Recently in Linux Category

A bit ago I got an almost-free computer from work with a couple of parts I wanted to upgrade my home system, bumping the CPU a bit and replacing the video card that goes WRRRAAAAAAWWWRRRRRRR-ER-ER-ER WRRRRRAAAAAWWWWRRRR with something a little quieter. Last night I finally got around to switching the parts, and found a couple of issues moving from the nVidia TI-4200 video card to an ATI Radeon 9250, so I figured I'd document it as an excuse to get something on this page so it doesn't completely stagnate.

First of all, I did it completely wrong, and simply shut down the system, swapped the video cards and booted it up. The graphics, which were configured for the nVidia card completely failed when booting up, giving me just a flashing console as it tried to run X11 with a driver for a card that wasn't installed at all.

I was lucky and had a computer next to me that I could ssh into the linux system and do maintenance remotely, however if you don't have this, read this to find out how to edit the GRUB config on boot to enter single user mode.

To recover the video, the first step was to remove that customization from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I have no idea why I had device specific configuration in there, as the last couple of Ubuntu releases have required only a skeleton file and will figure out your video cards for you. So the section I had at the bottom which looked like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

was removed.

Next I removed the nvidia packages I had installed:

$ dpkg -l | grep nvidia | grep ii
[list of packages, for me they were the "173" version, you might have different ones]
$ sudo apt-get remove nvidia-settings nvidia-glx-173 nvidia-common nvidia-173-kernel-source


And then install the non-free, evil, binary only packages for the ATI drivers (in theory I could have rebooted, let the system boot up with the default video drivers and install the restricted drivers from the 'hardware' application under the system configuration menu).


$ sudo apt-get install fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx


Packages install, reboot, and voila, the system should boot up as normal.

The short answer is to look here for the instructions that finally made it all work for me. After a little "mishap" with my addressbook a few days ago (helpfully synced, empty to the net and to my phone, so nowhere had a backup) I finally figured that checking out the much touted "Time Machine" backup software from apple probably would be a good idea.

Course, being that I use my laptop 99% of the time on my lap on the couch, having a external hard drive connected would kinda suck. Also I'm not paying the apple tax to get the Time Capsule hardware when I have a plethora of unused external disks here.

So what I did:

• First step was get one, plug a 500G disk into my linux workstation.
  
• Format it as ext3 and mount it in a safe place
  
  
  
  • Find the disk's UUID
    
  • Put it in /etc/fstab
    
  
  
• Make it a share in Samba
  
• Mount it under leopard and make sure it automounts.
  
• Follow the instructions here to tell Leopard to allow unsupported mounts (the defaults write... command) and test.
  
• In my case it failed, and I got the "backup disk could not be created" error, so I followed the rest of the instructions to create the sparse image and copy it to the samba share.
  
• Test again, correct typeos.
  
• Run the Time Machine config to select the share. Wait for the long 'processing' to finish.
  
• Success!
  
• Run backup.
  

First of all, I love Linux. I discovered it in 1994(ish) right around the time that kernel 1.0 was just about to come out. The fact it was a home brew system, that it was a rebellious band of freedom fighters coming together as a community to create something great, and that anyone could contribute with ease all tickled my heart.

One of the great things about linux is that there is a real feeling that the community actually listens. I have no idea how you'd submit a bug to Microsoft or Apple, I really don't. I don't know if I need to be an MVP, an Gold level partner, a ACG (Apple Certified Genius(tm)(r)(c)) (actually I just totally made that up), or what. With Linux distros, desktops and major (and minor) projects there's generally a way to submit bugs or get support via bug tracking sofware of some sort, and more often than not you get a response. You can even submit suggestions and there is a good chance that it will actually get implemented or fixed (I believe a bug I reported to the Mozilla browser got fixed, go me!).

However there are now three bugs that I've reported and recently got updates about that pissed me off a bit.

[Bug 145524] Show emblems from Nautilus

In the main file manager for GNOME there is some inconsistancy with the "emblems" you can apply to folder icons... seems like a simple fix to me, but I'm not a GTK coder. The only real activity this has gotten over the last 4 years is people agreeing with me that it's a bug, showing examples of it, asking about the status, doing the classic OSAM (Open Source Asshole Move... I totally just made that up too) of "well you write a patch then!"

