Fort Wayne LUG Blogs

I’ve been wanting a netbook ever since Rob brought his eee to a meeting last winter. The netbooks have a lot of what I consider desirable in a laptop – small, light, and (at least now) long battery life.
My favorite laptop of all time was a Sharp MM10, which was just over three pounds with the extra large battery, razor thin, tiny, and would run forever on a charge. Sure, the keyboard was a bit tiny, but I could adapt to that. Since I carry my laptop with me every day and on every trip I make, it’s the weight and battery that matter most.
So after switching to a Lenovo X-60 tablet when was working on my first book project, I was planning to get a netbook by January. The tablet was nice enough, but I really don’t usually need the tablet functionality and it was significantly heavier than its predecessor, a Dell X1 (my second favorite laptop ever).
That was the plan until I happened to re-read a post by my old friend (and former FWLUG member) Nathan Yergler about how he decided to rejuvenate his MacBook rather than buy a new laptop. Nathan’s always enjoyed getting new hardware, so this got my attention – if he could do better by refurbing what he already had, maybe I could, too.
So instead of moving forward, I went a step backward. I took out the old X1. It was pretty small – about  11″ x 7.5″ x 1″ – it was fanless, had wifi and bluetooth, CF and SD slots… Hmmmm… Even better, it had a 1280×768 display, a 1.2 centrino CPU, and the ability to hold 2 GB of ram (many sites say it’s only 1.25 GB, but in fact, if you put a 2GB stick in the additional memory slot, it recognizes it just fine.
So I thought all I’d have to do was replace the drive with a SSD, and upgrade the RAM, and I’d have an uber-netbook. It sounded so simple. And I even found several posts on line that suggested that yes, that was all it took.
Of course, things are never that easy. The X1 takes a 1.8 inch disk drive, with a micro IDE interface. Fortunately I found a place, Rocket Disk, that had a blisteringly fast 8GB SSD in that size for only 149$. I ordered it and a 2 GB memory stick from TigerDirect and sat back to wait. Of course the RAM arrived in a couple of days and worked fine – I now had 2GB, up from the 512MB that I was used to. Then things started to get interesting.
On the very day that the SSD was scheduled to arrive, I was giving a presentation on Linux Shell Scripting at the Hoosier Educational Computer Coordinators Conference. Since I’d already transitioned back to the X1 as my laptop, I had my presentation ready and examples set up on it. Then, when I went into the presentation room right after lunch to present, the old hard drive died. And I mean died so spectularly that the machine wasn’t even booting – as it started to load, it would apparently check the devices and that drive was so messed up it hung up the boot process for a good 10-15 minutes.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere I managed to borrow a machine to give my presentation, and I was relieved when I got home to find my new shiny SSD had arrived. That’s when I discovered that the SSD was a ZIF device, not a micro-IDE. Ooops…
I spent the evening looking for options and discovered that adapters existed that would apparently solve my problem. The only issue was that they all seemed to be in Hongkong. The story of ordering those I’ll save for another day, but suffice it to say that the boat from Hongkong is a slow one – I’m still waiting on those parts.
In the meantime, I booted with a live Intrepid Ibex CD and used the “Create a USB startup disk” option from the system menu to turn a 4GB usb stick into my main hard drive. It takes forever to boot, but it uses an overlay filesystem to allow file storage (including adding packages) on the system without hassles.
So my uber-netbook is up and running – with a weird appendage sticking out the side, but up and running. I’ll report the rest when my parts start showing up.

If anyone is listening, I thought I’d go back to putting a little summary of meetings up here. If I get a chance, I’ll also post some other notes on various projects. And if anyone wants post things on this blog, let me know and I’ll set you up with a username.

The November presentation was by Andrew Latham. Andrew is a consult and the owner and principal of TuxTone, Inc, in Warsaw, and he has enormous experience in digital telephony. He is a co-author or O’Reilly’s VoIP Hacks and the coming Asterisk Cookbook. He’s also a great Linux/FLOSS advocate, to the point that I’ve never seen him not wearing a polo shirt with Tux on it.

Andrew started with a quick run through the history of telephony and the development of VoIP. Following that  he discussed some of the current phones and equipment (he brought literally buckets of toys) and discussed the options one might have in experimenting with VoIP at home.

Andrew suggested that beginners should start out creating a digital answering machine, which gives an opportunity to experiment with managing calls, etc. He also mentioned services like grandcentral.com, which offer ways to connect and manage phone accounts without necessarily going through a phone company.

Andrew also walked through a simple (and amazingly easy) install and set-up of Asterisk, and then discussed various questions.

