Rammblings and Madness

Marching South

HyKim ready to March

Flight leaves tomorrow 6 AM

Ok it’s been an odd morning.

This morning i got a phone call on my home line from some old man wanting help with his ubuntu install, well more to the point is that he wanted to format ubuntu and start again.  After asking a couple of questions about what he wanted,  I told to format the drive and do a fix MBR in windows is probably abit more complex than he wants, and since he was dual booting that he should just continue to launch windows instead.

His orginal problem was he couldn’t get on the internet at the time, It didn’t click at the time when he said he was with optus that the reason he couldn’t get on the net is the weird way that optus modems are setup.

After talking to him for a while i finally got around to asking how he got my number because it was becoming more clear i didn’t know the guy.

Apparently he found my ubuntu wiki page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gabz and assume I could help him looked up my phone number in the address book since my last name isn’t very common my home (parents house) is the only listed number.

So this was the first time i’ve been rung by a 85 year old man wanting to know how to fix ubuntu. It was an odd experiance.

If how it all ended, was well I got over the slightly weird feeling told him to keep ubuntu there, since he mentioned he lived in Toronto (NSW) we exchanged email address and I sent him the link to Westlakes Linux Learners

Anyone else recieved random phone calls asking for linux help ???

Christmas was very good to Gabz, he scored Wii controllers, remote control helicopters and of course what this post is about, a new netbook, namely a Acer Aspire One, Linpus 512 Mb Ram 8 Gb SSD.

Impressive Parts

• Size, Weight and Keyboard.
  It’s small like you would expect but the keyboard is easier to type on that the XO olpc which is the only other netbook sort of thing I’ve gotten to play with. It’s really light weight and the battery is giving me 2.5 hours.
• Boot time – Linpus got one thing right 14 second boot time from cold boot it also does hibernate but that isn’t really any slower than a cold boot.
• 3G Modem support. If your 3G modem is made by Huawei (Optus, Vodafone or 3 ) then your in luck once you download the software from the acer site the Huawei modems work great. They even use the same software as you would under windows so you can still send those SMS messages. only extra step is making a new profile for your modem.
  

  Mobile Partner

• If the 8 Gb SSD Isn’t enough for you, you can expand with a SD Card they even merge the 2 drives together to appear as a single drive.
• Also the webcam is builtin, the Mic is placed well and once you download Skype from the acer website it works great.
• If you brought the extra USB DVD-RW like I was given you be pleased to know that under Linux you have DVD playback out of the box. Also the DVD-RW DL powers just from the USB port so no extra cables needed.

Unimpressive Parts

• LINPUS ! – For starters it’s based on Red Hat (Fedora) being a Debian guy I find this to be a negative.
  Limited Range of Software, Acer isn’t supporting much they have an Acer game installed which is trial ware. Not really impressed that the full range of linux software isn’t easily available on this distro.
• Security ok when you start linpus for the first time, you set the root password. Ok fair enough but there is no User password. Which is ok by it self. But guess what the user has no password but has Full SUDO rights ?! So if you ever want to change the root password on any linpus Acer try “sudo passwd”
  

  Root Password changing

Basically I’m very happy with this Netbook, and most of my problems will be solved in the coming weeks when I get Ubuntu on to this netbook. Though I would love a way to decrease the Ubuntu boot to the 15 second range.

Ok after several thousand Google searches. credit to this post for having what i wanted

I finally found what i needed. the command to bring up the shutdown options in gnome.

I wanted to do what alot of other people have wanted to do is put a big arse shutdown button on the desktop for those computer users which can’t find the little one hidding in the right of your screen.

plenty of misleading post about a short cut to “sudo shutdown -h” but that’s not what I wanted.

gnome-session-save –kill

Is the magical code you need to make it work.

how to make the shortcut that’s easy right click on the desktop “Create Launcher..” click.

Name: shutdown Command: gnome-session-save –kill Comment: anything you like.

And you can click on the icon and try and find a new one.

Then you are done a nice shutdown button for all your blind users.

Kubuntu 7.10 was coming up with errors such as ‘unknown URL system:/’ and my KDE4 broke, I found links that told me it was a dolphin problem and was fixed in a version of dolphin that didn’t exist in my repos so I decided it was time for a fresh install (gnome worked fine to access files though).

