upgraded. It does off to install server type packages like Apache and mySQL as well as the GCC compiler, joomla cms and python. This whole process would be a little off putting to a new user. The package manager also is not very smart – in several cases it would not install a program because the dependencies were not installated when it should just mark the dependencies for intstallation. This may be because the underlying package format is rpm instead of deb. I think that Mandriva is a red hat deriative and not a debian deriative like Ubuntu.

Ok we are rebooted. We decline all the register and other nags and log in. One neat thing about the login screen is that the Session option offers a number of window managers such as Gnome, IceWm, evilwm, drak3d, etc. The Actions menu also allows you to run the XDMCP chooser which reminds me of the days when I used to log into red hat 4 or 5 using eXceed from my windows box. That was a useful thing.

Well the startup sound works and we were able to browse the windows network and connect to Motha and see the files. However, the window behavior is annoying, as you drill down the network it create separate windows – sort of like XP does and i do not like overlapping or tiled windows. We need to change this behavior in the window manager settings.

We made a screenshot and uploaded it to the web site. Firefox is not quite as nice looking as on Ubuntu – the fonts seem a little off.

We found the screen capture program in a different spot but the menus are fairly similar thanks to the Gnome desktop environment.

There are some different programs installed for example:

Skype for making phone calls over the internet

Nice to see it has pre-installed Sun Java and Adobe Reader

It has the open office suite but version 2.2.1 instead of 2.3

It also has Scribus – a desktop publishing tool and the Gimp and Inkscape a vector illustration package. There and menu items for installing Google Picassa and Google earth which is a nice touch. Google does not allow these programs to be part of a distribution so this is a good thing for new users. There are lots of audio/video programs.

We decide to install the updates and then later take a look at the package manager. After the install is all done we will pull the existing disk and put in a new one to test out the Novell SuSe commercial distribution.

First impression – not a bad looking desktop and well organized. The install is a bit more complex than Ubuntu which may throw off novices. For some, the ability for remote X servers to connect to the machine will be a useful thing in a secure network as well as the ability to select from a bunch of different window managers (i should install fluxbox). And the fact that Scribus works here but not well on Ubuntu is also a plus. However, the overall impression is of a less well polished and thought out product that Ubuntu and since you are still running Gnome and pretty much the same applications the hard question remains of why would you choose this over Ubuntu which has more developers, more users and a fixed release schedule?

I guess this is the crux of the problem – unless a distribution has a real niche such as runs on old hardware with <>

Installing Ubuntu on the Dell 1420 laptop

Hardware (using Gabriel Topala's excellent system info utility)

• Dell Inspiron 1420 model 0DT492

• Intel dual core 2 processor 1.5Ghz

• BIOS revision A07

• 4 gig ram
  

• 160 gig hd

• Intel X3100 graphics (intel mobile 965 express chipset)

• Intel pro/wireless 3945ABG

• Broadcom Fast Internet

• Sigmatel 9228 audio

The Dell was chosen because Dell sells a pre-installed Ubuntu laptop and provides online support at the Dell wiki at:

http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Wiki_Main_Page and the Dell blog at:

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archive/2007/12/19/38924.aspx

There is also an active discussion about this machine on the Ubuntu wiki at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam

Installation

The first task was to wipe the installed Vista OS from the drive. I booted from an XP cd but it could not find a hard disk. This is because the dell has SATA drives set up for Vista using some new Intel AHCI setting. I had to change the drive mode from SATA to IDE in the BIOS and to also disable the FLASH memory option (this is where Vista uses a USB stick as swap memory). XP now detected the hard drive and i wiped out all the Vista partitions and created an NTFS partition for windows.

XP was installed along with the usual applications. I also used xplite to remove all the windows crap i do not use and did not want like outlook, media player, msn, screen blankers etc. I had created a CD of XP drivers for the Dell. In particular we needed the Intel wireless driver, the broadcom fast ethernet driver and the Intel chipset and x3100 graphics drivers. Once everything was installed i used a partition tool to resize the NTFS volume and to create a 30 gig ext2 formatted partition. The hard drive image was then ghosted to an external HD and a bootable recovery disc was created.

We then downloaded the ubuntu 7.10 system restore dvd iso image from the Dell wiki along with a Dell 7.04 cd image and burned them to disc.