Thanks to Andrew for a hugely informative session. His notes on Asterisk are at http://tuxtone.com/index.php?title=OSS:Asterisk

Newcomer Simón Ruiz gave a detailed presentation on the new (and old) features of Ubuntu’s latest release, 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Simón did a great job, managing to come up with features that surprised (and pleased) both Ubuntu newbies and veterans. I particularly liked the Disk Analyzer, which has already helped me recover several gigabytes of wasted storage on various disks.

After the main presentation, about 6 members stayed behind to talk about our options for holding a LinuxFest in Fort Wayne. The consensus was that pulling things together for a major event in conjunction with this year’s Three Rivers Festival would be next to impossible. In fact, the feeling was that a major event would need to wait until next year.

On the other hand, the alternative of having a more installation/troubleshooting event, like our previous InstallFests, was put forward as something we could accomplish in the nearer term. The suggestion was to see if this could be held in the library, perhaps sometime in October.

One final note, Canterbury will be under construction and will not be available for meetings until August. The consensus was that we will have social meetings (without presentations) at Mad Anthony’s for June and July.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Rob and Ben lead us through the halls of Canterbury High School demonstrating the mesh networking capabilities of the Linksys WRT-54G routers, AFTER they had been re-flashed with the free, open source, and totally cool dd-wrt software. If you have wifi at home and want more control and features on your router, talk to Ben or Rob about the capabilities of this combination – it’s truly impressive.

In other developments, we decided to share the joy of LUG management at bit more. Rob Ludwick will be leading the charge to co-ordinate presentations at meetings, James Scott will be looking into the issues involved with putting on a larger LinuxFest, and several people expressed interest in helping with those and other functions.

The star of the November meeting was Ben Dailey who presented a detailed introduction to QEMU, an open source emulator that can emulate several different processors and architectures.

Ben followed his detailed talk with several demos, including time trials in booting Damn Small Linux on both VMWare and QEMU. VMWare won 38 seconds to 57, not bad for a free product that is largely the work of just 2 men.

Rob also mentioned that he was hosting the LUG Christmas party at his house. The date will be Dec. 14 (the second Thursday of the month, not the usual third Thursday). More information will be sent out to the mailing list, but save the date.

How bad can it be? That was my thought as I started my upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu on Friday.

The answer is, “not that bad, but not that good, either.” If your not familiar with the Debian way of upgrading from one version to the next, let me explain. First, you change the distro name in the list of source repositories (from “dapper” to “edgy” in this case), then you refresh the package lists, then you run “apt-get dist-upgrade” (or its equivalent) and go out for coffee. When you return, you magically have an upgraded machine.

Or so they say – I’ve never quite gotten the first 3 steps to add up the that perfect result, except on installs so bare that it would have been easier to just re-install the whole system.

Anyway, my first attempt here at school hung during the package downloads, probably because of all the traffic on the mirrors from other eager upgraders, so I had to wait until the evening to have a stab at home.

As usual, the magic of dist-upgrade hit a minor snag – the two versions of pythoncard had similar version numbers, so apt-get got confused, one of those must remove, can’t remove, must remove, can’t remove… problems that had to fixed by using ‘dpkg -r python24-pythoncard’ to explicitly remove the old package. It seems like I always hit at least one of those. When I finally got back to the upgrade at school it was python-docutils that had that same problem.

On my Dell X1 laptop, I had a more serious problem. It needs the 915 library to use the wide screen, and that apparently upgraded just fine. The problem was that for some reason it failed to correctly update all of the xorg packages so I was left at the shell prompt. A resinstall of the xserver-xorg main packages fixed that, leaving me with just one annoying problem.

Emacs. On my laptop the fonts for emacs are broken, displaying the familiar little “I dunno how to make that character” boxes almost everywhere. And emacs segfaults whenever I try to go to the font configuration menus. Sigh.

Our October meeting main talk was Christer Watson talking about FOSS in science, particulary astronomy. It was a good talk, covering both practical and philosophical reasons open source and science go together, as well as featuring cool graphics and the entertaining story of APES++ (did I get that right?), a software project gone horribly wrong.

Charlie Turner had a great story of his trip to Columbus for the Ohio Linuxfest, and how his beard might end up in the unix beard hall of fame. It sounds like a great event (Linuxfest, that is) – we need more representation next year.

Coming up we have a possible presentation on QEMU by newcomer Ben Dailey in November, a Christmas party at Rob’s or Munchies in December, and talks on Ruby and Backups with Subversion on tap for next year.