I decided on Kubuntu 8.04 Beta 1 with KDE4, my first problem was because I have an nvidia graphics card (8600) splash screens usually fail to appear and so did the disk check and ‘press enter to reboot screen’ before and after I installed 8.04, but after installing and updating I found the “Hardware Drivers Manager” which had the latest version of nvidia drivers; they were just one click away. Sadly my Dvico TV tuner card doesn’t work out of the box, but when 8.04 becomes stable I’ll reinstall that.

After installing nvidia drivers and restarting my splash screen came back! Sadly only in 640×480 so I changed the splash screen res to 1440×900 by:
sudo vim /etc/usplash.conf
sudo update-initramfs -u
I also changed the splash so it showed details of loading by changing
sudo vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
delete ‘quiet’ from the kernel line of the kernel you are running right down the bottom of the file then you will get all the messages under the loading bar of “filesystem OK”, etc.

I also installed Firefox 3. It looks horrible out of the box, BUT there is a package called gtk-qt-engine-kde4 which will put KDE4 themes on GTK. After the package is installed you go into system settings-> appearance -> GTK Styles and Fonts. I still don’t like the look of it, so I ended up installing Firefox 2.0 to get back to something that looked decent.

And my last problem that I have found so far is they took IRC out of Kopete!!! (bug 201732) So annoying… I may have to start using pidgin.
Oh and Adobe Reader doesn’t seem to appear for 64bit Linux, kpdf it will have to be.

Another random note Openoffice.org 2.4 opens nearly instantaneously

Yesterday i finally decided to upgrade my wordpress not to the brand new 2.5 because i used the lazy “Fantastico” way of installing wordpress i just pressed the upgrade button to update me to 2.3.3.

This leads to the 2nd part of why you upgrade wordpress SPAM…

WordPress is a target there a millions of wordpress blogs out there and the are 1000 of spam bots exploiting them, Since my blog isn’t the most popular it hasn’t really been a problem, i’ve dealt with spam by hand.

So in the past couple of weeks wordpress spam has gotten loose on me. On the planet site i admin. http://planet.newcastlelug.org/ David M Williams Managed to attract not comment spam but RSS feed injection spam, because the planet syndicates the RSS feeds suddenly half way through his post we have links and casinos advertisement. So quickly check it was only his blog affected sent an email off to david.. he wasn’t real impressed. and I delete the cached file of his blog once he’d done some cleaning up of spam to remove the spam from the planet site.

So while wordpress maybe be a great blogging tool you really do need to keep it up to date like this week has shown me. I’ve noticed David upgrade his site also to 2.3.3 so hopefully we will remain spam free for awhile. I might wait to see if there are any security loopholes in 2.5 before i do that upgrade through.

Edit: since i upgraded wordpress i went looking for a new theme.. that supported tags.. etc. what do you think of my kde 4 style wordpress theme ?

Gabz

Most Mathematicians use Latex for their documents on the other hand most ‘normal’ people use some sort of word processor.

The Open Office Latex plugin is the compromise.

Basically the only reason you would use it over Latex is…..

You can share an open office file with your non Latex converted friends, you know those statistics students who are doing other degrees not maths and you are forced to do group work with them.

Other reasons yeah.. OOo has a spell checker … it’s easier to insert pictures.

Anyway installation: go grab the file from http://ooolatex.sourceforge.net/ save and download.

Install using the install extensions tool in open office. Installs just like a Firefox extension.

yeah next part is configuring it.

Frankly the instructions on the website where lacking at this part of the process.

I couldn’t find the config section because I didn’t notice the new bar underneath file.

And no suggestions where the binaries for Latex and ghostscript would be except for a mac screenshot. But since this is my ubuntu box it was easier solved with locate:

/usr/bin/

For both binaries.

Next thing was having a play.

Using the “equation” button, you are presented with a fairly confusing screen, working out things like when you select inline in the equation menu you don’t need to put in the $ $ and selecting emf as the output image format didn’t work so I used png, took some trial and error.