Insert the DVD and restart the computer.

This asks if you want the default Dell reinstallation system or to boot to the Live CD. We choose the live option as we are not sure if the reinstallation option will wipe out our existing partition table. By booting the live we can see if there is an install option.

Ubuntu boots with no problems. The usual install icon is present so we click it. The question is - does this install a generic version or the one with the Dell customizations?

When the partitioner runs it asks if we want to resize sda and use the free space. We want to use the existing ext2 partition we already created so we choose the Manual option. This allows us to select /dev/sda5 which is the 30gig partition we had already set up.

One problem is the touchpad is way to sensitive if you hover over an option while you thing about it then the option is automatically selected. This is very poor practice. Bad usability. It was impossible to use the menu system to change the touchpad properties as it kept executing menu choices faster than i could read and select a menu option. I had to plug in an external mouse just to be able to use the menus. It is in fact the fault of the default touchpad settings. Trying to be helpful but getting in the way. I did not install the Dell touchpad driver for XP just this reason. The XP driver does not have the fancy helpful features so it works like you expect - you have to click on an option to execute it.

With an external mouse connected i was able to continue the install. The problem with the manual install became clearer now that i had the time to read the messages with the next option executing. I have to set up a root partition and the swap partition manually as well but of course i did not leave space. So the best option is to let the installer resize the existing disk. I decide to go back and delete the ext2 partition i had set up and then restart the install.

We now choose Guided partitioning and to resize the hard disk to make a 35 gig partition. It detects that windows XP is installed on sda1 and offers to migrate documents and settings. Neat - it will bring over your firefox settings as well as wallpaper, music, pictures etc. It also asks you to create a user to import the selected info to. So we set up the same user and gave the computer the name of Barugon.

The install begins with formatting the partitions. When finished the system reboots and we log in as the user we set up earlier. We also see there are 205 updates available. We also see that desktop effects cannot be enabled which is an known issue with the Intel graphics.We also see that the intel pro/wireless restricted driver is in use. We turn to the Dell wiki and find:

Description: The PCI ID (8086:2a02) for the Intel 965GM video controller has been black-listed by the Compiz-Fusion Manager, because the 965GM chip doesn't support the necessary pieces for video to work without using EXA accelerated architecture, which Ubuntu 7.10 does not support.
Systems Affected: Inspiron 1420n, XPS M1330n, 1525n
Impact: Metacity will be used by default instead of Compiz-Fusion. Thus, 3D effects on the desktop can't be turned on.
Workaround: Edit the file (or create if does not already exist) /etc/xdg/compiz/compiz-manager and add the line:

SKIP_CHECKS="yes"

And restart the Gnome Display Manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del at the same time.

NOTE: Enabling Compiz Fusion on this video chipset will disable video playback.
Fix: None available. See LP141298.

We edit the file but can't save as we don't have permissions. So we open a terminal and cd to that directory and do sudo pico compiz-manager and issue our password, make the changes and save. Logout and log back in and now we can enable desktop effects.

The whole thing about the desktop effects reminds me of the Vista capable mess. I bought an laptop with a vista capable sticker although i was going to be running XP and really had no interest in Vista, but as a hedge against the future it couldn't hurt. When i discovered it could not run the Aero desktop effects i was quite annoyed and sold the machine, vowing never to purchase that brand again.

We restart and choose Windows from the menu. This launches the windows disk checking process as the disk had been resized. Windows runs and finds a new device (the changed disk) and so we reboot again.

Configuration

Now that the dual boot is working let's get the updates and then configure Ubuntu.

Rather than go thru all the steps we did for the desktop install we decided to use the Automatix installer from:

http://www.getautomatix.com/wiki/index.php?title=Installation#Ubuntu_7.10_.28Gutsy_i386.29

After it was installed we ran the program and choose pretty much everything except crossover office.

Printer Setup

System, Administration, Printing. We click on new printer and select windows printer via Samba and enter smb://gnickers which is the address of the OSX server. It allows us to browse and select the printers and then the vendor and model of the driver.

Adding a printer from work was no problem, i just picked up the IP address from the printer configuration page and added that and set the printer type.