One of the problems of the Fedora world is that you get a box installed and a few months later you have to immediately upgade it. And upgrading can be a pain especially with yum and non standard repo configurations.

So I was more than exuberant when Ubuntu came with Long Term Support. I could apt-get myself for the next 5 years without a problem, and then upgrade my distribution when I get around to it, not when I’m forced into it the way Fedora does support.

One thing about Fedora that I don’t quite understand is the transferring of support to Fedora Legacy. Why not just roll up the supporters in Fedora Legacy into Fedora?

That said, there are a few things were fedora does some things right.

Fedora believes in shipping packages with a working configuration. It’s up to you to turn them on during startup using chkconfig.

Ubuntu believes in shipping packages with a not-necessarily working configuration, you have to hunt through the config files to figure out what line to uncomment to get a working distribution and it varies from package to package.

NTP for instance, one just needs to modify /etc/ntp.conf. SASL requires you to modify /etc/default/saslauthd, etc.
I think both Ubuntu and Fedora are trying to be “Secure By Default”. I think Fedora does it better though.

I haven’t found a way in ubuntu to save off your IPTables configuration. Fedora has “/etc/init.d/iptables save”. Fedora then reloads it before brining up the interfaces. FIOS needs the line that clamps TCP to a smaller MSS since my FIOS has a smaller MTU than ethernet.

Also Ubuntu shipped with a broken sendmail. Yes yes yes, I know I should be on postfix, but I have a working sendmail config and I don’t want to muck with it. /var/spool/mqueue had the wrong permissions, and the /etc/mail/Makefile system is broken.

I read somewhere that Ubuntu server is the server “done right.” Nope. Not yet.

I thought for the good of the order I would start publishing a few notes from each meeting. This is NOT meant to be a complete record, and no, I’m NOT volunteering to keep minutes. (But if someone wants to, I would be happy to support them!)

Our September 21 meeting featured a presentation by James Scott on real time (both “soft” and “hard”) Linux and it’s application in embedded systems. As in his other presentations, there was a great depth of study, wealth of detail and an infectious excitement with the subject. Well done, James!

The main resources James mentioned in his talk can be tracked down from http://free-electrons.com/articles

We also briefly touched on the Ohio LinuxFest Sept. 30 in Columbus, OH. Charlie Turner is going – he is one of the 2466 registrants for an event where they were expecting 1000! Charlie promises to report on the event next month.

Speaking of LinuxFest, in August we decided to look for a date in February or March for our LinuxFest. If anyone has any suggestions for dates or alternate venues, please let us know. Right now, Canterbury looks fairly open at that time, but we’ve done it here three times now, so some variety wouldn’t hurt.

Next Month’s Meeting

Christer Watson has offered to talk about Linux and open source in science and research. I hope to see you then.

Cheers,

Vern

Over the summer I spent a couple of weeks stuck in the hopeless pit of despair that is Linux/Palm synchronization. Sure, I know that some of it works most of the time, and a small fraction works all of the time, but a lot of things don’t work much at all. But I’m not going to talk about that.

For some reason, probably that I hadn’t had enough frustration, after the Palm debacle I decided to get a FireWire cable for my video camera and see how bad it would be to capture the video to my Ubuntu desktop. After the cable came, I put off playing with it for weeks, knowing that it would probably involve days of fiddling to get some painful process to yield a partial result. Yes, I’d definitely had my expectations lowered.

So I wasn’t expecting much when I plugged the cable into my video camera (a Canon Optura 20, nothing special) and then into the hitherto unused FireWire port on my machine. Hmmm… dmesg at least revealed that something happened – after a few cryptic and not encouraging messages it reported “ieee1394: raw1394: /dev/raw1394 device initialized.”

Well, that was something although I wasn’t particularly encouraged by the “raw” part. Great, I thought, another few hours of tinkering to get something “not raw” and usable by the system. I’ve been around and I know it just can’t be that simple.

Still, ever the optimist, I can’t resist trying something, so I run dvgrab, a commandline video capture utility. After the usual fooling with permissions so that dvgrab could actually access the camera, something odd happened – it started grabbing video! How weird was that? And it was video I could actually play back! (Remind me to tell you sometime about the time I had MythTV “working” for weeks, except that the video was always played back upside down.)

Unable to believe my good fortune I loaded Kino, probably the most common video editing software for Linux right now. Huh? Not only did it grab video “out of the box”, but it controlled my camera, just like it should. Capture and editing? No problem!
So yeah, I’m still in shock. 20 minutes of fooling around and I have video capture and editing up and running.  It just worked. It may not be the Linux I’m used to, but you know, I could get used to that.