[Bug 85973] no drop down box for "find" in groups

This is another simple (to me anyway) omission when Pan (my newsreader of choice) got rewritten from the GTK 1.x to GTK 2.x toolkits. Basically the whole thing was re-written and a few minor details were missed. No biggie I guess. Except that in six (6) years this hasn't been done. It was re-prioritized around 2004, a suggestion made in 2006, and then in 2008 the commenter from 2006 was reproached for the way they did a OSAM.

[Bug 123796] hiding a panel with dual monitor moves panel to other monitor

This was an issue I got probably around the time I first got a dual monitor setup in 2003, 5 years ago, with an easily reproducible issue regarding panels and dual monitor setups. The only activity it's gotten in 5 years is people reporting that it's still happening.

These are the sort of things that turn people off to FLOSS and the community, which is sad. If you're not a coder with a good knowledge of the guts of the system the main ways you can contribute is to write documentation and report bugs, and people asking "how can I help" are constantly told this. But when those contributions are ignored for months and years, well, why bother? To put things in perspective, the last bug was reported on GNOME 2.4, the current version is 2.22, that's 9 releases (assuming that they did actually go all the way from 2.4, 2.6, 2.8 .. 2.22).

From the developer perspective of course, I'm sure it's tough dealing with an army of demanding whiners complaining that some incidental bug on some hardware or software set up that you may not have complaining that you're not fixing at the same time as you have a day job and put out software in your spare time for free, and not doing anything to help you along other than mention that it's still not fixed.... still not fixed.... still not fixed.....

Course, at least I don't have to pay Microsoft $99 per incident to be told it's not a bug, it's a feature, and it's my fault anyway. Well, that's how I imagine it is anyway. A search for "How to report a bug to microsoft" has the top results either dead links (requiring me to login with a live.com / hotmail.com email address), outdated information or articles saying how it's impossible to submit a bug to Microsoft. Submitting a search for "report a bug" from the front page of Microsoft.com crashes Firefox!!!

I don't know if it's better to not be able to report bugs, or report them and have them ignored... :)

[Bug 113556] META Refresh does not update back history as expected

This is the oldest bug in the list, one I reported to mozilla in 2001... looks like mozilla is doing a big bug-triage and this bug is being shuffled around.

As I said I just got an iPod, so now I have to deal with managing the music for it in my particular situation. I have the following going on at home right now:

• A fileserver with approximately 140G of mp3s all nicely tagged via MusicBrainz's tools and organized nicely into directories (ie: music player independant). All music is stored there.
  
• Laptop from work. "Daily" music is stored here, podcasts are downloaded for playing at work, and when I download my radio show during the day at work, I load it onto my mp3 player from here.
  
• Windows workstation with headphones. Minimal music management is done here, this is a gaming and accounting box.
  
• Linux workstation, hooked up to speakers. Music playing is done here, music management (basically rating songs and creating playlists) is done in Rhythmbox. No podcasts here.
  

Anyway, music management on the iPod is supposed to be done through iTunes which is a nice application, however it has a few downfalls.

You can only sync your iPod on one computer.

Bah. Unless there's a trick around it, when you sync an iPod to a computer, and then take it to another one and try to sync it, it tells you the device is new and anything on it will be nuked off. Say if I were to sync music for the gym on it at home, then try to put the radio show or something new on it at work. No fun at all.

Except that the new iPods don't work under Linux thanks to Apple encrypting stuff. It's already been broken, but hasn't made it's way into any released products.

What I was hoping to do was to sync things like my radio show and podcasts via the laptop, and load up the music under Linux. Looks like that won't work, at least for now :(

My solution in the meantime....

I'm copying 141G of music onto my work laptop, in the theory that it moves from work to home and back. Inconvenient however as I don't want to have to pull out the laptop each time I add some new music. Of course, the laptop doesn't have that big a hard drive, so I'm mounting it on the laptop and adding all the music in it to the iTunes library. So in theory it'll just show up as "can't find file" when I'm not at home.