File Sharing

This is turned off by default. We select the public folder in our home directory and right click. Select share from the menu and it notes that sharing services are not installed and offers a choice of NFS or Windows. We select windows. It installs the services. We can now browse and copy put files between the 2 ubuntu machines. However the public folder is not read only but i could not copy files to it from the other machine. I was able to copy some files from the desktop public folder to the laptop public folder so file permissions is important – they have to be set on a file by file basis, you just can't drop a file in public and make it automatically available.

Trackpad

Note: open office is unusable – we can outype it and the cursor jumps around randonmly.

In System, Preferences, Mouse, I unticked the touchpad preferences of tap to click, vertical and horizontal scrolling and set the motion sensitivity to low and increased the threshold. The touchpad can now be used without it zooming all over and doing things you do want. As an added bonus this has also fixed the cursor jumping problem in open office.

USB

Bought a kingston usb stick for this as the other one worked well with ubuntu. Recognized immediately and mounted on the desktop.

Ebook Readers

We installed the Adobe Acrobat reader with automatrix but we also need to read ebooks in the popular .chm format. We install gnochm.

Google

Google earth and picasa were installed with automatrix so we now downloaded and installed google desktop.

Video Playback

Although automatrix installed a number of multimedia options we like the VLC player on windows so we searched for it in the synaptics package manager and downloaded and installed it.

LCD/CRT

Hooked up an external LCD and powered on. The system came up and mirrored the display on both screens automatically. Very nice. I remember taking a week to get output to an external screen under redhat 5 or 6.

The external LCD a NEC 1560v provides an interesting comparision with the laptop display. The dell laptop lcd is very 'soft', text is kind of light blue in color from a straight angle, you have to tilt the lid way back to make it look blacker, but the NEC lcd has nice black text and a brighter screen as well as more contrast.

One problem: When doing a restart the external display was not functioning and Gnome noted an error. Turning off the computer and doing a cold boot solved the problem so the moral is to plug in the cable for the external display and then power up the computer.

Using a data projector in the classroom worked fine - just connect the cable before starting the laptop.

Display

Looking for some cool desktop effects we installed the Compiz configuration settings manager . The blurb in the package manager notes the OpenCompositing Project brings 3D desktop visual effects that improve usability of the X Window System and provide increased productivity. Once installed you can right click the desktop and select change desktop background, visual effects, custom.

Windows Network

The default windows workgroup name is MSHOME and we want to change this to our workgroup. So we open a terminal window and do:

gnickers@barugon:~$ cd /etc/samba
gnickers@barugon:/etc/samba$ sudo pico smb.conf
[sudo] password for gnickers:

Now we change the line to workgroup = @HOME and logout.

The public folder for the laptop is still not accepting files, not sure why. It was a permissions thing.

CD/DVD Burning

While Gnome supports simple cd/dvd writing we wanted a more flexible package so we selected system,administration,synaptic package manager and searched for and installed Brasero which allows you to create a data or audio cd, to copy a cd or dvd and to burn a disc from an image file.

3D Cube

Once the compiz-manager was installed went to system, preferences, advanced desktop effects. Under General Options, Desktop Size we set the horizonal slider to 4 and left the other sliders at 1. We then enabled all the cube plugins except gears and now we can switch workspaces using CTRL-ALT arrow key or CTRL-ALT-left mouse.

LAMP

It would be useful to have the convenience of a MAMP or WAMP package but these have to be installed separately. I tried tasksel on the desktop and managed to wipe out just about everything as it uninstalls the packages it didn't need and then crashed and refused to install what i just uninstalled leaving we with an usuable system. I was forced to do a new install of the os from cd.

Wireless

Campus network

It Picked up the uwo ssid on campus automatically.

Select System, Administration, Network

Choose the wireless connection

Change the Password Type to WEP Key (ASCII)

Run a web browser and enter your username and password and you're on.

Home Wireless

Clicked on wireless connection and choose properties. Selected the NICKERS ssid and it connected. Set the Password type and we were on the home network with internet access. A nice feature was it displayed all the wi-fi networks in range and there signal strength as a percentage.

Backup

We need to be able to backup the entire system to an external drive or network drive and to restore it from there after booting with a liveCD or doing a base install. We have an external usb hard drive partitioned into disk and disk1 each of 120gig. These are mounted on the desktop automatically when the external unit is plugged in.