Basically the plug-in has no polish.. only experienced computer and latex users should give it a go.

In order to do my stat2000 labs i need to use JMP, the university gives out copies of JMP out to students on some sort of site licences, the instructions where to go down to uprint and pick up a disk for a small fee ($5). I went down got my disk took it home, and too my disappointment it was only the windows version. JMP is multi-platform as shown by the System Requirements

A couple emails later to lecturers then he emailed desktop services, i got a email saying that they have a license file for me and a disk with the Linux installer.

Which brings the next problem the linux installer really is only a Red Hat installer. And my linux of choice is of course ubuntu.

gabriel@ubuntu1:/media/cdrom$ ls -la
total 506854
dr-xr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 2008-03-06 12:07 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 2008-03-13 16:57 ..
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 10 2008-03-06 12:07 cd.id
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 fonts
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 java
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 29142815 2007-09-29 04:46 jmp-base-al-7.0.1-1.i686.rpm
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 54675183 2007-09-29 04:46 jmp-lang-deDE-7.0.1-1.noarch.rpm
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 54591039 2007-09-29 04:46 jmp-lang-enUS-7.0.1-1.noarch.rpm
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 54693795 2007-09-29 04:46 jmp-lang-frFR-7.0.1-1.noarch.rpm
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 119767152 2007-09-29 04:47 jmp-lang-jaJP-7.0.1-4.noarch.rpm
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 92146971 2007-09-29 04:47 jmp-lang-koKR-7.0.1-3.noarch.rpm
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 106242682 2007-09-29 04:47 jmp-lang-zhCN-7.0.1-4.noarch.rpm
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 5241003 2007-09-29 04:48 jmp-setup
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 2477691 2007-09-29 04:48 jmp-setup-al-1.2-3.i686.rpm
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 media_data
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 order_data
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 product_data
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 11536 2007-09-29 04:45 ReadMe.html
dr-xr-xr-x 8 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 Resources
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 tools
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 2048 2008-03-06 12:07 unixODBC


So we have a random binary jmp-setup and some rpms.

So we start with the rpms i think. Start be installing alien
sudo apt-get install alien

The next setup is moving the files off the cd-rom on to the hard drive as alien needs to be run where you have read write access.

We convert the following rpms.

sudo alien jmp-lang-enUS-7.0.1-1.noarch.rpm
sudo alien jmp-setup-al-1.2-3.i686.rpm
sudo alien jmp-base-al-7.0.1-1.i686.rpm


Install your new debs using dpkg

sudo dpkg -i jmp-setup-al_1.2-4_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i jmp-lang-enus_7.0.1-2_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i jmp-base-al_7.0.1-2_i386.deb


I located JMP in my /opt/SAS/JMP7 folder.

I ran sudo ./jmp and yay it showed up in well outdated qt goodness..3.3.8 but the next problem was the license file, i copied and pasted it over from the email i was sent and added it but apparently it’s invalid. Of course having to run jmp as root isn’t ideal but it’s better than rebooting to windows.

Edit:

After reading the License file again there where 2 lines which looked odd 32 and 33, they started the line with a * instead of a space like all the other lines. i deleted these leading *’s and what do you know the file worked fine i now have a working version of JMP installed on ubuntu.

No Problems found yet but i haven’t started my assignment.

The documentation is now at a stage that’s it is in a readable usable fashion for all users.

It’s still heavly favours ubuntu users but there is some comments about the EeePC unfortunately Xandros/Asus didn’t think you would ever want to connect to a 802.1X connection with a Eeepc so they left wpa_supplicant out and didn’t include the handlers in the madwifi driver.

If you came here looking for help go here: wiki.newcastlelug.org

Another useful tool i’ve found is that firefox has a nice extension called Foxy Proxy which allows me to change proxy settings in firefox by just clicking on the tool bar. it also has a quick guide to how to change proxies based on your ip address But you need to write a pac file to do this so it’s another days job.

Problems outstand:

• Can’t connect to POP3 at uni
• Can’t connect to irc on wireless can at terminals
• Haven’t worked out how to get ssh access back to home.

aside note google is taking it’s sweet time to find the wiki on the website so it may be awhile before people find the documenation.