This will let me get everything I need, for now. I'm hoping that I can, in theory, manage songs via Linux when I get there.

Anyone have better ideas? It comes down to:

• Can't sync an iPod on more than one computer with iTunes.
  
• iTunes doesn't run (well) on Linux (last time I checked) and isn't what I want to use under Linux anyway.
  
• Can't manage an iPod from Linux
  

Anyone have anything similar? Any better ideas?

Just so my bitching isn't restricted to Microsoft, today a fair chunk of time fixing the Arcterex.net webserver after the latest version of Apache that is in the Gentoo repository. Version 2.0 has been installed and working fine for a while, but the config layout seemed to change and a bunch of things moved. Generally I try to not change config files that don't need to be replaced if I can avoid it, less chance of messing up an existing config. However, it seems that the new install didn't like that, and it was only after lots of mucking around (and many times thinking "man, I should downgrade to 2.0") I finally realized that I basically had to blow away all the old configs (the new default server layout had changed) and leave only my own virtual host settings before it would finally work. Bleah. I keep on wanting to switch to Ubuntu (still) but just can't bring myself to undo all the tweaking and setup I've done. However, when the server is upgraded with gobs of more disk space (1TB drives are getting cheaper all the time) I will move over to something a little less volatile :)

Long time no blog. Feeling a bit down lately, busyness, stress, life, work etc all sucking, so I've been pretty quiet. A nice change from that was Saturday myself, Dana, Wim and Tammie and Clayten went down to Linuxfest Northwest, the yearly geek fest down in Bellingham. Definitely not a place for non-geeks though... there was lots of heavy heavy geeking out going on :)

We were a bit late getting down there due to border traffic, so I missed the Xen presentation given by Reverend Ted. I chose to be a complete bastard and not go to Dana's presentation on strong authentication, and instead went to the Production Grade Scripting by Brian Martin. Quite a good presentation, though the first half was a bit slow. I was impressed with the way he set up his scripts and how output was filtered, and the shell of the script has all the fun stuff already set up to go.

Next on the list was OpenID which was kinda meh. Lots of interesting discussion about security afterwards, but since OpenID is still relatively new, and hasn't really found it's place in the world, it's sort of hard to address what it does right and wrong when no one really knows where it's going or what it's trying to do (or rather, where it should be going).

Last and best IMHO was Stuart from Real networks talking about scaling web services, especially in relation to their Rhapsody online music service. Stuart was a really good speaker, no powerpoint, just him talking passionately about what he does, lots of joking and very high energy, moving from hyperbole to reality and then back to hyperbole again. A few things gleamed from the talk was:

• "The same is better than better." - IE: having a computer that is the same as the rest of the computers in the data center is much better than having one or two that are tweaked, or different in anyway. Obviously exceptions are going to happen, but if you're rolling out 30 webservers, do you want them to be built automagically from script / PXE all exactly the same, or each one built by someone different with a slightly different configuration?
  
• "A reactive sysadmin is better than a contemplative sysadmin." - IE: Someone who has lower knowledge / training but who knows that when condition X happens hit button Y is better to have than someone who sits with his feet on the desk wondering why condition X happened....
  
• "Document startup and shutdown procedures." - Everyone needs to know how to take down a server, what it will affect, and what else needs to be done before after to it or other systems... nothing sucks more than "ooops, so that was tied into that system!" :)
  
• "Documentation sucks!" - Both hyperbole and truth. It's written for the wrong reasons for the wrong people by the wrong people.
  
• "People are idiots. You are an idiot." - Ain't that the truth! And knowing that, make sure that everything is scriptable so that you don't have to rely on anyone knowing anything other than "hit this button when that happens".
  
• "Script everything!" - Similar to the ideas of Extreme Programming, where devs just need to hit a button and get a "everything ok" or "something wrong" indication. Since everyone is an idiot, no one should ever log into a server and type anything, and if they do it should be a script. I assume that at Real they have scripts run from web pages or something. Obviously way more important in larger scale installations of course.
  
• Testing environments suck. - IE: you can spend $15m on a complete duplicate of your web service, but is it worth it? Basically all testing environments suck, and it sounds like at Real they basically poke at it and say "yup, it should work ok....", then swap from test environment to production, and swap back the second that anything goes wrong.
  