We searched the package manager for sbackup and installed it. Two entries are added to the system, administration menu – Simple Backup Config and Simple Backup Restore. We try the config part first.

This offers the ability to back up over the network to another machine using SSH or FTP or to backup to the default directory which is /var/backup but there does not seem to be a way to backup to an external drive. Ok, now we see it – you have to goto /media folder and choose disk or disk1.

We also have to choose recommended backup, manual backup or custom backup. We choose custom. The problem here is it says to do backups according to the settings on the next page of this dialog, but there is no next page. We are underwhelmed by this program so decide to remove it,

We decide to try flexbackup. Flexbackup is a flexible backup tool that works well for small to medium v sized tasks. It features:

Homepage: http://www.edwinh.org/flexbackup/

The only problem here is finding the program – the install routine does not add any entries to the menu. It turns out to only have a command line interface and the settings are in a config file.

We install partimage but again this is a command line and no menu item is installed. It also cannot backup mounted systems so you have to boot to the liveCD and then run the command sudo partimage.

So we look for DAR and Kdar. However, the gui part of the program uses KDE and we are using Gnome.

It has been said that Norton ghost will backup linux paritions including the GRUB bootloader which we need as we are using a dual boot setup. So we test this out by booting the desktop with a ghost 11 CD. Looks like it will make a sector by sector copy of the hd including the boot sector. You can also copy paritions to optical, other hard drives or across the network.

We reboot after the cloning and mount the external drive and see the 73gig windows NTFS partition but not the linux partitions. So we install gparted, the gnome partition manager to take a look at the external drive. So where is the menu item? - System, Administration, partition editor. We see /dev/sda1 which is the windows NTFS partition on the laptop drive and /dev/sda2 which is the linux primary parition and /dev/sda5 which is the linus swap parition. Device SDA is the laptop hard drive. Selecting Devices from the menu shows us the USB stick is /dev/sdc and the external hard disk is /dev/sdb which we select. On SDB we see all the file systems including /dev/sdb1 which is the NTFS partition and the linux partitions and the 15mb of unallocated space. BTW the USB stick is formatted as FAT16.

Movies

The quicktime movies do not play. I cannot remember if they played before but i checked them on the ubuntu desktop and they play fine. Also, if i play a quicktime movie thru the web browser the audio plays but not the video. Probably a codec problem but the w32codec package is installed.

I decide to install the gstreamer and gxine packages. GStreamer is a streaming media framework, based on graphs of filters which operate on media data. Applications using this library can do anything from real-time sound processing to playing videos, and just about anything else media-related. Problem is it did not work – the QT videos still exit when run locally. Let's try automatix.

We choose to uninstall the mplayer plugin for firefox and the restricted multimedia codecs and the w32 codecs. Then we will re-install them. Did not work so we look for a quicktime plugin for firefox.

But all the plugins are already installed. You can see what is installed by opening firefox, go to Edit-->Preferences-->Content and manage file types. Here you can see, which plugins are installed at the moment.

I opened a terminal and did sudo apt-get remove mplayer mozilla-mplayer and then did apt-get install mplayer mozilla-mplayer to reinstall and restarted firefox.

A blank square with 'no video' is displayed and there is now no audio. So we decide to install firefox 3 to see if that helps. No joy as it has no plugins so offers to open the QT video locally and the same problem occurs – the video exits in mplayer. So quicktime is not working on the laptop.

But the mplayer plug-in and mplayer works fine on the desktop which is a fresh install of ubuntu 7.10 with automatix updates. So something on the laptop is broken when it comes to QT.

Today we decide to remove all the proprietary codecs from the machine. That is what seems to be the problem. The idea is to remove and then re-install because the quicktime video works on the other ubuntu machines. So something broke it.

We go to the package manager and mark for reinstallation the ubuntu-restricted -modules. No change. We now run automatix and on the uninstall tab and uninstall the codecs and plugins. The restricted codecs cannot be uninstalled as some packages depend on them so we return to the package manager and uninstall from there. We go back to automatix but the same error so we decide to remove the multimedia packages too. Remove and install and still quicktime is not working. It's a mystery.

Mystery Solved! (May 29)

We discovered the the advanced desktop effects - the compiz 'cube' has the unintended side effect of disabling movie playback. When we set the desktop effects back to none then quicktime movies played with no problem.