• ... much more....
  

We also ran into a guy from the One Laptop Per Child project with a real OLPC laptop. Looked like a fisher price toy (or like the original iBook), but was super cool. Semi-sucky hardware (128mb ram, 100mb flash disk, geod processor) but it also has some neat stuff. High resolution screen, built in camera, wifi (with cute little ears) and the display has a black and white mode that is actually more readable the brighter it is outside (ie: you can use your laptop outside in the sun). It's also running a stock (ish) fedora Linux distro, so you can even play around with it if you don't have the hardware (which hardly anyone does) via LiveCD. It also sounds like the price will be about $175 USD, which is pretty cheap for a cool toy to play around with and hack on. There was a rumor that there was a "buy 2, get 1" deal where you pay for two OLPCs, got one and the other goes to someone who needs it, but that's just a rumor.

Other than that the day was pretty uneventful. Other than a mishap driving home (apparently if you keep going north on the I-5 you don't get to the 264th border crossing :) it was all home and I was back for a yummy dinner cooked by my loverly lady.

Well, it's the time of year again for Linux Northwest and Novell Linux's Reverend Ted will be there doing a Xen presentation. Any of the Linux crowd from this end of the woods (you know who you are) want to carpool down again?

I played with Ubuntu Linux a few days ago and reported that it went on slick and easy and was nice and stable, and I was considering replacing my desktop system with it. Well, in a fit of boredom this weekend I decided to do just that. Because I'm sane, and have had "oops" moments before I decided to do it on a totally separate hard drive so if something did go wrong I could revert back and still get work done. I didn't have any standard hard drives sitting around, so I decided to install the three 18G super-fast SCSI drives I still had from the old UFies.org system. I later found I also had a couple of 40G IDE drives, but leaving those 15,000 RPM drives and adapter just sitting in my closet seemed like such a crime.

Decided to throw Feisty Fawn, codename for the latest Ubuntu onto the second hard drive on my main windows box today, just to shake things up.

System specs are as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU (2.40Ghz)
  
• 2G DDR2
  
• nVidia GT7950
  
• 2x 320G SATA Hard Drive
  

The system is my windows Photoshop / Gaming box, with dual hard drives, one of which has never been used. So I disconnected the one that was plugged into the Windows drive and rebooted...

Booted up fine, but there were a couple of moments of "WTF?" when nothing happened, or my monitor went into powersaving mode. I had to hit CTRL-ALT-F1 and then ALT-F7 to get back into the graphical environment. Or think I did anyway, not sure if I was just impatient.

Since it's a clean box, I just hit the 'install' icon and let 'er go. Simple install, language, keyboard, my name and the name of the computer, then the partitioner (all of which I used defaults) and then off it went. Full install took about 20 minutes, all of which time it's still in the Live CD environment, so I played games while waiting. When it was done I hit the 'Reboot' button and was thrown into the new environment.

I have to say, bootup was pretty sexy, at least compared to what I'm used to with mainly servers, and fast. Either this computer is lightyears better than my other Linux box, or Ubuntu has really got some super-optimizations in their bootup system. I went from GRUB to GDM login screen in only a few seconds. Had the same issue as I had with the Live CD as far as having to go to the console and then back to ALT-F7 to get to the graphical environment. Odd.

Honestly, the only real reason I was doing this was to play with the cool eye candy stuff. I followed the Beryl Install which has their "three click" method (which worked perfectly) and was up with super-sexy desktop eye candy in about 5 minutes. Sweet! Much more stable than under my Gentoo setup as well.

The new additions to the Movie Player to allow it to download codecs on demand is cool too. Basically it's just a frontend into the package manager to allow the system to search for what's needed and then tell the system package manager to install it. Very slick. Only sucky part is that if you have another package manager going at the same time it bails out (understandably) and then you have to close the movie player and start again. Not a big deal though, and it works perfectly.

The one thing I was a bit disappointed with was the lack of widescreen support. My monitor does 1650x1080 native resolution, and it took a bit of fiddling to get it to work. Not much, but it was more than the rest of the system.

And that was about it. I had accomplished what I wanted (so far) and plugged in my windows hard drive to continue on with a day of coding and gaming. Now my next step is to see if I want to replace my current gentoo desktop with Ubuntu, and what I need to do to do this (as in special setup, backing up the systems, etc).

Slashdot brought up a story called Gentoo On Server Considered Harmful, a note on a blog entry by Cuzimatter on his experiences, both good and bad, with Gentoo Linux. One of his assertions was that Gentoo was too risky for servers:

The best way to keep a system stable is to get it working and then not changing anything. This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge.

A day after a rebuttal came out :)

Jumping Ship
Anyway, this is about me, so here's my story. I've been running Gentoo on my Linux Desktop since 2002 when it first crept onto the scene. The attraction to me at the time (over Debian) was that it was far easier to manage as far as different software versions, USE flags, and being able to go back to previous versions if something went wrong. Also, at the time anyway, the Debian version scheme of stable (2 years out of date software), testing (not as often updated with fixes) and unstable (bleeding edge, sometimes b0rks things for no reason) had bit me a couple of times too often.

So I jumped.

I updated my desktop machine first though, partially because at the time it was the first distro with the new GNOME (or maybe KDE) desktop available on the day of release, and you could install it all by simply typing "emerge kde" as root. Anyway, that was more attractive at the time than dealing with finding sources lists, incompatible versions, one guys archive of .debs conflicting with another, etc. Nowhere near the mess of RPM based distros (IMHO), but for folks who wanted to get the latest and greatest.

Using Gentoo on the desktop made me like it even more, so when I redid my main server in 2006, I decided to go with what I knew, and installed Gentoo on it.

Getting Bit
As the original article states, Gentoo's philosophy is to update everything, so it's very possible that an update to package "D" will have dependancies on "C", "B" and "A", and you may not want to update "A". When you do a full system update it's possible that the packages you don't want updated will be mixed up in the list of files that are going to be updated and you may end up sitting there not long after with a brand new version of MySQL or "PostgreSQL" that you weren't expecting. This happened to me not that long ago when I updated without paying attention.

The opposite of the "update everything" philosophy is that you don't have to, you can just update specific packages. The issue with this of course is because Gentoo is all compiled packages, updating, say, "libdb" to a brand new version could render many programs unrunnable. Sometimes this can go unnoticed for a while because when linux loads programs it loads the libraries into memory (or something like that) so that a running program (or it's dependant libraries) can be replaced unnoticed while it continues to happily run.

Until of course you restart the service and find that it fails to start up with a "missing library" error. This has happened to me too.

I have always been very careful with updating updated configuration files "etc-update", so while I see the issue with the potential of overwriting your carefully crafted configuration files, I haven't been hit with it yet.

So Why Update?
Why is this an issue of course? Well, Gentoo is supposed to be bleeding edge so there are updates constantly. This is great for people who have their desktop environments compiled out of CVS and who have to have the absolute latest, but this isn't good for servers. Servers really should only be updated for major security issues or hardware updates, not at a constant rate. Again, fantastic for those jonesing for the latest Tomboy release, not good for the datacenter with lots of users.

To Gentoo or Not to Gentoo?
Would I do it again? Good question.

On the desktop I think it's great. Issues can be fixed easily enough if you know what you're doing (a requirement it seems of using the distro), and if you're down for a day recompiling X and all of GNOME to get the new stuff that day or cause someone decided to update a library that forced everything else to be updated isn't the end of the world. It sucks, but if you can live with that to be on the bleeding edge, more power to you. Heck, that's why I'm there.

On the server, probably not. I've matured in the last 4 years of so as a sysadmin, and understand the value in not screwing with what works. I'm also working as a sysadmin right now in a prominently Debian shop, so I'm learning some of the tricks that I didn't know when I was using Debian ages ago. My original complaint still holds though, there's lots of way outdated packages in Debian, and RPM still sucks :)

Debian stable is probably how I'd go these days and just live without some of the new wizbang stuff, most of which is for the desktop anyway. Stability is key I'm learning, and now that I'm getting more and more people on the server, I'm appreciating that all the more. Question of course is how the heck to move back now :)